‘“Not a story,” I said. I began to run.
‘Behind me, even when I was far away, I heard him say quietly, “You’re a story,” and I wished I hadn’t told him my name.’ The head fell silent, I held it in my hands and waited.
‘What happened next?’ I said after a reasonable interval.
‘My story is not a sequence of events like knots on a string,’ said the head; ‘I could have started with the loss of Eurydice and ended with the killing of the tortoise — all of it happens at once and it goes on happening; all of it is happening now and any part of it contains the whole of it, the pictures needn’t be looked at in any particular order.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the thing is simply what it is. Hold a pomegranate in your hand and tell me where is the beginning of it and where is the end. The name of this pomegranate is Loss: the loss of Eurydice was in me before I ever met her and the loss of me was in her the same.’
‘Tell me what happened next.’
‘After the making of the lyre there is a long empty space before I became the Orpheus who was said to charm wild beasts and move trees and stones. I assume that I very slowly taught myself to play the instrument, that I made up little songs, nothing special. Probably I sang and begged my way from place to place. When I try to think of myself in that time I think of an emptiness carrying the emptiness that had been the tortoise. There is no story of me for that time — what I had been was gone and what I was to be had not yet come.
‘The next thing I know about is a morning, a dawn, the dawn mist rising from the river. I was sleeping off a drunk, I woke up not knowing who I was nor where I was. Something was looking at me from behind the mist, the strangeness that is Hermes, the strangeness that makes everything here and gone at the same time. The light changed and it was afternoon. The flight of the kingfisher opened in the air over the river a blue-green iridescent stillness in which a dragonfly, immense and transparent, repeated itself with every wingstroke. There was a drowsiness, a droning in the golden afternoon, a vibration in my mind or in the air, an ineffably sweet, honeyed sound that was seductive and demanding, a music not of any instrument. It enveloped and overwhelmed me, I felt myself surrendering to it, dying sweetly of it while the strangeness watched me from behind the blue-green stillness, from behind the dragonfly and the gold of the afternoon.
‘The air itself seemed honeyed, and it was in that fragrance that I first heard her voice, the voice of the woman who became my story. I heard her weeping in the leafy shade while the dragonflies printed themselves gigantically on the transparent stillness over the river.
‘There rose in my throat a terrible ache and in that moment the world became me and I became the world-child who knows nothing and believes whatever it is told; I was the world-child whose innocence binds the world together, whose innocence betrayed will unfasten the world. Oh yes, I thought, and as I listened to the weeping of the unseen woman in that golden, golden afternoon I became the tortoise I had killed. I felt my own cruel knife enter me, felt my life spurting out, felt my still quivering body being dug out of my shell. In an explosion of brilliant colours I suffered the many pains of death as underworld opened to me, underworld and the moment under the moment. I suffered the many pains, the many colours of death and I knew everything. The colours were swallowed up in blackness, there came a stillness and I found myself weeping by the river with the lyre in one hand and the plectrum in the other. The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water’s edge and swayed their tops against the sky.’
‘There opened to you underworld,’ I said, ‘and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping.’
‘Yes,’ said the head, ‘in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld.’
Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and a silence filled my mind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.
I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I supposed in some way it was still with me.
6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals
I came home feeling altogether used up and worn out but I typed up the whole episode while it was still fresh in my mind, put it on disk, and printed it out. On the far side of the common the plane trees swayed their tops against the morning sky. The telephone rang.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Are you all right?’ said Istvan Fallok. ‘I tried to get you last night but your line was always engaged.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be all right?’
‘You seemed to be in some kind of a state when you left here; you knocked me down and tore out of here with electrodes all over your head and you left your anorak behind. How are you feeling now?’
‘I’ve just been chatting to a rotting head.’
‘That isn’t just any rotting head, it’s the head of Orpheus.’
‘So it tells me. Have you known each other long, you and it?’
‘A year or so, I suppose, but I doubt that we’ll be seeing each other again, it and I.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Did you have a little angina during your chat?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did the head sing to you?’
‘Yes, it did.’
‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘Yes. It sang in a barely audible sort of wheezing whisper and it did some supernaturally complex variations on a spooky theme for about twenty minutes. I kept thinking, Oh yes, I’ve got it, then the next moment I’d forgotten it. We were outdoors at the time, I’d no recording gear. When it finished it said to me, “There, you see?”
‘“Could you sing it again?” I said. “I seem to have missed a lot of it.”
‘“Sing what?” it said.
‘“What you just sang,” I said.
‘“Did I sing something?” it said.
‘“Yes,” I said, “just now.”
‘“I don’t remember singing anything,” it said. “Maybe if you give me the parts you remember we can put it together.” So that’s what we began to do. Every now and then the head would turn up and if we were at the studio I’d play what I’d done and we’d do a little more or if I was out somewhere I’d have a little keyboard with me. Month after month I worked on that music and I never could get it to come right, it just wouldn’t hold still — I’d have a couple of minutes of it pretty well laid down and I’d think, well, now I’ve got something to work with, something I can develop; and then when I tried to develop it the whole thing fell apart like ropes of sand and I’d have to start all over again. Eventually I found myself in hospital with a myocardial infarction and I finally got some rest. It was wonderful, they let me stop there for a fortnight. Nurses are the nicest people there are; there was a lady who brought cups of tea at six in the morning and another with a book trolley and another with a little shop on wheels. They did ECGs and X-rays, tested my blood and my urine, recommended a low fat, low cholesterol diet, told me to take daily exercise and stop smoking, gave me a little bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets, and put me out on the street again.’