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5 A GRAND PIANO RABBIT HUTCH
“I HARBOUR NO ILLUSIONS as regards mankind,” said the solicitor and walked on with a gait so bizarre that you couldn’t but feel compassion. He looked as if he’d been run over by a tram years before and left to his fate, for his body to take charge of itself and make the best of having had nearly all his limbs smashed. Even his face was so crumpled that in order to see where he was going he had to look in a completely different direction. And as he went, he oscillated far over to the right and then again to the left, as if he were walking not on his own two feet but on short stilts, and his arms were like two bent withies, so if he happened to be carrying a pail of mineral water from the St Joseph Spring, the pail would swing about like a carter’s lamp and by the time he got home he’d have spilled almost all the water he’d collected. They said he’d been a solicitor and that during the purchase of a small house next to the grocery store he’d contrived things so fiendishly that he didn’t pay the owner a single penny, and so his infirmity was the just reward for what he’d done. He lived alone, and it was a miracle that he could put his clothes on, it took him nearly two hours to dress his rheumatic, twisted frame, so he recognised it was better to get dressed on Monday and stay dressed, because as soon as he got dressed it would practically be time to get slowly undressed and ready for bed. When he went for a bucket of water, he had to make some complicated manoeuvres before he could turn off the road towards the spring, like trying to turn a car with all its wheels blocked. He would reverse a few times, then take a few steps forward, then keep on reversing until he got the direction right and then the main thing was to find the way to the spring, his eyes apparently only being able to see in one direction and as if he were looking through a tiny slit in a black mask, so he saw the trickle of water only after ten or a dozen goes at finding and fixing that thin shaft of light on the tinkling water. And he was fat and he perspired and his face was the very expression of torment, nay horror. And yet he lived on his own, he didn’t want anyone, he was the house’s sole occupant, and though he certainly had money, he didn’t hire anyone in, so he struggled on his own, and he even relished the struggle, seeing it as a kind of triumph, and it was a great triumph when he managed to get to the co-op to buy bread and milk and other bits and pieces to sustain him, or to fetch water. It was quite a sporting achievement to hobble his way to wherever he desired or needed, a great moral victory, and he himself made no secret of the fact, full of admiration for himself and, you might say, wallowing in the preparations for each new excursion, even charting out improvements to his route, especially if the sun was shining. Anyone else was glad of the sun, but for the old solicitor sunlight might be the death of him, because the glare in his tiny cone of light was so strong that he could scarcely see at all, and he had constantly to shade his eyes so as to avoid stepping off the path into the ditch. So he would always stop, and the best thing was when he lifted his bag or pail up above his head, awful to see if you hadn’t seen it before, the pail and beneath its shadow those dire features with their permanent expression of surprise, groping to find the only spot from which that fine laser, that sole line of light stemming from his eye would ring true, for what sight the old solicitor had was in one eye only. But the sheer joy when he finally saw that he could see, when suddenly, as in the depth of night, he’d shone the slender beam of his torch onto the path, got his bearings and could walk another dozen metres or so until once again, although the sun was shining, he found himself in total gloom. And never ever would the old solicitor let anyone help him, take him by the sleeve and offer themselves, he would stand there, panting his defiance and wearing such an expression that anyone would, however horrified, just leave him to it, preferring to walk on rather than look into that seemingly absent, almost moronic face that suggested both a bewildered horror and a great readiness to wallow in the dreadful fate dealt him, but he wasn’t giving in, certainly not. Our solicitor proceeded in the same way when going to collect grass, lifting his basket into the sun, in the direction of the lights tumbling from the heavens so that, shading his eye with that large surface, he could see the grass. And he would kneel down a bit in the same way, not a real kneel, more a collapse as if he’d just been shot, as if he was collapsing under some moral reprimand, just like when Raskolnikov dropped to embrace the earth and accept its forgiveness. So the old solicitor fell to his knees to feel for the grass that he’d previously got a good feel for by eye, and he tugged at the grass, angrily plucking handfuls of grass, then he would twist his head around this way and that until the thread of his sight spotted the basket, then he would keep putting grass in his basket until he had picked as much as he deemed necessary. And again, as he rose, again it looked as if it was someone terribly drunk trying to rise, constantly falling back down, like someone who’d been run over by a car in the night, sent flying into the ditch and left to his fate. But the old solicitor adopted an angle that yielded the only position in and from which he was able to get onto one knee and then onto both feet. “You’re the only man ever to win hands down,” I once told him, having gazed my fill at his indomitable will and desire to stand up. He looked round for me, uncomprehending, following the direction of my voice, but then he had to keep turning his head for a while like some complicated scientific instrument until he got it aligned by tangents and cosines like a ship’s compass or some complex piece of mountain-top meteorological kit… and I saw that his gaze was as straight as a length of wire and just as cold, but humanly cold, because it was human. “I harbour no illusions as regards mankind,” he said, then set off back home with his basket of grass, zigzag, this way and that, like a lunar module on legs. Yesterday, some electricians dug a trench and lay a cable in it, being rather casual about earthing it over. I saw the old solicitor coming along in his usual way, I saw him step, in all innocence, into a void instead of solid soil, and, before his foot reached the bottom and the rubble covering the black cable, his entire frame rolled down, sinking into the trench, falling with his face in his basket, like a piece of machinery, then scrabbling back out of the trench and walking on, shuffling and jangling like a machine that was more or less working but churning out rejects, except that the old solicitor knew what’s what, knew that if ever he failed to get back on his feet, if ever he lost heart, that would be the end of him, that they’d haul him off, like some redundant piece of machinery, to the recycling centre, or some waste disposal site, or to the tip outside the village among the general waste, prunings and stinking tin cans. So he strode on, heading for home, hearing my footsteps beside him, and I could tell that what pleased him most was that I didn’t try to help him. “Thank you,” he said appreciatively. And he felt for the brick pillar, then the gate, and he entered the pathway lined with the branches of young spruces sweeping down to the ground, and as he went his zigzag way I saw the branches stroking him, brushing him down, scratching his face, but the old man, as if just for the pleasure of it, the pleasure of distress, fondled the trees, their fragrance, their new-grown pale-green tips, which were like the green fingers of recently ripped little gloves. “Can I come with you?” I asked uneasily. “Do, so you can see how it is I can harbour no illusions as regards mankind…,” and so the old boy walked round to the back of the house and that’s where I really got a shock. In the middle of the yard stood a grand piano, a black Petrof, slightly atilt, and from it issued a strange kind of concrete music, an odd plunking of the wires, then a long excruciating squeaking sound fit to freeze the blood, and it dawned on me that I used to hear the same sound as I made my way home at night, thinking it was the nocturnal moaning and vocalising of barn owls and pigmy owls and the wailing of little owls summoning death… but this time I could tell that the wailing came from inside the piano, the cries bolstered by clumping sounds and some quite noisy knocking. Leaning by an old pine tree there was an assemblage of rabbit hutches with a doe happily basking in each one, some with young, and these rabbits were so quiet, so calm, as if they were taking the sunlight and a bit of grass and spinning them into the serenity of a cloudless summer morning. “When I was in America,” I told the solicitor, “I saw an amazing event, and it only cost a dollar. A helicopter carried a piano just like yours five hundred metres up into the air above a playground, then there was a roll of drums and the helicopter let go of the piano and you should have heard the bang and the music, which went on for the best part of ten minutes, and from the bowels of the piano the strings and pins roused themselves to action, the keys were flying everywhere, leaving not just me but all five thousand spectators terrified… but I’m even more terrified by this piano of yours. “I harbour no illusions as regards mankind,” the old man squeaked, and once again the piano gave up a long, steadily rising squeaking sound, to which the old gentleman bent his ear with sheer delight, the very opposite of the horror with which my hat threatened to take its leave. “What