I asked, “Which is your truth?”
“You,” he said, dropping into the intimate form of address. “You are my truth: my life’s truth. That is why I offer you everything a man can offer a woman. That is what I meant when I wrote to you on that card.”
I give you my sacred oath that I lost my sight completely and died.
“Don’t you see these rags I am in from Krok?” was the first thing I said when I came to life again; also using the intimate address.
“No,” he said.
“I know no languages except Zoega’s English Primer,” I said.
“Really?” he said.
“And play the harmonium, which in itself is ridiculous even if one plays it well; and have never had varnish on my nails nor scarlet on my lips except at the most perhaps off some red fruit-soup; and you accustomed to women who look as if they had drunk black bull’s-blood and scratched raw human flesh.”
“Yes, all that is precisely what I meant,” he said. “That’s why I am turning over a new leaf.”
“But when you have slept with me for a night, or two nights, or even three at the very most, you will awake from your torpor and look at me, horrified, and ask just as in a folk-tale: Whence came this witch into my bed?—and then you will steal softly away from me before dawn and never come back again.”
“What do you want me to do?” he said, “and I shall do it.”
I gazed at him for as long as I could, then down at my knees; but I could make no reply.
“Do you want me to renounce everything?” he said. “The firm, the constituency, public posts, party, acquaintances, friends?—and be once again a plain penniless man of culture?”
“I could never, never bear to have you lowered by a hair’s breadth on my account,” I said. “Besides, I am sure that though you were penniless you would carry on being what habit has made you, the man you are; and I what I am, a country kid, a housemaid, common; nothing but a longing to become a person, to know something, to be able to do something for myself. Where would a place exist for both of us?”
“Now you must see that Patagonia is not such a bad idea after all,” he said.
“Does any Patagonia exist?”
“I shall show it to you now on the map.”
“Isn’t it some barbarian land?” I asked.
“Is it not all the same?” he replied. “Soon the whole world will be one vast barbarian land.”
“And there was I, thinking that world civilization was just beginning,” I said. “I thought we were beginning to be people.”
“The attempt seems to have failed miserably,” he said. “No one any longer imagines for a moment that it is possible to save capitalism, never mind resurrect it; not even with Poor Law Relief from America. Barbarianism is at the door.”
“Is Communism barbarianism then?”
“That is not what I said,” he replied. “On the other hand, Captialism will drag world civilization down with it to the depths when it falls.”
“Iceland too?” I asked.
He said, “There exist land and sea, divided between east and west; and the atom bomb.”
“Has Iceland then been abandoned to—the atomic war?” I asked.
Suddenly he rose to his feet, turned away and walked over to the radio, and switched off some Spaniard who was making a speech on the other side of the world.
“The conflict is between two fundamentals,” he said. “The battlefield covers all lands, all seas, all skies; and particularly our innermost consciousness. The whole world is one atom station.”
“And Patagonia too, then?”
He had managed to find some light music somewhere on the instrument. He came over to me and sat down on the arm of my chair and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Patagonia is a different matter altogether,” he said. “Patagonia is the land of the future in the middle of the present, the land that has always been what Europe and the United States have yet to become: a wasteland where a few ignorant shepherds look after sheep. I hope you understand that the world in which I have lived is doomed and that there can be no appeal against that sentence; and further, that I do not care, that I am losing nothing if I renounce it all. The decision is yours. Say what you want.”
24. The square before dawn
I opened my eyes after a short sleep; a light still glowed dimly in the night lamp, and I looked around me overcome with deep boredom as if in a wilderness. Where was I? And who was this man? I crept out of bed and dressed silently. Was he asleep—or was he pretending to be asleep? The door was unlocked and I stole away down the stairs with my case in my hand, and did not put on my shoes until I reached the outside door; and I walked on to the empty street in the cold morning breeze, while the town still slept.
The street lights took the place of stars, except that they brought no message from the depths of the heavens; this was a world without depths, and I was alone—so alone that even that other persona of the self, the one that stirs shame and regret, had abandoned me; I was dull, and everything was flat: a person without context, or to be more exact, a woman without existence.
And then I was standing once again in the square where I had stood the previous evening; that is how the opening theme reappears at the end of a musical composition, only in a different key, in a different rhythm, with unrelated chords—and with the contents in reverse; in reality I did not recognize anything any more, except my wooden suitcase. The square which yesterday had been thronged with busy people and throbbing with many thousands of horsepower was now empty and still. I seated myself on a bench in the middle of the square, tired.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Has anything happened?”
“No, nothing has happened.”
In this way I took part in a long and no doubt significant conversation, perhaps with some disembodied voice, perhaps with one of those personae of the self or the godhead which for so long had been lost, or had perhaps never even existed; until I happened to look up and saw a man standing beside me, studying me.
“I thought you were crying,” he said.
“No, no,” I replied. “I’m just a little tired; just finished a journey.”
“Well, well, good morning, how do you do?” said the man. “Surely it’s not you, here, is it?”
“Am I seeing right?” I said, for who should it be but my good friend and fellow pupil of the previous winter, the unself-conscious policeman, that thickset man who always saw things in the light of reality because he had such a heavy behind. And I rose to my feet as is the custom amongst country women when they greet a man and said, “And how do you do?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’ve just arrived in town,” I said. “From home.”
“At this queer hour?”
“We had a breakdown,” I replied. “It took them some time to repair it. We didn’t get here until just now. I’m waiting until it’s a rather more reasonable hour before going to wake people up.”
“Listen, dear,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “We’ll have some coffee, of course, with our professor, he’ll hardly be in bed yet. And you can tell us how the music is doing in the north.”
“Tell me about the south, rather,” I said.
“Oh, my dear,” he said, “what is a man to say nowadays? Child murders in the street are no longer news, nor even if men drink themselves stupid and insensible in order to get courage to beat their wives. The order of the day now is: sell the country, bury bones.”
I said that the only thing I knew about that was that the gods had come north to us with two crates and claimed they contained bones; but that while our pastor was rounding up a cortege, the Government had sent for the crates.