ο
π
‘’Εκτωρ Hector Πριαμíδης son of Priam
It seemed to be rather longer than I had expected.
It had also taken a bit longer to write than I had expected (two hours). This still compared favourably with a five-hour unwritable note. I wrote a final paragraph pointing out that for a real Rosetta Stone you would probably want to have a third column with Chinese but unfortunately I did not know any of the characters, and then I said that if he had ever come across the poem of Keats on looking into Chapman’s Homer he would probably be interested and surprised to see that this was what Chapman had written:
De dumty dumty dumty dum love saw their heavy chear,
And (pittying them) spake to his minde; Poor wretched beasts (said he)
Why gave we you t’a mortall king? De dumty dumty dum
De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum?
De dumty dumty dumty dum de dumty dumty dum?
Of all the miserable’st things that breathe and creepe on earth,
No one more wretched is then man. And for your deathless birth,
Hector must faile to make you prise de dumty dumty dum
and then I just said you see how easy it would be I hope you like it Must dash—S and after the S I put an illegible dashing scrawl because I thought there was a good chance he had not caught my name the night before.
Then I put this on a table where he would be bound to see it. It had seemed so plausible and suave when I had had the idea in bed, and yet now I wondered whether Liberace would realise that I was politely implying etc. etc. or whether it just looked outré. Too late, and so good-bye.
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness.
Whether Liberace liked the Horses of Achilles I do not know (going by his other remarks it would not surprise me to learn that he felt like Cortez gazing on the Pacific on reading the Chapman). It had made me happy to write down the passage, anyway, & I thought that I could now do this for the whole Iliad and Odyssey with interleaved pages explaining various features of grammar and dialect and formulaic composition. I could print them up for a few thousand pounds and sell them at a market stall and people would be able to read them regardless of whether they had studied French or Latin or some other irrelevant subject at school. Then I could do something similar for other languages which are even harder to study at school than Greek, and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK.
One day Emma invited me into her office for a talk. She explained that she would be leaving the company. What would I do? If her job disappeared, so would mine. I hadn’t been with the firm long enough to be entitled to maternity pay. Was I planning to go back to the States to have the baby?
I did not know what to say.
I didn’t say anything, and Emma made practical suggestions. She said the publisher was launching a project into 20th-century language which involved typing and tagging magazine text for computer; she said she had made inquiries, and thought she could get me smuggled onto this under my work permit. She said there would be no problem about taking the computer to work from the home since the office had been downsized out of existence. She said that she knew of a house whose owner could not afford to fix it and who was afraid it would be occupied by squatters if she did not rent it; she said that the owner would let me have it for £150 a month if I did not ask her to fix it. I did not know what to say. She said she would understand if I wanted to go back to the States to be with my family. I knew what not to say: I did not say no one could understand that, for I would have to be mad to do it. I said: Thank you very much.
I looked up to see how L was getting on. Odyssey 13–24 was lying face down on the bench; L was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t remember when I had seen him last. I thought of going to look for him, but then this would mean leaving the one place he knew to look for me.
I looked at the Odyssey to see how far he had got. My chances of not teaching him Japanese did not look good. I began leafing idly through White Fang.
After a while I heard a voice I knew.
Would you like to hear me count to a thousand in Arabic? said the voice.
I thought you said your mum was in Room 61?
She is.
Then we’ll have to leave it for another time.
When?
Some other time. Is this your little boy?
A security guard was standing in front of me, as was L.
I said: Yes.
L said: I went to the toilet all by myself.
I said: Good for you.
Guard: You’ll never guess where I found him.
I: Where did you find him?
Guard: You’ll never guess in a million years.
I: Where?
Guard: All the way down in the basement in one of the restoring rooms. Seems he must have nipped down the stairs and gone through one of the staff doors.
I: Oh.
Guard: No harm done, but you ought to keep a closer eye on him.
I: Well, there’s no harm done.
Guard: No, but you ought to keep a closer eye on him.
I: Well, I’ll bear that in mind.
Guard: What’s his name?
I wish people wouldn’t ask that kind of question.
When I was pregnant I kept thinking of appealing names such as Hasdrubal and Isambard Kingdom and Thelonius, and Rabindranath, and Darius Xerxes (Darius X.) and Amédée and Fabius Cunctator. Hasdrubal was the brother of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants in the 3rd century BC to wage war with Rome; Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a 19th-century British engineer of genius; Thelonius Monk was a jazz pianist of genius; Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath; Darius was a Persian king, as was Xerxes; Amédée is the first name of the narrator’s grandfather in A la recherche du temps perdu, and Fabius Cunctator was the Roman general who saved the Roman state from Hannibal by delaying. They all had names one should really not give to a child, and once he was born I had to think fast.