He was too much of a boy himself to be a father. I don’t mean that he looked young. The bitter battle with my mother had dulled the shine that once sat on his skin. You no longer looked at him and wondered how he could ever have been modelled out of base materials. Now you could see their traces — the peat, the particles, the salts, the mineral striations, the clouded water. He might live for another thousand years but he had rounded that corner from youth to age; he wasn’t a gleaming apparition any more, he did not seem to have been dropped here from another planet, he resembled the earth he trod on. But he was a boy in this way: he was still hoping for something for himself; he needed to be marvelled at as much as I did. He could not do for me what had not been done for him. And he could not be a father because he had not finished — let us be fair about this: he had never even begun — being a son.
I could see, as he walked among my strangulated blooms, that he had no eyes for what was around him. They were not his. He had not made them. He could not be praised for them. I did not then, and I do not now, call this selfishness or egoism. It was more a sort of hysterical blindness, occasioned by loneliness and sensations of shame. What did not proceed from his hands or his desires simply was not visible to him. The necessity he felt to be the cause of pleasure used up all his senses. He strained his hearing, he wore out his sight, he put a permanent twist in his neck, expecting appreciation. And like the rest of us, he was disappointed. For him, too, there were not enough of us. We were too few. And because we all wanted, we were none of us — except my mother at Abel’s bath time — free to give.
A more revelatory, less obfuscated God might have made his life easier. A man needs a Father he can see. Whether they enjoy cordial relations is not the point. The important thing is palpability. There are other views on this matter. Some argue that incorporeality is of the essence. I speak only of what I saw in my father’s case. His bad, unassisted dreams. The melancholy that never left him, not even when he was busy building penfolds, or tearing down forests to erect bridges over rivers we could paddle across. The heartbreaking prayers he had once or twice tried to lead us in but now practised in solitude, great sobbing psalms lamenting One Who Wasn’t There, Who Never Answered, Who Never Would Be There, Who Never Would Answer — the certainty of failure at last becoming an end in itself, a vindication, so that the music swelled into a triumphancy of despair. Rejoice, we are ruined!
A tin god would have served him better. A tumble of roughly carved rocks, with sticks for arms, that he could at least have kissed.
Do you have no feelings about it, I asked him, one way or the other? Meaning, my garden. Meaning, whether what I was doing in it was nice or not nice. Meaning, whether I was nice or not nice.
Should I have?
Yes, I said. I think you should. I think it would be good for me to know your opinion.
My opinion? (He laughed.) I can’t see you taking any notice of that. (I was wayward — we were all wayward — that was his explanation, his excuse, for leaving us to our own devices. No prizes for guessing from Whose example he learnt this disingenuous stratagem.)
I might take notice of it, I said. And I might not. What matters is that there should be something I can make that choice about. It’s possible I have to know what you think precisely so that I can oppose it.
He looked around. It was infinitely touching to see him really trying to use his eyes. To discover what I was up to. To discover who I was. I could feel how hard it was for him. How much it hurt his brain. I could see the pain, starting from his temples, like a bone that had suddenly become dislodged. If I’d been a better son, I wouldn’t have put him through this. Good sons don’t ask anything of their fathers. Not even the time of day.
He was standing beside a reddened fig tree, which I’d observed and then perversely encouraged in an act of parasitism quite breathtaking in its beauty. It climbed the trunk of whichever helpless unsuspecting host tree took its fancy, attained the summit, and from there sent down its own roots, a curtain of shimmering foliage which was at once a deed of suffocation and the veil behind which the deed was concealed. A murder and its alibi. A theft — for murder is only theft — in the guise of a gift.
I explained its principles to Adam. I got him to feel the tenacity of the fig’s grip. I made him put his ear to its branches, to hear the hectic unrhythmic breath of voracity. I walked him through the ensanguined curtain so that he should enjoy its leafiness and behold the victim, blanched and hapless, without expectancy, without vitality, without worth, within. Thus does the stronger, I said, eclipse the weaker, in will, in splendour, in elation, in vigour, and in promise.
I did not believe everything I said. If you care to hear the truth from me, I did not believe any of it. But it was my intention, my hope, to inspire my father to disgust. I looked forward to his reprimand. I welcomed with an anticipation that was almost sensual, that was certainly of the body, the idea that he would so far take cognizance of me as to find my words shameful.
He screwed up his eyes. He rubbed the back of his neck. He ran his hands across the fibrous curtain as though every whip contained a note and he might make music out of them. He looked me up and down with great indecision. He put his ear back to the parasite. Then he stuck out his tongue, and said, Bleh!
Bleh?
He was smiling at me, I think smiling at me, and panting like a dog. Bleh! Bleh!
He wanted us to play together. To roll around in the warm dirt like a couple of bears.
I didn’t move. I didn’t extend a paw. So there’s no point in looking to you for an example then? I said. The only word you have for me is Bleh!
He withdrew his tongue and allowed all the muscles in his face to slacken. It was a punitive collapse. Look how old you have made me, his face said. But there were no actual words exchanged. We stood looking at each other in reproachful silence. The only sounds to be heard in my garden were vegetable-vindictive: the groans of throttled plants, the viscous dripping of my euphorbias, the ticking of voodoo lilies, and the slow predacious rattle of my favourite epiphytic tillandsia opening its fans. Otherwise nothing. The primordial dejection of fathers makes no sound. Nor the primordial hard-heartedness of sons.
Why do you want an example? he asked at last.
So that I can resent it, I said.
He turned to go. Awkwardly. I mean physically awkwardly. He had been so badly made that he could barely swivel without falling.
Resent someone else, he said. His parting word. He made it sound mysterious, a riddle infinitely tormenting. But in truth I did not have that many choices.
Is it possible that He — HE — had been listening to this conversation? Or was it nothing but mere chance that directed an angel of the Lord into my garden a mere fifteen minutes after my father — father with a little f — had left it?
It’s a tricky business, balancing fortuitousness with design, especially when He whose design is in question is also the One who sets up the mechanism whereby chance operates. Ascribing motives is trickier still. An Unseen Hand is on the wheel; It might or might not have turned it; It might or might not have meant to; in these circumstances it takes an eternity just to decide what we mean by Whim.
Nevertheless, an angel landed. Which means that he’d been sent. Which means there was intention somewhere down the line. And behind intention, reasoning. And behind reasoning, promptings viewless as air.
I have had time — not eternity, but time enough — to consider what they might have been.
HE was sentimentally attached, like all truants, to the impression He imagined He had left on the hearts of those He had deserted. It was time to gaze with fondness upon this idealised image of Himself again.