Notes From a Room

 When we first moved there, she loved it: the silence and solitude. She liked it when I didn’t speak much, so I spoke less and less. I felt marvellous in that peacefulness, though I missed my family sometimes. She did her work and sold some of it, enough for us to get by. She still didn’t sleep well, but she never complained; she just got up sometimes and went to the kitchen to fix a drink.
   I laughed when she wanted to draw me. It was embarrassing, I felt like a model. She said if she drew me once a week she might be allowed to have me.
   Thinking back it was a strange thing to say but I suppose drawing was her way of feeling connected to things, or to herself. I don’t know.
   Once when she returned from an excursion and I went to kiss her she avoided me, then turned back, looked me deeply in the eyes, and said nothing for the rest of the evening. The next day she showed me the sketches she’d been doing: fearful things, like the gargoyles on cathedrals.
   She started only sleeping during the day. She said the dark made everything seem too still and sinister to sleep, that the things in our house were conspiring against her.
   One evening she said: ‘Say something. Please.’
   I thought and said: ‘Isn’t it strange how two people who’ve lived together for years come to resemble each other? In their thoughts and faces. I want us to grow old like two trees that grow together, you’ve seen the ones in the forest, with all their cracks and wrinkles, even like the old couple at the store, you’ve seen the way they move, or that old man and his dog.’
   She said, almost to herself: ‘It’s like God making Adam in one piece. Whole thoughts. Whole feelings. Then Eve with her sinister curiosity.’
   She said nothing the rest of the evening.
   She started selling fewer paintings and our savings dried up. I had to cook every meal and food isn’t easy to come by in those parts.
   One day while she was painting I found her diary.
   She’d written:

   The fact is that life itself, everyday life with its people, chatter, money, dramas, ingesting and excreting, is nothing to me, has always been nothing: a paltry illusion. I don’t want it to be so but it is so. Landscape and portrait painters are ridiculous to me. Everything is ridiculous but what points away from, out of this life.

   Talking to other people, socialising, falls so short of what it ought to be, of reflecting our real selves, that it disgusts me.

   There was nothing about me, my name wasn’t mentioned once.
   She asked me to stay up with her. She said she was afraid of her mind. She wanted me to ride out the silence with her.
   After a week it started frightening me too. Some nights it seemed it would never end. She comforted me and told me she knew exactly how I felt.
   It was the first time she’d caressed me for months.
   She looked almost happy.
   It was that touch that made her absence palpable to me. That was the moment I knew I had to leave.

(Based on Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.)

The words stopped coming. He enjoyed the respite at first, later less. Much less. He cleared away ripped pages, unwritten books. Sometimes they appeared when he was drunk. Then through a haze of phrases he came stalking meaning, like some Kasper Hauser trying to make sense out of a childhood murk. Was it him or the words? He listened to them and they spoke him; there was no getting behind them. But it was exquisite when they dropped into the right places. Fleeting however. And the audience held its breath then wandered off as he changed his costume. There were turns and fading paths, but there were vantage points too. Or rather walks that got you lost then brought you back as someone new. Or a wake of inspiration that bore you away from nothing and carried you to who knew what. He went on though it drove him half mad. The words now came stronger than ever: they woke him at night, phrases in his head like worms in a box.

The city patchworks through time, the bar radio wears down the day. He thinks back. Habit devours passion, inuring. Old water in the week’s seven ditches. Further back to when he scented love as a jackal senses blood. Sniffed, shrieked and grew to love his own noises more. Too soft in the head for the hard basics of grace. He confuses the streets now through his high smudged window. Loved love more than the blood itself. Catalogues confusion through the membranes of time. In moments of truth the idea of something Other that perseveres. Too strong for memory to undermine says another would-be Lazarus. Back again to when he bent and chalked a circle round his feet for her to step into then left. Then of course the seven ditched days. Time and again. Old water. But time’s dark rooms are elsewhere says another would-be Lazarus and you won’t be going back. Cataloguing. Something inside perseveres. What is sanctuary? No still centre but something that cracks up from the dead land of the past and transforms stony ground. Too hard for soft heads. Now night comes falling sweeping earth for dawn.

I pointed you to a pier where you could dive as I went up to the bar. In the evening we went through the old ritual of drawing hearts in the sand at low tide. Later still we made love accompanied by the song and sting of mosquitoes, your body burnished red-brown by the sun I avoided — arsenal of something or other — my silence perhaps. Homeward bound, we left the neighbour’s pleading dog and the small creatures between the tracks, roared at by their metal gods.