The Paper Men

  “The island’s shaking!”

  So it was, too. Telling the living or the dead about shakes in that island was taking coals to Newcastle and no mistake. Well, I did find a hotel with windows and no visible corpses except the barman who hadn’t been used for years and they fetched my bag from the car and I sat up all night on the side of the bed waiting for the shaking to stop but it didn’t. I must have slept, but the thing was that either I’d invented an unconscious or had had one all along despite what Liz said and I dreamed, my God how I dreamed! I must have had breakfast because I remember wandering about and seeing that the island consisted of powdered pumice with knives of black glass sticking up through it like a feast of steeples. An interesting place for normal people but not for you if you are creaky on the hinge. I suppose it was there? Yes, of course it was because of what came after.

  At some point I decided I would stick to coffee and I spent the morning with buckets of it. Then to keep myself sober I decided to go for a walk, avoiding the centre ville, the dead centre, ha et cetera. Sicilian burial customs, q.v.

  So out I went, cautiously hugging the walls. There was a big hill and I began to stalk it. Yes, I know quite well it sounds crazy; but then, it was. I began to approach it as if the old man himself, I mean my contemporary, according to Mary Lou—why, he’s no older than you are! What a liar the girl is. I was deceived in her. He is older than the church on which he shits. Pretty squalid the streets were, even for that area, I can tell you. I saw soon that the building that came into sight on the top was a church, probably a cathedral; and feeling so hot inside I thought I would case the cool joint for glass though the chance of anything other than atrocious stuff presented by the Mafia in about 1900 was minimal. After a time I had to stop, being out of puff, but no matter how long I waited I could feel the heat inside me and the heat outside me for the day was sweltering. It wasn’t ordinary daylight, it was incandescent daylight, not sunlight at all but an atmosphere with a luminescence in it. I thought at first it might be the drink but then realized if I could think that I wasn’t as bad with drink as I’d thought but with the other thing—being chased, I mean, and spied on, that not to put too fine a point on it was unbalancing my judgement just a little. As far as booze was concerned I hadn’t a trace of hangover which is a bad sign. Even the circle of sea round the island had an odd, brassy look about it. There was an islander coming down the hill past me and he was crossing himself like a mechanical doll. Then I saw what was up and why the island had the shakes. At a point on the horizon, God knows what the direction was, there was the plume of black smoke like you’d get from a megaton.

  You can say what you like but the earth shaking is worse than the shakes. It destroys the last little bit of human security, I mean the feeling that in the last analysis your feet have something solid to stand on. But the earth shaking is a reminder of the crazy ball flying through space which if you care or have to think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a description of the horrors of an eruption or earthquake you won’t find it here because as I now see I was too far gone to do anything but accept the whole thing as a personal insult or tribute and anyway the shakes—I mean the earth shakes—died away: and of course when I came out of that place on top of the hill I couldn’t have cared if the whole island, glass knives and all, had sunk into the sea.

  There was a vast ascent of steps, vast not only in extent—they seemed to go straight up to the sky—but vast in width. You could have marched a company up them in line abreast, and very appropriate, for they were donkey steps, the rise small, the step wide as wide, or perhaps the correct architectural term would be deep as deep. So up I went, brother ass protesting for all that he had these specially constructed steps for his convenience, until I reached the flat space in front of the main door of the huge building. It was the west door and it’s just possible I suppose that what happened after that couldn’t have happened in any other place but who can tell? There was an ancient lady sitting outside the central door of three on a rush chair and spinning a fine thread. No, she wasn’t one of the Fates, she was an ancient lady put there to see that none of the tourists who visited the place every ten years or so had a camera with him. Why? They don’t like pics and very right and proper too. It was a change to find people who know as I do that a pic takes something away from you, so I spoke my best broken Italian to her, assuring her that I wasn’t the sort of man to carry a machina photographica round with me. But she quite clearly didn’t understand, speaking nothing but whatever it is they speak in the island. However to show willing I pointed at the plume of smoke on the horizon and raised my eyebrows, whereat she started crossing herself, all rhythm of spinning interrupted.

  “Volcano!”

  She knew that word all right. Well, at least it wasn’t the bomb. A pretty place I’ve been led to, I thought to myself, it’s ho for those homely motor roads, Wilf, when the ferry comes back and be damned to Rick and Halliday and their Mafia. So in I went and it was very, very dark, even for a church.

  That was when I realized I still had my outsize sunglasses on; and I inferred from that they’d been in position for some days even when sitting on the side of the bed, or possibly dreaming. It was odd, standing inside the kind of preliminary wooden box between the inner and outer door to consider that it also implied I hadn’t washed for some time. So I took them off, pushed open the inner door and sidled in.

  It was a cathedral all right because I could see the cathedra. I took a step or two forward, glancing round and I saw at once that the glass wasn’t worth a second glance. I went forward a bit more, noting that the roof was the best bit as the spandrels were full of quite early mosaic. Mosaic is like glass—the earlier the better. I took a step or two forward, thinking that I’d case the joint quickly then concentrate on the good bits, when a piece of mosaic fell at my feet with the day’s last shake.

  Now. I had been advancing slowly. That tiny fragment of dirty blue stone fell a yard in front of me and I stood on my right foot, about to put the left one down but I kept it there in the air and looked at the stone. It was less than half an inch square. It lay directly in front of me. I put down my left foot and stood. Mountains throw cannon balls at me, churches drop a bit of stone the size of a finger nail. Well, I thought, remembering what had happened because I didn’t take any notice of the mountain’s warning, we’d better go carefully here. You don’t want to fall off the edge. What is more, there was something about that cathedral, an atmosphere. It was, now I saw in the absence of sunglasses, still darker than it had any right to be, seeing that the sun was brassy outside and most of the windows stark plain. You could call it a complete absence of gentle Jesus meek and mild. I didn’t like it and was in half a mind to leave but knew that if I did I should only find myself in an endless stream of time with nothing to help me forget it. I went on.

  How long did all that last? I sat on the surround of a pillar for a bit and was hot inside by contrast with the church’s coolth. I had a strain inside my chest like being held up on tiptoe. The strain made sitting down to rest quite, quite pointless, so despite the bit of mosaic that had fallen in front of me, I went on.

  It was in the north transept. It faced me across the whole width. It was a solid silver statue of Christ but somehow the silver looked like steel, had that frightening suggestion of blue. It was taller than I am, broad-shouldered and striding forward like an archaic Greek statue. It was crowned and its eyes were rubies or garnets or carbuncles or plain red glass that flared like the heat in my chest. Perhaps it was Christ. Perhaps they had inherited it in these parts and just changed the name and it was Pluto, the god of the Underworld, Hades, striding forward. I stood there with my mouth open and the flesh crawling over my body. I knew in one destroying instant that all my adult life I had believed in God and this knowledge was a vision of God. Fright entered the very marrow of my bones. Surrounded, swamped, confounded, all but destroyed, adrift in the universal intol
erance, mouth open, screaming, bepissed and beshitten, I knew my maker and I fell down.

  I believe it was the fat woman who had been spinning outside the door who found me. She wouldn’t have heard my screams, I think, not in that place. She wouldn’t have listened anyway, having her ears pricked for a belly rumble from the other island. But there must have come a time when she did her rounds of the place, checking perhaps that I hadn’t run off with the church plate. So she must have found me.

  I came to in hospital and didn’t even have to begin remembering. I came to with the memory. I lay, watched by a nun who told her beads just the way the old lady had spun. I don’t know if it’s normal to have a nun watch you. It may be that since I’d been struck down in the cathedral they thought they had a special responsibility for me or something. I don’t know and of course it doesn’t matter. I don’t think the hospital was very good.

  I lay for—oh, for a long, long time. I saw so many things with great clarity as if the light of the previous day, if it was the previous day, had filled me with its dreadful luminescence. I could not think anything or see anything but the truth. I saw that I had been planned from the beginning. I had my place in things. It didn’t matter what I had done or would do. I had been created by that ghastly intolerance in its own image. You may possibly recognize what I am talking about though it would be better for you if you did not. I saw I was one of the, or perhaps the only, predestinate damned. I saw this hotly and clearly. In hell there are no eyelids.

  A priest came and mumbled and I laughed which annoyed him and set the nun crossing herself as if steam-driven. The joke that I saw so clearly was this. The priest wasn’t a priest at all because all the real priests of the intolerance had been dead for thousands of years and he was like someone in a stage set. He went away, perhaps to take off his make-up. The doctor came after the priest and he was a bit better. He held both my hands and squeezed them, nodding. I understood that he wanted me to squeeze back, which I did. He went all over me and he said a word, frowning. When he saw I couldn’t understand he used another.

  “Colpo. Colpo?”

  Mea maxima culpa. Ha et cetera. I thought I knew what he meant and tried to speak, “Si, massima colpa,” but I couldn’t get it out, there was an ox on my tongue. He did a whole lot of smiling and nodding and patting, then went away. When he came back in the evening he had some new words.

  “Estrook. Piccolo. Leedle estrook.”

  That made me laugh again, thinking of the universal flail, but the doctor only went on nodding and smiling and testing my reflexes, the result of which tests, he persuaded me, added up to a tiny stroke though I could have told him drunks like me don’t have strokes, they get the horrors of one sort or another and now and then come across a real beauty, first prize, predestined and damned, the divine justice without mercy. In vino veritas, my other tag.

  The memory of it all still makes me hot. At half-past three in the morning it has made me a contemplative, stone-cold sober. I mean contemplative in the technical sense, contemplating a universal reality. They say some strokes—well, there’s no “they say” about it, I know from experience that some leedle estrooks make you speak one word when you mean another. They say too that there’s no rime or reason about the relationship between the two words, no connection except the nature of the physical brain but I know better. Wilfred Barclay, the great consultant. There is every connection as for example saying “dead” when you mean “dad” and “mare” when you mean “mum”. It—apart from the steel hard factuality of the intolerance—is what makes me know it wasn’t a leedle estrook at all, or if it was, the event was no more than coincidental.

  What does it matter? Lying in that hard bed, unnunned, blessedly ignored and allowed to contemplate the nature of predestinate insects or, moving up-market, lobsters and crabs, crusty chaps; looking for the primordial moment of will, our will I mean, and not finding it, knowing that we did not, I repeat did not, invent ourselves and that now in this eternal fix it is not what we do that will help, it is what we are that matters and what we are is not in our hands; lying, I say with the insolence of the damned who have nothing to lose and therefore do not have to suck up in a pointless attempt at influencing divine intolerance, a steel Hades, striding forward! Lying there, I say, either the verbal transpositions of my leedle estrook or it may be my natural language composed quite spontaneously a kind of set of psalms, antipsalms if you like, the natural blasphemy of our condition, why this is hell nor am I out of it, Marlowe, q.v. It is like the spontaneous effort by which a certain kind of wasp will lay eggs in a certain caterpillar it all makes good sense you wouldn’t expect anything else. What irony that it should have been so reasonable, so sane! Because during that time I must have seemed wholly mad with garbled speech, mumbling to myself in a language which wasn’t even English but my native tongue.

  However, I survived that state and began attempts to relearn a foreign language, the one I am using now. For a time I stuck to single syllables and it was quite interesting or would have been had I not still had the strain inside me, tuning me up, I thought, like a steel violin string—would I were catgut to snap and be done with, that’s what I thought, having early in life recognized that ninety-nine per cent of this language is metaphor and now having suspicions about the odd one per cent. Anyway I practised this foreign language to take the place of my so-called mumbles. It was difficult. It was like moving each syllable from here to there no that won’t do it was like having laboriously to refashion a statue, paint a complex picture, not to say “liquor” with your mouth when your mind had thought “sunrise”. I walked through the hospital regulations in a state cognate that’s the right word to madness or delirious trimmings which since by your time the whole load of religious stuff will have come back with a bang or with the bang or bangs I’ve lost my thread.

  At some point I found myself back in the hotel, then in the hire car, then in the ferry, each of these stages being quite separate like pictures in frames, and not very important compared with the violin string being wound tighter and tighter the note shriller and old nobodaddy there everywhere. But I went on practising my single syllables in its despite. On that ferry (I was watching an Italian cruise ship I think the Italians said she was the Cristoforo Colombo so for my biography I mean our biography you can find the exact place and date) I tried with my mind to think the word “end”. I spoke it out loud and what my mouth said was “sin”. This made me laugh in a lopsided way as I considered the relationship between this new word, the heat in my body, the steel string, the vision, all those things a biography would uncover that I had tried to cover in our dance. Oh it made me laugh all right. But at least I now had the alchemy of one word and might add others. It was like walking on thin ice.

  “My—sin.”

  I got that out all right. But of course it was the old intolerance’s deliberate mistake that has made calamity of so much. I tried again, not being minded to be its fool.

  “Not. Sin. I. am. sin.”

  Chapter XII

  I haven’t the heart or courage to reread that lot. It was a bad time and the very memory tempts me to the bottle which I am anxious to avoid. Behold old Filthy Rags wandering with the immediate awareness that old you-know-who has its eye on him no matter what. I didn’t mind the wanderings much because there was nothing to be done. I can’t explain that, you’ll have to take it as read. There was nothing to be done. Please see the joke! Here was Wilfred Barclay with the world willing (in a small way) to beat a path to his door (not at home). Here was old Wilf with what young men long for, as much money as he could spend and more, growing old, of course, but not aware he was screaming, dismarried if I can put it that way and quite possibly some sort of marriageable commodity if he had stayed long enough in one place, able to ride, fly, glide, sit, stand, walk, healthy in mind and body against all the odds with the world wide open for him—here, I say, was Wilf in a state of perfect freedom. People should be warned against it. Freedom should carry a gove
rnment health warning like cancer sticks! Teach that in the schools, thunder it from the pulpits, rise to propose it, Mr Speaker, hear hear, at all costs do not trust it, gentle maiden!

  Is that what I am trying to convey?

  Well. There is freedom and freedom. Surfacing as I say, I dissected myself into various portions that were at once held together and threatened by the steel string. The first thing I tried was catatonia. That provided a straightforward blow to the Barclay pride. I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t. The loo, for one thing. Adepts in the kingdom of Catatonia are able to ignore that as well so their obedient slaves do them up in nappies or what Rick would call diapers. I just wasn’t good enough at it, that’s all. Despite my every wish (and here you see the wilder shores of freedom receding) I’d have to get up and go to the loo. I even had to eat and drink, not booze, I mean but water, tea, coffee, limejuice, wet stuff. I couldn’t even avoid the thought that girls were interesting. Well, not interesting, just a lot of other things. I discovered my dreadful hatred for homosexuality. When it came to the point that I could recognize catatonia was a dead loss I thought I’d try fun. Fun. That’s what I thought. Be your age, I said, you’re only in your sixties after all and you can go on facing your youth, you don’t have to look behind you except every now and then. Commit. That verb is to remain intransitive. Go forth old man and commit. Commit afresh. Since there’s nothing to be done you might as well do something. Have some fun, hon. That set me to considering the deepest double-dyed commit that I could find. Now I, being a true Christian child of the twentieth century, you will think that I evolved some funny stuff with girls or children; but not so.

  This commit. It made me laugh at the time though not now of course, not after what has happened since and being where I am. There’s the faintest light of dawn behind the woods across the river. Soon there’ll be the dawn chorus though I shan’t hear it over the clatter of this wretched machine. I ought to get a silent one and have left silent machines here and there, it was always simpler to get a new machine wherever I was than lug one round with me.