When had my Zion been? I saw afternoon sun slanting on the grasses of Maiden Castle; there were sheep safely grazing; the grasses stirred in the winds of the long past and the footfalls of ghosts. ‘These Iron Age earthworks,’ Giles had explained, ‘were made to conform to the shape of the hills they were on, to make use of the earth forces. Speaking of which, in the aerial photographs, the system of ramparts and ditches in the eastern entrance remind me of a vagina.’ ‘So many things do,’ I said. The sun was behind him, and his wind-ruffled hair had a golden penumbra.
‘Nebuchadnezzar,’ said an American accent to my left. It was the man from Aroma. ‘Nabucco is the Italian version.’
‘You needn’t shout,’ said his wife, ‘I can hear you quite well. Nebuchadnezzar had the feet of clay?’
‘The idol he dreamt of,’ said the man as the lights dimmed. The curtain had gone up without my noticing and there were musicians on the platform over the orchestra pit and other musicians on the stage, not exactly trench-coated but in grotty combinations of outdoor wear and military surplus. The conductor had forgone the usual spotlit entrance and was onstage in his shirtsleeves conducting the overture. Were there already other people onstage? I can’t remember — the whole thing had taken me unawares and I hadn’t even looked at the cast or the synopsis in my programme. The overture was a take-charge affair that affectingly foreshadowed, from mood to mood, what was to follow; as it went on I was startled to realise that I knew the part I was hearing: it was an instrumental version of the chorus of the Hebrew slaves. I suppose it’s one of those things that everyone knows without necessarily knowing what opera it’s from.
Now I could see that the elevated walkways went across the back of the stage as well, continuous with the ones on both sides and behind me. There was a great deal of traffic on these, and when both Hebrews and Babylonians were in military garb I couldn’t always tell which soldiers I was seeing. The staging was adapted to the exigencies of the refurbishment and had a rather startled ad hoc look that added to the excitement of what was definitely a rouser — a very dynamic production with a soprano, Lauren Flanigan, who seemed a whole risorgimento in herself. Part of my pleasure in her performance was a response to her own keen enjoyment of the role of Abigaille, who turned out not to be Nabucco’s daughter; when Nabucco goes mad she usurps the throne and arranges the execution of the real daughter, Fenena, a mezzo who has a Hebrew boyfriend. Nabucco, however, reclaims his sanity and his kingdom, renounces Baal, and saves Fenena and the Hebrews. Abigaille then does the decent thing and takes poison in the very best operatic tradition. This of course is not a complete or coherent synopsis. I was not equally attentive to all the principals and events — my interest was mainly in Abigaille and Fenena. Anne Mason was a spirited and touching Fenena, and I was greatly relieved when she was rescued by the newly converted Nabucco. I found the whole production highly satisfying, but for me the main event was the famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Scene Two, Part Three, The Banks of the Euphrates; we had arrived at the rivers of Babylon and I broke out in goosepimples.
Since then I’ve bought a recording of Nabucco sung in Italian, and I’ve been listening to that chorus as Verdi heard it. ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate …’ it begins, [Fly, thought, on wings of gold …] and goes along quietly with the spirit building in it until it swells into ‘Oh, mia patria si bella e perduta!’ [Oh, my country so lovely and lost!]. By the time it reaches ‘Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati, perche muta dal salice pendi?’ [Golden harp of the prophetic seers, why dost thou hang mute upon the willow?] I’m ready to grab Giles’s cricket bat and head for the nearest ramparts. Small wonder that it became emblematic of the spirit of the risorgimento and was sung spontaneously by the crowds following Verdi’s funeral procession through the streets of Milan.
That was the music in my head when I left the Coliseum, and with it came Psalm 137 and my remembered Zion. The rain had stopped, and after I crossed St Martin’s Lane in the intervals between taxis and was once more in the darkness of Cecil Court I saw again the afternoon sunlight on the wind-stirred grasses of Maiden Castle. How shall I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? I thought. But then, really, that’s what life is, isn’t it: a strange land.
20
Adelbert Delarue
Whichever way you turn, your mind comes with you. To take the boy out of the Jesuits, that is possible, but to take the Jesuits out of the boy, that is not possible. In a dream I was stone, yes, chiselled by Gislebertus. I was one of the sinners on the tympanum of the west portal of the Cathedral of St Lazare. Is this all there is? I thought. If so, nothing much can happen. But just then two gigantic stone hands gripped my head and lifted me by it and I was eye to eye with Christ. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what have we here? It looks like a von Peng sort of sinner.’
‘Delarue,’ I said faintly.
‘Whatever,’ said Christ. From his garment he took out a much-used stone notebook and a stub of stone pencil. As he leafed through the pages it was like the riffling of tombstones. He frowned, licked the point of the stone pencil, and made a note. ‘I regret to see,’ he said, ‘that you have done business with some people not of the best, have you not, my old?’
‘That was my father, Gottfried von Peng,’ I said. ‘Of his business affairs I know nothing.’
Again Christ flipped through the stone pages. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘did you inherit from him?’
‘Well, yes,’ I said.
‘It goes,’ he said. ‘With the money, the sins.’
‘That hardly seems fair.’
‘What can I tell you?’ he said with a smile. ‘Would you like to hear chapter and verse of how you’ve spent your time and your money since coming into your inheritance? Shall we speak, for example, of lewd toys?’
‘You must have a great many demands on your time,’ I said. ‘How can you concern yourself with such trifles?’
‘There are no trifles,’ said Christ. ‘There are no little things; everything is big. Dare one hope that when you wake up you’ll try to …’ At this point the great stone hands let go of me and I lost the rest of his words in the rush and roar of warm air as I fell.
‘Do better?’ I shouted as I woke up.
‘Didn’t I do it the way you like?’ said Victoria. ‘Wasn’t it good for you?’
‘Quiet!’ I said. ‘I’m trying not to lose the dream.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Victoria.
21
Roswell Clark
Imagine a man climbing out of his office window and standing on a ledge forty storeys above the street. He’s about to jump and maybe he asks himself, ‘How did I get here?’ It’s a heavy question but the answer is very simple: he got here because one thing led to another and this is jump time.
Since finishing the gorilla I’d made a second trip to Tiranti’s for bigger chisels and gouges, a lignum vitae mallet, bench screws, and two adzes, one with a curved edge and one straight. I picked up the straight-edge adze, hefted the weight of it and felt its intention move up my arm. Then I went to Moss & Co for more lime.
The underground station at Hammersmith Broadway was manic with Christmas decorations, as was King Street when I crossed to it. It was raining, which somewhat moderated the visual din and seemed friendly. Walking to Dimes Place with the rain gently screening me from evil influences I felt that things might go well. In Dimes Place the old paving stones glistened their welcome and opened the familiar perspective of sheds in which the timbers and the forest spirits waited. ‘Ebony, Iroko, Jelutong and Lime,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that I’m ready for what I’m probably going to do.’ I touched the fingers of the crucified hand in my pocket as I entered the Lime shed. ‘What do you think?’ I said to the quiet leaning timbers, the attentive spirits of the wood. ‘Please be honest with me.’
Be unsure, they said. Be humble.
‘Is that all you have to say?’
That’s all there is, they said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll go with tha
t.’ I had intended to make a clay model before going to the wood but now I found that I wanted no intermediate steps. I had sketches, I had what was in my head, and I wanted to feel my tools cutting away everything that was not the image in my mind. I went to the office, showed Stuart Duncan various scraps of paper with measurements, did the necessary calculations with him, bought the wood for delivery the next day, and went home.
That evening I watched Mercy Mission — the Rescue of Flight 771 on video. The events in this story actually happened and the people are real. On a Christmas-Eve morning a young flyer and his partner take off from San Francisco to deliver two used Cessna crop-dusting planes to Sydney. Their Flight 771 is in four stages over the Pacific with stops at Honolulu, Pago Pago, and Norfolk Island. These planes were not designed for long-distance flight and are ill equipped; the whole thing is a bad idea but the pilot and his pregnant wife need the money badly.
All goes well as far as Pago Pago but when they take off on Christmas morning the partner crashes and although he’s unhurt his plane is destroyed. He goes home and now our young pilot, who has no long-distance experience, flies on alone. Norfolk Island is a tiny speck on his map and he’s navigating by compass and dead reckoning, hoping that he’s compensating correctly for crosswinds.
Fourteen hours out of Pago Pago he’s a half-hour overdue at Norfolk Island and there’s no land in sight. He’s lost over the ocean and running out of fuel with night coming on. He calls Auckland but he’s not within range of their radar so he’s not on their screens; his automatic direction finder is broken and he can’t tell them where he is. No search-and-rescue team can find him before he has to ditch; the best Auckland can do is patch him through to a veteran pilot on a New Zealand Air flight from Fiji to Auckland with a planeload of passengers.
Before he can be helped the exhausted young man must be located. Determined to save him from death in the sea, the older man, with unflagging ingenuity, finds him after many tries and leads him to Auckland. By this time our pilot has been flying for more than twenty-three hours. The rescuer lands first; he watches the little Cessna glide in and out of the darkness and the rain with an empty tank; then he half carries the young man out of the plane. I cry every time I see that little plane glide in empty.
Tomorrow when the wood arrived I’d cut pieces to size, glue them as necessary, wait for the glue to dry, and then get started on my first uncommissioned woodcarving.
Tomorrow came, and the wood. I sawed, I glued with Evo-Stik, and I waited until the next day. I was very nervous; the block of lime was screwed to the bench and my tools lay beside it, all of them razor-sharp and just as ready to bite into my flesh as the wood. Something needed to be said or done before I put my hand to the work. Prayer? Would it be right for an atheist to pray? I recalled various times when I’d said ‘Please’ in matters large and small. ‘Please let me get there on time.’ ‘Please let me not drop this.’ ‘Please let there be hot water.’ Was I talking to the train, the light bulb and ladder, the boiler? To what, then? The wood was waiting with my guide lines pencilled in.
I poured myself a large Jack Daniel’s; after all, this was the launch of something. Then I put on Peggy Lee, ‘Is That All There Is?’. That didn’t do it for me, so I went to Boney M and ‘Rivers of Babylon’, listened to that track once, then tried Mahalia Jackson singing America’s Favourite Hymns, starting with Track 5, ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. I imagined her singing with her eyes closed, her hands clasped, joyous and secure in her connection with Jesus. Carried along by her fervour, I let the CD run to its end, then I put on Patsy Cline singing ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. A different style but there was nothing lost in the change from one singer to the other: they were both hooked up to something that wasn’t there for me. And yet …
One more large Jack Daniel’s and I took up the mallet and the straight-edge adze. ‘Please,’ I said to the wood. I struck a tentative blow, the adze slipped and bit me in the leg. It didn’t find the femoral artery but there was a lot of blood so I bandaged it as well as I could, pressed down hard on it with my hand, and called a minicab to take me to Chelsea & Westminster Accident and Emergency.
‘You’ve got blood all over your trousers,’ said the driver. ‘I don’t want it all over my car.’ I’ve seen faces like his in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch but better done.
‘Give me five minutes,’ I said. I went back into the house, wrapped a towel and several plastic carrier bags around the offending leg, took a couple of turns with ducting tape to hold them in place, grabbed a book for the waiting room, and tried the minicab again. ‘OK?’ I said. ‘No blood.’
‘If there is, you’ll pay for the upholstery,’ said my Samaritan, and off we went.
This being a Tuesday morning traffic was fairly light at Accident and Emergency. I gave one of the receptionists my details and joined the other accidents and emergencies among rumpled newspapers and magazines and Styrofoam cups of coffee and soft drinks. There were two Muslim women accompanied by men and small children, a large man with a MOTHER tattoo on his arm, a youth with his arm in a sling, and a young woman who was reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Nobody was bloody but me. Outside the Fulham Road provided its usual soundtrack while in the waiting room an atmosphere of truancy and withdrawal from the world prevailed.
The book I’d brought with me was Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. I was at the point where chess had overflowed its boundaries to pervade everything and the grandmaster Luzhin saw the shadows on the floor grouping to attack him when my name was called by the triage nurse in her little cubicle.
‘You’re quite a package,’ she said. She had a Scots accent and looked like short shrift but with a friendly grin. She spread some paper towels on the floor, unwrapped me, and told me to pop off my trousers. ‘What happened?’ she said.
‘I was working on a woodcarving when the adze slipped.’
‘Accident-prone, are you?’
‘I didn’t use to be but maybe I am now.’
She cleaned the wound, which was only oozing now, put on a temporary dressing, and solved the bloody-trousers problem by giving me a hospital dressing-gown and steering me into a cubicle for express stitching by Dr Kohn, a young man who looked as if he knew too much. ‘You should get an anatomy book if you want to do the job right,’ he said with a straight face. ‘You missed the artery by about an inch.’
‘Very funny. Do I look suicidal?’
‘No more than others I’ve seen but you never know — a lot of accidents aren’t strictly accidental.’ He raised his eyebrows and looked at me knowingly.
‘Thank you for your input. If I had my notebook with me I’d write that down.’
‘Maybe you can remember it.’
‘I’ll try. Thanks for the stitches.’
A pair of hospital pyjamas was found for me and a plastic bag for my trousers. I phoned for a minicab and went home.
I didn’t feel quite ready to pick up adze and mallet again, and although my leg hurt I could walk normally, so after lunch I took myself to the Royal Academy of Art to see The Genius of Rome exhibition. This exhibition, drawing on so many museum and private collections, was as remarkable logistically as artistically and was unlikely ever to happen again. Painters from all over Europe who had worked in Rome between 1592 and 1623 such as Rubens, Bril, and van Honthorst were represented along with Caravaggio, Caracci, Saraceni, Gentileschi, and the other native Italians.
A slowly moving procession of eyes met, again and again across the centuries, the eyes of lute players, courtesans and low life, Christ and the Virgin, the penitent Magdalene, and a variety of saints and Old Testament figures. The modernity of the faces was startling — I’ve seen Caravaggio’s gypsy fortune-teller at the cashier’s window in Lloyds, d’ Arpino’s Virgin reading the Sun on the District Line, Gentileschi’s St Francis selling vegetables in the North End Road, and everybody’s Christs everywhere. These many faces of Christ spoke to me and asked questions but for the time being I avoided
this dialogue and gave my attention to the landscapes of Paul Bril.
I was much intrigued by a small one, only thirty-two centimetres wide, oil on copper, The Campo Vaccino with a Gypsy Woman Reading a Palm. There were some good-looking Roman ruins in the foreground, middle distance, and far distance. The near ones were in shade, making as it were a proscenium through which to view the far sunlit ones. There were many people and cattle. The figures nearest the viewer were deeply shadowed; the eye moved beyond them to the gypsy, her client, and the others grouped with them, and from them to the further sunlit figures. The campo, the ruins, the trees and sky and the divisions of space, light, and shadow were the main action; the gypsy and her group gave scale and emphasis to the visual planes of near, middle, and far. The colour, although austere and restrained, had a richness about it. If I had been able to stand in the real Campo Vaccino with the ruins and figures arranged as in the picture it would not have had the peculiar charm of the painting because the visual planes would not have been so ordered, so beguilingly presented. Everything in the picture was real but Paul Bril had restaged it so that the eye and the mind of the viewer could better contain it. Yes! I thought, if I could only see my life with the light and shadow and colours of near, middle, and far, I could … What?
I smelled honeysuckle and saw Sarah Varley looking at the same picture. ‘If only reality could pull itself together like that,’ I said.
‘I wonder why it is that we like to look at architectural ruins,’ she said.
‘Maybe looking at them makes us feel that humans can outlast brick and stone.’
‘Humans can outlast all kinds of things …’ She seemed about to say more but she stopped. ‘I’ll move on,’ she said. ‘I find it difficult to adjust my viewing pace to anyone else’s.’ Off she went.