In the Memorial Room (12 page)

The old powerful clichés that don’t even speak the truth, for death is the signal for immediate resurrection, since the souls of the living are designed as scavengers.

Therefore, while I condemned the strategy of the Fosters, to possess me, to alter me, to obliterate me, I understood their fears, for I had the same fears myself, but it has been my weakness or my strength or both that I am an observer, a nothingness which or who, suffering intended annihilation, is apt to exclaim, with interested attention,
I understand the motive
. My policy is disengagement; perhaps I should call it my impulse.

My fellow writers have called me a man of straw. I do not write political articles. I do not march in demonstrations. I do not make my voice heard against tyranny, injustice. In private life I turn the other cheek as I murmur
I understand the motive
, therefore I do not even have a claim to be a Christian, in the sense of a follower of Christ, for I make no protest to the boss when I realise that the work he has asked me to do will result in my death and when, at the last minute, I doubt the truth of the promises he made when he himself foretold my death. Being nothing, then, am I to join the ranks of the poverty-stricken bad poets who cry, ‘I am the dawn, the wind, the sky’, an assertion which has not even the properties of logic, since the cry is not also, ‘I am a parking lot, a jet plane, a shark, a vulture’. Am I also seeking my own annihilation, as Dr Rumor believed? And therefore do I gather about myself a favourable climate and the people who will act as the prevailing weather? Then why have I not been destroyed before now?

These were the questions I asked myself as I sat at my desk in the tiny corridor and tried to write my fiction. I began to grow afraid of the new appliances. They were precious; they cost many thousands of francs; their instruction booklets, encased in plastic slip-covers, had the confidence of a well-advertised ‘brilliant first novel’ and the gloss of a record.

‘Faites connaissance avec votre cuisinière jeunes foyers’

Gaz, électrique, mixte,
lamps d’éclairage du four
cas speciaux
Allures de chauffe
puissance électrique
characteristic de brûleurs,
graissage de robinet de dessus
And for the refrigerator,
Prescriptions d’utilisation.

They demanded constant attention. Twice a month the knob
de securie
of the hot water cylinder had to be manoeuvred to keep the pipes from calcifying (tartarisation); a small
palpeur
on the electric stove which acted as a thermostat had to be treated as gently as if it were a human heart capable of human heartbeats; and speaking of heartbeats, I felt them in the electric meter when it ticked and tocked the hour –
J’ai dit ‘tais-tu’ à son pouls
; now and again it was my duty to defrost the refrigerator by pressing the automatic defrost button, unplugging the evaporator, placing a tray beneath it and collecting the ice-water; to clean stove and refrigerator; sweep, scrub, clean; clean leaves from their whirlwind life at the front door; obliterate, cause to vanish the dirt, the dust, the dead leaves; take out the rubbish in small plastic bags to be deposited at the corner of the street by the railway line where the huge feeder-machine swallowed them five times a week; sweep away crumbs, wash the smoke from curtains, take sheets and towels to the laundry, retrieve them in their plastic jackets, still and white; clean the bath, the toilet, with blue disinfectant and fuming bleach-powder, flush, clean, scour, wash down the steps of the patio, remove the dead leaves from the geraniums and support their few pink flower-heads against the earthenware pots ranged around the small stone balcony; geraniums everywhere; clean scour scrub; and bath myself twice a week, my allowance, lying in the deep bath and looking out the window at the tall tops of the waving trees.

Even then, when Elizabeth came into the sitting-room, as she would do, on some pretext or other, she’d stoop to dislodge from the carpet a crumb that had escaped the absorbing power of the carpet sweeper.

It was after my third month at Menton – April had just begun – when I woke one morning to realise that I was indeed
deaf
. It was no joke, no dream, no imagination; and so I would not laugh, wake or rejoice.

At first I lay quietly, trying to surprise myself into hearing a sound and listening with acute attention, turning my head this way and that to receive the sound waves from the air. There was no interior sound as of rushing of my blood or beating of my heart as I had supposed, in the rare moments when I thought of deafness, would be emphasised and amplified. I cleared my throat. I heard nothing. I laughed selfconsciously, Ha Ha Ha. Still I heard nothing. I tapped my hand on the wall beside my bed. I switched on my small transistor radio. None of these actions resulted in sound. There was a velvet soundlessness that was not even silence. One might have thought that it had snowed in the night, snowed right up over the brim of the world. An enormous fatigue came over me as I imagined that I would now spend the rest of my life straining to listen. I closed my eyes and sank into a nothingness which became sleep, and when I woke once again an hour had passed and the sun had set three narrow panels of light on the wall opposite my bed.

I was still deaf. I shook my head and began again turning this way and that to trap the waves of sound, but it was no use. I began to think of practical matters. Consulting a doctor, Dr Rumor. Then, I felt I wanted to keep my deafness secret. But supposing it was a symptom of a serious condition? I was young enough to feel that the only serious condition could be that leading to a swift death. Dr Rumor then. Oh Dr Rumor, I have this problem.

—Yes, what seems to be the trouble?

Then I realised that I’d not hear him, that he would have to write down his questions, unless I were able to lip-read. I jumped out of bed and stared in the mirror. I spoke, —How are you today, exaggerating the movement of my lips, but as I could not hear what I was saying, there was a distance about my image which frightened me. I heard, mentally,
How are you
, and I wondered if there might come a time when I could no longer have an image of sound, when the words
How are you
would become objects to look at as I was now looking at myself, at my moving lips, at the panels of sunlight. Then a more practical thought came to me. I wanted this Fellowship in Menton. I wanted to keep it. If some drastic physical condition overcame me I should have to relinquish the Fellowship and return to New Zealand. I decided that I must keep the deafness secret. It could only be temporary. I’d consult Dr Rumor. I’d write down what I wanted to say to him. (Deafness was already giving me a reluctance to talk.)

Then a sentence came to mind: ‘The blind man, in his fury, struck out with his white stick.’

How would I strike out in my fury? With my hearing aid, and have the world laughing at me? How would I know, when I spoke, if my voice were too loud or too soft? I’d often been startled by the shouting of those who were deaf. (He’s deaf, that’s why he shouts.)

Beethoven…

How comforting to ally oneself with the great.
He
could still hear, mentally: auditory images were different, depending largely on memory, and as I was only thirty-three and my memory was good and I’d had thirty-three years of hearing…

Fifteen minutes later I was preparing breakfast for myself, standing in the small kitchen in front of the refrigerator and the grand stove with its glass-doored oven and its thermostatic
palpeur
. Normally, the refrigerator made a sound like a distant jet plane with a background of a high-pitched whine, while the stove, in use, sang a more subdued note, a low-pitched hum if the left-hand plate were set at its highest, ten.

The kitchen was silent. I was silent. My footsteps made no sound, the external world sent no sound through the windows; a loosened window-catch set one window swinging to and fro, and the slight breeze swaying the palm trees did not cause the usual shuffling of leaves as if unseen footsteps were following a path in the air. Presently I grew used to the soundlessness. A train passed. I felt the vibrations through my body. I felt the house brace itself against the assault of the train-sound but I heard no sound: my body received the news of the train; my feet, my belly, knew it was passing.

I wanted to get out, to get out of myself, to hear. I looked out of the kitchen window as I ate my breakfast. I was an early riser. Few people were up. The Fosters’ curtains were still drawn. In the one huge apartment block beside the Fosters’ one or two lights were on. Someone was rolling up a blind on the third floor balcony.

A middle-aged man. I’d seen him before, doing his housekeeping, carefully moving the table and chairs as he swept around them, and then sitting by himself to dine, looking out over the olive grove at the sea. Perhaps at this hour he was looking for Corsica which was said to be visible before sunrise, in winter only, though few people had seen it, and seeing it with little effort from two healthy eyes or from two healthy eyes behind carefully trained binoculars, gave one, in Menton, a lifelong cause for pride. Seeing Corsica was a ‘gift’ and as with gifts it was not a case of one’s choosing to see but of being chosen.

The man in the apartment vigorously shook a mat over the balcony; I could see the dust flying, even from my window. Evidently he was not hoping or trying to see Corsica.

I know now that in affliction one does not think grand thoughts: one’s thoughts are mean, resentful. Not being able to grasp the fact of my deafness, I turned again to the idea of blindness, thinking, as if it might have been a haven,
Now if I had been blind I would be able to say, rousing pity, —I shall never see Corsica
. Who will have sympathy for me if I say I can never hear Corsica? I despised myself. I had become a living anticlimax. One does not always quote fiction as a good example for life but, I told myself, I would never have let this happen in fiction – a man going blind who instead becomes deaf, who, concentrating on the drama of looking his last on colour and light and form, suddenly finds himself robbed forever of the first few bars of the Hammerklavier Sonata, of their entering again from the outside world as if they lived there, in comfort and prosperity, as citizens of a respected country.