In the Memorial Room (13 page)

I had located my drama: Beethoven would take me by the hand through the paradise and hell of soundlessness, but first, because I was only Harry Gill, I would go to Dr Rumor and say, —Dr Rumor, I’m deaf, stone deaf, I can’t even hear if the new refrigerator is working.

Therefore, as early as possible, and avoiding any meeting with Dorset and Elizabeth and beginning an acquaintance with the experience of being a Removed Man (my mind played with the use of the word ‘remove’ in the serving of meals, and the controversy about whether the ‘remove’ should be eaten first or last; I had a feeling of horror as I remembered what I had read only a week ago in a cookery book, ‘Hunger and thirst are unlovely things yet they are the foundation for the house of hospitality’), I set out to visit Dr Alberto Rumor in Rue Henry Bennet.

My walk was unsteady; I had not realised how much the sound of my feet firmly striking the earth had directed my ability to walk. I kept turning my head this way and that, trying to receive and interpret sound, working it like a radar tower, and my confusion increased as I felt my powers of interpretation working overtime on sounds which were nothing but imaginings.

I saw a heavy truck. I thought I heard it. I became afraid. I began to think I would not get as far as Rue Henry Bennet. I felt very lonely. No one knew I was deaf; I had no signal to put out for attention, sympathy and consideration. My hands cupped behind my ears would invite laughter or smiles. My incomprehension when spoken to would label me, perhaps, as one of the unfortunately disabled who must be arranged for or removed. I hadn’t realised before how much of one’s day is spent in talking to oneself, in listening to body sounds and movements, in uttering now and again small sighs of pleasure or pain, in exclaiming and hearing the exclamation with satisfaction, oneself talking to oneself.

It occurred to me that my removal was as complete, or seemed so, as if I were invisible; my feeble eyes, perhaps in a kind of jealousy or rivalry, emotions which I’m told eyes are capable of feeling, searched up and down, everywhere they could look, not only for the reassurance of my visibility but for a chance sight of some small sound to carry, with an emphasis of magnanimity, to the threshold, the pavilion, the inner chambers of my ears.

I was pleased that Dr Rumor remembered me. Even Hamlet’s father’s ghost, for all his demands in the name of memory, would have been pleased by the simple recognition of a smile. Dr Rumor was about to say something to me – he had begun – when I gave him the sheet of paper I had been preparing as I sat in his waiting-room. It said: —I’m totally deaf. Since early this morning I haven’t been able to hear a sound, not even myself breathing.

Dr Rumor looked at me as at an object. He frowned. I held out my hand for the sheet of writing-paper. I took it and leaning it on the edge of his deck I wrote, —It’s true. I’m deaf. Write to me.

Reading what I had written I had an impulse to laugh. Write to me, indeed. It sounded as final as ‘Remember me’, a paper utterance made before I set out on a long journey to a land where I would be almost inaccessible.

Obediently, Dr Rumor wrote, —You’re the young man who consulted me before. The young man in the newspaper photograph, standing beside the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.

I read what he had written. I felt erased.

He drew down the brilliant ceiling light and taking his instruments he began to examine my ears. He took out his watch and held it by each ear. He said something which of course I could not hear. Then he opened his mouth and made a grimace; he looked as if he were shouting for his jaw tensed and thrust out like a container for the sound he was obviously making.

When he had made all the examination he seemed to require, he raised the light to its normal position, took the sheet of paper and wrote, as if he were sending a telegram, —Can’t help you. Modern disease. Auditory Retaliation. Strategy of War.

In answer to this peculiar telegram I wrote, —Self-inflicting?

He wrote in reply, —A sealing-off, a closure. Auditory hibernation.

—Permanent? A physical condition?

The telegraphic phrases were appropriate, I thought, for my state of removal.

He smiled and shook his head. Evidently he did not know.

He wrote, —Seems to be.

This was the moment, I thought, when patient and doctor would begin talking about the best specialists in the country, ‘ear-nose-and-throat’. I knew. My father was a doctor. I had been a medical student. I had an aunt with Ménière’s disease, and, while I was studying, several patients with ear disease or malfunction or, now that we are in an age of empirical drugs, malformation. I had seen a child born with tiny ears where its arms should have been, wheat-ears new on a green wheat-stalk. The child could breathe and move but not hear or talk. The child did not live.

There was no space left on the paper which Dr Rumor and I had used, otherwise I would have written, I thought, —What shall I do?

Anticipating my question he drew another sheet of paper from his desk drawer, licked the tip of his ballpoint pen (an unhygienic habit I felt for a doctor) and wrote for a few seconds, every now and again glancing at me as if, estimating my character and capabilities, he were writing me a reference for a job.

He passed the paper over to me. I read, —As I said before, Mr Gill, you are at the point of bisection of circumstances, opportunity, characters, time; everything is favourable for your obliteration. You have been stifled, muffled, silenced. You cannot cry out because you cannot hear the cries of others.

On an isolated line he had written: Interesting. As if it were in place of: To be recommended. Or: A good worker. Or: Conscientious.

I wrote, —But what can I do?

—Mr Harry Gill – is that really your name, by the way? Just wait and see. I think your condition will cure itself. I give it four months.

—Four months! And wait and see! What about, Wait and Hear! Hear nothing! Four months is the time of my Fellowship. What are you hinting?

—Trust me. Wait and see.

As I was leaving I put out my hand for my pen which Dr Rumor had pocketed; his own was still in his hand. He apologised. I went as quickly as I could from his consulting room. He was as unbelievable a doctor as ever I had met. I glanced at the brass plate at the door to make certain that it had not been I who had created him and his unbelievability – no, I read: ‘Dr Alberto Rumor, Specialist in General Medicine’.

How hard it is to be oneself! What is oneself? Always one must do as others are doing, even if it is the others who lived in a stone age or other ages than ours – even the old man finds his hero; the poet of seventy, who has written quietly, mostly unadmired, for many years, begins to draw the inspiration of his daily life from the letters of the young Keats. He reads Milton. He learns Latin and begins to read Latin verse. He attempts Greek. Suddenly, at seventy, he is satisfied only with reading Homer, Sophocles, in the ‘original’, this poet whose strength in writing has been his technical skill, his powers of observation, and not his originality. In the young Keats he has found, nevertheless, a companion and hero. In a year’s time, if he is alive, he will have found another hero and model, as if he were adolescent again, and he will be saying, I’m reading X in the original. Y did, you know. I’ve been reading Y’s life. Only, because Y is dead, he is unlikely to dress like Y, though if he finds a physical resemblance to him he may cultivate a beard or a special way of doing his hair, if he has hair, which reminds those who know Y or have seen photographs or daguerreotypes or artists’ likenesses of Y, to comment on the resemblance.

I myself had once relied on Keats to instruct me how to pass my time! I drank the wine that Keats drank. I did not care for the French language because Keats thought it uglier than the conversation overheard around Babel. Yet I have never been a person of extreme suggestibility, only, as Keats described himself, one of extreme nothingness which, given the talent and the imagination, would have made me an actor. I don’t imagine that Keats and I are alone in this nothingness – it is the commonest state in its simplest form where it remains nothingness, emptiness, a container with now and again a few contents – Mr Metonymy, the container for the contents, where Mr Metonymy has no contents. The streets of the world are peopled with the Metonymy Family, the containers with few contents, living in figurative bliss, while others, desiring to change, embrace the simple genre, whatever that means, become members of the Literal Family, which survives through its centuries-long feud with the Metaphors and the Similes.

Here I was, then, newly deafened Mr Anticlimax, feeling like one of the species of writers whom I despised – those, growing in number, who must ‘experience’ their subjects, who will dye themselves different colours so as to ‘feel’ the experience of being of different race, who will work for a year in an office, live in prison, in a cave, on a desert island, in a monastery, in order to write their ‘intimate story’ of life in these places:
Third Trimester Bleeding
,
The Mechanics and Expectations of a Central Tumour
,
The Blood–Brain Barrier
,
Fabric Food
,
Catecholamines
,
Small Sample Problems
,
Multi-media Learning
.

I decided to live with my deafness for the period of my Fellowship, to be a deaf Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, with what must have appeared to be alarming disregard for my future health and the prospects of a cure which would diminish, I supposed, unless I sought help at once from a specialist. I could not explain, then or now, my
laissez-faire
state of mind about something on which my survival might have depended. When Dr Rumor suggested I go at once to a specialist to have tests taken, X-rays and so on, and that agonising test which is remarkably like water torture where water is poured into one’s ears until one is on the verge of fainting, I wrote on the new sheet of paper provided that I knew someone and would take care of the matter myself. These were lies. I knew no specialist in Menton. I suppose that, thirty-three years old, not long technically out of adolescence, which for me anyway was a delayed process, I was courting disaster as surely but not so evidently as the young man who buys a motorbike and rides it at its full capacity. Yet I had never been a reckless person. Rather, I had been rather timid, bookish, cautious in my actions. It often happens, however, that with a person of my nature, the power of the crowd may suddenly pierce his perfect behaviour, and his nature is artificially inseminated with the potency of the master brute ‘crowd psychology’ or ‘adolescent psychology’.

Whatever the explanation I accepted my deafness with a passivity which, before the age of the raging clitoris, would have been looked on as feminine!

Although I accepted this total deafness I was not overjoyed by it. I was depressed and afraid. Once again I knew the strangeness and numbness of walking soundlessly through soundless streets and of watching the mouths of people open and shut, pout, twist, beg, as if they were fledgling birds each looking on the other for food, which they were doing; I could see them receiving and swallowing words, rejecting them at times, tasting them, relishing them, then perhaps spitting them out as if they had found the bitter stones within the sweet fruit. I became aware even as I walked home to my
petite maison
that I now looked hungrily on the mouths of others, and I was aware of a survival instinct in myself by which my intensity of staring awakened gradually the ability to ‘read’ the lips so that even without sound I too could taste the words. I felt afraid that I would forget the sound of words. I wanted to anchor my memory as if it were an intractable giant and I a tiny Gulliver; walk the miles and miles around its vastness, winding, securing an unbreakable bond.

As I turned the key in the front door of the little house, and walked in flannel-footed from the flannel world I realised that I had half-hoped that in my home, at least, there would be sound again, that it would be switched on, the way electricity is cut off while the company makes urgent repairs and one goes out for a walk planning to return when everything is working again, the lights lighting, the refrigerator refrigerating, the heater heating; and so on returning, one touches the switch inside the front door and the light shines instantly. Ah. Back to normal. The feeling of suspension in a hostile dark machineless world, the obsessive wondering how it used to be when writers wrote with quills and went to bed at sunset, the loneliness of estrangement from progress convincingly equated with necessity, all vanish at the touch of the switch; one can breathe again.

I don’t think I have ever been as near to crying as that morning when I shut the front door behind me and stood, hearing no sound at all, though I even waited for a minute or two in case last-minute ‘adjustments’ were being made to the hearing mechanism which I now appeared to think of as something beyond myself, in some central workshop where these matters were dealt with. No sound. I took a deep breath, which I had to take on trust because I could not hear it – I was reminded that in future this would be the nature of my speaking, if I tried to speak, speech on trust.

I went to my bedroom and made my bed. I felt very tired and lonely. I wanted desperately to think myself back to the day before, as if what had been visited upon me were a kind of punishment and if only I could return to ‘yesterday’ I would promise to be and do all that was asked of me. Asked by whom?

I would have to be careful. I was peopling the world with agents. I was fast throwing out my normal mental furniture and all the harmless inhabitants of my mind, and I realised that I was in danger of opening the door to find them transformed, the gentle inhabitants into devourers, the furniture into an expanding space-engulfing suffocation. (I was remembering a recent newspaper story of the farmer who turned his dogs out for the night and when he opened the door in the morning to feed them they killed and devoured him.)

I smoothed the coverlet on my bed, put out my pyjamas for the night. I glanced at my watch. It said half past eleven. I went upstairs to the corridor and sat at my desk, opened my typewriter and put in a sheet of paper. I withdrew the paper, closed the typewriter and, leaving my desk, went into the living room where I sat on the sofa and looked out at the palm trees. The day was going to be fine. There was no wind. The palm leaves hung without moving. I looked up at the Fosters’ house and could see no sign of their being home. Perhaps they were gardening up the back of their land? They sometimes gardened in a fury for two or three days at a time, wrestling with weeds and stones and many years of neglect, and after their three days’ work they would say to me, ‘We’re not really gardeners, not in the usual sense.’ It had not worried me that, like many people, they were living in an illusion about their own natures – I was reminded of someone I knew who while insisting, ‘I’m not really a traveller, you know,’ spent her time flying from country to country. I accepted, however, Elizabeth Foster’s explanation (their gardening had not only to be denied but explained) that Rose had been fond of gardening, and I was aware that when someone in a family dies, those who remain often adopt characteristics and habits of the dead as if these had thereby been abandoned, as orphans, which no one else would take in and care for.