Sugar and Other Stories (17 page)

He picked the object up, as an instrumentalist will pick up a violin or a clarinet he understands, which will in his hands sing, or as a good cook will weigh this knife or that.

“We kept glass dust, for smoothness, we dipped our hands in it,” he said, miming this unimaginable gesture. Then he tossed the wooden cage into the air and caught it, turning the wooden spindle rapidly, rapidly, between elegant palms. Faster and faster
it spun. He tossed and caught, faster and faster. His professorial face took on a new smile, not a polite smile, but a craftsman’s smile of pleasure, a child’s smile of surprise at skill. He smiled with closed lips and narrowed eyes, all the angular lines of his face slanting up to his composed eye corners. Celia felt delighted and excluded by his absorption. She tried to work out how a kite would be wound on this reel and failed. She summoned up an imaginary hillside full of small boys in white linen, all tossing and spinning, all smiling gravely, and above them dipping and hovering and swooping aerial fleets of dragons, suns and moons, all in the clear strong folk-colours. The visionary kites were Chinese, and the hill was Box Hill, where she flew kites with her small son. She fanned herself with her new fan, inked in soft blue on oiled creamy paper, spread on delicate wooden ribs, still smelling of the oil into which it had been dipped. She had been three days in the intermittent company of Professor Moon and knew nothing at all about him.

They were almost late, on their return from this cleanly festive ghost town, for the final banquet. Banquet is an odd word, suggesting perhaps to the English some municipal function in an industrial city where the New Left has not yet done away with robes and silver plate. The Chinese have adopted this word for their more convivial formal meals in their socialist state, where delicate flavours succeed each other with none of the brutality of paving-stone steaks and sickly chocolate-sauced pears. Milton’s desert Christ, rejecting classical learning, rejected also the Tempter’s proffered Banquet of Sense, a fantastic feast which had manifested itself from classical Mediterranean cultures through to this final Puritan flourish. The food for the symposium in English Literature was offered in an inner room in a restaurant, where the guests sat shoeless and cross-legged around a low, L-shaped table. Celia was here separated from Professor Moon who now had a shape in her mind, not of what she knew about him, but of what she was aware of not knowing, a form of absence, like
a glass box under a clear light. The exhaustion of the strange came upon her, the sudden refusal of mind and senses to take in new faces, new words, new foods, new courtesies, or old ones whose meanings had shifted and become dangerous or void. Everyone smiled, there was warmth, food came and more food, long amber tentacles of salty jellyfish to be gathered delicately with fine stainless steel chopsticks whose slipperiness reminded her of childhood knitting-needles.

Her neighbour on her left was only half-visible as she concentrated on her chopsticks. He had a large round face like Professor Sun, but he was not Professor Sun, he was younger, gentler, more shy. “And what are you currently teaching?” she asked this man, gathering her forces. “English pastoral,” he told her. “From the Elizabethans to the nineteenth century.” He seemed mildly offended at the question, but Celia persisted. This was their
lingua franca
, Eng. Lit., pedagogy. She had not seen a student in this foreign land. She had stood in the murky sky on top of the Press Centre and had spoken, not knowing those to whom she presumed to speak. Any academic knows the hazard of verbal slippage in such situations. A slight shift in the tension of the mesh of discourse, an increase or decrease of perhaps fifty words in the selected technical vocabulary, a shift in the selection of what must be explained and what may be presumed to be understood, can wholly change the perception of the speaker — from the trenchant to the inane, from the illuminating to the
déjà-vu.
Now, belatedly, she sought orientation. They talked about Arcadia and the English Lakes, and the jellyfish was replaced by fiercely cold white cabbage in blood-red pepper sauce and vinegar. Across the table Professor Sun the second recounted his tearing desire for this dish, exiled in Buffalo, working on Joyce’s Dublin, walking the streets in search of a compatriot or a non-existent ethnic restaurant with its own casks of pickle. Dr Wharfedale, a young and uninhibited truth-seeker, was finally clearing up points of anxiety. The tower, he enquired, in the middle of the city, the tower with the red numbers, what did that
refer to? That, said Professor Moon, was a symbol of national pride. It displayed the number of days left to go before the city hosted the World Games. We are very keen on gymnastics, but we never win. Our bodies appear to be the wrong shape, our legs too short, our trunks comparatively heavy, but lately, since our nourishment has improved, since we have become richer with our economic miracle, this is changing. The young have longer legs and higher hopes.

Ah yes, the young, said Dr Wharfedale. I gather you have trouble with student protest on your campuses? This question, like Celia’s question about altars, produced an eddy of silence. Then a series of disjunct answers. The country, one said, was threatened from outside, and economically unstable, expanding too fast, maybe. The culture was authoritarian and hierarchical, had always been so. Respect for ancestors and hierarchy was part of the national character. If now this was being questioned it was because the students were better fed and had high expectations. They also cannot remember, as we older folk can, the days of oppression, the days of colonial rule, the days when our language was forbidden and our works of art carried away to foreign museums. They do not value what we subversively fought to preserve. They wish to bring down. For the sake of bringing down. Like students everywhere, Dr Wharfedale pacifically said. The assembled professors considered him with suspicion, or so it seemed to Celia. I have noticed, Dr Wharfedale said, that when you speak, you always put your hands across your mouths, so. Is this a form of politeness? Or shyness, perhaps? It is because we believe it is very rude, very aggressive, to show anyone else our teeth, they answered. Very dangerous, it was once believed.

“Sometimes I think, to be quite truthful,” said Celia’s left-hand neighbour, “that I have wasted the whole of my life. It has all been very interesting, perhaps, all this Wordsworth and Milton and George Eliot, but I am not sure it has had any real value.”

Celia, still thinking about the student will to reject, considering
her neighbour’s youth, hurried too rapidly to agree.

“I too have wondered what it is all for, in this world we live in. My students grumble that Milton has no right to ask them to know Virgil or Ovid or even the Bible, which to them is not particularly holy and which they haven’t learned at school, as I did. I am not a Christian, why should I ask them to read
Paradise Lost
? But I am too old to change. These things are my roots.”

“Well,” said her neighbour. “Well, that is not exactly what I meant. Do you know what is meant by Third World literature?”

“Oh yes,” said Celia, again too rapidly, for she did not know. She knew what the Third World was. It was an economic entity defined in relation to two prior worlds. And she had examined degrees in places where the only literature taught was written by women, or blacks, or homosexuals, voices contradicting or modifying a voice, now unheard, that had once claimed to be the best that was thought and said in the world. She did not like, as a woman, to be thus marginalized. She did not like all these separate differences to be lumped heterogeneously together in one anger. The Third World was not one, it was many. Except when it faced the First World, from which she came, as an enemy.

“I think perhaps we should be studying Third World Literature. We should think about imperialism. And economic imperialism.”

There was a place in the city where it had been supposed she desired to go, where you were clutched by the arm from shack doors by fluent girls and eager grandmothers, come buy, come buy, Gucci bags, St Laurent battleblouses, Zeiss cameras, Sony Walkmen and Cabbage Patch dolls, the mimetic products of the miracle, indistinguishable from their platonic forms and a tenth of the price. You could buy a teeshirt with a tomato-pink and brassy Iron Lady, or one with mushroom-cloud and capering mutants proclaiming, “We’ve learned to live with the Bomb.” Vanity Fair, Celia had self-righteously thought, and had corrected herself, no, economic growth.

She turned kindly to her radical young neighbour.

“Perhaps you should study it. Perhaps you should. I am told I should. But Milton and George Eliot are my roots, I do not want them to vanish from the world.”

“Nor do I. But it may not be of great importance if they do.”

She turned to him again and said, “I know how you feel.”

He put his hand across his lower face. “I wonder if you do. No, I don’t think you do.”

It was then she made the mistake of asking his name. His face expressed, she could read it, baffled hurt succeeded by indignation and contempt. He brought from his pocket, wordlessly, the circular disc that had been pinned to his coat during their earlier deliberations and had been removed now, for they had all become friends, had exchanged ideas, they knew each other, did they not? He was not like Professor Sun, he
was
Professor Sun. Not to have known him was to annihilate everything that had been said or acted, to break the frail connections that had been made. She had failed to distinguish between oriental faces. You can’t tell them apart, she might just as well have said. She had lost face absolutely. Her hand went up to her mouth. She told the truth.

“Tonight you look twenty years younger.”

He said frostily, with his old attacking note. “I am forty-six. Young for a professor.”

“You look twenty-six.”

“Yes. Well.”

All the way home, through the day-long dark of the perpetual night of flying, she brooded on this failure. She thought about the delicate process by which we recognize faces. Something in the brain constructs a face from circular elements, a visual equivalent of the hypothetical deep structure of language. Infants in their hospital cots are teased or titillated by perceptual research workers, who dangle over them paper suns or moons, adding eyes maybe, or a smiling mouth, sketched universals. And from there to the exact particular, how does the mind move? In the national
museum of that country hall after hall of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas smile, unvarying and various. Their hands speak a language Celia could not read, mudras that call power from the earth, or evoke infinity. No two were the same, though they were all one. The idea of England from the air was small, dense, disagreeable and irrelevant, though to what it was irrelevant, she could not exactly have said. It was required that one think in terms of the whole world, and it was not possible. Later, in deference to Professor Sun, she would read a book by a francophone West African in which she found a curious key to the confused towers. This black man was incensed by his compatriots’ collusion at the imposition of a deviant Western cosmography on the lively animism of his people. Their poets and teachers, he said, kowtowed to the miscalled universal values of Western literature which were the product of ideology and superstition. Take the shiny glass and steel skyscrapers erected on African soil by Western bourgeois capitalism. These silly buildings omitted the thirteenth floor in order to propitiate foreign ghosts, witches and spirits. Dr Wharfedale had ascertained that their lecture tower lacked a fourth floor in deference to antagonistic local powers. Celia fancied that the world was perhaps after all ruled by Milton’s God, who walked among his subjects and observed them building, with bricks and black bituminous gurge, an ambitious tower of universal human speech, which might obstruct heaven towers. So, in derision, he set a various spirit upon them, who razed their native language from their tongues, and replaced it with a jangling noise of words unknown.

Celia had always before been sorry for the amicable men of Babel, who had surely desired a good thing? This jealous god was only a local deity, Israelite and seventeenth-century Puritan. But the dialect of the tribe was the human speech of particular men. The universals haunted by the mocking various spirit were the plate-glass tower, the machine gun, the deconstructive hubris of grammatologists and the binary reasoning of machines. The rational silver man-made wings hung fragile over the empty dark.
Somewhere briefly below, at some point, lay a plain, westward of Eden, where the builders had been frustrated in the days of Nimrod, where a group of nomads, who knew the place well, sat around an oasis, and looked up indifferently at its winking trajectory, a few communications satellites, and the indiscriminate bright flux of the Milky Way.

This is a story about writing. It is a story about a writer who believed, among other things, that time for writing about writing was past. “Our art”, said T. S. Eliot, “is a substitute for religion and so is our religion.” The writer in question, who, on the summer day in 1970 when this story takes place, was a middle-aged married woman with three small children, had been brought up on art about art which saw art also as salvation.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Death in Venice, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Or, more English and moral, more didactic, D. H. Lawrence. “The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained.” “The novel is the one bright book of life.” Mrs Smith was afraid of these books, and was also naturally sceptical. She did not believe that life aspired to the condition of art, or that art could save the world from most of the things that threatened it, endemically or at moments of crisis. She had written three brief and elegant black comedies about folly and misunderstanding in sexual relationships, she had sparred with and loved her husband, who was deeply interested in international politics and the world economy, and only intermittently interested in novels. She had three children, who were interested in the television, small animals, model armies, other small children, the sky, death and occasional narratives and paintings. She had a cleaning lady, who was interested in wife-battery and diabetes and had that morning opened a button-through dress to display to Mrs Smith a purple and chocolate and gold series of lumps and swellings across her breasts and belly. Mrs Smith’s own life made no sense to her without art, but she was disinclined to believe in it as a cure, or a duty, or a general necessity. Nor did she see the achievement of the work of art as a paradigm for the struggle for life, or virtue.
She had somehow been inoculated with it, in the form of the novel, before she as a moral being had had anything to say to it. It was an addiction. The bright books of life were the shots in the arm, the warm tots of whisky which kept her alive and conscious and lively. Life itself was related in complicated ways to this addiction. She often asked herself, without receiving any satisfactory answer, why she needed it, and why this form of it? Her answers would have appeared to Joyce, or Mann, or Proust to be frivolous. It was because she had become sensuously excited in early childhood by Beatrix Potter’s sentence structure, or Kipling’s adjectives. It was because she was a voyeur and liked looking in through other people’s windows on warmer, brighter worlds. It was because she was secretly deprived of power, and liked to construct other worlds in which things would be as she chose, lovely or horrid. When she took her art most seriously it was because it focused her curiosity about things that were not art; society, education, science, death. She did a lot of research for her little books, most of which never got written into them, but it satisfied her somehow. It gave a temporary coherence to her perception of things.