Art and Lies Read online

  Call the rain. Drops of mercy that revive the burnt earth. Forgiveness that refills the droughted stream. The rain, in opaque sheets, falls at right-angles to the sea. Let me lean on the wall of rain, my legs at sea. It is giddy, this fluid geometry, the points, solids, surfaces and lines that must undergo change. I will not be what I was.

  The rain transforms the water.

  Handel

  SHE IS, perhaps, thirty-five. She wears her hair as lions do. Male lions of course. Why, when we compliment our women, do we compare them to the male beast? Lion hair, eyes of peacock blue, a swan’s neck (the male’s being longer and whiter), panther grace, skin soft as antelope hide. I had an Arab acquaintance, a homosexual as it happens, who told me that the male antelope is the softer. The female coarsens through breeding. ‘Isn’t that so?’ he said, as we were walking past the Maternity Ward.

  Men prefer one another, I am quite sure of that, women are a kind of indulgence. I don’t expect my Arab friend to like them, he doesn’t, but I find it odd when my heterosexual friends don’t like them either. My colleagues don’t like their wives. They do desire their mistresses. Other women do not come within the scope of their consideration. There are nurses, mobile bedpans, we call them, and there are an increasing number of doctors who are women. Fortunately most of those remain in the lower ranks, either out of vocation or family ties, I say fortunately and I mean fortunately for them. Consultants are not well mannered except to paying clients. I work with a man who always asks the women whether or not their breasts get in the way of the stethoscope. They blush, he laughs, slaps me on the shoulder in that chummy conspiratorial way, ‘Handel will see to you,’ he says. ‘Best pruner in the business.’

  I do apologise. I do apologise. I do apologise …

  *

  ‘Will you stop saying “Sorry,” Handel? They are the ones who are supposed to be sorry. That is what they have come for, to say sorry, this is Confession.’

  My priest despaired of me. It was his duty, my training, that we should sit side by side in the little veiled box that separated us from the penitent by a thin lattice of sin.

  ‘Father I have sinned.’

  ‘Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience?’

  ‘Sins of the flesh.’

  Yes, always sins of the flesh, nobody has any conscience.

  ‘Begin.’

  Those long Friday afternoons, the stories the same, no matter the teller always the tale. No evidence there for the individual life. Shop lifting, wife beating, work dodging, betrayals, infidelity, infidelity, infidelity, the common denominator crime. The men bragged, it was in their voices, the women trembled and cried. There was one, I remember, a sparse woman, with whom the priest was particularly harsh. What had she done but take one night to make sense of the space between her legs. The neglected space where her child’s head had been, where her husband’s pleasure had been, the thing that had become the drain to let out the gin.

  She said ‘I don’t love him but I had to have him. I’ve never wanted a man before, not like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What if my children find out? What if my husband finds out?’

  I didn’t say, ‘Your husband comes here to relieve himself on me every Friday, just as he goes to relieve himself on a prostitute every Thursday pay night.’

  I said ‘You must never see the man again. Pray to God to help you.’

  She said ‘My body thinks of him.’

  I thought of her body underneath his hips. ‘I’m sorry.’

  My priest and I walked with long strides through the Seminary’s covered avenue. The wind blew back our skirts, revealing socks held up by short suspenders, and long-toed lace-up shoes. I watched our feet hit the flagstones in four beats, each to the rhythm of the angry priest. He lectured me on God’s Will for Humanity, not seeing it in the cloud-cracked sky where the sun tipped out in a golden yolk. Not seeing it in the huge trees wind-thralled. God’s will, this small blue planet. God’s will that we are spirit in skin and bone.

  ‘She sinned greatly.’

  Did she? What if I had told her to give thanks for her feelings?

  To give thanks for her body, his body, their pleasure? Would she have loved God more or less?

  I did not say this to him, for whom the wind blew or did not blow. For whom the sun shone or did not shine. He was talking to me about erections, about controlling his erections, and I wanted to say ‘Damn it man, she wasn’t talking about an erection, she was talking about the most intense moments of her forty-two years.’

  Why had she been sitting in a booth telling a twenty-five-year-old virgin boy about that?

  What does it say in my notes? ‘To understand the problems of his flock the priest need have no experience of them. He has the authority of God.’ What about the imagination of God? Mozart, dear, drunk, divine Mozart, would have made a better priest than me. I sat alone, in my darkened room, the shaded lamp behind me, and listened to the close of The Marriage of Figaro, where the Countess Almaviva offers forgiveness to those who have least reason to expect it. Forgiveness. And I?

  *

  I did not succeed as a priest. Gone the humble desire to take my medical bag and a missal to the heathen sick world. I lacked authority. I lacked imagination. It is so easy for the Voice of God to sound just like my own, plus forte. I am entirely justified by the Scriptures, but the odd thing is, so is every other Catholic I know, liberal or strict. I do not wish to be unfair to Catholics, what I say is true for Jews, Muslims, Baptists, Methodists, Calvinists, Evangelicals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and ordinary bigots everywhere. The accommodation of the Scriptures is a marvellous thing. I have not lost my faith in God but I long ago lost it in men.

  And women? Look at her, slender as the reeds of Solomon, her hair in Absalom trails. What to do with beauty? I have never been quite sure …

  My mother, between the hours of three and four o’clock, said to me, ‘Handel, when we meet a beautiful woman, you must compliment her, but never intrude.’ What can I do? A compliment is an intrusion nowadays isn’t it? Women don’t want to be beautiful, they want to be barristers and medical men. At least in the Catholic Church they won’t be priests. Shall I say that to her? Shall I lean forward and whisper, ‘Miss, there is so little beauty in the world that we can’t afford to lose yours.’ Already my face is slapped. She wants to wear a ridiculous curly wig and shout ‘OBJECTION!’ at a lecherous and senile judge, who, if she is lovely, will privately believe that she is perverting the course of justice, and take against her in his heart. Why does she want to thicken her ankles pounding hospital linoleum? Why does she want to pilot Concorde, be a Member of Parliament, ruin herself up the north face of the Eiger? Why does she want to succeed in big business when succeeding in big business will rob from her the time allotted, in a short life, to understand something of what life is?

  It’s our fault, men like me I mean, we’ve spent so long trumpeting the importance of all that we do that women believe in it and want to do it themselves. Look at me, I am a very wealthy man, at the top of my profession, and I’m running away like a schoolboy because I can’t sit at my desk even for another day. I know that everything I am and everything I stand for is worthless. How to tell her that?

  The light lay on the sea. A taut white film of light, full stretched, horizon to beach wave. The light gauzed over the green sea, pale wings atomising the water, butterfly light on the spread of the sea. The light fluttered, its scalloped margins shading the rocks that made a breakwater for the fishing boats. The light rested on the bruised prows.

  The light had salt in it. Cleansing light that polished the sand and pumiced its fragments to diamonds. The light abrased the smooth concrete columns of the harbour and gave them back the rough dignity of the sea. The unman-made sea and the scouring light.

  What things matter? What things have a value of their own instead of a borrowed glory? Is there such a thing as intrinsic worth? It’s fashionable to say
no. To say a tree is only its wood, that any painting is a work of art, that journalism can be literature, that love is self-interest or that ethics are mores. It is right to question standards but wrong to assume that there aren’t any. Where there are no standards the market-place obtains.

  I like markets, like the bustle and the jostle, the haggling and the lies. I enjoy the effrontery of badly made goods parading as craft, I’m keen for the scent of a treasure, here, there, somewhere.

  But who controls whom? Is the market for me or am I for the market? The human pig trussed up and sold in quarters off a greasy stall. Long pig, favourite delicacy of the market, never count the cost to the human soul.

  In Chungking on the Yangtze River, a place where I spent some years, the peasants walk in to the town before dawn to queue to work. Arms outstretched, Madonna of the Supplication, at the mission we run there. On their knees, arms outstretched, begging for work.

  Work is a long pole with my luggage dangling off it, if not my luggage, then 200 lb bags of chillies, sackcloths of rice, a row of chickens tied by the feet.

  The way down to the river, where all life starts, is ricked with shallow steps. Mediaeval steps, that have served for feet since then. Feet in embroidered shoes, feet in thin silk slippers, feet in fur boots leather sewn. Feet bound for the marriage market, the bare feet of the labour market, up and down the slippery steps, the coolies, shoulder-poled.

  Goods arrive this hour, this minute, every other. A babble of goods, speechful, mobile, carrier and carried indistinguishable and unshapeable, a gaudy bundle moving up the rock side.

  The boats that bounce the river are both humble and grand. Each pulls to a pole sunk in the black mud. A particular and thick black mud that sucks a pony’s hooves to its fetlocks. The black mud and the yellow river. The wasp drone of the small engined craft, and the deep gluga, gluga, gluga, of the diesel boat.

  This is the market, but the goods cannot be sold unless the humans are sold too. The price is not high; a dollar a day, hours, dawn till dusk. In return, a shelter, two bowls of rice noodles, 3 oz of meat. That way the peasants can save a little to take back home. They shrug, ‘This is the market.’

  My companion, a banker, there to explain to the humble Chinese that their characters for Free Man and Happy Man, are in the West spelt Capitalist Man, said to me, ‘Lesson Number One, Handel, be realistic about market forces.’

  Why? Why must I? Why must I be realistic about an invention? There is nothing a priori about market forces, nothing about the market that isn’t a construction and that couldn’t be deconstructed. When I question the great god of the market, my friend, who is atheist, laughs and calls me a dreamer, but his way of life is a nightmare. He is a successful man who has abandoned three marriages, who owns four houses, but rents them out, who lives mostly in an aeroplane, and when he is not doing that, he makes his home in an hotel, and looks for companionship at night. He has not taken a holiday in five years. He is a successful man. I said, ‘Alan, the least of the animals can find a home that suits it, can get enough to eat, can bring up its young, play its part in the pack, and have time to bask in the sun. For a human being, the roof and crown of nature, those things are a considerable achievement. Most of us are substantially worse off than the rabbit in the field.’

  There are two cities in the world where that which is increasingly desired can no longer be bought. Not happiness or love, both outside the money exchange, but space. No matter how rich I am, I can’t buy it, because it doesn’t exist. The gardens have long since been built over. The larger apartments have been divided. Houses, if you can get one, have yards, if you are lucky. A yard fit for a slum tenement, the dank restricted area that would have embarrassed a nineteenth-century weaver, and where a Chinese peasant would throw his rubbish. That is what a millionaire can buy in Tokyo and New York City.

  I confess I have a passion for land. The slate green moors of my childhood are the geography of my heart. Hard to accept that my heart is now a National Park. What was wild is tame. What used to be unpathed, now has rustic trail ways, decorated with acorns. There are no oak trees. There are cafés and rest rooms every 10 miles. Pony trekking on demand, so that everyone can discover the freedom of what was once the countryside. Why should country folk have it to themselves? This is a democracy.

  It’s had to be improved, of course, not the democracy, the countryside. It was simply too bumpy and rough for the average family car. Naturally, on a day out, children need regular injections of Coca-Cola followed by a good flush on the toilet. They can’t be expected to squat in a hedge. The wild blackberries and nut trees have had to be grubbed up, they could be poisonous, and they don’t conform to EEC food hygiene laws. Those delightful rushing streams, so quaint on a postcard, have had to be fenced off in case of insurance claims against the local authority. There is plenty of grass, but now that the sheep have been removed to facilitate public access, the grass is too abundant, and it has to be sprayed four times a year with a bomb of chemicals slung under the belly of a Cessna. No need to worry about the chemicals, unlike the blackberries and nut trees, sloes and hips, chemicals are perfectly safe.

  My advice is to stick to the paths, which lead in a Dantesque descent, from the car parks to the toilets, to the gift shops, to the Heritage Museum. There they go, democratic man in his shell-suit and fluorescent kagool. As yet, city scientists have not found a way to improve the weather over National Parks.

  Gleams like the flashing of a shield. The sun on the uncut slate rubbed smooth. The gleam of the land is in its rocks, the fine-grained argillaceous rocks, here, not purple or grey, but green of living stone.

  The rocks cry out. The bone of slate beneath the green clothes, moss, mole soft, moleskin dense. The land ribbed with bright stone that forces its colour into the soil, into the grass, into the tough tongued sheep. Sheep that stand as hill carvings, things wrought not made, things wrought out of their own land, deep land quarried and mined, the very depths drilled for the pitched roofs of the little houses that come out of the hill. Stone and slate connecting generations to the land and to each other.

  The road is narrow at the foot of the moor. Narrow as the smoke from a chimney stack of a single house. From a distance, perspective gives the road a crazy turn and runs it upwards into the smoke, so that the smoke continues the tarmac road as a carbon ribbon, making way for the traveller among the clouds.

  For so many years I shaped my course to this road; resignation of early childhood, the misery of public school, gloomy adolescence, even some manly pride, my boots ringing to the pleasure of a medical scholarship. On my left, the valley in falling curves, on my right, the moory heights.

  The weather changes the moor. In fresh sun and light wind, the red fenescue moves as Moses’ sea; grass waves that part for me as I pass, and close up again in smooth combs. On those days the firm hills billow. The trees bend and the ground beneath them, there is only motion, nothing still but me. A rabbit runs away in the wood.

  Is it because my nature is melancholy that the moor I love best is the moor drenched out of colour, slate rain on the slate land, through the open roof of the sky? On those days, the valley houses evaporate, but for a valiant smoke signal that makes a strange high column above the mist. The rain the sheep ignore undyes the hills. The washed green leaches into streams that run, not pale, but frothy and sinister over the shiny black stones. Where the trees re-inforce the reflection, the water has a green eye, and slips reptilian over the rocks. I used to follow it on its tortuous journey, until it flung itself over a crag, a perpetual suicide and rebirth in the deep pool below.

  A waterfall is temptation. The sparking living power that never hesitates, but takes the impossible drop at a leap, and makes a crystal bridge for my body. Once, twice, three times, have I taken off my clothes and stood in the spray on the brink, my skin dropleted with excitement, my hair wet through. All of me wanting to risk the prismic folds and slide into the waiting water.

  Why did my feet grip the
bank with prehensile caution? I couldn’t jump, although every muscle was tensed to jump. I didn’t want to die, I wanted to know that power, the strange electric torrent and the great din in my ears.

  I suffer from hydremia. Perhaps that’s the reason why water draws me when I should draw water. When we lived in Rome, we had a well in our garden, I wanted to climb down it and change my name to Angelotti. Even as a little boy, I had no interest in heroics, but my mother played Puccini, and forbade me to be Floria Tosca. I learned to be silent and to hide in the well. I’m not a hero, I’m not even a chessboard knight. Trying to be a priest was something of a fianchetto wasn’t it? Clever move by a poor player.

  But Handel is a doctor now. Doctors save lives, doctors are important. My elder brother is a judge. I live off sickness, he lives off crime, and yet we are so very respectable. Bow down at the Sign of the Leech. Ha, Ha. I have one, you know, a wooden board that sports a jolly looking leech. I got it from an eighteenth-century apothecary shop, along with glass tubes, silver vials, lettered jars, and other fattrils of medical hocus pocus. Sotheby’s sale.

  I don’t want to sound disillusioned but I am.

  What were my illusions?

  Progress. Love. Human Nature.

  Shall we take them one by one, now, in the stale air of a dead train, shunted by the concrete sea?

  Progress: An advance to something better or higher in development. Are human beings better or higher in development than they were? There have been many outstanding men and women in history, and, since there are now vastly more people than at any previous time, we should expect at least a proportionate rise in the number of the great and the good. Where are they? Not in politics. Not in public life. Not in the Church, whatever your brand, there are no great spiritual leaders. I will admit that we have better scientists, if by better, we agree that they are more sophisticated, more specialised, that they have discovered more than their dead colleagues. But if we ask, are they more ethical, more socially aware, more disciplined, more relevant to the happiness of the whole, then our scientists have failed the age they claim to have created. The masses are fobbed off with gadgets, while the real science takes place behind closed doors, the preserve of the pharmaceuticals and the military. Genetic control will be the weapon of the future. Doctors will fill the ranks of the New Model Army. And of course you will trust me won’t you, when I tell you that with my help, your unborn child will be better off? The white coat will replace the khaki fatigues as the gun gives way to the syringe.