Kitabı oku: «The Dalkey Archive», sayfa 2

4

Mild air with the sea in a stage whisper behind it was in Mick’s face as his bicycle turned into the lane-like approach to the Vico Road and its rocky swimming hole. It was a fine morning, calm, full of late summer.

Teague McGettigan’s cab was at the entrance, the horse’s head submerged in a breakfast nose-bag. Mick went down the steps and saluted the company with a hail of his arm. De Selby was gazing in disfavour at a pullover he had just taken off. Hackett was slumped seated, fully dressed and smoking a cigarette, while McGettigan in his dirty raincoat was fastidiously attending to his pipe. De Selby nodded. Hackett muttered ‘More luck’ and McGettigan spat.

– Boys-a-dear, McGettigan said in a low voice from his old thin unshaven face, ye’ll get the right drenching today. Ye’ll be soaked to the pelt.

– Considering that we’re soon to dive into that water, Hackett replied, I won’t dispute your prophecy, Teague.

– I don’t mean that. Look at that bloody sky.

– Cloudless, Mick remarked.

– For Christ’s sake look down there by Wickla.

In that quarter there was what looked like sea-haze, with the merest hint of the great mountain behind. With his hands Mick made a gesture of nonchalance.

– We might be down under the water for half an hour, I believe, Hackett said, or at least that’s Mr De Selby’s story. We have an appointment with mermaids or something.

– Get into your togs, Hackett, De Selby said impatiently. And you, too, Mick.

– Ye’ll pay more attention to me, Teague muttered, when ye come up to find ye’r superfine clothes demolished be the lashin rain.

– Can’t you keep them in your cursed droshky? De Selby barked. His temper was clearly a bit uncertain.

All got ready. Teague sat philosophically on a ledge, smoking and having the air of an indulgent elder watching children at play. Maybe his attitude was justified. When the three were ready for the water De Selby beckoned them to private consultation. The gear was spread out on a flattish rock.

– Now listen carefully, he said. This apparatus I am going to fit on both of you allows you to breathe, under water or out of it. The valve is automatic and needs no adjustment, nor is that possible. The air is compressed and will last half an hour by conventional effluxion of time.

– Thank God, sir, that your theories about time are not involved in the air supply, Hackett remarked.

– The apparatus also allows you to hear. My own is somewhat different. It enables me to do all that but speak and be heard as well. Follow?

– That seems clear enough, Mick agreed.

– When I clip the masks in place your air supply is on, he said emphatically. Under water or on land you can breathe.

– Fair enough, Hackett said politely.

– And listen to this, De Selby continued, I will go first, leading the way, over there to the left, to this cave opening, now submerged. It is only a matter of yards and not deep down. The tide is now nearly full. Follow close behind me. When we get to the rock apartment, take a seat as best you can, do nothing, and wait. At first it will be dark but you won’t be cold. I will then annihilate the terrestrial atmosphere and the time illusion by activating a particle of DMP. Now is all that clear? I don’t want any attempt at technical guff or questions at this time.

Hackett and Mick mutely agreed that things were clear.

– Down there you are likely to meet a personality who is from heaven, who is all-wise, speaks all languages and dialects and knows, or can know, everything. I have never had a companion on such a trip before, and I do hope events will not be complicated.

Mick had suddenly become very excited.

– Excuse the question, he blurted, but will this be John the Baptist again?

– No. At least I hope not. I can request but cannot command.

– Could it be … anybody? Hackett asked.

– Only the dead.

– Good heavens!

– Yet that is not wholly correct. Those who were never on earth could appear.

This little talk was eerie. It was as if a hangman were courteously conversing with his victim, on the scaffold high.

– Do you mean angels, Mr De Selby? Mick enquired.

– Deistic beings, he said gruffly. Here, stand still till I fix this.

He had picked up a breathing mask, with its straps and tank affair at the back.

– I’ll go after you, Mick muttered, with Hackett at the rear.

In a surprisingly short time they were all fully dressed for a visit under the sea to the next world, or perhaps the former world. Through his goggles Mick could see Teague McGettigan studying an early Sunday paper, apparently at a rear racing page. He was at peace, with no interest whatever in supernatural doings. He was perhaps to be envied. Hackett was standing impassive, an Apollo space-man. De Selby was making final adjustments to his straps and with a gesture had led the way to the lower board.

Going head-down into cold water in the early morning is a shock to the most practised. But in Mick’s case the fog of doubt and near-delusion in the head, added to by the very low hiss of his air supply, made it a brief but baffling experience. There was ample light as he followed De Selby’s kicking heels and a marked watery disturbance behind told him that Hackett was not far away. If he was cursing, nobody heard.

Entry to the ‘apartment’ was efficient enough for beginners. If not adroit. De Selby readily found the opening and then, one by one, the others made their way upwards, half-clambering, half-swimming. They left the water quite palpably and Mick found himself crouching in an empty space on a rough floor strewn with rocks and some shells. Everything was dark and a distant sussurus must have been from the sea which had just been left. The company was under the water and presumably in an atmosphere that could be breathed, though only for a short time. Time? Yes, the word might be repeated.

De Selby beckoned Mick on with a tug at the arm, and he did the same for Hackett behind. Then they stopped. Mick crouched and finally squatted on a roundish rock; De Selby was to his left and the three had come to some sort of resting posture. Hackett gave Mick a nudge, though the latter did not know if it meant commiseration, encouragement or derision.

From his movements it was evident even in the gloom that De Selby was busy at some technical operation. Mick could not see what he was doing but no doubt he was detonating (or whatever is the word) a minuscule charge of DMP.

Though wet, he did not feel cold, but he was apprehensive puzzled, curious. Hackett was near but quite still.

A faint light seemed to come, a remote glow. It gradually grew to define the dimension of the dim apartment, making it appear unexpectedly large and, strangely dry.

Then Mick saw a figure, a spectre, far away from him. It looked seated and slightly luminescent. Gradually it got rather clearer in definition but remained unutterably distant, and what he had taken for a very long chin in profile was almost certainly a beard. A gown of some dark material clothed the apparition. It is strange to say that the manifestation did not frighten him but he was flabbergasted when he heard De Selby’s familiar tones almost booming out beside him.

– I must thank you for coming. I have two students with me.

The voice that came back was low, from far away but perfectly clear. The Dublin accent was unmistakable. The extraordinary utterance can here be distinguished only typographically.

– Ah not at all, man.

– You’re feeling well, as usual, I suppose?

– Nothing to complain of, thank God. How are you feeling yourself, or how do you think you’re feeling?

– Tolerably, but age is creeping in.

– Ha-ha. That makes me laugh.

– Why?

– Your sort of time is merely a confusing index of decomposition. Do you remember what you didn’t know was your youth?

– I do. But it’s your youth I wanted to talk about. The nature of your life in youth compared with that of your hagiarchic senility must have been a thunderous contrast, the ascent to piety sudden and even distressing. Was it?

– You are hinting at anoxic anoxœmia? Perhaps.

– You admit you were a debauched and abandoned young man?

– For a pagan I wasn’t the worst. Besides, maybe it was the Irish in me.

– The Irish in you?

– Yes. My father’s name was Patrick. And he was a proper gobshite.

– Do you admit that the age or colour of women didn’t matter to you where the transaction in question was coition?

– I’m not admitting anything. Please remember my eyesight was very poor.

– Were all your rutting ceremonials heterosexual?

– Heterononsense! There is no evidence against me beyond what I wrote myself. Too vague. Be on your guard against that class of fooling. Nothing in black and white.

– My vocation is enquiry and action, not literature.

– You’re sadly inexperienced. You cannot conceive the age I lived in, its customs, or judge of that African sun.

– The heat, hah? I’ve read a lot about the Eskimoes. The poor bastards are perished throughout their lives, covered with chilblains and icicles but when they catch a seal – ah, good luck to them! They make warm clothes out of the hide, perform gluttonly feats with the meat and then bring the oil home to the igloo where they light lamps and stoves. Then the fun begins. Nanook of the North is certainly partial to his nookie.

– I reprobate concupiscence, whether fortuitous or contrived.

– You do now, you post-gnostic! You must have a red face to recall your earlier nasty gymnastiness, considering you’re now a Father of the Church.

– Rubbish. I invented obscene feats out of bravado, lest I be thought innocent or cowardly. I walked the streets of Babylon with low companions, sweating from the fires of lust. When I was in Carthage I carried about with me a cauldron of unrealized debauchery. God in his majesty was tempting me. But Book Two of my Confessions is all shocking exaggeration. I lived within my rough time. And I kept the faith, unlike a lot more of my people in Algeria who are now Arab nincompoops and slaves of Islam.

– Look at all the time you squandered in the maw of your sexual fantasies which otherwise could have been devoted to Scriptural studies. Lolling loathsome libertine!

– I was weak at the time but I find your condescension offensive. You talk of the Fathers. How about that ante-Nicene thoolera-mawn, Origen of Alexandria? What did he do when he found that lusting after women distracted him from his sacred scrive-nery? I’ll tell you. He stood up, hurried out to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife and – pwitch! – in one swipe deprived himself of his personality! Ah?

– Yes. Let us call it heroic impetuosity.

– How could Origen be the Father of Anything and he with no knackers on him? Answer me that one.

– We must assume that his spiritual testicles remained intact. Do you know him?

– I can’t say I ever met him in our place.

– But, dammit is he there? Don’t you know everything?

– I do not. I can, but the first wisdom is sometimes not to know. I suppose I could ask the Polyarch.

– Who on earth is the Polyarch?

– He’s not on earth, and again I don’t know. I think he’s Christ’s Vicar in Heaven.

– Are there any other strange denizens?

– Far too many if you ask me. Look at that gobhawk they call Francis Xavier. Hobnobbing and womanizing in the slums of Paris with Calvin and Ignatius Loyola in warrens full of rats, vermin, sycophants, and syphilis. Xavier was a great travelling man, messing about in Ethiopia and Japan, consorting with Buddhist monkeys and planning to convert China single-handed. And Loyola? You talk about me but a lot of that chap’s early saintliness was next to bedliness. He made himself the field-marshal of a holy army of mendicants but maybe merchandizers would be more like it. Didn’t Pope Clement XIV suppress the Order for its addiction to commerce, and for political wire-pulling? Jesuits are the wiliest, cutest and most mendacious ruffians who ever lay in wait for simple Christians. The Inquisition was on the track of Ignatius. Did you know that? Pity they didn’t get him. But one party who wouldn’t hear of the Pope’s Brief of Suppression was the Empress of Rooshia. Look at that now!

– Interesting that your father’s name was Patrick. Is he a saint?

– That reminds me. You have a Professor Binchy in your university outfit in Dublin and that poor man has been writing and preaching since he was a boy that the story about Saint Patrick is all wrong and that there were really two Saint Patricks. Binchy has his hash and parsley.

– Why?

– Two Saint Patricks? We have four of the buggers in our place and they’d make you sick with their shamrocks and shenanigans and bullshit.

Who else? What about Saint Peter?

– Oh he’s safe and sound all right. A bit of a slob to tell you the truth. He often encorpifies himself.

– What was that?

– Encorpifies himself. Takes on a body, as I’ve done now for your convenience. How could the like of you make anything out of an infinity of gases? Peter’s just out to show off the keys, bluster about and make himself a bloody nuisance. Oh there have been a few complaints to the Polyarch about him.

– Answer me this question. The Redeemer said ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall found my Church’. Is there any justification for the jeer that He founded his Church upon a pun, since Petros means ‘rock’?

– Not easy to say. The name Petros does not occur in classical, mythological or biblical Greek apart from your man the apostle and his successor and later namesakes – except for a freedman of Berenice (mother of Herod Agrippa) mentioned in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18, 6, 3, in a passage relating to the later years of Tiberius’s reign, that is, the thirties A.D. Petro occurs as a Roman surname in Suetonius’s Vespasiae 1, and Petra as a woman’s name in Tacitus, Annals 11, 4.

– And you don’t care a lot about him?

– The lads in our place, when he barges around encorpified and flashing the keys, can’t resist taking a rise out of him and pursue him with the cackles of a rooster, cock-adoodle-doo.

– I see. Who else? Is Judas with you?

– That’s another conundrum for the Polyarch. Peter stopped me one time and tried to feed me a cock-and-bull story about Judas coming to the Gate. You get my joke? Cock-and-bull story?

– Very funny. Is your mother Monica there?

– Wait now! Don’t try and get a dig at me that way. Don’t blame me. She was here before me.

– To lower the temperature of your steaming stewpot of lust and depravity, you married or took as concubine a decent poor young African girl, and the little boy you had by her you named Adeodatus. But even yet nobody knows your wife’s name.

– That secret is safe with me still.

– Why should you give such a name to your son while you were yourself still a debauched pagan, not even baptized?

– Put that day’s work down to the mammy – Monica.

– Later, you put your little wife away and she shambled off to the wilderness, probably back into slavery, but swearing to remain faithful to you forever. Does the shame of that come back to you?

– Never mind what comes back to me, I done what the mammy said, and everybody – you too – has to do what the mammy says.

– And straightaway, as you relate in Book Six of your Confessions, you took another wife, simultaneously committing bigamy and adultery. And you kicked her out after your Tolle Lege conjuring tricks in the garden when you ate a handful of stolen pears. Eve herself wasn’t accused in respect of more than one apple. In all this disgraceful behaviour do we see Monica at work again?

– Certainly. God also.

– Does Monica know that you’re being so unprecedentedly candid with me?

– Know? She’s probably here unencorpified.

– You betrayed and destroyed two decent women, implicated God in giving a jeering name to a bastard, and you blame all this outrage on your mother. Would it be seemly to call you callous humbug?

– It would not. Call me a holy humbug.

– Who else is in your kingdom? Is Judas?

– Paul is in our place, often encorpified and always attended by his physician Luke, putting poultices on his patient’s sore neck. When Paul shows too much consate in himself, the great blatherskite with his epistles in bad Greek, the chronic two-timer, I sometimes roar after him ‘You’re not on the road to Damascus now!’ Puts him in his place. All the same that Tolle Lege incident was no conjuring trick. It was a miracle. The first book I picked up was by Paul and the lines that struck my eyes were these: ‘Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in chambering or wantonness, nor in strife or envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in the lust thereof.’ But do you know, I think the greatest dog’s breakfast of the lot is St Vianney.