Athena

“Banville has the ‘terrible beauty’ that Irish writers have made their stock in trade, and, with
Athena
, Banville once again proves that song as well as cries can be wrung from the soul’s dark night.”

—
Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Banville is an elegant, witty writer whose prose is intelligent, deft, often gripping.”

—
Los Angeles Times Books Review

“Full of twisting passages, distorting mirrors, blind alleys, puzzles.”

—
The New York Times

“Breathtaking and heartbreaking.… Banville’s prose turns wonderfully pictorial and amusing.…
Athena
is a lover’s lament and more.”

—
Newsday

“Mr. Banville is an exuberant prose stylist, and the city in which the action takes place … is depicted in a combination of pop colors and grotesquery reminiscent of Batman’s Gotham.… Tension builds steadily.”

—
Washington Times

“John Banville is a splendid and daring writer at the height of his powers, and his central theme is his own moving hand and eye: his theme is delight.”

—
Washington Post Book World

Cover

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

First Page

1.
Pursuit of Daphne
ca. 1680: Johann Livelb (1633-1697)

2.
The Rape of Proserpine
1655: L. van Hobelijn (1608-1674)

3.
Pygmalion
(called
Pygmalion and Galatea
) 1649: Giovanni Belli (1602-1670)

4.
Syrinx Delivered
1645: Job van Hellin (1598-1647)

5.
Capture of Ganymede
1620: L.E. van Ohlbijn (1573-1621)

6.
Revenge of Diana
1642: J. van Hollbein (1595-1678)

7.
Acis and Galatea
1677: Jan Vibell (1630-1690)

My love. If words can reach whatever world you may be suffering in, then listen. I have things to tell you. At this muffled end of another year I prowl the sombre streets of our quarter holding you in my head. I would not have thought it possible to fix a single object so steadily for so long in the mind’s violent gaze. You. You. With dusk comes rain that seems no more than an agglutination of the darkening air, drifting aslant in the lamplight like something about to be remembered. Strange how the city becomes deserted at this evening hour; where do they go to, all those people, and so suddenly? As if I had cleared the streets. A car creeps up on me from behind, tyres squeaking against the sides of the narrow footpaths, and I have to stop and press myself into a doorway to let it pass. How sinister it appears, this sleek, unhuman thing wallowing over the cobbles with its driver like a faceless doll propped up motionless behind rain-stippled glass. It shoulders by me with what seems a low chuckle and noses down an alleyway, oozing a lazy burble of exhaust smoke from its rear end, its lollipop-pink tail-lights swimming in the deliquescent gloom. Yes, this is my hour, all right. Curfew hour.

Three things the thought of you conjures up: the gullet of a dying fish into which I have thrust my thumb, the grainy inner lining of your most secret parts, ditto, and the tumescent throb in the throat of some great soprano – who? – on the third, held note of the second alleluia of Schubert’s
Die junge Nonne
(O night! O storm!). Much else besides, of course, but these textures persist above all, I do not know why, I mean why these three in particular. (I apologise, by the way, for associating you with that fish; I caught it when I was a boy and never caught another, but I remember it, the poor creature hauled out of its element, shuddering as it drowned in air.) I hardly dare think what form of me you would recall: an eyed unipod heaving and slithering towards you across the floor, something like that, no doubt. Yet what a thing we made there in that secret white room at the heart of the old house, what a marvellous edifice we erected. For this is what I see, you and me naked and glistening in the mirror-coloured light of an October afternoon, labouring wordlessly to fashion our private temple to the twin gods watching over us. I remember Morden telling me the story of a builder of his acquaintance demolishing a folly down the country somewhere and finding a centuries-old chapel concealed inside the walls.
Tight as an egg
, he said.
Amazing
. And laughed his laugh. I thought of us.

We had our season. That is what I tell myself. We had our season, and it ended. Were you waiting all along to go, poised to leap? It seems to me now that even while I held you clasped in my appalled embrace you were already looking back at me, like one lingering on the brink of departure, all that you were leaving already fading in your glance, becoming memory even as it stood before you. Were you part of the plot, a party to it? I would like to know. I think I would like to know. Would we have been left free and undisturbed, left entirely to our own charming devices, as
we were, had someone not decided it should be so? Before such little doors of doubt can open more than a crack my mind jumps up in panic and slams them shut. Yet reason with a scoffing laugh insists that you were in on it, as they say, that you must have been; but what does reason know except itself? Nowadays I prefer the murk and confusion of the lower brain, the one that used to go by the name of heart. Heart, yes; not a word you will have heard me employ very often up to now. I feel as I have not felt since I was a lovelorn adolescent, at once bereft and lightened, giddy with relief at your going – you were too
much
for me – and yet assailed by a sorrow so weighty, of so much more consequence than I seem to myself to be, that I stand, no, I kneel before it, speechless in a kind of awe. Even at those times when, sated with its pain, my mind briefly relinquishes the thought of you the sense of loss does not abate, and I go about mentally patting my pockets and peering absently into the shadowed corners of myself, trying to identify what it is that has been misplaced. This is what it must be like to have a wasting illness, this restlessness, this wearied excitation, this perpetual shiver in the blood. There are moments – well, I do not wish to melodramatise, but there are moments, at the twin poles of dusk and dawn especially, when I think I might die of the loss of you, might simply forget myself in my anguish and agitation and step blindly off the edge of the earth and be gone for good. And yet at the same time I feel I have never been so vividly alive, so quick with the sense of things, so exposed in the midst of the world’s seething play of particles, as if I had been flayed of an exquisitely fine protective skin. The rain falls through me silently, like a shower of neutrinos.

The murders seem to have stopped. The police have not turned up a body now for weeks. I find this disturbing. The killings started about the time we met and now that you are
gone they have come to an end. It is foolish, I know, but I cannot help wondering if there was a connection. I don’t mean a direct link, of course, but could it be that we disturbed something with our wantonness, upset some secret balance in the atmosphere and thus triggered a misfire deep in the synapse maze of that poor wretch, whoever he is, and sent him ravening out into the night with his rope and knife? Foolish, as I say. I am convinced that I have seen him, the killer, without realising it, that somewhere in my prowlings I have stumbled across him and not recognised him. What a thought.

My headaches too have stopped. Pains in the head, murders in the night. If I tried I could connect everything in a vast and secret agenda. If I tried.

Aunt Corky left me all her money. (You see? – a lost love, a locked room, and now a will: we are in familiar territory after all.) There was a great deal more of it than I ever imagined there could be. Her last flourish, the sly old thing. I wonder if she thought it was her money I was after? I hope not. Sticking with her through all those long, last weeks of her dying was, I see now, the one unalloyed good deed I could point to in my life, the thing I thought might go some way towards balancing my account in the recording angel’s big black book. Still, I won’t pretend I am not glad to have the dough, especially as Morden despite his trumpetings about probity and fair dealing (and to think I believed him!) somehow managed to forget to recompense me for my troubles before he did a flit. My troubles … Funny thing, money; when you haven’t got any you think of almost nothing else, then you get some and you can’t understand why it ever seemed important. Aunt Corky at a stroke (to coin a phrase) has solved my life, or the getting and spending part of it, anyway. I feel light-headed and sort of wobbly; it is an odd sensation, like that flutter that lingers in the muscles
when you put down a heavy load you have been carrying for a long time.

It’s ironic, really: Aunt Corky was the one who was forever urging me to take up work and do something with my life, but now I have her money and will never again need to go out and earn a crust. What was she thinking of? I suppose it was me or the Cats and Dogs Home. ‘You are a no-good,’ she would say cheerfully in her deliberately fractured English, ‘a no-good, yes, just as your father was.’ She was given to such franknesses, they were not intended to wound – in fact, that mention of my father denotes rueful approval, for I know she had a soft spot for the old boy. What she meant was that he and I were wastefully dilettantish, even if to her eye we did have a certain style. She was not wrong, about the waste, I mean. I have frittered away the better part of my life. I did it all backways, starting out an achiever and then drifting into vagueness and crippling indecision. Now, becalmed in the midst of my decidedly unroaring forties, I feel I have entered already if not my second childhood then certainly my second adolescence – look at all this love stuff, this gonadal simpering and sighing; I shall break out in a rash of pimples yet.

Now that I think of it, it was largely Aunt Corky’s work-ward urgings, as well, of course, as my own natural (or should that be unnatural?) curiosity, that led me to Morden and his hoard of pictures. I am still not sure exactly how he came to know of me, for I have changed my name (by deed poll: yes, there really is such a process), along with everything else that was changeable; it was his man Francie who ran me to ground in the end, by God knows what devious channels. Morden had a touching fondness for secrecy and sudden pouncings, I noticed that about him right away; he loved to lead … his victims, I was about to say; he loved to lead people on by a show of seeming ignorance and then reveal with a flourish that he had known all along all there
was to know about them. For all his moneyed look and the sense of menace he gave off, there wafted around him a definite air of the mountebank. The occasion of our first meeting retains in my memory a sort of lurid, phosphorescent glow; I have an impression of a greenish light and dispersing stage smoke and the sudden swirl and crack of a cloak and a big voice booming out:
Tarraa!

It was the first time I had been in that quarter of the city, or at least the first time I noticed myself being there. September, one of those slightly hallucinatory, dreamy afternoons of early autumn, all sky and polished-copper clouds and thin, petrol-blue air. The river still had a summery stink. How much larger, higher, wider the world appears at that time of year; today even the bellowing traffic seemed cowed by this suddenly eminent new season rearing above the clanging streets. I crossed out of sunlight at the entrance to Swan Alley, dodging a charging bus that mooed at me angrily, and found myself at once plunged in shadow thin and chill, like watered ink, and had to stop a moment to let my eyes become accustomed to the gloom. When I think of the place now I always see it caught like this in a sort of eclipse; even your presence in my mental picture of these little streets and cobbled alleyways cannot disperse the glimmering, subfusc atmosphere with which my memory suffuses them.

The house was in … what shall I call it? Rue Street, that sounds right. The house was in Rue Street. It looked derelict and I thought at first I must have the wrong address. Big gaunt grey townhouse with rotting windows and a worn step and a broad black door sagging on its hinges. I pressed the bell and heard no sound and knocked the dull knocker and imagined I could detect a muffled tittering from within. I waited, putting on that abstracted, mild look that waiting at doors always demands – or always demands of me, anyway. Next the obligatory ritual: step back, scan the upstairs windows, frown at the pavement, then scan the
windows a second time while slowly assuming a querulous expression. Nothing. On the left there was a fenced-off site with rubble and empty crisp packets and a flourishing clump of purple buddleia, on the right a dim little flyblown shop that seemed to have its shoulders hunched. I went into the shop. It smelled of cat and stewed tea. Do we really need all this, these touches of local colour and so on? Yes, we do. The usual crone peered at me over the usual bottles of boiled sweets, at her back a dim doorway leading down to hell. Before I could ask her anything there was a light, syncopated step behind me and I turned. This is how things begin. A blue cloud of cigarette smoke coming at me like a claw opening and behind his shoulder the honeyed sunlight in the street and a diagonal shadow by de Chirico sharp as the blade of a guillotine. Francie. Francie the fixer: an S-shaped, shabby, faintly grinning, glitter-eyed, limping character, tallish, thin, concave of chest, with scant reddish hair under a flat cap, face like a chisel, and a fag-end with a drooping inch of ash attached to a bloodless, hardly existent thin long line of lower lip. I had never set eyes on him before yet felt I had known him always; or at least – I can’t explain it – that he had known me. ‘Mr Morrow!’ he said, in the tone of a hunter claiming his bag, pointing a finger pistol-wise at my breast. Morrow: yes, that is my name, now; have I mentioned it before? I chose it for its faintly hopeful hint of futurity, and, of course, the Wellsian echo. Finding a first name was more difficult. I toyed with numerous outlandish monikers: Feardorcha, for instance, which in our old language means man of darkness; also Franklin, the freeman, and Fletcher, a famous islander; Fernando, with its insinuation of stilettos and the poison cup; and even Fyodor, though the overtones of that were too obvious even for me. In the end what I settled for seemed just the thing. But I confess I have not yet accustomed myself to this new identity – or identification, at least – and there is always a hesitation
when I am thus addressed. Francie I could see had caught that telltale lapse; Francie was a man who noticed such things. ‘Come on along with me now, will you,’ he said. I followed him out, and had a picture of the shopwoman standing there forever behind the counter with her pinched old face vaguely, patiently lifted, unable to stir, stricken into a statued trance for all eternity, waiting for the banal question I had left unasked.

On the sunny pavement Francie looked sideways at my legs and smiled with pursed lips as if something funny had occurred to him. ‘We watched you from on high,’ he said, pointing at the upper windows. ‘I couldn’t get down fast enough for you. Patience, they tell me, is a great thing.’ The faint smile turned to a grin, his thin mouth seeming to stretch from ear to ear.

A large dog with bristling, shiny black fur and pricked-up, pointed ears had appeared from nowhere and was loping silently at our heels.

We stopped at the house and Francie flicked away his cigarette butt and produced a great key and jiggled it in the keyhole. He pushed open the sagging black door and waved me in with an elaborate sweep of his arm. High white shadowy hallway paved unevenly with sandstone flags. The door shutting produced a shiver of tiny echoes that fell plinkingly about us. Smell of distemper and ancient plaster and crumbling stone. A delicate staircase with a banister rail moulded into a sinuous, rising curve – I think of that part of your arm between the elbow and the wrist – ascended airily toward a soft glare of white light falling from tall windows high above. Echoingly we climbed. The dog, ignored, followed after us, claws clicking on the bare boards. ‘These stairs,’ Francie said, ‘are a killer,’ though I was the one who was panting. He turned suddenly and made a feint at the dog and roared merrily,
‘Prince you bugger get out to hell out of
that!’
The dog only looked at him adoringly and grinned, its pink-fringed, glistening jaws agape.