Cain’s Book (8 page)

He allowed these last statements to fall on the silence as a grocer allows dried peas to fall from his brass scoop, one at a time, his head cocked, regarding the indicator needle fixedly, until
it reaches the appropriate mark. I didn’t mean to keep him waiting. Finally without saying anything I fetched the unbroken bottle of whiskey and poured him a drink.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

“Happy New Year!”

We clinked glasses and he drank his down with obvious relief. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be on his way. Claire was waiting for him. Claire. I always thought of Claire as
strawberries and cream, cream, red and pink. He looked guilty for her. As well he might. She would have betrayed him for a dry Martini. She told him she didn’t like me.

I helped him on with his coat and he wrapped the scarf round his neck. At the door we shook hands. As he left he turned back for a moment and said he was counting on me. I waved him down the
stairs. Back in the room I finished my drink and smoked a cigarette. I might have laughed. But I always found it difficult to laugh alone.

F
OR A LONG TIME
now I have felt that writing which is not ostensibly self-conscious is in a vital way inauthentic for our
time. For our time – I think every statement should be dated. Which is another way of saying the same thing. I know of no young man who is not either an ignoramus or a fool who can take the
old objective forms for granted. Is there no character in the book large enough to doubt the validity of the book itself?

For centuries we in the West have been dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify. It is no doubt because conventional classifications become part of prevailing economic structure that
all real revolt is hastily fixed like a bright butterfly on a classificatory pin; the anti-play,
Godot
, being from one point of view unanswerable, is with all speed acclaimed “best
play of the year”; anti-literature is rendered innocuous by granting it place in conventional histories of literature. The Shakespearean industry has little to do with Shakespeare. My friends
will know what I mean when I say that I deplore our contemporary industrial writers. Let them dedicate a year to pinball and think again.

Question the noun; the present participles of the verb will look after themselves. Kafka proved that the Great Wall of China was impossible, it was a perpetual walling; that the burrow was
impossible, it was a perpetual burrowing... etc. A “distance theory” of writing could allow for pockets of Stanislavski, of spontaneous prose.

Thus I take soundings. It’s a complicated business this living it over again and apart from the forgotten judgements that were part of it. I am engaged in a complicated process of
knitting, see myself as one of those old crones who during the Reign of Terror sat in the shadow of the guillotine as the heads fell, and knitted, on and on. Each time a head falls I drop a stitch,
and from time to time I run out of wool and have to go off in search of a new ball. It’s seldom easy to match colours.

Someone said somewhere that one doesn’t marry a woman but an idea. That is rather imprecisely put, overstated. Still, it
isn’t
very useful to suggest that we should go into
marriage without preconceptions, go anywhere without them; if we hadn’t such preconceptions we shouldn’t think of marrying. I knew a very gentle and troubled Englishman who settled in
Paris and married a dark, thin Negress from Sierra Leone. She didn’t speak English. She bore no resemblance to the romantic conception of
la belle négresse.
A fat, bluish
purse of lips, a flat broad nose, eyeballs set outwards with the gleam of billiard balls, flat-breasted, thin shins long on which rayon stockings hung loose and creased, making her legs look mauve,
skin the colour of an eggplant, her taste in all things suggesting long indoctrination in a Mission School, her natural smell conveyed about her on waves of perpetually evaporating eau de cologne,
her manner of sitting at the edge of a chair, tall, straight, with her hat on and wearing white gloves, her cheap navy-blue suit buttoned up to the demure white ruff at her neck, knees together,
her feet ridiculous in Minnie Mouse shoes. When she visited she gave to whatever room the air of a waiting room in a provincial court. He read history at Oxford and not long after he arrived in
Paris to study certain medieval legal texts he met her at a Communist Party “social” near Barbès. She had come with her sister and her brother-in-law. When she became pregnant he
married her. He used to visit Moira and me when we lived together on the Rue Jacob. He was in love with Moira in his quiet, hopeless way, and of all his friends we were the only ones who were
permitted to meet his wife. I used to try to imagine conditions under which such a man would choose such a woman. For me she symbolized the vulgar triumph of all the tawdry goods, spiritual and
material, which were foisted on the African in exchange for lands and freedom.
Ave Caesar! Nunc civis romanus sum.
⁷
She was the kind of victim who
believed it. Was it only later that he discovered this or did he know it from the beginning? Each time he visited us we could sense his reluctance to return to her, but he went always, and I have
the impression that he is still doing so.

The idea which I married when I married Moira was more obvious. From the age of twelve on she was the princess of my immediate experience, first evidence that beautiful girls existed beyond the
shadowy, teasing images of the cinema. Her beauty, I felt, would serve to put a frame round my own which, sad to say, had up till that time attracted the attention of few connoisseurs. I most
desperately needed evidence that in spite of the obvious deficiencies of my birth I was, after all, a prince, and I treasured intimations of things or imaginings to come as jealously as a
prospector his bag of samples. Daydreams anyway, drained of all assurance each time I was confronted by Moira in the flesh, too struck and captivated by her brilliant presence to have ulterior
thoughts; indeed, I had no more freedom than a yo-yo. Every dangerous act of rebellion – in time I attained a relative mastery – was consecrated to her, a classroom infested by six
hundred and forty-two bees, a fallen ceiling in the north wing, endless acts of sabotage to break the monotony of the long school day. She was flattered by the grandeur of some of these love tokens
but remained out of reach.

My thoughts of her well beyond puberty were of a ghastly purity. Softs and damps were taboo. If she had dropped her pants I might have hanged myself. The first time I noticed the new inscription
in the boys’ lavatory: “Moira Taylor’s cunt”, I was stunned. Up till then my romantic agony had prevented me from framing such a concept.

The object of my wet dreams was another girl, the highly sexed daughter of a Portuguese tart, whose actual advances I was young and misinformed enough to consider improper. Sylvia. Her surname,
like my own, provoked a strange response when it occurred in a list of more native surnames: Laird, Little, Macleod, McDonald, Morrison, Ross, Sylvia... Sylvia Jesus Sylvia was the full name
inscribed in the register, and, in its shortened form... Sylvia Sylvia, with the accent on the second syllable, its sound was almost obscene; it trickled like olive oil amongst the crags and the
heather. She was reputed to wear red knickers and her name was current in the school lavatories. Although she was only a year younger than I, Sylvia was at three forms remove, considered a rather
backward child, a problem for the teachers because of her abnormal physical development. Her academic placement more or less cut her off from boys who, if she could have attended their dances,
might have been interested in her.

The school, a coeducational boarding establishment in the countryside of Kirkcudbrightshire – a brave, wartime measure – was a sensitive spot for the more advanced educationists in
Scotland. The many acres of garden and park with its copses and wildlife in which children of both sexes could wander was always a potential target for the long moral rifles of the descendants of
John Knox.
⁸

I was in the fifth form and had the privilege of visiting the junior dance which ended at 7.30 p.m. After that, Sylvia, as a junior, was not allowed in the large room where the dances were held.
Relations between her and me for the rest of the evening were regarded as improper. The headmistress, whose particular favourite among the boys I was – she saved me more than once from the
wrath of the headmaster – was doubly hard on Sylvia.

“Sylvia Sylvia’s cunt”: I had no difficulty in conceiving that; I was conscious of its insistent animality every time I danced with her. On soft summer nights, set between her
soft plump thighs, like a dark rose, it was served darkly to me in my dreams. I would promise myself that on the morrow I would say yes. But the sun rose with Moira Taylor and daylight defeated
me.

I made love for the first time with a prostitute. Princes Street, Edinburgh. Ten shillings for a short time in an air-raid shelter. I had never seen such ugly thighs nor ever imagined it like
that, exposed for me in matchlight, the flaccid buttocks like pale meat on the stone stairs, the baggy skirt raised as far as her navel and with spread knees making a cave of her crotch, the match
flickering and this first sex shadowy and hanging colourless like a clot of spiderweb from the blunt butt of her mound. She rubbed spittle on it brusquely, as my mother with a handkerchief rubbed
spittle against my cheek when we were visiting. She rubbed spittle on it and it was like someone scratching his head. It bristled then, and bared its pretty pink fangs. She told me to hurry up. The
stone steps were cold. Above in the street there was a fine rain and I could hear the swish of tyres on the wet macadam. At my naked thighs I felt the night wind. The match was out. In the almost
total obscurity of the shelter I lay on top of her and felt her belly sink cool and soft and clammy under my own.

I was a seaman in the Royal Navy at the time. I remember walking alone back to the YMCA where I was staying. I went over it again and again in my mind, and by the time I reached the YM little
feeling of guilt remained. I was even in a vague way proud, callow possibly, but I experienced an authentic feeling of relief. I savoured it with a cup of milky coffee in the tearoom of the YM.

I had been lying in the bunk for over an hour allowing thoughts of the past to mingle with my more immediate memory of the man’s naked body pressing down on me. He had
gone after about an hour, before dawn. I fell asleep almost at once.

He was Puerto Rican and he told me his name was Manuelo. He spoke almost no English and I almost no Spanish and it had occurred to me as soon as we were in the cabin with one kerosene lamp lit
and the dead silence broken only by the regular leak of water at the bilges of the scow... on us and infesting us with its own secrecy... it occurred to me that it was better that way. There were
no common memories between us; we shared our male sex only, our humanity, and our lust.

It was not the first time I had had sexual experience with a man, but it was the first time it was not in one way or another abortive, it was the first time I had encountered a man who knew how
to take all that was given without a trace either of embarrassment or of that shrill crustacean humour dedicated homosexuals sometimes adopt, and my body afterwards was heavy with the kind of
satisfaction I have often envied women. He drank a cup of coffee before he left, his lips smiling and his teeth very white under his small black moustache. “We see again?
Si
?”
he said quietly. I nodded and placed my hand gently on his. “
Espero
,
⁹
Manuelo,” I said. He left shortly afterwards. And I went at once
to bed to savour the intense satisfaction at my limbs.

I woke with all the sexual memories of my past, allowing them to come and go, comparing them, the reliefs, the triumphs, the shames. Occasionally I felt an edge of self-justification in my
thoughts, a plea too intense, an enthusiasm caught up and too lugubriously rationalized, but I was fundamentally very calm and still profoundly satisfied, physically with the mute certainty of my
body, intellectually because I had broken through another limit and found that I could love a man with the same sure passion that moved me to women generally. The river noises of the morning began
to come to me where I lay smoking a cigarette.

...About ten in the morning someone knocked at the door. It was Irish, the market runner. He is responsible for the inspection of the boats and likes to be thought of as the
“marine superintendent”.

“Just a minute!”

I climbed off the bunk and got into my pants and a T-shirt and went to the door.

“No up yet, man?” He was ramming tobacco into his pipe with his left forefinger.

“Yeah, got back late last night,” I said.

“I thought you were on standby?”

I yawned and shook my head.

“Well, look now,” he said. “I’ve just been down and looked below. Do you know you’re carryin’ more than a foot of water in them bilges?”

“Yeah, I think I must have sprung a new leak. I got a bad dunt from one of the Colonial tugs.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, about a couple of weeks ago.”

“Did you report it?”

Irish is a small man with tired angry blue eyes. I know he likes me but I could see he was displeased.

“There was no damage to report as far as I could see. It must just have loosened a couple of planks.”

“Well, you’d better get down there and caulk it up, Joe. I’m going to leave the motor pump on the dock in about a quarter of an hour. So come and get it and get that water
pumped out o’ there, OK?”