Mefisto (24 page)

– Come here, he said, come on here, now.

He took down a big iron key from a hook behind him, and lifted the flap of the counter and stood back to let me enter. I looked at Felix. He shrugged.

– Go ahead, he said. There are some things even I don’t know.

Dan led the way through a door behind the bar into a narrow, dim passageway with cluttered shelves and crates of bottles on the floor. There was a musty smell of apples and of clay. For a moment I felt I had been here before, long ago. We came to another door. Dan paused with the key in the keyhole.

– I knew you weren’t like them others he brings up here, he said. I knew you were different.

And he smiled and winked.

The room was small, and filled with things. A banked-up coke fire throbbed in the grate. By the fire, in a vast armchair, a vast woman sat. She had a great round head, like the head of a stone statue, and ragged sparse white hair. Her bloated face glistened in the glare of the coals like a glazed mask that had begun to melt. She wore a sort of gown of some heavy shiny black stuff, and a knitted jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape.

– This, Dan said, is Mammy.

Out of that swollen mask two tiny glittering eyes fixed on me an avid, unwavering stare. She did not speak. A window at the far side of the room looked out on to a scrubby bit of garden where a few hens were scratching in the dirt. The jagged tops of the pines stood stark as black teeth against the sky, as if a huge mouth were closing slowly around us. The hour was growing dark. Dan brought a chair for me and I sat down. Mammy smelled of peppermint, and of things that had been worn for too long next the skin. Each breath she took was a deep, harsh draught, it shuddered into her, subsiding, and then she was still for a moment, until the next one started. Dan sat down beside me, rubbing his palms on his knees, his big face shining.

– There’s not many are let come in here, he said loudly. Isn’t that so, Mammy?

He smiled sheepishly, gazing at her proudly, as if somehow she, not he, were the offspring. She ignored him, he might not have been there. Her hand lay on the armrest beside me, stuck like a stopper into the end of her fat arm. Her face was almost featureless, nose, mouth, cheeks, all had melted into shapeless fat. Only the eyes remained, undimmed. Since I came in her gaze had not shifted from me for an instant, it was at once remote and intent, as if she were not used to looking at human creatures. The air thudded softly, heavy with heat. The room crowded around us. There was a table, cabinets, cupboards, a brass coal scuttle, a sofa with its stuffing coming out, two china dogs eyeing each other on the mantelpiece, a porcelain ballerina in a tutu made of real lace, a silver cake-stand, a bookcase without books, a glass globe with an alpine scene inside it and stuff that would make a snowstorm, a bow of crimson satin saved from a chocolate box, a pair of toby jugs, a ship under full sail in a bottle, a coloured picture of Mary, the Mother of God, with a dagger piercing her heart. Dan was talking away, but I was not listening. The darkness deepened, the fire shone red. I wanted to leave, to get away, yet could not, a kind of voluptuous lethargy had taken hold of me, my limbs were leaden, like flasks filled with heavy liquid. And it seemed to me that somehow I had always been here, and somehow would remain here always, among Mammy’s things, with her little unrelenting eye fixed on me. She signified something, no, she signified nothing. She had no meaning. She was simply there. And would be there, waiting, in that fetid little room, forever.

The bus was late. Felix and I paced up and down outside the pub. The night was clear and starry. Felix was pensive, whistling softly through his teeth. He didn’t know why I was going, he said, why I wouldn’t wait a few days more. He would be leaving too, then. We might have gone together. He glanced at me sideways, trying to make out my expression in the darkness.

My expression.

– Can’t tempt you, eh? he said. Well, there’ll be another time.

I gazed away up the road. He touched my arm lightly.

– Oh, yes, he said, there’s always another time.

Then he walked off, laughing, into the night.

The hill road gleamed, the pines sighed, the light from the lamp over the door of the pub shivered in the wind. Absence, absence, the forlorn weight of all that was not there.

THE LILAC WAS IN
bloom in the hospital grounds. The first frail venturers of the season were out in their slippers and their dressing-gowns, holding up their shocked ashen faces to the sun. On the roof gay puffs of white smoke streamed away in the wind, they made the building seem for a moment a great ship bounding through the blue. The entrance hall was a glare of light. A sparrow had got in somehow, and was beating its wings against the glass in the corner of a high window, I can hear it still, that tiny, frantic commotion. They stopped me at the desk.

– Are you a relative? they said.

A shaft of sunlight thronged with dust-motes stood aslant the stairs, like a pillar falling and falling.

Mother.

I walked down a corridor, waited in a room. There was a table, plastic chairs, a vase of dried flowers. Time passed, an age. I was there, and not there. At last Father Plomer arrived, and stood before me with his soft hands clasped. He was not wearing his spectacles, without them his eyes had a raw, damaged look. He shook his head, as if over some mild disappointment, or some inclemency of the weather.

– I’m sorry, he said.

Icarus. Icarus.

Full is the cup.

I wanted to see her room. The bed had been stripped, the waste bin emptied, the locker door stood open. And yet, for me, she was there, there in all that was missing. Had it ever been otherwise? I leaned my head at the window, watching the smoke on the roof, the little clouds, the far, shadowy hills. A frozen sea was breaking up inside me. Father Plomer paced softly, his leather soles creaking.

– She was found in the chapel, you know, he said. I take that as a great sign, that she would go there, to be at peace.

He paused and looked at me, with that naked, groping gaze, then paced again, creaking.

– Of course, the question is, he said, where did she get that awful, awful stuff, and so much of it. The powers that be have their suspicions, and if they prove right, a certain person, I can tell you, will be losing her position here, and very soon, at that.

Again he glanced at me, with a meaning look, and nodded slowly once. Do I imagine it, or did he rub his hands?

I found Professor Kosok at the flat in Chandos Street. He was sitting by the window in the kitchen, in his overcoat and hat. One fist lay clenched before him on the table. His eyes were red, fat tears rolled down the greasy sides of his nose. They had given him her things in a plastic bag: her handbag, her fur coat, her flowered tea-gown. He looked at me wearily.

– Where is your order now? he said.

She was his daughter, did I mention that?

I walked through the bedrooms at the back. How grandly the sun dreamed here, falling down through the great windows, light from another time. I stood and wept. Summer! The garden was in blossom. A pigeon landed on the sill, spoke softly, and flew away again.

When I left I took her syringe with me, in its velvet case, as a keepsake.

A part of me, too, had died. I woke up one morning and found I could no longer add together two and two. Something had given way, the ice had shattered. Things crowded in, the mere things themselves. One drop of water plus one drop of water will not make two drops, but one. Two oranges and two apples do not make four of some new synthesis, but remain stubbornly themselves. Oh, I don’t say I had not thought of all this before, only that now I could not think of anything else. About numbers I had known everything, and understood nothing.

I lost the black notebook, misplaced it somewhere, or threw it away, I don’t know. Have I not made a black book of my own?

Grief, of course, and guilt. I shall not go into it. Pain too, but not so much as before, and every day a little less. My face is almost mended, one morning I’ll wake up and not recognize myself in the mirror. A new man. I stay away from the hospital. What is there for me there, any more? I want no protectors now. I want to be, to be, what, I don’t know. Naked. Flayed. A howling babe, waving furious fists. I don’t know.

Have I tied up all the ends? Even an invented world has its rules, tedious, absurd perhaps, but not to be gainsaid.

Sometimes still I have the feeling, I think I’ll never lose it, that I am being followed. More than once, as well, I have turned in the street at the sight of a flash of red hair, a face slyly smiling among the faceless ones. Is it my imagination? Was it ever anything else? He’ll be back, in one form or another, there’s no escaping him. I have begun to work again, tentatively. I have gone back to the very start, to the simplest things. Simple! I like that. It will be different this time, I think it will be different. I won’t do as I used to, in the old days. No. In future, I will leave things, I will try to leave things, to chance.

J
OHN
B
ANVILLE
was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945.
He is the author of fourteen other novels including
The Sea
, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize.
He has received a literary award from the
Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

A
LSO BY
J
OHN
B
ANVILLE

Long Lankin

Nightspawn

Birchwood

Doctor Copernicus

Kepler

The Newton Letter

The Book of Evidence

Ghosts

Athena

The Untouchable

Eclipse

Shroud

The Sea

The Infinities

First published 1986 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited

First published by Picador 1999

This electronic edition published 2011 by Picador
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Copyright © John Banville 1986

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