The Dead Seagull (9 page)

I will speak simply about the conclusions that overcome me now when I consider the death of my wife and my son. I had believed in the mercy and not in the justice of god. How can anything really disastrous, I asked myself then, ever happen to them, the innocent and the beautiful, the virtuous? But I had forgotten the truly irremediable disaster that had already overtaken them: they loved and they were loved. In the house of your love, my dear wife, there was that marvellously appointed room of forgiveness, the door always ajar, the single candle lighted, the window opening on to a purified future: but were you aware, my dear love, that an anticipation was its tenant? In the chamber of your forgiveness the prescience of the crime that you were fated to forgive, and never to forgive, took up its habitation because destiny disallows disuse as much as nature hates emptiness. The holy ones are those who regard destiny as a shoddy trick like the carrot and the donkey: these holy ones sit all their life long on the banks of the Ganges and stare their vision out of existence by gazing at the water until they die. This is the holy No with which they answer life.

*  *  *  *

My love, you will remember the question you asked me but gave me no time and no chance to answer? You asked me if I truly loved Marsden. I have, since then, had almost too much time in which to turn over in my mind what would even then have been a simply and schizophrenically affirmative answer. And when I turn this Yes about in my mind, when I look long and closely at the figure of my love for Marsden, I am dazzled with enigmas. How can one love a monster? It is too easy, if one is oneself a monster. No, I do not claim, for a moment, that I am, or ever was, a monster of such magnificence as she. And the word is precisely the correct one. Like Rasputin, who, believing that the exercise of repentance was the highest virtue of which we are capable, rose to an impiety of irreligious illogic by committing sins so that he could repent of them, like this monster, Marsden saw in the charity, the consideration, the kindness, the pity, the gentleness, the forgiveness, the mercy of people, in these she saw virtues, or, rather, faculties that, fortunately, the indulgence in her own selfishness could start functioning for the benefit of all concerned. It could be put much more succinctly: she took advantage of other people’s natural humanity. She did so because she existed in the moral anarchy of an animal: whatever she wanted was right. She was beautiful with the dynamic of her purpose: her desires drew her towards them as passionately and as mysteriously as home draws a pigeon through the air. Yes, all this is so. I loved her for the reason that I also love the purposeful pigeon, the amoral tree and the unthinking star.

*  *  *  *

But you, sleeper with a stillborn son in the cradle of your bosom, rocking and hushing an armful of nothing to rest, what will you say to me when we meet at the paradisal kissing gate? Drawing the babe closer, will you seek to let me pass without recognition? Or will you, then, look up with eyes in which, like prophecies in water, all our unaccomplished understandings become fulfilled? I think that you will do neither of these things. No, you will lead me, without speech, through this gate; we shall walk through a garden in which a snake and a tree stand coiled in a perpetual convulsion of realisation, blasted by the magnitude of their legacy; and, still not speaking, we shall go up through grottoes in which ascetics pray and heroes everlastingly aggrandise themselves and lovers grunt and sigh and manufacture genealogies; until, in what will by this time be the half-light of the evening, we shall reach a chamber of glass, perhaps—for I cannot distinguish clearly—a house of glass. Adorned with the flowers and veils of the bridal bedroom, this room of glass contains an ornate bed of gold, and it stands on a rock. Naked upon this bed lies the most beautiful youth who ever was. And you, looking a last time at me, show me that the cross and the kiss in your face have both put out leaves and flowers; smiling you leave me. And I return to a cave in the gardens where the eighteen breasted Eve, rolling Erasmus Darwin’s sea in the cup of her tongue, greets me with an embrace that draws blood from my sexual organs. And from then on, every time I sneeze, a child is conceived.

*  *  *  *

Can I delude your image with these masochistic abnegations? Will your innocent spirit, true as only a bird entering a trap is true, flutter inside the structure of my self-accusations, and be a singing prisoner, a cause, and an exorciser? Now the bread of my heart is not white enough for your dove; the salt of my grief is not bitter enough for your feathers; and with the justice of your going held up like a hand against me, forbidding any pursuit, forbidding even a farewell, I watch you, seagull with a gold sacrament stuck through your breast, ascend, out of my sight, out of my knowledge, but never out of my love, until you break into the window of heaven.

*  *  *  *

When the mermaid, murmuring her hypnotic invitations, lounges, with a mirror in her hand, on the masculine stones, it is perfectly natural for her to close her eyes in gratified fulfilment when the rock, victim of buttock and voice, breaks open and crushes her in its embrace. My dear Marsden, you, too, must have learned in how many of the two hundred tongues of Europe the plough that the cut worm forgives is a copulation. Yes, of course, you know.

There are simple souls, I believe, who find it hard to understand why the unenterprising Eve should have plucked the apple: the reason, and your life, my dear Marsden, quite nobly and simply demonstrates this, is threefold. The lady wanted an apple, she did not mind taking it, and was not too ashamed when she had eaten it. Because it gives her a bellyache that evolves a world. But, O my God, where was the individual will of the undersigned when that nude bitch under the tree held up her hand with a sprouting womb in it? The will of the captive is free in a box of mirrors. The will of the lover is free inside the seed. The will of the woman is free inside her desire to die into the next generation. For freedom is the knowledge of necessity, and the necessity of the human is love, and the necessity of love is existence, and the necessity of existence is two sinning in a bed, and the necessity of two sinning in a bed is to be forgiven. It is thus that our only freedom is to be damned.