The Last Samurai (18 page)

She said Oh and she said she had seen Seven Samurai though not the other one and what a marvellous film

I said Yes

and she said It’s a little on the long side but what a marvellous film, of course it’s basically so simple isn’t it I suppose that’s the source of its appeal, sort of like the Three Musketeers, an elite band—

and I said WHAT?

and she said Sorry?

ELITE BAND! I said staring aghast

and she said there was no need to shout.

And if ONE GREEN BOTTLE should accidentally fall

There’ll be EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES hanging on the wall

I began to imagine L seeing all kinds of things in the film which would not be incompatible with throwing a person from a plane on orders from a third party

EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL

I said politely but firmly I think if you see the film again you will find that the samurai are not, in fact, an elite band. Lesser directors have of course succumbed to the glamour of the eliteness of a band, with predictable results; not Kurosawa.

She said there was no need to take that tone

EIGHT GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL

& I said politely Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought. We should draw our conclusions from the evidence available rather than from hearsay and try not to be influenced by our preconceptions. We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.

She said What?

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

I said Also, we should remember that appearances can be deceptive. We may not
have
all the relevant evidence. Just because somebody is smiling doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better off dead.

She said I really don’t think

SEVEN GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL

I said Let’s say A sees his wife, B, burned alive at time t. A survives. Later we see A singing in a local ritual. C, observing the ritual, thinks A has come out ahead. We infer that C is not in full possession of the facts & has been influenced by his own preconceptions since

She said It all seems rather clinical

I said Clinical!

THERE’LL BE SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL

She said & isn’t this rather morbid—

I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.

After all we both when it comes down to it we both think it’s a marvellous film, she said pleasantly.

I was afraid she might give some other example but luckily the train pulled into Moorgate and this was her stop.

SIX GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL

SIX GREEN BOTTLES

[Could be worse. He could be singing 100 bottles of beer on the wall, instead of a song that not only counts down, but starts at 10.]

277 degrees above absolute zero.

I said All right, we’ll take the Circle Line again, and we had another argument about Cunliffe.

I: Look, there’s no point in bringing a dictionary when there is no place to put it. You can’t use it if you are holding it in your lap with the book on top. We tried that before and it didn’t work.

L: Please

I: No

L: Please

I: No

L: Please

I: No

L: Please

I: No

The ideal thing would be to go somewhere with tables, such as the Barbican or South Bank Centre—but it is impossible to go to either without being faced at every turn with bars and cafés and restaurants and ice-cream vendors, all selling expensive appealing food which L wants & we cannot afford.

Please No Please No Please

I thought about another day like the last 17, 10 hours of marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius; I thought about another day like yesterday, more marvellous wonderful far too young what a genius
plus
nonsense about elite bands not to mention 10 hours explaining every single word/visiting toilet inaccessible to pushchair/ smiling pleasantly through 273 verses (10 + 0 + –262) of the green bottles song. Could I be sure that he would not start up again at –263 or rather would anyone familiar with the child offer even straight odds that he would not? No.

So I said All right, forget the Circle Line. We’ll take Cunliffe and we’ll go to the National Gallery, but I don’t want you to say ONE WORD. And no running through doors that say No Entry or Authorised Personnel Only. We’ve got to be inconspicuous. We’ve got to look as though we’ve come to look at the paintings. We’ve been looking at the paintings and our feet are tired so we’re just sitting down to rest our feet. We’re just sitting down to rest our feet so we can get up and look at more paintings.

Natürlich, said the Phenomenon.

I’ve heard that one before, said I, but I put Cunliffe under the pushchair along with
Odyssey
13–24,
Fergus: Dog of the Scottish Glens, Tar-Kutu, Marduk, Pete, WOLF!, Kingdom of the Octopus, SQUID!, The House at Pooh Corner, White Fang, Kanji ABC, Kanji from the Start, A Reader of Handwritten Japanese
, this notebook and several peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I put L in the pushchair with Les Inséparables and we set off.

We are now sitting in front of Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge. L is reading
Odyssey
18, consulting Cunliffe at intervals—
infrequent
intervals. I have been looking at the Portrait of the Doge—
somebody’s
got to.

I have brought things to read myself but the room is so warm I keep falling asleep and then jerking awake to stare. In a half-dream I see the monstrous heiskaihekatontapus prowling the ocean bed, pentekaipentekontapods flying before it, Come back & fight like a man, it jeers, I can beat you with one hand tied behind my back (heh heh heh). Strange to think Thatcher could work on three hours sleep, five hours & I am an idiot. Should never never never have told him to read all those things—but too late to retract.

I think the guard looks suspicious.

Pretend to take notes.

No sooner were Liberace and I in his bed without our clothes than I realised how stupid I had been. At this distance I can naturally not remember every little detail, but if there is one musical form that I hate more than any other, it is the medley. One minute the musician, or more likely aged band, is playing an overorchestrated version of The Impossible Dream; all of a sudden, mid-verse, for no reason, there’s a stomach-turning swerve into another key and you’re in the middle of Over the Rainbow, swerve, Climb Every Mountain, swerve, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, swerve, swerve, swerve. Well then, you have only to imagine Liberace, hands, mouth, penis now here, now there, no sooner here than there, no sooner there than here again, starting something only to stop and start something else instead, and you will have a pretty accurate picture of the Drunken Medley.

The Medley came at last to an end and Liberace fell into a deep sleep.

I wanted to clear my head. I wanted strangeness and coldness and precision.

I listened for a little while to Glenn Gould playing pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier. In recording sessions Gould would often make nine or ten different versions of a piece, each note perfect, each perfectly distinct from the others in character, and each note played bears the mark of all those to which it was preferred. I am not really capable of replaying a fugue in my head so I listened to his queer performance of the C minor prelude, Book 1, which begins with each note staccato, and then two-thirds of the way down the first page the notes suddenly run very smoothly and softly, and then I listened to Prelude No. 22 in B flat minor which I could never play without the pedal. I think that though perhaps it should not be played with the pedal it should at least be played legato, and yet the harsh abruptness with which Gould plays this piece displaced with its coldness, its lack of ease, the wilful expressiveness with which Liberace wearies the heart.

Liberace was still asleep. His head lay on the pillow, face as I had seen it, skull encasing a sleeping brain; how cruel that we must wake each time to answer to the same name, revive the same memories, take up the same habits and stupidities that we shouldered the day before and lay down to sleep. I did not want to watch him wake to go on as he had begun.

I did not want to be there when he woke up but it would be rude to leave without a word. On the other hand almost any note would be impossible to write. I could not say thank you for a lovely evening because you can’t. I could not say hope to see you again because what if he took this as encouragement to see me again? I could not say I had a horrible time and I hope I never see you again because you just can’t. If I tried to write a short note that said something without saying any of these things I would still be there five or six hours later when he woke up.

Then I had an idea.

The thing to do, I thought, was to
imply
that we had had an interesting conversation which just happened to be interrupted by the fact that I had to leave (for some sort of appointment, for example). Instead of marking the close of the occasion the note should present itself as a further element of a conversation which was still in progress & only suspended. The note should appear to assume that Liberace was interested in things like the Rosetta Stone & should purport to answer a perceived scepticism as to the possibility of putting together such a thing in such a way as to be generally comprehensible, thus presenting itself as part of an ongoing discussion to be resumed at some unspecified later date. All I would have to do was write down a short passage of Greek, as if for this interested sceptic, with translation transliteration vocabulary and grammatical comments—taking pains, of course, to write the latter as if for the type of person who can’t get enough of things like the middle voice, dual number, aorist and tmesis. I am usually not very good at dealing with social dilemmas, but this seemed a stroke of genius. It would take about an hour (comparing favourably with the five-hour unwritable note), and the final tissue of false implication would practically guarantee (while avoiding gratuitous cruelty and yet not departing for one instant from the truth) that Liberace would never want to see me again.

I got up and got dressed and I went into the next room and got a piece of paper from his desk. Then I took my Edding 0.1 pen from my bag, because I was going to try to fit it all on one page, and I sat down and got to work. It was about 3:00 a.m.

You seemed to doubt that a Rosetta Stone would be possible (I began casually). What do you think of this?