The Point (3 page)

The Devil who is death. Christopher Smart declined into insanity and debt, and died within the Rules of the King’s Bench, which was a prison and within its Rules is tantamount to gaol.

But why should we judge a man’s life by his death?

For there is nothing sweeter than her peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than her life when in motion.

I have written these words on a card and pinned them to my wall. Sweetness. Briskness.

I think I was born short-sighted. As a child I do not believe that I ever saw sharply or clearly. When I first went to school I was naughty and inattentive. I could read, since I was three years old, my pedagogical big sisters saw to that, and I read while teachers taught, scrawling their faint white scribbles on the hazy greyish blackboard. And when they took away my books I carved words into the desk. With a nib, the wood flaking and showing its yellow heart. I was smacked and made to stand in corners. The ochre plaster wall not so dull as they probably thought, so near to my close nose, with its patterns and stainings and old life open to my picturing mind. And when some sharp person perceived that I could not see a foot beyond my nose, so that my parents took me to an ophthalmologist, I was filled with gratitude that the world was opened to me, and I saw it as another book to be read.

Though not without loss. Loss of that world of shimmering shifting light, which I could believe peopled with saints, every person haloed in his own glory, too bright for the human eye to see except as a dazzle, like the saints in books. Glory is to be squinted at, glanced at sideways, the full and open eye will always be smitten by it. So I believed until I began to wear glasses, and the glory disappeared.

The spectacles were round and thick and slid down my nose, so immediately I developed the habit of pushing them back again. Sometimes I push them up my nose even when they are not there. My mother sent a note to the nuns asking that the other boys not call me Four-eyes; I’ve often wondered whether it would have occurred to them otherwise. Four-eyes I was. Not a bad name, I came to think. I said to myself, four eyes must be twice as good as two.

Now I take off my glasses and see my surroundings fuzzing and winking with light and think of the epitaph of the inventor of spectacles:
May God forgive him his sins
. But then I was greedy for seeing, though I never quite got the hang of its erudition, nor of the skills the hands learn from it. Could not catch a ball to save my life, or worse, my self from the ridicule of my peers, nor hit it with a bat. Dead hopeless at sport, said Brother Matthew. Keep your eye on the ball, it’s not hard. But my eye was shut behind a spectacle lens, was not free to soar with the ball. Though it could easily follow the words on a page.

My mother made me pray to Clarus, who is the patron saint of short-sightedness. Simply it seems because his name means
clear
, though he was given it because of his brightness in the perception of the things of God. How could I lose, my mother thought. Though it occurs to me that maybe he saw God so bright because his eyes were bad; his short sight saw the dazzle.

When you are called Jerome in a home like mine you sooner or later realise that there is a message to be got. Mind you, there were plenty of us to get it. The girls were Therese, Catherine and Mary, the boys Dominic, Benedict, Gregory and Ambrose. As well as me, of course. Our mother was intensely devout, in the way that Catholic mothers used to be. Are they still? I somehow don’t imagine it. She lived in and for the Church. My father shared her religion, but was less devout and it seemed we understood this was a family thing, her devotion stood for both of them and she had his support in every element of it. We lived our lives according to the calendar of the Church, and when we weren’t actually at worship the observances were made in food. Always fish on Fridays, whatever the Pope said. Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. No butter in Lent, and an abstinence of our own choice. And the meals, large uncounted stretchable meals, for who knew how many we would be; I was eighteen before I knew what a lamb cutlet tasted like.

Therese did the right thing; she found a vocation and went to the Carmelites. Catherine and Mary did the right thing in lesser but still admirable ways; they married steady Catholic boys and settled down to raise large families, though Mary made everyone nervous by having a career, and when five years in there were no children it was a worry, but then she came good and managed both which filled the two sides of the family with a kind of edgy admiration, as though we’d produced a trapeze artist. What skill, what brilliance, but when will she fall?

Dominic and Benedict got good jobs, one in real estate, the other in accounting. Dominic married a good Catholic girl (I always wondered about this phrase; did anybody actually know she was good, or was that just the Catholicness, or was it impossible for a Catholic girl to be otherwise than good? I tried to ask my mother this but she said, Oh Jerome, this facetiousness, it’ll get you in trouble one day) but Benedict didn’t, he was a bachelor, a gay bachelor my mother called him until someone pointed out that time had moved on for that word and she probably didn’t mean what it now meant, though whether she should have was another question. Gregory did carpentry then went to London to study stage design and didn’t come back. So that left Ambrose and me. Ambrose was the baby, the precious little afterthought.

I’m not saying there was any pressure. Oh no. A vocation has to come, it can’t be imposed, can’t even be suggested, shouldn’t really be wished. Of course, subliminal messages are another thing. But my vocation was all my own work, I was certain of that, at the time. It came from God, and in a flash.

I think my mother would have liked me to be a Jesuit, well, I know she would have. Her brother was a parish priest down Boorowa way; I always imagined his prayers were mainly for the speediness of certain horses. Her sister was a Brigidine, which was probably why Therese wasn’t. But the Jesuits, the Jesuits were power and glamour, and my mother was ambitious. The Franciscans were altogether more modest. But it was a Franciscan who came in my last year at school and did a retreat with us, and that’s when I had my vision. And I knew that God wanted me to be a Franciscan.

In truth, I still coddle that desire of mine to be a Franciscan, I cleave and cling to it, the idea of it, though I can no longer manage the fact. It was my youth responding to St Francis the young man, who was passionate and poetic and had a great enthusiasm for life, who was indeed quite a boisterous lad and liked lots of laughs. He saw all people as God’s children, brothers and sisters, and animals and inanimate things too, everybody knows Brother Sun and Sister Moon; he said the Church is made up of living stones. He died welcoming our sister, the death of the body, and singing Psalm 141,
let
the wicked fall into their own nets
… he was robust enough. But also wrote out the prayer,
May the Lord bless thee and keep thee,
may the Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and give thee
peace.

Indeed.

Yes, I remember why I became a Franciscan, just as I know I cannot go back to that youthful ebullient innocence.

You can’t impose a vocation, or even suggest it, and you can’t argue with one, either.

And there was my name. Jerome, my saint, my patron, on whose day I was born, the thirtieth day of September, which means hot weather coming and the lawns full of yellow daisies which my sisters made into chains to crown me, I was the right age to be the plaything of my sisters. Ambrose escaped, they had left home and married by the time he was born. Jerome is the patron saint of scripture scholars and exegetes. Who knows what an exegete is nowadays? An expounder, an interpreter, an expositor of sacred law. Eusebius Hieronymous Sophonius, the most learned man in the ancient world. In the sacred scriptures. His native language was Illyrian …
This is Illyria, lady
… and he was a master of Greek and Latin.

As I was. My four eyes saw the living patterns in these dead languages, fell in love with their syntaxes and shapes, the taste of their words on my tongue, the sweetness of their meanings and music. These days people would say, how useless. They didn’t when I was young, but a lot of them thought it. Dead languages. When for me they were more alive than the dreary sport I was obliged to attempt to play. The thwack of leather on willow, the thump of boot on ball; I could never see the music in them. Dead languages: full of life to me, eternally. And seen to be useful for a career in the Church. Latin was the words of the mass, and they were living, the language of eternal life.

I have often thought of the purity of my education. When learning was hunger and the satisfaction of feeding it, was appetite and appetite’s delectation, was craving and craving’s fulfilment. Yet hunger and feeding suggest necessity and the essential business of keeping alive, and the thing about my education was that usefulness was not a consideration.

When do hunger and feeding turn into greed?

The other thing I learned was bookkeeping. Double entry. In large ledgers with marbled endpapers. The beauty of that is perhaps even less obvious. But the carefully inked figures with their totals that balance … I can tell you, a page of double entry bookkeeping has a similar finesse and elegance to a page of Latin epigrams.

Latin and Greek. And beautiful bookkeeping. Who would have thought I was laying the foundations of my brilliant career?

A vocation is a vision. And when I left the Franciscans that was a kind of vision too. A vision of the flesh, or rather of the blood. I looked at two large carp in the fishpond, just hanging there in the current of the water, mouth to mouth, a flick of their fins in that limpid space keeping them trembling together, even such cold fishy creatures, and suddenly the blood that flowed through every artery of my body beating out from my heart and suffusing my whole flesh was filled with desire for the world, the world of love and lust and women and people and knowing and
things
, which seemed much more God’s world than this polite and lifeless cloister, and I went.

Of course, some people would have said it was a disease in the blood, not a vision. We were learning at that time of new and terrible plagues that returned us to the old sex and death nexus which we in our innocence had thought the sixties had forever scotched. But I knew that my aims were noble.

Fair and unpolluted flesh.
Surely that is all flesh, unless it is dead, or diseased, which is a form of death in its way, but sex doesn’t pollute the flesh. Though that is what Gertrude meant, that Ophelia was virginal, unpolluted by a man. As I was by any woman. I went straight from school to the Franciscans, all I knew was a bit of fumble-kissing, but it wasn’t pollution that I was expecting, or looking for, as I said, my vision saw itself as noble. Though I was curious about the little death, that moment of suspension, of ecstasy, the loss of knowingness that is like death and might be, if you kept going. As some people do, rock stars are the ones we notice, and politicians, when they play with death in games of sex. Dangerous it is, death doesn’t play by the rules.

Flora was not a person I’d have thought of, at first. So skinny she was, her skin and her fuzz of hair pale brown, the skin fine and, not wrinkled exactly, but a little worn. I didn’t think of her sexily. Anabel, now. That thick creamy skin and the glorious flesh it enclosed, her long black hair that flowed past her billowing waist when she walked naked through the house and her breasts and her buttocks trembled. Her flesh shimmering under her skin, that was what I desired, and married, and now I write these words that once had me trembling, write them with a coolness that can no longer imagine let alone remember what they were like. They belong in that other country the past, and besides the wench is … no, not dead, only to me, the wench did leave me, and the heart she broke mended, not fast, but you can function with a broken heart, you can desire other beautiful women, and then came the one who jigsaw-puzzled the pieces together and with her Morgan le Fay breath melted them into a whole again.

Flora didn’t much care for being called Morgan le Fay. You, she’d say, you are all quotation. Second-hand. And it is true, I was, I am full of other men’s words. Other people’s words. Ever the exegete. It was all I had for such a long time. But true it also was that she was a sorcerer, in her way, a sorceress, too good you could think for natural human skills, and I did wonder if she’d made her own bargains. Of course she had. And if I had understood them, would I have fallen in love with her? Of course I would have.

And the words of others, why not, when it’s only common sense to see them as so much better than your own. Some people are good at putting together words, it’s up to us to use them. Would you build your own motorcar, I asked her.

Motorcar, she said, and I thought I heard a faint breath of exasperation. Motorcar. With a man walking in front carrying a red flag.

Once I told Anabel a story of that Princess Charlotte shoved into marriage with the Prince Regent, Prinny who built the Brighton Pavilion and was such a dandy, how she was riding barebreasted (like many good stories it doesn’t tell you the why of it) and when the horse galloped, her titties, which were great, swung about so much that one flew up and gave her a black eye. Anabel had just been riding me, the wonderful bulk of her banging up and down, she bucked and she bounced, the sheer juicy weight of her raised stars behind my eyeballs which was what made me think of the Princess Charlotte, and I was lying marvellously crushed and spent and bruised and muzzily grateful that sex could be so terrible as this, I mean terrible meaning good, as God is terrible, awful and awesome, and I didn’t even think that was a blasphemous thought, not any more, and she’d heaved herself off me and was spread panting and pearled with sweat beside me. I fingered her pillowy flesh and made her a present of the little narrative, but I don’t think she was impressed. Anabel inhabited the mass of her flesh with a vast and easygoing calm and frequently pleasure, but she was sensitive to slight. It was a stupid story, she said, who ever heard of a woman horse-riding half naked. It was in Italy, I replied, but that didn’t help. They sound hideously pendulous, she said. I called her my terrible dear, after Shelley’s poem to the night, and she was offended, she didn’t know about poetry, she didn’t have its shapes in her head, they puzzled her and Anabel didn’t like to be puzzled, she liked clarity and paring down and nothing superfluous, which was odd considering her own gloriously unnecessary flesh. I said something like that to her once and she was upset, she’d home in on one word and not see the delicate ambiguous balance of the whole, that I think was where things went wrong, she did not like my words, and I told her she had a banal mind, an exquisite and complex body but a banal mind and without subtlety. When you find the beloved other failing to understand how unnecessary might be a word full of admiration and indeed adoration you know you might as well give up. Explaining, I don’t mean loving.