There are the nightmares too, of course, the recurring ones, lit with a garish, unearthly glow, in which the dead speak to me: flesh, burst bone, the slow, secret, blue-black ooze. I shall not try to recount them, these bloodstained pageants. They are no use to me. They are only a kind of lurid tinkering that my fancy indulges in, the crackles and jagged sparks thrown off by the spinning dynamo of my overburdened conscience. It is not the dead that interest me now, no matter how piteously they may howl in the chambers of the night. Who, then? The living? No, no, something in between; some third thing.
Dreams, then waking. At times it was hard to tell the difference; I would drift out of riotous slumber and get up and walk around in a hazy, shallow state that seemed only a calmer, less tormented form of sleep than that which had gone before. I tramped the roads in the chill of dawn while a white sun came up tremblingly out of the sea. Everything is strange at that hour, stranger than usual, I mean: the world looks as I imagine it will look after I am dead, wide and empty and streaked with long shadows, shocked somehow and not quite solid, all odd-angled light and shifting facades. These open vistas — so much sky! — alarmed me. I was permanently dizzy, clinging for dear life to our flying island, and there was constantly a sort of distant ringing in my ears. It felt like early morning all day long, there was that fizzing in the blood, that taste of metal in the mouth. The days hung heavy, falling towards night. We watched in silence the unremitting, slow advance of time. Here on Devil’s Island we are not allowed the illusion of highs and troughs, of sudden speedings up, of halts and starts. There is only the steady, glacial creep that carries all along with it. Sometimes I fancied I could feel the planet itself hurtling ponderously through space in its bubble of bright air. I had my moments of rebellion, of course, when I would scramble up from the slimed flagstones and rattle my shackles in rage, shouting for the non-existent jailer. Mostly, though, I was content, or calm, at least, with the febrile calm of the chronic invalid. That’s it, that’s what this place is most like, not a prison or a pilgrimage isle, but one of those Sanatoriums that were so numerous when I was a child and half the world had rotting lungs. Yes, I see myself up here in those first weeks and months immured behind a wall of glass, peering out in a feverish daze over serried blue pines while a huge sun declined above a distant river valley. Heights, I have always sought the heights, physical if not moral. It is not grandeur I crave, not the mossy crag or soaring peak, but the long perspective, the distance, the diminution of things. I had hardly arrived here before I found myself tramping up the fields behind the house to the oak ridge. Wonderful prospect from this lofty crest, the near green and the far blue and that strip of ash-white beach holding up an enormity of sea and sky, the whole scene clear and delicate, like something by Vaublin himself, a background to one of his celebrated pèlerinages or a delicate fête galante. From this vantage I could make out in the fields around me a curious, ribbed pattern in the turf. I wondered if vines perhaps had grown here once (vines, in these latitudes! — what an ignoramus I am), but the spinster who runs the post office in the village put me right. ‘Potato drills,’ she told me, shouting because for some reason she took me for a foreigner (which, when I think of it, I suppose I am). ‘From before the famine times, that was.’ A thousand souls lived here then. I picture them, in their cawbeens and their shawls, straggling down the path to the beach and the waiting black ship, the men fixed on something distant and the women looking back out of huge, stricken eyes. Cythera, my foot. Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that’s not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything.
I bring the household rubbish up here on to the ridge to burn it. I like burning things, paper especially. I think fire must be my element; I relish the sudden flare and crackle, the anger of it, the menace. I stand leaning on my pitchfork (a wonderful implement, this, the wood of the shaft silky from use and the tines tempered by flame to a lovely, dark, oily opalescence), in my boots and my old hat, chewing the soft inside of my cheek and thinking of nothing, and am excited and at the same time strangely at peace. At times I become convinced I am being watched, and turn quickly to see if I can catch a glimpse of a foxy face and glittering, mephitic eye among the leaves; I tell myself I am imagining it, that there is no one, but I am not persuaded; I suppose I want him to be here still, someone worse than me, feral, remorseless, laughing at everything. The heat shakes the air above the fire and makes the trees on the far side of the clearing seem to wobble. Between the trunks I can see the sea, deep-blue, unmoving, flecked with white. The stones banked around the fire hum and creak, big russet shards with threads of yellow glitter running through them. I recall as a child melting lumps of lead in a tin can, the way the lead trembled inside itself and abruptly the little secret shining worm ran out. I used to try to melt stones, too, imagining the seams of ore in them were gold. And when they would not break nor the gold melt I could not understand it, and would fly into a rage and want to set fire to everything, burn everything down. Timid little boy though I was, I harboured dreams of irresistible destruction. I imagined it, the undulating sheets of flame, the red wind rushing upwards, the rip and roar. Fire: yes, yes.
I have other chores. I draw wood, of course, and tend the stove, and check that the water pump is running freely and that the septic tank is functioning. These used to be Licht’s jobs; he took a great satisfaction in handing them over to me as soon as I arrived. I had not the heart to let him see how I enjoyed the work that he thought would be a burden. I could rhapsodise about this kind of thing — I mean the simple goodness of the commonplace. Jail had taught me the quiet delights of drudgery. Manual work dulls the sharp edges of things and sometimes can deflect even the arrows of remorse. Not that convicts are required any more to do what you would call hard labour. I have a theory, mock me if you will, that modern penal practice aims not to punish the miscreant, or even to instil in him a moral sense, but rather seeks to emasculate him by a process of enervation. I know I had ridiculously old-fashioned notions of what to expect from prison, picked up no doubt from the black-and-white movies of my childhood: the shaved blue heads, the manacled, ragged figures trudging in a circle in the exercise-yard, the fingernails destroyed, like poor Oscar’s, from picking oakum — why, even leg-irons and bread and water would not have surprised me — instead of which, what we had was Ping-Pong and television and the ever-springing tea-urn. I tell you, it would soften the most hardened recidivist. (Perhaps when I am finished with Vaublin I shall produce a monograph on prison reform: here as elsewhere, though it may be slower, the spread of liberal values goes unchecked and cannot but do harm to the moral fibre of the race, which needs its criminals, just as it needs its sportsmen and its butchers, for that vital admixture of strength, cunning and freedom from squeamishness.) Of course, in prison there were deprivations, and they were hard to bear, I will not deny it. I had thought it would be women I would want when I got out, women and silk suits and crowded city streets, all that rich world from which I had been isolated for so long, but here I was, pottering about in this rackety house on a crop of rock in the midst of a waste of waters. I had my books, my papers, my studies, playing the part of Professor Kreutznaer’s amanuensis, supposedly aiding him in the completion of his great work on the life and art of Jean Vaublin for which the world, or that part of it that cares about such things, has grown weary of waiting. The fiction that I was no more than his assistant was one that, for reasons not wholly clear to me, it suited us both to maintain; the truth is, before I knew it he had handed over the task entirely to me. I was flattered, of course, but I did not deceive myself as to his opinion of my abilities; it is true, I have a capacity to take pains, learned in a hard school, but I am no scholar. It was not regard for me but a growing indifference to the fate of his life’s work that led the Professor to abdicate in my favour. No, that’s not right. Rather it was, I think, an act of expiation on his part. He like me had sins to atone for, and this sacrifice was one of the ways he chose. Or was it, on the contrary, as the weasel of doubt sometimes suggests to me, was it his idea of a joke? Anyway, no matter, no matter. My name will not appear on the title page; I would not want that. A brief acknowledgment will do; I look forward to penning it myself, savouring in advance the reflexive thrill of writing down my own name and being, even if only for a moment, someone wholly other. If, that is, it is ever to be finished. I am happy at my labours, happier than I expected or indeed deserve to be; I feel I have achieved my apotheosis. My time is wonderfully balanced between the day’s rough chores and those scrupulosities and fine discriminations that art history demands, this saurian stillness before the shining objects it is my task to interrogate. In these soft, pale nights, while a grey-blue effulgence lingers in the window, I work at the kitchen table at the centre of a vast and somehow attentive silence, doing my impression of a scholar, sorting through sources, reading over the Professor’s material, in Licht’s exuberant typewriting, and writing up my own notes; collating, imbricating, advancing by a little and a little. It is a splendid part, the best it has ever been my privilege to play, and I have played many. I am in no hurry; the lamplight falls upon me steadily, my bent head and half a face, my hand inching its way down the pages. Now and then I pause and sit motionless for a moment, a watchman testing the night. I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark. Where can he be hiding, if he is still here? Could he have got back into the house, could he be skulking somewhere, in the attic, or in some unused room, nibbling scraps purloined from the kitchen and watching the day gradually decline towards darkness, biding his time? Is he in the woodpile, perhaps? If he is here it is the girl he is after. He shall not have her, I will see to that.