The house was built on the side of one of those hills behind the palace. A high white wall with an imposing wooden gate set into it was all that I could see at first. I hesitated over the bell, then pressed it firmly. From beyond the wall came a tinkle, and again, faintly, tink, the far little chimes ringing strangely, secretively, amid the hum which came up from the streets below. An old woman with a stick passed by on the road. There were pines about, perfectly motionless, their outlines diffused in the sunshine. I watched the old woman until she had hobbled around the bend. Above, beyond the pines, there was the road again, repeating itself, and another wall, another turning, and presently another crone bravely scaling the heights. She struggled slowly upward, toward yet another, higher repetition, fading, as she went, into the furious blue light. Across the road, in the pines, an animal crouched and looked at me with its teeth bared silently. Behind it, half hidden by the trees, a figure stood. It was Yacinth. He laid his hand on the dog’s head. The animal licked its chops and wagged its tail, then came across the road and sniffed at my ankle. Good doggie. Why is it always the ankle that they consider, why not the knee, a much more tender region, with better tooth-holds? It was an enormous black beast with the head of a wolf. Yacinth looked up the road, and down the road, and at his feet, everywhere but at me.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
With a flick of his head he threw the curls away from his brow, and lifted his sullen eyes to mine at last.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘Do you remember me?’
I smiled winningly. He did not bother to reply. I stopped smiling. As talkative as ever, the lovely child. I looked wistfully at the back of his neck, unprotected but for a gleaming whorl of black hair. A swift rabbit punch, and then … and then he asked,
‘Do you want me to come in?’
He glanced sidelong at my left ear.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to see your fa— to see Julian.’
Never could get the hang of these relationships. He pushed open a small trapdoor in the gate and we stepped through. The dog growled deep in its throat. The wall enclosed the garden on four sides, and in the centre of the garden stood the house, white, massive, its front face traced with a complex of balconies and outside staircases, hung with flowering creepers. There was an archway, wide enough for the passage of a car, cut right through the centre of the ground floor, and through a short tunnel a courtyard could be seen, with a fountain and a piece of sculpture, and figures sitting at a table. Two long cars were parked on the drive, nose to tail, a situation in which I thought the dog might take some interest, but he did not, and we walked on through the tunnel, into the courtyard. Julian sat by the table, the generous melons of his backside swamping a small cane chair, with, before him, one whom for the first few moments I did not recognize. Yacinth made a careless gesture toward me, and disappeared through the french window beyond the fountain. Julian, without rising, took my hand. The dog went to him and wagged its tail against his leg, thump thump thump.
‘Mr White, Benjamin, my friend. How are you?’
‘Hello Julian.’
‘This is Colonel Sesosteris. Benjamin White.’
‘We’ve met,’ I murmured.
Aristotle exuded a profound gloom. He had changed, looked older and sicker. His eyes moved restlessly about the courtyard, seeming to suffer at the hands of everything they saw. He gave me a distant, faintly irritated glance, and looked at his watch. I could not say if he remembered me or not. I did not very much care. Julian offered me a chair, and I sat down between them. The piece of sculpture atop the pedestal of the fountain represented a peculiar-looking hen, or a cock or something, with one claw uplifted and feathers bristling. Julian patted his belly with an open palm and squinted at the sky, yawning delicately behind three fingertips.
‘How are you getting on with that old crook Rabin?’ he asked.
I squirmed to the edge of the chair, and folded my hands in my lap.
‘Fine,’ I murmured. ‘Fine.’
‘Coincidence, meeting like that, eh?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. Aristotle sighed, and looked at his watch again. He scowled at it suspiciously, as though he thought it unlikely that the little hands could be trusted to stagger unaided from one minute to the next. Julian’s glass clicked as he set it down on the marble top of the table. I made an effort.
‘Your house is …’
But my effort was in vain, for already Julian had turned to Aristotle to say,
‘Benjamin is a friend of a friend of yours, Colonel.’
‘Oh yes?’
Aristotle’s voice was weary with indifference. His eyes rested on me for a moment; a flicker of recognition stirred in their lustreless depths, then died again, and he looked away. The waters rose and fell in the fountain, rose and fell. A cricket began to sing somewhere. Julian touched my arm.
‘Many of us in this city live under the protection of the Colonel here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps even yourself, without realizing it.’
I looked at him, but the merry eyes and smile were nothing but themselves. The back of Aristotle’s neck turned slowly crimson. Julian went on blithely,
‘As a visitor, Benjamin, what do you think of the situation here, I mean the political situation?’
I shrugged.
‘I’m not a political animal.’
Aristotle suddenly turned on me and said venomously,
‘Like all the English.’
I reared away from him in fright, stammering,
‘I’m, I’m Irish.’
He looked past my shoulder and sank once again into his pit of gloom.
‘So they tell me,’ he muttered.
The sun drew a length of shadow painfully across the table. It lay quietly between us, faintly shaking, drinking from our glasses. My eyes followed it to the ground, and to the dancing water of the fountain, from whence it came. My eyelids were wet. In the house, a clock chimed thrice, deep black notes that reached far down into the silence and left it quivering. Julian was drawing patterns in the gravel with the blunt toe of his shoe. He wore a nice light linen suit and a cream shirt. There was a tiny purple scratch on his jaw, where he had cut himself with his razor. The dog lifted its head, looked at something in the blank air which only it could see, then set its chin down on its paw again. We had none of us anything left to say. I felt as though the heat were trying to suck me into the sky. My brain was banging, and my head was like a lump of scorched wool. Something stirred behind the dark glass of the french windows. All this had happened before, somewhere, on another plane. I thought of that four-letter word of which Heraclitus was so fond. Things fluctuate, merge, nothing remains still. A late September day, say, and you pause in a deserted corner of a strange town. There is a white sunlit wall, and a patch of dark shadow. Dandelions nod among sparse grass. All is silent, but for an intimation of music somewhere, just beyond hearing. The leaning lid of a dustbin beckons you around the corner. You step forward, and come suddenly, breathtakingly, upon the river, far below, calm and blue, with a small white cloud swimming in it. You think that this has all been arranged, that some hand has set up the props, that wall, those flowers, all of them exact and perfect and inimitable, so that you may catch a strange memory of something extraordinary and beautiful. It never reaches you, but you walk on, down to the river, smiling, enriched by the mere knowledge that such a memory exists and may some day be caught. You have touched the mystery of things. In time that moment in that strange town becomes itself a memory, and merges with the one which eluded you. Life goes on. Spring sunshine wrings your heart, spring rain. Love and hate eventually become one. I am talking about the past, about remembrance. You find no answers, only questions. It is enough, almost enough. That day I thought about the island, and now I think about thinking about the island, and tomorrow, tomorrow I shall think about thinking about thinking about the island, and all will be one, however I try, and there will be no separate thoughts, but only one thought, one memory, and I shall still know nothing. What am I talking about, what are these ravings? About the past, of course, and about Mnemosyne, that lying whore. And I am talking about torment.