All evening, Sal berates W. and I. — ‘Why don’t you write your own philosophy?’—‘She’s right!’, says W. ‘Why don’t we? You explain’. And then, to Sal, ‘Open your eyes! Isn’t it obvious! Look at us! Look at him!’
Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. His book was better before he started working on it, she tells me. It’s true, W. admits, he cut so much of it that parts make no sense at all. — ‘Still it’s better than your book, isn’t it? You should see his book’, he says to Sal, ‘my God!’
The damp’s worse than he can imagine, I tell W. on the phone. Mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I brush it and it flakes down, salt from the wall. Salt leached from the walclass="underline" isn’t it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, I tell W., the corner from where the leak ran.
But I can still hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards.
‘Keep it warm’, said an expert on the kitchen damp. And the damp in the bedroom? — ‘Keep that warm, too.’ So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room to the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.
In the living room, the washing machine on its side as though it were stranded on a beach, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor tomorrow. — ‘Keep it mouldy. Then he’ll be able to see’.
I have no idea how to talk to people, W. says. I lack even a basic sense of the reciprocity of conversation. W.’s going to write a book of etiquette for me, he says. The art of conversation, that’s what I’ll have to learn, he says. Give and take. And table manners. — ‘You never learned them, did you?’ And keeping myself clean. — ‘Look at you! You’re filthy! When did you last wash your trousers?’ And wiping off that morose expression on my face. — ‘Why should anyone want to talk to you?’
Conversation! All real conversation is messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said — quite the contrary, but the fact that it is said at all, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that? — ‘You’re conversationally lazy’, W. says. ‘You can’t be bothered, it’s obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights’.
For his part, W. is never happier than when he is pressing a conversation towards the messianic. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life-changing. That’s what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I’d have no sense of that.
Every conversation must be driven through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, that’s W.’s principle; the shared sense that it’s all at an end, it’s all finished. He loves nothing better than conversations of this kind, W. says, when everything’s at stake, when everything that could be said is said.
That’s when messianism begins, W. says. You have to wear out speech, to run it down. And then? And then, W. says, inanity begins, reckless inanity. The whole night opens up. You have to drink a great deal to get there. It’s an art. The Poles have it, W. says. They understand what it is to drink through the whole night. And that’s what the Hungarians are doing in the bars in Béla Tarr films, W. says. Steadily, patiently, they’re drinking their way through the night.
All drunks have something of the Messiah about them, W. says. They speak a lot, for one thing. They feel they’re on the verge of something, some great truth. He does when he drinks, W. says. Once he starts drinking, says W., he can never stop, it’s quite impossible.
It’s because of the faith it gives him, says W. It’s because of what drinking reveals: the whole night, the apocalypse, but also the patience to get through the apocalypse, to dream of the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might get better again.
The whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.
The smell is overwhelming. I feel faint, I tell W. on the phone. The other day I went outside to look at the kitchen wall. Naked brick, exposed. I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out the stuff between the bricks. But it was the brick itself that started to come off, I tell W. The brick itself, rotting as I touched it. It’s wet and runny, I tell him. It comes off on your nails as you scrape it.
Inside, I tell him, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then — in another hour, or two more — pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same clammy brow it was before the drying.
But still I watch, I tell W. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is the wall drying out? Has it begun to dry out? I ask myself like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time — today I thought I’d lose my voice, I tell W. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I approach the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.
W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. — ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill’. I ask him whether his houseguest has gone. She has; and Sal’s still away, so his house is becoming like Howard Hughes’, he says. With bottles of urine everywhere? He hasn’t cut his hair and nails, says W. He’s like a wild man.
Has he had any thoughts from his illness? — ‘None’. Has his new book advanced any further? — ‘No’. Has he written our joint abstract? — ‘No again’. And what of my news? he asks me. I tell him of my plans, my new schemes. — ‘Every year a new stupidity! It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?’, says W. ‘What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you?’
I’m at my most idealistic at the start of the year, W. notes, whereas he’s at his most gloomy. ‘Idiocy protects you’, he says. He reminds me of my great follies in the past. — ‘Do you remember your Hindu period? Your plans to learn Sanskrit and become a scholar of Hinduism?’ And then there were my plans to learn music theory and become a scholar of music. We both marvel at them. ‘What’s it to be this year?’, says W., ‘go on, I need a laugh’.
The new year! It’s always the same! New ideas! New follies! But W. is ill, and has no plans. Bottles of urine everywhere, hair and nails uncut, scrabbling through piles of unfinished writing, he staggers through the day.