It was sorrow that drove us to the sun-dazed south. Sorrow encourages displacement, urges flight, the unresting quest for new horizons. After the child’s death we made ourselves into moving targets, Gloria and I, in order to dodge, to try to dodge, the fiery darts the god of grief shoots from his burning bow. For loss and love have more in common than might seem, at least so far as feeling goes. I suppose it was inevitable we would hurry back to the scenes of our first dallyings, as if to annul the years, as if to wind time backwards and make what had happened not happen. Gloria took our tragedy harder than I did, and that also was inevitable: it was a part of her, after all, flesh of her flesh, that had died. My role had been not much more than to release, three trimesters previously, the tiny mad wriggler whose one intent had been to kick his way free of me and go tadpoling towards his disdainful yet in the end all too receptive target. Another piercing, among piercings. How neatly it all seems to hang together, this life, these lives.
I wouldn’t have thought the child had been with us long enough to make her presence, or her absence, rather, so strongly felt. She was so young, she went so soon. Her death had a deadening effect in general on our lives, Gloria’s and mine; something of us died along with her. Hardly surprising, I know, and hardly exclusive to us; children die all the time, taking a part of their parents’ selves with them. We — and in this instance I think I can speak for Gloria as well as for myself — we had the impression of standing outside our own front door without a key and knocking and knocking and hearing nothing from within, not even an echo, as if the whole house had been filled to the ceilings with sand, with clay, with ashes. There were subtler effects, too, as when for instance I struck a fingernail against even the lightest and most potentially musical of objects, the rim of a wine glass, say, or the lid of that little Louis Quatorze rosewood box I stole from the desk of an art dealer in the rue Bonaparte years ago, and there would come back to me no ringing resonance. Everything seemed hollow, hollow and weightless, like those brittle casings of themselves that dead wasps leave on window-sills at the dusty end of summer. Grief was flat, in other words, a flat dull empty ache. I suppose that’s why when children die in sultry desert zones, where feelings are more readily freed, the parents, along with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins at multiple removes, all wind black rags around their heads and rend the air with ululating shrieks and throaty warblings, determined their loss shall have its terrible and noisy due. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of rending and shrieking myself; better that than the restrained snivels and snuffles that we felt were all that the rules of decorum would allow us, in public, at least. There must be, it seemed to us, a limit to the mourning we could do for a life not lived. That, however, was the point. What we were sorrowing for was all that would not be, and that kind of vacuum, believe me, will suck in as many tears as you have to shed.
Grief, like pain, is only real when one is experiencing it. Up to then I hardly knew what it was to grieve. My mother had barely entered on her middle years when she fell ill and simply drifted away, her death seeming hardly more than an intensification, a final perfecting, of the general distractedness in which she had passed her lamentably brief life. My father, too, went quietly, after that moment of violent protest on his last visit to the shop, when he kicked over the print stand. He appeared less concerned for his own suffering than for the distress and disruption he was causing in the lives of those around him. In his final moments on his deathbed he squeezed my hand and tried to smile reassuringly, as if it were not he but I who was launching out into uncharted distances with no prospect of return.
Gloria and I had a fight one day not so long ago. It was strange, for we rarely even argue. Our disagreement, let’s call it that, was over a potted ornamental tree she keeps by the window in the kitchen. I’m not sure what variety of tree it is. Myrtle, perhaps? Let’s say myrtle. I didn’t realise how fond she was of it, or how fiercely she would cling to it, until, seemingly for no reason, it began to decline. The leaves turned grey and drooped despondently, and wouldn’t revive, no matter how lovingly she watered the soil or fed the roots with nutrients. At last she discovered what the matter was. The tree had been invaded by parasites, minuscule spider-like creepy-crawlies that flourished on the undersides of the leaves and were gradually sucking the life out of them. I was fascinated by this teeming, relentlessly devouring horde, and even bought a powerful magnifying-glass the better to study the little beasts, so industrious, so dedicated, so disregardful of everything around them, including me. Particularly impressive was the intricate filigree of webbing, strung in the angles of the leaf-stems, in which the young, no bigger than specks of dust, were suspended. Gloria, however, white-lipped and with eyes narrowed, went immediately and mercilessly about the business of eradication, dousing the tree with a powerful insecticide spray and afterwards taking it into the back yard and throwing pitcherfuls of soapy water over it to wash away any possible survivors. I, unwisely, protested. Had it not occurred to her, I asked, that she might have her priorities in the wrong order? True, the tree was alive, but the mites were more so. Why should they not be allowed to go on living, for as long as the tree could sustain them? Was the pretty spectacle the tree provided for us more important than the myriad lives she was destroying in order to protect and preserve it? For a long minute she looked at me in silence from under lowered brows, then flung the spray bottle at me — she missed — and stalked out of the room. A little while later I found her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, her head down and her hands plunged in her hair, just like my mother, weeping. I thought to apologise, I wasn’t exactly sure for what, but instead went away quietly and left her there to her tears. What did it mean? I don’t know, though it must have meant something — many of the real things I meet with in waking life are to me as baffling as the fantastical apparitions I encounter in dreams. I tried to talk to her about it, when her temper had cooled, but she cut me off with a sidewise slice of her hand and rose from where she had been crouching and walked away. I have the notion she was thinking of our lost Olivia. The tree recovered, but refuses to flourish.
Speaking of death — and I hardly seem to speak of anything else, these days, even when the subject is supposedly the living — I want to tell of a fatal accident that I witnessed as a young man, more than witnessed, and that haunts me still. It happened in Paris. I was there as a student, working in the atelier of a third-rate academician who had grudgingly taken me on for the summer through the good offices of an older Francophile painter whom my mother somehow knew, and whom she had charmed into giving me a letter of introduction to Maître Mouton. I lodged in a cheap hotel on the rue Molière, in a maid’s room on the fifth floor, directly under the roof. It was stiflingly hot, and the ceiling was so low that I couldn’t stand fully upright. Also the flights of stairs, that were of a normal width lower down, grew steadily narrower the higher they went, and coming home at night, when the minuterie on the second landing had clicked off, I would have to negotiate the top flight in darkness and on hands and knees, feeling as if I were scrambling up the inside of a chimney. I was penniless, hungry, and mostly miserable, passing my days in that state, one that is peculiar to the young, I believe, of torpid boredom mingled with thrashing desperation. One overcast, airless afternoon along the quays I was waiting at a corner for the traffic lights to change. A young Frenchman of about my own age was standing beside me, in a splendidly crumpled white linen suit. I remember how that suit glowed, giving off a sort of aura, despite or perhaps because of the day’s humid gloom, and, envious, in my imagination I made him into the spoiled son of a rich plantation owner sent home to pretend to finish his studies at some impossibly exclusive grande école. His head was turned back and he was speaking over his shoulder, volubly and gaily, to someone close behind him, a girl, I imagine, though I don’t remember her. The traffic clanked and rattled past in the way that it does on those broad thoroughfares, seeming to be not a series of individual vehicles but one immense ramshackle engine, welded together from innumerable ill-fitting components, a clamorous, smoking and endlessly extended juggernaut. The young man in white, laughing now, was turning to face forwards again, and somehow lost his footing — whenever, passing into sleep, I seem to misstep and start awake, it’s him I see at once, in his impossibly shining garb, there on the quai des Grands Augustins, opposite the Pont Neuf — and stumbled off the pavement just as an olive-green army lorry was approaching, close in to the gutter and travelling at breakneck — the apt word — speed. It was high and square with a rapidly shuddering tarpaulin stretched over the back of it. A big mirror stuck far out at the driver’s side, riveted in place on two or three steel struts. It was this mirror that struck the young man full in the face as he teetered on the side of the footpath, trying to regain his balance. I used to wonder if there had been time for him, in the last instant, to catch a glimpse of himself, startled and incredulous, as self and reflection met and annihilated each other in the glass, until I realised that, of course, the mirror would have been turned the other way, and that it was the metal back of it that had hit him. And did I really see a perfect corona of blood exploding around his head at the moment of impact? I’m doubtful, since it’s the kind of thing the imagination, ever eager for a gory detail, likes to imagine; also it’s suspiciously an echo of that halo of light I had noted surrounding his suit. As he toppled backwards, it was into my instinctively offered arms that he collapsed. I recall the damp warmth of his armpits and the tap-dancer’s brief, rapid tattoo that his heels played on the pavement. Slight and slender though he was I hadn’t the strength to support him — he was already a dead weight — and when he slipped out of my arms and flopped to the ground his smashed-up head fell back between my splayed feet and struck the pavement with a soggy thud. One leg of his trousers, the right one, had been neatly severed above the knee, don’t ask me how, and the bottom part of it was concertinaed around his ankle. The leg that was thus exposed was tanned, smooth and hairless; he wore, I saw, no socks, in the casual French way that I emulated, if Polly’s memory of me the first time I called into Marcus’s workshop can be trusted. The unfortunate fellow’s face — ah, that face. You’ll have seen it in more than one of my early things, particularly that awful Bacchae triptych — how the mere thought of my past work taunts and shames me! — where it looms low above the corpse-strewn plain, a featureless disc, ghastly and glaring, the bluish-red of a freshly flayed side of beef and dripping gumdrops of glistening pink gore. I went blue in the face myself from having to assure purblind commentators over and over that this smeared and ruddied blob wasn’t a case of deliberate distortion in the manner of Pontormo, say, or Bosch the devil-dreamer — and many did say it — but on the contrary was a careful and accurate rendering of a real sight I had seen, with my own eyes, and felt called on to commemorate, repeatedly, in paint.