The awful torrent of her ranting came back to torture him in the cell. She had him cornered there. The most articulate being he had ever known, a kind of curse in her. You dragged me back you made me puke my death out of my lungs you revived me after the madhouse of psychopath doctors you plan you planned to save me in the missionary position not only on my back good taste married your babies because I gave mine away like the bitch who eats the puppy she’s whelped develop ‘careers’ you invent for me because that’s what a woman you’ve saved should have you took away from me my death for that for what you decide I live for said I must stop punishing myself but here’s news for you if I stay with you it’s because I choose I choose the worst punishment I can find for myself I revel in it do you know that
It does not end there. It flows from all the nights they talked until three in the morning, high on her words, they hardly needed anything else. And all the time while she enraged and flayed him — he heard again what he had thrown at her in place of a blow of his hand against her mouth, one violence resisted only for another: I should have let you die. I wish I had let you die — he had been aware in the most intense sorrow of lines she had written for him in one of her poems ‘I’m a candle flame that sways/in currents of air you can’t see./You need to be the one/who steadies me to burn.’ He had not done this for her; he was not the one.
I should have let you die.
Does this mean he wanted to kill her. Look back on his Eurydice he had brought from the Shades, so that she could follow him no more. Rid of her and loving her so much; choosing her disastrously as she said she chose him.
That would have been premeditated. How many times had he stayed the hand that was to go out against her mouth. She was right when she taunted him about his middle-class background; what’s it all about but docility, she laughed. Your parents — a pair of self-righteous prigs. Your father took you to church, he’s a confessing Christian but real Christians are rebels they’ve gone to prison for what they see is wrong instead of taking their piddling little sins to the priest behind the curtain pretending to stand in for God up in heaven. Your mama’s a good liberal, which means she deplored, oh yes, what went on in this country in the old days and let other people risk themselves to change it.
And you (had he said it to her) you think you are an anarchist, and anarchy has no form, it’s chaos you are, and it’s what I’ve left my drawing board for.
All day in the cottage waiting for her to come back and she did not. Other times when there’d been an affair, she disappearing for a few days somewhere, she had reappeared with the little carryall that was provision enough for a weekend with a lover, she had been unapologetic (she was a free being) but calm, obviously pleased to see him. Once she even brought him a souvenir she had collected, a fossil fragment. She could get away with such improbable gestures. There had followed a night of talk. He desired her strongly all through it but did not want to be so soon where another man had been. After a day or two they made love again, and for her it was as if nothing had intervened. That’s all there is to it.
At last, in the late afternoon he got up from their bed where he had lain all day and went over to the house. But first, the strange ordinary movements gone through, he opened a can of pet food, placed it in a bowl outside the door; the dog prancing and leaping about him in anticipation, the simple joy of appetite, existence. He went to the house. He didn’t want to speak to anyone but he heard himself in silent monologue and this time the words were not to be in the middle of the night and not with her. He did not know what he was saying, going to say. He was aggrieved right to the back of his throat, stopped up there. If he had any purpose at all it was to know what whoever was listening to his silence would say. It was Jespersen. Jespersen was lying on the same sofa.
So he came upon him again.
The man lifted his head and smiled, opening his eyes wide under cocked brows and pulling down the comers of his mouth, his familiar attractive representation of culpability in the style of an accomplished mime. What he said was: Oh dear. I’m sorry, Bra. The form of address picked up from the black frequenters of the communal house came in handy to assert between the two of them overall brotherhood which would absorb any transgressions.
It was exactly the manner, the words, with which the man had announced the end of the months they had lived as lovers.
Bewilderment exploded; he had not had in mind anything but her, she was what was filling him right up to the source of speech, she was what he was carrying before him in accusation, the corpse of his emotions. With the enactment of those words, that facial gesture there came the stun of that previous blow, he felt again, saw lying there relaxed in one of those remembered Japanese cotton gowns and flexing the toes of a muscular foot in favoured sandals, the tom bereavement of that rejection which he had long thought of as a forgotten phase in the evolvement that living is, as the passions and frustrations of adolescence dwindle to their minor proportions. It was Jespersen who was lost; lost in the body of the girl. Jespersen too, was the corpse of life. This man had himself destroyed it all, everything, the meaning of himself and the meaning of the girl, in the contortions, the hideous fit of their coupling.
Talk. Jespersen with his sing-song Norwegian English talked reason that was obvious. We are not children. We don’t own each other. We want to live freely don’t we. We shouldn’t stifle impulses that bring people together, whether it’s going to be sex or taking a long walk, never mind, eh. The walk is over, the sex is over, it was a nice time, that’s it, isn’t it. Just unfortunate we were a bit too impulsive. I mean, she’s a girl who usually arranges things more privately, doesn’t she. All of us know it … you know it, my Bra. It hasn’t changed things with you and her before. You see, you should never follow anyone around, never, that’s a mistake, that’s for the people who make a prison out of what they feel and lock someone up inside. If it hadn’t turned out the way you made it turn out, she’s a great girl you’ve got, she would never have given it another thought and me too, for me no claims just part of the good evening we had, the drinks, the laughs she and I had cleaning up together. Why don’t you help yourself to a drink.
Talk.
All through the talk there was another babble going on inside him as if the tuning knob of a transistor were racing from frequency to frequency, snatches and blarings of the past, of the night, other nights, despair, self-hatred, inexpressible tenderness, raw disgust, insupportable rage for which there was no means of order. The communications of the brain were blown. He could not know what it was he thought, felt under the talk, talk, talk. It was the grand apocalypse of all the talk through all the nights until three in the morning. It was that he must have put an end to when he picked up the house gun left lying in his peripheral vision and shot their lover, his and hers, in the head.
That’s all there is to it.
Of course he would never do such a thing. So that is why there is nothing to explain to those poor two when they come to sit with him in the visitors’ room. What there was, is, in himself he did not know about, they certainly did not, cannot know. The clever lawyer must make up an explanation. We are now in your hands, Bra. It was the lawyer who told him the post-mortem confirmed that Carl, Carl Jespersen, was dead of a gunshot in the head. That was how he came to believe it. He had not seen Carl bleed. He had not waited to see what picking up the house gun had done. He had fled as he fled into the garden when he overturned and broke a lamp in his mother’s bedroom as a child. If the death sentence is to be carried out perhaps the brain should go to research; maybe there is an explanation to be found there that might be useful. To society. All he can do for the two in the visitors’ room is hope that society won’t subject them to much publicity when the trial begins. He has status as a big-business target for the journalists in one sector, she has status as a target in the sector of good works for humanity; people will like to see what press photographers can show of people of status whose son has done what he never could do. But perhaps it will go unnoticed, what is an indoor killing (homeground in the suburbs), lovers’ obscure quarrel, gays’ domestic jealousy, something of that kind, in comparison with the spectacular public violence where you can film or photograph people shot dead on the streets in crossfire of the new hit-squads, hired by taxi drivers and drug dealers who have learnt their tactics from the state hit-squads of the old regime with its range of methods of ‘permanently removing’ political opponents, from blowing them up with car and parcel bombs to knifing their bodies again and again to make bloodily sure bullets have done their work.