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Enough
of these vagaries. I am going to explain myself, to myself, and to you,
my dear, for if you can talk to me then surely you can hear me, too. Calmly,
quietly, eschewing my accustomed gaudiness of tone and gesture, I shall
speak only of what I know, of what I can vouch for. At once the polyp
doubt rears its blunt and ugly head: what do I know? for what can I vouch?
There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness,
nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions . . . So the crazed philosopher
declares, swinging his mighty hammer. Yet the notion haunts me that I
am being given one last chance to redeem something of myself. I am not
speaking of the soul, I am not that far gone in my dotage. But there may
be some small, precious thing that I can buy back, as once I bought back
Mama Vander's silver pill-box from the pawnbroker's. It occurs to me to
wonder if that might have been your real purpose, not to expose me and
make a name for yourself at all, but rather to offer me the possibility
of redemption. If so, you have already had an effect: redemption is not
a word that up to now has figured prominently in my vocabulary. But then
your motives were never clear to me, no more, I suspect, than they were
to you. Perhaps you did indeed betray me, and someday soon a publication
will pop up from the presses in an obscure corner of academe with a posthumous
essay in it, by you, on me, and I shall be disgraced, laughed at, hooted
out of the lecture hall. Well, no matter.
The name, my name, is Axel Vander, on that much I insist. That much, if
no more. Her letter was delivered to me one morning a world ago in the
pleasant town of Arcady by a helmed and goggled Hermes on a bike. The
message it carried was one I had been waiting for and dreading all my
life, what I think of as my life, my real life. Now it had come at last,
and the first thing I felt was embarrassment. It was as if I had been
informed that a long-dead sibling, hardly remembered and never loved,
was not dead after all, but tritely and vigorously alive, residing in
a neighbouring suburb and about to pay an impossible visit. What could
I find to say, at such a distance of time, to this discarded version of
myself? I drank whisky all day, euphoric with terror and panic, and woke
up at dead of night to find myself slumped in the old swivel chair down
in my study with a burnt-out cigarette stub still in my fingers. From
outside in the soft California darkness I could smell the smells that
were exotic to me even yet, after so many years: eucalyptus, dust still
warm from the day's sun, the tang of charcoal drifting down from the blond
hills where fires had been smouldering sullenly in the grass for months.
I let the letter fall to the floor and laughed the inane laugh of the
inebriated. A car sizzled past on Cedar Street, going very slowly, as
if its driver were counting the house numbers, and I thought of a mask
with narrowed eyes behind it scanning the doors and the blinded windows.
I lifted a hand and cocked my thumb and pointed a finger into the darkness
where the door was. I laughed again, more phlegmily this time, and turned
my hand around and stuck the pointing finger into my mouth and let the
thumb fall like a hammer. I would have put a bullet in myself if . . .
if what?
Pah.
I tried to rise but could not, and fell back with a clatter, the chair
squealing in agony under me, my dead leg rolling like a log. I hate this
leg, ineluctable companion of my failing years, hate it even more than
the sightless eye that glares at me unmoving from the morning mirror,
clouded and colourless as I imagine the eye of a dead albatross. That
is what I am, a dead weight hung about my own neck. It will not be so
for long more. Lately I have begun to feel that I am falling off myself,
that my suety old flesh is melting off my skeleton and soon will all be
gone. I shall not mind; I shall be glad; I shall rise up then, bared of
inessentials, all gleaming bone and sinew smooth as candle wax, new, unknown,
my real self at last. There is a moment that comes in drunkenness, or
on the far side of it, when, as is said to happen sometimes to the afflicted
in the throes of a heart attack, I seem to separate from my body and float
upward, and hang aloft, looking down on the spectacle of myself with disinterested
attention. It had happened now. I saw myself sprawled there, and then
shift again with a violent heave, like a splayed horse trying to get to
its feet, flailing about helplessly, muttering. I reached for the bottle
on the desk and drank greedily from the neck, making suckling noises.
My mouth was raw from the long day's drinking. When I let my arm sweep
down beside the chair the bottle slipped from my fingers and rolled with
a joggling hesitancy on the polished wooden floor, pouring its heart out
in lavish, glottal gulps. Let it spill. In truth, I dislike the smoke-and-ashes
taste of bourbon, but early on I had fixed on it to be my drink, as part
of my strategy of difference, another way of being on guard, as an actor
puts a pebble in his shoe to remind him that the character he is playing
has a limp. This was in the days when I was making myself over. So difficult
it was, to judge just so, to forge the fine discriminations, to maintain
a balance-no one could know how difficult. If it had been a work of art
I was fashioning they would have applauded my mastery. Perhaps that was
my mistake, to do it all in secret, instead of openly, with a flourish.
They would have been entertained; they would have forgiven me; Harlequin
is always forgiven, always survives.
I heard paper crackle under one of the castors of the chair, like a snicker
of admonitory laughter. It was that letter. See: I lean, I grunt, I pluck
it up and flatten it with a fist on the arm of the chair and read it yet
again in the cone of gold-dusted light that bathes me in its undeserved
benevolence, my old wild leaning head, my sloping shoulder, my rope-veined
claw. The typewritten lines flicker in time to a pulse beating in my temple,
and my good eye waters with the effort of keeping the words steady and
in line. She was in Antwerp-Antwerp, dear God! Her studied, scholarly
tone amused me. Narrowly, striving to concentrate, I speculated as to
how much she might know. I had thought I had shaken off the pelt of my
far past yet here was evidence that it would not be entirely sloughed,
but was dragging along behind me, still attached by a thread or two of
dried slime.
It came to me then, with drunken clarity, what I would do. Odd, how this
random world insinuates its sly suggestions. I scrabbled among the papers
on the desk and found the embossed card that had been lying there for
a week and read with a rictus of contempt its curlicued and pompous blandishments.
Chiarissimo Professore! Il Direttore del Convegno considera un altissimo
onore e un immenso piacere invitarla ufficialmente a Torino . . . I had
intended to decline, of course, with a curt and scornful note, but now
I saw that I must go, and make her come to me there. Where better to confront
my ruin, if that was what it was to be?
When I had read the letter first my first thought had been to disappear,
simply to stand up and walk out of my life, as I did once before, with
remarkable, with outrageous, success. It would be less easy this time;
then, I was no one, now there are people-a select band, but a band-across
however many continents there are who know the name of Axel Vander; all
the same, it could be done. I had my escape routes mapped out, my secret
bank accounts primed, my sanctuaries sealed and waiting . . . I am exaggerating,
of course. But for a minute or two I did entertain the thought of fleeing,
and was entertained by it. It made me feel daring, dangerous; it made
me feel young. I wondered if this wielder of the poison pen, whoever she
might be, had known the effect her letter would have on me: was it possible
she was allowing me time to cut and run? But where would I go to, really?
Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I
could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was
the known world. No, I would not do it, I would not give her the satisfaction
of hearing the clump and stumble of my clay feet as I fled. Better far
to confront her, laugh in the face of her accusations-ha! I would lie
to her, of course; mendacity is second, no, is first nature to me. All
my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for
placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's
almost-anagram. And now my earliest exercises in the art, my prentice
falsehoods, had come back to undo me.
Excerpted from Shroud by John Banville Copyright�
2003 by John Banville. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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