Forests of the Night Read online

  She had well and truly hooked me, of course. If I had met her in Athens, some sun-baked afternoon, I would have felt decidedly out of my depth, taken her for cocktails, and foundered before we had even reached the dinner hour. But here, in this pulsing green bubble of light and leaves straight out of one’s most irrational visions of the glades of Arcadia, conversation, however erratic, communication, however eccentric, was happening. The most inexplicable thing of all was that the mask had ceased almost immediately to bother me. I cannot, as I look back, properly account for this, for to spend a morning, a noon, an afternoon, allowing yourself to become fundamentally engaged by a woman whose face you have not seen, whose face you are actively being prevented from seeing, seems now incongruous to the point of perversity. But there it is. We discussed Ibsen, Dickens, Euripides, and Jung. I remembered trawling anecdotes of a grandfather, mentioned my sister’s jewellery store in St Louis, listened to an astonishing description of wild birds flying in across a desert from a sea. I assisted her over rocky turf, flirted with her, felt excited by and familiar with her, all this with her masked face before me. As if the mask, rather than being a part of her, meant no more than the frock she had elected to wear or the narrow-heeled vanilla shoes she had chosen to put on. As if I knew her face totally and no need to be shown it, the face of her movements and her ridiculous voice.

  But in fact, I could not even make out her eyes, only the shine in them when they caught the light, flecks of luminescence but not colour, for the eyeholes of the mask were long-lidded and rather small. I must have noticed, too, that there was no aperture in the lips, and this may have informed me that the mask must be removed for purposes of eating or drinking. I really do not know. I can neither excuse nor quite understand myself, seen in the distance there with her on her island. Hartley tells us that the past is another country. Perhaps we also were other people — strangers — yesterday. But when I think of this, I remember, too, the sense of drawing I had had, of being magnetised to that shore, those trees, the nostalgia for a place I had never been to. For she, it may be true to say, was a figment of that nostalgia, as if I had known her and come back to her. Some enchantment, then. Not Medusa’s Island, but Circe’s.

  The afternoon, even through the dapple L’Après-midi d’un Faune effect of the leaves, was a viridian furnace when we regained the house. I sat in one of the wicker chairs on the terrace and woke with a start of embarrassment to hear her laughing at me.

  ‘You are tired and hungry. I must go into the house for a while. I will send Kleia to you with some wine and food.’

  It made a bleary sense, and when I woke again it was to find an old fat woman in the ubiquitous Grecian island black — demonstrably Kleia — setting down a tray of pale red wine, amber cheese, and dark bread.

  ‘Where is — ’ I realised I did not know the enchantress’s name.

  In any event, the woman only shook her head, saying brusquely in Greek: ‘No English. No English.’

  And when I attempted to ask again in Greek where my hostess had gone, Kleia waddled away, leaving me unanswered. So I ate the food, which was passable, and drank the wine, which was very good, imagining her faun-buying father putting down an enormous patrician cellar, then fell asleep again, sprawled in the chair.

  When I awoke, the sun was setting and the clearing was swimming in red light and rust violet shadows. The columns burned as if they were internally on fire, holding the core of the sunset, it appeared, some while after the sky had cooled and the stars became visible, a trick of architectural positioning that won my awe and envy. I was making a mental note to ask her who had been responsible for the columns, and jumped when she spoke to me, softly and hoarsely, almost seductively, from just behind my chair — thereby promptly making me forget to ask any such thing.

  ‘Come into the house now. We will dine soon.’

  I got up, saying something lame about imposing on her, though we were far beyond that stage.

  ‘Always,’ she said to me, ‘you apologise. There is no imposition. You will be gone tomorrow.’

  How do you know? I nearly inquired, but prevented myself. What guarantee? Even if the magic food did not change me into a swine, perhaps my poisoned dead body would be carried from the feast and cast into the sea, gone, well and truly, to Poseidon’s fishes. You see, I did not trust her, even though I was somewhat in love with her. The element of her danger — for she was dangerous in some obscure way — may well have contributed to her attraction.

  We went into the house, which in itself alerted me. I had forgotten the great curiosity I had had to look inside it. There was a shadowy, unlit entrance hall, a sort of Roman atrium of a thing. Then we passed, she leading, into a small salon that took my breath away. It was lined all over — floor, ceiling, walls — with the sea-green marble the columns were made of. Whether in good taste or bad I am not qualified to say, but the effect, instantaneous and utter, was of being beneath the sea. Smoky oil-lamps of a very beautiful Art Nouveau design hung from the profundity of the green ceiling, lighting the dreamlike swirls and oceanic variations of the marble so they seemed to breathe, definitely to move, like nothing else but waves. Shoes on that floor would have squeaked or clattered unbearably, but I was barefoot and so now was she.

  A mahogany table with a modest placing for eight stood centrally. Only one place was laid.

  I looked at it and she said, ‘I do not dine, but that will not prevent you.’

  An order. I considered vampires idly, but mainly I was subject to an infantile annoyance. Without quite realising it, I had looked for the subtraction of the mask when she ate and now this made me very conscious of the mask for the first time since I had originally seen it.

  We seated ourselves, she two places away from me. And I began to feel nervous. To eat this meal while she watched me did not appeal. And now the idea of the mask, unconsidered all morning, all afternoon, stole over me like an incoming tide.

  Inevitably, I had not dressed for dinner, having no means, but she had changed her clothes and was now wearing a high-collared long grey gown, her mother’s again, no doubt. It had the fragile look of age, but was very feminine and appealing for all that. Above it, the mask now reared, stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  The mask. What on earth was I going to do, leered at by that myopic, soulless face which had suddenly assumed such disastrous importance?

  Kleia waddled in with the dishes. I cannot recall the meal, save that it was spicy and mostly vegetable. The wine came too, and I drank it. And as I drank the wine, I began to consider seriously, for the first time (which seems very curious indeed to me now), the reason for the mask. What did it hide? A scar, a birthmark? I drank her wine and I saw myself snatch off the mask, take in the disfigurement, unquelled, and behold the painful gratitude in her eyes as she watched me. I would inform her of the genius of surgeons. She would repeat she had no money. I would promise to pay for the operation.

  Suddenly she startled me by saying: ‘Do you believe that we have lived before?’

  I looked in my glass, that fount of wisdom and possibility, and said, ‘It seems as sensible a proposition as any of the others I’ve ever heard.’

  I fancied she smiled to herself and do not know why I thought that; I know now I was wrong.

  Her accent had thickened and distorted further when she said, ‘I rather hope that I have lived before. I could wish to think I may live again.’

  ‘To compensate for this life?’ I said brutishly. I had not needed to be so obvious when already I had been given the implication on a salver.

  ‘Yes. To compensate for this.’

  I downed all the wisdom and possibility left in my glass, swallowed an extra couple of times, and said, ‘Are you going to tell me why you wear a mask?’

  As soon as I had said it, I grasped that I was drunk. Nor was it a pleasant drunkenness. I did not like the demanding tone I had taken with her, but I was angry at having allowed the game to go on for so long. I had no knowledge of the
rules, or pretended I had not. And I could not stop myself. When she did not reply, I added a note of ghastly banter, ‘Or shall I guess?’

  She was still, seeming very composed. Had this scene been enacted before? Finally she said, ‘I would suppose you do guess it is to conceal something that I wear it.’

  ‘Something you imagine worth concealing, which, perhaps, isn’t.’

  That was the stilted fanfare of bravado. I had braced myself, flushed with such stupid confidence.

  ‘Why not,’ I said, and I grow cold when I remember how I spoke to her, ‘take the damn thing off. Take off the mask and drink a glass of wine with me.’

  A pause. Then, ‘No,’ she said.

  Her voice was level and calm. There was neither eagerness nor fear in it.

  ‘Go on,’ I said, the drunk not getting his way, aware (oh, God) he could get it by the power of his intention alone, ‘please. You’re an astounding woman. You’re like this island. A fascinating mystery. But I’ve seen the island. Let me see you.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I started to feel, even through the wine, that I had made an indecent suggestion to her, and this, along with the awful clichés I was bringing out, increased my anger and my discomfort.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said, ‘do you know what they call you on Daphaeu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is absurd. You’re frightened — ’

  ‘No. I am not afraid.’

  ‘Afraid. Afraid to let me see. But maybe I can help you.’

  ‘No. You cannot help me.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  She turned in her chair, and all the way to face me with the mask. Behind her, everywhere about her, the green marble dazzled.

  ‘If you know,’ she said, ‘what I am called on Daphaeu, are you not uneasy as to what you may see?’

  ‘Jesus. Mythology and superstition and ignorance. I assure you, I won’t turn to stone.’

  ‘It is I,’ she said quietly, ‘who have done that.’

  Something about the phrase, the way in which she said it, chilled me. I put down my glass, and in that instant, her hands went to the sides of the mask and her fingers worked at some complicated strap arrangement which her hair had covered.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘good. I’m glad — ’

  But I faltered over it. The cold night sea seemed to fill my veins where the warm red wine had been. I had been heroic and sure and bold, the stuff of celluloid. But now that I had my way, with hardly any preliminary, what would I see? And then she drew the plastic away and I saw.

  I sat there, and then I stood up. The reflex was violent, and the chair scraped over the marble with an unbearable noise. There are occasions, though rare, when the human mind grows blank of all thought, I had no thought as I looked at her. Even now, I can evoke those long, long, empty seconds, that lapse of time. I recollect only the briefest confusion, when I believed she still played some kind of hideous game, that what I witnessed was a product of her decision and her will, a gesture —

  After all, Pitos had done this very thing to illustrate and endorse his argument, produced this very expression, the eyes bursting from the head, the jaw rigidly out-thrust, the tendons in the neck straining, the mouth in the grimace of a frozen, agonised scream, the teeth visible, the tongue slightly protruding. The gorgon’s face on the jar or the oven. The face so ugly, so demented, so terrible, it could petrify.

  The awful mouth writhed.

  ‘You have seen,’ she said. Somehow the stretched and distorted lips brought out these words. There was even that nuance of humour I had heard before, the smile, although physically a smile would have been out of the question. ‘You have seen.’

  She picked up the mask again, gently, and put it on, easing the underpart of the plastic beneath her chin to hide the convulsed tendons in her throat. I stood there, motionless. Childishly I informed myself that now I comprehended the reason for her peculiar accent, which was caused, not by some exotic foreign extraction, but by the atrocious malformation of jaw, tongue, and lips, which somehow must be fought against for every sound she made.

  I went on standing there, and now the mask was back in place.

  ‘When I was very young,’ she said, ‘I suffered, without warning, from a form of fit or stroke. Various nerve-centres were paralysed. My father took me to the very best of surgeons, you may comfort yourself with that. Unfortunately, any effort to correct the damage entailed a penetration of my brain so uncompromisingly delicate that it was reckoned impossible, for it would surely render me an idiot. Since my senses, faculties, and intelligence were otherwise unaffected, it was decided not to risk this dire surgery, and my doctors resorted instead to alternate therapies, which, patently, were unsuccessful. As the months passed, my body adjusted to the unnatural physical tensions resulting from my facial paralysis. The pain of the rictus faded, or grew acceptable. I learned both how to eat, and how to converse, although the former activity is not attractive and I attend to it in private. The mask was made for me in Athens. I am quite fond of it. The man who designed it had worked a great many years in the theatre and could have made me a face of enormous beauty or character, but this seemed pointless, even wasteful.’

  There was a silence, and I realised her explanation was finished.

  Not once had she stumbled. There was neither hurt nor madness in her inflection. There was something… at the time I missed it, though it came to me after. Then I knew only that she was far beyond my pity or my anguish, far away indeed from my terror.

  ‘And now,’ she said, rising gracefully, ‘I will leave you to eat your meal in peace. Good night.’

  I wanted, or rather I felt impelled, to stay her with actions or sentences, but I was incapable of either. She walked out of the green marble room and left me there. It is a fact that for a considerable space of time I did not move.

  I did not engage the swim back to Daphaeu that night; I judged myself too drunk and slept on the beach at the edge of the trees, where at sunrise the tidal water woke me with a strange low hissing. Green sea, green sunlight through leaves. I swam away and found my course through the warming ocean and fetched up, exhausted and swearing, bruising myself on Daphaeu’s fangs that had not harmed me when I left her. I did not see Pitos anywhere about, and that evening I caught the boat which would take me to the mainland.

  There is a curious thing which can happen with human beings. It is the ability to perform for days or weeks like balanced and cheerful automata, when some substrata, something upon which our codes or our hopes had firmly rested, has given way. Men who lose their wives or their God are quite capable of behaving in this manner for an indefinite season. After which the collapse is brilliant and total. Something of this sort had happened to me. Yet to fathom what I had lost, what she had deprived me of, is hard to say. I found its symptoms, but not the sickness which it was.

  Medusa (I must call her that, she has no other name I know), struck by the extraordinary arrow of her misfortune, condemned to her relentless, uncanny, horrible isolation, her tragedy most deeply rooted in the fact that she was not a myth, not a fabulous and glamorous monster… For it came to me one night in a bar in Corinth, to consider if the first Medusa might have been also such a victim, felled by some awesome fit, not petrifying but petrified, so appalling to the eyes and, more significantly, to the brooding aesthetic spirit that lives in man that she too was shunned and hated and slain by a murderer who would observe her only in a polished surface.

  I spent some while in bars that summer. And later, much later, when the cold climate of the year’s end closed the prospect of travel and adventure, I became afraid for myself, that dreadful writer’s fear which has to do with the death of the idea, with the inertia of hand and heart and mind. Like one of the broken leaves, the summer’s withered plants, I had dried. My block was sheer. I had expected a multitude of pages from the island, but instead I saw those unborn pages die on the horizon, where the beach met the sea.

&nbs
p; And this, merely a record of marble, water, a plastic shell strapped across a woman’s face, this is the last thing, it seems, which I shall commit to paper. Why? Perhaps only because she was to me such a lesson in the futility of things, the waiting fist of chance, the random despair we name the World.

  And yet, now and then, I hear that voice of hers, I hear the way she spoke to me. I know now what I heard in her voice, which had neither pain nor shame in it, nor pleading, nor whining, nor even a hint of the tragedy — the Greek tragedy — of her life. And what I heard was not dignity either, or acceptance, or nobleness. It was contempt. She despised me. She despised all of us who live without her odds, who struggle with our small struggles, incomparable to hers. ‘Your Greek is very good,’ she said to me with the patronage of one who is multilingual. And in that same disdain she says over and over to me: ‘That you live is very good.’ Compared to her life, her existence, her multilingual endurance, what are my life or my ambitions worth? Or anything.

  It did not occur immediately, but still it occurred. In this way, the myth is perfectly accurate. I see it in myself, scent it, taste it, like the onset of inescapable disease. What they say about the gorgon is true. She has turned me to stone.

  THE TREE: A WINTER’S TALE

  I dreamed the central idea of The Tree, and saw the characters, Marcusine the most clearly, when I was about fifteen — a great many years before I wrote it. Some of my ideas do take two decades or more to form their fruit, though I am often stealthily aware of the preceding blossoms.