The Limits of Vision Page 4

  To return to that pale memory of a boudoir biscuit in the café. That was very much a living-room memory. I am a great believer in the orderly storing of memories, to make them easier to retrieve. It is quite a common mnemonic trick. I have a sort of mental image of my house, the House of Memory, and in each room I mentally place certain kinds of thing I want to remember. Generally things are pretty evenly distributed around the house, but as much as one fifth of my store of useful facts is kept in the bathroom. Partly this is because the bathroom is exceptionally well lit and clean, so it is easier to find things in there. Also, it is easier for me to run through all this useful stuff when I am actually in the bathroom, during moments of mental leisure sitting on the loo. Numbers, though, are spaced out evenly around the house. Five is in the kitchen. It is yellow and it hovers in a shimmery sort of way in front of the kitchen window. A green one and a dark blue nine are cramped together in the downstairs lavatory. Two is at the front door, and further along the hallway a black six hangs suspended more or less directly over the spot of fungus on the carpet.

  Four and seven are in opposite corners of the living room where I am now silently presiding over a coffee morning. While I am sure we all visualize numbers differently I imagine that there would be a large measure of agreement about keeping four and seven in the living room, for after all they are the numbers of conviviality, aren’t they? Perhaps it is this that I should raise now, cutting in on their arguments about the Vietnam War and the display of women in Dutch art. I wish, I really wish, I could pay attention for long enough to what they were saying to be able to participate more fully. Perhaps when they are gone I should get a notebook out and reconstruct from memory as much of their conversation as I can remember. If I made a regular practice of this then perhaps I should be able to set up a file of cards on the sorts of thing that everyone says and from my cards be able to memorize a list of suitable topics to bring into the conversation.

  Anyway to go back to the numbers, three and eight are in the dining room across the hallway from the sitting room. I don’t know why they are there, unless possibly it is because we keep the TV there as well and Philip and me and the TV makes three, while eight is the maximum number of people we can get round our dining table, but I’m guessing. Tens I keep upstairs in the two bedrooms, the bathroom and on the landing. Hundreds and powers of ten higher are fished out from the jumble in the attic. I see infinity as the cloudy sky rolling over our house. Before I went ‘underground’ as a housewife, I read mathematics at college (not a very good degree, I am afraid!) but, like many mathematicians who are even better than I am at Boolean algebra and so on, I am not much good at doing quite simple sums of addition and subtraction. So then, when totting up the household accounts, I have found it a help to go up and down the stairs into the various rooms, so as to visualize the figures I am adding up more clearly. It really works! Sometimes though I must admit I have found myself walking into a room and forgetting what I have come for, an imaginary number or a pair of Philip’s socks in the drawer. There are limits to all memory tricks, but still … I have thought about writing to Good Housekeeping about this in the hope of seeing it printed as Tip of the Month.

  They are so close in confabulation that their heads almost touch. I stand on the edge tightly smiling (my dirty teeth). The sitting room was done yesterday when I remembered that they were coming. Nevertheless even here, in ‘the room for best’, the Fungus has its allies. How can they be so oblivious? I am straining to pick up an interchange about men not putting their shoes away, but it is lost. Meanwhile Steph is going on about the feminist exhibition, Griselda and Mary are talking about the new vicar, and the rest are listening to Rosemary being solemn about her bloody novel.

  Stuff her novel. Isn’t her housework enough for her? It’s all so false. In God’s name why don’t we, why can’t we talk about housework? That’s all we ever do all day long so it must be important. It is always in our thoughts. We must talk about it, then. I am screwing up my courage to say so. But the truth is that I would rather be anywhere than here and now.

  Politics, religion, art, all that high-pitched chatter – they remind me of coolies round a camp-fire, backs to the dark, talking of anything except He whom they fear.

  The coolies sit with the soles of their boots showing to the fire. Their eyes are tight slits against the stinging wind. Somewhat shapeless in their fur caps, worn jerkins and wrappings of cloth strips, they are disposed around the fire in a way which reminds me of the tea parties I used to arrange for my dolls when I was a girl. The chief muleteer is holding a stick up in the firelight. The coolie heads come closer together. I cannot see, but I know that on the stick there will be two tiny insects and that the coolies are going to make them fight.

  ‘According to the philosopher Arbus, the Chinese believe that one passes through boredom to fascination.’ This is Père Teilhard who has come up behind me while I stood engrossedly contemplating the delight that our workers find in the smallest things.

  Père Teilhard is a priest of course. He is also one of the leaders of the expedition and the undisputed authority on the excavation.

  ‘I wish I shared their faith,’ I reply. ‘How many days have we been here now? And what have we found? And if it’s like this now, what will it be like when winter comes …?’ I give an expressive shiver.

  ‘Yes, one always expects a desert to be hot. That is not true of the Gobi, I am afraid.’ He speaks softly. ‘Yet it must be admitted that even for one like myself who has dedicated his life to work in these unChristian parts, this must be the coldest place in which I have ever had to conduct a dig.’

  I look quickly back at him. Does he fear what I fear here at Lop-Nor? The coolies sense it, I know. They have been talking about the earth spirits, how the earth spirits show themselves when disturbed. Faces have been seen in chance arrangements of gravel or carelessly folded linen. The faces can easily be made to disappear with a scuff of the boot. Still they have been seen. And some of the workers have been making surreptitious visits to Dust-Muhammad, the Buryat geomancer who is camped on the other side of the Nor.

  The eyes of Teilhard are heavily pouched, the cheeks so cadaverous as to suggest that he has no jaws, and his skin is yellower than any Chinaman’s. If I let my eyes drift out of focus, then his face seems to blend in with the sand-laden air around us. Through a freak of turbulence, the air around the camp fire at the head of the crevasse is relatively clear, but everywhere else, all around us, the wind whips up billows of yellow sand and coils of darker subsoil. Even though banks of thick cloud lie between us and the sun, the sky is yellow. A susurrus of grains trickles over our boots. The Bactrians are tethered on the very edge of visibility twenty yards away. Our camels were being loaded with supplies for the geologists’ forward camp when this blew up and the chief cameleer (now totally absorbed in urging his insect on) has not troubled to unload them again. The camels strain against their ropes. Some of them, too obstinate to kneel, are lurching dangerously, for their loads which were poorly trussed threaten now to tip them over.

  ‘As to what we have found,’ Teilhard continues, ‘we have found a great deal. You must admit it. Come to my tent and I will show you what has been turned up today.’

  I nod and, throwing up my scarf to cover my mouth and nose, I plod behind him in the yellow storm. The tent is found only by stumbling over its guy ropes. He fumbles at the flaps, then stands aside to let me untie them. We throw ourselves head first into the tent and a great deal of sand follows before the flap can be fastened behind us. For a while there is nothing but darkness and grit. Then the flame of the oil lamp shoots up between the hands of the priest. He forages in his haversack and passes something to me. I take it from him gingerly, expecting it to be one of the day’s finds. It is a piece of Sporting and Military Chocolate.

  ‘In France I would never eat chocolate, not even when I was a boy. Every street-corner shop sells the stuff. But here, in the middle of the Gobi, there is something luxurious
in the activity – so luxurious, I would almost call it sinful.’ Teilhard giggles.

  He rummages in his haversack again and hands me something else. I am holding something small but heavy, a shapeless lump – no, not shapeless, for surely nothing is truly shapeless. Soft but heavy. Perhaps its weight comes from the encrustation of dirt? I fetch out my little brush and cloth and begin to work away at cleaning it. This is my skill. That is why I am here. It had not been expected that there would be so much work for me. The expedition was not actually looking for human arte-facts. Teilhard’s own interest was in scaly lumbering horned beasts who used to lay eggs in sand – whatsitodons or that-sosaurs, some name vaguely reminiscent of a toothpaste ingredient. So the site had been chosen almost at random, a place where the erosive wind had blown away the loess and it would be quicker for us to reach the more ancient strata. Great was our astonishment then when we realized that the trench we had set our coolies to dig was cutting through the midden of an ancient civilization of which even the name was lost. For over a week now we have been digging through or around building rubble, pottery sherds, hearth ash, powder-dry turds. To the eye of the amateur all that we had found was rubbish: to the archaeologist it was gold dust. (I remember Père Teilhard remarking, in a lecture given to the Imperial Academy in Peking, that our view of the ancient preliterate civilizations, not only of Central Asia but also of East Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, had been distorted by the fact that the archaeologist worked largely from the discards and rejects of those civilizations. The museum in Peking was now full of objects which their ancestors thousands of years previously had judged too ugly or too useless to preserve.)

  The heavy wind thuds against the tent. The light wavers. I turn the thing round and round in my hands. The priest leans forward anxiously.

  ‘What do you think?’

  My reply is slow in coming.

  ‘I don’t know. I mean that it’s not that I don’t know. There is something very powerful in this object … I sense it. There is an idea in my head but I don’t know how to put it into words.’ (It is fear as much as anything. It is a little like the fear of ever saying anything truly intimate to casual acquaintances one has invited to one’s house.)

  Père Teilhard smiles.

  ‘Come, come, Marcia. “Much that is inexpressible would hardly be worth expression, if one could express it.” Lichtenberg wrote that. Have you read Lichtenberg? You should, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know … I expect that I’ll be clearer about this thing’s purpose when I’ve given it a bit of a rub with my cloth.’

  ‘Perhaps – but I doubt it. You know, I sometimes feel grateful that my vocation has given me insights into our archaeological work that are denied to my lay colleagues. Now is one of those times. Let me tell you, Marcia, something that I worked out for myself when I was a young seminarian. What is a good, or rather goods? (My English is not so good, I think.) I mean those things that we purchase in shops. Why in a Christian society do we call them “goods”? Because these things make us fat, or lazy, or attractive-looking or possessed of status? Surely these are not the properties which make “goods” morally good, are they, Marcia?’

  I cannot reply. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that this is an extraordinarily unlikely catechism to be facing in the middle of the Gobi Desert. And there is something about the object, some half-remembered promise or threat … déjà vu perhaps …

  Teilhard does not notice my distress and continues.

  ‘Ah no, it is because a “good” is something that is good to think with. When we purchase and consume “goods” we internalize them. Goods furnish the building-blocks of our consciousness. Do you understand what I am getting at?

  ‘No? Well, never mind. You will come to it. I have great faith in you, Marcia. Your skills as a housewife have been invaluable to the expedition. Who was it – Emerson perhaps? – who said that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains? Well, you have that sort of genius.’ He sighs. ‘You must read Emerson. But what I was leading to now is that this thing there on your palm is not such a commodity. Here is one of the “bads”. This is an object which is bad to think with.’ The priest looks doubtfully at the lump which is taking on shape in my cleansing hands. ‘In truth, I now regret having shown it to you at all. It was foolish of me even to have asked you to come on our expedition. You sense the evil in this thing, do you not?’

  I don’t know what to say to the priest.

  ‘I … wouldn’t … I couldn’t ever …’ Yes, I am floundering. Perhaps the object in my hands is bad to think with. My thoughts are slow and sticky like jelly in the process of setting, and the boundaries between my words are not as clear as they usually are. And the object is a bit the same. It is not hard. It’s a bit pulpy and sticky. It gives way to my inquiring fingers then closes over them, and when I withdraw a finger it feels greasy. It is like being blindfolded and then plunging one’s hand into the dustbin in a sort of unlucky dip. Some of the plasticity of a turd, the pulpiness of a large bit of fungus, and yet with some of the sweetly clinging quality of honey mixed with greasy butter. The words in my head are all wriggly but I know what this thing is and why I am where I am. I have never really forgotten who I face, only I feared to think it in the front of my brain where all is fully lit. All the time we have been sitting in the tent, the knowledge has been resting in a dark untended back room of the brain. Soon it will come lumbering out.

  ‘There is material rubbish and intellectual rubbish. You are holding the former and thinking the latter. Multo in parvo.’ The priest smiles sallowly, patronizingly. ‘Ah, Marcia, I see that you are afraid. It was foolish of me to have persuaded you to come on this expedition – no, selfish rather. You see, we needed you so much. Who but Marcia could have inspired our coolies to cut through so many layers of dirt? Who but Marcia could have kept our trench so tidy? Who but Marcia could have restored our finds to such a shine and made our little patch of wilderness like home? Even so I am sorry, Marcia, for this is no place for a woman.’

  I will speak. I will not be silent.

  ‘Father, you did not persuade me to come. I was summoned.’

  ‘Summoned here! How? By whom?’

  ‘I don’t know what you call him, Father … I call him Mucor. He … it is perhaps the Spirit of Uncleanliness.’

  Teilhard crosses himself.

  ‘Merciful heavens, child! And have you seen the Spirit himself?’

  ‘I have and I fear that I shall do so again. It is for this that I was sent. Look here on my hand.’

  Bits of grit still cling to the squashy lump which quivers on my palm. Tiny bubbles emerge on its surface and pop. I perceive that Mucor has appeared among these white bubbles. I am dizzy with horror. I can just hear the whisper of Mucor. My swooning vision can hardly hold Teilhard in focus. His pouched and leathery face is merging with the brown wrinkles of the tent’s roof. His voice too has become very faint. I can hardly tell one voice from another – and there are other voices …

  ‘… the source of a very ancient evil, the very well-spring of dirt, the seat of our Prince. It was from here that our Prince conjured up the Black Death and spread it about through the world on the backs of rats and fleas. It was here too that he directed the poisoning of the wells of the nomad herders, thereby transmitting typhoid to the unhygienic kitchens of the West …’

  ‘Unclean spirit, I adjure you to come out from this woman …’

  ‘… the numbers of men on earth in each generation increase geometrically, yet the rate of man’s increase can never equal the rate of increase of his rubbish. The earth is made of his rubble, the seas are filled with his effluent. Man toils and crawls over his own garbage like an insect …’

  ‘… Go out from her. Go out, I say!’

  ‘We always fry ours in batter …’

  ‘… so that walking round the gallery looking at them should be more of a consciousness-raising experience than an aesthetic one …’

  ‘Marcia,
you must go home. I recognize the adversary. This struggle is reserved for the Church, not the housewife …’

  ‘Our master is outside … Only let him in and he will bed you in entropy … Go on, spoil yourself, give yourself a treat, caress yourself … You deserve it. Relax … It’s time for a break … Let your hair down and put your feet up … Comfy? Those are truffles growing under you … Hard to know where your body ends and the earth you lie in begins. As the body relaxes, it softens, becomes viscous, a bit like cheese fondue really. Delicious, isn’t it?’

  Though the form of Teilhard is all but dissolved in the murk, yet his insistent whisper breaks through once more.

  ‘Get out, get out, I say! She’s ours and I will speak to her … Marcia, can you hear me? I’m sending you home. Pray for me there, will you? Now listen carefully. Picture a road. Picture a road, woman. Concentrate. Visualize. Don’t let yourself go to pieces. That’s what Mucor wants. Picture a road. You are walking down that road. On the left-hand side there is a house. Stop and look at that house. It has a minute little garden and a tarmac path going up to the front door. Do you see it, really see it? Good, now. It is your house. Don’t let go. Push open the latch of the gate. Only four steps will take you to the door of the house. Take those four steps. The door is green. Its paintwork is blistering. It is unlocked. Push it open and go in. Now you are in the hallway …’

  ‘Yes.’

  Now I can see myself in the hallway, advancing like a sleep-walker. Something white and shimmering on the carpet hisses at my ankles.

  ‘Pay no attention to that. Keep moving, whatever you do. You are in the hallway. Everything about it is sharp and clear. Seven steps will take you to the door of the sitting room. Go into that room …’

  I hesitate, hearing voices through the door, but I go in nevertheless. Only now does the whispering stop. I look back, for I want to argue with the priest. I have not told him what is on my mind.