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But let me tell you another, even more curious adventure, partly overheard, about two men and a mouse, and a tale connecting them. Something's got to connect them. "What really happened." S arrives on an island, make it a warm one, blue waters lapping, one of those places you've never been so you've only got a clear image of it. I heard only parts of this story. A man arrives on an island to meet another man, he's been hired somehow, or the hiring goes on after he gets there. S becomes a secretary for A, a writer or a businessman. Does it matter? A is gay, which may or may not be part of the story. I could write it with a man, a woman, and a mouse, but that's not the way I overheard it. A matter of point-of-view, and part of the point of the story if it's not just repetition. Read it twice. A is gay and may or may not "have designs on" S, the new arrival, but anyway the teller, the one I heard about (leaning back in his chair, closinq his office door, dreaming of Cleveland), implies that he does. Or did he hear it from another, repeating that snigger (see below) as if it were his own? "Snigger," uncomfortably close to a word we're taught to avoid, signifies an oral qesture indexing innuendo, but do "sniggers" ever occur in "real life"? Who am I to say. Filter it through enough narrators (thank you Joe C.) and you can present any content, however vague, twisted, uncertain. The word survives the gesture, no surprise. The story is overheard, remember. The narrator leans back in his chair; the writer puts his ear to the wall. There are no shortcuts. The teller sniggers a bit when he says, "What he didn't know was the guy was gay. It was all right, though, he got his own cottage out back and the guy left him alone." The innuendo is important to the story, a kind of foreshadowing, to make "sense" of later "events." Let us not forget to ask where it comes from. The characters, the storytellers (a chain of them, acting as a "voice"), and me, the writer writing, not speaking, check your ears. "Did he 'have designs on' him! I’ll say!" Someone must have "seen" it, some first storyteller, voiced that snigger, repeated later, reported here. Is reporting repeating? None of this is easy.
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Seated ready to tell it, if one might go to drink a bock over there, and the typewriter continue by itself (because I use the machine), that would be perfection. And that's not just a manner of) speaking. No writing about writing here, this is writing about storytelling, however reduced, so far anyway, writing at a distance from the tale (what can we know for sure in the real world?), the uncertainty of the facts like real life a little (I forgot I was going to say that), yes storytelling is the subject here, not those men, A and S, and the job they have between them on that island, what island doesn't matter, not even that storyteller, only a voice after all, sitting on a bar stool, dreaming of Clevelandbecause I was born there (was I?), and because it's absolutely particular, and because it doesn't mean anything but the direction it points within the story, helping to focus the reader's attention (yours) where I want it, there, on that snigger, so signifying. (Go to part 5 now, if you haven't been here before.) There's nothing new here, mind you. It would be wonderful to be able to put irrelevant things into writing. Canons of the well-made sneak up on us. I'll find my difference. Joe Conrad did narrator chains years ago, perhaps not better than anyone else, but very well. Lord, Jim, what really happened? Is modernism a Polish joke? Dreaming of Warsaw. But Joe was after a "realism effect." Perhaps everyone knows this. Not just the fiction of a tale told aloud, on deck after dark, to an eager audience. We don't learn "real world" histories straight forward, or even, I add, in that neat frame-and-flashback structure so common in short stories (stories that are short, fiction of a certain length, lies). We pick up bits and pieces as we go along, as you have to here. But my question is different: what forms a set of actions, incidents, characters, and whatever else one might want to consider, into something we recognize as a completed tale? Is it natural? How convenient. Or does it take a seeing of the facts, an "act of imagination" on the part of some (ab)original storyteller? And if that's true, what violence might be done to the facts themselves? What if there really was a man on an island and he drowned a mouse? What if it didn't mean what the tale says? (What does mean mean, what says?) Who, overhearing this tale, could unbelieve that the secretary was a mouse, and would be had?
3
There is now your insular city of Cleveland, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with its surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward . . . where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
| Cleveland can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveller arriving overland add a different one to him who arrives by sea. When the camel driver sees, on the horison of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert. . . .In the coastline's haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel's withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water. | Cleveland at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a skyscraper, the terminal tower, epitomizing the city, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses, which a fragment of its medieval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting. To live in, Cleveland was a trifle depressing, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows. |
| Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Cleveland. It was dusk when I landed there. On the dock the sailor who caught the rope and tied it to the bollard resembled a man who had soldiered with me and was dead. It was the hour of the wholesale fish market. An old man was loading a basket of sea urchins in a cart; I thought I recognized him; when I turned, he had disappeared down an alley, but I realized that he looked like a fisherman who, already old when I was a child, could no longer be among the living. I was upset by the sight of a fever victim huddled on the ground, a blanket over his head: my father a few days before his death had yellow eyes and a growth of beard like this man. I turned my gaze aside. I no longer dared look anyone in the face. | It was late in the evening when S arrived. Cleveland was deep in snow. The terminal tower was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that it was there. On the wooden plank leading from the ship S stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him. Then he went to find quarters for the night. The inn was still awake, and though the landlord could not provide a room and was upset by such a late and unexpected arrival, he was willing to let S sleep on a bag of straw in the parlor. S accepted the offer. Some workers were still sitting over their beer, but he did not want to talk, and after himself fetching the bag of straw from the attic, he lay down beside the stove. It was a warm corner, and he soon fell asleep. |
| And suddenly, coming from outside, quite close, there is a long drawn-out cry. | A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. |
4
Without discarding what he'd already written, he began his story afresh, in a somewhat different manner. Is there an air of mystery about the place? The town--it would be an error to call it a city--is old, perhaps not as old as the island. Class struggle is inscribed on the landscape here, if that impressive wall around the manor house, the hacienda, the palazzo on the hill in the center of the island is any indication, but it is the newer houses of the mainlanders (it is the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the English Channel), interrupting the sheep lands, that the villagers mutter about, going about their business, fishing harder. S sails in on a white fishing boat, making connections, on the way to the island to assume duties as secretary, scribe, subordinate to A, a writer or a businessman, he can't remember which, whom he met at a party--where?--in London, a month before. Then the telegram: "Come quickly, all expenses"; perhaps the English Channel's the best choice for credibility. No one is there to meet him, no one who knows his name. Almost without thinking about it he hires one of the boys lounging about the dock to carry his bags, and sets off for the house on the hill that looks (so he has been told) like a camels' withers. They trudge up cobbled streets. I make this up as I go. Somewhere a fruit vendor cries, loud and long. Perhaps it's not a fruit vendor.. . . puts down his absinthe, smiles "in an odd way," catches S's eye and says, "I'll come out to the cottage after a while. We can play chess or something." Why does S reply, fast as instinct, "I'm pretty tired, I think I'll turn in early," and then, as though there were no contradiction, "I think I'll go down to the Hungry Fisherman for a while," leaving chess out of the question?
5
Evidently it has already been rehearsed several times: everyone knows his part by heart. Words and gestures follow each other in a relaxed, continuous manner, the links as imperceptible as the necessary elements of some properly lubricated machinery. The tale culminates in an incident involving a mouse, "revealing" a symbolic relation between that incident and an (imputed) relation between two men. It seems there were mice in the house (the teller is sitting on a bar stool near the bathrooms, catching glimpses through the doors). It seems there were mice in the house with the colonnade of palm trees leading up to it in the center of the island. Out back was the secretary's cottage, more privacy than he's used to, more than a room over a garage for example, but still not a home of his own, he feels A's subtle presence. Here, before the anecdote, a few details of their life together, S and A, dictation sessions on the verandah, poetry and the problems of translation, whether anyone else was around, all bathed in a rhetorical glow designed to bring out the shadows of the listener's, the reader's suspicions. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. A caught a mouse in a "live trap," you know, a spring-loaded cage that doesn't wound. Nice detail, meant to mislead the listener, and the reader too, once. Our friend S was there watching, so the story goes. We see it of course from the point-of-view of the "straight" man here. Then the writer took the mouse out of the trap. We can imagine him, holding it by the tail (which, unlike a guinea pig's, does not come off), the mouse either struggling or rigid in uncomprehending fear. And then--and here's where the story lies, finally--he carries it over and drops it (the present tense, here, for "immediacy") in a sink, a wash basin, which he slowly fills with water. Where are they? in the kitchen? a bathroom? Beyond the window white fishing boat on thin strip of blue above green fence. Mice can swim, mind you, and perhaps this one needs a bath. The writer, with our friend looking on, watches for a while, then puts his finger on the mouse's head and pushes it under. The next day our friend was gone from the island. What do you think would have happened had he stayed?
2/5-6/11/80
to John Barth, David Bromige, Italo Calvino, Joseph Conrad, Julio Cortazar, Michael Davidson, Witold Gombrowicz, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Ron Silliman
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