I write these last pages to you, my dear Sebastian, without in any way hoping that even my most importunate solicitations will disturb your sleep, or, if you do not sleep, reach you wherever you happily are. No, it is not in the belief that communication between us is even conceivable that I write your name here; it is simpler, and sadder, and more wretched than the illusory supernaturalism of an impossible correspondence: it is, my dear son, the sensation I have of your standing here, a tall child with a recognisable face and a somehow familiar manner, your standing here at the side of this white table, as I write your name a yard away from your presence. And if you were indeed here, a grown boy of—let me say—thirteen or fourteen years, old enough, then, to ask the truly hard questions, the simple ones that drag up the roots of truth with them, if you were here, on this afternoon of rain and memory and remorse, what would you say to me: I can bear the bitterness of your accusations, if you should choose to accuse me. And if you should ask for reasonable explanations, I could give these, too—even though these reasonable explanations would be reasonable explanations of unreasonable happenings.
Will you ask me why you died? Is this question the perpetual uneasiness that vexes your cherubim of a spectre? No, this, I am sure, is not the great interrogation that you carry about like a crux anxata in front of you. For now, hopping about in eternals, playing with the mercy and justice of God as you might have played with my watch and my fountain pen, you will know that the answer to the question, Why, is always the same. For, now, you yourself are part of the answer to this question. I can believe, myself, that the dispensations of the heavenly will bend their heads and listen, if they bend them at all, to the supplications of the dead rather than to those of the living. Even that, to some degree, the will of God is—no, not modified, not mollified, but, made, perhaps, a little more human, by the accumulated admonitions of all those who have died. So that we, the living, are, in this sense, indebted to our predecessors for some small mercies.
Then I say that, simply because you died, you will know better than I do why you died. And, my dear son, as you stand, in my mind, no more than an embrace away from me in this room, I would wish to read a sentence to you from the confessions of a cardinal I spent this morning perusing: “And so I argue,” he writes, “about the world; there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence, and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.” You will ask me for what reason I repeat that desperate cry of John Henry Newman’s. I do so because I have discovered the nature and name of the mystery he terms “some terrible aboriginal calamity”, the calamity in which we necessarily labour. My dear son, it is love. Yes, Love is the terrible aboriginal calamity.
Outside my window a handful of women, hung around a magnificent renaissance fountain, belabour their washing with sticks, and gossip, and play with their dirty children. Often I cannot tell whether it is their voices or the sudden flutter of pigeons that I hear below. The rain, as I wrote, ceased, and the Italian sun stepped out of a cloud; after sharp showers, said Peace, most sheet is the sun, and love is never warmer than after war in this world. For then the bodies of those who have died, lying about among stars and rocks, sidle together, like the lovers on the hillside at the Messina earthquake, and kiss the cold from each other’s mouths. So, my dear son, I kiss you. For I think that I, too, have died.
Not far from my window a lake lies deep among mountains, and, in the evenings, I often walk along its single stretch of shore. It is a birthplace of mirages. Out of the flickering waters and the sometimes flashing mountains, with, lately, the stars, out of the reflections and shadows, the apparatus, as it were, for my apparitions, the gilded images of my memory have emerged and followed me along the foreshore.
You, my sweet Sebastian, shot full of wounds, a little boy trailing a martyrdom behind him, holding your mother by her hand, and she with her face wiped away by the handkerchief of grief, you both have walked with me by the lake. And now I am no longer surprised—indeed, if you do not do so, I am actually disappointed—when you accompany me. When one evening in the late summer, you, both of you, for what must have been the second or third time, took me, at either side, by the hand, and the three of us walked in silence, each in no way puzzled at the presence of the others, that evening, I remember, returning alone along the shore, I was faintly surprised—I was even, I think, a little bit amused—to find only one parallel of shoeprints going where we had gone. And I soon grew accustomed to that at first exacerbating sensation of knowing either you or your mother was following me, at all sorts of unpropitious times, just at the rear of my vision’s sideways extension.
But not all these illusions were gilded with this idyllic melancholy. I was awakened on the morning of Sunday the twenty-seventh of August by a voice crying my name out loudly from beneath the window. This voice, high and sweet like the note of a flute, pierced a dream in which, for the hundredth time, you and I, my small son, sailed in boats or rode upon ponies or quietly strolled together; and in the dream, suddenly and fiercely, at a moment when you were, by mischance, out of my sight, I trembled to hear your voice calling my name, as though you had lost me. I awoke with sweat in my hands. It was still almost dark. A cold wind blew in through the open window. The quiet of the hour before morning sat like a dew upon all things in the room. My heart galloped about my breast and tossed its horns wildly. And then, again, clear, not twenty yards from me, your voice brightly cried out the name of its father. It called me again and again. Not with impatience, not with resentment, not with accusation, but in a clear, sweet insistence, as though you knew that I would come, without failure, in a few moments.
I was not frightened—for how could you frighten me?—but I was physically paralysed. My body had turned to glass as I stood halted in the motion of rising from the bed. This paralysis shattered itself, an instant later, when you called again, but this time with a sort of peremptory appeal. I went to the open window and stared down into the morning shadows, expecting, dreading, desiring, praying, to see, upturned, your boy’s face smiling at our first real meeting.
Out of the patterned cage of shadows cast by the laurel tree, bright and gold there, like a young fruit, the big eyes suddenly averted as I gazed down, there, Sebastian, glimmered your ten-year-old face of an angel, the lips (oh, trumpet and kisses!) pouted in parting. Looking directly at me, you called my name again. Your voice flew into my breast and broke my heart. It groaned and broke.
In this grief I heard, then, a door open and close and the scuffling of feet below; a second voice, also a boy’s voice, fluttered rapid Italian. And when I looked down again I saw two ragged village urchins making hurriedly away toward the lake for their morning bathe.
Was this instant of mistaken existence in truth a visitation? It was, it was. Beside that window I suffered you into a heartbreak of life. Under that window you deluded me into a life of heartbreak.
Do not ever leave me. O admonitions and illusions, voices, the crack of the overloaded heart, the haunters of the derelict kingdom, remain with me always.
And equally to you, dead mother of a dead son, I do not so much speak these last lines as dedicate, if this should be possible, some valedictory offices. I will not pester with posthumous attentions the memory of a love that in its heyday wept too often in corners at the paucity of my attentions. Dull-eyed, the incomprehensible monster sits inside me, staring, like a homicidal lunatic, at the evidence of its incomprehensibility and its monstrosity.
For, in truth, my bed was made by my own hands, down to the stone at the foot and the lachrymatory at the head: I confess from the bitter depths of my heart that I sleep there with a misery that is not entirely miserable, with an unrest that is not wholly distressful; for the misery of it is shot through with penances and expiations, and the unrest, sometimes, takes on a tortured attitude of flagellatory exculpation.
So that, in all honesty, if there is any honesty, I cannot offer to you even these ineffectual recompenses; they are all disfigured and defaced by my necessity—I would, a world and a year ago, have said my moral necessity. The great effigies of guilt rise looming and moaning from misdemeanours too small ever to have housed them, or from crimes so twisted in shape and nature that nothing, not even the guilt, could ever escape from them. Nevertheless it rises and goes crying out forever afterward over the whole world and down all the years. “Do you blame him?” they say of the wife-beater or the alderman who raped his seventeen-year Venus of a daughter; no, we do not. It is destiny, the engine of justice, that nightly places a beloved corpse in the wife-beater’s bed, and plants in the womb of the alderman’s daughter a female embryo in whose womb a female embryo cuddles around a womb in which a pregnant daughter contains a recessional infinity of daughters. For destiny is simply what we desire coming up to us in the disguise of what we deserve. He was not a wise judge who remarked to the mother: “Madam, it was wrong to burn your two babies in the fireplace. Neither the babies nor the fireplace were designed for this purpose.” I could wish to inform this honourable magistrate that he was wrong: it is precisely the place for which destiny intended both.
How dare the instruments of its execution conceive it possible that they might, even darkly, comprehend the intentions of the divine will? When the pencil turns round in my hand and judges this sentence, I, too, my god, will turn in your hand and make judgments also.
I will speak simply about the conclusions that overcome me now when I consider the death of my wife and my son. I had believed in the mercy and not in the justice of god. How can anything really disastrous, I asked myself then, ever happen to them, the innocent and the beautiful, the virtuous? But I had forgotten the truly irremediable disaster that had already overtaken them: they loved and they were loved. In the house of your love, my dear wife, there was that marvellously appointed room of forgiveness, the door always ajar, the single candle lighted, the window opening on to a purified future: but were you aware, my dear love, than an anticipation was its tenant? In the chamber of your forgiveness the prescience of the crime that you were fated to forgive, and never to forgive, took up its habitation because destiny disallows disuse as much as nature hates emptiness. The holy ones are those who regard destiny as a shoddy trick like the carrot and the donkey: these holy ones sit all their life long on the banks of the Ganges and stare their vision out of existence by gazing at the water until they die. This is the holy No with which they answer life.
My love, you will remember the question you asked me but gave me no time and no chance to answer? You asked me if I truly loved Marsden. I have, since then, had almost too much time in which to turn over in my mind what would even then have been a simply and schizophrenically affirmative answer. And when I turn this Yes about in my mind, when I look long and closely at the figure of my love for Marsden, I am dazzled with enigmas. How can one love a monster? It is too easy, if one is oneself a monster. No, I do not claim, for a moment, that I am, or ever was, a monster of such magnificence as she. And the word is precisely the correct one. Like Rasputin, who, believing that the exercise of repentance was the highest virtue of which we are capable, rose to an impiety of irreligious illogic by committing sins so that he could repent of them, like this monster, Marsden saw in the charity, the consideration, the kindness, the pity, the gentleness, the forgiveness, the mercy of people, in these she saw virtues, or, rather, faculties that, fortunately, the indulgence in her own selfishness could start functioning for the benefit of all concerned. It could be put much more succinctly: she took advantage of other people’s natural humanity. She did so because she existed in the moral anarchy of an animal: whatever she wanted was right. She was beautiful with the dynamic of her purpose: her desires drew her towards them as passionately and as mysteriously as home draws a pigeon through the air. Yes, all this is so. I loved her for the reason that I also love the purposeful pigeon, the amoral tree and the unthinking star.
But you, sleeper with a stillborn son in the cradle of your bosom, rocking and hushing an armful of nothing to rest, what will you say to me when we meet at the paradisal kissing gate? Drawing the babe closer, will you seek to let me pass without recognition? Or will you, then, look up with eyes in which, like prophecies in water, all our unaccomplished understandings become fulfilled: I think that you will do neither of these things. No, you will lead me, without speech, through this gate; we shall walk through a garden in which a snake and a tree stand coiled in a perpetual convulsion of realisation, blasted by the magnitude of their legacy; and, still not speaking, we shall go up through grottoes in which ascetics pray and heroes everlastingly aggrandise themselves and lovers grunt and sigh and manufacture genealogies; until, in what will by this time be the half-light of the evening, we shall reach a chamber of glass, perhaps—for I cannot distinguish clearly—a house of glass. Adorned with the flowers and veils of the bridal bedroom, this room of glass contains an ornate bed of gold, and it stands on a rock. Naked upon this bed lies the most beautiful youth who ever was. And you, looking a last time at me, show me that the cross and the kiss in your face have both put out leaves and flowers; smiling, you leave me. And I return to a cave in the gardens where the eighteen breasted Eve, rolling Erasmus Darwin’s sea in the cup of her tongue, greets me with an embrace that draws blood from my sexual organs. And from then on, every time I sneeze, a child is conceived.
Can I delude your image with these masochistic abnegations? Will your innocent spirit, true as only a bird entering a trap is true, flutter inside the structure of my self-accusations, and be a singing prisoner, a cause, and an exorciser? Now the bread of my heart is not white enough for your dove; the salt of my grief is not bitter enough for your feathers; and with the justice of your going held up like a hand against me, forbidding any pursuit, forbidding even a farewell, I watch you, seagull with a gold sacrament stuck through your breast, ascend, out of my sight, out of my knowledge, but never out of my love, until you break into the window of heaven.
When the mermaid, murmuring her hypnotic invitations, lounges, with a mirror in her hand, on the masculine stones, it is perfectly natural for her to close her eyes in gratified fulfilment when the rock, victim of buttock and voice, breaks open and crushes her in its embrace. My dear Marsden, you, too, must have learned in how many of the two hundred tongues of Europe the plough that the cut worm forgives is a copulation. Yes, of course, you know.
There are simple souls, I believe, who find it hard to understand why the unenterprising Eve should have plucked the apple: the reason, and your life, my dear Marsden, quite nobly and simply demonstrates this, is threefold. The lady wanted an apple, she did not mind taking it, and was not too ashamed when she had eaten it. Because it gives her a bellyache that evolves a world. But, O my God, where was the individual will of the undersigned when that nude bitch under the tree held up her hand with a sprouting womb in it: The will of the captive is free in a box of mirrors. The will of the lover is free inside the seed. The will of the woman is free inside her desire to die into the next generation. For freedom is the knowledge of necessity, and the necessity of the human is love, and the necessity of love is existence, and the necessity of existence is two sinning in a bed, and the necessity of two sinning in a bed is to be forgiven. It is thus that our only freedom is to be damned.