Writing
Observations from the Kitchen is an autobiographical
adventure story that unfolds upon the metaphoric battlefield of a chess board,
a place The Cook uses to describe and make sense of a lifetime spent in service
to gastronomy.
Set within the sweatshop kitchens that have been his home,
it is a journey that takes the reader from the frenetic chaos of the London's
West End to the narcissistic playgrounds of the Cote d'Azur, through amazing
India and magical Marrakech to the snow-covered domes of the Kremlin before
ending in the steamy jungles of beautiful Costa Rica.
The Cook invites different companions, the people who have
touched him, made his life something other than mundane, to join him 'a
table', where, whilst preparing his signature dishes, they discuss such
themes as Ambition, Loyalty and Contentment and whether such ideas are
comprehensible to anyone other than the person who utters them.
***
Tico Times Book Review April 2014
I had hoped to have a professionally
edited and photographed book to offer and even imagined that I had secured the
help of a large and prestigious literary agency whose M.D encouraged me over
the summer with the following assessment ........
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE KITCHEN is rather wonderful. You’ve
created an extraordinary work here, and a beautifully crafted one. I found
myself thinking that every creative should read it regardless of what industry
they’re in or skillset they’re mastering. It raises such important questions,
and is so refreshingly forthright about them. This work is unique in many ways,
yet you refer to OBSERVATIONS as a novel. That brings with it certain
assumptions and expectations. I’m not sure that this is where it should sit.
It’s such a smart, thoughtful, brave discussion about some really difficult
(dare I say unresolvable) issues. It strikes me as a meditation, a parable, an
exploration of the creative journey. If a reader comes to the work with that
sort of lens, I think they would get a lot more out of it than if they came to
it with “novel” in mind.
Unfortunately, the company decided
that the book was impossible to 'position' so I am left with offering an
amateurishly edited book accompanied by my own home photographs. I do hope
however, that you might still enjoy it.
If you would like a copy you can
find it at the following link.
A publisher's
view..........
There can be few cooks that
have been awarded Michelin stars in both England and in France. There will be
even fewer that can boast a multiplicity of cultures to inform their craft.
Richard Neat was the
youngest recipient of 2 Michelin stars when he received his second
in 1996 for his establishment Pied a Terre in London’s Charlotte
Street. His second recognition by Michelin in 1999 was for his
eponymous restaurant on France’s Côte d’Azur where he became the first
Englishman to be so honoured in France.
Neat honed his talents
under the eyes of Raymond Blanc at Manoir Quatre Saisons in the Oxfordshire
countryside, Joel Robouchon at Jamin in Paris and Marco Pierre White at Harveys
in London.
Neat’s European
establishments (Pied a Terre in London, Neat in Cannes, Neat and Neat Brasserie
in the Oxo Tower) enabled Neat to nurture younger talents such as Warren
Geraghty and Tom Aikins. His advice to the aspiring cook?
“Look out for the
chef-patron, see if he has food stains on his tunic, as though he has recently
been in the proximity of food, is unshaven and hirsute as if indifferent
to presentation, if he is awkward outside of his kitchen, implying he is
happiest amongst his sauces and dead animals. If yes, to all of the above, then
beg, cajole and plead entry into his establishment and be humble enough to
absorb everything that is done there. Watch, learn and do everything that
is demanded of you and acquire as many techniques as possible as this will give
your later work greater breadth. Familiarize yourself with the ingredients that
you use, identify why they are valuable. Ask as many questions as your
betters’ patience will tolerate and challenge yourself to be the best in this
environment. Continue the above formula until you’ve worked your way as far up
the food chain as possible and always leave on good terms. These people have
given you something valuable: knowledge.
Neat’s kitchen was once
described by a French film crew as a “chaotic frenetic ballet” but beneath this
is a thoughtful man. His employees past and present will attest to
the breadth of Neat’s interests, to his humour and his requirement that
they can play chess.
Neat’s own ventures enabled
him to feel the painful, pitiless impact of commercial realities colliding with
his search for sublime food, genuine and generous hospitality
and excellent conversation. As Neat says:
“It seems as though
gastronomy has been hijacked by the media and public relations industries. For
myself, there were two iconic figures of the period when I was active
in London; Joel Robuchon and Pierre Koffmann. I never once saw them on
television, never once read interviews by them as they regurgitated inane
stories about themselves as they sought to make themselves relevant, or
newsworthy. They were instead, faultless, fanatical craftsmen. And places
were coveted in their restaurants because you would get a meal that would
definitely move you. It’s just another example of packaging vanquishing humble
effort.”
Neat’s travels have taken
him away from Europe to luxury establishments in Moscow, in New Delhi, in
Morocco, and these distinct culinary cultures are there to savour in his
current establishment, de jure uxoris, as he says.
For those who can make the
journey, his superb food is the traveller’s reward - offered up in the garden
or in the cloisters of Park Garden Antiques, where antiques and antiquities are
also for sale in Sabana Norte, San Jose in Costa Rica.
This
self-described rabid, pan-throwing, culinary sociopath is no more. Casting
a sobering (but not sober) eye back over his colourful career to date, Neat has
produced a contemplative and informative look at modern kitchens, culture,
commercialism and the ancient art of chess.
Observations in the
Kitchen: A Backward Look from Richard Neat is the result.
***
Richard Neat, the cerebral chef over at San José’s Park Caf,
has a penchant for chess, Russian novels, philosophy and political manifestos.
Now he’s whipped up perhaps his most complex dish in the form of a
self-published reminiscence centered on “life at the center of the gastronomic
revolution.”
Neat weaves in tantalizing snippets of how he prepares his
signature dishes, as well as vivid travelogues covering his nomadic life over
four decades, from London to France to India to Morocco to Costa Rica.
The introspective, existential themes of the book are played
out against the strategic framework of an ongoing chess game and fashioned
after a Platonic dialogue, with the chef debating such heady topics as
ambition, faith, hubris and loyalty, with various opposing interlocutors. Along
the way we are also treated to scathing but entertaining rants against greedy,
over-taxing governments, and — my favorite — poisonous, overweening restaurant
critics.
As a non-chess player, the metaphoric strategy was lost on
me. What I did enjoy were the insights Neat provides into what it takes to
aspire to and reach the pinnacle of artistry and craftsmanship in any field –
in his case, gastronomy, and the golden grail of Michelin stardom.
The achievement of two Michelin stars in his London
restaurant Pied à Terre, along with the only Michelin star awarded to an
Englishman cooking in France, for his Neat Cannes restaurant, certainly
qualifies the chef as an expert in what it takes to succeed in the gastronomic
world. Much of the book deals with the collision between the forces of
creativity and the high-stakes economics of the restaurant business.
Each chapter features the preparation of a Neat signature
dish, starting with smoked foie gras with onion purée, and ending
with an incredibly complicated braised pig’s head with pumpkin purée.
Neat makes it all seem so deceptively simple. But these complicated “preps”
make you realize how much training, experience and talent it takes to attain
Neat’s level of creativity and craftsmanship.
The pressures to “create new temptations to amuse my
ever-fickle audience” and to become a “faultless, fanatical craftsman” are
neatly balanced by the pleasure Neat takes in the “beasts and vegetables that
were reared and grown with care,” which, he says “oblige a cook to treat them
with sufficient reverence.”
There is a lot to digest in Neat’s observations, on a number
of levels. As a food aficionado, the lasting impression I took away was the
realization that, along with skill, a lot of thinking goes into haute cuisine.
All those decades Neat has spent in the kitchen were not just about producing
food to eat, but also food for thought.
“Observations From the Kitchen“ by Richard Neat
is available on-line for $7.99 at
Or visit Neat’s blog at www.parkcafecostarica.blogspot.com.
*******
Chef Magazine July 2021.
https://www.chef-magazine.com/
****
June Edition 2022.
“Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see
if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith
the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger.” Lamentations. 1:12
condemnation
Healy watched in silence as the inaugural morning light
crept slowly across the bedroom, little by little devouring the darkness and
obscurity that had sought shelter in his room since the previous evening.
Familiar objects that had lay still and hidden throughout the night now cautiously
reappeared as he mechanically audited their existence. He yawned and rubbed his
still sleepy eyes, an indifferent spectator upon the tussle between darkness
and approaching day, one as yet inconclusive, a struggle that created a
tenebrous mood, a palette of dull opacities such as favoured by Caravaggio upon
which he might bring forth life.
His apartment in Old Havana faced in an easterly
direction and bore the unenviable task of being first to witness each new day,
dutifully cataloguing every sunrise that rose upon this tragic isle, sunrises
that portended life, glimmering new reveries and deceitful hope. Each new
morning bore within it the seeds of annihilation as Time tormented the
buildings with the inexorable ruination of their beauty, driving every sensible
object towards its inevitable demise. Destruction came as a blustery wind, a
brilliant shard of sunlight, a handful of raindrops, Nature’s cruel hand that
wore-away and eroded form, that wished only to annihilate those who had had the
temerity to exist.
Healy had been awake for some time –his circadian cycle was
measured in cigarettes and the new day was almost two sticks long- though had
laid all the while motionlessly, as if unwilling to alert the new day to his
presence.
His mind worked sluggishly, only slowly beginning to assign
sequence and value to the surfeit of images that ran amok within his brain. As
he stirred beneath the sheets, he came across the book entangled in his covers
and pulled it towards him. He glanced at the faded portrait and remembered the
intimate evening he and the author had shared together. Spinoza appeared
as erudite as ever, and seemed to stare expectedly back at him, as though
alluding to some unfinished conversation they might attend together. Healy
strained to remember the previous night spent amongst the pages of his Ethics,
and as though struggling to string a yarn onto a fine needle, he fumbled to
thread his earlier ruminations back on to the slender eye of the previous
night’s lucidity. He goaded himself with words and incomplete passages but on
this particular morning could only curse his uncooperative memory as it refused
to reconsider the episodes that the night before had seemed so clear.
Frustrated, Healy slunk further into the bed sheets, ignoring
the oath of novelty the fresh day pledged, and anyway, doubtful as to whether
the outside world could be as interesting as the emerging activity within his
mind as a riotous stream of tittle-tattle, gathered randomly by his senses,
clamoured for his attention.
He registered a whiff of detergent upon the sheets. Newly
washed linen meant yesterday must have been Thursday and he instinctively
groaned at his easy usage of such an appellation and wondered whether he would
ever free himself from its clutches. It had been an ambitious idea he conceded,
as one of his first acts upon arriving on the island had been to banish all the
thoughtless words and magisterial descriptions that had forever imposed a
routine upon him.
Names of days that had always notified him as to some
irrelevant event, hours that whined of an unimportant rendezvous, or minutes
that had yelped like an irritating puppy constantly in need of attention, they
had all had too much influence upon his life. They had all been guilty of
cajoling him into the pursuit of something pointless. Such subjugation
had belonged to the life he had vowed to reject, and in his new life he had
declared all dates, times, and measurements as outlaws, every tool of
tyrannical precision as superfluous to his new liberated self. From then
on, with a determination reminiscent of Canute, he had stopped buying
newspapers, avoided any scheduled mealtimes and in a extravagant gesture of
intent had thrown his watch, a present from a previous girlfriend, one whose
memory was often as equally painful to him, into Havana Bay.
Immortality he reasoned, was not to live every minute and
every second of past and future time, but was to be a mode of being quite
independent of artificial measurement. He would live forever, his own forever,
for when his heart ceased beating he would be conscious of nothing more,
certainly not conscious of any continuation of Time that was not his own. By
removing himself from the clutches of Time he would be free from notions of
before and after, thereby making the idea of change and decline nonsensical. He
would live forever in an everlasting now.
He smiled to himself as he remembered the exhilaration he
felt when he had audaciously informed Time that he would no longer require its
services, even going so far as politely explaining that he had invented -so he
modestly imagined- a more personalized, more spiritualized calculation of
existence. One that prosaically tick-tocked in harmony with the lifespan of the
flowering bougainvillea that he habitually picked through the iron railings of
the Spanish Consulate gardens and kept in a bowl by the window, or the duration
of a smile upon his girlfriend’s face.
Of course this desire to stand outside the stream of Time
had caused a few inconveniences, but with mock indignation Healy had dismissed
the few discordant girlfriends whom he had made wait hours at vaguely specified
meetings. The occasional empty stomach that groaned as he peered helplessly
through the windows of restaurants that had long since finished serving food.
Or the time when he went to the southern coast by bus only to discover that it
returned to Havana only every third day, thereby leaving him stranded without a
place to stay and he had slept on the beach. But these nuisances were paltry
compared to the elation he felt at no longer being a servant to the diktats of
a tyrant who had once commanded him when to wake, to hurry along, to eat and
when to lie down to sleep again. It had been, he thought, a stunning victory, a
genuine liberation, the moment from which he might truly begin to live.
It was an idea that inevitably exiled him from the
uninitiated, people who were still yoked to schedules and timetables, people he
should be cautious of being close to as they could always be relied upon to
betray the time of day with witless predictability. Yet when his landlady’s
casual statement all those months ago that new linen would be issued on a
particular day of the week, a proclamation that effortlessly breached the
flimsy walls of his blissful citadel, Healy merely lamented her lack of
imagination rather than the possibility that his efforts might be impractical.
He shrugged to no one in particular, indifferent to the
news, for whilst the new day now had a wretched name, it had not yet acquired a
plump and rotund character, one that would be bloated and overladen with
appointments, schedules and other demands upon his non-time. He tried to return
to the contemplation of more serious affairs such as his homage to Spinoza. He
stretched for the book and found the page from the night before. Again, he
attempted to retrace the steps of his comprehension, but struggled because of
new distractions, as through the deafening stillness of his room he heard the
bustle and nascent activity of a waking town. Seductive voices that promised
Healy it might be on this new day, this newly christened Friday, that he might
do, or see, or feel something that justified his immersion within its long and
tedious hours.
He fought valiantly against such temptations, and instead
surveyed the contents of his modest room, silently nodding approval that his
early attempts to hamper the work of Time were reaping such startling
victories. The landscape viewed from his bed was entirely different from the
previous morning and he smiled as he remembered how he had first imagined the
ruse. Noticing how the earliest, most zealous sunrays had always burst into the
room with the same tiresome punctuality, prodding his exhausted body until his
awakening became as rhythmic as the sunrise itself, he had implemented a
brilliant scheme. His cunning plan had been to move the bed to as many
different places in the room as its size and meagre collection of furniture
might permit. After that, he had lived like a fugitive from the early morning
light, as each day’s boisterous shafts of gold had been forced to search him
out with ever greater difficulty and he had been able to wake only when he felt
like participating in that particular day, rather than by the rude summoning of
Helios.
At first his landlady had protested at the unusual
rearrangement of her furniture before she realised her objections were futile,
after which her irritation lapsed into mere bafflement and she would simply
shrug her shoulders exclaiming something in Spanish about locos ingles.
She similarly hummoured his earnest requests that she might refrain from
assisting the tyrannical work of Time by reminding of him of when. After a
while, it had made her laugh, a wonderful anecdote with which to amuse her friends,
as she recounted the behaviour of her strange foreign tenant. She even gave up
her seat in the kitchen so that if he ever took coffee with her there, he could
sit with his back to the clock, away from the minutes and hours, who Healy
called the evil siblings who marched purposefully around the clock face,
beating an unvarying rhythm upon a drum of ephemerality and always towards his
demise.
Healy’s early years hinted little of such eccentricity, as
his life until his arrival in Havana had otherwise followed a vaguely
conventional theme. A happy childhood spent in a somnolent country village
where the hedgerows, fields-o-gold and huge stone houses wore the
respectability of age, a sense of permanency that looked disapprovingly upon
any step towards ambition or impetuosity. Without the distraction of siblings,
Healy remembered that his sole childhood responsibilities had been to accompany
his curiosity on its daily adventures and to respectfully obey each and every
suggestion that his subversive inner-voice might propose.
He had avoided the company of adults whom he remembered as
always being preoccupied with chores, doing things and hurrying along, with
always wanting a happy moment to end and replacing it instead with something
more practical and definitely less pleasurable. He found them silly and
unimaginative as they never seemed to be as enchanted by the things he
encountered in his day as he had been, and noticed a special tiredness that
clung to adults, which made them melancholic. Later a helpful uncle had
explained to him that this was the burden of life’s responsibilities and duties
and he would one day have to suffer them too. He had never looked forward to
growing up.
Then came school, where his natural dreaminess and a
tendency to rouse his interest only for exploits that he could find magic and
adventure within, meant his early years were not always easy. He was vexed that
precious space had had to be found amongst his treasured thoughts for mirthless
equations and stern-faced facts, whose didactic lectures as to their usefulness
in later life were but a hint at the gloomy utilitarian notion of learning. He
was horrified by adults who peddled the monstrous idea that knowledge was
merely a means to achieving an end, rather than as a glorious discovery in
itself.
He had been taught by a crusty old schoolmaster, a relic who
had been born and lived his entire life in the village, only leaving twice as
far as anyone knew, once, to visit an ill relative, and on a second occasion to
attend his absent father’s funeral. The schoolmaster was a man who had
assimilated the permanency of his surroundings, his grey pallor and stolid
frame finding empathy with the obdurate local stonework that had magnanimously
aged beside him. He had taught Healy and the generations of children in the
same Spartan manner in which he had lived, handling delicate facts with a
solemnity and detachment more usual for an embalmer of dead bodies. It was not
just his fault that Healy had developed a gnawing sense of conflict between
what he was being taught and what he felt he needed to learn.
However, not all of his schooling was a hopeless waste of
dreamtime, for he loved the arrival of new words that he discovered in his
studies, ones that even collaborated in his daydreaming, excitedly describing
and cataloguing his adventures in ever-greater descriptive hues. Craft and arts
were also a revelation as he learnt to instruct his hands to become the
faithful servants of his imagination by way of paints, clays, wood and metal.
He even began to sense in a clumsy, childlike way, how dignifying it was to
transform his thoughts into something solid, even experiencing a sensation that
might have been the joy of generosity in that others might take pleasure in
these creations. Lastly, he had eaten voraciously upon the dusty food of
history, humbled by the immense shadows that long since dead men had cast upon
the present, provoking yet another opportunity to dream as he had wondered as
to the size of shadow he might make.
But daydreaming and imaginative wanderings had left him ill
prepared for the day of expulsion from this untroubled Eden. He had rudely
discovered how everything was different outside the lush walls of his childhood
world and remembered the disorientation he felt as he tried to apply the same
juvenile tools of reasoning, ones he occasionally had used upon the truths and
customs of his youthful adventures, upon the realities of his new adult world,
and found them wholly inadequate. He had begrudgingly absorbed a new lexicon of
responses to life, such as insincerity, manipulation and duplicity, ones that
had been more concentrically entrenched for each mile he ventured forth from
his forests, with each new acquaintance he had made. It tired him
enormously and on many occasions in later years, cowed by the titans named expectation,
duty and fortitude that strode so resolutely across the terrain of
adulthood, he had sought the hidden doorway back to his childish home. To the
place that was covered in an amnesia as thick as moss that led into the
tranquil fields of his childhood, desirous for a brief respite - a second only
he had promised himself- so he could once more taste an exquisite drop of
childish nothingness.
Whiskers and sullenness had announced that adulthood had
arrived, and after acknowledging with great reluctance that it would be a
permanent condition, he had lent some thought to the hazy notions of how he
might be able to earn a living. He briefly fantasised upon the life of a sannyasi, of
having as much courage and integrity as Diogenes, of
anathematizing possession and desire, and living like a savage in his beloved
forest, before his culture officiously stymied the idea and directed him in its
proper way. Suitably chastened, Healy was forced to consider what skills he
actually possessed, what use society might have for him and how hard he might
be willing to work to achieve the painfully vague expectations of life that he
harboured. His parents were predictably adult-like and made harsh and bromide
references to consequence and responsibility, confirming in Healy’s mind the
futility of choosing which one of Hobson’s mares he might ride out to life
upon.
But the indoctrination of his parents and his society were
stronger, and he was forced to listen, forced to accept the mantra of work, earn,
contribute, endure. It made sure Healy tried harder. He spent an inordinate
time debating with himself as to whether it was relevant that any future work
might be enjoyable or meaningful. Whether he might tolerate for any period of
time longer than a rain-shower, or a departing sun –his usual parameters of
attention- what he could commit himself to.
Still, he proudly insisted upon some rules; he had known his
future life must be creative, it must be solitary, it must be dignifying, it
must allow him the scope for ingenuity, it must allow him self-sufficiency. All
these seemed modest demands to make for what would be a lifetimes effort in
pursuit of society’s goals. Reluctantly he had begun to scan the environment for
a manner in which it could be achieved.
Eventually he announced to the horror of his parents that he
would paint. He had been told so many times that he had a talent for drawing
and therefore appealed to –and certainly not for the last time- this endorsement
of others to why he might perform and act in any particular way. He spent
precious months poring over the works of men whom he knew as “Those who had cast
great shadows,” paying special attention to those who had excelled in his
favoured disciplines of reflective contemplation and imaginative escapism. He
studiously analysed their techniques and inspirations, searching for the
eternal secret as to how the artist performs the Eucharistic miracle upon
inanimate form, where through his touch it acquires meaning, life and symbol.
The more Healy looked upon creation, the more it seemed self-evident that this
would be the only opportunity through which he might achieve any manner of
self-mastery, any chance to create a life’s goal and realise his own path towards
it.
An artistic life also seemed a perfect alibi for many of the
maladies and paradoxes of his character. His ill discipline and occasional
indolence might be validated by the whimsical habits of the artist who alone
commanded when the time was ripe for effort. By being an artist, he could
continue to selfishly guard the truths he had first learned in the solitude of
his childhood, ennobling them now as the subjective treasures of a creative
mind, ones that provided the only legitimate vehicle of truth. He could claim
that his natural taciturnity and aloofness were merely the burdens of a
thoughtful character that was unable to articulate itself conventionally. And
most of all, he would no longer need to experience the limitation of word, a
tool that was often so sadly deficient at depicting and describing his
ineffable kaleidoscopic visions.
However, if he had believed that self-expression would
liberate him from much of the mundane and tiresome aspects of life, he was soon
given a sobering lesson. Art required a disciplined application; tools to be
bought, a roof to live and work beneath, an ability to interact with people who
might at least be useful for the transmission of his notoriety. Art also
demanded an erudite philosophy to explain -at least internally - the meaning
that his hands had set forth, as creativity otherwise spoke in torturous
riddles, riddles that would exile him further from his peers, making their
speech an incomprehensible babel to him, and his to them.
Once he had committed himself to this life, he had initially
struggled with the concept of magnanimity and how he might learn to
begrudgingly accept the tatty scrapes of comment other people might offer. How
he had been angry that the words he uttered, those that described the beauties
he thought he alone had discovered, belonged equally to others. How indignant
he felt when he had heard such exquisite words as great or perfect, being
hackneyed and desecrated by people who could never in their miserable lifetimes
devote the emotional effort required to glimpse upon them. But despite these
burdens, he knew he was too selfish to be anything other than a loner.
Healy had thus set forth upon a privileged life of pain and
suffering, one that afforded him the opportunity to sell his most precious,
innermost visions to people who had neither the time nor inclination to sketch
their own view of the world around them. He painted the themes of life that
resonated for him, an abstract, torturous depiction of ideas and thoughts that
haunted his psyche and achieved some measure of success, assuming that success
was measured by other people’s approval, and he had even grown fond of the
concept of receiving money for his work as a form of applause. Eventually he
had felt sufficiently skilled in the science of sociability to enter into
friendships and relationships, in due course trying his guileless hand at love.
And there it might of ended, an inertial life, one that had never cast the
shadows he had once dreamed of making whilst waiting for death in occasionally
pleasant salubrity, until he had his own Pauline moment, one of such
devastating clarity that it demanded what amounted to a re-birth.
It had happened on a cold and gloomy autumnal morning, when
a particularly irascible northern wind rampaged around his expensively
manicured garden, petulantly throwing his girlfriends garden ornaments around
and generally making the day unappetising. He had stood at the window,
punctiliously rearranging the ornate Moroccan daggers that someone had
thoughtlessly pointed in the wrong direction, watching a nearby birch writhe
and wail, its branches clinging frantically to its chattels, the rusting red
and gold leaves that were in constant danger of being torn away by such a
blustery thief.
He had spent much of the morning working through his
repertoire of pained facial expressions, exaggerated body movements and
plaintive utterances as he waited for something to motivate him to action,
something to spur the first qualitative idea of the day. Nothing seemed
to be working as his apathy fed upon the inclement and miserable climes,
casting his mood into darkness indistinguishable from the clouds that hung
above his home. The rain fell with Biblical force, yet still nothing had
inspired him, and Healy had felt furrows upon on his brow, ones as deep and
regular as the corrugated roof of his battered garden shed, forming in bleak
anticipation of a wasted day in his studio, worse, another wasted day of life.
He had looked over at the breakfast table, appraising the
scene and secretly hoping that some nugget of activity might offer him
diversion. He had re-read a letter from his gallery, one that had
reminded him of his obligation to finish more paintings, unctuously suggestive
that they, the gallery, would prefer more work in the same style as his
previous collection, a collection that had been the most financially successful
to date. Healy had felt it was a request that debased him as an artist,
treating his creativity as though it was some industrial tool, an idea that had
only contributed to the morning’s irritability.
He looked over at his girlfriend happily ensconced at the
table, feet pulled up beneath her and sipping a milky coffee that had left a
white moustache on her lip as she read the newspaper without comment or
discernible interest. He had made his way to the table and gave the newspaper a
cursory glance at which moment a particularly incendiary headline had grabbed
his attention. Healy had rudely snatched the page from his girlfriend, who
after two turbulent years together had become accustomed to such histrionics
when he was bored and listened indifferently as he scanned the story whilst
uttering a well-rehearsed litany of complaints.
She had sipped her coffee and mulled over the different
types of jams on the table, confident that Healy’s foul mood would pass as
assuredly as the weather that howled outside. Healy had cursed some more and
demanded she acknowledge that the story merely confirmed he had been right all along,
that his observation that bad governance, idiotic thinking and a rotten culture
had wrought misery upon the entire country and its people. She lazily concurred
as she sipped more coffee and lent across the table to tear off another piece
of croissant that had retained a little warmth due to her wrapping it in one of
the napkins she had bought the month before.
In the absence of anything of particular, or personal
interest on that morning, Healy, as he was want to do, had voluntarily accepted
the tribulations of mankind as his individual responsibility. He remembered
that he had tried to alert his girlfriend as to the imminent collapse of
western civilization and that she had answered with some anodyne response that
he shouldn’t let such things upset him, which Healy had felt was a wholly
inadequate response to such cataclysmic events. He had admonished her for such
apathy, warning her that the time for irresoluteness was over. Everything, everything he had
shouted, had repercussions and she, they, everyone, would have to live amongst
the smashed ruins of a culture that had been perverted by greed, sloth,
mediocrity, formulaic plagiarism and mindless banality. He had demanded a more
passionate response.
Healy remembered that he had ranted to such an extent that
his girlfriend’s usually docile mien had worn an expression of alarm. He had
spoken of his hatred -yes, that divine loathing that required every bit as much
industry and dedication as its saccharine cousin, love- of the presumed
architects of everything he thought was wrong. A litany of vandals, criminals
and miscreants who forged such a fetid zeitgeist were named and maligned.
A generation of politicians who genuinely believed their interference in your
life would be beneficial, business leaders who somehow imagined the entire
ineffable human drama could be viewed through the paradigm of possession and a
flow-chart. Educationalists who prepared the future generations merely as
economic foot-soldiers rather than curious, enlightened individuals. Nauseating
celebrities who were an accurate barometer of the decline of not just a nation,
but of a species, loathsome advertisers who were willing to peddle anything
regardless of the superfluous nature of the product and the misery caused by
unprincipled desire. With misanthropic zeal, Healy placed everyone within his
dystopian gun sights.
Healy had stood ominously above his girlfriend and demanded
that she share his disgust at the manner in which modern living was conducted.
He had spoken of his embarrassment that if the quotidian news, full of
sanctimony, redistributionary malice and veneration of averageness were the
culmination of centuries of conflict -conflicts of principle by comparison-
that had sought to curtail the silliness of priests, the bombast of princes and
loathsomeness of demagogues, then he concluded there was something drastically
wrong.
Healy remembered how he had walked menacingly around the
breakfast table, a piece of toast in one hand, a knife in the other,
oratorically addressing himself to anything other than his terrified
girlfriend. He had invited her to mourn the untimely deaths of Faith and Shame, noble
ideas slain by an assassin’s hand, two rather private and priceless concepts,
one’s that had moderated people’s selfishness and had only been replaced by
licentiousness. The new mantra, shouted Healy, was Fun, Self-Expression and
Getting-Ahead, and it was a doctrine
that had no end of sponsors. Healy had flung the newspaper down for the third
time. He cursed the hacks who slavishly repeated the lies of politicians, ones
who used faux compassion as nothing other than a tool for saving their jobs and
generating unmerited applause. He railed against financial neophytes who spoke
earnestly of prices and spiralling costs, though seemed ignorant of the fact
that the word ’value’
had been hijacked long before by a shameless clique of criminals who had
successfully detached it from any tangible meaning. In a moment of blissful,
deranged ecstasy, Healy had cursed the leaders and commentators who had flung
themselves and their followers upon an altar inscribed with the canonical text
of Progress
and Accumulation,
before finally condemning the whole experiment of societal living and mutual
cooperation as a waste of both emotional and creative resources. Breathless
after such a tirade, he had looked upon the dreary rewards of a bourgeois
existence, his charming home, the pretty breakfast crockery, his blandly
satiated girlfriend, the beautifully packaged teas and jams that were his
auroral delectations, and Healy had simply asked; Why?
His poor girlfriend, a pretty thing who was otherwise
wonderfully competent in the elemental requirements of a relationship, was
ashen faced, her handsome mouth hung open. Healy gulped, mumbled an apology as
he mechanically placed his cutlery on the side of his plate, before hurrying
out the room. He had even terrified himself on that particular morning. He had
fled to his studio, fled to a solitudinous space within himself, a morally
sterile environment away from the contamination of other people’s ideas and
values, a place in which he could perform as brutal a vivisection upon his life
as he might bare.
Had there been an event that marked the Rubicon wondered
Healy, one to make him so detached, so antagonistic towards the society and
culture that had reared him? He loved and admired so much about his culture. He
devoured western literature and art, was in awe of the genius of its composers,
performers and artisans. He was fascinated by its thinkers, humbled by its
military leaders and occasionally impressed by its kings and leaders. But
latent within this richness was the travesty of the present. All had taken
silver; all were culpable in the betrayal of such a glorious heritage. Healy,
like most people had chosen comfort before integrity and was therefore equally
damnable. But his desire for comfort had been incongruous with his inability to
fit in and empathize with other people.
His first confession on that infamous morning, when all was
swept away, was that he was too selfish to live in society, that he had been
unwilling to ever share a single one of the finite moments that would be his
life upon the idiotic, yet wholly legitimate, concerns and desires of others.
He had taken a sheet of paper and written Selfish, at the
top of the page, followed by Unsympathetic
below it. He had vowed not to leave the studio until all was revealed.
He had clambered high above the inconsequential aspects of
his existence and from such a vantage point had viewed the entirety of his
past, present and probable future as a congruent, seamless whole. He had hidden
his face in shame after admitting to his judge-conscience that his life had
been one that drifted aimlessly upon a crude, deterministic stream that bore
few torrents, one that was happily nourished on a few meagre scrapes of independence
that were his acquisitions and ostensible self-employment, as though they were
the only litmus of autonomy. His humiliation turned to contempt as the
narrative illustrated in cruelly bleak imagery the compromises he had welcomed
into his heart despite the oft-silenced protests of his amour-prope.
To the alarm of his girlfriend, he had spent a couple of
days in such a wilderness, before reluctantly returning to a sensible world he
no longer felt connected with, a physical return though now accompanied by a
dark morosity that was thereafter his permanent attendant. From that moment on,
anomie prowled around his mood with apt felinity, appearing and disappearing
with stealthy irregularity. His nemesis, Time, was even
concerned as to his behaviour and contrived to placate him, reminding Healy
that he had no idea as to the length of yarn Lachesis had allotted him,
entreating him that he might not be panicked into ever-greater absurdities as
he already bore the wounds of vain regrets and unfinished projects.
And so, for the next few weeks Healy had wrestled with a
discontent that hid its face and refused to be named, all the while his
superego patiently waiting for the spark that would detonate the old life he
knew was unworthy, but which fear of newness still protected. His
dissatisfaction finally coalesced around the arrival of a single grey hair that
appeared audaciously and unsolicited above his left ear, which he espied one
morning whilst shaving, a cruel branding that whispered the terrifying news of
his mortality. News of his forthcoming demise demanded some kind of urgent and
irrational response. He only knew that his unhappy life could not be allowed to
persist any longer. He tried to calm his boisterous emotions as accusations and
recriminations howled their charges like angry plaintiffs. He rejected Despair as she
was only temporarily effective and was anyway unedifying, and calmed the
furious voices of Fault
and Blame as
unhelpful in his present state; he nodded respectfully towards Faith but
recoiled in horror at her terms. Instead he stood meekly before Destiny and asked
of her what was to be done.
She rebuked him for his previous infidelity, though
admittedly in a gentle manner as she had as much interest in Healy as much as
any man. Tired and exhausted, he sat before Destiny and with
a clarity of vision, one by virtue of her foresight, she explained to Healy in
enigmatic and veiled detail the glorious future that he might entertain up to
the moment of his inevitable death.
His first task had been to destroy every single rule and
custom, every apparent word of wisdom that he had inherited and lived beneath
the tutelage of since his first awareness. Under such instruction, he had built
a funeral pyre at the highest point within his consciousness and pilled every
old truth upon it, knowing they would have to perish before he could
authenticate any of them anew. God was first to leave, guilty of divinizing
anything that was good within Healy, as though virtue or goodness were gifts
that He alone might allocate rather than be rewards one earned from performing
life’s adventures well. All others had soon followed; Tolerance, that
pitiful notion that insisted we endure another’s poor behaviour and call that
acquiescence a virtue, rather than demanding that each other’s acts are those
we would wish were done to us in the first place. Sympathy and Compassion;
harlots that permitted man to gain merit without skill or labour were expelled
with similar haste. Duty
too was ejected, an apologist for any number of unspeakable miseries as it
demanded unquestionable obedience to someone else’s truth. Temperance was an
irritating old maid who was incognizant of the exquisite fruit of intoxication.
Healy would have liked to see the deserved expulsion of the conceited duo, Reason and
Rationality, whose smug and monstrous belief that by adhering to colourless
and stale formulas one could find meaning to life had cast a sterile cloak upon
many-a-life. He had merely put them on notice that in future they would be the
handmaidens of every delicious ad hominem
demand. He basked in this glorious midday, this Great Midday that bore no
shadows.
Inevitably, friendships, loves and social ties had wilted
under the ruthless blows of such lucidity, as Healy’s victims, Tolerance, Duty,
Compassion, et al, had been the very twine which socialized man, permitting
him to endure another. But Healy had wanted rid of the company of every man and
woman, of the very others he had begun to perceive nauseously, the others who
were responsible for electing the idiots, creating the rotten culture, for
promoting the values, for erecting the walls that curtailed his ability to live
the life that he had promised himself. Hell really was others! And with every
departure he felt the lifting of the debilitating debt of fealty, of the
debilitating emotion of possession, and once gone, once he was alone, Healy
began to feel free, to feel colossal.
After such a nihilistic destruction of his past, he started
the arduous task of rebuilding his self. Conscious of the need to break with
everything from a life that was unacceptable, he started scouring the globe for
a new place to call home, a place that his untrustworthy memory could not
appeal to. He sought a new environment of exciting stimulations, a place
where he might live cheek by jowl with new ideas no matter how heinous the
ideas might be. He wanted to share a home amongst raw emotions that still
managed to provoke sublime irrationality, with earnest people whose slowness
was considered a blessing, people deaf to the threats and lamentations of Time,
whose bastard children, precision and efficiency, might
provoke equal bafflement.
In view of such criteria, and after studying the chaotic
places around the globe, places where the State was less ambitious, or at least
more indolent and bovine, he had found himself in Old Havana. Upon an island
where much of modernity had been uninvited, amid the promise of an entropic
State whose employees, he hoped, were too demoralized by years of repeating
mindless slogans to care as to whether he might over-stay his visa.
Healy returned to the present. The rude mattress fingered
his naked body, its lumpy fabric unresponsive to his appeal for calm. He
brought the cigarette back to his lips and felt the filter relax upon the most
parsimonious of smiles that had broken upon his face as the imprecise scent of
his sometime girlfriend’s perfume had conjured up her recollection. He
remembered that she had been there the night before, that they had argued and that
she had left. He struggled to remember the cause of yet another fight, but its
triviality cast a cloak of amnesia upon the episode. He drew deeply on his
cigarette, the strong tobacco smell rendering her olfactory presence as
pitifully brief as he imagined her emotional one was upon his heart. Healy
boasted vaingloriously to himself that he was self-sufficient, that he had so
many things to keep him occupied, that he was so desirable in a country where
everyone was for sale. He told himself he needn’t think of loneliness. Healy
extinguished the third timepiece of the day.
He glanced at the scribbled notes that lay beside the book.
He had written sometime before that Spinoza’s god was pantheistic -present in
all matter-and recalled the brief exhilaration he had felt at the notion of the
divine being within him. He had wondered how Spinoza, one of the supreme
ethicists the West had ever produced, might have dealt with the perplexities of
modern life.
Spinoza imagined all individuals and separate
bodies as being merely adjectival, terms that facilitated speech and
understanding, but ignorant of the eternal whole. It was a concept, thought
Healy, though literarily beautiful, even theoretically attractive, was
practically redundant. Rather than an abstract idea, one that can easily be
condemned, how wondered Healy, would Spinoza have dealt with the actuality of
injustice? The fact that man lived in solitude, that the individual lived and
felt alone. Only the individual could really feel the elation or pain that
would be their private responses to the things they saw around them. Spinoza
had felt that the anomalies of individual beings would be nullified by
eternity, an infinity of time that rendered all aberrations meaningless by the
final purpose of the universe.
Yet tears really did flow across the faces of
injured people. Emaciated bodies due to evil men using starvation as a tool of
governance were real and unendurable. Living in a society that presents an
idealized image of what a ‘good’ life should
entail, but then that same society flagrantly neglecting to arm its citizens
with the necessary tools of achieving that particular form of ‘good’. An
individual felt every ill of existence with the greatest clarity, the greatest
honestly. Epicurus had presented a simple formula; justice consisting of the
ability to act so as not to have occasion to fear another man’s resentment. It
was that simple, yet man had seemingly lived in opposition to such a truth.
Healy re-read his notes which were as chaotic
and unfathomable as his madly fluctuating moods. He had written in complete
contrast to the sympathetic earlier passage, that ‘assuming the validity of
societal living, at what point does one persons dereliction of duty, a duty
towards self-actualization, of entelechy, make
that person unfit to be a recipient of aid and compassion?’ He had further
scribbled ‘The ethic of reciprocity has a long and illustrious history, with
virtually every culture acknowledging it as a crucial element of collective
living.’
Luke and Mathew are explicit, yet there is no
decisive conclusion as to the fate of miscreants. What worldly obligation do we
have to people who are unwilling to return a good deed to one’s peers? If
common values are the only language that unites man, the only thing that makes
one man comprehensible to another, then people who refuse to accept even the
most basic principles must necessarily be excluded from society. Even then
society was unsure what to do, or even how to identify the offenders within its
mist. Was anti-social behaviour a flaw of the individual, or a flaw of the
society that gave birth to that person? The evidence was confusing and open to
many ideological explanations.
Healy wondered whether Spinoza had ever looked
up from polishing his lenses to see the poverty of an individual life whose
duration was unendurably long and painful and was caused by the absence of
justice. Justice had to be real and tangible, attainable for that particular
person, and attainable during that person’s life. To suggest that the suffering
of today was the necessary compost from which the utopia of tomorrow might
arise was grotesque.
Healy flicked through his notebook. A central
theme of Spinoza’s philosophy was his earnest appeal that each man should
substitute negative thoughts and their subsequent debilitating emotions with
more positive ones; instead of feeling hate towards someone, show love or
magnanimity. Perfectly admirable and certainly a recipe for a better world,
thought Healy, though surely the trade would have to be one of similar values
or intensities, as the darker emotions of anger and loathing were obviously far
more vivid and powerful than insipid compassion, or unedifying pity? Healy
re-read the scribbled notes from a previous musing; probably suffering the
intoxication of an indulgent audience, when he had madly scrawled that he would
be unable to exchange an exquisite revulsion, for such a paltry remuneration as
a smile.
However, in the days, or weeks since his
Spinozarean revelation he had occasionally attempted his techniques, rummaging
through the treasure chest in which he kept his happiest memories to find an
unsophisticated happiness or infantile joy from his childhood. And whenever
confronted with any of the litany of tribulations that life was heir to, he
would look amongst these souvenirs to find a good and hold it
up triumphantly, like a head of Medusa before his pains, then watch as they
would flee and he could bask in the warm glow of ephemeral contentment. But
they had never been properly vanquished and simply came back at the earliest
opportunity to torture not only his waking moments, but his restless nights
too.
Healy thought it was impossible to ignore the
insatiable human appetite for redress. It was inherent within the
western-Judeo-Christian heritage, from Anaximander through Enoch to Mathew
there was an explicit eschatological threat that was issued by the
self-proclaimed righteous. They, “the elect’, or “righteous” had themselves
defined “the good” and decided who would live in ever-lasing bliss and who were
the reprobate to be condemned to ever-lasting torment. They had embraced the
whole notion of free will, a terrible deceit, simply so blame could be assigned
and punishment administered. All had failed as miserably as Healy to embrace
Spinoza and his ideal of magnanimity. Thankfully, thought Healy there were good
people on the earth, one of whom was his girlfriend, a magnanimous being who
implored him to love her, to love life, to love their life. She
had challenged him to love other people, to see the good that people often did,
to understand that for there to be goodness, there needed to be good people.
So he had promised, despite his skepticism and
reservations, to continue trying Spinoza’s methods whenever he encountered the
phantoms that dwelt within the cavernous depths of his unconsciousness. He
would find a good to combat his ills; his lack of empathy, his inability to
love another human being, the absence of any faith and failure to understand
the simplest of life‘s rituals. Even the terrible, vast abyss in the center of
his being that should have been filled with meaning.
Healy lit another cigarette and inhaled the full
measure of its amiable warmth as he re-read his notes. He tried valiantly to
reconstruct the train of thought upon which he had travelled the previous
night; a construction he triumphantly imagined might decipher the thrust of
Spinoza’s cosmology and whether it had any useful application upon his own
life. Spinoza had viewed life, history, objects and one’s selves as
indissoluble parts of a seamless eternal whole, rejecting the arbitrary lines
and boundaries that man had constructed around things as though it were
arbitrary lines that gave substantiality to everything.
It was an idea from antiquity, an idea that Form
meant things,
as only form might confer substantiality upon an unruly mass of matter. Matter
could only achieve ‘thinghood’
by possessing a defined shape and Healy admitted that he had too easily
accepted such a dusty hypothesis about forms, one that delineated
matter and ideas and facilitated the way one saw the world, saw it in easily
distinguishable pieces so that we might lazily comprehend its nature. It was a
simple case of man’s unimaginative desire to hold his own possessions closer to
his breast so that he might be able to pronounce with greater clarity the
ghastly word mine, a word that had had such an inglorious history.
Healy had strained to conceptualize Spinoza’s universe and
sweep of history, it’s beautiful idea of unity and harmony, and his own role,
at once both great and infinitesimal, as both subject and object, amongst its
wholeness. He had found himself in a pleasant dream state where he felt himself
drifting blissfully towards henosis and
luxuriated in
the temptation of being part of Spinoza’s erudite, eternal whole, whose
recurrent cycle of events made the notions of both time and death obsolete,
removing the significance of we, me, they.
Forever would be a concept that everyone and everything could participate
within, and Healy
remembered briefly caressing the word immortality; a
word that promised an explanation for the inconsequential life he had lived and
as a panacea for the terror he sometimes felt in anticipation of the eternal
nothingness that would be death. But as so often had happened in his life, he
had failed the test of faith, the sympathetic contemplation that was the
prerequisite of belief had vanished as he recoiled at the thought of sharing
his life experiences with an undeserving humanity. Of receiving a greater part
than he deserved for all the wickedness that man had displayed since his
expulsion from Eden.
He had drawn a larger than necessary question mark after the
sentence, testament to the skepticism he had felt at the above statement.
Healy gave a large sigh at the thought of the hard work
ahead and gratefully accepted a momentarily lapse of concentration as his
attention was caught by patch of mold that was creeping slowly over a large
corner of the ceiling. The house in which he stayed would have once belonged to
one of Havana’s wealthy families. Fifty years of indifference, Communist lies
and cobwebs had not been able to extirpate the smell of privilege that had been
crafted into the balusters and ornate ceilings, and Healy wondered whether the
original family had wallowed in their luxury with sufficient insensitivity to
have provoked the equally loathsome revolutionaries into terrifying revenge. He
doubted if any of the islands elites had felt their responsibilities extended
any further than Baudelaire’s recipe of calm, ordre, luxe et volupte,
and if so, had they not deserved their fate of now living amongst the
eviscerated carcasses of their once grand homes. Worse, inherited by barbarians
who desecrated them with witless propaganda in the windows in place of fine
silk curtains and unsightly clothing that hung proudly over the cast-iron
railings, whose weaving patterns decorated the balconies from which the rich had
once viewed injustice. He wondered whether justice, in its imperfect, clumsy
way had finally been served.
Healy flicked a winding serpentine ash trail that had grown
from the forgotten cigarette onto the floor, and wondered what obligations, if
any, were inherent with the privilege of wealth. Assuming that notions such as fair and just would
forever attract derision, then the bare minimum the wealthy owed mankind was
that their immoderation might be conducted with exquisite taste, sensitivity,
and aesthetic devotion. That was the litmus, thought Healy, for while the rich
might have the legitimacy of history on their side -as history had always
tolerated injustice and the rich had always trampled with arrogant disdain over
the bodies of the oppressed- then they should have had the good grace to
whisper to the poor that their decadence was genuinely in the service of a God
whose name was Beauty, whose diaphanous image even they bowed humbly before.
But Healy doubted whether the islands rich had shown any
such humility. True, they had lived amongst some of the most stunning
architecture in the new world, but they had shown as little consideration as
their peers from the Old World. Noblesse oblige
should have demanded that the privileged not only lived well, but also lived
well with panache, an aestheticism worthy of Huysmans’ Des Esseintes. At
least he seemed to have a sense of obligation, reasoned Healy.
As the nineteenth century toiled forth, and whilst other
Latin-American countries had thrown off the yoke of monarchical servitude and
religious backwardness, Cuba was given the motto La Siempre Fidelisima
Isla by the Spanish Crown, as dreadful a sobriquet as one might ever be
awarded, mused Healy mirthlessly. Eventually the national hero, José Marti,
invaded the island, was quickly killed and immortalized, but not before
provoking Spanish soldiers into killing over a quarter of a million civilians,
mostly in the prototype of the twentieth century’s most hideous and iconic
monument; the Concentration Camp. Within a few years, the US battleship Maine was sunk in
Havana Bay, and the yellow press -not for the last time in history- managed to
incite an equally gullible President and public into war. The Spanish were
roundly beaten, a few of their possessions, Guam, Puerto Rico and The
Philippines were bought by the victors for twenty million dollars, without much
reflection as to whether whole peoples, their lands and homes could be
considered as mere chattels that might be exchanged as rewards of martial
aptitude.
With all sorts of caveats, the US reluctantly granted
independence to Cuba, which subsequently fumbled its first election thereby
encouraging its powerful neighbour to intercede. Such an inauspicious start was
merely a prelude to a half-century of benign oppression, as clueless oligarchs
stumbled through balmy decades intoxicated by their own pomposity, all the
while encouraging similarly repulsive priests to murmur words of consolation to
the hordes of the God’s invisibles.
Mobsters arrived from the north, built casinos and brazenly
held a conference at the legendry Hotel Nacional
preaching an equally mendacious psalm that money did not need to be earned and
could be gotten by force, or luck, a commodity that until then had eluded the
island. Eventually their excesses, the priestly lies and class-based serfdom
broke the patience of the people.
The ghastly clerics had packed away their vaudeville
rituals, their stale two thousand year old moralities and went in search of
greater ignorance, the gangsters moved from the casinos to the government
buildings and the islands iniquities were bartered for the malignant deception
of socialism. Healy gave an imperceptible shrug as he wondered what culpability
an individual, or even worse, an individual’s descendent, had for the
misfortunes of history. Was it Great Men that forged events wondered Healy, or
were they themselves like helpless twigs upon the turbulent waters of a river
of causal forces? And if so, if every event of
history was caused by the inexorable forces of its precedent moment then surely
we received the society, the culture, and form of governance that we deserved,
as we were the sons and daughters of our parents. Men and women as members of
societies, as Rousseau’s General Will by
their strivings and yearnings, were that
tumultuous river of causal force. There was no denying each and every man’s
culpability.
This was how Healy had spent so much of his inconsequential
life. Giving time and effort to every inane and trivial thought that came
along. So many viewpoints clambering for attention, he gave them all a fair
hearing. He pondered and thought, dissected and mused, asked a million
questions and received no conclusive answer. Regardless of his fatigue, or
incomprehension, the questioning never ceased, and despite the ventriloquial
quality, Healy had always been unclear as to who might be the true author of
such rude inquiry. He had always done it he conceded. Always asked why, and though
he had initially been indignant that this inquiring voice had sought to disturb
the orderliness of a life that coveted neither the transcendental, nor specious
meaning, he continued to indulge his musings. The bouts of examination
continued until Healy felt obliged to look for enlightenment, pleading the
assistance of long-dead authors to shed light and meaning upon the uneventful
events, the unremarkable responses and non- monuments that had been the
landscape of his life.
Healy looked at the piles of books that lay scattered around
the bed; books he had hoped would provide some direction to a life he knew was
floundering in a miasmic broth, one without reason, or purpose. He had been in
Havana for over two years, had poured over the pages of knowledge, studying
like an exegete the wisdom that oozed from every sheet, but was still no wiser
nor closer to eternal truth. All the authors had offered equally plausible, yet
almost always divergent paths to truth. Healy had not even perfected the art of
meditative thinking, and at times had even begun to fear the inactivity he had
once cherished, as the achingly quiet moments often lapsed into a gruesome
post-mortem upon every unedifying moment of his life.
How many days and nights had he peered down upon his
existence, watching an unfinished performance whose characters acted with
restless frustration, recoiling in horror as a pack of wolf-like creatures
named impermanence,
anonymity and futility ate
carnivorously upon the carcass of his non-achievement? Each forgettable episode
of his life had opened, revealed itself and closed without casting any shadows
or having any consequences. True, he had always loved indulging his senses, his
intellect and imagination, had been grateful of a sensitivity that permitted
himself to feel and love, to smell and taste, to think and imagine from a
rarefied altitude, but from all this he had created nothing that would outlive
him. Death would come one day and Healy wanted more than anything, that from
his puny body he might cry out and be heard by someone in this enormous
universe, that not only had he once lived, but that the monument before them
bore his name and told them why he had lived.
Healy smiled again, his fourth that morning, as he thought
of the kind of benediction he sought and the likelihood that it would exile him
even further from the company of his fellow men. The smile immediately
dissolved from his face to be replaced by an anguished grimace as he thought of
the terrifyingly powerful words ‘depart from me ye cursed’ and
instinctively pulled the sheets closer around him. As though Mathew’s narration
of God’s wrath was intended solely against him, for was his crime of excessive
pride – the desire to be self-sufficient- not so equally conceited? His muscles
tensed as he remembered how he had reacted to the initial realization that the
life he had accepted from destiny would be truly solitary. He had panicked,
climbing to the highest peaks of his consciousness to cry out loud that he had
not chosen this conceit, this penitential isolation, that it was loneliness
itself that had actually chosen him, as though by some wicked deterministic
trick. He had prostrated himself before this terror and promised to abide by
the rules of society if only society would let him back into its bosom. He had
so much wanted to belong.
But his courage had eventually returned and he had dutifully
risen to the challenge of the existence that he had been allotted, his dignity
appalled at the notion of a lifetimes hiding behind an inherited truth, or a
cowardly deterministic explanation. No, he had accepted the privilege of being
independent and would accept whatever consequences there might be. He vowed to
make the episodes of his life begin with “I” and that the tapestry of his
existence would be embroidered solely with the rich threads of volition and
choice. He had trembled in admiration at Satan’s defiant assertion of
self-sufficiency: Non servium and promised that he would equally not
serve. Not serve truths, whether social, cultural, or religious, that he
himself had not first validated.
The first few weeks had been anticlimactic. No text existed
as to how he might proceed and he therefore rejected all contact apart from the
necrophilous company of his mentors, unsure as to whether the remotest wish for
living company would represent a form of dependency that might shatter his
resolve. He had rarely risen before dark and had spent his days reading and
re-reading the score of books that had accompanied him into exile, dissecting
the words and attempting to mine the deepest caverns of their meaning. He had
staggered in wonder amongst the totemic ideas of history, some that had
afforded no place for God, and in the theatre of his mind, had indulged in a
celebratory orgy of vices at having consigned his earlier religiosity to a
childish period of his life, an episode that was embarrassing for its
immaturity and fearfulness. He no longer dreaded a god that would pry into his
life, no longer felt shame and guilt that his ignoble deeds and thoughts had
been viewed and damned. Healy was an enthusiastic pupil and gave everyone his
or her chance. He was prepared to listen to every great thinker, writer or poet
who had had the courage to ask why?
A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts.
“Healy”?
It was the owner of the house where he lodged. They had had
a passionless affair some time after his arrival, he motivated by nothing more
than a cursory inspection of his new symbiotic conditions, she, he assumed, by
a belief that it was a courtesy foreigners expected of their hosts. It had been
interrupted when her husband had come back from his work at one of the costal
resorts, before formally having had a stake driven through its lustful heart
when Healy had started to bring home his own Cuban catch. The relationship was
now one of awkward glances, perfunctory greetings and pecuniary timeliness.
“Senor Healy, do want you breakfast”?
He avoided taking meals in the house which were additional
to his rent, not because of the exorbitant price she charged for any product
that she and her husband didn’t care for, nor the sordidness of their memories
that weighed heavily upon their infrequent meetings, but simply because she was
an awful cook. When the government permitted a handful of residences to operate
as guesthouses, these new entrepreneurs were unencumbered by any notion of
customer satisfaction. A whole vocabulary of phrases that the West had invented
to offer signposts for businesspersons as to the satisfactoriness of his
product had been left unlearnt, replaced instead by an inept execution of any
service, unclothed by the language of good and bad.
“No, gracias” replied
Healy towards the door as he stubbed out his latest cigarette into a pile of
butts that lay chaotically in a hand-cast saucer, one which his landlady had
left beside his bed, probably in some clumsy attempt at decoration, which Healy
had insensitively used as an ashtray, the latest addition merely disturbing the
heap, causing it to spew-out its fetid staleness.
The interruption provoked him into action and Healy threw
off the bed sheets in an exaggerated display of eagerness to begin the new day,
and lurching on still sleep-ridden legs he stumbled towards the chest of
drawers that housed his meagre belongings. He grabbed his wash kit and towel
and opened the bedroom door. Conscious of his nakedness, he smiled slyly as he
caught sight of his landlady looking covetously upon him as he entered the
bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot water was a rarity, especially at the
hours he awoke, and he suffered his customary moment of trepidation as he
braced himself for the imminent chastisement of a cold shower.
He gasped as the icy water lashed his weak and pampered
body, and proceeded with improper haste to conclude the ritual of bathing. His
memory, as was oft inclined, mischievously conjured recollections of the
salubrious baths he had taken whilst in the West, where a leisurely hour might
be spent with smokes and a newspaper. Exiting only, once his skin resembled an
ashen prune before immersing himself in the luxuriant softness of a towel and
dressing gown he might have had the foresight to have lain upon the heater an
hour before. These unspeakable memories lay in wait for him at all moments of
the day, ready to ambush his attempts at Spartan solitude and remind him of an
incarnation he had vowed to forget. He had marvelled at how Saint Jerome had
entered his hermitage in search of truth after renouncing a life of superficial
luxury, accompanied only with his library of Cicero and his desire to reflect
upon the meaning of his life. Healy had promised himself that whoever claimed
his soul, whether it might be religion, aestheticism, rationalism, or even
communism, that he would attempt the same devotional service to it that the
good Doctor had shown towards his beliefs.
He straightened the mirror that had made the face opposite
stare at him in a quirky, lop-sided way and allowed the razor to wander across
his face without the slightest hint of menace. Healy looked at the face that
filled the mirror in front of him. Its skin was not only a bronze colour, but
had started to stretch thinly across its bony frame, a sign of his advancing
years. His hair was long and evidently unfamiliar with grooming as it sprawled
in a dozen different directions whilst the mouth around which the razor skated,
was large though often pursed and tense. The blue laconic eyes that gazed back
at him could still on occasion sparkle and administer warmth and appreciation
to those on which they settled, but were of late so often lugubrious. In all,
it was a face that might be considered attractive.
Dressing was as quick and simple as usual thanks to the
brevity of his wardrobe. He had arrived with two pairs of jeans, one pair of
sneakers and a pair of shoes that he kept in case he had to appear in front of
the authorities to explain why he had over-stayed his visa. The only concession
to his previous fondness for beautiful things was the dozen shirts that hung
like sentinels guarding the memory of a consumerist life where temptation had
hung in every shop window. It occasionally caused him distress as though
indulging in a recidivist act of deviancy, but he really loved his shirts. Once
dressed, he grabbed his satchel, checked the contents; crayons, notebook,
cigarettes and a copy of Borges from whom he presently sought enlightenment,
slung it over his shoulder and left the room.
Healy walked through the passageway that led into the main
house and found his landlady in company with another woman whom he recognized
as their next-door neighbour. He stopped by the daily paper that was open on
the console and scanned a few stories on the international page, automatically
decoding the Orwellian text so that he might gauge a scrap of outside news. He
walked into the room proper and found himself assailed by the hostile gaze of
the houseguest. She must have realised the monstrous appearance of her face, as
at once the amorphous contours of her cruel mouth altered shape for a fleeting
second to offer him an insincere greeting. She possessed the kind of ugliness
that suggested a lifetime’s dedication to bitterness, envy and suspicion,
though it wasn’t only her face that scared Healy. In the few times that they
had met, he had always been particularly terrified by her hands, for though
they were ostensibly feminine, being decorated with painted nails and adorned
by jewellery, they could easily, with a greater opportunity he suspected, be
hands that lovingly caressed instruments to inflict torture and pain.
With psychopathic ease, she returned to the diatribe against
what sounded like every other person in their street, beginning again to wave
her claw-like hands like the conductor of some hideous operatic performance,
her passion lifting her to a crescendo of malignant denouncements. She spat out
the last few words before her terrifying schizoid character struck out her
little finger and serenely lent forward to drink the tea in front of her that
Healy recognized was served in his landlady’s best china.
A chilly silence, one that has known the presence of evil,
swept through the room and a few moments passed before the petrified objects of
the house felt it safe again to breathe.
Appropriately, she held a significantly trivial post for the
government; trivial in that it offered no plausible purpose to anyone’s lives,
significant in that her position represented yet another harness upon which to
yoke her people. Healy had often noticed, not just in Cuba, but in all
countries that tolerated the creation of positions of power without merit, how
such posts were inevitably filled by people incognizant with the notion of
personal liberty. People who were wholly oblivious to the fact that the
majority of life’s most satisfying acts could be carried out voluntarily by the
individual, or at least in tandem with a freely chosen partner, though
definitely unaided by any institution. People like the wretched woman before
Healy hated the idea of others taking control of their own lives because they
would cease to be needy victims, or simply that the hag and others like her,
lacked the courage to do so for their own lives.
Healy congratulated himself, admitting that although he was
a sworn misanthrope he didn’t hate his fellow man as much as the woman before
him obviously did. Denying someone the right to take responsibility for his
life was possibly the foulest deed that one man could inflict upon another and Healy
thought it fitting that the woman smiling insincerely at him that morning was
an agent of such cruelty. Her husband was likewise a minor official and
between them they conducted with predatory skill, every mendacious trick known
to bureaucrats to create for themselves as comfortable a life as was possible
on this Laputan paradise, whilst simultaneously erecting as many obstacles upon
the paths of everyone else so that their pitiful status might not be
threatened. Both were too lazy or stupid to be true ideologues.
His landlady rose from the sofa and gestured to Healy that
she wished to speak with him privately. She led him past the print copy of an
English hunt scene that hung incongruously on the wall, one that Healy had
often smiled upon as he passed, its figures and a life of privilege they
represented being fifth-columnists in such a workers’ paradise. They entered
the small courtyard at the center of the house and were at once accosted by the
stale odours from the previous night’s balmy excesses and the stirring noises
of a city still in the process of waking. They took their places on a decrepit
wooden bench that crumbled in the silent shade of the courtyards only other
inhabitant, an old lemon tree who on warm festal evenings had treated Healy to
kisses from a citric zephyr breath, which she softly exhaled from the center of
the house. On this particular morning, with matriarchal charm she administered
such duties as dispensing coolness and privacy to all around her.
His landlady was named Christina, though he had reverted to
calling her Senora
Salas as the name Christina had been bathed in the paroxysms of lust. Healy allowed
her to take her place on the bench, had sat down himself and then watched as
she moved closer to him, sitting close enough
that he felt the warmth of her femininity, its pulse threatening the
equilibrium of this cool, still space. He joylessly drank in her evocative body
fragrances and silently cursed his recalcitrant memory that reminded him
immediately of one particularly loveless tryst upon this very spot. On that
occasion, the night had shrouded their reticence, permitting only the moon and
stars to peer upon them with voyeuristic delight as they had fumbled together
with animal greed.
“Healy, I need your help”, started his landlady without any
introductory platitudes, her face bearing a painful resemblance to Melpomene’s
mask with an unhappy, down-turned mouth. Healy in turn began immediately to
erect defenses within his mind, confident that the emotional ones around his
adamantine heart were secure. She had asked him for assistance once before, and
he had on that occasion failed to uphold a personal belief that demanded the
removal of the word “give” from his
vocabulary. Silently he began to recite the credo that he had memorized with
the same dedication he shown towards The Lord’s Prayer in his childhood. ‘To
give is to degrade both parties. The giver being forced to acknowledge and feel
pity at the inferiority of the receiving person, possibly feeling guilt at his own
position, or worse, take delight in the creation of a dependent. The needy by
comparison are required to renounce any dignity or sovereignty they might have
had the good fortune to possess, and plead instead to the iniquitous gods of
pity, justice and charity’ He might have concluded with an Amen given the
sacredness he believed in such a doctrine.
Healy caught the odd word or phrase from the hackneyed
mantra of his landlady; sick mother, kindness, need, hope and other terms that
he was forced to rummage through the detritus of his infancy to find the
meaning of. He liked her, she was affable, attractive and honest, but this was
nothing to do with personalities and he was too drunk upon the catechisms of
self-denial to really hear her. His faith in independence considered altruism
an evil, one that necessitated people to wallow in the misery of others so that
the altruistic might be able to perform some good deed. It happened too often
he thought, how some people saw despair and wretchedness as an opportunity to
advance themselves or their agenda. Selflessness really couldn’t exist he told
himself. He worshipped instead the notions of earn, worth, exchange, and reward, words
that were infinitely more precious possessions, ones that when spoken, felt as exquisite
in ones mouth as a good wine, or a lover’s kiss.
Healy thought that suffering fell into several categories,
the first being illness which was just one of the perils of life, and to which
all would probably have to experience to some degree before one died. This
category at least allowed the sufferer some opportunity to display stoicism and
fortitude.
The second variety was that one experienced because of the
diktats of his culture; such as comparative worth, and the inherited notion of
shame; the profound disappointment when acknowledging that one hadn’t lived up
to his own or society’s expectations, or the suffering that is felt from toil
that offers no justification. This variety, at least thought Healy, allowed the sufferer to view his tribulations in a
particular context that might offer some specious explanation.
And then there was Healy’s favourite type of suffering, the
type that was invoked by the finer being, the gratuitous, self-indulgent
variety that one suffered in the pursuit of intangibles; perfectionism, “the good” the
exquisite pain of existentialism that wept upon images of meaning and was
superior to all other types of misery. It was the choice of connoisseurs, he
joked, a sacred trial that afforded the sufferer an opportunity to place as
much distance as possible between his elevated self and a needy, instinctive
beast. It afforded the historical possibility of smashing the pitiful alters
dedicated to contentment and complacency upon which one might otherwise be
tempted to die an untimely death whilst his heart still beat.
Unfortunately, Cristina’s suffering fell into none of these
categories, it instead being the type of suffering inflicted by man upon
another man because of his gluttonous love of power. It was sadly so common
amongst the species. And whereas the other forms of suffering often visited
people with a mirror in its hand, this last type wore a disguise that one might
have difficulty calling out to condemn it. It was bad thinking. Man inflicting
suffering on man was always in the service of bad ideas - the more
universalistic being the vilest- that had left a trail of misery and
destruction throughout history, ruining the lives of every individual and every
culture that had had the ill luck to be exposed to them. As his landlady’s
suffering fell into this category any charity would be wasted, when redress was
more germane. It was a scenario played out throughout history; simple
people living with the terrible consequences of their ancestors early failed
attempts at overcoming the most dreadful affliction of man; the expulsion from Eden.
As Dostoyevsky had mused, man had been given Paradise but had wanted
freedom, and freedom had been impossible to define or implement. Freedom was
antithetical to social living and the dependencies and compromises that were
inherent in being amongst others. Living in groups demanded rules, customs and
laws that were always antagonistic to the duty of every individual to live
according to his inner commands.
It was from this womb that all manner of ghastly suffering
crawled forth.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” said Healy, holding the
woman’s despair fully within his gaze, hoping that she would not recognise the
degree of anger he felt towards her that she had obliged him to feel pity for
her.
“But Healy, I need your help, I have no one else to ask” she
implored, her beautiful round eyes, ones he had often seen so full of
happiness, now articulated her distress so loquaciously. It was the same
despairing look worn upon the millions of faces through millennium of need and
injustice.
Healy felt himself swallow but held her gaze, feeling as he
did so her hands finding his. He remembered how her hands had once caressed him
as a lover, as an equal, and today how they touched him cloyingly as a
supplicant.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” he repeated mechanically,
telling himself that he must remain true to his ideals, that he was not
responsible for the consequences of the bad thinking that had condemned her,
this island, the majority of mankind to having to accept the hand-outs of
strangers rather than feel the euphoria of self-sufficiency. He told himself
that she would thank him for his obduracy on the day she was strong enough to
blame the proper people and seek redress rather than alms.
She pulled her hands away and tossed her head upwards, her
face, which a moment before had spoken of vulnerability and despair, now
displayed a visage of angry pride. She knew that “can’t” meant “won’t” and only
etiquette barred her from displaying the hostility her eyes and angry lips
hinted at. Instead, she smiled, wished him a good day as she began to stand up,
signaling an end to their meeting. Healy looked down at the ground, cursing the
person who had first uttered the terrible word hope, but denied
those who embraced it the tools to achieve what they hoped for.
He rose to his feet in time to catch the terrible look of
condemnation that she pronounced upon him before turning away and heading for
the house.
Healy left the courtyard and passed through the front room
as quickly as possible, hoping to avoid any further hostile stares from the
neighbour. He arrived unmolested at the entrance and pulled at the front door
before setting off in the direction of the Plaza de la Catedral. It was
evidently still early as the last vestiges of sleep were still exiting the
houses, though the street already wore an air of purposefulness as its meager
occupants threaded their way amongst each other, busily pursuing the secret
trails that would lead to their own closely guarded ends. Healy noticed a
wizened old lady who lived a few doors away hailing a neighbour whom he also
recognized and felt the vaguest resentment towards the two of them as they ate
heartily upon each other’s salutations and gestures of affection, whilst he
went unnourished of their cordiality.
He spotted the local drunk, as usual lying comatose in the
doorway of the dilapidated house at the corner of the street, brazenly parading
his misery to the neighbourhood and forcing people to look away so that they
might not have to feel shame. Shame for themselves that they might have to feel
contempt for him and be obliged to pass such a terrible judgment upon another
human being, containing not an ounce of respect for him. Healy by contrast,
compelled his eyes to feast upon the degradation of the man, taunting them as
to whether they had had their fill. Healy admired the authenticity of the
vagrant, whose response to the incomprehension of life was the oblivion through
alcohol, a response, not qualitatively that different from those who succumbed
to the oblivion of religion or the nihilism of possession. It was at least his
own response.
As he turned into Obispo, his
attention was caught by a forthcoming spectacle commemorating The Passion. The
poster in the bookshop promised a trip along a Via Crucis, Christ’s
condemnation, the bearing of His cross, His falls, His death and Deposition.
Healy was familiar with the story and its richly pictured symbolism. It was at
once a story of hope and a story of utter futility, allowing any man to
interpret the story in the manner in which he viewed his own life. Christ had
promised a better place at a moment sometime in the future; it merely required
faith to enter. Man on the other hand, despite Christ’s life amongst man, had
shown he was incapable of betterment. Man still killed, still lied, still stole
and deceived and would never be worthy of a place in Paradise all the time he
build earthly kingdoms which allowed just one man to suffer. If one man failed
then all men failed, it was man’s collective fate.
Healy left the main street and passed through a passage with
a mural painted on the wall. It showed the revolutionary Trinity of Castro,
Guevara and Marti, though executed without the finesse of a Durer lamented
Healy. He entered the piazza, and
though it was probably the most touristic spot of the town, Healy still enjoyed
his mornings there; the architecture was exquisite, lit proudly by an
alacritous morning sun, while bougainvillea lounged languorously against the
stonework and the buildings spoke haughtily of their past importance. The
coffee and the ubiquitous quintet of musicians -who might have envied the
immortality of their surroundings- were both passable.
Havana wore its beauty, as any elegant woman of advancing
years. Defined and therefore a captive of its charm and style, the aging woman
would shed silent tears at the arrival of every new wrinkle, whilst the town
quietly mourned each drop of paint that fell wearily from its façades. Both
suffered the burden of melancholia at the perceived neglect they endured, at
least when compared to their heydays when they were so perfectly presentable.
And both were understandably fearful of the day when their admirers might
forget them, or pass away and a new generation might offer nobody to love them.
Healy dropped into a nearby chair at a table, one that
afforded the best views as to the genius of man, whilst minimizing his exposure
to the ugliness that the same species was capable of displaying amongst itself.
A group of foreigners were occupying his favoured seats and
occupying even more of the piazza with their loudness. Healy wondered what had
happened to reverence, why some people were unable to be touched by the
magnitude of their surroundings and instead insist upon celebrating the inanity
of their own inconsequential moment. It was probably democracy that was to
blame he concluded. It had elevated the importance of each person to such giddy
heights, promising each individual his right to matter, be heard and more
importantly, to be seen. Loud ostentatious behaviour was really a demand that
the erstwhile invisible should be seen. Loud voice, look, look, I’m hear.
Garish clothing, I’m hear. Exaggerated, extrovert actions, I’m hear. A demand
that the person be noticed. This was the leitmotif of democracy –that everyone
matters- and it was tolerated, even encouraged so that nobody would have to
suffer the ignominy of obscurity.
That was the fundamental flaw of democracy, that it
transgressed the sacred rule of Earning. Earning wasn’t just about money, it
was earning the right to be seen and judged, of doing something remarkable that
another might voluntarily take notice of you.
A waiter appeared at Healy’s table and greeted him with a
warmth that Healy, until then, had been unfamiliar with all that day. Healy
thought his name was Jose, but could not be sure and felt an emotion that might
have been remorse point an accusatory finger at him. Healy gave an expansive
smile as a measure of apology to the waiter who had shown him nothing but
politeness and cordiality over the previous months and whom Healy had repaid
with casual neglect by not even remembering his name.
The waiter handed Healy a tattered menu listing plates that
Healy would have been ashamed to feed to his dogs a few years earlier. Healy
read the menu, a pointless exercise as he had done so a million times before
and it had never changed. The waiter stood waiting for instructions. Healy
looked at the menu quizzically, unsure what meal was appropriate for the time
of day before concluding that it didn’t matter as the entire menu was available
at any time and it was anyways consistently bad whatever he chose. That said,
on that particular morning the plates inedibility was not even a consideration
as he was famished, provoking thoughts of the previous evening with Maria,
where much to her chagrin, they had dined on cigarettes and vodka. He
remembered vaguely that he had woken that morning, not beside his girlfriend,
but with hunger as his bed-fellow and the gnawing pains now studied the menu
with greater enthusiasm than Healy the person could muster. Eventually, and
with splendid indifference, he ordered the grilled chicken with rice on the
assumption that it gave the cooks the least opportunity for vandalism.
The waiter scribbled the order and left Healy pondering why
apathy should be an option in life. Existence was difficult, even
incomprehensible, so surely one could momentarily escape from the misery and
boredom of life by way of a passionate commitment to something. Anything? For
example, thought Healy, the cooks in this restaurant might find a crumb of
meaning in labour well performed. It would transform their lives. If life is
full of drudgery, incomprehension and frustration, then surely work should be
embraced as a temporary escapism. Healy remembered Camus’ Sisyphus and how he
thought that at the moments when Sisyphus had to return each time to the bottom
of the hill to retrieve the boulder that was his punishment, it was at these
moments that he would have had a sense of clarity, a sense of excitement at the
onset of an endeavour. It was the moment when he might be happy.
Work. Healy tenderly fingered the word and realized how much he missed it.
He had enjoyed the period since arriving on the island, the luxury it afforded
him of being able to read, to reflect, to chart a different course in life, but
he had often felt a pang of nostalgia for the stimulation that one could only
find in industry. Work as an ideal allowed each man to show off the skills they
had accumulated through their own effort, it afforded each man the opportunity
to attain satisfaction from their labours. It hinted of Circean reward and
modest self-satisfaction. Healy often romanticized about the past, imagining
simple artisanal people feeling a degree of satisfaction as they stitched the
final thread on a shoe they had made, or
making wines and spirits like alchemists, doing anything where the individual
played an intrinsic part of a products formation. Machinery and
industrialization had deprived him of such pleasure, driving him to further
alienation.
Healy shrugged and pursed his lips as though in company and some
sort of superfluous gesture was necessary. Work was sadly one more wonderful
theory that had been ruined by witless implementation. The West drove every idea to its logical, sterile conclusion and work and
industry were one more such example, where enterprise had become a Moloch
figure. One that simply created the conditions for misery and angst by fuelling
the necessity to work harder and longer so that you could vaingloriously
compare your position with that of your neighbours. It was, like much of life,
a conundrum and Healy promised himself that he would address this need
as soon as possible, though only on the condition that work would never again
be the mere handmaiden to status, consumption or necessity as it had often been
in the West. He would do it simply because it felt good to be productive.
His food arrived with enough haste to make Healy suspect
that it merely been rehashed rather than be the product of the frenetic
travails of a skilled artisan. It was nevertheless sustenance, and it was this
brutish instinct of need, rather than some elevated, abstraction of
delectations being eaten as a pleasure, of fleeting flavours dancing across his
tongue, of Healy being a bon vivant, that
forced him to attack the food with immodest gusto.
And there was the rub as far as Healy was concerned, that
the mature, developed world, where the free-market was worshiped and assumed to
be a paragon of quality and creativity, a system that effortlessly produced the
best and most applauded products and merchandising, could be the author of such
malaise. For as Healy sat and ate his grisly meal, he knew it was preferable to
the choreographed and perfectly executed meals he would receive in the West.
Where all services and entertainments had been murdered by the very parents who
had given birth to them, as spiralling costs, the monopoly of capital and fear
of failure had encouraged chilling levels of efficacy and predictability that
asphyxiated the space in which one used to feel the exhilaration of risk and discovery.
Sophistication and beautification did not always sit harmoniously with
authenticity. Everything in the West was beautifully packaged and promoted and
nothing was left to chance, but everyone had forgotten that chance and
spontaneity had lent so many colours to life. The landscapes of the high street
were becoming more and more identical; formulas reigned and spouted their
mechanical, robotic mantras. In this atrophic environment, one’s life
experience narrowed as new was same, and jadedness the logical response to
life.
Healy nodded to himself in agreement as he concluded that
making such a discovery had been one of his most powerful incentives to live in
the chaotic, pre-formulaic world. A place where things were still conducted
badly by people who hadn’t been recruited and brainwashed by corporations into
serving a system that was ambivalent to them. The muddled, un-choreographed
world still had integrity, was still alive to the dialectical ballet of
clashing themes and possibilities. Good and Bad sat
side-by-side and were often interchangeable, a masked and unconscious who-was-who
waiting to be assigned to things. Real ideas, and the emotions and
ramifications they might provoke, were waiting impatiently to be implemented.
It was all so stimulating. Healy felt a tingle of excitement as he knew that in
a place like Havana superstitions could still command a mirthless hearing,
passions might be admired, and where ideas and ideology still had an impact on
people’s lives. Good and Evil were real concepts rather than the pantomime
figures they had become in the West. He laughed to himself as he thought about
a country that allowed this diabolical chicken to be sold, but knew that only
here he might be privileged to glimpse some of the genuineness of man, rather
than a well-rehearsed but soulless adaptation that the post-historical West
pursued.
Healy took out his Borges and flicked through until he found
his page, balancing a teaspoon on the paper to keep it open.
―I shan't be happy anymore. Maybe it doesn't
matter. There are so many other things in the world. Any instant is more
profound and diverse than the sea. Life is short and even if the hours are so
long,
Healy’s mind wandered as he pushed the remaining rice grains
around his plate, somewhat disinclined to consume the last awful mouthful of
conspicuously burnt rice. Instead he condemned the present moment as being
unworthy of his attention and urged his imagination to take its leave, depart
the piazza as
though it was nothing more than an empty and abandoned theatre set upon which
the actors had stopped performing.
Everything around him lost its tangibility and dimension as
his dreamy thoughts escaped to the verdant spaces of his youth, across fields
and running apace with the rampaging evening wind, shot like an arrow from a
blustery bow. Past the oaks that stood erect like sentries, silently guarding a
furtive kingdom unpolluted by the burdens and expectations that had broken his
will in later life. As often as possible Healy needed to escape the torment
that was his incomprehension and was grateful to his memory that it so
frequently indulged him. Only in the past did he know all the stories by heart,
where adventure’s beginnings found their ends. He dreamed some more. Exhausted,
his ethereal being finally collapsed upon his favourite hilltop, gasping in the
moistened air that had neglected to dry itself from that afternoon’s downfall.
Prostrating himself beneath a giant oak that anointed him with a handful of the
million raindrops it preciously clung to, souvenirs upon its weighted limbs
that were but a momentary twinkle upon the eternal memory of the countryside.
With great ceremony, as had always been his way, he had
brought out into the pastures his most treasured thoughts, placing them
earnestly at the feet of the great tree and beneath the star-laden skies to
humbly ask the meaning of his laughter, tears and dreams. Nature replied
in a vocabulary that spoke through the creaking of branches, through the
nightly breezes that ran airy warm fingers through his short brown hair, by a
feral moonshine that lit the excited features upon his youthful face.
But that was his infancy, when the simplicity of living made
every day an adventure and feelings such as frustration and disillusionment had
yet to collide with his curious, yet overly sensitive character.
Healy felt a light caress upon his shoulder
followed by soft, moist lips upon his neck. He turned around and found his
sometime girlfriend, Maria, at his side. Her arrival anywhere was always a
spectacle, as everything about her, her graceful movement to perform even the
most mundane task, her expressive chestnut eyes that spoke as eloquently as any
gifted orator, or her eternally black Latino hair that danced around her
bronzed face, provoked a festival amongst the senses of any looker-on. She had
evidently forgotten, or forgiven the events of the previous evening.
”I thought I’d find you here, my darling,” she
purred in her effortless tone as Healy instinctively battled the warm feeling
her magnanimity kindled within him.
She opened a satchel that was hung around her
slender shoulders and pulled out her sketchbook, throwing it down before him.
”I drew these this morning after we argued and I
left the house,” she said matter-of-factly, oblivious to any awkwardness that
her prodding the wound of the previous evening might arouse.
Forgiveness was a virtue that Healy practiced
with typically male sluggishness, as the imagery of the night before replayed itself within
his mind and he wondered whether they had had a suitable conclusion of
hostilities. She had worn the red polka dress that he had bought her a month
earlier and her hair had been tied back, allowing her expressive, emotive mouth
an even greater stage from which to vent her iridescent temper. She had
ridiculed his theme-less life in Havana, whilst he had dealt an ignoble blow by
reminding her of her previous incarnation as a prostitute before they had met.
It was a raw wound from which anyone could peer directly into the depth of her
soul and was the frequent cause of the dark melancholy that pulled its sombre
cloak around her otherwise exuberant spirit.
Healy gave the drawing a perfunctory glance,
wishing more than ever to withhold applause as he considered the previous night’s
fight as unconcluded as the taunts of aimlessness she had hurled at him had
left a few still throbbing wounds. Gradually though, his appreciation of beauty
pacified the side of him that demanded vengeance and he was able to enjoy the drawing as an honest
admirer rather than as an aggrieved combatant. Her
portraiture was unrecognizable from the earliest efforts that Healy had seen
where she drew in an idealized form, redolent of the propaganda posters that
would have thundered lies at her youthful mind. Her subjects now were people
who celebrated life; street musicians whose mirthful salsa tunes won momentary
victories against the drudgery that ate
greedily upon the unrequited hopes of a people. She painted children whose
faces spoke of naiveté and childish joy rather than as tools of
deceitful adults. She had become a very enjoyable artist thought Healy
magnanimously.
Love and admire. Healy had never been able to
successfully disentangle the two concepts. He fingered the other sketches in
the pile. He found the half-finished drawing of the young dancer she had etched
at the weekend. He instinctively tut-ted, as he remembered it had been a Sunday
and had been unable to stop calling it by such an artificial name. There had
been a dance competition on the Plaza Vieoje and he remembered how they
had sat under one of the arched walkways that lined the square. She had drawn
the competitors as he had read Spinoza, his head resting on her luxuriant
svelte thighs, while they had drank an Argentinean Malbec whose impenetrable
purple hue matched the hair band of the winning dancer.
They had managed to argue that day as well. He
had been reading Spinoza that morning and had marvelled at the idea of
replacing a negative emotion with a positive one. When he had felt love for
Maria it had seemed so easy. Whenever he felt like hating, cursing or desirous
to break something, he would instead invoke the aid of a beautiful image or
phrase to vanquish the negativity. Spinoza had also promised a form of
salvation was available to those who practiced such behaviour as their goodness
liberated them from the toil
of anger and that accumulative acts of goodness
facilitated the birth of a decent person. For the sake of contrariness he had
tried to rubbish the idea, explaining to his kind-hearted girlfriend that he
enjoyed anger too much, that the discordance of flux had a productive quality
about it, as only amongst its power and potency could mediocrity be defeated.
It was against this background that Maria had committed an unforgivable crime.
How, Healy wondered, would Spinoza have reacted
to being obliged to drink an obscenely expensive Malbec, one that the
dollar-store had shamelessly over-charged him for, from plastic cups because
his girlfriend had carelessly forgotten to take proper wine glasses from the
house despite being asked to do so? It should be beyond the endurance of anyone
with a modicum of respect for the efforts of the people who made the wine. It
was this fact that had ignited his wrath as Maria had glibly suggested that
drinking from a plastic cup was no problem, as the wine tasted the same to her
when drunk from either. It was the sort of statement he hated as he had spent
months trying to educate her as to the meaning of value, and that even
consumerist neophytes such as her and her people, should be able at the very
least, to recognize one product or action as being superior to another. Of
course he later felt that such an argument was inappropriate, but what response
was suitable he wondered in the face of people who didn’t attach sufficient
value to things.
They had as usual exchanged all the hurtful
observations that had been stockpiled in preparation for such an argument,
rolling off a litany of complaints, admonishing her for her insouciant nature that not only
sanctioned mediocrity but also actually encouraged it. Lamenting her inability to understand the importance of ceremony,
which he thought all the more incomprehensible, her being a Catholic, as wine
was a perfect example of how through the power of ritual -the swirling of the
wine in a sufficiently generous glass that they might appreciate its bouquet,
how glass allowed the drinker to appraise its colours and hues- could an
experience be heightened. Lastly, he had berated her for her lazy usage of the
word like, as
though every single object, person, or concept could only be understood when it
became interchangeable and placed into easily understood categories by
comparing it to something familiar.
With uncharacteristic Latin patience she had allowed him to
speak, tilting her head to one side with tightly pursed lips as was her manner,
whilst all the time showering him with the crushing weight of her rancour. She
ridiculed his pedantic insistence upon things being done with canonical
exactitude, rather than having the broadness of vision to see that many of
life’s experiences were contingent upon that precise moments circumstance and
feeling. She asked him to explain his ravenous appetite for applause where he
insisted on doing things perfectly so that people would be obliged to
compliment him, and whilst she appreciated his tutelage, on that occasion for
his insights on the qualities of an Argentinean Malbec, she was beginning to
tire at his inability to distinguish between lover and student.
They had sat angrily for a while, her painting, him reading,
both of them testament to the eternal tension of individuals attempting to live
together when in possession of two conflicting thoughts. They had stolen
occasional mistrustful glances at one another, possibility in the hope of a
recommencement of hostilities and the chance of decisive victory until Maria,
as usual, managed to dispel his anger with the skill
of an exorcist, her anodyne phrases and tender kisses conquering his unhappy
character in an uneven bout. The afternoon then
played itself out as a pleasantly forgettable episode that demanded nothing
from either of them apart from a guileless passivity as they became intoxicated
on an over-priced Malbec drunk from wretched plastic goblets.
Despite the stain of offence and rudeness not
entirely expunged from their company, they had laughed at the dreadful
accompanying music of the dance competition. As cheap sound equipment had
managed to make Western Pop sound even worse than it did in the West, while a
sequence of earnest young dancers encouraged by relations shuffling vicariously
and in disharmony to an alien beat, performed for them. Healy had toasted
the irony and completeness of the West’s victory, as after all the blockades,
sanctions and bungled assassination attempts that had left a hideous ideology
in place, it was the West’s horrible popular culture, an insidious and
saccharine Trojan Horse left within the gates of this paranoiac regime, that
had proved victorious and to whom its people now readily worshipped.
Maria’s depiction of one little girl was
masterful, she had altered the clumsy cut of her homemade dress, ignored the
gaudy movements that the music had demanded of her and instead drawn her as a
graceful figure, her face the study of purpose and concentration. The lines of
her hands and skirt were blurred, alluding to the energy that was her
performance. Healy wondered whether it was her innate generosity that made her capture
the little girl in such favourable light or whether it was some vestigial
idealism that taught her to see things as they might be, rather than how they
actually were.
Healy collected up the drawings and his memories
and looked at the wonderful Maria.
”You draw beautifully”, he said in a grave
voice, nodding his head in agreement as though her talent demanded such
solemnity. She laughed with her attractive round mouth and lent across to kiss
him in appreciation of his approval.
As he felt her full lips upon his, he thought of
the tragedy of her life, of how she had sold herself to other men during the
worst times upon the island. Justifying her dishonour to Healy by saying that
she had had no choice, as though choice was a privilege of the rich who alone
had empowerment over their lives or the lives of those they used in their
schemes. In one previous argument, she had scolded him that he had no right to
pass judgment upon her, as he would never understand the awful conditions that
made possible such a terrible dilemma. One of choosing between an empty stomach
that pleaded for sustenance and a human dignity that begged for an end of the
touch of the filthy hands that defiled her unloved body. Her misery had
continued after she took a waitress job in the restaurant that her cousin was
managing, a man who knew of her months of debasement and assumed it was
volitional and that her salary was not a recompense for her travails, but
payment for further abuse. This had ended when he had made a botched effort to
reach utopian shores to the north with a group of friends and been detained and
lost the dubious privilege of serving foreigners.
A few months later, on a unhappy, gusty morning,
when the sun refused to shine and grey clouds hung moodily across the sky, she
had served the newly arrived Healy and continued to serve him for the following
ten days as he suffered their watery coffee and stale pastries while he made
awkward attempts at seduction. At first, she struggled with the idea of being
desired, as the covetousness she had previously known reeked of car seats,
dirty rooms and out-of-the-way places shared with lecherous brutes. In her
damaged reality, intimacy was correlated with the frantic night-time scrubbing
in the vain attempt to cleanse herself of ignominy. Eventually she had allowed
Healy to take her for a coffee, although insisted on buying her own in case he
assumed, as all men did, that he had somehow bought a part of her.
He had sat listening solemnly to her stories of suffering,
and together they had performed a requiem for the death of her innocence.
Privately, Healy had become fascinated by his proximity to evil, and desired to
know the identity of an entity that had compelled her to shed every garment of
self-worth she had possessed. How something as innocuous as an idea, uttered so
long ago, was able to cast so terrible and powerful a shadow upon this
beautiful creature? Like a detective, he followed the trail of evidence from
the crime that was her life. She lived under a government that couldn’t provide
an environment in which she could feed herself, and this was because her
grandparents generation had been foolish enough to believe that the
dissatisfaction they felt with their lives might be solved by the platitudinous
lies of the revolutionaries who said they spoke for the people, but really used
their misery for their own ends. These vile revolutionaries drew their energy
from the ignorance of a people who were encouraged to be that way as it was
easier to control them, leading all the way back to the distorted message of a
man who died on a cross who taught that worth was innate and didn’t need to be
earned.
His initial horror turned to envy, as he believed that
having seen depravity so closely she was more qualified than he, to recognize
life’s antipodal treasures. For hadn’t his pitifully sanitized version of life,
a Western one that promised the removal of pain and danger in exchange for
every individuals rejection of divine irrationality, ill-prepared him to grasp
the true Bacchanalian nature of beauty? Over the following weeks he had
questioned her with ever-greater intrusiveness as to the emotions and images
she had seen and felt during her previous life. He knew he should have felt
ashamed as he persuaded her to reveal greater detail of her past but the
poignancy of her emotions were so compelling. When she spoke of pain, he
acknowledged it as a pain he had never been close to experiencing. It was
elemental; it was one that deserved to be painted, immortalized. Though she initially
felt uncomfortable reliving the nightmarish details and glimpsing once again
upon the leering faces of men who had defiled her, she eventually began to feel
the cathartic benefit of such a narration. She believed Healy when he reminded
her that the wages of her ignominy had paid for the canvasses and paints
through which she now liberated herself and which offered her salvation of
sorts, an opportunity to express her own vision of life. Her face had radiated
like a brilliant sun as he had described her as an alchemist who had
transformed filth and degradation into something exquisite, and through her
suffering, so Healy told her enough times, she had achieved an authenticity
that he himself might not have had the courage to live through?
Healy had been vaguely aware that the appreciation he
sometimes felt for her was an important milestone on his long journey to
becoming the magnanimous, empathetic man he thought he aspired to be. He sensed
a warm stir when he imagined the gratitude he felt towards her, that she
brought another dimension of beauty into his life, and he suspected that it
might be appreciation that was the greatest hope of humanizing him, so that he
might live amongst other people? For wasn’t aestheticism, at least for the mere
spectator, the softly spoken goddess that taught man to humbly appreciate the
efforts of his fellows? A goddess whose gentle alluring tones led the viewer
into a spiritual place where words and analysis were redundant, and where
appreciation equated with generosity and empathy to view man in his most heroic
colours, momentarily amnesiac that he was equally capable of baseness, cruelty
and ugliness.
Healy had always felt the meditative quality of wonder,
standing before anything of beauty in a daze, a feeling of awe towards its
creator. It was this appreciation and humbleness towards a creator, a truly
heroic character, a man who dared to stand alone, that Healy hoped to find
salvation. One that consoled his pains and occasionally fed him the essential
food of humility, not from fear of some other-worldly eternal damnation, but as
ambrosia. It was by this route that Healy had initially admired and then
eventually loved Maria, because she made things that he loved and admired,
because she helped to sensitize him. That was all he could ask from a
companion, though occasionally he wished this object of beauty might transmute
into a piece of soft marble or paint upon a canvas, never at risk of
imperfection or the disappointment that life was heir to, and certainly not to
argue with.
But if he loved her and wanted their love to last it would
be because he could always admire her. And to always be admired, he reasoned,
they both had to experience every emotion, every adjective of speech in its
most extreme and parodied form. Always driving each other on, always
discovering new experiences from which to elicit a more intense response. For
art and beauty to retain their authenticity, they had to be the anguished cries
of Dionysian elementalism, something that transcended notions of time and
fashion. The things that really moved a man would be identical to what
intoxicated the first Bacchanalians; intensity of feeling. Either that or art
would degenerate into vapid decoration and lowly regalement, something that
trivialized and mocked the genuine hardships of life, laughing in the faces of
people not fortuitously born with eyes to see it, or a sensitivity to feel it.
It would be a luxury for the rich or idle, its ephemerality a pointless waste
of time and resources that titillated a few as they evaded the anguish and
boredom that were the true staple of existence.
Art would be the grotesque buffoonery enjoyed by the
aristocrats of the ancien
regime, an extravagance that ridiculed the sans culottes
with their empty stomachs and shoeless feet, paupers who had been permitted
only to look covetously from a distance upon the exquisite, yet forever
prohibited from touching it, living it. In such a light, it was inevitable that
history’s invisible people had seen vacuous beauty as the emblem of their
suffering, something to be despised. Then when history afforded them their
moment of revenge, their moment of wrathful lucidity, they had chosen bread and
shelter and wallowed in the ensuing lawless orgy of destruction as they
trampled upon the once resplendent body of vacuous beauty.
Maria was distractedly shading in an area behind one of her
figures as Healy remembered how they had hesitantly explored the first moments
of their love together, how the frailty of its parts, ones as self-possessed as
a candle flame before a evening zephyr, had strained beneath the weight of
their histories. Maria metamorphosing into an icy marble statue at the moment
of their first caress, while her tears rolled uncontrollably across their lips
upon their first kiss. Likewise, Healy was as ill equipped for tenderness
as he had ever been, treating her with the same suspicion that he had always
shown towards another person who might have had the temerity to want a part of
him.
For Ananke had determined Healy to be a bleak and tragic
misanthrope, dooming any person’s attempts of empathy towards him to failure.
It was against this terrible fate that he had struggled all his life. He knew
he was a terrible lover, knew that his efforts at love were so ham-fisted and
abnormal. He would continue to try to love, because he knew it felt good and
right, but he also knew in his heart that he was acting against his nature. For
he had ever only enjoyed his own company, playing alone in the eternal spaces
of his imagination, or creeping quietly into the secret passages of his soul,
always adhering to the belief that company meant only distraction and
complication. It was with such an inauspicious script that they endeavoured to
make love work.
“I will draw our children when we have them,” she
laughed and Healy instinctively froze at the simple utterance that had the
power to shatter their fragile relationship. She wanted children and Healy
couldn’t think of anything more horrendous. He knew the truth and couldn’t
understand why she of all people, tormented by the awfulness of her past,
should not have acknowledged the same self-evident fact; the world was a
dreadful place, and any child they might conceive would rightly despise them
for summoning him or her to be a part of it. He had talked her into an abortion
soon after she had excitedly announced an earlier pregnancy, she eventually
consenting to the termination, but only after he had dangled the prospect of a future
together. She had agreed, but had cried for days, her grief communing with the
shame of her whoring days and together, the twinned sorrows groped in the
darkness of her unconsciousness searching an egress from their confinement,
managing afterwards to never being far from the surface of her moods.
He knew that she had never forgiven him for insisting on
their infanticide, and he felt that she had stayed with him only because she
had appreciated the tenderness he had shown her when she was first recovering
from the debasement of her previous life. After that, she had become obsessed
with the idea of having children and while he secretly hoped that her womb, one
that had been a scene of death before, might tire of the idea, she continued to
insist that it had always been her life’s ambition. He had tried to dissuade
her, pointing-out that their lives were too chaotic, that her embryonic career
as an artist would suffer from the inevitable domesticity, that her country’s
impending turmoil was hardly a suitable place from which to bring forth a
child. But he had stood no chance against such a powerful force as maternal
desire, suspecting only that a baby meant for her a chance to live vicariously
through a new life unlike her own, through a child that would not know the
iniquities that she had suffered, thereby cheating memory of its due.
And so inevitably the ghost that had lived within her
ensured that their happiness assumed a vitreous quality and Healy despite his
clumsy efforts of greater sensitivity towards her knew that it wouldn’t take
much effort from her to trade the love she once declared for him for a loathing
that he might deserve. Healy forced himself to smile as he looked upon her.
“I know you will” was all he could muster.
The sun stood directly overhead the city like a great, fiery
Colossus, forcing shadows to cower as they shrunk to tiny forms against the
sides of buildings. Healy gasped for air. The waiter came and cleared away his
plate and Healy spoke a few inanities to him, fumbling clumsily with requests
for coffee, food for her and the closing times of the restaurant, all the while
feeling a chilliness emanating from her expressive chestnut eyes. He looked her
fully in the face and saw the faintest glimpse of revulsion run furtively
across her features.
Her eyes regarded him in estranged silence. “Why are you so
selfish?” she said quietly, as though she knew he was expecting the question
and her words were unnecessary. “You are so obsessed with your own life you
don’t have the generosity to give just a part of it to me, to a person that we
could make together. “
“Do we have to talk about this now” mumbled a tired Healy,
knowing only that he might but temporarily postpone the inevitable conflict.
“Just what happened in your life that made you hate it so
much? Don’t you have the courage to hope, to believe that tomorrow might be
better than today?”
Healy wanted to tell her that frankly he didn’t believe
tomorrow would be better, and that the future was full only of terrifying
uncertainty. He had told her so many times that the world was unprepared for
tomorrow, that their generation did not have the leaders to permit every one of
their citizens to achieve a meaningful life. How could Maria wish to bring a
child into a world that was running out of food and resources, one which
encouraged the commoditisation of everyone and everything, a world that
fostered wars upon its most vulnerable inhabitants, a world which venerated
mediocrity in the guise of scale and volume? A world that cruelly offered no
meaning. It was too horrible and Maria as a beautiful, conscious, sensitive
creature should have recognised this and joined him in his protest by not
perpetuating the misery of man by bringing forth another perplexed denizen.
“I would do anything for you,” she implored. “I have loved
you throughout our tribulations, I have been your student, learned from you,
allowed you to mould my thoughts and dreams, the things I say and the values I
now adhere to. Why can’t you give me something back, the only thing I’ve ever
asked from you is to be the father of my children?”
Healy brushed a hand through his hair as he looked off into
a place away from Maria, hoping that in his absence she would stop her
unreasonableness. Why couldn’t she understand they could be happy together
without such complications? He contemplated lying to her, telling her that she
was right and that might start a family at once, but he suspected that she
already knew the truth, and would be vigilant towards any deception.
Healy sighed as he looked upon her beautiful face for what
might be the last time, watching the forces of discord swirling around them; he
wondered how he existed in her consciousness, how he would remain in her
memory, whether the depiction was as he would have wished and whether he would
achieve a degree of immortality in her thoughts. He hated himself, that even
now with the loss of such a companion he could only think of himself. He would
do anything to be a better person but simply didn’t know how. With all his
reading, his hours and days spent within his learned books and authors he was
incapable of some response that would alleviate this beautiful creatures pain.
He didn’t deserve her, so by his own rationale he would have to let her leave.
In his conceit, he had often pretended that he was indifferent to their
relationship, but at that precise moment he knew at least one incontestable
truth. It was a great loss. He wanted to touch her one more time, but couldn’t
reach out, so he breathed in one last inhalation of her perfume, and ran his
eyes across her face and body, as though salvaging possessions from a burning
house, hurriedly collecting as many memories from her presence as he could carry.
She waited for a response, but he was tired of lying, and their vocabularies
lacked similar words to describe the future. He merely asked his eyes to inform
hers that he was sorry.
Maria stood up, gathered her drawings and turned away. Healy
felt the awful weight of her condemnation upon him.
Continued..........................
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