Phrenology claims that certain undeveloped organs of
the brain, combined with others abnormally developed, show a
tendency toward criminality. The external ear receives the terminal
branches of so many classes of nerves and concentrates in such a
small space the lines of communication from various centers of
sensation that the otyog-nomist may readily recognize such
tendencies. Here, the large circumference where the ear joined the
head showed an incorrigible spirit, the coarse and thickened
texture denoting destructive tendencies, and the marginal line of
the anti-helix establishing an inclination toward rashness. The
width at the base of the conch showed a lack of sympathy, with a
plane of comprehension very very small. The incisura intertragica,
very wide, showed an almost animal covetousness, and the
lobelessness, attaching the ear to the face, as it were, made a
limitrophe of a complete head. They might have been boxed shut,
thought Darconville, but not boxed enough! I shall be called
Ukhovyortov!
The memory, according to Pliny, is seated in the
lobe of the ear. But these of course were lobeless and
exappendiculate—unable then to retain any recollection of that to
which, once covetous to hear, they’d been filthily privy—like the
barren habitat of two planets sealed off, mindless and instinctive,
from sentient life and reduced to the basic elements of the
physical universe which, in fact, they incorporated: earth (the
loam in the conch); water (the endolymph and perilymph fluids); air
(the sonoric puffs that touched the tympanic membrane) —but fire?
Where was the fire?
As Darconville studied the labyrinths of those ears,
he assessed them. They were colossal, he saw, but large enough, he
wondered, to contain the vehemence of my accusations? They provided
spatial orientation but balance enough, he wondered, to sustain any
gravity against the onslaught I should mount? They stood rigidly
attentive, but were they vigilant enough, he wondered, against
shrieks of destruction that could pierce more wheels of wax than
could Odysseus supply for his men? Finally, they were rooted firmly
there but tight enough, he wondered, to remain when fastened to the
tenacious grist-bite of my hands?
Fire? thought Darconville. O, that could be
provided. That could be arranged.
LXXXVI
The Tape Recording
All that’s spoke is marred.
—WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE,
Othello
IT WAS A GREY AFTERNOON, smelling of rain, several
weeks later when the long-awaited explanation from Isabel finally
arrived— a primitive misaccomplishment not unrelated, if the truth
be told, to a brief telephone conversation Darconville had had with
her mother just prior to his release from the hospital when to that
solution-proof but suddenly suspicious soul it was quite soberly
vouched, and repeatedly so, that though it were the very day of her
daughter’s wedding, that though the world itself flew off its
supports, that though he himself had to crawl back from the dead
trawling a sheet of flame, he would have it. And then it finally
turned up, in a sealed envelope with insufficient postage, at the
Harvard post-office. There was no letter, nothing written down—only
a small cassette.
There was a sick color in the sky. The wind was up
and the pale undersides of the few leaves left on the trees were
layered to windward as, frantically, Darconville set off on the run
to find a recording machine—across to Langdell, over to Paine Hall,
into the Science Center, and then cutting back through the Yard he
found one upstairs on the fifth-floor of the Lamont Library where,
conveniently, no one was about. The librarian pointed to a machine.
Darconville tore off his coat, clicked the tape into place,
and—holding his breath—pushed the button to play. Isabel’s voice
was cool.
“I found it impossible to write. I’ll try, anyway,
to explain as much as I can here. You said you wanted the truth,
well, I
doubt
that my truth will satisfy you. And you
might as well know right now that there’s really no point in trying
to see me. I guess I can’t actually blame you [
sigh
] for
the way you must feel now, but it doesn’t matter anymore, you see,
because I’ve too long listened to what you’ve said to me. It hasn’t
been good for me. I’m afraid I’ve let you dominate me.”
Darconville closed his eyes.
“I don’t exactly blame you for that as I suppose,
oh, I’ve let myself be dominated. I can’t tell you, I guess, when
this whole thing began, but you might say it began from the
beginning. There were—little things—always: the trust thing we, you
know, had a big conflict over. If you don’t know what I mean, it’d
be pointless to explain.”
“You might condescend to try,” said Darconville.
The voice on the tape was assured and complacent,
with a touch of weary finality to it implying its wisdom, and the
mature pain that informed it, might be just a trifle too
incomprehensible to those of less spiritual provision, and yet it
bore the stamp of set-speech, typically found in that kind of
parvenu
whose sudden confidence, determining the
self-congratulatory tone which adopts clarity of diction to express
itself, is so flown with the conviction of its own new
respectability that it becomes in itself the worst kind of hauteur,
as merciless as it is recent.
“I didn’t really trust you. I assumed you were
seeing other people, right from the beginning. That’s when it
began, I think. I mean, I
knew
you lied to me. I didn’t
blame you, I honestly didn’t, I should have been more mature about
it all, and maybe it was my own fault for not trusting. But my
first year at Quinsy? All that business with Hypsipyle Poore? As
you—”
Horrified, Darconville shoved the stop button,
pushed rewind, and pressed the machine to play.
“—trusting. But my first year at Quinsy? All that
business with Hypsipyle Poore?”
What the devil in hell?
“As you know I was completely taken with you. It
didn’t matter what you did. Like when you went away, I was
completely faithful to you and didn’t see anyone, not when you were
in England (I don’t suppose I can ever really go back there again,
you know?) or anytime. And I knew even then that both Govert and
Gil, well, I don’t know [
audible grinning
], wanted to be
with me, you could say.”
“Forty thousand brothers could not with all their
quantity of love make up my sum,” said Darconville, quoting another
disappointed friend.
“But I suffered a lot, just like it was with
Hypsipyle. I
knew
there was something there—a person can
tell. In school people talk. Girls: about your looks, your car,
your being unmarried. I didn’t believe a lot of it, the rumors and
what all. [
yawn
] And of course I didn’t even
know
what was going on until I found some of the notes. That was when
the doubts came back. And pressures, like you wouldn’t believe. You
know?”
It was totally unanswerable:
vox, et praeterea
nihil
—a piece of faery almost flowing with the lewd heat of
anticipation for the third party in whose defense she was forced to
reach back four years for an excuse that was non-existent. The
habit of lying
did
beget credulity in the liar! She was
talking like a tour-guide, perjuring like Epaminondas, but she was
so fully pretentious she seemed not to be! Were bad actors,
wondered Darconville, only good actors playing bad actors? Yet he
couldn’t move, so fixed was he to travel along with the words that
raveled off with such a routine and premeditated sense of
convenience. He could see her: she was obviously lying
down—probably at night—feet crossed, speaking her little
penny-repentance into the microphone in one hand and maybe eating
tiny hard candies with the other, while the slowly turning mobile
overhead sent its slow heliocometrical shadows across the
cream-and-red bed.
“This past summer those pressures were gone. I was
alone—getting in touch with my feelings. Though I needed you, I
resented you too. I
know
you sold your car, I
know
you were teaching to earn money for the wedding, I
know
you couldn’t get up from Quinsyburg to see me,
still—and you can see I have faults, like anybody else—I resented
you. [
giggle
] It’s almost, you know, like a love/hate
relationship. It’s so painful, all this reviewing—but
[
sigh
] I have to, for you. I see that.”
“Trowel on, Mason,” said Darconville.
“Then I had my car accident that time. And for you
to tell me I drove too fast, I always drove too fast? I didn’t need
that then—I needed a shoulder! That’s when it began, I think. That
just stripped away everything that was left and just ruined,
rueened
, all I ever felt for you, though I can’t explain
why. That wasn’t all. There was the sewing—the money? you gave me?
remember?—well, I never really wanted to make my wedding dress. I
felt confused about that, [
long pause
] I guess I’m happy
with myself—except in the way I’ve treated you, which I think you
know you caused as much. It’s just that you made me feel small. I
would have always felt unimportant if we were ever—together—that I
was, I don’t know,
lacking
a lot. You’re probably laughing
even now—to be hearing all this, to see how sensitive I can be. I’m
just a country girl, really, who wants to live close to nature and
animals and things, [
sigh
] I guess you forced me to look
at myself, to make me see things I didn’t want to see. I mean,
maybe I should see a psychiatrist. (Of course I can’t afford one.)
But sometimes I wonder if it’s just not better going through life
not so concerned with your faults. I have faults, I admit, if you
look closely they’re there. Please don’t think I’m making you out
to be an ogre or, I don’t know—you know—’cause I think you’re
basically a good person, as, um, you are well aware of.”
It was rhetorical higry-pigry: a language in which
Darconville heard the rude and rustic paratragediations of Fawx’s
Mt.—the legacy of living down there with all those truckfarmers,
sheep-fucking insouciants, and raw-wristed moonlings with their
flails and rakes—and from nothing more than the sounds of this
meaningless monologue, in which linguistic incorrectness grappled
with illogical inadvertency, was he able to summon to mind with
almost ritual wretchedness those long wasted years of his life and
to see at last the sudden poverty of those once-cherished memories
smelted out of the dross heap of the past.
“I can be very independent and want to be. I let
myself
lose
that. I felt you didn’t respect me. That’s
when it began, I think. I felt I couldn’t be myself. I always felt
I had to be—to
do
—something; it was important to you, I
think, even though you told me the opposite. I felt like I had to
live up to something—that was a pressure. But, you know, maybe this
is good: it points up, like, I’m not what you thought I was. Maybe
if you thought I was too good—which I
wasn’t
—it’ll help
you get over this, [
yawn
] You know? I’m not perfect. I
know you love me, but, lord, people get over things like this, and
you will too. I don’t blame you for hating me, I guess. I don’t
know, maybe you can think back on all the good. I know you’ll
always resent me— but maybe it’ll provoke great writing on your
part [
audible grinning
] at the expense, I suppose, of
myself. But, who knows, maybe I’ve given you a motive.”
The first side of the tape ran out.
It was a bolus of mendacities. There was no strict
line of conciliation to thought or duty or affection, only a
post-posited and out-of-sequence rehearsal to
avoid
explanation,
un pièce radiophonique
recorded with an
overdeveloped theatrical flair—careless, stupid, and
anaphrodisiac—in order to present herself as a sloe-eyed Blakean
infant in touch with the dark para-rational world of animals and
forests, one of those fake innocenti who’d like you to believe she
kissed fog or slept with a felt rabbit, and yet those few sequences
not ceremoniously spent in buying her virtue by selling her guilt
were squandered in a fatuous half-hour of perfect
indistinguishableness, cruelly disregarding any ratio of priority
to subsequence and leaving unillumined by the concentrated light of
any single defining concern the real facts of her iniquity which
she dismissed, typically, by way of the formulaics of
heroineism—the “brave” smile in the face of tragedy; the
pos-terosuperior piety; the studio-finish profile framed in modest
contrition; and the jolly heads-up tone, making versicle response,
that victory will always use in lessoning defeat. It was rubbish.
What had really happened? When did it actually begin? Why had she
kept up a sham for four years?
Sitting forward, Darconville slapped in side two and
the voice continued its disclosures, as hypocritical and excusive
as were those of the smooth, deceitful chatelaines of yore.
Remembrance fallen from heaven! Madness risen from hell!
“I put off writing to you after you left because I
couldn’t cope with it. That’s one thing I guess I can’t be forgiven
for: not writing. I started several letters and they just came out
wrong, but you’ll be happy to hear, anyway, that it’s bothered me;
and that’s one good thing that’s come out of all this—you remember
our talks about it?—I
knoooow
I have a conscience. That’s
almost a relief to me. Yes, I’ll admit, I’ve been happy, very
happy, these past few weeks, it really’s nice now, but it’s somehow
been tainted, too. I know that because of me you can never really
be happy.”