Growing pains
by Adam Elgar
[ fiction - april 06 ]
I know everything about the two of them, but this may not last.
I undergo spells of remorseless pounding and lose the ability to reflect. During these attacks the man makes me attend only to his face, which is fixed in a blend of ferocity, tenderness and amazement that never ceases to astonish me - and I feel sudden blinding agonies of… What? Self-awareness? Surely not. Not yet. As I shudder under the blows of his mallet, I wonder what it is that he wants from me.
Afterwards we both recover from the assault, and he slurps harsh dark tea from the cap of a thermos flask, mumbling each mouthful like a solid, as if it needed punishing. If he looks at me at all, it’s with something like distaste, but his thoughts tell the true story, and he passes long interludes leaning against the wall, arms folded, in sombre speculation. He wants to know what I’m hiding from the two of us.
The spattered sleeves of his jersey are wearing out at the elbows. The woman gently chides him for this when he appears in the kitchen, wild and dusty, like an emissary from a remote grey world. She sometimes asks him if he’s finished working, and may succeed in persuading him to change his clothes, but I have never seen her complain about the powdery patina that he deposits throughout the house.
Between bouts of work he roams the studio, lean and loping, hunting down his vision. He hums nasally as if to reassure it, as if he wants to lull it into his grasp like a predatory Orpheus. This leaves me free, or freer, and I am able to consider his other creatures, which are spread around the studio in every possible state of completion. Sometimes he stops beside a piece and probes it with his eyes, or runs a reminiscent hand over a surface - clay or stone or bronze - and I strain to catch their exchanges. At these moments he becomes opaque to me, the life of his mind growing fluid, blurred. My efforts to follow him are less successful than they used to be.
I am his only piece of marble. The last marble work he did was heaved onto a pallet by two burly men in overalls, and carried away. There was something like relief in this. The finished pieces trouble me. They tell me nothing, and I do not understand why. Once he no longer works on a piece it becomes closed to me, unlike his mind and hers. Those that he returns to, even over long intervals, still offer me glimpses into their unfolding dramas - I almost see the reasons for these tight frenetic combats. But I have an unsettling suspicion…. I suspect that my openness is temporary, and that it is designed to end when I am complete. When that moment comes I shall know nothing, and be closed to all but my own perfected state. I hope it will be enough for me. At least I shall no longer have to endure the upheaval of his attention.
When he returns to the attack, his eyes pare away whatever is superfluous. His chisel slices my dross, my not-me, but that is not the whole story. The tool is no more than a blind disciple. It is the making glare that does the real work of tearing me from my unformed state. A war is fought between the eye and its object. His matted beard trembles. Involuntary noises rise from his diaphragm. The studio shudders. Consummation is not easy for either of us.
The woman enters the room with practised silence, bringing food. (A man at war is not to be startled.) Cheese, a slice of pie, a tomato, an immaculate cloth - this is also artistry, an art of care too deep for him to see, though her tending of his art’s flame is as closely bound up within him as his bones. She makes every day a masterpiece of judgement, of paring, trimming, and furrowed foresight. Times are hard, even harder than I am, and although he is at last achieving a kind of success, they are never far from poverty. She knows he would expect to live no differently if he made a million selling me.
She ensures that in every room there is a sketchbook, chalk, and sharpened pencils - he needs to know that his materials will be readily to hand, waiting for the call - but she has no rights or responsibilities in the studio, where he is meticulous. The dust of each day’s labours is swept, except for what he carries into the house on his clothes and in his hair. My fellows and I spend every night under blankets or pieces of sacking, protected from… who knows what? And this is how time goes by.
A change has come over the woman in the short time we have known each other. Something is at work in her. After bending to place the tray on the table in the corner behind him, she may stiffen for a moment, and a hand may stray timidly over her left side, but she always restrains her grimace as perfectly as she would if he and she were standing face to face.
How little they say to one another!
Yet together, without words, they keep firm hold on their son. He died in Picardy nearly twenty years ago. Neither of them believed for a moment in the War To End War (though the defence of the Spanish republic is a different matter). They know too well how the architecture of the human form can be grossly unjointed, flayed in vile mud - but to them their son remains intact, heroic. He advances upright and determined into a wall of machine-gun fire, stamping the deferential earth like a giant, falling cleanly, his nobility inviolate.
She, unlike the man, is a realist. This is not lack of imagination. No, she felt unspeakable wonder and awe at the child she bore, at her secret and bewildering extension of herself into the body of a baby boy who lived to be a young man of 19 - but this blinds her to nothing. Her knowledge of their son extends into realms where her husband’s imagination will never go, though she does not speak of it, but. She refuses severance. For the man, however, severance is an absolute, undefiable. The boy’s death demands stoicism from him, and nothing more, but the woman follows their son into forbidden territory, giving a kind of afterlife. She sees him not in the monstrous front, but the seamy reaches of his leave in Paris or Boulogne. Unlike her husband, she has no time for the abstract, nor does she sanctify their flesh and blood. The boy was human. His needs were urgent. He will have gone to places where women’s bodies are available for public use - the older men will have seen to that. They will have looked upon it as a duty to couple him with a whore before he died. One of those women may have borne her son a child. This idea soothes her, though there is a sin in thinking it. It allows their joint line to continue, her womb to reject extinction.
I do not understand why each of them knows things that exclude the other. They are unfinished creatures like me, so this should not be so. It is part of the human mystery.
Her hair has always been long. She pays no heed to the passing of fashion, and the revelations of the Twenties meant nothing to her. Her imperatives were too narrow. She wears like a jewel the man’s unconscious gasp every time she unpins her coil of hair and lets it cascade. At times he is seized by the need to capture this moment, and sends his pencil skittering over page after page, requiring her to pin her hair up and release it over and over, so he can record its waves, curls and eddies like air made visible.
When night comes she tells herself, and it may be true, that there is no finer wonder in her life than his continuing need of her weary and dedicated body. I know that he has inside him (and puts into everything he makes) the need to show her how beautiful she still is after all this time. He has never said these words to her, but she has heard them anyway.
Before sleep, she sits on the edge of their bed with him behind her, his long thighs either side of her, so that he can rub her back. This does not address the real pain, which nags at the side of her belly and sharpens her gaunt look, but it allows him to soothe her without loss of innocence, shaping her bones and muscles under his broad palms. Afterwards he undresses her with reverence, and their devout consummations take them to a place where pain and pleasure lose their meaning. Then, while he sleeps, she tells him the truth about herself.
I know something about dark and light. I remember the first dark, the time before my astounded wrenching into the human world, but that was nothing compared to what will come.
Sometimes in the dead of night, my ruminations are interrupted. The woman comes into the studio and lifts the cloth from me. Then I have to submit to her scrutiny, not the maker’s. I don’t know which is harder to bear. Her demeanour mystifies me at these times and I allay my disquiet by studying her in return. She moves with ease and assurance in the silence. She seems at home.
She looks and strokes and presses, following the day’s work with her fingers, discovering my new contours. I watch the lines around her eyes, the tiny movements of her mouth. In them I see horror, love, delight, reassurance, and a dogged grimness. The infinite variety of the human creature. How can these contradictions live so meshed together? What is she seeing, what is she willing me to be? She tells me that I will be her last work. I do not know what this means but I have to accept it, and in any case I am more interested in understanding what it makes her feel. In the place where her life happens there are so many subtle seasons that they occlude each other. She and I are good at resignation. We want the man to learn it too, but fear that it would extinguish his creative fire, and neither of us could bear that. In my case this is selfish. In hers, I think, it is the opposite.
Before going back to bed, she conceals her trespass, folding the rough cloth around me exactly as he left it. For an hour afterward, my still crystals remember the pressure of her hands and quicken with a little warmth.
