Mefisto Read online

  A picture of the town hangs in my mind, like one of those priceless yet not much prized medieval miniatures, its provenance uncertain, its symbols no longer quite explicable, the translucency of its faded colours lending it a quaint, accidental charm. Can it really all be so long ago, so different, or is this antique tawny patina only the varnish which memory applies even to a recent past? It’s true, there is a lacquered quality to the light of those remembered days. The grey of a wet afternoon in winter would be the aptest shade, yet I think of a grocer’s brass scales standing in a beam of dusty sunlight, a bit of smooth blue china – they were called chaynies – found in the garden and kept for years, and there blooms before my inward gaze the glow of pale gold wings in a pellucid, Limbourg-blue sky.

  Along with the tower and the broken wall there were the human antiquities, the maimed and the mad, the hunchbacks, the frantic old crones in their bonnets and black coats, and the mongols, with their little eyes and bad feet and sweet smiles, gambolling at the heels of touchingly middle-aged mothers. They were all of them a sort of brotherhood, in which I was a mere acolyte. It had its high priests too. There was the little man who came one summer to stay with relatives on the other side of our square. He wore blue suits and shiny shoes, pearl cufflinks, a ruby ring. He had a large handsome head and a barrel chest. His hair was a masterpiece, black and smooth as shellac, as if a gramophone record had been moulded to his skull. He rode an outsize tricycle. Astride this machine he held court under the trees of the square, surrounded by a mesmerized crowd of children, his arms folded and one gleaming toecap touching the ground with balletic delicacy. He was in a way the ideal adult, bejewelled, primped and pomaded, magisterially self-possessed, and just four feet tall. His manners were exquisite. Such tact! In his presence I felt hardly different from ordinary children.

  I went to the convent school. Corridors painted a light shade of sick, tall windows with sash cords taut as a noose, and nuns, a species of large black raptor, swooping through the classrooms, their rosaries clacking like jesses. I feared my classmates, and despised them too. I can see them still, their gargoyle faces, the kiss curls, the snot. My name for some reason they found funny. They would bring their brothers or their big sisters to confront me in the playground.

  – There he is, ask him.

  – You, what’s your name?

  – Nobody.

  – Come on, say it!

  And they would get me by the scruff.

  – Gabriel … ow! … Gabriel Swan.

  It sent them into fits, it never failed.

  In my class there was another pair of, yes, of identical twins, listless little fellows with pale eyes and knobbly, defenceless knees. I was fascinated. They were so calm, so unconcerned, as if being alike were a trick they had mastered long ago, and thought nothing of any more. They could have had such a time, playing pranks, switching places, fooling everybody. That was what fascinated me, the thought of being able to escape effortlessly, as if by magic, into another name, another self – that, and the ease too with which they could assert their separate identities, simply by walking away from each other. Apart, each twin was himself. Only together were they a freak.

  But I, I had something always beside me. It was not a presence, but a momentous absence. From it there was no escape. A connecting cord remained, which parturition and even death had not broken, along which by subtle tugs and thrums I sensed what was not there. No living double could have been so tenacious as this dead one. Emptiness weighed on me. It seemed to me I was not all my own, that I was being shared. If I fell, say, and cut my knee, I would be aware immediately of an echo, a kind of chime, as of a wine-glass shattering somewhere out of sight, and I would feel a soft shock like that when the dreamer on the brink of blackness puts a foot on a step which is not there. Perhaps the pain was lessened – how would I have known?

  Sometimes this sense of being burdened, of being somehow imposed upon, gave way to a vague and seemingly objectless yearning. One wet afternoon, at the home of a friend of my mother’s who was a midwife, I got my hands on a manual of obstetrics which I pored over hotly for five tingling minutes, quaking in excitement and fear at all this amazing new knowledge. It was not, however, the gynaecological surprises that held me, slack-jawed and softly panting, as if I had stumbled on the most entrancing erotica, but that section of glossy, rubensesque colour plates depicting some of mother nature’s more lavish mistakes, the scrambled blastomeres, the androgynes welded at hip or breast, the bicipitous monsters with tiny webbed hands and cloven spines, all those queer, inseverable things among which I and my phantom brother might have been one more.

  It seems out of all this somehow that my gift for numbers grew. From the beginning, I suppose, I was obsessed with the mystery of the unit, and everything else followed. Even yet I cannot see a one and a zero juxtaposed without feeling deep within me the vibration of a dark, answering note. Before I could talk I had been able to count, laying out my building blocks in ranked squares, screaming if anyone dared to disturb them. I remember a toy abacus that I treasured for years, with multicoloured wooden beads, and a wooden frame, and little carved feet for it to stand on. My party piece was to add up large numbers instantly in my head, frowning, a hand to my brow, my eyes downcast. It was not the manipulation of things that pleased me, the mere facility, but the sense of order I felt, of harmony, of symmetry and completeness.

  ST STEPHEN’S SCHOOL stood on a hill in the middle of the town, a tall, narrow, red-brick building with a black slate roof and a tin weathercock. I think of damp flagstones and the crash of boots, rain in the yard, and the smell of drains, and something else, a sense of enclosure, of faces averted from the world in holy fright. On my first day there I sat with the other new boys in solemn silence while a red-haired master reached into an immensely deep pocket and brought out lovingly a leather strap.

  – Say hello, he said, to teacher’s pet.

  The thing lolled in his hand like a parched and blackened tongue. Each boy could hear his neighbour swallow. Suddenly all of life up to this seemed a heedless, half-drunk frolic. Outside the window there was a stricken tree, then a field, then firs, then the hurt blue of a bare September sky.

  I sat at the front of the class, appalled and fascinated. Each master, even the mildest, seemed mad in his own way. All were convinced that plots were being hatched behind their backs. They would whirl round on a heel from the blackboard, chalk suspended, and fix one boy or another wordlessly with a stare of smouldering suspicion. Without warning they would fly into terrible rages, diving among the desks after a miscreant and raining down blows on him as on some blunt obstruction against which they had barked their shins. Afterwards they were all shamefaced bluster, while the rest of the class averted its gaze from the victim slumped at his desk, hiccuping softly and knuckling his eyes.

  At first I tried placating these distraught, violent men, offering up to them my skill at sums, tentatively, like a little gift. They were strangely unimpressed, indignant even, as if they thought it was all a trick, a form of conjuring, gaudy and shallow. I puzzled them, I suppose. I could do all sorts of mental calculations, yet the simplest things baffled me. Dates I found especially slippery. I was never sure what age I was, not knowing exactly what to subtract from what, since my first birthday had fallen not in the year in which I was born, but in the following year, and since, halfway through the present year, when another birthday arrived, I would find myself suddenly a year older, with half a year still to run on the calendar. It all had too much of actuality sticking to it. I felt at ease only with pure numbers, if a sum had solid things in it I balked, like a hamfisted juggler, bobbing and ducking frantically as half-crowns and cabbages, dominoes and sixpences, whizzed out of control around my head. And then there were those exemplars, those faceless men, measuring out the miles from A to B and from B to C, each at his own unwavering pace, I saw them in my mind, solitary, driven, labouring along white roads, in vast, white light. These things, these whizzing object
s and tireless striding figures, plucked thus out of humble obscurity, had about them an air of startlement and gathering alarm with which I sympathized. They had never expected to be so intensely noticed.

  – Well, Swan, how many apples does that make, eh?

  A ripe red shape, with a sunburst trembling on its polished cheek, swelled and swelled in my brain, forcing out everything else.

  – You are a dolt, my man. What are you?

  – A dolt, sir.

  – Precisely! Now put out your hand.

  I would not cry, no matter how hard they hit me. I would sit with teeth clenched, my humming palms pressed between my knees and the blood slowly draining out of my face, and sometimes then, gratifyingly, it would seem the master, not I, who had suffered the worse humiliation.

  Yet I did well, despite everything. I came top of the class. Every year I won the school prize for mental arithmetic. At home I kept such things dark. On the last day of every summer term, I would stop at the sluice gate behind the malt store on my way home, and tear up my report card and scatter the pieces on the surge.

  Then without warning I was summoned one day to the headmaster’s office. My mother was there, in hat and Sunday coat, with her bag on her knees and her hands on her bag, motionless, looking at the carpet. The room was cramped and dim. On a pedestal on the wall a statue of a consumptive Virgin stood with heart transpierced, her little hands held out in a lugubrious gesture. It was a spring day outside, windy and bright. Father Barker’s big feet stuck out from under his desk, shod in lace-up black boots with thickly mended soles, and uppers worn to the texture of black crape paper. He was a large unhappy man with a moon face, blue-jowled and ponderous of gait. His nickname was Hound. This is a bit-part. He rose, delving under the skirts of his soutane, and brought out a grubby packet of cigarettes. He smoked with a kind of violence, grimly, as if performing an irksome but unavoidable duty. He had been saying, he said, what a fine scholar I was. He came from behind the desk and paced to and fro, his soutane swinging. At each turn he swerved heavily, like a horseman hauling an awkward mount. Grey worms of ash tumbled down the shiny black slope of his belly. He had high hopes, he said. He stopped, and loomed at my mother earnestly.

  – High hopes, ma’am!

  She lifted her gaze to me at last, reproachful, mute, a minor conspirator who has just found out the enormity of the plot. I looked away from her, to the window and the bright, blown day. Far trees heaved in silence, hugely labouring. I said nothing. Father Barker, lighting up again, was swallowed in a swirl of smoke and flying sparks.

  Later, when I came home, a terrible silence reigned in the house. My mother stalked about the kitchen, still wearing her hat, buffeted by a storm of emotions, anger and pride, vague dread, a baffled resentment.

  – Like a fool, I was, she cried. Like a fool, sitting there!

  She had a horror of being singled out.

  In the senior school our mathematics master was a man called Pender. He was English, and a layman. How he had come to St Stephen’s no one seemed to know. Elderly, thin, with a narrow, wedge-shaped head and long, curved limbs, he moved with the slow stealth of some tree-climbing creature. His suits, of good broadcloth greased with age, had the loose, crumpled look of a skin about to be sloughed. His taste was for the byways and blind alleys of his subject, for paradoxes and puzzles and mathematical games. He introduced into his lessons the most outlandish things, curved geometries and strange algebras, and strange ways of numbering. I can still recite a litany of the queer names I first heard in his class: Minkowski and Euler, Peano and Heaviside, Infeld, Sperner, Tarski and Olbers. He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. He would circle the room at a slow prance, his long arms intricately folded, surveying with a sardonic grin the rows of faces lifted up to him in attentive blankness. Common words when he spoke them – set, system, transformation, braid – took on an almost religious significance. He had a liturgical aspect himself, when he stood by the window, his profile lifted to the day’s pale light, a halo of white hair aglow on his gleaming pate, and spoke in his thin, piping voice of the binomial theorem, or boolean algebra, or of the mysterious affinity between the numbers of a fibonacci sequence and the spiral pattern of seeds on the face of a sunflower.

  He was delighted with me, of course, but wary too, as if he suspected a trap. He tiptoed around me with nervous jocularity, swooping down on me suddenly as if to grab me, the wattles of his scrawny neck wobbling, and then quickly drawing back again, with a hissing laugh, darting a grey tongue-tip through a gap in his teeth where an eye-tooth was missing. By now I knew differential calculus, could solve the most delicate problems in trigonometry.

  – Amazing, Mr Pender would sigh, chafing his papery hands. Quite amazing!

  And he would laugh, his thin lips curling in a kind of snarl and the tip of his tongue darting out.

  The class began to call me Pender’s pet. But I did not welcome this cloying and somehow perilous connection. The beatings that I used to get were less embarrassing, less difficult to manage, than Mr Pender’s furtive patronage. I tried retreating from him, made deliberate mistakes, pretended bafflement, but he saw through me, and smiled, with pursed mouth and cocked eyebrow, and pinched the back of my neck, and passed on blandly to other things.

  Then one afternoon he appeared unannounced at our house. He sported a louche felt hat and carried a cane. Away from school he had the raffish, edgy air of an out-of-work actor.

  – Mrs Swan? I was passing, and …

  He smiled. She backed away from him, wiping her hands on her apron. Our square, she knew, was not a part of town Mr Pender would find himself in by chance. Sudden strangers worried her. She put him in the parlour and gave him a glass of sherry, bearing the thimble of tawny syrup from the sideboard with tremulous care.

  – Ah, so kind.

  She stood as in a trance, her hands clasped, not looking at him directly, but absorbing him in bits, his hat, his slender fingers, the limp bow-tie. He spoke quietly, with intensity, his eyes fixed on the table. She hardly listened, captivated by his delicate, attenuated presence. She had an urge to touch him. He sat, one narrow knee crossed on the other, fingering the stem of his glass. He had the faintly sinister self-possession of a priceless piece among fakes. Around him the familiar succumbed to a dispiriting magic. The flowered carpet, the wrought-iron firescreen, the plaster ducks ascending the wall, these things would never be the same again.

  – An extraordinary phenomenon, Mrs Swan. Such a brilliant gift. A miracle, really. What can I say? One feels privileged.

  An eager light glowed in his glaucous eye, and flecks of serum gathered at the corners of his mouth. She noticed the jumbled wreckage of his teeth. He stopped, and watched her, spreading the silence before her as a salesman would a sample of some wonderful costly stuff. She listened to him holding his breath. There was a wickerwork darn on the heel of his sock. She had a fleeting vision of what his rooms would be, the dust, the worn patch in the carpet, the tired light motionless in the corners. She roused herself.

  – Yes, she said, smoothing her apron on her knee. Yes I see.

  I sat on the sofa, looking at Mr Pender in silent amaze. His presence was an enormous and somehow daring violation. He smiled nervously when he glanced in my direction, and raised his voice and spoke rapidly, as if to hold something at bay. My mother looked at me as at an exotic, bright-plumed bird that had alighted suddenly in her parlour. First there was Father Barker and his high hopes, and now this. She felt a familiar, angry bafflement. The things he was saying, these plans, these propositions, she did not like them, she was frightened of them. They were incongruous here, like that expensive hat on the table, the cane he was twisting in his chalk-white hands. At last he rose. She showed him to the door.

  – So glad, so glad to have met you, Mrs Swan.

  She was suddenly tired of him and his precious manner, his smile, his gestures, the way he said her name, pressing it softly upon her like a blandishment. Outside t
he door he hesitated, eyeing the tender trees in the square. He should try once more, he knew, to impress this dim little woman, to wring a promise from her, but she looked so fearsome, with her arms folded and her mouth set, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. But oh, did she realize, did she, what an extraordinary – what an amazing – ? Anger and frustration reared up in him like a wave and broke, leaving a wash of sadness in their wake. How do I know these things? I just do. I am omniscient, sometimes. He smiled bleakly and turned away, lifting a finger from the knob of his cane in melancholy farewell.

  When he was gone a hectic gaiety flourished briefly, as if the house like a frail vessel had brushed against disaster and survived. Then a thoughtful silence descended.

  Uncle Ambrose called. He hesitated inside the door, sniffing at the strained atmosphere. He was a larger version of my father. His body was too big for the small head perched on it. He had close-set eyes and crinkly hair, and a raw, protuberant chin, deeply cleft and mercilessly shaved, like a tiny pair of smarting buttocks. He treated his ugliness with jealous attention, dressing it richly, pampering and petting it, as a mother with a defective child. Still his suits were always a shade too tight, his shoes a little too shiny. Silence came off him in wafts, like an intimation of pain. He seemed always on the point of blurting out some terrible, anguished confession. His reticence, his air of pained preoccupation, lent him a certain authority in our house. His opinion was respected. My mother told him of the teacher’s visit, flaring her nostrils and almost shouting, as if she were recounting an insult. Put him in my hands, Mr Pender had urged her, smiling his tense, toothed smile. Uncle Ambrose nodded seriously.