Abortion is complicated for us, because our thinking on it has changed over the centuries, or should I say our ordnances have changed? Our thinking revolves with sickening dizziness round and round the same problem: When does the embryo receive its soul?
Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the prevailing view, although by no means the only view, was that the male receives his soul on the fortieth day, while the laggard female must wait until the eightieth day. If one accepts that, it is possible to distinguish between Foetus Inanimatus, which has no true life, and Foetus Animatus, the gift of God and sacrosanct. Thanks to the blessed absence of technology, it was impossible to be sure of the sex of the child, and, with unusual common sense, Canon law allowed abortion, up to the eightieth day, if the mother was in mortal danger. Again, mortal danger was a moot point before science decided that everything could be accurately diagnosed, and so there was an element of compassion, a little leeway, in many of the decisions made by ordinary local priests.
In 1869 Pius IX decreed that every foetus has a soul from the millisecond of conception.
The woman who came to me was young, poor, unmarried, uneducated, beautiful, illegal, Catholic. We talked, and while we talked, she did not look at me, she stared at my kelim on the floor. I was mindful of my position, my responsibilities, the seriousness of this.
I knew what my priest would say …
‘Tell the slut to control herself.’
Yes, tell her that, why not?
‘Have you had an examination?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there are no complications?’
‘No.’
‘You and the baby are both healthy?’
(I had her report, why was I putting her through this?)
‘The doctors say so.’
‘And you have a job?’
‘But not if I have a baby.’
‘Why weren’t you careful?’
(Tell the slut to control herself.)
She didn’t answer, and I could see in her face, with its delicate chitinous bags, all the careful days unravelled in one spontaneous act.
She left. With a single stroke of my pen I condemned her child to life. It would not be for me to feed him, to clothe him, to bathe him, to wipe his head, to wake for him when he cried, to sleep beside him when he was afraid. It would not be for me to walk out every morning to provide for him, to come home every night to comfort him. To comfort him. It would not be for me to tell the little creature, born full of hope, that there was no hope in the world.
How to say, ‘This filthy room where you were born is likely to be the filthy room where you will die and all the years in between will be grey cloth.’
How to say, ‘You will pay for your life with every day of it.’
There are no social programmes now, because we all know that single women become pregnant so that they can live off the State. And even if that were true, even when it is true, what does it say about us, the wagging fingers and severed heads? TELL THE SLUT TO CONTROL HERSELF. And if there is no Self to control? No dignity, confidence, purpose, spirit, place in the world, understanding? Not for her. Not for her. She can’t afford any of them. And if she does make money, she’ll find she can’t buy them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
She left. Probably I would never see her again. Probably she would find a back-street boy with a knitting needle and a dose of crack. Probably the baby would not survive the shack birth, infected cloths, poor milk and cheap food. Probably it would catch a cold that would develop into pneumonia. If it lived at all it would be to fill up the gutter with the rest.
What could I do? It wasn’t my baby.
But there was a baby wasn’t there Handel?
Yes. There was a baby. The windy night fog-stained. Fog in horizontal columns, like battering rams, driving up the narrow streets. A brown fury, grit and dirt of carbon monoxide.
I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps I would have recognised her name but the name I had was not the name of the woman I had seen last winter. Why should she hold on to a name? I haven’t held on to mine. At the derelict house, wrapped in an orange mesh poultice, to show it was unfit for human habitation, I met a man, the father of the child, he said. Big, brawny, scared, he had tried to take her to hospital, but she had refused to go.
I walked up the exhausted stairs that smelt of kerosene and chips. The room had a stripped car engine in one corner. A throw-out bed. A big box from the fishmarket, that he had lined with newspapers, he was proud of it. ‘For the baby,’ he said, and offered me the one stool. She looked at me. Did she know me? Did I flatter myself that she could know me? We look alike, the men with money and power, give or take a few pounds. Our tailors work side by side in the same street. We drink the same vintages from the same five chateaux. Most of us drive the same kind of car, and we read the same newspaper. Yes, we are the individualists of our age.
How lovely she was … Madonna of the Desperation. Deep blue lines of tiredness rimming her eyes, her knuckles, starched against the pain. Frail, membrane-thin, but not yet exhausted out of her youth.
I was not the father of the child but I knew that I had brought her to this moment as surely as if I had penetrated her. I wanted to get rid of the other man, this was something private, something between she and I. We were intimates, she and I.
I sent him away to fetch water, and sat myself down at an angle to her on the sunk bed. Her legs were aching and I began to rub them up and down their length. She lay back, glad of the relief, women tell me I have good hands.
I had to tear up my shirt to make cloths.
‘It is not the doctor who is naked,’ she said, laughing at me.
I was embarrassed. I hate anyone to see my body. My body is the shape of my clothes and nothing more. I was glad of the dim flare that lit up the corners of the dirty room, better than it exposed my skin. I did not want her to look at me.
‘Lie back,’ I said. ‘You must rest.’
I was much paler than her, gecko-white on the warm stone of her, a lizard in too much light. If anyone had come in, what would they have thought? That I was paying her? Yes, that I was paying for pleasure as men do to whom money comes easily and affection so much harder. I have women friends who confide in me about their husbands’ habits. Of course, their husbands boast to me about their exploits, and although the facts are identical, the story is not at all the same.
Silence and stillness as I sweated to birth the child. The mother was brave and hardly cried out above the wheeze of the flare. The creaking bed, the wheezing flare, that putter-puttered almost out. The feeble flap of curtain fighting the wind. I, between her legs, kneeling with my head down, not sure whether it was a child I was delivering or myself. She smelled of iron and tar and field mushrooms.
I kissed her cunt. I took all that I could of her huge birthing cunt into my mouth and kissed it. I held my tongue against her clitoris, big as a pullet egg, and under the yoke of her orgasm, the baby began to shift. I pulled my face away in time to bring forth the head of a little girl, body umbilical bound. I bit the cord, swung the child upside down, and in response to a tiny slap, she discovered her lungs. A bright red baby yelling herself purple in the blue air.
The mother was laughing and I laughed too and wiped my smeared mouth on my own shirt, and then, gently, gently, wiped her. There was nothing I could say.
I left her quite a lot of money, hiding it where I hoped the other man wouldn’t find it. I promised to come and see her in a couple of days.
I never saw any of them again for twenty-three years.
What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
*
Look in the mirror Handel, the long mirror that reflects the whitened body, cuttle-fish bleached and brittle boned. What can you see that is really you? The man to whom you think you are accustomed? What can you see? The gene pool that has made you
one shape rather than another; that has bestowed upon you your blue eyes and their quizzical stare. The inherited strengths and failures of your ilk. Is that you? Look deeper: How much of your thinking has been thought for you by someone else?
Speak Parrot!
What kind of parrot am I?
My range is wide, my accent, good. When I speak I am convincing. Very often I convince myself. Isn’t there a proverb; In the country of the Blind the one-eyed man is King? But what of the articulate among the guttural? Once upon a time I would have been listened to with respect, now, I am regarded with suspicion, and for the wrong reason. I know that I am false; the irony is that the barkers and jabberers believe themselves genuine. As if to speak badly is to speak truly. As if to have no command of language must ensure a complete command of emotional sincerity. As if, as journalists and novelists would have me believe, to write without artifice is to write honestly. But language is artifice. The human being is artificial. None of us is Rousseau Man, that noble savage, honest and untrained. Better then to acknowledge that what we are is what we have been taught, that done, at least it will be possible to choose our own teacher. I know I am made up of other people’s say so, veins of tradition, a particular kind of education, borrowed methods that have disguised themselves as personal habits. I know that what I am is quite the opposite of an individual. But if the parrot is to speak, let him be taught by a singing master. Parrot may not learn to sing but he will know what singing is. That is why I have tried to hide myself among the best; music, pictures, books, philosophy, theology, like Dante, my great teacher is dead. My alive friends privately consider me to be rather highbrow and stuffy, but we are all stuffed, stuffed with other people’s ideas parading as our own. Stuffed with the idiocies of the daily paper and twenty-four-hour television.
Well, I am an old bird who has tried to choose his stuffing. Stuff me with the best, and although I might dilute it with my own fear and inadequacy, at least I will know what the best is. Don’t you want something better than yourself to live up to?
A colleague of mine, in hospital for hip surgery, put down his crossword and asked me why I bothered with the opera.
‘The plots are so ridiculous,’ he said.
‘I don’t care about the plots.’
‘The music then, the music is so artificial.’
‘Unlike your hip-replacement?’
‘Don’t be clever with me Handel.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, but tell me, don’t you think it odd that while you are happy for your daily existence to be as artificial as possible, pre-packaged food, the latest medical techniques, your every moment spent in front of a blinking screen, your life as independent as you can make it of the seasons and the hours, day for night, and night for day if you wish it, all this, and yet you criticise art because it is not natural. Art is not supposed to be natural.’
‘Art is the mirror of life,’ he said sententiously.
‘Get thee behind me Hamlet.’
‘Can’t contradict the Bard.’
‘Not even when the Bard contradicts himself? A single dramatic utterance of Hamlet’s is no more Shakespeare’s own view of art, than the speeches of Iago are his own views on morals. Read The Tempest and then tell me that art is the mirror of life.’
‘I know what I like.’
‘You have no idea. You blindly obey every impulse because you think that makes you a free spirit. What will it be tonight? A tart? A private view? A musical? A trash bestseller? Sparkling wine served with its vintner’s assurance that it is every bit as good as champagne for half the price and none of the effort? You are a slave to advertising, to fashion, to habit and to the media. You like to call yourself a free man but you are bound by rules of which you know nothing …’
He did not speak to me again.
Speak Parrot … In order to escape the arbitrary nature of existence I do what the artists do, and impose the most rigorous rules on myself, even if, inevitably, those rules are in turn arbitrary. Language, musical structure, colour and line, offer me a model of discipline out of their own disciplines. What liberties they take are for the sake of a more profound order, the rules they insist upon are for the sake of freedom. How shall I learn to discipline myself if not by copying the best models? The paradox is that the artificial and often mechanical nature of the rules produces inexhaustible freedom, just as the harsh Rule of the early great monasteries was designed to shut out every inessential, but to fully open spirit and mind. Of course rules are made to be broken but when they have been broken they must be made again. Periodically all the arts break their own rules, to renew themselves and to invigorate themselves when the letter is killing and the spirit is offering life. The Church has not been either as brave or as wise. I wanted to be a priestand not a traffic warden. I wanted to open the way to spiritual insights, not dole out penalties for every silly offence. That is why I left the Church, not the teachings of Christ but the dogmas of Man, and when I turn to the Church now, I know, God forgive me, that it is because I am too weak to turn to myself.
*
Myself. The accumulation of parts; menus, concert programmes, blood-pressure charts, books read, conversations overheard, irrational fears, recurring dreams, love lost and found, childhood miseries, adult compensations, cinema tickets, holidays, that day with you, the white rose, La Mortola, I keep pressed between the pages of a book.
Open me up, all these things and thousands more, digressions, digestions, dissipations, dissertations, dilettantism, dilatoriness, dilapidations, disassociations, dill-pickle. The man in brine preserved against change by habit. Teach the parrot his lines and he will re-order the words and you might think he is talking to you. He is not talking to you, he is talking to himself. He is such a novelty but he says nothing new.
Speke parot … whose lines are they?
Across the dying sky a veneer of light. Thunder light that bound the broken edges of the clouds into a single square of threat. The sea had turned black and left its shadow in dark waves on the sand. The discoloured sand and the oozing water, rock pools like oil drums, filmy and still. Over by the port the huge lorries chugged out their diesel, the little men, their servants, breathed it in. The motionless trucks, the scrambling stick men in yellow hard hats, a volley of tarpaulin. The storm was coming.
The man felt the first drops of rain, fat like falling fruit. The sky shook and the ground underneath him repeated the tremor. He heard the piccolo of the lesser birds and the kettle drum cattle warning in the fields. Then, the tiny note of quiet, and the sky was strung with lightning.
The Jehovah bass of deepening thunder.
The sea, that had been restless in quavers of foam, strengthened and lengthened into breves of black muscle that ran past the marker bars of high tide and pitched against the quay. Human dots were dragged away on the eight-fold power. The man heard a crazed whirling behind his head. He turned and saw the propellers of the wind farm blurred into white eyes that seemed to be advancing on him in a rhipidos of terror. The eyes, strangely illuminated by the sickly storm, had the look of operating lights, and he remembered the hideous moment, after the anaesthetic, when the patient revives, and sees, unfocused, the huge swimming lights, too close, much too close, and the green mask of the surgeon staring down.
She had woken and felt for her breast.
So often he had looked at them; a jelly of tissue and fat, the puckering dead skin and the useless nipple on the tin plate. What could he do with those breasts, sliced like kiwi fruit, soft variegated off-coloured flesh? He scraped them into the bin. Binfuls of breasts, although a country colleague of his used to take them to feed to the pigs, why not? Napoleon had had a plaster cast made of his sister Paulina’s breasts because they were considered to be the most beautiful breasts in the world. Handel had seen them often in the Napoleonic Museum in Rome.
I was brought up in Rome. We had a house a little way from the Spanish Steps. My mother used to go there every morning and play her ’cello to the begg
ars. (Man shall not live by bread alone.) My father was a Tax and Trusts lawyer to The Vatican. I was sent back to school in England when I was twelve but by then it was too late.
What can I tell you about those closed evenings in draped rooms?
It was customary for some of the more eminent clergy to gather together on Sunday evenings, to play cards, drink port, and to discuss theology. My father, who was well liked, as much for his acumen as for his piety, was often invited, and I went with him when I could.
Our room, high, circular, was decorated with a fresco of Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery. She was the only woman I ever saw, in that room, or any of the others in The Vatican. The Blessed Virgin is not a woman.
The furniture, Renaissance, Empire, Third Republic, priceless, was red covered and trimmed in gold. The room was lit by chandelier and sconces. The decanters were full. Opulence, comfort, gentle-manliness, good taste and reason. And it was in measured tones of opulence, comfort, gentlemanliness, good taste and reason, that we discussed the difficulties of Coitus Reservatus: Quando fornicare non è fornicare? When is a fuck not a fuck?
There is a delicious salacious pleasure in the abstract puzzle of sexual morality. None of us were fumbling, cock-hard, with the latest encyclical, while our wives lay under us in the marriage bed. Celibate subtleties: To put it in — when? To take it out — when? To resist it — should she? To demand it — could she? A roar of laughter and a lewd nudge of holy elbows: ‘Una scopata è sempre una scopata?’
All this and a young boy’s burning face.
I had a friend, an old Cardinal, worldly wise, cunning, traditional, reactionary even, if that can seem possible in a Church whose progress is forever backwards. At the same time, in a contradiction tolerated only by the Catholic Church, he entertained, quietly of course, personal eccentricities of faith and behaviour which would have been unacceptable in a more usual setting.