ALSO BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The Passion
Written on the Body
Art and Lies
Art Objects
Gut Symmetries
Copyright © 1989 by Jeanette Winterson
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First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-30682
ISBN 978-0-8021-9870-9 (ebook)
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
CONTENTS
THE STORY OF THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES
1649
1990
FOR MELANIE ADAMS
My thanks are due to Don and Ruth Rendell, whose hospitality gave me the space to work. To all at Bloomsbury, especially Liz Calder and Caroline Michel. And to Pat Kavanagh for her continual support.
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The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?
Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of die world?
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My name is Jordan. This is the first thing I saw. It was night, about a quarter to twelve, the sky divided in halves, one cloudy, the other fair. The clouds hung over the wood, there was no distance between them and the tops of the trees. Where the sky was clear, over the river and the flat fields newly ploughed, the moon, almost full, shone out of a yellow aureole and reflected in the bow of the water. There were cattle in the field across, black against the slope of the hill, not moving, sleeping. One light, glittering from the only house, looked like the moat-light of a giant's castle. Tall trees flanked it. A horse ran loose in the courtyard, its hooves sparking the stone.
Then the fog came. The fog came from the river in thin spirals like spirits in a churchyard and thickened with the force of a genie from a bottle. The bulrushes were buried first, then the trunks of the trees, then the forks and the junctions. The tops of the trees floated in the fog, making suspended islands for the birds.
The cattle were all drowned and the moat-light, like a lighthouse, appeared and vanished and vanished and appeared, cutting the air like a bright sword.
The fog came towards me and the sky that had been clear was covered up. It was bitterly cold, my hair was damp and I had no hand-warmer. I tried to find the path but all I found were hares with staring eyes, poised in the middle of the field and turned to stone. I began to walk with my hands stretched out in front of me, as do those troubled in sleep, and in this way, for the first time, I traced the lineaments of my own face opposite me.
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle. These are the journeys I wish to record. Not the ones I made, but the ones I might have made, or perhaps did make in some other place or time. I could tell you the truth as you will find it in diaries and maps and log-books. I could faithfully describe all that I saw and heard and give you a travel book. You could follow it then, tracing those travels with your finger, putting red flags where I went.
For the Greeks, the hidden life demanded invisible ink. They wrote an ordinary letter and in between the lines set out another letter, written in milk. The document looked innocent enough until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered; what mattered was the life flaring up undetected
till now.
I discovered that my own life was written invisibly, was squashed between the facts, was flying without me like the Twelve Dancing Princesses who shot from their window every night and returned home every morning with torn dresses and worn-out slippers and remembered nothing.
I resolved to set a watch on myself like a jealous father, trying to catch myself disappearing through a door just noticed in the wall. I knew I was being adulterous; that what I loved was not going on at home. I was giving myself the slip and walking through this world like a shadow. The longer I eluded myself the more obsessed I became with the thought of discovery. Occasionally, in company, someone would snap their fingers in front of my face and ask, 'Where are you?' For a long time I had no idea, but gradually I began to find evidence of the other life and gradually it appeared before me.
Remember the rock from whence ye are hewn and the pit from whence ye are digged.'
My mother carved this on a medallion and hung it round my neck the day she found me in the slime by the river. I was wrapped up in a rotting sack such as kittens are drowned in, but my head had wedged uppermost against the bank. I heard dogs coming towards me and a roar in the water and a face as round as the moon with hair falling on either side bobbed over me. She scooped me up, she tied me between her breasts whose nipples stood out like walnuts. She took me home and kept me there with fifty dogs and no company but her own.
I had a name but I have forgotten it.
They call me the Dog-Woman and it will do. I call him Jordan and it will do. He has no other name before or after. What was there to call him, fished as he was from the stinking Thames? A child can't be called Thames, no and not Nile either, for all his likeness to Moses. But I wanted to give him a river name, a name not bound to anything, just as the waters aren't bound to anything. When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free. I would have liked to pour out a child from my body but you have to have a man for that and there's no man who's a match for me.
When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.
Jordan...
I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
When Jordan was three I took him to see a great rarity and that was my undoing. There was news that one Thomas Johnson had got himself an edible fruit of the like never seen in England. This Johnson, though he's been dead for twenty years now, was a herbalist by trade, though I'd say he was more than that. When a woman found herself too round for her liking and showing no blood by the moon, it was Johnson she visited with only a lantern for company. And when she came back all flat and smiting she said it was Mistletoe or Cat-nip or some such, but I say he sucked it out for the Devil.
Nevertheless, it being daylight and a crowd promised such as we see only for a dog and a bear, I took Jordan on a hound-lead and pushed my way through the gawpers and sinners until we got to the front and there was Johnson himself trying to charge money for a glimpse of the thing.
I lifted Jordan up and I told Johnson that if he didn't throw back his cloth and let us see this wonder I'd cram his face so hard
into my breasts that he'd wish he'd never been suckled by a woman, so truly would I smother him.
He starts humming and hawing and reaching for some coloured jar behind his head, and I thought, he'll not let no genie out on me with its forked tongue and balls like jewels, so I grabbed him and started to push him into my dress. He was soon coughing and crying because I haven't had that dress off in five years.
'Well, then,' I said, holding him back, the way you would a weasel. 'Where is this wonder?'
'God save me,' he cried, 'a moment for my smelling salts, dear lady.'
But I would have none of it and whipped off the cover myself, and I swear that what he had resembled nothing more than the private parts of an Oriental. It was yellow and livid and long.
'It is a banana, madam,' said the rogue.
A banana? What on God's good earth was a banana?
'Such a thing never grew in Paradise,' I said.
'Indeed it did, madam,' says he, all puffed up like a poison adder. This fruit is from the Island of Bermuda, which is closer to Paradise than you will ever be.'
He lifted it up above his head, and the crowd, seeing it for the first time, roared and nudged each other and demanded to know what poor fool had been so reduced as to sell his vitality.
'It's either painted or infected,' said I, 'for there's none such a colour that I know.'
Johnson shouted above the din as best he could...
'THIS IS NOT SOME UNFORTUNATE'S RAKE. IT IS THE FRUIT OF A TREE. IT IS TO BE PEELED AND EATEN.'
At this there was unanimous retching. There was no good woman could put that up to her mouth, and for a man it was the practice of cannibals. We had not gone to church all these years and been washed in the blood of Jesus only to eat ourselves up the way the Heathen do.
I pulled on the hound-lead in order to take Jordan away, but the lead came up in my hands. I ducked down into the shuffle of bare feet and torn stockings and a gentleman's buckle here and there. He was gone. My boy was gone. I let out a great bellow such as cattle do and would have gone on bellowing till Kingdom Come had not some sinner taken my ear and turned me to look under Johnson's devilish table.
I saw Jordan standing stock still. He was standing with both his arms upraised and staring at the banana above Johnson's head. I put my head next to his head and looked where he looked and I saw deep blue waters against a pale shore and trees whose branches sang with green and birds in fairground colours and an old man in a loin-cloth.
This was the first time Jordan set sail.
London is a foul place, full of pestilence and rot. I would like to take Jordan to live in the country but we must be near Hyde Park so that I can enter my dogs in the races and fighting. Every Saturday I come home covered in saliva and bitten to death but with money in my pocket and needing nothing but a body for company.
My neighbour, who is so blackened and hairless that she has twice been mistaken for a side of salt beef wrapped in muslin, airs herself abroad as a witch. No one knows her age; what age can there be for a piece of leather like a football that serves as a head and a fantastical mass of rags that serves as a body? Not I nor anyone else has ever seen her feet beneath her skirts, so there's no knowing what it is she walks on. Her hands, always beckoning and twisting, look like the shrivelled monkeys the organ-grinders carry. She hardly moves but her hands are never still, scratching her head and her groin and darting out to snatch food and ram it square into her mouth. I'm not one for a knife and spoon myself, but I do know how to eat in company. I know how to use mybread as a plate and dollop the stew on it without spilling the lot down my dress. One look at her chin and it takes no witchery to divine what she has been eating these three weeks since. When I found Jordan, so caked in mud I could have baked him like a hedgehog, she helped me wash him down to find out what his sex was. All the time I was trying to soften his coating with a sponge of hot water she was scraping at him with her darting fingers and pulling bits off the way you would from a dog that's been hunting.
'He'll break your heart,' said she, glad to have found a mischief so close to home. 'He'll make you love him and he'll break your heart'
Then she stopped awhile and put her ear on his chest, and the noise of his beating heart filled the room.
'There's many will want this heart but none will have it. None save one and she will spurn it.'
Then the crone almost choked herself to death on her cackles and I had to bang her on the back until she spat up some phlegm and thanked me for my pains. Truth to tell, I could have snapped her spine like a fish-bone. Had I done so, perhaps I could have changed our fate, for fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. I should have killed her and found us a different story.
She crawled off into the night and I walked out after her.
I was invisible then. I, who must turn sideways through any door, can melt into the night as easily as a thin thing that sings in the choir at church. Singing is my pleasure, but not in church, for the parson said the gargoyles must remain on the outside, not seek room in the choir stalls. So I sing inside the mountain of my flesh, and my voice is as slender as a reed and my voice has no lard in it. When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been. But does it matter if the place cannot be mapped as long as I can still describe it?
One night Jordan took me sailing. We set off when the tide was high and the day was ebbing. We sailed down the Thames and out into the sea and I kept looking back and marvelling at how quickly the sights I knew best vanished. Jordan said the stars can take you anywhere. On either side low buildings hung over the water, their floors well raised on poles. Here and there the dredgers waded in between these poles, swirling the dark mass with their sticks and filling their wicker baskets with rubbish. Only a week ago one found an anchor said to have come from Rome when we were all barbarians with our hair at our waists. The dredgers have no pride and will duck into the filth for anything. It is true that one of their company lives in a fine manor house in Chelsea, but for all his elevation he and his wife and brats still resemble the waste that sustains them. She is a brown string and he is a great turd. Their children fill up the lawn like rabbit droppings. I am a sinner, and common withal, but if I had trade enough for a rope of pearls I'd wash my neck before I wore them.
Jordan told me to put on my best clothes for our voyage. I did so, and a plumed hat that sat on my head as a bird nests in a tree. He gave me a comfortable seat and asked me ten times or more whether I was warm enough. I was warm. I was seeing the world.
When it was fully dark Jordan lit lanterns round the sides of the boat. He came to me and said it was the shortest night of the year and that in a few hours the sun would be up and I would see something Pd never seen before. He wouldn't say anything else, and I racked my brains to think what flights of fancy he might have made for me. Besides, I pride myself on having seen more than most, including a mummy from Egypt. I didn't see the bandages themselves but I saw the gilded tomb as it passed through London on its way to Enstone. It was a present from good Queen Henrietta to a favourite of hers who had made a wondrous garden full of continental devices.
And I have seen a banana.
What, then, could Jordan have prepared?
We waited in the boat with the soft smacking on either side and Jordan told me stories of the places he'd been and the plants he'd brought back to England. He's seen all the French ways, and the Italian too, and he's been to Persia with John Tradescant. Tradescant died soon after Jordan brought the first pineapple to England, but in the years before he filled his house in Lambeth with oddities and rarities from the far ends of the earth. 'The Ark', as it pleased him to call his home, was so jammed with curiosities that a visitor might never find room to hang his hat. But the very great went there, including the King, and I have seen the King. What
wonders are there left?
'Look,' said Jordan.
We were out at sea. Grey waves with white heads. A thin line in the distance where the sky dropped into the water. There were no birds, no buildings, no people and no boats. A light wind ruffled us.
Then we saw the sun. We saw the sun rising over the water, and the light got louder and louder until we were shouting to make ourselves heard, and I saw the sun on Jordan's face, and the last glimmer of the lanterns, and against the final trace of the moon a flight of seagulls that came from nowhere and seemed to be born of the sun itself.
We stayed where we were in the rocking water until the night fishermen came in silent convoy. They hailed us and threw Jordan two fishes and then, looking at me, they threw him a third.
I had brought a loaf of bread, and we cooked our breakfast and left the remains to the circling gulls. Then we sailed home with the sun on our backs, and as we entered the Thames I looked behind me once. What I remember is the shining water and the size of the world.
The shining water and the size of the world.
I have seen both again and again since I left my mother on the banks of the black Thames, but in my mind it is always the same place I return to, and that one place not the most beautiful nor the most surprising.
To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which everyso often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.