Chapter Twenty
De descriptione temporum
That particular evening, the talk drifted on to Victoria’s plight.
‘Well, as a matter of fact there was a time, not so long ago, when people used to talk. I mean, really talk; they were trained to. People knew their logic and how to handle words, ideas, images, metaphors, and so on. Not anymore, it’s something that has nearly disappeared.’
That was old Thomas all right. I’ve always thought that his arguments had a bit of an artificial flavour especially when he suddenly kicked off on one subject or another without warning. But no one could deny that without his dithyrambs, his sweeping remarks and his absurd tirades, those meetings wouldn’t have been half as amusing as they usually were. That’s why there was always someone ready to challenge his dialectics with a view to moving matters on and spurring controversies.
‘What can you mean? I mean, people have always talked to each other. And indeed, they still do if you look around a bit,’ someone said.
Thomas shook his head vigorously and drank from his tumbler. ‘No talking, to my mind. More like a general catharsis where everyone just vents his own feelings and doesn’t care a hoot for what the next man is saying... As a matter of fact, just the other day I was—’
‘That’s exactly what’s happened to Art, I mean nowadays the actual product doesn’t matter at all as long as the market chooses to ignore it.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe, uh, you should say that people don’t listen anymore. But they still do really talk to each other. What on earth are we doing now, if—’
‘Yes. I think Brasillach was right when he said that the public was more important than the artist.’
‘¿Did he? ¿Is it?’
‘Yes, they once argued over that with.’
‘Only last week I was introduced to a loony doctor, a shrink of sorts, and he was saying precisely that: that when his patients started to listen, he knew that they were on their way to recover—’
‘Have you ever observed that silly ritornello that frequently appears in so many American films? You know, the chap who blurts out with an imperative wail: “Talk to me! Talk to me!?”’
‘Yes, I know, I know... it’s repeatedly said to a badly wounded friend lying in a gutter rigged with bullets and quite unable to move, let alone talk.’
‘...and the only thing that seems to matter is that the bloody artist can finally express himself, with no consideration for the public, I ask you.’
‘Quite. Or maybe it’s a harried husband crying out to his unfaithful wife whom he’s just found in bed with—’
‘...and the adulteress just keeps silent.’
‘Yes. Talk to me! It reminds me of Henry Higgins’s precise question: “I ask you sir, what kind of word is that?”’
‘So now we have happenings or installations or I know not what the hell.’
‘Warwohl and the lot.’
‘Actually, it’s Warhol.’
‘Whatever.’
‘There you are, there it is!’
‘...reminds me of Goebb’
‘What? Well, what we were just talking about. There’s a classic, you see. You know, a film that resists the destructive pounding of time, the irresistible flood of time passing... I mean, time carrying nearly everything away into the land of forgetfulness.’
‘It wasn’t a film originally, you know.’
‘You don’t mean “My Fair Lady” do you?’
‘I ask you, sir, what kind of film is that?’
‘Exactly. It has a quality, it has a humour, a spin—probably Bernard Shaw’s making—that will continue to delight generations, whatever else happens. In any case, Shaw, for one, loved talking—’
‘Mostly gibberish to my—’
‘...because he loved words. He put into Professor Higgins all his love of language, and logic, and the powers of educated communication.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What'dya mean “I don’t think so?”’
‘There’s no way “My Fair Lady”, or “Pygmalion” for that matter, will resist this last wave of forgetfulness, this sweeping last strike against memory, culture, civilisation and classic... I mean, if people don’t even know who the hell was Cervantes, or Dante, or Shakespeare... I don’t very well see how Bernard Shaw, of all people will survive this wave of forgetfulness.’
‘He was progressive enough to deserve a quiet disappearance.’
There were some chuckles at that.
‘Now Victoria didn’t care about catharsis or whatever... her sonnets were, how should I put it? Clever. And I liked her songs, they were so’
‘Optimistic.’ George said.
‘What songs and sonnets?’
‘Well, after Peter was posted at Covunco she took to composing some very nice—’
‘Before the piano was sold.’
‘What can you mean by that?’
‘Too much... uh, well I wonder how to put it... Say a sort of presumption that human nature can actually—’
‘...happen to see eye to eye with you on this one. People have always been basically philistine. And that’s the way it should be. Education is not for everyone, you know. That’s one of democracies greatest lies. Just teach the masses to read and in comes the yellow press, and you suddenly have half-literates, dim-wits who think they actually know things when... You only have to check out the dates: Lord Northcliffe comes along only a few years after the first compulsive education act.’
They were half a dozen middle-aged men, sitting around the huge fireplace, some of them resting on a somewhat deteriorated couch, others in old armchairs and one or two were sitting on straight chairs. They were old friends who had known each other for decades, most of them from Bella Vista, most of them had even gone to the same School. Victoria’s school, by the way. Most of them were smoking and drinking red wine. Two of them smoked pipes. It was dark and cold outside and it was about ten o’clock. They had been meeting just like this particular night every Sunday evening for the better part of twenty years. They had argued and disputed every subject under the sun. They had laughed at the same old jokes once and again. They had shared their joys and sorrows. They had cursed one government after the other. Of course, over the years their Sunday meetings had occurred in different places: for a couple of years, memorably so, in a little Bar at the local Station that now has disappeared.
Recently they had taken to getting together at the old Wade’s house. After all those years, the drawing room had changed little, except for the fireplace that had been built into the wall more or less where the grand piano used to stand. It had been sold shortly after Professor Wade’s passed away, when it became quite clear that Victoria would not play again. Also, there were a lot less books around; each of the children had taken one lot or another as they had, over the years, moved out of the old house to take up new, and smaller, lodgings. By a lucky chance Henry’s wife had inherited quite a packet some years before and they were able to buy the old house which gave cause to general rejoicing among all the Wade’s old friends, except, perhaps, Philip, who seemed to resent the fact that the house had changed hands and gone out of the family.
Some time after his mother’s death, Philip had given up his religious studies, relinquished his calling and determined to become a lawyer. In effect, he took up law and eventually finished his career with considerable academic achievement. He now worked as a partner of sorts with Thomas who had left his job at the courts and had set up as a solicitor, doing passably well. But it was Philip who was getting the big clients. After marrying Veronica and after some years living in the Belgrano district, Thomas had moved to Bella Vista which made it all the easier for him to attend these Sunday côteries. But Philip hadn’t married and lived all by himself in Buenos Aires, coming down to Bella Vista once a month or so to visit his brothers and nephews. He had become quite liberal in his ideas, and very rarely stayed over to attend these Sunday gatherings,
not feeling entirely comfortable with the entourage. Then, some years later, Joseph surprised us all by taking up religious orders and now was a well beloved priest in Salta, miles away from Bella Vista, way up North of the country. They seldom saw him, except once in a blue moon when his religious duties brought him down to Buenos Aires to preach a retreat or something.
But Jimmy saw him from time to time, living not far from his Parish. He had married a girl from that northern province, a salteña, whom he had met when posted with the 19th Regiment in Tucumán. Some years later he had retired from the Army as a Captain and married the girl, and now rusticated on one of her family’s huge farms. He had three children—the eldest was called Peter—and his poetry appeared quite often in the local literary magazines. He hardly ever came to Buenos Aires—but when he did, he was prone to stay over for a week—coming over to Bella Vista on weekends armed with cases of wine. On those occasions they would gather in Andrew’s or Henry’s house for cheerful barbecues and long conversations until dawn.
‘Hey! Wait a minute! George over here says that Victoria was much too optimistic, I ask you,’ said Edward with a loud voice drawing attention to the rest of them all.
They all looked at George with interest. He was a Spanish Professor and most of his friends recognised that he was among the cleverest among them, though always a bit stringent in his way of putting ideas forward.
‘Well, I’m not too sure, uh, but—but for that matter we were all much too optimistic, not only Victoria.’ He sat in that funny way of his, cuddling one foot under his behind, just as he used to do when a young twenty-something timid scholar. ‘We belonged to the seventies, all right, but most of the sixties optimism staved off for a while the dreadful pessimism that later came to be so familiar to us.’
‘Well, may I ask, what exactly was the sixties optimism?’ someone asked.
George impatiently waved a hand. ‘Oh, you know. I mean Kennedy, and Vatican II, and the moon-race, and The Beatles hooked to a satellite and singing to the whole world “All you need is love”—’
‘I actually heard it on a wireless by a soccer playground in Switzerland, of all places. I can distinctly remember—’
‘And the pill, and Woodstock, and Paris’s événements, you know, May, ‘68. It was silly, but it was infectious. Even us, the pessimist Nationalists, were in high spirits most of the time and thought that things would eventually look up. Not any more, what?’
Someone quipped to the effect that a pessimist is only an illustrated optimist, but then Henry started to sing “Something’s in the air” to general laughter.
But George remained undaunted by these interruptions.
‘Despite the Cold War, and the Cuban crisis, and the Berlin Wall and Vietnam, and the drug peddling, people were mostly optimistic... I mean, take a look at Flower Power and all that silly... You can’t explain what happened afterwards if—’
‘Because of the arts?’ Edward ventured with a grin.
They laughed at that, because the week before he had read out loud one of Tolkien’s letters in which he explained to his editor—a prospective publisher of ‘The Lord of the Rings’—that true Art cannot actually stop the general decadence of Time, although it can certainly delay it, or at least mask its more deleterious effects.
Edward was about forty, with big spectacles and quite bald. He was well known to them all as something of a Philosopher and a really cryptic one at that. He reflected that the sitting room was dense with smoke and conversation and masculine laughter as it always had been since he had first been to the Wade’s so many years before. Edward had married Lucy, Victoria’s sister, but hadn’t enough money to buy the house when it had finally been sold. However, he thought it was a very fortunate turn of events that they had all somehow been able to keep it.
‘Is there any whisky, do you think?’ Andrew enquired. Henry promptly went to the Bar and came back with a bottle. Andrew had aged most notably, by now nearly completely bald. He had also fattened to quite scandalous proportions. But he remained the most anarchic, unruly, ungovernable and joyful friend. He had married one of Peter D’Angelo’s sisters. Peter, Victoria’s little neighbour, had made a good career as an accountant and was actually posted in Edinburgh, of all places. They all had prolific families, seldom getting them together because of the logistic problems posed by such huge number of children. All the same, most of the little ones went to the same school and, what with one thing another, their mothers frequently met. They were relatively poor—most of them didn’t have a car—relatively successful in their professions, and relatively happy. They loved Bella Vista and tried to hand down to their offspring some of the magic, something that raised quite a noticeable disapproval among a lot of the more recent Bella Vista neighbours, people who had a more modern bourgeois outlook, who preferred loud cars, less trees and fewer dirt roads, who sought refuge in gated communities, fenced districts where they had built American looking houses in a protected atmosphere—something that kept them quite apart from the real town life.
A middle-aged woman dressed in black came into the room with an ice bucket and gently deposited it on the table next to the fireplace. Everyone stood up courteously to greet her. One or two of them dedicated a couple of compliments at her and she smiled back winningly and laughed at her old friends with natural gaiety.
‘We’ve been talking about you, again,’ Thomas laughingly confessed.
‘Well, well, well. I wonder what makes you lose your time like that. Surely there are more interesting topics than that.’ All the same, she smiled at them knowingly, a dimple appearing on her left cheek.
‘George over here says that as a young girl you were much too optimistic.’
George protested to the effect that he had said no such thing and sent ripples of laughter around the room.
Victoria had lived with Thomas and Veronica since the house in Belgrano had been sold and had built a small cottage at the back of the garden where she dedicated long hours to her Art classes. She had plenty of pupils and was an Aunt of sorts to Thomas and Veronica’s numerous children. Time had certainly taken its toll, and even if she looked her usual distinguished self, the lines on her face eloquently told about a girl that had never been entirely happy. Behind her heavy framed spectacles her once twinkling blue eyes seemed to have acquired a greyish, a somewhat clouded tint. There was something like ‘Northerness’ in them, Edward once remarked, borrowing C.S. Lewis’s expression.
Victoria remained standing straightening her dress with pale un-ringed hands while they all sat down again. She focussed her bespectacled eyes on the blazing logs in the fireplace. A barely discernible air of gravity seemed to follow her at all times, and this time there was no exception to that.
‘Optimistic, sanguine? Quite. But then, so was Peter. So was this dear country of ours.’
With that a silence fell over them, a kind of hush. Thomas reflected once again how, after all those years, they still missed Peter even when quite aware that their feelings were small fry compared to Victoria’s.
Victoria sighed and beamed at the company.
‘Anyway, as the old saying has it, an hour in the morning is worth two in the evening.’
George shook his head and looked up at a photograph of Peter that stood on the mantelpiece. It showed him as a spruce officer in full uniform with a wide smile across his juvenile face. This time it made George smile back.
‘I don’t know, I think we all did our best, but I also have this feeling that it was later... you know, I mean, we hadn’t realized how late it was.’
This last sentence took Victoria back into time and in a flash old memories came back to her. She dwelled on that famous Sunday morning when Peter had impulsively kissed her on her forehead and impatiently courted her under the rain.
‘He was in such a hurry,’ she smiled to herself, ‘what with Father Mole coming along the street and everything’.
To her bewilderment, the whole party burst out laughing
.
‘Good gracious! I’ve done it again’.
Victoria had been thinking aloud.
* * *
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