There was between the two of us, or, rather, between them and me, a distance of some two hundred or more yards, far enough for me to have to shout or to retrace my steps if I was going to speak to her, to ask a question of that human figure, who was clearly a young woman, her boots were waterproof, supple, shiny and close-fitting, they were not just any old rainboots, they had been chosen, studied, were possibly expensive, flattering, maybe by a well-known designer. I stared at them, she had not uncovered her face, at no point did she raise the umbrella covering it and did not, therefore, return my gaze, but neither was she troubled because a man was standing watching her from not very far away, at night and in all that rain. She crouched down, the skirts of her raincoat fell open when she did so and I could see part of her thigh, she patted and stroked the dog’s back, probably spoke softly to him, then stood up again and the skirts of her raincoat closed once more over that glimpse of flesh, she did not move, did not set off in any direction, it occurred to me then that she might be in need of help, lost in an area she did not know, or a young blind woman out with her guide dog, or a foreigner who did not know the language, or a prostitute so hard up she could not miss even one night-time excursion, or was wondering whether or not to ask me for money, help, advice, something. Not because I was me, but because I was the only parallel being there. I had the feeling that any meeting was impossible, and, at the same time, that it would be a shame if it did not take place and that it would be better if it did not. The feeling was one of pity, whether for myself or for her, I don’t know, certainly not for us both, because one of us would have come off worse — I thought — and the other would have benefited, that is usually how it is with such street encounters.
Many years before, in this same country, when I was teaching at Oxford, I had been followed off and on by a man with a three-legged dog, one of its back legs neatly amputated, and subsequently, without prior warning, he had visited my house, his name was Alan Marriott, he was rather lame in his left leg (although it was still intact) and he was a bibliomaniac who had learned of my own bookish interests, which coincided in part with his, from the second-hand booksellers I used to frequent there. The dog was a terrier, he’ll be dead by now, poor thing, they do not last as long as we do. The young woman’s dog seemed to me, from a distance, to be a pointer and still had all its four legs, which I found strangely cheering, in contrast with the crippled dog, I suppose, who came suddenly to mind in that night of eternal rain. ‘But I don’t want anything of anyone,’ I thought, ‘nor do I expect anything of anyone, and I’m in a hurry to get out of this rain and reach home, and forget all about the interpretations of this long day which doesn’t end or which won’t end until I’m safe up there on my third floor. Let her come to me if she wants something from me or if she’s following me. That’s her problem. She must have a reason, assuming she was following me or still is, it can’t be in order not to talk to me.’ I turned and hurried on to my destination, but I couldn’t help listening out during the rest of my walk to see if I could or couldn’t hear that tis tis tis which was, as it turned out, the sound of a dog and its eighteen toes, or perhaps of those long boots with such low heels that they glided over the asphalt without even striking it, without making a sound.
I reached my door, turned the key and opened it, and only then did I furl my umbrella and shake it so that it didn’t drip too much indoors, and once upstairs, I immediately took the umbrella into the kitchen, leaving my raincoat there to dry as well, and then I went impatiently over to the window and scanned the square, but I saw neither the young woman nor the pointer, even though I had heard their weightless noise until the end, accompanying me as far as the door downstairs, or so I thought. I looked up and across at my dancing neighbour, who had often before had a calming effect on me. There he was, of course, he was unlikely to be out in that awful weather, and he had a visitor too, the black or mulatto woman with whom he sometimes danced: judging from their movements and posture and rhythm I was sure they were immersed in some pseudo-Gaelic dance, feet frantically flailing, but going nowhere (the feet keeping strictly to a point on which they insist and stamp and stamp again, an area no bigger than a house brick or, lest we exaggerate, a floor tile), while the arms are held, inert and very stiff, close to the body, it was likely, I thought, that the dancing couple would be listening to the music of one of those demented shows put on by that idol of the islands, Michael Flatley, who stamps his feet like a man possessed, they re-issue his old videos with remarkable frequency, maybe he’s retired now and rations his appearances so as to make his furious boundings about the stage seem even more exceptional. Whether dancing alone or in company, my neighbour always seemed so happy that I sometimes felt tempted to imitate him, after all, that’s something we can all do, dance alone at home when we think no one is looking. But you can never be sure that no one is looking or listening, we’re not always aware of being watched, or followed.
Having one leg missing, the bibliomaniac Marriott’s poor terrier would only have had fourteen toes, I thought. Perhaps I had remembered the dog because its image was forever associated with that of a young woman who also used to wear high boots, a gypsy flower-seller, who used to set up her stall opposite my house in Oxford, on the other side of the long street known there as St Giles’. Her name was Jane, and, despite her extreme youth, she was married; she usually wore jeans and a leather jacket; I would sometimes exchange a few words with her, and Alan Marriott had stopped at her stall to buy some flowers before ringing my doorbell on the morning or afternoon that he visited me, on one of those Sundays ‘in exile from the infinite’ (I quoted to myself). He and I had just been talking about the Welsh writer Arthur Machen (one of his favourites) and about the literature of horror or terror which the latter had cultivated to the great delight of Borges and of very few others, although I remember that Marriott had not heard of Borges. And suddenly he had given me an illustration of horror through a hypothesis involving his dog with its three legs and intelligent face and the flower-seller in the high boots. ‘Horror depends in large measure on the association of ideas,’ he had said. ‘On the conjunction of ideas. On a capacity for bringing them together.’ He spoke in short phrases and hardly used conjunctions at all, making minimal, but very deep, marked pauses, as if he held his breath while they lasted. As if his speech too were slightly lame. ‘You might never see the horror implicit in associating two ideas, the horror implicit in each of those ideas, and thus never in your whole life recognise the horror they contain. But you could live immersed in that horror if you were unfortunate enough always to make the right associations. For example, that girl opposite your house who sells flowers,’ he had said, pointing at the window with one very taut index finger, one of those fingers which, although clean, seems to be impregnated with whatever it spends its days touching, however frequently the owner of the finger may wash it: I’ve seen such fingers on coalmen and butchers and house painters and even greengrocers (on coalmen during my childhood); his fingers were impregnated with book dust, which always clings so and which is the reason I wore gloves when I went rummaging around second-hand bookshops, but, then again, the chalk I used when I was teaching had already started to stick. ‘There’s nothing terrifying about her, she doesn’t in herself inspire horror. On the contrary. She’s very attractive. She’s nice and friendly. She stroked the dog. I bought these carnations from her.’ He produced them from his raincoat pocket, into which he had carelessly crammed them, as if they were pencils or a handkerchief. There were only two, they were almost squashed. ‘But she could inspire horror. The idea of that girl in association with another idea could. Don’t you think so? We don’t yet know the nature of that missing idea, of the idea required to inspire us with horror. Her horrifying other half. But it must exist. It does. It’s simply a question of it appearing. It may also never appear. Who knows, it could turn out to be my dog.’ He pointed downwards with his vertical finger, the terrier had lain down at his feet, it wasn’t raining that day, the
re was no danger of it dirtying the sitting-room, it didn’t deserve to be exiled to the kitchen on the ground floor (his index finger covered in invisible dust). ‘The girl and my dog,’ he repeated, and again pointed first at the window (as if the flower-seller were a ghost and had her face pressed to the glass, it was the window on the second floor, that pyramidal house had three, I slept on the top floor and worked in that living-room) and then at the dog, his finger always very erect and rigid. ‘The girl with her long, chestnut hair, her high boots and her long, firm legs and my dog with his one leg missing.’ I remember that he then touched the dog’s stump affectionately or tentatively as if it might still hurt him, the dog was dozing. ‘The fact that my dog goes everywhere with me is normal. It’s necessary. It’s odd if you like. I mean the two of us going around together. But there’s nothing horrific about it. But if she went around with my dog. That might be horrific. The dog is missing a leg. I’m the only one who remembers him when he had four legs. My personal memory doesn’t count. It’s of no importance in the eyes of other people. In her eyes. In your eyes. In the eyes of other dogs. Now it’s as if my dog had always had one leg missing. If it had been her dog, it would certainly never have lost its leg in a stupid argument after a football match.’ Marriott had told me the story already, I had asked him: some drunken Oxford United fans, late at night at Didcot Station, the lame man beaten and held down by several of them, the dog, not as yet lame, placed on the railway line so that it would be killed by a through train. They had let it go, they had drawn back, frightened, at the last moment, the dog had rolled over, it was lucky in a way (‘You can’t imagine the amount of blood he lost’). ‘That’s an accident. An occupational hazard for a dog with a lame master. But if it had been her dog, perhaps it would have lost its leg some other way. The dog is still missing a leg. There must be some other reason, then. Something far worse. Not just an accident. You could hardly imagine that girl getting involved in a fight. Perhaps the dog would have lost its leg because of her.’ He emphasised the word ‘because’. ‘Perhaps the only explanation of why this dog should have lost its leg, if it were her dog, would be that she had cut it off. How else could a dog who was so well looked after, cared for and loved by that nice, attractive flower-seller have lost its leg? It’s a horrible idea, that girl cutting off my dog’s leg; seeing it with her own eyes; being a witness to it.’ Alan Marriott’s words had sounded slightly indignant, indignant at the girl’s behaviour. He had broken off then, as if he had conjured up too vivid an image with his own terrible hypothesis and had indeed seen the horrific couple. As if he had seen the couple through my window — ‘with the eyes of the mind,’ I quoted to myself. He seemed to have unnerved himself, to have frightened himself. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ he said. And although I urged him to continue — ‘No, go on, you were on the point of inventing a story’ — he was not prepared to go on thinking about it, or imagining it: ‘No, forget it. It’s a poor example,’ he had said firmly. ‘As you wish,’ I had said, and then we had passed on to something else. There would have been no way of persuading him to continue his fantasy, I knew this immediately, not once he had alarmed himself by it. Perhaps he had horrified himself. He must have been shocked by his own mind.
A dog and a young woman in high boots. That rainy night was in fact the first time I had seen this conjunction, this image, with my own eyes; but my memory had already recorded or made the sinister association many years before, in this same country which was not mine, when I was still not married and had no children. (This present time of mine was beginning to resemble that other time; I had no wife or children, although I relied on them and sent them money and missed them every day, at some moment of each day.) The flower-seller Jane used to wear her jeans tucked into her boots, almost musketeer-fashion. The woman hidden behind her umbrella was wearing a skirt, I had glimpsed one thigh. It was doubtless because of that invisible precedent, that imagined image transmitted to me once by the lame bibliophile, that I had felt so relieved to find that the nocturnal white pointer had all its four legs, I had counted them one by one even though I had seen them anyway at a glance. But I had wanted to make quite sure (an instance of reflex superstition, I realised) that he and his mistress did not form some horrific couple already dreamed up by someone else.
That was what I was paid to do in the building with no name. I ceaselessly made associations, rather than interpretations or decipherings or analyses, or, rather, those merely came afterwards, as a rather feeble consequence. Wheeler had more or less announced this to me that Sunday in Oxford, in his garden or during lunch: there is no such thing as two identical people, nor has there ever been, we know that; but nor is there anyone who is not related in some way to someone else who has traversed the world, who does not have what Wheeler called affinities with someone else. There is no one who has no ties, there never has been, no links of fate or character, which, anyway, comes to the same thing (I was paraphrasing Wheeler freely), except perhaps for the very first men, if they really did exist before all others rather than many of them springing up in many places simultaneously. You see two very different people and see them, moreover, separated by centuries from your own life, so much so that, by the time the second one appears, the first has been forgotten for all those centuries, just as I had stored away the anaesthetised image of that horrific couple dreamed up by Alan Marriott. They are people who differ in age, sex, education, beliefs, mentality, temperament, affections; they might speak different languages, come from countries far, far away from each other, have entirely contrary biographies and not share a single experience, not a single parallel hour in their long, respective pasts, not a single comparable one. You meet a very young woman, with her ambition so untouched and intact that you cannot yet tell if she has any ambition or not, I remember Wheeler saying. Her shyness makes her hermetic, so much so that you’re not sure if her very shyness is not merely a pretence, a timid mask. She is the daughter of a Spanish couple you know and whom you visit, the parents force her to say hello, to join in, at least for a while, to have supper with the guest and with them. The young woman does not want to be known or even seen, she is there against her will, feigning indifference and coolness, waiting for the world — which she feels owes her a debt — to take an interest in her, to court her, seek her out and even offer her reparation, but feeling vastly bored if the friend of her parents (whom she does not consider to be part of the world: she has, by association, excluded him) displays an insistent curiosity in her, watches her with friendly concern, flatters her and draws her out. She is a slightly offended sphinx, or perhaps she is frightened, or vulnerable and uncertain, or deceitful, an impostor. She’s impossible to fathom, she wants people to take notice of her and, at the same time, sees this as interference, she can’t bear to be noticed by someone who doesn’t count, someone who, according to her perceptions and criteria, has no right to notice her. She isn’t and cannot be unpleasant, she doesn’t go quite that far, besides, no one with a pretty, blushing face ever is, but it is impossible to imagine what lies behind the helmet of her extreme youth, it is as if she wore the visor lowered so that all one could see of her eyes were her eyelashes. The immature and the unfinished are the most unfathomable of things, like the four lines of a drawing, dashed off and left incomplete, which do not even allow you to speculate on the figure they aspired to be or were on the way to becoming. And yet something nearly always does emerge, says Wheeler. Rarely do you meet a person about whom you remain forever in the dark, rarely — by dint of sheer persistence on our part — does a figure fail to emerge, however blurred or tenuous, and however different from what you were expecting, remote, defined, or out of keeping with those few initial lines, even incongruous. You become accustomed to the darkness of each face or person or past or history or life, you begin, after unflagging scrutiny of the shadows, to be able to make something out, the gloom lifts and you grasp something, discern something: the discouragement abates then or else invades and wraps around us, depen
ding on whether we wanted to see something or to see nothing, depending upon which characteristics, which affinities we find in which person, or whether these are merely our own marks, our own memories. Anyone who wants to see nearly always does end up seeing something, imagine, then, what a person committed to seeing could achieve, or someone who makes a career out of it, like you and like me, you think you haven’t begun, but you began a long time ago, you just haven’t yet been paid to do it, but now you will be, very soon; it’s the way you live anyway. There are so few of us who have the courage and the patience to keep looking that we get well paid for it (‘Go on. Quickly, hurry, keep thinking and keep looking beyond the purely necessary, even when you have the feeling that there is no more, no more to think, that it’s all been thought, that there’s no more to see, that it’s all been seen’), to examine in depth what appears to be as smooth, opaque and black as a field of heraldic sable, a compact darkness. Yet one suddenly catches a gesture, an intonation, a flicker, a hesitation, a laugh, a tic, an oblique look, it can be anything, even something very trivial. You hear or see something, whatever it might be, in the young daughter of the couple you are friendly with, you see something that you recognise and associate with something else, that you heard or saw in someone, I think, while Wheeler continues his explanation. You see in the girl the same conceited, cruel, neurotic expression, the identical expression, that you saw so often in a much older man, almost elderly, a magazine publisher with whom you worked for far too long, even a single day would have been too much. They are, in principle, unrelated, no one would have made the connection, it’s ridiculous. There is no resemblance, nor, of course, any family relationship. The man had grey, almost bouffant hair, the young woman’s is a glossy, dark brown mane; his flesh sags, his face grows visibly more haggard every day, her flesh is so firm and exultant that, beside her, her parents seem one-dimensional (as do you, probably, but you cannot see yourself), as if she were the only person in the room who had any volume, or as if only she had been carved in relief; his eyes were small and treacherous, greedy and malicious despite the smiles that frequented his wide-set teeth — which looked as if they had never been polished or buffed (or as if the enamel had worn away, so that they resembled the tiny, grubby teeth of a saw) — in the hope of making the whole more cordial (and he deceived many, even me for a while, or perhaps I merely averted my gaze from what I saw, that is what the world does constantly, and you cannot always separate yourself from the world), whereas her eyes are large and elusive and grave and seem to covet nothing, her lips do not bestow smiles on those who do not, from her miserly point of view, deserve it, and she doesn’t mind appearing sullen (she’s not as yet interested in seducing anyone with flattery), and the rare glimpse you get of her teeth is a radiant benediction. No, they are entirely unrelated, that devious owner and publisher of magazines, that boastful and unpleasant older man, so insecure about his acquisitions and so conscious of his monetary and intellectual thefts that he would do his best to crush, if he could, those from whom he pilfered; no, nothing connects them, he and this girl on whom one would say the curtain has not yet gone up, who is still all potentiality and enigma, a ready-prepared canvas on which only a few tentative brushstrokes have fallen, a few experiments with colour. And yet. In the end, at the last, it is only when your persistence finally runs out that you see, with a clear, disinterested bitterness, that flash, the expression or even the look of that man whom she does not resemble and whom she does not know (thus ruling out any idea of mimesis). It isn’t just a matter of superimposing their two faces, so different, so opposed — that would be a visual aberration, an ocular absurdity. No, it’s an association, a recognition, an affinity grasped. (A horrific couple.) It’s the same flicker of irritation or the same demanding look, doubtless provoked by different causes or following such divergent trajectories that his is already declining and hers is barely starting. Or perhaps there is no cause in either case and the trajectories count for little, the flicker or the look do not have their origins in a setback or in a piece of good luck, nor in what events might bring. In the businessman, such expressions were already deeply rooted, permanently resident in his ruddy drinker’s complexion threaded with broken veins, whilst in the young girl they are only a momentary temptation, a mist perhaps, something that could yet be reversible and which, at this precise moment, is of no importance. And yet, once you’ve noticed that link, you know. You know what she is like in one aspect, and that there can be no emendation in that crucial aspect: it will go hard for anyone who thwarts her and equally hard for those who try to please her (‘Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, to cease to exist for them’). That look and that expression indicate something which you discerned and noted from the very first moment, but without making the link with that old, immensely arrogant petty thief, without noticing that the young woman shares that characteristic with him, or reproduces it (she doesn’t even know him, yet she has produced an exact copy). Both feel, or perhaps judge, that the world is in their debt; that anything good which comes their way is merely their due — what else; they therefore know nothing of contentment or gratitude; they appreciate none of the favours done to them or the clemency with which they are treated; they see such things as evidence of respect, and respect they see as evidence of the weakness and fear of the person who had the cane in his hand, but chose not to beat them. They are quite simply insufferable, people who never learn, certainly not from their mistakes. They always feel that they are the creditors of the world, even though they spend their whole lives affronting and despoiling it, via any of the world’s innumerable offspring who happen to stray into their line of fire. And if, given her age, the girl had not yet been able to shoot down many of these, I was quite sure that, swiftly and with great precocity, she would soon make up for the intolerably long waiting time that indolent physical growth imposes on the very determined. When you recognise that conceited, cruel, complex-ridden expression — which always presages anger — when you make that unhappy link, that is, when you cease to be curious about the young woman, or to look on her with sympathy, or to flatter her with the captivating questions of an adult. And she, who previously found those attentions so hard to bear and who spurned them because of the person they came from — a friend of her parents, so boring, so old — now finds it still harder to bear the withdrawal of that deferential behaviour. Which is why she bolts her dessert, gets up from the table and leaves the room without saying goodbye. She has suffered, she has collected and stored away yet another insult.