One Boat

by Jonathan Buckley

‘Remember then that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses – if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one.’ — Epictetus

Shifting into a philosophical register, Tom proposed that he had been on an excursion from himself, and wanted – desperately – to return to the right path.

A space was available for thinking, but nothing was taking advantage of the vacancy. The brain sending out an open invitation, but getting no responses, I wrote.

A number of times I glimpsed her off-guard, collecting a tray from the bar, or waiting for more customers and watching the strollers passing, and what I often saw was an expression that I had summarized as brooding. It went well with those remarkable eyes. She would make a wonderful killer, I noted one day.

I was sitting in the midst of half a dozen conversations, none of them in English. I was immersed in the life of the town, a life to which I had only the most limited access. There was more than a little self-congratulation in this, in having chosen a place that was not a resort, and in resisting the fantasy that some sort of special relationship was being formed. I was nothing to these people; almost nothing. I listened but understood nothing that was being said around me. It was unavailable to me, but I was finding it pleasurable to move upon the surface, I noted.

my mind slipped into another scene, a generic scene rather than one particular moment, and in that scene he was sitting beside me, in a concert hall, listening, leaning forward slightly, as he often did, with fingers meshed, listening acutely, not merely receiving the music, but reaching into it, concentrating as I might concentrate on a page of a document, whereas I was a recipient rather than a reader of the music that was being performed, taking it in as one might take in the view of a landscape or a perfume, and I think it came to trouble me, that my enjoyment was more superficial than was my husband’s, that he heard gradations of tone that I could not, just as some people can detect and identify a dozen intermingled elements in a perfume that to others is a single pleasing scent, and no matter that the very idea of ‘depth’, as he said, made no sense when the subject was the experience of sound, just as it would make no sense to say that person X saw crimson or cobalt more deeply than person Y, nevertheless it was in terms of depth that I tended to think of it, as if musical sounds were something like the sea, and I remained in the shallows, or on the surface, looking down, sometimes marvelling, but never within it.

I became aware of the impression I was making – specifically, of the scrutiny being transmitted from an adjacent family. And I wondered: was it the case that I had some need to be observed in this way, writing – thinking deeply, apparently – at a café table, as though at work in my room at home, while others were relaxing and enjoying what was around them? ‘Is she a writer?’ Is this what I want people to ask themselves?

The abandoned woman had, it seemed, adapted to life as a single woman immediately, as if the alteration were of the same order as the loss of a cat. Once he had gone, my mother never had the slightest interest in discussing the adulterers, not out of jealousy or bitterness, but because she was indifferent, or so she said, and it appeared to be true. Her indifference was pure. There was no prohibition against mentioning my father, but his life was of barely more relevance to her than the life of a random man on the train. She had never been one for looking back, she frequently reminded me.

The upland path was an image of which she was fond: one was where one was, and who one was, because that particular path had been followed through the hills, but if one looked back one would see that most of the path was lost from sight now, and there is no turning back.

To excel in work of the kind that occupied her days, a certain cast of mind was a prerequisite, and this analytical surplus was counterbalanced by what some might describe as a deficit in other areas, the non-rational faculties to which we tend to assign adjectives connoting conditions of comfort – viz. softness and warmth. The mind of my mother was one that breathed the air of abstractions, a chilly air to which only the chosen few were adapted. Intelligence of this kind was antithetical to disorder, and hence to passion.

Love is not an act of will, I wrote, before turning off the light. And: Did I love him, in any sense, from the time he left us? Or even before? And what of my mother & him? Habit & repetition rather than a fusion of souls?

‘Handsome’ is an adjective that has been applied to me. Handsome rather than beautiful. Insufficiently feminine, some men – and women – have thought. I was known to my first colleagues – some of them – as Brünnhilde. This was overheard in the toilets. I have been thought ‘blunt’ or ‘uncompromising’ or ‘rude’, according to taste. A perfectionist. A straight arrow. A strong oar. The combination of temperament and build has been professionally advantageous. ‘Arouse and Intimidate’ might have been my personal motto, Tom said. On our very first date he told me I could be a Swedish or a Dutch woman who had switched to the law after injury had curtailed the tennis career.

He had come to think that people never change their minds because they’ve been persuaded to. If they change their minds, it’s because they want to. The door only opens if it’s already unlocked. We arrive at decisions by our own route, and when we have arrived, and have done what we had to do, we find our reasons for what we have done.

I often feel that I don’t exist.

I feign commitment convincingly and am even capable of convincing myself for a while. I am taken to be someone who thinks strategically, who has targets for every stage. Five-year plans. But there is no sense of destination. The career is a vehicle in which I am being carried. I steer, but the propulsion is not mine. It’s like gravity. Skiing down the mountain, taking one of the lines you have to take if you want to stay upright. The lines present themselves. Swerve left here or right – and you make the choice without thinking. Something like that. I am proficient, and so I don’t fall, but I am not in charge.

Inevitably I followed the straight path, obediently, law-abidingly. For me, the decision had involved self-questioning and self-doubt. Everyone else, looking on, saw the working-out of predestination, like watching from above as the young woman made her way through the twists and turns of the labyrinth’s single corridor. We feel that we are deliberating between equal possibilities, while people wait for us to make the choice they know we will make.

Being in the present was the key idea.

It was like Spain, he told me: there had been no proper reckoning. Tens of thousands had died in the civil war. People had starved and lost everything. The dead were everywhere, but the bones were being left in the earth, undisturbed, as if that were an answer, as if silence would eventually prevail.

History was an aspect of the town’s attraction – the ancient palace, the castle. For many of the people who came here, distant history was the only history. It was a kind of romance – the romance of the ancient world, barely distinguishable from myth. It augmented the romance of the present.

The Iliad and the Odyssey were the books he’d read most often, along with the first philosophers, whose writings he would never understand, but they baffled him rewardingly. He felt a sort of nostalgia, he said, for a society that had no scriptures. How anyone could believe in a just and merciful God had always been incomprehensible to him. It was much more sensible to have a gang of gods, and to make them a fractious mob. The heroes of the Iliad were wholly of the earth, according to Petros. This appealed to him, as a man who fixed cars for a living. Homer’s warriors have no secret self, no hidden motives – they know what they are, and they do the things they do not in the hope of eternal reward, nor even of happiness, but for the sake of fame and reputation.

‘Everyone is the same: Once you’re aware of what the others have, you want it. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. Nobody chooses to settle for less,’

Spiders everywhere, some as fat as olive stones – webs lying over leaves – handkerchiefs of transparent muslin – others strung across the path, vibrating – tiny lucid beads of dew.

Some of the furnishings of my self had been carried away.

My extinction did not appal me. Death was not a deprivation – it would not rob me of anything that was mine. One could be deprived only of something that had been possessed, and one could not possess the years on the other side of death, because they did and could not exist. I would be deprived of nothing.

A long life and a short life are the same, because the present is the only life we have – the same for everyone.

I witnessed transition in everything: the slow movement of the clouds, the slower rising of the sun, the agitation of the sea. I witnessed it and felt it: with each breath, each heartbeat, I was changing, a changing thing among other things that were changing. More: as I gazed at that uncertain horizon, across the glowing water and the glowing leaves, the elements of the scene lost their separation. All categories and names were lost in the totality of it, dissolved in the light. This was how the episode achieved its climax, in an overwhelming acceptance. An Amen of sorts. That was what I wrote. ‘Ataraxia’ is a word I might have used, had it been at my disposal then.

The offender and the offence were one and the same, and he couldn’t comprehend how anyone could think otherwise. The cruelty of a cruel person is who he is. ‘It’s his substance. It’s his character,’ he said. ‘You can’t hate the sin but love the sinner. It makes no sense.’

You’ve changed. We all change. The Odysseus who comes back to Penelope isn’t the Odysseus who left, not exactly. But he comes back, because there’s a continuity. I’m not identical to the young man who was me thirty years ago. Of course not. But he’s not a different person. That tree’ – he pointed with some force – ‘was that tree thirty years ago and it’ll be the same tree thirty years from now. You’re thinking about your father while you’re here, like before, with your mother. Mourning is all about continuity. A continuity has been broken, and that’s painful. But memory is continuous.

A satisfying cadence to the whole episode of my return to the town was composing itself – just a cadence, not an all-concluding finale or revelation.

It’s remarkable, his ability to discuss his work, to praise it, as though it were the work of someone else.