Transit(22)

There was another reason, he said, that he was put on a platform next to Julian so often, and that was that both their books were categorised as autobiographical. That made things easy for the people who had to organise events like this one. But in fact his and Julian’s books had nothing in common at all. They might almost be described as functioning through mutually oppositional principles.

‘The other day,’ he said, ‘I was sitting in my study staring out into the garden and I suddenly saw my cat, Mino, on the lawn. Mino had a bird pinned to the grass between his paws. The bird struggled and flapped while Mino watched it interestedly. Mino was enjoying his power and anticipating the moment when he would fulfil it by biting the bird’s head off. At that moment there was a sudden noise, some sort of bang or report from the road, and Mino looked up, distracted. The bird seized its opportunity and struggled free and flew away.’

It had surprised Louis that the bird was so resourceful. But it had to be admitted that Mino was getting old: in his younger days as a hunter he would never have allowed his paws to loosen their grip even while his mind was off its guard. Also, Louis could have saved the bird himself by standing up, opening the door and shooing Mino away. He had been thinking, in that moment, about success, and about the fact that the book he had written in the filthy and oppressive basement studio that used to be his workplace had through its worldwide sales transported him here, to this large and pleasant room in the pleasant home he now owned with a view of his beautiful gardens. He had also bought several new items of furniture with his money, including the Mies van der Rohe chair in which he had at that moment been sitting. He could feel the soft leather beneath his thighs; his nostrils were full of its rich, luxurious smell. These sensations were still quite alien to him, yet he was aware that they were causing a new part of him, a new self, to grow. He had no associations with them but those associations were being created right now, while he sat there: he was actively and by small degrees becoming distanced from the person he had been, while becoming by the same small degrees someone new.

He had wanted to finish these thoughts, to think them to their completion and discover what he truly felt about his change of circumstances: was it self-satisfaction or shame? Was it the vitriolic feeling of having defeated the people who had once belittled and humiliated him, or was it guilt at having escaped them and turned his experiences at their hands to profit while their own lives remained miserably untransformed? These meditations were interrupted by the arrival of Mino in his line of vision and by the story that started playing itself out before his eyes. As he became absorbed in the story – brief though it was – of Mino and the bird, Louis was aware of the feelings of responsibility it was immediately beginning to invoke in him. He watched the bird feebly flap its wings while Mino held it pinned to the earth. Nobody, he realised, was controlling that story: either he needed to act and intervene, or he would be hurt by the sight of Mino killing the bird, because it was of course with the bird that he identified, despite the fact that he knew Mino and that Mino was his cat. As it was, the incident was quickly resolved: the narrative had somehow taken care of itself. What that narrative looked like was the triumph over adversity – Louis himself had attributed the qualities of determination and resourcefulness to the bird – but in fact there had been something far more profound and disturbing in his witnessing of these events, which in themselves meant nothing, but to which his feelings of responsibility and knowledge gave an entirely different cast. His public identification with his cat Mino was in conflict with his private identification with the bird: the sense of responsibility, he realised, came from the active realisation that those two things were about to collide. Part of him must hate Mino, yet Mino was part of himself. Watching the bird get away, he was reminded of the randomness and cruelty of reality, for which the belief in narrative could only ever provide the most absurd and artificial screen; but greater still was his sense of the bird as symbolising something about truth. Despite his new circumstances, he recalled very well the way he used to be in the world, particularly the way he had played cat, as it were, to his own bird. For as long as he could remember he had felt it inside him, the frantic presence of something trapped that ought to be wild, something whose greatest vulnerability lay in its capacity to lose its freedom; for years he had exerted power over that thing, mindlessly, programmatically, much as Mino had exerted his power over the bird. Sitting in his pleasant study with the smell of leather in his nostrils, watching the activity on the lawn, the ease with which he recalled that old state of mind convinced him that he had in fact re-entered it, that the bird had been trapped anew and was once again frantically flapping inside him. After all, it was in its nature not to learn, not to retain knowledge: once it became trained, its nature was transgressed and it was no longer free.

His book had sold all over the world, as he had said, despite the fact that after the initial shock of appreciation people did little but complain about it, about the fact that nothing, as they saw it, ever happened in his writing, or at least nothing they recognised as fit to be written about. A book such as Julian’s was far more palatable: it always surprised him how people lapped it up, extremity, how eager they were to consume what lay far outside the compass of their own experience, their relish for it if anything increased by the absence of the very thing he, Louis, was abjured for removing – the screen of fiction. People believed that Julian didn’t need to make things up because the extremity of his experiences was such that it released him from that obligation. Reality, on this occasion, could serve in the place of fantasy as a means of distracting people from the facts of their own lives. In fact he quite liked Julian’s book, and not just because they had become, so to speak, fellow travellers. A lot of writers seemed to think that the higher a truth – or to be more accurate, since truth was something altogether different, a fact – was pitched from the earth, the less of a supporting structure it required: so long as something could be proved to have actually occurred it could be left to stand on its own, and if that thing happened to be so bizarre or grotesque that it caught people’s attention, the need to explain it was diminished even further. Unlike the others, what Julian appeared to realise was that for every degree of extremity a corresponding degree of responsibility was required, just as the architect of a tall building faces a more strenuous task of engineering than the builder – if Julian would excuse him – of a garden shed.