Turning Back the Sun(54)
During his last few days, Rayner took to rambling the streets and parks. He was reminded of how beautiful the city was. Unsmirched by industry, the fa?ades of all its public buildings shone in a lustrous stone. They resembled, he thought, a stately theater set. He peered inside the Opera House, which was showing L” Africaine, and watched the guards outside the presidential palace, marching back and forth in their white and gold uniforms. He took coffee under the hanging flower baskets of the shopping arcade. He even spent time identifying the statues in the squares: men in frock coats, mostly, with scrolls and upraised fingers, telling the world things. Sometimes the whole city seemed very innocent.
Occasionally, a little way in front of him, he imagined he recognized the rangy stride of Adelina or the froth of Miriam”s curls. But when he drew alongside, the expression which met his would be blank. In fact he saw nobody he knew. And people seemed to move in a languid self-absorption. Their eyes might meet his, but they rarely focused, and he came to associate this dreamy stare with the city: a gaze without penetration, like the becalmed vision of a cat. Whole shops and restaurants and streets were filled with it. It turned them faintly unreal. Even the young women, looking back at him, would only glance away or smile after two or three seconds. A few of them were beautiful. But most looked merely pretty, like mezzotints. He could not imagine them losing their tempers or making love. They only made him ache for Zo?: her exuberance and irreverence and unpredictable passions.
Once he saw a cat like hers squeezing through a restaurant doorway and felt suddenly, joltingly sick. He half expected her to follow it out and gather it in her arms.
He wondered where the savages had gone, who years ago had been drafted in as domestic labor, but there was scarcely a sign of them. They had not intermarried, and the few he saw were “white men”s natives,” tamed and neat in their suits and frocks. Only once, as if she had stepped out of the wilderness, a wild-looking woman and her young child came striding past him down the central boulevard, inexplicable among the trams and parasols.
Whenever Rayner turned the corner into his parents” street and glimpsed between the ranks of balconies the whitewashed church, he received a momentary sensation that he shouldn”t be there, that the whole street belonged to the dead. He had not attended mass for fifteen years, and had lost his faith before that: yet unconsciously he had located belief in this sanctuary near his childhood home, where God perhaps survived inside the comfortable body of the community.
He stepped into the nave. Two or three elderly women were sitting among pews in the pleated chiffon collars which they wore for confession. Nothing had changed. The plaster Virgin still looked at heaven while the tapers died at her feet, and the saints performed their miracles in the stained glass. He went softly into the chancel. He remembered each memorial plaque. Higher up, where as a boy he had offered Anna”s crystal to the crucified Christ, the embroidered gold altar cloth was dedicated to the memory of his father.
Then he felt a heart-shaking guilt, as if his apostasy was branded on him. He was standing in a foreign temple. It mattered now that he could not repeat the Creed or drink the wine, and he remembered amazed how for three years he had attended mass in half-belief, or none. Now he was too exacting even to look at the altar”s gold Christ. His God had not outlived him in the city, had not been located in space at all, but in time, where He had been lost.
CHAPTER
23
Doctor Morena had a creaseless moon-face which looked permanently anointed with skin cream. He apologized for the howl of babies in the surgery—which was mild compared to baby clinic day in Rayner”s practice—and settled pleasantly behind his desk. He had known Birgit Sorensen for years, he said—a truly original woman, “one of the old school”—and had read Rayner”s articles on psoriasis with respect. If Rayner should decide to settle in the capital, then … conditions, he implied, were more benign than those in the town. Heatstroke and septicemia were rare, and diseases due to stress were less common than infectious and hereditary ones. But even TB and diphtheria were on the wane; and there were, of course, no industrial accidents, and little alcoholism or venereal disease. The surgical and obstetric wings of the local hospital coped with any problems beyond general expertise.
Smiling back at the beneficent, faintly smug face in the well-appointed clinic, Rayner felt perverse to be hankering after the rumpus of his own. Medically, he knew, it was not the way things should be, but his tough, diversified practice—the chaotic improvising, the follow-up of his patients through the hand-to-mouth hospitals, the hazards of his radiotelegraph service—had become his second nature and stimulus. Out there he was at once more tested, more needed and more self-governing than here. He recognized that he had been tightened to a certain pitch like a violin string, and could not now be undone. A little astonished at himself, he thanked Dr. Morena for his offer, but realized that he would decline. He was bewildered at the finality of this, and by his lack of much regret.
But he wanted to go home.
In the sky, as he started back to his aunt, a whispering flock of cranes, heading south, betrayed the deepening autumn. He got off the tram beyond the State Assembly, and entered the skein of familiar streets. His foot was starting to throb, but he was nearly back, and did not care. For the first time, as he rounded the corner into his parents” road, he had the sensation that it existed in its simple essence of iron and stone, and that in the last few hours it had been laid obscurely to rest.