'You were thinking how pretty I am', said Ann, when he fell into her trap. She said she could read minds, and when he asked her – what a fool! – what was on his mind, she said it. You were thinking how pretty I am: and what a trap, and what a fool he was.
Of course she was pretty. Everyone young is pretty, the poet says. That's how he thought of her: she was young, very young. Innocent. Innocent enough to say: You were thinking how pretty I am. Young, coquettish – and hadn't she a right to be a coquette? Young, very young: she had every right. All the rights were on her side, and none on his.
He said nothing, did nothing. They walked further along the river. Further, the afternoon all around them. Further, and his stomach turned, he felt terribly ill, he wanted to sink down. And that's what he said: 'I feel terribly ill'.
I feel terribly ill, he said, like an idiot. He had been given something. A door had opened. Light flashed through the sky. Him, it was up to him. Beauty was passing by on a summer afternoon. Beauty – and not merely prettiness – was flashing by.
You can be pretty – beautiful – enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty. What does it deserve?, you might ask yourself, looking in the mirror. What is its due? It is as if beauty led its own life, its own fate. That it wandered through this world, our world, according to its own unguessable lights.
What beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Who could ever admire the tapering of her own limbs or the brightness of her face? You owe your beauty to Beauty. Your beauty is only the way Beauty travels through our world. Your beauty is not yours. You cannot own it, or keep it to yourself. It travels, passing. It is passing now.
He once read the story of a Buddhist nun who, singled out for her beauty, held a hot iron to her face. Beauty was her trial – it was like a light constantly shining upon her; she wanted to sink into anonymity, to be no one in particular. But in a sense, the anonymity she sought was already part of beauty. It is not hers; she does not possess it, and it is as though it wandered ahead of her, opening doors and windows, leading her on.
Clear the way!, beauty announces, like the flag waver who walked out ahead of the earliest steam engine to warn of its coming. Clear the way: and so a face in a nightclub might open like a woodland glade, all light. Clear the way; and so a limb – an outstretched arm – points along itself to God.
Beauty is anonymous, the poet says. Beauty has nothing to do with the one who is touched by beauty. Touched – and been left behind by it, too. Touched – until beauty begins to soften and disperse itself across the face. Until it begins to lose itself in a mist through which, for a time, it shines with a great benevolence.
But in the meantime, today (that day, back then), Ann's eyes having been marked out in eyeliner and mascara? Today, when her eyes have becoming something to be watched as the most delicate register of passing mood?
When she looked at him, he felt a roaring in his ears, he said. He wanted to pick up a sharp object and stab himself, he says, so he could be done with it. He wanted to slice his arm with his own keys. It was unbearable.
But when she looked away, it was also unbearable. As though the whole world had turned away from him. He was lost, cast out. He was a fallen angel. A moment ago, just then, he had had his chance, and now …
His chance, his chance: he pictured for himself another life, another way of living. In another, brighter world he is with Ann. With her: but what does that mean? With Ann … in a relationship: but what would that mean, to be in a relationship? What would beauty want with him, anyway?
But beauty would want nothing from him. He'd seen something, some secret; he'd caught it out. It had shone for him in Ann's face. It had flashed out at him, for him. And in his other life, with great thanks, he would have stepped up to honour what he saw. To honour it, to encircle it, to touch Ann's hands because they were beauty's hands, to look into her eyes because they were the eyes of beauty.
In another life … But in this life? Nothing was to happen. The threshold quivered. The afternoon was an open door. But he stepped back, retreated. He had to. It was his duty, his mission.
What had they been talking about? Everything, nothing. All of their lives – the whole of their lives, each of them, freely and openly – neglectfully – as you can do with a stranger, with someone who doesn't know you.
You can speak as you would dream, like river plants under the water, bowing to the current. You can bow to something, submit to it, to your own story, to your portion of fate, to what has happened so far.
This is what has happened, you can say, but lightly, almost indifferently. This is it, but neglectfully, as you might pick a piece of flowering grass and chew it for a moment. A green taste. Spit it out. As you might let your hand brush the clock of a dandelion. Feathery spores in the air. As you might hold a branch of bramble aside for a fellow walker. Be careful!
Yes, that's how they spoke, on the threshold. That was it, the sky open above them like an open door. He could say anything, anything at all. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
He had Ann to himself. They had the afternoon to themselves. Nothing was planned, nothing was to happen. Dinner time was far off. The evening – what were they going to do with their evenings? The next day – anything could happen tomorrow, for those who barely worked. Anything tomorrow and the day after that.
All the days were there, at the threshold. All the incomplete and incompletable days. But he let himself be led into a trap, didn't he? He wandered into it, the gentlest of traps, the kindest of bullets. He should have fallen deliriously. He should have let himself be caught by catching her, by placing his arms around her. By kissing her – could he imagine that? By kissing her.
You're thinking how pretty I am. How pretty: and when she said that, the afternoon, and all afternoons, came to an end. How pretty, how pretty … he laughs.
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