Babel Tower Read online

  A young woman called Dora, who was, or had until that moment been, a lady’s maid—if indeed that moment was the moment of emancipation, or unshackling, or evolution desiderated by Culvert—this young woman asked, in a pretty and languid voice, which the Lady Roseace prevented herself from characterising as “insolent,” whether her own natural passional need to live the life of a lady, and drink tea, and lie on a couch, and flirt with gentlemen, could now be put to good use, in the new order. Culvert answered this flippancy with a most beaming gravity, saying that he hoped that from now on, from time to time, to be regulated and ordered by the organism of the community, everyone who so desired might lie on a couch and sip tea, for these were not insignificant pleasures by any means. And that also flirting with gentlemen, fulfilling the desires of gentlemen, and indeed sharing mutual pleasures with them, would be part of the rights and duties of all women in the Tower. And that also productive work must be done, the community must be fed, agriculture, cooking and so on must happen, and those unable to carry out any duties in the fields or kitchens must find other ways of benefiting the common wealth. The questioner could hardly be employed as a whore in the new order, he supposed, for pleasuring should be by mutual consent and freely given—unless particular passions felt an irreducible need to be paid for their services—for he had noticed that to some, coins of the realm in the palm of the hand, or the stocking under the bed, were a greater delight than any number of ejaculations or embraces, and he was not yet firm in his own mind as to whether this proclivity would disappear in a harmonious world, or persist ineradicably. The young woman appeared to be taking some time to think out the implications of this last observation—her pretty brow was knit and her mouth pouted thoughtfully.

  From the back of the theatre, in the shadows, the dark voice of Colonel Grim could be heard, breaking into the momentary silence.

  “And who will be responsible for cleaning the latrines?”

  A further silence ensued. Colonel Grim said, brisk and conversational, “I ask again, who will be responsible for cleaning the latrines? And I offer you the observation that many previous attempts to found ideal societies or just commonwealths have foundered on just this question, which is not trivial but, if you will forgive a little wordplay, of fundamental importance.”

  No one could think of an answer to this question, though Narcisse proposed that the task be shared by the whole community, by rota, everyone working with a partner for so many days of the month or year. He added, with a graceful smile, that he would be only too happy himself to purchase his release from this duty with anything it might be in his power to offer anyone, after the institution of the new order. Merkurius said that the best way would be to find someone whose natural passion was ingenious invention, and who, with a system of pulleys and funnels, runnels and pumps, might perhaps make the latrines self-sufficient, might construct a self-perpetuating, self-evacuating, self-purifying system. Turdus Cantor said that if they were to work on the assumption that everyone had a set of passional inclinations that contributed to the good of a society, perhaps they should ask if anyone here had a passional inclination to the clearing of excrement. He had seen Bedlam lunatics happily at play with the substance, but he thought there were not yet any Bedlam lunatics amongst them. Culvert said that the persons in question might only have been restrained in Bedlam because their natural desire to handle turds was disapproved by society, and that such persons might indeed be usefully employed in latrines in a reasonable community. Another silence ensued which was broken by Marius, a twelve-year-old boy, who remarked that cleaning latrines could be a form of punishing offenders here, as in schools and military camps he had seen. The Lady Paeony said she hoped that no form of punishment would be thought desirable in the new world they intended to build, and the discussion moved away from Colonel Grim’s question to the question of the desirability, or otherwise, of punishments and sanctions, which took up several sage, delightful and exhausting hours.

  After the debate, Turdus Cantor said to Grim: “No answer was found to your question.”

  “No. And things are thereby already worse, for those who did clean the latrines will hardly continue to do so.”

  “Some leaders would have set an example by setting themselves at the head of the first rotating cohort of shit-shifters.”

  “That is not his style. But I believe he will find a solution to the shit-shifting. I do not think shit-shifting will be his downfall.”

  “Yet finding volunteers will not be easy.”

  “All men can be coerced into voluntary acts against their instincts. You will see.”

  “You are not sanguine about our success, Grim, I think.”

  “I do not say that. I say, I am not a young man, and if there is success, it will be so much delayed that I shall not live to see it. Whereas if there is failure at the outset, I shall be here, to take a hand. I can be relied upon for some things.”

  That evening, Culvert in his chamber was visited by Damian, who was, or who had been, his valet. Damian knocked as usual, discreetly and respectfully, and Culvert as usual answered negligently, “Come,” and lay back on his couch with his booted legs extended. It was, or had been, Damian’s duty to draw off these boots, kneeling solicitously at Culvert’s side, and to carry them away, pushing his long arms into their warm sheaths, fingering and massaging the supple leather on to the tall boot-trees, before returning to tuck his master’s toes into their embroidered velvet slippers. Around this minor ritual, over the years, master and man had arranged many solicitous little games. Sometimes, for instance, Damian would brush his lips over every inch of the damp silk stockings, one after the other. Sometimes he would strip them off gently, and kiss Culvert’s beautiful naked feet, inserting his tongue precisely between every pair of toes, whilst the master lay back on the cushions with all sorts of smiles, voluntary and involuntary, playing over his sensuous lips. Damian was a thickset man, shorter than Culvert, and in all probability a few years older. He had a cap of very straight black hair, cut like a pudding-basin helmet, large, sad, deep-set dark eyes, and a luxuriant but well-dressed moustache, whose fronds aroused particularly delightful sensations in Culvert’s toes, and not only his toes. Sometimes his attentions were spread upwards to the knees and the thighs, and sometimes he would respectfully unlace the breeches and nose and caress with his tongue the magnificent rod which sprang to view. He had a straight Norman nose, this Damian, with which he produced very particular shivers and frissons in Culvert’s groin, and in the soft pouch which contained his balls. These games were for the most part wordless, and Damian had a very nice understanding of how far he might go—in the direction, that is, of the upwards exploration of his master’s body, of which the full lips were the most sacred, most infrequently conceded treasure, and in the direction of vigorous manipulation or even attack. For there were certain days when the little ritual ended with the master spread-eagled naked among the cushions, and the man throwing himself upon him, with sinewy force, opening his own clothing as he did so, so that here and there skin met skin. If Damian, in these games misjudged the pressure required, caused too much, or too little pain, the master would kick out with his considerable muscular power, and tumble the man to the ground. Once he had cracked Damian’s collar-bone with one sharp, well-placed impact of the elegant white foot.

  Tonight, Damian came into the room and stood loosely inside the door, all his muscles relaxed.

  “Come, come,” said Culvert, kindly enough.

  “I do not know what I should do,” said Damian.

  Culvert lounged against his cushions. His face was particularly beautiful in the light of a candle in a golden-rose Venetian glass shade, which stood on a shelf above him. After a moment’s thought he saw what Damian seemed to be thinking, and said lazily, “You must do what you want, now, of course. You must do what gives you pleasure.”

  He added, with a singularly sweet smile, swinging his foot from the edge of the couch, “Perhaps you should take my pl
ace here. When we have played that game, when you have taken the place of the master, and I have been your slave, that has made you happy, I think. I have given you satisfaction in that capacity, have I not? Perhaps tonight we should play that game?”

  Damian stood in the shadow of the doorway, stolid and hunched.

  “That game is over for ever. You must see that. We cannot play that game any more, monseigneur, or should I say ‘my friend,’ after what you said today in the Theatre of Tongues.”

  “But I said also, we must all do what gives us pleasure. We must find out the subtle secrets of what most pleases us, and perform the acts we desire to perform. What we have done together has pleased you, Damian, I think. Your sweat was the sweat of an excited man, and your sperm has spurted into these cushions in joy. There is no reason why this should cease. Come and lie down here, and I will take off your boots and your breeches, and lick your feet and blow into your maidenhair.”

  “You understand nothing, I see,” said Damian steadily. “The pleasure I felt then was in the pleasure of my independent thoughts whilst my body, like my life, was at your command. My livelihood depended on being able to please you, in this as in other things, the preparation of cravats, the service of wine and sweetmeats, the ready presentation of whips and cigarillos. If I was able to discharge my seed on your body or your cushions, my lord, it was because inside my head I watched, like a voluptuous sultan, a scene in which you were bound, ankles to neck, with cords that cut your fine flesh, whilst black girls whipped you with bull pizzles. I could come at will at the imaginary sight of those imaginary runnels of blood, sir, my friend, and so I was able to fulfil my duty. Of which I am now absolved.”

  Culvert sat upright, and the shadows chased each other like clouds across his ivory brow.

  “Perhaps,” he said doubtfully, “that is how we should proceed. I cannot, I fear, provide black girls or bull pizzles, but cords there are in plenty, and perhaps you should bind and hurt me, and thus fulfil your desires.”

  “You still do not understand,” said the other. “Those too were the desires of a servant, a bondsman, a man with a master. Those are the desires of a man whose desires are secret, not his own, at another’s command. Now I am a free man, or so you seemed to say, and I must learn the desires of a free man. And what I desire is perhaps not to do with you at all, but to lie in the arms of the Lady Roseace, and hear her sweet voice call me my love, my heart’s desire, my dear darling, and other such tendernesses of which I know nothing, and to feel her fair fingers touch me with fear, and gentleness, and tenderness. And perhaps that may never be, for I do not know that she could ever desire me, bound or free. Unreciprocated desires, my lord, my friend, may prove to be as troublesome as latrines in your new economy.”

  It was then that Culvert felt the first movement of the invention that was to bring so much pleasure and so much terror to La Tour Bruyarde. It came to him that these problems—the regrettable desuetude of his pleasant games with Damian, the problem of Damian’s desire for the Lady Roseace, and whether she could return it, were susceptible to a solution involving Art, involving Narrative, involving Theatre, as he had dimly adumbrated it earlier in that long day. For if the members of the community no longer had fixed identities or functions, but were all in need of finding themselves in the new flux of their beings, then a way, the way, the best way, for this self-discovery might be enactment of what had been and what might be in the future, or in the imagination, before the company, for the benefit of all. And in the Theatre he and Damian could again be, box and cox, master and man, and in the Theatre Roseace could safely simulate or feel desire for Damian that might be unforthcoming or unapparent if the man presented himself, requiring it simply for his own good, at her chamber door.

  But he was unready to propound this new scheme of the universal benefit, so instead he said to Damian, “I propose, then, since I feel myself in urgent need of release and relief, that we find some strictly equal and balanced way of pleasuring each other, so that we may both go our own ways and sleep soundly. I propose that we lie here, face to face, cock to cock, naked on this carpet and perform upon each other only those acts which are the mirror-image of what the other performs. A kiss for a kiss, a handle for a handle, and so to satisfaction, and this shall be a seal of the new equality and respect between us, whatever we may subsequently choose to do, or not to do. What do you say to this, my friend?”

  “I say,” said Damian, “that it is an elegant solution, and one I shall accept with the intention of taking direct and not mendacious pleasure in your embrace.”

  So they stripped, and lay down together, mouth to mouth, cock to cock, awkward as two virgin boys, and Damian kissed Culvert long and hard upon the forbidden lips, which at first flinched away, and then opened deliciously and returned the kiss with good measure. And so matters went on, a little awkwardly at first, but then with more heat and animation, spurred on in inventiveness by the artifice of every embrace being exactly reciprocated. The details I well leave you to imagine for yourselves, for I know your imaginations will prove more fertile of quick breaths and jissom than my pen and ink shadows of desire. But I can assure you that they came together to a most triumphant and arching climax, and cried out, both together, in honest delight in their shared exploit. And Culvert thought to himself the Commonwealth had commenced well and inventively, as he meant it to proceed.

  III

  Dear Frederica,

  You said you would like a letter, so I am writing one. It was so strange, seeing you in that wood, like a creature from another time, or another world, and with your beautiful son. It was a great shock to me to see him, because I had not even known of his existence, and this made me realise how far apart we had grown, which I am sorry about. I doubt if you ever knew how much you meant to me, and it is only since I saw you that I have come to realise just how much I miss your uncompromising intelligence and the sense I always had that you knew why reading and writing mattered in the world. We all thought we knew that, then, but that was why it was such an unreal, such an isolated, Paradisal time—that we should all be there to read poetry, that that was what we were for. I suppose if we had stayed on, this might have been possible to perpetuate—as Raphael has done—but I would feel uneasy about that, even if I were academically good enough, which I am not. I don’t feel that I would be quite real if I spent the rest of my life inside the walls of a College—like Tennyson’s soul in the Tower in “The Palace of Art”—although I do see that there is a perfectly tenable intellectual position from which this view is absurd. Raphael’s life is a good, rich, exacting, complicated life—and just as real as the lives and deaths of his family in Auschwitz, though I completely see how, for him, that reality drains life from his own. Anyway, I think I will tell you a little about the reality I have made for myself—and its elements of unreality—and hope you will reply.

  The most important thing to me is still writing poetry. I say that first because often I don’t do it for days and weeks together and I do spend long hours either teaching or reading for the Papagallo Press, which makes defining myself as a poet rather absurd, and sometimes depressing. Some of the time I tell everyone I meet “I am a poet” and the rest of the time I never mention it at all, I say, “I am a temporary teacher,” or, “I have a part-time job in publishing.” I’ve written one or two things I’m quite pleased with, but I know I don’t have my own voice yet, and this worries me, since for a poet I’m no longer young, really. If I get up the courage, I’ll send you the pomegranate poem I was working out in my head when we met, and you will think how strange it is that those images came out of your yew trees—tho’ yewberries are not unlike miniature pomegranates—an image I couldn’t fit in. All poems trail behind them images that are part of them but can’t be fitted in. Everything connects to everything, despite you being so furious when I quoted “Only connect” about your present life.

  Monday to Thursday lunchtime I do supply teaching. This varies enormously from school to s
chool. Sometimes I have eager sixth-formers doing The Winter’s Tale or Hamlet and sometimes I have kids of thirteen and fourteen who cannot keep still or quiet or speak in words of more than one syllable and who do from time to time frighten me. I have had a pair of scissors pushed into my ribs and spent a week or two with one eye closed up by a blow with the corner of the Bible. There is something peculiarly horrible about going back into the atmosphere of school, which I can’t say I ever enjoyed or liked (an understatement) and despite the violence, the stupidity and the philistinism (all of wch. you might think of as “real”). School has its own closed, tower-of-ivory reality with its own rules and language quite as much as Cambridge colleges. I’m lucky I think because I didn’t expect to find it rewarding or exciting—colleagues with high ideals about sharing D. H. Lawrence or Hardy with London teenagers inevitably come to grief—one colleague who spent hours of his own time compiling an anthology of writings about Fire for a group of teenage girls had his classroom set alight amongst witchy shrieks of glee. There is a lot of educational idealism around but I think Lord of the Flies got it triumphantly right, and find that most children think so too, in schools where I am allowed to teach it. I hope this doesn’t mean I shall find my head on a sacrificial stake in the playground, on the analogy with my fiery colleague.

  Every now and then I meet surprising children—there is a boy called Boris in my present comprehensive with a perfect ear, the poetic version of perfect pitch, who gives me great pleasure and savours Hamlet’s throwaway rhythms—but I do not want to get attached to any of them, that would make me A Teacher, and I am not. I teach for the books I teach—what I have discovered in Hamlet over the last year in Stepney and Tooting Bee and Morden would stagger even you, Frederica. And if I am any good as a teacher it is because I care more about the books than about the kids and some of the kids respect that, and I have a knack of frightening them wch. I think you may be born with or not, so sometimes they listen. I think it’s because they know I don’t love them and don’t care what they think of me. I thought I’d be a hopeless disciplinarian, but I’m not. I say, “Shut up,” and sometimes they do and that gives me pleasure. Who would have thought it?