SECTION ONE

LINGUISTIC LEPROSY
Allegro non troppo

Ce qui m’etonnait c’etatit qu’it was my French that disintegrated first.

Thus I expounded my affliction, an instant after I noticed its onset. My words went, of course, unvoiced. A comic-strippist would balloon them under the heading THINKS – a pretty convention, but a convention just the same. For instance, is the ‘THINKS’ part of the thought, imply the thinker is aware of thinking?

Moreover – and this is a much more important omission – comic strips don’t shew whom the thoughts are thought to.

Obviously, it wasn’t myself I was informing I had contracted linguistic leprosy. I’d already known for a good split second.

I was addressing the imaginary interlocutor who is entertained, I surmise, by all self-conscious beings – short of, possibly, the dumb, and probably, infants (in the radical sense of the word).

Consciousness: a nigger minstrel show in which you are for ever grabbing a disembodied buttonhole and gabbling, ‘Pardon me, Mister Interloctuor.’

From the moment infant begins to trail round that rag doll, mop-head or battered bunny and can’t get off to sleep except in its company, you know he’s no longer infant but fant. Bunny is the first of the shadow siblings, a proto-life-partner. Mister and Missus Interlocutor: an incestuous and frequently homosexual marriage has been prearranged. Pity Bunny, that doomed childbride.

I have known myself label the interlocutor with the name and, if I can conjure it, the face of someone I am badly in love with or awe of. But these are forced loans. Cut short the love or awe, and the dialogue continues.

Only death, perhaps, breaks the connection. Perhaps it is Mister Interlocutor who dies first, turning away his head and heed.

The phantom faces of the interlocutor are less troubling than the question of where he is. I am beset by an insidious compulsion to locate him. When my languages gave their first dowser’s-twig twitch and I conceived they might be going to fall off, I still treated that matter less gravely than the problem of where I was addressing my account of it.

The problem was the more acute because I was alone in a concourse of people. After a moment I noticed that my situation had driven me to think my thoughts to the public-address system, which had, for the last hour, been addressing me – inter aliens – which commands (couched as requests), admonitions (a tumble of negative subjunctives) and simple brief loud-hails, not one of which I had elected to act on.

Whichever language it might be I should be left with a few words of when all the rest had dropped off, at least public address would be equipped to understand my halting thoughts. Comforted, I set myself again to enjoying the refuge I was deliberately taking.

Yet it’s imprecise of me to call the public-address system the location of my interlocutor. As a matter of fact, I had not managed to spot where the voice came out – only the three points where it could go whispered in (to a microphone like a hose), murmurings of a uniformed snake-charmer to her phallic love.

The voice did not seem to emerge anywhence. It was loosed upon and irradiated the vast lounge, the top nine tenths of which contained only air and light, the people being mere shifting silt at the base. From time to time public-address commanded. ‘Pass the silt, please.’

The voice was mechanical. Mechanical equals international.

‘Bay uh ah annoncent le départ de leur vol six six six, à destination de Rome.’

Italian place-name, Frenched, spoken with an angliccent: its mutations made me diagnose my linguistic leprosy as a fallout disease. The unlocatable loudspeakers were bombarding me with linguistic Beta Eta Alpha rays.

At the recognition, my German dropped off, PLONK, its wing swiftly severed by an invisible-ray buzz-saw in mid flight.

I addressed back to the public-address system my macaronic plaint, with the brilliant apostrophe in qu’it throught which I sobbed on an indrawn breath – a plaint which, because it both stated and illustrated my leprosy, constituted a rebus in language.

I had decided to refuse to follow the hint of ‘destination de Rome’ – and equally of ‘destination: home’.

My internal eternal city, my capital Home, was founded by Romulus and Rebus.

The interlocutor whom child–I used to trail to bed was a punny.

I sprang out of the tweed-suited chair which, sloped backwards, was designed to let you rise from it only as a very slow Venus from the foamrubber, and began to stroll. I would have liked to brisk-march but, alone among strangers, you simply cannot, unless you are sure in the possession of a purpose which, if stopped and asked, you could declare as to the Customs. It makes no difference that you know no one ever would stop you and ask.

I strolled, as if not noticing where, towards the wall of glass through which you could look out on a la piste/die Startbhan/the apron, whereon it was forbidden to smoke/rauchen/fumer.

I had not succeeded in leaving the interlocution behind, trapped like drained nectar in the valley of the chair slope. Caught it without an answer at the ready, I merely repeated: Ce qui me’etonnait . . .

Hearing this for the second time round, the interlocutor demanded why it was already in the past tense.

I explained. I cruise, my jaws wide to snow-plough in the present tense, the plankton of experience. This I then excrete rehashed into a continuous narrative in past tense.

Naturally the process is imaged according to bodily functions. That is an old habit of fant’s (fant, the feu infant), so much of whose childtime is preoccupied with them. Even adult fant, book-learned enough to know about metabolism, doesn’t feel it happening. You eat; you excrete; but you never catch your cells in the act of creating themselves out of your food and never hear the pop of sugar-energy released into your service from your laden corpuscles.

No more can you detect your personality and its decisions in the course of being created by your experience. You know why that you ingest the present tense and excrete it as a narrative in the past.

History is in the shit tense. You have left it behind you. Fiction is piss: a stream of past events but not behind you, because they never really happened.

Hence the hold fictional narrative exerts on modern literate man. And hence the slightly shameful quality of its hold.

I knew as I stately rose from the tweed and rubber launching pad that my stroll, ostensibly towards the glass wall, would soon conduct me to the bookstall.

Go daily to stall. Or do you want, inquires nanny interlocutor, to spend a punny?

And hence the disesteem in which authors of fictional narrative are held – and hold themselves. Don’t, says the nanny, hold; don’t touch. That’s where fantasy and fiction begin. How authors squirm, how they sidle from foot to foot, to avoid that compulsion to narrative. They poise their shears over the wire, threatening to cut the connection. They say they are seeking to alienate you. They take aim to fling you an open-ended fiction: the book lands legs akimbo, pages open at the splits, less a book than a box of trick tools, its title DO IT YOURSELF KID.

Kidding myself, I run my fingers through the fringes of paraprinted-matter. Tartan holdalls (for smartie knowalls), purses impersonating sporrans (is that sporran forran? no, tartan has become the livery of internationalism), sets of dice enticing your fingers to set them a-chatter in memory in advance of the knucklebones your fingers may become on a wired skeleton; penrings, keyknives, paper-screw-openers; snow cosies, egg weights, thermo-timers, paper storms, crystal towers and Eiffel palaces; fabergé in lurex: I riffle an Eiffel and edge, shamefully, nearer to print.

With a push I revolve and at the same time rock an octagontower whose every storey racks stories postcards, every layer a rack and ruins; postcards single, postcards in concertinas or twinsets (history – herstory), a trivial fond ricordo di the bay/the hay/the majordomo outside the sun-bronzed swing baptistery doors. Long stood Sir Bedivere revolving many mementoes.

But if I am to stay here some hours I must disencumber myself of that compulsive interlocution. Let me still it, let me blot, pad, plug or drug it out with other peoples’. I sidle, furtively, towards books.