The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma

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СКАЧАТЬ A hazy full moon hung in the sky, bathing in its soft glow the immaculate lawns surrounding the house, most of them cluttered with flowerbeds, hedges and oversized stone fountains – dozens of them – decorated with excessively ornate sculptures of mermaids, fauns and other mythical creatures. His father had accumulated such a large number because, an unsophisticated soul, his only way of showing off his importance was to buy a lot of expensive and useless objects. In the case of the fountains his extravagance was excusable, because they combined to soothe the night with their watery refrain, making the listener want to close his eyes and forget everything except their hypnotic burble.

      Further off, beyond the neatly clipped lawns, stood the immense greenhouse, graceful as a swan poised for flight, where his mother spent most of the day marvelling at the exotic flowers that sprouted from seeds brought back from the colonies.

      Andrew gazed at the moon for several minutes. He wondered whether man would ever be able to travel there, as had the characters in Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac’s works. What would he find if he did manage to land on its shimmering surface – in an airship, or shot out of a cannon, or with a dozen bottles of dew strapped to his body in the hope that, as it evaporated, he would float up to the sky, like the Gascon swashbuckler’s hero? Ariosto the poet had turned the planet into a warehouse where lunatics’ reason was stored in phials, but Andrew was more drawn to Plutarch, who imagined that the moon was where dead people dwelled. Andrew liked to picture them living at peace in ivory palaces built by an army of worker angels or in caves dug out of that white rock, waiting for the living to receive their safe-conduct to death and to carry on their lives anew, exactly where they had left off.

      Sometimes he imagined that Marie was living at that very moment in one of those grottoes, oblivious to what had happened to her, and grateful that death had offered her a better existence than life. Marie, pale in that white splendour, waiting patiently for him to decide once and for all to blow his brains out and come to fill the empty space in her bed.

      He stopped gazing at the moon when he noticed that Harold, the coachman, had followed his orders and was standing at the foot of the stairs with a brougham at the ready. As soon as he saw his young master descending the flight of steps, the coachman rushed to open the carriage door. Andrew had always been amused by Harold’s display of energy, considering it incongruous in a man approaching sixty, but the coachman clearly kept in good shape.

      ‘Miller’s Court,’ the youth commanded.

      Harold was astonished by his request. ‘But, sir, that’s where—‘

      ‘Is there some problem, Harold?’ Andrew interrupted.

      The coachman stared at him for a moment, his mouth hanging ludicrously half open, then recollected himself: ‘None whatsoever, sir.’

      Andrew gave a nod, signalling that the conversation was at an end. He climbed into the brougham and sat down on the red velvet seat. Glimpsing his reflection in the window, he gave a sigh of despair. Was that haggard countenance really his? It was the face of someone whose life had been seeping out of him unawares, like a pillow losing its stuffing through an open seam.

      In a certain sense this was true. Although his face retained the harmonious good looks he had been born with, it now resembled an empty shell, a vague impression in a mound of ashes. The sorrow that had cast a shadow over his soul had taken its toll on his appearance: he could scarcely recognise himself in the ageing youth, with hollowed cheeks, downcast eyes and unkempt beard, who stared back at him in the glass. Grief had stunted him, transforming him into a dried-up, sullen creature.

      The brougham rocked as Harold, having overcome his astonishment, clambered up to his perch, and took Andrew’s attention away from the blurred face sketched on the canvas of the night. The final act of the disastrous performance that had been his life was about to begin, and he was determined to savour every moment. He heard the whip crack above his head and, caressing the steely bulge in his pocket, he let himself be lulled by the vehicle’s gentle sway.

      The brougham left the mansion and went down Carriage Drive, which bordered the lush vegetation of Hyde Park. Gazing through the window at the city, Andrew thought that in less than half an hour’s time they would be in the East End. This ride had always fascinated and puzzled him in equal measure: it allowed him to glimpse in a single sweep every aspect of his beloved London, the world’s greatest metropolis, the giant head of an insatiable octopus whose tentacles stretched over almost a fifth of the Earth’s surface, holding Canada, India, Australia and a large part of Africa in its vice-like grip.

      As they sped east, the salubrious, almost countrified atmosphere of Kensington soon gave way to the crowded urban environment of Piccadilly, and beyond to the Circus, where Anteros, the avenger of unrequited love, is firing an arrow into the city’s heart. Beyond Fleet Street, the middle-class dwellings seemingly huddled around St Paul’s Cathedral gradually came into view, until finally, once they had passed the Bank of England and Cornhill Street, a wave of poverty swept over everything, a poverty that people from the adjoining West End knew of only from the satirical cartoons in Punch. It seemed to pollute the very air itself, as it mingled with the stench rising from the Thames.

      Andrew had last made this journey eight years earlier, and had known ever since that, sooner or later, he would make it again, for the very last time. Hardly surprising, then, that as they drew nearer to Aldgate, the gateway to Whitechapel, he felt slightly uneasy. He peered warily out of the window as they entered the district, experiencing the same misgivings as he had in the past. He was overwhelmed, again, by shame because he was spying on an alien world with the dispassionate interest of someone who studies insects – even though, over time, his initial revulsion had turned into compassion for the souls who inhabited this place, where the city dumped its human waste.

      Now it seemed that there was every reason for him to feel compassion still: London’s poorest borough had changed relatively little in the past eight years. Wealth brings poverty in its wake, thought Andrew, as they crossed the ill-lit, rowdy streets, crammed with stalls and handcarts, and teeming with wretched creatures whose lives were played out beneath the menacing shadow of Christ Church. At first he had been shocked to discover that behind the dazzle of the city’s façade there existed this outpost of hell where, with the Queen’s blessing, human beings were condemned to live like beasts. The intervening years had made him less naïve: he was no longer surprised that, even as the advances of science were transforming London – and the well-to-do amused themselves by recording their dogs’ barks onto the wax-coated cylinders of phonographs or conversed via telephone under the glow of Robertson’s electric lamps – Whitechapel had remained immune to progress, untouchable beneath its rotten shell, drowning in its own filth.

      A glance was enough to tell him that crossing into this world was still like sticking his hand into a hornets’ nest. It was here that poverty showed its ugliest face, here that the same jarring, sinister tune was playing. He observed a couple of pub brawls, heard screams from the depths of dark alleyways, glimpsed a few drunks sprawled in the gutter, gangs of street urchins stripping them of their shoes, and exchanged glances with a pair of pugnacious-looking men standing on street corners, petty rulers in this parallel kingdom of vice and crime.

      The luxurious brougham caught the attention of several prostitutes, who shouted lewd proposals to him, hitching up their skirts and showing their cleavage. Andrew felt a pang of sorrow as he gazed upon this pitiful spectacle. Most of the women were filthy and downtrodden, their bodies bearing the mark of their daily burden of customers. Even the youngest and prettiest were stained by the misery of their surroundings. He was revisited by the agonising thought that he might have saved one of these doomed women, offered her a better life than the one her Creator had allotted her, yet he had failed to do so.

      His sorrow reached a crescendo as the carriage rattled past the Ten Bells, emitting an arpeggio of creaks as it turned into Crispin Street on its СКАЧАТЬ