Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [3]
We don’t like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it’s coming our way. Herd of deer in the meadow, heads down grazing peacefully. Then woof woof – wild dogs in the woods. Heads up, ears forward. Prepare to flee! Or the muskox defence: wolves approaching is the news. Quick – into a circle! Females and young to the centre! Snort and paw the ground! Prepare to horn the enemy!
“They won’t stop,” says Tig.
“It’s a mess,” I say. “I wonder where the security was?” When God was handing out the brains, they used to say back then, some folks we could name were last in line.
“If someone really wants to kill you, they’ll kill you,” Tig says. He’s a fatalist that way. I disagree, and we spend a pleasant quarter of an hour calling up our dead witnesses. He submits Archduke Ferdinand and John Kennedy; I offer Queen Victoria (eight failed attempts) and Joseph Stalin, who managed to avoid assassination by doing it wholesale himself. Once, this might have been an argument. Now it’s a pastime, like gin rummy.
“We’re lucky,” says Tig. I know what he means. He means the two of us, sitting here in the kitchen, still. Neither of us gone. Not yet.
“Yes, we are,” I say. “Watch the toast – it’s burning.”
There. We’ve dealt with the bad news, we’ve faced it head on, and we’re all right. We have no wounds, no blood pours out of us, we aren’t scorched. We have all of our shoes. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there’s no reason not to feel pretty good. The bad news comes from so far away, most of the time – the explosions, the oil spills, the genocides, the famines, all of that. There will be other news, later. There always is. We’ll worry about it when it comes.
Some years ago – when? – Tig and I were in the south of France, at a place called Glanum. We were on a vacation of sorts. What we really wanted to see was the asylum where Van Gogh painted the irises, and we did see that. Glanum was a side trip. I haven’t thought about it in years, but I find myself there now, back then, in Glanum, before it was destroyed in the third century, before it was only a few ruins you pay to get into.
There are spacious villas in Glanum; there are public baths, amphitheatres, temples, the kinds of buildings the Romans put up wherever they went so they could feel civilized and at home. Glanum is very pleasant; a lot of upper-level army men retire here. It’s quite multicultural, quite diverse: we’re fond of novelty, of the exotic, though not so much as they are in Rome. We’re a bit provincial here. Still, we have gods from everywhere, in addition to the official gods, of course. For instance, we have a little temple to Cybele, decorated with two ears in token of the body part you might wish to cut off in her honour. The men make jokes about that: you’re lucky to get away with just the ears, they say. Better an earless man than no man at all.
There are older Greek houses mixed in with the Roman ones, and a few Greek ways linger still. Celts come to town; some of them wear tunics and cloaks like ours, and speak decent Latin. Our relations with them are friendly enough, now that they’ve renounced their headhunting ways. Tig has to do a certain amount of entertaining, and I once invited a leading Celt to dinner. It was a social risk, though a minor one: our guest behaved normally enough, and got just as drunk as manners required. His hair was odd – reddish and curly – and he was wearing his ceremonial bronze torque, but he was no more ferocious than some other men I might name, though he did have an eerie politeness.
I’m having my breakfast, in the morning room with the mural of Pomona and the Zephyrs. The painter was