The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [302]
“You are making me laugh, but it isn’t funny.”
“No man has a right to dictate another man’s inner life—the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte—you say acolyte?—good—of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross.
“They had invented me, do you see?”
“I do.”
“They had made me into a—into an unpleasant sculpture, or painting. I was trapped in my artificial dreams, and couldn’t get out. And then, I got out. I have to admit—you must not mock me, Frau Colombino—it was a dream which showed me the way out.”
“What did you dream?”
Florence turned her body, and its burden, on one side, and gave him her whole attention.
“I dreamed I was in a studio full of light. I was surrounded by canvases perfectly painted. They were all very pale. White on white, with minimal shadows, in full light. Vast paintings, of a cup with its saucer and a silver spoon, on an endless white starched cloth, with folds in it. Or white flowers in a white jar on a white ground—in a white window with white curtains—”
“As though you were dead and had gone to heaven.”
“Do you think? I didn’t. I analysed it for myself. It said to me—like a commandment—consider the surfaces. Care for the surfaces. Don’t dig under.”
“Did you? Can you?”
“It can be done. All that white paint was a surface—a visible skin, laid on a surface. I went out and saw the lake. I looked at the light on the surface. Something said to me, if you can see the surface well, you are in a right relation to the world in which it is.”
“But the lake has depths. Trees have insides. So does the earth.”
“We can know that, yes. But I know I must live by staying on the surface. Like those flies that walk on water. Like a painted flower on a plate.”
“So you gave up being analysed?”
“Everyone said it would be very dangerous, but I insisted. Then there was a lot of trouble with Dr. Gross, and Herr Jung was preoccupied, and my parents sent me here to come to my senses, which I thought I had done, myself, quite adequately.”
He laughed, and Florence laughed with him.
“You should found a school of painting,” she said. “Or of philosophy.”
“I think more, of rigorous contemplation. I should like to be a Buddhist. I do paint, but I cannot paint the surfaces I see. Living on the surface is hard, Frau Colombino.”
Florence suddenly thought that her own surfaces were not the truth about her and the creature growing inside her. She looked away, and began to weep. He said
“I did not mean to distress you. Rather the opposite.”
“I am in a state of permanent distress. It is tedious.”
“You are not naturally a… superficial person. But as an exercise, it is good. Look at the wind on the surface of the meadow, and how all the surfaces of all the grasses turn in the light…”
It was absurd, and yet, when she turned her gaze on the meadow, it was somewhere between a wonder and relief. She looked at the surface of the juice in her glass tumbler, and how it appeared to be suspended between the walls, an oval ruddy-gold coin. She looked at the sun on Gabriel Goldwasser’s hair and beard. She had sensed him as an incomplete person, not in the real world, and talked to him for that reason, because there was no threat in him. Now she saw how deliberate was this absence of threat.
On another occasion she said to him “I can’t live like you.”
“I think not, no, that is so,” he said, calmly.
One bright day, some weeks later, he said “Forgive me, but I think I have a superficial answer to a superficial