The Vigil for
My
Sixtieth Birthday (from FRA)
There are the usual noises off from the port, yacht moorings death-rattle their corsetry. One night, I think, an almighty gust will rip open their knots and release the boats. I can’t see them as the palm tree outside my window, bending and slapping in the wind, occludes my view. But I can see my reflection in the glass. I resemble Picasso’s Buste d’homme ecrivant, my worst fear. I keep a postcard of it above my desk. A mad-eyed turnip head with his mouth distorted by a pipe. His right-hand scribbles ‘xxxx’s. I think my heart is ribbed with branches beating against the pane. One day it will break the glass.
I’m the same age as Julio Iglesias. Gilded middle age has passed me by. No gold chain dangling on an open-necked shirt. But what a waste of a life to be like him and never grow old. It must be like living in the plastic skin of a super-market black pudding. Welsh tells me I should grow my hair and finger-nails, a ponytail needs talons to comb it. I could haunt the streets in the small hours, like Edgar Allan Poe’s revenant ‘who knows no repose’. My mask will be a skull-head. I risk a look in the mirror and I’m surprised to see my face is in slightly better condition than the dead Balzac. ‘I penetrate the soul without neglecting the body,’ he claimed optimistically. But aged fifty-one, attempts to make a death mask-failed as his features decomposed too fast. Beethoven never meant to look like Beethoven. It’s just he hadn’t time to make himself presentable like Haydn. ‘I think continually of the truly great,’ like Stephen Spender. I dream Vincent van Gogh sitting on a wicker chair with a pipe in his hand. He takes a match from behind his ear and strikes it on a sunflower clenched between his knees. A cloud of smoke blots out his eye. Sucking deeply on the stem, he puffs, obliterating the other. Well, if it isn’t James Joyce himself? I wake up.
The mechanism of un miroir aux alouettes now preoccupies me. The mirror was used to hunt larks at a time when they were considered fair game. A circular piece of wood is studded with mirror fragments and rotated to catch the sun which lures the bird into the trap. I break my mirror with a look, but see it together to examine my teeth. Yellow wobbly fangs of unreliable character. I am urgently in need of whitening toothpowder, like Byron (letter to John Cam Hobhouse, circa 1820). Leigh Hunt jibed, ‘The lower half of his face was a model of beauty.’ I too have a low brow, but my teeth only move when I move, or in a nightmare figuring the grandpa in the John Ford western: ‘Stop the dance. I done gone lost my teeth.’
‘Buy grandpa a Weiss’s device,’ says Josie Manders, my dentist from hell. ‘What is that?’ I stutter. ‘A masticator for the toothless, which chops up food by hand.’ Josie dabbles in antiques – not the kind the Limerick trollop told her family she collected, returning home from London wearing a mink coat driving a Mercedes. Booty from decrepit members of the House of Lords.
Of course, curls disguised the terrible truth about Byron’s upper half. If I shaved my hair at the front like Casanova, I would have a noble brow. But, since my sins are written on it, it’s either a fringe or a pulled down hat.
My look is a blank stamp going nowhere. In better dreams, I’m always the fresh-faced aspiring boy, all his life before him, anxious to please but not knowing how. But I wake up feeling the boy has been disappointed. Seeing an old man in the mirror with one eye smaller than the other. I have no intimations of immortality. ‘The long habit of living indisposes us for dying’ – Sir Thomas Browne, 1659 – ‘What remains is the future, and it runs out… ‘
The phone rings. A single bell. So, it’s Welsh. He has finished a painting. I will not be going down to admire it. It’s my night. ‘It’s your sixty-first year,’ he’d say, like canny Aunt Annie would. I extinguish my candles one by one. There is comfort in darkness. And I warble like Fats Waller, ‘When you grow too old to dream / you will get a good night’s sleep.’ This year is the anniversary of last year. How time flies, correcting itself like the acrobatic planes of le Patrouille de France spiraling upwards. When time reaches weightlessness, it will be heaven. I tear the chicken in two in homage to the swashbuckling Errol Flynn. But I’m not a hungry boy anymore. Drinking long from the bidon, I fall asleep like a baby. And wake up old.