Free The Dead Seagull by George Barker Page B

a monument in the room. Her shadow lay across the bed. In a high, clear, seemingly inspired voice, as though it were called up from the depths that only her last agonies of mind could reach, Theresa cried out, twice, before she died: “I curse you! I curse you!”

THREE
     
    I WRITE THESE LAST PAGES TO YOU, MY DEAR Sebastian, without in any way hoping that even my most importunate solicitations will disturb your sleep, or, if you do not sleep, reach you wherever you happily are. No, it is not in the belief that communication between us is even conceivable that I write your name here; it is simpler, and sadder, and more wretched than the illusory supernaturalism of an impossible correspondence: it is, my dear son, the sensation I have of your standing here, a tall child with a recognisable face and a somehow familiar manner, your standing here at the side of this white table, as I write your name a yard away from your presence. And if you were indeed here, a grown boy of—let me say—thirteen or fourteen years, old enough, then, to ask the truly hard questions, the simple ones that drag up the roots of truth with them, if you were here, on this afternoon of rain and memory and remorse, what would you say to me? I can bear the bitterness of your accusations, if you should choose to accuse me. And if you should ask for reasonable explanations, I could give these, too—even though these reasonable explanations would be reasonable explanations of unreasonable happenings.
    Will you ask me why you died? Is this question the perpetual uneasiness that vexes your cherubim of a spectre? No, this, I am sure, is not the great interrogation that you carry about like a crux anxata in front of you. For now, hopping about in eternals, playing with the mercy and justice of God as you might have played with my watch and my fountain pen, you will know that the answer to the question, Why, is always the same. For, now, you yourself are part of the answer to this question. I can believe, myself, that the dispensations of the heavenly Will bend their heads and listen, if they bend them at all, to the supplications of the dead rather than to those of the living. Even that, to some degree, the will of God is—no, not modified, not mollified, but, made, perhaps, a little more human, by the accumulated admonitions of all those who have died. So that we, the living, are, in this sense, indebted to our predecessors for some small mercies.
    Then I say that, simply because you died, you will know better than I do why you died. And, my dear son, as you stand, in my mind, no more than an embrace away from me in this room, I would wish to read a sentence to you from the confessions of a cardinal I spent this morning perusing: “And so I argue,” he writes, “about the world; if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence, and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.” You will ask me for what reason I repeat that desperate cry of John Henry Newman’s. I do so because I have discovered the nature and name of the mystery he terms “some terrible aboriginal calamity”, the calamity in which we necessarily labour. My dear son, it is love. Yes, Love is the terrible aboriginal calamity.
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    Outside my window a handful of women, hung around a magnificent renaissance fountain, belabour their washing with sticks, and gossip, and play with their dirty children. Often I cannot tell whether it is their voices or the sudden flutter of pigeons that I hear below. The rain, as I wrote, ceased, and the Italian sun stepped out of a cloud; after sharp showers, said Peace, most sheer is the sun, and love is never warmer than after war in this world. For then the bodies of