‘She is a woman palpably meant for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being) and yet so casually, it seems, she has chosen solitude, loyalty to an absent one, a refusal to love …’
This is the sentence I wrote down at that crucial moment when we believe we have another person’s measure (this woman, Vera’s). Up to that point all is curiosity, guesswork, a hankering after confessions. Hunger for the other person, the lure of their hidden depths. But one their secret has been decided, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorising. It all becomes comprehensible, reassuring. Now the routine of a relationship, or indifference, can take over. The other one’s mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise. Their heart to a set of predictable responses.
At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs, for we kill this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential that we have encountered. We would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person….
It must have been during those September days, in a village among forests stretching all the way to the White Sea, that I noted down observations of this type: ‘a being of inexhaustible potential’, ‘murder’, ‘a woman stripped naked by words …’ At the time (I was twenty-six) such conclusions struck me as vastly perceptive. I took enjoyable pride in having gained insight into the secret life of a woman old enough to be my mother, in having summed up her destiny in a few well-turned phrases. I thought about her smile, the wave she greeted me with when catching sight of me in the distance on the lake shore, the love she could have given so many men but gave no one. ‘A woman palpably meant for happiness …’ Yes, I was pretty please with my analysis. I even recalled a nineteenth-century critic referring to a ‘dialectic of the soul’ toe describe the art with which writers probe the contradictions of the human psyche: ‘… A woman made for happiness, but …’
That September evening I closed my notebook, glanced at the handful of cold, mottled cranberries Vera had deposited on the table in my absence. Outside the window, above the dark treetops of the forest, the sky still had a milky pallor suggestive of the somnolent presence, a few hours’ walk away, of the White Sea, where winter already loomed. Vera’s house was located at the start of a track that led to the coast by ways of thickets and hills. Reflecting on this woman’s isolation, her tranquility, her body (very physically I imagined a tapered sheet of soft warmth surrounding that female body beneath the covers on a clear night of hoar-frost), I suddenly grasped that no ‘dialectic of the soul’ was capable of telling the secret of this life. A life all too plain and woefully simply beside the intellectual analysis.
The life of a woman waiting for the one she loved. No other mystery.
Séamus Sweeney 