Bronze
It is sometimes said, and indeed sometimes feels, that there are two of them - another, quite identical, not so far off - though in the absence of landmarks it is difficult to say how one could know it was another and not the same one encountered twice.
Snow falls with the motion of a sheet shaken in warm weather to settle upon the surface of the bed. The sky, what you can see of it, is stratified as if formed of carefully folded flannelette blankets of faded rose and green.
But otherwise there are only the two colours, the bronze and the white. It’s just that there are countless shades of each; plus, of course, the colours of the retinal after-images left by each on the other. It might as well be chocolate, because chocolate would no sooner melt than bronze at this temperature.
Who will have visited her today - men in bare feet mirroring her own? And what offerings shall we find there? A pile of burning wooden crutches? It’s unlikely to be anything so dramatic. It very seldom is. Sometimes there are offerings of flowers, of old medals with their frayed ribbons, of choice cuts of meat, of bowls with children’s pennies in them saved up. You find the offerings; but you never see the visitors. At least, I have never seen them. One day, perhaps.
One thing I should mention, in case the thought has not occurred to you: statues are commonly a little over life-size. If a statue is no more than life-sized it actually looks smaller than a real human being. That’s because a statue is, for all its three-dimensionality, only a representation, and the size has to compensate for that - or at least to acknowledge it by being seen to occupy a different perspective. Thus alternative spatial systems are simultaneously present. A statue is either further away than it seems or closer than it should be; or it achieves the closeness of intimacy while at a respectable distance. We cannot interact with it. We simply observe as snow collects in the crevices of her toes.
Sometimes they leave the pages of forbidden books, which do not blow away. One day there was an old fashioned metal spectacle case, stripped of its cloth and burnished with long handling.
The after-image of bronze: pale peppermint on the whiteness.
It is difficult to be sure what she is wearing, to identify the fabric which wraps her to reveal one shoulder and the upper curve of one breast. Perhaps it is fur; or perhaps it is a deep towelling that has warmed on a bulbous cast iron radiator to await her as she stepped steamily from the bath. Her hair, which seems to have been coiled negligently to keep dry, is coming unknotted. With one hand she clasps the wrap in place. In the other she is holding a magnifying glass which is made of real glass set in a bronze rim, and which takes on from certain angles the milky quality of the moon. Sometimes, if perhaps the upper atmosphere has been cloudless, you will see an arc sliced into the snow where the sun in its transit, focusing through the glass, has melted it and it has at once re-frozen to leave a scar with crisp starched edges reminiscent of the crochet border of a linen tablecloth. From ground level, however, the sun is rarely to be seen - though it did once penetrate the snow haze briefly, and I recall that it had the appearance of a perfectly formed peach.
She seems young, though sturdily proportioned. Then again, it may be that the impression of sturdy proportioning results from a misapprehension: the attributing of a property of the statue, by virtue of its actual dimensions, to the person it portrays. Likewise it is wrong - at least, I take it to be wrong - to ask whether the tufts of the fabric of her wrap may not be matted and stiffened by the prevailing frosts.
An arc in the snow: what could be more pure an acknowledgment of a gift?
You will have noticed that no footprints lead towards her or away from her. The snow hereabouts, being extremely dry and powdery, has the unusual property of reclaiming any hollow as a cat will reclaim the hollow of a chair the moment you have vacated it. Only bird tracks remain - the delicate parallel stitching of those that hop, the arrowed stutterings of those that walk. Today some locks of hair have been left: grey hair mostly, not so easily spied against the whiteness. I don’t know who leaves the locks of hair, though one sees them quite often. I don’t know who any of the people are who leave things. Not really.
Sometimes, when the leaves of books have been left, her glass raises wisps of smoke from the paper as it might raise wisps of pain from skin.
By and large, you see, people prefer not to talk about their visits here. My belief is that they are secretly afraid of what may be revealed beneath the snow should it ever thaw. Who is to say how deep it is? The small arc cut by the burning glass can scarcely do more than score the surface. It may be that the remnants of some ancient massacre lie glaciated below us, corpses, their skins drawn tight as drums over the protuberances of hip and rib. Or maybe just old Christmas decorations, sodden and disintegrating, tingeing the meltwater with diluted childhoods as it gurgles away... if it gurgles away...
As I have said, she has her own spatial co-ordinates which are not ours. And that is why she seems not to notice us. Perhaps, in her world, it is we who are locked in stasis while she moves between us as if we were garden ornaments, occasionally stroking our heads. Do you think that is possible? Once I saw laid before her a feather, an egg and a diamond. But only once. I never saw that on any other occasion. Sometimes there are nibbled crusts, though.
These two short pieces are from Dai Vaughan’s as yet unpublished collection, Germs. He has two novels out from Quartet, The Cloud Chamber and Moritur.
Page(s) 63-64
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