‘I don’t want to be known,’ Louis said, into a silence that was all at once cavernous. ‘I don’t want anyone to know me.’
He spoke in a slow, slightly hypnotic monotone, hunched in his chair so that his straggling hair fell forward over his face and his stubbled chin was almost resting on his chest.
When he wrote his book, he said, what he desired was to express himself in a way that was free of shame. One source of that shame was other people’s knowledge of him: yet what they knew was not the truth. The truth, he realised, was something he assiduously hid from others. When he wrote his book it was this desire to be free of shame that drove him on. He wrote it in the belief that he was addressing someone who didn’t know him at all, and who therefore he didn’t have to be embarrassed in front of. That person was effectively himself.
There was another reason, he said, that he was put on a platform next to Julian so often, and that was that both their books were categorised as autobiographical. That made things easy for the people who had to organise events like this one. But in fact his and Julian’s books had nothing in common at all. They might almost be described as functioning through mutually oppositional principles.
‘The other day,’ he said, ‘I was sitting in my study staring out into the garden and I suddenly saw my cat, Mino, on the lawn. Mino had a bird pinned to the grass between his paws. The bird struggled and flapped while Mino watched it interestedly. Mino was enjoying his power and anticipating the moment when he would fulfil it by biting the bird’s head off. At that moment there was a sudden noise, some sort of bang or report from the road, and Mino looked up, distracted. The bird seized its opportunity and struggled free and flew away.’
It had surprised Louis that the bird was so resourceful. But it had to be admitted that Mino was getting old: in his younger days as a hunter he would never have allowed his paws to loosen their grip even while his mind was off its guard. Also, Louis could have saved the bird himself by standing up, opening the door and shooing Mino away. He had been thinking, in that moment, about success, and about the fact that the book he had written in the filthy and oppressive basement studio that used to be his workplace had through its worldwide sales transported him here, to this large and pleasant room in the pleasant home he now owned with a view of his beautiful gardens. He had also bought several new items of furniture with his money, including the Mies van der Rohe chair in which he had at that moment been sitting. He could feel the soft leather beneath his thighs; his nostrils were full of its rich, luxurious smell. These sensations were still quite alien to him, yet he was aware that they were causing a new part of him, a new self, to grow. He had no associations with them but those associations were being created right now, while he sat there: he was actively and by small degrees becoming distanced from the person he had been, while becoming by the same small degrees someone new.