It sounds to me like you’re getting on top of things, he said.
He asked me what I wanted to eat, and ordered two glasses of champagne to be brought to the table. The restaurant was small and dimly lit: the softness of the light and of the upholstered surfaces seemed to blunt the sharpness of what I was trying to communicate. He said that it was strange it had taken us so long to meet: in fact it was almost exactly a year to the day since we had been – albeit briefly – introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, he had asked the mutual friend several times for my number; he had attended parties and dinners where he had been told I would be present, only to find that I wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the mutual friend had resisted putting him directly in touch with me, if it was anything so deliberate as resistance. But one way or another, he had been obstructed; until – again without knowing why – he had recently asked the mutual friend once more for my number and promptly been given it.
I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.
He was watching me while I spoke, with strange-coloured eyes that reminded me of peat or earth and that now seemed strangely naked, as though by removing his glasses he had also removed the shield of adulthood. I saw that there were plates of food on the table, though I couldn’t remember the waiter bringing them. He was struck, he said, by my allusion to anger: it was a biblical word and carried connotations of righteousness, but he had always believed anger to be the most mysterious and dangerous of human qualities, precisely because it had no fixed moral identity.
His father, he said, had liked to make things with his hands in his spare time: there was a shed in the garden of their family home and his father had created a workshop in it. Everything there was kept meticulously in order, each tool hanging on its designated peg, the different-sized chisels always sharp, the nails and screws arranged according to size along a shelf. His father could always, therefore, conveniently select the tools appropriate for the task in hand, and his exercise of his personal qualities – which had included a terrifying, unpredictable anger as well as an unshakeable sense of honour – seemed to lie similarly under his premeditated command. He would use anger in particular with a calculated deliberation, and this sense of his control had been perhaps more frightening than the anger itself, for anger, surely, ought to be uncontrollable; or rather, if one was capable of controlling it sufficiently to decide when and how to use it, that use of it might be described as a sin.
I said I hadn’t heard someone use that word in a long time and he smiled.
‘I never believed in an angry God,’ he said.
He had learned how to tread carefully around his father but also how to please him and elicit his approval. His father’s calculatedness, in a sense, had tutored his children in the same arts, though he had never deemed his son trustworthy of handling his beautiful set of tools: he left them all to his son-in-law in his will, an unpleasant character who divorced his daughter a year later, so that the tools passed for ever out of the family. His father was a man who took the part of rightness even when he was wrong: that piece of poetic justice, had he been alive to witness it, would probably still have eluded him. Years after his father’s death, on a dismal holiday with his wife at the time and her two children in a farmhouse in the French countryside, he had done some small favour for the elderly housekeeper and she had returned the next day with a metal chest in the back of her car. Inside was a most beautiful set of old tools, which she explained she would like to give him. They had belonged to her husband, she told him: he had died a long time ago and she had kept them, waiting for someone to whom she felt she could bequeath them.
When he was five or six years old, his parents had sat him and his sister down and told them they were adopted. He was a model son and student until, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he had suddenly stopped behaving well. He went to parties, started smoking and drinking, failed his exams and lost his chance to go to university. His father immediately threw him out of the house and never accepted him back again. The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free.
I said it seemed to me that forgiveness only left you more vulnerable to what you couldn’t forgive. Francis of Assisi, I added, had been disowned by his father, who had even taken him to court to sue him for the material outlay of parenthood, which at that point amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. St Francis removed them there in court and returned them to him, and thereafter lived in a state that other people called innocence but that I viewed as utter nihilism.