Barnes. Pdf

PARENTHESIS 
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L
ET ME TELL YOU
something about her. It's that middle stretch of the night, when the curtains leak no light, the only street-
noise is the grizzle of a returning Romeo, and the birds haven't begun their routine yet cheering business. She's lying on her 
side, turned away from me. I can't see her in the dark, but from the hushed swell of her breathing I could draw you the map of 
her body. When she's happy she can sleep for hours in the same position. I've watched over her in all those sewery parts of the 
night, and can testify that she doesn't move. It could be just down to good digestion and calm dreams, of course; but I take it as 
a sign of happiness. 
Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence 
till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching 
about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness. Every so often I find myself catapulted out of 
bed with fear of time and death, panic at the approaching void; feet on the floor, head in hands, I shout a useless (and 
disappointingly uneloquent) 'No, no, no' as I wake. Then she has to stroke the horror away from me, like sluicing down a dog 
that's come barking from a dirty river. 
Less often, it's her sleep that's broken by a scream, and my turn to move across her in a sweat of protectiveness. I am 
starkly awake, and she delivers to me through sleepy lips the cause of her outcry. `A very large beetle', she will say, as if she 
wouldn't have bothered me about a smaller one; or 'The steps were slippery'; or merely (which strikes me as cryptic to the point 
of tautology), 'Something nasty'. Then, having expelled this 
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damp toad, this handful of gutter-muck from her system, she sighs and returns to a purged sleep. I lie awake, clutching a slimy 
amphibian, shifting a handful of sodden detritus from hand to hand, alarmed and admiring. (I'm not claiming grander dreams, 
by the way. Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or 
nuclear war.) I admire her because she's got this job of sleeping that we all have to do, every night, ceaselessly, until we die, 
much better worked out than I have. She handles it like a sophisticated traveller unthreatened by a new airport. Whereas I lie 
there in the night with an expired passport, pushing a baggage trolley with a squeaking wheel across to the wrong carousel. 
Anyway … she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce 
narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a 
calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she senses what I'm doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and 
pulls the hair off her shoulders on to the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a 
shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking 
her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she's touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her. She 
doesn't know, of course; I've never told her of this tiny, precise pleasure of the night. Though I'm telling her now, I suppose ... 
You think she's really awake when she does it? I suppose it could sound like a conscious courtesy - an agreeable gesture, 
but hardly one denoting that love has roots below the gum of consciousness. You're right to be sceptical: we should be 
indulgent only to a certain point with lovers, whose vanities rival those of politicians. Still, I can offer further proof. Her hair 
falls, you see, to her shoulders. But a few years ago, when they promised us the summer heat would last for months, she had it 
cut short. Her nape was bare for kissing all day long. And in the dark, when we lay beneath a single sheet and I gave off a 
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Calabrian sweat, when the middle stretch of the night was shorter but still hard to get through - then, as I turned towards that 
loose S beside me, she would, with a soft murmur, try to lift the lost hair from the back of her neck. 
`I love you,' I whisper into that sleeping nape, `I love you.' All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. When 
tempted by didacticism, the writer should imagine a spruce sea-captain eyeing the storm ahead, bustling from instrument to 
instrument in a Catherine wheel of gold braid, expelling crisp orders down the speaking tube. But there is nobody below decks; 
the engine-room was never installed, and the rudder broke off centuries ago. The captain may put on a very good act, 
convincing not just himself but even some of the passengers; though whether their floating world will come through depends 
not on him but on the mad winds and sullen tides, the icebergs and the sudden crusts of reef. 
Still, it's natural for the novelist sometimes to fret at the obliquities of fiction. In the lower half of El Greco's `Burial of the 
Count of Orgaz' in Toledo there is a line-up of angular, ruffed mourners. They gaze this way and that in stagey grief. Only one 
of them looks directly out of the picture, and he holds us with a gloomy, ironical eye - an unflattered eye, as well, we can't help 
noticing. Tradition claims that the figure is El Greco himself. I did this, he says. I painted this. I am responsible, and so I face 
towards you. 
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible 'I' (when I say `I' you will 
want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the 
two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love - selfish, shitty love - 
into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into 
prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love. 
And they write this stuff called love poetry. It's collected into books called The Great Lovers' Valentine World Anthology 
of 
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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½