if nothing had stopped resonating since the very beginning, not even when we can no longer recognise or trace the living, who areperhaps still alive, we live alert to and troubled by innumerable voices whose origin we do not know, they are so distant and muffled, or have they just been dug down too deep? Perhaps they are the feeble echoes of unrecorded lives, whose cries have been seething in their impatient minds since yesterday or for centuries now: 'We were born at such a place,' they exclaim out of their infinite waiting, 'and we died at such a place.' And far worse things too.
Sometimes four or five of us would go out together, and occasionally six or seven, when Tupra invited Jane Treves or Branshaw or both, for I did eventually meet them, or even, depending on the situation or the place, some other sporadic outside informant or guide. These were times, I think, when Tupra felt festive and convivial and in need of accompaniment, not so much company as accompaniment, in need of an escort, a retinue or perhaps a herd, as if he wanted to experience a feeling of belonging, to have a tangible, noisy sense of forming part, with us, of a team or a group or a body, and being able to say that word 'us' often. On several such nights and days my sense was, rather, of being part of a gang, or of a matador's cuadrilla. I guessed that this gregarious inclination corresponded with times when he was fleeing from Beryl or she from him, if it was Beryl. Not that it mattered who exactly: it corresponded with times when no particular woman was allowing herself to be sufficiently monopolised by him or, consequently, when there was no woman to distract him during his freer or more sociable or diplomatic or preparatory moments from his realms and his manoeuvres, or else when he was avoiding the threat of some woman becoming all too particular.
These were only guesses on my part. Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to pastexperiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behaviour and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel; a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge. His pale eyes did not merely take in something as tiny as the scene at a buffet supper, they penetrated and analysed and drained it in an instant (me included) - it was child's play to him.
These, however, were my intuitions, suppositions and imaginings; for his part, he exposed fragments and revealed isolated flashes of his past life in the form of maxims and adages or, sometimes, unintended aphorisms, almost proverbs of his own making. And thus one gradually tied up loose ends, which, however, always came undone again, however firmly one had tied them and with however perfect a knot, as if, in his case, the areas of shadow grew still larger whenever one managed to glimpse the glowing ember of some isolated period or insignificant episode of his existence, or as if each tiny revelation served only to make one appreciate the vastness of what remained dark or opaque or murky or even distorted, just as his long eyelashes, the envy of many women, always rendered murky or opaque the ultimate intention of his meditations, which were so prolonged they seemed almost insubstantial, and the true meaning of his looks, which were, it is true, clear and flattering and
Sometimes four or five of us would go out together, and occasionally six or seven, when Tupra invited Jane Treves or Branshaw or both, for I did eventually meet them, or even, depending on the situation or the place, some other sporadic outside informant or guide. These were times, I think, when Tupra felt festive and convivial and in need of accompaniment, not so much company as accompaniment, in need of an escort, a retinue or perhaps a herd, as if he wanted to experience a feeling of belonging, to have a tangible, noisy sense of forming part, with us, of a team or a group or a body, and being able to say that word 'us' often. On several such nights and days my sense was, rather, of being part of a gang, or of a matador's cuadrilla. I guessed that this gregarious inclination corresponded with times when he was fleeing from Beryl or she from him, if it was Beryl. Not that it mattered who exactly: it corresponded with times when no particular woman was allowing herself to be sufficiently monopolised by him or, consequently, when there was no woman to distract him during his freer or more sociable or diplomatic or preparatory moments from his realms and his manoeuvres, or else when he was avoiding the threat of some woman becoming all too particular.
These were only guesses on my part. Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to pastexperiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behaviour and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel; a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge. His pale eyes did not merely take in something as tiny as the scene at a buffet supper, they penetrated and analysed and drained it in an instant (me included) - it was child's play to him.
These, however, were my intuitions, suppositions and imaginings; for his part, he exposed fragments and revealed isolated flashes of his past life in the form of maxims and adages or, sometimes, unintended aphorisms, almost proverbs of his own making. And thus one gradually tied up loose ends, which, however, always came undone again, however firmly one had tied them and with however perfect a knot, as if, in his case, the areas of shadow grew still larger whenever one managed to glimpse the glowing ember of some isolated period or insignificant episode of his existence, or as if each tiny revelation served only to make one appreciate the vastness of what remained dark or opaque or murky or even distorted, just as his long eyelashes, the envy of many women, always rendered murky or opaque the ultimate intention of his meditations, which were so prolonged they seemed almost insubstantial, and the true meaning of his looks, which were, it is true, clear and flattering and
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