Elizabeth Costello полностью

A door opens, and in file the judges, her judges, judges of her. Under the black robes she half expects them to be creatures out of Grandville: crocodile, ass, raven, deathwatch beetle. But no, they are of her kind, her phylum. Even their faces are human. Male, all of them; male and elderly.

She does not need the bailiff's prompting (he has come up behind her now) to stand. A performance will be required of her; she hopes she can pick up the cues.

The judge in the middle gives her a little nod; she nods back.

'You are…?' he says.

'Elizabeth Costello.'

'Yes. The applicant.'

'Or the supplicant, if that improves my chances.'

'And this is your first hearing?'

'Yes.'

'And you want -?'

'I want to pass the gate. To pass through. To get on with what comes next.'

'Yes. As you must have learned by now, there is the question of belief. You have a statement to make to us?'

'I have a statement, revised, heavily revised, revised many times. Revised to the limit of my powers, I venture to say. I don't believe I have it in me to revise it further. You have a copy, I believe.'

'We do. Revised to the limit, you say. Some of us would say there is always one revision more to do. Let us see. Will you read out your statement, please.'

She reads.

'I am a writer. You may think I should say instead, I was a writer. But I am or was a writer because of who I am or was. I have not ceased to be what I am. As yet. Or so it feels to me.

'I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.

'Secretary of the invisible: not my own phrase, I hasten to say. I borrow it from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz, a poet, perhaps known to you, to whom it was dictated years ago.'

She pauses. This is where she expects them to interrupt. Dictated by whom? she expects them to ask. And she has her answer ready: By powers beyond us. But there is no interruption, no question. Instead their spokesman wags his pencil at her. 'Go on.'

'Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs,' she reads. 'I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call.'

Again she expects an interruption: Whose call? But there are going to be no questions, it would seem.

'In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.'

'Without beliefs we are not human.' The voice comes from the leftmost of them, the one she has privately labelled Grimalkin, a wizened little fellow so short that his chin barely clears the bench. In fact, about each of them there is some troublingly comic feature. Excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist's idea of a bench of judges.

'Without beliefs we are not human,' he repeats. 'What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?'

She sighs.'Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.'

'Negative capability,' says the little man. 'Is negative capability what you have in mind, what you claim to possess?'

'Yes, if you like. To put it in another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty.'

The little man purses his lips. His neighbour turns and gives him a glance (she can swear she hears the rustle of feathers). 'And what effect do you think it has, this lack of belief, on your humanity?' the little man asks.

'On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect.'

'Your own cynicism, you mean to say.'

Cynicism. Not a word she likes, but on this occasion she is prepared to entertain it. With luck it will be the last occasion. With luck she will not have to subject herself again to self-defence and the pomposities that go with it.

'About myself, yes, I may well be cynical, in a technical sense. I cannot afford to take myself too seriously, or my motives. But as regards other people, as regards humankind or humanity, no, I do not believe I am cynical at all.'

'You are not an unbeliever then,' says the man in the middle.

'No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too.'

There is a silence. 'Go on,' says the man. 'Proceed with your statement.'