Elizabeth Costello полностью

Yet even as she skulks in the bunkhouse, who is to say she is playing no part? Why should she think that she alone has it in her power to hold herself back from the play? And what would true stubbornness, true grit, consist in anyway but going through with the performance, no matter what? Let the band strike up a dance tune, let the couples bow to each other and step on to the floor, and there, among the dancers, let her be, Elizabeth Costello, the old trouper, in her unsuitable dress, circling in her stiff yet not graceless way And if that is a cliché too – being a professional, playing one's part – then let it be a cliché. What entitles her to shudder at clichés when everyone else seems to embrace them, live by them?

It is the same with the business of belief. I believe in the irrepressible human spirit: that is what she should have told her judges. That would have got her past them, and with foot-stamping applause too. I believe that all humankind is one. Everyone else seems to believe it, believe in it. Even she believes in it, now and then, when the mood takes her. Why can she not, just for once, pretend?

When she was young, in a world now lost and gone, one came across people who still believed in art, or at least in the artist, who tried to follow in the footsteps of the great masters. No matter that God had failed, and Socialism: there was still Dostoevsky to guide one, or Rilke, or Van Gogh with the bandaged ear that stood for passion. Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?

Her first inclination would be to say no. Her books certainly evince no faith in art. Now that it is over and done with, that lifetime labour of writing, she is capable of casting a glance back over it that is cool enough, she believes, even cold enough, not to be deceived. Her books teach nothing, preach nothing; they merely spell out, as clearly as they can, how people lived in a certain time and place. More modestly put, they spell out how one person lived, one among billions: the person whom she, to herself, calls she, and whom others call Elizabeth Costello. If, in the end, she believes in her books themselves more than she believes in that person, it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel. Her books are, she believes, better put together than she is.

From a change in the air, a change that penetrates even the sluggish space of the dormitory, she knows the sun is declining. She has let the whole afternoon slip by. She has neither gone dancing nor worked on her statement, merely brooded, wasted her time.

In the poky little washroom at the back she freshens up as best she can. When she returns there is a new arrival, a woman younger than herself, slumped on a bunk with her eyes shut. It is someone she has noticed before, on the square, in the company of a man wearing a white straw hat. She took her to be a local. But evidently not. Evidently she is a petitioner too.

Not for the first time, the question occurs to her: Is that what we are, all of us; petitioners awaiting our respective judgements, some new, some, the ones I call locals, long enough here to have settled down, settled in, become part of the scenery?

About the woman on the bunk there is something familiar that she cannot pin down. Even when she first saw her on the square she seemed familiar. But from the beginning there has been something familiar about the square itself, the whole town. It is as though she has been transported to the set of a dimly remembered film. The Polish cleaning woman, for instance, if that is what she is, Polish: where has she seen her before, and why does she associate her with poetry? Is this younger woman a poet too? Is that where she is: not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park, set up to divert her while she waits, with actors made up to look like writers? But if so, why is the make-up so poor? Why is the whole thing not done better?

That is, finally, what is so eerie about this place, or would be eerie if the tempo of life were not so languid: the gap between the actors and the parts they play, between the world it is given her to see and what that world stands for. If the afterlife, if that is what this is, give it that name for the moment – if the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently, not just by a hair's breadth – one could forgive it that – but by a hand's breadth?