Elizabeth Costello полностью

From a gold cigarette case she takes a cigarette, strikes a match, puffs. Her hand is stubby, broad, a peasant's hand. Yet the fingernails are clean and neatly buffed. Who is she? Only the light soul hangs in the air. It sounds like a quotation.

'Who knows what we truly believe,' says the woman. 'It is here, buried in our heart.' Lightly she smites her bosom. 'Buried even from ourselves. It is not belief that the boards are after. The effect is enough, the effect of belief. Show them you feel and they will be satisfied.'

'What do you mean, the boards?'

'The boards of examiners. We call them the boards. And we call ourselves the singing-birds. We sing for the boards, for their delight.'

'I do not give shows,' she says.'I'm not an entertainer.' The cigarette smoke drifts into her face; she waves it away. 'I cannot drum up what you call passion when it is not there. Cannot turn it on and off. If your boards will not understand that -' She shrugs. She had been about to say something about her ticket, about handing back her ticket. But that would be too grand, too literary, for so petty an occasion.

The woman stubs out her cigarette. 'I must go,' she says. 'I have purchases to make.'

Of what nature these purchases might be she does not say. But it strikes her, Elizabeth Costello {Here names fade away: well, her name is not fading away, not in the least), how passive she has become, how incurious. There are purchases she herself would like to make. Aside from the fantasy of the typewriter, she needs suncream, and soap of her own, not the harsh carbolic soap of the washroom. Yet she makes no move to enquire where in this place one does one's purchasing.

There is something else that strikes her. She has no appetite any more. From yesterday she has the faint after-memory of a lemon gelato and macaroons with coffee. Today the very thought of eating fills her with distaste. Her body feels unpleasantly heavy, unpleasantly corporeal.

Is a new career beginning to beckon: as one of the thin folk, the compulsive fasters, the hunger artists? Will her judges take pity if they see her waste away? She sees herself, a sticklike figure on a public bench in a patch of sunlight scribbling away at her task, a task never to be completed. God save me! she whispers to herself. Too literary, too literary! I must get out of here before I die!

The phrase comes back to her again at dusk, as she is taking a stroll along the town wall, watching the swallows swoop and dive above the square. A light soul. Is she a light soul? What is a light soul? She thinks of soap bubbles floating up among the swallows, rising even higher into the blue empyrean. Is that how the woman sees her, the woman whose job it is to scrub the floor and clean the lavatory (not that she ever sees her doing these things)? Certainly her life has not been a hard one, by most standards, but nor has it been easy. Quiet perhaps, protected perhaps: an antipodean life, removed from the worst of history; but driven too, the word is not too strong. Should she seek out the woman and set her right? Would the woman understand?

She sighs, walks on. How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum! At least there is that to fall back on.

It is the same courtroom, with the same bailiff, but the panel of judges (the board, as she must now learn to call it) is new. There are seven of them, not nine, one of them a woman; she recognizes none of the faces. And the public benches are no longer empty. She has a spectator, a supporter: the cleaning woman, sitting by herself with a string bag on her lap.

'Elizabeth Costello, applicant, hearing number two,' intones the spokesman of today's board (the chief judge? the judge-in-chief?). 'You have a revised statement, we understand. Please proceed with it.'

She steps forward. 'What I believe,' she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation.'I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it.

'When the waters subsided – I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon – acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas.