Antiquity
“Have you ever touched a really old person? I don’t mean just their hand or kissing their cheek or anything, I mean their naked skin, have you ever handled an old person?”
“No.”
Paul was a young man of few words, and in any case was right now more interested in Annette’s naked skin under her pullover. Annette, not certain that she was in the mood for Paul this evening, considered gently disengaging herself.
“Old women’s breasts sort of subside until there’s nothing left,” she noted sternly, then relented as his hand found her own unsubsided left nipple. And their skin, she might have added, has a strange, dry, silky quality to it. You feel that if you stroked it you would hear the crackle of static electricity. Not something I can put to the test though, she thought, they’d probably sack me if they caught me stroking the old ladies.
***
“You have rather beautiful hair,” Christobel said. And added, “I’m so old now that I’m allowed to make personal remarks.” (She was not far short of her 98th birthday.)
Annette smiled and said nothing, then realised that Christobel couldn’t see her smile. And of course couldn’t see her hair – for Christobel was blind. Annette thus made what she hoped was a friendly non-committal sound, the verbal equivalent of a polite smile.
Christobel said, “I’ve no idea what colour your hair is but I can feel it is beautiful and silky because when you lean over me to heave me up in bed it sometimes brushes against my cheek.”
“It’s medium fair.” (How did she know what I was thinking?)
“If you brushed it in the dark – a hundred brush strokes like people used to do in my youth – you’d probably see sparks. Static electricity.”
Christobel closed her sightless eyes and thought of light and dark, sparks of static electricity, candlelight, sparks of anger, laughter, sparks of passion. A figure standing laughing in a doorway, dark against the sunlight, then rumpled sheets and clothes thrown carelessly over a chair in the grey half-light of dawn.
She’s in the twilight of her life, thought Annette.
“You know, it may sound like a cliché but I really am in the twilight of my life now,” said Christobel. (How did she know?)
“Thank you, Annette,” Christobel said as Annette washed her. “A clean body and a clean nightdress are among the minor pleasures of life that I can still enjoy.” Christobel’s frail veined hand fumbled for a minute at the front of the nightdress and slowly undid two of the three buttons that Annette had just fastened; Annette leant forward and undid the third. Christobel slipped her hand inside, to come to rest upon her meagre breast. “Thank you,” she said again. And added, “There’s a sort of comfort about touching one’s own body.”
One of the things Annette liked was the fact that Christobel said “Please” and “Thank you”, for it somehow made all the mundane little acts of caring for Christobel’s needs into transactions between equals. (Most of the old ladies had long since passed beyond the realms of “Please” and “Thank you” – no pleasure left now, nothing but a thankless desert.)
One of the things that Christobel liked about Annette was that she never called her anything but a neutral “you”. The powers that be had decided, in the interests of cheery egalitarianism, that everyone was to be on Christian name terms with everyone else, staff and patients alike (except that these descriptions weren’t used: “carers” and “residents” were the words preferred). Although Annette had no difficulty using Christian names with the definitely senile, it had never seemed quite comfortable to her to address someone so very compos mentis and more than seventy years older than herself as “Christobel”. In this way a kind of non-egalitarian equality, better called mutual respect perhaps, developed between the two of them.
***
“The other thing about really old women,” Annette told Paul as he slipped his hand into her knickers, “is that the hair on their bodies gradually disappears. Their armpits become almost smooth and their pubic hair pathetically wispy.”
***
“I never had very much hair on my body,” said Christobel the next day. “Fair people don’t, it’s the dark ones who are really hairy.”
She lay back on her pillow and thought about the rough feel of an unshaven cheek in the morning against the tender hairless flesh of her thighs, of a dark man emerging from the bath, laughing, with little rivulets of water running down all the hairs on his body. “I always liked really dark pubic hair, black and beautiful,” she mused. “My son was dark too,” she added.
“I didn’t know you had a son,” said Annette, grasping at what seemed the easier of these two statements to respond to, but at the same time blushing for she had almost blurted out “But I thought you weren’t married.”
“My dear, yours isn’t the first generation to have children out of wedlock, you know.” (How did she guess?) “Of course in those days nobody talked of ‘single parents’, we were supposed to feel dreadfully ashamed of ourselves… A bit tiresome, always having to pretend to be a widow.” But then I was an unmarried widow all too soon, she thought.
Contraception probably wasn’t so easy in those days, thought Annette.
“My son wasn’t a mistake, by the way, I wanted to have him. We were perfectly capable of not having babies when we didn’t intend to. He died four years ago.”
“I’m sorry.” (For your son’s death, for my own lack of imagination.)
“It is not natural for children to die before their parents. Not his fault, my fault perhaps for living on and on to be such an antique… His father died more than forty years ago, far more sensible really.” But his wisdom was of another kind, she mused, he was many things, beautiful and dark and laughing, yes, but he was never what people called sensible…
***
Annette’s period was a few days late that month. She resorted to some desperate finger-crossing and had a row with Paul.
***
“You’ve been in a bad mood these past few days,” said Christobel. “I’m glad you’re sunnier again because your hands are a bit brusque when you’re tense.”
“Sorry,” said Annette and smiled with her voice.
“You’re forgiven. Did you have a quarrel with your lover? If you’ve got a lover.”
“Well, I don’t know about lover, I’ve got a boyfriend.” He’s all right as far as that goes, thought Annette, without quite specifying to herself what ‘that’ meant, but I don’t really love him.
“Boyfriend, boyfriend, what an ugly word. Men are better than boys – as I’m sure you’ll find out – and friendship is far too valuable to be confused with all life’s minor romances.”
There’s nothing very romantic about being old and withered and bed-ridden, thought Annette, finding the word ‘minor’ a bit dismissive.
Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait, thought Christobel. She said, “It’s quite all right not to love him as long as you don’t pretend.” And a couple of minutes later, as Annette carefully turned her on to her other side, “Thoughts and memories live on in your mind, even when your body has withered.”
***
“All they ever do is dream and remember,” said Annette.
Paul said, “Can’t be much fun just lying there waiting to die.
***
The extremely old do not sleep very much, so that their dreams are largely waking dreams. Christobel usually woke at about 4 o’clock and lay quietly, remembering and waiting. She rarely called the girl on duty at night. Annette and her daytime colleagues arrived just before 8 to perform the morning ritual of ‘getting the old ladies up’; since without exception they were now permanently confined to bed, this was a euphemism to cover all the various activities involving bedpans, washing, the brushing of sparse white hair and the serving of cups of tea. In many cases sheets had to be changed.
“I’m extremely glad I’m not incontinent,” said Christobel. “When that final indignity of second childhood arrives I shall probably decide to die.”
“Is it a matter of decision?” asked Annette.
“By the time you’ve reached my stage I think it is.” She waited while Annette moved her into a sitting position, pillows behind her to prop her up like a small, frail doll.
“When you’re younger dying is something that happens to you, but when you are as ancient as I am it’s something that you tend to do yourself. I’m not just lying here waiting for death, you know, I’m waiting till the time is right.”
“How will you know?” asked Annette, a little uneasy at this conversation yet curious.
“When I’ve finished thinking about things I shall know it’s time to let go. Dying is a private business so I’ll probably do it at night. Please don’t worry about it, Annette,” said Christobel politely.
***
Annette sometimes felt that it was not a bad idea to keep Paul at a distance. Thus, “I’m tired tonight,” she told him, “I think I’ll stay home and go to bed early.” Paul tried to persuade her to change her mind. “See you tomorrow,” she said firmly, and put down the phone.
These days she was beginning to wonder if she would see Christobel tomorrow.
***
“Good morning, Annette, how nice to see you again,” said Christobel after Annette had been off work for a week with flu. Then laughed: “How strange to say that, considering that I’ve never seen you and only know your voice and your scent and your hands.”
“It must have been terrible going blind,” said Annette, thinking for the first time about how it would be, then kicking herself mentally for saying something tactless.
“I missed being able to read at first,” said Christobel dispassionately, “and being able to look at the sky and the trees and the colours. I always liked colours.”
She lay still as Annette carefully cut her fingernails, suddenly remembering being neatly dressed in a pale blue dress with a white lace collar and having her nails briskly scrubbed before being sent downstairs to have tea with her mother’s friends. What an insufferable little show-off I must have been, she reflected. By the time Annette moved on to her toenails, her thoughts in turn had moved forward in time to a pair of large, firm, sensitive hands unbuttoning a grey-green silk blouse. Annette put away the scissors and got out a comb. Christobel thought of two heads on a white pillow in the languid drowsy aftermath of a sunlit afternoon: short, thick, curly black hair and long, straight fair tresses. You always had to take care to pin your hair up properly afterwards, she remembered. But there were mental embraces too. “You are telepathic,” he’d said during one of those laughing conversations the summer their son was conceived, “you read my mind.”
“It is all still with me,” she murmured. The girl though had turned round to open the window a fraction and did not hear her.
“Would you like me to read to you sometimes?” asked Annette, feeling bad that she hadn’t thought of this before.
“No thank you, my dear,” Christobel replied. “I’m quite happy with my thoughts. And anyway, I read minds.”
© Petrie Harbouri 2018
“Have you ever touched a really old person? I don’t mean just their hand or kissing their cheek or anything, I mean their naked skin, have you ever handled an old person?”
“No.”
Paul was a young man of few words, and in any case was right now more interested in Annette’s naked skin under her pullover. Annette, not certain that she was in the mood for Paul this evening, considered gently disengaging herself.
“Old women’s breasts sort of subside until there’s nothing left,” she noted sternly, then relented as his hand found her own unsubsided left nipple. And their skin, she might have added, has a strange, dry, silky quality to it. You feel that if you stroked it you would hear the crackle of static electricity. Not something I can put to the test though, she thought, they’d probably sack me if they caught me stroking the old ladies.
***
“You have rather beautiful hair,” Christobel said. And added, “I’m so old now that I’m allowed to make personal remarks.” (She was not far short of her 98th birthday.)
Annette smiled and said nothing, then realised that Christobel couldn’t see her smile. And of course couldn’t see her hair – for Christobel was blind. Annette thus made what she hoped was a friendly non-committal sound, the verbal equivalent of a polite smile.
Christobel said, “I’ve no idea what colour your hair is but I can feel it is beautiful and silky because when you lean over me to heave me up in bed it sometimes brushes against my cheek.”
“It’s medium fair.” (How did she know what I was thinking?)
“If you brushed it in the dark – a hundred brush strokes like people used to do in my youth – you’d probably see sparks. Static electricity.”
Christobel closed her sightless eyes and thought of light and dark, sparks of static electricity, candlelight, sparks of anger, laughter, sparks of passion. A figure standing laughing in a doorway, dark against the sunlight, then rumpled sheets and clothes thrown carelessly over a chair in the grey half-light of dawn.
She’s in the twilight of her life, thought Annette.
“You know, it may sound like a cliché but I really am in the twilight of my life now,” said Christobel. (How did she know?)
“Thank you, Annette,” Christobel said as Annette washed her. “A clean body and a clean nightdress are among the minor pleasures of life that I can still enjoy.” Christobel’s frail veined hand fumbled for a minute at the front of the nightdress and slowly undid two of the three buttons that Annette had just fastened; Annette leant forward and undid the third. Christobel slipped her hand inside, to come to rest upon her meagre breast. “Thank you,” she said again. And added, “There’s a sort of comfort about touching one’s own body.”
One of the things Annette liked was the fact that Christobel said “Please” and “Thank you”, for it somehow made all the mundane little acts of caring for Christobel’s needs into transactions between equals. (Most of the old ladies had long since passed beyond the realms of “Please” and “Thank you” – no pleasure left now, nothing but a thankless desert.)
One of the things that Christobel liked about Annette was that she never called her anything but a neutral “you”. The powers that be had decided, in the interests of cheery egalitarianism, that everyone was to be on Christian name terms with everyone else, staff and patients alike (except that these descriptions weren’t used: “carers” and “residents” were the words preferred). Although Annette had no difficulty using Christian names with the definitely senile, it had never seemed quite comfortable to her to address someone so very compos mentis and more than seventy years older than herself as “Christobel”. In this way a kind of non-egalitarian equality, better called mutual respect perhaps, developed between the two of them.
***
“The other thing about really old women,” Annette told Paul as he slipped his hand into her knickers, “is that the hair on their bodies gradually disappears. Their armpits become almost smooth and their pubic hair pathetically wispy.”
***
“I never had very much hair on my body,” said Christobel the next day. “Fair people don’t, it’s the dark ones who are really hairy.”
She lay back on her pillow and thought about the rough feel of an unshaven cheek in the morning against the tender hairless flesh of her thighs, of a dark man emerging from the bath, laughing, with little rivulets of water running down all the hairs on his body. “I always liked really dark pubic hair, black and beautiful,” she mused. “My son was dark too,” she added.
“I didn’t know you had a son,” said Annette, grasping at what seemed the easier of these two statements to respond to, but at the same time blushing for she had almost blurted out “But I thought you weren’t married.”
“My dear, yours isn’t the first generation to have children out of wedlock, you know.” (How did she guess?) “Of course in those days nobody talked of ‘single parents’, we were supposed to feel dreadfully ashamed of ourselves… A bit tiresome, always having to pretend to be a widow.” But then I was an unmarried widow all too soon, she thought.
Contraception probably wasn’t so easy in those days, thought Annette.
“My son wasn’t a mistake, by the way, I wanted to have him. We were perfectly capable of not having babies when we didn’t intend to. He died four years ago.”
“I’m sorry.” (For your son’s death, for my own lack of imagination.)
“It is not natural for children to die before their parents. Not his fault, my fault perhaps for living on and on to be such an antique… His father died more than forty years ago, far more sensible really.” But his wisdom was of another kind, she mused, he was many things, beautiful and dark and laughing, yes, but he was never what people called sensible…
***
Annette’s period was a few days late that month. She resorted to some desperate finger-crossing and had a row with Paul.
***
“You’ve been in a bad mood these past few days,” said Christobel. “I’m glad you’re sunnier again because your hands are a bit brusque when you’re tense.”
“Sorry,” said Annette and smiled with her voice.
“You’re forgiven. Did you have a quarrel with your lover? If you’ve got a lover.”
“Well, I don’t know about lover, I’ve got a boyfriend.” He’s all right as far as that goes, thought Annette, without quite specifying to herself what ‘that’ meant, but I don’t really love him.
“Boyfriend, boyfriend, what an ugly word. Men are better than boys – as I’m sure you’ll find out – and friendship is far too valuable to be confused with all life’s minor romances.”
There’s nothing very romantic about being old and withered and bed-ridden, thought Annette, finding the word ‘minor’ a bit dismissive.
Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait, thought Christobel. She said, “It’s quite all right not to love him as long as you don’t pretend.” And a couple of minutes later, as Annette carefully turned her on to her other side, “Thoughts and memories live on in your mind, even when your body has withered.”
***
“All they ever do is dream and remember,” said Annette.
Paul said, “Can’t be much fun just lying there waiting to die.
***
The extremely old do not sleep very much, so that their dreams are largely waking dreams. Christobel usually woke at about 4 o’clock and lay quietly, remembering and waiting. She rarely called the girl on duty at night. Annette and her daytime colleagues arrived just before 8 to perform the morning ritual of ‘getting the old ladies up’; since without exception they were now permanently confined to bed, this was a euphemism to cover all the various activities involving bedpans, washing, the brushing of sparse white hair and the serving of cups of tea. In many cases sheets had to be changed.
“I’m extremely glad I’m not incontinent,” said Christobel. “When that final indignity of second childhood arrives I shall probably decide to die.”
“Is it a matter of decision?” asked Annette.
“By the time you’ve reached my stage I think it is.” She waited while Annette moved her into a sitting position, pillows behind her to prop her up like a small, frail doll.
“When you’re younger dying is something that happens to you, but when you are as ancient as I am it’s something that you tend to do yourself. I’m not just lying here waiting for death, you know, I’m waiting till the time is right.”
“How will you know?” asked Annette, a little uneasy at this conversation yet curious.
“When I’ve finished thinking about things I shall know it’s time to let go. Dying is a private business so I’ll probably do it at night. Please don’t worry about it, Annette,” said Christobel politely.
***
Annette sometimes felt that it was not a bad idea to keep Paul at a distance. Thus, “I’m tired tonight,” she told him, “I think I’ll stay home and go to bed early.” Paul tried to persuade her to change her mind. “See you tomorrow,” she said firmly, and put down the phone.
These days she was beginning to wonder if she would see Christobel tomorrow.
***
“Good morning, Annette, how nice to see you again,” said Christobel after Annette had been off work for a week with flu. Then laughed: “How strange to say that, considering that I’ve never seen you and only know your voice and your scent and your hands.”
“It must have been terrible going blind,” said Annette, thinking for the first time about how it would be, then kicking herself mentally for saying something tactless.
“I missed being able to read at first,” said Christobel dispassionately, “and being able to look at the sky and the trees and the colours. I always liked colours.”
She lay still as Annette carefully cut her fingernails, suddenly remembering being neatly dressed in a pale blue dress with a white lace collar and having her nails briskly scrubbed before being sent downstairs to have tea with her mother’s friends. What an insufferable little show-off I must have been, she reflected. By the time Annette moved on to her toenails, her thoughts in turn had moved forward in time to a pair of large, firm, sensitive hands unbuttoning a grey-green silk blouse. Annette put away the scissors and got out a comb. Christobel thought of two heads on a white pillow in the languid drowsy aftermath of a sunlit afternoon: short, thick, curly black hair and long, straight fair tresses. You always had to take care to pin your hair up properly afterwards, she remembered. But there were mental embraces too. “You are telepathic,” he’d said during one of those laughing conversations the summer their son was conceived, “you read my mind.”
“It is all still with me,” she murmured. The girl though had turned round to open the window a fraction and did not hear her.
“Would you like me to read to you sometimes?” asked Annette, feeling bad that she hadn’t thought of this before.
“No thank you, my dear,” Christobel replied. “I’m quite happy with my thoughts. And anyway, I read minds.”
© Petrie Harbouri 2018
Narrated by Erin Standlee
Narrated by Erin Standlee
POST RECITAL
TALK
TN: Hello Petrie. Thanks for speaking with us today and welcome to The Strange Recital.
PH: Thank you for inviting me.
BR: We’ve featured a number of your stories, so it’s nice to finally talk to you.
PH: Well I'm honoured that you've chosen some of my stories. I enjoy writing them but basically I write them for myself alone and hadn't thought before of sharing them, except perhaps with a few friends. I was lucky enough to find a publisher for my three novels but my stories have all been written simply for my own pleasure.
TN: Well this story makes me think about the way society treats old people. They are under-appreciated.
PH: Well in the West, at any rate, old people are often marginalized to the extent that their feelings are disregarded, old women especially. If you think about it, there are many more pejorative words for old women than for old men. Hag for instance.
TN: True. Well you know the way that old people are under-appreciated in our society might have to do with a constant search for profit which monetizes the care of old people. And then there’s the glorification of youth. Young people are more susceptible to marketing apparently. The old ones get sidelined.
PH: You may be right, although I hadn't thought of it in monetary terms.
TN: Well it's big business.
PH: I was thinking that people are marginalized when they are no longer perceived as sexual beings. Post menopausal women are often unconsciously seen as having no value. Quite obviously a mistake, since a person's value in no way depends on whether he or she is sexually active. A lot of younger people find it hard to imagine what their elders get up to. Post menopausal women are of course sexually active, and my own great grandfather was born when his father was eighty. All the same there is probably a deeply routed social and biological prejudice in favour of those who are of the more usual breeding age. And don't forget the insecurity that is fostered by so much in today's society about whether or not one is attractive. Insecurities often lead to identifying with a group and rejecting those outside the group who don't fit its criteria.
TN: Yeah. Very pertinent. But everybody gets old, unless their lives are cut short.
BR: Yeah, "forever young" sounds good in theory, but it means you're dead. So... that boundary between young and old... I'm interested in the interpersonal aspects of it, which you've illustrated brilliantly in this story. The generation gap, you know it's such a cliché. Is it inevitable? Can we avoid it by fostering the roles of caregiver and care-receiver -- essentially a parent-child relationship that reverses poles in later life?
PH: Well, forever living is even worse. There's a Greek myth in which Eos, the goddess of the dawn, falls in love with a beautiful young man called Tithonus and begs the gods to give him eternal life. They do but she has forgotten to ask for eternal youth too. So Tithonus gets older and older, more and more decrepit, a thinner and thinner husk of himself until he turns into a rasping cricket always asking to die. And in the ancient world the sybil, an aged prophetess in southern Italy, when asked what she wanted, answered “to die.” As for the generation gap, it's certainly inevitable that older and younger people have different experiences of life. In my story Christobel quotes the old French saying on the subject: “Si jeunesse savait, si viellesse pouvait”, meaning more or less: “If the young had the knowledge, if the old had the ability.” But if there is a gap, then it is bridged whenever people are in sympathy with one another and feel interest and curiosity regardless of their respective ages. A life without sympathy, interest and curiosity would in any case be a poor one indeed.
BR: The story is full of lovely physical details that add up to a sensual mood of closeness between these two women. The skin, the hair, the emphasis on touching, all of which is about the boundary between two people -- the physical boundary at least. Where did the writing of this story start for you -- in the sensory details, the relationship, the ideas, or somewhere else?
PH: Well funnily enough it started with the title. For some years my husband, I and a friend with whom I shared a birthday would all meet for dinner on that day and would each write a short story on a set title to be read aloud after dinner. On this occasion the title “Antiquity” was chosen by my husband. I very soon realised that it would be about an extremely old woman and her young carer, What you called the sensual mood of closeness partly arises from the fact that when you are bedridden your outer world is largely reduced to small physical sensations and these acquire an importance they might not have for the able-bodied. But more than this, Christobel necessarily lives in her memories and these are often erotic, focusing on all the small sensual details of her time with her lover. Also Christobel is blind and as a result very aware of tactile sensations. Annette is a sensitive young woman in her turn, aware of Christobel as an individual and this leads to a delicacy in her care of her and a mutual liking, so that their physical contact with one another, which might simply have been routine and matter of fact, turns into real intimacy. When I was at university, by the way, I worked one vacation as a general dogsbody in the radiology department of a big London hospital and among my jobs was helping elderly women patients undress for their x-rays. That was what made me think for the first time about the feel of old people's skin.
TN: Maybe cultural attitudes towards mortality, and even beauty, make people turn away from ageing. They just don’t want to accept it. That’s too bad because the vantage point of old age could enrich everyone. What do you think? And I’m not assuming that wisdom necessarily comes with age.
PH: Well attitudes are certainly important. If people feel that they are sidelined, or have fewer employment opportunities if they look older, then it's clear why looking younger becomes a goal and of course wisdom doesn't automatically come with age. But in this story Annette is enriched by her relationship with Christobel. I portrayed the other side of the coin, as it were, in my novel Our Lady of the Serpents...
TN: Yes I like that book...
PH: ...in which a very isolated old woman comes alive emotionally and is enriched by her growing relationship with a younger man.
TN: You know, familial responsibility for the elderly has lessened as state or corporate involvement has increased. Do you think it's an unavoidable effect of modern life?
PH: Among the social changes that have occurred in the West over the past fifty or sixty years, although many such changes are very positive, the breakdown of the extended family and the dumping of the old in “homes” have particularly sad repercussions. I suppose though that old peoples' homes may be inevitable given that today people live as nuclear families and often in very small apartments and many work long hours. Yet in other cultures old people are valued and treated with respect... actually in the country where I live – Greece, although homes for old people do exist, it is still not at all uncommon for elderly parents to be taken in by one or other of their married children. If you think about it, the word “home” is a dreadful euphemism, a sop to the consciences of those who have placed their elderly relatives there, for there is nothing in the least homelike about such institutions. But of course sometimes there really isn't any other solution in the case of the severely demented for example, or as with my character Christobel, when an old person needs care and has no living relatives.
BR: I find it very interesting that your third-person narration moves back and forth between the two women's minds, rather than sticking to one. Again, as if the boundaries are very fluid, or maybe don't exist at all. Why did you choose that approach?
PH: The simple answer is that there is a relationship between Annette and Christobel and in any relationship what each person thinks of the other is really important. Each is always groping to understand the other. A narrative that focuses on the mind of a single character can't convey this sense of groping. Of course another fictional device is the all-seeing narrator who has access to the thoughts and feelings of all the characters. But I didn't want this. But I was interested in the immediacy of the two women's thoughts. This is a very short story, hence without the space for a lengthy exploration of the two women's experiences and feelings so they have to be revealed as succinctly as possible.
BR: Mind-reading is often treated with such loud sensationalism. This may be the most subtle and quiet story about telepathy I've ever read, which I like. I can't read your mind, so I'll ask -- why the restraint?
PH: Oh, a question of temperament I suppose. I like restraint in life as in literature. I can't be doing with loud, over-stated, in-your-face writing but always appreciate the subtle and the oblique. I want as a reader to be given pause for thought, not to be told what to think.
TN: Hello Petrie. Thanks for speaking with us today and welcome to The Strange Recital.
PH: Thank you for inviting me.
BR: We’ve featured a number of your stories, so it’s nice to finally talk to you.
PH: Well I'm honoured that you've chosen some of my stories. I enjoy writing them but basically I write them for myself alone and hadn't thought before of sharing them, except perhaps with a few friends. I was lucky enough to find a publisher for my three novels but my stories have all been written simply for my own pleasure.
TN: Well this story makes me think about the way society treats old people. They are under-appreciated.
PH: Well in the West, at any rate, old people are often marginalized to the extent that their feelings are disregarded, old women especially. If you think about it, there are many more pejorative words for old women than for old men. Hag for instance.
TN: True. Well you know the way that old people are under-appreciated in our society might have to do with a constant search for profit which monetizes the care of old people. And then there’s the glorification of youth. Young people are more susceptible to marketing apparently. The old ones get sidelined.
PH: You may be right, although I hadn't thought of it in monetary terms.
TN: Well it's big business.
PH: I was thinking that people are marginalized when they are no longer perceived as sexual beings. Post menopausal women are often unconsciously seen as having no value. Quite obviously a mistake, since a person's value in no way depends on whether he or she is sexually active. A lot of younger people find it hard to imagine what their elders get up to. Post menopausal women are of course sexually active, and my own great grandfather was born when his father was eighty. All the same there is probably a deeply routed social and biological prejudice in favour of those who are of the more usual breeding age. And don't forget the insecurity that is fostered by so much in today's society about whether or not one is attractive. Insecurities often lead to identifying with a group and rejecting those outside the group who don't fit its criteria.
TN: Yeah. Very pertinent. But everybody gets old, unless their lives are cut short.
BR: Yeah, "forever young" sounds good in theory, but it means you're dead. So... that boundary between young and old... I'm interested in the interpersonal aspects of it, which you've illustrated brilliantly in this story. The generation gap, you know it's such a cliché. Is it inevitable? Can we avoid it by fostering the roles of caregiver and care-receiver -- essentially a parent-child relationship that reverses poles in later life?
PH: Well, forever living is even worse. There's a Greek myth in which Eos, the goddess of the dawn, falls in love with a beautiful young man called Tithonus and begs the gods to give him eternal life. They do but she has forgotten to ask for eternal youth too. So Tithonus gets older and older, more and more decrepit, a thinner and thinner husk of himself until he turns into a rasping cricket always asking to die. And in the ancient world the sybil, an aged prophetess in southern Italy, when asked what she wanted, answered “to die.” As for the generation gap, it's certainly inevitable that older and younger people have different experiences of life. In my story Christobel quotes the old French saying on the subject: “Si jeunesse savait, si viellesse pouvait”, meaning more or less: “If the young had the knowledge, if the old had the ability.” But if there is a gap, then it is bridged whenever people are in sympathy with one another and feel interest and curiosity regardless of their respective ages. A life without sympathy, interest and curiosity would in any case be a poor one indeed.
BR: The story is full of lovely physical details that add up to a sensual mood of closeness between these two women. The skin, the hair, the emphasis on touching, all of which is about the boundary between two people -- the physical boundary at least. Where did the writing of this story start for you -- in the sensory details, the relationship, the ideas, or somewhere else?
PH: Well funnily enough it started with the title. For some years my husband, I and a friend with whom I shared a birthday would all meet for dinner on that day and would each write a short story on a set title to be read aloud after dinner. On this occasion the title “Antiquity” was chosen by my husband. I very soon realised that it would be about an extremely old woman and her young carer, What you called the sensual mood of closeness partly arises from the fact that when you are bedridden your outer world is largely reduced to small physical sensations and these acquire an importance they might not have for the able-bodied. But more than this, Christobel necessarily lives in her memories and these are often erotic, focusing on all the small sensual details of her time with her lover. Also Christobel is blind and as a result very aware of tactile sensations. Annette is a sensitive young woman in her turn, aware of Christobel as an individual and this leads to a delicacy in her care of her and a mutual liking, so that their physical contact with one another, which might simply have been routine and matter of fact, turns into real intimacy. When I was at university, by the way, I worked one vacation as a general dogsbody in the radiology department of a big London hospital and among my jobs was helping elderly women patients undress for their x-rays. That was what made me think for the first time about the feel of old people's skin.
TN: Maybe cultural attitudes towards mortality, and even beauty, make people turn away from ageing. They just don’t want to accept it. That’s too bad because the vantage point of old age could enrich everyone. What do you think? And I’m not assuming that wisdom necessarily comes with age.
PH: Well attitudes are certainly important. If people feel that they are sidelined, or have fewer employment opportunities if they look older, then it's clear why looking younger becomes a goal and of course wisdom doesn't automatically come with age. But in this story Annette is enriched by her relationship with Christobel. I portrayed the other side of the coin, as it were, in my novel Our Lady of the Serpents...
TN: Yes I like that book...
PH: ...in which a very isolated old woman comes alive emotionally and is enriched by her growing relationship with a younger man.
TN: You know, familial responsibility for the elderly has lessened as state or corporate involvement has increased. Do you think it's an unavoidable effect of modern life?
PH: Among the social changes that have occurred in the West over the past fifty or sixty years, although many such changes are very positive, the breakdown of the extended family and the dumping of the old in “homes” have particularly sad repercussions. I suppose though that old peoples' homes may be inevitable given that today people live as nuclear families and often in very small apartments and many work long hours. Yet in other cultures old people are valued and treated with respect... actually in the country where I live – Greece, although homes for old people do exist, it is still not at all uncommon for elderly parents to be taken in by one or other of their married children. If you think about it, the word “home” is a dreadful euphemism, a sop to the consciences of those who have placed their elderly relatives there, for there is nothing in the least homelike about such institutions. But of course sometimes there really isn't any other solution in the case of the severely demented for example, or as with my character Christobel, when an old person needs care and has no living relatives.
BR: I find it very interesting that your third-person narration moves back and forth between the two women's minds, rather than sticking to one. Again, as if the boundaries are very fluid, or maybe don't exist at all. Why did you choose that approach?
PH: The simple answer is that there is a relationship between Annette and Christobel and in any relationship what each person thinks of the other is really important. Each is always groping to understand the other. A narrative that focuses on the mind of a single character can't convey this sense of groping. Of course another fictional device is the all-seeing narrator who has access to the thoughts and feelings of all the characters. But I didn't want this. But I was interested in the immediacy of the two women's thoughts. This is a very short story, hence without the space for a lengthy exploration of the two women's experiences and feelings so they have to be revealed as succinctly as possible.
BR: Mind-reading is often treated with such loud sensationalism. This may be the most subtle and quiet story about telepathy I've ever read, which I like. I can't read your mind, so I'll ask -- why the restraint?
PH: Oh, a question of temperament I suppose. I like restraint in life as in literature. I can't be doing with loud, over-stated, in-your-face writing but always appreciate the subtle and the oblique. I want as a reader to be given pause for thought, not to be told what to think.
Music on this episode:
Pavane in F sharp minor, Opus 50 (flute ensemble arr.)
by Gabriel Fauré
License CC BY-NC 3.0
THE STRANGE RECITAL
Episode 18121
Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait