Lanark: a life in 4 books by Alasdair Gray Page B

Arabia …..”
    “… annihilating sweetness …”
    They reached a place where half the names were printed on one wall and half on the other, and here the tunnel forked and diminished. It forked and diminished three more times until they entered a single low tunnel labelled ozenfant. The red glossy curtain at the end opened on a surface of heavy brown cloth. Munro pulled that aside and they stepped into a large and lofty apartment. Tapestries worked in red, green and gold thread hung from an elaborate cornice to a chequered floor of black and white marble. Antique stools, chairs and sofas stood about in no kind of order with stringed instruments of the lute and fiddle sort scattered between them. A grand piano stood in a corner beside a cumbersome, old-fashioned X-ray machine, and in the middle Lanark saw, from behind, a figure in black trousers and waistcoat leaning over a carpenter’s bench and sandpapering the edge of a half-constructed guitar. This figure stood up and turned toward them, smiling and wiping hands on a richly patterned silk handkerchief. It was a stout young man with a small blond triangular beard. His sleeves were rolled well above his elbows exposing robust hairy forearms, but collar and tie were perfectly neat, the waistcoat unwrinkled, the trousers exactly creased, the shoes splendidly polished. He came forward saying, “Ah, Munro, you bring my new assistant. Sit down both of you and talk to me.” Munro said, “I’m afraid I must leave. Dr. Lanark has tired of my company and I have work to do.”
    “No, my friend, you must stay some minutes longer! A patient is about to turn salamander, an always impressive spectacle. Sit down and I’ll show you.”
    He gestured to a divan and stood facing them and dabbing his brows with the handkerchief. He said, “Tell me, Lanark, what instrument do you play?”
    “None.”
    “But you are musical?”
    “No.”
    “But perhaps you know about ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, rock-and-roll?”
    “No.”
    Ozenfant sighed. “I feared as much. No matter, there are other ways of speaking to patients. I will show you a patient.”
    He went to the nearest tapestry and dragged it sideways, uncovering a circular glass screen in the wall behind. A slender microphone hung under it. He brought this to the divan pulling a fine cable after it, and sat down and said, “Ozenfant speaking. Show me chamber twelve.”
    The neon lights in the ceiling went out and a blurred image shone inside the screen, seemingly a knight in gothic armour lying on the slab of a tomb. The image grew distinct and more like a prehistoric lizard on a steel table. The hide was black, the knobbly joints had pink and purple quills on them, a bush of purple spines hid the genitals and a double row of spikes down the back supported the body about nine inches above the table. The head was neckless, chinless, and grew up from the collarbone into a gaping beak like the beak of a vast cuckoo. The face had no other real features, though a couple of blank domes stuck out like parodies of eyeballs. Munro said, “The mouth is open.”
    Ozenfant said, “Yes, but the air trembles above it. Soon it shuts, and then boom! ”
    “When was he delivered?”
    “Nine months, nine days, twenty-two hours ago. He arrived nearly as you see him, nothing human but the hands, throat and sternum mastoid. He seemed to like jazz, for he clutched the remnant of a saxophone, so I said, ‘He is musical, I will treat him myself.’ Unluckily I know nothing of jazz. I tried him with Debussy (who sometimes works in these cases) then I tried the nineteenth-century romantics. I pounded him with Wagner, overwhelmed him with Brahms, beguiled him with Mendelssohn. Results: negative. In despair I recede further and further, and who works in the end? Scarlatti. Each time I played The Cortege his human parts blushed as pink and soft as a baby’s bottom.”
    Ozenfant closed his eyes and kissed his fingertips to the ceiling. “Well,