Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow (Vintage International)

ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS

FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einsteins Monsters
London Fields
Times Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Yellow Dog
House of Meetings
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Clich
Koba the Dread
The Second Plane

The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

A LEXANDER H ERZEN

narcissism: n. excessive or erotic interest in oneself and ones physical appearance.

Concise Oxford Dictionary

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed Into different bodies.

The Metamorphoses

(T ED H UGHES, Tales from Ovid)

2006
Introductory

They had driven into town from the castle; and Keith Nearing walked the streets of Montale, Italy, from car to bar, at dusk, flanked by two twenty-year-old blondes, Lily and Scheherazade

This is the story of a sexual trauma. He wasnt at a tender age when it happened to him. He was by any definition an adult; and he consentedhe comprehensively consented. Is trauma , then, really the word we want (from Gk wound)? Because his wound, when it cameit didnt hurt a bit. It was the sensory opposite of torture. She loomed up on him unclothed and unarmed, with her pincers of blissher lips, her fingertips. Torture: from L. torquere to twist. It was the opposite of torture, yet it twisted. It ruined him for twenty-five years.

W hen he was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid , or crazy . But now (now he was old) the stupid and the crazy were given special names for what ailed them. And Keith wanted one. He was stupid and crazy too, and he wanted onea special name for what ailed him.

He noticed that even the kids stuff got special names. And he read about their supposed neuroses and phantom handicaps with the leer of an experienced and by now pretty cynical parent. I recognise that one, he would say to himself: otherwise known as Little Shit Syndrome. And I also recognise that one: otherwise known as Lazy Bastard Disorder. These disorders and syndromes, he was pretty sure, were just excuses for mothers and fathers to dope their children. In America, which was the future, broadly speaking, most household pets (about sixty per cent) were on mood drugs.

Thinking back, Keith supposed that it would have been nice, ten or twelve years ago, to drug Nat and Gusas a way of imposing ceasefires in their fratricidal war. And it would be nice, now, to drug Isabel and Chloewhenever they weaponised their voices with shrieks and screeches (trying to find the limits of the universe), or whenever, with all the freshness of discovery, they said quite unbelievably hurtful things about his appearance. Youd look a lot better, Daddy, if you grew some more hair . Oh really. Daddy, when you laugh, you look like a mad old tramp . Is that a fact Keith could imagine it easily enough: the mood-pill option. Come here, girls. Come and try out this lovely new sweet . Yeah, but then youd have to consult the doctor, and trump up a case against them, and go and queue in the striplit pharmacy in Lead Road

What was wrong with him? he wondered. Then one day (in October 2006), when it had stopped snowing and was merely raining, he went out into it, into the criss-cross, into the A to Zthe sodden roadworks, the great dig of London Town. And there were the people. As always, now, he looked from face to face, thinking, Him 1937. Her 1954. Them 1949 Rule number one: the most important thing about you is your date of birth. Which puts you inside history. Rule number two: sooner or later, each human life is a tragedy, sometimes sooner, always later. There will be other rules.

Keith settled in the usual caf with his Americano, his unlit French cigarette (a mere prop, now), his British broadsheet. And here it was, the news, the latest instalment of the thriller and tingler, the great page-turner called the planet Earth. The world is a book we cant put down And he started reading about a new mental disease, one that spoke to him in a haunting whisper. It affected children, the new disease; but it worked best on grown-upson those who had reached the years of discretion.

The new disease was called Body Dysmorphic Syndrome or Perceived Ugly Disorder. Sufferers of BDS, or PUD, gazed at their own reflections and saw something even worse than reality. At his time of life (he was fifty-six), you resigned yourself to a simple truth: each successive visit to the mirror will, by definition, confront you with something unprecedentedly awful. But nowadays, as he impended over the basin in the bathroom, he felt he was under the influence of a hellish hallucinogen. Every trip to the mirror was giving him a dose of lysergic acid; very occasionally it was a good-trip trip, and nearly always it was a bad-trip trip; but it was always a trip.

Now Keith called for another coffee. He felt much cheered.

Maybe I dont actually look like that, he thought. Im just insanethats all. So perhaps theres nothing to worry about. Body Dysmorphic Syndrome, or Perceived Ugly Disorder, was what he hoped hed got.

When you become old When you become old, you find yourself auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, youre finally starring in a horror filma talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) theyre saving the worst for last.

E verything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true (Rita is true, Adriano, incredibly, is true). Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent. Or else all of them were innocentbut cannot be protected.

This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later you have your first crisis of age (my body whispers that death is already intrigued by me) . But something very interesting happens to you in between.

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!! Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

Book One
Where We Lay Our Scene

1
FRANCA VIOLA

It was the summer of 1970, and time had not yet trampled them flat, these lines:

Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles first LP. Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis (formerly History), Cover magazine, February 1968

But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced. Sexual intercourse had come a long way, and was much on everyones mind.

Sexual intercourse, I should point out, has two unique characteristics. It is indescribable. And it peoples the world. We shouldnt find it surprising, then, that it is much on everyones mind.

K eith would be staying, for the duration of this hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer, in a castle on a mountainside above a village in Campania, in Italy. And now he walked the backstreets of Montale, from car to bar, at dusk, flanked by two twenty-year-old blondes, Lily and Scheherazade Lily: 5 5, 34-25-34. Scheherazade: 5 10, 37-23-33. And Keith? Well, he was the same age, and slender (and dark, with a very misleading chin, stubbled, stubborn-looking); and he occupied that much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven.

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