Sparrow

JAMES HYNESSparrow ContentsI, Jacob, son . . .IIIIIIIVAuthor’s Note For Mimi Qui invitus servit, fit miser, servit tamen.The unwilling slave grows wretched, but is still a slave.– Publilius Syrus, Sententiae I, Jacob, son of no one, father of no one, beloved of no one, a slave, a whore, a cinaedus, a eunuch, a murderer, a pimp, possibly a Jew, possibly a Syrian, possibly the silt of the Nile, a labourer, an overseer, a cripple, a consumptive, an abandoned piece of property, a weathered piece of driftwood discarded by a receding tide, the sole remaining resident of a deserted town in an abandoned province at the bleeding edge of a dying empire, set down this history of my life. It will never be finished, for who will write my ending? But then no one will ever read it, because it will undoubtedly die with me, and I am dying fast. It will not long outlast the swift corruption of my body, it will survive me only as long as this papyrus lasts, mouldering untended in a crumbling house, nibbled around the edges by rats, feasted upon by beetles and cockroaches, soaked by the rain coming through the rotting roof, then bleached into silence by the infrequent British sun when the roof is gone. Or perhaps it will simply disintegrate, the way that all the other books in this library in which I write have already begun to flake away into dust. If it can happen to Tacitus and Cicero and Juvenal and Seneca and even the emperors Julian and Marcus Aurelius, then why should it not happen to me? I am just another author no one will ever remember, and this is just another book that changes nothing.But I make this promise to you, the unknown reader who will never read these words: I will never lie to you. My life may have been wanton, but my page is virtuous. I An angry woman is boning a fish. She carves with a controlled rage, her fingers expert, her gestures unwasted. With a long, sharp blade, she slices the fish behind the gills, unseams the spine, and lifts off the pink fillet. She scoops out the blue intestines and tosses them aside. Then she lifts the head with two fingers under the gills and swings the naked spine at me.I am a nameless child in the shadows, legs akimbo on a cracked flagstone in a corner of a kitchen. The fish head and its ladder of spine slither to a stop between my splayed legs. The fish’s mouth is ajar, as if surprised to find itself naked on the floor. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is this a game? Maybe, maybe not. The fish’s clouded eye fixes itself on my startled face, as if to warn me.‘It’s you she’s angry at,’ it says.The kitchen is full of shadow and stifling heat. It smells of smoke, onions and garlic, stale oil, and, yes, fish. Years of hot southern spices are baked into the blackened walls, a tang I can still feel in my sinuses. Along the back of a cement countertop are bottles of seasoning and spice, battered pots and pans, canisters of chickpeas and dried figs, and stained jars of olive oil, vinegar, honey, and garum. Above the countertop, hanging from hooks, are knives, tongs, a spatula, more knives, two ladles, assorted spoons. On a masonry cooktop along the adjacent wall, an iron pot is already on the boil. The morning’s fire smoulders in the firebox below, red seams glowing in the ash. The only light comes through a low, square doorway, and beyond the doorway sunlight pours straight down into a kitchen garden, a knee-high jungle where chickens jerk their heads this way and that among the drooping leaves of heat-wearied plants. Beyond the garden is a whitewashed wall almost too bright to look at, and above the wall, a sky of flawless cerulean. Even now, after having lived most of my life under milky, shifting, inconstant British skies, the adamantine blue of that Spanish sky is still my Platonic ideal of the firmament – cloudless, boundless, depthless, perfect. It is the sky I would expect to see in heaven, if there actually were a heaven, and if I had any hope of going there.Down the centre of the narrow kitchen is a stout wooden table, unsteady, unpainted, and crosshatched with knife cuts. Hunched over the table is the woman who is angrily boning fish. Under the table I see the ragged hem of her skirt. Her dirty toes clench and unclench against the flagstones as she eviscerates another. I have earlier memories than this, but they are just fragments – sunlight glittering on the sea, pellets of cat shit on a wooden floor, the smell of almond blossoms. This is my first coherent memory. It is the start of my story, and like all the best stories, says Horace, it begins in medias res. So when the serpentine head and spine of another fish skid to a stop near me, I am startled, but I do not cry. I already seem to have known not to protest. I already seem to know what will happen if I do.‘Still angry,’ says the second fish head. ‘And it’s still you.’In the stifling twilight of the kitchen, the woman’s pale face shines with sweat. Her abundant hair is tied back in a bun, and the light through the doorway picks out unruly red strands round her face. She wears a blackened iron collar round her neck. She never looks in my direction, which is another way I know she’s angry at me. Yet somehow the fish heads continue to land with unerring aim between my legs, a little boneyard of staring eyes and twisted spines. She knows where I am. She just doesn’t want to look at me.A shadow flickers past the doorway. I turn. There is nothing but sunlight glaring off the garden wall, a chicken bobbing her head,