The Love Song of Vincent Valentine
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Vincent rose from a bed that was not his, leaving the rest his body had so required only a few hours ago; now his mind was in charge and who was he to tell it no? Silently, he gave an unearthly stretch, long and tall, swift and intimate, and then he relaxed, as though a narcoleptic, at once asleep on his feet, but he was as awake as ever.
Nibelheim. It had not been so long, thought Vincent as he leaned out a window on the second story, since he had seen this place, this place and all it's heartbreak. Surely it was a damned place, with all the sore memories that had raped it's calm provincial streets. It was a festering sore of loneliness, of desperation. Yes. Desperation.
The view from the window no longer did him any good; he needed to be a part of the city, to feel the cobblestones that had seemed to jump up and crush him thirty years ago beneath his feet and know that they were nothing more than cobblestones, but more so than that, he needed to be a part of it's inherent loneliness, wanted to swim in the pus of the festering sore. He closed his eyes as he closed the window and descended the stair.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
What he must look like to people, were there any to behold him. He was, for lack of words, a wreck. His hair had not been cut in the longest time and was filthy, beyond filthy, stringy and oily and black as death. Eyes like a wound scabbed over were tired and sunken and blood-shot, the red on red looking like the eyes of white mice, but fuller, deeper, and more disparaging beneath a heavy brow, shaped and reshaped by so many kinds of worry and pain, a clay pot that fate had not yet dealt the final hand. Nothing on his face resembled cheeks like he used to have, when he used to smile. Now the smiles were so fleeting and meaningless they no longer had a place on his face to be born from; his face was long and somber like a horse's, like a work horse who has never had a day free of a heavy load pressing down on his shoulders, pressing down so hard he sinks into the ground and so heavy he is free of any desire to ever get up again.
It was calm outside but for a soft breeze which seemed to carry the hopes and dreams of the world on it, and it told him so in whispers between leaves. He tried to tell it, "Get away from this place, nothing good ever surfaces here…can't you feel it? Get away from this place before you wither and die just like everything else that ever finds this town, this pit of hell."
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
It was all too familiar to him, he supposed, and he knew of the true suffering that bled from the very atoms of this place, it was measurable in how many things fell apart on themselves, like his love, like himself, like the woman who had shared in them both. She was as much of a fragment, a shadow as he was himself, and they both reveled in their collective loneliness, for what else was left for them? No matter how much they want, two shadows cannot become a candle.
There were no broken shards of Vincent's life to pick up and put back together, no. It had been broken and then lost and then thrown away like a cup removed from the cupboard in fine condition, ready and willing to be used and washed and put away and used again, serving its purpose. But his cup of all the cups on the shelf had been handled by clumsy hands and was dropped to smash upon the cobblestones. And as he walked on them, they were but cobblestones and did not leap up and engulf him as he was certain they had thirty years ago. They were rocks in the earth, fitted and shaped by time to become a second ground that clicked loud enough to break his ears with each footfall, and this sound combined with the rhythm of his useless beating heart created a song of desperation. Yes. Desperation.
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
He was at the edges of town, now, standing solemnly before Shin-Ra Manor, bowing his head in some distorted reverence; he was a man who, bowing his head before the Crucifix, bends down to be lifted up, and in doing so, finds himself out of the reach of Salvation, though her arms are open. This run-down hideous structure of a place was his church, his looking glass through which one must see the evils of the world to see the good, but to his dismay, all the good had been swept clean away by the broom of irony, and all that remained was Vincent.
To one knee, then the other he fell before this place, just at its gates, falling in the spot where a picture had been taken so many years ago. He had been asleep in the basement of this place when the picture was taken and indeed, the snapshot was a snapshot of someone else's story and had brought the hideousness of truth upon another tarnished youth, but now he knelt in the spot where a man had stood with false pasted on his face, false being his personal favorite concealer. In Vincent's mind was an engraving of the sheer power of that man's eyes, with the strange properties of a drug that lived inside him, lived inside Vincent, lived inside the core of this very planet, and with the properties of some alien form, and that too the man shared with Vincent, but then, this was someone else's story. Someone else's story that could have been his son.
His hands found the earth and in them he lifted a rock which he pitched with all his might toward the mansion, and it found it's target, crashing through what little remained of a first story window, though next to the click of the cobblestones and the beat of his heart it was silent and unsatisfying, but again he reached for one of the infamous stones and tossed it again at the house, and then it was a desperate barrage of stones, one after another, his fingernails tearing at grass and earth to get at those rocks, and the tips of his fingers began to bleed with the effort and he stopped, forehead kissing the earth like friends finding each other for the first time in a long time. He had the sensation then that he deserved this, all of this, that this was just his lot in life, and that it wasn't the town or the mountain that brought failure into his heart. It was his heart that brought the failure.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal
Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
Vincent missed his lover, his Lucrecia, then, and saw her face in a place that was hiding in the back of his mind from thought, for thought and feeling are odd bedfellows. He had once held her in his arms and smelled the tender perfume of her hair, though he supposed it was only shampoo, but that smell lingered in his mind like the picture in the back of his mind. The breeze, with its hopes and dreams, seemed then to bring the smell along with it, and with his forehead to the earth, small tears slid from his eyes and rolled upward passed his eyebrows and lost themselves in his hair, his rank, filthy hair, oily and stringy and black as death, black as the night that was closing in on him.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
There in the darkness, he felt that sleep closing up around him, sleep he had suffered for thirty years, dead to the world, dead to himself, lingering in a coffin, a fine place for a nap, where he could, before losing faith and consciousness together, hear the worms in the earth in the walls around him, could hear the earth, not like Aerith with her wisdom and power, but could hear its creaks and groans. It always seemed ready to give in on itself, to give in on him and bury him alive in that lonely room of soil and sadness, a room that seemed a great barrier against the world where no one could hurt or be hurt anymore. Of course, Vincent never took into account thirty years of painful nightmares eating away at him like a plague on his soul like the worms around him ate the earth and threatened to eat him alive as well, should the earth fall down like it said it would.
He sat up, stood up, wiped away the tears, and without really meaning to do it, he charged the manor, expecting resistance from the closed front door, but it offered none, simply gave like it wanted to open anyway, and so he was tossed into the building where he clattered to the floor with little grace, falling on his side and rolling, and then he lay on his back, staring at a chandelier covered in cobwebs but still a pretty thing, though it seemed so out of place. Had he ever noticed the fixture before? Most likely not. He had not looked up in a great long time. Though dusty and dirty it was, it seemed a pearl in this place, one great shining spot of beauty in this grey-washed house of ugly, ugly like the thoughts that lingered in his soul, like the scent of Lucrecia in his mind.
She had seen him and thought it a dream. He had seen her and thought it torture. He had locked himself away for thirty years and risen once more to right his wrongs and found her more tired and alone than she had ever been and she refused his solace, for two shadows can never become a candle. He never even got to touch her again. Closing his eyes once more, he tried to put out from his mind the picture he had seen of her, of her weakness, of her loneliness, and tried to remember her smiling strength of thirty years past but it would not come to him. All that would come were the nightmares.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind?
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
He pulled himself from the floor and faced back to the door, but though it was opened, it seemed miles away and hard to get to, and for the first time ever, he really thought, "How easy it would be, just to go back down those stairs, and fall asleep for another thirty years." And another and another, for he would never die, not with the cells that lived inside him, the same cells that lived inside Lucrecia and festered and ate like cancer. Sometimes he thought he could feel them moving inside him, like some disgusting insect swarm in his organs, and he would retch, disgusted by his own body which was not his own. No, he would never die and she would never die, and he had not the courage to take his own life or to submit to another death. He would grow old and would never grow old, only become sicker and more tired, but it would all be in his head. Not that it wasn't now.
For those moments, he looked longingly at the staircase, old and threatening to cave in around the first feet that dared to lay heavy steps upon them, and he thought how tired he was…and then he pitched his fist at the floor, striking it hard, disturbed that he could have found such a thought left in him! That he would sacrifice himself once more to the nightmares and abandon this world once more? No, he would not do it. He would not be so weak that he would let the earth cradle him again whilst he lay silent and complacent to the world around him, a docile, sentient creature. No. He would take back what this world had stolen from him, and if he could not take it back, he would work to death to play a part in someone else's story, so that at least one of the two of them could have a happy ending. Even if it was not his happy ending. Even if it killed him. If it killed him…then he could rest.
He flew back out into the night, the shadowy outline of Mt. Nibel looming over the town. He thought about the evil that lurked in that mountain, the hidden truths and long goodbyes and so many many lives lost to its hunger. Vincent seemed to challenge the mountain the way he pressured his gaze to it, watching it, making sure it made no sudden moves or tried in an instant to swallow up the earth or to spew its foul luck upon him. He dreaded to think what still lurked in there, what haunted someone else's nightmares, what had been taken away from them. It was a place no man should have ever fooled with, and yet there they established mines to suck up the very life of the planet, as if man was saying to nature, "You think you can scare me? We'll see about that." No, that mountain should have been left alone; perhaps then none of the despair would have leaked out of it and onto the city, onto the cobblestones that once again felt as though they were fixing to swallow him up.
Quickly he found his way back to the inn where he slept, and found it as silent and desolate as before. Everyone was asleep, he found, everyone but himself. Irony twists its ribbons cruelly. His body wanted the rest it had been taking before his mind had leapt to life, and it succumbed to the bed, though his mind would not idle; it was running on empty but running still. Vincent thought of all he had seen in this town, this mouth of hell, this place whether evil or just another city. He had watched the life of a twenty-seven year old man fall apart in the name of science, a science that now destroyed the world piece by piece, day by day. For a moment he thought it was perhaps because that man had sensed some foreboding in the name of that science, but that man was him, and he could not give himself that much credit. No, he had only wanted to love and be loved, he only wanted what everyone else had, and he asked nothing more that that. It was stripped away, and in that same breath, the world was fouled and he was dead.
It was over, his old life, and this was some new life for some new person he hadn't yet learned to become. Perhaps he never would. Perhaps he would just lay in this bed forever with his mind playing a cruel trick on his tired body; a mind which had once refused to wake him now refused to let him rest. Perhaps that was the price he would pay for thirty years of complacence. Perhaps he would never sleep again.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
(Authoress' note: The italicized poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Elliot, and it is one of my favorite poems. I probably would have never written this if I hadn't come home sick once day while taking my English final. I guess I just figured it fit very well and thought the poem and the story don't exactly have the same rhythm, they do have a lot of the same feel, and I thought it went well. I figured it was something a little different from a song fic, and besides, what else am I supposed to do on a sick day?)