1. Away
i.
3 am, the sound of hooves on the street. Outside the window, no horse. (It is not uncommon to see horses on the streets here.)
Valentine’s Day in despite of, and – In this cafe I am the oldest woman still trying.
It’s in the cafe where we met that you told me about the Irish word, geis.
A geis (pron: /ɡɛʃ/) is a form of taboo in folklore. An impediment, it is encountered while travelling. Until confronted, it prevents you from getting any further and, when met, it sometimes results in disaster. To avoid your geis entails dishonour. You must leave home, however, in order to confront it.
A geis is something you give a loved one. It puts a condition around them.
The second time I see you, the city takes shape around you where it was once just streets with houses and shops. I risk your city becoming not as it was before, empty and full of promise, its streets capable of any number of meanings.
A geis is a conditional sentence: “If you do, then you must …” A geis is a word that facilitates an act.
I walk the streets alone – to get a city imprinted on me? To get a person the same? Or is it to master someone?
ii.
In the cafe you told me there were bar to me, two in my ears, and one across my throat.
I ask myself the question: do I have a geis?
In stories, women seldom have a geis. (“If someone has a fate, it’s a man, if someone suffers a fate, it’s a woman.”*) It is women who put geis on men—their sons, their lovers.
To stop them straying? To keep them from danger? Why would women limit the men they love?
But I have a discovered a type of geis for women. Consider the geis of Donkeyskin, the geis of The Little Mermaid, the geis of the girl whose seven or nine or eleven brothers are turned into swans. In each case they leave home in disguise, and travel unable to tell who they are. To tell involves a risk: if the girl with the seven swans can keep quiet, she gets her brothers back; Donkey must not explain her new skin (this is also the geis of The Little Mermaid).
The geis of men is positive: their confrontation with it triggers an action.
The nature of a man’s geis is, he can’t not. The geis of women is negative: her action triggers a confrontation. The nature of women’s geis is, she must not.
If a woman crosses this border she will lose. If she does not cross the border she will win. If a man does not cross this border he will win.
If he crosses the border he may win, or lose. The borders for men and women are different.
Men have nothing to lose from obeying their geis, and women everything to win. A woman’s base position can only be improved.
(And, furthermore, there is something I can’t tell you.)
iii
My geis is, perhaps, a weakness for foreign men. I cannot be interested in any man in my own country. The moment I am, they move away. I am in love with distance. (Ironically I am short-sighted.**)
I have made the decision to be short-sighted*** only recently. This involved going to an optician, having my eyes tested, and buying some glasses. Before this I was not short-sighted, I just couldn’t see the numbers on buses.
(How do I know I fall only for foreign men? I go abroad to find them.)
My new glasses make me nauseous. It’s the change in focus. I must have been straining to catch things far away. Now things are nearer, I can’t do close-up. I walk as if I’ll trip. There are some things I prefer not to see too clear. In these cases I leave my glasses off. And, as for me, I want to become small enough to peer at, I want to buy some tiny coral earrings.
In love I like to buy such cheap trinkets, seduced, I expect, by the easy feeling of attainment. Meanwhile it is my habit while here to go into junk shops, always looking for a second chance (or to give one).
iv.
Though no one asks, it is possible to wonder why heroes leave home on quests knowing they will risk encountering their geis. How I ignore the long outskirts of cities only to plunge into their soft centres, all bars and shops and historical landmarks!
This is what a city is, I say, and, for a time, I convince myself. That bus from the airport every time – when do I feel I’m here: by the Beckett Bridge?
A geis almost always ends badly, but there’s always a chance it will end well. Each morning I walk past Christchurch to take the 66 or 67 bus to where I work. Though there is often drizzle later, each day begins sunny. The weather has been all sorts of things recently except too cold. In the back of my mind I’m aware it’s not right to see flowers so early. Still I like to see them.
Avoiding your geis is mere biding time. Or rather there is no avoiding it. A geis only seems to demand obedience. In fact it demands crossing. Here with you one week on/one off, I could have done that journey every day. As though it were my life.
v.
A geis is a kind of sensibility, like living abroad. To understand it, more than translate it, you must dwell with it.
In my suitcase there are some clothes you have seen me in, some you have not, and some I wore before I met you. Our time can be laid out in them. When I get home, that’s what I’ll do.
A geis is defined in its breaking. But a geis is not a spell. It cannot be broken with a kiss.
I will not get what I want so I have been careful to note the shape of your fingers’ ends, their length, the direction of the whorls in your ears, the texture of the short fur between your shoulder blades, also how you smell. And I have been careful to rub some of your molecules into mine in order to take them with me into a foreign country.
From which you will be no more than a photograph.
I wish I were going to a different home. My body is in the wrong place in relation to that concept. I don’t want to arrive at that other iteration of it. Though I am tired of travelling, I can’t want this not-arriving to stop. It means I will come back.
When a man successfully confronts his geis, he can go home. If a woman fails her geis, it means she must. I am leaving now. Would you like – I did not need to say – to walk me to the bus stop? If I had asked you to accompany me to the airport, you’d have come.
II. Home
i.
A geis can be triggered by something as simple as the mention of your own name. To have a geis is to be two things, one before and one after the word.
The physical takes the place of words. Body-to-body alters communication: for a few days after I have no need to write. Only last week I told you how to make Turkish eggs. Today in another country I am making them. The told eggs were more real. We shall shortly be citizens of different continents. We both prefer living on our own, but I don’t think that means the same thing. Telescoped, here I am in my kitchen doing something you can’t see. I can no longer precisely remember your face.
I have a name I cannot tell. It is a name I am frightened you won’t like.
Talking in bed is best. And afterwards we talk again but from two different beds. (By talk, I mean type.) Sometimes you can be filed away as a coincidence of time and space. We talk to each other at night, or rather in the early hours of the morning that exist nowhere. Wanting the medium of saying ‘with’ you but having no ‘with’ to say, it’s painful to reread your body words in this disembodied situation, to spread words over you as if their emolience could make you stick, or slip. This effortful synaesthetic fun – this proving of similarity – is an addiction to reply. And again. Once is never enough. But restraint is needed in reply, the point not information but response. To continue, love must have repetition, and repetition across the space of the body.
We are both waiting for something to take root. I wanted to say, ‘roost,’ but –
It is a name you are unlikely to guess.
– words are conditional on forgetfulness. Incidents fabricate memories that can be told. I mean they give words weave. If I breath in sharply I can conjure the smell of your name which is partly body, unwashed wool scarf and washed t-shirt, hair and leather jacket. I do not know why this action of speeding up breath would shape air molecules thus.
(… always second-guessing what men don’t want named out loud.)
This town smells different. And I’m not sure how long I can go without washing my hair.
ii.
Outside that cafe, strings of branches hold up clumps of heavier blossom: a double illusion. Desire, not being at home here, is watching trees through a window: they move but I can’t hear them. I am frightened I might be wasting tenderness on you that I could use elsewhere. It is produced on demand; nevertheless I do not have an infinite store. It wavers sometimes: who are you after all? I ask this only at the moment I can’t tell who I might be, and the gravity of either of us, relative or absolute.
Here are two more things about distance:
a) Sometimes when having sex I think remembering having sex is more fun, without the pressure of making immediate decisions as to how to have sex, but, while I am remembering having sex, I think how much more fun it is to have sex.
b) And, though I wish that I were with you now, it is also satisfying to have a love and for him to be at a distance. And even though I don’t believe that phrase ‘a love,’ or that word, ‘have,’ to suspend my disbelief is pleasant.
Time, which is so strangely arranged that we must continue our lives in the intervals between, means preparing to be happy can be the happiest point, planning how I could be more easily with you for longer (without telling you how, of course: it makes me feel the man!). This state of being ‘from’ – suspended– I like it. There is no mode that is not aeroplane mode.
iii.
I am obligingly Having my period for you
This week.
In the meantime, I have dreams that seem to address aspects of my life, but they’re opaque as blocks of ice cream. How would it be to have someone to do things with again, to do the things couples do, to go driving in a car, to go to a place to do something (though neither of us drive), to drive and then to walk, to go to places to eat or drink together, though we’d have been together all along, to go to places to witness each other doing things we do normally, but not normally in each other’s company, and needing each other’s company to prove the difference? (In any case we both said we never went ‘on holiday.’)
I am dreaming, perhaps, not of you but of your country, a passport that still bends in the hand: international flexibility! Who’d have thought I’d be such a mail-order bride? Is it that feeling? –caught one, got one! – oh, the things I accuse myself of. And I thought I was a citizen of a ‘progressive’ country …
I have got this far, nevertheless, past first dates and first sex and what-shall-we-talkabout- after – many perils! It is a test as in a fairytale: I am on a quest, perhaps. So long as my quest continues I will continue to tellits story. Perhaps the story sustains the
quest, or perhaps I undertake quests in order to sustain stories, as the heroes of stories are, by definition, those undertaking quests. My quest is always to be on a quest.
And now I must pack a disingenuous baise-en-ville. How awful to prepare for things!
iv.
In the meantime, you are disintegrating into the body parts shown in your photographs, which resemble only themselves. You have in any case lost the scarf in the photo, you are no longer exactly the same person.
My problem being I do not trust my memory to separate you from the places I have seen you and the things I have seen you with. My problem being I do not trust myself to tell the difference. I want to show people your photograph to prove your discrete existence. (To be fair when we were in the same country, I wanted the flesh proof too.)
Each time I see you, the photographs renew. But I can’t believe you want to see me again. Because I am under a geis.
I am under the narrative geis of the girl who spun straw into gold. The more I spin, the more attention I get from princes. Albeit the skill and the prize are undeserved, the gold is real gold and, however much I try, I can never turn it back. I am under a geis to convert love into words. There is something I can’t tell, so I cannot have love.
While I can’t tell it, I can write. If I can’t have love, I’ll have writing: that is the spinning action. For every geis is also a gift.
v.
Actually, I’ve decided, only love can break a geis. Isn’t that what they say in the books?
(No, they say love can lead you to encounter it.)
The girl who spun straw into gold had no name.
(I have been told most men prefer a blank page.)
Being, however, my own Rumpelstiltskin, I also do not want you to guess my name. But I must remind myself that, if forced to encounter my geis, there is always the possibility I might win.
What shall I tell you? Or, rather, when? Like Rumpelstiltskin, the question will answer itself in the morning.
My daughter says, Mum you’ve got thin again. There it is, I thought: worry, and winter, and love.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 61, out now.