The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

Author:Deborah Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

While I sat on the stone steps by the winterized fountain, I saw one of my students walking through the park. She was wearing a red coat and red woollen gloves. She was speaking to someone on her phone. After a while she took the glove off her right hand to better grip the phone, reaching with her left hand for the few leaves left on the tree.

She had recently given me some of her writing to read. It was clear that she feared her emerging voice would be mocked. Every time she wrote something she really meant, she followed it with a self-deprecating joke to undermine the truth she had struggled to untangle. Perhaps this was a bid for approval, or a bid for love? Yet what sort of love would demand that she conceal her talent? Among her influences were Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob, poet, artist and resistance fighter in the Second World War), and a book she carried with her at all times, Black Skin, White Masks, by the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who was born on the Caribbean island Martinique. She had torn the wallpaper off the walls of her family house and slipped her hand inside the naked bricks to reach for something she knew was there. A feature of her story involved two caged singing birds. After I had read it a few times, I questioned these singing birds – to which she was very attached. The traumatic events in her writing occurred during the months of the monsoon in southern India, between July and September. I suggested she work with the rain instead of the birds. She rewrote the story and it came to life. It was both nuanced and furious – a hard combination to pull off. She had used the last line of a Langston Hughes poem as an ironic and sad refrain, which she had repeated throughout the story.

And I love the rain.

Now that the birds no longer screamed over her own powerful voice, the student told me it was hard to own up to its force. It scared her. When I told her that I believed she had an abundance of talent, she began to cry. And then she said, ‘Sorry, I haven’t had breakfast.’ She fumbled in her rucksack and took out two tiny samosas. When she unravelled the napkin they were wrapped in and used it to wipe her eyes, she was nervous and her hands were shaking a little. Later in the day, I saw that she had left the samosas on my office desk. I’d had to run down two flights of stairs to find her, and when I placed them in her hand she looked at me and said, ‘Oh, but I left them for you.’

‘Well, thank you,’ I replied. ‘But you don’t have to give me things for letting you know you’re a genius.’

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