by Louis Armand
After all these years.
But at the end of the nightmare, I find Blake. Slouching by a newspaper stand, under the eaves of a bus station in La Paz. Rain slanting down through polluted air. Waiting for me. The way a complete stranger waits for you, to take possession of your life. A djinni. A spirit. The shadow of a rope dancer weaving your soul into bondage.
*
Six years later. Paris. A ship back across the Atlantic. A train from Le Havre. Escape had been useless. I knew where it had to end, even then, staring through the train window at row after row of chimneys rising above an unfamiliar horizon, black smoke billowing into the sky. An orange sun hovered there, like a fragment of a dream fading. Wheels shunting on tracks.
The sound of the wheels goes far back. All the way to the Amazon, staring at the sun rising over the vast river delta – the black sun reborn. Believing I too had been reborn. The old flesh worn away, scarified, purified. The past, cast off like fiction. Who would know me? I held onto the image of Regen, unfallen, untainted by what I’d forced myself to know. To become. Like the prodigal son on the eve of return, his crimes cast behind him like a shadow grown thin with the approach of midday.
But at the Gare St Lazare I waited on a bench, not knowing what to do. Like a prisoner stepping back out into the world. With each day crossing the ocean, my paranoias had increased. I sank down into my captivity. Born of the great river, now once again nothing but a man inside a body inside a room. The inner room and the outer room. The room of the mind and the room of the universe.
There’s never any way out. Held hostage by a past you’re unable to confront and a present that escapes you. You stare at a crack in a wall, never thinking what you’d do if you ever found yourself all of a sudden on the other side. Or the other side doesn’t exist. You step through and immediately you’re where you started again. Like a crime you’re destined to commit and go on committing, time without end. A crime made pointless. Because the victim’s already dead.
The ghosts multiply. The places you return to are more than meets the eye. I imagined myself going backwards through time, to that moment on the bridge, in the rain, with Regen’s face dissolving and reforming. There. Forever there. And all I’d have to do is reach out my hand and touch her. The light in her hair, falling across her bare shoulders. Caressing her. The way I longed to caress her.
But I wasn’t there yet. Sitting on a bench, in the Gare St Lazare. Unfamiliar faces on every side enlarging into proximity. After a while I noticed a black woman sitting opposite me, her head in her hands, sobbing. How long had she been like that? I didn’t know. I looked around, but the crowd moved as though it’d fallen asleep. It was a sleep I longed to join. To become nothing but a particle in a human tide. To see and hear nothing. But still I waited. The woman seemed to go on crying for hours. I tried to say something to her in French. I lent over and touched her shoulder. Her hair. Her face. She looked up in confusion. I imagined her recognising me, like a lost child come home. Smiling through her tears. Embracing me. Covering me with her mouth. Taking me home to some shithole in the banlieue.
I saw my reflection in the woman’s eyes. It made me feel sick. I wanted to wrench it out. A deep fear came into me and I ran. A man in a dirty suit, with an old duffel bag, rushing headlong into the crowd like a thief. Inhuman voices pursued me onto the street. I staggered blindly. Everything blurred. My mind travelled alone through its darkness. Eventually I wandered into the Marais. Off rue de rivoli I walked into a bar. And there was Blake, sitting at a table, counting his cigarettes. He was thin and pale, his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull, and his hair had turned grey.
But he was expecting me.
*
In Bolivia we’d both had different names. Different names, different histories. He wasn’t a photographer yet then. During the last of the uneventful years, the nomenklatura had him shovelling shit at a pig farm in Lety for his sins. After the revolution, he took the first plane out, fucking his way around the world. Bogotá. La Paz. Rio de Janeiro.
When I sat down he didn’t even look at me, just told me to buy the next round. I said I didn’t have any money and he laughed, a dry sardonic laugh.
“Don’t worry about it. Neither do I.”
An old algerian barman out of a film by Clouzot set down a carafe of vin blanc on the table, beside an empty one already there.
“Na zdraví!” Blake said. “Here’s to old etceteras.”
We drank and watched the traffic. The barman brought another carafe. It got dark. We drank some more. Another carafe. The barman. Replay after replay in slow motion. The traffic like a tin orchestra, rattling out an accompaniment to the old man’s underwater dance. Flies circled above the table at half-speed. It couldn’t go on, I thought. I told Blake I was going back. Prague. He nodded profoundly.
“Kafka called Prague a malignant old sow.”
“Kafka was an insurance salesman.”
“Naturally,” he said. “It pays to expect the worst.”
I wondered vaguely about what would happen next. Blake pointed across the street at a bike parked on the sidewalk. A black Enfield Bullet.
“What do you think of that beauty?” he said. “A wise old Indian left it with me as collateral. Would you believe they still make them in a factory in Bombay? Just like the originals.” He stood up. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
*
Fast forward. It’s too late or too early. September becoming October. The between-seasons. Along the Boulevard St Michel, advertisements in light-boxes illuminate pools of vomit on the sidewalk, bums asleep behind umbrellas and cardboard boxes in doorways. As I walk it begins to feel as if something’s spilling out of me, trailing on the street, unravelling like intestines. The gutters are full of me. With each step more of me is oozing out. I turn around and expect to see the rats at work, gnawing at my entrails. But there’s nothing. Tarmac and dead neon. Ultraviolet.
Four a.m. on the Pont Neuf, I begin throwing up. It doesn’t stop until there’s nothing left inside. I vomit so hard my eyes bleed.
An hour ago I was laughing my head off on Denfert Rochereau. Rock’n’roll Hell. Blake and the Spanish whore were dancing under a streetlight. I left them there, fixed in my mind like two figures in a postcard. Before that, a narrow brick house on the Passage Barrault and Blake’s half-room apartment. A red light over the toilet and contact sheets hanging everywhere. He’d started photographing the girls he picked up on the street with an old Flexaret. Crude black and white. Stripped. Needle-eyed. He’s begun to make a name for himself. He’s going back to Prague, too, to have an exhibition in some gallery that’s supposed to be famous.
The ride across Paris had been a blur. The Marais. The Seine. The lights of the Boulevard St Germain. Alphaville. Nameless streets winding into the night.
We sat on a balcony drinking Japanese beer and rum, watching the dull halo of the city. Darkened façades like expired film stock. He talked about the women he’d known. About revolution and death squads. Argentina. El Salvador. Mexico. Cuba.
“History’s all about copping it sweet and thinking you’ve got it made.”
“Yeah. And they say we had a velvet revolution.” Sure. Velvet like a whore’s skirt worn thin at the back. Or not even velvet, but some cheap imitation, velveteen.
“Fuck the revolution,” Blake said.
He brought out a film canister full of white powder and began cutting up lines. We got high. It was La Paz all over again. A grimy courtyard room with flies asleep everywhere. Stained mattress on the floor where a waterfall cascaded through the ceiling whenever it rained. I’m sitting on a chair, hypnotised by the sound of mosquitoes, water dripping. I hear Blake on the phone. He’s calling someone. He says it’s some Spanish whore he knows. We do more lines. Blake passes a joint. It’s heavy stuff. Silhouettes flap their wings – a flock of crows. Echoes multiply. Distant orchestras tune their strings.
Later there are voices. A man’s and a woman’s. I can hear somebody
breathing, too hard. My chest thuds. There’s a muffled cry. I wake up. Blake’s standing at the balcony railing with a woman bent-over in front of him, her skirt hiked up above her waist. I guess it’s the Spanish whore he keeps talking about. There’s a pillowcase over her head, tied at the neck. He’s running his fingers in and out of her arse. Legs spread. Her hands reaching back, cuffed. Light glints on her fingernails. The sound of her breathing.
Blake turns to me, a humorous look in his eye.
“Fuck her,” he says.
His camera’s on the table. A Flexaret, antique. The lamplight from the apartment falls across their bodies at wrong angles, like montage. I struggle to my feet. My head swims. The back of my neck’s wet through the collar of my shirt. I try to focus on the sliver of light across the girl’s left thigh. It snakes in and out. Blake’s grinning at me. He says:
“Just like old times.”
She stands there, immobile, a mannequin. Something conjured out of nowhere. Le Paz. Paris. I look down and see my cock half-stiff in my hand. A thing. An instrument. I hear the Spanish whore laugh. I reach out with my free hand and grip the pillowcase around her neck, her torso across the railing. And then I’m fucking her. Or somehow she’s fucking me. Stuffing me in her. The shutter of the Flexaret rasping. The night sky wheeling.
7. FIESTA PIG
Kafkaville. It’s after midday when I leave Blake passed out in his studio with a half-empty whiskey bottle. The pavements are cracked and subsided, banked with mud and melted snow. Grey, brown, black. There’s only a slight mist of rain now. Umbrellas. I pass an all-night cinema showing old Mario Bava films. La Frusta e il corpo. A poster with Christopher Lee brandishing a whip, the tail of it coiled around Daliah Lavi’s wrist. Low budget phantasmagorias. At the intersection, people waiting like people always do. Fog seeps up from the river valley.
I find a seat on the next tram that comes along and sit there looking at my hands. Ex-slaughterer’s apprentice. It’s hot inside but I’m shivering. Outside the fog turns everything into contradiction as we descend towards the river, making immediate what’s impossibly remote, the proximate turned unfathomable. The world slides away as sleep takes hold of me, summoned to dreams of future refinements of killing. I see my father working his machines. Gutters of blood and offal. The huge fiesta pig stuffed with little pig corpses.
The tram’s downtown already when someone jostles me and I wake up. Václavák. Wenceslas Square. I stagger out into the weather, crowds on the sidewalks, cling to walls under eaves, press against the flow, collar pulled up, water in my eyes. I escape the Square into a maze of narrow cobbled streets – a cluster of bars and non-stops, and then the boarded-up courtyard where the brothels used to be. Behind it, the old Temple district, and a bar called the Marquis de Sade.
It doesn’t even begin to live up to its name. The entrance is plain with a few tables and chairs spilling onto the pavement and a sign painted in red and black. A naked lightbulb hangs over the doorway. I push through a pair of swinging saloon doors as a peroxide blond in a black miniskirt comes staggering out. She trips, smashing her face into the wall. The smell of alcohol and sex trails behind as she recoils onto the street. Inside, the usual circus is going on. The dregs Saturday night left behind.
I shake the rain from my coat and head for the bar. When I sit down I get the feeling the barman doesn’t like the cut of me, so I give him my ugliest smile and order brandy for two. There’s a girl sitting alone a couple of stools away. Under the dull glow of the lights, she looks like just another hustler on the downslide, except she’s reading a book at the bar the way Regen used to. I slide the second drink over and she looks up, glass-eyed. Could be worse. Short and blond with a starved face. A black, high-necked sweater, black skirt and boots.
“Not interested,” she says, looking at the drink. Then she takes a closer squint at me. “I don’t know you.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“Sure you do,” I tell her. “We’ve known each other for centuries.”
“Whatever,” turning her attention back to the book.
“What’s the main attraction?”
She shakes her head, dismissive. Then looks up with eyebrows comically raised, all mock gravitas now:
“Aristotle.”
I can’t help laughing.
“Here’s to old man Aristotle, then.” I tip back the brandy and signal the barman for a refill. He nods at the girl. I see she’s emptied hers, too. Cute. I jerk two fingers at the barman. Sure, drinks are on me kid. He even manages a grin. Seen this before. Well so what? I didn’t come here for anything. I wait for the barman to make himself scarce then take another look at the girl. She’s watching me, eyes not glassy anymore.
And then it’s ten years ago. The end of the night, in a border town strip club. The Ace of Spades. A cellar done up like a medieval dungeon. The place stinks of booze, cigarette smoke and sweat. You can imagine people having died there in despair, broken, souls dislocated from bodies and dunged-out with the rest of the effluent. I look around, getting my bearings. The place is almost empty except for the fixtures in the front row, too drunk to move. A dancer who’s seen better days is going through the motions and already down to her last trick when I make the bar. By the time I’ve crossed to the back of the room the stage is empty. It hardly makes a difference. My eyes aren’t on the stage anyway. I’m looking at Regen.
She’s sitting alone at a back table, reading a book. A black fake fur coat and fake leather boots. I know when I see her that I’m afraid of what’ll happen next. She’s changed already in the weeks since she ran away. She’s dyed her hair. Blonde. It catches the red neon. Her fingers tap the side of a glass as she reads. Long, jade-green fingernails. I search her face, blotted mascara making her eyes into bruises. It’s a while before I realise she’s staring back at me. A black basilisk stare. It’s obvious she knows I’ve been looking for her. All along the border, one sleaze pit after another. Trying to pick up her trail. Almost losing her.
The moment’s an anticlimax. I don’t know how I imagined it should’ve been. Seeing myself now, standing there in that bar, staring at the blonde in the black coat. I feel the bouncer behind me waiting for a sign. Regen shakes her head. Slowly. Telling him we’re old friends. I don’t even know what that means, but my legs are going weak. I sit down. We seem so remote, then, facing one another across that table. I think of visiting-hour scenes in old prison films. The man doing time for his woman, who brings him cigarettes once a fortnight and tells him she’s saving herself for the day he gets out.
After a while I realise she’s smiling at me. My face twists into something ugly, but I guess I’m smiling back at her. We’re both smiling together.
*
Back in real time, in the Marquis de Sade, it’s pushing mid-afternoon. They’ve replaced the earlier crowd with an even seedier one. The music’s decades old and getting older. The next three tracks are all Walk the Line. It’s a grind. I figure listening to Johnny Cash is like having the piles. Then it switches to something more upbeat. Tom Waits. God’s away on bizniz. And ain’t that the truth. Some blow-hard hangs on my elbow and starts giving me the spiel about how music sold out. I tell him to breeze. The barman smears a dirty rag over the zinc-top.
When I ask, the girl at the bar says her name’s Inessa. From a mill town, where the Ucha meets the Serebryanska, some shithole called Pushkino. It conjures all sorts of things: Soviet cinema gulags for dead poets. She looks older than she probably is. Says she’s a student at the university. Doesn’t talk much. I prefer it that way anyhow. We finish the best part of a bottle of brandy in near silence. Later when we’re fucking she’s as quiet as a corpse. In the boarded-up passageway opposite St Jakub’s church, her face against the wall, eyes screwed closed. I make believe it’s Regen. In my head I’m fucking her and she’s laughing so hard I have to hit her to make her stop.
But it’s only in my head. I tell myself to get a grip. Inessa just stands there wiping between her legs with a dirty
handkerchief, eyes glistening in the dark of the passageway, too young and too old. I reach out and she cowers, half-expecting the blow that doesn’t come. Something wrenches at me and I feel my fist smash into the wall. Those eyes, that dumb animal look, like an accusation. I reel out into the rain and let it soak into me. I want to scream. The sky falling down. The raw air. And there’s Inessa, in front of me, punching me in the chest with both hands as hard as she can, cursing in bitch Russian, so furious it makes me laugh. A mad laugh, mouth open to the rain and her, in her sideways heels, flailing for all she’s worth. Until the laughter gets into her too. And then we’re both laughing, like a pair of idiots out there in the rain, in the empty street.
We kiss then, the way children do. Blindly. Selfishly. Something like tenderness comes over me. She’s shivering. This frail, unknown thing. I take her in my arms and carry her across the street out of the rain into the church. Beneath the archway, through the wooden doors, along the aisle. The smell of scented tallow hangs in the air. I lay her down on a pew and rest beside her. Her head on my thigh, my coat draping her. In the silence of the church she drifts into a fitful sleep. I sit and watch the light falling through the stained glass windows. The martyrdom of the saints. The miraculous birth. Death and resurrection. Light falling through darkness. Darkness into light. The eternal contraries.
A watery voice calls through an alcoholic haze. Some kind of music. I open my eyes and Inessa’s standing there watching me, comical in my oversized Gestapo coat. I can’t help laughing.
“Vole!” she says. Ox.
People turn and notice us. They’re filing in for the afternoon service. A herd of swaying bovine faces, avid for penitence. And the fool has said in his heart “there is no God.” I grin back foolish. Let them take their god to hell with them. Hanged son of man in the laughing tree. My pious mother stands there, evangelising the false sinners in purgatory. Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Virgo serena, pia, munda et immaculata. Dismayed whispers follow us onto the street. Inessa, her matted hair, mascara bleeding down her cheeks. An angel driven from door to door. I kiss her face, brush her wet hair back with blunt fingers, standing over her in my undertaker’s suit. What dreamless charity settling the old accounts?