Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  She asked about illness and Aigues-Mortes: is it forthcoming? Have you adequately prepared? I told her that though Moira sends postcards nearly every day, she never indicates precise whereabouts. Alma insisted I quickly fly to Aigues-Mortes: “Why dilly-dally? Are you overdoing the Cabernet?” Truth is, I’m abusing Percocet. She called me “catatonic schizophrenic.” She finally understands Aigues-Mortes, realizes I’m warden of Moira Orfei’s public ecstasies. Alma mentioned the seamy Aigues-Mortes underbelly: arms-traders, mercenaries, smugglers, drug-dealers, money-launderers, pimps. Perhaps the Mafia has imprisoned Moira.

  Friedman massaged my prostate; over Mechanical Street, a sickle moon shone. He asked me to clarify the performance that Moira Orfei and I plan to give. I’ll coordinate Ravel’s Sonatine with Moira’s horses doing the Levade and the Capriole; I’ll match Messiaen’s Petites esquisses d’oiseaux to Moira’s bird-dance on the wire; I’ll play Liszt’s “Orage” while Moira manages the sea lions’ anger. “Ark-ark-ark,” I cried, imitating her underlings, while Friedman repeatedly brought me toward orgasm and away: I paved a tantra route, recirculating heat into my Crick-opiated chakras, enjoying gelatinous interruptus in thighs, testicles, and rectum, like wanting to dynamite a neighbor’s house or a concert hall, and leaving me this morning with a bad case of blue balls. With my remaining days before Aigues-Mortes I will abstain from prostate massages and from all drugs not prescribed by Dr. Crick. My virtuosity will appall Alma, unflappable mistress of the “Lugubrious Gondola.” Moira Orfei understands that my hands, though not huge, are powerful. Wrongly I’ve forced piano to imitate violin, bird, gunshot, and waterfall, but have avoided innate gruesome “Tarantella” sounds. Guilty, I flee the present: didn’t a great American conductor say that waltzes were kaput? Why agree with that racist maestro? Follow Moira Orfei’s example. Waltz—Moira Orfei’s famous Andalusian surrender to three-quarter time—is why the Aigues-Mortes committee invited me to dominate.

  Sultry Derva Nile—ally, subordinate, love—has reserved me two flights: Barcelona, Nice. Meanwhile Brad Olney has promised to compose me a piano concerto based on the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer and Joseph Cornell. Maybe Brad wrote Alma a concerto, which she’s performing behind my back at a Buenos Aires tanguería. Today I bought a plastic see-through tux shirt at Jacob’s Ladder: performance outfit.

  When a local heiress, Arletty, who resembles the young Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody, and who runs a publishing house, Slumber Press, heard that I was keeping notebooks (twenty-four, so far) on Aigues-Mortes preparations, in the event that my reunion with Moira Orfei becomes historic, Arletty offered to print a facsimile limited edition. Slumber Press recently published Artur Schnabel’s appointment calendar. Arletty can do good business with my notebooks, which represent, she says, “the situation of fallen boy.” I will donate the original notebooks to the Moira Orfei Living Museum, once I found it.

  Theo,

  You never told me about your family. I regret their tenuousness: they are difficult to hold in the mind. Was not “confusion,” from that first rendezvous at the Montecatini bandstand, our rapport’s rivet? Did not “confusion” follow us to Catania? Has not “confusion”—and its antidote, “love”—been the slow path leading us directly to tomorrow, to Aigues-Mortes, where I remain, prepared, stunned, anticipating? Elephants, monkeys, dogs, ponies, tigers, and seals have been trained; trapeze artists, clowns, midgets, and magicians hold themselves aloft. Afternoons in my hotel, I nap away nervousness. I grow to tolerate the sand wines.

  Moira Orfei

  For morning warm-up I played a Per Aspera Moszkowski virtuosity study, and then said farewell to Tanaquil. Shivering, she refused to see Dr. Crick; her own disreputable physician, Gaston Lair, says that she does not have a relapse of “red brain.” She suffers from anemia, vertigo, vaginismus, and agoraphobia. Dr. Crick praises my fugue states: all great pianists have dissociative amnesia. I lack nerve to try Liszt’s Second Concerto with the Aigues-Mortes festival orchestra; in Carpentras, the vivamente cadenza paralyzed me. To erase coma, I must reenter it.

  Theo,

  You and I will be Aigues-Mortes headliners together and redeem the past, our separate pasts, each flawed, and the new, present past we are piecemeal constructing together.

  I won’t address your mistakes, only your successes—the time you played the Mephisto Waltz in La Spezia’s public gardens, near the gulf. I nearly fainted as you began, but I recovered spirit, and entered the ring, with midgets, for my biased act.

  Moira Orfei

  Unspecified time has passed—“nervous breakdown days,” Tanaquil calls them. I won’t discuss my hospitalization, aphasia, hand paralysis, urinary incontinence, pregnancy hallucinations, “borderline” diagnosis, subsequent rescinding of hasty diagnosis, cancellation of my appearance as headliner at the Aigues-Mortes festival and then reinstatement, postcards from Moira Orfei not forwarded to me at the East Kill Hospital, my failed attempts (from the back ward) to contact Moira via Alfonso Reyes, Dr. Crick’s refusal to let me call Chloe, hours of television in the rec room with the other morons, Tanaquil’s refusal to visit (hospitals, like funeral parlors, upset her), Friedman’s visit . . .

  “You never initiate social arrangements,” Friedman told me at the hospital. East Kill society has dropped me. Men in the water district are dying. Friedman noticed my disappearing voice and told me not to overuse it. He quoted his mother: “Remember Corfu.” She counts on our visit.

  The hospital gave me a single bed (as if I weren’t famous enough for a double), and a blanket the color of our Mechanical Street house: Dreamsicle.

  Alma telephoned once. She described her performance of the Joaquín Nin-Culmell Tonadas at Palacio San Martin and told me to keep open the pipeline to madness. She named two of her yearly hospitalizations: the 1965 nervous exhaustion after playing César Franck’s Les Djinns in Kyoto; the 1966 nervous exhaustion after playing Ernst von Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Song in Lima. She plans to appraise the Guadalquivar jewels—Gertrude’s. Who owns them? My glans burns.

  Theo,

  Where are you?

  Remember: mist is our modus operandi.

  Moira Orfei

  This afternoon, an unseasonably warm early spring day, I played Liszt’s B Minor Sonata at the East Kill Hospital, a concert in the central courtyard garden. I wanted to tell the crocuses that they would die in a fortnight, and that during their brief existence they would not universally delight staff and patients. I wanted to tell the crocuses that I was cruel to use them as scapegoats, but my attention drifted to the audience, waiting for me to begin the Liszt, which turned into another display of what Alma calls my “egregious athleticism.” Liszt emigrates from melody into noise. Tanaquil visited the hospital to say goodbye.

  Derva Nile has canceled my flight to Barcelona but not my flight to Nice. I will show up in Aigues-Mortes when I show up.

  Theo,

  Climbing the Tour de Constance, its walls twenty feet thick, I remember Protestants imprisoned here for thirty years; outside the town walls, heaps of salt await.

  My languid camels will echo the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  1248, 1270: in a trance, I see St. Louis, in Aigues-Mortes, sending forth Crusaders, and embarking, himself, on the fruitless expedition of extermination, from which he never returned . . .

  Moira Orfei

  I left the hospital, returned home to Mechanical Street. My left ear doesn’t work. Dr. Crick came this afternoon to set up the care situation. Derva Nile drops in to nurse. Soon I’ll fly to Nice and drive a rented car to Aigues-Mortes. I may choose not to mention Moira Orfei in the following notebooks. Will I find her in Aigues-Mortes, or will she have already departed? Certain dreams have lapsed, Alma said, on the phone, and yet she was referring only to her final performance of Xavier Montsalvatge’s Tres Divertimentos and Sonatine pour Yvette at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, a city whose musical community, she fears, has turned against her, as if against every consummation.
>
  Did the remembered, corrugated fabric of Alma’s maternity blouse (when pregnant with Tanaquil) provoke my return to Fauré’s preludes, as if no time had elapsed, and as if my reunion with Moira Orfei were not hopelessly compromised? Would there be a memorial service, in Aigues-Mortes, for the Aigues-Mortes festival that never transpired, or would the comeback take place, an impromptu execution, without premeditation? I will ask Moira Orfei, when I see her in Aigues-Mortes, what acrobatics she has planned to accompany my performance of the preludes.

  Notebook Twenty-Five

  Theo,

  My hotel room is equipped with a video monitor, and I have been reseeing my films, with disappointment. They are not as great as I had remembered. I envy the career of Brigitte Bardot, lucky enough to work with better directors. Of course I had Visconti and Godard, among others, but not always, and sometimes the director was powerless to save the production. Watching the gladiator picture I made with Eric Rohmer gives me no pleasure.

  And yet I would not exchange my career with Brigitte Bardot’s. In “Contempt,” her longest film, she reveals her buttocks. In this scene, as I recall, she is lying on her stomach, waiting for something or someone—waiting, as you once put it, “for meaning to arrive.” It never showed up. Brigitte may not have been happy to expose her buttocks but lo and behold they appear. I will ask her, the next time we meet, whether she was pleased to exhibit them, and whether she wishes she could eradicate her earlier mistakes.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  Resurrection is not too much to hope for. Healing, contemplating my errors, I wait in Aigues-Mortes. I look down at my body and see, beneath the beauty, scars. Traumatized by circus, I remember you watching me tap-dance on a straw hat in Seville. The whip cracks! The show begins!

  Moira Orfei

  Moira Orfei gives no forwarding address. It is her nature never to mention an address. If I were able reliably to write to her, she would not be Moira Orfei, circus eminence. Today is her birthday and I have no method of reaching her. Am I perhaps the one person from whom she genuinely wants to hear? Mechanical Street: I lie in bed. Tanaquil is a patient nurse. More details later. Tanaquil helps transcribe Moira’s letters in the Aigues-Mortes notebook. I dictate translations, and she writes them down.

  Theo,

  I have not forgotten you. Nor, I trust, have you forgotten me. Your regular messages are a boon.

  Sometimes I am disconsolate, as I sit in my room in the Hotel Constance, staring out, beyond the Aigues-Mortes walls, at the salt heaps, and thinking of the unfinished work ahead. In my act, the mother elephant guides the baby elephant; the baby’s tricks surpass the mother’s.

  Moira Orfei

  The Hotel Constance! At last, Moira has admitted her address. (Of course, Alfonso Reyes had already spilled the beans.) I recall sitting beside my Guadalquivar grandfather—Ricardo—in a Chevrolet, while he coughed. A mechanical device, installed in his lungs to help him breathe, made the sound of a circus artiste climbing, with bare hands, a rope ladder. I patted helpless Ricardo on the back to clear his congestion. Aigues-Mortes approaches. If only I could convince Moira Orfei that she is Brigitte Bardot’s superior! Tanaquil agrees: Orfei in Triumph of Hercules is more beautiful than Bardot in Contempt. In my bedroom, Tanaquil and I watch the Triumph video. In Moira’s first scene, she emerges, sorceress, from a red cloud that clears only to form a denser, more enveloping fog.

  Theo,

  In the Hotel Constance, I dream. Late in the day, reality dawns; I push it aside.

  We perform not as ourselves, but as replicas. The incongruity drove Father mad.

  In the Hotel Constance, I remember Father, asylum-committed (I see Lucca’s ramparts); again circus insists I enter its séance.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  Fasting, I remember what Marguerite Duras told me, soon before her death: never hesitate. Was Marguerite wrong?

  I’d like to destroy all my circus programs from the past twenty years, to forget.

  The Spanish Inquisition and the Spanish Civil War enter my sleep. Long-ago mistakes, re-erupting, shatter Europe. Reparation is performance’s point. In our act, Europe will finally cohere, even if unity is horror.

  Please appear to perform these truths within the ring, beside trapeze and Indian leopard.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  I spend my days napping in the Hotel Constance, waiting, dreaming. I wake, and suddenly remember that we were to meet tomorrow, at six p.m., under the arcades, within view of the Constance Tower. And then I fall back asleep.

  Six turns into seven, but then, seven turns back into six.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  Afraid of vibrations in the Hotel Constance walls; afraid of towers, parapets; afraid of the Middle Ages, returning; afraid of dying lagoons surrounding Aigues-Mortes walls; afraid of the four canals leading to the town, and what the canals have carried; afraid of seriousness and of levity; afraid of the work awaiting us, and the unfinished nature of circus; afraid of Aigues-Mortes—

  Afraid, I left Aigues-Mortes, though I will soon return—

  Afraid, I fled, for Portbou. You told me that you vacationed there, as a child. Now I learn that Portbou was where Walter Benjamin took his life. I had not realized until today. The information sinks deep into me, as I nap, in the hotel. I remember Father telling me that Walter Benjamin (known to my family not as a philosopher but as a circus connoisseur) was a follower of the great Grimaldi, the clown; that Walter rode a Liberty Horse in the Grand Parade of the circus of the Fratellini Frères; that he idolized the immortal Paul Cinquevalli, juggler . . . Father’s information may be wrong. Though not a circus artiste, Father walked on wires, the crossbars of lunacy . . .

  I enclose a photo of Portbou’s Hotel de Anza, recently opened. If you hurry, you may find me there, before I return to Aigues-Mortes.

  My tone is cold but my heart is warm.

  In the graveyard, I met a young man, Paolo, a handsome young Italian, from Monterosso al Mare; for a living, he leads tours of Portbou, but no one these days wants a tour. He told me details of Walter’s suicide, which I forget. Did he shoot himself or drown? Paolo took me to the memorial, a staircase that leads down—almost—into the ocean. Right before you fall into the sea, a plexiglass plate with a mysterious inscription stops you. Then you walk back up the passageway, returning to the light. Ascent is more melancholy than descent; return, more horrifying than departure.

  Circus has not given me time for philosophy, though there are more profundities in the elephant trunk swaying, the artiste somersaulting over seven horses, than in entire libraries.

  I am learning my lesson, traveling, dissolving former mendacities in the Golfe du Lion, the Côte Vermeille, the Costa Brava, even if I never visit them, even if these coasts are chimeras.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  Profane, I wait in Portbou, preparing for return to Aigues-Mortes, where I will meet you, upon your tardy—never too late—arrival.

  Paolo put me in touch with a Portbou psychic, a gypsy who told me that I would soon contemplate a religious vocation, and that I am Spanish, not Italian. I sank into trance, Paolo said, when I sat in the gypsy’s parlor (her necklace the color of amontillado), and I began to speak of continental slaughter, of Europeans destroying their neighbors, of carnage that we can never erase or rectify. And when I woke from my trance, I felt again entrapped in circus, and I knew what it meant to be lost in Portbou; to fear return; to wait for rescue; to ignore the sea view; to descend a staircase into Stygian waters; to have no art, or too much art; to wonder about the existence of palm trees in the North.

  Moira Orfei

  Theo,

  Indefinitely I remain in Portbou, so quiet I imagine that Europe has collapsed and that only I remain. The postal system is about to break down: a strike. I must mail this letter, before communication fails.

  Moira Orfei

  Friedman came by. He will fly tom
orrow to Corfu, joining his mother. She promises to nurse him back to health, though I doubt that Corfu doctors are sophisticated enough to finesse his case, and I doubt that Samantha will tolerate Friedman’s violent tantrums. Will he hustle in Corfu, or will that vocational chapter close? I said farewell to Friedman, our eyes moist as the red cloud from which Moira Orfei, playing Pasiphae in Triumph of Hercules, emerges.

  Theo,

  At the risk of endangering our act (I am a circus artiste, not an historian), I remain in Portbou, at the Hotel de Anza, absorbing exile’s frequencies. Each day I wander with Paolo, who is obsessed with Walter Benjamin. I understand the preoccupation: Father trained me to forgive men’s monomanias. Aloud, Paolo speculates about what manuscript Walter carried in his heavy black briefcase over the border from France to Spain. These speculations mean more to Paolo than to me, and yet, sensing their urgency, I listen, as if hearing Chloe’s sick cat cry. No one knows what happened to Walter’s briefcase, or the manuscript inside. Paolo thinks it was an unfinished autobiography. According to Paolo, Walter died by overdosing on morphine in Portbou; the Spanish authorities had threatened to send him back to France, and the thought of the return journey over the difficult mountains, with his weak heart, made him choose death. I understand. I would take morphine, if I were forced to leave Montecatini forever, and never lay eyes again on the huts and palaces of my forefathers.