by Roman Payne
I was still half-sober when a man—a very tall man, he was dressed to his eyelids in black crêpe—stopped me on the street to tell me I looked deathly pale. Having seen me for the first time at this moment, I took offense. How the hell could he have known what my complexion normally looks like? And what if I were always deathly pale?! I asked the monster these questions. He replied that he couldn’t know, but that if I needed a hospital, one could be found at the end of this side-street near where we were standing. I don’t know if I thanked him, or cursed him to Hades. But I did take his advice. I went vagabonding down that side street where the hospital was said to be… just in case.
My vagabonding took me into a seedy part of town that I found out later was called El Raval. The street where the saidhospital was located branched-out into sinister alleys, apartment squalors, everything the color of soot. The quarter smelled of poverty and dirt. In this dirty quarter, I thought, in the fine clothes I’m wearing, all it would take is one crazy thief with a pistol to rob me of my entire fortune and make me a pauper. But no, I would take a bullet before surrendering to any thief.
“Why on earth am I following this street that leads to a hospital?” I screamed this question over and over in a very loud voice, so the passersby thought I was mad. “Why am I following a street that goes to a hospital? Do I need a hospital? Well, do I? Damn-it, I am a hospital!”
By now, the opiates were in full effect with all the sweet pleasures opiates bring, my head tingled, my body too. I enjoyed the high until I felt something else, something new, something very unlike opium. It was that green death… that unknown chemical, it frightened me at first! ‘Why frighten you, Saul? Of all people, you are not afraid to die. Take it as it comes…’
Next effect to shake my brain, what made me truly certain I had been killed with a chemical poison, and not some douce tueuse1 like our Lady Opium who is natural and holy to medicine. First I suffered twinges in my head where, for the space of a several moments, I didn’t know where I was in relationship to the world: An intense self-depersonalization schism, I believed I was standing by myself, watching myself walk down the sidewalk; then my chest tightened and breathing became strained. The leather of my head started tightening in the strangest way, I was sure that at any moment I would die of a brain aneurysm, or else my heart would give up…
Then comes a moment when the panic disappears and I feel numb again. I am at peace. Now, no longer at peace, my depersonalization fever strikes again and rises to a level where, not only was I autoscopic1, but I was also teleautoscopic! My Watcher-Self was not near to my body like the first time; rather, I was far away from my body this time, about ten meters up in the air, and away, looking down at the pathetic figure of my carcass walking along without a soul, trying to fight off death, and trying to make sense of what remains of his life. Wherever could he be going on this sidewalk he was sent to stroll?
1 DOUCE TUEUSE: (Fr) This phrase can either be translated as “sweet killer” or “soft killer.”
Fortunately, these crises of autoscopy lasted only moments and I would soon come back to myself enough to register my surroundings. I passed a young couple kissing away on the street. Between embraces they whispered to each other; they giggled pleasantries, and they laughed away that world that was outside of their world, the world of their love. And I heard what they were saying between kisses. They were discussing me! Those stupid animals! I, Saul, who is after all a human being, yet a human being who has lived his whole life with a great respect for philosophy, while striving to live the eudaimonic life, was now in the process of giving up his soul, of dying. Meanwhile, these lovers were amusing themselves by painting my death into their tryst as some sort of ornament to the scene.
“You will not have it!” I growled, loud as I could as I passed the two lovers, “You will not have it, and I will not have a banal ending by going out here, like this… and with you!” So I spoke as they huddled in fear. Though I did not understand it then, that the end had not come yet, that it was now the very beginning; and that my poisoned body was struggling to bloom, and not to die.
The sound of my new life began, as begins the sound of a solitary Spanish guitar. Imagine if you will, a classical guitarist who is highly skilled in his art, and who strums the one guitar he loves, and has had for most his life; he strums from his solitude, a single soul lost in the Spanish night. His song is in a minor key, it speaks of travel, of loneliness, of love.
1 AUTOSCOPIC: From the Greek αὐτός (‘self’) and σκοπός (“watcher”). Autoscopy is a mental phenomenon experienced most often through mental illness or drug abuse, where a person hallucinates that they are outside of their body, watching their body (often from an elevated position) perform the same tasks that the person was engaged in when the hallucination began. Autoscopic experiences are reported to be very brief, and often very terrifying.
As I walked that night, and wherever I walked, the sound grew stronger and more beautiful. Gone were all the symptoms of my, malaise; I no longer travelled from my body and I no longer feared to die. I simply walked and listened to the classical guitar, imagining the scene of the player who was playing.
A scene formed itself in my imagination… It was one of some handsome, olive-faced youth playing beneath the balcony of some lady, who may fall in love with him, he hopes, if he plays well enough. He is perfumed and is wearing his finest suit for the occasion. The lady may listen by the window with eagerness, or she may fall asleep in her bed if his singing voice doesn’t match the charm of his rosewood guitar. So the youth will play his song and she will either be enchanted or annoyed by his nighttime serenade. It will all depend on the condition of her heart, and the direction of its affections.
I was meanwhile floating along in my own universe—a cloud of anesthesia, a euphoria of harmony. The guitar piece was progressing nicely and I knew I would soon overtake the youth in the street. I would stop to watch him play his song, guitar on his knee, his face tilted amorously, upwards!—towards his one love’s balcony.
I was soon to be brought to light, though, and shown the falseness and foolishness of the idyll my mind had conceived. As I gained pace and the guitarist played on, keeping his great wheel of a song rolling along in the minor key, and when his song came ‘round again, and the wheel came ‘round again, that would be the moment I would pass the trees that blocked the part of that house where the balcony was, where the player was playing.
Two, or perhaps three times in a person’s life, usually not more, does it happen that everything aligns together in poetic perfection to allow his and her destiny to become for a time, as beautiful as we say, it had to become.
That was how it was this night. When the singing began, not a moment later or a moment sooner, was when I caught sight of the guitarist…
It was that it was her voice, that it was her touch on the strings, that had seduced me up until I caught sight of her: I saw a young girl sitting alone on a balcony, at a moment when she began to sing. No other way to describe her voice other than: It was feminine. It was feminine and healthy, without a blemish though not over-practiced. The songs of Orpheus may have moved rocks and snakes, and killed his lover, but this goddess’ song moved my heart to a kind of love that ten-thousand vipers could never poison. Here is my impression of seeing her for the first time:
A very young girl was seated on a balcony, a mere two floors up from the street. She finished her song on the classical guitar, and now she’s stopped and sits still, as though caught by a sudden idea. She is the very portrait of youthful perfection, including all the charming defects of youth. Her feet were bare (I noticed them first), and were smudged with dirt. Her legs dangled over the balcony’s edge. Both were tanned, and her knees had scratches on them. Her skirt was the color of cracked-cream. It was bunched-up and was dirty at the hems as though she’d been out tramping in the streets. Now she was apparently at home and at her ease, certainly at her father’s house. I imagined they were a rather poor family. Husb
and and wife were asleep in bed, while their daughter had decided to fetch her guitar and step out onto the balcony to serenade herself in the light of the full moon…
On her small thighs sits her Spanish guitar. Her fingers resume plucking the strings. Her song resumes on the minor key. Her head is lowered in concentration, her face is obscured by long falling hair. A simple cotton nightshirt, two straps on tiny, bronzed shoulders, clings to the forms of her body, a body that has just begun to show the first early, promising signs of an upcoming womanhood. Her small breasts tremble slightly over the pumping of her young heart. Her ballad turns round-and-round, the great wheel that always falls on the same low refrain, only to rise again. Each time the cycle turns, I expect her to resume singing.
It was only when she prepared herself to sing again—raising her chin, letting her forehead ascend, bathing her face in the moonlight, an act which sent her mass of hair tumbling back over her shoulders—that I saw her face for the first time… it was the most sensual, holy, and angelic face that heaven or earth e’er did create. The first sight of her face made my heart evaporate in my chest.
Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born. It was a face at once innocent and feral, soft and wild… Her mouth voluptuous, eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her bare feet, and the soot-covered balcony on which she perched. All this and the pungent air! Ô this night, sweet pungent night! Hébé1 may come but a season. But this girl’s season would know a hot spring and an Indian summer.
When I achieved to separate my eyes from my angel, I looked around at the street that was otherwise dark and deserted. I felt then a strange heat penetrating my body, and the pleasure I had felt from gazing at my girl turned into an intense fear. The poison in my blood made itself felt again. My heart pushed at the cage of bones in my chest. The vertigo that one experiences before losing consciousness increased to overwhelm me. My vision failed me— now the world was blurry, now it was black! And what if I am to die now? Oh, no! Don’t make me die just now!
I felt myself sleeping while standing, I wanted to look at my guitar player again. But eyes fluttered... between blackouts and blizzards of blur… I couldn’t focus on her anymore. All I could see was myself: my own dead body dressed in funereal clothes. I was keeping vigil over it. The girl with the guitar was gone from my life, but I was happy! I had died, but I was happy… For I had died the sweetest death of my life!
I didn’t wake up until very late the next day. Or maybe it was two days later. I was in a small, unknown room, dimly lit, lying on a small, unknown bed. The room was warm and smelled fresh and sweet, like amber and sugar, like teenage perfume.
1 HÉBÉ: (Greek) The Greek goddess of youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera. The word “hébé” (ηβη) is also used to describe the time at which a girl or woman has reached the climax of her beauty, in contrast to the masculine version: “Aristeia” (ἀριστεία), the time when a Greek man fights his ‘best fight’ in battle.
I was numb and at peace. Although I seemed to not be in command of my body, I was not afraid. I strained to move my eyes so as to look around and understand my environment. At first I thought I was alone in the room. I flashed back in my memory to think where I could be. Was I back in Malta or Alexandria?, I wondered. Then I remembered I’d arrived in Spain. I felt myself smile as I remembered the vision I had had on the street, watching that girl playing and singing on her guitar.
The schism I’d experienced out on the street replayed itself in my memory with great clarity. I had separated saint from devil in myself out in the street. From now on I would live the ascetic life. This thought made me laugh. It was a small laugh, but it sounded giant in that bedroom. What room was I in? I rolled my head and felt a pillow propped beneath it, a pillow that smelled sweeter, fresher, better than anything I had ever smelled before. I rolled my nose into the pillow, tasting it with my mouth. I realized the mobility of my head. Then a sudden fear came and I shot my head up and looked around.
Girl’s clothes were scattered everywhere, strewn all over the chairs, the floor, an old trunk stood in the corner. It was then I noticed, sitting in a small chair of light-colored wood, several paces away from me, a young girl. She was staring at me with great intention, her two fists plopped in the lap of her crumpled skirt. Her eyes were wide open. Her lips trembled slightly and were glossy and pink. She said, “Good then! You are awake now!”
“I am awake?!” I asked her, surprised. But who was I to be awake?! So, it seemed when we die, we meet no agèd man with a white beard seated on a throne in the clouds. Instead, we meet a young girl sitting in a chair of light-colored wood, in a room where feminine clothing and girlish possessions lie scattered around; the air is filled with the enchanting smells of teenage perfume… this is death.
As though someone were handing you clues to a riddle, which becomes ever more clear each clue you are given, so did my memory piece itself together as the moments flit by. I remembered arriving in Barcelona, the commotion in the street, buying wine in the Barrio Gòtico, leaving my money and jewels at my hotel, being poisoned at an herborista’s house. I remembered dressing for my birthday and going out and seeing this same girl, this soft adolescent, who seemed to me an angel dancing on glass. then to be carved in ivory or white marble. My angel was dressed in ivory and white marble, and sat on a balcony in a poor quarter of town on a road where I was told I would find a hospital. Now, to-night, the light was different. Everything in this scene now was more real, more sober. The girl with the guitar, now my guardian, was still a creature of youthful perfection. But she was no deity. A nymph, yes. But she was no goddess holding her womanhood before man as honey and poison, the gift of life, and the gift of death. I didn’t have to fear for my life, I knew, for my guardian was just a young girl wearing a little pale-yellow summer shirt: all damp from the Barcelona humidity, its straps clinging to bronzed shoulders rolling down into the fabric covering a young girl’s chest, breasts small as two ripe apples, a small little tummy. Bunches of white lace on her cotton skirt shone bright against smooth, golden legs bearing only a down of fine, light-colored hair.
I gasped and had a flashback from that night on the street. I remembered, as I stood there, my blood pumping poison into my heart; my wild heart pounding with insanity—her clothes were a little dirty that night. Just as the exquisite angel in the graveyard where many storms and foul days leave their filthy imprint in the folds of marble cloth, sticking in the cracks of stone; so this girl with her guitar appeared that night in my intoxication, perfect then too as now—except now she was no ivory goddess, no immortal angel, she was merely a young girl who had recently bathed, and whose face was fresh and charming, who sat on the edge of her seat in a very small and cluttered little room that smelled of sweet perfume.
She asked me the most bizarre questions: “How did you come to fall in the road in fine clothes? You were sleeping…” She sat patient and seemed to look inward at herself; until suddenly she cried out: “So it’s true! I knew that you would fall in this road, I knew it had to be in Barcelona, and on this road!”
Was she crazy? I of course had no idea what the girl was talking about. I let her go on talking about how she found me in the road—“sleeping in fine clothes,” as she put it—and I said nothing.
“Did you know you were going to fall there?” her face kept searching in mine, “How long have you known you were going to fall there?! Do you know Adélaïse? You’ve never heard of her? Neither Adélaïse from Marseille nor Adélaïse from Paris?”
I had never been to either Marseille or to Paris, and I didn’t know about falling anywhere and I told her as much.
“I was poisoned. It wasn’t plan
ned. They forced me to eat the opium. It has a strange green shimmer. I wanted to find the hospital to get an antidote. I was close, I think. It seems there is a hospital at the end of your street. A man wanted me to find it, a tall and thin figure; he said I looked like I was dying. And I knew then that I would fall—and I did fall! …I guess I did, who really knows …Listen, I won’t trouble you anymore. I’ll leave now.”
I tried to get up out of her bed.
“Don’t!” She rushed to me and threw herself against me, which caused me to fall backwards on the bed. I felt then an incredibly soft body and the sensation was so sweet that I let her breathe against me, her chest on my chest; her scent was some soporific drug that I breathed until I fell into a deep sleep.
Sometime later, the room was very dark, the girl was gone. Her chair was empty.
I sat up in the small bed, weak from fever and fearing it had been a dream, and that the girl had never been there. While travelling, I occasionally lodged in inns where I was put-up in the bedrooms of my hostess’ young daughters, during the time they were away studying or doing something. I was probably at one such inn now, I was sure of it. As I considered this, the sound of breathing caught my ear. I rolled and looked down over the edge of my little twin bed and saw that there on the ground, curled up and sleeping softly like a squirrel in a pretty little ball, was the young girl, my guardian.