by Edmund White
Julien had always been open to new experiences—new fashions, new arts, new countries, new friends—that Austin might present to him for his delectation, but now his energy wasn’t sufficient to understand and absorb the new. They went to an avant-garde opera in a theater just two blocks away, but after the first act Julien shuffled away toward home and after the second act Austin, worried, followed. They would go to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which was in the neighborhood, for an opening, but each new style of painting (new to them, at least) demanded extra energy; it was a promissory note that would be redeemed only years from now, if ever. Julien just tore it up.
His doctor kept trying to stimulate his appetite with, first, an analogue to marijuana (but Julien didn’t like to feel stoned), and then with the patches of estrogen, which caused the predicted loss of libido. When Julien still failed to gain weight the doctor surgically inserted a shunt in his chest through which he could be fed. Before the operation Julien had tried to be gay and courageous: “It’s the twenty-first-century way to eat. Chewing is hopelessly twentieth century.” But the day he came back from the hospital he wept in Austin’s arms: “I’ve been disfigured. Never before was the envelope of my body broken. It’s the beginning of the end.” Within three days the wound was exuding pus and the shunt had to be removed. Later another doctor said almost casually, “Shunts almost always become infected. They never work.”
Julien, who’d been high-spirited or stoic in the face of pain, in any event fastidious and dandified, now became querulous. He spent more and more time in bed, shouted at the Chilean cleaning woman who came once a week, grumbled at Austin. He said that Gloria hadn’t dusted the living room or that Austin had disturbed his pills on the night table. He complained about Ajax jumping up on the bed and spreading infections. He complained about the raucous drunks in the street below, singing and shouting at two in the morning. He complained about Austin’s carelessness in treating his sketches and paintings, which were kept in large racks in the studio where Austin slept; was Julien worried that Austin would just throw his work away once he was dead? He complained about Austin’s long phone calls with Rod. He didn’t know Rod, but he resented their intimacy. He complained about Austin’s cooking, about Joséphine’s trivial conversation (“Does she think I want to consecrate my remaining time to listening to that shit?”), about his brother’s dullness (“Oh, Petit, you’re the only one I still like”).
Austin didn’t let himself think about tomorrow or even really take in today. When Robert came up for a few days on All Saints Day, he was shocked by how unpleasant Julien had become and how he snapped constantly at Austin, but Austin hadn’t even noticed. Julien associated an old perfume they used to cover odors in the toilet with his constant vomiting; he could no longer bear the scent and threw it out.
Austin longed to massage Robert’s massive shoulders and to sleep in his arms, but he didn’t dare to touch him. Robert had said something that revealed he just assumed Austin had been the one to infect Julien.
One night, when they were alone, Julien was sitting up in bed in striped pajamas. At the corner store he had bought a gauzy black scarf with a repeating white pattern of a skull and crossbones and had tacked it on the white wall above his bed, as if he were a pirate flying this grim flag; putting it up had been a provocation as well as a kind of “performance piece.” Now Julien said, “You and Robert are attracted to each other, aren’t you?”
Austin felt caught in Julien’s headlights and froze. “Well, of course I can see he’s handsome, but that would never have occurred to me, I mean—”
“It’s okay, Petit.” Julien smiled weakly. His teeth were chipped and discolored, perhaps from all the vomiting induced by the DDI. “I can see that you two have a private little thing, a crush …” (un béguin was the French word, which made Austin think of beginning the Beguine).
“But we’ve never done anything, not so much as kiss—”
“I know, I know.” Julien laughed, a shrunken death’s head bobbing on a chain with feeble joyousness. “Don’t panic. Above all, don’t panic” (Surtout ne panique pas). “I like it that you’re attracted to each other. Maybe you’ll become lovers. Then one day when you’re wading at Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat I’ll float by as a jellyfish and startle you by brushing against your feet. Or I’ll sting you.”
Austin was tempted to say once again, “You’ll outlive us all,” but he didn’t want to break the delicately playful mood Julien was spinning nor the almost hypnotic insistence.
One day Julien could no longer bear Ajax. He’d been out walking with the dog and had almost been knocked over when Ajax had spotted another dog’s delicious-looking rump and had lunged for it.
“He’s too strong for me now,” Julien said. In the past he would instantly have relented, kissed Ajax on the stomach and whispered, “Poor little beast,” but now he just glowered at him resentfully.
Robert flew up from Nice again for a few days and when he left he took Ajax with him.
Three days later Julien bundled up and went in a taxi with Patty to Père Lachaise. They were gone for several hours but when they came back Julien said, “Ça y est, it’s done, I’ve made all the arrangements.” He explained to Austin that only Parisians—official residents of the city and its twenty arrondissements—had the legal right to be interred at Père Lachaise. But Julien had thought of a loophole. He had bought a niche for their ashes for the next fifty years (which their heirs could renew for a further half-century), but had paid for it in Austin’s name. They couldn’t refuse Julien, who was a Parisian by virtue of voting here and because he was enrolled here for welfare benefits; by assigning ownership of the crematorium niche to Austin, Julien had made sure they couldn’t refuse Austin either when the time came for him to be interred.
“I looked at the vases for holding the ashes; I chose something very sober. Patty was so much help. So this is the plan. When I die you’ll make arrangements with one of the funeral homes up there to cremate me and you’ll give them this piece of paper. I don’t want any ceremony or anyone to come except my brother and Fabrice. You must write your plans into your will.”
Austin couldn’t help calculating that Julien was spending all his savings and that now he must be almost at the end of his resources.
In December Julien suffered from the cold, which ate into his bones and attached itself like leeches to his joints, attacking the marrow now that there was no more flesh to consume. He who’d been a thoroughbred had become a nag. Even his nose and ears looked longer. His beard grew in; only his dark-blue eyes suggested he wasn’t what people back home in the South called “an ethnic.”
He spent more and more time in bed watching television. Although he urged Austin to go out, Austin didn’t want to leave him. Taking care of Julien, feeding him, enduring his complaints and insults—that was what Austin did now. Maybe because Austin had lost his mother when he was still a child, he was drawn to mothering Julien, even singing him silly little lullabies he made up as he went along. Austin would lie beside Julien in the dark transected by the splinters of light that shot through the gaps between the drawn curtains and he’d sing his silly songs and rub his back, which was in almost constant pain. Julien had rejected Ajax and refused to see his few friends. He wouldn’t even take their calls. He’d say to Austin, “Tell them I’m thinking of them. They’re constantly in my thoughts.” But as he became more and more isolated, he wanted to be with Austin all the time; not even the dog, their child, was there to serve as a distraction now.
Because he could no longer keep food down, Julien went to restaurants armed with airplane vomit bags. Austin would sit staring at his lap while Julien threw up the entire dinner he’d just eaten. He was seated at the table, too weak to excuse himself. Austin wasn’t embarrassed, or not usually. Nor did he identify with Julien’s pain, or if he did it was bone to bone, nerve to nerve, not thought by thought. He couldn’t see how it would be useful to feel Julien’s pain al
l over again, even if it was possible, and these days he’d reduced everything to its use. They were stripped for action, the action of dying.
Julien’s back ached all the time. Austin massaged him many times a day; he was shocked—and moved to tears—by the sight of his withered buttocks, which looked like the skin of stewed fruit, and by his coccyx, bright red and rubbed raw because he had no flesh to protect or cushion the bulb of bone. When their activity had finally died down like flames, then the only wakefulness that still glowed was in the studio. Austin was alone and made himself enormous bowls of cereal and plates of toasted muffins soaked in butter and freighted with marmalade. He’d sit on the floor on a thick oriental rug with his back to the single bed and leaf through his pornographic magazines; he liked only the color pictures of a young blond man with hair so straight it must have been chemically relaxed and with a downturned, thick-lipped, garnet-colored mouth as beautiful as a wound. What he liked most—what excited him—was any suggestion of a flaw, a broken and badly mended little finger, slightly rotated out of position, a mark that looked like a splash of paraffin on that deliciously taut stomach, a swollen toe or the hint of a red vein in the instep. A flaw seemed to make a boy more accessible. Austin liked the way the boy, photographed through a metal fence, clung to the wires with his hands, a dreaming expression on his features, an erection shoved through one of the openings—it was a reference to impassioned yearning and forbidden love, not to lust.
“Let’s go to Morocco,” Julien said. “I’ve always wanted to show you Morocco. And it will be warm.”
Austin couldn’t bring himself to say no. It had been so long since Julien had wanted to do anything. He contacted a glossy magazine and asked if he could do a story on Marrakesh. “It’s the hot new place, you know,” Austin said brightly to the skeptical woman in New York at the other end of the line. It seemed grotesque that he would have to sell this tragic trip to Home and Hearth as the latest trend.
The day before they left, Julien broke an appointment with his doctor. He called, saying he was too ill to come to see him in Villejuif, half an hour away, but asked if the doctor thought he was up to a trip to Morocco.
The night before they were to leave, Julien insisted that Austin pack his bag and bring it to his bed so that he could go over every pair of socks or underwear.
“The light has burned out, Petit,” Austin said. “I’ll do it in the morning. I’ve started, but I’ll finish in the morning.”
“There won’t be any time in the morning. Do it now.”
“I don’t want to. I’ll do it in the morning, I said. I can’t see anything!”
“Then I won’t go,” Julien said. “I won’t go.”
“Fine,” Austin said bitterly. “I’ll go without you.” He knew that Julien was afraid of being abandoned; Austin instantly regretted his strong-arming, but he’d made such an elaborate itinerary for Morocco that he was reluctant to undo it. And he knew that even if Julien forced them to cancel the trip, two days later he’d be craving the warmth of the south.
In the morning Austin packed in silence and they rode in the taxi to the airport without saying a word. Julien was irritated that Austin hadn’t ordered a taxi to come to the door, but they found one quickly on the corner. At the airport Austin had arranged for a wheelchair. Julien made the man push him through duty free. He wanted to ogle all the gold watches and compare them with his own. He bought Maison et Jardin and one of his adult comic books. Once they were in the air Julien relaxed. He said, “So far so good. Better than could be expected. But ask the hostess for vomit bags. I want a good supply.”
They stayed in a chic new Marrakesh hotel outside the city walls. Because it was warm, Julien wanted to go out every day, sometimes twice. They’d head in a horse-drawn carriage to the big square in the center of the old city, the Place Djema’a el Fna. Along the way teenagers with beautiful black hair and bad teeth would ride by on bicycles and hitch a ride by grabbing onto the side of the buggy. “Meester, meester! English? French? Dutch?” They’d offer their services as guides. For every one waved away by the exasperated driver, another two would sail up, either on bikes or on foot.
Out in the square, mounds of oranges were stacked high under big parasols. Women in black veils pushed brightly striped and starred and colored caps toward them. A fortune teller seated on a folding metal chair was carefully following the movements of his hen, which was strutting over a board hand-painted with numbers. Julien and Austin sat in a café and drank chewing-gum-sweet mint tea around which a few lazy bees hovered. Despite the intense noontime heat, a fire was burning somewhere, which rendered the air sweet and pungent with the odor of burning grass. They could also smell the smoke of cooking lamb.
Few of the buildings were more than two stories tall; most were a muddy brown or a salmon pink dulled by dirt. Once in a while a man would walk by wearing a sweater or sports coat, but mostly the Arabs were dressed in long robes, usually with a hood pushed back. Some of the men with black skins had immaculate cream-colored robes and close-fitting turbans to match. Children held their mother’s hand or clung to the gathered folds of her caftan. A snake charmer was blowing his flute and a seedy-looking cobra responded drowsily. Next to him, a dentist was seated beside a card table covered with boxes of loose individual teeth. An ancient transvestite—dirty and mustached—was doing a comic belly dance, accompanied by an orchestra of six dignified old men seated tailor-style on mats.
They wandered through the maze of the covered market, surrounded by the boys who would be guides. Bamboo poles held up a roof of clear green plastic. The boys hovered like the bees around sugared tea; but then maybe they noticed how frail and old Julien appeared. Austin supported him by the elbow while they inched their way past stalls of jewelry and daggers, shoes and shirts, rugs and lamps, nuts and popcorn being roasted in big shallow pans. There were mounds of raisins and almonds for sale as well as stacks of graduated ceramic bowls, painted an indigo blue. There were smoked sheep’s shanks.
In the spice stall a bespectacled salesman showed them a jar of Spanish fly. He said, “I’m forbidden to sell this,” and from behind his glasses raised his eyebrows. “Who uses the Spanish fly—men or women?” Austin asked. The salesman said, “The man, of course. The man does all the work, n’est-ce pas?” He indicated to them jars of carmine for staining the lips. They bought a morsel of musk, smelling like burnt sugar and body odor, as well as a hand of Fatima for good luck.
“It’s about as restful as an LSD trip,” Austin murmured to Julien as a boy of nine in a white nightshirt and sequined red fez spun past rattling large tin castanets. Julien laughed faintly, as a saint might who has already moved halfway toward transcendence.
Chapter Nineteen
They rented a car and headed south through the mountains. The highway was just two lanes. What appeared on the map to be a straight line turned out to be hundreds of hairpin curves. At first the landscape was innocent enough—the melting snow in the mountains was flowing into the irrigation ditch beside the road and making it into a clear, clean stream, leaping and cascading from step to step down the slope, the flow as thick as a cable. At some points the falling water was so capacious its splashing was audible through the closed windows. The fields were just beginning to take on a bit of spring color. The two men drove through a village of charming old wood houses, neatly painted.
And then they began to climb, up and up. At a scenic spot high in the mountains they stopped for gas; they could see their breath. A little girl came toward them with something for sale, a small, stoppered vial of attar of roses. Along the roadside three men were crouching beside sections of quartz geodes. The amethyst-colored points made Austin think of sharks’ teeth.
With his peripheral vision Austin was constantly monitoring Julien. He was aware of how Julien was sitting up or slouched down in the car, whether his mouth sounded dry when he spoke, whether he was in pain or developing a cramp.
Their c
ar climbed higher and higher. They drove through clouds, which they could see from below as they approached them. No one was living up here, not even shepherds, and they encountered only one vehicle, a bus barreling down from a higher peak and pushing them perilously close to the edge of a ravine. When they got above the clouds they saw an eagle wheeling past, its wings spread, looping in slow, majestic circles.
At last they descended onto the plain beyond and by dark they were at their hotel in Taroudant, a small city east of Agadir.
Julien loved the hotel and they spent four days there. He was worried when he saw the room with its bed on a mezzanine, fifteen stairs to go up, but in fact he managed them well, if sometimes with a little push from Austin. The hotel, which occupied the former palace of a local ruler, was built against the old mud city walls. In the evening, sitting out by the modern pool in deck chairs, they watched the starlings swooping into and out of the square niches let into the thick terracotta walls. The pasha’s massive wood gates were thrown open and the noisy, chaotic road was dimly visible behind an intricate metal grill. The blue pool was lit from within. Four tall, skinny palm trees in a row soared up above the walls and their parapets. Outside the walls they could hear the clip-clop of horses and the gruff voice of a driver, and even see a cart moving, dusty, behind the grill. A muezzin, his voice tinny and amplified, called the faithful to prayer, while by the pool the bartender tuned in a little radio to dance music. The bartender was wearing black knee breeches with a tiny waist, the sarwel.
Every meal was torture. There was a European dining room and a Moroccan. Nine times out of ten they chose a table far from the other French tourists in the formal European dining room. There they’d sit in nearly total silence. Julien would take a long, long time to eat. Usually the other guests had left and their dishes had been cleared while Julien still faced a full plate. Julien would try to eat a few things, just several sips of clear broth, or a bit of dry toast, but within a few minutes his diaphragm would start to heave, his face would lengthen and he would grab one of the sacks from the plane and throw up in it. Austin would fill the silence and try to lessen the feeling of defeat by saying something absurdly general and pleasantly genteel, what he thought of as “dowager chat,” but in the midst of his babbling Julien would suddenly stand and totter out, walking with his slow, dragging tread. Often Austin was impatient with Julien for walking so slowly but revealed nothing. He remembered hearing that “toward the end” even if some nourishment got down nothing was absorbed, the digestive system could no longer extract any benefit from food—but could this be the end?