by Gail Jones
Later, in bed, she whispers into the night:
This city: its scent, its scent is feminine.
Perhaps Jules thinks her absurd; perhaps she is overcome by her own giddy impulse of invention. He is quiet; then he stirs.
I’ve always thought so, he softly replies. The Metro, too. It is yeasty, rich. Sometimes it smells of menstrual blood.
In the winter dark Jules Levy stretches sleepily to encompass her. His arm is warm and firm — it almost feels like her own — as it lies, sash-like, across her naked breast.
Did you know, Anna, that I was once hypnotised? I was so anxious to become a true Surrealiste that I became instead a shameless and docile body, reconstructed as medium, the object of others’ intentions, a sign, a manikin. I would have lain on a table, Aztec and sacrificial, with my breasts exposed to the regarding sky, inviting knives. I wanted to be oh-so convulsively beautiful, a rose, a swan, an alabaster Venus. Breton used to say: La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas — ‘beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be.’ I believed that maxim absolutely. I still do today.
It was a late-night party at the Eluard’s apartment. The crowd was eating Swiss chocolates shaped like women, which were proffered in a teapot on a silver tray. Dali was there, smacking his lips. André Breton, with his head like a light bulb, had an organ-grinder’s monkey balancing on his shoulder; Victoria watched him slide chocolate women into the animal’s mouth. Everyone was enacting their own exceptionality. Under the electric apotheosis of too many lamps they were stylised and enticing. Simone. Paul. Breton’s wife, Jacqueline. Leonora, she remembers, wore a violet dress with lime-green hummingbirds embroidered over the bodice, and carried in her manner a sort of party-time excitation. She was by then the lover of the German painter Max Ernst, and Victoria was beginning to discover the sensations of jealousy. The pair were together, in a corner, sucking women at each end. Leonora caught her eye, dissolved her chocolate mouthful, and mimed the words cannibal carnival; after which she laughed and kissed Ernst with a peck on the cheek. Then in a tender parody of her silent message, she bit at his ear lobe. Victoria experienced the misery in seeing one’s object of infatuation at the far other-side of a room, animated and autonomous. Her feelings were sharp, crystal. Nusch Eluard, with her heart-shaped face, walked over to kiss the light bulb and confirmed Victoria’s aloneness. On the gramophone played Ellington’s Baby When You Ain’t There. It was Jules she was missing. Jewels. Jewels.
Victoria drank thimbles of Chartreuse and gobbled too many women. Smoke from Gauloises floated in the air. Jelly Roll on piano. Dali talking Hitler. Breton debating Maldoror with Dora and Jacqueline. Leonora began dancing, setting her birds in flight. A tray of trembling desserts, crème passionelle, circulated among the crowd, each on a paper plate cut in the shape of a hand. Eluard was singing: forked tongue, spooned tongue, knifed tongue, forked tongue … When someone suggested, half-serious, a demonstration of hypnosis, Victoria was so very drunk and unhappy that she offered herself immediately.
Take me. Subordinate me. Give me erasure.
André Breton, minus his monkey, assumed an air of rectitude. He unclasped from Victoria’s bosom a marcasite brooch, and held it like an icon before her eyes. There is no record anywhere of his precise instructions, but Simone took a transcript of the hypnotic exchange, the questions in French and Victoria’s replies in English.
What fabric are you composed of?
I am lace, lace. Mostly hollows, fancily described. Women wove me. Nets to catch bodies in.
What is your colour?
Colourless deep space. Tiny luminosities in a general dark. Moony apparitions, on special occasions.
What is the taste in your mouth?
Taste: cinerary. No sweet confection but fragments of ash.
What do you hear?
Echo-chamber of this or that narcissus. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Faintly.
What is your shape?
Desire makes me triangular. Hips. Smiles. Spaces to rest in … Invitations.
What creature are you?
Swan and not swan. Winged and wingless. Beady-eyed.
Do you have a name?
Lily-white. Midas. Ruby. Swan-Seine.
Awoken from hypnosis Victoria was lucid, revived. The party stood around her in a perfect semicircle.
Bravo! said Breton. Bravo! Bravo!
Everyone clapped.
Victoria took a bow for the performance she had been insensible of performing and when she arose, flushed, she saw before her the froth of a violet dress, and beyond that hummingbirds brilliantly distinct, Leonora’s face, her smile, her absurd congratulation. Ernst peered over her shoulder, his cheek double-headed against hers, and asked in heavily accented English: Whose little triangle then are you?
Since she had no knowledge at all of what she had just disclosed Victoria felt disquieted. The whole assembly laughed out loud. As they dispersed they spoke of a Victoria she didn’t know.
Most of the others left in a group for the cabaret; Victoria made her way home alone through the waking city. Nacred clear light hung over the buildings. On Rue Valette a black man played harmonica mournfully and she threw francs at his jacket which rested on the pavement like a corpse.
Merci, cygne, merci.
His smile was a triangle. He nodded at her feathers.
Then Victoria followed, eavesdropping, two early-morning risers, who apparently worked together in an automobile factory. She heard of deaths, and poor machinery, and the misery of mechanised labour, she heard of a worker electrocuted, and another with fingers severed, and a third with hair torn out by a drilling machine.
A cyclist wove between them, halting the list of accidents. Stella Renaults zoomed past on the road.
The two men resumed their casual lamentation, and it was one of those moments in which vocation seems entirely presumptuous. Victoria saw Paris darken and believed her artistry despicable. The feathers on her head were mere stupidity; her paintings excrescences. Notes from the harmonica drifted from behind, and before, flowing towards her, the voices of workers.
What am I doing here?
And when at last she slept she dreamt of the Midas mine, but on awaking could not remember any details. Perhaps it had been a dream of death or dismemberment. Or a dream of sex. Even dreams had no definition or message that would make her less alien.
So what do you dream of? demanded Victoria.
Anna knew this was a test. She summoned her courage and told Victoria her recurrent dream. She began:
When I was a child my father worked as a gold-miner in the Midas mine, and I often imagined following him underground. But the dream I have is always about my mother … it is always about searching for my mother in the mine. I hate it down there, under the earth. It is scary and cold. In my dream I have a torch but it always dims and fails, so I must bang it against my thigh to revive the batteries …
This was the first time Anna had told this dream and she wondered if her voice betrayed a quality of confession. She attempted to produce a disinterested tone, but heard her words emerge with a fragile inflection, like infirmity, or guilt. When she finished Victoria had tears in her eyes.
My father, Henry Morrell, owned the Midas mine.
I know, Anna admitted. I knew that already.
And I dream of it too. And in my dream, like yours, I am always searching.
Anna raised an eyebrow. If Victoria had not, at that point, had a trail of tears on her cheeks she would have disbelieved. But the old woman began to sob and search for a handkerchief, so that Anna was compelled sympathetically to lean forward and embrace her, and to feel that beneath the artist’s extravagant and multilayered clothes, beneath the feathers and the jewellery, she was a brittle shape, breakable as a bird. Victoria allowed herself to be held. When she had finished her weeping she shook herself slightly and rearranged her crown in its clever fan, quite as though nothing at all had transpired.
Victoria said distractedly: They were sh
its, some of those men, some of those Parisian Surrealists. Late one night Peret rang Cocteau’s mother to tell her of her son’s fictitious death in an automobile accident. Breton stood behind him, giggling, as they made the lie more and more convincing and elaborate. Poor Madame Cocteau; I’ve often thought of her.
Let me make you a cocktail. A Martian? A Mary-Magdalene?
2
Anna hates the Underground, especially at night. She cannot imagine why Londoners choose to traverse their city in these roaring, fearsome pitch-dark tunnels. As she descends the steps beneath the city she feels she is entering an infernal space; heat flames up at her; noise beastly and mechanical issues from nowhere; patrons of the railway assume hopeless expressions. The air is chemical and gaseous, the tone carcereal. Buskers of little talent sing or play plaintively. A young woman with a child on her lap and a ticket saying Homeless pleads in silence at the foot of the stairs. As Anna passes money to her hand the woman says, God bless you; her voice has a confined and fainthearted aspect.
God bless you.
Here, Anna thinks cynically, benedictions do not alleviate.
She rides unhappily. The doors hiss and shoosh, sealing her in. She experiences a sharp apprehension of suffocation. Her body clenches. Her lungs contract. Then she is plunged into the darkness, she and the men with briefcases, the Sikh with his turban, the three black boys in smart leather jackets, the woman with a hairstyle, the shopgirls tarted up, the assortment of cross-class, post-colonial and tired-out humanity. They are all locked together in a strange and lonely union. Velocity embraces them. Through the window lit platforms and figures slide away, billboards blur, then there is black-out and the close echoing walls of the tunnel, swerving at the train or bending around it. Sparks. A flash of light bulb. The details of things annihilated. And such a roar. Anna closes her eyes against this fiendish transport. When she arrives at her station she discovers that her hands are wet with sweat.
The Comedy of Errors at the Barbican, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Anna has been living on bread and cheese so that she can afford London theatre tickets. She is the only woman alone in the lobby of the theatre. Other women are accompanied by partners or friends, and flap expensive programs as they bend towards each other and intimately speak. Elocuted voices scroll upwards into the air. Anna stares with fanatic intensity at photographs of old productions; she wishes to appear as if her singularity is entirely deliberate. Yet she feels — it is inescapable — working-class and conspicuous. Her clothes are poor. She fingers a hole in the pocket of her secondhand jacket, and looks down, like a schoolgirl, at her unfashionable shoes which are lined with cardboard and unevenly down-at-heel. Over the past few months she has seen half a dozen fringe performances of extravagant experimentation and unmemorable titles, and tonight she feels more than ever in need of theatrical vision, those bodies fixed artificial in a spot-lit square, proclaiming learnable lines at the tops of their voices, moving with exaggerated and purified gestures. Tonight she requires the drastic consolation of dramatic pronunciation and hearty applause. The lights dim and her heartbeat suddenly quickens, and she watches the unwrapping of a radiant faked world, there, impressively close, on the stage before her. Curtains. Sets. Auras of large lives. The audience like sunflowers, their faces heliotropic.
As Anna leaves the theatre she sees in the chattering crowd a man who also — she is sure of it — lives at Mrs Dooley’s. She has only glimpsed him before, leaving the tenants’ bathroom at the end of the hallway and ducking with his towel into doorway seven, and is disconcerted to see that he has an independent existence that includes her choice of entertainment. He walks off quickly in the direction of the Underground station, and Anna follows discreetly, at a detective’s distance. He too is alone but seems secure in that state, moving through the night with bold and untentative steps. When he boards the train she enters the carriage behind him, then follows again as he makes his way along the streets to their shared lodging house. The full moon drifts with them, at walking pace.
Later, when they become lovers, she will lie in the warm hollow of this man’s beautiful black arm, and he will confess that he knew, that night, that she was following behind him all the way from the theatre, but that he was much too shy to turn and acknowledge her presence. He will also concede a terror of the roaring Underground, and the familiar symptom of sweating hands. And gradually they will begin to tell each other stories of their childhoods: in bed together, both released from loneliness, they wish to learn every small detail of each other. Anecdotes are precious, tiny tales intercept and punctuate their lovemaking, they narrativise everything. When first he said, in his deep voice, the word Jamaica, it carried the strange profundity of a spell. Australia, said Anna in rhyming reciprocation, as if that word too was newly sonorous.
They join their two faraway and respective countries. They improvise an international pact of diplomacy, trade, negotiate, exchange consignments of raw and valuable materials, sign with the wordless movements of their bodies some document or other of treaty and concord. The earth’s globe dissolves and is reformed to their design; in this upheaval both lovers become tropical and dark.
This is the metaphor they share, this is their jokey extrapolation.
Much later, when he is angry, he will say to hurt her: I will not be your dark fucking continent.
But now, resting enlaced, their metaphors are still comic. They lie together in bed and speak of Shakespeare. They send the name like a special code, like a vow or a password, back and forth between them. In his mouth it sounds not like a name but like a Jamaican noun: shakespeare, shakespeare. Anna kisses the broad-lipped mouth that speaks it. She adores the night of his skin with her moon face, full, resting gently upon it.
My new-found land, she whispers, my new-found land.
Insulting him gently. Providing herself with stinging memories of her own insensitivity.
In the bland light of morning Anna handed Mrs Dooley a reproduction of Black Mirror and asked her what she thought.
So this is it, eh, exclaimed less-than-curious Mrs Dooley, who said she was not at all arty herself but her nephew-in-Australia, the one who never wrote, made cathedrals out of matchsticks, could stuff ships inside bottles, and fix a chair? — never you mind, fix anything he could, with his magic hands and his girl-crazy smile and his cheekiness and how she missed him, and he was such a clever lad really, could av done anything, doctor, engineer, aeroplane pilot, and just like Paddy Kernan whom she used to be sweet on, with his white skin, delicate, and his black hair and blue eyes, and they used to meet near the canal, where the water gushed through the locks, and there was a dead dog there once, and Paddy pulled it out, and all Dublin spoke of it, well all their close friends anyways, and he had hands thin as spiderwebs and slipped over one day on some phlegm on O’Connell bridge, and she had to lift him by herself, all heavy he was, and his coat and his cap smelled so strongly of peat smoke that she went misty and soppy and knew she was in love.
Is this French? asks Mrs Dooley.
She pauses in her biographical recitation and points to the words déjà vu and jamais vu that rest in each corner of the reproduced painting.
Anna cannot understand why she has not commented at all on the images: the woman-on-fire, its symbols, its curious mirrorings.
So what happened to Paddy Kernan? Anna asked.
And Mrs Dooley, who looked for a second as if someone had struck her in the chest, said that she’d thought he would follow when she came out to London to work, and she waited and wrote letters and prayed to Saint Jude and to Holy Mary the Immaculate Virgin, and heard from Sally Dignam, who’d heard from someone else, that he’d drowned himself in the Liffey, like that dog he pulled out, all mucky and dripping, and she thought of his tweed cap floating and the sorrow of it and the shame, and then heard again from Sally Dignam, bloody tart that she was, with that ass and her tarty rigmarole and her rougey cheeks and lippy lips, that someone else said he’d gone off to live in Aus
tralia, where her nephew was now, and who knows maybe they’ll meet again or maybe he’s dead, but she still thinks of him there, back in Dublin, in the summer, there in shady Raglan Road, with his shirtsleeves and his white skin and his two hands thin as spiders’ webs.
So what do you think of the painting? Anna persisted.
That French stuff is all double-Dutch to me, lovey.
Mrs Dooley laughs at her own joke, gives Anna a rough cuddle and a smacking kiss, and drinks more tea.
Ah, Paddy Kernan, Paddy Kernan, she chants softly to herself. The first time I ever saw him, she adds to her story, he had the Spanish influenza or somesuch foreign complaint. He looked, did Paddy Kernan, like death-warmed-up. Like death-warmed-up, my poor Paddy Kernan.
Victoria asked abruptly: Do you have a lover?
The stare was a challenge. Anna pressed the off button of her tape-recorder and considered whether or not she ought to lie.
Winston. His name is Winston Field. He is a black man. From Jamaica.
Anna stared back at Victoria.
Tell me more.
He lives, like me, at Mrs Dooley’s boarding house. He is a postgraduate on a scholarship, studying English Literature. Shakespeare. The Comedies. I introduced myself after I saw him alone at the theatre.
And?
I was attracted to his difference. And to his loneliness.
Ah, difference and loneliness. You must bring him to meet me. How different is he?
Completely, said Anna.
The truth is that at first Winston Field had not seemed interested in her at all. She arranged coffee, left him books, slipped notes under the door; and in the end he told her that he was a married man, back in Jamaica.
I’m not free, he announced; it sounded so direct and conclusive.