by Gail Jones
What a cliché, said Leonora. The Bridge of Suicides.
She rubbed arnica cream tenderly on her friend’s wounded throat. The man had left his thumb-marks there — two mauve and yellow pansies.
Leonora bent and kissed the spot where death had almost happened. Max Ernst entered in his dressing gown; he kissed her too.
Because she wore the breathtaking pansies her assistant gave her, because Jules had taken away her heart and left her a heartless automaton, because it was 1938 and Fascism was rising and fear was a web in the air that brushed everyone’s faces, Victoria was more than usually absorbed in Surrealist distraction. She strolled to the Café Le Chien qui Fume to hear Breton’s lucubrations: he extolled revolution in art and sexuality in all things; he spoke as though the marvellous alone would defeat Hitler and collage would demoralise the bourgeoisie. He speculated on primitivist urges and waxed racist on Black Venuses.
Their cunts, Breton declared, are our mystery, our homecoming. They are the darkest most unconscious places we know. Nature with no lights on. (At which point, for dramatic effect, he put his hand over his eyes.)
Josephine Baker, he continued, is a Surrealist par excellence in her pitch-black nakedness. Her skirt of bananas is the exemplary girdle, the phallic containment of convulsive womanliness. When she dances, Africa wakes in us.
Bullshit, Victoria thought. She saw his head, like a dirigible, floating in smoke. Pink light from nouveaux lanterns played erratically across his face.
She was fascinated and appalled.
But somehow André Breton signified Paris itself. He was what Victoria wanted, and also what repelled her. He was Europe. He was Surrealism. He was high-aestheticism. Victoria had carried her own nationality like an inferiority complex, convinced of the superiority of all-things-European. Sometimes she felt like a person who had grown up in a country with no mirrors, so that she knew herself from the chest down but had no familiar face. She felt unknown to herself. Lost in Paris. And when she said out loud the word Australian — perhaps it was like this too for Canadian, Jamaican, Indian — she heard resident in her own voice an apology and deviation. The accent was wrong. The vowels sour, uncouth.
Nusch Eluard, with her heart-shaped face, hailed Victoria and came over to kiss her on both cheeks, but she was kissing anonymity. She inclined her head and said in a hushed wispy voice:
He’s such a bore when he starts on black women, don’t you think? So arrogant. So dumb.
Her eyes were flecked with lights and she wore a collar of broderie anglaise, so that her face was on a plate with a doily, almost consumable.
Victoria kissed her doubly in return.
Your neck, Nusch asked. Which bastard lover was that?
And then for some reason Victoria began to weep. In the Café Le Chien qui Fume whole oceans opened up in her, and she drowned Breton, and his wife Jacqueline, and Paul Eluard and Nusch, she drowned the waiters in long aprons and the men with cigars, she drowned the accountants and the schoolteachers, and the idle gossipers and the travelling salesmen, she drowned junkies and musicians and Don Juans and kleptomaniacs, she drowned poets and prostitutes and agents provocateurs. She wept for herself because she was a body others pressed their intentions on. She wept for her own loneliness and her depatriation.
Victoria was a hodge-podge of surfaces and angles. When later she saw Picasso’s Crying Woman at Rue Des Grands Augustins, she saw her own portrait. Her shattered face, in his studio, at number seven.
But now she was still caught up in oceanic thrall, and still deliquescent. Nusch’s arm was around her shoulder and she was being guided outside. Zinc furniture winked at her, faces drifted past. In the pink light everyone had achieved tints of porphyry and coral. A glass door swung away and night flooded to meet her. She pushed forward with the blunt heaviness of somebody moving underwater.
She was — what was she? — the starfish others gazed at.
Why did Jules leave?
Victoria had closed her eyes; she was still locked in that flood-lit moment of weeping.
During this time Victoria went often to the movies, and always to the same movie-house, just to sit in fake darkness. In the daytime, half-empty and with a kind of fusty air, it was precisely the smothering occlusion she required. A box to pour her sadness in. A public camera obscura.
The building itself was a kind of vault. A high ceiling, like a theatre. Neo-classical cartoons. Corbelling. Buttresses. Shaded lamps on the cornices. It felt very safe and entirely de-temporalised. Victoria descended the tiers of steps guided by a no-nonsense usher who wore a cap and a brocaded jacket and carried a small bright torch which sent thin searching rays into the smoky auditorium. Faces turned, in unison, to watch the two women as they passed.
Victoria sat in the front row, so that she could believe that what appeared was for herself alone.
There were claret velvet curtains that parted with the audible creak of rollers, and then the magnifying glass, into which Victoria fell. So many flawless women with pearly faces. So many taller men bending to kiss. Victoria listened to couples making love and the usher descending with her ray. She could hear raised voices and swearing and saw the torchlight flash. But she loved it, this amorous darkness, in which she was wholly alone, with her own face, silver, flickering in and out of visibility …
So why did Jules leave?
Jules left twice. Once because I was a bitch. Once because of the war. I was mean and cruel. I mocked his photography. I was infatuated with Leonora. And Max Ernst, and Breton. And I flirted and fucked around.
Why?
Desire panicked me. I was overwhelmed.
You, Victoria, can do better than that.
I can’t, truly. It was a kind of panic. Mad love — that’s what they called it — mad love was a panic. Amour fou.
Victoria went silent and stared at the rings on her hands.
I went crazy after he left. You know that, don’t you. Crazy with grief.
Yes, said Anna. I know. Amour fou.
Secretly Anna is judging Victoria Morrell. This woman speaks in the register of the hyperbolic; she is unsubtle, she exaggerates, she commemorates her own life with self-conscious fuss.
I know what you’re thinking, Victoria says.
No. No you don’t.
In her depression everyone existed as though behind glass. They were all remote and coldly removed. She almost believed that if she reached out she would touch not a person or a human body but some inflexible, taut and intervening surface. Victoria spent her days in the cinema and her nights roaming or attending parties. She drank and became lost. She scandalised herself. She ringed her eyes with night-shaded kohl and donned black feathers and white stars, and thus in showy weeds dragged herself into the glassy city, the city in which surfaces reflected not her but her miserable shadow. There she was in blurred versions in the front of cafés and brasseries, estranged, self-haunting, her reflection diasporic. Once it occurred to her — glimpsing some fleeting and evasive copy — that just as her swan was the wrong colour so her stars were asterisks for nothing, referring to meanings that had drifted away and without which some crucial meaning was inexplicable.
And each time she re-entered their apartment on Rue Gît le Coeur, she expected to find her Jules returned. The bed still bore his shape and the curtains waved as they had when he was there. There were the garlic bulbs on the windowsill he had assiduously cultivated. There were potted plants she had purchased that he had undertaken to keep watered: a particularly vivid pelargonium, African violets, ivy. There was the window shape that had framed him, since he liked to gaze down at the street, and its rectangle hung like a portrait of what explicitly was not there. The double bed they had slept in was entirely mnemonic; Victoria could hardly bring herself to climb under its covers only to find his persistent scent, and her own heart in quick-time, and her own erogenous rush. Sometimes she woke from dreams thinking he had returned and was beside her, but she found herself, empty-handed, embracing only ai
r.
There on the wall was a trace in chalk of his profile. And there, his Turkish slippers, still nestling aligned under the bed. Superstition prevented her from moving and disposing of them, and they rested, twin boats and ridiculously long, beneath the green fringe of the emerald coverlet they had married their milky bodies on.
Victoria could not paint: half-finished images littered her apartment and were propped abandoned against walls. She was useless and unmotivated. She ate hashish, which burnt her throat, and then drank to excess, and tried violently to vomit out all of her sorrows.
One night Victoria dreamt of a network of kissing of which she was the centre. Nets of kiss patterns tessellated, lips meeting lips, kiss-cross, kiss-cross, until a kiss that had begun with her arrived at last with Jules. In this dream her desire travelled Surrealistically to find him, stretching out into night-space, travelling down half-lit streets and in the bellies of heaving trains, across fields reaching in long stripes under glaring full moonlight, into laneways, into briny ports, all the way — in a zoom effect — around head-shaped France, finally finding the bed upon which he now lay separately sleeping, his brown eyes closed.
Anna searched in Victoria’s drawers while she slept.
Victoria possessed an enormous number of gloves, in every colour, some paired and some single. They were something she collected, a kind of obsession. The pairs were pinned at the wrists with small golden pins and the singles formed their own piles, neat and multicoloured. There were also scarves and assorted beads; and secreted away, wrapped in tissue paper, was a fossilised starfish, perfectly preserved. A few dozen French post-cards, none of which was addressed to Victoria, lay tied with lengths of sepia-coloured ribbon. There was also a photograph, cracked and stained: Victoria with her arm around Pablo Picasso.
At the back of the dressing-table drawer was a box of ancient items — an opalescent buckle shaped as a broad-petalled flower, buttons of bone and of pearl-shell, small coin-shapes of amber, and a single satin shoe that was ash-smeared and smelt of smoke. There too rested Victoria’s mother’s journal, and Anna could not resist peering inside. Small fragments were legible, but for the most part it was written in an unfamiliar script; it looked furtive, illegible. Only ampersands, their filigrees, were at all familiar, but connection was clearly the least of its meanings.
Victoria woke suddenly.
I dreamt my brother was above my bed, swinging his swords. Here I am, an old woman, and still afraid of him, she said, in a voice quiet and tiny like that of someone dying.
Anna held the journal behind her back.
THE SWAN
Cygne, oiseau des marges Swan, bird of the margins
(Edward Jabés, Le Livre des Questions)
There is a stringency to writing biography that Anna seems unable to observe. She had imagined a process of solidification, like the building of an identifiable face out of clay: the slow, careful achievement of feature and definition. But the more Anna knew of her subject the more imprecise she began to seem, the more dispersed in story, the more disincarnated. She assembled her notes and transcriptions in a chain before her, and saw not the neat confirmation of a life, but its meagre supplement. Not attestation, but its barest trace. Biography works, she thought, as reliquary does, investing in fragments. She remembered seeing the index finger of Galileo mounted in a small ivory and gold tower in the science museum in Florence, as though it signified something other than the adoration of his acolytes. The finger pointed to heaven, recapitulating cartoon-like his cosmic imaginings. And when Anna tried to take a photograph a museum attendant appeared from nowhere to sweep down and prohibit her — no! no! no! no! the woman shouted. She gestured at a poster depicting a camera cancelled by a huge black cross.
What black crosses operate now, to prevent one person knowing another? What X-marked cancellations?
Anna is striving against the treason of images that Victoria has presented her with, to try to impose order on her information. She writes the words skeleton plan in the centre of the page. She will build the body anew. She will start with the parents.
It is a ludicrous reduction, but Anna Griffin begins to try to meet Victoria Morrell once again. Novelistically.
(i)
Victoria May Morrell was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1910, to Herbert and Rose (née Boyle). Herbert was a banker and investor, fabulously rich, and Rose a society beauty of the hourglass, peaches-and-cream and rose-budded variety. This implies a parental species of cardboard cutouts — indeed one can almost see the spherical belly alongside an amphora of womanliness — but in fact both parents were unconventional, even eccentric.
Herbert Arthur Morrell had a passion for collecting — such as only the truly wealthy can indulge — and sought out objects on a criterion of radical unAustralianness. Contemptuous of the local, he chased with laborious effort and at foolish expense exotic knick-knacks, gewgaws, art-works and curiosities. Foreign was a word he loved to roll in his over-dentistried mouth. He wore suits of Assam silk and smoked Havana cigars; his shoes were English and French and his hats inevitably Spanish. He was both lavishly multinational and stubbornly monocultural, and believed that the millionaires of the world had a duty to destroy nations in the interests of laissez-faire capitalism, so that in the end the Universal Marketplace would mother-succour all (his own chosen phrase, it must be added, garnered from the Melbourne Argus).
No more nations! Herbert declaimed, rather grandiloquently, in boardrooms — to the alarm of bewhiskered men with kangaroo-and-emu shaped tie pins and investments in wheat-and-sheep, some of whom thought him traitorous (though a damned spunky fellow) — and he would go on digressively to describe the features of this or that new taxidermic acquisition, a falcon in a bell-jar from the Royal collection in Persia, prized as much, he explained, for the scimitar particularity of its shiny beak as for its hunting prowess and general nastiness. The Persians are a race, he went on, for whom everything is symbolic: they cannot see a beak but think sword; they cannot see a woman but think honey. (Here the board-roomed men exchanged baffled glances and conferred.) They are by habit indolent, effeminate, untrustworthy and sly, but have arts of the highest distinction and calligraphic genius. Why I have myself … and here Herbert would extrapolate with an authenticating traveller’s tale, concerning adventures connoisseurish, gustatory or haremesque, that disclosed once and for all the pan-symbolic nature of Persians.
His utterances were legendary and widely reported, and no board meeting, apparently, was ever dull.
Herbert Morrell had opinions on every race and nation on earth and had systematically ranked them. At the top of the list, at one hundred per cent, he placed Great Britain, Great Britain the incomparable. This was a nation he considered peerless in its qualities and achievements. He thought of steam engines, country manors and Westminster Bridge, of butlers with white gloves bringing letters on a silver tray, and tier on tier of cakes and sweetmeats at Fortnum and Mason. He thought of dead Queen Victoria and her inestimable bosom. Her regal perpendicular. That nose. That chin. Of the words British Empire, which excited him, economistically.
Other races and nations (for he mentally conflated them) fell away in the steep declension of imperfection — the US at ninety-five per cent and Germany at ninety — right down to the Javans, the Peruvians and the lowly Hottentots. At the bottom of his scale were the Australian Aborigines, a people whom Herbert considered despicable since they were without markets, commodities and evidence of artistry, and moreover refused all the blandishments of Civilisation. Australia would advance, he believed, only when the extirpation of the Aborigine was complete. In his utopian moments he imagined the nation renamed New Britain and the landscape converted entirely by hedgerows and elms, the final stage before an ultimate decomposition of all nations, whereupon the global marketplace would replace all known systems of government. He had written and self-published a volume on this topic, entitled Whither History?, and had performed numerous speaking engagements, the most p
restigious of which were at the Melbourne and Empire Clubs. He considered himself ahead of his time, and was undaunted by a lack of official interest in his schemes. In the meantime he devoted himself to collecting objects and making money, and strode down Collins Street, his belly before him, knowing that wealth alone remained the incontestable index of worth.
Rose Mary Morrell, the woman before whom suitors grovelled and swooned, dissolving, weak at the knees, in truly disabling desire, was not interested at all in the construction of racial rankings or the envisioning of global markets. Born of a different class — her parents were indigent Irish, a farm labourer and a housemaid — she knew secretly but surely that wealth is always undeserved, and that value is always a perverse and calculating endowment. The invisible preciousness of things was never accounted for. Her father’s meticulous memories. The bravery of crossing oceans. Threads of her mother’s grey hair left in the creases of a pillow. She adored all her brothers and sisters and mourned daily for her parents, and it was perhaps this grieving disposition that gave her an elusive and ambiguous quality, so that even in conditions most social and pleasantly extrovert she seemed distracted by some inner and private contemplation. As she listened to yet another of her husband’s mercantile monologues — he was engaged by profit, regulation, the delights of trade surplus — she thought of the unprofitable and unregulated aspects of things, the shape of her baby son’s head, the bitten fingernails of her lover, the Melbourne rain, so Irish, so soft-dripping on the plane trees, and the relic of her dead mother’s hair, curled Celtic and frailly intricate in the Whitby jet brooch she wore nestling against her heart.
This disproportion in the value of things was known to both husband and wife; but Rose was more ideologically divergent than Herbert would ever discover. Persuaded to the cause of International Socialism by her lover, the chauffeur, she read inflammatory tracts and workers’ papers with idealist avidity, and made generous donations, anonymously, to a dozen worthy causes. Her beauty, she knew, designated her ornamental, so that she was beyond suspicion with regard to having ideas. If in company she forgot herself and produced an insight or a witticism, this was regarded as an instance of charming aberrancy. Men and women gazed at her gorgeous face and thought only one thing.