– Manners and propriety, lout. This dance is for you and your bride.
Christ, yes, so it was, and me with that, man. Cheers and jeers, and I had to hurl myself and my burden on to a Catherine pulled out by supple circus arms into the ring. Hiding it in her, I clumsily whirled her about, but that warm fat flesh was like iced water to it, and it receded in shock and rage like an exorcized devil, shaking its fist with a promise of return. And then.
– The boss! cried Dunkel.
The boss? I was past all surprises as you, the reader, must be. What, incidentally, are you like? Yawning and idle, looking for a good read, have you picked this idly from a public library shelf or remainder table or barrowload of dogeared joblot hasbeens and followed distractedly, with an apple or a cigarette or/and casual puttings down and takings up, certainly with detachment, this dripping of the heart’s blood of an innocent sick boy set upon by the madness in the very core of life? Be sympathetic; more: believe. I might be your own son or father. The boss was Dr Fonanta (but had I not heard that name, or something like it, when the circus first brassed, whirred, roared into my life at the tail of Senta Euphorbia’s procession?), and he was being pushed in an altropropel wheelchair down the raked aisle of the big top by his thug. The thug did this with one hand; with the other he steadied on his shoulder a lightly sweating Frigoportatile which, as we all soon saw, contained a dozen of champagne. Only Dunkel seemed to know that this was the boss; the rest of the circus company watched his descent to the ring in wonder and curiosity.
A sort of wedge in the ring’s plastic circumference was removed to allow Dr Fonanta to enter. He sat cheerfully, nodding at all impartially while the bottles were taken from their box and exploded by the thug Umberto. Umberto, who kept his peaked cap on, had an exaggerated and brutalized version of the face of a longdead Canadian tycoon called Lord Beaverbrook. Dunkel said to the company:
– Very rarely we have the pleasure.
– Very rarely indeed, Dr Fonanta interrupted with a face of pleasure, and the pleasure is all mine. This is your first appearance on the island where I have made my primary home, and it will probably be your last. The expense of transportation, as you will have guessed, far outweighs any possible profit. But a remarkable and happy event has emerged from your visit, one that contents me a great deal. I apologize for being too late to attend the actual ceremony, but I have had various things to do. I have also witnessed a sad and strange thing. The failed assassin of His Excellency has publicly regretted the failure of what must be termed not merely murderous but also blasphemous. The police, acting on information received, arrived at this man’s house, which is in Nattermann Square, a populous place, to find him waiting armed at his front door, warned of their approach by their sirens. He made his loud declaration of dissatisfaction with life in general and, in particular, the organization of life in this republic, and then he fired at nothing, though the police thought it was at them. Rightly nervous, they counter-fired, and the man dropped on his own doorstep, full of bullets. He was a man who had been much respected for his gentility and learning, and also pitied for the cruel deformity he carried from the womb, being truly misbegotten. Many were shocked to find he could conceive an assassin’s purpose, if not achieve an assassin’s success. His name was Dr Gonzi. Mr Dunkel had, I believe, made professional overtures to him, but he was not, I think, known to any of the rest of you here.
Dr Fonanta smiled around but gave no special gesture to indicate the part that Catherine and I had played, I alone really, in the accomplishment of Dr Gonzi’s messy quietus. I bowed the head inside my head in grave acknowledgement of his happy release, and then I allowed my heart to leap, since my own release could now not be delayed much longer. Somewhere on one of the imagined corners of the ring, behind his elders, the elephant boy was still playing his little radio. I fancied that the news was coming through in Castitan. Catherine said:
– Miss Emmett, how is Miss –
– Better, my dear, as you will soon, I hope, see. I said:
– My bride and me, like. We ought to be on our way to the old nuptial like couch, man.
That phrase, despite the tmesis, sounded too literary for poor Llew, so I qualified it with two or three iconic loin thrusts and an openmouthed leer, adding a couple of Zulu clicks for good measure. Dr Fonanta, with merry regret, said:
– Ah, my dear boy and girl – I know them already, ladies and gentlemen, and they have many fine qualities – there are certain secular hymeneal ceremonies to be performed – a tradition with circus weddings. First, an epithalamium has to be recited. I have such a composition here, as it happens, newly written, its writing one of the reasons for my lateness. Clink glasses freely, since, frail as I am, my voice can rise well enough to this occasion.
It could too, by God. Dr Fonanta took a sheet of typescript from an inner pocket and then must, from the volume he poured out, have activated a hidden amplifier. While the company drank in embarrassment, he declaimed an English poem in a French voice:
Let the marriage demons shed
Grace and blessings on this bed
That these two shall occupy,
Where with laced limbs there will lie
Youthful bone with youthful flesh,
Fresh as blossom, blossom fresh,
One already, now more one
In predestined unison –
I couldn’t help it. In my own voice I cried out:
– Oh God, to think you have the nerve to disparage a genius like Sib Legeru –
The response to this was various. Most seemed to think I was putting on a bad and badmannered act, some saw me with new and narrowing eyes, others knew too little English to perceive any difference between this and the regular Llew. The Bird Queen betrayed nothing. Dr Fonanta spoke goodhumouredly:
– Very well, my boy, let us have no bedding poem. Let us, or rather you, have the bedding itself.
He nodded to the bandleader, a beery man who had removed his frogged tunic. The bandleader shrugged and made his players blow and thud that unfamiliar wedding march again. Dr Fonanta called above it:
– Carry them to their wedded bliss.
I was at once picked up with ease by a little man of superb development who doubtless did that sort of thing professionally. But this, like the elephant dance, was too much like shop. A varied gang soon had me roughly aloft, and Catherine was chaired more gently, with compassion even, by a team which contained all the ladies of the troupe, Aderyn excepted. She was not to be seen, she had disappeared with birdlike suddenness. As we moved out by way of the backring area, The Great Giro came up with one of the celluloid dolls from the weddingcake, grinning in plenidental malice. He drew a lighter from his pocket, struck it aflame, and consumed the doll in less than a second. I said:
– Might be the wrong one, you shitbrained salamiarsed mortadellastuffer.
There were fireworks out tonight, thudding and searing the samite air. Dr Fonanta, down there alongside pushed by Umberto, remarked on them, the happy coincidence of the festal sparks and skytrails and violet bursts, but the happier coincidence of the noise. He said:
– Charivari one might see it as, hear it rather. And now, ladies and gentlemen, trot them.
And so we were jolted at the double, Catherine going faintly oh oh oh, towards the trailer park, and we stopped before the door of one fine blue chunk of mobile living luxe, eight feet high and twenty long. Dunkel, who had been following in the rear, somewhat subdued (probably because of that massive faux pas with the late Dr Gonzi, its indiscretion at last revealed to him), now came with a key, opened up, and switched on a light. Dr Fonanta said:
– Now perhaps the ladies would be good enough to prepare the bride for the consummation of her joy.
With Catherine still feebly going oh oh oh, and then, in sharper stabs, No and again no, the ladies giggled her in, on her feet now, to a vague prospect of softness and shadow. Then the door was closed and I was left with the men, who dropped me pretty much as I once saw a treed monkey drop
a puppydog she had stolen from its dam – the supporting arms losing interest, the burden consigned to the air, a bump which caused yelps. I picked myself up and dusted off Llew’s suit and found Umberto offering me a drink from a silver flask.
– Stick it, man, I said. I’ve had enough for one night.
– U trink.
And, by God, I had to. It was all right: cherry brandy with a metal brace of something, but I was really drunk already. I had to be drunk. Dr Fonanta said:
– Dutch courage as they call it. Now I don’t think you’ll begrudge me my reading of the part of my poem which is addressed to the bridegroom only.
He had the paper in his hands. He could almost read by the whizzing exhalations, and the noise, which was distant enough, meant nothing to him. The strong men who had upheld and then dropped me stood around with folded arms, grinning. He recited:
Donor of the honeyed pang,
You, whose kingdom is the yang,
Generalize the yielding yin
Much before you stand within,
Hanging Phryne’s likeness on
Undifferentiated noumenon.
Do not yearn for Helen – ask!
All identity’s a mask,
Even swords of sib and kith
Wait for melting by the smith,
Orang tukang, homo faber,
And, by dint of his tough labour,
But by godlike vis enpassioned,
Gladly seek to be refashioned –
– What’s that? I asked feebly. What was that word, name I may not have got, gotten, all the lines right, but I was certain that among them – I was very drunk, there was no doubt. The circusmen laughed. Dr Fonanta smiled kindly. And then the door opened and the ladies, also laughing, came out, indicating that I might now enter, and I heard the rich voice of Father Costello somewhere in the background intoning:
– God flow in your seed.
But then I was inside the trailer, the door shut on me violently but silently, and I faced poor scared Catherine naked, as I could tell from the neat pile of her clothes on a wallseat – with the bedclothes up to her chin, timehonoured useless shield against entering man.
– I’ve got to, I said, flopping on to that very seat where her over and under clothes lay, think.
– Oh what a mess you’ve you’ve –
– Think, I snarled, I’ve got to think.
Outside the trailer was the crunching of rockets and petards, also the noise of retreating simple circusfolk who were going off to finish the champagne. Inside there was as much luxury as it seemed possible to get into a mobile home – white sheepskin rugs on the marbly composition deck, a fine double bed with black silk pillowcases and a crimson, gold and white silk coverlet, a complicated wallpanel to control a radiogram, lights, toaster, teamaker and the sliding door of a small bar. There were embroidered hangings – a Flemish hunting scene, a naked mythological rout with grapeclusters and winecups – and also some good reproduction of modern painters like Rostral, Ombro and Indigène. But there were no windows or lights or whatever they’re called on a trailer. There was a desk fixed firmly in a corner, also a glass-doored inset cupboard full of files. Reduced in size and made static, this cabin or stateroom would be called a bedsitter. A heavy brocade curtain led to what I supposed were a kitchen and bathroom. The first would have, I was sure, Fortnum and Mason delicacies in it, including a fussy brand of Assam or Cameron Highlands tea; the second would gleam with lovely bottles – Penult, Divan, Incog, Pro and Con, Rondeau.
– Think, I said.
And I was struck by what I should have been struck by in the Batavia Hotel – the meaning of Tukang, Yumyum Carlotta’s name. It meant what Faber meant – a skilled workman. I was struck by what I had done before making that al fresco protest – answering what should properly have been the unanswerable, for I doubted whether Professor Keteki had known the answer. A man with a clubfoot had once answered the unanswerable and moved on to sleep with his mother. Riddles are there for a good purpose – not to be answered. They are like those do-not-touch wallpanels set in the great buildings of the modern world, which you can take as a rationalized translation of the natural order, panels decorated with Black Hand Gang warning signs – skulls and crossed bones, stylized lightning streaks. Fifty thousand million volts, mortal danger. As for Swellfoot the Tyrant, how much was he to blame? If he hadn’t answered he wouldn’t have banged his mother. If he hadn’t answered he would have been eaten alive. Take your choice, man. I’d had to answer Dr Gonzi’s riddle at the last; the first time, though, I’d risked being eaten alive. I’d done better than Pusfoot, but it made no difference. I had no excuse. I’d answered the unanswerable, and the bloody unanswerable was often as easy to answer as the four-two-three nonsense that brought plague and famine and blindness and death to a Greek kingdom. What goes up when the rain comes down? An umbrella. You could build a whole tragic cycle on that. It isn’t the difficulty that makes the riddle unanswerable; it’s the unanswerability.
I hardly started at all when a voice came out of the ceiling. Catherine looked up, petrified as a saint, and I noticed that the poor girl had a quite nicely made throat. The voice was not human. It said:
– You can be seen, you know.
It said that three times. It was a bird’s voice, of course. It had, like a telephone time signal, been prerecorded: the repetitions were exact. It came from what I had taken to be a ventilator but was evidently one of a cunningly disposed set of hi-fi speakers. Presumably the recording was coming from a tape machine somewhere in the wall: it wasn’t worth my while to investigate. After a pause it said it three times again. Easily done: transferred in endless repetition from one tape to another. She was mad. But cleverly mad: witness this use of impersonality. You can be seen, you know. By anybody, everybody, nobody. Spoken by the voice of all three.
And then another point came to me: why did it always have to be a bird or a half beast? Birds spoke; demianimals spoke. The riddle couldn’t have been asked by a portly shiningfaced man in a robe, offering Oedipus a couple of ripe figs, or a hetaera offering more, showing glowing shoulders. Like, now, Catherine’s in her fear. The riddler has to be itself a riddle. But no: the ultimate organic creation’s emissary, rather, granted a voice. With this voice it says: Dare to try to disturb the mystery of order. For order has both to be and not to be challenged, this being the anomalous condition of the sustention of the cosmos. Rebel becomes hero; witch becomes saint. Exogamy means disruption and also stability; incest means stability and also disruption. You’ve got to have it both ways, man. I needed Dr Gonzi to clarify all this for me, but Dr Gonzi had to be dead. The other doctor had moved me on from Berkeley to Kant. That flesh on the bed was the nameless intuited; on her I had to impose, along with my person, some legitimate, meaning sensuously acceptable, phenomenon. I was drunk, remember.
– You can be seen, you know.
– I don’t doubt it, I answered, beginning to take off my, Llew’s, clothes. And I didn’t, either: behind those tapestry hangings there were probably, after all, miniature portholes coinciding with the blank eyes of the hunters and revellers.
– Heard too, probably, I answered. Under the mattress a microphone would be eager to drink up the whole drama of sonorities. I was totally trapped, but I had initiated the process that night on the campus. 1 plus 1 equals 1 when you’re dealing with capital crimes or mortal sins. It was a mere formality now to see if the door was locked. It was. I already had my shirt off when I tried it. Catherine was, of course, aghast, appalled, incredulous, speechless, to see me standing at last naked, drunk, grim.
– You can be heard, you know.
He changeth his tune.
– We’ve got to push on, I told her, to very nearly the limit. Trust me. I won’t cross the border. We’re on the stage, that’s all. The acting ends when they unlock that door and let us out.
I brushed my hand along the control panel and the lights went off. And, in mid-moneme, the bird went silent. Then I was i
n the roomy bed struggling briefly with Catherine, who was too weary and tranquillized to hold me off. That viaticum I had been made to drink had undoubtedly been spiked with cantharides or something, but the bitchy madonna barebacked girl had been the true stimulant. What she had started could now be finished. She was in my arms now, grown plump. Catherine did a very tired row of breathless protests, but I whispered An act an act in her ear. I remembered a couplet of the Earl of Rochester’s, once quoted by Professor Keteki, whose name, I realized for the first time, was pronounced not unlike Kitty Kee: Swift orders that I should prepare to throw/ The all dissolving thunderbolt below. I must withdraw stay withdraw stay withdraw stay.
A hellish hammering on the door and the shrilling of female voices imposed a counterspasm. I was out of that bed at once, pumping seed on to Dunkel’s sheepskin rugs. I groped, still pumping, to the control panel and had light on again, also the birdvoice saying we could be heard, you know. To Catherine I cried:
– Get your clothes on. It’s all over.
18
– Only reasonable, I think, Dr Fonanta repeated, to let them spend the remnant of their wedding night – whose happiness so far has been grossly impaired by the trauma of that sudden interruption – back in the town; back, shall I say, in the bride’s own premarital lodging. A circus does not perhaps after all provide the proper ambience for the start of a honeymoon. This young pair needs and deserves tranquillity.
The fireworks had ceased and a quarter moon had risen. Dunkel was in his trailer looking for marks of my defilement. His eyesight was such that he could not easily see the floor without getting on his hands and knees, and this he did not do. Catherine stood beside me, unnaturally jaunty. Her ringfinger lacked its ring. Dunkel would find it later in his bed perhaps. I was back in Llew’s suit, my own few possessions in its pockets. Umberto still held Miss Emmett back. Her scissors were at her waist, bright in moonshine. She had said:
– Filthy woman, filthy filthy woman. Listening, trying to look. Luring my Kitty Kee into that thing with this horrible boy, and then looking and listening. If poor poor Miles was here he’d rend mother and son alike. Filthy family.
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