by Brian Castro
I sought refuge in alcohol. While Gottlieb refilled my empty glasses, I supplied him with stories from my grandfather’s past. How we were all connected by illegitimacy. Grandpa had three concubines, I said. I think after three or four Nights at the Brasserie, which is what I began calling these sessions, he knew that I knew that he knew I was more than myself. I was being sacrificed for his art. It must have been how Booty felt, with Montaigne sitting by his bedside. Booty in a dream-fever, saw things through imperfect understanding. He knew he was being etched into a minor history.
I make my way down the track to Fabiana’s cottage. Moonlight glosses my path; it is a safe light and it shines on Jason Redvers. I am fighting for my originality, struggling against being swabbed out with turpentine. Of late I have ceased creating. My optic nerves enter the back of my eyes at right angles, so there is some retinal separation. There have been four operations, but my vision is now blurred and I have many blind spots. It is perhaps the reason why I ride a bicycle. Though I cannot see what is to the side of me, my hearing is extremely keen. The night is busy with voices. Unused to walking, I imagine riding. I coast through the grizzle and hiss of marsupials. I hear whispers in the wind. Ghosts come down to water. A zone of sound. Music would surely kill me with its beauty. But there it was, a Beethoven sonata in C major, coming from her bedroom.
I was telling stories to Fabiana over our omelette and crisp white wine, which was thoughtful of her. She had side dishes of prosciutto and assorted cheeses, and she had baked her own bread. It was simple and tenderly served. She let me talk. I was primed by my nights at the brasserie and was professionally entertaining. I was a native son of Macau, born sixty years ago, resident of the Côte d’Azur for twenty years. But having lived in Australia for a much longer period, I was nevertheless unknown. It was as though I had always painted in another’s name. It was as though the country didn’t know how to recognise me. Fabiana didn’t intrude and nodded in all the right places. After a while I felt I was the only one filling the silence. She brought more wine. I tried not to stare and avoided her eyes through which I would have fallen and not have found bottom. An old fool can only feel pride. Somewhere in primeval history, a stirring. She wore stockings and heels. Lilac slacks. A shapely woman in an indigo cashmere pullover, fluffy and tender. She listened to my nonsense with wide green eyes. I was father to the child. Though if you ask me now what she looked like, I cannot quite say. Creating an identikit mugshot is quite impossible, I told the detectives.
For almost a year, I told Fabiana, I worked at the Villa d’Este on Lake Como in Italy. It used to be a grand hotel, though I don’t know what has happened to it since. It stood on the site of an old convent, with rolling hills and parklands which commanded views of the lake on three sides where in summer you could see the sailboats keel over in sudden squalls. I earned my living as a waiter and rose in rank to Maître D’ as I was fluent in Italian and French and had references from the Negresco in Nice where I was the barman at La Rotonde Brasserie. It was easy work. From June to September I plied old dowagers with champagne, after which they snoozed in the cool parlour beside the frieze of Cupid and Psyche, their snores circling up to do battle with the ceiling fans. The town of Cernobbio was a short walk away and I had the afternoons off to browse at one of the three bookshops which sold rare books, in one of which I found a sixteenth-century volume published by Cardinal Gallio. The Cardinal, a great stroller around the parks, often seen striding forth in his crimson robes, had met a French nobleman by the name of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne was undertaking a voyage in search of mineral spas. That was in the year 1581. The Villa d’Este had been a meeting place and hospice for travelling poets, artists and men of science. Montaigne stayed in one of the rooms on the second floor of the old wing. There you can still make out an inscription on the blackened beam that runs beneath the ceiling. Montaigne was famous for leaving graffiti and this must have inspired Cardinal Gallio to have his carpenter chisel deeply into the wooden beam, the philosopher’s remark that he, the Cardinal, was an affable boulevardier of considerable charm. For this had been written in the visitors book. It was mostly in Latin, and boulevardier, being such a typically urbane French term, was rendered more respectfully as ambulator. The Cardinal was not aware Montaigne had published this very sentence in French in his travel diaries, with reference to the typical Bordeaux dog, a boulevardier which he described as très gentil, when it was not urinating.
Thank goodness there are no beams in my studio, Fabiana laughed a laugh sweet as wild honey. She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. The ghosts were close by. I took the opportunity to explain my mania. I find silence soothing, I said, when I’m with someone else. I hold silence dear, not only in complete solitude. My kidneys are aching. It probably accounts for the fact that I’ve never had a long-term relationship with anyone. I pass stones which grate like rosary beads. The noise of contrition is deafening. Fabiana is shifting in the lounge, placing her feet up so she is looking away from me, as if to be nearer to me at the same time. Confiding, I noted, was also a turning away. She knew me without need for any further explanation. The walk from the silo had been a test. Perhaps it gave her time to look me up on the internet, make a few phone calls.
I offer a story for a story, she began. I left my husband a year ago. He was a farmer and owned this property. There are rivers enough here…I’ll show you the pool where you can swim…a spot with deep icy water all year round…you can hang and jump from springy willow branches. I left him; left all of this. She inscribed a semi-circle with her index finger. He was a good man. Dull, but good. A man of routine. You would hear the tractor come round the hill at precisely five o’clock in the winter. I cooked him steaks. The fire crackled and the wind howled outside. Do you like Brahms? I was crazy about Brahms, but Roger hated any kind of music. He said incessant music repulsed him. It was a kind of terror. I think he was jealous. Not of me, but of Brahms. He hardly lived indoors. He would have the milkers penned, the pails washed, the floors hosed and he would be up at four-thirty the next morning. It was not a life of feeling. I stuck with him, then I got pregnant. The twins were not his. Roger and I lived separate lives, but we did not move away permanently. I wanted to play the piano in Sydney. It was not unpremeditated. My friends Claire and Nikki used to come up on the weekends. We formed the Sibylla Trio. We were friends at the Conservatorium and had already given several concerts together. Though rusty, we practised hard. We started playing lunchtime concerts at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I stayed in town more and more, and then six months later Roger disappeared. At first the police said he was crushed under his tractor. Then they said there was no body. At first they said it was an accident. Then they said it was no accident. He was hauling a trailer with a full water tank to douse some flames in the western paddock. Lightning had sparked a grassfire. The flames went through. He may have dragged himself down to the waterhole. There were no clues. I think he just gave up. Neighbours said he gave up. Stopped applying his routine. Things ran down. His heart wasn’t in it. Should I feel guilt or blame? I was the one who was pregnant, who was all on her own, with very few resources. Neighbours here don’t talk to me anymore, Redvers. Just the dogs.
You said there were twins.
I fell pregnant to another man. My daughter’s extremely bright, though I don’t say that as a mother.
You play Brahms, you paint. I hear your antiquated refrigerator rumbling in the kitchen and all around you things run down. I dream you in your past, long-married and suffering the wordlessness of Man, his flannel shirt stuck with burrs, the grease-stained overalls flapping on a cold line startling the pink galahs. I lie upon the procrustean bed in my tower-silo hearing the wind explore a cavity in my soul, staring at a false dawn waiting for the scabrous intimacy of too much significance, or not enough, as when you said to me as I left that night: Tomorrow’s Saturday and I work in a shop in Sydney, so I’ll drive you in to get your things. I fill a missing place for now, but it’s
in neither of our hearts to love again. And yes, you play Brahms in the night and you paint. I think of why I did not take her in my arms and kiss her two or three times. I think she would have stopped me, stoppered them, told me to get on my bike. It seemed that upon too much intimacy, she turned abruptly cold. Good. But return to me.
I’d like to think it was the story I told that inspired you to make the offer of letting me rent one of your silos, Fabiana. Maybe I was just in love with your name. Maybe your name inspired my stories. Fabulation. Your name in Cantonese starts with the word for flower. Fa; A note. A pressed flower. Preserved perfumes. You settled down on the lounge, put your feet up beneath you and I began.
At the north bank of the west end of Qutang Gorge on the Yangtze river there are caves in the cliffs. During the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Xiangzhong, an insurgent, so the label went, was driven with thirteen of his followers to take refuge there. The Emperor’s soldiers blockaded the river just below the gorge, hoping to starve them out. But they didn’t count on Zhang’s ingenuity. He got his men to chisel holes in the rock below the cliffs during the night. Then they used what was left of their fighting sticks and staves and cut them into sections, which were then fitted to the holes. In this way they descended, one by one, removing one rung at a time to place it in the slot below. At the bottom, they were able to drink and catch fish. But unless they swam, they could not escape from the cliffs. The current was too fierce in the narrow gorges and they would surely drown. Each night, they performed what they called their water-stealing, and each day they dried the fish they caught. Meanwhile, the Emperor’s men were finding it difficult to maintain their siege, for they were recruited from the cities and did not know how to fish efficiently, needing to be supplied by road. They did not understand how the insurgents could have survived. Morale started to deteriorate. Zhang’s rebels hung their fish out in full view. They toasted the soldiers below with their plentiful supply of water, holding out their ceramic bowls. Then they mocked their foes, punching holes in their bowls so when they held them up, water dribbled out. This was in mocking reference to the way the Emperor measured time with his dripping water-jars. The soldiers were frustrated. Rumours became rife about this being a hundred-year siege. Their archers could not reach the cave with their arrows. They soon withdrew. Zhang’s band did not leave the cliff. They felt so secure there, so untouchable, they overstayed Nature’s welcome. A monsoonal flood cut them off. There were no fish in the water. They died inside their caves. There were rumours of cannibalism.
Fabiana listened. When Redvers finished his story he had a strange look on his face. He often felt himself leaving his body when he told stories, as if he didn’t belong to himself, the words working against presence. She led him to her study, where amidst the books and jars of paint and writing implements, she drew out from a cupboard carved with Chinese characters a small doucai cup decorated with blue and red flowers and butterflies. Redvers commented on its beauty. The blue flowers in the thin white glaze were translucent. It’s not very old, she said. About 1927. This was made by my grandmother’s friend. It was one of the very few things she made with clashing colours…that’s what doucai means. Her name was Anna Ångström. She was obsessed with Chinese porcelain, but she was not at all brittle. It was at the moment when he returned the cup to her that she held his fingers, just for a few seconds.
I’d given up amour. It was a strangely ancient experience, like a sound of chariots. I recalled the last time a woman kissed me. Then there was the sound of wheels on a gravel drive. I was teaching English in a high school in Paris. It was after I had left Marie de Nerval and had cycled all the way to Paris from Provence. I had to record my voice on tape for the language laboratory and was sitting at my booth one afternoon when Céleste, the philosophy teacher, entered and quite suddenly kissed me on the back of the neck. I heard a car crunch up the gravel drive outside. I was wearing a collarless shirt and the mark of her crimson lipstick was quite visible, though I didn’t realise it was imprinted there, and all day the students were smiling at me in a strange and knowing way and when the deputy headmaster offered me his half-bottle of wine at lunch, saying I needed inspiration and courage to fight with one arm tied behind my back, I became suspicious. When I met Céleste’s husband, I saw he only had one arm. He was a charming host, a man of esprit. He asked me if I could give him a lift home in my little red car, my bagnole, my chariot, for he could not drive. I left the school soon after.
11
I think Fabiana made an offer to me because we traded stories. I don’t mean the offer to drive me to Double Bay − Marie had already indicated I should be gone when she returned from Europe. I mean if only Fabiana could drive me to my single room in Newtown, my old abode, which would depress her no end if she saw my live-in garage and stretcher bed and the dog shit dotted outside, she would ask if I wanted to work in her studio for a modest rent, and I could board there, for at least until she sold the property. She did make the offer. It would be a few months yet, she said. My first thought, I don’t know why, was of my heart in a state of siege. Timetables filled me with anxiety. Deadline was an apt term. It got the wind up me. A simoom blew through the arid regions. I saw long depressive afternoons. I saw engorged bloodworms sliding down the cliffface of the Qutang Gorge.
I ache all over, not from my fall, but from all the dehumanisation since the Enlightenment. In Fabiana’s machinery shed I repair my wheel. There is no thought but that of rotary motion, balance, rolling resistance. To true a wheel is more than to make it round. Being well-rounded is perhaps the least scientific, least engineered of all mechanical principles. Where the eye senses perfection, the flaws are abundant. A spinning wheel reveals all the bumps and crookedness, all the rocking and rolling, the swivelling and swaying. And so inside a human being, the diffracting motion of X-rays can show up the crookedness of a spine, the fracture of the first metacarpal, the loss of movement in the primate’s opposing thumb due to violent impact. Only in motion and against the wind do we find some kind of perfection. It is better that grief strikes us dead than we have words to frame it, for my sorrow, weighing upon suspicion of my friend Walter Gottlieb, pained me more than any injury. I collaborated with Gottlieb; helped him write, as he said, this novel of huge import to uncover an unknown poet. I did not speak my discontent and squashed any thoughts of propriety and jealousy. Montaigne had taught me well: I am little subject to these violent passions. I have naturally a hard apprehension, which by discourse I daily harden more and more.
12
Many years ago, I lived in Paris. Down-and-out. I scraped by, working as a barman and waiter. That was after I did time for forging famous paintings. Gottlieb came to Paris. He saw the state I was in and promptly arranged for me to take up a job as a gallery guard in an art museum. He was ecstatic. He liked being a wheeler-dealer. I complained at first. A gallery gardien! Gottlieb smiled. Humility, Redvers. Besides, you’ll be near your favourite paintings all day long. You won’t have to speak at all, not even to raise your voice at miscreant children. To be in uniform! What a position! You can almost smell the paint! You’ll be the guardian of civilisation. Wouldn’t you rather sit in a warm museum, muffled in a comfy chair between Velasquez and Vermeer than ply the streets in your condition, pockets charged with garlic and chives you’d stolen from the fruitshop near the Métro station?
Walter, I said, a museum’s not alphabetical.
We were sitting outside a brasserie near the Picasso Museum. They had gas heaters on tall stands. An icy wind funnelled up the rue du Temple. Gottlieb was in shirtsleeves, wearing braces and a bow tie. You do smell bad, he chuckled, fiddling with the wings of his spectacles, staring at the other patrons. His mind was on some practical task. Droplets of perspiration appeared on his forehead. There’ll of course be a queue for the carte de travail, he said, but it could all be done with some clever shuffling, quiet words upstairs and quick signatures on the sly. I said you were a famous painter… in Australia. The French are always lucid
when it comes to frontier places. They like naïfs. But don’t mess up. You would, in no time at all, be a fugitif. French law has always been flighty, my dear Redvers. You could go back behind bars without seeing a lawyer.
Gottlieb pronounced French words badly and loudly. He was newly converted to deconstruction. His bow tie was colourful and his suit impeccable, and the well-to-do customers nodded as though they recognised him. Perhaps he was Henry James. Parisians of course, dwelt in different time zones.
At the musée, there wasn’t much to do. It wasn’t as though I was watching the Mona Lisa watching me. Gottlieb took me to dinner several times in the ornate dining room, and when I changed out of my gardien’s uniform, nobody recognised me. Parisians triaged their lives in Cartesian form: mind, body, food. Gottlieb was rubbing his hands together. He was pleased I liked the job. He took special delight in drawing me out. I was obsessed with Vermeer. (It was after my Francis Bacon phase.) But why Vermeer? he asked. I shrugged. He’s not what he seems, I said. I told Gottlieb how at the Bilderberg Garden Hotel in Amsterdam, Vermeer had complained about the smell of mussels. He was walking around the restaurant sniffing at the buffet. I can’t stand the smell of mussels in the morning, Vermeer said, fanning his nose; he seemed to have had a heavy cold. And all this fuss about the Nightwatch, the painter said to me, leaning over my table. How can anyone stay at a hotel called the fucking Nightwatch? He proclaimed he had fine powder. The management made threatening noises. They didn’t know who he was. He had another name of course. It’s all right, Vermeer said to them, though the waiters stood their ground, waiting for him to leave. I walk away, he said. That’s what I do. I just walk away. Vermeer and I travelled much together. He taught me the secrets of his paintings: how he used himself as a model for portraits of women. It took three months before I came out of character as Vermeer’s doppelgänger. I couldn’t afford psychoanalysis. I still go in and out like that, in flight from the drudgery of being a gallery guard. Customers love it…I take them on tours with this patter. They come out completely disoriented.