The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  Uprooted parquetry is only good for burning. I do not know why I saw your story, Fabiana, in a rectangle of wood… your fabulation…why I was thinking of Gottlieb when he told me he was seeing someone ‘of immense talent’, an artist, no, a writer, he said, correcting himself; though I knew at once that he was lying. I was not jealous. Perhaps he simply forgot what he saw there in the mist of love which came over his eyes. Anamorphosis: a change in perspective owing to an initial forgetting; a moment of inadvertence by the creator, accidentally knocking his palette from the easel.

  I do not see Fabiana very often. Indeed, she drives to the city on the weekends, so I presume she has a lover there. I feed the dogs and keep the generator running on windy nights when blackouts are frequent and thunder sets the dogs to howling. Fabiana remains pale. The first flush of our accidental meeting is over. She leaves me alone at this end of her property. She has offered me the use of her car, though I have never driven, and have never learned to drive. The Swift is enough for me. I am conscious of Fabiana almost every minute of the day. I do not know the exact attraction. (I veer towards sadness with some women.) I’m sure it is not a physical one. My heart has stopped beating over such things. Blindness perhaps. Reversing the old saw. She asked me if I had any vices. I mean, in the nicest possible way, as a joke, with a smile. I thought it wise for any landlady to ask that of a lodger who heard voices and who conversed with the dead in the night. There was this one kiss. I retaliated with several. When you have suffered a lot of pain you tend to get through love; do it faster. Something about being inured. Conscious of the inevitable betrayal. Time’s wingèd Iscariot. She cantered away. I could have followed up her question with a long thread which would have led to her bed. But she has left me alone and I don’t complain. I gave enough rent to her. It would probably cover a year, but I didn’t work it all out exactly.

  One evening, over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot which she said had been given to her by an admirer, I asked about Roger. It was an ill wind, Fabiana sighed, which marked the beginning of the end. It was a year in which trees fell and the wind wouldn’t let up, circling the bush and rushing down upon the house, and all the agonies came forth at once…every turn, every move, became grief between Roger and myself. In the end it would have been better if his body had been found. It would have been better if he had died in a hospital. I can’t help thinking he crawled off somewhere after the accident and animals picked him clean within a matter of days, his bones redistributed in various lairs. Fabiana clinked at my glass with the bottom of hers, as if all of this had been lucky. The way she clinked was vampy and suggestive and rough. That night I walked back to my silo, looking out for anything bleached, shards catching the moonlight.

  My father was dying in a hospital bed vomiting some kind of foam. He looked as if he’d tried to shave. He was always leaving soap around his ears. The last time I visited him he was semiconscious. I sat for a long time. I didn’t see the point of just sitting there when he was almost in another world. What can you see? Nothing. Where are you? Nothing. I’ve seen the solicitor about the will. Nothing. I’m going to have to go. Nothing. Then as I was leaving he suddenly sat up. I think he asked for water. I was on the way out. I think I saw him do that out of the corner of my eye. But then I am blind on one side; peripherally occluded. I continued out of the ward. I jogged out through the corridors. Sprinted out into the carpark. It was mid-winter. The trees were bare. I thought it was the end for my tired heart. I think he was calling for me to take him to the water. He wanted a swim. Above his bed, a pub poster of Bondi Beach: bronzed lifesavers; rolling surf. He died that night. In the water at Bondi.

  Grey trees. Spatter of rain. I’ve never taken any notice of the naming of vegetation. Trees. Grass. A splash of colour. That’s all that was needed. I could have said something about the scarlet sumac, blood brought up on alcoholic nights. Perhaps the colour was drained out of my eyes. I’ve never made much of nature. It wore you down. It was about attrition. Survival of the fittest. Almost every bird or animal I saw had something wrong with it …a limp, a cough, torn ears, worms, lice. I got tired just thinking about it. The dying birds, the dying wombats. Preoccupied they are, with their condition; sex a long way in the past; sex even disgusting now. Just a smell, no heat. A whiff of burning tyres. Death a lingering tediousness. As we approach the thought of it, we are already dead. We moan and groan but are asleep. Montaigne would tell you so. Having fallen from his horse, he found his semi-coma sweet, his stomach heavy, slowly filling with clotted blood, his writhing involuntary, detached from himself. He had left his body behind. When he recovered, he experienced pain and pain was nothing but the thought of it, having to negotiate with it. He learned from this that we are often besotted with our knowledge.

  In the slingshot rain I used to like to write by the ticking fire. I was indulged by art; selfish, self-serving. There was a rhythm. I was mostly unconscious. Fabiana awakened and attracted me because she said she never wanted to write. Everyone wants to be a writer. Even my dogs have started to look wise and cynical at anyone who even looked like they were writing, she said to me. I see the dogs nodding with half-closed eyes before the fire. They express nothing but their present contentment. No, if I should desire to be a writer, then one should shoot me, Fabiana said. It was a strange remark to make, while the hail was striking the window panes. I found great joy in her conversation. I write daily, I said to her. I wrote for her, though I didn’t say that, knowing that I was writing unto extinction. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now I see it clearly, that I was trying to reduce my readership to the bare minimum in order to express my ideal of possessing the perfect reader. But perhaps I was really expressing my desolation at never having possessed my own story, my grief taking on the unadorned nature of one whose house had been robbed. Surely Gottlieb had already written everything about my grandfather by now? Surely he would have observed my fugue states, in which I was the poet Camilo Conceição? Had these just been my blind spots, or were they invisible to others as well? I certainly cannot remember whether I had been in this role, or how much I have revealed. I ride my bicycle and sometimes forget where I am. I am distanced, dissociated. Not for me the desire to be in situ or to be famous, to be the man on the spot. Not for me the common herd of newsboys leaning on their bicycles dreaming of fame or Olympic glory. I told Gottlieb stories and I became tired, and my anger grew more prevalent over all his thefts and misunderstandings. His interest in me was unashamedly professional. I was simply a conduit for his portraits, shifting in and out of the picture.

  They are sitting by the fire in her house. The wood that Redvers had brought in for the hearth had been placed in a tin tub…a kind of baby bath…and there is an insect making a buzzing sound inside, trying to decamp from beneath the bark it has called home for so long. The dogs are roused and they soon begin to growl and are suddenly at the door; someone at the front gate. The postman, Fabiana says, on his late rounds. He rides a bicycle too.

  We are sitting by the ticking fire in her house. The postman had just called. He left some parcels on the patio…art books and music scores Fabiana ordered from abroad. Once a month Fabiana invites me to dinner, when she plays Bach for me. I tell her that Glenn Gould, the famous Bach player, used to play like a cyclist, crouched egg-shaped at the keyboard in a kind of disagreement with any windy theme emanating from the notes, as though he, Glenn Gould, was trying to plumb the secrets of those rotary fugues which Bach had hidden from view because they existed outside time and like the motion of a bicycle, could only be brought into existence both corporeally and incorporeally, an exercise in transparent logic and absurdly stationary physical regularity. Bach, I said, was non-anxious, with his slight degrees of sadness wafting upon zephyrs emerging from lowly fields, when all the while these winds could have had the potential to breach the heavy doors of stone cathedrals and blow away the aroma of incense and the odorous corpses of seditious cardinals. Bach was not aggressive; he was discursive, like Montaigne. It
was a well-tempered joy, not like that of my friend Gottlieb, I said, who had succumbed to the illness of romanticism. Every time I thought of Gottlieb I wanted to escape, ride my bicycle, engage in a back and forth motion, reciting my Brief Lives in order to revoke everything I have ever told him about myself. Or told him about others. A friend who was no friend. But you will have to read my book, my friend.

  I revered Jacques Anquetil. For it is impossible to talk about cycling without speaking of Jacques Anquetil, whose Norse name meant cauldron, and who won the Tour de France five times, I was telling Gottlieb on one of those nights at the Bay Brasserie. Anquetil’s name sounded like iron, an anvil, but his cycling style was as smooth as butter. What I liked about Anquetil, I said to Gottlieb, was that he never warmed to the public, and when I asked for his autograph after the brutal climb on the Puy-de-Dôme in 1964, he looked at me with dark humour and wrote J.A: contre toute façon on my programme notes, playing on the phrase ‘against the prevailing fashion’…in other words he was inimitable, unique…and the word ‘counterfeit’ (contrefaçon). It was this snaky scrawl of his which put me in mind of Baudelaire’s story Counterfeit, wherein a man gives a counterfeit coin to a beggar, emphasising that everything is an act of faith, even our soul, and this faith is subject to cruelty and miscalculation. And also of Gottlieb’s interpretation of Anquetil’s autograph, which Gottlieb said (and I paraphrase), was a serpent he was giving you, and I took this to mean Anquetil was giving something venomous to me, as well as an intriguing tail of a tale, for Anquetil’s life after his famous victories offers the enigma of a man who took too many amphetamines with his champagne, a minter of truth, a semi-recluse who married a woman who had been married to his doctor and who, as a semi-recluse, had an affair with this woman’s daughter from her earlier marriage, giving the said daughter a daughter of his own, and when all that was over, had another child with his first wife’s daughter-in-law from a previous marriage. To manage all this, there must have been a lot of counterfeiting, perhaps even of conception itself, as he went to great lengths to alter the names of his offspring.

  But it was what Walter Gottlieb said to me afterwards that struck me more, even more than Anquetil’s esprit, and that was his confession that one night, not long after Blimunde’s death, he had attempted to take his own life and had chained and padlocked himself to the last pier supporting the jetty which stretched into the harbour from the bottom of his garden, and he had thrown the key far out into the water, waiting for the tide to come in above his head, while the lapping sea only reached his crotch – he had misread the moon’s phases – and he had to scream for Marie, unfortunately rousing the neighbours, who then cautiously cut him loose. I give you that story on credit, Gottlieb told me, and I knew I would have to pay for it…sooner or later. I find it hard to reciprocate such confidences.

  And then there was the time while we were sitting in the same bar when Gottlieb turned to me (I was sure there were tears in the corners of his eyes), and said: It is only four in the afternoon, but it is always an eternity. I asked him what he meant. I wish I were elsewhere, he said, in another time, even if they were perilous times, but elsewhere in time must be under the same sky, must it not? To be in a moment which stays forever? Is that possible? I didn’t understand him. The weather had always deceived humankind. He began declaiming in the mournful scale of an Aeolian monody: I am writing to a woman: by means of this engraving, I am come alive; but O, how can one survive, when love is so enslaving?

  Gottlieb wanted advice on how to charm a woman through letter-writing. He said he had made a grand effort to forget her, but somehow there were reminders everywhere; her smile, like the sunrise on Copacabana beach. But you’ve never been to Rio, I said. You don’t have to have been there to understand how a culture is genetically inserted into an expression, Gottlieb argued. For instance, the way you shake your head when you affirm something is purely Hindu. He flicked something from his thumbnail. I am not the best letter-writer, he told me spilling his coffee onto his lap. While he was mopping up, he wanted information, as briefly as possible. The technique. What is the technique? Patience, I said. There are no short cuts to seduction. You have to write with the right amount of balance, between concern and desire. It’s best to proceed with curiosity about her situation, for Narcissus cannot love, I said. Write it down for me, Gottlieb ordered. I thought it a betrayal of a friendship to be used thus, an amanuensis to love, as if I were a Cyrano. The irony of it. As if I had really loved. Perhaps; and yet, perhaps not.

  It appeared Gottlieb could only live by anticipation. He checked the mailbox a hundred times a day. He was in despair when nothing arrived. Indescribably lonely in a crowd, his heart ached in bed, lying there next to Marie, who was more aware of his agony than he thought, and who repressed it even further. He didn’t want to acknowledge her presence. He clung to his despair as an accusation. It was their life that was killing him. But he would never relinquish his despair because it provided him with the possibility of another life. You know, Redvers, Gottlieb said to me, love is harder than anything in the world. No one assesses its remarkable beauty or its excessive pain outside of yourself. I think Gottlieb believed Socrates’ idiotic proclamation that love was absolute beauty. Who was the Greek kidding? Love was making a fool of yourself. Gottlieb later said these letters were a return to love, something he had scorned for decades, because by revisiting it, love had diminished his freedom to control its processes. Freud called this repetition-compulsion, I said to Gottlieb – the feeling of not wanting to return, but painfully going there again and again. I had heard all this before – the roundel of the unrequited. Love was never equal; always a lover and a beloved. It was tacky, this confession of Gottlieb’s. He covered it up by making himself out to be a Casanova…many fish in the sea and all that. He pulled out a photograph of a darkhaired girl with a silver streak in her raven mane, wearing a lace camisole and stay-up stockings. She was sitting on a cane chair with her thin legs crossed. He smirked and said nothing. The music had changed from a cello fugue to a drinking song.

  Which reminds me, I said to Fabiana that evening, I cannot reciprocate these soirées of yours, as I do not play any instrument, and I scarcely cook inside my silo and I dine mainly on cold tuna fish McCredie sells me at a discount because the tins have been damaged. I have become a fish man. I have cat-breath. My body has shed its meatiness. By concentrating on my body I have been able to think about the present. To be in situ. We do not escape ourselves, the house we have built. You could have said I destroyed my house in order to build Gottlieb’s with its stones, I said. Donated the tombstone of the past historic tense. But I live, I live…

  There were three minor lawsuits when Brief Lives (I) came out. A poet claimed he was never molested by a priest, a detainee never by a dog, a schizophrenic never by himself. Brezinski won them all. He was good, striding over the courtroom floor, hands behind his back; he had the profile of Abraham Lincoln. At sixfour, he leant over the litigants. The world is a bell with a crack in it, he said. Only a writer can strike a true note in order to flush out the pigeons. I think that was his most famous moment. His next line was shit, but nobody can remember it. He had friends in the High Court. They were Masons. They wrote books on belfries. All the libel suits were dropped.

  I suppose it was with the same ingenuousness that I answer ed Fabiana’s queries about Gottlieb. When she asked questions of me, I actually learned more about her than she did me, because of the condition I have, which ensured I gave away almost everything I possessed and having been lightened and enlightened thus, emptied, a non-entity, I was filled with an hysterical pleasure which allowed me lines of flight without risk. This set others at ease. I took no heed of consequences: how I may have been interpreted; suspected. Indeed, she may have found me a bore, but she didn’t indicate this feeling at all, and I took it that my self-obsession was perhaps interesting or entertaining for her. Through the gaps I learned that Fabiana spent weekends, sometimes whole weeks, in the ci
ty where she had a shop in Double Bay. My curiosity was aroused: In which street? Was it near the marina? No, she said, but it wasn’t far from the chandlery. I sold craftwork; tasteful work, she said; fragrant herbal soaps and perfumes, dried flowers and wooden sculptures, candleholders and pipette barometers. She was in partnership with another woman, an artisan, for that was how Fabiana described her, and in the evenings she, Fabiana, played in a palm-court orchestra at the Intercontinental Hotel, to keep her fingers and her little knot of friends, she said.