The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  The pains in Montaigne’s kidneys had been present for some time during the writing of the first two books of the Essays, I said to Gottlieb, who wasn’t interested at all in Montaigne and was gulping down his whisky twirling his index finger around in it and rubbing his temples with the sweating glass, indicating, I think, that I should hurry up with the history and listen to his story, which he was eager to expound, but only for the moment, and then he held back. He wanted me to speak about my grandfather again, but I was not in the mood for my grandfather. Montaigne, I continued, had just published the second book of his essays, and took it north to present a copy to Henry III with great fanfare, though in private conversation with his coachman, he had remarked that Henry III was a dissolute transvestite. The king received the copy with feigned interest and spoke into the mirror whilst rouging his cheeks: Would Montaigne like to join His Majesty at the siege of La Fère in Normandy?

  Montaigne had no choice. Throughout the blockade he regretted bringing a copy of the Essays to be read by the king. ‘An ageing mannequeen,’ he confided to his valet. Montaigne’s kidneys hurt so badly that he had to stand in the stirrups, even swinging himself over to one side, hoping that this acrobatic jolting would dislodge something. The siege was a long one.

  Gottlieb was snoring. At least I thought he was. (In hindsight, how mistaken was I?) His head had flopped to one side and his eyes were closed. I believed there was a tear secreting from the corner of one eye. Lately he’d been wearing a large silver crucifix around his neck, which he clutched in moments of spiritual doubt. He still had one hand on it. It was the same gesture Marie used to employ. His large head and lion’s mane of hair was at odds with the contortion of his tiny trunk. It was as though he was tormented by a torso he could not forgive and was summoning the image of a tortured Christ as a hedge against mediocrity.

  I continued with the story of Montaigne. His travel cure took him to Rome, I said, where he witnessed the circumcision of a child. After cutting off the foreskin, the rabbi took a gulp of wine and then sucked the glans and spat out the blood. Then he rinsed his mouth with more wine, dipped his finger in it for the child to suck and applied resin to the wound. A rabbi who had circumcised more than twenty infants had the privilege of never having his mouth eaten by worms after he was buried. He could speak from beyond the grave.

  Montaigne, in his essays, does not repeat La Boétie’s sonnets. He simply says Booty’s twenty-nine verses are elsewhere. These missing fugues represent the circumcision of Montaigne’s desires. He will never be a poet like Booty. He will never be a painter like Holbein. He only has this amputated prose as a memorial of what has been lost. Booty’s missing voice is the voice of youth; Montaigne’s the sound of worms busily eating at the night.

  My dear Gottlieb, I said, leaning over the table (the brasserie was filling, the Saturday night crowd crushed together after rugby games and rowing regattas; youth was exploding with ignorant testosterone), I have not had a single physical desire for the last five years…how is it between you and Marie? As I spoke, I noticed his little black book in which he noted down observations. What I may have said that night inspired him. The notebook was closely guarded and it hardly ventured the short distance between his jacket pocket and his lap. I removed it from beneath his elbow. Opened it. It was empty, except for the last page, where he had scrawled the words: Husbandry is a servile office between enslavement and blackmail. There is no third position.

  Montaigne conceived everything in threes. His best ideas came on horseback. Then he retired to his tower and he wrote. Three things he did almost every day. The ternary destroyed the dependency of the couplet upon its loving dialogue…dissolved its poetry with thinking. The tower was his library and his memory. It was on the third floor of a three-storey rotunda. There, he presented himself for dissection, where he was no man and Everyman. A reader of himself. Open to all the deadly virtues. He had three windows. It was a panopticon. He could view his courtyard, his fields, the public road. He carved aphorisms and epithets into the wooden beams and inscribed his aim inside a wardrobe; i.e. to retire to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where he would find freedom, tranquility and leisure. He spent some time inside the closet. Inside and outside. Three windows. A triptych. He looked out and examined the limits of himself. The wooden joists formed the spines of his books, the bars of his memory. He liked the idea of prison. Each word a cell. The cell as the basic unit of writing, he said to himself. He would use his mind like a prism. Examine the flaws in each confinement. Find the perspective in which there would be revelation or escape, all the while knowing that his retirement, his voluntary coming to the dark tower, was a willingness to end the trade in deception. But his furtiveness and openness could never coincide. The third element for this to occur was missing: a lover to whom he could confess.

  I was not aware of Gottlieb’s secret, of the practical nature of his affair with Fabiana, the prágmata, the good things of friendship, that had been perverted into the counterfeit of love…and money. I was isolated out here on this property and I had to watch my step. Not ask too many questions. There was a net closing in on me; just a jailbird’s intuition.

  A police car came up the track, jouncing. Its blue flasher lights were on, the radio chattering and the dogs barking. I went out, ordered the dogs to stand and stay, buttoning my donkey jacket in the wind. Two of the braver mongrels went up and sniffed at a trouser cuff. A dog should always have a bone to gnaw on. I thought one of the cops was going to shoot. She was unfastening her revolver. The driver was out of the car first, his cap pushed back. Where are you from? What are you doing here? Who are you? he asked. I answered backwards. Redvers. Writing on Montaigne. Paris. The female flic wrote Paris laboriously onto her palm. She had heavy metal around her waist. In Paris, I said, the gendarmes were not as pretty. Her face hardened but her partner smirked and asked to see the silo. I displayed my books and paintings. No these are not mine, I said, indicating the ones in Silo #2. Hers up at the big house. Yeah, we knocked; the female uniform monosyllabic throughout. We’re looking for a stolen car; so what do you drive? I said I don’t. I had a Swift. What’s that? A bicycle. You don’t drive? No I’m prone to blackouts. They both moved a half-step back. I squeezed oil onto a palette. My morning routine. Anyone else live on this property besides this Martins woman? Not that I know of, I said. Her husband died about a year or so ago. I added that for authenticity. We know, the burly woman said. She stuck her biro back into her pocket. It was a fire, I explained. My supplement was not an invitation for them to elaborate. They knew already. They looked around. I continued to squeeze out paint. I went into Fabiana’s studio. They followed, made some secret notes. The dogs, the same two, sniffed their tracks when they turned their backs. I waved back the rest of the pack. The cops smelled of prison-issue. The police radio piped up. The woman went to receive. The man, stocky, needing dentures, told me he knew all about me. McCredie told him. McCredie had cleared me, he said. Then as he turned to go, he volunteered some information. There was a fire, he said, but no body was found. Roger, the woman was saying into the microphone. Yeah, Roger, that was his name. Well if you see any strange activity, car wrecks, let us know. I nodded. I don’t look out that much, I said. What? I decided not to repeat my remark. I waved. They drove over the daffodils I had planted along the sides of the track. The dogs watched them go.

  Having opened up Fabiana’s studio I smelled it once more. Opium and prison-issue uniforms. I went inside the studio, Silo #2. Opened all the windows. Turned the canvases around. Mixed the paint on the palette. I still paint Francis Bacon faces, full on, sideways, distorted, grimacing, open-mouthed. I had been a scholar of suicides, had haunted the morgues in Paris. In Silo #2, I paint over Fabiana’s cubist canvases, transforming their faces. These ‘accidents’, with the imploded features of people I still remember, can always be read backwards in recomposition, through a prism, where the living once again sit on their toilet bowls to have their portraits painted.


  23

  Torpors, soma; I drowse at midday, living reluctantly. I would rather not live if not for this vigorous resistance of the flesh. The beginning of the long silence to the grave. Only the Swift squeaks. To be matter is my desire; it is at the core and pith of misanthropy. To be a bicycle. To be ridden by Fabiana. The midday sunlight. It was to that which Gottlieb was referring when he lectured on the fallacy of being taken in by emotion. From the panoramic triptych of the cinema screen with the closing curtains, the side walls, the back exit, we were ejected into the prism of sunlight through which everything decomposed. At the moment of disillusion even the Swift exploded into parts, its wheels splintering into tyre, tube and rim. Only at dusk could I see more clearly, composing with the aid of the telescope, and could pick up the movement first in the trees, an uncoordinated dancing of hot and pendant leaves. Now I am able to focus more precisely on Fabiana’s house, her green roof with the furiously revolving weathervane, characterless, like me, at the mercy of every breeze, a prismatic compass of words and counters and now I can see her window, lit in the gloaming…oh, erotic wind!…oh, unveiling wind!…parting curtains, blouses, skirts…I adjust my square, and there she is, wearing a cap, which she’s taken to doing when Sergio is around and she sports a ponytail which she’s drawn out behind through the adjuster-strap and she’s reading, though I cannot see her book (I adjudge this through the periodic lowering of her right hand from her face), sitting, I presume on her modernist furniture…she liked that period which is now no longer modern but which signified a departure from classical lines, full of steel and glass…and I am reminded that Francis Bacon was a furniture designer first, before he was a painter and the figures who sat on his furniture, on his toilets, secreting their bodies into pools of paint made sense now, bringing into perspective both viscid death and the pungent reality of decomposing flesh. And there you sat, Fabiana, and I was mesmerised by the way you lowered your right arm and then raised it again and it was the thought of you and Sergio, who you said was helping you clear the blackberry… though you had neglected to tell me anything else, why for instance, the poppies had grown so high in its place, Nepenthes they called it in ancient Greece…opiate or alcohol, the fugue of forgetfulness which chased away sorrow…it was the thought of Sergio and you Fabiana, as you sat reading in the silk dressinggown which I gave you and which you left opened, your book that is, the thought that he comforted you with his guitar, this well-tempered escravo, soothing you with his chocolate tongue… not for nothing did Valéry write that love consisted in the privilege of being silly beasts together…and all I could see was the way you moved your hand to the back of your chair and touched at your own hair and how your grip tightened as your breasts heaved, and it was this thought that brought back to me a fearful potency, Fabiana, which I believed had left me ages ago when I wandered the hills near Benares and they were harvesting poppies, lopping off the heads of the white flowers and I saw Salomé, not the biblical character but you Fabiana, deflowering all the monsters of isolation, and you looked out your window then, pausing, as you did when you turned a page, recounting to the kneeling Sergio, who does not read, your desires, and you were staring straight at me grimly through your window, as if you were ready, with one stroke, to lop off my head with the glass from its frame.

  24

  And there I was, slowly riding back from Fabiana’s cottage to the broken stones around the twin silos − the sun was aslant this day − when I saw her coming out of Silo #2, and she looked displeased, angry, her eyes full of stony disappointment. I was quick to speak, to ward off a painful pause, the moment when she would employ a platitude out of mockery, and I declared my breaking into her silo as an accident, related the incident of the police visit, all of which I said, was caused by a slip of the hand, a splotch of paint, a dribble of ink, because it was out of my unwillingness to help the police that I thrust myself into some activity, distorting your paintings, I was saying to Fabiana, because that is what I know best, I said, masking, covering up, cloaking myself in silence, which was different from lying. There was no need to tell the police about what was in the indigo porcelain pots. I think I was frightened of slipping into the skin of another me – a good citizen – when my being consisted entirely of being a Chinese mask, I said, which had its own morality by not living for others. That had been my life, I told Fabiana, a full-scale negation of authenticity. It was good never to have been observed, because others will find me out when I am long gone, peeling off layer upon layer of paint. But for now, I had ceased trading in enigma and I was falling in love with Fabiana, much against my will. Was I attracted because of her danger? Francis Bacon, I said, explaining to her the canvas she was holding, depicting a cubist woman now modified by my Bacon look-alike – the figure seated on an office chair beside a bathroom sink – one of those sinks I remember from the age of four when my father forced my head into it for not remembering to brush my teeth: Shank, the name printed on the porcelain had been imprinted on my retina – the figure now shanked on a meathook with the melting face of Walter Gottlieb…Francis Bacon, I continued, employed prisms and circles and cages to hold his figures within a strict perspective; an intellectual limitation of the imagination so that the melancholy of space remains true: held them from exploding into dream and restrained them to themselves, all the while executing their swollen decomposition. His flat was an abattoir. Bacon sometimes feared his own art – not because of its withheld horror – but because he thought it so mediocre he suspected some unconscious fakery. To forge a Bacon therefore, was to take on a redoubled pain, to love with another’s passion, but at the same time to do Francis a favour by being his proxy, putting him out of reach, out of his misery, loosening the noose around his neck, releasing what had tied us together. All responsibility for our friendship was abdicated, I said to Fabiana.

  Fabiana, understanding nothing except my distress, held my elbow and led me to the stoop whereupon I sat despondently, holding my head in my hands for some time. She went inside to get me a drink of cold water and I noticed she had set the hourglass upright on the table and had turned on the light before examining what I had done. She had been frightened by my logorrhea, and was now horrified by my images.

  It was through that sandy prism that I recalled Walter Gottlieb’s face, I said to Fabiana. When you gave me the hourglass, all I could do was to think of Gottlieb’s face, how his insomnia had driven him into psychosis and his stroke had wrenched him into wordlessness and madness and he took to sending me notes, even though I was only in the other wing of the house…he sent little bits of paper in envelopes via Madame Defarge, the maid with the guillotine-blade nose, little yellow envelopes containing what he called ‘conversations’, though they were really ‘interrogations’, asking me to clarify what I had said the previous night at the brasserie, especially about Florian Gautier-Epstein, the kitchenhand who was about to inherit his father’s millions. What happened after he committed suicide? Gottlieb wanted to know, and Gottlieb’s prurience, his curiosity, even his rat cunning, irritated me no end, because I hated this curiosity sugared with false naïvete, for while Gottlieb pretended he wanted the story again to write it down in a different form, probably in a novel, for he had already published the facts in the Paris paper Le Figaro, I was sure he knew full well it was that publication which brought about Florian’s suicide and he, Gottlieb, was simply trying to have me confirm he had abjured any involvement in the Florian Gautier-Epstein affair. I can still see the headline: CAPRICES DES GAUTIER-EPSTEIN – TISSU DE MENSONGES – FAMILLE EN CRISE. Stolen narratives have terrible consequences. Gottlieb, I realised, was dangerous, even in his stroke state, and I began entering these ‘conversations’ with him by mutilating the subject of our friendship, employing a fugal device, a stretto, a narrow strait, a constriction, using the subject as its own accompaniment in another key, or as is known in painting, ‘layering’, or to use the painterly term: a palimpsest, where the painter has re-used an original – and so I used the dev
ice of the stretto, a final, narrow passage recounting Marie de Nerval’s attempt on her own life soon after meeting Florian… whether she had slept with him I do not know…he used to show her his paintings, I told Gottlieb; and it was then, in Paris, that Gottlieb wrote that fatal article…the noose tightening around the friendship between Gottlieb and me, the subject screeching in another key, its arteries constricted.

  Fabiana was looking at me intently. I knew that speaking about my mutilation of her paintings in musical rather than in pictorial terms would draw her out a little. You didn’t touch my grandmother’s work? No. Of course not. She was looking wistful. She was dressed in a severe black jumper and black jeans and both were tight, which brought a Sartrean response to my mind’s eye: peripherally, I was making love with her but she would have to wear stockings. Those paintings of mine weren’t that good anyway, she admitted, and you knew that. All this time I thought you were writing a book, so you said, about a sixteenth-century philosopher, when in fact you were practising deception, reconfiguring my work. And all this time I was attempting to paint like my grandmother Julia Grace, she of cubist fame, who left these shores for France, achieving nothing because she was an attractive woman, and an attractive woman would never be able to attract interest in the genius of her art rather than in the beauty of her face. Oh yes. Fabiana shrugged one shoulder in that slightly foreign manner which had leached down from her ancestors.