The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  All stories began in hot springs or baths. I believed and vowed never to believe anything said in hot springs. It was only later that I started writing things down, stories told to me by Marie de Nerval, who had become a sort of patient-friend and who consulted me in exchange for advising me on art, which was becoming a growing interest of mine. But I only began to write things down in concealment, under a sort of cachet of client confidentiality, of doctor-patient secrecy. It was Marie de Nerval who first told me about Walter Gottlieb. Walter, having been driven mad from having lost a daughter, was wandering around Europe and China in a demented state, trying to assuage his grief, attempting a grand walking tour, as he called it, in order to stop thinking.

  6

  Slide #1: Carukia Gottlieb. Cubozoan.

  You see him moving out of the light. He comes forward then disappears into the dark. He doesn’t swim on the surface. There are many perspectives you can take when observing him. I think the most interesting one was a written one; the one in the Common Book belonging to Fabiana Martins. She sold these blank notebooks in her shop in Double Bay, along with dried wildflowers, clocks, hourglasses, barometers, microscopes and telescopes. You know the kind of book I mean: skin-bound, with an elastic strap, with ruled, squared or plain versions, endorsed by the writer Bruce Chatwin when he was jotting things down in Patagonia or Australia. For some reason Fabiana preferred the squared ruling, so that her words were vertically as well as horizontally spaced. I suppose she picked up this fondness for squared pages in Paris where the notebooks originated, or perhaps in Shanghai, where the graph paper suited the formation of Chinese characters. She seemed to have had a fondness for cubic spaces, and Walter Gottlieb’s little room in the university college was just such a space, neatly arranged so that three walls were completely lined with books and the fourth looked out from a casement window onto the courtyard and the playing fields beyond, from where he could observe all the comings and goings of his students. It was said that Walter Gottlieb preferred standing to sitting, and paced around his small room lecturing even when there was no one present…the cleaners had discovered him thus several times…speaking in a loud voice, which he said was a pedagogical conceit, that rhetoric was its own enactment, a form of dramaturgy which authenticated life. Of course Fabiana was just repeating his words, since she was in complete awe of the Master…Maestro, she called him… from the moment she heard one of his lectures on Socrates, which he, as always, at the beginning of each term, insisted on as a prelude to his literature courses. That Fabiana Martins had sought to meet with him in private not once, but several times in his room is well documented, since Gottlieb was Master of a male-only college, and an attractive woman walking into his room in high heels and mini-skirt in the fashion of the times gave cause for rumour, which in a male-only college, tainted Gottlieb with an ambiguous reputation: half heterosexual centaur and half betrayer of gay and aspiring youth. But it seems that Fabiana, having diligently researched Gottlieb’s past as a failed priest and academic, felt a strong urge to confess to him and to seek his advice. She wrote everything down. Gottlieb, of course, never wrote anything down. At least, you never saw him doing it.

  You can imagine him moving into and out of the light from his window. He was in the middle of lecturing to no one in particular, speaking in a low voice and then a louder one, as in a dialogue; something about Dante’s circles of hell, and he had on an academic gown, you know the kind, lined with ermine, even though the day was fairly warm, and he turned to you midsentence, having invited you into his room without addressing you until now, and said that if all punishment matched the guilt…and since he had no appetite for life until now, having been brought to the ultimate stage of man’s weariness, Weltschmerz…then what was he guilty of if not of a kind of original sin…why had he been persecuted thus? Fabiana turned on her heels, believing from what he said that she had suddenly been scorned as a temptress, sent to torment him as some college prank, but he placed his fingers lightly on her arm and detained her. She had brought him a present: a notebook with squared paper.

  You can imagine him moving back into the darkness of his shelves, where sat ancient volumes in their uniform of dull gold lettering. That was when she fell in love with him, something so deep, beyond obsession. Several meetings later, Fabiana sat on his bed and told him about her marriage: how she had been seduced by a man who owned property; how she needed security and money; that she was on the verge of having to sell her grandmother’s art collection. Roger was a tradesman, a parquetier, and he paid off her debts, gave her a gold credit card linked to his account for her birthday, bought her a small apartment and a baby grand piano beside a bay window. Nothing could have been more ideal, when she entered the front drive on the weekends, the car loaded with dresses and ornaments, the air smelling of moist hay, to know that he was out in the paddocks on his tractor, all the home fires alight for her. A double life. There was companionship but no love. It’s how we waste others. We do not know the moment when love turns to hatred under such benign circumstances. We do not know the moment because we have taken on the original sin of choosing life above fidelity, which inevitably involves suffering. He knew she was having an affair. He spent more time on his tractor. Until he couldn’t anymore. He stormed in one day when she was on the phone. You’re just an old cunt! he shouted. She ate blood oranges all night, simpering in the spare room while her skin glowed. In front of her mirror she asked what it was that must have disgusted him.

  Some music, she said, saddened you immeasurably, and she was saddened for no good reason, and the yearning did not cease and she returned to her music, just to sample the sorrow. There was no music in Roger, Fabiana said, and she had never quite realised what a gap this would be, a lack which was, as she put it, in the composition of blood. And this was an indication that she was on the right track, that this incompatibility would become an attrition of their relationship and that she would have to leave him sooner or later. He drove his tractor; ploughed further afield. He could not express himself in any other way.

  When he went out to fight the fire on the property at Putty, she left for Sydney, frightened of him, she said, whose generosity was matched by equally selfish and violent expectations of wifely duties. She was through, she exclaimed to Walter Gottlieb, with home duties. It was at this point that Gottlieb placed his hand upon her silken knee. You are very lonely and lovely my child, he said, and then with a Tennysonian flourish, added: ‘more beautiful than day’ and he began to stroke her hair, which was fine, like goose down. Her face was half in darkness when she told him they had never found Roger’s body. The fire had exploded in the pine forest where he had towed the trailer with the large watertank on board. They found the truck overturned and charred, but there was no evidence of any human remains. Then she told Walter Gottlieb something that he would carry to his grave.

  It’s the fourth corner that makes a cubozoan jellyfish. Gottlieb found himself stung with passion. It was tortuous when she left that evening, her perfume on his academic gown, the fragrance of her kisses on his brow. He had succumbed to what Thomas Mann called the late adventure of the feelings. He ploughed a furrow walking on the football field that night, lecturing through the fizzing voltage of cicadas. The next morning he wrote a letter to the Vatican, asking to be released from his vows. He was still wearing his cloak, which was pinned with dead fireflies.

  7

  My living quarters are behind my surgery. The side facing the sea is glassed in, so that light can flood the open-plan living area. Even the bathroom and bedroom appear to sail out to the horizon. I had the architects design this floor as a replica of the Mies Van der Rohe Tugendhat house, using what they called ‘smart-glass’, which is one-way and can be lightened and darkened manually or automatically with control filters…like the lens of a microscope. When I look out from my shower, I can see waves in the distance, breaking on the reef. Boom! I suppose that’s what it would sound like. Now and again there’s a fastmoving speck, not
a bird, but a military jet fighter. Boom! Mid-point, just this side of the reef, I often watch Janet Cordillion hanging from her dragon-winged para-sail. Swivel past her and you can see the coastal tanker at eleven o’clock. Directly to the left of the surgery, on an outcrop called The Peninsula, is the Cordillion estate, a white stucco mansion built like a Mexican hacienda, totally out of keeping with the Australian environment. This triangulation between Chinese kite, Acapulco estate and the modernist repair shop of my surgery counters any hint of transcendence or of any assured culture. Here, on this stretch of coast, there is no nostalgia for history or for aesthetic absolutes. Perhaps this is a good thing…that in this country, we copy without understanding. How terrifying therefore, even to know history!

  The Romans understood how false time could be. They used words like fama and fata. Fama was storytelling and selfpromotion, instant fame, man-made; no other evil was swifter because it acted upon the present but was nourished by rumour; a grand illusion. Fata, however, was one’s fate, the future which ‘explained’ the past. Fata was enduring time. It had legitimacy. The afterword. The gods had decreed it all along. It was hindsight as foresight; a divine prolepsis. It all depended on the time of speaking; on perspective, on the calibration of the sundial, or the dripping of the clepsydra. In the end, these measures were still man-made. Divination was artisanal; and because it was humble craftsmanship to build such instruments, stonemasons were always reflective and saturnine. Obituarists.

  I meet Blixen Gottlieb in the lobby bar of the Temple Meridien resort. I sit next to the stone fountain, which features twin mermaids. The air is moist and cool. There she is, looking a little dishevelled but smiling fresh-faced, her blonde hair in a ponytail. She is twenty-four today and when I hug her I feel her fragility. We do not speak for a little while. Tonight we will dine at the Rastoni, where they have a seafood carbonara that eliminates everything else from the menu.

  When Blixen stays with me she always remarks about the weather; not in any ordinary sense, not in the phatic way most people speak about the weather or the climate. Blixen sets free her ponytail and then refashions it expertly into a small chignon pinned with a tortoiseshell comb. She observes that it practically never drizzles or rains for a prolonged period here in the tropics. There is the afternoon storm which is irregular, and a night rain which lasts less than an hour. It suits me, Blixen said. These are my reasons to be happy. In the year that Father died it rained for three months. Blixen has not really gotten over her father’s death. Not like me, who practically forgot my father’s disappearance in the space of a year. My father, the great Professeur, le docteur Émile Sarraute, achieved his fata. He is there on all the plaques, crowned with laurels, in the science buildings in Paris. Intaglios and imbroglios. Blixen does not speak much about her father. Walter Gottlieb, it seemed, had achieved very little at the time of his sudden death, there in the bathroom of his wife’s Double Bay mansion, a vial of morphine in his hand, which I had to pry loose as rigor mortis had already manifested itself (Marie was away in London and Blixen was in boarding school), before I could write my report. It was raining, I had noted… though this seems strangely irrelevant and it was not usual for me to note such extraneous circumstances, I detest formless interventions, lyricism, irrelevant conjunctions conjured up simply to paint a scene…though Blixen’s comment about the rain, made as she stretched her shapely legs out over my balcony while replacing the sunglasses she had on over her forehead… forged an uncanny connection with the autopsy report. Gottlieb’s body was still dripping when I arrived. I smelled a woman’s perfume in the bedroom. Something French. Blixen suggested, half-jokingly, that I turn the Rastoni restaurant (which wasn’t doing much for me I admit), into an art gallery. I listened with interest. There are enough restaurants in the resort, she said.

  The Irukandji jellyfish eats and excretes through the same aperture. I am not a great eater. I’ve always preferred small, meagre dishes to large Queensland-style meals. I do not like places which display signs that say: All you can eat. I’m more inclined towards emaciation. I had never really wanted a partnership in the Rastoni restaurant. It was Carter Cordillion who made me the offer; a rather generous one. Carter would like to get me into his bed, but not while Janet was alive. The thing though, about the Irukandji jellyfish, is that it has three eyes. It sees things differently; so much so I thought the art gallery a good idea.

  Grifting

  The dark one and the blonde one. It was the dark one who left her diary on the banquette. I’m not returning it now…that would mean I had probably read it…besides, identifying myself is not something I do, and the blonde one will recognise me. I wear nondescript clothes…blue jeans, loafers, pastel shirts. I always wear different glasses, sunglasses, reading glasses, mirror shades. Sometimes I shave, sometimes I sport a light beard. I practise walking with a stoop, limping a little, walking straight-backed like an army colonel, briskly, effortlessly sliding over seats, easing out of doors. Absent-minded eccentricity is my greatest cover. I never feel that I will be caught, in order to preserve, as naturally as possible, a demeanour of affronted self-respect when the moment occurs. If challenged, I always distractedly produce authentic credit cards or sometimes I even pay in cash.

  Grifter/grafter: a sneak thief. Not a polite etymology, since some believe the word ‘graft’ comes from the word ‘job’, meaning excrescence. I agree. I blame my truncated education. Not a great one: waiter/barman; barman/waiter. At least I know the workings of hotels. I know jobs. When the chambermaid, for example, is in the bedroom, she always turns on the TV. Making beds can be monotonous. No one can hear anything when Oprah Winfrey is on. When the maid does the bathroom, I scan for briefcases and watches. In corridors, during mini-bar replenishments, I pick off whisky and cognac from the drinks trolley. I make sure I go up and down the lifts a few times so the staff recognise me. I fiddle with plastic room cards if confronted, complain about demagnetised strips. I never go onto a floor if I hear a walkie-talkie. Fire-escapes are the best exits. Sometimes you can be lucky. The early-bird checkout will drop his card into a slot in the concierge’s desk. You ring the concierge from an in-house phone – you need him now, you’re maintenance and the lift door is stuck. Collect the card from behind the slot. Sometimes they forget to wipe the code for the next guest. Sometimes you can only break into the gym or the poolside deck…where you can have brunch on the same room tab. Now and again I ring for a late checkout, queue for lunch, study the room carefully, go to the toilet when the buffet is crowded and slip out, walking briskly, heading for free drinks at the next gallery opening; canapés at a book launch; unbadged convention dinners.

  I was attracted to the blonde one on the plane. Now I’m rather interested in the dark one; the older woman. They are so happy to see one another they don’t notice I’m listening in. Sometimes you can find out where they’re staying. But I’m not getting much from this conversation. I pull out her diary which I’ve re-covered in brown paper, try to match the voice to the writing.

  8

  Blixen is in her last year in medical school and I’m trying to talk her out of going onto an internship where she’ll work double time for no money, learning on the job to do what I did for twenty years, a jack-of-all-trades, prescribing drugs, delivering babies, cleaning out pus, suturing wounds, picking out glass, giving myself regular hepatitis shots, tetanus shots, flu shots, looking down throats and up anuses. You’ve got to be dedicated to people, I said. It would be better to specialise. Why didn’t you, Jude? Blixen asked. Because…well…you know the answer. Blixen nodded. Your father the specialist. No, the researcher. He wasn’t interested in people. A doctor? he used to ask, who wants to be a doctor? You think I want a dingy practice in Pigalle peering at penises or breathing the foetid exhalations of old crones? Have patients steal my ether for personal sniffing, hear them snivelling behind doors, pushing their children forward onto my knees, kids whose bums are seething with worms, their noses oozing, while I listen to their hacki
ng coughs and catch their spew in a basin? You think that is heroic?

  You see how I was not interested in his rhetoric. Words should cleanse, not sully. It was those ready-made phrases which came out of him so easily which pushed me in the opposite direction. Words are physicians of the mind…Aeschylus. Don’t quote Aeschylus to me please, Blixen said, and I saw that she was disturbed by what I was saying. Her father had quoted Aeschylus to her: how words should dissect, fumigate, sterilise the physical loathsomeness of sin. He made everybody heroic, Blixen said, speaking of Walter Gottlieb her father, so much so that his book was a tribute…the whole thing a tribute to failure, Blixen said, and all you speak of is success, the success of art, the success of business…

  I thought Blixen was going to cry. I thought I had touched a raw nerve, but I am always doing this to people I think are worthy of being touched. Rastoni’s was filling up. I ordered the seafood carbonara, the Stella Maris water, the Lacrima Christi del Vesuvio 2001. Gastronomy mimicked religion and anticipated medical methods. Surgery, after all, is not only a cutting up of sacrificial victims…you learn from observing pork butchers how to put it all back again, festively, in the window. Your father wrote his book whilst suffering a fugue, I said, just to change the subject. Blixen sighed and looked away. Her eyes were glassy. I tried to fill the awkward silence which followed. It now seems to me he intended it to be read only after his death. He spoke as a dead man, Blixen murmured…out of time, about things which the living couldn’t recognise. My father tore up his manuscript you know, and then pasted fragments of it together. Reading him was like…I don’t know…reading a history of wounds. His publisher did well editing and marketing it. Yes, I said. Then came Jason Redvers’ hatchet job.