The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  There I go opening up wounds. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to stir up Blixen’s painful memories of how Redvers’ book came out just before Gottlieb’s novel…the former consisting of allegories of the master stealing from the student, the professor filching stories from the acolyte. It tarnished a good novel, I said, trying to compensate for my mistake, and that publisher of his… Blonsky?…Kapuszinsky? Brezinsky, Blixen added helpfully, yes, Brezinsky the libel lawyer, I said, would have known how to turn an allegory into a claim…the plague of plagiarism, or some such thing.

  I stopped there. I didn’t want to hurt Blixen anymore by getting into such a conversation. There’s that pale drifter again. I’ve seen him lifting the tips from tables. He thinks he’s not being observed, but I watch the back of his head reflected in the mirror on the Rastoni wall, beside the photograph of Ernest Hemingway and a huge swordfish.

  9

  Blixen gets distracted, in the same way her father used to be sidetracked by mirrors. She peers through a kaleidoscope, not a microscope. Then again a kaleidoscope is not that distant from a microscope. While she allows fragments to fall into place differently each time, serendipitously, my micrological procedure isn’t any more objective than hers. I frame a particle of jellyfish to search for its thickness and it melts away from the light to reform differently. New worlds come to life under illumination. Reconstituting and repairing. But first I have to slice through the jelly. Surgery as sculpture. What looks disfigured in its everyday impenetrability, appears properly ordered from another point of view. I am far more aggressive than Blixen, and I sometimes wonder if I have lost my life for having no romance. Take the Chironex fleckeri box jellyfish, which was thought to be the most common jellyfish around here, locally known as the sea wasp or sea stinger. This venomous creature was known as Chiropsalmus quadrigatus, from which the common name ‘quadie’ was derived. But this is not the same as Carukia barnesi, which is far more lethal. True, the latter is a cubozoan, like the ‘quadie’, but such single-minded, single-eyed obsession over having four sides may be limiting. I squint but I don’t see where the two animals have diverged. I only see my patient record cards, my ordered laboratory and shelves of drugs, my victims in their vinegar bath. Jellyfish deserve more poetry, more than my quadratic field.

  Blixen is far less restricted. She has her colourful kaleidoscope: her gorgeous body; her childhood memories; her innocent personality; her heroes and heroines. The first principle of wooing is to make oneself sevenfold, wrote Walter Benjamin.

  10

  I’m busy treating Mickey Jones for burns. He’s old and his hand is blistered from trying to douse his flaming barbeque with brandy. He’s of the old school, a Francophile, wears a beret, but has never travelled overseas. He relives the First World War although he wasn’t even born then. He comes to see me because he says French women speak beautifully and they give him a hard-on, although he no longer remembers how that felt. I change the bandage on his hand with care. I do this tenderly, more tenderly than usual. Perhaps it’s because Blixen is working as my nurse, observing everything I do.

  When we have a free moment between patients, I speak to her of my art gallery idea. I’m feeling flippant and I tell her I’m going to call it The Museum of Forgery. After all, no one knows what I’m going to put in it. World-famous reproductions, perhaps. Oh yes, I do, Blixen says, and kisses me on the neck while I look out to sea and observe Janet Cordillion, finally aloft after several failed attempts. I’m going to call it the Galerie Kahnweiler, after the gallery which used to be at the end of my street in Paris, I tell her.

  It was mid-afternoon when the first sting patient of the season was brought in. A boy of about fourteen, of Middle-Eastern background, his mother beside herself with worry, pulling at her chalabi, not having been warned that Australia was full of venomous creatures which you could hardly see, full of danger signs in a language few who come from distant cultures could read, full of words just as deadly when unseen. Her jewellery flashed beneath. The boy was sweating, his arms and legs in severe cramp, moaning with every intake of breath, his voice trembling. I asked Blixen and his mother to restrain him from touching the stings. He’s shouting in Arabic now, and his mother embarrassed, apologises. We smile, shake our heads, it’s okay, we do not know the words. I draw a hypodermic and he is silenced. Normally, I would inject a dose of Fentanyl – with no known neurotoxicity; but there is a new drug on the market. I ask his mother if he is allergic to sheep, to sheep products. No? Then 2 ml of Parenteral injected slowly into a vein perhaps; no, I think 6 ml injected slowly into a muscle; his suffering finally punctured. The results are good. Before day’s end they’ve brought in three more cases. Jellyfish are being washed up on the beach, nematocysts discharging into those who swept upon them unwarily.

  Blixen and I open a champagne. Let’s hope there are no night swimmers. They’ve set up arc lights on the beach, hammered in warning signs. They do not know that light attracts jellyfish, which are most numerous eight to ten days after a full moon, their canopies extending so they rise further up to the surface of the water. But you can’t tell functionaries to turn off their lights. It’s a matter of public safety, they will say. Times are such that everything is a drama, an emergency…it’s an obsession with flashing lights and sirens. No one reflects on the idea of plagues, of epidemics as having biblical precedence, cyclical occurrences, wheels within wheels. No one reads the implications of why terror comes from not knowing life’s reproductions. Why do we name a species of jellyfish, the scyphozoa, the Medusa, for instance? Formerly a beautiful virgin whose gaze could turn men to stone, Medusa slept with Poseidon, the god of the sea, in Athena’s temple. Athena was livid with rage and transformed Medusa’s hair into live snakes. She was hydra-headed. If one serpent was killed, another sprang up in its place. It was a ghastly reproduction of beauty. Medusa was the victim in the end…because she was once seductive. One sample is intriguing. A million is an invasion. For that, people have been exterminated.

  Look at Blixen. Her mind inseparable from her body. She watches television in order to spot our little beach on the news. Your great-grandmother, I began, speaking over the voice-over on the screen, came up here for holidays. Mmm, she said, drawing up her legs under her in the way little girls did, then stretching out a hand began to stroke my hair, that white lick which has persisted in my coiffure since early adolescence, something I put down to my father’s experimentation, a vial of peroxide or something more evil. I breathe with difficulty upon another’s touch. I never knew my great-grandmother, Blixen yawned. Her chest filled like an hourglass and suddenly Blixen appeared like her great-grandmother Julia Grace.

  I’m tired of patients, Blixen said. Others are too much in me. I recognised this last statement. It was a complaint heard often in my surgery. Patients who had suffered some mental breakdown. Too many voices in the head. Too much for the system. After all, Blixen was a twin of a dead twin. She lost Blimunde, half of herself, at the age of five. Drowned in her father’s pool. But I don’t need to go into all that. All the business of Fabiana’s psychosis. The history of her breakdowns, the way she lived several lives; city lives, country lives; how she always returned from the city looking for respite from all those people inside her. Before they were settled with their father, the twins alternated between the flat in Potts Point, the shop in Double Bay and the farm at Putty. Roger, her husband, enjoyed having the twins on his lap, showing them the burrs he had picked out of his lumberjacket, making sheep noises. But I think he grew tired of Fabiana’s absences. She would just get up and leave him there; she would go missing days at a time. He suspected it was a sort of concubinage in reverse. She sojourned in several houses. He didn’t know, when he married her under that big almond tree behind the big house at Putty, that she had this fracture in her. He didn’t know she was quite incapable of raising children normally, having dragged them in a pram from flat to flat in Kings Cross, neglecting to pay her bills, her electricity supply cut off. When
she bought a car, she drifted off while driving and rammed several vehicles outside the Conservatorium of Music and a wheel came loose and bounced into the Botanical Gardens, knocking over a fertility monument shaped like a breast. The police found two babies in a large cardboard box on the floor of the back seat. Roger didn’t know about that because her friends hushed it up. Nor did he know that her neighbours had tried to help her and that she had accused them of interference, screaming obscenities while she threw bottles at them as they rang the child-welfare authority. After they had been married a month, she and Roger began quarrelling virtually every day. It was the result of a mixture of alcohol and provocation; seduction and jealousy. Minor squabbles turned into suicidal odysseys, and once he had to rescue her from a cheap motel in Darwin, where she had been held captive by a complete stranger. The police were not called on that occasion. He hadn’t researched her past carefully enough. Otherwise, he would have found that it was stubbornness, it was pride, it was the injustice of it all…that she had not been gifted with the maniacal discipline of a great artist.

  It was equally unfair for Walter Gottlieb. He had just left the priesthood. He had little money. He had to marry Marie de Nerval to convince the authorities of legal custody. He just had to make it work. And then on a cloudy day, with his friend Redvers sunk in a fugue by the side of the pool, Blimunde had floated out of her inflated angel wings and had found bottom. I found Gottlieb’s notes beside his bath.

  11

  From the notebooks of Walter Gottlieb

  The sixteenth-century mind was not the same as ours. There was a lot more doubt. A lot more superstition and speculation. In comparison, we are quite uninventive. We fear failure. We adopt received opinions, sitting in our cages constructed by others. We live for them. We speak their inanities, just to make noises. We no longer ruminate like Montaigne, who described his breath as ‘excremental’, pushing out only digested thoughts. As Redvers used to say, even shit could be philosophy. On his deathbed, Montaigne’s remaining moments contained a dialogue with imaginary servants as he clung to the social meaning of dying together (‘commourans’ was the word he used), under the seductions of sleep. Meet me at the next tavern, he said, I have never succeeded in keeping some part of me from always wandering. He didn’t mean a smoky chamber at the inn. He wanted to be in a convenient part of the house. Nowhere moreso than in the bathroom, being bathed in brine for his ulcerations. In the sixteenth century, hot baths were said to have caused madness by overheating the liver and putrefying the humours. It was observed how flowers wilted when placed in a hot tub. These observations were noted down in flowery figures of speech, excessive in their encouragement of tepidness and moderation. The bath, apparently, was morbid. It provoked thoughts about death. For Montaigne, it had a familiar feel. He was a melancholic.

  He always referred to his friend Booty, or Étienne de La Boétie, as La Boitie, unconsciously associating a limp (boiterie) with a lure (boête). Booty suffered from terminal melancholy, which Montaigne was trying to avoid without success. Booty lived under the sign of saturn. In a Zürich library I once came across this illustration. It’s a portrait of Jason Redvers…I’ve seen him naked, asleep on my lawn. He may be holding a crutch, or the handlebars of his bicycle. He’s just lopped off desire with that sickle.

  A dialogue and a phone call I found Blixen in the bath. It was a bright blue morning and no tourists were walking on the sand outside, no one stepping between the mounds of jelly. The beach was deserted and the jetty was devoid of cormorants. No one was fishing. I heard voices, and at first they seemed to be coming from an open window, but it was Blixen in the bath. I knocked and went in. She said she was exorcising ghosts. Exercising? She smiled and then I saw that she was in tears. She tried to hide her face in a washcloth. I took it from her gently and scrubbed her back. She was better then. I said the bath was not a good place to be on one’s own. This was the wrong thing to have uttered. I’m going to leave soon, Blixen said.

  I try not to speculate. When I observe, I am silent. When I speculate, I always say the wrong thing. I do not know how to fill the silence while waiting for fragments in the kaleidoscope to fall into place. For Blixen, this silence is a condemnation. In the sixteenth century it would have been accepted as a form of skepsis. A dignified doubt which served coherence and unity. I am not one for soothing words when there is no intellectual solution which justifies them. Your father always walked with a slight limp, I said to Blixen. I asked him about it several times when he came into my Double Bay surgery for his blood-pressure tablets, his Prozac, his Viagra.

  You lie back in the bath while I place a hot towel behind your head.

  It was not a real limp, you finally said. He zigzagged all over Portugal with that lurching gait. Doing research. I’ve shown you his notebooks.

  Montaigne also walked with a limp, I said. Perhaps it was from falling off his horse, but I rather doubt whether it was a real physical disability. Baudelaire, I believe, walked erratically, bobbing and weaving.

  Yes, I know, you said. Redvers had written about it too. I don’t know if any of it was true. He was a piss-taker. I used to see him shaking himself on the lawn at midnight. He was probably making fun of Daddy. Redvers always scorned hospitality, and to urinate on Daddy’s million-dollar lawn was employing his own freedom of expression.

  I don’t think so, I said. Redvers had a prostate problem which was going to kill him. The boot was on the other foot. Come to think of it, they were both aware of their mortality. Montaigne wrote of his love for cripples because they resisted being dragged along by the current. Erasmus declared that since Amazons crippled their future studs, it was crippled men, not crippled women, who were more sexually desirable. If that’s an affectation, it’s a positive one for me nevertheless. Friends, after all, were crutches for all kinds of repression.

  This argument of mine was unconvincing. I noticed you frowned. You hold your breath and slide for a moment under the water. I know this moment of yours. See nothing, hear nothing. You rise, blowing like a seal. Why do you hate baths? you ask. They are so purifying.

  It’s good to attend to yourself, I said to Blixen. Then I left the bathroom. I did not mean to upset her. I did not mean to imply her father had been unethical, faking an intellectual limp to cover his tracks. Those who do not attend to their being are ready for a fall. I know Blixen is half Blimunde and she is not always in control. She has bath fugues. You cannot drown in a bath unless drunk or drugged; given over completely. After our talk, Blixen now bathes in private and she has locked the door.

  I’m in two minds about locks on bathroom doors. Builders install them as a matter of course, though the number of deaths in bathrooms should be a warning to us all: Jim Morrison – heart attack in his suds; Keith Relf – electrocuted while flaying his Fender in the tub; Catherine the Great never emerged from her visit – she was pushing at the door the wrong way when she had a stroke; Claude François – the teen idol with the sequined suits who sang My Way – Clo-Clo, as he was known – electrocuted himself in the bath while standing up to change a light bulb. I am totally against cheap hotels. Then again, if Marat had had a lock on his bathroom door, Charlotte Corday would not have been able to stab him to death. And despite W. H. Auden’s public praise of Man’s private bath – his Encomium Balneae, as a site of Edenic and carnal pleasure with a lock on the inside – it was the unlocked door which saved Carter Cordillion.

  Carter Cordillion was frantic when I received his phone call last April. He sounded really desperate, and was in a great panic. Please come right away, he pleaded. My place. Break down the bathroom door if you have to; the neighbours aren’t home. I wasn’t going to do this without further information. It occurred to me from the sound of his voice that this was not a joke or ploy to get me into his bathroom. Can you tell me what the problem is? I asked. No. He could not. Something intimate had gone terribly wrong. Could I please come now? It would be your duty of care, he said. A failure of care, he insisted. Why don�
��t you call the ambulance? I asked. As I said, he shouted, it’s intimate! Johnny Smee…he’s my mechanic…his brother’s the town paramedic. I can’t call them. Can you hurry?

  I drove over to the hacienda. His palm trees had dislodged some of their green coconuts. The red gravel on the drive was bright. The red tiles on the roof were too bright. The red brick path blinded me. I put on my sunglasses. Knocked on the front door. No one. I opened the door. Carter? I called. I heard a grunt. Judith! he yelled. Upstairs. Quickly. I walked up the sweeping stairs slowly. It was not a moment in which to be surprised. I did not want him appearing naked or in a towel, his gold chain around his neck, complaining about his gout or water in his ear. In the bathroom! He was struggling. In some pain. And there he was in the huge spa bath lying on his side with his head lolling above the oily water. I’ve got a lemon up my arse. What? I’ve pushed a lemon up my bum, he gasped. It’s stuck… all the way in. Hurting like mad. I helped him up. Hauled him over the edge of the tub. He was a big man and he used all the strength he had in his arms, but his legs were like jelly. I placed a few towels under him. His splayed legs were hairy. For an instant I thought of Montaigne, who contrasted the size of his imagination with his scanty penis. Mentula minuta. Carter had never shown much imagination, but now I was rethinking that. Pain shrivels. I searched in my bag and gave him a shot of muscle relaxant. Put on my gloves and fished out the lemon. I did not ask what he was doing with it up there. He looked immensely relieved. He smiled inanely and begged me not to tell anyone. Then he recovered himself and added that of course I would not tell; I was bound by professional ethics. I let myself out of his house. When I arrived back at the surgery I took a long time cleaning my arms with Hibiclens, removing all the bath oil, continuing my dialogue with Blixen, only the bathroom was empty and she was gone. The house was as bleak as the weekend ahead. There were no fish in the sea. I made myself a gin and tonic. No; no lemon.