The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  12

  It’s official, now listed as an ‘epidemic’, though the word really means a disease prevalent among a people, which has entered them from an outside locality. The word ‘plague’ is perhaps closer to the truth. Mounds of jellyfish have been washed up on the sand, now being cleared away by bobcats, pushed into pits and then covered over. Come look at this.

  Slide #2: Carybdea Rastoni

  This little creature is called the ‘Jimble’. It’s not deadly, though it can cause a weal on the skin…see how vinegar inhibits the discharge. Now watch as I apply methylated spirits…all the nematocysts are firing. The sound of firing and the smell of methylated spirits. 1943. My father doggedly continued with his experiments throughout the war, his smell the odour of ether and methylated spirits. He married my mother smelling like that in the church at Montmartre, and all the time the firing, now close, now far away, and while they were going home in the métro a Jewish woman threw herself in front of the train and workers had to drag out her body, my father placing a handkerchief soaked in ether over my mother’s nose so she could be led drowsily back through the streets and later, much later, long after the war, he told me she would never have survived even though he had married her, because her memories would have caught up with her in the end, but while all the firing was going on, they enjoyed a rather bourgeois life, despite the rationing, going down to the little restaurant at the corner of the rue de Vaugirard and the boulevard du Montparnasse, sipping minestrone, and all she could hear was the crackling which she thought was distant gunfire but which turned out to be the backfiring of trucks as they came speeding down towards the Seine, turning eastwards with 8000 Jews being deported to work camps, where they would later be pushed into pits and then covered over, my mother gripping the edge of the white linen tablecloth as she listened for the trucks, my mother who had a morphine habit on account of her guilt, on account of surviving by imposture, a Jewish woman married to a Catholic man who was a well-known specialist in human skin diseases, who kept morphine liberally stored in a cool meat safe, and there was my mother finally, stretched out on the table at the morgue when they had fished her out of the Seine… it was ten years since the end of the war…her dress over her head, and my father was shouting to the attendant to shut the door through which I was peering, and the door was pushed so hard it slammed onto my nose, tears of pain welling up into my eyes though it was not the same pain as that which lay in my chest as I watched my father bathing with his mistresses in his apartment, pouring champagne taché into the water, the women giggling with fleshy stupidity and shameless ignorance, when I saw through the keyhole with one eye what it was like to be enslaved to desire.

  13

  The condition of awareness is sensitivity to form, I said to Blixen as we drove up into the Daintree Rainforest to get away from the volume of patients. Blixen enjoyed herself that afternoon, hopping over the huge boulders in the river. Parrots swooped at great speed through trees, leaving just a dab of colour behind. Riverine birds, less colourful, dipped and swung up to misty peaks and the roaring and gushing of water drowned out conversation. On the other bank some Indigenous people…you didn’t see them at first until you glimpsed the red of their bandanas…were drinking the day away since no one paid them as guides anymore, and they drank to the reality of their rockspirits haunting the places from which the unaware would fall, deep into the ravine, for having violated the laws of form.

  Julia Grace violated the laws of form. Some of the letters between her and the poet Camilo Conceição have survived. You could have said she expressed too strong a desire for the cloudy lack of perspective in some of the Chinese paintings that he possessed, where distance was not accounted for, where mountains met the dimensions of prophets, and women, suspended midair, sailed in their silks over deadly gorges. Instead, Julia Grace said she did not think such paintings had much value. They were talked up in catalogues, she said. They didn’t subscribe to the principle of originality. What was certain was that a shipment of them had arrived at the Grace property a few months after she had returned home from France. She had borne a child by then, a daughter to whom she would point out stars in the huge night sky. They would mark out Venus and then Mars and Julia would map with her finger the arcades in Sintra where a swan had once settled upon her lap.

  Blixen, fixing a stare upon the roaring waters, said that she would like to give them to me as a gift. But a gift was always tainted with debt. Best to give a gift away. Friendship rested on divestment, not investment. Further surgery on the idea was needed, I said to her. I could see she was disappointed with my response, but the murky world in which these artworks had come into her possession through the coincidence of Fabiana’s disappearance overseas was not where I wanted to go. Besides, I didn’t wish to take possession of anything that was tainted with ancestral tragedy. God knows, I’ve already seen part of the Barringila collection from Putty which had been brought to Walter Gottlieb’s place at Double Bay and I had recognised some of Jason Redvers’ works among the Chinese collection, paintings he was forging in Milan in the late sixties, massproducing Francis Bacons with sales going to the Red Brigades. When Bacon moved studios he abandoned quite a few canvases, simply because they were too awkward to push through the narrow doors. He encouraged friends, poor artists, squatters, itinerants, to paint over them. One could come into possession of a genuine Francis Bacon beneath the top coat, just as one could come across a genuine Ma Yüan beneath one of the Conceição restorations. One could also buy an inane despoliation. I sat for him once, I said to Blixen. No, not for Bacon, but for Redvers. The result was not a fake and it wasn’t badly done either. He even signed the back of it Justine de Reviers, no doubt making fun of the way I’d always got his name wrong. I wonder if he knew that the infirmary at Auschwitz was called the Revier. You expected to die upon entering it. My mother would have preferred to expire there, perhaps would have willed it to arrive sooner, exhausted from her hard labour, making the most of a bed and a blanket with less lice. That’s where she would have given birth to me in May 1944. That’s where they did some experiments, coating newborn babies in lard and leaving them in the snow, timing their survival and their liquidation. One or two out of a hundred survived. Those who did, saved their mothers as well. All were given lukewarm baths in the Revier, their mothers set to work carrying crates of bottles containing blood, and then the same bottles containing a colourless liquid. There were potted plants in the corridors; tiny saplings.

  On the morning of the 25th of September 1940, at the border between Vichy France and Fascist Spain, the philosopher Walter Benjamin rested his head on his briefcase beneath an almond sapling. There was a warm westerly wind. Benjamin had less than twenty-four hours to live. Walter Gottlieb found that almond tree, fully grown, laden with nuts, at Port Bou. He told me that when he sat beneath it, he could recall someone else’s memories. He said: If you listen closely, you can actually hear the other’s recollection, gathering like a swarm of grasshoppers on a midsummer’s evening. This habit of sitting under trees may have been his refuge from his wife Marie de Nerval. But the susurration of grasshoppers – for that was the sound Fabiana was making beside him that fateful night when Marie was in Paris, the sound of Fabiana removing her skirt and her stockings, the sound of her climbing on top of him in his marriage bed – signalled a plague. He was losing his mind; losing himself to desire’s swarms. Gottlieb, I said, could not have been a Jewish name. God, after all, could never be named. Blixen ducked under the water. She was beneath the suds a long time. Then she rose and I handed her a towel. Not in Hebrew, she said. But it’s possible in German. The real family name, she said, was Goldberg.

  So Walter Goldberg made his way to his bathroom at one in the morning after Fabiana had left, every artery in his body constricted with guilt…there would have been a tight knot around his heart and his penis, flashing lights erupting behind his eyelids; there would have been wheels of fire, blacksmiths with eye patches, their red arms in m
olten metal, weaving a net so fine through which only time could escape…and in the bathroom he would have glimpsed, in the tiny aperture of his remaining moment of consciousness, the whole machinery of the Underworld.

  On the Cook Highway we pass Carter Cordillion’s gold Mercedes speeding the other way. Do you know him very well? Blixen asks. Not very well, I say, but Blixen knows I’m lying. I wonder if I should tell her the truth about everything. Trade a secret for her secret. It may have been what Fabiana told Redvers just before he accidentally blew himself up with a stick of gelignite down by the waterhole on the Putty property – bits of his clothes were scattered all over the branches (the locals said it was a very windy day; gale force winds which may have provided static electricity in the air, causing a spark in the leg wires, which Redvers had not insulated) − it may have been what she said to him that made him go down there to try to blow a hole in the rock with his gel. After all, when the wind blows, the mad are distressed. ‘If a dead tree falls,’ Fabiana said to him, ‘and is wedged in the fork of another, you might just alter your perspective and not notice it. On the other hand, if you are obsessed with it, you’ve got to figure out how to fell it – at some personal risk.’

  Anyway, that’s what the shop owner McCredie said.

  Wood for the fire; grist to the mill. All stories are caught in the forks of others.

  14

  It was at the Temple Meridien resort some years ago, when I first moved up to Queensland, that I met Carter Cordillion. I was looking for a place for my surgery and ideally, a double-storey building so I would have a view of the sea over the gorse. Carter was walking across the lobby with a hand outstretched, a palm which was remarkably soft, though he was quite rugged in appearance, and he was unshaven, dressed in his immaculate Armani suit, saying: ‘It sure is a pleasure meeting you…’ in what I believed to be an Irish accent, but which turned out to be transatlantic. It was a good meeting. Cordillion was true to his word and I picked up some promising real estate, since the Temple Meridien resort was at the far end of town on the paved concourse, my property only two houses along from it, on a small dirt road. Cordillion said mine would become the best street in the area, and as the second property facing the beach, the architecture of which he described as Caribbean tropical vernacular, my pavilion home would make a good business investment. Especially since the present occupant had had remote-controlled windows installed and the Italian Saturnia marble floors laid by real artisans. Carter liked my idea of doing the clinical business down in the old cottage and enjoying an unfettered private existence up the slope. Only the best patients would come to you, he said. Then he asked me all about toxicology.

  It was during my second meeting with him that he introduced his wife Janet to me. We met for dinner at the Poseidon Bar. Janet had taken too much sun and glowed like a radium dial, destined for a cancer ward. Her dyed ash-blonde hair and bottomless blue eyes interlaced with crow’s-feet gave her the appearance of an alien. She and Cordillion didn’t seem as if they were ‘together’. She hardly spoke except when we talked about reef sports. She invited me out on their cruiser and suggested para-gliding and underwater activities. I made a feeble excuse. Flying and diving were unnatural for humans. Carter guffawed, loosened his tie and before I knew what he was doing, had his hand on my knee under the long tablecloth. I had on my moiré skirt. It was a cold hand and I didn’t shift my leg. He let it lie there like a dead fish and then pinched at my stocking with little minnow gestures. I just wanted to see how far he would go. He didn’t. When Janet looked uncomfortable enough he brought his hand back up onto the table. There was a pulse which kept throbbing in the vein in his neck. This diastolic moment dilates the heart. The systolic contracts it. One extends and dissipates the body, sluicing it with blood. The other contracts the body in order for it to build force and escape from itself. Carter was trying to flee his own body. On his fifth visit to my surgery, he wanted some advice on sexually transmitted diseases. I sent him for a blood test, but not before he insisted on my examining his penis. I was not interested in such suggestions, unless there was some medical connection. But let me write this differently on his card. His mentula, as Montaigne would have put it, was swollen. I thought of my marine research: Ascidia mentula: predominantly occurring on the upper faces of circalittoral bedrock with little tidal flow. It has a rather barren, pink appearance due to grazing pressure from sea urchins. Cordillion’s member displayed signs of contusions caused by ligatures.

  Time also has a diastole and a systole, like a water clock; the dilation of a drop when it gathers momentum is followed by its contraction and dissipation when it splatters. The pressure and pleasure of my moment with Blixen was bound to be shattered. While I was attending to Carter, I saw his bronzed, towheaded son outside in the waiting room, engaging in an animated conversation with her, and she was excited, fawning, smiling just a little too much, looking just a little too young and pretty.

  Grafting

  I am a drifter. I work by association; sleights of hand; petty theft. I have always lived this way, and have been caught out only a few times. You learn from being caught; it makes you cleverer on the next occasion. I’ve found out that she is a doctor, the dark one, with a successful practice in town. Dr Judith Sarraute. Her network of associations is a very interesting one: high-flyers, resort owners, developers; the big end of a very small town. Of course they are hardly ever there. Seasonal people. Like me.

  To graft: to insert a graft into a branch or stem of another tree; to propagate by insertion; to implant. I suppose Dr Judith Sarraute has done some surgical implanting in her time. On the hotel internet I discovered something about a bungled sex-change operation. Sarraute was not the chief surgeon. She returned to being a GP after that. Fled Sydney. My profession, however, may be an even older one than surgery. For centuries they have been taking twigs from ancient trees, grafting them onto younger ones. My associations go back to Adam. We branch out; we connect and proliferate…sometimes to no end.

  I sit in this restaurant drinking sweet wine and study the hybrid rose they have in a vase on the table. The sun shines with a metallic glare and the sea is sick, heaving, dirty green. I notice these things because my survival depends on noticing. The white tablecloth burns my eyes and the fried fish I have eaten layers the emptiness with bones. There is hardly anyone in the restaurant and that spells trouble for me. It means I will have to leave when the waiter goes to the kitchen; slip out the side between the heavy plastic which they’ve let down to break the salt wind ruffling the tablecloths, knocking over the roses. A gold Mercedes cruises the waterfront. I recognise the heavy build of the driver; the five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, the slouch to one side, the way he works the wheel with one hand. I’ve seen him park at Cairns airport. On a connecting flight between Sydney and Los Angeles (I was stopping in Sydney, mingling with transit passengers…you never know what kind of duty-free you can collect from under seats on sleepy stopovers), I saw him embracing a woman. He was holding shopping bags in both hands. She looked like a porn star, dressed in a short golden chiffon skirt, leopard skin tights, black top with much cleavage. There was something about her that wasn’t right. For a brief second, I looked again…it’s not good for me to stare, not in my line of business. But there was something strange that stood out. I couldn’t be sure about the woman part of her. It was as if it had been grafted on. But then what do I know? I have to stay pallid, wallflowery, in order not to be noticed. It never pays to be too analytical. It’s hard work, going with the flow.

  The word ‘work’ is the original meaning of ‘graft’. But the meaning has slipped, deteriorated. One root has been corrupted, one branch rotted. I still consider it a trade, a craft. But look what they’ve done with it: scammer, sharper, chiseller, swindler, gouger, clip artist, con artist, beguiler, cheater, deceiver, trickster, slicker, welsher. People who use these words forget one thing: we are all codes and copies, melting, merging. Look at this DNA map they’ve just produced. I found
it in a catalogue. They tell me you can buy it at a huge price, the litmus paper dissolving beneath your microscope into key molecules from which you can distinguish double helices, twin spiral staircases of life, mortal coils. It’s strange, but I’ve always felt cheated by science, by scientific people. None of their results benefitted me; they did not make me happy beyond the three seconds or so of happiness I enjoyed every six months. I’m like the fishbones on my plate…left behind, fossilised…dead fish eyes won’t be seeing rainbows out there over the sea…in school I learned human skin colour comes from rainbows…it changes when seen through a prism…was it Mendel or Mendelssohn who discovered the chromatic scales? My brief forays into amphetamines have ruined my memory. I think I’m alone; singular. But really, I’m born to look like someone else. In my brief forays into sex I’ve often had the bored concentration of a barramundi in a drying billabong… beyond help…foggy…staring with fried cataracts at the harsh light of the tropics which turned a graft into an open sore, thinking how we loved one another because we were blind…oops, there he is, Cordillion, looking like a TV weatherman, coming into the restaurant, checking the sky through his mirror sunglasses…flesh, all too fleshy…How are you? Good. How’s Janet? I will ask him. He’ll try to flip through his mental Rolodex… Who the hell are you?…I will make the observation that it wasn’t Janet at the airport, the woman with whom he took the flight to LA, that he may want to pay for my meal…and another bottle of the Sancerre. But I think better of it, say nothing, and slip out through the side, briefly parting the plastic, my cheeks stinging with salt.