by Brian Castro
It took some time before Blixen spoke. He was trying to make some money to help his father, she said. I’m sorry, I explained to her, I don’t quite understand. The afternoon outside my windows had broken into a grey squall massing on the horizon. Soon patients will be queuing in reception. My evening regulars: the middle-aged women with sinus problems caused by low pressure and humidity; the jellyfish victims no longer boisterous with bravado. Sometimes the wind turns everyone anxious. It seems, Blixen said, Carter got into difficulties in Africa…
I didn’t urge her to say more, because this is the way I was brought up by my father. You neither urge nor encourage. They soon tell all. My father was not urged to make statements he later regretted, first about the Aryan status of his wife, then about the Vichy régime. It was he who forced the Kahnweiler to close in 1943, writing an article in the Croix de Fer newsletter about the gallery’s ‘decadent turn’. No, one’s urges should be one’s own and one should take full responsibility for them. I suggested Blixen take a hot bath. In it, she let me rub her back. I pointed out significant moles and asked her to take notice, have them checked. I did not mention her fair skin. How she looked just like a younger version of Fabiana. She should spike up her hair with gel; immerse herself in the balm of things past.
Difficulties in Africa…the rich indulge in deliberate wastage, I was about to say, when Blixen informed me she was giving up medicine to join a Buddhist convent. I didn’t tell her she was throwing everything away. I didn’t say what a mad idea I thought that was, that the rich indulge in deliberate wastage, that they let themselves be carried away by a rip-tide, that the Nerval-Gottlieb fortune should be squandered on a child who could have been a Schweitzer, but who chose to push prayer wheels and chant mantras to child gods. I did not say anything when Blixen told me she was turning over all her paintings…inherited from her great-grandmother Julia Grace…turning over all of them to me, to kick off the launch of the Kahnweiler Gallery, in a stunning exhibition of old and new, in a vernissage unseen in this country, attended by dignitaries and art lovers from all over the world.
Blixen had an unstable lineage. Someone will have to pay; someone will be sacrificed. I retreated from the bathroom. Maybe she was missing Blimunde, ‘connecting’ with her. The twinning theory never worked for me. She was escaping from malevolent time…giving away her legacy; her inheritance of guilt.
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Slide #5 Carukia Fabiana
On the other side of her family, the tearaway Fabiana. You can imagine: fine hair ruffling in the harbour breeze. The twins. Blixen came first and she averted her eyes from the baby; could not bear to look at what had been inside her, the demons of Gemini…was there something from Siam as well, a message? The child was trying to attach, imprint, find its mother, its unfocused eyes roving, folding back. Then the second. Blimunde. She looked. It was all right. They were not joined. The doctors were right. How clear to her that she cared about normalcy! How she cared. Then came a dark cloud and it settled on the mother’s face. There was no hormonal rush, no spurting breast. She could not give any more. All had been taken away from her. And now, so were her babies.
Years later, Levine’s be-ringed fingers. He had grown old with addiction, thin and dark. Levine, the North Sydney dealer and private investigator…whom Gottlieb tried to imitate in a grotesque and ludicrous pantomime, was rubbing his fingers over her unproductive nipples. Levine drove a big car. You couldn’t imagine Gottlieb in a pink Chev. Or maybe you could, his hair flying in the wind while discoursing on Hegel. But Sol Levine, whose jealousy ran his reason, produced a razor in his hand and held it to Fabiana’s jugular. Have there been any children? From me? You better come clean, girlie…if I’m whacked I need to have them in the will. She knew Levine was broke. She hired Sergio for protection and let out her silos to itinerants and went nowhere without her pack of dogs. It was only a matter of time before Levine called on her again, following an ageing cyclist from a Newtown nightclub. Levine drove out to Putty in his pink Chevrolet. It was just a matter of luck for her that Redvers had his accident that day, and when Levine heard the explosion coming from the waterhole, he legged it to his car, only to find it gone. He hitched a ride on a semitrailer and disappeared in Sydney. Six months later, Fabiana left for Rio. From there, a third country with no extradition treaty. She bequeathed Barringila to Blixen, and it was there that Blixen wanted to retire to her Buddhism and meditation. She would build an ashram out of the ruins. You could imagine all the ghosts. Maybe incense would cure the air and chanting would drown out the voices, ream out all the skeletons from hollowed trees.
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We came to this country with poisons, my father and I, after the suicide of my mother. Dr Sarraute (in Australia it rhymes with ‘carrot’), crated his whole collection and had it shipped under refrigeration. When the right technology came along, he told me, this will be like gold dust. It was the sixties, when France ran with recriminations, revisions and revisitations of what one’s father did during the Occupation. The Algerian war exploded lives for all to see in the newspapers. Was my father a collaborator? Did he save my Jewish mother by erasing her past? He knew about DNA. Undoubtedly, as the journalists pointed out, he didn’t rescue her. He wrote letters to powerful friends. He was careful not to incriminate himself. This was cause to be reviled. Nor did he save himself; neither with his champagne baths nor his determination to forget, wandering off to other countries to find a tropical hideaway. He died in Fiji while I was in medical school in Sydney, of a rare blood disease. I kept a sample of his blood in my industrial fridge, building on the micro-array of codes documented in his deoxyribonucleic acid. I found toxins in the mitochondria. At the university they called me a vamp. Vampire, to make it clear. Not flattering. A blood expert. Blood orange, they also called me: My black hair of which I was ashamed, which I had dyed red, still left a white streak.
Carter Cordillion’s pathology report turned up today. My receptionist rang and left a message for him. He didn’t call back. Blixen was making preparations to build an ashram at Putty. The Kahnweiler Gallery was starting to look like a real art gallery, with a spiral staircase in the centre of the ground floor, circling up through permanent artworks to a space above for current exhibitions. Carter didn’t press me for payment of my instalments. Instead, he sent me a note, written shakily on what felt like papyrus. He would brook no discussion. He wanted me to have lunch aboard his cruiser on Tuesday. If I didn’t turn up he would rescind the property deal.
That morning Janet was not skimming the horizon, hanging from her Chinese kite. The tanker was nowhere to be seen. It was an absolutely blank day, a glazed, layered painting of grey lines with a filigree of dark tentacles where a tropical storm was brewing. I walked down to the jetty. I was about half an hour late. Carter’s cruiser, with its exhausts curdling the water, its transom bubbling like a cauldron, bobbed slowly beside the jetty. Mounds of jellyfish rode the swell astern. He saw me walking up and came out from the bridge to greet me. He had a shadow on his cheeks…that wry, defeated smile which said we had once been intimate and that I had not played the game. He held my arm and helped me aboard and then let his hand linger for a brief moment. Although the day was not hot, his palm was sweating. The aft deck was set up with a table and chairs, wine glasses, ice buckets and a basket of prawns. He said butterfish was on the menu. He offered me pink champagne, which I refused. He asked me to unhitch the bowline and he eased the boat out into the glassy cove. I was slightly nauseous. In about ten minutes we were near the reef. Carter showed me where we could glide over the coral, where it was colourful and shallow, without jellyfish, and then he took the boat out into the blue, serious water. Before we dine, he said, what’s the prognosis?
The water became rougher and when I told him he looked away from me to the stern and nodded as though he had expected this news all along and it seemed he had suddenly aged ten years, his shoulders slumping and his cheeks sagging, a look which I had seen on others when I pronounced a death
sentence, and you just have to observe their reactions, make sure they don’t turn suicidal or hysterical, but most of the time they are resigned, and Carter was even looking a little happy, relieved, knowing he had less than two months to live, because the toxins had caused the cells in his blood to revolt, caused them to die inside his veins, and he was already dead, and knowing this was like jettisoning the lifebuoy, any hope which had been weighing him down…it was the worst thing, hope. But now all the fight had gone out of him, and there was peace, and even a need to square one’s conscience, reveal what one had spent one’s lifetime concealing, the rapacity that had been driving him from the moment he was born, naturally enough staving off hunger and despair, but which had killed any empathy, anything other than material wealth, so now he didn’t quite understand this sudden need to be human, why now, why this moment to look inward? The fear of not being missed. There was nothing much inside. I asked him where Janet was, why she was not para-sailing and he looked at me in an almost aggressive manner and then smiled and said she was at home, but he was distracted and gunned the motor so the boat slipped from the crest of a wave and began to bounce and slump, spreading more foam from its stern.
I wasn’t in Africa, Carter said after a while. I think I knew that already. Everything bad Carter contracted came out of Africa, but I took that to mean a place he shouldn’t have gone. I went to Los Angeles, he said, with Sam, and she took me out to an African snake farm where they had hundreds of varieties of poisonous serpents and she was learning how to milk them and make them harmless for a short time because she needed to dance with a boomslang coiled in her bosom…it was for a floorshow in Vegas…and the snake-keepers, they had a fancy name, herpetologists, warned her the common tree viper from sub-Saharan Africa was an extremely dangerous, greenish-brown snake, delivering a potent hemotoxic venom with its folded fangs. Sam always liked extreme risk, Carter said. She was going to read out all the snake information at the beauty pageant and then produce the reptile and allow it to nestle between her breasts. She had been bitten many times by other snakes and some of the poisons sent her into a sexual frenzy, she said, and I stupidly volunteered to be first to be bitten by a milked boomslang, what the heck, maybe some of this snake venom would drive out all my other viruses, I figured. Well, it all went horribly wrong. I thought I could hold the snake in a trance. They gave me an anti-venom serum but I was allergic to it and then I had to have blood transfusions and chased ambulances all over California, finding doctors willing to diagnose me, washing out bad blood, getting a high each time they stuck the needle in.
You’re a fool Carter, I said. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for saying it, but he smiled and said he was committed to death and he was sorry he asked Blixen to get him more poison and the dear girl brought him morphine. You trained her well, he said flicking a cigarette he didn’t light into the sea. He was pushing on the throttle handle and the boat lifted its nose and he was making for a tanker which had appeared unnoticed by me, on our right, blowing black smoke, and I thought for a moment he was going to crash the boat beneath the ship’s rusty bow, readying myself to leap out, but he was warning it to sail further away from the reef. Damn pilot’s asleep, he said and blew the cruiser’s klaxon and then stepped out on deck to wave the ship back into the inner shipping route and a seaman on the bridge waved back, mistaking it all for some drunken game rich white guys got up to in this part of the world. Then Carter was on his radio and he was calling REEFREP, to report dangerous shipping and the radio crackled and I wondered if I would survive all this heroism and finally I said to him I’d like to go ashore now, and I think I disappointed him by not wanting anything to eat and only accepting a glass of mineral water, a bottle of which he reluctantly dragged out of the fridge. Carter poured himself a whisky and threw the prawns overboard and was back to his old self, making sure the cruiser was docking safely in the marina, fussing over hawsers and buffers. On the jetty he handed me a manila envelope. The gallery is yours, he said.
Graffiti
It means inscription; claw; scratch. They found those in the ruins of Pompeii. Ash-embalmed victims in the act of scrawling their names on the walls. They wanted to be named, to be known in death. Make their mark. Kids have already painted graffiti on the ochre walls of the Kahnweiler Gallery in Rim Cove. They’ve drawn huge penises. This is an old practice. In the sixteenth century Montaigne complained of this penis desire, three times as extravagant, he emphasised, chalked on the walls of the great houses. I’ve got a casual day job with the Council scrubbing off graffiti with a high-pressure steam hose. I didn’t give my real name. Graves, Robert. ‘Grave-’ – to dig, inscribe. I once worked for the Council digging graves. Whenever I’m short of money, the Council is a good bet for some day labour. I’ve got a name on all the lists, copied from gravestones. Graft. It’s worth following up.
I guess I can always hold this journal over until I work out a way of getting a reward for it. One has to do this carefully. I don’t know what Dr Sarraute would do to get this back. She shouldn’t be using confidential patient information like this. I could maybe copy something from it to show that it is authentic and that my interest in helping return it is genuine. Graft – a pencil-shaped shoot. That’s all I possess. Graft and no boodle.
There was no moon that night when I went out to the pine trees again, on the edge of the promontory in the national park at Cedar Bay. I thought I was dreaming that night when I saw Travis Cordillion burying something in the sand and now I was trying to find the spot, see if there was a trace of his digging, but there was nothing, just empty beer bottles left by amateur fishermen; burnt driftwood where they tried to start a fire and gave up, as driftwood is hard to burn unless you gather it further inland, and out on the reef there was a light which wasn’t moving. A tanker? Dropping off another load of drugs, weighed and marked by crayfish buoys which Travis would pick up? But the light wasn’t moving. I stepped back behind the pines. Sat down on the needles and watched for more than an hour. These narrow channels through the reefs are dangerous for shipping. The Messiah will enter through an aperture. Every day I dream of a catastrophe, which will install a new time. That is the grifter’s salvation: that things will not be the same again. I heard the familiar burp of the jet ski. It was coughing and spluttering and it seemed that Travis was having some trouble. He waded ashore and dragged it onto the sand. Backed his trailer up. It wasn’t Travis. In the dim light of the cabin console I caught a glimpse of a face. It was a black man. Perhaps someone wearing a balaclava. He took off without lights and bounced dangerously over the verge. I walked down to the water’s edge, very slowly, just in case he decided to return. The water was black. The fact that there was no moon made it all the more sinister. I took off my sandshoes and tested my fear. Amorphous, elemental sea. It buoyed me up. The water was warm, heavy, with a coating on it. My feet came away black. The tanker I was watching had run aground on the reef and was leaking a massive amount of fuel oil.
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When Dr Judith Sarraute looked out her surgery window that morning, she could not see anybody para-sailing on the horizon. There was a sharp glare coming off the water and she observed an oily sheen on it which made her nauseous. The tanker was still aground on the reef and it would take several hours while the tugs waited for the tide before it could be towed out to sea. The incident had already made all the national news bulletins and it was reported that Rim Cove developments would take huge losses. There were no fish in the sea. And now an oil spill.
Towards the late afternoon they pulled the tanker off. The bay was ringed with lines of booms. Volunteers were spraying detergent on the beaches. It would take weeks, they said, for everything to return to normal. It was almost evening; martini hour in lounges and bars in normal times. The sky had turned a steely blue. The tourists had gone. Dr Sarraute stirred her drink on her balcony. She only had three patients today. One case of haemorrhoids; a woman with an ingrown toenail; Mickey Jones wanting Viagra, sitting there smiling slyly be
neath his beret. It was just upon sunset when they found Carter Cordillion’s body entangled in prawning nets. They called the only doctor on duty. They had a floater, the policeman said to Judith over the phone.