The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  When she looked at Carter’s body he had no face left. She saw bloated meat, a Francis Bacon study, a white object, grotesque and bland, in conformity with what appeared to be a human body, swathed in black fuel oil and wrapped in netting. She studied it with the disinterest she had applied during her years of surgery, matching appearance with reality when bodies crossed over. Yes, she confirmed it was Cordillion…the telltale tattoo inside the left thigh which he and Sam decided to get on a night out in Bangkok. She said they would have to phone for a forensic pathologist. They would have to transport the body to Cairns. The tall policeman, the one with a head that looked too small for his body, wanted to know if they should Glad-Wrap the corpse. He’s marinated, but not in extra-virgin, he said.

  29

  It had been a thirty-day epidemic and now the stingers were gone. The oil had blocked out their light, Judith Sarraute was saying to Blixen Gottlieb when she saw the latter off at the small Cairns airport where they were swabbed for explosives before they could get a drink. They talked about how foreign tourists were putting up shrines in the shower sheds to ward off future plagues. Carter Cordillion had committed suicide, Judith was saying. She was quite certain. There were other client details she could not speak about, but Blixen knew most of those anyway. As the call came for boarding they hugged, and then the older woman whispered in the other’s ear that all dirt dissolved in soap. The coast would be cleaned and the fish would return. One simply had to be observant, single-eyed, ambitious. The moment of understanding would come. The younger woman nodded. I’m sorry about breaking into the morphine safe, she said. Judith Sarraute shook her head: I’m just glad you’re finishing your studies. You’ll see that little by little your flights will diminish. It’s a bit like a thirty-day epidemic. Sooner or later fugues resolved themselves. They only had a limited range, a small number of octaves; they were made for portable harpsichords and clavichords. Sooner or later they returned to where they began. And then you will discover yourself outside yourself.

  30

  How much do you think a grifter could get for a doctor’s notes? And who is asking this question?

  Egress

  To shoot: to depart, to get away; shoot through.

  Landscapes, seascapes; they all overwhelm me. I don’t know why, but they come upon me with great sadness, a tree-lined corner here, a track leading to a windswept lookout, a public garden. They all possess a bittersweetness, like an old suppurating wound. It was because I was not busy that I suffered. I experienced the suffering of others, became engulfed by their sadness, suffocated by the lives I thought they lived. It was my own projection. They were not in the least disturbed by their lives, not in the least affected by landscapes and seascapes, save for some banal marvelling at nature.

  It had been a couple of years now since I’d come down to Rim Cove. The place had been dead a while and then revived. No more oil spills. The authorities didn’t allow tankers anywhere near the reef and they’d forced them out into deep-sea lanes. Stingers come and go in their season, drifting like me, and at the Ocean Temple bar they even have a cocktail called a Stinger, and you see that couple over in the corner? Well…just imagine…he’s passing his hand over hers and they gaze into each other’s eyes and soon they will go upstairs, and in their room they will draw the curtains and he will feel the need for speed, but will refrain, everything tending towards significance as though in a dream, but the dream is fractured by their anxiety, the dark glass reflecting light from their single florid lampshade. Same old story. Each move is the end of something, yet moving towards something they don’t yet believe can end. He addresses her breasts, undresses her a little, his hands like butterflies. Showtime. Wait. I remember it now. It was years ago. I had picked up a stray credit card. Followed them to their room. The same girl. The same strangeness about her. The way she seemed to have been grafted. He runs back the curtains with the remote control. The fulllength windows bathed in nightlight and sea salt. She is translucent. Arms akimbo. I had brushed the large cash tip he left for the waiter into my pocket. I paid for my drink and left the bar with his camera slung over my shoulder. I walked past the security chap in the black suit. As a rule, I do that early in the morning and often during the day. I make my way to the sand where wooden tables wait for lonely observers, night owls framed by their own investigator’s eye, and I click away up at the window with a telephoto lens…you never know, the return of flow… love’s rhythms all but lost…my digital instrument automatically sharp in the darkness and in the glimmer of brief light, old light, I could have sworn it was him; the property developer with the mirror sunglasses. There are no simple stories; the wind comes up; I pull my lumberjacket around myself and smell my odour; I’ve not bathed for days, though the sea is warm and clear of nasty cubozoans. I return to my caravan for the night and rap on the tinny side of my neighbour’s rig for him to turn down his country-and-western music. I cannot abide sentimental ballads. I swear I’ve also seen that she-male before.

  Morning. I have just bathed in the pristine sea. I am free from threat. Salted with vitality. The world, my oyster. A subtle change in wind signifies a change in season, which passes virtually unnoticed at this latitude. A sea bath always turns me inside out. I am wide open; stretching to the horizon. Clean. There are no jellyfish; no fish at all. The mayor of Rim Cove is accusing the military of causing this calamity. Janet Cordillion was quoted in the local paper, claiming that toxins draining into the groundwater and the sea from the base have mutated species and produced fish which cannot spawn. Inland, feral pigs are dying in their hundreds. The northerly wind is said to be deadly for children in the Indigenous community next to the test area.

  I stroll over to the Kahnweiler Gallery to have a look at the exhibition called ‘The Culture of the Copy’. Chinese paintings which they cannot quite assess as ‘originals’. Some are copies, done by apprentices. Others unknown; perhaps masterpieces. This is how a culture is passed on. The copied text becomes known through the soul of the copier, since he has to traverse the terrain it commands. A bequest from some woman artist who was famous in the 1930s has left the nation this collection. It bears the thumbprint of the Chinese copier. I read up on all this before I went to the Kahnweiler opening a year or so ago, in case someone engaged me in conversation. No one did. I hardly ever participated in conversation since I have lived alone for many years and am happy with my reclusive life. I did not know who Julia Grace was. There was no food at the ‘vernissage’. Not even finger food. Just plenty of bubbly which I drank to excess. Rolled out the door last and got to plant a small kiss on the cheek of the somewhat puzzled Dr Sarraute, who didn’t know why there was this intimacy between us. This display of touching and affection and breaking cover is not what I normally do. Retreating, I palliated my appearance. I am bland, believe me; beige; instantly erased from memory; a correction of the work of being born. You are?…My life has always been thus, getting by on the fiction of first names. I slide into the slender recesses of a system card. Three lines cover me. I take pride in never having worked for more than two consecutive days. Judith brushed back the white lick in her hair and asked if I could help carry out the crates of empty bottles. Outside, the misty night. She was distracted, still trying to recall my face, confused by crowds of copies, as if her numerous patients had turned impatient, all wanting to be recognised with the same face. The eternal return of the same. Some people kill to be different. She’s frowning. Something in her unconscious. The unconscious always wants you to be found out. It lays out its traps: scattered on the wind, liquefied in rain, revealed by sunlight. She opened a door with a key. In the packing room I realised how Judith had made her money…by an epidemic of diagnoses. In the packing-room, boxes upon boxes of her patient records. She was disturbed. By the fog… by me…by names.

  The Kahnweiler Gallery. It sits on the other side of the road which runs through the resort town, so that if you stand on the beach you can see it directly behind, on a green hill surrounded by da
te palms. On the left, facing the reef would be the peninsula upon which Cordillion built his mansion and his ritzy estate. To the right is Sarraute’s surgery. The gallery is at the fourth point where you box the compass. A cubic stinger. They say Cordillion gave the doctor the site and the building. For her services to epidemiology. ‘Gratis’. That is my name for today. It’s better than ‘Graves’. Cordillion was a philanthropist. The rumour was he was bonking her on his cruiser.

  The Kahnweiler Gallery is sad, melancholic, built out of white stone with dark teak window frames, and it has large dark green doors and there is a courtyard in the middle of it, sprouting deep palms, so that it appears like a colonial mansion in Singapore or Macau. I can vouch for the architecture: a great copy of imperial construction; the edifice of edification. I ride up to it upon my bicycle, a grey aluminium racer I found abandoned at the local tip. On it, I am almost invisible. As I approach, the gallery looms large in my anxiety, although it remains hidden and squat behind the palms, a hum emanating from it, for it must sit on the matrix of a powerful electricity grid. The whole site is completely floodlit at night. A northerly wind is blowing strongly.

  Enter. It is very cool inside and the slate floors hold tight patches of sunlight which warm the soles of my feet. Today I am dressed between an ageing hippie and a food writer: loose cream shirt and three-quarter length beachcomber trousers. Beige canvas shoes. Almost colourless. Entry, I noted, was free. On this level, around the courtyard, there is pottery and sculpture, which I find to be mostly primitive, naïve art about which I know nothing, but at least I know what I like, though that is probably not the best way to approach art. A roomful of ceramics by Ångström. Wasn’t he the founder of spectroscopy? I have Judith Sarraute’s journal in my khaki canvas bag and I intend to leave the leather-bound volume on a bench, on one of the padded seats in the Julia Grace gallery, the one on the second floor featuring Australian modernist paintings, where someone else will find it and not knowing to whom it belonged, may just return it to the front desk. Bach fugues flow from the sound system. Perhaps I will leave the diary in the bookstore, where others will read it, try to purchase it, along with a volume on Giacometti, his sculptures photographed at the Victorian State Gallery…here, a shot of them being admired by a short rotund fellow looking like Alfred Hitchcock; there, a beautiful, tall girl in black lace with her back to the camera. My life is premised upon such juxtapositions and coincidences. Suddenly, an aria piped through the speakers. One should bypass arias. Here on the first floor, the Chinese paintings. They seem to be curated according to the weather. A gentle breeze on a lake here and there, and at the other end of the wall, an overcast, windy landscape, trees bent in the direction of hills. Then a misty sequence, starting in a valley where gnarled tree-trunks stretch into foggy mountains; tracks which lead to a promontory lashed by rain. There is hardly any sunlight. No perspective. These are landscapes from pre-history, representing a region after a catastrophe, craggy peaks about to topple. Everything hangs in defiance of gravity; suspended because reiterated, repeated and contrapuntal. That is how the eye reads. It reminds me of something I was taught at school: too close to depiction and distance is pierced. My pacing from one picture to another, my walking…retreating and approaching…changes all perspective. Perspective is a sentence. ‘I’; ‘you’. The pleasure of observing a grifter comes from a glimpse of his escape. Through slight variations, he comes to be accepted as the return of the same, as in a fugue…he’s an earlymorning riser; an express checkout; a noonday stroller; a late-diner…too close to depiction. At the moment of his disappearance, at the vanishing point, there is a distrust of the eye. Gravity-defying, he leaves…nothing. Off to somewhere off-limits and without limits.

  I walk on. This section is on poster art. Look here. A whole series advertising Chinese bicycles. These must have been the original designs, done in oil on canvas. Two scantily clad women advertising ‘Sa-Bei’ brand cigarettes while riding their ‘Forever’ bicycles; here’s one with a girl in red silk and mink stole, her left breast fully visible, ‘The Wu-Xi silk company: apparel for women cyclists’; and this one called ‘The Sitting Monk’. He is squatting amongst seven semi-naked women leaning on their bicycles. It’s for a calming medicine. Beneath the paint could be an original landscape from the Sung Dynasty, or vice versa, it all could be one gigantic sting…or chance…I was convinced there was a painting that would tell me all of this.

  These little rooms inhibit strolling. A gallery should have rooms which follow one another in a straight line, so one does not have to turn corners suddenly. All of the art can be seen from a distance, in motion, forming and reforming according to one’s arrival and departure, as in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where one could view a Soutine two hundred feet away, and if you squinted, whole new worlds appeared, parallel universes, the skeletal structure of each painting visible in its embalmed death, smells of despair trapped in paint, a renaissance of putrid meat, then if you head south towards the Van Goghs you experience a similarly purulent frenzy, distempered dripping, a deep shimmering in the noonday heat, hear the falling water of the wash-shed where there were once hissing vipers and upon approach, the sunflowers would grow, shine, wilt and finally melt into microbes before the guard reprimands you for nosing too closely.

  And so to the contemporary…the somewhat present. The air is cooler here back on the bottom floor. This seems to be where the interest lies… I count four couples and some art students in front of the Francis Bacon; pretty girls in sarongs sitting on the floor sketching. This room has an informality about it…an untidy aspect that comes with boldness, strong colours, fleshy montages. Nothing very interesting except for a portrait of a girl in a cane bathchair in black lace, her beautiful legs crossed, with long dark hair and wide smile, innocent, somewhat disabled in her thinness…and I notice it formed the beginning of a series that had once been hung for the Archibald Prize, portraits of celebrities, though of course celebrity is something I stay well away from and have never been curious about people who have achieved it, so I do not know many of these names. I step over the art students to get a closer look at the little cards on which is information about the artist and the subject and I spend more time looking at these cards than at the paintings themselves, feeling that I can hide up close, peering at the text rather than standing back in the spotlight of colours spewing from the canvases…and at the end, at the very end of the exhibition, there is a small portrait, done on squared paper, a scientific study…all this time I have not missed the strange quiet, the polite silence which no one has noticed, but now there is a murmur of what seems like discontent, a desperate argument kept at very low decibels, the kind of silent disagreement one often finds among spouses in art galleries when one partner, out of the need to assert an opinion, cannot wait patiently before breaking the silence like a familiar fart, uprooting an old argument that had been germinating beneath for all those marital years, and the whole round begins again, a murmur ending at the wall at the end of the corridor leaving behind half-expressed frustrations, nasty games, and I wonder what had provoked all this and I walk up to the scientific study on squared paper to get a closer look at the controversy and here I am, hunched over it, hearing the sound of a toilet flushing behind the wall, wanting to poke at this portrait, wanting to find out why it caused such disagreement amongst ordinary townspeople, this painting of a…of a surgically masked woman holding up in her gloved hand a jellyfish which, when stared at long enough, resembles a man’s head, the translucent tentacles of the jellyfish hanging down like dreadlocks, and in her other hand, a scalpel…as though receiving her applause like a violinist at the end of a difficult fugue, as if waiting for the bearded, severed head to answer, speak up, tell the truth. Her eyes alight, allconsuming…they speak of her secrecy, the purdah of this jelly-like thing… behind which was her strength, her oath, this anti-memory, this silent reproduction of deadly codes which had given her both life and fame.

  To disappear behind a mask, benea
th the surface of things. He slid over the waxed floor and the art students shifted uncomfortably and they looked at one another for they had only felt a slight breeze, as if nought but a ghost had passed between them and as he made his way towards the exit the bored guard noticed a shadow that had zigzagged…everyone was disturbed, it seemed, by that portrait – it gave them vertigo – the way it was set at a slant, skewed, the fact that the woman’s left eye was missing… and the shade stopped by the gallery shop to purchase the reproduction, yes, the one entitled ‘Judith and Holofernes’, yes, that one, by Redvers, and yes, that’ll be on credit…

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The quotations from Montaigne’s Essays in the English are from the translation by John Florio, 1603. The illustration Saturn and his Zodiacal Signs is from Von den XII Zeichen des Gestirn, 1470, Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, MS C.54 (719), Fol. 14, vol. 2.

  My sincere gratitude to Marion May Campbell and Isabel Morais for their generosity in making so many resources available to me.

  Prior research was carried out during a Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. My thanks to the Potter Foundation and to the English Department at the University of Melbourne.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.