The Heart Is a Burial Ground

by Tamara Colchester

  She pressed her hand into her pocket, feeling the shells she had collected last year. As her thumb touched the hole at one of the shell’s openings, her tongue also felt into the softness of the hole in her gum, and she felt a little wave run through her body as she probed the wobbling absence where her tooth had been. When, she wondered, would the sharp white tip of her grown-up tooth begin? Thumb and tongue felt blindly in the darkness, the dip of the plane making her tummy slip wildly. Hearing her father speaking to her brothers, she sat forward and tried to listen over the searing drone of the landing plane.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine now what could have been so important about this little island . . . ’ they all looked below them as the plane flew so low its shadow could be seen on the rain-soaked field beneath them, ‘but back then it was of the greatest strategic importance.’

  Paris, 1923

  ‘Are we going to stay here?’

  ‘Yes, Diana. We’ve escaped.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From the big black beast of boredom. I thought I didn’t want to give birth again, darling, but I do. I want to give birth to life each and every day. With the moon guiding my tides, and his arm pointing true to the sun, we can make our own world. Sunrise and moon-tide, each of us holding today taut as a rope between us.’

  Diana stared at her mother as she drank. She grimaced. There was something wrong with this milk.

  ‘Look out that window, Diana.’

  She put down her glass and stood up, heaved uselessly at the solid frame. ‘I can’t open it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, look through it.’

  ‘It’s stuck closed.’

  ‘Never mind, Diana, what do you see beyond it?’

  ‘A pigeon on a roof.’

  ‘Behind that.’

  ‘The Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘Well, I can see the cosmos spread above us like a great starred blanket, and we’re lying beneath it in a tangle of happy bodies.’

  ‘When will we go back to Boston?’

  ‘Diana.’ Her mother turned to look at her, and her eyes were darker than ever. She had been biting her lips and they were bruised dark. ‘There’s no going back. And furthermore, we are each our own home now, as marvellous as a castle or as mean as a shed.’

  ‘Perhaps I can be a kennel like the one we had at home?’

  ‘It’s forward now, darling. No more looking back.’

  ‘But Father still lives in Boston.’

  ‘Nobody is living in Boston. They just settle, like fog. Obedient clouds that stay in their cages, forgetting the bars can do nothing to keep them in.’

  ‘Why are the clouds in cages?’

  ‘Because Bostonian clouds have very sharp teeth. Now snuggle into your bed, it’s time for your dreams to come true.’

  ‘Will you be going out?’

  ‘For a little while. When you wake up in the morning, I’ll be there. Worry not, everything is going to be glorious.’

  Roccasinibalda, 1970

  In an arched portico, Caresse showed the men where they could sit and then arranged herself in a chair where, unbeknownst to her, her daughter had knelt between the young man’s legs the night before. The silk was becoming rather frayed. How beautiful decay can be, she thought, looking through the large stone archways covered in a mosaic of lichens, to where the upright pines could be seen, dark against the scrub-covered hills that played across the horizon.

  ‘Now, Mrs Crosby, I’m going to be speaking to the camera, here.’ She turned back and the man with the Hermès scarf knotted neatly about his throat (Martin, was it?) indicated behind him. She nodded, eyeing the cameraman who was waiting patiently. He looked just like Canada Lee, Caresse noted. A Negro boxer from the Bronx, he’d been one of the gentlest men she’d ever known. (No, she wouldn’t share that anecdote. She knew enough about men like Martin to know you could trust them about as far as you could . . .)

  ‘All right then, Mrs Crosby, let’s begin.’ Martin waved his pen. ‘And three, two . . .’ He twirled a finger in the air and began, his voice seeming to melt into the shared space between the two of them.

  ‘Mrs Crosby, your feelings for the arts and the role you played in shaping the work of Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Dalí and others is well known. As we sit here in the remarkable environment of the fortress of Roccasinibalda, do tell our viewers about how you came to turn this place into a fortification for the arts. For many are convinced that the most peculiar, and in many ways envied society, is living here in these walls where art and literature are the essence of everything.’

  ‘Well,’ Caresse rested her arms on either side of the chair, ‘I found this castle in 1950 after it came to my attention through an artist friend who’d shown at the gallery of modern art that I started in Washington. I had begun my campaign for peace by that time and this friend told me that his mother had been born in a little town in the foothills of the Abruzzi and that in this town had been built the most amazing castle, like something from a Grimms’ fairy tale. He said to me, “Caresse, you must go and see the place because it’s just the thing for you to start your Città della Pace.” He thought that artists would love to live in a place like this.’ (No shit, thought the cameraman. But there was something about this old lady that stopped him mocking. Something pure.) ‘So when I came to Italy I came to visit and arrived at that hill there,’ she glanced behind her, more sky than land, and thought it was absolutely beautiful. It was towards sunset and the castle was ablaze with light. ‘I love to say yes and so my answer to the castle was yes.’ Her hooded eyes looked directly at the two men and she smiled as someone does who is used to giving in to pleasure. ‘After I bought it, I lived here alone for over a year and was happier than I ever had been anywhere. Alone at night, I could wander through the echoing halls, circle the deserted battlements and stand in the bare and brilliant solitude of the courtyard . . .’

  She was silent for a moment as she remembered drifting in her silk dressing gown followed by her own tapping echo. Lazily undoing the wide ribbon at the front so that the cool night air moved through the mere idea of her nightdress, making her shiver. She was like a flag herself then, white silk rippling in the dark, witnessed only by the humped shapes of furniture lying in wait in the shuttered rooms. She smiled. ‘That solitude was important and the fruit of it was my plan that the best of the spiritual life of the world would meet yearly here, preaching freedom of spirit and soul and standing above narrow-mindedness and dogmatic thought. I found this ancient fortress and I started again.’ She looked at the men. ‘Who knows where this will lead . . .’

  ‘So.’ Martin leaned forward. ‘Born into the upper echelons of Boston society, when did you first find yourself saying “yes” to life?’

  ‘Well, I’d always had a feeling for freedom and enjoyed doing what others were afraid to do, but the big moment, the symbolic moment, if you will, came when I invented the brassiere. That was the perfect enactment of breaking out of that life, which had been fairly strict and restrictive. I’d wanted to wear a low-cut dress to a dance and didn’t like how it looked with my corset, so had my maid quickly sew two handkerchiefs together and attach some ribbons. That was all there was to it. Of course, all my friends were dying to see how it worked and begged me to make them one too, and soon I had a little business going. As it happens, I sold the patent for a hundred dollars to a very nice gentleman at Warner Brothers and thought myself the cleverest little thing. I realise now how meagre my first portion of profit was (they went on to make over fifteen million dollars with that patent), but there you go. I never was motivated by money and never have been. It’s the creative spirit that interests me, and that has never been dimmed or diminished in any way. If anything, it gets stronger with time . . .’

  ‘And you are well known for your own creative spirit. I believe I’m right in thinking that you caused something of a scandal in puritanical New England society when you left your husband and small child before setting off for Paris . . .�
��

  ‘I did not leave my child.’ Her eyes locked onto his.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry, it says here . . .’ Martin glanced down at his notes.

  ‘I did not leave my child.’

  Martin scratched a line through something and then looked up, smiling. ‘I’m very glad we’ve set the record straight on that. Do please tell us about Paris.’

  ‘Well,’ she moved on, ‘really those early years are a blur, but it seemed that it was where life was being kissed till it hurt and there was nowhere else we wanted to go. Always yes and never no was our answer to the twenties and it was from our first tiny apartment on the Île Saint-Louis that I’d paddle my husband to work wearing a swimsuit in our bright-red canoe, flowing with the current past the Île de la Cité, down by the Conciergerie, then the Louvre and under the Pont Royal as far as the Place de la Concorde; then pulling upstream all the way back – marvellous for the breasts, you know.’ Caresse smiled, remembering the shouting of the drunks, the jeers of the workmen and the shocked faces of the grey crowds streaming to work over the bridges. The sudden darkness as she went beneath them, and then the brilliant sun in her eyes, arms pulling hard against the flow of filthy water.

  ‘I was happy as a clam there and loved to go marketing in the back streets of that small island, bringing delectable meals home to our tiny apartment on the Quai d’Orléans, whose windows were quite choked with wisteria.’ She laughed. ‘Eventually, however, we needed to find somewhere with more space, a place in which we could expand our minds a little more liberally. And it was thanks to Cousin Walter that we found our first home.’

  ‘Do you mean Walter Berry, man of letters?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Cousin Walter was slim as straw and as sec; he could have exhibited as a sculpture by Lipchitz. A wonderful correspondent, of course, and a great friend of Proust. Their letters were one of the first works we printed, in fact. He was also Edith’s lover, though really that word feels a little voluptuous as a description.’ (Wharton, Martin jotted in his notebook.) ‘He was responsible for passing on the extraordinary library we inherited after his death. Thousands of books, precious editions that almost made one want to give up parties for good and simply spend your nights in bed devouring what was inside all that skin. It was Cousin Walter who introduced us to the owner of 19 Rue de Lille (a most extraordinary Russian princess who kept a bear in her garden and quite refused to get out of bed) and really, that is where it all began . . .’

  ‘And it was from this address that you and many of your fellow artists and writers wrote The Revolution of the Word. Would you mind if I quoted it here?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Tired of the “hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, naturalism, the tyranny of time”, you proclaimed instead: “Imagination unconfined, metamorphosis of reality . . .” ’

  ‘Talking a lot of balls?’ Diana suggested, walking in, still damp from her swim.

  ‘We’re in the middle of recording my interview.’ Caresse looked her over coolly. ‘Gentlemen, my daughter Diana.’

  Diana extended a hand to both men and liking what she saw in their reflection, sat down. ‘Perhaps I’ll listen in.’

  ‘Yes, but you mustn’t interrupt. Now, Martin, where were we?’

  ‘ “. . . Hallucination of the word. The writer expresses, he does not communicate. The plain reader be damned!” ’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ Diana said, leaning forward to pluck a grape from the low table between them.

  ‘I never did like that part about being damned.’ Caresse frowned. ‘You know, we started the Black Sun Press because we wanted to get our own work in print, we wanted to write. Our editions were all very beautiful, with great care taken in the lining, colour and type. They were new thoughts in a classic binding, like an angry boy in his grandfather’s jacket. Wonderful objects that transcended anything “modern”.’

  ‘Didn’t Wilde say that nothing ages so fast as the modern?’ Diana said.

  ‘Well, quite. That hits the nail right on its behind.’ Caresse nodded and Diana felt a little kick of pride that gave birth to a pleased smile, which she hid by bending down to adjust her ankle tie.

  ‘And so Mary Peabody metamorphosed through the caritas of caring and the innocence of yes into Caresse Crosby, poetess and publisher.’ Martin’s honeyed voice flowed into the microphone and Caresse’s smile became rather fixed, refusing to look at Diana.

  ‘We found our little printer on the Rue Cardinale soon after we’d arrived,’ she broke in. ‘And really, Mr Lescaret was the most wonderful thing in getting the project of the Black Sun Press off the ground. His typesetting was absolutely meticulous and he set to the projects with real gusto. It was the craziest operation, crammed with papers, funeral notices, pamphlets; that sort of thing. My daughter used to be frightened of coming there for fear of the press itself squatting in the corner like a great spider.’

  Diana looked at her mother in surprise. She didn’t remember that.

  ‘We published not only our own work, wonderful volumes,’ Caresse went on, ‘but many other writers and artists.’ Martin sat forward with his microphone and the cameraman leaned a little closer.

  ‘T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, Wilde, Proust. The matching of the artist to the writer was most important: Polia Chentoff, Max Ernst, Alastair – Alastair was the most extraordinary character, straight out of a work by Poe – T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald . . .’

  ‘You published some of Mr Hemingway’s earliest works, is that right?’

  Diana had always liked that direct handsome man. Knew a good fight when he saw one too.

  ‘I must make it clear that I did not, as some have said, invent Hemingway,’ Caresse said. ‘He was a friend. We met at a circus and both took a liking to the owner, a lion tamer who wore the most beautiful evening dress to perform with his beasts. But yes, I did publish him and others too, Hart Crane and Joyce . . .’

  ‘Tell us about Hart Crane. I believe he came to stay with you while he finished writing The Bridge.’

  ‘Well, Hart was—’

  ‘A menace,’ interrupted Diana. ‘Always roaring from his turret for more booze and going off to the docks to bugger more sailors. He managed thirty in a weekend once.’ The cameraman leaned out from behind his equipment with raised eyebrows. ‘Exactly.’ Diana nodded at him. ‘I never forgave him after he brought a chimney sweep he’d found back to my nursery and . . .’

  ‘Yes, that was rather a mess,’ Caresse broke in. ‘I’d just had the room repapered in a terribly pretty rose print. Hart could be something of a menace when he drank,’ she conceded. ‘Though I don’t think we should cast too many stones in that direction.’ She glanced at her daughter. ‘Besides, the artist needs fuel, and the more incendiary the better.’

  Diana crossed her arms and pulled her mouth to one side, picturing the dirty smudges left on her broderie anglaise pillow.

  ‘Hart would get caught, quite caught in love affairs that caused him an awful lot of pain. His work caused him a lot of pain too. He couldn’t write without the shadows getting all stirred up. And of course he struggled with the idea of getting older, losing his vigour, that sort of thing. That foghorn voice crying out against the threat of greyness . . . He couldn’t take it, in the end. So many . . . couldn’t.’ Caresse’s voice drifted to a stop.

  ‘My old nanny used to say that if those writers left any more out of those books there’d be nothing left to read at all. According to her – No Bad Thing. Then they could all go and get on with something useful,’ Diana said drily, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘You can leave that illiterate crook out of it. Mette was hardly an aerial for receiving the message of the modernists.’

  ‘Though she did always say that too much thinking would be the death of—’

  ‘Oh, do leave her out of it,’ Caresse interrupted Diana sharply. ‘Diana’s nanny was a reprobate,’ she explained to a puzzled-looking Martin. ‘It was the deal that, along with looking after the child, s
he would also place and collect my husband’s bets on the races. Her salary was supplemented by 5 per cent of our winnings, but she also took a 5 per cent deduction of any losses; that was the agreement they came to, anyhow. But it emerged that poor Diana was left to spend half her childhood in a freak show in the Marais while the nanny listened to the track results coming in at a bar round the corner.’

  Diana closed her eyes against the memory of the hot tent that smelled of mowed grass and sweat and the strange shapes of the ‘exhibits’. She tried to arrange the thought into a sentence quick enough to throw back out to the room, but her mother’s voice was already running on . . .

  ‘Diana began to look quite ill, like the child of a fishwife. Quiet as a mouse, weren’t you, darling? No, not a mouse, what was your name? Rat.’ She pounced on it, delighted. ‘That was it. The Wretched Rat. Awful name really, and not a bit true.’ She smiled at Diana and then turned back to Martin. ‘But where was I?’ Caresse’s voice flowed on like a tide. ‘Yes, Hart. His dedication was messy, brutal; unlike Joyce, who was terribly precise . . .’

  ‘Yes, do tell us more about Joyce. It’s so rare to hear these anecdotes.’

  ‘Well, Joyce was an elegant figure, a patch on one eye and walking with a cane. Very straight, very angular. He lived near the Boulevard des Invalides. His home was tidy but somewhat unimaginative with an upright piano and a goldfish bowl. But his family life was very touching and he spoke Italian with his children. He was just a great big brain eating everything up. He wanted to know how it all came to be . . . He used to come to the house to collect proof, though the first time he came to visit us at home he only got as far as our front door because, on hearing Narcisse’s bark from within, he walked right home again. He was very afraid of small animals for his eyes were so bad. The next time he came, we hid the dog in the bathroom, so that he could read us part of his Work in Progress. “Now,” he would say, in a soft Irish key, “I wonder if you understand why I made that change.”