My only guide was the very weak lightbulb at the end of the hallway. When my eyes adjusted a bit to the darkness, I saw brownish stains all over the walls that reminded me of the bat droppings that smeared the Mayan crypts of Palenque. I came to the door at the end of the hallway and turned the knob, afraid it would be locked. It gave way easily, and I found myself at the bottom of a narrow, steep staircase, from which a stream of putrid water ran. Above, I made out a slit of light seeping out from under yet another door. Holding onto the iron railing, I struggled up the stairs, opened the door at the top, and came to a room somewhat better lit than the hallway and staircase I had left behind.
Although it didn’t quite match the description of the place that Moreau told me he’d gone through before reaching the opium den, I was relieved to recognize some of the objects he said I would find when I got there. In the middle of the anteroom was an ewer and basin with a towel and a bar of soap. A mirrored armoire took up the far wall entirely. I wiped the soles of my shoes on a straw mat and went to the washbasin. The soap had a delicate aroma of vanilla and jasmine. As I washed my hands, the surface of the looking glass took on a sheen, as if someone had turned on a light on the other side of the armoire. I looked carefully and noticed what appeared to be two human shadows behind my reflection. I turned around. There was no one else in the room, but when I looked into the mirror again, the shadows were still there. I pressed the doors of the armoire with my fingertips and they moved toward me with a slow creak. I opened them wide and saw that instead of a sheet of wood there was a curtain, through which the light of the space behind filtered in.
I drew the curtain and saw a vast room whose elegance was a stark contrast to the spaces I had just passed through. In the middle stood two women. One was blind and old, the other a disturbingly beautiful young lady who looked at me intently. The old woman took a step toward me. She was tall and very thin, with brittle skin and large, bony hands. After carefully feeling my face with her hands, she hummed a tune in a soft voice, then went into the armoire and disappeared. The one who remained in the room with me couldn’t have been more than twenty. She was taller than me, was wearing a very agreeable perfume, and had a slightly androgynous air. She offered me her hand, which was white and delicate, and said in flawless English: Come, your friends have been waiting for you for a while now.
The scene that followed was almost comforting, since I’d seen it countless times in old photographs, in books, and at the movies. Men and women were lying on divans and mats, attended by servants who moved about, refilling their opium pipes. The customers had an electrifying air of sensuality and abandon about them. The women weren’t bothering to cover their thighs or their breasts. Some were Asian, a few were black or mulatto. The majority were white, European types. They were all luxuriantly dressed—in fact, the ostentation of their clothing might have been more exciting than the sight of their bodies.
My guide led me to a private room where I found Louise and Mussifiki with others I had met on previous occasions, although I couldn’t remember where. Louise’s eyes met mine for a moment before shutting me out.
She hasn’t seen you, she’s dreaming, my young guide said, not having let go of my hand. It’s your turn now, get comfortable. I’m going to prepare you a pipe.
I leaned back in one of the divans, not far from Louise, and I watched the young woman in the robe get to work. She deftly kneaded a ball of opium, placed it in the bowl, and lit it delicately.
Take a deep breath and continue to inhale, she said, bringing the pipe to my mouth, even if you think your lungs are going to burst.
I did as I was told. A silver blade slit my chest open, but instead of pain, I felt as if a curtain of light were descending from the sky. I lost all my strength.
Are you all right? my guide asked, caressing my hair. I nodded, wordlessly contemplating her goddess-like countenance, feeling as if both of us were slipping through a crack in space leading who knows where. Still leaning over me, she watched over my indescribable heaviness. Her words ricocheted, bursting in the air a thousand times, a crystal echo trailing them farther and farther away. Are you all right? she asked again, caressing my head and my face. I lifted my eyes, trying to retain her image, but it was escaping me. She crouched by my side. I felt the touch of her smooth, pearl-gray robe on my cheek. She had very white, thin, and delicately shaped legs. I tried to caress them before giving in to the drowsiness that was plunging me into unconsciousness. The robe opened imperceptibly. There was no trace of desire in my gesture, all my will toward pleasure was now in the pull of the opium, but I continued to watch the contours of her thighs, letting my eyes slip toward her crotch, when I realized that my guide was a man. He put the pipe to my mouth again and said, Breathe in, and I saw the spreading flame, like a cosmic explosion.
MARGUERITE
[Shortly before meeting Nadia.]
With Louise, in her Deauville studio, drinking:
We were at Corsair Beach, in a cave, Corsair’s Cave. Well, the fact is that the beach was named after the grotto, which had once been used as a hideout by pirates. To get there you had to head off the main road and walk down a dirt road that bordered the vineyards. We went often when we were young. There were two ways to be there—so radically different it might as well have been two places, hundred of miles apart. One was with the family, on Sundays or holidays, the other when we skipped school and no adults were around to watch us.
She poured herself another scotch and set her eyes on an unfinished canvas. The large colorful swaths suggested a seascape.
I don’t know why, but lately I’ve been thinking about Marguerite a lot, although I haven’t seen her since she went off to college in Lille. I often wonder what became of her. That painting there is inspired by my memory of Marguerite. I’m working on it to get rid of this nostalgia. Maybe I’m reminiscing about her now because of what you told me about Sam Evans? Who knows? I hope nothing’s happened to her, although—really—she ceased to exist for me when she left for Lille. I haven’t heard from her since.
She looked back at me and said:
I had just turned thirteen. The boys wanted us to go inside the cave with them. They asked us to take off our underwear. They wanted to kiss us in the dark, touch us where they shouldn’t—you know. Some girls agreed and pulled down their panties. As for me, I didn’t even consent to step inside. But then there was the time Marguerite asked me. It was different. She asked me and I said yes, spontaneously, without even thinking about it, not even a bit afraid. She was a high school senior, three or four years older than me. The others had already gone into the cave and we were the only two left outside. Then she took my hand and said we should go in, and I let her take me.
THE DICE OF DEATH
[December 1988?]
Telegram from Paris. Louise pointed to a folded piece of thin blue paper on the glass table. Alston Hughes died, she said.
Alston Hughes? I repeated, incredulous, and things got a little blurry. Sylvie took my hand and pressed firmly.
Sit down. I know how it must feel. You want something to drink, Gal? she asked. And I said no.
The telegram is from Moreau. Well, I didn’t expect anything like this so soon, but it isn’t exactly a surprise, is it, Gal?
I told Louise she was right. In his last letter, Anzaldúa had told me that Alston was a mess. He pissed and shit on himself in bed, insulted everyone, said that he was going to win the Nobel Prize. He’d wake up with the DTs in the middle of the night. He only got out of bed to drink, and when he actually managed to make himself drunk, he would sing and scream until he was exhausted. Then he sat down to write. He wrote poems, letters, sections of books in which he mixed four different languages. (I have become an alloglot! he exulted in one letter, then explaining: “someone who writes in a language other than his mother tongue.”) He ripped out pages from his diaries and glued them to the walls. He began to make a collage, a mural that took up his entire bedroom; he asked his friends from all over t
he world to send him photographs to add to the work in progress. He was saying his farewell to life. Sometimes, when he tried to write but couldn’t, he would howl, like kids do when they don’t get what they want right away. The amazing thing was that he was ever capable of writing anything at all, in such a state. He sent me a letter almost every week, and I wasn’t the only one. His poems were another story—they got away from him more often than not, abruptly descending into nonsense and echolalia. Against all odds, however, there were times when he produced fragments of a strange and chilling beauty. It goes without saying that his private life was a shambles. He quarreled with Moreau, with Anzaldúa, with Gilgamesh, with everyone who had helped him financially. He bragged about it, boasted about biting the hand that fed him, said it with pride. He said he was going to donate a part of the prize money for his Nobel to the fight against AIDS.
He died the day before yesterday, Sylvie said. And that same day, an envelope mailed to you, care of my suite number, arrived at the Chelsea Hotel.
I don’t know why he sent it to my address. She gave me a badly damaged envelope from a tray. I tore it open. Inside was an object that might have been intended to be a book, but more resembled a bundle of papers haphazardly sewn together. I looked for a letter, a note, but there was nothing else. Sylvie and I looked at the cover for a while, a lousy photocopy.
He sent us another one too, Sylvie said. Also without a note—just the book. According to Moreau, someone he knew at the Embassy of Panama in Paris agreed to publish a “limited edition,” which he then mailed to a few friends, ten to fifteen copies at most.
At long last, he made up his mind to get into print, Louise laughed.
It’s not his first book, I said. Anzaldúa showed me two others.
That’s right, she confirmed.
His friend Gilgamesh published them under his own imprint, Invisible Editions. One is his correspondence with María Zambrano, the philosopher who went into exile after the Civil War. The other one is a collection of poems titled Mosaics. I asked Gilgamesh to get copies for me and he found them in the Casa del Libro on the Gran Vía of Madrid. They were the last remaining copies of a tiny edition. Alzandúa bought them and mailed them to me.
Now I leafed through the book that Alston had sent before he died. The pages were unnumbered. There was no title or name on its paltry cover, which was a photocopy of a reproduction of the famous Milk Drop Coronet by Harold E. Edgerton—a photograph capturing a drop of milk at the moment of splashing into a body of more milk. Later, Moreau told me that Alston had taken it from D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, one of his favorite books. The image on the cover was so dark that it looked more like a coronet of blood.
The dark blood poisoning his heart, Louise said, trying to make me laugh.
I read Alston’s book that very afternoon. It would be hard to describe it. A spiritual autobiography of sorts. As a memoir, it’s very interesting—not just for those who knew him, but for anyone intrigued by the dynamics of literary creation. I wanted to rescue something from the mess and incorporate it into Brooklyn. And immediately I knew what to pick. An amazing story, especially given that Alston didn’t write fiction. It’s called “Salsipuedes.” I’d numbered the odd pages in pencil as I read through, so I know that the story begins on page thirty-three. It’s very short. Still, it took me an hour to copy it longhand. That night, I called Chus in Barcelona. He was very upset by Alston’s death, and told me he was going to write something about him. After I hung up, I picked up Alston’s opus and examined the cover in detail. It was so worn-out that it looked like a canvas coated with a layer of cracked gesso. When I had been examining it with Louise and Sylvie, I told them that it reminded me of a painting that needed to be restored. The splashing blood-milk was reminiscent of a crown of thorns. Behind it was a tall square, the night, finely edged, and above that was a bright distant point, the primeval eye of the moon.
It reminds me of something, but I don’t know what, I told Louise.
It reminds you of Malevich’s mystical squares.
She was right. It’s fascinating to me how clearly she sees. White on white, an invisible surface over the nadir. I decided to use that same image as a cover for “Salsipuedes,” the story I would put in Brooklyn. I would make a photocopy of the photocopy and write above it “The Dice of Death.”
In the loneliness of my room, I opened Alston’s book and began to read. As they say: I couldn’t put it down. When I’d finished, I pictured him in his tiny apartment in Paris, writing to his friends at night, waiting for his death. It took me three days, but I was finally able to cry.
KADDISH & τπ
[Below this enigmatic title there’s a note in Gal’s handwriting that says, Story from Atlantic Monthly, translate and include here. Juxtapose with farce? Send both to Nadia. In the Brooklyn Notebook, however, there’s only a blank space. I’ll do the same here.]
Full text of the lecture given by Felipe Alfau before the Order of the Knights Incoherent. Transcribed by Lord Gin, permanent secretary and stenographer to the Brotherhood. The Periscope Bar & Grill, Lower Manhattan, April 1, 1964.
Ladies and gentlemen, members and guests, freeloaders and rate-paying attendees, enemies and friends:
We have gathered here today to celebrate, yes, that’s the word, celebrate, the death of Mr. Tuttle, aka the Shadow, honorary if outlandish member of our distinguished Order. It is a proven fact that he lived underground, but we cannot know how and why he was brought to such straits. Neither do we know his place of birth, nor what he did for a living. He always wore the same outfit, his demeanor one of a weary elegance, but I am not going to describe his clothes. This is not a novel. Once a year, on March 16, he rented a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Today is April Fool’s Day, a date on which our august society traditionally opens its doors so the public may attend our annual lecture. It is my turn to deliver the lecutre this year, and I have decided to dedicate it to the memory of our late friend, telling the story of the place in which he chose to mark his anti-birthdays and put an end to his life. My talk is also dedicated to the graduating class of the Miguel de Unamuno Program in Creative Writing, funded by our Order, and here with us today. After my lecture, they will receive their diplomas and so become fully anointed and accredited writers; may God have mercy on their future readers.
Before getting into today’s topic, I would like to invoke the help of good old Don Miguel, by whom I have always been guided when it comes to methodology. I mean to say that it is not my intent to give a full and systematic dissertation on the peculiar building whose history I am about to recount. What I will do is make a few observations in my own manner, a process that, so far from being Teutonic, we might call Unamunian, which, conceptually speaking, is the exact opposite. I know this is a monster of a word, but I will coin it right here, protest though you might, much as we have been saddled with Kafkaesque or Chekhovian. Don Miguel more than deserves the same honor. In my future work, I shall employ the term Unamunian as a modifier vindicating the natural right to wipe one’s ass with certain formalities that, masquerading as academic rigor, do nothing but set back the process of approaching the truth, which is never where we look for it. (And if I should fail to use it again in the course of this address, you may be assured that I will certainly have recourse to it in my future writings and allocutions.) As for this lecture, I don’t have the least intention to pay heed to any narrative or chronological thread; if it should appear that I am doing so, I assure you that this will be mere coincidence. It is also my intention to do without any facts I happen to feel like omitting. That being said, let me start, it’s about time.
The building we know as the Chelsea Hotel was opened in the year of our Lord 1884, at the height of the robber-baron era, ruled by such crooks as the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Astors, and the Vanderbilts, among others: a time of ostentation and corruption that would give rise to great dramatic episodes, such as when the mistress of the tycoon Jimmy Fisk blew her lover’s brains
out in the bedroom of a suite they were sharing . . . What, what’s this here, Murphy, you moron. Fisk was actually shot by her lover’s lover, although not in the hotel. But we’ll leave it at that, we have to stay with the building.
The style of our building could be described as Victorian Gothic, a mixture of Queen Anne and free-style classicism. The apartments used to be (they no longer are) enormous, with very high ceilings and soundproof and fireproof walls. The interior stairwell, made of wrought-iron like the balconies, runs from the lobby to the roof terrace, and has a railing made of the finest mahogany. The roof terrace, made of red brick tiles, is an enormous, uneven space, scattered with steps, skylights, chimneys, studios, dormer windows, observatories, lounge chairs, parapets, gardens, and—though this might be hard to believe—an extensive grove of trees . . . An extensive grove of trees, what kind of assistant are you, Murphy? Okay, fine. I will take your word for this, but it makes it sound like a real forest up there.
Dear members of the audience, before continuing the water torture, I want to stress that for the most part I owe all this information to the efforts of my research assistant, who is in attendance today. Salute the audience, Murphy, don’t be shy. Stand up so everyone can see you. A hand for Mr. Murphy Burrell. Thank you, friends, and thank you Murphy, please stop bowing like an epileptic, everybody’s seen you now, you can sit down, that’s enough.
We were talking about style. In the early days of the future Chelsea Hotel, the elegance of the furniture and accessories was on a par with the nobility of the materials used: marble for the floors; mahogany for the moldings, doors, and armoires. The enormous mirror frames were one of the trademarks of the place. The rooms had stained-glass windows. At one point, there were three large dining rooms, one of which became the property of some Americaniards who named it “El Quijote,” which is still open today.
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