Travesty

by John Hawkes

  At the appointed hour, then, I touched the bell button, noting as usual the pathetic opulence of the brass nameplate, and climbed the obviously little-used cold stones to the almost empty room where I inhaled the first trace of that antiseptic smell in which in a few moments I would be engulfed. I heard the air stirring in the rest of his chambers, noted in several chipped, white ceramic ash trays the week-old remains of his dead cigarettes. Of course I was well acquainted with his habit of dragging himself to this very room and seating himself and smoking his cigarettes, reading one of the ancient journals, the doctor waiting alone in the room intended for patients who were never there.

  Can you understand the peace and satisfaction I felt in that place? The visit was perfectly routine, nothing happened out of the ordinary. And yet from entrance to exit I could not have felt more at home amidst all the paradoxes of this establishment: the unused instruments and archaic machines of medical science located within medieval walls; the sound of birds roosting somewhere amongst surgical knives and old books; the faint smell of cooking food which the antiseptic chemical could not disguise; the doctor himself, who was skilled but thought to be unsavory, and who in his own affliction exemplified the general pomposity and backwardness of our nation’s corps of butchering physicians and who in his broken marriage exemplified the soundness of our sexual mores. Then too, I knew for a fact that once every week this poor, ruined man sat entirely alone for precisely two hours in a little nearby movie house devoted only to the showing of so-called indecent films. Understandably, it was this habit rather than the missing leg or absent wife that accounted for his unsavory reputation. No wonder I admired and enjoyed his crippled presence.

  As I say, there were no surprises. The doctor, as usual, forced himself to walk the length of the corridor to greet me, thrusting to the side one fat, startled hand for balance and swinging in great arcs from the hip his artificial limb, the use of which typically he had never mastered. We met with effusion; he consulted his files; he enquired about my general health and the health of my wife; unbidden I removed my shirt and undershirt; he disappeared; he returned to his desk; the artificial leg obtruded between us in full and menacing view. Again I welcomed silently the trembling hand, the mucus thick in his throat, the cigarette that was burning his fingers. Again I appraised the awkwardness of the ill-fitting leg, noting as usual that our nation is simply not adept at the crafting of artificial limbs because we are not concerned with the needs and imperfections of the individual human body. Again I realized that in the middle of every night the doctor now puffing and coughing beside me, fumbling over my naked chest with his cold and unsteady hands, must lie awake listening to this same artificial leg walking to and fro on the other side of his bedroom door. He was devoting what remained of his life to this hollow leg which wore a green sock and dusty shoe. But dominated or not by the ugly leg, nonetheless he was listening to the strength of my absolutely reliable heart. I regretted that I had never sat beside him in the old movie house.

  I waited, I enjoyed the chilly air on the skin of my chest, shoulders, arms; I surveyed the diseased palm tree below in the public garden; I nodded in pleased recognition when the crippled and perspiring doctor knocked one of his full ash trays to the floor, as he always did. I was pleased with the appearance of the nurse-secretary, whose body had the shape of a girl’s and the texture of an old crone’s. While she drew as usual a handsome quantity of blood from the thick blue vein in my left arm, I listened to the doctor who was breathing wetly through his nose, his mouth, his nose and mouth together. I listened with pleasure; with pleasure I perceived once more that the old nurse-secretary had dabbed herself not with perfume but with the overpowering antiseptic that killed flowers and defined our circumstances.

  Time passed like ivory beads on a black thread. My own blood climbed inside the glass. Again I had my brief affair with the old X-ray machine which, after clanking and groaning, rewarded my patience with its sound like a flock of wounded geese in uncertain flight. And I passed exactly the required amount of urine, watched the doctor himself wrapping up the small warm flask with a string and paper, once again marveled that so much painful incongruity could be assembled so awkwardly into a single person.

  Well, once again the doctor pronounced me in perfect health, as you would imagine. And of course he suspected nothing, nothing. In all his discomfort and disproportion he retained his purity. Little did he know that in several days and on the other side of the city a laboratory technician, unshaven and smoking a yellow cigarette, would analyze the blood of a man already dead; or that the hazy image of ribs and single lung on the photographic plate would represent only as much reality as the white organs lubricating each other in one of his weekly films.

  But there is no justice in the world, since we may safely say that that poor one-legged creature has finally lost his only patient, and through no fault of his own. But what, you ask, if even this wretched man continues to live, why shouldn’t we? Why does your closest friend not have within himself that cripple’s determination to remain alive? Well, let me answer you slowly, quietly. The problem is that you are being emotional again, rather than rational. You must remember that both my legs are sound and that my wife is faithful. Do you understand?

  Yes, she is vomiting. But you need not have mentioned it. I have perfect hearing and am just as sensitive as you to those faint, terrible noises. Do you think I am not listening? That I have not been listening? After all, there is nothing worse than painful human sounds unattached to words. And the contents of my own daughter’s stomach . . . Even you will concede that my bitterness would be all the more justified. But I am not bitter. And despite all our so-called natural inclinations, why should we not agree that poor Chantal has earned her vomiting? It is the best she can do. And surely it is no worse than your wheezing.

  Actually, the music of melodrama (had you allowed us the pleasures of my superb car radio) would not have been a sodden orchestration of wave upon wave of uninteresting feeling but rather a light, sinuous background of muted jazz. The detached and somewhat popular syncopation would have cushioned our every turn while the clear tones of, say, a clarinet would have prevailed and, had he been able to hear them, would have given greater poignancy to the distance between the sleepless goatherd and the momentary, cruel appearance of our headlights in the righthand corner of the wet night. Do you hear that black clarinet? Do you hear the somewhat breezy quality of this dry and sophisticated music? The melody is pleasing, there is even a certain elegance and occasionally a dash of humor in the glassy accompaniment of the invisible piano. How perfect such easy lyricism is for us. What splendid, impersonal sweetness it would have contributed to the tensions of our imaginary and deliberately amateurish film. Well, the radio is already tuned. You have only to extend your arm, reach out with your fingers, touch the knob. But still you are not tempted? Of course you are not. I understand.

  A trifle faster? Yes, you are quite right that we are now traveling a breath or two faster than we were. Now is the moment when I must make my ultimate demands. As you can see, my arms are stiffening, my fingers are flexing though I never remove my palms from the wheel, my concentrating face is abnormally white, and now, like many men destined for the pleasures and perils of high-speed driving, now my mouth is working in subtle consort with eyes, hands, feet, so that my silent lips are moving with the car itself, as if I am now talking as well as driving us to our destination. And we are approaching it, that final destination of ours. We are drawing near. Soon we shall be entering the perimeter of Honorine’s most puzzling and yet soothing dream. And now beneath the hood of the car our engine is glowing as red as an immense ruby. How unfortunate that to us it is invisible. How unfortunate that the rain is determined to keep pace with our journey.

  But while we are on the subject of invalid doctors and vomiting children, and since tonight we seem to be taking our national inventory, so to speak, allow me to say in passing that generally our physical institutions are indeed a
match for the inadequacies or eccentricities of our professional personnel. In other words, our buildings of public service are as bad as the people who occupy them. Take the hospital nearest La Roche, for instance. I have not had any firsthand experience with this ominous and in a way amusing place, and in fact have never seen it. But on good authority and thanks to my theory of likenesses, which I have already described to you at length, I know for a certainty that this dark and drafty little place of about twenty beds is not equipped with any separate or special entrance for the reception of emergency cases. None at all. A few lights are burning; several cooks are smoking their stubby pipes in the kitchen; the entire drab interior of the place smells like a field of rotting onions. And there is no emergency entrance. No means of swift and ready access between the narrow cobbled street outside and that small whitewashed room to the right and rear where simple first aid may be administered. No access to this small room for bleeding truck driver or possibly his corpse except through the kitchen. The kitchen. It is a scandal. Even our own remains, such as they may be, will be hurried on rattling litters through the steamy kitchen of the miserable hospital near La Roche, that kitchen in which the cauldrons of soup for the coming day will provide a fitting context for the shoeless foot at dawn. Do you see the humor of it, the outrage? But everywhere it is the same: rooms without doors, sinks without drains, conduits that will never be connected to any water supply, corpses or bleeding victims forever passing through the kitchens of our nation’s hospitals.

  But why, you ask, why this terrible and at the same time humorous correspondence between physical building and human occupant? The answer is obvious: it is simply that there is no difference between the artist, the architect, the workman, the physician, the bloody victim and the cook slicing his cabbage. One and all they share our national psychological heritage. One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarianism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.

  But indeed, these qualities also account for our charm, our good humor, our handsome physiques, our arrogance, our explosive servility. We are as we wish to be. We would have it no other way. Our national type is desirable as well as inescapable. You and I? You and I are two perfect examples of our national type.

  The reason we make such a perfect pair, such an agreeable match, is that you are a full-fledged Leo, while through the marshes of my own stalwart Leo there flows a little dark rivulet of Scorpio. You were unaware of it? But then naturally you could not have suspected anything of my Scorpio influence since I deliberately though casually concealed even the slightest shade of that all-too-suspect influence from your detection. You see how capable I am of deception, at least of any deception which in my judgment is for our mutual good. But thus we have one more scrap to toss on the heap of our triumphant irony. Because in our case it now appears that the poet is the thick-skinned and simple-minded beast of the ego, while contrary to popular opinion, it is your ordinary privileged man who turns out to reveal in the subtlest of ways all those faint sinister qualities of the artistic mind. Yes, you are the creature who roars in the wind while I am the powerful bug on the wall. But you are not interested? You are not amused? And yet if only you would pause a moment to think, cher ami, then you would realize that behind my coldest actions and most jocular manner there lies not hostility but the deepest affection. After all, my Scorpio influence inspires me to unimaginable tenderness.

  I applaud the dark night. I love the darkness. Not merely for regressive pleasures: for comfort, security, the peace of the dream. No, I am much too active a person to stop with mere sensual immobility, though I am not at all denying my proclivities in that direction as well. No, it is simply that the night is to my eye as is the pair of goggles to the arc-welder. Through the thick green lens of the night I see only the brightest and most frightening light.

  For instance, the cemetery we are about to pass— yes, a cemetery, as luck would have it, along with the rabbit and gentle syncopation of the muted jazz which, at this moment, naturally intensifies and quickens—the cemetery we shall shortly pass is already clear to my eye, brilliant, rock-hard, motionless. You would see nothing even if you looked, so don’t bother. I see quite well enough for the two of us. At any rate the cemetery—and now, as a matter of fact, we are abreast of it, just there on the left—the cemetery stands now before my eyes, small, rising in tiers, a very old and typically well-ordered arrangement of crosses and crypts and mausoleums of black marble, white marble, some kind of deep gray stone, and it is quite as if we were staring at that small village of the dead (the likeness is most appropriate, cher ami) from a stationary vehicle parked in our empty wind-blown, golden field directly across from that small, excellent example of our morbid artistry. Yes, that is precisely how totally and clearly I see our cemetery, thanks to the night. And there is sunlight but no sun, a quality of deadened daytime colors that could only be perceived in the blackest and, I might add, the wettest of nights. The white vases, the red flowers composed of wax, the sagging ribbons, the tiny photographs that might have been stripped from an album depicting all the participants in the last great war, and the rows of gravel and little barred windows and stone rectangles constructed to the dimensions of the human body, and, thank goodness, not a single mourner to be seen in that entire conglomerate of piety and bad taste—well, now you have an idea of the true reason I so enjoy driving at night. It is not merely because the roads are generally unused at night. Not at all.

  But was that cemetery somewhat familiar to you, cher ami? It should have been.

  Silence. The bird in flight. Silence falling between driver and passenger who find themselves deadlocked on a lonely road, deadlocked in their purposes, deadlocked between love and hatred, memory and imagination. But you need not bother to raise your chin, turn your head, rouse yourself from all your afflictions into unhappy speech. I know what you are thinking. I could not agree more heartily. Silence is what we are after, you and I. Silence. I long for it also. You are not alone.

  We will not be denied. After all, we are now on the near edge of recklessness, it is no longer even a question of time to spare, and beyond us the trees are dying, the tiny shoots are turning a bright green, the landmarks are falling to the left and right of us so quickly that their significance is fading in direct proportion to our mounting preoccupation with ourselves, with what is to come. Yes, silence is consuming sight.

  The moral of it all is trust me but do not believe me—ever. Why, even as I deny the fleeting landmarks I cannot help but call your attention to that small church set back from the road in that clump of naked trees on our right. Naturally the church has nothing to do with the cemetery. The cemetery is already far, far behind us. It is gone. No, this is the church that is guarded by the old crone who tends the place with her cane and dog. She is an insufferable old creature who tried to frighten me away the very afternoon I stopped and strolled about and committed the landmark of her ugly little church to memory. She has a beautiful cough, I can tell you that. And I knew at once that she was no more taken in by the weedy sanctity of the little church and mutilated calvary than was I. At any rate I had only an objective interest in the steeple, as a point of essential reference, and a personal interest in the fountain which I knew I would discover in the tall grass behind the church.

  The fountain was there, as I knew it would be. And just think, according to local legend it was the Fountain of Clarity. You can imagine how pleased I was to stand in the last of the sun with this precise moment of our dark passage fixed in my mind—hearing the rain, the engine, the tires, seeing our lights—and at the same time to lean fo
rward and regard my own face in the little pool of water that lies in the depths of the Fountain of Clarity. Its ancient artisan could not have known that one day a privileged man such as myself would so admire his work. The creators of that ancient legend could not have known that I have never expected anything at all from my life except clarity. I have pursued clarity as relentlessly as the worshipers pursue their Christ. And there I stood, noting the algae in the bottom of the pool, the paleness of the still water, the rough ingenious construction of the fountain hidden in the tall grass. It was a pleasing coincidence. But my own face, our dark night that was as real to me as it is this moment, the automobile that was awaiting me on the dirt road in the shadow of the wretched calvary—it was nothing, nothing at all compared with the intensity with which I was then contemplating the existence of our own Honorine. Your Muse, my clarity, I cannot convey to you my satisfaction as the thought of Honorine filled the silence of an earthly spot which, except for the fountain, was otherwise perhaps a little too picturesque. But if I had ever worn a wedding band, an idea which for me has always been distasteful, certainly I would have removed it then and dropped it as an offering into the cold pool where the cows drank and the old woman filled her jugs and bottles.