by Jeremy Reed
It is from watching your son's solitary hours on the shore that I have come to establish another tenuous connection which I hope in time to develop. He is himself being constantly watched by a figure concealed in the cliffside grasses. I can gain no lead on this man. His occupation may be better known to your department. His involvement has something to do with ships — a wrecker, a smuggler, a trafficker in contraband? His binoculars are regularly trained on your son's activity, which seems to be nothing more than that of someone who wishes to be alone by the sea.
I am certain that both characters are unknown to each other. I shall designate this man as X in future communications.
Long observation tells me that your son walks with a stoop, though I cannot say if it is affected or natural. He is also liable in moments of elation to develop a limp in the left leg as though comically imitating a character study. These outbreaks are further evidence of his undisciplined nature.
I hope to be able to build on my preliminary investigations and provide you with more detailed accounts. Flammarion's private notes on your son read:
Possibly a classicist but lacks discipline. Decadent leanings that find a resonance in my own area of experience. Too solitary to learn from the discourse of others. Excitable imagination. Fascination with bestiaries, the antediluvian world of monsters. Could be put to purposeful use in my cause if it weren't for an unrelenting obstinacy. I suspect he knows the truth about his parents?
*
Chapter 1
It was the clock by which I lived, persistent and without duration, the measured flood of surf involving my ear like a shell caught up in the undertow. I could hear it in the lapses between fever, the universal rhythm of tides, the world rolled like a pearl through emerald gulleys. Sometimes the wind would report on a wreck breaking up on a reef, its hull dislodged and dragged over a coral steeple. I would imagine its sunken cabins sequined by luminous shoals of fish, their collective motion resembling aquatic butterflies.
On my bedside table were the shells I had dived for or filched from a cove. It was their completion that fascinated me. Nothing was left to chance. Their colouring was dictated by their habitat, and correspondingly brought to mind the multicoloured pockets of the sea, its brilliant fauna, vermilion and yellow prairies of weed, fronds vibrating in the current.
A diver showed me how to extract the mollusc from the shell with a corkscrew twist of the knife, but more often I buried my trophy in the sand and allowed the ants to clean the interior. When I heard my father pejoratively snapping my name, I would place my ear to the rose-coloured helix and listen to the roar inside my head. That way I was alone again, basking on a ledge, my mind given up to the sun and the wave unrolling a white hem of lace on the sand.
When my father's voice intruded on my silence, I grew confused. His inquiry had the effect of a stitch coming undone in the seamless fabric I called my inner dialogue. He was stiff, imperious, inflexible in his dictates. I would watch him pacing the balcony, and I knew by the pauses in his metronomic beat when he was thinking of her, and how the image of her face must have arrested his mechanical step. His rigidity disguised an almost imperceptible limp which would develop in times of crisis. He must have lived with the refusal to recognise its autonomy ever since he had come to live in Uruguay, and had renounced his small teaching post in a village in the Hautes-Pyrénées. He kept a watch on it — the slightest hint of any physical defect and he would have lost face. It was only my diligent watching that discovered it, and tonight his secret was pronounced. His left leg spasmodically twitched without his seeking to redress the action.
I could see the sequins of sweat oiling his forehead, his head comically pepperpot-squat on a Roman neck, his white linen torso corseted by a red sash. His felt hat rested on a white cane chair, together with an open copy of Balzac that would be meticulously returned to its library shelf in the morning. It must have been something more than his life as a teacher that inclined him to amass so curious a collection of books. I never tired of poring over the plates of natural curiosities, monsters said to be extinct. There were huge armour-plated dinosaurs, cumbersome mastodons and great ground-sloths uprooting a tree bodily. The primitive bestiaries came alive at night. I learnt to people my dream landscapes by prolonged meditation on pictorial images. If I closed my eyes I could trap the monster in my head, afford it life in the great inner spaces where nothing has ever died or relinquished its right to terrorise. I declared war on the dark gods, their horned buffalo heads and red eyes watched me from wooded summits. I was granted a cheetah's speed, I could never be taken captive — a gold wind-arrow pursuing a flight arc that took in a plain at a single stride.
Solitary, at odds with colonialism, I paced the beaches anticipating an encounter that would convince me of the meaning of reality. I watched fishermen put out at dawn on a serene sea, a white sail on the horizon pricking up like a cat's ear in response to wind. I saw gold coins flung back in an officer's face by a half-dressed girl, tinkling as they rained down on stones.
When my father threatened that next year I would be sent away to board at the Lycée Impérial of Tarbes, I allowed his words to escape me. I made believe that by ignoring the directive, Father would in time forget. His manner of addressing me was so unreservedly formal that he gave the appearance of standing back from his words, as though absolving himself from the inconsequence of speaking to a minor. He seemed frightened that language implied a moral responsibility, a psychological evaluation of the manner in which we express our thoughts. He was irritable, peremptory, his moustache stained with coffee, and I backed out of his study into the green sunlight, then took off at a run behind our house, making for the bay with its long, dazzling surf-line, the sapphire water disclosing a ribbed sea-floor of zebra stripes, a nervous cloud of pink fish taking off into deeper water.
I was resolved to stow away, to punish my father for his indifference and create a scandal amongst the colonial community. Obscenities, recriminations, telescopic metaphors crowded my head. I took out my notebook and began penning my anger by way of release. All of the frustration evolved over years of restraint flooded out of me like the deadly black ink of a cuttlefish.
My dear Father
By the time you receive this letter I shall be on the high seas bound for Bordeaux. You will nonchalantly draw on a cigar, assess your diminishing assets and delight in the attraction presented by your new sense of a bachelor's freedom. They will never know, as I do, the truth of what happened to Mother, and how she must forever rise as a drowned body in the black pool of your unconscious. You forget that I was there that day on the beach.
As one whose vocation is to be a poet, I thought I would entertain you with an allegory from my stock of inherited madness.
— There was this man and he took root in his house. He secured himself to it like a clam its shell, and the walls digested his secrets. In the dark of the night he would think I am invisible, people have accepted my station, and he would refer to his library shelves as conspirators in his plot. When he heard of a man who lived in a hut on a vertical cliff, shelved above a dead drop to the sea, he broke out in a cold, vertiginous sweat. The prospect unbalanced him. He began to dream of the place, and his oneiric visions were of himself becoming a bird that lacked the gravity to return to earth. His obsession with the precariousness of this cliff-hut compelled him to visit it.
He set out on a day of sea-mist and rain. A vessel had foundered off the coast that night. It could be seen upended, prow down in the open shark's jaw of a hidden gulley. When he arrived at the coastguard's shack, his repeated knocking on the door met with no response from the person he knew to be inside. He could hear someone moving about the room quite naturally, oblivious to his repeated summons. The rain was blowing off the face of the sea, a white smoke that saturated his military greatcoat. He could hear the man indoors working with a hammer, Isidore and to his confused senses it seemed as though the door was being boarded up against his entry. His hand went numb and it
was only when it dropped involuntarily to his side that the hammering stopped. Simultaneous with the abrupt reintroduction of silence he noticed big flowering-currant sprays of blood on the thin, white timbers, and the rawness of his knuckles stung where the skin had shredded.
He stood there a long time staring at his damaged fist, the skin peeled open like the corolla of a lily. The wind had risen, threatening his own safety, and he charged inland, head down and butting through the grasses. He expected at any moment to hear the foundations give and the house plummet over the cliff into an angry head of white water. Several times his imagination audibly created the sound, but it was only the renewed assault of waves detonating at the cliff base. He pushed through tall streamers of grass, his coat teeming with ducts of rain, the panic mounting in him as he tore deeper into unknown territory.
When he got back to the town, he remembered his rank and adopted a martial strut — eyes fixed on the skyline, back erect. To his astonishment a great crowd was milling on the outskirts of his residence. The animated buzz resembled that of a disturbed hornets' nest. He pushed his way through their disorder and found that his house had been levelled by the tempest. Nothing stood upright. The roof had been pitched into a nearby plantation, the walls slatted, and incongruously only his heavy oak desk remained anchored to the site. When he moved closer, something shifted with the wind, layers of pink chiffon bordered with pearls and fluted with salmon lace had him think of a wounded bird, a flamingo trying to lift from the grasses. It was only when he prodded it with the ferrule of his cane that he recognised it as one of his wife's petticoats. He stood back and watched it soar birdlike with the gust and spiral up high into the underface of a sooty cloud, a migrant off-course and lashed by the storm. It hung motionless for a second and then disappeared in a series of rapid loops.
The man buried his damaged fist in the earth of his foundations and traced out these words: A house of blood is open for all to see, whereas a house of paper withstands the hurricane.
I left off writing, my nerves pacified by the black venom-trail of my pen. I realised how little I spoke of psychological issues, how rarely I committed my inner world to speech. Instead I recorded it in words, huddled over my notebook like a man crouched in front of a fire, the ink-blotches showing like berry stains. I had to keep these concealed from the inquisitiveness of our maid, Alma, whose shadow mooned over every surface of my room. Her lips pouted whenever she crossed my bedroom mirror, giving one the impression that she had just bitten into a raspberry. Alma was a local girl from the village, a mulatto whose unstudied walk had the rhythmic pitch of a belly-dancer. Her hips completed an imaginary circle with each motion of her body as though her intention was to rotate rather than propel herself forwards.
I would watch that quiver, which seemed to radiate from the base of her spine through the cleft of her bottom, and wonder if the balls of her feet were balanced on oranges. Her language was one of gesture, not speech. She lacked the element of mistrust in natural phenomena that so characterised the tension in our house. My father, for all his reserve and unassailable hauteur, was terrified by the outbreak of storm. If an electric storm broke over the gulf at night, I would hear him go downstairs and unstopper a decanter. Then the pacing would begin, a drawer would be opened and shut, papers would crackle with the urgency of fire rushing through brushwood. This disturbance would last for the duration of the thunder — the anxiety of a caged jaguar, its beat constricted by the confines of its cage. In the morning the purple rim left by the discolouration of Father's monocle would be outlined like a bruise. The air would smoulder with the reek of cigars, and the orderly quiet of the study admit to the rampage that had ransacked cupboard and drawer in the early hours of magenta light shot with quicksilver.
Alma went about the house like a somnambulist. What she did not wish to see, she bypassed. Her thin dress acquired the line of her body, and on rainy days one could imagine the tight, mauve buds of her nipples flowering from expansive breasts. It was not desire I experienced so much as a confused apprehension to witness my opposite. I had believed that the self was an inexhaustible study, a beach that one could never cross owing to the complexity of ciphers scored in the sand. One was a long time in kneeling to examine each new cryptogram that evolved from a sensory awakening. The triangular imprint left by the oyster-catcher was slashed and crossed by a graph sheet of conflicting signs. One could spend a lifetime searching out the oyster-catcher's trail to the exclusion of any other alternative. There was no end to the maze, and all that summer I felt an increasing dissatisfaction with my inability to enter into the tidal current of other lives. No sooner had I raised my horns from the involuted turban of my shell, than I retracted. The big events happened inside; it was there I could establish my province.
I got into the habit of making nocturnal excursions to the shore. Lights flickered from small fishing-craft rounding the coast. The lighthouse was a moving arc against the stars. When I closed my eyes, the seascape was contained within me like a ship inside a bottle. If you kept on doing that, I told myself, you became God. Once you had achieved the internalisation of the universe, your proportionate expansion demanded a cosmic awareness. In that way the mystic eye could see the universe as a child's clear blue marble — a crystal sphere balanced on a projecting ray of light.
The beach was my imaginary kingdom. I imagined myself as a sea-king, solitary, listening to the beat of surf, my head on my knees at the edge of the world. Everything existed only because of my consciousness. I was the seed that germinated in the void, and already I knew Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, the works of Mickiewicz, Byron, Musset and the psychological hells devised by Poe. I saw myself as the child in Baudelaire's Le Voyage who sits with his maps and stamps by lamplight, only my precocity allowed not so much for amazement at the vastness of the universe as boredom when I realised that its discovery would afford only a sense of the predictable. I had already lived the poem's trajectory and suffered its conclusion: 'On through the unknown to find the new.'
If I sat absorbed by my own reflection, it was because I believed that the magnification of the particular comprised our only access to knowledge.
My father would be away for days at a time. He would be gone at the head of a small diplomatic party, his features set into an impersonal mask, and only the thin sickle-blade of his mouth, the upper lip hidden by a sandy moustache, revealed the inhumanity he translated into a devotion to duty. There were uprisings everywhere, insurrectionist blacks firing the houses of Europeans, squalling through flame for the pickings of loot — chamber-pots, jewel-caskets, gowns of Bordeaux-blue velvet which in time would become sweat drenched and slashed in a cane thicket.
I would sit on a chair in the portico overlooking the courtyard and make up stories, which I pretended to narrate to a figure who stood below me. He was called Hermione. Hermione was the protean form that embodied my chameleonic flights of mood. Alma could not see him. On the one occasion when I mistakenly owned to his identity, she adopted a peremptory manner and suggested I go indoors and lie down with the shutters closed. ‘But then he'd only come inside,' I replied. 'We're interchangeable. He might look out of me and you'd never know.'
Sometimes when Father was away for a prolonged period I would ride into Montevideo and drink coffee in Independence Square. If a boat had put in, there would be the excited milling of crowds, irregular panopticons of trunks lashed to a carriage that rattled towards the Panaderia del Sol.
But even in the comparative serenity of the capital I could sense the uprising that was to come. I could smell the pungent histamine of grass-fires and hear the spar-jarring collapse of rafters. There was the reverberant sound of cattle breaking across country pursued by a red overhanging wave of fire. And the women, even in my juvenile imagination, were being twisted into impossible extravaganzas of geometry — legs somersaulting over their heads, a soldier dancing on the world triangle, forcing his pleasure to the exclusion of time and place, realising through the mounting sur
f of his climax the momentum that forces a tidal wave over a white cliff-face. The sense of imminent destruction was with me as I stood outside the Duplessis Bank, calle Cerrito, watching the rich plantation holders arrive, their plutocratic diffidence pronounced by their reserve, the conviction that they need never die in a country which offered such continual beneficence. They would be found one day in an outback, a colony living on in orange and lemon groves, the perfumed blossoms snowing their laps, their wisdom as old as stone.
My youth burned with precocity. Standing still in the middle of the square in Montevideo, I would feel myself levitate, lifted by a big wind that seemed to displace me from the limitations of the present and establish me in a century I should never live to see. The consciousness of being at odds with my age also extended to a dislike of my body. Tall, thin, slightly stooped, my raffish blond hair curtaining my forehead, I was awkward, odd as a heron as I stood still listening to my thoughts well up from a subterranean cavern. The shrillness of my voice was an oddity like Shelley's. Day after day I would see it, his blackened skull picked out of the roaring pyre on the beach, bone scoured by the fire, Byron spitting into the ashes, cursing the green sky, stubbing his club-foot on a charred timber, subduing the impulse to smash the triumphant death's head on a cauldron of rocks. I could smell the red hecatomb, the black wick of smoke swathing into the azure sky. Shelley with his violet eyes had dispersed into the elements he had celebrated. His small mourning party walked back up the beach, elated, still unable to equate death with the sanded drags of smoke, the blue dazzle of light above the sea.
Hermione wouldn't go away in times like these. He was just there, waiting between me and the light as a sign that the narrative was to begin. He would surprise me on the portico while I cradled my glass of lime sorbet and listened to a woodpecker drilling up high in a tree-top. Or he would intrude at dinner. I would stop in mid-sentence, tumble over the cohesion of my words, drop a knife or fork, to the outraged rancour of my father, who would redden, but I was overtaken, lifted out of the present and transported into fragments of a fiction. I was witness to two sailors' brawling in an alley over a red-haired woman who lifted her skirt higher and higher as an enticement to the one who should win.