Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  When the scene changed, I was the solitary figure waiting on the beach in a blue boating cloak for the news that would come of the birth of a king in the islands. The child was guarded in a black marble villa by two sisters sworn to keep the secret of his parentage. Already he wrote in his own blood as a mark of his absolute authority. He would drape the mirrors, for if he were to see himself, it meant death. He would prepare speeches for his eventual voyage to Rome, and in his mind hear the voluminous approbation of the stadiums. He would die by night in Venice, rowed in a gondola across black, star-lit canals, the potency of a swallowed aphrodisiac raging in his poisoned entrails, the masked figure lying beside him on cushions, already forcing the rings off his fingers. Noli-me-tangere. Suck my cock.'

  I would be ordered from the table. My father would stand up, his cheeks turned claret, and watch me leave in a silent rage. It was at such moments I would observe the buried youth in him. I would see the sapling inside the gnarled features of the weathered tree. Without the moustache trained into the shape of a circumflex accent, and the discoloured eye-rings of the insomniac, his figure relieved of the ballast accumulated at diplomatic dining-tables, it was possible to see a young man stooping to blue gentians on a mountain-slope, excited by the anticipation of what life might come to reveal. I would stare at a candle-flame as the tension drew tight like a bowstring. A lilac oval quivered inside the orange halo. That light was responsible for the illusory pentimento of Father's youth.

  I continued to stare at him in the way a sculptor cuts the waste marble free of the intrinsic form he has preconceived. I kept on wishing he could see himself as the candle allowed me to imagine him: a young man leading the girl who was my mother across a field of tempestuous anemones, their petals resembling a rainbow arched over a magenta wash. Father had lost thirty years in standing up. I wanted him to remain like this, a figure created by flame, hollowed and dabbed by gold and blue

  I was to be punished for day-dreaming; my father couldn't tolerate unresponsiveness to his politically informed conversation. There was news of Louis-Napoleon's expansive liberalism, of a Paris liberated from the despotism of Louis-Philippe's Second Republic — women waking to find diamonds under their satin pillows, the gunfire of champagne corks, dukes pissing into chamber-pots in the small hours, Vox Populi, vox Dei! inscribed on the blue-black night sky above Notre-Dame.

  I was ordered to bed by an implacable silence. Outside my window I could hear the tireless susurration of surf, the Atlantic expiring in a white ruff on the moonlit beach. And beyond that horizon? I was already there. The world would offer me a straw with which to negotiate the labyrinth — I could see my shadow huge in a corridor, drunk on the reek of animal, following through to the hurricane contained in the bull's eye.

  *

  The Eye 2

  Recurrent lapses in tutorial attendance. I wonder that this aspect of your son's behaviour is not made apparent to you through Monsieur Flammarion.

  Of a more disturbing nature is the boy's attraction to scenes of violence, something that was first drawn to my attention by a stable-hand. The horse ridden by Isidore has several times been returned with vicious welts cut into its flanks by the use of a whip and spurs. If he rides for an afternoon, a horse is ruined for a week.

  On the 5th, 8th, 12th, 23rd and 27th of this month your son visited the capital. I had expected his visits to be motivated by the need for stimulus or devised with the intention of making brief contact with strangers in town. Your son is careful to avoid acquaintance with residents of Montevideo. In this respect his instincts are remarkably advanced for a young man. His judgement is infallible. He responds to the one approach that he knows is safe.

  On the 12th and 23rd events took a more serious turn. I observed Isidore Ducasse leave the Imperial Hôtel and walk diagonally across the town. His direction took him towards the abattoir situated on the outskirts of the poor quarter. On the 12th he was chased off from the site by a gaucho, but returned an hour later and managed to conceal himself behind offal-bins in the yard. I need not describe for you the butchery that characterises this place. Shrieking animals are brought to the ground and slaughtered. Your son appeared unmoved by the sight of such unrelenting bloodshed and returned again on the 23rd. This time he bribed the foreman and was allowed to enter the abattoir. The workers paid no attention to his presence, despite the neatness of his clothes, the oddness of his being there. His intense absorption, the stiff movements of his body, seem to suggest a compulsion that is close to trance.

  Blood-stained clothes. Took his shirt to the beach, washed and dried it in the heat.

  Three days at home engaged in writing and close study. On the 27th he set out for town about an hour before noon. Intense heat and an atmosphere of unrest that characterises the carnival preparations. I followed Isidore Ducasse to Independence Square, where he deposited a letter at the American Hôtel. He then made his way towards the central market, an unsafe area which I understand he is forbidden to visit. Fireworks were already being released from the roof-tops.

  In one of the filth-littered streets behind the market your son was challenged by a masked figure, dressed for the carnival, who effectively cut off your son's right of way by occupying a position in the middle of the road.

  Something about this man, his light stature, his movements, has me associate him with X, whom I have referred to in my previous report.

  The police report will have filled you in with details of the incident.

  Suspect: Ruben Machado

  Occupation: Unknown

  Address: 3 Bista del Mar

  Other Relevant Information: Former sailor, speaks French and English. Known

  to the police. No convictions in Montevideo.

  *

  Chapter 2

  When the last of the panic-stricken animals had entered the abattoir, the gaucho, pursued by his attendants, galloped outside the enclosure round to the other side of the yard. There he dismounted and retrieved from the ground a long, thick rope manufactured from raw skin, and tied it to his saddle-ring. In the course of watching I realised that that leather rope was a flexible lasso, the loop of which was slung over a pulley. The man standing inside the yard brandished it several times above his head, before his aim directed itself round a bullock's horns. Simultaneous with the lasso finding its target, the horseman spurred his animal to a quick uptake, and by means of this opposition brought the captive bullock to the ground, dragging him at the same time close to the spot where the man who had thrown the lasso was waiting with his knife to dispatch the animal close behind the horns.

  The first time I witnessed this I felt compelled to go on watching, despite the trapped herd's stampede, the contained hysteria of horses, the ferocity of the killing. The dead animal was then dropped through a trapdoor on to a truck that ran along the sheds on iron rails. Six men waited at the terminus to lift the carcass from the carriage and begin immediately to skin and dress it. The procedure went on for hours with monotonous regularity. Somehow, although I had never wished to encounter such scenes of brutality, and by now my white shirt was flecked with a fine spray of blood carried on the wind, I was mesmerised by the subversion of my own heroic myth in which I ventured my life against a single intractable force that stood between me and the blue sea-roads leading to the future.

  On several occasions I surprised myself on the way to the abattoir. I would start as though caught in the act of theft, and pull up short on the road. I could not decide whether it was I or another who hurried with such intent towards the scene of slaughter. I expected to find myself sitting in my room, the windows flung open on the day, dreaming the incident, so that at a switch of my thoughts the action could be erased — the projected double hauled back in on a lifeline.

  I stood back against the whitewashed wall of a courtyard and breathed in the scent of aloes. It was I who was standing there using up unrepeatable moments of a life that appeared to have fallen like a coin on its rim so that both sides were visible al
ternatives, one depicting the sharply relieved circle of an oroborus, the other a caduceus. That thin circle of gold caught fire in the sunlight. I imagined it dropped by someone hurrying to catch the ferry to the underworld.

  I was journeying towards blood in streets already hectic with preparation for the three-day carnival. There was a simmer of gunpowder in the dry pre-carnival air. Someone had paint-splashed the name Juan Manuel de Rosas on the wall of a suspected agitator's house. His dictatorship had ended when I was a child of six, but people still spat whenever his name was mentioned. Tomorrow fire-balloons would drift out over the harbour with its imposing lighthouse. Masked orgiasts would patrol the streets; women with a silver tassel on each nipple and faces sequined with cosmetics would stream through the alleys leading to the Customs House and the Hotel Oriental. All day the mask-makers would be at work, elaborating on papier-mâché grotesques, clowns' faces, primitive warrior expressions, and somewhere a death's head, a lantern-jawed, white skull staring out of the dark at a braying donkey.

  I hurried on; the air smelt of saltpetre from the fireworks that had been prematurely released into the daylight sky. Orange and black, they had gone up as a flight of orioles before exploding into pyrotechnical blossoms of a blue flame-tree.

  I should have been at home reading Racine or Corneille for my private tutorials aimed at preparing me for the Lycée at Tarbes. Flammarion was an old Bonapartist who had fled to Montevideo under the France of the Citizen-King Louis-Philippe, and talked constantly of returning to Louis-Napoleon's Paris. He was a small, understated individual who seemed forever about to impart an intimate secret to an imaginary audience. His etiquette was as polished as the silver tip of his walking-cane. He carried a top hat and wore the check suits made popular by the Comte de Walewski. I distrusted this asthmatic, punctilious man and his anecdotal memory, the watery glaze in his grey eyes that seemed to hint at the existence of collateral bands of thought, a forked tongue that undermined his façade of sincerity. And there were the hours when he was to be heard talking to Father in his study. It was a different voice I heard then, the inflexions being more variable, the intonations more volubly masculine. It could not be me they were discussing at such length, although in the black thunder of my mood I imagined I was the exhibit in a glass dome on show between the two of them. Were they conniving to be rid of me, or was the pedantic Monsieur Flammarion impressing Father with his intimate knowledge of the colour scheme of the Empress's apartments at the Tuileries? What was it that fascinated him about the portrait of the Prince Imperial as a child, wearing the broad red ribbon of the Legion d'honneur on his little white frock-coat? Details, punctums, the illusory never separated from the real.

  I could hear delirious laughter coming from the open window of a villa. Someone was throwing water-bombs in the street, pelting me, and I felt their cold, detonating shock. I was struck on the left shoulder and then the crown of the head, to the accompaniment of the dull report of a firework flourishing an emerald mare's tail in the blue sky. I pressed on through streets reeking of a filth that was in contradiction to the cosmopolitan innovations of our city, its architectural parallelograms, its sea air smelling of jasmine and mimosa. A harlequin darted out of a doorway dressed in a spangled jacket, yellow tights and a pink face-mask. I pulled up short, challenged by this confrontation in a side-street, the figure barring my way, moving with a boxer's feint to left and right, disguising his intentions under a clown's red-painted mouth. I backed off and he advanced; I went forward and he retreated. A spider's tacky thread had contrived to join us — an invisible but tightly binding line linked our umbilicals, drawing us now forward and now back on a wavering tension cord.

  When I looked round, the alley was blocked behind me by a crowd that had gathered, sealing off my exit to the thoroughfare. Simultaneously a group of masked figures had gathered behind my unknown antagonist. They stood with their backs to the wall, pretending indifference but all the while vitally alert to our every movement. Without my being conscious of it, the distance had narrowed between us, and for the first time I could see the black drill-holes of eyes in the slit apertures of the cerise mask. The figure facing me was deceptively misproportioned, the shoulders padded inside the tight-fitting scarlet jacket, the hair scraped up beneath a tricorn and tied in a bow, a white froth of lace concealing the chest. The jacket flashed a rain-storm of brilliants.

  I stood fixed in the white, sunlit street. I was ice in the noonday heat; resolute in my determination to cut my way through the crowd. I was experiencing the same excitement as on the first time I was allowed to ride without instruction. The division between my own momentum and that of the effortless rhythm of the horse beneath me had so vanished that I neglected to take in the overworked steaming flanks, the hot fleck of saliva, the repeated incision of my spurs. On my return I was thrashed by the groom, but I was drunk on speed, intoxicated by the huge spaces I had swallowed. I still seemed to hang over a green furnace of grasslands, a figure autonomously projected into an overreach of the future. Thereafter I should always be a fraction ahead of myself.

  Again the figure closed. I kept wondering what had caused our lives to intermesh, and if the figure were not in some way connected with the abattoir and my hanging around there when the fat cattle were driven into their waiting pens.

  I could see the handle of a knife resting partly concealed on the outside of my opponent's right leg. The tension was exacting. A fly punched across my vision on a squib-fuse. I could feel the crowd willing the conflict as an incitement to the riotous festival that would begin at nightfall.

  I was forbidden to be here, that was what drummed in my head; fear of my father and not that of my antagonist interposed as the only division between me and my opponent. I was to be constrained to the prospect of festive fire-balloons floating across the bay, from the roof-top. Blood, salt, ammonia. I could smell them in the air, the pungent ingredients that predicted physical conflict. We narrowed again, close enough this time for me to see false breasts in my antagonist's shirt. I had the feeling that he somehow knew more about me than I did myself; he had acquired an extra dimension on me that I had still to find in my psychological make-up. He was at an advantage, his features concealed and distorted, deflecting me away from the identity that showed through his eyes.

  People had gathered on the adjacent roof-tops, nonchalant, indifferent, immune to the outcome of another knife fight, but interested enough to keep half an eye on us.

  I was too light for my opponent, my schoolboy's body would be thrown or kicked at the first interlocking of bodies. I was half the man's weight, armed with a small boating-knife although he did not know it, a foreigner in the mixed Spanish and Italian neighbourhood. Involuntarily I was devising a strategy, mapping out my hit-points, my possible avenues of escape. The rush was beginning to occur in me, I could feel the adrenalin forcing my blood; I had to restrain myself from making the first improvident move.

  A solid backdrop looked on, a tableau depicting the curious, the accidental and those whose natural impulse quickened the undercurrent of impending violence. Time in its concentration seemed indefinitely extended. I was both here in this alley and elsewhere, and it was my vision of somewhere else that told me I was not going to die. I envisaged myself years on, a slim young man in a black velvet coat, foxed at the elbows, looking out of an attic window at sun-burnished spires. In order to get there I had to eliminate my opponent. The cord uniting us grew more assertive in its vibrancy. The dust irritated my nostrils, worked through to the lining of my throat, and settled there. Then the blaze occurred, a whiplash of lightning had me veer wide of my opponent's triggered projection, his hand simultaneously finding the knife as he ran through the space I had occupied, my feint sending me chin down in the dust, to the accompaniment of an uproar as the onlookers shrieked, at which the military gendarmerie cut through, lashing to right and left with savage cuts of their horse-whips, dispersing people with indiscriminate brutality. A dismounting officer tore the sequined
eye-mask from my opponent to reveal the face of a young woman, her black-eyed Italian features scored by a horizontal scar across her forehead. She was beaten and left on the pavement of a street that did not even own to a shadow. Meanwhile the spectators had deliquesced into the blue vapour of the afternoon. I stood there, the knee of my black breeches torn, the elbow of my shirt shredded.

  I was driven home in a landau, silent, white-faced with rage at the indignity of being escorted back to my father's house. We passed orange and banana plantations, and here and there the black shade cast by a fig tree. Some of the European houses had drives bordered by Australian gum trees, and in one an ombu offered a cool and impenetrable penumbra. As we drove along I could recognise the tiru-riru of a thorn-bird, or the firewood gatherer as Alma called it on account of its propensity to collect sticks for building purposes.

  I was uncommunicative with the two officers who escorted me home. They doubtless wanted to be free of their charge and to return to the city for the dubious pleasures of the carnival. Restraint was exercised by no faction, and only last year the chief of police had been found drugged, stripped of his uniform and credentials in a bad part of the old city, his body ballooning like a fish in a hammock strung up in a native girl's room. It was in this district I had been found, in an alley behind the principal plaza which had been built by the Spaniards, and divided by a flagway from the chief market at the Plaza de Independencia. My guilt was a private one; neither of these two men could have known that I was on my way to the abattoir to experience the butchery of droves of hysterical cattle. And although I should have to account for my presence in the old quarter, I was still the threatened victim with rights of protection and not the unlawful antagonist.