by Jeremy Reed
When we entered the drive, with its hectic azalea flames, I knew from the horse standing there, patient, head bowed, that Monsieur Flammarion must have been waiting for over two hours in the house, impatient to resolve and punish my flagrant breach of courtesy. The question of my safety would not have occurred to him; his concern would be the inconvenience he had suffered.
Alma answered the slightly rolling toll of the doorbell, and while I stormed upstairs without so much as a word of greeting, one of the officers was received by Monsieur Flammarion in the library. I locked my door and remained deaf to Alma's solicitations. I wanted to be alone, and already I had conceived the notion of writing about the experience. Only by doing so it did I extract it detail by detail from my head. The transference of the indelibly visual to the medium of words would by that exchange alter the experience, so that both I and the event would become something else in the telling. I wanted to be a part of that change already. I imagined that if I could appear before Monsieur Flammarion as the person embodied in my intended fiction, I should be beyond his reach. There would be a confusion quite different from a lie in how I related the incident. It occurred to me that one could grow to live like this. To anticipate one's actions by their fictional occurrence.
I stood by the window listening for the reassurance of the sea. Its movement was always there even if you could not hear it, its vibration connected with my breathing, the hollowed curve of my diaphragm.
I was interrupted by Monsieur Flammarion's authoritative double-knock. He knew there was no need to speak; his dictates were imperative without ever having to be enforced. I went obediently to the door and opened it. He stood there, his hands behind his back, chest elevated, his expressionless eyes aimed at a point behind my shoulder. He was wearing a bullfinch-pink waistcoat beneath a sober grey suit. He appeared to have been drinking. I could smell juniper on his breath, the almost eau-de-Cologne scent that distinguished gin.
'I should like a word with you downstairs' was all he said before turning on his heel and leaving me no alternative but to follow him.
When I knocked at the door I was admitted to a room full of the Empire furniture and bibelots that my mother had shipped from Europe. The ponderous furniture had the air of knowing it would outlive you. I had the feeling as I faced Monsieur Flammarion that the nineteenth century would remain weighted down by the ballast of its drawing-rooms, its cardamom-scented studies.
The silence in the room deepened until I could make-believe I was walking underwater, opening my mouth in fish-ovals against a blanketing wall of sea.
'I shan't tire you with the details of a situation of which you are fully aware,' Monsieur Flammarion began, his eyes fixed on one of the two little Italian landscapes. 'You have not only disobeyed your father's instructions that you should keep away from the city during the period of carnival. You have insulted me by missing your tutorial.'
I had already lost interest in the situation and was looking at the light filtering through the aromatic gum leaves outside the window. If I were to be sent away on that interminable Atlantic passage to Bordeaux, it was my wish to go now. I would punish Father subsequently by my incommunicativeness; his letters would demand the obedience it was in my power to withhold. I would leave him nothing, only my mother's face, inaccessible in death, her features resisting any attempt on his part to re-establish their physical likeness to mine. I had already penetrated beyond the express status of individuals to probe the putrefying molluscs in their shells.
'Word of this will reach your father, even if I should refrain out of delicacy from mentioning it,' Monsieur Flammarion was saying, unable to conceal the latent pleasure he took in acting out the role of a duplicitous intermediary. 'Let me tell you,' he continued, 'should you lose your father's trust, your inheritance will be imperilled. You'd do well to view power not as an imposition but as the unifying undercurrent that determines our place in the social hierarchy.'
Monsieur Flammarion polished the little glassy full moon circumscribed by a rain-halo that served as a monocle. His manner had relented; the implacable indignation of his mood had devolved to the reminiscent. I was suspicious of this switch of tactics, the brightening of his eye that I had learnt to read as a barometric register indicating cross-currents.
'These are difficult times,' he continued. 'Something I shall have more to say of in my memoirs. This country has been subject to continual violent revolutions. Out here, men die like pigs.’
There was a silence I punctuated with both real and imaginary surf. I wanted to be out on the coast watching the water brighten from sapphire to kingfisher as it flooded into the shallows.
‘If you were a commoner, Ducasse,' Monsieur Flammarion resumed, 'the incident would be of little significance. But given your father's position and the extreme tenuousness of the political situation, your presence in what I understand to be a disreputable quarter requires a careful defence.'
It occurred to me that this piece of subtlety was the line I was being offered to enter into a conspiracy with the insignificant, pedantic man who aspired to state honours. For a long time I had suspected Monsieur Flammarion of going through Father's private papers. My suspicions were founded not on any tangible proof but on an attitude of mind that secretly desired recognition for actions it was forced in the interests of propriety to conceal. His cleverness was in allowing me to observe his silence. The vulnerability, the tensions I learnt to decode in him as a surer sign than language were all clues to a guilt in which I was somehow implicated. His invisible spider's web had been slowly settling on my face. Now he could observe his delicate artistry, the interweaving of his thoughts with my own.
'I am also to inform you', Monsieur Flammarion continued, 'that your father will be away for the period of the carnival on official duty. He has gone to San José, entrusting you to my charge. My advice to you is to go upstairs and make amends for the tutorial you missed this afternoon. I shall then discuss with you over dinner how a compromise can appear so signal a victory as to hold in check a potential that is too ruthless to admit to the field. It is not experience one acquires with age, it is more a knowledge of how best to capitalise on those situations where the strength withheld is assumed superior to the weakness manifested.'
Monsieur Flammarion lapsed into a partial silence; he was seeking my tacit approval by allowing his words to weigh in my mind. They went the way you throw stones in the shallows and watch them plummet in delayed spirals to the sandy bottom. I could pick them out by their mineral patterns — a blue, a green, an ox-blood stone embedded in its own shadow.
When I went upstairs to my room, I was further resolved in my determination to run away. I could feel the tyranny of the mid-nineteenth century tighten an iron cummerbund round my breathing. My father was unapproachable, my mother dead, and now my tutor was attempting to involve me in an illicit complicity against my father. I looked out of the window and felt the blue air beating its cool volutes of flame against my chest. What I saw with unmitigated clarity was not the whitewashed villas holding to the arc of the coast but the opening out of a timeless dimension, a cone of light through which I saw the gathering of peoples, the survivors milling together in a lunar landscape, the sky livid with warheads, a black rainbow arching over all. This visionary landscape had excluded the immediate one. I was realising the transforming power of the imagination and how reality was an inexhaustible lake inside me, a water rising on me. If I were to live, I had to learn to defend that province, to sit and meditate on black lakes like a swan quiet in the smoky reprieve of twilight. I was made suddenly aware that the secret was within me. The red jaguar running across a royal-blue beach under a zebra-striped sky existed because I had conceived it.
I could not concentrate on Racine's Phèdre. I thirsted for lines that would burn into my nerves. If it was to Baudelaire and Poe I turned most often for the sustenance of crowding on sail in my anxiety to reach the void, it was to the incredulous sobriety of Montaigne's mind that I switched when seeki
ng support for the unnatural.
Inwardly I fumed. Monsieur Flammarion would have resettled to his book. It would be Chateaubriand's Mémoires, but a part of him would not be reading at all, it would be measuring its prey, moving a beam of light over the image it had selected to trap. Somewhere at some moment I had registered as a potential in his scheme, the elevated arrow-head had bristled on my spine, and without my knowing it I had been marked.
Outside, a wind picked at the espaliered fruit-nets and shook the plumed tassels of pampas-grass.
I could hear Alma stop outside the door and hesitate. Her presence was defined by her breathing. I could sense that she was standing on tiptoe; the tension had persuaded her to follow the trajectory of her nerves in their straining towards an unrealised completion. I had to imagine what she was thinking, rooted there, her mind already engaged in perfecting what she h td still to achieve. I focused on the page and gave myself up to the automatic writing that I had come to find so pointed a directive to the transcription of the unconscious.
When I set out on the road for the lost city of Zalziba, I looked through a mirage at a herd of unicorns standing amongst flamingos in a blue pool. A summit stood upside-down in the glare like a thimble-top. I watched its snow-cap crown the waters, measure them like, a plummet, and suspend from their heights the primal image, the god in the form of the drowned man, choked like a water-rat in the crystal of his creation.
I continued my journey, and encountered a carriage drawn by four white tigers headed towards a villa lost behind maples.
I stood watching it go, and a young girl, her blouse open on breasts full blown as yellow roses, approached me and handed me a long-stemmed hookah. She had run away from the old scholar I had seen returning to his estate. He had spent a lifetime in the study of the relation between the tidal currents of the Bosporus and the erotic rhythm of the body at the heightened moments of orgasm...
Alma's light tap on the door found me dissociated. I did not want the muffled drum of her knuckles to intrude on my narrative. Within the limited radius of my life there was nobody in whom I could confide. The adult world seemed to be engaged in a perpetual conspiracy against the young, and to have adopted an inveterate antagonism amongst themselves.
I let her second and third knock go, and when finally I opened the door I recognised the smell of Mother's perfume: ashes of violets refined in Paris and sold in expensive crystal phials. Alma was heavy with it, a displeasing invasion that had me think she was wearing a borrowed skin. Her black eyes looked without seeing at the shambles of my bed, the surf of papers overlapping my desk, the disorder of my senses reflected in the disarray of my room. I wanted to protect my creative chaos, admonish her from the room, but her eyes came at me in ways that were disarming, as though she had discovered in me the pliant strings of a guitar that awaited only the play of her fingertips. This subtilised inner body that had been a source of such conflict to me was being drawn to the surface of my skin. I was both outraged and compelled by the suggestion of her advances, the instructive intensity of her stare forcing me into an apparent role of provocation. I fell back on the bed and continued falling through a well-shaft of unconscious imagery. Fragments of street scenes exploded into life. Soldiers were hustling a young Mexican out of an alley, his mouth still bruised by the juice of a pomegranate. Heat-whitened parallelograms, trapezoids, rhombs broke up the attempt to have a landscape slow down and stabilise. I was watching a fishing-boat sit in a bowl of light off the coast. Then the roar of surf was gaining in my ears: the universe was blacking out as lips folded into and funnelled my breath, their location shifting to leave scorch-marks on my neck and throat. Without any assistance on my part Alma was kneading her breasts against me, swimming in slow motion through planes that shattered like ice on my confused uptake.
I tried to push myself out from under, but the rhythmic spiral of her pelvis had connected with my own excitement. Something embodied in me was turning larval, a fire that I was not sure how properly to direct was gaining, fanning its heat towards an instinctive outlet. As her positioning pivoted on me I began to submit and feel myself cushioned by the tide rather than forced underwater. I was being instructed into that rhythm the way a dancer picks up on the drum tattoo, the clap of maracas. I was being lifted on a wave that gathered in momentum. It had begun to run for the shore, its gradient slanted, tilting, almost sheer in its concave arc, fetching me up in its overhang, compelling me forward in the white dazzle of its fomenting roar, the savage thunder of its detonation.
Then she was gone. I lay there soaked in a hollow of the bed, the phosphorus burning inside my skull. Now that it was over I had to convince myself of the reality of what had happened.
The house was still silent. Somewhere in its cavernous interior Monsieur Flammarion must have fallen asleep over his book. Our very separate apprehension of the world at this moment in time impressed on me the isolation in which each individual lives.
I lay back and allowed the flood of physical warmth to suffuse me. Swallows were diving in the air outside, skimming the eaves in the frenetic zigzag of their aerial chase, with whiplash elasticity. If I prolonged the moment indefinitely I could go on living it. The wave would become a frieze, a timeless transparency in which the afternoon would depict Monsieur Flammarion asleep over a calf-bound book, the stages by which Alma advanced to seduce me, Father's carriage frozen in its journey to San José, swallows cutting a wing-dip above the sea — and over it all, flushing the marble pink, the invisible and transforming rays of my mind.
*
The Eye 3
Your absence on official duty coincided with the carnival. From examining the family accounts I see your son lives on an independent income. He likes money — it is part of his superiority in town. But its purchasing power is not used locally. The books he values are brought to him from Paris, and so too are the silk cravats he delights in wearing. He has quickly established a network of contacts. You may wish me to pursue this, but X is the key to breaking the system.
Your housekeeper Alma excites my curiosity, not out of any express interest on my part in her life, but in her relationship to your son and Gustave Flammarion. I naturally find myself asking this question: What does she know that I don't? She is on the inside, and yet the language problem seems insurmountable. I can find no access to her. Does Flammarion? And if he does, then his connection with her involves your son. I trust you follow me. It is my belief that Flammarion has shaped your son's life more than that of his initial acquaintances in Montevideo.
It is extraordinary that one so young can have already decided on preferences in life that seem to owe little to his environmental upbringing. He has already cultivated a love of Chopin and Liszt, attending piano recitals in the home of an American, James Lowell. Whatever he does carries with it the conviction not of a beginner but of someone who is right and whom others in the course of time will follow. What I had taken at first to be a pretentious arrogance I now detect as a form of modest conviction.
On the chief night of the carnival, your son having been upbraided by Monsieur Flammarion and doubtless sent to his room in view of his daytime activities, I saw no purpose in maintaining a watch.
I decided to go into town and stay close to X's house in Bista del Mar. It seemed obvious to me that if your son were to break bounds, he would be found in that district.
*
Chapter 3
When I awoke it was to find the house silent and a smoky blue dusk flooding the window. I could hear the report of fireworks, the luminous sky blaze of a casa, sky fountains of ruby and emerald ascending in curved parabolas to earth themselves in a rain of cinders. From my window I could see the harbour lit up by the early-evening festivities. There were Portuguese and French three-masters in port, and a billowing wick of gunpowder smoke hung over the town.
I stood at the window breathing in the warm air blown off the Atlantic, trapping it in my shirt folds, my nerves thrumming in anticipation of the carnival I intended t
o visit in the small hours. The confrontation I had experienced in the morning had left me with the restless desire to seek out my antagonist and, if necessary, renew the challenge asserted earlier in the day. My intuitive faculties told me that my intention was reciprocated, and that somewhere in an alley a transvestite was applying pink snowballs of rouge to a cosmetic mask as a preliminary to the wished-for encounter.
As I stood looking out over the bay it was my mother's face that was suddenly pointed up in my memory. I saw her as she used to look when she visited me in the evenings, her chin dusted with powder, her sea-grey eyes communicating to me from a sense of hurt. If she came to me late, she would untie her hair from a simple black ribbon and pins and let its gold, streaming curls flood her face and shoulders. She spoke to me always as the friend she would have become, had time permitted the establishment of that bond. Even now when I say her name, Célestine-Jacquette, I am conscious of how little she could communicate her sufferings. I was aware of no arguments or altercations between my parents, no visible or audible show of displeasure, and yet the tragic consequences of this ill-suited marriage cannot have been a thing of the moment but rather the corollary to bitter rites — the unspoken language of a cold marriage bed. When Mother visited me in the evenings, she was permitted to re-express her childhood. The simplicity of her early life showed in the manner in which she entered into my love of picture-books and the sailing-ships depicted on stamps, but foremost in the conspiratorial manner in which she narrated our stories, surprising herself as much as me in the way the fiction overtook us, conveyed us as strangers into an unknown territory and threatened to leave us there. We would be alone then, the two of us stranded on a sun-fired island, our boat burning on the sands, our location inaccessible.