Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  The narrative isolated us from Father. He would be downstairs preparing a report, his shadow forming a penumbra over the page, his specious industry guarded with a watchdog's truculence. Mother gave the impression of wishing to stay with me for hours; it was a different world up here with the blue bay visible from the window, and steam- and sailing-ships putting into harbour with their regatta of multicoloured flags. The barriers between us would grow porous and then fluid, and our easy intimacy meet like the confluence of two streams which braid together in a mountain pass before finally resuming their own separate tributaries.

  If Mother stayed too long, we would anticipate Alma's subdued knock at the door; and then I would watch her eyes cloud, and the anxiety show in her features the way a breeze places a sudden tremolo in still water. With great ingenuity she would step to the mirror, tie up her hair without Alma's assistance and straighten her skirts as though she had been discovered in the act of visiting a lover. When she turned to go, she had aged ten years and was no longer my conspirator in negotiating islands but a woman obedient to her marital duties.

  I dressed for dinner in a white linen suit and white shirt, the collar tied with a black velvet bow. Dressing was simply another ritualised expression of my isolation. I was no more wanted here in this house than I was in a Europeanised town resembling Constantinople on the Atlantic coast of South America. I was unfailingly conscious of the edge; the coast marked a boundary line beyond which everything was abstraction. Somewhere, indefinably lost on my mental map, was the France that my parents had left, and to which by reason of language I would be sent for my education. I was already thirteen, and this afternoon I had experienced my first taste of manhood. Salt and a tingling orgasmic flash.

  As a stimulus to the night I could hear a medley of drums, tambourines, piccolos, guitars and cavaquinhos instate the mamba rhythm for a King Momo whose obese, clownish image had already been released in the form of a fire-balloon.

  I entered the dining-room to find Monsieur Flammarion already seated at the table, a book open beside him to the right, the ruby glow of a glass within easy reach of his left hand. He removed his reading glasses as a gesture of transition between the solitary nature of study and the convivial discourse that attended dinner. He appeared unusually formal, something I attributed to Father's absence and the repressive shadow that fell on the house whenever his marginally uncoordinated step crossed the threshold.

  'I trust you have spent the hours in profitable study,' he began. 'Reading is that process by which we receive another's thought in isolation, and discourse is that by which we reconvert that experience into something which becomes our own by virtue of considered reflection. I should like you to conceive of your studies in that light. You are at an age when sitting down seems a restraint on liberty, knowledge something to be acquired in old age, and when wisdom appears the dubious acme of those who have pursued an unadventurous life. These thoughts are, in their context, perfectly natural, but let me explain life to you in more accessible terms.'

  Already I was focused elsewhere. What I knew was the intuitive, the unpredictable image clusters that constellated the unconscious. I could sense the rehearsed entry to his speech.

  'In the ode of Pierre Ronsard's which we studied, you will remember how he discredited poetry as a prescription to poverty. Not even Anacreon, Simonides, Philetus or Bacchylides, he says, can hope for anything but the erosion of their works by time. It is quite another order by which man advances to a position of office and security. It is with your father's wishes at heart that I advise you to pursue a course of study at Tarbes which provides for a profession. The imagination, or how shall I express it, a concern with the arts, leads invariably to the situation that Ronsard has described for us.'

  What perturbed me more than the contents of his uninterrupted monologue was the allusion made to my secret writings. The suspicion I entertained of Monsieur Flammarion going through Father's papers extended to my own fear that he had access to my carefully concealed notebooks.

  'Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in space,' I answered, hoping my vindication of poetry would go unobserved.

  'At the Tarbes Lycée', continued Monsieur Flammarion, 'you will be subjected to the disciplinarian values that demand a rigorous application to study. Your day will begin at 5.30 and finish at 7 p.m. The school allows no latitude for digression of any nature. But there is an achievement in that, a sense of living with and not outside of time.'

  Already I felt trapped. The Atlantic beaches which were my sounding-board to the sky's blue deeps, the forest trees in which I perched like an animal in the heat, high over pools, the dreams I nurtured of disappearing into the interior of the country, of travelling as an entomologist in a canoe down the coils of the Amazon; the whole flight-paths of my childhood were being erased by the ordered precision of Monsieur Flammarion's dictates.

  'Tarbes will prepare you for the Empire's new prosperity,' Monsieur Flammarion reflected over his wineglass. 'Change is instrumental in creating the momentum for still further change. When I stood in the esplanade des Invalides, under the sun of Austerlitz as we called it, and heard the salute of guns proclaim Louis-Napoleon's triumphant procession to the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, almost eight years ago, it was for me still another beginning. And growing up is only an extension of this — you prepare yourself for what never happens, because, by the time it does, you have already outgrown it. The future will quickly displace your longing for the past.

  'And there are things I should like to discuss with you, Ducasse, which don't fall into the natural order of our discourse,' Monsieur Flammarion ventured, his hand drawn to the fluted crystal of his wineglass.

  In my imaginary world I was voyaging down the Amazon, penetrating a world of dense Bacaba palms, impenetrable forests, alligators snouting the scum.

  'Your knowledge of history is still small,' he continued. 'A sense of the past, by which I mean the manner in which individuals seek to impose their own will on the prevailing ethos, is something one acquires in proportion to one's years. Whilst blood remains the discourse of history, we have still to attend to the cultural enlightenment of the mind.'

  As I listened, I was reading the silent speech which is the true message of words. I had learnt how language is an accompaniment to thought and not the medium of its translation. The words themselves most often mislead and point to an inner dialogue — the message being in the undertow, like a hidden current chased out in the flow, so that speech involves the marriage of silences, the sympathetic attunement to dimensions of inner space. When you really picked up on a person's depths, you shared with him a redundance of words.

  Behind Monsieur Flammarion's connected thoughts were the savage associations he did not dare articulate. I had read somewhere of how the convicted were sent to the guillotine barefooted, in a long white shirt, and concealed by a black, hooded veil which was lifted before the head was sliced into the blood-stained basket.

  I could hear ships firing their cannons at sea. The screeching violin note of a rocket detonated high above the port in a shower of emerald stars. Monsieur Flammarion's perspective was narrowing. He was able to keep his eyes open only by concentrating on one thought at a time, sustaining its pitch, for fear that if he let it go he too would follow its extinction.

  I was edging my way towards the irreversible flooding of his senses that would set me free to challenge the town's nocturnal alleys. When he left the room, a book wedged under one arm, I was conscious only of his attempt to sustain lucidity and of how for a moment he seemed to have preconceived my intentions, and to have lurched through my defences with the unreasoning drunkenness of a sailor come out of the harbour fog in order to menace.

  I went upstairs, my body loaded with the dynamic impulse to take up with the drumbeat of the crowd. I knew that tonight delirium would reign in every quarter — a spontaneously choreographed hysteria. Roles would be reversed for the magic of the festivities; the poor would assume the mask of the rich, the
slave that of a king, gender would be exchanged, and the crowds would follow the legend of 'O rei de Franca na ilha da Assombracao' — The King of France on the Haunted Island. The red, silver and white costumes would afford a brilliancy to the image of a boy-king, and to the legends of old black slave women from Maranhão, whose witchcraft changed a beautiful outcast slave into a silver snake.

  From the balcony I could see that the light in Monsieur Flammarion's room was already extinguished. I inhaled the night scents of honeysuckle, fat lobes of perfume invaded by moths. How often I had stared from this window at a garden in which jewelled humming-birds sipped at the proliferation of scarlet roses.

  Tonight would be the first stage of my leaving this house for ever. I knew in advance that my actions would not go unnoticed, despite the elaborate disguise I had prepared for the occasion. I unlocked a trunk and lifted out the papier-mâché pierrot's mask, cradling it like a death's head in my hands. The mask, with its black, down-turned lips, its gold tear sparkling on the right cheek, while a black butterfly occupied the left, represented the androgynous marriage of opposites.

  I had prepared myself for the solemnity of this ritual. It was with perfect calm that I stepped out of my clothes and fastened the pearl buttons of my blouse. There was a fascination in studying my own face before replacing it with a mask. I had taken for granted features I rarely questioned. It was only now I realised my unnatural height and the pronounced stoop which, owing to my solitary life, had not yet grown to be a source of schoolboy ridicule. I did not recognise the person I was seeing, the hazel-green eyes that I used as the interpretative medium of conveying my emotions were objectively bewildered by my questioning. I had reversed the process of coming at the world, and confused my sensory responses by challenging them with a double.

  My lank, blondish hair was unruly, and already I had developed the characteristic of pushing it back from my eyes with my left hand, a gesture that invariably infuriated my father. I was thin and my elongated fingers were fashioned for rings. It was a surprise to confront myself thus in reality, and disquieting to realise how great is the divide between the mental image we have of ourselves and the physical reality.

  When I tried on the mask to accustom myself to this new identity, the experience was one of unity. I felt reconciled to a pre-existence. There was a sinking in, a realisation that the mask corresponded to the real me, and on its removal a corresponding sense of loss when confronted by my ordinariness.

  The house was silent. I placed a grey topcoat over my sequined jacket and red tights, and prepared to carry the mask until I reached the outskirts of the town. What I should enter would be the collective spirit of the carnival, its primitive, animistic street ceremonials, the dark gods generating a sexual fever. Blood would be drawn in alleys, women posted up against walls and raped, chickens set fire to by thrown torches, horses would panic and jettison their riders, but the mob would be irrepressible, the spirit lifting them to a state of ecstasy that took in life and death as an inseparable experience.

  Once clear of the house I broke into an exhilarated run. I crashed through opposing shrub land, tamarisk whiplashing my face. There was a molten red glow in the sky. Drifts of smoke swabbed my lungs so that I choked on the acrid reek of bonfires. In my confusion I half stumbled over a couple making love beside the road, shapely dark legs knotted round a white waist, the fingers travelling up and down the spine as though playing a guitar. The countryside was constellated with couples abandoned to a spontaneous orgiastic coupling. Overhead the sky was lit by whizzing racemes of red lobelias.

  The journey I had to make on foot was longer than I had anticipated, and I kept up a half-run, the past beginning to stream through my mind with a concentrated and indelible imagery. I was again experiencing the terrible silence in the house on the day that Mother had gone missing. It was that which told me she was dead. I could see myself going out into a garden I no longer recognised. On that day I had run towards the beach without seeing. They were still there in my unconscious, the group of native fishermen squatting down on the sand, contracted into a tightly bunched ring. Alma was visible amongst them, her orange sheath pronounced against the azure. My way there had been through a jerky visual field: Mother's blotched face and matted hair, her waterlogged clothes clinging to her like wrack beached by a wave, blood streaming from an ankle. These impossible transformations were being re-enacted again.

  The words Célestine-Jacquette had bitten into my mind and were repeated by scalding tears. They had placed her face down on the sand and one of the fishermen was pumping her back, forcing the water from her mouth as if she were a fish. I wanted to scream now as I had then. Alma had pulled me away, ripping my hand, tenting me in the warmth of the same body that had come to me this afternoon dressed in my mother's clothes to consummate the incestuous union which had never been realised.

  And the drag back across the beach, my feet moving of their own accord in response to Alma's rhythm, the attenuated umbilical that still existed as a lifeline between Mother and me, thinning towards the inevitable break. I had tried to run back in the opposite direction to which I was running now. It was the force of Alma's outspread palm, creating a solar roar in my ear, which had stopped me. The force of her blow had spun my head round, so that I had followed in blind obedience, her heart and muscles pumping for us both, the incline up the littoral staggering her forceful drive, but her grip on me had the strangulating effect of a liana, a tentacular handhold pulling me up out of a dark crater into the bright green sunshine of the early afternoon.

  My breath was laboured. And now as I reached the outskirts of the town I was visibly disturbed. The dramatic events of the day, the anticipated dangers of the carnival night, the breathlessness of my flight, all of these factors had contributed to my hallucinated vision. The flashbacks so disorientated me that it seemed I had never left the beach and was impaled on a white blade of light mirrored off that violent noonday sea.

  I posted myself up against a wall and urinated. A red papier-mâché dragon was being canted from a flat roof-top while balloons in the shape of silver sea-horses lifted fluctuatingly into the black night-sky. The values of a society were being stood upside-down — the money won by such hardship, such minted sweat in the face of crops, was being blown sky-high in the ecstatic evaluation of the present. There was only 'now', the sudden immersion in pure being. Every societal privilege would be dissolved in the light of a reversion to primordial chaos.

  I began running again, swooping into an alley, adopting my mask for the first time and conscious of the freedom it permitted. I was now breathing and living through the medium of a mask: I had become somebody else. Death was everywhere in the form of paper and sugar-candy skulls, skeletons with fireworks shooting through their hollow eye-sockets.

  The town was written in my nerves, and I was conscious without having visited many of its quarters of the potential it offered for the sublimation of unconscious desires. I could hear the mamba beat accompanying the central exhibit of headless horses reverberating from the town centre. The negro primitivism displayed in the rhythm of the music was expressive of pain, revolt and abandonment. It was beginning to work itself into my blood and transform my body into the willowy fluid organism of someone motivated by their deepest primal instincts.

  People were grouped on balconies, playing guitars, exchanging an endless relay of jokes, so that the discordance was on two levels, the delirium of the street rising to meet the hysterical crescendo of roof-top carnival. Everything and everyone seemed to be straining towards the sky, where poinsettias suddenly flared open in the blue-black.

  Tonight those who believed in the gold-mines at Ophir, and how Solomon sent treasure-ships up the Amazon to the Japurá river, would re-enact the subliminal location of treasure. The charged air wired me to my own individualised vision of the universe. I was a shaman capable of turning into a werewolf and drinking the blood of my aggressor earlier in the day, and able to complete the ecstatic journey to the
sky or the descent into the underworld to reclaim my mother's soul.

  In a synchronised outburst of firework salvoes I could see the red beam of the lighthouse perched on the ruins of an old fortress five hundred feet above the harbour, directing its radial light across the night seas. For a moment I entertained the idea of climbing to those heights and celebrating the carnival from that elevation, but the momentum of the crowds dragged me back into the tributaries that seemed magnetised to a common centre — the oneiric vision of the child-king drawn by red-blanketed horses.

  I moved forward and found myself wedged in the spinal undulations of a chequered serpent, a garnet-eyed, fang-flickering head that raised its phallic crest to the stars. We were of one movement, a unified trance in which the intermeshing of minds found its counterpart in the mamba's rhythmic beat. The fear of death that had so heightened my senses earlier in the day had temporarily vanished. I found myself manoeuvring between a bull's head and the silver plumes of a bird-mask, my pulse beat seeming to resonate from the drum-skin.

  The great train of the living were filing towards the dead. Tonight there would be an exchange of identities, a crossing of frontiers; some would disappear like the wild swan and others would come back, and the transference of identities would be. known to neither. When I forced myself free of the mesmerised train, my body was still answering to the music. I had shed my heritage; lit coals twinkled beneath my dancing feet — I was a humming-bird darting through the yawning jaws of a jaguar.