Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  I got into an alley where two masked figures beat out a rhythm on tambourines and danced round a black mulatto. Behind that a violet, turbaned head was engaged in fellatio; the glittering, beehived mask working with the motion of a potter's hand-shaping craft on an abandoned partner in a doorway.

  I began deliberately to seek out the person who had confronted me in the alley behind the market-place. A desperate need to fulfil something unrealised in me compelled me to rush sharply from alley to alley. Blinded by smoke I found myself abruptly projected towards the main exhibit — the frisky, nightmarish advance of headless horses, red plumes combed back from their manes, a snake and a bull flanking them on either side. In my confusion I imagined being dragged under the float, trampled by the stampeding crowds. I flickered momentarily towards the vortex before the adrenalin-flash hit my nerves, having me catapult high to the right of the advancing float, my body awkwardly thrashing above the shoulders of the oncoming dancers, flailing, heaped, and finally nose-diving into the maelstrom, firm hands righting my way up without faltering in the procession's march, so that I was jammed into a place that wasn't a space at all, my ribs bruised, my lungs forcing for air, my arms locked against my sides. I was being dragged forward like a dead branch on the spine of a fast-flowing stream. The music and accompanying delirium of bodies exploded in my head. My direction had been turned around, so that I went with the current and not against it. I should have to work my way five to the left to be free of the constrictive ruck, to punch a gap through the log-jam to the crowds lining the pavement and beat a solitary retreat to the old quarter.

  Furnacing in the crush I imagined the white, hissing cloud rising off water boiling in a volcano crater. My height allowed me to periscope, and through our position close to the front I could see that the whole procession was going to have to turn left to advance down the high street towards the American and Grand Hotels, and in the slowing of pace necessary to achieve this I planned to force myself out of the asphyxiating crush. At the exact moment of pause, when the drum fractionally decreased in its beat and our line came to an illusory standstill, I worked my way through the slight gap that opened in the wedge, my elbows jutting in my ricochet from one body to another, my fierce, relentless urgency to bullet clear leaving me winded, my head spinning, before I was free to balance upright, hands stretched out to a wall as the full sweep of the processional rounded the corner.

  I moved away from the crowd into a side-street. From a balcony overhead I could hear the unrestrained orgasmic throatiness of a woman ascending the pleasure-scale to climax.

  I examined the tear in my mask, flinching at the same time from fear of exposing my identity, and traced out a lesion that could have been inflicted by a knife. The features I had admired for so long, and come to assimilate as my true identity, had been symbolically wounded. It was the laceration intended by my armed opponent at noon.

  I refitted the mask to my face, my eyes depending for sight on a restricted central vision. At every corner I expected to encounter my fixation: the cerise mask lowered, the scarlet jacket pinched to outline the figure, the legs poured into yellow tights. The shock I had experienced earlier in the day over the confused sex of my opponent had come to be mediated by the realisation that someone could be both male and female. The core of my juvenile sexuality was expanding from a molten amorphousness to settle in the mould of an ambivalent object of desire. Alma's love-making had left me unsatisfied; her flesh had suffocated me without pronouncing any clear definition to which I wished to hold. She had swum above my transfixed body in the position I had imagined a man would adopt.

  I clawed my way through dense smoke to a gap in the darkness. The overhanging houses were familiar, and I was convinced that I had come full circle to end up again in the alley behind the Plaza de Independencia. Above me music issued from the roof-tops. Guitars responded to the mood dictated by the singer, black with the slow melancholy of rains falling in a mountain pool, or wild with the wing-clapping beat of flamingos rising above a lake.

  I came to a dead halt in the middle of the road and stood there listening to my thoughts beat out the tune of their dialogue. I dropped to one knee to examine a tear in my scarlet tights, my right hand exploring my raised left kneecap, while the left went wide of the leg in support, fingers splayed and suddenly hot with a nick of scalding blood as a stiletto whistled to a quivering vertical in the dusty V between my little and fourth finger. I jolted back, mouth open, eyes staring, my nerves electrified, frazzled by the invasive leap from security to danger. I had been found out in my own thoughts, knife-punched back to a reality in which I was without defences. My focus was narrowed to the thin, tapering blade, as though the fitted handle constituted the polarity for my being, a fixed identity that I had gone down to find, and once having discovered could live by no other recognition. I was waiting for the challenge that never came. In my stylised, rigid pose, I seemed to be prolonging a choreographed movement, the completion of which depended on an invisible partner.

  I turned fractionally on my pivotal heel in the direction from which the knife had been placed. Agonisingly, I moved round the fractions of an imaginary circle enclosing me. I felt like someone who, crouched on a circular disc of ice and rotating slowly, comes to realise that he faces a blue ocean on all sides. I could see a shadow projecting from a doorway. It was still, superimposed on the road, the angular boniness of the human thinned out to an ink-wash. It was the laugh that greeted me first, an uncontained falsetto that synchronised with the duration of a comet's whizzing tail. Then I saw him, the mask trained on me as it had been earlier in the day, the red jacket rain-dropped with brilliants, the livid colours sported on the enigma within. He was standing with his back to a wooden door, invincibly cool, calculated to threaten by the very quiet of his composure.

  Something within me was magnetised by this hybrid creature. I felt my nerves pick up on that attraction; I was being drawn towards him the way an animal hypnotised by fear goes complacently towards the jaws that have tracked it across country. As I began to move, so he disappeared upstairs, his illusory figure gone with provocative menace.

  I got up, over-exposed by the magnified inner lens through which I watched my awkward movements, knowing there could be no going back on this, and that if I did not follow, I should be hunted through the night as the sacrificial victim of the carnival.

  *

  The Eye 4

  Isidore Ducasse must have left the house some time between 11 p.m. and midnight. In this my instincts served me right. I anticipated that his reasons for getting caught up in the carnival's delirium had to do with the figure X rather than the spirit of entertainment.

  Mixing in the harbour area earlier that night I was fortunate enough to encounter an American acquaintance of your son's. Slightly intoxicated, given to garrulity, the man was drinking vermouth in a quayside bar. Dressed in a white panama, the man made no attempt to conceal the bundles of green dollars that loaded his pockets.

  After striking up a degree of easy trust I got on to the subject of your son. It turns out that Isidore Ducasse goes under the name of Comte de Lautréamont in these casual encounters. He adopts this pseudonym presumably to avoid the risk of being traced. You will agree that it is a refined art of duplicity for one so young. The man was guarded about his relations with your son. My pretending to be in sympathy with his nature, and recommending places where he could form further attachments, met with suspicion. There is always a reserve to a drunk; an area of experience which he feels is being threatened by his dissociation.

  What I did manage to ascertain is that money changes hands in the relationship between Isidore Ducasse and the various foreigners whom he meets in Montevideo. These sums are either the exaction of blackmail, money paid for favours in the town — remember, your son is in a privileged position given your office — or payment in respect of contraband.

  On carnival night Isidore Ducasse arrived at the Bista del Mar in a state of exhaustion and evident dissip
ation. His harlequin's costume was torn at one knee, his pierrot's mask was cracked. I have still to ascertain where in Montevideo he procured this costume, but a systematic check should supply me with the dealer. Your son's height, his stoop, the unkempt manner in which he keeps his long hair, his self-absorption and nervous hesitancy of speech mark him out amongst the residents. So too an intellectual modesty which points to an expansive capacity he conceals. He shows signs too of having picked up as a speech affectation the old Bonapartist terms adopted by Gustave Flammarion.

  He stayed at X's for over an hour and a half, finally leaving the house at great speed and continuing beyond my reach until I ascertained that he had returned home. I leave his purpose at the Bista del Mar to your assessment.

  A source of continuous frustration is my inability to be able to resolve your son's duplicity by isolating specific acts. His personal life still remains one of conjecture. I hope, however, to be able to report in time on more explicit actions of a sexual or criminal nature.

  *

  Chapter 4

  The way up was lit by the orange glow of a lamp placed at the top of the first floor. I was the wolf who had lived in the sheep's belly as I realised the metamorphosis I was still in the act of completing. I had crossed the frontiers of identity; my oval face was not the product of my parents but the habitable construct of the imagination.

  The balls of my feet were silk as I took the stairs, familiarising myself with each flaw in the stone, stair-sills polished by tired feet, quick feet, the drag-back of lethargy, elation of a lyric skip. I was coming at the light without heredity or past. If I had boundaries, they had been stretched to universal proportions: my foot rested on the blue spin of the globe and not the bevelled join of a spiral stair. As I came up level with the first floor I could see a door left ajar, a pink sash of light spilling from beneath the jamb. As I hung back on the outside, I was aware of nothing that had brought me here, dislodged me from my parental home; a boy on the threshold of being sent away for a privileged education in Europe was facing the entrance to a room lit with the smokiness of a hole in the Dantean pit.

  When I pushed the door to I could not see him at first. The whitewashed room was heaped with flowers which must have been dragged up here from the carnival streets. Narcissi, blue irises, red and pink carnations, lilies shaped like cornucopias. It had not occurred to me, as I looked around the room at the roughly made wooden table and chairs, at the coarse cotton curtains drawn back from a four-poster bed which occupied half the room, that he might be waiting outside, higher up on the stairs, hardly breathing as I entered the trap.

  The room appeared devoid of all possessions. The blistered spines of a few books bleached by the sunlight, an insignificant rosewood crucifix, a bottle and glass on the table grouped with the self-conscious isolation of a composition arranged for a still life, were at first all that registered in the muted light. I stood there afraid I would lose my energy charge, and acutely aware that I was for the first time in my life an intruder. I was on the inside of the night, from where the street proceedings took on a new dimension. I was at just sufficient a remove to allow for detachment. I felt as though I had withdrawn into an ante-room on the occasion of some great historic decision, and that for a brief interlude the surf roar of the mob had subsided, while the child hot from the warming-pan was swaddled in a cloak of fleurs-de-lis before being lifted to the attendant crowd.

  Time was measured by the racing heartbeats that drummed in my ears. I felt humbled by the simplicity of the room, its expedient frugality, the bare wooden floors where the tumbled flower sprays had not been spread. My mind was beginning to assimilate the room, absorb it the way water diffuses a blue spiral of paint from a brush-tip. I was filling up with it, clouding at the base, when I heard the door click shut behind me.

  'And so you came,' a voice said, without waiting for me to turn round, so that I continued to face the blue window-frame with its shooting parabolas of streaming lights. 'I knew you would come back. You see, I have been watching you for a long time. There is something that draws attention to itself in a young man who doesn't fit into an established role in life. I have seen the places you visit when you come to town — the abattoir, the alleys, and how you wander in and out of the big hotels. You are looking for something I found a long time ago.'

  The voice that addressed me was slow, articulate, drawn up out of the chest so that the words seemed to have been spoken deep down before rising to the surface. It was as though this was the depth of their consideration. They were aired to a secret confidant, an invisible intermediary, before being directed towards their eventual recipient.

  I did not have to turn round; the harlequined figure went wide of me, coming at me slowly from the far side of the circular table. The cerise mask was still in place, the voice slightly distorted by the mouth's restricted opening. I had the feeling that the impersonation was the real being, and that like myself the occupant of the mask had come to realise in his cosmetic persona the true nature of his identity. In this we were twins and in all other respects strangers.

  ‘Why have you been watching me?' I found myself asking, the words grouping of their own accord, insignificant, no longer even pertinent to the occasion as he sat squat on the four-poster bed watching me, composed as if he knew I had to stay in order to find out the reason for his motivation.

  'The first time I saw you, you were on the beach,' the voice took up. 'You were naked because of the warmth and privacy. I was higher up than you and looking down at the bay. I know this coast, contour by contour, its deeps and shallows, and the place where a boat can put in before crossing the estuary to Rio. You have to know these things if you live as I do. The people one encounters on this coast are soldiers with girls from the town, tourists, men who are out there because they cannot always formulate their need into words, dissidents waiting for a cause, an occasional coastguard. You were out there but you were really inside yourself. I could see that it would not have mattered if the shoreline had disappeared.

  'In my life you have a purpose for being somewhere — time represents money. But you were like a child mesmerised by fire. I wanted to break into your mind and discover the secret. And I was disturbed by your committing your thoughts to paper. Once they are expressed, words give you an identity. I have never wanted to be traced. I have not left any words, not even a signature. If you live by ear, people do not remember what you say, but you learn from their expression.

  'When you left the beach, I followed you. I traced you back to the white house in which I imagined you lived with your parents. I used to look up at the windows at night and imagine you alone in your room, probably sitting at a table, reading or writing. I got to know which one of the two was your father. The other one was already known to me by sight.'

  As I listened to the voice inform me of my life, both in its inner and outer contents, I realised that my childhood isolation was illusory, and that someone else had accompanied me on its journey. All of those days I had luxuriated in the azure cove, I had been watched. A contained penumbra had set up its own tent on the sand. I could imagine the quiet he must have instated, toning even the volume of his thoughts to a minimal pitch. He had lived through the aperture of his eye, the targe regulating the light, his visual field intuiting my need to be alone.

  'When you began to be attracted to the local abattoir, I followed you with renewed interest. I could see you were repelled by what you witnessed, but still you had to put yourself through the experience. I tracked you there. I watched the sweat-patches darken under your shirt when you removed your jacket, and the blood drain from your face when the bellowing hulk resisted the thrown noose. You must have thought those journeys the most secret of your life. But we are never free. Someone is always watching, and in the end we put on masks so as to be so conspicuous that people no longer look at us.'

  His voice needled my memory cells, imploding a series of depth flashes, silver bubbles that raced to the surface, each encapsulating
a particular visual image.

  'You’re lying,' I shouted, my anger feeding on his incisive tone. 'You don't know the first thing about me.'

  'I also know about your mother,' the voice continued with quiet assertion. He had tucked his legs under him and was shaking out the sparkles on his coat. 'I was there that day they fished her out of the sea. You forget my time is spent on the coast. You are not the only reason for my being there. They call me the Queen of Hearts. You cannot see, but my back is tattooed with red hearts. Time for me is mediated by action. For you it is a process of holding a mirror to your thoughts. Out there they would call you Narcissus.'

  'But what is out there?' I questioned. 'Who are you that you follow me?'

  'I'm the Queen of Hearts, as I told you. And you are Isidore Ducasse, son of a French diplomat. You will never lose your stoop. They will mock you for it at school, and when you run away they will pelt your spine with rotten fruit. And then you will plot against them in secret. I know your sort. You dream of savage reprisals, worlds built out of words. And that's what people fear most, because once they are written down, they cannot be destroyed.'

  I was unnerved by his easy shift between eloquence and a life-style that that was unknown to me. He seemed to be able to stitch the two together and with a tailor's chalk and pins create an invisible seam. I imagined his body like that; the male and female elements brought together in a defiant challenge.

  'I have experienced life in a way that you can never know,' he was saying. 'I was at one time part of a travelling circus, then I followed in the wake of the Argentinian Army all the way up the Cuyaba river to Paraguay. What I wanted from life was the knowledge that I was participating in time. And the greater the involvement, the more I realised that men paid to escape from reality. I already knew of the drug peyote, and of its power to induce hallucination, and of opium that the French sailors trafficked along the coast. There are ways of earning money which have people come back for more. You learn that out on the coast.'