by Jeremy Reed
I wanted to run, but my legs had solidified. I found myself backing off into a chair, trying to imagine the pictures inside his head as he was reliving them.
'I have travelled all over the continent,' he resumed. 'Right to the interior and the lower reaches of the Amazon. There the wall of trees cuts off the sky. And the nights. The black stuff is so thick one crouches to a fire. There are always Indians or natives watching — tricking through the undergrowth like snakes. No one thinks to come out alive.'
I could sense that behind his eyes everything was standing out in its retrieval, huge, creased from long storing, fluid, wet with the primal colours of the unconscious.
'You have not realised', he was saying, 'how much attention I have paid you. What I have known of life I have come to channel into an eye that concentrates on finding out how much of myself there is in another. Once I am aware of that, I know how much space I have to fill. The Queen of Hearts is about finding levels. Because you live so much in the centre of yourself, I found it hard to get in.'
I kept wondering how much longer I should stay. This man had tracked me, and I had the image of a deer feeling the weight of an eye on it, trying to brush it off like a fly, but the eye sticking, burning in round its target.
'When your mother drowned,' he said, 'I knew something had broken in you. Your face as you came up off the beach was so near to me that I thought you had seen me. And then I realised you could not see anything. You were distracted. I knew it was your father you were blaming. They had fought, the two of them. I had watched their altercations build to blows. The Queen of Hearts is always filling in spaces. Already you know something about your parents that you did not before. I could tell you the hidden side to everyone. There is a monster that sleeps in all of us, one eye closed and one awake. I am the personification of the evil you would like to eliminate in yourself. If I killed you with this knife, it would not be murder but suicide. Only the law does not see things like that. It insists on punishing one being for the ritual self-murder of the other.'
The pressure was building in me. It was all coming back: Mother's interminably long visits to friends, my father's hostile silences when she was away, that cold reservation I had come to equate with an over-diligent concern with his career. His manner was to dismiss me from his left-hand side by turning his head wide and short of my eyes. The past struck my chin like a wave.
'Now that I have brought you face to face with yourself,' he resumed, 'you are silent. You could reverse the situation, only my confrontation with myself occurred a long time ago. I was working in the Pampas. One day I had to lasso a small black stallion, one I had marked out as recalcitrant. I got it while it was grazing, and although it resisted, I managed to saddle it. I cut the creature so hard and repeatedly with a whip that I bloodied its right flank. Whether it was the heat or the exertion I do not know, but suddenly my arm was not completing the action, and when the horse swung round, fixing whatever it saw as me, it was myself I recognised in that stare. The furious animosity we shared for each other had resulted in this exchange of identities.'
His hand was unsteady as he aligned the neck of a bottle of tequila with a glass. When the liquor hit his nerves, he caught his breath. We sat in the blue corolla of an expansive pink flower as a firework detonated from a roof-top. The excitement that had brought me here in defiance of danger was diminishing. I was coming down after the blinding flash that had uprooted me.
'There will be victims tonight,' he continued. 'Knife-clashes, hands burnt by explosives, those whose bodies cannot live up to the dictates of the drug, and I have marked them all. I was in the streets yesterday and today and my look singled out those who will die. What happened to me today was the result of a police reinforcement. The policeman who dared look at me will go on doing so until he is mad, like an animal staring at a fire.'
There was a pause in his monologue. He cradled his head in his hands, supporting the fatigue that showed in his restrained body movements. The line of his body was accentuated by the tight fit of his clothes. He had a schoolboy's slight waist, but his shoulders and diaphragm were powerfully developed in contrast to his stick-thin legs, his gracefully elongated fingers. With each shot of tequila he seemed to spiral up a scale of blue-spirited flame. I could see him thinking behind that fire-screen. I had the feeling he wanted to blow a hole through the back of his mind with pure sensation. I could see the outline of his sex through his dancer's tights. Tubular, extended, aroused, it was the shape of a cactus, only it dragged globular roots in its distension. The angle of his body made it clear to me that he was inviting, provoking a sexual advance. I remained fixed, contemplating my flight — a hunched, helter-skelter dash through the alleys in the hope of finding concealment in the procession.
I was steeling myself to make a break and run out into the whirling flux. I felt as though I had been hooked through the lip, and that only by tearing loose and running with my wound could I convince myself of the reality of what had happened. The carnival was breaking down individual barriers; the great collective, animistic spirit moved forward like a flood-tide racing for its high-water mark. Whatever lived in the process of still becoming, the whole explosive primal world of the extinct, and the monstrous try-outs still to be conceived, rioted through the paper walls of my skull. Life was flowing into death, its opposite and complement, and carrying off those it demanded as a blood sacrifice, and those who lacked the psychic defence to withstand the pressure of that tide.
I knew that this man wanted my blood as a propitiation to the dark gods. Alma had told me stories of magic transformation, whereby the sorcerer adopts the form of an animal, a werewolf or a dog to drink the blood of his enemies. In ecstatic trance he then journeys out of himself, carried across the sky on an eight-legged horse. Under threat, I tried to imagine my own death, the journey back to the creative consciousness, the dream source, t he immersion in being that was no longer particularised by action. It seemed impossible that one could arrive there from the severance of an artery by a knife-blade. Rather I visualised the encounters of the hero, the ordeals to be undertaken and surmounted before death became a reality.
I could feel my blood recharging, the current humming in my nerves. His jacket front was stained with liquor escaped from an awkward mouthpiece.
'You won't forget the Queen of Hearts,' he shrieked, his shrillness collapsing back into a bottle-tilted choke. 'I could make you somebody in this world, in this God-forsaken, thieving world...'
His hand went down to his sex, and he simultaneously pushed his legs out in front of him and arched his back against the heaped pillows. I could sense his withdrawal into fantasy, the insertion of a film between himself and the blur I must have come to represent. I imagined myself as a black, white and red night-moth, oval face tilted partially askew, suspended in his focus as a recessive image, fore and hind wings raised, antennae bristling from the down-turned corners of my black mouth. It was odd to think that while I sat stable, I must have appeared fragmented, oscillating from left to right like water shaken in a glass.
When I stood up he made no effort to counteract my intentions. I had floated wide of his orbit, and his hand worked with a regulated monotony at his sex. He was like a man who had forgotten the reason for his words, having stalled in mid-sentence. I was suddenly disposable, anonymous, incidental to his self-gratifying lust.
I took one step back and then another, testing out what I supposed was a trap, expecting at any moment to be paralysed into obedience by his dictates.
A third and a fourth step; I had the impression I was learning to walk for the first time, my nerves waking to a post-hypnotic animation. I could feel the balls of my feet touch the wooden boards with the sensitivity of a pianist's fingers.
A fifth step and a sixth. The door was behind me. I had only to blow out its frame to realise the influx of smoke-saturated air. In my mind I was already face-up against the whitewashed, rectilinear walls of our house, my fingers finding the unlocked sash of the li
brary window, the house dormant, not a light or sound other than the reverberation of surf in the cove.
My face was cold-dropped with sweat beneath my mask. The knife was marginally out of reach to his right, the blade rhyming with the room's atmospherics, a small, lethal, useless thing he would not have time to punch between my ribs.
A seventh and eighth step. I was turning the world upside-down in my head. His breath was beginning to saw; I could hear it intensifying with the crisis in his body. A mosquito trapped in the room irascibly planed the ceiling, nose-diving into the lamp, then, setting off on a circuitous reconnaissance, blundered from obstacle to obstacle in an electric whine.
In the process of thinking about flight I had become the reality of my thought. In the power of my removal from the room, I was conscious only of the irrevocable decision I had made to risk acting. The stairs no longer appeared those I had quizzed with such caution on my arrival; rather they were impediments to my hurry, a spiral cut into a well-shaft that seemed rooted in a ravine. I slewed from wall to wall in the scrambled urgency, bruising my ribs, taking the last four steps in a lifting jump as I choppered out through the door, colliding, weaving, ducking between wedges of people whose movements were earthed in the dance's sexual rhythm. My bony angularity, my headlong rush contradicted the pattern; I was too visible in my blinding terror.
I tilted at breakneck speed through a troop of chequered clowns, red bulbous noses, bangles of straw hair, mouths painted red to the chin, sash-sized blue satin bows attached to hooped collars.
The town I knew so well seemed to have increased in size and complexity. A drunk lurched out of a doorway, his muzzy baritone cursing me, his imprecations following me the length of the road until I got into a side-street. At every turning I expected him to appear, his sequined mask bringing me to a stumbling halt. I could hear the sea; the groundswell of the Atlantic plotting the rhythm of its tides, that familiar music which had come to be associated with the movements of my blood. Its serene surf-line was breaking around the coast, rolling in the shallows like a playful white tiger. I knew that once I had picked up on its metronomic irregularities, its variance of longshore pitch, I was safe. Space with its flawless blue panes was a window on infinity. I had only to think of it to be there. Monsieur Flammarion's endless descriptions of enfilading Napoleonic troops, frogged blue jackets dusted by smoke on the veldt, the sky lit with the thunder-flash of cannons, came back to me as I imagined myself deserting the field under pressure of the redcoat cavalry cutting through a foot-sliding, bullet-holed artillery.
Fireworks detonated above the harbour. At each renewed explosion I expected the black night-sky to cave in like a shop-front. I dared not turn round for fear of pursuit. I ran until I dropped into high, cool grasses. The air sparkled with fireflies, fizzing, electric twitches crackling from point to point. Frogs and toads had set up a discordantly gruff chorus in the grassland in answer to the monotonous chirr of cicadas. I could feel the earth laying claim to me, dragging me down, so that my hands were like the trailing roots of a water-lily.
I took off the sodden, torn mask which had claimed the full power of my frenzy, and crumpled it with my fist in the grass. The town and its nocturnal brilliance were behind me. There was already the promise of dawn in the east — a green, pulsating island of light dilating in the blue-black pool of space.
I knew I should have to leave Montevideo to be free of the Queen of Hearts and his obsession with the details of my life. I imagined him lying dead drunk on his counterpane, the bottle having rolled to the floor and leaked its contents. He would be breathing heavily through the restrictions of his mask. He would wake at noon, his head hammered by bruises inflicted by the light. His grease-paint would have run like candle-wax down the side of a holder.
When I got back, the house was silent. A cock was opening up at the watery skyline. I could hear the waves dragging their ball gowns into the cove. I lay face down on my bed, too tired to sleep. In my semiconscious state Father was a black sphinx, his lion's body curled up on the divan. The Queen of Hearts was watching him through a window, undeterred by the species of his change. When the latter pressed his face against the glass, Father licked his hands and assumed an air of feline diffidence. The surf was beginning to flood as I fell asleep.
*
The Eye 5
What makes my job so hard is your son's refusal to exteriorise motives. He appears lazy but is probably better informed than most adults. He adopts indifference to his future, which in turn may suggest a concealed strategy.
At times I feel that it is he who is following me rather than I him. The only inconsistency in his life is that of secrecy.
I have only small things to report. I contrived to get into conversation with a friend of your son's called Paul Lafon. On the pretext of engaging him in talk about a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which is to be given by an amateur group with whom your son has connections, I was able by insinuating myself as a friend of the director's to inquire after Isidore Ducasse.
It appears that your son is disliked for his diffidence. Lafon speaks with reservation of your son's reluctance to share and penchant for incidents of minor cruelty. He treats his few acquaintances with an unpleasant dismissiveness, telling one that he will drown, and in the process undergo the torment of seeing himself repeat every wrong act, including masturbation, and another that he will ride out of grassland into a deep, red marsh and drown in a state of paralysis on horseback.
Such inventions suggest a dangerous imagination at work, and one that it is imperative to suppress.
*
Chapter 5
Monsieur Flammarion sat looking out of the study window at whitecaps snow the ultramarine bay. His attention, which should have been given to Father, found relief in a distraction designed to accentuate his seriousness and to impress on me the notion that the views expressed met with only his partial approval. His tight-sleeved, midnight-blue frock-coat reached to the knees of his putty-coloured trousers, overscored with an orange and brown check. His hands toyed with a red Moroccan binding. He seemed vague, watery, but vitally alert to Father's speech.
Father stood behind his walnut desk, shoulders raised to the pads of his grey serge coat, his black silk bow matched by the sash across his double-breasted waistcoat. He was ludicrously pompous, his rotund belly forced out in the manner of a bird puffing itself up by way of defence. I could see him rehearsing his sentences, considering his gambit, trying already to divorce himself from the significance of his words.
‘Ducasse,' he began, 'we have after careful consideration decided on the expedient of sending you to Tarbes in the hope that education will act as a corrective to your ways. Reports have come to me from various sources of your idleness, your association with the town. Besides, you will have heard of the cholera outbreak in the city. By midsummer the dead will be dragged out to die in the street. I myself shall cross the estuary to Buenos Aires, and if necessary go on from there to Chile.
'You'll be sent to the lycée and there you must educate yourself to provide for your future.'
As I grew dissociated, so Father appeared to be talking in a low key. He was miming the slow, cud-chewing gape of a cow turned lazy by the afternoon heat. I imagined a swarm of irate bees filtering into his throat, punching the sensitive tissue with their scalding stings.
'I understand that, further to your discredit, you have been associating with people outside your class. Your liberties must be punished or they will increase...'
I drifted in and out of the monologue. Father appeared gouty, apopleptic, rancorous. His sandy moustache was flecked with steel and had coarsened into a beaver-muff, concealing the upper lip. He had become his own audience, and in the tone of his voice I caught what must have been the measure of his cruelty to Mother. I wanted to oppose him with the incidents told me by the Queen of Hearts. And in their having come to me second-hand they would be the more terrible, for their exaggerations would conform to the intentions he had wis
hed to consummate but never succeeded in completing. I sensed the coward in him — the man who had beaten her with the flat of his open hands. His actions were written up in primary colours on the walls. Mother was sand-blasted by his towering fury, hypnotised into waiting for the concussive blow.
'You must prepare yourself to leave within the month,' Father was saying. Colour flooded his cheeks, decanted itself like port into his complexion. A purple vine of dilated veins showed in his forehead.
If I had tilted at him, head-butting, hollowing his inflated belly, he would have struggled on the carpet, calling down blood on the head of the son he had insulted. Monsieur Flammarion retained his pose with the concentration of an artist's model. He had drawn his hands together and sat half attentive, half distracted by the blue flashings of the bay in the window. The light jumped against the glass like the rainbowed agony of a boarded fish. His eyes watered; he was wincing under his characteristic role of wishing to remain neutral.
I watched the bowstring in Father's leg imperceptibly quiver, and the tension simultaneously trace out the ripple of a nerve in his left cheek. He pulled up short, as though blocking any evidence of the fractional disorder. He was like a man exposed by a fixed spotlight. His indignation demanded he face the wall. I listened for the explosion, but instead he jerked for air like someone struck in the pit of the stomach.
When he turned round, his face was a bloodless full moon.
'Get up to your room and stay there,' he ordered in the hushed, peremptory tone of a man alarmed by a shock that has taken place in his body. I was waiting for him to crash like a tree. Instead he seemed to be holding on to something inside which kept him from falling. A spar, a fireman's handhold across a ledge, a branch jutting out above a canyon. He must have been anticipating the recurrence, the blood-speck that would eclipse his consciousness.