by Jeremy Reed
I closed the door quietly and went up to my room. The measured pendulum of our mahogany Empire grandfather clock with its maritime panels drummed with the inexorable finality of time that outlives us all. I was already making notes on my observations, filling exercise books with my own thoughts and those of others who intersected with the plane of my poetic vision. I liked to imagine I was the club-footed Lord Byron at Newstead Abbey, rejected, departing from England in high dudgeon, planning my revenge on the world with whip-cutting savagery. Written in my nerves was the message of a universal cataclysm. I imagined a black corona surrounding a red sun, white cities landsliding into the sea, and men making for the deserts of the world under a rain of meteors. There would be lions in the street, eyes watching from pebbles and writing in the dust. The Name would be written by the wind on a dune in the Sahara.
I lay on my bed and scanned the precocity of a passage I had entered into my notebook on the preceding night.
He buries his head up to his neck in the tunnels of a hole; but conscience volatilises this head-down ostrich-trick. The hole disappears and its ether-drop expands to a series of light-rays deployed like a flight of curlews swooping down on lavender; and man, wide-eyed, comes face to face again with his double. I have seen him heading for the sea, scaling a rocky promontory, lashed by a white eyebrow of surf, and project himself like an arrow into the waves. But the miracle is this: the corpse reappeared the next day on the surface, dragged in with the high tide's jettisoned flotsam. The man detached himself from his body's imprint on sand, wrung the water out of his hair, and silently returned to his way of life.
My imaginative faculty was inexhaustible. My concern was not with inherited worlds and the monotonous duplication of reality, but with worlds created by the imagination. And beyond? Europe was a minotaur I had to appease. The rank, horned bull's head would attempt to gore me before I could appeal to the similarity of our bodies. Cenotaphs were raised to its dead — its sagging belly was a bone-dump for the misguided; its underworld swallowed the vagrant, the junky, the man reaching to find another in the dark. I imagined the Queen of Hearts waiting at the entrance to the tunnel, making hair ribbons out of the scarlet thread which he would never dare employ in a journey to the interior. For a moment I considered creating a scandal for Father by going to live with the Queen of Hearts. The attraction of one man for another had already germinated inside me. What I had to clarify was my theoretical fear; the world had not prepared me for it. The excitement, the curiosity, the different orientation of my drive would result in a restricted but intensified milieu.
I opened the window to a scent of jasmine. I was thinking of the town's cholera victims, and of the Frenchman I had met who had been in quarantine on board a steamer anchored off Salto on the Banda Oriental bank of the Uruguay. He was a naturalist and was reading a green leather book with a gold spider embossed on the cover. He spoke of villages decimated inland, of the dead left unburied to be gutted by vultures, and of cattle driven delirious by the smell of blood.
Outside, a breeze was rustling the leathery fronds of a palm. I lay back contemplating what I knew I was leaving behind and imagining the still undefined territory I should come to explore. Europe still had the soft edges of a cloud, it was vague, floating, indistinct, a land mass that belonged to Monsieur Flammarion's historic reminiscences.
I remembered a ride last year on a day of excessive heat, when my horse almost by instinct pushed through a screen of ferns and bamboos to discover a stream. A huge tree with giant arums shaded the spot, white trumpet flowers drooping towards the water; and as the horse stooped to drink, it was as though I were being tilted towards the mirror in which creation was first reflected. I imagined the word generating the world in this fashion, projecting a geometrical infrastructure on the waters. I had strayed from the road and only the uneven jolting of my horse kept me from falling asleep in the saddle. Reality had become confused with dream so that I hung suspended in a heat haze. When I started to, all I could remember was the absolute lucidity of the stream. Everything else was blurred, imprecise, without substance. My body was saturated from incipient fever.
I continued at an easy somnambulistic rhythm before being punched out of my stupor by an overpowering smell of decay. I was almost nose up to the decomposing body of a hanged man, his blotchy, discoloured corpse riddled by vermin, the ropy, sausage-coloured consistency of his flesh burrowed into by egg-laying parasites. I was cheek to cheek with a hatchet-faced privateer, his skin a livid pincushion of dotting flies. My horse reared, catapulting me into a bed of ferns. I got out from under and pushed through swathes of bushes, disturbing a floral snowstorm of saffron and purple butterflies, catching up with my horse again only after crossing the path of a giant, lozenged toad. Despite the nausea I felt I reproached myself with not returning to search the man's shredded jacket. A prospector, a deserter, a spy? — I should have liked out of morbid curiosity to have had some clue to his identity. Soon he would be a bleached skeleton hanging from a short-line of knotted hemp.
The rashered, eyeless face swam back to me, brutally aborted like that of the gibbeted figure in Baudelaire's poem 'Voyage à Cythère'. I had read the latter in a finely printed copy of Les Fleurs du mal which I had picked up from a visitor in Montevideo. Caution had me conceal it in a chest with my papers. I had heard through Monsieur Flammarion of the scandal surrounding the book and the author's being prosecuted for obscenity. Something inside me fattened like a grub on decay. I wanted to encounter rotting hulks of elephants, deserted cities with their dead left to blacken in the sun.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, listening for Alma's approach, expectant of her knock and dumb-eyed solicitations, hopeful that she would find me in my state of arousal, prepared, confident this time that I could control the indomitable sexual flood. The speed with which experience had overtaken my notions of fantasy and shattered the mirror in which I had been anticipating so many gradual arrivals had left me over-excited, nerves stimulated to the point of delirium. My skin crackled with electricity. Outside the window the sea was a blue blouse blown by the wind into lifting pleats. I imagined flotillas of blossom arriving from the islands, a solitary black swan on the wave transformed into an ebony goddess wading ashore to white coves untouched by human feet. Love and death and red poinsettias.
The air sensitised my skin, lay on it as though a swarm of migrating butterflies had chosen to cover my body as a place of rest. Antennae and feelers worked in like a series of dusting brushes, leaving a trace of gold powder. I could hear someone breathing on the other side of the door; a rhythm that volatilised my blood and had me come alive with throbbing urgency. An upwelling fire from the earth's core had rooted in my blood. Its ferocity had to be controlled, channelled, directed from a universal consumption to a particular attraction. In my heat I wanted to be bound in a sheath of tight black silk and rolled across a contrastingly cool surface, oiled until the sensation climbed out of me in constricted, fiery jabs, a chain of seed-pearls forming a molten insignia, an incandescent cooling.
In my anticipation big storms were rolling behind my eyes. Those sudden brown wind-clouds that blew from the Pampas, carrying off flat roofs, were driving in circles through my blood. I was too much for myself, a wheel that was straining at its circumference and threatening to break out of its circular design into another dimension. Faces were crowding in, unfocused, interchangeable fetishes; pouting red lips belled into a fuchsia bud and traced a red circle round the tip of my sex. The hallucination steadied — carnival faces swam through my room, orgiastic rites flickered behind my eyes. I lay back luxuriating in the expectation of Alma's rose-blown body.
When the knock came, her knuckles filmed in a handkerchief, I lay back anticipating her surprise at my closed eyes, my abandon, my partial nakedness, the movement of my hand which led the eye to my erection. I was conscious of nothing but the stream of my imagery, the erotic automata that lit up in my mind and whirled there with the intangible mobility of blue
sunbeams.
The smell of the carnival was still on my skin, the acrid tang of saltpetre, the sour reek of sweat and smoke, and so too the visual stimulus of couples entwined on the grassland, in alleys, the Queen of Hearts' sexual heat as he lay outstretched on the bed, coaxing himself into the world of fantasy that preoccupied me now. I would experience Europe as a violent sensual dream. My sexual encounters conceived in a state of animated trance would never live to reproach me. In the sober light of day, sitting at the piano or at a desk, I would be dissociated from the weird geometry of my sex. Men, women, what did it matter? It was my partners who would suffer remorse, the blinding migraine that came with the white morning light flooding the room. And it was I who would wake and coldly write of my experiences with the objectivity of a detached spectator. I should be hunted through the underworld, the city's complex network of tunnels, underground passages.
The heat was diffusing through my body, working its way up from my scrotal base through the spine. I did not look up as I heard the door close quietly and someone enter the room. I tensed, waiting for the warmth of her body to find mine, the heavier contours to overlap my thinly defined edges. I knew she would roll on me before moving down to my waist, and that her movement would rock me like a skiff being boarded. When the contact came, it was without preliminaries or touch. I felt myself drawn into a silk oval, a tongue flicking my vein, working round to the head and drawing me deeper. The friction nettled me as though hot and cold snowflakes were alternately alighting on the outer skin, prickling there with the irritant of, a feather tickling a foot. The cyclone was building in me, so that my head spun and the ungoverned sensation that seemed to be rooted somewhere in my depths started to assert a channelled focus, a slow mounting pressure, a spiral thread mounting in sensation, forcing a way up like an underground stream pushing towards the one fissure in the rock. My hands reached out instinctively to feel for shoulders, the concave slope of a spine, but the head remained pulled back, elusive of my grasp, inexorable in its rhythmic pattern. With the warm surf climbing to a crested wave, gaining in height as it ran for shore, I gave myself up to the force of its breaking. As I started to ejaculate, I felt I had connected directly with the sun. I strained towards a molten core, part of me contracting from the intensity, the other part exultant, overtaken, lifted up by the huge power.
I did not want to open my eyes. I was embarrassed by my singular gratification, and in the calm that flooded me I saw the wind-feathered green of the endless Pampas, and imagined horses, white horses lifting into the distance. I lay there, warm, relieved for a time of the animosity I felt for the world, the venom I should like to have stuck into Father's main line. When I opened my eyes there was no one. I could feel something abraiding my feet and sat up to find the sequined mask placed on the bed. It was watching me with the same contemptuous arrogance to which I had been subjected in that tiny room on carnival night. An exacting scrutiny I could not dissociate from the face I had briefly glimpsed, torn out of its mask and beaten savagely by armed police. A woman's, a man's, or something in between that had me think of a child with faun's ears and a libidinous mouth?
The voices were beginning again downstairs, one lagging behind the other, before their mutual uptake suggested a token agreement. I was waiting for the panic to set in, for the fear to grow huge in me at the realisation of what I had done. But nothing happened. I took off the mask and watched my numb, steely eyes register an assertive cold. Nothing appeared to have changed; clouds were still building out at sea and a fishing-boat scudded under sail for port. The universal cataclysm I expected to occur failed to take place. There was no branding of me with a scar or sign, a red Cain-mark by which my identity would be known. What alarmed me was the dexterity with which the Queen of Hearts appeared and disappeared. He might remain concealed in the house, and I should have to keep silent with my fear, so as not to create suspicion. I remembered his knife and the way the set of his eyes remained impassive, siphoning my life, reading me deeply as though he had contrived to look out of my eyes at himself seated on his bed. And if his voice started up in my head, I should be without defences. I began to imagine he would follow me to Tarbes and then to Paris. I should find him on the stair to my apartment or back to the wall at the end of an alley. I should be hunted across the face of the world. Sleepers would throw up their windows in country villages at the sound of my furious approach. And always I should be directed nowhere, my road an open-ended future.
I was suddenly cold. I waited for the slow delivery of blood to return and my unbending was like that of a tree righting itself after a persistent gale. I put on my clothes and returned to the window. The clouds had formed a solid indigo wad cratered by a white shell of light. The storm was going to miss us, it was being driven inland and would break over the Rio side of the estuary in vertical streamers of rain. Behind it travelled a blue clearing which would brighten to cerulean.
I knew as I sat there rafted on my bed, huddled into myself, that I was alone in life. Even my lessons had been abandoned, and instead of the increased study I expected to follow by way of punishment, it seemed that I was now to be shut up in my room and ignored. I decided to write my valediction to a country I knew I should never see again. Its white, rectilinear architecture, its cosmopolitanism, its steaming, choleric drains, its blue coasts and reeking abattoirs.
*
There was this boy — should I call him the Comte de Lautréamont? — who refused to leave a trace of himself outside of fiction. Everything he thought remained his because he left no identifiable clue by which it could be verified. In his birthplace he was without friends and almost without human contacts. He knew himself best in the aquarium proportions of the mirror in which he scrutinised his features to make sure no vestige of his inner life was portrayed in the face he presented to the world.
What came first was the sea and the rhythm of its ineluctable tides. It had gradually entered him, polished itself like a turquoise in his blood, and come to live in the pit of his belly. His spine was a sea snake evolving from that blue abyss. In fever he would hear a bell-buoy tinkling like a watchdog, or chimes from a drowned city rolling through the shoals of his hallucinated thought. The sea insulated and reminded him of the amniotic bubble in which he had lived as a foetus. A little crayfish alive in water. The force of that sea was responsible for his moods, his catatonic calm, the delirious frenzy of his ungovernable mania. When something or someone disturbed him, he felt as though a stone had plummeted into the glassiness of serene shallows. He would dive for that offending pebble, but gradually they accumulated to a bed of stones, too numerous and too individually heavy to retrieve from their place of deposit. His father's face, his mother's, his tutor's, all stared up at him from the strata into which they had sunk. At night he hunted those cobalt depths, armed with a diver's knife, but was chased away by the voracity of sharks. To go downwards was always a means of escape, the brilliant fauna contained parrot and humming-bird colours. He could open a window on a sea palace and live amongst turquoise mosaics. He was alone there.
The Comte de Lautréamont. How well the name had looked when first he had traced it out in the white sand of a cove! The name had come to him first through the novelist Eugène Sue, and he drew a circle round it as a kingdom and waited for the incoming tide to erase his secret. He had experienced a feeling of elation and complicity at the notion of an adopted pseudonym. When the surf found it, there was a glitter at first as though the letters had been illuminated, and finally the wave had hissed at his boots and flooded the signature. He ran up the beach, intoxicated by the prospect of his duality. In his mind he envisaged perpetrating crimes against humanity. He would watch the blood of the last man on earth drip into a glass and smash it. Only then would his desire to be alone find appeasement.
He had grown up without the capacity to love. His mother had promised him that in time his feelings would become polarised to someone, but the ice cutting him off would not thaw. She convinced him that what h
e felt for her was love, but in reality he knew it to be a means of siding against his draconian father.
He dreamt constantly of the power to be acquired by ceremonial magic, and of induction into the Cult of the Black Mother. He saw himself dressed in a white loincloth and led by four teachers to a small room where for sixteen days he would invoke spiritual insight into the meaning of the combination of male and female. He would go to Paris and study under the auspices of Eliphas Lévi. He had been lucky again, in that a French scholar staying at one of the hotels in Montevideo had loaned him one of Lévi's books. He liked too the idea that the occultist, after being expelled from his appointment at the Petit Séminaire de Paris, had found it necessary to adopt a new name. This had strengthened his own resolve to catch the world unawares by the anonymity of his arrival.
He would work by night and in secrecy, and watch the red dawn break over the roofs of the city. No one could know of the white honeycomb inside him, the cellular intricacy of a construction built out of inner light. In his imagination he envisaged an old vagrant climbing to his attic from the street. The man would bring hot bread with him, stolen from a doorstep, and they would exchange stories of the night over wine. In the conspiratorial quiet preceding the day they would sit like two men awaiting the dawn of a new age. No matter the ink and wine staining his sleeves, he was still the Comte de Lautréamont, and his title granted him the authoritative power to confess a fictitious ancestry. And in the relating of who he was not, he would in turn be gaining new inroads into his own identity. Multipersoned, manipulative, protean, the self in living out fictions had still to return to its source before being re-created by the lie on the page.