“Besides,” I screamed at him, “I am empty. Empty! Empty!”
Impassive, aloof, the Curator looked at me with complete coolness, as though he had been expecting just such an outburst. I began to talk again, but in a hoarse voice, the words rushing out in a kind of gloomy exaltation.
Like the sinner who empties into the confessional the dark sack of his iniquities and lusts, deriving from talking ill of himself a kind of pleasure that verges upon self-abomination, I painted for my teacher, in the foulest colors, with the blackest dyes, the uselessness of my life, its tumultuous days, its reckless nights.
As though they were coming from the lips of another, from a judge I carried within me without knowing it, and who made use of my own faculties to express himself, my words took such hold upon me that it frightened me to realize, as I listened to myself, how hard it is to become a man again when one has ceased to be a man. Between the I that I was and the I that I might have been the dark abyss of the lost years gaped. We lived together in one body, he and I, upheld by a secret architecture that was already—in our life, in our flesh—the presence of our death. In the being circumscribed by the baroque frame of the mirror the Libertine and the Preacher, those basic figures of every edifying allegory, of every moral with an example, were at that moment holding forth.
Fleeing the glass, my eyes moved toward the bookcases. But there, in the Renaissance Musicians corner, beside the volumes of Psalms of Penitence, as though deliberately put there, I could read the title, stamped on the leather binding, of Rappresentazione di anima e di corpo. The succeeding silence, which the Curator allowed to lengthen into bitterness, was like the falling of a curtain or the putting out of lights. Suddenly he made a strange gesture that made me think of an impossible power of absolution. He got to his feet and, picking up the telephone, called the president of the university that housed the Museum of Organography. To my growing surprise, and without daring to raise my eyes from the floor, I heard him reciting my praises. I was described as the very collector who was needed to secure certain examples still missing from the collection of aboriginal American musical instruments, in spite of the fact that it was already unique in its wealth of documents. Without making special mention of my skill, my teacher stressed the fact that my physical resistance, tested in the war, would make it possible for me to carry on the search in areas that older specialists would find it extremely difficult to reach. Besides, Spanish had been the language of my infancy.
Each reason that he adduced must have made me grow in the imagination of his invisible interlocutor, conferring on me the stature of a young Von Horbostel. With growing dismay, I discovered that I was being entrusted with the task of bringing back, among other unique idiophones, a cross between a drum and a rhythm-stick which Schaeffner and Curt Sachs knew nothing of, and the famous jar with two openings fitted with reeds which had been employed by certain Indians in funeral rites that Father Servando de Castillejos had described in 1651 in his treatise De barbarorum Novi Mundi moribus. This was not listed in any organographic collection, though the survival of the tribe that had made it roar ceremoniously, according to testimony of the friar, implied the continuity of a custom recently noted by explorers and traders.
“The president is expecting us,” said my teacher.
All of a sudden the idea struck me as so absurd that I felt like laughing. I tried to find some polite way out, alleging my present ignorance, my remoteness from all intellectual activity. I insisted that I knew nothing about the latest methods of classification, based on the morphological evolution of instruments and not on how they sound and are played. But the Curator was so bent on sending me where I had not the slightest desire to go that he resorted to an argument to which I could make no reasonable objection: the job in question could be easily done during my vacation. Was I going to sacrifice to my love of bar-floor sawdust the opportunity to sail up a marvelous river?
I was left without any valid reason for turning down his offer. Lulled into security by a silence that he took for consent, the Curator went into the next room to get his coat, for the rain was now pelting the windowpane. I seized the opportunity to run away. I wanted a drink. The only thing that interested me at that moment was to get to a near-by bar whose walls were covered with pictures of race horses.
III/ There was a note on the piano from Mouche telling me to wait for her. To kill time I began to finger the piano keys, striking meaningless chords, resting my glass on the last octave. The place smelled of paint. On the rear wall, above the grand piano were beginning to come clear the sketched-in figures of the Hydra, the Ship Argo, Sagittarius, Berenice’s Hair, which would soon give my friend’s studio a distinction that translated itself into money. After much scoffing at her astrological pretensions, I had had to accept the evidence of the business in horoscopes she had established, which she handled by mail, mistress of her own time, occasionally, with the most comic solemnity, granting a personal interview as a great favor.
Thus, from Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Libra, with information culled from curious treatises, paint pots and inkwells, Mouche drew up Maps of the Future that traveled to remote parts of the country adorned with zodiacal signs that I had helped her dignify with De Coeleste Fisonomiea, Prognosticum supercoeleste, and other high-sounding Latin phrases. People must be very uneasy over the state of things—I used to think to myself—to consult the astrologers so often, to study the lines of their palms so carefully, the strokes of their handwriting, shivering at the menace of unpropitious tea leaves, reviving the oldest divining techniques because they no longer know how to read the future in the entrails of sacrificial beasts or the flight of birds.
My friend, who believed firmly in veiled mediums, and who had acquired her intellectual formation in the great Surrealist bargain basement, found pleasure as well as profit in scanning the heavens in the mirror of books, juggling the beautiful names of the constellations. It was her present method of writing poetry: her only other attempt, with words pasted on plaquettes illustrated with photomontages of monsters and statues, had left her disillusioned—after the first thrill of the smell of printer’s ink had worn off—about the originality of her inspiration.
I had met her two years before, during one of Ruth’s many professional absences, and though my nights began or ended in her bed, few words of love had passed between us. At times we quarreled fiercely, then embraced furiously, while our faces, so close that we could not see each other, exchanged insults which the reconciliation of our bodies gradually turned into coarse praise of the pleasure we were experiencing. Mouche, who was very restrained, even chary, with words, at such moments employed the language of a streetwalker, which called for a reply in kind, these dregs of language sharpening our delight.
It was hard for me to tell whether it was really love that bound me to her. She often irritated me with her dogmatic devotion to ideas and attitudes that she had picked up in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and after futile arguing about them, I would leave her house determined never to go back. But by the next night the mere thought of her crudities melted me, and I returned to her flesh, which had become necessary to me, for I found in its depths that imperious, selfish animality which had the power to change the nature of my perennial fatigue, transferring it from the nervous to the physical plane. When this happened, I sometimes knew that kind of sleep, so rare and so longed for, which weighed down my lids after a day in the country, those all too few days of the year when the smell of trees pervaded my whole being and left me as though drugged.
Bored with waiting, I furiously attacked the opening chords of one of the great romantic concertos; but at that very moment the doors opened, and the apartment was filled with people. Mouche, whose face was flushed, as it became when she had been drinking a little, had just come from dinner with the man who was painting her studio, two of my assistants, whom I had not expected to meet there, the interior decorator from the floor below, who was always trying to find out a
ll she could about other women, and the dancer who was working on a ballet based solely on clapped rhythms.
“We’ve got a surprise,” my friend said gaily. And a projector was quickly set up with a copy of the film that had been shown the night before, and whose success was responsible for my immediate vacation.
Now, with the lights out, the images were reborn before my eyes: the tuna-fishing, the admirable rhythm of the nets and the desperate leaping of the fish hemmed in by black boats; the lampreys peering through the holes of their rock towers; the lazy, enveloping movement of the octopus; the arrival of the eels, and the vast coppery vineyard of the Sargasso Sea. And then those still lifes of snails and fishhooks, the forest of coral and the hallucinative battle of the crustaceans, so skillfully enlarged that the lobsters looked like horrific armored dragons. We had done a good job. The best passages of the score were heard again, with its liquid voix céleste arpeggios, the flowing portamenti of the ondes Martenot, the surge of the harps, the frenzy of xylophone, piano, and percussion instruments in the combat sequence.
Three months of arguing, discouragement, experiment, and flare-ups had gone into the making of the film, but the results were astounding. The script itself, written under the supervision of our studio by a young poet in collaboration with an oceanographer, was a model of its kind. And as for the montage and the musical direction, I could find no grounds on which to criticize my work. “A masterpiece,” Mouche said in the dark. “A masterpiece,” the others chorused.
When the lights were turned on, they all congratulated me, asking for the film to be run off again. And after the second showing, guests arrived and I was asked to show it again. But my pride dwindled each time my eyes, after a new review of what we had done, reached the “End,” ornate with seaweed, which served as the colophon of that model achievement. One truth soured my first satisfaction: all that the grueling effort, those pretensions to good taste, that technical skill, choice, and co-ordination of my collaborators and assistants, had brought forth, when all was said and done, was a publicity job ordered from the studio for which I worked by a Fisheries Association engaged in fighting a chain of co-operatives. A team of technicians and artists had worn themselves out weeks and weeks in dark studios to produce this celluloid product, whose sole objective was to attract the attention of certain important clients to the profits of an industrial undertaking designed to stimulate the daily consumption of fish.
I seemed to hear the voice of my father, in the tone of the dreary days of his widowerhood, when he was so given to quoting from the Scriptures: “That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.” That verse was on his lips for every occasion.
The words of Ecclesiastes left a bitter taste in my mouth as I thought how the Curator, for example, would have shrugged his shoulders at this labor of mine, probably considering it on a level with skywriting or an advertisement for pie mix so well drawn that it made the mouth water. He would put me in a class with those who defaced the landscape, signboard-painters or medicine-show barkers. But—I thought to myself angrily—the Curator belonged to a generation of men who saw things in terms of “the sublime,” who sought love in the boxes at Bayreuth, in the musty shadows of faded red velvet. . . . People were coming in, their heads intersecting the light of the projector.
“It’s publicity that develops techniques,” shouted a Russian painter sitting beside me (as though he had read my mind) who had given up oil for ceramics.
“The mosaics of Ravenna were nothing but advertising,” said the architect who was so enamored of the abstract. New voices emerged from the darkness: “All religious painting is publicity. . . . Like certain of Bach’s cantatas. . . . The Gott der Herr, ist Sonn und Schild comes from an actual slogan. . . . The cinema is teamwork; frescoes should be done by a team; the art of the future will be the art of teamwork.”
Still others came in with bottles, and the conversations began to break up. The painter was showing a series of sketches of maimed and flayed figures that he planned to reproduce on his trays and dishes, like “anatomical plates with depth,” which should symbolize the spirit of the times.
“True music is nothing but the calculation of frequencies,” said my assistant recorder, tossing his Chinese dice on the piano to show how a musical theme could be hit upon by chance. We were all talking at the top of our lungs when an energetic “Halt!” flung from the doorway in a bass voice froze everyone in an incipient gesture, a half-articulated word, a puff of cigarette smoke, like figures in a wax museum. Some were halted in the down-beat of a step; others with glasses in the air, halfway between table and lips. (“I am I. I am sitting on a sofa. I was about to strike a match on the emery of the box.” Hugo’s dice recalled the verse of Mallarme. But my hand was about to strike a match without conscious order. Therefore I was asleep. Asleep like all those around me.) Another order from the new arrival rang out, and each finished his phrase, gesture, suspended step.
It was one of the many exercises to which X.T.H.—we never referred to him except by his initials, which habit had transformed into the name Exteeaych—submitted us to “wake us up,” as he said, and bring us to a realization and analysis of what we were doing at the moment, however trivial. Inverting for his own use a philosophical principle we commonly employed, he used to say that anyone who acted “automatically was essence without existence.” Mouche had become professionally enthusiastic over the astrological aspects of his teaching, an approach that was very suggestive, but which, in my opinion, became too involved with Oriental mysticism, Pythagoreanism, Tibetan tantras, and God only knows what else. But Exteeaych had managed to impose on us a series of practices derived from the Yoga asamas, making us breathe in a certain way, measuring the length of inhalations and exhalations by “matras.” Mouche and her friends hoped thereby to arrive at greater control over themselves and at the acquisition of powers about which I had my doubts, especially in people who drank every day as a defense against despair, fear of failure, self-contempt, the shock of a rejected manuscript, or simply the harshness of that city of perennial anonymity amid the crowd, that place of relentless haste where eyes met only by accident and the smile on the lips of a stranger was a build-up for some kind of a proposition.
Exteeaych now went to work curing the dancer’s sick headache by the laying-on of hands. Dizzy with so much talk that ranged from existentialism to boxing, from Marxism to Hugo’s attempt to modify the piano’s sonority by putting bits of glass, pencils, tissue paper, and flower stems under the strings, I went out to the terrace, where the afternoon’s rain had washed Mouche’s dwarf lindens clean of the layer of summer soot from the smokestacks across the river. I had always been vastly amused by these gatherings, with their kaleidoscope of ideas passing swiftly from the Cabala to Anxiety by way of someone’s plans to start a farm in the West to foster group art by raising Leghorns or Rhode Island Reds. I had always loved those leaps from the transcendental to the eccentric, from Elizabethan drama to Gnosticism, from Platonism to acupuncture. I had even planned to take down these conversations on a tape recorder hidden behind the furniture. Such recordings would prove how vertiginous is the elliptical process of thought and language. In these mental gymnastics, in this acrobacy of culture, I would find, besides, the justification of many moral aberrations that would have seemed to me detestable in other people.
But the choice between one group of men and another was not too difficult. On the one hand were the hucksters, the merchants for whom I worked during the day, who were capable of nothing but spending what they had made in diversions so stupid, so devoid of imagination, that I could not help feeling myself a different breed of cat. On the other hand were those gathered here, happy at having found a few bottles of liquor, fascinated by the Powers that Exteeaych promised them, always bubbling over with high-flown projects. In the implacable setup of the modern city, they were carrying out a form of asceticism, renouncing material well-being, suffering hunger
and privations in exchange for a dubious self-realization in their work. Yet that evening those men wearied me as much as those whose aim is volume and profit. And it was because, deep down in my heart, the scene in the Curator’s house had had its effect, and I was not taken in by the enthusiasm with which the publicity film, which had spelled so much work for me, was hailed. All those paradoxes about publicity and teamwork in art were nothing but ways of shaking off the past, attempts to justify the exiguousness of individual accomplishment.
I was so dissatisfied with what I had done, because of the meretriciousness of its ending, that when Mouche came over to me with facile praises, I abruptly changed the conversation, telling her about my afternoon’s adventure. To my amazement she threw her arms around me, exclaiming that the news was formidable, for it corroborated a dream she had had in which she saw herself flying among great saffron-colored birds—which could only be interpreted as journey and success, change of residence. And without giving me time to set her straight, she held forth on the desire for escape, the call of the unknown, chance encounters, in a tone which revealed the influence of the Arrow-Pierced Rowers and the incredible Floridas of the Bateau ivre. I quickly cut her short, telling how I had run away from the Curator without accepting the offer.
“But that is absolutely idiotic,” she exclaimed. “You might have thought about me.”
I pointed out to her that I did not have the money to pay for her trip to those remote regions, and that the university was willing to pay the expenses of only one person. After an unpleasant silence, during which her eyes took on a disagreeable, offended expression, Mouche began to laugh. “And to think we have the painter of Cranach’s Venus here!”
Then she explained her luminous idea. To reach the habitat of the tribes who played the drum-rhythm-stick and the funerary jar, we would first have to go to the great tropical city famed for the beauty of its beaches and its colorful folk life. What we could do would be to stay there, making an occasional trip to the near-by jungles, enjoying ourselves as long as our money held out. Nobody would be around to know whether I had followed the itinerary mapped out in my duties as collector. And on my return, for the sake of my reputation, I would turn over a number of “primitive” instruments—scientific, accurate—perfectly designed on the basis of my sketches and measurements by our friend the painter, who was wild about the primitive arts and was so devilishly clever at copying and reproducing that he earned his living faking masterpieces, carving fourteenth-century Catalan virgins, complete with faded gilt, wormholes, and cracks. His greatest triumph had been selling the Glasgow Museum a Cranach Venus that he had painted and aged in a couple of weeks.
The Lost Steps Page 3