“Perhaps he won’t,” she said. But I had made her look up from her book, and she never went back to it. She stared out beyond the saucer of light into the pines. It was totally dark, pitch dark, the way only a forest can get dark. But she seemed to be seeing something out there, remembering something. She forgot my existence again.
I watched her, fascinated. I was also savouring my power. I can hurt her, I thought. I can make her stop reading her book. I can show her she doesn’t know my father at all.
Hours must have passed. I must have fallen asleep right there, sitting hunched on the steps, my head against the railing. What woke me was the sound of his car, driven, naturally, as though he were in an emergency or a Grand Prix race. The braking — an exhibition in itself. And when he got out of the car, I could smell it. At ten I must have had only the dimmest notion of what he’d been about, but that’s what I thought of: the stink of a tomcat. I remember it vividly. I remember that the mangy striped tom who prowled the fire escape outside our Montreal apartment went stalking through my thoughts. So that when the Old Volcano opened his mouth I expected a caterwaul to come out.
In a manner of speaking, it did. Though it was one of the Big Cats who snarled inside him.
“What the hell are you doing still up?” he roared at me.
I quaked. I hardly knew him, and at ten I still wanted so desperately to please him. (This was before I discovered the far greater rewards of displeasing him.) I tried to say something, but not a sound would come out. He stood towering over me (with, as I realize now, that particular ferocity of a man who knows he is in the wrong) and bellowed, “Answer me, dammit. Answer me!” My mouth seemed to be wired shut, and I was shivering with fear.
“I asked him to stay up,” Felicity said. She was totally calm. “I wanted his company. Come along, Jean-Marc.” And she took my hand. As soon as we were through the door, and out of his sight, I wrenched it free. I couldn’t be bought so easily. But just the same, I was amazed. I had only ever seen one other person who was not afraid of my father when he lost his temper, and that was the piano tuner. I think from that moment, I began to stop hating Felicity.
I lay in the dark (on the bed Dolores Marquez would lie on fifteen years later) and listened. I heard him pace. The cottage seemed crowded with tomcats: the way they prowl afterwards, the way they want the whole cat world to see.
“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?” he asked. (Spit, spit. Hiss.)
Oh, she was magnificent. A Siamese cat. That blue-eyed innocence, deliciously indifferent. They don’t give a damn. They lick their paws, they smile their little secret smiles, they stretch their sleek bodies in front of the fire while alley cats watch green-eyed from fire escapes. They are languorous, erotic, exotic, aristocratic. They don’t give a damn. They drive those tomcats wild.
“Does it matter?” Felicity asked.
Lying there in the dark, I could picture the casual lift of her eyebrows. I could see that look, that startled, mildly puzzled, wide-eyed Siamese stare, the way she had looked when I hit her with the pebble. And I could hear him breathing fire, hear smoke coming out of his ears. I had to bury my face in the pillow to stifle my laughter. Oh I knew right then, at ten years of age, that he’d met his match. I knew whom I wanted to study.
When she calls, I will scarcely be ruffled. Fliss, I’ll say, have you been gone long? I’ve been working on a piano and I lost track of the time.
Because it’s perfectly typical of her.
In the middle of some drowsy children-noisy morning, in a village on the leeside of the Guazapa volcano in the province of Nowhere, she will look up suddenly and think: Oh my God, I promised Jean-Marc I’d call back.
Jean-Marc, she’ll say. It completely slipped my mind.
Forget it, I’ll say. It’s nothing. But I have a confession to make. I had this dream, this incredibly convoluted dream.
Oh a dream, she’ll laugh. Write it down.
I did, I’ll say. That’s not the confession, don’t butt in. The joke is this: I’ve been bitten, I’ve had a taste of the stage, I got carried away by the performance. The piano tuner wants to conduct. It’s the shape of the thing, and the power, and a sense of what the audience wants or thinks it wants. I brought you to an untimely end.
I’m sure I deserved it, she’ll laugh.
Kathleen and I tell each other stories.
The disappeared ones, we call them. Los desaparecidos. We have taken up Felicity’s hobby, we watch the news, we keep clippings. See, we tell each other, there are other stories stranger than ours, verified by the press each day. A. P., Reuters, the New York Times, it must be true, surreal though it seems: that for no more reason than a whiff of an echo of association at two removes with a person considered to be suspicious, people can disappear. Disappear without a trace.
Still, Kathleen says doubtfully. This isn’t Latin America. Things happen in Latin America that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
That’s true, I acknowledge. People are different down there. Our case is undeniably different. Any day now we’ll get a phone call.
“Our car was obviously stolen,” she says. “He never drove like that. It was somebody else inside.” Kathleen is a child, not quite eighteen, and needs a hope to hang on to.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “He’s still running errands of mercy, Robin Hood in a Chevy, a borderline saint.”
These are not lies I’m telling her.
There’s a fine distinction between what cannot be proved or disproved and what is essentially true.
Felicity’s case is different again.
I know Felicity.
I know the way things slip her mind.
Any day now she’ll call.
39
I knew I was right. It’s happened. A sign.
Invitation to an Exhibition: the latest work. And at her own gallery, no less! Gold print, an embossed border, rough-torn parchment edges, very tastefully done. Of course she sent it. Who else has ever sent me an invitation to his openings?
Well, Fliss, I’ll say, you’ve won. You’ve finally got me to come to one of them. But don’t expect me to drink champagne with him — unless he makes a peace offering first.
It would be cruel to mention this to Kathleen. There is nothing, I’m afraid, to suggest that her father might come back to us, and she can be a little funny about Felicity. She gets peevish, she thinks I talk about Felicity too much. Kathleen’s eighteen now — almost old enough to face reality — and she recently moved in with me. Just a business trip, I’ve told her. New tuning equipment that’s not available up here. She gets a distant look in her eyes. Sometimes, when she walks across a room, I think of a Siamese cat.
Felicity’s gallery is full of reporters and photographers and champagne buckets. Long dresses, black ties and tails, bits of chatter splattering themselves around like paint on a studio floor. Utterly unexpected … Post-modernist, certainly, but also, wouldn’t you say … ? Life in the old man yet, a completely new … A kind of symbolist … Numinous, I think is the word.
All the usual brittle inanities.
A waiter passes with a tray and I take a glass of champagne. Even on tiptoe, and craning in every direction, I can’t see either of them, so I join the lemmings who are making the grand tour of his latest eruptions. I can see that he is still playing with acrylics, going for vibrant violence, though there’s something new too, an interest in radiance, in brilliant diffused light. It’s as though J.M.W. Turner and Rousseau and a clutch of aggressive symbolists, all drunk at the same party, had worked on a canvas together.
The first one is pure sensationalism. Gratuitous, the critics will say. And the Old Volcano, pretentiously cavalier, will toss back: These are violent times. I can hear him now. Watch me, watch me. Hot lava from on high.
The first one: a crimson and beige composition around a black slash, and at one end of the black slash — like a beacon against the dark — is a halo of light. The crimson? Applied completely without restra
int. It’s a bloody painting. Nothing clear, of course; nothing simplistically pictorial; but I know how to read his codes. He is raiding our lives as usual, making capital out of her dreams. I know what the blood-streaked flesh tones speak of, the layered slaughterings like so much stacked meat. I recognize the black dress.
In the next one, two forms, shadowy, bend toward each other over something luminous. A lantern perhaps. A discovery. It is not clear that the forms are human, though the one on the right is like a net of floating discs. They could be atoms, they could be eyes. They float in pairs, and one of each pair is slightly higher than the other.
The next one startles me. It’s a parody, I hear people saying, an artist’s joke. A tribute, someone else suggests, or a backward glance. A reinterpretation of Van Gogh’s bedroom. But I recognize my bed at the cottage. There is a radiance around the headboard, a smear of blood on the quilt.
Predictably, the next is a Magdalen, starkly black, an abstract rendering, but recognizable just the same. The eyes (Felicity’s eyes) float loose in a bubble of light. Homage to Perugino, the painting is called.
And then this: a figure clothed in white samite with a gaunt cadaverous face (I think of Rouault, of all those tragic clowns) surrounded by a gaudy skirl of colour: temptation perhaps; dancing girls; the worldly vanities. I close one eye and focus on the face, which has been done with a deliberate and heavy crudity of line. I recognize the eyes, I recognize the hunger, the bright vacant gaze of the dreamer. It is Augustine Kelly. Unmistakable. Whom he never even met. I look at my catalogue and see that the painting is called: To Carthage then I came.
A stunned moment. And then I am trembling with rage. Because that was my idea, my creation, my performance. He is sucking me dry again. I know what you’re up to, old man, I fume. The catalogue tells me that The Piano Tuner’s Dream is next, but I have seen enough. He thinks he is pulling all the strings, he thinks the whole world is his canvas, he thinks we’re all part of his game.
I’m shoving my way through the crowds now, bumping into people, knocking over glasses, slopping champagne over silk skirts, standing on people’s toes. I’m looking for Felicity.
Fliss, I’ll say. You got me here. But his arrogance is more than I can take. I have to leave before I kill him. I’ll see you later.
There’s a story the Old Volcano should read, a story by Borges. It’s in my library, I think I’ll send him a copy. Read this, old man, I’ll say. Put this on your palette and paint it:
A man in a ruined world dreams. Night after night, he spins out dreams, he dreams a peopled world, he fills canvases with populations of phantoms, he paints them in the gallery of his sleep. He dreams words into their mouths, he dreams their dreams, he dreams their lives. They twist and turn on their phantom strings. He dreams he’s the puppeteer.
His phantom cosmos is not enough, he is drunk with a larger dream: the demiurge. (We might call him the Old Volcano.) This is his obsession: to push a phantom beyond the confines of his sleep, to dream an entire man into being. He dreams with a violent singleness of purpose. He has the God-itch. He dreams his dream-being organ by organ and hair by hair. He calls him son.
He dares not cease from his dreaming, for if he does, his son will not exist. So he believes. It is — if I may comment on Borges — the usual arrogance of the artist that is depicted here. It is typical, for example, of the Old Volcano, who thinks that his paintings are the borders of reality. He paints Felicity, he paints me; the paintings are more real to him than the sitters. We cease to exist in his mind; we become mere shadows of his paintings.
But the last laugh is on the Old Volcano.
In Borges’ story, the ancient gods of the circular ruins tap the dreamer on the shoulder. Sorry, old chap, they say in effect. But someone else is dreaming you.
Oh the last laugh is definitely on the Old Volcano. And the very last word is with me.
Someone else is dreaming you, old man, I’ll say. I’ve caught the virus, your very own disease. I’ve got you down on paper. You’re just a shadow of my words, your paintings only live in my chapters, you cease to exist once my reader puts you on a shelf, you have to reach past me to touch the world. The piano tuner has got hold of the baton.
I’ve pushed through to the front of the crowd now. There’s a space, an emptiness, which has been cordoned off in front of his major piece. It’s a huge canvas, it takes most of one wall of the final room of the exhibition.
Even I am impressed. Dazzled. (I am not ungenerous. I have a certain critical integrity.) It’s as though he has painted the mind of the sun, the concept of light, the idea of God. Such is the radiance, the effulgence of the canvas, that my eyes water and I have to close them. And when I close them, dark flecks like sunspots dance inside my eyelids. They are in the shape of Felicity’s eyes, they dance in lopsided pairs.
Oh, I acknowledge grudgingly. Brilliant!
When I look again, shading my eyes, I realize that the entire gallery is in fact lit by the glow from the canvas. No other lighting is necessary.
“Mr Seymour,” I hear a reporter say. “Could you comment on this extraordinary new … this almost mystical … one might say transcendently luminous … I find myself at a loss for words. Could you comment on the shadow of the woman behind the light? Could you tell us who sat for the painting?”
The Old Volcano’s voice sounds like the creaking of a very old house. “It is the shadow of a woman who left me,” he says. “The idea of a woman I lost.”
And then I see him.
A shock.
It’s been a number of years, and I am not prepared for how old, how frail … Not that this excuses him for anything.
His eyes are watering from the brightness of his own painting. His arms are dangling at his sides like broken awnings. He doesn’t know what to do with them. He half lifts one towards me and lets it fall.
“Jean-Marc,” he says, and his voice breaks. “You came. You finally came.”
“Because I thought …” And I’m back in a childhood accent, I’m reduced to begging, I’m pleading with him: “Where is she?”
He stares at me.
“I was hoping you’d know,” he says. “I was hoping she’d called you. She always worried more about you, I was sure she’d have …” His hand is groping towards me again like a blind thing, it casts about in distress.
She probably couldn’t get through, I try to say. She’s probably somewhere remote. (I can see her now, wearing sunlight, in a village on the far side of the Guazapa volcano. The light falls like wings on her shoulders. And there are streamers, she is trailing streamers of children.)
“The fire …” he falters, interrupting.
“Oh, for God’s sake, she wasn’t there!” (I shouldn’t be shouting — though it’s a strain being patient with him.) “She wasn’t there,” I say more gently, recovering. “That’s not the way she’d … You know how she loses track. How she just takes off.”
“Yes,” he says, relieved, and his drunken persistent hands lurch toward me again. “Any day now, I expect …”
And she will call, of course, though when she drops in from wherever she is, she’ll be amazed to see us standing here holding each other like this.
Oh Jean-Marc, she’ll laugh, and we’ll catch fire from the sound of her voice.
First published 1985 by Hodder & Stoughton
Paperback edition published 1987 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1990
This edition 2003
www.uqp.uq.edu.au
© Janette Turner Hospital
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
Sponsored by the Queensland Office of Arts and Cultural Development.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942– .
Borderline.
I.Title.
A823.3
ISBN: 9780702256066 (ePub)
OTHER FICTION BY
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
NORTH OF NOWHERE SOUTH OF LOSS
“I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere, everywhere, in the margins.”
Janette Turner Hospital’s stories have won widespread international acclaim for their dazzling style, intellectual depth and crackling energy. Her characters oscillate between estrangement and a sense of belonging, as Hospital herself has suffered geographical displacement from the Deep North of Australia to the Deep South of the United States.
Seven of these fourteen stories were included in the “North of Nowhere” section of Collected Stories (UQP 1995). Seven, including “South of Loss”, are published here in book form for the first time.
“Her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected center of calm.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation … her stories develop like poems or meditations.”
New York Times Book Review
ISBN: 0 7022 3333 1
CHARADES
This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland’s Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital’s characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning Scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-held secrets of her family origins.
“A journey of strange and beautiful complexity through some of the finest prose being written anywhere today.”
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