by Robert Irwin
We went nowhere special and we were nobody special. It is hard to imagine anything more banal than a pair of lovers walking through the streets of Paris. (Since I do have a strong imagination I can imagine things that are even more banal, but I will not trouble you with them here.) Occasionally we would find ourselves walking behind another pair of lovers also arm in arm and I would find myself almost unable to walk, practically swooning, overcome by the ordinariness of my love and theirs.
We used to rise late and walk late into the night. In the night the rain gave a silvery gleam to the buildings and the sphinxes, gargoyles and obelisks with which Paris is so richly blessed. Then, after walking, we would drink brandy in some zinc bar before returning to study more pornography in Jorge’s flat.
After the first night she trusted me enough to stop wearing her uncomfortable girdle in bed. Each night I requested permission to lick her and this was always smilingly granted. I stopped her taking baths, for I preferred her sweaty. I also kept a glass of Pernod on the floor beside the bed to refresh my tongue. This substitute for real sex was just barely tolerable, since it was innocent enough for her (‘I feel like a kitten being washed!’) and perverse enough for me (I felt like a sex slave). I could even persuade myself that there was something Surrealist in our nocturnal ritual, for Caroline’s way of dealing with my desire reminded me a little bit of Salvador Dali’s much underrated novel Hidden Faces in which he introduces the world to what he claims is a new perversion, cledalism, amour-voyance or orgy-incontinence. In cledalism things are taken to such an extreme that lovers attain orgasm without touching one another at all, by purely mental means. The only sex I had in Paris that week was mental. I tried to tell myself that this was what I needed or wanted, but I knew that this was not so. I had had bizarre sex with Kiki de Montparnasse and others. Now I wanted normal sex and I wanted Caroline to bear my children. Not because I gave a damn about children. I did not. But because childbearing would bind Caroline more closely to me in a traditional little bourgeois family circle. That was my fantasy.
Anyway after most of her body had been licked (she would not allow me between her thighs), Caroline would sleep and for hours I watched her sleeping. She slept like a seal, turning in the bed as if in water. My own sleep was more fitful. Even so, early one morning I awoke with a start to find that she was no longer beside me in the bed. Rolling over, I discovered that she had left a note on the pillow.
‘Darling,
This morning I suddenly feel the need to be alone for a little bit, so I thought that I would let you sleep on and I have gone off on a purposeless little walk on my own. Meet you at the Cafe de Dome at one sharp.
Love and kisses,
XXXXXXXXXXX’
I stumbled over to the window and, gazing dopily down, I glimpsed Caroline walking smartly down the Rue de Clignancourt. I did not pause to think. I did not even pause to put on any shoes. I hurled myself into trousers and shirt, and, having leapt down the flights of stairs from Jorge’s flat, I started running down the Rue de Clignancourt. It and its continuation, the Rue de Rochechouart, proceed directly for a long way into the heart of Paris. So it was that I was successful in spotting her ahead of me. She was walking briskly down the road, looking neither to the left nor the right. Although she was walking fast, I could have overtaken her, had I continued to run. However, I did not. Instead I shadowed her from a safe distance and I moved from tree to urinoir to doorway in the somewhat stagily secretive manner that I had seen this done in the movies. I think that half of me was playing and enjoying the pretence of being a red indian or a private detective, but the other half of me was sick with a kind of dread. I could not, however, identify the source of my dread.
At the end of the Rue de Rochechouart Caroline produced a map from her handbag (I did not know that she had this map) and thereafter she kept consulting it as she pursued a twisting course into the crowded centre of the city. We walked quite a way and it was not long before one of my feet was bleeding. From time to time I glanced back at the gory spoor that my foot was leaving on the pavement.
At length she arrived at the building which proved to be her destination and, after paying for her ticket at the caisse, she went in. I limped across the street to stand in front of the building’s entrance, even though I had already recognised the goal of Caroline’s journey as the Musée Grevin in the Boulevard Montmartre. Above the entrance, beneath the images of two somnolent women, I read the legend Cabinet Fantastique. Palais des MIRAGES. However, I dared not enter the waxworks and I would not confront her. Instead I concealed myself in the doorway of an office on the other side of the Boulevard and I waited. Almost two hours had passed before it occurred to me that the waxworks might have an exit that was separate from its entrance. I crossed the street once again and discovered that this was so. The Musée Grevin had an exit in the Passage Jouffroy, the covered arcade that ran along the side of the building. It was most probably that Caroline had already left and I was now in danger of being late for our rendezvous at the Cafe du Dome.
I took a taxi and hobbled out of it into the cafe. Caroline arrived about ten minutes after me. She was looking preoccupied and perhaps even afraid, but that may have been only my imagination. I was ready to imagine anything.
‘Sorry I’m late. I was ambling about without thinking. Darling! What have you done to your feet?’
Looking down at my feet I simulated vagueness.
‘My shoes? Oh, I must have forgotten to put them on.’
‘Oh Caspar, you are hopeless. Are you expecting me to carry you home?’
I smiled at Caroline. Then, snapping my fingers I summoned over a shoeshine boy and got him to blacken and polish the tops of my feet. As the boy worked away, we chatted about what we had been doing that morning and she proved to be as vague as I was on that subject. Then she turned the conversation round to a proposed expedition to a fashion showroom on the Place Vendome. I hardly listened to what she was saying, for I was reproaching myself for having shadowed and spied on her. I told myself that this action was typical of my mistrustful, creepy nature – that this was exactly me, a pale creature who lurked in the shadows of dark doorways or behind urinoirs. I disgusted myself.
Finally we did set off for the Place Vendome. As chance would have it, there were wax mannequins in the window of the showroom, dressed in Schiaparelli’s latest creations, bizarre evening-gowns with designs by Salvador Dali. Caroline studied the window display earnestly and I studied her, unable to decide whether it was the evening-gowns or the wax figures which so held her attention.
That evening, while she was washing and binding my feet, she told me that I was crazy and mysterious and that she did not think that she would ever succeed in discovering the real me.
The following day, our last full day in Paris, was also the day of our meeting with André Breton at the Cafe Flore. We found him and Jacqueline playing cards with the Eluards on a table outside. Paul acknowledged our arrival, but signalled that the game was reaching a crucial stage and must not be interrupted. André dealt out two cards to Paul, five cards to Jacqueline, four to Nusch and three to himself. The rest of the pack he divided into three dummies. Paul turned over the top card on the first of the dummies and whistled through his teeth before rejecting it. Jacqueline turned over the top card of the second dummy. It turned out to be a two of clubs and Jacqueline, showing the Queen of Spades from her hand, scooped the rest of the dummy. Nusch did not turn a card over, but she exchanged three out of the four cards in her hand with cards from the third dummy and then laid out two court cards from the hearts suit on the table. And so play continued in this perplexing manner for another fifteen minutes or so. From time to time a player might announce a ‘grand slam’, declare that jokers were trumps or demand a reshuffle of one of the two remaining dummy packs.
Finally, this somewhat random game, whose rules only came into existence as players thought of them, broke up in roars of laughter and at that point Paul rose and with solemn courtesy int
roduced us to André and his wife. I went into a close huddle with André for a while, talking business and then, once the business was concluded, I found myself having to field questions about Ned and the Serapion Brotherhood. André did not regard Ned as serious and he wanted me to ditch him and come over to the Paris Surrealists. Meanwhile I think Jacqueline was telling Caroline about her former career as a professional swimmer.
Then talk became more general. André produced a letter from Benjamin Péret. Péret was fighting in the Durrutti column of anarchists helping to defend Madrid against the Fascists. Saragossa had fallen to the Fascists only a few days previously. Liberty and democracy were under siege. A great war could not long be avoided. I was unused to such talk, for as I have already remarked, Ned had no belief in politics. (According to Ned, politics was just like astrology, a totally spurious system for explaining why things happened and democracy had no more real existence than the Fairy Commonwealth.)
Then André talked about plans to hold the next great Surrealist exhibition in Paris in the coming year. He hoped that I would exhibit and perhaps Jenny Bodkin too.
‘Recently Salvador Dali has been producing interesting work using mannequins and wax-figures. And Bellmer too,’ said André.
‘Yes, Jenny has been doing the same,’ I replied, raising my voice as I did so. ‘She finds wax a stimulating medium to work in’.
As I replied, I watched Caroline out of the corner of my eye. However, there was no sign that she was listening to our talk and she seemed wholly concentrated on feeding crumbs to a dog under the table.
Only when she had finished feeding and teasing the dog did Caroline rejoin the conversation. She talked to Paul about his collection of poems, Les Yeux Fertiles, and about what poets she should read next. Then she turned to André and asked him what novels she should read.
André exploded,
‘What novels, Mademoiselle? No novels! Never again read novels! And try to forget those novels you have already read! The novel is an outdated art form and useful for nothing. The reading and writing of novels cramps and constrains the imagination. Novels delude us into thinking that time and space are fixed things in which we are trapped. Novels teach slavery to life. They present people’s characters as fixed and that is a lie. Novelists are tyrants.’
André had started out so angrily on this tirade that Caroline cringed back into her seat, but as he continued to talk it became clear that André was only now really seeing her for the first time and his tone softened.
‘Read only poetry, Mademoiselle, for only poetry is a suitable vehicle for the celebration of the mysteries of love and womanhood.’ And then, quoting himself, ‘The problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem there is in the world’.
Caroline looked a little doubtful. It may have been that she did not like to think of herself as a problem, whether marvellous or not.
Jacqueline wanted to know how we had met and once again Caroline described finding me blindfolded in Soho and again Paul urged us to explore Paris in the same fashion. So Caroline tied her scarf tight round my eyes. Our audience with André Breton was over and blindfolded I made my formal farewells, shaking hands and kissing cheeks.
I do not know where she led me on that last day in Paris. I was thinking about other things. Why on the previous day did I not follow Caroline into the Musée Grevin and confront her? Or why did I not ask her later what she had been doing in the waxworks? Well, nothing is simple. Everything is absurd. In part I think I was paralysed by my shame at having followed her. What could I say? How could I explain myself? But there was more. Somehow I had the sense of an interdiction, some sort of prohibition. I played with the fantasy that if now, while she was leading me blindfold through the city, I asked her directly about her dealings with the wax figures, then she would show me the truth and it would be a truth that I would rather not have seen. In my absurd fantasy she would lead me by the hand into the Musée Grevin and then, when she had taken my blindfold off, I would behold the bloody corpses of other foolish young men, so foolish as to ask the same question that I had just asked, and they would all be hanging on meat-hooks in a chilling chamber, prior to their being embalmed in wax.
Well, it was absurd and it was impossible to think of Caroline doing anything really naughty, never mind seriously evil. She was an old-fashioned English girl, kittenishly, teasingly affectionate on that last day in Paris.
Suddenly my mind was made up. I tugged her to a halt and kissed her. Then,
‘Caroline, will you marry me?’
There was a long silence. My heart was beating so furiously that I thought I might die.
‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’
There was another long silence and I suddenly became possessed by the notion that there was someone standing close by and listening to all that we said. I stripped the scarf away from my eyes. We were standing alone beside the Seine. There was no one anywhere near us, but now I could see that she was silently crying.
‘It’s not that I’m unhappy,’ she explained. ‘I’m crying for happiness.’
‘Caroline, I need your love.’
‘But darling you have my love.’
‘No. I need your passion, not your affection.’
‘No darling, just now you need my affection and you have it, all of it.’ And she continued. ‘But you don’t know me. You keep watching me as if I was something you were just about to eat, but you don’t know me at all.’
Chapter Nine
That winter things fell apart. One Sunday in early December, after several cancelled dates, she came to the studio in Cuba Street for what proved to be her last sitting. I had been studying the Hilliard miniatures in the Victoria and Albert Museum and I was trying my hand at a portrait of Caroline which would be small enough to fit into a locket.
When I sensed that we were getting near the end of the sitting, I proposed that she came again the next Saturday afternoon. She shifted uneasily in her seat.
‘I can’t come so often for a bit. Mummy and Daddy have been complaining that they don’t see enough of me these days, and – I’ve been meaning to tell you – I’ve got a part in the Vortex by Noel Coward. It’s being put on by the Putney and Barnes Thespians, and I’ve been given the part of Bunty Mainwaring, you know, the girl who is engaged to Nicky the drug addict. It’s the best part I’ve ever been offered. Anyway the rehearsals are going to take up a lot of the weekends’. She looked apologetic. ‘The opening night is towards the end of January. Come and see it if you like.’
I was angry and I allowed my anger to show. Didn’t she care about me? Did she think nothing of these fantastic portraits I had been doing of her? Was she just going to walk away and leave everything in mid-air? Was she going to let amateur theatricals get in the way of real art?
She was angry in response,
‘I’m sorry darling,’ she said.
(I had never heard ‘darling’ used as a term of hostility before.)
‘I’m sorry, but you have a lot to learn about life. You can’t always get your own way, and this will teach you more quickly than you think – if you let it.’
I was speechless, astounded to find myself being patronised by this girl, but she pushed a strand of hair away from her face and continued,
‘You and your friends in the Brotherhood sit around talking about the Surrealist revolution and about doing all sorts of fantastic things, but where is the reality in all that? You must recognise yourself for what you really are and then act on it. For how long are you going to keep on doing these weird paintings? And how is the world going to benefit from them?’
She stood up to go and then looked serenely back at me.
‘I’ve said everything I’m going to say now. If I were you, I’d say nothing in reply, in case you say something that you might regret.’
And with a final blown kiss she walked out of the room and out of the house.
Since Oliver had stopped coming to see me in Cuba Street, I went
round to see him in his grimy rooms off the Tottenham Court Road. I found him in shirt sleeves, sitting at a table covered with brightly coloured cards. I had seen similar ones before in the hands of Gala Dali and recognised them as from the tarot pack. A pattern of ten cards was upturned on the table in front of Oliver, and he with difficulty raised his gaze from them.
‘Good evening, Caspar.’ Then peremptorily, ‘Look at this would you? There are four cards from the Major Arcana in the hand I have just dealt myself – the Fool, the Magician, the Star and the Hanged Man. Can you see that one of the cards is special? Don’t answer straight away, but think carefully.’
I looked, but could see nothing.
So Oliver picked up the Star. The card showed a star and under it a naked woman who knelt and poured water from two vessels onto land and into a stream.
‘It’s Arcana 17. It symbolises hope, a light to be guided by. Inspiration from above. The determination of the future. The transcendence of normal limitations. I dealt it and so this card has been directed to me. You haven’t got it yet, Caspar? The Latin for Star is Stella.’
I was unable to stifle a groan. I had hoped that all this Stella nonsense might be fading by now. Alas, no.