The Great Concert of the Night

by Jonathan Buckley

  I told him what had happened.

  William looked at me as though at a picture that had suddenly gone out of focus, and said nothing. He turned away and stared into the ground. “That’s terrible,” he whispered. Grimacing, he scrubbed at his face as if to ease an exasperating itch.

  We talked about Imogen, briefly.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he murmured. “I really liked her.”

  “So did I,” I said.

  Still gazing into the ground, he put a hand on my arm, gingerly, like a blind man ascertaining the location of a rail.

  •

  “Why have you been hiding her from us?” asked Emma, slighted, after Francesca had reported that my attachment to the actress was somewhat stronger than had been supposed, and that she was a charming and unpretentious person. Imogen was in the midst of preparations for Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, which gave some plausibility to my excuse—that her schedule made it difficult to make plans. The explanation was accepted, provisionally. Emma believed that she knew the reason for my evasiveness. She had not seen La Châtelaine or Devotion, but from what she had found out she could understand why I might not feel comfortable with the idea of introducing Imogen. But Emma wanted me to know that she was rather more broad-minded than she imagined I imagined her to be—no less broad-minded, in fact, than her daughter. “She’s intrigued,” Francesca told me.

  The date of the visit was agreed many weeks in advance; when the day came, Imogen’s mood was beginning to darken, but she was well enough, she assured me. On another day, she would have answered more expansively the questions that Emma and Nicholas had for her. They had many questions about the business of film-making; they talked to her as if she were some sort of explorer. That evening, Imogen’s manner was polite, patient, modest, ­self-deprecating. They had expected someone more voluble, I am sure; more vivid; perhaps more glamorous. Nobody looking at pictures of the group around the table would have guessed her profession, said Emma, when she phoned the following day. This was by way of praise. The reticence had been something of a surprise, Emma confessed, but she understood why I would be attracted to her. Some people, without really doing anything, manage to transmit a certain charge, Emma said. “Charismatic, isn’t she?” she said. She talked about “still waters,” and surmised that Imogen might be easily bored. “I think we bored her, a bit,” she said, not as a complaint. That was not so, I assured her, though there were times when Imogen was bored by herself. But there was never to be another visit.

  •

  Walking home, I am startled by a laugh from a young woman. The sound is exactly the delighted laugh that Imogen produced for the scene in which Julius does the sleight-of-hand trick, seeming to make his fiancée’s handkerchief disappear. A dozen takes were required, because the handkerchief would not fly as Marcus Colhoun wanted it to. At each take Imogen’s laugh was a perfect expression of spontaneous delight. Afterwards, Marcus remarked that it was easier to fake an orgasm than to do what Imogen had done. To make herself laugh, she told Marcus, she brought to mind an incident from her childhood: her brother being chased by a demented duck. The mirth of Beatrice is indistinguishable from genuine mirth. And her laugh is not at all like the sinister laughter of Agamédé, or the soft laughter of the elegant Claire, or the laughter of young Caroline, all of which were quite different from Imogen’s.

  •

  Imogen started to rub her brow. After two or three slow strokes she began to rub quickly, scowling, as if trying to remove an ink-stain from her skin. Then she lowered her hand and looked right at me, fearfully. “I can’t remember anything,” she said. “I can’t think.”

  “But that’s not true,” I said. “You’re talking to me. So you are thinking.”

  “Words are coming out,” she corrected me.

  “Words are coming out in order, in sentences.”

  Her mind, she told me, speaking very quietly, was like a lake of black water. For most of the time the water was calm, but every now and then a breeze would rush over it and some foam would appear on the surface. That’s what her thoughts were—foam on black water.

  On the worst days, her mind was swarming with “pieces of sentences.” From these fragments, sometimes, an item of sense, or half-sense, would materialise. These moments, she said, were like “birds flying out of fog.”

  •

  Agamédé and the guileless Nicolas Guignon, in a chamber to which she has led him, examine a painting in which a roguish-looking man, in pink satin breeches, is playing a guitar for an audience of richly attired young adults, who recline on the grass of a romantic garden, amid roses, urns and statuary. After some discussion of the picture, Nicolas Guignon confesses to Agamédé that he has lost his heart to Delphine, his pupil, the youngest daughter of the Count. He needs to speak of the accomplishment and beauty of Delphine; Agamédé allows him to. He has much to say about his philosophy of love. Sitting beside him, Agamédé listens. Then she takes his hand, as a mother would. Her demeanour becomes grave. Transfixing him with her gaze, Agamédé says to him: “But I have found that love, Nicolas, is too often a thing of the imagination. A man imagines the woman he thinks he sees, and imagines that he loves her.” So few people can bear to be alone, she tells him. “This weakness is the cause of what they take to be love.” Belying their meaning, the words are spoken in tones of great tenderness. The young man is weakened by the scrutiny of Agamédé, by her voice, by her bewitching hauteur, the delicious glaze of her skin, the penumbra of candlelight in her hair. He pretends to be considering what she has said, but already he is losing his heart for a second time, or so he believes.

  •

  “Nothing really dies,” William states. We are sitting in the park; he clamps his hands on his knees and sweeps his gaze over the town. It makes no sense to talk about death because every human being is a field of energy, and every thought is an electrical event, he explains. Energy can never be destroyed. So it follows that we can never disappear. Radio waves play some part in the argument, as do sunlight and cosmic radiation. “We are information,” he says. “That’s what we are.” The monologue is punctuated by variants of this idea. “Information can never be lost. That’s a basic law,” he tells me. He tells me about black holes. “You think black holes are these whirlpools in space, right? Cosmic plugholes,” he proposes. Eventually everything will be sucked into them and lost forever—that’s what we think. But this isn’t right, says William. Scientists have a new idea about what will happen. Information will stream towards the black holes and be held there, on the edge, instead of plummeting into the abyss. In time, all the black holes will come together. And you could say that the result will be God. “All the information that there has ever been—that’s God. And we will be part of it. We will become part of God,” he explains, with every appearance of rationality. His manner is that of a physicist rather than an evangelist. “I know you’re not sure about this,” he says. “These things are difficult to understand.”

  •

  In London, at night, we saw a couple admiring the spectacle of luxury that had been staged in the window of a furniture shop: tables that cost as much as cars; carpets created by picturesque craftspeople in picturesque villages. In the next doorway a hand was held out. The gaze of the window-shoppers slid over the human object; the act of semi-blindness might have been determined by shame, or embarrassment, or a belief that the beggar is there by choice, or is not truly destitute. Reasons can always be found. Not a rare occurrence; we have all done it. “I am not seen, therefore I do not exist,” Imogen remarked, on Oxford Street.

  March

  Online, a Q&A session with Antoine Vermeiren, recorded in Paris after the release of Le Grand Concert de la Nuit; intermittently subtitled. The attire is smart, and slightly dandyish: sugar-white shirt; a black suit of self-evidently expensive fabric; similarly fine footwear. The one exception to the monochrome scheme is the hosiery: violet socks. The other extravagance is the hair: a thick sweep of striated grey, just short of
collar-length. For every question he has several hundred words; the voice is drowsily low-decibel; as he speaks, his left hand describes curlicues in the air, mimicking the turns of his thinking; it holds a cigarette, which is deployed with easy technique, like a miniature baton. The right hand is for raking the hair. Before each answer, the hair is raked or a cigarette sipped.

  Inevitably, a questioner remarks that the subject of sex is prominent in Vermeiren’s oeuvre; the director is invited to share his thoughts on the subject. Another cigarette is lit at this point; Vermeiren considers the lights in the ceiling. “Sex is not that important,” he pronounces. “Sex is of less importance than work,” he goes on, squinting into the light. Work, productive work, is what makes us human; the separation of sex and work is the basis of civilisation. “And I work very hard,” he says. The cigarette is halted in mid-air, in anticipation of a downbeat. “But sex is also of great importance,” he resumes. Some of the things he says are things that Imogen said to me; the same phrases are used. But he goes further: sanctity and transgression, he maintains, are inseparable. Nobody could deny, he proposes, that the libertine is closer to the saint than is the man who has no desire. His work is “profoundly spiritual,” Vermeiren asserts, because “the things of the body are the things of the spirit.” A strong emphasis on sont—as if the syllable were a hammer with which, at a single blow, he shatters the carapace of hypocrisy.

  The characters in Le Grand Concert de la Nuit—indeed, in all of Vermeiren’s films—are loquacious, extremely so, a member of the audience observes. “They deliver speeches,” she says, at which Antoine Vermeiren smiles and nods; he encourages her to continue; she is pretty. The question has something to do with rhetoric. The eighteenth century was the golden age of rhetoric, Vermeiren states. That is why he likes that period so much. That is why he loves the music of the eighteenth century. “It is reasonable music, but it has passion,” he says. He suggests that the questioner has identified a paradox that lies at the heart of Le Grand Concert: “These people talk about their wildness, but how can wildness have a language?” He wants it to be understood that Le Grand Concert de la Nuit is not merely set in the Baroque era—it is Baroque in spirit, because Baroque art is concerned with “the representation of what cannot be represented,” and is imbued with the “melancholy of failure.” There is something of the Baroque in Vermeiren’s answers; the logic is hard to discern, but the performance is enjoyable, like an opera with fine music and an unfathomable libretto.

  He must be absolutely clear: he is no apologist for violence. This is something that he deplores in American culture: its appetite for violence without consequence, its use of violence as entertainment. Within a minute he has declared himself to be a vegetarian. This is connected to his ideas on Christianity. Contempt for animals is intrinsic to Christian morality: “The beasts are beneath morality, and therefore disgusting,” he explains. “I do not share this disgust,” he says. “Deus est anima brutorum. God is the soul of beasts.” The cigarette performs an intricate loop.

  His next film, he announces, will be based on the life—the outrageous life—of Georges Bataille. A script has been written. He has much to say about Georges Bataille, about the “reversal of values,” the “profound affinity between erotic pleasure and religious exaltation,” et cetera. The accusations that were made against Vermeiren, a few months later, no doubt played some part in the annulment of that particular project.

  •

  Pierre/Vermeiren walks down the main street of Vézelay, so self-­consciously that he appears to be suffering the after-effects of cramp; his hands hang like lumps of chicken meat. And the ghastly smile that he does: intended to suggest a deep and dark and illusion-free mind, but more suggestive of toothache. Vermeiren believes, I suspect, that his creativity transcends any considerations of mere technical competence. He can no more act than I can.

  •

  Francesca tells me that I should pack a copy of Lucretius for my Roman holiday. I will like him, she promises. How could one not admire a man who, writing in the century that preceded the arrival of Christianity, argued that the gods neither created us nor have any interest in what we’re up to? Why would any deity create a species as vulnerable as humans and then confine them to this inhospitable lump of rock and water? Why bother? Do the gods crave amusement? No—they reside in a place of infinite tranquillity, and have nothing to do with the world in which we live. They do not punish us and they do not reward us. Nature is the ruling force of our world.

  •

  As did many of his coevals in the medical profession, Samuel Vickery believed that one could read in the contours of the skull the character of the mind within. The head-bones of criminals were not of the same form as those of the law-abiding, he maintained, and in proof of this theorem he displayed in his consulting room three skulls that he had acquired. They were of Italian origin, and were said to have been removed from the skeletons of a swindler, a violent drunkard and a matricide. All three came into the possession of John Perceval, and are now in room seven. The trio of criminal skulls are placed on a shelf at median adult head-height, so that they may meet the viewer on more or less equal terms.

  I showed Imogen the skull of the belligerent drinker; the bumps of the cranium were indicative, supposedly, of a propensity to Combativeness. Having bought this item, John Perceval had shown it to a colleague who, like Samuel Vickery, was an adherent of the pseudo-­science of phrenology. The skull, John Perceval explained, was the brain-case of a commedia dell’arte actor from Cremona. From the irregularities of the dome, he proposed, it was clear that this individual had been an exemplar of Wit and Mirthfulness. The colleague, after careful examination of the specimen, concurred with his analysis.

  Looking through her reflection at the matricide’s skull, Imogen said: “An upholstered skull. That’s what a face is.” She glanced at me, with a rueful smile. Years later, in her room, she would look at her wasted arm as it lay on the sheet, and say: “The bones are just about ready to come out.”

  •

  Walking down Union Street I catch sight of Samantha amid the shoppers and strollers, fifty yards off, heading towards me; two seconds later, as if she has sensed that she is under observation, she glances up the road, hitting me immediately, in the instant in which—feigning a sudden distraction—I detach my gaze from her. Having briefly simulated an interest in a display of jackets, I look in her direction, thinking she might have taken the opportunity for evasion. But Samantha would not be party to such pretence; she is approaching; she has prepared herself. So I smile; the smile is intended to let her know that I had seen her immediately, and was simply waiting for her. Her smile tells me that the deception has not been successful.

  “Seen something you like?” she asks.

  I indicate a tweed jacket, the most conservative item on show. “What do you think?”

  “A bit too horse and hounds?” she suggests.

  She has a point. “How are you?” I enquire.

  Her headmaster has announced that he’ll be leaving in the summer; he’s off to rescue an underachieving school in Liverpool. The topic sustains a one-minute conversation.

  “And what about you?” Samantha asks.

  “I’m OK,” I answer.

  “That’s good.”

  In parting, I send my best wishes to Val. This is accepted wryly, with no words. Anyone passing within earshot would have mistaken us for ex-colleagues, at best.

  •

  Wherever he goes, William tells me, a CCTV camera is pointing at him. It’s like being an animal in a zoo. It’s worse than that, because the cameras make him feel bad about being himself, whereas a monkey cannot feel bad about being a monkey. It is like being accused all the time, says William. He has done nothing wrong, but the cameras make him feel that he has. In every corner of the town he is being judged and found guilty.

  •

  A woman of my age, emerging from room seven with the expression of someone who has just been grievo
usly insulted, tells me that the warning notice should be more strongly worded. “There are some horrible things in there,” she says: the dissected baby, for instance; the syphilitic head. Children could be given nightmares, she tells me. Later in the afternoon, shrieks of delighted disgust from a boy and girl in room seven; aged ten and twelve, I estimate. “Is that football thing real?” the boy asks me. He points to the twenty-five pound ovarian cyst. “It’s real,” I answer. “What about that?” asks the girl, indicating the placenta in which repose the fractured bones of a foetus that was killed by its sibling in the womb. “That too,” I tell her. “Sick,” says the boy, and they go back for another close look.

  •

  I remember when Samantha first used the word “narrative” in talking about herself. It was a word for which Val had developed a penchant. Val’s mission was to help people to “take ownership” of their “personal narratives.” And now Samantha had come to understand her own story with a new clarity. While sorting through some boxes that she had brought away from her mother’s house, she had come upon a wallet of photographs. The photographs were miscellaneous in subject and in age. One made her linger: a picture of herself, at fourteen, with friends in what appeared to be a park. In the middle was Barbara, the beautiful one; to Barbara’s left, madcap Janet; to Barbara’s right, Gillian, the high-flyer, who eventually went to Oxford to study law, and forsook her old friends entirely; and beside Gillian, Samantha. She had forgotten how she had once felt about Gillian; looking at the photo, at the smile and the sidelong glance, it was so obvious, said Samantha. And before Gillian, she now remembered, there had been someone else, a delicate but regal girl, two years above her, whose elegant walk—as though she were following an invisible and extremely narrow path—Samantha had tried to emulate.

  Imogen, at the age of fourteen, had been enthralled by an older girl called Hulda, a glorious blonde Amazon who threw the javelin as if intending to kill. Such adorations are commonplace, as Imogen said. Remembering Hulda, she felt no embarrassment at the infatuation; she felt nothing, because the smitten Imogen existed only as a source of memories. But for Samantha, there was a lesson to be learned from the past. She saw that she had allowed herself to be diverted from the right road. The manifold forces of conventionality—overt and covert—had prevailed over her, and consequently she had become someone who was not truly herself. Gillian had been directing her towards a road that she had not taken, and the years of marriage had been a diversion. Not that she regretted those years, I was to understand. But thanks to Val, Samantha’s narrative had at last come to make sense.