Travesty Read online

  The car that passes the very chateau that must have been its destination; the unmistakable tire tracks across the viaduct; the turn that is nothing less than incomprehensible; the tremendous speed upon impact; the failure of the autopsy to reveal the slightest trace of alcohol in the corpse of the driver. . . . What can they think? What can they possibly produce as explanation? What will they say about an event as severe and improbable as this one will appear to be, as well as one loud enough to wake the curate in the little nearby village of La Roche?

  But that is exactly the point, since what is happening now must be senseless to everyone except possibly the occupants of the demolished car. During the—let me see—next hour and forty minutes by the dashboard clock, it will be up to the three of us to make what we can of this experience. And we will not be able to count on Chantal for any very meaningful contribution.

  At any rate the lumbering disruptive oil truck is out of the question. Out of the question. Nothing will destroy the symmetry I have in mind. Don’t you agree?

  I have never seen the old curate of La Roche, but I know that he coughs a great deal and has a tobacco breath and that his fingers are forever stained with wine. But he is a deep and noisy sleeper, of that I am certain. What an irony that the co-ordinates of space and time have fixed on him to be our Chanticleer, so to speak, and that it will be he who will offer the first cockcrow to the explosion that will inaugurate our silence. Which reminds me, only yesterday I sat in this very automobile and watched an old couple helping each other down a village street (not La Roche, I have never been in La Roche) toward a life-sized and freshly painted wooden Christ-on-the-Cross mounted on a stone block not far from where I sat in my car. The old man, who was holding the woman’s elbow, was a thin and obviously bad-tempered captive of marriage. The old woman was bow-legged. Or at least her short legs angled out from where her knees must have been beneath the heavy skirts, and then jutted together sharply at the ankles. This creature depended for locomotion on the lifetime partner inching along at her side. The old man was wearing a white sporting cap and carrying the woman’s new leather sack. The old woman, heavily bandaged about the throat in an atrocious violet muffler, was carrying a little freshly picked bouquet of flowers. Well, it’s a simple story. This scowling pair progressed beyond my silent automobile (you must imagine the incongruity of the old married couple, the orange roof tiles, the waiting Christ, the beige-colored lacquer of this automobile gleaming impressively in the bright sunlight) until at last the woman deposited the trim little bouquet of flowers at the feet of the Christ.

  There you have it. Ours is a country of coughers and worshipers. Between the two I choose the coughers. At least there is something especially attractive about one of our schoolyards of coughing children, don’t you agree? The incipient infection is livelier than the health it destroys. Yes, I do appreciate that hacking music and all their little faces so bright and blighted.

  But have I never told you I am missing a lung? The war of course. That is another story. Perhaps we shall get to it. At any rate it is probably true that my missing lung determined long ago my choice of a doctor. You see, my poor doctor is missing one leg (the left, I believe) which was amputated only weeks before the poor fellow’s wife ran off, finally, with her lover of about twenty years’ standing. It was a compounded shock, an unusual circumstance, and as soon as I learned of it I became an additional patient on the diminishing roster of my crippled physician. The affinity is obvious, obvious. But by now you will have perceived the design that underlies all my rambling and which, like a giant snow crystal, permeates all the tissues of existence. But the crystal melts, the tissues dissolve, a doctor’s leg is neatly amputated by a team of doctors. Design and debris, as I have said already. Design and debris. I thrive on it. For me the artificial limb is more real, if you will allow the word, than the other and natural limb still inhabited by sensation. But I know you, cher ami. You are interested not in the doctor’s amputated leg but in his missing wife. Well, each man to his taste. At least I can report that my physician is highly skilled, despite all his cigarettes and his trembling hands. Incidentally, his cough is one of the worst I have ever heard.

  But you are groaning. And yet even now we have so far to go that I cannot help but advise you to conserve the sounds in your throat. That’s better, much better. But must you wring your hands? Remember, you are setting a firm example for Chantal.

  Yes, it seems to me that one of the strongest gratifications of night driving is precisely that you can see so little, and yet at the same time see so very much. The child awakes in us once again when we drive at night, and then all those earliest sensations of fear and security begin shimmering, tingling once again inside ourselves. The car is dark, we hear lost voices, the dials glow, and simultaneously we are moving and not moving, held deep in the comfort of the cushions as once we were on just such a night as this one, yet feeling even in the softness of the beige upholstery all the sickening texture of our actual travel. As children we had absolute confidence in the driver, although there was always the delicious possibility of a wrong turn, some mechanical failure, all the distant unknowns of the night itself. And then there was sight, whatever we could see to the sides of the car or on the road ahead, and it was all so utterly dependent on the headlights, and sight so uncontrollably reduced was of course all the more magnified and pleasing.

  It is no different now. Even setting aside our projected destination, which to me is the final blinding piece in a familiar puzzle, the fourth and solid wall in a room of glass, the clear burst of desire that is never entirely out of my mind, while for you it is quite the opposite, since what you know about our particular journey blunts you to the pleasures of this road, this night, this conversation, so that you and I are like two dancers at arm’s length, regurgitation locked together with ingestion in a formal, musical embrace. . . . But setting all this aside, as I say, there is still the undeniable world of our night driving, and it is alluring, prohibitive, personal, a mystery that is in fact quite specific, since it is common to child, to lovers, to the lone man driving from one dark town to the next.

  Yes, raise your eyes. Look through the clear glass of the windshield while it is still intact. There, do you see how the outer edges of the cone of light shudder against the flanks of darkness? And look at the actual length of our yellow beams, the reach of our headlights. We can see remarkably far ahead, and to the sides as well. Note that clump of wild onions out there in the dark, and that blasted tree, and that jagged boulder stuffed into that trough of moss. And there, that little road marker no larger than a child’s stone in a cemetery and which you refused to read.

  But I will tell you something. The hour is precisely eighteen minutes past one a.m., and in mere moments, as soon as we are drawn into the gentleness of the long curve that lies just ahead—but of course it is still invisible—there will be on our right a rather small grove of olive trees, a stone hut, a silent but watchful dog. And if you look when I tell you to look, you will see that among the olive trees someone has made a small pile of human possessions: a white wooden chair, a broken trunk, a crude rake for the garden, a heap of clothing that might have been stripped from dead bodies. It is difficult to understand that the life of the stone hut has been emptied into the darkness, and that the olive tree is beautiful only because it is so deformed. Yet these things are true.

  It is amusing to think that tonight our speeding car shall frighten the abandoned dog.

  But do you know that once Chantal and Honorine together urged me into the arms of a woman of luxury? It is true. Absolutely true. And I complied.

  Chantal was only a girl at the time, and we were traveling, the three of us, in a car very like the one we are presently enjoying. We had dined well, after a day of gray clouds, flat road, high speed, and having left behind us connecting rooms with high ceilings, marble fireplaces, wallpaper the elegant color of dry bone, had walked into a moonlit street filled suddenly with the warmth of summer and the sm
ell of flowers. A moving shadow, an open window, a few notes of music, and then we understood that we had stumbled into the very center of the honeyed hive of a city already acclaimed for its women. Down the narrow street we went arm in arm, laughing, Chantal and Honorine both claiming to be well-known residents of that gentle quarter. And I was in the middle, walking between Chantal and Honorine, and somewhere a caged bird was singing and even out there in the street I could smell fat bolsters, feather beds, nude flesh.

  It was a night of wine. And the woman, when we found her, was much older than Honorine and might have come fresh from some turn-of-the-century stage where whiteness of skin and heaviness of flesh and limb were especially admired. Chantal and Honorine exclaimed their enchantment; I hesitated; the woman raised her chin and smiled. And do you know that Honorine proposed with so much good spirit that I enjoy this woman that I became aroused and agreed to leave Chantal and Honorine eating chocolates in a little empty parlor while, several ornate rooms away, I contributed three quarters of an hour of sexual authenticity to their delightful game? In taking that tall and heavy woman, who filled her maturity with the exact same elegance with which she lived in her skin, it was as if I had only found my way again to Chantal and Honorine, and as if I had accepted from mother and daughter the same unimaginable gift. So I prepared the way for you. Don’t you agree? And with my two women, who are yours as well, have I not created a family small in size but rich in sentiment?

  The next day we were a close and smiling triad as we continued driving through the sterile marshlands and past the great brown windmills with their sad faces and broken arms.

  But I must tell you that this little romantic story about the complicity between my wife, my daughter, and the older woman of luxury reminds me more strongly than ever of a curious emotional reaction of mine—a reaction I rarely recall and never felt except upon one of those innumerable occasions of Chantal’s childhood happiness. That is, Chantal had only to reveal the slightest sign of personal enjoyment, had only to pick some leaf or kiss Honorine or show me with evident pleasure some faintly colored illustration in one of her books, to send me sliding off into the oddest kind of depression. I was a perfect companion to her gloom, her anger, her hours of fear, her childhood pantomimes of adult frustration, her little floods of helplessness in the face of some easy problem. But let Chantal throw her arms around my neck or grow warm of cheek or simply give me a clue that she was momentarily alive in one of those private moments of beatitude all children experience and I was hopelessly alien from her and depressed, inexplicably downcast. Throughout all of Chantal’s childhood I was sorry for her whenever I should have been glad. Yes, I was actually sorry for my own child, but sorry only when she was in one of her states of well-being. And when she was herself unhappy, why then I was busily content.

  I hear your impatience. And in the circumstances my perhaps sentimental recollections must touch you with profound irritation, especially since you have imagined so much more life than I myself have lived. And perhaps you have already analyzed my darker, nearly forgotten parental emotions as fear of mortality, and have thus dismissed them. But I must ask you again to indulge my nostalgia, if only because its source is gone, quite gone, and I am now capable of loving Chantal without putting myself perversely at the center of our relationship, like the fat raisin that becomes the eye and heart of the cookie. No, for years I have been what the rest of the world would call a normal father, feeling only joy for Chantal’s joy and pain for her pain. My “perversion” has long since been cauterized. I no longer reverse and then exaggerate what Chantal feels. I still enjoy licking smeared chocolate from my daughter’s fingers, and do so with perfect impunity. But I am in no way responsible for maintaining Chantal’s life, and long ago gave up anticipating grief for its loss.

  Do you know that now I am not even tempted to look into the rear-view mirror?

  But there, the dashboard settings are now subtly different. You cannot be as aware of them as I am, yet for me the mere climbing or falling of needles, the sometimes monstrous metamorphosis of tiny, precise numbers behind faintly illuminated glass, a droplet traveling too quickly or too slowly through its fragile tube—these for me are the essential signs, the true language, always precious and treacherous at the same time. And now the settings are different. There are the mildest indications that we are beginning to deplete the resources of this superb machine, though in our present context those resources are of course inexhaustible and in fact will probably account for the grandeur of the sound that will wake our poor curate. Nonetheless the life of the car is running out, the end of our journey tonight is not as distant as one might think. Naturally there are steep grades, sudden turns, even abrasive changes in the road’s surface, and still time enough to tax us, preoccupy us, demand the utmost from our living selves. And of course you may argue that our experience so far has been constant, virginal, that we have heard no variations in the music that reaches us from beneath the car; that Chantal has not discovered some poor wounded bird imponderably present and expiring on the seat beside her. Yes, things are the same, I am not even beginning to feel the strain of driving at this high speed.

  But then our situation is not so very different from my war, as I call it, with Honorine’s old-fashioned clock. It is a crude affair that hangs on her wall. Nothing but a few pieces of dark wood, a long cord with iron weights at either end, a circular ratchet, a horizontal pendulum fixed with wooden cubes like a tiny barbell. It is only the bare minimum of a clock, suggesting both the work of a child and the skill of some parsimonious medieval craftsman. Small, simple, dark, naked. And yet this contraption makes the loudest ticking I have ever heard. And slowly, it ticks more slowly, more firmly than any time device created by any of the old, bearded lovers of death in the high mountains. Well, I cannot stand that ticking. It is unbearable. So at every opportunity I stop the clock. But somehow it always starts up again and beats out its relentless unmusical strokes until once again I find it so insufferable that I jam its works.

  You know the clock, you say? And you have never bothered to listen to the noise it makes? But of course you are familiar with Honorine’s old clock. Of course you are. What a silly oversight. We are not strangers. Far from it. And how like you to be so unconcerned with something that gives me the utmost aural pain. But what I mean to say is this: that I hear that ticking loudest when the clock is stopped. Exactly. Exactly. It is the war I cannot win. But it is a lovely riddle.

  The point is this: that our present situation is like my wife’s old clock. The greater the silence, the louder the tick. For us the moment remains the same while the hour changes. And isn’t it curious that I really know very little about automobiles? I merely drive them well.

  Yes, it was a rabbit. You see it is true, as everyone says, that at high speeds you can feel absolutely nothing of the rabbit’s death. But next it will rain, I suppose, as if an invisible camera were recording our desperate expressions through the wet glass. Perhaps you should have agreed to the radio after all.

  Confession? Confession? But do you really believe that the three of us are sitting here in what I may call our exquisite tension (despite all my own pleasure in this event, I am not insensitive to the fact that we are in a way frozen together inside this warm automobile) merely so that I may indulge in guilty revelations and extract from you a few similar low-voiced scraps of broken narrative? No, cher ami, for the term “confession” let us substitute such a term as, say, “animated revery.” Or even this phrase: “emotional expression stiffened with the bones of thought.”

  I do not believe in secrets—withheld or shared. Nor do I believe in guilt. At least let us agree that secrets and so-called guilty deeds are fictions created to enhance the sense of privacy, to feed enjoyment into our isolation, to enlarge the rhythm of what most people need, which is a belief in life. But surely “belief in life” is not for you, not for a poet. Even I have discovered the factitious quality of that idea.

  No man is guilty
of anything, whatever he does. There you have it. Secrets are for children and egotists and sensualists. Guilt is merely a pain that disappears as soon as we recognize the worst in us all. Absolution is an unnecessary and, further, incomprehensible concept. I am not attempting to justify myself or punish you. You are not guilty. Never for a moment did I think you were. As for me, my “worst” would not fill a crooked spoon.

  And yet there are those of us, and I am doing my best to include you among our select few, for whom the most ordinary kind of daily existence partakes of the contradictory sensation we know as shame. For such people everything, everything, is eroticized. Such a man walks through the stalls of a butcher in a kind of inner heat, which accounts for his smile. But if we allow shame to the sensualist and deny guilt to the institutions, it is simply that such words and states serve poetic but not moral functions. In the hands of the true poet they are butterflies congregating high in the heavens, but in the hands of the moralists or the metaphysicians they are gunpowder.

  But you are becoming angry, cher ami. Be patient.

  Another cigarette. I approve. Though you must know that every minute you are growing more and more like my good but crippled doctor, despite the fact that you are in full possession of your four limbs. But it occurs to me that had I not given them up on the very day you entered our household, I would now ask you to reach slowly across the space between us and position your freshly lighted cigarette between my own dry lips. And you would do that for me. I know you would. And your shaking hand would hover there an instant just below my line of vision, sparing my own two hands for their necessary grip on the wheel, until I fished for the end of the cigarette with my parted lips and then found it, held it, inhaled. One of your cold fingers might even have brushed the tip of my nose as I waited and then exhaled, blowing one lungful of smoke against the inner side of the windshield like a silent wave curling along a glassy shore.