A Void (19 page)

Approaching, I saw in my turn an oval ruby, as tiny as buck-

shot, with a trio of inscriptions, incrusting his infant's tummy-

button, as if it was a bloody stump of his umbilical cord.

Unmindful of his child's continuing sobs, Augustus took that

oval ruby (not without difficulty) out of its tummy-button, gaz-

ing at it for an instant without saying a word. A thick, suffocating

gurgling sound shook his torso.

"Right," was his first word. "I am willing to confront public

scorn. As this brat truly is my son, what can I do but adopt him?

I'll call him Douglas Haig, thus immortalising that bold and

cunning Commandant with whom I fought at Douaumont. I'll

maintain a constant watch so that nobody will inform him of his

status as a natural child, a bastard. His adoration for his guardian

will stay unambiguously filial."

So Augustus B. Clifford found his Zahir on his own son, who

was to find in him a worthy papa, magnanimous, solicitous and

sagacious. As for that Zahir, it was to form an incrustation on a

gold ring which Augustus would always insist on sporting on

his right hand.

Douglas Haig would soon attain boyhood. Not a day at Azin-

court would go by that wasn't calm and harmonious; not a day,

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for six long springs, that wasn't full of joy and good humour.

And, among Azincourt's shrubs, in its plush, lush, luxuriant

grounds, a glowing, coruscating, autumnally purplish crimson

would turn into a warm brown finish a sparkling bluish sky,

across which would blow (God's own natural air-conditioning)

a bracing north wind . ..

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10

On a fantastic charm that a choral work by Anton

Dvorak starts to cast on a billiard board

So that (says Squaw) you'll grasp how all our bad luck was born

and out of what it's grown, I'm going to start again from scratch

with a long flashback.

In his youth, Augustus had had (but why? To this day nobody

knows but him) what you might call a moral crisis, a crisis so

alarming that a cousin of his, a naval man, in fact an Admiral,

afraid of his blowing his brains out in a fit of anguish, distraction

or illumination, got him to do a six-month stint on his sloop

"Flying Dutchman", aboard which young Augustus was taught

a harsh but invigorating job, that of cabin boy.

On coming out of his psychological convulsion, which was in

truth so profound that his circumnavigation didn't totally fulfil

its function of curing him, Augustus was to fall for a charlatan

(or quasi-charlatan), Othon Lippmann, who had, as a
soi-disant

yogi, a charismatic gift that would transform many of his faithful

into fanatics.

With Augustus pinning his faith on this dubious guru, trusting

him implicidy, worshipping him as a fount of occult wisdom, a

holy pathway to oblivion, to Nirvana, sly Othon Lippmann,

without wasting an instant, sought to act on his minion's child-

ishly candid imagination by forcing him into a total abjuration

of his Christianity, by inculcating him in his own cult, a schis-

matic olla podrida that took as its immortal gods not only Vishnu

and Brahma but Buddha and Adonai, by obliging him, in its

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initiation ritual, to study as many as six "holy" books, actually

an unholy mishmash, a ludicrous hocus-pocus drawn up from

Vasavadatta, from Mantic Uttair, Kalpasutra, Gita-Govinda,

Tso-Tchouan and Zohar, and in which you could also find,

thrown in any old how, Saint Mark, Saint Justin, Montanus,

Arius, Gottschalk, Valdo, William Booth, John Darby,

Haggada, a significant chunk of Shulhan Azukh, Sunna, Gholan

Ahmad, Qruti, four Upanishads, two Puranas, Tao-to-King,

Catapathabrahmana and thirty of Li-Po's songs.

An important factor in Othon's cult was its draconian Canon,

imposing on his faithful a host of implorations, invocations,

orisons and unctions.

It also had four purifications a day (at cockcrow, noon, six

o'clock and midnight) and Augustus would carry out his morning

purification in a particularly original fashion. This would consist

of his taking a lustral bath of morning damp - damp which I

had to scoop up from 25 tanks laid out in various locations

around Azincourt's grounds and which an oudandish apparatus

would start canalising into a low, long tub built out of a raw

block of
antico rosato
, a crystal quartz so hard only an uncut

diamond could polish it.

So that a surplus of irroration harmful to his constitution

wouldn't afflict Augustus, this admission of damp was con-

ditional upon a circuit of automatisation stabilising both its flow

and its constant fluctuations, and calibrating that flow by a hydro-

hoist of communicating airlocks, its oscillation provoking (by

a narrow conduit, that of a cog-rotating piston on a fulcrum

controlling an input-output transistor circuit and its induction)

his apparatus's constriction.

Thus, day by day, dozily crawling from his futon, Augustus

would find a lustral bath of a total, unvarying constancy.

For it, though, to conform to his faith and its laws, Augustus

had to buy a trio of products with which Othon Lippmann would

furnish him at an absurdly high cost:

first, a drop or two of starch, as, containing too much

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ammonia, morning damp might risk an obstruction in his throat,

thus making it obligatory to add a soothing lubricant;

also, six grains of albumin, strong in radioactivity, which

Othon would claim had a vigorous purifying capacity (it was in

actual fact a shampoo for phthiriasis, a dubious concoction from

a notoriously unorthodox stomatologist in Avignon who'd

sought to inflict it on that city's public hospital; a prohibitory

injunction was almost instantly brought against it, though, as it

was found to contain far too much
aconita;
and so it was said

that Othon, coming by this surplus in his usual shady fashion,

found it politic to fly to Tirana - only, on chancing across a

pack of local bandits, to apply his skills to a flourishing traffic in

opium);

finally, day in, day out, Augustus would add to his bath 26 or

25 carats of a product of unknown composition, a product that

was most probably its principal factor, its gist.

Was its impact soporific? or hallucinatory? or hypnotic? To

this day nobody knows. What I can say, though, is that it would

transport him into a condition, a stupor, of almost voluptuous

bliss. As soon as his lustral bath was just right, not too hot, not

too cold, as soon as, in that hairy pink birthday suit of his,

Augustus slowly sank into it for his morning purification, a mon-

strous frisson would run through his body. Knotting a tight

caparison around his brow so that his nostrils would stay dry,

thus avoiding any risk of suffocating in his tub, Augustus would,

in a twinkling, go limp, sluggish, and fall into a coma.

On occasion, as soon as this coma of his would pass, Augustus

was willing to talk about it, about his Nirvana, his fainting fit,

his blissful swoon, his vision of an All-Surpassing Guru, his visita-

tion by an All-Knowing Divinity, his introduction to a profound

and original Fount of Wisdom, to a God Almighty and His holy

Will, his fascination with total Sublimity - in a word, his Illumi-

nation. Numb and catatonic, but - and I'm quoting him word

for word - soaking in Oblivion, bathing in Purity, wallowing in

Infinity.

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Until his son's, and thus his Zahir's, irruption into his daily

round, Augustus took his morning lustral bath without fail,

ritually, and also took profound satisfaction, both physical and

spiritual, from it.

But if his Zahir was on his pinky (which, in truth, it always

was, so allowing him constandy to gloat on it, allowing him,

too, to inform anybody willing to pay mind to him that nothing

was as alluring to him as his own mortality), Augustus found

that dunking it, so to say, in his bath would straightaway bring

about an agonising pain in his body, a constantly throbbing itch,

a chafing inflammation, so sharp, stinging and prickly that, not-

withstanding a will of iron, it was soon impossibly difficult for

him to stand it - aching, tingling, vomiting and, in addition,

losing sight of that swooning bliss that was his bath's vital, capital,

cardinal alibi, its primary motivation, its basic goal.

So, racking his brains, Augustus thought up an apparatus

which, akin to that harnass that would maintain his nostrils dry,

would allow him, without too much pain, to sport his Zahir in

his bath; and built a spool-hoist, fitting it out with a jack to

control a maulstick that would float on top.

For fully six springs, by thus avoiding both Scylla and

Charybdis, his morning ritual would go off without a hitch.

From his lustral bath Augustus would draw an invigorating com-

fort as unfailing as it was abundant.

But a day would dawn on which, climbing out of his tub, languid,

clumsy, awkward, still stagnating in his morning Nirvana, Augus-

tus, noticing that his Zahir was now
not
on his pinky and that a

clot of blood, about as big as a ruby, was coagulating on it,

forming a pallid, oval stigma, as if marking his Zahir's incrus-

tation - a day on which Augustus, I say, crying out in a truly

inhuman fashion, his wits in total disarray, would start pacing

back and forth, back and forth, for four days and four nights,

turning this way and that, haggard and drawn, frantically

unlocking tallboys and cupboards, looking high and low, rum-

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maging Azincourt from top to bottom, from rooftops to

floorboards, ransacking its outbuildings, its barns, its courtyard

and its hayloft, raking all its shingly paths.

Four ghasdy days, which a brutal fifth was to cap: Othon

Lippmann's arrival at Azincourt.

Othon, obviously all in, his body giving off a strong musky

odour, his raglan practically in rags, instandy ran towards Augus-

tus with a foul outpouring of profanity, vilifying him, shouting

a long string of disgusting cuss-words at him, almost physically

abusing him.

His command of insults might rival Captain Haddock's in
Tin-

tin
- "Oaf! Pinbrain! Numbskull! Big fat ninny! Nincompoop!

Halfwit! Schmuck! Moron! Lazy good-for-nothing! Stupid old

fart!"

At which point, Othon hit him hard on his jaw.

With amazing sang-froid, Augustus, thrown for a loop by

Othon's fiilmination, put up a good fight, landing a knockout

blow, a right swing, which had his assailant on his back, groggy,

out cold.

Watching this bout of fisticuffs, Augustus's son, who at that

point was a typically naughty kid of six, had a lot of fun counting

1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . up to 10 and finally proclaiming his papa

champion.

But Othon Lippmann was still unconscious. Abruptly triumph

was turning to alarm.

I saw that Augustus was now frantically wringing his hands

and asking in a low, gruff murmur, "What's wrong with him?

Oh, what's wrong with him?"

For his part, Haig, too young to know that a tornado was just