A Void (4 page)

C O M M A N D A N T
(livid):
So? So? And
(pointing again)
that's

an. . .

B A R M A N
(abruptly dying):
Aaaaaaah! Shhhhhhh . . .
R.I.P.

C O M M A N D A N T
(about to go but first noticing his body):
What

a storm in a port-flip!

Which is what you might call adding insult to injury.

Vowl isn't always in such good humour, though (in so far as this

vision of his can claim much humour at all), occasionally taking

fright, starting up in panic, his blood curdling. For what if a

crouching Sphinx is about to attack him?

1 4

Day in, day out, and month in, month out, his hallucination

would go on distilling its poison - akin to an addiction, to opium

having him in its thrall, to a suit of armour imprisoning him.

At night, his spotting an ant or a cockroach scrambling on top

of his window crossbar only to fall back down again would,

without his knowing why, instil within him a profound dis-

comfort, as though so tiny an animal could function as a symbol

of his own bad luck.

At night, too, just as dawn is rising, his habitual fantasy,
d la

Kafka, is of tossing and turning on his hot, damp pillow, without

anything at all to hold on to, as though caught in a sort of iron

cuirass and growing a carrion crow's claws, claws that would start

writhing about to no avail. Nobody would rush to assist him.

Not a sound would disturb his long nocturnal vigil - but, at

most, for a monotonous drip-drip-drip from a tap running in his

bathroom. For who would know of his plight? Who would find

a solution to it, now and for always? Did any dictionary contain

a word that, only by pronouncing it, would calm his morbid

condition? Slowly asphyxiating, Vowl gasps for air. His lungs

burn. His throat hurts as much as though sawn in half. Trying

to call for aid, his lips, crinkly from a moribund grin that also

starts wrinkling his brow, form only a dry, mournful cough. As

panicky as a pig in an abattoir, sobbing, panting and suffocating,

shaking, rattling and rolling about, his pupils dilating, a crippling

load cracking his ribs, a flow of black blood oozing continuously

from his tympanic cavity, a monstrous tumour bulging out of

his right arm, from which a catarrhal pus would occasionally

squirt, Vowl is visibly shrinking, losing from four to six pounds

a day. His hand is now nothing but a stump. His physiognomy,

ruddy, jowly, puffy and thick of lip, sways to and fro atop his

tall, scrawny stalk of a throat. And as always, torturing him,

throttling him, that clammy whiplash, as of a boa constrictor, as

of a python, as of a python out of
Monty Python
, would coil and

curl and crush his torso with a flick of its tail. His discs would

15

slip and his ribs would snap — with nary a word, nary a cry,

issuing from his lips.

I'm dying, thinks Vowl. And with nobody to pour balm onto

my wounds, nobody to accompany my last hours, no sacristan

to grant absolution for my Original Sin, for nobody at all has an

inkling of my plight.

Now Vowl looks upwards and sights a carrion crow watchfully

circling him. In his room, all around him, sits a pack of animals

- plump black rats, stoats, rabbits, frogs and toads, a solitary

cockroach - as though on guard, lying in wait to ambush his

stiff carcass, anticipating a Gargantuan picnic. A falcon swoops

down on him. A jackal burrows out of Saharan sands to attack

him.

On occasion Vowl finds his imaginings alarming, on occasion

almost amusing: to finish up as a jackal's lunch, a snack for a rat

or nourishing bait for a falcon (a notion that brings to his mind

a book by Malcolm Lowry) has, as it had for Amphitryon, no

slight attraction for him.

But it's his chronic attraction to anything sickly that is of

utmost fascination to him. It's as though, for him, this is an

unambiguous sign confronting him with, and initiating him into:

Not annihilation (though annihilation is still at hand), not

damnation (though damnation is still at hand), but first of all

omission: a "no", a non-admission, a missing link.

Things may look normal and natural and logical, but a word

is but a
faux-naif
talisman, a structurally unsound platform from

which to sound off, as a world of total and horrifying chaos will

soon start to show through its sonorous inanity. Things may

look normal, things will go on looking normal, but in a day or

two, in 7 days, or 31, or 365, all such things will rot. A gap will

yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an

abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by

margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will

find nothing to say.

Without knowing why such an association is popping into his

16

mind at just this instant, Vowl now thinks of a book that was

bought by him in his youth, a book brought out by Gallimard

in its imprint
La Croix du Sud,
a work of fiction by Isidro Parodi -

or should I say Honorio Bustos Domaicq (if, to his compatriots,

known simply as Bioy) - an account of an amazing, astonishing

and also alarming calamity in which an outcast, a runaway pariah,

is caught up.

Call him Ishmail, too. Having had to sustain many, almost

inhuman hardships, this Ishmail drops anchor on an island that

is, at first sight, totally without inhabitants. Initially, things go

badly, with his almost dying of cold and starvation, burrowing

into a sand pit, shaking, suffocating, coming down with malaria,

curling up both day and night in a tight ball, simply waiting to

pass away.

But six days go past, and his unusually robust constitution

allows him finally to sit up and look around him. Our protagonist

is now disturbingly skinny but can still, if with difficulty, climb

out of his pit — a pit that was almost his tomb. So Ishmail

starts living again by first luxuriandy slaking his thirst; now

swallows an acorn but instandy spits it out in disgust; and soon

works out which fruits and mushrooms won't do him any harm.

A particular fruit (akin to an apricot) brings him out in a rash of

itchy, purplish spots, but bananas, avocados, nuts and kiwi fruit

abound.

At dusk, using a sharp rock, Ishmail cuts a notch on a stick

(to tick off his first night as a castaway); and, with a total of 20

such cuts, constructs a hut, a sort of impromptu shack, with a

door, four walls, and flooring and roofing built out of mud.

With no matchsticks at hand, though, his food is invariably raw.

Constant, too, is his panic that an animal might attack his camp;

but, as it turns out (such, anyway, is his supposition), no lynx

or puma, no jaguar, cougar or bison, stalks his island. At most,

comfortably far off, and only at sundown, a solitary orang-utan

prowling around but not caring (or daring?) to approach him.

17

And if it did, Ishmail had cut a stout club out of a mahogany

branch that would firmly put paid to any assailant.

This lasts a month. At which point, his physical condition

improving on an almost daily basis, our Robinson Ishmail (if I

may so call him) starts making a tour of his unknown Tristan da

Cunha, taking a full day to walk around it, his club in his hand,

and by nightfall pitching camp on top of a hill that would allow

him a panoramic command of his domain.

At dawn, cupping his hand to his brow and gazing about him,

Ishmail looks northwards and sights a kind of canal swirling and

foaming into marshland, and also, to his horror, not too far from

his hut, a row of mounds (akin to that sort known as tumuli), six

in all; cautiously slinks down towards this curious construction

(possibly a sort of windpiping?); and hazards an assumption (and

rightly so) that it's by a tidal flow that it functions.

Now, abrupdy, as it dawns on him what it is and of what it

consists, Ishmail starts noticing signs of habitation - a housing

compound, a radio installation, an aquarium.

But it all looks forlorn and vacant, its fountain as dry as a

structuralist monograph (and playing host to a trio of fat and

languorous armadillos), its pool mouldy with fungus.

As for its housing compound, it was built,
circa
1930, in a

crypto-rococo fashion imitating, variously, a pink-icing casino in

Monaco, a bungalow on a Malayan plantation, a colonialist villa,

an ultra-chic condominium in Miami and Tara from
GWTW.

Passing through a tall swing-door with slats and a mosquito

guard, you would walk along a corridor, about four yards high

and six yards long, taking you into a largish sitting room: on its

floor is a vast Turkish rug and, all around, divans, sofas, arm-

chairs, cushions and mirrors. A spiral stair winds up to a loggia.

From its roof, built out of a wood that, though light in colour,

is actually rock-hard (most probably sumac or sandalwood), a

thin aluminium cord, from which hangs a shiny brass ring of

outstanding craftsmanship, supports a colourful lamp no doubt

brought back from a trip to Japan and which casts a dim but

18

oddly milky light. Finally, via four bow windows inlaid with

gold, you could go out on to a balcony surmounting a fabulous

natural vista.

With a caution born of suspicion, Ishmail now pays this com-

pound a visit from top to bottom, from ground floor to loggia,

tapping its roof, its walls and its wainscoting, going through

its cupboards, not missing any nook or cranny and noting, in

particular, in a downstairs stock room, a labyrinthian circuit

which, linking up an oscillograph, a prismatic mirror, a two-way

radio, a hi-fi (with an apparatus to amplify its sound), a multi-

track rack and a strobo-cycloidal rotator, probably has a global

function unknown to him.

Not daring to pass a night in such unpromising surroundings,

Ishmail simply "borrows" as many tools as his arms can carry, as

also a big brass cauldron, a chopping board, a winnowing fan, a

matchbox or two and a hip flask brimming with whisky, and

quickly slips off to a clump of dark woodland not too far away,

in which stands a run-down shack; starts doing it up, allowing

not a day to go by without improving it; hunts, kills and cooks

rabbits; and, on his most fruitful raid, actually corrals an agouti

with his lasso, making bacon and ham, dripping and black pud-

ding, out of its carcass.

Days and days of this. Days of monsoons, of a curdling sky,

of ominous clouds amassing on its horizon, of a high, cold, gusty

wind blowing up all about him, of tidal troughs and billows,

of a foam-capp'd flood rushing inland, plashing and splashing,

washing and sploshing, anything in its path. Days of rain, rain,

rain.

Not long into his third month Ishmail sights a yacht putting

into port and dropping anchor off his island. Six individuals now

climb up to its casino, from which soon float out sounds of a

jazz band playing a foxtrot, a 30s "standard" that's obviously still

popular. At which point nothing again is as it was.

Though, initially, his instinct is to turn tail, to withdraw into his

19

shack, Ishmail cannot but find this situation intriguing and crawls

forward on all fours. What
is
going on? In a malodorous pool

choking with fungus, and around a shabby, unglamorous casino,

his visitors start swimming and dancing: a trio of guys, a match-

ing trio of dolls, plus a sort of footman adroidy mincing back

and forth with a tray of snacks, drinks and cigars. A tall, smiling,

muscular man - in his mid-20s at most - is particularly conspicu-

ous in a suit with a Mao collar and without any buttons down

its front, a Cardin fashion of long, long ago. His companion, a

man in his 30s with a tuft of bushy black hair on his chin, sporting

a stylish morning suit, sips from a glass of whisky, adds a dash

of soda and lazily hands it to a young woman - obviously his

girl - snoozing in a hammock.

"This is for you, Faustina. May I kiss you for it?"

"Why, thank you," says Faustina, half in a laugh, half in a huff.

"Ah, Faustina, what bliss I'd know if only . . . if only I could

. . . oh, you know what I'm trying to say . . ."

"Now now, I said no, no and no again. Why can't you and I

stay just good chums?" adds Faustina, fondling his hand for an

instant.

What a fascinating woman! thinks Ishmail, who now starts to

follow Faustina around, though naturally, as a runaway convict,

still afraid for his own skin. For who's to say that this group of

upstarts isn't harbouring a cop or a grass? What am I but an

oudaw, worth a king's ransom to any informant? As an outcast

from my own country, having had to fly from a tyrant as corrupt

as Caligula, as bad as any Borgia, how can I know that this

insignificant-looking yacht isn't on a kidnapping mission? Alas,

I don't know and I don't want to know; all I know is that, loving