Augustino and the Choir of Destruction (10 page)

things, look at the eagles and hawks up in the sky, I know the Caribbean well, you know, and the Antilles Sea, the Inner and Outer Antilles, I'd love to take you there later on, anyway, how to remember the rest of the story, no telling tales, no gossiping, and Mai wouldn't say a thing, after all, she had promised bushy-beard-and-hair, about how he had sheltered her from the wind with his smelly shirt, now you're under my wing, next to my skin, and what had he done besides defend her from the eagles and the hawks that would rapidly have preyed on her, like mice and ferrets, caressing her legs under the dress with the neck undone, what would Marie-Sylvie have said, dressing her that morning, the fisherman had stood up in that cave under the pines, thought Mai, he would row to his boat on the incoming tide, with a single expert finger he seemed to trace the perfect line of Mai's legs, he said, and listen, no chattering, don't tell anyone anything, or else the eagles, hawks, and all those vultures will descend on your parents' house, and your little brother's the first one they'll gobble up, there's your mother calling, can you hear her, quick, go find them, you careless kid, 'bye, it was nearly night, and the sun was setting on the water, Daddy was there saying, Sweetie, Sweetie, and sat Mai on his shoulders, and he didn't ask any questions, though her dress was soiled and she was missing a sandal, he said, Mai you had your mother really worried, you must never disappear like that again, besides what could a little girl be playing at alone in the pine woods like that so far from her parents who are looking for her everywhere, no telling tales, no gossiping, I saw some big vultures, Mai said, her legs hanging over his chest on either side, he seemed very hot, and she understood she had upset him, there were tears behind the tremor in his voice, she had upset him, and he was pretending to forget as she returned triumphant on his shoulders, everyone running to make a fuss of her, even Caroline, the elderly lady with a cracking voice, showing veiled sympathy by admitting that she too had tended to run away at that age, but they were all so happy to see her that she felt it was more a holiday than a day for ashes as they were saying, down they went in clusters aboard electric carts to the marina where they would all meet on the
Grand Catamaran
, and the captain had iced drinks ready for them, they had spent a long time at sea, Mai, still perched on her father's shoulders, had managed to fall asleep there amid the staccato sounds of the motor; she no longer remembered the rest once she saw the sliver of light under Augustino's door, what did she have to fear from those vultures in the sky, and when would her parents be coming home, no one had better be able to come in through the half-open window, she'd tell Marie-Sylvie to keep it closed, you could sit on the window-seat with the cats and soft cushions in the daytime and see the roses in the garden, then stand up and watch the ocean, no worries, of course Grandma said that was no way to do your homework, there was a ladder in the room, and Mai would climb it with Augustino to get books off the shelves in the library, Grandmother thought every room should seem like an art gallery or an exhibition room, in Mai's room, against the beige wall, there was a framed black-and-white photo by Robert Mapplethorpe of a bouquet of dried flowers in a shaft of light, like the open window onto the rose garden, it looked as though someone could just part the flowers and attack you in your bed, there was nothing to it, but Mai believed it, the man who showed up the most was not a tangle of beard and hair, a funny, clean-shaven young man, sitting on the soft cushions of the window-seat, he said to Mai, don't tell anyone you saw me, they call me molester, rapist, and my picture's everywhere, at the town hall and the post office, then under my name they've written WANTED, but what for, I'm already in prison, you can see the fence of the state prison, they say watch out, behind my smooth exterior, sometimes it's the likeable ones, they say I exploited you, kidnapped you, but I'm just a respectable citizen like all the others, how would you like to go out for a walk with me, first take off your pyjamas and let's have a look at you, with her cats by her knees, Mai was not afraid of anything, the ray of light under Augustino's door was still there, you were supposed to fall asleep right away to the sound of the waves, Daddy and her grandmother said so. Here it is, nightime, Caroline said, and Harriet, Miss Désirée, half asleep in the armchair, what servitude she goes through with me, never loses patience, a good nurse for an old lady, can she sense it will soon be over, today I had a bit of tea so as not upset her as much by being finicky, when I think about Charles, I can see he needed to be in love, in love with Frédéric, in love with love, in love with Cyril, and the idea of fertile love for literary creativity, loving and passionate, that's what he said, or was it Frédéric, that the poet and writer's life was an act of love that consumed, even destroyed one, Charles' life should have been like François René de Chateaubriand's, a life of nothing but action, filled with pitfalls, sandbanks and reefs, action, travels, creation and a career as bursting with carnal intensity as scrapes in a very personal mysticism, for thus was written the unending
Mémoires d'outre-tombe
in a torrent of ardent living, powered by all its excess, some days Charles was the incarnation of the most turbulent poets, no less taken by love, he was Walt Whitman, a bard of liberalism who sang the praises of equality between men and women, the innocence of the body, love, his headlong passion fearless of words, this was the effect Cyril surely had, the praise of love received, and writing hundreds of poems, building so many
Leaves of Grass
, building a temple of meditation of ripened thoughts on life, death, and our eternal vagabond wanderings, Cyril listened and learned, the desire to love seeming so simple to him, so spontaneous, he recited for Charles from a memory which rarely faltered — a privilege of youth — the words of Raymond Radiguet, who like Charles, had written poetry at fifteen, “I burned, I hastened like those bound to die young,” these words must have tortured Cyril, the typhoid fever that killed Radiguet shortly after this joyously pronounced premonition, or was it frivolously, what we now call viral pneumonia, let's lay out the real evil that will carry me away, thought Cyril, it wasn't there in the arms of a man that the ghost of fear slipped by, Cyril was burning up too fast, and in loving, Charles' gaze spread out, sudden and lonely, to those melancholy landscapes of his life where Jacques and Justin still called to him, the kingdom of death clinging to him by a mere thread of dew, it seemed, like the life of spiders, and the spouse still alive, Frédéric, his Frédéric, the most perfect of all, and the one who asked nothing except that Charles be happy, so delicate that Charles could sense his indignation, oh, if only the fascination and temptation were never to end before this poet's gaze, Cyril thought, and yet there he goes without saying a word to me, off to the ancient lands of his world, that's what it was, completion of one another, however dissimilar Charles and Frédéric were, they came together harmoniously, these thoughts suddenly enraged Cyril with jealousy, their geniuses completed one another with the extravagant diversity of their gifts, between them, nothing was beyond their grasp: painting, drawing, writing, and they were highly praised musicians as well, did Charles love Cyril or was he just the beautiful creature of an interlude, gifted actor that he was, he could see in Charles' eyes, as though they had suddenly taken on an amorous glimmer, what the entity of Charles and Frédéric was, Charles thought of all the books he and Frédéric had written together, and the ones for which Frédéric had done illustrations, art books bound in night-blue, hands joined, Cyril thought, what did Charles revisit while they played the piano together? So many pictures, places and faces erupted from the portfolio of their lives, an ethereal temple Frédéric had drawn in Athens, so many portraits, though Frédéric was the painter of dark tints unto which he infused lightness of being, his portraits were so real they seemed made of flesh and blood, the peach colour in the cheeks and lips of a seventeen-year-old Greek boy brought the freshness of the outside indoors, he was sitting in a yellow armchair, and the model's head seemed to be crowned with yellow and blue flowers, though the illusion was created by the mirrored reflection of the vase they were placed in, that yellow, Charles said, how can you forget that, it's as vehement as Van Gogh's, the colour of buckled gold, Van Gogh's fist, painting his miners and paupers in a hallucinatory state, the virulent yellow belonged even more to the fields harvested with a scythe by the Greek boy now settled into the armchair of the house Charles and Frédéric had rented on one of the islands surrounded by the churning seas where they had washed up sometime that August, Frédéric suffering from seasickness, they had slept on straw in the barn belonging to a family of peasants, and that morning at dawn, Charles was soaking his face at the fountain with a towel around his neck when the daughter of the house asked the stranger, who are you, or maybe she said in Greek,
eisai Kalos
, you're good-looking, feeling bashful for a long time, he had hesitated before finally answering
eisai Kalos
, both of them reddening, and you of inexpressible beauty, he had said, when the grandmother came and separated them, saying to Charles, you, stranger, move on, my granddaughter is not for some foreigner, a boat would be leaving for Athens at one o'clock, well, the critics should have mentioned it, Charles said, that Van Gogh's yellow was compassionate, that's the only way to describe it, the bitterness of that colour moderated by sympathy was the yellow of death, the virulent death of Jacques, whom Charles could not stop thinking about and would carry in his heart like a tombstone which weighed on his pleasure and his love, where is Tanjou, Jacques asked from the depths of his reincarnations, Tanjou, the unfinished book on Kafka, is this what we have inherited with Kafka's revelations, a bunch of malevolent demiurges running the world through their totalitarian regimes, ants that we are, insects crawling in moonlight to the labyrinths of the Castle where all are forbidden to lay their souls to rest, it is madness that Kafka wrote in the language of the enemy and lived in a country lent to them by the enemy, or had he already learned this frightening comedy in the ghettos, the writing hand caricaturing this pact with the enemy or resigning itself, this stone weighing on Charles' heart, heavy book, now Jacques' book was taking root in the very fibre of Charles' being and in his love, though disappointing for Cyril at times, the book that had reached fruition called out to Charles to be written, recount all of Kafka's humiliation, living and writing in the language of his persecutors, wouldn't it have been better to leave Prague for Vienna or Berlin, thus his presence would have been just one more shadow among others, a beggar, just as destitute, he was a beggar of cultural magnificence, of knowledge, his shadow pivoting on the fragile consciousness of an insect in the universities where he was initiated into the science of law, then, small as he was, he gazed up at the pillars of courts, all those emperors who for centuries had barred Jews from their territories, Kafka was born to a state of mourning, too sensitive to ignore past and future riots, synagogues had been vandalized for many years, attacks had occurred in the streets, store windows had been broken, archives had been plundered, and by writing fables and allegories, Kafka was displaying his ancestral anxiety, perhaps his father, a hard man, had shown the same heroic courage as the cockroach by stubbornly continuing to live in the hell of Prague, son of a butcher and meat merchant in peasant villages, this dominating and poorly educated father of Kafka's and his obsessive curse would turn the son against his meat-eating father and make him a vegetarian, excessively prudent about his health, till his pores and respiratory passages were infected by Koch's Bacilla, an infestation Kafka called the Animal, Jacques would have said that the Animal of Pain was his too, he would have begged his doctor, as Kafka did when they brought him comfort in the form of morphine, Kafka's irony would have been his, I'll be a rock in the face of the Animal, Jacques said, all the while he was writing, Jacques was confronted with a Trial he did not deserve, jurisprudence sneered at him, their tribulations were the same, the verdict would be pitiless, still Tanjou laid the balm of his caresses on Jacques' wounds, Charles reflected, Tanjou, about whom we knew nothing and who had fled inconsolable, they said he had rebuilt his life and was living in poverty in New York, having given up his dance company and his stripped-down choreographies to music by a Chinese composer, he wasn't the same Tanjou that Jacques had loved and stimulated, was he account-administrator in a less well-known dance company, was he a silhouette bent over files in a huge building, who knows, you had to take the chance of hastily formed relationships, adventures, thought Cyril, burn up before rows of coffins piled up on acres of greenery, speed up the pulse before the flu or yellow fever came back, despite the fact that this was the century of medical miracles, Cyril would have liked to rejuvenate the theatre, the century, and the metamorphosis of art, that could be done in a cave, an underground bomb shelter, there one would see a painfully modern
Phaedra
, as Cyril explained it to Charles with such ardour as he would have felt playing Hyppolitus armoured in leather, as a young prince more nihilist than punk, and with as many violent liaisons with
Phaedra
as with the rest of the world, the world as her country, her prince, like Hamlet, would be especially emotional beneath his angular armour, incapable of fighting the violence that had been bred in him, the bitter fruit of years of service in deserts of blood, his passion for
Phaedra
or hers for him would have been like Charles and Cyril, the sign of fate, an inevitable predestination, like in the dramas of Euripides, and Charles said the fate or predestination was null, though the presentation of Hyppolitus as someone violently aggressed by the world was interesting, Charles wondered why Cyril, so gentle-seeming, had always felt such repugnance for violence, scars of a disabused, sabotaged youth perhaps, he thought, he resolved to be more attentive and understanding; so it was that there grew up around Charles and Cyril, Charles and me, like in the plays of Euripides or Seneca, that vague something that appeared to be the workings of fate in each of us, and we did not know how to avoid it or defend ourselves from it. If planes took off from the kitchen table in Samuel's kitchen, he could also see very young people he'd never seen before from his window, clusters of adolescents, black and white, adhering to one another in airless half-smoke rooms, some passed out on the floor, cigarettes in their hands, motionless, as though having given in to exhaustion from a long dope session, others, barely worked up, looking fixedly in front of them, as though they'd seen Samuel without seeing him, a girl, a boy, or two girls and boys, in sloppy underwear, looking like little orphans wearing themselves out in deeply sensual postures they'd long been practising since their addiction to crack and cocaine, they were suspicious, Samuel thought, as troubling as the teenagers in photographs by Larry Clark, the debauchery and lasciviousness in unmade beds and dirty sheets seeming to limit themselves suddenly to hallucinogenic prowess, still Samuel would appear to have no control over them and their carousing, busy with their swapping, among his books, appearing to have no visitors, parents or guardians, spending entire days in blissful unawareness, always lumped together, wired to one another, and before them the monumental dream that life was not worth living, sex, stupor and being stoned, well yes, that was alright, all at once Samuel shut his eyes and saw them no more than he saw planes taking off from his kitchen table, was he dreaming or awake when he examined in detail faces and bodies in newspapers and magazines just in case Our Lady of the Bags was among them, one of the homeless that had made it through the earthquakes, along streets filled with debris, indescribable horrors reflected on their faces, in below-zero temperatures without tents or covers or food, under some ruin or other, at some level below a citadel, tower, or fortress of which the steel beams had melted in less than an hour, where had Our Lady of the Bags been sent, Samuel wondered, or maybe during reconstruction of the city, by an oversight she had been poured in cement and walled up with bricks where even dogs could not find her; a mute woman with pleated hair took Our Lady's place with dignity in that Manhattan park on South Avenue, and her eyes were sad, her face tense, as she sat upright drawing the attention of passers-by to a piece of cardboard on which she had written,