Black Mirror (11 page)

Anna took the glass, upended it, and watched grains speed through the aperture. She paid the enormous sum that Victoria had entrusted to her, and purchased the hourglass.

On the Underground she held it in her lap, like a baby, afraid it would drop. Afraid time would break open and irretrievably spill.

Tour Eiffel, Palais Royal,
Notre Dame, Jardin des Tuileries, Père Lachaise, Montmartre, Le Tour Saint Jacques: these sites existed as tokens of tour-guided knowledge, as plastic currency exchanged endlessly in the feverish acquisition of Paris.

This was a city Victoria knew both as an Antipodean stranger (her Plan de Paris fluttering open before her) and as a dedicated Surrealist. Famous spots on the map, touristic X-marks of simplified and summarised attractions, seen already by everybody and already over-encoded, were in the end less charged than the circuitries she felt on her skin; the tiny streets of the Marais that hid sparky alliances, the ac/dc of market stalls and noisy bars. Not the blue-guided or Baedekkered
monuments illuminés
, but the golden colour of faces that emerged lit from any doorway, the Chinese lanterns swaying like hips in cafés, like the abdomens of women composed of rose-water light,
strung there in a smile shape, to shine on lovers below. The plate-glass refractions from zinc-countered brasseries. The glint off a saxophone somewhere smoky. Light rays shot, iris to iris, in the electric moment of seduction.

When Jules left Rue Gît le Coeur, he took Victoria's heart with him, so she re-learned the city at night and with heartless promiscuity. Paris was a vessel of ink with all messages still merged. A well of darkness, totally fluid.

Victoria donned a jacket of spangles, so that she wore a cover of stars, and carried her own milky-way out into the streets, strolling down boulevards, along the quays and into cafés, shining. She spoke imperfect French to perfect strangers, and seduced them with her air of abandonment and desolation. A man's hand entered under her dress as she sat over her Pernod, and she let him explore there, his face yellow with desire. She brushed against priests and old men riding home on the Metro and blew kisses to small children and rich ladies in hats. In the tunnelled spaces along the Seine she saw the twin moons of eyeglasses slide eerily towards her, and matches flare to cigarettes protruding from half-faces, to resolve in punctuations of smouldering orange. Chestnut sellers stood over braziers that exhaled sparks in the wind, little spurts of red stars, flying upwards.

Victoria was unafraid: she was waiting to be murdered. She sought out darkness. She chose the danger of shadows. She fucked standing up with her dress
hitched around her. She thought she saw a hand drift over the river and trace a line in the sky, a kind of script of her death, a prognostication.

(But I will be no-body's Nadja, she thought to herself.)

 

On such a night, dressed as galaxies and desperate for a kiss, Victoria,
tenebrous, bereft, disconsolate
, took a cab-ride to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It was almost midnight as she entered and walked along its curved paths, paths lined with hoops and sulphurous lamps and tall trembling trees, paths leading, every one, to the Bridge of Suicides. She was like the swan which floated quietly on the ornamental lakes; she was silver, a mythology, and bent on reversal. She was like a figure in a story-book, condemned to live with no heart. She made her way to the suspension bridge linking the artificial rocks with the artificial island, and looked across at the belvedere, lit from below so that its dome was a skull in the sky, and then she stepped onto the space of suspended mortality. The metal grille was surmountable and the foothold nervous. The space below was inviting; it was pure black silk. But something in her paused. Morbid romance repelled her. Wanting obliteration she did not want a death others might retell as café talk.

So Victoria instead crossed, and mounted the rock, and sat alone beneath the high bright skull of the belvedere. The hole in her chest banged with what had been possible.

From this elevation she could see faint trails of
white paths, and lamplight in small spheres arcing away into the woods. There was water somewhere, and the sound of a waterfall, and somewhere too a white swan, a proper sign, untrespassing, cruised with its blond reflection across deep black water.

 

And it was then — as though, after all, she had successfully summoned something to destroy her — that a man appeared from nowhere and flung himself upon her. It was so quick that Victoria took a moment to realise she was being attacked; she was grappling with a male-shape saturated with the odour of vodka; he was pressing his thumbs at her yielding throat.

Not like this. Not like this.

Victoria raised her knee sharply to his testicles, with just enough force to disturb him, then taking advantage of his confusion and the dislodgment of his hands, kneed again, much harder. The man toppled sideways, groaning, and she scrambled and rose and kicked twice at his ribs, all the time imagining another murderous scenario — that she might push him, her substitute, from the Bridge of Suicides. No one would know.

 

But Victoria saw her own sequins decorating the prone body. In their struggle metal stars had released from her jacket and sprinkled her assailant with stipples of light. And now he was crying, in loud sobs, and the light patterns bobbed, so that she was seized with love-of-life and an urge simply to flee. She hurled herself into the darkness, back along the narrow walkway
of the Bridge of Suicides, back down into the woods and along the pale pathways, past statuary and monuments, and ornate lamps casting light poorly, and ran like a criminal who was fleeing a crime-gone-terribly-wrong. As though she were the guilty party.

When she emerged from Parc des Buttes Chaumont Victoria had to run forever down the shadowy street — outlines flashed past her, yellow headlights stunned — before she came across a cab that would take her to safety …

 

What a cliché, said Leonora. The Bridge of Suicides.

She rubbed arnica cream tenderly on her friend's wounded throat. The man had left his thumb-marks there — two mauve and yellow pansies.

Leonora bent and kissed the spot where death had almost happened. Max Ernst entered in his dressing gown; he kissed her too.

 

Because she wore the breathtaking pansies her assistant gave her, because Jules had taken away her heart and left her a heartless automaton, because it was 1938 and Fascism was rising and fear was a web in the air that brushed everyone's faces, Victoria was more than usually absorbed in Surrealist distraction. She strolled to the Café Le Chien qui Fume to hear Breton's lucubrations: he extolled revolution in art and sexuality in all things; he spoke as though the marvellous alone would defeat Hitler and collage would demoralise the bourgeoisie. He speculated on
primitivist urges and waxed racist on Black Venuses.

Their cunts, Breton declared, are our mystery, our homecoming. They are the darkest most unconscious places we know. Nature with no lights on. (At which point, for dramatic effect, he put his hand over his eyes.)

Josephine Baker, he continued, is a Surrealist
par excellence
in her pitch-black nakedness. Her skirt of bananas is the exemplary girdle, the phallic containment of convulsive womanliness. When she dances, Africa wakes in us.

Bullshit, Victoria thought. She saw his head, like a dirigible, floating in smoke. Pink light from
nouveaux
lanterns played erratically across his face.

She was fascinated and appalled.

 

But somehow André Breton signified Paris itself. He was what Victoria wanted, and also what repelled her. He was Europe. He was Surrealism. He was high-aestheticism. Victoria had carried her own nationality like an inferiority complex, convinced of the superiority of all-things-European. Sometimes she felt like a person who had grown up in a country with no mirrors, so that she knew herself from the chest down but had no familiar face. She felt unknown to herself. Lost in Paris. And when she said out loud the word
Australian
— perhaps it was like this too for
Canadian, Jamaican, Indian —
she heard resident in her own voice an apology and deviation. The accent was wrong. The vowels sour, uncouth.

Nusch Eluard, with her heart-shaped face, hailed Victoria and came over to kiss her on both cheeks, but she was kissing anonymity. She inclined her head and said in a hushed wispy voice:

He's such a bore when he starts on black women, don't you think? So arrogant. So dumb.

Her eyes were flecked with lights and she wore a collar of broderie anglaise, so that her face was on a plate with a doily, almost consumable.

Victoria kissed her doubly in return.

Your neck, Nusch asked. Which bastard lover was that?

And then for some reason Victoria began to weep. In the Café Le Chien qui Fume whole oceans opened up in her, and she drowned Breton, and his wife Jacqueline, and Paul Eluard and Nusch, she drowned the waiters in long aprons and the men with cigars, she drowned the accountants and the schoolteachers, and the idle gossipers and the travelling salesmen, she drowned junkies and musicians and Don Juans and kleptomaniacs, she drowned poets and prostitutes and
agents provocateurs
. She wept for herself because she was a body others pressed their intentions on. She wept for her own loneliness and her depatriation.

Victoria was a hodge-podge of surfaces and angles. When later she saw Picasso's
Crying Woman
at Rue Des Grands Augustins, she saw her own portrait. Her shattered face, in his studio, at number seven.

 

But now she was still caught up in oceanic thrall, and still deliquescent. Nusch's arm was around her shoulder and
she was being guided outside. Zinc furniture winked at her, faces drifted past. In the pink light everyone had achieved tints of porphyry and coral. A glass door swung away and night flooded to meet her. She pushed forward with the blunt heaviness of somebody moving underwater.

She was — what was she? — the starfish others gazed at.

Why did Jules leave?

Victoria had closed her eyes; she was still locked in that flood-lit moment of weeping.

 

During this time Victoria went often to the movies, and always to the same movie-house, just to sit in fake darkness. In the daytime, half-empty and with a kind of fusty air, it was precisely the smothering occlusion she required. A box to pour her sadness in. A public
camera obscura
.

The building itself was a kind of vault. A high ceiling, like a theatre. Neo-classical cartoons. Corbelling. Buttresses. Shaded lamps on the cornices. It felt very safe and entirely de-temporalised. Victoria descended the tiers of steps guided by a no-nonsense usher who wore a cap and a brocaded jacket and carried a small bright torch which sent thin searching rays into the smoky auditorium. Faces turned, in unison, to watch the two women as they passed.

Victoria sat in the front row, so that she could believe that what appeared was for herself alone.

There were claret velvet curtains that parted with
the audible creak of rollers, and then the magnifying glass, into which Victoria fell. So many flawless women with pearly faces. So many taller men bending to kiss. Victoria listened to couples making love and the usher descending with her ray. She could hear raised voices and swearing and saw the torchlight flash. But she loved it, this amorous darkness, in which she was wholly alone, with her own face, silver, flickering in and out of visibility …

 

So why did Jules leave?

Jules left twice. Once because I was a bitch. Once because of the war. I was mean and cruel. I mocked his photography. I was infatuated with Leonora. And Max Ernst, and Breton. And I flirted and fucked around.

Why?

Desire panicked me. I was overwhelmed.

You, Victoria, can do better than that.

I can't, truly. It was a kind of panic. Mad love — that's what they called it — mad love was a panic.
Amour fou
.

Victoria went silent and stared at the rings on her hands.

I went crazy after he left. You know that, don't you. Crazy with grief.

Yes, said Anna. I know.
Amour fou.

Secretly Anna is judging Victoria Morrell. This woman speaks in the register of the hyperbolic; she is unsubtle, she exaggerates, she commemorates her own life with self-conscious fuss.

I know what you're thinking, Victoria says.

No. No you don't.

 

In her depression everyone existed as though behind glass. They were all remote and coldly removed. She almost believed that if she reached out she would touch not a person or a human body but some inflexible, taut and intervening surface. Victoria spent her days in the cinema and her nights roaming or attending parties. She drank and became lost. She scandalised herself. She ringed her eyes with night-shaded kohl and donned black feathers and white stars, and thus in showy weeds dragged herself into the glassy city, the city in which surfaces reflected not her but her miserable shadow. There she was in blurred versions in the front of cafés and brasseries, estranged, self-haunting, her reflection diasporic. Once it occurred to her — glimpsing some fleeting and evasive copy — that just as her swan was the wrong colour so her stars were asterisks for nothing, referring to meanings that had drifted away and without which some crucial meaning was inexplicable.