Lookout Cartridge (41 page)

The girl zooms slowly at us from the green gloom of what I’m thinking must be forty meters if Michel and I are thirty-five. (Dagger is sitting on the surface with the boss in a gray rubber raft, we are maybe fifty yards from the anchor line that seems to hold them down up there.) My room softens and opens, my cartridge does not get mushy, it swells out of capsule hardness to hear the never recorded words of the Bonfire night in Wales: What is here is elsewhere; what is not here is nowhere.

You think at first when you go down you will not have enough air, and you breathe too fast and your heart is as loud as the world. You die and live again. You are the only wind in this dusk. The limbs go free, but you must not swim your arms. No one you know in London has
plongé avec les bouteilles
. Not Geoff Millan, well ballasted as he is, whose work will no doubt achieve the condition of music. Not the three or four English couples who in their late thirties have taken up sailing. Not Dudley Allott, who still pursues that New York fire and perhaps can never be a friend but who tells you things which have become more interesting over the years as his life has become more clear. Not even formidable Mary who is from Inverness and whom you only met this week, who can show point by point why she sees in the male menhirs of southern Corsica an early outpost of the hero, bound out toward his patriarchal system away from the Majestic Mother, her terrible body, its sea of magic nights. I breathe the water, I hear my other heart like a mechanical thing I’m learning to be further and further away from. The cartridge opens at a hundred gills. My mask has taken in three grains of water; Michel has shown us how to blow it clear even under water but I can wait, my nose and eyes like a brain sequestered from other functions is apart from my mouth to which my air hose runs. My window films a little.

Why film? Why not negative New York, blow her up into far-flung frames, detonate the notion of New York so it will go away and leave me alone in London with Lorna, an anesthetic TNT to soften New York into a mere remembrance of what the future used to seem. I breathe now a message from my tank and I make the adjustment, I reach back past my right shoulder for the valve understanding that it wasn’t meters on Michel’s left wrist-dial but minutes—now more than thirty-five. But now with an ache in my jaw I can’t see where all that time went.

Michel unmouths his mouthpiece no hands, the girl’s yellow tank like some ridable creature rises below me, and Michel is warbling the
Marseillaise
in tinkly bubbles. Up in the boat he said he’d sing it, it’s part of your fifty francs plus a titillating encounter with the resident anemone of Ajaccio Gulf. The girl extends to me slow-mouon her find—an ashtray from one of the cruise ships.

Michel undoes his rubber crotch-flap—the encased eyes the more ribald with his dimpled mouth transfixed by the hose. He signs to me do I want to do the same for some purpose?

We are not building the Brooklyn Bridge in 1872 in the watertight caissons so unintentionally menacing to all the sandhogs who risked “the bends” (so named by those very men after some Grecian pose then a ladies’ fad in New York). Some came up too fast after ten hours raising cubic acres of muck to clear the bedrock for the towers which let you today admire on high, not think downward, to that dread dreck toil prey to pressure and flood and gas leak—days those immigrant workers did a century ago neither exactly brave nor at all crazy but needing work, and one victim of that so-called caisson disease (which has nothing to do with bullet boxes or artillery wagons) whose name alone survives was John Roebling’s son and collaborator Washington, thus crippled, who watched the rest of the job through a telescope and cannot have found in the sandhogs’ nickname for decompression sickness much of a joke.

The writing here is at least as good as the cartridge proper that Jenny typed and liked so much, perhaps even as good as the Marvelous Country House about which when she typed it the first week in August she said not a word.

The girl rises before me. I reach for the back of her temperature-less thigh and in answer she puts her palm back on her butt where her rubber jacket-tail seals her neatly, even overlapping as well the fold or two of flesh, and fastening like mine in front with two plastic cotter pins. We rise through the gray-brown cleft at forty-five degrees, or do you translate that into some bomber-pilot’s two-o’clock?, pass the three predator stars, and find the tall and luminous anchor line.

Slowly treading we follow the line up into a verdant slush of light and just before I slip into the surface there seems much more air coming through my mouthpiece though there isn’t. But it is good to get my teeth out of it and get it off my gums. Dagger is saying so Rasputin ate the cyanide cupcakes and drank the glasses of cyanide wine and nothing happened when Yusupov’s dog Nabosco came in and Rasputin handed him down the last of the poisoned cupcakes—I lift my mask up to my forehead and the man in the gray rubber boat with Dagger interrupts him, points at me, and says in French to blow the blood all out.

The girl is smiling beside me, I do not know her name. Michel’s hair is as blond as that of the man who stepped off the fortress curb toward us and was recalled by the bald man and whom I saw watch us and enter the scuba trailer after the boss started our outboard and we were running out between the lines of power boats, and not only did I not call Dagger’s attention to this but I did not tell him I saw he saw and wasn’t telling me.

An English female voice—not the kind that has helped to keep me in England these many years—behind us in the evening (but of our group) asks what type of palm these are along the boulevard. They’re date, replies an American male, but they’ve virtually given up bearing. From a distance by daylight the tops look like feathers slowly exploding from party tubes tricked up by a children’s magician, but the trunks tonight are a formal avenue past the casino toward the center, stately or even to a tropical tourist stunning but, if one thinks also of the muscular indolence of Corsica, as idiotically official as Napoleon’s hat in colored lights.

Close, as we stroll beside the dark glimmering gulf, the reptile bark and tough fronds seem fragrant, but the smell is not the palms but the bougainvillaeas. Lights stand here and there against the dark shore across the gulf like bright thumb prints. There are corals there at forty meters, or so the scuba man promises if I dive another day.

I include our stroll because Dagger brought the Beaulieu after all. We thought we would not intrude into the famous café the Nagra unit—whose quarter-inch sync tapes are nonetheless (I learn only now from an école student) hell to match with the optical print when you come to editing. But unbeknownst to Dagger—why my secrecy?—I’ve begged a small Sony from the same student. In my hand now it’s like a book, and its strap is discreetly wound about the black leather.

OK. Cut to famous café.

No, cut not yet.

A word more, first. Mike and Mary are again in our group. Dagger says to me OK we drive to the east side of the island tomorrow. Mike is interested why. I mention some possibilities—the American past dropping TNT in neat bombs on the mosquitoes over there in the malaria swamps, then the colonists settling there after leaving revolutionary Algeria, then
l’esprit de Corse
denied so many avenues of action, so they try a little home-grown sabotage more reactionary than revolutionary, opposed to change or just to
les colons
and secretly to their prosperous reclamation of that part of the island.

Mike doesn’t say anything. Dagger says that nothing can take the place of the old cherry bombs they used to set off behind the Freehold Presbyterian Church on July 4.

I add, Of course it’ll fit in with other footage.

Did he hear me depress the record button? Instead of an intro to him, I have as yet only myself faking a bit to draw him out.

But then Mike says, Would you kill?

Ah well, I say (thinking to see what the remarkable Mary sees in him, with her elegant legs—can she see with her legs?—and the wild-hawk turn in the bridge of her nose), you know we’re just filmmakers, traveling eyes. But since you ask, would
you
kill?

Mike chuckles in the dusk.

Cut to famous café. We push in through sidewalk standees whom Dagger didn’t have light enough to shoot, nor the darkening façades with a bright casement here and there, the isolated glare of a fish restaurant, two old women in black leaning toward each other in a doorway, adolescents near a corner ice cream shop, music down the street, but here is the music.

Dagger’s American friend booked us what’s now the last table in a far but public corner. Family people double up. We are watched across the packed room to our table. Dagger will use the 15-mm. lens, our widest angle now we’ve given back the zoom, and when he sits down he opens the aperture right up for maximum light.

His American friend is explaining a song. He says, Shepherds, lots of shepherds. Or used to be. But no artisan culture. Against the music I miss some words between Mary and Mike. I wish the American would stop explaining the song.

I do not know what Dagger is interested in. He asks Mary about her family because that’s where she gets her archaeology and she’s been telling him about the statue-menhirs. The great male faces are awesome, there are swords, the eyes are cavernous shadows carved back under plain eyebrow ridges, there’s a head and not much more, the figure seems standing in the earth able to rise but only if there’s a reason to rise, they’re very dark and marvelous. Mary has been here before but this time she’s on her way to Sardinia and stopped by to see this surly Mike who is a friend of her brother’s. When she left Oxford she lost her passion for classical archaeology and is still torn, she says, between megalithic and Egyptian.

But your brother, says Dagger, and lets the sentence hang.

I reach toward Dagger: Hey isn’t that the girl at the fortress?

Dagger says he doubts it, and I add. The one with the two guys who tried to get away from us.

My brother is changing, says Mary. She smiles and it’s clear how much she cares about her brother.

Is Burns such a great hero where you come from?

The Scots still hold out, I said.

Now
menhir
, she says, as a song ends and there’s desultory clapping that declines oddly to a collective clap in near unison because the singers are about to take a break. Do you know what
menhir
means? Dagger is rising with the camera: just what it says:
men here
. Nonsense, says Mary,
men
(and you may learn from this, Michael)
men
means
stone
in Middle Breton,
hir
means
long
.

What could I learn? says Mike watching Dagger pan and cut and then get on up past the singer who because of the corner we’re in has been standing with his back to us.

Now Dagger is moving. The singer doesn’t mind. The big boss sits against the wall wringing his fingers over the steel strings of his guitar which lies snug between his belly and the table. Mike and Mary are between me and the singers. You get four or five. Mary has been here before and says the proprietor has to replace the singers because in the local style, furious, hard, and shrill, they kill their voices. Dagger is popping shots all over the room. The girl who looks like the midriff maiden at the fortress is with a dark-haired man. She is aware of Dagger but not watching him.

I have my elbow on the Sony and switch it on. Mary is talking to Mike, who is between her and the singers. Dagger’s American friend is on the other side and Dagger is on the move.

That is surely the girl from the fortress. She had dark glasses on then. A mole above her upper lip moves when she smiles. Without looking at him she handles the dark-haired man’s forearm. There is a cross-ways aisle behind them, then the door filled with standees.

I’m at the rear end of our table, facing the whole room. Dagger’s American friend, whom I can’t recall describing, is at my left, Mary and Mike in that order on my right. Mary talks despite the music, and Mike leans half around to be polite, then he gives up and turns in his chair to see her as she talks. Dagger’s focus passes us and it occurs to me that he is filming the sound source—my recorder—though he doesn’t know it, and in the developed print with, if possible, this tape integrated and synced, you’ll see the singer and (until he suddenly moves to block us) our table with Mary facing the camera talking words which may well be salvageable on the final track.

In one song a dead dog tells a heavy tale. It’s like one of Dagger’s, tedious yet droll.

Then comes the shepherd. The lyrics are hard. I am listening to Mary as if I did not trust my machine.

Then a third singer: a bandit’s lament sung by a wiry man who with his long slit of a moustache and passionate catlike indifference could have been a brigand. But there are no brigands in the mountains any more, Mary tells us.

Dagger roves.

You and your history, says Mike. Yet he is interested. Perhaps because she is interested in him. He looks like a long-haired quarterback from New Jersey. But I have never discounted him. You know, I say, that’s precisely what I came to Corsica for.

I thought so, says Mary, and Mike looks at my glass and then up at me as if he’s uncertain if I’m a dumb, horny over-the-hill flirt, or genuinely sinister.

Dagger bends near the portly guitarist, then straightens and turns, shooting (I think) Mary and Mike for a second, and Mike follows my eye, sees Dagger, and turns back to Mary hunching his shoulders. I’m not in the line of focus.

Here’s Dagger shooting the crowd and the current singer, the brigand, and Mary and Mike; and if we ever get onto the Nagra an audible track from this cassette and then sync it in to this footage (for this isn’t even what they call wild sync), we have a curious effect: people listening, singer singing—Corsica on the wall and the footage in montage—but the sound track will have the singer little louder than the crowd-murmur, and the principal track, the queer northern yarn Mary is telling, interspersed with my solicitous queries that deepen Mike’s scowl as he glances about from time to time to see where Dagger is; perhaps that is the very reason she keeps on. Once he stares at me and says What do
you
care? and he stares at Mary’s sharp bones of chin and cheeks and the most distantly menacing idea of a hawk in the bridge of that receptive nose and the faint golden rose that seems to illuminate her deep matte tan from inside her. She drinks her cassis; she is missing two joints of the fourth finger of her right hand.