Lucia's Masks (17 page)

Slick marketing exploited crass desires. At the age of twenty-two, he had railed against people’s stupidity. He sees his young self standing on a table, left arm raised as he drunkenly harangued his equally drunken companions. “Who remembers the great masters — Kieslowski, Godard, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky? Who knows now the wonder of sitting in the dark, while the images spin out and around us, enlarging a world that is no longer dark, bringing a vision that satisfies what men once called god-hunger? Who now knows the catch of the breath as the last credit rolls away, and you grasp the fact that you have witnessed something infinitely mysterious — and proof absolute that we human beings do indeed have souls?”

Yes, he had once been that young and risibly idealistic. But he could not fault his own obsession. For obsession it had been. He would go without a meal in order to rent a rare video from the ever-dwindling number of outlets catering to “archaic tastes.”

He would watch scenes that magnetized him over and over, running the film back and freezing the image, unplucking the disparate elements, marvelling at the composition, the use of colour, tonality, chiaroscuro. And so he remembers . . . an undulation of saffron silk as a banner is loosed from a dark parapet; a woman’s sorrowing face reflected in a rain-beaded window pane. Or a gauntly elegant man in a dress suit, who wades hip-deep through a spa bath, cradling a lit candle between his palms, striving to keep the flame alive.

That had been his objective too, once upon a time. He had wanted to keep that flame of the great masters alive. But fate interfered. He had inherited wealth and it had been his undoing. He sees that clearly now.

His inheritance had come as an utter surprise; the lightning bolt that later made cinder of his dreams. He had had a lover — no, more a keeper — an older woman whom he serviced with his hard body and supple hands. He had not known she was dying. She had kept her secrets as meticulously as she did her person. In his case, the classic human irony had proven true: it was only when she had gone that he realized the depth of his affection for her.

She left him not just a substantial financial fortune, but also stocks in a company renowned for furthering the “exact mimesis potential” of virtual reality technologies; specifically, the digital spooks that stimulated human taste and touch receptors. He found himself on the company’s board of directors, drawn into the lair of the monster he had once abhorred. Inevitably, he emerged transformed. Wealth corrupted him. Power corrupted him. He served the monster where once he had served the flame.

He discovered he had a gift for cunning scenarios. Because if the public taste for simulated gore and pillage and orgy was insatiable, so too was its thirst for plot. Climax was not enough in itself. There was still a deep human hunger for the sequence of steps that led to the climax. And then? And then? And then? In the beginning, when he still bothered to analyze what it was he did, he had thought this hunger for story a good sign. Here perhaps lay a seed for the possible redemption of humankind. Perhaps — just perhaps — people would at last tire of climaxes that were mere simulated explosions.

In those early, self-deluding days he had hoped the “virtual reality audience” might eventually hunger for Art, and for the transcendent joy one feels in the presence of mystery and symbol. He had even tried for a time to deploy in his scenarios visual images that had once conjured up so much more than they were: a fluted glass of ruby wine; a round loaf of crusty bread set on a scoured table; a house painted the shimmering green of poplar leaves in spring, with cut-out gables like lacework.

These feeble efforts came to nothing. His natural cynicism reasserted itself. The public did not want plot for story’s sake. They did not care about symbols. They wanted a stuttering sequence of events, slippery stepping stones that prolonged their anticipation of the final debacle. “And then? And then?” was merely a kind of torturous foreplay, self-serving and self-indulgent.

The resonance of things greater than themselves — of wine and bread and gabled houses — had no place in the world where he now lived. So he had forsaken his dream of artistry and become a consummate hedonist. For many years, his only goal was to indulge his cravings for evermore intense and novel sensations, liberated from the burden of remorse.

Then he had found himself caught up in a wretched twist of fate. He heard about a study group dedicated to the work of the twentieth-century genius, Antonin Artaud. As a student, he had read about Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, a kind of extreme staged drama, using gargantuan mannequins and masks, and all manner of outrageous sights and sounds. The goal was a deliberate derangement of theatre-goers’ senses so as to unleash the full powers of the unconscious. This idea still intrigued him, intellectually at least. He wanted to experience those heady insights Artaud described as emerging from “dark matter,” liberated by the “engine of cruelty” this idiosyncratic theatre celebrated.

When he applied for admission into the study group’s tightly guarded circle, he found his looks an asset. At his interview, several of the women made their desire for him crudely evident. He had another distinct advantage — or disadvantage, he was to think later — that smoothed the way to his initiation. This was his physical resemblance to the French dramatist as a young man.

He sees again in his mind’s eye the Man Ray portrait of Artaud in profile. The playwright looked like an ivory god-head floating in his primeval chaos. His eyebeam tunnelled through the generative smoke, fixed on the tempests and conflagrations of his own imaginings. An enlarged version of this portrait dominated each of the Theatre of Cruelty’s meetings, except for that last fatal gathering when every wall was smothered in black.

In that room, he had been party to an act so nefarious it had etched itself on the tissues of his brain. No drug, no drink, no daunting physical risk, could erase the memory of what he had done. Remorse (or was it guilt?) gnawed at his gut. His dreams became torture rooms in which he was flayed alive and worse. He had thought he would go mad. At his worst moments, he had seriously considered self-murder. What stopped him was an atavistic fear of what lay beyond death. Did this make him a coward? He thought not, particularly as the form of penance he chose, pruned of all artificial supports, seemed often as punitive as any imagined afterlife could possibly be.

He had plunged into penance as a man might plunge into churning water so as to douse the flames consuming his body. He had not thought the consequences through.

Examining his conscience, now naked and vulnerable as a peeled egg, he realizes he had even taken a selfish, childish pleasure in his disguise. Readying himself for departure from the City, he had put on his gown (left over from some best-forgotten costumed orgy) and studied himself in several of his full-length mirrors.

He had thought himself a handsome penitent. Vanity had dogged him even then. Throughout his cosseted, mature adult life he had seen himself reflected in many mirrors: strikingly handsome still, lean and slightly louche. His features were those of a wolf who had mated with a particularly gorgeous woman. He had long recognized this and exploited his innate magnetism to the full. His dark-blue eyes took people aback. They were among the finest weapons in his arsenal of charm. As was the fleeting smile that both discomfited and fascinated his admirers. It set a fleeting twist upon his lips that might betoken irony, bemusement, or a penchant for cruelty.

He emanated danger and had learned by his early teens just how powerful an aphrodisiac this was. It had secured him plenty of sexual conquests, and that edge in the business world essential to survival. But there had been occasions — under the influence of especially potent hallucinogens, for example — when he looked in the mirror and was terrified by what he saw. The lineaments of the wolverine straining beneath the skin. A crown and cape of spiked flame around his head and shoulders. He had to turn away from his own image, and tell himself consoling tales about his flame-tipped charisma. This was true enough. He was charismatic. He did have abundant, erotically charged allure.

But that — he reminds himself yet again — was the man he
had
been, superficial, self-obsessed, and ripe for corruption. He is another being now: a server in a monk’s garb who must do his penitential duty, if necessary onto the day of his death. Protecting these five — now six, if he counted the old woman — was his elected duty. He was their Outpacer.

He had croaked his wish that first night into Lucia’s ear. She was on fire-watch duty, the only one of the five awake. What a hapless, mismatched crew he had thought them. The three women seemed the most competent, and resolute to survive. Although the boy Chandelier showed evidence of problem solving, prompted by instinct alone perhaps. They needed him more than he needed them. (Or did they? Was this assumption just his old arrogance at work? He must strive to keep this in check, along with so many other shortcomings in his far from exemplary character.)

Lucia had not flinched when he spoke into her ear. She was remarkable. He thought only a cat could have heard him approach. He had come up behind her, swift and silent on the balls of his feet. He moved with such stealth, he had time to count the vertebrae visible beneath her shirt. Her eyes widened when he bent down and spoke his name into her ear. That was her only reaction. Her eyes widened, pulling the night deeper into her soul. Her eyes were black as sloes.

He had stepped back two paces, and walked round the camp-fire, directly across from her, so that she could take in what he was. She raised her exquisitely moulded chin a little, looked at him and nodded. Her mind was quick. She grasped the meaning of the monk’s gown right away.

He was lucky it was Lucia. Any of the others might have screamed at the sight of

him. His monk’s habit could trigger nightmarish visions. What lay beneath the shadowy cowl? A face horribly disfigured, hacked at and badly healed? Or a sucking vortex to grind you bone by bone?

Lucia, with her swift intuition, had looked at him and seen the inexorable discipline of the monastic life: the rising before dawn, the prayers on one’s knees on hard floors, the meagre repasts, the labour in garden, granary, or library. Above all, she saw his willingness to do penance
. It would be done. It would.
Somehow, he would compensate for the abhorrent sins of his past.

He knows the hateful animal still inhabits him, despite his monk’s guise and honest desire to do penance. The animal’s muzzle presses into his brain; its claws scrabble in his bones. The animal wants out. He must keep it in.

At these times, when the unrelenting guilt makes him quake, he wonders whatever possessed him to come into the midst of these innocents. Was it loneliness? Or the magnetism of Lucia? Had he simply wanted to hear the sound of his own voice? Or rather, hear himself speaking to beings who might respond and thus affirm his existence?

No, not his existence. His self. It is not a word to which he has given much thought over the past several years.

The hour is upon him again when he must seek out a landscape of pain. He will bear it in the understanding that it is only a minuscule part of his atonement. He will behave as the Outpacer must. He will keep the rapacious beast inside him at bay.

Chapter Seven
Which Circle of Hell?

I
CANNOT RECALL IF
D
ANTE HAD
a Circle of Hell for the slothful. If he did not, it was probably because he knew sloth is its own punishment.

There is something about this old stone house, or perhaps the ground on which it stands, that induces a torpor in me. I see signs of this in the others: in Harry’s increasingly long daytime naps, and in the way the Outpacer sleeps at night in the hallway with his feet against the door instead of maintaining his invisible cordon outside. I too am failing in my duties. I am neglecting my watch because we have fallen into the foolish assumption that if we are inside the house, we are safe. I go out foraging less and less — even though I know fresh berries would be more nourishing for us than the insipid canned pears in their viscous syrup.

Worst of all perhaps, I feel estranged from my clay. I moisten the small precious ball I brought with me and roll it again and again in my palm. But it generates no spark in me. I cannot feel the vital pulse of yearning, either in my fingers or in the clay itself.

I wish we were on the road again. I wish I had never found this house. I believe there may be some mephitic element in the atmosphere that is corroding my will. Every day I promise myself I will speak with the others about how we can solve our basic conundrum — this most pressing problem we leave largely unspoken. We cannot move on toward the north and leave the old woman behind. Yet how, in practical terms, can we take her with us? As far as I know, she can barely walk at all. How she coped on her own before our arrival will likely remain a mystery.

Like Candace, I am concerned that Bird Girl’s relationship with Lola is becoming unhealthy. She hardly ever leaves the old woman’s bedside. Bird Girl’s complexion has lost its natural colour and she eats as sparingly these days as does the old lady. Whenever I go into their room to offer to sit with Lola in her stead, Bird Girl looks startled as if I have just roused her from a heavy dream. She always refuses my offer of help. I sense she is anxious for me to go so that she can be alone with Lola and her own thoughts.

I am perplexed and distressed too, at how Bird Girl and the Outpacer seem now deliberately to avoid each other. Whenever she does come down the stairs, either to get food or go outside to the privy, they do not speak to each other, not even to extend the barest greeting. If by chance the Outpacer happens to be sleeping when she comes down, she sends little furtive looks his way.

I am sure something has happened to make them uncomfortable with one another, but have no idea what it might be. I believe the Outpacer takes the fulfillment of his penance too gravely to have made sexual advances to her. And surely she would tell me if he had done so?