Rochester Knockings (20 page)

We stayed almost three months in New York. Anyone who doesn't know this city is a hick. Everyone exists there with the mad agitation of a beheaded centipede. Everything there is immense
and opens to the river or the sea, everything there resonates like on a dizzying dance floor where everyone in the entire world, including horses, wears Irish tap shoes. Leah got married there, to the great chagrin of Mr. Strechen, our manager. Kate, that kind of pale lunar creature all men want to protect, became the muse of a media baron who doesn't believe either in talking tables or any other materializations. Is he expecting instantaneous prophecies of the weather from her? It's crazy, the journalists' and bankers' interest in spiritualism! Let's just say that without my little sister's sleepwalking, we probably never would have been put on a big train to Broadway!

Kate and I have a developed a direct method of automatic writing. No need any longer for the rectangular tablet on wheels, equipped with a pencil that you animate with the tips of your fingers. Once the spirit is manifested, it's enough to separate the arm that is writing from the rest of the body with a little curtain and let the hand equipped with a graphite stick move all alone across a blank sheet of paper. Here, I just tried it myself out of the blue:

               
A centipede in the staircase

               
Climbs steps four at a time

               
His shoes are down on the ground floor

               
His shoes are up ahead on my landing

               
A staircase in the elevator

               
Complains to my sister about only having one foot

               
I walk on the ceiling in slippers

               
With a flyswatter and a shoehorn

When to burn my diary?
It's getting to be time, before unfriendly hands seize it. What a shame it would be for me if Leah were
to come across it! But she has too much to do with that Under-hill, and soon we'll hardly see her anymore. She's a New Yorker now, the spouse of an artist of high finance and holding court, while Kate for her part invokes the spirit of the little peddler from Hydesville and I languish alone in Rochester. Do Prince Charmings have to be rich bourgeois in this damn country? What became of my dear Lee in Rapstown, my beloved with the skin of an angel?

Now that scoundrel Frank Strechen, the unemployed manager, is falling back on me, for lack of any other leads. He is offering me the going rate for a solo demonstration in Philadelphia. I'm off for Philly! City of Quakers and brotherly love. Provided that I do not lose my means along the way!

               
If you have the time to listen to me

               
Blow your nose with your toes

               
And pull the spinach out of your ears

XI.

The Sleeping and the Dead

L
ady Macbeth and some specters took the stage of the Eastman Theatre. Charlene Obo played the role with an unsettling energy, throwing her audience, all dressed up for the premiere night, into a state of stupor close to terror.

“Why do you make such faces?” she declaimed. “
When all's done, You look but on a stool!
”

In a side loge of this Italianate auditorium, leaning on the balcony railing, Lucian Nephtali sat paralyzed. Charlene outdid her character in a lugubrious chiaroscuro where the shadowy recesses were contending with the purple of a perpetual twilight.

The sad Macbeth himself seemed to be trembling more at the hallucinatory determination of his wife than of the consequences of their crime:

               
Ay, and since then too, murders have been performed

               
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,

               
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

               
And there an end but now they rise again,

               
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns.

Soon, in the midst of walk-on actors, the usurper reacted with a bewildered terror at the sight of the specter of his victim, which he alone could distinguish:

               
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

               
The arm'd rhinoceros, or th'Hyrcan tiger;

               
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

               
Shall never tremble. Or be alive again,

               
And dare me to the desert with thy sword;

               
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me

               
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!

               
Unreal mockery, hence!

A cold sweat stung Lucian's neck. Alone in his loge, hands trembling on the guardrail, he had the impression that all the faces below, haloed in a vermillion light, were turning ostensibly toward him. Sponging his temples dry, he had to admit he was still feeling the effects of his time at the Golden Dream that afternoon, magnified tenfold by the playwright's thunderous parables. Sometimes it happens that a mild discomfort takes on such an intensity that one would willingly leap into a pyre to escape from it. The nearest real person at this moment, the only one who would be able to help him, was separated farther from him than the ghost of the King of Scotland! For almost another hour, Charlene belonged only to the stage, as did for that matter the audience transfixed by her performance.

But the hellish couple “still young in action” was going to retire in order to quench themselves in the soothing waters of sleep. Haunting the illusory moors, the three witches, made up to perfection like transvestites for All Hallows' Eve, came to the front of the stage to consult Hecate, mistress of evil spirits, under the faraway rumbling of a storm.

Lucian didn't let himself watch the interlude, so much did he fear a new setback of a completely falsified reality. The play continued on with these supporting roles. By concentrating on the exterior details as if immersed in the dark gold of opium, he perceived, like a little isolated flame, the face of Kate Fox among the many masks, and was irrationally frightened of some kind of singular collusion between her and Lady Macbeth, who came back on stage in the fifth act in a trance, without even having to mimic the act of sleepwalking.

               
Out, damn spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,

               
then, ‘tis time to do't. Hell is murky! Fie, my

               
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we

               
fear who knows it, when none can call our power

               
to account?—Yet who would have thought the old

               
man to have had so much blood in him?

A murmur crossed the auditorium when, after some hypnotic confessions, Lady Macbeth cried out as expected: “To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate,” for it became clear that the actress had found herself alone under a magnetic influence. Her role finished, she stood crazed in front of the side curtains backstage, while her partners went on with the scene. Clad in the same
combination of colors as the decor, a stagehand came to lead her offstage. Charlene appeared to fall down flat, stage left.

In the hands of the makeup artist removing her greasepaint, little by little she regained consciousness in front of a mirror just after the curtain had gone down. The reflection of Lucian Nephtali appeared, smiling tensely.

“What happened?” she asked in a faint voice.

“It's best to spare you,” he said only.

“I don't remember being applauded . . .”

“The applause happened without you, but it was for you that the public cheered.”

“Are we going to Buffalo Street?”

“The car is waiting for me and Kate is already on board. But you,
to bed, to bed, to bed!
Go home to sleep. Your nerves are on edge.”

“Not at all!
Come, come, come, give me your hand . . .
”

The next day, Lucian woke badly with the certitude of having killed his friend Nat Astor. His foggy reasoning led him to believe that this murder was not such a big thing, considering the immortality of souls. Was it really so terrible to push a mortal into eternity? Kate and Charlene had reached no conclusions in front of his friend's grave: some dematerialized intruder wanted too much to intervene; not counting the destitutes of long ago and the fugitive slaves from the common grave. One legend claims that every cemetery has as its guardian the phantom of the first person buried there. That night, during the ceremony, a Negro dressed in charcoal sacks suddenly appeared a few steps away from Nat Astor's gravestone. His face lit by oil lamps, he alleged that he
was the caretaker of the place, which made the gravedigger paid to guide them laugh maliciously.

“That would surprise me greatly,” he shot back. “Negroes have their own section!” But the shadow returned with a laugh of his own.

“Long ago,” he declared, “in the time of the British Empire, the throat of a Redskin or a baptized slave was slit in secret to ward off evil spirits on the eve of the inauguration of a new white cemetery. This is how I came to be the first person buried here.”

Seated on the couch where he must have ended up last night, Lucian took some time before getting his bearings. The bluish light announcing the sunrise bathed this interior in the unreality of dream. Mounted on the wall above a full-length mirror tilted toward the ceiling, a recent photograph of Charlene in a frightful rhinestone frame left him perplexed, until he recognized the pattern of the carpet, the ebony and mahogany furniture around him. Quietly he put on his shoes and went off to find a spirit or a body, once again surprised by the accumulation of mirrors and painted portraits, drawings or photographs, all of them endlessly reflecting from one wall or partition to another.

He found the actress in her bedroom, lying across the bed, a satin negligee bunched above her naked body. The emotion he felt had nothing to do with the sensual. Seated at the foot of the bed, he contemplated her beautiful breasts, spread apart, and the circumscribed forest of mystery between the groin and the border of her pubis. To him a woman's sex looked like a cross of burning eyelids with a bloody heart. Could he put his lips there without fear, like on the mouth of a dying man? Gently, he pulled the fabric down over this perfect body and sat next to the sleeping woman. It's the face that saves a body from monstrosity.
Everything becomes spirit in its prism. There is no longer woman or man. A face is the imprint of an angel's glance. With her eyes closed, this one resembles the one in his dream—a mask drowned in the ocean's depths . . .

“Is that you, Lucian?” murmured those lips between two worlds.

“You were sleeping half-naked.”

“
You should have taken me as dead.
I love being made love to in my sleep . . .”

“I just woke from a dreadful nightmare. A gravedigger was leading you and me to Nat's grave. Kate Fox was accompanying us. It was night. Under the gravedigger's dull lamp, you couldn't stop laughing, a mad if quiet laugh. Kate was in a state of extreme distress. She asked Nat's spirit to manifest itself but a shadow stood up before us and claimed to be the guardian of souls . . .”

“Is that so terrible? It's just grief. Nat's spirit is still linked to yours.”

“I'm the one who killed him.”

Charlene sat up, letting her bare breasts oscillate in a beam of sunlight.

“I was with you on the terrace when he shot himself in the park.”

“I was also in the park.”

“Lucian, Lucian, we were coming home, all three of us intoxicated from the Golden Dream. I recall that Harry Maur was furious when he let us into his house. That bear hates honey. He made us drink some of his whiskey to remind us of ordinary drunkenness.”

“I remember all that too, Charlene. But in the state that you were in, that all of you were in, you could very well have imagined
me at your side on the terrace while I was arguing with Nat in the park. In my nightmare, Kate exclaimed: ‘No, no! I cannot hear this,' while staring at me with horrified eyes.”

“Calm down, Lucian. If all our dreams described exact reality, what place would there remain for spirits? They are who come to visit us in sleep, they communicate with us through great symbols and small insinuations. Not all of them are benevolent. Human dream is the domain of spirits more or less stuck in their memory, and disembodied criminals prowl around there alongside God's angels. Besides, you can't have forgotten that we drove Kate back home last night?”