The Acrobats (18 page)

“I just met Kraus on the stairs.”

“André, you look ill. Did he hit you?”

“I’m not ill. I’m drunk.”

“Oh.”

Golden legs climbing into a skirt.

André handed her a cigarette. He lit it for her. “Did you get into bed with him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he force you?”

“No.”

All he could see was the two of them in bed. She, in his arms, panting.

“You must try to understand André. He was crying like a child. I felt sorry for him.”

Still, something was broken. He felt empty. “I understand,” he lied. “I love you and I understand.”

She came into his arms and he shivered.

“André, you’re ill. Your skin is burning.”

He sat down uneasily. His eyes were not so much shocked as absolutely innocent and uncomprehending. “Chaim is leaving Spain tonight,” he said. “They closed the club, he was here on a false passport. Roger told them, probably because of us.”

“Oh, André.”

Yeah, he thought. I know. Oh, André. “We will get married tomorrow, and join him in Paris on Thursday.”

Toni puffed deeply on her cigarette and a hollow formed in her cheeks. Her hair was all tangled up. She turned on him
suddenly, her eyes passionately deep. “Do you really want to marry me?”

“I don’t know.”

“André, don’t be angry. It would mean leaving my country, my people. You never really loved me. You feel sorry for me. That is not enough.”

“Does he love you?”

“You don’t understand. I love you, André, but I don’t know if it would work out.”

He sat down beside her on the bed and for a long time he stroked her hair gently.

Finally, she said, “What shall we do?”

“Come to France with me.”

“All right.”

He got up. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“To my room. I don’t feel well. I think I’ll paint for a while.”

“No drinking?”

“I don’t really mind that you went to bed with him,” he said.

“Do you want me to come with you now?”

“No. Not now.”

He walked over to her again and stroked her black hair. “You are beautiful,” he said.

She smiled.

“Is it, Toni … Do you think that I cannot love?”

“There is something rotten inside you. Together we shall fight it.”

“Good-bye.”

“Hasta mañana.”

“Si, guapa.”

What was that song?

He was slipping down a ladder, every rung rejecting him.

The bottle was on the floor beside the bed.

Another drink.

André could not sleep.

The bed was a ship whirling in a stormy sea yet standing still at the same time.

His body was no longer a well-integrated unit but instead a bunch of ridiculous, unrelated items. Something to be tabulated, like clothing returned from the laundry. Some arms, some legs, a few organs and private parts, so many fingers and dirty feet, and a head twirling, superfluous and independent, in still faraway water. He would have lifted up his arm to anchor his floating head but he knew if he did this his arm would snap off. Also that his fingers were molasses and if he attempted to grasp the bedpost they would stick to the metal in puddles.
God will punish you
, his father always used to say. The grating hullabaloo of the rats fussing in the woodwork came to him again and he slipped down further under the blankets to keep his head from being exposed. An hour’s sweat had dried on his body. The itch was a constant agony.
He was going mad!
He laughed weakly.

Sentences, not thoughts, came –

A body and a head, thin body big head, are lying on my bed.

I am a madman,

this is my spout.

Pour me out,

pour me out.

In the neighbourhood theatre somebody or something like him was doing fiendish things on the screen; sometimes the yahoo on the screen and his more rational self would snap into an idiot focus, but the fusion was always blurred.

I’m dead!
Tomorrow I’m going to come back and look at my dead body and tickle my dead body, tomorrow after breakfast. I wonder if my dead body will look peaceful like dead bodies are supposed to look?
Yo-yo-hum and a bottle of rum
. The corpse will have to be shipped back to America for mama and that’s going to cost money.
Cash, brother, cash. Put up or shut up!

Slowly the madness in him subsided.
Entr’ acte
for the damned. Time for drinks and time for cakes. Exhausted, breathing heavily, he lay back on his pillow sinking abysmally.…

The elastic mustn’t snap …

What if the whole bed is full of them, he thought. What if right now a rat is picking at the dandruff in my hair? Suddenly he trembled.
Now I’m travelling through that undiscovered country from whose bourn
 … He pleaded with the engulfing vagueness. I’m up! Jesus, I even know what’s going on. He tested this last thought aloud to find out about his voice. The sounds were jarring but he recognised it as his own flat untuneful baritone. Winding through a spinning progression of questions and answers he soon convinced himself that everything stinging in the bed was him.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away
The rats are scribbling prophecies on the ceiling and jitterbugging on my floor. Madman boogie! He tried to laugh. (Turn over the record, jack.) The upshot was a lunatic cackle in an empty subway. Next he tried to bribe himself about switching on the lights. If he did this there would at least be a cigarette. Unable to hoist himself into any
conclusion he began to whine and think about home, about why he had ever left and if he could ever possibly go back.…

It was the London nightmare again.

A real empty stomach and a rotting soul, flaking at the sides, walked love and love through the purple bomb-gutted streets of the victorious city. The yellow pasteboard moon hanging like a bright lollypop in the black sky illuminated a building on Old Kent Road. From the other side the building was really only a wall. While waiting for the fall of the man who had entered a window on the fourth storey of the building that was only a wall, a stinging hose of urine ran down André’s right trouser leg. The man must have never quite fallen to the bottom as he stood there and stood there for three whole weeks without ever hearing a goddam sound. The fetor of his own dry urine mixed with the floating ambrosial stink of the dead violet flowers being pumped on to the pavement through the drainpipes. Ernie, hollow-eyed spiv with a No face, sold American-made nylons on Trafalgar Square.

A perfume advert, posted in neon dream blood over the Haymarket.

Ernie ruined at least three pairs when a sore burst under his thumbnail and running green pus cascaded over the silk in a blinding viscous fountain. From the top of his colonnade a one-eyed admiral of another time and place tottered precariously as the pigeons heaped still more piles of excrement on the gawking tourists below. The young bobby with a foreign gaffer in his arms beamed while a stray arm snapped the shutter of a Kodak, exploding the whole area in a firecracker of light. Simultaneously and nearby a Welsh whore
spat. Nobody noticed. Rats floating by in pools of gangrene had clogged the streets again.

One thing I’ll say about the Limeys, a man waving a copy of
Time
magazine shouted, they sure can take it!

On insecure concrete bases the imperial lions drooped lugubriously, nicotinic teeth beginning to crack and fall. Hairless bodies, pimpled bodies, gleaming like rotting meat in the sun. Nobody had been kind enough to tear out their eyes so André rushed over and wrenched them out with the branch of a dead tree. A professionally blind pauper woman approached an enlightened whore with flowers.
TWO BOB
! I wouldn’t wipe me bloody arse with your flowers.

I wonder, another tourist with an airmail copy of
Superman
comics folded under his arm wondered, whether we’ll ever be able to make anything of this?

Flung into Westminster Abbey on the tide of a frantic mob André saw more Kodaks and women chewing gum trample on the tombs of Samuel Butler and Charles Dickens. He got the idea and began to pick vigorously at his ass while standing on Alex Pope. The guide obliged his fact-greedy audience, informing them that as the abbey was so jammed with the immortal dead many of the poets were buried standing up. If there’s no more room, André considered aloud, burn my body on hot flame and sprinkle my ashes in the public urinals. When the Russians arrive they may piss their guts out on my cranium. Vomit got stuck in his throat and to avoid suffocation he rushed outside.
Ida loves Manny ’48
was carved on the railing of Westminster Bridge.

For several ages he stumble-wandered through the twilight alleys of Soho drinking and vomiting up blood-red wines like a
consommé
of an anger offered up as a hate-broth to the gods.

Later, in Piccadilly, he got angry with Eros. With a handy can-opener he ripped open his stomach, wrapping a mile of slimy intestines around a railing while rent flesh flapped in the
wind. Tossing leaking kidneys heavenwards he studied his heart, mouldy but still beating, on the pavement. A legless orphan with a bent arm and his nose on sideways gave him a quick shove before he could finish disembowelling himself. The spectre snarled; move on, gov’ner, we’ve seen all this before.

He took to flight, racing across oceans and worlds, but he could not escape the mockery of the whores chuckling in the vacuum.

Eighteen tiny red dots behind six others of an unusual shade of green floated to and fro in the mist. So after all, André aroused to semi-consciousness penetrated the fog, so after all …

If he switched on the lights he would have to see the rats!
His cigarettes were nearby on the table and he managed to light one in the dark. Listening to the darkness, he was conscious of the sharp scuffle of the rats and the loud beating of his heart. Puffing flaccidly at his cigarette, his last link with sanity, he tried to shake from his mind the persistent visual image of a decapitated dead rat. Inky spurts of blood trickled slowly out of the rat’s neck. The grey body coughed convulsively and the belly gradually flattened out like a punctured tube. He watched the lighted end of his cigarette butt shudder in the darkness. There was no longer an outer objective world. (And perhaps, he thought with sudden delirious vision, there never was.)

Finally, and with many misgivings, he switched on the light. A rat scurried across the bedroom floor and slithered in under the cupboard door. Another, more formidable rat looked up slyly and amazed from atop the heap of soiled laundry piled under the sink. They stared at each other for an instant – the rat whisking his long tail closer around him and the man shaking.

The rat darted across the room and slid in under the bed.

His cigarette dropped to the floor. He was completely undone. Useless, not dead and not alive but hovering fitfully,
he pushed his head down deep into the bedding and bit hard into the pillow. And he lay there, sliding about in his own sweat, for a good half hour.

Bottle on the floor.

Another drink, huh?

Valencia, April 19, 1951

“What can she see in him? He is a drunkard and probably mad. It is certainly that she is young and romantic.

“What a glorious afternoon! What a personal triumph! It is true that at first she was reticent, that she professed foolish loyalties to the boy, but once I had mastered her how eager she was for more! I shall not immediately talk of marriage. It would be bad for her. Theresa will be difficult at first, but Antonita’s modest ways will soon win her. It shall be Theresa’s duty to train the child in the ways of society. For I know now that soon I shall be needed again. Hermann writes from Rome that he has been appointed to an important post in Argentina. Paul is doing his background credit in the Belgian Congo. The Afrika Korps meets regularly now. Perhaps I shall be called next? As soon as I am repatriated I can count on a high position in the new army. An American Ambassador in Madrid is a healthy sign. Perhaps I should write to him? Theresa could do the letter for me. How it will please her to see us reorganised, returning to our old work with a new vigour! She will
stop moping about her Alfred (for she does, even if she refuses to admit it), and my wife will be able to help her. I …”

“Writing again?” Theresa asked, after she had entered the room quietly.

Roger smiled good-naturedly. “My journal,” he said.

“You are in good spirits lately,” she said.

“Theresa …” Roger began slowly, “if – well, if his kind had won the mobs would be – there would be no order. Isn’t that true?”

“How many times have I told you not to speak of him?”

“I would kill him for you!”

Theresa laughed. “It is too late, Roger dear. He is dead.”

Dead, yes. Then why is he always in the room? He thought of saying so, at least asking (for she knew everything), but then he thought better of it. “You think of him too much,” he said meekly.

“I regret ever having known him,” she said, enunciating each word clearly. “Now, are you pleased?”

Roger laughed and shut his diary. “Theresa, do you like me? Do you enjoy having me near you?”

“Like you? Why I adore you! I couldn’t live without you.”

“Don’t joke.”

Laughing, Theresa tossed her head back. He watched the Adam’s apple bobbing on her neck. She stopped laughing as quickly as she had begun. “What does it matter?” she asked.

“Don’t laugh at me!”

“Why not? What does it matter?”

Roger looked down at his boots and he rolled up his fists so that his fingernails dug into the palms of his hands. “I had news from Hermann this morning,” he said. “He is going to Argentina. Everywhere calls are coming. It will be our turn soon. Won’t that delight you?”