Travesty (3 page)

The next day we were a close and smiling triad as we continued driving
through the sterile marshlands and past the great brown windmills with their sad
faces and broken arms.

But I must tell you that this little romantic story about the
complicity between my wife, my daughter, and the older woman of luxury reminds me
more strongly than ever of a curious emotional reaction of mine—a reaction I
rarely recall and never felt except upon one of those innumerable occasions of
Chantal’s childhood happiness. That is, Chantal had only to
reveal the slightest sign of personal enjoyment, had only to pick some leaf or
kiss Honorine or show me with evident pleasure some faintly colored illustration in
one of her books, to send me sliding off into the oddest kind of depression. I was a
perfect companion to her gloom, her anger, her hours of fear, her childhood
pantomimes of adult frustration, her little floods of helplessness in the face of
some easy problem. But let Chantal throw her arms around my neck or grow warm of
cheek or simply give me a clue that she was momentarily alive in one of those
private moments of beatitude all children experience and I was hopelessly alien from
her and depressed, inexplicably downcast. Throughout all of Chantal’s
childhood I was sorry for her whenever I should have been glad. Yes, I was actually
sorry for my own child, but sorry only when she was in one of her states of
well-being. And when she was herself unhappy, why then I was busily content.

I hear your impatience. And in the circumstances my perhaps
sentimental recollections must touch you with profound irritation, especially since
you have imagined so much more life than I myself have lived. And perhaps you have
already analyzed my darker, nearly forgotten parental emotions as fear of mortality,
and have thus dismissed them. But I must ask you again to indulge my nostalgia, if
only because its source is gone, quite gone, and I am now capable of loving Chantal
without putting myself perversely at the center of our relationship, like the fat
raisin that becomes the eye and
heart of the cookie. No, for
years I have been what the rest of the world would call a normal father, feeling
only joy for Chantal’s joy and pain for her pain. My
“perversion” has long since been cauterized. I no longer reverse and
then exaggerate what Chantal feels. I still enjoy licking smeared chocolate from my
daughter’s fingers, and do so with perfect impunity. But I am in no way
responsible for maintaining Chantal’s life, and long ago gave up anticipating
grief for its loss.

Do you know that now I am not even tempted to look into the rear-view
mirror?

But there, the dashboard settings are now subtly different. You
cannot be as aware of them as I am, yet for me the mere climbing or falling of
needles, the sometimes monstrous metamorphosis of tiny, precise numbers behind
faintly illuminated glass, a droplet traveling too quickly or too slowly through its
fragile tube—these for me are the essential signs, the true language, always
precious and treacherous at the same time. And now the settings are different. There
are the mildest indications that we are beginning to deplete the resources of this
superb machine, though in our present context those resources are of course
inexhaustible and in fact will probably account for the grandeur of the sound that
will wake our poor curate. Nonetheless the life of the car is running out, the end
of our journey tonight is not
as distant as one might think.
Naturally there are steep grades, sudden turns, even abrasive changes in the
road’s surface, and still time enough to tax us, preoccupy us, demand the
utmost from our living selves. And of course you may argue that our experience so
far has been constant, virginal, that we have heard no variations in the music that
reaches us from beneath the car; that Chantal has not discovered some poor wounded
bird imponderably present and expiring on the seat beside her. Yes, things are the
same, I am not even beginning to feel the strain of driving at this high speed.

But then our situation is not so very different from my war, as I call
it, with Honorine’s old-fashioned clock. It is a crude affair that hangs on
her wall. Nothing but a few pieces of dark wood, a long cord with iron weights at
either end, a circular ratchet, a horizontal pendulum fixed with wooden cubes like a
tiny barbell. It is only the bare minimum of a clock, suggesting both the work of a
child and the skill of some parsimonious medieval craftsman. Small, simple, dark,
naked. And yet this contraption makes the loudest ticking I have ever heard. And
slowly, it ticks more slowly, more firmly than any time device created by any of the
old, bearded lovers of death in the high mountains. Well, I cannot stand that
ticking. It is unbearable. So at every opportunity I stop the clock. But somehow it
always starts up again and beats out its relentless unmusical strokes until once
again I find it so insufferable that I jam its works.

You know the clock, you say? And you have never bothered to listen to
the noise it makes? But of course
you are familiar with
Honorine’s old clock. Of course you are. What a silly oversight. We are not
strangers. Far from it. And how like you to be so unconcerned with something that
gives me the utmost aural pain. But what I mean to say is this: that I hear that
ticking loudest when the clock is stopped. Exactly. Exactly. It is the war I cannot
win. But it is a lovely riddle.

The point is this: that our present situation is like my wife’s
old clock. The greater the silence, the louder the tick. For us the moment remains
the same while the hour changes. And isn’t it curious that I really know very
little about automobiles? I merely drive them well.

Yes, it was a rabbit. You see it is true, as everyone says, that at
high speeds you can feel absolutely nothing of the rabbit’s death. But next
it will rain, I suppose, as if an invisible camera were recording our desperate
expressions through the wet glass. Perhaps you should have agreed to the radio after
all.

Confession? Confession? But do you really believe that the three of
us are sitting here in what I may call our exquisite tension (despite all my own
pleasure in this event, I am not insensitive to the fact that we are in a way frozen
together inside this warm automobile) merely so that I may indulge in guilty
revelations
and extract from you a few similar low-voiced scraps
of broken narrative? No,
cher ami
, for the term “confession”
let us substitute such a term as, say, “animated revery.” Or even this
phrase: “emotional expression stiffened with the bones of
thought.”

I do not believe in secrets—withheld or shared. Nor do I
believe in guilt. At least let us agree that secrets and so-called guilty deeds are
fictions created to enhance the sense of privacy, to feed enjoyment into our
isolation, to enlarge the rhythm of what most people need, which is a belief in
life. But surely “belief in life” is not for you, not for a poet. Even
I have discovered the factitious quality of that idea.

No man is guilty of anything, whatever he does. There you have it.
Secrets are for children and egotists and sensualists. Guilt is merely a pain that
disappears as soon as we recognize the worst in us all. Absolution is an unnecessary
and, further, incomprehensible concept. I am not attempting to justify myself or
punish you. You are not guilty. Never for a moment did I think you were. As for me,
my “worst” would not fill a crooked spoon.

And yet there are those of us, and I am doing my best to include you
among our select few, for whom the most ordinary kind of daily existence partakes of
the contradictory sensation we know as shame. For such people everything,
everything, is eroticized. Such a man walks through the stalls of a butcher in a
kind of inner heat, which accounts for his smile. But if we
allow
shame to the sensualist and deny guilt to the institutions, it is simply that such
words and states serve poetic but not moral functions. In the hands of the true poet
they are butterflies congregating high in the heavens, but in the hands of the
moralists or the metaphysicians they are gunpowder.

But you are becoming angry,
cher ami
. Be patient.

Another cigarette. I approve. Though you must know that every minute
you are growing more and more like my good but crippled doctor, despite the fact
that you are in full possession of your four limbs. But it occurs to me that had I
not given them up on the very day you entered our household, I would now ask you to
reach slowly across the space between us and position your freshly lighted cigarette
between my own dry lips. And you would do that for me. I know you would. And your
shaking hand would hover there an instant just below my line of vision, sparing my
own two hands for their necessary grip on the wheel, until I fished for the end of
the cigarette with my parted lips and then found it, held it, inhaled. One of your
cold fingers might even have brushed the tip of my nose as I waited and then
exhaled, blowing one lungful of smoke against the inner side of the windshield like
a silent wave curling along a glassy shore.

Cigarettes always make me think of bars. They
remind me of the war, of talkers around a dark table, of wine, of a
woman’s hand in my lap.

But no, not even that single puff. Not even now. It cannot be. And yet
while you are drenched in the aroma of your cigarette, and while Chantal may be
acquiring some slight awareness of the relative newness of this automobile which she
cannot help but smell, I myself am breathing in fresh air, dead leaves, ripe grapes.
And the windows are closed. Quite closed.

Chantal? Do you hear Papa’s voice as through the ether?
Whatever you are thinking,
ma cherie
, whatever monsters you may be
struggling with, you must believe me that your presence here is not gratuitous. That
would be the true humiliation, Chantal: to be as small as you are, to be as young as
you are, to be seated behind Henri and me and hence quite alone in the car with no
one to comfort you by touch or wordless embrace (precisely as I comforted you at the
death of Honorine’s Mama, that splendid woman), and then to be conscious of
yourself not only as so very different from the two men talking together in the
front of this darkened and terribly fast sport touring car, but also to know
yourself to be forgotten, only accidentally present, unwanted perhaps. What could be
worse? Especially since you are in fact no child, and have spent almost the total
store of your youthful sexuality on your own small portion of Henri’s poetic
vision, and since you
have always harbored a special regard for
your Papa’s love.

But it is not so, Chantal. You are no mere forgotten audience to the
final ardent exchange between the two men in your mother’s life, men whose
faces you cannot even see. Not at all, Chantal. No, I have thought of you with utter
faithfulness from the beginning. In my mind there were always three of us, Chantal,
never two, and in all the accruing of the elements of this now inevitable event (the
month, the day, the night, the route), there you were in the very center of my
concern. And during these last hours it has been the same: when I thought of you and
Henri finishing your dinner in the restaurant, when I waited for the attendant to go
through the motions of pumping the last tankful of gasoline into this silent car,
when I noticed on my wristwatch that the time of our rendezvous was approaching,
even when I so unexpectedly depressed the accelerator and violently increased our
speed and hence interrupted our lively conversation and signaled the true state of
things: in all this you were the necessary third person whose importance was quite
equal to Henri’s and mine.

That the protective parent turns out to be the opposite, that familiar
accord turns out to be the basket containing the hidden asp, that it is impossible
to weigh the magnitude of what your father is doing as opposed to that of what will
soon be happening—this is a disillusionment I cannot discuss for now. But let
me at least reassure you in this other matter: you are here,
now,
with Henri and me, only because of the strength of my devotion, my poor Chantal. No
one can rob you now of your Papa’s love.

We are like the crow and the canary,
cher ami
.We are that
different. And yet we are both Leos. It is almost enough to engage my interest in
astrology. Or at least it is a fact that should help me to suppress more effectively
my amusement at the new astrological age of the young. Of course this amusement of
mine is more sympathetic than scornful: one cannot merely scoff at the signs of the
zodiac sewn to the buttocks of the tight faded pants of our young men and women
these days. How like them to believe in the old wizardry and yet sport these
portentive signs so innocently, naïvely, on the seats of their pants.

But you and I are Leos. One more unbreakable thread in the web. What
does it mean? Is it the crudest irony of all, or does it somehow light the way to
our reconciliation? Is it a mockery of our differences or a hint as to the nature of
that odd affinity for each other that we appear to share? Perhaps your future
biographer will find in this astrological coincidence of ours the essential clue to
what will always be known as your “untimely death.” Who is to say?

I seem to remember an old adage that the true poet has the face of a
criminal. And you have this
face. You and I know only too well
that you are publicly recognized by your short haircut, the whiteness of your skin,
the roughened texture of this white skin, the eyes that are hard and yet at the same
time wet and always untrustworthy, as if they have been drained of blueness in a
black-and-white photograph. Are you beginning to see yourself,
cher ami?
Yours is the face of the criminal, the lover from the lower classes, the face of
someone who has just died on a lumpy sofa in an unfamiliar apartment and who lies
there as if alive but already cooling, with one hand touching the bare floor and the
grainy head supported in the grip of two cheap sofa cushions. And no matter how you
dress, whether conventionally in your dark modest three-piece suit as of this
moment, attired in exactly that same absence of flamboyance as myself, as if we had
come from separate business offices only to meet on the same outmoded train, or
whether you are casually dressed in a somewhat rumpled mauve shirt and loosened tie,
as I have often seen you, still for me you are only dressed in one way: in black
pants and in a white shirt that is open at the collar, and tieless, and a little
soiled. It is the garb of the man about to be executed, the garb of the unsmiling
poet whose photograph is so often taken among those festive crowds at the bull
ring.