Travesty (5 page)

But you and I have been the foxes to those ripe
grapes, have we not? And to think that it is she, this sleeping Honorine, who awaits
our passing.

Well, now you can breathe again, as can I. That’s a dangerous
turn, you saw how much trouble it gave me, for all my knowledge of our route and no
matter the perfect timing—or perhaps nearly perfect timing, I should
say—with which I prepared once more to meet its treachery. Yes, an extremely
difficult turn, a threatening moment indeed, as you could tell by the song of our
tires and my silence and the sternness with which I held the wheel. Of course you
too felt that sudden inundation of centrifugal force, the nausea that told us that
we might in fact be leaving the road. But it’s all right, the uncertainty is
past, we have emerged from the turn, again we are safely adhering to the earthly
path of our trajectory—which on a white road map looks exactly like the head
of a dragon outlined by the point of a pen brutally sharpened and dipped in blood.
But it is precisely by such small incidents as this one, when all at once the
irrationality of the night intrudes upon us, that we inside the car are given to see
ourselves as through the eyes of some old sleepless goatherd on a distant hill: to
him, we are only the brief inaccessible stab of light that announces impersonally
—quite impersonally—the vicious passing of an invisible
and even inconsequential automobile through the damp and chilly medium of the
black night. Then we are gone.

And so we are. So we are.

Chantal? Can it be? Have you forgotten the injunction of your Papa?
Have you, like a poor childish sleepwalker, slipped free of your belt and worked
your way down, down to the narrow but thickly carpeted area between the rear seat
and two front seats? You, Chantal, burrowing down back there like some little
frightened animal or tearful child? But it is a grievous tabloidal gesture. It could
hardly be more hurtful to your Papa, who despairs to imagine you now conscious of
nothing whatsoever except the burden of your own pure and quite meaningless
revulsion. It is not how I thought you would behave, Chantal. Surely you cannot hope
to save yourself by lying flat or in the fetal position and bracing yourself with
knees and shoulders and covering your distracted face with your beautiful, small
hands? Alas, the effort is futile, as you must know. But perhaps you are simply
trying to escape your Papa’s voice. Could it be that? You prefer the fine
soft music of our transmission to the truth of what your Papa is saying? But there
is time yet to recover yourself and regain your seat and participate in the
assessment, analysis, of our discussion.

After all, you are nearly twenty-five years old.
And I confess I found your sobbing more tolerable than this sudden convulsive state
of withdrawal. But can’t you see that this collapse of yours is, at the very
least, an extreme distraction? Think of it, Chantal, we may not be so fortunate on
the next turn.

But here it is,
cher ami:
my own dear Chantal lying face down
behind us. How much worse it is for my poor child than I imagined. And only a few
days ago I watched from our bedroom window as below in the otherwise empty courtyard
Chantal, fresh from her riding lesson and dressed in her whipcord britches and black
boots, emerged from this very automobile, alone except for her mother’s
Afghan which she was holding on a leather leash. The cobblestones like loaves of
moldy bread, the long beige-colored car, the dog with his silken brown and white
coat ruffling in the afternoon’s cool breeze, the small and quick-moving
woman with her dark hair, olive complexion, black riding boots, and dwarfed by the
dog—it was a sight I could not help but admire, safe as I was from the long
waves of regret which that same scene would have inspired in me in years past. I was
still aware that Chantal’s energetic presence below in the courtyard only
heightened all the more the abandoned quality I especially appreciate in my
wife’s chateau, as if one could catch a glimpse of a large modern car left
standing empty inside the iron gates of the very castle where the sleeping princess
lies in all her pallor. I thought of it from my place at
the
window. But what most held my attention was the sheer vigor of the young woman below
with the dog. How tight she was in her small body, I thought, and in her dark
complexion how very different she was from our own fair and slowly sauntering
Honorine. Yes, Chantal takes her small size and rose-and-olive beauty from her
grandmother, that woman of diminutive regal shape and Roman coloring. How odd that
not a trace of the old woman’s alluring decadence is to be found in the
features of our Honorine.

But now she has collapsed, the “porno brat” who became
my child of the Renaissance. A few days ago I watched her crossing the courtyard
quickly, happily, somewhat disheveled from her ride. The tall thin dog drifted from
view to the clicking of my daughter’s boot heels. She abandoned the car, this
car, with the door on the driver’s side wide open. I smiled. Now Chantal lies
behind us, her body crumpled on the floor of the car like the corpse of an abducted
socialite. She is a cameo nearly destroyed. And yet need I say that regret is not at
all the same as grief?

I have two significant regrets. Only two. The first is that the
crash soon to be reported as having occurred near the little village of La Roche
must result inevitably in fire; the second is that the remains of the crash must
inevitably disappear.

No doubt such considerations are not important.
Even now I can hear your argument that these refinements of mine are for you nothing
more than trivia elevated to the condition of impossible torment, or that at a time
like this my extensive articulation of violent, unseemly details is nothing more
than a kind of unfair tugging on the fishhooks already embedded beneath your skin.
But of course I would by no means accept the notion of “trivia”; the
nature and extent of physical damage can never be trivial, even when measured
against the irreplaceable loss of three lives. And surely I need not remind you that
I am serious and hence not at all interested in the infliction of minor
psychological injury. On the other hand, if you were in fact thinking, if you were
but a little more engaged in our discussion, then you might well retort that for a
man who has pre-empted absolute or, we might say, whiplash control over this much
immediate last-minute life, all speculative fantasy becomes a mere glut of
self-indulgence. What, you ask, is he not satisfied with things as they are, with
all the tangible evidence of the terrible blow he is dealing his daughter, his
closest friend, himself, but what he must inflate himself still further and so must
invent in his own eyes, arrange within his own head, even that context of
circumstances in which the three of us will no longer exist? But he goes too far,
you say, too far. Well, it would be a pretty speech if you could make it. But even
if you did reply to me with some such dubious form of logic, my own reply, prompt
and good-natured as it would clearly be, would convince even you
that it is this idea precisely that lies at the dead center of our night together:
that nothing is more important than the existence of what does not exist; that I
would rather see two shadows flickering inside the head than all your flaming
sunrises set end to end. There you have it, the theory to which I hold as does the
wasp to his dart. Without it, we would have no choice but to diffuse the last of our
time together by passing between us the fuming bottle of cognac bought and freshly
opened for just this occasion. But thanks to my theory we are spared such an
intolerable waste. There shall be no slow maudlin loss of consciousness for you, for
me. After all, my theory tells us that ours is the power to invent the very world we
are quitting. Yes, the power to invent the very world we are quitting. It is as if
the bird could die in flight. And unless we exercise this power of ours we merely
slide toward the pit feet first, eyes closed, slack, and smiling in our pathetic
submission to an oblivion we still hope to understand. But for us it will be
different,
cher ami
. Quite different.

And yet I must say it. I regret the fire. Here even I am helpless. My
theory does not apply to exploding gasoline. And I am sure that you will appreciate
the fact that my attitude toward the burning of our demolished car has nothing to do
with any personal feeling of mine against roadside cremation. On that score I am
indifferent. But if I were able to prevent that burst
of flame,
to obliterate the sparks before their very inception and so stop the hot flame, the
sheet of light, the fire that will turn to brightness the entire area of wall,
wreckage, gasoline spreading and thus extending still further the circle of this
most intense visibility—yes, if I could eliminate the flames I would. Yes, it
seems to me that if we preserve this scene in all its magnitude and with all its
confounding of disparate substances and with its same volume of sound, but remove
from it the convention of fierce heat and unnaturally bright light, so that this
very explosion occurs as planned but in darkness, total darkness, there you have the
most desirable rendering of our private apocalypse. Announced by violent sound and
yet invisible, except for the glass scattered like perfect clear grains across an
entire field —what splendor, what a perfect overturning of ordinary
expectation. The unseen vision is not to be improved upon.

Well, you will understand that in much the same way I would prefer
that the remains of our crash go undiscovered, at least initially. I would prefer
that these remains be left unknown to anyone and hence unexplored, untouched. In
this case we have at the outset the shattering that occurs in utter darkness, then
the first sunrise in which the chaos, the physical disarray, has not yet
settled—bits of metal expanding, contracting, tufts of upholstery exposed to
the air, an unsocketed dial impossibly squeaking in a clump of thorns— though
this same baffling tangle of springs, jagged edges
of steel,
curves of aluminum, has already received its first coating of white frost. In the
course of the first day the gasoline evaporates, the engine oil begins to fade into
the earth, the broken lens of a far-flung headlight reflects the progress of the sun
from a furrow in what was once a field of corn. The birds do not sing, clouds pass,
the wreckage is warmed, the human remains are integral with the remains of rubber,
glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has
begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is
snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then
daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a
scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the
essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design
inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design. Until
one day two boys stumble upon the incongruity of a once beautiful automobile smashed
in the barnyard of an abandoned farm. For them the spectacle yields only delight: a
little plastic-coated identity card winking in the sunlight, dead leaves nesting in
the wheels which lie on their sides, a green shoot growing from the mouth of the
rusty and half-crumpled fuel tank. Indeed, this spectacle now exists merely for
them, merely for the pleasure of two boys in ill-fitting trousers and wooden shoes.
But who better might we have as witnesses?

Well, it is impossible. It is not to be. Nothing
will prevent our sudden incandescence in the night sky. And then we shall have blue
lights, motorcycles, radio communications, the arrival of several of our little
white ambulances. By dawn they will be hauling apart our wreckage with hooks and
chains, and by noon of that first day there will be nothing left but the smell of
gasoline and the dark signs of a recently extinguished fire. They will make notes,
take photographs, climb through the elbows of hot metal, and then tow it all away
with their clumsy trucks.

How sad it is,
cher ami
. What a brutal sport.

Perhaps if you make an effort to remain still, to position your arms
so as to allow your chest room enough for its greatest possible expansion, and then
breathe in slow conscious cadences through your open mouth, perhaps if you undertake
these measures you will be more comfortable. But it is an unfortunate development,
this partial suffocation resulting from that dreadful constricting of the bronchial
tubes. I can imagine the growing panic of not being able to breathe,
cher
ami
. You have my sympathies. Apparently your various nervous and
physiological systems are quite de-determined not to be outdone by all the failures,
impairments, of our poor Chantal. Now that the seizure is upon you, so to speak, I
do remember your bitter
description of yourself as an infrequent
but nonetheless violent sufferer of this diabolical chest affliction. Generally it
is a childhood illness, is it not? But the unfortunately unavoidable extremity of
artificial heat, the closeness of the air around us, the effect of your cigarettes
on a chest condition as sensitive as this one is, and of course the severe
emotionalism of your present state —no doubt all this is conducive to one of
your infrequent attacks, as you call them, of thick and heavily labored breathing.
And then the whole thing is circular, is it not? The greater the pain, the greater
the weight bearing down on your chest, the louder that dreadful rasping sound (it is
indeed a curiously annoying sound,
cher ami)
, the greater your own fury
which, being directed at the self, of course, only gives still greater impetus to
the whole wheezing machine.

Well, you have my sympathies. The onset of this condition of yours,
with its promise of facial discoloration and even loss of consciousness so evident
in every rattling breath you take, must certainly come as the final outrage, like
eczema on top of leprosy. And unless I am mistaken, by now you are quite wet with
perspiration. I suppose the body expresses what the mind refuses to tolerate, which
probably says something about my own single lung and satisfactory respiratory
system. But I would give you relief if it were in my power. Fields of oxygen, the
smell of a blue sky. . . I wish I could give them to you,
cher ami
. As
it is, I am certainly going to find it harder to hear your voice, while for you
it will be much more difficult to concentrate on anything but
these increasing indications of expiring breath. But perhaps you should remember
that it is only the rarest person who is not in one sense or another gasping for
air.