Travesty (8 page)

Let me repeat: you do not want me to take you seriously but only to
heed your shouts in the dark, which is why for the first time in your life you are
not only wheezing but wheezing on the very brink of savagery. You are strangling in
the ill-concealed savagery of your resistance. But you know my position. It will not
change. Surely I must be able to strike that one slight blow that will cause all
your oppressive defenses to fall, to disappear, leaving you free indeed to share
equally in the responsibility I have assumed, short-lived or not.

As it so happens, this particular argument of yours is just as obvious
but perhaps a little more interesting than the rest, and I have long ago faced it
studiously. Some men, or so goes this line of reasoning, search with uncanny
directness for what they most fear to find. We rush off to die precisely because
death’s terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it
is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future
moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded
experience itself provides relief. We are so consumed by what
we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it. “Now” becomes better
than “later.” We run to the ax instead of allowing ourselves to be
dragged. And so forth. And as one of the few interesting efforts to make sense of
suicide (except for the clinical, to which I do not subscribe) this particular
argument of yours has its appeal. We have heard it before, we have listened, it has
a good ring. We can imagine the shoe fitting. It is possible, it is exactly the kind
of paradoxical behavior that engages all but the bumpkins. And who knows? Perhaps it
has cut short the lives of a few bumpkins as well.

But this one is not the lever to pry me from my purpose. My clarity is
genuine, not false, while my dread, as you in your pathetic hope imagine it, does
not exist. What more can I say? I respect your theory; I respect the fear from which
you yourself are suffering (though it oppresses me horribly, horribly); perhaps it
would be better for all concerned if just this once I could find you in the right
and could hear the shell cracking, so to speak, and all at once find myself overcome
with fear and so pull to the side of the road, thus ending our journey, and in rain
and darkness sit sobbing over the wheel. Then I could take Chantal’s place
back there on the floor and slowly, slowly, you could drive the three of us to Tara.
In that case you would take to your bed for two days, Chantal would return to her
riding lessons, I would follow your lead to the asylum that effected your famous
cure.

So it would go, if you were in the right. But you
are not. If I could discover that my clarity is a sham and that I am afraid of death
and have devised the entirety of our glassy web because of that same fear of death,
I would give myself happily to sobbing over the wheel and spend the rest of my days
(after undertaking the cure) in trying to make restitution to you and Chantal. But I
can make no such discovery, because there is no such discovery for me to make. Of
course I have my qualms. Who would not? But as for this maniacal dread of death that
would explain my planning, my determination, my mounting exhilaration as well as my
need for a couple of companions, witnesses, supporters to accompany me in the final
flash of panic—well, it is unknown to me, your maniacal dread.

But let me be honest. Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of
committing a final and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early
manhood, and that drew me with so much conviction and compassion to those grainy,
tabloidal, photographic renderings of bodies uniquely fixed, but nonetheless fixed,
in their own deaths. And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with
the cut string I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued
by what I defined as the fear of no response. It is true. I have nothing to hide. In
those days (needless to say I was then no sensualist) I required recognition from
girls behind counters, heroes in stone, stray dogs. Let a policeman dip his stick in
the wrong
direction and I suffered chills in the spine. The frown
was my
bête noire
. If the world did not respond to me totally,
immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then I did not
exist—or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be
recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved,
loved, which is what I most demanded. But no more. The heat of those feelings is
quite gone. I have long since known what it is to be loved. Now, tonight, I want not
relief but purity.

But of course I have just now asked you for “one moment of
genuine response.” So you see how close you have come to the mark.

I do not know why that figure of speech (the kneeling marksman, the
drawn bow, the golden arrow) reminds me so insistently of little Pascal. But so it
does, the great naked hunter calling forth the little child like a voice from the
shadows. Perhaps little Pascal was destined to become a larger-than-lifesize hunter,
naked (except for the silver bow, the golden arrow) and stalking his invisible
victim among the white boulders beneath a vast sky of unchanging blue. At least I
always saw the grown man in little Pascal. By the time he died, when he was not yet
three years of age, he had already become a child god, an infant Caesar. Yes, he had
already attained his true character by the time he died.

It is a pity that you had no children. So much
intimacy with Chantal surely precludes your thinking of her as your own child. But
perhaps it is time for you and me to share Pascal—since anything is possible,
and since nothing matters, and since he only exists among the white boulders. But it
is true: Pascal has been dead for so many years that he might as well be your son as
well as mine. What’s that? You long ago decided against fathering children?
But everything considered, how right you were. Now that you mention it, the thought
of a child surviving you is out of the question. But of course little Pascal
survives nothing at all.

And yet who can fail to eulogize our infant Caesar?

He was a fat and contrary tyrant,
cher ami
, and in his third
year he began each of our days by subjugating Honorine and me, and even Chantal, to
the essential paradox of his fatness, his pink skin, the crown of authority with
which he masked his sweet nature. Admittedly, Honorine is not small. But neither is
she large in her bones, in her flesh. How then did she mother a child so beautiful
in his naked weight, so fatly and gently erotic for all his recalcitrance and
pretended ferocity? We shall never know. He was his own source, I often thought, and
he is gone. But I saw his little fat body on the spit as often as I saw it crowned;
in the chubbiness and gleam of his totally sweet and spoiled nature he was that
desirable, that strong.

Yes, he came to Honorine and me with every sunrise, bold and bare,
having stripped off his white
nightshirt and wearing only his
buttery skin and disapproving frown and air of infant determination. With every
sunrise he pulled away the bedclothes not from me but from Honorine, who was always
his happy match for nudity. Perhaps you are not able to visualize those mornings.
But I see them still: dawn at the window, sunlight falling across our bed from that
window and from the rose and plum-colored tapestry on our bedroom wall, the sound of
distant bells, the scent of coffee, and the birds in the air and already the small
automobiles congregating somewhere on the cobblestones. And then the entrance of
Pascal, the open door, the light winking from the long glass handle, and our little
naked son approaching us with his pink cheeks and pouting underlip and little penis
which Honorine always used to touch with the tip of her finger, as if that tiny
sexual organ belonged not to Pascal but to the winged infant cast in bronze. You
must see such a morning as clearly as I do,
cher ami
, if only to know that
in fact I am not a person who despises life. Quite the contrary.

But in he would come, pouting, wordless, making his little belly
fatter than ever (as might some exotic fish with air) and in my own arousal from
sleep I would see his bare plumpness and the light in his fine-spun golden hair. And
the lip, the beautiful underlip thrust out and moist in his unmistakable message:
that he was the joy of all who saw him, but in return there was nothing in all the
world to give him joy. Too ripe, too beautiful, too lordly, pleasing but never
pleased—
such was the fate and character he had created
for himself at that early age. But there he would be, the brown eyes filled with
accusation, the sunlight flooding the spot where he stood, the tiny spigot crooked
and gleaming in the base of the belly. In that moment the faun in the tapestry would
quiver at the sight of him and the silver dove on Honorine’s commode would
fly.

Well, it was always the same. He would wait until I had had my awesome
look at him and until Honorine had begun to smile in her feigned sleep and to make
her soft welcoming sound, and then cloaked in all his slow assurance he would march
across the carpet and reach out one chubby hand and pull the bedclothes from his
mother’s nude, youthful body. For a moment the two of us, Pascal and I, would
gaze on Honorine, who would continue to conceal her wakefulness and, for our sakes,
would incline her cheek toward the pillow and arch her back and stretch out an arm
and luxuriate in the aroma of her night’s perfume.

Do you see her? Do you see Pascal and me? Are you listening?

Well, after that moment, and as if he had received an invisible and
all-important sign of acquiescence from Honorine, little Pascal would begin to
climb. Yes, with great deliberation he would climb onto our bed (the very same
antiquity in which at present Honorine lies sleeping) and then climb onto his
mother’s warm and well-shaped body. Yes, with frowning difficulty he would
mount that body, straddle the hips, seat himself,
position
himself, until his rosy and sturdy little buttocks were firmly, squarely in place
atop Honorine’s cluster of purple grapes. There he would sit. Enthroned. And
he was quite aware of how he was sitting and how thoroughly his own baby flesh
covered and cushioned the flesh of his mother’s grapes. I knew what he knew
because there was no mistaking the way he would glance in my direction, settle his
weight, and then raise his chin in a perfect gesture of self-satisfied defiance.

Then Honorine would open her eyes, she would laugh, she would seize
both his hands in hers, with her hips and stomach she would imitate the gait of a
trotting horse. Again and again she would murmur
cheri
and beg for a kiss,
which he always refused to give her. As for me, at that moment I would wish my
little Pascal a good morning, to which inevitably he replied that it was not a good
morning but a bad one.

There he would sit holding us in the power of his princely manner and
infant eroticism until at last and rubbing her eyes, poor Chantal would appear
obediently to haul him away.

How did Honorine survive his death? How did I? But if he had lived,
his little body growing and his infant eroticism maturing into impressive
masculinity and his head day by day swelling to the round of the laurels, still he
would have fared no better than poor Chantal. Actually, he would have fared much
worse.

But I myself cloaked his little stone cross in satin. So it is not as
if I have never known what it is to grieve.
But perhaps I am the
man little Pascal might have become had he lived. Perhaps it is he who inhabits me
now in his death. Who knows?

You will not believe it, but only this morning I visited for the
last time my one-legged doctor. Yes, only hours ago and on this of all days, I held
up my end of our yearly medical rendezvous. But I am attentive to your every nuance,
even to the nuances of your stubborn silence, and now despite your misery and
against your will you are objecting to yourself that my concern for my health on the
day of my premeditated death (and yours, and Chantal’s) is worse, much worse,
than rabbits, rain, the invisible motion picture camera with its wet distended lens,
the emotional orchestration of the radio you refused to hear. At first glance you
would appear to be right: illusory circumstances are beginning to justify your
horrified contempt for a man who might be engaged in committing drastic actions not
from clarity and calculation but merely to satisfy his inmost urge to saw away on
the tremulous violin of his self-love. And yet once again you are wrong. Wrong.
Because it was not I who was responsible for this morning’s appointment with
the crippled physician but rather that elderly woman with the girlish body who is
the doctor’s nurse and secretary combined. It is true: she notified me of
today’s appointment long after I myself had figuratively torn today’s
blank page from my
appointment book. And what do you think of the
fact that the doctor’s rooms are situated directly across from the very
restaurant which you yourself happened to choose for your dinner this evening with
Chantal, the doctor’s rooms and the restaurant facing each other on opposite
sides of that same little public garden where the lovers sit holding hands on the
cold benches? In other words, this morning while waiting for my medical examination
to commence, and stripped to the waist in anticipation of needles and the
doctor’s archaic X-ray machine, I myself stood at a dusty window in shivering
contemplation of the exact same suffering old palm tree which you and Chantal
regarded this evening over your soup and wine. But you are already familiar with the
pleasure I take in these alignments which to me are the lifeblood of form without
meaning.

At the appointed hour, then, I touched the bell button, noting as
usual the pathetic opulence of the brass nameplate, and climbed the obviously
little-used cold stones to the almost empty room where I inhaled the first trace of
that antiseptic smell in which in a few moments I would be engulfed. I heard the air
stirring in the rest of his chambers, noted in several chipped, white ceramic ash
trays the week-old remains of his dead cigarettes. Of course I was well acquainted
with his habit of dragging himself to this very room and seating himself and smoking
his cigarettes, reading one of the ancient journals, the doctor waiting alone in the
room intended for patients who were never there.