Winter of artifice; three novelettes (3 page)

Doubt. She turned this word in the palm of her dreaming hands, like some tiny hieroglyph with meaning on four sides.

From some little tunnel of obscure sensations there came almost imperceptible signs of agitation.

She packed hurriedly, crushing the hat with the feather, breaking his presents.

Driving iskst in her very large, too large, her movie star car, driving fast, too fast away from pain, the water obscured her vision of the road and she set the wipers in motion. But it was not rain that clouded the windows.

In her movie star apartment there was a small turning stairway like that of a lighthouse leading to her bedroom, which was watched by a tall window of square glass bricks. These shone like a quartz cave at night. It was the prism which threw her vision back into seclusion again, into the wall of the self.

It was the window of the solitary cell of tlie neurotic.

One night when Bruno had written her that he would telephone her that night (he had been banished once again, and once again had tried to reconquer her) because he sensed that his voice might accomplish what his note failed to do, at the moment when she knew he would telephone, she installed a long concerto on the phonograph and climbed the little stairway and sat on the step.

No sooner did the concerto begin to spin than the telephone rang imperatively.

Stella allowed the music to produce its counter-witchcraft. Against the mechanical demand of the telephone, the music spiralled upward like a mystical skyscraper, and triumphed. The telephone was silenced.

But this was only the first bout. She climbed another step of the stairway and sat under the quartz window, wondering if the music would help her ascension away from the warmth of Bruno's voice.

In the music there was a parallel to the conflict which disturbed her. Within the concerto too the feminine and the mascuhne elements were interacting. The trombone, with its assertions, and the flute, with its sinuosities. In this transparent battle the trombone, in Stella's ears and perhaps because of her mood, had a tone of defiance which was almost grotesque. In her present mood the masculine instrument would appear as a caricature!

And as for the flute, it was so easily victimized and overpowered. But it triumphed ultimately because it left an echo. Long after the trombone had had its say, the flute continued its mischievous, insistent tremolos.

The telephone rang again. Stella moved a step farther up the stairs. She needed the stairs, the window, the concerto, to help her reach an inaccessible region where the phone might ring as any mechanical instrument, without reverberating in her being. If the ringing of the telephone had caused the smallest tremor through her nerves (as the voice of Bruno did) she was lost. Fortunate for her that the trombone was a caricature of masculinity, that it was an inflated trombone, drovwiing the sound of the telephone. So she smiled one of her eerie smfles, pixen and vixen too, at the mascuHne pretensions. Fortunate for her that the flute persisted in its debcate undulations, and that not once in the concerto did they marry but played in constant opposition to each other throughout.

The telephone rang again, with a dead, mechanical persistence and no charm, while the music seemed to be pleading for a subtlety and emotional strength which Bruno was incapable of rivalling. The music alone was capable of climbing those stairways of detachment, of breaking like the waves of disturbed ocean at her feet, breaking there and foaming but without the power to suck her back into the life with Bruno and into the undertows of sufFering.

She lay in the darkness of her white satin bedroom, the mirrors throwing aureoles of false moonlight, the rows of perfume bottles creating false suspended gardens.

The mattress, the blankets, the sheets had a lightness like her own. They were made of the invisible material which had once been pawned off on a gullible king. They were made of air, or else she had selected them out of famihar, weighty materials and then touched them with her aerial hands. (So many moments when her reality was questionable — the time she leaped out of her immense automobile, and there on the vast leather seat lay such a diminutive pocketbook as no woman could actually use, the pocketbook of a midget. Or the time she turned the wheel with two fingers. There is a hghtness which belongs to other races, the race of ballet dancers.)

Whoever touched Stella was left with the tactile memory of down and bonelessness, as after touching the most delicate of Persian cats.

Now lying in the dark, neither the softness of the room nor its whiteness could exorcise the pain she felt.

Some word was trying to come to the surface of her being. Some word had sought all day to pierce through like an arrow the formless, inchoate mass of incidents of her life. The geological layers of her experience, the accumulated faces, scenes, words and dreams. One word was being churned to the surface of all this torment. It was as if she were going to name her greatest enemy. But she was struggling with the fear we have of naming that enemy. For what crystallized simultaneously with the name of the enemy was an emotion of helplessness against him! What good was naming it if one could not destroy it and free one's self? This

feeling, stronger than the desire to see the face of tlie enemy, almost drowned the insistent word into oblivion again.

What Stella whispered in the dark with her foreign accent enhancing strongly, markedly the cruelty of the sound was:

ma soch ism

Sochi Och! It was the och which stood out, not ma or ism but the ochi which was like some primitive exclamation of pain. Am, am I, am I, am I, am I, whispered Stella, am I a masochist?

She knew nothing about the word except its current meaning: "voluntary seeking of pain." She could go no further into her exploration of the confused pattern of her life and detect the origin of the suffering. She could not, alone, catch the inception of the pattern, and therefore gain power over this enemy. The night could not bring her one step nearer to freedom. . . .

A few hours later she watched on the screen the story of the Atlantis accompanied by the music of Stravinski.

First came a scene like a Paul Klee, wavering and humid, delicate and full of vibrations. The blue, the green, the violet were fused in tonalities which resembled her feeling, all fused together and so difficult to unravel. She responded with her answering blood rhythms, and with the same sense she always had of herself possessing a very small sea, something which received and moved responsively in rhythm. As if every tiny cell were not separated by membranes, as if she were not made of separate nerves, sinews, blood vessels, but one total fluid component which could flow into others, divine their feelings, and flow back again into itself, a component which could be easily moved and penetrated bv others like water, like the sea.

When she saw the Paul Klee scene on the screen she instantly dissolved. There was no more Stella, but a fluid component participating at the birth of the world. The paradise of water and softness.

But upon this scene came the most unexpected and terrifying explosion, the explosion of the earth being formed, broken, reformed and broken anew into its famihar shape.

Tliis explosion Stella was familiar with and had expected. It reverberated in her with unexpected violence. As if she had already lived it.

Where had she experienced before this total annihilation of a blue, green and violet paradise, a paradise of welded cells in a perpetual flow and motion, that this should seem like the second one, and bring about such a painful, physical memory of disruption?

As the explosions came, once, twice, thrice, the peace was shattered and blackened, the colors vanished, the earth muddied the water, the annihilation seemed total.

The earth reformed itself. The water cleared. The colors returned. A continent was bom above.

In Stella the echo touched a very old, forgotten region. Through layers and layers of time she gazed at an image made small by the distance: a small figure. It is her childhood, with its small scenery, small climate, small atmosphere. Stella was born during the war. But for the diminutive figure of the child the war between parents — all division and separation — was as great as the world war. The being, small and helpless, was torn asunder by the giant figures of mythical parents striving and dividing. Then it was nations striving and dividing. Tlie sorrow was transferred, en-

larged. But it was the same sorrow: it was the discovery of hatred, violence, hostihty. It was the dark face of the world, which no childhood was ever prepared to receive. In the diminutive and fragile vessel of childhood lies the paradise that must be destroyed by explosions, so that the earth may be created anew. But the first impact of hatred and destruction upon the child is sometimes too great a burden on its innocence. The being is sundered as the earth is by earthquakes, as the soul cracks under violence and hatred. Paradise (the scene of Paul Klee) was from the first intended to be swallowed by the darkness.

As Stella felt the explosions, through the microscope of her emotions carried backwards, she saw the fragments of the dispersed and sundered being. Every little piece now with a separate life. Occasionally, like mercury, they fused, but they remained elusive and unstable. Corroding in the separateness.

Faith and love united her to human beings as a child. She was known to have walked the streets at the age of six inviting all the passersby to a party at her home. She hailed carriages and asked the driver to drive "to where there were many people."

The first explosion. The beginning of the world. The beginning of a pattern, the beginning of a form, a destiny, a character. Something which always eludes the scientists, the tabulators, the detectives. We catch a glimpse of it, like this, through the turmoil of the blood which remembers the seismographic shocks.

Stella could not remember what she saw in the mirror as a child. Perhaps a child never looks at the mirror. Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of itself it does not see itself in the mirror. She sees a child. The child does not remember what he looks like.

Later she remembered what she looked like. But when she

looked at photographs of herself at one, two, three, four, five years, she did not recognize herself. The child is one. At one with himself. Never outside of himself.

She could remember what she did, but not the reflection of what she did. No reflections. Six years old. Seven years old. Eight years old. Eleven. No image. No reflection. But feeling.

In the mirror there never appeared a child. The first mirror had a frame of white wood. In it there was no Stella. A girl of fourteen portraying Joan of Arc, La Dame Aux Camelias, Peri Banu, Carlota, Electra.

No Stella, but a disguised actress multiplied into many personages. Was it in these games that she had lost her vision of her true self? Could she only win it again by acting? Was that why now she refused every role — every role that did not contain at least one aspect of herself? But because they contained only one aspect of herself they only emphasized the dismemberment. She would get hold of one aspect, and not of the rest. The rest remained unlived.

The first miiTor in which the self appears is very large, inlaid in a brown wood wall. Next to it a window pours downa so strong a hght that the rest of the room is in complete darkness, and the image of the girl who approaches the mirror is brought into luminous relief. It is the first spotlight, actually, the first aureole of lighting, bringing her into relief, but in a state of humiliation. She is looking at her dress, a dress of shiny, worn, dark blue serge which has been fixed up for her out of an old one belonging to a cousin. It does not fit her. It is meager, it looks poor and shrunk. The girl looks at the blue dress with shame.

It is the day she has been told at school that she is gifted for

acting. They had come purposely into the class to tell her. She who was always quiet and did not wish to be noticed, was told to come and speak to the Drama teacher before everyone, and to hear the compliment on her first performance. And the joy, the dazzling joy which first struck her was instantly killed by the awareness of the dress. She did not want to get up, to be noticed. She was ashamed of the meager dress, its worn, its orphan air.

She can only step out of this image, this dress, this humiliation by becoming someone else. She becomes Melisande, Sarah Bernhardt, Faust's Marguerite, La Dame Aux Camelias, Thais. She is decomposed before the mirror into a hundred personages, and recomposed into paleness, immobility and silence.

She will never wear again the shrunken worn serge cast-off dress, but she will often wear again this mood, this feeling of being misrepresented, misunderstood, of a false appearance, of an ugly disguise. She was called and made visible to all, out of her shyness and withdrawal, and what was made visible was a girl dressed like an orphan and not in the costume of wonder which befitted her.

She rejects all the plays. Because they cannot contain her. She wants to walk into her own self, truly presented, truly revealed. She wants to act only herself. She is no longer an actress willing to disguise herself. She is a woman who has lost herself and feels she can recover it by acting this self. But who knows her? What playwright knows her? Not the men who loved her. She cannot tell them. She is lost herself. All that she says about herself is false. She is misleading and misled. No one will admit bhndness.

No one who does not have a white cane, or a seeing eye dog will admit bhndness. Yet there is no blindness or deafness as strong as that which takes place within the emotional self.

Seeing has to do with awareness, the clarity of the senses is linked to the spiritual vision, to understanding. One can look back upon a certain scene of life and see only a part of tlie truth. The characters of those we hve with appear with entire aspects missing, like the missing arms or legs of unearthed statues. Later, a deeper insight, a deeper experience will add tlie missing aspects to the past scene, to the lost character only partially seen and felt. Still later another will appear. So that with time, and witli time and awareness only, the scene and the person become complete, fully heard and fully seen.