(Thrusts hand into trousers. A horn blows in the distance. The graffiti papered walls surrounding on all sides flutter in a sudden gust of wind. Dashes head against several different photo advertisements depicting women in submissive positions. Moves hand increasingly faster in many differing positions. A host of onlookers appear on the street and sidewalk, watching in mute ennui. The sound of the horn gradually fades. Pulls soiled towel from back pocket with free hand and places it atop head. Eyes disappear from view of the crowd. The people in the crowd all turn and stare at the billboard with the beckoning blond woman, and, in unison, raise their arms and point their index fingers at her.)
IV
the day of the execution—Castelo’s apology
We should never have traded places. I told you it would not be a good thing. Now look: everything is confused. And if I had it all to do over again, I surely would do it differently. Do you remember the day when we were exposed? The day when I, Castelo, confessed despite your pleas and supplications? It might have been a Wednesday, though any day of the week that I tell you, you will believe.
The villagers of Juarihuantas and the other neighboring villages were gathered around the well. There were so many people, along with their animals and children, that even the seldom used scaffold was creaking under the weight, as there was no more room to stand on the ground. And in the middle you stood, Aviero Ilhavo Figueira de Foz, like a god returned from the heavens or like a proud warrior returned from battle. Your clothes were strange, and to show your newfound wisdom, you spoke the strange language you had learned. How could we simple villagers not be frozen in awe?
Imagine that you were in the place of Castelo, and it was you who had been witness to what Aveiro Ilhavo had done. You would have been hunched outside the window of the prostitute, hidden in the low thicket, your hand buried in your trousers, waiting for Ophiuchus. It was a cloudy night, and the constellations were hidden, but you would have known when your time had arrived: four minutes later than the night before. This night, you were certain, was to be the night when you at last actualized your desires, when you summoned the courage to answer to the beckon of the prostitute, to her long white finger which you fancied first pointed toward you, then curled in toward the chasm between her sun white breasts.
How would you have prepared yourself for what you then would have seen? When you saw me in her sacred chamber, actualizing your long latent love, my chest wet with sticky beads of moisture, my blood welling up; and her, the prostitute, in her thinnest finery, sunk deep into her down chair in wait, preparing herself—what would you have done?
Would you have:
run back to the hut and made wreckage of the earth map?
slowly retracted your hand from your trousers and examined it in the dim light of the moon-refracting cloud mist?
destroyed La Democracie en Amerique by incineration, laceration, or page by page shredding?
repeated your favorite jingle and attempted to quake in laughter, only to find your attempt failing feebly?
confessed?
revealed to the villagers of Juarihuantas the secret, embodying all possible hyperbole of the facts, crying for the long unused scaffold to be set once again into use?
watched as I destroyed you?
The choice is for you to make.
I, Castelo, am the hangman, employed to execute condemned prisoners by hanging.
This is not merely a children’s game in which blank spaces are filled with letters to create a word. For each wrong choice, one body part is added to the stickman on the scaffold; for each correct choice, one letter is revealed.
And now how does the rope about your neck feel? Is it perhaps a bit too snug? For once you say nothing. Are you remembering our separation? You can not see through the black cloth sack, but if you could, you would see the prostitute. She is watching you and me, together on the scaffold. She does not weep. Her skin looks much different in the sunlight. It resembles the harlotskin you once described to me, when I had no desire to hear of it. But you were relentless. You filled me with unneeded descriptions, and now you feel the weight of what words can do.
Third Person On A Bed Built For Five
A declawed cat walks across the living room floor, ashtray strapped to its back. It does not mind the ashtray. It has been to parties before.
When I was seven years until I was ten years old, I would play
chess with my father. I always beat him. We switched to checkers. But I always beat him at that too.
The cat walks back across the room. It scratches its paws on the scratchpost, shag rug on a fat dowel. It walks back across the room in futility.
A frequented mode of expression, he said. Stock.
Do you want white or black?
I am in the dorian mode for the time being, natural minor.
No, he decided not to come, wanted to play with his computer, he and it, together.
What are you writing, Jeremy?
A drunken handwriting analysis to be soon typeset, proofread, published, distributed, and plastered on dormitory walls all over the nation.
Life is great material, said the writer.
Here kitty kitty. Here, kitty.
The great floppy disc upstairs, double sided, double density, formatted, but all his files are empty.
And I felt my glasses, and they were bent, and I didn’t know how they got bent, and I knew that I must have missed something.
He sits there in front of that screen all day. If he’s not trying to write, he’s playing a video game to pass the time.
The declawed cat walks back across the room. —The ashtray is full now.
When I was ten, just before my eleventh birthday, he beat me at checkers. He hasn’t played me since.
And I always find him sitting there, punching the escape key, again, and again, and again.
Do you know how the game of chess began?
And it just brings him back to the main menu, the list.
Check.
He refused to reply abruptly.
Do you have a towel, he ejaculated.
Jeremy sits there with a pen, the thief.
The audience was hesitant, even reluctant, to speak. Jeremy took notes on the silence.
The literature of silence, Samuel Beckett, the scriptures, said the writer.
If you are a writer life is a tax deduction.
He put the cigarette in the center of the table in the ashtray in the slot, carefully. He put it in backwards.
I always ask him to play, but he still won’t.
They used to use real people, moved by dignitaries with megaphones. Kings, popes, et cetera.
When the cigarette burned down, the ashes fell on the fur of the declawed cat. The cat did not notice.
Check.
It’s a new video game, nuclear warfare it’s called. If you lose, you go to the fallout shelter, furnished, stocked, heated, cooled, carpeted, plumbing functional, in the cellar of the library of congress.
Here kitty kitty. Here kitty.
They used to battle for the squares with swords.
Check.
But if you lose, you end up on the surface of the planet, standing in a wheat field, melting down with the cows, the geese, the horses, the termites, the pigs.
The winner got to stand on the square, now claimed for the dignitary.
He just smiles and laughs when I ask him. Someday, he says.
Either way you lose your quarter.
Mate.
I am the third person. I am the third person on a bed built for five. I go to parties often. Two couples and me usually. Where is Jeremy, they asked. Masturbating in the bathroom, taking notes with his spare hand. I bet he’s got a mouthful on us.
Has anybody seen the ashtray, she asked.
Here kitty.
It’s much too quiet here.
Like, it’s hard, she said, you know, like, you know, it’s hard, you know, to make a decision, like, you know? Are you an athlete, she asked.
Does it occur to you that I may be otherwise, in a different mode, the locrian perhaps, the half diminished chord or scale beginning on the seventh degree, on a skew plane, outside, I asked.
Being stood up on a date. Going to a party uninvited.
She laughed.
A skew set of lines in an indeterminate plane.
Creusa
Many times after he had cleaned his brushes and scrubbed the oils and acrylics from his face Romero had walked below her second-floor hotel room on Toulouse Street on his way to his favorite bar, The Dungeon. He had heard the sound of a flute playing solo and had thought the player very skilled. Sometimes Romero would stop and stand and he would listen in the humid delta night for a long time, wiping hot pools of perspiration from his forehead with his forearm. He would listen to the flute whistle low beneath the electric whirring of the cicadas and he would wonder if he could paint the song the flute was playing, if he could make the oils swirl and trill and crescendo and diminuendo and dance like notes of color yet still represent something from nature. If he could paint like the flute played he would paint something very good.
But Romero could not tell what it was about the flute’s songs he liked so much, why they were so different from his own work; he didn’t even know what songs they were, who wrote them, where they came from. Perhaps it was that though the flute was a tangible thing, the music was not. Perhaps that was why he liked the songs. Romero used paint and brushes and canvas and when he was through the finished product was just a rearrangement of things that already existed. But the music, once played, was gone, and existed only in the infinitely resonating echoes of memory and space. Romero did not like to think about this too much because he had not yet even perfected his own imperfect medium, so most of the time he did not stand and listen for a long time.
Romero had never actually seen her, but the nights he walked home from the bar instead of driving he would see her vaguely defined silhouette passing back and forth across the sun-browned window shades and she would still be playing. All the while he had been drinking Scotch in The Dungeon she had been creating, and none of it was left. Why isn’t she playing somewhere where people can enjoy her music, Romero wondered. He had always thought of art as something that needed an audience, that wasn’t complete until it had stood the test of criticism, and that was why he thought it so important that he someday paint a very good painting again and let people see that he still had it in him to paint a very good painting. He had always thought that art wasn’t art until someone else had perceived it, that art could not exist in a vacuum, that creating art for only one’s self was the lowest form of masturbation. But the girl with the flute was not playing for anyone, so far as Romero could tell, and yet he could not think of her music as anything but art. And if what she was doing was art, then what was his work? Many times Romero had stopped in front of her house after drinking many Scotches and listened to her music and he had studied her vaguely defined silhouette.
Romero could not tell from the silhouette how she looked, but strangely it did not seem to matter how she looked.
One night Romero decided to walk home because he needed to think and he did not want to go back to the house just yet and he was still very drunk. The streets were not quiet and he could not tell the buzz of cicadas and mosquitoes from the buzz of electric wires and neon lights. Cars passed by and the drivers did not know who he was only that he was a man who was drunk and a man who was walking. Romero tried not to listen to the sounds of tires thumping into pot holes and prostitutes calling out of windows to other men on the streets and people laughing and sometimes not laughing. Romero was a painter and he was used to seeing and not listening, but tonight he tried not to listen and the more he tried the more he listened and all he wanted was to not hear.
Romero did not hear the flute when he reached her hotel. Her light was on but there was no silhouette and no music and still he could hear only street sounds and he did not want to hear them. He stood outside and tried not to be drunk but he was drunk anyway and still she would not play the flute. He might have said something but he could not tell if he had or not. Romero sat on the sidewalk, his back against a cold iron lightpost, and he waited for her to play.
She did not play and Romero did not know what to do because he wanted to hear her play so he walked into the lobby and up the rotting and splintering wooden stairs and he did not like the way the stairs creaked as if they would not hold his weight. He walked down the corridor and stopped at the door he thought was hers and he knocked twice.
“You may come in,” came a female voice.
Romero opened the door and saw her for the first time. She sat on the bed with the flute in her lap and her feet did not touch the plywood floor. The bed was not made. She wore a long black dress and her ankles did not show. Her hair was long and stringy and bleached blond with black roots and her eyebrows were shiny black. Her eyes were painted with a great deal of makeup, not like a whore, but like an actress who had not yet cleaned up after a performance on the stage.
“You’re not playing tonight,” Romero said.
“I am Greek,” she said.
“You play very wonderfully.”
“Tonight I do not play.”
“I would like it very much if you did.”
“You have heard me before. You do not need to hear the flute tonight.”
“Tonight I especially need to hear the flute.”
“I cannot play for you to listen.”
“I am Juan Romero. I am a painter.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am Creusa and tonight I do not play the flute.”
Romero sat down in a chair and asked her if she had anything to drink and she said yes she did, she had rum. It was not good rum but it was rum and they poured drinks and they drank.
Romero wanted to paint her. He wanted to paint her with her flute and paint the music too. He drank more rum and wondered how he would do it and he thought of the painting of the whale-spouts in The Dungeon and how he did not like it now.
Creusa had not looked beautiful at first, she was short-legged and short-bodied and unathletic and her skin was the same bleached color as her hair and her skin and her hair were whiter than the exposed sheets of her bed. But now Romero studied her figure as if he were going to paint it and he saw that she had the figure of a Reubens woman or a Dürer woman and even her plumpness was very beautiful. To paint her, Romero thought, I would have to paint like she plays the flute. When I paint a subject the subject ceases to exist and only the painting remains and the painting is not the subject anymore but only paint and canvas. But to paint Creusa correctly I would have to take something from her and put it into the canvas and paint and perhaps I can not do that. She can play the flute and the music is both her self and music at the same time; but a painting—can it be both paint and her at the same time also? Juan Romero poured Creusa another rum and he poured himself another rum.
“Play your flute for me.”
“I can only play if you do not listen. Promise not to listen and I will play.”
“I promise.”
“Then I will play,” she said. “But I am not playing for you and if you listen you will not hear what I play.”
“I won’t listen.”
She lifted the silver flute to her lips and closed her eyes and her eyeshadow glittered in the lamplight and she tilted her head down and Juan Romero watched. She held the flute in her fingers more delicately than he had ever held a brush and she blew air over the flute and the flute made no note but Romero heard the air hissing low and sure and it sounded as beautiful as a note.
She pulled the flute away and opened her
eyes and she looked at Romero. “You’re listening,” she said.
“No I’m not,” he said.
“Stop listening to my music.”
“Yes,” Romero said.
She played again and Juan Romero tried not to listen. Again she blew a long breath of air over the mouthpiece, but this time Romero listened to other things. He heard footsteps in the corridor outside the door and he heard a bottle break below on the street. He heard her take in air and he imagined he could hear her lungs filling beneath her dress. Someone coughed in the room next door and a door slammed shut. Romero picked at his index finger with his thumbnail and he heard the click of flesh peeling.
She was playing a long note now and he tried not to listen but it wasn’t working. No matter how hard he tried to listen to certain sounds the note she was playing seemed to be the base of them all, the tone underlying all the noises of the hotel, of the city, of everything Romero could hear. She began playing different long notes, holding them longer than Romero imagined possible, especially for such a small woman. It seemed that her notes were the key in which all sounds were played and each time she changed notes the key of all sounds changed at her command.
She played faster and faster. Romero kept trying not to listen and he drank more rum and he did not feel very drunk anymore. He heard her fingertips sliding across the keys and he heard the keys slapping against the pads of her flute. He heard her take in air and he heard the hiss of her breath across the mouthpiece. The vibration of his ears seemed to make their own sound and the sound he heard was not only Creusa’s music nor Creusa’s breath but every sound humming through the New Orleans night. Romero knew that even if he wanted to he could not listen to her music alone now. Her music was no longer isolated, it was a part of something much larger. Romero could not listen much longer.
14 Fictional Positions Page 4
