by Lee, Tanith
The lantern, a huge ungainly object, swung for a few moments, then settled itself.
It was a filthy room, into which a rainbow had fallen, splashing everywhere, even into the webs of spiders.
With the erosion of time, which can eat at the edges even of the most visual memory, Cuerca’s Room is difficult to describe, at least in logical terms. It acted instead on the optic nerve, the viscera.
What did I see first? There was a stripe of pure green that hung and blazed as if with green fire, and rippled as if with green water. And over there, another stripe, this one orange, that did similar things. And there was a crimson square that kept immobile and glowed like the core of a hearth. And curves of deep blue and purple that twitched and waited, and a slinking manipulative yellow, like a leopard.
He didn’t advise me. He let me find my own way. I began to see in greater depth.
He, it could only have been he, had painted shapes on the walls in vivid opaque color. And over them and beside them and before them had been hung or slung, or nailed, or simply piled, objects that were of those same colors, either exactly, or in some corresponding color-echo. A bunch of green enamel grapes suspended from a green cord before the green stripe, an emerald glass pitcher, its neck smashed off and instead surmounted with a green-painted egg, stood below, jade grapes on a plate of green faint enough to seem transparent. Against the red oblong rags of a tattered vermilion banner from some war, a red cup holding an artificial rose like blood. Where the yellow uncoiled, a piece of ochre ivory, shaped like the fretboard from some giant’s guitar, nestled in a cascade of broken yellow glass. Against the blue a woman’s blue shoe, its little heel caught in a sapphire comb. A cluster of dried oranges choked by necklaces of chipped amber melted into the orange circle...
The old man, Cuerca, went by me, and unceremoniously and unerringly shoved the purplish grape-flowers between the violet colored jug without a handle and the chunk of raw amethyst beside the hoop of purple paint.
The expensive and the worthless clustered in each group as one. No hierarchies among these items, lost or abandoned, stolen or thrown out on rubbish heaps, all eventually pilfered by him, by Patxi Cuerca, brought here and each made part of its correct entity.
To outline all this is only to invite incomprehension and scorn. How could such an eccentric, childish medley convey anything? It did. No doubt the dark, flooded selectively by the big cracked lantern, caused some of the effect. But that hot day maybe my eyes had been thirsty. And now they drank.
The lamp flickered, some insect or cobweb dropping in there. I saw the yellow shape, crusted with its glisten, swing quietly sidelong to seize the blue shape – a woman, dancing – in its mouth. How gracefully she fell. But the red shape, stretching from oblong to square, and back to oblong, sprouted a thousand red roses, twining and knotting with their ruby thorns. The purple shape was a galleon’s sail, marked with an indecipherable device. The orange shape was the ship’s bodywork. They flowed together and sailed over the green shape of sea, which spangled and rioted with darting jade fish, spraying up the emerald foam—
But I thought of the spice and mold I could still smell, of drugs grown and harvested from the petrified courtyard, which formerly had been, had it, a Garden of Earthly Delights?
I blinked, once, twice. The shapes were static. Almost. Priceless and worthless. Unalive and living. They only shimmered a little, as the lamp had. Flicked a blue sequined eyelid or a sinuous tail. One last minuscule wave broke over the amber figurehead, who pursed her lips, before her face lapsed back to necklaces. The purple sail shivered as it flattened out against the wall. A single petal fell through the roses. Became again a broken red bead.
Quite suddenly then the old man, the magician, turned round, and the finale of his magic show was accomplished.
I saw him dazzling clear, meshed between the streams and orifices of colors. Like the salamander which had emerged from the chipped cherub, the real man now stepped free of his shell. Cuerca was young. He was straight, tall, lean, his shoulders back, his body planted as fluidly as an athlete’s on his strong long legs. He wore his now inky clothes only in affectation, to match the ink-black feathers of his thick smooth hair, the jet stones of his eyes. His unlined face was handsome, nose aquiline, mouth long, slender and aloof. In his beautiful hands, articulately strong enough to rip out any beating heart, he held a burnished flame of knife. But you could not be afraid at this. You wanted all, and therefore anything and everything he might do. And he said to me, in perfect, only-slightly accented French (while the light glinted on his white teeth), “Go along now. Get out. You’ve seen. Go and rescue your friend from Marija. Remember. I am Patxi Cuerca. Never forget you have seen me, and this room.”
And then, weightless and careless, as if casting a paper, he tossed the knife over my head. It thunked into some soft place in the wall behind me.
Disarranged by its motion, the lamplight jumped again, the rainbow leapt, and all its pieces, with the shadow, came down on him, and covered him up. He was old once more, dirty and crippled, and crazy. So I turned and went out, and in the courtyard the dragon too had slid back into its stony carapace. The liquid it had spat was already dry.
Although I rescued him from Marija, Georges did not forgive me. She had been telling him he was her long lost son, it seemed, and threatening him with the rich (seventeen olive trees) betrothed he had deserted, telling him she would bring him wine and he must drink it.
Perhaps he was her son. After all, I had seen the Room, and I had seen Cuerca grow young again, and then old again. Metamorphosis riddled the place.
No doubt Cuerca’s youth was only a trick of the light, as they say. Or drugs burning. Or the dazzling after-images of all the colors sprawled about in there.
Around thirteen years later – also long ago now – I saw a photograph of him as a young man, in a book to do with the art of that torrid southern region. For of course he had been an artist of repute, when young. Abstract paintings, sculptures and mechanical toys not for children, peculiar gardens even, were credited to his invention. He did, in the picture, look remarkably like what I’d glimpsed, or imagined, standing among his last creation, his Room. (The book did not mention, or did not know about, the Room.) But probably, even by the time I opened the book and saw him there, he was himself dead.
As Georges and I tramped back to our rented house in the ash of the afternoon, he swore at me and I at him. Any liking was gone, and any tenderness. Which wouldn’t, naturally, prevent an orgy of famished coupling for another two days and three nights.
When we passed below the poplar tree, the crow had returned there. It sat far up, raising its disheveled head to the over-gilded sky and rasping out a succession of caws.
Georges at once transferred his vitriol, or some of it, to the crow. “If I had a gun I’d shoot it!” And then to me, “I’d shoot you too, you damned Semite bugger.”
But I only saw Cuerca’s knife as if skimmed over my head; Remember me. Remember me.
Georges, immune to his own repetitions, was scrabbling for another stone. I pushed him hard so he fell flat on the track. When he got up, he followed me in rebellious docility.
“Bloody crow,” he muttered. “Crow-crow-crow. Why do you want to protect it? What use is it? It’s old and diseased and worthless. It’s nothing.”
The crow lifted itself out of the quills of the poplar. It spread its wings and sprang into the sky.
“Look, Georges,” I said. “Do you see? It can fly.”
From a fragmentary MS by Judas Garbah,
collated and adapted by Anna Garber, his sister.
Disturbed By Her Song
Esther Garber & Tanith Lee
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me: all things leave me:
You remain.
Arthur Symons Memory
One
All the time, when she was young, Georgina fell in love with people. Even
occasionally with men; although in that case not sexually. It was around that time also that she began to dream about the green house.
The house (in her dreams) was unalterably located on a sort of rise or slight hill, where it stood alone, while other houses and various buildings lay just below and closely adjacent. These changed from dream to dream. One or two busy roads encircled or ran by the house. Sometimes it was positioned at a T junction, with three, though never a crossroads. Tall trees and a small wild garden surrounded it on every side, but the walls were low, or even in bad repair. And anyway the trees were often winter stripped, and only draped, as if for modesty, with a little ivy. She, and therefore anyone else in the dreams, could see straight over and through to the house.
Architecturally, the house was complex. It had, she thought, a sort of partly Victorian-Edwardian style. There were three (now and then four) stories, and a series of attics. Towers and long verandah-balconies ornamented everything above the ground floor, and there was – usually – a type of verandah terrace along the front of it too. Windows were of various sizes; some, on the upper floors, very long, rounded or square at the tops. Sash windows, or else the kind one threw open in two long panes like wings. At the summit, apart from towers and chimneys, a balustrade ran round corner to corner. Presumably the roof, where flat, might be walked on. The color of the house was nothing to do with paint. It was like that of a young healthy vegetable or fruit, an immature plum, perhaps, or grape, or a tuber of some denomination. The surface was luminously smooth. It looked strokable. Eatable. And over the crowns of its windows and the indecipherable ornamentation along the upper balustrade, a pale magenta showed, intermittently flowing in a definite if irregular pattern. As if ripening.
Georgina was always curious about the house during the dreams, and always recognized it as well. She did not, even so, always go in. When she did she either had a key, or the door had been left ajar. It was always her house, too. There was never any doubt. But it might be a house her dream-self had lived in, and now went to visit, or merely noticed, in passing through the (changeable) area. Or a house she had just purchased and was planning soon to move into. Yet sometimes also she knew, in the dream, it was the dream house she had only ever owned or bought or visited or noted – in other dreams.
Inside it was quite bare, but in good condition. The walls were of a creamy fawn, without faults. The floors of wooden boards were firm and clean, if not a feature, and never polished. A wide and generous staircase though, of dark wooden banisters, wound upward through the house. It had broad unsteep treads that promoted easy steps: you could run up and down it with total safety.
There seemed to be three or four large rooms on the ground floor. Above many more, but the dark wood doors were shut. Light came from somewhere. She did not ever trouble in the dreams to wonder from where. The ceilings were high. But in all her uncountable calls she had never explored any of it, (aside from running up and down stairs) except for twice, and these explorations both of a single upper room.
Nor did she ever find anyone else in the house, save only once.
That hot summer (hotter still in memory?), Georgina was meeting someone just off Oxford Street for lunch. The meetee was a boring man, a director she had known about eighteen months before, when she had been part of the singing chorus for a small theatre production of The Bacchae. The production had been quite good, however – credit where it was due. When she finally reached the restaurant, almost the first thing she would say to him would be, “I just saw Sula Dale working at the perfume counter in Liberty.” “Really? And who’s that? Shula Dade, I mean.” “Sula. Dale.” He was forgetful too: “She was in Bacchae.” “Really?” “Agave,” Georgina helpfully supplied the name of the play’s only female character, aside from the maenad chorus. The director slowly shook his head. “What a pity. A good actress.” He sighed. “Resting, I suppose. Just like us.”
In later years Georgina would give up resting, to work more in the backstage capacity. But in the era of the lunch she spent a lot of time being interviewed and overlooked for small singing parts. Often work gained meant a lot of traveling too. Her last job before the meeting had been in Scotland. The meeting in fact, she had hoped, might lead to a London job, but it did not. And maybe for that reason too, seeing Sula Dale took on a mantle of extra importance. Because after, it seemed better to have had a significant cause of coming into town, and wasting two hours with the boring director, who unluckily turned out to have a physical interest in Georgina and had to be fended off before the third bottle of wine arrived.
Sula was anyway, at least to Georgina, memorable.
She was young to be playing Agave – her stage son, Pentheus, at thirty-five only a year her junior. Yet she had done it well, acted well, and spoken the translated lines in a musical and velvet voice. The horrible last scenes she – as a minor critic had termed it – ravished.
Her hair was probably a natural blonde, light-streaked and silky, her skin clear white. She had the flexive movements of a beautiful snake, an idea her eyes accentuated. They were ‘hazel,’ where darts of green-gold electricity constantly passed through amontillado sherry.
Georgina had, of course, fancied Sula Dale, and admired her skills. But no more than that, really. Throughout the three-week production they had perhaps exchanged less than twenty words, none of them of any import.
Perfume counters tended to make Georgina’s eyes smart. By then in her early thirties, she could detect a chemical undertow to almost every one of the best scents. The same had happened to her with commercially produced chocolate. A shame. In her teens she had often lingered in both areas, inhaling these forbidden fruits. That day though, even as she was marching resolutely by, she glimpsed a slim, strong arm, lightly summer-tanned, and a flick of hair – not blonde but deep henna red. And knew, even before she knew, and turned round. And there was Sula Dale, smiling sweetly at a customer and handing her her purchase and the change, just like scores of others in the store.
There was a gap in custom then, and the other assistant was busy.
“Can I help you?” Sula asked Georgina politely. The sweet, interested smile was an act. But then Sula was an actor.
“Hello—” said Georgina hesitantly – “you’re Sula Dale, aren’t you.”
Sula did that thing some actors do, instinctively sometimes, frequently malice aforethought. She literally backed off a step and composed her features to blank coldness. “Am I?”
“I think so,” said Georgina more firmly. “We were in The Bacchae at the Coachhouse...about two years back.”
“Oh, were we?”
“Well,” said Georgina, trying to minimize the unintended temerity of a chorus member equating her status with that of the female lead, “I was one of the singers. You played Agave, of course.”
Sula loosened a little. She looked now vague rather than guarded. “Oh. Yeah. That one. With Jack – ?”
“Dollington.”
“That’s it. I remember now. God. That place! A dump. And that persistent sneezer on the last night.”
Georgina laughed. “Yes. I’m Ginny Kendry, by the way.”
“Hi. So, how are you?”
“I’m fine, thanks. You?”
“As you see,” said Sula Dale, frowning. “There was a movie deal, but it fell through. So, I’m having some work experience. “
“I’m sorry. I like your hair,” said Georgina. She did not. She had liked Sula’s stripy blondness.
“Did it for the film. They wanted to see it red. Then – zilch.”
“I am sorry. That’s foul.” “Mmm,” said Sula.
Exactly then a customer came over and wanted to ask about some new fragrance whose name Georgina caught as Stupidest – which seemed unlikely. But so many modern names then were weird or eccentric. Georgina pretended to study the scents standing along the counter front, little flagons of Benedictine gold, or opaque blue or crimson flasks. She sprayed a wisp of some tester on her wrist and then wanted to sneeze.
She held it off by thinking of Sula’s caustic comment on the last night audience. This is madness, Georgina thought. Stop pretending and get out. She doesn’t give a flying fuck. She didn’t even want to know my name. Like Stupidest, however, Georgina’s name had undergone translation. (As the customer’s preferred bottle emerged, Georgina saw it was actually called Cupid’s Test. Which was also pretty weird.) ‘Georgina’ had been abbreviated endlessly, both by her succession of dire schools and the rather better musical Academy, and finally by various working acquaintances in the theatre and other venues (once even Glyndebourne) where she had, always in a slight degree, been employed. She was repackaged as Georgie, George, Gina, or even, twice, Gee-Gee.
And all that had subtly yet consistently annoyed her, until at last she always added to an intro, “Ginny, if you like.” Ginny was tolerable. Even quite fun, here and there. “Ginny as in gin? Would you like a Ginny and tonic then, baby?”
The customer had paid with a card, signed and exited left with the awful thin-pink and squirted-cream box of Cupid’s Test – what was it? Some kind of exam for gods?
Georgina or Ginny lifted her head as Sula warily glanced at her. “Sorry,” lied Georgina, who was not, but perhaps should have been, “I’m trying to find something for a friend.”
Sula regarded her with indifference. As a customer, clearly, Georgina did not count. Which must mean Sula did not believe Georgina’s pretense at all.
Nevertheless, “What sort of stuff does she like?” asked Sula.
“Sort of – heavy, musky—” Shut up, thought Georgina to herself. But oh God, too late. Here came Sula Dale with a red flask, a yellow bulb like a scoop of poisoned treacle, and a tall thin menacing shape with a bow around its neck.
One by one Georgina would have to sniff them, even spray them. Her empathic eyes began to water. Presence of mind arrived quickly. “Oh yes!” she cried in false triumph. “I recognize that one. What is it? Oh. Speechless. Yes, she likes that.”
