The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  Fabiana took all this in, but all the time I felt she had done a million riskier things and she was weighing up where I came in on her scale: liar; drunk; vagabond; thug. A game you played with buttons. She had undone the top ones of hers. You’re an artist? You appear so different each time I look at you, she said in a soft voice. I stared at her for an explanation. I just wanted to hear it again. The non sequitur. Perhaps I missed something. The remark was not unpleasant. A most expressive face; beautiful eyes; my head was spinning. She removed an ice cube from her drink and held it to my temple. Outside, the wind arrived in violent gusts. All was dust; a khamsin, a desert visitation. A voice arose. It said: In Egypt this wind blows for fifty days.

  8

  I had given up poetry for painting after university, I said to Fabiana, claiming how lucky she was to have this peace in the countryside. Poets should die young. Painters can paint badly for a long time. She laughed and the dogs embarked on a chorus of whining. They give no peace, she said, but I love them. It’s freerange boarding, she added. We don’t believe in caging them. The plural signalled a partner. Gottlieb would have been compiling a list of questions by now. I hated his curiosity. What was the point in finding out? Should she have a husband? A lover? Was I beginning to be interested? She left off the apostrophe in Martins Kennels, I remarked. Oh, let me not begin, she said. Her father was Brazilian. Alfredo Martins. I’m no longer married, she said, wagging her ring finger. There was a sad silence. Apostrophes implied possession or absence. We seemed to be speaking at cross-purposes; in a void; to or about the dead. The sky outside was turning cobalt.

  I needed to go. It was getting dark. Considering the fact she’d run over my wheel, I could not expect her to do much else than drive me to the crossroads where I could hitch a ride. Out of the question; she said I was in no state to travel. Come. We went to the verandah and put on our shoes and with the packs of dogs running behind, she drove us to another part of the property where two small silos reared against the sky like minilighthouses in a sea of spent wheat. Fabiana walked with her hands behind her back, stepping over the flattened stalks. A hare bounded away up the hill. I’ve had this one converted into a studio, she pointed. She was slightly out of breath. I paint, but it was my grandmother who was the famous artist. She and a friend went to France and they joined an artists’ commune, sometime in the 1920s, I think. Fabiana opened the door. Took a lantern hanging from the back of it, raised the glass and lit the wick with her cigarette lighter. The butane-inspired flame roared like an oxy-welder. Smells of kerosene and turpentine. She found a switch on the wall and around the roof a pink circle of fluorescent tubes glimmered and ignited. It was a clean, well-lighted place. A rose pagoda with a brass bed. I imagined things: her soft voice between a child’s and a seductress’s; undressing between the sheets, a spilling of flesh; the long screech of a frogmouth owl outside; her leaning over me, the steady exertions. I longed for my stretcher like Peter the Great, who when offered the grand suite in the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, unfurled his bedroll over the stone floor. You can stay here, Fabiana said, gently taking me by the elbow. I informed her that I seldom stayed overnight anywhere without considering whether I would be able to die there, divested of all the paraphernalia of gloom, amongst harlots and jesters. She smiled the sort of smile for which some men would have died. We walked to the centre of the wooden floor. Perhaps we could have danced. Smells of resin and oils. There were five small square windows cut into the circular wall. You can sleep quite well here, Fabiana said, and if you’re bored there are plenty of books on the shelves, if you get to them before the mice. There’s a washbasin and a tap. I’ll move these frames and canvases out in the morning. When you’re ready, come over for dinner. It’s about a ten-minute walk…at a leisurely pace.

  I’d forgotten the damned summer light. She turned, cutting a lonely figure through the stubble. Her Range Rover growled through dust. She neglected to change gears. A little later, headlights flicked on, and the car disappeared. We had withdrawn from intimacy for practicality’s sake, I imagined. But the way she touched my arm…the closeness of her body. A rising wind fanned my anxiety. I washed my face, studied her grandmother’s paintings. Cubist influences. A girl with donkeys. Angular landscapes: southern French villages bathed in limestone light. Powerful women with cone-shaped breasts and cyclists’ thighs. Indigo panels. Then everything was transformed – the painter may have had an eyesight problem – I recognised the changes straight away – from strong colours to faded landscapes, a deliberate flouting of perspective, a renouncing of distance, for such space beyond the intimate world which one could no longer see turned one infinitely sad. A later period perhaps. The houses had been rendered amorphous, floating in ether; human figures standing on cliff-tops now had the measure of a mountain. It was all very Chinese. Stirred, impressed, I thought how strange it was for her grandmother to travel backwards from cubism into the heart of ancient China. I stretched my eyelids. Nobody understood hybridity. I was forged myself, with impressions of authenticity.

  I pulled out the crumpled letter Marie had written to me whilst I was in Paris. She had mentioned a house for rent off Martins Road at Colo Heights. I had gone way past that turn-off in my fugue. But why this coincidence? Why am I at the right place now? Why Fabiana? Well, there are stranger things in the countryside. I did some calculations. Fabiana had made ends meet by selling artworks. The kennels kept the taxman from her door. Wheat had been grown in the two lower paddocks. There had been some logging of the hardwood forests and timber trucks have destroyed the track, leaving one side of the hill exposed to erosion. Gorse and blackberry were multiplying.

  There was a man here once.

  9

  I have taken a Montaigne turn. I question and analyse, but cannot enter into feeling, yet love is a strange animal which persists, appearing out of the dark, bleating and alternately threatening. Indeed, Montaigne had written that no relationship failed sooner than that which was concluded for beauty’s sake. I preferred to be left alone. A friend, though, was loved because he was my self. And so, I must have loved Gottlieb, for reasons which I still cannot fathom.

  Gottlieb liked repeating the phrase that life was not art. That it wasn’t, was obvious. But the corollary was more difficult: that art was not life needed explanation. Mathematical differentiation, he said. Just as a parabola approaches a straight line and only touches it at one point, so life only touches art at one perfect moment. You only peak once, you mean, I said to him. I think he liked me for this simple-mindedness. My admitted failure. Few will ever touch the line, Gottlieb shook his head as he spoke. I reflected on this in silence. I knew that art admonished life for the latter’s failure to risk itself. I was sure Montaigne knew that art was brave. Unlike Booty, Montaigne didn’t have a death warrant in his pocket. But did Walter Gottlieb?

  Within three months of Blimunde’s death, Gottlieb suffered a slight stroke. He had been drinking heavily for some time and that seemed the most likely cause. After the stroke, his speech became slurred; he stuttered; he drank little, but he always appeared drunk. One eye had almost closed. But his wits were still as sharp as ever and when he rang me in the East Wing of his house, he quoted from Mao and said The East is rrr-Redvers’. He was working then on a series of what he called ‘wordless poems’, though I inferred from this he meant he was doing nothing. It’s a ch-ch-Chinese thing, he said.

  He was almost inconsolable after Blimunde’s drowning but he forced me to stay close. He said he could not trust himself. I feared he would take his life. Each morning we would work on our respective oeuvres and at one o’clock Gottlieb would ring me from his study to suggest lunch at the brasserie near the Marina. We walked slowly, and I noticed he was slurring his left leg, in time with his speech. He always wore one of his bow ties and lugged a black briefcase. We never discussed our work, but he was always asking me whether I had read one thing or another and in this way I suspected he was building up a file. He hardly slept at night. He said he w
as overloaded with ideas. In winter he started bonfires in the garden and sat in a wicker chair, clasping a sheaf of papers to his chest. I stopped paying attention to his ravings and his stuttering was neither worth repetition nor anticipation. No pearls gleamed in deep frustration. I spoke of my grandfather the Macanese poet. I said his Water Clock Poems were tears of time, filtering through each stanza to resonate with the ground-bass of tristezza. My grandfather was lost in contradiction, torn between cultures, between love and homesickness. Sometimes a poet should not have a heart. He should deal in blood. Ha! Gottlieb shook a finger at me. He was taking notes. For a while I clammed up. Writing isolates, he said, putting his arm around my shoulders, it tears us away from our mythic states, our communal tongue, our shared sense of terror. Your stories of Macau keep me alive. I would have liked them to be my own, but alas, your constant supply of them fills my life while Marie howls and laments and jets off to London. There is no question of their ownership, but anonymity is more virtuous. (I was pumping up my tyres. It matched his insufflation.) Writing is the ethics of high envy, I suggested. A higher mind knows what to borrow and what to steal and conceal. Anything less than genius turns art to suspicion. Marie, Gottlieb said, changing the subject, has taken to wearing large crucifixes around her neck. She brings home priests and has them visit me in my study. I detest this intrusion. I need to be exorcised from priests. I am not dying. Not yet.

  I know, I said. I meant I knew about Marie and her crucifixes. She was killing him.

  Gottlieb devoted himself to Blixen, lavishing all his attention to educating her for something other than literature. He bought her microscopes and telescopes and encouraged her to bottle ants. Since Blimunde’s drowning, he suspected all emotion. He seemed only to be playing at feeling, constantly on stage. Marie may have had him under surveillance. He declaimed his lamentations in the spotlight. Charlene, the maid with the guillotine nose, was never far away. Once when Marie went to London, Gottlieb took a flight to Melbourne for an assignation – a slim, dark girl in black lace and shiny stockings. She may have been a former student. They went to the art gallery on St Kilda Road to look at a Giacometti exhibition. Gottlieb seemed grotesque, portly amongst all those stick figures towering over him. A photographer snapped them, he and Jet Gems, for that was her name, she said, smiling a white smile, flicking back her raven hair. And you sir? The camera was thrust in his face. He would give his name as Redvers…he secretly enjoyed these trysts, assuming names, tried to coach Jet to assume them too…use any friend, he said…but she already had one and was not about to ruin her professional career. Walter Gottlieb grew anxious. This was a photo. Ceci n’était pas un texte. He walked off quickly; fled without the least sign of a stroke. The photographer snapped Jet on automatic, arms akimbo, leaning against the wall. He knelt on the floor for more shots, lay down, chatted her up. Another journalist joined them. They were on assignment for Fashion Week. She dazzled them while Walter waited in the bookstore. He stood on tiptoe, peered up over the lower shelves. Was she through yet? Look at those sleazebags. The Giacomettis shimmered like burnt trees in the middle distance. His heart was pounding. What if the photo appeared in a national daily? He could see it. What would he say to Marie? He would be out on the street. He was already planning how to cancel the paper delivery, train next door’s labrador not to retrieve what he threw over the fence; no, maybe he should write to the arts editor, explain he didn’t want to be exposed; men alone understood these things. His heart started behaving strangely, the world swelling and subsiding, systole and diastole, life-giving, giftretracted. Indian giver, they used to call him at school. It was true. He hated parting with things; pens, comics, cap pistols. He gave them away to make himself more likeable. He had bought Jet Gems some very expensive French perfume, but now this whole trip was ruined. Never mind her friend, a big man in a loud tie was shooing the photographers away. He was touching her arm. Alberto. Was that his name? Was he inviting her to lunch? No, he was a friend of Giacometti’s. Jet looked across and signalled. Gottlieb smiled. She was still his.

  More shock in store. When Gottlieb arrived in Sydney, Charlene met him at the airport with Blixen in her arms. He thought she was abducting the child. He was confused, reached out to grab his daughter, but there was Marie a few paces behind, a darkness veiling her face. They were leaving. Leaving him? It was something not even Thomas Hardy could have plotted. Marie was at the domestic terminal because her plane from London had been diverted to Melbourne. Sydney was shrouded in fog that morning. They had been on the same plane. She had a migraine. Her face was puffy. Les réactions…she said, they give me a ’eadache…pas confortable. Her eyes had by now shrivelled to dark sultanas. Reactions? Gottlieb translated to himself, knew she was cryptic when flustered. Yes, jets.

  I had known from the moment Gottlieb lectured on the split narrative at university, that his personality was itself a split narrative. An imaginative person always led two or more lives: that which he projected for others and those which he hid even from himself. So Gottlieb was naturally duplicitous and this naturalness did not warrant rationalisation or condemnation, but carried him through life; indeed, it enabled him to live.

  10

  Bats were gliding between the trees. While I was washing my cuts over the enamel basin, they emerged from the sky and sailed past the window in slow flurries of black snow. They made for the orchards, where a night of fruitful and silent savagery began. I remembered Fabiana had primed the gas lamps which lit the silo. I was disappointed she lacked concern over my cuts and abrasions, but she had seemed preoccupied with something else. Perhaps there were other vampiric guests. Not all the dogs followed her. One was silhouetted on a windy ridge, remaining still for a moment, its ears against the early moon. I looked at some of the canvases turned against the curving wall. More oils of heavy women chiselled from stone, sketches of hilltop villages, and then indigo. Indigo everywhere.

  Just before Étienne de La Boétie died at the age of 32 in 1563, he repeatedly called for Montaigne to be close to his bedside. My brother, stay close to me, please. The name Brother is indeed a glorious name, but as Montaigne wrote, the sharing of goods distempers all alliance. It was in the priesthood that Walter Gottlieb began his adult life and it was in the seminary he learned goods were there to be used only as needed for existence. He appropriated the intimacy of others. Without question, he said, I thought that to be called Father was so much better than Brother. Paterfamilias; bequeather; testator. He was to lead the chosen: disciples; epigones; ephebes. The rest could be spurned, or as Gottlieb had it, were common goods used to advance the intellect a little further for those who lacked other means. Knowledge is not held by any one of us for himself alone, he said to me one day as we played squash on the university courts − I was still far from graduating − Gottlieb had attached rubber bands to the heavy frame of his glasses and he looked like a wild Apache chief suddenly intent on arc welding − knowledge, he said, supersedes personality. I teach, you acquire. There is no need for return save friendship and devotion. The Greeks knew all about that. Call me Fra Gottlieb. I am no padre, but a professor partial to Marx. As always, Gottlieb had his arm around my sweating shoulders in solidarity with my failure to win a point, yet I could not shake off the thought that for him, the word Brother had always been a legal fiction. I lost on purpose. Fathers, though, were there to be murdered.

  I was thinking about this as I began the walk down to Fabiana’s house in that speckled moonlight which drew the tide of instinct. I was thinking how Gottlieb had said all friendship was debt and labour. Sex, he said, was only the expectation of capital, for orgasm was not enlightenment, the phallus a oneeyed waiter in the dim refectory, bringing up food we had all seen before. It’s best to pay for prostitutes, for honest labour which delights by numbers and by difference.

  My problem with Walter Gottlieb, I was going to tell Fabiana when I arrived at her house, began when our long lunches at Double Bay stretched into evening dinners and then to late-
night drinking sessions. Gottlieb had unlimited cash, which he unleashed upon obsequious waiters to keep them at bay. They were not to stack up chairs upon the stroke of midnight. Gottlieb suggested he write something on my Portuguese grandfather… nothing really intricate, he said, just a kind of introduction to his work and then some balanced critique. I winced at the word ‘critique’ but went along with it. Feed me information, Gottlieb said. I need to know not only the work, but the man. There is a nuance to all these things and I do them best, he said. He was the expert of tone and feeling. You and I, he said, find refuge among the great dead. Read Hermann Broch, he suggested, The Death of Virgil. You, however, are a synthesiser who has not realised himself…you feel too keenly the imperfection of life and that defeats your will. You studied painting and forged a few. You were the filter of others and you brought out their imperfections. You are not a writer, but you can translate your grandfather’s poems, can you not? Even imperfectly?

  That was when I began telling him all. My grandfather’s life, which left me with nothing. His spirit stolen. The great poet Camilo Conceição, whom nobody had been able to pin down. An insatiable succubus inhabited me by day, for I was manic with ideas of image and advertisement and I reached out for his posterity, but in the dead of night it bit back with guilt and distrust. My father never spoke about his father. He was a poet, my father said. You must never consider that as a legitimate title. Discourage all research. I told Gottlieb that. Friendship was poison. Was not Gottlieb inquiring into this for me, out of respect, friendship, honour? Why then, did I feel so empty? So insincere? The rosewood bed in the East Wing felt like an empty tomb, a stolen monument, a theft of my legacy.