The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  Gottlieb was writing everything down on a napkin with a silver ballpoint. If I seemed particularly dissociated that day, he didn’t appear to notice. I’m sure he thought I was on drugs. I could have been mad of course, but there’s no point in explaining madness.

  My doctor, Judith Sarraute, says I am not mad. Listen to what the OED has to say about the fugue state, she instructs, lifting a heavy volume onto her silken knees. She licks a finger and flips over a page. Here we are: a flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality…a dissociative reaction to shock or emotional stress in a neurotic, during which all awareness of personal identity is lost though the person’s outward behaviour may appear rational. On recovery, memory of events during the state is totally repressed but may become conscious under hypnosis or psychoanalysis. A fugue may also be part of an epileptic or hysterical seizure.

  Judith encourages self-measurement. A fugueur needs points of reference, she says; compasses; hourglasses. Sometimes I see stars, I tell her. You may not know what innocence is, or guilt; or even murder, she continues, ignoring me. You will have these blind spots. You won’t have a memory of your episodes.

  But if you can’t remember, then are you guilty? Or is it that you are guilty of invention?

  13

  In the West Wing in his mansion in Sydney, Gottlieb could never sleep when Marie was away in London or New York, at her art auctions. She could not obtain an export licence in France, despite the efforts of her father. Important works stayed in the country. The idea of France is starting to smell rancid, she warned, shouting at Gottlieb over the phone line which discordantly delayed every word and then echoed it, nothing new, she yelled, could come from it, since all that had been gone through is being repeated. Gottlieb used to ring me in the East Wing all hours of the night. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t say he was struggling with originality. I told him it was on account of the contortionist who made his bed, the guillotine-nosed maid from Ashton’s Circus. He agreed. I could hear him sighing at some sound from Blixen’s bedroom. That maid, I said, walks in everywhere unannounced. She’s waiting for the tumbril to take you to your execution. She’s outside your door right now. Gottlieb hung up.

  He pleaded with me to drink regularly with him. I believe he was already an alcoholic, though out of some unwritten protocol he tried never to drink in solitude. Even alone in a bar, he said, you can have a mirror-self. But privately, at home, there is only the dark end of all despair. Read Berryman, he said. I told him I did not have Berryman, that my confessive poets ran out at Lowell. Well, buy a volume then, or borrow mine. The whole enchilada. I’m gonna sample a double maltski. What about you? Speaking like this, Czar Gottlieb was a sedated murderer come to life in his prison cell. Padding slowly from room to room, the only thing he menaced was the cat.

  I was a slave to his insomnia, but it was saving me on rent. When Marie was away, Gottlieb ticked her secret rental book and told her I had paid. It was a modest fee for such grand premises, but we all understood the rules of friendship, hospitality and the unspoken principle of suicide prevention.

  The maid passed me in the hallway wide-eyed, a grimace on her face. She was carrying a pillow. Imprinted on her irises, dead flowers. Gottlieb was sitting in his Morris chair, a rare one with large castors. He called it his fauteuil roulante. He wheeled to the sideboard. You’ll have to tell me another story, he said. He liked pathos. His head lolled to one side. He reached into his dressinggown and sucked some pills from a phial.

  In all the years I’d known him, I’d often experienced this moment. The drooping head, the pathetic demeanour. What immediately followed was usually proprietorial overkill. I think all the years at the seminary taught him self-preservation through bullying. He was, how else could I put it, lacking in refinement. It was the way he brushed his hand away from his chest in irritation and impatience. It was the way he flicked his thumb with his index finger to indicate the stupidity of a remark made in his presence. This came from somewhere deeper, further back in the genetic helix, from the wilds of his Latvian ancestry. I see a young Gottlieb lugging firewood in a snowstorm, schlepping faggots towards a smoky postwar tavern. The mountains loom depressingly. It is already dark in the middle of the day. He’s flicking splinters he’s pulled from his thumb after depositing the fascicles. The swaying head does not obey his wishes. People think it’s compliance, that nodding service of his, arriving with wryness. He understood his own foreignness, just as I understood mine. It’s just that I had less trouble with my past since I invented myself at every moment. My ghosts, I said to Gottlieb, were benignly middle-class, but I took risks. Forgery was not a game, except perhaps for academics. Gottlieb’s phantoms were roughly of the arbeitende Klassen. Not like my father, who fell from grace, son of a major poet from Macau, I said to Gottlieb. Gottlieb senior would have got by on hard work in Australia, would have changed his name to Goodleap if it hadn’t been for the registry forms which he couldn’t hurdle – Vot means dead pole? Imagine all that guilt at having left for a new world; at having survived; worse, at having covered their tracks. Don’t sign anything. Pliss. Erase. They were all vegetarian, having seen all that baby flesh bartered on bombed-out sidewalks. But here is the intellectual son ordering a story from me as I pour his drinks like the good waiter I am. He thinks I’m anarchic and childish, but he knows there is no mileage in the reflective life. You had to act; write; hear those typewriters clacking. He likes to eat, his pudgy fingers breaking bread upon the tablecloth; his jaw doesn’t cease chewing and there is pity and fear in his eyes, just as cattle display when the truck nears the abattoirs.

  I began:

  I have always caused the deaths of those I’ve tried to help.

  Take Florian Gautier-Epstein. He was slumming it as a waiter in Paris because he couldn’t get along with his father. He was simply waiting for his inheritance, a vast fortune. But he would have to reach the age of twenty-one, something he was unlikely to do since he believed that life was to be lived at breakneck pace. Indeed, he belonged to a secret society of bicyclists… Thomas Hardy, Mircea Eliade, Bohumil Hrabal, Eugène Ionesco, Eddy Merckx, Slobodan Milosevic, Gavrilo Princip, Jozef Skvorecki, Tzvetan Todorov, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, George Dwyer and the philosopher De Selby. One night, in the hotel kitchen, Florian told me a little of his life, of his association with famous people. Many of the latter were dead, he said. He said that in high school he had seduced his French teacher with an impressive command of the preterite tense, which conveyed a musty sense of bygone times, lazy Sunday afternoons on a Rover Cob (an English bike), riding from manse to manse, a written narrative he actually spoke and spun into instant seduction. He said he liked this tombstone conjugation, leaning and fallen, in need of a period. He dazzled her by singing it as one would recite Homeric epics with original scansion, turning them upon exact and erotic rhythms; disarticulated; clean. She was nearing forty and he seventeen, and she would squint while he declaimed, sitting backwards in his chair like Jimmy Dean. He confessed to her after Rhetoric Class that he was having a breakdown. His lightness under stress attracted her and their butterfly courtship took hold midflight: he desired, she fled; she reached out, he left. She did not know why such passion was always predicated upon wealth, nor why her heart so compromised her. She drank. Love turned obsidian. She was romantic and a Communist. She had an ageing charm and ageing parents who couldn’t make him out and when recalled to meeting him would exclaim: Ah! The kike who rode a racing bike. She was much more suited to old professors and archivists who had lost their daily lives in worlds beyond the present.

  Florian was aged far beyond his years. By sitting at women’s feet he got to know a thing or two. With domestic patience born of ancient craft, he was an expert at writing letters. It may never have gone beyond the epistolary if not for her active encouragement, for she hallucinated clouds of mentors and virile acolytes, believing her fertile period was not yet over. He took her out to lunch at Maxim’
s and they walked from the rue Medici where he’d obtained a first edition of her beloved Bérénice by Racine (in the bookshop the staff had caught another thief so he was totally unseen), and over Châteaubriand (the writer not the dish), he feigned romance, mocked the efficacy of inherited charm and she was wise enough to avoid the baited hook until the cognac and then the priceless book, when her defences suddenly all collapsed. She fell for poetry and delinquency. He took her home to his own apartment on the rue St Honoré and put on Santana’s Caravanserai, his hi-fi scratching while she shyly slipped her slip between his covers.

  A week later he disappeared from school without taking his Bac and her lessons fell apart. She rang him frantically. They met a couple of times in a gallery and a museum – he was aloof and dark – and she with bloodshot eyes, her face aglow then pale, would sigh at him while he would come and go, talking of Fra Angelico. She was too deeply in love to care how she looked, tossing lank hair, frowning too much, blind to his deliberations: There are five different kinds of love which don’t exactly fit our description: delictio, caritas, amica, amor and concupiscentia, not necessarily in that order. I wonder if we shall ever meet again? He banked on being in absentia. She waited in rented, bare apartments in northern slums where she anticipated being taken from behind while speaking softly to the neighbours down below… when in reality he didn’t even show. One fine day she received a line: Je voyage en Orient, ton Florian.

  He said he was going through a cubist phase. (The disturbing thing is how angry people get with angles.) His indifference was beginning to cut. He wrote that he could not love. In March she took some pills and had her stomach pumped at Sainte-Marie. By December she was spending five thousand francs a month on psychoanalysis. Florian stopped writing the following April. He had taken his fill of love with others and was last seen on his bicycle heading for Lille. She walked the windy streets, her heart threadbare, her position at the Lycée under threat. She did not care. There were flashes of him on every corner.

  The Galeries Lafayette department store still made her delirious; the Samaritaine made her ecstatic. (The rain outside was cold. It helped to shop in order to forget.) She tried on fancy stockings just for him. It made her bold. One stormy Saturday, after a rush of blood in the lift to the top floor with two bags of shop-lifted goods: a roll of silk from the haberdashery department, a line of underwear from Schiaparelli of which she was so fond…his careful tutelage had not been wasted…she was spotted clambering over the iron balustrade to leap from the slippery roof.

  It was all reported in Le Monde but Florian Gautier-Epstein’s name escaped the final proof.

  14

  What do you mean? Did you try to help her? Did you cause her death?

  Fabiana was concerned. What if it were the other way round…that he couldn’t handle the power of her love?

  The wind was howling. It was always howling. Fabiana was sitting on the old couch in the silo. Around the walls were cubist paintings and on the floors her frames and palettes and tubes of oils. She has not moved any of the clutter. I have one small shelf of Montaigne’s Essays above my stretcher bed. I have paid my rent, three months in advance. It gives me custody of these books. In the past, in France, I have used them as collateral. In Australia they weighed them by the kilo and tried to pay me in inverse proportion. Each time I redeemed them. No one was interested. Fabiana said it was good to have a man around the property. I said I was no good for farm work. No, she smiled and nodded. I think she envisaged me in a painting, wearing nothing but a vest, muscles bulging, massaging a clod with a mattock upon the stroke of noon. I think she wanted to oil me. But then I’ve never actually seen her painting. She uses the other silo as a storage shed. There are ceramic pots in there; bowls, clay statuettes. She keeps that one padlocked.

  No, not her death. I had no part in that, I said to Fabiana. Florian showed me some of the letters. The ones she wrote to him. They were novels. Everyone wants to write, Fabiana sighed. That’s what’s wrong with the world. There is no longer a reality, only celebrity.

  I agreed. Though I would be the last to see that as a fault of the world.

  Well, I was a gallery guard forging famous paintings, I said to Fabiana. I was now working at the Musée d’Orsay. After closing time I took colour photographs, using flashbulbs. Gottlieb was still in Paris and we used to meet at a brasserie at the Bastille. I told him Florian Gautier-Epstein needed help. I told him everything. Maybe he could empathise; that in this case, love did not counterfeit itself for money. The wealthy knew the wealthy. He could take Florian under his wing, make him a disciple of the preterite art of ancient feeling.

  Instead, Gottlieb broke the story in Le Figaro. Marie helped translate the scandal. It made page three, but that was enough. I looked Florian up; knew he wouldn’t handle the loss of friends and the family business. I found him in a dingy one-room flat in the Barbès district. He looked like Baudelaire, a black cat upon his shoulder; newspapers all over the floor. He offered comté cheese and a mild Bordeaux. His hair was greasy and he looked ill. I said: I had no part in this. I told your story to a friend in the hope he would help by publicising your poems. I said it was nothing more than a story kitchenhands and waiters told to pass the time and that was that. I understood Florian’s gloom − it was a bad meeting. I walked back along the Seine pretending to justify my lie. A giant Ferris wheel revolved to Santana’s Caravanserai.

  Two months later, when everyone had forgotten him, Florian Gautier-Epstein opened a vein in his wrist and bled to death in his mother’s bath in a four-storey apartment on the fashionable avenue Montaigne. That made much bigger news.

  15

  Water. I drink nine glasses by 7 am. It runs from a spring near the silo, spurting from a clump of rocks which you have to climb over and then the water descends towards a small cave. I sit above a subterranean river singing through grass and I look back at the small green towers at the top of the hill and then in the other direction, and I see Fabiana’s smoking chimney, the long yellow stretch of winter grass and the unkempt sheds leaning in one direction, ready to fall like playing cards.

  In my silo I have a sink and a wood stove. The tin flue goes all the way up to the coolie-hat roof and it draws efficiently. Each day I stack up fire-rolls near the door, which I split at dusk. Kindling I find in several old water tanks which lie on their sides, wedged against trees. Polished pieces from old parquet floors. It seems Fabiana’s dead husband was a parquetier at one time. I’ve seen photos on her piano of him standing proudly on a newly laid dance floor. Now I feed the jigsaw pieces into my fire, fry eggs and bacon and raise my cholesterol level, floor by floor, storey by storey, stories in polished wood. I burn what they have witnessed, these oblongs of varnished grain, parallelograms etched with small circles, thin sickles, stiletto heels, marks of crowded afternoons, scandals and martinis. Time-sealed, these wooden cells reflect dinner jackets and cummerbunds, silks and suspenders. I take my reading spectacles from their little case. If I bend the lenses back and forth, I sometimes see debauchery.

  16

  I do not visit Fabiana very often. I like to keep intimacies to myself. I ride to town for provisions on my newly repaired Swift. It now sports two panniers. I take the other road from the property, the one nearest the town of B., where I have made the acquaintance of the grocery store owner, McCredie, a suspicious ex-army man who has decorated his shop with old swords and rifles. In the glass-fronted cooling cabinet he’s got a helmet with a bullet hole through it, lying like an upturned turtle next to the ice-cream. It is meant as a kind of display, but it is not tasteful. I tell him that it is not tasteful. It isn’t meant to be tasteful, he replied. War is shit and shit is not ice-cream, though some think it is. So you be the new chap? He is a small, lean man in junglegreens. He has orange hair. So where might you be from? I don’t know, I say. I hate his curiosity. My appearance: it may be a distortion. He scratches his head. Extortion? My prices are the lowest, he says defensively. Oh, that we agree upon. Th
at settled something. It made him safe. Where did you live before? I do not answer immediately. McCredie was the sort of fellow who liked to catch you out. I begin a kind of meander, from here to Vietnam, and I have a vision of the nights he screamed in bed before and after his wife left him, though during her leaving things were exceptionally calm, the moment when the firing stopped and he wondered whether to collect the wounded and the dead, cockroaches on his wooden floor growing larger by the minute. The screaming. His wife. Anamorphosis. What? A deformity appearing in its true shape when viewed in some unconventional way. What? Holbein, I suddenly exclaim. Isn’t there an army base there? McCredie asks. No, I say. Holbein was a painter.

  At that moment I was thinking of Roger the parquetier and I was thinking how as I looked at his photo on your piano, Fabiana, I saw a man with a dark face and a turned-down mouth, not a face with a dark complexion but a face with a hardness and a hatred, as if he hated you at the moment you were taking his photo, and it occurred to me that men like Roger remained on the ground all their lives, having, as Nietzsche called it, only a frog’s perspective, from the floor, and that they spend all their lives there unless they meet a woman like you who would encourage and arrange for their proprietorial talents, and in Roger’s case, support him while he bought more land and then began to philosophise about land and nature. He had a frog-mouth, and it was apparent to me that he was bitter about not having discovered this philosophising talent earlier in life, but that he was pleased about having met McCredie, a friend with whom he could philosophise, telling McCredie about a French philosopher who strangled his wife, and so his life was bittersweet for not having his wife as a companion, choosing instead an army mate with whom he shared unspoken things, and it was apparent that you needed to give Roger everything, your full care and attention so that he could develop his full potential as a veteran and an intellectual, and that land-owning would at least supply him with the power to thrust his authoritative opinion upon others. Indeed he looked like one of the subjects in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which features two well-fed Renaissance men with turned-down mouths leaning on a sideboard, while at their feet a rogue floorboard seems to have sprung up between their heavy calves (they were horsemen, though with thicker thighs they could have been cyclists, had Holbein exercised different muscles) and the Persian rug. At first glance it looks like a flawed painting. Viewing it with the naked eye, it seems as though the painter had made a bad mistake and had painted his palette in mid-flight, falling onto the Persian rug. It would cause a mess. Fortunately it seems to be landing the right way up. There is much here that is unperceived. The heavy curtain actually hides a bathroom, into which Holbein had disappeared for a moment to take a pee. If you use a cylindrical or conical mirror, you can see a human skull in the oblong flaw upon the floor.