The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  She seemed at the opposite pole to me. I was trying to undo all knots. If you had to describe me you would say I was a knot loosener. Dispensing with friends of the ordinary variety, only maintaining acquaintances who were most likely to become enemies and who could then be shed without conscience, I acquired true solitude. The only time I felt lonely was when I lived on the banks of that French river with rats for company. The rats fought a lot amongst themselves. I didn’t seem to have their attention. Back in my bourgeois life people always intruded. Even barged in when I was in the toilet, like when I was sharing the flat in Newtown with a couple who made noisy love all day. They had a big bed and liked manacles, whips and chains. It was a construction site with vinyl; I had to use a megaphone to enforce union hours. The hippy with angel hair cooked, appeared out of nowhere, offering lentil soup. Accosting me in the outside toilet one day, she suggested we practise constriction. She was twirling a little braid of rubber bands. Anyway, it’s because I liked solitude so much that I have had these seizures, escapades, repetitions, I was saying to Fabiana, since I had been born to perfect my life according to my art and so much of both had already been dissipated by a failure to garner critical acclaim. Hell was other people. So her silos were a godsend, I said. (I had since moved all the paintings and easels and frames into the smaller bin, which only has one window.) Fabiana said she didn’t mind, so long as I didn’t damage anything. Besides, it was cooler for the canvases in the smaller silo, which I called Silo #2. My round tower, which I heated with a wood oven until the walls started to peel and crack, was perfect for hatching, germinating, incubating flight plans. I bought a small tin bath, lugged it back on the Swift looking like a turtle; cars swerved, truck drivers blew air horns like Vikings. I heated water and soaked in peace – solitude at last!

  I do not see Fabiana very often, yet I seem to know her well, perhaps because when she plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations she always plays Variation No. 26 (or Variation No. 25 if the Aria is bypassed), with sadness in her face. I read this in her ancestry. It was upon this Variation that Bach understood genius, I said to her, because if you listen to the key changes you will see both destiny and chance there. She looked puzzled. Yes, I said, it is a key change of pure genius, spiralling upwards, aleatoric because there is no willing, only chance, some rude questioning about the future, rising up like smoke towards God. No theme, no pure noun, no subject. Total risk. Like a Francis Bacon painting. (I was waxing lyrical now, eager to reveal my former friendship with the great painter.) The love of the roulette wheel and the questioning of God, I said, are present in their genius, in both Bacon and Bach, and this genius howls in a minor key because it is ill, it is through with elevating the sacred, reaching upwards only because it is degraded, brilliant because abnormal, deep because it is denatured and cursed with catastrophe; sentenced to greatness, I said to Fabiana. It was the moment at which Bach understood that he was alone.

  Oh yes, Fabiana said. Oh yes, oh yes. The Goldberg Variations. How I love them!

  She was having a love affair, I could tell straight away. Her benevolent narcissism, svelte good looks offered to all, willed malnutrition – the drawn hair, the tiredness, the secret pride which showed itself in the eyes as experience – all spoke of passionate living. A glow came off her. Nothing wrong with it, just the added attraction of being available to whoever was paying attention, to whoever would listen. A firmer clue came in the form of her falling asleep whenever I talked to her. Tell me things, she would ask, and all too willingly, I spoke freely, when after about five minutes she would be fast asleep and I would stare at her lips, which seemed to be always smiling, and imagine her riding my bicycle, her hips swaying from side to side, up and down, and I would understand the silences which engulfed her, which enclosed her in her world of friendships, and which wasted her great talents for the piano. Beauty demanded discipline, I would say to her sleeping form.

  17

  I had little time left. Judith told me as much, though she didn’t elaborate on my illness. I went in to see her after fasting. The blood test drained me for the ride back. Judith asked how far I had come. I said I was going backwards. No, not your career, she bit her lower lip. Later she asked me to go next door, to the bakery, for some wholegrain bread which would sustain me for the hundred kilometres back. But here it is in the report. Pathology sent it in a plain brown envelope. I knew that meant the death sentence.

  Time? I had no time. Fabiana drove up one morning. There was thunder. The black branches swayed, prelude to a storm. She wore jeans and high boots. Her swaying, lurching gait, hands in pockets, revealed the goldminer’s daughter that she was, ashamed still of her large hands. Brazil ’66; the year of her father’s death. She brought me an oblong box, miniature coffin, hand-carved, and proceeded to unwrap the tissue. It was from her shop: a huge hourglass, big as a professional pepper grinder, bearing fine, white sand. Annoyed, I asked if this was really necessary. I had a telescope, I was about to lie to her, which cut through time, forwards and backwards. I did not need these shards of measurement, microscopic harbingers of my death, siliceous lineality. I fell into deep gloom. Fabiana was hurt, but she hid it well. That story, she said, the one you told about your friend Florian…I was very moved by it. This gift is to ease your guilt. It was not your fault that someone else published your story. She smiled such a radiant smile her eyes ignited. There was something in her; sand…as Mark Twain would have written… misplaced. In my father’s parlance, a coin of a girl. But not for me. She said she was going swimming in the waterhole. She sat on the front seat of her Rover, reached under her skirt, unrolled her stockings and handed them to me.

  She drove away. Perhaps wanted to push me out of the preterite, into the present. But I had become unpredictable and the only way of attaining balance was to ride my bike, furiously at first, then upon reaching the first hill, more at one with frailty, and finally descending with supreme joy, ploughing over deep mounds of sand on the track, a volcanic pressure upon the heart, such pumping, its bellows firing silica into glass and the glass narrowing to allow sand through a fine artery, hour upon hour until chest pains. The sign of infinity: a bicycle.

  My dear Fabiana,

  Only I could have been so crude. To have accepted a gift with such an accusation. Etc.

  I rode down to her house and left the letter on the front doorstep. I don’t think she was in. I remember telling Gottlieb that when I lived in Paris I was a bicycle courier for a short time, constructing phantom books in my head as I rode, inflamed by the example of Proust sending letters to countesses through couriers. I would linger in the courtyard with the concierge’s daughters, girls in flower, tilt my cap and loiter in the shadows, waiting. But in reality I risked my life in heavy traffic for legal scrolls, stockmarket statements, pathology reports. I turned the hourglass on its side. Infinity. Took out her stockings. Fine black silk.

  18

  My pathology tests came back. Dr Judith gave me these pills which I had to extract from a plastic strip, labelled with dates and days. For the stones. I took jellybeans instead. After all, they were kidney shaped. When I awoke each morning I began to wander. Night dreams were docile, in place, black-and-white. But in the mornings, magpies glided without a wing-beat to surprise competitors and mark out territory and I would prepare to leave again. Each morning, the tentacles of my fugue-work: branching lines towards the horizon.

  My Chinese self sustains me. Franz Kafka had a Chinese self. So did Walter Benjamin. I buy provisions when in Sydney, ride back with panniers loaded: ginger, rice, preserved plums. When I eat for my Chinese self, I withdraw into the private gut. Saved by peanuts and ginger. Strength returns. It is a lucid occasion, uncluttered with thinking. No longer a guest. Home. How I pine for the pines, the terraced mountainsides, the loneliness of the oak that was mine! I have lived away from my self enough to survive my last remaining days, but…one false move and I still reach for the noose; to preserve it all. I mean, this shape which has not yet shown.


  I found an old telescope McCredie was trying to sell for a hundred dollars. It was lying atop some books beside a can of beans. A brass instrument that needed cleaning. I blew on it. How would I play this? I offered twenty. He shook his head. Started to tell me about his ten years in the army…Vietnam… White Mice, the starched militia who shot people for jaywalking… Tet made them tetchy. I rode away. Rode back. Bought tuna fish. McCredie charged me more than usual. He said the global price of tuna fish had risen. He spoke less like an economist and more like a priest singing a High Mass. The twenty-five watt light bulb above his head projected its mean orb. He said a barrel of tuna fish came in at ten cents more a kilo these days. I rode to the next town. After three weeks of absence, McCredie accosted me on the highway. He was parked on the side of the road in his ute and he wore a large hat with a badge on the side…some sort of fan or sunrise you see on packets of soap. He brought out the telescope and asked me for twenty dollars. I gave him ten and said I would pay the rest if the price of tuna fish came down. He accepted this as a deal but not a bargain.

  Now I had the means for a distended view, after much cleaning and blowing out grey worms in my head, vers de gris, grizzled verses, never mind, I got a long view of the long paddock and then focused to see lorikeets scratching their ears…birds have ears do they not? Or just a hole in the head? They hear remarkably well, at least, they frighten well. But let me set this up, this look back into time, for isn’t that what we’re seeing when we look at the stars, this old light reaching us, documenting events before bacteria crawled out from under a crystal? Let’s see, swivelling, tromboning. I’m only going to attain half my fugues with this, but there we are, we progress by halves. What can we see? Fabiana’s green tin roof from the top of this tower… no higher point save the water tank and then the windmill which could unjam at any moment and decapitate me with sharp blades…try anyway, Fabiana’s windvane swivelling just for me, a sign of my direction, the tail gamely pointing to signal game. I smell foul play.

  19

  The art of the fugue. Point and counterpoint. Crazy walking; street stalking; fast talking. Montaigne, having had too many pots of wine, encountered a group of women on the corner of a Roman street; danced a chaconne with them, a slow waltz in three-quarter time. For one moment he lost himself in movement, in the swaying torches, the measured music, the elegant steps. He was escaping from his essays. The Essays were attempts to gain control over his daydreaming. The Essays demanded firm action from him, forcing him to discover himself through travelling. But suddenly, in this fugue, he wanted to be rid of essaying, the tryline receding before him. No logic, just chitchat. Chatting up. A charm offensive. He strained to excise his non-committal smile, showing his teeth. Only in motion could he reinvent himself, pull off the tightening knot of false friends, the voices which gathered in his head. He wanted to be in a new place between each piece; match reality with reality in order to prevent himself from opinionating. Yet he wanted to be as deluded as poets and painters, to fly free, to experience. Perspective had to be fluid. But when he looked up at his oak beams in his hotel room, he saw dry reason. All those knots in the tree. He looked more closely: little fat men perched on their toes giving off bad odours, women with bad teeth, a child reaching out from its dirty blankets, left there on a corner of the street by a prostitute who at that moment was riding a couple of youths upon their naked thighs, someone vomiting into a trough, night pigeons making for the regurgitated mash, a lost dog circling aimlessly between the legs of shitting horses; and there it was, life in all its guises, the living intoxicated by the same music and gallant dancing before illusion faded and the pox or death arrived. The woman picked up the screaming child. He could have sworn she was at the spa yesterday. There he was, Michel de Montaigne, swigging a jug of red wine at the moment his equerries brought him a letter saying he had been made mayor of Bordeaux. How did that make him feel? It made him feel dirtier than the others. A hypocrite with kidney stones pretending he was participating in society, not quite able to let himself go. Continence. Noble toady. In the uniform ugliness of the early morning light he smelt the putrid wind. There it was; old sex at cold dawn. Riding had made him hard; riding now on his stallion as the mayor of Bordeaux; no more dancing with loose women. That’s it. A putrid wind always came upon success. It made him feel both fugitive and lord, wary of the next turn.

  Back in his mill-tower in Bordeaux, Montaigne wrote that we should reserve a storehouse for ourselves where we can hoard true liberty. He was in flight from convention; from his wife; fugitive, fugueur. Liberty had to be stolen, pilfered. He wanted a friend with whom he could discuss all, but he only had his writing. He was furtuose, given to thieving from his own thoughts. A furtuoso. He could not bring himself to be passionate, chaotic and dangerous…like poets…but he took long journeys, périples, odysseys, to escape domesticity.

  Back in my silo in Colo I write a letter to Gottlieb in his grave, telling him stories of Montaigne, reprimanding him with the fact that husbandry was a servile office. Gottlieb had been afraid of being abandoned by Marie. She had money. He had some kind of Catholic guilt and a terror of poverty. The priesthood made him fear destitution. He felt sick when he thought of going back to teach at the university. All those awful meetings; busy work; stabbings in the corridor; septic language and management microbes. When Marie suspected he was having affairs with his former students she put a gas meter in his bathroom. He would need coins for hot water, bills for his wines, credit for his self.

  I think now of how he made his life into a showpiece; Gottlieb as community stalwart, opening art shows, umpiring cricket matches, his hair growing wilder in the wind, standing at the wrong end of square leg insisting on wearing rolled-up jeans which Father O’Hanlon called ‘cowboy britches’. Then Gottlieb would walk home with his daughter, Blixen, who had now grown a little taller, thinner, bearing within her face a fine bone structure, her smile angular and subtle as she pushed back her hair, her walk athletic; everything that squat Walter and plump Marie did not possess, and the girl, in her twelfth year of life, knew the sadness that was inside her came not from the golden plane trees unleaved by the wind coursing through the park, nor from being unloved − for she was loved, with Gottlieb’s hairy forearm on her shoulder − but from suspecting that unlike the foliage, she may not have scythed down from this particular family tree.

  20

  I have fitted to my Swift a peculiar thing. It is not a pump, though it looks like one, tied there to the top tube with a bit of elastic. It is not a stick, though I use it as a frightener for dogs who try to follow me. I ride to and fro, far and wide, over fields and along goat tracks, and bump over bracken, sail over fern. After months of eating very little, I have become quite light. In the afternoons I discover ruined abbeys, burned offerings bushfires have left, and I scour the naves for signs of spirits, while outside in the abandoned yards with their blackened tombstones…the essence of this country, I was saying to myself, convinced it was a duty to the forgotten past to read lists of family tragedies aloud…I conjure an Australia made up of massacres and the moral slaughter of the day-to-day, relieved by a breeze down by the waterhole, the ritual of a paternal rape perhaps, and upon the strengthening wind, a flight or two of dark imagination, spumante trails of landing black duck. We have all but lost it now: this sadness of the land. In summer, pain lights up in white heat and there is a hatred that stems from the heat, a black sun which has no depth, no sweetness with the burn it brings, no mourning, only nostalgia for colonial vigour, and the nights carry no relief, simply a stink, which has built up inexorably like the benediction of carcasses. Nothing rings out, no crispness of bells in the valleys, just the hiss of swollen bellies, pregnancies of the earth which burst into bushfires, red tongues of grass spurting under fleeing reptiles and then dry scales of measure: a crusty revival, slow time with nightmares and no future imagination of this as the best it ever will be. For to imagine the country’s history is to be ruthless with the t
ruth, which used to spend itself uprooting families, dislocating bark humpies, destroying life on mad sprees; to imagine is to confront disgust, the insecurity of ennui, the phalanx of children and the loss of solitude from slab hut or stone bungalow to paste-board suburb; to imagine is imperious autism, the never-ending journey into despair…inevitably, to murder. Oh, tense joy of the kill! This is layered in the land and we have all but lost it, paralysed from denial…given up our hindsight for the faint haunt of unachievable contentment in the future, which is already smelling like curdled milk.

  So down to the crossroads and then across safely, other side now, of the highway heading towards the river through a gap in the wire fence I cut yesterday, gliding down to the waterhole, a deep wide pool where you could have sailed a small boat back and forth, a quick swim in the icy depths sluiced with duck shit and comely weed around my privates, midges in my mouth, freezing now in the tramontana which whips over these hills, fetching, if not a sliver of snow, some icy blasts, memories of the Piedmonte, and I’m restored to fighting illness as I push the Swift up the track to the summit of the black hill from where I can survey all…there she blows…following the long road to the same waterhole with her Brazilian boyfriend half her age and she spreads out a rug on the sandy bank and the sun had come out for them at that moment, shining only on the waterhole where all around it was dismally grey with mist, and he undresses, his member attentive, a staghorn erupting quickly when she touches him, none of it very inventive or prolonged (she, being more modest, leaves her underclothes on, her thighs glistening despite that), then they swim − and I realise all my hours in the silo had not produced a fraction of this jealousy and eros, not even a hint of this exquisite and painful scenario, this exclusionary moment, this dispassion of having watched Diana at her bath being seduced by her Actaeon. She is dissatisfied when she emerges, but he is spent, and there she goes tearing branches from the trees to use as switches for bothersome flies. She stands, majestic still, unarmed and naked now, then lies on her back staring straight at me, one leg arched in defiance and she knows I am watching, anointing me with her permission for me to tell…and as I lay down the spyglass, I knew I would always feel the itch in my right eye as a lasting memento, through with searching for what was pleasant and easy, scenes which tickled me. In the other hand I grip the leash of my brace of hounds, the beasts straining to tear the boy to pieces.