The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  Of course I wasn’t sure who they were, down at the waterhole; the water shimmering, a Watteau painting; and I wasn’t going to mention it to Fabiana that night when she came up to the silo with a peace offering, her hair wet, a bottle of Glenfiddich under her arm, saying she would take back the hourglass if I wanted, though I said no, for it did mark out my day somewhat, since I’d started reading again, and I saw them leave the waterhole together; though of course I didn’t say this to anyone. I didn’t say I followed as closely as I could without being seen, standing behind trees holding up the Swift on its back wheel like a rearing stag, until the dogs began to bark…hark, another measure of the day…the sand holding me back, the wind, and after a brief twister they were gone.

  But it was Fabiana who mentioned it first: saying quite casually that the woman who was driving that cow along the road with a stick on the day I fell into the creek…that was how she put it…that I simply fell in…that woman Miranda, had found herself a boyfriend. A Brazilian; tout court; un sauvage – totalement nu, she led me to think. I did not believe her for one moment. Her black stockings hung on a branch, trailing in the breeze. Those windsocks binding me to her forever. The little object of my lift-off. Whenever I see a woman in black stockings I have always wanted to order a bottle of wine.

  21

  With the aid of the hourglass I can see what Montaigne was trying to tell me. This timeless hourglass measures eternity. It is an Eternity Machine in a vacuum, which magnifies my daily life of pain; torments my obsession with measurement; exaggerates my folly as I stand hypnotised. To have one’s measure. If we want to know anything beyond ourselves, if we want to transcend our limited capabilities, we have to edge just a little towards chaos. Fall off our horse. Go beyond measure. Indulge in frippery piperie.

  I was trying to train my smell. How to train one’s smell? I mean one’s sense of smell. I follow the example of dogs. What delights them, what intrigues them, what is of no consequence or is no matter to them. Nothing actually disgusts them. They are devoid of the morality of smell. Montaigne said that the use of perfume only covers defects. To smell sweet, is to stink. I have seen dogs take great delight in rolling on dead and rotting carcasses. What one delights in, is a matter of experience. I stressed this to Gottlieb, when I told him a little of my childhood dream.

  In my father’s time they played a version of the game called ‘The Love Pipe’ in cabarets when the rains came to China − a circle of half-clad boys and girls inhaled a debilitating drug – they passed the smoke through tight erotic kisses from right to left until desire reached its peak and when the pungency declined, or the weather leavened, or the wind died down, began again from left to right.

  It was 1947.

  There was a slender spy within their midst who passed on secrets with an active tongue and who, though masked, was neither high nor dizzy but leant towards a lassitude not entirely beyond seduction. They said she was an expert in other things as well: a choreographer, torturer, writer of plays-within-plays, she could also dance and sing. Her name was Kitty. She was hung in ’49 after the Communists took Shanghai, where such perverse production was henceforth forbidden. It was on her death certificate they wrote that she was he.

  That same Kitty had taken me aside one day and teased my ear with whispered sighs. I was a child and understood nothing, but the words still stake out haunts on lonely nights, some echo that her courtesy could never overstep the mark: Excuse me, my lord − she addressed me thus − the liberty I take in undressing you tonight…and she proceeded to place a silken mask upon my face and take my boyhood in her mouth, and intermittently, through poetry, her voice trembling in the evening breeze (while blinded thus I cannot now remember what the weather was, or even if the wind came from north or south), she began a slow inversion. I was overcome by vertigo while my bird was being swallowed whole in a nest of words high up in branches. Did you feel, she said in extrication of her tongue from some untidy verse, the power of ventriloquism? In fine, how came you to womankind?

  From that moment on I’ve wanted to recapture this strangest scene to see if this play within the game of Loving Cup was real or dreamt. I had written it down long before, in fragmented fashion, and did not want to lose the thread of it, since the addition of perspective over years may have revealed a flaw in grounded memory. The drug in the Loving Cup was never described, but the odour of my aunt’s breath remains memorable, like bruised lavender. I have not smelt it again till now. Fabiana’s stockings. Tinged with Morpheus, the god of sleep, it possessed a subtle odour between fruit and flower, accompanied by a scent of poppyseed. Part of it was in the wind after the harvest of pomegranates on de Nerval’s estate. Some of it was amongst the tramps gleaning uncollected grapes. Yet none of these arrived together. There was a perspective of smell through the hourglass. If you gazed long at the twinned tulips, you would see a reflection of two faces. That is how one would describe it. There is no other simile; a smell without morality, reflecting a two-faced smile. Janus-like. Good and evil, painkiller and addiction. Vial or vile container. Preserver or liquidator. It was in Dr Judith’s surgery. It was here. At first I sniffed Fabiana’s hourglass and thought I was deceived. It was in the wood which formed the base; the columns on the sides; the sand perhaps, though that was improbable, since all was sealed. Maybe it was Fabiana’s perfume, L’Occitane; Thé Vert. But no. This was much subtler than any scent. It occurred to me that I had not caught Fabiana’s perfume since the day I fell into the creek. Since then, Fabiana herself had no smell. I circled the walls of the silo. It could be that the silo still contained some odour of fermented wheat. I sniffed around the shell. Nothing seemed to match. I thought of Fabiana’s workshop, the locked Silo #2. That’s where she said she constructed knick-knacks for her shop in Double Bay. That’s where all these smells were focused. Memory now crystallised them; gave them one description.

  The smell of opium was a smell of relativity. The description of a smell was relative to a past…or to the experiences of many past smells. You galloped past them. It led me to think that smell was a form of motion, I was telling Doctor Judith one day, having ridden all the way to Double Bay for a consultation. Kinetic smells led you through a spectrum of a life. Judith was having a particularly busy day and could only give me a few minutes. Hmmm, she said. Smell as a motion. A pathologist would agree.

  That rather cruel remark aside, I had now become obsessed with this indeterminate odour of what I believed was opium, or perhaps morphine, and I was determined to have a look at the locked silo, Fabiana’s workshop, and I began discussing how one would make a skeleton key or lock-picker with McCredie. Oh it’s easy, McCredie said, in the army we learned that early; part of basic training to open the lockers of others, release padlocks from gates, unlock doors for discharge papers, gain access to the armoury. He said he once stole a Chieftain tank. He sold me a tool consisting of a series of hooks and files. We practised on several locked display cases.

  Montaigne in motion. He could never see himself in the mirror. He writes about scents being left on his moustache and beard after love, but he is unable to speak about himself in love. He is changeable and he is centreless. He fails at love not only because he is as tender as a child, but because he doesn’t work hard enough at it. He makes it a lifelong quest to be a good lover, but he fails. He feels he is nobody trying to be a somebody, but only because he sees other perspectives and is true to his nature. For many years I liked Montaigne because I thought he was a loser. In the end, I thought, he reverted to convention because he didn’t want to dilute himself with deception, narcissism, drink or drugs, never having reached the point of love. I believed that’s where he failed. Too cautious. If I hadn’t read Montaigne, I thought, I would not have been so moderate, discoursing on balance. I would have lived more fully, pursued my desire to be a real painter. Immoderately, I would have passed away earlier. I would not have given up going to the Ganges merely to observe human duplication and liquidation and would have plunged i
nto that oily water, gone caving in those submarine depths, pursued the horror of bloated faces and half-burnt skulls exploding from black and bony shelves, the multifarious and the nefarious still roped in jewels, and I would have stopped giving everything away to Gottlieb, harnessing silence, having squeezed out all, ending my days declaiming like Dylan Thomas when he writes that Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,/ And all the deadly virtues plague my death…doing quite the opposite to weaving a wreath around my words.

  Instead I am conservatively unlocking Montaigne through a smell. It is the smell of old cologne sealed in a folded hanky. If he hadn’t been a mayor, he would have been a bank manager. When dancing a chaconne, men and women sometimes gripped a kerchief between them, and one held on slightly longer if there was a scent of love. For Montaigne, writing prevented such fugues, their fragrance sealed by reason. He always let go of a fetish too soon.

  Oils. I could detect the presence of palettes and canvases. The silo door rubbed against the stoop and creaked open. I shone my torch at all the works of art. Stars blinked above through the skylight. In Venice, Montaigne reported that the coaches had glass roofs, so travellers could spy on women at their windows. He greatly desired to be a coachman and a painter. Here, in this my observatory-silo, he would have found all those selves in these muscular landscapes; female swimmers; dizzyingly sexual. On the tables and shelves there were jugs, plates, pots, whole dinner settings, all in indigo and white, some heavy, some brittle. I shone the torch through them, so fine was the porcelain, that I could read the skeletal Chinese characters beneath. I was thinking how, by appearing conventional, Montaigne dissected himself and scattered his light through the perspective of others. He placed himself beneath the work of others in the same way that Vermeer drew himself first and painted women on top. I’m scattering light everywhere but I’m not finding the pieces that fit my shadow. Reverse for Redvers. A shattering. I wish I hadn’t dropped that plate. I was just turning around and my elbow brushed it off the table and it smashed onto the concrete floor. I swept it up as best I could and put the pieces into my pocket. I hope it wasn’t valuable. And that was when I caught the smell. Poppyseeds at harvest time. And there, in a large teapot decorated with indigo motifs of maidens in gardens with their scarves and robes trailing in the wind, was a packet of Benares Pure, the mandolin carnation, bittersweet chandu.

  I have stolen the smell at midnight. In the presence of convention, not everything can be perceived. Many of the paintings are labelled. Drafts for commercial posters. Chinese advertisements for Red Lion cigarettes and Russian Veloski bicycles. I presume these were for exhibitions or auctions. They had ‘C.C.’ written on them. My grandfather’s initials. Behind the canvas of one of them was stencilled: Lesbians massaging each other with medicinal oil from the Leopard Eng Aun Tong Pharmacy Company.

  I am unsure what happened next. I came across stacks of bills and papers. A traffic infringement notice for $750 which was overdue. Of course I made a cylinder with it, lit something and inhaled. Always the prelude to mixing oils and then painting over an existing canvas, exactly, more brightly. Learning the brushstrokes, the secrets, as the Chinese had perfected it in the transmission of their cultural heritage. This painting-over, this restoring or forging a new road, experiencing the past and experimenting with the future, was what my grandfather did to unearth his poetic inspiration. My grandfather − the famous and infamous Camilo Conceição. I live under his shadow. What was he doing here? (Tomorrow, all this significance will look fanciful and ridiculous.)

  22

  Each morning I rise at cockcrow, go down to the shed where the milkers are waiting in their stalls straining with full udders and I scatter the chickens, sterilise the pails with boiling water, milk each by hand, in a daze, the cows in a daze, munching softly, a sound of silk brushing by and then unstitched, I dream of Fabiana. But then the cows are gently looking at me in the dim light, each kicking over their pails and I realise how quickly I had become another.

  She invited me for afternoon tea one day I think it was a Saturday, though I only monitor the hours and not the days, and the wind gauge was spinning on the roof of the house, and she had made scones and even before I entered the door I smelt something, the rankness of goats, hairy armpits, rutting boars, and out walked a dark young man, half naked, wearing only his jeans, smiling at me. She introduced him as Sergio. Sergio, she said was helping her poison the blackberry which had taken over near the waterhole. Sergio, she said proudly, owned a nightclub in Newtown. She called him her Brazilian. Like a horse. He smiled all the time, showing off his white teeth.

  I do not ask questions. Sergio’s presence on the property has precluded any curiosity on my part. It suits me since I had broken a dish, not to ask questions which would raise any suspicion about that event. It suits me that Fabiana has hardly come up to her silo or looked in. It suits me that I have escaped the imprisonment of her hourglass since Sergio has proved to be a hard worker, a muscular worker, a handy, efficient, knowledgeable farm-boy. He smiles at me and sings his sad songs and then brings me berries he’s picked. I do not ask anything about the art works in the studio-silo. I do not ask anything at all, keeping my eyes in a book, walking around with my hanky to my nose trying to be inconspicuous, sniffing at the time of cologne. I do not ask because I’m spying on myself from up close − it is a movement of pride − and I only ask myself how I could have heard Fabiana and Sergio discuss a field of poppies they were about to plant when the blackberry had all been cleared.

  My bladder is full of heavy sand and I piss time like the hourglass. Kidney stones shoot pain with reckless skill. Spasms in my back arrive on the hour, when the world turns red. Astride the saddle of the Swift, I am numb in the nether regions and an occlusion rises behind my eyes, so I am forced to walk the hills, then coast down while balancing on one pedal, standing upright as on a scooter, a boy still in pyjamas, tranquillised with early dementia. The Swift has its own mind when not in harmony with a human body. It veers. In practising this walking and coasting method, I conclude that like an ass (I was leading and coaxing the Swift… I mean that the Swift was like a stubborn, disdainful donkey), there is nothing more demanding and intransigent than a bicycle.

  New South Wales is in the grip of drought. The trees are dusty with the deposits of deserts. Eagles stir puffballs over lethargic rabbits; fires cast dirty furrows of smoke through the bleached hills. I ride in search of water, keeping away from habitation where everything is sullied, where life is stuffed into a sausage…I can see them driving their cars as fast as they can in mindless stupidity, not out of risk but from routine impatience and aggression…snaking into a white electric fog. I cannot drink the water on the property any longer. It comes from a spring which has turned sour, full of minerals, salt, flavours of drowned mice, and I see Sergio holding each one up by the tail when he checks the water tank. I have become a connoisseur of water, of boiling, cold, tepid, dead, toxic, sulphurous, salty, heavy water. I ride out on the Swift, embark on a balance and a weighing-up of dryness. I practise exagitation, stirring things up, muddying the waters in the district. I allow McCredie to spread the word that I am a diviner. When the melancholy humour, I say to McCredie (who is leaning over his cabinet of horrors – this time I see him remove a small red cylinder from beneath the holed helmet), is mixed with the sanguine (I watch his incomprehension turn to pain and I have to explain that mixing the melancholy and the sanguine is like eating a bloody steak with pity in your heart), then something divine comes forth. He finally hands over the waxed tube. That’s gelignite, he says. If and ever you need it for what you do.

  I cannot pass the stones. My urine is bloody at sunset. Not a death sentence, but I do not want to live. I cannot bring down fruit by shaking a tree; I cannot lift a sack of wheat. Endless unhappiness; endless failure. I find a thin stream of water and lay the Swift down to urge myself with the gurgling, but all I succeed in doing is to soak my books which are in the panniers. Novenas. I try to drink nine gla
sses of water every morning in my solitarium but I cannot filter out deception. What looks and tastes like sweet water causes me unendurable pain an hour later, like reading my grandfather’s poetry which I had been clumsily translating from the Portuguese for Gottlieb before the latter’s death; each line shaping like barbed wire instead of a teardrop. The sentiments in them were out of time, out of place. This was why I bade farewell to literature, which was pain through joy, lyricism garlanded with razors. As for the water I tested, it was life, but only if you wanted life. Sweet water seeped into graves and levelled out into the watertable and always pumped up salty.

  On the 28th of January 1581, Monsieur de Montaigne passed a rather biggish stone and other smaller ones. Before Montaigne went on his health trip through France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, he had already suffered much, I informed Gottlieb on one of his particularly difficult nights. It was just after Gottlieb’s stroke and he had taken to wearing a fedora, partly to disguise his rictus. I met him at the Brasserie in Double Bay and he ordered a bottle of whisky and couldn’t undo the cork even though the waiter had loosened it. He asked me to help him and I thought at that moment of the knot of friendship between us. I uncorked the bottle, but the knot was suddenly tighter. After the first glass, Gottlieb stared at me and spoke in his deepest voice. Have you ever wondered why I left the seminary? I shook my head. The sight of Marie, I was thinking, was not conducive to a coup de foudre. Some homoerotic scandal? Paedophilia? None of these seemed convincing in the light of his Vatican dispensation. I saw his eyes glinting; an alcoholic’s teariness. Then he looked at me strangely from beneath the brim of his hat and said: I have always wanted to be a criminal who incriminated others. A gangster with a name like Levine. Gottlieb said he’d never experienced a fugue state.