The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  I was at this moment touched by Fabiana’s observation, not only because it was the first time she seemed to be forthcoming about her work, but because she had forgiven me, so I thought, and the tightness of her black garments seemed now to be a counterpoint to her discipline, loosening her secretiveness and untying her tongue. Julia Grace, I said, is a beautiful name. There are two paintings by her, are there not, in the studio? Fabiana appeared startled. Yes. Of course you would not have touched them? I had them turned to the wall. But you would not have touched them because you recognised their value. No, not their value, I said, but their delight, their masquerade. Why did Julia sign her paintings ‘C.C.’? I asked. It was a fatal question. The look on her face said I had intruded much too far this time.

  It was only after she’d turned away, long after she packed the paintings into a crate so as to emphasise my crime, long after she whistled up the dogs to accompany her back to her cottage, after the cold wind had risen, that I came to myself, so entranced was I by her. I laid the hourglass back down on its side and thought of Gottlieb. In order to see myself better, I had come up here, viewed my relationship with him through a different prism. Now this prism was showing me astonishing things. I was being untied from him. Solitude undoing the knot. I realised how pale I was in comparison to someone like Gottlieb, who had devoted his life to art and I had irreverently painted him seated on a toilet bowl, leaning rather heavily on a sink where the word ‘Shank’ was printed in the porcelain above the overflow slot. And it was only after I had painted over Fabiana’s canvases that I realised the word shank had a meaning beyond being a brand name, a surname, perhaps of its maker, but that it meant to walk away, to leg it, to wander off, and that at the age of four I was already being instructed by words to remove myself from things, never to have settled upon anything, never to have persevered in painting or in writing, always to have wandered off, and it was only when Fabiana asked me one day (she was eating plums she had plucked from the tree by the river when I came upon her, and she was offering me one and the juice had squirted slightly and settled on the sleeve of her black pullover), it was only when she had asked me whether I had any children that I replied that the idea of bringing a life into the world horrified me. To think that I could pass on to a child the shame of existence! I said, thinking to myself that I was useless even in the most natural act of creation. And it was while Fabiana sat down on the bank, her toes wriggling in the soft sand, that she told me about her daughter, that same daughter whom I had not met, but who comes up to visit her, she said. It was a daughter she had given away, Fabiana said, a year after the child’s birth, and now the girl had recently turned eighteen and had traced her mother through a diligent search of state records. It must have been strange, I said, but then I said no more, because I was really thinking how nauseating it would have been, not to have seen your daughter since she was a oneyear-old, and to have her turn up as a young woman, your own flesh and blood, a separate individual, for whom you had renounced responsibility, and I was thinking, though I did not say it, that this to me, was like a seedling that had taken, expanding to become a tree, shooting outwards and downwards, never to retract, and it would not behoove you to cut it down. I do not know why, but I thought of how I did not go to my mother’s cremation because I had an important university exam, and I thought how this would have been the mirror image for Fabiana of that event, of having a child turn up after so many years, knowing you had abandoned her because families needed to preserve respectability, social importance, hiding the pregnancy from public scrutiny, leaving a cremated memory floating in the Ganges. But it must have been more than any of this. Fabiana must have been desperate. She must have been on the edge of an abyss; ready to jump off the deep end. I do not know why, but I thought then of holding Blimunde in my arms trying to keep everything together.

  25

  I saw Sergio driving along the Putty Road in a pink Chevrolet. I was sure it was him. Driving naked to the waist as he liked to do, speeding in a convertible, the top down, a joint between his lips. Sergio does not speak much English and he has no French, German or Italian, so it remains for him to stare at me, I who speak all four and he, smiling with contempt, simply to convey his proprietory attitude over Fabiana and her property as if he had sensed the presence of a fellow criminal, because I was sure Sergio was a car stealer and I was starting to regret the fact that I pursued intellectual matters, locking myself away in a silo, a sillographer, albeit one in the pits, one who had sunk so far as to be unable to understand human complexity, one who could no longer read books without passing quickly from one to another, strolling along the walls to pick at the shelves, achieving less and less with greater persistence. Without lightness, there was nothing, I was thinking, just at the point when the wind picked up behind me and I sailed on the Swift, weightless as a feather, just when Sergio sped past me in a powder-pink American convertible with fins.

  Dark thoughts descend while upon the Swift; sooty, forktailed, they swoop. The Swift flies with them; tyres buzzing beneath me on the road to Sydney; red wheels and silver spokes carrying me with speed and grace; men stand up to look from their work in fields, children wave, and I, disembodied, flow upon double triangles, descending into the brown murk of the city to squeeze into the wealthy glare of Double Bay, its houses hidden from view, their walls rejecting intruders on this still afternoon of my unruly madness.

  The little maid opened the door. She wore a cardigan, badly knitted. She scowled at me. For the first time I saw in her a divine blemish. She was someone who had devoted herself to doing one thing superbly in the circus, and when she fell from the trapeze and tumbled over the side of the netting onto the sawdust-laden ground she was forever deformed, not physically, though I was unable to tell that just by observation, but mentally. She carried this mental deformity unconsciously, with her guillotine nose and her permanent scowl. Her swift flights had ended. I asked for Marie. The maid said she would go and check, as if checking would determine my worth. Brevity would have been joyous, but the length of time I waited at the door determined this in inverse proportion. Presently Marie appeared, looking tired, wearing a sack dress which concealed her bulging body and which made her seem more of a nun than ever before. She was pushing her mouth to one side, screwing up her lips so I immediately recognised one of those unstable phases of hers when she would make endless novenas to the Virgin Mary, not out of a desire for redemption, which proved unattainable for someone as wealthy as she, but from superstition, a storing-up, an insurance against disaster. And disaster was what she suspected I had always brought. Though my peripheral vision was all but useless, I noticed that in a corner of the dining room the maid was extracting tea from teabags with her fingers. Marie and I discussed my situation. She came straight to the point: Was I asking for money? Everyone was touching her for that lately. No, I assured her I needed nothing from her. The reason I said I was visiting the Château de Nerval, as I called it, was not to ask her to slip a few more Francis Bacon forgeries onto the market… which she would not have done in any case, though she made a good profit from them in the past by later exposing them as fakes, for there was a profitable market in good fakes; in fact, one could have said that it was a status symbol to possess fakes and to hang them in one’s Parisian apartment rather than displaying originals, and there was nothing quite like the Seine barges shining their searchlights up into spacious apartments during Patrimony Week, illuminating all the forgeries on the apartment walls… anyway, the reason I had for visiting her at the Château de Nerval, I told Marie, was to try and discover whether there had ever been any issue between us. Issue? There were a million issues, Marie said, not least your little entanglement (embrouillement was how she put it), with Lisette…and while I was in the house, she said raising her voice a little. No, I explained. There was hardly a month between my leaving Marie and her proposal of marriage to Gottlieb, who had accepted eagerly. It was, as they both informed me, a meeting of minds. Therefore I was wonderin
g… and here I began thinking again of Lisette, Marie’s sister, who had suffered from a spirochetes, which sent her into periodic states of euphoria, her hair falling out in handfuls into my shirt, into my books, sticking to the paint on my canvases, and it was in compensation for this alopecia that she always dressed magnificently, even while we made passionate love, obsessed with arranging her wardrobe in order to please me, and it was not only this sweetness, but her immense intellect, this beauty of balance, that convention was dropping away, which made me fall even more deeply in love with her, leading me back to the question of issue…Absolument non, Marie screamed. The maid had entered from the back, she may have been clutching a carving knife. To think that you think such things! Marie asked the maid for another tisane. Then she confided to me in a whisper: the women in the Nerval family have never been able to produce children… or if they conceived, there were always malfunctions, she said, miscarriages, stillbirths, premature deaths. It’s a family ailment that goes back centuries, documented in the national archives in the Palais Soubise as Le renvoi en marge de Nerval, a marginal alteration to the family, meaning, of course, that there were countless mad bastards. Then Blixen and Blimunde?…Marie closed her eyes at this point and began a silent prayer, shaking her head from side to side. We adopted them, she gasped. Walter was so pleased. He spent every hour with them and there were so very few. Tears were rolling down Marie’s red cheeks. Her face was asymmetrical, completely calm on one side and distressed on the other, and somewhere in the distant past I recalled, I had also loved her with this asymmetry in mind. Dear Blixen is in her first year at the university, dear Blimunde, please watch over her, after all, they were twins and they still are. You know how twins never let each other go don’t you? They were always together, like a mirror image, a shadow of each, a Rorschach ink blot… Marie was now speaking quite rapidly and incoherently, they only ever saw the backs of each other’s heads, because they did not need fictions of one another…Marie was now invoking the heavens, rolling up her eyes, and then she began intoning prayers and I left her at the altar of her huge dining table, which appeared funereal, the silver placed perfectly, candle holders tarnished from disuse, and I walked to the door, let myself out while the maid watched me from the bay window as I retrieved the Swift propped against the mossy stone of the wall and rode to Newtown.

  My former housemates had moved. In their place, another couple looking like the previous, time-encased, outré, flowers sewn on their flared jeans and pirate bandannas on their heads and silvery hooks piercing scaly flesh. I asked them if they knew Sergio, owner of the Salada Salsa nightclub on King Street.

  26

  Montaigne said when reason fails us we employ experience. How to tell a bad egg from the good. The bad one floats. I have never been able to see evil, though I have been quick to suspect it. Whenever I look closely at a so-called thoroughly evil person I find there unexpected charm and humour and I come away quite refreshed by the world. Floating. This judgment is from experience. Yet there are so many people one would presume good whose evil lies concealed in the presumed act of doing good, as in people who profess that their true aim in life is never to be dishonest or contradictory, and who constantly tell the ‘truth’ without a hint of contradiction, ending in a flow of constant gossip which causes irreparable harm, warning us of concealed dangers like a lighthouse which no longer projects light, but which rears up as an added danger at the last moment.

  For many years I had felt an unease, or suspected a disease in storytelling, so much so that whenever I captured a story, I released it almost immediately, vowing never to tell stories, even though in my mind I had already formulated its beginning, development and ending, and I had in a flash, seen that this is what a presumedly so-called good person does, by simply saying it is a story, rounding it out, manufacturing its completeness, and by saying that it is of no consequence, that there is no use for it except to titillate us for a moment, perhaps make us wonder about it, but not for too long, and if it is a really captivating story, to stir us enough to desire it or to steal it for employment, for that is the kind of evil that resides in a dishonest mind. But that is rare, because only an idiot lives by stories; only a complete fool carries around a story trying to imitate its precepts and attempting to put them into practice in the hope of gain. Sometimes of course we admire tellers for their charm, but mostly we realise all is calculated by charm in order to charm, and in the end, those of us who have learned through experience realise there is a religious charism at work here and that in the end stories are fanatical lighthouses without light and appear only during the day, possibly in fair weather, but they are nothing to cling to in the deepest of nights, for we only have ourselves, the controls are in our hands alone, as we glide towards danger, suicide or resurrection. Snake-charmers do not have the well-being of cobras in mind. I have never tried to tell stories. I’ve lived them of course.

  I was thinking these things as I rode back to Martins Boarding Kennels, dog-tired and dogged with cynicism. I thought about the dying Count Von Keyserling of Dresden. It was 1742. The year had gone badly for the former Russian ambassador to Saxony. It began with kidney stones, for which pain the Count took copious amounts of laudanum. The pain had spread to his bowels. He could not pass a motion. He sat on his commode for hours on end. He could not sleep at night. Others were going to the Russian Embassy Ball. Keyserling, of course, would be unable to attend, as he could hardly stand up without doubling over in pain and when he took his opium drops he flew into strange hallucinations, sailing through English gardens pursuing pageboys with cherubic smiles. The Count’s court musician was an angelic fifteen-year-old called Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a protégé of Johann Sebastian Bach. Count Keyserling asked young Goldberg to play the harpsichord in order that he, the Count, might try to sleep. Young Goldberg replied with caution, for the last time Count Von Keyserling asked him to play him to sleep, it was not the harpsichord that Goldberg attended. The boy said cunningly that he would have to ask his master and mentor, Herr Bach, for advice on what to play. Anything to stall for time. Anything that would not end in the eruptions of a fleshy flute. Anything with endless variations and striations and returns and endless ways of mutilating the subject. Something smooth and lively, the Count yelled from his bedroom commode. If it doesn’t send me to sleep it may at least initiate a movement. Little Gottlieb Goldberg ran from the court and hailed a carriage. He asked the driver to find Bach’s house, but on approach they discovered the narrow street blocked by a crowd. In the flare of oil lamps they saw stilt-walkers and magicians and women dressed intrans lucent silks. There was a fire-eater and a knife-thrower expertly cleaving apples from a boy’s head. Young Gottlieb heard music. Someone was playing a viola da gamba, another a lute. Several couples were dancing a pretty chaconne. And suddenly there was the Maestro, his right hand beneath his chin, memorising the tunes in passing, nodding at attractive women, writing the notes of the sarabande in his head…does any of it need an aria?…already sensing his protégé beside him without so much as a glance, saying to him that these tunes were not variations on a theme, because…and he cocked his head to one side…hear that? There was no theme; just each one varying the bassline in a different way. He looked down at the cherubic face. The boy was not going to have an easy time of it. Everyone wants stories. They will keep him from the court before too long; it was his name; a circumscription. Never reveal a theme or an ambition, the old man silently cautioned his young charge. The music grew louder and then it stopped. Bach pushed the boy along, his hand on Gottlieb’s shoulder, guiding the boy to the house, bidding him to sit at the instrument and to play something that he had just heard. The boy sat at the harpsichord and played flawlessly: pieces of the chaconne; variations of the passacaglia. Slower, Bach said; faster here. There. You memorise well. Now the bass, progressively higher! Yes! Bach shouted. The maid knocked and came in to close the windows. There is a dusty wind coming from the direction of the Leipzig Palace, she said crypticall
y. The old man understood these rumblings of the people. Even though he had a court appointment he had never forgotten that his greatgreat-grandfather was a humble miller and still remembered the story of his ancestor turning up at the grinding mill, the round tower on the edge of town, where he played his cithern while waiting for the wheat to be ground. It was this musical relentlessness, the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach was thinking, which had been passed down the generations. Imagine the unceasing grinding. Yes, he said to young Gottlieb, that is what will put Keyserling to sleep. I will write this down for you. Even though there is no theme, I will call these the Goldberg Variations. As you play them, think of the millstone tied around your name and the rumblings in the distance, but above all, think of the delicate sounds of the cithern, with the dusty wind howling outside. Sleep is disagreement with life. With these words he sent Gottlieb Goldberg away, promising he would have a soporific solution within a week. Every idea, Bach said to himself while standing at his window, is built from what is already known; created out of chance, counterpoint and somersaults. O, God, are you really there, or are you just a miller?

  27

  A police car passed me on the way up to Kurrajong. Admittedly I was finding the hill difficult because gravity demanded energy and my energy was being siphoned off since I was thinking of Fabiana, of the time when she was living at Potts Point, in a terrace house shrouded by liquid ambers, long before the city council trimmed the trees to prevent addicts climbing them to break into and enter premises from balconies. I was thinking how she told me she had met the notorious Levine, who came to her concerts and then sent her flowers and notes and obsessively invited her to dinner at expensive restaurants, brushing aside all her excuses, breaking down her defences and then finally charming her by finding her weakness for men with a shady side.