by Brian Castro
The two same cops as before were passing me in their police car and I waved, lifted a weary arm while wrestling with the hill, gripping my handlebars, and they did not wave back, but looked grimly at me and then sped off, as if to demonstrate that power, as distinct from mechanical efficiency in concert with human potential, led to progress, which is nothing so much as a concept at the mercy of history and history is always narrated for the sake of progress. As I climbed the hill in my saddle I thought how time always had a theme specially suited to narration since it was always interpreted in linear form, but time is never really linear, because of its superfluity, abundance, excess of chance which produces events in an entirely random way. I thought how Bach, in contrast, confined chance to a probability, so that his fugues were not random events but a highly disciplined reconfiguration of time, using it against itself, so that time, which is mostly represented in its appearance and disappearance, is finally felt. That was how Bach understood the Jewish tragedy and its corresponding triumph, its flights and fugues. Little Gottlieb Goldberg was open to an uncertain future, facing an eternal return that was not of his choosing; and yet he will be resurrected, if only by chance. As I crested the hill in triumph I saw Fabiana’s dark secret through the prism of my sweat, beads of perspiration clouding my vision:
‘I don’t know,’ Levine said, ‘isn’t it best in the late afternoon?’ ‘What?’ ‘When one is drowsy and dreamy?’ ‘Wha-at?’ Fabiana asked him again, the melody in her voice filling him with desire. ‘Well, when one is drunk and lascivious,’ he said, drawing out the needle from his bound arm. He used a phylactery. The shadows were lengthening in Potts Point. He had had such a terrible day, such a day of fighting off all of his despair that he realised everything had been formed by an emotion, inarticulate, inarticulable. There were men and there were women. Everything was liquid. ‘I do not need to say what I want to say,’ he said. ‘All you will say is that we could never be lovers. And that has set me back thirty years.’ It was a rejection like a used bus ticket. Fed through a system. Mechanically, without spleen. That was how he would have described Fabiana if he could have found the words. She teased. But then, so did he. He was thinking of her body. ‘Anyone,’ she said, ‘who was not interested in seduction would not have slipped into your limousine…’ and she could have added that she opened the liquor cabinet and watched him watching her as she poured, watching the sheen of her silk skirt reflecting the lights as the chauffeur pulled away towards his apartments in a North Sydney tower, crossing the bridge crossing her stockinged legs silvering beneath the thin black skirt while she plucked ice cubes from her glass and as she leant over to him already seeing the hardness in his trousers and while holding clinking glasses in one hand unzipped him with the other, working him out through his underpants, sipped at the droplets curling from her glass before running an ice cube over him….
In his apartment she lost herself; screamed and trembled in a zone which frightened even him. There were men and then there were women. Their dance and their warfare took place upon one understanding: addiction made them neither.
28
All of these visions are against nature; against Bach; against the bicycle, both of which have principles and laws; the way I am interested in nouns beginning with B; both proper and improper. I sailed down the other side of the mountain towards the Colo River feeling the bassline of time, heavily thumping in my chest. Bach must have been a bicyclist. He noted at the bottom of the score for Variation No. 26 that ‘young Goldberg sometimes sat at the harpsichord as though he sat a hobbyhorse, a trumpetblowing cherub on a wheeled bench.’ He may have seen the drawings by Da Vinci. I ride over the wooden bridge. I breathe in the river, measure the approaching hill, absorbed by the idea that all motion in the world is rotary, sitting yet moving, stationary while in motion, no gap and no pause as the world flies by the still point of my circular reference, one foot down, the other up and vice versa, repetition and difference, point and counterpoint, everything reciprocated through perfect control, filtered through detachment. Indeed, the Swift was incorporeal, yet still capable of divining the earth. Another fugue arrives.
The rain is filtering down through plane trees three weeks after they meet and they decide on a late supper, after which they go to his apartment, which consists of five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen and a warehouse-size living room with glassed-in bookshelves, Giacometti on the table, a magnum of champagne, cushions on the floor and a concert grand…in the bedroom they draw the curtains and he feels the need for speed, but refrains, everything significant, in capital letters, fractured. The dark glass reflecting their single florid lampshade. Every move the beginning of something. A sentence about to form. Moving towards something they don’t yet believe can end. Levine addresses her politely, undresses her a little, his hands like butterflies. Would you like me to walk for you then? she asks. Wait. He runs back the curtains with the remote control. The full-length windows bathed in nightlight and rain. She is translucent. Arms akimbo. In an adjacent building in the watched and watching city, a telephoto lens extends. He smiles, visualising a frame of her spread-eagled on the pane, on the glossy page, while on the roof a green neon blinks and hums: the architecture of a beautiful body, and then the floor, shingled with stiletto imprints, he watches himself watching her, the rain streaking the window behind so she is filmy and wet, passed back and forth between negative and positive, her suppleness after babies, dark nipples, her shadows, her clicking heels. He is scarcely aroused, shakes loose his hair from a ponytail, always appearing louche, the pallor of his skin so different from hers. She walks, she kneels, he pushes her away. Her sentences do not hold. She is tired of playing Bach, realising all too late that in her attempt to will originality, she had become predictable. She broke it off with him a month later, sitting in tears in her apartment on Macleay Street…the flaking Pomeroy apartments, once a mansion with croquet and tennis lawns, in which Julia Grace, Fabiana’s grandmother, had lived and painted her cubist panels.
I think this was the story Walter Gottlieb wanted to tell me, on one of those nights he couldn’t sleep. I saw him come to life, blood rushing to his cheeks, animating him from semi-paralysis. He had dreamt Levine…surely it could not have been a memoir…and was asking my advice to push this story further. At least it was better than his poetry.
What happened? Fabiana asked me. What happened with the child that drowned, your friend’s little daughter? I don’t know, I said. I was asleep beside the pool, fleeing to the Ganges, always in flight. I couldn’t do anything after the fact. I had let Gottlieb down. There was no more reciprocation, I mean, in a friendly way, and from that moment on I think I had to memorise every apparent act of friendship in order to imagine its opposite, waiting for the moment at which my negligence would encounter recrimination. But he must’ve given you stories too; he must’ve made you a confidant, Fabiana said.
I was not a real writer and couldn’t use any of it. In secret, I was planning my Brief Lives (II), in which there would be a chapter dedicated to Blimunde entitled: Pavane pour une Infante Défunte. Even though I did not say this to Fabiana, because I caught a whiff of her increasing curiosity, concern, or need I say, alarm, I was thinking that at the moment Blixen roused me from my slumber to indicate that Blimunde was not moving at the bottom of the pool, the instant that I woke, I felt the ineffable weight of time, a landslide of sand shifting inside me. It was like smelling or tasting the cold, when getting out of a warm bus into a grimy winter, flakes of grey snow brushing against dark buildings; or when entering an air-conditioned cinema on a hot summer’s day…each space a kind of vault, affecting the heart; both a leap and a withdrawal; systolic and diastolic; panic and paralysis.
It was then that I got wind of a forthcoming publication, a posthumous work by Walter Benjamin Gottlieb. The ad in the review pages literally blew across the stoop outside McCredie’s store as I propped up my bicycle. It was one of those ill winds that occurred regularly, and I didn’t feel good
on my ride home with the folded newspaper tucked inside my shirt.
29
Sergio has disappeared. I have not seen him for several weeks. I can only assume he is renovating his dance club in Newtown, the Salada Salsa, a share of which Fabiana owns. My book on Michel de Montaigne is progressing slowly. In 1573, Montaigne was made a gentleman of the chamber to King Henry III. During this time he was witness to a number of royal debaucheries. The king was a staunch anti-Protestant, and Montaigne a lukewarm Catholic. The latter had to watch his step. Any intrigue not well handled, any information passing into the wrong hands, could entail a summary execution.
Yesterday I had another visitation from the constabulary. This time the two of them were accompanied by Fabiana. She said they were investigating the laying of poison baits in the area. Someone was doing it illegally and two of the dogs had lain dying, froth bubbling from their muzzles, writhing down by the waterhole. Which two? I wanted to know. They all looked at me. The two that followed you around, Fabiana said. She seemed unconcerned. She was explaining the layout of the property, the logging, the clearing of the paddocks, her plan to grow flowers for her store in Double Bay. All three stood huddled in a conspiracy, looking at me sideways, and when I mentioned Sergio, how I had not seen Sergio for weeks, though McCredie said he had sold him some meat, Fabiana turned to them and with her back to me, made the sign of lunacy with her index finger twisting a stray lock of blonde hair by her temple. Sergio, I said, Sergio the Brazilian. The constables looked at me with a smirk on their faces. McCredie says you’re a writer. The fellow showed his bad teeth. Have you ever published anything? Yes, I answered. Brief Lives. The policeman nodded. A whodunnit was it? Was there a Sergio in it?
I have never been forthcoming with authority. Authority requires simple-minded clarity and it produces an ugliness of language, a language which cannot encompass all the nuances of the body. It is at this point that I am closest to matter. I am simply active and reactive, and could be compared more favourably to the Swift, my skeleton taking on the characteristics of the bicycle, which, with all its circularities, only defies gravity when in motion.
When the police left, Fabiana lingered, went into her studiosilo and I assumed, tried to paint. At a little after four o’clock, she knocked on my door and she asked me to come to dinner that evening, inquiring as to what I would like her to wear. The strangeness of some people cannot be underestimated. Montaigne said that we should not impose our value system upon others with vastly differing customs. He also noted that whenever there was a conjunction of body and mind, when the body made up its mind, so to speak, a form of dissociation occurred. My illness, for example, sometimes brought me a delirious joy. Likewise, love brought a terrible agony. I was surprised at Fabiana’s invitation at first, but then again, I did not really know her, and at that moment began seeing her in a different light: the unkempt hair, the threadbare jeans, the darkness beneath her eyes. Having failed in eliciting memory from me, she was going to essay seduction. I saw how completely deceived I had been, over what I thought was her charming mystery, which had in fact become a malignant and deceptive plotting, my suspicion not taking root until I saw her interacting with the malevolent cretinism of the police. Women do not know perversity, but they know plotting. I’ve noticed how materialistic she was…the logging, the boarding kennels, the dried flowers she sold, the kitsch art she manufactured in her spare time. Now there was her association with Sergio, a sniff of drugs, the nightclub and poison. My disillusionment was justified when I read what Montaigne had written: that nothing was your own, not even your desire, and that only your control gives you a measure of the world, a control which is forever being corrupted by the need for love. Clarity was dissociation. He received this insight not through idle speculation, in repose, in comfort, but from being ill. Lucid in his fever, he saw criminality in obsession. The last thing he wanted to do was to become the mayor of Bordeaux.
I think the last thing I wanted to do was to have dinner with Fabiana. I think she was interested in poisoning me. I can see it now: my retching and vomiting; a slow death in the solitude of my silo. Like Gottlieb, she was blaming me for my negligence. I was not paying her enough attention. I was not reading the patterns in the parquet. Everything had to be re-thought in order for me to trace the flaw in her character. I would have to go back to the source, find the clear water which gushed from the spring and use it as a prism. Steal the water back for the hours I’ve missed while living in a state of love.
30
In the middle of the night, in this silo of mine, I prop the Swift up on its centre-stand and I ride, flicking on the flickering lamp, the wheels whirring in their revolutionary rhythms, and I traverse ancient cities. Repetition-compulsion. Pedalling up, pedalling down. Turning and returning. Round and round. This circularity wears down reason. The mind becomes disconnected. The body breaks down identity. Through mechanical reproduction, the original is worn away. Chaos: the tearing of a piece of cloth. In this gaping chasm, the world was born, copying itself, an erotic violation of God’s original. But the act of repeating has made shameful what was not there to be seen; it has caused a rent through which we peer at our emptiness and at our loss.
I needed to tell someone of this trap of reproduction, just as I had warned Gottlieb of fame. But my friend was dead. There was no friend. Gottlieb’s posthumous novel entitled In My Briefcase (sly old Gottlieb would have insisted on a space between brief and case, but such are the vicissitudes of sending a child into the world after the death of its father), is now a succès boeuf. It caused a scandal in Portugal.* Tarnished the image of one of their greatest poets, my grandfather Camilo Conceição. Portrayed him as degenerate. The book was dedicated to me, the author of Brief Lives (I): Mon frère, pour renouveler notre amitié, avec les sentiments de la plus profonde humilité. Gottlieb had finally triumphed…without my friendship. Yes, I had sat by smoking while he suffered on the gibbet of his marriage and had made a careful triage of my loyalties to him, always with an eye to my lodgings. There would have been a trade-off. Montaigne was right about friends. Then there was that final twist of the knife in Gottlieb’s will: he had bequeathed his library to me. Six thousand books; a lifetime’s collection. He knew I was almost blind. Anyway, I had nowhere to store them.
The blue sky and the shimmering gumleaves bear down on this round mill. The landscape remains a paradox: wide-open, available, withholding painful secrets. So with only two hours of daylight left, I strap McCredie’s stick of gelignite onto the top tube of the Swift and I bring my torch and cycle to the back portion of the huge property, the track becoming rougher, rutted with stones and corrugations, sloping down to the waterhole which is now dry, where the willows no longer indicate the presence of wind, their drooping boughs crisp with clumps of dying, drooping leaves, and I walk the Swift to the rocks on the dark side of the waterhole, lean it against a boulder. I climb the rockpile and make my way towards the little opening which allows me to squeeze into the small grotto where Fabiana once showed me Aboriginal hand drawings, and I light a match and wait to hear the sound of dripping water, listen for the resonating echo, contre-basses, cavernous counter-voices of the dead, searching for the god of Error, pondering my situation as the Emperor’s troops have surrounded me now; rhythmic footfalls, soldiers of time. I scramble down in the dark. Feel the water running up to my calves. This is the channel which feeds the waterhole. It flows underground and then rises up at a different level. Water always finds its own level. I trace the ebbing wells with my toes. I walk the walk that I have memorised during my expeditions here. I now have to go further. There it is, I feel the aperture first with my foot, then with my hands, the damp and the moss. There is a little ledge just above my head. If I stand on tiptoe and can find a grip, I will be able to pull myself up over the slippery rocks. I have the stick of waterproof gelignite which I will place in the small hole where the spring has been stoppered by mud, rocks and tree roots damming up all the subterranean arteries, and when
the bung bursts open, there will be an almighty gush of water and time, uncontrollable, a diabolical pumping and shuddering circulation, for water is true imagination, memory dammed up over time, seeping from dense sources, and the earth is impressionable, receptive of such leakage, and both earth and water have heavy dispositions for they constitute the substance of Saturn. I was suddenly back in Benares, by the banks of the Ganges. It signalled the end of my illness…of always seeing the corruption in things. That muddy water in India gave up its secrets and filled the mind and then erupted above me as I submerged myself, freeing me of my paralysis, my immobility. Unlike Narcissus, I was relieved of all my tortured daydreaming. Here was construction. Here, measure and squeeze through reality, the water already flowing faster; it forces me back, the mouth of death always cold. Outside, after the explosion, my bicycle will slowly submerge, but when the flood subsides, something will rise up on a parquetry of stone behind the bridal veil of water, propped against a vault inscribed by ancient peoples, a bleached cranium bathed in prismatic colours, grinning dementedly at the way we always represent ourselves as ambassadors of blindness.
The wind, the wind. All around, swifts are darting, crisscrossing the evening sky.
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