The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  Conceição had fallen in love with Julia Grace. She had been horrified at his circumstances, intrigued by his ‘savage riches’ as she described them in one of her letters to him…an interestingly intimate letter, apologising for her initial reaction, her forthrightness at such squalor and grandeur before she was able to assess his priceless paintings, his antique furniture, his ancient ornaments and scrolls. Her collector’s eye had been clouded by his women, her covetousness confused, blushing helplessly when Silver Eagle stared her down. She had been ushered in by Nickel Hawk, through two museum salons which were impressive despite the dogs and cats and chickens, and she turned right, following the girl, whom she mistook for his daughter, and she brushed aside the drapes which Nickel Hawk had let fall onto her face and saw him in his bath with the yellow screens behind and the untidy bookshelves and the cupboards full of jade vases, jars, porcelains and bronzes, and there were paintings stacked against the wall, damp from the steam of his bath. His tub folded back into a wardrobe with a mirror, revealing a sodden Persian rug, the whole affair arranged along one wall of the large room. They had a long discussion while she sat beside his bath and Silver Eagle poured in water and the Peregrine, swaying and willowy, lit his pipes. They spoke about drugs and then about fugues. He said he was peripatetic, prowling around the back streets, lost in the vortex of the city, but now he was tired more and more, his urban revolutions smaller, his map marginal. He was coughing up flecks of blood onto his handkerchief. She was caught between disgust and her fascination with his silken women, intrigued by their indifferent silence. She suggested buying some of his collection…the paintings, of course. Outside, beyond the shuttered windows the city exuded an unhealthy mist, fermented the air with decay, tang of wet markets, fish stalls closing for the night, cobbles gleaming with blood and silver scales. She had walked here and the hem of her dress was still damp against her boots and she had had to elbow her way through a thick soup of people, thinking of her farm at a place called Putty, in New South Wales, Australia, where there was always the health of the grain, wet wool of sheep, the sweetness of silos bursting with store, flavours of roasting lamb and the sharp crackling of red gum burning in the grate, and no people, and she thought of that peace which was not here, the stillness of the night and the proximity of the stars.

  When they were alone he began to speak more eagerly about his dry-brush copying, the hand revealing the will, the experience, he said, of traversing the same road as those Chinese masters, a true imbibing of the weather, and that was what it was like with his poetry. Julia then saw sadness, a windblown shade come upon his face when he spoke about his son, of the fate of those born out of wedlock, the perfilhados – perfidious, he claimed, sons without faith – so they always turned out – for the very reason that in Macau they had the same rights as their fathers. The monkey was on his back, pushing him one rung further down into the grave. The son was his copy and would extinguish him; and then his son, and then his son. Brush him out. He wanted to put himself out of reach. She wanted to show him that he was wrong, bring him to another place where there was the sweetness of timber and the crispness of air, the inhalation of life and taking the washcloth from the side of the tub she began slowly to wash him, first his feet which he had propped on the rim, and then his shoulders and his thinning hair and as the water became more tepid, knew refilling was a disturbance, a displacement of pleasure taken from the alreadydead, and so she submerged her hand beneath where there had been no more feeling and brought him to the present. It was the one thing for which there was no correction. The rest is history. The clepsydra dripped.

  29

  There is a very small entry in Anna Ångström’s diary, which was left behind in the studio at Cerbère…fortunately rescued by the patriarch of the artistic community…the small entry made on the 5th January 1928, almost two years after Anna had visited Macau, which does have the ring of truth about it, indicating a mystery which had not yet been digested, since all jealousies and betrayals entail consequences and speculations which become more lucid with time…the entry of the 5th January 1928 notes that:

  …something had happened to Julia…it was most certainly the result of an encounter with that awful Rasputin. They had met three times in our short stay and even though Julia made it quite clear that she was on a mission that was purely business, I could not quite trust her. I’m not sure if I was jealous, for time has passed quickly and I cannot remember if she had been disloyal, though I knew that deep in her heart she was not that way inclined. I therefore began to suspect her motives. Why she was spending time, for example, with a man who was at the end of his minor career as a poet? A man at the limits of his talent, who admitted to her that he was always having to make such a mental effort with modernity he could never return to Europe. A man who hated everything about modern art, since we were sailing towards the future: modernism; cubism; surrealism. That Camilo creature knew nothing of what was going on in France. He had gone backwards into Chinese painting and exclaimed during our one brief meeting at dinner…an event I was fortunate not to have to repeat… that he was ‘always looking for midday at two o’clock’. Passé. He was absolutely passé in his thinking. A man of the past who destroyed the past. A passéiste who painted cheap advertisements over once worthy canvases. A man who believed in symbols of commodity, who fathered children indiscriminately and who bought women for his pleasure.

  My suspicion of Julia began that day we set sail, when she suddenly expressed the desire to go home. Indeed she only spent a month at Cerbère and it was a desperate month for both of us, for we argued constantly and Meister Gleize had to counsel me for what was rapidly turning into nervous exhaustion. A break-up, as it now turns out. But Julia was running back home. I know how she would have waited breathlessly at the post office at Putty, waiting for news of him in that Australian heat.

  If only Julia knew that Conceição was raving mad by this time. He sent the Peregrine to bring him his pipes. He liked the honey colour of the Macau Opium Farm brand. Long after Julia had departed he asked Nickel Hawk to put lilies in a vase. He said they were grown in a honey-coloured valley. He directed her to it, somewhere in the heart of China. Nickel Hawk said there were no lilies. The woman with the lilies had left a month ago. No, Miss Grace will do it herself, Conceição said, and filled the vase with bathwater. He saw the flowers being nourished. Autumn is gone now, the cold returns…he wrote of her as Ophelia, her hands translucent and cold beneath the water.

  In the mornings he walked as far as he could but suffered from a chronic pain in his joints, a pressure behind his nose, a head that would not tell the time. The walking was all there was – a forward movement towards a narrowing gap. He walked barefoot in his long indigo nightshirt like a beggar, zigzagging between people, crossing and recrossing the streets out of some superstition that buildings may collapse, tiles may come tumbling down, for catastrophe may occur at any time. The world was discontinuous. He walked barefoot to feel the state of the ground, to detect the fine tremors of future earthquakes, to configure his position with regard to the earth because he felt he had come to the end of his time and this ending was fortuitous, and his bare feet felt the cold stones and the coldness gave him back something that was not entirely wasted. The thought of the gift of his death lightened him; released him from another rehearsal of a life in which he would be overcome by ambition all over again. It would only be at the last moment – when he became discontinuous, when he had already fostered discontinuity, having fathered useless words and children – it would only be at the last moment that he would find that this imitation of life had no meaning; except for his taking revenge on the rhythm and circulation of time itself. He would need to teach Nickel Hawk how to escape through this aperture, how to recognise originality. He would teach her that by submitting herself to the command of the work, she could collect other people’s memories and free her own vision. She had already created. She should teach her son about painting.

  Look at
him lifting his feet as though he were cycling, careful of the dog shit. Or maybe he was pedalling a foot-driven watermill from which the Chinese word for bicycle is derived. Going through the repetitious motions of life to sample all the scales of emotion. He rolled out his tricycle. It was garnished with rust, suffocated with cobwebs. He walked it through the streets, struggled with it up the hill to the school. He would ask for his old job back. He was a teacher. The measure of his life was as a pedagogue, a reproducer of failure. Cobwebs had been stuffed down his throat. He stood outside the gates. Heard the muffled recitals of verse. He wasn’t dressed. Barefoot, dirty, he would have to dust off his jacket. Mournfully, he wheeled the tricycle around. Sat on it and sped down the hill. The contraption squealed. Words running like spiders in his brain. He flew. The brakes gave way, levers like sponge cake beneath his fingers. At the bottom of the hill he had a moment of rational calculation: the seawall; if he turned at the right moment, he could spin the vehicle in such a way the back wheels would take the brunt of the impact. But there was no balance. There was no weight. It rolled and he toppled; surprised, disoriented, uncharted; and then there were perfumes, flowers, sweet paradise.

  His dogs were sleeping faithfully on his cold body when the women found him in his dry tub – you should have seen their look of horror, the realisation that their welfare had suddenly disappeared – and there he was, divested finally of the fugues he so favoured, having come to rest when he thought his work was finally and uselessly done. Passing on. There was a smile on his ravaged mouth, a glow on his cheeks where a savage beauty had settled.

  30

  And now I await something which may not make itself apparent. I, Walter Gottlieb, am waiting for a life sentence…the interminable future of one’s reputation. Had I not interrogated Redvers, absorbed his memory, found out all I could in order to glimpse the palimpsest of Conceição? Had Redvers knowingly lied and I blindly followed, or had he lied blindly and I followed knowingly? Have I not mined Conceição’s archive to discourage future fabulators? Am I not wearing a red bow tie? A clean white shirt? Please be assured I have staked my life on my credibility and my research. Conceição has been my life’s obsession. His descendants, save for one, are dead or untraceable. How else but to lure the survivor into my confidence? We fell out of course, in one-way traffic. He fled to Paris, his safe haven.

  I have this little phial of morphine I stole from my doctor’s fridge. I do not know what it will do to the heart. Some kind of étouffement. Suffocation; constriction. Miraculous calm there is, in deceit: liminal, between two realms. What? Erect at a time like this? Alert, this organ? No, not my heart. A change of heart. That’s what all these drugs do; they turn life into a drowsy variation of thirty short dances between depression and excitement. So brief. No rush now. Coming into a transit zone: counterpoint…step and turn…pulsing…flesh…inert matter… step…an anamorphosis…pirouette…my bleached face melting beside the toilet bowl, finally, those useless muscles in the process of articulation. Just a little bit more then. Dr Walter will write you from the future. I am at the jetty again, chained, waiting for the tide, only this time nobody will hear me. I am at the border. It is all too familiar, my ennui. No one writes to me.

  I shall go to Lisbon, thence to Macau to meet Conceição, to sit and converse with his ghost, find out the truth. But before that I memorise my room on the upper storey, the rug, the desk; I mentally photograph these tessellated tiles, this cast-iron, clawfoot tub, the baroque mirror on the ceiling, so that I can accurately describe to others in another world how these crossings are accomplished by raiding the past. I turn on the taps. Here, in my absence, those who remain behind will feel they had forgotten something; a briefcase perhaps. Downstairs, they will be reminded by a small leak in the ceiling. Readers will experience a certain familiarity with things out of time, having encountered an invisible stranger from the future who, like themselves, is a perennial lover of life. To learn this new identity, to be open to a world brimful with hope and happiness, is like learning how to ride a bicycle, moving forward while sitting still, pedalling faster to avoid falling, conquering borderless territories by means of a sweet union with the earth.

  Sarraute’s Surgery

  I am glad not to be sick; but if I am, I want to know I am; and if they cauterise or incise me, I want to feel it.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  Ingress

  Something had gone terribly wrong. There were no fish in the sea.

  On this very fine, very blue morning, in Rim Cove North Queensland, the jellyfish have taken over. That’s what the mini-bus driver told us last night when we arrived at the airport and were shuttled to the resort in the warm and glutinous air. Plastic bags. From the South Pacific to the Andaman Sea. Plastic bags which turtles mistook for jellyfish. So the turtles were all dying, choked by plastic which they swallowed, thinking they were jellyfish, jellyfish which they loved, transparent blubber, neverending ‘hors d’oeuvres’, nourishing protoplasm with a touch of spice, a whole underworld of eating and drinking. Now the turtles have gone and the jellyfish have taken over and the fish are dying, stung with poison, trapped by curtains of tentacles, deprived of fish food. That’s what the mini-bus driver told us in the black night lit only by the lights of the resort, while a tropical mist descended, bringing odours of frangipani. We need guns, the driver said. For the plastic bags? I asked. No, for the pigs. Feral pigs are like jellyfish. Breeding. Destroying the land. Like…he looks around the back of the bus…catches my eye and smiles a sly smile…like them Asian property developers, hey.

  But now this bluish morning. A hazy horizon. Something wrong when there was not a single person in sight. Warm already, full of seaweed smells; the raw and the cooked. I hang my Italian sandals around my neck; I wear white flannels rolled. Fine, clean sand squeezes between my toes, cold, hard-packed; softer pockets further up on the small dunes, still cool beneath. Everything groomed by a small tractor which trawls up and down at dawn and sunset. No glass bottles, no trash. The oncoming heat bears with it an anxiety that the day is already lost. Prickles of shells, squeak of soles. Sea pineapples bowl up and back, frothing and rippling. Later in the forenoon I will frequent the marketplace, stroll about, loiter in the shade, lean on doorposts to glean local knowledge. The ‘agora’. With the market crowd, all that matters is my own silence. And then they will tell me everything. I need to buy a lantern. Find an honest man.

  Last night I ate alone at the Biarritz Restaurant. Open to the beachfront, windy, warm, with barbecued smells of shrimp and steaks, all you can eat, Queensland style. The restaurant was blurry with smoke, staff in the fug and panic of a small kitchen fire. Busloads of tourists arriving. Confusion is what I cherish. The woman next to me (our tables were small, French style, in a row, along a continuous banquette), appeared professional and busy. Real estate perhaps, but definitely a local. The waiters were obsequious. I may have drunk a little too much. Not much recollection, but I’ll try it in the present, so I can go in and out. The woman next to me has long black hair and intense dark eyes and she catches me glancing to my right, over at her, so I look away at the glistening sea sparkling with…well, glowing sea-critters. I’m not one for too much nature study. I gave that away when I shaved off my beard. Someone else inhabits me now. She eats quickly, studies a pharmaceutical brochure, lifts a long finger for her bill. Pays, slips out the other side of the table. The staff are preoccupied with smoke. I take her money, put the bill on the empty table on my left, leave twenty of her dollars beside my plate and am just about to ease out of the confines of the banquette when I notice she has left a book behind. A leather-bound notebook, black, lying on the red leatherette. I take this to be fortuitous. Red and black are my favourite colours. If stopped by anyone, I could say I was simply chasing after her to return it. It’s a ploy I’ve used before, an exit strategy, though this night I felt happy, adventurous, leaving everything to chance. I carry the book under my arm into the fresh breeze, thinking of the skinny blon
de girl I met on the plane, who said she too, was heading for this same resort. I had told her (after several small bottles of airline bubbly) that she was beautiful, and she smiled in a way that was neither embarrassed nor dismissive. I was looking forward to meeting her again by the warm saltwater pool. In the meantime, I sample French champagne from the Honour Bar, which for me bars all honour, as I read the spiked slips which have been turned over for secrecy, and graft onto my honoration of the best wine all the best room numbers.

  Clean-shaven, I look much younger than my years. Faces, at any rate, are melting moments. One never sees them entirely, since they change like the weather. In Rio, I thought I recognised many people, all from my past. Ex-lovers, ghosts, maybe. In their new lives they deserve not to be recognised, so I did not approach them. I certainly don’t judge people by their faces. Judgment is acquired from a distance and the face changes as one approaches one’s subject. Tropisms, for instance, occur in the noonday heat. Re-assessments take place after a good meal. Alcoholic vulnerabilities settle in during the late afternoon, when desires or disgust arise. Perspectives are sharpened. It may explain why sane and sober people are often paralysed by unconscious and unclear moods, dulled by emotions with the consistency of jelly.