The Bath Fugues

by Brian Castro

  15

  Chinese art is non-representational, I was saying to Blixen as we lay on our banana lounges on the lawn in front of the beach. We have been working fifteen-hour days at the surgery and finally tourists have got the message about stingers. Now we are taking a day off, relaxing in front of the Pacific Palisades watching the water turn pink with coral spawn. Blixen was speaking about the Conceição paintings. Ancient Chinese art, I continued my lecture, was not about realism, nor about the copying of reality, which is really a kind of trickery, if you think deeply enough about it…you know, the discovery of perspective destroyed narrative and emotion, I was saying to Blixen, who was not listening at all, her dreamy eyes wandering all over the beach, waiting to catch a glimpse of Travis, the Cordillion boy, who any moment now would saunter up rubbing his abdominal muscles with its protruding navel, smiling behind his shades and Blixen would melt into embarrassment…for God’s sake, she’s twenty-four, it’s as though she’s never had a date with a six-pack, spending all her life studying and sipping atrocious coffee with bespectacled nerds at the university. Perspective made you melancholic, I was saying, it put you at a distance, and you suffered from being at one remove, never arriving, but always being held by the vanishing point. Well, there’s such a lot Blixen doesn’t know about, and I guess I have to let her go find out herself.

  It’s not as though she didn’t know about her mother Fabiana, who was always looking for adventure in men with whom she shouldn’t have become intimate…she was incapable of detaching her eyes, anxious she would not be admired…sleeping with her neighbour’s boyfriend, so that what’s her name… Miranda, yes, that was it, flew into a frenzy of rage and jealousy and fired guns up at the house in Putty, and it was not as though Blixen didn’t know about Fabiana’s increasing instability, her obsession with her analyst and with hourglasses and with Brazilian boys who ran dodgy nightclubs, guitar players who helped her grow marijuana on the patch of land cleared inside a pine forest, where she stored drugs in a silo protected by dogs… where she watched time like a cat watched goldfish. It’s not as though Blixen was entirely innocent about me either, since she already knew of my career at the North Sydney clinic where I did sex-change operations and that I had given it up when I was convinced it destroyed too many lives. It’s not as though I hadn’t written about how it was better to have left trannies in two minds rather than to be implanted and grafted, forever dissatisfied and forever to be pumped full of drugs until the body’s hormones revolted and flesh fell into fat, shape into silicone, all melting like a Bacon painting into lonely grief, paranoid schizophrenia; suicide…It’s not as though Blixen had been sheltered from all these things…from her father’s investments in coastal property, his dealings with shady financiers, so that when he died, much of it passed on to her. He was her hero. Of course Blixen hadn’t gone through Redvers’ writings since she found the latter’s literary style impenetrable and therefore would not have read that chapter in Brief Lives (II), where, without any need for allegory or subterfuge, he outlined the venal motives of his friend Walter Gottlieb, criticising the latter’s need to ‘divine’ fame for himself, exploiting rumour, buying the public’s belief that he had been let into a secret, when all the time he had been stealing his, Redvers’ stories…so Redvers said…adding that he, Redvers, was a descendant of the Portuguese poet Camilo Conceição… Redvers, who was always broke; Redvers, who envied his erstwhile friend, mentor and benefactor Walter Gottlieb; Redvers, who wrote that beautiful elegy for Blimunde. No, Blixen didn’t know about Redvers and me.

  But I wasn’t going to say this to her. Not while she was infatuated with Travis. Just as I wasn’t going to remind her that at the age of fifteen, after a weekend in Putty, she had run back to her father Walter Gottlieb and had tried to encircle his thick waist with her thin arms. He didn’t hug back. He never did.

  Slide #3: Tripedalia Fabiana

  The bell reaches 14 mm across and has many warty mammilations containing nematocysts. There is little information on the Tripedalia species. Wait for the sting. (Buddhist monks ring a bell; hit one another to keep concentration.)

  I wouldn’t go so far as ever to insinuate to Blixen that her mother was a murderer. No, Fabiana was simply trying to get Gottlieb to leave Marie, trying to get him to live with her, the love of her life, the father of her children; she would have killed for him even though she would have betrayed him a hundred times. But Gottlieb wasn’t going to leave the luxury of his existence, the preciousness of his harbourside poetics, the weekly reading group to which he now belonged…and most of all, the safety of Marie, because he was through with risk, through with selfdoubt, with the insecurity of faith, hope and love.

  That’s the romantic version.

  The gossip in the forest was that Roger the parquetier found out how much the ‘Chinese’ paintings were worth. He exploited Fabiana’s naïveté and took possession of the works, in order, as he said, ‘to put a value on them’. He met up with Marie de Nerval in Double Bay. The first thing he said was that his wife was cheating on him. He wanted those damned paintings catalogued. He intimated that divorce would be a messy business and that he was a simple man. He hired a private detective named Levine. Redvers told me all this. The third version, my dear Blixen, I cannot repeat to you. Redvers said your mother was a complete narcissist.

  16

  – Jude, who was Redvers?

  – A drifter who lived on your mother’s farm; a ghost, a phantom.

  – Did he die there?

  – Well, he disappeared, Blixen. Just like Roger. No one knows what happened to Redvers. He suffered from fugues. He said there were always thirty of them in one’s lifetime. I think he was a melancholic; a sad fellow. He was always trying to live up to the myth that he was a great painter. He went everywhere on his bicycle; always appeared at moments when secrets were about to be revealed.

  – What is a fugue exactly? Not that I’m going to specialise in psychiatry.

  – Sufferers usually had two alternating personalities; a kind of double consciousness. Doctors first discovered these cases in 1885, in Bordeaux. Then in the 1880s gleaners, tramps and vagabonds discovered the ‘safety’ bicycle and an epidemic of fugueurs was reported. It was a kind of pathological tourism. Economy class. They terrified pedestrians, these manic travellers, poor workers for the most part, who did not appear out of nowhere. They had history on their side. They were stuck to their bikes in their ‘other’ state like former knights on their horses. They had eminence and precedence. Melancholic artisans without access to any nobility. Driven to movement, not humility. Three centuries earlier, Michel de Montaigne, the essayist and nobleman, was similarly obsessed about dying upon his horse whilst on his travels in the 1580s.

  – Wasn’t he the mayor of Bordeaux?

  I play a CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I’m trying to understand Blixen’s mother. How a talented woman like Fabiana followed such a devastating path in life. She did not have any self-esteem, Blixen said. Blixen in the bath, taking her time, wringing out her long blonde hair. Variation No. 26. I listen to Glenn Gould’s historic 1955 debut recording. Taking his time. You can hear the pedals being pressed and released. The resonating aftertones. Bach’s key changes indicate some form of destiny…Bach speaking deeply to himself as though he had no real will, only questions about God’s harmony in the disharmony of the world…God’s voice, Gould’s touch. I listen to Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the same Goldberg Variation he played in a concert in 1955. It is much longer. This time there is a haunted humming as well. He’s an older man now, enjoying his mastery and his argument. His voice adds another conversation. He’s not there for others. It’s no longer a disagreement with God, but a kind of resigned abnormality, as though being a detective in these solitary fugues needed indifference and cruelty. I can hear Blixen humming along. Her cheating voice doubling Gould’s. She’s going to have a summer affair with Travis Cordillion. I said this aloud, irritated at myself for having been so
unproductive in my research, for not being able to read the future. Ever since Blixen’s arrival, ever since the epidemic, I have not discovered a single thing beneath the microscope. Squiggling molecules. I haven’t given enough time to considerations of beauty, having spent much of it in cynical observation. What did you say? Blixen asks; she’s come out of her bath, looking divine, wrapped in towels.

  17

  The relentless blue of the sky. The endless thudding of the small waves on the sand; the green water churning over masses of white jelly. The queues of patients and the smell of their vinegar baths prefigure a crucifixion. Someone must be sacrificed. On the horizon you can see the kite rising, hovering…Janet Cordillion, suspended there beyond the reef where there were few stingers… too cold, too dark in the water for them. She flies, towed behind her cruiser. The cruiser is a present from Carter. I think she has orgasms up there, Carter told me over a crab salad. He was drinking a whole bottle of late-picked Riesling by himself. I don’t disapprove of people drinking at lunch, especially when I make them sign what is necessary. How’s Samantha? I ask. He looks at me and takes a minute to think. He told me about Samantha. He’s crazy about her. She’s fine, he says finally. I’m the one you ought to be thinking about. It’s okay, I say. You’ll get the results by next week. I can’t…he begins…I won’t be able to…you know, with Sam. Not if you’re responsible, I tell him. He looks over the papers for the Rastoni again. It’s all in order. I wanted a sixmonth option, an instalment plan. He signs. If you speak to Angus Cattle my solicitor, we can lay off staff tomorrow, I tell him. They’ll have no trouble finding other jobs. The stingers haven’t put off all the tourists. They come here to be social, to party. They prefer to swim in the pools anyway, I say to him. You know, Cordillion mumbles, preoccupied with something entirely different, Sam’s not sure about the operation. Then she shouldn’t have it, I say…I’d seen pre-ops at suicidal pitch because they’d taken too many hormones.

  I’m watching Janet out there on the reef and I’m depressed by her loneliness. All sky and sea, all alone except for the cargo ships swollen with fuel oil, fat to the Plimsoll line, smoking up and down the coast, threading the Grafton Passage and the Trinity Opening between the reefs, ploughing up dark blue water. Why doesn’t Janet want to know about Carter and Sam? Samantha, I think to myself, was beautiful…I’d only met her once. She was cute, slim and dark, wearing black lace and stockings, sitting on a cane chair, winner of the Singapore Transgender beauty contest. The room sparked with camera flashes. She was electric, a mix of cultures, like the cocktails she liked to drink. The risk was not in the operation, I said. I wanted Carter to be aware of this. Men were the real danger. In the end men always killed abnormality. Carter was silent. At the moment he may have thought he was in love. There will be a time when such feelings will vanish; when he will become confused and not understand a single thing about dysphoria.

  I said this to him again in his lounge room when he and Janet invited me to talk about some share options he was offering in his multiplex organisation. Janet was in the kitchen at the time, making tidbits, caviar on biscuits which seemed to lack all imagination. Carter wasn’t really sensitive to my warnings. He was lighting a cigarette. Do you mind? It’s your house, I said. He stubbed it out, but the damage was done. My warnings increased his self-loathing. We argued about Sam without mentioning her name. I said her participation in these anti-pageants was a need for recognition, a risky procedure. I tried to point out the huge pain of being born with a body that was opposed to one’s mind. It was wretchedness generated by an identity crisis, not, as Carter thought, a sexual come-on. His house was dark, billowing with curtains. Outside, a blind God was still blowing jellyfish ashore.

  18

  My father, the professor of tropical medicine, had the best collection of venom in the world. In his laboratories in Paris, he had two large coolrooms filled with compression shelves in which he stored venin and poisons from all over the globe: everything from funnel-web toxins and snake venom to deadly nightshade. When I was twelve…the age at which he said I had become a woman, he gave me the key to his rooms. I walked among the shelves. On one side, the dull transparency of death appearing harmless as saliva; on the other, colourful antivenenes. He taught me all the properties of blood. I observed: coagulants; corpuscles; my father making love to an assistant. Sticky components. Contortions. I learned to extract venom from cobras, blood from human veins. A boomslang snake, I noticed, went into contortions after biting something, presumably out of excess aggression and the need to generate more venom. Then it would grow tired and you could pick it up by the tail. I always worked backwards, picking things up by the tail. My rear up in the air. My father with his large hands around my waist as I bent my eye to the microscope. Even though I hated my childhood, I respected the privilege of having the key to such things.

  19

  Blixen no longer rides with me to Mossman and back. She’s always complaining of tiredness. I wanted her to send some blood samples to the pathology lab before the week was over. I went on long randonnées with the over-fifties club, though they were much too slow for me. On these group rides I heard all the gossip. Cordillion wanted to build a casino up the coast. Janet, they informed me, was riding up front, showing off. He’s off to Africa next week. Who? Carter of course. He’s always off somewhere. It’s all very unhappy for her.

  Blixen doesn’t show up at the surgery that often now. She stays out, presumably with Travis. Passed into another’s life. Comes home late, goes to her own room, sleeps until midday. I don’t like my stepmother behaviour. I don’t like staying up waiting. I don’t like suspicion or fantasy. I don’t speculate on scenarios. I have cold showers. I am punctual and methodical.

  I have inherited my father’s collection of poisons and antivenins, though these are more for the sake of historical data on aggression and stress in animals. Every now and again surgeons in the field of gender reassignment call on me to clarify the problems of hormonal reaction to surgical stress – any incision is an aggression upon the body. But my real interest is not in these areas of stress and anaesthesia, but in the psychosis patients develop after being bitten or stung. Over the years, I’ve built up my own collection of venom and anti-poisons, which I house in a Chinese teak cabinet, locked for obvious reasons. Downstairs in the surgery there is a steel safe for dangerous drugs. Collecting is contiguity: one item placed next to another without real meaning. All that matters is that there is a kind of ‘system’…an alarm clock which calls decadence to assembly. Look, these moments of my life: this phial in which I have preserved toxins discharged by Irukandji jellyfish, painstakingly extracted from the microscopic strings of pearls along hundreds of tentacles. Books too, can be necklaces saturated with poisons…Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, in which almost everybody dies, a damp copy of which is beside the bath Blixen has just used. Among her underwear, her father’s rosary beads.

  20

  I catch myself acting like a stepmother with Blixen and step-mothers are not naturally good. I look at Blixen’s slim body, her blonde ponytail, her lazy athleticism, the way she walks on the balls of her feet in her pink Converses, and she matches Travis Cordillion, in height and lightness. Though give him a few more years and he will turn to fat with his beer, as they all do, driving his car too fast on a winding road. Blixen left the door of the steel drug safe open. It was carelessness I could not overlook. That kind of thing could get me struck off, I said. She laughed, though she could see I was serious and gave me that look which said I was a little old and stuffy. As a stepmother I am too bleak. I take a bit more time with Travis. I am patient, entrusting him with courier work, transporting samples to the lab. Carter says enforced idleness is not good for his son. Because of the stingers, Travis hasn’t been conducting his diving tours out on the reef. I’ve seen him staring at me, watching me in my pink lycra, straddling my bike on the concourse as I ease out into my ride, past the grifter, who’s stealing glances in my direction, and with all
this staring I want to sprint…an itch that will become furious, a fast-twitch muscle ticking in my mind, deluded about my erotic authority, angry with Blixen for having left dangerous drugs unlocked. There it was, wide open for any addict. Luckily, nothing was missing.

  My cycling is a recycling of the body. Getting everything to work is in fact anti-aesthetic, since beauty doesn’t produce discipline, and discipline doesn’t produce beauty, but being in motion is vertiginous and seductive. There is nothing to be revealed about a body. To assume a body is simply to care for its needs…to be a custodian of its duration while it memorises its pathways. After my exercise I shower and find myself hardened, my thighs more powerful, my breasts pouting in defiance. I have had many suitors in my time, but I have not had enough time to consider them, those men who cannot understand anything I say, as I cannot speak ordinarily, though I am intent on conveying ordinary things like the weather, and each time the suitor would end up feeling cheated, as if I were mocking what he had to say, mocking his defensiveness, his submission even, and it would be left to me to puzzle over what I said that was wrong; the slight tone of supercilious dismissal, the mildest indication of scorn. Now in my fifties, I have been pegged at thirty-five, but I don’t spend time worrying over appearances. There is Travis observing me again and I can see him considering his Blixen (for surely I have given him Blixen? I have given her to him as a gift only to know her better, for her unfaithfulness to him will increase my propriety over her), measuring the girl against the older woman, thinking a thought with his body which puts his mind under stress, a clearly painful curiosity. And as I pedal along the coast road I feel the heat rising up from below, the same heat that Travis will now feel under him on the sand at the far end of the beach and next to him Blixen will be turning over in her black string bikini so that the sheen of the material over her backside, appearing under patches of wet sand which have slipped off as she turned, blinds him momentarily with desire, as though a landscape had subtly eroded and revealed not a woman next to him but the emptiness of the memory of his father’s mistress…a memory of Samantha, always immaculately dressed, slowly peeling open his astonishment as she rose up in the escalator, this encounter in a department store in Sydney, his father stammering behind, making small talk, introducing her as a business associate though it seemed obvious to Travis she knew nothing about his father’s businesses, and now as Travis looks across at Blixen he will be encountering something different…suddenly she is without mystery and he will not be patient, resulting in Blixen’s abrupt departure, flinging her towel around herself, having sensed his distraction, believing it was I who had displayed myself too readily on my bike, mistaking the I who could not have distracted him…I, who lifted my rear into the air, who could have had no interest in him except to remind him of worlds which may not have existed and which formed an idea beyond him.