Tom sighed. At least he had the group, and the trip to Venice. He had a focus now, as he’d had in ’68. He would observe, make notes, and at last write up his conclusions about—
His conclusions about—
He didn’t have to draw formal conclusions. He could write his observations, as he had in From the Barricades.
The game would be revealing. Tom had no doubt he’d be able to identify the others. He pictured them in some Venetian trattoria afterward, laughing, unmasked. Rolf, the Man of Mystery, was in a black cape and black slouch hat. The conventional Jean-Pierre was a conventional Pierrot, the sad clown, with a black-and-white satin clown costume, a skullcap, a fat tear painted on his cheek. Brian was a Renaissance prince, ambiguously beautiful, in green velvet bound with gold braid. Sally— Sally was a barefoot hick, wearing overalls, a straw between her teeth. As for Francine— well, he couldn’t help thinking of Francine as an Earth Mother, even though she hadn’t liked the idea. He saw her full, luxuriant body in a semi-transparent white shift, garlanded about with leaves and flowers and fruit. She’d be wearing nothing underneath, so you’d see the outline of her thighs, the slightest tightness in her nipples.
He shifted his position in the chair. She’d been scornful of the idea. Better think of something else for her.
And for himself? The obvious thing, the first that had leapt to mind, was Socrates. Maybe it was too obvious. Socrates the teacher, leading his disciples to wisdom step by step. Socrates, willing to die for his beliefs. Socrates, with his unsympathetic, nagging wife— although, Tom had to admit, Olga wasn’t unsympathetic, really, and she didn’t nag. Tom didn’t have much in common with her anymore, that was all. Anyway, Socrates— the only thing was, Socrates was gay. If Tom himself dressed as Socrates, would it be taken as a declaration on that level as well? Because understanding as he was of Brian and Jean-Pierre, he would never— he didn’t have the slightest interest, ever.
Except maybe with Brian. Just once, out of curiosity.
He drank off his coffee, got up, and poured himself another cup.
That was the problem when you had somebody around who was as handsome as Brian. You forgot sometimes that he was an ignorant, snot-nosed kid. The group had been completely off balance since the romance between Brian and Jean-Pierre started, and this was no time for the group to be off balance.
Tom should work, but he felt a little shaky. If he went to the Café du Coin, somebody might be there, even though the weather was so rotten. He went to find his jacket and umbrella.
Afternoon At The Bistro
Rolf took the plateful of picked-over bones from in front of the florid man in the gray suit. The bistro had been only half-full for lunch because of the weather. It had hardly been worth it for the owner to call Rolf to substitute for the regular lunch waiter.
The only other customers were a young couple with a camera and a green Michelin guide. Americans, for sure. The woman looked dolorously out the window and made a remark to her husband. Cursing the weather. Why were you stupid enough to come to Paris in January, anyway? It isn’t the Bahamas, you know.
The woman looked a little like Sally, but prettier. Brown hair, freckles across the nose, but where Sally’s hair hung past her shoulders with no particular style, this lady had a very chic cut. Sally was so plain, so provincial. She reminded him— she really reminded him a lot—
Rolf raised his eyebrows in an inquiring expression and approached the gray-suited man. “Dessert? Café?”
“Un esprèss,” the man grunted.
In the kitchen, picking up the espresso, Rolf noticed that his hands were sweating. He’d had to leave America because of women like Sally. There were a lot of them there, those trusting, unsuspecting sorts of women. He had gotten annoyed sometimes because they were such idiots.
The United States was very large, fortunately, and a young man of twenty, twenty-one, could go wherever he pleased. He could live in university towns, work at jobs like this one, find roommates to share some bug-infested garret, find women.
The cup rattled in its saucer as he set it in front of the man.
It hadn’t been good, after a while, not good at all, and Rolf had thought it best to come back to Europe, where things would be different. How odd that things were not very different at all. He was working as a waiter, hanging out with students, and— Sally was a lot like the others.
The American couple had finished eating. As Rolf picked up the plates the husband said, “L’addition, s’il vous plaît.” Rolf nodded and glanced at the woman. She looked nervous. Probably wondering if her husband had pronounced everything right when he asked for the check. Come with me, baby. I’ll give you a visit to Paris you’ll never forget. He saw her naked, writhing, gasping.
Somebody like Francine you could approach with all sorts of ideas and hell, not only did she go along with you, she contributed a few wrinkles of her own. When neither of them had anything better to do, Rolf and Francine got together and had a pleasant enough time. Yet the edge wasn’t there. The edge that came from adding shock and outrage and, to be honest about it, fear. It was tricky, though, because if a woman’s fear excited him, it was also likely to spark his anger. A situation like that was difficult to balance, and that’s why he’d come back to Europe.
The Americans were already struggling into their raincoats, and the husband was glancing impatiently at Rolf. Rolf deliberately turned his back and, in leisurely fashion, began to add up their bill. The Venice trip would be diverting. He was thinking of going as the Devil. An attractive Devil, carrying a pitchfork that branched into penises. He was sure he’d have no trouble recognizing the others. Francine would be a whore in black net stockings; Brian, a naughty little boy in blue satin knickers and a starched white Peter Pan collar; Jean-Pierre, a big dog slavishly drooling over Brian; Tom, some witless, has-been revolutionary waving a tattered banner and shouting an outmoded slogan.
Tom was ridiculous. Rolf had been interested at first, because he’d heard of Tom, and had even read Tom’s book. Now, he thought he should have checked out of Tom’s stupid entourage long ago. He didn’t know why he hadn’t.
Sure he knew. He’d stayed because of Sally. When he first saw her, he got a jolt that made his mouth go dry. Which was all the more reason to get out. After Venice, he would for sure.
Sally’s costume? Against his will, he saw Sally wearing a schoolgirl’s plaid skirt and a prim white blouse with a ruffle around the collar. He saw her eyes start to open very wide.
“I don’t know what you have to do to get a check around here,” he heard the American man saying in a loud voice.
Rolf finished adding the numbers, folded the paper and put it on a saucer. Blandly, he placed the saucer at the American man’s elbow. The woman was talking in a low, agitated tone. Rolf heard her say, “…don’t do things exactly the way we do at home, that’s no reason to—” before he moved off.
It was midafternoon. The American pulled a credit card from his wallet. Rolf wandered to the window. It was still raining.
Francine’s Handiwork
Francine, her tongue clamped between her teeth, spread paste-soaked newspaper over the roundish blob of papier-mâché in front of her. In this weather, it would take a long time to dry. She brushed hair from her forehead and sat back to study her work, looking from the blob to the photograph in the book beside her. The shape, the roundness, was good. She hadn’t gotten the nose right, though. And speaking of noses, she hadn’t solved the problem of how she was going to breathe.
She’d worry about that later. First, get the shape.
Finally, she thought she had it. Especially the profile. Sophie, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the family from whom Francine rented a top-floor maid’s room, was hanging around, bored because of the rain. Francine pointed to her handiwork and asked, “Who does that look like?”
Sophie studied it gravely. “I don’t know.”
“Come, Sophie. Look at it.”
Sophie picked at her
underlip and said, at last, “I don’t know. Really, it looks like a goblin.”
“Sophie!” Francine picked up one of the small Indian-print pillows from her bed and hurled it at Sophie, who screamed with laughter and cried, “A goblin! A goblin!”
“You’re an idiot!” Francine yelled, ducking the pillow that sailed back at her. “Don’t they teach you anything at your silly school?”
“Not about goblins,” Sophie gasped, and laughed hysterically until Francine had to laugh, too. They were still giggling when Sophie’s mother called her. Sophie’s mother preferred that Sophie not spend a great deal of time with Francine.
After Sophie left, Francine looked closely at her creation. It would be painted, of course, but it seemed to her obvious, despite Sophie, that this could be nothing but the head of Jean-Paul Sartre.
She had already bought a man’s suit and tie at the flea market at the Porte de Ouen. She’d pad herself with pillows to achieve the correct body shape, carry a cigarette, and— there it was. Sartre, the symbol of her true self.
Francine had known immediately that she would go to Carnival as Sartre. Since first reading Being and Nothingness she had felt a mystical connection with him. When others had said Being and Nothingness was dense or difficult, Francine had not agreed. Francine had felt that Sartre was speaking directly to her.
Francine discovered Sartre when she came to Paris from the provinces to go to school. She had been confused, directionless, until she found him, or his spirit found her. It maddened Francine that Tom was so evasive about what Sartre had been like in person. Tom confined himself to the blandest generalities, when Francine wanted to know how the philosopher had smelled, the timbre of his voice, the texture of the skin on the back of his hand. Tom claimed to have forgotten. She would find a way, somehow, to force him to remember.
Brian had laughed at her. He had once said that when it came to Sartre, she didn’t know her ass from first base, whatever “first base” might be. Francine could not let Brian take Sartre away from her. She could not let the purest thing in her life be sullied by unfeeling, unthinking, beautiful Brian.
No. Let Brian laugh. Francine and Sartre could laugh, too. She saw Sartre’s eyes, goggly behind his glasses, light up with mirth.
Francine smiled. To dress as Sartre, re-create herself in his physical image, was an idea that greatly excited her. Obviously, there was a parodic element in it, but she knew Sartre would understand that she meant it as an homage.
She gazed at the profile, listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Having the papier-mâché head was almost, in an eerie way, like having Sartre himself with her.
The others, she was sure, would not have costumes so perfectly matched to their inner lives. They would be completely transparent. Tom would be a dithering, frightened old woman; Rolf a sleazy thug in tight pants, picking his teeth with a knife. Jean-Pierre would be a fussy little priest, with a picture of Brian around his neck instead of a cross. Brian would be a shallow, stupid Narcissus, entranced by himself and his own image. Sally— Francine yawned, then chuckled. Sally was like the pool Brian— or Narcissus— looked at himself in. He tried and tried to get an admirable image from her, but she wouldn’t show him one. That’s why he couldn’t give her up. But how could Sally ever construct a costume to represent a reflecting pool?
Francine turned her attention back to her head of Sartre. She could hardly wait for it to dry so she could paint it. After that, she and Sartre would be one.
Embarkation
Sally clutched her boarding pass. Brian sat gloomily beside her in his molded-plastic chair, a large box tied with string at his feet. The two of them were the only people in the departure lounge who weren’t chattering happily. The conversations around them, she guessed, were about how excited everyone was to be going to Carnival. Many of their fellow passengers carried hat boxes and bundles that probably contained pieces of their costumes. A man nearby had a Cavalier’s hat with a curling plume, and the woman next to him wore a black lace dress under her white fur coat, and she had roses in her hair.
Sally had gotten a bit excited when she was putting together her costume, but now she dreaded the whole thing again. Brian didn’t seem to be anticipating it as eagerly as he had been, either. Something was wrong. Lately, Brian had been jumpy and somber, and over the past weeks Sally had watched pale blue circles deepen under his eyes.
She thought he was bothered by the letters. He had received four of them, in little white envelopes with no return address. Brian’s name and address were written on the front in a hand she didn’t recognize. Sally always got the mail, because Brian was home so rarely. She put the first letter under the clock for him, and when he returned and opened it, she heard him draw in his breath. She didn’t ask what it was because she was sure he wouldn’t tell her. The other three he hadn’t opened in her presence.
In the meantime, plans for the Venice trip had continued. She and Brian rigorously kept their costumes secret from one another, designating certain closets and drawers off-limits. Sally had no idea, not the slightest, what costume Brian might choose. When she tried to imagine, she couldn’t picture anything. As for the others, she didn’t care. She was going to play the game, parade around at the foot of the Campanile from two until two-thirty tomorrow afternoon. After that, everything was going to be different, because the one thing she knew was that she couldn’t go on like this.
French words came out of the loudspeaker. People began gathering their possessions and standing up, so Sally assumed the flight had been called. They were lucky to have gotten a cheap fare and avoided the long train ride. Then the announcement was repeated in English, and she and Brian, not looking at each other, picked up their things and joined the crowd pressing toward the woman checking boarding passes.
It hadn’t been as easy as Sally thought to figure out a corpse disguise. You could do Death, all right— skull, scythe, black hooded cape— but Corpse was harder. The only article of clothing she could associate with a corpse was a shroud. Or maybe a winding-sheet, a term she had run into in her literature classes. Sally wasn’t sure what a winding-sheet looked like, or whether it was really a sheet at all. She took a bed sheet and tried winding it around herself in various ways, but it didn’t look like anything but a Roman toga.
Then she thought of bandages. She could wrap herself like a mummy. That was closer, but her experiments with a roll of gauze left her convinced that it was impossible to wrap her entire body.
By now, she was deeply interested— more interested than she’d been in anything for a long time. She finally solved the problem when she found, in the fabric section of a department store, a kind of white cheesecloth that looked like medical gauze. She bought several meters.
She also bought a white leotard and tights— she’d wear her thermal underwear beneath— and white satin ballet slippers. She went home and put these on and then wrapped her body in the gauze. She swathed her arms, swirled it around her head, let it fall over her face. Then she went to the mirror.
It was horrifying. The gauze fell away from her body in loops, the ends looking tattered, as if her winding-sheet were loosening. The effect could be more Ghost than Corpse, but it was dreadful either way. Her heart began to thud, as if she really were looking at her dead self. She clasped her trembling hands in front of her, and that was even worse— like a lost, supplicating, half-rotten dead girl. Her eyes stung. She hoped Brian would be terrified when he saw what he had done.
She made one mitigating adjustment. She bought, in a store that sold religious articles, a little circlet of white silk blossoms intended for a young girl to wear to her first communion. With that on her head, at least she’d look as though someone had cared enough about her death to send a few flowers.
The only thing lacking was a mask, and everybody said the best place to buy a mask was Venice.
She and Brian settled into their seats on the plane. All her absorption in her disguise had dissipated. When she thought of it now,
it seemed ridiculous, as did this whole trip. A bunch of kids playing Halloween games. She stared glumly out the window at the overcast sky. At least, by tomorrow afternoon it would be over.
Part II
INTERLUDE
On a damp, foggy morning toward the end of Carnival, everyone wants to come to Venice. At the Piazzale Roma, buses from the airport disgorge loads of passengers, and the parking garages are filled to capacity. A crowd waits at the vaporetto stop for the next boat. It is not a roistering, jostling crowd. Clowns stand subdued, and a young boy in a devil’s red cape and horns clings to his mother’s hand. A thin man wearing a brown leather jacket, a backpack propped at his feet, smokes and watches a group of chattering teenage girls wearing crowns of fake flowers.
Here at the Piazzale Roma, nothing has begun. The autostrada is still a recent memory. Mestre, the industrial district, with its factories wafting corrosive smoke, crouches too near. To reach the desired Venice, one must travel by water, make the slow journey along the undulating length of the Grand Canal.
The merrymakers shuffle aboard, and the vaporetto begins the journey. Engines drumming, it proceeds along the Canal, past Venice’s grand houses, narrow palazzos with arched windows, peeling facades, and white stone balconies. In the subdued light the Canal is such a dark green it might as well be black, and the palazzos, in sunshine deep red, dusky pink, pale ochre, are washed into a monochrome that is, all the same, eerily beautiful. When the water rises and recedes in the vaporetto’s wake, it is possible to see that the foundations of these houses are covered with slimy-looking vegetation.
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