Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  She, grimly: I don’t like to try to make nobody bored, Hot Stuff.

  Warlike music in all hearts, she says, why are we together?

  But on the other hand, she says, that which exists is more perfect than that which does not….

  This is absolutely true. He is astonished by the quotation. In the Hotel Terminus coffee shop, he holds her hand tightly.

  Thinking of getting a new nightie, she says, maybe a dozen.

  Oh? he says.

  He’s a whistling dog this morning, brushes his teeth with tequila thinking about Geneva, she, dying of love, shoves him up against a cream-colored wall, biting at his shoulders…. Little teed off this morning, aren’t you, babe? he says, and she says, fixin’ to prepare to get mad, way I’m bein’ treated, and he says, oh darlin’, and she says, way I’m bein’ jerked around—

  Walking briskly in a warm overcoat toward the Hotel Terminus, he stops to buy flowers, yellow freesias, and wonders what “a few months” can mean: three, eight? He has fallen out of love this morning, feels a refreshing distance, an absolution— But then she calls him amigo, as she accepts the flowers, and says, not bad, Red Head, and he falls back into love again, forever. She comes toward him fresh from the bath, opens her robe. Goodbye, she says, goodbye.

  The Educational Experience

  MUSIC from somewhere. It is Vivaldi’s great work, The Semesters.

  The students wandered among the exhibits. The Fisher King was there. We walked among the industrial achievements. A good-looking gas turbine, behind a velvet rope. The manufacturers described themselves in their literature as “patient and optimistic.” The students gazed, and gaped. Hitting them with ax handles is no longer permitted, hugging and kissing them is no longer permitted, speaking to them is permitted but only under extraordinary circumstances.

  The Fisher King was there. In Current Pathology by Spurry and Entemann, the King is called “a doubtful clinical entity.” But Spurry and Entemann have never caught him, so far as is known. Transfer of information from the world to the eye is permitted if you have signed oaths of loyalty to the world, to the eye, to Current Pathology.

  We moved on. The two major theories of origin, evolution and creation, were argued by bands of believers who gave away buttons, balloons, bumper stickers, pieces of the True Cross. On the walls, photographs of stocking masks. The visible universe was doing very well, we decided, a great deal of movement, flux—unimpaired vitality. We made the students add odd figures, things like 453498*23:J and 8977?22MARY. This was part of the educational experience, We told them, and not even the hard part—just one side of a many-sided effort. But what a wonderful time you’ll have, we told them, when the experience is over, done, completed. You will all, we told them, be more beautiful than you are now, and more employable too. You will have a grasp of the total situation; the total situation will have a grasp of you.

  Here is a diode, learn what to do with it. Here is Du Guesclin, constable of France 1370-80—learn what to do with him. A divan is either a long cushioned seat or a council of state—figure out at which times it is what. Certainly you can have your dangerous drugs, but only for dessert—first you must chew your cauliflower, finish your fronds.

  Oh they were happy going through the exercises and we told them to keep their tails down as they crawled under the wire, the wire was a string of quotations, Tacitus, Herodotus, Pindar…. Then the steady-state cosmologists, Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle, had to be leaped over, the students had to swing from tree to tree in the Dark Wood, rappel down the sheer face of the Merzbau, engage in unarmed combat with the Van de Graaf machine, sew stocking masks. See? Unimpaired vitality.

  We paused before a bird’s lung on a pedestal. “But the mammalian lung is different!” they shouted. “A single slug of air, per hundred thousand population…” Some fool was going to call for “action” soon, citing the superiority of praxis to pale theory. A wipe-out requires thought, planning, coordination, as per our phoncon of 6/8/75. Classic film scripts were stretched tight over the destruction of indigenous social and political structures for dubious ends, as per our phoncon of 9/12/75. “Do you think intelligent life exists outside this bed?” one student asked another, confused as to whether she was attending the performance, or part of it. Unimpaired vitality, yes but—

  And Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was there in his Sam Browne belt, he was copulating violently but copulating with no one, that’s always sad to see. Still it was a “nice try” and in that sense inspirational, a congratulation to the visible universe for being what it is. The group leader read from an approved text. “I have eaten from the tympanum, I have drunk from the cymbals.” The students shouted and clashed their spears together, in approval. We noticed that several of them were off in a corner playing with animals, an ibex, cattle, sheep. We didn’t know whether we should tell them to stop, or urge them to continue. Perplexities of this kind are not infrequent in our business. The important thing is the educational experience itself—how to survive it.

  We moved them along as fast as we could, but it’s difficult, with all the new regulations, restrictions. The Chapel Perilous is a bomb farm now, they have eight thousand acres in guavas and a few hundred head of white-faced enlisted men who stand around with buckets of water, buckets of sand. We weren’t allowed to smoke, that was annoying, but necessary I suppose to the preservation of our fundamental ideals. Then we taught them how to put stamps on letters, there was a long line waiting in front of that part of the program, we lectured about belt buckles, the off/on switch, and putting out the garbage. It is wise not to attempt too much all at once—perhaps we weren’t wise.

  The best way to live is by not knowing what will happen to you at the end of the day, when the sun goes down and the supper is to be cooked. The students looked at each other with secret smiles. Rotten of them to conceal their feelings from us, we who are doing the best we can. The invitation to indulge in emotion at the expense of rational analysis already constitutes a political act, as per our phoncon of 11/9/75. We came to a booth where the lessons of 1914 were taught. There were some wild strawberries there, in the pool of blood, and someone was playing the piano, softly, in the pool of blood, and the Fisher King was fishing, hopelessly, in the pool of blood. The pool is a popular meeting place for younger people but we aren’t younger anymore so we hurried on. “Come and live with me,” that was something somebody said to someone else, a bizarre idea that was quickly scotched—we don’t want that kind of idea to become general, or popular.

  “The world is everything that was formerly the case,” the group leader said, “and now it is time to get back on the bus.” Then all of the guards rushed up and demanded their bribes. We paid them with soluble traveler’s checks and hoped for rain, and hoped for rodomontade, braggadocio, blare, bray, fanfare, flourish, tucket.

  Bluebeard

  “NEVER open that door,” Bluebeard told me, and I, who knew his history, nodded. In truth I had a very good idea of what lay on the other side of the door and no interest at all in opening it. Bluebeard was then in his forty-fifth year, quite vigorous, the malaise that later claimed him—indeed enfeebled him—not yet in evidence. When he had first attempted to put forward his suit, my father, who knew him slightly (they were both clients of Dreyer, the American art dealer), refused him admittance, saying only, “Not, I think, a good idea.” Bluebeard sent my father a small Poussin watercolor, a study for The Death of Phocion; me he sent, with astonishing boldness, a black satin remarque nightgown.

  Events progressed. My father could not bring himself to part with the Poussin, and in very short order Bluebeard was a fixture in our sitting room, never without some lavish gift—a pair of gold cruets attributed to Cellini, a cut-pile Aubusson fire-extinguisher cover. I admit I found him very attractive despite his age and his nose, the latter a black rocklike object threaded with veins of silver, a feature I had never before seen adorning a human countenance. The sheer energy of the man carried all before it, and he was as well most
thoughtful. “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light,” he said one day. I have latterly seen this remark attributed to the Swiss Le Corbusier, but it was first uttered, to my certain knowledge, in our sitting room, Bluebeard paging through a volume of Palladio. In fine, I was taken; I became his seventh wife.

  “Have you tried to open the door?” he asked me, in the twelfth month of our (to that point) happy marriage. I told him I had not, that I was not at all curious by nature and was furthermore obedient to the valid proscriptions my husband might choose to impose vis-à-vis the governance of the household. This seemed to irritate him. “I’ll know, you know,” he said. “If you try.” The silver threads in his black nose pulsated, light from the chandelier bouncing from them. He had at that time a project in view, a project with which I was fully in sympathy: the restoration of the south wing of the castle, bastardized in the eighteenth century by busybodies who had overlaid its Georgian pristinity with Baroque rickrack in the manner of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. Striding here and there in his big India-rubber boots, cursing the trembling masons on the scaffolding and the sweating carpenters on the ground, he was all in all a fine figure of a man—a thing I have never forgotten.

  I spent my days poring over motorcar catalogues (the year was 1910). Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler had produced machines capable of great speed and dash and I longed to have one, just a little one, but could not bring myself to ask my husband (my ever-generous husband) for so considerable a gift. Where did I want to go, my husband would ask, and I would be forced to admit that going somewhere was a conception alien to our rich, full life at the castle, only forty kilometers from Paris, to which I was allowed regular visits. My husband’s views on marriage—old-fashioned if you will—were not such as to encourage promiscuous wanting. If I could have presented the Daimler phaeton as a toy, something to tootle about the grounds in, something that enabled him to laugh at my inadequacies as a pilot of the machine (decimation of the rosebushes), then he might have, with a toss of his full, rich head of hair, acceded to my wish. But I was not that intelligent.

  “Will you never attempt the door?” he asked one morning over coffee in the sunroom. He had just returned from a journey—he always returned suddenly, unexpectedly, a day or two before he had planned to do so—and had brought me a Buen Retiro white biscuit clock two meters high. I repeated what I had told him previously: that I had no interest in the door or what lay behind it, and that I would gladly return the silver key he had given me if his mind would be eased thereby. “No, no,” he said, “keep the key, you must have the key.” He thought for a moment. “You are a peculiar woman,” he said. I did not know what he meant by this remark and I fear I did not take it kindly, but I had no time to protest or plead my ordinariness, for he abruptly left the room, slamming the door behind him. I knew I had angered him in some way but I could not for the life of me understand precisely how I had erred. Did he want me to open the door? To discover, in the room behind the door, hanging on hooks, the beautifully dressed carcasses of my six predecessors? But what if, contrary to informed opinion, the beautifully dressed carcasses of my six predecessors were not behind the door? What was? At that moment I became curious, and at the same time, one part of my brain contesting another, I contrived to lose the key, in the vicinity of the gazebo.

  I had trusted my husband to harbor behind the door nothing more than rotting flesh, but now that the worm of doubt had inched its way into my consciousness I became a different person. On my hands and knees on the brilliant green lawn behind the gazebo I searched for the key; looking up I saw, in a tower window, that great black nose, with its veins of silver, watching me. My hands moved nervously over the thick grass and only the thought of the three duplicate keys I had had made by the locksmith in the village, a M. Necker, consoled me. What was behind the door? Whenever I placed my hands on it the thick carved oak gave off a slight chill (although this may have been the result of an inflamed imagination). Exhausted, I gave up the search; Bluebeard now knew that I had lost something and could readily surmise what it was—advantage to me, in a sense. At dusk, from a tower window, I saw him trolling in the grass with a horseshoe magnet dangling from a string.

  I had taken care that the duplicate keys manufactured for me by M. Necker had also been coated with silver, were in every way exact replicas of the original, and could with confidence present one on demand if my husband required it. But if he had been successful in finding the one I had lost but concealed that fact (and concealment was the very essence of his nature), and I presented one of the duplicates as the original when the original lay in his pocket, this would constitute proof that I had reproduced the key, a clear breach of trust. I could, of course, simply maintain that I had in fact lost it—this had the virtue of being true—meanwhile concealing from him the existence of the counterfeits. This seemed the better course.

  He sat that night at the dining table slicing a goose with a prune-and-foie-gras stuffing (taking the best parts for himself, I observed) and said without preamble, “Where do you meet your lover, Doroteo Arango?”

  Doroteo Arango, the Mexican revolutionary leader known to the world as Pancho Villa, was indeed in Paris at that moment, raising funds for his sacred and just cause, but I had had little contact with him and was certainly not yet his lover although he had pressed my breasts and tried to insinuate his hand underneath my skirt at the meeting of 23 July at my aunt Thérèse Perrault’s house in the Sixteenth at which he had spoken so eloquently. The strange Mexican spirit tequila had been served, golden in brandy snifters. I had not taken exception to his behavior, assuming that all Mexican revolutionary leaders behaved in this way, but he had persisted in sending me, hand-delivered by hard-riding vaqueros in Panhards, bottles of the pernicious liquor, one of which my husband was now waving in my face.

  I told him I had purchased a few bottles to assist the cause, much as one might buy paper flowers from schoolchildren, and that Arango was a well-known celibate with a special devotion to St. Erasmus of Delft, the castrate. “You gave him my machine gun,” Bluebeard said. This was true; the Maxim gun that usually rested in a dusty corner of the castle’s vast attic had been transferred, under cover of night, to one of the Panhards not long before. I had a truly frightful time wrestling the thing down the winding stairs. “A loan only,” I said. “You weren’t using it and he is pledged to rid Mexico of Díaz’s vile and corrupt administration by spring at the latest.”

  My husband had no love for the Díaz regime—held, in fact, a portfolio of Mexican railroad bonds of the utmost worthlessness. “Well,” he growled, “next time, ask me first.” This was the end of the matter, but I could see that his trust in me, not absolute in the best of seasons, was fraying.

  My involvement with Père Redon, the castle’s chaplain, was then, I blush to confess, at its fiery height. The handsome young priest, with his auburn locks and long, straight, white nose … It was to him that I had entrusted the three duplicate keys to the locked door and the eleven additional duplicate keys that I had caused to be made by the village’s second locksmith, a M. Becque. Redon had hidden one key behind each of the Bronzino plaques marking the chapel’s fourteen Stations of the Cross, and since the chapel was visited by my husband only at Christmas and Easter and on his own name day, I felt them safe there. Still, the cache of my letters that Redon kept in a small crypt carved out of the reverse side of the altar table worried me, even though he replastered the opening most skillfully each time he added a letter. The nun’s habit that I wore during the midnight Sabbats organized by the notorious Bishop of Troyes, in which we, Redon and I, participated (my shame and my delight, my husband drunk and dreaming all the while), hung chastely in the same closet that held Constantin’s Mass vestments— cassock and chasuble, alb and stole. The ring Constantin had given me, unholy yet cherished symbol of our love, remained in its tiny velvet casket on the altar itself, within the tabernacle, stuffed behind pyx, chalice, and ciborium. The chapel was in the trues
t sense a sanctuary, all thanks to a living and merciful God.

  “You must open the door,” Bluebeard said to me one afternoon at croquet—I had just hit his ball off into the shrubbery—“even though I forbid it.” What was I to make of this conundrum?

  “Dear husband,” I said, “I cannot imagine opening the door against your wishes. Why then do you say I must open it?”

  “I change the exhibit from time to time,” he said, grimacing. “You may not find, behind the door, what you expect. Furthermore, if you are to continue as my wife, you must occasionally be strong enough to go against my wishes, for my own good. Even the bluest beard amongst us, even the blackest nose, needs on occasion the correction of connubial give-and-take.” And he hung his head like a lycée boy.

  “Very well then,” I said. “Give me the key, for as you know I have lost mine.”

  He withdrew from his waistcoat pocket a silver key, and, leaving the game, I entered the castle and walked up the grand staircase to the third étage. Before I could reach the cursed portal, a house servant flourishing a telegram intercepted me. “For you, Madame,” she said, all rosy and out of breath from running. The message read “930177 1886445 88156031 04344979” and was signed “EVER-LAST.” Coded of course, and the codebook far from me at this moment, recorded on fragile cigarette papers tightly rolled and concealed within the handlebars of my favorite yellow bicycle, “A” to “M” in the left handlebar, “N” to “Z” in the right handlebar, in the bicycle shed. “Everlast” was M. Grévy, the Finance Minister. What calamity was he announcing, and was he telling me to buy or sell? My entire fortune, as distinct from my husband’s, rested upon the Bourse; Everlast’s timely information, which had increased the value of my holdings in most satisfactory fashion, was vital to its continued existence. I’m finished, I thought; I’ll wear rags and become secretary to a cat-seller. I longed to rush to the bicycle shed, yet my intense curiosity about the contents of the prohibited chamber exerted the stronger sway. I turned the key in the lock and plunged through the door.