Travesty

by John Hawkes

  I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccesible or absent; that the poetic structure—like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel—can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

  —Michel Leiris: Manhood

  You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden. I’ll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me.

  —Albert Camus: The Fall

  For Three Sophies

  No, no, Henri. Hands off the wheel. Please. It is too late. After all, at one hundred and forty-nine kilometers per hour on a country road in the darkest quarter of the night, surely it is obvious that your slightest effort to wrench away the wheel will pitch us into the toneless world of highway tragedy even more quickly than I have planned. And you will not believe it, but we are still accelerating.

  As for you, Chantal, you must beware. You must obey your Papa. You must sit back in your seat and fasten your belt and stop crying. And Chantal, no more beating the driver about the shoulders or shaking his arm. Emulate Henri, my poor Chantal, and control yourself.

  But see how we fly! And the curves, how sharp and numerous they are! The geometries of joy!

  At least you are in the hands of an expert driver.

  So you are going to relax, cher ami. You are determined to hide your trembling, achieve a few moments of silence, begin smoking one of your delightful cigarettes, and then after this appropriate expenditure of precious time and in the midst of your composure, then you will attempt to dissuade me, to talk me back to sanity (as you will express the idea), to appeal to my kindness and good sense. I approve. I am listening. The hour is yours. But of course you may use the lighter. Only reach for it slowly and keep in mind my warning. Do not be deceived by my good nature. I am as serious as a sheet of flame.

  As for you, Chantal, you must stop that sobbing. I will not say it again. Don’t you know that Papa loves you? Not many young women have the opportunity of passing their last minutes in the company of lover and loving Papa both. The black night, the speeding car, the three of us, a glimpse of early snow curled in the roots of a fleeting roadside tree—it is a warm and comfortable way to go, Chantal. You must not be afraid.

  And to think that we used to call her the “porno brat.” Yes, our own Chantal—no sooner was she able to walk than she was forever stumbling into the erotic lives of her parents. Or perhaps I should say the illusory lives of her young parents. At any rate it was Honorine who began to call our own baby girl the “porno brat.” But with a smile. Always with that ingenuous smile so appropriate to the oval and sensual face of the woman who is your mistress, my wife, Chantal’s still young and generous mother. And then there was the schoolmate of Chantal’s, that boyish jokester, who gave her the optician’s chart with its letters diminishing in size and saying TOO MUCH SEX MAKES ONE SHORTSIGHTED.

  But do you know that I have never worn eyeglasses and even now am permitted to drive the fastest cars without anything at all to assist the sight of my naked eyes?

  But Chantal and Honorine—what a pair of names. And to think that at this instant the one is white-faced, tear-streaked and clinging to the edge of hysteria in lieu of prayer directly behind us, while the other sleeps in the very chateau we are approaching. But be brave, Chantal. There will be no comforting Honorine when she receives the news.

  Murder, Henri? Well, that is precisely the trouble with you poets. In your pessimism you ape the articulation you achieve in written words, you are able to recite your poems as an actor his lines, you consider yourselves quite exempt from all those rules of behavior that constrict us lesser-privileged men in feet, hands, loins, mouths. Yet in the last extremity you cry moral wolf. So you accuse me of planning murder. But with the very use of the word you reveal at last that you are only the most banal and predictable of poets. No libertine, no man of vision and hence suffering, but a banal moralist. Think of the connotations of “murder,” that awful word: the loss of emotional control, the hate, the spite, the selfishness, the broken glass, the blood, the cry in the throat, the trembling blindness that results in the irrevocable act, the helpless blow. Murder is the most limited of gestures.

  But how different is our own situation. Suspended as you are in time, holding your lighted cigarette between your fingers, bathed in your own sweat and the gentle lights of the dashboard—in all this there is clarity but not morality. Not even ethics. You and Chantal and I are simply traveling in purity and extremity down that road the rest of the world attempts to hide from us by heaping up whole forests of the most confusing road signs, detours, barricades. What does it matter that the choice is mine, not yours? That I am the driver and you the passenger? Can’t you see that your morality is no different from Chantal’s whimpering and that here, now, we are dealing with a question of choice rather than chaos?

  I am no poet. And I am no murderer. But did Chantal ever tell you about the time she won for herself the title “Queen of Carrots?” No? But perhaps your sexual knowledge of my daughter has made you shortsighted after all.

  I am not laughing at you. I am the kindest man you will ever meet.

  Slow down, you say? But the course of events cannot be regulated by some sort of perversely wired traffic policeman. We do not argue with the star, the comet, the locomotive racing almost invisible in the cold night, the conductor on the empty but moving autobus. I am not a child. I trust you not to demean yourself with mere transparency or pathos. Our speed is a maximum in a bed of maximums which happen to include: my driving skill, this empty road, the time of night, the capacity of the car’s engine, the immensity of the four seasons lying beyond us between the trees or in the flat fields. Like schoolboys who have studied the solar system (I do not mean to be condescending or simple-minded) you and I know that all the elements of life coerce each other, force each other instant by instant into that perfect formation which is lofty and the only one possible. I am aware of a particular distance; these yellow headlights are the lights of my eyes; my mind is bound inside my memory of this curving road like a fist in glass.

  You cannot know how often I have driven this precise route alone and at the fastest speed I could achieve. You cannot be aware of those innumerable late afternoons each of which contained this silent car, the technician sprawled on his back beneath my car, a bank of chromium instruments, a silence only faintly smelling of grease and oil, myself as the patient spectator in one corner of a place that resembled the nearly empty interior of an aircraft hangar. There, there is your speed. Would you believe it?

  Between the adjustments made by the hand of that white-coated figure lying as if dead on the concrete floor of his vast garage, and the warm and living pressure of my own two hands on the thick black skin of this steering wheel—from that time to this, from one hand to a pair of hands, from the minute adjustments made beneath the car to the life of the mind that holds the moving car to the road, there is nothing, nothing at all.

  The last time I drove this car to that garage I shook hands with the technician. On the ramp the waiting automobile gleamed as new. Now we are traveling as if inside a clock the shape of a bullet, seated as if stationary among tight springs and brilliant gems. And we have a full tank of fuel, and tires hardly a month old.

  Do not ask me to slow down. It is impossible.

  But you are already loosening your collar while I ramble on about Chantal’s childhood, my love of cars, the intimacy we share, our swift progress through the fortre
ss of space. Suddenly you and I are more different than ever, yet closer even than when we were three to a bed. But don’t worry, despite all this talk of mine I am concentrating. Never for an instant do I lose sight of the road we follow through our blackest night, though I can hardly see it. Yes, my concentration is like that of a marksman, a tasteful executioner, a child crouching over a bug on a stick. And I understand your frustration, your feelings of incomprehension. It is not easy to discover that your closest friend and husband to one mistress and father of the other is driving at something greater than his customary speed, at a speed that begins to frighten you, and that this same friend is driving by plan, intentionally, and refuses to listen to what for you is reason. What can you do? How in but a few minutes can you adjust yourself successfully to what for me is second nature: a nearly phobic yearning for the truest paradox, a thirst to lie at the center of this paradigm: one moment the car in perfect condition, without so much as a scratch on its curving surface, the next moment impact, sheer impact. Total destruction. In its own way it is a form of ecstasy, this utter harmony between design and debris. But even a poet will find it difficult to share this vision on short notice.

  But Chantal, perhaps you would like to remove your shoes. Perhaps you would like to imagine that you are merely one of several hundred airplane passengers preparing themselves to survive if possible a crash landing. And yet we are only three. Only three. A small but soothing number.

  Of course I am not joking. How for the briefest pleasure of joking could I risk the lives of my own daughter and a poet acclaimed by the public? I am certainly not the man to take risks or live or for that matter die by chance. I am disappointed. Apparently your need to be spared—your need for relief, for deceleration—is so great that now, after all these years, you are willing to do even the most terrible injustice to my character, merely for the sake of your urgency. You wish only to open your eyes and find us safely parked on the edge of the dark road, the interior of the automobile filled with our soft and private laughter. I understand. But I regret that it cannot be that way, cher ami.

  Why not alone? Or why not the four of us? Well, these are much more serious and interesting questions. At last you perceive that I am not merely some sort of suicidal maniac, an aesthetician of death at high speed. But even to approach these subtle thoughts you must give me time, more time. And yet doesn’t the fact that you’ve asked the first question hint at least at its answer?

  Please, I beg you. Do not accuse me of being a man without feeling or a man of unnatural feeling. This moment, for instance, is not disgusting but decisive. The reason I am feeling a sensation of comfort so intense as to be almost electrical, while you on the other hand are feeling only a mixture of disbelief and misery—the reason for this disparity between us is more, much more, than a matter of temperament, though it is that too. We have agreed on the surface aspects of trauma: the difficulty of submission, the problem of surprise, a concept of existence so suddenly constricted that one feels like a goldfish crazed and yet at the same time quite paralyzed in his bowl. A mere question of adjustment. But the fact of the matter is that you do not share my interest in what I have called “design and debris.” For instance, you and I are equally familiar with our white avenues, our sunlit thoroughfares, our boulevards beautifully packed with vehicles which even at a standstill are able to careen about. The bright colors, the shouts, the bestial roar of the traffic, the policemen typically wired for contradictory signals—it is a commonplace, not worth a thought. And you and I are equally familiar with those occasional large patches of sand which fill half the street, marking the site of one of our frequent and incomprehensible collisions, and around which the traffic is forced impatiently to veer—until some courageous driver falls back on good sense and lunges straight across the patch of sand, his tires scattering the sand and revealing the fresh blood beneath. Another commonplace, you say, more everyday life. The triteness of a nation incapable of understanding highway, motor vehicle, pedestrian. But here we differ, because I have always been secretly drawn to the scene of accidents, have always paused beside those patches of sand with a certain quickening of pulse and hardening of concentration. Mere sand, mere sand flung down on a city street and already sponging up the blood beneath. But for me these small islands created out of haste, pain, death, crudeness, are thoroughly analogous to the symmetry of the two or even more machines whose crashing results in nothing more than an aftermath of blood and sand. It is like a skin, this small area of dusty butchery, that might have been peeled from the body of one of the offending cars. I think of the shot tiger and the skin in the hall of the dark chateau. But for you it is worth no more than a shrug. Your poetry lies elsewhere. Whereas I have never failed to pull over, park, alight from my automobile—despite the honking, the insults—and spend my few moments of reverential amazement whenever and wherever I have discovered one of these sacred sites. It is something like a war memorial. The greater the incongruity, the greater the truth.

  But what about me, you are asking yourself, what about my life? My safety? And why am I now subjected to foolish philosophy mouthed by a man who has suddenly become an insufferable egotist and who threatens to kill me, maim me, by smashing this car into the trunk of an unmoving tree in ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty?

  Now you must listen. The point is that you cannot imagine that I, the head of the household, so to speak, can behave in this fashion; you cannot believe that a life as rich as yours, as sensual as yours, as honored, can suddenly be reduced inexplicably to fear, grief, skid marks, a few shards of broken glass; you simply do not know that as a child I divided my furtive time quite equally between those periodicals depicting the most brutal and uncanny destructions of human flesh (the elbow locked inside the mouth, the head half buried inside the chest, the statuary of severed legs, dangling hands) and those other periodicals depicting the attractions of young living women partially or totally in the nude.

  Spare me, you cry. Spare me. But the lack of knowledge and lack of imagination are yours, not mine. And it will not be against a tree. There you are even more grossly mistaken.

  Remind me to tell you about little Pascal. He was Chantal’s little brother and died around the time Honorine nicknamed Chantal the “porno brat.” My son, my own son, who died just at the moment of acquiring character. Even now the white satin hangs in shreds from the arms of the stone cross that marks his grave.

  Very well. No radio. Music, no music, it is all the same to me, though had the thought been agreeable to you, I suppose I might have preferred the gentlest background of some score prepared for melodrama. No doubt I am attracted to the sentimentality of flute, drum, orchestra, simply because listening to music is exactly like hurtling through the night in a warm car: the musical experience, like the automobile, guarantees timelessness, or so it appears. The song and road are endless, or so we think. And yet they are not. The beauty of motion, musical or otherwise, is precisely this: that the so-called guarantee of timelessness is in fact the living tongue in the dark mouth of cessation. And cessation is what we seek, if only because it alone is utterly unbelievable.

  But Chantal is not listening. She is preoccupied with an agony even greater than yours. She cannot care that recently her Papa has begun to think about our several lives. But of course from you I expect total attention. We are grown men, after all, and have eaten from the same bowl often enough. As for me, in this instance I respect your wishes. My beautiful high-fidelity radio stays dead.

  Let us hope that I have not miscalculated and that there is not some overblown machine now lumbering down upon us, filling the road ahead, its great belly brimming with thick liquid fire and, in its noisy cab, a gargantuan young peasant singing to keep himself awake. Disaster. Witless, idiotic disaster. Because what I have in mind is an “accident” so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular, instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived. A clear “accident,” so to speak, in which inventi
on quite defies interpretation.

  In the first place I fully intend us to pass the dark chateau where our own Honorine lies sleeping. We will be traveling at our highest speed, of course, and already will have reached the top of our arc. But perhaps for an instant our lights will somehow intrude upon Honorine’s interior life, or perhaps even the sound of our passing—that faint horrifying expulsion of breath which is the combination of tires and engine racing together at a great distance—may somehow attract the briefest response from Honorine’s dormant consciousness. She will move an arm, make a sound, roll over, who knows? Then eight kilometers beyond the chateau and we approach the old Roman viaduct. You remember it, that narrow dead viaduct that spans the dry gorge and always reminds me of flaking bone. Of course you remember it. And in the smallest imaginable amount of time our demon steel shall fuse its speed with the stasis of old stone. The sides of our handsome car shall nearly touch the low balustrades of that high and rarely traversed construction, we shall all three of us be aware of the roar of stone, the sound of space, our headlights boring across the gorge as in a cheap film. And now, now you are thinking that here is the spot where it shall all end. Yes, here would be the natural site of what will be called our “tragic accident.” Roman time, modern car, insufficient space between the balustrades, the appalling distance to the rocks in the bottom of the gorge, the uneven surface of the roadway across that viaduct. . . . What could be better? But you are wrong.

  Because that is the problem. Precisely. All those “logical” details and all those lofty “symbols” of melodrama speak much too clearly to the professional investigator (and reporter) of such events. No, we shall not be able to crash off the viaduct or even miss it altogether and so sail directly into the wilderness of that deep gorge like some stricken winged demon from the books of childhood. Instead we shall merely continue beyond the viaduct about three kilometers (hardly the twitch of a lid, the snap of a head) where we shall make an impossible turn onto the premises of an abandoned farm and there, with no slackening of pace, run squarely into the windowless wall of an old and now roofless barn built lovingly, long ago, of great stones from the field. That wall is a meter thick. A full meter, or even slightly more.