Travesty

by John Hawkes

  But you and I have been the foxes to those ripe grapes, have we not? And to think that it is she, this sleeping Honorine, who awaits our passing.

  Well, now you can breathe again, as can I. That’s a dangerous turn, you saw how much trouble it gave me, for all my knowledge of our route and no matter the perfect timing—or perhaps nearly perfect timing, I should say—with which I prepared once more to meet its treachery. Yes, an extremely difficult turn, a threatening moment indeed, as you could tell by the song of our tires and my silence and the sternness with which I held the wheel. Of course you too felt that sudden inundation of centrifugal force, the nausea that told us that we might in fact be leaving the road. But it’s all right, the uncertainty is past, we have emerged from the turn, again we are safely adhering to the earthly path of our trajectory—which on a white road map looks exactly like the head of a dragon outlined by the point of a pen brutally sharpened and dipped in blood. But it is precisely by such small incidents as this one, when all at once the irrationality of the night intrudes upon us, that we inside the car are given to see ourselves as through the eyes of some old sleepless goatherd on a distant hill: to him, we are only the brief inaccessible stab of light that announces impersonally —quite impersonally—the vicious passing of an invisible and even inconsequential automobile through the damp and chilly medium of the black night. Then we are gone.

  And so we are. So we are.

  Chantal? Can it be? Have you forgotten the injunction of your Papa? Have you, like a poor childish sleepwalker, slipped free of your belt and worked your way down, down to the narrow but thickly carpeted area between the rear seat and two front seats? You, Chantal, burrowing down back there like some little frightened animal or tearful child? But it is a grievous tabloidal gesture. It could hardly be more hurtful to your Papa, who despairs to imagine you now conscious of nothing whatsoever except the burden of your own pure and quite meaningless revulsion. It is not how I thought you would behave, Chantal. Surely you cannot hope to save yourself by lying flat or in the fetal position and bracing yourself with knees and shoulders and covering your distracted face with your beautiful, small hands? Alas, the effort is futile, as you must know. But perhaps you are simply trying to escape your Papa’s voice. Could it be that? You prefer the fine soft music of our transmission to the truth of what your Papa is saying? But there is time yet to recover yourself and regain your seat and participate in the assessment, analysis, of our discussion.

  After all, you are nearly twenty-five years old. And I confess I found your sobbing more tolerable than this sudden convulsive state of withdrawal. But can’t you see that this collapse of yours is, at the very least, an extreme distraction? Think of it, Chantal, we may not be so fortunate on the next turn.

  But here it is, cher ami: my own dear Chantal lying face down behind us. How much worse it is for my poor child than I imagined. And only a few days ago I watched from our bedroom window as below in the otherwise empty courtyard Chantal, fresh from her riding lesson and dressed in her whipcord britches and black boots, emerged from this very automobile, alone except for her mother’s Afghan which she was holding on a leather leash. The cobblestones like loaves of moldy bread, the long beige-colored car, the dog with his silken brown and white coat ruffling in the afternoon’s cool breeze, the small and quick-moving woman with her dark hair, olive complexion, black riding boots, and dwarfed by the dog—it was a sight I could not help but admire, safe as I was from the long waves of regret which that same scene would have inspired in me in years past. I was still aware that Chantal’s energetic presence below in the courtyard only heightened all the more the abandoned quality I especially appreciate in my wife’s chateau, as if one could catch a glimpse of a large modern car left standing empty inside the iron gates of the very castle where the sleeping princess lies in all her pallor. I thought of it from my place at the window. But what most held my attention was the sheer vigor of the young woman below with the dog. How tight she was in her small body, I thought, and in her dark complexion how very different she was from our own fair and slowly sauntering Honorine. Yes, Chantal takes her small size and rose-and-olive beauty from her grandmother, that woman of diminutive regal shape and Roman coloring. How odd that not a trace of the old woman’s alluring decadence is to be found in the features of our Honorine.

  But now she has collapsed, the “porno brat” who became my child of the Renaissance. A few days ago I watched her crossing the courtyard quickly, happily, somewhat disheveled from her ride. The tall thin dog drifted from view to the clicking of my daughter’s boot heels. She abandoned the car, this car, with the door on the driver’s side wide open. I smiled. Now Chantal lies behind us, her body crumpled on the floor of the car like the corpse of an abducted socialite. She is a cameo nearly destroyed. And yet need I say that regret is not at all the same as grief?

  I have two significant regrets. Only two. The first is that the crash soon to be reported as having occurred near the little village of La Roche must result inevitably in fire; the second is that the remains of the crash must inevitably disappear.

  No doubt such considerations are not important. Even now I can hear your argument that these refinements of mine are for you nothing more than trivia elevated to the condition of impossible torment, or that at a time like this my extensive articulation of violent, unseemly details is nothing more than a kind of unfair tugging on the fishhooks already embedded beneath your skin. But of course I would by no means accept the notion of “trivia”; the nature and extent of physical damage can never be trivial, even when measured against the irreplaceable loss of three lives. And surely I need not remind you that I am serious and hence not at all interested in the infliction of minor psychological injury. On the other hand, if you were in fact thinking, if you were but a little more engaged in our discussion, then you might well retort that for a man who has pre-empted absolute or, we might say, whiplash control over this much immediate last-minute life, all speculative fantasy becomes a mere glut of self-indulgence. What, you ask, is he not satisfied with things as they are, with all the tangible evidence of the terrible blow he is dealing his daughter, his closest friend, himself, but what he must inflate himself still further and so must invent in his own eyes, arrange within his own head, even that context of circumstances in which the three of us will no longer exist? But he goes too far, you say, too far. Well, it would be a pretty speech if you could make it. But even if you did reply to me with some such dubious form of logic, my own reply, prompt and good-natured as it would clearly be, would convince even you that it is this idea precisely that lies at the dead center of our night together: that nothing is more important than the existence of what does not exist; that I would rather see two shadows flickering inside the head than all your flaming sunrises set end to end. There you have it, the theory to which I hold as does the wasp to his dart. Without it, we would have no choice but to diffuse the last of our time together by passing between us the fuming bottle of cognac bought and freshly opened for just this occasion. But thanks to my theory we are spared such an intolerable waste. There shall be no slow maudlin loss of consciousness for you, for me. After all, my theory tells us that ours is the power to invent the very world we are quitting. Yes, the power to invent the very world we are quitting. It is as if the bird could die in flight. And unless we exercise this power of ours we merely slide toward the pit feet first, eyes closed, slack, and smiling in our pathetic submission to an oblivion we still hope to understand. But for us it will be different, cher ami. Quite different.

  And yet I must say it. I regret the fire. Here even I am helpless. My theory does not apply to exploding gasoline. And I am sure that you will appreciate the fact that my attitude toward the burning of our demolished car has nothing to do with any personal feeling of mine against roadside cremation. On that score I am indifferent. But if I were able to prevent that burst of flame, to obliterate the sparks before their very inception and so stop the hot flame, the sheet of light, the fir
e that will turn to brightness the entire area of wall, wreckage, gasoline spreading and thus extending still further the circle of this most intense visibility—yes, if I could eliminate the flames I would. Yes, it seems to me that if we preserve this scene in all its magnitude and with all its confounding of disparate substances and with its same volume of sound, but remove from it the convention of fierce heat and unnaturally bright light, so that this very explosion occurs as planned but in darkness, total darkness, there you have the most desirable rendering of our private apocalypse. Announced by violent sound and yet invisible, except for the glass scattered like perfect clear grains across an entire field —what splendor, what a perfect overturning of ordinary expectation. The unseen vision is not to be improved upon.

  Well, you will understand that in much the same way I would prefer that the remains of our crash go undiscovered, at least initially. I would prefer that these remains be left unknown to anyone and hence unexplored, untouched. In this case we have at the outset the shattering that occurs in utter darkness, then the first sunrise in which the chaos, the physical disarray, has not yet settled—bits of metal expanding, contracting, tufts of upholstery exposed to the air, an unsocketed dial impossibly squeaking in a clump of thorns— though this same baffling tangle of springs, jagged edges of steel, curves of aluminum, has already received its first coating of white frost. In the course of the first day the gasoline evaporates, the engine oil begins to fade into the earth, the broken lens of a far-flung headlight reflects the progress of the sun from a furrow in what was once a field of corn. The birds do not sing, clouds pass, the wreckage is warmed, the human remains are integral with the remains of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design. Until one day two boys stumble upon the incongruity of a once beautiful automobile smashed in the barnyard of an abandoned farm. For them the spectacle yields only delight: a little plastic-coated identity card winking in the sunlight, dead leaves nesting in the wheels which lie on their sides, a green shoot growing from the mouth of the rusty and half-crumpled fuel tank. Indeed, this spectacle now exists merely for them, merely for the pleasure of two boys in ill-fitting trousers and wooden shoes. But who better might we have as witnesses?

  Well, it is impossible. It is not to be. Nothing will prevent our sudden incandescence in the night sky. And then we shall have blue lights, motorcycles, radio communications, the arrival of several of our little white ambulances. By dawn they will be hauling apart our wreckage with hooks and chains, and by noon of that first day there will be nothing left but the smell of gasoline and the dark signs of a recently extinguished fire. They will make notes, take photographs, climb through the elbows of hot metal, and then tow it all away with their clumsy trucks.

  How sad it is, cher ami. What a brutal sport.

  Perhaps if you make an effort to remain still, to position your arms so as to allow your chest room enough for its greatest possible expansion, and then breathe in slow conscious cadences through your open mouth, perhaps if you undertake these measures you will be more comfortable. But it is an unfortunate development, this partial suffocation resulting from that dreadful constricting of the bronchial tubes. I can imagine the growing panic of not being able to breathe, cher ami. You have my sympathies. Apparently your various nervous and physiological systems are quite de-determined not to be outdone by all the failures, impairments, of our poor Chantal. Now that the seizure is upon you, so to speak, I do remember your bitter description of yourself as an infrequent but nonetheless violent sufferer of this diabolical chest affliction. Generally it is a childhood illness, is it not? But the unfortunately unavoidable extremity of artificial heat, the closeness of the air around us, the effect of your cigarettes on a chest condition as sensitive as this one is, and of course the severe emotionalism of your present state —no doubt all this is conducive to one of your infrequent attacks, as you call them, of thick and heavily labored breathing. And then the whole thing is circular, is it not? The greater the pain, the greater the weight bearing down on your chest, the louder that dreadful rasping sound (it is indeed a curiously annoying sound, cher ami), the greater your own fury which, being directed at the self, of course, only gives still greater impetus to the whole wheezing machine.

  Well, you have my sympathies. The onset of this condition of yours, with its promise of facial discoloration and even loss of consciousness so evident in every rattling breath you take, must certainly come as the final outrage, like eczema on top of leprosy. And unless I am mistaken, by now you are quite wet with perspiration. I suppose the body expresses what the mind refuses to tolerate, which probably says something about my own single lung and satisfactory respiratory system. But I would give you relief if it were in my power. Fields of oxygen, the smell of a blue sky. . . I wish I could give them to you, cher ami. As it is, I am certainly going to find it harder to hear your voice, while for you it will be much more difficult to concentrate on anything but these increasing indications of expiring breath. But perhaps you should remember that it is only the rarest person who is not in one sense or another gasping for air.

  Our villages carved out of old bone, our forests shimmering with leaves the color of dried tobacco, our village walls over which the dead vines are draped like fishing nets, the weight of the stones that occupy the slopes of our barren hills like sculpted sheep, the smell of wood smoke, the ruby color of wine held to the natural light, the white pigeon drawn to the spit even as he becomes aroused on the rim of the fountain—surely there is no eroticism to match the landscape of spent passion. There is nothing like an empty grave to betray the presence of a dead king in all his lechery. The blasted tree contains its heart of amber, you can smell the wild roses in the sterile crevices of ancient cliffs, suddenly you find the whitened limb of a tree sleeved in green. Yes, ours is a landscape of indifferent hunters and vanished lovers, cher ami, so that but to exist on such a terrain, aware of blood and manure, of the little paper sacks of poison placed side by side with bowls of flowers on the window ledges of each village street, or aware of the unshaven faces of our local pharmacists or of the untended pubescence of the girls who work in our markets and confess their fantasies in our darkened churches—yes, simply to exist in such a world is to be filled with a pessimism indistinguishable from the most obvious state of sexual excitation. I am a city person and not without my own form of pragmatism. And yet whenever I have seen from the window of this very car a glimpse of a distant woodland, I have thought of the royal hunting party mounted and in pursuit of a fevered stag, and thought of the sound of the horns, the lovers in that boisterous army, pretty and plumed, flushed and separated on their tossing horses but riding only in wait for the day of the chase to give way to the night of the tryst, when the mouth that took the brazen hunting horn by day will take the elegant and ready flesh by night. Yes, we who are the gourmets and amateur excavators of our cultural heritage know in our cars, our railway trains, our pretentious establishments of business, that we have only to pause an instant in order to unearth the plump bird seasoning on the end of its slender cord tied to a rafter, or a fat white regal chamber pot glazed with the pastel images of decorous lovers, or a cracked and dusty leather boot into which some young lewd and brawny peasant once vomited.

  Yes, dead passion is the most satisfying, cher ami.You have hinted as much in your verses. But no wonder I have always thought of Honorine as mistress of a small chateau and nude beneath a severe black hunting costume for riding sidesaddle, though she has never been on a horse in her life. And you can imagine my ple
asure when Honorine did in fact inherit from her mother, that noble woman, the small chateau which I myself named Tara and which you and I have filled with the deadest of all possible passion. You don’t agree? You disclaim anything but vitality and tenderness in your relations with Chantal and Honorine? Then perhaps it is only my own passion that is so very dead, cher ami.