Travesty

by John Hawkes

  But to be perfectly honest, the village is something else again. It is careening toward us this very moment, only a few words or a few breaths away. Of course the little street through that village is short, hardly more than several lengths of the car or one of those sylvan paths that take you from the intersection of two dusty roads to the turnstile at the edge of the field. So it is a short village street but obstinate, and unlighted, and extremely narrow, and bordered for its entire length by a high, sinuous stone wall overtopped by the now wet tile roofs of the village houses and the limbs of an occasional dead tree. Throughout our passage through the wretched place the side of the car will be within touching distance of the heavy stone. If you insist on looking, you will see an infinite rapid shuffling of rock and wood; iron door handles and high broken shutters will fly in your face; our way shall consist of impossible angles, a near collision with the fountain in the central square, a terrible encounter with a low arch. We shall have become a locomotive in a maze, and the noise will be the worst of all. Our lights will be like searchlights swiveling in unimaginable confinement, and a forlorn, artificial rose and the granite foot of one of their crucified Christs and a sudden low chimney will all approach us like a handful of thrown stones. But the noise will be the worst. It will be as if we ourselves were a rocket firing in the caves and catacombs of history. Let us hope that the cats of the village are not as prevalent as the rabbits of our rural highway. Let us hope that we are not deflected by a shard of tile or little rusted iron key or the slick, white femur of some recently slaughtered animal. Otherwise we shall brush the stone walls, swerve, bring down the entire village to a pile of rubble which we shall no doubt drag after us a hundred meters or more.

  There is nothing to be done about the sound. But you may well wish to close your eyes, or simply lean forward and bury your face in your hands. The entire deafening passage will last an eternity but also no time at all. Why see it? Why not leave the seeing as well as the driving to me? And you might amuse yourself by considering what the peasants will think when we shake their street and start them shuddering in their poor beds: that we are only an immoral man and his laughing mistress roaring through the rainy night on some devilish and frivolous escapade. Or consider what we shall leave in our wake: only an ominous trembling and a half dozen falling tiles.

  But do you see it? . . .Just there? . . .That huddled darkness of habitation? . . .The stones in the rain? . . .Here it is. . . . Hold on . . .

  Come, come, cher ami. It is behind us. But now you know how trustworthy I really am.

  Do you realize that among all the admiring readers of your slender and now somewhat rare volumes there are those who, if given even the briefest glimpse into your life and mine, would consider me a silly coward and you a worthless soul? If the invisible camera existed, and if it recorded this adventure of ours from beginning to end, and if the reel of film were salvaged and then late one night its images projected onto a tattered white screen in some movie house smelling of disinfectant and damp clothing and containing almost no audience at all, it is then that your malignant admirers would stand in those cold aisles and dismiss me as a silly coward and condemn you as a worthless soul. As if any coward could be silly, or any soul worthless. But then it is what you at least deserve, since you have spent your life sitting among small audiences in your black trousers and open white shirt and with your cigarette in your mouth and your elbows on your knees and your hands clasped—like a man on a toilet—telling those eager or hostile women that the poet is always a betrayer, a murderer, and that the writing of poetry is like a descent into death. But that was talk, mere talk. Now, if given the chance, you would speak from experience.

  As for me, I have said it already and will not hesitate to say it again: I am an avowed coward. I am partial to cowards. If I am unable to detect in a stranger some hint of his weakness, some faint gesture of recognition passed back and forth between us furtively and beneath the table, or at least the briefest glimpse of his particular white flag raised in the empty field that is himself, then I am filled with hopelessness, with a sadness as close to despair as rain to hail. But who is not? Who in the very depths of the dry well of his “worthless” soul does not loathe the stage setting that holds him prisoner? Who does not fear the inexplicable fact of his existence? Who does not dread the unimaginable condition of not existing? It is easy enough to say that tomorrow you are going to turn into a rose or a flower. But this optimism of the believer in the natural world is the cruelest ruse of all, a sentimentality worthy of children. Of course I am overstating the situation grossly. But if you cannot find the rift in your self-confidence or admit to the pale, white roots of your cowardice where it thrives in your own dry well, then you will never ride the dolphin or behave with the tenderness of the true sensualist.

  Only a bumpkin would call your cowardly bad-dreamer “silly.”

  What, cher ami, still arguing? Still unable to put aside self-preservation, the survival instinct, the low-level agitation of the practical mind, the whole pack of useless trumps of the ego? (In the deck that represents the ego all the cards are the same and each one of them is a trump. But these are the liars, the worthless trumps.) But why continue wasting your time and mine by inventing false arguments which I will only refute? Your arguments are hardly gifts to the mind. You are not interested in what they mean. It pains me to see you pulling them out of your sleeve—another argument, another trump—and in each one to hear you shout what you have been shouting the whole night: stop talking, stop the car, set me free. That has been your only refrain, through all I have said. But why can’t you listen? Tonight of all nights why can’t you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else.

  Let me repeat: you do not want me to take you seriously but only to heed your shouts in the dark, which is why for the first time in your life you are not only wheezing but wheezing on the very brink of savagery. You are strangling in the ill-concealed savagery of your resistance. But you know my position. It will not change. Surely I must be able to strike that one slight blow that will cause all your oppressive defenses to fall, to disappear, leaving you free indeed to share equally in the responsibility I have assumed, short-lived or not.

  As it so happens, this particular argument of yours is just as obvious but perhaps a little more interesting than the rest, and I have long ago faced it studiously. Some men, or so goes this line of reasoning, search with uncanny directness for what they most fear to find. We rush off to die precisely because death’s terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides relief. We are so consumed by what we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it. “Now” becomes better than “later.” We run to the ax instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged. And so forth. And as one of the few interesting efforts to make sense of suicide (except for the clinical, to which I do not subscribe) this particular argument of yours has its appeal. We have heard it before, we have listened, it has a good ring. We can imagine the shoe fitting. It is possible, it is exactly the kind of paradoxical behavior that engages all but the bumpkins. And who knows? Perhaps it has cut short the lives of a few bumpkins as well.

  But this one is not the lever to pry me from my purpose. My clarity is genuine, not false, while my dread, as you in your pathetic hope imagine it, does not exist. What more can I say? I respect your theory; I respect the fear from which you yourself are suffering (though it oppresses me horribly, horribly); perhaps it would be better for all concerned if just this once I could find you in the right and could hear the shell cracking, so to speak, and all at once find myself overcome with fear and so pull to the side of the road, thus ending our journey, and in rain and darkness sit sobbing over the wheel. Then I could take Chantal’s place back there on the floor and slowly, slowly
, you could drive the three of us to Tara. In that case you would take to your bed for two days, Chantal would return to her riding lessons, I would follow your lead to the asylum that effected your famous cure.

  So it would go, if you were in the right. But you are not. If I could discover that my clarity is a sham and that I am afraid of death and have devised the entirety of our glassy web because of that same fear of death, I would give myself happily to sobbing over the wheel and spend the rest of my days (after undertaking the cure) in trying to make restitution to you and Chantal. But I can make no such discovery, because there is no such discovery for me to make. Of course I have my qualms. Who would not? But as for this maniacal dread of death that would explain my planning, my determination, my mounting exhilaration as well as my need for a couple of companions, witnesses, supporters to accompany me in the final flash of panic—well, it is unknown to me, your maniacal dread.

  But let me be honest. Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of committing a final and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early manhood, and that drew me with so much conviction and compassion to those grainy, tabloidal, photographic renderings of bodies uniquely fixed, but nonetheless fixed, in their own deaths. And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with the cut string I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued by what I defined as the fear of no response. It is true. I have nothing to hide. In those days (needless to say I was then no sensualist) I required recognition from girls behind counters, heroes in stone, stray dogs. Let a policeman dip his stick in the wrong direction and I suffered chills in the spine. The frown was my bête noire. If the world did not respond to me totally, immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then I did not exist—or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved, loved, which is what I most demanded. But no more. The heat of those feelings is quite gone. I have long since known what it is to be loved. Now, tonight, I want not relief but purity.

  But of course I have just now asked you for “one moment of genuine response.” So you see how close you have come to the mark.

  I do not know why that figure of speech (the kneeling marksman, the drawn bow, the golden arrow) reminds me so insistently of little Pascal. But so it does, the great naked hunter calling forth the little child like a voice from the shadows. Perhaps little Pascal was destined to become a larger-than-lifesize hunter, naked (except for the silver bow, the golden arrow) and stalking his invisible victim among the white boulders beneath a vast sky of unchanging blue. At least I always saw the grown man in little Pascal. By the time he died, when he was not yet three years of age, he had already become a child god, an infant Caesar. Yes, he had already attained his true character by the time he died.

  It is a pity that you had no children. So much intimacy with Chantal surely precludes your thinking of her as your own child. But perhaps it is time for you and me to share Pascal—since anything is possible, and since nothing matters, and since he only exists among the white boulders. But it is true: Pascal has been dead for so many years that he might as well be your son as well as mine. What’s that? You long ago decided against fathering children? But everything considered, how right you were. Now that you mention it, the thought of a child surviving you is out of the question. But of course little Pascal survives nothing at all.

  And yet who can fail to eulogize our infant Caesar?

  He was a fat and contrary tyrant, cher ami, and in his third year he began each of our days by subjugating Honorine and me, and even Chantal, to the essential paradox of his fatness, his pink skin, the crown of authority with which he masked his sweet nature. Admittedly, Honorine is not small. But neither is she large in her bones, in her flesh. How then did she mother a child so beautiful in his naked weight, so fatly and gently erotic for all his recalcitrance and pretended ferocity? We shall never know. He was his own source, I often thought, and he is gone. But I saw his little fat body on the spit as often as I saw it crowned; in the chubbiness and gleam of his totally sweet and spoiled nature he was that desirable, that strong.

  Yes, he came to Honorine and me with every sunrise, bold and bare, having stripped off his white nightshirt and wearing only his buttery skin and disapproving frown and air of infant determination. With every sunrise he pulled away the bedclothes not from me but from Honorine, who was always his happy match for nudity. Perhaps you are not able to visualize those mornings. But I see them still: dawn at the window, sunlight falling across our bed from that window and from the rose and plum-colored tapestry on our bedroom wall, the sound of distant bells, the scent of coffee, and the birds in the air and already the small automobiles congregating somewhere on the cobblestones. And then the entrance of Pascal, the open door, the light winking from the long glass handle, and our little naked son approaching us with his pink cheeks and pouting underlip and little penis which Honorine always used to touch with the tip of her finger, as if that tiny sexual organ belonged not to Pascal but to the winged infant cast in bronze. You must see such a morning as clearly as I do, cher ami, if only to know that in fact I am not a person who despises life. Quite the contrary.

  But in he would come, pouting, wordless, making his little belly fatter than ever (as might some exotic fish with air) and in my own arousal from sleep I would see his bare plumpness and the light in his fine-spun golden hair. And the lip, the beautiful underlip thrust out and moist in his unmistakable message: that he was the joy of all who saw him, but in return there was nothing in all the world to give him joy. Too ripe, too beautiful, too lordly, pleasing but never pleased— such was the fate and character he had created for himself at that early age. But there he would be, the brown eyes filled with accusation, the sunlight flooding the spot where he stood, the tiny spigot crooked and gleaming in the base of the belly. In that moment the faun in the tapestry would quiver at the sight of him and the silver dove on Honorine’s commode would fly.

  Well, it was always the same. He would wait until I had had my awesome look at him and until Honorine had begun to smile in her feigned sleep and to make her soft welcoming sound, and then cloaked in all his slow assurance he would march across the carpet and reach out one chubby hand and pull the bedclothes from his mother’s nude, youthful body. For a moment the two of us, Pascal and I, would gaze on Honorine, who would continue to conceal her wakefulness and, for our sakes, would incline her cheek toward the pillow and arch her back and stretch out an arm and luxuriate in the aroma of her night’s perfume.

  Do you see her? Do you see Pascal and me? Are you listening?

  Well, after that moment, and as if he had received an invisible and all-important sign of acquiescence from Honorine, little Pascal would begin to climb. Yes, with great deliberation he would climb onto our bed (the very same antiquity in which at present Honorine lies sleeping) and then climb onto his mother’s warm and well-shaped body. Yes, with frowning difficulty he would mount that body, straddle the hips, seat himself, position himself, until his rosy and sturdy little buttocks were firmly, squarely in place atop Honorine’s cluster of purple grapes. There he would sit. Enthroned. And he was quite aware of how he was sitting and how thoroughly his own baby flesh covered and cushioned the flesh of his mother’s grapes. I knew what he knew because there was no mistaking the way he would glance in my direction, settle his weight, and then raise his chin in a perfect gesture of self-satisfied defiance.

  Then Honorine would open her eyes, she would laugh, she would seize both his hands in hers, with her hips and stomach she would imitate the gait of a trotting horse. Again and again she would murmur cheri and beg for a kiss, which he always refused to give her. As for me, at that moment I would wish my little Pascal a good morning, to which inevitably he replied that it was not a good morning but a bad one.

  There he would sit holding us in the power of his princely manner and infant eroticism until at last and rubbing her e
yes, poor Chantal would appear obediently to haul him away.

  How did Honorine survive his death? How did I? But if he had lived, his little body growing and his infant eroticism maturing into impressive masculinity and his head day by day swelling to the round of the laurels, still he would have fared no better than poor Chantal. Actually, he would have fared much worse.

  But I myself cloaked his little stone cross in satin. So it is not as if I have never known what it is to grieve. But perhaps I am the man little Pascal might have become had he lived. Perhaps it is he who inhabits me now in his death. Who knows?

  You will not believe it, but only this morning I visited for the last time my one-legged doctor. Yes, only hours ago and on this of all days, I held up my end of our yearly medical rendezvous. But I am attentive to your every nuance, even to the nuances of your stubborn silence, and now despite your misery and against your will you are objecting to yourself that my concern for my health on the day of my premeditated death (and yours, and Chantal’s) is worse, much worse, than rabbits, rain, the invisible motion picture camera with its wet distended lens, the emotional orchestration of the radio you refused to hear. At first glance you would appear to be right: illusory circumstances are beginning to justify your horrified contempt for a man who might be engaged in committing drastic actions not from clarity and calculation but merely to satisfy his inmost urge to saw away on the tremulous violin of his self-love. And yet once again you are wrong. Wrong. Because it was not I who was responsible for this morning’s appointment with the crippled physician but rather that elderly woman with the girlish body who is the doctor’s nurse and secretary combined. It is true: she notified me of today’s appointment long after I myself had figuratively torn today’s blank page from my appointment book. And what do you think of the fact that the doctor’s rooms are situated directly across from the very restaurant which you yourself happened to choose for your dinner this evening with Chantal, the doctor’s rooms and the restaurant facing each other on opposite sides of that same little public garden where the lovers sit holding hands on the cold benches? In other words, this morning while waiting for my medical examination to commence, and stripped to the waist in anticipation of needles and the doctor’s archaic X-ray machine, I myself stood at a dusty window in shivering contemplation of the exact same suffering old palm tree which you and Chantal regarded this evening over your soup and wine. But you are already familiar with the pleasure I take in these alignments which to me are the lifeblood of form without meaning.