Political refugees are at the auction: conspirators, deposed monarchs, defeated factions, poets, bandit chieftains. Such figures no longer wear the black berets, the pebble-lensed spectacles and enveloping greatcoats of yesteryear, but strike resplendent attitudes in boxy silken jackets and high-waisted Japanese couture pantaloons. The women sport toreador jackets bearing sequinned representations of great works of art. One beauty parades Guernica on her back, while several others wear glittering scenes from the Disasters of War sequence by Francisco Goya.
Incandescent as they are in their suits of lights, the female political refugees fail to eclipse the ruby slippers, and huddle with their male comrades in small hissing bunches, periodically hurling imprecations, ink-pellets, spitballs and paper darts across the salon at rival clusters of émigrés. The guards at the exits crack their bullwhips idly and the politicals control themselves.
We revere the ruby slippers because we believe they can make us invulnerable to witches (and there are so many sorcerers pursuing us nowadays); because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return; and because they shine like the footwear of the gods.
Disapproving critiques of the fetishising of the slippers are offered by religious fundamentalists, who have been allowed to gain entry by virtue of the extreme liberalism of some of the Auctioneers, who argue that a civilised saleroom must be a broad church, open, tolerant. The fundamentalists have openly stated that they are interested in buying the magic footwear only in order to burn it, and this is not, in the view of the liberal Auctioneers, a reprehensible programme. What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also? ‘Money insists on democracy,’ the liberal Auctioneers insist. ‘Anyone’s cash is as good as anyone else’s.’ The fundamentalists fulminate from soap-boxes constructed of special, sanctified wood. They are ignored, but some senior figures present speak ominously of the thin end of the wedge.
Orphans arrive, hoping that the ruby slippers might transport them back through time as well as space (for, as our equations prove, all space machines are time machines as well): they hope to be reunited with their deceased parents by the famous shoes.
Men and women of dubious character are present – untouchables, outcasts. The security forces deal brusquely with many of these.
‘Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promised to take us home, but are metaphors of homeliness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to redefine the blessed word?
Are we asking, hoping for, too much?
As our numberless needs emerge from their redoubts and press in upon the electrified glass, will the shoes, like the Grimms’ ancient flatfish, lose patience with our ever-growing demands and return us to the hovels of our discontents?
The presence of imaginary beings in the Saleroom may be the last straw. Children from nineteenth-century Australian paintings are here, whining from their ornate, gilded frames about being lost in the immensity of the Outback. In blue smocks and ankle socks they gaze into rain forests and red deserts, and tremble.
A literary character, condemned to an eternity of reading the works of Dickens to an armed madman in a jungle, has sent in a written bid.
On a television monitor, I notice the frail figure of an alien creature with an illuminated fingertip.
This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture. Heroes step down off cinema screens and marry members of the audience. Will there be no end to it? Should there be more rigorous controls? Is the State employing insufficient violence? We debate such questions often. There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day. After all, few of us would choose to travel in the opposite direction (though there are persuasive reports of an increase in such migrations latterly).
I shelve such disputes for the moment. The Auction is about to begin.
It is necessary that I speak about my cousin Gale, and her habit of moaning loudly while making love. Let me be frank: my cousin Gale was and is the love of my life, and even now that we have parted I am easily aroused by the mere memory of her erotic noisiness. I hasten to add that except for this volubility there was nothing abnormal about our love-making, nothing, if I may put it thus, fictional. Yet it satisfied me deeply, deeply, especially when she chose to cry out at the moment of penetration: ‘Home, boy! Home, baby, yes – you’ve come home!’
One day, sad to relate, I came home to find her in the arms of a hairy escapee from a caveman movie. I moved out the same day, weeping my way down the street with my portrait of Gale in the guise of a tornado cradled in my arms and my collection of old Pat Boone 78 r.p.m. records in a rucksack on my back.
This happened many years ago.
For a time after Gale dumped me I was bitter and would reveal to our social circle that she had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen in an accident involving a defective shooting-stick; but vindictiveness did not satisfy me for long.
Since those days I have dedicated myself to her memory. I have made of myself a candle at her temple.
I am aware that, after all these years of separation and non-communication, the Gale I adore is not entirely a real person. The real Gale has become confused with my re-imagining of her, with my private elaboration of our continuing life together in an alternative universe devoid of ape-men. The real Gale may by now be beyond our grasp, ineffable.
I caught a glimpse of her recently. She was at the far end of a long, dark, subterranean bar-room guarded by freelance commandos bearing battlefield nuclear weapons. There were Polynesian snacks on the counter and beers from the Pacific rim on tap: Kirin, Tsingtao, Swan.
At that time many television channels were devoted to the sad case of the astronaut stranded on Mars without hope of rescue, and with diminishing supplies of food and breathable air. Official spokesmen told us of the persuasive arguments for the abrupt cancellation of the space exploration budget. We found these arguments powerful; influential voices complained of the sentimentality of the images of the dying spaceman. Nevertheless, the cameras inside his marooned craft continued to send us poignant pictures of his slow descent into despair, his low-gravity, weight-reduced death.
I watched my cousin Gale as she watched the bar’s TV. She did not see me watching her, did not know that she had become my chosen programme.
The condemned man on another planet – the condemned man on TV – began to sing a squawky medley of half-remembered songs. I was reminded of the dying computer, Hal, in the old film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal sang ‘Daisy, Daisy’ as it was being unplugged.
The Martian – for he was now a permanent resident of that planet – offered us his spaced-out renditions of ‘Swanee’, ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ and several numbers from The Wizard of Oz; and Gale’s shoulders began to shake. She was crying.
I did not go across to comfort her.
I first heard about the upcoming auction of the ruby slippers the very next morning, and resolved at once to buy them, whatever the cost. My plan was simple: I would offer the miracle-shoes to Gale in all humility. If she wished, I would say, she could use them to travel to Mars and bring the spaceman back to Earth.
Perhaps I might even click the heels together three times, and win back her heart by murmuring, in soft reminder of our wasted love, There’s no place like home.
You laugh at my desperation. Ha! Go tell a drowning man not to clutch at straws. Go ask a dying astronaut not to sing. Come here and stand in my shoes. What was it the Cowardly Lion said? Put ’em up. Put ’em uuuuup. I’ll fight you with one hand tied behind my back. I
’ll fight you with my eyes closed.
Scared, huh? Scared?
The Grand Saleroom of the Auctioneers is the beating heart of the earth. If you stand here for long enough all the wonders of the world will pass by. In the Grand Saleroom, in recent years, we have witnessed the auction of the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alps, the Sphinx. We have assisted at the sale of wives and the purchase of husbands. State secrets have been sold here, openly, to the highest bidder. On one very special occasion, the Auctioneers presided over the sale, to an overheated and inter-denominational bunch of smouldering red demons, of a wide selection of human souls of all classes, qualities, ages, races and creeds.
Everything is for sale, and under the firm yet essentially benevolent supervision of the Auctioneers, their security dogs and SWAT teams, we engage in a battle of wits and wallets, a war of nerves.
There is a purity about our actions here, and also an aesthetically pleasing tension between the vast complexity of the life that turns up, packaged into lots, to go under the hammer, and the equally immense simplicity of our manner of dealing with this life.
We bid, the Auctioneers knock a lot down, we pass on.
All are equal before the justice of the gavels: the pavement artist and Michelangelo, the slave girl and the Queen.
This is the courtroom of demand.
They are bidding for the slippers now. As the price rises, so does my gorge. Panic clutches at me, pulling me down, drowning me. I think of Gale – sweet coz! – and fight back fear, and bid.
Once I was asked by the widower of a world-famous and much-loved pop singer to attend an auction of rock memorabilia on his behalf. He was the sole trustee of her estate, which was worth tens of millions. I treated him with respect.
‘There’s only one lot I want,’ he said. ‘Spend whatever you have to spend.’
It was an article of clothing, a pair of edible rice-paper panties in peppermint flavour, purchased long ago in a store on (I think this was the name) Rodeo Drive. My employer’s late wife’s stage act had included the public removal and consumption of several such pairs. More panties, in a variety of flavours – chocolate chip, knickerbocker glory, cassata – were hurled into the crowd. These, too, were gobbled up in the general excitement of the concert, the lucky recipients being too carried away to consider the future value of what they had caught. Undergarments that had actually been worn by the lady were therefore in short supply, and presently in great demand.
During that auction, bids came in across the video links with Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris and Milan, bids so rapid and of such size that I lost my nerve. However, when I telephoned my employer to confess my failure he was quite unperturbed, interested only in the final price. I mentioned a five-figure sum, and he laughed. It was the first genuinely joyful laugh I had heard from him since the day his wife died.
‘That’s all right then,’ he said. ‘I’ve got three hundred thousand of those.’
It is to the Auctioneers we go to establish the value of our pasts, of our futures, of our lives.
The price for the ruby slippers is rising ever higher. Many of the bidders would appear to be proxies, as I was on the day of the underpants; as I am so often, in so many ways.
Today, however, I am bidding – perhaps literally – for myself.
There’s an explosion in the street outside. We hear running feet, sirens, screams. Such things have become commonplace. We stay where we are, absorbed by a higher drama.
The cuspidors are in full employment. Witches keen, movie stars flounce off with tarnished auras. Queues of the disconsolate form at the psychiatrists’ booths. There is work for the club-wielding guards, though not, as yet, for the obstetricians. Order is maintained. I am the only person in the Saleroom still in the bidding. My rivals are disembodied heads on video screens, and unheard voices on telephone links. I am doing battle with an invisible world of demons and ghosts, and the prize is my lady’s hand.
At the height of an auction, when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from the earth.
There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become – yes! – fictions.
And fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.
In fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to rest.
So it is that my cousin Gale loses her hold over me in the crucible of the auction. So it is that I drop out of the bidding, go home, and fall asleep.
When I awake I feel refreshed, and free.
Next week there is another auction. Family trees, coats of arms, royal lineages will be up for sale, and into any of these one may insert any name one chooses, one’s own, or one’s beloved’s. Canine and feline pedigrees will be on offer, too: Alsatian, Burmese, saluki, Siamese, cairn terrier.
Thanks to the infinite bounty of the Auctioneers, any of us, cat, dog, man, woman, child, can be a blue-blood; can be – as we long to be; and as, owering in our shelters, we fear we are not – somebody.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND QUEEN ISABELLA OF SPAIN CONSUMMATE THEIR RELATIONSHIP
(Santa Fé, AD 1492)
Columbus, a foreigner, follows Queen Isabella for an eternity without entirely giving up hope.
— In what characteristic postures?
Proud yet supplicant, the head held high but the knee bent. Fawning yet fearless; possessed of a certain saucy vulgarity, he gets away with it by virtue of his confidence-man’s charm. However, as time passes, the ingratiating aspects of his stance are emphasised; the sea-dog raffishness wears a little thin. As do his shoes.
= His hope. It is of what?
Obvious answers first. He hopes for preferment. He wants to tie the Queen’s favour to his helmet, like a knight in a romance. (He owns no helmet.) He has hopes of cash, and of three tall ships, Niña Pinta Santa Maria; of, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, sailing across the ocean blue. But, on his first arrival at court, when the Queen herself asked him what he desired, he bowed over her olive hand and, with his lips a breath away from the great ring of her power, murmured a single, dangerous word.
‘Consummation.’
— These unspeakable foreigners! The nerve! ‘Consummation’, indeed! And then following in her footsteps, month after month, as if he stood a chance. His coarse epistles, his tuneless serenades beneath her casement windows, obliging her to have them closed, shutting out the cooling breeze. She had better things to do, a world to conquer & so forth, who did he think he was?
= Foreigners can be dogged. And can also, on account of language difficulties, fail to take a hint. Then again, let us not forget, it is considered de rigueur to keep a few foreigners around. They lend the place a certain cosmopolitan tone. They are often poor and consequently willing to perform divers necessary but dirty jobs. They are, moreover, a warning against complacency, their existence in our midst reminding us that there are quarters in which (hard as it is to accept) we ourselves would be considered foreign, too.
— But to speak so to the Queen!
= Foreigners forget their place (having left it behind). Given time, they begin to think of themselves as our equals. It is an unavoidable hazard. They introduce into our austerities their Italianate blandishments. Nothing for it: turn a deaf ear, look the other way. They rarely mean real harm, and go too far only infrequently. The Queen, be assured, can look after herself.
Columbus at Isabella’s court is quickly burdened with the reputation of being a crazy man. His clothes are excessively colourful and he drinks, also, to excess. When Isabella wins a military victory she celebrates it with eleven days of ps
alms and the sonorous severities of priests. Columbus crashes about outside the cathedral, waving a wineskin. He is a one-man debauch.
— See him, the drunkard, his huge, shaggy head filled with nonsenses! A fool with a glittering eye dreaming of a golden paradise beyond the Western Edge of Things.
‘Consummation.’
The Queen plays with Columbus.
At luncheon she promises him everything he wants; then cuts him dead later the same afternoon, looking through him as if he were a veil.
On his saint’s day she summons him to her inmost boudoir, dismisses her girls, permits him to braid her hair and, for a moment, to fondle her breasts. Then she summons her guards. She banishes him to the stables and piggeries for forty days. He sits forlorn on horse-munched hay while his thoughts run on distant, fabled gold. He dreams of the Queen’s perfumes but awakes, gagging, in a pigsty.
Toying with Columbus pleases the Queen.
And pleasing the Queen, he reminds himself, may help him to achieve his purpose. Pigs rootle by his feet. He grits his teeth.
‘Pleasing the Queen is good.’
Columbus ponders:
Does she torment him merely for sport?
Or: because he is foreign, and she is unused to his ways and meanings.
Or: because her ring finger, still hot with the memory of his lips his breath, has been – how-you-say? – touched. Yes: tentacles of warmth spread backward from her fingers towards her heart. A turbulence has been aroused.
Or: because she is torn between the possibility of embracing his scheme with a lover’s abandon, and the more conventional, and differently (maliciously) pleasurable option of destroying him by laughing, finally, after much foreplay, in his foolish, supplicant face.
East, West: Stories Page 6
