A Void (2 page)

slain by an adjutant with aspirations to match his own.

viii

In Paris a young man, a bit of a wag, no doubt nostalgic for

his country's military incursion into Indo-China, sprays napalm

up and down Faubourg Saint-Martin. In Lyon, upwards of a

million lost souls pass away, mostly martyrs to scurvy and typhus.

Acting without instructions, wholly on his own volition, an

idiot of a city official puts all pubs and clubs, poolrooms and

ballrooms, out of bounds - which prompts such a global craving

for alcohol (in fact, for oral gratification of any sort), such a

profound thirst for whisky or gin, vodka or rum, that it's just as

painful as going hungry. To cap it all, this particular May is

proving a scorchingly hot and sunny month: in Passy an omnibus

combusts without warning; and practically 60% of our popu-

lation go down with sunburn.

An Olympic oarsman climbs on to a rooftop and for an instant

attracts a mob of volcanically frothing fanatics, a mob that

abruptly crowns him king. Naturally, it asks him to adopt an

alias fully worthy of his royal rank and vocation. His own wish

is - wait for it - "Attila III"; what, by contrast, his champions

insist on calling him, is "Fantomas XVIII". As that isn't at all to

his fancy, his downfall is as dramatic as was his coronation. As

for Fantomas XXIII (who follows him - don't ask why), think

of a pompous ass sporting a top hat, a gaudy crimson sash, a

walking-stick with a solid gold tip and a palanquin to transport

him to Palais-Royal. With a crowd awaiting his arrival in triumph,

though, our poor monarch-for-a-day has his throat slit by an

assassin, a villain with a cold, malignant grin shouting, "Down

with tyrants! Forward for Ravaillac!" You'll find his tomb (King

Fantomas's, that is) in Paris's catacombs, which a commando

of impious vandals soon took to profaning — without actually

analysing why - and did so for six scandalous days and nights.

Following his burial our nation has had, in turn, a Frankish

king, a hospodar, a maharajah, 3 Romuli, 8 Alarics, 6 Atatiirks,

8 Mata-Haris, a Caius Gracchus, a Fabius Maximus Rullianus, a

Danton, a Saint-Just, a Pompidou, a Johnson (Lyndon B.), a lot

of Adolfs, a trio of Mussolinis, 5 Caroli Magni, a Washington,

ix

an Othon in opposition to a Hapsburg and a Timur Ling, who,

for his own part, got rid of 18 Pasionarias, 20 Maos and 28

Marxists (1 Chicist, 3 Karlists, 6 Grouchists and 18 Harpists).

Although, on sanitary grounds, a
soi-disant
Marat bans all bath-

taking, this sanctimonious fraud hoards a zinc tub for his own

scrotal ablutions; but, I'm happy to say, a back-stabbing (or ball-

stabbing, as word has it) from a Hitchcockian psychopath in drag

soon puts paid to his hypocrisy.

Following this assassination, a mammoth tank lobs mortars at

a tall municipal building into which Paris's administration has

withdrawn as though for a last, forlorn stand against anarchy.

Upright on its roof, a city councillor starts waving a flag of

pacification, proclaiming to all and sundry that total and uncon-

ditional abdication is at hand and assuring his public of his own

solidarity in any totalitarian call for martial law. Alas, this oppor-

tunistic U-turn is in vain: not caring to put any trust in his hollow

vows, any faith in his word of honour, without bargaining with

him or proposing any kind of ultimatum, his assailants forthwith

launch an all-out assault, razing to its foundations this surviving

bastion of authority.

God, what a world it is! Strung up for saying a word out of

turn! Slain for a sigh! Go on, attack anything you want! A bus,

a train, a taxi-cab, a postal van, a victoria! A baby in a pram, if

such is your fancy! A body in a coffin, if such is your fantasy!

Nobody will stop you. Nobody will know. You can go barging

through a hospital ward, lashing out at this man writhing in

agony or firing point-blank at that man with chronic arthritis and

no right arm. You can crucify as many phony Christs as you

wish. And nobody will mind if you drown an alcoholic in alcohol,

a pharmacist in formol, a motorcyclist in lubricating oil.

Boil infants in cauldrons, burn politicians to a crisp, throw

solicitors to lions, spill Christian blood to its last drop, gas all

shorthand typists, chop all pastrycooks into tiny bits, and circus

clowns, call girls, choirboys, sailors, actors, aristocrats, farm-

hands, football hooligans and Boy Scouts.

You can loot shops or ravish shopgirls, maim or kill. Worst of

all, nothing can stop you now from fabricating and propagating

all sorts of vicious rumours. But stay on your guard, don't trust

anybody — and watch out for your back.

xi

I

ANTON VOWL

1

Which at first calls to mind a probably familiar story

of a drunk man waking up with his brain in a whirl

Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to

his watch it's only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl

sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his

chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two;

but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his con-

dition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort,

throws it away in disgust.

Padding into his bathroom, Vowl dabs at his brow and throat

with a damp cloth.

It's a soft, warm night and his blood is racing through his

body. An indistinct murmur wafts up to his third-floor flat. Far

off, a church clock starts chiming - a chiming as mournful as a

last post, as an air-raid alarm, as an SOS signal from a sinking

ship. And, in his own vicinity, a faint lapping sound informs him

that a small craft is at that instant navigating a narrow canal.

Crawling across his windowsill is a tiny animal, indigo and

saffron in colour, not a cockroach, not a blowfly, but a kind of

wasp, laboriously dragging a sugar crumb along with it. Hoping

to crush it with a casual blow, Vowl lifts up his right hand; but

it abruptly flaps its wings, flying off without giving its assailant

an opportunity to do it any harm.

Hand-tapping a military march on his thighs, Vowl now walks

into his pantry, finds a carton of cold milk, pours it out into a

bowl and drinks it down to its last drop. Mmmm . . . how

scrumptious is milk at midnight. Now for a cosy armchair, a

3

Figaro
to look at and a good Havana cigar, notwithstanding that

its rich and smoky flavour is bound to sit oddly in his mouth

with that of milk.

And music, too, radio music, but not this idiotic cha-cha-cha.

(A casual fiddling of knobs.) Ah, a boston, and now a tango,

and a foxtrot, and now a jazzy, harmonically spiky cotillion
d la

Stravinsky. Dutronc singing a ballad by Lanzmann, Barbara a

madrigal by Aragon, Stich-Randall an aria from
Aida.

Probably nodding off for an instant or two, Vowl abruptly sits

up straight. "And now for a public announc-. . ." Damn that

static! Vowl starts twiddling knobs again until his transistor radio

booms out with clarity. But no particularly significant communi-

cation is forthcoming. In Valparaiso an inauguration of a viaduct

kills 25; in Zurich a Cambodian diplomat "has it on good auth-

ority that Norodom Sihanouk is not planning to visit Richard

Nixon in Washington"; in Paris Pompidou puts forward a non-

partisan proposal for improving conditions in industry, but a

majority of unionists outflank him with a radical (and frankly

Marxist) social contract. Racial conflict in Biafra; rumours of a

putsch in Conakry. A typhoon has hit Nagasaki, and a tornado

(known to aficionados as Amanda) is about to lay Tristan da

Cunha in ruins: its population is waiting for a squadron of

Brazilian aircraft to fly it out
in toto.

Finally, at Roland-Garros, in a Davis Cup match against

Darmon, Santana has won 6 - 3 , 1—6, 3—6, 10—8, 8—6.

Vowl turns off his radio, sits down on a rug in his living room,

starts inhaling lustily and trying to do push-ups, but is atrociously

out of form and all too soon, his back curving, his chin jutting

out, curls up in a ball, and, staring raptly at his Aubusson,

succumbs to a fascination with a labyrinth of curious and transi-

tory motifs that swim into his vision and vanish again.

Thus, on occasion, a sort of parabola, not fully confocal in

form and fanning out into a horizontal dash — akin to a capital

G in a mirror.

Or, as achromatic as a swan in a snowstorm, and rising out of

4

a diaphanous mist, an imposing portrait of a king brandishing a

harpoon.

Or, just for an instant, an abstract motif without any form at

all, but for two Kandinskian diagonals, along with a matching

pair, half as long and slighdy awry - its fuzzy contours trying, if

in vain, to draw a cartoon hand, which is to say, a hand with

four digits and no thumb. (If you should find that puzzling, look

hard at Bugs Bunny's hands or Donald Duck's).

Or again, abrupdy surfacing and just as abrupdy fading, a wasp

humming about, with, on its inky black thorax, a triangular rash

of chalky markings.

His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinising his rug, Vowl

starts imagining 5, 6, 26 distinct visual combinations, absorbing

but also insubstantial, as though an artist's rough drafts but of

what? - that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call
Jungian

slips, an infinity of dark, mythic, anonymous portraits flitting

through his brain, as it burrows for a solitary, global signal that

might satisfy his natural human lust for signification both instant

and lasting, a signal that might commandingly stand out from this

chain of discontinuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all

of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a

kind of paradigmatic configuration, of which such partial motifs

can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations:

a body crumpling up, a hoodlum, a portrait of an artist as a

young dog;

a bullock, a Bogartian falcon, a brooding blackbird;

an arthritic old man;

a sigh;

or a giant grampus, baiting Jonah, trapping Cain, haunting

Ahab: all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining

will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of

wisdom and authority which is now lost - now and, alas, for

always - but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not

abandon.

5

Staring at his rug in this way starts grating on Vowl, who, a

victim of optical illusions, of sly tricks that his imagination is

playing on him, starts to fancy that a focal point is at long last

within his grasp, though just as it's about to solidify it sinks again

into a void.

But Vowl insists, stubbornly hangs in, without trying to sur-

mount his fascination, without struggling to kick his habit. It's

almost as though, intrinsic to his rug, to its vitals, in a way, is a

solitary strand looping around a vanishing point - Alpha, you

might call it - as though, acting as a mirror to all unity and

harmony, such a point might grant him a synoptic vision of

cosmic infinity, a protological point of origin gradually maturing

into a global panorama, an abysmal chasm discharging X-rays

(which is to say, not a radiographical "X" but that, in maths,

indicating an unknown quantity), a virgin tract of curving

coasdands and circuitous contours which Vowl cannot stop

tracing, as grimly and untiringly as a convict pacing back and

forth along his prison wall, pacing, pacing, pacing, without any

notion of scaling it. . .

For four days and nights Vowl works hard at his oblong rug,

squatting and crouching on it, languishing and lying in ambush,

straining at his imagination so as to catch sight of its missing

strand, so as to construct an occult fiction around it, wilting,

cracking up, pursuing an illusion of instant salvation in which it

would all unfold in front of him.

It starts suffocating him. Not a hint nor an inkling drifts his

way, nor again that kind of involuntary illumination that may on

occasion turn out fruitful, but myriad combinations floating in

and out of his brain, now amorphous, now polymorphous, now

just within his grasp, now as far from it as it was within it,

now a common, ordinary, almost banal thing, now dark, sly and

cryptic, a faint and riddling murmur, an oracular form of mumbo

jumbo. In a word, an imbroglio.

* * *

Notwithstanding a cup of hot cocoa and a cordial of allobarbital,

opium or laudanum, a moist cloth on his brow and a slow

countdown from 100 to 1, Vowl simply can't stop tossing and

turning on his pillow.

Finally, oblivion - but only for a blissful half-hour or so. For,

just as a church clock is chiming half-past two, Vowl sits up again

with a start, his body twitching uncontrollably. Soon, too, his