A Void (5 page)

this woman as I do, I want to
know
Faustina - Biblically.

Caring not for company, Faustina strolls about this way and

that, hips swinging lighdy to and fro. Finally Ishmail accosts his

inamorata, who is studying a book, Virginia Woolf's
Orlando,

as it turns out.

"Miss, oh Miss, I'm sorry, awfully sorry, I . . . I had to talk to

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you. It's just my hard luck if anybody spots us . . . I'm willing

to risk it. . ."

Alas! ignoring all his sighs and supplications, Faustina looks

straight through him.

At which point Ishmail falls victim to hallucinations, possibly from

consuming a poisonous black mushroom or having had too much

to drink; or, why not, from having shrunk so much as to vanish

wholly from sight, so that Faustina is nothing but a vision, a vision

passing right through his body; or, if not, from losing his mind,

going crazy, moonstruck, stark, staring mad, as though still stag-

nating in his filthy marshland and simply conjuring this vision out

of a bout of paranoia - casino, yacht, Faustina and all.

All right - but, if so, why, as though caught up in a warp in

chronology, should Ishmail again catch sight of a party uncannily

similar in both word and act to that of his first visit: dancing by

moonlight, Louis Armstrong playing a foxtrot. . . ?

All right — but, if so, worst of all (for Ishmail's fiction now

actually starts to nourish his own hallucinations, it's now that a

comparison of his own situation with that of Bioy's book, a

comparison that's possibly illusory and anyway naggingly hard to

pin down, will occur to critics), why, occasionally, whilst walking

along a corridor, should Ishmail abruptly find a door ajar in front

of him and a footman coming out with a tray in his hand and

why should this footman look glassily past him?

As though by instinct, Ishmail jumps out of his way, watching

him put a book, say, on top of a trunk and approaching it in his

turn to find out what's in it. But why is it so inhumanly hard

and smooth to his touch? No Titan, no Goliath, could lift up

such a book.

It's as though a cunning troll or hobgoblin has sought to
statufy

all that is solid within and around this casino, to spray it with

poison gas or coat it with varnish, incrusting surfacings and

suffusing grains, controlling atoms and ions, so that nothing

stays for long as it was.

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Things may look normal-,
if Ishmail looks at a thing or at an

individual, it logically follows that that thing or individual is

actually in front of him; a sound (a laugh, a cry, a jazzy riff) is

just as loud in this world as in any normal world, an odour (of

a blossom, of a woman's hair) just as fragrant to his nostrils. Now

Faustina is lounging on a sofa among an array of silk cushions as

soft: and light and airy as balloons. Now his darling stands up

and walks out, abandoning on a cushion (as a gift to him?) a

bulky gold ring with a multi-carat diamond stud. Ishmail jumps

up, taking this ring as a sign, a sign that Faustina is his, but is

too afraid of that odious individual with his morning suit and

his glass of whisky - a husband? a suitor? just a companion? -

to admit it (for nobody could claim immunity from a Law making

of Ishmail an outcast, a pariah: nobody could touch him or stop

him from strolling back and forth; but nor was any human con-

scious of him at all).

Making contact with Faustina's cushion or ring for only an

instant, though, a numb, downcast, haggard Ishmail withdraws

his hand. What, again, occurs is that this cushion, say - a thing

normally as soft and downy as a baby's bottom - is, to his touch,

now a hard, cold, compact block, as rock-hard as a diamond, as

though part of a shadowy twin world consubstantial with

Ishmail's own but caught through a glass darkly, a living mirror

of our own world and just as cold, shiny and insular as a mirror.

A world, too, in which all that is human, or inhuman, maintains

a capacity for motion and action: thus Faustina can unlock a door

or charmingly languish on a sofa; thus that boorish individual

(as Ishmail cannot stop thinking of him) has no difficulty at all

pouring out a whisky-and-soda; nor, thus, has a jazz band any

difficulty striking up a foxtrot, a yacht docking, a woman drop-

ping a gold ring, a footman sashaying along a corridor holding a

tray. For anybody, though, not part of it all (which was obviously

Ishmail's plight), that world was nothing but a smooth, cyclical

continuum, without a fold in it, without any form of articulation,

as compact as stucco or staff, as putty or portland; an imbrication

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of nights without adjoining days, a total lapidification, a flat,

hard, constant, monotonous uniformity in which all things, big

or small, smooth or lumpish, living or not, form a solitary, global

unit.

Though trying hard, straining with all his might, Ishmail can-

not bunch up a small and dainty silk cushion, for it's a cushion

of rock-solid silk; nor, though bringing his foot down hard on

it, disturb a tuft of hair on a Turkish rug; nor, with his hand,

turn a light-switch on and off. No, poor Ishmail is now an outcast

from two worlds.

Ishmail (as it slowly, far too slowly, dawns on him) is living in

a film, a film that was shot, wholly without his companions'

authorisation or approval, by M., Faustina's suitor, on a short

tour of his (Ishmail's) island in or about 1930.

Whilst a fatal malady attacks "his" island's baobabs, whilst a

mould crawling with tiny, malignant bugs starts to run riot in

its swimming pool, whilst its villa is rapidly going to wrack and

ruin, a haphazard sprinkling of raindrops all too soon turns into

a noisy downpour, a tropical monsoon, so that a concomitant

tidal flow, rising and falling, flooding that coastal construction

that Ishmail first saw from on top of a hill, activating its circuitry

(circuitry which had initially struck him as totally baffling) and

causing its dynamo to hum into motion, brings about a curious

and oddly tragic situation in which, word for word, act for act,

so many instants (instants long past but also immortal) visibly

start to shrink into what you might call ions of chronology, just

as, with an apparatus built from vitalium, Martial Cantaral would

allow any ghosdy carcass to act out, in a vast frigidarium, and

again and again right up to doomsday, a crucial instant from its

past.

Things look normal, but looks can play tricks on you. Things

at first look normal, till, abrupdy, abnormality, horrifying in its

inhumanity, swallows you up and spits you out.

* * *

Anton Vowl's ambition is to find out just what brand of affinity

links him with Bio/s book: on his rug, constantly assailing his

imagination, is his intuition of a taboo, his vision of a cryptic

sort of witchcraft, of a void, a thing unsaid: a vision, or loss of

vision, a mission or an omission, both all-knowing and knowing

nothing at all. Things may look normal, but. . .

But what?

Vowl simply cannot work it out.

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Concluding with an immoral papacy's abolition and

its claimant's contrition

Days pass. Trying to work this thing out to his own satisfaction,

Vowl starts writing a diary, captioning it with just two words:

A V O I D

and continuing:

A void. Void of whom? Of what?

A curious motif runs (or ran or has run or might run)

through my Aubusson, but it isn't only a motif, it's also a

fount of wisdom and authority.

An imago as snug as a bug in my rug.

What, on occasion, it brings to mind is a painting by

Arcimboldo, a portrait of its own artist, possibly an

astonishing portrait of a haggard Dorian Gray, of a bilious

albino: an Arcimboldian jigsaw, not of shrimps and

crayfish, not of a cornucopia offruit, nor of snaky, tortuous

pistils twisting upwards to mimic a human brow or chin

or nostril, but of a swarming mass of sinuous bacilli of so

subtly skilful a combination that you know straightaway

that such a portrait had a body at its origin, without its

affording you at any instant a solitary distinguishing mark,

so obvious is it that it was its artist's ambition to fashion a

work which, by masking and unmasking, closing and

disclosing, turn and turn about, or mayhap in unison, would

hatch a plot but totally avoid giving it away.

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It's hard, initially, to spot any modification at all. Tou

think at first that it's your own paranoia that's causing you

to find anomaly, abnormality and ambiguity all around

you. Abruptly, though, you know, or think you know, that

not too far off is ... a thing, an incarnation that distracts

you, acts upon you and numbs you. Things rot around

you. Tou panic, you sink into an unnatural sloth; you start

losing your mind. A sharp - though not, alas, so short -

shock chills you to your marrow. If this horror is only a

hallucination, it's a hallucination that you can't simply

throw off.

If only you had a word, a noun. If only you could shout

out: Aha, at last, now I know what it was that I found

so disturbing! If only you could jump for joy, jump up and

down, find a way out of this linguistic labyrinth, this

anagram of signification, this sixty-four-thousand-dollar

conundrum. But you simply can't fall back on any such

option: you must stubbornly go on, pursuing your vision to

its logical conclusion.

If only, oh if only you could pin down its point of origin,

that's all you ask. But it's all such a fog, it's all so

distant. . .

This diary lasts about six months. Day by day, as twilight falls,

Vowl jots down, in a typically finicky fashion, a host of insignifi-

cant notations: drank up all my provision of liquor, bought an

LP for my cousin Julot for passing his
bac
with flying colours,

took my Moroccan kaftan to a local laundry, said hullo to a man

living down my road notwithstanding that Azor, his pug-dog,

has a habit of shitting on my doormat, and so on; notations, too,

on his books, on his chums, on a puzzling word or an intriguing

fact (a QC at court who couldn't finish his oration; a hooligan

firing blank shots at nobody in particular; a compositor at a

printing plant wilfully vandalising his own typographic

apparatus . . . ).

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Now and again, automatically clicking a Bic with his thumb,

Vowl would pass on to his own autobiography, would submit

his own past to psychological analysis, touching, most notably,

on his hallucination and Ishmail's island.

A particular day dawns on which it's a synopsis of a book, a

wholly imaginary book, that finds its way into his diary:

In a far country is found a small boy, Aignan, just two days

away from his fifth birthday and living in an old mansion that's

collapsing about him. This small boy has a nanny who, without

any warning at all, ups and says to him, "As a child, Aignan, you

had 25 cousins. Ah, what tranquil days - days without wars or

riots! But, abruptly, your cousins would start to vanish - to this

day nobody knows why. And, today, it's your turn to go away,

to withdraw from our sight, for, if you don't, it is, as Wordsworth

might put it — and you know, my darling," adds this palindromic

matron, "almost all of Wordsworth is worth words of almost

all - it is, I say, intimations of mortality for all of us."

So Aignan slinks away out of town. And in classic
Bildungs-

roman
fashion his story starts off with a short moral fabliau:

barring his path, a Sphinx accosts him.

"Aha," says this fantastic (and not so dumb) animal, lustily

licking its lips, "what a scrumptious sandwich for my lunch! How

long ago it is I last saw such a plump and juicy human child in

my vicinity!"

"Whoa, Sphinx, whoa! Just hold on a mo!" says Aignan, who

knows his Lacan backwards. "You must first of all quiz my wits.

Your famous conundrum, you know."

"My conundrum?" says his antagonist, caught short by this

unusual invitation. "What for? You can't throw any light on its

solution. Nobody can. So stop fooling about."

But, just a tad suspicious, it adds, "Or possibly you think you

can?"

"Who knows?" says Aignan with a roguish grin.

"I must say you sound a bit of a show-off, you brattish boy,

you, but I won't hold that against you. I'm willing to play fair,

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I don't mind allowing your ambition to act as a cushion to your

annihilation."

So saying, with harp in paw, it hums aloud for an instant and,

making an airy harp-string glissando, starts to sing.