A Void (7 page)

nudity and purity which was My birthday gift to him, for so long

stood upright upon a rock and for just as long withstood without

flinching My tidal attacks upon him."

"O Lamb of God, O Lamb That is God, O God That is Lamb,"

His adoring Cardinal croaks, words stumbling out any old how,

"I will do as Thou commandst!"

Thus an official inquiry tracks down this Aignan who calls

God's wrath upon him with truly Christian humility (and a hint,

too, of pagan stoicism); and at long last, following many trials

and tribulations, a commission of Cardinals stands in front of that

woodman's hut from which Aignan, so long ago, was brought to

his island prison. To start with, though, its occupant is in a

slighdy noncommittal mood, mumbling:

"Aignan, y'say? No . . . don't know any Aignan. Don't know

any island. No island as I know of in this part of world."

Finally, with a tidy sum of gold coins to coax him out of his

3 4

mutism, Aignan's oarsman talks. A boat sails forth chock-a-block

with Cardinals who start laboriously climbing that rocky promon-

tory on which, through thick and thin, Aignan is living out his

martyrdom. On top of it, though, no martyr, no Aignan, nobody

at all is found (proof that Our Lord is occasionally wrong, a

notion that brings about a profound diminution of faith in His

flock) - just thin air, nothing, a void. So God, too, alas, is only

human.

Thomas Mann notwithstanding, such was my story's only con-

clusion, murmurs Anton Vowl, writing "finis" on his manuscript,

his rough draft, I should say, or synopsis, as, with his chronically

vivid imagination now running riot, Vowl simply cannot bring

his task to what you might call authorial fruition, jotting down

25 or 26 random notations, amplifying 5 or 6 crucial points,

drawing a portrait of Aignan that's both thorough and scrupu-

lously fair, ditto for Aignan's Burgundian rival ("a tall thug of a

man, with short hair and long auburn muttonchops": it's obvious

that his inspiration was his own Dr Cochin, who had brought

him back to tip-top physical condition), coining (though only in

a short paragraph) an amusing nautical-cum-Scotch patois for

that wily old bumpkin who was willing to row Aignan out to

his island limbo ("Avast an' ahoy! All aboard who's going! Oh,

but it's a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht th'nicht, an' that's a fact!")

and portraying his and Sibylla's tragicomic imbroglio with a

touch so tactful that a Paul Morand, a Giraudoux or a Maupassant

would not disown it.

But that's as far as it got: in his diary Vowl would try to justify

his procrastination on slighdy unusual grounds. If (is his
a priori

postulation) I could finish my story, I would; but if it truly had

a conclusion, would it not contain a fund of wisdom of such cold

hard purity, of such crystal clarity, that not any of us, just dipping

into it, could think to go on living? For (Vowl scrawls away) it's

a quality of fiction that it allows of only a solitary Aignan to rid

us of a Sphinx. With Aignan put out of action, no triumphant

3 5

Word will again afford us consolation. Thus (signing off) no

amount of prolix circumlocution, brilliant as it may sound, can

abolish flip-of-a-coin fortuity. But again (adding a wistful post-

script) it
is
our only option: all of us should know that a Sphinx

might assail us at any instant; all of us should know that, at any

instant, a word will do its utmost to thwart that Sphinx - a word,

a sound, an if or a but. For - as Zarathustra might say - no

Sphinx is living that inhabits not our human Mansion . . .

3 6

1

Which, notwithstanding a kind of McGuffin, has no

ambition to rival Hitchcock

It's on All Saints Day that Anton Vowl would first go missing

— as possibly an offshoot of his noticing, just two days prior to

this vanishing act, a most alarming story in his
Figaro.

It was all about an unknown individual (a man, so rumour

had it, of such vast, almost occult authority that no journalist

had sought to crack his incognito), who had, at night, unlawfully

burst into a commissariat building that was said to contain many

important official manuscripts and got away with a particularly

hush-hush account of a major scandal implicating a trio of guards

at Poulaga Prison. Normalising such a situation was an awkward

task; convincing so diabolically crafty a burglar to hand back such

a compromising manuscript just as awkward; but it was crucial

to do so, for this kind of traitor usually has no difficulty in finding

a nation willing to buy his goods at any cost. But though it was

obvious that X . . . (for our burglar holds a high-ranking position

to this day and is, I am told, a notoriously litigious man) had

put it away out of sight in his flat, ransacking that flat again and

again had thrown up nothing significant.

Staking all on a hunch, a Commandant, Romain ("I just want

th' facts, ma'am") Didot, along with Garamond, his adjutant and

Man Friday, pays a visit to Dupin, known for his unfailing gift

for nosing things out.

"/4
priori
," Didot informs him, "it's not our constabulary's job to worry about such a burglary. For anything . . . 'normal', shall

I say, in our filing library, for an
x
or
y,
nobody'd complain too 3 7

much. But this sort of McGuffin is, I'm afraid, just a tiny bit too

significant to —"

"McGuffin? McGuffin?" Dupin, to whom this word's conno-

tation is a total blank, savours it in his mouth for an instant or

two.

Didot grins. "Pardon my film buff slang. Put simply, I want

you to know that solving this burglary is vital to us, in that it'll

ruin, it'll undo, what can I say, it'll play bloody havoc with our

organisation. Why, it risks cutting our working capacity by up

to 20%!"

"So," asks Dupin, "you say you shook down our burglar's flat,

high and low, with a toothcomb? Is that right?"

"Uh huh," admits an unhappy Didot, "but I can't say I found

anything incriminating. And I was as thorough as any of my

rivals from Scotland Yard!"

"Hmm," grunts Dupin. "It's as plain as daylight. You hunt

high and low, you tap walls and floors, but without any luck;

for whilst you may think that your approach is obvious, it's ironi-

cally that which is truly obvious that it can't account for. Hasn't

it struck you that your criminal had to find a hiding spot that a

big, plodding flatfoot - it's you I'm alluding to, Didot - wouldn't

think of looking at, and would probably not stash his loot away

at all but simply stick it into an ordinary blotting pad, a blotting

pad that you probably had your hand on again and again, without

knowing what it was, without caring or trying to know that

what it had on it was no casual scrawl but your own almighty

McTavish!"

"McGuffin," says Didot sulkily, still smarting from Dupin's

insults. "Anyway, I saw no such blotting pad."

"That's what you think," Dupin murmurs with ironic

suavity.

Putting on his mackintosh, taking a big black brolly out of its

stand and unlocking his front door, Dupin turns to Didot and

says, "I'm off. In a twinkling I'll hand you back that manuscript

of yours."

3 8

But — not that anybody could fault his logic - but our famous

dick was, on this particular occasion, all wrong.

"I'm PO'd, truly PO'd" (PO was a contraction of "piss off"),

sighs Dupin; who, at that point, as consolation, and allowing

Didot and his constabulary to work it all out without his aid,

starts tracking down a homicidal orang-utan with a grisly trio of

victims.

If Dupin should fail, though having it all within his grasp from

A to Z, how can I possibly look forward to my own salvation,

to my own absolution? That's what Anton Vowl jots down in

his diary - adding:

"I did so want to sink into an alcoholic coma. I did so want

to finish my days in a softly intoxicating and long dying torpor.

But, alas, I cannot avoid . . . a void! Who? What? That's for you

to find out! 'It' is a void. It's today my turn to march towards

mortality, towards that fatal hour, towards 'that good night' (as

Dylan Thomas put it), that 'undiscovYd country from which

bourn no man . . .' and so forth, towards omission and annihila-

tion.
I f s a must.
I'm sorry. I did so want to
know.
But a lancinating agony gnaws at my vitals. I can only talk now in a dry, throaty,

painfully faint hum. O my mortality, a fair ransom for such a

mad compulsion as that which has had my mind in its tight grip.

Anton Vowl."

And to that Vowl adds a postscript, a postscript which shows

him as having truly lost his mind: "I ask all 10 of you, with a

glass of whisky in your hand — and not just any whisky but a

top-notch brand — to drink to that solicitor who is so boorish as

to light up his cigar in a zoo" - adds, finally, and almost as though

initialling a last will, a trio of horizontal strips (No. 2, curiously,

isn't as long as its two companions) with an ambiguously

indistinct scrawl on top.

Was it a suicidal act? Did Vowl put an automatic to his brow?

Or slit his wrists in a warm bath? Swallow a tall glass of

3 9

aqua-toffana? Hurl his car into an abysmal chasm, a yawning pit,

abysmal till Doomsday, yawning till Doomsnight? Turn on his

flat's gas supply? Commit hara-kiri? Spray his body with napalm?

Jump off Paris's Pont du Nord by night into a flowing black

miasma?

Nobody knows, or can know, if his way of quitting this world

was wholly of his own volition; nobody in fact knows if Vowl

did quit this world at all.

But, four days on, a chum of his, who had found Anton's last

writings alarming and had thought to support him through what

was obviously a major crisis, was to knock at his flat's front door

in vain. His car was still placidly sitting in its hangar. No stains

of blood on floor or wall. No clothing, nor any trunk to carry it

in, missing.

Anton Vowl, though,
was
missing.

4 0

I L L U S O R Y P A R D O N S F O R ANTON Y O W L

a Japan without kimonos,

a smoking boa constrictor on a curling rink;

a flamboyant black man,

a shrill cry of nudity in a plain song,

a kindly scorpion,

10 bankrupt tycoons spitting on a stack of gold coins,

a gloating sorrow,,

a simoon in a long Finnish corridor,

a profound cotton hanky:

that's what could rid our world of Anton Vowl. . .

a hippy cardinal shouting out an anti-Catholic slogan,

a razor for citrus fruits,

a raid on a trio of British bandits by a Royal Mail train,

a straight compass,

a man's tummy-button from which a volcano spouts forth,

a land only natal by adoption,

a twilit balcony supporting a lunatic who has lost an arm,

a crucifix without a Christ,

a sisal pissing Chardonnay for magicians without cloaks;

that's what would function as a pardon for Anton Vowl. . .

a farrago without fustian,

a looking glass dull from a tiny, not spiny, fish,

autumnal grazing,

a myriad of billows rolling in from a promontory,

a faithful old hunting-gun,

4 1

a whitish burn, a body without body, a world without war,

an illusory omission,

that's what would stop Anton Vowl from dying . . .

but how to construct it all in just that instant in which is

born a Void?

4 2

1

Which, following a compilation of a polymath's random

jottings, will finish with a visit to a zoo

Anton Vowl's bosom companion is a man known as Amaury

Conson.

Conson has (or had) six sons. His firstborn, Aignan (odd,

that), did a vanishing act similar to Vowl's almost 30 springs

ago, in Oxford, during a symposium run by a
soi-disant
Martial

Cantaral Foundation and in which Lord Gadsby V. Wright,

Britain's most illustrious scholar and savant, was a participant.

Conson's following son, Adam, was to pass away in a sanatorium,

succumbing to inanition through wilful auto-starvation. And that

was only to start with: in Zanzibar a monstrous shark would

swallow Ivan, his third; in Milan his fourth, Odilon, Luchino

Visconti's right-hand man at La Scala, had a particularly bony

portion of turbot catch in his throat; and in Honolulu his fifth,

Urbain, was a victim of hirudination, slain by a gigantic worm

sucking his blood, totally draining him, so that as many as 20

transfusions would fail to bring him back. So Conson has a soli-

tary surviving son, Yvon; but his liking for Yvon is gradually

diminishing, as Yvon, living so far away, now hardly visits his

poor old dad.