Travesty (2 page)

Spare me, you cry. Spare me. But the lack of knowledge and lack of
imagination are yours, not mine. And it will not be against a tree. There you are
even more grossly mistaken.

Remind me to tell you about little Pascal. He was Chantal’s
little brother and died around the time Honorine nicknamed Chantal the “porno
brat.” My son, my own son, who died just at the moment of acquiring
character. Even now the white satin hangs in shreds from the arms of the stone cross
that marks his grave.

Very well. No radio. Music, no music, it is all the same to me,
though had the thought been agreeable to
you, I suppose I might
have preferred the gentlest background of some score prepared for melodrama. No
doubt I am attracted to the sentimentality of flute, drum, orchestra, simply because
listening to music is exactly like hurtling through the night in a warm car: the
musical experience, like the automobile, guarantees timelessness, or so it appears.
The song and road are endless, or so we think. And yet they are not. The beauty of
motion, musical or otherwise, is precisely this: that the so-called guarantee of
timelessness is in fact the living tongue in the dark mouth of cessation. And
cessation is what we seek, if only because it alone is utterly unbelievable.

But Chantal is not listening. She is preoccupied with an agony even
greater than yours. She cannot care that recently her Papa has begun to think about
our several lives. But of course from you I expect total attention. We are grown
men, after all, and have eaten from the same bowl often enough. As for me, in this
instance I respect your wishes. My beautiful high-fidelity radio stays dead.

Let us hope that I have not miscalculated and that there is not some
overblown machine now lumbering down upon us, filling the road ahead, its great
belly brimming with thick liquid fire and, in its noisy cab, a gargantuan young
peasant singing to keep himself
awake. Disaster. Witless, idiotic
disaster. Because what I have in mind is an “accident” so perfectly
contrived that it will be unique, spectacular, instantaneous, a physical counterpart
to that vision in which it was in fact conceived. A clear “accident,”
so to speak, in which invention quite defies interpretation.

In the first place I fully intend us to pass the dark chateau where
our own Honorine lies sleeping. We will be traveling at our highest speed, of
course, and already will have reached the top of our arc. But perhaps for an instant
our lights will somehow intrude upon Honorine’s interior life, or perhaps
even the sound of our passing—that faint horrifying expulsion of breath which
is the combination of tires and engine racing together at a great
distance—may somehow attract the briefest response from Honorine’s
dormant consciousness. She will move an arm, make a sound, roll over, who knows?
Then eight kilometers beyond the chateau and we approach the old Roman viaduct. You
remember it, that narrow dead viaduct that spans the dry gorge and always reminds me
of flaking bone. Of course you remember it. And in the smallest imaginable amount of
time our demon steel shall fuse its speed with the stasis of old stone. The sides of
our handsome car shall nearly touch the low balustrades of that high and rarely
traversed construction, we shall all three of us be aware of the roar of stone, the
sound of space, our headlights boring across the gorge as in a cheap film. And now,
now you are thinking that here is the spot where it shall
all
end. Yes, here would be the natural site of what will be called our “tragic
accident.” Roman time, modern car, insufficient space between the
balustrades, the appalling distance to the rocks in the bottom of the gorge, the
uneven surface of the roadway across that viaduct. . . . What could be better? But
you are wrong.

Because that is the problem. Precisely. All those
“logical” details and all those lofty “symbols” of
melodrama speak much too clearly to the professional investigator (and reporter) of
such events. No, we shall not be able to crash off the viaduct or even miss it
altogether and so sail directly into the wilderness of that deep gorge like some
stricken winged demon from the books of childhood. Instead we shall merely continue
beyond the viaduct about three kilometers (hardly the twitch of a lid, the snap of a
head) where we shall make an impossible turn onto the premises of an abandoned farm
and there, with no slackening of pace, run squarely into the windowless wall of an
old and now roofless barn built lovingly, long ago, of great stones from the field.
That wall is a meter thick. A full meter, or even slightly more.

The car that passes the very chateau that must have been its
destination; the unmistakable tire tracks across the viaduct; the turn that is
nothing less than incomprehensible; the tremendous speed upon impact; the failure of
the autopsy to reveal the slightest trace of alcohol in the corpse of the
driver. . . . What can they think? What can they possibly produce as explanation?
What will they say about an event as severe and
improbable as
this one will appear to be, as well as one loud enough to wake the curate in the
little nearby village of La Roche?

But that is exactly the point, since what is happening now must be
senseless to everyone except possibly the occupants of the demolished car. During
the—let me see—next hour and forty minutes by the dashboard clock, it
will be up to the three of us to make what we can of this experience. And we will
not be able to count on Chantal for any very meaningful contribution.

At any rate the lumbering disruptive oil truck is out of the question.
Out of the question. Nothing will destroy the symmetry I have in mind. Don’t
you agree?

I have never seen the old curate of La Roche, but I know that he
coughs a great deal and has a tobacco breath and that his fingers are forever
stained with wine. But he is a deep and noisy sleeper, of that I am certain. What an
irony that the co-ordinates of space and time have fixed on him to be our
Chanticleer, so to speak, and that it will be he who will offer the first cockcrow
to the explosion that will inaugurate our silence. Which reminds me, only yesterday
I sat in this very automobile and watched an old couple helping each other down a
village street (not La Roche, I have never been in La Roche) toward a life-sized and
freshly painted wooden Christ-on-the-Cross mounted on a stone block not far from
where I sat in my car. The old man, who was
holding the
woman’s elbow, was a thin and obviously bad-tempered captive of marriage. The
old woman was bow-legged. Or at least her short legs angled out from where her knees
must have been beneath the heavy skirts, and then jutted together sharply at the
ankles. This creature depended for locomotion on the lifetime partner inching along
at her side. The old man was wearing a white sporting cap and carrying the
woman’s new leather sack. The old woman, heavily bandaged about the throat in
an atrocious violet muffler, was carrying a little freshly picked bouquet of
flowers. Well, it’s a simple story. This scowling pair progressed beyond my
silent automobile (you must imagine the incongruity of the old married couple, the
orange roof tiles, the waiting Christ, the beige-colored lacquer of this automobile
gleaming impressively in the bright sunlight) until at last the woman deposited the
trim little bouquet of flowers at the feet of the Christ.

There you have it. Ours is a country of coughers and worshipers.
Between the two I choose the coughers. At least there is something especially
attractive about one of our schoolyards of coughing children, don’t you
agree? The incipient infection is livelier than the health it destroys. Yes, I do
appreciate that hacking music and all their little faces so bright and blighted.

But have I never told you I am missing a lung? The war of course. That
is another story. Perhaps we shall get to it. At any rate it is probably true that
my missing lung determined long ago my choice of a doctor. You see, my poor doctor
is missing one leg (the left,
I believe) which was amputated only
weeks before the poor fellow’s wife ran off, finally, with her lover of about
twenty years’ standing. It was a compounded shock, an unusual circumstance,
and as soon as I learned of it I became an additional patient on the diminishing
roster of my crippled physician. The affinity is obvious, obvious. But by now you
will have perceived the design that underlies all my rambling and which, like a
giant snow crystal, permeates all the tissues of existence. But the crystal melts,
the tissues dissolve, a doctor’s leg is neatly amputated by a team of
doctors. Design and debris, as I have said already. Design and debris. I thrive on
it. For me the artificial limb is more real, if you will allow the word, than the
other and natural limb still inhabited by sensation. But I know you,
cher
ami
. You are interested not in the doctor’s amputated leg but in his
missing wife. Well, each man to his taste. At least I can report that my physician
is highly skilled, despite all his cigarettes and his trembling hands. Incidentally,
his cough is one of the worst I have ever heard.

But you are groaning. And yet even now we have so far to go that I
cannot help but advise you to conserve the sounds in your throat. That’s
better, much better. But must you wring your hands? Remember, you are setting a firm
example for Chantal.

Yes, it seems to me that one of the strongest gratifications of
night driving is precisely that you can see so little, and yet at the same time see
so very much. The
child awakes in us once again when we drive at
night, and then all those earliest sensations of fear and security begin shimmering,
tingling once again inside ourselves. The car is dark, we hear lost voices, the
dials glow, and simultaneously we are moving and not moving, held deep in the
comfort of the cushions as once we were on just such a night as this one, yet
feeling even in the softness of the beige upholstery all the sickening texture of
our actual travel. As children we had absolute confidence in the driver, although
there was always the delicious possibility of a wrong turn, some mechanical failure,
all the distant unknowns of the night itself. And then there was sight, whatever we
could see to the sides of the car or on the road ahead, and it was all so utterly
dependent on the headlights, and sight so uncontrollably reduced was of course all
the more magnified and pleasing.

It is no different now. Even setting aside our projected destination,
which to me is the final blinding piece in a familiar puzzle, the fourth and solid
wall in a room of glass, the clear burst of desire that is never entirely out of my
mind, while for you it is quite the opposite, since what you know about our
particular journey blunts you to the pleasures of this road, this night, this
conversation, so that you and I are like two dancers at arm’s length,
regurgitation locked together with ingestion in a formal, musical embrace. . . .
But setting all this aside, as I say, there is still the undeniable world of our
night driving, and it is alluring, prohibitive,
personal, a
mystery that is in fact quite specific, since it is common to child, to lovers, to
the lone man driving from one dark town to the next.

Yes, raise your eyes. Look through the clear glass of the windshield
while it is still intact. There, do you see how the outer edges of the cone of light
shudder against the flanks of darkness? And look at the actual length of our yellow
beams, the reach of our headlights. We can see remarkably far ahead, and to the
sides as well. Note that clump of wild onions out there in the dark, and that
blasted tree, and that jagged boulder stuffed into that trough of moss. And there,
that little road marker no larger than a child’s stone in a cemetery and
which you refused to read.

But I will tell you something. The hour is precisely eighteen minutes
past one a.m., and in mere moments, as soon as we are drawn into the gentleness of
the long curve that lies just ahead—but of course it is still
invisible—there will be on our right a rather small grove of olive trees, a
stone hut, a silent but watchful dog. And if you look when I tell you to look, you
will see that among the olive trees someone has made a small pile of human
possessions: a white wooden chair, a broken trunk, a crude rake for the garden, a
heap of clothing that might have been stripped from dead bodies. It is difficult to
understand that the life of the stone hut has been emptied into the darkness, and
that the olive tree is beautiful only because it is so deformed. Yet these things
are true.

It is amusing to think that tonight our speeding car shall frighten
the abandoned dog.

But do you know that once Chantal and Honorine
together urged me into the arms of a woman of luxury? It is true. Absolutely true.
And I complied.

Chantal was only a girl at the time, and we were traveling, the three
of us, in a car very like the one we are presently enjoying. We had dined well,
after a day of gray clouds, flat road, high speed, and having left behind us
connecting rooms with high ceilings, marble fireplaces, wallpaper the elegant color
of dry bone, had walked into a moonlit street filled suddenly with the warmth of
summer and the smell of flowers. A moving shadow, an open window, a few notes of
music, and then we understood that we had stumbled into the very center of the
honeyed hive of a city already acclaimed for its women. Down the narrow street we
went arm in arm, laughing, Chantal and Honorine both claiming to be well-known
residents of that gentle quarter. And I was in the middle, walking between Chantal
and Honorine, and somewhere a caged bird was singing and even out there in the
street I could smell fat bolsters, feather beds, nude flesh.

It was a night of wine. And the woman, when we found her, was much
older than Honorine and might have come fresh from some turn-of-the-century stage
where whiteness of skin and heaviness of flesh and limb were
especially admired. Chantal and Honorine exclaimed their enchantment; I hesitated;
the woman raised her chin and smiled. And do you know that Honorine proposed with so
much good spirit that I enjoy this woman that I became aroused and agreed to leave
Chantal and Honorine eating chocolates in a little empty parlor while, several
ornate rooms away, I contributed three quarters of an hour of sexual authenticity to
their delightful game? In taking that tall and heavy woman, who filled her maturity
with the exact same elegance with which she lived in her skin, it was as if I had
only found my way again to Chantal and Honorine, and as if I had accepted from
mother and daughter the same unimaginable gift. So I prepared the way for you.
Don’t you agree? And with my two women, who are yours as well, have I not
created a family small in size but rich in sentiment?