Travesty (4 page)

And let us not forget your days as a mental patient. We are all
familiar with those red-letter days of yours,
cher ami
.

Yes, I know you well. Only a Leo could cultivate so
successfully this
persona
of the man who has emerged alive from the
end of the tunnel or who has managed to cross the impossible width of the arena. It
is always the same: you are like a man who spends his life in intense sunlight
becoming all the while not pinker, darker, but only whiter, as if your existence is
a matter of calculated survival, which accounts for your curious corpselike
expression, which in turn is so appealing to women. You are plain, you smoke
cigarettes, you appear to be the friend of at least half of all those professional
toreros
now working with the majestic bulls, as some people think of
them.

And you have spent your days, months, in confinement. We have only to
see your name, or better still to see your photograph or even catch a glimpse of you
in person, to find ourselves confronting the bright sun, endless vistas of hot,
parched sand, the spectacle of a man who always conveys the impression of having
been dead and then joylessly resurrected—but resurrected nonetheless. Of
course your suffering is your masculinity, or rather it is that illusion of
understanding earned through boundless suffering that obtrudes itself in every
instance of your being and that inspires such fear of you and admiration. Another
way of putting it, is to say that you have done very well with hairy arms and a bad
mood. But I am not trying to rouse you with insults. At any rate you will not deny
that in yourself you have achieved that brilliant anomaly: the poet as eroticist and
pragmatist combined. Though you merely write
poems, people admire
you for your desperate courage. You are known for having discovered some kind of
mythos
of cruel detachment, which is another way of expressing the
lion’s courage. And I too am one of your admirers. Just think of it.

Your modesty? Honesty? Humility? Anxiety? I am aware of them all. In
you these qualities are made of the same solid silver as that courage of yours. Yes,
you are the kind of man who should always be accompanied by a woman who is the wife
of a man as privileged as me. Only some such woman could qualify as your Muse and
attest to your courage.

Well, I prefer the coward.

Is it possible then that I too am a Leo? I for whom the bull is
interesting, if at all, not for his horns but for the disproportion between his
large flabby hump and little hooves? I who possess none of those externals of
personality which adorn you,
cher ami
, like
banderillas
stuck and
swaying in the bull’s hump? I who despise the pomp and frivolity of organized
expiation? I for whom the window washer on a tall building is more worthy of
attention than your
torero
in the moment of his gravest danger? I who must
get along without a Muse and for whom poetry is still no match for journalistic
exhibitionism? (The poetry of present company excluded,
cher ami.)

Well, perhaps I am merely the product of an astrological error or,
more likely, of some clerical slip in the mayor’s office. Perhaps I am only a
counterfeit Leo,
a person who has lived his life under the wrong
sign of the zodiac—the coward to your own man of courage. But then how ironic
it is that behind the wheel tonight we find not the poet but only the man who
disciplines the child, carves the roast. Perhaps the crow is not so inferior after
all to his friend the canary.

It is quite true that I am unable to bear the cold. In all her good
humor, Honorine still considers it my severest failing, this inevitable capitulation
of mine to the power of the falling thermometer. The shocking whiteness of our bed
linen, the touch of approaching winter on the back of my neck, the painful sensation
of coldness spreading like water on tiles across the undersides of my thighs, the
chill my hand is forever detecting on the surface of my rather bony chest (despite
flannel shirt, woolen pullover, tweed jacket), a sudden unpleasant deadening in the
end of my nose—here is a sensitivity which even I myself deplore. What could
be more cowardly than fear of the cold?

Yes, I fight the drafts. I complain bitterly indeed about the trace of
ice on the windowpane, the sound of wind in our vaulted fireplace, the enemy that
sets the flame of the candle dancing. Do you know that I suffer acutely because one
of my ears is always colder than the other? My feet begin to stiffen inside my thick
socks and English shoes, the coldness of my hands
defies the most
vigorous rubbing, reproachfully I tell Honorine that the walls are cold, that the
fire is too small, that someone has left one of our thick oaken doors ajar. But you
have heard my complaints. You have even remarked that an old chateau is no place for
a man who sniffs out spiteful breezes in all seasons.

And yet you cannot know what it is to have cold elbows. The elbows are
the worst. Because in them the little twin fiends of numbness and incapacity appear
to sit most easily, comfortably, as if the nearly naked exposure of the bones in the
elbows attracts most readily those sensations—those two allegorical
envoys—of the ice that is already creeping and hardening across the very
surfaces of our last night. Oh yes, Honorine is tolerant of this obsessive
susceptibility of mine. She is forebearing, indulgent, good-humored, despite her
critical comments and all these years of robes, hot fires, the soft and warming fur
of dead rabbits. And yet hours after I have been restored as fully as possible to a
condition resembling so-called normal body temperature, it is then that I am most
aware of the coldness lingering in my elbows and of the fact that I can never be
entirely comfortable while for her part Honorine is never cold. Actually, it is
embarrassing to be unable to touch your wife at night without first warming your
hands in a sinkful of scalding water. It is not pleasant to feel your wife flinching
even in the heat of her always sensible and erotic generosity.

But I hope it is not too warm for you. Surely you
can understand that tonight especially the heating regulator is set precisely
and, I admit, at the highest possible degree. In this case the discomfort you are
being made to feel is simply no match for that which I am avoiding. Don’t you
agree?

So you think that I am merely deceiving you with words. You think
that I am trying to talk away the last of our time together merely in order to
destroy the slightest possibility of my change of mind. You think that I am
shrouding the last dialogue of our lives in the gauze of unreality, the snow of
evasion. You think that euphemism is my citadel, that all my poised sentences are
the work of mere self-protection, and that if only you can persuade me to accept
head-on the validity of your word—that word—as the simplest and
clearest definition of the car accident that is intended and that involves persons
other than the driver, then you will have won the very reprieve which, from the
start, I have tried to convince you does not exist. Well, beware,
cher ami
.
Beware.

But perhaps you are right. Perhaps “murder” is the
proper word, though it offends my ear as well as my intentions. However, mine is not
a fixed and predictable personality, and you may be right. I too am open to new
ideas. So let us agree that “murder” is at least a possibility. Let us
hold it in store, so to
speak, for the final straightaway. But I
ask only that you then find new and more pertinent connotations of that ugly word
and make your most objective effort to believe—believe—that there can
be no exceptions to the stages, as I’ve sketched them, of what we may call
our private apocalypse. It is like a game: I cannot accept the idea of
“murder” unless you are able to refuse the illusory comfort of
“reprieve.” After all, how can the two of us talk together unless you
are fully aware that the two of us are leaping together, so to speak, from the same
bridge?

Which reminds me of a singular episode of my early manhood. It
occurred when Honorine was hardly more than a seductive silhouette on my black
horizon. And yet it was most instructive, this brief event, and may well be the clue
to the beginning of my romantic liaison with Honorine and even to the lasting
strength of my marriage. Certainly it determined or revealed the nature of the life
I would lead henceforth as well as the nature of the man I had just become. It is
something of a travesty, involving a car, an old poet, and a little girl. Perhaps we
shall get to it. Perhaps. For now you must simply believe me when I say that, thanks
to this singular episode, my own early manhood contained its moment of creativity.
In my youth I also had my taste or two of that “cruel detachment”
which was
to make you famous. More similarities between the
canary and his friend the crow. But now you must realize that you have always
underestimated the diversity, as we may call it, of the members of the privileged
class.

At least you have always appreciated Honorine. Yet who would not? In
her entire person is she not precisely the incarnation of everything we least expect
to find in the woman who appears to reveal herself completely, and no matter how
attractively, in the first glance? Think of her now, not sleeping in that massive
antique bed of hers, but, say, outdoors and bending to her roses or better, perhaps,
in our great hall and sitting on her leather divan and wearing her tight
plum-colored velvet slacks and white linen blouse. Only another attractive,
youthful-looking married woman of the privileged class, we assume. Only one of those
conventional women framed, so to speak, by her bankbook and happy children and a car
of her own. We see her against a background of yellow cloth on which has been
imprinted a tasteful arrangement of tree trunks and little birds; we know that
everything in her domain reflects a pleasing light, a texture of familiar elegance;
we recognize that she is neither large nor small, neither beautiful nor plain,
despite her golden hair cut short and feathery in the mode of the day; we expect her
to be little more than a kindly person, a friend to other
women,
a happy mother, a fair athlete, someone who reads books and supervises the
redecoration of an old chateau and secretly tries to imagine a better life. Large
but studious-looking eyeglasses of yellowish shell, shoes that gleam with the
aesthetic richness of the country from which they have been imported, a wedding band
excessively studded with rare stones, an agreeable mind that complements the oval
face, the willing personality that reflects the hot bath taken only moments
before—all these telltale signs we both have scanned too often in the past,
have we not? Haven’t we here the young middle-aged woman who cannot quite
compete with the paid models in the fashion magazine but who yet catches our eye?
The young matron not quite distinguished enough to join the striking matriarch on
the facing page, yet benign enough to make us think of a drop of honey on a flat
square of glass? If this is she —the woman in tennis shorts, the person who
smiles, the wife with trim legs in which the veins are beginning to show—then
we have seen her kind before and cannot find her especially interesting. Everything
about such a person suggests the bearded father, the hand prepared well in advance
to tend the sumptuous roses, a certain intelligence in the eyes, but finally the
undeniable indications of the female life that is destined, after all, for
unfulfillment—which is not interesting. No, we are hardly about to spend time
or undertake the risks of seduction for a mere drop of honey on a sheet of glass.
Let her remain in her old chateau where she belongs,
surrounded
as she deserves to be by husband and children and all of her uncertain advantages.
At best this woman will give us only pride or pathos, being too long descended, as
she appears to be, from that original countess who in ageless vigor maintained who
knows what naked dominion in the boudoir.

But how wrong it all is, how very wrong. Superficially correct, and
yet totally wrong. Yes, you and I know better, do we not? Together we know that the
beauty of our Honorine is that, deserving these various epithets as she surely does,
still she contains within herself precisely the discretion and charm and sensual
certainty we could not have imagined. On this you will bear me out. I know you
will.

Just think of it: you sit beside her on the cream-colored leather
divan; you remove the owlish eyeglasses and notice that the eyes are flecked in the
corners with anxiety; the great hall is silent, waxen, filled with the residual
afterglow of the late sun; you notice that the face turned in your direction is
strong but that the smile could be interpreted as timid; your hand grazes the chaste
white linen of the blouse which, her eyes still on yours, her body apparently
relaxed, she herself begins to unbutton, as if without thinking; with relief you
notice an endearing tobacco stain on several of the otherwise conventionally white
teeth; and then like a figure from our wealth of erotic literature, you find
yourself kneeling on that polished stone floor and holding a firm ankle in one hand
and in the other the heel of a
shoe that appears to have been
molded from dark chocolate. And then she leans forward, leans on your shoulder,
frees herself of the shoes you could not remove, and then stands up and, for a
moment, experiences girlish difficulty with the zipper of the plum-colored velvet
pants. Well, the vision is yours as well as mine: the disappearance of the velvet
trousers, the strength and shapeliness of the hands that pull down the underpants,
the clear uncertain tone of the voice in which she remarks (quite wrongly, as all of
my photographs attest) that she has never been very good at stripping. And there at
eye level, for you are still kneeling, there at eye level we find the slight
protrusion of the hip bone, the modest appearance of the secret hair which might
have been shaven but was not, the smallest off-center appearance of the navel born
of the merest touch of a hot iron against that soft and ordinary flesh. But more,
much more, as only you and I could know. Because just there, adorning that small
area between navel and pubic hair, there you see once again the cluster of pale
purple grapes on yellow stems—yellow stems!—that coils down from the
navel of our Honorine or, to put it another way, that crowns the erogenous contours
of our Honorine as it did even when she was only an unexpectedly eccentric girl.
Grapes,
cher ami
, a tattoo of smoky grapes that move when she breathes or
whenever there is the slightest spasm or undulation in her abdomen. After seeing
them, who would risk any constricting definition of our Honorine?