Winter of artifice; three novelettes (10 page)

"We must look for light and clarity," he said, "because we are too easily unbalanced."

She was sitting at the foot of his bed.

"You've got such strong wings," he said. "One feels there are no walls to your life."

The mistral was blowing hot and dry. It had been blowing for ten days.

"Now I see that all these women I pursued are all in you, and you are my daughter, and I can't marry you! You are the synthesis of all the women I loved."

"Just to have found each other will make us stronger for life."

Samba the Negro came in with mail. When her father saw the letters addressed to her he said: "Am I to be jealous of your letters too?"

Between each two of these phrases there was a long silence. A great simplicity of tone. They looked at each other as if they were listening to ?misic, not as if he were saying words. Inside both their heads, as they sat there, he leaning against a pillow and she against the foot of the bed, there was a concert going on. Two boxes filled with the resonances of an orchestra. A hundred instruments playing all at once. Two long spools of flutethreads interweaving between his past

and hers, the strings of the violin constantly trembling like the strings inside their bodies, the nerves never still, the heavy potindings on the drum like the heavy pounding of sex, the throb of blood, the beat of desire 'which droivned all the vibrations, louder than any instnmient, the harp singing god, god, and the angels, the purity in his brow, the clarity in his eyes, god, god, god, and the drums pounding desire at the temples. The orchestra all in one voice now, for an instant, in love, in love with the harp singing god and the violins shaking their hair and she passing the violin bow gently between her legs, drawing music out of her body, her body foaffiing, the harp singing god, the drum beating, the cello singing a dirge under the level of tears, through siibterranean roads with notes twinkling right and left, notes like stairways to the harp singing god, god, god, and the faun through the flute mocking the notes grown black and penitent, the black notes ascending the dust route of the cello's tears, an earth tremor splitting the music in two fallen walls, walls of their faith, the cello weeping, and the violins trevibling, the beat of sex breaking throtigh the middle and splitting the white notes and black notes apart, and the piano's stairway of sounds rolling into the inferno of silence because far away, behind and beyond the violins conies the second voice of the orchestra, the dark voice out of the bellies of the instruments, underneath the notes being pressed by hot lingers, in opposition to these notes comes the song from the bellies of the instruments, out of the pollen they contain, out of the wind of passing fingers, the carpet of notes mourn with voices of black lace and dice on telegraph wires. His sadnesses locked into the cello, their dreams wrapped in dust inside of the piano box, this box on their heads cracking with resonances, the past singing, an orchestra splitting with fullness, lost loves,

faces vanishing, jealousy twisting like a cancer, eating the flesh, the letter that never came, the kiss that was not exchanged, the harp singing god, god, god, who laughs on one side of his face, god was the man with a wide mouth who coidd have eaten her whole, singing inside the boxes of their heads. Friends, treacheries, ecstasies. The voices that carried them into serenity, the voices which made the drum beat in them, the bow of the violins passing between the legs, the curves of wo7nen^s backs yielding, the baton of the orchestra leader, the second voice of locked instruments, the strings snapping, the dissojiances, the hardness, the flute weeping.

They danced because they were sad, they danced all through their life, and the golden top dancing inside them 7nade the notes turn, the white and the black, the words they wanted to hear, the new faces of the world turning black and white, ascending and descending, up and down askew stairways from the bellies of the cello full of salted tears, the water rising slowly, a sea of forgetfidness.

Yesterday ringing through the bells and castanets, and today a single note all alone, like their fear of solitude, quarreling, the orchestra taking their whole being together and liffmg thein clear out of the earth where pain is a long, smooth song that does not cut through the flesh, where love is one long smooth note like the wind at night, no blood-shedding knife to its touch of music from distance far beyond the orchestra which answered the harp, the flute, the cello, the violins, the echoes on the roof, the taste on the roof of their palates, inusic in the tongue, in the fingers when the fingers seek the flesh, the red pistil of desire in the fingers on the violin cords, their cries rising and falling, borne on the wings of the orchestra, hurt and wounded by its knowledge of her,

for thus they cried and thus they laughed, like the bells and the castanets, thus they rolled from black to white stairways, and dreaming spirals of desire.

Where is serenity? All their forces at work together, their fingers playing, their voices, their heads cracking with the fullness of sound, crescendo of exaltation and confusion, chaos, fullness, no time to gather all the notes together, sitting inside the spider web of their past, faihires, defeats.

She writing a diary like a perpetual obsessional song, and he and she dancing with gold-tipped cigarettes, wrinkled clothes, vanity, and worship, faith and doubt, losing their blood slowly from too much love, love a wound in them, too many delicacies, too many thoughts around it, too many vibrations, fatigue, nervousness, the orchestra of their desire splitting with its many faces, sad songs, god songs, quest and hunger, idealization and cynicism, humor in the split-opened face of the trombone swelling with laughter. Walls falling under the pressure of wills, walls of the absolute falling with each part of them breathing vnisic into instruments, their arms waving, their voices, their loves, hatreds, an orchestra of conflicts, a theme of disease, the song of pain, the song of strings that are never still, for after the orchestra is silent in their heads the echoes last, the concert is eternal, the solo is a delusion, the others wait behind one to accompany, to stifle, to silence^ to drown. Music spilling out from the eyes in place of tears, vmsic spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling fro7n his fingertips in place of caresses, music exchanged between them instead of love, yearning on five lines, the five lines of their thoughts, their reveries, their emotions, their unknown self, their giant self, their shadow.

The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like their

knowledge of destiny. But she sat on five lines cursing the world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the voice, saying always: have faith, even curses make music. Five lines running together with sifftultaneous song.

The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a father who will lean over and understand all things. I need absolution! I believe in others^ purity and I find myself never pure enough. I need absolution! Another line on which she was making colorful dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life a mockery with an evil mouth. Everything lived out sirmd-taneously, the love, the i?npidse, the doubt of the love, the knowledge of the lovers death, the love of life, the doubt, the ecstasy, the knowledge of its death ger?n, everything like an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythn, my father? Khy thm — rhy thm — rhy thm.

* * • *

At midnight she walked away from his room, down the very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watching, throwing her shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors in the empty hotel, the train of her silk dress caressing the floor, the mistral hooting.

As she opened the door of her room the window closed violently—there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, like opera settings, and the mistral blowing

Over her bed the white mosquito netting hung like an ancient bridal canopy

The mystical bride of her father

It was she who told the first lie, with deep sadness because she did not have the courage to say to her father: "Our love should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those lies which we tell the weaker ones."

Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which she had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented her from saying this. Truth was impossible.

At the same time there were moments when she experienced dark, strange pleasure at the thought of deceiving him. She knew how deceptive he was. She felt deep down that he was incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to her, fail her. And she wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper way. It gave her joy to be so far ahead of her father who was almost a professional deceiver.

When she saw her father at the station a great misery overcame her. She sat inert, remembering each word he had said, each sensation.

It seemed to her that she had not loved him enough, that he had come upon her like a great mystery, that again there was a confusion in her between god and father. His severity, luminousness, his music, seemed again to her not human elements. She had pretended to love him humanly.

Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of the ever-growing distance between them, suffocating with a cold mood, she recognized the signs of an inhuman love. By certain signs she recognized all her pretenses. Every time she had pretended to feel more than she felt, she experienced this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of her body. By this sign she recognized her insincerities. At the core nothing ever was false. Her feelings never deceived her. It

was only her imagination which deceived her. Her imagination could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a warmth which her body knew very well to be unreal.

In her head there could be a great deal of acting and many strange things could happen in there, but her emotions were sincere and they revolted, they prevented her from getting lost down the deep corridors of her inventions. Through them she knew. They were her eyes, her divining rod, they were her truth.

Today she recognized an inhuman love.

Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over her eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, her feet on a pillow. Lying back with a feeling like that of convalescence. All weight and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over the eyelids.

She recognized a state which recurred often, in spite of light and sound, in spite of the streets she walked, her activities. A mood between sleep and dream, where she caught the corner of two streets—the street of dreams and the street of living—in the palm of her hand and looked at them simultaneously, as one looks at the lines of one's destiny.

There would come cotton over her eyes and long unbroken reveries, sharp, intense, and continuous. She began to see very clearly that what destroyed her in this silent drama with her father was that she was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather, that everything that happened, the many incidents, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which she could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one's self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never ad-90

dressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between them, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged with her father, yet they had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between them but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.

Now that the world was standing on its head and the figure of her father had become immense, like the figure of a myth, now that from thinking too much about him she had lost the sound of his voice, she wanted to open her eyes again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the warmth of her other loves. So she opened her eyes and she saw: the picture of her father's foot. One day down south, while they were driving, they stopped by the road and he took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled off his sock she saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate and perfectly made, sensitive and small. She felt as if he had stolen it from her: it was her foot she was looking at, her foot he was holding in his hand. She had the feeling that she knew this foot completely. It was her foot—the very same size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing and the same air of never having walked at all.

To this foot she could have said: "I know you." She recognized the lightness, the speed of it. "I know you, but if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my own foot."

A confusion of feet. She is not alone in the world. She has a double. He sits on the running board of the car and when he sits there she does not know where she is. She is

standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of the confusion. If it were someone else's foot her love could flow out freely, all around, but here her love stands still inside of her, still with a kind of fright.

There is no distance for her to traverse; it chokes inside of her, like the coils of self-love, and she cannot feel any love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into her like a perpetually coiled snake, and she wants always to leap outside of herself. She wants to flow out, and here her love lies coiled inside and choking her, because her father is her double, her shadow, and she does not know which one is real. One of them must die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself. To leap out freely beyond the self, love must flow out and beyond this wall of confused identities. Now she is all confused in her boundaries. She doesn't know where her father begins, where she begins, where it is he ends, what is the difference between them.

The difl'erence is this, she begins to see, that he wears gloves for gardening and so does she, but he is afraid of poverty, and she is not. Can she prove that? Must she prove that? Why? For herself. She must know wherein she is not like him. She must disentangle their two selves.

She walked out into the sun. She sat at a cafe. A man sent her a note by the gargon. She refused to read it. She would have hked to have seen the man. Perhaps she would have liked him. Some day she might like a very ordinary man, sitting at a cafe. It hadn't happened yet. Everything must be immense and deep. In this she was absolutely unlike her father who liked only the most superficial adventures.

Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe fruit. Looking down at her lacquered toenails, at the white dust on her sandals. Smelling the odor of bread in the bakery 92

where she stopped for a roll. (This her father would not do.)

A cripple passed very close to her. Her face was burned, scarred, the color of iron. All traces of her features were lost, as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh she saw the meat of an animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood.

Fler father had said once that she was ugly. He had said it because she was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, overflowing with health and joy. But at the age of two she had almost died of fever. She lost the bloom all at once. She reappeared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him said coolly: "How ugly you are!" This phrase she had never been able to forget. It had taken her a lifetime to disprove it to herself. A lifetime to efface it. It took the love of others, the worship of the painters, to save her from its effects.

His paternal role could be summed up in the one word: criticism. Never an clan of joy, of contentment, of approval. Always sad, exacting, critical, blue eyes.

Out of this came her love of ugliness, her eff'ort to see beyond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something which never possessed the same shape, color and features as thought. Out of this came her love of men's creations. All that a man said or thought ivas the face, the body; all that a man invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People were made of crystal for her. She could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. Her eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. She overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk ... she forgave ... she became clairvoyant. A new sense which had awakened in her uncovered the smell of their soul, the

shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond the words and the appearances she caught all that was left unsaid—the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal breath of their yearning. She never saw the fragmented individual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfillment and the intention, the core and the future. She saw always the actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the intention as one

Now with her love of her father this concern with the truth lying beneath the surface and the appearance became an obsession because in him the mask was more complete. The chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and his true self was deeper.

Through this mask of coldness which had terrified her as a child she was better able as a woman to detect the malady of his soul. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. He was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the near, the real. He seemed to have come from very far only to be leaving again immediately. He was always pretending to be there. His body alone was there, but his soul was absent: it always escaped through a hundred fissures, it was in flight always, towards the past, or towards tomorrow, anywhere but in the present.

They looked at each other across miles and miles of separation. Their eyes did not meet. His fear of emotion enwrapped him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, its human odors. He had built a glass house around himself to shut out all suffering. He wanted life to filter through, to reach him distilled, sifted of crudities and shocks. The glass walls were a prism intended to eliminate the dangerous, and in this arti-

ficial elimination life itself was deformed. With the bad was lost the human warmth, the nearness.

There was no change in his love, but the mask was back again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his artificial life began again. He had stopped talking as he talked down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his salon life. There were always people around with whom he kept up a tone of hghtness and humor. In the evenings she had to appear in his salon and talk with the tip of her tongue about everything that was far from her thoughts.

This was the winter of artifice.

In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, there was only a fashionable musician bowing.

Although in reality he had not abandoned her, she felt he had passed into a world she would not follow him into. She felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning to end. She wept at the isolation in which her father's superficiality left her. She told him she had surrendered all her friends and activities for him. She told him she could not Hve on the talks they had in his salon. Each phrase she uttered was almost automatic.

It was the scene she knew best, the one most familiar to her even though it became an utter lie. It was the same scene which had impressed her as a child, and out of which she had made a life pattern. As she talked with tears in her eyes, she pitied herself for having loved and trusted her father again, for having given herself to him, for having expected everything from him. At the same time she knew that this was not true. Her mind ran in two directions as she talked, and so did her feelings. She continued the habitual scene of pain: "I gave myself

to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a human being."

The scene which she acted best and felt the best was that of abandon. She felt impelled to act it over and over again. She knew all the phrases. She was familiar with the emotions it aroused. It came so easily to her, even though she knew all the time that, except for the moment when he left them years ago, she had never really experienced abandon except by way of her imagination, except through her fear of it, through her misinterpretation of reality.

There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one's soul and Ufe habits. It was in this way she remembered most vividly that as a child a man had tortured her; still she could not help feeling tortured or interpreting the world today as it had appeared to her then in the light of her misunderstanding of people's motives. She could not help telling her father that he was destroying her absolute love; yet she knew this was not true because it was not he who was her absolute love. But this statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was her father who had endangered her faith in the absolute, it was his behavior which she did not understand as a child which destroyed her faith in life and in love.

She knew she had deceived her father as to the extent of her love, but the thought in her mind was: what would I be feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance.^ I would be thoroughly despairing. This thought increased her sadness, and her face betrayed such anguish that her father was overwhelmed.

After this scene he continued his marionette life: a chain of fashionable concerts, of soirees, hairdressers, shirtmakers, newspaper clippings, telephone calls. ...

She began to hate him for evaporating into frivolity, for disguising his soul with such puerilities.

She was filled with doubts. She saw him in a perpetually-haunting shadow of something he was not. This man that he was not interfered with her actual knowledge. These encounters where love never reached an understanding, where all ended in frustration, this love which created nothing, this love strangled her life. As soon as he was away she began again to imagine him as he might be. She imagined him talking to her deeply, she imagined tenderness and understanding.

Imagined! Like a contagious disease withering her actual life, this imaginary meeting, imaginary talk, on which she spent all her inventiveness. As soon as he came all these expectations were destroyed. His talk was empty, marginal. His whole ingenuity was spent circling away from everything vital, in remaining on the surface by adroit descriptions of nothing; by a swift chain of puerilities, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansions of empty facts.

This ghost of her potential father tormented her like a hunger for something which she knew had been invented or created solely by herself, but which she feared might never take human shape. Where was the man she really loved? The windows he had opened in the south had been windows on the past. The present or the future seemed to terrify him. Nothing was essential but to retain avenues of escape.

This constant yearning for the man beyond the mask, this

disregard of the mask, was also a disregard of the harm which

the wearing of a mask inevitably produced. It was difficult for

her to believe, as others did, that the mask tainted the blood,

that the colors of the mask could run into the colors of nature and poison it. She could not believe that, like the women who had been painted in gold and died of the poison, the mask and the flesh could melt into each other and bring on infection.

Her love was based on faith in the purity of one's own nature. It made her oblivious of the deformities which could be produced in the soul by the wearing of a mask. It caused her to disregard the deterioration that might affect the real face, the habits which the mask could form if worn for a long time. She could not believe that if one pretended indifference long enough, the germ of indifference could finally grow, that the soul could be discolored by long pretense, that there could come a moment when the mask and the man melted into one another, that confusion between them corroded the vital core, destroyed the core....

This deterioration in her father she could not yet believe. She expected a miracle to happen. So many times it had happened to her to see the hardness of a face fall, the curtain over the eyes draw away, the false voice change, and to be allowed to enter by her vision into the true self of others.

When she was sixteen she could feel his visitations. He would descend on her often when she was dancing and laughing. He came then like a blight, because when she felt his presence, she felt a curtain of criticism covering all things. She looked through his eyes then instead of her own. Her mother always said: laugh and dance, but her father in her was contemptuous. A strange intuition because she did not know then that her father could not dance.

Once she was dancing on the stage. She had just begun her first number. The Spanish music carried her away, whirled her into a state of delirium. She could feel the audience surrender-

ing to her. She was dancing; carrying away their eyes, their senses, into her spinning and whirling.

Her eyes fell on the front row. She saw her father there. She saw his pale face half hidden in the audience. He was holding a program before his face in order not to be recognized. But she knew his hair, his brow, his eyes. It was her father. Her steps faltered, she lost her rhythm. Only for a moment. Then she swung around, stamping her feet, dancing wildly and never looking his way, until the end.

When she saw her father years later she asked him if he had been there. He answered that not only was he not there but that if he had had the power he would have prevented her from dancing because he did not want his daughter on the stage. Even from a distance she had felt his criticalness. Now she saw him as she had divined him, cold, formal, and conventional; and she was angry at the prison walls of his severity.

As soon as she left him everything besan to sint; again. Everybody she passed in the street seemed like a music box. She heard the street organ, the singing of the wheels roUino;. Motion was music. Her father was the musician, but in life he arrested music. Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. Every rusty fragment, every scattered piece could be melted into one rhythm. A note was a whole, and it was in motion, ascending or descending, swelling in fullness or thrown away, thrown out in the air, but always moving.