Caracole, page 1
ACCLAIM FOR EDMUND WHITE’S
Caracole
“White is a true literary pioneer.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Extraordinary…. Golden ages, innocence—these are myths, and some of the best novels have been about them…. Caracole is among the best.”
—The Advocate
“A devastating panorama of life in a high-powered city where everyone is on the make in one way or another and where the mixture of greed and vanity is evident in most of the practices of love…. Caracole would be my nomination for the finest French novel written in English.”
—Phyllis Rose, The Nation
“The largest and most accomplished of his novels, and one that will confirm his status as one of the most interesting of Americas writers.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Sensations pile upon sensations in this dense, swirling book which piles images of sensuality, pride, greed, and lust on every page in the dance-like interactions of its main characters…. Elegant, original, and hauntingly inventive.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
TO
JOHN PURCELL
The author gratefully acknowledges the help he received
from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Table Of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Also by Edmund White
Copyright
“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette, and never see the great soul in a man’s face.”
—GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
—Parlez donc avec plus de respect, dit la comtesse souriant au milieu de ses larmes, du sexe qui fera votre fortune; car vous déplairez toujours aux hommes, vous avez trop de feu pour les âmes prosaïques.
—STENDHAL, La Chartreuse de Parme
GABRIEL’S father—a silent, stubborn man, so wary that when asked to go for a walk he would avert his eyes and say, “I’ll tell you my answer in a minute”—insisted that in the morning the boy conjugate verbs from the household’s sole book, an unglued and incomplete sheaf of pages stuffed between boards the rain had warped, an animal had chewed, the sun had bleached from red to pink. These exercises required Gabriel to shout out every possible form of today’s word (its meaning unknown and unexplained) to his mother who dozed, drunk, in the next room, which would have been dark had the shutters not been missing their slats in sequences as irregular as bars of band music the wind blows away on a summer night.
Invariably the historical past was the tense that excited a kind of desire in her. She raised herself on one elbow, turned her enormous face blindly in Gabriel’s direction and called for him; the sound of her voice was surprisingly gentle. Once the boy was beside her, he could look around the room and pick out other signs of her former softness, kindness, respectability—remnants, for instance, of family silhouettes snipped out in black paper and fixed to white velvet. Once in a fit she had torn the silhouettes to shreds. Later, she had pieced what she could back together, though she’d scrambled features and assigned Gabriel’s long, simple profile (just seven turns of the artist’s scissors) to his father’s squat neck and placed the nurse’s corrugated head (seventy-six minute snips) on her own aristocratic, sloping shoulders—oh, they’d all been turned into monsters.
The six younger children were as scrambled on the velvet as in their mother’s memory, which had telescoped the wearisome identities into just two names and just two qualities: Boy (Bad) and Girl (Worse). Gabriel’s name, though, she remembered, and she called it out over the unexpectedly short forms of a tense that like her own past had begun and fully ended before the present and, accordingly, had taken on the frozen simplicity of fear or sleep.
Gabriel kneaded her white back with the heels of his hands (“Palms too hot,” she’d once grunted) until the skin glistened like pie dough too long on the slab. Conjured out of the shadows, breeding up out of the dirt like flies, came his brothers and sisters, weak blue eyes trained on the domestic mystery of the massage, mouths open to reveal bad teeth and hunger. The children jostled one another, ground knuckles into ribs, jabbed a black elbow into a scabby flank, sending a sibling toppling into the torn organdy duster fringing the bed or hurtling under the lace suspended from the vanity until, caged by cloth, the victim looked out through gray eyelets whitened by cobwebs.
Time for lunch.
He slipped off the inactive volcano of his mother’s body and led his younger brothers and sisters, caroming off cracked clay walls behind him, down a maze of corridors to the ancient double kitchen. Past the seven tenantless maids’ rooms, home now for bats, rabbits, and grass sprouting up between sinking, tilted flagstones. Past the dim chamber where hundreds of garden flowers had once been snipped daily, frogged, vased, and wafted off to the great hall. Past the mangling room, rollers rotting on their cylinders, chains unthreaded and fused into inverted clumps, the cistern putrid with dried lye. Past the pantry where china and crystal had once been stacked dirty after supper to await washing the next morning, on the theory that servants are too tired and drunk at night to be trusted with it; now the tall cabinet door hung open to reveal shelves, empty save for one upright porcelain menu framed in glazed fleurettes.
In the kitchen he sopped slices of bread in olive oil and garlic and fried them over a campfire he had fashioned out of parts from the defunct stove. He fueled the flame with kindling he’d gathered in the woods. Later, in the early evening he’d fry more bread and, for the sake of variety, slather it with goose fat. The children, snatching the food out of his hand, blew on the hot bread and whistled after each bite. They had no memory of real dinners, real table talk or, for that matter, of polite conversation of any sort; even for Gabriel the family’s former grandeur seemed as faint as their cipher on the toppled gatepost.
He wandered in the afternoons down a long alley of trees, once the sweeping approach to the house (which was called “Madder Pink,” after the local wildflower), but now lapsed into waist-high grass. Farther and farther from home he’d venture until its portico, still noble if seen from a distance, disappeared below the waving grass. His own heritage interested him not at all. The decline of the family fortunes had happened so slowly—as slowly as the aging of a face—that he could never think of it as a drama. It had all begun eight infinite years ago, when he’d been nine. One day a maid had talked of going, a month or two later she’d gone; one spring the gutters had needed painting, that autumn they were still choked and useless, drawing noisy links of rain across French windows that by winter were paneless, by spring unhinged, fallen lattices confining weeds in squares, grids on grass. The stable hand left and though he promised to return he did not; Gabriel’s father emptied the stables one day and for two months the boy’s pony, Heart’s Delight, still suffered his master to ride him. But after a hard winter the shaggy animal, limping on a bad ankle, looked at Gabriel sheepishly and tottered away from the rope harness.
The real horse he replaced with a stick one, a branch four feet long, wide at the neck and narrow at the tail, something he’d turned into a palomino by stripping off bands of black bark to expose white wood. This mount he named Curfew, after Heart’s Delight’s legendary sire, and it led him where it would, out beyond the gates, up the foothills and onto Troublesome Mountain. To keep the horse happy Gabriel had to whisper praise in its ear. “My Curfew,” he said in a low voice, “has a thick mane and silk tail. He smells like good shoe polish. His legs are wet with sweat. His teeth are yellow as piano keys. His eyes are amber as maple sap. His nostrils are blacker than the insides of gloves. He is brave and trustworthy and obeys no one but me.”
Up the steep sides of Troublesome the boy clambered astride his stick. At a stream he dipped the wood in water. On a gravel run he’d dismount and pick a stone out of the imaginary hoof. Slowly they ascended through patches of white lilacs, horsemint, fairy fringe, cow wheat, meadow rue, and stands of laurel, oak and pine.
Just come day, go day.
If Curfew fancied flatland, they’d follow a dry creek bed, the only road that hadn’t reverted to undergrowth. On their rounds they picked up two other boys on their stick horses, lads who spoke in a way Gabriel found hard to follow. They were sons of the old rural gentry—people who, unlike Gabriel’s family, had never lived or studied in the capital, and who, accordingly, retained the outmoded vocabulary of the previous century. One of them had a clay pig, small enough to fit into his pocket; it whistled one dry, low note when blown on the snout. The other knew the names of stones but he was the hardest to understand. Someone’s youngest brother he called “the Least One.” If he doubted a story, he said, “I don’t confidence you.” Windows he called “lights” and their hiding place in an oak bole he spoke of as the “plunder room.” Where the creek fanned out into a hundred rivulets, this child said, “That’s where it turkey-tailed,” and if a grown-up showed him special attention he’d ask later, “Why did he much me?” Both of Gabriel’s companions spoke in doubled nouns (“biscuit-bread,” “ham-meat,” “sulfur-match”). Nor did they grasp what Gabriel meant when he said once, “Have a nice weekend.” After a while it turned out their families worked every day and the notion of a weekend was beyond their means.
Before Madder Pink had collapsed, Gabriel’s father had brought i
Some summer evenings Gabriel went into the woods just before sunset and noticed the light prying dexterously through dark foliage in order to seize and set on fire a single leaf, choosing this one leaf fluttering humbly on a low branch for the day’s final, terrifying honors. And at that moment, if he stopped and squinted, the boy could see Curfew’s mane ignite and flow, its flow the animal’s only concession to the rising winds that were signaling the end to a nine-day hot spell. All the leaves, of course, were pattering like gathered rain blown in irregular volleys off roofs across an empty plaza. A stirring of leaves would start somewhere far away, rush closer, stop, resume, talk in tongues above his head—and the red light on the leaf or mane would solemnly dim; die. Just time to turn around and see the tip of the sun’s huge index finger retract below the horizon.
He felt lonely for a second. On the path home the leaves started up again, more anxious than before, a live tree scraped against a dead one, a sassafras brush threw up its hands in mimed despair, a blackbird with an ugly caw showed the unpleasant side to motherhood, a doe lowered her head the better to peer out beneath a low-slung bough at Gabriel, while her fawn, less confident, bounded away through a maze of blackberry bushes. Gabriel feared for a second that the doe might actually charge him, but Curfew whinnied just then and sent her scampering after her child. Even so the boy touched for luck the wax cake hung on a string around his neck.
Where the path turned and broadened just before the woods gave out, he saw that girl again. She had dark brown skin and thick matted hair and now, since she was sitting on a tree stump studying the ground, her hair swarmed over her face like bees suspended outside the hive their queen has elected to abandon. He could almost hear her hair. She was patting a bare foot against the ground, one bare shoulder pitched higher than the other as though she were already halfway into a shrug, but when she drew on her long-stemmed pipe the glow revealed big, widely spaced eyes trained on him. She did shrug then, look away, double the speed of her drumming foot, slap at a mosquito he suspected was there only for effect.
He nodded.
Though she was deep behind her hair she returned his greeting and once again drew a light from the pipe to expose her fat, down-turned lips, broad nose, the baby fat of her cheeks and the sooted satin of her lowered lashes. He took a few steps toward her. Embarrassment, like the burn of gulped whiskey, spread through him; Curfew—this stick toy—seemed ridiculous and he dropped it, hastily kicked it aside. A little whinny of protest … he had betrayed his horse for this brown girl scratching her nose.
He smiled at her. Perhaps there was simple friendliness in his smile, but never before had he wanted to be so cunning save in his dealings with his father. With his father, however, Gabriel was always plotting in order not to lose another fight or surrender another freedom; now, he wanted to gain … a word, say.
He got it. “Hello,” she said. “Want a smoke?” She had an accent and spoke slowly.
“Thanks. Yes.” He sat down beside her and she pushed back her hair on the far side of her face, leaving a confessional curtain between them, through which he glanced once. The indistinct line of her profile lengthened as she inhaled the smoke and her chin grew. When she handed him the pipe her paw touched his hand and the heat of her skin thrilled him. It was the heat of another, more intense, shorter-lived kind of animal; it was also, to his mind, an invitation to feel her body all over.
He’d seen her before. She belonged to a family of those tribal laborers his father had imported. Now that they had no work his father had ordered them to leave, to return to the South, but they hadn’t. They raided the granary and the dilapidated barn, they shit in the abandoned school house, they stole eggs and even chickens, they ran naked through the fields at night, splashed in the stream, calling to each other in their singsong, raucous voices. On his rounds astride Curfew, Gabriel had spotted their ancient queen, scarcely four feet tall, inching slowly through the grasses, her gold paper headdress catching the rays of sunlight that leaked through the torn umbrella the men held over her. If he galloped toward them, the men, all gold teeth, formed a laughing screen that blocked her from view. She continued her painful progress with just two escorts. He never saw her face, just the glittering hat from which bobbled strips of white parchment on which words in black ink were written. The men grinned goldly, a knife with a red leather grip passed from one hand to another and Curfew wheeled up through the air, rolling eye panicked by a blade either rusting or spotted with dried blood.
He asked her name.
“Angelica,” she said, pausing over the syllables as though they were pronounced or stressed differently in her own language.
The smoke from her pipe unfurled lazily in the air until it reached a certain height (second branch up the oak) where the wind tore it to shreds.
If he kept quizzing her, he’d know the foods she’d eaten, the horses she’d ridden, the history behind that white scar brightening the brown web of flesh between her thumb and index finger. And yet the prospect of possessing all this knowledge alarmed him. He wanted to tell her to hold things back or to leave now and appear only at dusk and then just for ten minutes, her mouth sealed with wax, a red thread crossing her lips as a guarantee that the envelope had not been broken open.
She raised a hand to his cheek and he shrank away; looking into her beautiful face he’d forgotten how disfigured his own was. He’d even jumped ahead to some moment when he might know her too well and be bored with her—obviously a fantasy to innoculate him against the more likely possibility she would soon enough disdain him. “What are these?” she asked, touching the acne, the painful eruptions. “Were you burned?”
For a second he considered saying yes. A burn, yes, the sores will heal in a week, nothing really, I’ll soon be handsome again.
More likely she was making fun of him, gangly white thing that he was with a blistered face gabbling to a stick between his legs, frightened of deer, son of a man powerless to drive her kinsmen off his own property and of a woman entangled in fouled sheets who lacked hunger but possessed a thirst that couldn’t be quenched. To Angelica they must all appear ludicrous. His skinny, shifty-eyed father, whose grain rotted in the fields while he chased his own laborers around the tumbledown hen house in a vain attempt to recover one egg. His fat, pale mother struggling to overflow the margins of her bed, her giant body emblazoned like an old coat of arms with shifting bars of light cast by the missing shutter slats, argent bend sinister in the morning, by sunset dexter: gules. And he must be the most laughable of all, the eldest son, overgrown and dirty, humming as he surveyed his patrimony of weeds, his face showing for him the scarlet shame he was too degraded to feel.
“I must get home,” he said, standing and looking at Curfew, writhing on his side under a bush.
Angelica had the cruelty to laugh. And then she actually reached out and touched the mound of bulging muscle below his fly buttons. “Why leave when this is hard?” Her small fingers undid the buttons patiently; she looked up at him. He had not seen clearly the moment when someone else would take up his weapon, nor was he certain it should be handed over to anyone else, since he liked the way it responded to his own touch. When he had fenced with it in solitude he had clenched his jaws shut, widened his eyes, flared his nostrils, expanded his chest, stabbed with rhythmic power and majesty, black knight drawing white blood. Or he thought of himself as the universe, and this galaxy of discharged fluid on his stomach as the Milky Way.
