Caracole, page 17
Her induced shyness was precisely what attracted Maurizio. She appeared to be even less assertive than he was. He offered to smuggle her through customs at the risk of losing his irreplaceable documents. Once they were safely in the city he took her to a house in the dyers’ quarter and there his aunt let her bathe and sleep. Over wine Maurizio told Angelica that the reason he spoke so deliberately was that he’d stammered as a boy until a celebrated actress, whom he’d visited backstage, had befriended him and told him that he must think out each sentence fully and say it mentally before ever opening his mouth. The method had worked and had given him the unexpected advantage in business of seeming far older than his years and much more serious than his looks suggested.
He still felt grateful to the actress, whose name was Edwige, and visited her occasionally. He should despise her, since she’d become the plaything of the conquerors whereas he was an ardent patriot. And Angelica? What were her politics?
“I’m just a woman,” she said.
The candle merchant and his aunt laughed. The aunt said, “Forgive me, my dear, but you’re a girl, almost a child, not a woman. You’re also from one of the tribes, to judge by your looks and accent, and in the eyes of the conquerors your tribal status is all that counts. They don’t see you as a woman, unless as an object for their soldiers to abuse. No better than a salt lick set out for cattle to lick, one and all, for cattle to lick into lovely, dwindling shapes until you’re all licked away.”
The woman was so accurately and poetically evoking what had just happened to Angelica that the girl’s smile faded and her eyes drank in her wisdom.
The next morning they led her to Mateo’s house. Angelica resolved that if she stayed on in the city, she’d cultivate the merchant’s aunt (Maurizio himself spent little time in the city and when he did come to town he was always involved in political meetings). She caught a hint that he, Maurizio, carried messages between bands of patriots. He said, “You, so young, so innocent, you could help your country. No one would ever suspect you. But of course most tribal people feel as oppressed by the patriots as by the conquerors. What are your politics?”
“Give me time,” Angelica said, too proud to admit she had no idea of what he was talking about yet flattered that he sought her aid. Just when she’d felt that she had nothing to offer anyone, this man seemed to need not her body but her cunning.
When Mateo opened the door and saw Angelica for the first time, he thought she was one of those dirty and aggressive children who hold up a drugged infant, its eyes sticky with flies, and whine for alms. He hated his mornings, which were inwardly anxious and only apparently lazy, to be vexed by bill-collectors, by florists or caterers or tailors he’d failed to pay, by provincials or foreigners he’d met the night before at a reception and to whom he’d made rash promises—all those who reminded him of how powerless and impoverished he was. He needed a whole day of conjuring with himself to raise his spirits as a magician might cause a lady to levitate: time, concentration, endless pots of coffee and flattering notes from friends and admirers. If by teatime he’d dispatched and received a dozen messages, if his mantelpiece had been snowed under by a sudden avalanche of crested invitations, if he’d condensed his dispersed matutinal fogs into a simulacrum of a human being, then he could welcome with warmth a stranger, even a poor stranger.
It was all a question of momentum. In the mornings nothing moved, nothing flowed, the realm of the material comically—humiliatingly!—resisted the impulses of the spirit. Bathing, shaving, dressing were each an ordeal, partly because he had an almost limitless amount of time in which to do them and, quite secretly, he half-feared that once he was ready for the day the day would turn out to be empty. He misplaced things, an almost terminal fatigue beset him, he’d feel close to tears on the toilet as he contemplated the gross, failing bellows and mulcher he was attached to, his body. In the morning his body seemed older, heavier, hairier, less acceptable than at any other time. It had not yet been redeemed by (or at least subordinated to) his birdlike prolific chatter.
His preferred mode was beneficence, but on some mornings he stung himself awake through petty rages. He’d detest everyone. The young would be kept waiting, then given lectures on their manners. If Walter dropped in he’d be liberally peppered with freshly grated scorn. “Oh, you’re so mean,” Walter would squeal, thrilled at the attention. Walter had such an uncomfortably baggy sense of himself and his friends that he delighted in the tight-fitting costumes of sadist and masochist, so neatly reciprocal, so brightly plumed. Like Mathilda he had a taste for society but no gift for it. That both of them passed for social leaders, Mateo grumpily observed, had more to do with their persistence than skill. Or with the general debasement of public life under the conquerors.
Mathilda’s fame as a thinker, earned and deserved, would always attract new people—luckily, since she was perpetually in need of recruits. She drove away most of the old people with her rudeness, her moodiness, her unreliability, her arrogance. In fact her only old friends were Walter, Mateo, and her son, at least the only ones she saw regularly, and even Mateo was becoming less and less faithful—he’d even failed to attend the premiere of The Ice Rose. Of course she had hundreds of acquaintances in every corner of the empire. Mathilda never needed to change her ways; she would never be humbled through rejection or isolation. This constant change of cast even suited her habit of regarding life as research. For just as she used Daniel to spread at her feet his night’s haul each morning, just as she justified the luxuries of her mansion in the South as ethnographic trophies, in the same way she looked on new acquaintances as specimens to study. If someone invited to tea for the first time said something clever, Mathilda had the shocking habit of vigorously nodding approval while looking at Daniel, as though to say, “Well, haven’t we stumbled on a gold mine here!” Once Mateo had tried to explain to her how many ways in which she was being insulting (treating the guest as entertainment; applauding his tricks as though condescension were praise—praise, moreover, directed to Daniel, as though the guest himself were subhuman and communication wasted on him; praising him in such a qualified, menacing way that he would know lower grades could just as easily be handed out next time).
The fact that Walter maintained open house suited and attracted all the aging intellectuals in their circle, people who craved company but who considered making engagements and carrying around a little black social notebook the height of foppishness. They haughtily turned down invitations for a week from now, even three days from now, until every hostess in town had dropped them. Their remaining social option was the permanent one: Walter’s house, which he kept open out of a genuine simplicity, a democratic love of good fellowship he’d acquired in his twenties as a Septembrist. Democracy also informed his judgments about people. He just happened to find the rich, the famous, and the titled “amazing good sports” or “terrific talkers” whereas the obscure came under fire for their “standoffishness” or their “shyness—always a form of egotism.”
Walter had other blunt but stunning arrows in his quiver. For instance, he had a waggish way of treating the oldest, frailest philosophers as though they were rakes and heartbreakers. “Oh, you coquette!” he’d shriek. “Don’t pretend you didn’t happen to notice the tears in that poor girl’s eyes when you snubbed her. Beast!” And, shouting, Walter would stamp and point at the innocent culprit, who feared he actually had wounded a young person. The philosopher would be even more confused by the role Walter had cast him in—and terribly, terribly pleased. For just as every great pianist imagines his true genius lies in the kitchen, so every thinker fancies his forte is the boudoir. The fact that this talent has gone undiscovered until now only makes him all the more blushingly eager for it to be detected.
At Walter’s house some oafish bit of mummery was always under way. His immense wardrobe of unsuccessful “looks” and lapsed fads could provide all the fancy dress any number of masquers might require, so long as no one was too squeamish about coffee stains, blisters of dried egg or specks of loose tobacco. Whether pounding the piano or prancing up to the door dressed as a doge or doll, whether accusing intellectuals of carnal excesses or reducing four trustees from the museum to kittens all in pussy costume, complete with long tails, miaowing their way through a “comic” quartet penned especially for one of his evenings by an equally silly but far more gifted Robert Constantine, Walter could always be counted on for some new absurdity.
Mateo was the least willing to jump through Walter’s hoop. Once during a party Walter rushed up with a paper heart held to his sleeve and asked, “What do you guess this symbolizes, Mr. Pussycat?” Mateo coolly replied, “He who gets slapped.” Walter’s grin faded and he started bawling, “You’re so mean,” an alarm designed to provoke curiosity in the other guests. Walter was so pleased that Mateo had delivered one of his acerbic mots at his reception that he didn’t care it was at his expense. Moreover he claimed he liked it when Mateo turned “disciplinarian.”
Of the “vices” in himself Walter alluded to with such pride, no one, not even Mateo or Mathilda, could be certain they weren’t fabrications, no more real than his getups. He frequently mentioned his three-hundred-pound “dominatrix,” a “housewife in the banlieue,” someone he would hire to trample on him and shave his entire body. But he seemed suspiciously alive to the humor value of a perversion one rather thought the adept himself (at least) would take seriously. Had he been so scholarly as a youngster that he’d neglected to cultivate any interesting twists in his character? Did he know how to attribute bizarre tastes to other sere “pussycats” because he’d had to trick himself out in just such inventions? The irreality of Walter’s eccentricities led him to peculiar insights. He once sat beside the twelve-year-old daughter of his oldest schoolchum, a girl who’d been raised in the strictest seclusion and by the most old-fashioned governess, and whispered to her, “I’m sure you have the capacity to be very cruel to a man.”
As it so happened, his intuition was dazzlingly accurate and the girl shook all over with the ecstasy of self-discovery—a physiological response her horrified parents interpreted as the normal revulsion to an abnormal insinuation. They hustled her out and broke off relations with Walter. One afternoon, however, the child returned on her own to show Walter the drawings she’d just done at school. “But can’t you draw any better than that?” Walter asked with trembling scorn.
“Then you’ll have to draw them for me, you filthy, ugly man,” the girl hissed. Walter sat down, delighted, docile, and did her homework for her, as he was to do for weeks to come, enjoying the most perfect contentment of his life.
In fact he had surprising powers of concentration, given his social extravagance. Tucked in among the many calls he received and the few he paid, he managed to write curious tracts that were more praised than read. He was always just finishing a new one or racing off to a corner of the empire to read one to some learned society or other. Since his works were too concrete to interest philosophers, too general to attract politicians and too colorless to intrigue artists, no one believed they were addressed to him. Unread, his works inched their way across the shelves. The only people who actually consulted them were critics who saw no reason not to like them, particularly since Walter was such a good host, so influential and so highly regarded by so many other thinkers. Young provincial teachers also read Walter in public squares on hot afternoons during the long summer break and blamed themselves for not being able to stay awake for more than a page or two. Why? The sentences were short, the words clear, the tone sober, the conclusions modishly pessimistic. If the continuity sometimes seemed sketchy and the logic elusive, a provincial could only blame himself and this wretched, sleepy town where he was slowly becoming as moronic as his drunken neighbors, shouting through the night, all night, every night.
Mateo had been enraged this morning by an unannounced visit from Walter, who had just dropped off a copy of his latest title, issued no more than six months after his previous work. Mateo thought it unfair that he, too, wasn’t a writer who could place on friends these impositions called “books,” these liens on busy peopie’s time and thoughts, these thefts one was expected to greet as gifts, these week-long monologues by nonentities one wouldn’t let go on in person longer than three minutes. Walter hadn’t left more than an instant before a timid knock announced the arrival of this beautiful beggar child.
Mateo was about to say “The lady of the house is not in” and slam the door when the girl muttered, “Your sister at Madder Pink sent me.”
Mateo feared his sister was dying or dead and tears gathered behind his eyes as he led the girl down the dark narrow corridor walled at the far end in warped glass, a slimming mirror he always consulted when he needed to feel hopeful. There he was, slim again, with a miniature storm cloud of hair beside him, or perhaps it was a moving squadron of bees deserting the bagged and burned hive.
The child told him about Gabriel jailed in the cage his father had built, about the wicked mistress and the dozing volcano of a mother who’d finally erupted when Angelica came to her bedside and told her of her son’s plight. Angelica sullenly confessed her loss of the letter Gabriel’s mother had sent him.
“And you? What relationship do you bear to my family?” Mateo asked. Angelica’s mouth flickered into an uncertain little smile and her huge eyes softly touched each object around her as though her eyes were hands.
Instantly he recognized that despite her almost undetectable accent and her fluent, colloquial choice of words, she could say far more in his language than she could understand and her vocabulary, like ice on a spring lake, was just sufficient to the swiftest passage. He also knew instinctively that she was hungry but would refuse food if asked. He put bread, cheese and a knife before her. Then he excused himself and left the room, since he guessed she might be superstitious about eating before a man or an infidel or a stranger or by day or who knows what, they have a million rules.
Later, realizing she was dropping from exhaustion, he told her he’d be much obliged if she’d stay the night; he might have a few more questions for her in the morning. He drew her a bath, showed her to her suite, and closed the door, then began to fear she might not know how the old-fashioned faucets worked and would leave the water running till it flooded over. Well, there was no going back in there. He could tell she was as proud and apprehensive as she was ignorant.
As she was lovely.
As soon as he’d seen her he’d thought of a cat, one that would lift its chin to be nuzzled while its lids drooped shut over gold eyes, its breath just the softest pulse of air, its mouth a welted black seam, the insides of each ear so pink and floral one expected to see a stamen rising in it … Later, its hunger could be heard in the creaking mews that followed each opening of its jaws by half a second, as though only the back of the hinge was rusty. When hungry the animal paced across a human lap, leaning its skinny flanks into anything solid, pausing to knead bread—no difference, really, between its way of asking for supper or sex.
The next day her embarrassment about how to behave in such a house made her angry and she huddled in a chair in the kitchen hiding behind her swarm of hair and tapping her foot. Mateo prepared breakfast for her and left her alone with it. He peeked into her bedroom. She hadn’t turned down the sheets; he could see the dent in the coverlet her slender body had hollowed out. Later he could smell tobacco. She was smoking an ornamental ivory pipe that had been gathering dust on a shelf of bibelots for a decade and a cannister of sweet flake nearly as old, certainly stale.
The week before, he’d happened to attend a dull reception, which he’d gone to only because the host had said with ill-mannered gaiety, “Name your day!” And because he, Mateo, sometimes romanticized life among the unfashionable. There he’d found solace in a young couple so mismatched one had to assume either ambition or a taste for rather specialized cochonneries must unite them. The young man seemed to be almost entirely constructed. He’d been a street urchin, a scrappy little fighter; now he was a poet and a dandy, but he’d made a boutonniere out of selected simples from his past. Although he was as attentive and well-groomed as a dancing master, he liked to allude to his hooligan past and fit into his polished speech rough expressions.
She (her name was Flora) belonged to Angelica’s tribe but was some sort of princess, in any event bejeweled, well-spoken in several languages and dressed and made up with attention to detail. Her escort spoke about poetry and then, somehow, moved on to a comparison of Mathilda’s and Walter’s thought, neither of whom he knew personally and both of whom he referred to by their last names alone, as though they were already dead; Mateo had an unpleasant vision of seeing their names on tombstones.
Flora glazed over during the young man’s disquisition. She pulled a mirror out of her purse and examined every pore of her face with unpartisan attention. She even bared her teeth and studied them. She lifted her upper lip and checked her gums. Next on the inventory were her nails, then her rings and bracelets. Satisfied with her own appearance, she sat back, looking much older and fatigued, and took stock of every other woman in the room.
Mateo thought it so odd that the boxer-dandy had chanced to mention Walter and Mathilda. People often spoke of Mathilda, of course, no surprise there. But the two together like that? “I know them, you know, they’re both friends of mine, dear friends. I could introduce you to them.”
Mateo could scarcely believe his own foolishness, the way each sentence he uttered compounded the folly. When he’d first come to the capital twenty years ago, he’d always been promising strangers favors. He hadn’t even had to like them. If he was near them he thought he must like them; proximity was his most sincere form of affection. Over the years he’d learned to censor this impulse even if he couldn’t eradicate it. He knew his own standing had been kept artificially low by his lack of exclusivity. Too many people of all sorts grazed in his salons. Mathilda didn’t like meeting new people. That was a job for her son. If Daniel liked someone new, if he kept seeing him, bringing back intriguing reports, then maybe one evening Mathilda might come along, unannounced, to some place neutral, a café, say, or a Sunday concert in the Palace grounds. And if that went well she might stay on for supper. Later she’d most often say to Daniel, “Oh, I certainly see what you mean, but he’s not my kind of thing, you know. More yours. But you’re so brave. You go everywhere. You’re getting to be a social omnivore, aren’t you?” Pause. “But you don’t really like him, do you?” Her eyes flicker into flame, a pyre Daniel ascends. “No?” Laugh. Daniel burns. “I thought not. I knew you couldn’t.” Imitating a high-pitched voice: “‘The sixteenth century is the matrix’—what a silly little man.”
