Caracole, page 8
“I hope I don’t frighten you,” she said without conviction.
“Everything frightens me.”
The moment she smiled at his words he realized that sincerity could be turned into charm, that the poorest pumpkin truth might become a carriage that could transport him … into Mathilda’s favor. The trick, he saw, was to present the most shameful secret as though it were one everyone shared. He resolved to step out boldly into the light carrying it, his shame, in his arms, holding it up, showing it.
“What interests you?” she asked, yawning. “What do you want to do while you’re here?”
“Everything and nothing,” he said. “You must understand, madam, that I come from a fairly … unusual family.”
“And so?” she said impatiently. “So do we all. Monster parents, bourgeois hypocrisy, provincial views—I see it all and nothing could be more banal.”
“I don’t think you quite grasp the originality of my situation.” His voice betrayed his anger.
Her eyes widened. She wasn’t used to being challenged. Perhaps she was intrigued by this sign of defiance. Just as one gypsy violinist might hear another play a few notes, aching, accurate, across a café blue with smoke, and respond with an exclamation of his own fiddle until in a moment the two musicians have locked eyes and are edging toward one another, their bland expressions belied by the indignant duet they’re improvising, in the same way Mathilda, usually surrounded by a host of ambitious young men, seemed to have detected in Gabriel someone who could interest her. She moved closer.
“It could be, I suspect, very pleasant,” she said, “to listen to you establish the originality of your situation.”
Gabriel was ready to do anything to make Mathilda like him. But on the other hand he recognized that only a measure of independence was likely to attract her; he must insist she please him. For an unrelated reason (fear of devils) he’d moved his chair away from her. This little act, which she’d seen as a slight, had given him an advantage. He suspected she’d do anything to tame him but that if she succeeded she would lose interest. He walked to the window, turning his back to her. There were no trees or children below, nothing but pavement and housefronts enclosing a wide, empty square. He could hear the children’s voices, the splendid hive. He could picture bees—clustering, wriggling, overlapping—as they filled and sealed golden cells. The treble laughs and screams had been simplified by distance into just such a community. For some reason those voices made him think of Angelica. At night he’d think of all the things they’d done to each other, the way they’d played with the fire within them, turning up the wick until the glass chimney charred. He felt that the natural mode of release (if release could be natural) was to draw one’s own white blood, to reach a sting or two in private; he and Angelica had blasphemed against the order of things by using each other as fragile means to shattering ends. Perhaps they had, after all, been invaded by devils, and these spirits had lashed them into humiliating contortions, making them monkeys unworthy of the clothes on their back. But of course their wedding had consecrated their union, if it had been a wedding and not a dream and if the old woman were a priest and not a demon.
When he glanced back at Mathilda he could see in her eyes the same sequence of desire that would twitch jerkily through Angelica’s, a look that would keep changing, not by shadings but absolutely, a series of ever more disturbing closeups of the same subject until it loomed too close and became a blurred abstraction.
She was still seated, of course, when he came over to her and stood beside her. They both watched the blue silk pleat of his pants stretch and fill. They exchanged a funny little glance, incapable of questioning this development but still nonplussed by it.
At his uncle’s insistence Gabriel moved back into the pink and green bedroom and the huge bed with the canopy held up by a flight of amputated angels, a bed consecrated to the future and other people, whereas his grubby cubbyhole in the maid’s room beside the kitchen safely deleted him from time and society and removed him to a margin that smelled reassuringly of his own dirty feet and stale armpits and un wiped bottom, a cot littered with the crumpled wicks of paper in which he’d twisted yet another letter to … well, to a wounded creature of his own imagination, Angelica.
One day he received a note which said, “Hope you’re having fun with that wild uncle of yours. Believe it or not, I’ll be dropping in on you one of these days. Don’t worry. Just for a cup of tea.” It was signed with an extravagant letter A of which the two sides curled up like windswept hair framing a face barred by mysterious dark glasses.
He hadn’t missed her. He hadn’t missed anything except Jane Castle and the endless night and freedom of the cell his father had put him in, that absolute solitude to which his cubbyhole here was a mere allusion, a diminution, as one might say that a raised bow suspended over a waiting violin diminishes its silence. To be honest, he had missed having Angelica in his arms, had missed this contraption of wet warmth and twisting muscle he could never quite duplicate, not even with his hand wet or dry, warm or cold, rough or slippery with oil. He’d missed her body. That was all.
Sometimes when he’d spied on her at play in the woods he couldn’t reconcile this cool, independent girl with the fiery furnace she’d become when they embraced on the ground. Sometimes she seemed scarcely human, more a kiln for liquifying the stiff ingot he presented into flowing gold. A primitive but obsessive industrial process (up, down, swivel, stop, then on again through the whole clumsy, efficient cycle) designed to melt, then mint, finally mill the mere sovereign he’d turned into. Her face would drain, her teeth would close on his everted lower lip, her voodoo eyes would roll weirdly back into her head, her nails would hang her whole dead weight from his shoulders—and then, once all her vitality was concentrated in her pelvis, her body would heat up, speed up, strip its gears, pause and start all over again at some safer level. She didn’t always like him nor he her, almost as though they were both ashamed of so much urgency.
Yet now she’d sent this maddening little note (or had she? she couldn’t write and it didn’t sound like her—or had she changed?) and he felt he must have her here with him or he’d die. One of these days? “Don’t worry,” she’d said. Did she mean don’t worry she’d stay too long?
A few times his uncle had suggested he go out, run an errand, post a letter, but he’d usually dawdled or managed to fall asleep. This reluctance had been due to his fear of the hectic, unfamiliar world he could see from the kitchen window. Now he had a worthier reason for staying in: he might miss Angelica’s visit. What if she came when no one was at home? What if she was desperate—hungry, sick, cold? He slept half the time in the maid’s room because it was closer to the front door and the other half in the pink bedroom because it was where they’d live.
Did the doorbell work?
He tested it ten times a day but could never be satisfied it hadn’t just gone dead.
Could he hear it in the pink bedroom? Sheepishly he asked his uncle to ring the bell while he listened for it.
“So it’s that bad, is it?” his uncle asked with a timid, intimate, worldly smile.
“Yes,” Gabriel said, more because he wanted to be worthy of that smile than out of concurrence. “Does it get this bad for you, too?” he asked, having no idea what he meant exactly.
His uncle had just returned from a long evening out. He pushed his old, no longer shiny hat back, the sort of hat he still referred to by the awkward name people had given it in his youth: “eight reflections.” He was standing in silk scarf and black cape in the entrance hall under the grimy chandelier with its almost grey chains of crystal and its flyblown lusters, each a specimen slide prepared by time. He smelled of gin and a woman’s perfume and an unfamiliar brand of cigarettes. He was like a tray a servant brings out of a room from which one can deduce the activities of the other guests—the half-deck of soiled playing cards, the drained bottle, the dirty glasses, the crumpled note, the still smoking revolver.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “I’ve done my hours of sitting inside, waiting for Her to call.”
“Her?” the boy asked eagerly.
“The Eternal Her; the Universal Whoever,” his uncle replied, softening the airiness of his remark with the sweet solicitude of his tone, his voice trailing away out of concern. “Did you sit here all night waiting for her—here on the floor?”
Gabriel was about to deny the absurd, embarrassing charge, yet something stopped him. “Yes,” he admitted, for it was true. “Yes.” He lowered his head.
And then here was the avuncular hand—warm and moist because just extracted from the glove, veined and knowing, a gold band giving a waist to the fat torso of his little finger—here was this hand on his neck, now under his chin, confidently lifting his face back into the light.
“I’m not a monster, you know,” his uncle said and smiled, showing the two front teeth that were too large, too smooth, not quite the right color, too innocent of detail to be real, and that always siphoned onto his breath a slight sourness, bitterer at night after a long day of smoke, wine, and the clogged residue of having advanced so many opinions, none quite charitable. Sometimes Mateo wondered if he and his friends were malicious because they’d inherited all the intellectual pretensions of their parents and none of their scope. After all, when the capital had been rich and powerful, the ideas (even the whims) of its nobles had caused things to happen. Now they all took stands—but they were standing on air. Their impotence made them irritable.
“I’ve sat here,” Mateo pointed, “on this very floor and rolled and howled like an animal,” and Gabriel knew it wasn’t true but appreciated the effort, the invention, as though lying, at least in this case, were a form of politeness. “Howled,” he repeated, as though he’d just heard the false thunder rolling in after the fake lightning. His hand dropped and he stared into a single point of brilliance beaming out at him from the heart of the dulled chandelier.
They drank their liqueur together in the kitchen, the room that had, a century earlier, been the studio of a painter who’d found his subject in the silk gowns of society women. “He was my kind of painter,” Mateo was saying. “Philistines thought he was one of their own, intellectuals dismissed him for his superficiality, by which they meant his subject matter, the life of the rich. But he was that most delightful of all things—an artist who makes small but daring experiments within an exhausted tradition. No one, of course, gives him any credit, not even now. The vulgar rich think he merely held up a mirror to their ancestors—and that world they now consider démodé, as cold as old gossip. They’re even embarrassed to see their relatives in hairstyles so old-fashioned. The intelligentsia, equally vulgar, can detect novelty only if it’s canonically avant-garde (usually the last place to look for a real invention). For genius works best with worn-out things, things fingered and faded enough to ‘compose,’ quilts put together out of the scraps of old sacking, gowns or teatowels. Our man could make his portrait of Mrs. Edwin Smith as the Mother Goddess into a bravura exercise in rendering every aspect of a pearl without ever once dipping his brush into merest grey, blue or white.”
When his uncle talked this way (there was an old word for such talk, a word that could be translated “rhapsody”) Gabriel sank deeper and deeper into shame and fear, since he suspected this was the way people out there were routinely expected to talk. Just as Angelica’s furnace could distill only a few drops of gold despite its twistings and throbbings, in the same way gallons of liquor, years of coaching and hundreds of overheard colloquies had been needed to express this blackest of all stimulants—his uncle’s rhapsodic talk.
“But I’m talking about art,” his uncle said, that sad, worldly smile brushing across his lips again, “while you’re getting more and more depressed thinking about love, about your Angelica.”
Gabriel started to deny that he loved Angelica, much less was thinking of her, but he had to confess a desire for her did cross his mind, just as his uncle, although intent on their conversation, still smelled of the woman he’d recently left. His uncle asked him to describe Angelica, and as the boy expatiated on her charm, Mateo nodded knowingly—indeed, almost as though he could picture the girl.
“But I thought you wanted me to love Mathilda,” Gabriel said.
“My boy,” his uncle protested and shrugged; he smiled, bent over the kitchen table and with chemical exactness measured out a beaker of mandarin orange liqueur, which had been judged not quite fit for guests. Gabriel added, “You’re being incredibly nice about my love. I mean my love for Angelica.”
“Nice?” his uncle repeated, looking up, blinking with dramatic confusion. Gabriel realized he’d said something wrong. “How can you say I’m being nice when all I’m doing is acknowledging this sweet yoke, these silk fetters, this blessed curse?”
Correction: not wrong after all. Nice had been exactly the right springboard his uncle had needed to leap off into generosity and poetry.
This word love troubled and intrigued Gabriel. He sensed he could gain an advantage from it or the reality it might represent. But just now “love” mostly seemed to be a pleasant conspiracy he and his uncle were sharing.
When Gabriel had first moved into his house, Mateo had used the boy and his responsibility toward him as a pretext for forgetting Edwige. She was a pretty, nasty little blonde Mateo had been obsessed with for nearly three years. They’d met quite properly, that is comically, at a mock matchmaking. Like everything else in their friendship, this introduction had been ambiguous. A composer, Robert Constantine, who relaxed after his musical ascents into the Alpine mists of passion and number by indulging in a social manner that was flaccid and giggly, accosted Mateo one day and said, “Hey, Mister Sweetie-puss, are you in the market for true love?”
“Naturally,” Mateo had murmured, as always embarrassed and flattered by the composer’s attentions. Constantine was the sort of insolent fool one would have fled had one not divined his true nobility from his music, those great oratorios for one voice, an ecstatic soprano, accompanied by an always hushed and vast symphony orchestra whispering to itself like a forest wrapped around a small clearing in which a hauntingly tacky band of banjo, accordion and harmonica held forth, smoke rising from the brave campfire in the midst of that chilly wilderness.
Constantine almost never read a book. His last four works had been settings of different passages from the same text. But now he was immersed in an old tale in which two married sisters devoted all their energies to finding a husband for the youngest one, a pursuit conducted through professional matchmakers. His reading had suggested the occasion during which Mateo was to meet Edwige.
Perhaps only Mateo thought the purpose of the gathering was actually romantic. What had Edwige been told? Perhaps everyone, including Edwige, took the evening seriously, as a parody of a form both foreign and vanished yet with a significance open to interpretation. Probably the others half-expected Mateo to make a fool of himself, and Constantine had staged this unfunny buffoonery just to gratify himself. The oddest possibility of all was that everyone—Constantine, the guests, the couple—was more or less confused, and this confusion was due to Constantine’s carelessness, his real indifference to everything nonmusical. For if he liked to be silly, this wasn’t a strong but an insipid taste derived from his contempt for mere life, that unscored noise, beside which he’d scrawled an insulting ad libitum. Who met whom, what transpired, and how it all ended—these details meant nothing to him, not even when they affected his own fortunes. More sincerely than any monk, he was indifferent to everyday life, which he viewed as a drowsy infant might look at motes in sunlight. Constantine drank too much, squealed with pretended pleasure and played naughty tricks on trusting friends who, unlike him, took themselves perfectly seriously and refused to consider life as just another longish intermission.
And Edwige? She was a blonde who looked pure and still so young that her dissipations merely underscored her beauty, a hollowing of a pink cheek, a smudge of storm-cloud blue under eyes that were clear-sky blue. Like the evening, she herself was ambiguous; she radiated indecision. As an actress she thought she could have everything and capture everyone at once, could play in big, bad crowd-pleasers and cultivate the elite. Tonight counted as her first sortie amongst the intellectuals of the capital. She really didn’t know how to enter this particular world. Of course she needn’t have worried; the intellectuals were thrilled to meet a star even of a minor magnitude and they were already storing up stories about her lack of culture, her infamous politics, her obvious intelligence, her outré but effective white fox coat.
Mateo had actually believed Constantine when he said Edwige wanted an older lover who was intellectual but also sociable. Since this description suited his own most ambitious view of himself, he was sure she’d like him. And yet at the party she scarcely seemed to know which one he was; at least her curtsy wasn’t even fractionally deeper when he was presented to her. She asked everyone questions with a charming deference—or perhaps the deference was merely inferred from her practice of keeping her eyes lowered until she lifted them gloriously at the end of someone else’s learned or tortured speech, as one might throw open a window in a stuffy room to let in the wet warm night or as an orchestra might silence the rubbishy chitchat of a thousand scornful mouths and commence with the strict measures of an earlier, better century.
Now, three years later, Mateo refused to deny those sublime eyes, but he no longer made the mistake of ascribing their power to Edwige herself. She could not have begun to crack the code of her own beauty. Vengeance and endurance were her only obsessions. She exercised and bought clothes and submitted to facials, diets and daily coiffures so that she—or at least this artifact, Edwige—would endure, unchanged, perfect, eternally tempting to some about-to-materialize impresario.
