Traitor Comet, page 28
“Yes, you’re wasting reams of poetry on a woman who doesn’t know you exist,” Louis put in.
“Oh, no, no,” Desnos moaned theatrically, “never. I prefer the freedom of being a prisoner. I belong to Yvonne George until death parts us, as life has kept us apart.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Louis sneered. “Is this a love affair with her, or with yourself?”
Cold beds notwithstanding, the room was unbearably hot. Finally I could stand it no longer and rose, pulling the covers off the cot. It was no cooler outside but at least I had fresh air, and more room than on that rickety contraption which was too short for me. I spread out luxuriously on the grass, stretched, and slipped my hands behind my head, staring into the familiar darkness between the stars, into the knowledge that I looked neither down nor up. The earth was round, and the sky no more an alien place than the water around a fish or the air around my head.
There is only this world, I thought, and the world inside of this world, and the world inside of us. The world was creatures upon creatures, living things inside and outside of other living things, negotiating life or stealing it. I closed my eyes. The sound of crickets ticked away in the night like thousands of tiny heartbeats.
In the darkness I heard light footfalls nearby, and I wasn’t sure if I had just awakened or had been awake for some time. At first, I could see nothing. A small candle burned in the window behind me. The rustling continued, small dancing steps in the darkness that woke me completely. I sat up, and there was a gasp.
Her trembling breaths helped me locate her in the darkness, and in the diffused glow cast by that candle and by a bright blue planet in the sky our eyes locked, the instant, jarring recognition of a human iris. “Who is there?” asked a small voice, and her body separated itself from the darkness as if congealing out of foam. I could see it was Génica. She was naked. My heart pounded hard and fast. “Who is there?” she asked more firmly, and in my head I heard Robert Desnos taunt: “Who is there? Who is there?”
I gulped. “It’s me. Uh—” I gathered the blanket around me as the figure withdrew. “Don’t be scared. I can’t see anything.”
From somewhere I heard her disbelieving exhalation.
“Not much, anyway. Go ahead and dance,” I said. “I’ll just go back to sleep.” But I heard no footsteps then. There was a sniffle. I asked, “Are you crying?”
She didn’t answer.
“Come over by me,” I heard myself say, “and tell me what’s wrong.”
Her form dissolved back into the darkness. The wind rose, rattling the leaves and obscuring any sound she made. Disappointed but not very surprised, I leaned back and nearly clonked my head against hers as she knelt beside me. Her hands pushed at my shoulder, and I moved aside for her as she slipped into the sheet, pressing her back against my chest. Her forehead was warm and damp beneath my fingers and I lifted her waving hair from her neck, blowing gently on the skin there. “What’s wrong?” I gasped, and then I tilted her beneath me and found her lips with mine.
Oh, she was so soft and full, and so fragile. The vein in her wrist fluttered beneath my thumb, fast and frightened like a bird’s. “Don’t go!” I begged against her mouth, hating myself as I felt her hands wedge between us, straining against my shoulders. I tried to slant my mouth across hers again when the thread abruptly snapped, spilling me in a pleasureless eruption between her thighs before I knew what was happening.
Immediately I threw myself off her. “I’m sorry.” My pulse was racing as I knelt there, but my blood seemed to be racing all around me, like the wind in the branches, and not a part of me at all.
Her face was not very clear, but I could certainly make out the furious glance thrown over her shoulder as she sat up, hugging her knees. Then she was gone. A door closed and there was silence again as I knelt there. The candle in the window went out.
I swore and let myself fall forward until my forehead touched the blanket as the old Muslim’s had done on his rug, and I laced my fingers over the back of my head. Idiot! Right now she must be informing her lover, the man I thought of as my friend and wanted as my friend—although she had climbed in beside me, I thought angrily. What did she expect, throwing herself into bed with a man? And had she known, while she paraded naked on the grass, that I was out here too?
The wind blew stronger, bringing with it a cool breath that hinted finally of rain. With my head still in my hands I waited, breathing the smell of dew and earth as I had done on that morning on the farm, a million years ago—or perhaps I had never lived there, at that unreal place. But nothing happened. No lights came on in the windows, no angry voice challenged me, no accusations came from Génica. I rolled onto my side and, exhausted, gripped my pillow. Clouds gradually covered the stars and the night continued on like the slow, even waver of a pendulum.
In the morning I sat silently at the breakfast table and hardly lifted my eyes from my plate. Roger would have made fun of me, so I said nothing to his gibes. I was beginning to tire of his relentless flippancy—and he mocked me anyway.
“Look, Geoffrey is glowering,” he announced to everyone else at the table while I angrily gulped my coffee and scalded my tongue. “If anyone has ever wondered what it means to glower, observe Geoff.” When I looked up, he smiled brilliantly at me. Génica did not even glance my way, but Desnos did.
“Leave people alone,” Louis retorted. “Maybe he had another sleepless night.” Desnos kept staring at me, all his characteristic warmth gone. I looked away from him.
During breakfast the clouds gathered together and pelted the house with darkness and drops, a steady rain I could tell would not clear up soon. The temperature dropped like a man shot in the head. We dodged raindrops out to the woodpile, stacked up wood beside the hearth in the front room, built a fire in the fireplace, lit the lamps, and resigned ourselves to a day trapped in the house.
Never before had I considered Antonin Artaud a comedian. This morning before breakfast as yesterday, he monopolized the makeshift outdoor shower and five buckets of warm water, and the ground around the wooden crate we stood on didn’t need rain to become muddy. When Desnos called him a water-hog and suggested he bathe in the river instead, the actor launched a horrified face through the part in the curtains and announced he would never! Enter a body of water! Ever! Then the curtains fell back together.
“So don’t bathe in the river, then,” Desnos grumbled, stumbling back to the kitchen stove with another sloshing bucket to heat on the stove. Roger, muttering something about drowning mice, kept an eye on the curtain, ready to throw himself into the shower as soon as it was empty.
Into his coffee Artaud dropped a few raspberries from his pocket and stirred them and exclaimed they did not dissolve. For breakfast he put the remnants of last night’s ice cream on his baguette, butter, canned ham, and soft cheese. “This tastes good,” Louis admitted to us when he tried it too. Artaud, watching Roger fiddle with his violin after breakfast, asked him why no violin had keys or horns, and if it was possible to draw a bow across the strings in a piano or to pluck them like a guitar. Then he asked me—for apparently, I had sermonized about nature and the cosmos during my nocturnal blathering our first night—if a man farted, belched, or ejaculated in a vacuum, would he be launched through space like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s rocket?
I put my hand to my face and laughed. “Ignore him,” Roger hissed to me. “He does it for the attention.”
There was not much to do on this rainy day except listen to Roger or me play the violin, or read, or listen to that behemoth of a radio, or talk. Desnos loved every tawdry love song over the crackle, but Artaud kept turning the radio off. “I loathe disembodied voices!” Artaud told us.
On my violin I tried to play from memory that third movement of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony we’d heard the day before during my dream-drawing, that scherzo which was a spooky and sinister parody of a Viennese waltz. Both Roger and I agreed with Desnos that we could, indeed, hear a floundering ship in it. “Scherzo means ‘joke,’” I told a delighted Desnos.
He handed me the cheap crime novel he was reading, Fantômas, written in 1911. Its lurid cover showed a masked man in a tuxedo and a top hat straddling a city as he surged forward as if to jump off the cover to attack the reader. “He looks like me,” I told Desnos, and when Roger took the book and looked at its cover, he burst into laughter and nodded.
After showing such blank reticence Artaud could wander into a conversation and yank together words in a maze of strange images. Desnos could do this too, and when those two played off each other it sounded like automatic writing, though Desnos treated it as a joke whereas Artaud pressed on with full moral import. Also, they seemed to be competing, and I had not sensed that between them before.
Justine and I broke ranks to prepare luncheon together, and after we ate, she and Roger retired to their bedroom. “Lucky,” Desnos muttered under his breath as Roger shut the door behind them, doing a little triumphant strut before he did. Without those two the conversation in the front room fell apart. Soon Artaud and Génica went to their room too, and the three Billy goats gruff were left to their own devices again.
“Writing another poem for Yvonne?” Louis teased Desnos as they both scribbled in the light of the fire.
Louis was drawing Desnos, and Desnos was letting out his words as he wrote: “Oh pangs…of love! How necessary…and dear… Eyes shut against imagined tears… Hands grasping voids…”
I stole to the closet in our room to reach into the pocket of my suit jacket and feel for the bullet. It was still there. Desnos hadn’t asked about it. I wondered when he would notice it had been taken from his gun. I went back to the front room to read my book of Poe.
“And the perfumes…of the sky…” Desnos continued to recite, but I doubted he was actually writing because his eyes were on me now. “And stars…and the crowing of the cock! Yes, I’m writing a poem for Yvonne, Landis, of course a poem for Yvonne, man. And what woman is Geoff the cock thinking of?” Desnos turned to me suddenly, and the hard edge to his voice made Louis raise his head from the dancing charcoal over his pad.
I wondered if I blushed as I remembered Génica running from me. “I was thinking,” I replied morosely, “of Hug.” I sank down by the hearth. And the scowl slipped from Desnos’s face as if it had never firmly hung there. He leaned back in the overstuffed chair and yawned.
“Hey, Robert the cock,” I said then as I stared into the flames, “crow us a story.”
Louis yawned as well. “Yes, do. We’re lacking inspiration today.” He put down his charcoal pencil and moved his fingers.
“A story about Hug?” Desnos grinned at me, that same old smile. I managed a wan smile too and stretched out on my stomach on the floor, hugging a sofa cushion to my chest. Rain thrashed against the windows like buckets of water thrown at them, and the flames placed a hot hand on my side. Desnos reached over and turned down the oil lamp, and then the windows became dark mirrors that reflected the fireplace and our own indistinct faces. It reminded me suddenly of the Dôme when I tried to see Artaud’s unknown stalker through the window and saw only our reflections instead. I stared into the fire.
“What do you see there in the flames, Geoff?” Desnos asked me then. “You know, you can read fire just like the lines of your palm. You can even predict the future from the way the wind stirs one’s hair.”
“Really?” I asked, doubting it. I turned my head to look at him again.
“It’s the truth.” Desnos crossed his legs and folded his hands, his head leaning to one side on the upholstery. His bright eyes gazed into the fire as the shadows flickered on his face. Louis and I waited for his pronouncement. Finally Desnos began: “I see a field of flowers—”
“Oh God, can’t you do any better than that?” Louis groaned.
“A field of flowers,” Desnos insisted. “It is night, but they bloom. You are—” and he paused. “You’re in love with someone.”
Louis laughed then. “Pick a man, any man, and say the same; it will be true.”
The prophet wagged his finger at me in warning. “It is not Hug.”
I chuckled at this. “No?”
“No. Hug is too safe for you.” Desnos looked past me again and stifled a yawn. “You are someone who is in love with love, Geoffrey Weidmann—like me. You must feel intensely. There is no middle ground for you. You need to be constantly in love, an ecstatic, lunatic love. This can make you fickle or it can make you Surrealist. Love for you could become another disappointment, or a great incarnating power. But you must decide, you must consciously resolve, whether or not you…mm… Mmmmm…”
Suddenly his lids closed, and his head fell peacefully against the chair and remained there. His breathing stretched, settling into a steady rhythm. I waited but he didn’t speak again. Like a sage he sat there, hands folded, lips pushed aside a bit from the pressure of the cushion on his cheek, his legs still crossed, and I imagined his eyes rolling into the back of his brain, alert even now and staring at the hidden churnings of his thoughts. The Surrealist sleeper, awake—always awake within himself. But when he remained silent, I look up in confusion at Louis.
Louis got out of his chair and leaned forward to look into his face. He laughed. I tapped the man’s knee, but he still did not wake up. Desnos’s mental calisthenics were legendary among the Surrealists and well documented in La Révolution surréaliste, but now he just seemed asleep.
“Desnos! He’s always doing this,” Louis said. “I called Man Ray a liar until I saw it for myself.”
“Saw what? Doing what? He’s not doing anything,” I replied.
“No, he is,” Louis insisted. “He’s dreaming awake.” A door opened in the hall and Artaud poked his head into the room. “Stick around,” Louis told me, “he’s not finished. He may talk in his sleep, or open his eyes and finish your prediction.” Louis sat down again, vigilant as he shuffled his cards. He dealt them out on the table in a game of solitaire.
Instead of returning to my reading, I pulled out the pages I’d stuck in the back of the book. Artaud stood over me as I leafed through the strange little piece I’d written the day before, but his face, when I finally looked up at it, showed no anger. Génica had held her tongue, it seemed. I resolved to apologize to her, and then I decided not to and save both of us the embarrassment.
“You’re not content with what you’ve written,” Artaud said to me, reaching over my shoulder to point a finger to the page. He sat down beside me at the hearth.
“You’re very perceptive,” I answered. I held up the drawings too, examining them one by one. “No, I’m not satisfied with it. I was in a trance, I finally managed to do it, lose myself…but now I don’t remember anything about it. It happened without my realizing it, and now the experience is gone, and I can’t retrieve it. That’s not the answer, is it? I want to know—”
“Precisely.”
“—what really happens when one writes.” I put the papers back in the book and stared into the fire again. Artaud sat silently beside me, and for a while there was no sound but the slaps of rain on the roof and the slaps of the cards as Louis moved them, and the crackling of the flames.
Then I said to Artaud, “I’ve been thinking about your grievance, that you lack words for what you think and feel. I can’t help wondering, if that’s the case, why search for words at all?” The man next to me smiled that knowing smile again, but I pressed on. “If the words you are looking for do not indeed exist, either new ones must be created, or language must be abandoned altogether. You said all you needed was one word. Since you obviously know what you mean why not say that word, even if it’s gibberish to the rest of us? Why not invent your word and give up trying to describe these states of mind to others in any language?”
Artaud leaned closer to me. “It’s such a relief for someone to ask me that, flat out, instead of skirting the issue: ‘But we’re all at a loss for words at times!’ as if I am only looking for a new way to say the same shit—how pretty flowers are, the falling snow—over and over as poets do. I’ve asked myself your very question.”
“And what was your answer?” I asked.
Louis looked up from his cards.
“How successfully,” Artaud asked me, “can one think without language?” I opened my mouth and closed it again, and he continued, “And to complicate things, now disregard the idea that language is only words. If you believe as I do that everything is a language, images, yes, and even emotions, even gestures, physical sensations, the question becomes: How successfully can one think without a medium of thought?” He rested an elbow on his knee, his finger brushing his lips, and still smiling.
“Not very well,” I admitted. “Perhaps not at all.”
“And that’s the paradox, isn’t it?” Artaud replied. “Language leads me along a path and seduces me and I think, ‘I see where this is going, it’s so clear I can never forget it,’ and then, I do! Suddenly I’m stumbling through my words as words, through the images as mere perverse juxtapositions, and that is the problem. Poetry evokes, but it only evokes halfway, like a broken-off incantation. But it does evoke. We do need to speak. Because if we did not speak, we couldn’t think—indeed, we couldn’t exist—at all. So I really don’t know that one word I would speak.”
“That sounds like the dream I had last night,” I said. “A series of swinging doors…” The scene flashed before my eyes again, and I realized where it came from. A painting—was it from La Révolution surréaliste? Or a painting that hung in Louis’s apartment? “I saw a painting in my dream,” I told Artaud, “of a door which opened upon another room with a door, which in turn opened upon yet another room with another door.”
Yes, it was one of Louis’s paintings. I remembered the eerie impression that painting gave me the first time I saw it, for at the end of this succession of opened doors was an iron door that was not only closed but bolted and padlocked. “Senility,” Louis had titled it, and it did convey the impression of senility, the frustration of wanting that door open, that seventh door which led outside to the garden only hinted at by the beguiling blue sky through the window and the roses whose blooms barely reached the top of the sill.
