Adventures In Immediate Irreality (5 page)

It was about this time that the doctor who prescribed
quinine was called in. The impression I received during the visit, the impression of
his resemblance to a mouse was confirmed, as I mentioned above, by a freakish,
totally absurd incident.

One day I was lying next to Clara, feverishly tugging at her dress, when I had a
feeling there was something out of the ordinary in the room. It came more from the
vague yet acute intimation of the extreme pleasure I was anticipating and could not
share with a foreign presence than from anything tangible, but I was under the
impression that we were being watched by a living being.

Alarmed, I turned my head, and what did I see on the trunk, just behind Clara’s
powder compact, but a mouse. It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the
trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them
two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for
several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps
the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere
reproach, but its fascination soon ran its course and it suddenly disappeared behind
the trunk. I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.

This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my quinine. Illogical
though my reasoning was, I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter.
The doctor had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get
even he had prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. I could just hear him
ruminating over his verdict: “The grrreater the pleasure, the more bitter the
rrremedy.”

A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his attic: he had put a
bullet through his brain.

The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, “Were there mice
in the attic?” I needed to know. Because if the doctor was well and truly dead, a
band of mice would have to set upon his corpse and extract all the mouse matter he
had borrowed during his lifetime to be able to carry on his illegal human
existence.

Chapter Three

I was, I believe, twelve years old when I first met Clara.
But no matter how far back my childhood memories go, they are always linked to
sexual awareness. I find my early experiences of sexuality every bit as nostalgic
and pure as my early experiences of night, fear, or friendship, and in no way
dissimilar to other melancholy phenomena such as the tedious wait to “grow up,”
which I measured concretely each and every time I shook hands with someone older
than myself, trying to determine to what extent the weight and size of my tiny hand,
lost in a mass of gnarled fingers, differed from the enormous one pressing it.

Not for a moment in my childhood did I disregard the difference between man and
woman. There may have been a time when all living beings coalesced into one clear
whole of motion and inertia, though I have no precise memory of it: the “secret” of
sex was always present, a secret as concrete as an object, a table or chair.

Yet when I examine those distant memories carefully, I find that what relegates them
to the past is my misconception of the sexual act at the time. I had a completely
false picture of the female organs and imagined the act itself to be much more
ceremonious and strange than what I experienced with Clara. All my interpretations —
from the erroneous to the increasingly accurate—had an ineffable air of
mystery and bitterness about them, gaining slowly in consistency like a painting
made on the basis of rough sketches.

I can picture myself as a small child wearing a
nightshirt that comes down to my heels. I am weeping desperately, sitting on a
doorstep that leads into a sun-drenched courtyard with an open gate and an empty
square beyond, a hot, sad, noonday square with dogs sleeping on their stomachs and
men stretched out in the shade of their vegetable stalls. The air is rife with the
stench of rotten produce, and large purple flies are buzzing loudly in my vicinity,
alighting on my hands to sip the tears that have fallen there, then circling
frenetically in the dense, scorching light of the courtyard. I stand and urinate in
the dust. I watch the earth avidly drink up the liquid. It leaves a dark spot, like
the shadow of a non-existent object. I wipe my face with the nightshirt and lick the
tears from the corner of my lips, savoring their salty flavor. I resume my seat on
the threshold, feeling very unhappy: I have been spanked.

My father had just given me a few slaps on my bare backside in my room. I don’t quite
know why. I am thinking it through. I was lying in bed next to a girl my own age. We
were supposed to be taking a nap while our parents were out walking. I didn’t hear
them come in and don’t know what I was doing to the girl under the quilt. All I know
is that when my father suddenly tore off the quilt the girl was beginning to
acquiesce. My father turned red, lost his temper, and spanked me. End of story.

So I sat on the doorstep in the sun and had a good cry and now I am drawing circles
and lines in the dust. I have moved over to the shade and am sitting cross-legged on
a rock. I feel better. A girl has come for water in the courtyard. She is cranking
the rusty pump wheel. I listen to the old iron grating away and watch the water gush
into her bucket like the magnificent tail of a silver horse. I look at the girl’s
big, dirty feet—yawning because I didn’t sleep a wink that night—and try
to catch a fly now and then. Life is returning to normal after the tears. The sun is
still pouring its oppressive heat onto the courtyard.

Such was my first sexual adventure and my earliest childhood memory.

Thereafter I began feeling vague instincts that now burgeoned, now buckled, and
eventually found their natural limits. What should have been an ever increasing
fascination, however, was for me a series of renunciations and cruel reductions to
an absurd banality. My evolution from boyhood to adolescence was attended by a
continuous diminution of the world: as things took their place around me, they —
like a shiny surface that has misted over—lost their ineffable features. Only
the miraculous, the ecstatic figure of Walter retained its fascinating brilliance
and does so to this day.

The day we met he was sitting in the shade of a locust tree reading an installment of
Buffalo Bill. A luminescent morning sun was filtering through the dense green
foliage to the swish of refreshing shadows. His attire was most unusual: he wore
suede trousers, a deep-purple jacket with ivory buttons, and a pair of sandals made
of fine strips of white leather. Whenever I feel like reliving the extraordinary
sensation of our first meeting, I gaze upon the yellowed cover of a Buffalo Bill
installment.

The first thing he did was to leap to his feet as gracefully as an animal. We
immediately made friends. We had barely exchanged a few words before he made a
sudden, stupefying proposal: that we should eat the blossoms on the tree. It was the
first time I had met someone who ate flowers. Before I knew it, Walter was up in the
tree gathering an enormous bunch of blossoms. Then he climbed down and demonstrated
the delicate operation of removing the corolla and sucking its tip. I tried it. The
flower burst between my teeth with a pleasant little pop, and a sweet, refreshing
flavor I had never tasted before spread through my mouth.

We had been standing there for a while, silently eating locust blossoms, when all at
once he grabbed my hand and said, “Want to see where our tribe holds its
meetings?”

His eyes were sparkling. It frightened me a bit.

“Well, do you or don’t you?” he asked again.

I hesitated a second, then answered “I do” with a voice no longer mine and a sudden
willingness to take a risk quite alien to me.

Still holding my hand, Walter led me through the little gate at the end of the
courtyard. We came out on a vacant lot teeming with weeds. The nettles burnt my
legs, and we had to pull the thick hemlock and burdock stems apart to pass through.
At the far end there was a dilapidated wall with a deep pit just before it. Walter
jumped into the pit and called up to me to follow. The pit tunneled under the wall,
and we climbed out of it into an abandoned cellar. The steps were in ruins and
overgrown with grass, the wall oozed water; the darkness ahead of us was complete.
Walter squeezed my hand hard and drew me after him. We made our slow, cautious way
down ten or so steps and came to a halt.

“This is where we stay,” he told me. “You can’t go any farther. If you do, you come
to these iron men, men with hands and heads of iron, who grew out of the earth. You
can’t see them in the darkness, but they’ll wring our necks if they catch us.”

I threw a desperate glance back at the hole leading into the cellar and the light
coming from a clear and simple world where there were no men of iron and where there
were plants and houses and ordinary people as far as the eye could see. Walter had
found a board somewhere and the two of us sat on it for several moments in silence.
It was pleasant in the cellar, cool, and there was a heavy aroma of moisture in the
air. I wouldn’t have minded spending hours there alone, away from the steamy streets
and sad, boring town. The cold walls felt good beneath an earth sweltering in the
sun. The futile afternoon hum coming through the hole in the cellar was no more than
a distant echo.

“This is where we bring the girls we catch,” said Walter.

I vaguely understood what he was referring to, and the cellar took on a new
attraction.

“What do you do with them?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Walter said, laughing. “We do what all men do with women.
We lie down next to them . . . and then we take our feather . . .”

“Your feather? What sort of feather? What do you do with it?”

Walter laughed again.

“How old are you anyway? Don’t you know what men do with women? Here, have a look at
mine.” He took a small black feather from his jacket pocket.

Just then I felt my usual crisis coming on. If Walter had not taken the feather from
his pocket, I might have been able to endure the atmosphere of complete and utter
isolation to the end, but all of a sudden my isolation there in the cellar was
deeply painful to me. Only now did I realize how cut off I was from the town and its
dusty thoroughfares. It was as if I had cut myself off from myself, alone as I was
deep down under the ordinary summer day. The shiny black feather Walter had shown me
meant that nothing more existed in the world as I knew it: everything had fallen
into a swoon, while the feather gave off an anomalous brilliance in the middle of
this odd room with its moist grass and cold-mouthed darkness avidly drinking up what
little light there was.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” Walter asked. “Don’t you want me to tell you what we do
with the feather?”

The sky visible through the hole grew whiter and whiter, hazier and hazier. The words
ricocheted against the walls, flowing down me as if I were a fluid. Walter went on
talking, but he was so far from me and so ethereal that he seemed no more than a
pool of light in the dark, a patch of mist in the murk.

“First you stroke the girl with the feather,” I heard him say, as if in a dream.
“Then you stroke yourself . . . You’ve got to know these things . . .”

He came up to me and started shaking me, waking me up, and slowly, ever so slowly, I
came to. When my eyes were fully open, I saw Walter leaning over my pubis, his mouth
pressing against my member. I could not for the life of me comprehend what was going
on.

He stood and said, “There, you see? That felt good, didn’t it . . . That’s the way
Indians woke their wounded on the battlefield. Our tribe knows all the Indian spells
and cures.”

I felt drunk and exhausted. Walter took flight, disappeared. Then I trudged
cautiously up the stairs.

For a few days I sought him everywhere. In vain. There was nothing for it: I would
have to go back to the cellar. But the vacant lot looked totally different when I
got there: there were piles of rubbish everywhere and dead animals putrefying in the
sun; the stench was horrible. I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort with Walter. I
decided not to go to the cellar anymore. I never saw Walter again.

I got myself a feather, wrapped it in a scrap of
newsprint, and kept it well hidden in my pocket. There were times when I thought I
had made up the whole feather incident and Walter had never existed. Now and then I
unwrapped the feather and stared at it. Its mystery was impenetrable. I would brush
its soft, silky surface over my cheek and shudder slightly at the touch. It was as
if an invisible but real person were caressing me with his fingertips. Then one fine
evening, under quite extraordinary circumstances, I used it on someone else.

I liked staying outside as late as possible. That evening there was the heavy,
oppressive feeling of a storm in the air. All the heat of the day was compressed
into a stifling atmosphere beneath a black sky rent with lightening. I was sitting
on the doorstep, watching the play of electric light on the houses—the
streetlamps swaying in the wind, the concentric circles of the globes flitting along
the walls, splashing like water in a swinging bucket—and the long sashes of
dust that swept through the road and spiraled upward.

In the midst of all this turbulence I thought I saw a white marble statue rise into
the air. No, I was as certain as I could be of anything: I had seen a block of white
stone climbing rapidly, at an angle, like a balloon that had escaped from the hand
of a child. In no time the statue was a simple white speck in the sky, no bigger
than my fist. I also saw two white figures holding hands and gliding through the sky
like skiers. My mouth and eyes must have been wide open because at that moment a
girl stopped in front of me and asked me what I was looking at up there in the
sky.

“See that statue flying through the air?” I said. “Look quickly! It’s about to
disappear . . .”

The girl screwed up her eyes and looked long and hard but told me she couldn’t see
it. She was a local girl, a chubby little thing with eternally scrubbed red-rubber
cheeks and sweaty hands. Until that evening I had barely spoken to her.

“I know why you tried to fool me,” she said, standing there and laughing in my face.
“I know what you’re after.”

And off she hopped. I stood and followed her. I called out to her from a dark alley,
and she came of her own accord. There I lifted her dress. She let me have my way,
docilely holding onto my shoulders. She may have been less conscious of the
impropriety of the deed than surprised at what it consisted of.

I myself was in fact more surprised at the outcome of the adventure, which took place
a few days later in the marketplace. Some masons were slaking a batch of lime in a
vat, and I was watching it bubble when all of a sudden I heard my name called out
and a loud voice saying, “A feather, was it? Is that what you used?”

It came from a sturdy red-haired fellow of about twenty, a loathsome character. I
think he lived in a house in that dark alley. I caught sight of him shouting at me
from behind the vat through the steam of the quicklime, a ghost-like figure, an
infernal apparition holding forth amidst fire and brimstone. Perhaps he said
something else and I gave his words a meaning close to my preoccupations of the
previous few days: it was hard for me to believe he could have seen anything in the
pitch darkness of the alleyway (though the more I thought about it, the more I
wondered whether it had been as dark as it seemed, whether I hadn’t been standing in
a patch of light). I concluded that during the sexual act I had been possessed by a
dream that muddled my sight and senses. I determined to be more circumspect in the
future. Who knew what aberrations I was capable of? Under the spell of arousal I
might well react unconsciously, like a sleepwalker, even in broad daylight.

Closely connected with the feather is another memory, that of a book—small,
black, and highly disturbing. I came across it one day on a desk and leafed through
it with great interest. It was a banal novel by André Theuriet.
Frida
was
the title. It was profusely illustrated with drawings of the two main characters: a
boy sporting curly blond locks and a velvet jacket and a plump girl in a flounced
dress. The boy looked like Walter. Sometimes they appeared together, sometimes
separately. Their encounters always seemed to take place in the nooks and crannies
of a park or beneath the walls of a ruin. What did they do there? That is what I
wanted to know. Did the boy have a feather like mine in his jacket pocket? I didn’t
see anything like it in the drawings, nor did I have time to read the book, and in a
few days it vanished without a trace. I began to look for it everywhere. I asked for
it in the bookshops, but no one seemed to have heard of it. It must have been full
of secrets because it was nowhere to be found.