Children of the Albatross (14 page)

Woman:
I learned…from talking with other
women. I also have a natural gift.

Man:
I suppose it was Maurice who taught
you the most. It enrages me to see how much you know.

Woman:
I never asked you where you
learned. Besides, it’s always personal. Each couple invents their own way.

Man:
Yes, that’s true. Sometimes I made
you cry with joy, didn’t I?

Woman:
(crying) Why do you use the past
tense?

Man:
Why did you go off with that
singer?

Woman:
If you insist so much I will tell
you something.

Man:
(in a very tense voice) About the
singer?

Woman:
No, someone else. Once I tried to
be unfaithful. You were neglecting me. I took rather a fancy to someone. And
all might have gone well except that he had the same habit you have of starting
with: you have the softest skin in the world. And when he said this, just as
you do, I remembered your saying that, and I left the man, I ran away. Nothing
happened.

Man:
But just the same he had time to
note the quality of your skin.

Woman:
I’m telling you the truth.

Man:
You have nothing to cry about now.
You have taken your revenge.

Woman:
I’m crying about unfaithfulness
in general, all the betrayals.

Man:
I will never forgive you.

Woman:
Once in six years!

Man:
I’m sure it was that singer.

Faustin, lying down, smoking as he listened,
felt the urgent need to comment. He knocked angrily on the wall. The man and
the woman were silent.

“Listen,” he said, in his loudest voice, “I
heard your entire conversation. I would say in this case the man is very unjust
and the woman right. She was more faithful than the man. She was faithful to a
personal emotion, to a personal rite.”

“Who are you?” said the man in the other room,
angrily.

“No one in particular, just a neighbor.”

There was a long silence. Then the sound of a
door being closed violently. Faustin heard one person moving about with soft
rustles. Judging from the steps, it was the man who had gone out.

Faustin lay down again, meditating on his own
anxiety.

He felt at this moment like a puppet, but he
became aware that all this had happened many times before to him, but never as
clearly.

All living had taken place for him in the other
room, and he had always been the witness. He had always been the commentator.

He felt a guilt for having listened, which was
like the guilt he felt at other times for never being the one in action. He was
always accompanying someone to a marriage, not his own, to a hospital, to a
burial, to a celebration in which he played no part but that of the
accompanist.

He was allowing them all to live for him, and
then articulating a judgment. He was allowing Jay to paint for him, and then he
was the one to write ironic articles on his exhibits. He was allowing Sabina to
devastate others with her passion, and smiling at those who were consumed or
rejected. Now at this moment he was ashamed not to be the one consumed or
rejected. He allowed Djuna to speak, Michael to face the tragic consequences of
his deviations in love. He was allowing others to cry, to complain, to die.

And all he did was to speak across a protective
wall, to knock with anger and say: you are right, and you are wrong.

Rendered uneasy by these meditations, he
dressed himself and decided to go to the cafe.

He was called Uncle Philip by everyone, even by
those who were not related to him.

He had the solicitous walk of an undertaker,
the unctuous voice of a floorwalker.

His hands were always gloved, his heels
properly resoled, his umbrella sheathed.

It was impossible to imagine him having been a
child, or even an adolescent. It was admitted he possessed no photographs of
that period, and that he had the taste never to talk about this obviously
nonexistent facet of his personality. He had been born gray-haired, slender and
genteel.

Attired in the most neutral suit, with the
manners of someone about to announce a bereavement, Uncle Philip nevertheless
did not fulfill such threats and was merely content to register and report
minutely on the activity of the large, colorful, international family to which
he was related.

No one could mention a country where Uncle
Philip did not have a relative who…

No one could mention any world, social,
political, artistic, financial, political, in which Uncle Philip did not
possess a relative who…

No one ever thought of inquiring into his own
vocation. One accepted him as a witness.

By an act of polite prestidigitation and
punctuality, Uncle Philip managed to attend a ceremony in India where one of
the members of the family was decorated for high bravery. He could give all the
details of the function with a precision of colors resembling scenes from the
National
Geographic Magazine.

And a few days later he was equally present at
the wedding of another member in Belgium, from which he brought back
observations on the tenacious smell of Catholic incense.

A few days later he was present as godfather of
a newborn child in Hungary and then proceeded to attend in Paris the first
concert of importance given by still another relative.

Amiable and courteous as he shared in the
backstage celebrations, he remained immune to the contagion of colors, gaiety
and fame. His grayness took no glow from the success, flowers, and handshakes.
His pride in the event was historical, and shed no light on his private life.

He was the witness.

He felt neither honored nor disgraced (he also
attended death by electric chair of a lesser member).

He appeared almost out of nowhere, as a family
spirit must, and immediately after the ceremony, after he partook of the wine,
food, rice, sermon or verdict, he vanished as he had come and no one remembered
him.

He who had traveled a thousand miles to sustain
this family tree, to solder the spreading and dissipated family unity, was
instantly forgotten.

Of course it was simple enough to follow the
caeers of the more official members of the family, those who practiced orthodox
marriages and divorces, or such classical habits as first nights, presentations
at the Court of England, decorations from the Academie Francaise. All this was
announced in the papers and all Uncle Philip had to do was to read the columns
carefully every morning.

But his devotion to the family did not limit
itself to obvious attendance upon the obvious incidents of the family tree. He
was not content with appearing at cemeteries, churches, private homes,
sanatoriums, hospitals.

He pursued with equal flair and accuracy the
more mysterious developments. When one relative entered upon an irregular union
Uncle Philip was the first to call, assuming that all was perfectly in order
and insisting on all the amenities.

The true mystery lay in the contradiction that
the brilliance of these happenings (for even the performance at the electric
chair was not without its uniqueness, the electric power failing to achieve its
duty) never imparted any radiation to Uncle Philip; that while he moved in a
profusion of family-tree blossoms, yet each year he became a little more faded,
a little more automatic, a little more starched—like a wooden figure representing
irreparable ennui.

His face remained unvaryingly gray, his suits
frayed evenly, his soles thinned smoothly, his gloves wore out not finger by
finger but all at once, as they should.

He remained alert to his duties, however. His
genius for detecting step by step the most wayward activities led him to his
most brilliant feat of all.

One relative having wanted to travel across the
Atlantic with a companion who was not her husband, deceived all her friends as
to the date of her sailing and boarded a ship leaving a day earlier.

As she walked up and down the deck with her
compromising escort, thinking regretfully of the flowers, fruit and books which
would be delivered elsewhere and lost to her, she encountered Uncle Philip
holding a small bouquet and saying in an appropriate voice: “
Bon voyage!
Give
my regards to the family when you get to America!”

The only surprising fact was that Uncle Philip
failed to greet them at their arrival on the other side.

“Am I aging?” asked Uncle Philip of himself as
he awakened, picked up the newspaper at his door, the breakfast tray, and went
back to his bed.

He was losing his interest in genealogical
trees.

He thought of the cafe and of all the people he
had seen there, watched, listened to. From their talk they seemed to have been
born without parents, without relatives. They will all run away, forgotten, or
separated from the past. None of them acknowledged parents, or even
nationalities.

When he questioned them they were irritated
with him, or fled from him.

He thought they were rootless, and yet he felt
they were bound to each other, and relat himselfach other as if they had
founded new ties, a new kind of family, a new country.

He was the lonely one, he the
esprit de
famille.

The sap that ran through the family tree had
not bloomed in him as the sap that ran through these people as they sat
together.

He wanted to get up and dress and sit with
them. He remembered a painting he had seen in a book of mythology. All in coral
and gold, a vast tree, and sitting at each tip of a branch, a mythological
personage, man, woman, child, priest or poet, scribe, lyre player, dancer,
goddess, god, all sitting in the same tree with a mysterious complacency of
unity.

When Donald had been ejected from his apartment
because he had not been able to pay his rent, all of them had come in the night
and formed a chain and helped him to move his belongings out of the window, and
the only danger had been one of discovery due to their irrepressible laughter.

When Jay sold a painting he came to the cafe to
celebrate and that night everyone ate abundantly.

When Lillian gave a concert they all went
together forming a compact block of sympathy with effusive applause.

When Stella was invited by some titled person
or other to stay at a mansion in the south of France, she invited them all.

When the ballet master fell ill with asthma and
could no longer teach dancing, he was fed by all of them.

There was another kind of family, and Uncle
Philip wished he could discover the secret of their genealogy.

With this curiosity he dressed and went off to
the cafe.

Michael liked to awaken first and look upon the
face of Donald asleep on the pillows, as if he could extract from the reality
of Donald’s face asleep on a pillow within reach of his hand, a certitude which
might quiet his anxiety, a certitude which, once awake, Donald would proceed to
destroy gradually all through the day and evening.

At no time when he was awake could Donald
dispense the word Michael needed, dispense the glance, the smallest act to
prove his love.

Michael’s feelings at that moment exactly
resembled Lillian’s feelings in regard to Jay.

Like Lillian he longed for some trivial gift
that would prove Donald had wanted to make him a gift. Like Lillian he longed
for a word he could enclose within his being that would place him at the
center. Like Lillian he longed for some moment of passionate intensity that
would be like those vast fires in the iron factory from which the iron emerged
incandescent, welded, complete.

He had to be content with Donald asleep upon
his pillow.

With Donald’s presence.

But no sooner would his eyes open than Donald
would proceed to weave a world as inaccessible to Michael as the protean, fluid
world of Jay became inaccessible to Lillian.

This weaving began always with Donald’s little
songs of nonsense with which he established the mood of the day on a pitch too
light for Michael to seize, and which he sang not to please himself, but with a
note of defiance, of provocation to Michael:

Nothing is lost but it changes

into the new string old string

into the new bag old bag…

“Michael,” said Donald, “today I would like to
go to the zoo and see the new weasel who cried so desperately when she was left
alone.”

Michael thought: “How human of him to feel
sympathy for the weasel crying in solitude in its cage.” And Donald’s sympathy
for the weasel encouraged him to say tenderly: “Would you cry like that if you
were left alone?”

“Not at all,” said Donald, “I wouldn’t mind at
all. I like to be alone.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I left you?”

Donald shrugged his shoulders and sang: