Onion Songs (20 page)

A VISIT HOME

The house is not as I
’ve remembered it all these years. The style is more modern, the living room more spacious. There is no real wood—it is all imitation grain. My mother and father seem older, grayer than any human beings I have ever met.

I have brought three college friends to see this town I grew up in, this place where my dreams came from. My friends appear startled by the lush greenness of the vegetation, the humidity, the bright sunlight through blue skies striated by wispy cloud. I know they won
’t want to stay long.

I realize it is the same lot, the same location as the house I spent my childhood in, but there is a new house here. What have my parents done? Torn the original down and rebuilt according to some hopeful plan for rejuvenation? But I am afraid to ask them what has happened. I am afraid of what they might tell me.

I spend my nights roaming the halls of this new house, stepping quietly so as not to awaken my three friends, somehow knowing that my parents won’t be aroused no matter what I do. I examine several pieces of furniture each night: my father’s new, barrel-shaped liquor cabinet with the carved eagle on its front, the new refrigerator with the automatic ice-maker, the matching pieces of the never-used guest room, the ornate rugs, the new pictures on the walls—photographs of people I don’t recognize.

Occasionally I find something belonging to the old house; a piece of bathroom tile, a door stop, an old worn footstool, and once an entire yellow-papered wall that materialized in the hallway without warning. When I blink it is gone.

THE MULTIPLES OF SORROW

Malcolm had gone from London to Paris after the end of the First World War.
His few remaining friends in England speculated it must have been a desperate move to escape some unhappiness. What they had not grasped was that desperation required a certain emotional investment Malcolm had not budgeted for during his remaining years on the planet. He had no intention of feeling desperation or any other strong emotion. He could see no point. If he was going to waste his time, there were activities far more interesting for his thoughtless consumption.

If anything
, he’d left for aesthetic reasons. Not because Paris during that time promised so much in terms of freedom, beauty, art—he had no illusions of access to such things—but because London promised so little. Despite the post-war appearance of palatial department stores and great business houses, jobs were few and the divide between rich and poor intraversible. He’d grown tired of the slums of the east end and the architecture of ruin and rust, surfaces silky with a moist dust of unknown content, unidentifiable insects disassembling on the edges of vision. Worse than the bombs dropped by the German Zeppelins had been this devastating fusillade of failed commerce.

Of course the aesthetic background of Paris was no richer, only different: a stacked mess of darkened brick
, spider-veined by wet, depthless streets where broken beggars stumbled and died. Upon reaching Paris he was possessed of few funds and he had no considered plan for their replenishment. Now and then he would work a menial restaurant job for the privilege of some laughable underpayment and the dubious benefit of glimpsing such luminaries as Picasso and Ford Madox Ford. He lived in the worst possible places, attic rooms where he could not walk upright, the ceilings decorated with the long, looping signatures of marching insects. If he grew tired of the wriggling creatures falling into his small store of food he’d burn a bit of sulphur to drive them into the next room, separated from his by the thinnest possible layer of paper and board.

“
Monstre!”
boomed the voice on the other side of his flimsy door, followed by a rain of fists on wood that shook the room. “
Meurtrier!”

But instead of hiding like a child he rolled out of his bed and jerked open the door.
“
Oui!”

The large bearded man hunched in the doorway, his head lowered as he peered inside.
Malcolm noticed several gray insects crawling in and out of his hair, thin black legs slipping on the oily strands.

“
Degaré?” Malcolm asked, recognizing him as a man he sometimes washed dishes with in the restaurants.

“
Mon Dieu!
Malcolm!” He suddenly grinned. “I have bread, if you have the wine to wash it down!”

For a time they had an arrangement, but nights when Degaré had too much to drink Malcolm would always leave.

Malcolm sold some of his clothing and most of his other belongings for rent, with a few sou left over for bread and margarine, wine, cheese, some potatoes, a little coffee. The price of food had increased so drastically the past few years, bread almost three times, an egg at least five, he’d been reduced to the occasional theft and killing pigeons in the park. This was always an awkward task—having no skill with a slingshot he had to bludgeon the birds with a stick or a decaying shoe and sneak them into his apartment under his coat where he would fry and rapidly eat them. On those nights it was Degaré who left, in disgust.

He supposed he was starving himself, but frankly found the prospect more interesting than frightening.
Starvation and poverty served as acute catalysts for breaking down the usual sensory boundaries. He saw things more deeply than he had in years. He only wished this new vision were of a finer resolution.

“
Animal!”
Degaré would cry, whenever he saw Malcolm with a pigeon on a plate, referring to both. Malcolm thought that at least it was a clean plate, but did not present this detail in his defense. He simply took a larger bite.

Perhaps this exchange was what initially triggered the idea.
Man’s dual nature: the spirit and the beast. It was a lot to chew on. It took Malcolm some months developing a theory, refining his understanding of his own impulses.

He spent most of his days in bed to preserve his strength, preferring to go out at night when Degaré was sleeping and the details of the city
’s decay were somewhat wrapped in romantic shadow. He accepted that decay but did not want to be constantly exposed to it. The daylight made the city’s deterioration abundantly clear. There was no excuse for surprise, of course. A building material hadn’t been invented that would last forever— most fell far short of the mark. If all the wealth in France were focused on the single purpose of maintaining Paris in pristine condition there still would not be sufficient funds. No nation had the resources necessary to maintain a major city in such a manner. Buildings do fall apart, eventually, and it seemed to Malcolm that most of the major cities—London, Paris, New York—were failing at approximately the same time.

He felt the inevitability of the decline most obviously during late afternoon strolls through insistent rain.
The Paris sky boiled down into a spoiled soup. He clamped his mouth to keep out any taste of the foul French precipitation. All around him the brick walls melted, sliding into the streets. It happened too slowly for most of its denizens to notice but Malcolm had grown acutely sensitive to the world’s steady transformation into mud. Certainly human beings were little more than that—animated mud, however they might dress themselves up. Their condition stunned them. Everywhere he looked he could see Parisians staring at him, or staring off into space. Consumption ravaged their tired flesh. They smiled at one with a smear of blood. They stared out of illness, out of insanity, out of death.

It was hardly surprising their city was maintained so poorly.

Degaré did his wanderings during the day. Sometimes they would pass each other on the disastrous stairs leading to the attic room they now shared. Malcolm’s roommate occasionally growled at him, little more. He did not know what Degaré did during the day, although he suspected criminal activity was involved, as the man returned every evening with his enormous carcass swollen even further with hidden cheeses and breads under his coat, as well as wrapped packages whose contents obviously surprised Degaré when he ripped them open.

One evening Malcolm found a few drops of blood on one of the bread loaves.
Their eyes found each other, Degaré’s swollen and angry. “Do you wish to make
une réflexion
,
Monsieur?”

In answer Malcolm stared and began eating the bloodied area.

Sometimes after an extended period in bed Malcolm felt very much the philosopher. What better place to construct his theories? His father might have said this was no way to make one’s way in the world, to which he might reply that neither the way nor the world was very clear. One invention of meaning was as near the truth as any other as far as Malcolm was concerned. There was no sense having a heart attack over such questions, which his father, indeed, had.

Lying in bed he had the opportunity and the will to review and reflect upon his life, something which even the wealthy could not always afford. It gradually came clear to him that a single human being could not have possibly felt and done all the things he had felt and done in such a relatively short time.
One being could not possibly contain such conflicts of feeling. He was a man of some education and yet he had eaten bread soiled with a stranger’s blood. And the repugnant Degaré? Sometimes his roommate recited French love poetry in his sleep, with very few mistakes. Such conflicts of spirituality and bestiality! The usual explanations for such contradictions made less sense the longer Malcolm remained in bed. He himself hated the ugliness and falseness of the world, and yet loved the heightened sensibility his hatred brought him. He had absolutely no hope or optimism for his own future, and yet it was a future he looked forward to with great anticipation.

The true mystery was why more did not go mad when forced to endure these conditions.
Malcolm concluded there must be a surfeit of souls in heaven (or whatever one chose to call that astral realm) and a shortage of flesh in the mundane world to serve as their vessels. Even when madness was not the immediate result, to live with such internal warfare had to lead inevitably to the vilest sort of illnesses.

In one sense these were merely the idle speculations of a man with no other pressing chores.
But Malcolm was taken aback to discover that these ideas triggered emotions he had not experienced in years. Of course he had no one reputable to bear witness to these recent enlightenments. He had no real acquaintances, actually, other than the disreputable Degaré. And so it was that one late evening while engaged in one of their increasingly rare shared dishwashing jobs, the kitchen explosive with heat and argument, a porridge of loose food underfoot, he pulled the giant Frenchmen out into the alley and told him all that he had surmised on the subject.

To Malcolm
’s somewhat uncomfortable surprise Degaré actually appeared interested, nodding and sucking in his cheeks, periodically staring at Malcolm with a sympathetic look on his face. Finally, when Malcolm was not yet finished but too exhausted to go on, Degaré turned to him with a dripping ladle raised like a wand and spoke. “I may know just the man who can help you with this problem. He’s a German. He comes to Paris from time to time for various studies, experiments, and God knows what. He dresses very finely, oriental robes, silk scarves, even when he is renting the poorest of hovels to preserve his privacy. You might think he was simply some sharp-tongued dandy, but he is educated, a writer, or so I’ve been told—he certainly weaves magic with his words—who knows deeply the issues of mind and spirit.”

“
What is his name?”

“
Oh! He has so many! When I first met him he was Meyer, but I have heard others call him Dagobert, and Ruben-Juda. He is quite fluid, let us say, in his allegiances. He joins associations only to tear them down it would seem. I can never tell if the man is serious! But that is simply a symptom of his brilliance, I think.”

“
You would seem to know him well.”

“
Un peu
. I have done the occasional odd job. I have acquired a particular ingredient he has desired, now and then. What can I say? The man talks, I listen, I have learned a bit of his situation. Perhaps he can help you. He is known among certain, say, circles
impopulaire
for—hmmm—
le processus de arrachage?”

“
I don’t understand.”

“
How do you say? An
extraction process?”

“
Is that dentistry you’re referring to?”

Degaré laughed.
“
Non! Ne dentiste!
Surely there cannot be a physical process for such a thing. It is philosophical, spiritual. No danger, or so I am told. How could there be? You can have my spirit,
Monsieur
, I give it gladly, if you will only feed my belly, and other things.”

Malcolm shuddered at what he thought the Frenchman might be suggesting.
“Where do I find this magician?”

“
Why, only a short stroll to the east, I think you know it? The
Rue D’âmes Vidées?
I will give you the precise address, for, say, a bit of innocuous cheese?”

*

As Degaré had promised, the
Rue D’âmes Vidées
was a short stump of a lane a few minutes stumble toward the river. Malcolm had not been familiar with this particular segment of pavement, although he was aware of other parts of this street from the conversations of others. It had once been one of the longest streets in Paris, a north-south slash through the city’s heart, but over the centuries it had been broken up, blocked by one project or other, canals or public buildings, or occasionally when some housing development was extended across its surface like a dam across a stream. Streets required advocates if they were to remain intact, but this street had none. Now its longest segments were only a few blocks—
Rue Abattue D’enfant
was one of the siblings, he believed, as well as the
Rue des Veuves Aveugles
, and the
petite route des fenêtres chuchotantes
—and here and there, at least according to rumor, a section would be completely enclosed on all four sides, becoming a
cour
, a courtyard, or forgotten completely on the other side of windowless walls.