Augustino and the Choir of Destruction (19 page)

Phaedra
, a street version done as a musical with the songs played and sung by marginal people like bikers emerging from dark alleys and subway stations, that was how the handsome and rustic Cyril saw it, as if to say, that leather-clad Hyppolitus is me, this is what I am, none of this vulgarity works for me, Adrien announced, and other critics joined in, no doubt crushing the young man and putting him into such anger that Charles could do nothing to reason with him, what Cyril accused me of was really the fact that Adrien was my friend, a false friend of Charles, so none of us in our brilliant bourgeois circle had understood a thing about their fiery union, Cyril wrote me, we were self-involved narcissists: Adrien and Suzanne, basking in outdated glory, Jean-Mathieu and me, just as complacent and stuck in the past, I cried when I read Cyril's letter in words that this leather-armoured Hyppolitus used without nuance to slice me up, country boy, no, alright, he was not a country boy nor crude the way the others saw him, he was like me, vulnerable and torn, when Charles left him it was in pieces, he was life's fresh beginning, so he got carried away with telling us who were at our end, of course, that was it, the end, and as Charles would say, he alone was right, being young, that's what we all refused to admit in our jealous fears. You touch on taboo subjects, Adrien said to Daniel as they walked along the beach, Suzanne strolling along behind them and humming to herself as though remote from the weightiness of their intellectual debates, oh how this splendid dawn air gives me a lust for life, she seemed to murmur as she hummed and freed her hair from its turban, I mean the will to live a long life, very long, don't pay any attention to my wife, Adrien said at once, she denies the existence of death, these subjects are what are sometimes so unpleasant in your book
Strange Years
, he went on imperturbably, you know what I mean, when you write at length about what you call scatalogical art, or what nowadays you might better call scatophilia, but that's what it is, said Daniel, sensing the breath and embarrassment in Adrien's voice so close to him, it's a form of commercial art, I talk only about what I see, Adrien went on, I confess it disturbs me, these words and images you come up with, wishing Daniel would walk a little faster and keep up, is it really necessary to write down absolutely everything you see and feel, like for example, the story of that young English artist you met in the Spanish monastery and who does performance art with his stomach rumblings, a whole show made up of sounds from the gasses in his digestive tube, is it really appropriate for this artist, if he deserves to be called that, to make a living from the exploits of stomach and intestines, to be invited to play in different countries, do you really feel the need to write down every manifestation of what you call scatalogical art, you say yourself it is everywhere, but what I don't understand is that you don't condemn these aberrations, instead you describe these manifestations in minute detail, but they're constantly there in our faces, Daniel said, thinking of the lofty verse written by the older man, indeed what a contrast it was, the English student's stomach noises, all the gurgling in his guts, of course it was normal for Adrien to be disturbed, even shocked, Daniel thought, but still more scatalogical was the page in a circular that defined the couple, man and woman, by their proximity in the bathroom: he, not visible, to the left, but represented by the raised toilet seat against a backdrop of clean tiles, some big, brown, unlaced boots beneath the bowl; she represented by a bowl with the toilet seat down, prettied up with a crushed and faded bouquet of roses, and open wardrobes with an array of shoes and accessories, and thus lived man and woman side by side, with their intimacy exposed for all to see, well, I don't want to know anything about all that, Adrien said, I'd rather hear about Rembrandt and his water colours, you do that too in your books, and let man and woman be as they are, Adrien suddenly felt himself getting tangled up in words, no longer knowing just how to explain what he felt so vividly, not bathroom creatures and primary objects, that's not what men and women are, but something sacred and indestructible, there you have it, he went on, the man-woman couple cannot be compared to any other thing, but just then, Suzanne caught up and started smiling, what are you going on to Daniel about, my dear, she asked, what do you want to educate him about this time, the truth of course, said Adrien, just the truth, here in this town we have all kinds of multi-formed couples and marriages, you know how tolerant I am about that, even our friends and loved ones, but the solemn couple made up of a man and a woman, the celebration of their union in marriage, surely that's the strongest relationship, the most unshakeable, the most naturally convincing union, he said, but Suzanne could not help laughing provocatively at her husband's emphatic speech, at that instant it seemed unforgivable that they had so rarely seen or invited Charles and Cyril to their house, such an exceptional couple they seemed, despite the fact that Charles was still unalterably attached to Frédéric, just as she had been for years to Adrien, she was thinking she'd have liked to have a lover like Cyril, still with Adrien there, perhaps she was just tired of Adrien's moralizing about love, twenty years earlier, before they were married, he'd said the contrary, hadn't he, he'd proclaimed the freedom of their living together, allying himself with all those marginalized couples, maybe, she thought, love was as sudden in its inspiration as poetry, a state of heightened consciousness one should not fight against, besides, how could Charles have refused the combined inspiration and fecundity that was Cyril, that of the poet and his friends reviving inextinguishable flames, the same way that thirst is inextinguishable, living on infertile soil was the anomaly, not thirsting after an intelligent and gifted creature like Cyril who fixed you with his azure gaze, still an anarchist and an incendiary thing, Adrien added, look at the ravaged life of poor Frédéric, and look at what Cyril does on the stage, having
Phaedra
played with insidious ambiguity by a man, a
Phaedra
dressed as a soldier is who we see, man or woman, well, there's no doubt about it, I translated Euripides myself, and
Phaedra
is the daughter of Minos and wife to Theseus, it bothers me a lot to see an actor just fool around with it out of pure vanity, wanting nothing so much as to draw attention to himself by provoking people, Suzanne thought it was abominable not to give in to the thirst to hug Cyril and travel by his side, so much more so because he could recite bits of Charles' work from memory, to refuse his presence, indeed, why was it they had never invited Charles and Cyril to their home, what sign of mistrust was it on Adrien's part, Suzanne herself had often invited Cyril to breakfast with her on her terrace by the sea, but remembered now that he had politely declined, surely because of Adrien and his review in a town newspaper, it really is inadmissible, she suddenly said to Adrien, that we've never invited Cyril and Charles here this summer, but, my dear, he said, we hardly get to see them, they're always on the go, I worry about Charles' health with all those trips, he's not a young man like Cyril any more, it was as though Charles had forgotten all about how delicate his health was when he and Cyril had left for India, Suzanne said again, it was a mistake, an irreparable one not to have them here, who knows what will happen next, or when we'll see them, oh come on, Adrien said, nothing's that irreparable, they'll be back soon, and Charles will be just as head-over-heels about that boy he hardly knows, unlike us, whom he's known since his youth, but Adrien's mind had already moved on from Charles and the couple he formed with Cyril that had so haunted him, and was observing Daniel and wondering why the writer let himself look so rundown, still polite, Daniel had rolled up his jeans and the sleeves of his shirt open to a vigorous torso, Adrien saw his coal-black eyes shining beneath the blue-grey glasses reflecting the colour of the sea, neither a smug nor a pretentious writer, he was just disarmingly natural, but managed to irritate or annoy Adrien without knowing why, surely it wasn't Daniel himself that got to him, serenely striding along the shoreline, but his book
Strange Years
that rubbed against Adrien's self-esteem, I feel somehow annoyed when I read you, Adrien said, pulling his hat down to his nose to block out the sun, although there wasn't much this early at daybreak, one gets lost in your maze like the twists and turns of medieval churches, there seems to be no way out, you skip from one subject to another till we don't know where we are, in these meandering constructs and interwoven paths it is all there, but we don't know why, music by the Viennese Alban Berg, paintings by the Frenchman Georges Seurat, and the anxiety of time arrested and slowly dissolving into a reddish mist in
Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte
, that same dissolution of time we are sensing this morning, all of us soon to be together here by the sea, dawn or morning, time already seems to be ahead of us, we appear and disappear like oil stains on a canvas, that's what you write, isn't this the inspiration of Charles and that corrosive salt of his, the salt of dissolution and disappearance, or of that thinking I detect behind Seurat's painting, quite ironic, as though a walk on the beach or a picnic were a prelude to a one-way trip to eternity, and all of a sudden you inundate us with your legal and political ideas, as if we hadn't thought about all that already, Kandinsky's painting, you talk about that too, first you confess to your fears that there are dictators who are barely getting started, just gearing up before making torture constitutional, an allowable necessity, and in the end there is nothing you don't get us to believe, of course, sometimes you're right, unfortunately it's certainly true that for more than four thousand years men have been executed in Iran because of their sexual orientation, people are killed every day for the misdemeanour of being different, what sort of world are we living in, he sighed finally, but don't go writing that all this might happen here, in our society, Daniel's musical ringtone went off, and Adrien turned to Suzanne, as though she had saved him from the meanders and mazes in Daniel's book, and feeling tender that she was still close and listening to him, he took her hand, and mopped the sweat beading on his brow with his handkerchief, how hot it is, dear, he said, and Daniel heard Vincent's thin voice saying, Papa, come and get me, when am I going to see you, Papa, remember that Sunday on the sailboat when the sky turned black and I had this violent, hacking cough, you saved me just in time, Papa, you carried me to the hospital in your arms, you're a hero for saving your son just in time, one second more, and it took so long to tie up the boat, and you kept saying, breathe, son, don't stop, we'll soon be at the hospital, one second more, and in that second I knew you were the hero to save me, it was a very long second, because tying up the boat in the rolling waves wasn't easy, you said, above all Vincent, don't stop breathing, you must know, Daniel said, what saved you son was the oxygen tank the doctor handed me, not me myself, it was life he had in his hands, Daniel was unhappy that his son's voice was practically a whimper, Papa, where are you, where are Mama and Marie-Sylvie, when am I going to see them and Samuel's boat
Southern Light
, Will in the wheelchair is happy because we got a visit from some actors, there's even a kid on a gurney because he had a bad attack during the night, really bad, like me on the boat, when you saved me, Papa, they say it's an independent theatre company with actors from all over who've come to entertain the kids who are sick, but I'm feeling better, Papa, I don't want to stay here anymore, it's fun when we play-act, or sing and dance, and I was OK enough to dance with a black musician wearing necklaces of all sorts of colours that tinkled in my ears, I felt for sure I was cured, Papa, will you come all the way to the mountains in Vermont to get me, Papa, with this homesick refrain, his voice went out like a little silver bell to his father and Marie-Sylvie, Papa,
Southern Light
, had the phone actually rung, had Daniel really heard the voice of his son, were the waves already drowning out Vincent's hesitant voice, his contained tears and his cough, it must be unthinkably hard to hear that your twenty-year-old daughter or son or both at once had been killed in the front of their armoured Hummer, a sheet over their remains, to hear it from a suspicious voice no parent wants to hear, in a murderous month with treacherous combat, to hear from this suspicious voice that you will never see them again, son or daughter, they had enrolled, and you couldn't stop them, in other times they had done it to pay for university, they'd fight forest fires, then suddenly safe, or so they thought, in their armoured Hummer, enrolled to fall in combat, killed in an ambush, what would Daniel have done if this shadowy voice had said, we regret to inform you that Vincent, the weaker one, and Samuel, we regret to inform you that your children, peacekeepers in the front of their armoured Hummer, have succumbed to their injuries, they left their unified families, Daniel thought, a world of model students, of playing in the schoolyard with their blonde Labrador, hoping one day to go to university, often poor or sons of workers, just kids, they left for the horror, stiff in the uniforms they would be buried in tomorrow, experienced in their warlike tasks, serving without knowing who, and dying without knowing why, just sensing in their fragile limbs, at the back of the neck, in the front of their armoured Hummer, that they were falling under enemy fire with no crowd to attend to them, a mother and father in a stupor, maybe a twin sister to survive them, suddenly deprived of identity with the other, as though having lost the use of an arm or leg, they would say she was the hundredth or two-hundredth to die, never this many girls since World War Two, never, fifteen-year-olds, sixteen-year-olds, twins, still close, flirting and wild, then suddenly the laughs shared with the brother or sister were gone, so was the flirting, so was the drinking, one wrote to her father, Dad, it'll soon be nightfall on the Tigris, forget about the fun and games when I was fifteen and wanted to go out with a different boy every night, I'm afraid, dear Dad, but I have an ideal, and it tells me there are things worth dying for, if I were to have an accident on patrol, remember these words I'm e-mailing you, I'll write tomorrow, now I can hear the crackle of firearms nearby, you have to expect, Dad, that all convoys will be attacked, though not every night or day, don't forget I'm going to register at university, that too is my ideal, more than any other, and as you often say, a family with lots of kids has no other choice, I'm not a soldier, I'm a peacekeeper, tell my twin sis I miss her a lot, I've never lived without her, even if we are always fighting, I miss sleeping in the same room with her at night, I want us both to register at the University of Madison, Julie wrote that she wanted to come out here with me, that we'd be safe together behind the lines, tell Julie, my dear twin sis, please, don't come out here, it's no place for you, there's too much burning near this post right now, too many suicide-bombs, I'm sending you a picture, Julie, the person you saw on TV targeted and shot on duty wasn't me, more gunfire, I've got to go now, dear family, till I see you on Easter furlough, what could a mother or father think re-reading these words, knowing now that the Easter visit had never happened, that they would never see their kids again, did it all have to replay over and over like the shootings of the cousins in Poland in 1942, when Great-uncle Samuel, for whom Samuel was named, died in the village of Lukow, Lublin, did it have to replay like that with a girl falling far from her sister in her armoured Hummer under enemy fire, and why was there always to be fire and enemies, with the young guard, her unwilling surrender and death, the rabbis prostrated themselves over and over, and near them, Great-uncle Samuel with bullets in him, if death gave way to life, why continue firing ceaselessly until the very seed is gone, thought Daniel, the root that still held firmly to the earth when tenacious life could not be put an end to, Suzanne thought she'd write to her daughters tonight, and she'd do it behind the Chinese screen so Adrien would not see her from his workroom and ask her, as he often did, for advice on one of his translations, dear girls, she'd write, your parents are in top health, and my hip fracture's no longer causing me problems, so we go to the tennis court every day, but I often think of Jean-Mathieu and Caroline, I love life and your father too much to . . . no, she'd write this instead, do you remember that letter I wrote you to tell you about my decision, or was it our decision, I don't remember, because I never really got to discuss it clearly with your father, well, anyway, today I'll tell you my decision, do you recall that the freely chosen end of a beautiful and enlightened life is not suicide?