Augustino and the Choir of Destruction (7 page)

it seems, thought Samuel, that nothing can erase those words from the Book of Hate, the inheritance from Samuel's grandfather Joseph and his great-uncle shot there in the snow, it had so distraught Daniel in his youth that his sole refuge from the memory had been in drugs, and now it was Samuel who was torn apart by the revealed violence of the world, history's spectator assimilated all he saw of the unfolding documentary, the filmed events were confusing, here one recalled Lenin's death mask held up to the crowd, why, though, had an unidentified young anarchist woman shot but not killed him, for a long time the bullet from the revolver had stayed in the revolutionary's neck, and it troubled Samuel that this young anarchist had carried out this irrational act of courage, but why, there would be no answer because the anarchist was killed, what was it that made her throw away her life and youth for some never-to-be-understood higher purpose, our lives are just such ephemeral gestures as hers, ending in the death she intended to deliver to someone else, she had learned her radical lessons from master theoreticians she had read or contacted, and become the enemy of all hierarchies and states, but in taking aim at Lenin, she had acted alone, a sterile act of suicide in which perhaps she had seen a liberating, evangelical dimension, who would know since she had been killed on the spot, something comparable would have happened to her today, piloting a plane with which she would go down in flames on embassies in Africa, the army of terror to which she would belong would send her to destroy herself along with the consuls and consulates, and no one would ever know her name any more than they would have in Lenin's time, because these volunteers were punished with silenced names, even though every day they were there ready to die, everywhere the anarchist would be the archangel of death with her wings striking Kenya yesterday, Tanzania tomorrow, or maybe even Samuel's dance school, or again the theatre that performed Arnie Graal's choreography each night, perhaps he lived, Samuel thought, lived and breathed inside the unstable framework over which the deity of anarchy reigned from on high, like the painting by Hiraki Sawa, which was both animated film and a changing black-and-white picture, the artist who paints or dances in his studio while airplanes take off from his kitchen table and land on his bed, the sky of studio and bedroom intermingling with the sky outside where impersonal planes do criss-cross, and this now is how we live, watching the stormy trajectories in the sky from over a cupboard, as in the Japanese painting or from his unmade bed, the planes streaking at high speed across the plasma screens that broadcast their jagged and wavering journey, the life and art of Samuel, his predilection for music and dance were, after all, transposed onto a living drama, the immense tension of an immediate present not yet ready to be archived like his parents' and grandparents' past, while the planes seemed to take off from the kitchen table in Samuel's little studio and land on his bed — like in Hiraki Sawa's filmed self-portrait — a voice said beware, we are here at your door, whether you want us or not, you are part of our design, on the grid, woven into us, the design of your future life, whatever happens, you must bend to our service, and Samuel walked along the street where he had seen Our Lady of the Bags, wondering where she was now, under what pile of rocks or toxic stones, he longed to say to her, as the morning sun dawned on the city, maybe you were right, Lady of the Bags, won't we both be, as you said, you and me tomorrow or whenever, witness to all killings, where are you living, I can't find you, and Caroline said, I don't want this breakfast, Harriett, I don't want anything, oh I know they're all just waiting around to get the inheritance, cousins and all, but they won't get a thing, I'm giving it all to Charly, it isn't much of a fortune now, Ma'am, said Miss Désirée, that girl Charly that you let in here, why what a shame, be quiet Harriett, said Caroline, she waited on me, so don't speak ill of her, but I will have a bit of tea before I go out, where are my hat and gloves and cloth handbag, the one with the compact and keys, Miss Désirée, and why am I shut up here like this? Will Adrien and Suzanne be coming to dinner tonight, and Charly, where is she? I must go out, I just have to see her, I understand everything, her meanness, her thieving, her swindles, when I pretended not to notice, she told me all about it, even where all the injustice began: no one wants to remember, but the memory punctuated her life, her delinquency and her mistakes, the
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left all those African and Jamaican slaves to drown, that's memorable enough, so why would Charly, as a Jamaican, not remember? I couldn't bear it, I was as guilty as the others of the
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, and what if the servants in my parents' home were well treated, I was the one who said to Charly, take everything I have, send this money to your family in Jamaica, no, she said, now wasn't that honest and upright, because of the white man, my father and his pirate ancestors, slave-merchants, alone carried the blame, or maybe when I could no longer stand seeing that boat at night with the pitiful shadows swimming around its machinery, I said, Charly, what's mine is yours, you sign these cheques for me, it's OK, I'll let you, why would I want to live now that Jean-Mathieu is gone, there now, his name isn't slipping away from me, Jean-Mathieu, that was his name, without him, why was I living anyway, and the vessel
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massaged the waters, that was the nightmare that haunted my nights, obliterating all, chewing up one-by-one all those who were lost, including Charly's mother and sisters whom I photographed on the beach, and I said take it all, Charly, then she kissed me and said, aren't we great together, just the two of us, Caroline, please get rid of that cook and that secretary and that maid, and let's just be alone together, and I told her they've been with me for many years, from my parents' house to here, I can't live without them, nor could I offend them, like Charles with Cyril, how did it come about that I obeyed and submitted to all her whims, when more than ever the
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went down in my dreams leaving behind her a wake of slaves, in the pool naked, Charly snorted out water, so perhaps I liberated her by giving her what she wanted, didn't I? Charles wrote me that Cyril was under contract and often had to leave for England or the US, was that really true or not, he was hailed in plays by Tennessee Williams, Charles wrote, he and the heroes of the plays shared the same sensibility and aversions, I don't know if Charles was exaggerating, but he was often alone in the Indian springtime, writing solitary in his ashram, springtime and his flowers, the greed of Cyril's young and tempestuous body along with the ecstasy of Indian spring, perhaps it was a bit evanescent, where Charles saw in Cyril a vigorous animal of youth, and I wonder if Cyril was as acclaimed as all that, perhaps he was more like an illusory peacock spreading his magnificent plumage around Charles, bewitching him with the metallic glint of eyes so very clear that Charles did not properly realize their numbing effect, was this what it meant to love, he wrote, these departures and absences, I'm still waiting for the reviews that will prove all this really necessary, but so far, nothing, doubtless, Cyril's being so non-conformist and visited with a natural disobedience, he must have shared the nervous sensibility of the great Southern author's main characters, just one thing missing, though, no matter what he did, Cyril was never at fault like those heroes he played; he was never culpable or unpardonable, though Charles often had proof to the contrary, he was a being devoid of any sense of culpability, no matter what he did, and yet didn't an actor have to experience every state of being? It was something missing in Cyril, wrote Charles, and where was he, why hadn't he written yet, and I thought, here we are, Charles and I, under the spells of our respective witches, waiting for a word on the cell phone, a letter, the parsimonious charity of a friendly word, when Jean-Mathieu hadn't written or phoned, I used to ask Charly, what's that liquid you pour into my glass, and she said, it's to help you sleep tonight. The
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dissolved into the night waters, I did sleep better and stopped waiting up for Charly when she came in at dawn and the noise of her shoes thrown against the wall. The sad part is that Cyril glories in seducing women as much as men, Charles wrote, imagine all the hearts he breaks, but he never gives them a thought, it's like the way he crushes beer cans one after another between those long fingers of his, I can't stand the noise or the damage he does to himself with too much alcohol, women and boys, of course he did not actually write any of this, but I could read it in what his solitude left out, his disappointed tenderness, or maybe it was my own, I asked Charly, what is that you're pouring into my glass and why? She would say, well, it's to stop your migraines, you'll see, you won't feel a thing, and she was right, I gave in to the mysterious numbing of pain and slept better for it, all at once, I got a letter from Charles, Cyril was back from Delhi, and they were happy together, really, no lie, oh Charles, how could you have been touched by doubt, he reproached himself, Cyril had been hailed in London and Boston, what a gifted actor and friend, whether it was true or not, I believed it too, after all, Cyril could probably play any role, including the gigolo with a loving and unfathomable heart, or a character with more sophisticated inner disapproval, he was as stimulating on the stage as in life, awoke the sleeping flesh, and people threw themselves at his feet with gratitude, I dreamed around that time that a letter arrived from Charles in India, no words, just staples, needles and pins glittering like delicate silver signs on matte paper, my eyes burned to read these symbols, each one finely chiselled, was it my concession to Charly, or did I simply hear about it from Charles, like each one of his concessions to Cyril, an increasing number of them by both Charles and me, I don't know how I ended up arguing with Charly, I think she had her eye on a piece of jewelry I could not give her, a family gift I held very dear, it was crazy, but all of sudden I dug my heels in and said to myself, no, not that, my fierce child, I'm not giving in to you, must you strip me of everything, well, what had I done for her to become violent like that, her hand on my face, I could have fired her on the spot, but I didn't, I just locked myself in my room for days, although she begged forgiveness, seeing the mark on my face, I decided to stay there and not come out, after all, what would my friends say, Adrien, Suzanne, Chuan, Olivier and all the others, Charles hit his head accidentally against a tree during a race with Cyril, and both of us were degraded and humiliated, we were shot through with pins and needles as Charly had done many times to her voodoo dolls, so why didn't I fire her then, and Charles wrote that what happened with Cyril was a little accident, you know, dear, how hopeless I am at sports racing, I should simply not have been so hardy, that's all, young people are always right to be intrepid and daring, but us never, we're going to Holland for a few days, Cyril and I, was it a mere accident or not, still I mustn't see my friends like that, no matter how slight the mark, in fact under a wide straw hat it didn't show at all, just vanity of course, but I got in the habit of not going out, not that Charly had to force me to it, that was what I wanted, or at least my will was like a flickering lamp, and thought about the time when my villa, with its gazebos and cottages, my house had welcomed all of glittering society, oh, it wasn't like Mélanie and Daniel's, which became a home for refugees like Julio, Jenny, Marie-Sylvie de la Toussaint, but I did host an intelligent elite with Charles, and Frédéric in my garden and around my pool, if I was a woman of the world, it was with artistic passion and the intention of photographing all those faces around me, I had the impression of being the architect of all this . . . I had retained something of my unused training in architecture, studies interrupted by the war, plunging into a first marriage, so many mistakes, I still had the feel and manual bent for plans, constructions, faces, and images of friends and people I knew less well, I felt like an architect when I collected and consolidated them with my camera eye, put them into a structure and aesthetic ordering, that was before Charly, when I was with Jean-Mathieu and dignified, I used to say, welcome to my house and my table everybody, it wasn't Charly adding something to my drink back then, it was the euphoria from an intoxication I really benefited from, drops of a deadlier poison; ah yes, a feeling of guilt I had never had before, what wasn't yet in my nature became so, actions, even those I hadn't performed, were prejudicial, the boat
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with all those drowned aboard began appearing in my dreams, why had the worthy, light-hearted, complacent woman in me never before had this impression of letting others down, this poison was the shadow of all my thoughts, I could have told Charly, enough, I won't hear any more, but I didn't, perhaps my whole started to go tip with the
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as it went down amid the waves, the memory of the falconer's return and of the child, the little girl that we dropped from the boat at sea, my first husband and I, there you go, we don't want you, you have to be gone from your mother's womb before you are viable, this was neither the time nor the epoch to be born, quick, let's throw her overboard, for many women abortion was butchery in those days, I was hatefully indifferent, I felt mutilated but indifferent, true or false, we went out so much it was dizzying, shallow, cruel amusements, hunting gazelle from an open convertible, deer captured dying on the railway tracks, either this is how we thought of it or this is what he said, this is not the time nor the epoch, dark days, a fascist era in Europe, darkness over the earth, the disillusioned unemployed, the hungry everywhere waiting for bread, lines of men and women in the streets hopeful for what never comes, desperate farmers, women sitting on barrels in front of tents, young immigrants already so tired in their cotton dresses, worn down by poverty, cold and hungry November days, the brutal forces advancing everywhere on women and children, we had no choice, that's just the way it was, everything went too fast, perhaps we simply had no time, and in the darkness there was nothing else to be done, the child was not to be born, come to grips with it, yes, those drops Charly put in my glass every evening weren't good for me, the child, one of the wrecks, the