Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (42 page)

“One doesn’t need clothes here,” I remarked. “You can go naked, if you
want.”

“Quelle vie!”
he exclaimed.
“C’est fantastique.”

Later that morning, as he was shaving, he asked if I didn’t have some talcum
powder. “Of course,” I said, and handed him the can I used. “Do you by chance have any
Yardley?” he asked. “No,” I said, “why?”

He gave me a strange, half-girlish, half-guilty smile. “I can’t use anything
but Yardley. Maybe when you go to town again you can get me some, yes?”

Suddenly it seemed as if the ground opened under my feet. Here he was, safe
and secure, with a haven for the rest of his life in the midst of
“un vrai paradis,”
and he must have Yardley’s talcum powder! Then and there I should have obeyed my instinct and
said: “Beat it! Get back to your Purgatory!”

It was a trifling incident and, had it been any other man, I would have
dismissed it immediately, put it down as a caprice, a foible, an idiosyncrasy, anything but an
ominous presage. But of that instant I knew my wife was right, knew that I had made a grave
mistake. In that moment I sensed the leech that Anaïs had tried to get rid of. I saw the
spoiled child, the man who had never done an honest stroke of work in his life, the destitute
individual who was too proud to beg openly but was not above milking a friend dry. I knew it
all, felt it all, and already foresaw the end.

Each day I endeavored to reveal some new aspect of the region to him. There
were the sulphur baths, which he found marvelous—better
than a European
spa because natural, primitive, unspoiled. There was the “virgin forest” hard by, which he
soon explored on his own, enchanted by the redwoods, the madrones, the wild flowers and the
luxuriant ferns. Enchanted even more by what he called “neglect,” for there are no forests in
Europe which have the unkempt look of our American forests. He could not get over the fact
that no one came to take the dead limbs and trunks which were piled crisscross above one
another on either side of the trail. So much firewood going to waste! So much building
material lying unused, unwanted, and the men and women of Europe crowded together in miserable
little rooms without heat. “What a country!” he exclaimed. “Everywhere there is abundance. No
wonder the Americans are so generous!”

My wife was not a bad cook. In fact, she was a rather good cook. There was
always plenty to eat and sufficient wine to wash the food down. California wines, to be sure,
but he thought them excellent, better in fact than the
vin rouge ordinaire
one gets
in France. But there was one thing about the meals which he found difficult to adjust to—the
absence of soup with each meal. He also missed the suite of courses which is customary in
France. He found it hard to accommodate himself to a light lunch, which is the American
custom. Midday was the time for the big meal. Our big meal was at dinner. Still, the cheeses
weren’t bad and the salads quite good, all things considered, though he would have preferred
l’huile d’arachide
(peanut oil) to the rather copious use of olive oil which we
indulged in. He was glad we used garlic liberally. As for the
bifteks
, never had he
eaten the like abroad. Now and then we dug up a little cognac for him, just to make him feel
more at home.

But what bothered him most was our American tobacco. The cigarettes in
particular were atrocious. Was it not possible to dig up some
gauloises bleues
,
perhaps in San Francisco or New York? I opined that it was indeed but that they would be
expensive. I suggested that he try Between the Acts. (Meanwhile, without telling him, I begged
my friends in the big cities to rustle up some
French cigarettes.) He
found the little cigars quite smokable. They reminded him of something even more to his
liking—cheroots. I dug up some Italian stogies next time I went to town. Just ducky! Good!
We’re getting somewhere, thought I to myself.

One problem we hadn’t yet solved was stationery. He had need, he maintained,
for paper of a certain size. He showed me a sample which he had brought with him from Europe.
I took it to town to see if it could be matched. Unfortunately it couldn’t. It was an odd
size, a size we had no demand for apparently. He found it impossible to believe that such
could be the case. America made everything, and in abundance. Strange that one couldn’t match
an ordinary piece of paper. He grew quite incensed about it. Holding up the sample sheet,
flicking it with his fingernail, he exclaimed: “Anywhere in Europe one can find this paper,
exactly this size. And in America, which has everything, it can’t be found.
C’est
emmerdant!”

To be frank, it was shitty to me too, the bloody subject. What could he be
writing that demanded the use of paper precisely that size? I had got him his Yardley talc,
his
gauloises bleues
, his eau de cologne, his powdered, slightly perfumed pumice
stone (for a dentifrice), and now he was plaguing me about paper.

“Step outside a moment, won’t you?” I begged. I spoke quietly, gently,
soothingly. “Look out there … look at that ocean! Look at the sky!” I pointed to the flowers
which were in bloom. A hummingbird had just made as if to alight on the rose bush in front of
us. All its motors were whirring.
“Regardez-moi ça!” I
exclaimed. I allowed a due
pause. Then, in a very even tone of voice I said: “When a man has all this, can he not write
just as well on toilet paper if he has to?”

It registered.

“Mon vieux,”
he began, “I hope you don’t think I am exigent….”

“I do indeed,” said I.

“You must forgive me. I’m sorry. Nobody could be more grateful than I for all
you have done.”

“My dear Moricand, I am not asking for gratitude. I’m
asking for a little common sense.” (I wanted to say “horse sense” but couldn’t think of the
equivalent in French immediately.) “Even if we had no paper at all I would expect you to be
happy. You’re a free man now, do you realize that? Why, god-damn it, you’re better off than I
am! Look, let’s not spoil all this”—I gestured loosely toward the sky, the ocean, the birds of
the air, the green hills—“let’s not spoil all this with talk of paper, cigarettes, talcum
powder and such nonsense. What we should be talking about is—
God.”

He was crestfallen. I felt like apologizing then and there, but I didn’t.
Instead I strode off in the direction of the forest. In the cool depths I sat down beside a
pool and proceeded to give myself what the French call an
examen de conscience
. I
tried to reverse the picture, put myself in his boots, look at myself through
his
eyes. I didn’t get very far, I must confess. Somehow, I just could not put myself in his
boots.

“Had my name been Moricand,” said I softly to myself, “I would have killed
myself long ago.”

In one respect he was an ideal house guest—he kept to himself most of the day.
Apart from meal times, he remained in his room almost the entire day, reading, writing,
perhaps meditating too. I worked in the studio-garage just above him. At first the sound of my
typewriter going full blast bothered him. It was like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun in
his ears. But gradually he got used to it, even found it stimulating, he said. At lunch and
dinner he relaxed. Being so much on his own, he seized these occasions to engage us in
conversation. He was the kind of talker it is difficult to disengage once he has sunk his
hooks into you. Lunch times I would often pull myself away abruptly, leaving him to work it
out as best he could with my wife. Time is the one thing I regard as precious. If I had to
waste time, I preferred to waste it in taking a nap rather than in listening to my friend
Moricand.

Dinner was another matter. It was hard to find an excuse for
terminating these sessions at my own time. It would have been a pleasure to glance at a
book after dinner, since there was never any time for reading during the day, but I never got
the chance. Once we were seated for the evening meal we were in for it till he had exhausted
himself. Naturally, our conversations were all in French. Moricand had intended to learn a
little English but after a few attempts gave it up. It was not a “sympathetic” language to
him. It was even worse than German, he thought. Fortunately, my wife spoke some French and
understood a lot more, but not enough to follow a man with Moricand’s gift of speech. I
couldn’t always follow him myself. Every now and then I would have to halt the flow, ask him
to repeat what he had just said in simpler language, then translate it for my wife. Now and
then I would forget myself and give him a spate of English, soon arrested of course by his
blank look. To translate these bursts was like sweating out a cold. If, as frequently
happened, I had to explain something to my wife in English, he would pretend that he
understood. She would do the same when he conveyed something confidential to me in French.
Thus it happened that often the three of us were talking three different subjects, nodding,
agreeing with one another, saying Yes when we meant No, and so on, until the confusion became
so great that we all threw up our hands simultaneously. Then we would begin all over, sentence
by sentence, thought by thought, as if struggling to cement a piece of string.

Nevertheless, and despite all frustration, we managed to understand one
another exceedingly well. Usually it was only in the long, overembroidered monologue that we
lost him. Even then, astray in the complicated web of a long-drawn-out story or a windy
explanation of some hermeneutic point, it was a pleasure to listen to him. Sometimes I would
deliberately let go my attention, facilitate the process of getting lost, in order to better
enjoy the music of his words. At his best he was a one man orchestra.

It made no difference, when he was in the groove, what he chose to talk
about—food, costume, ritual, pyramids, Trismegistus or
Eleusinian
mysteries. Any theme served as a means to exploit his virtuosity. In love with all that is
subtle and intricate, he was always lucid and convincing. He had a feminine flair for
preciosities, could always produce the exact timbre, shade, nuance, odor, taste. He had the
suavity, velleity and mellifluousness of an enchanter. And he could put into his voice a
resonance comparable in effect to the sound of a gong reverberating in the deathlike silence
of a vast desert. If he spoke of Odilon Redon, for example, his language reeked of fragrant
colors, of exquisite and mysterious harmonies, of alchemical vapors and imaginings, of pensive
broodings and spiritual distillations too impalpable to be fixed in words but which words
could evoke or suggest when marshaled in sensorial patterns. There was something of the
harmonium in the use he made of his voice. It was suggestive of some intermediate region, the
confluence, say, of divine and mundane streams where form and spirit interpenetrated, and
which could only be conveyed musically. The gestures accompanying this music were limited and
stereotyped, mostly facial movements—sinister, vulgarly accurate, diabolical when restricted
to the mouth and lips, poignant, pathetic, harrowing, when concentrated in the eyes.
Shudderingly effective when he moved his whole scalp. The rest of him, his body, one might
say, was usually immobile, except for a slight tapping or drumming with the fingers now and
then. Even his intelligence seemed to be centered in the sound box, the harmonium which was
situated neither in the larynx nor in the chest but in a middle region which corresponded to
the locus empyrean whence he drew his imagery.

Staring at him abstractly in one of those fugitive moments when I caught
myself wandering among the reeds and bulrushes of my own vagaries, I would find myself
studying him as if through a reflector, his image changing, shifting like swift-moving cloud
formations: now the sorrowful sage, now the sybil, now the grand cosmocrator, now the
alchemist, now the stargazer, now the mage. Sometimes he looked Egyptian, sometimes Mongolian,
sometimes Iroquois or Mohican, sometimes Chaldean, sometimes Etruscan.
Often very definite figures out of the past leaped to mind, figures he either seemed to
incarnate momentarily or figures he had affinities with. To wit: Montezuma, Herod,
Nebuchadnezzar, Ptolemy, Balthasar, Justinian, Solon. Revelatory names, in a way. However
conglomerate, in essence they served to coalesce certain elements of his nature which
ordinarily defied association. He was an alloy, and a very strange one at that. Not bronze,
not brass, not electrum. Rather some nameless colloidal sort of alloy such as we associate
with the body when it becomes a prey to some rare disease.

There was one image he bore deep within him, one he had created in youth and
which he was never to shake off: “Gloomy Gus.” The day he showed me a photograph of himself at
the age of fifteen or sixteen I was profoundly disturbed. It was almost an exact replica of my
boyhood friend, Gus Schmelzer, whom I used to tease and plague beyond endurance because of his
somber, morose, eternally somber and morose mien. Even at that age-perhaps earlier, who
knows?—there were engraved in Moricand’s psyche all the modalities which such terms as lunar,
saturnian and sepulchral evoke. One could already sense the mummy which the flesh would
become. One could see the bird of ill omen perched on his left shoulder. One could feel the
moonlight altering his blood, sensitizing his retina, dyeing his skin with the pallor of the
prisoner, the drug addict, the dweller on forbidden planets. Knowing him, one might even
visualize those delicate antennae of which he was altogether too proud and on which he placed
a reliance which overtaxed his intuitive muscles, so to speak. I might go further—why not?—and
say that, looking deep into his sorrowful eyes, somber, simian eyes, I could see skull within
skull, an endless, cavernous Golgotha illumined by the dry, cold, murderous light of a
universe beyond the imaginative bounds of even the hardiest scientific dreamer.