Death, Sleep & the Traveler (8 page)

“Allert,” Ursula was saying, “my reason for leaving you is not sexual. Not at all sexual. It’s just that you don’t know yourself, that you have no idea of what you are, that in my opinion you are an open cesspool. Your jowls, your eyes like lenses for the treatment of myopia, your little cigars, your ungainly person, your perverse sense of humor, all this is nothing to me. But you have long since emotionally annihilated yourself, Allert, and I can no longer tolerate your silences, your silence in the throes of passion, the accounts of your dreams, the stink from the cesspool that is yourself.”

During this monologue a large white perfectly smooth ceramic bowl filled with fresh fat purple grapes stood coolly dripping on the table between us, which to me was either especially thoughtless of Ursula or especially cruel.

The knuckles of the vibraphone player were round and white and minutely smeared with small wet stains of fresh blood. He was playing the metal bars of his silly instrument with his knuckles which were split and bleeding. The bars
of the instrument were greased with the musician’s blood. The drummer and the saxophone player were women.

In my dream the nighttime village, which is poor and not at all the village of my birth, consists of no more than a dusty road flanked on one side by a candle-lit cathedral and on the other by a small unoccupied petrol station. The road is blanketed with dust and emerges from the darkness, the pitch darkness of empty night, into the brief space illuminated by the flickering light of the enormous anomaly of the cathedral—gothic, candle-lit in every crevice within and without, active with the breath of spirits, but empty—and illuminated also by the single unshaded bulb that glows beside the single outdoor pump of the petrol station. The road emerges into the light of the opposition between the palace for dead men and the hovel for dead autos, then disappears again into the night which to me is oddly familiar. I am not surprised to be alone in the barbaric village in this illuminated space within the context of the familiar night. I perceive and yet do not perceive the monstrous incongruity between the empty cathedral and abandoned petrol station, which consists of the pump and a doorless whitewashed hovel smelling of urine. Nor am I surprised at the silent appearance of the funeral procession, nor surprised to find myself a part of that procession as it too emerges into the light, a procession unattended by any person except myself and bearing in its slow midst only a high humpbacked black coffin. Nor surprised finally to discover myself identified with the coffin, as if it is my own
body that lies dressed for death inside. But when the coffin turns away into the great flickering panorama of the waiting cathedral, I turn in the opposite direction and pass through the unlighted and doorless entrance of the petrol station.

When I told this dream to Ursula, saying that it was one of my more important dreams, she laughed and said that I had not yet run out of gas, as she put it, despite my obvious fears. She picked up her magazine and remarked that I was actually fortunate not to have made my way already into the cathedral of death, reminding me of that other man who had died not so long ago and no matter how foolishly for her. Then she added that apparently I had not yet gotten over the religious hopes of my childhood after all, which was unfortunate since until I did those hopes would always be a screen between myself and the world in which I existed.

For some reason I chose that moment to ask Ursula if she ever discussed my dreams with Peter, but she did not reply.

“If you manage to destroy your guilt, my friend,” Peter said, “you will destroy yourself. You are quite different from Ursula and even from me, for instance, since all your generosity and even your strength depend on unfathomable guilt, which is part of your charm.”

While he stood there with pipe in mouth and the sun greasing the dead ducks at his feet, I told him in good-natured tones that I thought he was wrong.

“We’ll see, my friend,” he said. “We’ll see.”

In my dream I have become once more the silent little boy of my childhood, a plump and rather long-faced child in whom the features and temperament of the man to be are already evident, and I am securely situated in the village of my birth and, though it is clearly the darkest time of night and the village sleeps, nonetheless I am seated bibbed and powdered under a brightly shining light in the shop of the village barber. I hear running water, I hear the clicking of the shears, because the barber is wide-awake and at work on me. He smells of spice, and some kind of unguent that makes me quiver in pleasure and apprehension. We are alone, I am wearing my short trousers, my hiking boots, my monogrammed shirt with the broad white flowing collar. And from toes to neck my body is tented in the voluminous white bib which the barber has draped about me gently and pinned at my neck. I am drowsy, but I am totally aware of the night, the darkened streets and houses beyond the barber shop, the single electric light that smells like tallow, the movements of the barber who is clicking his steel shears between the slopes of my skull and the growth that is my childishly unattractive ear. But most of all I am aware of the barber’s mirror.

Within the mirror’s soft transparency I see myself, my slow eyes, and the blades of the steel shears. But into one edge of the rose-colored strips of wood that frame the mirror the barber has thrust a very large black and white photograph of a smiling girl who wears no clothes. She is seated on what appears to be the flowered bank of a canal for barges, and she is sitting with her legs to one side and
a slender arm propping up her thin and tender torso. Her clothes are piled at her side and in the right-hand portion of the photograph is plainly visible a small boy who is holding his bicycle and staring down at the naked girl posing so naturally for her photograph. Whenever I allow myself to stare into the soft white world of the mirror, watching the puffs of powder rising from the barber’s great fluffy brush with which he sweeps my tingling neck, I cannot help but stare also at the girl whose naked breasts are to me totally unfamiliar. I stare at the girl’s breasts, I cannot understand how they protrude as they do, nipped apparently by the spring and swollen.

The mirror and the photograph are drawing closer, the light sways, the barber turns my chair professionally, or so I think, but with the result that my view of the photograph is even more vivid than before. And I am aware of the tightness of the pants around my thighs, the smell of tallow, the girl’s nakedness, my breath that has become swallowed somewhere inside me, a terrible and delightful sensation as of a little finger stiffening inside my pants. The girl is watching, the girl understands what is happening while I do not and can only attempt to control my breath and prevent the barber from discovering what strange metamorphosis is occurring inside my tent. I am aware of the smell of alcohol, the scent of lilacs, in the picture the boy’s face is pained while I see in the mirror that my own face is pained as well. I find that I am spreading my plump thighs in a stealth quite unknown to me and that I am grinning in the unbearable pain of my boyish joy. And then I notice that the shears have stopped, that
the light bulb no longer sways, that the barber’s face is suddenly close to my naked ear.

“Touch your little penis,” he whispers gently, “touch it with the tip of your finger, little boy.”

I gasp, I blush, I wait, and then I do as he says. The girl is smiling at me in approval but the darkness inside my tent is soaking wet and between my legs a fierce pain lingers in the wake of the shock that was triggered by the tip of my finger and the whispering sounds of the barber’s voice.

When I told this dream to Ursula she said that it was charming and that it well explained my collector’s interest in pornography. And yet it would have been better for me, she said, had I been the boy with the bicycle and had there been no photographer to interrupt the child’s encounter with the sun-bathing girl. But of course it was amusing, she went on to say, that apparently even the rich life of sexuality shared by the two of us was still not sufficient to make unnecessary the psychic siphoning, as she called it, evident in my nocturnal emissions. It was then that she commented laughingly that I was drenched in sex.

I heard the tapping on the door. I heard excited voices and the sound of feet moving quickly across the deck outside. I heard the sound of her voice calling softly through the louvers of my cabin door.

“Allert? Are you there? We are passing the island. Won’t you come and look?”

I waited, stretched flat on the coverlet, and quite
distinctly I felt some alteration in the position of our tonnage as it shifted in the deep sea, and could not prevent myself from hearing the hivelike excitement of those passengers who were gathering on the starboard rail. I could hear the wind in the straw hats, I could hear the bodies crowding each other at the mahogany rail.