The Fata Morgana Books (5 page)

* * *

These images, so clumsy and ordinary, filled me with joy: transported into rapture, as if by the sweetness of a ripe peach, I felt as if I were about to lift off from the ground. Outside, now, it was dark; the city’s lights shone in front of sky and sea confused into a single vast endless black surface. I watched the video several times; each time, it stuck in my gaze, nailed all my desires, usually so fluid, to a single blind point before which I found myself transfixed, breathless.

* * *

However, as I rather quickly discovered, this was just a poor sample of a considerable series, mass-produced by a production company a little savvier than the others; yet this knowledge changed nothing, absolutely nothing: these images remained what they were, frozen in the eternal repetition of their so violently human perfection. I no longer left my room, I hardly even moved from my mattress; I could just barely get up when I felt an urgent need. Eating, drinking, they no longer concerned me; of course I was ill, but I had no way of knowing that unless someone told me; but no one came, I stayed there alone in the midst of my funhouse mirrors, which altered not the image they reflected, but the very person who was mirrored. The same friend finally gave me, by telephone, some good advice: “You should go find a doctor.” I had two doctors—thin, stiff women in their long white smocks, one still young and quite attractive, the other much older and more talkative too. “You definitely do not look well,”she said with birdlike gestures.Together,they had me undress, listened to my chest, palpated me, examined the various orifices of my body, with comments that were cryptic to me, but no doubt rich in meaning for them. In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there. They sent me home with some medicine, somewhat randomly selected I think, and I took it at random too, in the following spirit: if my condition got better, then the remedy was good, and if it got worse, then it was bad.

* * *

Despite my poor health, I still occasionally watched the little film. I had finally realized something: more than the sight of it, which had so absorbed me, it was the sound of this scene that moved me so violently. I made this discovery entirely by chance; by mistake, I had cut the sound on my computer; muted, these images were nothing more than grotesque gesticulations. Whereas all I had to do was close my eyes and listen to the groans, the gasps, the broken, stammered words, the interrupted breathing, to find myself rapt again: a dazzling, almost blinding discovery, this, but limited nonetheless, in that the echo of these sounds, which at first opened the way, itself ended up forming an elusive obstacle, flexible but insuperable; caught in its snare, I found myself once again rejected, brutally returned to myself, and thus everything began all over again, in a crazy whirling that only rooted me deeper in my own impossibility.

* * *

“Come with us!” my friend had called out, peremptorily— how to resist such a command? Thus I found myself with a whole company of people in another city, where a
feria
was taking place. Jubilation reigned in the streets, borne by a huge crowd, happy and overexcited, maddened as much by the liberties allowed on these few days as by the sun, the alcohol, the laughter, and the disordered jostling of bodies. We walked about aimlessly; whenever we felt like it, we would drink some chilled wine, standing in the street or packed into crowded cafés. Toward evening, my friend announced: “Come, let’s go and see the bullfight.” But I needed a cigar for that, and so I went into the first tobacco shop I saw, where the shopkeeper barked out: “A cigar, sure, but which one? What kind do you want?”—“Whichever you like, as long as it lasts through six bulls.” In the arena, people were crammed into the stone tiers; the ring spread out at our feet, a pale disk surrounded with red by a bright barrier of painted boards. Nothing could trouble its calm orderliness: not the shouts and gesticulations of the crowd, not the music started up by the brass band, not the succession—by turns measured and frenzied—of figures formed and dissolved by the men in glittering costumes around the bull, a black, brutal monster overflowing with vigor, and yet so quickly killed. When the mules dragged away its body, the blood inscribed a long red comma on the sand; men quickly raced forward with rakes to erase it, so that nothing would come to disturb the placid surface that reflected the glory and triumph of the killer of bulls. Everything delighted me, the movements that won roaring ovations as well as those that elicited boos, and I paid as much attention to the long ash on my cigar as to the horn of the animal, appearing and disappearing in the undulating folds of the pink and yellow capes. Already the fifth bull was charging out of the depths of the arena. The man who had to kill it was, apparently, famous for his talent, the purity of his style and of his movements. When the bull stopped, panting, nervous, confused, he provoked it from very far away, almost the opposite side of the red circle, before moving forward with tiny steps, stiff and with his back arched, using his voice and his cape to encourage the animal to charge, which it always ended up doing; then, motionless, feet together and chest proudly flung out, the man would calmly make the animal flow around him, like a current eddying around a rock. I had, of course, had the rules of the game explained to me: nothing required the man to remain in place, to offer his belly or his loins to the horn, so close sometimes that it snagged the gilt decorations on his costume; it was a question of etiquette, which in this affair was everything; wounds or death weren’t taken into consideration. And now the man was getting ready to kill the bull; drawn up onto the tips of his toes, turned sideways, he was aiming his long curved sword at the back of the bull’s neck, straight between the horns of the exhausted animal, doomed but still raging; his left hand with its piece of red flannel crossed in front of his body, he dove straight in; a moment later, he was bouncing on the horns, a limp puppet, a rag doll, grotesque in his beautiful gilt costume, as if he were to remain caught up there forever, while his assistants rushed in shouting and vainly waving their capes. Finally he fell to the ground, the men drove the animal back, others tried to carry away the wounded man; “It’s nothing,” he seemed to say as he got up and grasped the sword held out to him, “it’s nothing.” He returned to stand facing the bull. His face, his hands, his shining outfit were coated in blood; arched back, in profile, he held his sword up with his fingertips, in a perfect triangle with his arm, as if to salute his adversary, and he stared at it with two round, black eyes, empty of all thought except the perfection of the gesture to be repeated, eyes that gazed at the animal to be killed the same way they would have gazed at a mirror. Then he made one swift gesture, and already he was turning his back on the staggering bull, dragged into the ballet of capes thrown under its muzzle, the sword planted to the hilt in its neck; he walked away without turning back, toward the red barrier, as the animal collapsed heavily behind him, its four hooves in the air, pointed at the sky.

* * *

That night, I found myself in a cellar; on a stage in the back, some men dressed in black, sitting on simple wooden chairs, their feet flat on the stage, were playing music. It was very beautiful; but to tell the truth, what I especially liked was the curtain drawn behind them, a long curtain with folds of garnet velvet, illumined with a bright light. Someone had handed me a drink, red also, in a tall, straight glass, I didn’t really know what it was, wine perhaps; I was sitting at a little round table, in the company of many people, I didn’t quite know who they were; my friend must have been there, but maybe he had gone away. After a while, a few young women came out onto the stage, wearing long black dresses spangled with red dots, like fat blood-red moons scattered across a night sky; they danced with stiff movements, yet their stiffness was strangely supple, forming and then unmaking squares and circles; when they twirled, upright and proud, their ample skirts flew around their fine muscular legs, opening up into large fluid circlets, like the wheel of a cape spun out behind his back by a haughty matador ending a series of passes by bringing his bull to its knees. The women stood out from the red curtain like shadows, they whirled round clicking their heels; they were made even more present by these rhythmic sounds and the figures they formed, static, almost clumsily linked figures, like the poorly connected passes of a novice still unsure of his animal, than by their bodies eclipsed behind the cloth of the moon-dresses; only the sweat soaking their armpits, visible when they raised their arms to snake their wrists around and snap their fingers, reminded one from time to time of their materiality. I was slowly getting drunk, and this drunkenness made me euphoric; yet at the same time, just like the bullfighter’s gestures in the center of the arena’s red circle, just like the movements of the dancers on the rectangle of the stage, it too, I realized, was a form of communion, the step beyond that imperceptibly opens up the road to the world of death, revealing to the one taking it that it already stretches far behind him, and always has.

* * *

I returned to the arena; beneath the flaming wheel of the sun, the red barrier was gleaming, its sweeping curve diagonally sliced by the line of shadow. Yet I passed from one circle to the other: for when I plunged my gaze into the circle formed by the arena, I finally found myself faced not with the bull and its horns, but with myself, my pale, distraught face, reflected in the dull halo of the mirror in my bedroom; and the flesh the bull’s horn gouged, when it caught the unfortunate matador in the muscular triangle inside the thigh, almost by chance and in exactly the same way I sometimes happened to catch the soft, vulnerable triangle of a girl chance drove into my arms, this flesh then was in a way probably none other than my own, offered naked, without any protection—neither the ridiculous covering afforded by lace underwear, nor the dazzling and sovereign protection signified by the matador’s fabulous suit of light—possibly only the protection of endless desire, flitting back and forth like a muleta shaken by the wind, a bloody, elusive, derisory rag, confusing all these forms into one impossible gesture, only to separate them forever.

* * *

In my bedroom, I would spend hour after hour resting, lying on my mattress, the curtains drawn but the French door wide open, letting the breeze play over my bare skin. My head turned to the wall, the round mirror reminded me of its presence; it no longer reflected my body, but its circle was filled with the dark, rumpled folds of the curtain, constantly agitated by the wind. When some need or other came over me, I would get up. The water, stretched out far beyond my windows, drew me; all of a sudden, I desired it passionately, frantically, but this desire brought with it neither the patience to leave the city again, nor the courage to confront the crowds and the noise and dirtiness of the beaches at the bottom of the streets. Further along, though, up the little hill, there was a swimming pool, a simple solution to these difficulties, and to get there, the metro. At one stop, a young couple came and sat down next to me, first the boy, then, on his lap, her back to his chest, the girl. She wore white overalls cut short and was greedily devouring a banana; from the side, I could see her freckles, she seemed rather ordinary, but lively and high-spirited. I couldn’t see the boy at all: with his hand, he was caressing his friend’s belly, and at each movement his smooth, downy arm brushed against my own, as if we were all three taking part in this affectionate gesture, as if without consulting each other they wanted to include me with them, and I was delighted at this, I was grateful to them for this friendly presence. The girl had finished her banana; taking advantage of another stop, she leaped out of the car to throw away the skin, then quickly flung herself back inside, laughing, and returned to slide down onto the legs of the boy, who resumed his caresses. Their image was reflected in the rectangle of the window opposite, I observed the girl, now slumped back in her man’s arms, leaning on him with all her weight, happy. At the pool, a large open-air blue square overlooking the city, I gaily plunged my body into the cool, clear water; as I paddled about, or leaned on the edge, my eyes could run over the vast expanses of buildings, piles of blocks confusedly heaped up by a clumsy child, or else, drifting on my back, I could lose myself in the immense wavering dome of the sky. All around me rang out laughter, happy shouts, the sounds of water; bare bodies glistened in the sun; nearby, in another pool, bold, graceful children were attempting acrobatic dives from high diving boards of various heights. They always dove in groups, the girls with the girls and the boys with the boys; their temerity filled me with wonder: never would I have been capable of such beautiful, precise, courageous movements. When I climbed out of the water, I sat down still dripping at a little round table and ordered a dish of lime sorbet; I let the sun dry me as I ate the ice and watched the children dive. Two little girls had placed themselves at the edge of the highest diving board, a dozen meters above the water, with their backs to the pool, their arms alongside their body, their little muscles distinct and taut: as if on cue, they simultaneously let themselves topple backward into the void, stiff as boards; suspended in mid-air, they slowly unfolded their arms to form a point above their heads, just in time to break the surface of the water like a powerful arrow. Already other laughing kids were taking their place, I happily finished my sorbet, with each little spoonful savoring the wait before returning to the sweetness of the water.