A Change of Skin (59 page)

So: we've returned and we cross my garden with its volcanoes and mountains of trash and its lakes and seas of mud. We come to my make-believe castle, that elevated place of turrets, spires, battlements, and towers where we may besiege ourselves and be besieged, where we can stroll into the observatory and align our lives with the stars, my pyramid, my fortress, my basilica, in one word, my pad, which if you should happen to pass this way, mark it well, soul brother, is your pad too, any time, any time at all. We climb the corkscrew steel stairs, curled conch-shell listening post, sentinel always alert, and file into the enormous living room which at the moment is dark as Satan's asshole and equally as cold, yet docile and willing to greet us as we may greet it, to suit its shadows and colors and smells to the light and color and smells of whatever we may feel and be. And what do we do as we enter? Do we light the candles and build a fire in the fireplace and smoke and cough and hum and sit down on the old chairs and the dirty reed carpets and ask for a drink and paint our lips and scratch our balls and glance at our reflections in a mirror in the darkness? No, not quite. One of us who is a priest although he wears Ivy League garb and carries a black portfolio that ought to be carried by a lawyer or a traveling salesman moves forward and opens the portfolio and takes out and offers a small paper bag that contains desiccated dream. The Monks accept and put the bits of mushroom into their mouths and chew slowly, at the same time beginning one of their throbbing litanies, chanting with a single voice,
we are erring truth, we are the lonely crowd, we are the sacred tumult.
We, the black pigeon, the scarred face of the crippled child, the thorn crown. We the waiting sand and the salt wild earth. In the darkness they form a circle, clasping hands, a circle from which I am excluded, yet into which I feel drawn. Jakob, in the middle of the circle, cries harshly, loud above the beat of their chant:

“I, Jakob Werner, born in the year zero, condemn to death Franz Jellinek, born two thousand years ago.”

I draw away from them, feeling alone and ironic. I know what they want. They want to transform my helpless room into four damp prison walls, into a charged electric fence. They would like to heap its corners high with fresh-chopped hair and discarded dentures and spectacles and toothbrushes. They would like to change it into a wandering and endless gray labyrinth of cells and corridors and kennels and wooden bathtubs and hooks upon which hangs sweat-drenched clothing that tomorrow must be worn again. They would like to make it echo hollowly to the slap-crack of a rubber-hose lash, to the click-snap of padlocks. Their chant goes on and I begin to tremble.
We are the androgynous pages. We are the cherubs of innocence. We are the spell-cast virgins.
We are the rite and the lamb that is sacrificed. We are promise and the memory of promise. We are neither men nor women nor good nor evil nor body nor spirit nor essence nor accident nor real nor ideal nor consciousness nor instinct. Their voices are not loud, yet they seem to fill the room until it overflows with sound. They sway in the darkness, their hands locked, their weight balanced light on the balls of their feet, and the darkness sways with them and I must hold myself rigid to resist that beckoning movement, that movement that can never be described because it is forever unknown, even to itself, full of portent for them and senselessness and fear for me. I move away from them mentally, taking refuge in the thought that this is my dwelling and they, my guests, must vanish the moment I cease to envision them. I think of Gershon and Becky, of Raúl and Ofelia. It is their dwelling too, here they were born, here they died, here they lived their tired and repetitious lives that Javier and Elizabeth might be born and love and marry and hate. I think of them, but I find myself full of bitter doubt: why were they born after all? Why did they have to die? The Monks are moaning now: Medusa struggling for life again, the Furies giving vent to blood-red rivers of hatred. This is not their dwelling, nor have I ever known their parents. They are themselves alone. The different, the alien, the new, above all the new: that which has never been repeated because it has never existed before. And what their fecund chant is telling me is the cold counsel that our story is not the only story, that there is another and greater one in which ours seems less than a brief nightmare reserved for a few restless seconds in the eternal sleep of death. Now I know that they are hunters on the scent of a prey who is myself. No words I can shout can stop them. No reason I can hold to can long withstand the destructiveness of their single incandescent intuition. Why did Becky go insane, I ask myself. Was it so that her daughter's insanity might merit the name of reason? Why did Raúl disappear? Was it so that Javier's flight might seem a march toward an encounter? I tell myself to keep thinking. Don't stop thinking. Don't hear them. Don't see them. Take out a match and light a candle. Carry it to the corner where the old trunk stands, dusty and cobwebbed, with its blackened brass locks and clasps. A vast old steamer trunk such as they don't make any more, a trunk large enough to pack the world itself in, as empty as space, with as many drawers as there are stars. I work the locks open one by one. Now, with my hand on the trunk, I can turn and face them again. I say to them quietly: “An old man ripe with wizardry sold me this trunk. A smiling old Jew who lived and kept shop near Tacuba and was forever putting his tongue into the gap of a missing front tooth.” They face me. I point to the tattered, faded labels of the Lloyd-Triestino Line, the seals of the Greek customs. “He was an old Jew who dealt in forgotten junk and lost worlds, like this trunk. More than dealt, he was a collector.” They have stopped their chant and are listening to me and watching me. It is I, not Medusa, who has been reborn. I swing the two halves of the trunk open. One side stacked with small drawers, the other a single vast compartment stuffed with clothing, bundles, boxes, a violin, the lean neck of a bass viol trailing a tangle of broken strings, a heap of coal-dusty top hats, you name it. The Monks approach me and I take out my first exhibit, a small net, like a woman's hairnet, for the mustache. With a grave flourish I present it to bearded Boston Boy and with a grave smile he dons it. Exhibit Two, the broken violin, I offer to Jakob of the Ivy League costume and the black portfolio. Then a torn and yellowed poster with the words
GARBO LOVES TAYLOR.
Rose Ass accepts it. A Currier and Ives print: the sleighs, snow, peaked rooftops of New England winter; this I give to pale White Rabbit. For Rose Ass, a 1928 Montgomery Ward catalogue. For Boston Boy again, the printed program of a concert in Prague's Wallenstein Gardens: “In 1856, Brahms found the title of his
German Requiem
in an old notebook that had belonged to Schumann, his teacher.” Now a worn leather money pouch, as heavy as silver; I give it to dark Morgana and she empties it out into her hands, a cascade of small pebbles still wet from the sea, some brilliant as mirrors, some yellow as mustard, hemispheres of the hours of the deep, sculptured eggs, sepia moons, the playthings and the treasures of children and the poor. White Rabbit reaches to snatch the pebbles away from Morgana, who holds them against her breasts like jewels. And everyone is looking at Brother Thomas, for he has been given an old stereopticon and is staring through its lenses, inserting and withdrawing quickly the double-imaged cards that I remove from one of the drawers and hand to him. They crowd around and ask to have their turns to see those faded photographs that look as real as dead and half-remembered life: the castle of Hradcany in Prague, a teashop on Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, a path with a bench near a bridge in Central Park in New York, the lions that guard the agora of Delos, a nude by Modigliani, the body of assassinated Leon Trotsky laid out for burial, a still shot of Joan Crawford in
Grand Hotel,
another of John Garfield in
The Fallen Sparrow
(with Maureen O'Hara and Walter Slezak, Elizabeth), the entrance to the fortress of Terezin with its legend:
Arbeit Macht Frei.
They grab the stereopticon and pass it from hand to hand, on to the next, before the last has had a clear view. No one notices the portraits of the comic-opera monarchs I offer, Wilhelm and Franz Josef, or the lovely, hand-tinted photograph of La Belle Otero wearing a pair of Turkish slippers and nothing else. Now I come to the battered round tins of old motion-picture films upon which scribbled labels, stuck with glue that after all the years is still bad-smelling, show the titles:
Golem, Nosferatu, Der Blaue Engel, Vampyr, Das Rheingold.
I let the yellowed film slide between my fingers, a slow march of
Caligari
's broken images, squares of brown and blue and yellow that in five acts relate the stories of authority and its phantoms, of reason and its collapse, of crime and its pleasures, of the behavior that one finds in lunatic asylums and nightmares as if these were the only real settings appropriate to acts that in the street or the office go unnoticed, mere normality. I come to the garments. To one side I toss a turtle-neck sweater that is still damp, still smelling of salt air, a pair of corduroy pants with the ass worn thin, a woman's suit from the thirties, its jacket cut mannishly and its blouse of piqué, a cocked tricorn hat, some wooden shoes, a leather Tyrolean vest, a brown uniform, an old greatcoat with a high hood, a striped gray coat, thin and cold, with the star of David shining in dull faded yellow on its breast. I come to the bottom of the heap, to the clothing that I want to offer them. The purple-red cloak of a Catholic cardinal for Brother Thomas, who puts it on and with finger across thumb gravely blesses us. A hood of black and scarlet for Rose Ass. Rich embroidered cloths, like medieval hangings, for pallid White Rabbit; a rain cape for Judge Morgana. A cope, also embroidered with a depiction of the Apocalypse, for Blond Boston Boy. And beneath everything, small and heavy, wrapped in red silk which I unwind layer by layer with less haste than uncertainty, for I'm not sure where he is now or who he is or what he may be up to, I'm not sure whether this is the beginning or the end of my show, a puppet dwarf which I lift at last and introduce to them, trying with one finger to hold his flaccid neck stiff. My six Monklins move back a step or two and shake their new costumes. I stick my fingers into the puppet's mouth and transform his expression of frustrated fury into an amiable smile. Yes, despite everything, he will condescend to visit with us. I turn his head a little and he looks back thoughtfully into the trunk, at the nest of tiny gravestones of tiny dolls with blond and black wigs, dressed in crinolines and boots and carrying whips, small dolls with little phalluses of plaster, at the paintings which hang over them, sailboats entering a harbor, wheatfields under the sun. He nods approvingly and the Monks stare as I seat him upon my knee. The Monks stare and step back, except for Boston Boy Franz, who slowly kneels beside the single candle. I touch the mustache and beard of my little puppet, a scanty but carefully trimmed beard. They know that he is about to speak and he does speak in a resonant baritone that has nothing to do with his deformed small body, from which one would expect shrillness. “You have shattered my repose, young man,” he says gravely, accusingly to Boston Boy. “One has a right to rest occasionally. The landlord of the trunk assured me that it was a quiet and tranquil establishment.”

“You must forgive us, sir,” Boston Boy replies just as gravely. “We did not know that a tenant had moved into the trunk.”

I remove the little man's gloves and make his courteous but inquisitive eyes pass around the room. I squeeze his diaphragm lightly, and he sighs.

“So we meet again, my young friend.”

“Yes,” says Boston Boy, nodding. The little man on my knee sighs again. His legs dance in the air as he stretches his small boots, protected by spats, as if he were trying to reach the floor.

“I was asking myself what had happened to you. I wondered what you and your friend had done with my dolls and my paintings.”

“As you see for yourself, Herr Urs, they are still with you, there in the trunk. No one touched anything.”

“Yes, so I have observed, and with a certain relief, I confess. Yet it is true that I was thinking of presenting everything to you, young sir, to you and your friend, as a remembrance of your neighbor, myself. But the attack came upon me too suddenly. I miscalculated and in the end did not have sufficient time. I had told myself: I shall present my works to these young gentlemen who are so polite, well-reared, and understanding. But it need not be done until the last moment. Then, when I lie upon my deathbed, it will be not less a gift but will become also an inheritance, and they will understand it as such. But I didn't have time. I miscalculated.”

“It doesn't matter, Herr Urs. I have often dreamed of your dolls and paintings.”

“Yes, my young friend, that would be only natural. Perhaps after so many years you see things clearly. Do you chance, perhaps, to recall what I said to you then?”

“Certainly, Herr Urs. You told us that you wanted to reproduce, on canvas, the old buildings and the old streets, so that something would…”

“Yes, so that something would remain after they had been demolished and forgotten.”

“Exactly, sir. You also said that you painted each of your works twice. First when you looked upon your scene with the eyes of repose. The second time when your vision was exalted. And that between the two views, we could be sure, there existed a great abyss.”

“Indeed. And now as then, time must be left to decide the destiny of my work. It could not be judged then. Or even today. Heroism is comprehended only when its embittered enemies have disappeared. Then, finally, judgment can be made without prejudice. And I must confess, dear young friend, that as I repaired each little doll and painted each of my paintings, I felt myself heroic. I ceased to be poor and deformed and alone and became…”

“A small god, Herr Urs. A household god, one of the family.”