Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 31

Needle

Joë gave a solemn nod in Jacques’ direction. Jacques stood and washed his hands in the sink in an open anteroom.

Simone heard the sound of a cabinet being opened, a faint clatter of metal and glass.

“On account of my condition, I am granted surcease from pain…” Joë said. “As a student…before the war…I sought out that substance Homer refers to as nepenthe, frequenting back alleys and the docks. I was forced to strike some dark bargains to obtain it…But I won’t shock you by telling you all that. When I was wounded, my body was on fire and at the same time, I was so cold—the ambulance ride, each bump and jolt an agony—and finally, a nurse with the face of an angel saying, this will help with the pain, and in that moment, my whole life became utterly clear to me: I was destined to have this wound. Indeed, this wound existed before I did, and I was born to embody it.

“I’m like a man besotted with love, who bores everyone with endless babbling about his beloved…I love my wound—not a simple love, mind you, its mixed with hatred and resentment,” he gave a wave of his hand, “as all real love is.”

Jacques set about preparing an injection from a rubber-stoppered glass vial. Then, tying a tourniquet around his friend’s arm, he slapped his flesh until a vein stood out, blue-black beneath the pale flesh.

“In English, they use the word ‘painkiller.’” And here he made his right hand into the shape of a gun. “I rather like to imagine an American cowboy”—those last two words in English, the word cowboy repeated for the sheer pleasure of saying it. “He strides through the dusty town, spies the pain—a black blob, slithering about on the ground between the saloon and the horse rail, takes aim and fires. But in truth, this drug doesn’t actually remove the pain, it’s scarcely dead, only one is now able to observe it from above.”

Jacques administered the injection and Simone, feeling faint, looked away. So this is what the room of a poet looks like, she thought, taking in the rows of books surrounding Joë’s bed, the magazines printed on cheap newsprint scattered on the floor. The cover of one showed a photograph of a woman wearing a horned Viking helmet with her tongue sticking out, the cover of another proclaiming DOWN WITH ART! She wondered if later on she would be able to get up the nerve to ask Jacques, “What does it mean? Why is the woman wearing a Viking helmet and why is she sticking out her tongue?” and “Am I hopelessly old-fashioned because I believe in art?”

“Ahh,” Joë said, as the needle entered him. “I would be a poor host indeed if I traveled to a distant shore and left my friends behind, waving to me from the dock.”

Jacques drew another dose into the syringe.

“Oh, half of that. Half,” cried Joë, “she’s slight and this is her first time.” Then, cocking his head to one side, “It is your first time, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Simone murmured. “I’m a bit—what will it be like?”

“Ah,” Joë said, “we are going to a place where words cannot follow.”

“I am going to—demur.”

“Very well,” Jacques said, filling the syringe, and wrapping the tourniquet around his own arm, using his teeth to tighten it.

Joë worked his lips and tongue. “Ah, the taste of bitterness in my mouth! It lets me know that my beloved morphine is entering every pore and orifice of my body. What is it that the Bible says? ‘In bitterness we find the sweet?’”

“What book of the Bible is that from?” Jacques asked.

“The Gospel According to Joë.”

“Bitterness,” Joë said, and then fell silent. A few minutes later, he said, “Our minds are acutely tuned to bitterness because poisons are bitter. The brain awakens in its presence. Chefs will tell you…”

“Chefs will tell you what?” Simone finally ventured.

“Hmmm?” Joë asked. “What did you say?” and lapsed into silence. After a while, a long while, he said, “Has he told you yet that he is Egyptian? Your Jacques?”

“Yes.”

“And that his spirit is a tortoise. He’s told you that, am I right?”

“Yes, he’s told me that.”

Simone wondered if she was one in a line of women who had been brought by Jacques to kneel before the altar of this demigod.

“When I,” Jacques’ voice was deep, “when I, I was, in Madagascar…”

“Ah,” Joë sighed, “I love these stories that begin When I was in Madagascar…”

The thought crossed Simone’s mind: Was it possible that the two of them were—she did not know the word to use—had a liaison of an intimate nature? When Joë had said that prior to the war, to his injury, he had obtained this drug on the docks and been forced to strike some ‘dark bargains,’ had he been referring to—she could only imagine the cover of a cheap novel she had seen displayed at a book kiosk, a sailor slouching with his hip jutted out, a sultry gaze at the viewer from beneath half-hooded eyes. In this world where all the rules were different, might friends also have—an unnatural connection? How could it be—after all, Jacques was married and Joë a paralytic. Perhaps this flirtation was, like the threatened duel, a playlet he put on to make his life in this shut-up cell more diverting.

There were so many questions she wanted to ask: How did he experience his inanimate legs? Did they seem to him to be familiar objects, like the shoes we wear daily, almost part of our corpus, but objects nonetheless? Or did he feel towards them a kind of grieving anger—the way once-beautiful aging women regard their faces, now mottled and creased by time? And as for the other business of the lower body—the passing out of waste, arousal—how were those things managed?

At length Joë said: “‘To enter the kingdom of heaven, one must become as a little child.’ Now that’s really from the Bible. Our Lord and Savior,” and here Joë gave another one of his giggles, “said it.”

“Now, why did you say that?” Simone asked.

“Because I felt like saying it,” Joë said.

“No, but how did it relate to—the previous conversation?”

“It didn’t, my darling, it didn’t. I merely said it—because I said it.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, rolling up her sleeve.

Jacques roused himself from the chair, trudged to the anteroom, opened the medicine cabinet, prepared a dose for her. She watched as the needle entered her arm, saw the flesh clinging to it as Jacques withdrew the syringe. “Press your finger, there, so you don’t get a bruise.” His speech was slow, as if his tongue and lips had thickened.

She turned her face up towards Jacques, hoping he would kiss her, stroke her hair.

Joë, alert to drama even in this state, said, “Simone, you must understand this morphine is a god. And like the Old Testament Yahweh, this god is a jealous god. When we are before his altar, he demands that all other gods—Priapus, especially, his rival in joy—must be banished.”

After a minute, Jacques said: “I had just bent down to tie the lace of my boot—” and Joë said the words along with him.

“We have had this conversation many times, your friend Jacques and I. Sometimes many times in one evening. Jacques speaks to me of his wound. Under the influence, one’s tongue can be loosed. Loosed or unloosed?” He stuck out his tongue like a naughty child, and then took it between his thumb and forefinger. “What a strange appendage—the tongue,” he mumbled, before letting go of it.

One’s tongue unloosed? Simone wished that it were possible to insert the now-empty hypodermic back into her arm, draw out the drug—at the same time realizing that such a notion was evidence that it was already beginning to have an effect on her. What words of love for Jacques might pour unstinted from her?

“Free tongue…” Joë was saying, and said it again, and then for a third time.

Jacques turned to Simone, took her hand. “He told you we were going some place where words could not go. But they’re like a dog, a dog that doesn’t want to get left behind, words trot after you, looking up at you: Take me with you! And then begin to howl and whine.”

“Your Jacques and I take this drug, and our words cease to be original, we chant a Gregorian chant, over and over he says, ‘I had just bent down to fix the lace of my boot.’ That is why his wound was a minor wound, a blessing, it got him out of the trenches and…” Joë’s voice trailed off, then: “What were we talking about?”

“War wounds,” Simone said.

“Ah, yes…” A smile flitted across his face.

The gravity in the room increased. Perhaps they were on a distant planet or in an underwater realm. Great force was required to move their limbs. Time slowed down to a crawl. Lifting one’s head—my head, thought Simone, this head I am lifting is mine, it belongs to me, it is me, but at the same time it is a head and I can regard it as a concrete object in the world—it was all quite clear and terribly confusing at the same time, and when she got to the end of a thought so much time had elapsed it was impossible for her to remember where the train of thought had begun.

She heard herself say the word, “Saturn.”

“Ah, this girl of yours is a poet. She’s just spoken the perfect poem, a single word: ‘Saturn.’ It’s exquisite. Simone, you must never debase your oeuvre by declaiming another word. Rimbaud knew when to stop: otherwise, he would have been one of those poets who showed great promise as a young man…In fact, I think it would be best if you ceased speaking altogether—fell into mystical silence, like Nietzsche.”

The shelves of books. The drawings thumbtacked to the wall. The honey-colored light from the kerosene lamps. Gravity. Her ankle. The bell on the bedside table. An incongruous lamp with a fluted linen shade, embroidered with forget-me-nots—her mother would have exclaimed over it. An even more out-of-place vase, porcelain nymphs and satyrs, Pan’s flute becoming the opening to hold the flowers—although the vase was empty.

“When,” Jacques said. “When,” he said again, “when I was in Madagascar. In the cities—well, the cities are cities, but in the countryside…perhaps you are back in time, or perhaps this modernity of ours is but a…I just had a very profound thought. But now I’ve lost it.”

Decades later, Simone too will be granted this balm as a medically sanctioned release from pain. The faithful Marie-Claire will dispense it, having become not only maid and dogsbody, but also nurse.

The sight of the little glass vials of morphine lined up on the shelf will give Simone a feeling of security.

One of the poets will come to visit and deride her drug, saying “Simone, morphine as compared to opium—well, it’s like the difference between sugar and sugar cane, the insipid essence as opposed to the complexities of nature, the interpretation of the dream as opposed to the dream itself.

“Picasso used to say to me: ‘Opium’s smell is the least stupid smell in the world. It’s like the stink of a circus or a sea port.’”

Although he will feel the object of his affection far superior to hers, Marie-Claire will nonetheless notice a few vials missing after his departure. In the future, she will take the precaution of hiding them prior to his calls. And then the poet’s visits will cease. Once men had been drawn to Simone by a glimpse of her finely turned ankle. Once men had been drawn to her by her willing ways. Once men had been drawn to her out of a desire for connection with or revenge upon her husband. Then men were drawn to her by a desire to make off with her morphine.