Читать книгу Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality - UNIV PLYMOUTH - Страница 9

The Feather

I must have been twelve years old when I met Clara. However far back I rummage through my memories, in the depths of childhood I find them connected to sexual knowledge. She appears to me as nostalgic and pure as the adventure of night, of fear, of first friends. She is in no way distinct from other melancholies and other times of waiting, for example the tedious waiting to become an “adult”, which I could physically gauge whenever I shook hands with an older person, trying to delimit the difference of weight and size in my small hand, lost between the knobbly fingers, in the enormous palm of the one who was gripping it.

At no time in my childhood did I ignore the difference between men and women. Perhaps there was a time when for me all living beings were jumbled up in a single limpidity of movement and inertia; I have no exact recollection of this. The sexual secret was always apparent. It was a matter of a “secret” in the same way as it might have been a matter of an object: a table or a chair.

When I examine my most distant memories more carefully, however, their lack of actuality is revealed to me in my fallacious understanding of the sexual act. I used to imagine the female organs in erroneous forms and the act in itself as much more grandiose and strange than as I knew it with Clara. In all these interpretations, however – fallacious, and then increasingly just – there ineffably floated an air of mystery and bitterness, which slowly acquired consistency like a painting by an artist who has set out from amorphous sketches.

*

I see myself as I was when very little, in a nightshirt down to my heels, crying desperately on the threshold of a door, in a yard filled with sunlight, whose gate opens onto a deserted market, a market in the afternoon, warm and sad, with dogs sleeping on their bellies and people lying in the shade of the vegetable stalls.

In the air there is an acrid scent of rotting vegetables, a few large violet flies are buzzing loudly around me, imbibing the teardrops that have fallen onto my arms and making frenetic swoops in the dense and broiling light of the yard. I stand up and carefully urinate in the dust. The earth greedily sucks up the liquid and in that spot there remains a dark patch, as if the urine of an object that does not exist. I wipe my face with my nightshirt and lick away the tears at the corners of my lips, savouring their salty taste. I sit down once more on the threshold and feel very unhappy. I have been beaten.

Just now my father smacked my bare buttocks. I do not very well know why. I am thinking. I was lying in bed next to a little girl the same age as me; we were put there to sleep, while our parents went out for a walk. I did not sense them when they returned and I do not know exactly what it was I was doing to the little girl under the quilt. All I know is that in the moment when my father suddenly lifted the sheet, the little girl had begun to yield. My father turned crimson, he was enraged, and he beat me. That is all.

And so I am sitting on the threshold, I have wept and I have dried my eyes, I am drawing circles and lines in the dust with my finger, I shift my position more toward the shade, I am sitting cross-legged on a stone and I am feeling better. A girl has come to fetch water in the yard and she is turning the rusty wheel of the pump. I listen carefully to the creaking of the old iron, I watch how the water, like the haughty, swishing tail of a silver horse, gushes into the pail, I look at the girl’s large, dirty legs, I yawn because I have not slept at all and from time to time I try to catch a fly. It is the simple life that recommences after tears. Into the yard the sun forever pours its overwhelming, torrid heat. It is my first sexual adventure and my oldest memory of childhood.

Henceforward obscure instincts will burgeon, wax, distort and settle within their natural bounds. What should have been both an amplified and ever growing fascination was for me a string of renunciations and cruel reductions to banality; the evolution from childhood to adolescence meant a continuous diminution of the world and, as things started to structure themselves around me, their ineffable look disappeared, just like a gleaming surface clouding over with condensation.

Ecstatic, miraculous, the figure of Walter even today preserves its fascinating light.

When I met him, he was sitting in the shade of a locust tree, on a log, reading a Buffalo Bill comic. The clear light of morning filtered through the thick green leaves in a rustle of very cool shadows. His attire was not at all ordinary: he was wearing a cherry-coloured tunic with buttons carved from bone, deerskin trousers, and, on his bare feet, sandals plaited from straps of white leather. Sometimes, when I want to relive for an instant the extraordinary sensation of that encounter, I gaze for a long time at a Buffalo Bill comic. Nevertheless, the real presence of Walter, of his red tunic in the greenish air under the shade of the locust tree, was something else.

His first gesture was a kind of elastic leap onto his feet, like that of an animal. We made friends instantly. We spoke little and all of a sudden he made a stupefying proposal: to eat locust tree flowers. It was the first time I had met someone who ate flowers. In a few moments Walter was up in the tree gathering an enormous bunch. Then he climbed down and showed me how you ought delicately to detach the flower from the corolla in order to suck only its tip. I tried it for myself; the flower gave a little pop between my teeth, a very pleasant little clack, and in my mouth dispersed a delicate and cooling perfume such as I had never tasted before.

For a short while we remained silent, eating the locust tree flowers. All of a sudden he grasped me tightly by the arm: “Would you like to see our gang’s headquarters?”

In Walter’s eyes sparks had kindled. I hesitated for a second. “Yes, I would”, I answered with a voice that was no longer mine and with an impulse for danger which suddenly erupted in me and which I very well sensed did not belong to me.

Walter took me by the hand and through the little gate at the bottom of the yard he led me to a vacant lot. The grass and the weeds had sprung up there unchecked. The nettles stung my legs as I passed and with my hand I had to move aside the thick stems of hemlock and burdock. At the bottom of the vacant lot we came to a tumbledown wall. In front of the wall there was a ditch and a deep hole. Walter jumped inside and called me to follow; the hole led through the wall and thence we entered an abandoned cellar.

The steps were broken and overgrown with grass, the walls oozed dampness, and the darkness before us was consummate. Walter squeezed my hand tightly and pulled me after him. We slowly descended some ten steps. There we came to a stop.

“We have to stop here”, he told me, “we can’t go any further. At the back there are some iron men with iron hands and iron heads, growing from the ground. They stand there motionless and if they catch us in the dark they’ll throttle us”.

I turned my head and gazed desperately at the open mouth of the cellar above, whose light came from a simple and clear world where there were no iron men and where at a great distance plants, people and houses could be seen.

Walter produced a plank from somewhere and we sat down upon it. For a few minutes we were silent once more. It was good and cool in the cellar; the air had a heavy odour of dampness and I would have sat there for hours, isolated, far from the hot streets, far from the sad and tedious town. I felt good enclosed between cold walls, beneath the earth seething in the sun. The pointless hum of the afternoon came like a distant echo through the open mouth of the cellar.

“This is where we bring the girls we capture”, said Walter.

I vaguely understood what he must have been talking about. The cellar took on an unsuspected attraction.

“And what do you do with them?”

Walter laughed.

“Don’t you know? We do what all men do to women, we lie down with them and… with the feather…”

“With the feather? What kind of feather? What do you do to the girls?”

Walter laughed once more.

“How old are you? Don’t you know what men do to women? Don’t you have a feather? Look at mine”.

He took from the pocket of his tunic a small, black, bird’s feather.

In that moment I felt that I was being overwhelmed by one of my usual crises. Perhaps Walter would not have taken the feather out of his pocket had I continued to bear that cellar’s air of complete desolation to the very end. In an instant, however, the isolation took on a painful and profound meaning. I now realised how far the cellar was from the town and its dusty streets. It was as if I had grown distant from myself, in the solitude of the subterranean depths beneath an ordinary summer’s day. The black, glossy feather Walter showed me meant that nothing else existed in my familiar world. Everything entered a fainting fit where it gleamed strangely, in the middle of a strange room with damp grasses, in the darkness that inhaled the light like a cold, ravenous mouth.

“What’s up with you?” Walter asked. “Let me tell you what we do with the feather…”

The sky outside, through the mouth of the cellar, became whiter and whiter, more vaporous. The words tapped up against the walls, they softly slid down me like some fluid creature.

Walter went on talking to me. But it was as if he was so far away from me and so ethereal that he seemed a mere clear space in the dark, a patch of mist palpitating in the shadow.

“First you stroke the girl”, I heard him as though in a dream, “then, also with the feather, you stroke yourself… These are the things you have to know…”

All of a sudden Walter drew closer to me and began to shake me, as though to wake me from sleep. Slowly, slowly, I began to come round. When I had fully opened my eyes, Walter was bending over my pubis, with his mouth tightly stuck to my sex. It was impossible for me to understand what was going on.

Walter stood up.

“See, that made you better… In the war, the Indians wake their wounded like that and in our gang we know all the Indian spells and cures”.

I awoke groggy and exhausted. Walter ran off and vanished. I too climbed the steps, cautiously.

In the days that followed, I sought him everywhere, but in vain. It had been agreed that I should meet him in the cellar, but when I went there it seemed wholly altered. Everywhere there were heaps of garbage, with dead animals and putrefaction that reeked dreadfully in the sun. With Walter I had not seen anything of this. I gave up going to the cellar and thus I never met Walter again.

*

I procured a feather, which I kept in great secrecy, wrapped up in a piece of newspaper in my pocket. It sometimes seemed to me that I myself had invented the whole story with the feather and that Walter had never existed. From time to time I would unwrap the feather from its newspaper and gaze at it for a long while: its mystery was impenetrable. I would brush its silky soft gloss across my cheek and that caress would cause me to shudder a little, as though an invisible, albeit real, person were touching my face with his fingertips. The first time I made use of it was one beautiful evening, in circumstances that are quite extraordinary.

I liked to stay outside until late. That evening a heavy and oppressive storm had sprung up. All the heat of the day had condensed into an overpowering atmosphere, under a black sky slashed by streaks of lightning. I was sitting on the threshold of a house and watching the play of the electric light on the walls of the lane. The wind was shaking the light bulb that illuminated the street, and the concentric circles of the globe, casting shadows onto the walls, were rocking like water sloshing in a pot. Long streamers of dust were being whipped up in the road and rising in spirals.

All of a sudden within a shroud of wind it seemed to me that a white marble statue was rising into the air. There was in that moment a certitude that was unverifiable, like any other certitude. The white block of stone was rapidly receding into the air, in an oblique direction, like a balloon released from a child’s hand. In a few moments the statue became a mere white patch in the sky, as big as my fist. Now I could distinctly see two white figures, holding hands and gliding across the sky like skiers.

In that moment a little girl came to a stop in front of me. I must have been sitting open-mouthed and gazing wide-eyed aloft because she asked me in astonishment what it was I could see in the sky.

“Look… a flying statue… look quick… soon it will vanish…”

The girl looked carefully, knitting her brows, and told me she could not see anything. She was a girl from the neighbourhood, plump, with ruddy cheeks like medicinal rubber, her hands forever moist. Up until that evening I had spoken to her only rarely. And as she stood there before me she suddenly began to laugh:

“I know why you tricked me…” she said, “I know what you want…”

She started to move away from me, hopping. I stood up and ran after her; I beckoned her into a dark passageway and she came without resistance. Then I lifted up her dress. She allowed herself to be manhandled, docilely holding onto my shoulders. Perhaps she was more surprised at what was happening than aware of the immodesty of the deed.

The most surprising consequence of this occurrence took place a few days later in the middle of a square. A few builders were slaking quicklime in a bin. I was looking at the seething quicklime when all of a sudden I heard my name called out and someone said loudly: “With the feather, you mean to say… with the feather… eh?” It was a lad of about twenty, a ginger and insufferable lout. I think he lived in a house down that passageway. I glimpsed him for no more than a moment, shouting at me, on the other side of the bin, emerging fantastically from the vapours of the quicklime like a hellish apparition, speaking in the midst of fire and cracks of thunder.

Perhaps he said something else to me, and my imagination lent his words a meaning about which I was preoccupied in those days; I could not believe that he had really seen me in the compact darkness of the passageway. Nonetheless, thinking about this thing more carefully, it occurred to me that the passageway was not as obscure as it had appeared to me and that everything had been visible (perhaps we had even been standing in the light)… all these were as many suppositions which strengthened my conviction that during the sexual act I was possessed by a dream that muddied my sight and my senses. I imposed greater prudence upon myself. Who knows to what aberrations I was capable of abandoning myself, in broad daylight, in the thrall of excitement and possessed by it like a heavy sleep in which I moved unaware?

Closely connected to the memory of the feather a very disturbing little black book also comes to mind. I had found it in a row of books on a table and leafed through it with great interest. It was a banal novel, Frida by André Theuriet, in an illustrated edition with a great number of drawings. In each drawing recurred the image of a young boy with curly blond hair, in velvet garb, and a plump little girl, in a flouncy dress. The little boy resembled Walter. The children appeared in the drawings now together, now separately; it was plain to see that they met above all in the nooks of a park and beneath ruined walls. What did they do together? This is what I would have liked to know. Did the young boy have a feather like mine, which he kept in the pocket of his coat? In the drawings this thing was not visible and I had no time to read the book. A few days later, the little black book vanished without trace. I began to seek it everywhere. I asked at bookshops but it seemed that no one had heard of it. It must have been a book full of secrets given that it was not to be procured anywhere at all.

One day I plucked up courage and went into the public library. A tall, pale man with slightly quivering spectacles was sitting at the back of the room and watched me as I approached. I could no longer turn back. I had to advance as far as the table and there pronounce distinctly the sensational word “Fri-da”, like a confession, before that myopic man, of all my hidden vices. I approached the lectern and murmured in a hushed voice the name of the book. The librarian’s spectacles started to quiver more noticeably on his nose; he closed his eyes as though he were seeking something in his memory, and he told me that he had not heard of it. The quivering of his spectacles nevertheless seemed to me to betray an inner disturbance; I was now sure that Frida contained the most secret and most sensational revelations.

Many years later I found the book on the shelves of a bookshop. It was no longer my little book bound in black cloth but a lowly and wretched pamphlet with yellowed covers. For an instant I wanted to purchase it, but I changed my mind and put it back on the shelf. It is thus that I still preserve intact within me the image of a little black book in which lingers a little of the authentic perfume of my childhood.