Prologue
Overlooking
my house lies a cemetery from where emanates the faintest hint of a murmured discussion
between the dead, but I comfort myself by thinking that this is only the wind
blowing. Sometimes I go and stroll through its alleys. Two tombs of a married
couple in particular have retained my attention. On them features the last two
verses of a poem by Yeats, suggesting the possibility of an ongoing and
passionate conversation between the two.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell
I wonder what dead people may say to one another. I would like to think these two
loved each other so profoundly that their souls, as the text goes, shall be a
continual farewell of the story of how they met, lived and died together- or
rather, the way they appear to me now, buried in
earth and stone along with lives long gone and past- a continual farewell of what
could have been; stories
crisscrossing, colliding with one another, and with only the slightest consideration for such
a notion as time-space, for its chronological and factual constraints
differentiating truth from fiction. For to be eternally buried deep down under this sullen earth and in the same dark box, a lot of
imagination is required not to end up dying again of sheer boredom. Perhaps as
I am standing in front of the graves, these two are mocking death by experiencing
life all over again, a whole kaleidoscope of lives, for who knows what power
the imagination might hold when unabashed by the implacability of reality.
The wind is blowing hard. Gusts of
whispers caressing my shivering body. I can almost distinguish two voices, one
male, one female.
I lay my ears over the gravestones,
forcing myself to listen.
And from one life to another
We rise and fall
We
fall and rise
Round and round
Again
1.
I met you
on a beautiful day, remember ? Of course the day turned beautiful because
I met you, so I guess I used a metonymy, although the day would really have been beautiful in any other circumstances.
It was all sunshiny and cloudless and… You’re asking me,
what’s a metonymy? I do not know, dear, I used the word because it sounded
beautiful, and kind of novel… But a metonymy, well, it’s a word, often an
adjective, that is put in the wrong place, like, hum, well I can’t quite find
any, so I hope you won’t mind if I use you as my metonymy? No, no, no! A
metonymy is not an insult… It’s a stylistic device, like women’s make-up, it
helps mask what’s obvious, it turns banality into art…. Now wait! I do not say
that a woman without makeup is banal…
I will stop this nonsense for now and tell
you a story, not anyone’s story but ours. You know it of course but this is what
I remember. Do not mind the facts, for my story as it shall unravel to you will
have nothing to do with History with a capital H. In my story, the day was warm
and beautiful because I’d been feeling cold and lonely for a long time. You
wore a knee-length navy blue skirt and had no underwear…Or rather, in your
protest against global warming you wore nothing. It was your idea to undress in
the middle of the Honorary Courtyard of La Sorbonne University, and to climb onto
Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo’s statues.
2.
We met at university, remember? You waved
a streamer, Go naked, fight global
warming, and I couldn’t help laughing when the Education Officer saw you
and called the police. I undressed and joined you. We might have met under
other circumstances, but it doesn’t matter for I will always love you, whether
you’d be a crazy protester or a boring academic. We were thrown at the back of
the police van, handcuffed and as naked and wiggling as worms, trying to untie
ourselves. We were full of rage and young at the time and started singing bawdy
songs until our vocal cords broke or the police got fed up and decided to use
some tear bombs to calm our ardors. We were young and free; in spite of the
handcuffs and the wire netting around us we were free.
You
told me your name was Angela, not Angelina, you can’t deny the difference and
the difference is significant, although it does not mean anything now, for I will
always love you, whatever the circumstances.
Would you love me if my name were Adolf? And if I were fat and ugly, and you
discovered I had a small… But when they brought us to the interrogation room and
measured us from top to bottom, you said laughing this was the biggest you’d
ever seen! Anyhow, the interrogation room soon turned into a concentration camp,
the police proving to be SS, yet they behaved nicely with us because we were
artists. Do you recall your singing? You never sang again after -some moral principle of yours I will never understand. But O, how well
you sang! What saved us was your voice, suave
and sensual. Never did they lay a hand on you, I would not have let them touch
your skin, even under the breech of a weapon. I kept my head high and spat at
their face as you did when I first touched you.
3.
Yes, you spat on me! I can feel the warm
liquid dripping down my face as I crawled into your bed at nighttime, (though
this was a bunk really, remember this was in a concentration camp)… and while
you were asleep, I groped into the dark and pushed aside the ten-or-so other
girls sharing the bunk with you. You yelled, and spat on me, with that prima
donna puff of yours. The other girls joined in till they saw me, which caused
them to laugh. I felt awkward amongst all these women, wearing a stupid stripy
night cap like a dunce’s hat. The barracks of the concentration camp, when I
knelt down and made my marriage proposal, shifted into a theatre in which you
and I were actors on a stage to entertain the masses. There was more bursts of
laughter, chuckling and giggling, and a lot of cheering followed by silence as
I knocked three times on the floor with my walking stick which you do to
announce that a play is to start… Indeed, I had a walking stick. Everyday, I
was sent breaking stones and my back on the fields. Under my stick, rows of
stacked bunks became balconies, from where the audience threw flowers. They
landed in a church nave through which we found ourselves walking, heading for
the altar to get married.
It could have been anywhere and I would
have married you. We did get married
in a church, though this was not in Las Vegas, but in a former concentration camp-theatre-church and now-cathedral
such as Notre Dame or La Sagrada Familia. The latter is a masterpiece of
surrealist architecture, like a Dali painting but in living colour, all crooked
and twisted, over-ornate with gothic gargoyles and other monstrous creatures,
dragons, tigers, werewolves, vampires and pedophiles. Its spiral staircases
rise endlessly skyward, more merciless even than those of the Eiffel Tower,
where tourists have died of heart attacks or vertigo. So narrow are they, these
staircases, and the tourists, tailing one another, so numerous, that you might
as well die of suffocation. Would you make it to the top and face the queue at
the entrance, who like a giant snake buckles around and up its core through the
stairs?
The queue when we climbed turned into a wedding procession. With flashing
cameras whirring like insects they let us pass and slowly followed behind as we
strode upon the first steps of the cathedral side by side, hand in hand,
together. We might have all fallen down in a domino fashion, yet no one missed
a stair. Don’t turn back. Each of the
tiny loopholes pierced in the walls of the cathedral revealed an abysmal void. Don’t look. Instead I watched the
gracious moves of your slithering derrière.
4.
Shall I say your derrière is indeed of the most exquisite spectacle that has ever
been given me to contemplate? Let’s call a spade a spade, a derrière means a
bum, yet it is due all the honors that this ascension has rendered so familiar,
hence its so-called appellation, of which, by the way, I soon lost track. For a
time, all I could see were the heels of your Cinderella shoes, until only the
trail of your wafting perfume remained. I called, but only my own echo was
heard, and when I turned around the procession had disappeared. At this point
of the story, I am lost in the damp and somber corridors of La Sagrada Familia,
crying over the plight of my fate, but we shall skip that un-heroic bit and press
forward when I reach its dungeon at the top. There I found you, and a man
looking like Saruman, that old white beardie of an evil wizard in Lord of the Rings,
now retaining you prisoner. I puff out my chest in defiance and breathe a
hellish dragon pant at him that is enhanced by the thousands of stairs I
swallowed and cannot digest - which I am hoping will scare my opponent. I
inhale, ‘Saruman, you’re dead!’, adding to the statement my last remains of
energy. The wizard looks all but deterred and laughs a sonorous laugh at me in
return that rings in my ears. The laugh recedes, soon vanishing altogether,
along with Saruman and you, his beautiful captive;
along with La Sagrada Familia and its two outlandish towers, and the setting
has changed again.
Interlude
‘So! How do you like my story so far?’
‘I think I heard somebody’s breathing…’
‘A hellish dragon pant, rather, aha. Ah!
You and your imagination! This is only the wind blowing…’
‘Wait. Listen carefully.’
The
two are stretching their ears upwards, towards
the ground, but all sounds in there are muffled. It is barely audible,
increasing, decreasing then rising again, and too regular as it is to be merely
the breeze.
‘Did you hear?’
She
is now certain she hears someone’s breath, like a peaceful, quiet purr, as if that
someone was having a nap. She imagines the person lying against the cold
gravestones, sound asleep.
‘Do you think…’
‘The wind, dear, the wind! But you must
now listen to the rest of my story.’
‘Please do proceed.’
5.
We are back at uni, at the library this
time. You wander past a bookshelf, not really looking for anything in
particular, and with one hand sweeping over the books you leave a scented mark
in your wake. Under your touch the colour of books changes, taking on shades of
blue matching the colour of your navy blue skirt. The librarian, as you call
for him, is surprised to see that all the books on the shelf have turned blue.
The titles have changed, too. In place of a History
of the Roman Empire: 27 BC – 476 AD, by Professor Gregory Antoniov,
features a collection of essays under the pompous and lengthy title of, On the Art of Kama Sutra, from its Humble Beginnings
to its Worldwide Fame and Practice. All the books, one after the other,
have now turned into monuments of sexual glorification, of the pleasures of
fornication, sodomy and orgy. They stretch
their shadows accusingly over the poor librarian, who might have spent the rest
of his life with his nose stuck in dusty books, if not for you. Am I stereotyping
too much? He probably has got a wife and children, but a librarian’s a librarian.
Anyway…that librarian of mine has never leafed through the sundry layers of a
woman’s clothes, stopping only at the front and back covers, and the mere
thought of it gives him the creeps.
The librarian I decide to be me. I wear
heavy-lens spectacles and a neatly trimmed moustache that gives me an air of
importance, and suspenders patterned with blue lily flowers, the symbol of
French royalty. A long time ago, the members of my family were powerful
aristocrats who ruled the land before their heads rolled over dirt. Many more images, pornographic in character come flashing past, a kaleidoscopic movie trailer
that I fail to repress, so that I avert my eyes and turn to the Courtyard window
instead. There I see two youngsters, intertwined to the statues of our
venerated Maîtres des Lettres et Sciences,
naked. I am overwhelmed by a feeling of déjà
vu, the sensation of having seen these two before. The girl is waving a
streamer that says, Turn me on, loveless
world, and is rubbing her backside onto poor Hugo’s lap. I hear she yells at
the Education Officer who threatens to call the police if she does not climb
down immediately. I think I am having
an hallucination and the whole scene appears as in a dream. My twisted mind,
now lost in lust, remembers an incongruous fact about Victor Hugo few would
have known. The writer was rumored to have composed some of his poems while having
sex with his maid, sitting down on a chair or standing up on his feet with the
maid by his side, writing through the act of love, but I reject the anecdote as
being too gross to be true, besides seeming an almost impossible feat of
coordination between mind and body.
I try to chase away images of Hugo’s shaky
handwriting and turn away from the window. The girl with the navy blue skirt
has disappeared. The books have returned to their normal hue, of a boring grey
the color of Paris sky. I revert to my tedious task of clerk with a dull
bitterness at the bottom of my throat, and the thought of being a failure. At
this point of the story, I am all alone at my desk crying over the plight of my
fate and your disappearance, but we shall skip that un-heroic bit and press
forward when I raise my head in disarray and fix the window again. The
Courtyard is empty but for a girl. She wears a knee-length navy blue dress and
is looking lost. She does not seem like a student and reminds me of one of
these American pin-up girls from the 50s - Monroe and that famous shot of her
standing on an air vent, her dress flying in the air. The girl’s dress flies
away too as she gets rid of it altogether and leaps naked about the courtyard. Hitherto,
the square-shaped courtyard and its imposing walls appeared like a
concentration camp of rancid knowledge to my depressed librarian’s mind. They
now are the giant walls of a coliseum, and from the multitude of the windows,
students are popping out their heads, throwing all they can find; books, rulers rubbers pencil cases, cheering
whistling roaring at the girl’s gymnastic arabesques, cart wheels, splits and handstands.
Silence then settles as she releases the first verses of a poem in a languorous
voice.
O anger! O despair! O age my enemy!
Have I lived simply to know this infamy!
6.
Is this Le
Cid by Corneille? Had she recited from Mein Kampf, I would have drunk from the
poisonous elixir of her words. Her voice hypnotised me. Do you remember how
well you loved them, and even composed some yourself! Obviously not, because
you never recited or composed any poem after - some moral principle of yours that I
will never understand, but your poems, O, how beautiful were they! I remember
one in particular, I see you smiling so I guess you know which one, but would
you mind if I recite it to you? I feel the story has overstretched a bit, but
you and I have got as much time before us as we wish. I have it here with me, yes,
the one by Yeats; though I’m not as good an orator as you were I’m afraid…
EPHEMERA
'YOUR eyes
that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in
sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our
love is waning.'
And then
She:
'Although
our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone
border of the lake once more,
Together in
that hour of gentleness
When the
poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away
the stars seem, and how far
Is our first
kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'
Pensive they
paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly
he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has
often worn our wandering hearts.'
The woods
were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like
faint meteors in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old
and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was
over him: and now they stood
On the lone
border of the lake once more:
Turning, he
saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in
silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and
hair.
'Ah, do not
mourn,' he said,
'That we are
tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and
love through unrepining hours.
Before us
lies eternity; our souls
Are love,
and a continual farewell.'
7.
Our souls were love and a continual farewell. The librarian’s heart now
burst into flame at the sight of this girl whom he knew not and yet felt, O how
powerful a feeling, as if he had met, lived with her in more than one life.
Windows to other worlds opened before his eyes – a marriage in a church (had he
ever been married, even had a girlfriend?), a concentration camp, and to his
surprise, the Honorary Courtyard of La Sorbonne, in a public love-making scene
with a girl who resembled the other girl declaiming her poetry naked outside. A
feeling of dizziness seized him, and the flames of his burning passion built up,
nibbling off his clothes, breaking his suspenders apart, and his pants fell down on the floor of the library with a ‘zip’
and a ‘flop’. Students laughed at him and he laughed with them. He felt free like a bird, and would have thrown himself
from the windows if only he could fly. His spectacles felt itchy on his nose
and he tossed them away. Sight in particular and the senses had been paramount
to the comprehension of his world, but following the flow of his desire for the
girl, he stumbled down the set of stairs leading to the courtyard without
falling once. Instead of going down, the stairs went abruptly soaring upwards
and narrowed in size so suddenly that he nearly tripped over, if not for the
handrail on which to clutch to. He identified the stony spiral staircases as
being those of La Sagrada Cathedral in Barcelona, although he failed to explain
how he knew this with so much evident certainty. In trying to go down again,
the stairs kept evaporating under his footsteps, leaving an abysmal hole
through which gusts of winds rushed into the narrow tower, so that he had no other
choice but to continue his ascent.
When checking himself, the librarian discovered he was wearing what
looked like a bridegroom costume, consisting of a bow tie attached to a screaming-white tuxedo. A red
rose stuck out from his left pocket against his once-burning, now-pounding heart. A
girl stood at the top of the staircases, in a navy blue wedding gown. He took
her hand in his own and they walked up to the summit of the
Cathedral into a tiny chapel. Behind the altar, where sacramental items had
been laid out – a crosier, some holy water in a font and a cross- stood an old
white-bearded priest. He reminded the bridegroom of Gandalf, the good wizard in Lord of the Rings. ‘I marry you, may your life be
happy and prosperous,’ said Gandalf the Priest in a fatherly voice. He then
seized the crosier and disposed holy water on the couple’s faces, chests and
shoulders in the sign of the cross. ‘And I now declare you for husband and
wife. You may kiss the bride.’
8.
But when I turned to kiss the bride, her face was emaciated
and sallow, her complexion waxen and sickly. Instead of her wedding gown, the girl was now in rags and shivering with cold. Most noticeably of all, her mane had been shaved and she was
bare-headed. I was at pain recognising
her, but I loved her all the same. We shared the moment together in silence,
after so many days of toiling
in separation in this segregated concentration camp on the borders of time. Do you
believe me when I tell you that you had no hair? The minute we arrived, they drew a line through the
dirt and yelled orders in German which we were lucky to understand, ‘women,
children, old, crippled and diseased on the left! Others on the right, schnell!’ Your hand in mine loosened and
I never saw you again. I have heard stories that are hard
to believe, but I will not mention them, come, we must find a place to hide. The
police sirens can be heard screaming in the distance, come, they will be
looking for us! But the girl won’t bulge, isn’t
even looking at him but towards the Statues of Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo facing each other,
immortalised in this position
and gazed upon admiringly by generations and generations of youths. The girl,
too, will be immortalised in tomorrow’s headlines when she climbs over Victor Hugo’s lap and onto his
head, deploying the wings of her denuded flesh through the
wave of a streamer that simply says, Make a Statement, inviting anybody stupid or brave enough to raise his
voice throughout the Courtyard.
9.
I was trying hard to concentrate on the revision of my final exams,
hiding from the temptation of the summer sunshine within the buried depths of
La Sorbonne library when I heard uproars in the upper floors, muffled by layers
of concrete and my own sleepiness. This is the time for me to
press the elevator button and command the upper floors where I thought the
noise came from; to engulf through the sliding doors of
the elevator. On ground zero the doors slid open on a sunshiny,
dazzlingly white and empty
courtyard, with the exception of that rat-face of a librarian whose real name I’d
never known, and whom I only dared to refer as such in the presence of my
friends and classmates.
Today, Rat-face must have decided the weather was too hot to be wearing
any clothes. He is blinking idiotically, mouth wide open, at some point in the
sky. I follow his eyes and narrow mine against the blinding sun and first, I
see the statue of Victor Hugo, then a girl (naked as well!), standing over the
statue’s head cap, waving a streamer that enticingly says, Make a Statement. This
is enough to make me take
my cue and close the distance that separates me from
Rat-Face the Librarian, and our images duplicate into one; I, the youthful and
carefree student; I again, the old and only too-careful librarian, merge into
one. I climb over to the top of Louis Pasteur and make my marriage proposal in
a deep and well-articulated voice that resonates against the walls of the
courtyard for what seems like eternity but really lasts a few seconds, and then subsides
away. When I dare to look at the girl with more than a passing flicker of the
eye, I see an old wrinkled parchment of a skeletal body, riddled with ageing
stains the color of coffee and a hideous smile, toothless mouth that formulates
the shape of a silent ‘yes’ in my direction. But it does not matter because
whatever the circumstances I will always love you, young or old, dead or alive.
My own body I realise has turned grey and is all crooked. It twists on itself
like the spiral staircases of La Sagrada Cathedral. From grey our bodies have
now turned to dust and dirt combined. And…!
Before us lies
eternity; our souls
Are love, and a
continual farewell.
Epilogue
The wind
has subsided. I have no sense of time, I would not be able to say how long I have
remained lying here in this cemetery, ears glued to the leafy, untended grass
stretching its way over the surrounding graves. What was I trying to listen?
Dead people having a chat, how absurd! I must have fallen into deep sleep, for
it is now dark. As I get up, my eyes get caught on the poem by Yeats, engraved
in the gravestone, and these two lines.
Before us lies
eternity; our souls
Are love, and a
continual farewell.
The story
comes back to me, or rather, a fitting together of many stories. La Sorbonne,
La Sagrada Familia, a concentration camp, a library, a church, all these places
entangled like Virginia creeper over gravestones. I realize, examining the two
stones in detail, that there is no date of birth or death on them. There are photos
and names, though, but without the dates, these tell me nothing. I stare over
the graves for a while, trying to pierce the mystery that lies underneath, but
the wind has picked up again,
colder than ever, as if to prevent me from any further
intrusion. It is their story, after all, not mine, and one should respect the
dead in their sleep.
As I start
retracing my steps towards the entrance of the cemetery, I resist the
temptation of turning back as two voices can be heard whirling in the air,
speaking in high-pitched tones about what was and what could have been, but
also what will be.
One male.
One female.
Walking past its tall gates, I am
overwhelmed by the solemnity of the moment and the place, and tell myself this
old saying, “to honour the dead with one’s life.” But who is dead, who is
alive? I am perplex. Tall gates and brick walls circle the cemetery, too
protectively it now seems, to be trusted as a safe line of demarcation, as if
they were props of the eye to hide some fundamental truth.
Wrapped in solitude, I am left with my
sole breath and the rhythm of my footsteps timidly breaking in the silence of
the night to rely upon; each breath, each step, unconvincing, ephemeral marks
of life intermittently reclaiming the obvious: I am alive, I am alive, I am…
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