| |
Chapter 12: O. le Flâneur The propriétaire and his wife stood by sadly as their clients stepped lightly into the good morning cheer for the short walk to their new digs. Les Dutronc, haggard, bitchy and loaded with an uncountable number of bags, suitcases and boxes left in two taxis for the airport and their sojourn in dear old Hindustan. Olney and Maggie were taking possession of the apartment a few days before Christmas. Chez Dutronc-Garkle-Bebette overlooked the Rue de Foutre from a low-cost, high-rent apartment building in the Quartier Javel. The new tenants were put off by the housing commission facade, but once inside the view was Paris perfect. Four of the seven rooms looked across the street to a block of older buildings whose chaotic rooftops piled tile upon tile clear to the sky. The apartment was comfortable. It came equipped with everything they needed and more. Gaston's record player and sizeable collection of "disques" would keep Olney happy and drive Maggie mad. Except for a doll sized kitchen and a toy soldier bathroom, the lounge and three bedrooms were more than spacious. Even the WC was oversized, serving extra duty as a shoe closet. Above all, every room was warm. The radiators hissed at Olney's fear of being cold for months on end. As they inspected the rooms--now quiet after weeks of tri-lingual cacophony--it became clear that a proper cleaning hadn't taken place in years. Subji had admitted as much; at best the apartment was subjected to careless tidyings. She was too busy. Her paintings sold moderately well, and she often travelled to other countries to attend the vernissage of a new exhibition. The rest of the time she was painting. Gaston, himself frequently on the move, was no better at housekeeping. His keenness for snapping moments of stark reality never included the ones he stumbled over every day. The tiny kitchen contained a table, one side of which leaned against the wall and window facing the street, three chairs, a refrigerator, two walls of cabinets and counter space, and enough room to turn around in. At Subji's command, Gaston had painted the walls midnight blue. Fishing for ideas as to why, Olney decided the colour was a failed attempt at creating a mood. Maggie was sceptical. She soon discovered old lumps of grease under the paint and some newer stains it cleverly camouflaged. At night, an unshaded overhead light made the small room look like the basement of a bunker. The effect was so depressing they dined by candlelight from the second night on. The bathroom was even smaller. A tribute to logistical ingenuity, it held a washing machine, an enormous wicker basket for dirty clothes, a stall shower, and a wash basin built for gnomes. The walls of this room were painted a peculiar shade of dusky red, reminding Olney of spat betel nut on the footpaths of India. In addition, years of dust from Subji's Bengali-made rouge generously speckled the festive horck-dye. Two large light globes protruded like diseased eyes on either side of the mirror behind the sink, giving to the room an atmosphere of opening night in the black hole of Calcutta. They took the master bedroom for their own. Across from the bathroom and WC, it was the only bedroom not facing the Rue de Foutre--a plus, since all streets in France are noisy twenty-four hours a day. Instead, it overlooked the inevitable yawning gape of a square block of apartment rears, upon whose balconies and clotheslines the sun rarely shined. On the opposite side of the hall leading from the lounge were the two other bedrooms. The first was Subji's former workroom, now used temporarily for storage. Finally, next to the WC, was the children's room. Olney immediately converted it to his study. Voila! This was it. Home for six months (if they were lucky and the shoestring didn't break). It took them a week, Christmas day included, to scour all the rooms. They worked hard, devouring Croque Monsieurs, drinking sweet French beer and listening to Gaston's collection of French pop music and arcane songs in the Occitan language. As the new year rolled around, Olney and Maggie found themselves securely installed as genuine denizens of Paris, ville lumière. §§§ New cycles of life took root immediately. Perhaps the cycle whose root went deepest, burrowing straight to China through Maggie's head, was Olney's morning ritual: no less than three Rossini overtures would get him out of bed. Indeed, only with such a rigid and precisely planned routine was Olney able to prepare himself for the arduous effort of doing nothing for the rest of the day. It was the same every morning. When he was able to keep one eye open for more than a few seconds, he would stumble out to the living room to put the record on. With the opening bars he then stumbled to the toilet to empty his bladder for an eternity and sometimes longer. Maggie, whose blood pressure started to rise at the first cock of his eye, would be sizzling when he made his re-entrance, pinch-faced and grunting in a peevish, whimpering way. To further annoy her, he fell into bed so heavily she literally bounced. While Rossini blasted the morning to smithereens, Olney would simply fall asleep again, his sonorous snores, if not keeping perfect time, irritatingly trying to. After the third overture, concluding the recording, he would awake all perky and enthusiastic, with a loving look for his infuriated companion. And every morning she'd have a new expression of loathing for him and his Rossini. "You know, one of these mornings I'm going to hack you to death. You just snore while I have to put up with it!" Her revenge at watching his loving expression turn to bewilderment every time almost made up for the ordeal. One fed-up morning, the poor girl made the mistake of storming out to lift the needle on La Gazza Ladra. Before she could set the arm in its cradle, Olney came flying down the corridor with a bloodcurdling cry. He lunged, she screamed, and the two fell noisily to the floor. "I need Rossini to prepare me for the book!" he bellowed. "What book?" she bellowed back. "All you're doing is setting little piles of crap into some kind of retentive order. Turn off that nerve-wracking Italian and get to work." Maggie was right. Regarding his book, Olney was doing a Bunny Berigan. He spent the day farting around in the city by himself, and then at night, when she wanted them to be together, he hid in the children's room, working on old poems. Warm up stuff, he liked to tell himself. But he'd already worked them over unto death; they were cold and stiff and still weren't right. "What useless difference does it make?" he asked himself one motiveless night, said self sitting its vehicle back in the chair. A barrel-chested sigh escaped his thickly oscillating lips, the overwhelming prelude to paralytic depression. "Merde . . . " He flipped an unsharpened pencil for awhile. "Dum-de-dum . . . " Switched to a magic marker. Dropped it. "Fuck, I'm just killing time til ten-thirty's nightly grip on the ol' cognac bottle. Used purely for medicinal purposes," he hastened to add, speaking to the authority figure always lurking in his mind. "In order to sleep," he further justified. Yes, it seemed Olney Garkle was blessed once again with noisy neighbours. When had he ever been free of them? Why, oh why, were the people who lived directly above, just below, on all sides and across the lane always so noisy? What universal law was involved here? Now it was the neighbours upstairs. Neither he nor Maggie had noticed them until they had settled in. "Gotta get up early around here," he mumbled. "Godawful ranarium up there. Can't let 'em wake me, ruins my day. Come from dead sleep to an instant rage, heart can't take it. Best be ready à table with a cup 'n' a Gauloise." He grew agitated just thinking about it: "How dare they croak and hack through loudhailers at dawn's delicate hour. I never play Rossini til much, much later. And why do they stomp so? Back and forth, unceasingly, for over an hour. Who but the brain dead bourgeois would hook a microphone to the breakfast table so that I must hear each gulp of coffee while they munch whipped toast." It was a grand excuse to drink every night. Cognac, the super soporific, would always come to his rescue. He nodded smartly at the eternal verity of Cognac's curative powers. "Important to be dead abed of drink before 2 a.m., because then's when the baby wakes up. They must give the little demon a bottle and go back to sleep, for surely if they heard it crawling from room to room as I always do, heard it pounding on things with a sledge hammer, heard it rise on little hooves to dance like a thousand Rumpelstilskins and cry like a herd of werewolves eating balloons, surely they would smother it with a pillow." Olney called up his time-honoured fantasy of dealing with bothersome Others: flinging open their door, he sprayed all inhabitants with a sub-machine gun. "Mengele thumbed the wrong crew," he resumed. "Should've got everyone's neighbours. Then rednecks and all right-wingers. Gassed the heathen-hating lot of 'em. Left the planet free for the use of humans. Who write Poetry and paint Art. Install Olney Garkle emperor. Pencils and paintbrushes to all and to all a good birthright. Trouble is, people are too stupid to be human. Greatest threat to their own evolution. "What use is a poem anyway, back to the subject. No one reads 'em any more, except the poets themselves and teenage girls in heat. No one cares about the meaning of life unless it bloats the bank account. Things moving too fast to properly digest. Slick news programs editing tragedies alongside hysterical housewives and their detergent Lotharios; South African genocide one second and the next it's Mrs. Umeruhca begging to be taken by the good looking but neutered knowitall slithering out of her top loader. And all of it slipping down the gullet of the nightly numbed. Terror in the world reduced to media events. Toilet paper choirs and shot Pope's just part of the inch deep production. No poetry, no art. Things of the past. No one interested beyond the bucks and fucks, and the bigger the buckies the quicker the fuckies. World in another go-down mode . . . " Olney leaned forward to light a Gauloise. "Let it go, stop complaining," he said, gasping as a wedge of smoke further desiccated his lungs. But no: "Poet's not listened to any more. As for Art, ha-ha, well. Picasso the last to influence this world. Ten painters in every block now and the Latin Quarter is glutted with galleries. How do they manage it? All that expense. Rich fuckers. Subsidised. Not at all starving to death like days of old. Had to be a genius to paint then, to write then. Alcoholic and mother-hungry like poor Utrillo, V. Stellium-driven like Baudelaire. Nowadays every housewife in France's turning out a canvas 'tween diaper changing and grocery shopping. Shee-it. Some good stuff there, o' course, but where's the genius? And who fucking cares, anyway? Too many painters. Holland even pays 'em to paint. And where do the great works go? Into deeply buried vaults under Amsterdam, never to be seen again. Paintings stacked in sunken warehouses so deep that sea monsters, en route from one uncharted earthcore ocean to another, bump into its walls. Deep indeed are those vaults, so bloody fucking de-e-e-p . . . " Olney's head jerked up in time to save his rave from a snooze. "Wouldn't mind a government stipend, myself, but hell, what government is going to fund a great writer? Or painter or poet. How can you be great if the government is sending the monthly check? Genius goes hand in hand with madness, goddamnit, and madness just naturally turns those fund-giving bureaucrats right off. Nope, governments only there to eat people. Best thing do: bring 'em all down. Yeah, but poor Van Gogh. Sunflowers selling like hotcakes these days, bank-funded entrepreneurs vying to spend millions on 'em. Must be turning in his grave. But not to worry, Vincent. A bullet 'neath the crows after such accomplishments's worth more than body count seizures behind all the corporate desks. The corporate enemy's spreadsheet temples. But a patron, now, that's different. Someone like Theo, who's willing to put up with your innumerable shortcomings, who believes in you and takes some sort of critical interest in your work. That's where the money ought to come from. Olney's Theo, as karma would have it, was the Pootie. "Hey, she's got it easy," ho-ho'd he, wondering if it was yet ten-thirty. "Why, her only requirements are to nourish my soul, cater to my whims and pay for everything. In return, it's my task to tune her up and join her at Go. From there, we'll barrel down the highway of life in the vehicle of our composite excellence; not an impeccably tooled Rolls Royce certainly, but somewhat superior to a two-toned Henry J, j'espère! "Bof," he said on the exhale, butting out the stinking cigarette. Truth was, Olney didn't care where the money came from and he only felt artistic when driven. One notch above survival was just about right. Above that, he was out looking for thrills. §§§ Oney's first study, ever; perhaps a pair of pantoufles were in order. He'd rummaged through Subji's work room for useable tools, but it seemed painters and writers shared little in common. He brought back her drafting table, the chair that went with it, and a clip-on lamp. Gaston had offered his old portable typewriter, an Olympia Traveller de Luxe. Olney found it to be in perfect working order, but the French AZERTY keyboard only served to heighten his hair-tearing. The table was large and inauspiciously bare. Beside the tiny typewriter lay a gleaming ream of paper, still unopened. "I've flown around the world in a plane," he sang, caressing it's promising bulk. "I've settled revolutions in Spain. And the North Pole I have charted, still I can't get started with you." Kali's cassette player, its door missing, sat there too. Olney leaned forward to insert one of the only two cassettes he owned--both by Steve Reich--and turned it on. Music for Eighteen Musicians burst from the tinny little speaker. "Tonight ve begin!" said the future great novelist, moved as always to save his incarnation from self-destitution whenever he listened to this crowning achievement of "bananas music". The lilting flow of happily wistful sounds never failed to relieve his mind of its dense preoccupation with inertia. It made him a troubadour in his soul, free to wander over his life without weighty judgment. The music had no beginning or end, and no shattering climaxes hooked him to his sludgy, evolution-thwarting emotions. Instead, it unfolded as a series of subtle changes gradually soothing and refreshing his monkey mind and jittery nerves. The melodic repetition of the instruments and instrument-like voices invited the inspiration he knew would never cease . . . once he made the commitment to begin. "Tonight ve begin!" Olney had been toting these cassettes around for years. He listened to them over and over in many strange places and never once had they reminded him of anywhere. For this he was grateful. Steve Reich made tabula rasa music. It wiped illusion from the mind, and Olney needed his slate cleaned often. Others felt differently. "That noise'll drive you bananas," they said. Perverse Olney felt an unholy joy every time he brought his cassettes to parties. "Hey, wait'll you hear this," he would say to innocent party goers. Within a few minutes he was facing mayhem. "The record's stuck!" "Who put that crap on?" "Play Emmy Lou Harris or I'll scream!" And so on, until he was forced to make a hasty Stop/Eject and run for his life. Reich's Six Pianos especially drove them crazy. For some twenty minutes six pianists pounded out a choppy, apparently unchanging rhythm. "Listen carefully," Olney appealed enthusiastically to the nearest menacing inebriate, "and you will clearly hear that changes are happening all the time." "Take it off!" was the inevitable reply. While the music tended to drive Olney into states of ecstasy, it had rather the opposite effect on revellers. Even his friends took to frisking him at the door. "You're not gonna drive us bananas tonight, Garkle. Hands against the wall." "Tonight ve begin." The words tumbled moth-eaten and hollow from his lips. Instead he looked dumbly at the old poems. Like many a Leo without portfolio, Olney wanted to be acknowledged in perpetuum for his creative efforts without unduly sweating over their manufacture. "But," he confided to the hand rising to mop his brow, "will the anthology of eternity remember me for this?" Les Enfants et leur Mère "Stick that'n yr Sunday-in-the-Country, Bertrand," dit le poet, struggling to sink back in his wooden chair. If only he had some dope. In Holland he could go to the local school and buy a couple of grams of Afghani from a vendor in the cloak room. But this was France. He didn't trust the narcotics laws in rabid Catholic countries, not to mention rabid Muslim countries. For this reason Spain and Iran were at the top of his list of places not to hang around in owing to unforeseen horrors issuing from their diametrically opposed belief systems and the similar repression resulting from both. He'd sped through Iran back in the old days, when the Shah had ecstatics hung in the public square for simple possession. But that was before the fanatic domain had decided to get serious and take on the world. Olney figured any system based on paradise ought to allow a toke on earth. A big sigh. The famous Paris book store, Shakespeare and Co., held poetry readings on a regular basis. They even invited unknowns to read, setting them up in a little out-of-the-way room upstairs in case anyone came. During his previous stay in Paris, Olney had decided to give it a go. To his embarrassed question, the American clerk answered that yes, he could read his poems, and was there any published work to help bring in an audience. Olney said bashfully that two chapbooks were published in the Sixties (a period, he admitted reluctantly, when every Tom, Dick and Olney was getting mimeoed). The clerk went on with breathless boredom to ask their names. "Well," Olney answered, biting his tongue and kicking his foot, "there was my tribute to salient moments in the dero's life, entitled The Stubble Hotel, followed by Cockroach Poems, a documentary in haiku on the victims of the American Dream." "I see," drowsed the clerk. "When would you like to read?" Olney was about to reply when he noticed a middle-aged American woman in Bermuda shorts. She looked up from the book in her hands--The Biorhythms of Gertrude Stein--to eye him from the quaking root of her clitoris. "I'll let you know," he told the clerk on his way out the door, regreeting a lovely Parisian day. Besides, he reflected at a nearby friterie, I'm no poet and Sylvia Beach isdeadisdeadisdead. §§§ Hs vertebrae ached from the attempt to relax. He got up and flopped on one of the children's beds. Kali's. He sniffed for memories of her scent, any scent would do. No scent. The other bed and all of the toys and clothes and tables he'd put away in the closet; nearly a hectare of stuff crammed in there. "Maybe I should write Ripley," he said, lighting another cigarette. In French movies, the good, the smart and the suave always smoked Gitanes. Olney smoked Gauloises. Olney and the riffraff. People who sweated a lot. You could just see the wet hairs under their arms. But Olney was no slob. At heart, he was really a very refined guy, though Maggie was forever accusing him of impecuniousness and crass grossness, especially his eating habits at breakfast. She was in the living room now, listening to music on the earphones. He scoffed: "Carole King, I'll bet. Oh, don't get me wrong," he added quickly, before an indignant inner twit--the one who always fought for the rights of others (indeed, the very same fair-minded self who fervently desired Olney's downfall for subjecting people to Steve Reich)--jumped in for the usual harangue. "Carole King was a fine singer, but she is so Sixties. Why do people keep hanging on? My ears cry: 'Play Violin Phase or I'll scream.'" He swung to his feet and switched off the cassette recorder. Steve Reich had done his duty by vacuuming Olney's mind, but the cleaned and readied house couldn't muster so much as one tenant of an idea. "Duh-h-h," he said, genius a-flower. There was a knock at the door. "Yeah?" "How's it going in there?" Maggie asked, on her way to the loo. "Don't remind me." He picked up the book's outline, written the last time he was in Europe. It covered some forty pages of French quadrille paper, the kind with a zillion tiny squares. "Prep sheets for Pointillists," he sneered. "Can't find a decent sheet of lined paper in all of France." The tattered A4 paper reminded him of the time he was headed for L'Alpe d'Huez to look for a job in, of all places, a church. And a Catholic church at that. He was acting on a lead given by a Dutch girlfriend (he later found out the girl had a history of raving at the buttons that held the padding to the walls in selected hospital cells). Of course it turned out to be no more than another desperate move. Of course the priest had said, "A job? Here? You must be kidding." Ha-ha. Well, where was the sense in going to a church at the top of the Alps to look for a salaried position? To do what? But then, much of Olney Garkle's life had been wanting in the common-sense-seeking directions known and enjoyed by his fellows. And the quadrille paper, upon whose minuscule grids were noted episodes of a senseless existence, always reminded him of this foolish emprise: on the way, nestled in the forest below the road somewhere near Grenoble, he'd seen the Rhodia plant, where the weird sheets were manufactured. The toilet flushed. Maggie: "Want a glass of wine?" "No thanks, Poot. I'll be out in awhile. Nothing much happening here." He stared closely at the outline. It seemed to be written in a foreign language. Greek, was it? "Aha! C'est bien clair. Ce crap est écrit dans le grec. Malheureusement, c'est pas ma langue." "Did you say something?" Maggie asked from the hallway. "Non!" "Eh?" "J'ai dit, non! "What'd you say?" "Mais . . . j'ai dit non, Goddamnit!" "No need to curse. I just asked if you said something." "J'ai dit 'J'AI DIT, NON!'" "Ok, ok," said Maggie, huffily retreating. His book, with the working title, Journal of an Insect Living in Excrement, was about a man whose normal range of human sensitivity was meant to deal with the American way of life. The protagonist was an outsider by nature, whose task was to find that nature acceptable to himself and commendable to others. Thus the book was about a hero, for in America even outsiders were gobbled up and spat back in some homogenised form or other. One of Olney's chief problems with the book was that he could not stand America, either living in it or writing about it. The culture offended him in the extreme, even if it was responsible for leading the world into the 21st century and, hopefully, an evolved state. A dilemma. While India--a place he did love--might be the country in which everything that had ever happened happened every day, America was the country in which everything that had yet to happen was going to. Thus the allure and his inability to break away completely. But he hated America, and he hated Americans. Even the ones he loved. "Well, maybe that's going too far," he said quickly, calming at a stroke the inverbal activist ever ready to rise in the parliament of his conscience. Olney held up the outline. He gave it an uppercut to the mid-page. "I'll never get this thing written." Like many a grandiose Leo, Olney liked to start things and let them finish by themselves. Then he could run off to engage in the fiendish pleasures his primitive brain yearned for (modified, of course, by a developed sense of civilised cunning). "What now, Subhuti-O?" Olney asked of his very own He-Who-Squats-Within. As there was no reply, he stood up. "Very well." Putting swift order to his life's work, he said: "Let us then go §§§ Chapter 13: Sunday in Paradise |