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Now Dolma writes to tell me A——— has become pregnant by an animal. It is impossible. But I also know that it will come to pass. This judgment.

Carl Brouwer
Letters, November 1983

        1

Quartier on quartier, winter keeps a cemetery prospect: stone after stone; cream, grey; unsoftened by foliage. Trees exasperated. Trees reduced to several up-ended things. Bird’s feet. Whisk-brooms of trees.

A cloudmass hurtles grey and grey-black above the grey and grey-cream. It passes by the windows of the studio as if a curtain has been drawn.

Rue Campagne Premiere.

Fine scratches of rain appear against the glass. Before the glass, the white of potted cyclamen.

‘Do you know what a city is?’ she asks — as she had asked on that December afternoon, a month before.

She draws upon the cigarette, then lets the smoke roll upwards from her mouth. It moves about her hair; a soft blue scarf. It enlivens her.

‘A city is a tension in breadth and a tension in height. Nothing else.’

                                    ¶

‘As a child — it would have been just before the war — I can recall looking out over Montparnasse. There had been heavy rains; enough to fill the Cimetiere du Sad.’ Her voice came from behind. ‘From the window you could see the private sepulchres that line the cemetery avenues. I can remember watching young men push their way out between the iron-lacework doors, dressed in bathing costumes. Or perhaps it was a dream.’

I watched her slow descent: the gloss of dress, a shift; the leaving of an after-image, figure upon figure, as if the perfume had embalmed her absences. Blue-mauve. Beaded chiffon rouched against the hip.

I watched the slow elaboration of her movement; a self in its procession; more majestic, how it is performed in music halls:

Les petites filles de Camaret

Are virgins every one, they say ...

She was in her seventies. A face of clay on which she had fashioned for herself a scarlet mouth. And cheeks of scarlet. Her hair was built like spun toffee; though drained of colour to a sunless grass.

I’d sing and I’d dance for them; with my scarf—which I slid across my shoulders as if to say, “It’s not so bad, what I’m singing here.” And they would pass the bowler hat!

‘I had a good ear, but a bad memory. I cannot see how these women could sing as easily as they urinate! Monsieur?’

I held the proffered hand a moment, before bringing it to my lips. I observed a previous courtesy: the cancers gently kissing at her skin.

Dolma.

We sat, much as we sit today; a blade of pale sun, riddled with lace, giving flesh to air, blue with tobacco.

She too had noticed it.

‘At The Jockey you would have to go for air, from time to time ... out onto the Boulevard...’

She had pulled her hem, extravagantly enough, above the knees — which had been rouged for the occasion.

‘...and then another plunge into the smoke of endless countries. Copeland with his cowboy songs, or Hiler. And if Hiler didn’t play, we would grab the silverware and clank three spoons together ...

‘You bring me other dreams,’ she said, and placed her cigarette upon the tray.

‘Recently, I read the cards. She had returned — hung from the sky, her dresses billowing. And there were journeys ... Other dreams. More brutal dreams, I fear.’

She must have recognised it from where she sat: his letter; scrawled out upon its single sheet; every space — as if the whiteness of a page had terrified him — infested with confession.

A bleak smile moved her face — the prowling sun that strengthens for one moment to find endless detail in a bald monotony of plane — and then everything subsided to the grey-cream of this earlier December afternoon.

‘He was, I make no secret of it, one of my favourites. He had that exquisite lunacy of the men I saw about me in my childhood. Where these days do you find such risk? Such jokes? Such capacity for ruination?’

She brought the paper slowly to her face; so close to make me fear, a moment, she might eat it.

I sought her yellowing, clouded eyes. And were these weathers (I considered), clouded, yellowed — their cataract across the city — consequent upon her failing sight; come, like a dream, to flood this emptiness with view? I watched her turn the letter back and forth. She paused.

‘This judgment,’ she repeated, reaching for the cigarette. ‘And you still wish — and after all that has occurred — to seek her through the child? And even there? You wish to journey to this other place?’

She sat silently a moment; head averted from the smoke, turned slightly to the left and upwards, as if in expectation of another voice.

‘You are aware of the precise nature of the child?’

I had imagined (not what she was soon to say) something possibly shortlived. And cloven. Bristling underneath the smothering-cloth. And not the words that she would use.

‘I have heard,’ she said, ‘that it is something of a god.’

                                    ¶

‘I have had innumerable lovers — but then I had the fortune to be born into the world of lovers! How they fall in love, these artists and their models; all the endless coups defoudrel But (it is a cliché) I have seldom loved.

‘Modi, of course, I loved. He was the most handsome man in Montparnasse! And I was barely twelve. I would rouge my lips and cheeks with petals from an artificial geranium and sit waiting for a glimpse of him at La Rotonde.

‘Modi, yes. And Camini.’

The lamp flickered, as if the name had snatched, a second, electricity from the room.

‘I started bleeding on the first day that I saw him. This was significant, yes? I felt that he had somehow brought it on, this violent menarche.

‘He had been a painter then for many years. After the war there were no more construction sites: no singers there, no stalls, no prostitutes; no carvers to give limestone to the artists! Now his studio floor was covered with a carpet of coal, charcoal and matches.

‘I modelled for him. My hair was badly developed in a certain place and I had to make myself up with black crayon.

‘I would stand beside the window, drenched in winter light and I would stare, as he had asked me, down, away, across the makeshift corrugated roofing. My view would always end within a courtyard: dark; held in deep perpetual shadow. The walls were cracked with stains where ivy had been torn down from the bricks. I can recall the blackness. And a red scarf, like a wound against his throat.’

‘Camini was the first I knew who sought this other place.

‘ “Do you know what a city is?” he said, the night of his departure. “A city is a tension in breadth and a tension in height. Nothing else.

“Every individual tries by whatever means: their legs, the train, a trolley, or explosives — that transportation of the future—to find the meeting point of these two tensions.”

‘It haunted him. He was in love with its extremity. Un coup defoudre!

‘Then, after months of silence, I received a letter.

‘It was brought to me, much as you have brought this other correspondence.

‘A single white page; white, white; crossed through with two diagonal lines — an “X” — as if everything should be deleted/

She rose from the divan and stood before me. Her body seemed quite suddenly to have gathered all its sparsity of fat to one small pouch, low on her abdomen; her form mis-shapen, it appeared, through the very act of telling.

‘I shall bring the letter,’ she announced. ‘It is the only map of this place that I have ever seen.’

I watched her slow ascent towards the mezzanine. The beginnings of a distant conversation came to me — at first, I thought, from an adjoining studio.

I heard the now-familiar emphases of Dolma’s voice, insistent:

‘Aldo, all the young men, all so recently enthralled!’

And then a deeper voice, more thickly accented — effeminate (I add with some amusement) — came in reply ...

I had moved again towards the windows, their space reduced to tapestry by the decaying light. I had traced the wall (papered in a fading leaf— a spill of foliage shattered from a fallen stem), the lower edge angled by the skirting board; and, following the stairs, in that irregular pentagon of light created by the door, half-opened, to an upstairs room, I had seen Dolma, much a mannequin, yet answering herself in that impersonated voice:

‘...For all his different history, he is not so unlike your Pogliani? No?’


        2

Air drenched with the metallic taste of electricity, building and releasing in explosive clicks. A tongue snapped from the palate.

The guardien’s cigarette-end drops diagonally — a sudden click — its path veers back; the ash striking at the floor: a ricochet of powder zig-zagging on the stone like an escaping lizard.

Pulsing cones of loudspeakers crackle their repeated anthem to the re-touched face of General Pesce — liberator, saint — his cheeks resplendent in their twenties rouge.

Quartier des Echafauds. Every body-chime congested with a shimmering of wings. A swaying, raucous black.

Shriek of mandrakes. Streets littered with their roots. Restless, still-tumescent tubers, bursting underfoot; the surface of their skin like magnified hair.

Along the avenues, the Titans, massive, perfectly proportioned, clamber from the billboards; their clothing riddled with decay; their skins, once tanned and oiled, grown pale and torn.

They fall strengthlessly upon the street. Their faces fold upon themselves.

The insects gather.

                                    ¶

Undeniably, towards the second hour of dusk (How dusk? This resin soaking through the flapping rags of sky.) a machine, bizarre in the intricacy of its clockwork, approached from the horizon: the model of a solar system — a sun, flamboyant in its gesturing, surrounded by the eccentric orbits of some seven lesser bodies.

A voice, distorted by the snapping air, called out to me across the plain, as if we shared some common purpose.

‘You are heading for the hospital? L’hôpital de la Conception? Too far!’ he cried. ‘A journey to the hospital at such an hour would be unthinkable.’

I watched him lurching out towards two of his assistants, ordering them to make a pile of their equipment.

‘Can’t you see my friend is very tired? You must carry him!’ he trumpeted. ‘Are you incapable of hearing? Leave the lights! Marcel, enough of this! My fellow traveller must be carried to the villa. Allez! Allez!

Pogliani.

                                    ¶

‘I loathe the hospital. The wire.’ He stopped. ‘Most of all, I loathe the sound of wire, the movement back and forth. It is the rupturing of everything I know. Of civilisation. Of hope. Of desire.’

Then possibly his hand began to speak. Of course not. Just the bubbling of the hookah: smoke procuring its wraith passage through the staining water.

‘He has become a skeleton. His right arm is completely useless and most of the left. They give him shocks with some electric apparatus: the hand twitches — then it might as well be cabillaud. Last time his back was completely flayed from the bed.

‘Nonetheless, he gives permission for the filming. I tell him I adore his poetry. I tell him that the BBC has shown an interest.

‘He talks, but he is evasive; everything is metaphor. I have had cartons of his prattle transcribed.

Pogliani sat bolt upright in his chair. ‘And I have searched it thoroughly for hidden meanings!’

I stared at the Italian’s forearms: a baroque profusion. A brooding cashmere in the oil-light of the study. The colour of his hair. The colour of burnt almond, shot through with the black-red of drying blood.

It was his surfaces that seemed to crave description: the flocculence of arms; the stubble; and the duskiness of skin.

And yes, a detail: a crescent scar upon the cheek — and held between the tips, a mole. I contemplated it with a certain mariner’s affection. And that he was dressed in a safari suit; as if he were a hunter.

‘So Dolma sends you here,’ he smiled. ‘You know she was Camini’s lover in the twenties — during his so-called “abstract” period, yes? And that she came with him, to Xei, as it was called in those days ... Have you read the history of this place?’ He leaned forward, conspiratorially. ‘It was for many years the furtherest city of the Roman Empire ...He arrived, December 1923, and he began to film.

‘You know too well what the city chose to show him.’

Pogliani stared at me, as if I should have understood the subject of his speech.

‘It frightened him. He assembled everything into the documentary as though it were his last confession. And then silence.’

He paused, perhaps providing me with space in which to add my own confession. I listened to the persistent bubbling of the hashish as if we might have passed below the surfaces of air and were conversing underwater. Yes. This would have helped explain the slowness of our movements; the impediments to the passage of words; the sound of the chair against the wooden floor reaching me too late, as if the noise had been retained, perhaps distracted, by some unseen listener and released a moment later — the original sounds already having started to decompose. I listened to the rotting of his voice.

‘It was the documentary that led me to the arms of Dolma.

‘I can recall each moment of that languid afternoon in Paradise.

‘We sit beside the windows of her studio. Her knees are rouged for me. She is showing me a nude she modelled for Massoni. A child of fourteen — but I notice how the brushstrokes have a sense of purpose. I turn, to see the dress fall first from one shoulder, then the other.

“I find the brassièe to be a troublesome and modern bondage,” she announces. And she smears the last of mauve sateen across her ribs into a gathering below the waist. I hardly need remind you that she is a person in her seventies. The breasts belong upon a goat!

‘However, I decide that I shall ginger the occasion. I croon her name as if I were her lover from the twenties. I lift her sparrow body in my arms and drape her on the counterpane. I spread her hair — you know, of course, the quite insufferable nature of her hair — I place what hair I can across the pillows. I anticipate the marbling of the lower fleshes. I say, “Ah, how age performs its alchemy: this flesh to precious stone!”

‘And my beloved Dolma slowly rolls onto her belly. Using both her hands pressed tightly to her thighs, she slides the chiffon skirt above her buttocks. I can see the wrinkled genitalia hanging loosely in between her legs like some malignant afterbirth!’

He stopped. He burst into ferocious laughter: ‘She is a man!’

‘Of course, I had no choice. You can imagine it was sickening. For weeks afterwards I found it quite impossible to defaecate without the memory returning.’

I watched his hand fall open: an old man’s mouth; a drool of sweat between his curving finger and the thumb.

‘It was a rather bald exchange: my knowledge of the film for what she knew about the angel.

‘But I have kept you in suspense too long. No doubt you must be anxious to observe this footage for yourself.’

‘I have in my possession the second-last reel — you can imagine at what cost — nonetheless, the crucial evidence is here.’

Pogliani threaded the projector.

‘At Lecce, I have all Camini’s earlier work ... the cubist animations.’

‘And the paintings?’

Pogliani halted in his preparations.

‘You must excuse me, but I have never heard of any painting. It is possible, of course; but Camini worked in film, as I do. If you know of the existence of a painting ...’

I remarked that Dolma had implied a work, or possibly I had mis-heard; misunderstood her reference.

‘Or possibly she keeps a little secret from me? We must discuss these rendezvous in further detail!’

And he turned the light.

The whirr began. The metal teeth lodged and then discharged from the sprocket holes. The brittle nitrate film unwound its shifting mouldered chiaroscuro across the lamp.

We were in a stark and windowless enclosure; the ceiling typically vaulted, as if the walls had curved with the accumulation of these gravities.

A single wooden table. On its surface lay a figure; naked; the belly grossly distended; thrust by its own contents into the greater distortions of the room.

        IL PARTO È LUNGO E DOLOROSO

Pogliani leant forward slightly, translating.

The labour is long and full of pain.’

We had moved closer to the centre of the room. In the background, hazed by focus, two robed figures were preparing a solution in a shallow pottery saucer, their bodies swaying slightly: a drawn curtain disturbed by gathering wind. In the foreground ...

A further title appeared.

The moment is at hand!’ cried Pogliani with such enthusiasm I was not sure if this was his own exclamation or whether he was merely offering the sense.

We had returned to the shaved flesh of the genitals, in such extreme close-up there was a momentary loss of detail: the vagina dark and puckering. Like a pink.

‘Miracolo dei miracoli!’

I caught Pogliani’s transfixed face, bathed in the reflections of projected light.

I looked back to see the child expelled in a caul: the pouch of membrane resting pupae-like between its bearer’s legs.

I peered down on the smothered surface, detecting in the ravellings of flesh perhaps the legs, the torso of a child.

The head curved into view. The snout displayed its teeth. It bit against the membrane and the fluid broke, dissolving all the view into a streaming light.

I caught the creature, with the half-flap of its yet-unfeathered wings, lumbering to the frame’s edge, where it disappeared into the rust of the emulsion.

The distortion of the woman’s genitals had been immense, lending the appearance of a withered penis — not unlike how Dolma’s sex had been described by Pogliani. Then suddenly the image flared to white; and there was nothing but the sharp and brittle slap of film-tail, thrashing from its spool against the projector.

The lights had been restored. Pogliani showed increasing agitation, as if he were full-bladdered with some additional detail.

‘What was it, do you think, you followed here? What blacker star? What were your gifts?

The answers are of little consequence, my friend,’ he gasped. Tour search has been too late!’

He pulled me by my collar from the room.

                                    ¶

The tangled threads that were our shadow, hooped the surface of a narrow passage-way.

A seepage, oil-slow, had collected underfoot. I watched the splash of Pogliani’s boots — liquid peeling off the surface like a membrane from raw liver.

Tour eyes will soon become accustomed to the light,’ he said. ‘Look there!’ And faced me at the darkness.

‘Do you think that Pogliani has been burdened with his predecessor’s fear? Another little Aldo, quivering at his editing machine?

‘I have a trophy of the voyage, and have brought damnation down upon my head for what I have achieved.

‘Can you see it?’

My eyes drew out appearances from shadow. Convinced themselves of foreground, background; of the fact amongst this shamble of improbability.

There was a cage.

‘But what is there inside the cage?’

Air warmed by a faecal stench. A memory of circus.

He thrust the lamp towards the space ahead of us, ejaculating into childish laughter.

‘Look! There is an angel!’

‘At first the constant battering of wings against the bars caused frightful, I fear permanent, damage. I doubt for instance now, that it could fly.

‘Consequently, there were certain measures forced upon me ..,’

Behind the bars I momentarily caught the nightmare vision of a jackal god, its wings outstretched in pale embracement. Then other details came to me.

The creature was restrained within a wooden frame, the hind legs barely reaching to the floor and flicking upwards in involuntary spasms.

A black wig had been fitted to its head.

The wings were mere theatrical effect: a gathered sheeting draped across the shoulders and outstretched on wooden poles.

In one particular, Pogliani had been right: it could not fly. I watched as the director knelt before the suffering creature.

‘Sing,’ he gently crooned. ‘My angel, sing to me.’

I slept perhaps a single hour. An hour pervaded by a vivid and recurrent dream in which Pogliani’s angel, now grown whole, broke free of its restraining brace: the sheets become a feathered flesh; the wig, a mane. I watched its half-flapping, shuddering passage — thrashing through the liquids — back along the milky-pinkness of the corridors.

I saw Pogliani sit up in his bed and vomit.

I saw the angel leap, half-flapping, to the covers where it stood astride the director, trampling the sheets, kicking up its twiggish feet, as if engaged in some outrageous Charleston.

I watched it tear out Pogliani’s heart — a scarlet, fibrous tuber — and carry it, half-flapping in between its jaws, towards a set of balances that hung above the bed-end.

I watched it spit the still-beating object to the metal of the tray. I saw it weighed against a feather. And I saw that Pogliani’s heart was heavier.

I fell awake; a squib-glimmer of light pattering at the shutters, like a moth.

For a final time I retraced the passage to the dog-cell (and what if I had found the creature absent?) moving back along the wave-form surface of the walls.

Behind the bars, the creature shuddered convulsively on its frame. And it was such, that should I have asked, ‘What do you want?’ it surely would have answered this:

‘I want to die.’

                                    ¶

At the hospital, a group had gathered in the courtyard.

‘L’estropié’ they cried towards the arches of the balcony. Where is the amputee?

The sky was gathering about them: darkly puckered and then slackening — a breathing; bulging down in loops of rippling cloud.

It was the mother-dress, full and billowing. It was the shroud.

It was another curtain ready to be drawn.

I waited the remainder of the day amongst the milling people, holding to the bars.

As evening drew the last of light to earth, the poet’s sister made a brief appearance on the balcony.

Her lips had been disfigured; punctured through with wooden splinters as a token of her grief. As if she understood that

speech could only now be undertaken at the cost of pain.

She spoke, the flaps of skin stretching up and back with each deliberate word.

‘I talked with him, for some time, as you would have wished. I give you these, his final words, dictated to me thus, an hour before his death:

one tusk only

two tusks

three tusks

four tusks

two tusks.’

                                    ¶

The fiction that I brought condolences from Pogliani seemed of little interest to the guardien.

‘Les femmes soignent ces féoces infirmes retour des pays chauds,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll find her in the galleries. She has requested les embaumers.’ He breathed forcefully through the nose. ‘It is ridiculous, when there’s so little left to be preserved! At least the stench will make her easier to find.’

He pushed a torch across the counter’s ivory.

                                    ¶

There was a single staircase cut from stone; a narrowing spiral, as if the workers had grown increasingly impatient with their task; these hundred steps that fed me deep beneath the hospital.

Crystals had begun to form within my joints: a gout induced, presumably, by breath.

The stairwell flattened to a single tunnel, curving out of view and downwards to the right. These were the now-familiar surfaces of the underground: the pink-white from the corridor at Pogliani’s villa.

I advanced in loping strides, stooped by a ceiling gouged out to a height barely above five feet. My jacket pressed itself against my back — then billowed wilfully: a line of wet, half-flapping linen. A slow arc of torchlight swerved across the walls: the yellowed beam too weak against the airless gales of gravity.

And then, illuminated for a second, I glimpsed the letters forming ‘RUE’, obscenely carved into the stone-face.

(Here are rose-flanked pathways; here, the flower-named detention camps.)

These streaming gutters dignified as streets.

And soon the torch found other half-named passages — a ‘QUINE’, a ‘RASPAI — amputated from the body of this stolen city.

Now I chose the turning filled with dogs.

Now I chose the bellowed laughter.

And the stench.

                                    ¶

I had made her bleed.

The wooden splinters tugged at her speech like an impatient child; delaying every syllable, as if she were entranced; every word a wound’s re-opening; every word a fresh annointing of the blackening layers stepped down from her mouth.

I had become her priest.

‘During the chaos of Pesce’s revolution — who knows,’ she said, ‘perhaps occasioning it — a child was born ... as some would have it, an unnatural child ... and was delivered from this place...’

And did she mean this city? Or this hospital? Or even from this room?

The poet’s body, much as Pogliani had described it, lay upon a wooden table in the centre of the chamber.

The face was coated in hot resin. The stiff wire used to slash the brain had been removed.

One of the embalmers now began to spoon the pulp out through the nostril with a small cup-ended rod.

A stampede of odours.

A plague of mating air.

‘I have heard my brother talk about an earlier child,’ she was continuing. ‘I have heard it perished shortly after birth, at the hands of its attendants.’

The words became a momentary gargling. Her hands reached to the splinters and she pouted slightly, clearing the saliva from her mouth.

‘Both were born on heat, with jackal heads and wings ...’

But I had seen this child. It was a mongrel strapped to a bondage brace. The wings were sheet.

Perhaps it was the eyes — how else could I have read that answer as a smile?

‘So, you have visited the sideshow. I have heard of Pogliani’s masterpiece. It is a mockery.’

Behind her, the robed figures of the embalmers burst into usual laughter. A joke about the genitals.

On the table end, wedged between the poet’s thighs, a bag of fluid — body seepage — bulged out like some excessive scrotum.

‘No,’ she said, oblivious to their raillerie, ‘the true child lives.’

She paused.

‘It shall grow to be the Angel of Extermination.’

She stared at me as if to dare a contradiction.

‘That was the vision of our brother’s final poem.’

I glanced towards the half-legged body.

‘You think this was some reverie of fever? The amputation was for him the perfect disordering of the senses.

‘The years in exile were a necessary preparation; the love, the suffering, the madness; the consuming of the poison; the charge through those unutterable, unnameable things ... all to reach the unknown: here. “The time of the assassins” as he once described it.’

She paused again, re-bearded in her blood.

I watched the slashing of the poet’s abdomen; the thrusting of hands into the cut; the gathering of the stomach and intestines.

‘This was not hallucination. He was present at the birth you came to seek. But for him the act was merely confirmation. Our brother — the great criminal and malade, the great accursed! — understood there is no difference between the poem and barbarity.’

‘Qebhsenuef!’ bellowed the embalmer, the slippery ropes of flesh unravelling through his arms, ‘Qebhsenuef! You son of a whore!’

The assistant brought a limestone jar.

‘I was with him for those final hours. It began with disgust and it ended with a riot of perfumes. It began with rustrerie and it has ended with the angel.’

I listened to this talk of the apocalypse, garbled in the black-red boxer’s mouth that gaped, opening and half-opened, ruined at her face.

‘I doubt,’ I said, ‘that ours is such a time of myth.’

There was a brief hiatus. I watched her stand. I watched as she drew the wooden splinters, one by one, slowly through her lips, placing them beside the oils, the adze, of the embalmers. I watched her move towards the bed.

Isabella bent towards her brother’s broken mouth and kissed him. A lover’s kiss. She straightened; turning to me; her lips now streaming with the fluids she had occasioned from his body. It was as if her face had given birth.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, the words now bilging from her mouth, ‘we have faith in our poison. It has the same name as our kisses. It has the same name as this city.’

I closed the door upon her grief — that metaphysick of hysteria.

I moved, amongst the milling dogs, along the walls. The torchlight slashed against the streetsign of the gallery. I pressed my fingers deep within the wet slits of stone, tracing out the name.

It was familiar: as if the genitals of someone once beloved; someone known for many years, whom one had come eventually to loathe.

        3

The wind has dried all but the largest drops of rain: each holding in its sphere a portion of the lightness and the darkness of the afternoon.

There is a sudden squall. The rain becomes smoke.

‘It is the signature of the illiterate. It is perverse. It is illicit. It is the heart of the unknown, obliterating everything in its profusion.’

Dolma has unwound the soft blue scarf. The blue-mauve dress has slipped first from one shoulder, then the other.

‘A poem is just like a city. The poet must make himself a new language with the alphabet: a language of great distances, of depth and height. The poet must construct his language with the ruins of the past...

‘But enough of this, ma chere fringille, mon frère.’

She calls me, ‘Aldo, you must kiss me, as you have come to do. And deeply.’