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there were no lace drapes nor windbells nor moonlight nor any moist whisper of
lugubriously seductive rain; this place was bleak, mean and cheerless and the
sheets on the mattress they threw down on the floor for us were blotched with
dirt although, at first, we did not notice that because it was necessary to
pretend the urgent passion we always used to feel in one another's presence
even if we felt it no longer, as if to act out the feeling with sufficient
intensity would recreate it by sleight of hand, although our skins (which knew
us better than we knew ourselves) told us the period of reciprocation was
over. It was a mean room and the windows overlooked a parking lot with a
freeway beyond it, so that the paper walls shuddered with the reverberations
of the infernal clamour of the traffic. There was a sluggish electric fan with
dead flies caught in the spokes and a single strip of neon overhead lit us and
everything up with a scarcely tolerable, quite remorseless light. A slatternly
woman in a filthy apron brought us glasses of thin, cold, brown tea made from
barley and then she shut the door on us. I would not let him kiss me between
the thighs because I was afraid he would taste the traces of last night's
adventure, a little touch of paranoia in that delusion.
I don't know how much guilt had to do with the choice of this decor. But
I felt it was perfectly appropriate.
The air was thicker than tea that's stewed on the hob all day and
cockroaches were running over the ceiling, I remember. I cried all the first
part of the night, I cried until I was exhausted but he turned on his side and
slept -- he saw through that ruse, though I did not since I did not know that
I was lying. But I could not sleep because of the rattling of the walls and
the noise of traffic. We had turned off the glaring lamp; when I saw a shaft
of light fall across his face, I thought: "Surely it's too early for the
dawn." But it was another person silently sliding open the unlocked door; in
this disreputable hotel, anything can happen. I screamed and the intruder
vanished. Wakened by a scream, my lover thought I'd gone mad and instantly
trapped me in a stranglehold, in case I murdered him. We were both old enough
to have known better, too. When I turned on the lamp to see what time it was,
I noticed, to my surprise, that his features were blurring, like the
underwriting on a palimpsest. It wasn't long before we parted. Only a few
days. You can't keep that pace up for long.
Then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and
appalling place. I woke up one morning and found it had become home. Though I
still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself
in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character,
whatever that is.
The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't
it? Everything else is artful.
Master
After he discovered that his vocation was to kill animals, the pursuit
of it took him far away from temperate weather until, in time, the insatiable
suns of Africa eroded the pupils of his eyes, bleached his hair and tanned his
skin until he no longer looked the thing he had been but its systematic
negative; he became the white hunter, victim of an exile which is the
imitation of death, a willed bereavement. He would emit a ravished gasp when
he saw the final spasm of his prey. He did not kill for money but for love.
He had first exercised a propensity for savagery in the acrid lavatories
of a minor English public school where he used to press the heads of the new
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boys into the ceramic bowl and then pull the flush upon them to drown their
gurgling protests. After puberty, he turned his indefinable but exacerbated
rage upon the pale, flinching bodies of young women whose flesh he lacerated
with teeth, fingernails and sometimes his leather belt in the beds of cheap
hotels near London's great rail termini (King's Cross, Victoria, Euston . .
.). But these pastel-coloured excesses, all the cool, rainy country of his
birth could offer him, never satisfied him; his ferocity would attain the
colouring of the fauves only when he took it to the torrid zones and there
refined it until it could be distinguished from that of the beasts he
slaughtered only by the element of self-consciousness it retained, for, if
little of him now pertained to the human, the eyes of his self still watched
him so that he was able to applaud his own depredations.
Although he decimated herds of giraffe and gazelle as they grazed in the
savannahs until they learned to snuff their annihilation upon the wind as he
approached, and dispatched heraldically plated hippopotami as they lolled up
to their armpits in ooze, his rifle's particular argument lay with the silken
indifference of the great cats, and, finally, he developed a speciality in the
extermination of the printed beasts, leopards and lynxes, who carry ideograms
of death in the clotted language pressed in brown ink upon their pelts by the
fingertips of mute gods who do not acknowledge any divinity in humanity.
When he had sufficiently ravaged the cats of Africa, a country older by
far than we are yet to whose innocence he had always felt superior, he decided
to explore the nether regions of the New World, intending to kill the painted
beast, the jaguar, and so arrived in the middle of a metaphor for desolation,
the place where time runs back on itself, the moist, abandoned cleft of the
world whose fructifying river is herself a savage woman, the Amazon. A green,
irrevocable silence closed upon him in that serene kingdom of giant
vegetables. Dismayed, he clung to the bottle as if it were a teat.
He travelled by jeep through an invariable terrain of architectonic
vegetation where no wind lifted the fronds of palms as ponderous as if they
had been sculpted out of viridian gravity at the beginning of time and then
abandoned, whose trunks were so heavy they did not seem to rise into the air
but, instead, drew the oppressive sky down upon the forest like a coverlid of
burnished metal. These tree trunks bore an outcrop of plants, orchids,
poisonous, iridescent blossoms and creepers the thick-ness of an arm with
flowering mouths that stuck out viscous tongues to trap the flies that
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