Monument Maker, page 10
Think about it, she said, these black GIs who fought at D-Day came back to a segregated America and were never decorated. That reminds me, I said to her, wasn’t Mauthausen concentration camp liberated by an African American tank commander in a stolen tank? I haven’t heard that one, she said. Yes, I told her, as I became sure of this strange memory, he turned up in a tank and all of the starving prisoners were suspicious and of course some of them were shocked to see a black man in charge of a tank at the head of a liberating force and some of them believed it to be a trap or, worse, the work of the Russians. But the African American tank commander stood on top of his tank and announced as loudly and as clearly as he could to the masses of inmates cowering in fear and confusion or walking round in a strange daze that Hitler was dead. Hitler is kaput! he announced, before withdrawing, into history and folklore, never to be named, or photographed, or heard from again. Wow, she said, that is quite some story, but I specialise in the Normandy landings, so it’s beside the point.
There is a concert at the local church tonight, she said. I think you and your friends may enjoy it. It’s a free concert, she said, where the orchestra will play Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. Isn’t that the music that accompanied the announcement of Hitler’s suicide on German radio? I asked her. Yes, she said, I hope they will do it justice.
Just then a terrific thunderstorm broke out, so we had to quickly cycle to the church in the pouring rain in just our shirtsleeves and long flowing dresses because none of us had thought to wear a jacket, what with this being France, in the summer. We threw our bikes down at the entrance and charged into the Church of Saint-Étienne de Villiers-sous-Grez, a church that I had no previous knowledge of but whose bare stone walls and pale-blue curtains and collection of suffering icons, many of which seemed to be captured in the act of turning their eyes away or otherwise looking elsewhere in the presence of the agonised body of Christ, immediately appealed to me. The lightning raged behind the stained-glass windows, which portrayed a sorry saint with a sword over his shoulder, gazing down in strange bemusement at the painting of the Passion below, while the conductor did a remarkable job of fussily and obsessively tuning and generally bossing the orchestra by ear.
And then they were off, and it was marvellous; the slow, heavy swells of strings, the distant brass, the contortions of the conductor, the young teen on the timpani (who are these people?), and the thunder rolled in accompaniment and the lights flickered and threatened to drown us in darkness and that is when I realised that Saint-Étienne de Villiers is one of those secret, cryptic churches that are modelled on the body of the whale in which Jonah travelled, or, more secretly, but truly, the symbol of the fish, which is the secret body of Christ and his chariot into history, and I saw the white arcing stones, curving across the roofs, as the ribcage and the spine of this incredible amphibian, the belly of the beast that would carry us through the storm and just as suddenly the lights gave out, the lights gave out and darkness descended and we were buffeted from side to side by the music, and the storm, and a fat gentleman in front of me held his hands to his ears as if we were at a concert by Led Zeppelin, and now the orchestra are winging it by ear, they cannot read the score, all they have to go on is memory and the increasingly frenzied movements of the conductor, who at this point is just a black silhouette, a black silhouette that has been swallowed by a fish, and the music is starting to wobble, and it is tumultuous, and it is history, and it is a classical recital during a bombing raid, and there is something terrible and unfortunately true about it all, something that requires bravery to even think about too deeply, something that we fled, into the night, afterwards, and something that we talked around a little bit, in the garden of the studio-hotel, in the dark, where, in our absence, the lightning had brought down a huge tree that now blocked the path to the river, which meant that we couldn’t even swim any more.
Actually, I know why Strindberg never went to the basilica at Larchant to sort himself out. Because Saint Mathurin of Larchant is not the one to cure you of madness; Mathurin is the patron saint of madmen and fools. And of exorcists.
All around the semi-ruined cathedral are scattered the corpses of pigeons, so many that you may at first think it points to some kind of idiot ritual in order to keep the world turning. Possibly. The ruins smell of dogshit and of urine. But this is France, so who knows. The stone carvings are no Autun, but still, they are remarkable. Five headless statues stand sentinel on either side of the tympanum that depicts Christ as Pantocrator; a sixth is now invisible (and not a Baptist in sight). These are airheads, classic fools, while high above incredible Notre-Dame-esque gargoyles leer out into the air, their mouths and throats hollow, a channel for sidereal influence, for a rain of idiot drool, and in order to make the wind sing. Looking up through the destroyed central tower is to gaze down, into the ocean, is a final lake, of gargoyle, while a single bell, perched on a crumbling wall high in the air, dares the most foolish of all to climb the stones and sound his madness. All around there are small, time-effaced carvings of the pointlessness of everyday tasks and the futility of striving. Step inside, to the restored cathedral, and it is clear that this is no secret amphibious structure, no chariot across time, unless perhaps an octopus, a crazy, mad octopus from whose sac extends an arcing red ribbon of the blood of Christ, which is the fuel of time. But no; inside is closest to a vast echoing Golgotha, which means the place of the skull, with the arc of the roof acting as a membrane, amplifying the constant chattering of the pigeons inside the walls, and it feels as though there are vast colonies, living in the walls, toppling dead from the ramparts of heaven past the long stained-glass windows, echoing, forever, in the back of the skull, nagging, mocking, laughing, praying, forever echoing, just beneath conscious thought, a madness, in other words, a madness to hold off the end of the world and an endless supply of pigeons, too, in constant recitation, as in the monastery of the skull. Sit there, close your eyes, and listen to the insane song of the Incarnation of the Heavenly Choirs Forever. And Christ, here, is rendered in a way that points to his eventual return as the Ecce Homo of Giménez, his image as fallen as that masterpiece, as uncanny and as childlike and as inhuman and as odd in its angles, as a waxwork, as a papier-mâché model, simultaneously less than and more than human, as grotesque and idiotic as a true god. And the stone of the cathedral, the stopped-up doors and the crumbling walls, singing, as a rebuke to anyone possessed by the pagan idiocy of proclaiming the works of nature as the proof of all we need to declare the life eternal, eternal life triumphant, as if the lilies of the field, the potatoes of your garden patch, the rising of life from the compost of death were the final ground of existence, as if they somehow held up life themselves, but this is process, too, and the ground they are fixed to, the ground they rise up from and die back to, is a final stone, an ultimate father, who is not here, echoing, oh madness of the father, ho fool of the first stone, is the song of the squabs in the walls, of the birds in the brain, of the echoes, in time, from Golgotha, and that life, and grace, and love, are not inevitable, are not essential, but are gifts, freely given, which we do not deserve and have no need of receiving, and is the first stone, echoing, empty.
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens embraser Larchant,
Viens Saint-Esprit, habiter tous nos chants,
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens régner dans nos cœurs,
Viens Saint-Esprit, faire briller ta splendeur!
WOH, OHO, OH, HO, OHO, OH, OH . . .
Viens Saint-Esprit, assister Mathurin,
Viens que ta gloire se déploie en ton saint,
Viens Saint-Esprit, que ta vie coule en nous
Viens Saint-Esprit, que nos liens se dénouent!
COO, COO, OH, HO, COO, COO, COO . . .
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens embraser Larchant,
Viens Saint-Esprit, faire de nous tes enfants,
Viens Saint-Esprit, nous révéler le Père,
Viens Saint-Esprit, exaucer nos prières!
WOH, OHO, OH, HO, OHO, OH, OH . . .
Viens Saint-Esprit, assister Mathurin,
Viens Saint-Esprit, nous guérir par tes mains,
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens apaiser nos cœurs,
Viens Saint-Esprit, Toi le consolateur!
COO, COO, OH, HO, COO, COO, COO . . .
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens embraser Larchant,
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens agir puissamment,
Viens Saint-Esprit, viens libérer nos cœurs,
Viens Saint-Esprit, que l’amour soit vainqueur!
WOH, COO, WOH, COO, OH, HO, OH . . .
As we walk away from the cathedral, my Flower and I, we come to this, written in stone, in childlike letters, above a house there, in French:
JUNE 29 1792
MADE BY ME
JEAN PIERRE
BERNARD AND
ADELAÏD HAMELIN
MY WIFE
Another summer.
8. VILLAGE OF IN THE BEGINNING
I receive a phone call at the hotel. Flower answers. It is my mother, she announces. My mother has died. I am to return home for the funeral. I refuse. With that, any connection I had to my remaining family is severed. I hang up the phone and prepare for the future that has been gifted me. And that is lonely, now, and nothing like I thought it would be.
Aside from the secret churches in faraway forests and the great basilicas, hanging down, into the air, some of the best architectures in France, certainly the most beautiful, the most monumental, are the vernacular architectures, and by this I mean birds’ nests, the nests of swallows, most particularly, those incredible upside-down creations that defy gravity with simple spit alone, a simple squirt of spit from the mouth of a tiny bird is enough to cement these creations to the roof of heaven, look up, there they are, and look how the swallows squeeze in and out of that tiny hole, do you see the little beaks, the eyes made by God for peeking out in terror and wonder, how wonderful it must be to squeeze in and out of those nests with a mess of insects in your cheek, how like being born again, every time you leave home, and those shacks by the train tracks too, take the train from Gare de Lyon—quick, get out of Paris—and there, by the side of the tracks, you will witness an architecture as ingenious as the birds,’ as bird-brained as Saint Mathurin himself, little huts made from sheets of corrugated iron and old windows that totter on two storeys like towers in fairy tales, that stand half-submerged in sunken gardens with flooded beds and decorated with beer cans and thought up by mad old tramps in their ingenuity, poverty is a gift, is what the Lord reminds us, poverty is the gift of ingenuity, the cure for all boredoms, the meaning of the day, for without poverty we are merely rich, and bored, and pay other people to do what would otherwise fulfil us, while we fool ourselves that a life of poverty is the only thing worth outwitting, but if you love outwitting then stay poor, my friend, stay poor, for all that riches have given us are perfectly symmetrical chateaux, grotesque palaces whose rooms we could never hope to occupy, solutions to things that we will never have to think, so we need another word for poverty, for riches, surely, are impoverishing, and poverty, surely, is enriching, in the right hands is ennobling, these noble shacks, these nobilities by the train tracks, or skirt the River Loing, lose yourself in the paths through the forest and stumble upon wooden shacks behind fences that pretend to be electrified or to be patrolled by security groups, signs that have surely been stolen, idle threats, and behind these chain fences and padlocked gates are the wonderful summer huts, some up on stilts like a fable or an allegory, some leaning, some half-collapsed, lived-in architecture, leaking architecture, with young girls spread out on towels before them in the late-afternoon light, young girls slipping their bikinis down in order to avoid tan lines, young boys leaping from rickety piers, repaired but never improved, never bettered, by succeeding generations, and these are lessons of how to live secretly, richly, and in faithful idiot poverty.
France is a land of dogshit, unfortunately. Watch where you lay your towel. We cycled in the dark through the forest to a place where some guy was making home brew. The whole village was out in the streets. My Flower and I are introduced to a Frenchwoman, with long curly hair and a huge drooling Rottweiler named Ook, who tells us that she knew we were here already. The whole village knows, she says. Then she asks us if we went swimming in the river on Sunday. In the river, next to the bridge, she asks my Flower, was that you? Yes, I saw you, she says. I saw you in the water because I noticed what a beautiful flower you were, she tells my Flower. A Flower is a flower is a Flower. We are joined by the couple who run the cafe that had the baroque music trio. Cico, the owner, is drunk. You stay at Grez-sur-Loing? he asks me. Grez is a type of stone, a type of granite, he says. You stay at the Stone-on-the-River, he says. How can a stone be on a river? I ask him, and he picks up an out-of-tune guitar and plays the chords to “House of the Rising Sun” while the French woman with the curly hair, whose name is Babette, manhandles her dog, holding this huge thing that can rear up to the size of a man down by the ear, forcing it to lie prone on the ground, and tells us about her experiences as a nurse in an emergency ward, where she says it was common to be called to remove household objects “from anuses and vaginas.” Like what? Light bulbs, she says. Why light bulbs? Because they fit, it is inspiration, they see it fits and they do it and they can’t get it back out. But doesn’t it smash? Sometimes it smashes and there is blood. What else? Vegetables, she says, two-pronged carrots, she says. She gets up to use the toilet and she takes the dog with her. When she comes back she sits down next to us and she says to my Flower: I put honey on my vagina.
Afterwards, in the dark, in a field by the side of the road, on top of a towel, Babette and my Flower make love while Ook and I watch with a flashlight, looking at each other and thinking the same incomprehensible thoughts, experiencing the same incomprehensible feeling of life, before us, Ook straining at the leash the whole time, the foreskins of our huge slobbering cocks pulled back, our monstrous tongues, as the two lie entwined, in the beam of the flashlight, their skin the colour of the moon in France.
My mother is dead. I am alone in a field in the dark. We have crossed the Meridian. Afterwards there is dogshit all over the underside of the towel and I am forced to abandon it in a bin. In France you must be careful where you lay your towel.
I went to Mass and chanted the word Ook beneath my breath the whole time and waited for God to strike me down. Ook, I say, Ook, Ook, and babble. He did no such thing. God approves and is the instigator. It is your portion, under the sun, is what he says, in the Mass.
I must remember you, Flower, as you appear before me, now, once again, in the garden, with three fingers you hold open the pages of a book, which you read to me occasionally, you clear your throat in announcement and wake me from this trance of time, to read me something lost now, but which was about the moment, and the uncovering of it being its own solution to the same, I think, something about looking in answer, something about the question as the solution, is tied up in knots, in the past, and which turns on the question of what it was you said then, which is its answer, and the perfect mirror of your fingers, beneath the fingers of your hand, rising up, as to the surface of a river, in support, which is the stone on the river, I see now, which is the correct question to ask of time, Grez-sur-Loing, in the garden, suspended, on the tips of your fingers and your black sandals with the buckles that glint in the sun, now, your long hair hangs over your face as you scratch at a little bite on your arm, while your mind is somewhere else, inside the book, inside of this book, which is the mirror of the book you were reading, then, and the answer to it, as you shift your position to the front and make a move that flattens the grass, like the joyful cats of France and with just as little care, as little consciousness of me, watching you, from now, you don’t care for any of it, Flower, but your place in this book, which now you are underlining, which now you are taking notes from, the little toe on your left foot strapped up, and tied to the next, bashed and banged up as the badge of your obliviousness, and your arse, fatter than a French arse, which as a rule is small and is skimpy and is tanned and which is no arse at all, honestly, young girls of France you have no arse at all, as a rule, but here it is, your fat voluptuous arse, which I would slip inside of, now, with the aid of pills and memory, your bikini bottoms, drawn down, brown and gold and with a blue tag extending, colour is hardest for me, in memory I have so few colours in memory, as if the past were all primary, and no hues at all, as a cathedral in unpainted stone is the glory of God, and you run your right hand through your hair and coil it around your neck, bite your lip in young womanly concentration, age has no need of biting lips in concentration, for age has all come through and is unstoppable and will not hold for the mere pressure of the teeth on the lips, and your legs bent back behind you at the knees, like a skydiver into summer, your nose, which is unruly, too big for your face and so mystical and statuesque, your lips now tight in grim concentration as you enact the question and supply the answer, which I would call lover, as your bikini top slips down your shoulder and reveals the tongue-print of a dragonfly, the love bite of an insect, its lips held in grim concentration as it feasts on your flesh, making meaning, in answer to the answer, and with a single snapped antenna, as struck by tiny lightning, as tiny weather systems we have no way of knowing, Flower, stamen, lightning rod, and stone wall, climbing up, you too I will include in the picture, now, and will scan upwards, into the clouds, the baby blanket of clouds that gather in the orbit of the ruins, for there was never a time with eyes that was without ruins, never a time of life that was without death, never a garden that was not peopled by lovers, once, never a moment that was not fleeting, and bashful, and all new, never a stone that was not formed, itself, by stone. You sip your beer through the side of your mouth, it is awkward and endearing, your glass reads Hard Rock Cafe Paris, hard rock hold me up, river, as we move through you, stone, your book is propped up on your abandoned dress, your rumfled dress, rumfles, hold me up, as you press your sunglasses to your face with a single finger, how much minute correction, how much tiny dancing in order to stay still, how much imperceptible movement in stone, is the question I provide as the answer to a summer, which is you, first Flower, love of my life, which is let go now, and the bones of your ribs, showing through, which is disappeared now, and the pinch of your waist, which is how I must remember you.
