Monument Maker, page 13
Flower’s friend Katarina the Bitch arrives with her husband, Thierry. He works as some kind of project manager for blah blah blah but his eyes are alive with mischief. They take seats far apart from each other at the table and I tell myself they are swingers, you never know who will turn out to be a swinger, but I tell myself, it is these two, for sure. Anne has made schnapps with the leaves of raspberry plants and she passes the bottle around the table and everyone sings drinking songs. The Swedes’ are sad, the French bawdy. I sing “I Belong to Glasgow” and the Finnish cartoonist tells me that my accent gets him in the heart. Everyone is becoming progressively drunker and drunker. Thierry corners Anne, who by now is ignoring her boring boyfriend completely. The Swedish painter with the white cap and idiot glasses tells me he likes to listen to Swedish hippy music like International Harvester while he paints, and it makes me think of Mary and her avant-garde din. In the dark, Doris falls into the waterlogged ditch that runs along the side of the garden and emerges soaked, with her bonnet of flowers sopping, and stuck to her face, and now she too looks bashful and born again. The party degenerates; everyone is dancing to Abba. The drunken Finnish cartoonist (I forgot to say that the boring Finnish poet had gone back home for the Midsummer celebration) leaps the fire and ends up in the ditch himself. Katarina and Thierry disappear into the night. Another night, I think, as I watch Flower escort them out of the garden and kiss them on the stairs. Before they leave, Thierry points down the garden at me, I pretend not to see, but I watch from the corner of my eye as the three of them talk about me, and think I can’t see, silhouetted there, at the end of the garden. We dance some more as the sun comes up. Anne asks if I am a Christian, and I tell her I am, but it’s not what you would think. Then I feel ashamed, and say, actually, I am a Christian and it is exactly what you would think, because who needs all of this apologising and elucidating and explaining. The night ends with the drunken Finnish cartoonist sitting in a chair next to the firepit and berating the Swedes for their performance in the Second World War. How many Jews did you save? he demands, again and again. In the morning the cross has fallen, there are bottles and crockery everywhere, and not a soul to be seen.
Saint Anselm, writing in his book Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), has this to say about how incredible the situation is: since God is infinitely great, any sin against him is infinite, and forever. But man is finite, and so simply doesn’t have the time to fully expiate a sin against forever. Only a being that is both human and divine has the necessary qualities to expiate eternal sins. So: God gives his only son, Christ, to die on the cross, so that man, the infinite sinner, can be redeemed. Something has changed. This is no longer Christ the Vanquisher of Death but Christ the Suffering Redeemer. And this is me, Pierre, God almighty, relieved of my duties and now free to sin, forever, but at what cost.
In the forest around Villiers-sous-Grez they are playing Dungeons & Dragons for real. We come across a yurt inside of which is a wooden chair with carved spider legs and next to it instructions for the Dungeon Master. In the event of a battle it gives details of who should win and who should rise again, from the dead. We pass through a clearing where, ranged all around us, on top of the high rocks, men in cloaks with horned helmets and women dressed as sorceresses face each other in battle. They act as if we don’t exist and for a moment there, and forever afterwards, we are the ghosts.
We attend a party outside the village, next to a football pitch, where DJs are playing reggae and families are spread out on towels, and with dancing, in the floodlit field. It is the first time I have smelled marijuana outside of Paris and quite a few people seem to be very drunk or stoned. I meet the strange antiquarian bookseller who this time tells me about the discovery of a place near Antarctica named Desolation Island, which is another favourite of hers, and that she has three books about it, which she won’t sell to anyone, and then her husband starts singing a King Crimson song, and I don’t remember much more than that. Flower is distracted. In the distance, dancing in front of the DJs, is that creep Davide. Katarina the Bitch is dancing with her husband, who is wearing a T-shirt of the group Magma.
I spot Babette, the girl that Flower made love to in the dark, the owner of Ook, she is with her boyfriend who she introduces as Jean-Marc. I wonder if he knows, does he know I watched her fuck my Flower, by flashlight, while I held his dog tight by the leash. But he seems oblivious, and is friendly, and he tells me he has entered his dog, which he describes as an attack dog, into a competition. You must train your dog to attack you, he says, but really it is not attacking you at all, it is attacking the special protective suit you are wearing, he says. If you took the suit off and sat it next to you, it would attack the suit and not you. Training dogs changed my life, he explains, as I stare over his shoulder and see Flower talking to Davide across the field, silhouetted in the floodlights. They are playing the song “Groove is in the Heart.” You cannot be too soft with a dog, he says, and all the while I have my eye on Davide, who kisses my Flower on both her cheeks and holds her by the shoulder while he talks to her. You must be firm, he says. And now they are dancing to the music. Really, it is a game, he says. What’s a game? I ask him. The game of the dog attacking you is a game, he says, and he says it exactly like that. It is like a sparring match, he says, a martial art where you beat the shit out of each other and then afterwards you shake hands and embrace, he says. It changed my life, he says, and then he asks me if I would like to attend a training session with him and his dog in Fontainebleau. Also, he says, do you like tombs? Tombs? I say. Graves? No, he says, and he grasps for the word. Under the stones, he says, what lies under the stones? Caves, Babette says, caves lie under the stones. Yes, Jean-Marc says, caves, do you like dark caves in the middle of the night? If so, he says, I can take you to one, near the Route de la Grande Vallée.
Later, all four of us go back to their house, where we eat pakora and drink Japanese whisky and where Babette asks me about my writing, where do I get my inspiration, she says to me, and I tell her God, and she says, no, you should replace the word God with the word Source, she says, it is better, and she makes a joke of pretending to phone The Bible and ask if she can have the word God replaced and the voice on the end refuses to give his name and asks her to call back in the morning between 9 and 9.15 A.M. and while my Flower and Jean-Marc talk about dogs in the living room, Babette locks me in the bathroom, and translates a text she has hanging on the wall for me, a text by an unknown author, discovered in a monastery in the sixteenth century, and whose contents I can barely recall now, except something about stillness, except something about being in the centre of the stillness, as she unzips my fly, and takes my cock in her mouth.
Davide beat the shit out of Flower, that is what she is saying, it isn’t a game, she says, he is dangerous, she says, as she shows me the bruises on her arms and the single cut on her neck. So many questions. But they can wait. I head over to his place with a hammer in my pocket, despite the protests of my Flower, and now I am the echo of an echo of an echo.
Harder. Harder. Harder.
I beat him round the head with a hammer, harder.
There is a little bird, a goldfinch, shivering, on a roof across the way.
9. HERMITAGE OF BATTLING DEMONS IN AFRICA
Now I can tell you the full story of Max Rehberg and how he lost his right arm battling demons in the deserts of Africa in emulation of extravagant monasticists like Simeon Stylites, the Syrian who sat on top of a pillar for thirty-seven years, or Saint Jerome, author of the so-called Vulgate, who, even more crazily, took up the study of Hebrew in order to circumvent an obsessive desire for masturbation, or that hermit, what was his name, the one who stood on one leg without eating or drinking and, who knows, probably holding his breath too, for God only knows how long, only Rehberg was a killer, a gun for hire, according to the story I have put together, who worked for regional warlords and gun-trafficking gangs, but from a similar place, motivated by that same holy urge to empty his mind of everything but the glory of God.
Like Saint Augustine, whose spiritual autobiography resembles his own, Max Rehberg was himself a shining example of man’s “corruption, redemption and continued imperfection.” His family was military: distant, cold, unsupportive of anything except the continuation of the same. Perfect training, in other words, for the adventurer that would burn it all to the ground. At age seventeen he experienced a conversion, well, a calling, perhaps, is the better way of putting it, when he claimed to have seen written in the air, in letters of blood, he claimed, as if the sky itself were crying blood, he said, the figure of his own heart. Whose wording was obscure, of course, for who could ever truly figure the depths of his own heart, except for his maker, of course, except for his creator, which is exactly how Rehberg interpreted it, as though his creator had spoken the name of his mission, which was called Africa, which was called Desert, and which was called Demon.
How to be worthy of this life? he writes in a teenage diary salvaged from the pyre his partner made of his belongings after his death. Make of your heart a fortress, he says. And then yield, is the law.
At twenty-one he sails for Egypt, where, in 1973, at the age of twenty-five, he is involved in a tank battle in Suez against the invading forces of Israel led by Ariel Sharon. It was here that he met Yasser Mahmoud, “The Ostrich,” as he was known due to his preferred mode of execution, which alternated between upside-down crucifixions over firepits and being buried alive, head first.
At twenty-seven he publishes his first pamphlet, To Run Wild In It, essentially an updating of the anathematised heretic Bishop Honorius of Rome’s view that although Christ had two natures and was, essentially, divided, in his humanity and in his divinity, yet in this division, precisely because of this division, in fact, he was united in one will, which was the will of God, the Father, who made this world, Rehberg claims, in order that Christ, and all of the Christs to come (for, in his argument, anyone who enters history is incarnated as a Christ), could run wild in it.
At twenty-eight he has his first child, in Livingstone country, in a village hard by Victoria Falls, a half-caste boy fathered with an unknown woman, both of whom disappeared, into history, one presumes, in order to run wild in it. He abandons them, takes on three wives, and lives in a mud hut on the banks of an alligator-infested river. He enters into a business deal with The Ostrich, which involves smuggling arms across the internal deserts of Africa. He also publishes a second pamphlet, via the same Egyptian letterpress, a copy of which I have in my possession, this time entitled Worship What You Burn and Burn What You Worship after the entreaty of Saint Remi of Reims on the baptism of the barbarian King Clovis as related by Gregory of Tours.
The Africa Max Rehberg arrived in can be found on no map; for this is the Africa of Holy Maximilian Rehberg. To travel, truthfully, is to go nowhere, Rehberg writes in a journal from the time, except, maybe, deeper. You are the same person no matter where you go, and you drag all that you would escape behind you, as in a corpse you are unable to dispose of because it has taken on your own face. However, if the traveller is lucky, he says, or perhaps simply cursed, he may be given to look behind, and beyond, and see something that is not himself.
He bears witness to a flotilla of burning boats on the Nile, piled high with smouldering corpses, the stench of which, he claims, was “more beautiful than the prayers of the saint.” A boat runs aground and he and The Ostrich go through what is left of the bodies, which seem to have been torched along with all of their possessions, the bodies of the women mutilated and rearranged like in a drawing by Hans Bellmer, the men decapitated and with a sign carved into their bodies, into the flesh of their chests, in the shape of a cross, but with spaces for letters, for language, like this—#—almost, in each vector of which there are different combinations of zeros and crosses. A game of noughts and crosses, Rehberg says, but The Ostrich has no idea what he is talking about and asks him if Noughts and Crosses are the names of gods. It is the language of God, Rehberg corrects him, which is written in flesh. In the hull of the boat, seemingly untouched by flames, Rehberg retrieves what he describes as an ark, a large white metal cube inside of which is the mummified head of a man. In a secret compartment, beneath a false bottom, he claims to have discovered what appears to be a diary, written in a Sudanese dialect, that with the help of The Ostrich he translates into English and later publishes as Belly of the Fish of Christ, Ship, the first of the Holy Books.
BOOK TWO: TRANSEPT
1. BELLY OF THE FISH OF CHRIST, SHIP
KHARTOUM, SUDAN, 1884
20/3/1884
We sat cross-legged in the street, drinking port into which we would pour a thimble’s-worth of sand in order that it would clean out our insides and open our passages. Suddenly Biraggo Fonte said: Look! That’s Charles Gordon!
He appeared on the roof of the Serail as a silhouette, a black bird atop a white cube. Fonte got to his feet and began to gesticulate. Gordon turned and raised his telescope towards us. I thought we must look like insects to a man like Gordon, spiders on their backs, grotesque. No, Fonte said. Then Gordon turned, and pointed his telescope to the north. You see, Fonte said. He looks to the north. A man like Gordon is implacable. He looks at us and then he looks to the north. What does that tell you? I asked Fonte. The north is the unconscious, he said, he is dreaming Khartoum. He is looking for relief, I replied, he is searching the horizon for the sails of his rescuers. That is the quality of the dream, Fonte said.
We sat for nearly an hour. If he is dreaming Khartoum, I said, then we might still be spiders, the kinds that cobweb dreams and that squat upon your chest with their multiform eyes and that bare their teeth. Now you’re making sense, Fonte said. But beetles would be more appropriate in this instance, he insisted, dung beetles, rolling great balls of excrement into the dark. Is there not a saying that equates balls of excrement with the midnight sun, the black sun of the north? I asked him. Now we’re getting somewhere, Fonte said, now you’re starting to understand. I don’t understand at all, I said. There is no escaping the sun, Fonte lamented, as he stirred the golden grains into his cup.
During the time it took us to walk to Fonte’s quarters, a small whitewashed cave dug out beneath an abandoned grocer’s, we talked of all that we had lost and how we had come to be stranded at this crossing place of the Nile. At one point Fonte held up his forearm and in the arteries that stood out on his skin, tunnels that contained and ran all the way back to his birth, it was as if it was revealed to me the specifics of our predicament and our co-ordinates on God’s earth.
Later, in a place near the marshes, Fonte spat in the face of a serving girl and threatened to disembowel her three crippled brothers. I rolled diamonds of sand between my teeth and looked to the future.
21/3/1884
A freak rain came to Khartoum and I was forced to remain in my quarters for the best part of a week. I subsisted on dried beans and curdled milk. Word came to me that Gordon had been seen walking the streets without his bodyguard and as soon as the weather gave way I made a point to comb the perimeter of the palace in quest of a meeting. The palace is high and white and looks as if it has been dropped from heaven itself.
27/3/1884
I met Fonte in the street and we engaged in conversation. He asked me what I thought the difference was between Sunni and Shia Muslims. I explained that in my understanding it had to do with tradition and orthodoxy, but he seemed unconvinced. Do you not think, he asked me, that the difference has more to do with time? I asked him to explain himself, but he was vague. The Sunni sees time as bountiful, he ventured. The Shia sees it as something that is running out. In that case Khartoum is a Shia city, I laughed. I disagree, he said, and he seemed upset. I’m sorry, I said, I did not mean to offend you. I have to take a nap, Fonte announced, and he excused himself, abruptly. Right then I saw Gordon approaching from the south, walking slowly. I moved towards him and was suddenly emboldened to catch his arm. He didn’t flinch, and I had the feeling that I could have willingly led him away to whatever assignation I might have dreamed up, as if he would take to the skies like a kite at the slightest touch. I felt my own self loosened as I looked into his eyes and saw that one was slightly larger than the other, which made his face appear as a composite, his left side regal, round and upstanding, his right side palsied, dug in. Unhand me, he asked me, a request more than a demand. He searched my appearance for a clue as to my motives. I am a world traveller, I told him, and a prisoner. He returned his hand. I am a monument, he said, to futility.
