Monument Maker, page 36
Often we would begin the show with an act of basic hypnotism, in order to presage the greater hypnotism still to come. I would request a volunteer, a young man or a young woman or, on this occasion, a lame old crone. By this point I had developed an elementary but highly effective technique. As the crone approached I would open my arms as if to embrace or console her and then in the second before the love embrace I would strike her arms down and run my fingers, held tight together, quickly and gently across her throat. You have no head, I would tell them, for I have removed it.
The volunteer’s body would become limp, and they would stagger, unbalanced, from side to side. I would stand behind them and have them fall back into my arms, a technique that was particularly effective with women. Then I would ask them how, with their head removed, they were capable of thought at all. They would say all sorts of things at this juncture: I don’t know; well, what doesn’t know; my body; well, where in your body (these answers were often lewd and unintentionally hilarious); something is thinking for me; well, do they have a head (this provoked much laughter); a ghost is thinking; well, does that mean you are haunted (the Headless Horseman, someone shouted one night); my mummy and my daddy dreamed me up; well, would they really have dreamed of a baby with no head (again, much laughter); then I would drop my punchline. You have no head because God is dreaming you, I would tell them. You are a thought bubble in the mind of God. The results, I must confess, were often spectacular.
I am all a bubble, the old crone said. I am set adrift. Isn’t that fancy? What did God think of you? I asked her, and at this point I hammed it up a little by turning to the audience and shrugging my shoulders as if to say, what have we got here? He thought me on one of His good days, she said. Then He thought no more of it. Well, who’s thinking you now without a head? There was more laughter in the audience, but it was a little more awkward. It’s just an echo, she shrugged, as if that were the most natural explanation in the world. Then she started again. Mr. Hitler burst a bubble, she said, and she laughed. I heard Mariella cough from the side of the stage, the signal to wrap it up. But I was intrigued, and I couldn’t resist one further question. And what do you think God thinks of Mr. Hitler? I asked her. Why, He can’t stop thinking about him, I would imagine, she said. I clicked my fingers and brought her back to life. There was muffled applause.
The second part of the performance went without a hitch and successfully raised the atmosphere. I reported on the fates of dogs, of sweethearts, of aged parents and of a green parakeet who informed his owner that he had made the journey back to the Azores to be reunited with his family where he had died of old age in a tree. It seemed to satisfy everyone. Traditionally we would end with what we called a “silent thanksgiving,” where for the space of a minute we would praise the creator, however we understood him, the source of all sources, was how we put it in the literature. On this night something wonderful happened. I opened my eyes and it had begun to snow. From the roof of the theatre a blizzard of tiny snowflakes floated to the floor. I looked up to see it and I felt them dissolve into my eyes. Of course it was fake, that was the explanation, that some stagehand had accidentally triggered the fake snow machine. But even so, I realised the truth. It was the first of the miracles that turned me around. Inside me it was snowing for the first time in years.
That night was the first night that we made love, Mariella and I, in the winter, in the snow, in my first summer after the war, my season of romance (boys, it’s a sex scene, the young man in the pyjama top announces), we had been drinking wine afterwards, backstage, this time I didn’t take off my mask, as there were members of the public swarming all around us, touching my robe, marvelling over me with Mariella, wherever did you find him? they asked her and she said things like, the wind blew him in, or, the sea gave him up, all of which were true, and as she did so she looked at me and she smiled, a wide smile, a toothy grin, that made all the years fall away between us, and as she talked she kept looking at me as if she too was possessed by me completely, as if she had given herself up to my spell, notice that I didn’t say I had caught her under my spell, she had given herself up to my spell, which is much sexier, believe me (here we go, boys, the young man nodded), there’s a difference, and although she couldn’t see where my eyes were, they were on her completely, fixed on her utterly, even as I put up with the pawing of an elderly lady who smelled of potpourri and urine, of musty underwear (here we go, boys, the young man nodded), and I watched Mariella’s lips as she drank her wine and I swear they quivered and her cheeks flushed and she smiled self-consciously at that and I thought, love is a power like ESP, and I recalled at that moment that I had known a girl called Mariella when I was at school, a beautiful, unavailable girl outside whose window I had stood in the evening, under a streetlight, outside her empty window, and had willed her to appear, had willed her to break out from her parents’ house and float down from the window and make love on the dewy grass right there and then, but who had never appeared, indeed who had dated instead a young man with a squint and a hunchback, you can imagine how that made me feel, and with an eyepatch, for God’s sake (hey!), but now here I was, more hideous than he would ever dare, masked up for my own good and for the good of those around me, and with a connection, such a powerful connection, with a woman called Mariella, that I could feel the wine as it trickled slowly, sensuously, down her throat, and into her precious belly, which is where I longed to be myself (here we go, boys, the young man nodded), and I felt myself get an erection (told you, boys, the young man said, let’s go), the first spontaneous erection since the war, I’m not saying there had never been a single spontaneous erection since the death of Hitler but then again, who knows, these things take time, especially after trauma and God knows the whole continent had been traumatised, so erections were probably at a premium, remote ones even more so, and besides, that’s exactly what it felt like, an erection rising from the ruins of Berlin, from the ruins of the Clydeside, and of Dresden and of Malta and of Oradour-sur-Glane, look it up boys, when you get out, a filthy erection is what I’m trying to say, a lascivious erection, an erection like the sun rising on a battlefield, is what I’m getting at, and of course it began to stick out beneath my robe and get in the way of old women, it’s big, I might as well tell you, there’s no point in lying over this, it’s a big member and it’s becoming an obstruction, so that I push my way through the throng (with his dong! the guy with the crap tattoo says, who by this point has joined in) and Mariella sees me moving towards her and she makes to finish off her conversation and I take her by the arm, something I had never done before, we never linked arms or held hands, and I push us through the crowd and out the emergency exit at the back and down the stairs where there is a car waiting for us, a car with its engine running, unbelievably, just like in the movies, and we take off, and of course outside it isn’t snowing, I would love to have said that we sped through the snow and the dark and all the stars came out, this time right side up, but it’s snowing inside me, by this point it was a blizzard, a compete white-out, and we looked at each other and we didn’t mention the snow, even though inside us both we knew, we knew all about it, and she leaned over and she put her head on my chest and I thought, she is listening for the snow, she is listening to the snow falling, but then I thought, does falling snow even have a sound, doesn’t it fall silently, isn’t that part of its magic, that it arranges itself in silence over everything and transforms it without a sound, so that when you wake up and throw the curtains back it takes you by surprise and there it is, blanketing everything, transforming everything while slowly dying into it, isn’t that what Mariella has said about her husband, about his films, about art, about dying into it, isn’t that what she meant?
We measure everything by the past, by the light of the past, we say this is as beautiful as something, as something that happened once that we now think of as the most beautiful time, the most beautiful moment, always in the past, but this is what changed in me and I don’t pretend it is anything but a minor miracle, a human impossibility, almost, but for the first time I saw the beauty of the future reflected in the present, it was as if I stepped out of myself, ran a little ahead, and then looked back in amazement, in amazement at the quality of light, the tenderness of the moment (the size of his steaming erection, more like, the man with the crap tattoo said), the miracle of the coincidence of everything, and the cost of it all too, I saw that moments up ahead were just as fixed as moments in the past, that the future sat there in anticipation of your arrival like a host, only I didn’t use a word like fixed, I used a word like betrothed, I used a word like reception, but the point is I wasn’t up ahead, really, the point is I gained this knowledge, this certainty that the beauty of the moment flows into it from the future, that all that’s past is redeemed in the light of the future, I gained it through a connection with another person which in turn connected me to a third truth, in any relationship between two things a third factor is implied which is known as an intercessor, and of course that’s when I began to think of my wife once more, my heart in a locked room, was how I described her, if you recall, and how she had appeared to me as the three of hearts, and I wondered if perhaps, somehow, she was the intercessor in all of this, which made me love all the more passionately and with abandon (here we go, boys, the young man nodded) as I dropped my robe to the floor of our hotel room and Mariella kneeled to embrace me (get in there, the young man said), but still I kept my mask on, your mask is sexy, she said, your mask is so sexy, make love to me with your mask on, she said, and I lifted her up and laid her out on the bed, her dress pulled up around her waist (I love it like that, the man with the awful tattoo agreed), and as I slipped her panties off, pink panties would you believe (oh yes, the young man marvelled, perfect, I believe it), I almost went to put them on my head, to wear them like a crown, but at the last minute I thought better of it and instead I tossed them across the room and I watched as they landed, I watched the shape they made, they pooled, to be precise, everything was significant, they pooled in the corner like a puzzled face or like a quizzical face, though maybe that’s the same thing, but I don’t think so, to be honest, and then I undid her top, her breathing was fast and shallow and rhythmical by this point, and then I unclipped her bra, which clipped at the front, would you believe, I had heard about these bras but never seen one in real life, and at this point I caught myself in the mirror, there was a full-length mirror on the cupboard, and for a moment, just for a second, you understand, nothing significant, but for a moment I was repelled by myself, I was put off, I was disgusted, I saw all the scars on my body, the badly healed wounds, the complications, I remember thinking, though God knows why, but it makes sense, I guess, if you think about it, and my paunch too, I was out of shape, that was another complication, and there I was leaning over this beautiful woman in a state of abandoned undress (you can’t beat that, the man with the appalling tattoo agreed), looking like a fiend, there is no other word for it, a Shakespearean fiend with the addition of the mask but a fiend nonetheless, but somehow this only added to my passion, to the lasciviousness of my delivery (nice word for it, the young man laughed), and I felt my back arch uncontrollably in ecstasy and I entered her right there and then as if I were entering heaven’s gates themselves, which the unruly tattoo of my cellmate serves to bring to mind, and it felt like my brain was ejaculating, like it was squeezing all its sense down my spine and out into Mariella, who for her own part had started to mutter, to form primitive speech patterns in my ear, and I felt like I was in the movie once more, in all of the movies her husband had made, the one with the couple on the bed, of course, but more than that, the one in the zoo where evolution seems to run backwards, that’s what her words said to me, and the one with the light that buzzes on and off in a darkened room and that wakes the dead, and of course the one where the ocean meets the shore.
Cut to the chase, the boy interrupted me, we’re in prison, for God’s sake, what were her tits like? Her breasts? Her breasts were lined, curiously lined, with thin wrinkles, rivulets, even, as if they had changed size, as if they had once been bigger, in her youth, and they were quite pale. What about the nipples? Let me tell you about her eyes, eyes are best experienced in tandem with the breasts, as we all know. Around her eyes she had the most expressive crow’s feet I have ever seen. They were so sexy. It really looked like a crow had stood with one foot planted on either side of her eye while it drank blue milk from her pupil. What about the nipples? Her eye make-up was smoky-grey and combined with her pupils, which, as I say, were the palest whitest blue and which seemed to draw the attention inwards and downwards at the same time, which is to say that making love felt like the equivalent of being a high diver. Were her nipples blue as well? Her nipples were brown and petite, like a freckle stood to attention. Oh wow. What happened next? She took me in her mouth. What was her mouth like? Tight. Endless. Did she say anything else, did she goad you? Not while my cock was in her mouth. Afterwards she just said, fuck me. Oh God. Fuck me? Fuck me. Too much. And did she grab you? She held on to my buttocks. She scratched my back. She bit my neck. You better watch that, the wiseass with the idiot tattoo cautioned, a human bite can be a terrible thing. Did she come? the boy asked me. She didn’t say I’m coming or anything. She didn’t announce it? No. The muttering became faster and she began thrusting her hips back towards me. Then she sort of melted a little bit. But you kept on at it, right? You bet I kept at it. What did she smell like? Like being pursued through a soft, damp, forest. That’ll be the perfume, the young boy nodded sagely. That’ll be the womanhood, the clown with the tattoo countered. What next? While I’m fucking her, I spread her buttocks with my hands and I start to tap her asshole, rhythmically, with my finger. Oh boy, that’s just like the flashlight going on and off, the kid said. How did she react? She’s loving every minute. Then I start to whisper in her ear. Like what? That’s between us, boys. But let’s just say she’s coming back to life all over again. Christ, this is a marathon, the young kid says. What next? I slide my finger in and I keep it there. You keep it there? I keep it there. Then I stop moving altogether. I freeze. Why? I get the feeling that we are being filmed. Impossible, I thought you were in a hotel room in a foreign town? the young man protested. That would have meant someone hiding out in that specific room and having a place to set up a camera and remaining undiscovered and also it would have meant that the hotel staff were in on it too and even the people who presented your performance as they would have had to book the correct hotel and ensure you were given the appropriate room. Nonetheless, I get the feeling, like an arrow through my heart, that we are somehow being captured on film. Captured? I can’t explain it but yes, there is no other word that I would have used at that moment. In fact, I believe we are making Exodus.
What’s Exodus? the guy with the unadvisable tattoo asked me. It’s a film, the boy said, a film that the woman’s ex-husband made of the two of them making love. The two of who? Her and her husband or her and our Oddity? If he’s seen the film how can he be in it at a later point? Well, that’s just it.
Remember I told you that I couldn’t see the face of the man who was making love in the film, I interrupted them, I told you his head was buried over her left shoulder? That’s exactly the position I was in when I froze. But also, the film was dark, very dark, it was another silent black-and-white number, so it could have been that the lover was wearing a black leather mask. What about the surroundings? It was a close-up of a bed with nondescript white sheets. Were they in the same position? They could have been. Impossible, they couldn’t have replicated every wrinkle, every stain, every fold? I’m saying it could have been the exact same scene. But didn’t you say something about Mariella, is that her name, crossing her leg at an angle over the lover? That’s just it, as soon as I froze she moved her leg into position as if on cue. No! Yes. Wait, the boy said, I’ve got it, didn’t you say there was some kind of mark on the man’s arm, like a tattoo or something? Yes, I admitted, I did say that. You don’t have a tattoo. No, I don’t, but now I think it was a wound, a scar. Look at my arm, I said, and I pulled up my sleeve, there was a gash, an injury I had received at the hands of the Nazis. Okay, but what about your physique, did it match that guy in the film? I think so, I said, though who knows, you can’t recognise yourself from the back, there’s never the opportunity, everybody knows that. Well, what happened next, surely now you are aware of the moment you can disrupt the continuity by doing something unexpected, something that doesn’t take place? But that’s just the thing, I replied, the film I had seen was on a loop, so it doesn’t matter what I do afterwards, I didn’t realise where I was, which is to say I wasn’t overcome with a terrible sense of déjà vu until the action required of the loop had been played out. Now they could do what they wanted with the footage and there was nothing I could do to disrupt it. Wait, you said you slid your finger into her ass and you kept it there. That’s correct. Well, can you tell in the film if he had his finger up her ass? She’s on her back, the arm is beneath her, the finger could be anywhere, I shrugged. There’s no way of knowing. Anyway, the point is I panicked. I leaped up, I unplugged my finger from her ass, withdrew my cock, which was throbbing, still, let me tell you, I was about to come but I couldn’t stay there any longer, ejaculating on cue, in a film, not me, and I ran over to the painting on the opposite wall and I yanked it off, fully expecting to find a hole in it, it was a religious painting, a painting of a woman sitting in a hallway or an annex or some kind of conservatory, perhaps, and outside there is another woman, a younger woman who is kneeling down and looking at her through the window and offering her something, maybe, I seem to recall something in her hand like an arrow, maybe, and up above the younger woman, in the sky, on a cloud, there’s God almighty Himself and He is shooting a beam of light, that’s what it looks like, a beam of desire or longing or will or command, who knows, he is setting a seed, I thought, which is funny knowing what comes next, and the beam goes through the window of the annex and pierces the shoulder of the older woman and I’m fully expecting to find a window behind it and a camera crew there, Mariella’s own husband, even, with his trousers round his ankles, getting off, and I realise there’s an unstoppable orgasm building in me, there’s no way to head it off, and I look around at Mariella, she’s curled up in the sheets in a state of confusion, and I’m holding this painting in front of me and I just shoot, there’s nothing I can do to stop it, I come all over the painting, I’m holding it in front of me and I look round at Mariella and her mouth’s hanging open, her eyes are wide, those cold blue pools I told you about, well, the ice has cracked, boys, and then, you couldn’t make this up, it’s almost unbelievable, she says to me, that was fucking amazing.
