Monument Maker, page 8
I was living in the middle of nowhere, the drunken Finnish poet tells me, with nothing but a hundred horses. Would a hundred horses be enough, I think to myself, but enough for what.
Harder.
Basalt is the densest form of rock, which means it is the least empty. But where are the basalt cathedrals? The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption of Clermont-Ferrand is a cathedral of dense black lava. The cathedral at Agde is built from black volcanic basalt. Its walls are between two and three metres thick. When a cathedral is built from the densest stone it is no longer a cathedral. It is a mighty fortress. The mighty fortress is accessed through what is known as a “lady chapel.” I am listening to my Flower and the drunken Finnish poet discuss how fashion photography has changed in the past ten years. It used to be beautiful, the drunken Finnish poet says, but now it is all ugly, ugly, ugly. What a confusion of thoughts I am thinking as I am sat there, echoing.
The French know how to relax, and they do their relaxing anywhere. That’s the conclusion you would be drawn to if you had joined my Flower and I as we cycled along the Canal du Loing and passed sleeping motorcyclists passed out in the weeds by the bank, families picnicking on the verge by the side of the road, two fellows fishing round the back of an abandoned grain silo and best of all a young girl on a fold-out bed at the foot of a row of terrible rusting gas tanks, cut off from the sun and hidden in shadow, fully spreadeagled as though on a beach in the Med.
Another conclusion to which you may have been drawn had you accompanied us on this idyllic day out now misfiled somewhere long ago in the past would be that French householders are inexplicably shocked to see anyone who does not resemble themselves pass anywhere near their homes. The French have a facial expression reserved especially for the split second you pass by their domain that best resembles a puzzled bird, as you pass by and you gaze into their gardens with all of the longing you could possibly muster for another life which you could disappear into, another life where tall sunflowers grow and tomato plants stand staked in neat rows and fat French cats prowl the undergrowth and forest vipers belt it as soon as they hear the rattle of your wheels, or before some fat French kid can drop a slab on their head, and still the French gaze at you in puzzlement as you speed by, as if you were there to steal their eggs, as an emissary from another planet where eggs are as gold, or to snatch a forbidden glimpse of a gaudy painted statue of the Virgin Mary in the back garden of a tree-shaded villa, or a photograph of said Virgin, even, stood in inexplicable sorrow next to a gaudy statue of a horse and cart, as if each view, each blissful domestic vista, were something to be snatched and stolen and secreted away in full view of its proud and hard-working owner, and every few minutes I would have to dismount and check behind me where, in the distance, my Flower, in a stained metallic-blue dress and sandals, her hair tied up and dishevelled in the sun, was invariably photographing one of these secret back gardens, invariably peopled by scattered passed-out French families in nothing but shorts and bikinis, sleeping with one eye open for would-be amateur sleuths ready to steal their native souls, and I confess that it irritated me, yes, this empty irritation would seize me and I would curse her under my breath, every time my Flower stopped to add yet another pointless photograph to her collection I would curse her—Lord! what an imbecile, I would say—because back then I was convinced that photography was a hobby for the sort of people who have hobbies (I curse that word hobby, just so you know, I curse that word God damn it I curse it and I spit it out, too), especially profligate photographers, of whom this day my Flower was surely one, as I flattered myself that I, and only I, was able to take the correct temperature of the moment, and when I stooped to photographing something or other myself, it was invariably the correct moment, and the perfect shot, and I took one photograph and one photograph only, because I flattered myself that I understood the moment of things, can you believe it, it would be laugh-out-loud funny if it wasn’t outrageous, if it wasn’t extremely sad, that here I was, on a day trip out into the newly made past with my Flower by my side and I flattered myself that I understood the gravity of moments while at the very same time I fled them and cursed them and ranted against them as though the correct moment were only up ahead, in Nemours, in Fontainebleau, in the magical village of Larchant, where a visit to the basilica is reputed to cure you of madness, and of course I was right, and all of those villages do lie in the future of this book, just up ahead, stood in awe, themselves, at the perfect moment they have been entrusted to deliver, but even so, even when we reach these moments, which right now lie just ahead in this book—have patience where I had none—though even when we reach them we will find that our attention is once again drawn to the future, to the moment when all of the contents of these moments cohere in a single revelation, which, too, has its moment, and which points to a further revelation, which is the curse of photography too, I say, and which speaks to our terrible inability to simply be, to be still, and yet, should we refrain from internally ranting about the perceived failings of the ones we are supposedly head over heels in love with, we would again come to this empty point, this stillness, and we too, if we knew what was good for us, if we were able to arrive in this stillness, then we too would strip off most of our clothes and lie down, together, in the nearest tall grass and forgive ourselves everything but this present moment which we would indeed snatch and secrete and memorialise, in our fear and confusion and in our longing to let it all go to hell, even at the foot of rusting water towers, of ghastly oil drums and faceless industrial factories, even in the shadows of these ghastly things, we would topple from our bikes, on top of each other, in that summer, long ago, and we would refuse to move, yes, you heard that right Our Father who art in heaven, I am proposing a sit-in in my past, I am calling for a peaceful protest, back then, but what good does it do as my Flower pulls up at some idiot savant assemblage of mannequin heads and old rusting watering cans and wooden barrels and metal hubcaps behind a locked gate on the canal, and I look at my watch, and I throw my bike to the ground, and I stand, impatient, in the distance, I think you can picture me there, tapping my foot impatiently, like a bull, as if there was a more perfect assignation up ahead, and of course there was, there is, don’t despair, we’ll get there, in the end, but still, really, everything I have to say is here, everything I could have said was then, and I was unworthy of the gift. I had yet to learn gratitude. Ha ha, gratitude, I hear you say, bugger off with your gratitude. But you are only twenty years old—if that—and so I refuse to take you seriously. And I say it again: gratitude, you ungrateful little bastard, now grow the fuck up.
I am caught up reading the letters of August Strindberg, which I pilfered from the library of the hotel in which he is supposed to have stayed while writing some wretched book about the state of the French peasantry. Who no doubt stared at him like puzzled birds too. I am one hell of a man, he writes, as you can see, and I am capable of the most unusual things, he says. He is boasting about his facility with language, but he was also capable of full-blown possession, of channelling thoughts via an iron bed frame placed in the attic above his room, and of visiting his estranged lover while asleep, on the astral plane, and of making love to her there, against her will, it has to be said, poor Harriet Bosse, raped by Sweden’s maddest playwright in her dreams, a hell of a man. Do you even know who August Strindberg is? I sincerely hope not, because that would make you either Scandinavian, in which case stop reading now I hate you (unless you are Finnish, and a drunken Finnish poet to boot), either that or you are some fan of the theatre of the nineteenth century or perhaps you are some simpleton attracted to the occult, in all of which cases I most politely invite you to fuck the hell off and stop reading now, please. Because I am one hell of a man.
As I am writing this, at the bottom of the garden in which this Strindberg fellow cursed ghosts in four languages and could have done with a visit to the basilica at Larchant for which to cure his mythomania (it’s only a forty-minute cycle away, for God’s sake), I realise I am one to talk, I admit it, I am one hell of man, writing this while all around me there is the most incredible hubbub, as young boys and girls in pretty pink bikinis and long sandy hair make daredevil leaps from the bridge into the water, one beautiful girl in particular, who I estimate as being thirteen years old and whose tiny pink bikini is the colour of pale flesh made rosy by the sun, and I turn to look over my shoulder and I see the same table and chairs at which we sat, all those years ago, look up to the bridge we crossed to the Sunday market where I fell into conversation, incomprehensible conversation, you would have thought, with this eccentric old French guy’s madness, I had spotted him earlier on, shopping for old bottle tops spread across a tabletop, had looked over his shoulder and spotted a catalogue in which he had highlighted his own finds with fluorescent marker, and who is this mad old bat, I had thought to myself, and I, a collector of eccentrics, I admit, had walked off satisfied, and was busy flicking through a collection of old French porno magazines with titles like Rendezvous and Contact, with pictures of young, newly budded women and of French teenagers bent over in tight black panties when I was approached by this same eccentric collector, who nudged me and said, in French, which I understood immediately, perfectly, you will like this, he said, and he pointed to a certain maker of bottle tops, next to which he had attached a Post-it note that mentioned three odd—and very rare—variants, known only to initiates, he said, and he laughed, with glee, at the sharing of this arcane knowledge with a stranger at a French market, and on the Post-it notes he had hand-drawn what he believed the bottle tops to have featured, the Kama Sutra, he said, and he laughed and he nudged me, the Kama Sutra edition, he said, and he pointed to his drawings, one of which had a tick beside it, as if he had confirmed the existence of at least one of this supposed secret sex trinity to be found on the tops of beer bottles in the past, one that featured a stick woman bent over in front of a stick man, while the second, so far unlocated by this eccentric sleuth, featured a woman on her knees in the act of fellatio, while the third featured what seemed to be the same stick woman spreadeagled on a table or pedestal while the man held her by the heels and entered her, and he muttered one word, this eccentric collector of insignia and erotica, which was the French word for pigeon or dove, I believed, or rather I was instructed, in that moment, and he offered me his hand, still laughing the whole time, and he told me his name, which was Bernard, and he asked me my own and I said to him I’m August Strindberg, I said, and I’m one hell of a man.
Harder.
There is no better way to be here now than to witness, from a distance, your Flower having sex with another man. I am in the adjoining room with my trousers round my ankles, praising the moment to the skies, in a terrible agony, in divine rapture. I hear him mutter something in French, this young kid, this boy, really, who we picked up at the market across the bridge, this young boy selling rock n roll postcards and hard-rock LPs from the back of a car, this boy from a village, oh, ten kilometres away, he said, and now I am in the moment completely and am emptier still. I hear him mutter something in French. A command, I tell myself, he is commanding her. I hear her gasp and assent, again and again, oui, oui. Yes, she is telling him, yes, she is saying. Now he is insulting her, I tell myself, now he is humiliating her. I wish my French were better. The cocks of these young boys, she says afterwards, are like iron bars. Though perhaps that is just my clumsy translation.
Can the sharing of your partner bring you closer? Yes, but closer to what? Near to the wild heart, I tell myself, which is one of my favourite books, as well as a quote from James Joyce, but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? God has come down into the flesh, I say to you, and I have heard it with mine own eyes.
We got into a fight at a restaurant in the village of Grez-sur-Loing. I should say: I got into a fight at a restaurant in the village of Grez-sur-Loing. I had heard it was a rip-off. The drunken Finnish poet warned me: that guy will charge you for extra beers and he will whip his price list away should you question it and he will claim that there are new prices for everything as of now. Plus, the pizzas are the saltiest pizzas I have ever eaten, she warned me. It took me three beers to finish one, she said. We had spent the afternoon swimming in the river at the bottom of the garden, my Flower and I, the same garden in which your man Strindberg had boasted about his facility for language.
I rehearsed what I would say. Can you recommend me a good red wine, I would say (in French). A good French wine but one that is not too expensive, I would say (in French). And don’t cheat me, I would say (in Scottish this time, for effect). This place feels like the cloisters of a monastery, my Flower said to me (in English, in cute pigeon English), as she floated on her back in the river. I sat with my feet dangling and let the minnows, the little younkers, we called them, my father and I, the little younkers that were swarming around me in the waters, I let them nibble at my legs. It is like the cloisters of a monastery where people write and paint all day and then emerge to bathe in the water, my Flower said. And watch out for your translations, the drunken Finnish poet who was already well sauced by this point said to us, I have two friends who went in there and ended up with a plate of kidney and had to take it away in a plastic bag.
At first all went well. My translations were all in order. My Flower will have the pizza with artichoke and olives, I said (in French). I will have the breaded escalope with house tagliatelle, I said (in French). And could you, monsieur, recommend me a good red wine, not too expensive, I said (in French). He said something in French in return, blah, blah, blah, un petit Bordeaux, he said. A bottle? I asked him (in French). Non, he said. Non. Then he brought us a bottle of Graves—ah, Graves! I exclaimed (because it is my favourite)—and he uncorked it, sniffed it, and offered me a taste. Très bon? he said. Oui, I said, très bon. At this point a mangy dog with sores all over its arse and with painfully swollen black balls crawled under my seat and began rubbing itself on the legs and making a growling noise. You make that noise! my Flower said to me, and she laughed. You make the same noise as my boyfriend, she said to this mangy dog beneath the table, and she winked at him. We sat outside and ate our dinner as the clouds turned to puffs of pink candyfloss. Across the way a Frenchman in a backwards baseball cap and with a T-shirt that said New York on it pulled into a shuttered garage. Do you know the song “Europe Endless” by Kraftwerk? my Flower asked me, because it was as if we could see all the way over the horizon to forever. The food arrived and there was ham on the vegetarian pizza. The menu made no mention of ham on the pizza, but we decided to leave it. He rushed us for coffee. Would you like some coffees? he said (in French). We’ll finish our wine first, my friend, I said (in English this time), and he shrugged and walked off. But when we came to pay there was a problem. He had charged us thirty-four euros for a bottle of wine. I told you not too expensive! I burst, and Flower told me to calm down, what is the problem, and the proprietor’s wife, who was also the long-suffering chef, vacated the scene “tout de suite.” Don’t fucking cheat me! I screamed at the proprietor, and my Flower ran outside. The proprietor said something in French, something interminable in French, and I went for him. I grabbed him by the throat and I told him that all non-French-speakers were not so gullible (only in Scottish), that he shouldn’t take me for a fucking mug (in straight Scottish this time), and that I would beat his fucking Danny DeVito arse to a pulp. Then he handed me the card machine. It read 3.40 euros. Is this correct? I demanded. Oui, he said. Oui. I paid and then I stomped out with a leer on my face. Let’s go, I told my Flower, and I showed her the receipt. Then we marched off in the opposite direction, so he couldn’t be sure of where we were staying or even dream of sending anyone after us. Later that night, wired on coffee and adrenaline, we made love on the couch while outside the open window a thunderstorm raged, and the pots fell from the walls, and people stormed up and down in the corridors outside.
What are those wrinkles across your lower back? I wonder about my Flower as she lies on the banks of the river reading a pamphlet about the religious architecture of the Île-de-France. Are they the same as the suffering marks on a tree?
We swam in the river with the drunken Finnish poet, who this time was drinking only sparkling water on account of a hangover the size of a truck. She had been to read at some international poetry gathering in Paris the night before and had missed the last train home so had been forced to sleep drunk at the bus station. Her poems had been badly mistranslated, she claimed, and she had been given no chance to see the edits before publication. I told her about my own experience translating Pierre’s book, how I had taught myself basic French from books and from dictionaries to be able to do it. I can read and write it fine, I said to her. Then we told her about our experience with the restaurateur across the way. He can’t speak a word of English, she despaired. You should have kicked his fucking arse, she said. Then a fog came down and Flower and the hung-over Finnish poet sat on the bank and applied make-up to their faces. Let’s get inner tubes, the hung-over Finnish poet said, let’s all buy inner tubes and we can float down the river together and then hitch-hike back in our swimming costumes. They traded foundation, cream foundation was the term they used. It’s what the saints use in the old paintings, my Flower joked. It gives them that sallow-in-the-face-of-God look, she said, only she didn’t use the word sallow, that is my better translation. The hung-over Finnish poet wore a pair of boy shorts and a mismatched bikini top, while my Flower wore a russet-green one-piece swimming costume. The hung-over Finnish poet told us about some standing stones she had visited in the weeks previous, some dolmens, she said. Do you know about dolmens, they are monolithic stones propped up in circles and rows in order to align with the solstice and equinox, she said. In France there is what is known as the Circuit des Mégalithes, she told us. But before I could say, we laugh at megaliths and dolmens like at simpletons who cannot spell, I recalled something that Mary had told me, that a girlfriend had told her, something about walking cures and completing circuits, but before I could say, oh, I see, you mean that when you complete the circle of the stones you feel changed and transformed, like writing words or letters into the earth, words or letters that could only be read from heaven or from space, but before I could say any of this she said, no, I mean a circuit as in an electrical circuit, my hair stood on end, she said, my hair stood on end like in one of those mad science experiments, she said, and someone fried an egg on one of the stones just like it was plugged into the grid, she said, and then she went on and on, deeper into idiocy, with talk of ley lines and apparitions, and I was waiting for a UFO to touch down any second or for the Men in Black to appear from the hollow core at the earth’s centre with a message from the secret masters. I looked at my Flower and she looked back at me, she knows me too well, I thought, and I said to the hung-over Finnish poet, who by this point had put on a red dress with prints of what looked like some Indian peasant sat in meditation all over it, so what? Do you really think that the other side chooses not only to communicate with us but to alert us to its own existence by demonstrating its powers to fry an egg or make your hair stand up or to make a light pass over you in the sky? The spirit is not a circus animal, I said, nor is it a clown, but before I could dismiss her fantasies completely she said, no, it proves one thing and one thing only, she said, stone, she said, is alive.
