The Bath Fugues Read online

  Gottlieb touched a flaring nostril. We didn’t understand. We’d never wept. We thought the sunlight outside was catharsis, or even peripeteia. It was all French to us. Layer upon layer. We longed for a smoke. That would surely mist up our eyes. When Gottlieb said theory was just a form of doubling, or as he sometimes said, dubbing, he looked to us like he was winning. During high summer, in low dudgeon, we ran past his college garden on half-marathons and saw him in his shirtsleeves watering weeds in the hot wind, his dribbling hose anointing the hordes, believing he was warding off the threat to civilisation.

  In those days I used to run all day, sometimes in tweeds, always conscious of my weight. At lunch I ran around the campus with several others, clockwise, anticlockwise wound by a repetition-compulsion to circle the university until time stood still. One day we passed the student regiment with bayonets fixed, marching over protestors who were lying on the road. We ran faster than ever from the goad, threading through cries of rage and outrage, to catch Gottlieb’s lecture on W. B. Yeats: Sex, Uprising and the Spirit of the Age. We were his chosen ones − he was peeved if we were late − and while he spoke directly to us about tone and the deception of finer feelings, we sat in a weightless pool of cool, stared up at ceilings and floated upon his buoyancy. Later, we asked sententious questions while row upon row of jealous eyes burned holes in our bobbing heads.

  It was Gottlieb who encouraged me to travel. Where do you want to end? he questioned through a fumy cigar. My thoughts began to unravel. I did not want to end, simply to be in motion. I remembered my schooldays, that same inquisition from the vocation counsellor, his radio voice crackling from afar. My answer then was that I wanted to be a piano player in a New York bar.

  One afternoon, Gottlieb invited the Disciples to a regular tea where he ordered in cucumber sandwiches. He lived on campus at the time, master of a male college which grieved him with its lax dress code. The Vice-Chancellor had overruled him on the wearing of gowns. His rooms overflowed with manuscripts, some secured in stacks with red bow ties. His tools of trade were few: some pencils; a black Olympia typewriter; blue rustling carbon paper. His leather Chesterfields were worn and mined with dirty whisky glasses. Almost every book on post-structuralism was marked with slips of paper, so one guessed at whether those pages were important or whether Gottlieb had simply given up. The fight against theory had taken its toll. He had an air of weariness. So sure, he kept repeating. Theory is always so sure. Perhaps he was mumbling Saussure, Saussure. He certainly looked like he had given up. The rings around his eyes were permanent. He handed out easy passes and urged us all to travel. Go and look at how the French did things. It was too late for him, he said. I went home that night resolved to spend some time abroad. I stayed away for ten years.

  I don’t know what it was that made Gottlieb suggest I should rent the East Wing of his mansion upon my return. The East Wing was approachable down twenty narrow stone steps past the neighbour’s bougainvillea. It was self-contained and private, with partial views of the harbour. Perhaps he thought that a jail term and years abroad had tempered me, had caused me to repent, to renounce revolution, to embrace civil society. After all, what would an ageing forger do when his cover was blown? Where could he hide all that secret admiration? I accepted almost immediately. More than twenty-five years out of university, I still felt like I was his student, living off his magnanimity. Gottlieb and Marie must have wanted to lodge an intimate in their midst for ballast. Then again, I did appear a little down-and-out. I wore a dirty-cream linen suit, my shoes were scuffed and one lens of my spectacles was cracked. I took private students and taught bad Italian. Crooning maniacally at the piano, I may even have inspired them. They showered me with useless gifts. People always wanted to give me things I generally did not need. When my father died, Gottlieb was so depressed himself he bought me a brand new suit for the funeral. He did not hide his feelings, which I took to be deep. He wanted to know about my grandfather. I said my grandfather had been dead a long time. He asked me for a photograph, which he took to have framed. I accepted his gift and stored it in a suitcase. I didn’t need to move. My lodgings in Newtown, mice-infested, had given me no bother. I called the rodents by name. They came, bolder and bolder, and suffocated in the blankets at the foot of my bed. My sticky linoleum floor squeaked with mournful song, rattled with black rice, and the television took me back to monochrome days of pure good and evil.

  Looking back now, I believe Gottlieb wanted to keep a close eye on my working methods. He was my keeper. Had I returned to a counterfeit life or was I really trying to write? There was no difference. Nevertheless he was a sleepless spy. To think I entertained the idea of a ménage à trois. But in those days triangles were my speciality; I was looking for angles, the hypotenusa – what used to be called the screw, that subtended – the feminine side equal to the power of both the others, and I was sure I would find her hidden somewhere, for it was not Marie, but Gottlieb’s secret lover, who intrigued me…but what the hell, the harbour was languid and fresh and when the gusty wind whipped up spindrift, my heart galloped along excitedly.

  It was the tragedy that brought things to a head.

  At first I used to visit for weekend barbecues. I wasn’t sure about staying, but there were free hot meals. In place of saying grace I had to put up with Marie speaking of her illness. She bore down on our company. She had never mastered the art of conversation and reverted to some complaint which replaced my self-pity with hers. When her face thickened and crumpled into pain Gottlieb made excuses for her to retire hurt. He and I then sat on silently with our whiskies. It was still early and vesper bells sounded five times across the water. Then he looked at his watch and ordered his tiny twins to fetch bed slippers for me and to recite from Beatrix Potter. At forty-nine he was quite old to be their father. There was no clapping. He did not like applause in case it spoiled them for life’s disappointments, but he did conceive then, his now famous line, embedded with a double meaning, embossed on his linen business card: Dr Walter appreciates your talent and will write you in the future.

  Another ’ski? It was the question he loved most to ask, which for me, had always been the pinnacle of any hospitality. He bought nothing but the best: fifty-year-old malts with unpronounceable names. We would stand atop the windy highlands at midnight quoting Burns and I would play O Danny Boy on the piano while we slurped Marie’s chicken soup for chasers. We always hugged before I made my way under the ferns and creepers to the East Wing. Propping my bike up on its centre stand beside my bed, careful of the counterpane which in the past had fouled the chain, I set out on a stationary ride to formulate my thoughts before sleep…reciting Attic poetry, for instance, listening for strophes and antistrophes…and from one squinting eye observed the last ferryboat flit like a firefly across the oily water before chesty tugs churned out for early morning duty.

  I didn’t miss my Newtown digs and had quite forgotten my father’s death but for the smell of old prawns which rose from the net someone had left beneath my window. Shrimp paste had been my father’s favourite condiment. Akin to fertiliser on dying lawns, my father called it balichão. An odoriferous fish sauce, fermented to perfection, its name needed to be sung to compensate for loss of appetite. It cured minor ills − the wriggly tilde above its vowel is best articulated with a cold. The secret, Father said, was in shrimps, so transparent and fine you could hardly see them in daylight. Rare, found only in the Pearl River near Macau, they were dried, salted and bottled in rice wine. My father was their sole importer in Australia. He mixed in Portuguese brandy, tore up bay leaves, added peppercorns and chillies. He simmered everything until old Mrs. Harris complained in falsetto from the far end of our apartment block. She was his oven clock. He pretended he was deaf. His jars were sealed for three months. When my father died, I used his balichão to lure bait. Dragged it over the shore in a football sock. I never had long to wait for the fat lug worms to wiggle up, a tribute to the chef.

  I used to tell Gottlieb a
bout my father – that he was the sporting son of an obscure poet who smoked opium and begat children while my father boxed and raced bicycles. My legacy was contradiction. And your anxiety is illegitimacy, Gottlieb would say. Sometimes his smirk looked like Adolf Eichmann’s. He would interrogate me on them, hardly letting up when I pleaded exhaustion.

  I could never sleep in Gottlieb’s East Wing, upon the rosewood Marie Antoinette bed, for more than two nights in a row and when the nights were balmy, I sometimes camped outside, naked, lying on fustian I’d found in the boatshed. Fig trees rustled in the August wind. I thought of Gottlieb’s maid, a girl from Ashton’s Circus who folded down the sheets so tightly my feet ached from their imprisonment (sometimes she left a rose upon my pillow). Marie became a fast friend of this procrustean, a grim girl with an undershot jaw who I didn’t think would stay too long. But the latter knew her ropes and there was something of the guillotine in the profile of her nose. Charlene was obviously good for the twins. She dandled them upside down and swore she’d teach them how to trapeze and swim.

  The house seemed outside Gottlieb’s range. He was more at home in college, where before his marriage, he had busily posted exam marks on bulletin boards and then appeared batlike in his chalk-smeared gown at casement windows, pushing out rippling panes through reddening ivy to announce the Medallists. In the summer months when all was quiet, he would patrol the lawns and hockey fields where years before we had discussed his leaving the Catholic church. I was about to leave for Rome. He had worn a furrow that night, weighing up the pros and cons. The Vatican exacted an examination of conscience and then there were the usual threats − a secular life of perpetual guilt. All kinds of dispensations and preliminaries would have to be negotiated with neither impatience nor rebellion. It had not been an easy decision and he told me that he had good reason, and that he would take his secret to the grave. At the time I presumed the secret to be some sort of perversity, but now that I know the truth, I blush at my naïveté. He had slept with a young student.

  During barbecues at Double Bay we often sat on a terraced lawn, which at four squares of turf was itself worth a million dollars, while his daughters giggled and plashed in the spa adjoining the pool. I made no reference to dormitories, or to long walks, or to nights discussing Kierkegaard. Marie said I was such a godsend for her husband. You’ll see him waiting for you at the balcony, she said to me. He always watches for you there. Whenever I rode down to the house at the end of Bay Street after a morning’s tutoring, I would see him hunched over the railing, motionless, expectant, and strangely tense. These were drowsy afternoons without philosophy. That was the failing. Philosophy would have kept me alert. One day, while the twins were painting fairy rings on the garden rocks with Marie’s supply of nail polish, my happy hosts seemed particularly keen to absent themselves. It was the first time I’d seen Gottlieb giggle. I don’t know what brought on this frivolity − I suspect it was the season − when they went upstairs to check on a roasting lamb. I recall the twins happily engaged in their practical work. I remember Marie in a black swimsuit which did not flatter her shape. I still see Gottlieb appearing briefly at the bay window without his dressing-gown, reminding me of the pale underside of a flounder. I dozed on and off astride the banana lounge and toyed with dialogue, glad I’d postponed lunching with a blocked writer who’d fallen foul of melancholia. I drank my gin and avoided nibbling on schadenfreude.

  I was dreaming of Benares, of dipping into the Ganges where once on such a humid afternoon as this, treading water amongst some half-cremated bodies, I was suddenly coated with such disgust for humanity I’d not eaten any meat since. A recurring nightmare featured pyres where night vultures looped like bats, picked at roasted morsels and roosted on my windowsill. I felt their down draught in my dream and in the morning found their droppings on my floor. I was halfway between India and Double Bay and was half-seeing the harbour wavelets lapping beyond the swimming pool disgorging blackened flotsam, when one of the girls…it was Blixen…began tugging at my arm. Through half-closed lids I saw sailboats skimming past. A loathsome southerly was about to blow. The halyards tinkled with alarum. And that was when I noticed Blimunde at the bottom of the deep end of the pool, motionless, facedown, her useless water-wings circling near the filter. I dived in, but was too late. Her lifeless body was blue, icy cold and heavy. I tried resuscitation knowing it would do no good, and blamed myself for half-heartedness…perhaps because the neighbours may have looked over the fence and thought I was a paedophile. I had missed the flight from Delhi, the southerly had come in, and the Ganges was afire. I looked up and called, weakly at first, for help, and saw the pale figures of the Gottliebs appear naked, briefly at their window, and knew things would never be the same again.

  2

  Summer always had its own particular trials. For decades, siroccos, föhns, khamsins tormented me with dry lunacy. I was a cyclist, and winds were anathema, but now I just took interminable baths. In the south of France the vent d’autan blew for three, six or nine days at a time. It was odd, the effect of breathlessness it had on me; I panicked; ran from room to room. It blew with such ferocity I closed my shutters and wept in the howling dark. It was neither warm nor cold, a Devil’s fart that sent Van Gogh crazy. It caused migraines, made cattle charge, provoked snakes to attack. Rabbits burrowed deeper, fish would not bite and philanderers returned home to plead with their wives for forgiveness. Wine turned into vinegar, wildfires erupted and lunatics in the Albi asylum formed a conga line, a dancing marathon which lasted for weeks. In Australia, the hot north-westerlies brought me chronic desperation and intensified my alcoholism as all thought dried, ink turned to rust, words to dust. Lust evaporated in the gibbering desert. Yes, of course I heard voices. Each birthday I attempted suicide while the sirens wailed. Saved from death by chance − a loose knot, failed short circuit, pills untried, the sudden and unexpected return of an old lover dragging me from my overdose − I exercised, sexualised, till all thought ceased, for that was what was expected in Australia. Erudition implied mental effort, so in accordance with the culture, I took up sport. A sporting death was the ultimate credential, I was saying to Doctor Judith Sarraute, my GP, who was stretching gymnastically, reaching backwards for a syringe (Chagall would have painted her), fitting a needle, which until now I had disavowed, having preferred love’s prick as a cure.

  My father had prostate cancer, I said to Doctor Judith, angling for sympathy. He was from Macau and came to Australia for his own funeral. Australia, my father pointed out, had lots of room for the dead. He wanted to be buried by the sea, facing Antarctica. A southern death, he called it. It was quite sudden. He loved cold water. He had always been a swimmer, and each morning he performed a freestyle crawl, half-stooped, before his full-length mirror. He even turned his head to breathe, his eye cocked in alarm and his mouth in a rictus, gasping for air. His reddening face soon turned purple. So when a pain developed in his back I suggested he stop this channel-crossing. He went to a chiropractor who sold him a newfangled machine to heat up his spine. I tried it out. It reduced muscle mass and I was keen to be greyhound lean. It heated up my chest and shoulders and redirected whales, but did not bring me the famine victim’s featherweight or a lighter cage for my heavy heart to flutter in. The pain in my father’s back increased and he died within two weeks, I said to Dr Judith. The cancer went undiagnosed. His heart gave out in the Bondi surf. The coroner said it was a drowning; a sick man out of his depth, it was not uncommon. A sign of other drownings. I would flee to Paris again and again, the city of refuge, where I would spend endless hours sitting by the Seine.

  Doctor Judith neither discouraged nor encouraged speech, though she never answered personal questions. She was young and balletic, but there was no point in flirting. She treated me professionally, calling me Justin, a misnomer I kept correcting. There were prints on her walls, fine drawings of jellyfish by Pehr Forsskål (b. Helsinki, 1732, d. Yemen, 1763). Not originals? I inquired, obsessed with authentica
tion. Surely not? There was a cuttlebone on her desk which I accidentally knocked onto the parquet floor. Such an object spoke volumes: inky molluscs; the uncanny detritus of homelessness; bone-food. My inadvertence was surely a sign of evil. Dr Judith performed general practice twice a week, in order, she said, to keep in with normal people. I don’t know where she operated on other days, but I suspected she was a specialist of some kind. She told me depression was always difficult, that most of her patients were migrants. I don’t know why she made that connection. Was I one? Was she one? There was no home if you had ambition, I said, staring at the bone, thinking of hermit crabs. No friends either. I remarked that Nature was evil. I don’t know how this idea arose, perhaps because someone was beating a child in the waiting room. She looked at me, pushed back her raven hair and flexed her waist. She did not bend at the knees. If you are reading the Marquis de Sade, Justin, the signs are good, she said swaying her hips while annotating my card.

  One afternoon, when her patients were dwindling and the receptionist had slipped out for a moment with the pathology courier, she snapped on a surgical glove and inserted a finger into me. Just checking, she said. She had expert digits and reminded me of Arabian nights, the symmetrical arabesques of double-entries, before a poster on the wall halted me abruptly with the words: Prostate cancer: all the early signs. Accountants would know how to work it out. I was broke. I had no private cover. Jellyfish, I kept thinking, reproduced if cut. Not money though.

  Back home, I no longer had my five o’clock seizure. Watching the trees sway in the pall of a dying afternoon from a porthole in my bathroom in Gottlieb’s East Wing, I reflected on Nature and the body’s imperfection. There was always an invitation to voyage: luxe, calme et volupté. I suffered from reflux, bad karma, my soul walloped with wind. I read Baudelaire and was going blind. Diabetes, probably. On my wall, a triptych by Francis Bacon: a toilet bowl, two contorted figures, bloated faces. Bacon made few friends and terrible enemies. When a friendship revived…as they often did…he changed his mind and swabbed his canvases with turpentine.