Companions of the Day and Night Read online

  THE THIRD DAY

  (High Wind)

  He felt, as he dressed that morning, the first intimations of having been thrust into a high dangerous wind that unsettled the state of the world. He needed to see her again. He needed to hold her again. How close did one come to the madonna as rejected commission of an age through ex-priestesses of forgotten cults, not only buried cults, drowned cults, but post-revolutionary, post-Christian hidden cults?

  The conversation they had had (as between naked body and naked mind) still lingered in his head. Artist’s model. Fastidious as a nun. It seemed to someone like him (in search of a cure for his disease) a bizarre repudiation of paranoia through the displacement of opposite projections. In short (the Idiot scrupulously shaved) the new fall of man.

  It was, she had said, the time of the year when the trees that lined the avenue to San Francisco Convent were streaming and bent high in the air, half-blown to kingdom come. If he wanted to meet her again he must go there and reconnoitre the neighbourhood. She lived within a stone’s throw of that avenue on the road from Mexico City to Cholula.

  He hired a car and drove along the Insurgentes North past a modern railway station and social security hospital towards the Shrine of Guadeloupe. A sprinkle of rain fell out of a faint sky misty with pollution. The yellow Basilica loomed, fell behind.

  He drove now through the edges of parkland—a rolling countryside of brown, grey hills with clumps of dark green wood. The sprinkle of rain ceased. A lorry was speeding in the distance upon a lane or track off the main road. Trailing dust.

  He drew up at the roadside. Consulted his map. Had taken the long way round, needed to go right, join the Avenida Consulado.

  There was an old road that ascended into the Sierra Madre and fell to Cholula.

  Once again he was sailing through a dust-ridden landscape plotted with occasional fields, mounds, painted with deep shadow. The land was rising into higher altitudes. The thin mist was lifting now and there swirled far away that high wind unsettling the globe. Bones. Earth. Epitaph the Idiot wore in his head. Snow-epitaph far above upon the tops of ancient volcanoes, perhaps long extinct, the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl. It was time to lay aside for a while his hair of waving wood, dust-swirled reminiscences of terrestrial lakes, and to replace it with pine. Snow-cloud and pine. Sharp scent, sharp heights of pine. Time to bow to the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl the Warrior.

  A truncated pyramid of landscape man Popocatapetl was. Deprived of a skull. Yet as the high wind swirled in the Idiot’s head an interchangeable epitaph was blown there towards him of shadow and light that turned outer absence into inner presence, rose backwards upwards into a fabric of glaciated sun or gigantic crystal hollow in space, volcanic skull, Aztec, Mixtec. Warrior. Priest. Displacement of opposites.

  He drew up now upon a bridge and looked across a ravine into distances that concealed a memorial to Cortez erected within the pass he had taken four and a half centuries ago within the Sleeping Lady and her Warrior/Priest.

  From there the conquistadores possessed their first view of Tenochtitlan shining in its lake. From there they began to descend into interchangeable vocations, Christ and Conqueror.

  Twentieth-century Fool bore all this in the hand with which he stabbed the place now like a backward door into time. Winced to an invisible wire in his blood. Invisible wire or prick of bone in the fire-eater’s commission of virgin landscape.

  Wire. Bone. Something coiling and glancing through him into Sleeping Spaces, Possessed Spaces, Dispossessed Spaces …

  Sensation of a code, indefinable, implacable that conditioned the hand, the eye, the senses, one’s responses to a pebble, a fence, a mountainside that seemed there, given timelessly, forever now what they always were. Until one glimpsed one had been coded into it, into place and time like an involuntary puppet of subjective destiny—into the ground one trod that other men had shaped and trodden long long ago; into the road on which the Idiot drove that other men had driven like shepherds under flocks of cloud; into the bridge across the ravine set at a certain angle of sacrificed spaces time wore on its back.

  It was this instinct, this passion for reversible objectivity/subjectivity at the heart of the world (man-made? god-made? nature-made?) that wired each bulb into epitaphs of place to flash a message through Idiot Skull.

  *

  The descent along the old road to Cholula—through a wide landscape pitted by shadow—drew one down into the battledress of approaching Easter.

  Propped against a wall was a blood-bespattered Christ on its way to the Convent of San Francisco. The outlines of a chasm, a ditch, stood at its feet into which it seemed about to fall as if it had been riddled for that purpose by an invisible firing squad.

  Its descent to the Convent lay, therefore, through a climax of dust that dozed in the sun. Path downwards as well as forwards into pointillist brides of space susceptible to Christ. The Convent of San Francisco was now a church. It may have once been an actual convent but with the revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century nunneries and monasteries had been banned by the state.

  Some had therefore converted themselves into churches and chapels.

  Others (such as the hidden Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla) had resisted the ban, concealed themselves for a number of years until they could no longer do so when they had become museums or vanished into oblivion.

  And there were curious ironies, unconscious parallels and pits in that subjective/objective landscape of opposite tendencies. There were post-revolution convents that seemed to sink when their end came into excavations that had recently commenced, after centuries of eclipse, into preConquest Toltec shrines concealed in mounds and hills.

  The strange humour of Christ lay in this, in susceptible spaces, susceptible executions, susceptible carvings, susceptible resurrections and descent into apparent oblivion, apparent nakedness woven into the intuitive chasm of his world.

  Everything there could be taken for granted. Nothing there could be taken for granted. And it was this combination of levels, levels of open disguise that gave him the magic of universality—gave him a body susceptible to intelligences and bullets as it was to fatalistic love and unsuspected corridors, underseas, undersides, of creation.

  Was unfrocked space his? Was unfrocked nun his? Had he consented to a new kind of nakedness or a new kind of proportion?

  Idiot Nameless asked himself these questions as if he were descending into his own past life, past lives (it seemed), preparations, adventures, excesses, crimes of love. It was a peculiar self-accusation but it ran true to a susceptibility to adventure as a mirror of callousness, a mirror of fathoms created and explored in which began the concealment of brides of passion to whom he was to return later through other lives as if these could restore his own rejected premises. Or was it murdered premises, the art of murder and love, from which an overspill of emotion engendered seas, oceans, air, rivers, lands as the burial place and cradle of endless apparitions of guilt, glory, compassion?

  Idiot Nameless followed at a snail’s pace in his car the procession of bullet-ridden Christ to San Francisco Convent.

  He was stunned by a sensation of mutual disguise, mutual nakedness enveloping him in the faces of the people in that procession. Hewn blood. Solid and dark as though a self-created tree or wall drew each to the other inch by inch into bed, ditch, unfrocked space.

  Did earth fall into air, air into sky, sky into a hollow to make seas, lands, mountains over which one marched, moved like self-executed premises in one’s head, self-executed marriages?

  For a while it seemed as he crawled inch by inch along the road that god dozed in his wheels and in the shuffling feet of innumerable peasants, until all at once they had reached the avenue that led to the Convent and one was aware of the trees, tall trees whose topmost branches were bent and streaming in the wind.

  It always blew, he had been told by the fire-eater’s model, for a week or so at this time of the year.

 
This was the place then.

  He would need to scout for her in the immediate neighbourhood.

  What a marvellous old façade seemed all at once to float under the trees as he drew close to the church—squares or tiles, square inches of summer and autumn and winter and spring multiplied and rare.

  The whiteness of the sun blazed at the tops of the trees. The stream of the wind blazed in the tops of the trees.

  A woman came out of the church. There was dust on her lips. A square inch of thin dust.

  He almost swore it was she and a dry sensation crossed his lips before they could melt into hers. But he was mistaken. She was not the woman he was looking for. Their gaze locked, broke and the stem of expectation he had shared for a sun-locked moment with her broke into areas of human drought. Inimitable drought. Inimitable lips … Inimitable dust of a trodden moment, a trodden flower.

  THE FOURTH DAY

  (Unfrocked Spaces)

  The Fool made a perfunctory estimate of holes in his chest as they bore Christ through the façade of the seasons—nine bullets in all.

  The first two were already spent as interchangeable balloons (pyramid of earth? pyramid of moon?).

  And the third brought him to the brink of descending into an unfamiliar bed or chart.

  He secured a room in a lodging house, fell into bed, sun-drenched sleep, dreamed he was a man floating on a log. Then he became the log.

  A log may drift back into the past, preparations for a journey, shores of the past, self-executed marriages.

  Ages past condensed into an autumn bride. Autumn crime. Crime of love.

  It was autumn, the Idiot dreamt, an autumn spent hollowing a canvas of space, hollowing oceans on which to sail, hollowing sky within which to fly to Mexico; hollowing evolutions of murder and sacrifice through which to carve a queen of beauty and sorrow in the edges of copper, gold and scarlet leaves carpeting the globe.

  Edge of autumn sacrifices, autumn globe within which to sculpt tranquillity, carve immortality. Edge of autumn bride through which to turn again to penetrated tranquillity, penetrated immortality as the blood of expiring calendar rising up into the depths of a sea upon which to sail, turbulence of sea. Creation of horizons, frontiers through enraged premises that become a code of conflict and splendour written into reflections of security.

  A log may reflect a leaf, caress a leaf, paint a leaf in the illegality of conquest like a god who begins to sail through ordinary flesh-and-blood towards the execution of hollow spaces to encompass seas. Towards the execution of commodities of love afar off on distant carpeted shores. Intangible layer upon layer of love of commodity under his hand. Scent, animality, wondrous texture, whore of a leaf, whore of a butterfly.

  *

  Late afternoon of a god the Idiot dreamt. Sacrificed angel pinned to the sky. Reflected wings buried in the sky. Glimpsed pride and guilt as commodities of love.

  “The art of murder”, the Idiot said to the angel in his bed, “is the art of love of heaven too through winged premises. Have I not buried you in the sky as I secreted you in the sea? A tree may fly with a leaf and flash its skin, secrete its animal, secrete its darknesses. All these prospects and more add up to executions and menaces buried in wings of time, wings of space …”

  He laughed now to dispel a mist, scarlet leaf, copper, gold. He felt the breath of her wings as they fluttered on his lips like a dust cloud, arched themselves into a mellow camouflage, mellow sky at the edge of the sea.

  “One dies or kills with the dying year in order to pursue what one prizes, an inimitable equation between life and death …”

  The dream faded and the Idiot awoke in a sharp tree of morning light that ran from him across the Mexican sky. Unfrocked angel. It was a beginning … the beginning of the kingdom of light … the beginning of glimpsed proportions, unsuspected proportions … the beginning of a kind of “aloneness”.

  ALONE

  “How should one put it?” the Idiot thought (as he shaved). “Fourth Day in a novel-gospel? Gospel of the Fool?”

  Fourth Day of glimpsed proportions perhaps within accumulated levels of sacrifice over unconfessed ages, unconfessing ages. The new fall of man. The aloneness of man.

  “I like that,” the Idiot reflected. “Suits me.” He was invaded all at once by an immense sadness, the sister of compassion.

  He finished his shaving, ate breakfast and set out to meet the guide Hosé he had secured for the day’s expedition.

  Amazing how the sun in this sky sometimes seemed to stand straight up, to suspend one straight up until one felt quite safe, quite well.

  And if one fell it was into a pillow of earth newly painted and translated out of the depths of a sky one had oneself hollowed or dug.

  Why had he come to this part of the world to live, perhaps to die . .? It was a sudden question out of the blue, that hit him like gunfire without rhyme or reason at a stroke, stroke of pen, stroke of a brush as the fire-eater would say.

  Somewhere in the composition of his days lay the enigmatic reply. To find an equation between revolution and religion, to face a firing squad.

  Stark equation, perhaps, and it left him with a sense of anti-climax, of desolation of premises.

  The fire-eater’s model lived in this area. Think of that. Everyone knew. He knew as he absorbed an emotional gunflash that seemed to come out of nowhere into the pit of his stomach.

  What no one knew as yet—what he had not whispered to himself as yet in the pages he had written—was that he had planned, in any case, to come here. Long before he met her. He had planned it in London and New York. He was looking for the foundations of a vanished nunnery in these parts that may have been blown sky-high or lake-deep.

  There was another hidden convent close at hand in Puebla (the hidden Convent of Santa Monica it was called) which was well known to travellers and their guides alike and this had been converted into a museum. Whereas the vanished order he sought might never have existed for all the world knew and it was this, those lost vocations, with implications beyond a dead past, a dead future in the museum of the mind, which drew him to the spot, this very spot perhaps, within the globe.

  Yes, he could see reason in all this. Legitimate reasons, hopes, ambitions. Except that now he felt illegitimate, desolated. Something had happened to him, something to do with the woman he had picked up or by whom he had been picked up the day after he arrived in Mexico City; something that made him question his own motives now in coming to a site he intended to visit all along but which in a flash shrank into nothing it seemed as he dreamt brutally, vividly of possessing the woman again. It was a repudiation of himself on one level and confirmation at the same time of compulsions that ran deeper than plans like an inexplicable tide embodied in action.

  And having confessed it, having implied it openly now he felt himself falling anew into the site (chosen site?), into re-arranged naked premises, re-arranged naked features, rearranged exposures of the susceptibility of the future to the past …

  There was a rumour he had heard, or she had whispered to him, that she was related to a nun …

  Buried in that thought it came almost as a shock to feel a sleeve brushing against him. Hosé the guide had appeared. The Idiot turned and saw he was smiling. A cold smile he felt. Like someone in a frame of mind perhaps at this moment which made him distant, which drew him to stand with one foot in the grave, the other in the past. Was it the style of his dress? Or the length of his hair, the trim of his beard?

  The Fool saw now he had not taken him in quite like this before when they met and discussed the present expedition. It was his dress perhaps, the sense of involuntary fashion, involuntary time-lag, a cruel past, a cruel present.

  Late twentieth-century man dressed in early twentieth-century obsessions.

  Early twentieth-century obsessions dressed in late nineteenth-century paint.

  Late nineteenth-century paint dressed in early nineteenth century hate.

  Early nineteenth-century hate dres
sed in late eighteenth-century skin.

  Skin-within-glove-within-skin …

  Was it the length of his beard or the rings he wore on his hands?

  A man of seventy stockily built (peasant? aristocrat?). Either way both feet in the past.

  Guide-within-paint-within-obsession …

  “How alone would one be,” the Idiot murmured, “if one saw one’s obsessions, glimpsed one’s susceptibilities (age to age, future to past)? How alone . .?”

  “How alone . .?” the guide echoed.

  The Idiot saw his lips move to a painted lesson, as if he were repeating a parrot’s tongue. As if he were immersed in the living fate of all guides into the past—to which one succumbs—to settle for the past as if it were the moral paint and skin of the present, as if the past reflected in the present had no bearing on the present except to adorn the present with facts, figures, appearances, commodities of love like a solid unbroken mirror through which one glimpses nothing but reflects everything.

  “Oh my god, Hosé,” said the Fool. “I feel suddenly naked and yet it is possible to be naked and not to be alone. To be dressed naked which is a monstrous self-deception.”

  “Are you quite well sir?”

  “I felt…. Oh nothing. It will pass. I am glad you have come.”

  “It’s a bit of a tramp sir. That wood. Over there. I know these parts like the back of my hand. I am sorry to see you fell. Your knees are all muddy. There was rain last night. Are you sure you still want to go . .?”

  “Quite sure. Yes I slipped. It’s nothing really. I did mention yesterday, Hosé, that I am curious about an artist’s model who lives in this area. Perhaps you may know of her.”

  “Are you a reporter sir?”

  “In a manner of speaking yes. I suppose I am.”