Each
night when the tropic sun abruptly ceased (to resume or not), we began to be afraid,
because of the comet blooming in the sudden dark. "The velvet dark," purred
Quigley. Although a metaphysician and habitué of Miss Stein’s on the rue de
Fleurus, his tropes were commonplace. Remarking on the comet and other portents, Freud had
prophesied that ours would be an anxious century. And we were anxious each evening
when the nightjars invaded the sky and the darkness (velvet or not!) scythed about us
dangerously. We would hurry then to a place of refuge -- in my case the Mormbassa Hotel
Bar, or (unable to avail myself of the consolations of Mrs. Willoughby when Mr. Willoughby
was at home after heroic feats in the hinterland) to the brothel.
"It is fin de siècle man’s dread of
female sexuality and its homicidal power that makes us anxious," said Sigmund,
rummaging in the cocotte’s closet for her shoes. He was investigating
fetishism at the time. I objected that the century had already turned, ten years earlier.
"In fact but not in the mind," he replied. "In the mind, these things
linger on." And aren’t women also anxious? I wanted to know. "Women,"
he whispered so as not to be heard by one lying beside me, "are not like you and
me."
"Would you like a nightcap?" the madam
asked.
"Yes," I said gratefully, feeling the old
thirst rise up in me once again.
I took my drink into the library where several
gentlemen were
examining leather-bound volumes of erotic
illustration. I finished my drink and smoked a cigar, a Dannemann Pierrot. It was then I
noticed Gregg, busily writing at the madam’s secretary desk.
I peered rudely over his shoulder.
"Turkish?" I asked.
"Pardon me?" he said, looking up from his
notebook.
"Is that Turkish you’re writing, or perhaps
Persian?"
He snickered.
I twisted his arm painfully. He was of slight build,
and I had no doubt that I could subdue him.
"Why do you snicker?" I demanded.
"At your evident ignorance of
orthographies."
Having failed to daunt him, I let go his arm.
"Please accept my apologies," I said
obsequiously. I was curious to know the meaning of his strange marks.
He closed his book, eyeing me with disdain.
"Care for a drink?" I asked.
He didn’t drink.
Or smoke cigars.
Nor -- he assured me -- did he dally.
"Not with women of ill repute!"
"Then what are you doing in a house of ill
repute?" I inquired.
He took me by the arm and led me onto the balcony.
"There is no better view of the night sky than
this!" he nearly shouted in his excitement.
I looked nonplused.
"To see the comet!"
Henri Matisse barged in with canvas and easel.
"I was told there was an odalisque?"
he said, looking around the library.
"There are no odalisques in
Mombassa," said Gregg with obvious relish.
Matisse bowed his head in disappointment.
"I was promised!" he pouted. "I’ve
come all the way from the Cote d’ Azure to paint an odalisque!"
(Oh, he was annoyed!)
"There are cocottes," observed one of
the perusing gentlemen; "and courtesans and other women of the night."
"The night!" Gregg sighed, for night
interested him profoundly.
"Do they dress in culottes?" Matisse
asked, hope kindling in his eyes.
"I’m afraid not."
Hope extinguished in an instant, and with it the
light.
"I know an odalisque in Morocco," I
said, wanting to help.
"Morocco is far," Matisse said wearily;
"and I have already come such a long way!"
He unstrapped his easel and set it down. I noted a
freshly sized canvas waiting for its odalisque.
"There is, however, a comet ..." said Gregg,
who was obsessed with (as I would later hear him call it) "the poetry of night."
"Rooms are what interest me," Matisse
replied airily. "Rooms and women who lightly move in them."
"But the comet appears only once in 76
years!" Gregg asserted.
"Perfect pleasure is rarer still," said
Matisse.
"The comet! The comet!" shouted Gregg from
the brothel balcony.
I pulled the sheet over my head.
"Not now, John!" I moaned.
He climbed into bed with us -- with me and a comely
young woman who may have lacked harem pants but was, in my opinion, every bit as nice as
any odalisque.
"But it’s beautiful!" he cried.
"Heavenly tracery ... vestige of the hand that sketched the universe ... the shining
thought of the Creator ... the --" He expatiated on the comet.
(Is it the comet one sees or its imprint, its
incandescent present or fiery past? Interesting questions; but the woman lying next to me
in humid, unclothed expectancy was far more interesting.)
"We are afraid of the comet, John," I
explained patiently. "All Mormbassa is afraid."
"Nonsense!"
"Even Sigmund is afraid of what it harbingers for
the world."
(The Age of Dread.)
"The comet is an expression of universal
constancy," Gregg declared. "A promise of eternal return."
(Many would say catastrophe.)
"Make him go away!" the woman cried.
(The bed was meant for two!)
Matisse entered, redolent of oil paint.
"What is going on?" he asked, getting into
bed with us -- with me,
Gregg, and the woman who was now fit to be tied.
Sensing this, Matisse quickly tied her to the bed
posts with sash cord.
"I wish to paint you by comet light," he
told her.
Gregg looked on approvingly.
The woman protested noisily; the madam entered,
followed by a stranger with tripod and camera.
"What is going on?" she asked while the
photographer set up his equipment.
"Art," Matisse replied simply.
"Painting is finished," the photographer
sneered. "Photography is the only art suitable to the 20th century."
Insulted, Matisse threw down his brush.
"Untie me!" the woman demanded.
"No!" shouted the painter.
"Yes!" shouted the photographer, whose
specialty was motion.
Scissors appeared suddenly in the madam’s hands.
I watched spellbound as comet light played along its blades.
Sigmund stepped out of the closet where he had been
lucubrating.
"Castrater!" he screamed.
"Vampire!"
The madam cut the cord.
"It is the fault of the comet," she said
indulgently. "The comet makes everyone nervous."
"Muybridge is an enemy of art," Matisse
complained.
We were walking the streets of Mormbassa in search of
local color.
"His photographs are academic studies of motion
without emotion. Their purpose is not pleasure, but efficiency."
Having no opinion, I said nothing.
"Aren’t you at all concerned about the
future of art?"
"No," I answered truthfully.
We stopped at the entrance to an alley. Teddy
Roosevelt leaned against a wall, embittered by exile. The sun flashed angrily on his
wire-rims.
"I would not go in there," he warned.
"Why T. R.?"
"One does not easily return," he said.
(Was it the alley he meant, or history in whose maze
he now thought himself hopelessly lost?)
I looked into the alley. There was nothing unusual:
Beggars and old men. Women squatting in the shadows. Broken crockery. The pungent smells
of cooking and unwashed bodies. The rattle of cans and that shrill music that seems a red
string winding sinuously through the meager, dusty trees.
At one point I seemed to see Anna, who had left me in
Kampala because of the lion.
"Anna!" I shouted.
The sun shattered in a pane of glass, and I saw her no
more.
My mind went elsewhere.
To the dead sparrows at my feet.
To the cloud whose shape I very nearly recalled.
To the colorful geometry behind my closed eyes.
To the book I had picked up one afternoon in the
Mormbassa Hotel and read without comprehension as if entranced, my eyes catching on the
barbs of its typography.
A boy appeared from out a doorway and said:
"If you see Mr. Gregg, please tell him to
come."
He was a ragged, dirty boy with a color suggesting
illness.
"Come -- come where?" I asked, my eyes stuck
open in the way that sometimes happens in bright sunlight. "And for what
reason?"
All sounds ceased.
The boy faded -- swallowed up in sunlight or simply
vanished in Africa where things come and go with a suddenness to make the head spin.
In the intense silence I heard Halley’s Comet
fizzing in the darkness at the other side of the world.
"The comet drew me to Mombassa," said Gregg.
"It seemed to say that here you’ll find a subject fit at last for your
shorthand. Here you will record the poetry of night instead of the dictation of
businessmen. Look --"
He opened his book and showed me pages dense with a
mysterious calligraphy, the spiked and loopy writing of dreams.
"Each night I trace the comet’s path as it
moves deeper and deeper into the mind."
"The mind?" I asked anxiously, fearing that
all would once again prove illusory.
"The comet colors our dreams," he said.
"Look --"
He pointed to the crest of a hill above the Indian
Ocean where Marie Curie walked, her white nightdress glowing like a watch dial.
He pointed to Sousa marching over the waves, his
sousaphone brimming with light.
He pointed to Einstein, whose eyes shone with luminous
equations.
He pointed to Freud, cigar flaming in the darkness of
Queen Victoria
Street.
He pointed to the Wright brothers’ fragile cage
of light.
He pointed to the ragged boy in the alley, shining in
his illness.
"Who is that boy?" I asked Gregg fearfully.
"He believes I can cure him; or, more precisely,
the comet can and that I am its prophet." He smiled wryly. "It is what many in
Mormbassa believe."
I asked him if I was asleep and, if so, what light the
comet shed on my dreams.
The light of desire, he said. The light of murder.
While Matisse slept and dreamed of painted odalisques,
Eadweard Muybridge studied photographic plates. He had caught the comet’s flight in a
series of rapid exposures but was dissatisfied with the result.
"What happens here escapes me," he
said, pointing to the blank space outside each frame, the border where one image ends and
the next begins; "and that is what is most significant. The secret of the subject
lies in what we cannot see."
"What happens beyond the margin is the
poem," said Gregg.
"Is the dream," said Matisse from the
depths of a voluptuous sleep.
I am asleep, or awake. Impossible to tell one from the
other -- in Africa during the time of the comet. Asleep or not, I am making love to a
woman the color of night. The drapes are open wide to receive the comet’s blessing,
or curse. We move slowly among particles of light. A silver dust, they cling to our hair.
Oblivious to us, Gregg sits by the window, taking the comet’s dictation. Matisse
sleeps; Muybridge sleeps, dreaming of horses
and pugilists. Teddy Roosevelt looks at the sky and
weeps.
Moved, I leave the woman and go to stand with him on
the balcony.
"What is wrong, Mr. President?"
"No more," he says, "no more. It is
Taft’s turn at the helm."
"Your time will come again -- your ‘crowded
hour.’"
"We are lost."
"We are in Mombassa," I say, taking his hand
to comfort him.
"All of us will be lost in what comes."
He looks around him as if for his Rough Riders. At the
hill, hoping perhaps to see San Juan Hill here beside the Indian Ocean. Looks at the woman
asleep under the mosquito net -- wanting Alice, his dead wife. Now he turns his eyes to
the comet and shudders:
"I see in it the shape of death."
"It is only rock," I say. "Dust."
He shakes his head. He sees what I do not. The century
unraveling from this single knot of light. He shakes his head at what he sees: war, ruin,
death -- all in this knot of light.
"The Age of Dread," says Freud, who is
plumbing the depths of his dreams, in his room on Queen Victoria Street.
"No!" shouts Matisse, who has wakened.
"There is something more. I can show you something more than death though there will
be much of it in the 20th century. Death will be ample."
"I suppose you mean art?" says Teddy
cynically.
"I mean pleasure," Matisse replies.
But Teddy will have none of pleasure. He walks away
without a look at the sleeping girl, who is naked and deserves a glance at least.
"And what is your opinion?" Matisse asks me.
As usual, I have none.
"You should take an interest in life!" he
scolds.
Yes, Henri, but life terrifies me.
"What is it you do here in Africa?" he wants
to know.
I shrug. I came out to hunt, to go on safari. But now
...
"I drink gin and make love to women, when I
may."
He approves of women and also of love.
"I miss the Cote d’ Azure," he says
wistfully.
"Then you should go home," I tell him. To
your room overlooking the Mediterranean. To your paint. "At once, Henri!"
He picks up his easel, his night-blackened canvas, and
steps into the darkness -- disappears through a hole in the dark, or a door though I do
not hear it open or shut. Into a Fourth Dimensional Riviera, Quigley later claimed, where
pleasure is heightened. (He had attended Povolowski’s lectures in Paris on the Fourth
Dimension and spent his free hours searching for it in Africa.)
I go inside. Gregg is at the window, transfixed by
night’s needle.
"How is it with you, John?" I ask.
He doesn’t answer; apparently the poetry of night
is wordless. He traces a hieroglyph in the air, signifying comet.
I think that he is crazy. I think we are all crazy and
beyond Sigmund’s curative powers. (I think Sigmund is crazy, too, but he amuses me.)
I think that the comet is a flare sent up from a sinking world.
I lie down beside the woman. Asleep, she is floating
under the mosquito net. I close my eyes and prepare for dreams of desire, or of murder. I
pray the world will reassemble itself after the unconscious hours. I pray the century will
not drown us.
|
Fiction
Norman Lock
(born 1950) writes for stage, radio, film, and literary reviews internationally. "In
the Time of the Comet" is from a linked collection of post-modern fictions - A
History of the Imagination. Additional "histories" have appeared in Ambit,
Archipelago, The Cream City Review, De Tijdlijn, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Lo
Straniero, NEeuropa, The North American Review, The Paris Review, The Quarterly, Rampike,
and elsewhere. He won The Paris Review's Aga Kahn Prize in 1979; and is the author of The
House of Correction, voted among the 10 best plays of 1988 and 1994 (for its revival)
by The Los Angeles Times. "Arguably the best new play of the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre
Festival," a feature film has just been made of it. Lock lives in New Jersey (U.S.).
The author can be contacted at: