Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

We played hide-and-seek in the papyrus thickets of the marshes, shouting to each other, “A whistle or cry, or let the game die. Waterman, Wodje Mze , arise!” I crawled like a weasel through the reeds, and when I could smell him behind me, as strong as twice-fortified wine, I turned and threw a handful of mud into his face. But he was too quick for me. Blinded by his vertigo of elbows and knees, he tumbled me into the stumps and swamp water, pushing my head into the muck. It was all I could do to keep my nose above water, and behind me I could feel Charon’s throbbing phallus. I screamed a mortal scream, managed to free an arm, reached up and tore out a gout of hair, and then, encrusted with the tomb-leaves of semen, ran back to the house.

Certainly, I found this irritating and rather beside the point, but the same scenario would be repeated many times. It was neither erotic nor innocent. It meant nothing in itself, but it presaged much. Though I saw him infrequently, he was always there — I remembered him three times a day, and still do.

One day Mother took me aside upon my flustered return. “I see you have been experimenting,” she said cheerfully but with melancholy eyes. “Just remember that the wastebin is where experiments should end up, not à la page .” And only our lack of ready cash prevented my seriously deranged playmate from being sent away to school. “One day,” Father said with a shrug, “you will just have to collect yourself, take a step back, and knock him down.”

I came into the world to replace a dead child, a true sister, pretty, petite, flirtatious, and extremely well-behaved, who lived only a single hour. I do not know if she had a given name. The lintel door of the chapel in which she was buried is inscribed only, “Waterlily of the Mze.” I had strict orders never to play near it — its doors were always locked — so I was inevitably drawn to it like a magnet, and regularly stole away to gaze through the chapel keyhole. Inside, impressive stained-glass windows rose to a cupola hooding a small bell which was never rung. A wine-red banner hung across the sanctuary, on the steps of which was a cushion nestling a broken saber. Once I gained entry through a broken floorboard. In the altar, behind a spring-loaded door, I found a chalice, upon it engraved “The Cup of Sorrow.” Inside the chalice, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, were two perfectly cut stones, one red, one blue. I felt a great solidarity with this vanished playmate, and I knew no one would ever build such a monument to me.

Her chapel (the last gothic church in the West) had been constructed from the ruins of a watchtower upon a promontory, its bowsprit terrace providing perfect views up and down the Mze. Owls nested in the gables by day and eagles by night, a silent changing of the guard accompanied only by Waterlily’s incessant singing; like me, she sang well before she could speak, throughout the night. She had our mother’s voice; her forzas were like a car hitting a wall, and eventually she mastered even the most difficult Astingi song-cycles, which, tighter than a sestina, go on in the same excruciating fashion — absence, devastation, return, retribution, wedding, absence, et alia, alia , among them Rage Over a Lost Penny; I Am Not Scheherazade; If I Lay Down for You, It Is God’s Wish; It Doesn’t Become You When You Speak; He Who Doesn’t Kiss Her Deserves to Have His Tongue Torn Out ; or that showstopper, the eighteenth-century magisterial masterpiece, The New God :

On a pilgrimage I heard

the good tidings from a

conversation between a dog and a cock

That the Almighty Father was dead

as well as his Good Lady, his son,

and the fearsome ghost

Put in his place is an elderly

Uncle with red whiskers who

has only been in jail once

He understands not a word of

Hebrew, Latin, or Greek and

only a smattering of English

He wears an old black silk top hat

and a red knitted waistcoat and

knows all there is about turnips and buttermilk

He has a rusty old gun but

no license, and a bad-tempered

sheepdog whom the angels call “Testy”

They say he will make a very good God,

And a much better one for our people

A great pity they had to endure the other for so long.

When I returned to her, on Easter or other holidays when the family was otherwise preoccupied, I would open the altarpiece and, taking the stones from the chalice, shake them in my hand like dice — and when I was feeling most like the last son of an inglorious age, she would sing sweetly in the chapel, “So what are you alive for?”

In those stolen moments in the chapel of my dead sister, it occurred to me what my problem was. I had an âme féminine , a feminine soul. My thick heroic blood had somehow become feminine, upper class, and barbaric, negating modern culture, which makes the feminine masculine, democratic, and artificial. Civilization clung to me like rags. So while playing the man, I have always felt like a princess, a dead princess about to awake and make mincemeat of certain people, and as such I have incurred the fear and hatred of men, particularly if they were important personages.

My feminine soul was thus always in search of my body, mourning the disappearance of the old kind of artistic male who has died out; a virgin body being serviced by a non-virgin heart. I was a good little boy but a bad little girl, a winning combination. To preserve the appearance of manliness I would eventually take refuge in alcoholic stupor, from which I emerged a drunken and diseased victor, while retaining the eternal priority which was the delight of my feminine soul. I was one of the dead with whom the living have to reckon, a salon bandit , a bathhouse nymph, who would put in jeopardy men’s calm, their faith, and what’s more, their cynicism; female preference always modifying male domination. Oh, I may have been a born imitation, but one so hungry that I could gobble up any ten originals for breakfast. And in Cannonia, where everyone is based on someone else, Waterlily remained my favorite playmate, even more than Waterman.

The Esteemed Traveler may have noticed that known artistes often resort to introducing just such little choruses of chromatic chums who are mostly empty canvas, whose sidereal appearance illuminates a larger theme, amplifies a point, or assists in pulling through a packthread of some secret motive. But truth be told, there are no minor characters in Cannonia; everyone gets their aria as well as their comeuppance. And in my experience, it is best to keep such folk on the same page, because if they begin to wander aimlessly, like electrons or deviations from a tonic chord, nothing good can come of it. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who wants to become a character in a novel. So when one of these little black keys is sounded, never put the other two out of mind. Their tempos are set well beyond our egos, and if they do not strictly belong to a given key, each character constructs its own society. Whether embracing, confronting, echoing, fracturing, or inverting one another, they are simultaneously all melody and all accompaniment, and as such are difficult to kick out of the composition.

And what’s most interesting about such people is not the freshness of their entrances, but how, one by one, they disappear.

From his tower suite, Father saw the rented trap careen up the drive and come to a skidding stop, leaving deep, muddy ruts in the oval lawn. Mother had picked up the hysterical pounding of the troika miles before and was already on the terrace to greet the stooped and trembling Professor, whom she perfunctorily embraced as she flung a helpless glance toward Father’s window. As they passed in the servants’ stairwell, she told Felix of the tragedy, adding, “Get his mind off it, but don’t even let him near our dogs!” When Felix found the Professor wandering absently in the entry hall, he commiserated with his double loss, took the suitcase from his hand, and dragged him down the cellar stairs beneath the stables, where he poured him a glass of his rarest wine, a priceless triple-pressing siphoned from a small, cobwebbed barrel tucked under his arm.