Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Mike’s look at me is blank. He says with a hand on Mary, I’ll answer you, and dives. She screams while he’s under. The fight is over. The yellow rafts are empty but being reboarded.

How do you know my brother? says Mary, and Mike’s answer is too low, and she says, But how do you know Paul?

I can’t hear Mike.

Halloween, says Mary I think, and becomes aware of me.

I swim in.

I wade out, firm and sleek.

Melanie meets me disconsolately. What were you doing out there? Aren’t you making the film too?

Dreaming, I say.

Want to have a drink? she asks; and then: He stopped filming the boats when Mike fell in.

Good, that means more film left.

He dropped a reel on his instep and now he’s limping around in agony, Melanie says, but he just went on shooting Mike and that Scotch woman.

She’s old enough, I say.

Mike said he had to discuss something with your friend tonight. Do you know where?

Can’t drape sea water over your toes like you can a blanket. Floating in the Gulf of Ajaccio, drape a line from eye to toe. Then one from toes to mountain like a suspension bridge. Document your daydream with fact.

Well here you talk about the condition of music whatever the hell that is, and let’s say in a suspension bridge like Brooklyn Bridge there’s as much melody heating up in its cables as in the formulas John Roebling used to arrive at just a couple of cables each 12½ inches in diameter and containing, helically wrapped with galvanized wire, almost as many wires as there are feet in a mile; what if we take it the other way round and, instead of finding beauty in calculations, make measurements of the beautiful, what about the cyano-meter Ruskin devised to measure the blue of the sky?

Mad Ruskin.

I could no more have contained in its solid slot that Corsican cartouche than in the diary part I gave Jenny to type add to the after-all relevant dialogue a measure of the warm span of Melanie’s breasts unbra’d beneath a spanking white T-shirt sporting a black Napoleon horsed at Waterloo, right hand inside his coat. Yet Jenny was to say next week that my style grew on her.

Once coming out of our Welsh dairyman Mr. Jones’s I converged upon Tessa who was coming to have tea with Lorna, and right there in the middle of the road in Highgate Tessa gave me a book about the Maya and told me to read the bit about physical characteristics, also Le Plongeon’s theory that through their own colonists the Maya influenced the culture of Babylon, Syria, Asia, and Africa.

You have me. Even if you have not the book. I put it in my jacket pocket. I half read it the first night but to this day I have not returned it. I told Dudley I hadn’t finished and he said the less of that we have around the house the better.

In Jenny’s typescript of the Marvelous Country House the first week in August, the name Gene hit me, but the night we filmed at Stonehenge and I saw that the deserter from the Unplaced Room had turned up, I thought to ask Dagger how Mike in Corsica had known Gene. Through Cosmo, Dagger said; Mike was mainly in New York.

Place Foch: we dine outside.

Back at the école they’ve finished dinner an hour ago no doubt and have grabbed their guitars.

We are near the hips and elbows of promenaders. Stiff thick old palms stand around the square; flowers in the middle and a newsstand now closed where I bought postcards of sights I won’t see. The strings of festival lights are not so fancy as the façade of lights hanging over Cour Napoléon that depict Napoleon’s hat. Beyond, high above a side street off Place Foch a line of laundry sags near the light of a bare window. I put my hand on the Beaulieu where it lies on a chah between Dagger and me. A German was shot in a bar last night. In the leg from behind, in the foot from the front, in the buttock from the side — the tale chculates. They say every other car in Corsica has a gun in the trunk. Tonight the week has gotten away from us. But my prospect of ball games (soft and steel) and malaria bombs and rings of fire and glaring chalky walls with tourists plodding single-file holds as firm as the New Orleans I visited on business a fortnight after Mardi Gras once.

We have shot footage of the seminar students sagely taking down names on mailboxes in the lower street of shops that runs parallel to Cour Napoléon, to determine the residents’ ancestry, French, Italian, Greek. We have shot festival fireworks — no telling what explosively experimental fruit-storms have lathered our celluloid skies. Cartouche means fireworks and cartridge. We’ve shot and taped the école youths feeding, drinking, singing “Auprès de ma blonde” and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and marching around the long tables but not like ’68. (Corsica is too strategic for its own independence.) I want to go diving with the camera to deepen the Bonfire in Wales and the Naval Engagement. There’s no way to take the camera down, I’ll have to go alone.

We dine in Place Foch, giving the seminar’s bonhomie a rest. A child is being force-fed yogurt, yogurt is good for the liver. We return the zoom tonight. I discuss the fish soup with a huge-nosed old waiter. People click by. You can see the pier. A bronzed foursome occupy a table near us. They’re speaking Italian, I may have seen the dark girl on the Genoa boat. The older man who has a blue-and-gold captain’s hat on holds the menu up to one side and talks from it to the obsequious girls and back, as if it describes them.

I ask Dagger what we have achieved here. He is putting away the rich peppery fish soup. The Italian in the hat claps his hands and calls out in French for someone higher up than the handsome waiter who stands by. Dagger says, We’ve got a lot of good stuff, the Naval Engagement, the market, the fortress. I say what about Mike and Mary playing games. I say I feel like we’ve been sleepwalking or waiting for something to happen when we should have been making it happen. Dagger is glad we ate out tonight — did I ever hear about the man who’s been in a coma since early 1957? Dagger pilots a hunk of bread around his soup, sinks it, lifts it out, and puts it in his mouth: Well, this man wakes up from his coma and learns that Eisenhower is dead and says My God, then Nixon is President.

I propose shooting the east side of the island where the Algerians settled. Mussolini comes up at the Italians’ table. Mussolini’s son. Dagger agrees we might look at the east side of the island. I suggest we interview someone there who knows about the reactionary sabotage, for some of it may be anti-American. Dagger with his mouth full says, That’s getting pretty wild.

This was not in what Jenny typed, though what she typed she said was the best I’d done. The Corsican cartridge has opened and spread, like the paper of gunpowder Dudley Allott told me of, that by joke or chance turned up instead of salt in the bread and eggs and fowl that Stephens and Catherwood had packed for a leg of their toiling trek through Guatemala seeking ruined cities. “It was,” Stephens said, “the most innocent way of tasting gunpowder, but even so it was a bitter pill.” But lucky for them they weren’t cooking that night.

Our langouste comes, long narrow crayfish with spines. Paris fixes the market price.

The man in the captain’s hat is at least sixty, and tough. The young man could be a film actor. The blonde inclines her head to our side and takes a relaxed look around.

We go to work. The wine is cool.

The Italian has sent a bottle back.

I put my hand on the Beaulieu — the business (or right-hand) side with knobs and a switch for frame-power and the two tiny windows over the footage gauges — the top with the vertical needle registering meters and feet, the bottom with horizontal needle registering frames 1 10 100. Dagger doesn’t notice. OK, he says, you tell me: what should we be doing here? Here I thought I was looking after your health, education, and welfare — free grub at the école, girls on the beach, and you learned that there are five towns in the U.S. named after Pasquale Paoli.