Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Yes, the intent of the mysterious M. Artaud was unspecified, as was the location of his Country of the Tarahumaras, whether somewhere in the New World or only in the head of this Artaud; but the doctor’s reasons for selecting the passage were obvious: the pale traveler, the indecipherably alien land.

The doctor, himself, was a cipher. Apparently he’d stopped practicing medicine long before his death, but wouldn’t go home. Sands thought he understood.

And Sands had kept, in addition to the several publications, one of the notebooks, the doctor’s private jottings. Stolen it. The doctor’s notes stood up in a strong, square script which Sands was translating, along with the doctor’s favorite passages, into a notebook of his own.

Dear Professor Georges Bataille:

In March of 1954 I read, in manuscript form, your essay “Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux, or, The Birth of Art” in the offices of the Library of Fine Arts at the Sorbonne, where my brother’s wife is employed. I was visiting my homeland from Indochina, where I have resided for nearly thirty years.

Skip recognized the title—Lascaux, ou, La Naissance de l’art—a big, beautiful volume with color plates of the paintings on the walls of a cavern system in France’s Lascaux region; he cursed himself for letting the book go, but it had seemed too valuable for stealing.

I have recently acquired the book, with the photographs. Of course

it is superb.

May I direct your attention to a book by Jean Gebser, an Austrian “professor of comparative civilizations”—Cave and Labyrinth? I quote:

“To return to the cave, even in thought, is to regress from life into

the state of being unborn.”

“The cave is a maternal, matriarchal aspect of the world.”

“The church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue of Southern France in which the gypsies worship Sarah, the black Madonna.”

(M. Bataille: In Spain, 3,000 gypsies live in caves near Granada.)

(M. Bataille: Is the mind a labyrinth through which the consciousness gropes its way, or is the mind the boundless void in which certain limited thoughts rise up and disappear?)

(M. Bataille! — We think of things in caves as black, but aren’t they pale, almost translucent, very pale …)

“Theseus by entering the labyrinth is re-entering the womb in order to gain a possible second birth—a guarantee against the second, irremediable and dreadful death.”

(M. Bataille: In the year 1914 Count Bégouën discovered the Trois Frčres cave in the Pyrénées—here a tunnel that can only be wriggled through like a birth-canal ends in a massive chamber covered with Paleolithic 12,000-year-old images of the hunt, including fantastic were-animals. This chamber was used for initiating adolescent boys into the ranks of manhood in a ritual of death and new birth.)

“If the cave represents security, peace, and absence of danger, then the labyrinth is an expression of seeking, movement, and danger.”

(—Seeking an exit, M. Bataille, seeking an escape? Or seeking a secret at the center of things?)

(After longer than sixty years of life, I see myself.)

(Chaos, anarchy, and fear: This drives me: This I desire: to be free.)

Yes!

The body of Bouquet’s unfinished letter to the scholar Bataille — impassioned, intricate, verbose —Skip was still working on.

After a month in his burrow he let Pčre Patrice lure him out into the weather to view the tunnel into which Dr. Bouquet had disappeared. They walked through the village and out the north end and along a trail to the west, hardly half a kilometer. At the base of a rain-eroded hillside lay a scoop in the earth, no more than that. The fatal blast had undermined the entrance, and the rains had caved it in. As with so much else in this country, its depths were denied him.

“This is not a critical area,” the priest announced. “The tunnel was not used.” “Who laid the booby trap?”

“He took his own dynamite, I’m sure. Some dynamite to get past a cave-in, perhaps. Then—he exploded himself.” On the walk back Skip told the priest, “I’m glad I didn’t have to go inside.”

“Inside the tunnel? Why did you want to go in?”

“I didn’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m a coward, Pčre Patrice.”

“Good. You’ll live longer.”

The priest had come many times to the villa for supper. If his duties to the parish hadn’t taken him far and wide he’d have turned up every night. The cuisine was marvelous. Mrs. Diu, it turned out, knew omelets, sauces, dainties, anything you could name in French, and though she didn’t often have exotic ingredients, still she served simple, delectable meals of fresh fish or pork with rice and wild greens, and local fruits for dessert. She baked delicious dinner rolls and golden loaves: here, Sands felt, he could have made it on bread and water.

In these ten rainy weeks, the colonel hadn’t visited. Except for the priest two or three times a month, and Nguyen Hao about as often, Skip stayed friendless and returned to his natural solitude—he knew this about himself, the only child of a working mother, a widowed mother— to the solitude of rainy school-day afternoons. In the smallest of the three upstairs bedrooms he pursued his calling as an arbiter of fragmentary histories in his uncle’s “2242” file. A languid pursuit. He could only stand so much at one sitting. The colonel’s file cards had been alphabetized according to the names of people either questioned or mentioned in interrogations between 1952 and 1963 throughout what was now South Vietnam. He’d passed the cutting and pasting stage and begun making new headings for each of the nineteen thousand duplicate cards and arranging them according to place names mentioned, so that someday— not soon! —it would be possible to look at this information as it related to district, village, or city. Why hadn’t it been kept to these categories to start with? And why should he care? As with CORDS/Phoenix, officers had ventured out, asked questions, made notes, gone on to other posts. He longed to trip on a clue and follow it to some ravaging discovery— Prime Minister Ky spied for the Vietcong, or an emperor’s tomb hid millions in French plunder—but no, nothing here, all worthless; he sensed it with his fingers on these cards. Not only were the data as trivial and jumbled as those of CORDS/Phoenix, but also their time had passed. These three-by-five cards served only as artifacts. In this they held a certain fascination.

At the beginning of August, Hao brought him a bigger French-English dictionary—Skip’s request—and a packet of photocopies from the colonel: a somewhat famous article from Studies in Intelligence called “Observations on the Double Agent,” by John P. Dimmer, Jr.; and a partial draft of the colonel’s own article, the one that had made some trouble for him, seven typed pages with handwritten notes—ideas more inflaming than French texts, more sinister than Eddie Aguinaldo’s cryptic warnings. On the one hand completely reasonable, on the other alarmingly disloyal.

The colonel had clipped a covering note to Dimmer’s “The Double Agent”:

Skipper, refamiliarize yourself with J. P. Dimmer, and have a look at

these pages from my draft. I’ve got more, but it’s a mess. Will drib

ble it out to you. Or you’d go crazy trying to sort it out.

Sands well remembered the afternoon in which he’d last heard mention of “Observations on the Double Agent.” Remembered it not for the mention, but for other remarks the colonel had permitted himself.

Along with Sergeant Storm he’d come to rescue his nephew temporarily from CORDS/Phoenix. Once in a while the colonel took him to lunch, today on the terrace of the New Palace Hotel. At the top of the stairs a sign announced today’s FESTIVAL OF HAMBURGERS. Skip remarked that again it was overcast, and Jimmy Storm said, “Ain’t no sky in the tropics.” Jimmy wore civvies, he was zingy; Skip suspected he took Benzedrine.