John Hawkes - Travesty

Yes, they were indeed blindfolds, and at the first sight of them, and while Lulu and his grinning assistant were tying them like broad, white bandages over the eyes of the young trio kneeling as if awaiting the revolver of some brutal executioner, the audience voiced its approval and curiosity in a new and sudden spurt of informality. By now we knew what was coming, of course, and that we were about to witness some sort of competition or game which would involve the men, the girls, and the carrots. We could hardly have been more aroused or appreciative.

Lulu called for silence, and in the next moment one could hear even the lapping of water against the flanks of an invisible sailboat or the sound of insects in the bamboo matting overhead. All faces were admirably attentive. We watched as the three girls, now illuminated in the bright beam of a single spotlight, shifted nervously in their kneeling positions and gathered their muscles, so to speak, and raised their pretty, blinded faces like sniffing rabbits. The girls waited, Lulu raised his thick right arm, the assistant composed him-

self behind two of the girls as might a sprinter. Already the three charming contestants had begun to perspire. Music from a car radio came to us faintly across the little midnight harbor.

Then Lulu shouted, flung down his arm, and thereby sent our trio of sweet girls into an unbelievable flurry of agitation which, we saw immediately, was all the more pronounced and even feverish because of the ground rules by which the girls were forbidden to move their spread knees. In the previous few moments each of us in the audience had made his firm choice, his loyal commitment, and had fixed upon that particular young girl whose efforts he would champion to the very end. And now, even at the mere outset of this simple sport, the shouts of encouragement were deafening.

The rest is obvious, as most stories are. And yet there was indeed a certain mounting excitement, because first it was necessary for each girl to locate her carrot, a process in which all three initially employed merely their good will, their innocence, their straining young bodies (fixed to the rough planks at the knees), the entirety of their groping faces. But as the game wore on, marked by waves of clapping and held breaths, one by one the girls began to intuit what was required of them, began to discover within themselves an abandon which they could not possibly have known until now. That is, they began to grope for the tips of the carrots with their open mouths, with their bright, red, girlish lips now puckered into an oval shape, or at last and skillfully enough began to fish desperately for the fat carrots with their glistening tongues. In all this there was a good deal of tension and comedy, as noses buffeted carrots or a flushed cheek accidentally knocked one of the great orange creatures quite beyond reach. The girls swayed and rose and fell on their spread knees; the carrots swayed in wild circles; the two men became more pressing as pilots, so to speak, of the now hot and sightless girls. Yes, Lulu was devoting all his efforts to Chantal while the accordianist, poor fellow, was obliged to divide his attentions between the other two now frantic girls. Of course it was only too apparent that Lulu and his assistant were attempting to guide their charges toward possession of the unobliging carrots not only with whispered words but with hands that were momentarily visible on a wet and tender shoulder and then, for long periods, were quite invisible in what could only have been their impatient grip on the seat of one of the pairs of tight blue demin pants. The ac- cordianist was not at all in sympathy with his own two awkward girls while Lulu, on the other hand, appeared to be gaining impressive, delicate control over our remarkably responsive Chantal. The black, pointed tip of his shoe was visible between her knees, he crouched behind her like a ventriloquist manipulating an erotic doll.

Well, the admirable young contestants searched in vain, caught the tips of the carrots between eager lips, screamed joyously, thereby once again losing the prize.

The carrots began to glisten, the denim pants grew predictably shaded with perspiration, the girls cried out in glee or in a childish mockery of frustration. We of the audience applauded whenever a carrot was successfully trapped, we moaned when that same carrot bobbed away.

You know the rest: the object of the game, which was merely the clever excuse for its existence, was to eat the carrot. And while the two other girls nibbled and tossed themselves about and even shed pretty tears, it was Chantal, of course, who finally understood the game and slowly, sinuously, drew the carrot between her lips and sucked, chewed, reaching always upward with her small lovely face, until the deed was quite beautifully done.

Can you see the hollow cheeks? The tendons in the youthful neck? The traces of smeared lipstick on the now devoured carrot? I am sure you can.

Well, Lulu untied the blindfold and, perspiring himself, lifted our happy Chantal to her bare feet to receive her ovation. And that, of course, is how Chantal became the Queen of Carrots. It was only the next day that she found courage enough to go for the first time barebreasted to the beach where she spent the morning as well as the afternoon exerting herself in one of the old, white, cumbersome paddleboats. Her companion in the paddleboat was, as you will have guessed, none other than the notorious Lulu. It was plain to Honorine and me that Chantal had quite overcome her shyness and that the gigantic Lulu was enjoying to the full this first day with his little pink and amber Queen.

So you think that my brain is sewn with the sutures of your psychosis. So that's what you think. But how very like you to require not a single last resort but two. And if you will remember, I knew it was coming sooner or later, this double-bladed effort first to persuade me of my own psychological distraction, if that is the term, and second to entice me back to sanity, as only you could express the idea, with promises of repose, forgiveness, your imminent departure, the everlasting adoration of my wife and daughter. Of course I understand that you have no alternative but to lay at my door this your actual last resort. As I have said already, it is my opinion that you publicized and glamorized excessively those few months in which you gave yourself over to the sullen immobility of the mental patient. But I am sympathetic. I am well aware that in that short time they so sutured the lobes of your brain with designs of fear and hopelessness that the threads themselves emerged from within your skull to travel in terrible variety down the very flesh of your face, pinching, pulling, and scoring your hardened skin as if they, your attendants, had been engaged not in psychological but surgical disfigurement. I appreciate all this. I regret that you were so abused and that you took such dreadful pleasure in the line that cracked your eye, cleft your upper lip, stitched the unwholesome map of your brain to the mask of your face. But we must remember that we are talking not about me but you. What I have just been saying applies to you but not to me. Despite my theory of likenesses, as I have called it, you are simply not to think that your former derangement has reappeared in me and, at present, is driving all three of us to what the authorities define as death by unnatural causes. I believe that if you have been listening you will have heard in my words the dying breath of your own irrationality, not mine.

Concentrate, cher ami. Concentrate. Because I know already that I am "adored" by wife and daughter. It would never occur to me to wish for your "imminent departure." After all, cher ami, it is I who chose you to be present with me tonight. But on the last point I am even more confident: you and I would always shun "repose," even if it in fact existed and were not merely the phantom of all who refuse to present themselves to the stillness of the open gate.