Lucia's Masks Read online

  I keep treading in a rough circle, with our campfire as its centre. My right hand is near the knife strapped to my thigh, and I make my way cautiously and quietly. When an odd bleating sound comes out of the dark, I am thus able to stop, and set my foot down again soundlessly.

  I stand still, my body all attention, and take out my knife.

  The bleating comes again, then a groan apparently wrenched out of deepest misery, and then a sob. There follows a sizzling sound, as if someone has laid a brand upon the night air. And then again: the pathetic bleating, the groan, the sob.

  I recognize the voice that utters these sounds. But they so obviously belong to some private ground of pain, I am reluctant to intrude.

  Then I smell the iron scent of blood. This smell, together with the human bleating and the sizzling upon the air, all come together in a picture I find unendurable. I have to intercede.

  When I come upon him, I am appalled by what I see. The moon has emerged to reveal his nakedness. His burlap gown lies heaped at his feet. His mouth is twisted in agony, ruining his lean, wolfish beauty. The shadows under his eyes look like indelible stains left by years of bleeding or weeping. In his right hand he holds the viper-slim whip, twined with what look like stinging nettle and burrs.

  It is harrowing to look at what he has done to his body. Yet I know I must. I cannot begin to guess the number of wounds he has inflicted on himself. Stripes, gashes, lacerations — some festering and some scabbed over and reopened by the lash — and blood running black in the moonlight. Never had I imagined that this was the secret the Outpacer hid beneath his robe. I wince to think of the burlap rubbing against his ulcerated flesh. It is all intolerable, as intolerable as if he had been flaying himself alive.

  What he has done makes me think of Titian’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas. The doomed man hung upside-down, while intently busy satyrs peeled off his flesh in strips. A dog lapped at a pool of blood at his head. Marsyas was being punished, Aunt Giulietta told me, by the god Apollo. As a child, this picture had revolted me. It had seemed to belong more to Dante’s Hell than to the work of the sensuous Venetian painter.

  The sickening thought comes to me that the Outpacer might be his own satyr. Was it possible he enjoyed this torture of himself?

  He has not moved since my approach. He still grips the whip, which lies inert along his right flank. I both sense and see his alertness. I am aware now of the acrid odour of sweat mixed with blood.

  “Who is there?” he cries out.

  In answer I move closer so that I stand only a few feet from him.

  I see some of his tension drain away when he recognizes me. He makes no move to cover his genitals, and I see that he is not sexually aroused. I understand that by his quiet acceptance of my presence we have entered some new, indefinable bond.

  “If anyone had to discover me at my business,” he says, “I would prefer it be you.”

  I feel dizzied by his use of the word “business.” Yet what words would adequately describe this scene and the activity at which I have discovered him? Surreal? Nightmarish? Primal?

  I look at this naked man of uncommon strength, and at the rope-like cording of muscle on his forearms and thighs and calves. I see the dark cavity that hunger has made under his rib cage. I see the greying tendrils of his pubic hair. I see the slashes and scores and punctures and abrasions that seem to cover every inch of his skin, with the exception of his hands and feet and face. It is a vulpine face, with blue burning eyes.

  I am glad that he has apparently never lashed his eyes or mouth.

  He falls to his knees.

  “Will you hear my confession?” he whispers. He is wringing his hands. A shudder passes through him; then another and another. His breath comes quickly. Too quickly, I think. I fear he might have a fit.

  I sit down near him.

  Again he shudders. And again.

  “It is foul,” he says. “What I have done . . . and not done.”

  “I will listen,” I say. But I am afraid.

  His mouth moves, but no sound comes. He twists his hands and pulls at the flesh between his fingers.

  “Repentire,” I tell him. The word rises up out of my childhood, and I am grateful. It has solemnity and music. It sounds like a bell.

  He comes closer to me, moving slowly on his knees. I wait for the words he is about to speak.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Outpacer’s Confession

  HE PUTS ON HIS ROBE TO cover his nakedness so that she will no longer be exposed to his ulcerated flesh. Which is ludicrous, he thinks, given the substance of what he is about to relate: a story that has set the worm of self-loathing burrowing in his blood, bone, and brain.

  “I am afraid I will pollute you,” he tells her.

  She has her face turned away from him. Under the flood of chill moonlight, her profile strikes him as having a preternatural strength, like an image on an ancient coin of hammered silver.

  She puts her finger to her lip; then touches his hand, lingering only a moment, light as a moth.

  “Please,” she says. “Go on.”

  The elements of his confession feel to him like slivers of glass. He fears each word will produce a gout of blood in his mouth. He had not realized it would be so physically hard to wrest the words from himself; that they would have the power to pierce his inner throat and slit his tongue. His lips already feel numb and bloodied.

  And yet how else could it be when one tries to recount the doings of the Theatre of Cruelty? “Doings” seems the right word. Not “endeavour” or “craft” or the stern and noble “work.”

  Just doings. Evil doings.

  “I must go slowly,” he tells Lucia. “I will seem to digress perhaps. But I must give you a context. I have to explain . . . ”

  “Yes,” she says. “I am listening. We have time, given my wakefulness. Much time,” she reassures him.

  It occurs to him that he knows exactly what he is going to say. Day after day in his life as the Outpacer, he has been mentally rehearsing his confession, and this prologue. Is this because he has been waiting for the right listener?

  He begins: “When I lived in the City, I joined a study group in all innocence. Each week we met to discuss the work of a long-dead poet and theatre director. This man had a theory about a new kind of radical drama that would open our minds to a rare understanding of life and the cosmos. He called it the Theatre of Cruelty because it used extreme sounds and sights as means to break through to the unconscious of people attending the play.

  “All this greatly appealed to the man I was. I thought it good intellectual sport. I hoped that by joining the group, I might recapture some of the pleasurable play and stretch of the mind I had enjoyed as a student.

  “I should explain that when I first joined the group, I had become jaded and numbed by my own sexual excesses and drug-taking. I woke each morning with a dry mouth, trembling hands, and a drum tolling in my head the grim rhythms of self-disgust. This is the despicable man I was.”

  The moonlight streams down upon his hands, which twist repeatedly in his lap. He realizes he has been silent for some minutes, while Lucia sits waiting patiently. He swallows, and begins again.

  “I attended several study sessions in preparation for my admission to the promised mise-en-scène, when we were to put the dramatist’s theory into practice. I enjoyed these evenings, where we read aloud and discussed Artaud’s difficult, oracular prose. My glimmerings of understanding brought me an intense pleasure. The illumination, however brief, seemed proof that I was not yet entirely jaded. I had a spirit still that could leap up and be jubilant when it perceived the seeds of light in dark matter.

  “I honestly believed that never before had there been such a need for the prophet’s direct and bloodied truth. In moments of painful lucidity, I saw the travesty that human culture had become. What did we have in the City except a relentless stream of meretricious images that dulled the senses and undermined the capacity for disciplined att
ention? If we can no longer appreciate what beauty is, how can we be human?

  “I saw the proof of this in the glazed eyes of the street dwellers who stared up at the sky-screens. I saw it in the addicts of the virtual reality palaces, so locked into their sensation-drenched fantasy experiences they were oblivious to each other and to the world. To me, they were barely recognizable as human, with their wraparound viewing goggles and supersensory gloves. Their limbs jerked spasmodically in reaction to the brutish scenes played out in their private panoramas. Or they drooled or ejaculated inside their protective full-body suits, with sanitary pockets.

  “Forgive me,” he pleads. “It must seem to you that I ramble pointlessly. But I need to tell you . . . ” Again, he breaks off.

  “Yes,” she says. “I understand. We have much time.”

  He finds relief in her calm demeanour and evident sympathy. He continues.

  “One day it dawned on me that the virtual reality palaces made infants of their captives; that every customer was just an open mouth, twitching anus, and throbbing sexual organ. As for what was on the screens, it actually pained me to watch the degenerate spawn of the once-glorious medium of the cinema. That radiant world was now as dead as the common house sparrow.

  “I should tell you that I had inherited a substantial share in a visual production company. This was willed to me by my patroness, a woman who loved me. With that inheritance, I nurtured dreams of rescuing film from its precarious state. I wanted to restore the medium’s vigour and grace, and its power to astonish and to engage the mind and heart in wonderful, salubrious ways.

  “Do I sound pompous?” he asks.

  Lucia only smiles.

  “My share in the company was substantial, yes, but not substantial enough. Every one of my proposals was thwarted by my colleagues on the board — by a raised eyebrow, and the blunt suggestion that I familiarize myself with market demand. For my elucidation, or my punishment, as I saw it, I was made to view the documentary footage of audience reaction to the company’s latest product.

  “It was a lesson I did not want repeated. The more barbaric the scene, the louder the audience cheered. Naked fists, naked swords, naked genitals. Gleaming guns, gleaming cars, gleaming teeth. All these elements, both the naked and the gleaming, inevitably came into frantic collision one with the other. The audience was as avid for yet another bullet-ridden corpse as it was for close-ups of yawning orifices in the obligatory orgy scenes.

  “I was dumbfounded by how absolutely squalid the entire exercise was. ‘Holes,’ pronounced the chairman of the board at the end of the screening. ‘They like to see holes. Holes in flesh. Holes between women’s legs. That’s your audience. They’re crude. They probably go home and play happily with their own shit.’ Everyone around the table laughed, except me.

  “Our customers are vulgar, and we give them what they want, I was told. ‘They give us their filthy lucre. We make a gigantic profit. It pays,’ sneered the chairman, who was corpulent and bald, ‘for your expensive suits.’

  “I knew that the other board members despised me, and called me Gigolo Boy and worse behind my back. They had won their place at the table through cunning manipulation, or cut-throat tactics. I had won mine because a dying woman loved me far better than I deserved.

  “I resolved not to let them intimidate me. Yet I had to concede they were right about the market. I was deluding myself if I thought I could re-educate the public’s sensibility, or cultivate a niche market, producing real films for the discerning few.

  “It was not simply that I lacked the financial resources to make the kind of film I had dreamt of as a young man. I knew I also lacked the drive. I was not willing to forgo my own comforts in order to see an artistic project through to its end. I was not willing to suffer and to burn. I was quite certain that was what it took to make art.

  “After that blunt lesson in the boardroom, I gave up all my dreams of personal creativity. I slid into the sump of the unthinking voluptuary. In rare moments of terrifying clarity, I would ask myself if I was unconsciously punishing myself for abandoning my muse.

  “Can you understand?” he asks her.

  She nods.

  “It was a simple matter for me to evade these questions,” he tells her, “and yield to my habitual hedonistic imperative: another potent drink, another warm and willing nubile body, another new drug to fracture reality into slabs of colour and a swarm of scintillating particles that might or might not be dangerous to the touch.

  “I only realized how estranged I had become from any human dignity when I happened one day to glance up, and see my own naked coupling on a sky-screen. I felt sick with disgust at myself, and shame felled me to my knees.

  “How could I have allowed that degrading spectacle on the screen to come about? I had a fleeting vision of my dead mother’s face, appalled by her son’s depravity. I heard myself cry out words I had forgotten I knew — Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi! “Who was it, I wonder, that I implored for help?

  “Within moments, I managed to recover my composure. But the incident stayed with me, as did those strange words, and the anguish they revealed.

  “When I learned a few days later of the group dedicated to the principles of the French dramatist and his Theatre of Cruelty, I saw this as a happy portent. ‘Aidez-moi,’ I had implored the vast insensate universe, expecting no answer. Yet an answer had come — through this opportunity to delve into the writings of a maligned genius with an extraordinary fire in his head.

  “I had hopes that this study group might stir my own desire to make something, to dream again productively, or at the very least, renew my intellectual vigour.

  “It all began innocuously enough. At the first meeting I attended, the group examined Artaud’s idea of the intellectual cries that came from the flesh. ‘There is a mind in the flesh,’ he wrote, ‘that is as quick as lightning.’

  “I listened. I experienced a mounting excitement. I saw salvation as a real possibility for the first time in many years. I thought it feasible I might still become the man I had once envisioned.

  “I was as delighted as a child the evening that the Theatre of Cruelty group showed scenes from Abel Gance’s Napoleon in which Artaud played Marat.

  “Have you ever heard of this old silent film?” he asks her.

  “No.”

  “For me,” he explains, “it is a masterpiece that has the impact of a visionary experience. I sat through it rapt twice when I was a student, awed by its grandeur and miraculous conveyance of palpable human emotion. And without speech! Studying the close-ups of those extraordinary, mobile faces, I sometimes wondered if Gance and his actors were another order of being altogether.

  “Do you think I am being facile?” he enquires of her anxiously.

  “I do not want you to think,” he presses her, “that I am being insincere. It is only that I feel compelled to tell you the prologue. I must set out for you the circumstances that led to my embroilment in this heinous deed. I must explain to you fully how I came to be there. Otherwise, if I was to describe only the crime itself, you would think me a monster.”

  “Yes,” she assures him. “I know you are sincere.”

  He takes a deep breath.

  “I was speaking of Abel Gance’s masterpiece, of the film’s sublime artistry and technological daring. I was spellbound when he tilted the on-screen images of the seething revolutionary mob, rocking them back and forth. Watching, you could not help but feel the fatal reverberation of the Terror to come. An upturned world, where the streets ran with blood.

  “When I first saw those scenes as a young man, I did not expect to see a Reign of Terror take hold in my own lifetime.

  “Did you ever feel,” he asks, “that our culture was one that had murdered time? The social malaise, the vacuity, the obsession with surface polish, the ultimate shoddiness, these were all aspects of time’s vengeance on us.

  “We slaughtered each instant in the frantic onward rush for novel stimulation. We cut off o
ur own heads, and did not understand this was happening because we dishonoured time.

  These were the kinds of insights that came to me after I joined the study group. I was greedy for more.

  “So when Artaud’s glowering, incandescent Marat appeared projected on a wall, I gave the flickering phantasm my unadulterated attention. The others in the group watched the ancient film to observe their prophet. I sat, my body taut and eager as it always is in the presence of great art, striving to absorb how this superlative thing was made.

  “That night I slept more soundly than I had for years. On waking, I felt light-hearted, and new-made. It was not until my second sip of coffee that I identified this rare state of mind as hope. It was still possible, I thought. I might still make something worthy of the word ‘art’ before I died. Hope — which I had hungered for so long without realizing it — transfigured the future, which seemed suddenly more spacious, like a great hall filled with light.

  “And then . . . ”

  Here, he has to break off in his telling. He is not at all certain he can continue.

  “I was happy,” he tells Lucia again. He grinds his knuckles into the earth.

  “I cannot go on,” he whispers. The taste of blood is in his mouth again.

  “Repentire,” she counsels him.

  The single word, spoken in her habitual low tone, reverberates through his entire being.

  “Repentire,” she repeats.

  He is staring down at his knotted fists. Then he raises his eyes to look at her profile, gilded by moonlight. Slowly, she turns her head so that she faces him. He sees in her eyes her sincerity and compassion, and is reassured. She reaches out to enclose his right hand in hers. Her skin is calloused, warm and dry. He has the sensation that the moonlight encircling them is like cool water. He could turn his face up to the sky and drink.

  “Confront your dark truth,” she says. “I will listen. I will help you bear it.”

  He shakes his head. “It is far worse than anything you can imagine.”