Charbonneau (18 page)

Surely the tribesmen of the interior, hunters and goatherds, cannot be so abject as the swellers of Tangier.

Day after tomorrow we set out, if all goes according to plan. Paul and I will be mounted on dromedaries, light, fleet camels bred especially for riding; with us will be several of the Moors, an interpreter, a guide, plus drovers; and we shall have some camels and burros as pack animals. Perhaps it will be like many expeditions I have made on the Great Plains of the American States.

I anticipate with great eagerness seeing you next winter, and sharing a bottle of a vintage that will help me to forget the local potions.

Yours ever in friendship,

le sauvage naïf

SEPTEMBER 20: Baptiste’s diary: “We have been riding for some days now on high plateaus of grassland, with mountains sometimes visible to the southwest. It is an odd country, and has a strange effect on the mind. One moves as through an illusion of time. Every morning the sun rises, a sun identical to yesterday’s in a cloudless sky over a featureless plain; every noon it stands overhead and scorches even the shadows away, raising waves of heat that blur the horizons; every evening it sets behind high mountains to the west. During the day we pass a few words, mostly the same ones; Paul notes in his journal that the vegetation is the same; we take three meals and a noon rest; the camels and burros plod so many steps forward. Yet nothing at all has changed. We might be on some vast treadmill, creating the illusion of movement in a landscape that moves by without any shift in its character, an endless repetition of the same hills, ravines, and far-stretching grass; a sort of cosmic joke.”

ABOUT OCTOBER 1: “Still no change. I have been bored with this arid land; I have been awed, perhaps even frightened by it; I have been intrigued with it: It is a place where men are made to feel that they count for little, a place too mammoth huge for human beings.”

ABOUT OCTOBER 5: “Gradually, grassland has been transformed into the greater aridity of high desert. We are moving down an immense, high, flat valley flanked by mountains running parallel on each side, the ones on the south edging the great Sahara itself. The terrain has shifted from the gray of parched grass and shrub to the red, tawny, and yellow of desert earth and rock. Grass grows in occasional clumps, like camel droppings, at random. The mountains on either side just straight up; looking at them, Sternenstein tried to feel the gargantuan force of their life toward the sky; he failed but the idea excited him.

“They have a kind of poetry, these mountains, a poetry utterly unlike anything in books. Its rhythm is the hard, firm rhythm of rock itself, drawing lines against the sky; its feeling is austere, harsh, serenely distant, enigmatically itself. I hesitate to put more words to it. In the last two hours before the sun fades, the red and yellow rock radiates a violent glow of pink, as though it, and not the sun, is the source of that rose light. It makes one
marvel
.”

ABOUT OCTOBER 20: “We encountered some Berber nomads today. They had removed high onto the slopes of the mountains on the northern side of the valley, where there is grass at this time of the year. In the winter they will graze their herds at lower elevations, and we saw stone terracing there that evidences the growing of certain grains. These nomads were utterly unlike other denizens of Northern Africa we have met: They are said to be fiercely independent, proud, utterly self-sufficient, and sometimes unfriendly. Some of this they showed in their disinclination to converse with us, limiting themselves to terse answers to thrice-put questions.
Sternenstein
liked them. We have come upon no Touregs, nor are likely to; the guide says that if we did, we would probably pay toll with our blood.”

ABOUT NOVEMBER 1: “Have long since lost track of time, and am glad of it The white man’s time matters not at all out here; only the time of the sun and the seasons speak for ought. Paul talks volubly of his great love of this wild place; so volubly that I think he scarcely is able to take the time to look, listen, and smell.”

PERHAPS NOVEMBER 10: “We are camped on a boulder-strewn plain near the top of a high pass through the Grand Atlas Mountains. Three days ago we turned back toward the sea, riding into what seemed an impassable massif; we are near what is said to be the highest point of the Atlas range. The wind has lashed at us for two days, and the steep grade has fatigued the animals brutally. The mountains to either side are barren and wind-swept, the dark rock plastered with snow, jaggedly austere. We are above the realms where either creatures or plants can live. These mountains are at once great naysayers to life, and yet awesome and grand. We men only scurry through their austere immensity.

“Some Berbers on their way to Market at Marrakesh are likewise encamped here. This evening I had an exchange with a Berber boy of perhaps 13 or 14, though we could not converse: I snowed him something of how to play my harmonika, and learned from him to make sounds on his Jew’s harp. Then we shared a dinner of warm goat’s milk, cheese, and bread. I have enjoyed being in this strange land and look forward to Europe.”

OCTOBER 21, 1827: Baptiste’s diary: “I cannot see Sophie these days; I would probably be reluctant to attend her salons, anyway, from mixed feelings, but she is not holding them. The report is that she is working furiously on her novel, and that it will be a satirical lampooning of
Society
; perhaps, if she disguises her fictional characters but thinly, she will have a
succès de scandale
. Paul is immersed once again in the preparation of his
ms.
about North America for publication; I have seen him and the royal family but twice in the month since our return. So I occupy myself in the morning with
Herr Kapellmeister
, applying myself musically with some diligence; in the afternoons with my tutor, Herr Doktor Professor Steinhaus, attempting to learn something of philosophy, and in the evenings with Karlheinz, drinking ourselves toward
Götter-dämmerung
. Since I allow myself no other diversions, it is a program of some austerity.
Le sauvage naïf
is, in fact, in jeopardy of turning into a scholar; he is engaged, at the behest of Herr Steinhaus, in the composition of a small paper in philosophy to be called ‘The Spectacles of Mythology.’ Sometimes I become so that serious about it that I chide myself against becoming an
enthusiast
.”

Karlheinz waved at him from the other end of the
Kaffeehaus
. He was setting up the chess pieces before Baptiste sat down. “Two hours, and not a single game,” Karlheinz complained mildly. He dropped a bishop, which was not like him, and his fingers jerked at the pieces. Baptiste had known him to hold the chess table against all comers for an entire evening.

“Is this still your idea of sport?” Baptiste demurred. He leaned over and gave Hamlet an affectionate pat on the rump; the Dane would lie quietly under the table for hours while Karlheinz drank wine and talked.

“No, it is my addiction. Besides, you are bait. And I do have to concentrate against you. Sometimes.” When he couldn’t find a game, Karlheinz would harass Baptiste into playing him. Baptiste understood how the pieces moved, but nothing else of chess, and he played lackadaisically. Karlheinz’s entertainment was in trying to checkmate Baptiste’s king without losing a single piece of his own.

“I’ve worked it out,” Baptiste said, advancing his king’s pawn the mandatory two spaces. “It’s in my head, but not on paper. Do you want to hear?”

Karlheinz gave him a mock-hateful look, opening with a knight move.

“Never mind. It’s the price you pay for humiliating me on this imitation battlefield. This chessboard, in fact, may be a symptom of the illness I’m writing about.”

“Far be it from me to claim health,” murmured Karlheinz. “I am quite mad.” He shot Baptiste his mad look and went back to the chessboard. Baptiste moved a piece pointlessly.

“The world is encrusted with mythology,” Baptiste started. “The natural world is so thick with accreted mythology, like pigeon shit on the facade of a cathedral, that no one can see the original through the myth.

“In fact the white man’s particular mode of thought may be described as myth-making. He refuses to see a thing simply as a thing. It is a revelation, a manifestation, a symbol. The rainbow is not a meteorological phenomenon I don’t understand; it’s God’s promise of fair weather to mankind. The lily is not simply a plant that grows in certain places; it is God’s example to mankind of the foolishness of laying up riches. The very mustard seed is an incipient parable. The key is that nothing is itself; everything is a manifestation.”

Baptiste noticed that Karlheinz’s knight had forked his castle and his king. He ignored it and moved a pawn; Karlheinz put the pawn back, moved Baptiste’s king out of check, and took the castle.

“Some of this is all right, and has a certain poetic beauty. But a lot of it is dangerous. What happens is that we get handed ready-made ways of seeing and understanding. That’s what religion is—a fabricated way of seeing the world. It converts everything from what it simply is into a metaphor of a divine plan, divine will, divine love, or whatever. Christianity holds that simple, observable fact like the coming of spring is a symbol of God’s benevolence.

“I say it’s dangerous. Some of it puts destructive ideas in our heads. As children we are given the notion of Original Sin, of fault transmitted genetically that makes us evil. Thus, when we err, or misbehave out of anger or desperation, we don’t say we did something we wish we hadn’t done. We take the error to be a manifestation of inherent evil. A simple deed becomes a cosmic one.”

Karlheinz was proceeding with some care. Baptiste guessed that he was not merely trying to get a checkmate, but to capture every one of Baptiste’s pieces first.

“But it isn’t just that they’ve given us wrong ideas. It’s that they’ve put spectacles on us, spectacles that
a priori
change existence. The world, for instance, is not simply the physical world. It’s an arena in which man plays out his drama of good and evil. And man is not simply one organism among many on the earth, he’s the zenith of creation, the completion of God’s plan. Life is not merely the finite event of my existence, it’s an elaborate moral trial. Witness here the transformation of all that is physical into the metaphysical.

“The problem is teleology. The search for a divine plan, for final causes, for ultimate reasons—where there are none.

“Religion, though, is not the great culprit.” “Check,” Karlheinz gloated.

“Religion is not what makes the white man mythologize the world, it’s the result of that impulse. Observe how we are governed by an ideal of courtly love. When a modern gentleman approaches a lady, he is not simply his particular self coming to a specific lady, he is in atmosphere and imagination Pelléas coming to Mélisande, or Lancelot to Guinevere. These trappings, of course, may make his actions entirely inappropriate to the actualities at hand, may make him absurd, and must lead to romantic delusions with disastrous consequences. But unless he can see himself in those terms, he is not satisfied.

“Today, young men cast themselves in the aspect of the late and tragic Lord Byron, cultivate melancholia, put on airs of grandeur, and walk to bed with a limp. To be less than that—to be themselves—would be petty and inconsequential. Ship captains embarking for Corsica strut the deck as they think Magellan did; junior French officers learn to stand with their fingers inserted between the buttons of their coats. None of them are willing to see themselves or others simply as what they are. All is colored with myth, with the ideal. Everyone is a figure in a cosmic drama—an imaginary drama.”

“Checkmate,” Karlheinz announced with satisfaction. He beckoned toward a girl at another table. “Do you mind?”

“No, but I’m not finished. The result of all this mythologizing is of course that we miss life. We miss our own lives as they pass. That can be dangerous. The modern Magellan strutting the deck and imagining for himself the fierce winds off Tierra del Fuego may put his little bark on some mundane local rocks. But whether or not it’s dangerous, we lose the experience of our own existence, we miss the beauty and ugliness of our surroundings, we pass through the world without noticing it.”

“Anna Jurgen,” said Karlheinz, “Baptiste Charbonneau. You’ve heard me speak of him.” She was pretty, but had the face of someone perpetually injured. Baptiste remembered Karlheinz’s descriptions of his amorous delights with her. “You may see Anna’s lovely legs,” Karlheinz went on, “at the ballet. May we have a moment?” he asked Anna, seating her. “Baptiste is coming to his peroration.”

“The lover likewise moves through a dream,” Baptiste went on. “Meeting a lady at the ballet, he converts her and himself into idealized figures—demonic or angelic, it makes no difference. Later, if he is successful, he makes love to a dream, and does not touch the actual lady he is with.”

“I find the flesh more stimulating than the gauze of imagination,” said Karlheinz. “If Hannes is making love to dreams, that will explain his impotence. He will be glad to know.”

“The list goes on and on. We are living, most of us, in an elaborate myth, far from the feeling of the dust under our boots and the hardness of the wooden chairs we sit on. We cannot see or feel the world we walk through, for the haze of myth that engulfs it. We live in a God-damned dream world. The pun is deliberate.”

“So what would you do?”

“I wish we could see the world as Adam saw it. Purely. Without encrustation. For the concrete, physical thing it is. To him a snake was an animal of a different shape. To us it’s a symbol of evil. I’d like us to see a snake as a snake again. Somehow we ought to learn to see the world with our eyes, first-hand, and not through the eyes of a thousand teachers, poets, priests, and myth-makers.”

“Anna would like to know,” Karlheinz tossed out with a smile, “whether the Indian is a better lover than that.”

Baptiste scowled at him. Anna was watching Baptiste with amusement. “I make love to the woman I am making love to, in my own person.” Anna’s smile acknowledged his poise.