Consumed (22 page)

Bak later swore that he had been mistranslated and that he had a deep respect for all women, particularly intellectual women like Célestine, and was incapable of even thinking of words like that in relation to her. Yolanda later came to us in Paris, technically as a witness in the assault investigation proceeding against me, but emotionally to sob and whine about the loss of her festival job and the general degrading of her standing in the community of translators. She did ultimately end up in bed with me and Célestine, and was very sweetly needy and desperate sexually, which of course was a delight to me, and would normally have been to Célestine, but she was still benumbed. It was only when I forced Yolanda to describe our sex play in real time in the most obscene way in both Spanish and Korean that Célestine was somehow resuscitated.

I had entered Yolanda from the rear—not anally, you understand; she resisted that—and Célestine had her back up against mine. As she heard the breathy, ragged, dirty phrases coming from deep within Yolanda and mounting in intensity, she turned until her belly was against my back, reached across my head, and grabbed Yolanda by the chin and the hair. She rotated Yolanda's head until the shocked translator had to twist towards me to avoid having her neck snapped, and then, face to face now, Célestine said, “And the meaning of the title, then? You can explain it to us and reveal the sinister malignancy it encodes according to Bak Myun Mok? I saw you talking to him in the halls of the Festival Palace. You were flirting with him. He must have confided in you.” At first Yolanda was understandably confused, firstly because Célestine spoke to her in her very imperfect Spanish, and then not least because she had seemed to be on the verge of a monumental orgasm, one
which had a Moorish flavor somehow, or perhaps that was just my delusion, and now had twisted me out of her, leaving her to pump frantically against my right knee, which had been aching in its chronically unpredictable way, so that I had to shift her pudendum to my left knee.

Most of this melodrama is, as I have said, embodied in the famous essay, famous for the personal events that it revealed as much as for its radical, some say unhinged, approach to consumerist philosophy. What Yolanda said in our bed about the North Korean film did not satisfy Célestine. Bak Myun Mok's interpretation fell along traditional political lines: staggering under the burden of a crushing drought, the poor villagers in the film—who lived in a hermetically sealed fantasy of a timeless proto-Korean village—were forced by their rulers to supplement their protein-poor diets with insects, which were viewed as noxious and disgusting by the filmmakers, although of course considered legitimate delicacies elsewhere in the world. (Even in modern South Korea,
beondegi
, steamed or boiled silkworm pupae, looking unashamedly segmented and insect-like, are a popular street snack food.) The title word
judicious
was used with irony, in the sense of “desperate,” “last-gasp.” But in the stunning and brilliant new world of North Korean Juche Idea, or neo-Stalinist self-reliance, one would not have to resort to insects to feed one's children, and this was exemplified in the most didactic, programmatic way by the revolt of the peasants against their village elders, who were all members of a violent, repressive, shamanistic caste that promoted insect-eating as a religious imperative. Did not Célestine see the crude propaganda involved? Was she seduced so totally by the retro visual style of the movie, so strangely in color and camera movement like a lush Douglas Sirk Hollywood melodrama of the 1950s?

What Célestine did see was a work created expressly for her by, unaccountably, a North Korean movie director whom she had never heard of and who probably, given the geo-fencing of the country, had never heard of her. How was this possible? Of course, she recognized the inevitable
theory that this was a solipsist reverie, but in the spirit of inner drama it didn't matter if it was: it had meaning for her, and gave her a philosophical project. Korean cinema, particularly North Korean, became an obsession for Célestine, but of course, given its unorthodox trajectory, it did not require study of Korean history or even the actual watching of Korean films. No. It required research of the subversive, subterranean kind, and so I came home one evening, for example, to find our apartment full of acolytes of Simon Sheen, also known as Shin Sang-ok. Shin was most famous for having been kidnapped in Hong Kong, along with his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee, by the future dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il. Kim was a movie fanatic who understood the propaganda value of film, and also knew movie charisma when he saw it. And he didn't see it in North Korea, so he kidnapped it. (The evening proved to be dismal and awkward, with no narrative to speak of, though Célestine was enraptured by the Sheenians' somewhat confused presence.)

Célestine convinced herself that the director of
Judicious
was not Korean at all, but was in fact a kidnapped French director who knew her very well and was signaling her through his film. Bak had claimed that Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un himself was the movie's producer, following the principles set out in his father's book
On the Art of Cinema
, and so, given that the passion for movies still flourished in Pyongyang in tandem with neo-Stalinist ruthlessness under the guise of the Juche Idea, why would they not kidnap the best appropriate director? Why would they not kidnap Romme Vertegaal?

SO. “WE MUST DESTROY
the insect religion,” she said.

“Tina, are you really awake? Are you dreaming? Do you know what you're saying?”

[“Tina?” said Naomi.]

[“From Céles
tine
. And we both loved Tina Turner, the American singer.”]

[“Okay. So, Tina.”]

“He would be forty-two now,” she said.

“Who would?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Romme,” she said. “He was almost exactly twenty years younger than me.”

You need to know that while there was always Aristide, there were also what we called lacunae, intervals when we needed to be apart. And inevitably filling those lacunae for Célestine was Romme, a brilliant young and radical filmmaker who left his Sciences Po studies to communicate his politics through the art of cinema. Strange politics, and strange cinema: an obsession with Ike Eisenhower, China, the 1950s in America, and the films of Douglas Sirk. Romme Vertegaal was a student of Célestine's, and of course her lacunate lover as well. He was Dutch born and ridiculously tall, and he stressed to Célestine right from the very beginning that, perhaps in keeping with his extreme height, his eye was always on oblivion. “Blessed, blessed oblivion,” the original Beats would have tattooed on their shoulders, and Romme had those words tattooed on his heart. It was clear that he intended to disappear, to “obliviate,” and eventually he did, leaving Célestine quite devastated. We had just reconnected, filling our latest lacuna with ourselves, and the substance of our rekindled talks was this newly lost love of hers, and the unexpected pain it caused her hurt me too, because I thought she would never recover from it, and therefore any love between us would be experienced in the shadow of this holy, much greater, lost love. Romme was a spectacular young man even beyond his absurd, almost surreal height. Perhaps you have encountered some of his works on YouTube. They are stunning.

His friends were certain that he committed suicide in some fiendishly clever way that involved the absolute dissolution, possibly by automotive
chemicals, of his body, and that was also the tentative official police version of his disappearance. Célestine, however, was sure he went to China and disappeared into the vastness of that country, despite his height. And then came
Judicious
, and Célestine knew that he had ended up in North Korea, making propaganda films for Kim Jong Il, and then real movies for his possibly more volatile successor, the boy-king Kim Jong Un, movies which had certain messages directed at her, Célestine, Romme's eternal and transnational love.

And so, that night when Célestine shook me awake to tell me that we must destroy the insect religion, I knew we were in trouble. I just didn't know what shape that trouble would take. Perhaps in the cards was an approach to whatever clandestine North Korean representatives in Paris we could find with the suggestion of a special visit to their homeland from two famous French philosophers, with an emphasis on the philosophy of cinema. Once there, Célestine would try to contact Romme Vertegaal, who worked under the pseudonym Jo Woon Gyu (the listed director of
Judicious
), and would elope with him, or rather would marry him under the auspices of Supreme Leader Kim, auspiciously replicating the forced marriage of Simon Sheen to his actress ex-wife after they were both kidnapped, and symbolizing the divine fusion of political philosophy and cinema in the Workers' Paradise of the North. Could Célestine really think in these terms? Profound emotion lay beneath all her thinking, but it never stopped her from being crystalline in her logic, rigorous in her doctrine. Everything connected with Romme, on the other hand, was soaked through with girlish lunacy, and was very disturbing and destabilizing to me and to us.

But even given all the time I spent living in her head and in her body, I never could have anticipated Célestine's actual Korean strategy.

WE DRIVE AN ELECTRIC
Smart Fortwo in Paris. I took Célestine to a North Korean restaurant where she was to meet some mysterious collaborators on her Romme Vertegaal project; it was famous for its startling military-theme design featuring the graphics and colors of totalitarian kitsch. She asked me to leave her there; she would call me when she was finished. I became worried that she was getting into a potentially dangerous situation. I fantasized that she herself would be kidnapped and spirited off to Pyongyang. That she didn't want me involved troubled me even more: it meant she was communing with Romme, almost the only time that she could not also commune with me, and of course that was distressing. I confess that I parked our car some streets over and lingered across the street from the restaurant.

As I stood there smoking, sheltering in the entrance to a carpet shop, I mused, oddly enough, on the fact that even in his youth, Romme had worn hearing aids—originally Phonaks, but when last seen, Siemens—as a result of a childhood disease. When I finally accepted that I needed them myself, I thought of Romme's claim that they were tuned to the music of the spheres, and then, more seriously and mundanely, to certain satellite frequencies. He was never ashamed of or reticent about his hearing disability; he was more likely to be boastful and aggressive about it—he politicized it, like everything else—and so it became a cause. After he had worked you over in a café, you felt as though you ought to at least pierce your eardrums with a fork tine in solidarity with him, and also to experience firsthand the divine creation of Swiss and German audio technology. In a kind of audio-homage to him, I went to his own audiologist when it came my time to be fitted. By then, digital technology had enhanced the sophistication of these devices beyond science fiction to the point that they could be linked to cell phones, satellite GPS, and many other communications devices. It was commonplace to call them hearing
instruments
, an appellation with empowering artistic overtones, as opposed to hearing
aids
, a term unfailingly evocative of aging and infirmity. My own
Siemens instruments featured Bluetooth, six separate programs tailored for different hearing environments, rocker switches for program shifting and volume control, and a wireless controller that looked like a garage door opener. Mme Jungebluth cryptically assured me that she numbered several international intelligence agents among her clientele, none of whom was hearing impaired.

I was certain that any of those agents would have been listening to Célestine's dinner conversation if he stood where I did on that corner, and recording it and transmitting it to some distant Siberian outpost, but I was left, pathetically, only to imagine it. And then I saw Célestine emerge from the ornately carved doorway of the restaurant in the company of two Korean men in dark suits and ties, one middle-aged, one quite young. She turned to face them, paused, and hugged them, one after the other, with great, joyous warmth. The young one handed her a padded manila mailing envelope which he took out of his inside jacket pocket, and as she stuffed the envelope into the pocket of her coat, he put his hands together, bowed, and turned away. His companion did the same. As the two men walked off down the street, Célestine took out her old Nokia clamshell and called me. I quickly muted my own phone's ringer and turned my back towards the restaurant.

“Yes?”

“I'm on the street outside the Eternal President. Will you pick me up?”

“Of course. Give me ten minutes.” But I stood there for at least five, watching her like a spy, like a curious stranger, like a talent scout for an Albanian sex-slave trader, analyzing her body language as she paced and smoked, rhythmically patting and squeezing her coat pocket to make sure that the envelope was still there, seeming to take pleasure and security from whatever was in it.

Back in the car, Célestine was distracted and joyful, a very disturbing combination. “How was it?” I said. “The Eternal President. I've never been
in there. I assume the name refers to Kim Il Sung. The walls must be covered with glorious images of him in that Stalinesque North Korean style.”

It took Célestine too many seconds to reply to what I said, almost as if she had to decide to absorb it first and then decide to respond. “Not just the walls, but the plates too. Kim Il Sung as the Sun King, laughing, happy, emanating yellow rays of light, encircled in red, adored by soldiers and workers of all ages. And the floor show: beautiful young girls in strictly cut, short-skirted military dress and cake-shaped peakless caps, but executed in cartoonish colors and fabrics, pastel chartreuse and fuchsia, performing perfectly synchronized choreography that seemed to mock military exercises while somehow glorifying them at the same time. And singing songs that did the same thing, pop versions of army songs, soldier songs, aggressive and cheerful and threatening. It was exhilarating in its alienness.”