The Bat Tattoo

17 Adelbert Delarue

Always I underestimate the effect on me of what I do. Did I think I could go to Autun and come back the same as I was before? On my return I looked at everything with eyes on which were imprinted scenes of this time alone and the first time with Solange. And in my ears was still the shouting of the bells.

Victoria tried to interest me in our usual games. She brought out the toys and demonstrated that in my absence new partnerships had been established. By now all four figures had names: the man was Max, the woman Celeste, the mastiff Hector and the gorilla Marcel. Marcel and Max were now an item, while Celeste and Hector had formed a serious attachment, particularly piquant when they performed to the accompaniment of that part of Swan Lake where the corps of pretty swanettes come tripping in on point. This failed to enliven me, nor did those special attentions Victoria pressed upon me. I was haunted by the Christ on the tympanum of the west portal of St Lazare.

This outspread, open, entranced Christ, I realised, does not judge: his existence, as man and as idea, is a judgement. We pass beneath his hands to the safe sheepfold of God or we fall to the fires of Hell. The Last Judgement is every moment: even this very moment in which Celeste and Hector couple to Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and Victoria mouths her devotion. The fires of Hell are not necessarily flames tended by working-class devils with pokers and pitchforks; these fires can equally be the grey and chilly dawn in which one awakes utterly alone beside one’s lover.

I think about Roswell Clark and wonder what I expect from him. In the beginning it was clear enough: I was the patron; he was the artist whom I commissioned to make little sexually active crash-dummies: man; woman; mastiff; and gorilla. What is in my mind when I watch these various wooden couplings? What do I think of while Victoria does her best to anticipate my every desire? Sometimes I see mass graves.

Crash Test was a metaphor absurd and profound; I recognised in Clark a talent capable of surprises, possibly of development. Because of the manner in which Crash Test had drawn me to itself it seemed to me that there might be a significance, as yet unknown, in our transactions. I tend to see omens and portents in all kinds of things: if the yolk of my soft-boiled egg is at the top I expect the day to go well.

What does crashing into a wall and flying into pieces signify for me? Mortality, yes — life crashing into death; I have already spoken of that in these pages. Is there more? Is there in me a desire to crash, to go Peng! and fly into pieces? Have I already flown into pieces without the Peng? What did I think my toys would do for me? From depravity does one move on to something higher? Depravity, I think, comes naturally to the human animal. And it is of course more fun than higher things.

As I was saying, in the beginning I was the patron. As I commissioned the man and woman, the mastiff, and the gorilla, I felt each time that Clark and I were moving closer to something of importance, something that would come from him as his talent demanded more of him. What will it be? The large and the small of it is that I am depending on Roswell Clark for something, I know not what, that will make me feel better than I do now. Money can buy many things, and uncertainty is one of them.