The Bat Tattoo

8 Adelbert Delarue

Strongly intriguing, is it not, the variety of ways in which we humans replicate ourselves? I do not speak of the process of reproduction here, no. I have in mind dolls, models, puppets, toys soft and hard, with clockwork and without. I have a little tin clockwork porter who pushes a tin trolley piled high with tin luggage. I have a smiling plastic gymnast who does marvellous things on the bar and never tires as long as his clockwork is rewound. I have a tin ice vendor who pedals his icebox tricycle but has no tin customers. These little toy people do the same as their human counterparts but they do not relieve the humans of their duties.

I think now of crash-dummies, little ones first. The wooden two who make love to the sound of a crash, their black-and-yellow discs emphasise the motion of their bodies. So erotic is the sight of them as with blank blind faces they couple without fatigue and inspire Victoria and me to new heights of passion. Why should the action of these dummies have that effect? I think it is because always more sexual excitation is needed, and to see the toy copulating while we do the same is exciting. And there move with us the black-and-yellow discs we have painted on ourselves. Other elements come into it; there was a film called Crash in which the Eros/Thanatos theme was explored with many crashes and sexual acts. It goes without saying that the meeting of hard metal and soft flesh is provocative, and to be naked in a car is already an acceptance of whatever may follow. But this is not what is now uppermost in my mind.

Car crashes arise from drunkenness and careless driving, excessive speed and sleeping at the wheel. These are sins for which many die each year. In the hope of avoiding death we strap dummies into cars and make them die for us. From these harmless deaths we gather data so that we may crash without dying.

Sometimes in the small hours of the night Victoria and I paint our bodies with black-and-yellow discs and our nakedness we cover with black silk dressing-gowns. Then I ring for my chauffeur Jean-Louis and he knows that I want the black Rolls-Royce with the black windows. In the car, quick, quick, we are again naked. Under us the leather upholstery is cool in summer, warm in winter. The Rolls-Royce hums smoothly through the quiet streets, then on to the Périphérique where it acquires speed. On either side rush past the darkness and the lights of Paris and as we fasten ourselves to each other I feel the black-and-yellow discs moving with us and I imagine the impact, the noise and the pain of a high-speed crash. Strange, is it not, what games the mind will play? The crash that impends always, the sudden violent death are built into this road and this motorcar that wants always to go faster. The death in the road and in the machine, the velocity of the car and the feel and smell of the upholstery excite us, cradle us as we give ourselves to each other and the night. We make love, then sleep and love again.

We sleep when Jean-Louis returns us to the Avenue Montaigne before dawn. He inserts a CD in the player and wakes us with Jan Garbarek’s Madar. Another day begins; another night awaits us.

I am not an artist. In my house are works of art: Sèvres, Meissen, and Minton porcelain; glass by Gallé and Lalique; a Sevigny armoire; Hofmann chairs and tables and other pieces from the Wiener Werkstätte; Kelim rugs; a T’ang dynasty horse. On the walls are paintings by Daumier, Redon, Guardi, Whistler, and Waterhouse; drawings by Tiepolo, Claude, Friedrich, and Rethel. I can buy art and look at it and be moved by it but to produce it I have not the capability. I look at Daumier’s little painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and I try to feel how he felt when he painted it. I try to think his thoughts; I understand his use of light and shade and colour, the play of weights and volumes, the density of the tinted air in which Don Quixote on Rosinante and Sancho on Dapple are at the same time solid and ghostly, dream and reality. But if I were given a blank panel I could not see what he saw in it; my hand would not know what his hand knew when it held the brush. There is in my life nothing as good as what he did.

There will never again be a Daumier or a Claude; the time for that kind of seeing, that kind of thinking, is past. Art now is too often the childish showing-off of talentless poseurs supported by collectors at the cutting edge of idiocy. We are all of us strapped in a car that speeds towards a blank wall while crash-dummies race ahead of us to die for our sins.

What are the thoughts of Roswell Clark as I write this? In addition to the income from Crash Test he has now had from me seventy thousand pounds with which to buy unencumbered minutes, hours, days, and weeks. I have given him time in which to be open to what will come to him. What will come to him?