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DES LITS DE GUIBERT
(Of Guibert's Beds)
It has been claimed by the most erudite authorities, that these pages were found among the papers of the late Hervé Guibert, the French novelist, after his death from AIDS related illnesses in 1991. Part 2 purports to be written by an acquaintance of Guibert, 'le professeur David Kinloch'.
1
I had discharged myself from my hospital deathbed (in the Pavillon Falguière to be precise), despite the direst warnings of le docteur Chandi, and had boarded a plane en route for Glasgow in Scotland and then, several hours later, a small eight seater bound for the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly of the Outer Hebrides, as instructed by a minor acquaintance -- cruised briefly in Le Mic-Mac Man I think in 1988-- a young, or rather younger, Scottish poet and academic, David Kinloch, who, on several occasions during the months of my final decline had offered me the inviting prospect of a short stay with him in that land of mist and romance (believing, of course, that I would never make the trip), our temporary abode being the Carrick View Guest House -- proprietor J.MacLeod-- not far from the standing stones of Callanish of some five thousand years antiquity.
Such a trip was quite in keeping with the restless image I had cultivated for years, years which had seen trips to Rome, Rio, Hamburg, Moscow, Rome again, always in fact returning to Rome whose every stone oozes art quite unlike these Scottish stones which could, and probably will, resemble my tombstone (swollen to gigantic proportions and conveniently fauve in its ruggedness) were I to choose to have one -- which I won't, of course.
This journey, however, was a little different from the others, most of which had been tantalising quests in search of paintings and other 'objets d'art' some of which I suspected -- with a frisson only deadmen reared on placebos can know -- might be fakes. I had now reached the stage of my year-long death at which each and every bedroom I entered might contain my deathbed. It was a kind of dormitory Russian roulette: each chamber appeared empty at first until I caught sight of the death-head grinning back at me from the hotel mirror. After a month or so of this, I began to see that these bedrooms and hospital wards had to form part of the process I had begun some three years earlier, partly recorded in my masterpiece A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie. This work and others had been crucial steps in the ongoing process of outwitting and domesticating the HIV virus, ceaselessly replicating itself in my blood, by producing -- and the emphasis was very much on the act itself of writing, the replicating of the replicating in fact -- descriptions and analyses of my final years and months, making the illnesses visited on me by this odd parasite an integral and in a sense loved part of my being. This was a joyous morbidity indeed, not dissimilar in some respects to the 'joyous anger' Almaviva detects in Figaro. Just as I had to inject the unutterable queerness of the virus into my pen so I needed to make these beds, where I spent more and more of my time, my familiar, no matter how strange they might at first appear; the stranger the better in fact, for thanks to the virtuosity of that very same pen I would then be able to die in one with a smidgen of equanimity.
I began to roam -- it is difficult to shake off the word -- both the globe and its libraries in search of bedrooms as inimical as possible to the petit pédé parisien I had become in my innermost being. The libraries were mere relaxation, dilettantism, yet there I made the pleasing discovery that the clinics from which I was attempting to escape derive their name from the ancient Greek, kline, meaning bed. The Nationale afforded me beds in folio: of Assurbanipal, of Niniveh, of Solomon's cedar wood temple. The Mazarine brought me to the Tipi of the Pawnees and in Arabia I lay on baldaquins, divans, sofas, tabourets, all choses jetées à terre.
The voyage to Lewis was a most earnest attempt to meet the other head on: I imagined -- because I had been told by that false friend, that epitome of academic fakery, le professeur Kinloch -- brochs, blackhouses, thatch, byres. Imagine my dismay, my contempt therefore, when the simple B and B, barely roofed against the elements, turned out to be an establishment with Taste of Scotland florets, double glazing, a pink and blue bedroom of ineffable comfort -- the kind I insisted on calling le confort anglais to spite my host -- perfidious Albion!
In the evening I retired to my cubiculum with Dibie's Ethnologie de la chambre à coucher and there, in that stifling Hebridean snug, sunk into a fitful sleep, wrapped -- or so I dreamt -- in a convertible fishing net of the type which doubled as a hammock and gauzy protection against the mosquitoes that used to suck on the primitive ancestors of my Scottish hosts five thousand years ago.
2
Tiny black pellets from the tight arses of sheep, the acrid, candied reek of peat smoke, shades of grey dappling to the west like the underbelly of Johnson's baby cotton wool, Lewis littering these northern seas, eventually all this seduced his sweet telephone voice and Hervé Guibert promised to come with me to the Outer Hebrides: 'Yes!' he had yelped. 'Nothing could be queerer! I'll come.'
Yet he was so far gone in his various illnesses by the time he reached me that when he stepped gingerly from the plane I could see no difference. Guibert and Lewis were one as the wind rushed into the cavern of his MacIntosh like a druid to the protective hug of a standing stone. The flight from Glasgow was full and as the passengers packed into the tiny, corrugated hut that served as terminal building they shifted uneasily aside as Guibert struggled through them to collect his case. You only had to look at him to see what was wrong. Somehow they couldn't perceive that all they had before them was a bit of the land itself, dark and barren like the peat-bogs, a hooded walking stone collecting a battered case from the trolley. Soon it would be different though. In a month or two. When he would be machair, rivulets of rain on the tarmac.
With his delicate French accent he would try to pronounce the Gaelic names of the villages we drove through but he could never get to the end and his voice would sink to a whisper at the crossroads of a particularly difficult cluster of vowels. I could be of little help to him and eventually he gave up, his eyes as vacant as the white diamond boards that marked passing places on the single-track roads. Only once did he leap to attention, grabbing the map from his knee, forcing me to stop the car so that he could confirm the English version of Barabhas. This place, pronounced 'Barvas' which seemed to bear the name of the thief ransomed by the crowd in preference to Jesus, was a self-inflicted village of the plain, with ramshackle cottages, rusting buses in peat-bogs, dreich as the first Sunday after creation. It was dominated by a huge barnlike Church with a car-park as big as a supermarket. Light the colour of sperm poured through tall, thin windows from the other side of the building. We could see a simple wooden stair and nothing else. At this point, Guibert said he 'would like to walk a little in Barabhas'. I pointed out that there were wonderful beaches in close proximity 'with air that will be wholesome to your lungs'. But he was quite insistent. As, indeed, was a sheep which butted him so hard in the thigh on his descent from the car that we both feared broken bones. Guibert failed to see the humour in the situation and thereafter glared at every docile creature munching its way along our road.
A look of deep foreboding came over his face as we reached the sands of Uig. I paid no attention, however, and he walked quietly with me down onto the beach. We buffeted our way right to the centre of the vast expanse, skirting rafts of water abandoned by the tide, caught in the streams of sand that swerved around our ankles. 'On dirait Maspalomas,' Guibert murmured. For a moment he bent down and noticed that here the wind had slashed with such ferocity that it looked as if thousands of bullets had strafed across the beach. Little broken shells, slivers of of razorblades, white and blue, had caught there in the helter-skelter from the sea and perched like flags or hats on the tiny peaks of sand.
But Guibert wanted to press on to Rodel and the Church of St Clement. It was typical of him that he should make a bee-line for the one place on the island where art surely triumphed over nature. Soon we were standing in the simple twelfth-century church before the tomb of Alastair Crotach or Alexander VII of Harris to give him his proper title. The guidebook informed Guibert that this was the most impressive item of medieval art in the Western Isles but he needed little telling. Alastair's armour-clad effigy lay carved in black stone but above him an arched canopy of chiselled panels depicted both his fleshly and actual heavenly lives.
Just at this moment, sun from a window in the north transept moved through the church and stole slowly across the whole tomb, making the quartz crystals in the schist sparkle. Panel by sunlit panel, the tomb broke into life: the sails of a stone galley billowed briefly in the glitter and a smile broke like a wave across hunting stagmen. A devil chatted to St Michael as they weighed the peat-slabs that were Alastair's sins. Guibert was silent for a while, then smiled and said that he loved the galley, the castle and the stag hunt and thanked me for bringing him here.
His interest brightened considerably, however, when I explained from the guidebook that the sarcophagus was almost certainly empty, the remains having been removed to an anonymous burial ground in the cemetery when news had come of an impending invasion. Alastair's oval helmet and sword contained no bones, no steel, no residual DNA. He was a shell, a fake and the spirit of St Clement's was just the devious Hebridean light. As we left, Guibert remarked that Alastair Crotacht must have been a tyrant and patron worth knowing.
3
Guibert's Rodel Poem
The road that brings you me
is silverweed and tormentil
bird's-foot trefoil and all
the machair flowers.
I give the road that brings
you me, out-crop, windows
infilled with six-spokes, the grave-
slab of the Chamberlain of Harris.
The road that brings you me
baptises with font,
with apse and human heads
wrought in freestone,
badly weathered gneiss.
The road that brings me
places you gently in pediment
and recess, thing that tilled
lazy-beds, creature of
centaury, eyebright and thyme.
The road that brings me
grants you eyes of schist,
a body of amphibolite,
carved galleys and castles
to swim upon your chest.
Royal ferns glitter about
the brow of Black Guibert,
lying in his sequinned quartz.
4
Barabhas
I have brought with me, from Paris to Lewis, nothing but my recurring dream of the nightingale floor -- le plancher des rossignols -- more melodious in French than in English but in fact created by timorous Japanese to warn them of the shapes the darkness takes. Singing parquet! It sparkles with birdsong in my sleep, my highland futon pierced by the local piping of sandpiper and dipper, waking me to the shadows of Gaelic samourai and hatamoto who steal with Mrs MacLeod about my floral walls. Rossignol! Rossignol! Each cry bursts a T-cell. Count! Count! Each note is a footstep in my blood, each enemy that comes has a different mask and name. I count the multitudinous names of beds: Lectuli, triclinium, lectisterniacor, lectica sheeply somersault beneath my lids. Which one will I die In? Towards dawn, I am the queen-pin in a sickly 'lever de la reine' assisted with my regalia by vying buddies. Rossignol! And this nightingale landscape is like the day where Lewis is creole, impure: breaker, machair, peat-bog, rock, knoll, scrub, burnt heather, a scribbled brown, a scribbled black, a dash of blue, a pinch of green and slate, interminable grey and cloud turn through my double vision with the voracity of unceasing Z-bends. Stop, go, stop, go! The nightingale passing places!
Two kilometres past Barabhas now. At least its name is certain, no joke intended. But what of Breascleit, Carlabhagh, Siabost, Gearraidh na-Aibhne? Such shifting sand is all too familiar to me; I will write its declivities up: I saw a river of blood this morning and would not ascribe it all to peat. Yet I ache for the regularity of a solid immeuble by Haussman, bevelled brick and the reliable filigree of an unused verandah. The isle is full of voices. What hubris to think they could be changed into the being of a little Frenchman! Rossignol! Off with these Gaelic etymologies! Bring me at last to the home-rooted bed of Ulysses, fast in the heart of two kissing olive trees built about by walls and entered by a door. Finer than the beds of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, the retching bed of the Tarbert ferry, the bed of the shipwrecked sand. Nightingale beds that cry beware! Or fake! I would swing my feet from the hammock of my Band B and plant them firmly on the ground but, looking down, this is -- what? -- floor, rug, thick pile, parquet, the slight song of a dreaming bird. Like the waking Eskimos, I move slowly, with infinite care, lest the hundred souls that lodge in my body's articulations be bruised, put out of joint. Snipe cry past the window from the loch. Here is adek, soul of life, whose seat is at the base of my neck and soul of sleep couched beneath my diaphragm. Gently. Doucement. Sometimes I wonder if he's laughing at me, that nightingale. What would he laugh at? What?! My life, my closing days, this mulatto island, these Gaelic words are like the Inuit's floor of ice, clear for several metres but then, in sleep, we hear his tongue chirping two thousand different names for it. I lie in Mrs MacLeod's thrice recommended establishment and am a dictionary of ice, three thousand feet deep in places. Listen. I crave plain ice but here there is svell, in modern usage 'ice with solid ground beneath'. Above the lintel of her door there is iss, ice on water, svell-ottr, water swollen with lumps of ice. At Rodel that morning, amidst the pain and beauty of my many cancers, my rossignols, the sunny, empty tomb of Alastair laid upon me handar svell, the ice of the hand, gold and sars dreya, fetla svell, wound-ice, weapons. I gaze on the standing stones of Callanish, five thousand years of stone and beg for klaki, hard-frozen ground. They answer back: koma e-m a kaldan klaka, the phrase: to put one on a cold ice-field, to bring one into distress. One stone is frozen turf, klaka-torf, one stone is klaka-hogg, crowbar to break the frozen ground, my friend the gravedigger.
from Un Tour d'Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001)
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