-Chapter 4-
I awoke with an uneasy familiarity, déjà vu for a place gathered like a ragged mirage above the flat blue Mediterranean. The island had a name; it must! Names were irrelevant in this part of the experience though, so instead I fixed a drawn-out, lazy Sunday breakfast. Eggs and fennel and toast with bacon, gin from the bottle he hadn't quite done away with last night. The bitter drops clung to the green insides of the glass, opalescent in the sun. I put on faded khaki cut offs and rowed the little dingy into shore, the beach a million souls of crushed sea creatures, their hollow homes baking in the warm air. I’d never seen a beach made only of shells, and bent down close to the bleached, gritty surface so that my face was inches from it, studying the myriad shapes and histories of them.
The island was only 15 or 20 kilometers from the mainland, and I could see the craggy white hills east of Cannes protruding above the earthy horizon to the north. It was shrouded in a strange atmosphere, I felt. A tepid stillness focused the omniscient sun into little corners between the sand dunes. Palm trees, whose fronds hung limp and quiet as if admitting defeat, had been planted behind the dunes. The isle doubtlessly had a long and convoluted history, but I chose to let this be, to soak in the existential beauty of the harsh silver light and teal water. The harbor was a fine respite from the sea, and I imagined it in times of fierce storm, sitting stoic and permanent between the rising swells.
At one end of the little cove was a rocky protrusion out into the sea, gray limestone butting up against the azure water ten or fifteen meters high. At the top of this precipice, suspended on rough wooden stilts, was a small red house. It had neat yellow trim around the windows and door, suggesting the summer home of a modest family- a tax accountant in Marseille or café owner in Nice. I approached it at a modest clip, feet always about to catch a forward fall, the boyish anticipation of the next step too much for gravity to counter. At the northernmost edge of the rock, right before it tumbled down into the sea, stood Guillaume. 'Oh, Guillaume!" I thought with abstract joy, and ran full sprint down the remaining 50 meters of the white shells, arms foolishly aside me.
It was not Guillaume. The man's features changed and became more angular, a trim mustache turned downward at the creased edges of his lips and an elaborately styled pouf of straight brown hair jutting over his forehead like the cliffs over the sea. The man was still; he said nothing at first. His expression was smug and content, a gambler who just played his best hand to the bewilderment of his opponents. As I speculated in panicked urgency on how to best introduce myself, an uninvited guest on a private island, the man took off toward him like a derailed freight train. His smirk was replaced by a gaping, manic smile, and before I knew it I was being wrestled into the soft sand, the dead sea creatures brushing uncomfortably on the day old sunburn on my thighs. I made no effort towards resistance; rather I let my body go limp the way a kitten might innately understand when its mother picks it up by the scruff. I knew somehow this too was an integral part of it, being wrestled with in the sand by a French madman on an island in the strangely untamed Cote D'Azure.
I felt the imperceptible pull of gravity, downwards and into the mushy, salty ground, feeling resigned to my fate even before I knew the outcome. The man's name was Julian, and he said he was sorry, but visitor's were not expected or necessarily welcomed. He said he might make an exception for me though, and with this he led me up an old wooden staircase in a shallow cleft in the precipice, his steps bounding upwards like a small child climbing a lookout tower. Julian was fucking crazy; this I had gathered quite sensibly from our first encounter. The rigid rules of society, even along the hedonistic Cote D'Azure did him no justice, and yet he ostensibly refrained from drugs or alcohol, I thought in amazement, walking around the barren cabin. By barren of course, I meant there were no substances to partake in. Rather it was covered, from the prim whitewashed walls to the bare beams of the ceiling, with art of the most obscene and gratuitous kind, photographs. Big ones, small ones, giant phantasmagoric pinhole apparitions on glossy matte: they were everywhere.
As Julian prepared jus d'orange avec ouellettes in the neat, rectangular kitchen, I broke the silence with the logical question of whether he was a photographer [he looked a few years too old to be an art student still?]. In broken English, fragmented bits of thought that were abstractly honest, he said he’d studied photography and painting in Geneva. His family came from some obscurity of the old establishment, with lineage dating back to the suppression of the bourgeois in the Revolution. He quickly followed this with the fact that by living on the island alone, painting and photographing nature and himself, he was slowly atoning for the sins of past lives, the inexcusable high-brow tedium he’d come from, and was on his way to becoming pure, or at least aware. This sounded awfully pretentious and scary, I thought, and our breakfast on the little yellow wooden veranda seemed much more rewarding.
I told Julian we didn't have to talk if he didn't want to, which seemed to relieve him immensely. He communicated now in nervous, anticipatory smiles and quick glances over his shoulder, as if aware of the judgment of the seagulls and silent island creatures. The isle was bigger than I thought, Julian informed me in matter-of-fact pride: 5 kilometers long and 2 wide. It had been a trading outpost during the Roman Empire and later a small fishing community was built on the stone ruins of the Roman fort. It had ended up in the personal estate of a Jacques de Marquee, one of the most powerful and tyrannical land barons of the old world, his summer respite from the growing demands of the peasants in the late 18th century. The sun here was hot and luxuriant, radiant in a way that justified the excess of spending and accumulation. Suddenly Julian's 30-something ineptness and half-staged life out on the island seemed more appropriate.
I thought he ought to tell Julian about Guillaume, not that he would care: just to air my thoughts in the stiff morning breeze before someone similarly misplaced. Julian was someone who might laugh and point yet might also feel compassion- jealously even, I hoped in secret awfulness. He listened intently and then did precisely as I’d expected; laughed and gesticulated in wild incoherent French and almost fell over in his chair, saying something to the effect that I was an American dealing with the French and this was so typical it wasn't even worth noting. This made me angry, yet also sympathetic- Julian was similarly lost after all, and I ought not to forget that, cultural differences aside. I liked how he was vulnerable and insecure, yet also resolutely angular and filled with exploding, loud ideas. We both seemed tired of being watched, thinking we were being watched, forgetting to be watched; Goddamn it! By myself more than anyone, I thought pointlessly. Still though, Julian, like Guillaume of recent times, was intrigued, because I’d presented an interruption to a life that was already partly resigned to predictability, the flat spots in my collective experience sometimes their high points. To be bored by nothing more than your own potential, was this the fate of 20th Century man? To live in an age of both privilege and slavery, enthralled by the latest media holograph, hollow and immediate, to turn away from that of substance- was this the brave new culture, the modular petri-dish everyone spoke of? It was all too difficult to think about now, and I withdrew into my own mind, postponing the unnecessary search for answers that seemed arcane to begin with.
I recalled sitting in the library at Brown earlier this past semester, last January it was, the wet snow coming down in heavy, globular thwacks on the old wooden roof. Across a table sat a black, curvaceous girl lost in the internal struggle of committing to reading or listlessly watching boys, and I’d noted with possibly malevolent content that Brown was doing a great job creating a more diverse student body. Thoughts of how exotic she seemed compared to my blinded, bubbled childhood distracted me and when I’d looked up again at her, I’d discovered she was in fact not black, just an awful, orange tan, the drooping edges of her lips hiding a lingering unhappiness. This was it though; I had this dreadful ability to look at people and stare right through them, the unchanging geometry of a brick wall or hedgerow more appealing or tolerable than a stranger's face.
She’d watched me too though, with nervous fascination, I’d been wearing a Kashmiri crewel coat adorned with bright swirls of color and faded gray Levi's two sizes too small, garish red thrift store penny loafers slid over green argyle socks. A bastardized hippy prepster, I must have seemed, worse than those pretty blonde SDS girls in their Tibetan dresses and long scarves, hiding under layer after layer of cultural appropriation. To what extent were we both right? Entitled to be young and make unnecessary mistakes, to appropriate without intent to harm, only searching for a flat, stable place amongst all this college placelessness.
Julian could tell I was distracted, and led me arm in arm the way the French sometimes do, down to the beach on the other side of the precipice. It miraculously was made of sand and not shells, the texture more pleasing to me bare, increasingly calloused feet. He had his camera with him, a heavy black Leica with expensive looked attachments. A long rounded lens jutted forward like a telescope against his boney hips. At the end of the little sand cove some smooth, flat ledges faded humbly into the shallow green water. He sharply instructed me to lay down there, facing him with one arm propping my head up, 'like a fucking mermaid', I thought, yet I complied without hesitation.
Julian took photographs as if he'd heard he might be charged for them one day; each click of the shutter confident, yet apprehensive of the consequences of light or misdirected intent. I followed his instructions silently, the shallow, repetitive waves and distant gulls framing things just right now in the absence of words. Julian never specified what anything was for; rather it was inherently understood that I was in the midst of some sort of biopic; a hurried trip forward that needed no explanation. Suddenly sex seemed so sterile and mechanical to me that my relationship with this new stranger became unburdened and platonic…still beautiful, yet free of the expectations of physical love. This wasn't to say that attachment wouldn't occur. Indeed, I prayed in his now hollow mind, filled with the blinding reflection of the sun- that I might know the fullness of spirit that came with truly selfless affection, attracted or not to him.
The physics of love though, the material presence was so greedy and consuming, it gnawed away at me until I cried out in pain. The pain was actually due to a jellyfish that had appeared to be dead and benign beside me. As I recalled from childhood seaside mishaps, it was never safe to assume such, and I recoiled from the sting of a few long, red tentacles that had inadvertently brushed against me while lost in Julian’s posturing. I complained like a small child to him, protesting because I felt I could, and I smiled when he decided a swim was the solution to all the various stresses of the day we’d encapsulated.
Julian was done for the moment with all the endearingly French gesticulating, and he relieved me of my mermaid duties, abandoning the prized Leica in the pale sand and bounding half-clothed into the sea. I was hot and itchy from the sun, the sand and the smooth rocks, and joined him in the surreal green ether. It seemed to wrap up all the unconsolidated stuff in the world, bound it tight like the heavy wool blankets my mother had tucked me under on family ski vacations as a boy. Cozy and safe in this little cove on the Roman Isle; Jacques de Marquee. What a strange turn of events, as usual. The visions of past sin and excess came to me like the long, even sets of breakers against the gray limestone, and I longed for the pencil-thin memories of childhood, which waited only to be replaced. Julian had swum out a good ways, to a little black ledge rising humbly out of the water some 300 meters distant. He stood atop it naked, proclaiming the sea as his whole kingdom. Like the small boy who first stands atop a mountain peak, he knew no slightness.
Even submerged in the August Sea, the sun was hot and uncaring, I thought. I found myself longing for the long northern twilight of my youth, the salty Maine coast that numbed the extremities even at midsummer's crest. Breathing laboriously and doing my best to disguise a frantic doggy paddle as an indifferent backstroke, I coasted up onto the little ledge, joining Julian. Hands together and thrust triumphantly overhead, we sang absurd, lewd melodies of our own creation, Julian ad hoc improvising in poor English. The yacht, The Stranger [its given name, the 'Evening Star', was dull and unapologetic, I’d decided] sat contently on its mooring in 5 fathoms good standing, as the old timers might say. I glanced around the little point at her, smiling knowingly. She was beautiful and demanding; forged in the humble good character all sailboats ought to be, I thought. I wondered, like the boat, how much longer I might get away with this minimal upkeep, the lack of plans both terrifying and liberating. 'Everyone is so fucking predictable anyways', I thought with sudden irritability, though I knew this was completely untrue.
Julian had become part of the decor of the island, it seemed; like a crystal or fossil, he could be shelved and catalogued in my mind- form to be admired later, now that I knew nothing was going to happen. His aesthetics, his angular, arrogant jawline, the piercing blue eyes that were only evident in light of the mathematics of the situation, had become symmetry duly noted without pretense. That was exactly it though- I’d judge people with such merciless precision that there was no compassion left over, only a soggy, half-formed opinion. The world, however unfairly stylized by me, was perfect and round when viewed from the sea. All the lookers and assholes and even the nice people were earth-bound and stationary, seen at my leisure from the circular vantage of the ocean. The things that pleased me now were grand and austere; their presence never betrayed my trust or shifted. I laughed at the irony most people seemed to find in my steadfast trust in the raw, unpolished elements of nature- the gulls and the wind. I suppose most people don't want to deal with it all, to truly deal, well, 'there were so many fucking layers to digest', and they left for easier subjects.
Some memories, not even memories in the sense of boxed, dusty experiences, but living, animate things; well, they seemed so sensory and perfect that all I had to do was channel this and everything fell into place. The warmness of truly relating to someone, the extension of one's own skin was alien at the moment, yet I found some solace in nature’s permanence. I swam back to shore in a clouded, hazy paranoia; the heightened awareness of the past a bit disorienting. Julian led me by the hand back up the dull wooden steps to the house, and yet my distraction still blurred things indecently. When we were bare and sweaty under the thin crescent moon, whose edges reluctantly lit the windowpanes, only then did I exhale and smile without effort. I decided to stay for some time- the trip never had an August deadline anyways, I rationalized, and this seemed like as good an excuse as any not to go somewhere else aimless.
I was wrong about Julian, and the next few weeks on the island passed in uneventful bliss. The ineptness and luxuriant time wasting of the supposedly privileged classes wore on me though, and soon I longed for simultaneous unrest and even rhythm of the open ocean again. Italy was somewhere off to the east, with green olive and citrus trees on steep hillsides. The continuity of the island became too much to deal with, so one night in fidgety sleeplessness I got up and left. I’d felt awful doing it, physically twisted in knots of regret and doubt as I left Julian child-like under the covers, unaware that he would wake up alone. What it really came down to was a basic intellectual inequity, a rift from which I didn't think we could recover. Julian was organic and emotional, prone to wild gesticulating and waving his hands over life's unsolved woes, and I was alienated by his infallible idealism and tepid logic. The idea that his ‘logic’ only made sense to him never seemed to enter into the equation. This stirred up too many other difficult points, and I was content to spurn Julian silently, such that I might move on.
I left a hastily scribbled note, almost an afterthought to my sudden departure, something for Julian to ponder in quiet madness while I set a course South 60 East to Sicily or Rome. He’d cry and tear the down quilt to little ragged pieces with a kitchen knife, his anguish simple and unrequited. The next day he would awaken stoic and resolute, memory brushed aside forever, I imagined. He had this ability to slice people out of his mind, surgically and methodically, to almost involuntarily remove the imprint of someone’s soul. Like a quarter in a subway turnstile, memories were deposited and recycled into the great humming future. Julian didn't need food, clothing, or even shelter, I thought bitterly, just that goddamn black Leica, its old leather strap clinging protectively round his sleek, strong shoulders.
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