Beautiful Losers Read online

  – Blood! What does Blood mean to us?

  – Blood! Give us back our Blood!

  – Rub harder! I shouted, but some angry faces shushed me.

  – From the earliest dawn of our race, this Blood, this shadowy stream of life, has been our nourishment and our destiny. Blood is the builder of the body, and Blood is the source of the spirit of the race. In Blood lurks our ancestral inheritance, in Blood is embodied the shape of our History, from Blood blooms the flower of our Glory, and Blood is the undercurrent which they can never divert, and which all their stolen money cannot dry up!

  – Give us our Blood!

  – We demand our History!

  – Vive la République!

  – Don’t stop! I shouted.

  – Elizabeth Go Home!

  – More! I pleaded. Bis! Bis! Encore!

  The meeting began to break up, the daisy chain began to fray. The speaker had disappeared from the pedestal. Suddenly I was facing everyone. They were leaving. I grabbed lapels and hems.

  – Don’t go! Get him to speak more!

  – Patience, citoyen, the Revolution has begun.

  – No! Make him speak more! Nobody leave this park!

  The throng pushed past me, apparently satisfied. At first the men smiled when I seized their lapels, attributing my imprecations to revolutionary ardor. At first the women laughed when I took their hands and checked them for traces of my pubic hair, because I wanted her, the girl I’d come to the dance with, the girl whose round sweat fossils I still wore on the back of my shirt.

  – Don’t go. Don’t leave! Seal the park!

  – Let go of my hand!

  – Stop hanging on my lapels!

  – We’ve got to go back to work!

  I implored three big men wearing QUEBEC LIBRE sweatshirts to hoist me on their shoulders. I tried to get my foot hooked on the top of a pair of trousers so I could scramble up their sweaters and address the disintegrating family from the height of a shoulder.

  – Get this creep off me!

  – He looks English!

  – He looks Jewish!

  – But you can’t leave! I haven’t come yet!

  – This man is a sex pervert!

  – Let’s beat the shit out of him. He’s probably a sex pervert.

  – He’s smelling girls’ hands.

  – He’s smelling his own hands!

  – He’s an odd one.

  Then F. was beside me, big F., certifying my pedigree, and he led me away from the park which was now nothing but an ordinary park with swans and candy wrappers. Arm in arm, he led me down the sunny street.

  – F., I cried. I didn’t come. I failed again.

  – No, darling, you passed.

  – Passed what?

  – The test.

  – What test?

  – The second-to-last test.

  48

  “Let the cold wind blow, as long as you love me, East or West, I can stand the test, as long as you love me.” That was number seven on the Western Hit Parade long, long ago. I think it was seven. There are six words in the title. 6 is ruled by Venus, planet of love and beauty. According to Iroquois astrology, the sixth day should be devoted to grooming, having your hair done, wearing ornate shell-woven robes, seeking romance, and games of chance and wrestling. “What’s the reason I’m not pleasing you?” Somewhere on the charts. Tonight is the freezing 6th of March. That is not spring in the Canadian forest. The moon has been in Aries for two days. Tomorrow the moon enters Taurus. The Iroquois would hate me right now if they saw me because I have a beard. When they captured Jogues, the missionary back in 16-something, one of the minor tortures (after having an Algonquin slave sever his thumb with a clam-shell) was to let the children pull out his beard with their hands. “Send me a picture of Christ without a beard,” wrote the Jesuit Gamier to a friend in France, showing an excellent knowledge of Indian peculiarities. F. once told me about a girl who was favored with such a luxuriant growth of pubic hair that, with daily brush training, she taught it to descend nearly six inches down her thighs. Just below the navel she painted (with black liquid eye liner) two eyes and nostrils. Separating the hair just above the clitoris she drew it apart in two symmetrical arcs, creating the impression of a mustache above pursed pink lips, from which the remaining growth appended like a beard. A piece of costume jewelry squeezed in the navel like a caste mark completed the comic picture of an exotic fortune teller or mystic. Hiding her body under sheets except for this section, she amused F. with humorous renditions of Eastern sayings so popular at the time, casting her voice from beneath the linen with the skill of a ventriloquist. Why can’t I have memories like that? What good are all your gifts, F., the soap collection, the phrase books, if I can’t inherit your memories, too, which would confer some meaning on your rusty bequests, just as tin cans and automobile crashes achieve high value when placed in the context of a plush art gallery? What use all your esoteric teaching without your particular experience? You were too exotique for me, you and all the other masters, with your special breathing and success disciplines. What about us with asthma? What about us failures? What about us who can’t shit properly? What about us who have no orgies and excessive fucking to become detached about? What about us who are broken when our friends fuck our wives? What about us such as me? What about us who aren’t in Parliament? What about us who are cold on March 6 for no apparent reason? You did the Telephone Dance. You heard the inside of Edith. What about us who poke in dead tissue? What about us Historians who have to read the dirty parts? What about us who have smelled up a treehouse? Why did you make everything so baffling? Why couldn’t you comfort me like St. Augustine, who sang: “Behold the ignorant arise and snatch heaven beneath our eyes”? Why couldn’t you say to me what the Blessed Virgin said to the peasant girl Catherine Labouré on an ordinary street, Rue du Bac, in 18-something: “Grace will be showered on all who ask for it with faith and fervor.” Why do I have to explore the pock marks on Catherine Tekakwitha’s face like the lens of a moon missile? What did you mean when you lay bleeding in my arms and said: “Now it’s up to you”? People who say that always imply that that which they have done is so much more the major part of the ordeal. Who wants to just tidy up? Who wants to slide into a warm empty driver’s seat? I want cool leather, too. I loved Montréal, too. I wasn’t always the Freak of the Forest. I was a citizen. I had a wife and books. On May 17, 1642, Maisonneuve’s little armada – a pinnace, a flat-bottomed sailboat, and two rowboats – approached Montréal. The next day they glided past the green, solitary shores, and landed at the spot which Champlain, thirty-one years before, had chosen for the site of a settlement. Early spring flowers were riding the young grass. Maisonneuve sprang ashore. Tents, baggage, arms, and stores followed him. An altar was raised on a pleasant spot. Now all the company stood before the shrine, tall Maisonneuve, his men clustering around him, rough men, and Mile. Mance, M. de la Peltrie, her servant, and the artisans and laborers. And here stood le P. Vimont, Superior of the Missions, in the rich vesture of his office. They knelt in hush as the Host was raised aloft. Then the priest turned to the little band and said:

  – You are a grain of mustard seed, that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the land.

  The afternoon darkened. The sun was lost in the western forest. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining bouquets, and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, built their bivouac fires, stationed guards, and lay down to rest. Such was the first Mass sung in Montréal. And, oh, from this shack I can see the lights of the great city prophesied, the city foretold to cast its shadow across the earth, I see them twinkling in great soft garlands, the fireflies of downtown Montréal. This is my mental comfort in the snow of March the 6th. And I recall a line from the Jew Cabala (Sixth Part of the
Beard of Macroprosopus), “that every work existeth in order that it may procure increase for Mercy.…” Move closer, corpse of Catherine Tekakwitha, it is 20 below, I do not know how to hug you. Do you smell in this refrigerator? St. Angela Merici died in 1540. She was dug up in 1672 (you were a child of six, Kateri Tekakwitha), and the body had a sweet scent, and in 1876 it was still intact. St. John Nepomucene was martyred in Prague in 1393 for refusing to reveal a secret of the confessional. His tongue has been entirely preserved. Experts examined it 332 years later in 1725, and testified that it was the shape, color, and length of the tongue of a living person, and that it was also soft and flexible. The body of St. Catherine of Bologna (1413-1463) was dug up three months after her burial and it gave off a sweet fragrant scent. Four years after the death of St. Pacificus di San Severino in 1721, his body was exhumed and found to be sweet and incorrupt. While the body was being moved, someone slipped, and the head of the corpse smashed against the stairway and the head fell off; fresh blood gushed from the neck! St. John Vianney was buried in 1859. His body was intact at the disinterment of 1905. Intact: but can intact support a love affair? St. Francis Xavier was dug up four years after his burial in 1552 and it still had its natural color. Is natural color enough? St. John of the Cross looked all right nine months after his death in 1591. When his fingers were cut they bled. Three hundred years later (almost), in 1859, the body was incorrupt. Merely incorrupt. St. Joseph Calasanticus died in 1649 (the same year that the Iroquois burned Lalemant across an ocean). His insides were removed although not embalmed. His heart and tongue are intact up to this day, but no news of the rest. My basement kitchen was very stuffy and the oven timer sometimes switched it on because of faulty mechanism. F., is this why you led me up the frozen trunk? I am frightened of no perfume. The Indians ascribed disease to an ungratified wish. Pots, skins, pipes, wampum, fishhooks, weapons were piled in front of the sick person, “in the hope that in their multiplicity the desideratum might be supplied.” It often happened that the patient dreamed his own cure, and his demands were never refused, “however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable.” O sky, let me be sick Indian. World, let me be dreaming Mohawk. No wet dream died in laundry. I know sexual information about Indians which is heavenly psychiatry, and I would like to sell it to the part of my mind which buys solutions. If I sold this to Hollywood it would end Hollywood. I am angry now, and cold. I threaten to end Hollywood if I do not receive instantaneous ghost love, not merely incorrupt but overwhelmingly fragrant. I’m going to end Movies if I don’t feel better very soon. I will destroy your neighborhood theater in the near future. I will draw a billion blinds over the Late Show. I don’t like my predicament. Why do I have to be the one who cuts fingers? Must I do the Wassermann on skeletons? I want to be the only-child stiff carried by clumsy doctors, my young 300-yr. blood flushing away the concrete stairway. I want to be the light in the morgue. Why must I dissect F.’s old tongue? The Indians invented the steam bath. That is just a tidbit.

  49

  Catherine Tekakwitha’s uncle dreamed his cure. The village hastened to fulfill his specifications. His cure was not an unusual one, it was one of the recognized remedies, and both Sagard and our Lalemant describe the treatment in various Indian villages. Uncle said:

  – Bring me all the young girls of the town.

  The village hastened to obey. All the young girls stood around his bearskin, the starlets of the cornfields, the sweet weavers, girls in leisure, their hair half braided. “Toutes les filles d’vn bourg auprès d’vne malade, tant a sa prière.”

  – Are you all here?

  – Yes.

  – Yes.

  – Sure.

  – Uh-huh.

  – Yes.

  – Here.

  – Yes.

  – I’m here.

  – Yes.

  – Of course.

  – Here.

  – Here.

  – Yes.

  – Present.

  – Yes.

  – I guess so.

  – Yes.

  – Looks like it.

  – Yes.

  Uncle smiled with satisfaction. Then to each one he asked an old question: “On leur demand à toute, les vnes apres les autres, celuy qu’elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles la nuict prochaine.” I give the documentation out of duty, for I fear that sometimes my sorrow does violence to the facts, and I do not wish to alienate the fact, for the fact is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore. The fact is a crude spade but my fingernails are blue and bleeding. The fact is like a bright new coin, and you do not want to spend it until it has picked up scratches in your jewelry box, and it is always the final nostalgic gesture of bankruptcy. My fortune is gone.

  – What young brave will you sleep with tonight?

  Each girl gave the name of the that evening’s lover.

  – What about you, Catherine?

  – A thorn.

  – That will be something to see, they all chuckled.

  O God, help me get through this. I am corrupt in stomach. I am cold and ignorant. I am sick in window. I have taunted Hollywood which I love. Do you imagine what servant writes this? Old fashioned Cave-Jew yell of supplication, trembling with fear vomit at his first moon eclipse. Ara ara ara arrrooowwww. Fashion this prayer to Thee. I don’t know to get it with 1000-voice choir effect like “consider the lily.” Fashion this heap with gleaming snow-shovel facets, for I meant to build an altar. I meant to light a curious little highway shrine, but I drown in the ancient snake cistern. I meant to harness plastic butterflies with rubber-band motors and whisper: “Consider the plastic butterfly”: but I shiver under the shadow of the diving archaeopteryx.

  The Masters of the Ceremony (les Maistres de la ceremonie) summoned the young men whom the girls had named, and, hand in hand, they came to the long house in the evening. The mats were spread. From one end of the cabin to the other they lay, two by two, “d’vn bout a l’autre de la Cabane,” and they began to kiss and fuck and suck and hug and moan and take off their skins and squeeze each other and nibble tits and tickle cocks with eagle feathers and turn over for other holes and lick the creases of each other and laugh when others were fucking fanny or stop and clap when two screaming bodies went into a climax trance. At either end of the cabin two captains sang and rang their turtleshell rattles, “deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent de leur Tortue.” Uncle felt better toward midnight and got off his mat and crawled slowly down the length of the cabin, stopping here and there to rest his head on a free buttock or leave his fingers in a dripping hole, taking chances with his nose between “bouncers” for the sake of microscopic perspectives, always with an eye for the unusual or a joke for the grotesque. From one sprawl to another he dragged himself, red-eyed as a movie addict on 42nd Street, now flicking a quivering cock with his thumb and forefinger, now slapping a stray brown flank. Each fuck was the same and each fuck was different, that is the glory of an old man’s cure. All his girls came back to him, all his ferny intercourse, all the feathery holes and gleaming dials, and as he crawled from pair to pair, from these lovers to those lovers, from sweet position to sweet position, from pump to pump, from gobble to gobble, from embrace to embrace – he suddenly knew the meaning of the greatest prayer he had ever learned, the first prayer in which Manitou had manifest himself, the greatest and truest sacred formula. As he crawled he began to sing the prayer:

  – I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  He did not miss a syllable and he loved the words he sang because as he sang each sound he saw it change and every change was a return and every return was a change.

  – I change

  I am the same
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br />   I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  I change

  I am the same

  It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over. When the morning came the captains shook their rattles slower. The clothes were gathered up as the dawn came on. The old man was on his knees proclaiming his faith, declaring his cure complete, as into the misty green morning all the lovers sauntered, arms about each other’s waists and shoulders, the end of night shift in a factory of lovers. Catherine had lain among them and left with them unnoticed. As she walked out in the sun the priest came running.

  – How was it?

  – It was acceptable, my father.

  – Dieu veuille abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse ceremonie.

  That last remark is from the letter of Sagard. This unique mode of cure was called Andacwandet by the Hurons.

  50

  And I listen for answers in the cold wind, for instruction, for comfort, but all I hear is the infallible promise of winter. Night after night I cry out for Edith.

  – Edith! Edith!

  – Ara ara ara arrroooowwww, cries the wolf silhouette on the hill.

  – Help me, F. Explain the bombs!

  – Ara ara ara arroooowwww.…

  Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms. Morning after morning the winter finds me alone among the frayed leaves, frozen snot and tears in my eyebrows.