UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

[Lucien Ropes at his best? Certainly his most unhinged...]

Throughout my long and rather illustrious life, I have oft been pummelled with words. Sticks and stones? Sadly, no. Feel free to toss a stone or two in my direction: I should appreciate the change of scene. It would do my constitution good. Oh, the soft touch of a stone flung fiercely at the face! So much better than a string of letters from the pen or finger of a jealous enemy. So so much better. For words gnaw at one like silent mice. You think you’re fine, then wake one day to find a black hole in your mind, into which everything is sucked, like a swallow into an aeroplane engine. Sffwahck! Feathers everywhere. Simply dreadful.

It would be a bore to recount the latest diatribe fired in my direction, though I may as well tell you now that this particular enemy came from within. That’s right: within. And no, I don’t mean Georgy Riecke (for once), nor the feisty Miss Kohlenberg. Nor do I mean myself (I have never practised self-loathing; it gets in the way of my mirror worship). No, the foul beast was none other than:

Silence is held. One chooses to refrain from petty recriminations. My jousting days are over. My suit of armour does not fit – a decade of doughnuts has taken care of that. Not for me the pathetic prancing of the literary fencers, shuffling up and down an imaginary line, blinkered and absurd like a pair of alien insects.

Fine, you say: fine. You won’t tell us who the beastly creature was. At least tell us the nature of the charge. To this I cradle another silence. Watch me cradle this silence – softly, softly, like the zoologist’s daughter with a baby meerkat. Let us not speak of charges. I have not always cuddled up to the truth, I will confess it: nevertheless, I still refute the majority of the wretch’s claims, whatever they were and are. ‘Prince of pretence,’ he writes. Ha! I’ll pretend I never read that, my dear fellow. Better to let sleeping dogs kip on until dawn. Or to lie down (lying down is always good) and lick one’s wounds in silence. Yes indeed. So here I am licking my wounds. The bruise on my left shoulder tastes of aniseed. The rest are bland. Enough licking for one day.

Come closer and I’ll tell you a secret. I am writing this review in a hospital. Oh yes, dear me yes. I have been hospitalised, bless me. It seems I have been ‘worded’ to the edge of death. Perhaps the illness is unrelated. I think not. Mean-spirited sentences are running in my blood stream, infecting every inch of my timeworn body. The prescription reads ‘no more literature’. Damn the doctors, pretty though they may look in white. I cannot do without words. I thirst for fiction. And so here’s another secret (if you’re going to tell anyone, pick the nurse with the chestnutty hair: the other one I suspect of psychopathic tendencies). I have smuggled a book from a man across the room. I say smuggled, I mean stolen. Still, I don’t suppose the man will mind. I think he died half an hour ago. In any case, the book is now mine. Mine, I tell you, mine! No one shall take it from me, however sharp their knife, however polished their boots, however dark their glasses.

I had hoped the book would be a cheap romance, telling of the love that grew one summer between a farmhand and the grocer’s pretty cousin from Southwold. It was not. It was, instead, Maurice Moika’s Queen Bee, in the second American edition (which contains, by the way, a rather gorgeous cover illustration courtesy of a skilled Albrecht Durer copycat, to whom I bequeath this parenthetical kudos). It could have been worse. Moika isn’t such a bad companion for an ailing soul, after all. More than once have I proclaimed his talents to the world in glowing, positively luminescent terms. Three times, in fact, is the tally. The first time was during a conversation with a Japanese businessman I found wandering around a London art gallery on a spring morning in 2004. The man spoke little English. No matter: the conversation was mine. I steered it hither and thither, like an Olympian yachtsman. I flowed with the elegance of maple syrup, colouring the cream of our encounter into a warm honeyed white. We fell – or I pushed us – towards the subject of Moika. Why? Why not? Who knows where the muse will carry me? She wanders here, she wanders there. On reflection, I fancy the man nudged us onto this course. ‘Moika’ he said. Or maybe he didn’t. More likely he was asking for directions to the exit. But I wasn’t to be discouraged. ‘Moika!’ said I: ‘Let me tell you about Moika!’ And I did. And, to give the man credit, he listened – or gave a good impression of doing so. Good on him.

(For the sake of something which I shall not disclose at this point or any other, I will not speak of the other two occasions on which I announced to the world – or one of its representatives – the wonders of Maurice Moika’s writers. Why will I not speak? Because, to introduce a handful of frankness into the discussion, I can neither recall these occasions, nor care to.)

Moika is Portuguese, by the way. That’s something to think about. He is Portuguese and has a long neck, like a goose, though he’s much less beautiful than a goose (even a Portugoose). I wonder if he’d make a palatable paté? Perhaps if a goose had a night out on the pond of a public house and got friendly with a shoveller duck, something Moika-ish would ensue. So far as the shoveller duck goes, I am of course thinking of the writer’s nose, once described by charmingly facetious friend of mine as an ‘ice-cream scoop’. On that subject, I must say that I wouldn’t, speaking personally, be overly keen to be served with ice-cream removed from a tub by the nose of a Portuguese novelist. Here’s a pretty parlour game – if one was to have the most sumptuously flavoured ice-cream in the world (lychee and champagne, for instance) scooped up by the nose of a contemporary writer, which contemporary writer would one choose? From the top of my head, I can already think of a seven-strong shortlist – and neither Maurice Moika, nor Adrian der Linger (if you can call him a novelist, which you can’t) are on it.

More about Moika. His novels – yes, I suppose I may as well say something about his novels. After all, Queen Bee, his first, sits beside me as we speak. It was his second, however – Circus comes to San Josef – which I used to prize the most. I once promised to write a review about it, so great was my love. Looking back, I wonder whether or not this was a rash promise. Had I any real intention of writing this review? No, not really. I still don’t. Nevertheless, I reckon if I mention it every now and again no one will know the difference. Riecke (dear chap) is a sop at heart: he’ll have heard of my hospitalisation and will forgive me anything for a week or so. Potentially I can write anything right here. Funny what a constraint that is. Nothing remotely scandalous comes to mind, where last week I was simply bursting with tittle-tattle.

Queen Bee, though – now there’s a novel. I was never so sure whether Moika identified with the genius figure or one of his cohorts. I, of course, identified with the genius. I’m flicking through the pages right now, searching for the poor man’s name. Ah, yes – Yves. A modest name, one fancies, for such a conceited monster. The king of ideas, he calls himself (a little ironically). There he sits, be-throned, steaming like a kettle, blowing vapour into the arms of his dunderheaded servants. I noted irony, for this man is not only the king, but also the queen. Queen bee in fact, lying fat at the centre of the hive, attended by busy workers, whose aspirations go no further than to solidify the shady forms she/he tosses up into the ether. Yes, yes, yes. Many a creative mind has wandered down this path. Too many ideas, not enough time! What it would be to have a team of capable, but ultimately unimaginative writers, prepared to pad the crazy paths of your half-realised (but essentially perfect) plots. This is Yves’ dream. And one would say that the dream is also Moika’s, were it not for the appearance of a character in his second novel, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a man who attempted to carry his career along these very lines.

More of that in a minute. Meantime, those pills of mine. Did anyone see where the evil nurse deposited them? Ah, here they are…

So yes. What I’m mumbling on about is this: The model for Yves, I propose, was none other than Roberto Xarmando, a writer for whom Moika may or may not have worked when he was young. How do I not exactly but almost know this? It is suggested, as noted previously (forgive me these repetitions), by a character in Circus comes to San Josef. I haven’t this book with me, so I’m going to have to trust my memory on this one, but I seem to remember that when the circus arrives to Seville for the second time (it doesn’t reach San Josef as you probably know, till the penultimate chapter) it is visited by ‘a block of flesh, posing as a man’ who turns out to be the head of a publishing company – exactly the position that Xarmando held in Seville in the late 1950s. ‘What do you write?’ the lump of flesh is asked – or something to that effect. ‘I generate books, I do not write them,’ he replies, ‘Any fool can compose a sentence. I decide what the sentences are about’. He puts it much better than me, with far greater pellucidity – proving, ironically that any fool cannot compose a sentence, at least not a meaningful one. Stillisimo, Xarmando was never seriously interested in linguistic trickery. He wasn’t the kind to get a kick out of the word ‘peridium’ (cheap wordy thrills – where would I be without you?) Plot was his forte. Pretty words for the sake of pretty words? Not for him.

Moika, on the other hand… Now, Moika is good with pretty words. And he’s good with plot too, though whether or not that’s due to his having a fertile imagination or not is, you might say, unbolted to disputes. Thief is one way of putting it. Novelist is another. Best opt for something inbetween. Theifolist? Novelief? The fact (which is not quite a fact, but for the purposes of this paragraph takes the appearance of one) remains that Moika steals his stories. There are those who say things like ‘that black cloud over there looks especially threatening – are you carrying an umbrella?’ and there are others who say things like ‘Maurice Moika is ninety percent stolen stories, most of them belonging to Coco Papa’. Across the room there’s another group of people, a scurvy lot, though decent at heart, who ask questions like this: ‘Who in the name of the heavenly camel is Coco Papa?’ Lastly, there’s me. Here I am: give me a wave! (I said a wave. That looks more like you’re trying to in vain to convince a marauding bear that you’re the dominant predator. Now, that’s better. That’s what I call a proper wave.)

Coco Papa was a clown. I say was: I mean was. To the best of my knowledge, the man has deceased. If he hasn’t, he’d be in his one hundred and tens by now, which is an altogether undignified age for a clown, as we all know. Coco Papa is not his actual name. Papa Koko is. Actually I doubt it is, but Papa Koko is the name he gave himself in real life; whereas Coco Papa is the name of the clown in Maurice Moika’s imaginative tale mostly removed from reality, the aforementioned Circus comes to San Josef. Moika saw it as his duty to steal Coco Papa’s story. ‘If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist’ – as someone once said (and many others have echoed). I will not argue with this. I am often accused of throwing too much verbiage on the fire of life. Maybe so, say I, but if I threw nothing, the poor fire would go out. Papa Koko, however, believed that his ‘story’ didn’t need to be written down. It would survive the generations in oral form. And if it didn’t, he would always be there to tell it. I’ll probably come back to that last comment (if I don’t, it’s got something to do with reincarnation). Regarding for the one that came before it – as doth the mechanical rabbit before the speeding greyhound – may I just say this: The ‘oral tradition’ is great when it works. Storytelling of this sort combines the best of our ancient habits and eternal deficiencies. Chinese whispers across the centuries: a constantly honed, elaborated, reshaped, remodelled, reconstructed story. Clay thrown from hand to hand. Still the same piece of clay at the end, but the shape is bound to change. Dirt from hands joins the substance. Dead skin, blood stains and fine twirls of hair. Like I said, great when it works (if it ever did).

Let’s move on, shall we?

Moika took life: other people’s lives, other people’s stories. When neither presented enough for compelling fiction, or when he came across gaps in their narratives, he resorted to the back-up plan: he created something to fill in the gap. He filled in life’s gaps with lies. Well naturally. Is not a lie more fun than a gap? An example: Why is my friend sad? I don’t know. It stands to reason, if there is no logical way of me finding the answer (asking her is a dreary option) it is better (no definition supplied) for me to imagine that she is suffering from an unrequited love for a Shetland pony than to fall back on the fact that I don’t know. There may be no Shetland pony involved at all (sometimes there isn’t, you know) but why ruin my fun? Why would you do such a thing?

Lying here on my mildly comfortable hospital bed, I sometimes think back on moments in my life in which I could have done things differently. Parties to which I could have turned up wearing far more outrageous outfits. People I should flirted with more rigorously. Postcards I should never have sent without a stamp. When I think back on this piece of writing (as I may do tomorrow, or even later today) I shall no doubt wish I had said more about Coco Papa’s red shoes, or his theory of reincarnation (no different from anyone else’s, all things told, but then I’ve always had a soft spot for the subject). Fortunately I have seen into the future and imagined in the present what I would be regretting in the past. Destiny is in my hands! And it feels somewhat like I imagine a pig’s bladder to have felt like, for those accustomed to holding such a thing in their hands. Which reminds me…

The red shoes, incidentally, are a bit of Moika’s story that wasn’t stolen. The real Papa Koko, I am told, did wear red shoes, but couldn’t fly very far with them on. What a pity. Moika has made something up. We’ll make a writer of him yet. Still, a bit of flying in a novel is always good. I’ll never say no to a bit of flying. Nor a decent pair of shoes. Contemporary European literature has always been wilfully ignorant of the symbolic potential of shoes. Perhaps this is why I used to like Circus comes to San Josef so much. It was the shoes. That and the circus. That and the reincarnation, and the mad flying clown, and the stolen passages, and the passages that aren’t stolen, and the episode concerning the purple-faced girl. Or is that in Queen Bee? Goodness, it’ll take some flicking through to sort this one out. Hold on…

….

….

Ok, so it’s not in Queen Bee, in which case I’m almost certain it must be in Circus comes to San Josef, unless I’ve been mistaking this book for another one all along, which is by no means impossible. These pills are stronger than I imagined they would be. No, I remember now: Coco Papa and the purple-faced girl have an altercation – oh what an altercation! – underneath the ferris wheel. That’s when Coco Papa claims to have been Balzac’s Polish lover in a previous life. It’s also when the purple-faced girl recounts the story of a life frighteningly similar to that of a girl who Maurice Moika once knew. Still, this girl did not have a purple face, so what was all the fuss about? Moika had the decency to play around with the truth. He took the warts off her face – which is what literature is all about. So what if he added a purple face in its place?

Here’s a question: In light of previous comments pertaining to the…

Wait, no. I’ll rephrase this.

Here goes: Regarding issues to which…..

No, that’s no good.

One last try: In reference to earlier attitudes revealing the sentient notion of a….

Aargh. It’s no good. My question will have to wait. This writing business has worn me out. I feel like the bear-tamer at the end of Moika’s novel. Or do I mean the man with the bolt through his tongue? Let me get back to you on that one. What I need is a collection of underling reviewers, ready to translate my many half-formed thoughts into sensible prose. Oh, but how dreadful that sounds – sensible prose! Blast the underlings. Eloquence be damned. I shall go out talking wonderful nonsense, just you try and stop me! I shall go out like Coco Papa, flying high, catching my trousers on a passing star, shifting a shoe to gain speed, waving at a bevy of bees as they pass, watching the ferris wheel fade into the night, eyes firmly fixed on the moon, all thoughts of cruel accusations floating downwards, tumbling, crashing, yes crashing, crashing onto the head of the man who made them, yes, that’s how it ends, oh yes, yes, yes, that’s what this is all about…

Review by Lucien Ropes

Further Reading:

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