Involuntary Bliss Read online

  Ever since Warren’s death, said James, he’d had the peculiar ability to recall certain sounds with unusual clarity, this auditory recollection having the opposite effect of a needle upon a record, which, with time, would wear away the pits and peaks of the vinyl, gradually effacing the very trace of the sound it reproduced, whereas each time James recalled a sound it became that much clearer, more distinct and louder than it had been before. He could not recall the sound of speech or music, but only sounds of a primal and prelinguistic nature—the sounds of pain, or pleasure, or yearning, the sounds of infants in the nursery, the mournful howl of a dog, the sound of a dying calf, the sounds of that midnight assignation on the mountain, the couple’s breath, their reactions to one another’s touches increasing in volume and intensity with each subsequent recollection. The sounds, he explained, and the memory bound up with them, the spontaneous joy of that anonymous mountainside tryst would come unbidden to his mind’s ear, overwhelming all other sensations, which frightened him.

  This led me to recall what had come to pass the night before, in those moments just before I fell asleep, when side B of had run its course and the sounds of Sam (The Man) Taylor and his Orchestra were replaced by the barely discernible buzz of the stereo speakers as the needle of the record player laid itself to rest, while I rested upon borrowed blankets on the floor and looked up at James on his bed, his eyes closed, his mouth open, his hands pressed firmly over his ears as if to mute the sound of some unbearable noise he could only hear in his dreams.

  Then James left the path and started walking into the forest. Though he did not ask me to follow, neither did he ask me to wait, and so I followed him, the two of us fending off branches, arms stretched out before us, until we came to a location somewhat removed from the path we’d left behind and otherwise unremarkable save for the presence of a large and obdurate oak. James placed his hands upon its trunk, felt the coarseness of its bark, sank to his knees, took Warren’s mandola from his shoulder and laid it on the ground. He then turned and sat at the base of the tree, his back pressed up against its root, so that he faced toward nothing in particular. As it seemed he intended to remain there for some time, I sat down with my back up against a neighbouring oak, the two of us facing the same direction, as if we both expected, sooner or later, something or someone to emerge from the forest before us. It occurred to me then that I had, not so long ago, seen James and Warren sitting in that same fashion, the two of them facing the campus quad, their backs pressed up against the Corinthian columns that so endeavoured to bestow upon on us something of the élan of the ancients in all their relentless erudition.

  “Is this the tree?” I asked.

  “There’s no way to tell,” he said. He sat there silently for some time and when he spoke again he said he’d not been doing well since Warren’s death. Everything had become more difficult to endure since he’d dropped out and moved away. Hardships he would have once thought easy to withstand had become impossible to bear. He was glad he’d moved to Montreal, though he’d now been without a job for several weeks. This disclosure came as a surprise, for James had worn his uniform when he’d met me at the station the night before. He hadn’t wanted me to worry, he said, which is why he hadn’t told me right away.

  “Were you let go or did you quit?” I asked, and he replied that the answer lay somewhere in between. He’d grown increasingly frustrated with the uniform he’d been required to wear at the hotel and the minor injuries sustained while going about his work. He’d been employed by the Auberge St. Eglise in the capacity of furniture arranger, arranging tables and chairs in various configurations, according to the size of room, the number of guests and whether the scheduled function was a banquet, a conference or a reception. This had been the primary source of his livelihood since he’d returned from Peru some seven months before. Arranging hotel furniture is more complicated than it sounds, he said, and requires some degree of skill. The organizations who met at the Auberge St. Eglise discussed virtually every topic of which one could conceive, although they tended to discuss finances most of all. Usually there would be one or more speakers, often a presentation projected on a screen, before the participants would break into smaller groups in small, adjoining rooms.

  There were frequent lulls between frantic sessions of furniture arrangement, and at these times, he had occasion to observe the proceedings in these smaller rooms as he awaited instructions while standing idly in the halls. These conference rooms of the hotel, said James, were not unlike the room in which our Cyclopean Studies seminar had been conducted. Sometimes the conference organizers would request easels with large pads of paper, on which the conference participants created lists or diagrams involving arrows, circles, triangles and the occasional pentagon. In the event that a colleague had recently died, or in the event that the organization had recently suffered a financial blow—jeopardizing the very livelihood of everyone gathered around the pad—the listing and diagramming would be done in earnest, or else with great solemnity, each member of the group aware of the import of his contribution. In this way, the more serious of the meetings in the Auberge St. Eglise were not dissimilar to the prevailing mood of our Cyclopean Studies seminar, all of us, despite our disparate ideological orientations, having been equally committed to the primacy of the cyclopean world view, seeing it as the only viable antidote to the troubles of our times. More often, however, the listing and diagramming in the conference rooms of the Auberge St. Eglise would be carried out in a spirit of joviality, of lightheartedness. At these times inevitably someone would write something on the pad that had nothing to do with the task at hand, or was related in a way that was flippant, or vaguely indecent, and this would be cause for laughter. In these moments all of those in the group would be pleased to be away from home, to be staying at the Auberge St. Eglise, in the company of people they’d never met before, or else met only infrequently, but with whom they shared a vested interest in the welfare of the organization. Each member of the group would begin thinking of the adjournment of the day’s conferencing, of the banquet and the drinks that would follow, and, in some cases, what would follow after that. But then someone would call their attention back to the task at hand, and whatever impropriety had been inscribed upon the pad would be blotted out before they reported their findings back to the larger group, or else the page would be torn from the pad altogether and they would start once more from the beginning.

  Such improprieties foreshadowed the kind of activities that inevitably transpired behind the closed doors of the private rooms of the Auberge St. Eglise, said James. It was a large hotel, though not the most luxurious, and its rooms were moderately priced. The debauchery that went on at the Auberge St. Eglise was not as sordid as the kind that went on in the cheaper hotels of Montreal, nor was it as decadent as the debauchery that transpired in the city’s most luxurious and exorbitantly priced hotels, but was more depraved than either. In his capacity as furniture arranger he’d never directly encountered the debauchery, but had come to know of it through the chambermaids, who discerned its nature from the traces that were left behind. It was the job of the chambermaids to sanitize the hotel’s private rooms after the debauchery had transpired. The chambermaids were good at their jobs and the Auberge St. Eglise enjoyed a reputation for cleanliness. But they were also renowned for being prolific gossips that tended towards one of two extremes. On the one hand there were those chambermaids inclined to be prudish, while on the other were those inclined to be prurient, each equalling the other in the extremity of its inclination. The prurient embellished their accounts to a degree that strained belief. The prudish chambermaids, on the other hand, were known to sanitize their descriptions just as they sanitized the rooms in which the debauchery transpired, their accounts being mundane to the degree that they defied belief no less than the accounts offered up by their prurient counterparts. The truth of the matter, as in most things, lay somewhere in between, though James believed the accounts of the
prurient were in this case the more truthful of the two because of their similarity to what went on in the pages of the Peruvian novella, with its confounding notion of involuntary bliss.

  The week before the novella was assigned, our Cyclopean Studies professor had warned us that the debauchery described in its pages “would make the Kama Sutra seem like a bedtime story for small children.” That was the precise phrase she had used, said James: . This, of course, had piqued our curiosity. Once we’d read the novella, all of us had found ourselves agreeing that our professor’s warning had been in no way an exaggeration. Everyone in the seminar had been deeply affected by the novella, particularly James and Warren. So moved had they been, said James, that he and Warren both agreed to take the next semester off in order to travel to Peru, even though it would mean having to delay their graduation. Only through first-hand knowledge of the land that had produced the Peruvian novella could they fully comprehend the wisdom it contained. One had to approach its subject matter cautiously, he knew, for what went on in the pages of the Peruvian novella could not actually be put into practice, all of us in the Cyclopean Studies seminar understanding that the events described in the Peruvian novella were nothing other than an obscene thought experiment based on a unfathomable hypothesis conducted only in the author’s mind. Our professor, a renowned expert in the field of Cyclopean Studies, had given us no indication that this was not the case. Though intriguing, even revelatory, the notion of involuntary bliss as depicted in the Peruvian novella had no practical application, we’d thought, much like the expression of the male erectile organ as the square root of minus one (√-1) or the theory of rhizomatic cartography, other ideas to which we’d been introduced in the Cyclopean Studies seminar. Conceiving of the events depicted in its pages as necessarily limited to the theoretical realm was the only way to read the Peruvian novella without throwing up one’s hands in disbelief. If one could not conscionably experience what the characters in the Peruvian novella experienced, James and Warren had reasoned, one could at least witness the heights of Machu Picchu. This is what he’d done, said James, having made the trip alone in the wake of Warren’s death. But it was not until after he’d returned from Peru, he said, only after he’d moved to Montreal and come to be in the employ of the Auberge St. Eglise that he’d come to know that the practices depicted in the novella were carried out in the hotel’s private rooms.

  At first he’d thought the chambermaids must have been joking, he said, or else embellishing, given their well-established inclination. Embellishing was their useful custom, one that made their unpleasant duties easier to endure, providing them with a way to entertain one another and anyone who would listen. At the end of the day, he said, he’d much rather listen to the accounts of the prurient chambermaids, for they invariably told better stories. Though sometimes the accounts of their prudish counterparts could be amusing in their understatement, they quickly grew tiresome. It was the prurient chambermaids’ stories that most often got the attention of their colleagues, and rightly so. According to their accounts, which circulated widely among the employees of the Auberge St. Eglise, the kind of debauchery that went on in the hotel, it seemed to James, was strikingly similar to the kind described in the Peruvian novella, the same elaborately orchestrated of id, ego and superego. It was this similarity that had led him to believe that the prurient chambermaids described what went on with greater accuracy than their prudish counterparts, that somewhere in their accounts was a kernel of unsettling truth. He could not credit the prurient chambermaids with inventing such descriptions on their own, he said, though their proclivity for gossip was in no way in dispute. He was not being unkind, nor was he underestimating the fecundity of their imaginations when he concluded that they were incapable of fabricating such accounts. Embellishment was one thing, while invention was another. The Cyclopean Studies seminar had truly plumbed the depths, said James, our professor having declared her commitment to investigating the perverse and the unseemly when the seminar had first convened. No vile or perverted notion was to escape the Cyclopean Studies seminar’s singular gaze, she’d said.

  To be able to conceive of notions as depraved as those depicted in the Peruvian novella was a rare gift, said James, or else it was a curse. In either case, it was not a capacity he was prepared to believe had been bestowed on the chambermaids in the employ of the Auberge St. Eglise. Of course it had occurred to him that the prurient chambermaids might have been familiar with the Peruvian novella. Though the Peruvian novella was obscure, it was not entirely unknown. We ourselves had read it, as had the others enrolled in the Cyclopean Studies seminar. But when he put the question to the prurient chambermaids, asking them each individually if they were in any way familiar with the Peruvian novella and its notion of involuntary bliss, their answers were unanimous and unequivocal. None had heard of anything approximating the Peruvian novella, though several of them were themselves of Peruvian descent. It was the Peruvian chambermaids who’d looked at him suspiciously when he’d asked. He’d only wanted to know the truth, he’d told them, so as to better comprehend the nature of the debauchery they’d described. This only served to deepen his suspiciousness in their eyes. To look at him suspiciously was the very opposite of , and thus attested to the verity of their claims, said James, as we sat with our back against the trunks of our respective oaks.

  He’d not been in a position to press the matter further, for the Auberge St. Eglise functioned according to a rigid hierarchy in which even the chambermaids outranked him. He’d come to understand the hotel’s hierarchy as ecclesiastical in nature, there being no other way to understand it. In this ecclesiastical hierarchy the senior managers were the hotel’s bishops, the mid-level managers its priests, the desk clerks its deacons, the chambermaids its Sisters of Charity, the bellhops its acolytes, and the aloof owner its archbishop, issuing solemn decrees from afar. The guests who stayed at the Auberge St. Eglise were its parishioners but also its multitudinous popes, each intent on his or her comfort, each wielding over the hotel staff an unquestionable authority equivalent to the pope’s in all his attendant honours and roles as the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff, the Primate of Italy, the Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, the Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, the Servant of the Servants of God, while James had been hired by Auberge St. Eglise in the capacity of furniture arranger, a position from which he had little hope of ever ascending, a furniture arranger being the equivalent of an altar boy in the hotel’s hierarchy, with all the protocols and prohibitions the equivalency entailed, furniture arrangers prohibited from being in the hotel while bleeding or with open sores, from touching anything but the furniture they arranged, required to be clean-shaven, pristine of appearance, apparelled in the appropriate vestments, obliged to perform every gesture with humility and grace. Tables and chairs nevertheless had to be arranged with great haste, unsightly bruises and alarming numbness plaguing the tips of his fingers so that he could scarcely feel them upon the strings of Warren’s mandola. Now that he’d been excommunicated and was no more than a heathen in the eyes of the hotel’s ecclesiastical hierarchy, he was optimistic that something of the sensitivity his fingertips had once possessed would return. He was loath to think his employment by the Auberge St. Eglise might have deteriorated his faculties to the degree that his future prospects had been irreversibly truncated. He’d made so many sacrifices in the few short months since he’d been in the employ of the Auberge St. Eglise. He’d shorn his beard. He’d cut his hair. In the end it was the one sacrifice that he refused to make that was the only one that mattered. The crux had been the denim trousers he’d worn in spite of the management’s insistence on polyester pants, denim trousers being in his estimation the most appropriate pants an arranger of hotel furniture could wear. Polyester did not breathe, said James, did not sit well against his skin, nor did it suit his sensibilities. Every time someone put on a pair of polyes
ter pants it was an affront to human dignity, and to common sense. Never had he heard a hotel guest compliment the employees’ polyester pants. Never had a hotel guest chided him on his denim trousers, the guests of the Auberge St. Eglise proving entirely indifferent to the pants worn by hotel furniture arrangers, which is why the management’s insistence on polyester was absurd, much like their insistence that he wear a bowtie at all times. He’d always worn his navy blue bowtie just as the hotel management insisted, though it dismayed him no less than the polyester pants. Why, he’d wondered, did the hotel’s management insist their employees wear attire the likes of which hotel guests had not worn for half a century or more? Only when there was a black tie gala did hotel guests themselves wear bowties, these bowties being invariably black, never navy blue.

  Outside of black tie galas, said James, the only hotel guests who wore bowties were dandies or eccentrics, who were by definition rare. The dandy prides himself on his fashion sense, whereas the eccentric does not care what others think. To insist that hotel staff wear bowties is to infringe on the dandy’s right to his distinction, on the eccentric’s right to his eccentricity. James had always worn his bowtie nevertheless, compliantly, beneath the starched white collar of his shirt. So too had he worn his button-down vest. The line had to been drawn somewhere, he said, and he’d drawn it at the waist. This had resulted in stern admonishment, then formal censure, so that his eventual excommunication had come as no surprise. He’d been an exemplary furniture arranger, his arrangements of tables and chairs being entirely beyond reproach. The more enlightened of the hotel’s mid-level managers had not wished to see him go because he’d done his job so well. Though they’d implored him to wear polyester pants, he’d been unwilling to comply. It was precisely because of his insistence on wearing denim trousers that he’d consistently maintained such an exemplary standard of furniture arrangement, as anyone could see. It would have been impossible to achieve this standard while wearing polyester pants, said James, as we sat on the side of the mountain on that Sunday afternoon.