The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [47]
“Rousseau? Great. The man who put all five of his children into foundling hospitals.”
“Or Baudelaire, who thought that genius was no more than childhood recaptured at will, with an adult’s means to express it.”
“Would another analogy be the music of our youth? Which we never forget? Because it’s the only music that ever really reached us, touched our soul? I mean, old people never listen to new music, they reject it all, they return perpetually to the music of their innocent, impressionable youth. Lullabies, children’s songs, teenage music. Is that the sort of thing we’re talking about?”
Norval stubbed out his cigarette. “No.”
Samira nodded. “Right. So what are the ‘shackles’ you mentioned? What’s stopping Noel from being a great artist?”
“A weak motor and broken rudder. And like every failure he spends an hour worrying for every minute doing. But he’ll get there eventually.”
“What does he worry about?”
“You name it. He worried the first time he had shit stains in his diapers. He then ground his teeth in his sleep so savagely it took three orthodontists to fix them. Now he worries about his weight. And his mind. Just like Byron, who had two fears, of getting fat and going mad— and who was sometimes both.”19
Samira fell into a thoughtful silence. “Noel seems too … sensitive, too melancholic, to be able to …”
“Melancholy’s good for art. Look at Proust. He wrote À la recherche du temps perdu while lying in bed, in a chronic state of depression.”
“… to be able to deal with life. He seems monstrously sad—I think he’s the saddest man I’ve ever seen. Even the word ‘sad’ seems inadequate. There’s something broken in him, something completely shattered, crushed.”
“As most geniuses are. They see the flaws, the deadly disorder in the machine.”
“I have this feeling that if someone close to him dies, or if he’s rejected by a woman—”
“He’s been rejected by women all his life. At first they find him cute and put up with his tongue-tied confusion and mind of many colours, but soon find him unmanageably weird. ‘Rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated’ is how Vorta describes him in a file I ... came across.”
“Really? That’s not what I would’ve thought. I thought he’d be … well, oversensitive emotionally, dangerously oversensitive. Someone who would never get over, never forget a death or a rejection.”
“Forget? Noel can’t forget anything, can’t block out anything. His memories haunt him forever. One of the things he can’t stop reliving, in lurid detail, is his father’s suicide.”
“Oh, God …”
“His wife was having an affair with Vorta. He found out, drove his car into a water-filled quarry.”
“Are you serious? Is that what happened?”
“It’s possible. Anyway, don’t think Noel’s problem is a woman or a broken heart. Oh, no. Noel never goes out with women.”
Samira paused. “He prefers men?”
“There may be the odd scuff mark on the closet door. But what I meant was that he doesn’t go out with women because he already has one. He’s already in love with a woman.”
Samira nodded reflectively, but said nothing.
“I might as well tell you,” said Norval. “The news will be out soon enough. Noel’s been living with a dark secret for years, ever since his father drowned himself. It involves a Scotswoman of fabulous wealth and Deneuvean beauty.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“A perverse passion—with a Greek precedent.”
“Not Oedipus Rex …”
“And a French precedent as well. After his father died, Baudelaire and his mother lived together in what he admitted was a ‘period of passionate love,’ a ‘verdant paradise’ in which she was ‘solely and completely’ his own. It’s a bit like that for Noel and his mother.”
“Are you making all this up?”
“About Baudelaire? Absolutely not.”
“About Noel.”
“Shall we get started?”