Sparagmos: the Fall

SPARAGMOS

the Fall

— a memoir —

Paul Xylinides

Copyright © Paul Xylinides 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.

ISBN-13:978-1517328818

ISBN-10:1517328810

PaulXylinides.com

Cover by: Dayna Barley-Cohrs

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. — Hamlet, II, 2

None does offend, none — I say none! — King Lear, IV, 6

1

The Dear One

The small kitten played away the sunny afternoon on the rear third floor balcony until it played itself off the edge. I was told about it later. The olive-skinned landlord had deposited the remains, as he thought adequate, in the garbage.

You're sure it was dead?

Yes, yes, dead.

His tone was self-confident, his accent Greek.

As a prospective tenant thumping about the empty walk-up on St. Urbain, he'd taken me, in my long wool army coat, new brown leather boots, dark blonde hair, to be German. The Germans had gone into Greece and sight of me had brought back the past. No, I was Russian, Greek, and English — my footing secure wherever I stood.

Those years on St. Urbain quite a bit of sporadic dying went on, peripheral to the main thrust of things, or so it seemed at the time — a mother cat smothering her litter, abortions, accidents. Things just happened beyond one's control, or actions were needed to be taken and, with some logistical effort, were taken. Those were the days of 'back room' abortions. One of the actors was a portly European, well over middle-age, who wore a wine-coloured smoking jacket during the deed that he performed out of his apartment. Of a moralistic bent, he afterwards proffered the bloody mess for the better instruction of his client. How does this make you feel? he asked, putting the blame where it belonged and then pocketing his three hundred dollars.

Although I didn't voice it, I felt sorry for the Dear One and for what she had had to undergo. I felt nothing in particular towards the pieces of torn, inchoate flesh (thrust at her not at me) as with the previous time when she had taken a knitting needle to herself and ended up in the hospital where I'd found her in a white hospital gown. Telling me what she had done and describing the blood, she was as vulnerable as a sick child and I felt it awful that she had been brought to this pass. I blame it all on the social climate at the time that made me inept and unmanned me. Better to be rid of it than to come forward, and I was secretly glad that she had taken it upon herself. I admired her bravery while horrified at its details. Alone she decided our fate by penetrating herself with a knitting needle. It seemed too crude an instrument for such an objective, and fraught with danger. In my mind's eye, I visualized it: the murderous probing, the unstaunched blood, her rushing alone to the hospital. I saw nothing else, except that she had taken charge of her destiny. How this related to me I could not see.

The last occasion of this sort, on a grey blustery autumn afternoon, provided few lasting images. Clinics were finally beginning to sprout up here and there. It was soon over and we took a taxi home where she rested for a day or so. Things had become sanitized, technical, with less psychological and emotional drama. We had matured and the world with us. In the future it would be a struggle to remember that anything had taken place and, given the opportunity, would we have made different choices? The Dear One would no longer be able to bring to term and I, on my own, would never again entertain the possibility.

Now the first cat to die, that was a different matter, an event fat with sentiment. We would be able to recall its name — Pasha — years later when we'd been long apart and barely able to remember each other's faces. It was a death we could memorialize, its body shaking with distemper as it tottered about the apartment, frantic dialings for help in the corner phone booth, food paste smeared across its teeth as it got thinner and thinner unable to eat or to tolerate water. It received a full backyard burial complete with shroud and candles. The rooftop pigeons that so annoyed in the mornings with their coos above their droppings must have been silent witnesses of the ceremony. It was our first Siamese cat status symbol.

More quickly followed. Someone in the neighbourhood needed a home for two adults. One over-weight and cross-eyed, the other yowling its displeasures as it demanded attention to its state of heat, they never had quite the Arabian Nights presence of Pasha. However, they were Siamese and as such would serve in its stead as the exotic genii of our world. And, while the Dear One — at the time the Korean pejoratives of the epithet had yet to appear — would persist in conjuring up their storied ancestors, her efforts lacked their former fervour and frequency.

As for myself, I was never able to attribute quite as much mythopoeic appeal to these creatures and I eventually came to tossing glassfuls of cold water at their yowls. When the cross-eyed chub murderously lay herself down on her new litter, she finally lost, as had her unappeasable mate, all her status as an emblem of our household and of the romantic exoticism that we continued stubbornly enough to detect in ourselves. I did wonder as I looked down upon the suffocated, hairless, blind little bodies whether the blame lay completely with the mother's obtuse indifference, but it remained at the time no more than a whiff of suspicion. Something about life in that apartment had perhaps short-circuited her natural instincts.

Your cats in those years always seemed to die unexpectedly, commented the Beloved years later.

She had been my first returned love. It was she whose heart, with the aid of the Dear One, I broke, and whose broken pieces paid me back in spades. The Dear One still awaits her punishment, if such be the order of things.

I first met the Beloved in the apartment of the Dear One and her mother. She had freshly arrived from New York, smartly dressed in brown skirt and jacket of a fine silk material with thin white stripes. It was early spring and her hair was pulled back from her lightly freckled face. The two girls proceeded to mock me in a bantering fashion that was not displeasing. I had of late become quite friendly with the Dear One, showing her poems I had written and doubtless she had passed on information about me.

I had already been in love with the Dear One for a long time. She couldn't have been more than fourteen when first I lifted my eyes to her, standing a little separate from the other spectators, from my place on the local sports field. As I looked at her, pretty, observant, but uninvolved and unaware of me, I fell in love then and there and remained so off and on until I met the Beloved. At the Dear One's invitation, I would walk her now and again to her after-school job. We would meet at the coffee shop that was the local student hang-out. Our steadies not being about, off we went, trekking across the park that was the focus of so much youthful activity in those years. We would not say much as I carried her books but, when we parted, she thanked me as though I had served her most chivalrously.

The Dear One's parents had separated, with divorce proceedings in the air. I would notice an untended hole in her school uniform stockings.

The year that I went into university, I had not seen the Dear One for a good length of time, and she was quite out of my mind when, one evening, I received a phone call from her, our first.

Can you meet me? she asked. It's a matter of life and death.

Even if her request hadn't been so full of import, I'd have agreed. The fateful significance she gave to her call never failed to impress me in the years that followed. At the time, I thrilled to the dramatic urgency that she communicated. Later, I would wonder at its metaphysical implications in the matter of our personal destinies.

Within the half hour we met on a windy corner beneath a city street light. Our openness and intimacy of spirit improved upon the awkward character of our infrequent and brief meetings in the past and upended the length of time since we'd last been together. I never did find out what the particulars of her mortal urgency on the phone were. It didn't seem necessary since a mutual and tacit understanding of freedom possessed us and we were happy enough to tramp the streets, climb the stairways up the small mountainside at the centre of the city, and revel in each other's passions as we celebrated what had been revealed to us so far of life's mysteries and richness.

2

My Professor

A few days later, discussing an assignment with my English Professor, I let drop that I was a writer of poetry whereupon, in kindly fashion, he offered to look at it. Having a long week-end ahead, I devoted myself to preparing my presentation and fattening my opus with further efforts. Some days after receiving the submission, My Professor reported back that he had much to say of his findings and invited me to his home that we might adequately deal with these.

The following Sunday afternoon, with directions in hand, I climbed the road that snaked up the city's low mountain-side. Among the old baronial houses of cut stone I came upon two or three smaller modern homes each quite distinct from the other. I knocked at the door of the least prepossessing but overall most effectively designed — a flat surface of pale brick with a roof that arched at its corners like outspread wings; beneath the tips of these, windows received the outdoor light. The whole of it seemed a couched bird raising itself for flight. Occupying a lot on the street's south side, it fronted the mountain, but the rest of its construction descended the slope in terraced steps and remained to be revealed.

My Professor occupied the top floor where the ceiling sloped upward with the roof and the living quarters formed a U about the stairwell to the front door. Panelled entirely in glass, the rear wall commanded the broadest view of the city, the southern stretch of its encircling river, and, far beyond, dimly viewed mountains and obscure flatlands, with sky enough directly ahead to journey satisfyingly through its ever varying aspect, if only in thought.

Upon arrival, instead of being engaged in the purpose of the visit, I found myself otherwise absorbed. My Professor as it turned out was an artist and eager to have an audience for his work. Large, framed paintings hung on the walls. At the far end of the apartment that also served as a studio stood even larger, unframed canvases one against the other. Those on the walls had been executed in a traditional, old-fashioned style that did not diminish my interest, untutored as it was, for the other works were of a quite different spirit. These monumental abstract renderings were immediate in their effect. With its central two-flanked fiery wave, the Sounding Angel struck me as the very forging fires of the creative spirit. He had executed it in a single night. Another work — Sparagmos — depicted the universe torn apart and collapsing about a tiny fleeing Adamic figure. It looked back to the Oriental landscape style with its inclusion of a minute human element that serves to instil an aspect of consciousness and responsibility into Nature's vast presence. Whatever may have connected the painting's subject matter to My Professor personally he kept to himself and I was sufficiently attuned to my status not to pursue what I no more than dimly felt. Before these two paintings of the human spirit and its creative and destructive powers metaphysics became more than speculation.

When evening came, at first flooding this eyrie with a shimmering sunset and then leaving it at its far reaches, we were still in conversation before his canvases and, only when night had long closed in, did we turn to my poems after a quickly prepared meal at an unfolded card-table that My Professor covered with a white cloth and, for atmosphere, decorated with two candles. Having merrily eaten our fish sticks (a concession – My Professor being a life-long vegetarian), chips and peas, we dealt at last with the original purpose of the meeting.

The poetry, it appeared, showed great promise. My English Professor had found much that was fresh, original, and even inspired. He was especially taken by its maturity as was I, in turn, by the compliments that he warned me would dangerously increase the size of my head if I didn't take proper care. He left it to me what this psychological self-intervention should entail. As for myself I felt perfectly capable of absorbing without harm whatever fulsome praise came my way. The appreciative but scholarly manner of his response to the writing was not that far removed from when he was showing his own work and it was this as much as anything he said that made me feel not just heartened but as though we were fellow artists. His respect and displays of enthusiasm gave every sign that he was evaluating evidence of a substantial poetic talent. It was not until the early hours of the morning that I left in a cab that My Professor insisted on providing.

A recurrent and ironic memory of equal significance to the one of this visit would be the initial exposure I had to My Professor from a front seat of the class room where, legs stretched out casually, I had thought to myself, So what can you teach me?

3

The Beloved

Two or three times during the remainder of that school year I visited again and, at least once, I brought along the Dear One. Surprisingly, she was subject to attacks of shyness in his presence although she nonetheless bore herself very well. She responded just as did I to the paintings but with greater familiarity, having taken art classes. As for our jaunts together, nothing beyond friendship had come out of them, the Dear One being tied up, incomprehensibly, with a loud-mouth, and so, when she introduced me that spring to her girlfriend from New York, I had not to divest myself of any romantic bonds. I must, however, have committed a betrayal of some kind for what else might explain the negative attitude I assumed towards the Dear One as I began to spend all of my time in the company of the Beloved as her friend soon came to be?

Although not called upon to do so, I felt it incumbent upon me to repudiate my relationship with the Dear One, going so far as to decry what I now characterized as her pretentious manner. I went so far as to ridicule her former invitations to tea and, having been the recipient of validating recognition of my talents, I would scorn the accompanying intellectual chit-chat with her mother despite its engendering in me a foreboding as to my state of preparedness for such exchanges. (I had yet to realize that the condition of having nothing definite in mind — no immediate conversational resources — can be as much an asset as a liability as long as there is the capacity to deal with whatever might arise.) For some reason, the Beloved did not refute my sentiments, perhaps sensing that I needed to exorcise something within myself or feeling the need to observe without contradiction this infatuated being who had entered her life. Perhaps she was merely conflicted. That summer, staying with friends on the other side of town and generally keeping out of touch, the Dear One made for a safe target. She seemed, if anything, to have abandoned her former companions.

Although the Beloved had at times a mocking air, I saw it as a minor challenge and she was my first reciprocated romantic passion. A light of bestowal towards oneself manifests subtly about a person who becomes, as it were, destined for the intimacies of one's heart. Just this occurred when the Beloved stood before me one day with a presence as though a shield of invulnerability had dropped away leaving her available to my good dealings. What else could they possibly be and how could I ever feel anything different?

In addition, You need to keep yourself separate from others, she said to me.

How did this thought come to her? What she saw and meant I did not understand, but it was a counsel I was to remember if only because she herself appeared to hold me apart in some fashion. She was spending the summer at the home of her guardian who had a son and daughter of his own. Being an orphan, she merited for me extra consideration. We were both just eighteen and she had lost her parents as a child. The eldest among her siblings, except for a brother who was institutionalized, she seemed to me to be especially burdened. At the same time, having been educated at a private Catholic convent in New York, she appeared wonderfully sophisticated and self-possessed to this product of a public school. Perhaps due to her early responsibilities, she bore an independent spirit able to deal with the world at large.

We began to go about together, one day making a foursome with the Dear One and a friend of mine that came to mark the beginning of our romance. Off we went on two motorbikes that spring morning into the countryside, bringing with us the makings of a picnic: wine, cheese, baguettes. Eventually, in a tall-grassed, sun-bathed field, it wasn't long before my friend who had a reputation for this sort of thing took the Dear One by the feet and dragged her off with no marked protestation on her part. Left alone together, I and the Beloved whiled away the afternoon with the food and drink, the immobilizing and melding sunlight that served as the connective tissue of our talk and our reflective silences.

The Beloved's guardian was a rotundly stout, elderly gentleman of Dickensian manner, a widower who, for obscure but undoubtedly sound reasons, confined himself to his bed. He had, one early evening, granted me an introductory audience in his chamber that was lit by a single, shaded bulb. We cloaked our brief exchange in a bantering tone and the following day I learned from my friend that her guardian had pronounced me more capable than her previous admirers. Although I did not expect but might have wished for a round of unearned applause, there seemed, to my ears, in this communication some reserve as to just how capable. Nonetheless, I had received the qualified blessings of the house and I very rapidly got into the habit of appearing at its door every evening.

Very soon into our relationship, the desire came to me to give my feelings written form and present the results of my exertions to the Beloved with the ulterior two-folded purpose of solidifying identity and securing my position. I immediately set about the task, having provided myself with sufficient drink and pills at hand. (These means of lubricating the creative process didn't have the more deleterious effects that long use might expect.) My labours continued throughout the night, and I finished my production in the late dawn. I had the knack of putting words together in a way that expressed the lyricism of my feelings and that gave the impression