This is the Ritual Read online

  *

  Through cigar smoke, they regard the loose pages: shards of text, impressionistic photographs, a semi-coherent polemic. ‘Pessimistic novelists, a veritable production line of them. What are they trying to do, overthrow our civilisation? They’ll only overthrow themselves.’ ‘One of them has made a million since last February . . . Anyway, how do you know the blonde has beautiful eyes?’ ‘Because every time she walks into a bar, some guy buys her a drink.’ They say nothing, sip their cognac. Two jaded ex-revolutionaries, sitting in this sepulchral bar all week, like they’re afraid. This stale, stinging air.

  *

  Young people on a beach, preparing a meal. It’s an overcast day, a little windy. ‘Eat something.’ A dog sitting on the bonnet of a car, seems to know more than anyone. The exceptional beauty of these girls. ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel.’ . . . ‘No god lingers in my blood.’ A poet masturbates in a cave, out where the rocks are jagged.

  When the tide comes in, the youths have disappeared.

  *

  Madam’s erotic dreams . . . Fearsome tyrants butchered on camera – the embassy in flames – ‘We reject in the strongest terms this –’ Hot tongues of mongrel dogs. They approach slowly and lick the glass . . . She wakes drenched in sweat, panting. All this opulence, yet so many nights since she’s had a man beside her. Every woman needs it.

  *

  ‘Your father’s dead,’ says her teacher. The gamine Nicole has always had troublesome fantasies. Now they might become real. ‘Take me.’ They fall together, a pleasure intimating total annihilation. ‘All I want is to vanish from the earth,’ she whimpers as he moves inside her. ‘With you!’ The teacher’s urgent words: ‘We are not bound to “real life”, nor to their shitty morality.’ He comes inside her with a howl.

  *

  The blonde girl kneels down and takes it. Pornography, shotguns, occasional music. (In her latest painting, crucifixes line both sides of the autostrada to Salerno, a groaning fascist on each one.) At first I made her read the Marquis de Sade aloud while I explored her with my fingers. But Christ – that girl soon brought me to my knees. In a voice as delicate as an hourglass: Love is best conveyed with the fist. Against a severe desert sky, a towering phallus glistens like an obelisk. ‘Past the age of twenty-four, men just don’t fuck the same,’ she tells her friend over the phone. ‘Sexual morality . . . crucifixes . . . Men are terrified, and they’re right to be. I’m young, sexy, and as beautiful as death. Tell me that’s not power!’

  I wasn’t insane. I had sought a return to animal life, that kind of debased magnificence. The next time we met, she dangled the keys in front of me. Then she locked the monotonous hotel room from the inside. ‘I’ve always had a thing for panting blondes.’ ‘You and everyone else.’ She made me slide a finger in her asshole. I could feel flakes of shit against my fingertip. My breath in her hair, on her neck. Nothing had changed. ‘You get happier, and more fatalistic.’ Brazen and vulgar, as intoxicating as an open sewer. The closest to love I ever got.

  4

  Baby, the West Will Fear Us

  Passion festers within the camp perimeter. The odour of dust, excrement and coffee seeps into the affair itself. She looks at him now with mistrust. Writes her nightmares in notebooks she conceals in her mattress. (‘In this mirror full of screams.’) On the walls of the camp, relief maps, aerial photographs, refugee statistics. All that textual babbling. Midnight in the canteen: ‘Your attitude is bizarre and sometimes sickening.’ ‘Look, just tell me you won’t make an issue with my wife.’ ‘We have nothing more to talk about.’ Out here, all tensions are exacerbated. Desert truth.

  *

  You talk often about nobility, but what do you know about shame? Cacophony, dissolution, this eternal fucking world. Cities teem with men like me and our torturous intrigues . . . He began to shudder and then scream. Stagnant, atrophied, patently homosexual, he rides the night train from end to end and back again. The only therapy he can afford. Beneath this city, such feelings, these rabid eyes. Men like me become a threat. Men who brood in small rooms with bad air. Listen. Soon you will see my face on every screen in this nation. He carries photographs of Moscow and St Petersburg in his breast pocket – street signs, buildings, blurred shots of obscure functionaries and minor celebrities. Shakes his head disgustedly – these infirm men and their ideological drivel. Poverty is not a crime! The beast in us wants to be whipped. I will step up. The night train hurtles through diseased cities – his bad mind. Tyre factories, power plants, slums that seethe with venereal sickness and every kind of plague. He’ll feel better at daybreak, he tells himself. That’s if I live that long. There is nothing to do but recall childhood and try to stay calm. Days later he awakes in a rented room in another city. I keep myself alive only out of hate, and habit.

  *

  Madman painting in his studio. Psychiatric outpatients’ home on the edge of a vast park in the middle of the city. Calls these paintings his ‘blue series’ – a wilful provocation. The medication suppresses his sense that the territories are being overrun (migrants, refugees, terrorists). ‘Silence please.’ Panic in the air like a rectal stench, a –

  *

  Cop pulls her over on the interstate. ‘Need to see some ID.’ She looks at him desperately, still clutching the wheel. ‘Transgression, the lust for disorder . . . Officer, I’ve spent my whole life courting delirium.’ Cop shakes his head sadly. ‘Out here that just won’t ride. Been driving like a crazy person.’ And she was so near to the coast – this unceasing ordeal.

  *

  ‘In my defence, I was crazed with lust.’ The young man stays in his ground-floor room watching porn and taking caffeine pills. Vines from the back garden cover the window. No job, few friends. Says the internet meets all his human needs, bar nutrition. Flatmate is from Belgium, twenty-five, lesbian. Likewise private and reclusive. He rarely sees her. That’s not to say he doesn’t fantasise. This is to the east of the city, where rents are cheaper. ‘I’m out in the future. Symbols are ambiguous . . . Stranded in remote territories . . . We have known each other for ever.’ He dreams of her on a black sea, dying to capsize.

  *

  Another slap in the face, another abandonment and humiliation. I too have lived in filthy hovels, I too have crawled like an insect. Raskolnikov of the internet age. ‘You raise the gun, you transcend all laws.’ I fell in love with porn actresses, suffered indignities in the workplace, voted for the lesser of two evils. I watched my human heart grow diseased and die before I was twenty-two. What do these leeches know about shame? I’m ten years older than everyone. Ten years that passed like a day. There is no home for people like me.

  *

  Paris on a midweek afternoon. I was supposed to be writing about a Bulgarian author whose feverish theories had haunted me since college, but my thoughts were sluggish and grim. When it rained I sat in a café and took out my notebook: ‘Perimeters . . . Reproaches . . . A lifetime spent wandering in foreign cities, utterly depressed . . . The world holds its breath for a collision it both fears and craves.’ Somewhere a door closes. Footsteps in a corridor. He orders another coffee.

  *

  I liked her but I knew she was insane. So was everyone else in that guesthouse on a lost coast. Ocean like a churning scum, skies of impenetrable grey, motorbikes that passed in the distance – local amphetamine-thugs with a grudge against my civilisation. She would walk by herself on the beach for hours, gazing out at the foam. Those days I sat alone in windswept bars, often the only customer. Sometimes there wasn’t even a barman. ‘Heard he was only here for the sex, and to drink himself into oblivion.’ ‘Yep.’ On a hill out of town, a group of boys strum a guitar, singing intermittently. Everyone seems to be waiting for a calamity, a shattering. I slept for thirteen hours. When I woke, she was gone. A note on the bedside locker said, ‘This is a past life.’ A few vague lines about a shaman and some ruins.

  If I stay here, I will go mad.

  *

  Autumn in a
mid-sized city that isn’t particularly distinguished. He’s always tired now, sighing and staring into the TV while she’s out at work. Sometimes he murmurs about having kids one day, other times he’s silent for entire afternoons. Something has been damaged: a fundamental innocence. The daytime talk-show host gestures manically. ‘Everywhere the sacrament of LSD is being consumed.’ Drives with the radio on but remembers nothing. (Music? Talk? Static?) Sees his own emptiness reflected in billboards. By night, watches burning condoms curl up and disintegrate in a deserted car park. They never make love any more.

  *

  On the afternoon of her twenty-sixth birthday, the Belgian girl drew a bath and opened her wrists. A drowsy, incoherent goodbye. Her flatmate was in his room with the porno. ‘She was always insane.’ ‘We will never make it home, not now in any case.’ ‘The condition of being locked outside of life.’ ‘A willing, attractive woman by your side. Days free of all obligation . . . Does it matter that our sexuality was incompatible? I loved you, in my way.’ Burning condoms in a deserted car park. There is nowhere to go.

  Utter derision, in this mirror full of screams.

  *

  Interstates, freeways. Drives all night with the radio on. ‘I would want, literally, to kill her.’ A cuckolded boyfriend – that perennial experience. When something is broken, it’s broken. Hears the voice of the talk-show host say softly: ‘The saddest thing I ever heard . . .’

  In an early bar on the dusty edge of a city, saves himself only by getting blind drunk. ‘How beautiful you were.’ Starts weeping and embarrasses the barman (he is the only customer). The barman has no time for this maudlin scene – he looks away. ‘Last night the devil stood outside my door . . .’ It’s all coming out slurred. The barman continues to ignore him.

  Finally he collapses face-first on a table. Everywhere, whiskey and broken glass.

  Barcelona

  Alicia moved to Barcelona when she was twenty-nine, having ended an eight-year relationship after learning of her partner’s long-term infidelity.

  After a couple of months in the city, she got a job as a waitress in a restaurant on the Calle Trujas, on the fringes of the red-light district. She mostly worked nights, and often prostitutes or their pimps or clients would come in, alone or in small, garrulous groups, to eat burritos and kebabs. The prostitutes’ clients were drunk and loud, and sometimes they tried to joke with Alicia about their exploits, as if to reassure themselves through her complicity. Many of these late-night customers were foreign tourists. Sometimes they said the most obscene, misogynistic, lewd things in Alicia’s presence, not realising she spoke English. Other times they just didn’t care.

  On some nights, Alicia was overcome by bitterness and misanthropy. It seemed to her that the Calle Trujas was a sewer, and that the restaurant where she worked was a rotting piece of wood that floated along the surface, on to which rats would crawl and sniff around for a while before lurching back into the fetid stream. Alicia did not have much money: most of what she made at the restaurant went on rent. She could have lived more cheaply if she shared an apartment, but she was determined to live on her own, which she had never done before. Late at night, when her shifts ended, she would go back to her apartment, several streets away on the Calle de la Madera, and sit with the lights off, looking out at the rooftops, drinking a beer and eating from a box of noodles or a few slices of pizza. When summer came, she sat on the roof terrace instead.

  Before I started getting to know her, Alicia had no significant friends in Barcelona. She could have met some had she wanted to, but it felt natural, even enjoyable, to be alone, walking the streets on her days off work, letting her sadness and anger swirl out into the foreignness of the city. She put aside at least half an hour every day to study Spanish, aided by a book and the accompanying CDs which she had loaded on to her phone. On a few occasions, she went for late-night drinks with her colleagues after they had closed up the restaurant. She danced and laughed with them, and they liked her, but whenever they suggested meeting up again soon, she made tactful excuses. On one of these nights out, when Alicia had been waitressing for a month or so, she went home with a slender Moroccan named Salim who worked in the kitchen. Before they made love, Salim stripped his bed of its covers, rolled them up and laid them in front of the window. Alicia did not know why he did this. In the morning, she awoke to find Salim kissing her neck. She drew him in around her, enfolded by him on the uncovered bed. Afterwards, Salim unsheathed the condom and tied it with the tip of his finger in a manner that struck Alicia as delicate and touching. Salim wanted to take her out for breakfast, but Alicia kissed him on the lips and said she would see him in work on Monday night. After that, she and Salim remained friendly, but they didn’t sleep together again.

  Alicia found a bar that she loved on the Carrer de Paris, one Metro stop away from her home. Sometimes she would go there to write in the notebook she had bought at the Saturday market, or to read, or just to sip coffee, wine or brandy, and watch the locals float in, have their conversations, drift away again. She developed a passion for Chekhov, reading first all his short stories, then all his plays (or as many as she could find in English translation). She also read Kundera, until it came to seem to Alicia that he was engaged in a conversation which excluded her, as if he were unaware she was even in the room. After that, she read Djuna Barnes, Gogol and Jane Bowles. The bar was called Angelino’s and it was never full, never empty, and always played appealing music at just the right volume. Once, a couple walked into the bar holding hands. The woman was older, perhaps in her early forties, and wore a red leather skirt and a red top, not unlike some of the prostitutes Alicia encountered at the restaurant. The man was handsomely dishevelled, a decade or so younger than the woman. They sat at the bar and giggled, grinning at one another even as they ordered their drinks, oblivious to the rest of the bar and the world outside. Alicia had been writing about St Stephen’s Green, but now she began writing about the couple in Angelino’s, imagining the relationships they had both fled to be with each other, the affair they would live out over the coming months – passionately sexual, yet bound on a course for agony and destruction. She wrote about the woman in red standing on a windswept coast, alone, looking out to sea but expecting nothing.

  Another evening, Alicia was again writing in the bar. It was already autumn, the sun sinking on the street outside. She did not have to work till the following night. Absorbed in her writing, she was startled when the empty chair by her table shifted. She looked up and saw that it had been moved by a man, who was asking by gesture if he might sit with her. Momentarily Alicia was annoyed that her writing had been interrupted. But the man’s eyes were kind. He sat down with her. He wanted to buy her another coffee but she said she shouldn’t drink more caffeine. A few minutes later, she let him buy her a glass of Prosecco. He was a big man, with thick arms, strong shoulders and dark, Mediterranean skin. His balding head was shaved and he had a neat, black beard. He laughed softly as he spoke, and listened attentively when Alicia did, nodding faintly. Halid was his name. Around midnight they took a taxi back to Alicia’s apartment. They made love till dawn began to show over the rooftops outside the window. Later they stood on the roof terrace in the light of early morning, a sheet wrapped around the two of them to maintain their modesty before any passing seagulls. Alicia later told me they were like two Greek philosophers, and they both giggled like children.

  Alicia and Halid met up usually once a week, always on Alicia’s terms. When Halid realised that this was to be an exclusively sexual affair, he amiably accepted the situation. They would meet in bars, have one or two drinks, and then go to either Alicia’s or Halid’s place. If they slept at Alicia’s, she would always gently let Halid know, soon after they woke up, that she wanted him to leave. When they were at his tiny apartment in the Barceloneta district, she always left early. Then she got on with her day, smiling spontan-eously as she bought vegetables at the market, or took orders from customers, or sat on the roof terrac
e and listened to the sounds rising up from the street.

  It was while Alicia was seeing Halid that I got to know her. I used to take walks around that quarter of Barcelona at night. It was because of Alicia that I often wandered into the restaurant, drinking coffee as the prostitutes and drunken tourists filed in and out. I liked the look of her. Sometimes I would have a book with me and I suppose she saw me as a sort of kindred spirit. Once we had a staccato conversation about Ortega y Gasset while she was between orders. Alicia said she didn’t read much philosophy, nor feel the need to, because things were quite simple after all. One night I came in late and lingered while Alicia and Salim were closing up the restaurant. Then she and I went for a drink in a nearby bar.

  We drank martinis and Alicia spoke openly to me about her past, the circumstances that had led to her leaving Ireland. She had been in Barcelona six months now, she said. I told her about my art and photography projects, my time spent living in New York and Tangier, and the residency I’d been granted in Barcelona for the next three years.

  ‘What are you working on now?’ she asked.

  I told her about my project, which was inspired by Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and was divided in two parts. First,I said, I took photographs of my subjects as they slept, and made audio recordings of them. I explained that my sound equipment was highly sensitive, able to pick up even the most furtive and intimate noises the subjects made as they slept, including the gurglings and rumblings of their tummies.

  ‘You’re a creepy guy,’ she said, laughing, then sipping her martini. She had already eaten the two olives on the plastic stick. ‘Are they women and men as well?’ she said.