Music for Chameleons (3 page)

In 1975 and 1976 I published four chapters of the book in
Esquire
magazine. This aroused anger in certain circles, where it was felt I was betraying confidences, mistreating friends and/or foes. I don’t intend to discuss this; the issue involves social politics, not artistic merit. I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.

However, I did stop working on
Answered Prayers
in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with any public reaction to those parts of the book already published. The halt happened because I was in a helluva lot of trouble: I was suffering a creative crisis and a personal one at the same time. As the latter was unrelated, or very little related, to the former, it is only necessary to remark on the creative chaos.

Now, torment though it was, I’m glad it happened; after all, it altered my entire comprehension of writing, my attitude toward art and life and the balance between the two, and my understanding of the difference between what is true and what is
really
true.

To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek. But I felt my writing was becoming too dense, that I was taking three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph. Again and again I read all that I had written of
Answered Prayers
, and I began to have doubts—not about the material or my approach, but about the texture of the writing itself. I reread
In Cold Blood
and had the same reaction: there were too many areas where I was not writing as well as I could, where I was not delivering the total potential. Slowly, but with accelerating alarm, I read every word I’d ever published, and decided that never, not once in my writing life, had I completely exploded all the energy and esthetic excitements that material contained. Even when it was good, I could see that I was never working with more than half, sometimes only a third, of the powers at my command. Why?

The answer, revealed to me after months of meditation, was simple but not very satisfying. Certainly it did nothing to lessen my depression; indeed, it thickened it. For the answer created an apparently unsolvable problem, and if I couldn’t solve it, I might as well quit writing. The problem was: how can a writer successfully combine within a single form—say the short story—all he knows about every other form of writing? For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing—all I’d learned from film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?

I returned to
Answered Prayers
. I removed one chapter and rewrote two others. An improvement, definitely an improvement.
But the truth was, I had to go back to kindergarten. Here I was—off again on one of those grim gambles! But I was excited; I felt an invisible sun shining on me. Still, my first experiments were awkward. I truly felt like a child with a box of crayons.

From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I’d had in writing
In Cold Blood
was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absent. Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible.

Now, however, I set myself center stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simpleminded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing.

Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a nonfiction short novel (
Handcarved Coffins
) and a number of short stories. The result is the present volume:
Music for Chameleons
.

And how has all this affected my other work-in-progress,
Answered Prayers
? Very considerably. Meanwhile, I’m here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards—and, of course, the whip God gave me.

—TRUMAN CAPOTE
, 1979

PART ONE

Music for Chameleons

I

Music for Chameleons

SHE IS TALL AND SLENDER
, perhaps seventy, silver-haired, soigné, neither black nor white, a pale golden rum color. She is a Martinique aristocrat who lives in Fort de France but also has an apartment in Paris. We are sitting on the terrace of her house, an airy, elegant house that looks as if it was made of wooden lace: it reminds me of certain old New Orleans houses. We are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe.

Three green chameleons race one another across the terrace; one pauses at Madame’s feet, flicking its forked tongue, and she comments: “Chameleons. Such exceptional creatures. The way they change color. Red. Yellow. Lime. Pink. Lavender. And did you know they are very fond of music?” She regards me with her fine black eyes. “You don’t believe me?”

During the course of the afternoon she had told me many curious things. How at night her garden was filled with mammoth night-flying moths. That her chauffeur, a dignified figure who had driven me to her house in a dark green Mercedes, was a wife-poisoner who had escaped from Devil’s Island. And she had described a village high in the northern mountains that is entirely inhabited by albinos: “Little pink-eyed people white
as chalk. Occasionally one sees a few on the streets of Fort de France.”

“Yes, of course I believe you.”

She tilts her silver head. “No, you don’t. But I shall prove it.”

So saying, she drifts into her cool Caribbean salon, a shadowy room with gradually turning ceiling fans, and poses herself at a well-tuned piano. I am still sitting on the terrace, but I can observe her, this chic, elderly woman, the product of varied bloods. She begins to perform a Mozart sonata.

Eventually the chameleons accumulated: a dozen, a dozen more, most of them green, some scarlet, lavender. They skittered across the terrace and scampered into the salon, a sensitive, absorbed audience for the music played. And then not played, for suddenly my hostess stood and stamped her foot, and the chameleons scattered like sparks from an exploding star.

Now she regards me.
“Et maintenant? C’est vrai?”

“Indeed. But it seems so strange.”

She smiles. “
Alors
. The whole island floats in strangeness. This very house is haunted. Many ghosts dwell here. And not in darkness. Some appear in the bright light of noon, saucy as you please. Impertinent.”

“That’s common in Haiti, too. The ghosts there often stroll about in daylight. I once saw a horde of ghosts working in a field near Petionville. They were picking bugs off coffee plants.”

She accepts this as fact, and continues: “
Oui. Oui
. The Haitians work their dead. They are well known for that. Ours we leave to their sorrows. And their frolics. So coarse, the Haitians. So Creole. And one can’t bathe there, the sharks are so intimidating. And their mosquitoes: the size, the audacity! Here in Martinique we have no mosquitoes. None.”

“I’ve noticed that; I wondered about it.”

“So do we. Martinique is the only island in the Caribbean not cursed with mosquitoes, and no one can explain it.”

“Perhaps the night-flying moths devour them all.”

She laughs. “Or the ghosts.”

“No. I think ghosts would prefer moths.”

“Yes, moths are perhaps more ghostly fodder. If I was a hungry ghost, I’d rather eat anything than mosquitoes. Will you have more ice in your glass? Absinthe?”

“Absinthe. That’s something we can’t get at home. Not even in New Orleans.”

“My paternal grandmother was from New Orleans.”

“Mine, too.”

As she pours absinthe from a dazzling emerald decanter: “Then perhaps we are related. Her maiden name was Dufont. Alouette Dufont.”

“Alouette? Really? Very pretty. I’m aware of two Dufont families in New Orleans, but I’m not related to either of them.”

“Pity. It would have been amusing to call you cousin.
Alors
. Claudine Paulot tells me this is your first visit to Martinique.”

“Claudine Paulot?”

“Claudine and Jacques Paulot. You met them at the Governor’s dinner the other night.”

I remember: he was a tall, handsome man, the First President of the Court of Appeals for Martinique and French Guiana, which includes Devil’s Island. “The Paulots. Yes. They have eight children. He very much favors capital punishment.”

“Since you seem to be a traveler, why have you not visited here sooner?”

“Martinique? Well, I felt a certain reluctance. A good friend was murdered here.”

Madame’s lovely eyes are a fraction less friendly than before. She makes a slow pronouncement: “Murder is a rare occurrence here. We are not a violent people. Serious, but not violent.”

“Serious. Yes. The people in restaurants, on the streets, even
on the beaches have such severe expressions. They seem so preoccupied. Like Russians.”

“One must keep in mind that slavery did not end here until 1848.”

I fail to make the connection, but do not inquire, for already she is saying: “Moreover, Martinique is
très cher
. A bar of soap bought in Paris for five francs costs twice that here. The price of everything is double what it should be because everything has to be imported. If these troublemakers got their way, and Martinique became independent of France, then that would be the close of it. Martinique could not exist without subsidy from France. We would simply perish.
Alors
, some of us have serious expressions. Generally speaking, though, do you find the population attractive?”

“The women. I’ve seen some amazingly beautiful women. Supple, suave, such beautifully haughty postures; bone structure as fine as cats. Also, they have a certain alluring aggressiveness.”

“That’s the Senegalese blood. We have much Senegalese here. But the men—you do not find them so appealing?”

“No.”

“I agree. The men are not appealing. Compared to our women, they seem irrelevant, without character:
vin ordinaire
. Martinique, you understand, is a matriarchal society. When that is the case, as it is in India, for example, then the men never amount to much. I see you are looking at my black mirror.”

I am. My eyes distractedly consult it—are drawn to it against my will, as they sometimes are by the senseless flickerings of an unregulated television set. It has that kind of frivolous power. Therefore, I shall overly describe it—in the manner of those “avant-garde” French novelists who, having chosen to discard narrative, character, and structure, restrict themselves to page-length paragraphs detailing the contours of a single
object, the mechanics of an isolated movement: a wall, a white wall with a fly meandering across it. So: the object in Madame’s drawing room is a black mirror. It is seven inches tall and six inches wide. It is framed within a worn black leather case that is shaped like a book. Indeed, the case is lying open on a table, just as though it were a deluxe edition meant to be picked up and browsed through; but there is nothing there to be read or seen—except the mystery of one’s own image projected by the black mirror’s surface before it recedes into its endless depths, its corridors of darkness.

“It belonged,” she is explaining, “to Gauguin. You know, of course, that he lived and painted here before he settled among the Polynesians. That was his black mirror. They were a quite common artifact among artists of the last century. Van Gogh used one. As did Renoir.”

“I don’t quite understand. What did they use them for?”

“To refresh their vision. Renew their reaction to color, the tonal variations. After a spell of work, their eyes fatigued, they rested themselves by gazing into these dark mirrors. Just as gourmets at a banquet, between elaborate courses, reawaken their palates with a
sorbet de citron
.” She lifts the small volume containing the mirror off the table and passes it to me. “I often use it when my eyes have been stricken by too much sun. It’s soothing.”

Soothing, and also disquieting. The blackness, the longer one gazes into it, ceases to be black, but becomes a queer silver-blue, the threshold to secret visions; like Alice, I feel on the edge of a voyage through a looking-glass, one I’m hesitant to take.