By Nirina Mignon
It was the flight of the sibyls at the Brocken, all under the suggestion of that torrid night the frail collegiate walls could scarcely contain the ceaseless clamor within them; la nuit de feu, a time of midnight procession within the dorms at Georgetown. Juliana had not been roused, half-prisoner to the idiocy of sleep, by the bassoon of the incipient boarders and their games, but by an omen whose portent carried a delectable vision. The first knock which had revived her genius was nothing less than the harassment of her awkward dorm-mate Edith (or by her more vulgar cognomen, “Eddie”), by which she thought most urgent to alert the subject of this tragedy that the room’s fan no longer functioned comme il faut, which meant the end of the crescent lunula’s warding off of familiars and their effect: it had been under the enslavement of reason to this heat that the worst choices had been made. Our Juliana replied with a general swatting motion, which could suggest most economically both a dismissal of the platitudinal remark (had not the fan malfunctioned since earlier that evening, merely affected by the rigor mortis which feigns living movements only to submit to Letum?); and if politeness could be parsimoniously translated from her annoyance, then a distaste for the oppressing condition was conveyed. The chlorose illumination of the desklight seemed to shun the two dorm-mates evermore as the first frustration had been given a resolution, this had been the second torment which coagulated an end to Juliana’s light reverie; it belonged not to the light whose rays nourish gladness along the mount’s foot, but rather the cruel humiliation which renewed fear, and confirmed that Fate’s fugue had left one erring far from the right path, amidst the rustling of wilderness, that tant’e amara which eclogues do not treat of. The third wake did not belong to the violent paroxysm which captures sweet repose as if it were a Sabine woman, but rather a form of gentle consent to the wakeful condition: to meet it half-way at the Niemen river and be spuriously subjugated by it after a few sleepful spasms. The hind of her ears still stung, arguing yet distanced by the circumference of her nape, and she stood near the bathroom mirror examining her frizzled bronze hair which strayed away from the counsel of her cherry-red headband.
The nascent incipit common to the beginning of a new aria, which enunciates a mourning sound after it has cut off the previous act, began within Juliana’s auditory altar and she assumed a downcast figure, with her neck rotated half-way to the audience of her reflection, with eyes dim and only partially open as to display a graceful abandonment of the world, soporific of contempt. Here was our Connais-tu le pays?, our L’ho perdutto me meschina, beginning with the reorganization of bare feet upon the sterile bathroom tiles, a toe or so pressed up to a depression of grout.
“Why, I can not live without it. Every motion of Fortuna’s sway, fickle as that lady may be and how her frail spokes like the equivocating casuist does say “What awaits you, the world, a lofty name resounding with a terrible metre, will to you be an inheritance,” only to turn clockwise and shame with a hiss “As on this side of mine I turn, you will have none of it.” Divorced of all that gladdens me, every face does withstand me like a cold sore. Here I am, consigned to the attendance of my own funeral. Juliana est morte. Yet, I live. The curling firmament, the alloy of clouds, all that sprouts and faints, flees from me. With little constancy to my limbs, I grasp at the accusing hands of my captor; hers as a thorny vines’ peduncles and mine as a dream’s stuff.”
Hereafter the soliloquy of our J., as if in replacement of the expected Amen was carefully lifted a line from Chénier’s ode to his captive muse, as if to consummate the inchoate string of petty desire into hope. That scepter of Asclepios stationed ambivalently listing (to a side and another) for the edifice of a deserted nation became a Cross, and the voice crying in the wilderness was no longer the bemoaning flight of Hagar but an affirmation of something, when it was said and done by her: “J’ai les ailes de l’espérance.” She reclined convex to her initial position and against the wall opposite to the dorm’s living quarters, and was slightly recumbent when Eddie covertly constricted her arms about the shoulders of the limp Juliana.
“What is it, mon coeur?”
Juliana thought. Edith was a character whose nature furtively escaped any attempt at examination, every resulting attempt at so being putative at best. In some ways she was mundanely lambda, every gesture of hers seemed honest, yet it was as if the essence of its actor would not effuse. In the vignette of comparison she lacked the tacit quality of her sex; or otherwise was proprietor to a quality which belonged not to the illustrated schemes of Gavarni. By no means was she precocious, with limbs erratically outstretching a canvas as a Jackson Pollock painting; neither was her formation delayed and braced with a perpetual neoteny of a cherubic face and a parallel-running abdomen. Her speech was not abated by an indolent tongue which made every sound a buzzing fricative. In the worn developmental journal which so allay the worries of parents following the bureaucratic tradition, it was written of Edith Warner: “Language-acquisition period reached, overregularized speech expected but not overly talkative. Healthy weight of 18 kilograms [the matronly scion Warner had gleefully imputed this development in the margins of the page to the nourishment of her breast]. Average vision, slightly myopic in left-eye and far-sighted in the right.” Withstanding every measurement and fulfilment of charts, a disheartening tempest in Warner laid, inconcomitant to the innocuousness of her glistening eyes and oak-colored hair.
Our Juliana began, succinct rather than magniloquent and lacking the euphony of her soliloquy which still lingered on her palate, “Don’t worry about me, orals are soon.”
Only after a considerate whimper of sympathy and a mild frown affecting her face, Eddie replies with a congenially nasal Latin, all whilst sieving her fingers increasingly superficially through the future Georgetown alum’s hair, “As what was said of the lilies of the valley, non laborant neque nent etc. etc.”
After exerting a hum, the hair-appraisal ends, and a proposal is made from her: dinner the following night at a restaurant, the vaguely European sort with servers clad in black gowns and lengthy bread-knives; something which the deflated Juliana agrees to in excessive French liaisons (“Rendons-nous-y-alors”). A Duchenne smile, very madamic, followed from Edith’s lips, while J. could only splay the extremities of her face (partially restrained to position by invisible pins) to reveal a bottom range of teeth: something alike to a dissection.
Aside, and very faintly in a contralto color, “Edith Warner, a cenar teco m’invitasti.”
Eddie continued holding the other with a misericordious glance as in a Pietà scene, only to lift the supine ragdoll Juliana to her feet by assuming a hand placement akin to the techniques learned by pre-meds for loosening the pharynxes of choking infants. The two retired to their separate sides of the room, which though undivided by any wall, hermetically contained each to their separate domains as soon as the binding words of ‘Good night’ had been exchanged. Juliana laid on her back, reciting most laboriously the introducing paragraph each candidate had to make in order to prove both familiarity and relation with the song; while her boarding mate slept on her left side, awaiting the honor of the day. Brillante sur sa tige, elle boit les doux présents de l’aurore.
The infanta of Georgetown was stirred to the graceful morning, the time when the vocalizations of mourning doves and the violent propulsion of Edith’s hairdryer all seemed an introit, a collective doxology in lilt of what was to ordered to come. The diaphanous peace which now resounded had such an effect on Juliana that she was reverted to the infancy of confession; she extended her voice into an open chord, by which she could hear every pound of culpability be lessened; she then brushed her copper hair in a trite fashion. Edith had now rotated her pleased face from the bathroom mirror to the salutation of Juliana’s fading voice and frizzled headdress. Only once a smile of decency by Edith after her wave of goodbye had completed its full cycle did our Juliana convert her loose-fitting graphic shirt and tartan pants into the sartorial sensibility of a white blouse concealed by the movements of a dress-coat, the composed pastiche ending with Oxford shoes, which meandered between the occasion of a funeral and a ballet concerto. In that moment, she was something alike to a lawyer of the French Revolution, with dismal constitution ready to accuse a moderate Assembly with an invective replete with quotes of Boileau or some other author of fables, “Faites-vous des amis prompts à vous censurer!” The only diriment impediment to this comparison was the lack of cravat: which if appended onto her mannerist neck would disqualify her for the use of costumes (she was to audition for the breeches role of the philter-intoxicated Cherubino). She glided effortlessly, aided by her weightless raiment which girdled her as a rosary, and was led mindlessly through the cedar cloister halls of the Davis Center. As though catatonic until her terminus, there had been no measurable variance between the inert image of waving Edith and the scrutiny of judges.
The stock characters of the beetlebrowed graying professor, alongside his feminine acolytes of varying times (one being genteel as Jackie Kennedy, the next a lady-in-waiting of the Tudor period) were all expected; and yet there appeared a figure of Apollonian curls, more ochre than gold, belonging to the conversation of honest dithyrambs at Parnassus, lacking the pudic shame of fig coverings, ces époques nues! She had not been a judge herself but a candidate as evidenced by her tailored dress which billowed in her grace and scarcity of years. Thus began the examination, a few notes of appreciation were candidly shared by the aforementioned professors for everyone’s attendance, and our Juliana had been selected to perform first.
As for her dorm soliloquy, the introit of strings began within her ears yet inaudible to the world, the cue subjugating her to assume a somnolent countenance with arms positioned to follow the song’s guiding list, her mirthless arms animating once the oboe conducted her to. Her puerile voice wobbled simultaneously as the professor’s pen did as he noted the defect, his brows became more circumflex the more he considered her second-rate. All in all, her performance and that of the next Voi che sapete were acceptable. Then the grace-laden competitor, with the weight of her frilled taffetas holding the day under her mantle, sung with such levity and chromatic excellence (every paused aspiration preparing the audience for awe) that Fortuna was bound in her favor. Juliana railed against Heaven, its decrees which pronounce the paleness of her talent; she understood the peace of the morning, that such an ordered symphony was truly in lauds of this rival and in ignorance of herself.
The decision by the presiding judges, feigning equivalency in the three, adjusting for the chance variable of ‘skill’, was to have the latter (Corinne!) favored in upcoming rehearsals with the two others as remainders in case of an inopportune inevitability (such as illness or an inflexible schedule).
Ut parum est etc. Ut paretur non etc. It is not enough to serve, if the whole rule is to be followed. This had been the fatal maxim which rendered the two contestants as pallid and trite, which made their talent in the art of ‘verbatim’ worthless. Juliana haïssoit Corinne, her speech of Alexandrine verse, her arrogance and presumptive faith in acts she knew already decreed; her entrance which necessitated the choir’s sudden alarum of Te Deum’s to be sung in her glory. Or, at least such was the phantasmagorical picture of her rival Juliana had conceived and accepted as dogma. The confabulated image was so potent in her mind that, drenched in purulent resentment, she devised to inconvenience her rival from consummating the opportunity, perhaps not by arsenic but menial conspiracy, that it may be said “Thus did Banquo.”
Before leaving, she lingered and trembled discontented, with equal constancy to her limbs as one sick with the ague. She made sure to affix her eyes on this Corinne with a last desirous omen before receding into the outdoors of the Capital, reading every falling leaf’s vein with a downcast gaze. Once every willow and work of pseudo-Athenian architecture had been passed, an impenetrable night fell upon every jaundiced streetlight. Juliana had reached the dining outskirts which Mme. Warner invited her to. Once the latter accosted the former under the restaurant’s gazebo, they politely exchanged des bises in the fashion of Russian émigrés over tea. Edith’s appearance had been a newfound discovery to the circumscribing eyes of J., which were fogged with the morning: She had been wearing a tennis skirt lime-green at the hems, and her hair evenly rested on a leather jacket which obscured a spaghetti top incarnadine as a rose.
Beginning with Eddie’s success in equitation (it is customary to begin with the less pressing of news lest it be forgotten), a few more leisurely or jocose questions befitting of friends were brought forward, such that the question was broached: “Is Juliana of Georgetown dating?”
Though the question had been posed to increasingly defer the delicate issue of the audition to a more solemn time (as it is said that an archer hoists the bow higher and higher, through few saccades of white, for the arrow to reach its red center), the infanta’s countenance and words had inadvertently answered the question and more. The confessor’s face flustered increasingly as a flared vermilion, not in the sophomoric fashion common to mildly embarrassing trifles (as being questioned for the smell of cigarettes) but one of almost pale accusation; her words lagged behind another, monogrammed and slowly sinuous. After a few lip contractions and glottal spasms, J. delivered a defense she had rehearsed as a contingency to the eventual subject, a monologue about how Dante preferred writing of his twice-seen Beatrice than the woman he perfunctorily places in the Heaven his Muse led him to. This was interspersed with incipient but desisting consolations of Edith that the question could be buried. Nonetheless, she insisted on continuing until the leporine interest of Edith distended into a mild horror. Rather than the debonair profession of a Savoyard priest to Émile, a catechism, or an interesting exegesis on the poetic soul, it was evident to everyone but Juliana herself (who was convinced of the lie) that it had been a confession: the sacrament of intimacy had been vitiated from her by tar which no deluge could wash away; her limbs and every shape of hers was a crime, which in the faculty of theory could be modeled to form a kiss or embrace, but any practice had a grave interdict on Juliana. She had been excommunicated from herself and Edith now knew, though her sorrow could only be evidenced and parsed by Juliana as the general disinterested air of when a subject overextends and must be excused by an apologetic “Je divague.”
Juliana, being rapt withal with a cruelty and a compunction for the act which would proceed from her, accused herself to the dining coeval with words which did not even treat of such. Edith with her misericordious gaze, without words, answered her with sweet repose which denied the croaks of envy and the tragedy preceding it. “Hoc facite in commmemorationem meam,” with this little remembrance, Juliana vit.