Javant Biarujia


THE COCTELIEN HOUR

«Pourqoui, dit-il, chercher midi à quatorze heures? ...»
— Jean Cocteau

LEGIONNAIRE, a paramilitary trooper
JEAN MARAIS, an actor
JEAN COCTEAU, a poet
SECOND SOLDIER
OPIUM, a prophet (unseen)

   Rue de Bourgogne, just below the Assemblée Nationale: an olive-granite van with grilled windows and rows of doors that can fly open all at once; a paramilitary trooper of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité slouches against the wall, his hieroglyphical eyes half-closed, like a stranger’s face on a pillow or in a drawing: «Le CoRpS endormi»; his smooth organ-pipe neck and nipples like tacks are exposed; Gauloise smoke filters through his nostrils; cruelty is described in his lips; his helmet, visor up, encasques the curls on his head; his respiratory apparatus dangles against the razor-sharp teeth of his exposed flies; the barrel of his automatic rifle is pointed up; his gestures, skin, looks (profound boredom), gait, are those of a garter-snake.
     COCTEAU and MARAIS stroll by.

     LEGIONNAIRE
  (Slouching back against the wall, addressing COCTEAU.)
Is that a copy of Ars amatoria in your breast pocket? Of course, I’m no expert on callipygean dialectics. Technopaegnia’s more my forte.
  (The SECOND SOLDIER smiles. MARAIS pretends to hand the LEGIONNAIRE a baguette, who then takes it to be a pun on braguette [front slit or fly] and not on ram-rod.)
Who’s lifted my cavendish? There was a truncheon strapped to my belt. Who’s made off with my cigarettes? There were nine cigarettes left in the pack.

     MARAIS
Do you have a light?
  (Aside.)
That baton-cosh-thyrsus-totem-club-caduceus-wielding dildo!

     LEGIONNAIRE
  (Sarcastically, having heard the aside.)
That scent is Hermès, isn’t it: civet, musk tonquin, castoreum, costus — and ambrette seeds. Am I right?

     COCTEAU
There’s no olfaction for addicts. None. It’s an absolute flop. Why I don’t just give it up, I don’t know. Do you? I was an ambulance driver at the front, you know. My task was to lift the troops’ shirt fronts and, with what looked like a bicycle pump, drench them in delousing powder. I remember one boy very well: through his buttonless flies came a great puff of whiteness. — Why don’t you let the bird sing with my fingers beneath your leather strapontins? — You know, your muscles, your broad shoulders, solicit the slyest manoeuvres. — Show us your aculeated medals! — Well, your accumulated files, then; it can be unofficial. — Cold fish, cold fish, I must say. — No, impotence is the smoker’s haunt. You really are a disciplined but audacious sight. — Ah, your nipples have begun to stiffen at last! A metaphoric rise to flame. I was beginning to think your panoply was empty. No, yours is the quatch-buttock of the glutton. (I’m speaking as a poet: quarter-back to you.) How full of oysters, this basket of yours! You could spoon all of today’s torsos with that. I dare not kiss you.
  (He reads MARAIS’ next line and addresses it.)
A manifestation of young foreign students here? You’re quite the cavaliere servente, the souteneur chevelu, aren’t you? Well, what you’re telling me is, there are not enough periprocts and pubescents to go round. Things were different in the war: there was a continual parade of soldiers, sailors, warriors, officers and younger men in the ranks to be had for the asking. A whole army, in fact.
   (He turns to the SECOND SOLDIER.)
Thank Napoléon for the code! Hold me in your arms. Arrest me!
   (The SECOND SOLDIER ignores him. He turns back to the LEGIONNAIRE.)
Légionnaire! Legionary! Command your men! Don’t they understand demarcations? There were boîtes and clubs, clubs and boxes. There were boxers and wrestlers. Flute-playing lutteurs.... Zut!
   (The LEGIONNAIRE, with arms outstretched, shields the civvie COCTEAU. MARAIS applies a modicum of mascara to his eye-lashes whilst the SECOND SOLDIER agitprops three or four twentyish he-shes, who concocteau for themselves a scumbled identity. He addresses the unseen OPIUM.)
So! your laisser-baiser attitude, Opium, finally got you in the soup. I’ll bach it. You’ll see. I’ll find another roommate. You’re not the only budgerigar in Malebolge. Yes, I will kiss your couilles goodbye. There, I said it. Didn’t I? I said it. Ah! Better still, I’ll move out of this pigsty.... The guard has fallen off his perch. Today’s toys are so terrible, so full of calumny and cholera. Why is it so? So apt it should be in this era of sit-ins! Saliva and paulo-post-future sweat, Opium! Why do rubber gloves render me unheard? Art lovers and audiences dislike distractions: they laugh at a pair of forgotten rubber gloves when I’m being deadly serious. Expensive india-rubber. And your influence, that was once like a ready pleasure, removes me from society no longer; it does nothing now. How could I go on without rejecting you ... ? But I’ve had it up to here with your neolojissoms, Opium. I have rejected your rough cells as you have rejected me. Your vicious pronunciations, your pataquès, have taken their revenge. You played on me as on a word, as on a daedal dido, me, Cocteau, Marais’s friend, soldiers’ panel! Well fiddle-de-dee, I adored Desbordes, but you, you mean nothing to me. You’re getting in the way and I’m getting away with creating a farce in which soldiers look like angels as they sleep. Oedipal Rex. Members of the jury, I am incapable of writing a play and putting it on for or against something. Call it an extempore Morse on a blood-filled mouth, the dots followed by longer breaths. It was the changing light full of sandiver and analysands that so changed Europe, not free verse. There is nothing in the world so naked as the courtroom. There is nothing in the world so overdressed as liberation. In the whole world, there is nothing so démodé as poets’ hyperbole. The Public Prosecutor should have radicated his point long ago, and when the other Authority was compromised, should have counselled the clarity of the rules. Ah! Have you deeply transformed me, Opium? Behind time, hands’ permissiveness makes a full confession. The good légionnaire will take down my statement. Well, you have annihilated your aesthetic, Opium, but me, you haven’t annihilated me. If you had’ve quoted me you would’ve ruined me. I know you, Opium, and if you know what a safe vacuum is, what is? Oh, how you were accreted in my upturned eyelids! I still waited for you to come, Opium.... I somehow flourished, as flowers do; and I forgot to bury the mirrors. Neither snapdragons nor mercury could have spared my life. What shall I do now, Opium? Neither my inventions nor the police who burst in on them can whisper time out of our hands. I was an addict, and you did addict me. I was my own subject, and you did subject me to the same nausea. I was bankrupt, and you did bankrupt me with combinations of every turned page.... Aha! You don’t think I can break it off, Opium? Serenely taunt me as much as you will. Well, now that I’m cured, the poems can leave of their own accord and pantoums of air shall invade dexterity’s loose threads like Mayakovsky’s pantaloons. Ah, Opium, Opium, my next work will be a travesty.

     LEGIONNAIRE
  (Addressing MARAIS.)
He is a twichild, your catamite; he is an ingle if not an Englishman.

     MARAIS
Bien entendu. We are dehors, centurion.

     COCTEAU
  (Interjecting.)
Centaur!

     MARAIS
Horseshit! Only the adult eye discerns the composite parts. Christ, you’re confusing the two.

     SECOND SOLDIER
  (Rising, petulantly.)
Ah! There speaks the true pédé! It’s clyster clear to me now! Non mi rompere le scatole! Time, gentlemen, for some ballistics. My bullets yearn for a dripping wound. Ammo in ano. Get down and lick the suint off my hide! Suck the sweat off my probe! Let’s see what tapette paradise looks like. The cure is just beginning.

     THE EYE OF COCTEAU
Au revoir, mes enfants. Adieu.
  (The SECOND SOLDIER rushes forward and attempts to crush COCTEAU, opiomane, beneath his riot shield.)

 
 
 
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