The Nail in the Eye , livre ebook

Edilivre - William Marazzi

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292 pages

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The Nail in the Eye explores the catastrophic results engendered by dishonesty in love. The setting is China in the 1920s during Chiang Kai-shek's rise to power; the Green Gang godfathers rule the city while the expatriate class is having a ball. Dark clouds are gathering on the Chinese political front when the wealthy American Chinese scholar, Professor Charles Gordon, and Lili, his glamorous young Parisian wife, land in Shanghai. As the months unravel unforeseen events tear off their masks; revealed are their true personalities and sexual preferences.

Sujets

Sexualité

sexualité

Sexualité

Littérature

Fiction

Thriller

Romans de genre

Nouvelles de genre

Thriller psychologique

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Publié par	Edilivre
Date de parution	20 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782334214308
Langue	Français

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0034€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Cet ouvrage a été composé par Edilivre
175, boulevard Anatole France – 93200 Saint-Denis
Tél. : 01 41 62 14 40 – Fax : 01 41 62 14 50
Mail : client@edilivre.com
www.edilivre.com

Tous droits de reproduction, d’adaptation et de traduction,
intégrale ou partielle réservés pour tous pays.

ISBN numérique : 978-2-334-21428-5

© Edilivre, 2018
The Nail in the Eye

Manhattan, spring of 1928.
How am I to concatenate the story of my marriage, a short-lived connubial fiasco? Come to think of it, probably as per my rational wont of logically and sequentially tacking one event to another, much in the fashion of my childhood game when I created pyramids by stacking colorful wooden cubes. Would this pragmatic approach fail to deliver the pith of the matter, I shall adopt the forcible technique devised by the Taoist Immortals, grab the mind’s elusive dragon and hold onto it for the duration of the wild ride to the end of the reconstruction.
I am not a procrastinator, this is not in my nature, but with an intellect stymied by hesitations for days I have sat at my desk, faced the blank page, put my hands to the typewriter to see no action but my fingers freeze on the keys – my cogitation stalled. Stalled by what I pondered. Certainly not by a writer’s block; there is much that I want to tell, words are my business, deductions my skill, history my forte. A deep reservation about my ability to objectively relate the events that have scarred irreversibly my core, routing as they have the course of our lives, has been holding me back. I am not blaming anyone in particular for the calamity that befell us, least of all Peter, as to my wife her memory is burdened with much responsibility in this matter. All of us are guilty in unequal measures; the bill of guilt and pain we share according to the sensitivity of our conscience. Yet are we really to blame? Was our bizarre adventure not the product of the corrupt metropolis in which we lived and less the fruits of our characters? After all it was just the way things were with us in those lawless years overseas. My aim is to lay the ghosts to rest whereby to afford myself a tolerable measure of inner peace in my present seclusion.
In the aftermath of our separation, her death I mean, left alone in the house of my birth, my eyes roam over the familiar features of the sanctum of my writing activities. My entire study is saturated with her presence, her feel quasi palpable in the lustrous Oriental antiques, the exquisite dynastic artifacts, the glossy lacquerwares, the huge royal-blue and ivory pictorial Peking rug surfacing most of the Versailles Panel parquet. Her music anthologies, she categorized by historical periods on the shelves of the Beaux Arts oak bookcases which line the four walls from floor to ceiling. In the recess of the Renaissance-style mantelpiece richly carved in walnut by the Palermo sculptor Salvatore Valenti, she substituted my ancestors’ Early American brass andirons with the pair of bronze Foo firedogs from the fireplace of her bedroom in Shanghai. The myriads of Peking Knot embroidered silks, she selected for the curtains, pillows, and lampshades. She reassembled this Eastern bazaar décor not only in my study but throughout the five floors of this mansion soon after our return from China in 1927.
She is here on my desk, to the left of my typewriter, within my reach, smiling at me out of the Javanese silver frame; a vibrant Lili accoutered in gray chinchilla, creolizing in a chaise longue on the upper deck of the steamer that was taking us to the Far East. The liveried Egyptian steward stands guard over her left shoulder with a plaid folded over one arm and a pillow squashed under the other arm.
Jasmine, lavender, and vanilla: the notes of her perfume stain the air; their wraith taunt my sanity and jumble my remembrance. The exotic memorabilia that fill my surroundings are stamped with her ideal sense of beauty; they vouch that she could not leave behind the land of her birth, her emotional bond to China was holding her fast around the heart, nixing her conscience, blinding her to her own light. She died without knowing who she was. She died before she could mature much like the jinxed caterpillar entrapped in a chrysalis gets strangled by its own yarn in its dream of morphing into butterfly.
Tonight I am spent. My eyes are sore, my mind weighty as lead from too much coaxing; my back aches; sleep scorns me. I switch off the cranes and clouds Goryeo meiping desk lamp, recline in the leather armchair and put my feet up on the small tapestried stool that was my mother’s. Eyelids shut, I feel for the dinky tin of Tiger Balm, the Chinese-Burmese doctor Aw Chu Kin’s salve that I keep at the ready inside the breast pocket of my smoking jacket. I rub the white panacean balm down the sides of my neck and sideburns and apply a touch over my mustache – the tingling cool sensation and the blunt odor of menthol under my nostrils cauterize my sinuses and invigorate my brain. The aroma of Chinese medicinal herbs takes me back to the Ming study, to Peter, to our secret talks and kisses and imaginings exchanged, of the evanescence of love, and of Lili the Snow Queen throning in the center of our stage. Appraised in this light the past tallies poorly, to delusion and treachery above all; and to what lofty ends have we bartered our humanity and the priceless ownership of a clean conscience? The accounting works against us. Our trio hit a clinker – what a lousy performance – how ridiculous and wasteful.
This relaxing posture is conducive to retracing consciously our steps, to better contemplate the stretches of our relationships from different angles and catch the minutest details that have so far escaped my notice; I give in to the flow of memories and know melancholy.
One by one I sort out the stages of our journey chronologically, firstly as a gardener shuffles roughly a heap of raked autumn leaves, in the process releasing not the pleasant scent of adoration but the moist effluvium of the decaying season. And secondly, like an occasional private eye I scrutinize the reverses of the leaves with a magnifying glass. Their color and texture subtleties provoke a new avalanche of discoveries that bears questions of a novel order. These are not the self-centered queries fraught with petty remorse that a lover pummels his sense of right and wrong with as he contemplates the wreckage of his love life. I stopped blaming history and strangers for the events that brought us to this impasse though they definitely had their roles cut out in it. I reached a truce with these foes some time ago, so I fool myself to believe. But the truth of the matter is otherwise of course, the pain is dormant, so slowly decomposing that the faint breath of remembrance revives the burning. The coals of defeat glow beneath a thin layer of ash; I easily find the pain dwelling right there in the glowing red.
Now that she is gone, dropping into my lap the facts of her scheming with the aspergillum of atonement, leaving me to deal with the fallout day in and day out, how do I really feel about her? That’s a tough dig at self-honesty at a time when I ought to be mourning unequivocally the passing of my beloved spouse and not thinking of pardoning beyond the trivia that’s bound to rock any close relationship.
Right after the funeral I avoided looking back; it was too soon, insuperable, I just could not do it. Thus I treated the past as a book laid aside on the library table, left there for further studying posteriorly, in the meanwhile dusted regularly cert but untouched lest a buffer grew between the past and the present that would soften the ache. Then the hour came that I picked it up out of duty and curiosity rather than scruple I admit. I began to read the lines and then between the lines of the opening paragraph and moved on to the next paragraph and so on; when the truth struck home I realized that I was caught in the current of the entire piece as by a trawl – I struggled; in this fashion the scope of my marriage emerged bit by bit and forgotten matters filled the gaps. Put in a nutshell the whole exercise boils down to my having spent about five years with a stranger whose dazzling daily proximity masked an imposter. Marital routine does that to you, fits blinkers to your intuition, blurring your common sense.
This evening the sole auditory distraction that lines the bottom of my introspections is that of the fountain gurgling in the garden – not the luxuriant garden that sheltered our breakfasts and lazy afternoons on the small creek off the Huangpu River in Shanghai’s Foreign Settlement. My present garden is a downgraded version of that Oriental Eden; a small patch of city grass heightened with tulips and rosebushes, flowerbeds topped with a large weeping Japonica cherry tree; tall black bamboos hem the brick wall on the three sides. The color of black bamboo stalks is a deep violet and the leaves the shade of powdered green tea. At the twelfth hour of the night Fifth Avenue is deserted and the plaza fronting the Metropolitan Museum of Art plunged in obscurity.
I love the night; I relish the freedom that night grants my mind to travel uncensored through time and space over limitless distances, free of physical encumbrances. The sensation might be akin to the freedom enjoyed by the departed, minus the gloomy finality of no return to the tangible side.
In contrast the daylight hours are jammed with too many outside impressions which tend to clutter excogitation and impede the clarity of my deliberations. It is a form of pollution that of being made the receptacle of other people’s opinions uninvited, not very deep usually, aimed at you clumsily like blunt arrows shot by beginner archers under no other pretexts than that of healthy social behavior goaded by shallow compassion. These intruders define their existing by the am