Armitage

Jean Armitage is a very corrupt ambassador to Italy, and finds himself very out of place as he hunts for a certain telephone.

Wars have a cunning way of overriding the days just before them. In the reflection, the thinkers come out from their fox-holes to ponder and philosophize among the rubble, those days and months and years are so volatile and calamitous and filled with noise and gravity which the thinkers condition us to forget. Yes, but that is so that the war may have more importance, you see, yes, yes, yes, but yes, yes but still …  was it ever so difficult to see the hidden machinery of the marching dreadnought, drumming away towards the day the conflict breaks? Surely there was once a world laid beneath the massive battle-map that covered it all exactly, one to one, when there were feelings rising up through the tears and events lifting up the edges, briefly, and a certain observant few see things they were not meant to …

 

A certain French ambassador to Italy, whose job devotion one might rightly describe as ‘corrupt’ or at the very least ‘wholly unenthusiastic’, wonders if he lives as one of these observant few, speculates his grim perceptibility, dreading so, but he does not show it outward. The passerby in this evening’s tide of faces, Parisian and uniform amid the sloughing crowds, eyes glazed with the purpling sky, hear coming the rapt, jocular rhythm of the obnoxiously gilded walking cane attached to one Jean Armitage, gray with his thick notebook clasped under his free arm like an artillery shell stolen from some modest but appropriately brutal conflict in northeastern Italy. Armitage hopes the disposition of his notebook is not so forthright, disdained to perfect his demeanor, complete his disguise, obfuscate the last sign of his betrayal of his country. He is not very good at his career, to negotiate virtually all of France’s parasitic relations with Giolitti’s crumbling biscotti of a Prime Ministry, nor does he particularly wish to see the best interests of magnificent France realized any more than he does to see a not-too-hot cappuccino upon his workdesk, perhaps with cinnamon today … but his workdesk is back in le Petite Couronne, and that is not where he must walk at this moment, cane clicking expertly, and deliberately so. Armitage has to be anywhere but there, simply not present at his desk this evening, anywhere for a covert and overdue meeting with a telephone. But where will he go? The Italians, he recalls, have a word for it, erreri, to wander with no destination in mind, save a few forbidden ones.

 

Armitage, wanderer, looks down. All of the sidewalks in Paris are cobblestones, slick and dark with centuries of use, some of them dug up from the old Roman roads, obstinately, he is sure. For bizarre anachronisms, the black path of stones responds amicably beneath his cane and worn chaussures, the grip augmented perhaps with the grand history that grips to it. In this nighttime, the pallid moonlight bests the post-sunset amethyst to kiss each stone with a sinister sheen.  There is a devilish quality to them all, numerous and jumbled up into anonymity all throughout the city, that dares to go against the day, sprawling over Paris and back into time, before instant communication could be made over a wire, before light could be summoned from a glass and switch, before industry came and scattered the wealth, before the Revolution, before the Christians and their Popes, before befores, when civilization shifted with the softest of whispers instead of the thunderous shouts it trumpets today. Or how it has been loudening, each one of those befores. How it still wants to … even now … screaming vociferous murder into his ears, screaming from across the sky on those peculiar red nights …

 

 

He recalls the painting, Munch’s psychotic brushstrokes scorching the atmosphere itself into the twisted sexless figure, clawing at itself for the supreme howl of cosmic agony, rage, sadness, the delta point crossed in an instant, der shriek … and it was barely two decades old. That, he coughed once to Geri, is a troublingly contemporary doomsday. My friend, mio amico, those vast and intertwining ropes of fate are tightening to a knot! Click, click, pause. There is the devil Armitage sees gleaming from the cobblestones, the arcane fires craving to scorch again, to leap out of Munch’s red shriek, from behind Gauguin’s savages, underneath le Grec’s melted Toledo … the knot grips endlessly, churning on the cords until the omega, when they shall all rupture in flames or slip free in rapture, the answer is in the paint … Armitage’s horror coils within. The strokes of death are accelerating, across Paris, across the World.

 

And they must not cross Italy. Armitage spies the marché from across the next plaza, they well have that telephone, from there he will dial Geri in the Uffizi. Italy, the creative compass of humanity for centuries, the artforge of civilization, will need Armitage very soon. But first, he growls, cane clicking ever closer towards that telephone, likely still all in brass and gilded tribute to its magic, Italy will need convincing. Armitage’ll show Geri the knot, that’s the trump card, ultimately, and he’ll be forced to admit it, let himself hear the same scream. The proof is in the paint, Geri, he could say, even if the paints were not quite so cognizant. Armitage ambles towards the marché and telephone. Time will tell.