“Alors. As I remarked, everything is imported. We don’t even grow our own vegetables. The natives are too lackadaisical.” A hummingbird penetrates the terrace and casually balances on the air. “But our sea-fare is exceptional.”
“Yes and no. I’ve never seen such enormous lobsters. Absolute whales; prehistoric creatures. I ordered one, but it was tasteless as chalk, and so tough to chew that I lost a filling. Like California fruit: splendid to look at, but without flavor.”
She smiles, not happily: “Well, I apologize”—and I regret my criticism, and realize I’m not being very gracious.
“I had lunch at your hotel last week. On the terrace overlooking the pool. I was shocked.”
“How so?”
“By the bathers. The foreign ladies gathered around the pool wearing nothing above and very little below. Do they permit that in your country? Virtually naked women parading themselves?”
“Not in so public a place as a hotel pool.”
“Exactly. And I don’t think it should be condoned here. But of course we can’t afford to annoy the tourists. Have you bothered with any of our tourist attractions?”
“We went yesterday to see the house where Empress Josephine was born.”
“I never advise anyone to visit there. That old man, the curator, what a chatterbox! And I can’t say which is worse—his French or his English or his German. Such a bore. As though the journey getting there weren’t tiring enough.”
Our hummingbird departs. Far off we hear steel-drum bands, tambourines, drunken choirs (“Ce soir, ce soir nous danserons sans chemise, sans pantalons”: Tonight, tonight we dance without shirts, without pants), sounds reminding us that it is Carnival week in Martinique.
“Usually,” she announces, “I leave the island during Carnival. It’s impossible. The racket, the stench.”
When planning for this Martinique experience, which included traveling with three companions, I had not known our visit would coincide with Carnival; as a New Orleans native, I’ve had my fill of such affairs. However, the Martinique variation proved surprisingly vital, spontaneous and vivid as a bomb explosion in a fireworks factory. “We’re enjoying it, my friends and I. Last night there was one marvelous marching group: fifty men carrying black umbrellas and wearing silk tophats and with their torsos painted with phosphorescent skeleton bones.
I love the old ladies with gold-tinsel wigs and sequins pasted all over their faces. And all those men wearing their wives’ white wedding gowns! And the millions of children holding candles, glowing like fireflies. Actually, we did have one near-disaster. We borrowed a car from the hotel, and just as we arrived in Fort-de-France, and were creeping through the midst of the crowds, one of our tires blew out, and immediately we were surrounded by red devils with pitchforks—”
Madame is amused: “Oui. Oui. The little boys who dress as red devils. That goes back centuries.”
“Yes, but they were dancing all over the car. Doing terrific damage. The roof was a positive samba floor. But we couldn’t abandon it, for fear they’d wreck it altogether. So the calmest of my friends, Bob MacBride, volunteered to change the tire then and there. The problem was that he had on a new white linen suit and didn’t want to ruin it.”
“Therefore, he disrobed. Very sensible.”
“At least it was funny. To watch MacBride, who’s quite a solemn sort of fellow, stripped to his briefs and trying to change a tire with Mardi Gras madness swirling around him and red devils jabbing at him with pitchforks. Paper pitchforks, luckily.”
“But Mr. MacBride succeeded.”
“If he hadn’t, I doubt that I’d be here abusing your hospitality.”
“Nothing would have happened. We are not a violent people.”
“Please. I’m not suggesting we were in any danger. It was just—well, part of the fun.”
“Absinthe? Un peu?”
“A mite. Thank you.”
The hummingbird returns.
“Your friend, the composer?”
“Marc Blitzstein.”
“I’ve been thinking. He came here once to dinner. Madame Derain brought him. And Lord Snowdon was here that evening. With his uncle, the Englishman who built all those houses on Mustique—”
“Oliver Messel.”
“Oui. Oui. It was while my husband was still alive. My husband had a fine ear for music. He asked your friend to play the piano. He played some German songs.” She is standing now, moving to and fro, and I am aware of how exquisite her figure is, how ethereal it seems silhouetted inside a frail green lace Parisian dress. “I remember that, yet I can’t recall how he died. Who killed him?”
All the while the black mirror has been lying in my lap, and once more my eyes seek its depths. Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.
“Two sailors.”
“From here? Martinique?”
“No. Two Portuguese sailors off a ship that was in harbor. He met them in a bar. He was here working on an opera, and he’d rented a house. He took them home with him—”
“I do remember. They robbed him and beat him to death. It was dreadful. An appalling tragedy.”
“A tragic accident.” The black mirror mocks me: Why did you say that? It wasn’t an accident.
“But our police caught those sailors. They were tried and sentenced and sent to prison in Guiana. I wonder if they are still there. I might ask Paulot. He would know. After all, he is the First President of the Court of Appeals.”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
“Not matter! Those wretches ought to have been guillotined.”
“No. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them at work in the fields in Haiti, picking bugs off coffee plants.”
Raising my eyes from the mirror’s demonic shine, I notice my hostess has momentarily retreated from the terrace into her shadowy salon. A piano chord echoes, and another. Madame is toying with the same tune. Soon the music lovers assemble, chameleons scarlet, green, lavender, an audience that, lined out on the floor of the terra-cotta terrace, resembles a written arrangement of musical notes. A Mozartean mosaic.
THEN IT ALL CAME DOWN (1979)
Scene: A cell in a maximum-security cell block at San Quentin Prison in California. The cell is furnished with a single cot, and its permanent occupant, Robert Beausoleil, and his visitor are required to sit on it in rather cramped positions. The cell is neat, uncluttered; a well-waxed guitar stands in one corner. But it is late on a winter afternoon, and in the air lingers a chill, even a hint of mist, as though fog from San Francisco Bay had infiltrated the prison itself.
Despite the chill, Beausoleil is shirtless, wearing only a pair of prison-issue denim trousers, and it is clear that he is satisfied with his appearance, his body particularly, which is lithe, feline, in well-toned shape considering that he has been incarcerated more than a decade.
His chest and arms are a panorama of tattooed emblems: feisty dragons, coiled chrysanthemums, uncoiled serpents. He is thought by some to be exceptionally good-looking; he is, but in a rather hustlerish camp-macho style. Not surprisingly, he worked as an actor as a child and appeared in several Hollywood films; later, as a very young man, he was for a while the protégé of Kenneth Anger, the experimental film-maker (Scorpio Rising) and author (Hollywood Babylon); indeed, Anger cast him in the title role of Lucifer Rising, an unfinished film.
Robert Beausoleil, who is now thirty-one, is the real mystery figure of the Charles Manson cult; more to the point—and it’s a point that has never been clearly brought forth in accounts of that tribe—he is the key to the mystery of the homicidal escapades of the so-called Manson family, notably the Sharon Tate–LaBianca murders.
It all began with the murder of Gary Hinman, a middle-aged professional musician who had befriended various members of the Manson brethren and who, unfortunately for him, lived alone in a small isolated house in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles County. Hinman had been tied up and tortured for several days (among other indignities, one of his ears had been severed) before his throat had been mercifully and lastingly slashed. When Hinman’s body, bloated and abuzz with August flies, was discovered, police found bloody graffiti on the walls of his modest house (“Death to Pigs!”)—graffiti similar to the sort soon to be found in the households of Miss Tate and Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca.
However, just a few days prior to the Tate–LaBianca slayings, Robert Beausoleil, caught driving a car that had been the property of the victim, was under arrest and in jail, accused of having murdered the helpless Mr. Hinman. It was then that Manson and his chums, in the hopes of freeing Beausoleil, conceived the notion of committing a series of homicides similar to the Hinman affair; if Beausoleil was still incarcerated at the time of these killings, then how could he be guilty of the Hinman atrocity? Or so the Manson brood reasoned. That is to say, it was out of devotion to “Bobby” Beausoleil that Tex Watson and those cutthroat young ladies, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Hooten, sallied forth on their satanic errands.
RB: Strange. Beausoleil. That’s French. My name is French. It means Beautiful Sun. Fuck. Nobody sees much sun inside this resort. Listen to the foghorns. Like train whistles. Moan, moan. And they’re worse in the summer. Maybe it must be there’s more fog in summer than in winter. Weather. Fuck it, I’m not going anywhere. But just listen. Moan, moan. So what’ve you been up to today?
TC: Just around. Had a little talk with Sirhan.
RB (laughs): Sirhan B. Sirhan. I knew him when they had me up on the Row. He’s a sick guy. He don’t belong here. He ought to be in Atascadero. Want some gum? Yeah, well, you seem to know your way around here pretty good. I was watching
