Cassandra's girlfriend was an anarchist, with a passion for all things Artaud. She lived on Rue des Haute Chats, found on no city map. The oxcart alley explored a kaleidoscopic terrain. Tall mottled houses leaned over the pavement with such yaw they nearly bumped heads. As Kit and Cassandra trekked into this Caligari-warren, doorways and windows grew vaginal. Ovoid, like the Vesica Piscis, each receding into its unique mystery. Elongated shadows slanted like the camouflaging of a somnambulist dreadnaught lost in the North Sea.
"So who's your friend?" Kit asked.
"Argentine chick named Inez Von Essen."
Cassandra had morphed into something vamp. Kit wasn't sure who inhabited her mind. Louise Brooks as Lulu? Isherwood's Sally Bowles? Something of each, he guessed. When they went out now she wore black. Her raven hair was gummed into church spires. Pale, powdered face. Looked like she'd been spooked by the Headless Horseman on the way to a Mafia funeral.
He wore something different too. Cowboy duds stuffed into a duffle bag, he was now the Laird of Paisley. Carnaby Street had captued his spirit. And his boundless insouciance was infectious. Try as hard as she could to be dark and tragic, he could always bring out a wry comment. She preferred the smirk over the smile.
Kit loved his little enfant terrible most dearly. Even when she would get drunk and prance about the flat, colliding with lava and tiffany lamps, crooning with The Doors: "I'm telling you, I'm telling you, we must die."
Her unread bible remained Kropotkin's Mutual Aid.
*
Kit carried his vinyl trove in a suitcase from Woolworth's. And she carried wine and cheese and summer sausage in a straw beach tote.
Cassandra introduced Kit to a copperskin Patagonian with cheekbones like small stones. He had expected a flaxen haired Spanish-speaking Kraut. He saw two posters on the mauve papered wall. Stills from Dreyer's "The Passion of Jeanne d'Arc." Falconetti and Artaud.
Cassandra broke the ice: "Inez has just returned from a bacchanal on Ibiza."
In a soft voice that undulated like crepe bunting in the wind, Inez told a slightly ribald tale. Half way through it, Kit and Cassandra exchanged winks and nods, agreeing to experience Ibiza for themselves.
*
The great public square in Barcelona could have contained a soccer field. Ancient Spanish brick underfoot gave Kit a profound sense of terra firma. Like strolling troubadours, street vendors sang merrily of their wares. Artisans had set up shop, displaying quaint little crafts on rickety checker tables. Perhaps because he had read so much about Big Brother Franco, Kit sensed the presence of the Civil Guard, unseen, deep in the noonday shadows, watching one and all like the Thought Police. Towering above all, the spires of Gaudi's cathedral-in-progress rose toward heaven, as if prayer to his beloved Holy Family.
Kaw! Kaw! Like so many crows. Black-robed women with gnarled driftwood for faces shrieked to high heaven. Buy the lottery! Buy the lottery!
With her Nikon Cassandra was a whirlwind. Salon photography was her ouvre. She shot in black-and-white with very fast film. Her blowups produced grainy poster-sized images. During interviews she let fly with trendy conceits. Entropy. Particle theory. Things she vaguely understood.
Early on she relied on telephoto, like a sniper unwilling to meet his prey face-to-face on the battlefield. It took a good while to summon courage to move close enough to her subjects to truly capture their life force.
*
She roamed the New York waterfront at night. Stalking those obliterated men who dwelled in whiskey bars. Hardboiled noir, she was Ida Lupino in a belted trenchcoat and a snapbrim chapeau.
The dives never closed, offering souls without manor or hearth a bare-bones shelter from the mortal storm. Dirty. Dimly lighted, they set men to deep introspection, and facile kinship with strangers. Neon beer-signs were things of timeless comfort.
Her initial port-of-call was Czarda's, a wolfden smelling violently of paprika, anise seed and rotgut tokay. After her entrance no one spoke English. A stevedore plied her with a heady red wine affectionately nicknamed Blood of the Bull. (She woke the next day with a blinding hangover and unable to meet her sister for their daily bagelnosh.)
House rule at Czarda's was that all unescorted women had to dance. Cassandra obliged them with a fearsome bellydance learned in a college game. All the men became unglued. Mata Hari in a Turkish
shakedown.
*
On the prowl. Cassandra hunted eyes. Eyes filled with loneliness and despair. She wanted to commingle with souls. Souls crushed by futile labor. People of pointless existence. Godless.
Then she saw him, that first noble man. Sitting on a curb, bogarting a Lucky down to the nub, he could have been the ghost of Albert Camus. He wore an old bomber jacket and faded army fatigues. Diamond-hard eyes challenged the world. Down and out? No way. More the slumming angel.
When he gazed into her eyes his own softened with compassion and pity.
She shot him on the quick draw.
While she capped her lens he disappeared. Drifting into the fog.
The "Portrait of Sisyphus" earned her a showing in the East Village. The gallery was a renovated chow mein palace reeking of cats.
*
Kit watched her swoop into the Spanish crowd, snapping away, isolating a subject and bottling its lifeforce.
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