Travesty Read Online Free Page A

for
     years I have been what the rest of the world would call a normal father, feeling
     only joy for Chantal’s joy and pain for her pain. My
     “perversion” has long since been cauterized. I no longer reverse and
     then exaggerate what Chantal feels. I still enjoy licking smeared chocolate from my
     daughter’s fingers, and do so with perfect impunity. But I am in no way
     responsible for maintaining Chantal’s life, and long ago gave up anticipating
     grief for its loss.
    Do you know that now I am not even tempted to look into the rear-view
     mirror?
    But there, the dashboard settings are now subtly different. You
     cannot be as aware of them as I am, yet for me the mere climbing or falling of
     needles, the sometimes monstrous metamorphosis of tiny, precise numbers behind
     faintly illuminated glass, a droplet traveling too quickly or too slowly through its
     fragile tube—these for me are the essential signs, the true language, always
     precious and treacherous at the same time. And now the settings are different. There
     are the mildest indications that we are beginning to deplete the resources of this
     superb machine, though in our present context those resources are of course
     inexhaustible and in fact will probably account for the grandeur of the sound that
     will wake our poor curate. Nonetheless the life of the car is running out, the end
     of our journey tonight is notas distant as one might think.
     Naturally there are steep grades, sudden turns, even abrasive changes in the
     road’s surface, and still time enough to tax us, preoccupy us, demand the
     utmost from our living selves. And of course you may argue that our experience so
     far has been constant, virginal, that we have heard no variations in the music that
     reaches us from beneath the car; that Chantal has not discovered some poor wounded
     bird imponderably present and expiring on the seat beside her. Yes, things are the
     same, I am not even beginning to feel the strain of driving at this high speed.
    But then our situation is not so very different from my war, as I call
     it, with Honorine’s old-fashioned clock. It is a crude affair that hangs on
     her wall. Nothing but a few pieces of dark wood, a long cord with iron weights at
     either end, a circular ratchet, a horizontal pendulum fixed with wooden cubes like a
     tiny barbell. It is only the bare minimum of a clock, suggesting both the work of a
     child and the skill of some parsimonious medieval craftsman. Small, simple, dark,
     naked. And yet this contraption makes the loudest ticking I have ever heard. And
     slowly, it ticks more slowly, more firmly than any time device created by any of the
     old, bearded lovers of death in the high mountains. Well, I cannot stand that
     ticking. It is unbearable. So at every opportunity I stop the clock. But somehow it
     always starts up again and beats out its relentless unmusical strokes until once
     again I find it so insufferable that I jam its works.
    You know the clock, you say? And you have never bothered to listen to
     the noise it makes? But of courseyou are familiar with
     Honorine’s old clock. Of course you are. What a silly oversight. We are not
     strangers. Far from it. And how like you to be so unconcerned with something that
     gives me the utmost aural pain. But what I mean to say is this: that I hear that
     ticking loudest when the clock is stopped. Exactly. Exactly. It is the war I cannot
     win. But it is a lovely riddle.
    The point is this: that our present situation is like my wife’s
     old clock. The greater the silence, the louder the tick. For us the moment remains
     the same while the hour changes. And isn’t it curious that I really know very
     little about automobiles? I merely drive them well.
    Yes, it was a rabbit. You see it is true, as everyone says, that at
     high speeds you can feel absolutely nothing of the rabbit’s death. But next
     it will rain, I suppose, as if an invisible camera were recording our