by Alex Pheby
Up comes a bounder and a cad, the kind of man who would make free with her and thereby ruin her reputation. He has a goatee and devilish eyes and in his ignorance imagines himself evil in the way that the Devil is, having only the desire to corrupt her in his heart. This is hilarious, since she is corrupted in advance of his arrival to such an extent that whatever corruption he hopes to add would be very minor, if noticeable at all. What does he intend to do? Make love to her outside the legally sanctioned unions of his country? This doesn’t even register, any more than the mating displays of a spread-legged pond skipper register to the perch or the bream that hopes to snap it up. It registers as little as the hunger in a freshwater fish registers to an angler, who may or may not return this fish to the water after he has raised the specimen up and held it thrashing in his hands as he smiles at it, makes a rough estimate of its weight, and then places it in the net to determine its fate later, when he has had his fill of sport. Or to the eel, who, once its teeth have been removed with pliers, will slip half inside and writhe there until it dies, to the sickened fascination of onlookers.
Up he comes and he applies his wiles to her, which are so obvious in their intentions that there is no way they could work on anyone but a child. On a child they would work very well, no doubt – he flatters, then becomes dismissive; he smiles, then frowns; he reaches to touch, and then pulls back, all the time showing his faces. He has a face that is pretty, one that is stern, and one that occupies an intermediate place between the two. The aim, although he may not realise it, is to engage the child in a world in which he is at the centre, rather than those tedious things of her own childish life. He aims to occupy her with the business of pleasing or displeasing him, which he will eventually take indoors, by which time she will not know whether she is coming or going and will have to take her knickers down either way.
But she is not a child, had not been a child even when she was a child, since she was corrupted and evil in the way that Eve was, or her Egyptian precursor deity, or the Babylonian one. She was made to be the focus of evil acts, whether they involve men, or dogs, or eels, and it is because she is evil that she recognises in him the desire to be evil, though, frankly, he will be incapable of it. He earns her derision in the first instance, and makes it so much easier for her to do what she intends to do, and what she intends her little white dog to do.
In Japanese mythology there is a demon who is a whore and also a spider. While the whore aspect plays you plangent and somehow also seductive tones, and flatters your arrogance, the spider aspect wraps you in silk so that later it can play with you. It will put its sting in you when the lights are out, and the liquor is poured, and mother has retired to her bedroom with a migraine. Eventually it will go so far as to appal itself, at which point it will kill you and suck out whatever is inside.
You will feel a strange warmth when you think of this demon, which the dog notices, and this is how you know you are wrong, and what are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Can a spider demon divest itself of the demon? Or the whore? What would be left? It is up to the victim to be wary of such creatures, since demons have no alternative. You, on the other hand, can steer well clear. If you see a whore, or a vulnerable woman parading on the sea front, or an insect in trouble having broken the surface tension of the water, you should resist the temptation to pounce. You will thereby avoid being wrapped in silk and submerged in a net and made subject to knife play while a little white dog fucks you in the arsehole to the appalled amusement of onlookers.
The action is very slow for her, and she has long grown tired of the simmering build up to festivities, but also she knows she must punish herself. Boredom is now the greatest punishment since, in the longueur, she has too much time to think. Even in the evildoer there is the memory of the time before the evil was done and seen to be integral to the self. There is a time in which the child is of the opinion that they are simply existent, rather than existent in a world of evildoing of which they are the prime mover. During periods of intense boredom, when the body does not supply enough excitement to quiet the mind, it is possible, indeed likely, that the mind will revert to this period of the child’s life and therefrom will they experience the world as an innocent will experience it: as horrific, and frightening, and very sad. To the evildoer, this is not ideal, except as a punishment that the weak-minded must suffer, and which can only be alleviated by greater acts of evil that the strong-minded will bring to mind when some act requires greater fortitude of will than such acts usually do. This will be something particularly awful that truly sickens even as it delights. So, she suffers the boredom, knowing that it is what she deserves, and it is constructive in the end anyway.
After what seems like an eternity of this, of sitting on the river bank, flicking the fly a couple of inches at a time over the surface of the water, he kisses her and she reciprocates, guiltily, one eye always for the arrival of her husband, who waits at home.
Now there is a pleasure in waiting, since she knows she has him, regardless of whether he realises it or not. She knows his heart, and while he is no saint, he falls on the side of the line that dictates whether love is possible for him, and it is. This line is clear and obvious to those who are on the other side of it, but it seems not to exist at all to those who are not, and he is not. It is like the surface of the water, or the division between this world and the underworld: one side has no use for it, the other spends its life walking it, looking for people to drag across.
There is an accumulation of events in a life that will prevent the heart from loving, and these events are all of a type – the use of love to commit crimes against the person. Once there are too many of them, then love itself is revealed to be a crime, and it can no longer be seen as anything else, since it exists only to facilitate these other crimes, and hence is a form of entrapment. Similarly, drink or strong drugs. Once they have a hold on one, it is impossible to see the world in the same way, and not simply through intoxication – the world becomes a place which facilitates more drink, more drugs, and those who do not understand this fact are like idiot children to her – they can be used, since they do not have the wherewithal to resist – and are consequently an easy meal.
He will come to love her, since he still has the capacity, and she will use this to commit crimes against him for her own satisfaction, and for the amelioration of her condition that dragging others into it brings. The drug addict revels in company – she will induce others to become addicted and thereby make it easier to facilitate more drugs (company may have money, and company provides a world which sustains itself in the way that many sparks together may sustain a fire, but one alone doesn’t catch, even on the driest kindling).
Now when he returns to Moscow and she loiters wherever she wishes, on the periphery of his life, but at the centre of other people’s lives, where she enacts whatever horrors she may, he will pine gradually for her. He will see her seductive face and body in his dreams. He will see dogs in the street and remember her dog, and think back to the time in Yalta with fondness. The longer this goes on, the more deeply felt will be his pining love for her, and she can entertain herself however she wishes in the meantime.
Eventually they will meet again at the operetta, The Geisha (which is appropriate since there is a woman who loves a goldfish in it), and she will lead him away from her husband. He is in the audience, so they go up and around staircases, she seeming to be unwilling, but really only enjoying the preliminaries. When he claims, as he must, that he loves her and cannot live without her, then she inserts the hook into his lower lip. The hook is barbed, so that even if he has the will to get free, which she is reasonably sure he has not (though one can never tell), he will tear when he pulls away, and rip when he pulls close. She can take pleasure in that, at his little squeak when he realises that actual damage is being done to him, and he might even weep a little, which is delightful!
She will spin some tale which will result in them meeting at an unfamiliar
place – a party, perhaps, which she cannot miss, but which he can attend without drawing suspicion. There she promises to retire with him up into the room which has been set aside for some other purpose and ought not to be occupied. There she will give herself up to the desires that she too has been feeling. When he arrives, she will get him down to his pants and socks, and restrain him with ties to the bed post, and gag him. Then she will leave and give the signal, and in will come the other partygoers, who are all dressed and having drinks, and most of whom are utterly unfamiliar to him, except a few, but he is not sure; has he seen them at the shop? He hopes not because now it is obvious that it is all a trap, although he still can’t believe it. She will step back and pull aside her mask and there will be the face of a spider, slit eyes, eight of them, and distended jaws, but speaking French as well as any native. She will come and pull down his knickers and pull off his bra, at which the crowd will applaud, their rings clinking against their champagne glasses. She will give a short speech about what a good sport he is.
Is there a world in which this is acceptable: a world in which, later that night, or tomorrow, she will be surprised to discover this was not what he wanted, was not what he had intended, something that, had his mouth been free, he would have begged them not to do? Surely not, and now she is whistling for the dog, who needs no encouragement. It has done all this a hundred times, a thousand times, so quickly does it go about its business of mimicking the attentions of a considerate lover. His desperation to be free looks entirely like the writhing of a woman in the throes of passion, and all this is bad enough until, at the clap of his hands, it comes up to her face, where it writhes around on her. The crowd finds this much to its amusement, clapping and laughing, and once this is done, the animal’s thick scent so strong that she would gag if she weren’t gagged already, it returns to the other end, where it does what all men do.
A spider demon would do this, must do this, since this is how it makes its living, but it is also a wonderful reversal of the natural order. Chekhov is to be admired for recognising in this story of modern mores the desire for revenge that lies in the breast of a woman who has been mistreated by men. It is not only that he writes a vengeful woman in this way, but also that he writes for his audience, who are women that are vengeful themselves. It is not easy for a male to empathise with females in this way. He has a reputation for writing situations that accurately represent the modern world, of which women are certainly a part, but it is here, surely, that he surpasses himself in the creation of a demonic champion for all those women who have been spurned, or made to do things that they do not wish to do, or who suffer at the hands of their fathers and uncles in childhood. Cousins, brothers even. He has made a fantasy which allows them some vicarious revenge, though it be nauseating and uncomfortable to read for those of us who have never had cause to wish for the painful sexual humiliation of our foes. Still more uncomfortable is it for those of us who have not come to have our own erotic preferences inscribed in this manner through poor handling as a child, as if one were a duckling who followed by accident a fox rather than the mother duck, and who has the image of it imprinted where the image of our mother ought to be.
We have committed awful crimes ourselves, and so must offset the pleasure we feel in seeing our enemies reduced to the level of objects of sexual mockery against the pleasure we have received in doing precisely those things that we wish our enemies to be punished for. It muddies the waters when one thinks that perhaps those who victimised us were victimised in the way we victimise others, and so won’t someone one day humiliate us, sexually? The only resolution to this being that we could experience it as a form of pleasure if we so chose, and later close the circle by self-immolation, such as that done by Brünnhilde in the ending of the Götterdämmerung.
This was the route taken by the gods as Wagner saw them, which is noble (although a little unfair on the horse) and much more fitting as a subject for opera than whiny songs about goldfishes, with rhymes and word play and jokes about things we don’t understand.
The Egyptian religion is not coherent – contradictory things are believed simultaneously, the same gods appear in different forms, with different functions, rituals are doubled, tripled, to ensure efficacy – they take many routes to the same place, so it is not unusual to see strange and confusing things. But it is coherent in some things – the body, the name, and the protections for the deceased in the afterlife must all be preserved. With this tomb, care had been taken to undermine all that. Though I was squeamish, I reached in and parted the cut linens and there was no sign of the talismans and amulets that would always be placed inside the mummy bindings to protect the corpse – specifically, and I reached in to confirm this, there was no scarab over the heart. Those things necessary to maintain the body intact into the afterlife had been removed.
Carry out the opening of the mouth and eyes, first with the djedft-implement, and then with the finger of electrum
So that the face of the deceased is recognisable in the afterlife, a mask of beaten gold is made in her image, finished and coloured with precious gems. This is laid atop the wrapped body.
LUCIA JOYCE
PARIS, AUGUST 1930
What on earth is Sandy up to now?
He brings in two of those trunks that first-class passengers’ lackeys loaded aboard the Titanic, with his name painted on them in white. alexander calder. One is full of heavy stuff, and has two belts strapped around it to ensure it doesn’t fall open as he drags it up the stairs, and send everything everywhere. He’s very precious about it, this foolishness, more precious than he is about almost anything else, and certainly more precious about it than he is about you, Lucia – you are an audience, and an audience is a wonderful thing, but interchangeable with any other audience. One may find members of an audience almost anywhere, particularly in Paris, which is a city to which people travel in order to be the audience for things, whether buildings, or street performers, or artists, or combinations of the three.
The things in these trunks are unique. That is better and consequently more worthy of the attention than being simply a person who can see and appreciate unique things that someone has spent an awful lot of time over (seemingly for no good reason).
The first thing he pulls out is an elephant. Its trunk is made from the piping one uses to connect a gas supply to a small machine that uses gas – a Bunsen burner, for example, or a portable stove. Unlike the ears, which are a naturalistic grey, the trunk is orange, which does somewhat lessen the effect of verisimilitude. But that isn’t what he’s after, for God’s sake; could you just wait until he’s got the fucking thing set up before you judge?
The second thing is a phonograph, on which he plays some god-awful racket.
There’s a red piece of diaper material and some segments of the arc of a circle – he lays the diaper on the floor in front of him and places the arc segments around it – they are painted with blue triangles, which is pretty. In the middle he puts a ringmaster made of pipe cleaners. The ringmaster is wearing a tuxedo and a tall hat, and has one huge hand. Sandy does his voice in French, introducing the audience to the forthcoming. He says, ‘Mesdames et Messieurs’, which is wrong because you are the only one there, and you are a ‘mademoiselle’ if you are anything. He moves the ringmaster’s hand with string, which, again, is visible, and spoils the effect. If the effect is to make the audience believe that the ringmaster is moving by himself, which of course it isn’t, then it is ruined. Why trouble with the string at all? He marches the ringmaster out of the ring, and it seems as if this is in response to criticism, but apparently it is always like this. You shouldn’t think, Lucia, that your fleeting role as audience to this performance, which he has spent the best part of the evening setting up when you could have been doing something much less focussed on him and his silly games, is pivotal in any way.
Which is the problem.
Once the ringmaster has cleared the arena, burlap is put down, and then a sweet little whi
te horse is brought out. It is made to process the arcs of the circle in a manner much less obtrusive than the way the ringmaster was made to move. There is a handle that gets turned out of eyeshot and there must be some kind of gearing beneath the burlap, because the horse canters gaily around. Then a girl acrobat rides on his back. There is something very affecting about this, but art? You should keep your comments to yourself, or are you being provocative? If so, then he should move this wine out of reach, for both your sakes.
Now there is a negress in a white dress, who is terribly elegant and she has a funny dog, whom she has trained to walk on his back legs. Clever thing! Which? Both.
She has a Pegasus who rides in, and directs, his own carriage. The negress watches imperiously and takes credit for the work of her animals, before making way for two clowns, one of whom is incapable of playing the tuba well, despite a shock of red hair. It is, though, more than capable of smoking a cigarette, which Sandy lights for him with a match from a matchbook. It is the kind of matchbook that you find in a glass bowl on a table in a restaurant or bar, and which you have a habit of taking multiples of, even if you don’t need them. Are you starting a collection? You have no idea what he means.
He smokes the cigarette through the orange tube, and if you don’t look at him, but only at the red-haired clown, it is very funny – almost worth the price of entrance alone. Now he is blowing up a balloon, which you find inordinately amusing, to the point of apoplexy, but when you see Sandy’s face – which has an expression which suggests he is a little put off by your reaction – it sours your pleasure very quickly. You then adopt a studiously bored expression, and urge him to get a bloody move on.
