by Tanith Lee
Her father had been a priest. That is to say, was suspected of being one. Her mother’s husband, a bookseller, had caused them to exist in a strange, dim gray artery of a street, where he crouched over his wares, and drank heavily, selling virtually nothing. Into this grim life, somewhere in the intervals of boiling turnip soup from half rotted vegetables gleaned off the market floor, and applying ointment to the bruises he gave her, Valmé’s mother absorbed a child. The only man she might have been said to spend time with (including her husband) was the priest. His church stood minutes away from the apartment above the bookshop in the artery. He was old, but very strong, and things had been said of him, once or twice. Valmé’s mother’s husband suspected some discrepancy, and unoriginally struck her, but she too was strong, and he weak. That his wife carried the bastard of another man, probably a religious one, fueled the drunken bookseller’s self-pity. He was enabled to become for himself a character in one of the books upon which he crouched like a gargoyle on architecture. “You know what she has done to me,” he would say to fellow drinkers in the tavern. Meanwhile the woman had instinctively gathered about herself the impoverished and tangible wives of the district, who, as they assisted her over her pregnancy, became a fortress of chignons, skirts, and aprons. Giving birth amid a thorn hedge of women, she had nothing to fear but the dangers of parturition, and these her tough body refused.
The child, Valmé, emerged then into this world where women were reality, and men soulless creatures, monsters, myths.
Of course, the drunkard hated the child that was not his, but some indefinable moral sense kept him off her in the first six months. By the moment, therefore, when, at her baby’s fractious crying, he turned on her, his arm upraised, the woman had reached a momentum. “Touch her, I’ll kill you,” she said, and in her hand was the knife from the turnips. As he moved, however, she did not after all stab him to death, which would have sent her elsewhere, and so deprived her child, she caught him instead a blow with the side of her fist on his nose. It bled, he fell. And lying on the floor, he vowed to see to her. But Valmé’s mother answered, “No, we’ll have an end to that. I’ve had enough. What are you, you sniveling bottle? What have you ever done for us that gives you the right of violence over me, or her?” “Not given her to you, surely,” he said, through the blood. At that she laughed. “No, squeeze you and only cognac would come out. Think what you like,” she said, “touch her and you’ll never touch another thing in your life. They’ll have you out in a box.” She was strong, he weak, and this, at that time, enough.
It would come about, in later years, that the drunkard, by then reduced to total sponge, would fawn on his wife in company and out of it, praising her, saying she was his rock, saying he would be dead but for her, and perhaps all this might be said to be true. He never again raised his hand to her, or the child. He ceased to curse her quickly too, for that alone did not satisfy. He dropped easily into the role of the pathetic, guilty, and useless, surviving on the kindness of his wife. For her part, she went on feeding him and securing his clothes, she took in sewing and even began to sell cheap novels in the shop (from such works he hid in fear), thereby making an income for them all to live on.
Valmé had the little schooling that the nuns could give her. She showed an interest at six or seven in the Virgin. She began to draw the Virgin, taking strange, lovely, unblasphemous liberties with her garments and symbols. The drawings were remarkable, said the proud nuns and the proud mother, in the way partial teachers and parents always do. But it happened that, in the case of Valmé, they were correct.
At twelve years, the scrimping and saving of her mother put Valmé into a school of art across the river in the old Scholars’ Quarter. Among the quantity of pupils, only five were females. On this distinction, most of them rose and sank, but Valmé paid no attention to anything that did not have to do with her work. Her reading improved, that she might read books on her subject, while to her tabulated species of the male was added one other, the Tutor. Those whose tuition she found valuable became nearly real, for Valmé. The others, like the pupils, she dismissed. None of that made her popular. But in the end this did not matter. For once, the best was also the most influential. These powers protected her and, at the age of fifteen, she emerged from the cocoon with remunerative and creative work already before her.
Five years after this she was able to buy for her mother a modest house in the hills above the City. Here the dregs of the father swiftly flowed away, mopped up finally by the healthful air, the pure food, the gentle lowing of cows and white meandering of sheep. For herself, Valmé acquired her apartment at the canal, her reputation as an artist, her consolidated and pleasing life. For pleasant it was. She liked to be alone, for her solitude was never unpopulated by anything except the human race. The aspirations she had observed in other women – to be fêted, to be adored, to mate and to produce small toy replicas of themselves – Valmé lacked. She did not even deposit in her room a cat, to act as surrogate for these things, although she was fond of cats, spoke to them on the streets, and fed such strays as occasionally haunted the bank of the canal.
One morning she had gone to church, as she did three or four times a year, to absorb the embers of windows, the music, the genuine excellence and truth of the teachings of Christ – which did not affect her in any way but the intellectual, as a perfect mathematic would the mathematician. Coming out of the Temple-Church, she was met by a tall and handsome young man in exquisite clothing. He delighted her eye. She stopped and allowed him to speak to her. Economically, he apologized for his approach, expressed a desire to walk with her, and being permitted this, gradually, another desire to take her to dine. Valmé had been propositioned by one or two others, though possibly by more than she had noticed. She had fobbed them all off. Now it seemed to her that perhaps an affair might be of value to her, extending her perceptions. To his riches she was, and remained, impervious. She saw no want of them, she had what she needed. As for his looks, although they had arrested her, as a masterful painting would have done, they evoked no fleshly response: She could only, if she had to, place Michael Zwarian in the category of the Mythical Man. She did not think he would like her for long, and was surprised when he neither tired of her nor imposed upon her. For his tact in every area of their relationship she came to value him somewhat. But only for himself. If he had left her, she would not have mourned. He did not enhance her life, merely added to it elements she felt she did not properly require, and sometimes, momentarily, he cluttered her. But he deserved only good of her, like her mother, and to both she was dutiful, the one because she was real, and the other because he tried to be.
She had been – the accepted term – Zwarian’s “mistress” for two years when they were strolling one day together through the long traceries of shops below the cathedral. It was his intent to buy her a present, hers to frustrate him. Already there was a basket of dark grapes, but on this they feasted together. At the bangles, silks, even at the books, she stared as if such items were incongruous. “You’d let me think you live in a cave,” he said. “So I do,” she said. He was subtly persuading her toward a place where artistic materials were sold. Here she might give in. He did not want to buy for her such stuff, but would consent if she would. Then, under an awning, there was a pheomenon, a glass window full of glass. It was so odd, it caught her eye, Next, the colors, clear, smoky, chemical, and ethereal at once. “Something here?” he asked her gently. “No,” she said, even more gently, for he made her impatient. “But to paint such a thing.”
So they stood gazing at goblets and vases sucked out of the sky and the river, from various drinks and ichors, some mingled.
It was not allowed, to go into the shop. She would be off if he suggested it.
Finally, she said, “Michael, what is that? Isn’t it a knife made of glass?”
“Yes,” he said.
“But what use could it be?”
“A glass dagger,” he said. “I imagine one would be
able to kill an enemy with it.”
The dagger of glass lay on a cushion of black plush. Where the other objects of the display were made of colored, perhaps liquid, emissions, this one thing had been cut from sheer air. It was hard, not fluid. Yet, colorless, it was hardly there. She could not see any ordinariness in it, for first of all she had assessed its parable, though not to understand the meaning.
“This you’d like,” said Zwarian softly. “Let me –”
“No, of course not. You’re already too generous. No. But tell me about it.”
“I don’t know anything. Shall I find out?”
“I’m so thirsty,” she said, and turned from the window.
So he must buy her crushed fruits in a common glass, not the paradox. That once, he went against her. Part of his tact maybe, to judge where he could overstep the mark, or rather what might be essential enough she must accept.… Luckily no price had been displayed on the dagger. It was costly. Probably she would guess, but had not seen.
His note, which accompanied his gift, relayed this:
“The proprietor was vocal on the dagger. A century ago they were, he said, in vogue at Rome and Venice, the weapons of assassins. The blade kills, much as a shard of bottle glass can. The top and hilt can then be smashed with a stick, leaving slight evidence to the undiscerning. At least two hundred skeletons, according to my informant, lie in Italianate mausoleums, with such glass blades wedged between the ribs, and lacking a handle. Dearest, be careful of the point, which really is quite sharp.”
It was this, then, this dagger made of harsh and tactile air, which Valmé had taken from its box and lifted up into the light, flashing and dying, like a flame.
Why should that be so? She had never attempted to paint the dagger. She kept it close. Had it become for her a cipher of what her lover should have been? Not necessarily noble, handsome, or wealthy, but an enigma, transparent and merciless, blazing and incalculable, the instrument of sudden death, and mystery?
“You’ll come to the theater?”
“Perhaps,” he said, because they hemmed him in. He did not want to go. A walk along the river alone in the dull lamplight would have agreed with him better.
“Yshtar is singing in the comedy.”
He had heard of Yshtar (who, as was the fashion now among artists and performers, went by one name only).
“Very pretty, I believe.”
“Oh, a sensation. Not a hoyden. A woman of class. A lovely voice, and the whitest arms, palest hair. They say she’s parted from Dauvin. Naturally, how could that grocer keep her?”
At the Goddess of Comedy they watched two acts of a play with songs. Michael Zwarian was bored and restless, but his good manners kept him by his companions. In the intervals, they drank champagne. In the third act, Yshtar appeared. She portrayed a Roman priestess in a charming, inaccurate costume, whose main function was to bare her arms, feet, ankles, and half her breasts. She was indeed beautiful, an amazement, and with a delightful voice. Zwarian was impressed by her, as most of the City had been since her advent half a year before. He had never seen her, as it were, alive, although he had read of her in the journals, most especially the flighty Weathervane, whose proprietor was said to be one of her patrons.
“We’ll go backstage before the last act,” said Delorette. He knew Yshtar, at least had met her. She was, he said, yet more wonderful when seen close to.
If Zwarian felt anything at this moment, as he was towed behind the towering bulwarks of the sets into the warren of the hinder stage, it was curiosity. He was not considering the actress Yshtar as a woman, or even a female creature. She was a marvelous waxwork that lived.
Her dressing room was cramped and shabby, crowded with stained mirrors and fly-blown, candle-spotted velvet, but freshened by torrents of flowers sent up that very evening by admirers.
The maid admitted them, reminding Zwarian of the brothels of which he had heard but to which he had never had recourse. It amused him, and also he felt sorry for the singer. She was like a poor lily put out for insects to crawl over and try to feed on.
Then she emerged from behind a partition.
She was clad in a satin dressing gown that fulfilled the rules of decorum as the costume had not. Her hair was still pinned up in the Roman mode, and her face was garishly plastered with the cosmetics demanded by her role. Through this mask the gorgeous, flawless sculpture of her face and neck, her lips and eyes, looked out like unsullied swans from a thicket.
“Gentlemen,” she said. She appeared neither pleased nor offended, in fact immune, but kind, mild. She would not hurt them if they observed the boundaries.
It was easy to be taken with the actress Yshtar. She favored none of them especially, was gracious to all. She declined to have supper with Delorette, although he was so insistent. (She allowed Gissot to joke about writing a play for her.) Only as they were leaving, just before the last act, giving her merely five minutes to don her concluding costume – she did not, either, try the trick of putting it on behind the partition in their presence – only then did she offer Zwarian the faintest and most insubstantial smile.
He stayed for the last act. As he watched her on the stage, he wondered if it would be possible to strike a bargain with her. She was, he thought, primarily a woman of business. She had no heart, only some dainty, strong silver clockwork that ticked away in its place. Her own talents would gain her whatever it was she desired. But she would presumably like money, provided it were coated with delicacy, offered via a placid etiquette, to match her own.
He grasped exactly the spirit of Valmé’s past from the very little she had told him. She had had to work for everything she found valuable. She had never had to work for the attentions of Michael Zwarian.
The affair of Yshtar with Michael Zwarian was somewhat talked of, as was inevitable. (Valmé’s attachment to him had scarcely been noticed.) Meanwhile, he did not see Valmé, although he sent her a very courteous letter, explaining that although he would not be intruding on her time, he was, should she want his assistance, always her servant and her friend. With the letter he sent no form of money or expensive present, which she would have disliked, only a basket of fruit and flowers. This the artist painted. In reply she sent him a letter even more courteous than his own. If he had tried to frighten her with the loud whiff of desertion, she seemed not to mind it. She thought of him most warmly, she said, and with gratitude for his many generosities. She did not think she would need to call upon his assistance, but as a friend she would always remember him, and wished him well as such.
Zwarian was not yet daunted. He had expected nothing else. Nevertheless, even expecting nothing else, perhaps he had hoped for something else. Would Valmé, hearing of his attentions to the actress, fastidiously brush him off the cuff of her life? He did not actually enjoy the sense of manipulating her. He became impatient, and sequentially, a few hours after, the lover of Yshtar.
There was a summer storm of great force. The sky cracked and roared and pieces of it seemed to fall dazzling in the canal. Seen through the casement wavered by the downpour, the water boiled in the rain, while on the skylight of the artist’s studio a herd of crystal beasts galloped ceaselessly by.
She had lit the lamps, it grew so dark. And yet the energy of the tempest, penetrating like a germ, sizzled in the air. Restlessly she paced from the fluttering dimness of the studio to the angle of the bedroom, longing perhaps to run out into the cauldron of wet and galvanism. But some veneer of decorum did not let her now, when three years before, probably, she would have had no scruple.
How strange. Surely she had avoided convention. What had changed her? Could it be her short time with Zwarian had done this? Insidious, then, maybe to be feared. It was as well he had, after all, grown tired of her and taken up with his actress.
The rain stabbed down. It wounded the canal over and over.
Valmé conceded that she was becoming absorbed by the idea of the woman called Yshtar. She found she thought of her often, and
never having seen her, formulated idle pictures, both mental and on paper, of her appearance from description. There was, it seemed to Valmé, a momentary intimacy between them. For Zwarian had known the flesh of Valmé, and now embraced the flesh of Yshtar, and this provided an infallible, if curious, link, as though indeed the two women had lain together face to face and breast to breast, naked on a bed. There was to this nothing either sensual or homosexual. Yet it was immediate, and constant. How can a man take the impress of a lover and not carry away some of it, like the mark a shell will leave in sand, which the new consort must sense stroke against her, as they couple?
Perhaps she should visit the theater, and watch Yshtar at her trade. That would be difficult, however, without an escort – and of course now she had none. Besides the vapid sugar of the plays in which Yshtar practiced did not appeal to Valmé.
The rain continued through the night. It washed the heat from Paradys, down her towers, along her roofs and walls, and through her gutters, Unseasonably cool, the morning.
