The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

by Rikki Ducornet

  “The loss of the world has me reeling with longing. Locked away, I have come to know that the world is a food; it nourishes us. Without it, the soul starves. I feel like Gulliver caged among giants; sprawling in all directions, abundance is unattainable. You say they call me ‘the Apostle of Nothingness.’ But I am, if I am anything, ‘the Apostle of Muchness,’ ‘the High Pope of Plenty and of Excess in Everything.’ And if all my rights have been taken from me but one—the right to dream—I dream excessively. If they don’t like it, they will have to chop off my head!

  “My pen is the key to a fantastic bordello, and once the gate is opened, it ejaculates a bloody ink. The virgin paper set to shriek evokes worlds heretofore unknown: eruptive, incorruptible, suffocating.”

  —And brutal.

  —Yes, citizen. As brutal as the world burning around us. Sade offers a mirror. I dare you to have the courage to gaze into it. [The fan-maker has totally recovered her aplomb. She is standing with her hands on her hips.]

  —You dare me? [He laughs, bitterly.] Else—

  —Else perish, perhaps.

  —Mark my words, citizen. It is you who shall do the perishing. Now. Continue without irony, if you please. What else did Sade say?

  —He said: [undaunted, raising her voice:] “And I don’t give a fuck if my inventions, unlike the guillotine, are not ‘useful.’” Sade is after new thoughts, you see. Thoughts no one has ever set to paper. Radical thoughts. “I am not simply dusting off the furniture!” he said. “When my pen starts thrashing, it’s like fucking a whore in the den of a famished lion. The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted. I am after Vertigo,” Sade said. “I am wanting a world in which the Forbidden Fruit is ascendant and rises just as the Old Laws fall—yes! Even the Law of Gravity.”

  Sade was educated by the Jesuits, who, as you must know, punish their charges—and often violently—for misdemeanors large and small, real and imaginary. One particularly crazed master, whom the students called “the Broom,” forced his boys to stand in a circle and thrash one another with whatever was at hand, thus forming an infernal circle, what Sade calls “the Broom’s Infernal Machine.” “It seemed to me,” Sade said, “that we had become—the Broom, the other boys, and I—a gear in the diabolic mechanism that makes the world spin. Night after night, the Broom sent us to our beds in pain, the lower part of our bodies covered with welts. Night after night, I tossed about in a high fever caused by rage and humiliation: a murderous rage. We had heard of a Jesuit’s throat being slashed by a boy who could bear no more the blows he received. Among ourselves, we spoke of little else.

  “It seemed to me that the functioning of the universe—planets in orbit about the sun, and moons about the planets—depended upon the torture inflicted upon us. I was convinced that the machine was eternal, that the torture would never end, that its end would cause the world to end. And then I wanted that desperately: wanted the world to end in a cataclysm of fire!” Already then, Sade, like Landa, longed for a holocaust.

  “The night I read the transcripts you brought me of the case against Landa,” Sade continued, “and reviewed the outrages he had perpetrated in the Yucatán, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I was once again taking part in the Broom’s circle of fire. As I and the other boys ran howling like beasts, weeping and foaming, we produced so much heat, so much perpetual heat, that suddenly the Broom’s robes caught fire, the floor and walls caught fire, and then we, too, were burning! We formed a ball of flame that soared up into the sky: yellow and red, the color of pus and blood.

  “Beneath us a crowd had gathered, everyone gazing up with astonishment. ‘A second sun!’ they cried. ‘What will become of us?’ An astronomer was called and arrived riding a broom. I stood among the crowd and saw that the stars on his peaked hat were peeling off. Pointing at the two suns with his wand, he shouted stridently: ‘Let us now speculate upon the inevitable disaster!’

  “I believe,” Sade said to me, “that thanks to this dream I have seen the face of Truth. A hideous face, a monstrous face, eaten away by spite. Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good. All that is left is a stench at the bottom of a tomb.”

  He told me: “I have seen a beauty’s cunt worn like a fur collar, seen the bodies of wags, innocent of every crime but vanity, cut into pieces and these carried aloft like filthy flags up and down the streets of Paris. I have seen carts in the night taking bodies to graves marked only by a stench. And I ask myself again and again: Is this the virtuous violence of which we dreamed? But what else could we expect from the rabble that continues to believe in warlocks and wizards and leper kings who bathe in the blood of babes, and whispers that the nobility stuffs itself on roasted peasant boys—an extravagant piece of nonsense when you consider that the famished peasants don’t have a spoonful of marrow or meat to be found on them anywhere but, perhaps, between their ears.”

  Sade said to me just the other day: “Everything is clear now. The plan has always been to expel me first and eat me after. In other words, like a dog, the Revolution eats its own droppings, and it is only a matter of time before I will be on my knees with my own head between its jaws. Until then I dream the same dreams as Landa, that bastard son of the Inquisition. I share that monster’s fever; I am damned with the same singularity.

  “The devastation ahead is immeasurable. I long for it night and day. Like Landa,” he concluded, “I long for the disappearance of things.”

  Three

  —Do you continue to work on the Rue de Grenelle?

  —Several years after my apprenticeship was completed, I found a shop on the Rue du Bout-du-Monde and set up on my own. The place had seen the production of marzipan and still smelled of sugar and almonds. Better still, a swan was carved above the door. The first thing I did was to make a sign of tin in the shape of a fan. This I painted with a picture of a red swan and hung over the street. I hired a girl to build the skeletons (for by then the guild rules had changed) and hired another, a beggar and an orphan whose father had died of beriberi and whose mother of chagrin, and who, once her face was scrubbed, proved dazzling. She was quick as a whip and became a great favorite, for she knew when and to whom to show the fan with double meanings, the fan with two faces or three. She was always smiling, and this is why Sade called her La Fentine—a name she assumes to this day with good humor, as she does all else.

  “It’s a clean living,” La Fentine says of fan-making. “You spend the day flirting without risk, you drink all the tea you want, and you never, ever need to stand about in the wind and rain. All sorts come into the atelier, but barbers never do, nor beggars. So I can forget that once, because of ill fortune, I lived in the gutter like a dog.”

  La Fentine knew how to read the eyes of the wealthy libertine in search of rarities, and the secret thoughts of the inexperienced maiden who wants a fan with which to inflame the youth she desires. My atelier is called The Red Swan at the World’s End, and my motto, painted in a fair red color above the door, is:

  Here Beauty and Laughter

  Rule all day and after

  I specialize in eccentricities, in artificial magic—such as anamorphic erotica—and imaginary landscapes: Chinese pyramids and jungle temples, a map of the world under water, hanging gardens filled with birds, and grottoes illuminated by volcanic fire. There is no other atelier in Paris where you may buy a fan painted with the heraldic jaguar of the New World, which appears to the initiated in narcotic dreams. Painted on green silk, he leaps across the entire leaf, from left to right.

  La Fentine has turned out to be a gifted fan-maker. She and I have together produced a series of two-faced fans: The seasons are painted on the back, and the games of love are on the front. Our “Diableries” are very popular—surely you have seen these—as are our “Tables of Paris,
” with their recipe on one side and lovers at table on the other.

  We are inspired by the Encyclopedia, but also by our memories and inclinations, those potencies that animated our childhood and the mystery of our adolescence. We believe this is why our fans are so popular, but also why we come to the attention of the lieutenant general of the police so often. Scholars collect our fans, you see, and they are often of the most vociferous sort. They engage in animated talk just outside the shop, talk the lieutenant thinks is seditious, and this only because he is too much of a numbskull to understand it. La Fentine likes to joke that the weather just outside our door is unlike that of the rest of Paris: “Hot, steamy, tropical!”

  The shop is also a favorite haunt of literary madmen, some of them authentic visionaries, and others simply out of their minds. One of them, a surgeon, has been stunned by hallucinations ever since he was a child. He claims to have seen the Celestial Father, the Celestial Mother, Satan, Christ on the Cross, and a host of archangels. He came to us years ago to buy a fan large enough to hide him from the eyes of demons, to protect him from the devouring abyss of their glances, from the sulphur they farted in his face, to keep his own eyes safe from the appearances of intangible houris so captivating he feared his cock would run off with his balls, leaving him behind.

  My favorite crier was the butcher’s daughter Césarine, who arrived with a basket, a brazier, and a chop impaled on a fork held up for all to see. With a voice as rich as a bowl of tripe she’d sing:

  Just like the one

  God stole from Adam!

  Buy one for yourself, sir,

  and one for your madame.

  —and she’d grill it for you there and then.

  We also evolved our own game of Heaven and Hell. I painted the itinerary on foolscap. The first player to reach Heaven got to embrace the Virgin Mary (Sade’s conceit), Torquemada, Kramer and Sprenger, or the pope of his choice. As you can see, to win was also to lose. Hell was better. You lost the game but got to screw any Jew who piqued your fancy, pantheists and Manichaeans, Ethiopians and Albigensians!

  —Would you read this letter, citizen.

  —I will. [She takes up the letter.]

  Ma belle olive, ma verte,

  I’m so gloomy! My breeches are worn through, my stockings in shreds, I’ve no ribbon for what’s left of my hair, and to tell the truth I long for something showy, a new silk coat, green and white, with a canary-yellow lining. To don such a thing in the morning, grab one’s favorite walking stick and be off! But I’d need clean linens, a fine shirt and all the rest, else, even in here, and if only to myself, not to look the fool. Today, to exorcise my demons, I itemized the things I used to wear. How I’d fuss over my buttons! They’d have to be inspired. My favorites were round, fronted with glass; each one contained a spanking green scarab, and all were perfect specimens. I had a silk waistcoat made up to match with an obelisk embroidered on each side, a sphinx at the heart. I called it “My Enigma.”

  I had another—this one striped gold and pink with a tender green lining. The buttons were Chinese—pink jade carved to resemble naked ladies. This one I named “the China Peach.” A fellow would be beheaded in a trice if he walked about dressed like that now.

  These days, ma verte, I have the imagination of a peasant. If a hag tumbled out of her haystack and onto my chamber pot offering me three wishes, I fear I would be as foolish as the beggar who wished for sausage. You know what happens next:

  The fool’s wife, a shrew and a scold, cries: “You pope’s pink arsehole! You knight of the Order of Cretins! What a turd in a piss pot you are, asking for sausage when we could have feasted on roast pig! Or even the king’s own fesses smoked like hams! I’ve not had a square meal since I married you, and now, when you get the chance, all you come up with is a stool the consistency of a newborn’s ca-ca to share between the two of us! What a miserable goat’s anal fissure you are!”

  As you can imagine, this enrages the poor bonehead. It enrages him so much that he picks the thing up between finger and thumb and cries:

  “I wish this sausage were stuck up this slut’s nose!” And at once it is. She, of course, is even angrier than she was—if such a thing can be imagined.

  “You miserable wretch!” she screams, the ignominious piece of tripe wagging like a puppy’s tail and causing her to sneeze—and each time she sneezes, she lets go a triple salute of musketry loud enough and hot enough to cause sunspots and other meteorological disturbances. “You bishop’s bastard with a stool for a brain! I will hound you till you shit pea soup and ham hocks, you dead camel!” And on and on until he cries:

  “I wish this shrew were as she was before!” And so she is, and so they are—the two of them as miserable as they were.

  Ah! I, too, have used up all my wishes foolishly! My youth, my passion, my promise. Today, nothing much remains but fever that prodded by unrequited appetite summons a satanic sauerkraut renewing itself as it is eaten, not one sausage crowning the cabbage heap, but forty-four:

  Frankfurterwürste,

  saveloys,

  crépinettes,

  sheep’s gut würstchen,

  pig’s brain sausage,

  madrilènes,

  Polish sausage,

  Strasbourg sausage,

  chorizo,

  boudin blanc,

  boudin noir,

  bite d’évêque,

  boudin fumé,

  marrow sausage,

  truffled goose liver sausage in the manner of Mademoiselle de Saint-Phallier,

  Rindfleischkochwurste,

  sausage made from calf’s mesentery,

  dry Lyon sausage,

  saucisson parisien,

  Genoa salami—

  and so on and so forth. But these are mere garnishes! For gleaming like smiles, bedded down like houris within the mound of glistening cabbage that rises like the tits of la Doulce France in my mind’s eye, are chunks of fat-studded pork loin smoked and fresh, grilled and boiled, and slices of fried bacon as thick as dictionaries, and pork chops broad enough to sail the Seine on, and goose, and meatballs studded with onions, and onions as glazed as the eyes of slaughtered cows, and lastly—and thanks to Science, which has assured us that potatoes may be eaten with impunity, that rather than thin the blood they thicken it, strengthening muscle and bone, soothing the brain yet animating the intellect—a steaming heap of Dutch potatoes, yellow as butter, sausage-shaped, sweet as honey and as firm as my buttocks once were and are no more.

  I’d settle for a macaroon. When I was a little boy, I was given a large macaroon stuck with angelica and gilded with gold leaf. The nuns who made it had put in all their misdirected sweetness, and I could tell that as they pounded the almonds and sugar together in the mortar they had dreamed of love. I devoured it quickly and then, because it was eaten, threw a tantrum—a rage as terrible as that initial rage of infancy when I rode poor Louis the way the Devil is said to ride the damned, my teeth at his neck, my fists pounding his ears; had I not been stopped, I might have torn out his eyes! Sometimes, I long to tear out the eyes of those who keep me here, and everyone else into the bargain! To lard my victims with their own eyes!

  It is true that I have been savage, I have savaged, I have “oceloted” a number of people; it is true I was once an ocelot disguised in a dove-gray coat and carrying a perfumed fan. And that, in my fury, the fury that has hounded me all my life, I dreamed of the extinction of the human race. But I never killed a soul, I never did to anyone more than the Broom did to me. Yet I languish here, and the Broom roams free.

  The libertine acts upon his instincts knowing that the world is without God and that his actions are impelled by his nature. The corrupt ecclesiastic acts in the name of God to justify, as Landa did, the worst crimes. The crimes done in God’s name are always the worst, crimes that the libertine only imagines in his black room lit by fairy lights.

  Fairy lights! The words evoke the lucent years of infancy when the world was a place of constant amaze
ment, like Lilliput. It is true I was a spoiled brat. (I was once given an entire breakfast service made of praline—cups, dishes, spoons, and forks—to coax me to table.) But even such a boy, despite swamped nerves and fits of rage (and what boy would not be frenzied by a mother who spent every waking hour on her knees sucking up to priests while his father was forever falling all over the king?)—even such a boy is eager for astonishment.

  Nothing is known of my birth; that is to say, nothing that is known is true. Because Mother’s oyster was too tightly shut to be seeded, and Father, just like the One in Heaven, no more than an Absence, I was not born in the usual way.

  There are numerous and conflicting stories to explain the stubborn fact of my existence:

  1. While Mother was at Mass, I tumbled from the priest’s thurible and into the cleft of her bosom;

  2. I slipped out of her missal and onto her lap;

  3. When on her knees looking for the scattered beads of her rosary, she heard me chirrup from under the pew.

  But the true story is this one: My buttocking father, warming his balls in a brothel, took it into his head that he needed a son to fortify his line, animate his eye, stimulate his heart, and afford him pocket in his decrepitude. Thus, like Minerva, it was my fatal destiny to have been born of thought, to tumble from my father’s brain into his ear and from there onto the rump of a whore. This prodigy he was able to conceal, for I was no bigger than a grain of pepper. He slipped me into his snuffbox and took me to my mother, who left her Paternosters long enough to cover my nudity with the shell of a pea and to put me to rock on the leaf of a geranium. Then she lulled me with her papist melodies, which, to tell the truth, I tolerated because I had no choice. This one fact explains why I was such a fussy baby, for if other infants are quieted with doggerel suited for the nursery, which makes them laugh and think the world a clever, funny place, my mother’s attempts were so dreary I decided that once I knew how to speak I would tell her to cease her canticles else assure me a lifelong funk.