Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  In case you are wondering whether anybody noticed the alteration of Rossetti’s monument, I may as well tell you now that the painter Leonor Fini, while making her morning promenade through that same Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” in hopes of reinterring a ghoulish hangover in the smallest possible hermetic coffin at the center of her skull, paused there, and caught the substitution right away, because when her father, wishing to raise her in the Catholic Church, had sought to kidnap her away from her mama, she became a watchful little girl in her knee-length skirt and sailor hat, posing with flowers and precociously pregnant with spite, clutching her cats, jeering and staring, growing up salacious and defiant, distrusting the male category and hence preferring to play with her transvestite friends. In the grimy alleys of Trieste she not infrequently spied ghosts—for instance, an old Serb named Jovo Cirtovich, whose face had perhaps fallen in a trifle, and his ancient, black-clad daughter Tanya or Tanyotchka, who was always seeking and never finding him. To more complacent observers they might have been shadows or scraps of cheese-paper. Once Leonor saw that pair wandering under a deep Roman arch which resembled a well laid on its side; he kept sighing and clutching at his throat, as if he had lost something which used to hang there, while she strode determinedly right through him, murmuring father, father, father. It chilled Leonor that they could not perceive one another; the lesson she derived was that a girl might as well seek pleasure in this life! On another occasion she saw the Emperor Massimiliano, dressed in the Mexican uniform in which he once delighted. When Leonor was a girl, her mama took her to visit Miramar, where, being apprised of the legend that who sleeps here in Massimiliano’s castle dies a violent death, she giggled and shuddered. Up on the wall, the pale melancholy faces of the Emperor and Empress, painted by Heirrich in 1863, almost seemed to foresee the execution.— Poor man! sighed Leonor’s mama. The Mexicans were so ungrateful . . .— The guide informed Leonor and her mama that to console him before he was shot, they performed his favorite tune, “La Paloma.” So when she encountered him that night on Via Dante Alighieri, Leonor hummed “La Paloma,” at which the ghost lifted his head and smiled sadly. How many other phantoms did the watchful woman see?— Cat-ghosts by the score, no doubt, and perhaps even the odd vampire.— And which of the living did she not see through? In that famous 1936 photograph by Dora Maar, Leonor sits with her stockinged knees apart and a black cat peering out glowing-eyed between them; she holds her head high, presenting her cleavage, her eyebrows painted on catlike, as if she pretends to be Cleopatra. One can tell that she sees everything. Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson catches her leaning forward in darkness, ornately decorated by embroidered sleeves, wide-eyed, pursing her lips as if in concentration, ruthlessly intent on seeing and being seen. Even in the photographs of Veno Pilon her wariness is her charm; sometimes she stares over her shoulder like a streetwalker. So you may be sure that she noticed Rossetti’s absence. With her loud, screeching laugh, Leonor now strolled up to the plinth and fondled Giovanna’s nipples. Her estimation of Rossetti took off like an unguided missile; she had never suspected that he might be one of her very own man-women! Not knowing what else to do in the face of such treatment, Giovanna kept very still. Leonor’s hangover perished with a plop, and she hurried home to paint the bronze lady and her palm branch into a crowd of bejeweled hermaphroditic clowns in the background of her latest surrealistic canvas, and before the oils had even dried down as far as tackiness, Leonor was wrapping herself in a robe of her own design and crowning her head with colored feathers, because a photographer from Marseilles had been entreating to do her portrait.

  Meanwhile, as Giovanna stood anxious, shy and proud in her master’s place, with an electric-grey pigeon warming her head, Rossetti, who would have been insulted had he known Leonor’s new misapprehension of him, persuaded the erratic Silvia to take him back to her rented room. The roses had not yet wilted in their vase and her tabby cat Lilith was barely getting hungry. Silvia removed her clothes with darling clicks and rustles; Rossetti undressed himself with clinks and clanks. Three bronze coins fell out of his pocket. How the procedure was carried out I who was not there cannot tell you, but it remains certain that with great success they made love in her bed, and afterwards, while he lay naked beneath the white sheet watching her and humming “La Paloma,” although he did not know why it had entered his mind, a fly crawled upon his bronze forehead as Silvia stood naked by the shuttered window, sipping wine, holding Lilith against her breast and stroking her, hungering ever more to vanish from Trieste, which was why her eyes kept shining and glittering on that late afternoon by the sea. She had booked a berth on a certain twin-masted brigantino, the Tancredi, a former warship which now sailed into the past, ferrying seekers of lost dreams. To get rid of her lover, she acquiesced in becoming the next Signora Rossetti; by then the Tancredi had already departed. The instant her intended had dressed, constructed their rendezvous for that very evening behind the botanical gardens, kissed her lips, breasts, hands and then departed, Silvia, tyrannized by the fact that in summertime Trieste the smell of sweat can drown both smell and sound of sea, smashed her wineglass in a rage, at which Lilith, frightened by the uproar, hissed and showed her claws, which impelled Silvia to throw the animal out the window; and the calmness with which she observed the cat’s whirlings and screechings all the way down rendered her worthy of either damnation or pity—all because the odor of sweat from that unmade bed exasperated her. Now she desired to embark for Hvar or Opatija, where the sea’s fishy vapors make frequent headway against the air. Accordingly she poured the roses and water from her vase onto the bed, hurled the vase out the window to shatter on top of her dead cat, laughed, pulled her dress on, painted her lips reddish-black, cocked that pale hat on her head, locked the door behind her, just in case (which proves her not utterly irrational) and set off once more to buy her ticket to sea-freedom, but this time Leonor Fini, unapprised of Silvia’s unforgivable cruelty to cats, caught sight of her, and although she mostly preferred men she could dominate, or men-women to play with, Leonor found herself in a mood to give and receive Communion between this girl’s legs for the instruction, humiliation and delectation of all Leonor’s membrane-shrouded ladies bathing in pitch, Leonor’s gentle corpses and Leonor’s lesbians in jester dress—for by now our talented heroine had advanced beyond seeing other people’s ghosts; she invented her own. The world of Leonor Fini, the painted world, could be reached by lifting aside a certain oil painting on a certain easel. Being one of those women who say yes when they would rather say no, Silvia permitted Leonor to lead her to her studio, which was just downstairs from her mama’s apartment, and presently, after cigarettes and absinthe, her hostess opened the door in the easel, took her hand, and pulled her down to the dark garden of lichens, logs and glossy greens; so that before she knew it, Silvia was standing naked in dark water, huger-breasted than ever before, with the sky red behind her, and half-submerged skull-crocodiles watching; Leonor was dancing white and naked on a black driftwood log, and the grey-wigged red-cloaked skeleton of the Angel of Anatomy performed a string solo for them both, drawing a rib across the music-hole in a woman’s pelvis.— Silvia was thinking: I’d rather be in Opatija.— And then catbird ladies commenced to fly softly down, hovering just above the tarry water, swishing it around with their fat white breasts, so that before Leonor and Silvia had even made love once, Silvia was in distress, recalling all too well what she had done to Lilith and therefore (I am happy to say) repenting, which Our Lady of the Flowers found pleasing, since to her way of thinking contrition became people about as well as anything. Beneath a long veil, a jewel-like skeleton, pale and smooth like a fly’s eye, now squatted to embrace a bald unconscious man-woman to whom Leonor paid more attention than to Silvia—who stole the opportunity to dress. Leonor, who had anticipated painting a portrait of her standing waist deep in that pool, threw a glass dildo at her head and commanded her never to come back, which suited both parties. By then it was Sunday afternoon, s
o Silvia decided to climb the stairs of the bell tower. She would sail to the radiant sea on Monday. The tower was dark. Passing the Roman griffin or Pegasus or whatever it was, and the wing-headed thing carved into the marble, the excited girl ascended and ascended. Here the light was bluish-greyish-white, yet also warm; and gazing across the world she saw the myriad masts like stalks of dark grass in the harbor, beyond which the last roofs and the lighthouse demarcated the end of gravity. Tomorrow she would happily forsake the humid glare of the coast, gathering up armloads of those sea-diamonds which glitter all the way to Dalmatia—but spiderlike within the immense metal skirt of the cathedral bell clung Rossetti; for Our Lady, entreated with his orange-fragrant prayers, and wishing to encourage and even facilitate his promise-keeping (although his sincerity in proposing marriage I myself cannot help but fault, and the only reason she haunted his desires was that she had broken their rendezvous), had informed him where to find her. Giovanna being irrelevant, he invited Silvia to bronzify herself and share his plinth forever. She for her part, determined to be free, leaped out into the sunlight. Just before she met the pavement, the Madonna dei Fiori looked upward, not at her but at Rossetti, who, fascinated by the bloodstain on her stone forehead, was thereby saved from witnessing Silvia’s death—but all the same, he wept verdigrised tears on his plinth for a full three weeks, after which he got consoled by a slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog. Her name was Lina. The whole time, Giovanna had heroically concealed her own troubles behind her palm branch.

  2

  Leonor, who loved a good quarrel, had been in a fine mood ever since she threw Silvia out. After drinking absinthe with two transvestite friends of hers she saw again the ghost of ancient Tanya Cirtovich in a light black veil, and painted that sad woman into the background of her latest oil autoportrait. The next time she visited the Madonna she found her weeping, and that was how she learned about Silvia’s suicide. Here I wish to insert that of all the Madonnas in the world, Our Lady of the Flowers takes greatest local interest in the doings of sinners. I have it on authority that when Buddha abandoned his family to go drink enlightenment beneath a tree, his little daughter cried so much as to fall into danger of death, so in the end they sent her to Trieste to be cared for by Our Lady, who sang her madrigals by night and gave her suck from her fine stone breasts until she became a stone seagull, a happy enough outcome were it not for the fact that after the fall of Mussolini they forgot who that seagull was and moved her into the Lapidarium. Our Lady wept twenty-four stone tears over that—the most she could have done for anybody so unchristian—and then, on a sultry autumn day when the bora blew the window open, transformed her into a real bird so that she could fly over the sea more or less as Silvia had wished to do. As for Silvia herself, how could Our Lady help such a bad girl? But was it Silvia’s fault that she had been created incapable of Triestine happiness? Moreover, she had repented about killing her cat. So the Madonna wept a river of tears into the sewer and through the forgotten Roman catacombs under the street and then down all the way to hell, in order to extinguish the flames which wracked that poor dead girl, who thus grew sufficiently sane to pray for Lilith, which entitled both Silvia and Lilith to come back to life, a favor which Our Lady gladly accomplished; she even gave Silvia a painted basket in which to carry her pet, who presently forgot to distrust her.

  3

  Leonor was one of those women who never allow anything to keep them from their pleasures—and, if I might say so, we would all better enjoy one another’s company if we lived and died like her. Being in a hurry, she stayed but a moment to hear the Madonna’s news, then kissed that stone female, of whom she was truly fond, upon the lips—didn’t they have cats in common? In their time they had both rescued myriads of felines, for, as Our Lady once remarked, a cat and a prayer are equally beloved in heaven, no matter how many songbirds the cat has done for.— You should really offer up a candle for Silvia, cara, even though she’s alive. Do it for me, my girl!— Of course, of course! cried Leonor, to whom grudges were an inconvenience. She went straight to the Serbian Orthodox church to keep her promise; and that very afternoon, as Silvia stood by the starboard railing of the ferry to Opatija, cradling Lilith in her arms and craving the snow-white specks of houses and villages ahead along the beach-edge of the blue-green coast, both woman and cat began to smell a delicious scent compounded of incense and catnip, all thanks to Leonor Fini and the Madonna, and so they lived happily ever after, until, dissatisfied with Opatija, they removed to Rijeka, and looking straight down past the white cliff-rocks and through the water’s wavering green near-translucency, down to where the white ovoid rocks, many of whose centers were green, waxed and waned like moons on the bottom of the harbor, Silvia imagined that she could see the back door to hell, which made her remember how she had sinned against Lilith, followed by her own dying, burning and all the rest of it; so, half suffocated, she picked up Lilith in her basket and carried her to the market, where a man was wooing his daughter with shining cherries which were almost the scarlet-purple of a harlot’s velvet dress; and first Silvia thought that cherries might save her; then she thought to trust in those neat bunches of chives, as yellow-green as summer, or in the pure white bulbs of leeks, never mind the lovely purple-black polka dots on glossy green fava beans; but the tiny old woman who sold them, turning her head like a bird—she had a brown-shawled, nut-colored face and eyes like small black round berries—gazed at Silvia and Lilith with such sweet half-comprehension (in other words, in so animal-like a fashion) that Silvia remembered Lilith’s trusting gaze the moment before she hurled her out the window (she had been purring wide-eyed, with her belly-fur whiter than sea-clouds); so they fled to Vienna; indeed, they had voyaged all the way to Prague, where staring out at her from the dark narrow doorway of a photographer’s shop Silvia saw a man whose face and hands were so white that she knew he must be dead; she might have recognized him from hell; his black eye-piercings aimed themselves at her, and his black gash of a mouth elongated; his black nostril-slits enlarged but of course did not pulse in the white flatness of his face. Just as Silvia began to wonder how her life would have been had she made love with Leonor Fini, the dead man said the words Heloy Tau Varaf Panthon Homnorcum Elemiath . . . at which Lilith, hissing, clawed at her basket, and then they both fell down dead, to the grief but not surprise of Our Lady of the Flowers.

  4

  Now I ought to tell you of another Triestine cat-career, whose creeping abjection rendered Our Lady of the Flowers yet sadder and wearier. Rossetti’s new sweetheart Lina, the one with the whip and the bulldog, loved cats nearly as much as did Leonor Fini, and currently kept a tiny mixed-breed specimen, named Giulia, who had in kittenhood been abandoned and so could never trust anybody. Lina tried sincerely to love Giulia, who repaid her with fear. At first she suspected her bulldog, but even when Giulia was entirely alone with Lina she could not successfully love her. Often, it is true, Giulia approached her when she was reading or sewing in bed, and not only meowed until she was petted but purred thereafter. But there were times when Giulia, suddenly fearing a lock of the woman’s hair or the loudness of her heartbeat, never mind the snoring of the bulldog down the hall, would scratch or even bite Lina, drawing blood. At the best of times it was not uncommon for Giulia to go on meowing even while she was being petted; she could never really be happy. If Lina sat up suddenly in bed, the cat rushed away in terror, sometimes continuing all the way down the hall until she crashed against the wall. At night she slept under the covers with her mistress, but not infrequently she would claw her way out from the bedspread and begin galloping up and down the corridor. Any stranger terrified her, as did anybody who stood erect, presumably because she had been tormented by boys when she lived on the street. Her instinct was therefore to hide. On certain mornings when her mistress stood before the wardrobe mirror, choosing a dress, Giulia would cree
p around her into the back of the closet, so quietly as to be unperceived, as a consequence of which she often got shut in. Upon being trapped in that dark place she never dared to meow, so that it sometimes took a day or more for Lina to find her. She likewise had a way of wriggling into chests of drawers, and her mistress feared that someday she would get crushed.