Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  After investigating the way that after an extra grappa the coat stands at the Caffè San Marco begin to resemble horns and trombones, Rossetti, not knowing how else to act, reestablished himself at his post. When Leonor next encountered him, he was as well turned out, careful and lost in his own downward gaze, as a violinist.

  All right, she said, I’ll bring you to her, but only if you come in high heels, with a crown of feathers.

  Be merciful, Leonor!

  Rossetti, you’re not nearly as masculine as you think. Lick up a little degradation; you might enjoy it. And you know what? If you do, both Giovanna and I will see you with different eyes. Both of us. Is that an enticement or what?

  He murmured: I’m in your hands.

  That’s better, signor! Now come with me. I’m going to show you something. Maybe you’ve never been this way. Your elegant girls don’t live up on the hill, do they?

  Because he was so submissive now (and quite amusing in his high heels), Leonor did not mind helping him, although he slightly disgusted her—for in truth she used to enjoy his arrogance. Oh, well; there was nothing for it but to be as kind to him as to any maimed animal. Sensing this, he began to find her nearly as lovely as a nude amber woman. But then with a sadistic smile she giggled: Poor Octavian! and he saw that she had led him to the last surviving gate of Octavian Caesar’s wall, which had long since became the Arco di Riccardo. High upon this relic, whose ankles and square toes were so deeply gnawed away that some people hesitated to walk through it, a cloaked and hooded little figure stretched out its sleeves, worn down to gruesomeness, its eyeless face like a peach pit, supporting or supported by spiral leafwork. The tracks and bubbles on the coarse whiteness were atmospheric pollution, no doubt.

  Pinching his cheek, Leonor told him: Stay on your plinth long enough and you’ll look just like that. What’s the use?

  Since he was now broken, she took him home to the atelier where she lived with her cats, her lover-man and her friend-man, explaining: Giovanna’s underneath the easel.— But when her mama led him there, down, down, turn again, skulls clenched their fangs at him and goggled their eyesockets up out of the dark ooze, beside a dead butterfly and a dead lizard lying belly up. Far away, a blonde Sphinx was gazing at him. The Sphinx’s breasts were so huge and round that they glued her to the mud.

  Malvina Fini left him alone there. So did Leonor, because she was in love with her own breasts.

  He saw a woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair, ornamented with leaves clasped in place by a dog skull, who stood beside a dark-furred cat-man or cat-woman; they were both leaning over a tombstone, admiring a lovely corpse. Closing his eyes in loneliness, he saw parallelograms of red light. And still Giovanna made no appearance, so at length he thought to descend another flight of stairs, which led him down, down, to the mummy realm; down to where two mummies were playing a game of senet, the gameboard having been pleasingly inscribed in the top of the drawered box where the wooden pieces were kept.

  Some people, including Our Lady, who eternally preserved a bright attitude, might have found these caverns almost festive, for their walls were sometimes decorated with red, black, ocher and green scenes of Apis, the sacred bull, who carries the mummies away; but Rossetti could not help but wonder: Why hasn’t he carried these mummies away? Or is this where he brings them?— He now encountered a male mummy whose shoulders were hunched and whose knees were drawn up; he was grinning at Rossetti as if in agony, and his toes resembled white marbles. Disgusted, the bronze individual turned away, to browse among the nestled half-bodies of anthropoid coffins. Where was Giovanna? Cat mummies bared their teeth at him, lurking among the little faience things found in tombs; and although Rossetti did not know it, his expression, by which I mean the expression of his soul, for his bronze face could scarcely grimace very well, became a younger version of his hosts’. He had seen dead bodies before; sometimes murders were committed in Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” even right before his plinth; and during the Occupation, the Fascists used to execute people there at night; unable to do anything else, Rossetti, who himself hoped never to be destroyed by the earth, had taken note of the dead faces like cruder mummy-masks of the Old Kingdom; now he remembered them, and the suicided Silvia disturbed him like some tiny vampiretta keening by his ear. Moreover, at first the floor-mosaics had been nearly as ornate as the brilliant red chestnuts upon the green algae and within the yellow light in the bottom of the pond in the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” but the designs grew ever more sinister, even to him, and the unpleasant atmosphere was deepened by the unsmiling joy of the goddess Hathor, whose diorite statue he encountered far too often; for even now Rossetti preferred a woman’s shape like some drop of bitumen pulled upward until it draws in at the waist. Hunting for Giovanna, ever so lonely even among these lovely slender statuettes of nude wooden women with their arms at their sides, he faced another stiffnecked, grinning mummy, with its bony hands splayed out in the air over its crotch—a wonder they didn’t break at the wrists!—and sometimes they approached him in a hostile manner, not that they could exactly trifle with his substance: a single blow from his bronze hand and they went flying into shards and flakes! But whatever he did, he now found himself surveilled by the rigid brown muscles of a certain mummy’s face, whose strained white grin and outthrust jaw felt still more unwelcome than the long white bones breaking through the torn brown fingers, pretending to be fingernails. He uttered Giovanna’s name. The mummy pointed deeper into the darkness. When he went that way, Giulia and Lilith, those two dead cats grown gruesomely swollen, launched themselves at him from some high dark niche, clacking their teeth against his face until he brushed them aside, and they flew into the darkness wailing.

  At last he prayed: Madonna, cara, help me, and I’ll offer a double handful of bronze coins to the Cathedral San Giusto!

  Pitying him, Our Lady pointed, and a stream of light sped from where she stood holding her stone child up there by the Teatro Romano; it penetrated the ground and made a road for him between the replicated sceptered profiles on the sides of Egyptian sarcophagi; so he went that way, until he came into a blind passageway, and his soul’s gaze grew as huge and dark as the kohled eyes upon a certain noble mummy-woman’s sarcophagus; because Giovanna seemed to have grown taller and more rigid, if that were possible; and, still crowned but otherwise utterly nude, she pressed herself up tight against Our Lady’s seventh cousin, the cat-headed avenger goddess Sekhmet, whose faces may differ but who always holds her scepter straight between her legs and whose tubular braids of stone hair fall down to her breasts—yes, Sekhmet, the one with the solar disk on her head; and Giovanna’s bronze tongue was in this cat goddess’s mouth and her bronze hands were clasping the goddess’s temples so tightly, grinding her stone face against hers, that the stone had already begun to crack, but Sekhmet did not care because to her Giovanna appeared as gravely beautiful as the goddess Maat, weigher of truth. Once upon a time, Sekhmet had been betrayed by the fugitive flesh of a certain wooden lady-statuette with worm-eaten eyes. Now she would only settle for imperishable loves.

  As Rossetti approached them, he perceived himself to be shrinking. It is no coincidence that Sekhmet’s knees are so high that the supplicant cannot reach them. That inhuman, ruthless, whiskered head of hers slowly pulled away from Giovanna’s mouth, and there she stood, tall, stiff, hardbreasted and lion-faced. Much more imperishable than he (for she was made of diorite), she sat down on her plinth, as if to put him in his place.

  Giovanna now turned, pointing her bronze palm branch at him like a spear.

  At Sekhmet’s feet lay a half-rotten wooden coffer. Giovanna pointed to it sternly. Realizing what she expected, he withdrew three bronze coins and deposited them there. While the stone goddess sat watchful, with her lion-snout shadowed, he said: Giovanna, I’ll buy you a plump canopic jar with a falcon head . . .

  But she replied, more inflexibly t
han he ever could have imagined: You’re not even a dream.

  7

  Rossetti returned, of course, to his plinth, where it came to him, again too late, that had he only been grave and stone-bearded like the god Ptah, he might have kept Giovanna; but since his desire for her had never been less superficial than some anthropoid pattern gilded over the glossy black bitumen of a mummy-case, and the stone cat goddess horrified him, he presently dismissed the matter from his mind. He no longer found it wearisome to adorn his standing-throne, especially on a May evening when he could overlook the brilliant gold-orange treetops of Trieste, whose church towers went golden-pink in the turquoise sky. His affections resembled bubbles in a carafe of mineral water, which may perhaps be bluer or more silver than the liquid they hang in. The matter of who might substitute for him whenever he went night-wandering concerned him, but since so many heroic effigies had already gone missing, and he had never cared that much for his so-called public, who paid him small regard and quickly rotted in any event, he essayed to overcome his self-constraint, and indeed so well succeeded that the plinth often stood empty, without any repercussions whatsoever. Admiring himself in the foxed mirror at the Caffè Stella Polaris, he presently grew sufficiently confident to drink espresso in broad daylight at the Caffè James Joyce, where vertical strips of brass ran around the counter, the legs of women accordingly getting sliced vertically, the toes of their dark leather shoes shining like stars, the black and white tiles widening away, the chocolate voices of women all fever-warm tracks of a railroad which might have carried him to his old flame Silvia (another lady about whom he endeavored never to think), and although none of these coffeehouse women showed interest in him (indeed, they sometimes mistook him for an ornate coatrack), he liked sitting there hour after hour, paying in bronze coins, dreaming about sweet women whose bodies presented the pinks, blacks and beiges of a Tiepolo drawing, while coffee-steam condensed on his forehead and he pretended that he was sweating. In a way, he was lost, and when Our Lady of the Flowers thought about him she sometimes wept, to the benefit of souls in hell, but he was not discontented, especially when he visited Leonor Fini.

  A certain Duke of hers took a liking to Rossetti’s powers of observation, which were of the category miscalled “phenomenal,” so he sometimes invited him over to inspect his art collection. Narrowing her eyes with pleasure, like a cat whose mistress is gently scratching her between the ears, Leonor said: Darling, sometimes I’m almost proud of you. The Duke says you’re the only one who’s ever understood his Serbian icons.— For a long time Rossetti pored over a certain old Italian panel of singing girl-children, whose marble was now greenish like the translucencies of frog-spawn. Better than anyone he could hear the hymns soughing from their eternally half-opened mouths. He yearned to make them aware of him. Since he could not, and for that reason among several others grew ever more unmoored, he and Leonor become friends of a sort and occasionally even lovers; he once brought her a pair of thick earrings from which strings of beads depended like fingers of a hand.

  Sometimes when she was marble-nude, gazing at herself in the mirror, alone but for her cat, Leonor found herself wondering how Rossetti would look in pink panties; by then he was up for anything; what a dear man he was! And women were mostly such bitches; she barely knew whom to trust! When she discussed this matter with the Duke (Lilith plumping herself out in Leonor’s lap, blinking gently as she got stroked), he insisted that Rossetti could be counted on, after which she valued him the more. And cypresses tilted up the flagstones across the courtyard; their friends faded into bluish-grey cartes de visite, like the portrait of the late-nineteenth-century signora in the long floral gown who stood with her sleeve-hidden hands on her hips, gazing dreamily along a diagonal to the other world, her hair parted high in the fashion of the period; once upon a time she had taught Leonor a certain trick of horizontal dancing. Our Lady replenished the coins in Rossetti’s plinth, and almost every year was as still as the grey-blue sea along the Istrian coast.

  Leonor fell out with her Duke, and Rossetti continued his own amours. Of course he never again descended the flight of stairs to that cold dry place to visit Giovanna, so he never learned that Sekhmet’s flesh is sometimes rough, sparkling and dull, sometimes smooth, glossy and dark; that sometimes her lion-head is narrower and more doggish than others; that her breasts rise and sink upon her chilly chest-cliff as she pleases. He never learned that Giovanna, now unalterably herself, remained so fixed, stern, unbending and upright that even Osiris came to approve of her, and for all I know they have made her a goddess by now. As it was, every time he paid a call on Leonor he met all the cats he liked; including those naked Sphinxes whose marble breasts were bigger than planetoids; while other sorts of cat-women were invariably to be found admiring themselves in mirrors. They were more his type.

  For a time Leonor moved to Paris; then her mama died, along with ever so many cats; she herself got old, and several other sad things happened. As she aged, she estimated Rossetti still more highly, because although he had barely known her then, he remembered the way she used to paint in gouache on crumpled paper in her carefree days.

  THE TRENCH GHOST

  1

  Of course the Trench Ghost loved to play at soldiers. On those summer evenings when the light tempted even him, with the smooth grey-green translucence of old robed and headless figures of alabaster, he sometimes rose out of the ground, but never for more than an hour or two; his favorite time, as one might expect, was night, and since he could see quite well in the dark, and, like a salamander, preferred the clamminess of dirt, the best way to meet him, had anyone ever wished to, would have been to wander through the old installations at Redipuglia, preferably hooting like an owl, or groaning a little, which would have been music to him. Deep in the dirt, as trench-diggers and even certain well-connected archaeologists knew, lay tiny votive bronze figurines with genitalia and elongated limbs. The Trench Ghost, as one might imagine, was proficient at discovering these. How it was that he could pass through earth, and even concrete, more easily, and certainly more inconspicuously, than a mortar shell, while yet being able to shuffle material things about, might require an ectoplasmic physicist to explain; I can’t, but then I also never understood why soldiers slaughter each other. For whatever reason, their blood darkened the dirt of Redipuglia, thereby bringing the Trench Ghost into being. How or what he was before the war I have not learned; nor could I tell you my own whereabouts before I was born. At first he scarcely wondered why he existed. Lacking solid dislikes or memories, he nonetheless had to be, without remedy. Prior to his ghosthood he might well never have lived, although at times he seemed to see his own form, whatever that might have been, and beside him the bare toes of a woman, and then a waving white curtain gone blue with Triestine sea-light; this recollection, if you care to call it that, was as worm-eaten as an old wooden statue of Saint Anna; and I for my part suppose him never to have been human; let’s say that he was the genius loci of Redipuglia, some “emanation” or sad freak of the mass grave beside those trenches. Couldn’t a pair of beetle-ridden relics have acted as anode and cathode in the celestial battery which powered him? As for his origins, there could hardly have been any Trench Ghost in that vicinity before Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke at Sarajevo; there weren’t even any trenches . . .— but no, earlier battles had most certainly soaked his earth.— Whether he was subject to diminution and eventual extinction in proportion as that buried mountain of dead human matter decayed was not for his consideration. Death meant nothing to him, being merely fundamental.

  Three dozen meters beneath the deepest trench lay a Roman marble fragment depicting an almost faceless hero on his rearing horse, the enemy’s horse crouching and trampled. The Trench Ghost used to sink down to it and gloat. He knew what murder was, and wished to drink the pride which comes of killing others in public, at risk to oneself, at times when killing or perishing is exactly what one’s leaders call for. In the beginn
ing the Trench Ghost did not wish that the hero possessed a face. Why wouldn’t his own serve? So one twilight he flitted out of the emplacements and down through the trees to the little stream, in hopes of seeing his own reflection. He could not. After that, he began to consider faces. Beneath a concrete slab laid down in 1915 and forgotten long before the end of the war there lay a certain neighbor of his, a grey skull all alone, which the Trench Ghost used to take between his hands as if it were a crystal ball, staring into its mud-choked eyes. Wondering whether his face resembled this, he scrolled his hands across his forehead and down his cheeks, but never could decide whether to let his fingers pass through himself; hence his investigations dwindled into inconsistency. He seemed to be hairy, gristly and bony, but then again, there might be nothing to him. Sometimes he envied the skull, for being neither more nor less than what it was, and often he hated it.

  He decided that if he could not know what he was, he might as well become a general. Deploying other creatures for some purpose external to them seemed grand; he might even fulfill himself thus. The cool, slippery trench with its many windings and its arched ceiling like a concrete debasement of Roman ruins was world enough in which to enact the noblest dramas. Gaunt as a mummy, with his legs worn down to bones, he began arraying his soldiers against each other. What the rare living visitors (mourners, students, lovers, sensation-seekers en route to Aquileia or Cividale) recoiled from as a deep belly-crawl of arched tunnel descending beyond those few half-lit galleries in which their shoes stayed clean, the Trench Ghost slid into as easily as an otter, right up to his chest in solid dirt; that way he could lay out his toys without bending over. The foremost of his gamepieces was a Venus-crowned hairpin made of bone; she, who must have been a thousand years old, began as his lieutenant-general, inspiring the others, who dared not retreat once he had pierced her into the mud, for her slender, yellow-green form was severe, her breasts hard, her tiny face resolute no matter whether the Trench Ghost had established her straight or crookedly. Immediately subordinate in rank came those Bronze Age figurines already described; as they drifted in and out of favor, he made them right or wrong, slaves or enemies. Who ought to lead the foes was a matter which gradually improved his mind; it would have been facile enough, as indeed he had done for some decades, simply to move them about, like a miser laying down gold coins; but in time even the Trench Ghost began to wonder what war was for; hence he decided to establish beyond his mere purpose an outright cause, relating to the conquest of evil; every martial monument on the battlefield cherished that as its engraved excuse! So which of his creatures should he define as wicked, and why? He meant to defeat them over and over, forever; hence they had to be sturdy and patient, perhaps even beautiful in their way; his cause required him to hate them, but not so vehemently as to destroy them, because then what would he do with himself?— Good Trench Ghost, he was already facing down eternity!—For the first half-century or so he satisfied himself with leaving them general-less. It sufficed that he swept them down. But presently he grew as unsatisfied with such easy victories as Hitler felt after his unopposed annexation of Czechoslovakia; and that was when he discovered another of his own qualities: He could make things.