“Don’t worry, Nini. I have an arrangement with the Vouivre.” He winks. “She don’t mind we take an eel or two – just as long’s we take no small fry and don’t get boisterous. She lives a peaceable life.”
“Where does she sleep?”
“Makes her bed on the sand beneath the water; just lays down and the snails’ conversations put her to sleep. Would you, too! Shellfish haven’t all that much to say to one another. And sometimes she sleeps in a room.”
“A room?”
“Where the sea has swallowed the land, there are cities carpeted with skulls and iron spoons and coins. The Vouivre ignores the treasure and the bones; currents and the filtered moon interest her more than the riches and destinies of men. If you look well and hard, Nicolas, you may – if you are lucky (and I believe you are) – see her, see her just once, for she can’t be seen twice, else you pay for your curiosity with blindness or your life. And,” he adds out of the blue, “never let me catch you pissing in the water. She’ll grab you, Nini; she’ll pull you in by your impertinence!” I laugh and look up in time to see a hundred clouds sailing in the sky.
If I never miss an occasion to be out on the water beside Totor, I have never caught a fish. I have caught hunks of water-logged driftwood, well-barnacled and black, but the only living thing I’ve ever caught are blue crabs on the beach and clams. But his prowess is uncanny. Smelts, in their dozens, no bigger than crickets (that Other Mother drowns in batter and deep-fries, and that we gobble down whole, heads and all), long, luminous eels that she stews in wine, tuna sweet as suckling pig.
We eat our Sunday dinner in the dining-room. The doors of frosted glass are closed, muting the kitchen sounds. I admire the sooty paintings of continents announced by breakers, of lonely lighthouses assailed by lightning. We eat the day’s take, a dorado stuffed with our stoop’s sorrel, Rose rarely sitting but spinning from table to kitchen and cellar, a whirling dervish of domesticity.
“Pig!” Rose’s Sunday décolletage framed in taffeta and masked in lace excites Totor. And he:
“For God’s sakes, sit down!” But she has already bustled off.
“There’s a bottle to be filched from the pantry and the pie –” Pie! Totor complains: it’s plum and she’s left in the pits; he swears he’ll crack a tooth.
“Or choke. And you’ll both be back in church and Nini fatherless twice over –”
“Hush!” There is a moment’s embarrassed silence I pretend to ignore.
“You were going to tell me about the time you saw the Vouivre. . . .”
“Ah! She was green but beautiful, Nini, enough to cut your heart-bone to the quick, a singular creature born of the deep’s blackest flame. I saw her wading, her hair streaming, and taken by surprise I cried out. Blast it! I startled her!”
“What did she do?”
“She turned and when she saw me, laughed. ‘Follow me,’ she said, ‘if you have the heart.’ And she was gone. If I had the heart to follow, son, I swear I didn’t have the guts! Not to lie – I was scared!”
“Out of his fits!” Rose cuffs him on the ear.
“And if you see her again?”
“Damned if I do! Turned to stone! Just like the starfish in the pavement. Why, I’d become a shell, hollow and hard; put me to your ear and hear the voices of cuttlefish! Dearest, ever since, I keep my eyes peeled for the smallest peculiarity and should I get a hint of her, I screw them shut fast as fast can, else be struck –”
“Blind as an old puss!”
“Blind as Oedipus, Rose, but never mind.”
CHAPTER
2
Our favourite corner of the city, Totor’s and mine, is the Ghost Port Bar, a smoke-filled, shadow-spooked hole-in-the-wall no bigger than an oyster on the half-shell. Like Rose’s kitchen, its door and window glass are green; Saturdays we leap from one aquarium into another. I’m a little young, at eight, for such a place, or so nags Rose, but the Ghost Port Bar is Heavenly Mystery and Hellish Nightmare too; I could not have stayed away had Rose bribed me with a thousand-egg floating island.
The atmosphere is thick in there and juicy; I must agree with Rose, there is not much oxygen. Down under the tables it smells like stale tobacco and feet and monkey fur, but higher up the air’s embalmed with fresh burning “navy cut,” the fumes of rum, zinc polish (and the zinc bar gleams in the half-light like the prow of a spanking new clipper), and the proprietress’s underarms.
“Her husband,” says Rose, “is a foul-tempered hyperbolic.” And the victim of bad teeth and black bile. Saturdays she’s the Ghost’s one queen, leaves him grouching somewhere in the unimaginable dimness of the second storey sucking a rum-soaked rag. I ask Rose: “Why doesn’t the Cod have his teeth pulled?”
“What would it change? He’s used to sitting on horns.” She sees my confusion.
“A saying. Means he’s on the spit, smarting.”
Saturdays I can never quite forget that upstairs the Cod, once a gentleman and a sailor, is smarting, while downstairs his wife is laughing with Totor, Toujours-Là, the Marquis, the other men and me.
There are many nice things about the Ghost. Not the least is the chimp who stands in a large cage at the back of the bar, pulling at his fundamentals – a thing I’ve not done in public since the age of three. To warm things up the Cod’s wife lets him weave around the room shaking hands. His hand is hot, his handshake congenial, and his teeth, very fat, oblong, and yellow, look like piano keys.
The chimp’s relations with the Cod’s wife are rumoured “seditious” by Rose. I ask: “Why suspicious?”
“He does her laundry, even sleeps in her bed and if that’s not Peruvious!”
“But he sleeps in his cage! I’ve seen his little nest!”
“I’m just repeating what the people say.”
“After church!” Totor cries, losing patience. “The monkey’s innocent; his fingernails the proof he’s never touched soap. It’s Gilles-Gillesbis what keeps the Cod’s wife in tune.”
“Gilles-Gillesbis and Aristide Marquis!”
“Rose!”
“I’m just rehashing what I’ve heard, Victor!”
“And Totor? Does she take Totor on, too?”
This is the first time I see them fight. I want to cry but I also feel like laughing. It is Rose who runs to the sink, sobbing, her apron thrown over her head. All this is the fault of the Evil, the Heavenly Ghost Port Bar!
“And PETOMANIA!” Rose wails, hiccups, and wails again. It is true. Last week the chimp, wearing a fire helmet of red paper, had snuffed out a candle flame with a fart. “He could have set the place on fire!”
Totor kisses Other Mother tenderly and dries her tears. He says: “Rosie, it was only a small wind. An oyster sneezing makes less wind.” Putting his arm around her he coaxes her back to her chair and, patting her hands, continues:
“Once I witnessed a big wind!” I’d heard the tale on Saturday.
“Oh, yes!” I cry. “Tell her about the Dolly Siren!”
“She was approaching Cape Horn and crawling because the sea was set like a jelly. As I was looking out over the water I saw the most fearsome apparition sliding up from the horizon and spitting sparks –”
“It was a dragon of smoke chasing her tail!” Leaping from my chair I spin across the room, whistling.
“I heard a roar, and with one breath the moon was blown clean from the sky –”
“And the Dolly Siren sent up just like an aeroplane!” Despite Other Mother’s protests, I climb onto the kitchen table.
“We saw the sea beneath us and men scattered and thrashing and sinking fast. The wind was so bad on deck a sailor was knocked down dead by a sawfish; an orbiting water barrel tore off the boatswain’s ear. Meanwhile, in Tunisia it rained anchovies; tar pots fell from the sky in Tasmania; the sun was so cold above Cairo the Egyptians all turned blue. The ship’s cat slid off deck, her rats screaming after. The captain’s hair turned white –”
“There was icicles hanging from his nos
e thick as tusks! Did he look like a walrus, Totor?”
“He did. The anchor scraped the peaks of mountains we couldn’t see; we heard it tolling like a bell. ‘To the hold!’ I cried. We stumbled under. A chest broke loose and squashed the chief mate flat. We heard the monster panting after us and chewing the mastheads to shreds. She could smell us, I swear, and her icy breath near froze us dead. Every time she arched her back the Dolly pitched and our skulls went slamming; the sounds of breaking bones so bad Cook himself went mad! There was brains –”
“For Heaven’s sake!” Rose shrieks, “Enough!”
“I’m coming to the end. . . . There was squids piled up in the forecastle when we was set down again, battered but still floating, all green and more marine than human. Nothing was left of us but a toothful of gutter crusts, shaking and gruelly, not fit – Nini darling, dearest Rose – to hold a candle to!”
Totor has told me that long before the city I know and love was built the sea possessed the land. When the waters evaporated the landlocked creatures were so petrified they turned to stone. The paving stones, stuck like puddings with the fossil pentagrams of starfish, prove Totor tells the truth.
Stranded himself, Totor spends these last years of his life liberating the spirit castaways. The landscape of my boyhood is haunted by ghosts armed with tridents, decked with cockles, tooting twisted conches. When it rains, as it often does, I can hear dogfish barking in the thunder, and in lightning clearly see the claws of catfish striking at the body of Heaven. Evenings the alleys are surging with pelicans and tiger-faced sharks. There is a great hunk of shadow looming like a finned camel just behind the courthouse, and, in the sewers, good (and evil) whales.
Once on my way to school I find a ring fallen, Totor tells me, from the body of a fish. I would not have missed a tribe of pious tuna reading psalms as they vanished two by two down Fools’ Alley had I been quicker.
“Didn’t you see them? Run, lad, and look! Hasty! But hush!”
The scales, tails, tongues of sea monsters are secreted, then revealed in the shadows of the floating clouds; the smiles of mermen are scattered on the water, and above the doors of houses Totor points out impressions of webbed fingers.
After, dark-finned dwarfs cavort and if I haven’t seen them, I have seen where they’ve kicked up sand. When the light is right, a solitary head, surely Neptune’s, looms half-mocking and half-hidden in the parlour. Did nine man-sized mackerel march on their tails in full naval regalia up and down the street three times on my ninth birthday’s eve as Totor insists? I do not doubt him; the air smells of mackerel all week.
I believe that spiders are the fishermen of the air, and bluebottle flies the not-so-distant cousins of flying fish. I am visited with the certitude as I lie in bed, that all nature’s infinite combinations are divine. That the spirit of the marvellous permeates all things, even, at supper’s end, the eel’s soft spine coiled upon my dish.
Above the stairwell Totor has painted:
and inscribed upon the wall above their bed:
CHAPTER
3
Saturday and pissing vinegar. The old port has vanished in the rain; port and sky and sea all smeared together like a jam of oysters, pearl-grey and viscous. Our heads bent against the wind, Totor and I make our way to the Ghost and trample in sneezing, arrested by the hot fumet of drinking men and their smoke. The place is packed with faces, some sinister, some sad, some joyous; some slashed, tattooed, marked by frostbite, fever, liquor. Toujours-Là is there, his blue eyes blinking, and Aristide Marquis, and the chimpanzee, his simple face pressed to a mug of punch.
The punch is strong and hot. I get some too, with a nice, fruity slice of lemon peel.
“And nurse it, Nini, go slow. That’s sailor stuff, see, made for men equipped with solid copper piping.” The Cod’s wife slips me a gritty stick of peppermint to stir with; there is monkey hair stuck to the sides.
“And my love is as vast as–” the Marquis moans boozily, and Toujours-Là, through smoke and din cuts in:
“My arse!” Which almost causes an incident. But the Marquis is easily coaxed back into felicity and soon the two are singing together. The Cod’s wife joins in fortissimo – leaning over the piano and holding her breasts with both hands – and Totor off-key, with a song, though none of us know it, shamelessly lifted (and scrambled) from Apollinaire:
“. . . The star above your garter
as tight as a nut cracker;
your mouth my delight, my nectar –
O Lu-Lu! Lu-Lu!”
The tiddly chimp, rocking alone on the floor, but carefully, so as not to spill a drop, quivers with excitement as the Cod’s wife sends the song cascading with a voluptuous treble:
“OOOH Lu-Lu, Lu-LOOH!”
Outside the fog is like a fine dust rising. The familiar street surges with shadowy figures before a gust of wind blots it out altogether. Inside, we are warm and cosy. The place is packed, the air palpable with all that breathing. Toujours-Là and the Marquis leave the piano for a game of dominoes. The chimp and I continue to nurse our punch, sucking drop by drop from our swiftly dissolving sugar sticks. Through half-closed eyes I admire the domino constellations and thrill to the sounds they make as they snap against the table. I lust after Toujours-Là’s white clay pipe barely perceived in the semidarkness; it is shaped like a mermaid with nipples and eyes of gold enamel: they twinkle.
I intuit a connection, perplexing and profound, between those eager eyes and nipples and in those oblong skies of darkest night pierced with planets. The Ghost’s constellations mirror those in Heaven.
My head foggy with rum, my mouth swollen with sugar, I imagine holes in the sky through which the sleet comes sliding (a quick glance out the window shows that fog has turned to rain, and rain to ice; the streets are paved with it and outside, drunken men tumble like skittles). We are marooned. The Ghost Port Bar has become our island.
The Cod’s wife brings out some herring for supper, boiled potatoes and slices of bread. The taste of salt herring, hot potato, rum, and bread so good I savour every particle. I do not think of Other Mother anxiously prodding the Sunday roast.
The Marquis has finished eating.
“Toujours-Là,” he says, “last Saturday Totor told us a famous story; it started badly but it ended well – the Dolly Siren waking in an inlet off the sunny coast of Sumatra and ever sea-worthy despite her detour in the sky. I’d say it’s up to you to tell another, but this time start it well and end it in disaster.”
Toujours-Là pulls his pipe from his lips and, scratching a jowl, says:
“This story is disastrous from start to finish; no way getting around that.” The chimp has fallen asleep on his feet, his body bent in two, his cheek resting on the floor. But I, I begin to wake up.
“I hope it’s about a mermaid!” I whisper loudly to Totor. Toujours-Là says:
“Yes, it is. More or less. Yes, it is, hah! In its way. But then it isn’t, neither.” I fear he is asking riddles.
At the other side of the room a few men are leaving; Toujours-Là waits for the scraping of their chairs and the clatter of their clogs to cease. As they go a gust of cold wind slams into the room and the chimp shivers in his sleep.
“Our bloody hulk, the Annabelle Lee, had sprung any number of leaks and was forced to dock in the port of an aborted rock pile not fit to be called a city, so ugly it burned the eyes.” Toujours-Là begins with a voice like a barrel rolling down a road. “This city was famous for its kilns and crockery. Figurines no bigger than a starving man’s turds sat in all the windows. I hated them worse than the bugs which overran the beds.
“I killed time drinking a sooty whisky. The bar’s proprietor had a collection of the peculiar pottery – a dozen stood on a shelf, and, as the Devil would have it, were reflected in a mirror, which made them twice as many, as if twelve was not enough, Goddammit, and I was forced to look at twenny-four. I saw bad luck in it. Figured they was telling me I’d be stuck there for as many months. I
swallowed the bastard’s poison, trying not to inhale, and blasted those clay birdies from their perch with the pistol of my mind.
“ ‘I see you admiring my collection,’ said the arse-hole barkeep. ‘Some are very old. These days they ain’t so nicely glazed.’ He showed me a piece of crap which was supposed to be a starfish. I lost my temper and sent it to the floor where it didn’t shatter, but rolled with a tinkle that sounded like laughter. He threw me out, but I was eager to go, sick to death of his cursed bric-à-brac damned with nine lives. I was even missing the pissing Annabelle Lee.
“Now, this place was known for more than its crockery. I’d heard rumours that a mermaid had been seen swimming in the canal. So I stopped a fella and said: ‘Hey! Where’s this mermaid I’ve heard about?’
“ ‘A myth!’ he lisped. ‘A fairy-tale!’ But shame hid his eyes like slime. He was lying. ‘A myth! Make-believe!’
“I roughed him up, which was easy. He was as limp as a dead snake. He begged for pity and insisted he had nothing to do with it.”
The room is quiet; everyone is listening to Toujours-Là. The only sound is the chimp’s gentle snoring. The Cod’s wife is standing between Toujours-Là and the Marquis, one hand on Toujours-Là’s shoulder, the other playing with a lump of amber the Marquis has hanging from his neck.
“ ‘You’re lying!’ I yelled. ‘I want to see her! Take me to her!’ He fell down sprawling. I was drunk, evidently. I pulled him up by the ears.
“ ‘No!’ he sobbed. ‘She’ll kill me!’
“ ‘Who?’ I said, giving him a slap. ‘Who? Who?’ But in a sudden frenzy he kicked me in the shin and scuttled off.
“The night swallowed him whole. I walked on, shadows thieving around me. I lost my way. An hour went by and I didn’t know where the Hell I was. I walked into puddles and I stepped on something queer; I lost my matches and my shin was hurting. Then I felt someone tugging at my pants – a dwarf. He came up to my knees. Said he knew a place where we can get island rum. For a drink he’ll tell me all I want to know.
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 2
