The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

by Ducornet, Rikki

  “Treasure!”

  “ ‘A heathen statue, no doubt,’ says Bottlenose, ‘a hoodoo hocus-pokery. A totem pole tomfoolery. A quackery. In other words: just some humbug idol.’ But if the rumour smacked of mumbo-jumbo, it smelled, Nini, of gold; Bottlenose’s rocket glowed.” Toujours-Là attempts to stand.

  “At night it lead the way

  Burning bright as day!

  “Ah! But the jungle was thick! Treacherous! Bottlenose himself was growing fearful of the thing! What if there was a Cyclops crouching in the shadows waiting to grab him, and skewer him through and through and through, and roast him over a slow fire!”

  “Was there a Cyclops?”

  “Hold on! Bottlenose stumbles through a terrain like some demons idea of a practical joke: vines like a hangmans nooses, and tar pits, and quicksand – not to mention crocodiles with tails rigid as saws. But Bottlenose walks on, though his eyes near pop from their sockets with fever. And then in a clearing, he sees it. Sees that brooding Cyclops with one tireless eye and outsize member.”

  “What does Bottlenose do!”

  “He collapses, Nicolas, in a fit of mad laughter. He laughs so hard the parrots tumble from the tree-tops because what he sees is only an old camera perched on a tripod and bleeding rust! There’s a wasp’s nest stuck to one leg and a buzzards turd crowning the top and the whole thing’s tilting precarious. A skeleton lies beside it picked clean as a pin, dressed only in a grin, a pocket-watch and a locket. Bottlenose laughed the harder, weeping as he roared, to see that the skull greening in the grass weren’t ivory but bone, the locket, gold plate; the pocket-watch, brass.

  “That night he succumbed to jungle fever. Bottlenose died contemplating the photographer’s stopped watch; now his own bones lie beside the other’s. Who knows what stories that marriage will engender among superstitious folk! Say – tell me – can you see the clock up on the wall?”

  “I can!”

  “Then read the time. Is it near three?”

  “It is! Ten to three!”

  “And today is Sunday?”

  “It is!”

  “Ah. Then it is time.”

  “Time for what, Toujours-Là?”

  “Time to take a plunge into the air. Time for a lesson in Natural History. Time to see. . . .” He pulls himself up from his chair and lays a worn coin down on the table.

  We leave the Snail and Shark for the familiar maze of streets. The air, cold again, speaks clearly of a snowless night.

  Toujours-Là ducks down an obscure alley, keeping his balance by leaning against the filthy wall. When he climbs a stone staircase, its iron railing torn away and veering blindly into space, I refuse to follow.

  “Come!” he coaxes, “I’m going to show you Blue Beard’s closet!”

  “No! I don’t like Blue Beard!”

  “Shh! No reason to fear. Don’t you want to see the fatal forest? Don’t you want to see the dragon?”

  “There’s a forest up there? There can’t be. You’re making all this up!”

  “Shh! You’ll wake him!”

  “Who?”

  “The dragon!”

  “There’s a dragon up there? Truly?”

  “Beautiful and terrible! Shh! Not a word, Nini, now; not a sound. He sleeps in a chamber of fa! fa! fire! You don’t want to wake him!” I follow Toujours-Là down a dark corridor which smells of mice.

  “Behind that door!” he whispers, squatting on the floor and pulling me down with him. A hole has been bored through the wood. Illuminated from behind, it shines in the shadows like a tiny star. Toujours-Là puts one eye to the hole and silently laughs. I am both frightened and devoured by curiosity.

  “The castle of love,” says Toujours-Là, “and its abysmal moat. Look!”

  Is there a Devil in the room? Or has something devilish happened to my eye? I see a bare, papered room with windows veiled in tattered lace and blazing in the sun, a soiled crimson quilt spilled across the floor, a length of brass bed and in a turmoil of sheets – the Cod’s wife naked on her knees and thrashing in a weird forest of arms and legs. Stunned, I blink, and look again. This time I recognize the twins – Gilles and Gillesbis – naked as seals. The Cod’s wife is prized between them; one twin is holding her by her unbound hair and the other slaps her rump. The fur at the base of her belly is so black as to be almost blue.

  Through a vortex of blood I hear sounds which must be coming from the walls, the floors, the incandescent window, from under the bed – but surely not from them. The sounds are not human. I am horror-struck, perplexed, unsure of what I have seen.

  Moments later as we walk down the reeling street, Toujours-Là says by way of an explanation and perhaps to justify himself:

  “The room’s my own. It’s the Cod’s wife rents it out for me. Nights I sleep there, see; days it’s hers.” As I remain silent, he continues. “Now you know what women are, Nini. But you ain’t seen the worst. Blue Beard’s closet is fathomless.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  Back home Rose is in her kitchen. The house smells of freshly baked custard pie. I carry Thingummy Ma’Hoot up to my room and lay him down beneath my pillow beside Erzulie. I imagine they form a couple.

  In the kitchen the pie, speckled brown and yellow like an egg, steams in the centre of the table. Afraid Rose will see the afternoon reflected in my eyes, I screw them shut to receive her kiss.

  “You’re as white as a sheet!” says Rose. “Why are you making faces? Where’s Totor?”

  “We just gave Charlie Dee a nautical funeral

  “Heaven forbid!” She sets a slice of pie down before me with a clatter.

  “Read me the recipe for abricots à la Condé, Nini, and don’t muzzle your food.” She slams the great red cookbook beside my dish and, collapsing in her own chair at the tables end, begins to peel potatoes. “I’ve not seen much of you!” she scolds. “You’re always out galoshing and I wonder where to? Not that I’m asking, mind you, though I’ve a right to know.” And, knocking the earth off a potato: “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out. . . .” I pretend to take an interest in the cookbook.

  “Out and about, I’d say!”

  “Poach the apricots in vanilla syrup,” I begin, “but first slice them in two.”

  “Obviously! How ladle-headed does Escoffier think I am?”

  “Don’t let them cook too long –”

  “They’re already cooked; cooked and bottled just as they should be. Each time I use this book I think he takes me for a goose!”

  “But he doesn’t know you,” I mumble with my mouth full of crust. I sit back, chewing dreamily. The pieces of the puzzling world slide closer into place.

  “It’s good to be home!”

  “Home is where the heart is,” says Rose. “Cut yourself another slice.”

  “Drain them and dress a border of sweet vanilla-flavoured rice pudding, well-thickened over the fire with two egg yolks, 150 grams rice, and a good piece of butter.”

  “Madame Pierre bought some of that comical vanilla,” says Rose, “and used it. She shouldn’t have. They all ate it, the entire family. Might as well feed pins to pigs. I’d rather die than cook with comicals.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing yet. What’s next?”

  “The rice should be soft, yet stiff enough to support the fruit –”

  “ ‘Time bombs in the kitchen,’ I said to her.”

  “Set the fruit on the pudding. Decorate with candied cherries and angelica cut to look like leaves. See picture page 446. Look, Other Mother! It looks like a basket of fruit!”

  “Do you think Aristotle will like it?”

  “The Marquis will love it!”

  “There should be little cakes to go with it. Find me a recipe for little cakes.”

  “Maybe you are an Ogress, Other Mother!”

  “What an idea!”

  “Fattening me up so you can eat me after! Other Mother . . . was my mother . . . someone nice?” Rose, her
apron ferrying potato peel, bustles to the trash box and then to the stove.

  “What did you say, Nini? Oh, handle it! I’ve burned my finger on the kettle again!” She works the pump handle furiously and a cascade of icy water bounces from her finger into the stone sink, submerging my question in a vortex of foam.

  Dinner is over. The ruins of the pudding are pushed aside; nothing is left of the hen but her bones, and the little cakes are reduced to atoms. Behind the etched glass of the dining-room doors Other Mother prepares coffee. Outside, a snow, like tufted fish, is falling.

  The Marquis prods the fire. Totor, his pipe between his teeth, tells how a half-century ago an entire ship’s crew vaporized in a mysterious fog in the port of Amsterdam:

  ”Nothing remained but the captain’s gold teeth. The girls – no longer girls – still talk about it. The riddle weren’t never solved, nor ever will be!”

  “All things pass,” says the Marquis, “all things, that is, but mystery. . . . Look at the battlements in the fire, Nini!”

  ”Looks inhabited from here!” cries Totor. “See that devil there, swinging from a donjon! Whoops! There he goes –”

  “And there goes the donjon!” A tower of embers totters and collapses.

  Outside the snow falls faster. As when sitting out on the breakwater watching the ocean slide past, I pretend it is I who is moving, tonight the entire house is rising into the sky, and with it, secreted beneath my pillow, Thingummy Ma’Hoot.

  Thingummy’s silence, his teasing smile, force me to heed my own nagging doubts and to indulge my curiosity. Within the week I am breathlessly searching in Rose’s top dresser drawer where I know she keeps her secrets and, therefore, mine. Tucked away in a faded blue envelope among letters from Totor dating from his seafaring days, and their wedding menu printed in gold and stained with wine and gravy, I find a photograph of a couple sitting together in a rowboat. Without being told, I know that these are my parents. In my father’s face I recognize my own, and the oval of my mother’s face has been carefully rubbed out with sandpaper.

  Father is an intense-looking young man in his thirties, dark, with eyes sparked by an endearing glint of good humour. His smile, as he gazes upon my mother, is affectionate. He looks like a man with a full life ahead of him, yet in two years he will be dead.

  Family connections have not yet been clearly defined. It is not until the spring I am told, having for the first time asked, that father was Totor’s nephew. This much clarified I return to the blue envelope.

  The afternoon is mine. I have time to ponder the question Thingummy – sitting on the dresser, a small, stolid oracle – has provoked. Why has Rose removed my mother’s face when she could have cut the photograph in two?

  I study my mother’s figure for clues. Her slender neck and arms are visible and her hand reaching for the water which – I see it now – is not there. This is, in fact, a studio photograph, and the mossy banks and weeping willows painted canvas. The lake itself is an unrolled sheet of paper.

  Looking up from the fictitious lake, wrinkled, a seam ill-concealed, I continue to investigate the country of my mother’s faceless body. She is strangely swollen, as if, Thingummy prods, she is with child. My breath catches: I am that child.

  This is why Rose has kept the entire picture: I am there. The thought that I might have been severed from my father to sail unborn in a half-boat, in a fictive landscape across a phantom lake fills me with such dread I forbid Thingummy Ma’Hoot to ask further questions. As that familiar screen of palpable shadow unfolds once again in my mind, I put away the photograph and, holding Thingummy to my aching solar plexus, go back to my room.

  Yet my investigations continue, if obliquely. I lead what Doctor Kaiserstiege later calls “a double life.” Life with Totor, Rose, and the Marquis (for he has become a member of the family). He has convinced Rose to write a cookbook “peppered,” says Rose, “with the antidotes he’s picked up the world round such as those cremated Easter chickens and, for example, fastidious information about the vanilla trade, and even a recipe for fisherman’s soup – the one they boil up on deck with sea water.” And my other life – those hours of ice and fire that I spend in the company of Toujours-Là.

  I can’t stay away from the Snail and Shark, at least not for long. Saturday after school I find myself transported as if by magic to the fountain and contemplating that gaily painted Devil from the street. Despite the risks, I often bring Thingummy Ma’Hoot. He is the tangible ghost of Charlie; he has power. The fact that I have stolen him, necessitating secrecy, assures that power. And because Toujours-Là knows, he is powerful too, magical, a man of keys. Keys to the past, to the Land of the Dead, to the mystery of parents departed – but not at rest. His knowledge of the story behind all stories is the tantalizing prize he holds up in the half-light again and again and always just beyond my reach.

  CHAPTER

  10

  In April the canneries are humming with activity and the horse-drawn trucks packed with cans thunder down the streets to the port. In this season which smells of street-side fritures, fish guts and boiling oil, I find Toujours-Là pacing the fountain square anxiously with a large sack. With each step his filthy toes slide out from the gaping ends of his clogs, and in the sunlight his odd, green coat looks like it might shine in the dark. The sack emits eerie, muffled sounds. He hands it to me.

  “You take this,” he says, agitated, “to the Cod’s wife. You tell her it’s the damned best I can do.”

  “A monkey!” He shakes his head. I take the sack from him gingerly. “What’s in there?” For all I know he’s caught a snake.

  “I thinksh,” he says, “some sort of a parrot; an exotic speshies of some short. Shit!” He pisses against the basin of the fountain.

  “GOD DAMN YOUR KNOB!” Startled, we both look up to see a crone craning from a window just above us. “THAT’S SAINT PETER!”

  Stunned, Toujours-Là shuffles backwards and collides into me.

  “She still there?”

  “She is.”

  “The hag’s unmanned me.” He jiggles his penis morosely. I follow him into the empty street. “Listen. You take the sack over there. I’d do it myself but I don’t feel so good. I feel like shit, Nini. I’ve felt like shit before but thish ish exsh-sheptional.”

  I loosen the knot at the top of the sack and take a peek inside. I see one angry eye and hear a demonic chugging.

  “It’s a turkey, Toujours-Là!”

  “So thash wash it is.”

  “WHAT’S GOING ON, YOU TWO?” the creature screams, “WHAT ARE YOU DEVILS HIDING IN THERE?”

  “KEEP YOUR NOSE TO YOUR OWN ARSE-HOLE!” Toujours-Là shouts back, furious. She eclipses. “Beat it, Nini, The bird’s been purloined. Hell! Makes me mad being cheated like thish! I should have known better than to deal with alcoholicsh. The man told me ’twas an exotic speshies. I see now he was a sh . . . a swindler.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This were a legitimate commercial enterprise. A swap, fair and square. ’Cept he were crooked.”

  “But you’ve got nothing to swap, Toujours-Là!”

  “Sure! You forget, Nini. I got the act. I swapped a look in the hole for the bird! But the bugger promised a parrot! Well, if she can’t mother it she can stick an onion –”

  “I’m not taking it, Toujours-Là. You’re the one owes her an apology. Not me.”

  “I thought I could count on you. If I can’t count on you, Nini, who the Hell can I count on? But hurry up! Goddammit! It’s soiling up the sack. What if it suffocates?”

  “Maybe it could be plucked,” I offer, “before you give it to her. Because she’s not going to want it for a pet. It’s got a nasty look, Toujours-Là.”

  “I’m not plucking it! Are you crazy?” Leaving the sack in the middle of the street, he turns and weaves his way slowly back to the Snail and Shark. I run after him.

  “I’m not doing it!” We are still arguing on the stoop when a four-horse factory truck load
ed down with two tons of canned sardines comes wheeling down the street with a tremendous, unstoppable, clamorous shudder. Toujours-Là pulls me by the sleeve into the Snail and Shark.

  “Another one will be here any minute,” he says, “an’ there won’t be an atom left of the bird. Let ush be philo-shopical. I say: GOOD RIDDASH. Did I tell you about the time, Nini, Bottlenose went to sea with a bellows?”

  That night Rose came up with “an extremely delegant recipe for fish soup made dreamy and anxious by the addition of roe, garlic, and egg yolks pounded together with a porcelain pestle and wedded with heavy cream.” The Marquis was the first to taste it and suggest additional pepper – after which Totor proclaimed the soup perfect. This soup contained brill, sole, spiny lobster, turbot, crabs and “a shy visitation of clams.” She served it with little diamonds of fried toast topped with roe poached in butter. For dessert she made a lemon mousse, “because after supper the fish should be only a memory of the mind.”

  After supper I slipped upstairs and took the photograph from Rose’s drawer. I squinted, trying to imagine my mother’s face. Then, instead of putting the picture back, I took it to my room and laid it under my pillow along with Erzulie and Thingummy Ma’Hoot.

  I returned to the Snail and Shark on Sunday morning. It was as deserted as ever. The dealer in antiques was there fast asleep, and at the bar a blighted woman pleaded with the snarling green shadows in her glass. Toujours-Là – the greater archon of that diminishing hierarchy – sat, as was his habit, brooding beside a bottle. I walked over to his table and with an anxious heart lay the mutilated photograph before his eyes.

  He did not move. I was aware of the woman’s soft bleating, the sleeping man’s shallow breathing. I looked across the room into an immense mirror which hung at a weird angle; the vast rectangular floor and everything on it seemed to be sliding into unchartered space.

  “Toujours-Là!” The old sailor twitched and, wiping the spittle from his chin with his wrist, appeared to fix on the picture with intensity. For a few slippery instants I feared he contemplated only the muddy well of his own thoughts. “Tell me!” I insisted. “Tell me what you know!”