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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  For Totor, the smell of sulphur attested to the spa’s authenticity, and was the proof of Pluto’s complicity. It alone was enough to convince him that we had entered a supernatural place. Not that the spa was haunted; here the ghosts one met were always one’s own.

  It was the season of sardine and the Marquis had no choice but to return that very evening to the sea. Rose and Totor stayed behind. Silently they walked through the station’s luxurious and extensive gardens without seeing them, or sat stunned like marble figures beside the marble fountains of the entrance oblivious to the Venetian-Viennese architecture and the perambulations of an international bourgeoisie and petite noblesse suffering from minor maux. In later years a Japanese dwarf wrapped from head to foot in a towel was all Rose remembered of her month spent in weeping at the spa. When they realized that they could do nothing to alter my condition, they returned to the city deeply grieved. Doctor Kaiserstiege knew that they were poor and, before they left, assured them that she did not expect to be paid. “Coma has long been my especial fascination,” she explained. “Very little is known about it, you see.” And she promised to write to them each week, to inform them of my progress, if any, and to describe her own procedures.

  Shortly after Totor and Rose arrived back home they received a letter:

  Life is a state of ceaseless restoration. The wound heals, the broken wing mends, the branch, burned by frost, sprouts new leaves. I am convinced Nini’s sleep is a restorative sleep. However, he has been deeply perturbed by the shock of drowning. He is in the hands of a mysterious preserving power; he clings to sleep as a castaway clings to a raft. He must be coaxed or prodded into consciousness.

  And the following week:

  Nicolas has now been examined by members of the National Neurological Institute. They have approved my procedures, although they are experimental. Such cases are exceedingly rare and there is no habitual therapy.

  All his senses are continually solicited. He is massaged and bathed twice a day. The waters here are very rich in minerals: magnesium, iron, calcium, sulphur. . . . He is given things to smell: roses, onions, ammonia, patchouli; particles of pepper and nutmeg are placed on his tongue. I’ve brought my own gramophone – I’ve some rare records of Chinese opera and monkey cries from the Amazons, but it is Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Tales from the Vienna Woods, which appeal to him the most. His little face wrinkles in indignation should I wind up Beethoven! Throughout the day a nurse strikes a triangle near his ear, or rings a large bell. He dislikes the triangle and the bell as much as he dislikes Beethoven.

  These procedures are not as “magical” as they sound. More and more frequently the smooth surface of sleep is agitated, the stagnation of those deep waters disturbed, those muddy tides sparked with light. At times his face is infused with happiness; often he appears to grieve.

  Appears to grieve – and this brings me to something we must all consider. I fear Nini’s mind has been disturbed by more than water. In agitated dreams he calls out for his father. You told me that he is an orphan. May I ask how and when his parents died? You must realize that I am not asking out of idle curiosity. This is a delicate case. I should hate to commit an error when Nini “surfaces” as I believe he will.

  Several weeks passed before Rose answered:

  Error is sometimes preferable to the truth. His parents both died violently. Ignoramously. It is best to leave sleeping dogs lie.

  The doctor asked:

  What do you mean by ignoramously? Perhaps you mean ignominiously? Sleeping dogs may awaken and bite. To hide the truth is like trying to hide a burning candle under a haystack. [She was pleased with this and certain she had found the right formula for Rose.] I assure you, I need to know all the influences which may have disturbed the dynamic action of his mind.

  And when this letter remained unanswered:

  Please tell me about his parents. I could be wrong, but I feel it is fear which keeps him so stubbornly sleeping. And you, Rose, what do you fear? Please tell me the truth. You see – I believe knowledge is sacred. A sacred right. And that not knowing is always worse than knowing. The known can be faced; it can be circumscribed. Whereas the unknown is like a ghost. It haunts us, but remains formless. It cannot be seized.

  But Rose refused to answer. When she wrote again it was to complain of Totor’s own silence – for since my drowning he had refused to speak – and to ask what I was being fed. She approved of broths and herbal teas and eggnogs, but not of bells and triangles. She ignored the doctors questions and redoubled her prayers. The doctor persisted:

  Sickness is not a devil to be fought with prayers. Nini’s mind is not inhabited by demons, but perhaps with painful memories. There is a theory to which I wholeheartedly comply: that a shock can lead to the denial of memory – a kind of willed blindness, which can lead to all sorts of nervous disorders. I see Nini struggle daily with that which appears to be a desire for and a fear of consciousness. In other words it is possible that he is afraid of waking up.

  All this was lost on Rose who, I know now, if not incapable of understanding K’s request, was unwilling to. To have understood, to have answered truthfully, would have meant admitting her own guilt, her own complicity.

  To justify herself, Rose spoke to the curé. “It’s just I’m not convinced,” she said, “that the woman is reliable. What I mean is, she being a doctoress, sees men, well, peeled. Not even married and she knows buckets from pokers!” The curé shared Rose’s distrust of female doctors. When Rose finally did answer K, she wrote:

  Nini’s parents drowned in a boating accident. Nini was a mere infant, just over two. He never knew what happened.

  Doctor Kaiserstiege knew this was not the truth but the “preferable error.” And if this is the preferable error, she thought, how much more traumatic is the truth? Whatever it is, she decided, he knows. And like the piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat, this knowledge will not go down!

  The Marquis returned to the spa one Sunday in early August. He found K depressed – I was not responding to treatment as well as she hoped and her other patients were inhabited by an irresistible lassitude which lectures, surprise galas, and picnics could not dissipate. K was visited with the terrible certitude that her patients were at the spa not so much to mend their bodies as to kill time. It horrified her to think that what had been conceived as an island of love and light was nothing more than a genteel amusement park. She wondered if the same sedimentation was also taking place on the outside.

  “They are all so stupendously blasé,” she confided to the Marquis. “My little universe of water and quiet pale beside the jubilant, bombastic promise of war. When the dreadful news arrives it will be received with enthusiasm. What is to become of us if we embrace Evil as eagerly as we embrace entertainment?”

  They were walking down an avenue of stunted palms. Turning onto a barely perceptible path they came to an overgrown corner encircled with boxwood hedges and busy with insects: scarabs, mantises, and crickets.

  “This,” she explained to him, “is a theatre intended for those inclined to solitary entertainments.” And she kissed him. As she described it to me years and years later, they kissed beneath “the crazy-quilt canopy of trees and the world smelled not of sulphur but of chlorophyll and crushed leaves, clover and shelled shrimp.” Knowing nothing of love, I wondered: Why shrimp? but was too shy to ask her to explain.

  “My beloved acrobat,” she said, “my merman of the air. Even now he animates my life. He was the only man I ever loved, and if he reappeared right now, walking up the path on his hands – I would ignite to be consumed utterly by happiness. You see, he gave me ecstasy; I had never known ecstasy. Oh, Nicolas! All these years I too have dreamed. . . .”

  War was declared at the end of summer. Doctor Kaiserstiege’s patients packed their wicker trunks in a fever and cleared out.

  At the station, a train festooned with flags and flowers churned past, choked with soldiers heading north. And, as K described it: “app
arently thrilled to death. They were cheered as if they were on their way to a tournament, yet they were soon to find themselves up against all the unsoundable torture of obstinate matter. How gladly civilians and soldiers alike traded serenity for vertigo! Someone cried: ‘We’ll celebrate victory at Christmas!’ Everyone imagined something fleet and coloured and noble. But Christmas came and went and the New Year, too. War was no longer the heady tumult of confronting armies out upon the open field; it was maddening stagnation in mud mazes and tunnels of smoke. The enemy had built a wall as impenetrable as the face of God. The price of a summer’s diversion was our innocence and a stiff five thousand corpses a day.”

  Aristide Marquis was drafted that winter.

  In the weeks and months following the declaration of war, the Neurological Institute sent K many unusual patients. Although their comportment varied tremendously, they were, as was I, all sleepers. The strangest case of all (if K were here she would hasten to say that her patients were “not cases! But people, people, people, Nicolas, in all their glorious singularity!”) was that of the lovers – two tawny adolescents who stood mouth to mouth for decades in the ballroom empty of everything but forty-four slowly oxidizing mirrors. Year after year they stood in their own vapour, their skin as incandescent as the knives of druids. I believe they must have haunted all our dreams; I know they haunted mine. Somehow I saw them eternally burning on the outer edges of my mind. The smell of smoke which still permeates the spa – stronger, even, than the stench of sulphur – is not the odour of war but of skin kindled and rekindled with unconsummated desire.

  And there was the cobbler. Although fast asleep, and often seized with tics – or what was more troublesome, the desire to bite – he continued to make shoes. If the materials at hand were not of the best quality he would go into a fit of depression so that K had to spend a fortune on suede and fine leather. As his production was phenomenal, and as he lost all interest in the shoes once they were made, all up and down the Loire Valley the impoverished children of wartime France, fatherless and dressed in stinking rags, wore the boots and slippers of fairyland: fox-brown, grass-green, blood-red.

  These things K told me, stately and a little stiff, dressed in her silk shirt and linen suit of out-dated style, regal, self-composed, and tiny in a worn garden chair. She was close to eighty when I awoke to meet her, the only woman with whom it can be said I shared my life – such as it was. Or we walked, she wheeling me at the beginning, in the ruins of her ideal domain. In a breathy, brittle voice she told me all that had transpired since the day I had plunged into the dark waters of my own reflection. K despaired: the paths were overgrown with weeds and the fountains gutted with leaves. As I recall, I told her I thought her garden was a paradise.

  “But Nicolas,” she said, “Paradise never existed, nor ever shall. I fear your old friend Toujours-Là was right in his mad way; righter than the Marquis, though, God knows, I prefer his way. I have always known that Paradise is an impossibility. More impossible even than meeting up with a unicorn, or reading an opera written by a whale. This said: I have always behaved as if it were possible. And the only thing worth fighting for.”

  Of her many sleepers I was the sole survivor. I hasten to add that she was as unresponsible for those lost lives as she was for the burning of her own books. As she wheeled me about her ruined gardens of enchantment, the story of the world as it happened while I slept, unfolded.

  As I have said, at the outbreak of the First World War, K lost all her regular patients and received only those the Neurological Institute sent her. The lovers, the cobbler, and I were joined by the eelman who, when not rooted in inertia, undulated like an eel, and a painter who rendered pictures of emblematic animals in the air with an imaginary brush. I see us as the inmates of an insane zoo, standing frozen in ridiculous postures, speaking in unintelligible tongues, shamelessly passing wind, communing with moonbeams and dustballs, but never with one another.

  K’s theory that the collective unconscious had perceived the impending first world conflict was confirmed by us. Our attitudes mirrored those of the shell-shocked and the gassed she saw among the victims of Verdun when she set out on her fruitless search to find the body of Aristide Marquis. “Just as if they had made the traumas of the war their own. But what is curious is this: if hysterics are bound by reminiscences, all my ‘sleepers,’ but the Sandman, suffered from the future traumas of perfect strangers.”

  We all responded to the phases of the moon. Living with us was like living in a clock museum; we’d bellow when the moon was full and low, and cower, winding down, when she’d shown us her horns.

  When, later, K ran out of funds, she was forced to sell the spa’s extravagant furnishings: the dining-room chairs upholstered in cool leather, the silly canopied beds in which heads of state had battled asthma, the portable tubs posing on gold-dipped feet, the absurdly precious vases and silver. Year after year the rooms were emptied of their treasures so that we, her oblivious wards, as thankless as logs, would survive. She took good care of us. Had it not been for the murderous zealot who notified the Nazis of our existence during the Second War, as late as 1944, it is very likely we would all be alive today. Now these rooms are weather-worn, empty, eerie, and the fissured corridors animated only by the startled eyes of lizards and the eager arrows of their tongues.

  The night Sputnik passed overhead, I opened my eyes for the first time in thirty years, and before closing them again for another twenty, I sang a song, Rose’s churning song, from start to finish. K managed to catch the refrain:

  When the Devil comes

  take up a stick

  and beat, beat, beat him about the horns.

  Beat the Devil ’till he calls for his mother;

  beat the Devil into white cream

  and sweet, sweet butter.

  CHAPTER

  13

  And now the time has come for me to describe as best I can what surfacing from a fifty-year-long sleep was like. Because it is so hard for me to put to words the feelings which submerged me, I have gone to K’s library to read all I can about other beings who died and were reborn.

  I have read of the Phoenix which awakens from its ashes a serpent; of Adonis who was kept prisoner in the bowels of the earth; of Attis who unmanned himself. But of all those mythical figures the one I feel closest to is Tammuz of the Sumerians whose name, extraordinarily (at least to me), means: “true son of deep water.” He is likened to trees and plants which perish from lack of rain. This I can say about myself: I am parched, arid, the very opposite of young, of rooted, of green. . . .

  Perhaps, as Bottlenose believed, all things are but agitation, and time a hollow measure. Those fifty years passed like a clap of thunder. Yet I felt their loss acutely; loss pressed upon my heart like a griffin of bronze.

  The question I must answer is this: What awakened me? It was August and an unusually large, full moon was shining. As she wished to gaze upon it in her loneliness, K had not drawn the curtain. She believes some elegant magic took place that night because, after all, this was the same “ogress moon” I had seen as a child in the stairwell. I acknowledge that this explanation is not rational, but I know in my heart of hearts it was the orange moon burning in the window which, like a kiss in a fairy-tale, aroused me.

  In the beginning the world edged its way into my consciousness. A cry escaped me. When it hit the air it shattered. Doctor Kaiserstiege appeared in a rust-coloured fog.

  “Nicolas.” She put her hand to my cheek. I recognized her voice and the gesture was tender. “Nicolas.” Her voice dissolving darkness. Her glittering tears. “You have been gone a long time.” The words unhinged. Letters bobbed in the ocean of my mind like luminous corks.

  “May I bring you some milk?” M – an abstracted bat rising from the floor to the ceiling, I – a wand, L – a pharaoh’s leg with a toeless foot, K – a broken gate. I watched the letters burning in the night, stellar, magical, and took her hand in mine.

  Despite Doctor K
aiserstiege’s kindness, those first months were a torment. For fifty years my dreams had clothed me like a mantle. Waking tore the fabric of my life. I lay immobile, crushed beneath the weight of my wasted youth. As I gazed at the night sky it seemed the stars were like myself – older and dimmer. In The Fountains of Neptune K describes me:

  As his dreamed life eclipsed he was seized by vertigo. The fertile island of the mind gave way to a barren and incomprehensible reality. It was as if the spring of his being had run dry.

  Although in her eighties, K was still beautiful. The skin of her face was so thin I could see the veins throb at her temples like the rivers of the world seen from the sky. She had a mane of white hair which she pushed from her face with nervous fingers. Her green eyes were orbited with umber; she was farsighted and could see only distances. Overcome with tenderness I watched her as she sat, her chair ballooning with pillows, bent over an open book. That winter we went through K’s favourites; Kafka and Lao Tse, Bachelard and Perrault, Melville and Freud are the voices of my rebirth. My own voice was an aviary, a froggery, a monkey tree, a caged animal, it croaked and squawked; all the torturous impatience of my confusion tumbling forth like spoiled herrings from a fractured barrel. Now, when I look back, that first winter is a violently coloured jumble of words scented with the plasticene she bought at the bazar in thin, ribbed slabs. The first thing I produced as a part of the therapy was an imaginary portrait of Bottlenose.

  This figure was followed by another which pleased K so much she had it photographed for the revised edition of the book. It is the figure of a child bent beneath the weight of a woman he carries on his back. K called him “Little Sindbad.”