“To see his face again . . .” she murmured. To my astonishment it seemed to me that she – the fervent atheist – was praying. But there was no one as tall, or as beautiful as he, and clearly, no one as black.
“Many of these photographs are very old,” K said, “taken even before our time. It was the First War that changed the faces and figures of the women and the men, and the face of the city. Until then things had drifted along unchanged for decades, long strings of decades. . . .”
We were both drawn then to a young woman’s face – a portrait of considerable technical skill. She was standing against a folding screen, her hands behind her back, and she was wearing a strange assortment of rags artfully pinned. She was uncommonly pretty. I wondered aloud if this could be my mother.
“Yes,” K agreed. “I imagine her this way. I imagine your father would have captured this expression – a mood that, perhaps, no one else would have perceived. Your father would have caught her wistfulness.”
“My father?” I was confused.
“Your father was a photographer.”
For a time I considered this in silence. “My father was a photographer, and she,” I whispered in awe, “she could be . . . Odille.” I had risen to my feet unaided, and my heart was madly beating.
“Yet she doesn’t look anything like you, Nini,” K reconsidered. “See – the eyes so far apart and her mouth large and down-turned. And she’s so dark, so exotic looking, really. She looks Latin, Spanish – Arab, perhaps. . . . She is lovely! Haughty if sad. . . . There’s a hint of malicious laughter lurking in those oval eyes. . . . It’s clear she’s seen too much, poor child, too soon. Then again – perhaps you take after your father.”
“I do!” I told her about the photograph I had found in Rose’s drawer. “But, K – maybe there is something in my face like hers?”
“Well – let’s see you!” she said, turning me around and gazing at me earnestly. I do not know what she saw, but now her own eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Nicolas!” she sobbed, taking me into her arms and holding me. “When the past is . . . is . . . only scraps of paper!” I had never seen this strong woman weep and I was shaken.
“K!” I barked wildly, clutching at her. “K! K!”
The curator came running, angered and perplexed, and suggested – if only by his agitated presence – that we be on our way.
K wheeled me past the pictures of both world wars: the battleships, the bombings, the city’s disarticulated skeleton. I saw a barefoot boy stumbling past a gutter filled with bodies, and thought I saw myself.
There were deep windows filled with life-size manikins dressed as Rose, Totor, and I had dressed, and cans from the cannery, and household articles including carved spoons which had once belonged to fishermen. I dared not look at any of these things too closely.
“All I have of the Marquis is one letter,” K explained as we rushed away, “and it is a letter he did not even write. And all you have of your father is the memory of a photograph. And of your mother –”
“The picture of a perfect stranger,” I said decisively, knowing as I did that if the beautiful girl in rags was not my mother, she was the closest I’d ever get to her. “The letter –”
“The letter was written by a friend the Marquis had made in the trenches. The place was called Verdun.”
We had come to the bottom of the ramp. Above and beyond, the museum spiralled in all its felted luminosity. The funnel of the exit, also brightly lit, stretched out before us. We were in an alcove dwarfed by an outsize anchor.
“Would you like me to read the letter to you?” K took a worn wallet of red leather from her purse and opened it. As the letter was very old she unfolded it carefully.
“Madame,” K began, “there is so much death here every day the dead cannot be counted. We live in troughs slippery with greenish mud and excrement oozing up from the Devil knows where. We cannot believe that this is happening to us; that we were born for this. We forget who we are, Madame. It’s hard to believe that we are human beings, even. Better to be a bug in this filth; a dung beetle’s paradise it is. Better to be a worm because our minds are sticky with anger.
“And I am so afraid. Everywhere I look I see craters where blood pools. And I weep. Because I am up to my neck in crime. Because I am caught like a sinner in a net of fire. Because the air I breathe is sharp with the splinters of trees and wire and the small, hot particles of my friends.
“Above all I weep because the Marquis is gone, enchantment is gone, and where he stood there is a hole, a great hole at the heart of the world. And all the wishful substance of our love can do nothing.
“And all the wishful substance . . .” K sighed. “He was Eros, come to walk the earth. He quickened me and everything he touched. . . . The wars killed Eros,” said Venus Kaiserstiege. She folded the letter and put it away.
CHAPTER
15
My life is an enchantment, not a fairy-tale. I am no Sleeping Beauty animated by a kiss, but a chronically ugly duckling hatched thanks to the perpetual ministrations of a dedicated doctor, or, as Doctor Kaiserstiege insists, “liberated at the completion of some obscure cycle of the psyche.”
That I awoke an old man is true and untrue. Sleep had inhibited aging so that the skin of my face is smooth and my body, if stiff and prey to the odd muscular tremor, is slender. There is something uncommonly soft and feminine about my appearance, though I treasure a beard which I keep neatly trimmed. I am very tall – well over six feet – and walk (I am beginning to walk now) with a slight stoop. I have a large nose, somewhat beaked, and this is fortunate as it imparts a much desired ruggedness to my features. I walk every day; I am attempting to bake my face into an outdoorsman’s leathery mask. Consequently my nose is always peeling.
I sometimes think that if I could pock my skin, artificially age it, I could look like another dreamer, the American statesman Abraham Lincoln. You see – it is not my homeliness which embarrasses me, but the symptom of my infirmity: uncanny youthfulness. This and the diminutive size of my hands.
Returning one afternoon from a stroll in the gardens, I found K sitting in her study sipping tea. The sweetness of her greeting filled my heart with happiness; feeling strong and peaceful I said: “Now, tell me about Odille.”
Doctor Kaiserstiege’s story begins in September of 1914 when she went to the city to “hunt down clues, and,” she admitted, “Aristide Marquis. The tender fearlessness of that man’s eyes had captivated me. I desired two things simultaneously: the knowledge of the trauma which had led to your own self-abandonment and further carnal knowledge of the Marquis, or, in other words, my own self-abandonment.
“The war was on. The port was full of immobile boats because so many men had been sent to the front. I explored the streets until I found Rose and Totor’s house.
“I pleaded with Rose to talk about the past but she said only: ‘The tongue’s best kept between the teeth and slops in the pail,’ and other such nonsense. Totor was an empty husk, Nini, bewildered by what had happened, and in pain. Visibly his heart was breaking. I knew later that he blamed himself for letting you go out on the water with someone who did not know. You see, in his mind, Odille had grown into mythical proportions, Ogress and Vouivre combined.”
“My mother! An Ogress-Vouivre!” It came to me that the stories Toujours-Là had told me had all conveyed this. I said as much to K.
“Your mother left so many stories behind her! And songs, Nini. She had sparked the imaginations of everyone. She did so much harm, but unintentionally. I don’t believe she was evil. But only a child ruled by desire. Her need, her loneliness, must have been so implacable, so exigent. . . .”
I thought of my own need, my own loneliness, and shivered.
“Totor and I left Rose behind in her kitchen stirring a custard,” K continued. “The whole street smelled of vanilla.” “I remember so well,” I said then, my mind reeling with the memory of Rose’s kitchen, “that smell!”
&nb
sp; “We walked out to the breakwater,” she went on, “and stood in silence for hours. He wept; he was convinced you were lost to him forever. It was true: you were lost to him forever. I realized then that he was a very superstitious man because when he spoke he said: ‘It’s her curse! That damned Odille! She’s stolen Nini!’ And he sobbed. I wondered: Odille? A curse ? But could get no more out of him. As it was getting cold and wet we went to the Ghost for something hot.”
“The Ghost! Is it still there!”
“That was then, Nicolas. You know the city is gone now.” “The Ghost,” I said, “is gone!” Even today it continues to exist with such vibrancy in my mind. “And then?” I pressed her, eager to know more. “What happened then?”
“Totor pushed open the door,” K continued, “and we saw the Marquis barefoot on the bar. He was juggling six empty bottles. He saw us and caught them one by one. Then he handed them to the Cod’s wife – who was scowling at me – and leapt to the floor.” For several instants she was silent.
“There was – how can I say it – a tension between us. As if our hearts were strung upon the same, taut wire. I had difficulty speaking. Breathing that potent air was difficult enough. I believe I may have sighed.”
“And he?”
“His eyes smiled!” I nodded; I knew. “Totor left us then. He vanished. He took La Georgette out to sea, and the fog, his old companion, claimed him. Totor was embraced by the weather and the water one last time. Perhaps he saw suicide – for that is what it was – as an act of atonement, or a way of placating the angry spirit of Odille.” She paused. “I have always feared that it was my insistence to speak about the past that precipitated Totor’s death. I believed that if I knew the truth I might save you all. I should have known. But everything had lost its place. Order was abolished and with it distance. The world had become a jumble of sensations. When one is in love, Nicolas, the world swarms.” When I reddened she squeezed my hand.
“It is not too late for you to know love.”
Agitated, I barked softly. K pretended not to notice.
“I explained to the Marquis why I had come; that I needed to learn about your past; that I needed to know what had happened, exactly what had happened. He had been untouched by the stories and the songs. He was intact – as if he inhabited another space, another dimension. Filth did not stick to him! But the Cod’s wife knew. She overheard me – she’d been hovering around us jealously; I thought her offensive and absurd: the sooty eyebrows and rouged cheeks! She took hold of Aristide’s shoulder defiantly, wanting me to think he was her property. She said: ‘Take her to Toujours-Là!’
“I thrilled at this! Because as you slept you had so often breathed those two mysterious words. It had never occurred to me this was someone’s name. Toujours-Là! Always there! The man you can be sure to find, day or night, haunting the darkest recesses of the bar. ‘You know him!’ I cried. ‘Where can I find him?’
“The Cod’s wife gave me an address on a torn piece of paper. I took her hand to thank her, and all at once I saw how good she was. I felt ashamed for despising her, her desperate attempts at beauty, her hand posed with hopeless love upon Aristide’s shoulder. She looked into my eyes then, surprised but pleased. And we were friends, accomplices.
“ ‘I must warn you,’ the Cod’s wife said, ‘he’s up there drunk and dying. Sometimes he’s sane and sometimes he isn’t. Don’t believe everything he tells you.’ ”
“Where was he?” I asked.
“There was a room,” K began, “up a stairway. The whole thing listing, rotting –”
“I remember!”
“You’d been there?” K asked.
“He took me there!”
“Who? The Marquis?”
“No!” I answered. “Toujours-Là! He took me there. To show me . . . to show me. . . .” The incandescent figures of the Cod’s wife and Gilles and Gillesbis leapt up from the grottoes of my memory. As the vision bore down upon me, I doubled over sputtering like a baby. When much later I could speak again, and K asked me what I had seen and what I had felt, I told her that above all I had felt shame.
Doctor Kaiserstiege did not continue with her story until several days later, and then only after I had assured her I was well enough to listen. Of all the stories I had ever heard, hers interested me the most. After all, it was, in fact, my own. However, I should make it clear that this récit, written down several years later, is, in part, the fruit of a reconstruction which includes her notes and passages from her diaries now in my keeping. At the time, K did not, and wisely so, repeat everything the old soaker had told her.
“The Cods wife had been caring for him,” K began, “and the room and bedclothes were clean enough although the air was foul. He was dying. His liver was so swollen I wondered that he continued to survive. At first he refused to let me near him.
“Aristide said: ‘She wants to know about Odille.’
“And something strange came to pass. He seemed to dream. When he awakened, he spoke in a fever, extravagantly, for close to an hour.
“Odille was wild,’ Toujours-Là began, ‘the wildest of all women; she was the flame that never dies. . . .
“ ‘She appeared from nowhere, from some hellish paradise and the city was swept up in the storm of that woman’s thighs, the tempest of her eyes; she was a whirlpool! And we – we was all sucked in!
“ ‘She was a’ways on fire; the air crackled where’er she moved an’ Odille was a walker, she walked all over, in every hole and corner and to the four winds – looking to be laid! Odille fucked fierce! She fucked to outdo Satan; she screwed to try God’s patience and man’s faith in the divine.
“ ‘Sailors would come to port and set right out looking for Odille at the Ghost, the Galaxy, and the Snail and Shark.’ He laughed, and his laughter was a rattling hiss.
“ ‘She’d do it everywhere! Why! She’d do it all over Hell!’ He groaned and his lips were flecked with foam. ‘I swear: THE FOG STILL SMELLS OF THAT SLUT’S CUNT! MIX ME!’ Toujours-Là rose up from the bed, shouting, ‘MIX ME! MIX ME! Mix me!’ he pleaded, ‘a wee panaché, for the love of God.’ He fell back, perspiring heavily. I bathed him and straightened his sheets as Aristide went over to the nearest bar for a bottle of absinthe.
“ ‘She had a juice on her, see,’ Toujours-Là whispered, ‘like a fine old barrel-cured whisky. Drove men into con-convulsions! She was our cu-cult, our ceremony, our sa-sacra-sacrament. I’M DYING!’ he shouted, ‘I’LL DIE TELLING SOME CUNT DOCTORESS ABOUT ODILLE FOR CHRISSAKES!
“ ‘Once you had Odille,’ he gurgled, ‘you a’ways wanted more. Her crack weren’t wide enough for all of us at once so they was plenny of fights. Men got hurt. She had a favourite, a Hindoo who was murdered in a brawl down at the Sna-Sna-Snark; left his blood all over the walls an’ floor. Some said jealousy had turned that man’s blood to acid, that the mirror behind the bar was foxed by the Hindoo’s blood. . . . To love that woman was to love self-immolation! I never understood it, but Odille was devastated by her lover’s death. Though she’d had worlds of men! She was a screwer, see, a threader; Odille was a whore. They was a song: She was our sea of trouble, our wa-water of li-life; all our dirty weather; everyman’s wife. . . . Argh! I can’t recall the rest. Something about . . . stars. . . .
“ ‘I was sayin’ we fought for her which was absh . . . absurd ’cause all of us could, would, or had had her! She did it like life depended on it! Like the world would stop still if she stopped fucking! And yet, when her Hindoo lay dying on the floor, she wept! She was blue for weeks. You understand’ – he swallowed hard – ‘I loved her. I guess we all loved Odille. She poisoned our existence, WHERE’S MY DRINK? WHERE’S THAT NIGGER? SHIT!’
“ ‘You watch your mouth,’ the Marquis said, returning with an armful of bottles, ‘else I serve this panaché as a purge.’ Toujours-Là watched greedily as absinthe and mint syrup transformed themselves into the lethal jade he adored.
“ ‘I a’ways liked you,’ Toujours-Là s
aid, as he reached for the glass. But he was shaking too badly to take it. The Marquis cradled his head and gently poured the drink down the dying mans throat. Toujours-Là swallowed, coughed, wheezed, dribbled, and sighed.
“ ‘I never dreamed I’d be extremely unctioned by a black man,’ he managed to sputter before sinking into sleep.
“The Cod’s wife joined us sometime in the night.
“ ‘I will tell you what my husband saw,’ she said, and she sat down at the foot of the bed. She described the crime as the Cod had seen it: the sun, the water, Odille, Thomas, the horned photographer, and you – the infant who was about to be thrust from the garden forever. Startled by your mother’s screams, you awakened in time to see your father’s face taken by the water; his body slowly sinking beneath the surface of the sea. You know the sea to be an Ogress, Nicolas; did she not eat your father?”
The day Doctor Kaiserstiege repeated the Cods wife’s story to me, there in the spa’s weedy garden, I saw myself as if from a great distance; saw a puppet-infant, its head stuffed with shrieks, bewitched by water, the fissured, riddled water – and reaching out for that place where a beloved face had been swallowed whole like a small, smooth stone. I saw the planet of the past rise like a sphere of black glass, and I knew in my heart why fifty years before I had tumbled from La Puce d’Eau into my own reflection. . . .
K picked up the story then where she had left off:
“Toujours-Là woke up, and, raising himself and clawing at the air, cried: ‘Odille! I’ve not . . . done! She were . . . destitute. Never a penny. ’Twas the men’d buy her supper, her rags. She had these sailors’ queer ideas of what wha . . . waz pretty – a Spanish shawl, a Japanese kimono, a brocade dress bought in some fly-shit souk. . . . So, she’s sitting in the Ghost one day when thish fun-house figure comes tripping in, a landlubber green as a caterpillar, not a sailor, jus’ a masturbator, a frog-arsed photographer thish was, see, wanting to immortalize the Ghost, the Cod’s wife, the boys, even the bottles of toxicants behind the bar. He had these crazy notions. “There’s a war coming,” he’d say, “and after, nothing will be th’ same. Time is telescoping,” he’d say; “Time’s twistin’ the world outta shape.” He took pictures of all the bars in town, the fishermen, fishwives, and whores. This was one dough-faced snoop, if you wants to know, talking Art (well bless my fart), but in truth as nosy as an elephant in a harem. When he sees Odille sipping schnapps, he wants her picture, too, and she’s pleased. She even smiles for the first time in weeks. He buys her a first-class meal with wine and sherbet! She starts sittin’ for him in all the places she’s been laid, only he doesn’t know that. And one day in the Snail an’ Shark she takes off all her clothes. Poor sod! He gets down on his knees and kisses her feet and won’t thread her ’till she promises to marry him.
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 13
