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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  I work late into the night. More than once a small face peers in at the window. Before retiring I stand the apes in careful rows in the turquoise room. Back in bed after a bath I continue to read K’s book: By returning to the water, Nicolas simultaneously returned to the Mother and unveiled her. He returned to the Father and became him. And he became Thomas: his father’s assassin.

  I fall asleep wondering what she means.

  CHAPTER

  20

  She means that my drowning was an attempted suicide. But I insist it was an accident. When I bent over the water to look after Aristide’s bird I leaned too far.

  Once K asked me: “When you looked into the water, what did you see?” This conversation took place a little over a month after my awakening. We were sitting in the garden, I on my wheels and K in a wicker garden chair so large it made her look like a child sitting on a throne.

  “I saw. . . . Once I saw my mother’s face above me in a dream. It was white, white as the moon, in fact it was the moon, shining in at the window. It woke me up. In the dream my mother was wearing diamonds at her throat and the cleft of her bosom was dark, a deep crevice, an abyss – I was afraid of falling. I remember another necklace, a string of pearls. I pulled at it and it came away from her neck. Pearls spilled all over my face, the bed, the floor. Even now I can hear the sound the pearls made as they hit the floor and rolled in all directions. I can hear her laughter, the sound of my mother’s laughter.”

  “Describe this laughter.”

  “Bells. It. . . .” And I was sobbing and could not stop. My heart was broken by the weight of my sorrow.

  My little apes have remained undisturbed for a week. The housekeeper complains that they impede her passage through the house. I have fought with her. I came upon her just as she was about to mop down the ballroom floor. She insisted that she was only following Doctor Kaiserstiege’s directions. And, as she also complained about the mess in the kitchen, I told her to simply leave a basket with my lunch just outside the door; to do this and nothing else. No longer ill, spry on my feet, I have no more need of her. I certainly don’t want her nosing about.

  In the turquoise room the Kingdom of d’Elir also remains untouched but for fine particles of dust accumulating on the city streets, the jungle paths, and sandy beaches, and even that maw of mountains on the wall. Dust adheres to those seven crests and muscled flanks like a snow. I like to imagine that the mountains conceal the warrens of dragons who, as they growl together, utter vowels of fire.

  I sit for hours and watch the particles of dust falling – from where? And rising. This stealthful activity, as sunlight and moonlight reveal it, appears to be continuous. Sometimes more dust appears to rise in the air than to descend. Yet everything finishes by falling. As I understand it, this is universal law. Even Thomas fell beneath the weight of bodies and of stones. Vain and potent he was brought down.

  Odille. My father. Thomas. As the story goes, within the hour all three – wife, cuckold, assassin – were dead. And I, the startled babe shocked into silence, wide-eyed and stained with excrement, lay looking up at the blessedly empty expanse of Rose’s ceiling, that smooth pearl. I lay like a turtle on my back in that white room of forgetfulness which smelled of scalded milk.

  What do you think? I write to K. Our fate is Charlie Dee’s. Sooner or later we all hit the wall.

  Ah, Fröschlein, she answers, you sound so unhappy. But you see, the wall is only in your own mind. Live your life creatively and the wall vanishes, and death, when it comes, may be peaceful.

  However, it is too soon for you to be thinking of death. Think instead of all the untried years before you, the game only just begun. The Tex-Mex dinners I’m going to fix upon my return.

  But I feel the turquoise room come undone around me. The floor-boards are loose, the nails brittle, the paper lifts like a scab from the walls. I leave the spa for new nails and a hammer; I lope along and sometimes stoop to drag my fingers across the ground. I feel that this way I’ll get there faster. I like to run at night. It makes me feel invisible – although more than once I believe I may have seen Figuebique staring at me through the leaves. I often have the unsettling feeling she is there.

  When I return from the bazar with the nails – and they sparkle as does the hammer – I set to work at once. I nail down the floor-boards in the turquoise room paying special attention to the contours of the peninsula. I re-glue the wallpaper as best I can and stick on stars. Stars ascend the walls and transmigrate the ceiling like a charm.

  I am certain the boy will like these. I paint the floor a dark blue-green. The plastic paint adheres to the old wood like a new skin, and looks so deep I leap onto the island scuffing the olive groves. They will have to be redone. The whole thing will have to be varnished, I think, as I stand on my toes. Yet Paradise reflected upon the sea could not be more wonderful than the boy’s chalk drawing.

  How long do I stand there poised like a ballet dancer upon a painted lake? I stand for hours in the deepening night imagining a bedchamber carved within the living trunk of an olive tree where a man can sleep and dream of love. And I wish the child would appear to take up the little blue apes, given as God gave figs to Adam, without any thought but to give his son delight.

  Dearest K,

  The apes are gone! All day I have had a sense of stealthful activity throughout the spa. I stick to my room as to a shell; I dare not show myself. Sometimes my heart beats so swiftly I must breathe deeply and regularly as you have shown me.

  I am making smalt repairs inside the spa. I am well and I am delighted that you have been asked to stay on another month. As for myself I still prefer to be here. The place needs to be maintained and there is so much to think about! Perhaps I’ll join you next year when you go to Japan since, as you say, Kyoto has those famous gardens. But who could have dreamed that they are interested in the Sandman over there?

  Your Nini

  Dearest K,

  As I hoped the apes have been incorporated into the game! They guard the walls of the city, the paths which lead into the jungle; some stand at the foot of the mountains. The boy’s monkey, officious in his silver cape, has chosen to rule with my moon-spotted “Ape of Magnitude,” Six others, all painted a pale green and wearing thimble helmets have entered upon an unknown adventure in the desert; they march into the badlands single file. However, the child continues to elude me.

  Nini

  The Gnostics, as K describes them in her book, imagined the process of creation as a sequence of magical events to which God acquiesced. These events were burglaries. The lesser demons who created the world animated it with stolen light. God nods and an island is born from the belly of the sea; God assents and a snake slides hissing from a tree.

  One night in June, I dreamed of an island of pearls shining rosy in the sun and another island – a knot of living dragons tied together by their tails and roaring their anger. In the early hours of the day I awoke to see the boy, his pale hair illuminated by the first rays of the morning sun, standing at the foot of my bed. He was holding the toy monkey before him with his two hands and he moved it slowly from side to side. He was humming an oddly dissonant tune, and the effect was eerie. But the proximity of his limbs, his eyes like hooks of flame, touched my heart as nothing had before. It was as if my simple room had greened with odiferous trees and I was Sindbad staring into the eyes of adventure.

  The boy reached out one hand as if to beckon or command me.

  “You know . . . I had a monkey once. . . I began. He remained silent. “What is his name?”

  “This is The Decagon,” he replied, waving the toy like a flag in the air, “author of the one hundred and forty-five articles and rules. Do you want to play at war?” He wagged the monkey in my face. “I,” he said a little pompously, “am Olivier the First.”

  “Do other boys play?”

  “Boys!” Olivier the First scowled. “There is only I.” Relieved, I said I would like nothing better than to play at war with him.<
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  “Then you must kneel.” I pulled myself from bed and kneeled on the floor. Olivier knocked me on the head three times with his monkey. “Rise! Sandman!” he shouted. And, running from the room, he cried: “Catch me!”

  I dashed after him down the hall flooded with light. Olivier had a manner of moving which was strange, graceful but strange, and he darted in and out of each room we passed. I lost him continuously but only for an instant at a time. Disoriented at first, I scampered after him, plunging into a room just after he abandoned it. In this way we went leaping down the halls, he with the toy monkey held high above his head and I barefooted, my nightshirt flapping behind me, the spa resounding with our laughter. I felt exhilarated during that mad chase, and clean – as if Odille and Thomas and my father had never existed, and all the old stories had been written on water.

  Olivier ran into the turquoise room and stayed. I followed; the room was silent, but for the sound of our breathing, the blood thudding at my temples. Olivier stood beside the peninsula with the ape between his feet, his hands held to his hips.

  “We shall be kings,” he said. Taking a small piece of chalk from his pocket he crouched down and began to draw a map of the spa on the floor.

  “This is my kingdom,” he said, hastily sketching the second storey, “and this” – he marked the attic with a large cross – “is where the wars began. You came down from the mountains – it was treacherous of you to do that; we’d signed a treaty, and these” – he pointed to three rooms in the south wing – “are the imperial stables.”

  “Horses!” I approved. “But I’d never break a treaty.”

  “Motorcars,” he corrected. “You did! The war’s been on for ages.” He pointed out copper mines, treasure stores, an elephant graveyard. “Fossil ivory,” he said.

  “Tusks!” I said. “And skulls.” He nodded. “My Assembly uses the skulls for seats. Officers sit according to their magnitudes. Pentagons, tetragons sit on the floor. Our warriors sit on heaps of dried dung.”

  A crash came from the kitchen – the sound of a large kettle falling, followed by a loud curse. The housekeeper had returned for the morning. Leaping to his feet, Olivier ran from the room and into the hall. I ran after him. “Stay!” I cried. But then the housekeeper was shouting from the bottom of the stairwell; I looked down and saw her pink housedress swelling beneath me like a poisonous plant. She was looking concerned and even angry, although I am no concern of hers and in no way deserve her anger. She was asking my preference for lunch, was preparing a stew: noodles or dumpling?

  “Hang the dumpling!” I shouted down, furious. “Hang the noodles! And hang yourself as well!” I dashed off, eager to catch up with Olivier. But he was gone, and the game, for that day at least, disrupted beyond repair. I ran after the housekeeper instead and attempted to excuse myself.

  Tearfully she accepted my apology and blew her nose into her apron. The persistence with which she continued to be preoccupied with the problem of lunch recalled Rose. Flooded with shame I allowed that it would not be unreasonable for her to scrub the kitchen floor. I realized then that the staff she carried was a new mop. I walked her back to the kitchen attempting further civilities. I even went so far as to propose she remain all afternoon to scour the pots and pans, whatever; she expressed her pleasure. She said that I had frightened her – to see me running in the halls had convinced her I had taken leave of my senses.

  “There was a child,” I told her, “who I was entertaining. He’s like a son to me – you see, I have no family.” I thought: Here I am justifying myself again to these creatures. Why? But I could not stop myself. “Perhaps you’ve seen him?” She shook her head sadly and prodded the floor with the toe of her shoe. She sniffed:

  “Perchance the patient was playing with himself!”

  “Perchance the housekeeper likes to stick her nose in other people’s business!” Decidedly, I had lost my head. “Doctor Kaiserstiege knows all about the boy,” I fabulated. “He’s part of her next book,” I shuddered. What if it was true? “I have things to attend to,” I continued, “and I believe you do as well!” Turning about with my nose in the air (and I believe at that moment I must have looked just like my old schoolmaster Shelled), I walked back to my room.

  How I hated her (and myself!) all afternoon – because she was there like a boulder in the kitchen making dumplings and scouring the stove. How was I to concentrate on the game with all that mindless activity going on below? I feared that at any minute she would turn on the radio. Much as I wanted to,

  I could not enter the turquoise room. The woman’s presence in the hotel made it impossible. The spa, vast as it is, had a way of shrinking whenever she was around. I stuffed my ears with paper attempting in that impoverished way to rid myself of her.

  She called when the stew was done; her shouts tore through the paper in my head. I told her to leave it warming on the back of the stove. Once she had gone I crept back to the turquoise room. The peninsula fingered the floor in the paling light. Setting the apes aside I hammered copper tacks into the mazes of the streets, the elephant paths, the castle walls. I applied a second coat of varnish with a soft, camel’s-hair brush. On the wet surfaces of the beaches I threw handfuls of white sand, the kind one buys for birdcages. The smell of burning brought the stew to mind. I pulled bits of meat and dumpling from the crust. Happily the hag had made applesauce.

  Tell me more, K asks in a recent letter, about d’Elir and its legendary geographies. And I do, although she seems so very far away and the boy and the Kingdom so very close. . . .

  This week in the garden we played at hide-and-seek. He has the eyes of an animal, they burn like two meteors in the dark. He came at me from nowhere and slapped me on the back. Dashing off, he claimed it was my turn to find him. I could barely find the path. We were in a cluster of hedges. I disturbed some sleeping birds. Hearing a sound I ran into the rose garden. The air was full of bats eating night butterflies. I stumbled on an ant-hill and fell. I lay on the ground and listened. The air was swarming with the cries of bats. I thought that if I waited he would grow tired and come for me. I fell asleep thinking this.

  As Olivier explained it to me, a decagon represents an army of one hundred million. His ape represents him and his men. My ape with the gilded buttocks is an octagon and represents one million monkey men (of the race of Ma’Hoot).

  We are creating armies of apes and those pink plastic babies transformed by fire and with glue. We invent all our own rules. We play with dice of our own invention. Each afternoon after the hag has left we sit in the silent kitchen, side by side, painting wood cubes with the symbols of variable disasters: demons, diseases and cyclones, quicksands and sins, treachery. Or symbols of good fortune: winter’s passing into spring, fresh water and ripe coconuts (which multiply an army’s ferocity by three and triples their speed).

  There are startling, beautiful moments when Olivier will reach out across the table, and, grabbing my sleeve, show the painted cube gleaming like candy between his fingers. I admire storm-clouds, stampeding elephants, the hurling of lightning, migrations of fat geese. I admire a halberdier, a regiment, a musketeer: a toss and entire companies are lost. Mercenaries and their risks are defined by other tosses. Certain confrontations are decided by a play of dominoes. As are eclipses of the sun and moon.

  Olivier names a hexagon Gilgamesh; I name mine Maximinole. For a time our favourite game is “Babylon.” We float slave galleys in all the baths.

  We have an entire room of ziggurats set down in real sand, a room of rivers, a tropical room, a room which is an island of ice. We have a moon game, an intergalactic war fought by angels and archons. We fight battles on rafts. We fight for silk, for gems, for oceans. We fight for salt. We fight against one another’s gods; we invent gods – sometimes terrible, sometimes ridiculous.

  Once we play at something we call “The Fly-Paper Wars” to disastrous effect. When the bazar produces a box of rubber alligators, we invent rules for this unusual army which h
as the firing power of archers, but which cannot cross the desert. We use tiddly-winks to plot our moves on the moon.

  We build navies. All our ships sail to Alexandria. The second-storey hallway is our ocean. A coral reef of papier mâché stretches from the extreme north of the universe to the extreme south. This is Mondstato. It contains a monastery and a bird sanctuary, which the pink babies threaten to sink. It is guarded by whales, giant clams, and meteor showers.

  Undersea activity threatens to destroy this lovely world. The monastic library, its portraits of magicians and kings must be moved. Olivier the First and I agree upon a temporary peace. We sit down together to produce these precious books, some on parchment, some on papyrus, some inscribed in clay.

  The library, laid out in a red room, is protected by a moat of liquid mercury and a molten key. Back on Mondstato the monks, visited by a venomous cloud (three consecutive rolls of double-sixes) die like flies. Frightened by the stench of death the birds all fly away. When the pink babies reach the coral world on flying carpets it is a silent, deserted place. Even the whales have moved on to another room.

  It would be tremendously interesting, writes K, to see your library. I can’t wait to get back home. Have you considered making up an encyclopaedia? You mentioned maps . . . a great carnival system . . . fire rites and funerary animals . . . sand paintings and insects . . . a princess born with silver feet. . . . I wonder: When Olivier laughs, what is the sound of his laughter?