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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  “I was four when this happened, see, an’ thish waz a cosmic event – for if there was only one shadow in the house stead of two, that shadow grew. She expanded, see, after he was gone. She was bloated on bile and all our little world; that dark and crumbling shithouse smelling of dead rabbits and mildew was a world reduced to a black, hard kernel of fear. We was always bruised about the face and buttocks; this was her doing. She taught me thish important thing –”

  “What was that, Toujours-Là?”

  “That the essence of the universe ish ignorance, a mindless will to will. I have a memory from that time. I would be nursing a torn ear on the stoop an’ watching the dogs fight over a piece of tripe. They would tug and growl, each to an end and they’d circle, much as the planets do, round and round. I had this metaphysical fan-fancy “What’s a –”

  “Your trap! It was she controlled the weather – especially the darkest kind: storms, thunder and lightning was female in my mind (still is!). . . . She was big. A big woman. . . . Her breathing rattled all night long in our little hole like wind in an empty coffin.

  “Me an’ my brothers – we was like piggies scuffling in a piggery; we fought over beans and a bone an’ our bare feet was filthy, we had lice. We was vermin feeding vermin and childhood would have killed me but I was saved by a treasure I found.”

  “A treasure!”

  “You wouldna’ call it a treasure –”

  “I bet I would!”

  “Well, maybe, Nini. Maybe.”

  “Where did you find a treasure! What was it?”

  “They is always plenty of dung beetles where there is sheep pastures ’cause the beetles love the dung. One day I seen a beetle go down a hole, so I got a knife and dug in after it. They was this tunnel and a neat little burrow at the end. Inside I found the queerest thing, the queerest thing but also the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. ’Twas a burnished pear, small, fit into my hand. It looked like a top turned on a wheel like I’d seen the farmer’s son play with – smooth, lovely no matter how you looked. I knew it belonged to the beetle, but it did not occur to me that the beetle had made it. I imagined that the beetle had stolen it from the farmer’s son. It was so dry and hard and pretty – how could I know it was made of dung? That there was a wee larval beetle growing inside? Sleeping in its little nest? All this I learned years later when it was explained to me.

  “That night I kept the pear close to my body. I slept on a heap of straw with my brothers; as I was the smallest I lay at their feet and I didn’t sleep much cause they kicked in the night. But now I had my treasure and didn’t care. I breathed easy and slept.

  “Daytimes I kept it hidden deep inside the straw. At night in the fading firelight I’d dig after it with my fingers; I’d whisper to it. It was my little god-thing, see; I thought it protected me. I did not know they was a worm inside but I was sure they was a power in there. Poor, ignorant Toujours-Là! The most powerful thing in my life has been my own bewilderment!

  “One day my father returned; he just appeared. All this time he’d been in prison. I did not know who he was but my heart sank when I saw him striding into the yard, the dogs all cowering and whimpering. I squatted in the straw, scared, touching the pear and watching him. We was all watching him, ’cept her. She was watching me. She saw I had something hidden and she came at me. She boxed my ears till I was forced to open up my hand and show her what I had. And she took it from me. She put it on the floor and crushed it with her foot.

  “That night I ran away. The land was rough, arid, and rocky and though it was near summer the nights was cool. I was scared, Nini; they was plenty of owls wailing in the trees, and even wolves. But I kept running. I ran nights. Days I slept a little. I stole eggs from farms and slipped into gardens. I discovered that the world was very vast and – far from home – strangely peaceful. The buzzing I’d always heard in my head ceased. For the first time I was hearing things clear – insects, frogs, the cries of bats, and barking foxes, the sweet trilling of birds. It seemed I had left a malignancy behind me. Once I had owned a treasure; I believed I would find another.”

  “Did you!”

  “Never!”

  “And then?”

  “And then one night I reached the sea. I stood at the edge of a cliff and, looking down, wondered at this magical thing, this enchantment which had, I was certain, been kept from me, purposely. I thought a piece of sky had fallen to the ground!

  “Later I came to a village of fishermen. I stood on the shore, and with wonder and envy watched the men and the boys – some my age – setting out in their slickers with their nets. A big, barrel-chested man pointed at me and everyone roared with laughter at the frazzled hayseed I was. I was humiliated and angry, but I held my ground. I burrowed my feet in the sand and fought back my tears.

  “The man knew me for a runaway, and he saw my need. He pulled a wheel of bread from the boat and waved it in the air. I approached.

  “You recall – I was swarming with vermin; lice had hatched in my hair. The man who was soon to be my master nodded and without warning the others seized me. I was stripped and rubbed with slime from the sea and sand – especially about the genitals. For the first and last time in my life I fainted. Later I learned that in those regions all the sailors are baptized in this way; none escape it.

  “I awoke in my new masters house on a poor attic cot which seemed to me princely. I had been bathed, disinfected, and I did not recognize my own smell nor the look of my skin, it was so pink! I tried the door and found it locked. There was no way of escaping but I could not have gone far anyway – I was so weak. My master’s wife came then with food. She was strict but childless; in time I became her own. They never asked me about my origins and I was eager to forget. I remember how proud I was wearing my first pair of clogs and the blue cotton of the fisherman! It was she who taught me to read. The book was the Bible and I – having never heard a story in my life – loved it, especially the notion that the world had been constructed, and purposely. I came to question that; it seems the only sense is the sense we give it. We are thrust into a s-s-snarl, Nini! Of snakes! The world crushes us blindly without rhyme or reason and we – we is foolish enough to wonder why!

  “I return, see, to what I knew as a small, filthy child: the essence of the universe is ignorance! If there ish a God sh-she’s as my mother was – stumbling blindly through a dark room and thrashing out in anger, indifferent to suffering, the enemy of dreamsh, of boyhood dreamsh! Tell me N-Nicolath – wash ish more presch-precious then the dreamsh of childhood? STOP FIDGETING! LISTEN! I wants you to open up your ears so wide a comet could fly through your head without freezing your brain! I wants to hear the wind going in one ear and out the other! I wants you to empty your brain, Nini. I wants you to get a big hole ready in your head for what I’ve got to say next because it is the only story, hear; all the others are just a lot of hot air, farts on the wind! So s-stop jiggling. An’ listen good, you little bastard!”

  “I’m not a bastard!”

  “Yesh! You ish! We ish all bastards! All the sons of men are bastards! Ever since Eve cuckolded Adam with the snake. They’s no man left walking the world, Nicolath, jus’ halfmen. The snake went up Eve’s crack, see, an’ stayed there. You put in your pecker an’ th’ Devil will bite it clean off! Cry! Cry, little frigger! Cry all you wants! Won’t change nothing.

  The sound of sobbing brought me back to the darkened room. The Christmas lights hurt my eyes, and the small, burning window.

  Olivier sat before me, weeping. A fine dust of many colours powdered his face and neck and arms. The infinite scales of his skin acted as minute prisms kindled by a thing which glowed at his throat, a golden knob of amber burning there which he fingered for comfort as he wept. Shivering with shame and fear I reached out for Erzulie; yet as I reached, Olivier receded, and, melting into shadow, vanished.

  Like a little yellow apple falling forever in space, Erzulie remained behind, but only for an instant. Seizing her I seized th
e air.

  CHAPTER

  23

  I cannot sleep; I can hear the constellations battling in the sky. I am deafened by the clashings of cups. Lupus and Leo tear out each other’s throats; Heaven is smeared with vomit and blood. The crab battles the clock; Vulpecula the little fox greedily devours the fish. The cusps of the stars are locked to the tusks of the moon.

  Tonight the sky is full of arrows and furnaces and swords; it is like a vast fishing net in which everything imaginable is caught up and thrashing: hunting dogs and microscopes and shields. I leave my bed to wander in the garden and, looking up into that seething ocean like an overturned kettle of filth, I see Thomas and Odille being dragged across the beach by their assassins, their bruised bodies glittering with sand.

  High in Rose’s arms I see it all. Unlike the others, Rose does not shout; she prays. She prays to the One God who sits upon an alabaster throne in an arid land, beside a pit of fire.

  Staring up at the sky, I am able to reconstruct everything. The entire scene returns with stunning clarity. I run to K’s study and begin to write, filling up page after page:

  My hands were pried from my mother’s neck and I was torn from her embrace. As I was carried to Rose who stood waiting on the beach, Odille’s body was seized and in an instant vanished beneath the bodies of the others like a morsel of meat beneath a swarm of wasps. Hours later when Rose forced my clenched fingers apart to wash my hands, clumps of black hair fell to the floor.

  My mother’s hair was black and her body was white. I need not close my eyes to see her mouth, rosy and moist; her teeth like those pearls strung into the necklace I loved.

  I want to reconstruct her body, to make a room which will be a tangible dream, her reflected memory. I want a room in which to sleep: white and black and quiet and perfumed. I want a sanctuary; I want to enter into the body of Odille. To sleep there as if suspended in water, my thoughts – water.

  I imagine a room without place or history, as round and as empty as a wheel. By a careful use of paint and perspective, I intend to circle the square. In such a room I will be like an embryo which has not yet heard the world. I will lie within the room in absolute stillness. The world outside will be only a dim smudge on the transparent glass of my mind.

  I have chosen a room facing north. The light it receives is cool and blue. Its paper peels off easily and falls to the floor with a dry rustle – the sound women’s skirts made long ago – leaving bare the perfect plaster as cool and as smooth as the shell of an egg.

  It takes three days to scrape the ceiling free of its old paint which falls in flakes. I enjoy the havoc on the floor – an accidental landscape. Perched on my ladder I look down on mountains, glaciers, seas or polar ice, fossil snow – the afterbirth of a sanctuary.

  Scraping ceilings is a painful business; one morning I awaken with a neck cramp and have to soak for hours in the “Kaiser Milkshake.” But when the room is ready to be painted I am dizzy with exhilaration.

  However, in order to proceed I must buy paint – shiny black enamel, and white. I have no choice but to return to the bazar. I set off at dusk having shaved, paper stuck to my chin and upper lip. (I’ve not yet mastered the art of the razor.)

  The bazar is closed. I turn into an alley and rap at the proprietress’s door. When she sees me she blushes, which causes me to bark. I apologize as best I can:

  “I need baba . . . bla! Black paint!” I notice then that she is not alone. Figuebique is there sitting by the fire in a monstrous chair.

  “Bah! Ah! Madame.” She acknowledges my mangled greeting with a sneer. In the shadows of the hairlip’s darkling room I believe I see other figures looming. A small clatter of spoons like hail striking a pane of glass convinces me – and the presence of an imposing faience coffee pot. Its spout rises in the inky opacity like the neck of an angry goose.

  I follow the harelip outside and watch as she pulls an antiquated key from her pocket. How embarrassing all this is, I think, hearing laughter, I should never have come.

  “I am so sorry to have disturbed you. Had I known . . .” my voice dies. But the lights are on and the bazar sprawls before me in all its lavish extravagance. Attempting to conceal my excitement I reach for the coveted cans of paint.

  “You are kind,” I tell her, “very kind. If I hadn’t needed this so badly I –” I am tormented by the thought of our last encounter. I bark once briefly; she blows her nose.

  “Nuffin’, eh?” Although I long to take another look up and down the counters, I don’t dare.

  “Nothing.”

  She pulls a wide sable hairbrush from a shelf. Reddish brown, wondrously soft, with a thick, brightly enamelled handle it is impossible to resist.

  “I’ll take two.” Carefully she wraps the brushes in white paper, cutting and folding and taping with such dedication the effect is hypnotic. She has uncommonly beautiful hands. I cannot help myself. “And two bottles of turpentine.”

  She climbs her little ladder and grabs two bottles of transparent blue plastic.

  “And masking tape. What’s this?” She has placed a curiously soft cylinder before me.

  “Ith ’eu.”

  “New?” She nods. “I see it’s new.” The thing is wrapped in cellophane. “But what is it?”

  “Broo –” I turn it over. It is a special sort of brush. For painting walls and ceilings.

  “Thank you. I’ll take one. You are really very helpful. Every time I come I spend money like water!” I attempt a little joke. “But I’ve kept you from your friends!” Elated I return home cradling my parcels in my arms.

  To paint the room takes me all week. After three coats of black paint the ceiling is as smooth as a skin of oil on the sea and appears to be deep. Looking up is like looking into a fathomless hole. My soul is drawn into it. I think this is the perfect room: empty, walls white, floors flayed down to a smoothness. Dizzy with fumes, I fall asleep on the floor beneath the ceiling’s black eye.

  Sometime in the night I am awakened by a tremendous clatter. I hear the sounds of voices, a confused babble very like the gobblings and honkings of turkeys and geese. I wonder: Has that mad journalist reappeared with reinforcements? Has he broken down the door? Does he intend to take the spa by surprise? But then I hear a voice shriller than the rest, bloodcurdling in its single-minded intensity, and to my terror recognize, in that hawking cry: Figuebique.

  “Allons, Mesdames! Après moi!” She coaxes her troops up the stairs; the spa reverberates with feet. My eyes inflamed with turpentine, I crouch in a corner of the black and white room with only a paintbrush for my defence, and wonder what is in store for me. I have felt Figuebique’s incomprehension and dislike from the start, but I am not in the least prepared for all that follows.

  “Allons, mes enfants!” Figuebique approaches, hallooing in the halls: “He’s here somewhere . . . follow your noses! It’s the rank odour of insanity!” The fumes of pesticide, ammonia, and black soap seep under the door, followed by a spill of sudsy water. Pressed to the wall, my head throbbing between my knees, I shrink into my shell and try not to breathe. Down the hall a body collapses into the Tower of Winds; like dominoes its columns tumble to the floor, scattering grazing camels. A troika splinters my door. I hear a hammering, a mind-splitting C-RACK! as an island is ripped from the body of the sea, a continent shorn of its mountains, the Ottoman Empire chucked down the stairs. Hags ascend the attic to swamp Shangri-La, to pulverize the battle royals and royal regattas of Rangoon. I weep as holes are punched into the blue skies of Myopia; as its circuses, black sand, ice-chess, and dice games are swept into buckets and emptied into the yard to be carted off in wheelbarrows – where? The dump? The river? Dogsleds and toboggans are smashed with hammers, and crypts, dance-halls, cyclone cellars – I smell SMOKE! They’ve made a bonfire. K! I cry, my heart transfixed by certitude, K! HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF!

  “Good Lord in Heaven!” Figuebique has discovered the Vermillion Room, its plaster sphinx. “Another Devil-God!” she caws
as she casts it from the landing, “COME OUT YOU ZOOLATROUS HYDROCEPHALIC!” She’s just across the hall now, in Hook Head’s Room of Chance, a kingdom ruled by numbers. “No!” My cries die in a gurgle of new suds; the room’s awash, my socks, the seat of my pants sopping wet.

  Shaking, I pull myself to my feet; my shattered door is kicked in, battered; the ladies have crowbars. With the sound of a horse being pummelled to death, the door is ripped from its frame. And suddenly Figuebique inhabits the room, immense, incandescent with anger, her lungs bellowing fire.

  “He’s HERE!” She’s surges in, followed by the Virtues of Paradis, abdominous and bumpy; all are carrying pails but for Figuebique who brandishes a mop. I catch a glimpse of the proprietress of the bazar crying in a corner, soaked with tears, sweat, or soap – I cannot tell – but before I can go to her with the intention of comforting her, Figuebique strikes me across the skull. Reeling, I fear she intends to impale me on her mop, just as the Cyclops impaled Odysseus’s men before putting them to the fire. But no – I am instead thrown down like a piece of fish and crushed beneath the beefy buttocks and thighs of two driving, vortical daughters of Eve; one straddles my chest and the other my knees. Satisfied to see me immobilized, Figuebique congratulates her troop before barrelling out:

  “Forward, ladies! No, let’s clean up this birdhouse!”

  For the rest of that interminable night I can hear their shouts of triumph, the clatter of their pails, their mops, and brooms – as those vandals engulf, cast down, and raze my valleys of diamonds, my peninsulas of precious stones, my gardens of Paradise, my beloved Kingdom of d’Elir.