by K. J. Bishop
The woman told me to wait. I stood inside the doorway, while she took the book from the lectern and brought it to me.
‘You may hold it,’ she said, ‘but you mustn’t open it. In every book there is a great gap between the front cover and the first word. There is another between the last word and the rear cover, but that one is of less consequence.’
I felt sure that I had encountered, somewhere, another book bound in velvet of that colour, but I could not locate it in my memory. This one had a layer of padding under the velvet, so that it yielded slightly to the touch. It was an attractive quality in a book, I thought – as, for no reason that I could explain, was the absence of a title or an author’s name.
The woman took the book from me and returned it to the lectern. She then went around pulling up the blinds, letting pale sunlight in. She reserved the blind on the left of the lectern until last. When she opened it, she did so with an air of reverence.
Then she stepped back, allowing me to see the view.
It showed a place elsewhere.
Where the other windows showed the level fields around the house and the outcrops of the neonate suburb, this one looked out onto a region of sky. By the depth and dimness of the blue, the time there was evening.
I didn’t realise I was approaching the window until I found myself standing close enough to the glass that I could see my own ghostly reflection.
All through the sky, for as far as my eyes could see, leaves hurtled around, borne on a tempestuous wind. The wind was audible to me, though it sounded very far away. The light was not steady; a watery brightness came and went, its source invisible.
(There is a feeling of remembering, of hating the stuffiness of a room…)
The woman was talking.
‘We do not know the nature of this window. It can’t be opened. It always shows this scene. The hour of the day changes, but the wind always blows, and there are always leaves in the sky. Perhaps the place to which that sky belongs is on the other side of the glass; perhaps it is within the glass; or perhaps it is elsewhere again, and this window is merely the mechanism which glimpses it for us.’
I touched the window with my finger. It was colder than the air around me. I felt a painful attraction to the sky. At the same time I felt possessed of a burden that I wanted to fling into the wind. But as soon as I observed this feeling and translated it into words, I questioned it. Did the sky in the window trouble me with the need to cast something away? Or was it a yearning to possess, or repossess, something that should have been or had been mine?
‘It magnifies dissatisfaction,’ the woman said behind me.
(Forgotten needs return, demanding, confronting the self with its own hollowness, its foolishness. There is a resurgence of an old enthusiasm, but also, deadening it even as it rises, a knowledge that the passion has waned, that the moment for finding the imagined prize was lost, not due to some great sin or stupidity but merely to attrition, bad memory, procrastination… was there something about a hill of beans, or beens, for dinner?)
I remembered you. You were the one who kept escaping me, long ago. Where had I lost you?
But perhaps you were not you anymore. And I, was I no longer the one who had sought you?
In that sky, who was present? And if they were there, did they also perceive me, standing here, as an enigma enclosed in a window?
It occurred to me that I could break the glass.
And it also occurred to me that I was nothing more than a need; sometimes I was great, sometimes small; but I was a hollow, and I feared what would become of me if I removed that which ordained my dimensions.
Was it possible for an object to give one a knowing look? The red velvet book gave me the impression that it did so, as if it had known I would return my attention to it.
I picked it up, the covers between my hands like two doors leading into a room.
MALDOROR ABROAD
The flourish of the razor through my cheek!
The mass guillotinings in the delta of the buccal nerve, the monsoon haemorrhage, the considerable pain, are no longer shocking. This act of self-mutilation has become habitual. I perform it every morning after my nightly exploits, at the hour when other men are shaving, defecating and scrubbing their skins to remove all the material their bodies have produced under the cover of darkness. As for me, I am clean: formaldehyde preserves my entrails, and lice, more careful and discerning than human beings, can rarely be persuaded to enter my bed.
I confess that my mouth performs a happy smile poorly, even when widened by two red inches on either side; but however dreadful it looks to the uninitiated, this graven expression is in fact a suave and contented one.
My own blood nourishes me as fully as mother’s milk nourishes an infant, and tastes more wonderful than the flesh of peacocks stewed in cognac and rose-syrup. It paints primitive colour onto my jaw; like henna it beautifies my tongue; then like magma entering the sea, steaming and potent, it hastens down my throat and falls into my pearly stomach. No need to take it as a clyster, as I used to. I am evolving.
My cut mouth heals swiftly, leaving no scar. No one suspects my addiction. I am not documented in any medical textbook.
I can always be found taking the morning air on the hotel terrace, standing perfectly still with my white hands hanging lightly. My face is smooth; you could think that I was a hermaphrodite with a man’s skull and a woman’s skin. Understand that by man I mean a robot soldier with a nightstick, a dangerous half-alive dummy, and by woman I mean some sort of gorgon or banshee.
In the soft light before dawn I contemplate the stupendous laceration I inflicted upon a young bride when her husband was out late at his city club, losing money at cards and getting maudlin over a little gypsy with breasts which, so like the delicate heads of two old brothers asleep in the same bed, tended to inspire sentimental feelings, and eyebrows where at least one former hellraiser was living out his life in naked, bewildered solitude amongst the warlike hairs… He had locked his wife in her room, where she lay sleeping. Neither of these young people was more stupid than the average human being. But who, though possessing a far superior mind, would have guessed that Maldoror was hiding in a closet with a sword?
You, my witness – I saw your eyes under the bed, like two luteous and patient tombolas waiting for a Napoleonic child to grasp them and roll them into war – might decide that by sparing this woman the torments of childbirth I performed a charitable deed. I had no such need to justify myself, my mouth staying as solemn as a toad’s while I murdered her, my shadow on the wall jerking like the silhouette of a man dying at the end of a rope. It was a pleasure to remove the unborn child, the little homunculus, and throw it on the fire.
The bells of the Sabbath morning brought the man home. He stumped up the stairs and cursed at the door’s stiff lock. He was in a hurry to find his pisspot and his bed. When he finally got inside and took in the scene before him, you and I saw him go mad in a matter of seconds. I didn’t have to do anything. The shabby figure scuttled to the window and leaped out, in front of the lidless eyes of his Creator, and shattered his bones on the pavement below.
Thus by my doing the burdened earth was relieved of three hominids. Now you find me at leisure, contemplating this rugose sea whose waves break rhythmically against the black posts of the pier.
I note that the earth is approaching the sun. The crests of the waves are turning to gold as though touched by Midas, but their gliding roots remain dark. The planet is about to roll over and show the star all the corpses from the night.
Orb of Day! Photosphere! Great Aten! It’s bad enough that you have to look at all this garbage, worse that the first eyes to reflect you belong to a foe of the human race and the Almighty, a criminal, pervert and medical oddity. I have no quarrel with you, so let us pass by each other like strangers in a busy place. When you start burning helium, I’ll nod to you like an old acquaintance.
It is night again. The murderer, who was executed but found h
is corpse rejected by the earth, lies under a laburnum arbour in the garden behind the house. His naked body is dry and white after its long transit through hills and under fields, his chest as motionless as a fossil. First his marmoreal lips and then his open eyes endure the passage of a grey slug across them without twitching. The moon, accomplice of witches, lantern of grave robbers, rises over the mountains. Her light comes near the arbour, and it seems that soon the fugitive will be revealed to the world; but before reaching his body the light stops, reverses and flees back to the dry lunar breast, complaining of what it saw: a raw eye, working like a projector, throwing forth profound intelligence, hectic sorrow, disastrous weariness and dreadful sanity.
And to whom did the eye belong? An irregular shadow, a humiliating memory, something dropped and forgotten, a character who only exists for the purpose of moving the plot along? Often I am nothing more than that. Don’t look for me among the famous villains, but Second Ruffian might be wearing my face.
Spirit languishing in Hades, look up! Contemplate the interior surface of your cranium, which lies above you in the earth. First observe the discoloration of the bone, although this is a trivial detail, then note the similarity of your empty eye-sockets to the cave of your eternal prison. Do not weep to see that your jawbone resembles a shear, instrument of Atropos. Recall that the devil pays for souls: therefore you were once worth something. Did you not suspect the treasures placed inside you? Perhaps not. It was you yourselves, after all, who traded your useful simian tails for brains capable of understanding television.
I was born human, but horror and the griping ache of the wound to my pride caused me to seek and find alternatives at a young age. I was happiest as a hog, when a bed of manure pleased me more than one of silk and I esteemed a bucket of slops as equal to burgundy and stuffed figs. After returning to bipedal form I never succeeded in becoming a hog again, but I did become a goat, which would have been a satisfactory condition, save that there was an undeniable beauty in my yellow eyes with their elegant horizontal pupils, so that when I saw myself in a stream I felt a longing which caused me pain. I found refuge in the earth and blindness. You who see birds every day, and wish for their wings, have never imagined the happiness of the earthworm: he has only one desire, which is to fill his interior with dirt, and that desire is perpetually satisfied. It is only because of the range and voluptuousness of his senses that the sublime hog is able to say he is greater than the royal worm.
Even if you are not so precociously dissatisfied as I, a day may come when you begin striving to branch off from the human race. Plastic surgery and prosthetics may appeal to you, but I advise you to save your money; and your own acts of great good or great evil won’t turn you into an angel or a devil but only into a better or worse human. Calamity, however, has been known to ignite the fires of metamorphosis.
The word is whispered by one buried up to his eyes in sand: even now, Maldoror gallops along the Andalusian coast, his figure recognisable by the broad black hat pushed down low on his brow and the black hair streaming behind him with the supple motion of Arab calligraphy. Often his head turns towards the sea, as though he is drawing power from its infinite waves.
The only known photograph of Maldoror was taken near Granada by Mrs Betty Balbin of New Jersey, who mistook the Montevidean for a Spanish gentleman in historical costume. The Balbins never returned to America: Mrs Balbin, her husband and their two children died in Spain when their tour bus collided with a semi-trailer on the road to Seville. Their possessions were returned to their relatives, with the exception of Mrs Balbin’s camera, which was sent with the rest but went missing in transit and was never recovered. If you know who to bribe you can find out about the existence in the Vatican archives of a dossier which contains the photograph of this horseman, its negative, and facsimiles of numerous police reports and newspaper clippings concerning unsolved cases dating back to 1811. The CIA, Mossad and several other agencies have similar dossiers, but only the one in the Holy See contains the image from Granada. The dark rider is clearly visible in the picture, but his face is turned away from the camera, rendering the image nearly useless to a biographer.
It is therefore left to the recording angel to put down the real facts about this elusive being. Of the four elements he had always favoured water. Before he learned it, the cells of his body knew that life grew in the sea first. He did not really think of himself as a land mammal. When he was emerging from boyhood he became aware of an antediluvian factor in his being, and after the dawning of that awareness he had endured as a strict punishment the daily fact of his physical similarity to other youths. He adopted flashy dress and an air of swagger, and learned to drink hard and use a knife, but he had no real fire in his blood, and the others sensed it. They said he was womanish and they also said he was dangerous. They were limited in the kinds of passion they could understand.
Climbing a tree once when he was six years old, a splinter entered the soft-skinned inner part of his thigh, which in turn bestowed the splinter with a deep burial, his flesh clinging around it and drawing it in, as though something in him was hungry for it. Hands armed with tweezers and needle coaxed out the trespassing object, and the father praised the son’s calmness. The boy knew he shouldn’t try to explain that the pain didn’t matter, that he only felt fascinated by his body’s permeability, and almost missed the splinter’s presence when it was gone. He understood his leg’s reluctance to give it up. From then on he became one of those children who fascinates himself and disturbs others by sticking needles into his palms and fingertips. His own boyish beauty didn’t appeal to him. Every morning he stood in front of a mirror, took hold of his lips and pulled them away from his face so that he could observe his jawbones.
He was delighted when in hygiene class he learned that millions of humble organisms lived on and within his body. While other boys daydreamed of high adventure in the lands of the Turks and the Russians, Maldoror’s mind cast around in a microscopic world whose finitudes were ordained by his own dimensions. In this spectacular world the wet surface of his eye was an ocean where lean, filthy bacterial dreadnaughts cruised, his skin a terrain of pitted prairies and swamps where huge golden herds of staphylococci roamed, and his dark interior a jungle swarming with a bestiary of hideous flukes, hookworms and protozoa. He was happy whenever illness worked its temporary transformations on him, for within him there was an unusual instinct to feel comforted rather than depressed by the knowledge that his flesh was malleable and mortal. He knew that if he died the jungle inside him would go wild and escape into the outside world. He came to believe that his soul might have hatched from the egg of a gulper eel or a hagfish.
The angel observed Maldoror in coastal waters, gliding naked among soft polyps and tube worms. Did the teenager comprehend his own beauty as he somersaulted freely among the transparent medusae and stroked the green and purple lips of giant clams? More than once he indulged in bizarre liaisons with sharks; but no great harm was done. It’s true, wrote the angel, that more than any other being on earth he succeeds in transcending the barriers between man and beast.
And in the margin the angel wrote:
Maldoror, strange being: where are you going with that gun?
Is this you in the black duster coat, riding into the desert town with a shotgun slung beside your saddle, your elegant hands resembling two poisonous bell-flowers? Though this spectre’s countenance is melancholy he is not Don Quixote, but some sort of desperado. His shadow is long and grim, as are his teeth.
‘It’s El Malo, Maldoror Furioso, Kid M!’ Watkins, Small and the others in the Long Afternoon Saloon told each other in tense whispers, perspiration gouting from fountains in dermal villa gardens…
‘What’s a vampire of the old world doing here in the new?’ a cock-eyed man demanded. ‘Find a priest and rally a lynch mob!’
‘Easy, Nathan,’ Small said. ‘Why would a vampire need a shotgun?’
‘For disguise, you imbecile!’
&nbs
p; Panic erupted in the bar.
‘He’ll kill us!’
‘Enslave us!’
‘Rape our women!’
‘Rape us, and strangle us and sell our bones!’
‘To who?’
‘To Wu! The celestial foreigners are conspiring to destroy the white man with their dog-darn opium dens and Communism! Where is my knife, Cecil?’ It was as if madness preceded the stranger like a motley-garbed herald.
But when the saloon doors swung open every man’s tongue lost its wag. In the instant the stranger’s cracked black boots crossed the threshold the sleep of the pontiff in Rome was disturbed by a dream of the endless arch of an ouroboros rotating with slow majesty through deep space, while at the same time the cold sleep of a female anaconda in the Amazon basin was disturbed by the vision of an ape pushing another ape into an oven.
‘Whiskey or beer, stranger?’ The bartender uttered his line in an admirably steady voice. ‘Or there’s a room upstairs, sir, where my wife or I could arrange your hands.’
An erotic scene, which might have involved secateurs, was prevented by the vampire himself, who made ready to speak. At the rising of his tongue from its bed, three wars, two plagues and a famine commenced in distant countries. ‘I hunt this criminal.’ He brought out from inside his coat a flat lead box, which he laid on the bar and opened, and from it drew out and unfolded an oil canvas depicting Christ on Golgotha, cynosure of voyeurs and necrophiliacs.
‘Are these eyes, heavy with rapture, familiar to you? Have you seen a man with this smooth chest and these slender feet, bearing wounds as you see here?’
‘Didn’t we hang something like that back in July?’
‘We done hanged a foreigner then, I recollect.’
‘He was a Mexican, I believe. He lodges at Boot Hill. If you’ve a mind to pay him a call I dare say he’ll be at home!’
