The lady was absorbed in burning tiny holes with the tip of her cigarette, through the skirt of the young girl. Itague watched as the pattern grew. She was writing ma fétiche, in black-rimmed holes. The sculptress wore no lingerie. So that when the lady finished the words would be spelled out by the young sheen of the girl’s thighs. Defenseless? Itague wondered briefly.
II
The next day the same clouds were over the city, but it did not rain. Mélanie had awakened in the Su Feng costume, excited as soon as her eyes recognized the image in the mirror, knowing it hadn’t rained. Porcépic showed up early with a guitar. He sat on the stage and sang sentimental Russian ballads about willow trees, students getting drunk and going off on sleigh-rides, the body of his love floating belly-up in the Don. (A dozen young gathered round the samovar to read novels aloud: where had youth gone?) Porcépic, nostalgic, snuffled over his guitar.
Mélanie, looking newly scrubbed and wearing the dress she’d arrived in, stood behind him, hands over his eyes, and caroled harmony. Itague found them that way. In the yellow light, framed by the stage, they seemed like a picture he’d seen somewhere once. Or perhaps it was only the melancholy notes of the guitar, the subdued looks of precarious joy on their faces. Two young people conditionally at peace in the dog days. He went into the bar and began chipping away at a large block of ice; put the chips into an empty champagne bottle and filled the bottle with water.
By noon the dancers had arrived, most of the girls seemingly deep in a love affair with Isadora Duncan. They moved over the stage like languid moths, gauzy tunics fluttering limp. Itague guessed half the men were homosexual. The other half dressed that way: foppish. He sat at the bar and watched as Satin began the blocking.
“Which one is she?” The woman again. In Montmartre, 1913, people materialized.
“Over there with Porcépic.”
She hurried over to be introduced. Vulgar, thought Itague, and then amended it at once to “uncontrollable.” Perhaps? A little. La Jarretière stood there only gazing. Porcépic looked upset, as if they’d had an argument. Poor, young, pursued, fatherless. What would Gerfaut make of her? A wanton. In body if he could; in the pages of a manuscript most certainly. Writers had no moral sense.
Porcépic sat at the piano, playing “Adoration of the Sun.” It was a tango with cross-rhythms. Satin had devised some near-impossible movements to go with it. “It cannot be danced,” screamed a young man, leaping from the stage to land, belligerent, in front of Satin.
Mélanie had hurried off to change to her Su Feng costume. Lacing on her slippers she looked up and saw the woman, leaning in the doorway.
“You are not real.”
“I . . .” Hands resting dead on her thighs.
“Do you know what a fetish is? Something of a woman which gives pleasure but is not a woman. A shoe, a locket . . . une jarretière. You are the same, not real but an object of pleasure.”
Mélanie could not speak.
“What are you like unclothed? A chaos of flesh. But as Su Feng, lit by hydrogen, oxygen, a cylinder of time, moving doll-like in the confines of your costume . . . You will drive Paris mad. Women and men alike.”
The eyes would not respond. Not with fear, desire, anticipation. Only the Mélanie in the mirror could make them do that. The woman had moved to the foot of the bed, ring hand resting on the lay figure. Mélanie darted past her, continued on toes and in twirls to the wings; appeared on stage, improvising to Porcépic’s lackadaisical attack on the piano. Outside thunder could be heard, punctuating the music at random.
It was never going to rain.
The Russian influence in Porcépic’s music was usually traced to his mother, who’d been a milliner in St. Petersburg. Porcépic now, between his hashish dreams, his furious attacks on the grand piano out in Les Batignolles, fraternized with a strange collection of Russian expatriates led by a certain Kholsky, a huge and homicidal tailor. They were all engaged in clandestine political activity, they spoke volubly and at length of Bakunin, Marx, Ulyanov.
Kholsky entered as the sun fell, hidden by yellow clouds. He drew Porcépic into an argument. The dancers dispersed, the stage emptied until only Mélanie and the woman remained. Satin produced his guitar; Porcépic sat on the piano, and they sang revolutionary songs. “Porcépic,” grinned the tailor, “you’ll be surprised one day. At what we will do.”
“Nothing surprises me,” answered Porcépic. “If history were cyclical, we’d now be in a decadence, would we not, and your projected Revolution only another symptom of it.”
“A decadence is a falling-away,” said Kholsky. “We rise.”
“A decadence,” Itague put in, “is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.”
The girl and the woman had moved away from the stage’s one overhead light. They could hardly be seen. No sound came from up there. Itague finished the last of the ice water.
“Your beliefs are non-human,” he said. “You talk of people as if they were point-clusters or curves on a graph.”
“So they are,” mused Kholsky, dreamy-eyed. “I, Satin, Porcépic may fall by the wayside. No matter. The Socialist Awareness grows, the tide is irresistible and irreversible. It is a bleak world we live in, M. Itague; atoms collide, brain cells fatigue, economies collapse and others rise to succeed them, all in accord with the basic rhythms of History. Perhaps she is a woman; women are a mystery to me. But her ways are at least measurable.”
“Rhythm,” snorted Itague, “as if you listened to the jittenngs and squeaks of a metaphysical bedspring.” The tailor laughed, delighted, like a great fierce child. Acoustics of the room gave his mirthfulness a sepulchral ring. The stage was empty.
“Come,” said Porcépic. “To L’Ouganda.” Satin on a table danced absently to himself.
Outside they passed the woman, holding Mélanie by the arm. They were headed toward the Métro station; neither spoke. Itague stopped at a kiosk to buy a copy of La Patrie, the closest one could get to an anti-Semitic newspaper in the evening. Soon they had vanished down the Boulevard Clichy.
As they descended the moving stairs, the woman said, “You are afraid.” The girl didn’t answer. She still wore the costume, covered now with a dolman wrap which looked expensive and was, and which the woman approved of. She bought them first-class tickets. Closeted in the suddenly-materialized train, the woman asked: “Do you only lie passive then, like an object? Of course you do. It is what you are. Une fétiche.” She pronounced the silent e’s, as if she were singing. Air in the Métro was close. The same as outside. Mélanie studied the tail of the dragon on her calf.
After some time had passed the train climbed to ground level. Mélanie may have noticed they were crossing the river. To her left she saw the Eiffel Tower, quite near. They were crossing the Pont de Passy. At the first stop on the Left Bank the woman arose. She’d not left off clutching Mélanie’s arm. Out on the street they began to walk, bearing southwest, into the district of Grenelle: a landscape of factories, chemical works, iron foundries. They were alone in the street. Mélanie wondered if the woman indeed lived among factories.
They walked for what seemed a mile: arrived, finally, at a loft building, in which only the third floor was occupied, by a manufacturer of belts. They climbed narrow stairs, flight after flight. The woman lived on the top floor. Mélanie, though a dancer and strong-legged, now showed signs of exhaustion. When they arrived at the woman’s rooms, the girl lay down without invitation on a large pouf in the center of the room. The place was decorated African and Oriental: black pieces of primitive sculpture, lamp in the shape of a dragon, silks, Chinese red. The bed was a great four-poster. Mélanie’s wrap had fallen away: her legs, blond and bedragoned, lay unmoving half on the pouf, half on the oriental rug
. The woman sat down beside the girl, resting her hand lightly on Mélanie’s shoulder, and began to talk.
If we’ve not already guessed, “the woman” is, again, the lady V. of Stencil’s mad time-search. No one knew her name in Paris.
Not only was she V., however, but also V. in love. Herbert Stencil was willing to let the key to his conspiracy have a few of the human passions. Lesbianism, we are prone to think in this Freudian period of history, stems from self-love projected on to some other human object. If a girl gets to feeling narcissist, she will also sooner or later come upon the idea that women, the class she belongs to, are not so bad either. Such may have been the case with Mélanie, though who could say: perhaps the spell of incest at Serre Chaude was an indication that her preferences merely lay outside the usual, exogamous-heterosexual pattern which prevailed in 1913.
But as for V.—V. in love—the hidden motives, if there were any, remained a mystery to all observers. Everyone connected with the production knew what was going on; but because intelligence of the affair remained inside a circle inclined toward sadism, sacrilege, endogamy and homosexuality anyway, there was little concern, and the two were let alone, like young lovers. Mélanie showed up faithfully at all rehearsals and as long as the woman wasn’t enticing her away from the production—which, apparently, she had no intention of doing, being a patroness—Itague for one couldn’t have cared less.
One day the girl arrived at Le Nerf accompanied by the woman and wearing schoolboys’ clothing: tight black trousers, a white shirt, a short black jacket. Moreover, her head—all her thick buttock-length hair—had been shorn. She was nearly bald; and but for the dancer’s body no clothes could conceal, she might have been a young lad playing hooky. There was, fortunately, a long black wig in the costume box. Satin greeted the idea with enthusiasm. Su Feng would appear in the first act with hair, in the second without: having been tortured anyway by Mongolians. It would shock the audience, whose tastes, he felt, were jaded.
At every rehearsal, the woman sat at a rear table, watching, silent. All her attention was concentrated on the girl. Itague tried at first to engage her in conversation; but failed and went back to La Vie Heureuse, Le Rire, Le Charivari. When the company moved to the Théâtre de Vincent Castor, she followed like a faithful lover. Mélanie continued dressing transvestite for the street. Speculation among the company was that a peculiar inversion had taken place: since an affair of this sort generally involves one dominant and one submissive, and it was clear which one was which, the woman should have appeared in the clothing of an aggressive male. Porcépic, to the amusement of all, produced at L’Ouganda one evening a chart of the possible combinations the two could be practicing. It came out to sixty-four different sets of roles, using the subheadings “dressed as,” “social role,” “sexual role.” They could both for example be dressed as males, both have dominant social roles and strive for dominance sexually. They could be dressed different-sexed and both be entirely passive, the game then being to trick the other into making an aggressive move. Or any of sixty-two other combinations. Perhaps, Satin suggested, there were also inanimate mechanical aids. This, it was agreed, would confuse the picture. At one point someone suggested that the woman might actually be a transvestite to begin with, which made things even more amusing.
But what actually was going on at the loft in Grenelle? Each mind at L’Ouganda and among the troupe at the Théâtre Vincent Castor had conjured up a different scene; machines of exquisite torture, bizarre costuming, grotesque movements of muscle under flesh.
How disappointed they all would have been. Had they seen the skirt of the little sculptress-acolyte from Vaugirard, heard the pet-name the woman had for Mélanie, or read—as had Itague—in the new science of the mind, they would have known that certain fetishes never have to be touched or handled at all, only seen, for there to be complete fulfillment. As for Mélanie, her lover had provided her with mirrors, dozens of them. Mirrors with handles, with ornate frames, full-length and pocket mirrors came to adorn the loft wherever one turned to look.
V. at the age of thirty-three (Stencil’s calculation) had found love at last in her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig. This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called “tourists.” Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to various degrees of efficiency, on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip. More than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks. As long as the Cook’s, Travellers’ Clubs and banks are open, the Distribution of Time section followed scrupulously, the plumbing at the hotel in order (“No hotel,” writes Karl Baedeker, “can be recommended as first-class that is not satisfactory in its sanitary arrangements, which should include an abundant flush of water and a supply of proper toilette paper”), the tourist may wander anywhere in this coordinate system without fear. War never becomes more serious than a scuffle with a pickpocket, one of “the huge army . . . who are quick to recognize the stranger and skilful in taking advantage of his ignorance”; depression and prosperity are reflected only in the rate of exchange; politics are of course never discussed with the native population. Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on Earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation; they share the same landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street’s own.
The lady V., one of them for so long, now suddenly found herself excommunicated; bounced unceremoniously into the null-time of human love, without having recognized the exact moment as any but when Mélanie entered a side door to Le Nerf on Porcépic’s arm and time—for a while—ceased. Stencil’s dossier has it on the authority of Porcépic himself, to whom V. told much of their affair. He repeated none of it then, neither at L’Ouganda nor anywhere else: only to Stencil, years later. Perhaps he felt guilty about his chart of permutations and combinations, but to this extent at least he acted like a gentleman. His description of them is a well-composed and ageless still-life of love at one of its many extremes: V. on the pouf, watching Mélanie on the bed; Mélanie watching herself in the mirror; the mirror-image perhaps contemplating V. from time to time. No movement but a minimum friction. And yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love: simultaneous sovereignty yet a fusing-together. Dominance and submissiveness didn’t apply; the pattern of three was symbiotic and mutual. V. needed her fetish, Mélanie a mirror, temporary peace, another to watch her have pleasure. For such is the self-love of the young that a social aspect enters in: an adolescent girl whose existence is so visual observes in a mirror her double; the double becomes a voyeur. Frustration at not being able to fragment herself into an audience of enough only adds to her sexual excitement. She needs, it seems, a real voyeur to complete the illusion that her reflections are, in fact, this audience. With the addition of this other—multiplied also, perhaps, by mirrors—comes consummation: for the other is also her own double. She is like a woman who dresses only to be looked at and talked about by other women: their jealousy, whispered remarks, reluctant admiration are her own. They are she.
As for V., she recognized—perhaps aware of her own progression toward inanimateness—the fetish of Mélanie and the fetish of herself to be one. As all inanimate objects, to one victimized by them, are alike. It was a variation on the Porpentine theme, the Tristan-and-Iseult theme, indeed, according to some, the single melody, banal and exasperating, of all Romanticism since the Middle Ages: “the act of love and the act of death are one.” Dead at last, they would be one with the inanimate universe and with each other. Love-play until the
n thus becomes an impersonation of the inanimate, a transvestism not between sexes but between quick and dead; human and fetish. The clothing each wore was incidental. The hair shorn from Mélanie’s head was incidental: only an obscure bit of private symbolism for the lady V.: perhaps, if she were in fact Victoria Wren, having to do with her time in the novitiate.
If she were Victoria Wren, even Stencil couldn’t remain all unstirred by the ironic failure her life was moving toward, too rapidly by that prewar August ever to be reversed. The Florentine spring, the young entrepreneuse with all spring’s hope in her virtù, with her girl’s faith that Fortune (if only her skill, her timing held true) could be brought under control; that Victoria was being gradually replaced by V.; something entirely different, for which the young century had as yet no name. We all get involved to an extent in the politics of slow dying, but poor Victoria had become intimate also with the Things in the Back Room.
If V. suspected her fetishism at all to be part of any conspiracy leveled against the animate world, any sudden establishment here of a colony of the Kingdom of Death, then this might justify the opinion held in the Rusty Spoon that Stencil was seeking in her his own identity. But such was her rapture at Mélanie’s having sought and found her own identity in her and in the mirror’s soulless gleam that she continued unaware, off-balanced by love; forgetting even that although the Distribution of Time here on pouf, bed and mirrors had been abandoned, their love was in its way only another version of tourism; for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.’s, which represent a kind of infiltration.
What would have been her reaction, had she known? Again, an ambiguity. It would have meant, ultimately, V.’s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization—at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris—that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became—to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no matter—a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. Or by contrast, might have reacted against the above, which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality—not merely as a love-game with any Mélanie—an inanimate object of desire. Stencil even departed from his usual ploddings to daydream a vision of her now, at age seventy-six: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heartpump through butyrate veins and arteries. Perhaps—Stencil on occasion could have as vile a mind as any of the Crew—even a complex system of pressure transducers located in a marvelous vagina of polyethylene; the variable arms of their Wheatstone bridges all leading to a single silver cable which fed pleasure-voltages direct to the correct register of the digital machine in her skull. And whenever she smiled or grinned in ecstasy there would gleam her crowning feature: Eigenvalue’s precious dentures.
V. Page 46
