New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Your uncle?”

  “Mother’s brother. He was just leaving when you arrived at the rink. He is a very busy man, very mysterious, very rich. He has gold mines in Australia and I don’t know where else. And I am his only heir. She won’t even dare to ask him whether what I say is true.”

  “So, you’re quite the heiress, then,” Thomas said, with a total lack of delicacy, which he had discovered women sometimes appreciated.

  “Certainly. But you’d better make your move quickly,” she said, with a curious smile that Thomas could not decipher. Was she referring to other suitors? “Is that what you’re after? A good marriage?” she asked.

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  She laughed at that. “We are going to have fun, you and I,” she said, nodding at some dim view of the future. Before Thomas, slightly taken aback, could react to this … opening?… she said, “Why, for one thing, don’t you come to one of Mother’s salons? There’s one next Thursday. There will be a lot of interesting people there. You could even bring the friends you told me about.”

  “Why, that’s very generous,” he answered, although he didn’t know where or, well, when he would be next Thursday.

  In another room, a ferocious organ boomed, and a monk came into the “Hall of Intoxication,” waving a bell to announce the evening’s show. Some patrons started to shuffle forward, and headed in a procession towards the “Vault of the Dead.”

  “Well,” said Blanche suddenly, her mood darkening a bit, “If you want to see the show, please do so. I’ve seen it so many times, I know it by heart. I am afraid I have to go now. See you on Thursday, then? Eighty-seven Boulevard Denfert. Oh, no, I have a better idea! Why don’t you come by tomorrow afternoon? We could do a little fencing together. If you fancy fencing, that is, and are not afraid of … pointy things.”

  Thomas stood gaping as she left, her black cape waving among the coffins. And one second after she disappeared, he already missed her.

  The show bored him. A man lay in a coffin, was stripped of his flesh and then reincarnated. Nothing new and all done with mirrors. The show in the other vaulted room, where a troupe called the Gay Spectres revealed more flesh than bone, amused him a little more, although not to the point of being as aroused as his neighbours, if he properly understood the rustles and whispers in the darkness all around him. As the Sad Spectres entered the stage, he stood up and followed the long corridor back to the Hall of Intoxication. Somehow his exhilaration had deserted him. This godforsaken, taste-forsaken place was to blame, no doubt—unless it was Blanche’s sudden departure. Or perhaps the weight on his chest was the thought of the little phial on his bedside table.

  Then, for the first time since he had left him, he wondered where Tuluk was.

  The Hall of Intoxication was almost empty when he stepped in. But at the table, where, he realized, he had imprudently left his coat, someone was waiting for him. For a moment, he thought this was somehow a part of the whole damn cabaret act.

  The man wore a red uniform jacket under his fur-collared coat, and also, oddly, a pith helmet. He had a long, sad, equine face with the smallest of pencil moustaches. His left side looked normal, but the right was all prosthetics: glass eye, wax ear, black shiny sugar-tong hand, and even his leg, from what Thomas could see of it, crossed above the other at an unnatural angle, sticklike and stiff.

  “India,” said the man simply, by way of explanation, with an accent as British as his uniform. “Interesting place. Can I offer you a drink?”

  Thomas accepted and sat down as if casually, but caught himself wiping clammy hands on his trousers.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. Captain Ivanhoe Yronwoode, military attaché to the British Embassy in Paris.”

  “Thomas Paynes-Grey, I’m, er … a navy cadet. From Canada.”

  “Ah, Canada …” the captain said, sternly. “You’ll miss us more than we’ll miss you. But it is always sad to see an empire—if I may so put it—torn to pieces.”

  At this, he put his claw-hand in front of Thomas and clicked the tongs twice, with a long pause in between.

  “Is there something you want from me?” Thomas asked. He was now weighing the possibility of a fight.

  “No. But there is something you want from me. And that is advice.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Oh, you don’t want advice on how to seduce Miss Blanche de Bramentombes, then? You are very brave. But very foolish.”

  Thomas suddenly recalled his feeling, earlier, of being shadowed. He had been right. “You know her?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I have that honour. I suppose that now she refers to me as a friend.”

  “Where I come from, such an imputation could be taken as fighting words,” Thomas said, trying to look straight into Yronwoode’s eyes, both the monocled real one and the artificial one. Both were hard to meet and hardly encouraging.

  “You don’t want to fight a man you can’t hurt,” Yronwoode answered placidly. “And who, for some reason which now eludes even himself, wants to give you a little help. But if you’re not curious, we may as well part now.”

  “I admit I’m curious. But I am not prepared to hear anything unpleasant about Miss de Bramentombes.”

  “Then, I won’t say that Miss de Bramentombes is a nymphomaniac and a pervert, whose wretched life, thank God, is numbered in months rather than in years. I’ll simply say that out of her good Catholic heart, she is dedicated to giving her life to the dispossessed, and has never been known to resist a man who was either a tramp or a cripple. She left me for a scrubby legless fellow who lived in the zone, outside the city. But apparently even a modest sling will do, these days.”

  Thomas felt sick rather than angry. “That was incredibly unpleasant,” he said. “I have to go home now. I’ll send you my witnesses, if you would be kind enough to give me your address …”

  “Witness things for yourself, and then if I’m proved wrong, send me whomever you want. You can find me at the Embassy.”

  Thomas tried to get up, his head spinning. “Agreed,” he said coldly.

  It was only outside that he realized that he was still squeezing the entrance ticket to the Cabaret du Néant—a little tin tag, embossed with a skull and bones. Une entrée a la Crêve, it read. Thomas didn’t know what that meant, only that it had cut a gash in the palm of his hand.

  VI

  Thulé-des-Brumes

  Brentford stayed at the hotel that evening, busying himself with diagrams on which he drew and crossed out arrows between points labelled PALLADIAN, CANADA, MAGICAL CROWN, and NEW VENICE. Gabriel had quickly excused himself, arguing that in Paris, it was in cafés, among conversations and meetings, that the action was found and the problems were solved.

  Not that Gabriel expected anyone to solve his own problems. Broken hearts are like beheaded chickens, he mused while walking along the Boulevard Montparnasse. They run furiously everywhere for a while, charging into nothingness, and once their blood is spent, they stumble miserably unto death. Such would be the case, he was convinced, with his phantom-hearted self. Where he had once had a heart, he now felt but a lump of rotten meat, and whatever stirred there was probably nothing but the crawling of maggots.

  Well, there were the Elphinstone twins—praise to whatever crazy God made them. But with the Twins, and contrary to public opinion on this matter, he’d had mostly good clean fun. He felt a great affection for them, which for lack of a better word he would call avuncular. But beyond that, the Twins were too wonderful and sacred to be loved, and they were too selfish, too bound up in each other, to feel real love for anyone else. Whatever one did with them, and Gabriel had done an awful lot, one always felt like a servant or a pet.

  So, for all Gabriel knew, his lost shadow was still crumpled and forgotten in the back of one of Stella’s stocking drawers. These days, accordingly, if he were about to pass by a girl that he found attractive, he would change sidewalks. In a position to speak, he found himself blushing and tongue-ti
ed, as if he were winding back at full steam towards puberty.

  Imaginary girlfriends, he decided, were the best. They were loyal and lecherous. They were there when you needed them and they made you feel like a better lover than you actually were. They wouldn’t leave you for another fellow, and they were not only not angry when you brought another imaginary girl home, they were pleased and playful. Gabriel liked to imagine such a companion at his side, veiled in black so her face might change according to his need. She was sharp and witty, had a voice that was either a little hoarse or maybe burdened with the slightest lisp, and eyes from which a promising glint scintillated through the lace of her veil.

  Tonight, Gabriel had decided to take his imaginary girlfriend to a small crèmerie—or milk bar—on the rue de la Grande-Chaumière, just off the Boulevard Montparnasse. It held about ten people—usually, boisterous artists from the many studios in the neighbourhood—and you could eat fresh food there for a franc and a half.

  It was already crammed when Gabriel arrived and ordered gigot with white beans. The place resounded with booming voices speaking French but with strong foreign accents, and Gabriel quickly lost track of what his imaginary girlfriend was talking about. One of the men seemed especially agitated, speaking loudly and wandering around with fork in hand and an energy that bordered on aggression. His face struck Gabriel as both handsome and crazy; his wild shock of hair and fiery steel-blue eyes gave him the look of someone perpetually sitting on an electric chair. His hands were red and scarred, as if they had been burned.

  “What are you looking at?” the man said when he noticed Gabriel staring at him. He held tight to his fork and looked as if he were ready to lunge. The surrounding tables went silent, the diners’ expectation not devoid of amusement, as if they were used to such scenes.

  “You! Are you a Russian spy?” the man shouted. “Or one of those electricians building a machine on the roof of my pension?”

  “I am neither of those things, sir,” Gabriel said cautiously.

  The man stared at him for a while, then sat back. At which point Gabriel suddenly recognized him. He was facing none other than the great August Strindberg. “May I say I am a great admirer of your work,” Gabriel said, even as he realized that his favourite work by Strindberg—the demented diary that the dramatist had kept, or was keeping, during his stay in Paris—had not been written yet.

  “Pshhah! That’s all over with,” Strindberg answered dismissively, almost angrily, though Gabriel could tell he had been flattered by the recognition. “No more literature. Now I am an alchemist!” He proudly brandished his sore hands.

  Two hours later, as they sat in front of an absinthe at the cosy Closerie des Lilas, Strindberg’s madness had ebbed somewhat, but the intensity of his presence still consumed his companions. Here was a man roasted alive on the gridiron of his own nerves, and he made Gabriel want to both strangle him and pray for his soul to find a little rest.

  “I am sorry for my little scene at the crèmerie,” Strindberg suddenly said, although with what still seemed a defiant look. “You know what drives us crazy? Our modernity. The trains, the telegraph, the letters, the photographs, the press. They hook us. They obsess us. They worm inside our brains. I was raised in the age of stagecoaches and books, I was used to seeing and digesting the world at a certain pace. And now, look! We get our brains beaten to a pulp in trains, our nerves wired and extending all over the Procrustean Bed of the world. How could we not be crazy when we have lost our sensations and gestures and let them be replaced with others that are totally deranged, totally degenerate? Unless we are at the dawn of a new mankind, developing new senses by the dozen and hundred. Take telepathy, for instance. Do you know how easy it is to impose your will on someone else’s brain? To cast a spell through a photograph? Uncovering Nature’s secrets is the only naturalism worthy of that name. The occult, I say, is the future of Literature.”

  “But the book will remain, don’t you think?” someone ventured. “It will not be replaced by the phonograph.”

  This was standard table talk of the time.

  “Oh! It will be,” someone else said, leaning across from another table. “Writers will become tellers of tales, and will be liked less for their style than for the tone of their voice.”

  Now Gabriel launched himself, taking advantage of the fact that he knew the history of French literature and could get away with a prophetic flourish. After all, it’s not every day that you know the future. He said, “I do not think the book will be replaced by the phonograph, but the phonograph will leave deep traces in it. Even Mallarmé himself, the most bookish of men, is very concerned by these questions: I hear that he now conceives of the poet as an ‘Operator,’ who not only writes but performs his Poem.”

  At this point, hearing the praise of a colleague, Strindberg lost all interest and turned away, but a man sitting at the next table suddenly turned towards Gabriel and looked at him closely. He had a greasy jet-black fringe over a flushed brow, clear, clever eyes, and long elegant fingers on the hand he extended towards Gabriel.

  “Paul Vassily. Pleased to meet you. Can I offer you a drink?” the man asked.

  Gabriel’s drink with Vassily—along with many others, to judge by the stack of saucers piled up before them on the marble-topped table—was not taken at the Closerie but at the Café d’Harcourt, down the Boulevard St. Michel, on Sorbonne Square. It was an incredible place, bright as if on fire, and noisy as hell with snatches of bawdy song and the clack of dominoes. But most of all, it was full of painted ladies whose long, coloured dresses swept the floor—a filthy melange of slush and sawdust—with clumsy, alcoholic grace.

  “You pay me a bock, chéri?” one of them asked Gabriel, having picked up the scent of a foreigner. But if there was a moral principle left in Gabriel, it was that he would not pay for sex, not even with a glass of beer, no more than he would for the air he breathed. He dismissed the lady as politely as he could, and off she staggered to another client, majestically wrapping herself in her fleabitten boa.

  “Ah, whores,” Vassily said simply, with a kind of detached, appreciative look. “I should warn you that the ones here are especially naughty.”

  “You won’t hear me speak ill of naughty girls,” Gabriel said. “At the end of it all, they are the ones we remember.”

  “What you say is mostly true,” Vassily agreed after a moment of reflection, “even if the memories left by the ones around here are often burning. Not that there is a shortage of fresher and somewhat saner flesh, especially in these unfortunate times. Our poets may be as much appreciated as our prostitutes, but these dreadful winters have dwindled one contingent and strengthened the other. I’ll let you guess which, of poets and prostitutes, are more resistant to the cold.”

  “You’re a poet yourself?”

  “More than I am a whore, I should hope, even if our dear Baudelaire claimed it is one and the same thing,” he said. He suddenly became serious again, and Gabriel knew that the time had come for some intense avant-garde poetry talk. “However much I revere the great Mallarmé,” Vassily went on, “I think we can go still farther along the way he opened for us. Poetry is too delicate a thing to be passed through the muddy filters of language alone. It is a dialogue between eternal minds, between pure souls that have to remain unsoiled by the cumbersome, uncertain mediations of the printed word. Symbolism, Mr. D’Allier, is nearly dead—here comes Suggestism. Imagine, this—” he leaned closer to Gabriel “—a few carefully chosen formulas whispered to a hypnotized subject, opening a whole theatre of visions in the soft folds of his sleepy brain. The subject would live the poem like a mysterious dream coming from the astral plane.”

  “Would the subject remember the poem afterwards, then?” Gabriel asked, vaguely hoping that Magnetic Crowns would crop up in the conversation. He could already envision catatonic amateur poets wearing the magnetic laurel crowns of fashionable poets fastened above their empty eyes.

  “No, that’s the beauty of it, you se
e—the poem secretly etching itself in the deepest recess of the subconscious mind … always there but never quite there, like a half-remembered dream … a forgotten word pressing on the tip of your tongue, nameless still, but full of the essence of the Thing … Well, since you appreciate the delicacies of the art, I would be honoured to demonstrate for you my latest psychopoem Pierrot Lotophage …” But before Gabriel could think of an excuse to avoid the performance, Vassily admitted, “But I must confess that the method has yet to be perfected. For the time being it only seems to work with young persons of the fair sex—an audience, I must say, that I am perfectly content with. For now, though, perhaps you will enjoy this.” He handed Gabriel a folded piece of paper.

  “What is it?”

  “A very precious coupon. I was supposed to give it to Strindberg, but I do not think he would cut a pleasant figure beside le Maître.”

  “The Master?”

  “Well, Mallarmé, of course. This is an invitation to his reading of The Book, as he calls it. For connoisseurs only. Of which I noticed that you are one. Next Tuesday, at his place, rue de Rome.”

  “I had no idea he did this … for real.” Gabriel was amazed.

  “I don’t know if it’s really for real. You’ll see for yourself,” Vassily said with a sly smile.

  Vassily, typical of that class of Parisian bohemians who live on family money, resided rather comfortably in a little apartment on Sorbonne Square itself. The place was entirely hung with crimson velvet, so that, invited there later that night, Gabriel felt as if he were entering some inflamed internal organ. A stuffed Grand Duke owl was perched on a roost in the living room, eyeing visitors with glassy, unruffled disapproval.

  The bookshelves immediately attracted Humots, the little book demon tattooed on Gabriel’s arm. He knew it was bad form to scrutinize people’s bookshelves, but his demon was stronger than he. When Humots was itching, Gabriel had merely to extend his hand to find the book that he needed, sometimes without knowing he did. How could he resist, for instance, the rough, smelly, musty Rosez edition of the Songs of Maldoror—the one that had slept fifteen years in a cave without ever being opened, biding its time and accumulating over the years a dark, malevolent power?