Brentford thanked the guard and turned back to the room of displays. Now, in the dim rooms of the museum, the figures looked to him as if they were waiting for a city to be built, and for their life to start again, up there, in the lethal, ecstatic North.
II
The Little Red Heart
Boulevard Denfert-Rochereau was a few minutes’ walk from Montparnasse. Early in the afternoon, dressed in his best, his arm in a blindingly white sling, Thomas rang the bell at the dark-green carriage door of number 87, which looked more like the entrance to a bourgeois house than to a hotel particulier. Maybe Blanche de Bramentombes was not the rich heiress she claimed to be. But Paris is a folded city that, past certain frontiers, unfurls itself into manifold surprises. From the archway of the door, he could see, at the end of the paved lane carefully cleaned of its snow, a beautiful three-story house surrounded by a garden that, with its tough eucalypti and rhododendrons, had remained impervious to the wintry weather.
A fresh, plump, toothsome maid introduced Thomas into a drawing room where a fireplace diffused a lulling warmth. Bunches of white roses bloomed on every item of Louis XV furniture that could accommodate a vase, forming a continuous Arcadian landscape with the fuzzy, sparkling groves on the room’s painted panels and in the mirrors that reflected them. There was a light, heady lushness to the whole snuggery, and the morphine coursing through Thomas’s veins made it come alive, deepening the perspectives and gently swaying the foliage.
He heard nimble steps pattering down the stairs and Blanche entered, already dressed for fencing, wire mask and foil in hand. She wore a black knee-length dress tightly belted at the hips and embroidered with a little red heart, black satiny tights, and a pair of black leather elbow gloves. Her curly black hair was held in a fuzzy bun and haloes of mauve circled her eyes, bringing out her pallor and that shade of feverish Troubled Nymph’s Thigh Pink on her cheeks.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Paynes-Grey,” she told him with a smile that seemed expectant, as if she were waiting for him to understand a joke she had just cracked. As she sat, he noticed that her black dress was lined with scarlet.
“To think I wanted to bring you flowers,” Thomas said, vaguely pointing at the avalanche of flowers surrounding them.
“Mother believes they’re good for my health and spends a fortune in the greenhouses. I think it looks like a funeral. What do you think?” she asked casually, as she beheaded a rosebud with a swift lash of her blade.
“I think … it’s heady,” Thomas admitted, taken aback by her poise.
“Don’t get too heady with me. What about a little exercise?”
The fencing “strip” was a stretch of creaking wooden floor in a garret above the third story that looked out over the gardens and domes of the Paris Observatory. A mirror ran along the wall, as if this had once been a dancing school. Various toys and baubles lay discarded in the corners collecting dust, a melancholy sight. Thomas realized that he did not know how old, or young, Blanche was, and, at this point, he didn’t dare ask. Blanche gave him some whites and, as he slipped behind a screen to put them on, he wondered who they had belonged to. A fencing master? The sinister Major Yronwoode?
“Are you okay?” she asked through the screen.
“Well, now you come to mention it, not really. This sling is a real bore.”
“Let me help you,” she said, coming round the corner of the screen and helping him out of his jacket, with more delicacy than Tuluk usually managed. He relished the opportunity to expose his muscles to both her eyes and hands, and shivered at the brush of her leather gloves.
“Please, put my arm behind my back,” he asked, as she softly replaced the sling. She hurt him as she did so, and for a moment he thought she was doing it on purpose, but he let her continue without so much as a groan. Still, he remembered Yronwoode’s advice. He would have to sort some things out, he thought, while grasping his foil and swishing as if to sign his name in the air. He caught himself in the mirror. Bathed in the Apollonian halo of morphine, he thought that he looked quite good.
“I think that as a strong man in the flower of youth, you should have a little handicap against a feeble creature like me,” she said, as he flexed his legs in front of the mirror.
“And what would that be?”
“You only win if you touch right in the middle of my heart, here.”
“I suppose that is acceptable,” he said with confidence, before saluting. “En garde! Prête!”
“Prête!”
She wasn’t a bad fencer—far from it—except that after a heated passage of arms she had to stop for a while to catch her breath, or laugh with short, brittle trills that flushed her cheeks and made her eyes water.
“Who taught you to fence so well?”
“My uncle did. He is a fencing fiend. I think the clanging reminds him of money, but that’s merely my personal theory. An English friend has recently added a few lessons. A man of unusual skills, I must say.”
Thomas, for a while, had played the gentleman, parrying more than lunging and trying not to score easy hits, but the mention of Yronwoode stoked him up. The morphine started to play tricks on him, too, coaxing his pride into reckless moves, multiplying the point of her weapon into a swarm of bothersome bluish flies, or into blurred swipes that seemed to float in slow motion through the air. Her little red heart danced before him, like a will-o’-the-wisp above a fresh graveyard, always just out of his reach.
“I’m afraid you have too small a heart,” he said during a pause, rivulets of sweat dripping down his brow.
“I think I’ve been told that before,” she said, and he could sense her smile under her wire mask.
“Would Major Yronwoode be liable to say something like that?”
Blanche did not look surprised. “If you have met Major Yronwoode, I suppose you’ll excuse him for being a bitter man.”
“He was more than bitter. He was impudent. You would not believe the things he said to me.”
“I take it that you didn’t believe them, either, then.”
“I even offered him to send him my witnesses,” Thomas said proudly.
“Because you thought he was telling the truth, or because you thought he wasn’t?”
Thomas hesitated. “I’d believe you if you told me he wasn’t.”
“Let’s make a deal about this duel. If you hit my heart, I’ll tell you the truth. But if you don’t …”
“If I don’t?”
“You’ll have to believe me and do everything I say.”
“I’m not sure that makes me want to win. But, as you wish: en garde, mademoiselle. Prête!”
He launched into a few wild flurries, and many times hit her close to her heart. The exertion started to make him feel anxious and nauseated, and he decided to strike once and for all. He attacked with a flêche, charging towards the heart, but the point passed under her arm and they got locked in a corps-a-corps. Their masks knocked and scraped and he caught her eyes shining behind their cage. He could hear her wheezing, too, and suddenly he felt afraid to hurt her. He started to retreat, but losing his balance, he tripped and stumbled onto his back, his arm sending a tidal wave of pain over his entire body.
He opened his eyes. She was bent over him, her mask still on her head, her point lightly pushing his Adam’s apple.
“You are dead, Mr. Paynes-Grey.”
“And I’m in heaven,” he said, looking at her.
“That or something else. Does your arm hurt terribly?”
“Since you ask, yes.”
She pretended to put her shoe on the arm, moving her heel as if about to press down. He watched her do this with more curiosity than fear.
“It must be terrible,” she eventually said. “Your suffering for me certainly deserves a reward.” She walked to the chimney and took a black velvet case off the mantel.
“Here is a little present for you,” she said. “To seal our friendship.”
He managed to sit up, and settling th
e case on his knees, he opened it with his good hand. Nested in purple silk and velvet was a glass and silver syringe, delicately detailed with curlicues. His initials were carved on the top of the plunger, and for a second, it was like reading his own name on a gravestone.
“This is a Pravaz syringe. And this,” she said, waving a small phial, “is a sixty-percent solution, from Hornuch, rue de Rome. The best in town.”
On her knees, she undid his jacket and found a spot on his chest. She stung the needle under his skin, letting it hang down. Taking out a spoon, she poured a little fluid from the phial, pumped it into the syringe, and then screwed the syringe back onto the needle. She wedged a small wooden board between the plunger and the syringe, to block the plunger once she deemed the injection sufficient. Then, she pushed the plunger, and he burned in heaven, as she glued her lips to his.
“Touché,” he whispered.
III
The Anaglyph
Brentford discovered, from a telephone book, that Edgar de Couard’s studio was not in Montmartre, but in Ménilmontant. Nobody, however, answered the phone, so Brentford had to walk all the way up the hill to the neighbourhood as the afternoon declined. He remembered a remark Gabriel had made a few days before about the unbelievable amount of walking done by the heroes of Parisian novels, and felt that on that score at least, he qualified for the position. Of course, when it came to snowy streets, he’d had a lifetime of training, and could surely teach those other heroes a thing or two.
He followed the boulevards and their triumphal arches, which stood like ancient ruins amidst the smoky, noisy hubbub of the neighbourhood, all the way to the Place de la République, a vast stretch of wilderness that the north wind made still less hospitable. A blackened bronze of Marianne, the sturdy female virago representing the Republic, stood in the middle of the square, her arm raised as if calling for help, while Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, white against the snow that crept up to and over them, grew blurrier, threatening to disappear any day now. Nobody seemed to mind the allegory.
Brentford came closer to a long string of heavily wrapped-up people who were queueing, with typical world-weary jocularity, not at a newspaper kiosk, Morris column, or urinal (those minarets of the Parisian faith), but before an automated distributor of warm drinks—mulled wine, mostly—which also featured a warm-water tap for rinsing glasses. Brentford made a mental note to install some in New Venice, before remembering that he was not the Regent-Doge anymore and that there was no New Venice to regent anyway.
Another queue filed up to the cable car linking the Place de la République to the heights of Belleville. The car was tiny and cramped, damp with condensation, and reeking of mulled wine. With grating hiccups, it worked its way across a frozen canal that made Brentford homesick, and from there up a populous street. The workers who lived there had cleaned the street themselves, a man in the funicular explained, so as not to lose the benefits of their cable car when they got home from their harrowing work. Too bad the government wasn’t so efficient, a woman remarked, triggering laughter that contained little mirth.
He got off at the rue Pyat intersection and walked past the modest shops and hotels until, suddenly, he found himself at the top of a hill, near a vertiginous path leading through snowy waste grounds into a knot of leprous streets. A panorama of Paris stretched across the snow-laden horizon, and for the first time Brentford saw the city as a whole.
Half-smothered in snow it spread before him, an ashen labyrinth that the first lights spangled with glowing embers. The sheer amount of human work that had been needed to build this insane, glorious heap of rubble struck Brentford as vaguely monstrous. The city seemed to have been built by Titans and djinns, not by poor men who had laid stone upon stone upon stone. Like many idealized places, Eden and New Venice included, it looked like a doomed promise of happiness. On the left, Notre-Dame raised her amputated hands to the leaden sky, cursing, it seemed, more than praising. At the other end of the scene, the I fell tower looked ridiculously small, a clockwork toy Babel for the spoiled children of progress.
He turned his back regretfully and went down the rue des Envierges, noticing louche figures passing by on the narrow sidewalks, though none approached him. Maybe this is where the shy ones go to live, Brentford reflected, thinking of de Couard. He could understand that a man of his antisocial nature would find refuge here, far from the fanfare of painter-infested Montmartre. He lost himself in a tangle of winding, humble streets, only managing to regain his bearings when he stumbled on the forlorn Ménilmontant station from the disused circular railroad. The rue des Cascades, where de Couard resided, was a little farther on, on the side of a barren slope, and with its blind walls and wooden fences it looked as lonely and rustic as a mountain village—nothing at all like the Pandemonium Brentford had just fantasized about. He found the artist’s house at the corner of the rue de Savies, its large picture window betraying the presence of a studio. Crude faces, he noticed, were carved into the wall, in a modern version of prehistoric art.
Brentford suspected that de Couard would not answer the knocker, which bore the face of a woman. He played out a little war of nerves, letting a few seconds go by between each knock, so as to give the painter the impression that his unwelcome guest had almost given up, except that he hadn’t, and wasn’t going to. Eventually hearing somebody coming to the door—probably to take a peep through the judas, as the French called peepholes—Brentford pulled out the snow-globe eye from his pocket and held it in front of the hole. The door squeaked and a blind old woman, with eyes as dead as the one he flourished uselessly, invited Brentford inside.
“I want to speak to Monsieur de Couard,” he said, and as he doubted that this alone would gain him entry, he added, “About the snow-globe eye in his figure of de Lanternois.”
One minute later, she came back to let him in, her face creased in staunch disapproval. Located slightly below street level, the glass-roofed drawing room was tasteful and warm, with faded peach walls, indigo velvet draperies, and deep rosewood furniture, but it had a stilted, stifling atmosphere that made Brentford feel instantly ill at ease.
De Couard rose regretfully from the deep leather armchair—the only one in the room—in which he had been reading, and stared at Brentford over his tinted pince-nez with not the least hint of benevolence, but rather, Brentford thought, with a diffused gleam of madness, all very well for an artist but enough to get anyone else committed to an asylum. He looked nothing like the scruffy, absinthe-stoked rapins who crawled the Parisian art scene. Rather, he was tall and stooped, with steely blue eyes and hollow cheeks, blond hair that looked like a stork’s nest, and a long double-pronged beard that gave him something of a regal air. Brentford could smell old money, an excellent if hard-and-fast upbringing by sadistic priests, and, judging by the unruly mob of tics that rioted on his face at any given time, a case of neurasthenia well above fashionable norms.
“Monsieur de Couard, I presume,” said Brentford, at his most diplomatic. “I am truly sorry to disturb you and interrupt your work, but—” with a nod at the glass eye in his open hand, “—it is precisely the quality of your work that prompted me to call.”
“The e-e-eye,” stammered his host, pointing an accusing finger at the little snow globe.
Oh, God, thought Brentford. This is not going to be easy. “I find it a fascinating piece of art. Would you mind discussing it with me?”
Now, Brentford could see that de Couard’s eyeglass lenses were of different colours, red and blue. But whether he looked through them or around them, the painter carefully avoided Brentford’s eyes, even as he reluctantly steered him towards the rosewood sofa against the wall. The spectral, blind old maid reentered the room and Brentford watched her with growing unease as she tremblingly brought tea to the coffee table in a jangle of Sèvres china. The tea, however, proved to be Russian and first-class.
Brentford shook off his discomfort and looked for a firing angle. De Couard might be shy, but he was also, afte
r all, an artist, and surely there was little risk in flattering his vanity.
“Monsieur de Couard, I am very grateful for your time and hospitality. It is the sad lot of artists, I know, to have to put up with their admirers. In my case, it is only your talent that you have to blame for your trouble.”
“The eye belongs to the wax figure,” de Couard stammered, reproachfully but so softly that Brentford had to lean forward to understand.
Brentford tried to appease him. “It will soon be put back in its place, don’t worry.” Maybe showing him the eye had not been such a good idea after all. It made de Couard seem even more strung-out than he clearly already was—and even, it seemed, more than a little scared. It might have been only the holy horror an artist feels at the desecration of his work, but Brentford sensed that there was something more in his discomfort—something that could bring him closer to New Venice.
“I have been, as I said, very impressed by your Arctic diorama at the Musée Grévin. I happen to come from just such a remote, distant place, in the Confederation of Canada. And when I saw your diorama I felt such a shock that for a while I felt that I had been carried back to the Arctic.”
De Couard was listening; Brentford had him hooked. Now he began reeling him in, very cautiously.
“It was almost as if I could feel the brush of the wind, hear the crack of the ice,” Brentford went on, embroidering his own impressions onto Tuluk’s story. “I wondered how you achieved such exactness. It’s almost—hallucinatory.”
De Couard lifted up his eyes for a brief moment, but lowered them again before he spoke, his stammer almost under control. He said, “I suppose you’re familiar with the latest theories of optical perception?”
“More or less,” Brentford admitted, even as he wondered what the hell they could have been in the 1890s. “Simultaneous contrasts? Pointillism?”
New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos Page 20
