New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  The painter nodded, and confided slowly, “I have gone much further since then …”

  Listening to a half-mad stutterer as he expounds the latest theories about the physiology of colour perception might not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but one of Brentford’s greatest qualities was that he considered himself never too old to learn. Besides, he remembered that Edgar de Couard had been—would be—among the first to live in New Venice, and surely for that alone the painter deserved his undivided attention.

  What de Couard explained was roughly this: it had recently been proved by psychophysics that the sight of colours was dynamogenic—that is, colours stimulated not only the visual organs but the entire nervous system. Depending on the colours, this stimulation triggered reflex discharges or inhibitions, and corresponding emotions, positive or negative. “Believe me,” he said in a confessional moment, “a sensitive man can find himself on the rack when two unmatched colours strike his senses, as if a cacophonic fanfare were playing right by his ear. The outer world as it is now can be a cruel place for such a man.”

  To a painter, he went on, this meant that painting had to go beyond the eyes; it had to reach the innermost recesses of the brain, had to change for itself “the ratio of the five senses,” as the great William Blake had said. Pointillism—of which, de Couard insisted, he was a dedicated epigone, even if he loathed its well-known anarchist leanings—had systematized painting according to the laws of the perception of colour contrasts. Now, painting had to be systematized according to the very laws of the mind and its own sets of contrasts.

  Brentford interrupted. “You mean painting can control the mind?”

  De Couard said he believed it could, but added that he would rather use words such as suggestion rather than control. Painting, he maintained, could be hallucinatory. Panoramas and dioramas had proven it, when people were persuaded they saw moving figures, or were so disturbed they threw objects at the canvas. Such powerful visual stimuli can loosen our grasp on reality to the point where the other senses join in the illusion: that was why Brentford had heard the wind in the Musée Grévin, de Couard explained—even though he also insisted that the Grévin diorama was a miserable work.

  “Like some sort of Synesthesia,” Brentford—always the good pupil—proposed.

  De Couard welcomed the word with the grave nod of an initiate. It would be the key to the Artwork of the Future that Wagner had predicted. It would not be a clumsy patchwork of mountebank arts, as philistines often misunderstood it, but it would immerse the spectator in a totally different atmosphere, in totally different situations, in a totally different reality. In that respect, any Montmartre cabaret was more advanced in painting than even the work of the pointillists.

  It all reminded Brentford of the story of the Chinese painter who was paid by a rich patron to paint his masterpiece and seven years later delivered what looked like a banal landscape. As the patron’s reproach was being leveled at him, the painter turned away, walked into his painting and was never seen again. De Couard, it seemed to Brentford, was a man whose dream was to walk into his own painting.

  The painter, now clearly warmed by a sacred passion that he seldom had occasion to vent, asked Brentford to follow him into his studio—a long, large space, so immaculate one would never suspect it belonged to a painter if it hadn’t been for the two palettes on display, one for the warm colours and one for the cool (he never mixed them, he said, as scornfully as a shy man could). The room was divided in the middle by a long black curtain, in front of which, set on a tripod, was a curious shiny machine made of superimposed colour disks and moveable rods.

  With nervous yet precise, staccato gestures, de Couard now drew the curtains over the room’s picture window, to shut out any spying eyes, and lit the Argand chandelier. Next, he handed Brentford a tinted pince-nez like his own, and set about rolling back the drape, apologizing for the poor quality of this work in progress. The floor should be painted, he said, and the ceiling too, so that the spectator could see nothing but pigment. But that would come later, he explained as, with a final tug on the curtain, he revealed a large, rectangular canvas.

  At first Brentford saw nothing but a confused whirl of luminous dots that here and there seemed to suggest hazy shapes. Nonetheless, following a gesture from de Couard, he put on the spectacles and stepped in for a closer look—and suddenly found himself transported somewhere else, speechless and dizzy.

  Under a grey snow-laden sky, a gigantic city jumped at his face and curled all around him, topped in the centre by a mammoth Parthenon. On the left, a gigantic but finely wrought steel cupola blocked a part of the horizon, and on the right, palatial buildings, grouped in closed squares and courts, rose for miles into the distance in mysterious ministerial rivalries. Between them, copper walkways and titanic iron bridges crossed the sky at precipitous heights. In the background, along endless canals, enormous snowy embankments teemed with marquees and pennants, as if a festival were taking place, and Brentford thought he heard bronzed slivers of music from a marching band. In the foreground, on a circular boulevard where the snow had turned to slush, arcades teemed with dots that seemed to move. A mail-coach shone as if covered with diamonds. Brentford thought he heard a bell ring, faintly, as if tolling under the water. It all disintegrated into a haze along the edges where, he realized, the painting was still unfinished, sketched in crayon or pastel, bringing evanescence to the dream.

  Brentford plucked off the glasses and tried to dissipate it altogether. He stepped back, faintly nauseated. He was the one stuttering now.

  “It … it’s wonderful,” he admitted.

  “You are too kind,” de Couard answered, giving a shadow of a bow. “It is inspired by Rimbaud’s poem ‘Villes.’ ”

  Brentford took a breath and stepped in again under the anaglyphic painting to examine the canvas more closely, the city dissolving as he did. He saw it was actually transparent, multilayered, like a diorama, but also painstakingly dotted with nearly microscopic blue and red specks of paint, which, he supposed, gave the three-dimensional effect. Feeling he was being too inquisitive, he retreated.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” de Couard went on, and Brentford could not tell if he spoke out of a pathological modesty or because his real ambitions were still more megalomaniacal. “The subject dominates here, not the colours. The day will come,” he predicted, “when an abstract array of pure colours will dictate feelings as precisely as a man can dictate words to a typist.”

  “The relief effect is truly striking,” Brentford said. “How do you achieve it?”

  “Anaglyphs have made much progress recently. I have heard that an Englishman, Mr. Friese-Green, has even recently adapted the technique to those despicable moving pictures that will soon be all the rage among Beotians. It works according to the same principle of colour contrast that made pointillism so far ahead of its time. Blending the two seemed only logical.”

  “It must be a great amount of work.”

  “Not so much, actually, since I have had this machine,” he said, pointing at the black contraption Brentford had noticed.

  “Yes, I was intrigued by that …”

  “It was devised by the French poet and inventor Charles Cros, who was so unsuccessful with the phonograph, or as he called it, the paleophone. According to Cros’s own Principles of Cerebral Mechanism, his machine simulates the effects of colour perception on the nervous system. For me, it’s most helpful to systematize the use of colour contrasts.”

  “I’ve never heard of Cros. Such a machine must be rare, I would suppose.”

  “It is the only one that exists. I knew Cros’s work, but I would never have known that the machine had been built had I not happened to meet his brother. He is as strange as Charles. He happens to be Keeper of the Seals of the small kingdom of Auracania and Patagonia.”

  “I have never heard of that, either.”

  There was no stopping de Couard now.

  “It is quite famous here. About thirty ye
ars ago a certain De Tounens, a French adventurer from the Sixties, federated some Indian tribes to claim the independence of Patagonia. For a while he reigned over sixty square leagues of Chile as Orélie-Antoine the First, and even sent out a few ambassadors here and there. He was soon overthrown and expelled, though, and, after a few attempts at reclaiming his throne, came back to France to die. And when he was dying he remembered an old school friend, Achille Laviarde, and entrusted the crown to him. This Laviarde was really up to the task of kingship: he named a cabinet in exile that included Cros’s brother, and His Majesty is still enjoying a certain popular prestige, at least in the cafés of Montmartre, where the kingdom supports itself by selling titles and medals. It was among them that I met a man who had bought this machine from Cros’s brother and offered it to me as an advance payment for the painting you just saw. He had been, he explained to me, very impressed by the de Lanternois diorama.”

  Decidedly. So a man involved with a fanciful kingdom had commissioned this painting of a Northern city, with de Lanternois on his mind? Interesting, thought Brentford “So,” he inquired, “this painting is not for sale?”

  “As I told you, it’s a commission,” de Couard said, a bit suspiciously.

  “Was adding the snow-globe eye to the figure part of the deal?” Brentford asked.

  De Couard blushed violently and started to stammer again: “I … I … have a clause of con-con-fidentiality.”

  Brentford took this as a yes. What did the eye mean, then? Was it a test? A message? For a moment he imagined it rotating in the wax face, covering the city with snow at every turn. He dispelled the idea and found another one just underneath it.

  “Would you accept another commission?” he heard himself ask.

  IV

  The Tail of Saint Mark’s Lion

  It was a dream that woke Lilian. She was facing the wax figures of the Seven Sleepers when one of them, tall and bald, came to life, showed her the knob of his cane, and said, “Didn’t you recognize the tail of the Lion of Saint Mark?” She sat up. For the second day in a row, she found herself next to Morgane Roth, in her puffy, mellow white bed. Under a tangle of black hair, she could see Morgane’s sinuous back slithering under the covers. She felt like softly putting her palm on it, but leaning over her she said only, “Morgane, I have to go.”

  When she came back from the bathroom, the heavy-lidded Morgane was already sitting cross-legged on the bed, rolling a cigarette from the excellent Maison Dausse hashish resin that helped her, she claimed, “go into the astral.” Lilian took a few distracted puffs while collecting her scattered clothes. She didn’t exactly feel remorse, but the trick she had played on Thomas didn’t seem as funny as it had two nights ago. Not that she feared for him: he was a big slab of beef, after all, and could take care of himself. No, it was more a part of the overall feeling that for the past few days she had been oblivious of the desperate predicament of the Most Serene Seven. Her dream, which was still floating wavy and dim on the surface on her mind, had left her feeling, finally, compelled to do something.

  But arriving back at the hotel around four o’clock, she found no one there except the Colonel, and she certainly didn’t feel like talking to him. Going downstairs, she came across Gabriel, staggering back to his bed from God least of all knew where. This will have to do, she thought. Seeing that he would need a little rest before she could speak with him, she arranged to meet him for an early dinner—at seven at the Crémerie Darblay, on la rue de la Gaîté—an invitation at which he nodded absent-mindedly.

  At seven p.m. sharp she was waiting impatiently at Darblay among the actors and musicians from the nearby theatres, excited by her discovery and sorry not to have seen Brentford first. But already Gabriel was there, throwing open the door of the clean little milk bar just as the clock finished striking the hour.

  Lilian had to admit that she did not like him. Of course, that might be because of his friendship with Brentford. When she and Brentford had been lovers, she had always resented Gabriel’s presence as slightly parasitic and somewhat suspect, though she could not say exactly why, as Gabriel had never been anything but courteous to her. But she still remembered—with mortification and anger—the day when she had been out driving with Brentford in his Albany sled and she had openly criticized Gabriel … and Brentford had invited her, politely but firmly, to cease or get out of the sled.

  Maybe it was Gabriel himself who put her ill at ease. He was kind of a conundrum, and as a matter of fact, he intimidated her. He was slight of build and soft-spoken almost to the point of shyness, but wore faddish, highty-flighty clothes, and in conversation he was as sparkling as champagne and as bitter as absinthe. The upper half of his face was delicate and racy, with the ringed eyes of a tormented soul, but it ended up in a prognathous jaw and a shambles of jagged yellow teeth that would have got him classified as a potential criminal by all current standards of anthropometry. The sensitive poet that upper face promised finished below as a degenerate brute. Well, that was something you could call many men, including that ass Thomas, who had corpora cavernosa for brains. But it was Gabriel’s fate and, she realized, misfortune, to wear the badge of duality stamped right on his face. That said, Lilian felt inclined to give him credit for having protected those cute, crazy freak twins in a way no one else would have dared to do. The thought of the Twins, and the danger they were in, brought Lilian back to her dream. Gabriel, for all his flaws, was loyal to Brentford and the Dauphin-Doges. He would have to do.

  “Neat little place,” he said as he sat down.

  He was very tired, and mired in the unpleasant aftermath of the previous night’s ether binge—a cold, bitter taste lingered in his mouth, and his cranium felt as if it had been stuffed with old, dirty rags dipped in crude oil. He didn’t know what to say to Lilian. As a matter of fact, she intimidated him. The first time he had seen her was on stage with the Sandmovers, twenty years ago, and he couldn’t help having a crush on her then, with her long Rapunzel hair braided with electric garlands. The new, metamorphosed Lilian who had sprung up last year, bony, brave, and sarcastic, was still more forbidding, and though he had nothing but sympathy for her gnostic take on the suffragette question, he had never found the nerve to say so, probably because he surmised that she wasn’t interested in his opinion. She was, simply speaking, the kind of woman that did not belong with the girls in his lullaby league, and the fact that she had been Brentford’s sweetheart only put her further off limits.

  Lilian watched him eat garlic-buttered snails with a vague shiver of disgust.

  “How’s your head?” she asked, pointing to the patch on his temple.

  “How’s your back?” he asked in return. It was typical, she supposed, of his way of being polite.

  “It’s well taken care of,” she said, remembering the long massage from Morgane that had made her lose all sense of time and place—maybe not the memory that she needed at the moment.

  “And Brentford? How is he doing?” she asked, out of politeness, she thought, but as she mouthed the words, she found herself feeling genuine concern.

  Gabriel stared at her incredulously. “You know Brentford. It’s always hard to say. Duty goes before his personal feelings.”

  That is his problem, indeed, she thought, but did not say so. “I always wondered what made you so close,” she mused, as if to herself.

  Gabriel lifted his eyes from his plate, surprised again at her candour. “Let’s say I’m the Dionysos to his Apollo,” he answered, straight-faced, though Lilian assumed it was probably some kind of private joke he had with Brentford.

  “I thought you were more the Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote,” she quipped. “But have you gods made any advance on our homecoming?”

  “Nothing to uncork the champagne about, I’m afraid,” Gabriel answered. He was too tired to mention Markham and his link to a secret society working in the Arctic. It was too inconclusive to be worth the trouble.

  Lilian hesitated. She would hate to make a f
ool of herself. She said, “I may have something, although I’m not sure it deserves champagne.”

  Gabriel lifted his eyes slowly back to her. “Who likes champagne anyway? It’s for children and cronies.”

  “It’s a dream I had, actually. You remember Morgane, the medium we met at the Salpêtrière? Two nights ago, Thomas and I went to one of her séances. There was another man there. A shaved, square-jawed brute in a dark blue suit. Lyonel Owain Savnock is his name. And I had the faintest feeling I had seen him somewhere, but I could not place him at all. However, I noticed that he had a curious lion’s head for a cane knob. And last night I dreamed I was among wax figures, and I heard him asking me, “Didn’t you recognize the tail of the lion of Saint Mark?” And then I knew who he was. One of the Seven Sleepers.”

  Gabriel goggled. “The tail of the Lion of Saint Mark? I had totally forgotten it. One of the most dubious relics in Saint Mark’s Dream Cathedral in New Venice, even according to the rather expansive criteria of credibility in the Roman Catholic Church. My godfather, the archbishop, used to show it to me when I was a kid. You’re sure he was one of the Sleepers, though?”

  “I knew him from his wax effigy,” Lilian went on. “Give or take a few years, it was the same bald head, the same shaved eyebrow, the same boxer’s jawline.”

  “The one with the white sash, then. Lord Lodestone?”

  “Lord Lodestone, yes.”

  It was too extraordinary to believe. “He was never called Lord Savnock, was he?” Gabriel asked, though he knew the answer.

  “It could be an assumed identity. Or maybe his name in New Venice was the false one. Lord Lodestone. It did always seem too good to be true.”

  “You named your last band for it, though.”

  “I never made the connection, I must say,” said Lilian, with genuine surprise.

  “Now you’ve made it,” Gabriel answered with a wry smile. “But didn’t Thomas recognize him?”