The Museum of Love

by Steve Weiner

  ‘Une p’tite lumière qui brille au bord de la nuit,’ he said, looking through the lilacs. ‘A flicker of light shining on the edge of night.’

  ‘Oui, cé belle.’

  ‘Un bec, a noirceur, cé tellement excitant,’ he said, turning to me in the shadows. ‘A kiss, in the dark, it’s very exciting …’

  ‘Etienne,’ I interrupted. ‘I had an episode – ’

  ‘A bad one?’

  ‘In Idaho. A crime – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I may have – killed – somebody – ’

  Etienne kissed me.

  ‘Poor, sweet Jean. Ch’t’é cru,’ he said. ‘I believed in you.’

  ‘I was hammered about.’

  We went out into the bayou where the mirlitons grew. We stayed out in the rain squalls, equally in the warm red twilight. Light came from the swamps and followed us down the road. The tide became luminescent, rolled under the reeds.

  I became worried.

  ‘See?’ I said. ‘Wilted celery.’

  ‘Not even a salute,’ Etienne said.

  ‘Etienne. It’s serious.’

  ‘You should have been the Jesuit!’ he laughed.

  Now I was really depressed.

  ‘Etienne,’ I whispered. ‘I’m limp.’

  ‘A limp imp.’

  His baritone laugh boomed over the Calcasieu.

  ‘For this I came to Bunco!’

  Etienne suddenly spat and turned around three times clapping his hands for grief.

  ‘When I think of the pain!’ he cried. ‘Loving you!’

  Bunco was invaded by les hurlants. Choctaw corpses, wearing blue, opened their mouths and hissed. They wore heifer hooves. A Catholic church was vandalized. They pissed in the soup kitchen, humped the pews. They came out when the twilights rolled in. We carried pistols because of les hurlants.

  Artichokes grew woody. It thundered heavily on Sunday.

  ‘Somebody will die,’ Etienne whispered, and crossed himself.

  My mother told me her idea.

  ‘We make a Catholic city of Bunco,’ she said. ‘Nurse the sick. An almshouse for women, you see, rich as Cluny. Cleanse each other with aloes. We send bons garçons through Louisiana.’

  ‘I have my idea.’

  ‘Yes?’

  I drummed my fingers excitedly.

  ‘I will go to Haiti. I will set up a museum of the Verhaerens.’

  She clapped her hands excitedly.

  ‘At last! Jean-Michel formulates a plan!’

  In fact, we wrote right away to the Sisters of Charity in Haiti, because my mother had a cousin in Gonaives.

  ‘Oh, Mama! We will drink paiwori and wear bells in our lips!’

  She took morphine at night, capsules in grey tubes that she dissolved in water. In the morning she woke dreamily, sliding around the apartment. She watched the grey dawn breaking through the mirage of Bunco. She dreamed the Verhaerens rose from the sea, silver streams pouring from their wounds.

  ‘Morphine,’ she slurred. ‘God’s aperitif.’

  Progeria accelerated. Her flesh dropped off and fell on the floor. I found scraps of yellow skin, whole tendons, a broken tooth.

  ‘Mama! Your ligaments!’

  Finally her leg fell off. I worked the bone back in with a ballpeen hammer, two screws, and varnished the joint.

  I stepped back.

  ‘Woman,’ I said. ‘Reassembled.’

  It came time. After all the consultations, operations and procedures, there just wasn’t much left. I drove her to the Gulf. Clouds tore over palm fronds shivering. One had to go forward by smell. There had been a strong gale last night and the water heaved and flashed. The sun was green over the Gulf of Mexico. The clouds choked a lighthouse. I put my arm in hers.

  ‘Lâche-moé,’ she said.

  ‘I’d like to help, Mama.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  I strapped her down in her wheelchair. We went down wood stairs and came out into flashing, sodden cane. Big storm clouds came up the Caribbean. I tucked a plaid blanket around her slumped shoulders, a bonnet over her rubbery ears.

  ‘LACHE-MOÉ!’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said.

  I cupped my hands lighting a cigarette. She stepped over wet sands, heavy as a manatee. Red kelp curled at her legs. The skies grew complicated. A million waterfowl suddenly darkened the sun. Her knee floated away.

  ‘Perhaps you could fetch it for me,’ she asked.

  ‘I’m getting it. See?’

  I went far out but she went farther. When I looked up she was beyond the lighthouse.

  ‘Mama – forgiv – ’

  Ether bubbled up through the boiling ocean. Lavender mist circled her singing over white dolphins jumping out of black waves. Bleeding hearts flared in the palms. She twirled into a black hole in the clouds and disappeared. I heard:

  Yvonne Krems, thou art blessed.

  At least, that’s what I told Etienne Bastide.

  ‘Jean. Your mother died on the operating table at Lake Charles Hospital.’

  ‘The surgeons butchered her.’

  ‘You were there,’ he said. ‘With me.’

  ‘I’m telling you what I saw. I’m telling you what I heard.’

  ‘Frankly, this casts doubt on everything.’

  I worked the Verhaeren museum.

  The smells of glue, wire, cotton and paints filled the apartment. I repaginated scrapbooks. I painted Jack Verhaeren, Gruel, Barrault, Father Przybilski, Swallowfield prison, St Bonaventure, Erland Szegy and his shotgun. A fierce wind came through. Exhibits flew out the window.

  ‘Jean,’ Etienne asked. ‘This museum. Is it worth it?’

  ‘Anything is, if you believe in it.’

  ‘Jean, you didn’t even come to the funeral.’

  I carried the museum to the train station. Etienne double-stepped to keep up. Exhibits tumbled into the gutter.

  ‘Jean – Cé-tu bye-bye pour toujours?’ he asked. ‘Is this – goodbye for ever –?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not even – an embrace – ?’

  ‘In the scheme of things,’ I said, ‘what is an embrace?’

  I went south, he went north. It was the last I saw of Etienne Bastide. It was the last anybody saw of Etienne Bastide.

  Eighteen

  I was a prison guard.

  I worked in Gonaïves, in the prison between the cemetery and the cathedral. I invented an oubliette and a machine that fed prisoners. I was a separatiste, and sent part of my salary to Quebec. I ate no meat on Friday, in the old style.

  My house had French iron grilles on a balcony. The floorboards were maroon, sun-spotted, brightly varnished. I could see from Cap-a-Foux to St Marc. I took a boy, Renè Haraucourt. He was an orphan and used to live on rue Cardinal, in the shadow of my prison. Orchids grew in from our Guatemalan ceramics. Behind our white stucco house were black cobblestone stairs leading uphill.

  I built the Verhaeren museum. I put the portrait of Catherine Labouré on red velvet. Ste Dymphna’s card, all the cards of the saints, were spread in fans. My father’s ammunition belt hung on a peg, his red accordion from a strap on a nail. I built a table of marble and laid out Ignace’s baptismal gown, stained amber. Postcards from St Lazare lined the wall. Pippi-on-wheels stood by green curtains that never moved.

  My living room contained pig’s blood in pewter, gris-gris dust, ceramics from New Orleans: Death poured beer for Satan, a male bride rode a black horse. A wooden German knight killed a dragon behind a stairwell. On the door was my votive painting of St Michael Archangel, who saved me from being run over on the Burley road. I had drawings of Black Hawk and Leith Anderson. I had a bird that whistled, a bird that sang.

  I had everything.

  I started a museum of my generation, but it depressed me and I threw it away.

  I dressed Renè like Antoinette Hartmann. Roger Vaucaire, too, and Colonel Canale, Reynolds Kayran, and Kurt Flood, all those who had been kind or cruel.

&
nbsp; I made René massage my deformed foot.

  ‘Such pain!’ I yelled.

  ‘Only I know where you hurt,’ he said.

  ‘You do – oh – God – that hurt – felt wonderful!’

  I kept a coffin under the bed.

  I played my father’s red accordion. René danced a bastard flamenco. I decided to blend the accordion with rock and roll and become an international sensation, but I got tired and put the accordion on the bed. René brought the mail. Danny Auban sent me a newspaper clipping. Etienne Bastide had hanged himself in Windsor, Ontario.

  ‘Who was Etienne Bastide?’ René asked.

  ‘Nobody.’

  René regarded me suspiciously, big eyes, furrowed dark forehead, hair bristled back.

  ‘A la ti monde malhonnête,’ René said. ‘– ti Jean–là:’

  ‘Who? Me?’

  ‘Yes. My little dishonest, my dear, Jean.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Mo’ che’,’ René asked. ‘My dear friend. Why with you, this feeling, like – death – ?’

  I signed my death certificate.

  Rain drenched the wildly overgrown gardens. Decayed French buildings sagged. Cemeteries ran with water and the corrugated roofs of the market rattled. One bought oranges down there, tobacco, donkeys, allspice, red peppers on strings, chicory, apricots, peaches in wooden boxes, spinning metal toys and hair straightener.

  ‘Remember the day we met?’ René asked. ‘In the market?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You interviewed me right there on that bench.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And now. Everything is so – difficult – isn’t it?’

  I wore a knife because of all our fights.

  René and I walked past the beggars outside the museum to the marina. We smoked cheroots and watched wet sailboats: La Bataille, Mon Pouvoir, L’Enfance Perdu. Sun came suddenly onto the bright cathedral. A square-faced man jumped from the alley. His black tongue pointed at me.

  ‘Śmierć! ’ he yelled.

  I hurried René onward.

  ‘Who was that?’ René asked.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  We walked and smoked. Gradually our hopes revived. We decided to move to Venezuela. Tourists from America came off the boats in white slacks and striped green designer shirts. The ingénues never looked at us.

  ‘We stink of the mattress,’ I said.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘I’m young,’ René said. ‘They like the way I smell.’

  René slapped his thigh and laughed.

  ‘Crazy Monsieur Verhaeren!’

  We went to the Queen of the Night night club.

  ‘What does śmierć mean?’ René asked. ‘It’s Polish, isn’t it?’

  ‘Śmierć means death.’

  Lights came on in the marina. Boats moved in black swells. Inside the night club, red lights circled a caged monkey on the dance floor. Gonaïves’s black women danced.

  ‘In Polish,’ I added smugly, ‘death is feminine.’

  René insisted we go out on to the balcony. There must have been a party last night because glass beads hung over the balcony rails and on the palm trees. I snapped my fingers. A Cuban girl took our order. René winked at her.

  ‘Stop it, René.’

  ‘I can smile at a girl.’

  ‘Not when I’m paying.’

  There was a fiestecita far away on a different island. Bonfires rose in a different harbour. There was a competition of bands. Silhouettes danced. I looked inside. The caged monkey beat against his bars. I looked up past the insect-blotted light. There was a heavy rain coming.

  ‘Who said that?’ René said suddenly, looking around.

  ‘Nobody said anything.’

  ‘No? I thought … somebody was listening … women …’

  René leaned forward, nursing his drink.

  ‘Monsieur Verhaeren,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Some day – maybe tonight – something extraordinary will happen and my soul will be revealed to me.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  Inside the nightclub Ignace rode his tricycle around the monkey and Erland Szegy winked at me, his forefinger sliding across his throat. René dropped my hand. He watched the Cuban girl. Birds settled in the trees. The sea mist turned black.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Gonaïves, Monsieur Verhaeren.’

  I wrote I was cheated in spit on the table.

  ‘Maybe if we’d been able to resupply Dienbienphu,’ I said.

  ‘You’re drifting.’

  ‘Or if crème de menthe hadn’t tasted so sweet.’

  ‘Drifting.’

  Renè faded into the black haze. Everything was slipping away.

  ‘Maybe if Antoinette Hartmann had loved me.’

  ‘You?’ René laughed.

  René brought his swizzlestick to a moth. The moth stiffened, then fell apart, all over the table.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘No oxygen.’

  Caribbean breezes suddenly separated the palm fronds. Red geraniums trembled. The monkey escaped from its cage and committed obscenities. Gonaïves’s black women laughed and came out behind me on to the balcony. Palm fronds shivered, birds flew away, red geraniums, beads, everything moved in the shadows of négritude.

  Author’s Notes

  Steve Wiener was born in 1947 in Wisconsin. He studied writing at the University of California and went on to study film animation. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife. The Museum of Love is his first novel.

  First published 1993

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1993 by Steve Weiner

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 4088 2857 1

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