Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  The Tarot Game is like those games of chess that medieval princes performed on the black and white marble chequered floors of their palaces, using men for pieces. They’d dress one team in black and one team in white; the knights would be mounted on suitably caparisoned chargers who sometimes unloaded a freight of dung as they stepped delicately sideways, to prove the game was real. The bishops would be properly mitred; the pawns, no doubt, dressed as common militia. The Count plays the Game of Tarot with a major arcana of fourteen of his retinue. If Madame Schreck adopts the emblems of the Papess to the manner born, the Fool remains himself, of course. They mask themselves and perform random dances to sounds not unlike screaming that the Count extorts from an electronic synthesiser. He reads the patterns the hallucinated pack make at random and so he invokes chaos. He has methodology. He is a scientist, in his way.

  Now, altogether I’ve been erased and substituted and played back so many times my memory is nothing but a palimpsest of possibilities and probabilities, there are some elements he cannot rid me of and these, interestingly enough, are not those of blood on an old man’s hair or his leather-clad minions closing in on me with mineral menace of eyes like stones; no. There is a hawk, drawing towards it in a still sky all the elements of which a complex world was once composed. And some man haunts the labyrinths inside my head and he was born without a mouth. And there are certain kinds of eyes, those eyes that, once seen, can never be forgotten.

  When I helplessly repeat, ‘I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk, I saw a hawk . . .’ or, ‘They say I have my mother’s eyes’, the Count half flays me alive. His anger is a nervous reflex, like the crazy courage of a coward in arms against his own weakness; that still, in my extremity, I should persist in remembering reminds him of the possibility, which is appalling to him, that there might be a remedy for chaos.

  I need hardly tell you that we, the women of the Scarlet House, live in absolute isolation, although the planned interpenetration of all our experience gives us a vague but pervasive sense of closeness to one another. When on a pillow wet with tears, I live over again the fatal moment of capture, it might be your dread I feel, or yours, or yours – a different kind of dread than mine which, nevertheless, I experience as though it were my own and so I draw nearer to you all.

  Yet our lives have contracted to the limitations imposed upon us by the grisly machinery of the Count’s harem. We are not ourselves; we are his playing cards, a shifting chorus to the Count, to Madame Schreck, to the Fool and to the others I do not know but only see on the nights he plays the Tarot Game, hieratic figures like apparitions from a forgotten theogony who rise and fall at the random dictates of whim. ‘God is random,’ says the Count who believes in the irresolute triumph of time over its own rectification, memory.

  We whisper among ourselves, of course, like toys might in the privacy of the toy cupboard after the little master is tucked up in bed for the night. Our whispers are soft, awed by the predicament in which we find ourselves. In the night-time darkness of our quarters, we cannot make out one another’s features. Our disembodied voices rustle like dead leaves and sometimes we stretch out our hands to touch one another, lightly, to lay a finger on one another’s mouths to assure ourselves a voice issues from that aperture. Like drifting cobwebs, the insubstantial caresses linger for a moment upon our skins. We manifest ourselves in a ghostly fashion for are we not already shadows? Phantoms of the dead, phantoms of the living, there is little to choose between two states of limbo.

  Nevertheless, I have certain precious mnemonics. A hawk; a man without a mouth; and eyes without a face. As long as I retain them in my memory, even if I forget any kind of context for them, then I can keep back something of myself from the Count’s dissolving philosophy. He may beat me as much as he pleases; I’m not afraid of encountering Death’s grisly skeleton in the gavotte of the arcana, and that’s something.

  (If you do find yourself partnering the skeleton, you vanish, of course.)

  The Fool never says a word but only screeches and babbles; he’s growing perfect, he’s quite forgotten how to speak. When the Count beats me and I scream, he says: ‘Now you’re talking! Who needs words?’

  We are his harem and also his finishing school. The curriculum is divided into three parts. First, we learn how to forget; second, we forget how to speak; third, we cease to exist.

  There are no mirrors in the Scarlet House because mirrors propagate souls. A mirror shows you who you are and not one single one of us poor girls has the slightest notion of what that might have been. Yet, when the Count beats us, we feel pain and so we know we are still living, not yet quite annihilated, and the anguish that overcomes me when I remember I am no longer myself is quite real and persists all the time.

  Yet the fugue of our common memory is also a kind of consolation. Though I am not myself, sometimes, when we are forced to play at the Tarot Game, I and the rest of the minor arcana, I sense I may be, in some as yet formless and incoherent way, almost a legion of selves. When we lie in our sleeping quarters and touch one another to confirm that the ripped envelopes of our bodies are still there, even if the contents have all been misdirected, it is almost as though my body had been transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples – no point, any longer, in trying to ascertain the original from my bewilderment. The more the Count scrambles the tapes, the more the harem becomes one single woman with a multiplicity of hands and eyes and no name, no past, no future – first, a being in a void; and, soon, a void itself.

  Chaos is like a vat of acid. Everything disintegrates.

  Nevertheless, I cling to my mnemonics like a drowning man to a spar. As time passes and wears me away, I meditate upon them more and more. I am beginning to reconcile myself completely to the fact that they may not contain any element at all of real memory. It was hard to bear, at first, but soon I understood how the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face, are all the residue of the world I still carry with me that does not elude me and, if they are not precisely memories, then they may be, in some sense, like those odds and ends that all refugees carry with them, from which they refuse to be parted, although they’re quite insignificant – a spoon with a bent handle, say; or a tram ticket issued by a city that no longer exists. Small items, meaningless in themselves, and yet keys to an entire system of meanings, if only I can remember . . .

  The hawk, now. If I think about the hawk long enough, I remember that I do not remember it. That’s a painful beginning; but one must begin somewhere. There was a sky, certainly; there’s plenty of sky outside the Scarlet House, though we see none of it inside. Sky. Now, the hawk – down! he comes, like a butcher’s cleaver thwacking through meat. The hawk drops on the plump, careless bunny romping through the clover and young grass; the hawk’s eye, like a telescopic lens, zooms in on me as I lie in the sun with the smell of fresh grass in my clothes. Yes. I remember the green scent of a summer’s day, not unlike the spicy odour of crushed geranium leaves. (Concentrate of fleshly impressions, any fleshly impression; reef it in from the past, from the time before my time in the Scarlet House. Scent of grass, of geraniums, of slivered lemons. All these scents bring back the world.)

  As I lie in the fresh grass I have reconstructed out of memory, I begin to perceive some element of paranoia in the image of the hawk. For I did not know that I was watched. I was ignorant of my clawed, feathered fate. And so I will be seized by force. Capture; and rape, from the Latin, rapere, to seize by force . . . that’s a curious pedantic bunny to hunt out from the back alleys of memory. I must have studied Latin, once, though for what purpose I can’t imagine. So the capture and the rape elide. Man is an animal who insists on making patterns, says the Count contemptuously; all the world you think so highly of is nothing but pretty floral wallpaper pasted up over chaos.

  The Count prepares chaos in his crucible. When he plays his Tarot Game, he makes an institution out of chaos. He signs himself, yours entropically, with the quill of a
hawk dipped in the blood of ruptured virginities.

  The hawk drops. They throw me down on the silk birds of the antique Persian carpet and rape me. And, to my amazement, a pattern emerges, although it is stylised as those woven birds I may once have walked on. For the hawk is nothing more and nothing less than the memory of my capture, preserved as an image, or an icon.

  I cannot tell you with what inexpressible relief I greeted the concretisation, not of a memory, but of an inter-connection that made some sense in my plight to me. It was as if I’d gone to the confused jumble of limbs and hands and eyes scattered promiscuously on the floor of the harem and unerringly been able to pick out my own hand, screw it back on to my wrist and feel the blood flow back into it. Or pull out my mother’s eyes from the mess, wipe them carefully on my sleeve and slip them back into my own eye sockets, where they belong.

  Now, these are my mother’s eyes that jumped out of the old photograph into my head; and there are also the eyes of the mute coachman that were full so full of pity for me that my heart stopped momentarily, out of fear for my own predicament. Those eyes, too, are rimmed with endless black lashes, they’ve been put in with a sooty finger. They move me as only the mute language of the eye can do and I do not know if, indeed, they are my own eyes, because there are no mirrors here, or if they are the eyes of somebody I loved, once, before they dissolved in my memory. However, I must slip these eyes back into some head or other; any head will do, to make sense of those eyes which will continue to speak even if the mouth is sealed up.

  Those eyes hold all the speech which will be denied to me when forgetting forges my lips together and I cannot speak at all, like the mute coachman, like the mute orderly whose eyes had been excised and replaced with those of a beast of prey. Or else with stones, like the bikers, whose mouths were hidden by their leather hoods so you could not tell whether they had mouths or no.

  And so I established the declension of my undoing, from capture to annihilation: the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face. After that will come nothing. I shall be perfectly silent.

  When I perceived I’d organised these disparate elements into a grid, or system of connections, I felt for the first time I entered the obscure portals of the Scarlet House, a flood of joy. I examined the abused flesh of my breasts and belly and felt, not sorrow I’d been so mauled, but anger the Count had mistreated me; and what if it’s only that the puppet turns against the puppet-master: Isn’t the puppet-master dependent on the submission of his dolls for his authority? Can’t I, in the systematic randomness of my connections, control the Game?

  The ghost reassembles the events that rendered it into non-being. As it does so, hourly it grows more substantial.

  And where there’s no hope, there’s no fear, either. Not even fear of Madame Schreck, through whose hole we must all crawl to extinction, one day; unless it is the way to freedom.

  This morning, the Count busily erased all the tapes of my Viennese apocalypse; I am glad of it, it was a vile memory and I am heartily sorry for whoever it was among my companions to whom it belonged. He tittered with his habitual beastly glee when at last he’d rid me of the compulsion, that nervous, that hiccuping reiteration; ‘They say I have my mother’s eyes.’ But that was because he does not know I no longer need to remember it, whether it were true or no; I know all that I need to know to enable me to endure the time of the torturers and all its second-hand furniture of fear – the magic robes, the book of pretend-spells, the silence of the fool, the extinction of the whore.

  This world’s a vile oubliette. Yet in its refuse I will find the key to free me.

  The Snow Pavilion

  The motor stalled in the middle of a snowy landscape, lodged in a rut, wouldn’t budge an inch. How I swore! I’d planned to be snug in front of a roaring fire, by now, a single malt on the mahogany wine-table (a connoisseur’s piece) beside me, the five courses of Melissa’s dinner savourously aromatising the kitchen; to complete the décor, a labrador retriever’s head laid on my knee as trustingly as if I were indeed a country gentleman and lolled by rights among the chintz. After dinner, before I read our customary pre-coital poetry aloud to her, my elegant and accomplished mistress, also a connoisseur’s piece, might play the piano for her part-time pasha while I sipped black, acrid coffee from her precious little cups.

  Melissa was rich, beautiful and rather older than I. The servants slipped me looks of sly complicity; no matter how carefully I rumpled my sheets, they knew when a bed hadn’t been slept in. The master of the house had a pied-à-terre in London when the House was sitting and the House was sitting tight. I’d met him only once, at the same dinner party where I’d met her – he’d been off-hand with me, gruff. I was young and handsome and full of promise; my relations with husbands rarely prospered. Wives were quite another matter. Women, as Mayakovosky justly opined, are very partial to poets.

  And now her glamorous motor car had broken down in the snow. I’d borrowed it for a trip to Oxford, ostensibly to buy books, utilising, with my instinctual cunning, the weather as an excuse. Last night, the old woman had been shaking her mattress with a vengeance – such snow! When I woke up the bedroom was full of luminous snow light, catching in the coils of Melissa’s honey-coloured hair, and I’d experienced, once again, but, this time, almost uncontrollably, the sense of claustrophobia that sometimes afflicted me when I was with her.

  I’d said, let’s read some snowy poetry together, after dinner tonight, Melissa, a tribute of white verses to the iconography of the weather. Any excuse, no matter how far fetched, to get her out of the house – too much luxury on an empty stomach, that was the trouble. Always the same eyes too big for his belly, as grandma used to say; grandma spotted the trait when this little fellow lisped and toddled and pissed the bed before he knew what luxury was, even. Cultural indigestion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit. How can I get out of here, away from her subtly flawed antique mirrors, her French perfume decanted into eighteenth-century crystal bottles, her inscrutably smirking ancestresses in their gilt, oval frames? And her dolls, worst of all, her blasted dolls.

  Those dolls that had never have been played with, her fine collection of antique women, part of the apparatus of Melissa’s charm, her piquant originality that lay well on the safe side of quaint. A dozen or so of the finest lived in her bedroom in a glass-fronted, satinwood cabinet lavishly equipped with such toyland artefacts and miniature sofas and teeny-tiny grand pianos. They had heads made of moulded porcelain, each dimple and bee-stung underlip sculpted with loving care. Their wigs and over-lifelike eyelashes were made of real hair. She told me their eyes had been manufactured by the same craftsman in glass who made those terribly precious paperweights filled with magic snowstorms. Whenever I woke up in Melissa’s bed, the first thing I saw were a dozen pairs of shining eyes that seemed to gleam wetly, as if in lacrimonious accusation of my presence there, for the dolls, like Melissa, were perfect ladies and I, in my upwardly social mobile nakedness – a nakedness that was, indeed, the essential battledress for such storm-troopers as I! – patently no gentleman.

  After three days of that kind of style, I badly needed to sit in a public bar, drink coarse pints of bitter, swap double entendres with the barmaid; but I could hardly tell milady that. Instead, I must use my vocation to justify my day off. Lend me the car, Melissa, so that I can drive to Oxford and buy a book of snowy verses, since there’s no such book in the house. And I’d made my purchase and managed to fit in my bread, cheese and badinage as well. A good day. Then, almost home again and here I was, stuck fast.

  The fields were all brim-full of snow and the dark sky of late afternoon already swollen and discoloured with the next fall. Flocks of crows wheeled endlessly upon the invisible carousels of the upper air, occasionally emitting a rusty caw. A glance beneath the bonnet showed me only that I did not know what was wrong and must get out to trudge along a lane where the mauve shadows told me snow and the night would arrive together. My breath smoke
d. I wound Melissa’s husband’s muffler round my neck and dug my fists into his sheepskin pockets; his borrowed coat kept me snug and warm although the cold made the nerves in my forehead hum with a thin, high sound like that of the wind in telephone wires.

  The leafless trees, the hillside quilted by intersections of dry-stone walling – all had been subdued to monochrome by the severity of last night’s blizzard. Snow clogged every sound but that of the ironic punctuation of the crows. No sign of another presence; the pastoral cows were all locked up in the steaming byre, Colin Clout and Hobbinol sucked their pipes by the fireside in pastoral domesticity. Who would be outside, today, when he could be warm and dry, inside.

  Too white. It is too white, out. Silence and whiteness at such a pitch of twinned intensity you know what it must be like to live in a country where snow is not a charming, since infrequent, visitor that puts its cold garlands on the trees so prettily we think they are playing at blossoming. (What an aptly fragile simile, with its Botticellian nuance. I congratulated myself.) No. Today is as cold as the killing cold of the perpetually white countries; today’s atrocious candour is that of those white freckles that are the stigmata of frostbite.

  My sensibility, the exquisite sensibility of a minor poet, tingled and crisped at the sight of so much whiteness.

  I was certain that soon I’d come to a village where I could telephone Melissa; then she would send the village taxi for me. But the snow-fields now glimmered spectrally in an ever-thickening light and still there was no sign of life about me in the whole, white world but for the helmeted crows creaking down towards their nests.

  Then I came to a pair of wrought-iron gates standing open on a drive. There must be some mansion or other at the end of the drive that would offer me shelter and, if they were half as rich as they ought to be, to live in such style, then they would certainly know Melissa and might even have me driven back to her by their own chauffeur in a warm car that would smell deliciously of new leather. I was sure they must be rich, the country side was lousy with the rich; hadn’t I flattened a brace of pheasants on my way to Oxford? Encouraged, I turned in between the gate-posts, on which snarled iron gryphons sporting circumcision caps of snow.