Darkscapes

by Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  It often came about at that time that I slept at the workshop, where a bed was made up for me. Far from reproaching me for this distance, of the real cause of which she knew nothing, Margaret said to me, her eyes lowered, that she felt quite happy to sleep alone with her babies, her thoughts upon God.

  I Haunt Mme Cholmondeley

  I enter Mme C at the place where I insert her enamel eyes; often I plunge from there into her oesophagus and feel my way down to her intestines beneath the satin of her stomach-muscles. Her husband, an ardent lover, places his hands there and pours out in a low voice amorous protestations that make my own entrails quiver.

  Funeral of Mme Cooper, my Wife’s Mother

  My mother-in-law dies of a stroke seven months after the arrival into the world of our children. It is in going to pay her a visit with one of the twins that Margaret and I find her unconscious under the window of her sitting room, which she had been opening or shutting, I don’t know which, when her seizure occurred. Margaret sits on the ottoman there stunned; her tears flowing over the child she holds in her arms. Mme Cooper is not yet dead; her large eyes are open and fixed on the ceiling, and a rattle comes from her throat. Am I to leave the unhappy Margaret alone with her dying mother in order to go and look for a doctor? The Cooper woman is glad to stretch herself out in my arms while her distracted daughter prays for the salvation of her soul. Innocence, innocence!

  ‘Her last breath’, she tells me that evening ‘floated out in the sitting room; don’t you think my poor prayers have escorted her up to heaven?’

  And I, clasping in my arms the remains of the sinful woman —O Margaret Cooper, ungodly mother of my beloved Margaret—loved, even if badly, even if betrayed in spirit day after day with the most ridiculous fantasies! There comes to me in the funeral Mass an ecstasy I had not anticipated. While an idiot of a priest who knows nothing of the old witch muddles through his sermon I dive for the first time in three days (the memory of Mme Cooper’s burning gaze on the brink of death held me back all that while) into Mme C with even more abandon that usual. So much so that, when her child lays its head on its mother’s breast, and murmurs to her with some story or other about a parrot that doesn’t want to return to its cage, I have the feeling that I am the kind, shadowy soul of Mme C; the hand that strokes the face of the weeping infant is mine. Note this, I ask you: I dissolve into Mme C without her having the least consciousness of this; I am an invisible guest who never speaks to her, never weighs her down. Do you know what it is to hear from beneath the skin a child’s voice and that, apprehensive and serious, of her mother?

  Margaret, kneeling in the pew, her veil drawn over her chin, is not weeping but pallid, praying for the impossible salvation of her mother. Mme Boissonneau, next to her, puts her arm round her neck. Margaret, I know, is once more filled with countless angels. I see them shining under the skin of her forehead and her cheeks. The same evening as she takes off one by one the simple garments that show her mourning, I see them again, distending her breasts and her belly. I thrust in to meet them, not with the joy I obtain from my union with the darkness in Mme C, but with pleasure all the same. I drown these tiny cherubim in my semen.

  More Reflections. The Eye

  On my return from the war I learnt my trade for three years under M Boissonneau, I measured eyes, copied them, painted them in the finest detail to order—I am, I know, a skilful craftsman—I managed to make them good likenesses; better still, I made them seem to see. I was able, even though I am no artist, to find a means of giving the enamel a sparkle, a brightness, in short, an illusion of living flesh. If I place one of these eyes in the hollow of my palm you may see me filled with demonic joy. Many times I have imagined myself caressing Margaret and Mme C, both lying on the same double bed, with my hands so filled. I seem to remember that when I was a child in Corsica, we ate pigs’ eyes cooked, and the first one-eyed man I saw was one whose eye had been torn out by an eagle owl. On battlefields I have seen many eyes blinded. When Margaret is asleep I sometimes put my mouth over one of her eyelids and breathe lightly in. I have no yearning to have within me an eye belonging to this poor child, to drown it in black bile and absinthe, no, it is I who would like to visit her with my roving globe, in the way in which I have for several months chosen to make my home within Mme C.

  Conception of the Child Antoinette

  As soon as her mother has been buried my foolish Margaret is seized with pointless guilt, and refuses herself to me night after night. This causes me no suffering, sated as I am by my sojourns in Mme C. One Sunday, however, when with Margaret we go walking at Poissy and, hands folded over her stomach, she falls asleep under a tree, I have an urge to take her there and then. I am checked by the presence of Mme Boissonneau, detestably kind and maternal, who holds against her chest our child Padoue, now aged a year and two months: a double shield of flesh, I say to myself, guardians and protectors of my silly wife. She sleeps, eyes shut and mouth open.

  And why am I so much at my ease in Mme C when I hear, evening and morning, the amorous compliments her husband lavishes upon her, when I feel the caresses of the husband who smoothly guides his wife’s hand, and still more the stiff male member which works in Mme C, dry, rapid, and evoking joy, sighs, laughter? The body of my wife is opaque to my gaze. She undresses without any real awareness of my love. The evening following that walk, however, when I had desired my wife as she lay on the ground, bits of grass on her face, I wait till she is asleep and am careful not to immerse myself in Mme C. This is how I take Margaret. Blindfolding her once she is asleep, and making a gag out of one of my ties, I come into her with great violence; I teach the angel a lesson, so to speak. The pain wakes her; she would like to cry out, but she cannot. I draw back after having ejaculated, and bite my hands with shame, my hands that pretend they see, while she wails and tries to free herself from her bonds. She is unable to. She raises herself, she falls and stays on the floor, sobbing away. As for me, a felicitous black wave has already carried me to my home within Mme C. She is, I can tell, asleep; some day I shall see what she dreams.

  Benefits of Absinthe

  One afternoon as I leave the workshop I see my wife coming out of a church in the Rue Vivienne together with a priest I do not know. She is again big with child, he is tall and thin, and yet the particular position of the sun in the sky gives them shortened shadows, dark and gleaming. Maggie is wearing a red dress which came to her, I think, from her mother. The priest has taken her arm and is speaking in her ear. I go to the café, for I find in absinthe a means of subsiding more rapidly into the intimate depths of Mme C, though this route makes me proceed by deceptive byways. Am I right to drink when at every moment there is accessible to me the strangest country in the world? Once at the Demi-Coq, which is in the Rue de Courcelles, I thought I saw, projected on the cortex of Mme C’s brain, images of her life before she went blind.

  Has my wife, I asked myself later, revealed to this Jesuit the brutalities I have inflicted upon her—and not just once, but six or seven times, for her feebleness fills me with rage? At last, one morning at breakfast, she takes a knife and slashes her palm without a tremor.

  ‘Why are you doing that, my poor child?’

  ‘I did not think,’ she replied, strangely sarcastic, ‘that you could feel any emotion at seeing me suffer.’

  As a result of that I left her in peace. She is the most indecipherable person. She spends her days with our twins and goes to Vespers with Mme Boissonneau, whom she looks upon as her mother. Every evening she lays out the cards to tell her fortune, and she reads nothing but the Bible and edifying novels lent to her by her great friend. The maid told me one day that as soon as my back was turned she would sing.

  Our Vows Renewed

  Some days after the birth of our Antoinette (oh, I know she is mine, in spite of the priests and a dream I have had twice of the Cooper woman sitting on the edge of our bed, her thighs spotted with blood, casting insolent glances at me: ‘Wretch! She will be every man’s prey
’) I have the agonising happiness to see Mme C again at the workshop, accompanied by a child of twelve or thirteen who must have been one of her daughters. Without her knowing, I renew our vows. Immediately afterwards I have to top-up with absinthe . . . yes . . . the joy that came over me on seeing her once more, perhaps for the last time, for, she told me, they are all leaving for the Antilles where her husband wants to develop his property. At my wife’s bedside I must confess I have paid less attention to the confidences of Mme C’s husband, taking refuge within her in order to sleep, if you will, and find tranquillity. Maggie does not recover quickly from this latest confinement. Our maid busies herself with the twins and Mme Boissonneau visits them frequently.

  Here I am, lying on the sofa in our sitting room, as I muse about the coming of Mme C to our workshop, and am borne up by a yellow sea which she will be crossing in a few weeks on the way to a new world from which I shall be separated only by the thickness of her skin and muscle. Tropical birds, monkeys, snakes, I shall hear you as well as she does. Look at me, about to fly beneath the huge dome of her soul, now grown colossal. I do not know too well where she is or what she is thinking, yet I am able to make this reflection; that she is asleep and I am revelling in her dream. I am your microscopic lover, Angela; your sweet parasite, the calm eye in your depths.

  Crossing

  It is the day that the Cholmondeleys embark for Fort de France, on a ship the name of which I do not know, though from the workshop, while examining the socket of a little girl who had lost her eye through a dog’s biting off her cheek, I sense the bustle of their departure. M Boissonneau over lunch puts to me his proposal. His fortune being made he wishes, he says, to retire to the country and find for his daughters husbands that are not ocularists.

  ‘In fifteen or twenty years, my friend, when your daughters are of an age to leave the nest, you will have the same desire.’

  This news, which ought to have delighted me, is unwelcome and upsetting. Leaving the workshop late I find it necessary to go to the Demi-Coq to drink, or to drown myself, I don’t know which, in several glasses of absinthe. The twins with their little legs are dancing on my head. Light as they are, while they are there I cannot enter into Mme C, a new and terrible situation. In my fancy I catch my children by their collars and throw them into the sea. Returning to the Rue Brey, I am so dazed by these unexpected developments that I pass in front of Number 11, where we live, without noticing: when I reach the end of the road I am amazed at not having found our door. I retrace my steps with my mind a blank as far as the Arc de Triomphe, at the time when the sun is setting, red and shimmering. In the end, I have to re-enter my gloomy dwelling. Margaret has still not risen from her bed; it is our German maid and sometimes Mme Boissonneau that take care of our children. I sleep in the sitting room; not only does my presence, I think, reawaken in Margaret a disgust which in her exhausted state she no longer troubles to conceal from me, but I feel that when I sleep beside her I breathe in the odour of her suffering all the way to my refuge. The door is black and tight shut, and the two children, their forms pale and thin, guard it against anyone who knocks.

  ‘The way in,’ they say, ‘is closed.’

  There remains one resource, a sombre one: the eyes of Mme C, which I hurl in their faces. I have them, you understand, kept safe in a box, those eyes that she wore, that she washed with her tears, eyes that were my sweet path into her.

  ‘The way in,’ they repeat, ‘is closed.’ Their aspect is terrifying; they gather up the eyes, they swallow them, they laugh.

  On my knees at the door of their mother’s bedroom I hear uttered in her sleep words of which I do not grasp the meaning. All, I think, are turned away from me; all close their souls to me. Mme C herself, I fear, has found me out and shuns me. Had I then attained to bliss only to see myself immediately separated from it and condemned to irremediable solitude? Our last-born child, who sleeps with the maid, starts to weep, and I do the same at the door against which I should like to dash out my brains. My two beloveds have left me, each on her own little skiff, Angela sailing bright oceans I shall never see, Margaret on her river of pus and ill humour. The twins are there, one at the prow, one at the stern. Whenever I approach they strike at me with their oars. The old Cooper woman in red velvet is on board too:

  ‘Do you remember,’ she asks me, ‘the day I died?’

  With her plump hand she strokes her daughter’s face.

  ‘Come here, Margaret, just come here, and for one last time let me look in you for that which I have never found.’

  At last, here I am on board. The demons, baffled, cast crooked looks at me, recognising my power: I hold in my hands the eyes from which she will be able to hide nothing.

  Confession

  I declare that on the morning of Sunday the 29th of August 1887 in our flat on the Rue Brey I killed my wife Margaret née Cooper daughter of another Margaret Cooper a prostitute and an unknown father my son Padoue and my daughter Marie my wife with a pistol shot in the head and a pistol shot in the stomach namely where there is nothing but blackness as for the children I cut their throats having no more ammunition in my pistol which is a relic of my wars and yet the door was never re-opened.

  IV

  WILDLIFE

  HILDA

  THE DAY I left the Society for the Encouragement of Zoology I was offered one of the young panthers born in the Society’s park; a creature I promptly named, I don’t know why, Hilda.

  When I say ‘panther’, that is not quite correct. Hilda is a selot from Karabakh, species Selotis selotis Fischhorn, called after the learned adventurer who discovered it. Selots are not much larger than ocelots, but they are sturdier and fiercer, or so it is said. Their fur is not so sought after, being of a dull brown that turns pale in winter.

  The Society also offered me a leash of blue leather, a harness and a sort of muzzle, fearing that I should not be allowed to take Hilda out for walks without these curbs.

  Though still a young cub Hilda nevertheless gave proof of a strength and vivacity seldom met with. At the Society’s bun-fight (rather overloaded with rich foods) she jumped on the table and carried off a ham pie to the top of a display-cabinet.

  In Karabakh the selots live in the trees, from which they drop down upon their prey. Hilda ate the ham and threw pieces of pie-crust to us with a puckering of her mouth that seemed to me to combine irony with satisfaction.

  Hilda then came silently down from the cupboard and dug her claws into several pairs of trousers. Pollock, the permanent secretary to the Society, advised me to have them cut, as one does with domestic cats; the Society’s vet would do me this service. Others spoke of little leather boots for her. There will never be any question of either.

  Hilda and I left the Society building at seven o’clock. The sun had become vast and orange, and was drowning the trees and rooftops. Hilda seemed happy. She padded at my side with a light tread. I ought to say that I had not attached her lead.

  In the course of this walk I gave thought to the life I should have with Hilda. I should know no peace, I told myself. It was not nervousness—though in following Hilda in the streets I experienced a certain tremor—nor was it an evil delight in being powerful and feared. But it would be a constant struggle, no doubt, and my sleep would always be light.

  Hilda would perhaps strip me, I thought, of my dreams. At the moment when I was slipping into them I should hear her growl, because someone was approaching, because she was hungry, because faint visions were coming to her of Karabakh.

  Oh, I bear no ill will towards the Society for Encouraging Zoology. I walk in our trimly kept streets in the dusty gold of evening with Hilda. It is a princely gift. When we pass children or dogs I grip Hilda by the scruff of her neck, which is already meaty. She growls and bristles at the sight of little strangers, but my firm hand on her neck calms her.

  Hilda will grow. The smell of her coat and her breath will become unbearable, says Pollock. It will be necessary, even if her full-grown size is
not great, to give her raw meat or living animals, rabbits, perhaps, or chickens that I must go and buy at I know not what price.

  I see myself next year with Hilda in the mountains. There is still a little light near the horizon, though the time is approaching midnight. Hilda is drawing me towards the fields. She walks with a slinking gait, ears laid back. Tonight she devours several of this year’s lambs. Tomorrow the shepherds will go out hunting, armed with pitchforks. But Hilda the Invisible is safe in my office.

  But there are also fierce dogs, wolf-hounds, stationed in the mountains. When, the following night, we are so rash as to return, they will hunt Hilda to the end of the open country, seize her by the throat and tear her to pieces between them.

  Another day, in the town, Hilda escapes my vigilance. A lorry runs over her. The police destroy her. Taxidermists carry her off, and I find her back at the Society’s Museum, which has failed to recognise its progeny.

  We have turned down my road. It is broad and bordered with trees. Hilda sniffs them. She sniffs the droppings and urine of dogs. Some children have been following us, sniggering, since the bridge, led by a man in a grey shirt. Hilda turns and growls. The children run away, and the teacher shrugs his shoulders.

  At the entrance of my block of flats joy overwhelms me. I sit on a bench and Hilda lays her head on my knees. Hilda, before disaster strikes we shall have some glorious days! I don’t know why, but scratching her under the chin I see her in my flat walking on her hind legs, bearing towards the dining room a wooden plate on which lies a bird, a white bird, cooked in a grape sauce. The grapes shine green on the plate.