‘Then I will drive this shiny pin from my black bandana deeply within your parts. I will split a testicle like an olive, possibly two.’
Tertius says nothing. I am rewarded with the instinctive, protective gesture, crossed hands like butterfly wings across the top of the thighs, the footballer’s gesture when faced by the penalty. Why, I wonder, does affection inspire insolence? Watching André leading away the sullen Tertius I cannot understand why someone reputed to have been such a terror in Lyons inspires so little fear in his young friends.
The Redeemer’s room really is very plain without even a view of the lake and I see he has his pictures up and his books, lives of generals, politicians, dictators: Hannibal, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mazzini, Gandhi, Mussolini and Hitler.
‘I devote much energy to the study of revolutionaries and their methods,’ he says and eats a duja with its button of candied violet.
More like dictators, it looks to me. All the pictures are of women, photographs framed in gold. The poses are pretty weird.
‘Sit down, please. Take that little sofa in front of the fireplace. I will sit on the bed.’
His bed is raised on bricks, two red bricks beneath each leg.
‘I observe the custom of my country. We believe that by sleeping high we escape the horrid little spirit who haunts bedrooms and steals the souls of men while they sleep. A trick our mothers teach us.’
‘My uncle lines the floor of his room with aluminium foil. That’s my Uncle Claude. He’s an astronomer. And an atheist. He believes that the earth’s magnetic currents affect him, and so does radiation. It’s something called geopathic stress. In fact the best way to guard against it is moving about a lot, that way you don’t get cooked in the same place night after night. Like you move the food in a microwave oven. Strictly speaking he should shove the furniture in his room about every week or so, but that gets to be a bit of a drag, so he puts down the aluminium foil instead and bounces the rays back into space. That’s the theory.’
‘You live with your uncle?’
‘If you can call it living. And with my grandmother. I’m really their prisoner. I used to live with my mother, in England. But then she went off to America, and got lost. So I came here. Everything’s gone wrong since Papa died.’
‘Has your uncle always had these ideas? About moving the furniture?’
‘He’s full of ideas.’
‘Europe is riddled with superstition. Full of blood and darkness. Sometimes a person dares not venture outside.’
‘My Uncle Claude’s a kind of scientist. He believes we’re all descended from viruses.’
‘Germs?’
‘Yes. He says human beings are probably just here to keep the germs immortal. They live on in us. We’re just by the way. When the earth was young and hot, about a billion years ago, these germs got into the early cells that swam around in the primal soup, drilled into them like crazy with their little tails that go round and round, and took up residence – those they didn’t kill, they consorted with. I’d really like to drill into Uncle Claude sometime. But my aim wouldn’t be to consort, let me tell you.’
‘I don’t think you like your father’s brother.’
‘I don’t like being accosted by someone with his views. About how he’s going to finish off God. And how man is really just the germ’s Eiffel Tower. Uncle Claude has two views of us: cosmic and planetary. Cosmically speaking, we don’t rate at all – a minor planet of an indifferent sun in a tenth-rate galaxy. In planetary terms we’re really just a means for getting the microbes about. And we serve as manure.’
He’s shocked. ‘Dung?’
‘Yes. Mammals are just here to fertilise the planet. To keep the plants growing.’
‘In Zanj we have punishments for these mockers and madmen.’
‘You do? What punishments?’
‘If I were in Zanj I would feed him to the crocodiles.’
‘You would!’
I don’t believe him for a moment but I have to say I’m warming to the idea of Zanj. ‘Tell me about these creatures who steal souls.’
‘Tiny little men – but their genitals are large.’
I love the idea of this horrid, horny little black troll. Now that’s what I call something to worry about! In fact I think everyone should start building their beds on bricks, it really makes sense if all these funny little guys are running around all night.
He waves a broad black hand around the room to include his gold-framed portraits of women. ‘My wives. Dear girls. To be seen in the National Gallery in Zanj. I started it. We are poor and can’t afford originals. So I brought science to the rescue. My dear consorts, whom you see here displayed before you, are photographed after the styles of certain famous paintings. Some modern. Some after the Renaissance masters. I often thought it wasn’t so much a collection of wives as an orchestra. Here is my wife Viola, posing in the manner of the Degas painting of a woman drying herself after her bath. Isn’t she nice? And here is Tympany, portrayed as a Roman Venus. What they call a Venus Pudica, hence the hand rather carefully draped. Now this is my third wife, Harp, in her recreation as Venus with Cupid, after a painting by Correggio. The man you see standing beside her is Mercury.’
‘It looks like you!’
‘It is me. I am Mercury.’
And indeed he is. Wearing a strange cap, and not much else.
He sits on the white counterpane, on the high bed, with the tray beside him and I look at his pictures. His orchestra of wives. We might be in an art gallery. Two people, tired of looking, resting between pictures.
‘I hope you will give me the pleasure of painting you, one day.’
‘What painting will I become?’
‘I have just the one! It’s called Les Beaux Jours, by the modern master Balthus. You will be perfect in the part.’
He looks at his pictures fondly. ‘I adore art. So did my wives.’
I understand. There had been other casualties when the mortars began exploding among the tapestries.
‘Sitting among my wives I feel like a child. In the mountains.’
I see this. They do rather loom. Viola turns her broad back on the camera, Harp shows her enormous breasts with pride and he sits beside her on the rock wearing a funny kind of feathery baseball cap.
‘Harp wears the wings of the goddess Venus. And my cap signifies my godhead.’
‘Who is the child standing between them?’
‘Cupid, played by one of my sons.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘I forget. I have many children.’
‘How many?’
‘Over sixty-five, I think.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘With their mothers, I expect. When the rebels moved in on the presidential palace, my surviving wives went back to their villages. To melt among their people. To wait.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘For my return. And here is my fourth wife, Dulcimer. She is a copy of St Ursula, a very fine carving by the Master of Elsloo from the sixteenth century.’
St Ursula, alias his fourth wife Dulcimer, wears an elaborate head-dress. Her breasts are small and high and she carries a book, looks down modestly and wears a diamond pendant around her neck. Her pendant is the image of my own. Her eyes are downcast modestly.
‘Ours is not a rich country. To decorate the presidential palace I was determined to hang the very best art. We have one of the lowest standards of living in Africa, a position which our first leader, my Uncle Richard, did very little to alleviate. He was more concerned with playing off the French and the British against one another to see which side would give him more aid, which he spent as quickly as they gave it to him. He negotiated independence for our country from the French in the sixties. He gave us a parliament based on the British system and a constitution based on the French mode
l. He ignored the fact that the Wouff, the Ite and the Kanga desire nothing more than to skin each other alive. Though not himself a member of the Ite tribe, he appointed most of his ministers from that group. A fatal mistake. It took into account none of the traditions of our country. When I was approached by a small band of patriotic colonels from the national army I told them, after due thought, that I could drive a Lagonda through the constitution, and I did. When I came to power, all appointments of any importance were made from the Wouff tribe. This is the way it had always been done and I am a great respecter of tradition.’
‘Isn’t that cheating?’
‘Not at all. Take my wives. First wife Viola was a Wouff. My second, Tympany, was an Ite, so I converted to Christianity. Harp, my third, belonged to the Kanga tribe – though you’d never think so to look at her – so I became a Moslem.’
‘And Dulcimer?’
‘A Wouff. Back to stage one. You see how even-handed I was? One of the first things you learn as a redeemer is that you must be everything to everyone. It’s not easy.’
The tea turns out to be chocolate. I can feel the gratitude rising in me, warm and strong.
‘I remembered what you said. That you liked it. I am a great respecter of addictions.’
So we drink chocolate and talk. Talk of one coup leads to another, I find. You drive a Lagonda through somebody’s constitution and somebody else drives a tank through yours. That’s how it seems to go. And here he is washed up in France. But why the funny little room? Not even a view of the lake. What there is though is a fine view of the front gates of the hotel and beyond them the carpark where the watchers sit in the Citroën, the Renault and the little Deux-Chevaux.
‘I see you are keeping a little eye on my friends, who are keeping an eye on me,’ he says.
‘Do they want to hurt you?’
He smiles. ‘On the contrary. They are here to look after me. It’s very touching, this concern. But I have tried to tell them it’s no good, I’m beyond help. You see the Wouff believe their leader or ruler to be the son of God. They further believe that when he abuses his authority he should be killed, because he shows that he is no longer the son of the great God.’ Suddenly he looks like a child, a fat, black, ugly child, his shoulders sink and he blows out his cheeks and his big lips turn downwards. He is for an instant the perfect baby.
Chapter 8
I spend the morning as usual on the private beach by the lakeside but no longer at ease despite the fact that the wooden platform creaks beneath the same weight of oiled, gleaming, familiar flesh as it did yesterday and the day before. My cast of characters on the plage privée are settled, named, content. They’ve not been consulted, I know. But then this is not a democracy. You can tell they like it by their relaxed, easy, affable behaviour; Edith and Alphonse sleep with the sun gleaming in their purple rinses; Wolf is reading the life of Bismarck – his little daughters look happier; the breasts of the Dutch sisters, Ria and Beatrice, are no longer quite so distant. Raoul looks a bit shifty – he knows I have my eye on him … We are at that point in the season where time seems to have stopped and no one is ever going to leave. Early in August the days get this way, the hawks fly higher, the sky is pale and powdery above the breasts of St Joan and it seems as if everything will continue, but I know that the perfect weather cannot last. Summers past are proof of that. The less time left, the faster it runs. These perfect moments mean the end of things. The sun pierces the wooden slats and lets down its dusty, silver nets into the green water but catches nothing. The fish flash past quick as thinking and there is no calling them back.
The fish are hungry and I am famished. Hunger is the mother of knowledge. Thinking is hunting.
My poor, dear Clovis now comes equipped with the new boot that the Angel presented to him.
‘Crystal, Bella!’
‘No, Clovis – plastic.’
Through the transparent boot Clovis’ withered little foot in its grey sock shows like a mummy. According to the Angel, beauty through disability is achieved by showing, framing, exhibiting the deficiency.
Because I’m eating tonight I starve myself, lock the big silver trunk beneath my bed, that bed now raised most impressively on two bricks beneath each leg to guard against the little black troll who haunts bedrooms … as Monsieur Brown teaches … It’s been diet day. I have to be strong. It’s worst, the craving, just before a period, I notice, and bad during it (very tender breasts), a burning in the back of the throat tells me to stop, but I can get over that. I take them out of their wrappers first and build branches with them, whole trees, and then eat the trees, twig by twig and the wrappers fall around me like leaves, each one about three hundred calories, and a batch of weird stuff, as Uncle Claude never tires of telling me, caffeine and theobromine for pep, phenylethylmine for love, faint feelings of nausea, but I can live with that, though I can’t bear to look at the scattered wrappers afterwards, twelve, fifteen, because I know I can’t have eaten all those, not one girl on her own, not me! Perhaps two or three, and one for the road, and a nightcap, just a nibble, perhaps …
Yes, Clovis, who has no money and for whom the chances of there being a tomorrow are slight, takes me to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in La Frisette, Les Dents Sacrés, because he wants to talk to me about the future! He arrives in his new uniform, on his new bike, wearing his new boot and we eat fruits de mer, the little cousins of these same silvery flitters which pass for thoughts in the watery mind of the lake.
I am on view in the new bottle-green, off-the-shoulder velvet dress, a red rose in my hair and, of course, my earphones, briefly occupied by the emissions of four lovely boys in six-inch stiletto heels communally called Ape! They operate at a level that would give a deaf man tinnitus – raunchy guitars and circular riffs being their stock in trade, and singing, sometimes in unison, ‘What do I do to please ya?/You and Mother Theresa!’ Actually I only wear the earphones to annoy the maître and take them off the moment we sit down and Clovis begins telling me about his future, and love.
Love for Clovis is summed up in a single word, ‘her’. It is with her that he has been riding around the village, the Dutch peach, on his pillion, his grassy wedge of hair is newly retouched in spanking apple-green, wearing his salmon-pink overall, issued by the Angel’s party to its association of communications workers, of which Clovis represents the first, and only, member, the sole recruit of the Postal Workers for the Fatherland, as well as being the favourite son of the Angel’s ‘beauty through disability brigade’, and, again, its entire membership.
The restaurant lies close by the water. Swans float by, their necks curving into question marks as they put on speed. The waiters mutter to themselves as they step over Clovis’ new boot which sticks out proudly beneath the table. They stare at his freshly painted hair.
‘Did you know, Bella, that your shoulders are very like the chocolate mousse you’re eating? I see things so much more clearly since I met “her”.’
‘I don’t think you must take everything you believe about “her” to be true. Well, not absolutely everything.’
‘Of course it’s all true. If it wasn’t I’d die. Because if you lose your salvation what is the point of saving your life? You should look to yourself, Bella. What is going to happen if your mother doesn’t come back for you? Will you stay here? For good?’
‘Never!’
‘Then where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. Somewhere. Maybe I’ll ask the new guest at the Priory if I can go home with him?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s not going anywhere, that one. Haven’t you seen the watchers at the gate, in the cars? They never sleep. They’re his guards, Bella. He’s a guest maybe, like a prisoner is the guest of the state.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Pesché, of course. We’re on the best of terms, the chief and I. Did you know that I’m in charge of the forward planni
ng for the Saturday rally? They can use me. The PNP give me work, trust me. I owe all this to the Angel.’
‘And that ridiculous pink overall? And the plastic boot?’
‘Not pink – salmon. And the boot is crystal.’
‘Why should the Angel give you a crystal boot?’
‘Because he’s a generous soul. And he loves beauty.’
‘It’s not even practical, a glass boot. What would happen if you smashed it?’
‘I’ve been issued with this boot by the PNP. If I break it or lose it I have only to tell Monsieur Cherubini and he will issue another one.’
‘Listen, the PNP is the creation of three men: the Angel, who hates immigrants, strangers, foreigners; Father Duval; and my Uncle Claude, who is frightened of people who aren’t quite right.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The physically handicapped.’
‘You mean cripples – don’t you, Bella? But my very employment shows that’s false. The Party wants what is its own. Sure. Own family, nation, country. Anyone who accepts this may join. We’ll become the party of the future because we want what is modern.’
‘And what’s modern?’
‘A computer for everyone. A video phone. Information storage and retrieval, the facts of life collated, stored, accessible so that society can be made orderly. A census each year. Statistics of everyday life, income, illness, age, debts, beliefs, crimes, all registered. Monitoring of the destitute and the dangerous. Online concern for the underdog, electronic surveillance of offenders. Are you coming to the rally? I’ll be there – with her!’
Of ‘her’ Clovis speaks in reverent terms. She has saved him, he says and his voice is full of devotion. He adores her in the way that savages once worshipped the moon, when the moon was still cold, naked and unattainable, before men began shooting things into her and dumping garbage on the rocky beaches of her empty seas. At one point in his litany he touches my knee beneath the tablecloth.
My Chocolate Redeemer Page 15