“We went off together, the dwarf tugging at my pants, first this way, then that. Then I saw a bright light shining – a place what calls itself the Scheherezade. I set the little fellow up with a bowl of flaming punch the size of a sink. I know Heaven exists, Nini! It’s that place – the Scheherezade.
“ ‘She was born a beauty,’ the dwarf began, wiping his lips with his wrist like a gentleman, ‘perfect to the nails of her toes, dancey, all sparkle, a little fairy-child, truly. When her mama died her father married a diabolical female, happy only when she heard bones breaking beneath her shoes. A witch this was, dim-witted. Liked to smash roaches between her thumbs. A calamity, really, not a woman. More a precipice. When the old fool died of melancholy she savagely mutilated the child. Cut off her hands and feet and cauterized the wounds with fire.’ ”
Totor cries: “Toujours-Là! Nini’s just a boy!” I kick him, not wanting to be babied. Toujours-Là continues:
“Now when the child’s wounds was healed, the ghoul threw her into the canal. Set her to paddle as best she could with her lopped-off limbs. ‘And so she lived,’ the dwarf said to me, ‘like a pale carp of nightmare. Like a pale carp of nightmare bobbing for crusts.’
“That’s how the stories began: bargemen sometimes saw the yellow hair, her white bottom as she dove after her dinner, poor angel, and no one doing a thing. Too scared of the ghoul. But the dwarf looked for her until he found her. And when he had some supper he slipped down to the water and shared it. Because she was so afraid he could never get near, he’d toss her a peeled chestnut, an onion. He said her skin was scaly and her hair gone green.
“The Scheherezade was closing. The dwarf took me back to his dismal room. He lived in a cellar by the port. It smelled of tar. I was surprised to see no furniture, not even a pallet of straw: only packing crates and all of them empty.
“ ‘I tamed her,’ the dwarf continued, ‘although it took time. I wrapped her in my threadbare coat and brought her here. All night I kissed her and held her and rocked her. I sang the little scraps of songs I remembered. I promised her dolls with wee cabinets. At dawn she smiled, a dazzlement, and gasping like a fish she died. I fear she died of too much tenderness. And now she haunts the city. Just as I do myself.’
“The dwarf had come to the story’s end. Dawn dispelled the night. To my surprise, I saw that as the shadows lifted he dwindled.
“ ‘The Ogress,’ he spluttered as he vanished, ‘the Ogress found me and now. . . .’ His voice was a diminishing trickle. ‘I haunt the night like a candle. Days I die. . . . Thanks for listening. . . .’ I could barely hear him. ‘I hope we’ll meet again. . . .’ ”
“A ghost!” I gasp. Totor squeezes my knee. Toujours-Là continues:
“I stumbled out into the mazes of the streets until I found myself back at the first bar. The infernal pottery nodded at me just as if we shared a secret. . . .”
My mouth drops.
“Now, Nini,” says Toujours-Là, all at once concerned, “don’t have any nightmares on me. The story was the fault of Master Punch and no reality. The Ogress but a figment of my addled brain.”
But the sailor’s apologies and explanations only convince me the tale is true. The story of the maimed maiden has struck a deep and sonorous chord in my heart. Never have I been so famously entertained, nor so frightened.
Outside the sleet is transformed to a heavy fall of snow. The chimp licks a domino and tries to stick it to his nose. I suck my candy thoughtfully.
“Tell me about the Ogress!” I plead. “What happened to her?”
Totor sighs. “I fear, old salt,” he says, “my stories pale beside your own.”
“I’ve never been so scared!” I admit. “I could tell the tale is true!”
“Hah! My truth,” Toujours-Là insists, “is whisky’s. Son, my brain is yellow like Hook Head in the moon and not always navigable. My tales, boy,” he spits, “are born in puddles of rum.”
“And that,” the black Marquis cries, “is the truth!” Is Toujours-Là about to cry? Just then two tears, like yellow grapes, roll off his nose.
Dressed in the Cod’s tassellated nightcap the chimp rocks over and seizes my hand. He looks like a little person in the cap. He lays his head down upon my knees. The feel of his furry face and its surprising warmth is, like the tepid punch and the soft fall of snow, delicious.
“The Ogress!” I insist. “What happened to her?”
“I heard,” Toujours-Là whispers, setting a flame to his pipe and sucking hard, “that someone tied a rock around her neck and threw her into the canal.”
“It was you!”
“Not so fast, son – you’re as fast as planets, whoosh!” He makes a circle in the air with his thumb.
“She’s dead!”
“I saw a face once in the Arctic, shining white in the black water. A woman’s face, following in the ship’s wake, following fast. And angry, Nini; with eyes of phosphorus. I figured she was after me.”
“Brrr! And since?”
“Oh, since. . . .” He sends the Cod’s wife to the bar for a finger of whisky for everyone but me.
“Could someone swim like that in the icy water?”
“Not someone, Nini. Like I said – this was a calamity. She was without a body – just a lonely head bewitched, riding the inky foam after my sanity. Her head was like a ball of ice with eyes, intent on doing harm.”
I shudder, enraptured.
“I saw the head again off Bloody Foreland, but – it’s the Marquis’ turn to tell a tale.”
“Something romantic,” Totor hastily proposes, “else the lad get warped notions of the fair sex.” For this he gets another kick. I will not be babied!
“Cool down,” Totor says to me, “the night has just begun.” Meaning I’ll be up very late, and this salves my bruised dignity. “Though,” he adds under his breath, “Rose will bread our ears.”
I look up. The windows of the Ghost Port Bar are crusted with ice and the world beyond extinguished. To myself I breathe: “Hook Head! Bloody Foreland!”
CHAPTER
4
Around his strong, black neck, the Marquis wears a knob of amber knotted to a blue string. Catching my eyes fixed to his throat he lifts it to my face and I see, caught like a seal in Arctic ice, a tiny, grey bee. My astonishment amuses him and he laughs broadly, straining the spindly body of his chair. I ask:
“Have you been to Hook Head and Bloody Foreland, too?”
“Ah!” he says warmly, his voice cinnamon. “I’ve been to Bûr Sa’id, Shhbzpur, and Hooghly, Crooked Island, Easter Island; I’ve been to Corpus Christi.” To my delight he repeats this in song:
“I’ve been to Bûr Sa’id,
Shhbzpur and Hooghly,
Crooked Island, Easter Island;
I’ve been to Corpus Christi.”
Then, bending over imaginary oars, the Marquis rows himself right out of his chair and around the room in an invisible boat which dips and rises, dips and rises, dips and topples over. Holding his nose, he tumbles extravagantly into deep water, and sinks. He surfaces, spitting, and shading his eyes as if from the sun, peers about until he sees me. When he does, he waves madly and paddles over to my chair where, on bended knees, hunched and breathless, he raises the amber sphere to the level of my eyes and both gentle and mocking, whispers:
“Does Tit-Nini
love my bee?
Her name is
Tit-Erzulie.”
I blush with pleasure. I have never met anyone like the Marquis.
“Listen! Listen! Tit-Z’oreilles . . . Tit-Erzulie is telling you a story; buhz . . . buhz . . . buhzzzzzzzzzzzz!” He holds the sphere to my ear. I could swear I hear the bee humming very softly.
“It’s magic!”
“Everything, Tit-Z’oreilles, is magic.” He springs into the air and, grabbing a phantom cane, executes an engaging soft-shoe before shuffling over to his chair and sitting down.
“I’ve seen the sea swarming with painted turtles; a s
ky so full of flying fish the face of the moon was veiled for hours. These fish whistled as they flew, and because, like parrots, they repeated everything they overheard, recited verses from the Koran, the Bible, and even Moby Dick. Imagine, Tit-Nini,” and he fingers the bead as he speaks, “imagine a thousand fish flying in the sky and all crying out at once:
“There is one God and His name is Allah!
O how beautiful is my beloved. Her eyes are
doves and her lips a scarlet ribbon!
Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest!”
And yes, I can imagine it.
Toujours-Là raps his pipe angrily against the table:
“Out with it, Marquis!” he cries. “Cease this convoluted foot-scraping at the door, this perambulatory –”
The Cod’s wife arrives with more punch steaming in a pewter pitcher. Stroking the Marquis’ handsome face she sighs:
“It’s not every man goes in for the perambulatories.” The Marquis brushes her hand away as if it were a fly. I ask who Allah is. Is he any relation to the old fogey in the sky Rose calls Gee-hover: He who Hovers Over?
“One and the same! Cursing folks with boils and brimstone. Now, boys, my perambulations are nearly over, but not quite. There’s a bit more. That is to say if you don’t mind.” He looks at me and his tiger’s eyes twinkle. The amber sphere glows against the deepest nightshade of his skin like a planet in space.
“Oh! No! Not at all! I don’t mind at all!” Despite the hour I’ve forgotten to be sleepy. My belly full of herring and my mind alive with talking fish and the humming bee, I’m wild for another tale and jiggle impatiently in my chair.
“My ancestors were traders in gold and ivory and wax,” the Marquis continues. “They bought and sold madder and rose water, quicksilver, and gold on strings. They knew all the bright sapphire ports of Africa’s eastern seaboard; they sailed the swiftest ships the world had ever seen – from Sofala to Mozambique, to Ras Hafun and even to Ceylon.” Taking a turquoise pencil from his pocket, he lightly draws a map of mediaeval East Africa on the oily table-top, including the ancient city of Zimbabwe, the Congo, the Nile, India, Ceylon, and the great island of Madagascar which hangs on the sea like a shattered tear. He draws ruffled mountains, fulminating volcanoes, forests and deserts, and even a black wind whipping up from Cape Horn and roaring across the Indian Ocean.
“They bartered with Persians and Chinese and Arabs; they brought jade from China into Africa; some worshipped Allah, some Gee-hover, some wedded the women of the Sabea, some settled in Ceylon where the girls are as graceful as gazelles. King Solomon himself traded with my ancestors. His throne was built of their ivory; he ate fruit from their ebony tables and the peacocks –”
“You’re bragging!” Toujours-Là growls. “And the tale’s too flow’ry. Nothing is happening, just a lot of twitteration. Gazelles! Peacocks! Ivory! Thish ish the twentieth century an’ we don’t give two hoots for your ancestors – all niggers too!”
“I do! I do!” I cry, startled by this outburst.
“Ah! Maybe Toujours-Là is right, Nini,” the Marquis says gently. “All that’s gone. Frozen in the past like my bee Erzulie. My ancestors, their blue cities clustered like blossoms, their oceans, and the blazing candles of their ships, their charts set with stars, their latitudes and longitudes of knotted gold, their joyous feasts and their deep, cool wells. . . . Now nothing remains but the silent, dusty hills tufted with scree and graves raked over by antiquaries. My people have become scavengers, without boats, without dreams, tending fires of thorn, fires of dung. They eat locusts. They die of thirst.”
“But why?”
“Slavery, Little Ears. Africa’s Black Death.”
“Tragedy’s everywhere,” says Toujours-Là. “Your people was not the only ones to know hard times. My ancestors was serfs for Kings. They lived on beans. Generations living on beans why I’m so squat. The braggart has always got to sell his soup first,” he says to me under his breath. “He’s too proud of his hoity-toity forefathers and I always steal a snooze, if I can, during his peram –”
“My grand-daddy,” the Marquis continues, as he rubs out the map of Africa with the palm of his hand, smearing his skin with lead, “was the last in a long line of seamen. Pity those who have nothing left, Tit-Nini; pity those whose luck has run out. He was a Haitian nigger, that blackest of blacks, and the grandson of a slave. All he ever had was a leaky boat and some weevilled sugar cane to sell for the manufacture of rotten rum. And even that he lost.”
“All my grand-daddy every had was beans!” Toujours-Là insists.
“Come on,” Totor complains, “let the Marquis talk. What’s come over you?”
“It’s liquor makes me mean,” Toujours-Là admits. “But the nigger repeats himself. I’ve heard this pro-long of his before and so has you.”
“Nini hasn’t,” Totor reminds him.
“This noble nigger likes to take his time,” the Marquis says with an easy laugh. “Time’s about all I have.”
“We’ve got all night!” I cry, squeezing Totor’s hand under the table. “Haven’t we, Totor!”
“All night.”
“All night!” thunders Toujours-Là. “I can’t take another minute. I’m up to my ears in the black man’s blue blood; I swear to God I’m drowning!” And to the Cod’s wife, he mumbles, “Come, slut, give ush a kish!”
“I’ll give you a kick!” she scolds, and she does; she kicks the seat of his chair. “Get out. You’re ruining everybody’s time.” Her most queenly, she points to the door.
“I,” he says as with difficulty he pulls himself to his feet and weaves his way across the room, “was jus’ going.” He stumbles out into the snow.
“BEANS!” we hear him cursing, “BEANS! BEEEANS!”
“He’s just so jealous,” the Cod’s wife shrugs her shoulders and gazes upon the Marquis with tenderness. “He’s getting old.”
“He’ll freeze out there,” the Marquis says. “He’ll freeze his arse out there!”
“He needs to cool off,” says Totor, mildly.
“He’s melting the snow off the stoop.” The Cod’s wife strokes the lobe of the Marquis’ ear. He pulls his head away. “He’s sitting down,” she adds.
“The bastard will catch pneumonia,” the Marquis insists. Totor agrees:
“I’ll go fetch him.”
Just then Toujours-Là staggers back in. “A man could die out there!” he sputters, colliding into the Cod’s wife and nearly knocking her over. “Sweet Mother!” he says, holding on to her as she batters his chest with her fists. “You smell good, like crude oil . . . like cold tobacco. . . . Angel, you smell like fish, cod fish!” Laughing bitterly he pushes her away.
“I’m worried about him,” says Totor. “I’ve never seen him quite like this before.”
“If I were a lesser man,” says the Marquis, “why Goddammit, I’d –”
Just then there is a frantic pounding on the ceiling overhead; it is the Cod.
“Throw the buggers out!” he screams. “It’s way past midnight.”
“Time to go,” the Cod’s wife caresses my hair apologetically. “Forgive him – his piles –”
“ARE SOME OTHER BUGGER’S UNIVERSE!” Toujours-Là shouts as he scrambles after a bottle, “THE ENTIRE GALAXY’S JUS’ SOME POOR BASTARD’S BLEEDIN’ –”
“For God’s sake – someone shut him up!” the Cod’s wife pleads. I say:
“He must be smarting bad to shout like that! Hey! Aren’t we going to hear the Marquis’ story?”
“Rose must be in a lather, Nini!” Totor slaps my behind. “Come, darling, we’re off!” The Marquis slams his glass down on the table as do I, first fishing out the twist of rind I’ve been saving for the road.
Gingerly we step out into the night, the Marquis navigating Toujours-Là who has gone limp. The Ghost Port Bar stands smoking in the snow. The Cod barks, the Cod’s wife cuts the lights, and we wave goodbye in the dark.
Totor and I thread home
. Beneath the porch light our swept path appears like a valley of diamonds.
CHAPTER
5
Other Mother is up, tying knots in her apron and wringing her hands. Her lower lip quivers when I kiss her.
“Ah! Rose!” Totor says much too loudly. “Forgive your wayward men! But it was sleeting fishes!”
“And I! And I!” she whines. “Sitting on pins and nettles! Did you think for one minute of the meat? A frugal cut but well prepared – and the potatoes – ruined!”
“We thought, we longed for it, Rosie, but we was marooned at the Ghost. We are as hungry as hounds,” he lies, “so slice it, dearest; let’s have a midnight feast – why, truly, it could be Christmas, see – we’ve tracked in snow!” She melts. Body and soul, Rose leans towards the pantry.
“We have pickles?” I pick up Totor’s ploy, although stuffed to the gills. Rose will never know the extent of our heroism, which is really just another shape our love for her sometimes takes.
“Pickles! Before sleep!” Our Rose has forgiven us entirely. “I thought you might be late,” she admits, “so I made a mayonnaise.” Head bowed, she runs to fetch it.
“The Marquis was there!” I shout after, “and Toujours-Là!” Rose clucks her tongue. She has forgiven us and is pleased to be feeding us, but she does not approve of the company we keep. With a smart thud, she sets down a bowl. The mayonnaise is deep yellow; pearls of moisture glisten on the top. Just looking at it makes me queasy. As my stomach reels, Other Mother’s crockery slides past the corner of my eye. Some uncanny influence grabs the kitchen by the face and twists its familiar features out of shape. I feel at once so forlorn that it comes to me, drunk as I surely am and giddy from lack of sleep, that this is the wrong house and dearest Rose, with her red, swollen face, crumpled apron, and beetling brows, an imposter. Had I been bitten by a viper I could not have felt stranger; I am tormented by a mad desire to laugh at the sudden poverty of Rose’s bottled eggs, her cherries in vinegar, the brash, bare bellies of her copper pots; her efforts to create order in what Toujours-Là had that very hour exposed as a riotous universe.
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 3