The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

by Ducornet, Rikki

  Set out on the undulating surface of Other Mother’s table the faience salt and pepper shakers in the shape of windmills look like martyred thumbs. The white dishes, lovingly soaped and dried, shine too brightly and it occurs to me that a knife can be used for more than slicing cold roast beef. I shudder. Other Mother, who misses nothing, raves: “He’s caught his death!” I begin to cry.

  Is death so catching? She puts her lips to my temples and with her freckled nose nuzzles after fever. “He reeks of rum!” Spinning about, she glowers at Totor. “Victor! If you ever – if you ever take the boy back to that, that din of pernickety . . . it will be over my dead body!”

  Startled, I look up at Totor with disbelief. My eyes dry up at once. What have I done? I have brought upon this catastrophe by behaving like a baby. I do my best to pull myself together, but the table refuses to co-operate and the little bowl of mayonnaise swells to the outsize proportions of the soup tureen she uses twice a year to moat her cotriade.

  “I’m just – I’m terribly sleepy, is all; and I’m not hungry, Other Mother – I –”

  “You’ve eaten her herring, haven’t you!” When I look at Totor helplessly, I give us both away.

  “Rosie!” he pleads. “We was marooned!”

  “I wouldn’t touch her herring with a twelve-foot pole!” shouts Other Mother.

  “It’s all right!” I cry bravely. “Our piping’s solid copper!” I cough as heartily as I can to disguise a hiccup, nearly choking on a bubble of gas. “What’s a galaxy?” I ask, attempting to change the subject.

  “Another low-class bar!” Rose shrieks. “Don’t tell me you was there too?”

  “No! No!” With exaggerated flourish, Totor spears a slice of overcooked meat with his fork. “Toujours-Là was talking about stars He pours salt out onto the table.

  “Bad luck!” Rose disapproves.

  “This is our galaxy, the Milky Way,” Totor sweeps the salt across the table with his hand, “and this speck’s the sun. The whole caboodle is spinning, see –” I read order and disorder in the turmoil of salt, the spiral galaxies Totor engenders and, with splayed fingers, sets circling in endless revolutions.

  “Bringing disaster upon our household!” Rose crosses herself as I, from a vertiginous height and, seeing the universe forming just beneath my nose, am filled with dread and enchantment, ecstasy and fever. I shudder again.

  “Get him to bed at once!” Rose commands, “while I boil up some camomile. . . . Herring and rum! Herring and rum!” she incants as Totor lifts me from my chair and takes me into his arms, a thing he has not done in a very long time.

  As he climbs the stairs, Totor wheezes. The stairwell is dark and ominous and like everything else tonight, not quite familiar. When he pauses for breath on the landing, a sob escapes me.

  “My precious!” he cries, “what is it?”

  “The face of the Ogress!” I hide my eyes against his heart.

  “It’s the moon, Nini! Shining in at the window.” In the winter sky, the moon rises like a sharp, silver disc. “Toujours-Là told a scary story, but none of it was true!” For the second time that night I burst into tears, knowing better. As I cannot be comforted, nor, despite the hour, sleep, Rose, having brought up the camomile, returns with another oil lamp and, setting it down before the mantel mirror, tidies up, stooping into the corners as if to exorcize the zoomorphic shadows she has herself provoked by bringing so much firelight into the room. Peeping out from under the covers I see flamboyant scorpions dancing on the walls.

  Other Mother dives for my shoes. Totor exclaims:

  “Don’t they look like turtles in the dark!” Rose prods the wormy laces.

  “Is the moon still shining?” Totor goes to the window and lifts the curtain.

  “The sky is black, Nini.”

  “Black,” says Rose, “as magic.” As I recall, it is at this precise moment that the little iron doorbell rings.

  “Who can it be?” Rose complains. “It’s nearly two!” Her hands fluttering at her sides, she bounces downstairs. In an instant Totor and I hear the Marquis explaining he’d seen the lamps lit and asking if “Tit-Nini’s not too grogged up on rum.”

  “I’m fine!” I yell, suddenly better. “Come up! Come up!”

  “The poor sausage can’t sleep,” says Rose as she leads the Marquis up the stairs. “You men have behaved unseasonably. I’ve never seen Nini so commotioned, and I swear –”

  “Aristide.”

  “I swear, Archimedes, he’s not going back there, not ever, not after this! Not over my dead body!”

  “Oh stop that!” Totor is exasperated. “Stop this talk of dead bodies. You sound like a Yankee funeral parlour!” Rose has never heard of such a thing.

  “A place,” the Marquis explains, “where they keep the corpses tidy.”

  “Where’s Toujours-Là?” I ask.

  “In the arms of Morpheus.” Rose frowns at this indiscretion.

  “Tell me about that island – that Easter Island!”

  “Well . . . there were no chocolate chickens anywhere, if that’s what you’re wanting to know. No pretty eggs in baskets. But there were plenty of baked chickens – the Easter Islanders wrapped them in nice new banana leaves and cooked them in deep holes filled with burning stones.”

  “That’s no way to cook!” Rose is scandalized.

  “That said, Madame Rose, and not wanting to contradict you – they were the best damned chickens I ever ate anywhere. You see, they baked like that all day slow as snails, and the banana leaves gave them a heavenly savour.”

  “Sounds good!” I cry. “Doesn’t it sound good, Totor?”

  “You come here this Sunday for supper, Aquarius,” says Rose, her vanity piqued, “and I’ll show you what I can do with a chicken. And I assures you, Aladdin, I don’t need a hole; I swear to God I don’t need stones, and I don’t need, Heaven help me, banana leaves! I was baking chickens long before you was a mere driblet of lard, son – I’m over fifty! And I bakes ’em any and all ways. Why I can bake ’em in ways you couldn’t count if you got up early last Thursday, for example: stuffed with lemons and onions, stuffed with sorrel, stale bread, liver and garlic, or parsley, ground pork and veal; larded with bacon, rubbed with pepper – you like pepper?” He nodded. “It entrances the flavour.”

  “I am entranced,” the Marquis beams. “You bake me a chicken and this spring on the first sunny Sunday, I’ll take you to a place called Paradis and the best restaurant I know.” Rose blushes and reflects.

  “Did they bake bananas along with the chickens?” she asks.

  “They did.”

  “It could be good . . . peculiar, but . . . good,” Rose concedes. “After all, I’ve stewed my rabbits with prunes.”

  “Marquis!” I suddenly remember. “Your story!”

  “Hm . . . I know a story about a girl who gets turned into a street lamp.”

  “A street lamp!” Rose is incredulous. “I’ve heard of a girl turning into a tree – as I recall she was a geek.”

  “That girl,” says Totor, “was a Greek.”

  “Anyway,” says the Marquis, “that’s just one of the many stories I know. But it’s not the one I was going to tell.”

  “Could you tell that one now?”

  “It’s a story that can’t be told, Tit-Nini. It’s a story without ears. For eyes, in other words.”

  “But it’s so late!” Rose kneads her hands helplessly.

  “Hush!” Totor says gently, taking her hands into his.

  “Hush, Rose!”

  The Marquis pulls off his socks and, with the ease of a serpent, uncoils from the foot of my bed where he has been sitting cross-legged and as still as a finely carved Buddha of ebony. One and then the other, he places his naked feet down upon the floor, and as the air turns into thicker, mutable stuff, he grows gills, webbed fingers, and fins. Slowly, slowly he wades across the deepening waters of my room, first up to his ankles, then his knees, his loins, his heart. When the waters reach his c
hin, the Marquis, with a curiously radiant smile (a smile which one day Venus Kaiserstiege will recognize as the same as on the face of La Clarté in the gardens of Versailles as she lifts the morning star to the sky), tosses back his head and sinks beneath his hallucinated ocean to explore those subaqueous cities Totor has described to me so many times, springing the captive spirits I know are always there waiting.

  The illusion is so perfect we see bubbles rising from his nostrils, the shoals of tiny shrimp he sweeps with liquid fingers from his eyes. When the weird shadow of an undulating squid slides across the walls, Rose gasps. Pushing up from the ocean floor the Marquis surfaces, and as the waters dissolve, he reaches out and appears to pluck something from Rose’s open mouth.

  Captivated, I see that he is soaked to the skin, that his hair, dark as grapes, is wet and his face pearled with moisture. Approaching my bedside he opens his hand and there, shining in the firelight, is Erzulie.

  When he slips the blue string over my head I throw my arms around him and kiss him fiercely on the mouth – so thrilled my teeth are chattering. Totor has his arms about Rose, who stands transfixed and staring into the evaporated promise of an evanescent world.

  Later, alone, I hear church bells muted by a fresh fall of snow: one, two, three. Rose calls snowflakes meteors, which is confusing. Sleet, hail, rain, snow – all meteors, all planets. In my damp hand I hold Erzulie, asleep in her planet of amber. Amber is an enchanted substance. Once it has touched the skin it radiates heat. Erzulie warms my hand; the sphere feels soft and silky, and the blue string exudes a faint smell of sandalwood and, more: the subtle smoke of the Marquis’ skin. I imagine that concealed in the shadows of owl-light the Marquis is sitting at the stern of my bed, my boat; that tonight he is my helmsman.

  I have memories of other blizzards, other storms, the sky shuddering and booming, the rain battering the roof and spilling from the gutter onto the street: “The Devil is whipping his daughter! See how she weeps!” as when on an evening I play up in the attic among the “floating Sams” Rose will not allow downstairs – those mysterious objects, all musty, Totor has brought back home from everywhere.

  For I’ve been to Bûr Sa’id

  Shhbzpur and Hooghly;

  Crooked Island, Easter Island

  I’ve been to Corpus Christi.

  Many years from now, K will point to an image of a falling star and ask:

  “Tell me, dearest, what does this make you think of?”

  “Me . . . auh –” I will be unable to speak. “Pla –” As tears inundate my cheeks, K will take my hand. Moaning I will sit back and, as clouds in the sky tear past like beasts fleeing from a forest on fire, manage to mutter: “Planets.”

  Totor has described a fish which is white when the moon increases and black when it wanes. As my dreams: some are white as mother’s milk and others black as ink.

  Totor has told me that like opium dreams, the dreams of the drowning are a way of dying. A nightmare leads to a sweet, luminous reverie, festive and far too bright – a pipe-dream.

  Very often, when I was a tiny child, I would awaken mewling with terror. To quiet me, Rose would sing her song of cabbages and sticks. Once I heard her say: “He remembers.” What is it I remember, Rose? Totor?

  Totor answers: “We are all rafts adrift, son, splinters on the sea.” I don’t want to be a splinter. I want to be a man.

  “A little small, still, for a man!” Rose caresses my hair.

  “But I will grow into a man!” I cry, eagerly, loudly – to banish confusion, the hour’s queer edge. Standing on Totor’s thighs I crow like a cockerel so that they who look so solemn laugh.

  Once I catch Totor weeping. “An old story,” he insists, “a shipwreck. I lost a friend. Several in fact.” He launches a convoluted drama which just this once I do not believe.

  Downstairs the clock chimes in turn: one, two, three. Why this discord between the clock and the bells? The question troubles me. Bells and planets; meteors and bells. Words felled in flight when once Rose dropped a spool of thread just outside my door at the moment when I tumbled into sleep. Ever since I need only to turn the charm over in my mind for the suspended gardens of the night to claim me. Bells and planets, meteors and bells. . . . A path, obscure and umbrageous, leads to a deep lake; already I see it shimmering beyond the trees.

  Yet, despite Erzulie burning in my hand like a little sun and the Marquis’ magic, tonight the path falls away and I am sent flying to my knees upon a greasy pavement. I recognize the city Toujours-Là described of filthy brick; the sailor is standing before me, the fog hissing at his heels.

  “Breathe deeply, son!” says Toujours-Là, “there’s whisky on the wind. It’s not a crime to lick your lips.” And he sings the Marquis’ song, except the words are not the same:

  “For I’ve been burned

  shat upon and bloodied

  torn asunder

  crucified . . . a corpse –”

  “I could tell you – I’ve seen –”

  “Please! Don’t tell me what you’ve seen!” But he ignores me:

  “I’ve seen the crypts of Egypt

  catacombs and cromlechs . . .

  the blue morgues of Africa

  the black pyres of India

  the graveyards of America

  the ossuaries of Spain;

  I’ve roamed the world all over

  from mudhole to cesspool

  from slaughterhouse to butchery

  and I’ve drunk with executioners

  and I’ve lain with murderers.

  For the world all over

  is slaughter –

  “– is a cold, cold sepulchre!” he adds, wheezing. “And the cold,” he cries, “is rising!”

  We are standing knee-deep in icy water. I climb up his back.

  “I am not a little monkey!” I shout, for it seems to me that he has said I am. “I am a man!”

  “Too small! Too small for a man! You’re a monkey! A little macaque! I’ve heard –”

  “Don’t tell me what you’ve heard!”

  “I’ve heard epitaphs and elegies

  I’ve heard the tolling bell

  From Mexico to Ireland

  all the world is Hell.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Christmas holidays had begun and I did not miss the schoolroom, nor my master whose name was Shelled; rather, Shelled is what we called him. He had been shell-shocked during the Franco-Prussian War and he had never entirely recovered. A man of sixty, he appeared to us as someone archaic, even biblical; there was something terrible about this moody man’s yellow face ravaged by tics. In his worst moments he threatened to hurl us through the window; on better days he read us stories from Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe. I cherish a vivid recollection of Shelled sputtering The Gold Bug, one arm bent at a painfully acute angle across his loosely aproned back and the other holding the book within a hair’s breadth of his myopia. Further down the aisle one of the wilder boys had shat directly in his path. Shelled stepped neatly over it without changing his inflection.

  This wild, scatological boy was the one friend I had made in school. I admired Maximinole who was older than the other boys and who, unlike me, had “no time for stories.” Max was interested only in what he called “real things,” liberty and, of course, tormenting Shelled. Fossils in pavement, shadows in fog, the beached frames of unfinished boats prodding the air like the skeletons of whales, the moon hanging in the sky like an evil face were without interest. Planets, meteors, old stones, old shells, old sailors’ gibberish – what did they matter? What did they prove? Those starfish I went on about were dead things. Once in my zeal to win Max over I had bragged about a piece of rock I had found in the attic. Its one polished face offered a seascape perfect in every detail: grottoes, rising mist, cresting waves, reeling birds. Maximinole hotly insisted the thing was impossible, and in an excess of anger had punched me in the face. My profusely bleeding nose and pained expression were too much
for him; Max ran from the schoolyard and never returned. Later I learned that he – in that city of sailors – had apprenticed himself to a baker. Someone had seen the fiery Maximinole at dawn bent in two beneath a fifty-kilo sack of flour. Although he hurt me, I’ve always felt that I pushed him too far, wanting him to see the world in a way he was unable to. I hate to think that this boy who had so brazenly lowered his drawers in the aisle was doing mule’s work for a baker.

  Companionless, therefore, on that cold December morning on the edge of Christmas, I set off in the slush – for there was a drizzle to the day and the heavy snows of Saturday night and Sunday morning were sliding off the rooftops and into the gutters with a hiss. I sloshed down the street on the lookout for marbles; I had found two favourites this way: an unusually heavy one made, I think, of hematite and a large one of transparent glass filled with thousands of pin-prick bubbles. Faithful to my habit I walked along with my eyes glued to the ground, my old wool beret pulled down over my ears making me look, I hoped, a little like a pirate. I also wore a pair of wool gloves cut off at the fingers. I did not find any marbles that day, but the sloppy water, oily in places and black, and the lumps of unmelted snow calving like icebergs in the miniature oceans of the street, had me continually dreaming. Such was the enchantment of those floating worlds that I lost all notion of place and time and wandered down to the port where the hulls of the season’s deserted sardiniers rocked in the icy water with a sorrowful, sucking sound. Their names were marvellous: The Free Thought, Hook’s Slave, La Communarde. Soon the wind sent me scurrying back to the protection of the streets where a thin mist followed me everywhere. The sun was already waning when, with a shiver of foreboding and delight, I recognized the side-street and the alley leading to the Ghost Port Bar. In an instant I saw the Ghost’s familiar fogged panes, its ancient stone doorsteps all puddled in the middle.