To the small boy I was, the Ghost inspired awe. I pushed the door open and entered on tiptoe. At first I could see nothing but the bottles twinkling like precious stones behind the bar: the hot ice of eau-de-vie, kirsch, and kümmel, absinthe’s green and bitter worm, a horrid toad-black beetroot alcohol, whisky, rum, and anisette, prunelle, a blushing peach brandy; and syrups: mint and lemon, angelica. . . . It was still early for customers and the Cod’s wife was not standing in her usual place. The room smelled of roasting fish – surely the Cod’s dinner. I walked over to the chimp’s cage. Charlie Dee was fast asleep. His snoring made me think of walking on gravel at the bottom of a pool. Then my heart leapt, for I saw in the far corner of the room, smoke wheeling about his head, Toujours-Là. The dying sun sent a faint gleam through the nearly opaque glass and bathed his features in alarming shadows. Now I wonder what demon compelled me to navigate the dusk and to sit down at his table.
The old sailor was pouring out two fingers of Terminus brand absinthe. With as much ceremony as a trembling hand would allow, he cradled a lump of sugar in a pierced spoon, balanced this over his glass, and poured in water. When the absinthe swelled to the colour of sea water, Toujours-Là acknowledged me and greased his whistle.
The liquor in the Ghost was served in thick, hand-blown tumblers the like of which I’ve not seen since. They were very old and the Cod had inherited a seemingly endless quantity of them when, no longer fit for seafaring, he had bought the place, handed his wife the brass key, and gone upstairs to give himself over to toothache, piles, and melancholia. The Ghost’s glass tumblers were so heavy, and the lip so sound and smooth, that they commanded love and respect. I’d heard of men throwing bottles in anger in that place, but no man had ever smashed a glass.
Toujours-Là licked his lips, cleared his throat, and said:
“I’ve travelled the world over and I’ve seen the Devil everywhere. But nowhere, Nini, nowhere, mind you, nowhere have I seen God.” He sucked his teeth, took a drink, and twitched.
“Rose says –” I began.
“Don’t believe the crap you hear!” he barked. “The universe and all its filthy planets were not created by God but by the Devil. Every morning the sun rises with an empty belly and at night she sinks bloated with blood. You’ve seen how the moon circles the world like a clean bone?” I nodded. “Like a skull licked clean of meat,” he insisted.
“Like the face of the Ogress!” I whispered, fascinated by the gloomy colour of his words. Although I sensed that the mad steersman was about to ferry me across the starkest latitude of his imagining, already my own darkest waters were rushing out to meet his.
“War is brewing again, Nini; I feel it biting at my bones. They said Bismarck was a hound – all men are hounds! The Devil’s hounds! And women are hornets. When was the last time you saw your mother?”
I was stunned. Toujours-Là, having momentarily emptied his gullet of bile, took up his pipe and for a time kept quiet. But I, at least within, was anything but quiet; my blood was in a turmoil. I tried to remember when I had seen her and could not. It was like trying to see a midnight path in a starless, moonless air. But then, unknown to me, the quicksand of my thoughts shifted, and I changed the subject.
“Tell me a story!” I breathed, curiously exalted as when once I’d leaned too close to a cage of vipers a tattered man was showing for a centime in the street. “Tell me another story; tell me, Toujours-Là,” I rambled on as stiff in my chair as Pinnochio before he was made flesh, “tell me another one, about her – about the Ogress –”
Just then the Cod’s wife came downstairs with a dish of baked tuna and pan-fried potatoes.
“So you’re here, Nini!” She pecked at my cheek and striking a match lit a lamp. “Where’s Totor?”
“I don’t know – I’m out alone! Out exploring!”
“I’ll bring you a lemonade,” she said, “a hot lemonade with bitters. But no rum, Nini. Rose was in, mad as a cat – you’re not supposed to be here, son.”
“I’m big enough to know where I should be!” I said dramatically, and to prove it pulled off my wool cap and threw it down on the table – just one of the heroic gestures I’d stolen from Maximinole. When she had gone Toujours-Là said:
“The woman’s always mothering me and wants me to eat. I tell her: ‘This is my meat!’ ” He held his glass to the light. “You want some supper?” The food looked good and I had been wandering since breakfast. He pulled the biggest folding knife I’d ever seen from his pocket. The tuna’s flesh was so hot it hissed against the cold steel.
“I once loved baked tuna. But they say a man’s a moulded river, little more than water. There’s something to be said for an entirely liquid ballast.” He knocked off another glass and with the ragged vocal cords of a rusty pail sang:
“My woman’s a bar lily
with a heart of flaming whisky
and the greenest eyes
and the meanest ways, yes
and the sweetest lies. . . .”
When the Cod’s wife was back with my lemonade and saw the empty dish pushed aside, she gave Toujours-Là a kiss. Good boy,” she said.
“Good boy!” he spat. “I’m old enough to be your grandpa – you silly cunt!”
You watch your language in front of the child!” she bridled, hurt.
I can hear anything!” I cried bravely. “My brain’s solid Copper!”
“If the old sonofabitch wasn’t ready to croak,” she explained, “I’d throw him out. Owes me plenty, too!” She slammed back upstairs.
I felt something pulling at my leg; it was Charlie Dee. He looked at me from under the table and grinned. I helped him up onto my lap where he immediately stuck his finger into my lemonade. Meanwhile Toujours-Là knocked his pipe out against the heel of his shoe. The ash tumbled to the floor. He took a curious beaded pouch from his pocket and scrounged around for a few fragrant shivers of tobacco. Then he refilled his pipe lovingly. I thought: One day, like Totor and Toujours-Là, I will carry a pipe. Hung before his face the mermaid sailed the air, and, like a steamship, smoked. She made the Ghost feel homey; she was, after all, a toy hearth. Toujours-Là poured himself another. This time he made a panaché; he mixed his absinthe with mint syrup and a spot of anisette.
“I was never a man,” he began, secreting the bottles on the floor beside his chair, “to carry dung in a pocket to exorcize misfortune. . . . One morning I woke up nowhere at all.
“I was young, still wet behind the ears, in fact, Nini, barely twice your age; an apprentice ship’s carpenter on his first time out, shipping with the Greenland Company and eager for adventure. We was after whales in Baffin Bay and we’d anchored off what’s now known as Thule – the furthest point off the North coast of Greenland a big ship can sail. The night before, I’d sat myself down in the most peculiar bar you’d ever hope to see – it squatted like a bitch taking a leak. The beams and rafters was made of the ribs of whales, the sod walls was carpeted with seal fur and the one window was the stretched bladder of a walrus.
“Outside they was those boreal constellations hanging so glassy they set my teeth on edge; why, just looking at them was like chewing sand. There was something hideously timeless about the place, and the morning looked like evening and the other way ’round so you never knew what time it was or where you was, fore or aft, sleeping or waking. Hell, you had to think twice before sitting down else sit on your own face.
“The blue-eyed Eskimo who ran things had, by the smell of it, distilled the bile of seals; too many hours before I’d taken a swig and one – the orbs of my eyes had bled, two – my ear drums had burst, three – I couldn’t feel my legs from the knees down, four – I began to feel warmer than I’d ever felt since relinquishing the womb (maybe warmer), five – I’d apparently begun to sing Offenbach, six – I was dancing on the table in my socks while my head orbited the room, and seven – I was out like a candle and under the table in the dimmest corner of a dark room, a room wherein everything was barely perceptible
, lit by a couple of sputtering walrus-oil lamps.
“Despite the considerable rumpus I’d made in the infancy of the evening, my mates and the polar proprietor had forgotten all about me. When I woke up I found that my grand-daddy’s pocket-watch was gone, but I still had my pipe.” He sucked on it thoughtfully, curing the cleft between the mermaid’s breasts with a filthy nail. “I ran outta there like rats from a hull on fire, but the sea was as empty as an overturned coffin.
“I stood by the water, cursing – ‘Devil take me!’ I hollered, ‘I’m marooned!’ I repeat, I was nowhere, Nini; there was nothing in Thule, nothing but Eskimos and one crazy Dane trapper (and he’s the one stole my watch for sure), and a couple of tumbledown sod wigwams, plus that damned cabaret tucked inside the ribcage of a leviathan, and the frozen heads of slaughtered reindeer marking the end of the street, their ears gnawed off by polar foxes which gave them an especial dismal appearance, and above all ice – ice, ice, ice – thousands of square feet of the stuff underfoot. I was standing on ice, Thule was anchored on ice – just thinking about it, even now, gives me vertigo. Water’s one thing; ice another. I’d rather wed a witch than be marooned on ice!
“ ‘Devil take me!’ I cried, ‘I need a ship! Any ship!’ In that beggarly light I looked with despair on a horizon larded with ice!
“And then, Nini, I see her. I see: Bel. She materialized like an uncorked genie in the middle of downtown Thule, halfway between a pyramid of frozen walrus guts and the public shit-house.
“ ‘Hello, sailor,’ she mewed, ‘you’re wanting a ship and I have one. I’m always on the prowl for sailors,’ she purred, and she gave me a wink.
“ ‘You a ship’s captain?’ I asked, flabbergasted. I’d never dreamed a woman ship’s master, and the wench was beautiful – if peculiarly dressed in an obsolete velvet with sleeves like bellows. She was wearing lots of jewellery; I particularly admired the wide choker of pearls. I took one sniff of her skin and the scattered pieces of my fractured skull came together.
“ ‘If you is a captain,’ I said, ‘where’s your ship?’ After all, I’d peeled the horizon for the Søren Kierkegaard and seen nothing but the bung-hole of a whale. She laughed and her black eyes gazed towards the ocean.
“ ‘I’ll be damned!’ I said again, because I seen a ship, Nini, such as I’d never seen before, and thank Lucifer, never since!”
“What was she like?”
“A species of barquentine but bloated, writhing with shapes indeterminate, ugly and obsh . . . obscure. Despite her size she was somehow volatile . . . a hammered air . . . a . . . what’s the word? Coagulum, yes, a coagulum of night, suspended between the sea and the sky like a cathedral on fire.”
“A cathedral!”
“From stem to stern she was carved like some hermetic cabinet with all manner of occult ribaldry: naked witches straddling billy goats and lunatic carpenters wielding their privates like hammers. There was queens kicking the posteriors of valets and kings with the vish . . . the visages of maniacs copulating with mitred bears; and preaching foxes and farting preachers – in short, a thousand devils and devilish devices, an encyclopaedic chaos wreathed with the names of rebellious spirits: Lucifer, Beelzebuth, and Astaroth; and magical words such as ZAITUX and TROMADOR in a muddle of griffins – but all rendered with such foh! felicity that though she could have looked ridiculous, in fact, the monstrous vessel commanded – in her wild and gloomy way – respect. Especially her mammoth figurehead.”
“Oh!”
“She appeared, Nini, wading knee-deep in the brine, which, with each passing instant, looked less like water and more like a filthy chowder. She confronted us full-on, a giantess of blackened madder, so wonderfully carved she must have been the work of sorcery. Her haggard beauty was worried by a century of high wind and salt. The throat was thrown back in silent laughter, the teeth as big as casks of rum, the feral nostrils flaring, the orbits of the eyes like planets, the tangled mane of hair blazing with the phosphorescent algae that gave the ship the semblance of burning. The cleft of her bosom was so deep it could have held the bodies of three men; her nipples were broad enough to straddle.”
I laughed.
“Laugh, will you! Little sprat! Only listen! At those massive thighs, the spheral knees, the foam sputtered and died. Suddenly the sea was still. So much dead water, a gum, a pitch –”
“A co-agulum!”
“A clotted pitch! ‘She suit you?’ Bel asks. ‘Her name’s Great Babylon. And mine’s Bel. Now let’s drink to seal our contract.’ I find myself standing in a richly appointed cabin on board, Bel proffering a brimming cup. As I drink, a story I heard long ago rattles in my head: The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet trimmed with gold and gems and pearls: in her hand she held a golden cup filled to the brim with abomination. . . . On her forehead was inscribed a mysterious name: Great Babylon. . . . And I saw that she was drunk on blood.”
“And was there blood in the cup?”
“No, boy, sweet wine. One taste and a whirlpool is spinning in my mind and before nodding I am sleeping. I awaken in the belly of the Babylon in a hammock next to twelve others, all empty. Sticking my head up the hatch I smell roasting and baking, and follow my nose to where Bel and her crew is feasting. I’m greeted with raised cups and pull up to a table set like an altar with all my favourite dishes: veal stuffed with prunes, and duckling with sauerkraut, and egg pudding swimming in caramel –”
“Rose makes that!”
“So I’ve heard. . . . We is a motley crew in our stained monkey jackets keeping company to a captain who looks more like a countess. Coopers, harpooners, blacksmiths, common sailors – sea-dogs all, and who, from what I gather, have all been saved from calamity: bedlam, suicide, starvation, shipwreck – even hanging for murder. Bel is like a mother to us, that fondant bosom heaving as she passes the platters.
“Then the cook staggers in with a flaming Alaska. He’s the strangest character imaginable. Looks like a hyena trotting around on hind paws and swathed in an apron. I needs look twice to see a man; yet swear I hear claws clattering like meat forks on the deck.
“ ‘Tell these worthy tars tomorrow’s menu,’ beams Bel. ‘A menu’s like a lullaby,’ she confides to me. ‘I like my men to sleep.’
“ ‘We sleep a lot,’ a deck-boy yawns. ‘A-a-a-a.’ He drops off then and there, his forehead in his pudding.
“ ‘Eggs Rosita!’ the cook attacks the menu with a yelp. ‘Eggs Rossini. Baron of lamb à la byzantine, Scarlet Beef, fried animelles, moussaka of mutton, a partridge estouffade, a salad arlésienne, braised salmon, pigs’ trotters with mustard sauce, sea-bream served in melted butter, scallops Mornay, stuffed shoulder of veal, smothered –”
“ ‘Stop! Stop!’ we all cry together as if afraid to die of too much happiness.
“ ‘I, ah . . . uh, eat when I, ah, sleep . . .’ the deck-boy sighs, still sleeping. ‘I sleep when I, e –’
“ ‘Cèpes! Fruit rissoles, rhubarb pie, pudding à l’anglaise, jam omelette, Bourdaloue pears, soufflé Erzsebet, frangipani, Devil’s food –’ howls the cook. It comes to me that all my mates look like sucking pigs – their faces so round and plump and their colour so high.
“ ‘A Sauterne will be served with the Devil’s food,’ Bel flashes her teeth, ‘and with the pigs’ trotters, a Moselle. And now,’ she breathes, ‘our toddy before tucking in!’ Bel smiles at me and winks. To tell the truth, I think this winking’s vulgar for a captain; then again I suppose a captain can never be a lady.
“Bel, it is clear by her attributes and attitudes, has been around. She is no white lily, but more your scarlet poppy, and her petals, lovely as they is, is mussed. Sounding my thoughts she gives me a slow, sideways glance which causes my stomach to sink. But then she’s handing me a fragrant cup. Inside I see a ring of imps cracking whips and leaping hoops of fire.”
“Oh! Don’t drink it, Toujours-Là!”
“It smells so pungent and delicious, I quaff it down and I’m sent flying
into the familiar whirlpool to the sound of trumpets and more prosaic the baaa baaa baaaing of a thoush – thousand sheep. I awake the next morning feeling unstrung and queer. But the smell of frying beefsteaks and fresh coffee has me and my mates leaping to our feet.
“Each day at breakfast Bel gives us our orders: retracing her chalk tetragrams (and the Devil knows their purpose), and scraping the rust off these iron coffins she cherishes, their insides fitted out with sharp nails, and swabbing down the timbers of the ship, those huge, hot decks. But scrub with bucketfuls of elbow grease and good, brown soap, still a dreadful phosphorated mould is always growing back, coating everything in a luciferous sheen. Yet there is never much else to do as the Great Babylon sails herself, her canvas groaning day and night in an unceasing wind. We is going somewhere very fast, but in a haze so thick only Satan could say where. I fear we’ll hit ice, but Bel says she knows no finer helmsman than the Infinite and His wind. I figure that the Infinite of whom she speaks is no other than His Highness of Infinite Hell. In the mist I sometimes think I see His furies knotting the latitudes and longitudes that net the globe, tugging, and twisting, and dredging for our souls.
“Since I am a carpenter, Bel has me repair the Babylon’s ancient witcheries – those lewd emblems worried by the salt of time. Some of these – the griffins and the bears – is badly worn about the rumps and muzzles as if in their static race around the bulwarks they has been tearing one another to pieces. Some is lost their noses, some their teeth, others is featureless. Sculpture were never my line and the stuff the Babylon is made of is dreadful dense. I wonder how, despite the outlandish humidity, the wood is so hard and dry. An unworldly fire consumes the ship from within.
“Nights I dream the Babylon is made of rotting flesh, and fractured bones and tiger’s breath and tar,” Toujours-Là continued, pouring out another panaché, “but Bel likes me and shows it by cuffing my ear in this kittenish way she has. Once, young fool that I am, I grabs her and gives her a kiss. For this I get a scratch from my temple to my chin what don’t heal for weeks. She is a demon, no doubt; keeps her pronged tail tucked beneath her petticoats.
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 5