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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  “Is it true,” I asked instead, “that Bottlenose went to sea with a bellows?”

  “Well, yes, it is true,” said Totor. “Who’s been telling you stories about Bottlenose, Nini?” I lied and said I thought it was Gillesbis.

  “Bottlenose had this theory about the wind. He said that everything is only ‘agitated air’ and he figured that if he could make his own wind, he could have an influence upon the world, people’s moods, for example, not to mention the weather. I recall he said human speech, like clouds or a bad mood were just so much stagnant wind about the head. He believed that with a simple kitchen bellows he could navigate the ocean, dissipate fog and send storms chasing in the opposite direction. He used his bellows sympathetically, said there was an affinity between water and air. It was all quite complicated, Nini, but what it boiled down to was this: Out on sea it’s dangerous to sneeze; sailors in animated conversation can – by the power of their own vociferations – change their boat’s direction or what’s worse – call up a thunderstorm. Or conjure up a school of fish. An ill-fated langoustier off the coast of Corsica was cursed by a continuous drizzle, trailed by a small, black cloud, simply because its captain – a heavy smoker – was cursed with a chronic cough. He used his bellows, see, with circumspection. He said in mild weather a lady’s fan would do, or even a paper envelope.”

  “And did he go to the Congo with his bellows?”

  “For sure, Nini! A red leather bellows embossed with curious designs of his own invention – he had it made up special for the trip.”

  “What nonsense!” cried Rose. “And pagan!”

  “What was, uh, embossed, as you said?”

  “Little fellows, all in a circle, with their pants down, making air.”

  I could tell that the man with the blue feet was listening to Totor. In fact, the entire room was quiet.

  “Couldn’t you!” Rose whispered sharply. “Couldn’t you for once, Victor, converse conveniently at table! And in a fanciful restaurant, too!”

  The Marquis handed her a tiny flower he had made with a piece of cigarette paper, and under his breath he sang:

  “And Bottlenose sailed with a bellows

  to the other side of the sea,

  to the very edge of the world

  where the crocodiles roam free.

  ‘What use this thing you carry?’

  the King of Banana asked.

  ‘Sire, with this dia-bolical blast-bag

  I make wind! Fore and aft!’

  Thus I have no top, nor bottom

  and when I make free

  I navigate sweet Heaven –

  a whirligig – that’s me!

  Forgive me, Sire, this madness

  for it is but my faith –

  and the object called a “bellows”

  my fellow, god, and wife!’ ”

  “I don’t make head or tail out of it!” Rose wailed, precipitating a fit of merry laughter all about the room. But the exquisite sabayon soothed her, and after one spoonful she was mollified and forgave Totor and the Marquis their incomprehensible levity.

  “Their ears must be buzzing!” she said congenially. She was referring to the angels. “They’ve only ears for sin,” she explained, “and don’t trouble themselves with the rest. Thank heaven one forgets that they are there, or one wouldn’t talk at all!”

  “What else do you know about Bottlenose?” I asked, smothering strawberries in cream.

  Aristide said: “Bottlenose had this theory about friction causing heat, and how you could boil an egg if you could only manage to rub it fast enough between the palms of the hands without breaking it.”

  “Remember,” said Totor, “when we pilfered all those eggs from the Cod’s pantry?”

  “Broke every damned one!”

  “And that other theory – that if you threw the egg fast enough –”

  “The friction of the air would boil it! Sure! I remember!”

  “Oh!” I sighed. “I wish I had known Bottlenose!”

  “Victor,” Rose whispered, “just how many eggs did you take?”

  “About twelve dozen.”

  “Twelve!”

  “Stole eggs and saved lives. Every single one was bad. Smelled worse than the Devil’s a –”

  “VICTOR!”

  “Ashpan – the Devil’s ashpan, Rosie.”

  After lunch we stepped out into the swilling sunlight. As Rose and Totor sat nodding on the grass beneath a willow, the Marquis and I explored the river beaches. Rose had unpinned her hair and from the distance looked girlish, her legs stretched out before her. She had kicked off her shoes.

  There were boats to let and I looked at them with longing. The Marquis proposed we cross the river. As he paid the man, I chose a turquoise boat the colour of that stub of pencil with which he liked to draw on table-tops. The prow was worn and the paint peeling, but Aristide claimed she was sound enough, unpretentious, and companionable. Her oars were nearly new. Her name was La Puce d’Eau (the water-flea) and this also suited us.

  We left the bank in an orgy of birdsong.

  “What a joy,” Aristide beamed, “to be in a boat for pleasure and not to have to think of fish!”

  But it was impossible not to. The water was riotous with startled fish, mating fish, rampageous, irrepressible fish. There were plenty of bugs in the water, too: water scorpions, water-fleas, boat flies with red faces, and oval beetles bright as lockets. It was good beyond words to be out on that living water with the Marquis. I closed my eyes and caught a distant smoke, the scent of woodlands, of wild roses, and decomposing wood.

  We had reached the far side. Aristide churned mud and suddenly the water spawned a milky swarm of infant eels.

  “All things pass,” Rose liked to say after dinner or at a season’s end. But that afternoon has never passed. I carry it in my heart, intact. I recall the sky’s shimmer above the distant hills, the zithers and reeds of an eternal afternoon. Something precious caught, life-like, in amber. I recall each instant with a witching clarity; each instant is etched in my mind with a far-seeing chemistry. Even now, I smell the nutmeg of Aristide’s skin and see his beautiful hands glisten on the oars. Even now, old and alone, I glide under a vault of leaves. The day endures, quickens, kindles and bursts into flame.

  We rode out into a silent space. There was a hush as if the world had ceased to spin. When Aristide pulled up the oars we heard one starred bittern’s ghostly cry.

  “Make quiet play!” I begged. He looked confused. “Make those pictures. . . from nothing. It’s like magic, Marquis – that quiet play. . . .”

  “So that’s how you call it! A clever enough name for mes bêtises.” Reaching out, he pulled a phantom bird from the air, caressed it, and put it into a fictive pocket. The air was blooming, hatching birds like small fireworks or flowers. He coaxed them up his sleeves and down the neck of his shirt. When he was inhabited by birds, when one dozen, two dozen were scrabbling under his clothes so that he scratched and wriggled and I howled with laughter, he unbuttoned an invisible shirt and removed an invisible cap and prodded an invisible pocket, and the air was crazy with flapping wings. But one black swan with a neck as sinuous as Aristide’s own arm did not fly away. Instead it dove in a fluid arc from his lap into the water.

  I leaned over the side of the boat to look after it and cried out because I saw a face. I saw – by some trick of mind and light and water – her face, the face of La Vouivre, bubbles threading her hair like rain. My heart spilled into the sweet commotion of her eyes, and visited with a sacred clarity: I saw my mother’s face. When a fish like a glyph of hammered silver darted from her lips I knew hunger and its capture; I knew seizure. And I fell for her; with a sound in my ears like a quantity of sand sliding down a very deep well, I dropped after her into the shivering water. I did not surface – although I knew how to swim – but gave myself to the green goddess of drowning freely, penetrated by a numbing sweetness. I was sucked in by a treacherous current; when the Marquis dove for me
I was already gone.

  When Aristide rose for air the world was chiming with frogs. A pair of dragonflies see-sawed in all their startling brilliancy above the boat. He dove again as I, lungs bloated with icy water, pulled up an inky mud with my dangling hands. It seemed I navigated forever. I was the prisoner of that dream I was dreaming when, no bigger than a fish, I swam Odille’s salty womb beneath her darkly brooding heart.

  The Marquis dove again. He explored the bottom of the river until La Vouivre claimed him as she had claimed me. He fought her, and when he thought that he would die she released him. Rising, he devoured the air.

  Not far away he found me floating among the wands of reeds. He carried me to the beach and scraped the mud from my mouth; he forced the water from my lungs until he had me breathing. He rowed me back to the inn and carried me to the kitchen where I was stretched out on a long table, undressed, and rubbed dry. As the Marquis massaged my feet and Totor my hands, Rose stood by, shrieking, until the cook, returning with blankets, had the presence of mind to slap her.

  I continued to dream. . . . Looking up I saw the clouds, red against a yellow sky, tearing past with a hissing sound. Somewhere beyond the sky I heard Rose cry:

  “Drowned! Drowned dead like his murdered papa!”

  Followed by a clap of thunder. . . . I had come to a city. It was evening and the streets were deserted. Turning a sharp corner I came to the house where I had spent my infancy. The house was a mill and its wheel churned a dark water. I saw Odille standing in her kitchen beside a deep well. She dropped in a bucket and brought up my father’s head.

  And still I dreamed: It seemed I had been floating for weeks in deep water among the soft bodies of jellyfish and the purple fans of plants. For an instant I thought I saw Aristide and Marquis pulsing past, but when I looked again he proved to be a sea-horse no bigger than my thumb. Somewhere beyond the sun I heard Rose say: “Water plays tricks.”

  I was drifting through the site of some catastrophe. The swell was ragged with a quantity of splintered wood and pieces of broken furniture. Barnacles had riddled beams and rafters with worming holes. A fiery multitude of starfish sunned themselves on a floating door. With a shock I recognized the door to my father’s house.

  And then I was inside the house, exploring the empty rooms. An ape who smelled of sour milk and onions suddenly grabbed me by the hair and pushed me up a ladder. A trapdoor slammed shut beneath me. I rubbed my eyes and in the blue flicker of a gas ring attempted to see. I made out a vast attic as cluttered and filthy as a knot in time. A baboon in a turban which made him look fragile as if his head had been recently fractured, sat humped over a table. He was up to his knees in sheaves of soiled photographs and with a piece of sandpaper tied to a spoon carefully rubbed the faces off all of them. A callused forefinger proved he had been at it for years. There was a box of bent spoons, the sandpaper worn, on the floor.

  “You are quite pale and hairless,” he said to me, although he had not once lifted his eyes. “You look sensible, however. That’s consolation.” He smiled sadly, as if this little speech was intended for a joke. He pointed to a stool and handed me a spoon.

  We worked steadily for several hours. The photographs to be altered were numberless. They crested in the pooled shadows of the room until they toppled over. “I’m seventy next Sunday,” he confided. “A ripe old age for a monkey, you’ll agree. I’m glad you are here,” he added, patting me on the head with a leathery hand. “It’s lonely in the attic, despite the bat. Lot’s of company down there,” he pointed to the floor, “but not our kind, eh? Infernal, eh? Eh?” Indeed, I heard shouting and music rising from under us like a filthy smoke flooding the room.

  “There are bars in the city,” he moaned, “and barmaids. There they are and here am I.” He wiped away a tear with his fist. “I wasn’t born a monkey,” he explained.

  From time to time the bat flew in from the dark recesses of the attic to help us. His technique differed from ours; he used no spoon but scraped the faces from the pictures with a razor-sharp fingernail about five inches long. The faces lifted from the paper like stiff little circles of tarnished metal. The baboon swept these up with his hand and polished them on his sleeve until they shone like freshly minted coins. He pocketed them and promised to buy me whatever I wanted. I said I wanted to go home. With a groan he bent over the table and, reaching for my face, gave my cheek a squeeze. Then he pulled a cold dish of lentils out from somewhere under the table and handed it to me. I told him I wasn’t hungry. A fly struggled weakly in the gravy.

  “Better in the gravy than walking around on your head.” He smiled companionably. When I did not return his smile he explained it was a favourite saying among apes.

  “The insects here all have very cold feet.” This was the first time the bat had spoken. The baboon retrieved the dish and put it back under the table.

  “Better a cold supper,” he said, “with a live fly in it, than a hot supper with a dead rat in it.”

  “Give me a sweet roll anytime,” said the bat, “with plenty of butter.” Seeing me perk up he set me straight at once.

  “There are no rolls nor any butter to be had in all the land for miles around. There’s even a song about it.”

  “I’d give my all for a roll –” sang the baboon.

  “In the hay!” sang the bat.

  “I wasn’t always,” said the baboon, “this old.”

  There were books to be erased as well, page after page of finely calligraphed script and even maps. We erased the names of cities and bodies of water and roads and railways.

  “Preparing for apoplexy!” cried the ape.

  “Apocalypse!” the baboon corrected him.

  “Our work was indescribably tedious and depressing. I thought that if I could only find Odille’s face or my father’s name written down somewhere, I could put a stop to all this. But the faces I erased were all unrecognizable and were – for the most part – the faces of baboons. As if he had been reading my thoughts, the bat then pulled a wallet from his pocket and, opening it up, pointed proudly to a picture of his family. They were all hanging upside-down.

  “Enough!” the baboon said then, sweeping a pile of maps to the floor. “Have you.ever played ape-chess? Ah!” he beamed. “It’s the oldest game in the world.” Once again he groped about in the shadows until he had found what he was looking for – a stained, dog-eared box of miscellaneous pieces. “It’s like regular chess,” he explained, “but not quite. And as I’ve not the proper pieces, neither, I’ve made up these you see! They are all of my own invention. This one, for example, is the Macocoscome. A most powerful piece. But having only spools and thimbles I’ve pasted on – although now it’s torn – this star. The piece corresponds to the Queen. Ah! You don’t play regular chess either! All the better!” he cried, undaunted. “You’ll have nothing to unlearn and all to learn! For as I was saying, the Macocoscome corresponds to the Queen, but not quite. The bat and I refer to her affectionately as the Great Apess. ”

  My head throbbed as he described her many moves and the treachery of a pawn made of a thimble and wearing a battered cone of red paper. To my relief a bell rang and, looking frightened and sheepish, the baboon thrust the game behind him. In his haste the Great Apess fell to the floor and was lost.

  “She’s fallen down the hole!” The bat offered to appease him, “Like everything does, you know, sooner or later. ”

  “I don’t see any hole,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees.

  “It’s too black to see!” said the bat.

  “It’s so black,” said the baboon.

  “It eats every last part –”

  “And particle–”

  “Of light!”

  “Why it’s so carniverous –” the baboon continued.

  “It’s ridiculous!” The bat took off looping among the attic’s invisible rafters.

  “There’s lots of stuff down here!” I cried. “Lots of cans of fish, and what’s this?” Scrambling to my feet
, I dangled a little gear on a string in front of the baboon’s nose.

  “It’s the Galaxy!” he cried, snatching it away. “A most curious piece! I thought you were lost, dearest!” He gave the thing a kiss. “But here you are, you rascal! He covers the board in a twinkling of an eye!” he confided in a whisper. “Wreaking havoc! Even the Apess Herself –”

  “I want to go home now!” I shouted.

  “You can’t!” said the bat from somewhere deep in that dismal room.

  “Your home is wrecked,” said the baboon. “Didn’t you see it – ”

  “Poor nitwit!”

  “– floating out to sea?”

  PART

  II

  CHAPTER

  12

  A doctor was brought in from the thermal station. Doctor Venus Kaiserstiege was young, brilliant, and Viennese. She was also the world’s only Freudian hydropothist. She had worked for several years under the guidance of Freud at the Psychoanalytical Institute in Vienna. When she left Austria for the spa at Paradis sur Loire, she continued to correspond with her former teacher. “The theoretical wars must cease,” she admonished him. “Psychoanalysis will flourish only if its practice is based on mutual appreciation and the acceptance of many diverse, therapeutic methods. Dogmatism is poisoning your dream-child.”

  Some said that Doctor Kaiserstiege was a heretic, a mad-woman, and a quack, but she was accomplished and devoted to her patients with a rare tenderness.

  From the kitchen of á la Recherche du Paradis Terrestre I was taken in an ambulance to the doctor’s blue-tiled infirmary – Totor, Rose, and Aristide crowded in together beside me. Years later Doctor Kaiserstiege said that she had known at once the Marquis and I would somehow fill her life, which was true. But we filled her life only with our absence. . . .

  As the Marquis carried me inside, Doctor Kaiserstiege showing him the way, Totor and Rose following behind, no one stopped to admire the hallway friezes so new the air smelled as much of linseed oil as it did of sulphur – cranes, ibises, and herons raising their wings and mating in a tricontinental landscape fused with all the careless licence of dreams.