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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  Next I made two figures, a woman and a man, their arms outstretched, beckoning to one another.

  “I love you,” I mumbled, and gently brought the clay people together for a kiss, “I love you.” I pulled them apart and made them embrace with more force. The arms were crooked now; the heads and necks askew. K looked on as I shouted: “I LOVE YOU!” slamming the figures together in a spasmodic convulsion I could not stop. When I had formed a smooth, round ball, I bit into it hungrily.

  One morning when I awoke K handed me a cup of hot cocoa and lay eight child’s lotto cards across my bed. The printed images were so colourful they seemed ready to ignite: a tiger, a hammer; a firefly, a flaming torch; a windmill, a Buddha; a lighthouse, a mermaid. The mermaid’s face and arms were bright pink, her lips scarlet; green scales concealed her breasts and blackened as they tapered to her fin. The sight of her precipitated an explosion of vivid memories: La Georgette, the pipe Charlie Dee broke into two, Charlie’s murder, the smell of lavender, the smell of fresh sardines.

  K pointed to the next card: a handsome devil, his pronged tail coiled about one leg like a snake, a robin with a beetle in its beak; a scorpion, and a bucket; a bee, and a bottle; a wheelbarrow and Louis xiv. With my index finger I caressed the bee, then the devil, and breathed:

  “SNAH!”

  “The Snail and Shark!” K approved. “And look!” I saw a corkscrew, a church bell; a cooking pot, a helmet; a Gila monster and a barometer; an apron and an apple.

  All that morning I looked at the cards and wondered that my life was reduced to potent signs. With my blankets and sheets I made a tent and spent the following weeks in seclusion examining: an eagle, a sphinx, a turkey. . . . K listened at the door hopefully while I gobbled and spoke to the idealized image of an apron. “Rose,” I said to it.

  Already during this period, curious people would appear at the spa from time to time to see me. Some hoped for a freak, others for a miracle. K would send them away.

  “There is only an invalid here,” I overheard her say. “A man in need of peace.”

  It was at that instant that I realized I was no more a little boy, but instead a man.

  Each day I looked out the windows at the changing landscape – it took all the courage I had – at the scabs of bark tensing in the shrill air, the famished branches scraping at the skin of the sky; the brown leaves scurrying across the brittle grass; the weeds as furred as spiders squatting beneath an armour of ice.

  Each time the crows – always of startling size – lifted their heavy, black bodies to heaven my heart was sheathed in darkness. I saw the elfish rose bushes stripped bare and dancing like bones; the fountains reduced to silence; the gravel paths grim and sodden; I received each storm as a slap across the face; the sun a fist of needles in the eye; the moon a lethal water.

  The end of that winter was animated by curious dreams:

  “I dreamed a cobbler gave me shoes for walking on water.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I refused the shoes. I said: ‘You’ve made a dreadful mistake. I asked for shoes for walking under the water! Like the Marquis!’ ”

  “Next time you dream I hope he’ll offer you both pairs!” “He gave me a pair for you, K. He said they were made out of Freud’s spectacles!”

  I remember that after this conversation I spent an hour or two looking into the cracked looking-glass at my aged-infant face, trying to reconcile what I saw there with what I was, or thought I was, my bare feet growing cold on the floor.

  When thaw had caused crocuses to detonate all over the grass, I, in a self-pitying mood, complained to K.

  “I continue to bark,” I said. “I weep round the clock. I am barely able to look at starlight, let alone the light of day. Will I ever be normal again?”

  “Normal!” she cried. “For Heaven’s sake, Fröschlein, while you slept the world went mad!” To cheer me, we took a walk, I in my wheelchair and K behind, chatting merrily about the puppets she had seen as a child in the streets of Vienna, the beggar boys turning somersaults for pennies, a trained white rat which shat into a doll’s chamber-pot. The description of the rat sent me dreaming.

  “If I were strong and rich, I’d form a circus company!” I said. “With trained rats such as that, and dancing dogs, and apes, and elephants – and a yellow-haired dancer riding a woolly buffalo!”

  “Which reminds me, Nini – I’ve been – we’ve been invited to America. When you are all better we will go together to see the buffalo grazing.” I hated the idea and told her so.

  K wheeled me into town. I had not seen Paradis since my “drowning.” We passed the once-wonderful restaurant – now boarded up and barren – where the Marquis had so grandly entertained Rose, Totor, and me.

  Time wreaks havoc, there is no doubt about it. Such desolation. . . . The windows filmed with dust as if with smoke. But further on the smells of baking flooded the street and it was at the baker’s that an incident occurred which was to affect my cure dramatically: I barked at a woman who prodded me, perhaps not accidentally, with her umbrella. K introduced me to Figuebique, a she-bear of such imperiousness I had to suppress a mad desire to laugh, not because she was funny, but because she was so formidable. I choked, coughed, and succumbed to a species of whinnying.

  “You will excuse my friend,” said K, “he is only just recovering from a long illness.”

  “You needn’t tell me,” Figuebique sneered. “I know who he is: The Last Lunatic.”

  “And it appears,” K countered, magnificent, “that you are The Last Horselaugh.” Visibly congested, Figuebique thundered from the shop and slammed the door, its little bell jingling wildly after.

  “That was the enemy,” K explained gravely. “Now let’s go home to tea.” Her mood brightened. “I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  As she wheeled me back home again, K clued me in to the village and its idiosyncracies.

  “Paradis,” she said, “is a village inhabited by women who have lost their men repeatedly to war. I know them well. Their lives are like their knitting: introspective, yet mindless; fussy, exacting, repetitive, and pale – tinted by the cheaper dye. Widowed, for the most part, their only comfort is the hairdresser where they exchange the nutshells of their lives. And if God is notoriously absent, they are his ambassadors nonetheless, and call me a heathen because I once took to court a local sorceress who, on the pretext of banishing demons, had starved a man to death. He was suffering from an ulcer.

  “They are self-righteous; their knitting consists of cumbersome and useless articles destined for the poor of tropical Africa. And they have made the proprietress of the bazar – an infirm creature who was abandoned in the cradle and brought up by charity – their own especial cause. The ugliest among them, she is everybody’s favourite.

  “Figuebique is the most powerful woman here, though I believe no one likes her; she is far too shrill and domineering. But all admire her as a gifted orator, and at the time of the trial she sided with the witch because she was ‘born and bred in Paradis,’ and I was the ‘outsider.’ That a man had died by folly did nothing to temper Figuebique’s ardour; you see, her father was the village’s only doctor, and I threatened him from the start. His practice relied upon purges (he was of the Old School) and, when they came into vogue, eccentric uses of antibiotics and a smattering of fractured psychoanalytical vocabulary he had learned with the intention of impressing me.

  “Once when we met accidentally on the street, Doctor Figuebique bragged about a ‘difficult’ case he was treating simultaneously for ‘ataxia, aphonia, and autochthonous ideas.’ The next time we met it was ‘dysphagia, dystonia and dystrophy.’ Was he memorizing a psychiatric lexicon? ‘My patient also suffers from echolalia!’ he said. He stood on his toes and hopped, but just a little, in his excitement, ‘and ejaculum praecox!’ ”

  After tea we sat together for a time in silence, breathing in the green air and listening to the humming bees; there were so many in the lilac tree that the darkene
d blossoms vibrated with a kind of self-contained frenzy.

  “What,” I asked, feeling strong and peaceful, “do you know about my mother?”

  “Odille! She was an enchantress of sorts; a child inhabiting the body of a grown person.”

  “As I!”

  “As you. . . For a time she did not speak. “There is much turmoil ahead, Nini,” she said at last. “Odille’s story is . . . extravagant. With each day you are growing stronger. We have all the time in the world ahead of us. Reflect upon what was her apparent loveliness and loneliness – both of a startling character. And the fact that she had the heart of a child, a child who had run away. I could never learn from what.”

  “And soon . . . you will tell me more?”

  “I will tell you everything I know.”

  “Last night,” I said, all at once remembering, “I had a terrible dream. I was alone in Rose–s kitchen. On the floor lay a lid which I was forbidden to touch. But I seized it by the handle and lifted it anyway. Under, I saw a deep pit; it seemed to fall away from my eyes forever.”

  “Fröschlein,” K squeezed my hand. “You have had that dream before. What happened next?”

  “Rose came and put back the lid.”

  “A luminous dream,” K said.

  Suddenly I was angry. “You are like Rose in my dream,” I cried, “putting back! BACK! BACK! the lid.”

  “The day you no longer need wheels to get about,” K promised, “the day you are able to take long, thoughtful walks alone, that day I will tell you what I know about Odille, your lost, your damned, your beautiful mother.”

  That night in my room I walked with my hands to the walls. Around and around I went in the moonlight, despite the pain in my legs which was so unbearable I fell to the floor again and again, and as a dog worries a bone, gnawed upon the flesh of my own naked arm.

  CHAPTER

  14

  “I wish to see the city,” I said one day to Doctor Kaiserstiege. “I wish to see and know everything which touches upon my atrophied past.”

  K said she feared the shock would be too much for me, but after reflection concluded that the head-on collision could cause a fusion, as if that impact might melt the skins of those alien entities: past and present. Because the “present” in my case was simultaneously the “future,” she warned that “to see the city would be like attempting to mate a tiger with a bear.”

  “It was eerie,” K said as she soaped down the Peugeot prior to our departure, “how as soon as you were installed deep-dreaming at the spa, all those others started showing up. As if that day out on the lake they had fallen into that potent water with you. You were traumatized by the past and they by the future (which was swiftly becoming the present). For example – have I told you this? At his worst the cobbler would throw himself into the air as if he had been hit in the gut by a grenade and cry:

  “ ‘There are pieces of me everywhere! Someone fetch them! Fetch them quick! Catgut! A needle! A needle!’ So that I knew the shoes he sewed fulfilled a neurotic need. ‘Ovens!’ the lovers shrieked at one another. ‘Ovens! Ovens!’ I had to wait years to understand what that was all about.

  “One of my patients tied a colander to his face – to protect himself from the poisons in the air – and another wore a cooking pot to protect his skull from shrapnel. Ah!” K smiled her gentle, ironic smile. “We’ve become a race of Tweedle-dees and dums, and the black crow, you know, is only ourselves.” I had not yet read Alice and so had no idea what she was talking about. I held my peace, attempting, for that day at least, not to badger her, as was my compulsion, with questions.

  My own childhood favourites had been Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. In K’s Peugeot I saw a time machine, a rocket to the future-present. But as we left the familiar green spaces of the countryside behind and approached the city, excitement ceded to anxiety, and anxiety to panic.

  “Back!” I barked. “Turn back! Back! Back!”

  “I’ll take you to the museum,” K cried, inspired, precipitating us around a hairpin curve and up a one-way street. “I’ve been told there are photographs of the city as it was before the wars. What a fool I was not to think of this earlier!” We sped past a bank fronted with green mirrors, and a municipal building of aluminum.

  I think now that had I awakened two decades earlier I would have been less shaken. Then I would have seen a wasteland, the port a ragged lip of rubble, the breakwater in collapse, the shards of ships stranded in dismal heaps along the beach, great mounds of muck thrown up from the deep belly of the sea. I would have seen the destruction of all that I had loved. But what I saw was worse because it denied memory. Nothing remained that I could recognize.

  K explained that if the city had survived the First War, the Second had destroyed it utterly. Machines had scraped the rubble from the blasted earth to create a smooth, uniform surface upon which the new city, reduced, or so it seemed, to minimal signs, and dominated by tragic forms K called “residential superblocks,” had been built by the very same industrialists who had made fortunes in the wars, producing shells and grenades and mustard gas in the First; and tanks and the packaging for tank parts and pharmaceuticals in the Second. K called this city “Amnesia.” When I said I longed to return to the spa’s charming ruins and the village of Paradis which – but for a television set which materialized grinning and winking each evening in the darkest corner of the café – remained unchanged, she said:

  “There’s not much left for those who long for Paradise! Soon all the cities of the world will look just like Amnesia!”

  The museum was a pyramid of cinder blocks badly stained by rain. We entered it by way of a diminishing funnel, which added to my feeling of unease, and by a brightly illuminated escalator which took us to the utmost peak of what proved to be a cone. K rolled me out upon a descending spiralling ramp; the pyramid’s inner structure was modelled on the towers of Babylon.

  I hated those curved, windowless walls, the felted silence; above all, I wondered about the spaces between the cone’s outer walls and the inside of the pyramid. That ambiguous void disturbed me so much that for many weeks after I obsessively drew little pictures of pyramids containing cones. The place still haunts my dreams even now; it makes its appearance as a necromantic mountain, and its lost spaces are my lost youth.

  As K wheeled me down a carpeted incline, I devoured the slices and fragments of my phantom city: the port, the fishing boats as they had been, the rugged coast, its gulls, its mist, its fishermen in slickers, and the charming streets; street-hawkers holding up dolls, and frying pans and freshly dipped candles, and freshly baked bread.

  “Look!” I cried. “Here’s Saint Peter’s fountain! And the barrister’s beyond – and K! The junk shop! The junk shop window!” She helped me to my feet and held my hand as I squinted at the wall, attempting to find meanings in that clotted fog.

  “If we had a glass,” she began, “but no – the window is too small and, besides, everything is muddled by the fountains spray.”

  I trembled with excitement and pointed to a precious image of the Snail and Shark’s façade.

  “The negatives printed back, back, BACKWARDS!” I managed to sputter.

  “Coffee black as Satan,” K read aloud, slowly deciphering the text. “What a wonderful Devil! These pictures are a gold mine, yes! But calm yourself, Liebling, pull yourself together. No need to make a spectacle of yourself.” I barked once in agreement, shrugged apologetically, then struck out at a label neatly pinned beneath a picture of the Snail and Shark’s front room titled: “The Galaxy.”

  “But – it’s not, not, NOT! The Galaxy!” I shouted, furious. “The Galax-ax-Ax! Galaxy was a tiny place,” I wept, “overcrowded with a little stage. The stage was dark” – I pushed my fists into my eyes, beginning to dream – “dark most of the time. But once in a great while there was a performance of some kind. Totor took me one Sunday afternoon when Rose was at a funeral.

  “There was a chanteuse, a tiny, golden-haired girl named Ti
na who wore nothing but a pair of paper wings and a pink leotard pinned with roses. She sang a song about heartbreak and kicked up her heels at the end of each stanza. Having never before seen tights I believed she had webbed toes. I heard the Cod’s wife say later that Tina was passée, but I thought her wonderful and for many months dreamed about her feet, her very pink skin, the rose blooming on her breasts. It was Maximinole who rent the mystery when he said that if Tina wore tights she also wore a wig! Tina was old! And I’d believed she was a child – not much older than myself!”

  We came to a second picture of the fountain – a close-up of Saint Peter capped with bird droppings. I recalled the priest’s filthy ankles as he lifted his skirts and splashed into the water to thrash the Saint into obedience. We saw pictures of the canneries, the women looking overworked and strained in their aprons weighty with oil. I wept to think that as I had slept all this had disappeared forever; that these people were for the most part dead, their bones baking in the earth. I had a dreadful vision then: I saw – rising from that place where the city of my childhood had been – a pyramid of skulls pointing to the sky’s unfathomable dome of blackest night; the world snatched and throttled in the dung-clotted fist of time.

  In profound crisis I cried out:

  “Odille! She’s here! Somewhere – I know she’s here.” And then: “There’s Rose! It’s Rose!” Together we squinted at the faded image, a market scene watermarked and creased. But was this Rose’s firm little figure sagging to the left beneath the irresistible weight of a very large basketed fish? Or was it someone else?

  “It is Rose,” I insisted, although unsure, for the woman was wearing clogs and Rose always wore shoes, not clogs “like Naked Ignorance!” No, I decided close to tears, it isn’t Rose.

  K was gazing at the pictures hungrily. Somewhere in that confusion of faces and figures, salt-stained and standing in shadow, or stooped and squinting in the sun, she might see Aristide Marquis. I dried my eyes on my sleeve, and together we examined the faces of the men; as out on the breakwater they sat together mending nets in the haze, or on the decks of fishing boats stood beside boiling cauldrons, their identities decomposing in steam or reduced to a smear as they danced in celebration on the beach.