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

by Ducornet, Rikki

  The next day I was not surprised to see the spoor of human footsteps in the dust of all the rooms. In a turquoise chamber painted with dolphins, I found a ghostly rose which fell to pieces in my hand. The faded petals had a fragrance I recognized; the rose came from K’s west garden. And when I crushed the petals and held them to my lips, I heard, somewhere near the ceiling, the voice of a soprano K once described who – in an ebony bed sold at Drouot for a tenth its value – had entertained the spa’s handsomest clients, male and female, and who had insisted upon fresh rose petals in her bed, her wine, her bath. That derelict voice struggled to a shrill complaint before dissolving.

  Then came a half-century of sound – dead marches, lullabies, the thunder of boots and distant bombings, of bodies colliding into furniture, of waltzes wafting up from the ballroom, of kisses, of doors slamming in the wind, of feeble ballads of wheelchairs in need of oil; and glimpses of the lovers embracing beneath a mantle of dust in a room smelling of steaming towels and broccoli. Just as my exasperated senses had been stretched to the point of snapping, the noises stilled to silence and the smells were only those of my lunch – a pot-au-feu of beef and marrow bones and cabbage, heightened, as I had requested, with one cloved onion (in Rose’s manner). I padded down the halls in my felted slippers and entered a room which, until then, had kept its secrets to itself and where

  I found a small, very worn toy monkey, apparently abandoned for many years and dressed in a soiled blue jacket.

  It is uncanny, K wrote to me later, how animals intrude upon our lives, imparting a symbolic potency. As I examined the doll, I could not help but think of those other apes who had so informed my life. Crouching there I felt that the very atmosphere curded with possibility, that eager spirits were conspiring to give nothing a palpable consistency. Again I heard a hammering and saw, just beyond the door, a vitrification of the air, a calcification of the vision – the cobbler so material he could have bled, his copper studs on fire in the dark, his hammer making sparks in the mealy air. When he looked at me, when his abrasive eyes met mine, I knew I was seeing Toujours-Là, that the cobbler and the ship’s carpenter were one. I supposed such queer marriages common in Hell.

  I stood and stared as the cobbler-carpenter disintegrated into granulets the size of poppy seeds, as the puissant weight of the present pulverized him and his hammer, as his eyes flaked into blackness, his studs melted down to stippled shadows on the floor. But when he crumbled into the last vestiges of sabulous stuff and the room was pervaded, particle by particle, with a brighter moonlight, I saw – squatting in the centre of the room and staring back at me – a living child. His skin was white as milk and his hair yellow as flame. He was barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of short, threadbare trousers, and the room was permeated with the earthy smell of his naked skin. When he reached out his hand, I knew that the little toy ape I held was his.

  I have been hallucinating, I wrote to K, but shall no longer. As it turns out the spa is haunted by a very real little boy. I’ve only glimpsed him, but expect to see more of him. By the way, the night you left I had the strangest dream. Here it is as promised:

  I am sitting alone in a darkened theatre facing the stage. The curtains are black velvet and painted with silver moons. They open to reveal a gigantic female, painted head to foot in bronze paint and carrying a bronze porringer – like a banquet-sized soup tureen. She bows to me and opening her mouth wide, vomits a torrent of blood. The porringer overflows at once; still she vomits. The blood gushes from her mouth as from a fathomless geyser.

  I hear two voices behind me. Someone asks: “What is this play called?”

  Someone answers: “History.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Today I received a telegram from K. It reads:

  A STRANGE DREAM INDEED, NICOLAS. HIS STORY IS, EVIDENTLY, YOUR OWN.

  It was brought to me with my tea, in bed. I have been ill all week. Fortunately the housekeeper prepares my supper and my lunch. I suppose I look odd in my outdated flannel bedclothes (the spa has a wealth of such things), and wool scarf, despite the warm weather – for spring has come to the Loire Valley at last – although I am too miserable to care.

  This evening my head has cleared so that I may read – one of my greatest pleasures. Not only do books nourish my dreams, they engender them. I return to The Fountains of Neptune and the chapter which discusses the “Virtuous Abyss,” the gnostic text which K chose to illuminate my case. Inscribed on a thin blade of silver, it was uncovered in the sands of Syria in 1939, and published in French translation one decade later.

  In her Preface, K explains that as a practising psychoanalyst I am interested in mythical cosmologies because they suffuse the hidden landscapes of the mind with light. She continues: Curiosity – perhaps our most transcendent quality – is kindled by our need to discover our origins. Looking for the “One Root” we are inevitably confronted with the “Forked Root.” That is to say: the dual nature of the world. We pay for this knowledge with anguish. The purpose of myth, therefore, is both to reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and to disguise it, to mask God’s forked tongue. From The Virtuous Abyss, K quotes:

  Mistress of Archons, She

  delivers the world

  from the filthy waters and

  animates the mud.

  She is the colour

  of water, the

  immortal, the immense

  Humid Element.

  She is Incorruptible Light.

  Violent agitation

  Power, Chaos, and Plenitude.

  The One Perfect Letter.

  The Virtuous Abyss.

  One might say, writes K, referring to my own mother, that the Virtuous Abyss is Odille, all our Odilles: Goddess, Mother, Temptress. Her essential quality is ambiguity.

  It is because the Sandman’s story, the story of a child who has seen by his mother’s fault his father’s face swallowed by the sea, that we may begin to understand a cosmology in which truth – which is the only “incorruptible light” – can exist in an abyss and so render it “virtuous.” The ancient text in turn informs the Sandman’s story, and gives it particular resonance. As was celebrated the Virtuous Abyss, so it was sung of Odille:

  She was our sea of trouble

  our water of life;

  all our dirty weather;

  everyman’s wife.

  According to gnostic tradition, the archons asked Adam:

  “Where have you come from?” The quest for knowledge is first and foremost the quest for self-knowledge.

  When the Sandman fell into his own reflection, he was attempting to answer the archons’ question. As we have seen, for the Sandman, it is water that holds the answer. Each reflection is a triumvirate: Vouivre, Father, Self. The metaphor could not be better: the Virtuous Abyss is no other than the female aspect of Neptune. She who “animates the mud” is mother of us all.

  Ill health is the perfect excuse for reverie. As I lie as vulnerable as a newborn babe my mind ignites. I dream about the blond boy seen in a sudden blaze of sunlight, the motes of the air orbiting his head like the scattered sequences of planetary rings.

  I offered him the toy monkey. He seized it somewhat savagely. I asked him his name. His mouth opened as if to form the letter o, but either he was too shy to speak or surprise had deafened me. His name remains a mystery.

  As does the name of God, K writes. Perhaps the boy is dumb? Why wasn’t he in school?

  And if Paradis claims two lunatics?

  I do hope, K writes, for your sake, that he will turn out to be both voluble and sane.

  I fantasize that, having learned of my illness, the boy appears in my room with little gifts: a pressed moth, a cuckoo’s egg, an orange. To thank him I tell him stories, the stories Totor, Toujours-Là, and the Marquis told me. And my own stories – don’t I have fifty years of dreams to tell? I pretend he is standing in the hall just outside my door listening. Sometimes I swear I can hear his soft breathing in the l
ate afternoon stillness. Yes! He is here. My nostrils flare with the fresh leaf-smell of his skin. . . .

  Tonight the evening sky is spectacular. I leave my room to sit beside a fountain in a garden, which fades before my eyes, and I see the boats of the stars pierced by arrows of fire. A mist informs the air like a text written in an ink of sulphur; a calciferous haze clings to the skin of the world. The play of fountains feeds it and the terraced pools of naturally steaming water. One day the spa, steeped in its own juices, will lithify. Its pillars will rise like fossil trees in a lunar air.

  Looking toward the topiaries I think I see the shadowy form of Figuebique. I blink, and then, looking again, it is gone. Unsettled, I return to the kitchen to paint paper flags.

  Later, padding down the halls in my slippers, I enter into a sudden climate of exhilaration. Irrational as it may seem, I feel that a discovery of magnitude is about to present itself. Familiarity cannot domesticate these rooms for they will always be mysterious – after all, these are the bare skeletons of rooms. (And it is mine to clothe them with flesh and to wire the skulls for speech!)

  The turquoise room, that chamber of special significance – for it is here that I first saw the boy – draws me to itself. As I walk to it I sense that it is waiting for me. When I push the door open it sighs. In the dim light of a rising moon, traced upon the floor in coloured chalk, a landscape is revealed.

  It is a peninsula and it covers two-thirds of the floor. It comprises yellow beaches, splintered promontories, an expanse of desert starred with seas of salt, a tropical forest with elephant paths, and at the tip, a city, its maze of streets and towers protected by an outer wall, an inner wall, and a moat. Mountains as cusped as the jaws of crocodiles rise where the peninsula touches the wall.

  Falling to my knees I squint at the floor. Along the shoreline I see words. They have been badly smeared, but upon reflection I am able to decipher:

  Now I spend all my waking hours collecting signs, fragments of the boy’s passing and clues to his games or, rather, the One Game, as it appears to be. I find the next clue on the ballroom floor – a diagram drawn in coloured chalk one metre high – and, because it has been almost entirely wiped away, almost impossible to decipher. It appears to have been a laddered graph, or species of family tree, consisting of rectangles of various sizes and a curious network of black arrows. The whole had been drawn with great care only to be hastily erased. Perhaps the boy was made suddenly aware of my proximity as I, in my morbid need to wander, shuffled from room to room? Standing over it I get the feeling of being on the edge of something unattainable, a valley of diamonds that can be reached only by eagles.

  Late this afternoon, I write to K, I looked in on the turquoise room. Something important is happening to me. I see the chalked peninsula with clarity; its sight quickens me. I am enchanted hy the child and his play. I long to uncover the mystery of the barely discernible, yet carefully traced ladder of laws or mythological chart – whatever it may be.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Sometimes I walk with my face to the ground contemplating the sand in the path, and sometimes I see small fossils – tiny sea urchins, sand dollars the size of tacks, the obsidian gleam of a shark’s tooth. Or I look to the sky. At night I contemplate the moon. It always takes me back to Toujours-Là; it always takes me back to Odille.

  Once when the moon’s full face illuminated the paths of sand I entertained this reverie: I imagined a planet where languages grow as spontaneously as crystals; I pretended that the fossils – so perfectly round – were the seeds of new moons.

  Today at noon the Heavens are exceptional. Both spheres are visible and the arc of the sky shines hard and bright like polished metal. I suppose I look foolish ambling along with my eyes glued to the sky; I suppose I look like something a brilliant boy might point a finger at. I know how odd I am, skinny and stooped, bleary-eyed, with a red beak. But as I walk along, my attention is captured by a thickening line traced deeply in the sand. Within the garden path a smaller path appears. It leads to the poplar grove.

  At the centre of a circle of trees, bright in the noonday sun, stands a small pyramid of sand. And at the summit, sitting on a smooth, white stone (I recognize a marble flagstone from the spa’s east terrace) sits the toy ape dressed in a cape of silver paper. Scratched into the sand at the foot of the pyramid are these words:

  In the stillness of the afternoon I stand in deep contemplation of the monkey on the mound. With nostalgia I recall my childhood companion: Thingummy Ma’Hoot – that delphic crockery which, secreted beneath my pillow, gave direction to my thoughts. I remember how, beneath Thingummy’s gaze,

  I caressed Odille’s belly with one thumb and with the other, Erzulie. I did this so long and so often that soon my mother’s belly was as worn away as her face.

  I stand thus for what must be a very long time. When the sound of footsteps tears at the skin of my dream, the sun is low on the horizon. I turn just in time to see the boy running through the trees towards the road to Paradis. He is so close I can hear chalk dancing like bones in his pocket.

  “Wait!” I cry. “Please wait!” He ignores me. It is likely he has heard strange things about me. My barking, for instance, my hermit ways, my more than peculiar history. Surely he wants to play, and yet he doesn’t dare. As he runs, I feel my thick dreamer’s blood hasten. Down, through the cypress valley, down the distant, wooded road, which tugs and bends beyond the northwest willows all in leaf, golden in the evening, I follow him. He tugs at my heart, this boy. Would that I were what he is. Would that I were he! Running towards some childish adventure, captivated by the game. Whatever the rules are, no matter how bizarre, I am prepared to play. If he is “Decagon of the Highest Magnitude” (that, too, I saw scrawled in chalk somewhere), I’ll gladly accept a lower station, a “lesser magnitude.” The boy! I have lost him.

  For the first time I find myself alone in the village. I walk past the houses, their curtains drawn against the street, and smell leek soup and the heavenly odour of fruit stewing with cinnamon. The streets are nearly empty but for a girl skipping home with a stick of bread, a man ringing past on a bicycle. Despite the hour, I see that the bazar is not closed; the front door painted green, and, repaired with a piece of linoleum, it is held open with a gutted chair. After these weeks alone in the spa’s barren stillness I am tempted to take a look inside. The proprietress is not a cordial woman. Thick, beetle-browed, asthmatic, she sits preying upon her knitting. She is partially concealed by a mesh bag of sponges, which hangs suspended from the ceiling.

  I wander past mite jet buttons, survivors of another era, spools of thread laid out in boxes like collections of brilliant scarabs, small, black paper packages of gold-eyed needles. I finger these and realize with a thrill that their manufacture has not changed since Rose’s time. The bazar, spangled and shining, could have been chloroformed fifty years ago and kept ever since under glass. Watercolour boxes and glue like syrup in rubber-tipped bottles. Boxes of flyweight stars. Games of “families,” and sticky-backed images of animals. I crave the bazar’s entire inventory. Wire crayfish traps. Boxes of copper screws. Baby dolls the size of thumbs and – hanging in clusters like grapes in cellophane – gnome gorillas with scarlet lips, very white teeth, and movable arms and legs. For an instant a beam of light slides in the door and sets the apes on fire.

  I steal a look at the bazar’s proprietress. She appears to have forgotten all about me. I take a gorilla down from its hook and examine it attentively.

  It is a cheap, plastic toy, but nicely made, the fur well moulded, the expression interesting. It looks intelligent – engaging and formidable all at once. I scrutinize another. Painted in haste, his eyes are ever so slightly crossed. Another shares a marked kinship to Charlie Dee. I want them all. K, I wonder to myself, is it foolish, is it folly, for a grown man to want to play with toys? I imagine K’s answer: But, Nicolas! You’ve had no time to play. Enjoy yourself: If God exists, He is a child at play.

&n
bsp; “Thong Hong.” The hag startles me.

  “King Kong?”

  “Hong Thong.”

  “My son!” I foolishly exclaim. Surely she knows who I am, and everyone knows I have no family. But she shows no surprise and it occurs to me that my life is of no interest to her. Yet I blush furiously and am shaken by a small fit of barely contained barking. What compels me to justify myself?

  “Tholdiers?” With a thick knitting-needle she points to a sooty box.

  “No,” I say with authority. “I’ll take the apes.”

  “All thapes?” Her eyes shine, not with curiosity but greed. When she smiles I realize that she has a cleft palate. I think: What an ass I am! She just wants to make a sale. I nod. Clucking her contentment, she clears the counter for my purchases.

  I need other things. Scissors. Glue. Coloured paper. To the sound of her heavy breathing I root around the place. Soon I forget her entirely. Merchandise rises to either side of me like the banks of Bottlenose’s enchanted river. In ecstasy I steam down the aisles. String. Those spools of thread. Thimbles. “Order and system are necessary in everything.” I reach for a feather duster.

  Upon returning home I light a gas burner in the kitchen and holding the apes one by one high above the flames with the help of a long-handled meat-fork, heat them gently until they are malleable. I transform them so that each should have a distinct personality. I flatten foreheads, cheeks, distend legs. It is a tricky business and a leg is atrophied in the process. I scorch my fingers. I do this with the windows open because the heated plastic gives off a dreadful stench.

  The bazar had provided small spray cans of bicycle paint. Taking pains, I spray each ape with a veil of colour. I give one a bluish tint, a magenta belly to another. Inspiration dictates that an “Ape of Magnitude” should be white, blackened by the moon with sombre spots. I paint his buttocks gold so that when he bends over, lesser apes will be dazzled. I give him a thimble helmet crowned with the dusters finest feather. I make boots with thread of many colours, and silver-foil belts, and capes of stars. I give some apes wings; they look like the archons of a gnostic manuscript; I give each ape a gilded split-pea amulet to hold.