CHAPTER
24
Olivier and I abandoned the Grand Hotel for the gardens: the rose garden, the poplar grove, the circular path, and the south-side oak which overlooked the gazebo and where I liked to sit with Olivier in my arms telling stories.
Olivier had grown not only smaller, but somewhat translucent, so that I had come to think of him less as a boy and more as an elf. Often looking into his eyes I surrendered to vertigo for there were compelling atmospheres and capricious weather to be read in those changeful irises threaded with azure and with umber. They recalled that small slab of marble the description of which so angered Maximinole. I still see it – the grotto convoluted, umbrageous and slick with moisture, the sea reflecting a sky heavy with mist and wheeling with birds. I can hear the waves sucking at the land’s edge; I can hear the parables, the fables of water, the elusive but lyrical weatherglass vocabularies of water.
In moments tending towards lucidity – and these were not many – I feared with an aching heart that I was dreaming Olivier, that he was only the purest essence of myself. But then he’d return with such seeming substance and renewed vigour that my wavering delusion would pick up just where it had begun to leave off.
The oak tree smelled of sap, the shit of insects and their corpses, and, because of the fountains and flowers nearby, of roses and sulphur. Perched like the noonday cipher in the broad, black hand of a steeple clock with Olivier on my knee, I could not help but think that if time had a smell it would be like this. For the first time in my life I sat out in the moonlight fearlessly and did not bathe, considering that I was washed each night by moonbeams. Stretched out in the deep grass or curled under rampant topiaries, it was the dew at the break of day which – falling from the leaves to my face – awakened me. I became well acquainted with several birds, certain spiders.
Figuebique could have plopped me in the nearest insane asylum had she wished, but the word was out that K was on her way back and so I was left alone. I suppose Figuebique hoped my accelerating dementia would justify her vandalous zeal; later I learned that the story had hit the press and indeed I have a vague recollection of hiding in a graveyard of shattered statuary as that ecstatic journalist roamed the gardens for hours calling my name.
K’s letters accumulated, unopened, beneath the door slot. The housekeeper, not daring to forgo her duties entirely, and feeling pity perhaps, left bread at the foot of a bust of Hermes each day and a covered dish. But prone to freakish mental oscillations, I was governed by a theory of mastication, the curative and purging powers of rose petals and oak leaves, and fed her food to the animals – fox, badger, and hedgehog – which still proliferated (all this having taken place prior to the construction of the high-rises overlooking the river, the shopping mall and highway).
Haunting the gardens, then, stooped so that my fingers scraped the ground as I lumbered hither and thither, barking at butterflies and bees, I, the Sandman, had become something of an ape. When I sat in the tree scratching myself, or nested in a heap of last autumn’s leaves, I justified my behaviour with thoughts such as these: The ape lives, just like the dreamer, in a state of moral suspension. Or: Running with the fingers dragging, the ape finds the nut.
Up there in the leaves it came to me that once war has destroyed all the cities of men we may well, return to the gardens and woods to leave behind all the tiresome concerns, apparatus, and misfortunes of Homo sapiens, sapiens, faber erectus. Having learned to cherish transparency over and above opacity, I, gazing at the sky, did not miss my black ceiling. The mastication of leaves and petals occupied most of my time, and the spectacle of dragonflies in aerial copulation.
Mastication and meditation. A mouthful and a mindful. I thought: What more do I need? Long hours did I consider the lives of men and monkeys and told Olivier – now so diminutive as to sit in the palm of my hand – about the inevitably tragic confrontation.
“The night Toujours-Là killed Charlie Dee,” I began, “Totor told me about a shipboard drama which took place in the 1880s. Small, red monkeys with golden manes and eyes of gold, and monkeys with thick, ringed tails, and noses the texture of licorice, and blond apes with long, sensitive fingers, and capable of smiling – were all kept in chains in the hold of a black and infamous ship aptly named the Nosferatu.
“The Nosferatu sailed from Sidney to Abijan, Le Havre and Amsterdam, and these creatures were intended for the zoos of Holland and Germany and Denmark and France. Somewhere in the middle of the sea they all sickened and died; their smoking corpses which smelled of charred forests and clotted blood were fed to sharks.
“One survived: a tiny, pink marmoset with white whiskers and a nervous tic. The captain kept her in his cabin where the beast’s shrill complaints kept the crew awake; the captain was a cruel man. The marmoset, which the crew had baptized with whisky, grew wild with despair. She lost all her fur from pure anxiety and then, driven to a fury, tore off her tormentor’s ear with her teeth. He had her hung from the mast-head but his wound was gangrenous and within hours he died of brain fever.
“And there’s another story, far stranger. A Dutch spinster lived alone in Amsterdam in a small, neat house built of purple bricks. She had no friends but lived in solitude conversing only with the baker and greengrocer. Once when after a week had passed neither merchant had seen her, they set off together in the evening to her house. When repeated knocking went unanswered they fetched a policeman who, fearing foul play, broke down the door.
“In the kitchen they saw that the table had been set for two: two cups, two saucers, and two spoons. In the bedroom they found the spinster dressed like a bride in a white satin gown and stretched out dead. A little monkey lay dead beside her. He was dressed like a groom in a tiny pair of striped silk pyjamas. Both the monkey and his bride were wearing wedding rings and both had died of poison.
“ ‘You see,’ Totor explained to me, ‘their love was impossible, but it was pure, I think, and somehow admirable.’
“ ‘Pure!’ Rose had bellowed, ‘Pure! Their love was Peruvious, Victor! And all your stories Peruvious, too! You only tell them to taunt me. Poor, tainted dove!’ She had crushed me to her breast. ‘Poor conscience. Poor ill-gotten angel!’
“But the saddest story belongs to the Marquis. He had once sailed to Malaysia on a cargo where a Chinese merchant had invited captain and crew to a feast. At a table constructed especially for such a repast, each guest was served the exposed brain of a living monkey. Aristide looked from his bloody bowl of severed bone in horror and down into the face of the tortured creature, its jaw locked by the same infernal mechanism which held the head in place. The monkey was weeping and the fur of its little face soaked with tears.”
I no longer know for how many days I had been sitting with Olivier on the black earth of the rose gardens pulling thorns from his feet and mine, all the while considering the infinitely possible shapes of biological, geological, and architectural structures – when I heard K’s sweet voice calling me through the trees. Like the leaves her voice rose and fell with each breath of wind.
“Nicolas,” she said when she found me, “please leave those bushes and come out. I’m home! And I’ve so much to tell you! I’ve some real dollars. We will get those leaks you’ve discovered in the attic fixed. I fear the entire roof needs to be seen to. . . .”
Although I was tremendously pleased and excited to see her, so excited that I began to bark, yet I held back and muttered (as she described it later) defensively:
“Olivier is here with me.” As if his being there prohibited me from leaving the protective, thorny branches.
“Ah, Nicolas,” she said, “there is no one here but you and I!” She considered for a moment before continuing: “Olivier is only a figment, dearest.”
Looking down I saw that in truth Olivier was already little more than a scattered puzzle of fractured light bouncing from leaf to leaf, and flower to flower. Before my eyes he was disintegrating. Soon all that was left of him was an odour of cla
y heated by the sun and a waxy shiver in the air.
I stood up very slowly and walked towards Doctor Kaiserstiege. As I approached her some subtle magic took hold, as if, by moving from the bushes to the path, I was no longer the helpless incarnation of an indecipherable secret, but a man shedding shadows with each step, setting forth on a voyage under the auspices of love. As if all K’s letters, and our conversations in the past, and even my dreams of her, had transformed her into more than my doctor and friend, but something like a limpid mirror.
I took her arm. She had grown fragile; I noticed that she walked with hesitation as if she feared falling.
“How festive the old place seems!” she said. “A regular fireworks display!” For the setting sun was striking the panes of all the windows and the Grand Hotel appeared to be burning. “A fitting setting for your Kingdom. When I arrived I saw you climbing down from a tree and so just dropped my bags at the entrance. I’ve not even peeped inside, Fröschlein; now you shall guide me! God knows I’ve looked forward to this!”
But I could only bark: “Doc! Doc! And sob and bark again.
All that summer and winter and deep into the following spring, K and I worked together to complete the revised edition of her book. A new edition was scheduled for the following winter, one in which I was to actively participate. Now the book includes my autobiography, from Rose’s kitchen to the time of my drowning, the transcripts of my sleeper’s babbling and those dreams I recall with clarity, the more pertinent aspects of the analysis, unorthodox as it was, and a detailed description of the Kingdom of d’Elir including maps and descriptive drawings.
The last week of August, Doctor Kaiserstiege wrote the final pages and the same week she had this dream: She saw three women, one young, one middle-aged, and one very old, holding a bright thread of glass which, as she looked on, began to vibrate wildly. K recognized the Fates and knew that the thread was her own heart. At breakfast – and we were in the garden – K said:
“Nicolas, I know I shall join the Marquis soon beside that deepest fountain of all, which is Death. Perhaps he will come to greet me. Perhaps he will be followed by the others: Totor, Rose, Toujours-Là, your father, Odille, and even Thomas. Then their faces (and their secrets) will be known to me at last, illuminated, I imagine, by Bottlenose’s wonderful lantern.”
That night, she read me the ending she had written for our book, its final page:
“The Sandman created a dream-child which was his way of creating a self and a dream-world because he was a stranger to this one. Like Troy all his cities were built upon ruins, and just as the historical evidence to his trauma had been deeply buried, so were d’Elir’s foundations deep. Despite the zeal with which the village wives scoured and scrubbed (and as soap and water were not enough, they used chemical paint strippers and even brought in an electric sander), traces of subterranean vaults and vestigal walls remain etched in the surface of the parquet – very like the paths termites leave beneath the bark of fallen trees.
“I wish I had seen the Kingdom of d’Elir, its aquariums, tar pits, and gasworks; its porous cliffs and smugglers’ paths, the short, square towers and marble thresholds of its ideal Egypt. I wish I had seen Mondstato, its dim monastic cells, and read its chronicles; seen the metaphorical reconstruction of Babylon and Venice and Crete; that third-floor ocean. Above all I wish I had seen Eden.
“By bringing together disparate times and places, the Sandman had dissolved History. To reconstruct his own story he began by building Eden – a metaphor of the world-self as it might have been, had it been ruled by love. Trauma violated his infancy’s garden; I should add: his infancy’s right to Paradise. The Kingdom of d’Elir and its garden satisfied a nostalgia for wholeness and the need for new beginnings. Like all myths it illuminated a greater reality. This Utopian vision of the world was also an unintentional metaphor of the universe as inexhaustible mystery and duplicity. Beneath that elaborate (Arc)hitectural and botanical delirium lay coiled (one of the Sandman’s favourite words) his own Gothic memory: Odille, the “Virtuous Abyss” which informed his life. This d’Elirium was ruled by ambiguity.
But as beautiful as d’Elir must have been, I imagine it was also a pathetic place because it was, after all, artificial: the universe reduced to sign, the world as book; an isolated object too small, too illusory for its own inventor to enter.
“Is this God’s dilemma, I wonder, to have created a world he cannot participate in because it is too small for his aspirations? In the end the creators of d’Elir can only be confronted by the unattainable nature of all worlds – real and imagined; the intrinsically enigmatic character of everything: real, imagined, and dreamed.”
The empty spa is mine alone in which to dwell in animated quietude. I have become a curator of silence, of fountains, and a grave.
Recently the eminent Doctors Tsukuri Nikki and Jiroku Nikki of Japan’s Institute for Psychoanalytic Study came to pay their respects. Twin brothers, they each carried a white chrysanthemum. As they stood beside K’s grave, Doctor Tsukuri Nikki said:
“Our Mistress’s boat
ignites with flowers.
The brightness lasts.”
They expressed a desire to question me, “Venerable Sandman,” but I declined explaining that everything they could possibly wish to know is already in the book. They apologized profusely, and, bowing in a charming way they had, took their leave of me.
What I said is not true; no book can contain an entire life, nor explore an entire brain. That exploration is my last, my only pleasure, and I indulge it all the time. My only other interests are tinkering with the motors of the fountains, raking the pebble paths (the Nikki brothers claimed they had seen no finer in the celebrated dry gardens of Kyoto and promised to send me photographs), and gardening.
If K were here I’d tell her: “I am a floater.” And she would say: “A floater, Fröschlein, what on earth do you mean?”
I mean this: I am only interested in the allusive messages of my dreams, the innumerable spaces of my memories, and the perpetual wanderings of my thoughts.
One gazebo remains standing in the spa’s south garden. I come here to reflect. Sometimes I indulge myself in thoughts of love. Oh, not for myself, but I imagine Venus Kaiserstiege as she must have been. When I think of her embracing Aristide Marquis there beneath the trees, I blush, not a little ashamed of my indiscretion. Yet it is a kind of worship, this reverie, and a longing for something I never had.
This evening as I sat watching the moon rise steadily up from the horizon I recalled an incident, long forgotten, which took place at the Snail and Shark. I had heard from Rose that the barkeep indulged in a “shamefaced passion for trash.” This, Toujours-Là explained to me, referred to his interest in human biology. It was generally known that the barkeep begged from the hospital anything they would give: old uncared-for specimens in need of labels or alcohol.
One afternoon, when we had been left alone, Toujours-Là told me to take a look behind the bar. There in the gloom under the counter among the bottles of the more expensive liqueurs was kept a fetal monster about eight inches high. Its oddly massive head covered with soft, red down sprung directly from its shoulders; the little person had no neck. Mounted in its jar upon a glass cross, it grasped the horizontal bar with both its fists, and knees and body bent, appeared to be riding a wheelless bicycle.
It occurs to me now that, although the jar was undoubtedly smashed during the Second War, and the scraps of flesh reduced to dust at last, it still inhabits the keeping medium of my mind. That the Sandman is very like the floating monster, both of the world and not of the world, and – as long as I can hold fast the glass wand of reverie – somehow eternal.
FICTION: AMERICAN
BARNES, DJUNA. Ladies Almanack
9.95
BARNES, DJUNA. Ryder
11.95
BARTH, JOHN. LETTERS
14.95
BARTH, JOHN. Sabbatical
12.95
BOYLAN, RO
GER. Killoyle
13.95
CHARYN, JEROME. The Tar Baby
10.95
COLEMAN, EMILY. The Shutter of Snow
12.95
COOVER, ROBERT. A Night at the Movies
11.95
CRAWFORD, STANLEY. Some Instructions to my Wife
11.95
DAITCH, SUSAN. Storytown
12.95
DOWELL, COLEMAN. Island People
12.95
DOWELL, COLEMAN. Too Much Flesh and Jabez
9.95
DUCORNET, RIKKI. The Fountains of Neptune
12.95
DUCORNET, RIKKI. The Jade Cabinet
9.95
DUCORNET, RIKKI. Phosphor in Dreamland
12.95
DUCORNET, RIKKI. The Stain
11.95
EASTLAKE, WILLIAM. Lyric of the Circle Heart
14.95
FAIRBANKS, LAUREN. Sister Carrie
10.95
GASS, WILLIAM H. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
9.95
GORDON, KAREN ELIZABETH. The Red Shoes
12.95
KURYLUK, EWA. Century 21
12.95
MARKSON, DAVID. Reader’s Block
12.95
MARKSON, DAVID. Springer’s Progress
9.95
MARKSON, DAVID. Wittgenstein’s Mistress
11.95
MASO, CAROLE. AVA
12.95
The Fountains of Neptune (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) Page 19