Now that we come to see eye-to-eye regarding Jonathan’s education, I am pleased to tell you more about the planned field trip this summer. As I mentioned to you, Jonathan has been selected to accompany our anthropology instructor to New England, where he will assist in retrieving and cataloguing artefacts for eventual display in our library. He will take the Second Oath while he is there, and the temple will benefit from a fresh bloodline. The College will, of course, cover all of his expenses while he is away. Please ensure that Jonathan’s passport is in order. It would be a shame if he were to miss out on an opportunity like this.
I fully expect Jonathan will surpass all of our expectations, and he will almost certainly be in good enough health to return to his studies in September.
In closing, I am passing along our college physician’s recommendation that you rest as much as possible. He said that the headaches and dizzy spells will fade quickly, and advised that you should not be alarmed about any memory loss. I trust you will be feeling better soon.
Sincerely,
Edwin Marsh
P.S. I am inclined to agree with you that Mr. Tilsley’s death was unfortunate, but not unexpected. Given the quality and content of his writings, one must wonder about his mental state, and the kind of audience he attracted. Nevertheless, the reporter exercised poor judgment in speculating how Mr. Tilsley’s “twisted and mummified” remains could have been stuffed into his twelve-inch wide chimney. I must write to the Toronto Star in protest; young minds should not be exposed to such sensationalism.
fin de siècle
GEMMA FILES
He had very little interest in life, and was full of crepuscular dreams, religious images, sickness, and suffering; but he hid those deep-seated wounds beneath an elegant exterior. . . . The walls of his soul were so thin that a strange light shone through them that was not of this world.
—Camille Mauclair
1909, Bruges, Belgium. The studio is mapped in flat, watery light, which seeps, unchecked, through warped glass windows to silver the ceiling, the walls, the floor. Gustave Knauff can barely gather enough strength to draw the blinds, or open them farther. His head is already full of absinthe-hangover, that toothache want and pull which settles a puke-green filter over everything within reach. Fumes rise from an open paint box. In front of him, the latest canvas sulks, unfinished.
In the corner, meanwhile, his family’s dreadful guardian angel goes on with “her” endless card-game: Shuffling them, laying them, turning them back up, red and black, and red-black-red. Gustave tries his best not to look her way as she does so—in fact, ever—but the noise they make (soft, papery, repetitious) is intoxicating, very nearly unbearable. It calls to him, a degenerate gambler’s siren-song, made somehow even more naturally seductive in juxtaposition with the angel’s supremely unnatural pictogram rush of no-voice, laid lightly overtop—
Come, Dame Knauff’s seventh son, can we not be friends just once more, before I take my leave? Sit down, let me deal you in. Drink deep. Win back your life.
“I won’t,” he says, out loud.
Ah, then. You must suit yourself, I suppose.
The angel sits erect, posture perfect, gloved right hand neatly folded while her bare left hand skims restlessly back and forth. Though illusory, her bottle-green dress strikes the faultless height of fashion, perfectly a la mode. Her veil, which hangs opaque from hat-brim to breast, is just a shade or so lighter—slightly iridescent, with poisonous blue tints to it; the same ones which inform a corpse-fly’s back, or a peacock-feather’s fringe.
Our very own Peacock Angel, Gustave thinks. But no—his mother would frown to hear him make such a blasphemous comparison. This phantom is only a kissing cousin of that particular principality, a mere forerunner of the true Angel to come. The nails on her bare hand are hooked and black, like cormorant’s beaks; they carve slight scratches on the cards’ faces wherever they touch, barely perceptible ghost-weals. And though he was raised almost from babyhood knowing her name, adding it always to his backwards midnight prayers, he has yet, even now, to see her naked face. . . .
(Not, to be sure, that he has ever actually wanted to.)
Ma’ashith, once an archangel of punishment, who announces the deaths of children; Ma’ashith, “sister” to Af, to Kesef, to Hemah, to Meshabber—to wrath and destruction, human mortality, animal cruelty. Who prefers always to appear in female form, though (like all her kind) she exists far beyond the boundaries of what Gustave and his ilk would call either sex, or pity.
An excerpt from Strange Provenance: Lost Works of the Fin de Siècle, by Ellin Pataky-Hemsworth (2002, Millipede Press, Connaught Trust Legacy Library copy):
One of the most mysterious figures of late Decadence must surely be Gustave Knauff, who left behind little except a tantalizing series of lacunae. We have no clear idea where or when he was born, where he studied, or even what he looked like (though some sources hold that the faceless, blurred background figure sitting next to a veiled woman playing solitaire in the unfinished piece “Au Café Brumaire,” by Jan Toorop protégé Degouve de Nuncques, might—possibly—have been meant to be him). Even Knauff’s sold works, all few and far between, seem to have met similarly obscure fates. We are left, instead, with reactions to the paintings rather than the paintings themselves, as here—
Saw also the third panel from Knauff’s “Hymnes de Paon,” finally complete, before it was removed from the exhibition at Rouen, after great public outcry . . . a morbid and dreadful picture painted in hues of luminous decay, most of it various cold shades of lilac tinged with moonlit white, with a little lettuce-green mixed with milk for sheen. I would give much never to have seen it at all, particularly so because in spite of the revulsion this painting aroused in me when I stood in front of it, I cannot help feeling a certain attraction to it—sick, strange, and growing with each passing day—now that I am safely far away.
—J.K. Huysmans, 1903
By collating such “rave reviews,” we confirm that Knauff’s most infamous—and thus sorely-missed—work was undeniably the legendary “Black Annunciation” (1907?). According to Odilon Rédon, who devoted a page of his unpublished memoirs to the painting, “[t]his joyful and polluting blasphemy performs the most holy service of all unholy creations, placing the logic of the visible firmly at the service of the invisible. I saw it only once, and it has informed my dreams ever since . . .”
In 1869, the angel tells him, not looking up from her spread, three children were playing in a meadow near Alton, in Hampshire, when a local clerk approached them—a young man of great respectability, though his father was a known maniac, and he himself was subject to depressive fits.
“Don’t speak to me, angel. I beg you.”
But she does not seem to hear him. Simply deals another card, this one’s face is all black, with no visible design on it at all—how his heart clutches, to see it so!—and goes on:
This clerk gave the children a ha’penny each, and asked one of them—a little girl—to walk with him in the woods nearby. This she agreed to, gladly. Then, after some time had passed, the girl’s mother began to worry; she sent her husband to town to gather young men, for a search. And later, much later, at the edge of yet another field . . .
Gustave has heard this story before, many times; he shuts his eyes and shakes his head, as if to clear it. But feels absinthe-hunger drive a metaphorical spike deep through the orbit of one eye at the same instant, clean and pure as new grass: dig it deep, twist it, corkscrew-crooked. Leave it there to sting.
“Did you hear what I said?” he forces himself to ask, angrily.
The angel’s arms are discreetly fringed with oblong feathers, pasteboard-stiff; she lets them rise and fall at once, a body-long shrug, with much the same thrum and patter of her game. Because: Yes, they could simply be cards, Gustave thinks, absently, his eyes starting to burn. Plucked and played, then replaced without me seeing it; simple sleight of hand. Like H
oudini. Nothing so very worship-worthy at all . . .
Oh, certainly, the angel replies, for all he has not spoken aloud. But perhaps I do not even address you—have you never considered that? Perhaps I talk merely for my own pleasure, because the sound of my own voice amuses me.
“Then I won’t listen,” Gustave says, and busies himself by rummaging in his paint box. At the moment, the canvas is a shapeless morass of purple and violet, with only a wash of black here and there, taming the chaos enough to suggest vague shapes: houses, boats, a stairway leading downward. A few odd dabs of acid Indian yellow to suggest gaslights flickering from the nearest bridge-side, while potentially fatal smears of Emerald Green (a deadly poison) show where the river’s current surfaces, undertow drag and all. As Rodenbach puts it: The pale water, which goes away along paths of silence . . .
The angel shrugs again, a literary avalanche. The detail we are never allowed to hear of, in any case, she continues, conversationally, is exactly what this young man did with the one thing he took from her body, after he had torn the rest of it apart and left it scattered across the grass like the Aztec moon-goddess Coyotlaxqui—limb from limb, a last shred of sinew letting one plump leg gape wide, to show the red hole between. This item, slack and hairless, he put in a box tied with satin ribbons, originally meant for chocolates, and kept under his bed. Turning over a new card, with a delicate flick: Until it began to smell, that is.
Gustave’s hand trembles, still reaching for the green. “You will not make me think of such things!”
I doubt I could make you do anything, Knauff’s son. Yet you do think of them, nevertheless. You are thinking of them now.
Gustave shivers. Outside, the waters of Bruges-la-Morte flow by, pulling drowned prostitutes from the river’s scummy bottom—Rodenbach’s dead city, the new Ys, criss-crossed by canals and abandoned to its fate. He came here two years ago, to escape everything . . . but mainly his family, their cultish ways, their insane and secret schemes, their inevitable vengeance for the slights he had already given them. Or a rustling footstep and a flash of green behind him in the dark, as she grew ever closer.
He knows now that the final stage of his journey began three weeks earlier, when—while blunting cadmium red with a dilution of lampblack—he thought he smelled something burning, and glanced up just in time to catch the mirror above his wash-stand gaping open like a lidless silver eye. But it was not until he came home late the next morning, reeking of sweat and aniseed, that he knew his mother’s immaterial spies must have truly found him at last; not until the landlord called out cheerfully to him as he went by, in both of Bruges’ official languages:
“Gut’ tag, m’sieu. Did she find you yet, your friend?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ton jolie copine la, in her veil, bien sûr—eine Engel-frau, mein herr! Or so my daughter tells me. She saw her coming up the back stairs, all en verte, like the Green Fairy herself.” A sly wink: “And we all know how devotedly you favour the Fairy, Herr Knauff. . . .”
When he climbed up the narrow stairs, he could see the landlord’s daughter sitting in the window above him, combing her hair (blonde, limp, in ringlets) and grinning a gap-toothed smile, with her skirt hiked to the knees. He thought her to be ten or eleven years of age, baby-fat and chestless, though her dresses looked to be cut-down versions of ones the landlord’s long-dead wife might once have worn, thus tending to gape immodestly. He remembered then how he had once heard her announce to playfellows that when she was older, she would go far away to model for artists like the mysterious Herr Knauff—perhaps to Paris, that wickedest of places, where she would pose without her underthings and be paid with jewels and sweets. . . .
And inside he had found the angel, waiting for him. Saying only, mildly: That girl likes you a great deal, Dame Knauff’s son. There are many ways you could take advantage of her affections, if you chose to.
Three weeks ago, only that. He could have run farther, he supposes, given the inclination—or the money.
Yet here he is, still. And she, his angel.
On the low wooden table at which the angel sits, her latest run of cards is plucked up, tucked away. Another appears to take its place, almost immediately—seven pasteboard faces blinking up at him, black-red-black, red, black. Her claw-nails now make a noise like picks scraping across salt, leaving visible tears in their wake.
Immediately, Gustave feels that red impulse he now seems to spend so much of his waking life fighting, rise in him like fumes, lightening his head. His stomach swims, and he has to brace against the easel for support, making it creak beneath his weight. The desire for absinthe is a fist to his face, a broken stick in his throat.
Oh God, my family’s most ancient enemy, please tell me quickly, before she does: How will this all end?
From Strange Provenance, Pataky-Hemsworth:
Supposedly even more disturbing than Leon Frederic’s “Le Torrent” (part of his own triptych, entitled “Tout est Mort”), which shows an entire mountain valley choked with dead, naked children splayed in pedophile-pornographic poses, what Knauff’s “Annunciation” appears to have been blaspheming against was both the Gospel story of the Slaughter of the Innocents—the massacre of a whole generation of Jewish infants, ordered slain by King Herod because they were born on the same day as Jesus Christ, in order to make sure none of them would become a Messiah powerful enough to displace or punish him—and the Annunciation itself . . . the exact moment when the Archangel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that she had been chosen to bear God’s son.
From Rédon’s further description of the “Annunciation.”
A sort of semi-monastic diablerie in a landscape inhabited by flowing, undulating, vomitory spectres, like a tidal wave of leeches. The whole background looks shrouded in gauze. The foreground is occupied by a heap of dead children, some of whose throats are still being ritualistically cut by figures in copes and cassocks; these ecclesiastical executioners seem half-lapidified, weighed down by gold and jewels, both sacred and profane. . . In the middle, enthroned on a chair made from bones, sits an equally childish figure—the Virgin—whose flower-soft eyes roll back in apparent rapture as she listens to the figure whispering poison into her ear, a veiled hermaphrodite in a bottle-green robe, caught in the act of placing a winged mantle made from peacock feathers onto the Virgin’s shoulders. A horrible halo, black and crackling with arcane energies, connects them both. . . .
Regard the Virgin. Is there, in Art, anything more beautiful and terrible than her visage, especially were it to have been copied from life? Beneath the horizontal immobility of the long eyebrows, under languid Hindu lids, her gaze is laden with dreams and death. The mouth is tinged with just a hint of blood . . . she is silent, rigid, both despoiler and despoiled. Her white eucharistic flesh, framed by plaited viper tresses, is marked with an irreparable kiss. Her folded hands cup her own belly, delicately heralding a spectacle of the future . . . surely some unborn monster, perhaps even that Beast foretold, which cannot possibly be allowed to come to term. . . .
A month ago, he can still recall taking his usual Sunday meal in the Café Brumaire, happy and productive. He sat next to two younger painters and listened to them argue about Wilde and Moreau, about whether the chimera or the Sphynx was the more fitting mascot for the age. Fleur was there, holding his hand tightly imprisoned in her lap and smiling into his eyes, like the willing whore she was; he let her thighs’ warmth seep steadily through his glove, knowing well she wore nothing beneath her skirt but garters. Delirious with both absinthe and possibility, the former already paid for, the latter seemingly boundless.
But I was there, too, even then, the angel says, though you could not see me. I have always been there. Your family and I have made a covenant. They serve the one I wait for, and I serve them, while waiting.
“That has nothing to do with me, any of it!” Gustave protests, racked with nausea. “It never did!”
A s
kirl, a further flutter, a flurry of cards and feathers, table and chair abandoned—and abruptly, awfully, he feels the train of Ma’ashith Punisher-angel’s ghostly skirts brush up against his trembling legs, from waist to ankle and back once more. She is near enough for him to taste her breath, if she had any.
Ah, but your mother thinks so. You have disappointed her so gravely, Knauff’s son—telling Melek-i-Taus’ secrets in paint, however obliquely. Selling them for gallery fees, an hour’s drunken friendship, a review in La Plume.
Oh, and now she is even closer yet, that cormorant-clawed hand spreading a fresh half-deck of cards before his wavering eyes, flipped open and shut quick as a courtesan’s fan: red and black and red, black-red-black. She will wear black the rest of her life for you.
“But she sent you to me, nevertheless.”
Mmm. And I go where I am bidden, as ever. We have no free will, my kind and I . . . not since Eden, or before. That was His gift to you, and yours. How do you enjoy it?
A simple question. Yet one to which Gustave, like most human beings, has no easy answer.
Your family bound me to them with false promises, Knauff’s son, the angel observes, like all humans. Yet as it is in the nature of angels to serve, no matter who, I do not count myself so terribly sinned against. I will have my freedom, eventually.
He throws up his hands; impossible to appeal to “her,” he knows—and yet he finds himself doing so nevertheless, words tumbling from his mouth like sharp stones. “Orders aside, why haunt me, even so? I, who alone of all of them, sympathize with your plight . . . you know it, have known it, since my childhood. It is only they who wish to change the world, for better or worse, in . . . that other angel’s . . . name. I have no stake in it.”
Oh, and they will. They are changing it already. You, too.
Have you truly not noticed?
Gustave’s eyes blur, sting, the green-hangover filter abruptly irising deeper, darker, to touch everything around him with muck. Upstairs, through the ceiling, he can hear his landlord’s daughter blundering joyfully around, stomping like a little goat: she is not a lady, after all, and probably glad enough for it. Not yet old enough to have to restrain herself.
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