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That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

Page 4

by K. J. Bishop


  Beauty spoke: ‘In the second half of our history, I became the protagonist. Circumstances threw me into the beast’s company. I loved him, Mr Seaming. You are looking judgemental. Are you appointed to decide where love should be given and where it should not? I loved him, and uncovered the final subtlety of the spell: if a woman could love the beast he would become the thing she most desired. He would always be at her mercy. His substance would be hers to mould. I desired the beast, but I also desired a man that I could love as a man. At the instant I proved my love, the change occurred.’

  ‘I had no human speech to tell Beauty of the curse,’ the wolf rumbled. His jaw gnashed from side to side. ‘I am neither man nor beast now, Mr Seaming. I have human shame, but if you must see the rest of my body, you may.’

  At this, Seaming realised the obvious. He berated himself for not having understood sooner – the human-sized legs beneath the covers could not possibly support the massive body above. The beast’s power was a sham. Seaming was suddenly overwhelmed with a compassion that negated all fear and judgement.

  ‘I had always hoped,’ he was moved to say, ‘that beyond the mundane world there was another and better one. I had not thought there could be one worse. I was wrong. You are from that worse world.’

  The wolf nodded and showed his teeth. ‘The laws of nature, also known as the laws of desire, are different for us, Mr Seaming. In this room, your talents can serve a far more important purpose than any to which you have previously applied them.’ There was a bullying humour in the yellow eyes. ‘I smell your confusion, even under the reek of your pity. Tell us this, then, artist: what is art?’

  ‘Many things,’ Seaming began. ‘There is considerable discussion–’

  The wolf cut him off with an impatient snarl. ‘Art is lust! As a man I collected art and thought myself above the crowd. As a beast, without a man’s talent for self-flattery, I acquired a better understanding. Art is the voluptuous language of the senses. The artist is a pornographer. The connoisseur is a voyeur. Art is a euphemism that permits humans to indulge all their lusts, however base or alarming, while imagining that they are using their highest and holiest faculties. Man can’t decide whether he wants to be an angel or an ape. Art lets him be both.’

  ‘I know a man who would agree with you,’ Seaming said, thinking of Stroud. ‘Perhaps he is a more sophisticated man than I.’

  ‘We do not need a sophisticate,’ Beauty said. ‘We need a simple idealist. We need a person whose philosophy opposes our own.’

  Again the wolf loomed forward and breathed the stench of his gullet over Seaming. ‘A beast knows its desires. Only humans do not know what they want. Because I am this much a man, my desires are complex and conflicting. I do not know, now, if I would rather be man or beast.’

  ‘And I,’ Beauty said sorrowfully, ‘still condemn him to be neither. Since he has become part man, I cannot help but love that man, too. My desires are as tangled as any human being’s. But you can enable me to untangle them, Mr Seaming. Like you, I do not love ordinary things. I loved one extreme, but perhaps I could love another. Create two images, man and beast, neither having any quality of the other, each an opposite ideal. Then I will know which one I love more. My choice will make my husband a whole creature, one way or the other.’

  Seaming admitted that he knew nothing of magic. ‘And I do not want to know,’ he said. ‘But when it comes to painting, I stand on firmer ground.’ He said that he believed he could do as she asked.

  ‘Then practice your craft, Mr Seaming,’ the wolf panted. ‘From my perspective there is nothing to be lost, and the peace of my soul to be gained.’

  Beauty brought Seaming a bright lamp to work by, while he unpacked his small portable easel. The wolf proved to be an excellent sitter. His nose and ears twitched a little to begin with, but soon he ceased to move at all, other than to breathe. As Seaming sketched he hesitatingly remarked on this to Beauty.

  ‘He sleeps with his eyes open,’ she explained.

  Seaming made several studies in ink and chalk. When he was satisfied that he had enough material from which to produce the actual canvases, he asked to take his leave.

  Beauty escorted him out, leaving the beast asleep, statue-like.

  At the top of the stairs Seaming blurted, ‘Why do you love him?’

  Again he had the sense that she was smiling. ‘He was the only creature I ever met who was as beautiful as I. The only being who ever fascinated me. Without him, I would wither from boredom. Human love is selfish, Mr Seaming.’

  He wrenched himself away, but not before his eyes had filled with tears of loss. Once out of the house, he all but fled the Ravels. When he at last arrived, breathless and exhausted, within sight of Cake Street, he thought the still-carousing nightspots had never looked anywhere near as welcoming and homely; nor had they ever looked as drab.

  ‘She’s right, of course. A woman after my own heart. What an escapade, old friend!’ Stroud lit a cigarette with a flourish. ‘I must say, I’m rather jealous. I should have liked to meet this beast myself.’

  ‘I think you would have got along well,’ Seaming said, though he privately thought that Stroud would have felt uncomfortably upstaged.

  They were in Seaming’s studio. Stroud waved the cigarette at the finished portrait of the wolf. ‘That’s quite spectacular. I wouldn’t have guessed you had it in you to paint such a thing. Outrageous, of course – but hang me if it isn’t handsome, too!’

  ‘He looks a lot like that. I didn’t have to alter much.’ Seaming had invented powerful haunches, long flanks and a thick tail, and had scrupulously erased any hint of human sentience from the wolf’s expression. He was fully animal, a fact emphasised by his rearing stance and carefully depicted, outsized canine genitalia.

  Stroud went on admiring the portrait. ‘He shows the human race up, doesn’t he? Rather an undistinguished lot we are, compared with that. I don’t mean just the pizzle.’

  ‘If taken only as physical objects, perhaps you’re right.’

  Seaming felt rather little towards his painting of the beast. It had gone against his grain to execute it; he was the opposite of the dramatist who does great things with his villain and gives his hero nothing interesting to say. Had he written plays, he would have lavished care on the most humane characters and left the brutal and ignoble ones dimensionless. Painting the beast had been, for him, a strictly technical exercise. But either his genius was more flexible than he had supposed, or else a decade of professional practice had stood him in good stead, for he had captured (without caging it, as Stroud said) the raw fearsomeness of the predator. It would not have done to paint a false gentility into the beast’s features, and he had strenuously refrained from doing so.

  On the other hand, Seaming was immodestly proud of his portrayal of the man. Having no actual face to base it on, he had been unable to resist the temptation to use Beauty’s own, altered to be recognisably masculine. Every time he looked at the canvas, he felt more reluctant to part with it. For this reason he had draped it with a sheet, but Stroud uncovered it.

  ‘A bit sterile,’ he offered. ‘Still, it looks like a much more congenial creature for a lady to keep in her boudoir. Which one do you think she’ll choose?’

  Seaming was well used to Stroud’s offhand manner and had long ago stopped letting it bother him.

  ‘It was a beast that she fell in love with,’ he replied. ‘But I think my human is inhuman enough that she may be moved to feel something for him.’

  ‘My friend, don’t be mistaken into believing that everyone is as intrigued by goodness and purity as you are.’

  That evening a thickly cloaked and muffled figure came to Seaming’s studio in a gig. It dropped his payment into his hands and took the paintings away.

  Seaming was depressed. Stroud suggested Cake Street for supper and drinks. Seaming wasn’t particularly keen to go so near the Ravels, but he never liked to appear timid in front of Stroud, so he pretended enthusiasm.


  Over their stewed peaches and anisettes, Stroud asked him why he had not attempted to persuade Beauty away from her monstrous husband entirely.

  There was no need whatsoever, Seaming felt, to say how little chance he would have given himself in that venture. ‘Because I’m not the kind of fellow who sees a marriage as crockery to be broken. Besides, whatever the difficulties of their relationship, there was love of a sort in it.’

  ‘Love is rarely wise.’

  ‘Love is rare. It should not be disturbed, lest it be destroyed.’

  ‘You love the notion of love too much, Seaming.’

  ‘And you wish that you had been in my place, so that Beauty might have fallen out of love with her beast and into love with you.’

  Stroud looked uninterested in the theory.

  Seaming swirled his drink around in the glass. ‘I hope they found a happy ending.’

  ‘Thus speaks the idealist.’

  ‘I suppose you’d prefer tragedy?’

  ‘A bitter finish suits my palate best,’ Stroud admitted.

  ‘Then you can console yourself that though I viewed my heart’s desire, I’ll never see her again, and no longer really have anything to hope for.’

  Stroud made a face. ‘I’m afraid that’s a lot closer to melodrama, old sausage.’

  In the green-lit room, Beauty lay with the wolf. On the wall before them were the two portraits.

  She scratched his bearded chin. ‘I would have given you what you wanted for yourself. If you can remember anything, remember that.’

  He nuzzled her hand. ‘I want beauty,’ he growled. ‘I want only beauty.’

  ‘I loved a strange beast. I couldn’t love an ordinary man, and that painted saint is remote and abstract. If he were real I think he would love God and the whole world, and love me no more than anything else.’ Beauty dug her fingers into the long rough fur on his head. ‘I always loved you because you were a beast, not despite it. I suppose your mind will change again with your body. Look, you’re getting more beautiful already.’ She shifted as long, strong legs grew under the covers. ‘I’ll have to find someone else to play chess with, won’t I? But I’ll always look after you. I promise you that.’

  The wolf whimpered in pain as his bone structure altered. Beauty soothed him with long strokes of her fingers down his neck. She farewelled the human intelligence fading from his features.

  ‘And what of your heart,’ she said, her voice dropping low, ‘does it still love me?’

  The grey tongue licked her hand. The huge head laid itself in her lap.

  ‘If I change my mind, perhaps I can turn you into a man again, eh?’

  A cunning, hungry glow came into the yellow eyes.

  ‘Is that a “no”?’ she murmured. Then she had to quickly get off the bed, for the wolf was rising.

  As she let him out to hunt, he turned and gave her a look that she could not fathom. It might have been fierce adoration; it might have been something else entirely. It was the look of a nature alien to her own. He was again an unfathomable creature, again a riddle and a mystery, like all animals. Standing in the doorway, she watched him lope towards the dark forest of the park.

  For him, Beauty mused, if life and love continued to have complexities, they would be complexities beyond her ken.

  ‘Forever, Beast,’ said Beauty, knowing that he would hear, even though he would not understand.

  When she could no longer see him, she beckoned to the old servant, who came forward, and to whom she said, ‘His room should be cleaned and aired. It may as well be done tomorrow.’

  WE THE ENCLOSED

  A room that was red, heat-stricken, ingrown, low. Scarlet walls, carpet, ceiling – the latter just above my head – and an igneous light, a sourceless, uninterrupted glare, as if the air were mixed with fire.

  Call this room the Apartment of the Ape, since the Ape was its caretaker. None other than the Ape of Reason, he squatted on a barrel – there was no other furniture – harvesting his fur for fleas, slipping a shriek of ‘Parasite lost!’ between the crushing and the eating of each one. He was insufferable, and I ached to get out of there and find you.

  I was looking for you because I desired you. I also felt I deserved you. But beyond that I was very vague as to our respective characters. While you remained undisclosed, so did I.

  I did not know who you were, only that you were both like and unlike me. You sparkled in a darkness far from this room. You were someone just ahead of me, someone with a front but without a back. If I could touch you, you would turn around and see me. And then? I could not imagine what would happen then; or, rather, I could predict a moment of mutual recognition, of enormous joy, but it was as if a firm barrier to further speculation lay just beyond that. I had only that momentary you ahead of me. But it was enough, like a beautiful scent coming from a distance down some ordinary street on an ordinary day, to make me yearn to go to its source.

  I felt that I had once known you, loved you, and had somehow lost you. But I had no memory of your nature, the features of your face, your speech, or of how we had been parted. I felt as though I should have been able to just reach my hand forward, and there you would be. But I had stood and reached out my hand many times, just like that, ignoring the Ape’s laughter, without touching anything but the stuffy air in the room. I am afraid I even cried, tears that quickly dried in the heat.

  The room offered me two doors in the wall I was facing, one to my right and one to my left. They were identical, fabricated of dark wood with recessed panels and a brass knob in the centre. I did not know by which door I had entered the room. I could not even assume that the doors, just because they were apparently the only way out, were also – and had always been – the only way in. Perhaps I had not entered through either door.

  Just as I could not remember you, I could not remember anything of myself before I began thinking about the red room. I had one piece of knowledge: I knew that if I opened one door I would not be able to open the other. I believed this knowledge came from outside the room, because I believed that I, too, had once been outside the room. I was sure that I could not be a native of this awful enclosure; who in here could have taught me language and given me a head full of ideas about a world outside? Worse, if I had always been inside the room, you were possibly a figment of my mind. If you were not as real as I, I did not want to exist. But perhaps you had been in here with me, teaching me to think and supplying me with concepts, and had left by yourself, and I had somehow forgotten all the details of your being and going.

  I tried listening at each of the doors, my cheek pressed against the smooth varnish, the stink of the Ape in my nostrils. His noise, his smell and the heat all put me in an urgent hurry to leave. Perhaps I could hear hammering, or it might have been feet. I thought I heard engines; but I could not be sure; the Ape was making enough racket for an entire House of Parliament. I raised my own voice and entreated him, with more courtesy than I felt he deserved, to give his tongue peace for a few minutes. He showed that he understood me very well, by pulling at his skinny penis and screaming ‘Tongue this piece!’ before returning to his prior activity.

  I examined both doors with my eyes and fingertips, searching for marks, wormholes, shapes in the grain, any distinguishing detail to suggest that one door might have more to offer than the other. It proved a waste of effort. There were no blemishes and all of the wood grain was straight and regular.

  Next it occurred to me to look for a correspondence between the Ape or myself and either of the doors. This time it took me only a few moments to conclude that there was none. The Ape’s barrel was positioned exactly in the middle of the wall between the doors, and while he moved his head constantly, his brute eyes favoured neither direction more than the other. I felt I was right-handed, and an experimental enactment of writing in the air confirmed that my right hand was the surer, while he used his left hand to pluck at his fleas. Both our leading hands were on the side of the door on my right. Since I saw the Ape
as my antagonist, we cancelled each other out.

  Was I to make an entirely random choice? No. I did not believe it could be random. The variables involved in human choice may be hidden, but they are there. To a person asked to choose heads or tails, one number out of ten, a shape, a colour, one option will always have an edge in appeal, for whatever reason or reasons – aesthetic taste, emotional sympathy with an image, prior experience, present mood, superstition, and so forth. I concluded that I had to make this type of choice, with nothing but my personal inclinations to guide me. In other words, I had to make a selection between the quality of ‘right’ and the quality of ‘left’. (I could have exchanged these positions by turning around, but the idea struck me as contrariness for its own sake, and I could not imagine any profit coming from it.)

  ‘Right’ suggested correctness and beneficial action, and so initially appealed to me, but it also suggested a state of all being well, while ‘left’ suggested departure and absence, residues and remainders, and the state of being forgotten or abandoned; in other words, things either missing or else redundantly present and not likely to be missed if removed. The left resonated with my own circumstances. But on the other hand, wasn’t I trying to leave my circumstances? However, in implying regularity the right also implied inflexibility – surely inauspicious to the mission of a seeker who knew nothing of what the search might entail.

  On I went like this, until a particularly shrill scream from the Ape pulled me up and made me ask myself a question: Was this ‘I’, who was trying to reach you using the Ape’s methods, the same ‘I’ who desired you and cried because I could not see you?

 

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