That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

by K. J. Bishop

  ‘I’m obliged, sirs.’ The stranger returned the canvas to the box and the box to his coat, and strode outside again, having obtained directions to the grave, his spurs jingling like a belly dancer’s cymbals. It was a short ride to the crowded little boneyard. The stranger set to work with a shovel. The grave was shallow and soon he had reached the coffin and was prying it open.

  The coffin was empty. Dust blew out of it.

  El Malo fell to his knees. His eyes wept, his nose bled, and his scream carried through to the other side of the earth.

  Creator and Redeemer, if my attempts to bring you to heel are always failing it is not because of any lack of intelligence, courage or work ethic on my part! You endowed me at my birth with a superior brain and body, and a soul able to love and hate as deeply as the sun’s radiation penetrates into space. It is unthinkable that you did not completely understand how I would first love you, then hate you. You must have anticipated the broad pattern of my scorn, if not its every nuance.

  Interloping deity, El Malo has sworn to kill you, and this time he will keep his word. He can smell you in the empty coffin. The barkeep and his wife would not wish to arrange you. You’re on the nose, you mangy, rotten-toothed old gimmick!

  I would like to suspect you have given me the means to destroy you. I wish I could guess that this game is as dangerous for you as it is for me. But of course you’re going to cheat. I would if I could. As I write this, a situation persists in which you have left a number of human beings, somewhat over seven thousand million of them, walking on the earth with free will but without free means. You have given them the internal combustion engine, the television news, and dominion over plastics, but some among them believe these concessions do not compensate adequately for all that you might have granted but did not. I sympathise with them, but it is not on their behalf that I hunt you.

  Dogs yearn for the infinite. I have said this before. The stray bitch who sniffs around the graves at night sometimes stops and howls with inconsolable grief, for she too believes in another home, if not among the boreal stars then a place mysteriously signified by those cold and brilliant luminaries.

  I know the vertiginous sense of exile is not false.

  Creator, if you have plans for us, did you intend us to read them in the tea leaves and entrails?

  It is no good my talking to you like this. Friends, worship first the spiral of the nautilus, then its inner chambers; anoint the bull’s nose, then his horns; adore the marvellous lyrebird, who sings all songs. You may even come to love Homo sapiens, and thus surpass me in compassion.

  He was a shooting star, but he couldn’t hit the broad side of the Saharan night…

  It pleases him to think of you on the run again, back in the desert where you began, when you were just a djinn with some big dreams, chutzpah and luck. El Malo spits in your coffin and walks away. Tomorrow he will ride into a medieval city whose every occupant resembles the subject of the painting, where he will, as usual, fail in his quest, having to flee before the curse of the place descends on him also.

  When I witnessed his latest execution, evening had fallen on the low-lying countryside. Naked save for a dunce’s cap, his wrists bound with damp leather, he was escorted by a team of wrestlers down a muddy track towards a flooded marsh. Chips of stone in the mud dug into his bare feet and the cold turned his ears red and shrank his penis to a wrinkled nub. The party halted at the water’s edge. One of the wrestlers kicked the back of his right knee, causing him to lose his balance and fall to all fours. A pair of watery stars shone in front of him. When his head was forced down into the green water he did not struggle, but held his breath and closed his eyes. When the pain reached a certain level his eyelids sprang open automatically. Miraculously, he was able to see clearly. The remains of a sunken house met his bulging eyes. The roof was gone, the upper rooms exposed. He observed the suggestive shape of an iron chair, which seemed to be awaiting him. Coming between him and this distressing piece of furniture, like an interceding angel, a black toad swam in front of his face and turned to look at him. He was struck by the sombre ugliness of this batrachian. Meanwhile he was suffering greater and greater discomfort, and at last he thought it best to open his mouth and let the marsh water flood into his body’s bottled world and do what it would.

  At the same time, the wrestlers let him go, and he slid into the water.

  He never ceased sliding through it, nor it through him. The fickle toad deserted him. Water deluged his private lands and seas. It drowned his many inhabitants, and claimed his kingdom for the empire of the wider world at last.

  He is one of the delicate freshwater hydrozoans now, and cannot speak to you. He is a silent, transparent bell composed of approximately 96% water, 3% protein and 1% mineral salts. But this damp beak in your ear, it has something to impart…

  (Forgive him his failure. He would speak further, but he is distracted. His spine bends into the shape of a horseshoe, his eyes roll and his jaw distends, as a dreadful pain in his perineum signals the arrival of his old basement lodger the crab, returning to take up residence in its former home.)

  A woman, a man and their daughter occupy a table on the terrace. The blue Mediterranean sparkles in front of them, and Maldoror, seated at a nearby table, is virtually unrecognisable in gas mask and geisha wig. He has ridden further than even he realises, his rigid shadow falling over the thickets of a family…

  The mother looks up from her paperback crime novel. ‘My daughter, have your schoolmasters taught you the correct method of fashioning a golem?’

  ‘Yes, mother, and next term I shall begin studying the forbidden books.’

  The mother addresses the father: ‘If a tulpa is endowed with too much vitality, it may well escape its maker’s control, is that not so?’

  ‘It is so, wife. Only pure and disciplined minds should attempt the higher magicks. Before the forecourt of the Golden Citadel there is, after all, that laughing garden with fountains of shadow, haunted by terrible deceptions in comely guise. Daughter, the colour has left your cheeks. Do you feel ill?’

  ‘I feel a dark presence pass between my face and the sun. How cold it suddenly is… Fiend, I banish you, be gone! No one summoned you.’

  Your fear is as dark and sweet as molasses, O pale girl, smooth and thin. You did not have to speak my name, or even know it. I can appear without being called. When I hear within a human being that which soughs like the phantom sea inside a shell, I outrace light. You have dreamed of me, and of the powers and pleasures I could steal for you.

  ‘Your cloak hides your face. Your voice is sombre and slow. I do not trust you.’

  Smart lass. But still, you shall have a garden where the sky sleeps upon a roof of dark leaves and ivies bind Apollo in a green spell, moss grows like a mineral, and herms endowed with speech plead for caresses; and you shall have a room, an octagonal salon lined in silk of your favourite colour, with a carpet of living serpents and a dome girdled by a circular frieze in which the whale rises endlessly to engulf the last individual plankton. Rest assured that there are Chinese screens, Gobelin tapestries, and divans finished in the peau du cul of girls more beautiful than you. Jardinières hold arrangements of lacquered hair; alabaster lamps distribute moonish light and the scent of sugarcane; there is a bowl of fruits whose flesh is as molten glass, and others almost human. The room looks inwards on itself, oval mirrors on each wall drilling avenues into eight infinities, conduits through which infinite chance may, at any moment, bring visitors. (As yet there is no traffic, but the chance does not decrease.) You shall lie in this room with a jaguar for your constant companion, your eyes heavy, laden with the weight of all they have observed, yet bright and unassailable as diamonds.

  ‘Spirit of the evening’s copper gloom, you are premature. The moon does not know me yet, so why should you? Children should be safe from you. Do not violate that precept, or some punishment will surely be visited upon you. Next term I shall study French, geometry and sewing. I desire a dece
nt and pleasant life, and I can find it without your help.’

  We shall see. I feel the geometry may change your mind. The study of mathematics causes sensitive minds to begin seeking truth. From the square on the hypotenuse to the curvature of space and time – analogous to the rubber sheet on a cholera bed, although, deplorably, lacking the hole for the egress of waste – and from there to the black arts, is not so long a journey as it seems to you now. I shall be patient. Meanwhile, your mother is putting her book down. You might not be ready for Maldoror yet, but your dear mother has been waiting a long time. How could you or any person who does not at each quarter-hour say, or else suffer certain death, ‘Who goes there?’ understand her thousand pains, regrets and longings? Long ago I offered her a volcanic island and promised to make her into a sacred prince of birds and fire. Her dreams were more daring than yours.

  Listen to the two of you:

  ‘Wife, what are you doing? Why are you climbing over the railing? If you wish to stroll on the beach, the stairs are that way… Woman, the shame! People can see your knickers!’

  ‘Mother, at least wait until dark…’

  But the woman did not respond to these cries from her two loved ones, whom she loved no longer, who were irritating and nauseating – a centipede running circles around her eyeball and a dead rat lying in her stomach. Without a final word or backward glance she stepped off the terrace, and Maldoror obligingly flung her body out into the distant sea. In her flight she was like a spiral galaxy, her four limbs rotating in obedience to the laws of physics, her descent a telling demonstration of gravity. Her silence was more difficult to explain. Who truly knew her? Perhaps not even he who met her in the deep, lighting the water with his weed-draped phosphorescent eyes.

  I will not forget you, and I hope you will not forget me. I killed your mother; your father will not be as vigilant as she. He won’t mind if you wander off alone. And in memory of your mama, here’s a pack of playing cards, in the waters of the insular scene on the reverse of which you will observe nothing like a hand raised in doubt. One joker is a priapic Gabriel, the other a lewd Mary with her skirts pulled up around her thighs. The cards will bring you luck!

  As for the rest of you – eminences with cavernous eyes, nationally significant hair, teeth like knives, and the ability to pass rose-scented material from your fundaments – I salute you. The world holds enough joy and splendour for you, and you love mystery without demanding a solution: indeed, a solution would break your spirits. Over your exquisite heads the pterodactyl passes without opening its cloaca.

  There is another race on the earth. They, like you, need pure beauty and the ecstasy of sublime moments in order to survive, but unlike you they are insatiable. It must be hard not to fear, loathe or pity them.

  There is a sense of occasion in the unrolling of tinfoil. If the proprietor of the den is worth what you pay him, he will see that you are comfortable; he puts soulful music on the gramophone and lights the candle himself. Thank you, Wu! And wedge two pennies in my eye sockets, just in case. Chasing dragons is a risky business; literature reserves it for the most reckless heroes. Whether one ascends the ladder of smoke to the realm of the sylphs or makes an antipodal journey to the rough fairyland of the Nibelungs, young warriors in bright mail will be waiting to defend their game preserve. You have seen them before. There is one way to defeat them: schistosomes!

  My eyes, lustrous as the slow gastropod’s footprint, noble as strychnine, have sought out the solitudes of the desert. I travelled through the earth. The dunes pulled me along in their thick dusty folds, rolled me over and over, and dried me out completely. But in the end they didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t break down like organic matter, erode like stone or rust like iron. In the end the dunes grew weary and spat me out at a motel on the interstate.

  I found cities in the wilderness. Some were mirages, while others were husks, dried and shrunken to only a few inches long, creased like old women’s pudenda. These husks blow across the hardpan in the wake of the simoom. No one knows what to do with them. Hogs won’t eat them. Centres are dying while peripheral territories swell; the fortunate earth is acquiring vast, unmapped, strange frontiers again. If this condition is a consequence of suburban sprawl, go and light a candle to thank God for installing a race of imbeciles in city planning offices.

  During one morning in the dunes I walked past the rusted lid of a well, the muzzle of a cannon and the leathery body of an acquaintance whose vicious nature I once erroneously believed I hated. I in turn was overtaken by a sphinx soaring high above me in a sky of Byzantine blue. It was no mirage, unless mirages are now abandoning the horizons for the stratosphere. That monster was only one of the unsolved mysteries which have departed the world, while I remain, and you. He looks incredulous, this young man who has trembled with real fear before phantoms disgorged by the magic lantern at the theatre! But curious tales are not always false. What I know, beyond doubt, is that the world is receiving new mysteries in exchange for the old. If that bothers you, chastise your ancestors for tending to their cattle instead of to the stars and mathematics.

  Another distinction between men and beasts: a beast does not despise its own body.

  We know you love a good freak show. Modesty exists only in the dictionary. If thine eye offend thee, open it wider, the better to watch what passes for life passing by. Voyeurs! No person under the age of fifteen years will be admitted unless of complaisant character and no worse than average pulchritude. By this precaution innocence and decorum will be rigorously protected.

  Before dawn the sky turns the lilac-grey of a pigeon’s breast. The sun appears, modestly, as a soft light behind clouds. The trees are in their most delicate season, with their branches half-clothed, half-bare. The air is not yet sharpening to the chill that will come later in the year, and is motionless during the first hours of the day. The canals are like long mirrors. Birds fly and feed in complete silence; the quietude of a painting sits over the town.

  I stole a small boat from a deserted jetty. Rowing below the shuttered windows and walled gardens I saw branches reaching hungrily for low-flying ducks… enormous stray dogs slouched from door to door… sometimes I saw a criminal or adulterer in a black cloak.

  My old friend, I rowed down the canal which led out to your lodge. I had no trouble finding it. It was exactly as you described, the front gate flanked by two stone sphinxes, hermaphrodites, each with goat’s horns, four breasts, and a long erect member pierced with arrows in the manner of St Sebastian’s body. I moored the boat at a tumescent bollard and approached the inimical doorway. An intruder might have been deceived by the apparent lack of guards in the entrance passage. I was not. I knew your assassins were watching through peepholes in the walls. The young daylight spurned my face, and by this your men knew me.

  I strode through to the courtyard, which contained your severe garden: a pristine lawn enclosed on all sides by old slender cypresses, with only one ornament, a central oblong pool around which were set metal chairs fitted out with the implements of your cruelty – traditional arrangements, and fearless of blame. The light which had refused me snagged on spikes, hooks, blades, cages, screws, braziers and poires d’angoisse.

  My friend, a master as decadent but less intelligent than you might have installed statues of foreign gods and a chained leopard or two to add an oneiric quality to the scene, but you were careful to ensure that the visitor couldn’t doubt that he was awake and in his own land.

  I walked across the lawn… a door in the west wing of the house opened into a grotto lit with chartreuse lamps. The light continued up an iron staircase… I was in your gleaming bile ducts… on one landing a leadlight window depicted a cluster of bullet-shaped figures which I took to be the rabies rhabdovirus… an anteroom on the fourth floor contained odd souvenirs: stuffed rats, a brass idol with an ass’s head, a black iron boar, long masks of bark, quite rotten… my anticipation grew, my hands trembled.

  A leather door opened before me,
and lo! I was admitted into a good likeness of heaven, where rococo idylls were painted on the walls and a canopy of blue adorned with gold stars spread overhead.

  A crowd of people filled this pleasant space. There are men and women, diligent enough libertines, who experience a state in which their nerves scream like a child stung by a thousand hornets at the merest adumbration of anodyne or conventionally delightful experiences. As a remedy they surround themselves with every kind of aberration and horror in Art and seek what seems to be aberrant in Nature; but, incomprehensibly, they close their doors to anything less than vivid beauty in their fellow human beings. Dear friend, you were not one of these hypocrites. Not one among all the courtiers in your heaven was sound of mind and body. They were the diseased, the deformed, the crippled, the mad; gimps, lepers and loonies. Some had found their own way to your house; others you had saved from asylums and the streets. Half of them were children. All were dressed in beautiful stuffs: the loveliest silks bandaged the lepers’ faces, the stumps of amputated limbs terminated in prosthetics painted and gilded like the figureheads of royal ships; the lunatics were garbed as the heroes, kings and queens, popes and deities they believed themselves to be. You spoiled them all rotten.

  As for you, with your tusks and your swordfish eyes, warmer than the rest of your body, you were more beautiful than I…

  ‘Maldoror! How goes the schistosome trade?’ you greeted me.

  Your reason for inviting me to your house was never stated explicitly in your letter. I assumed you wanted to taste my strange flesh for yourself. How could I refuse? I, too, yearn to be loved.

  After the refreshments and the baths, two of your lepers relieved me of my clothing. You and I went down the stairs and emerged in your garden, where the air was growing warm. The lepers appeared again: they had followed us at a discreet distance.

  ‘A chair is prepared for you,’ you said, gesturing towards the grim furniture.