"'Well, Snowy, it seems you, too, are not exempt from valuing appearances and personality although you claim the contrary.'
"An exceptional case, that one. A sort of sickness came over me, unique for her, too, that malady. Perhaps our long association with humans occasionally gives us dogs strange ideas. At least she thought that. 'Snowy,' she once said, on the corner of a great avenue, 'I'm not certain whether knowing you has ennobled me or debased me, for to feel for you as I do is to feel as a human, and it is not clear whether the human sentiment in these matters is not, in reality, a madness. We canines,' she continued, 'are liable to illness, worms, and infections, the rabies, but it is unnatural to add to them those borrowed .from our masters!' She was eloquent, she. And dainty. How gingerly she'd squat, barely touching the ground or pavement on which she'd squirt a lemonade stream. I was ill when we parted, almost wished myself in the boneyard, me always dwelling on her, sniffing the air for a whiff of her. And dreams! Real howlers. I'd wake with tears flooding my eyes. My paws ice cold, my snout dry and stiff as sea tack. España! Tierra del sol y de la señorita Concetta — for that was her name — Españ, the land of my joy and my sadness. And so I am as you see me now, Tintin, restored to my natural being, Snowy once again, despite my bittersweet affliction.'
"All very illuminating, Tintin, my boy. Decidedly provocative a digression, your speaking to and comprehending your dog, your rising erectile tissue. Formidable. But earlier you were speaking about your mother, I believe."
"Yes, yes. But I remember little of my mother," Tintin said sadly. "She was beautiful, I remember that. Sometimes I would go into her bedroom to watch her dress. It took her so long to dress, but I loved watching her roll up her silk stockings, her robe spread apart, and fasten them, one after the other, to the garter belt hanging flat on her solid white thighs. I'd sit on the bed's edge, watching her brush her long dark hair in the evening before going to a party or a dinner. She'd be soon gone, and I was in bed alone again. I'd often try to wait up for her, to hear her steps at the door and the turning of the latch. I'd hope she would look in so I could pretend she'd woke me, and I'd plead with her to join me in bed and to kiss away my bad dreams."
"Now, now, now," interjected Peeperkorn. "Now we are getting right to the stuff of life, right to your psychic mold, my dear boy. At least some would say that."
"How do you mean?''
"Mean? That you've explained your interest in Clavdia, that you have found again your lost mother."
"But I didn't think of Mademoiselle Clavdia in that way. Not like a mother."
"So you say, and so, I'm sure, you think. But consider, dear youth, that your secret sexual life is awakened, only now, under Clavdia's charming sphere. There is undoubtedly some association you make between this Clavdia and your mother; you were too young, among other considerations, to possess your mother, who, as your brief description indicates, excited your oedipal wish, but now fortunately you have found her again, the mother for whom you've unknowingly longed."
"Pardon me, dear sir, but do you tease me?"
"Not in the least. How else to explain this implausible attraction? I mean, not that Clavdia herself isn't capable of charming anyone, but that she should have charmed you demands more explanation than the usual."
"But to speak this way of my mother! Surely, if you did not intend to offend me — or did you? — you meant to provoke me in some way."
"No, no. Quite reprehensible of me to dabble in this abject and amateur psychic sleuthing. Unlike me at all costs. I must have picked up a touch of the psychoanalytic infection during a brief stay in North America — at some lecture or after-dinner conversation, no doubt. God, how virulent this disease and how innocently it must bite one to have gone unfelt until this moment.
"Yet I can't help following this earlier trail of analytic thought. Isn't your mania for chasing wrongdoers, as you term them, a wish to punish your father, whom, I take, you resent for having abandoned your mother, whether through death or desertion ... it is immaterial? Isn't your wish to punish miscreants the world over prompted by your wish to protect, to win your mother, as if to say, 'All men are not bad, dear Mother, regard me, for example?' And haven't you remained the size you are in order to dwell ever close to your mother, to remain her child forever, while rejecting the badness you associate with grown-ups? I shall not be like my father, I shall stay a child. Thus always to be loved, thus never to be wicked, thus, moreover, forever to defeat, forever to replace, forever to vanquish your father, all fathers, all of us grown men — me.
"I should say you stunted yourself by keeping the trigger of your cells locked. And then Clavdia's appearance sprang the psychic spring, sparked the chemical fizzle, and voila, the once-arrested clockwork of your retarded body was propelled into motion, into natural organic time. I may have mixed my metaphors, but you do understand my analysis, even if I have been somewhat flippant, less than candid, jocular even, my remarks to you a subterfuge. I've talked a great deal in my time, so many thoughts and arguments and convictions, so much experience, if you allow me to say, too much experience for one man, too much to reflect on, to absorb, to master. ... This makes for a tiredness. I'm drawing down with me the whole of my life. And you, you have suffered many trials in foreign places. You have suffered even more greatly the loss of the mother, and your wish for the mother is a festering disquietude alive in you all the long day. Is not Clavdia the amniotic fluid in which you long to bathe once again? Think, Tintin, is not her caress the return of all your childhood desires now fulfilled? Can she be your mother and your woman? Dites-moi, Tintin, mon petit."
"I have known her all my life, from the womb, as you would say. She pulls me where my soul has always been waiting to visit and to dwell. Now I know, too, that we've met once before, at Villefranche or Knokke, one of those places we summered as children. I saw her then, we passed by at dusk, she holding her father's hand, her eyes the slate color of the North Sea. I was nine. She, ten, eleven. I remember her now because I remember no other woman as well excepting my mother.
"Maître, I love her, have loved her and shall love her."
"Moi aussi, mon vieux. So the question is, What shall we do? A turn of the dice? A cut of the card? A flip of the coin? A gentlemen's agreement? A duel? Will you stab me while I sleep? I mistook you. Not to that new land of hope will you guide me, but to the precincts of loneliness."
"Maître, you break my heart to speak to me thus. I beg your pardon."
"Because of that? Sweet lad, were I to be angry for that, I would have burst from anger a century ago. Clavdia has worn holes in more mattresses than could be piled high to meet these mountains. To be plain, her body — "
"Sir!"
"Her body, I say, has received visitors the world over, quite international in its hospitality. Hardly a fortnight passes when some sweaty new tourist has not visited and departed enthralled with its vistas and its culture."
"Calumny, vile and unworthy of you; you blacken yourself with these ugly, jealous words."
"Doesn't it excite you? It does me, my dear boy. Thrilling quite, to know that she returns to me, time and again, after each coupling. Thrilling also to learn the details of her adventures. You, though she has refrained from speaking about you, I'm sure must have to go a long way before making a dent in that person about whom we are speaking.
"Above all, you must understand," said Peeperkorn gravely, "that this woman about whom we speak is folle. I say this neither to insult her nor to hurt you, but to caution you, should you be so naïf not to see the evidence for itself, which, if you were wiser, would have been as apparent as the brogues on your feet."
"Again, you demean yourself in demeaning her."
"Pas de tout. I inform you of this as mere courtesy, since I understand that you understand nothing of lunatic matters and ate preparing yourself for a grand and I hope not too hurtful disenchantment. Let me expand on the subject, for although I recognize you shall neither understand nor believe me, I feel obliged to
set out the truth to you in order that I may feel less culpable for whatever befalls you in the future. Let us say, then, that this little lesson is more for my own future benefit than it is for your present good. Be seated, I mean, seat yourself comfortably and firmly, have more drink, a cigar, or if you choose, there's some morphine and needles on the tray beside you."
Tintin said not a word but looked at Peeperkorn with rage and wonderment, wishing he could choose a course of action, wishing that he could remain seated with the demeanor, if not, in fact, the actual feeling, of equanimity or, short of that, that he could rise from his seat and rush to the self-possessed, nay, smug Señor mein Herr, and strangle him until his old man's eyes popped from their sockets. Rage, in fact, was new to him, so new that he wondered at the sensation, half enjoying, as he did, the bursting heat to his blood. The sensation, so novel — though its memory surfaced from a distant dream — so pleasant in its conscious form, almost made him forget the cause, so that when he next heard Peeperkorn's firm, authoritative voice, he had to muster up in himself all the powers of his diffused concentration in order to speak.
"Folie, you were saying, crazy and lunatic, she, about whom you and I, but mainly you, were speaking."
"This madperson is, among all, the most mad, most lunatic, most crazy," Peeperkorn said. "That this person, when not in public, that is, when alone with herself or with a lover of long duration for whom the need or desire for maintaining a state of mystery and artifice no longer exists — that lover thus relegated to the condition of a lapdog or any other accessory in the furniture of her life — this person about whom we are speaking spends most of her waking hours preening, primping, tweezing, cleaning, washing, bathing, combing herself, spends hours in having her body massaged, her hair cut, coiffed, conditioned, her nails trimmed, shaped, buffed, polished (toenails, too, I must add), and whatever else is done in the manicure procedure, her legs waxed (the most effective means of depilation), leaving her long, long legs and thighs and inner crotch smooth, especially after oiling. Let us add to this particular inventory of soins de beauté, her exercise class, lately supervised by one Amedeo Hartshorn, age twenty-three, a Nordic beauty of slender frame and brown, liquidy eyes who spends two hours a day in demonstrating and supervising Madame in the sit-ups and knee bends and torso twists required to keep said Madame in perfect working and aesthetic order.
"I do not count here the vast hours spent from home in the same pursuits — the salons and clinics dedicated to the care of her face, the various mud and herbal concoctions, the electric facial stimulations, the removal of dead dermis tissue and the dermabrasion to give creamy texture and youthful tone, and the silicone injections to smooth out wrinkles about the eyes whenever those aging signs should make so bold as to appear on that perfect face — nor do I speak of those visits to the cosmetic artisans who give no end of time to the contriving of pigments and powders and dull or glossy unguents to enhance and accentuate this or that feature of Madame's countenance, to capture the reflection of this or that tint in her purple eyes at morning, midday, and evening, prepared, of course, to suit whatever latitude and longitude and season Madame's face happens to find itself, for the dim gray light of London in winter requires different eye shading from the harsh, humid glare of Rio in summer. No, and I shall not add the spas to which Madame takes residence to follow for some days or weeks the regimen of hot natural baths, to drink the mineral waters, Karlstadt ... Marienbad ... to name a few only that have seen her name inked on the register. Now to the matter of clothes, of costume and the like, firm, firm yourself for this epic inventory — "
"No, I wish to hear no more."
"No more? Would you be content, then, to consider the sum required to propel Madame out for an afternoon promenade and window-shopping expedition on the Rue Faubourg St. Honore in Paris, say, her coat, sable, dollars beyond dollars, her rings rich and costly, her shoes Delman, her simple dress Chloe, her gloves and scarf Hermès, the limousine and its chauffeur to bring and fetch her back ... not to mention the stop for lunch, usually at Maxim's — the front room, naturally?
"My inventory does not include the actual purchases, which, on a dull day, a day when Madame is bored by the uniformly mediocre quality of the goods proffered her, may total some thousands of pounds, a mere nothing by her lights, and by mine, too, when compared with the days when luck favors her with the opportunity of buying goods rare and beautiful and without which her life would be impossible, unbearable. May the heavens help me on those days when chauffeur returns home with Madame's items,. a vase from the Ming dynasty, an Orientalist painting for only the cost to feed and house a family of four for a year, an eighteenth-century green briefcase from the Rue Bonaparte that shall remain untouched in her closet. Now, you say, this does not make Madame folie, and this you may well say, for the pastimes here enumerated would describe half of the bourgeois world of Paris and Milan and perhaps Brussels, but I answer, this represents only a fraction of what is required to keep her from the madhouse, where I admit it would be considerably cheaper to maintain her but where I as well would be deprived of her company. For if Madame is not occupied, Madame is crazed most unpleasantly.
"In the course of our cohabitation, our inequitable partnership, Madame has attempted several pursuits in the hopes of giving herself peace of mind, a feeling of worthiness, of purpose, meaning, and well-being, of having a place in the world, of defining herself as an individual apart from her identification with being merely a beautiful woman whose status derives from the man she is with, of allowing her to feel and believe herself an autonomous, integrated personage of standing in the purposeful cosmos: photographer, painter, dancer, poet, novelist, essayist, student of law and philosophy and botany, bricklayer, sculptor, beekeeper, filmmaker, actress, decorator, volunteer social worker."
"Stop."
"Stop, now? When you are just beginning to get the picture, so to speak? No, my dear boy, you must hear the rest, must learn, for example, how once while I was sleeping, she hovered over me, knife in hand, preparing to stab me to death for the simple reason that I was to blame for her misery. Had I not supported her, not pampered her, had I just kicked her in the street, so went her charges, she would have made her way, would have found her Self through hard necessity. I, and only I, was to blame for allowing her such amplitude of play and experiment, thus reducing all her activities to mere hobbies not to be taken seriously by herself or the world at large. That I had indulged her in all these attempts at self-defining activities proved me a weak and selfish fool, for as she insisted, a man authentic in his powers of understanding her and her needs would have sent her off to work, and thus forced her to define herself, or made her bear children — this while the knife wavered over my head.
"A simple incident repeated in various ways over the course of our union, but now let us take an ordinary domestic evening by way of model to this Madame's nature. An evening at home — how rare in itself — dinner and, for want of more illustrious diversion, a game of gin. We play; she is distracted; her eyes vacant, dead, she deals the cards slowly and furiously in turn; she stares at her hand while I patiently and with infinitesimal care attempt not to show my horror at the length of time these cards remain under her dull gaze; she finally plays out the hand and all the following with the same uninterest. Should she lose, she claims I have cheated. Once actually, sure of finding concealed cards, she made me turn my pockets inside out and roll up my sleeves, claiming hysterically that there is no use in playing when she cannot win. Should she be winning, she remains silent, smiling, and from smile to smirk and smirk to guffaws of triumph — guffaws, mind you, and I must pay up immediately, cash, no checks, no IOUs — but should she lose, she moans that I take even her little savings or shrugs off the debt since, she reminds me bitterly, the money is mine anyway.
"You are wishing to leave, Mr. Tintin? Stay, and explore with me Madame's activities on the horizontal, on love's platform. She'd make a whore blush with modesty. Thank heaven! Have you yet
noticed, for example, that Madame will most gladly put her tongue where a gentleman would not dab his walking stick?"
Tintin, fists clenched, lunged at the speaker, but then, gaining control of himself, he turned to the door.
"Stay, there's more! What I have told you is the simple appetizer of the fulsome main courses yet to come — the body of the menu of her personality."
"You've already fed me enough spoiled dishes, sir. I'm quite poisoned, thank you. What harm did you think I would or could do you that you stirred in your person the muck better left settled? Whatever once drew me to you, the filial impulse, the recognition of your grand personality, the respect for your mighty largess, I now disown. Henceforth all tokens of respect and loyalty are broken; the field is open to all claimants."
— Chapter XVII —
[Afternoon, same day.]
Tintin's solitary walk brought him close to the precipice where he had heard Naptha expostulate on the penal codes of the Incas. He halted on seeing Clavdia and Peeperkorn conversing animatedly by the historic and fatal edge. They gave no sign of seeing or hearing him, no indication they were aware of living in this world.
Clavdia shrieked, "We've tried it all before. There is no place on this earth for us, no place where we shall lose each other!"
"My darling, there is so little time left me, what does it matter? Let me finish these years with you."
"Be generous."
"As always, you mean."
"Be generous now. Let me go."
"Is it this boy? There've been other boys, less rare than he, perhaps, but with discernible virtues, I mean, with qualities."
"Cease meandering! Halt! Open your ears to my words! No tricks!"
"Trick? That I adore you! Have adored you since you were a child."
Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 17