She told me her name was Marguerite. She was a slender woman, slender nigh unto emaciated. I almost said so and wanted to buy her a meal. In the end, I didn’t offer, fickle cunt that I am. She wore boots too large, a leather coat too large on her kite-frame bones, some manner of a frock beneath, torn stockings. Her head, all a matted mop of hair, was auburn. Most striking though, the eyes in the pinched and pale face: the left was brilliant green, the right an equally brilliant blue. Emerald and sapphire eyes set into that single skull. Single et singular. Her English was quite good, and I shall here do my best to reconstitute our conversation, though I readily confess I’d been drinking – only wine, but still. In fact, I had a bottle with me, a cheap merlot, and I shared it with the woman whose eyes were beautifully “afflicted” with what ophthalmologists or whatever call heterochromia iridium (a/k/a heterochromia iridis):
“Yes,” she said. “I was there. I’ll not take all the credit, though. There were others.”
I asked her to name her particular victims between 1764 and 1767, and she smiled a sly kind of smile and took a pull off the merlot. “Unless you’ve forgotten their names, or never knew them,” I added.
“I’ve not forgotten, and I know them,” she replied. “Well, not all their names, but all their faces. That first young girl at Les Hubacs, she was mine. We drew lots, at the start. And later, the bold girl, Marie Jeanne Valet – la Pucelle – who fought back with only a spear fashioned from a spindle. She was also mine, and such bravery in her, I let her carry the day. A statue was raised to la Pucelle back in ’59. I gave the child immortality. And six-year-old Marguerite Lèbre, she was one of mine, and I borrowed her name. I meant to be bold, so there were witnesses that day, as attested to by the Curate Gibergue at la Pauze…”
She went on. I’ll not put it all down.
I cannot say I was even half convinced, as these are facts found anywhere one knows to look (La Bête du Gévaudan, M. Moreau-Bellecroix; Paris. 1945 and La Bête du Gévaudan. Felix Buffièr in 1994, and, for that matter, La Bête du Gévaudan in Auvergne. Fabre, Abbé François. Saint Flour. 1901 and Paris 1930.) The sculpture at Place des Cordeliers, Marvejols, (where, notably, La Bête was never even seen) by Emmanuel Auricoste, that’s a goddamn tourist attraction. I was tempted to tempt her back to my bed, to bed my raggedy loup faux, my self-proclaimed fantôme de la bête (?). She’d not have accepted the invitation, and me in no mood for rejection. Also, why set out to spoil Dorothée’s conviction or image of me as an exclusive and inveterate buggerer of the male sex?
“You are a lonely man,” Marguerite said.
“And how is that?”
“You smell very much of a lonely man, and I have read interviews.”
“There are worse fates.”
“Mais oui. Naturellement. But, one wonders, is it from choice, necessity, or…” and she trailed off and picked at a weed.
“Some men – and woman – are unsuited to anything else,” I told her.
“You know this?”
“I believe this. And it’s not such a burden. I get more work done without the distractions of constant companions.”
I asked where she lived, and, at first, she seemed reluctant to discharge an answer. She smiled and gazed up at the bright summer sky above Le Cimetière du Montparnasse. Then she told me she had a room not far from La Rotonde. A lie concocted then and there, I’d say, her needing an answer at the ready.
And then, echoing almost my dream – my sky-tortured nightmaring red cap – Marguerite said, sternly, solemnly and sternly, “Be lonely, then, if it suits you. But do not go to Gévaudan. Maybe there’s nothing left there to see. Maybe there are old ghosts in the forests, and maybe they’re still hungry. Stay here in Paris, Monsieur Perrault.”
I made her no promise, one way or the other, and shortly after we parted, all polite au revoir and take cares and perhaps our paths will cross again. I think they won’t. To be sure, I’ll not seek her out, green- and blue-eyed liar that she is, apparently.
I almost decided not to mentioned her red-felt cloche, which might last have been fashionable in 1933. Then I undecided, so there it is. I’ll make of it what I will. Or what I won’t. Be done with this.
29/7/98
THIS
Oh, you greedy gormandiser,
What a pity you weren’t wiser.
Mr. Wolf, so false and sly,
In the river now you lie!
THIS
Vous m’amusez toujours. Jamais je m’en irai chez-nous, J’ai trop grand peur des loups. (Voyageur Songs; French-Canadian, ca. 1830; collected by Edward Ermatinger)
ALSO
Since I’m making lais, Bisclavret
Is one I don’t want to forget.
In Breton, “Bisclavret’s” the name;
“Garwolf” in Norman means the same.
Long ago you heard the tale told –
And it used to happen, in days of old –
Quite a few men became garwolves,
And set up housekeeping in the woods.
A garwolf is a savage beast,
While the fury’s on it, at least:
Eats men, wreaks evil, does no good,
Living and roaming in the deep wood.
BISCLAVRET (excerpt)
Marie de France, translated Judith P. Shoaf © 1996
AND
I left out this, this, this…snippet. In my recounting of meeting goodly fucked weary plaguing-me nigh unto Perdition and back Mr. Peter Tannahill that day at the tumbledown lochside ruins near Drumnadrochit. An accidental omission, though it might well seem anything but and otherwise. At some point, he brought up Boleskine House, and that way did his conversation turn. Near to the village of Foyers, a mansion built in the late Eighteenth Century by a man named Archibald Fraser. And then, he told how Aleister Crowley, bête noir, that other Loch Ness Monster, came to and purchased Boleskine House in 1899. Crowley, usual flair and all, styled himself Laird of Boleskine and Abertarff. And maybe he did unspeakable rituals in those chambers above the all-but-bottomless lake. Maybe the “Abramelin Operation” out of something known as The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It all reeks to me to high fucking heavens of apocrypha and hype. But let’s us just say yes, this transpired. Crowley sought a higher self in this incantation, but Tannahill said how, no, instead was conjured what Crowley named “the Abramelin devils” and much mischief, as of the antics of poltergeists – darker, but reminiscent – ensued.
“Those Led Zeppelin wankers,” said Tannahill, “That Yank Jimmy Page fellow, a right Crowley devotee, he owned the dump for a time.”
&
There can be no denyin’ that the wind’ll shake ’em down
And the flat world’s flyin’. There’s a new plague on the land
&
Still so dark all over Europe
And the rainbow rises here
In the western sky
SO
IN CONCLUSION
I see a pattern here, or I see no pattern at all. A pattern exists, or no pattern is here. Too much to drink, so little sleep, and a woman with eyes that are green and blue, and I cannot find my beau garçon – Gautier.
30/7/98
I sit on my stool before the easel. My hands are stained, acrylic stained, bleeding in reverse, and I sit on my stool and rage at this haunting, this abomination jokingly [Christ]ened Last Drink Bird Head a few days back. Now I know it wasn’t a joke, even if and though all the various connotations the title may summon allude me. Just as I am eluded by its completion. It’s a stillbirth, or placental afterbirth expulsion, postpartum blood only in countless avocado gangrenous black-greens instead of crimson and meat shades. All an avocado standing on a hill, also an avocado hill, roiling labyrinth sky, no in and no out, and HIM, whoever HIM might be. HIM. Ibis-crown’d dæmon from a dream I can’t recall to lord over this fucking canvas. I know HIM, I know HIS name, but I will not speak it here. I dab camel’s hair to napthol crimson and there you motherfucker, you deal with
that hanging in your squirming goddamn sky. There. One dab or two or a third, but all a single body slumped in that worm welkin vault. Stürmischer Himmel don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky but my red damn’d splotch or even if that is Himmel.
Go to the kitchen drawer for a paring knife, and be a slasher.
Precedent the First: 15 June 1985, the young man who slashed crotch and then splashed concentrated sulphuric acid across Rembrandt’s Danaë, and there was little chance for restoration.
Precedent the Second: Munch’s The Scream, vandalized with a felt-tip marker. And too, too true, the scrawl, “Could only have been painted by a madman.”
Precedent the Third: 10 March 1914 and Mary Richardson’s meat-cleaver savagery against Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. Seven slashes. Slashes seven. She said later, “Because the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.”
Precedent the Fourth: Repeated attacks against Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642).
Precedent the Fifth: Twice decapitated, “The Little Mermaid” in the harbor of Copenhagen. 24 April 1964, “sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the Situationist movement, amongst them Jørgen Nash.” Then, only five (or six?) months ago, 28/1/98, decapitation again, perpetrators returned the head, but were never apprehended.
Too many examples, and these only those of which I am aware.
BUT
Precedent the Sixth (and most Relevant to the Case at Hand): Claude Monet, April 1903, an exhibition of his work, and this time it was the artist himself who entered and took blade and paintbrush spatters to his own work.
This is all fair fucking warning, you Thoth-headed avatar fuck of my undoing perched there on your too-ripe avocado hill. I am your god, and not around that Other way. I have knives. I can part delicately curved beak from cranium, jaws from quadrate, skull from almost human shoulders, etcetera. You do well to remember that, afterbirth.
31/7/98
Bad night last night. Faithful Dorothée came round to find me hung over and puking sick. No lasting damage done, to myself or the execrable (or excremenitious painting).
1/8/98
“Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them…there is nothing.”
1938, Sartre, La Nausée
1/8/98
It may be a dream. Hardly matters. I meant to write this hours ago, but scuttled off to Sartre, instead, being lowly, loathsome coward that I am. Being coward. Hiding in history and words not of my own devising. Words not even wholly suitable, but pilfered stolen appropriated pirated nonetheless. Privateering as avoidance. I meant, instead, to write this what might have been dream and this what might have been waking, or this WHAT might have been liminal space straddling the two mythic kingdoms, SLEEP and AWAKE. I walked la Rue Saint-Denis, so crowded with prostitutes and those paying supplicants seeking out the ministrations and sordid deliverances of their services, but so many, so many, walking la Rue Saint-Denis was to thread a needle. I cannot prove I wasn’t actually there. I can’t prove I wasn’t. My head choked, eyes choked with memories of bright lurid brothel signage: Club 128, “Sex Center” Projection Video, Top Sexy, Sexy Center, generic Peep Show. Video 121, generic Sex Shop; La rue Saint-Denis est surtout constituée de sex shops, yes and fine and true, but almost or no signs that were not in fucking English. Oh, but half times half a memory of stopping to purchase a pear at a fruit stand called la Palais du Fruit. Make of that what you goddamn will and pardon my murdered Français. In my head, the recollections are of cobblestones sticky with cum, gutters running silver-white with cum. This cannot be actual. Delusion or dreaming delusion. Faces all around like carnival masks, that painted and bright and plastic. Those faces, but also others of an entirely different breed. Filthy waifs and gaunt women with tarry blobs for eyes, jaundiced walking skeletons lurking in back of neon and cheap, sleazy glitz. The lure of an anglerfish comes to mind, or the tongue of a snapping turtle. Fakeout. I am asking everywhere after lost Gautier, whom I have come to believe stole something of me away when he left my studio. Same as the transvestite left the ring. My cock so hard I barely can even walk, but the thought of hands and knees in the semen-wallow gutter, no way, no way. Hands on me, hands of every comprehendible gender, and at first my polite refusals, and then I was shouting for them not to touch me, because I felt the microbes slithering from skin to skin, transepidermal, them unto me, and it might be, though I, not bathe ever again, (what?) but infection so deep I’ll be bones in the semen by dawn. Do not fucking touch me. Only show me the way to Gautier. You must know him, that face and shyness, and if I’d had a photograph I would have shown them all. See? This, this here, right here, is the very man or the boy child I am seeking. And I did find him. That’s the miracle of it. The loaves and fishes, manna from the sky, pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21-22; Exodus 14:24; Nehemiah 9:19, & etc.), bleeding statues, falling frogs, stigmata, Fátima (13 October 1917), miracles of modern goddamn medicine. He was standing in an alley near the intersection with rue de la Cossonnerie (a street, supposedly, with a far more savory character). It struck me in no way a surprise to see him on his knees, blowing a fellow with a wolf’s head, which soon after my arrival became, instead, the head of an ibis. I was even less surprised when the man sprouted wings and flew away into the streetlight-tainted nighttime sky. Gautier stood up, wiped his mouth, and tucked his thirty pieces of silver into a front pocket of his tight, tight jeans. Don’t think I don’t know I was meant to see each act in its turn and interpret their meanings for precisely what they were. “Miss me?” he asked (though, didn’t he not speak English?), and I shrugged and stepped into the alleyway, glancing first over my shoulder at the way I’d come. I wanted no followers. I wanted to be certain a line hadn’t formed, impatient for the boy whore’s favors. There was nothing back there but the neon and throng. Relief. How often do I ever feel relief these days? But in that moment I did feel relief, and I turned back to Gautier. “Do you think I missed you?” I replied, tit for tat, and he raised his eyebrows and spat into a pile of wet cardboard boxes. “I dreamed of your painting,” he said, oh so very softly he said that, and by then I was sweating, and if I’d not been, that would have done the trick. “I dreamed you finished it, and then gave it to me. I dreamed I sold it to an American for a great deal of money.” And I said, “You have good dreams,” and he said, “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t. What about you, peintre. What are your dreams? Does an incubus come and crouch on your chest when you sleep?” I saw, then, that as we’d been speaking, his eyebrows had grown so that they met in the middle, and it occurred to me a contagion had been passed from the wolf/ibis-headed john. If I cut fair Gautier, would I find a second skin turned inside out? If I cut him, would I find fur? There was plenty of space in even that narrow, stinking alley for a trial, an inquisition, and, quick as thieves, I weighed the wants of my cock against my interest in the Truth, and, too, the fact that I could have both. But the contagion might be catching, might it not? Did I wish to join Gautier in this lycanthropy of the soul? Why, if I chose that route, I could go to Gévaudan, after all. I could pick up where Marguerite and her unnamed compatriots had left off more than two hundred years before, yes? “Can’t stand here all night,” Gautier said, and he said it with a haughty, impatient air that made up my mind then and there. I drew the paring knife from my belt and, stepping quickly towards him, moving fast and leaving only inches to spare, drove the blade into his chest to the hilt. He didn’t scream, so all the better. I twisted the blade, as I’ve seen done in action flicks. His blood spilled so warmly it was almost hot over my right hand, near to steaming, and I considered the possibility all over again. Maybe I’d be numbered among the infected, despite my sloppy caution. I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine. I twisted the blade again, and he only looked a little disappointed before slumping to the ground at my feet. His descent was in no especial way different from the position he’d have assumed were I then a paying customer and not an executioner. “Does he know my name?” I asked the dy
ing boy. He answered, words death rattling from his slight and violated chest, “All our names are known to him, Sir. ‘I am thy writing palette, O Thoth, and I have brought unto thee thine ink-jar. I am not of those who work iniquity in their secret places; let not evil happen unto me.’ Thought you were Monsieur Myth Savvy. Thought you’d know that for sure.” For good measure, I kicked him, and turned to walk away in the same instant I became quite convinced I’d never drawn the paring knife. I stood with my back to the living Gautier, and he was saying that he was available, if I was interested. Why would I have sought him out, were I not interested. It was a nasty trick (adianoeta noted and no pun intended), turning the tables on me like that. Dying at my feet and condemning me with the taint of wolf and ibis blood, then my having never even pulled the knife, much less plunged it into his jaded heart. “Will you come home with me,” I asked, but he inquired, “Do you have a home, Monsieur?” So I put the question to him a second time. “If you have the cost of my company,” he said. Which is to say, he said no. And I recalled the Hag of Montparnasse: “You smell very much of a lonely man…” I stared at a flashing sign promising LIVE GIRLS (supposing the dead ones are unpopular or in short supply), and eventually I said to him, “Not what I had in mind, Gautier.” Car horn. Beat for emphasis. Sharp intake of breath. “You know I’m your money’s worth.” And I replied, “No. Wait here, and I’m sure you will attract the attention of some other pantheon. A forgotten god or goddess will come along, sooner or later.” He said not another word, and I left him standing there. I’ll never go looking again. A black dog followed me almost all the way back to the flat, though I took a taxi. I glimpsed it now and then. It wore many faces. Many gods and many voices.
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Page 28