V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Papa!” she screamed.

  The driver winced, tapped the brake reflexively. “I am not your father,” he muttered.

  Up into the heights of Montmartre, aimed for the most diseased part of the sky. Would it rain? The clouds hung like leprous tissue. Under that light the color of her hair reduced to neutral browns, buffs. Let down the hair reached halfway over her buttocks. But she wore it high with two large curls covering her ears, tickling the sides of her neck.

  Papa had a strong bald skull and a brave mustache. Evenings she would come softly into the room, the mysterious place walled in silk where he and her mother slept. And while Madeleine combed the hair of Maman in the other room, Mélanie lay on the wide bed beside him, while he touched her in many places, and she squirmed and fought not to make a sound. It was their game. One night there had been heat lightning outside, and a small night bird had lit on the windowsill and watched them. How long ago it seemed! Late summer, like today.

  This had been at Serre Chaude, their estate in Normandy, once the ancestral home of a family whose blood had long since turned to a pale ichor and vaporized away into the frosty skies over Amiens. The house, which dated from the reign of Henri IV, was large but unimpressive, like most architecture of the period. She had always wanted to slide down the great mansard roof: begin at the top and skid down the first gentle slope. Her skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe matte against a wilderness of chimneys, under the Norman sunlight. High over the elms and the hidden carp pools, up where Maman could only be a tiny blotch under a parasol, gazing at her. She imagined the sensation often: the feeling of roof-tiles rapidly sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump, the wind trapped under her blouse teasing the new breasts. And then the break: where the lower, steeper slope of the roof began, the point of no return, where the friction against her body would lessen and she would accelerate, flip over to twist the skirt—perhaps rip it off, be done with it, see it flutter away, like a dark kite!—to let the dovetailed tiles tense her nipple-points to an angry red, see a pigeon clinging to the eaves just before flight, taste the long hair caught against her teeth and tongue, cry out . . .

  The taxi stopped in front of a cabaret in the rue Germaine Pilon, near Boulevard Clichy. Mélanie paid the fare and was handed her bag from the top of the cab. She felt something which might be the beginning of the rain against her cheek. The cab drove away, she stood before Le Nerf in an empty street, the flowered bag without gaiety under the clouds.

  “You believed us after all.” M. Itague stood, half-stooping, holding the handle of the traveling bag. “Come, fétiche, inside. There’s news.”

  On the small stage, which faced a dining room filled only with stacked tables and chairs, and lit by uncertain August daylight, came the confrontation with Satin.

  “Mlle. Jarretière”; using her stage name. He was short and heavily built: the hair stuck out in tufts from each side of his head. He wore tights and a dress shirt, and directed his eyes parallel to a line connecting her hip-points. The skirt was two years old, she was growing. She felt embarrassed.

  “I have nowhere to stay,” she murmured.

  “Here,” announced Itague, “there’s a back room. Here, until we move.”

  “Move?” She gazed at the raving flesh of tropical blossoms decorating her bag.

  “We have the Théâtre de Vincent Castor,” cried Satin. He spun, leaped, landed atop a small stepladder.

  Itague grew excited, describing L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises—Rape of the Chinese Virgins. It was to be Satin’s finest ballet, the greatest music of Vladimir Porcépic, everything formidable. Rehearsals began tomorrow, she’d saved the day, they would have waited until the last minute because it could only be Mélanie, La Jarretière, to play Su Feng, the virgin who is tortured to death defending her purity against the invading Mongolians.

  She had wandered away, to the edge of stage right. Itague stood in the center, gesturing, declaiming: while enigmatic on the stepladder, stage left, perched Satin, humming a music-hall song.

  A remarkable innovation would be the use of automata, to play Su Feng’s handmaidens. “A German engineer is building them,” said Itague. “They’re lovely creatures: one will even unfasten your robes. Another will play a zither—although the music itself comes from the pit. But they move so gracefully! Not like machines at all.”

  Was she listening? Of course: part of her. She stood awkwardly on one leg, reached down and scratched her calf, hot under its black stocking. Satin watched hungrily. She felt the twin curls moving restless against her neck. What was he saying? Automata . . .

  She gazed up at the sky, through one of the room’s side windows. God, would it ever rain?

  Her room was hot and airless. Asprawl in one corner was an artist’s lay figure, without a head. Old theater posters were scattered on the floor and bed, tacked to the wall. She thought once she heard thunder rumbling from outside.

  “Rehearsals will be here,” Itague told her. “Two weeks before the performance we move into the Théâtre de Vincent Castor, to get the feel of the boards.” He used much theater talk. Not long ago he’d been a bartender near Place Pigalle.

  Alone, she lay on the bed, wishing she could pray for rain. She was glad she couldn’t see the sky. Perhaps certain of its tentacles already touched the roof of the cabaret. Someone rattled the door. She had thought to lock it. It was Satin, she knew. Soon she heard the Russian and Itague leave together by the back door.

  She may not have slept: her eyes opened to the same dim ceiling. A mirror hung on the ceiling directly over the bed. She hadn’t noticed it before. Deliberately she moved her legs, leaving her arms limp at her sides, till the hem of the blue skirt had worked high above the tops of the stockings. And lay gazing at the black and tender white. Papa had said, “How pretty your legs are: the legs of a dancer.” She could not wait for the rain.

  She rose, in a near-frenzy, removed blouse, skirt and undergarments and moved swiftly to the door, wearing only the black stockings and white buck tennis shoes. Somewhere on the way she managed to let down her hair. In the next room she found the costumes for L’Enlèvement des Vierges Chinoises. She felt her hair, heavy and almost viscous along the length of her back and tickling the tops of her buttocks as she knelt beside the large box and searched for the costume of Su Feng.

  Back in the hot room she quickly removed shoes and stockings, keeping her eyes closed tight until she had fastened her hair in back with the spangled amber comb. She was not pretty unless she wore something. The sight of her nude body repelled her. Until she had drawn on the blond silk tights, embroidered up each leg with a long, slender dragon; stepped into the slippers with the cut steel buckles, and intricate straps which writhed up halfway to her knees. Nothing to restrain her breasts: she wrapped the underskirt tightly around her hips. It fastened with thirty hooks and eyes from waist to thigh-top, leaving a fur-trimmed slit so that she could dance. And finally, the kimono, translucent and dyed rainbowlike with sunbursts and concentric rings of cerise, amethyst, gold and jungly green.

  She lay back once more, hair spread above her on the pillowless mattress, breath taken by her own beauty. If Papa could see her.

  The lay figure in the corner was light and carried easily to the bed. She raised her knees high and—interested—saw her calves in the mirror crisscross over the small of its plaster back. Felt the coolness of the figure’s flanks against the nude-colored silk, high on her thighs, hugged it tight. The neck top, jagged and flaking off, came to her breasts. She pointed her toes, began to dance horizontal, thinking of how her handmaidens would be.

  Tonight there would be a magic-lantern show. Itague sat outside L’Ouganda, drinking absinthe and water. The stuff was supposed to be aphrodisiac but it affected Itague the opposite. He watched a Negro girl, one of the dancers, adjusting her stocking. He thought of francs and centimes.<
br />
  There weren’t many. The scheme might succeed. Porcépic had a name among the avant-garde in French music. Opinion in the city was violently divided: once the composer had been loudly insulted in the street by one of the most venerable of the Post-Romantics. Certainly the man’s personal life wasn’t one to endear many prospective patrons, either. Itague suspected him of smoking hashish. And there was the Black Mass.

  “The poor child,” Satin was saying. The table in front of him was nearly covered with empty wineglasses. The Russian moved them from time to time, blocking out the choreography to L’Enlèvement. Satin drank wine like a Frenchman, Itague thought: never outright falling-down drunk. But growing more unstable, more nervous, as his chorus of hollow glass dancers grew. “Does she know where her father’s gone?” Satin wondered aloud, looking off into the street. The night was windless, hot. Darker than Itague could ever remember it. Behind them the small orchestra began to play a tango. The Negro girl arose and went inside. To the south, the lights along the Champs Élysées picked out the underbelly of a nauseous-yellow cloud.

  “With the father deserted,” said Itague, “she’s free. The mother doesn’t care.”

  The Russian looked up, sudden. A glass fell over on his table.

  “—or nearly free.”

  “Fled to the jungles, I understand,” Satin said. A waiter brought more wine.

  “A gift. What had he ever given before? Have you seen the child’s furs, her silks, the way she watches her own body? Heard the noblesse in the way she speaks? He gave her all that. Or was he giving it all to himself, by way of her?”

  “Itague, she certainly could be the most giving—”

  “No. No, it is merely being reflected. The girl functions as a mirror. You, that waiter, the chiffonnier in the next empty street she turns into: whoever happens to be standing in front of the mirror in the place of that wretched man. You will see the reflection of a ghost.”

  “M. Itague, your late readings may have convinced you—”

  “I said ghost,” Itague answered softly. “Its name is not l’Heuremaudit, or l’Heuremaudit is only one of its names. That ghost fills the walls of this café and the streets of this district, perhaps every one of the world’s arrondissements breathes its substance. Cast in the image of what? Not God. Whatever potent spirit can mesmerize the gift of irreversible flight into a grown man and the gift of self-arousal into the eyes of a young girl, his name is unknown. Or if known then he is Yahweh and we are all Jews, for no one will ever speak it.” Which was strong talk for M. Itague. He read La Libre Parole, had stood among the crowds to spit at Captain Dreyfus.

  The woman stood at their table, not waiting for them to rise, merely standing and looking as if she’d never waited for anything.

  “Will you join us,” said Satin eagerly. Itague looked far to the south, at the hanging yellow cloud which hadn’t changed its shape.

  She owned a dress shop in the rue du Quatre-Septembre. Wore tonight a Poiret-inspired evening dress of crepe Georgette the color of a Negro’s head, beaded all over, covered with a cerise tunic which was drawn in under her breasts, Empire style. A harem veil covered the lower part of her face and fastened behind to a tiny hat riotous with the plumage of equatorial birds. Fan with amber stick, ostrich feathers, silk tassel. Sand-colored stockings, clocked exquisitely on the calf. Two brilliant-studded tortoise-shell pins through her hair; silver mesh bag, high-buttoned kid shoes with patent leather at the toe and French heel.

  Who knew her “soul,” Itague wondered, glancing sideways at the Russian. It was her clothes, her accessories, which determined her, fixed her among the mobs of tourist ladies and putains that filled the street.

  “Our prima ballerina has arrived today,” said Itague. He was always nervous around patrons. As bartender he’d seen no need to be diplomatic.

  “Mélanie l’Heuremaudit,” his patroness smiled. “When shall I meet her?”

  “Any time,” Satin muttered, shifting glasses, keeping his eyes on the table.

  “Was there objection from the mother?” she asked.

  The mother did not care, the girl herself, he suspected, did not care. The father’s flight had affected her in some curious way. Last year she’d been eager to learn, inventive, creative. Satin would have his hands full this year. They would end up screaming at each other. No: the girl wouldn’t scream.

  The woman sat, lost in watching the night, which enveloped them like a velvet teaser-curtain. Itague, for all his time in Montmartre, had never seen behind it to the bare wall of the night. But had this one? He scrutinized her, looking for some such betrayal. He’d observed the face some dozen times. It had always gone through conventional grimaces, smiles, expressions of what passed for emotion. The German could build another, Itague thought, and no one could tell them apart.

  The tango still played: or perhaps a different one, he hadn’t been listening. A new dance, and popular. The head and body had to be kept erect, the steps had to be precise, sweeping, graceful. It wasn’t like the waltz. In that dance was room for an indiscreet billow of crinolines, a naughty word whispered through mustaches into an ear all ready to blush. But here no words, no deviating: simply the wide spiral, turning about the dancing floor, gradually narrowing, tighter, until there was no motion except for the steps, which led nowhere. A dance for automata.

  The curtain hung in total stillness. If Itague could have found its pulleys or linkage, he might make it stir. Might penetrate to the wall of the night’s theater. Feeling suddenly alone in the wheeling, mechanical darkness of la Ville-Lumière, he wanted to cry, Strike! Strike the set of night and let us all see. . . .

  The woman had been watching him, expressionless, poised like one of her own mannequins. Blank eyes, something to hang a Poiret dress on. Porcépic, drunk and singing, approached their table.

  The song was in Latin. He’d just composed it for a Black Mass to be held tonight at his home in Les Batignolles. The woman wanted to come. Itague saw this immediately: a film seemed to drop from her eyes. He sat forlorn, feeling as if that most feared enemy of sleep had entered silently on a busy night, the one person whom you must come face to face with someday, who asks you, in the earshot of your oldest customers, to mix a cocktail whose name you have never heard.

  They left Satin shuffling empty wineglasses, looking as if tonight, in some tenantless street, he would murder.

  Mélanie dreamed. The lay figure hung half off the bed, its arms stretched out, crucified, one stump touching her breast. It was the sort of dream in which, possibly, the eyes are open: or the last vision of the room is so reproduced in memory that all details are perfect, and the dreamer is unclear whether he is asleep or awake. The German stood over the bed watching her. He was Papa, but also a German.

  “You must turn over,” he repeated insistently. She was too embarrassed to ask why. Her eyes—which somehow she was able to see, as if she were disembodied and floating above the bed, perhaps somewhere behind the quicksilver of the mirror—her eyes were slanted Oriental: long lashes, spangled on the upper lids with tiny fragments of gold leaf. She glanced sideways at the lay figure. It had grown a head, she thought. The face was turned away. “To reach between your shoulderblades,” said the German. What does he look for there, she wondered.

  “Between my thighs,” she whispered, moving on the bed. The silk there was dotted with the same gold, like sequins. He placed his hand under her shoulder, turned her. The skirt twisted on her thighs: she saw their two inner edges blond and set off by the muskrat skin on the slit of the skirt. The Mélanie in the mirror watched sure fingers move to the center of her back, search, find a small key, which he began to wind.

  “I got you in time,” he breathed. “You would have stopped, had I not . . .”

  The face of the lay figure had been turned toward her, all the time. There was no face.

  She woke up, no
t screaming, but moaning as if sexually aroused.

  Itague was bored. This Black Mass had attracted the usual complement of nervous and blasé. Porcépic’s music was striking, as usual; highly dissonant. Lately he had been experimenting with African polyrhythyms. Afterward Gerfaut the writer sat by a window, discoursing on how for some reason the young girl—adolescent or younger—had again become the mode in erotic fiction. Gerfaut had two or three chins, sat erect and spoke pedantically, though he had only Itague for an audience.

  Itague didn’t really want to talk with Gerfaut. He wanted to watch the woman who had come with them. She sat now in a side pew with one of the acolytes, a little sculptress from Vaugirard. The woman’s hand, gloveless, and decorated only with a ring, stroked the girl’s temple as they spoke. From the ring there sprouted a slender female arm, fashioned in silver. The hand was cupped, and held the lady’s cigarette. As Itague watched she lit another: black paper, gold crest. A small pile of stubs lay scattered beneath her shoes.

  Gerfaut had been describing the plot of his latest novel. The heroine was one Doucette, thirteen and struggled within by passions she could not name.

  “A child, and yet a woman,” Gerfaut said. “And a quality of something eternal about her. I even confess to a certain leaning of my own that way. La Jarretière . . .”

  The old satyr.

  Gerfaut at length moved away. It was nearly morning. Itague’s head ached. He needed sleep, needed a woman. The lady still smoked her black cigarettes. The little sculptress lay, legs curled up on the seat, head pillowed against her companion’s breasts. The black hair seemed to float like a drowned corpse’s hair against the cerise tunic. The entire room and the bodies inside it—some twisted, some coupled, some awake—the scattered Hosts, the black furniture, were all bathed in an exhausted yellow light, filtered through rain clouds which refused to burst.