by Jeremy Reed
Others would learn of his character as a free-thinker, as someone who reviled factions and class, a rebel in the cause of the imagination, a titled man who learnt of the Paris underworld from a coterie of vagrants, pimps and prostitutes. He would talk of the pursuits of those who aspired to knowledge of a psychosexual nature.
His listeners would include a priest whose apostasy had led to excommunication and a fanatical devotion to the black arts. Still carrying a mauve-plumed biretta, the man would punctuate his speech with Latinisms, his tiny, effeminate hands working to free his mind of some irritant, some sexual fantasy unappeased by even the most debased encounters in alleys. His hands would shake as an indication of the viral march of syphilis through his central nervous system.
What would become of those violet dawns and the cognoscenti after they had dispersed back to their solitary rooms? He saw himself sitting at a piano declaiming his sentences, accompanying his prosopopoeias by chords thumped out on the keys. It was a way of disordering and heightening the senses, his empty stomach on fire with the kick of red wine. Sometimes he would write on the mirror in coloured chalks, or lie down on the floor and dream of the life he had known in Montevideo. That had been lived by Isidore Ducasse, a relation of his with whom he was no longer on speaking terms. It was said that Isidore had left his red teeth-marks in his tutor's wrist after a disagreement over his lack of punctuality in attending classes, and that he had caught his father dressing Alma in his dead wife's silk lingerie and lashed him with a riding-crop. And it was rumoured that he prostituted himself in American hotels, waded up to his knees in the blood of cattle in municipal slaughterhouses, and mixed with butchers' sons, thieves, deserters, drug-pushers, and he DIDN'T CARE.
Ducasse had been the subject of controversies remembered to this day when Lautréamont sat destitute in his room fisting a piano to an insane dissonance.
He recalled the unpleasant incident of the dead cow, and how, when Ducasse had ridden out with a neighbour one Sunday in autumn to the small town of Las Piedras, to see Don Victor, a jaguar and puma hunter who lined his hut with their extravagant skins, he had already predicted the brutal incident which was to occur. Don Victor was drunk, and had insisted on blasting shot into a particularly valuable puma-skin he had stretched on the wall. Not content with peppering the skin with bullet-holes, he had smashed a bottle of whisky against his exhibit. Isidore wanted to see the man pinned up on the wall himself, and for a moment a blank spot had entered his consciousness, as though he had run out of a dark room into the light and was temporarily blinded. He had jolted out of it in time to be called to the yard to resaddle. His neighbour evidently did not trust the hunter's trigger-happy exuberance and thought it safer to head back. They took a dust road, glad to be clear of their manic acquaintance, and had ridden for only ten minutes before they were pulled up by the stench of rotting flesh. A cow had turned maggoty under a floripondio, the carrion black with insects and spading vultures. Disgusted by the nauseous smell, his neighbour was shocked to a halt to discover Isidore had dismounted and was testing the putrescent flanks of the cow with his boots, all the time clapping his hands and shaking with raucous laughter as the vultures flapped clear, their leathery wings beating the sapphire air. He had stood mesmerised by the energy attendant on decay, the breakdown of flesh by swarming parasites, and the breeding-ground it proved to be for an irascible drone of glinting flies. Unable to get close enough to the root of dissolution, he had taken hold of a log and laid into the gutted sores opened by vultures. Vermilion, purple, the fissures had fascinated, drawn him down to inspect the putrid lesions like one discovering the beauty of colour in a sea shell. It was only when he felt the cut of a whip behind his ears, and heard the enraged howl of his neighbour's voice shouting to him to get back to the road before he slashed his ears, that he had co me back to himself and taken flight from the sun-cooked carcass. On their way back to Montevideo not a word was exchanged between the two riders — the incident was too disquieting for even Don Victor to report to Isidore's father.
There had been other things said of Isidore Ducasse. He was lazy and played bowls on a piece of waste land close to the harbour. He was obsessed with cock-fights and visited the harbour bars to watch two birds battling in a miniature Roman amphitheatre.
And what were his achievements, this blood dependant of the Comte de Lautréamont? He thought of the parasitical, awkward Isidore with disdain. He viewed the adumbrated highlights of that stranger's life with the clinical detachment necessary for art. He would spare only those features of a life that lent themselves to the elaboration of fiction. The rest would suffer an early and irretrievable dormition. This would be his most important task: the elimination of all personal facts that could not be assimilated into metaphor, and then the fragmentation of that metaphor into an impersonal mosaic. He would be helped in this by the knowledge that his father would almost certainly have destroyed his mother's papers after her suicide. And, given his own reputation, it was unlikely that a record would be kept of his past. He would also have to create an imaginary ongoing life for his father. Ends are like that; they cut you off from facts and necessitate the creation of a shadow life. Lautréamont would alter the balance of history by believing in nothing of the past. He believed in nothing but the truth established by the immediacy of metaphor. Everything else was to be mistrusted. His life suffered the exposure of a raindrop; but at the same time it had a blinding clarity of perception, a piercing scintillation that made it impossible for others to focus on without flinching.
Lautréamont would inherit Ducasse's determination to abolish rationalism and to detonate a literature entrenched in a doctrine of social realism. A link would be established between an umbrella and a sewing-machine, a red moon and a black sun setting above a pyramid. Lautréamont would open the floodgates of the unconscious, and the result would be the creation of new psychological states, patterns of behaviour that would configure in revolutions occurring on an inner plane, changes that would challenge man's whole concept of self-identity.
For years he had dreamt of uniting himself to his double. As he thought back in time he realised he had always been someone else, and that his energy had been concentrated into creating a dual figure. Only then had he realised that in time he would have to submit to the dominance of the superior power he had created.
The surf was slamming hard across the flat beach. Everything was caught up in the slide towards change — the molecular dance of the universe, the centuries disappearing into vortices the way pebbles rattled on the down gradient, to be caught up in the wave's retreating hem. And in the end there would be nothing but a heap of black pebbles on a white beach under a red sky. It was how he envisaged the end of the universe. And Lautréamont would witness the cataclysm. He would stand as the last man on a fire-scoured littoral, the big sheetings of flame burning to an emerald and black conflagration on the skyline.
It was not the coastline of Uruguay that met his vision, but the apocalyptic waste land he had prepared for the marriage with his double. A blue-eyed, lithic statuary followed him as he ran. The stone men who were waiting to come to life at a command. He was breathless, terrified to return to the unrelieved sterility of his home. Everything that had compromised his life now seemed immeasurably distant. The town appeared to have pushed off into mental space; he was separated from it by the gulf of a mental divide. He could never get back; he would need space and anonymity to give birth to Lautréamont. Somewhere a room awaited him in a European capital. Out of that window he would see the imperial eagle die in the hands of an inept emperor. The crowds were red ants running for crevices. The birth of the unknown hero always resulted in the collapse of civilisation. Lautréamont would have to be invincibly resilient to withstand the neglect that his work would suffer. There would not even be the friction aroused by hostility to mark the arrival of his genius.
The surf caught him again, but this time he made no effort to elude its blazing flood. He let it ride up to the level of
his boots and continued to wade through the shallows, careless of his clothes, eyes fixed on an imperceptible point on the horizon. It was here in the Atlantic's turbulent energy, the ocean of his beginnings, that he would celebrate the union between himself and his double. A symbolic death followed by an instantaneous rebirth. He had brought the other this far, carried him through danger, nurtured his latent ambition, been unsparing in his preparations, and now all that remained was to concede his name and liberate the subject of his myth.
He watched a swallow dive to the beach. It was time for Lautréamont to emerge and live.
*
PART TWO
Woodcut of Lautréamont by Mendez Magaririos, after the
photograph given to Alvaro Guillot-Murioz by Eudoxie
Ducasse © La Quinzaine litteraire 1972
The Eye 6
...I insist. I cannot provide you with duplicates of letters lost at sea. The irregularity of my reports from Tarbes and the greater consistency of letters reaching you from Paris suggest either interception or mismanagement in delivery. I incline towards the former.
You have surely received news of your son's unsavoury relationship with Paul Lespès and Georges Minvielle. I cannot repeat facts until I am sure that my letters reach you. In connection with the incident that occurred at school and Ducasse's imperious flaunting of authority, I am surprised you have not heard from Gustave Hinstin. The latter must have written to you in confidence about your son's moody and unpredictable behaviour?
What I know of Ducasse's life in Paris comes from Marthe David, a prostitute resident at 45 rue Barbesse. She knows him under the adopted name I have communicated in an earlier letter. Her presentation of him agrees neither with yours nor mine. She speaks of him as a young man who belongs to a secret order whose aim is to establish universal power. It is difficult to ascertain whether she has in mind a political body — the revolutionary spirit is rife in Paris — or one of the esoteric lodges. Her inarticulacy and general evasiveness on all matters relating to her life do little to assist my research into your son's equally enigmatic life.
What I can establish is a certain predictability in your son's habits. His behaviour here differs little from his preoccupations in Montevideo. He spends most of his time alone, seems to avoid friendships, takes pains on leaving his room to conceal his papers, and on going out shows an indifference to street life. What happens in his life seems to come about by chance. His few excursions, which have taken in the Roman amphitheatre in the rue Monge, the ruins of the Cluny baths and two visits to see the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, are done with a nonchalance that suggests a disdain for his physical surroundings.
His activities seem to be confined to his room at night. He writes, plays the piano and on occasions entertains the sort of man to whom he was attracted in Montevideo. Only these are different; they resemble vagrants, nocturnal revenants. I can establish no trace of a political movement and as yet nothing in his behaviour likely to create the sort of scandal that would threaten your position.
The books he buys are largely related to natural history. He seems fascinated by their plates and is selective in his choice of editions.
I shall await your further instructions, which will in turn be a confirmation that my letter has reached you.
*
Chapter 6
Twenty-three rue Notre Dame des Victoires. An address and a room in which to write. My skyline is dominated by the Haussmannisation of Paris — the network of elevated scaffolding that correspondingly plunges the Government into massive debt. I can hear the chain-gangs of workers trooping to the sites at first light. All day the thunder of falling masonry, the big flash that brings a block down like a house of cards. On frosty days the metallic ring of hammers, the industry of a pick-axe alerts each nerve in my body like a wire. Smoke billows from the site and anchors in the sky as a black willow before drifting off across the Bousse.
What I miss is the steady beat of metronomic surf. Those lapis lazuli and malachite depths in the wave as it rises to take on the colour of the sky before slanting into a white incline.
Paris affords me the isolation I had hoped to find. I sleep in the day and work at night. My friends are those who walk the city at night, those who are placated by the conspiratorial quiet, those for whom the darkness is a shell that hums with the reciprocal echo of their inner dictates. I gained nothing by my education: what I have, what I know, has come to me through the union between silence and apprehensible vision.
When I came to France, first as a boarder at the Lycée Impérial of Tarbes and later as a pupil of a school in Pau, my nerves revolted against my physical and mental displacement. I withdrew. I studied Latin prose and grammar, not with the relish of a classical scholar, but with the mind of one intent on studying magic and on following a precise discipline in order to train my senses for the universal disorder I should come to create. Tarbes turned out to be every bit as provincially delimiting and disciplinarian as Flammarion had impressed on me. A town with a convent, a cathedral, its leisurely bells invading the silence with a deadening, oppressive inertia; the chilblains, the mortuary cold of the dormitories, the brutality that existed between pupils, the medicinal smells of the infirmary, the fresh-bread smell of the linen-room. Elbows on the desk, my head in my hands, I sat staring at a textbook without reading it. I dreamt of freedom; azure skies blowing above banana trees, green bee-eaters chasing dragonflies, the wind in tall grasses. I had to prove myself to the youth I had left behind — Isidore Ducasse. I even took to penning him long letters, and prided myself on concealing my identity from the two persons with whom I shared not so much a friendship as a tenuous acquaintance. Paul Lespès and Georges Minvielle. How little they knew of me. And how unimportantly morose they seem to me now — they whose ambitions amounted to nothing more than the expectation of minor employment.
I used to go out with them to a willow-ringed pool where we bathed in summer. The willow crowns sat in the lacquered pond like green haystacks. We could hear toads bubbling in the grasses, a magpie rattling in a poplar. They were retarded and could think of nothing but parodying the eccentricities of our teachers, and adopting the bravura of young men who had experienced their first red-headed provincial prostitute. We would lie back in the grass and smoke, I remaining silent, while they exaggerated their repertoire of obscenities.
For a long time I tolerated their asinine obtusity — turtles sunning on the bank, their attempts to prove amphibious failing even after repeated efforts to acclimatise to the cool water. I wanted to shock them, to prove to them that I was not a part of their world of Latin cramming, Horatian odes, all the tedious effluvia that snaked downstream into a ministry's deposit pool.
I waited my time. After the long, intolerable boredom of staying on at Tarbes during the ravaging dog days of the summer vacation, we met on a warm day in September, when the chestnut leaves were yellowing and Lespès and Minvielle had returned from the long break at their respective homes. Minvielle was boasting how he used to take a local girl into the hayloft, and how, as an added delectation to their pleasure, she would flick her tongue tantalisingly over his erection, before alternately contracting and dilating on the head, coaxing him to orgasm. I could tell he was lying by the awkwardness of his narration, and that his desire remained unrealised, a fantasy he was too shy to take to a brothel. Their conspiratorial tone was designed to exclude me from the conversation. I could feel my blood freeze as though I were suddenly immersed in cold water. Without giving the least hint of my intentions I fell on Minvielle, pinning him down in the grass, while his friend, terrified by my white temper, backed off, unwilling to risk inviting my aggression.
I wanted to prove him a liar, humiliate him before his friend, so my right hand forced his trousers open, and all the while I kept spitting into his ear, 'This is really what you like, isn't it?', feeling his spontaneous erection grow in my hand, his involuntary arousal stimulated by our body-to-body tussle in the grass, my stronger hold keeping him
captive beneath me, his confusion and fear showing in his dilated eyes, his attempted resistance overpowered by the animal instinct that was stronger even than his sense of shame. His companion remained rooted to the spot. My quick backward glance found him fish-mouthed, white, his whole sensibility trying to blank out the reality that was happening before his eyes.
'This is what you really like, isn't it, Minvielle?' I shouted as I got up and left him in a state of exposure. I stormed off, tucking my clothes in as I went, dusting my black trousers, and leaving the two to resolve an issue that neither could transpose into a joke.
The occasion was never mentioned again. After that I became more solitary, more withdrawn, my hauteur commanding not contempt but respect. I was seen as an unmanageable foreigner, someone unlikely to be interested in the commonplace pursuits of my fellow-boarders. Left alone I had to compensate by indulging my imagination. My visions were intense, luminous, apocalyptic, but I was always in control of them, turning them outwards and away from madness, despotic in my subjugation of a world conceived imaginatively. If I had politicised my views, armies would have assembled in the name of my manifestos, troops would have marched in obedience to the angel of revelation, my book in their hands, the black clouds building over Europe, a dense cumulus shattered by red fire.
My precociousness, my failure to subscribe to orthodoxy, led to an eventual confrontation with my teacher, Gustave Hinstin. After I had repeatedly refused to eliminate the imagery from my essays, I was dragged out in front of the class to have the offending passages ridiculed in public. He had hoped to make of me a fishmonger's exhibit, the tail-stiffened, red-mouthed nature morte of a fish stored under ice. Instead I relished the ignominy attendant on my person, the ridicule intended to reduce me to a scapegoat in the eyes of a class suddenly collected around its teacher. But I was impervious to the eyes coming at my face. I recognised in my rhetoric the impoverished mediocrity of my detractor. He would live his life under the delusion that poetry was marble chipped from the classics, a bloodless monument immune to a transfusion from the street, a shock injection imploding the unconscious. As he read out my imaginative flights with deprecating emphasis on metaphor, I felt uplifted, as though I were staring into the blue eye of a future invisible to my contemporaries.