Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  When Hinstin stopped reading, his face was white with rage. His silent admonition warned me to get out and stay out. My retreat was leisurely. I savoured the incomprehension on the moon-faces that turned all the way round to watch me go. Horse-flies spotted the air outside. I spat and walked out to the willow-ringed pond.

  My convictions have not altered; they have deepened in accordance with my isolation. In a city you live like an eagle in its eyrie up above it all, or else succumb to the levelling criterion of the masses. From the vantage-point of my attic, I am conscious of what it is to live nearer the sky. The cloud changes are continuous; great continents of white cumulus build into vaporous ranges, and are as suddenly blown away to reveal an azure cube. One is closer to the quiet lexicon of night rain falling on the slates, to the spitting crackle of hail and the big concourse of winds tugging at verticals. I work through those changes which wash or stain my page.

  At first I used to write cursory notes to my father, explaining nothing of my way of life, for fear of further earning his displeasure, but always swinging a plumb-line into his financial reserves. My requests for money were seldom met. Like all weak men my father lived his life without consideration for others. His physical unattractiveness encouraged him in even more marital infidelities, for, being unconscious of his own appearance, he attached little importance to the beauty of others.

  My letters from Monsieur Flammarion were of a different nature and invited a reciprocal intrigue in the politics of the day. He feared the Republic's increased power and the depositional threat it constituted to Napoleon III. His tone was one that made it clear that I would be suitably recompensed if I chose to work as a spy and supply his party with the information necessary to apprehend revolutionaries. His letters also intimated that if he visited Paris he would be pleased to see me, but what I read into the nature of his suggestions was sexual. There was that ambiguity, neither stated nor concealed, which implied a liaison of a nature he had clearly contemplated for a long time and hoped to consummate.

  At first I considered taking him up on his intentions. The sadist in me would have delighted in ruining him, in exposing him in public, so that he would be arrested in a sordid alley close to the river.

  Unable to extricate myself from the intricacy of his web, I fed him with small details. My pretended sympathies were spurious. It mattered little to me whether Charles Floquet spat in the Tsar's face 'Long live Poland!' or whether Napoleon was nursing a hernia, gonorrhoea or congested kidneys. I had to return home that summer and hoped to extort from Flammarion the funds that my father consistently denied me.

  My brief return had been a mistake from the beginning. Mountainous green seas had pursued us across the Atlantic, whitecaps churned up in the wake of a hurricane broke over the poop, smashed across mid-decks and had the boat climb almost vertical before being dropped into a corresponding depression. When the wind abated, fog became our new adversary. We drifted through a dense white sea-smoke, fearing at any moment that a ship would run us down.

  We went ashore once to replenish our water supplies and came to a beach where three wrecked vessels had foundered. Two of them were lying on their beam-ends, surf-smashed, and the third, a flat-bottomed vessel, sat bolt upright on an even keel much further inshore than the other two. The shore was scattered with a mosaic of debris and wreckage, washed up in long spits, junked together and heaped into beached tumuli by the devastating assault of breakers. There were empty cigar-boxes, a case of surgical instruments, another of artificial limbs and an overspilled chest of dolls, clown-faced toys with their glued-on black or yellow hair, matted by the salt, and close to them a drowned man was rolling about in the surf, his body wedged between rocks, the face disfigured, nose and ears gone, the skin razor-slashed into pulped welts by the cutting edge of jagged stones.

  The site appeared to have escaped the attention of looters. A little further on I discovered a broken case of champagne, in which there were a few unopened bottles. I released a cork and almost choked on the lively kick of foam. My head blew. It seemed to be detaching itself from my body and kiting up on a vertical axis. Other bodies in various states of decomposition littered the frothing shallows. One was headless, another showed a caved-in chest, truncated arms and legs, suggesting a clean scythe-cut by a shark's mouth. Suddenly I was thrashing out into the water, breaking the surf with my knees, fascinated by the gaping red hole in the side of a body impaled on a submerged rock. The shallows were jumping with blazing fauna, crazy reds and marigolds and violets were sluiced into rotating whorls.

  Something lit up in my brain. I felt that same sense of reckless exhilaration as I had on the occasion when I had laid into the rotting cow blackened by vultures. I grappled the body off the impaling needle and dragged it towards me. I held the blotched corpse in my arms, pushing it from side to side as though caught up in an aquatic dance. The cavity was gaping, raw, a pulp of disintegrating tissue, but the colour seemed to me to resemble an underwater sun, a red disc that rose daily over the fish-thronged architecture of Atlantis. I pulled the body upright and rested it against my chest for support. The face had no eyes, ears or nose. I tilted it back, then swung it round in a half-circle before smashing it on to its back at the wave's edge. The surf licked at it on the outgoing wave before cleansing it on the run-in. It was like a purifying rite, seeing the surf steam over that red hole. I waited for the outwash to retreat, took one last look at the squid-bloated body, slatted with blue serrations, and made my way back towards the mass of wreckage. My manic overreach had given rise to depression, and I sat down on a beer crate and looked out to sea. The world was like that, there was either too much or too little of it. The stench, the stacked flotsam, the impurities that runnelled across the beach, all of these things had become odious. I remained rooted. I could smell a storm building out at sea. Clouds would suddenly be shaken like a lilac bush into a mass of whipped purples.

  It was only when a skiff came in close to my part of the shore, on a last-minute reconnaissance, that I ran out through the shallows, waving my arms to attract attention, and I was then bundled into the boat and rowed out to the Cythera.

  At home I was greeted with the indifference accorded a stranger. My father had been promoted again and spent much of his life at social functions, his weight increasing with his sense of self-importance. Flammarion was still in daily attendance and manifested an unconcealed power over him. It was he who moved through the house as if it were his own, and he who dictated the laws of conversation at the dinner-table. His thin, effete fingers were suddenly a lobster's pincered claws snapping tight on each exposed nerve-end.

  What occurred was the inevitable conflagration between Father and myself. It turned out that he had paid to have me followed and knew of my attraction to prostitutes in the ninth arrondissement. His informant had given him the name of Marthe David, a red-haired girl, profusely tattooed with green and blue snakes on arms she deliberately exposed. He knew that Marthe lived at 45 rue Barbesse, behind closed shutters. What shocked me more was his discovery that I went under the name of Lautréamont in Paris.

  I listened to his anger ricochet from wall to wall. The echo returned with the deadness of a lead ball dropped into a well. I was to be construed as a parasite, a drug addict who would rot of syphilis. Despite his claims to the contrary, Father was becoming rich. I had heard from a street acquaintance that he had bought the Hôtel des Pyramides, where he entertained ballet dancers with champagne. What I had pieced together of Father's behaviour over the years all pointed to a way of life which excluded my mother. His taurine masculinity, obsessive career drive and the coarseness of his sexual preferences had never been concealed in deference to her sensitive nature. On the contrary they had been flaunted as though he were punishing Mother for making any marital claims on him. She was the psychological anchor that had dragged at his crowded sails on the high seas of worldly ambition.

  'You will amend your ways,' he shrieked, 'or be thrown out of this house and the shelte
r afforded by my name. And let this be my last word to you: your lusts will be your ruin. When you're running with sores, you'll be left to die in the gutter. Now get out!'

  When the door slammed as though blown behind me by a great wind, I stopped and listened to myself think. I could hear the stream of my thoughts. Everything I had not said had been stored in a silent dialogue and was seeking a rapid release. I should like to have accused him of murdering Mother and to have her body swim up from the night waters of his unconscious. I wanted to tell him that Marthe specialised in O and A and that the lingam and yoni were tattooed on her bottom in red and indigo.

  I found calm in looking out of the window at the turquoise arch of the sky. Scarlet passion-flowers and orange begonias created a sun-storm in the garden. Everything went on living independent of man, uncontained by his consciousness, restrained by its cyclic limitations, the duration of its season. As I stood there, I felt a hand rest on my shoulder. The lightness of touch was accompanied by the resolution not to let go. The hand was weighted with a purpose guided by thought and not physical strength. I knew without turning round that it was Monsieur Flammarion's. I remained motionless.

  'Someone's been looking for you,' he said, with a note of conspiracy in his voice that I had for long suspected but never heard. 'He comes from a poor quarter of the town, a person your father would have locked up if he knew of his visiting the house. He wouldn't leave a name but said you could find him out on the coast.'

  The subtle emphasis the voice laid on the latter directive was sufficient to inform me of the equally ambivalent choice implied by his raising the subject.

  'It's my duty to speak of this in order to spare your father further suffering,' he said, resuming the persuasive tone he had once employed as my tutor. 'If you wish to speak to me about it, you will find me in your father's library.'

  My only thought was to get back to Paris and secure sufficient funds from Father to make my life there seem practicable. The facts surrounding Mother's death would serve as a point of conscience, a picklock's probe into the recess where his guilt burned with a bright flame. He must have tried so often to extinguish the fire, got up at night thinking the house was burning down, and found that the conflagration was alive in his head.

  I had resolved to stay no more than a week. I could find no vestige of the reality that I had lived here at some stage in my life. At night I bolted the shutters, for I knew the Queen of Hearts would be watching the house. Father's unrelieved insomnia and his insistence in keeping the house lights on, so that he could walk around at will at night, were an additional protective to my sleepless nights. I could hear Father pacing the library before he unlocked the bedroom that Mother had occupied and went in. He stayed a long time unlocking drawers, before reappearing with his leg audibly dragging in the corridor. If I had looked out then I should have seen him age twenty years in the distance between his own and Mother's bedroom. He was like a man at tempting to carry his own weight in his arms, save that the volume increased with each step.

  Alma kept away from me. It was clear she had become Father's mistress, and paradoxically his slave. Even her method of speech had changed, and her once spontaneous exuberance had been replaced by an awkward consideration of words. She reminded me of the catatonic wall-blank stare of madmen I had seen in the streets of Paris. Men who shuffled through the night in rags, their eyes preoccupied with an inner reality that stopped so far short of externalising it seemed they would never connect with the immediacy of things.

  It was the familiar rhythm of surf that restored me. Its voluble thunder hung in the air, turning the bowl of the sky into an echo-chamber. In Paris that same music lived with me, only it was internalised, the clap of dice in a cup, the audio-stimulation of memory. A few unmoving clouds stayed dead on the horizon; they were like white dabs of paint fixed there by brush-strokes. In the same way as I had removed myself from my birthright by adopting the name of Lautréamont, so I conceived of further distancing myself by creating Les Chants de Maldoror. Maldoror would be the perpetrator of crimes imagined by Lautréamont. My disguise would be made invincible by the creation of a third party. Maldoror's black lyricism would remain an unquantifiable enigma to the epoch in which he lived. His poetry would disorder the nerves like the atonal dissonant music I improvised at the piano.

  Maldoror would be the oracular scapegoat whose voice belonged to no time in his anticipation of final things. In preparation for his embodiment, I had already written of him: 'I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator — every hour of his eternity — to contemplate its gaping crevasse. This is the punishment I inflict on him.'

  Left alone I kept to my room or wandered upstairs to the attics. I had grown accustomed to my enforced isolation in Paris, and here the house I knew was lodged on the sea-floor, its windows open to the drowned.

  Since our brief encounter, Monsieur Flammarion had made himself inaccessible. He had grown into the unauthorised master of a house he had come to dominate. Whatever it was he had observed in Father, and by slow degrees opened up like a seam, stitch by unravelled stitch, had begun long before Mother's death. If I listened hard enough I could believe I heard the almost imperceptible beat of his eyelids as he read. His concentration was that of someone who read in order to focus his mind on a larger problem. I thought of how little I knew of this man outside his routine life in our house. It had never occurred to me to find out where he lived and with whom, and why he should always be available to Father.

  That my movements in Paris had been followed seemed more in line with Monsieur Flammarion's way of thinking than Father's. As the author of such a scheme his cunning would be vulpine, his assessment of the written reports offered, meticulous. I was biding my time, filling in the plot piece by piece, and learning to think as he did, by listening.

  At night there were the customary fireworks, and the lighthouse's garnet eye fixed on the coastal waters. This was the time I came alive, my imagination dragging up images from the unconscious. Maldoror lived as the recurrent end and beginning, the black serpent swallowing its tail. It was then I would begin writing, and in my overreach into the psyche I tapped resources that grew into an autonomous fiction.

  In the quiet of the noon a single man entered a deserted village. His footsteps echoed in the square and came back at him as a series of reproaches. The deep well had been quick-limed, the animals slaughtered. The man entered house after house, his tall figure ducking beneath the low doorways, his loping stride eating up the earth. He came to a whitewashed wall on which someone had written in blood: THE SHADOW LIVES ON THE INSIDE. WE SAW NOTHING.

  He dismissed the sign and kept on in his search. Once when a mirror gave back his reflection he smashed it, for he did not recognise what he saw. When he came to the last house, which gave on to the slopes of scorched foothills, he set fire to it, not knowing that the one surviving human lay on a mattress inside, waiting only to confide the universal secret of good and evil to the person she had heard coming up from the valley. That man was Maldoror.

  Sometimes the dawn would find me still up, exhausted from having lived through a night of generation and death. Already my creation had come to assert an independent orbit around an unsetting inner sun.

  I would dress and, white-faced, go down to breakfast, anxious to dispense with the formality so that I could sleep through to the early afternoon. Monsieur Flammarion would enter the room soon after Father and the talk would centre upon the mazorca — the Mafia who served under Rosas's dictatorship and whose methods of extortion were a constant source of fear to the inhabitants of Montevideo. Only last week they had set fire to a cattle ranch by making a human torch of its owner and spurring his tarred figure into a hayloft. People feared these terrorists. They descended on farms like a black thundercloud riding out of the sun.

  The faint air of disquiet that Father manifested in Flammarion's company was evident on the morning that put an end to my brief stay. I had s
ensed the seam in Father's thinking at the breakfast table. It was like a black line drawn across a white cloth. The hinge in his thought would not close. It flickered, lending him an air of distraction.

  When I went into his study I was aware of the sudden space that opened up in Monsieur Flammarion's absence. There was more light and air in the room. Father appeared larger, more focused, and anxious to hold centre stage. He puffed himself up in order to give voice to his authoritarianism, but there was a perceptible slackening in his rigidity. Suddenly he relaxed his taut shoulders and sat down. He faced the papers spread on his desk and, looking down, said: 'For reasons that are no concern of yours, I have dismissed Monsieur Flammarion from the household. As for your affairs, with which I cannot bring myself to sympathise until you pursue a regular profession, I have entrusted a solicitor with a small annuity to be made payable to you so long as you amend your behaviour.'

  As I stood in his study for what I knew would be the last time, and smelt the beeswax polish which Alma so assiduously worked into the oppressive mahogany furniture, I tried to envisage Monsieur Flammarion caught scrutinising Father's private correspondence; his quizzical eyebrows arched as he discovered a potentially incriminating sentence. Or was it the other way round? I wondered. Could it have been Flammarion who had confronted Father with some aberration of conduct, and as a consequence been dismissed for his audacity?