by Jeremy Reed
After a pause, Father nodded as an indication that I should leave. A blue light was flooding the rectangular window. Even today that azure frame represents my inner perspective when I look out over the city's roof-tops, and it goes on multiplying itself to infinity.
*
The Eye 7
Your confirmation reassures me. Gustave Flammarion's dismissal from your service should make for an uninterrupted flow of mail. The psychological repercussions of his removal will inevitably be reflected in your son's behaviour.
I wonder too how long it is safe for me to stay on here. The times are bad and the mob may rise. Your son remains confined to his room. There is a light on at all hours. What little I have managed to read of his writings is to me incomprehensible. Marthe David retrieved a number of pages from his waste-paper basket which were intended for burning. I pieced together as best I could an almost indecipherable script. Nothing made sense. I feared at first that Isidore Ducasse is mad and is devoted to nothing else but the commitment of his dementia to paper. But on reflection it occurred to me that these writings may comprise a code — Masonic, hermetic, esoteric. How else explain the lines: 'Who is opening the door of my funeral chamber? I had said no one was to enter. Whoever you are, get out; but if you have convinced yourself that there is a mark of suffering or fear on my hyena's face... He wanted to prove himself the universal monarch...'
The sheets are badly torn and my quotations approximate, but I imagine that the themes are consistent throughout his writings. I am constantly faced by the difficulty that your son has people visit him. He never risks fear of detection by going to places that might incriminate him.
Sometimes he visits the rue Vivienne; but again to no purpose. There is a barricade at the end of this street and a building site. Your son has always been attracted to such places. He stares at the fire which the workmen keep burning on the site, but meets no one. I have asked in the adjoining shops and cafes, but he meets no one there and neither collects nor leaves letters. I intend to pursue this line of interest further.
When and what he eats remain a mystery. To the best of my knowledge he lives on bread and wine. He visits a wine-seller and buys good Bordeaux reds. This and books seem to be his main source of expenditure.
His bookseller divulges nothing. A small, olive-headed man in a red fez who goes by what I suspect to be the adopted name of Henri Lorrain, and whose shop is at pont Marie, is by all accounts a radical propagandist. Meetings are held in his cellar, which contains a printing press. There is no evidence that Isidore Ducasse has political associations with the man, but undoubtedly they share a common link.
I await your further instructions. In the case of revolution, Ducasse will certainly take ship home and I shall follow in his wake.
*
Chapter 7
Thirty-two rue du Faubourg Montmartre. A change of address but not of habits. I still live on the top floor, my all-night light attracting the curious and those who maintain a conviction to live on the edge.
I live in fear of my work being discovered and burnt. A cursory police raid would result in the liquidation of my papers or an appearance before the Court of Cassation, which sits in a darkened courtroom and whose prevailing climate is to legislate against literature which in any way attempts to undermine the Bonapartist regime.
They have cost me my health, these interminable red dawns in which Maldoror has been conceived: this other through whom I celebrate poetic vision in the face of political factions, crowd riots, the momentum of a century bursting its floodgates.
My window turns from green to blue; the morning star twinkles above the Seine. At this hour the big contentions occur on an inner plane — madness is the bull that is led to the slaughter, head down, nostrils flaring, the wild pitch of its horns resisting captivity. When it charges across the page, words fly upwards, terrorised by its black, thundering hoofs. I have nothing but a hand with which to restrain this bolt.
The biography of a poet is written on the inside. My days correspond to those of my fiction, and there is little overlap left in which to pursue the autonomous drift chronologised by literary historians. I keep my duality secret; in that way no one can slip between it and me.
If I try to imagine how my acquaintances see me, then it must be as someone whose independence is suspect despite his revolutionary pronouncements. I maintain an impeccable appearance: white linen shirts, black velvet suits, the casual floppiness of a red silk bow. My books and piano profess my interests to the discriminating, but there is no real clue to my identity here, for I keep no papers other than my immediate writings and destroy all correspondence that comes to me either from Montevideo or Paris. Baudelaire's publisher, Poulet Malassis, writes to me from Brussels, warning me of the risk involved in publishing my book, and I memorise his letter before burning it. I recall his words on those nights when the work is with me like a fire lit in the hills: 'Your aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality. In this you inherit the tradition of the modern sensibility begun by Flaubert and Baudelaire in their recognition of the interplay between good and evil in man.'
I try to imagine this man, his hands stained with printer's ink, his eyes myopic from reading galleys, his unfailing humour disarming his creditors. I think of him as preoccupied with the weight, the watermark and the grain of handmade papers, and in the selection of a type-face which will sit slightly raised on the paper, permanent in its execution.
Maldoror's raging pace will electrify the uninitiated. They will read it, as it was written, by night, their ears finding in its music the beat of a new age. I cling to the likelihood of its publication. I who have buried my name, hidden my life, concealed my person, take a delight in the confusion that such a book will cause. Its passage will be slow, its journey a long one, its bite like that of fire consuming a hayfield.
I avoid the literati and their cognoscenti: those who compensate for lack of originality by the acquisition of power. Lacroix calls on me sometimes and asks to read whatever new work I have done on Maldoror, but invariably I plead that it is still incomplete, thereby keeping the text to myself. It is arranged that the first canto will appear in an anthology called Parfums de l’âme, to be published in Bordeaux.
On the few occasions that I have ventured into the company of men who write, I have been disappointed. I have heard their names — the flaking stucco of the lionised demigods — Gautier, the younger Dumas, the bitingly mordant Goncourt brothers, Renan, George Sand, the ageing, choleric and vicious Sainte-Beuve, the gallery of those who thought the march of their words would alter the world only to find that their books had predeceased them.
These occasions rarely differ. A fourth-floor flat in the rue Vaneau, furnished in red plush with portraits by Ary Scheffer on the walls, the conversation shifting from political contention to attacks on the Academy, and then the party's dispersal to a red-light district, with one woman in attendance, a décolletée blonde who claims never to have removed the red rose Manet painted on her spine, and demands that she be allowed to use a spy-hole to watch one of the more bizarre fetishes.
But mostly I am alone. Memories assemble like that — a lifetime is built out of associations that belonged to a moment. A blue bay remembered at a time of flowering mimosa, a face with red lips and a gold earring seen through mist on an autumn boulevard. The endless fictions multiply. It is when words vibrate on those nerve-endings that the crystallised image is conceived.
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside, painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each wor
k is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death.
I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on the paper.
A day, an hour, a month, they are much alike — words twinkling like drops of lit oil, sometimes refusing to settle, others cut like black marble into an assumed permanence. Those who call on me do so to drink and talk of the wrong in their lives and how it stays there like a bruise in an apple. These men are diverse, monomaniacal, at odds with the age. One fears he has committed the murder of which he dreamt, believing he disposed of a man in the Seine, and that if he sleeps, the man's eyes will open inside his head.
And in my own way I have come to realise in exploding the imagination that man is without mental healers. The implosive visions I channel into Maldoror feed on the same potential that fuels the odd who are attracted to me. They know nothing of my writings, except where my speech betrays a preoccupation with the concerns of my poem. These night conversations up above the city are a means of isolating the present, stepping off a moving train and believing that one has succeeded in slowing down time by the fact that one is walking while the train is accelerating towards Moscow.
I have no regrets for the Ducasse I buried in South America. He would have stayed and eventually conformed. If I were still him, I should be sitting in a cool government office, exercising a cigar-cutter on the tip of a seasoned Havana and discussing administrative means of controlling revolutionary outbreaks.
Here they speak of the Prussian coalition and of Napoleon invading Bismarck's Prussia with the assistance of Austria. And in Paris the anti-dynastic factions riot, loot jewellers and furriers and make love in the streets. The same power that drives my unconscious is pushing men forward like arsonists converging on the Tuileries. Unrest is undermining the city's equilibrium. The Republican fanatic who comes to my room speaks of the Emperor's ill-health, and how he has aged twenty years in three months. The Empire is on a crash course to extinction.
For the first time the sound of men running through the street late at night, or the sudden discharge of explosives somewhere in the city, had me sit up startled. My attention had been drawn to something I had not realised existed because I had no need to take it seriously. I found myself going down to the street at dawn and scooping up handfuls of the badly printed broadsheets that littered the gutters. Propagandist mendacities, they were nevertheless tangible evidence of a real dissatisfaction with Napoleon and his immediate circle. Rain-blotched, vehement caricatures, riddled with printer's errors and spelling mistakes. I gathered them up and took a childish delight in their crudities. They were like multicoloured autumn leaves wedged into drifts and pulped by the rain, the incessant trampling of feet.
Other, bigger storms preoccupied me. My always delicate health was beginning to show evidence of being stretched. For several days I locked my door and lay in the darkness, hearing a black surf roar through my veins.
I began to visit Marthe David again, taking a perverse delight in the knowledge that I was followed. I liked to watch Marthe brush out the red storm in her hair. It was like a field of poppies: a sunset that fell just short of her waist. She would playfully imitate a tiger, padding around the room on all fours, bottom up, inviting me to rush her from behind. Marthe in her elbow-length leather gloves and a face-net spotted with sequins: she would sugar me and peck at the tip like a strawberry.
Her naïve, childlike imaginings were in distinct contrast to the avarice she displayed for money. She would speak of her childhood in Rouen while painting a nipple, and of her father who had run off one summer night. This bricky, squat-shouldered man, who was of Russian descent, was a signalman on the provincial track. He had gone off with a local farm girl, while Marthe's mother shouted across the fields at nightfall. She waded out barefoot across streams, beat on doors, searched through barns and outhouses, frightened nervous horses in their stables and came home distraught, exhausted.
Marthe remembered it all with an exactness of detail which was terrifying. Her nerves cried out to embody the experience in a creative form, but all she knew was the allure of her body to men, the sale of her flesh for whatever price she could exact.
Marthe, whose particular speciality was protracted fellatio, recollected other childhood experiences. The brown-eyed cattle with their smoking breath in the autumn meadows bright with yellow oak leaves, the provincialism of the farmers, who spoke of nothing but their herds, the failure of their crops, hail damage to their blossom, the low price received for selling a calf to slaughter.
When Marthe told of these things her face softened before she checked it and hardened herself against any show of emotion. She had found respite from stress in painting water-colours, small village scenes in primary blues, yellows, greens, until one day the concrete disappeared and in its place she had painted abstract configurations to depict an unpeopled field with a thunderstorm building above the meadow. She had gone on doing this until one day the power was no longer with her and there was nothing to paint. She did not know why or where it had gone, only that its disappearance coincided with the beginnings of her menstrual cycle. There was nothing to paint and her moodiness had her fight with her mother and go off for long walks by herself, looking for something she knew was not there.
Instead she took to painting her eyes black and her mouth red, and at first people laughed at the child's precocity, the facetiousness of a schoolgirl emulating an artist's model. She grew to be a symbolic representation of what the men in her village most desired yet feared to touch, until one day a man offered her money to follow him into a field. He had not used any words about what was to happen — he had gone on talking about how a hawk had struck his chicken-run, come down as a bolt out of the blue sky, hitting up a raucous jabber of cries as it dispatched a blood-scored poult with beak and talons. He had repeated the story with minor variants, and she remembered the cow-parsley nodding its surf of umbels, the smell of ferns in the deep, green meadow. By the time his hand had travelled the length of her thigh, her head was buzzing from the monotony of his tale. The contact with her skin was a relief from his voice. It was a different form of communication, something she knew should not have been happening but which went on independent of her, as though it were being experienced by someone else, only she did not object to his eager kisses, the hirsute wrist that clumsily tore her blouse open, the stab of pain that seared her as he somehow became a part of her, forcing his different body on hers, two twisted irregularities strained into the one stem.
Marthe, who picks up clients outside the Hôtel de Ville, carries within her tormented person some of the contradictory forces that burnt out my own nerve. My inheritance of the sea is reflected in her serpentine tattoos, the intertwining, tongue-flickering snakes inked on her arms in violet, green and blue, which for her symbolise ports, sailors, the screeching of a bald monkey running amongst bollards and hawsers. All of these things had come to represent the sea passages that Marthe had never undertaken.
Marthe too had adopted her name. She knew me as Lautréamont, nothing else: a man whose interests in her were not so much sexual as vicarious — I paid to learn of other people's sexual propensities, ministers, bankers, sailors, priests, and the human link that Marthe comprised.
When I left her and returned to my attic, it was always with the fear that my room might have been broken into and my papers discovered. The other me, the youthful Ducasse, was always hiding behind the door, reproaching me for having denied him the right to live. I knew that if he could have found a way out of the captivity in which I placed him, he would have killed me.
I continued with Maldoror — his incursions into conventional states, the savagery of his attacks on absolutes, his recognition of the androgyne, the street-gangs who laid into him with boots. He could survive everything through the power afforded him by the reconciliatio
n of opposites.
At night I would make up before the mirror but never contemplated going out. Montevideo had been a city of masks, snapdragon-coloured fireworks, the startling lipstick gash on someone of unidentifiable gender — the chance was always there in the throw of a dice, the electric jab of a firefly, that the unexpected encounter would resolve itself in a garden within the sound of the sea.
Here in the rue du Faubourg Montmartre I can feel the pressure peculiar to this age. My life has been a preparation through words for the existence I shall live when I have renounced the shield of fiction. How can they know, those casual passers-by, of the inner landscape that occupies my days? My room is piled with natural history magazines, the endless cuttings I take from English publications on birds, reptiles and batrachians. Often I have the singular vision of two eagles fighting on a high summit against a red South American sun. An amazing aerial chase is followed by the interlocking of talons, one bird forcing the other on to its back in the flailing of black pinions, until one finally goes limp, its gut eviscerated, its neck broken. It is then that I see the victor perform a weird dance to the sun, flame extending from its wing-tips, and the sun in turn growing a dark red and putting out wings over the abyss. In recognition of that great force, the eagle tears out its eyes and stands mute, head bowed before the blackening heavens.
My father's letters urge me to go south. He does this under the pretext that my fragile health would profit from the Mediterranean. But I prefer to remain here; my own apocalyptic vision is in tune with the times. A man came shouting up my stairs that the Emperor was dead, another that Paris had fallen.