Isidore

by Jeremy Reed

  A time of rumours and confusion, the great powers threatening to mobilise, and all of it means nothing to the feet treading black grapes, the hands hauling in nets and separating blue mullet and mackerel from red and green clottings of weed.

  When Marthe called last night I was afraid. I had been at pains never to give her my address, but somehow she had found me out and came into my room, white-faced, black-eyed, her entire being shivering on the threshold of her nether lip. When I coaxed it out of her in my ill-humour, for my mind was locked into my work, I learnt that she had been followed for several days by a face that appeared out of the crowd with remorseless insistence but never spoke. A face that came at her without eyes and went off without looking, but seemed to know something that did not need to be seen or said. The sort of face that first occurs to you inside the head and only later materialises into an external phenomenon, confusing you as to which is which. Marthe could not explain it properly, but her occupation in life had afforded her a psychological acumen with which to assess the weird. She had witnessed almost every form of extreme behaviour, and had watched men strain towards that point where they adopt a dual nature, a persona so powerful in its desire that they momentarily tremble on the lip of transformation. But this man was not one of those who pays to dress up, be humiliated, reacquire a state of infantilism, or realise any of the more bizarre fetishes.

  I gave Marthe brandy and wrapped a blanket round her; but fear was embedded in her like a snake-bite. She grew so cold that I had to bully the fire into catching and drape my black greatcoat over her. When at last she could identify things, she spoke of the man as someone who had knocked on her door late one night and to whom she had refused entry. And from that night on she felt he had never gone away. She could hear him breathing in the corridor, his shadow was huge on the stairs, his feet resounded in the street until dawn. And despite the years of selling her body indiscriminately to clients, she had remained vulnerable, vitally aware of her own physical fragility and her lack of protection from the law. This man who was like a blind pit pony wanted to trample her, rear up and annihilate her in a single blood-flash, only she wished it would come quickly and that there would be an end to terror.

  For two days I sat with her, afraid of her dementia, terrified for some reason that we would be found together. I feared her death; my work was still incomplete, and I was driven by the obsession not to be distracted for a moment. But worse than that, in my distraught state I visited her room, and only later, threading back through the blue fog, did I remember that I had left her asleep in my attic. I even feared she was missing because I had killed her; but she was sitting up in bed, alert like a cat that has just woken, and biting into the black plums she had fetched from the street.

  My nerves were shredded. I sat at the piano and without any notion of tune created a black thunder roll, an oppressive andante. I played with my bare nerves, breaking myself against a wall of sound as I had once opposed the rush of giant surf crashing shorewards from the blue sea-roads. I caught a sideways glance of Marthe hurriedly dressing, forcing her full breasts into black satin, desperate to be out of the room and to avoid my mood. My mind built with the bass roll, the death march towards a black sun, reached towards a visionary plane when the current subsided and sent me hurtling back to the immediate, the wineglasses I had broken, the clutter of books shelved off the piano-top, the dissonant hum swarming round the room without an exit.

  Marthe had disappeared. I stood up and looked out at the dusk. A group of men were vociferating loudly in the street. Punches were thrown before an agent de police broke up the crowd, dragging the ringleader with him, a stringy bundle of a man, half starved, vehement with his party's cause. I took out my notebook and outlined my intention to conclude Maldoror.

  It is my opinion that the synthetic part of my work is now complete, and what awaits me now is a concern with the analytic. Today I am going to fabricate a little novel of thirty pages; the estimated length will, in the event, remain unchanged... I believe I have, after various attempts, at last found my definitive formula. It is the best: since it is the novel.

  I knew now that the completion of my novel would be rapid, final and without interruption. I had dismissed Marthe from my life; no one ever again would have access to my person. Writing poetry involves a fictitious leap into the posthumous. The poet has to anticipate a language, a mode of thought that will intersect with the continuous future. At night I often sit and wonder at those who have written in the trust that they will be read by a pair of blue or green or grey eyes in a new century.

  I go out once each day at twilight. Everything is still there — the yellow house with ivy zigzagging all over its architectural irregularities, the fish-lipped child who plays with a sailing-boat in the gutter, a dancer buying satin ballet slippers, and the red stripe of paint on the road that I have come to read as a sign, a presentiment instructing me to turn back. I have the belief that if I cross this mark my fortune will be reversed. It is as though an invisible force propels me back, and the purpose of my walk is simply to find this symbol and return. And if one day it were to go missing, so that I crossed over into an unfamiliar quarter, it is possible I should go on walking for days, powerless to halt my momentum.

  When I come back indoors, I return to my writing. I bring the great beasts into abeyance on the page. I raise a whip-hand to metaphor: I possess nothing but contempt for cliché. My body is periodically racked by fever, which must be the consequence of having picked up a virus on my brief return to Montevideo. In the day hours when I should be sleeping, I lie frozen, my mind lit up with visions like flares falling across waste land.

  A revolution means nothing in the light of finishing my book. The frantic entreaties of one neighbour to another, shouted across balconies, to get out of the city before it is too late, leave me cold. What I see, what I read in my inner life is of a more universally cataclysmic nature. The genocidal fury of nations is nothing compared to the weird spin of the universe that comes at me slowly like a black ball I am powerless to deflect.

  I take drugs to alleviate my tension. When the concierge informed me that a young woman with red hair had been round looking for me, I was so paranoid as to contemplate flight. She had left an illegible note in which I made out the words for your own safety before destroying it.

  Even though it is summer I keep a fire burning. A rank stench streams from the gutters. There is a smell of change in the air, as though autumn has become a permanent season, as though all the autumns of the world have rolled a red fireball of leaves down the hills of Montmartre into the city. At night the old Bonapartists riot to excess before the anticipated crash occurs.

  All Paris is ablaze with the scandal surrounding Prince Napoleon's murder of Victor Noir. This violent, pugnacious man fired at point-blank range through the journalist's heart, leaving the latter to crawl out into the suburban street at Auteuil and die in the gutter outside a pharmacist's. This particular murder, which went without justice, grew in my mind from the lamp-black posters to the idea that this young Jewish man, Salmon, who went under the name of Victor Noir, was in some way associated with me. I felt implicated with someone about whom I knew nothing. In my state of estrangement the murder seemed to have some association with the red paint-mark I encountered with such superstition on my daily walks. For days I was convinced that the stain on the road was really blood, and that by not informing anyone of my discovery I had contributed to Victor Noir's death. I went back to the paint-stripe and stood over it, occasionally bending to test it with a finger, and managing to work a little of the redness into my pigment, so that in some way I could identify with the murdered victim. He needed me in his dark, no matter how tenuous our thread of communication. We might have been interchangeable, only it was I who was sitting here working on the last section of Maldoror, my right arm lit by a late ray of sunshine probing the mist.

  At night stars dust my skylight. They have become my companions in the solitary hours. On a purple n
ight they seem closer than the lights burning in high windows. In three months my little book of poems will be published, something I wrote almost as an apologia for the shock tactics of Maldoror. I had to write to Darasse to raise money to pay the printer, for my father's meanness increases. He is convinced that I burn up my allowance on the night-life in Paris.

  My father's advice to me in a recent letter was to disengage from a life of reckless dissolution. 'This is not the way great books come to be written. Secure yourself a career: the poet in nineteenth-century France is the fish skeleton picked up by a stray cat.'

  I suppose what I fear most is that Father will have a paid agent gut my room and destroy my papers without discrimination. This is one of the reasons I so rarely go out now. And when Maldoror is complete, who will I be? The triumvirate of Ducasse, Lautréamont and Maldoror will have ended, and I shall be forced to adopt a new persona — a metamorphosis demanding a still further change of identity, a refurbishment of skin on the old patchy lesions.

  They come more often now, those stragglers fished up out of the night's black pool — informers, occultists, thieves, political revolutionaries who have tired of every meaning except the natural silence that comes before dawn, the hour in which time seems to stand still, and the illusion of a new age is, at least for a bluish hour, a possibility.

  And those who visit me, I still do not know their names. The eccentric young scholar of Gian Gastone, the last ruling Prince of the Medici family, who delights in relaying the salacities attributed to Gastone's father the Grand Duke, and how he kept a stable of boys, and how two bears were brought to dance for him in his room while he lay prostrate on a couch, cradling a wine bottle at his lips.

  And another one who took part in a naturalist exploration of the Amazon and is slowly wasting away from some tropical virus which lives in his blood. He is still caught up in the river's coils, still paddling downstream through green currents into the immense silence that characterises the Brazilian forests. When he shakes, you can hear his teeth and bones rattle. His entire protection against the world is a sheath of skin so transparent that his anatomy shows through.

  There are others, individual if less memorable. I have lived my life like this, associating with those who have dropped out of the social fabric. Access to this world is guarded with lions and torches. The psychotic, the insomniac, the drug addict are the modern furies who remind the conformist that man's real life involves a reversion to the primal, an inquiry into the mirror which returns his features as snake-haired, black-eyed, mouth pouring with oracular bees.

  There is growing news of a war that has left me untouched. MacMahon has assembled his troops at Metz in the Rhineland, and there is news of an engagement at Saarbrücken. The Empress is left as Regent at St Cloud. Some say the Emperor is too ill to be lifted on to his horse, and the signs are painted for revolution in his absence. I try to pretend that what is happening is not real, that it will go away if only I lose myself in the discoveries of inner space. For the last three nights I have had no callers: the streets are unsafe. Not even a night-wolf would quarter the terrorists who batter a jeweller's display to a lake of twinkling shards. Grubby fists close over emerald brooches, diamond aigrettes — street girls are paid in sapphires by the coarse and indiscriminate.

  Some months ago I wrote: 'Those men who have resolved to detest their fellow-beings have forgotten that one must start by detesting oneself.' This is the premise for all moral behaviour. Self-detestation establishes a balance whereby humility acquires a degree of greatness. What I see, what I say, what I do, each is an attempt to reconcile my approximate self with a higher being, the overself. That I fall short is part of the latter's greatness and not a condition of my own weakness.

  I have begun to envisage barricading myself in. This race against time, the writing hand trying to outclock the big hand of eternity, leads to mistrust of the body, suspicion of the mind, a realisation of the incompleteness of human endeavour. I can remember in my childhood waking to the shriek of those killed under Rosas. My recurrent nightmare was that of a man standing at the foot of the bed and opening out his hands to reveal a heart that was still beating. My mother would be woken by my screams, and her protective warmth and the camomile tea she prepared became a ritual associated with the night.

  I could doubtless bundle up my papers and possessions and leave Paris — head south and restore my health in a blue climate. But I have resolved to stay until the house is fired. The faces of revolutionaries resemble those monsters with which I have peopled Maldoror — the giant crab, the female shark, the octopus, all of them scavengers for offal, predators when on the offensive. One could not have imagined that Paris harbours so many defectors, people who seem to have been waiting half a lifetime in doorways, alleys, courtyards to intersect with the current revolution.

  Rumour has it that the Empress holds court in black and wears a jet diadem — the lights are on all night in the Tuileries as the last of her ministers feverishly plot a means of resistance. Paris has become a city of insomniacs, its night fever throbs through my arteries. I could see a crowd of men dancing on a roof, throwing a girl up into the air and catching her, before the building began to crack with crazy blue and green flames.

  Last night they tried my door but moved on. When I went out in the morning the red paint-mark had disappeared. Part of the road had been broken up and barricaded. It is a sign that I am without boundaries and alone.

  *

  The Eye 8

  The situation in Paris grows progressively worse. There is little chance of my communication reaching you before the city capitulates to revolution. I have risked my life in staying on and shall leave once I have dispatched this final report.

  Isidore Ducasse, or rather the person I assumed to be your son, has a double. The regular visitors to his room are by now well known to me — the vagrants, those who appear to have no identity during the day hours — but this person without any doubt answers to your son's description. Having ascertained that Isidore Ducasse remained behind in his room, I succeeded in following this double as far as the rue de Rivoli, where he finally disappeared down an alley without trace. He may have got wind of my following him and hidden in a basement.

  The possibility alarms me. It occurs to me that I may at times have been tracking the wrong person. This young man also walks with a stoop, is unshaven, has long, unkempt hair like your son, and dresses in identical clothes — a black suit, white shirt and red bow. I tell myself that I am wrong, but the facts are indisputably there. I have witnessed the two of them on three separate occasions. They link arms in the street, discourse ear to ear and are generally inseparable when together.

  It occurs to me that my course of investigation belongs as I see it almost exclusively to one and not the other. But to which one? It seems too improbable to suggest that your son has a double who serves as a decoy. Where would he find such a person?

  It is true that fear, insufficient food — we are now in a state of rationing — and bacterial water can all contribute to a state of disturbance; but the phenomena I describe are not the result of a deranged mind.

  I gained access to Isidore Ducasse's room yesterday by means of bribing the concierge. The room is stripped to a state of basic necessities. He appears to have packed up his personal belongings in expectation of leaving. The concierge hardly sees him. She complains only of his playing the piano at night despite repeated requests not to do so. He pays her a quarter in advance, which may account for her conviction that your son has most certainly not vacated his room. His double appears to live in an hotel in the rue Vivienne.

  In the course of my life I have been called on to examine a great number of rooms, but few have left so deep an impression on me. This has nothing to do with the furnishings — there is nothing untoward in his place. It has more to do with an atmosphere. The room emits a sense of violent disturbance — it is both too silent and too charged. Whatever goes on there will make it hard for a future tenant.


  Circumstances make it inadvisable for me to remain in Paris. It is possible that your son has already gone, but I saw one or the other of the two out in the street yesterday...

  *

  Chapter 8

  Dying begins with an anomaly of smell. It is no more than a catch in the air, an essence that was never separated from breathing, but is suddenly detectable as a scent. It is the closest we ever come to realising the self as something tangible. For twenty-four years that secretion has escaped my olfactory attention. I could imagine it taking the form of a white butterfly settling on a black pansy.

  I am systematically destroying everything that is not vitally necessary to my existence. Letters, books, clothes, journals, the few possessions belonging to my mother that I brought with me from Montevideo, and all of the correspondence I have received while in Paris. If they take me, they will have to name me, and that is no easy matter.

  If I look for certainty now it is in the mirror. I approach it like a fish, believing that I could without the least resistance swim through the glass and find myself on the other side looking out at the fictional characters I have created. These are the real people who will guide me into that dimension where the imagination is reality.

  What I am physically, flesh and blood, has a cheap price on it. The streets are full of the dead, organically externalised like the contents of a slaughterhouse. I have to resist the attraction to carnage that preoccupied my early youth. Whatever it was I tried to realise in the interaction between extreme fear in an animal and the butchered quiet that came as an aftermath to that instinctive panic, has remained unresolved.

  There is no way out. Travel and mail have come to a halt. I could arrange to leave Paris by night — my way of life has put me into contact with friends who could effect that, but affairs are thrown into confusion by news that MacMahon's army, disgraced in its campaign, is now retreating on the capital with a view to saving the Empire. It is extraordinary how in the world of external reality whole nations will rise for an idea conceived by a cripple, a syphilitic tyrant, a mad boy-king playing with skulls instead of toys, the pride of a man who, to reinstate his own slighted dignity, will churn a field into blood, leave a wick of smoke in place of a corn harvest and return victorious to his sycophants.