New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  In Weymouth, the train stopped right on the harbour, next to a pavilion that, Brentford thought with a pang, would have looked great on one of the endless New Venetian embankments. From there, the steamer Lynx took them to Jersey and the quiet, if somewhat dull, town of St. Hélier, huddling under the severe frown of its fort. Somehow this place felt familiar, with its blend of French and English names, as if it were some prototype for New Venice. Was their home city scattered everywhere, now that it was nowhere?

  Finally, on October 20, the Seven, crumpled and dingy, boarded another small steamer to Granville. An Arctic cold blew across the deck, where a few passengers shivered, and as the ship approached the Normandy coast, its hull began cracking through brittle, wrinkled pancakes of ice.

  “It looks like we’re coming home,” Brentford joked about the vista, although he was worried to see ice covering the sea so early in the year. He wasn’t surprised that he didn’t get the laugh he only half-expected.

  The Seven could have been excused, after weeks and weeks of a harrowing trip, for seeing in Granville nothing more than yet another nondescript port. A small, whitish city, sloping around cliffs, it could at least claim a decent hotel and a seaside casino—where, after Brentford had changed some gold at the bank, Thomas, drunk with military abandon, lost at the roulette table the first francs he had ever seen.

  IV

  The Phantom Train to Paris

  They woke the next day to a drizzle of stingy snow under a smudge of steel-blue clouds. It was probably sunnier in New Venice now. “Now,” “New Venice”—these words made Brentford chuckle a bit desperately as he thought of them. What language could describe the situation they were in, exiles from nowhere, banished from the future?

  At the train station, it was explained to them, with typical Gallic bad grace, that due to storms the train service to Paris had been badly disrupted. Out of the four daily trains to Paris, only one would run: the express 56 had come in the night before and would try to go back in the early afternoon. But the reservations they had purchased in Jersey, they were warned, might not be the open-sesame they hoped, as a lot of people would now be taking the train by storm, Bastille-style.

  So, the Seven walked around Granville at loose ends until the time of the train’s scheduled departure … only to learn that it would be delayed by another two hours. Since leaving Grimsey Island, they had been crammed or shoved into one cramped compartment, cabin, or waiting room after another, and this had started to gnaw at what little sense of time they had managed to retain. They felt like puppets attached to the wires of the transport network, their articulations aching from redirections, their minds sloshing between frustration, impatience, useless anger, resigned exhaustion, and plain old bad moods. Peterswarden, Brentford thought, would be glad to see that his punishment had gone beyond exile to torture. If this hadn’t been Peterswarden’s plan all along, that is.

  They returned to the station to overhear a rumour that this might well be the last train for a long while, as more snowstorms were on their way. As a result, the platform, hazy with damp breath and cigarette smoke, was even more crowded than the agent had forecast. The driver, M. Pellerin, and his fireman were hailed with the fervour bestowed on heroes and pioneers, while controllers were begged by ladies and insulted by their husbands. People with and without tickets rushed the doors with a riotous haste and a marked preference for first class. It took nothing less than Blankbate’s peculiar powers of persuasion to clear the seats and bunks of their reserved sleeper compartment.

  But barely twenty miles out of Granville, the train began to slow down. Its chugging turned to dispirited sighing as it groped its way though narrow banks of snow nearly two feet high and, as the evening fell, it was all topped by an increasingly dense bank of fog.

  Meanwhile, the towns they passed were smothered in snow like villages in Christmas tales, their lights unpredictable and dim as will-o’-the-wisps. Brentford wondered whether the driver could see the signals on the track, and decided he didn’t really want to know. Then darkness fell, and all they could see was their own sullen, sunken, gaslit faces suspended in the glass panes.

  Coming to some difficult hills, the train began to climb, reluctantly. Even in the compartment, the Seven could feel the resistance of the snow as the snowplow coupled to the front of the engine tried to clear the way, even as the overpiled snowbanks beside the rails began to crumble and block the tracks still more. Somewhere in the valley, the locomotive stopped and then suddenly lurched, trying to force its way through a wall of snow. This seemed to work for a while, but did not get them very far. Eventually the steam-engine stopped and the train came to a standstill. After a moment of hushed silence, several passengers rolled down their windows to look outside, inquiring of one another about the situation in scandalized tones, as if the snow were a personal offence. What was the government doing? An American voice resounded, claiming that in the United States everybody would take a shovel and clear the way, a piece of information the French passengers found to be a hoot.

  Gabriel and Brentford stepped outside and took a few steps along the narrow strip that separated the ballast and the crumbling snowbanks, their feet making a crunching sound that each knew the other was happy to hear, even if it made them a bit melancholy, too. From time to time a filmy, unconvinced moon appeared through the fog, revealing all around them the waves of an ocean of snow that seemed to go on forever. Strangely, it reminded Gabriel, even down to the most minute details, of a similar scene in a novel. But, after all, it was a good scene, and Reality had simply copied it, the way drooling toddlers scribble arabesques to mimic their parents’ handwriting.

  Other passengers who had ventured outside exchanged ominous rumours through their mufflers. The controller, whose uniform now officially designated him as scapegoat, struggled through the crowd, and after placating a woman who threatened to write to the authorities to complain, announced a delay of about four or five hours, the time it would take for workers to arrive from the nearest station at L’Aigle, three miles away. An employee had been sent running there to get help.

  Brentford and Gabriel walked back to the compartment in despair, their bodies now shaking with cold, while the shrill screams of the distress whistle got lost in the indifferent fog. The feeling of being nowhere, cut off from any existing world—so typical of train travel by night—seemed now to be a reality. For people who were already nowhen, it was all the more painful. New Venice seemed more and more like a fading dream.

  So, tucked in their bunks, their faces barely outlined in the dark, the Seven talked about their city, and what it meant to them, trying to rebuild that dream with words, which by and by, turning to blur on the windows, further erased the surrounding landscape.

  To Brentford, New Venice was an adventure of sublime proportions. It was all about numbers. He had governed the city for a year, and the demands of that job had been nothing compared with the pressure of bringing heat, water, and food to one hundred thousand persons every day, as he had done while working for the Arctic Administration. In those days, every time he went to bed he felt that he had fought a battle and won it, and when he woke up, what he saw looking through the window was that the dream was still alive, because of his and others’ loyalty to it.

  To Gabriel, too, their city was a dream, but of a different kind: a fantasy come alive in which he could live out his own. His New Venice was a labyrinth of lit boulevards and dark alleys, and he sleepwalked through it, searching for his own Northwest Passage, his heart aching with desire and his mind in a coloured haze.

  Lilian had known that lifestyle, too. But since coming back from her travels she had inhabited a different city—one that did not quite exist yet but that she thought she could see at the turn of the street and whose portents she collected and advertised, a bohemian city where women and men would be free and equal, where work would not prevail over leisure and art, where men could love men and women love women.

  “I see this, too,” Bren
tford commented, in the hope, she thought, of impressing her. “I mean, that the city either was, or will be, very close to what it could be, without ever actually being it. At times it seems hopeful, but at other times, it’s like that crock of gold at the end of the rainbow; you think you’ll never reach it. And, though I hate to admit it, the revolution that we staged changed very little. We were just struggling with different imperfections, and, I suspect, equally hopeless ones.”

  “It seemed quite perfect to me,” said Dr. Lavis, the outsider. “I could not believe the place when I first laid eyes on it. When I went back to Paris after my first visit, I thought about it all the time, and I doubted that it was real. And not being allowed to say anything about it because of the Polaris Pledge only made it seem more uncertain. This is why I came back and stayed: to make sure that I had not been dreaming. In a sense, the dream came to define the truth—and how extensive truth is. It taught me that many things can be real that I did not think possible.”

  Thomas Paynes-Grey did not understand what was dreamy about it. The place was so cold, you couldn’t doubt that it was real; the people were struggling in a very real sense; it was a city where things happened, and happened in a big way. Its pleasures and its pains were intense. It was both affluent and miserable, ecstatic and really boring. Severed from history and with a dubious future, New Venice was all about the present. You could live in it to the full, and follow life to its extremities.

  Blankbate nodded at that, and for once expressed himself through other means than the cracking of his phalanges and upper vertebrae. “It’s a real city,” he agreed in his deep drawl. “Like every other city, it’s dirty and dangerous, and the more beautiful it is, the more something ugly is likely to lurk beneath. It’s like a law.” He grinned, as if to indicate that he did not wish to be taken as seriously as his tone implied. “Every beauty is built with hard work and suffering. You don’t want to know how many workers’ corpses are embedded in the ice pillars that support the artificial islands, nor how many were found by simply dragging the canals. I see the beauty and I understand the pride, but believe me, it’s got a dark side.”

  The Colonel interrupted through the holes punched in his Gladstone.

  “I was there when the city was about to be finished. What this gentleman says is, I must say, a little truer that I’d care to admit. It is a harsh city, quite certainly. But when one looks at what the Seven Sleepers achieved, in such unmerciful surroundings, one can’t help being in awe, eh? It is a very monument to those who sacrificed themselves to build it”—here Lilian could not hold back a snigger—“and it is our duty to protect their legacy. That’s what the bloody place is about for me. Now, all this babble has made me thirsty. Has anyone out there anything to drink? A brandy?”

  “Brandy, Colonel?” Brentford said. “Are you sure that’s allowed?”

  “Of course, young man! It’s good for the gears.”

  Brentford shrugged.

  “I’ll do it,” volunteered Tuluk, who was more and more fascinated by the clockwork Colonel, and who for once forgot to speak of himself in the third person. He fiddled for a while with the flask and the bag—not an easy task in a cramped cabin—and finally sat down. The silence reminded him that it was his turn to speak. He blushed, hesitated, and then began.

  “For this Inuk, New Venice is two things. One is the city this Inuk saw from the outside. The lights in the night, the big round roofs, like igloos on the buildings, the arrows towards the skies, the warmth from the Fire-Maidens. And this city is like a dream, but not a good dream. A dream that is too big for the mind. It looks dangerous, as if it fell from the skies. But then, this Inuk came in and knew the city, and this Inuk saw you qallunaat live like us. You make things, you fix them, you build things, you get food and keep yourselves warm, one small thing after another, and this Inuk understands. He doesn’t think you do it the right way, but he likes the way you’re doing things, all these little clever things. So now this Inuk knows what the dream is made of and he is less afraid of it, because it’s only made of people and work, like the Inuit’s own dream.”

  And Brentford smiled because, without knowing it, Tuluk had almost uttered the motto of New Venice: Somnia et Labor. Dream and Strife.

  The train seemed now to have fallen asleep, as if lulled by the Seven’s fairy tale, but a restless and foul-breathed sleep it was. After four hours of waiting in doubt and despair, the good news eventually came that three platoons of soldiers, on reserve in Argentan for possible accidents, had been dispatched to shovel the express out of the snow, but that it would take a long time.

  And a long time it took.

  It was dawn when the track was cleared, if one can call a slight change of light in the fog “dawn.” And there were eight hours to go before they would reach the city, through a land that seemed enchanted in the true sense of the term: held under a thrall of paralysis and silence. Only a few crows dotted the snowy fields, like commas and semicolons on an otherwise white page. The train went as fast as possible to try and reduce its twelve-hour delay, an attempt both ridiculous and brave. Maybe the driver was simply eager to get home; at least, Brentford thought, he had one.

  What Brentford did not know yet was that, in the cab, the driver had died from cold and exhaustion, and the fireman had slipped on an ice puddle and knocked himself out while trying to remove his rigid colleague from the levers. The phantom train rushed through stations where it should have stopped, and by and by, telegraph signals were sent to announce it, but nothing else could be done, either to stop the train or to warn the passengers.

  As they entered the western suburbs of Paris near Issy, a blur of drab greyish houses, the passengers began to notice that the train gave no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, the landscape tore by; the telegraph poles that stapled it together seemed ripped away one after another. The Seven gaped out the window as their stomachs tightened and sweat broke out on their backs, while screams of panic were heard in the other compartments.

  And suddenly they were in the city itself, a colourless, twisted smudge, just as if a hand had wiped across a foggy mirror. Echoing between the buildings, the rumble of the wheels got louder and louder. In the dwindling distance, the twin glass arches of the Montparnasse station roofs were already visible, wide-eyed, as if not believing what they were seeing coming towards them.

  The controller ran towards the back of the train, perhaps to pull the emergency brake at the back of the last car. But it was too late. They were already zooming into the station, and it became a striped, grating blur. In the Seven’s cabin, fists grasped wrists, wild eyes locked, and for a brief moment, their heads were flooded with bright, blindingly white memories of New Venice: it was where the city lived now, in the fleeting, fatal interval between life and certain death.

  With a crash of scraped metal that seemed to be a scream of pain, the locomotive hit the giant buffers at the end of the line. The train was slowed a little but not stopped. It screeched through the space that separated the track and the glass wall of the building’s outer façade and, shaking off its dead drivers, smashed through it in a burst of smithereens. With a sound as if the whole world were being crumpled by an iron fist, the locomotive leapt from the platform down to the Place de Rennes, yanking the coal tender with it and crushing a woman in her streetside newspaper stall.

  The Seven felt themselves torn as if from their own bones, and then violently slapped back in, their minds buzzing, their skins tingling with fear. They opened their eyes on the afterlife only to find they were still in the station. Indeed, gingerly climbing to their feet from where they’d been thrown, they could see out the window that their car was still in the station, almost where it was supposed to be: only the locomotive and the tender were hanging askew beyond the platform in midair. The passenger cars, by miracle, had not smashed into each other.

  “I am afraid my arm is broken,” Thomas finally said, with well-rehearsed military coolness.

  “My back hurts,” L
ilian muttered, grimacing, while Lavis examined the ensign.

  Gabriel massaged his bruised, swollen temple with a hateful glare in which shone his resentment at the very existence of Matter.

  Brentford had no injuries, though the crash had done nothing to soothe a backache that had started days ago. Tuluk was also unhurt, wrapped in his cocoon of furs. Blankbate sat motionless, his arms folded, keeping any pain he felt to himself. The Colonel, too, was miraculously intact within his Gladstone, lucky for once that he had no limbs to break.

  “What? Are we there yet?” they heard him asking. “I told you to wake me when we got there.”

  People started to gather around the wreck, more curious than helpful, indeed mostly incredulous about what they had just witnessed. It was a miracle, someone who wasn’t the newspaper woman said. But, yes, it was a miracle that there weren’t dead passengers everywhere. And it was another miracle that the engine hadn’t caught fire—but sighed dejectedly on the sidewalk like a wounded rhino—or that its snowplow, buried three feet into the sidewalk, had not pierced the sewers nor crashed through the catacombs.

  The Seven cautiously stepped down onto the platform, where the hubbub had reached its peak. Stunned survivors were groping their own limbs with wonder, as if seeing them for the first time, or crouching, overwhelmed, among forests of legs, sometimes sobbing into their hands. Women were being given smelling salts and led away away to the buffet, where they could try to regain their senses away from the crowd. Eventually a doctor approached the Seven.

  “Anyone hurt here?”