New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “A gift from a Belgian friend. It’s very special to me,” said Vassily, with understandable pride, not to mention a little wariness.

  Gabriel flipped through it and read: “She was known as the snow girl because of her extreme pallor.” Good call, he thought. Humots was hot. There would be something for him on these shelves. The Snow Girl—wouldn’t that be a great name for an imaginary girlfriend?

  Next, a series of booklets attracted Humots. Diana Vaughan. Mémoires d’une ex-palladiste, read the cover. Ex-Palladian? A thrill ran up his spine.

  “May I have a look?” he asked Vassily.

  “Oh, this? It’s just been released. Really strange book. The most bizarre feuilleton since the Sixth Song of Maldoror. If it is a feuilleton …”

  “What do you mean, ‘If it is a feuilleton’?” Gabriel flipped through the pages quickly, perusing them for any mention of the Arctic.

  “It’s about the Masons being worshippers of Lucifer, doing black masses, wanting to rule the world, and so forth. Some people take this idea very seriously. Huysmans does, for instance. I think on the whole it’s a beastly read. For some reason I cannot fathom, if there’s anything in the world that’s more boring than Masonic literature, it’s anti-Masonic literature; I don’t know why. But if this is simply a feuilleton, then it’s genius. The newspaper form, the false readers’ letters, the games, the sense of detail, the mad erudition … very painstaking, very inventive.”

  “But this Diana Vaughan, does she exist?”

  “Does Diana exist? Oh, there are portraits—not my kind of beauty, if I may say so—but also interviews, letters. She’s supposed to live in a convent now. But what does that prove? Some years ago a journalist called Léo Taxil had everyone believing there was a drowned Roman city in the Leman Lake. Unfortunately, it was more poetic than true. And it is the same Taxil who is behind this series.”

  Prompted by Humots, Gabriel grasped another volume in the series. It was the same mind-boggling blend of Masonic gossip and ridiculous rituals. The next two booklets that he grabbed threatened to yield as little, and then suddenly he stumbled on an author with a name that rang a sleighbell: Vice-Admiral Albert Hastings Markham.

  Every New Venetian knew that name. As a young officer, Markham had been a part of the 1875 Nares expedition to Ellesmere Island. It was on this occasion that he had reached the Farthest North, above 85°. His man-hauled sledge was christened the Marco Polo, and it was from that, or from a common inspiration, that he named his starting point Marco Polo Bay. And of course it was in Marco Polo Bay that New Venice was built, and, whether through coincidence or design, the standard of New Venice bore more than a passing resemblance to the Markham coat of arms—not to mention, of course, that the city’s marina was named after him. He was rumoured to have been close to the Seven Sleepers.

  Diana Vaughan’s story about Markham was continued in the fifth feuilleton of the series, which had just been published. In it, she told how Markham, a Mason with the title of Grand Superintendent of the Royal Ark, was also an elected Grand Master of a Perfect Triangle located in Valletta, on the island of Malta. It was said that one day in 1893, for doubting reports of a magic arrow that wrote messages by itself, he had been instantly spirited away, to find himself in Charleston in the presence of the Eleven-Seven who ruled Palladism, and then, after an audience with them, he was sent back the same way to Malta. It wasn’t much, but it was another link between the Palladium and the Arctic.

  Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel’s bookshelf manners. “You’ll have to excuse me,” Gabriel said, putting back the booklet. “I have a severe addiction to ink.”

  “Don’t we all?” Vassily nodded. “Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.”

  Even after a few glasses of Chartreuse, however, Humots remained restless, forcing Gabriel’s gaze to return to the bookshelf. A thin pamphlet, its spine sticking out from the shelves, seemed to attract the book-demon to the point where the itch made Gabriel nervous.

  Finally giving in and sliding it out, he asked Vassily, “What’s this?”

  Vassily was now drunk enough to oblige.

  “Thulé-des-Brumes, by my friend Alphonse Rétté,” he replied. “Quite a little success, and, I dare say, a good candidate for Suggestism. In fact, it might give you some idea of how Suggestism would work.”

  “Well, I must admit a certain reluctance to be hypnotized.”

  “That might not be necessary,” Vassily said with a knowing smile. “There are alternative methods.”

  He started to read, in a vibrant, lyrical voice, stopping frequently to draw on his Uppman cigar, then exhaling his words in thin streamers of bluish haze.

  O exquisite joys! To go thus very alone, for weeks on end, under the polar night that is set ablaze, here and there, the silent fireworks of the Boreal lights: to laugh at the snow, the oblique flight of dream butterflies that brush and caress and drape me in ermine. Then, to stop to mould white statues that will never melt … Yes, to the North, always, with no other aim but to go there …

  It was far from the best poetry Gabriel had ever heard, but certainly he could relate to its inspiration—more so than Vassily could suspect. His thoughts evaporated into dim images of snowscapes and, hardly discernible from them, the outlines of a white city, raising its domes into the weak light …

  … Listen: there is an island so lost in the recess of the Boreal sea that one has to be us to know it …

  And then there was the drink Vassily had fixed for them both, explaining that it was the best accompaniment to his friend’s poem. It was a cocktail of champagne and ether, in which from time to time Vassily advised him to dip a raspberry. It took only a few sips before Gabriel felt his brain had become padded with satin. Vassily’s rendition of Rétté’s poem floated in and out, the images billowing in Etherama like a breeze-blown curtain. And at some point, Gabriel felt his imaginary girlfriend softly take his hand in hers.

  Helen … yes, this whiteness, when I close my eyes and exhale the syllables of your name, thus, amidst the opiate smoke of some eastern tobacco. And I feel so peaceful …

  Helen … New Venice was everywhere now, it bathed Gabriel, sucked him into an undertow of visions and then spat him back out onto the shore, full of longing and hope, only to plunge him again into a whirl of frothy pictures:

  The gondola glides under the bridge … a Thunder of yore wakes up; dusty flags are waved; bats whirl around.

  The knights cry out: “Take us with you; we were in your retinue when, leaving the Unfortunate Islands where you reigned, you tried to conquer the Princess of the Pearls.

  The prince is singing: The knights have died in the crusade.

  At this, they all throw their shields in the river.

  But the gondola is gone.

  When dawn came, Gabriel had fallen asleep and was dreaming of New Venice.

  To be continued …

  I

  The Wax Newspaper

  Brentford was woken from a dream of New Venice by the bellboy banging on his door, announcing a telephone call. Still in his dressing gown, he went grumpily down to the lobby to learn that the Commissariat de Police of the rue du Faubourg Montmartre had detained a certain Mr. Tuluk for the night, and that the authorities would be grateful if Mr. Orsini could come and answer a few questions.

  It took him almost a whole morning of plodding omnibus rides to get to the rue du Faubourg Montmartre. The street was an affluent tributary to the boulevards, yet the pavement outside its supposedly exclusive shops was festooned with long lines of shivering people. In Paris, Gabriel had explained, you never knew whether a queue meant scarcity or snobbery. Brentford’s welcome at the commissariat was rather lukewarm, but he relaxed when he found Tuluk sitting on a chair in the middle of a room and the sergeants laughing their heads off at whatever gobbledygook he was spieling. The comic muse, Brentford recalled, was an integral part of the Inuit’s survival skills.

  In this jolly
atmosphere, he was able to patiently reconstruct what had happened. A guard at the Musée Grévin had caught Tuluk standing in the middle of a diorama, trying to steal some of its precious objects; he had resisted with more petulance than was allowed; and it had quickly become a matter for the police instead. Unable to deliver any satisfactory explanation as to his identity or conduct, he had been invited to spend the night in the “Violin,” as the police called their famous custody cells. Brentford, remembering a similar incident at the Inuit People’s Ice Palace, wondered if dioramakleptomania was a deep-seated impulse among Inuits.

  Eager to sort out the situation with Tuluk, he was called instead into a dismal office, furnished in the typical faded and lacklustre style of state bureaucracies, and found himself face to face with Tripotte—exactly the thing he had feared.

  “Ah, we meet again, Mr. Orsini,” said Tripotte, with a thin veneer of cordiality, weaving his plump fingers across his paunch.

  Brentford’s veneer was barely thicker. “I am sure that this time, the Canadian nationality of my friend cannot be doubted.”

  “I must admit, he looks the part,” said Tripotte. “As to the answers he’s given me, I’m afraid they’re beyond my competency. Why in your opinion would an Eskimo want to steal something from an Arctic diorama? Hasn’t he enough of these things back home?”

  Brentford was totally at a loss. Arctic? That Tuluk’s case had anything to do with the Arctic was news to him. But good news, somehow. He fumbled for a noncommittal answer. “Maybe he thought those objects didn’t belong there. The Inuit are very respectful of their own culture. Things that may look like crude tools to us are immensely precious to them.”

  “He was trying to steal the goggles off the wax figure of a polar explorer, as a matter of fact. I don’t doubt that those would be precious to an Inuit.”

  “Explorer?” Brentford whispered to himself, before noticing that Tripotte was closely observing his reaction and collecting himself.

  “Maybe it was just the diorama,” he said. “The feeling of being home. You know the Inuit are a simple people, and when they’re exposed to our civilization they can easily go off their onions.”

  As he expected, the racial angle worked wonders with Tripotte, who said, “I can easily believe you on that point.” Then, with a touch of regret, he added, “As I can also believe that, according to the Canadian Commission, Mr. Leclou hailed from Montréal.”

  “So, it’s all clear, then,” Brentford answered with relief. “Unless charges have been pressed against Mr. Tuluk?”

  “By the Grévin Museum, no. That is about the only kind of publicity they don’t go in for. And your friend had his wits about him enough not to resist the police for too long. Apparently, he thought clowning was his best defense, and we can hardly charge him with making a fool of himself. I just wonder what you’ll turn up with tomorrow, Mr. Orsini.”

  “I assure you I have nothing to do with this Grévin affair,” Brentford answered as emphatically as he could—even as he realized that, whatever the Grévin affair was, he was now totally involved in it.

  As soon as he had taken leave of Tripotte, Brentford snatched Tuluk away from his rapt audience and took him for a quick sausage lunch at the nearby Café Brébant. Tuluk ate voraciously, as waiters, visibly pained by his sloppy table manners, circled worriedly around. Brentford, meanwhile, barely touched his plate, gazing instead out the window and brooding over a tatterdemalion who was using a tack on the sole of his shoe to pick up cigar and cigarette butts, then carefully sorting them, probably to resell. But the snow made it difficult: either he had to dig holes through it in the hope of finding bounty, or else splash through wet slush when he spotted a recently discarded butt. Brentford’s heart sank as he watched him.

  Tired of waiting for the improbable moment when Tuluk would be sated, Brentford turned back to him and asked for his story again.

  “So what is it that you saw in the eye of this explorer?”

  “The last thing that he saw.” Tuluk answered with his mouth full. “The spirit that took him, my mother would say.”

  “Which was?” Brentford bristled with interest.

  Tuluk rummaged through a pocket, then another, and another, then the first one again, and, with a smile, he put something on the table.

  It was a glass eye.

  “So you did take it.”

  “This Inuk was too quick for the guard,” Tuluk boasted, even if, in good Inuk fashion, he was still too modest to speak of himself in the first person.

  “And they saw nothing?”

  “No, this Inuk puts back the goggles. Very quickly. They think this Inuk want to steal the goggles. But the goggles they are on the eyes of the inunnguaq, and they don’t look below.”

  The glass eye looked up at Brentford, and not kindly, he thought. He returned the stare.

  “And you say there’s something in that glass eye?” he asked. Not that he didn’t trust Tuluk, but the Inuit, living in a barren, monotonous, nocturnal land, were well known for complementing their sharp but frustrated senses with the working of their imaginations. Their drawings, for instance, always showed imaginary beasts or spirits. At least, one hoped they were.

  “Look,” Tuluk encouraged him.

  Scanning the room to make sure none of the waiters was watching, Brentford brought the glass eye close to his own and stared into its iris. At first, he saw nothing there, but when he tilted it towards the light, he thought he detected something deep in the heart of the sphere, something very faint and uncertain, like a defect in the glass: a kind of long, thin splatter. The outlines of a city … and its reflection on the ice?

  Maybe it was only an optical illusion, or a pattern that was pure chance. He rolled the eye between his fingers to take another view, and when he turned it upside down, he thought he saw a shimmer, as if snow was falling slowly over the city.

  Ten minutes later, Tuluk was in a cab on his way back to the hotel, and Brentford was hurrying towards the Grévin Museum, the snow-globe eye bulging in his watch pocket.

  At the museum, Brentford decided that it was best not to draw attention to himself. So, he forced himself to stop and look at each one of the repulsive wax pantomimes in the “three-dimensional newspaper,” as they called it, that led to the diorama. Once there, he hardly dared draw close to the red velvet rope that surrounded it, and when he finally forced himself to read the descriptive plaque, he felt a shiver:

  LA MORT DU COURAGEUX EXPLORATEUR

  AMADIS DE LANTERNOIS SUR

  L’ILE D’ELLESMERE

  MAI 1895

  Although he’d suspected that the diorama would be about de Lanternois, Brentford was still taken aback—and then even more surprised by the plaque’s revelation that de Lanternois had died before New Venice even existed. Peterswarden, it seemed, had fooled Brentford and probably the whole Senate of the Sectors with a heavily made-up mummy. But had Peterswarden known what would happen next? And if de Lanternois had died before New Venice was built, why had the artist depicted the city in his eyes?

  Looking for clues, Brentford examined the diorama’s landscape. It looked authentic—like a drifting chunk of the Arctic, down to its sickly light and nagging refractions. And for the figure of de Lanternois, the use of wax made perfect sense, Brentford reflected: the artist had been trying to seize the exact moment when the explorer’s face, purple, almost blackened, had been frozen still and his last emotion expressed forever. But this emotion was more complex than it first seemed: seen from one angle, de Lanternois’ taut features expressed exhaustion and pain, but viewing them from another angle, he appeared to be smiling ecstatically. That his extended arm and the open palm of his hand could be either a salute or a plea only strengthened the uncanny impression. His eyes, no doubt, would confirm the ecstasy, but it had been the artist’s cleverness to hide them behind goggles, so as to keep the uncertainty intact. Brentford thought, a little uneasily, about the empty eye socket, and also wondered whether, beneath his hood, the de L
anternois figure was wearing the crown. But the hood was caked with false ice, and its shape told him nothing.

  “Excuse me,” Brentford said to the guard. “This diorama is beautifully executed. What’s the name of the artist?”

  “The artist?” asked the guard, as if he had just learned an entirely new word.

  “The crafstman, or whomever produced this diorama.”

  “Oh, that. I don’t know if I would call ’im an ‘artist.’ It’s the first time I’ve been asked that.”

  While his astral double strangled that of the guard, Brentford remained smiling and patient. “I suppose he has a name?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s Edgar de Couard.”

  Brentford’s heart skipped a beat. The de Couards were a dynasty of New Venetian painters, arch-rivals of the Elphinstones for the City’s biggest commissions. Edgar was famous for his book Le Bon usage de la Couleur and for—Damn!—the dioramas of the Palace of Memory located inside the Blazing Building. It was his mad son, Edouard, who had nearly destroyed New Venice by pumping blue pigments into the Air Architecture shafts.

  Brentford had found his first New Venetian citizen in Paris.

  “Where can I find him? Are there workshops in the building?” he asked, trying to master his excitement.

  “Him? He’s way too crazy for that. Mad as a rabbit, I can tell you that. When he works here, he wants no one to look at him—he’s always hiding behind screens or sheets. I’ve heard he has a studio in Montmartre, but I don’t know where exactly. But I doubt he’d ever let you see him. He’s so goddamn sensitive he can’t even look at himself in the mirror.”