New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Perhaps your mother would, judging by the question she asked at the séance.”

  Blanche hesitated and then said, “My father was reported dead before I was born. His body was never found. My mother has long tried to find it. That’s where her spiritualism comes from. But I don’t like to talk about all that. I promised you something amusing.”

  They swerved to the left and stopped at a low tombstone where a man of dark greenish bronze lay collapsed flat on his back, exposing the soles of his boots, an upturned top hat beside his hand as if he had just dropped it. He looked as if he had been felled just minutes before.

  “Victor Noir,” Blanche explained.

  “You should marry him,” suggested Thomas. “Then you would be Mrs. Blanche Noir.”

  “That’s what’s known as black humour, I suppose,” Blanche said. “This man was a young journalist, who, twenty-five years ago, was shot point-blank by a cousin of the Emperor himself. The cousin didn’t like something the reporter’s boss had written, and when Monsieur Noir came on his boss’s behalf to arrange for a duel, the Emperor’s cousin simply shot him dead. He became a symbol for the Republic and was relocated here five years ago. But take a closer look.”

  “I see nothing special.”

  “This bulge in his trousers. Doesn’t it inspire respect?”

  Thomas gave her what he hoped was an arch look. “I’ve seen better,” he said.

  “Look more closely, idiot. See how the bulge is a slightly different colour, almost coppery?”

  “Why is that?”

  “Life in death.”

  Tugging his arm, she dragged him behind a nearby monument.

  “Wait here. You’ll see,” she whispered.

  Twenty cold minutes must have passed before a woman, her face almost entirely hidden by a fox stole, cautiously approached the effigy of Victor Noir. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, she pulled aside her coattails, lifted up her heavy dress, sat astride the statue, and began feverishly rubbing herself against what Blanche had referred to as a bulge. The woman continued for a few minutes, her breath increasingly short under her veil, then she stopped abruptly, deposited a nosegay of chrysanthemums in the upturned hat, and left in a hurry.

  Thomas was dumbfounded. His first impulse was to impart his personal opinion of the mental health of French women, then he realized that was hardly the reaction Blanche expected, and, confused, kept his real conclusions to himself.

  “What’s going on here?” he blurted out at last, turning towards Blanche and noticing, finally, that tears glittered in her eyes, like smithereens of diamond.

  “It’s a ritual for some women in Paris. They believe it’s a way to cast love spells, or a fertility rite to help them beget children. I find it very moving—it makes me sad to think I will never have children.”

  Thomas racked his brains for a sensitive comment but, finding none, settled for leaning towards Blanche and saying, “I want you.”

  Blanche turned and quickly flung herself at him, in a hurried rustle of silk. For a few moments, their clinch looked more like a fight than an embrace … Then, just as a trembling Thomas finally found his purchase, a voice interrupted them.

  “Blanche?”

  It was Yronwoode and the old beggar Thomas had seen at La Villette, standing like ghosts among the graves. Slowly the lovers rose from the stone on which they’d tumbled.

  It wasn’t in Blanche’s power to turn any paler than she already was, but she stood rigid and trembling, and Thomas could see how upset she was. He moved in front her.

  “What do you want? You didn’t seem so talkative this morning.”

  “You’re not the one we were looking for,” Yronwoode said calmly. “Now we have found her, but it seems that you are always in the way. Bad luck for you.”

  Blanche stepped forward.

  “Who is this old man?” she asked Yronwoode, trying to sound collected, “Why is he following me everywhere?”

  The old man was stooped, his head down, not daring, it seemed, to look up at Blanche.

  Yronwoode maintained his calm tone of voice. “His name is Amédée de Bramentombes. He is your father.”

  Blanche shivered, looked closer at him, and then pulled back and clenched her jaw. “My father died a long time ago,” she spat out.

  “As you can see, he did not,” Yronwoode persisted. “Tell her yourself, Monsieur.”

  “And why would she believe him?” Thomas asked. “He’s surely some goddamn impostor.”

  The old man looked up and whispered in a hoarse voice, “It’s true, Blanche. I am your father … I’m sorry.”

  Blanche put her gloved hand to her veil as if to smother a scream. At first Thomas thought she was about to faint and moved to support her, but she pushed his arm away. The old man stood, not daring to draw any closer to her, and sobbing now into his filthy moustache.

  “You are in danger, Blanche,” Yronwoode said. “Your father’s death was a scam, to get rid of him. There’s money at stake, you see.”

  Blanche was fumbling for words. Thomas stepped in. “Money?” he asked. But Yronwoode wasn’t talking to him.

  “Your father was very ill when you were a child. Your mother’s friends decided to stage his death, so that they could get their hands on the money. Your inheritance …”

  Blanche stood motionless as the statues surrounding them.

  “At first it wasn’t all that much money. Things changed, though, when your uncle came back from Australia a millionaire. You are his only heiress, as well. The people around your mother wanted to ensure that this fortune wouldn’t go to waste. That’s why, for instance, your fiancé Amadis de Lanternois was sent to his death, thinking he went of his own free will. He was beginning to suspect things, you see, and had developed a habit of standing in the way.”

  Thomas saw that Blanche had straightened her spine at this. “Where did you learn all this?” she asked.

  “I was commissioned by the British Embassy to investigate de Lanternois’ death.”

  She took this in, never taking her eyes off him. “This is why we met, I suppose?”

  “Well, yes. But it is not why we kept seeing each other, is it?” Blanche blushed but he continued. “To get on with the story: you will soon be of an age to receive your father’s money, and perhaps your uncle’s, too—his life may well be in danger. But should something happen to you, the money would go to your mother—or rather, to the people who hold her under their sway.”

  Blanche’s voice had gone wan. “I’m going to die anyway.”

  “So are we all, Blanche,” the Major said softly. “But it seems someone is in a hurry on your behalf. Recent mysterious events involving your uncle have put his enemies on alert, and they realize that they are going to need his money a little sooner than expected. Which will put not only your uncle in danger, but also you—and soon. That’s why, after I tracked him down and explained the situation to him, your father agreed to come out of hiding. If he makes himself known, then you will not be his heiress so soon—a much safer position for you, especially as long as we keep your uncle alive, too.”

  “Why are you doing all this, Major?” Thomas asked.

  Yronwoode looked him up and down before saying, “It may sound a bit old-fashioned to you, but I make it my duty to protect the ones I love.”

  “I appreciate that, Ivanhoe,” Blanche said in a low voice. “But who is it exactly that you’re saying is a danger to me?”

  “Just about everyone from your mother’s salon—especially Papus and Tonnerre, who are after the money for different reasons.”

  “I’ve never liked them,” Blanche muttered to her father, who was watching her as if in wonder.

  “But most of all,” Yronwoode insisted, “you have to fear the man who found your father when he was sick and gave him a job as a ragpicker—a man named Hébert. He’s been successful in the waste business and has big plans for expansion—plans that will require rather a lot of funds. Hébert is a dan
gerous fellow, and your father bitterly regrets any service he has done him in the past. He wants nothing more now than to rehabilitate himself in your eyes.”

  Blanche sighed deeply, then walked up to her trembling father. She hugged him closely, even though he stank as if he had been freshly dug up from a nearby grave. He shook like a leaf.

  “You smell so bad it makes my eyes sting,” she said softly to him when she finally pulled away.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” Amédée stammered.

  Thomas averted his eyes, as did Yronwoode, who scratched a match against a gravestone to light a cigarette he was holding in his claw-hand.

  “You smoke, Ensign?” he asked Thomas, with only the slightest hint of benevolence.

  “No, thanks. I suppose I ought to thank you for all this, Major,” Thomas said.

  “At the risk of repeating myself, I still say you’d better stay out of it.”

  “And away from her, I suppose?”

  Yronwoode took a long drag on his cigarette. “It’s probably too late for that,” he exhaled. Then he turned to Amédée. “We should go now, my dear Baron. It isn’t safe for you two to be seen together. I think we’ve made our point to Mademoiselle de Bramentombes. When you’re in trouble, Blanche, I’ll bring your father back from the dead and expose the whole scheme. You are not alone.”

  His tongs on the reluctant Amédée’s back, the Major pushed him up the slope towards the columbarium. Blanche sat on a gravestone and watched them go, one hunched, the other limping, finally disappearing among the snow-covered crosses. Thomas sat beside her. He thought she was sobbing, and perhaps she was at first, but suddenly she lifted her veil and shook with a fit of coughing that sounded like silky thunder. Before she could seize her handkerchief, three little drops of blood fell in the snow.

  For a long while, Thomas stared at them, transfixed, unable to take his eyes off them.

  VI

  A Sweet Succubus

  The roar of a petrol engine grew and then ebbed to silence in front of the Hôtel des Écoles. From the half-frosted window Gabriel could see Père Tonnerre stepping down from his motorbike, a Millet model with a rotary engine that looked like a starfish inside the back wheel. Evidently this was the easiest way to chase demons around a snow-smothered Paris. Seeing the priest’s sturdy silhouette enter the building, carrying a suitcase full of what he supposed was holy paraphernalia, Gabriel suddenly felt bat-sized butterflies fluttering in his stomach. He wasn’t so sure he really wanted to go through with this ritual anymore.

  A thunderous knocking on the door subsequently made him start, and he had to calm himself before he could open it. Father Tonnerre stood framed by the light in the doorway, his legs apart, the blackened crucifix once again like a dagger in his belt.

  “Good evening. Have we been a good Christian today, Mr. d’Allier?” the priest asked as he stepped past Gabriel and entered the room.

  “God only knows,” Gabriel muttered.

  “Let us pray together, then,” Tonnerre said, a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder pressuring him to kneel on the floorboards. Gabriel, feeling humiliated, mumbled something that had less to do with the salvation of his soul than with the damnation of Tonnerre’s. From the corner of his eye he could see, sticking out of the priest’s sandals, two calloused, tattooed heels showing Satan crushed and vanquished. It disgusted him.

  “Now stay there on your knees,” Tonnerre ordered as he unlocked the suitcase and placed pictures of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ on the bed. His own crucifix he placed on the pillow.

  “We act directly in their names,” Tonnerre said, indicating the pictures, as he donned a violet stole over his surplice. “It is they whom the demons must obey, not a simple man like me. But first for the place …”

  He took a phial of holy water and poured it into a small cup, adding a pinch of salt with a cross-shaped flourish. Grasping an aspergillum, which he wielded like a bull’s pizzle, he began sprinkling the saltwater around in large, determined movements, reciting in Latin as he did so: “Blessed Saint Michael, Archangel of the Lord; I call on you to drive from this home the spirit that dwells here in unrest. As you drove out the Devil from the Abode of Heaven so too drive out this devilish presence. Oh purest of the Heavenly Host, Oh Commander of the Lord’s Host, cleanse this house! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

  This seemed to Gabriel to be taking forever, but then Tonnerre turned to him.

  “Now, you,” he ordered, sprinkling Gabriel liberally with the holy water. Curiously, it felt fresh and pleasant to Gabriel. The exorcist knelt down again in front of him, making the boards squeak, and, his eyes closed, started spooling off the never-ending litany of the saints, cuing Gabriel’s regular response of either “Lord have mercy,” or “Pray for us.” The list seemed to go on forever, and Gabriel quickly tired of the drab hum of it. So that’s the Catholic method, he thought: boring demons until they can’t stand it anymore. It was an old technique, that of inducing a trance through repetition, and Gabriel had to admit that after the fiftieth name he did feel somewhat less lonely in his fight against the demons …

  When the list was complete, Tonnerre launched immediately into psalm 54—“Save me, O God, by thy name”—and went on to adjure Him: “Holy Lord, almighty Father, everlasting God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who once and for all consigned that fallen and apostate tyrant to the flames of hell, who sent your only begotten Son into the world to crush that roaring lion; hasten to our call for help and snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this man made in your image and likeness. Strike terror, Lord, into the beast now laying waste your vineyard …”

  “Amen,” Gabriel said, as prompted, when this was finally done. He had to admit this was powerful rhetoric, and he’d always believed there was no end to what good metaphors could actually accomplish.

  He thought the exorcism proper was about to begin, but instead there was still a reading from the Gospels to endure. He almost wished he were at Gourmont’s play again.

  But Gabriel was distracted from the tedium when he began to notice that something was happening to Tonnerre—the priest’s face reddened more and more as he spoke, to the point of threatening apoplexy at any moment. But that wasn’t all: spasms twisted Tonnerre’s features, he emitted something like a barely contained giggle, and his eyes sparkled with a kind of panicked glee.

  Whatever was happening to him, Tonnerre made a mighty effort to pull himself together and shake it off, and he headed stubbornly into the first exorcism. His hands slightly trembling, he draped his long violet stole around Gabriel’s neck, as if to build a protective circuit around them both. Then, putting his large, clammy palm atop Gabriel’s head, he took a deep breath and began speaking again: “I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every satanic power of the enemy, every spectre from hell, and all your fell companions, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  He made a rapid sign of the cross and, again, with his every utterance, seemed about to crack apart at the seams. Tears welled up in his eyes as he stammered his way through the formula. He stopped, closed his eyes, tried to catch his breath, and pressed on, saying, “Begone and stay far from … this creature of God. For it is He, Hi … hi who commands you, He who flung you headlong from the heights of heaven into the depths of he … he … hell—”

  And then Tonnerre could hold it in no longer. He burst into laughter, flinging himself backwards, his belly heaving like a plunging whale, his tattooed feet kicking in the air, taking Satan into a wild, midair dance just in front of Gabriel’s eyes. Gabriel felt the laughter creep over him, too, but there was something so frightening in the priest’s eyes that it kept Gabriel’s laughter at bay. Tonnerre was absolutely roaring while simultaneously looking at him with an air of utter distress and disbelief—and fear.

  Gabriel was utterly baffled, and without a clue as to how to react until, calling upon a willpower that Gabriel judged tremendous, Tonnerre forced hi
s face to mould its features into a more serene expression, and he finally stopped laughing. The brief silence that followed was torn apart by the sudden deep rumbling of a motor that immediately brought the priest to his feet.

  “My motorcycle!” he exclaimed, still breathless from his fit of laughter. He ran to the window, followed by Gabriel, who joined him in time to see Tuluk astride the Millet and skidding dangerously at the slippery corner of boulevard Edgar Quinet.

  “Blasting Hell,” growled Tonnerre, with another sign of the cross.

  He gave Gabriel a withering dark look, then ignored him as he stuffed his paraphernalia back into the suitcase as quickly as he could, before rushing out of the room without bothering to say goodbye. Gabriel heard him tumble down the steps and then saw him pop out of the building like a cannonball onto the sidewalk, running towards the corner where Tuluk had disappeared.

  Still watching from the window, Gabriel finally let loose his own laughter.

  The whole show had so exhausted and baffled Gabriel that he soon went to bed, lying there on his back for a while, smoking cigarettes from a packet of Liberty Caps, musing about the Phrygian hat depicted on the packet and about the days when those who wore it proudly called themselves libertines. He let the smoke coat his lungs with warm tar and his brain with pleasant feathery thoughts, and it wasn’t until he had turned off the bedside lamp and tucked himself between the sheets with a nervous giggle of pleasure that he felt her, just beside him on the bed. He bit his lip and, trying to be brave, turned quickly to face her.

  Her presence was not exactly real, more like a grainy, trembling image, with a faint halo that may have come from the moonlight pervading the room. She was sitting on the bed, or suspended just above it, nude but posed modestly, with her blond curly hair falling softly on her plump shoulders and her chubby white arms hugging her round kneecaps. He could see, pressed against her thighs, the soft folds of her ample breasts and her velvety belly rolls. Two frail dragonfly wings that seemed made of the finest stained glass bristled on her back, sometimes beating with little buzzes and clicks. She was the Fat Fairy, and he knew her from a forgotten dream.