New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Flap?” he whispered.

  “Of course. Who did you expect, the Green Fairy?”

  “I’ll be damned …”

  “Nobody ever is. What an unpleasant old man that was that you had in here,” she said, with a voice that was not really a voice, but more like the soundless words one hears in dreams. “And how ticklish he was,” she added, giggling to herself.

  “You did that?” Gabriel asked. “He was laughing because of you?” Well, he told himself, that takes care of one religious mystery. “You mean you weren’t afraid of him?”

  She turned her face towards him, her small sapphire eyes sparkling in the moonlight. She looked more like an angel than a demon. “Afraid of him? He was so boring I barely caught a word he said!”

  Gabriel thought for a while. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Here, you mean?” she answered with the cutest frown, pointing at Gabriel’s head.

  “Wherever …”

  “A friend told me you were calling, looking for a girlfriend. I am your girlfriend, am I not?”

  “I suppose so, yes …” Gabriel answered hesitantly. He felt a tug in his guts, but fear had always been close to desire for him, and the two reactions shared quite a few symptoms. In this situation it was hard to guess which it was.

  “A friend, you said …”

  Flap gave a smile that spread her dimpled cheeks like a theatre curtain, and she pointed a stubby finger at the umbrella stand near the door. Then Gabriel understood: the moonlight that bathed her shone at a different angle from the moonlight coming through the curtains. It was as if there was a second moonlight, pouring forth from another source. And this source was the little Polar Kangaroo amulet that he had mounted on the knob of his walking stick. Like a phantascope, it projected Flap’s uncertain, white-gold image onto the bed—straight, no doubt, from New Venice, or at least from the dream bubble that at times seemed to surround that lost city.

  He looked at her and smiled.

  “What are you, exactly?” he asked. “What sort of being?”

  She made a funny face. “It’s difficult to explain. I’m more like a maybeing—a dream extra … a fantasy.”

  “But I wasn’t dreaming.”

  “You’re always dreaming, Gabriel. And always desiring in your dreams. That’s how we found you.”

  “Like that? Far away and out of time as I am right now?”

  “I don’t have much time for time and place.”

  Hope fluttered in Gabriel’s ribcage. “Then … can you take us back home?” he asked.

  “You’d better ask your friend,” she said, a tad impatiently, pointing to the figure of Kiggertarpoq gleaming at the tip of the cane. “He’ll know. But you didn’t call me just to talk, did you?” She moved lightly and knelt down in front of him, her arms pushing her breasts forward, her small nipples as pale pink and soft as the muzzle of a white mouse. Softly, she bent over him and blew lightly on his hurt temple, and it felt fresh and whole again. “There,” she said.

  So beautiful, Gabriel thought, with an overwhelming sense of relief as he reached out to embrace her.

  “Hey!” she complained. “Careful with the wings!”

  VII

  Lilian Unveiled!

  It was already late that night when Brentford and Thomas finally found the place where they were to meet Lilian. Le Furet, a small nondescript bar on the boulevard du Temple, did indeed display, crudely painted on the glass pane of its entrance door, a ferret goring and sucking the blood of a rabbit. Charming, thought Brentford. He opened the door with a sigh, wondering why Lilian had chosen such a dump for their rendezvous.

  But he quickly understood when he took in the clientele: except for a senile waiter carrying a tray of quaking, clinking beer bocks, there were only women there. They were huddled around the tables, playing lotto, poker, and dominos, smoking and talking, shouting and laughing. “Lively place,” Brentford muttered to Thomas. It was always striking to see women in the absence of men, their relief, their happy, loud abandon. And a clear message from Lilian, if he ever needed it.

  The women suddenly stopped talking as they noticed the newcomers, then quickly resumed their games as if in a purposeful hum of busy indifference. Brentford and Thomas saw that Lilian was already there, and she got up and came over to them, followed by a lithe, dark-robed woman whom a jealous Brentford tried very hard not to look straight in the eyes.

  “This is Morgane, the woman I told you about,” Lilian said.

  Brentford stiffened his backbone and, taking a deep breath, bravely faced the woman who now stood before him. Ah, well, he quickly decided—you couldn’t blame Lilian for falling in love with her. It stung, nevertheless, to kiss her hand, and a bitter shame coursed through his veins.

  “I’m glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Orsini,” Morgane said huskily. “Lilian has told me a lot about you.”

  “I have heard about your gifts myself, Miss Roth,” read the subtitle under Brentford’s awkward mumble. “But I suppose the séance will not be taking place here.”

  “No, we’re here for Thomas, actually,” Lilian said. “You’ll agree he deserves a reward for the brilliant deductions he came up with the other night, I’m sure. Follow me, sailor. And wait for us here, Brent—we won’t be long.”

  Leaving Brentford to his dark thoughts, Thomas let Lilian and Morgane steer him towards the back of the room. On the way he noticed, as they passed by the door of the loo, a horrid trompe-l’œil painting of a man squatting with his trousers round his ankles, his features distorted and his veins bulging horribly from his frustrated efforts. Then they reached and climbed a narrow staircase that spiralled so steeply that Thomas had to pull himself up with his hands as if it were a ladder. It led to a small, narrow bedroom or boudoir entirely hung in turkey-red, and which in the spare light of the gas lamp seemed to throb as if it were alive. The space was stifling, and encumbered more than decorated with porcelain dolls. Unfurled fans tacked up all over the walls like pinned butterflies worsened Thomas’s growing feeling of unease. A fat blond woman was slumped on a sofa, near a table where Thomas recognized the accoutrements of morphine cookery.

  “Ah, hello, bloaties,” she said. “This is the man you’ve told me about?”

  “Yes, Angèle …” Morgane answered.

  With a visible effort, the blond woman opened the bedside table, took out a bottle full of crystal cubes, and handed it to Morgane.

  “Here. It was poor Didine’s reserve,” Angèle said, her face twisted like that of a child about to sob.

  Morgane patted her back while Thomas and Lilian exchanged embarrassed looks. “We’re not going to detain you any longer, Angèle,” Morgane said softly. “Thanks for everything.”

  Angèle nodded, and sniffled. “Don’t pay attention, darlings. You girls have fun. That’s all there is to it, right?”

  “Didine?” asked Thomas, as he once again extracted himself with difficulty from the narrow staircase and faced the monstrous restroom door painting again.

  “Angèle’s sweetheart,” Morgane explained. “She recently died from an overdose. She had become so bloated that she couldn’t go down the stairs, and had to stay in her room in agony for weeks.”

  Thomas looked at his bottle and frowned.

  “The first symptom is usually constipation,” Morgane went on, pointing at the door of the loo.

  “The reminder’s rather hard to forget,” Thomas said, trying to look unconcerned.

  They found Brentford looking miserable at a table near the door. Lilian almost regretted having tricked him into coming here. “Okay, we can go now,” she said.

  “Hey, Lili, you promised us a song,” a woman shouted.

  “Yes, show us what kind of singer you were!”

  Lilian turned towards Brentford and took off her coat again. “Sorry. They’re right, I did promise.”

  She jumped up on one of the tables, the little crowd cheering and clapping around her in a heady maelstrom of perf
ume and smoke. With a quick gesture of the hand, Lilian commanded silence, and started a cappella, before the crowd joined in with jaunty albeit ill-timed clapping:

  They pass away these nights and days

  Like zebras in a ha-a-aze

  Turned to moonrays turned to sunrays

  They gleam upon the gla-a-aze

  But in the same places

  we still breathe the same way

  And your face is

  As white as …

  It didn’t take long for Brentford to recognize one of his favourite songs by the Sandmovers, Lilian’s band back when she still called herself Sandy Lake—a reminder of a time long gone, in more ways than one.

  Turned to moonrays turned to sunrays

  They gleam upon the gla-a-aze

  Another day feels like always

  The same old frozen bla-a-a-aze

  But with the same faces

  We still play the same way

  And your face is …

  As white as … ice is.

  The reason why she was singing it slowly dawned on him: it was a conniving, bittersweet recognition of their common life in New Venice, and a definitive valediction to it. The parting gift pierced his heart, and noticing the fun Lilian seemed to be having now, waving and rolling her narrow hips as she danced on the table, basking in the audience’s enthusiastic attention, he wondered if the song made the pain worse or actually soothed it … and he decided that it was soothing. He had lost her already, anyway, a long time ago in the future.

  It was a relief to Brentford when they finally arrived at Morgane’s. He expected little from the séance, except, perhaps, that it would distract him from his brooding and put him back on track. New Venice, remember? he asked himself. You may have lost a piece of it, but that means you need the rest all the more.

  Their hostess motioned Lilian, Brentford, and Thomas towards the round table where the Writing Ball awaited, distorted candlelight mirrored in its sheen. They sat down around it, and Brentford started when Lilian put her hand on his.

  “So,” Morgane said, tucking her long jet-black hair behind her small ears. “Did Lilian explain what our plans were?”

  “I’m not sure I understood them,” Brentford answered, his mind once again revolting against his submission to the situation.

  “What I told them,” Lilian explained to Morgane, “is that the spirit that contacted you the other day seemed to know all about a certain city in the Arctic that we asked him about. I suggested that perhaps, if you could get in touch with that same spirit again, he could tell us more about that city, and maybe even put us in contact with someone of our … you know … milieu.” She turned to Brentford and Thomas, and said, “Morgane told me earlier that she thought this was indeed possible.”

  “From what I must call the very vague explanations I was given,” Morgane hastened to add, “I am not sure I understand the situation, except that some things are either none of my business or better left unspoken. But, indeed, as I explained to Lilian, spirits pay no attention to distance or time … but that doesn’t mean that they’re always keen to run errands for you.”

  “But is it technically possible for a spirit to contact a living person?” Brentford persisted. “Someone living in the future, for instance?”

  “It’s not exactly simple,” she replied. “We can always try to ask the spirit. Provided, of course, the person you have in mind is sensitive to that kind of encounter.”

  Brentford looked at the other New Venetians in the room. “Let’s try Woland Brokker Sson,” he suggested.

  Morgane turned off the light and, asking the others to close their eyes, started the Skylark-Mirror. Soon, with a little backwards jerk of her head, she lapsed into a trance. Brentford opened his eyes and watched her eyelids fluttering like trapped Dusky Brocade moths. A thrill ran down his spine; he wasn’t sure that he liked this sort of thing at all.

  “Spirit,” Lilian asked, fumbling for her words, “We were here five nights ago. We asked you questions about a city in the Arctic. A city called New Venice. Can you tell us any more about it?”

  A heavy silence weighed on the darkened room as Morgane slowly extended her arms towards the keyboard, then began to type fitfully, a supple bronze automaton banging on a clockwork beetle, finally stopping abruptly.

  Lilian slowly took the sheet from the machine. It read:

  No! But perhaps you could tell us more, you little dark horse.

  Thomas and Brentford turned towards Lilian. “What does this mean, Lil?” Brentford asked.

  “How would I know?” she snapped.

  “Perhaps it’s just his way of saying he knows we know about the city. Just like he did last time,” Thomas proposed. Brentford noticed that although he looked collected, Thomas’s hand clutched in his own was trembling.

  Brentford sighed and leaned towards Morgane.

  “Do you know a man there, in New Venice, called Woland Brokker Sson?”

  A swarm of iron letters clacked over the white sheet like locusts. Brentford pulled out the page. This was serious ghostwriting, he thought.

  That senile old quack! And his tin-toy Colonel!

  Useless old fogeys, both of them!

  Brentford frowned, following the lines with his finger as if they were Braille. Not only did the spirit seem to know a thing or two, but there was something faintly familiar about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He nodded to signify he was going to speak again, even if what he had to say sounded damned stupid to his own ears.

  “Could you talk to him? Ask him to get in touch with us?”

  A little time elapsed before Morgane moved her hands to the machine, then hesitated slightly before pounding the keys like a volley of shots.

  Brentford extended a hand cautiously, as if afraid of a last stray bullet, then retrieved retrieved the page, and read it aloud:

  I wish I could, Brenty Boy. I surely wish I could.

  They all looked at each other, the truth dawning on them with the same strange reluctance as that of the sun after months of polar night.

  “Lilian? Is that you?” Thomas asked. “Was it you all the time?”

  “I don’t …” she began.

  Morgane slowly came back to herself, looking around the table, winking like an owl. “What happened?” she eventually asked, as she noticed the disappointed faces surrounding her.

  Lilian pushed forward the typed pages for her to read.

  “I should have guessed it!” Morgane said. “This one was too close to be very far. It was just at my side, actually. These things happen sometimes.” She seemed to find the confusion funny. Turning to Lilian, she added, with a sort of gruff tenderness, “Well, Lili, I’ve been channelling you since the first minute, haven’t I?”

  Lilian looked pale and thoughtful, even as she smiled back. “I’m really sorry. I thought …”

  “It’s okay,” Brentford said, with more nastiness than he had intended. “It was just your true self speaking.”

  “But if it was you all the time,” Thomas asked, “how did you know that the woman who was with us last time was lying about her husband?”

  “Even you could have guessed it, if you had looked at her instead of at her daughter,” Lilian answered, a little moodily. “What does it matter, anyway?”

  “Because I know for a fact that you were right. I met the father, and he is alive and well. And Blanche is d’Ussonville’s niece.”

  VIII

  Night Hunt

  Driving a motorcycle was not as easy as Tuluk had expected. The Millet’s tyres were narrow, for one thing, making the icy cobblestone streets a nightmare to navigate. The first curve had proven almost fatal when he had skidded extremely close to the little chalet in the middle of the boulevard Edgar Quinet. A U-turn later, he crossed Montparnasse Square.

  Totally oblivious to the surrounding traffic, which was, luckily, rather light at the moment, he drove on furiously down the boulevard, the motor throbbing inside his chilled
bones as if it were a part of him, revving up to a wobbly, noisy speed that filled his heart with elation. It was like being the wind itself, and he laughed at the looks he was getting from passers-by—their expressions suddenly desperate, as if in dismayed realization of the fact that the weather had finally turned so bad that Eskimos were now invading Paris.

  The gawking strollers became rarer, though, as Tuluk left the flickering avenue for a darker, more austere neighbourhood of forbidding façades. He couldn’t help wondering why it was the most deserted quarters that got the widest avenues. Passing near the square of Missions-Étrangères, where an owl was hooting, he approached a gigantic gilded dome that recalled New Venice’s Blazing Building in its otherworldly poise. But it was the moon playing hide-and-seek behind the dome that interested him, distracting him from his sense of elation at velocity alone. Never taking his eyes off it, he throttled down and cruised along the immense structure until he reached a vast expanse of snow that led directly to the bluish strip of ice that used to be the Seine. Stopping when he reached the parapet, he got off the Millet and left it where it fell and, in full Inuk dress, walked down a wooden staircase towards a disused omnibus boathouse resting on uneven pontoons just off the riverbank.

  Tuluk felt good as soon as he stepped out on the ice: his lungs opened up, his sight became clearer and his muscles more responsive to the slightest command. The city looked miles away from out on the ice, just a sullen hum sprinkled with the dying embers of streetlights … although he was momentarily mesmerized by the Eiffel Tower, which shone in the distance like a ladder to the stars. When it came to creating useless things, he thought, the qallunaat were the best, no doubt about that, and yet—it was hard for Tuluk to explain, but this thing was not totally useless: it fed your soul with a curious blend of wonder and pride and gave you a little more courage than you had before. A pleasant draught chilled the inside of his head, cleaning from it the fumes and noises of city life. He felt like running across the icy Seine like a loose sled dog, but the moon eventually reminded him of what he had come to do …