Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 33

  Once, before she became a kept woman, he and a group of Bohemians contrived to kidnap her from her customers at the cabaret, spirited her, at first protesting, then laughing, off with them, and they wandered along the streets in the small hours, looking for a place to take their prize for another drink and she urinated in the street, right there, didn’t announce it; or go off into an alley to do it on her own, she did not even leave go of his arm but straddled the gutter, legs apart and pissed as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Oh, the unexpected Chinese bells of that liquid cascade!

  (At which point, his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poet’s trousers.)

  Jeanne hitched up her skirts with her free hand as she stepped across the pool she’d made, so that he saw where she had splashed her white stockings at the ankle. It seemed to his terrified, exacerbated sensibilities that the liquid was a kind of bodily acid that burned away the knitted cotton, dissolved her petticoat, her stays, her chemise, the dress she wore, her jacket, so that now she walked beside him like an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying.

  He himself always wore gloves of pale pink kid that fitted as tenderly close as the rubber gloves that gynaecologists will wear. Watching him play with her hair, she tranquilly recollected a red-haired friend in the cabaret who had served a brief apprenticeship in a brothel but retired from the profession after she discovered a significant proportion of her customers wanted nothing more of her than permission to ejaculate into her magnificent Titian mane. (How the girls giggled over that.) The red-haired girl thought that, on the whole, this messy business was less distasteful and more hygienic than regular intercourse but it meant she had to wash her hair so often that her crowning, indeed – she was a squint-eyed little thing – unique glory was stripped of its essential, natural oils. Seller and commodity in one, a whore is her own investment in the world and so she must take care of herself; the squinting red-head decided she dare not risk squandering her capital so recklessly but Jeanne never had this temperament of the tradesperson, she did not feel she was her own property and so she gave herself away to everybody except the poet, for whom she had too much respect to offer such an ambivalent gift for nothing.

  ‘Get it up for me,’ said the poet.

  ‘Albatrosses are famous for the courtship antics they carry on throughout the breeding season. These involve grotesque, awkward dancing, accompanied by bowing, scraping, snapping of bills, and prolonged nasal groans.’

  Birds of the World, Oliver L. Austin Jnr

  They are not great nest builders. A slight depression in the ground will do. Or, they might hollow out a little mound of mud. They will make only the most squalid concessions to the earth. He envisaged their bed, the albatross’s nest, as just such a fleeting kind of residence in which Destiny, the greatest madame of all, had closeted these two strange birds together. In this transitory exile, anything is possible.

  ‘Jeanne, get it up for me.’

  Nothing is simple for this fellow! He makes a performance worthy of the Comédie Française out of a fuck, bringing him off is a five-act drama with farcical interludes and other passages that could make you cry and, afterwards, cry he does, he is ashamed, he talks about his mother, but Jeanne can’t remember her mother and her granny swapped her with a ship’s mate for a couple of bottles, a bargain with which her granny said she was well satisfied because Jeanne was already getting into trouble and growing out of her clothes and ate so much.

  While they had been untangling together the history of transgression, the fire went out; also, the small, white, shining, winter moon in the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand pane of the few sheets of clear glass in the window had, accompanied by its satellite star, completed the final section of its slow arc over the black sky. While Jeanne stoically laboured over her lover’s pleasure, as if he were her vineyard, she laying up treasure in heaven from her thankless toil, moon and star arrived together at the lower right-hand windowpane.

  If you could see her, if it were not so dark, she would look like the victim of a robbery; her bereft eyes are like abysses but she will hold him to her bosom and comfort him for betraying to her in his self-disgust those trace elements of common humanity he has left inside her body, for which he blames her bitterly, for which he will glorify her, awarding her the eternity promised by the poet.

  The moon and star vanish.

  Nadar says he saw her a year or so after, deaf, dumb and paralysed, Baudelaire died. The poet, finally, so far estranged from himself that, in the last months before the disease triumphed over him, when he was shown his reflection in a mirror, he bowed politely, as to a stranger. He told his mother to make sure that Jeanne was looked after but his mother didn’t give her anything. Nadar says he saw Jeanne hobbling on crutches along the pavement to the dram-shop; her teeth were gone, she had a mammy-rag tied around her head but you could still see that her wonderful hair had fallen out. Her face would terrify the little children. He did not stop to speak to her.

  *

  The ship embarked for Martinique.

  You can buy teeth, you know; you can buy hair. They make the best wigs from the shorn locks of novices in convents.

  The man who called himself her brother, perhaps they did have the same mother, why not? She hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened to her mother and this hypothetical, high-yellow, demi-sibling popped up in the nick of time to take over her disordered finances with the skill of a born entrepreneur – he might have been Mephistopheles, for all she cared. Her brother. They’d salted away what the poet managed to smuggle to her, all the time he was dying, when his mother wasn’t looking. Fifty francs for Jeanne, here; thirty francs for Jeanne, there. It all added up.

  She was surprised to find out how much she was worth.

  Add to this the sale of a manuscript or two, the ones she hadn’t used to light her cheroots with. Some books, especially the ones with the flowery dedications. Sale of cuff-links and drawerful upon drawerful of pink kid gloves, hardly used. Her brother knew where to get rid of them. Later, any memorabilia of the poet, even his clumsy drawings, would fetch a surprising sum. They left a portfolio with an enterprising agent.

  In a new dress of black tussore, her somewhat ravaged but carefully repaired face partially concealed by a flattering veil, she chugged away from Europe on a steamer bound for the Caribbean like a respectable widow and she was not yet fifty, after all. She might have been the Creole wife of a minor civil servant setting off home after his death. Her brother went first, to look out the property they were going to buy.

  Her voyage was interrupted by no albatrosses. She never thought of the slavers’ route, unless it was to compare her grandmother’s crossing with her own, comfortable one. You could say that Jeanne had found herself; she had come down to earth, and, with the aid of her ivory cane, she walked perfectly well upon it. The sea air did her good. She decided to give up rum, except for a single tot last thing at night, after the accounts were completed.

  Seeing her, now, in her declining years, every morning in decent black, leaning a little on her stick but stately as only one who has snatched herself from the lion’s mouth can be. She leaves the charming house, with its vine-covered veranda; ‘Good morning, Mme Duval!’ sings out the obsequious gardener. How sweet it sounds. She is taking last night’s takings to the bank. ‘Thank you so much, Mme Duval.’ As soon as she had got her first taste of it, she became a glutton for deference.

  Until at last, in extreme old age, she succumbs to the ache in her bones and a cortège of grieving girls takes her to the churchyard, she will continue to dispense, to the most privileged of the colonial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis.

  The lines (see here) are translated from:

  SED NON SATIATA

  Bizarre déité, brune comme les nuits,

  Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,

  Oeuvre de quelque obi, le Faust de la savan
e,

  Sorcière au flanc d’ébène, enfant des noirs minuits,

  Je préfère au constance, à l’opium, au nuits,

  L’élixir de ta bouche où l’amour se pavane;

  Quand vers toi mes désirs partent en caravane,

  Tes yeux sont la citerne où boivent mes ennuis.

  Par ces deux grands yeux noirs, soupiraux de ton âme,

  Ô démon sans pitié! verse-moi moins de flamme;

  Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t’embrasser neuf fois,

  Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine,

  Pour briser ton courage et te mettre aux abois,

  Dans l’enfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!

  Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire

  The other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal believed to have been written about Jeanne Duval, are often called the Black Venus Cycle, and include ‘Les Bijoux’, ‘La Chevelure’, ‘Le Serpent qui danse’, ‘Parfum Exotique’, ‘Le Chat’, ‘Je t’adore à l’egal de la voûte nocturne’, etc.

  The Kiss

  The winters in Central Asia are piercing and bleak, while the sweating, foetid summers bring cholera, dysentery and mosquitoes, but, in April, the air caresses like the touch of the inner skin of the thigh and the scent of all the flowering trees douses the city’s throat-catching whiff of cesspits.

  Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightforward, geometric shapes with crayons from a child’s colouring box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, blonde terraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.

  Against these bleached pallors, the iridescent crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the ancient mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beneath a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaine, the scourge of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand.

  The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, black and white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colours that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewellery made of red glass.

  They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black line straight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years.

  They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbanned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the foreign eye as a unicorn. They exist, in all their glittering and innocent exoticism, in direct contradiction to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow in the gutters. In the teahouse a green parrot nudges the bars of its wicker cage.

  The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In this early part of the year you can buy only last summer’s dried fruit – apricots, peaches, raisins – except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open on the stall to show how a wet nest of garnets remains within. A local speciality of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios.

  An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lunch and eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing.

  She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had come and, the last tale of all concluded, fall silent. Then, the lily-seller might vanish.

  A goat is nibbling wild jasmine among the ruins of the mosque that was built by the beautiful wife of Tamburlaine.

  Tamburlaine’s wife started to build this mosque for him as a surprise, while he was away at the wars, but when she got word of his imminent return, one arch still remained unfinished. She went directly to the architect and begged him to hurry but the architect told her that he would complete the work on time only if she gave him a kiss. One kiss, one single kiss.

  Tamburlaine’s wife was not only very beautiful and very virtuous but also very clever. She went to the market, bought a basket of eggs, boiled them hard and stained them a dozen different colours. She called the architect to the palace, showed him the basket and told him to choose any egg he liked and eat it. He took a red egg. What does it taste like? Like an egg. Eat another.

  He took a green egg.

  What does that taste like? Like the red egg. Try again.

  He ate a purple egg.

  One eggs tastes just the same as any other egg, if they are fresh, he said.

  There you are! she said. Each of these eggs looks different to the rest but they all taste the same. So you may kiss any one of my serving women that you like but you must leave me alone.

  Very well, said the architect. But soon he came back to her and this time he was carrying a tray with three bowls on it, and you would have thought the bowls were all full of water.

  Drink from each of these bowls, he said.

  She took a drink from the first bowl, then from the second; but how she coughed and spluttered when she took a mouthful from the third bowl, because it contained, not water, but vodka.

  This vodka and that water both look alike but each tastes quite different, he said. And it is the same with love.

  Then Tamburlaine’s wife kissed the architect on the mouth. He went back to the mosque and finished the arch the same day that victorious Tamburlaine rode into Samarkand with his army and banners and his cages full of captive kings. But when Tamburlaine went to visit his wife, she turned away from him because no woman will return to the harem after she has tasted vodka. Tamburlaine beat her with a knout until she told him she had kissed the architect and then he sent his executioners hotfoot to the mosque.

  The executioners saw the architect standing on top of the arch and ran up the stairs with their knives drawn but when he heard them coming he grew wings and flew away to Persia.

  This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a child’s box of crayons. This Tamburlaine’s wife of the story would have painted a black stripe laterally across her forehead and done up her hair in a dozen, dozen tiny plaits, like any other Uzbek woman. She would have bought red and white radishes from the market for her husband’s dinner. After she ran away from him perhaps she made her living in the market. Perhaps she sold lilies there.

  Our Lady of the Massacre

  My name is neither here nor there since I used several in the Old World that I may not speak of now; then there is my, as it were, wilderness name, that now I never speak of; and, now, what I call myself in this place, therefore my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature. But I first saw light in the county of Lancashire in Old England, in the Year of Our Lord 16—, my father a poor farm servant, and me mam and he both died of plague when I was a little thing so me and me brothers and sisters left living were put on the parish and what became of them I do not know, but, as for me, I could do a bit of sewing and keep a place clean so when I were nine or ten ye
ars of age they set me up as a maid of all work to an old woman that lived in our parish.

  This old woman, or lady rather, never married and was, as I found out, of the Roman faith, though she kept that to herself, and once a good deal richer than she had become. Besides, her father, wanting a son and getting nowt but she, taught her Latin, Greek and a bit of Hebrew and left her a great telescope with which she used to view the heavens from her roof though her sight was too bad to make out much but what she did not see, she made up, for she said she had poor sight for the things of this world but clear sight into the one to come. She often let me have a squint at the stars, too, for I was her only companion and she learned me my letters, as you can see, and would have taught me all she knew herself, had she not, as soon as I come to her, cast my horoscope for me, her father having left the charts and zodiacal instruments. And, having done so, told me I would not need the language of Homer at no time in all my life, but a little conversational Hebrew she did teach me, for reasons as follows:

  That the stars, whom she had consulted on behalf of her dear child, as she pleased to call me, assured her that I would take a long voyage over the Ocean to the New World and there bear a blessed babe whose fathers’ fathers never sailed in Noah’s Ark. And, from her reading, which had worn her eyes out, she had concluded that those ‘red children of the wilderness’ could be none other than the Lost Tribe of Israel, so shalom, she taught me, besides the words for ‘love’ and ‘hunger’, and much else that I have forgotten, so that I could talk to my husband when I met him. And if I had not been a steady girl, she would have turned my head with all her nonsense for she would have it that the stars foretold I should grow up to be nowt less than Our Lady of the Red Men.

  For, she says, that country far beyond the sea is named Virginia, after the virgin mother of God Almighty, and its rivers flow directly from Eden so, when the natives are converted to the true religion – ‘which task I charge you with, child,’ and she gives me a mouthful of Ave Marias – when that shall be accomplished, why, the whole world will end and the dead rise up out of their coffins and all go to heaven that deserve it and my little babby sit smiling over everything with a gold crown on his head. Then she’d babble away in Latin and cross herself. But I never told nobody about her Roman ways nor about her star-gazing, either, for if they hadn’t hanged her for a heretic, they’d have hanged her for a witch, poor creature.