Against Nature (17 page)

The smell of alcohol assailed Des Esseintes' nostrils as he took a seat in this dormitory for strong wines. Looking around him, he saw on one side a row of great casks with labels listing the entire range of ports, light or heavy in body, mahogany or amaranthine in colour, and distinguished by laudatory titles such as ‘Old Port', ‘Light Delicate', ‘Cockburn's Very Fine' and ‘Magnificent Old Regina'; and on the other side, standing shoulder to shoulder and rounding their formidable bellies, enormous barrels containing the martial wine of Spain in all its various forms, topaz-coloured sherries light and dark, sweet and dry – San Lucar, Vino de Pasto, Pale Dry, Oloroso and Amontillado.

The cellar was packed to the doors. Leaning his elbow on the corner of a table, Des Esseintes sat waiting for the glass of port he had ordered of a barman busy opening explosive, eggshaped soda-bottles that looked like giant-sized capsules of gelatine or gluten such as chemists use to mask the taste of their more obnoxious medicines.

All around him were swarms of English people. There were pale, gangling clergymen with clean-shaven chins, round spectacles and greasy hair, dressed in black from head to foot – soft hats at one extremity, laced shoes at the other and in between, incredibly long coats with little buttons running down the front. There were laymen with bloated pork-butcher faces or bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, winy cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes. Further away, at the far end of the wine-shop, a tow-haired stick of a man with a chin sprouting white hairs like an artichoke, was using a microscope to decipher the minute print of an English newspaper. And facing him was a sort of American naval officer, stout and stocky, swarthy and bottle-nosed, a cigar stuck in the hairy orifice of his mouth, and his eyes sleepily contemplating the framed champagne advertisements on the walls – the trademarks of Perrier and Roederer, Heidsieck and Mumm, and the hooded head of a monk identified in Gothic lettering as Dom Pérignon of Reims.

Des Esseintes began to feel somewhat stupefied in this heavy guard-room atmosphere. His senses dulled by the monotonous
chatter of these English people talking to one another, he drifted into a daydream, calling to mind some of Dickens's characters, who were so partial to the rich red port he saw in glasses all about him, and peopling the cellar in fancy with a new set of customers – imagining here Mr Wickfield's white hair and ruddy complexion, there the sharp, expressionless features and unfeeling eyes of Mr Tulkinghorn, the grim lawyer of
Bleak House
. These characters stepped right out of his memory to take their places in the Bodega, complete with all their mannerisms and gestures, for his recollections, revived by a recent reading of the novels, were astonishingly precise and detailed. The Londoner's home as described by the novelist – well lighted, well heated and well appointed, with bottles being slowly emptied by Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield or Tom Pinch's sister Ruth
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– appeared to him in the guise of a cosy ark sailing snugly through a deluge of soot and mire. He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination, happy to be indoors, and believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs by the bridge behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames. But his glass was empty now; and despite the warm fug in the cellar and the added heat from the smoke of pipes and cigars, he shivered slightly as he came back to reality and the foul, dank weather.

He asked for a glass of Amontillado, but at the sight of this pale dry wine, the English author's soothing stories and gentle lenitives gave place to the harsh revulsives and painful irritants provided by Edgar Allan Poe. The spine-chilling nightmare of the cask of Amontillado,
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the story of the man walled up in an underground chamber, took hold of his imagination; and behind the kind, ordinary faces of the American and English customers in the Bodega he fancied he could detect foul, uncontrollable desires, dark and odious schemes. But then he suddenly noticed that the place was emptying and that it was almost time for dinner; he paid his bill, got slowly to his feet and in a slight daze made for the door.

The moment he set foot outside, he got a wet slap in the face from the weather. Swamped by the driving rain, the street lamps flickered feebly instead of shedding a steady light, while the sky
seemed to have been taken down a few pegs, so that the clouds now hung below roof level. Des Esseintes looked along the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, bathed in shadow and moisture, and imagined that he was standing in the dismal tunnel beneath the Thames. But sharp pangs of hunger recalled him to reality, and going back to the cab, he gave the driver the address of the tavern in the Rue d'Amsterdam, by the Gare Saint-Lazare.

It was now seven o'clock by his watch: he had just time enough to dine before catching his train, which was due to leave at eight-fifty. He worked out how long the crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven would take, added up the hours on his fingers and finally told himself: ‘If the times given in the guide are correct, I shall arrive in London dead on twelve-thirty tomorrow afternoon.'

The cab came to a stop in front of the tavern. Once again Des Esseintes got out, and made his way into a long hall, decorated with brown paint instead of the usual gilt mouldings, and divided by means of breast-high partitions into a number of compartments, rather like the loose-boxes in a stable. In this narrow room, which broadened out near the door, a line of beer-pulls stood at attention along a counter spread with hams as brown as old violins, lobsters the colour of red lead, and salted mackerel, as well as slices of onion, raw carrot and lemon, bunches of bay-leaves and thyme, juniper berries and peppercorns swimming in a thick sauce.

One of the boxes was empty. He took possession of it and hailed a young man in a black coat, who treated him to a ceremonious bow and a flow of incomprehensible words. While the table was being laid, Des Esseintes inspected his neighbours. As at the Bodega, he saw a crowd of islanders with china-blue eyes, crimson complexions and earnest or arrogant expressions, skimming through foreign newspapers; but here there were a few women dining in pairs without male escorts, robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet. They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rump-steak pie – meat served hot in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a fruit tart.

The voracity of these hearty trencherwomen brought back
with a rush the appetite he had lost so long ago. First, he ordered and enjoyed some thick, greasy oxtail soup; next, he examined the list of fish and asked for a smoked haddock, which also came up to his expectations; and then, goaded on by the sight of other people guzzling, he ate a huge helping of roast beef and potatoes and downed a couple of pints of ale, savouring the musky cowshed flavour of this fine pale beer.

His hunger was now almost satisfied. He nibbled a bittersweet chunk of blue Stilton, pecked at a rhubarb tart and then, to make a change, quenched his thirst with porter, that black beer which tastes of liquorice with the sugar extracted.

He drew a deep breath: not for years had he stuffed and swilled with such abandon. It was, he decided, the change in his habits together with the choice of strange and satisfying dishes which had roused his stomach from its stupor. He settled contentedly in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to enjoy a cup of coffee laced with gin.

Outside, the rain was still falling steadily; he could hear it pattering on the glass skylight at the far end of the room and cascading into the water-spouts. Inside, no one stirred; all were dozing like himself over their liqueur glasses, pleasantly conscious that they were in the dry.

After a while, their tongues were loosened; and as most of them looked up in the air as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that these Englishmen were nearly all discussing the weather. Nobody laughed or smiled, and their suits matched their expressions: all of them were sombrely dressed in grey cheviot with nankin-yellow or blotting-paper-pink stripes. He cast a pleased look at his own clothes, which in colour and cut did not differ appreciably from those worn by the people around him, delighted to find that he was not out of keeping with these surroundings and that superficially at least he could claim to be a naturalized citizen of London. Then he gave a start: what of the time? He consulted his watch; it was ten minutes to eight. He still had nearly half-an-hour to stay where he was, he told himself; and once again he fell to thinking over his plans.

In the course of his sedentary life, only two countries had
exerted any attraction upon him – Holland and England. He had surrendered to the first of these two temptations; unable to resist any longer, he had left Paris one fine day and visited the cities of the Low Countries, one by one. On the whole, this tour had proved a bitter disappointment to him. He had pictured to himself a Holland such as Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade had painted, imagining for his own private pleasure ghettoes swarming with splendid figures as suntanned as cordovan leather, looking forward to stupendous village fairs with never-ending junketings in the country, and expecting to find the patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality which the old masters had depicted in their works.

There was no denying that Haarlem and Amsterdam had fascinated him; the common people, seen in their natural unpolished state and their normal rustic surroundings, were very much like Van Ostade's subjects, with their rowdy, untamed brats and their elephantine old gossips, big-bosomed and potbellied. But there was no sign of wild revelry or domestic drunkenness, and he had to admit that the paintings of the Dutch School exhibited in the Louvre had led him astray. They had in fact served as a spring-board from which he had soared into a dream world of false trails and impossible ambitions, for nowhere in this world had he found the fairyland of which he had dreamt; nowhere had he seen rustic youths and maidens dancing on a village green littered with wine casks, weeping with sheer happiness, jumping for joy and laughing so uproariously that they wet their petticoats and breeches.

No, there was certainly nothing of the sort to be seen at present. Holland was just a country like any other, and what was more, a country entirely lacking in simplicity and geniality, for the Protestant faith was rampant there with all its stern hypocrisy and unbending solemnity.

Still thinking of this past disappointment, he once more consulted his watch: there were only ten minutes now before his train left.

‘It's high time to ask for my bill and go,' he told himself. But the food he had eaten was lying heavy on his stomach, and his whole body felt incapable of movement.

‘Come now,' he muttered, trying to screw up his courage. ‘Drink the stirrup-cup, and then you must be off.'

He poured himself a brandy, and at the same time called for his bill. This was the signal for a black-coated individual to come up with a napkin over one arm and a pencil behind his ear – a sort of majordomo with a bald, eggshaped head, a rough beard shot with grey and a clean-shaven upper lip. He took up a concert-singer's pose, one leg thrown forward, drew a note-book from his pocket, and fixing his gaze on a spot close to one of the hanging chandeliers, he made out the bill without even looking at what he was writing.

‘There you are, sir,' he said, tearing a leaf from his pad and handing it to Des Esseintes, who was examining him with unconcealed curiosity, as if he were some rare animal. What an extraordinary creature, he thought, as he surveyed this phlegmatic Englishman, whose hairless lips reminded him, oddly enough, of an American sailor.

At that moment the street door opened and some people came in, bringing with them a wet doggy smell. The wind blew clouds of steam back into the kitchen and rattled the unlatched door. Des Esseintes felt incapable of stirring a finger; a soothing feeling of warmth and lassitude was seeping into every limb, so that he could not even lift his hand to light a cigar.

‘Get up, man, and go,' he kept telling himself, but these orders were no sooner given than countermanded. After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments such as he had suffered in Holland?

Now he had only just time enough to run across to the station, but an immense aversion for the journey, an urgent longing to remain where he was, came over him with growing force and intensity. Lost in thought, he sat there letting the minutes slip by, thus cutting off his retreat.

‘If I went now,' he said to himself, ‘I should have to dash up to the barriers and hustle the porters along with my luggage. What a tiresome business it would be!'

And once again he told himself:

‘When you come to think of it, I've seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel. I've been steeped in English life ever since I left home, and it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality.
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As it is, I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have thought of repudiating my old convictions, to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any ninny that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.'

He looked at his watch.

‘Time to go home,' he said. And this time he managed to get to his feet, left the tavern and told the cabby to drive him back to the Gare de Sceaux. Thence he returned to Fontenay with his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks, feeling all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous journey.