Nightwood (5 page)

A sudden silence went over the room. The Count was standing in the doorway, rocking on his heels, either hand on the sides of the door; a torrent of Italian, which was merely the culmination of some theme he had begun in the entrance hall, was abruptly halved as he slapped his leg, standing tall and bent and peering. He moved forward into the room, holding with thumb and forefinger the centre of a round magnifying glass which hung from a broad black ribbon. With the other hand he moved from chair to table, from guest to guest. Behind him, in a riding habit, was a young girl. Having reached the sideboard he swung around with gruesome nimbleness.

“Get out!” he said softly, laying his hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Get out, get out!” It was obvious he meant it; he bowed slightly.

As they reached the street the Duchess caught a swirling hem of lace about her chilling ankles. “Well, my poor devil?” she said, turning to Felix.

“Well!” said Felix. “What was that about, and why?”

The doctor hailed a cab with the waving end of a bulldog cane. “That can be repaired at any bar,” he said.

“The name of that,” said the Duchess, pulling on her gloves, “is a brief audience with the great, brief, but an audience!”

As they went up the darkened street Felix felt himself turning scarlet. “Is he really a Count?” he asked.

“
Herr Gott!
” said the Duchess. “Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?” She put her hand on his knee. “Yes or no?”

The doctor was lighting a cigarette and in its flare the Baron saw that he was laughing silently. “He put us out for one of those hopes that is about to be defeated.” He waved his gloves from the window to other guests who were standing along the curb, hailing vehicles.

“What do you mean?” the Baron said in a whisper.

“Count Onatorio Altamonte—may the name eventually roll over the Ponte Vecchio and into the Arno—suspected that he had come upon his last erection.”

The doctor began to sing,
“Nur eine Nacht.”

Frau Mann, with her face pressed against the cab window, said, “It’s snowing.” At her words Felix turned his coat collar up.

“Where are we going?” he asked Frau Mann. She was quite gay again.

“Let us go to Heinrich’s; I always do when it’s snowing. He mixes the drinks stronger then, and he’s a good customer; he always takes in the show.”

“Very well,” said the doctor, preparing to rap on the window. “Where is thy Heinrich?”

“Go down
Unter den Linden
,” Frau Mann said. “I’ll tell you when.”

Felix said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll get down here.” He got down, walking against the snow.

Seated in the warmth of the favoured café, the doctor, unwinding his scarf, said: “There’s something missing and whole about the Baron Felix—damned from the waist up, which reminds me of Mademoiselle Basquette, who was damned from the waist down, a girl without legs, built like a medieval abuse. She used to wheel herself through the Pyrenees on a board. What there was of her was beautiful in a cheap traditional sort of way, the face that one sees on people who come to a racial, not a personal, amazement. I wanted to give her a present for what of her was missing, and she said, ‘Pearls—they go so well with everything!’ Imagine, and the other half of her still in God’s bag of tricks! Don’t tell me that what was missing had not taught her the value of what was present. Well, in any case,” the doctor went on, rolling down his gloves, “a sailor saw her one day and fell in love with her. She was going uphill and the sun was shining all over her back; it made a saddle across her bent neck and flickered along the curls of her head, gorgeous and bereft as the figurehead of a Norse vessel that the ship has abandoned. So he snatched her up, board and all, and took her away and had his will; when he got good and tired of her, just for gallantry, he put her down on her board about five miles out of town, so she had to roll herself back again, weeping something fearful to see, because one is accustomed to see tears falling down to the feet. Ah, truly, a pin board may come up to the chin of a woman and still she will find reason to weep. I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say ‘Love’ and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.”

“Wunderbar!”
exclaimed Frau Mann. “
Wunderbar
, my God!”

“I’m not through,” said the doctor, laying his gloves across his knees, “someday I am going to see the Baron again, and when I do I shall tell him about the mad Wittelsbach. He’ll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler.”

“Ah,” exclaimed Frau Mann, “he will enjoy it. He is so fond of titles.”

“Listen,” the doctor said, ordering a round, “I don’t want to talk of the Wittelsbach. Oh, God, when I think back to my past, everyone in my family a beauty, my mother, with hair on her head as red as a fire kicked over in spring (and that was early in the ‘80’s when a girl was the toast of the town, and going the limit meant lobster à la Newburg). She had a hat on her as big as the top of a table, and everything on it but running water; her bosom clinched into a corset of buckram, and my father sitting up beside her (snapped while they were riding on a roller-coaster). He had on one of those silly little yellow jackets and a tan bowler just up over his ears, and he must have been crazy, for he was sort of cross-eyed—maybe it was the wind in his face or thoughts of my mother where he couldn’t do anything about it.” Frau Mann took up her glass, looking at it with one eye closed. “I’ve an album of my own,” she said in a warm voice, “and everyone in it looks like a soldier—even though they are dead.”

The doctor grinned, biting his teeth. Frau Mann tried to light a cigarette; the match wavered from side to side in her unsteady hand.

Frau Mann was slightly tipsy, and the insistent hum of the doctor’s words was making her sleepy.

Seeing that Frau Mann dozed, the doctor got up lightly and tip-toed noiselessly to the entrance. He said to the waiter in bad German: “The lady will pay,” opened the door, and went quietly into the night.

Close to the church of
St. Sulpice
, around the corner in the
rue Servandoni
, lived the doctor. His small slouching figure was a feature of the
Place
. To the proprietor of the
Café de la Mairie du VI
^e
he was almost a son. This relatively small square, through which tram lines ran in several directions, bounded on the one side by the church and on the other by the court, was the doctor’s “city.” What he could not find here to answer to his needs could be found in the narrow streets that ran into it. Here he had been seen ordering details for funerals in the
parlour
with its black broadcloth curtains and mounted pictures of hearses; buying holy pictures and
petits Jésus
in the
boutique
displaying vestments and flowering candles. He had shouted down at least one judge in the
Mairie du Luxembourg
after a dozen cigars had failed to bring about his ends.

He walked, pathetic and alone, among the pasteboard booths of the
Foire St. Germain
when for a time its imitation castles squatted in the square. He was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go in to Mass, bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird, pushing aside weary French maids and local tradespeople with the impatience of a soul in physical stress.

Sometimes, late at night, before turning in to the
Café de la Mairie du VI
^e
, he would be observed staring up at the huge towers of the church which rose into the sky, unlovely but reassuring, running a thick warm finger around his throat, where, in spite of its custom, his hair surprised him, lifting along his back and creeping up over his collar. Standing small and insubordinate, he would watch the basins of the fountain loosing their skirts of water in a ragged and flowing hem, sometimes crying to a man’s departing shadow: “Aren’t you the beauty!”

To the
Café de la Mairie du VI
^e
he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer. His manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble family, whose movements recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master. Even the doctor’s favourite gesture—plucking hairs out of his nostrils—seemed the “vulgarization” of what was once a thoughtful plucking of the beard.

As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the
corsage
of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.

After a long silence in which the doctor had ordered and consumed a
Chambéry fraise
and the Baron a coffee, the doctor remarked that the Jew and the Irish, the one moving upward and the other down, often meet, spade to spade in the same acre.

“The Irish may be as common as whale-shit—excuse me—on the bottom of the ocean—forgive me—but they do have imagination and,” he added, “creative misery, which comes from being smacked down by the devil, and lifted up again by the angels.
Misericordioso!
Save me, Mother Mary, and never mind the other fellow! But the Jew, what is he at his best? Never anything higher than a meddler—pardon my wet glove—a supreme and marvellous meddler often, but a meddler nevertheless.” He bowed slightly from the hips. “All right, Jews meddle and we lie, that’s the difference, the fine difference. We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and,” he added, “it makes the great doctor. The only people who really
know
anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell; they’d get slapped if they did. But the great doctor, he’s a divine idiot and a wise man. He closes one eye, the eye that he studied with, and putting his fingers on the arteries of the body says: ‘God, whose roadway this is, has given me permission to travel on it also,’ which, Heaven help the patient, is true; in this manner he comes on great cures, and sometimes upon that road is disconcerted by that Little Man.” The doctor ordered another
Chambéry
and asked the Baron what he would have; being told that he wished nothing for the moment, the doctor added: “No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.”

The Baron remarked that this sounded like dogma.

The doctor looked at him. “Does it? Well, when you see that Little Man you know you will be shouldered from the path.

“I also know this,” he went on: “One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth. Rear up, eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I’m going out of it; laughter is the pauper’s money. I like paupers and bums,” he added, “because they are impersonal with misery, but me—me, I’m taken most and chiefly for a vexatious bastard and gum on the bow, the wax that clots the gall or middle blood of man known as the heart or Bundle of Hiss. May my dilator burst and my speculum rust, may panic seize my index finger before I point out my man.”

His hands (which he always carried like a dog who is walking on his hind legs) seemed to be holding his attention, then he said, raising his large melancholy eyes with the bright twinkle that often came into them: “Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?”

“Neurasthenia,” said Felix.

He shook his head. “No, I’m not neurasthenic; I haven’t that much respect for people—the basis, by the way, of all neurasthenia.”

“Impatience.”

The doctor nodded. “The Irish are impatient for eternity; they lie to hurry it up, and they maintain their balance by the dexterity of God, God and the Father.”

“In 1685,” the Baron said with dry humour, “the Turks brought coffee into Vienna, and from that day Vienna, like a woman, had one impatience, something she liked. You know, of course, that Pitt the younger was refused alliance because he was foolish enough to proffer tea; Austria and tea could never go together. All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them. As for God and the Father—in Austria they were the Emperor.” The doctor looked up. The
chasseur
of the
Hôtel Récamier
(whom he knew far too well) was approaching them at a run.

“Eh!” said the doctor, who always expected anything at any hour. “Now what?” The boy, standing before him in a red-and-black-striped vest and flapping soiled apron, exclaimed in Midi French that a lady in twenty-nine had fainted and could not be brought out of it.

The doctor got up slowly, sighing. “Pay,” he said to Felix, “and follow me.” None of the doctor’s methods being orthodox, Felix was not surprised at the invitation, but did as he was told.

On the second landing of the hotel (it was one of those middle-class hostelries which can be found in almost any corner of Paris, neither good nor bad, but so typical that it might have been moved every night and not have been out of place) a door was standing open, exposing a red-carpeted floor, and at the farther end two narrow windows overlooking the square.