That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (13 page)

The angel observed Maldoror in coastal waters, gliding naked among soft polyps and tube worms. Did the teenager comprehend his own beauty as he somersaulted freely among the transparent medusae and stroked the green and purple lips of giant clams? More than once he indulged in bizarre liaisons with sharks; but no great harm was done. It
’s true, wrote the angel, that more than any other being on earth he succeeds in transcending the barriers between man and beast.

And in the margin the angel wrote:

Maldoror, strange being: where are you going with that gun?

Is this you in the black duster coat, riding into the desert town with a shotgun slung beside your saddle, your elegant hands resembling two poisonous bell-flowers? Though this spectre’s countenance is melancholy he is not Don Quixote, but some sort of desperado. His shadow is long and grim, as are his teeth.

‘
It’s El Malo, Maldoror Furioso, Kid M!’ Watkins, Small and the others in the Long Afternoon Saloon told each other in tense whispers, perspiration gouting from fountains in dermal villa gardens…

‘
What’s a vampire of the old world doing here in the new?’ a cock-eyed man demanded. ‘Find a priest and rally a lynch mob!’

‘
Easy, Nathan,’ Small said. ‘Why would a vampire need a shotgun?’

‘
For disguise, you imbecile!’

Panic erupted in the bar.

‘He’ll kill us!’

‘
Enslave us!’

‘
Rape our women!’

‘
Rape
us
, and strangle us and sell our bones!’

‘
To who?’

‘
To Wu! The celestial foreigners are conspiring to destroy the white man with their dog-darn opium dens and Communism! Where is my knife, Cecil?’ It was as if madness preceded the stranger like a motley-garbed herald.

But when the saloon doors swung open every man
’s tongue lost its wag. In the instant the stranger’s cracked black boots crossed the threshold the sleep of the pontiff in Rome was disturbed by a dream of the endless arch of an ouroboros rotating with slow majesty through deep space, while at the same time the cold sleep of a female anaconda in the Amazon basin was disturbed by the vision of an ape pushing another ape into an oven.

‘
Whiskey or beer, stranger?’ The bartender uttered his line in an admirably steady voice. ‘Or there’s a room upstairs, sir, where my wife or I could arrange your hands.’

An erotic scene, which might have involved secateurs, was prevented by the vampire himself, who made ready to speak. At the rising of his tongue from its bed, three wars, two plagues and a famine commenced in distant countries.
‘I hunt this criminal.’ He brought out from inside his coat a flat lead box, which he laid on the bar and opened, and from it drew out and unfolded an oil canvas depicting Christ on Golgotha, cynosure of voyeurs and necrophiliacs.

‘
Are these eyes, heavy with rapture, familiar to you? Have you seen a man with this smooth chest and these slender feet, bearing wounds as you see here?’

‘
Didn’t we hang something like that back in July?’

‘
We done hanged a foreigner then, I recollect.’

‘
He was a Mexican, I believe. He lodges at Boot Hill. If you’ve a mind to pay him a call I dare say he’ll be at home!’

‘
I’m obliged, sirs.’ The stranger returned the canvas to the box and the box to his coat, and strode outside again, having obtained directions to the grave, his spurs jingling like a belly dancer’s cymbals. It was a short ride to the crowded little boneyard. The stranger set to work with a shovel. The grave was shallow and soon he had reached the coffin and was prying it open.

The coffin was empty. Dust blew out of it.

El Malo fell to his knees. His eyes wept, his nose bled, and his scream carried through to the other side of the earth.

Creator and Redeemer, if my attempts to bring you to heel are always failing it is not because of any lack of intelligence, courage or work ethic on my part! You endowed me at my birth with a superior brain and body, and a soul able to love and hate as deeply as the sun
’s radiation penetrates into space. It is unthinkable that you did not completely understand how I would first love you, then hate you. You must have anticipated the broad pattern of my scorn, if not its every nuance.

Interloping deity, El Malo has sworn to kill you, and this time he will keep his word. He can smell you in the empty coffin. The barkeep and his wife would not wish to arrange you. You
’re on the nose, you mangy, rotten-toothed old gimmick!

I would like to suspect you have given me the means to destroy you. I wish I could guess that this game is as dangerous for you as it is for me. But of course you
’re going to cheat. I would if I could. As I write this, a situation persists in which you have left a number of human beings, somewhat over seven thousand million of them, walking on the earth with free will but without free means. You have given them the internal combustion engine, the television news, and dominion over plastics, but some among them believe these concessions do not compensate adequately for all that you might have granted but did not. I sympathise with them, but it is not on their behalf that I hunt you.

Dogs yearn for the infinite. I have said this before. The stray bitch who sniffs around the graves at night sometimes stops and howls with inconsolable grief, for she too believes in another home, if not among the boreal stars then a place mysteriously signified by those cold and brilliant luminaries.

I know the vertiginous sense of exile is not false.

Creator, if you have plans for us, did you intend us to read them in the tea leaves and entrails?

It is no good my talking to you like this. Friends, worship first the spiral of the nautilus, then its inner chambers; anoint the bull’s nose, then his horns; adore the marvellous lyrebird, who sings all songs. You may even come to love
Homo sapiens
, and thus surpass me in compassion.

He was a shooting star, but he couldn
’t hit the broad side of the Saharan night…

It pleases him to think of you on the run again, back in the desert where you began, when you were just a djinn with some big dreams, chutzpah and luck. El Malo spits in your coffin and walks away. Tomorrow he will ride into a medieval city whose every occupant resembles the subject of the painting, where he will, as usual, fail in his quest, having to flee before the curse of the place descends on him also.

When I witnessed his latest execution, evening had fallen on the low
-lying countryside. Naked save for a dunce’s cap, his wrists bound with damp leather, he was escorted by a team of wrestlers down a muddy track towards a flooded marsh. Chips of stone in the mud dug into his bare feet and the cold turned his ears red and shrank his penis to a wrinkled nub. The party halted at the water’s edge. One of the wrestlers kicked the back of his right knee, causing him to lose his balance and fall to all fours. A pair of watery stars shone in front of him. When his head was forced down into the green water he did not struggle, but held his breath and closed his eyes. When the pain reached a certain level his eyelids sprang open automatically. Miraculously, he was able to see clearly. The remains of a sunken house met his bulging eyes. The roof was gone, the upper rooms exposed. He observed the suggestive shape of an iron chair, which seemed to be awaiting him. Coming between him and this distressing piece of furniture, like an interceding angel, a black toad swam in front of his face and turned to look at him. He was struck by the sombre ugliness of this batrachian. Meanwhile he was suffering greater and greater discomfort, and at last he thought it best to open his mouth and let the marsh water flood into his body’s bottled world and do what it would.

At the same time, the wrestlers let him go, and he slid into the water
.

He never ceased sliding through it, nor it through him. The fickle toad deserted him. Water deluged his private lands and seas. It drowned his many inhabitants, and claimed his kingdom for the empire of the wider world at last.

He is one of the delicate freshwater hydrozoans now, and cannot speak to you. He is a silent, transparent bell composed of approximately 96% water, 3% protein and 1% mineral salts. But this damp beak in your ear, it has something to impart…

(Forgive him his failure. He would speak further, but he is distracted. His spine bends into the shape of a horseshoe, his eyes roll and his jaw distends, as a dreadful pain in his perineum signals the arrival of his old basement lodger the crab, returning to take up residence in its former home.)

A woman, a man and their daughter occupy a table on the terrace. The blue Mediterranean sparkles in front of them, and Maldoror, seated at a nearby table, is virtually unrecognisable in gas mask and geisha wig. He has ridden further than even he realises, his rigid shadow falling over the thickets of a family
…

The mother looks up from her paperback crime novel.
‘My daughter, have your schoolmasters taught you the correct method of fashioning a golem?’

‘
Yes, mother, and next term I shall begin studying the forbidden books.’

The mother addresses the father:
‘If a tulpa is endowed with too much vitality, it may well escape its maker’s control, is that not so?’

‘
It is so, wife. Only pure and disciplined minds should attempt the higher magicks. Before the forecourt of the Golden Citadel there is, after all, that laughing garden with fountains of shadow, haunted by terrible deceptions in comely guise. Daughter, the colour has left your cheeks. Do you feel ill?’

‘
I feel a dark presence pass between my face and the sun. How cold it suddenly is… Fiend, I banish you, be gone! No one summoned you.’

Your fear is as dark and sweet as molasses, O pale girl, smooth and thin. You did not have to speak my name, or even know it. I can appear without being called. When I hear within a human being that which soughs like the phantom sea inside a shell, I outrace light. You have dreamed of me, and of the powers and pleasures I could steal for you.

‘Your cloak hides your face. Your voice is sombre and slow. I do not trust you.’

Smart lass. But still, you shall have a garden where the sky sleeps upon a roof of dark leaves and ivies bind Apollo in a green spell, moss grows like a mineral, and herms endowed with speech plead for caresses; and you shall have a room, an octagonal salon lined in silk of your favourite colour, with a carpet of living serpents and a dome girdled by a circular frieze in which the whale rises endlessly to engulf the last individual plankton. Rest assured that there are Chinese screens, Gobelin tapestries, and divans finished in the
peau du cul
of girls more beautiful than you. Jardinières hold arrangements of lacquered hair; alabaster lamps distribute moonish light and the scent of sugarcane; there is a bowl of fruits whose flesh is as molten glass, and others almost human. The room looks inwards on itself, oval mirrors on each wall drilling avenues into eight infinities, conduits through which infinite chance may, at any moment, bring visitors. (As yet there is no traffic, but the chance does not decrease.) You shall lie in this room with a jaguar for your constant companion, your eyes heavy, laden with the weight of all they have observed, yet bright and unassailable as diamonds.

‘
Spirit of the evening’s copper gloom, you are premature. The moon does not know me yet, so why should you? Children should be safe from you. Do not violate that precept, or some punishment will surely be visited upon you. Next term I shall study French, geometry and sewing. I desire a decent and pleasant life, and I can find it without your help.’

We shall see. I feel the geometry may change your mind. The study of mathematics causes sensitive minds to begin seeking truth. From the square on the hypotenuse to the curvature of space and time
– analogous to the rubber sheet on a cholera bed, although, deplorably, lacking the hole for the egress of waste – and from there to the black arts, is not so long a journey as it seems to you now. I shall be patient. Meanwhile, your mother is putting her book down. You might not be ready for Maldoror yet, but your dear mother has been waiting a long time. How could you or any person who does not at each quarter-hour say, or else suffer certain death, ‘Who goes there?’ understand her thousand pains, regrets and longings? Long ago I offered her a volcanic island and promised to make her into a sacred prince of birds and fire. Her dreams were more daring than yours.