That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (14 page)

Listen to the two of you:

‘Wife, what are you doing? Why are you climbing over the railing? If you wish to stroll on the beach, the stairs are that way… Woman, the shame! People can see your knickers!’

‘
Mother, at least wait until dark…’

But the woman did not respond to these cries from her two loved ones, whom she loved no longer, who were irritating and nauseating
– a centipede running circles around her eyeball and a dead rat lying in her stomach. Without a final word or backward glance she stepped off the terrace, and Maldoror obligingly flung her body out into the distant sea. In her flight she was like a spiral galaxy, her four limbs rotating in obedience to the laws of physics, her descent a telling demonstration of gravity. Her silence was more difficult to explain. Who truly knew her? Perhaps not even he who met her in the deep, lighting the water with his weed-draped phosphorescent eyes.

I will not forget you, and I hope you will not forget me. I killed your mother; your father will not be as vigilant as she. He won
’t mind if you wander off alone. And in memory of your mama, here’s a pack of playing cards, in the waters of the insular scene on the reverse of which you will observe nothing like a hand raised in doubt. One joker is a priapic Gabriel, the other a lewd Mary with her skirts pulled up around her thighs. The cards will bring you luck!

As for the rest of you
– eminences with cavernous eyes, nationally significant hair, teeth like knives, and the ability to pass rose-scented material from your fundaments – I salute you. The world holds enough joy and splendour for you, and you love mystery without demanding a solution: indeed, a solution would break your spirits. Over your exquisite heads the pterodactyl passes without opening its cloaca.

There is another race on the earth. They, like you, need pure beauty and the ecstasy of sublime moments in order to survive, but unlike you they are insatiable. It must be hard not to fear, loathe or pity them
.

There is a sense of occasion in the unrolling of tinfoil. If the proprietor of the den is worth what you pay him, he will see that you are comfortable; he puts soulful music on the gramophone and lights the candle himself. Thank you, Wu! And wedge two pennies in my eye sockets, just in case. Chasing dragons is a risky business; literature reserves it for the most reckless heroes. Whether one ascends the ladder of smoke to the realm of the sylphs or makes an antipodal journey to the rough fairyland of the Nibelungs, young warriors in bright mail will be waiting to defend their game preserve. You have seen them before. There is one way to defeat them: schistosomes!

My eyes, lustrous as the slow gastropod
’s footprint, noble as strychnine, have sought out the solitudes of the desert. I travelled through the earth. The dunes pulled me along in their thick dusty folds, rolled me over and over, and dried me out completely. But in the end they didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t break down like organic matter, erode like stone or rust like iron. In the end the dunes grew weary and spat me out at a motel on the interstate.

I found cities in the wilderness. Some were mirages, while others were husks, dried and shrunken to only a few inches long, creased like old women
’s pudenda. These husks blow across the hardpan in the wake of the simoom. No one knows what to do with them. Hogs won’t eat them. Centres are dying while peripheral territories swell; the fortunate earth is acquiring vast, unmapped, strange frontiers again. If this condition is a consequence of suburban sprawl, go and light a candle to thank God for installing a race of imbeciles in city planning offices.

During one morning in the dunes I walked past the rusted lid of a well, the muzzle of a cannon and the leathery body of an acquaintance whose vicious nature I once erroneously believed I hated. I in turn was overtaken by a sphinx soaring high above me in a sky of Byzantine blue. It was no mirage, unless mirages are now abandoning the horizons for the stratosphere. That monster was only one of the unsolved mysteries which have departed the world, while I remain, and you. He looks incredulous, this young man who has trembled with real fear before phantoms disgorged by the magic lantern at the theatre! But curious tales are not always false. What I know, beyond doubt, is that the world is receiving new mysteries in exchange for the old. If that bothers you, chastise your ancestors for tending to their cattle instead of to the stars and mathematics
.

Another distinction between men and beasts: a beast does not despise its own body.

We know you love a good freak show. Modesty exists only in the dictionary. If thine eye offend thee, open it wider, the better to watch what passes for life passing by. Voyeurs! No person under the age of fifteen years will be admitted unless of complaisant character and no worse than average pulchritude. By this precaution innocence and decorum will be rigorously protected
.

Before dawn the sky turns the lilac
-grey of a pigeon’s breast. The sun appears, modestly, as a soft light behind clouds. The trees are in their most delicate season, with their branches half-clothed, half-bare. The air is not yet sharpening to the chill that will come later in the year, and is motionless during the first hours of the day. The canals are like long mirrors. Birds fly and feed in complete silence; the quietude of a painting sits over the town.

I stole a small boat from a deserted jetty. Rowing below the shuttered windows and walled gardens I saw branches reaching hungrily for low
-flying ducks… enormous stray dogs slouched from door to door… sometimes I saw a criminal or adulterer in a black cloak.

My old friend, I rowed down the canal which led out to your lodge. I had no trouble finding it. It was exactly as you described, the front gate flanked by two stone sphinxes, hermaphrodites, each with goat
’s horns, four breasts, and a long erect member pierced with arrows in the manner of St Sebastian’s body. I moored the boat at a tumescent bollard and approached the inimical doorway. An intruder might have been deceived by the apparent lack of guards in the entrance passage. I was not. I knew your assassins were watching through peepholes in the walls. The young daylight spurned my face, and by this your men knew me.

I strode through to the courtyard, which contained your severe garden: a pristine lawn enclosed on all sides by old slender cypresses, with only one ornament, a central oblong pool around which were set metal chairs fitted out with the implements of your cruelty
– traditional arrangements, and fearless of blame. The light which had refused me snagged on spikes, hooks, blades, cages, screws, braziers and
poires d’angoisse
.

My friend, a master as decadent but less intelligent than you might have installed statues of foreign gods and a chained leopard or two to add an oneiric quality to the scene, but you were careful to ensure that the visitor couldn
’t doubt that he was awake and in his own land.

I walked across the lawn
… a door in the west wing of the house opened into a grotto lit with chartreuse lamps. The light continued up an iron staircase… I was in your gleaming bile ducts… on one landing a leadlight window depicted a cluster of bullet-shaped figures which I took to be the rabies rhabdovirus… an anteroom on the fourth floor contained odd souvenirs: stuffed rats, a brass idol with an ass’s head, a black iron boar, long masks of bark, quite rotten… my anticipation grew, my hands trembled.

A leather door opened before me, and lo! I was admitted into a good likeness of heaven, where rococo idylls were painted on the walls and a canopy of blue adorned with gold stars spread overhead
.

A crowd of people filled this pleasant space. There are men and women, diligent enough libertines, who experience a state in which their nerves scream like a child stung by a thousand hornets at the merest adumbration of anodyne or conventionally delightful experiences. As a remedy they surround themselves with every kind of aberration and horror in Art and seek what seems to be aberrant in Nature; but, incomprehensibly, they close their doors to anything less than vivid beauty in their fellow human beings. Dear friend, you were not one of these hypocrites. Not one among all the courtiers in your heaven was sound of mind and body. They were the diseased, the deformed, the crippled, the mad; gimps, lepers and loonies. Some had found their own way to your house; others you had saved from asylums and the streets. Half of them were children. All were dressed in beautiful stuffs: the loveliest silks bandaged the lepers
’ faces, the stumps of amputated limbs terminated in prosthetics painted and gilded like the figureheads of royal ships; the lunatics were garbed as the heroes, kings and queens, popes and deities they believed themselves to be. You spoiled them all rotten.

As for you, with your tusks and your swordfish eyes, warmer than the rest of your body, you were more beautiful than I…

‘Maldoror! How goes the schistosome trade?’ you greeted me.

Your reason for inviting me to your house was never stated explicitly in your letter. I assumed you wanted to taste my strange flesh for yourself. How could I refuse? I, too, yearn to be loved.

After the refreshments and the baths, two of your lepers relieved me of my clothing. You and I went down the stairs and emerged in your garden, where the air was growing warm. The lepers appeared again: they had followed us at a discreet distance.

‘
A chair is prepared for you,’ you said, gesturing towards the grim furniture.

Believe me, I struggled when the diseased lackeys grabbed me! But their morbid flesh was inexplicably strong.

You explained the process I was to undergo. The chair was equipped with a complicated apparatus of clamps, drills and saw blades. And you said, ‘For afterwards, here is a celluloid mask you may wear. You will certainly experience health problems for the rest of your life, but I keep a staff of excellent doctors and nurses here. You will marvel at how they can soothe your torments by composing ekphrases on your condition.’

The flourish of the razor through my cheek!

Upon discovering his body in the sand I was unmoved, for I had outgrown him
, and a comparison of his dehumidified features with those of the painting’s insufferable sufferer exposed no similarity beyond that of a mutual surrender to agony. Those who watch everything from a varnished distance had observed the escape of an inmate and the theft of a celluloid mask of great sentimental value with civil decorum, that is, without snitching; but they grew bored waiting for me to desecrate the corpse, for I was as dry as he and could discharge nothing.

I cannot laugh because I fear to stimulate the crab, who has only just gone back to sleep. For the violent motion of my pelvis woke him and caused him to go running through my penetralia, searching for a berth that didn
’t pitch and roll. So, with a poker face: I wish our relationship could be a proper one of men among men. You could suggest to me, or I to you, ‘Tomorrow at dawn we shall meet in a private place and fight to the death,’ and it would be done.

As for the garden, after the young man’s installation in the chair it dreamed of itself as a jungle. It desired heat, moisture and growth eternal, an existence without winter. It dreamed of white waterfalls, black caves, a clangour at sunset. It coveted serpents and tigers. At last it could no longer bear the thought of staying put in its temperate clime. And so it prepared a special seed, a seed of its whole self, hidden in a sweet pod, where blood had nourished the ground.

The pod was eaten by a seagull. Compelled by the strong desires of the seed inside its body, the bird flew south and east, and dropped the seed in Alexandria, where another pod grew, the garden
’s eager quiddity transferring to it, to be consumed by an ibis. The ibis conveyed it to Persia, there occurred another miracle of virgin birth and transmigration, and a mynah bird brought the third seed to India, where a little ape ate it. In the darkness inside the ape, the garden’s essence panicked. It found it couldn’t influence this animal’s mind as it had influenced the simpler minds of the birds, and feared being dropped in some temple yard or town gutter where it might be swept up with rubbish and burnt. It felt the ape running, it seemed for a long time; then the ape ran no more, for a she-tiger ate him.

The tiger went and lay in the shade under an immense banyan fig to digest her snack. And there the garden died, not far away from the jungles of Bengal, in the potently acid belly of the beast it had yearned to harbour.

The tiger never felt entirely herself again. Her life, once fierce and joyful, like the life of a burning sun, acquired strange melancholy aspects. Sometimes at night, in her dreams that had always been filled with happy hunting and feeding, she found herself walking hungry down long rows of cypresses, low grass under her paws, strange cold rain pummelling her back. Disturbing man-tools, iron things, lay rusting around a waterhole. Her territory in the jungle, which had always felt like an extension of herself, now gave her odd feelings. She desired it, and it seemed exceedingly strange to her to desire something that already belonged to her and no other.