That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (15 page)

Years went by, and the tiger became a sad, restless beast. In her old age she finally lost her mind, and one night walked into a farming village and killed two children there. The peasants, in return, killed her and sold the carcass to traders who were keen to buy it for its medical properties. If the men of the Middle Kingdom wanted to believe that the flesh of an old
-woman tiger would grant immunity to snakebite, her skin cure fevers caused by ghosts and her whiskers work as a charm against bullets, the Indian villagers felt no obligation to argue the case of rational science; but they would in any case have been wrong in the matter of the tiger’s eyes, in which the soul of the garden had lodged, and which, duly processed, at last came into the possession of a creature who was not yet a Zelator in the consoling mysteries of the dispensary, and to whom the advertised action of the pills as a remedy for convulsions was of less interest than the gaily painted tin box: she, who already feared that she had no soul, ate the eyes of the tiger and so took into herself the soul of the garden.

This young person was your mother, whom I knew long ago…

I came to Paradise! A thousand flowering meadows, wild and deep woodlands, rainwashed glens, sun
-drenched parks! Orchards, lakes and groves, I had forgotten you! You come to my eyes as strangers to a boarded-up house; but no, it is I, the prodigal, who come to you, ripping away the boards I had nailed to my eyelids in a vain attempt to cure my insomnia. My horse’s vicious look grew mild and his scarlet phallus withdrew into its sheath. My own body ceased its random prodigious mutations and became like the body of an ordinary man. Wonder of wonders, this pleased me.

I rode like a knight
-errant in Brocéliande, full of delight, my base nature a distant memory to me.

Directions from the courteous people of the land led me eventually to the abode of the one who ruled it. I had expected a castle or palace, but the house was merely a small stone manor in a pleasant park. Servants stabled my horse and admitted me into the house, calling me by name. I was led straight to the king himself.

And here we must end the happy story scarcely after its beginning. Though the respite has only lasted for a few lines, we must already leave the lake where the white swans glide and the gilded quay where happy gallants and ladies prepare to embark for painted Cythera. Do you wish to go with them? Then by all means leave, for there are places for those who are tired of trudging on cemetery roads and coughing up lice. Here is the good ship now, steered by a woman of superb health and impeccable character, with room on its many decks for all of you, if you wish. It is arriving at the dock and white doves are flying all around it. Go aboard and it will take you to the true paradise, to the home of all your souls, across a fair sea in which not a single monster lairs, save for the noble dragons of Asia. Some of you are going – bon voyage!

The rest of you scurvy lot, who have convinced yourselves that the route to heaven passes through hell, not once but as many times as this blue planet has circled the sun, get thee behind Satan, who is behind Maldoror and probably attempting a buggery. Pick up your suppurating feet and make your way as best you can along Phlegethon
’s banks. What incomprehensible appetites you have! You’ve turned toxic through to your bones. If you die on this journey, how shall we legally dispose of you? But you will not die. You, O Residues, must drag your titanic bodies forward, step by broken step… at this point I cannot see the end.

The royal body did not sit in majesty on a throne of amber and emerald. It lay naked on a dirty bed, in a room off the scullery, surrounded by doctors who were tormenting it with shameful instruments. The monarch of the paradise could not offer salutations, for his mouth was gagged with a spiked ball. The doctors, however, were keen to explain the importance of their work.

These savants believed the sovereign to be bound magically to the land he ruled. Of course, this is not an uncommon belief; but these people lived by the more savage opinion that when there was illness in the realm it could be remedied by the monarch suffering pain and shedding blood. In other words, they were black magicians, and lunatics to boot. The happiness of their country was therefore perhaps evidence of the worth of diabolism and madness.

‘
But tell me, O doctors,’ I said, ‘is there such evil in your land that you must keep this man racked with pain?’

‘
Oh no,’ one of them replied, ‘not at all. Usually His Majesty can go about his business without any of this, since the people who live here are good souls and do nothing to upset the equilibrium. Natural disasters such as drought, flood or disease can be controlled with a thimbleful of the royal blood.’

‘
It is your presence, sir,’ said another, ‘which requires us to take these unprecedented measures.’

At that moment the enchantment was broken and my true nature came back to me like a lover from whom I had been parted.

Maldoror!

There is no haven for you! The ship has sailed without you; you missed your chance to stow away. No way but onward, through disappointments and the ordure that you vomit over your feet with every step. You insisted on this.

The knowledge of my exile from happiness fell on me again, a net of steel. I had my hand on my sword, ready to strike off that stupid king’s head. But I was lying on the floor squirming, wriggling like a boil of worms. And now those hoodoo doctors keep me trapped here in this motel room with their magic!

Is Maldoror trying to deal in his blood flukes and other parasites from his place of captivity? Please do not condemn him, for man is raised above the beasts by his sense of commerce.

Where are you, beautiful child? I
’ve been observing you, but your precise location escapes me. I know that you sleep happily at night, without a light, because you precociously made a pact with the ghosts in your bedroom. You accommodated their needs, no more onerous or coarse than those of the living fraternity, and balanced by more valuable recompenses. You would not enrage them by wishing them gone, and in return they would teach you a thing or two. You understood the relationship between evil and power and believed in your own bad character. Because of this, you have attracted my attention.

I am not interested in corrupting innocence. I want fruit already tainted.

One, two – the razor gives me a hospital breakfast of blood.

I
’ve been on my knees in the toilet, vomiting all kinds of filth. These offerings from my private ecosystem are flowing to the oceans of the world, and in time will enter the rain that falls everywhere. Close the entrances to your body; eat and drink nothing.

I may not be well, but I am getting wealthy. It pleases me to report that I have discovered a bountiful source of lice right here in this bed. I sell them, in the secret way of criminals who run cocaine empires from jail cells
.

I dreamed I banished the desert; I sang the jungle. I sang a deep green river, swaying through the steaming hills like a boa constrictor drunk on the darkness of the world. If the river hypnotises you and enters your eye, you will either become a great sorcerer or die within a month of a disease which turns your kidneys into lobes of jade and your brain to a dead coral.

The gears of the universe carried the stars into one of those sinister alignments before which the executioner in his hood kneels reverently. Dogs remember their role, and a cascade of barking and baying pours over the lonely intertidal zone, signalling that once again it is the hour of pink dominos and masked balls!

Bring green, red and silver sequins! Bring feathers of the peacock and the toucan! Bring kohl, cochineal and bismuth for the paints, talc and tar for the wigs, Indian musk and Phoenician rose for the perfumes, and Roman breastplates for the containment of raging hearts and graveyard coughs. And you, clairvoyant with the enormous brow, find something for one who is to play the part of an impostor.

Here come cakewalk princes, witches, raggle
-taggle gypsies, tattooed geishas, lion tamers, pygmies, strongmen, hunger artists, houngans, hangmen, Templars, limbo dancers, lepers, organ grinders, rag-and-bone men, roaring girls, deserters, hustlers, hunchbacks, holly rollers, pharaohs, mohocks, mariachis, martyrs, cowboys, eunuchs, showgirls, mobsters, Moonies, Thuggees, birdmen, mattoids and ninjas – and even habitually solitary Maldoror joins the conga line, his mouth forming a red semilunar split. Now everyone is singing!
Torch-eyed Maldoror tearing through the jungle, getting back to nature with the goblin host, Hades bursting out of the stereoscope! Winding down the banks of the bursting rivers, from the Hooghly to the Hudson to the delta of the Nile, a painted, sainted carnival phyle, Satan in the lead cheek to cheek with the Pope, going back to heaven in a pirate boat! Glory, glory, ho! The grinning throat!

Caught up in it all, enraptured by this vision of his inner jungle let loose and running rampant, victorious over the world of clay, the world of empty vessels made by the dull Potter of the Desert, Maldoror comes close, so close.

But his quest is tragically asymptotic. His body, with all its remarkable deviations from the norm, is nevertheless not sufficiently elastic to engulf a surface without end.

The dense fog remained in the garden, reluctant to disperse. Fog is that state of water which expresses a yearning to cease once and for all the cyclic commute of evaporation and condensation, the motion of rivers and tides and rain; it aspires to the captive tranquillity of a lake or a well. Like the fog, a pupil lingers at a school gate, unwilling to go in, or, in the afternoon, to go home; this youth, withdrawn and solitary, is necessary without anyone realising it: his utterly private mode of life and his ridiculous loitering in the precinct of the gate are necessary. He is like winter, or the stomachs of a ruminant, or a crystal button, and so he becomes a daimon… the urge to follow him is natural… in a row of city cottages, gauze curtains are not enough to hide an old couple watching television. I thought they were decently dead; but no, he scratches his paunch and she farts twice. The smell is curiously mild and sweet, like a memory of apples. She is not embarrassed, this heavy woman whose hands are red and swollen, who must enjoy the perfumed reminiscence she can supply for herself at no cost. In her world the grand dormitories of the great dreamers don’t exist. In her world there is only an unfailing light. In his world there is horror in the form of a red, immense old woman whom age has made intolerably coarse: a beast, a scarlet elephant, for which he manages, heroically, to feel pity.

It seemed that a murder might be required, but instead the bird of passage was welcomed by both of them as a long lost son. One can see him now, whose beauty is adequate for the needs of burlesque and folktale, lying asleep i
n the full light of day, still attired in boots which are spattered with the mud of a Breton field. It is Sunday morning and this seigneur is utterly spent after the antics of a sabbat – no less hilarious for being predictable. His left hand lies across his smoothly rising and sinking breast as if to remind him, by a gentle echo in his flesh, of the many hands that touched him in the night. Like the girls of sixteen who sleep near death rather than perform the sacrifices of womanhood he lies, as though by the agency of poisoned apple or pricked finger; without shame, the lord of witches has become sempiternal sleep; his body is the cobra-hooded gondola, a bower prepared for the union of anima and animus, and all their friends and relations too. It might be to our benefit to stay with him, but the old couple, next after the loiterer in what might imaginably become an endless series of psychopomps, are herding us towards another scene in another bedroom, in which a woman reaches across the pillows to touch her companion, but before the movement is completed, her arm and then her whole body silently fragments into a mosaic of debris – flakes of dry paint, petals and grass, eggshells, wood shavings, insect husks. Her transfigured form holds for an instant, then falls apart.

Her disappointed lover dresses himself and departs, his hands clenched inside the pockets of his coat. He leaves all her possessions alone. Something new will take shape in the room, and when it does he will come back to enjoy the new thing
– if he survives the fog, which at times like this, when the failure is significant, is apt to take on the properties of chlorine gas…

O beloved,
mon ange, mon singe
, outside the gates nothing is fathomable, while within naphtha flares cast hideous shadows. The bed is soft and the stars are pure and bright but I cannot sleep. The dunes are stealing across the world with a menace that is more stately than vague. Moonlight leaks around the edges of the shutter-blinds in the room in the cheap motel where Maldoror lies outflung like a discarded garment on a bed with pink cotton sheets, above which a plastic ceiling fan turns at a slow pace, reminding him of the gait of the ocean; the silken light creeps near to his open eyes, to be repelled, never to come near the brain, the mollusc in the cranium, bone of memory and error.