The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (29 page)

Just then, a tinker, who frequently spent his evenings and his earnings in the tavern, stopped and seized the barmaid by both shoulders, gazing directly into her eyes.

“You must
run
!” he implored. “Now, this very minute, you must get away from this place!”

“But why?” Dóta responded, trying to show as little of her terror as possible, trying to behave the way she imagined a woman like Malmury might behave. “What has happened?”

“It
burns
,” the tinker said, and before she could ask him
what
burned, he released her and vanished into the mob. But, as if in answer to that unasked question, there came a muffled crack, and then a boom that shook the very street beneath her boots. A roiling mass of charcoal-colored smoke shot through with glowing red-orange cinders billowed up from the direction of the livery, and Dóta turned and dashed back into the Cod’s Demise.

Another explosion followed, and another, and by the time she reached the cot upstairs, dust was sifting down from the rafters of the tavern, and the roofing timbers had begun to creak alarmingly. Malmury was still asleep, oblivious to whatever cataclysm was befalling Invergó. The barmaid grabbed the bearskin blanket and wrapped it about Malmury’s shoulders, then slapped her several times, hard, until the woman’s eyelids fluttered partway open.

“
Stop that,
” she glowered, seeming now more like an indignant girl child than the warrior who’d swum to the bottom of the bay and slain their sea troll.

“We have to
go
,” Dóta said, almost shouting to be understood above the racket. “It’s not
safe
here anymore, Malmury. We have to get out of Invergó.”

“But I’ve done
killed
the poor, sorry wretch,” Malmury mumbled, shivering and pulling the bearskin tighter about her. “Have you lot gone and found another?”

“Truthfully,” Dóta replied, “I do not
know
what fresh devilry this is, only that we can’t stay here. There is fire, and a roar like naval cannonade.”

“I was sleeping,” Malmury said petulantly. I was dreaming of – ”

The barmaid slapped her again, harder, and this time Malmury seized her wrist and glared blearily back at Dóta. “I
told
you not to do that.”

“Aye, and I told
you
to get up off your fat ass and get moving.” There was another explosion then, nearer than any of the others, and both women felt the floorboards shift and tilt below them. Malmury nodded, some dim comprehension wriggling its way through the brandy and wine.

“My horse is in the stable,” she said. “I cannot leave without my horse. She was given me by my father.”

Dóta shook her head, straining to help Malmury to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too late. The stables are all ablaze.” Then neither of them said anything more, and the barmaid led the stranger down the swaying stairs and through the tavern and out into the burning village.

4.

From a rocky crag high above Invergó, the sea troll’s daughter watched as the town burned. Even at this distance and altitude, the earth shuddered with the force of each successive detonation. Loose stones were shaken free of the talus and rolled away down the steep slope. The sky was sooty with smoke, and beneath the pall, everything glowed from the hellish light of the flames. 

And, too, she watched the progress of those who’d managed to escape the fire. Most fled westward, across the mudflats, but some had filled the hulls of doggers and dories and ventured out into the bay. She’d seen one of the little boats lurch to starboard and capsize, and was surprised at how many of those it spilled into the icy cove reached the other shore. But of all these refugees, only two had headed south, into the hills, choosing the treacherous pass that led up towards the glacier and the basalt mountains that flanked it. The daughter of the sea troll watched their progress with an especial fascination. One of them appeared to be unconscious and was slung across the back of a mule, and the other, a woman with hair the color of the sun, held tight to the mule’s reins and urged it forward. With every new explosion, the animal bucked and brayed and struggled against her; once or twice, they almost went over the edge, all three of them. By the time they gained the wider ledge where Sæhildr crouched, the sun was setting and nothing much remained intact of Invergó, nothing that hadn’t been touched by the devouring fire.

The sun-haired woman lashed the reigns securely to a boulder, then sat down in the rubble. She was trembling, and it was clear she’d not had time to dress with an eye towards the cold breath of the mountains. There was a heavy belt cinched about her waist, and from it hung a sheathed dagger. The sea troll’s daughter noted the blade, then turned her attention to the mule and its burden. She could see now that the person slung over the animal’s back was also a woman, unconscious and partially covered with a moth-eaten bearskin. Her long black hair hung down almost to the muddy ground.

Invisible from her hiding place in the scree, Sæhildr asked, “Is the bitch dead, your companion?”

Without raising her head, the sun-haired woman replied. “Now, why would I have bothered to drag a dead woman all the way up here?”

“Perhaps she is dear to you,” the daughter of the sea troll replied. “It may be you did not wish to see her corpse go to ash with the others.”

“She’s
not
a corpse,” the woman said. “Not yet, anyway.” And as if to corroborate the claim, the body draped across the mule farted loudly and then muttered a few unintelligible words.

“Your sister?” the daughter of the sea troll asked, and when the sun-haired woman told her no, Sæhildr said, “She seems far too young to be your mother.”

“She’s not my mother. She’s…a friend. More than that, she’s a hero.”

The sea troll’s daughter licked at her lips, then glanced back to the inferno by the bay. “A hero,” she said, almost too softly to be heard.

“Well, that’s the way it started,” the sun-haired woman said, her teeth chattering so badly she was having trouble speaking. “She came here from a kingdom beyond the mountains, and, single handedly, she slew the fiend that haunted the bay. But – ”

“ – then the fire came,” Sæhildr said, and, with that, she stood, revealing herself to the woman. “My
father’s
fire, the wrath of the Old Ones, unleashed by the blade there on your hip.”

The woman stared at the sea troll’s daughter, her eyes filling with wonder and fear and confusion, with panic. Her mouth opened, as though she meant to say something or to scream, but she uttered not a sound. Her hand drifted towards the dagger’s hilt. 

“
That
, my lady, would be a very poor idea,” Sæhildr said calmly. Taller by a head than even the tallest of tall men, she stood looking down at the shivering woman, and her skin glinted oddly in the half light. “Why do you think I mean you harm?”

“You,” the woman stammered. “You’re the troll’s whelp. I have heard the tales. The old witch is your mother.”

Sæhildr made an ugly, derisive noise that was partly a laugh. “Is
that
how they tell it these days, that Gunna is my mother?”

The sun-haired woman only nodded once and stared at the rocks.

“
My
mother is dead,” the troll’s daughter said, moving nearer, causing the mule to bray and tug at its reigns. “And now, it seems, my father has joined her.”

“I cannot let you harm her,” the woman said, risking a quick sidewise glance at Sæhildr. The daughter of the sea troll laughed again, and dipped her head, almost seeming to bow. The distant firelight reflected off the small curved horns on either side of her head, hardly more than nubs and mostly hidden by her thick hair, and shone off the scales dappling her cheekbones and brow, as well.

“What you
mean
to say, is that you would have to
try
to prevent me from harming her.”

“Yes,” the sun-haired woman replied, and now she glanced nervously towards the mule and her unconscious companion.

“If, of course, I
intended
her harm.”

“Are you saying that you don’t?” the woman asked. “That you do not desire vengeance for your father’s death?”

Sæhildr licked her lips again, then stepped past the seated woman to stand above the mule. The animal rolled its eyes, neighed horribly, and kicked at the air, almost dislodging its load. But then the sea troll’s daughter gently laid a hand on its rump, and immediately the beast grew calm and silent once more. Sæhildr leaned forward and grasped the unconscious woman’s chin, lifting it, wishing to know the face of the one who’d defeated the brute who’d raped her mother and made of his daughter so shunned and misshapen a thing.

“This one is drunk,” Sæhildr said, sniffing the air.

“Very much so,” the sun-haired woman replied.

“A
drunkard
slew the troll?”

“She was sober that day. I think.” 

Sæhildr snorted and said, “Know that there was no bond but blood between my father and I. Hence, what need have I to seek vengeance upon his executioner? Though, I will confess, I’d hoped she might bring me some measure of sport. But even that seems unlikely in her current state.” She released the sleeping woman’s jaw, letting it bump roughly against the mule’s ribs, and stood upright again. “No, I think you need not fear for your lover’s life. Not this day. Besides, hasn’t the utter destruction of your village counted as a more appropriate reprisal?”

The sun-haired woman blinked, and said, “Why do you say that, that she’s my lover?”

“Liquor is not the only stink on her,” answered the sea troll’s daughter. “Now,
deny
the truth of this, my lady, and I may yet grow angry.”

The woman from doomed Invergó didn’t reply, but only sighed and continued staring into the gravel at her feet.

“This one is practically naked,” Sæhildr said. “And you’re not much better. You’ll freeze, the both of you, before morning.”

“There was no time to find proper clothes,” the woman protested, and the wind shifted then, bringing with it the cloying reek of the burning village.

“Not very much farther along this path, you’ll come to a small cave,” the sea troll’s daughter said. “I will find you there, tonight, and bring what furs and provisions I can spare. Enough, perhaps, that you may yet have some slim chance of making your way through the mountains.”

“I don’t understand,” Dóta said, exhausted and near tears, and when the troll’s daughter made no response, the barmaid discovered that she and the mule and Malmury were alone on the mountain ledge. She’d not heard the demon take its leave, so maybe the stories were true, and it could become a fog and float away whenever it so pleased. Dóta sat a moment longer, watching the raging fire spread out far below them. And then she got to her feet, took up the mule’s reins, and began searching for the shelter that the troll’s daughter had promised her she would discover. She did not spare a thought for the people of Invergó, not for her lost family, and not even for the kindly old man who’d owned the Cod’s Demise and had taken her in off the streets when she was hardly more than a babe. They were the past, and the past would keep neither her nor Malmury alive. 

Twice, she lost her way among the boulders, and by the time Dóta stumbled upon the cave, a heavy snow had begun to fall, large wet flakes spiraling down from the darkness. But it was warm inside, out of the howling wind. And, what’s more, she found bundles of wolf and bear pelts, seal skins and mammoth hide, some sewn together into sturdy garments. And there was salted meat, a few potatoes, and a freshly killed rabbit spitted and roasting above a small cooking fire. She would never again set eyes on the sea troll’s daughter, but in the long days ahead, as Dóta and the stranger named Malmury made their way through blizzards and across fields of ice, she would often sense someone nearby, watching over them. Or only watching.

15/7/98

No one here seems to mind very much that my French is atrocious. I begin to suspect it isn’t true, what everyone says about how Parisians sneer at and disdain and show contempt for Americans who mangle their language. Or I’ve been lucky. Or. Or, I don’t know. From my window, there’s an excellent view of Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, which I read in a guidebook was once Le Cimetière du Sud. All those white-stone monumented narrow houses, and the low conical tower, as if the dead need a lighthouse or castle keep or what have you. I read, too, stone from nearby quarries was heaped here into a spoil pile, and in the Seventeenth Century the area, before it was a boneyard, become known as Mount Parnasse:
Tho’ their music here be mortal need the singer greatly care? Other songs for other worlds! the fire within him would not falter…
The stone, that rubble pile of yore before the coming of
Le
Cimetière du Montparnasse
, I believe to be hewn from out limestone beds sixty, seventy-five feet down below our feet. Stone that was seafloor ooze in Tertiary ages (?). The underground quarries are still there, below the feet in France. I’ve spent days walking between the rows. Days and days and days. We cannot walk there after dark, not in the summer, which is a shame, and perhaps some odd desecration. In my little black book, I write the names of the moldering interred (but there are yet many whom I have not visited). These I have: Baudelaire, Carrière, de Maupassant, Robert Desnos, Beckett, cherished St. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray. At Sartre Satyr Saint’s grave I leave tokens: coins, stones, a battered first-edition of
L’âge de raison
I scrounged from 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Shakespeare and Company. A bouquet of flowers for Mlle. de Beauvoir I stole from Queen Kiki de Montparnasse, and I think she’ll never miss the bundle of wilted roses and bracken. 

The old woman who lives across the hall asked if I find inspiration here. She knows enough English that we can converse in her broken English and not my broken French. She has false teeth and once was a singer. She takes pity on me, so I show her canvases I can’t finish. She brings bread and cheese sometimes, and I share wine.
Je partage mon vin
. I believe that’s not too far off the mark. We talk books and art and politics. We talk. I talk and she is kind enough to listen. Her hair is akin to wild grey moss, and she sometimes forgets to wear her teeth. Her eyes are the eyes of a young girl, and the color of agate. She says her name is Dorothée Lefbèvre, though I suspect she’s lying. Cannot say why. It hardly matters what she calls herself. Says she was born in 1917, and talks about the wars. I asked her, twice, to sit for me; each time she blushed and declined. We talk of aqueducts and crypts below churches. She doesn’t shy at morbidity. Perhaps we’ll make great friends, Dorothée Lefbèvre and I.

In the mirror where I shave, my skin has looked better. It all catches up with me, though I thought that would be later rather than sooner. All men must think that, yes? Delusions of immortality. Something of the sort. Wrinkles and grey hair. Teeth not what once they were, nor as numerous; eyes dim and bloodshot the way you know they’ll never be clear again.

Today I sit and stare at the canvas, the bird-headed demon gazing down upon all the world, gazing down in derision and indifference, doing the both simultaneously. I mix paint, and it dries before I commit a single brushstroke. I hate this one. I loathe it, but it will mean a check. Hence, I will trudge on to the muddy end. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair before the easel, which I never used to do. Or cannot recall having done. I should be out walking the streets, not sleeping in a chair before a ruined canvas. I’ve seen precious little of the precious city.

I hear rumors of
cataphiles
, men and women who explore the ancient abscesses, sewers,
les ossuaires
, the galleries of forgotten Twelfth-Century quarries (
carrières
), subterranean lakes, and on and on. I should not be sitting here with this acrylic dead-end. There is nothing here to learn. I swear again I would cease these paintings if I had that option. I swear again they eat at my mind and soul and body, pick me apart like ravens, and I would have nothing more of them. Idiots talk of muses and inspiration, naïve words from lips of starry-eyed fools who see romance where there is little more than monotony and humiliation. When I am interviewed, I ought to say these things, but I never do; my agent holds his thumb across my throat, pressing down on my tongue. Buyers like to believe the artist labors in the joy of creation, not in despair. Not always wanting out, and ever willing to seek new manners of egress. They – the buyers – should sit dozing in my hard chair, prostrate in sleep before this hideous abortion of a painting, the ibis-crowned monster plucked from…from…I do not know where, but here it is all the same, isn’t it. I ought to set it aside, at least for a few days, if only to spite the market and my agent and the galleries back in the States or London. 

I should be in the museums – Musée national d’art moderne, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, id est. I should leave the city and take the train to Gévaudan (now, of course, Lozère. Haute-Loire), as I planned. It may be that Dorothée would accompany me, if I paid her fare. I did ask if she knows the story of
La Bête du Gévaudan
; she did, she does. She was surprisingly well versed in the tales. Or I was surprised at her knowledge, and the one thing might not equate to the other. She has traveled the Margeride. In her youth. In some facet of her youth, all those many decades past. I will ask her perhaps. Or I will stare down this painting. In truth,
je m’en fou
, as she would say. I should seek out the deep-delving troglodytic cataphiles and ask them to lead me down to all the private Hades. I should find the tomb of Henri Fantin-Latour and leave dead flowers (
fleurs mortes
?). I should seek out a street where pretty boys sell themselves and lose myself in flesh, theirs and mine.

17/7/98

Found him down on la Rue Saint-Denis (a/k/a rue des Saints Innocents et grant chaussée de Monsieur, Sellerie de Paris, rue de Franciade, et al) that First Century Roman slash of paving now so clogged with whores, male
and
female, though the latter holds so little interest for me these days. He, who spoke not a word of English – I do not count the stray
yes
and
no
and various profanities and brand names, no, those I do not count at all – and I think he was surprised that I wanted more than a quick blow in an alleyway. I brought him back to the flat, and fucked him good and proper, then paid him extra to pose for me. 

There’s a heap of him still on the floor, a heap of charcoal approximation of that pinched face and lean ass and eyes that were proud despite their sorry lot. But I found him, and little more matters. He had a name, of course. Still does, unless a name thief is lose in the Quartier Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, some beast that slinks the blacktop and storefronts in search of the praenomen and cognomen of boy whores. He might have been sixteen, seventeen, but no older. Had he been, I’d not have paid so much. I’d not have paid at all, but continued in my search. He called himself Gautier. I bent him over my bed and splayed open his ass for my starving cock. He made no sound at all. None. No complaint from my
tapin
(isn’t that the current slang?), not like those whining boys in Munich and, also, yes, that one especial
trækkerdreng
in Copenhagen. In whose mouth I stuffed an overripe pear rather than bear the noises he made.

Gautier left before dawn. I said I would try to find him again sometime, one night or the next. He shrugged and left me alone.

Left me here with my stinking sins, taking sins away and leaving me with my greater damnations, these hideous paints and brushes, all fire and brimstone and cold wastes and yes, yes,
das Fegefeuer
. I haven’t slept. I’ve had too many cups of coffee to drive back the sleep, which is the coiled hive of dreams and almost nothing more. Not rest, and that’s for fucking sure. No rest now in more years than I have fingers. Coffee, though, and nicotine, amphetamines, tiny ampoules of ammonia for desperate moments. How can I not be blessed with simple insomnia?

18/7/98

The stars above cathedrals are shameless things, no less wicked than the leering, tongue-lolling gargoyles crouched by the vicious architects of Notre Dame de Paris and the Cathedral Saint-Etienne de Meaux. Only, those distant bodies in roiling rotation are so infinitely more truthful than the horrors of the Galerie des Chimères, dream gallery, nightmare palisade of godly lies and sacred intimidations. Stars have no need of intimidation, which makes them mightier than all the godheads nightmared by mere humanity. You, Monsignor Shitwit, you paint me a demon so voracious as a red giant or Sol, or a Tetragrammaton to match the electron-degenerate matter of a white dwarf, and then,
then
we’ll talk of hells and heavens. I lay on my back in a forest flanking the Seine, though that must have been so very long ago: mammoth- and lion-haunted forests (though neither of these did I glimpse, for I am afforded no such mild phantasmagoria). I lay in the dew-damp grass, and the stars whirled above me, weaving celestial labyrinths with no beginnings and no endings, mazes no one enters or escapes –
des labyrinthes sans sorties, des labyrinthes sans entrées
, so designated in my dictionary-shredded mockery. I’d have looked away, but that thought never once occurred to my sleeping mind. 

Van Gogh never saw a sky like that, not in the deepest folds of his epileptic, absinthe-fueled anti-reveries. Nor Kupka, nor, nor, nor Munch with all his Madonna and spermatozoa. The Dome of Heaven whirled above me, condemning kaleidoscope that knows my every transgression because it looks on every night and, in daylight, passes notes with the perfidious sun. Back here we come to stars. Plenty of gods et goddesses are stars: Helios, Hyperion, Ra, the seven Vedic Adityas. The dome wheeled above me without wings, though I feared those absent wings that would beat with no earthly thunder in the vacuum. Beating, they would be soundless as the dead.

The sky is black-blue indigo white adamantine alabaster blackest of all blacks. Blazing bright and yet absolutely, irredeemably tenebrous.

There is terrible
purpose
in the wheel.

This I saw, with sleeping eyes wide, and no man nor woman may gainsay these observations, not without showing themselves liars, and ignorant liars at that. I lay there forever, until she said my name, and I turned to the pale naked girl on the grass not too far away. Her knees pulled up beneath her chin, hiding sex and breasts from view, modesty or habit or retreat from the chilly night air. I didn’t need to ask her name; I’ve known all her names almost all my life. “Not wise to stare so long,” she said, and smiled, showing all those teeth of hers packed in like sardine pegs on enamel and ripping incisor/canine/premolar ferocity. “Were I you, I’d look away.”

I told her I already had looked away, to see her, instead.

“You stare too long at everything no sane man ought ever glimpse for a moment.”

“You never have thought me a sane man.”

“I never have,” she agreed.

So there she sat, in the lotus folds of all her names, but let’s be content with the one –
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge
. No, never mind. One will never ever do her. Addend Little Red Cap, then. And Riding Hood.
Und Rotkäppchen
. Goldenhood. Saint Margaret of Antioch. Spin them all about her as the sky spins, for now unsighted, above the Seine and the land before the coming of Paris. 

“You’ll not go to Gévaudan,” she said with great finality.

“Why?”

“There’s nothing left there for you to see, Albert. They slew her long ago. Cartel cut down
La Bête
twice a hundred and fifteen years ago. Her bones went to dust in Versailles.

I know she’s confusing, conflating, two versions of the tale, that in which the beast is slain by François Antoine and that other, in which she was slain by Jean Chastel. It was Antoine sent the corpse to the Court of Louis XV, not Chastel. I don’t correct her. Never have I corrected the girl, nude but for her woolen crimson and her wet black nose. She talks on while the sky wheels above the countryside: Jean Chastel’s great red mastiff, maybe the beast’s sire, maybe Chastel dressing the misbegotten hybrid in an armored boar skin and setting it upon peasants to slake his own perverse inclinations.

I listen, as always I listen when she speaks. Mostly, she wants to be certain I don’t make the trip to Gévaudan, not even if Dorothée accompanies me.

I go back to watching that maelstrom sky, because I have guessed it’s one of the missing elements in the unfinished painting. It has more to teach me than the red-capped bitch. It teaches me a labyrinth is not a place where one becomes disoriented and lost. It is a place into which one is born and may never escape.

The sun is setting when I wake.

19/7/98

The morning post brought an envelope from Manhattan, from that cunt shitbird fuck Larry fucking Tannahill. I’d have thought ending his salary would have ended his attentions. No. He sends a clipping, which I attach here (fuck knows why, that too), though the business with the film is well and truly over and done. He tore it from a magazine somewhere. It was not scissor-clipped, but torn:

Excerpt from “L’homme qui a assassiné Arthur Rackham: Une entrevue avec Albert Perrault,” published in
L’Oeil
(Avril 1989, No. 452), by J. S. Molyneux (translated from the original French by J. S. Molyneux):

L’Oeil:
The “Little Red Riding Hood” sequence, for example? It was not what you had envisioned?

Perrault: No, it was not. It was so completely outlandish, because the director
wanted
a crude, outlandish film. He would look at my sketches and paintings, the sculptures I did with Rob Bottin, and say, “Yes, yes, that’s a good place to start, but see, we can take it so much farther.” And that poor actress.
XXXXX XXXXXXXXX
, I think that was her name. She had worked on something very similar with Neil Jordan, and so
XXXXXXX
insisted upon her, though I thought she was somewhat too old for the role. Six hours in makeup for this scene, and I think it was four consecutive days she had to go through that, because they couldn’t get a take
XXXXXXX
was happy with.