Evil Interludes section heading.
Aug 192011
Aug 192011
My father was an enigma. But an enigma with twenty slick answers from the Sorbonne, and a stipend from the Count of Praslin. His mystery, as regards the world, was mostly resolvable in economic terms, the commonest and dirtiest denominator to which humanity enslaves whatever can be discovered of that truer enigma: ‘ourselves.’
How many times did mother repeat to me the tale of his charities on behalf of the ancien regime? Scouring warring streets ragged with cries of ‘Liberte, Egalite… Etcetera!’ to get one last line of credit for his imprisoned Count, to spring him from the bad old Bastille ‘once again.’ And all this merely so that my father could again pursue his diurnal doubletrack of duty and dissolution. By day, the Count of Praslin’s children came stomping and laughing into the well-appointed chamber in the main household, yanking on his liturgical frock, and settling down only when he would recite, in a voice that moved like vodka over ice, the daily grace. This stunned them into stillness, and they remained cowed and ready to begin the day’s schoolwork, their satin slippers lined up on the oriental carpeting in the very model of military attention.
By night, my father would escape gasping through the solid ornamental doors of buffed brass and begin to make his way to the sullen, sullied quarter where he made his apartment.
He would stroll rotor-erect, first to the Via Seculae, then subtly strutting over the Vinge Bridge which let him down onto the golden-toned Rue de Rouge Ruine. Perhaps Minks, or perhaps Vital, or even the self-flagellantly outrageous Whippe Strange, would call a greeting from one of their studios or the wine shop and an evening of discourse, both coarse and crowned, would commence in some nearby hovel.
He spent the rest of that hideous ‘mass’ revolution of Robespierre’s drinking wine from bombarded cellars, routing God from his tongue (a punishable offence in those degraded days), and ‘drawing pictures for the instruction of “The Public.”‘ My own run-ins with the Napoleons of ’48, were still many fat annuities of papa’s resuscitated royals away. Needless to say, when the plundering hubbub were banished, and Count Praslin had come home again, he remembered with loads of lucre my father’s angelic agency in extracting him from the raunchy ignominy of the too-crowded hoosgow.
It was on the annuities of this limited luxury that I came into my own ‘damned adolescence.’
Aug 192011
I thought Charles’ father the most exquisite, perfect nobleman in all the world. In the days before we were married, he came to the house in a ‘royal’ carriage, had his gates opened and shut by an old flunkey absolutely decked out in gold braid, and bearing a great golden wig on his old head, like a bonfire of money; even his shoes seemed dipped in gold, so much the better to scurry after his master Baudelaire, pulling his chair, or wiping the soup from his lip without imperiling his pronunciations on the current politics of the day–the dratted revolution, of course. I remember standing at his knees, my white veil giving a weird halo to the candles in the stifling room; his head was full of large beautiful grey curls, and his eyebrows were as exact and black as mama’s. I did not know then that one day I would keep his house, or maintain myself in his bed as his lawful wife. I was only nine at the time.
Years later, laughing at me in his dashing way, Joseph-Franscios corrected my misimpression, declaring that he had not only to tip his flunkey at his house just as if he had taken a cab, but he had to thank him for his pains as well!
His manners were always kept to the ‘perfect pitch,’ and he was well known to have a brilliantined mind, and also additionally the naive vigor; good bold shoulders, you know. And the bonhomie of La Fontaine, the fabulist.
Aug 192011
My father was always a mystery. He seemed content to paint and sketch in his retirement from official life, always smelling of books, or saturated oils and rich pigments. There was one large canvas of his that hung above the lumped ashes of our spacious fireplace, the ‘hellmouth,’ as he called it, and which was a very fine example of what my father, rightly, I think, acknowledged as his ‘detestable painting.’
It was St Anthony, aghast in a disastered desert, hunched in the overwhelming night with a stab of shine that marked his fisted crucifix, a dead Joshua tree intruding its bone-dry root into the background, while a gibbering Devil, spare and dangerously red as a side of slaughtered beef, dangled a whirlpool of temptations from a bright string, a tornado on a rope holding ‘images of all that could be desired.’ All of Anthony himself was cloistered in blackness in the moonless desert night; only the charm of the crucifix, the tortured whirl of the temptations, the Devil’s hide, and, here and there, sharp highlights of Anthony’s tormented face were dimly visible in the voluptuous midnight.
The thing always seemed to me to be no more than a grown schoolboy’s nod to God, until early one evening, I found my father out in the dark garden in his discarded cassock, his ‘painting frock,’ as he called it, hunched over a newly numinous canvas, just stretched in the potting shed that afternoon, and begun in a quiet frenzy as the sun bled out of the sky, and the world was once again turned over to shadows.
The evening was one my mother, pale angel, would have described as ‘splooched with dew.’ My father was quiet, concentrated–a large man in his overhanging cassock, intent, ‘at work.’ Beyond the black tempest of his shoulder, I could see the strange myrtle blotch of a bacchante gripping a thyrsis instead of St Anthony’s crucifix, and surrounded by a bowing crowd of blobby cupids adorned with rose complexions and miniature erections. Instead of a desert, there was a rich and wild Grecian countryside, like the uneven hills upon which Bryon battled before he died in a fever swamp.
My father went on painting for some hours, possessed by his subject, and undeterred by the evil mimicry of the mockingbirds that inverted the songs of the dawnsingers, or by the myriad bites of the mosquitoes that enticed them and made his hand start away to the kill again and again. Eventually the night itself mitigated against his continuance, and with the moonset and the failure of any more illumination, even I could no longer see him from my anxious perch at the window in my nightshirt, where my sleepless cheek rested against the cool windowledge. When, at last, he came through the house and passed my room in the hall, I could hear him laughing lightly to himself a strange whistling laugh, and then the loud slam of the bedroom door, and the softer slamming of his closet door in the bedroom where, after his death the next year, I discovered he had always kept the picture, and where, years after that, I learned from my mother, he would often shut himself in with a lamp and a bottle of heavy vintage.
After such an unveiling, when I roam again in my mind past my father’s more orthodox composition, standing before the decayed fireplace, I begin to understand Gautier’s comment about himself: “Why should my prose be easy to the apprehension? I am saying–simply–things which I do not believe.”
Aug 192011
The frost webs in crisp increments the department’s windows. A perfect cold clear winter’s day. I have watched the sun incise its blank parabola from seven thirty this a.m. until this hour–past three p.m., as it sinks into the abyss of Paris. And what do I have to show for these hours’ passage? Nothing. Shuffled memoranda immemorially. I could have been distinctly sauced by now, or taking a chilled tour around the park doing absolutely nothing, down by Malmorte. All that has happened is that I am now seven-and-one-half hours older.
Finis! The Minister no longer knows my name. Pierre pinches all the juicy ‘initiatives’ and I’m left with nada. Who am I?
Other Servants of the Service are in the limelight. Widgetsonne, Martin-Sobriquet (both), Melmott (hated by every man in the service), and even little Dumus.
It has been conveyed to me that, after starting out so prominently last year, a period of obscurity and ‘good behavior’ would be prudent and beneficial, show I was ‘serious,’ etc. All that has happened is that I have become obscure and passe. I should have realized that my enemies, who are innumerable (why?!) will now do their best to exploit my downcast condition in the most wretched fashion.
And this will also ruin my gelid and discreet afternoons with magnificent Marie (for which I am late!)–
Aug 192011
I had the pleasure to meet Mme. Baudelaire only twice in my life, but the impression she makes is quite strong and lingers in the mind of one sensitive to the traces of a fabulous youth tragically foreshortened; a subject of almost infinite meditation to one at first caught unawares in such circumstances….
The Madam, as she was always known to me, had about her the impeccable starkness of the religious convert–one to whom the simplicities of a religious life offer, if nothing else, a burnt-down and stripped landscape in which to suppress our more wiry emotions. Her mother, a penniless Catholic exile maintained by charity in an introverted England, expired, just after Napoleon’s rescinding of the more harsh laws restricting the practice of that barbaric faith. By luck, or a darker, feudal sense of life-debts, she was adopted by the Praslins–a family who owed much to Joseph-Francois Baudelaire’s own Draconian sense of mystical debts and holy accounts of interpersonal obligations. A gothic, almost pointlessly legal atmosphere hangs over the entire spiritual and sexual proceedings of that family–from a certain point of view.
“Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!”
This is how the Madam welcomed me into her dim abode. There was a lightness to her manner, and a hidden leven in everything she undertook. Perhaps this was the outcome of what Charles said was true of all of his family, right back to Eve: “idiots or maniacs, all of them vivid victims of terrible passions.” With Madam, this factoid only became apparent in retrospect, upon my own remembered reflections of our discussions, which were mainly concerned with how to coordinate Baudelaire’s defense before the Minister of Justice on the ridiculous and petty-minded immorality charges resulting from his publication of certain inflammatory poems.
“If there is no feeling, how can there be a poem? My Charles knows this, and follows the rule, although the world may make him pay.”
She poured me a small cognac and opened a heavy curtain to let the daylight into the chamber.
During one of these meetings Madam, always elegant, behaved a little strangely, perhaps freed from her usual restrictions by the desperation of Baudelaire’s case, the death of her own group of friends, herself having had some cognac, or even, as I suspect, a more than usual sense of her own lost lightness and youth, wasted on an old man (M. Baudelaire) whose sensibilities diverged from Madam’s to the utmost degree and in every particular. She had all the enthusiams of the young, he the cynicism and clarity of age; she was vibrant, he ironic and reserved; she was devoted to an active social calendar, and all the joys and inanities that go with such essentially meaningless diversions, he had his cronies, artists all, devoted to late nights and philosophy. Into this divided house fell Baudelaire, a child of the most unique sensibilities. He who had always “felt like a globe unto myself, a little criminal, ecstatic world, utterly extraneous to all of my neighbors and contemporaries, with whom one is so arbitrarily supposed to feel a pervading peerage.”
“Life is so like the death God warns us of in the Good Book,” she sighed. “But then, we are all accursed; my own life was crippled by my sense of goodness, the wish to do one good thing back for all the kindnesses I had received from the prodigal Praslins.”
I must have looked shocked, for she continued, “no, do not be so alarmed, M. Bonadventure, at a certain age everyone sights down their own life like a sharpshooter finding the nervous heart of an unsuspecting hare. Do not bother to respond; I know this much is true: my grateful spring of innocence has evaporated into bitterness. And I do not even have the cruel, cosmic sense of humor of my child or my first husband to laugh at myself. Ahh… M. Bonadventure….” She put her hand upon my arm, and breathed my name in a most compelling manner. I confess I felt myself stirring. But then I realized the exile that would await me at Baudelaire’s hands if he were even to suspect…. and I drew back from her heavy familiarity. But not before she apprised herself of my state by a quick touch that seemed far too sure, and alluring, for one of the Madam’s age. It seemed to me that some of her lightness had come back to her, and she dismissed me with a glance, turning calmly to the materials of the case before her.
As I stepped down the hall, seeing myself to the front door, I could hear her singing to herself, in a renaissance air:
“Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!”
“You know, don’t you, that I never found a permanent grave for the old man’s bones?” Her grin was almost… rapacious as she said this; and I understood that the ‘old man’ was Baudelaire’s father, a stern and distant character by all accounts, but not one to ever (even in death) lightly dismiss.
Aug 192011
The fire is growing, a glowing maw contesting the onrushing night. No further train whistles intrude on my solitude. I warm a wine in my hands before the merry gleam of the flame while genius turns to ash as eerily easily as discarded trash.
Now there were more and more pages and papers to consign to the fire. Incidental notes hurriedly dashed off, prezzies for mistresses, the bill from a whip-maker who used a bull’s pizzle for the aggravating tip. What had we here? I put the wine down on a rude side-table and pulled the paper up to my nose, peering at it from beneath my spectacles. Ah! One of the school-master’s reports from Baudelaire’s time at the Lycee.
In fact, the Lycee is where we had first met. I whiled away the common hour chiseling my playmates out of their allowances at marbles. Baudelaire spotted me, my face full of dust, and my knees filthy, and knew me for one of his own: a charlatan. Charles’ Charlatans was our gang. I was able to fund some of the more extravagant of our exploits with my marble winnings. But it was always Charles, reserved in his spotless knickers and blue velvet tie, who spawned our plans, and who stood coolly by on the midnight corner as our lookout while I pried pig fetuses from their pickle jars in the science building. Oh, what a fine Christ that ball of guts made, nailed above the altar, as the school processional stepped solemnly into the church that Easter Sunday!
Aug 192011
Evil Interludes section heading.
Aug 192011
Dear Madame de Aupick,
Young Charles is a competent scholar, but perhaps ‘taking it easy’ a bit too much. He is solitary and will not mix with the general school population. In his own mind, it is apparent from stray remarks he lets slip in conversation, he exalts himself and abases others, and, although there is a pool of talent and achievement that quite outclasses anything Charles has yet shown us, he continues to degrade and dismiss the verifiable accomplishments of others. Needless to say, this is not acceptable. The worst of it is that the other children, not comprehending the fake maturity of his distant and ironical attitude, are taken in by the mystery he poses to them, and he has quite a following of admirers–even not a few imitators. But one dark lone wolf is quite enough for my little lycee; you see my meaning, I am sure.
Perhaps a military academy could develop his obvious and natural, if unusually expressed, leadership abilities. If young Charles finds a subject that ‘catches fire’ within him, I feel certain that he would be fully capable of inspiring others to action and sacrifice of the very highest caliber, even unto the death.
In the meanwhile, please see to it that he learns at least a few less condescending manners.
Cordially Yours,
Phillipe Praxis
Aug 192011
“This way, young Charles, your accommodations are all in order. Do ignore the bolted doors and titillating screams. We’re redecorating….”
Baudelaire turned over in an evil dream of adolescence, sweating through the cheap sheets. He imagined himself with a woman–some wicked prefigurement of his ‘dear, damned Jeanne,’ no doubt. His misinformed boy’s brain kept the details frustratingly vague, yet his gift for sinful wistfulness had artfully tattooed above the groin-grotto of his girl’s twirling thighs the wooingly winsome motto: Abandon all hope, ye who enter her….
Youngling poets do have a certain odd combination of inertness and curiosity that make them more suceptible to the shortcut of a whip, the crib notes of sin. The curtains of his psyche (purple plush loaded with ghastly tassels) parted as I lifted my wizard’s baton.
“Welcome, laddies and ladies, to Saddamn and Gomorrah, b’gorrah!”
He charmingly arrived, as wet and steaming with afterbirth as a winter boulevard’s just-dropped horse turd.
Even I, master-mariner of all of deception’s supple grey seas, would be challenged to describe the boy Baudelaire’s gawper as he dawdled after my clacking hooves. Horror, interrupted by agony, advanced upon by greed–an avaricious wish to divine the most exquisite and depraved depths, it seemed to me; all of these fleeting expressions fought to plant their standard on Baudelaire’s nose. I was amused at the revolutions that revulsion and fascination spun upon the face of this amateur connoisseur of human misery.
“Not much farther on, Master Charles, and you shall see the nadir of all naughtiness… spasms of nastiness unsung! Do add them to your travelogue should you decide to return to life above the crust.”
I gave his plump rumpus a prodding poke with my flame-flecked trident and goaded him through the hole of a convolved cave-crack. With a chimp’s “Eeep!” he was in, goggling his dry eyes and rubbing his burnt butt. “Egad,” he laughed, doing a fine imitation of a London tourist. “All this demented delight just for me? Where to begin?”
He spat on his chapped finger ends, rubbing them into the corners of his eyes that he might widen them more absorbingly.
“I say, old chap… most extraordinary!”
In such comic tropes as these did the adolescent Baudelaire spend his night in Hades. What, precisely, he saw and felt there, I leave to the readers of his poems to interpret. I know only that he was struck dumb from using his native French, and that he more than once bent double to inspect this or that morally instructive torture with the scientific eye of a surgeon. Only once did I see a gleam of fear in him beyond this omnivorous curiosity of the cataloging empiricist–and that was when, as we were leaving the living flames, I asked him which torture he himself would prefer to suffer for his assigned eternity when he, most assuredly, returned? He explained humbly that his only anxiety was that his choice would be respected–not that he would be damned to it to begin with. It was, overall, even given his precociousness, even for me, a most extraordinary walk.
And then we surfaced: he to his dreams, I to my familiar aspect as a quietly curled black cat, softly irrelevant in the Paris night.
Aug 192011
“Don’t be such an execrable tyro, my loblolly boy. Marshall your forces, and then, be merciless.”
Papa’s eyes were pinwheels of fire as he brought his lead men around the stacked racks of dewy clay flowerpots behind the Tuileries Gardens. We had been invited for the weekend of the King’s birthday by Papa’s patron, Count Praslin, and then been left to wander. Chipped rifles and painted fifes stuck out indiscriminately between the fingers of his fists, and he sported a maniac’s grin as he bore down in righteous ire upon his only child, me.
“Beware, Charlie! Frontal assault! Royal troops of the line! Boom, crack!”
I had to admire his depraved rapacity.
“But, Papa,” I replied, my voice all innocence. “My cannon are to your rear.”
Papa was shocked upright. His visions of victory were dashed as he saw my gold-trimmed cannon lined up amongst the bloody carnations–orderly ordinance ranged against his spastic passion.
“Why… you… you… Napoleon!”
Aug 192011
Evil Interludes section heading.
Aug 192011
Dearest Step-Father:
As you know, the harmony in our house has been about that of a glass windchime in a hurricane. Never will the marshal and maker’s spirits mix into anything other than a soul-searing hangover, where each retreats again to his opposite corner of oblivion, that cozy closet where memory abandons both its charms and hurts. But, more to the point, and as you would say, “Speak seriously, Charles, for the Diety’s sake life cannot all go by in inimitable phrases, men must come to an accounting, especially when they find themselves on intimate terms with each other, as you and I do in this household, whose composition was beyond both of our controls.” Sententious, yes, but, Polonius, not without a point.
Yesterday, leaving the Lycee, I stopped at the charming ices stand where an incomprehensible old Italian dispenses his lickable ices, and getting my usual bittersweet lemon treat, I enjoyed my first refreshment–as a bachelor. The exam mastered me, but I managed to submit myself to its inherent tyranny so well, with such devil-may-care dexterity, that I extracted a pass.
But, really, I did not begin this letter as an exercise in self-advertisement. No, to the contrary, I began it, indeed, to congratulate you, good Colonel Aupick, now General, on your promotion to marshal de camp at the Academie Militaire, which I picked up from the notices in the ink-thick pages of The Universal Monitor. And Mother, I know from my private correspondence with her, has razed her garden with a mind to create–what was it now?–not so much a moonscape as a ruinscape, which seems all the rage in England; fallen Greek or Roman columns and wild vines…. Much news overtakes our tiny clan of three in the same tick of time. Fate has set our typeface with a single swipe of its rigid paw.
My congrats are real and naturally flow from my regard for you–unlike many other of the compliments you will no doubt be receiving. I am happy, extremely so, but mixed with this happiness, for both yourself and myself, but more purely for you and the family good fortune of your promotion, is inalterably mixed an almost unbearable anxiety. Such anxiety frays all of my resolutions, yet refuses solution–or even resolution, remaining as tenuous as a half-remembered dream whose pleasant stuffing, as one pulls at it to reveal more and more of its substance, begins to turn into shreds of human flesh–and one’s own at that! This is the pillow on which I have slept all night.
My future is all unsettled, my tastes and inclinations for a ‘career,’ vary by the hour, and all my horizons, seeming a circle impossibly vast, shrink to a chokehold through which may not pass even a single free breath. Oh, do not suppose your offer of a prime place for me in the establishment militare holds no glow for me–indeed military parades and the sway of glimmering braid have often whittled an idle hour away from me in deep pleasure–but it is the golden attraction, for me, that the cage has for the horrified bird.
My life, whatever it is and whatever it may come to be, will not fit in such finely milled limits, however spit and polish.
Aug 192011
The violence of men is a paltry thing, O Lord. But how enamored one becomes of the luxurious blood! The cringe-inducing crack of the smoky ordinance…. Rebellion is back on the Paris streets, whispers and suppositions flooding every corner. The Poles want a general revoltion in Europe to return liberty to their country; the Belgians agitate for a diocese; the Irish here in Paris–many thousands–think a France on fire will draw England to war and ruin again. All is agitation, action, anarchy, rebellion and revolt!
Like a pack of cats pouring through broken windows we flowed, myself and streams of students, into the abandoned armory. Amidst cries and stung-sung snatches of the Marseille, I outfitted myself regally with a crackerjack musket and pea green ammunition pouch. Monsieur MVP–whose initials adorn the rifle stock and the leather label on the pouch–will not mind my appropriation, I feel sure. Death, like everything else, ought to be carried out with a panache beyond the purely proletarian.
I stood upon the thrown-down doors of iron, surveyed the teeming bodies below me a minute, and prepared to take command of the situation. I noticed the students around me were not the law or science students of the Lycee, but cadets. In the moment’s chaos was a chance for vengeance if I was quick enough to catch it.
“Come, my brothers of the war-drum! Like the devil-red Apaches let’s take back by quick attack the Academie Militaire! Is not the headmaster, General Aupick, the most damnable demon of repression and confinement?”
“He’s our instructor!” cried one lad swinging a cannonball between his knees. He had that ‘student’ look on his face of hopeless moronicy. If I but expressed the spirit of the street, I would carry all before me.
“Instructor? He is a glorified jailer, keeping your young spirits pinned in and away from unconfining flight! He is Empire’s instrument, enforcing a false conformity on your wide possibilities! Woe to him, say I; what say ye? Say nay to him! Engage in this rebellious byplay with me, and be freed from his odious rules and regs. Discipline be damned! Bite the master’s hand! What ho? We’ll roast the Satan on his own pitchfork this very hour, or we never did have our human power.”
“As he says!”
“Mon Capitaine, Baudelaire!
“All our lives in your cause!”
“And the cause, whose cure is death, is General Aupick!”
“Aupick in smithereens!”
“Down with the Academie!”
“Up with liberty!”
We went loaded down with every kind of armament–out through the bent and broken doors of the armory. The streets seemed confused and semi-abandoned. Those who moved along them ducked or ran quickly into nearby buildings. White faces stared through windows firmly shut. There was scattered firing a boulrvard away, toward the river. The Academy was across the river. I corralled my few recruits into a ragged line, and we began a spirited march toward the gunfire. Ah, Aupick, my own true enemy besides God, I shall have you at last!
We strode past an imposing cavalry monument of glinting bronze: Napoleon on his ebullient Marengo, daring to dream of conquest and fame. Soon I shall conquer the sad goblin who has taken my father’s place in Mme. Baudelaire’s unmade bed. Aupick, that stark martinet who never allowed my art to be the center of our domestic life. That bland man who took my mother to wife! Boils and buboes upon his sallow hide! May his ribbons incinerate and his medals melt, causing his corpse to lie polka-dotted when the black, befeathered horses trot him to his soul’s hidey-hole. What calm talks between a loving mother and her devoted son has he interrupted in the lengthening shadows of the day, exiling our cozy commiseration, dashing our daisychains of daydreams with his blundering tug of ownership. He dresses as a cavalier, but performs the function without wit or wisdom–a man trapped in the duty-hugging panoply of the past: honors, rituals, regrets. Mon General, I pat my pouch and swig this wineskin to your defeat: salute! Here in my green pouch of powder and charge lies the lead tooth that shall nibble you a way to heaven. Glee penetrates me as this musket-ball will un-eye our strutting Aupick. Let his eyeless corpse wander long and lusterless in grey purgatory. Blind, like his faith, he shall at last have some dash of poetry.
“Capitain!” The cadet, no more than a tall boy, really, tugged me from my violent reverie. “The gunfire is increasing toward the bridge. Pierre and I scouted around the corner just ahead. A hot skirmish has broken out there.”
“Is there another way to the
“We must go through here. The nearest bridge is less than a mile upstream, but we must pass through this fighting to get to it. What are your orders, sir?”
I looked past the boy, and suppressed a pang of panic that I might be denied my vengeance.
“Men!” I cried. “Line up here before me. Let us assess our strength before this first plunge into the maelstrom.”
The young men assembled in a scraggly line–ricket-limbed rejects of the Academy’s officer’s school, it now seemed clear to me. Their cadet uniforms were unmended and of last year’s make. They passed a bottle of strong spirits (St Peter’s Chartreuse
Aug 192011
Pinet and Herbert jostled with me should-to-shoulder in the large sunlit lecture hall. I looked to left and right at them, and saw my own state of exaggerated excitation reflected in their eager young faces. Revolution had come to the streets of Paris, and we three had lived to see it! We were cadets of the Academy Militaire. What role would we play in this all-too-just uprising of ‘the people’? Could we three help to ressurect the Republic?
Just then, Old Aupick showed up at the front of the room, his back straight as a stick-pin. His chest was awash with medals glittering like foam cresting before a hurrying war-prow at dawn. His face drew itself together the way a spider draws its net tight when racing out from its hole to hog-tie a hapless fly. He seemed in complete command of the situation, despite his age, and despite our reckless excitement. Old Aupick blew out an attention-getting “harrumph,” ruffling his great grey mustache.
Most of the cadets in the hall were shouting: “We must go out! Out into the streets! Vivre la Republique!” At the sight of the old general marching into the hall, all of this shouting died down to a monotone of murmurs.
“Boys,” he began, “let not the valor and excitement of the day unseat your reason. Let not the chance to play at being petty deities under the storm-sky of rebellion over-awe the quieter braveries of fidelity and honor. ‘
It was not until much later, having played many different roles in the drama of that agitated day, that I found myself, quite by accident, shoulder-to-shoulder with Herbert and Pinet again when a rowdy crowd of workers waving rolling pins and pitchforks spotted Old Aupick’s too-large epaulets and began shouting “Hoist him up along with his damned flag–by the neck!” The three of us had rushed forward from our various stations around the scene, as if by unconscious consensus, and surrounded the old man with our own bodies. Still looking as dignified as a deacon, we walked him to temporary safety over a sea of troubled faces.
Aug 192011
Still disappointed, if not exactly disillusioned, with his inability to get within 500 yards of General Aupick during the day’s convulsions, Baudelaire looked round at his pack of unlikely revolutionaries. Baudelaire glared, almost froglike, above the fresh power burns still ashing his cheek. I, for one, looking at him, felt awkward and demure. I wouldn’t have gone half a step in the direction of rebellion–if it hadn’t been for the magnetized gaze and vivid rhetoric of this impossible poet. Such grand imprecations against the ‘imperial scheme of things’ followed by the almost chuckling ‘Allons-y!’ of a New Year’s merrymaker, as if our war tasks would be no more dangerous or imposing than a good afternoon’s gallop and giggle. Sweet liberty! We were the very figures of the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.
“Come along, my castaways of fate, foiled ministers of a refreshened ‘state of the people first and the state second,’ let’s still console ourselves by making more than a ruin of our honors this day. Eh? Let us bash at this disaster’s gate and bend the flimsy whim of chance with the hard iron of our ardor!” Already there was an improvised ire in his eyes, and I found myself smiling slyly, wondering what was in store for we poor four horsemen of the slobpocalypse.
Our chance of participating in any real action in the rebel fight had slipped away when the students Baudelaire had at first inspired stopped off to man at a smoking barricade about two miles from Aupick’s HQ at the Academy Militaire. We last saw them getting shot and cursing the gods while the survivors reloaded and more cobblestones were being piled on the barricade. Now it was just we few friends of Baudelaire’s, straggling along a side-street, eyeing the empty windows suspiciously. Auberge had fallen asleep in his cups behind a barricade. We looked like four sportsmen who had lost their dog, their duck, and their dignity. The aleady long day had gotten very long indeed.
“Follow me, my men, to the very barrow of our ignorance, the whited ground of our being, the veritable plot of is and is not. We must in the meantime, however, trade these outrageous rifles for regular shovels, and be content to store our warrior selves in M. Foulcault’s garden shed next to the flats of unplanted purple pansies–lest some passing gendarme feel his legal heart blip an uncivil alert at our morbid trooping past his assigned lamppost. Let us study war no more! That is work for students, not poetasters. Let us learn what peace may yet greet us in the plot of is and is not! Not the plot, swealter, and sweat of the farmer’s planted lot, his earnest endeavors so necessary for our daily bread; let us delve into another dirt, a lower and more august realm of realty. Hush! I see the shock on your faces: how can we abandon our marching for soiling ourselves with soil-work? Follow me, my mazed men, to that rough and ready country that refuses all further banishment. Walk with me into the mystery! Creep into the steeping night with me, and crawl under the crepe slipcover of a maggoty grave. For Death shall be our drinking-companion this night, no less a spectre than Death himself! Come with me, and bow before his barbèd helm. Rumor is rife that he favors a Rhinish draft….”
Aug 192011
Ready for adventure, we trooped toward the graveyard, the dirty shovels more alert on our shoulders than our mint-new rifles had been. Baudelaire was in the lead, his spirits undiminished as if we were still marching against Aupick’s mortality. His snub pipe stuck out jauntily from his gripping teeth as he strode along frowning.
“Bonadventure, have we a raspy file among us?”
“Claude may have one.”
“Claude?”
“An hostler who took up with us when we stole cupcakes from his rival’s brother’s royalist bakery. We almost lost him on our side-excursion to the wine shop.”
“These shovels must be sharp–we delve straight down to Hell tonight.”
“They shall be devil’s teeth, chief.”
“They will have to be!”
Baudelaire went back to sucking his pipe ruminatively, a bawdy song exhaling rhythmic smokes from his flared nostrils.
* * * * *
Some time later, we could see the sun, an engorged red bulb, dripping an ichorous blood wax over endless fields of gravestones and haughty tombs. Night was fast arriving, and we turned into a particular graveyard through the stricken screech of a pair of serviceable but rusted iron gates. Down a few alleys, and around the base of a gallows-tree hill, Baudelaire halted, raising his small wan hand in silence and spitting against the flagstones of the pathway. The sound of Claude’s file, singing in Theophile’s hands against the bishop’s-hat edge of his shovel, was the only sound to be heard; even the ravens had quieted at our approach, their black wings held close as solemn cloaks.
Soon, even Claude’s heavy file fell silent. We all looked toward Baudelaire, who stood before us as simply as a child waiting for instructions.
“This is my Father’s hallowed plot.”
With an open palm, Baudelaire indicated an area of hardened earth wild with weeds. It had the uncared-for look of a beggar’s teeth, and indeed the grave-marker was broken and discolored. The poor fellow buried here had been on the losing end of the fight.
“Through who knows how many randy readings of my Mother’s diaries, I have made my deductions and determinations. Here lie the forsaken bones of my Father. Dig! culprits of a kind (my kind); sullen step-children of night and the sourceless void, of a godless existence, a world unknown to men and woman of the daylit life. Dig! For here is buried treasure–the deleted past.”
And so we dug, turning the turf up like ploughmen of yore, looking for Pere Baudelaire’s bones. And sure enough, soon enough, in shallows still yellowy clay, we hit paydirt. It was no ordinary coffin we wantonly uncovered. It was a silver coracle created to surf eternity. Doubled hearts, melded together like romantically poured honeymoon pancakes, stood out still shining–a gravure image achingly unearthed.
Baudelaire himself split the oyster shell with his timid spade. There was the ratty cassock he had so often described, and on his dessicated chest, a gilt crucifix the size of crossed dildoes. Baudelaire, without hesitation, hoisted the corpse up and out of its rotted lair of degraded silks and goose feathers–and sat his father’s remains upright against the deceptively inscribed headstone, which read: “Here lies one… as dull as the other one.”
“Bernard, the candelabra,” panted Charles, resting on one knee, his dandy’s outfit torn and wrenched askew by the labor.
Bernard brought out the grand candelabra nabbed from a looted Knob Hill condominium (a newly innovated real-estate designation popular in the ritzier quarters of gay Paris). Soon enough there was a ghastly light over us all, as if an inverted spider’s legs had been set on fire. We stood before the staved-in hole–quiet and tired before a newly reunited father and son. We waited for Baudelaire to catch his breath.
“This begins the catechism, kids,” he said at last. And thus began the midnight inquisition–an inquisition into all the awkward, makeshift liaisons, lessons and mistakes of fatherhood. An inquest without let, nor, ultimately, redemption.
And there we were, disheveled semi-soldiers heavy with sweat and dejected at the fate of our abandoned rebellion. We had finished with the stolen champagne and with our ragged renditions of the Marseilles hours ago, our shirts untucked and our mangled boots thrown in the cooling grass. Still, we remained with Baudelaire and his crazy cause. Fighters without fealty or ideals, we were still Charles’ Charlatans. Somehow, I think, we knew that war is a matter between fathers and sons. There would be no release from duty until day was done.
* * * * *
Dawn found “Papa” buried again as we had found him, and all of us departed, in separate directions, in solemn silence.
Aug 192011
Evil Interludes section heading.
Aug 192011
What is in your power, what candle sways in your dim glimmer, dear absinthe, to make the clearest head see farther than its native commission? Amber oracles, jaded membranes vibed to the gibes–not of this war-lost world–but to the celestial joke, the fascinated flabbergaster, the which in the quizzical widget–the maybe in the byplay twixt man and all the rotten gods that laugh at us from the hollow portal of their gun-grey heaven.
Absinthe! Granular lave for a fascinated tongue! How you bless and stupefy–framing my meditations in oblivion. On what authority do you erase my grace? I sample a pull of your muds, and struggle to a stratosphere made of my own torn veins; another cup, and my brain has sheened to lead, a dull semi-protruding orb held in a Cro-Magnon’s skull. Soon, I am nothing but stone; rolled, doomed stone. Whatever of soul or spirit persists and operates, does so without connection to my bludgeoned body, my desecrated nest you have drowned in your six ounces of sipped infamy, absinthe.
Now the experiment takes on a tone of the eternal–the longed for, the real.
Aug 192011
We were out strolling in the Montparnasse and came across a bedraggled charwoman sweeping a stoop. Beside her, on the dirty pavement, laid a bundled baby tucked into a woven basket. Charles pulled great clouds of thought in through his windblown stogie and narrowed his eyes. He paused, addressing the tired woman with his eyebrows as if to ask permission to examine the “little beast” in the basket before us, as he invariably called all children. With an exhausted shrug, the woman consented non-committaly.
“Look at it,” he instructed me. I dutifully leaned over the bundle, adjusting my inspector’s monocle. The babe, a male, had undone is little green blanket with a sweaty miniature manliness, and now lay exposed to the sun like a little Greek god. Charles’ face bent over beside mine. Instantly, the child’s face became angry, or more accurately, perplexed. Vulnerable, bawling.
“Let us deposit this vile littleness in the nearest ashcan, at once,” Baudelaire suggested.
“Good God, Charles, why not stake the boy out on a pentagram with knitting needles dipped in vinegar and have done with it?”
“It,” continued Charles, not granting the living boy before us even the minor honor of its gender, “is not yet worth the trouble. All it has done so far with life is suck and shit.” He pulled a slow grey cloud in through wetted lips. “Surely this other creature sweeping her life away would be relieved if her little burden were to suddenly disappear. In fact, perhaps she could be persuaded to pay us a small fee, which we could then dedicate to Bacchus at The Bonnie Brit.“
He paused again, unwilling to give away any deeper purpose he might have had motivating this monstrous proposal. Keeping my composure, I decided to play his game, and retained an unfazed demeanor.
“A mother with no love for her child? Well, I suppose you have some experience to rest your judgment upon.” I laughed, a bit feebly, I must admit, not entirely liking my own humor in this moment. There was a sense of dislocation about the entire scene, as if it were the result of some unbidden recollection, rather than simply a sequence of spontaneously self-generating events.
“Mother… mother…” Baudelaire mused, puffing diffidently. He seemed almost amused by my having so cavalierly brought up so disconcerting a topic. “Ha ha, yes, indeed, I have some experience with such mothers, Bonadventure. Indeed I have. You have cheered me considerably. Perhaps you are not yet entirely without utility. Come, let us retire to The Bonnie Brit, and my Maman’s latest check will fill our cups!”
“But, what of the infant before us?”
“Today shall be his second birth day, and for the present, I shall give him the entire benefit of my dubious wisdom.” So saying, Baudelaire stooped most gently beside the child, solicitously handing his cigar to me to spare the boy the fumes. Baudelaire cupped his hand around the tiny ear and whispered something indistinct to the bawling babe. I could make out nothing of the words, which indeed sounded much like the baby’s babble, only in a lower register. Save the last thing that he said, and which may have been addressed more to himself than to the child, although Baudelaire’s gaze still rested on the miniature features.
“I, too,” he said softly, “have a mother.”
And the child had, mysteriously enough, ceased to cry.