How many times had Baudelaire put us in horror, or in ecstasy, with his vivid recollections of Africa—the crimson continent, as he called it, for the sake of the bloody sunsets and the perennial overcast of the red-leaved trees in Mauritius, as if he had examined all that was before him through the thin skin of a wound.
Under shadows so black that they are violet, thin men of dust collapse, giant eyes cast to the horizon, where the light will eventually escape them. But during the day there is no thought of this abandonment, only thought of the sun itself, huge and disproportioned, dispensing a vulvar vapor over everything, where desires and regrets condensed in the limitless afternoons. Their love of the aimless, their contentedness, stand out as sovereign in this atmosphere. As though in a painting of Eugene Fromintin, the contemplative and the violent are conjoined; the barbaric parades and travesties of justice that pass daily under foreign eyes in those extraordinary climes are but dissolute pages torn from some gigantic child’s album of nightmares. The dervish and the slave-trader, the stun of colors impastoed upon the retinal nerve, all whirl and wound the senses like knives and feathers.
Also, there was an incident of bravery; the ship was scraping the Cape, winds—intemperate with Indian prayers—bore a confused language from the graves of sailors.
The sea, it seems, had meditated upon their destruction. For long after the midnight pipes were pocketed, the rum toddies swallowed with a final, harsh gratitude in roughened throats, the passengers long abed and dreaming of missing their steps on familiar stairs, and the nightwatch had joked itself to silence, the only two men aboard who stood awake was the man at the helm, and the bowman looking for rocks with his nose extended into the dark. It was then that the sea began to uncurl its watery parchment and whisper into the solemn sails the story it had concocted, not above, but within the star-obscuring clouds: the dismasting of the Croesseus had begun.
“Ho, Francois!” cried the bowman. “A foggy patch is being blown clear.”
“Kurt,” replied the helmsman. “I see it not. Whereabouts?”
“Port ahead! Squinney, ye blind bastard.”
Francois squinnied; strange shapes, like those sculptors see in an uncut marble mass appeared to him—the blank potential of all shapes, all figures, all portents blew cold before him.
“Ay, I see it. ‘Tis like a beard blown sidewise without a face to hang upon.”
“The wind’s turned about and coming from a bad place.”
“Get the others up here! It’ll be the Devil’s own squall.”
“All? All the new bait as well?”
“Hurry, damn your eyes. There’s treachery in the air.”
Baudelaire was roused with a head-punch, and thinking himself under fraternal attack again, withdrew a sinister knife he had procured since his last attack, and sliced open the palm of the mate who’d summoned him. Kurt gripped his hand shut hard, but refused to cry out.
“I’ll settle with you later. There’s a squall out like to blow us to Kingdom Come.” Kurt shouted into the unlit hold: “All hands on deck!”
His first storm at sea! The boat moaned like a whore in labor. The night poured its mysteries and anguished vengeance on these poor representatives of hubris-haughty humanity who could discern nothing beyond the weak stabs and rays of their wildly swinging lanterns. And Charles leapt into that night! With a scrap of verse in his trim waistcoat, and the knife kept ready up his sleeve, and the sailor who would need but a single second in the upended dark to shove our young friend into oblivion, and no witnesses and nothing ever to be said!
Yet he scrabbled along the unfamiliar rigging, and threw his curses into the black void of creation as the crew furled every scrap of canvas that still hung its ass into the arriving gale.
“Ho, matey! Off the cross-tree! Nay, let it go! The wind’s too injurious for any man!”
“Down ye come, Charlie-boy! This one’s lost; there’s a crack i’ the grain!”
And Baudelaire shimmied, limber as a chimp, to the deck. They were to lose the mainmast, which meant hard sailing ahead, but the winds were pushing the ship nearly sideways just then—and if that canvas but once filled with water, the whole ramshackle show would capsize.
“Grab that sway of ropes, you three. We need to break her off this way, and not that, otherwise the other mast’ll go too!”
An amputation at the thigh, and nothing less than that, is what it was, with Baudelaire taking a lead among the men that hauled the dark corpse of the tree overboard, free and clear and carefully into what wicked seas! A wrong judging of the tide or impinging wind, and all that bolt of lumber would come back into the ship like a needle whittled by Satan to take ’em all straight down to Hell. But it was managed; it was managed by Baudelaire, and with no mean skill!
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.