“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.
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