By Gregg Glorie
[a.k.a. Gregg G. Brown]
a novel inspired by the life of Chas. Baudelaire
Birds of intermitted bliss
Singing in the night's abyss
~~Wallace Stevens
Published by
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
(732) 970-8409
gregglory.com
Acknowledgement
Please blame Dan Weeks for this effusion, who poured a little toilet water on the brune tinder in my flowerbox.
Baudelaire bent beneath his lamp intently. I quote him:
The title of my intensest work, Flowers of Evil, says everything. I am all declared in this paradox. It was gestated with the patience of an elephant's child, which labors 14 months in the womb before its gigantic birth, the size of a black coup caught in a rain of elemental perfumes. I am positive it is worth all the lies I have told to see it to print; it is also, I may mention, almost worth all the truths I have had to suffer to bring it off in rage and patience. People... their faces go up in flame when they read it. And yet, they deny me everything. All the glory that they were so willing to load down Satan with, they leave me bereft of, although they declare me his disciple. Hypocrites! I am tired, even, of seeing through their terrible, tepid hearts--pale as the starved spit of a saint! Willess imbeciles. The virtue of my trepanned treatise lies exactly in its faults, and these may all be summed up in one singular, monstrous phrase: it is honest!
So my friend commented to his maman in 1849, writing under a shaky lamp on trembling parchment, in an absolute livid fury the night before he was to stand trial in front of the justice of France on charges of what were, in retrospect, irrefutable immorality. His brow was like an egg, with a caricature of hatred drawn in shadowed lines above the black, bleak coals of his eyes.
"Let my poems revenge me after my death!"
In his agitation, Charles had knocked his bottle of squid ink to the floor.
"Yes! stain the globe with death!"
He smiled at the wicked thought.
"Yes, after all, why not? Why not the death of all of France for this effrontery? How can they be so prodigal of their good credit in the eyes of posterity? What credit have they accrued through just acts? None! I witness it! I have staked my life on my poems, so why shouldn't they?"
He laughed and sent the black bottle sailing at a cat, his Jeanne's Chuchu, with the toe of his shoe.
And to think, the other day I heard de Banville, waiting for his mistress by the theater stagedoor, in the mode of the poete mal, attest to me that, "of all the young poets of today... it is Baudelaire alone who lives, although he is dead!" I was livid at his insolence. What right had he to speak of Baudelaire at all, now that the great man was dead--this peon who had hated him so much in life? That I did not strike him is to me an eternal shame. And yet, I confess, I was such a coward, so much of a hollow spirit, so empty of heart, that I merely concurred when he went on or averr, "he, he is the one one looks to, the one I read at midnight for dark consolation when I find my trivial life too hateful."
How many hours have I spent turning the honored pages of that sacred book of his myself, seeking just such pardon of the passing hours! In that heavy binding always on my table were the impeccable sonnets and chansons of Hell, written in blood by the Prince Himself.
Time and again, Charles had railed at me about how the poet is the most debauched and blessed of men. A sinner with the conscience of a saint: a god with a velvet hide in incessant need of stroking. 'It would not be a vice, if it were not attractive.' Indeed, and we would be liars to say that at all times we stayed away from its low, red, embracing light that stains our features in a supple glow, as if we could witness the birth of our own souls from the mass confusion of sensations life bombards us with. Charles would shudder at his own feelings of attraction, at the strange enchantment fervent prayers might throw over a murder to make it more... delicious. On such subjects, such sensations of the innermost man, he could discourse for hours, and time with him would pass away like a dream until only the dawn and exhaustion would put an end to his explorations. I would then excuse myself and search feebly for the door out of his apartments, with only the vaguest sense of which planet I was on, while at my back, he would laugh like an infernal incarnation, instructing me still:
"Sleep is death, Bonadventure. Let the absinthe uncurl your nerves into this faultless blue sky, the same one that will shine down on you in your tomb when your friends gather to tell spiteful tales about your existence one last time to your insensate face!"
A supreme and unnerving lack of sentimentality, that was his gift. Dull, regular and virtuous as a tax-clerk in that respect. But, ah! How he yearned to find something of goodness in his constitution... but he wouldn't lie about the fact that he didn't! A tiger looking in a mirror sees a tiger. A dandy staring into that silver abyss, sees the dwarfish agglomeration of all of humanity's shortcomings. He might stare for hours, telling me, or, more likely, his priviledged self, "I am the only object of my own affections, my love stains only myself..." And then, perhaps after a pause of ten minutes or more, having undergone some disturbing revolution in his thoughts, with a ragged breath, he would annunciate in a harsh whisper, "beast, fauve!"
"Gautier! Is it better to gaze with a pitiless eye at a scab, or to tell yourself you are in the best of health?"
"Please, Charles, it is a disgusting thought. Would you care to see my new verse romance? Dangers, thrills! A real cliffhanger."
Then, as though I were not there, as if his voice issued from the throne of God in imperishable rectitude:
"This man searches for his vices away from home."
"By the deity, what do you mean?"
"In my heart are Abyssinias and lions, terrors, and the thief-cheats of virtues, exchanging, by their exact machinations, curses across the burning churchyard of my soiled veins."
You see the sort of frustrating friend he could be. And this sort of abuse, or insight (I could never keep straight which it was, not even to myself!) was interrupted only by bouts of the most desolate, creaking sobriety, absolute dustbowls of interior work, when not so much as a sigh would escape the man. And that, after you had traveled all day to be in his company, at his express invitation!
The distractions and miseries of Paris afforded him his only outlet at such times. His sadness, which made the grand chandelier in his rooms project black beams at noon, was greater, and perhaps nobler, than the crepes and sorrows of his contemporaries. He was sad for all men by being sad for himself alone, the imperfections of his coarse body, the 'smashed assets of my rotten soul.' Yes, here on the Rue Voltaire, lived a martyr of all mankind! It is true, my friends.
Sainte-Beauve, that constipated critic, declared that he had discovered in the sadness that spurted from Baudelaire's pages, 'the final symptom of a sick generation.'
If only we could all bear our portion of that sickness as incandescently as did Baudelaire, perhaps we would be free today of this deadweight of guilt that pulls our tired skeletons into the slough of despond, while still no less animated by the muscles that sink us, and yet cry out to be transformed into wax feathers and transcendent wings!
Here was the clairvoyant, the first seer who operated through the passionate analysis of that classic 19th century Parisian emotion: Remorse. He was such a theological innocent, that he did not hesitate to discover himself on the cross, broken and exalted. Gautier told me of his 'interior camera eye' which he deemed manly. "Pitiless to others, he nailed himself as well." First he would help the soldiers put up the unrepentant thieves, then he would ascend himself to the nexus of suffering consciousness.
The great erotic roarings for that slut, Jeanne Duval! A circus of sex and sin, the clasp of bodies ignorant of death. And yet, no man was more intensely aware of his ultimate demise; the disposition of his eternal estate was, for him, a constant pressure he continually sensed, as if mercury were filling the room, squeezing his lungs, shining at his lips ....
Oh, I saw it all myself with Rimbaud! Arthur! Strapping and lambent. Unable to be comforted. Risking, and willing to risk all of that penetrating intelligence to discover a single tingling truth that no thought could unseat. His facility to apprehend made him suspiscious of his every apprehension. And he did not trust God to care for what he had created....
"The work is... difficult.... My comfort is that it is useless."
And then, after enough years had passed, he would no longer smile, even at his own evil wit.
Yes, he was the first to see: that if we are to understand heaven, whose intimations form our only sense of sequence and worth in this daisychain of misery that afflicts all living consciousness, it must be, will only be, through our senses. His doctrine of correspondences, where sight and hearing intermingle their horn and ivory gateways to the sullen soul, that was the first step: to test the equipment of our senses by overloading them, to see and find out what they really consist of at bottom. What is the exact quality of sin? What are the furry sensations of virtue? What is the color of hope? Perversions, condemnations, every experience seared to its uttermost, only then would the harp of the self be tuned to catch the vibrational beauties of the immanent or transcendent without being liable to deceptions! Revelation has not been vouchsafed to us.
This is the scientific method he was the first to establish in poetry. Absolutely.
He had his cold delights, like many men.
Holding his enormous head, and strutting before the fireplace like a conscience-stricken peacock. Always in fine wares, and I daren't say a word against him, or he'd... he'd.... Well, he'd make me look into my own heart so far, I didn't want to live any more. He could turn an evil phrase! How he knew me, without being a whore himself, I don't know. Vile lashings of that spiked tongue! Ah! My heart was scissored by his whips! How did he ever manage it, knowing me like he'd been through every degradation with me, spitting at my pimp... and... other things. He would say, 'Love is the reason.' But no love ever spoke like his.
The next moment it was all "devotion without content, oh my miserable dear, it is the finest thing under the sun! For you I pour these roses over with my blood. Your masses of hair bury me, and, like a vampire of desire, I arise...!"
Such things. The erotic and the gnostic compellingly combined. I could... stand on his words and see the world. That's what it was. That's what it was like. No one's ever done that to me, before or since.
"Hand me that wine. There's a love. Put your pants on."
Without the incantation of a formula, there is no science. Lacking science, how can one have a poetry of mists and amulets, razors and daisies? If a heart should miss a beat, but then return to its effortful circulation, the circumlocution of its everyday existence, that petty farce and sham, we are brought to a new knowing of the heart, an awareness that it exists. To stop hearts, that is my experiment. If they start back up again.... Well, I tried. My own one day will forget itself.
How to see reality but through enchantment? How to create a vision that enchants yourself? This is the only difficulty: to be made to believe by words alone, so that reality may be completely blotted out, as in an opium stupor, or lonely Poe upon his lover's tomb chanting verities, and then to dismiss the fiction that has dismissed the world. Ah! That must be what it is like to be alive for a moment. An ocean of feeling--eviscerated!
Is this sanity? Yes, if properly punctuated.
Attend to life, and then depart it. This is how one cultivates the 'voice from beyond the tomb.' Velvet weltanschauung!
"Nerval, how shall we blend all effects, all expressions?"
"I forget."
"Do you really? As a child, I was too new to forget anything; everything was too close, too sudden to forget. I had yet to be touched by that magic wand, Nostalgia. One needs a death."
"Now I remember."
"That must be a poem!"
Ah! Young Franscois has put away the plates at last; the burnt bits of bacon, always too crisp or too flaccid, fried eggs solid as Gibraltar, cream cheese, mushroom caps, soup thin as a saint's blood, a wicked spray of asparagus that mocked my inoperant manhood--yes I have advanced to that grim age, Marlene, and even my animal interest has waned along with my wang--some gruyere and jam. A delight, really. And for the topper, a dollop of Nougatine and a sallow slice of dry cake. Hmm.
And now I have returned to my garden, taken up like the taming of Africa by my wife and old Jacques (old even to us!). A new trainline encroaches on our simplicity in the dead distance, sighing to a halt at that satanic gingerbread house concoction of a stop, which I can only think of as the fiendish application of a little girl's nightmarish dreams of a house brought stunningly and wrenchingly to powdered life. Ech! Jacque's one concession to barbarity out here in the garden is due to me--a bonfire pit where I roast my bones in some old man's prelude of Hell, and which I enjoy inordinately even in the swelter of August. I collapse on my old rattan chair, once so new I thought it would never be of service, like the rigid blankness of babies; you never imagine that they could grow into something as useful as a prostitute or an amanuensis. Yet, I have seen both emerge from their swaddling clothes in my passage on earth, and that is another delightful meal for me--of my memory.
Let me see--yes, in this ratty stack of manuscripts, here is all the soiled heart of that genius and compatriot of ours, Baudelaire. Before the bonfire, which is gratefully releasing my knees from the purgatory to which they have been condemned daylong, is the right place to read one last time, such words of fire:
"'Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.' Too true, too often! Our eyes are clotted with cancerous growths, we plunge into the abyss not knowing one thing from the next. Thinking to do good, we execute the innocent; harping on virtue, we innoculate the guttersnipe against reforms; blessed by a bounty of spirit or nature, we waste both and grumble at our spendthrift style! It seems to me that the only sure delight can come, must come, through the certainty of sacrilege; to know the good and to knowingly disobey. To have the mind of Jesus and the perversity of the Devil. For, by doing so, we at least know what we are doing, and are not just rockets let loose in the mist. In this way, all of our morality has the utilitarian angle of an angel's mirror: we see ourselves, not as we would be (as occurs in the instructive mirror of church) but as we are, by our willful deformity from the indestructible elegance set before us.
"Woman--take the savage in her natural state: her lyricism is that of the bestial mass, the 'beast with two backs.' There is no exaltation of the essential self in such an act, there is only a total and self-degrading abasement before another, an acknowledgement of need, an exchange of uses, as at an agricultural fair. It is the sick bargain between the abject gambler and the croupier--one agrees to give up all he has; the other, equally debased, agrees to accept the debt. A disgusting exchange! Nothing is given, all is hard trading and walleyed vision. Despicable!
"We sex where we excrete. God has jammed our noses in the foul joke; the moaning misnomer named 'love.'
"George Sand is one of these women, crying like a mounted hen about her glorious degradation. 'I have humiliated the men by taking my pleasure with them! haha!' That they have turned her pages, or cut into her supple fonts does not appear to have crossed that great empty gap she calls her 'mind, invincible and indivisible.' The artist never tears himself into needs, petty dramas or lazy lapses of the integral vision; his abysses are interior only! He never comes out to play. He remains maestro and intimate only with himself. The stage of life is a sham which never attains anything of interest; copulation is the entry under another's proscenium--the artist never leaves the green room of himself.
"All love is prostitution of the purer impulse. The more a man sates his sex on the arts, the less randily he hankers after the mottled artifact (of the woman, the man, or the child). If one is to choose degradation as a sensation, an artistic experience and type or route of salvation from dim ennui, only the ideal of degradation will serve the turn. Congress with Satan, fly the church perch of the limited self in the direction of homely Hades; invoke the delights of the damned, and tell yourself that you are going down, down, down--all the way. To seek God carries the insecurity of a lust for promotion in another's incomprehensible eyes; patience, humility, and a divine sign are all required passwords for this tourney of the soul. Uncertainty of the limitless light! I renounce the doubtful path--although it rise to Heaven itself!
"Every kind word is a kiss in the mist, uncertain of where its finally planted; every curse condemns with surety."
I put my old feet closer to the flaring conflagration, causing the glittery cinders to crack and grind.
"To lose one's way in the sewers of the flesh; all the annals of love throughout time are but the jottings of sanitation superintendents.
"Strip down to your virginity, then lave it with gravesores. This is the only likely turnpike."
The paper browns at its edges and sashays in the updraft before turning a double somersault and crumpling to its utter destruction. It is so beautiful to watch the light take away the inky weight of the words, their dirty intrusion onto the page. Now another page flies, fumbles, and folds. It seems that, as an artist, I have turned to burning. The beautiful soul-croaks of my friend--chasing oblivion once again (and, I pray, finally) in the flames.
Here in this garden bonfire, I reverse the heroism of embattled Byron. Instead of pulling the boiling organ from the conflagration, I here consign to fire the scattered pages that Charles had described to me one day in his last illness as
His apartment on the Rue de Salleon was like himself and called forth feelings and memories by their departure. A sort of permanent state of premature nostalgia. To actually be there, in the room, was a deliquescent form of absence....
An infinity of absence was the only decor, a plaster and candelabra evocation of staring at the sea--that intense feeling of nothingness such immensity commands. He stood, a dandified shard of driftwood, in soft shadows where the uncertainties of the candleabra's candles overlapped. In the center of the room, surrounded by six thigh-high red votive candles, stood a dusky dame stripped to her waist. She had been a secret obsession of Baudelaire's for some time, and one his whim was determined to comprehend completely.
He addressed Remarque, a 'poet of debauch,' as he styled himself in those days:
"Remarque, do you not find Jeanne attractive, the whore?"
Remarque turned to Baudelaire, affecting indifference, and answered:
"She'll do."
"I find in her the cruel rumor of a lion's beauty. Her neck alone is a downspout of godly bloods, always as hot as a slap below the arched frontiers of her nostrils.... Notice how the curve of darkness lingers into a comma, the invitation to experience for yourself, again perhaps, the very essence of all scents... and where would that lead? Oh, she is dangerous! Such a city of desires is impossible to fix on any map, and must be continually re-explored in the blindness of the bed."
Remarque was becoming sensibly aroused by this description.
"Well, it is as you say.... She...."
Baudelaire abruptly turned his stare across the room and said, in the most agreeable tones:
"What do you think, Jeanne? Do you like your portrait? It is fleshed out in Remarque's heavy stare. Do you like him? What do you think of him? An intense young man by all accounts."
Jeanne, undisturbed, drew deeply on her opium cigarette. The rolling paper and the herb combined to make the simple room smell of orange blossoms.
"Oh, I cannot stand this," cursed Remarque, and in a single swift motion stood before us, disrobed. He strode toward Jeanne, who exhaled with an unimpeded ease, and looked... I could not tell where her eyes were directed, they were too heavily lidded. Either to myself or Baudelaire. Was there an appeal in her glance? To this day I am uncertain. But Remarque shifted her petticoats--always of the lightest available material for such garments with Jeanne--and mounted her from the rear.
"Nudity is, of course, such a perfectly pitched expression," said Baudelaire, turning to catch my attention as I was bolted to the sofa at the sight of the extraordinary coupling going on, "of boredom."
Sixteen, ultrathin, and wickedly alert, Charles loitered at my oily sandalwood doorway. Under his breath he was humming his alma mater; "for the first and last time," he informed me. That day was the day of his baccalaureate examinations, and he had creeped by on the strength of his graceful Greek.
"Do not give me a name, even in your own imagination," I warned him when he asked. "I've seen too many young someones evaporate in the cipher of myself." He said nothing, but lit a little cigarette very elegantly, tossing one for me when I licked my lips. That's when I showed him into the recesses of the house and motioned him through the great red door, the equator of so many young men's sexual explorations.
In my dreams, my heart opens up to me like an egg filled with tar-colored snakes. Last night, consumed and tormented by the acrid stink of my own existence, I lay shelled in my stale linens for several hours, listening to the hiss of the gas jets in the streets, the occasional off-clop of a slow horse bringing his drunken master home for a sleep in the stable. Finally, my ears began to hear that null sound that accompanies coming unconsciousness. In a moment, I had opened my inner eyes on a pander of my acquaintance, wearing quite as bright a yellow vest as Huysmans sports, and posing affably before an impossibly ornately carved set of doors done in a darkly-stained heartwood. I felt the dread of familiar welcome in his smile.
"Monsieur, for ash Wednesday we have something special." I passed in, avoiding contact with his sallow extended hand, and coughed at the heavy incense that laced the parlour in a cheap attempt to disguise the heavy opium use among the prostitutes. Fine ladies, each and every one--I will swear by my champing blood--of inestimable value if, to unbearable boors, of questionable virtue.
In my hand, rank with unchaste sweat, I bore a goldleaf and cerulean tome of my own postulant blooms, my Flowers of Evil, which I have just had back from my grandly deliquescing publisher. My heart was once again my own, in my own hands, whole and en-tomed, even if still largely confused.
Around me on the walls were colored placards of the dead: erotic paintings decorating this hydra's lair of inconsequential desire; mocking rhymes of lush lust mated in couplets beneath depictions of cool couplings in exotic circumstances. A Raja and his elephant quickly consummating in Piccadilly, a lily-stockinged schoolgirl engaged in a minuet of dry kisses with her brother's red toy soldier while an erstwhile papa beams approval as warmly as a bribed mayor in the country. These things, dusty talismans of bygone urges, along with their antique tongue-twister limericks, gave me the impression that I was the last living man standing among the maudlin mementos of a morgue.
I turned my attention from the walls. Before me, grand as an odalisque, sat the mistress of the establishment, or Madame. A slab of rich Italian marble laid between us, set with fine ball olives, licorice-stick cocks, vaginal aspics, and lead goblets brimmed with difficultly procured blood-wines. I looked directly into her eyes, which had a vanished aspect I could not quite understand. Then I addressed her, and there was vermillion in my tone.
"Mother....?"
"Son," she commanded. "The book."
Her hand, stiff as pinewood, shot out from her spider's body of gathered-and-stitched pitch velvets, demanding the release of what, after all, contained all of my self and manhood. The depth and fatigue of my hesitation had all the qualities of a surgeon running his thumb meditatively over the scar he inflicts.
My mother smiled. It was the second smile I had been given that evening.
"Jeanne..." I asked, hesitating even more, "is she?" My question was almost an admission.
"Jeanne is not... otherwise engaged. No, not at all."
At this, the living vision of a waterfall appeared in the doorway behind and beyond my mother; this waterfall, this downfall, I could only call Jeanne. Mother now, as I looked away, reached out to touch the delicate binding of my skyey book.
"Charles...." Jeanne began.
Her vision mined my eyes for a response. In myself I felt the unleashing and echoing register of an intimate calamity, as if I were about to betray a family murder to the gendarmes. The load of my book dropped (or was it lightly tugged?) into my mother's under-girding hands. I glanced rapidly from face to face: Mother to Jeanne and then back again, imposing my own desperate pleas upon their soft and approving countenances that now alternated with the speed of a shutter flickering.
Yes, perhaps here, in the final graveyard of desire, where cash and sex intersect and power and love are plain upon every face in dim confinement, I had found a momentary harbor for the exploded rubbish of my soul.
Here was both the taste for death and the distaste for love, balanced for a single second on the soft cone of my inoperative desire. For you see, I could not... not with Jeanne... in Jeanne.
"Yes, yes, yes, you little wretch, I must have a fresh bidet twice daily; the water in this one's thick as the skin of curdled cream! I am accustomed only to roses and cloves--and coolness in August! The water should not feel as if it had just drooled out of a giant's ear; it must be sweet, and cool, and nice. Right, Juliette? Do you have it? Good. Now, run! or Jeanne will whack you like the dirty boys like to do, you little harlot. What will the Madame say if you forever disappoint even us poor prostitutes? Run! "
"Yes, Jeanne. Cool water in August; it will be as you say. But, but...."
"Out, you scullery whore. You disturb an artiste!"
"Yes, Jeanne. But... I think there is a note pinned to your door. A gentleman left it at the front desk earlier today."
"A gentleman? And a note? Stop where you are; do not run away from your mistress. This... gentleman... did he ask for me? Particularly for me?"
"No; he just wanted to leave the note. That's what Marie told me."
"He wanted to leave a note, and not come up to my rooms? That's a touch strange. He did say the note was for me particularly and not for one of the other ladies?"
"Oh yes, Jeanne. I can read, and it has your name on it."
"Hmm... imagine you being able to read. How you managed it, I am sure I will never know. Did you recognize the man? Did you see him?"
"I saw him when he was leaving. I forget his name, but he was the one with the 'evil eye.'"
"Julliette! Forget your gypsy ways, you are a French girl now. You don't want to go back to the orphanage, do you?"
"Oh no, no, no, Jeanne! Do not let them drag me away! Not there! Not again! I couldn't bear it!"
"Well, Madame won't care how pretty you are if your keep up with those witchy superstitions. Men in Paris will shrink from your caresses, no matter how sultry. And that will not be good for business."
"Yes. I know you are right. I shall not mention the 'evil eye' again, Jeanne." She paused. "Thank you, Jeanne."
"Yes, well, enough of that, what else can you tell me about this gentleman?"
"Oh, he was handsome, but pale, very pale, like a corpse laid out; the corpse of a prince or something. And very correct in his way of talking. Just like a real gentleman. But... but...."
"But what?"
"But, he had the saddest smile I ever saw, as if everything he loved, well, like he could see it, but it was all on the other side of a terribly big piece of glass. Like sometimes the way the really beautiful tropical fish look out at you in the new aquarium on the Place de la Glancee. Like they could see the wild ocean, but knew all the lands of the world lay between them and home."
"Charlie," Jeanne said to herself. "It must be Charlie."
His noble head resembled a soft-boiled egg. Already, at twenty-six, I could see that he would bare his soul and go bald, as all men with virile brains must do. My Baldy-laire. So ridiculous, so childlike, mewling between my legs. How I laugh to remember his aesthete's ways! Wickedness for him was all a mental sin. I never shamed him with tales of my naughty doings, unless to give him a rise while we entwined. He worshipped my muscularity, the mayhem of my haunch. Still, he blushed at the barbaric blood that coursed through me--his 'dark, deadly Jeanne.'
His apartments were well-appointed. Although he pinched his pennies, for his mother and myself he spared no expense. And his compliments were always excessive and extravagant. But, to keep myself in lobster and champagne, I kept my other clients, some of them real men who would paw and conquer me. Baldy did know things a normal man would not; how to argue like a woman, for instance, infesting the memory with indelible barbs. He had an insight into the pleasures and punishments of my life a man would not ordinarily possess; he was like a sister, but with a prick. Days and nights of endless diatribe, morose reconsiderations of our relationship. Why kiss at all, since it so demeaned our beings to even need each other? That naked-headed man would put his vile mirror in your mind until the only escape was to capitulate to his perversities. His tongue inflicted paper cuts, and his restless mind encircled one's molten throat like piano wire.
But why was he late for our appointment this night? I will not admit to worrying about him. It's not as if I exactly enjoyed our battle of wills, but when one is used to pushing against Gibraltar, and instead finds the canvas wall of a circus tent.... Well, something is simply missing.
Now, mostly, when he was in one of his too-cruel moods, I would go toe-to-toe with him until my own desire began to rise. If I could not trick and twist him into the lagoon of our sunken sheets, I would hit the pavement, prowling for some nubile youth to degrade, or some perverse payee who would stoop to me and keep his yap shut, letting me close my eyes and allow me to thus be with my verbal warlock in silence.
We are all actors in our time; and, as a harlot, I have worn many masks in my nakedness. Our flesh gives us all we need for persuasive pretense. Every human maneuver is at our fingertips; every face floats before our own skull.
I can't for my Mistress be an illustrious Lion;
The soul of my Soul has bruised off all its luster.
The mocking Universe stabs with invisible glances,
And Beauty no longer flowers in my sad heart.
For a pair of slippers she has sold her soul;
And when the Bon Dieu giggles at such infamy
I am a Tartuffe, a hypocrite, a liar,
A sell-out, whoring away my author's dreams....
Despite this, you are content to bizarrely chat
Past midnight as we promenade down a ruined street;
In your head, your eyes turn down--a dying pigeon's--
Trained on the crimson rivulets torn by talons
Of paying Men who spit jiggers of semen
On your distant face--simple, poor and impure.
You are Famine in the dead of Winter
Constrained by poverty to lift your dress in the chilly air.
--My beautiful one, my everything, my richness,
My pearl, my light, my laughter, my suchness,
Here in my groin you are my vanquisher,
But in your two hands you re-heat my Heart's core.
Signed,
Anomie
The prick, swollen contortionist, turns up its oily face to his persecutor; there is a defect in its symmetry, the casual smoothness of its wrapper that was once so usual, unremarkable, pale and rosy. The deformed prick puckered its slim slit, took in a premonitory breath, and began, incredibly, to speak:
"Well, evil man, you have used me as a blind man uses his stick--thrust into every slimy obstacle in your periplum's path! Odysseus did not abuse his wily wits with such prodigal purposelessness as you have used me! A divining rod born to locate vile mud would be cleaner after 300 years of dirty village service than I am at the the end of one day in your pulpy hands! Benedicte! I grew with you, and as you grew, in modest shadowed compartments, listening to the pure mumbled buzz of your mother's voice above, your own answers polite and tame as an angel's. This occurred for many years. I was powdered and sweet to smell or look upon.
"Then, from I know not where, a heat, a black lamp, a rising lava, an untamed flame, a fire, began to creep and increase along my veins, one evening after prayers, under the clean linen; up from the fat base, where irritating hairs had only begun to appear that lapping spring, a cauterizing stream began its inevitable flow.--Ah! that night has been the end of all my days since!--Because of you above, and your contemptible lack of imagination! You could have sought out an iron collar, a spike of ice to finish the inferno roasting my pink hide, a snip with a scissors or even, meekly, like a priest, wool underwear would have done the trick and abolished this hazardous destiny you have embarked both of us upon!
"Simpleton!
"But, no! You became a creature of soft gloves and furtive arrondisments; quick showers and false perfumes. And all the time, I alone would be left to feel the fire. And when it came, in sheets of faces like the shroud of Turin, obliterating the horizon the way a fire races through the forest, leaping even faster uphill than down, high on' its own heatwaves, then--and then only!--you would turn your spoiled attentions to me, trying to dig myself a common grave in your thigh, or hiding behind the cool coins in your pocket for a minute's respite. You would uncover me, startled and turgid and scarlet as a new-baked loaf of cinnamon bread, to the frightful ices of the night air. A single moment of relief and reprieve that hurt almost as much as it satisfied! But even this relief was a lie, for no sooner had I stood naked beneath the wan moon's cynical scowl, than your hand was upon my throat in a wrestler's chokehold, as if you would tear me from the very root of your ugly being! A feat, by the way, which you never managed, and which would have been best for both of us--and I would be free at last from the omnipresent odure of merde.
"The lavender of your pomp, the plump of your palpating hand soon brought me off in a miasma of fetid regrets. I sank, a shucked and scabbed husk, back into the truncated winter-stubble. If this was all, I would have been satisfied, knowing how adulthood degrades the child, and how pleasure lives leavened with disaster. But, no. This was not the end, nor was it the worst of it. Each night like a vampire I arose, not to suck but to flood the world! And you, my shambling harness, were glib in your approaches, fine in your dandy's appurtenances--ties of newly drowned silkworms dyed black in the blood of Brahma bulls who died in rut, old with incestuous connections--a waistcoat of pomegranate, textured with the ruffing of pale Italian underaged hands, pointed shoes of the most uncommon cut and polished as a banker's glance.... All these and all this, just so you could stick me like a sopping candle-end into some skeleton's eye socket! Pocked debaucheries! Nights of imagined flight only, your soul never leaving, really, its nest of scars. Assignations of gaslamps, wet roads, and stained, undignified sofas. And all the time you held me like a runaway coal being danced across an unlighted room to be the firebucket.
"But now is when I have my satisfaction, my conclusion, my wild apotheosis. Do you feel the bramble-branch pulled through me every time you piss? Do you note the bruise-tinted discharge that chums the chamberpot like a fish-boat? Look at me! Look at what you have done to me! I am no longer the tender ribbon of pink that sat with you in the tub: I am moiled in distortions. My proud crown sags with the fatal lapses of a beached jellyfish. I, pouting dowser," and here the purpled prick, agitated by his passionate appraisal of our differing powers over our mutual fate, wept a single, large, yellow and grey-pearl tear and continued "...we, have gonorrhea!"
I will record here this one generous, or noble, impulse of the prick in this wayward dream of mine. And that charity consisted in diagnosing itself with a simple case of gonococcal urethritis, and not the virulent madness, the compact degradation and cancellation of future hopes a case of syphilis would prophesy. I have been to the doctor since this dream, a Dr. Revieu, and I have, indeed, gonorrhea and syphilis both.
I passed a paralytic syphilitic this morning on the street. After a few inquiries made of the house owners in whose gutter this human stump rotted, I discovered that the man, who appeared older than my own father had seemed to me as a child (and I was born in my father's sixtieth year!)--was only thirty four years of age, and wasn't kicked from his terrible stoop because, like Electra, he was the son of the house-owner.
Two days ago, I passed my eighteenth year.
From the quiet precincts of that sodden tomb to which I often find myself returning in yellow moonlight on the anniversary of an eve immortal to both monuments and their harried makers, I often imagine that I am hearing a voice: insistent, familiar, insidious.... A voice climbing out, uncoiling like a mist around the other stones of the deserted graveyard, so full of destroyed hopes. And then, I suddenly recall to myself those lines engraved on more than marble or the embarrassed red dead sandstone markers of the, well, the so thinly departed:
Confess to me, the excited living man,
What dread, like pleasure, can I expect
In this soulless old body
Deader than the dead?
Then, perhaps with recourse to a comforting pipeful of burning weed, I allow myself to see the tomb door before me again. This is where my living feet wander in search of life, doomed fool that I am! I realign my attention to that voice crawling from the tomb, an outer voice that undoes my more inner integral voice, that distant misty voice. I listen to the voice of that man who wrote those lines while still so desperately full of dread de vivre, and I hear the dry rattle of one of his exact and pedantic 'Lists of Dismissal' with which he would categorize all of human life that confronted him:
"I acknowledge those who go on telling the world who I am, who I was, after I have given up the task for a futility and a sin," began the copper door of the tomb turned to an unpolished green, almost as if its moldy angel were whispering. "To me, it is better to molder in the grave than talk about such nonsense. But, cursed with eternity, I have taken note of these 'helpers' after my demise. I acknowledge, of course, without the slightest hesitation or secret resentment, before any and all of my other future biographers, that founder of Baudelaire studies, and his industrious son, so busy among my papers, like restless rats making their nests in my embalmed thoughts, Jackie Creep and his kid, who knew me when I lived, and refused to publish me or alleviate my sufferings, or even to sit still for my endless tirades; perhaps they knew me best who saw me least and whose sympathy never actually extended to assistance. Also I acknowledge the admirable and cloudy Claude Pliede, whose trim texts refused to straighten out my crooked soul, but printed my deformities in fat exactitude for the cold examination of the world; my thanks. To U. S. Bandy-About, I give the nod; his pale glimmerings, so warm about my bones, were among the very first of many friendly maggots to come and keep me company. I appreciate the arrowlike help of the tidy misses of the Biblioteque Nationale, Conservateurs en chefs, Depts of Manuscripts, Divisions of Manuscrits Occidentaux, and their gofer colleagues and snappy staffs, Depts des Imprimes and Dept des Periodiques, for giving my biographers access to my nastiness, without which I would lie uncaressed and forgotten... until Judgement Day. I must record, as I sort through the assorted business cards (slipped through my tomb's mail-slot) in the moonlight, my abject gratitude to that lonely Monsieur Jerque Suffragette, who reminds boneheads of the whereabouts of that damned intruder Andy Billy Bonadventure's papers and the cobweb-ridden analyses of Bonadventure's own too brief (too long!)--whatever length just not the right length--life. To the Conservateur en chef de la Maison de Victor Hugo, who lets men and women peer at M. Hugo's crudescent correspondence, and who keeps the windows of that penny-edition palace so clean, my very sincere thanks indeed; and last, though far from least in this burn-first document of a rotted consciousness, I am abjectly grateful to the Mayor of Honfleur, that repository of town-tales and creaking stacks of back-issues of the tinily titled L'Echo Honfleabagis. Translations of my soul into foreign tongues, I am incompetent to judge the badness of. Let the spirit of pouting Poe (whom I have honored or not with my misscribblings) stand wroth with a flaming sword over their necks.... And for godsakes Bonadventure, don't title your own memoirs with a quote from my oeuvre."
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.'
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.
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."
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!)--
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.
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!
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
"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.
"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!"
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.
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
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.
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...."
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.
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.
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.
"Love, which tempts us with its contretemps, will, like a Python beheaded in its deathgrip, never release its victim. This is an image of the human affections which once disturbed me greatly, despite or because of its inherent truth does not matter, until one day, greeting my dear Jeanne from her toilet, I noticed in her sigh a hint of the laughter that would move through her when she heard my death rattle. Yes, very definitely, Gerard. I have seen in her smile the sine curve of derision at its nefarious inception. In her ecstatic cries, delight at my helplessness. In her interest in the poems I dedicate to her beauty, I have spotted the clinician scanning a patient for defects, abnormalities that can be depended on to produce future fees. Who has not used their eye to crucify, their weakness to command? Bonadventure, Nerval, I know you do not have the power to imply otherwise, not while you quail here beneath my scrutiny; my gaze which implores with the desperation of a slave. Looking at the pair of you, I have no hope for my own freedom, certainly not any freedom from love's delusions."
This is how Baudelaire counseled Gerard de Nerval in his romances, which he always prosecuted with the desolate innocence of a child.
"But Aurelia.... The thunder that accompanies her kiss, is it from fear then that my own pulse responds?"
Nerval seemed almost mortally abandoned, ripped to shreds by the mechanical continuance of Baudelaire's arguments, steady and regular as a clockwork's cold progression; adding up the little nothings of a second until the sun is gone. I sat there beside him and did nothing at all to help.
O the ropes of regret that bind one to the experimenter's steel table! And for what? The hope of something new!
I glanced at Nerval--the look on his face, it was... but then Charles was at the helm again, pressing on into wilder spaces--
"I hold myself above the lovers like a disembodied bulb, prepped to flash out a recording light; I am but the instrument of a crime scene photographer."
"But, but, but" Nerval hiccoughed, "you yourself once said that 'an artist is someone with the beautiful inability to settle for someone else's reality?'"
This is the worst tack to take with Baudelaire if you want to get anyplace in a discussion--this quoting of himself against himself--the absolute worst. He considers it a form of kidnapping; a form which produces only a clumsy kind of intimacy of disregard when the true operator of such bad feeling should of course be oneself who, knowing the victim, could construct an orgy of self-loathing and produce a ream of ripping 'ransom notes,' which is what he occasionally styled his poems to be as he would thrust a revised sheaf at me for my purview.
"We already know that I am my own worst enemy, and my own best critic too, as you so ably quote, Gerard. Do you really love me so much, that you would torture me this way?"
The gentle Nerval, who had not a single schoolyard dart nib in his arsenal, flinched as he replied.
"Of, of course I love you, Charles. You know that I would never.... If-f...."
So Charles, charmingly, knowing the softness of the soul of our love-cuffed Nerval--leapt like a puma for his undulating jugular.
"Well, then, tell us of this Aurelia, the one love without a wound."
Nerval--have I mentioned?--always wore what was called a chevalier's tie, a type of bowtie that played itself out near the throat in a single silken lump, a bolted bobbin of very fine material that jumped up and down whenever he swallowed hard--which is what he did now. Nerval, whether through some mistake of nature or freak genius of God, had the stiff face of a Greek tragedian's mask; the same fixed features, the enduring--if never daring--stare.
"I was out walking this morning," he began plainly enough, referring to one of the kilometers-long and incessant treks that his perennial insomnia forced upon him most summer evenings, and which commenced at three a.m. or thereabouts and often continued on until noon, his head full of restless delights or the morose melodies he would hum loudly with all the grace of a thirsty horse.
"And dawn was infiltrating the city, crushing the dreams of thousands with morning's daily visibility. I had just turned down the Rue de Mortefontaine, when," and here Nerval's mask of a face didn't exactly change, but the lines that had been worn into it by lavish feeling, became more pronounced, more deeply drawn. He began to chant something, but so feebly that both Baudelaire and I had to lean into the soft aura of his whisper.
"A lady leans on her copper windowsill, absence-eyed, yet fair in antique crinoline.... Deep in the dream of another life, Aurelia, we've lived together--and live there still! Impeccable Utopias! Hesitation's engorged expectancy! Vague enthusiasms of dreaming youth! The aspirant's purest wish of aspiration! All, all were there, unmauled, in the blessed bouquet of her being. The only torch that responded to the sun herself: Aurelia! And then, I know you will not believe me but I do not care--not a pence--then she looked at me; our eyes met."
There was such a long pause at this point, so 'glorious' a hesitation, that I was afraid that Nerval would leave it at that, and lose his side of the argument to Baudelaire without a fight, resonant phrases notwithstanding.
And then Nerval looked up with, well I don't know rightly how to describe it--but, I guess, something of a lambency in his eyes; a saint's glance, a martyr's transformation, these words are empty....
"She resembled the ardent virgins in that choral portrait by Loungemains, the one in the Louvre that floats there in the blue room--as indeed the angels themselves must float in Heaven. I close my eyes, just now, and see her in a sort of wondrous self-containment looking over the adorable shoulder of a sister in perfection. But, as strongly as that image leapt to life when I saw it--when compared to the dirty Paris streets--so much more bright and lively is her image to me. I had never thought that souls could change bodies while they lived, or that two souls might inhabit a single frame. Pythagoras disapproved of it, and I learned in his school. But that glance of Aurelia's, that instant, I felt her take complete possession of me, of all that I could feel to be myself or my soul; and I knew her as well, as sharply as anything that moves beneath my crosshairs; and there I have remained, since that moment, gentlemen, staring from that copper windowsill--and there I am now."
"So I told Nerval, whose gaze never quite meets the horizon, but, like a lunar lightbulb, instead hovers ever above the sinkline where the rest of humanity lives and breeds--I told him the truth of love! In thanks for the pains he took to acquaint Bonadventure and myself with his azure dream, I cut his heart out with my tongue until he had to admit that it was there on the floor, beating and bleeding before him."
"Charles, the covers; I will wrap myself in them completely, you know how I love the feather-licks of silk, all except for my left ear. That I have always dedicated to your poetry exclusively, and now I will let you rant against its membrane; do, dear. It is my prettiest ear, is it not? You have always said so."
"I took for him the example, so unlike ourselves, jaded Jeanne, of two lovers who are very much, as it is said, in love with one another. No matter how truncated their reason, no matter how engorged their duelling desires, one--either the male or the female--would be more hypnotized, more delirious than the other at any given moment in the relationship. This one, true to itself, will injure or torture the other with its coldness, the minutiae of withdrawal, the angst of insufficient affection; or else, wishing to comfort and uphold the beloved, the lesser loving lover will trampoline into a net of little lies and nefarious fictions, thus comforting the other and undoing itself.
"In this way, even the torturer (or the surgeon, who hopes to help and heal) may be the victim of the situation, in this unequal validation of battling blossoms--evil blooms of what may be termed, mewlingly, 'love.' And what of lovemaking itself? Let us not exclude the deluded act itself from our examination. Between the two-backed beast roils a cauldron as miced as any incestuous thought. And isn't love-making just a pair of wildcats in claw-withdrawn attack? Sometimes not even that, not even that tiny retraction of the bestial scratch of our natures during the dark liaison. Muscles stiffen and contract as if in a death rictus, the supple troubles of the face stretch and distort into a form of skull, or slacken into a mash of unwilled ovoids--as if death had snaked the soul from its smelly bottle. Well, little ear, my pink and pouting conch shell, are you listening? What do you think? What can you say to me? Am I wrong?.... Ah! You too are now among the dead; you snore as do the dead; your face is bereft of speech, the chilled enamel of your teeth protrude from your wet lips only to drool....
"Still no response? Then let me apostrophize a memory of us while you lie here, entombed in your carnal silks. When I first met you, Jeanne damne, do you remember the occasion? I stood unobserved among a small battalion of my friends whose poems I couldn't quite bring myself to abhor. Their works had the softening effect on my aesthetic judgment that occurs when one first sees a shivering kitten bald from mange. Out of that pack I advanced--you had a blue velvet boostier, and your face was sunk so deeply in a whirlpool of cosmetics, I almost couldn't discern the stern glance of your crunched skull, or the dusky hue of your lustrous skin, save where one droplet of stagelit sweat had exposed the true you, just an inch in front of your left ear. I knelt before you as never before any other, dirtying a tailored knee in the beer and sawdust of the tavern floor. 'I want to bite you,' I said, and you turned to me those glacial eyes, at once so cold and so hot, twin extremes indecipherable in their effect. 'I want to bind your hands in the hair of dead children, immortal and unstained. I want to draw you to the ceiling by your wrenched arms and see you naked--so that I might, on my bended knees among shards of shattered glass, worship your upraised feet.' Your friend, I remember, screamed at my suggestion. But you, my dear, demented Jeanne, placed--very stealthily considering the crowd about us--my prayer-struck hand upon your cunt. And only then did you deign, so great was your grace, that evening, to smile."
I have already made some slight mention of Baudelaire's reaction to the intrusive prudery of the courts of the Second Empire--that time of dull public morality and wild private vice when Inspectors, gendarmes, and all manner of prissy officials caressed in private the very evils they excoriated in the sunlit square. There was the question of who was to prosecute the case too--would it be the sympathetic Guilliarme Moldave? He had been known to visit many new artists' studios, and respected Baudelaire's criticism on the subject. Also, he was an evening companion of Mme. Sabatier, whose Sunday salons were well known as an hospitible refuge for artiste and thoughtful audience alike. It was the sort of 'cultural' event that Baudelaire refused to acknowledge--although his company was itself a perpetual pow-wow on the muse and her minions. The danger was Pinard, who Baudelaire had a penchant for nicknaming Pinhead Pinard. He was a priggish stickler about 'the letter, and even the punctuation, of the law' as he had famously declared. Rumor had it that he even lectured his own children on such fine points of law as judicial scarves and the correct angle for wearing the epitoge when a fatal judgement was handed down. A clash with Pinard could cost Baudelaire both his liberty and his renown--for Baudelaire was betting heavily on poetry book sales to float his independence from the hideous insufficency of his allowance.
Here, in the very shadows of Lady Justice's skirts, I said a prayer--(cozener and villan in my day though I have been, let not the fiedom of false friendship be laid at my feet)--on the day Baudelaire went through those portals, just there, scuffing his slick black shoes petulantly on the stone steps, his mouth a pouty downspout as pronounced as any child's. I can still recall the words I used then, pacing alone even as I am doing now.
"Dear blind lady with arms upraised, I beg you not to use my blue Baudelaire the way he would use you."
"Aby, look, over there, past the elephant. It's Punch and Judy!"
"But, Helly, the cotton candy is here...."
"C'mon!"
Helly had her way; like mother like daughter. Our group manouvered through the approving throng, ruddy hands linked, toward the puppet booth. There was Punch, with his outrageous warted nose, his fool's cap and his bumpy club, screaming: to be let alone, to be given kisses, to get away with his witless mischiefs.
"Observe this miscreant pair of Punch and Judy, my little ones. See how Judy chases Punch with her whacking bladder? And note how offended Punch's sense of justice is, how wounded his mein becomes. But where are the gendarmes? The magistrates to adjudicate? This game of tit-for-tat is a laugh riot, but only because of this sad truth: punches without justice yeild nothing but agony and hilarity. And platitudes, too, perhaps. But not much else."
I thought for a moment of the Baudelaire case my team was prosecuting on the morrow. No matter how I proceeded, I would look like a dupe. Either in liscencious league with a polluter of public morality, or else a whip-whetting Philistine who punished innocent pursuers and purveyors of pristine Art. Art, in Paris, is always capitalized.
"Wow! Look at him run!" squealed little Aby. His eyes were festive with youthful delight.
"He better run if he don't want a whack," said Helly with authority.
Helly glanced up at me appraisingly, slyly. She whacked Aby with her ornate silk purse full of marbles and laughed, her eyes wide.
"Hey! Daddy, Helly hit me."
"There is no justice in this world, my son. Hit her back."
What a man can say, you have said--imperishably and poignantly. The rest is for a monk's meditation, or curses gnashed under the tusks of demons in Hell--as you might say! Any who have endured--ah! how wanted and wittingly!--an attack of the Ideal will know that the nacreous odor of your Flowers of Evil is but the sadness of separation from that Ideal, combined with an intenser appreciation of its reality. We live exiled from our rightful realm. You write of this exile as your lightning-limbed Satan might--with a clear-sighted anguish; to see the minarets of the heavenly mansion, but remain damned and disinvited! Our poetic selves live, sigh and thrive in an alternative vision of paradise that is not yet manifest. You are the first to see this: that there are new heavens we have yet to invent. That, in essence, is the catastrophe and surpassing chance of the poet; that is his moral obligation: to invent heaven. Could the court see the sincerity of this project of yours, your words would be carved in every cathedral in capital letters of gild and porphyry a foot high--and your government pension assured, incidentally. The impossibility of this actually coming to pass, however, and the certitude of its immanence nevertheless, gives rise to a possible impossibility, as it were: the impossimpable! (if one may coin so crass a term).
My fellow laborer in the fields of Elysium, good luck with your day of judgement. My wishes for lenient laws and a mellow judiciary follow your footsteps to the courthouse tomorrow morning!
Yours in art,
Gustave Flaubert
P.S. I have sent a messenger round to her Highness, the Princess Mathilde, but I do not have much hope for you there. Your tavern companions are too Republican!
With enough words a philosopher may erase his meaning completely. But not his infernal stench. So it is with my poems.... It is not their sense that one whiffs expectantly, but the echo of their emptiness that excites. If I have changed, through some unknowable alchemy, your lunch habit from bourguignon to béarnaise, or, indeed, the reverse, from béarnaise to bourguignon, then I have succeeded as an artist! In inscrutability I trust. This mechanism of the body is more than its bits of wire and wood, yet we are puppets nonetheless. Punch me, and I piss. Caress me, and I sigh.
It was on such meanderings as these that my brain arranged its damaged afternoon while I awaited the release of Bonadventure from the moil of his malaise. I refer, of course, to his employment, which would furnish the funds for our evening at the café. I am aware of the irony. Nevertheless, ironic or not, this was my puppet's plight. I watched the resentful sun sink into the sludge of an open sewer. Ah, night!
I went out the door, heading toward Bonadventure's tawdry office. No doubt I would run into him on his way to my own place of deliquescing habitation. The air was both fetid and refreshing; adventure was in it. I was in constant contact, not with reality, but with that renewal of one's hopes and expectations anticipation can command. How much more glorious and rarefied is this self-bliss than all the millions of realities that confront, offend, and inspire our merely mortal senses!
I would be drunk before the hour was out. Gladness bewitched me--could the solace of oblivion be far behind? The purpose of art is to give us thoughts troubling enough to be worth escaping. To drink because one's own life is an uninspired drudgery is no more than to renew a scab by one's idle picking at it; that is not creation, but recreation--however empurpled and painful the process might be. But, to seek out damnation and disorder from a profound disappointment with The Lord? Unassailable and deep are your motivations! Even you yourself will accept your excuses after the first draft of yeasty vintage, the aroma of all the soils of the earth impelled into your nostrils. Ah, night!
I turned the corner down Bonadventure's street, the Rue de Blandblah, a wolf's grin on my lips, and noted that the café to which we had planned to repair for the evening was between myself and his office. Surely, I could duck in for a quick one, supplying his name to secure the necessary credit from the barkeep. They knew us here. They were familiar with the contents of Bonadventure's wallet.
I entered the café as one enters a tomb: with regret at such an entrance's inevitability, and with solace at its eternal character. The marble tops of the little tables winked at me, friendly as unengraved headstones. Beyond the tables there stood the steaming silver urns of the coffee dispensers, the multifarious glitter of the liquor bottles, and below these the stained resonances of oak soaking up the brilliant flicker of a million sagging candles. And there was Henri, the barkeep. Hello, Henri! Yes, quite a long, dry day. And beyond Henri's pin-striped shoulder, I saw a small, balding cannonball glaring at me with withering recognition. After too long a moment, I realized that I was looking at myself, mirrored in a portrait of Hell.
"Henri, a moment of your time, if I may," I began politely.
I was about to confess the weakness of my situation to a social inferior, to confide in Henri that I was in an embarrassment of finances and would be dining out on the charity of an old-time associate and familiar customer of his; a school chum in fact, one whom I had played marbles with on the library floor as he taught me trick shots and I imagined being God to the planets, and the planets careening under the sofa. School chums! The most pathetic of associations, a bourgeois cliché.
And then....
I noticed a young boy lighting the chandelier, carefully bringing small tongues of fire into gorgeous accord, as when Wagner layers the cakes of his musical treats in the second act. The unapologetic joy of these jets of flame made me remember myself, how the poet shines in this squalorus pig-sty of a world: be it Hell or be it Heaven, who was to say? Either way, the poet must play, and the panjandrum pay!
Weakness is not the natural expression of genius, and in me confession most often takes the oblique form of accusation. What I would do, I accuse others of having done; at least I have the horse-sense not to work in government! This way of being was all part of my poet's daily alchemical transformation from sleep-drugged and dreaming dud to dashing dandy. I first recall threading my schoolboy's bowtie before a broken fragment of mirror in the secretly accessed attic of a cathouse on the way to class each morning. I tied my knot with a difference, as they say. And not with the regulation twist M. Aupick (or, for that matter, the hangman) approved of: such, at eight, was the picaresque extent of my rebellion!
I demanded a grand pinot noir from Henri, rather abruptly, and returned my dilettante's attention to the wavery man in the mirror.
How inspiration flared and fled in the wavery mirror--pissed away in a moment's undertaking. The mercury drop that had glowed with all the hallowed radiance of a fully-loaded moon, was splashed and splattered away by an irritable finger-flick as simply as the trace tear of an unwonted memory.
Yet, my eyes continued to look blindly, to stare at the figure receding to a grey chiaroscuro in the glass, full of their own moony insistence. How dully they intruded on a life as solemn in its unabated farce as a funeral procession. And look, how cordial and curled the crowning crepes of brunette hair.... How deep the pillow's velvet, the immense pools of bruises, beneath the dry chalky eyes.... Even now, before the vinegared event of my demise, my moony pate is balding to its bone core. What hair adheres does so only as an ugly afterthought--whatever has stuck to the stone club that killed the coney.
Now, as the chandelier's flare flattens and evening comes coolly through the saloon doors, the mirror robs me of my own reflections. The wine has a gelid, heavy aspect in my mouth, a sort of warm blood pudding. The mirror's eye delivers me up to myself--flayed as a fish--my human minutiae gruesome in their Frankensteinian detail: pores yawning deep as ocean vents, the clownish nose a clubbed lump of unsmelling flesh; two ears daftly a-dangle as the faux-furred legs of a burst pinyata. Of these cheeks, inflamed with cheap drink, I will simply note their resemblance to rotten cherries beset with bees in the soggy field of an abandoned farm. As for the eyes... oh, the eyes of a narcissist! Probing pin-lights seeking their own centrality, some signal in the self-regard that can assure: I will abide! Piggy-small, yet swollen with a moron's slow, indeed retarded, self-regard. Baudelaire, how many hours have you mooned to uselessness, transfixed in the squiggly pool of a mirror? Peered at more deeply, the eyes are two black balls balanced on bloodshot tundras of crooked ice; and, through the cracks in the ice, slow lightning bolts of red swell in ghastly littleness--as if the very fabric of sight has been shattered.
"Henri, another 'draft of vintage from the dusky south.' An apple brandy cordial, perhaps. I have a need to feel Edenic in my wickedness."
My eyes had not moved from the mirror. This face, against God! How can it be accomplished? Judas made a hash of it, squandering his chance to shame the creator in betrayal and hatred. His ambition whittled him smaller than he actually was somehow, made him more miniscule than any man--even in the mere dregs of his nature--is. Not that way, not for gold, not as a slave to dead metal, not in incandescent hatred only shall I defy the deity. Against God, this face! Not in disbelief; not in despair shall I have my battle. But how then? How, Saint Judas, shall I proceed? Hear my wild cry, and be you wheresoever below, answer me! At least Judas is remembered, though reviled; his flower shines in the springtime. Even I, his modern afterimage, revile him. Tomorrow, I must be in court. And, whether damned or saved, I must have my vindication. How then shall I proceed? I'll have to be drunkerer than this.
"Henri, if you please, a dram of absinthe.... Yes, put it on Bonadventure's tab."
Pinard again! The same old goat who wanted to take the milky hide off of Mme. Bovary's backside--and very nearly succeeded. Only the intercession of Princess Mathilde, an intimate of Flaubert's, kept the lash from hashing his eternal pages. I have no such advocate, no such angel, at the Royal Court to ease my pungent bouquet past that Argus-eyed prude, Pinhead Pinard. Perhaps if he were informed (on the sly, quietly, mayhaps in a daydream while my advocate takes the reins before the sour judge) that my Fleurs du Mal were to decorate my own funeral barge, he would leave my lovelies unmolested.
The prude, at heart, is always the most prurient, the most truly depraved of men. His inner evil informs him of the deviant in all men, and to him there is no justice without punishment, for guilt is universal and no one is innocent. What then is the point of court? To shame mankind in its own ugly eyes. If every man could stand naked before the tribuneral, the prurient prude would demand that each and every man be damned--without exception! My heart agrees with the judgment, but not the punishment; that is the domain of domestic relations. It is a woman's fate to excoriate her males.
Unconcerned with style or art, the constitutional prude must spend all his effort on maintaining a veneer of virtue. If only he knew the useful tools an honest art could bring to his task! Instead, in ignorant silence he delves the depths of depravity with his nose held high--a swimmer in human sewage. I could almost admire the conviction such perversity requires--if only it were persued with some flavorful flair!
My regrets are many, not least my pursuit of Aupick in the winter of '48. If I had shot him, blown his head or his heart into the ditch, I could rest satisfied. Instead, I merely dabbled in rebellion. If only I had not been in the bragging vanguard when I attacked the Empire's tin men, I would at least have some defenders in the press, and perhaps a Princess too. Today, I have no political convictions. Forced to cast a ballot, I would vote only for myself--and that ironically.
* * * * *
As the case proceeded, prosecutor Pinard recited the infamous rhetoric of the conservative Poignard Press like a psalm, snapping the paper pre-emptorialy and closing its fluttered pages with a most solemn and prayerful gesture when his service was concluded. The judge looked on wisely, his spectacles perched like Dame Justice's scales on the end of his sloping nose. This holy recitation from the public scandal sheets was the soul, sum, and sense of Pinard's prosecution. He was not persecuting me or Art, he was simply seconding the condemnation already visited upon me by the wisdom of 'public opinion.' In the service of public morality, what greater gauge was there than public opinion? Pinard's hands were clean, 'the people' had spoken. Had the hack at Poignard Press not done his thinking for him, Pinard would have had no more darts in his quiver than the prude's habitual disapproving scowl Nature provides.
"To review is to feed an appetite made for meat with frivilous bon-bons."
Such was Baudelaire's firm opinion of that art which first made him well-liked and respected in Paris. Both charletans and great men sought the stamp of his critique on their artistic and literary efforts. Only rascally musicians were immune to courting Charles' views on their own merits; and this is simply because they were often too drunk to care--quite often at Charles' apartments! Even the most negative review would be salted with some inestimable phrase divining the purveyor's inherent genius; and this was more valuable than a symphony of unvaried praise from the army of newspaper reviewers.
It is best that I burn these unpublished drafts of reviews, for Baudelaire himself condemned the practice of reviewing--its evility was evident enough in the ease with which one is paid to opinionize. Forced by mounting court fees (and his mistress' need for Egyptian eyeliner) to continue reviewing, and even rev up his output, Baudelaire poured his ire and despair (and hosannahs and hallelujahs) upon hack and fantastic craftsmen alike. All were subject to his inestimable eye and the unquiting tip of his quill. The family purse was tightened even more resolutely against his Vandal-like depredations following the public humiliation of being condemned in court--for his genius was stamped by the public prudes of the judiciary as 'immoral.' The sentiment was widely echoed, and the few who defended him did so in private, in personal correspondence they refused to have published. Because others kept their opinions to themselves, Baudelaire must cast his half-baked bread upon the waters!
Indeed, Baudelaire came to consider all the consequences of pecuniary opining a part of his personal catastrophe. If he was paid to think, how could he truly posses his own thoughts? He thought, in fact, that one day the world would realize that men are but paper figures, made more real by the reflected glory of the opinions of others than by what they have in reality made of themselves; and, reciprocally, they would value their own opinions of others more than those others, whatever their true merits might be; it was all, more or less, a transaction of commerce. And so, to the barbeque of souls, my little men! Puff, flame, and fade away.... Until even your afterimage is more imaginary than actual....
Young Franscois is no doubt abed by now, and his mother has washed the day's fantasies from her face. Soon I will join her in the oblivion of sleep, her unconsious hand placed to my lips. So end my daily prayers--I who have no God, and am alone.
In the end, Baudelaire, too, prefered to be alone.
"He who would be great must of necessity be solitary. Only solitude reveals a man to himself, whatever riots of ugliness that mirror contains. When your mistress speaks, stuff your ears with cotton! Lash yourself to the mast of solitude should that siren Politics cry out from some dim shore. The attractive lassitude of an idea is more dangerous than a hundred years of sleep--ask Rip Van Winkle. Eject them all from the singular egg of your time-capsule: women, politics, ideas!"
And reviewing dabbled dangerously in all these things, and was reviled. He thought he might while away his time doodling translations of Edgar Poe; such money was, perhaps, more honest than the francs he forged with his reviewer's invective. At least he could kick the dozing composers off his couch with a clear conscience!
In they came, by ones and twos, the deluge of daubers: humble, hackneyed, or haughty! Some with long drooping mustaches and haunted, sorrowful eyes; others lively as spaniels nipping me with viper-vim wits and vain smirks curled tight as chameleons' tails. Howsoever they came, I held them all in thrall--prisioners (parishoners?) of my pen. Success crested for those I loved best and shrivelled voidward for those I cursed. Such was the influence of intelligent comment in those days.
Down the furrowed carpet came Manet, his latest canvas coyly swathed in ratty blankets. He had the numb look of a digesting ox on his face. And yet, there was a hint of cunning....
"Unveil it," I commanded. "And then persist in silence until I speak to you again."
Manet did as I bade him, his resentful shoulders humping the awkward square onto the big easel that faced the light. He was backing away and folding the blankets as I fell to silence, the bell of my being quelled by a cupping touch.
The dress was a masterpiece of restless chiffon. Manet had not yet ensconced the goddess in a golden frame; she had flown semi-nude and nailed to her canvas magic-carpet right through my foul foyer! How pure, how whiter than steam itself! In fine, an unflinching effect. And how different from my salty and sinuous Jeanne--the dark Venus of vulva and black fire.
"Who... is she? Does she exist?"
Manet cleared his throat. "She is a Mme. Sabatier. A common enough sight at L'Opéra Grainier. Surely you have attended some of her Sunday salons?"
"Music strode upon my weeping soul as a spike-heeled goddess. The world was banished, and I myself was dispersed, disintegrated... a kaffir woman in the same room with a white. I myself did not exist. Only this ravishment, this perfection; these horrible colors of a rapidly opening space, unfurled beneath me, a desert dawn bleeding into my being...." Oh, yes, his 'raptures' could go on and on, and I steeled my nerves to follow the heightened contradictions and activities of his imagination's high flight; for I knew that it was I, and not he, that would be the poorer for having closed my ears to his pure vintage.
Eventually, he interrupted himself.
"Bonadventure, what time is it? Has my little clock flung the bold-faced day into its ashy residence?"
"Its eight o'clock, if that's what you mean."
The specter of a smile appeared upon his face, and then flashed away.
"Wagner! At once, your cloak."
We rattled out into the wary streetlight. Charles' short cloak, as he raced ahead of me, looked as though a devilfish had ascended from the deep and attached itself at his neck. Perhaps it had come to this misty midlight from the bottom of that despotic, extraordinary brain!
As we reached the gleaming steps of the L'Opéra Grainier, I wondered, like a slaughterhouse lamb, what final sight awaited me.
"Everything that is excessive, immense, ambitious, in the snaky spirit of ambling man... all swirl together in this Wagner's ardent, invincible sound!" And with this mumbled preamble, Baudelaire swung open the Grainier's doors with both hands, and, along with the powerful ruminative scents of pipe tobacco and a minx mix of women's scents, came... the sound.
If we are born blind in a waterfall of milks and wonderments; if our skin cannot comprehend the varieties of space that console and confront us in that first minute; if indeed it is several years before we may tell our mothers and fathers of our interior tremblings and triumphs; if any of these dizzying statements contains even a marginal shade of truth, then how can I tell you anything at all about that moment when the Grainier's frosted glass doors parted before me and the world dissolved?
And perhaps Mme. Sabatier, Charles' new enthsiasm, will be in boxed attendance--her profile as 'pure and reserved as Wagner is wild!'
Tannhauser opened on the 9th at the L'Opéra Grainier to a cautious audience full of rumors and smoke about the large Germanic Wagner, whose bludgeoning explorations in music seem ready to smash or reinvent all of Europe at a stroke. The place was packed. Gentlemen were hard put to maintain their dignity in the jostling crowd which, although well-heeled, was visibly affected by the performance as Tannhauser, a wandering minstrel and poet, comes to Venusberg through a plunging cave extraordinarily brought off by the canny set designer Mallot. In Venusberg, the singing Tannhauser sees Venus herself at her bath and becomes unutterably smitten and turns into a sinning Ulysses dallying with a coy Calypso. All his holy songs turn to pagan paeans. Eventually, through an accidental word, he is reminded of his faithful Elizabeth whom he left in the world above; he exits, his brow and throat both knotted with regret and anxiety. Not a few of the lesser peers in the audience let out with a harsh laugh at Tannhauser's stricken conscience, much to the shame of Paris and themselves. Upon Tannhauser's return to the world above, a singing contest is arranged throughout the kingdom, with the winner to be betrothed to the loyal Elizabeth, ably played by Mlle. Simpelle, whose soft white gown was a marvelous organization of fair fluffs and diaphanous falls. The other contestants, whose songs touch lightly and ably the themes of fidelity and truelove, remain chaste. Into this churchlike atmosphere, contrite, and with a deep spiritual love evident in his eyes and manner, Evan Tannglehott, who played Tannhauser, comes, his song starting with a single long and beautifully oscillated note, as if to literally draw his heart out of his mouth and present it to the listening Elizabeth.
And then, on an ambiguous turn in the leitmotif, where we begin to hear the echo of Venus' throbbing theme, Tannhauser transforms from a chloroformed and arsenicpale choirboy of heavenly affectation into a blazing bacchante, and his song discovers that all that had the urge and ability to ascend in Tannhauser can descend with the demons at as rapid a pace, back to the undergroud frolics of voluptuous Venusberg. The struggle of the entire soul of man to believe in even a single ideal--it turns restlessly, hopelessly upon that singe note! Until even our idea of heaven is tinged with the demeaning determination of the despotic, and even our most clouded and closed nightmares of Hell display some tinge of Heaven.
"The lies we tell ourselves are not invariably valuable in and of themselves. As with mirrors, whose mercury backing peels and lets shine through either the shadow of black felt or the dazzling lights of a glass world fleetingly glimpsed through aghast gaps in our own face, the effect of a lie's reflection resides more in the acuity of the observer than in the veracity of the facsimile to 'the truth.'"
"So, then, the brushwork of the artist, the noble tones of the poet, the arias the maestro elicits from his able minions, are to be dismissed as useless tradecraft? The sloppiest pot and the most pristine vessel are of equal value as aesthetic objects, since, truly, the value is created in 'the eye of the beholder?' This seems an absurdity, and your own hard-wrought sonnets mitigate against your sincerity in putting forth this case, my dear Baudelaire."
Baudelaire leaned against the green velvet couch like a panther at ease in the hot afternoon light of the veldt. Almost, there was a smile at the corners of his mouth as he contemplated the double fan of his fingertips pressed together in a calculating sophist's homage to prayer. An eyebrow arched wearily, and he began to explain, to make his case, to reel me in as he had done many hundreds of times before.
"Never doubt the infinitude of art, the caress or sparkle of its multitudinous baubles. Simply know that it is a seduction; that all things are a seduction; and all the seducers are whores. 'The truth' is merely one color in the palette. Do we question the rouge of a lover's cheek? Does her excitement come from being thrust against the skin of her beloved, or because a jealous husband is hunting her down--even as she gives you her 'all'? Is your eye wide at the delight of her nearness, her having chosen you, or because you have cheated death for another night in the infinite ennui of existence? Do you recall her name after even just a little time has passed, or when in the clutches of consummation you confuse your lover with the deity and cry out as if in ecstatic prayer: 'God, O, God!'?"
I felt both confused and intrigued by this line of thought. What was the source of my most cherished experiences? Did I gasp at a Venus de Milo out of some aesthetic apprehension, some revelation too deep for words, or simply because I willed myself to be seduced by her beguiling beauty's promise of immortality? Would a wanton serve as well as a Valkyerie for inspiration? My eyes grew heavy as I pursued these imponderables. The room felt warm and distant, a cage swaying on a golden rope in a dark cave.
"I see you are peering precipitously into yourself, my dear Bonadventure. What inner dramas have conducted you to your own drear depths? What surfaces have conjured and compelled your inward gaze, mystic of the self's endless principle? And, thus, you see, the mirror's seduction is accomplished. Your eye, flitting among feather dancers and imperishable marble monuments, has come to rest on the rolling boil of your own inner state. What is this if not seduction? Seduction and betrayal. For now you are blind to what is right in front of your nose."
I don't know how he did it--if it was some form of mezmerization, or if indeed he knew the key to art and was telling 'the truth' about truth being but a color in the palette of seduction. But, whatever the case, on hearing mention of my nose, I focused on the reddened tip thereof, and was astonished to find a flame rising less than an inch in front of it. Egad!
"Your bowtie is almost completely burned away, Bonadventure. It was in egregious taste, but perhaps you are more attached to your mustache. Water?"
And so saying, Baudelaire threw the whole carafe of water at my head, dousing the flame, and commencing his maniacal laugh, as much like a macaque monkey as a three-penny opera's evil genius.
Mother, dearest maternal sog-lump of my too-tired heart, my consolation, my courage.... No one will read about me listening to Wagner. My booklets, so beautifully brought out and bound by Pouncelle, come back from the bookshops in teetering tiers, their luxurious pages uncut. As if the eye could not help instruct the ear! As if both were not frail funnels to the human heart itself--Satan's parade ground and God's golfcourse combined. Wagner is sweetly, rapturously, aware of how our tortured senses overlap in this happenstance deemed by the ignorant, Life. How much more clearly can we understand space through his recreation of its very concept in his uncompromising tones, the blank tabulation of every vagrant impulse that traps us between our ears! This is passion, this correspondence of the visual and the aural, and the radical of all these intersections always always the sodden heart herself, passive and useless spoof of the final agony of God that it is. Mother, I would murder to maintain my opinions against the world! My pen hefts with the clean weight of a throwing knife. Whether lit cigarettes shall suffer or the attentive girl's nose be dispatched is the very substance of Fate.
Now, as to the matter of your harping tirade that I appear on your doorstep in Honfleur.... I cannot! Do not reduce me to such bourgeois displays of filial piety. On your breast, the reeling dreams of opium would not abate, and I would curl again into that solace you alone provide, and which your body itself produced, our inevitable, enviable mutual-dual sympathy.
Instead, I call you to me, maman, for say three weeks at the agreeable end of August, not so bad in the shadowy city, or three days if you cannot be so long bereft of the company of your housecat, or three hours which I, like Wagner, shall transmute into an eternity in remembrance.
Your letters are full of errors that a few hours of conversation would unwarp. I loved you passionately as a child! Come, be reasonable. Come.
"Keep that dress down," I repeated. (He kept saying.) "Charles was right, you are he most impudent puss."
(All is well; he disapproves of me.)
"The extravagance of a wedding portrait for a mistress you will never marry!" I shook my head. I don't know what exotic games Charles and his dusky lady had played, but they were well beyond me. (Still, there is a strange, strong gloom in his boys' eyes.... I do not possess him yet.)
"It is a melancholy commission, Mlle. Duval." (This would never do; I arched an inquisitive eye.)
"To paint me in the dress I am to wear to his funeral tomorrow?"
I nodded. (He was far too deadly earnest, even for a funeral. Damn that Charles' detestable testament! We are still alive after all--and he is young.)
"You had better call me Jeanne. Would you say I am the most impudent puss in all of creation, or just Paris?" I demanded. (Her question was vexatious, but it did result in my expanding the geographic range of her impudence.)
"Let's say," I began, "in all of France."
(I couldn't let a man have the last word, however downcast his countenance or sad his eyes. He'd never be willing to pay if he thought he already owned me. But then, pure mulishness also left one deposited at the roadside with a long walk back into town....)
"And her dominions," I insisted, pushing down my dress with caressing hands. To this demand, he acquiesced in silence; a man at his best.
(I kept quiet. Women have a fetish about having the last word. It is best to indulge them in their trivial preoccupations--this way, when something important comes up, as it was beginning to, it is the man's turn to prevail.)
I gestured for her to continue to smooth down the lacy extravagance of her wedding costume with my loaded brush like a courteous conductor. This she did, her dull skin making a ghoulish twilit contrast to both the black ribbon at her neck and the fairy-spray of material she sat in--like a sullen child overwhelmed in the playful arcs of a lusty fountain.
(It is best to let a painter have his way in painting, Charles always said. That way, one cannot be blamed for the result.)
"M. Manet, what do you think of my feet? Are they too small for these dainty velvet slip-ons?" I saw him lick his lips as he let his gaze rove down my form--which was, if I may say so, ably displayed. (Irrepressible minx!)
"Smallish, perhaps," I offered, not wanting to be drawn in (as it were). There was still too much painting to be done in the good lemon light of afternoon. Maybe when dinner time came... and the appetites began to lead the nose with evening scents... we could....
"Call me Eduard, please."
(Oh, I had him! Now he would strum my fiddle, so little in the middle, and I would hold my nose at his male grossness (so one must appear to do). When we had kissed cheek-to-cheek in greeting, I had felt the hard earnest of coin in his pockets. And now another earnest was hardening as I paddled my feet in slow rotations.)
"This light, it stings my eyes. Look, a tear!"
He came close to examine me, peering deepeningly, as if leaning precipitously over a shadowed brink. Then, just as I was sure we'd crouch and kiss, he started abruptly away. "Do not be ashamed," I almost cried. "It is only natural, after all." I was cresting like a wave in my suggestive saddle of silks and crinolines. Where had he gone? The tear had obscured my sight, and now it was pitch dark in the room.
"I've shut the curtains. Some champagne to dash the pain from your eyes?" (Yes, yes!)
"Oui. What year is the vintage?"
The opera was a blaze of lights. As we found our seats, and the candles got snuffed one by one, Baudelaire began another of his educational exhortations.
"Come, Manet, push, push your paints. Explore! Artists are voyagers of the psychic wilderness--or they are nothing. Every brushstroke sends the artist further, not into the chiaroscuro surfaces of daily reality, but further into those abscesses and unlit cubbies of his own mysterious mind. There, and only there, we confront our own reality-making machinery--those stock characters who haunt the manikins we make of our hapless compatriots and conquests. There are the warehouses stuffed with the quotidian or outrageous furnishings that litter the landscapes of our dreams. There, at the business end of your artist's brush, loaded with rainbows, you paint, always, your own astonished face--the face of an ape discovering fire!"
I felt as if my beard were being burnt off as he spoke. Such words! And yet, we were really here at the opera to do no more than scope out Mme. Sabatier in person, to lay eyes on the 'white diamond' as Baudelaire had dubbed her; it was a boys' mission to the girls' locker room--no more than that.
"Your silence does you credit, my painterly confederate. Are you familiar with the story behind Die Valkyries?"
I shook my head in the negative. It was the costumes and the dances (and the intense lighting effects) that most drew me to Wagner's works; he left all of the senses spoiled with surfeit after his feting. Even the smells of Paris seemed remote after overwhelming yourself on his weltanschauung.
"It is a most unusual romance.... That love is best which touches least.... The plot is infantile, the music unsurpassable...."
Before Baudelaire could further quote the virtues of sexless, father-defying Brunhilde over husband-horning, humping
"Here is a damsel I must defile," he said in a gulp. "Not that she would allow...."
Then Mme. Sabatier coughed, rouging her cheeks and pinking her bent brow, while Baudelaire rose upright from his ensconcing seat, waving to dismissive silence all the harmonies of the charging Valkyrie, and proffering with profane hand his hemp hankie (designed to scratch more than succor the nose) toward the fat wart of her balcony (whose hiccoughing hawker he preferred to Wagner's vital sublimity)--where two embossed cherubs (roly-poly in their roles) played cupid and concupiscent cur.
Shortly thereafter the curtain rang down like a rowdy waterfall, and the opera house bloomed once again into a disorienting blaze of lights. We found the street only by conceding to the thrust and tumble of the crowd. Baudelaire pressed me for Madam's address and only eventually (two absinthes later) was I able to content him with an ironclad invitation to Madam's next Sunday salon.
The pitiful whistlers of the world have all gone to bed. Manet to his mistress, the others to their snores. I am left alone to complain to the moon of my solitude, my alienation from my newly-viewed muse.
"O for a muse of fire," says the Bard of the Brits. But I would have my mistress made of ice cream and licorice drops. Creamy, cool to the touch, endlessly lickable, and with two good scoops on view. And then, at times, dark and chewy, with a maudlin aftertaste. But Mme. Sabatier, she is more than I can imagine--perfection! That remote whiteness of a mountain mist, a profile to define the very clouds. Why hadn't that mopey Manet painted her in profile? No doubt, it defeated him; his hungry gesturing with his camel's-hair stick would have defiled her infinite finesse.
O muse of ice, I'll pull from your pure swansdown the arrow of my ichorous quill. Female cupid, enchantress! Were ever the rules and roles of courtship so reversed, that a dog such as I should have this dream?
To her I would cry out from the exquisite pain in my heart: The suffering of the unwitting wanton is as real as the starvling martyr's!
"I am the superior degenerate of a race of defectives!"
"Do not mind, Theophile, it is the absinthe that has dashed the reason out of his mouth." I felt compelled to keep the ears of Baudelaire's listeners open to his tirades and philosophical expeditions, howevermuch I may have felt my own soul being dragged, heels first, to Hell.
"My father," Charles continued, "was three and a half decades my mother's senior, forcing upon her hothouse maidenhood the obscenity of his sex. Her innocence defended her from desire, even while inciting his own to madness! The combination of depravity and tenderness--does not the eye rebel from looking? I avert my face from the past, as from a perfect body scissored open upon the surgeon's steel table. I am a man in love with what wounds him, my persecutors are the only ones who would dare touch me...."
"Charles," protested Gautier, "this self-pity is monstrous. I am the last man to censure anything you say, since I have profited by it so many times in the past, but really!"
"Monstrous? Yes, well what do you expect from a monster?" His shotglass rang against the bar. Gautier poured him another.
"Is there nothing for us to do besides talk? We've been three hours at this scab-picking," I said. It was my part to express any unspoken irritation in the air, so that it might be addressed--and thus soothed--and so that Charles could then continue on his verbal voyage.
"But if the blood is golden, let them bleed! Isn't it worth everything to tell a truth on God, that grand street monte player?" And then, turning to Gautier: "Theophile, 'beauty' rhymes with more than 'duty,' you know."
"And 'soul' with more than 'foul,' Charles."
"The complexities of the starry sky are not defined by the dreams of the starlings who lose their way in it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, my dear Theophile, that I cannot be blamed for the obtuseness of the friends I choose; no more than for my own obtuseness."
Baudelaire lifted his eyes toward the ceiling.
"Ah, Mother, what strong and secret solace you have given me for my exile among males!" And, saying this somewhat in the manner of a salute to one absent, Baudelaire turned on his triumphant heel and fled the establishment. Gautier and I were dumbfounded and, although I did not then know Madame Baudelaire as I was to come to know, or think I knew, her, I must still confess that this outburst on Baudelaire's part resembles in my memory nothing so much as a surprise.
"To admit Love into the bedroom, into carnal consummation, is to escort a corpse into Heaven itself--a foul zombie strutting past St. Peter's Gate. It is to kill Love and make Love, Death. The corporeal deforms and falls to rot--the constancy, fidelity, and ecstasy of true Love participates in the eternal and ethereal alone and is itself immortal. Any manifestation of this limitless perfection on hinky Earth has the unexpected quality of a fortunate accident, a felix accidens, as it were, and should not have its pristine sheen pounced upon and prodded by an importuning prick."
Charles was at his bastard best that first Sunday. Replete in a silver-grey suit of silk, neither black nor white, he stood beyond all those in the room. None contested his outpourings. Save one--Mme. Sabatier--and she only subtly, more by her accent and her glance than her speech.
"There is something... persuasive... in the absolutism of your ideal, M. Baudelaire. But, I hesitate to ask, where can we find the proof of your theorums?" Mme. Sabatier sipped at her cigarette, perfect in a white frock stitched entirely of frills, her head crowned with her airy blond curls and a spiking white comb.
"Can one sullied in the coffee grounds of earthy existence touch the hem of an angel, or molest the sacred precincts of a saint? No, no! I insist! Such impious impurity implies the utter destruction of the Ideal--the inevitable dissolution of a perfect snowflake upon the simmering sinews of a too-hot tongue. Who could survive the negative proof of such a dirty universe? Only a man composed entirely of mud--a mud-man unbaptized by either the holy lotions of Love or the divine fires of Hate!"
"Hate and Love, then, are equals in your contest of Ideals? I confess, you have me... a tad... bemused."
Baudelaire cocked his head, like a hound listening to a whistle in an unknowable key. The faces around the table went back and forth as at a tennis match between Baudelaire and Mme. Sabatier--so compelling was their dialog to us. A smile--or was it a grimace--possessed his face entirely for an instant, and then he spoke.
"Pure Hate and actual Love, in this imperfect piss-hole of a world, register to us purblind beings, coiled in the confining chains of our senses, as a single experience--intensity. Beyond that, our ignorance engulfs us."
Come, my endearingly damaged dear... let us be liberated and lacivious at once... lacivertines!... the world has its unhappy Heaven... together we can be immensely miserable, beyond compare... joined at our burning hips... paint your lips with acid, and kiss... I melt... where you vulve, I verve... imagine it all... supremely I possess you... an infinitude too rude to blush... bliss insists where true love trudges... incomparable mud-lovers.... I will snake and penetrate while you coo and dilate....
Dear demented Man,
The assignation you suggest, as Manet delivered it, is a violation of my every vow. Howsoever sugar-sweet the rewards of ribaldry, we should not indulge them, but continue on our Platonic path to where our grand Idealizations can readily replace with classical colonnades the rank and reedy hutch to be built of a few seedy memories, however actual. Do you not agree? You held to the case at my last Sunday salon, and defended your tender point against all comers. Would you now self-defenestrate simply to leap into my lap, howsoever snowy, the way my bonnie Lonnie does? His curly hairs get everywhere, and I must paddle him back to his doggy pillow with a pestilential punctuality. Do you wish to feel the heat of my hand upon you so? When we should stride as equals to the very clouds....
And yet....
This Thursday, my lady's maid and my hovering hubby will both be away by 8p.m.--she to her elderly daddy, he to the gambling tables at Monte Carlo. I shall leave the window (third from the left) unlatched--the windows that overlook the sculpted hedges of the Tulieres--you know, the ones you remarked upon last Sunday, of Abelard and Heloise--with that uppity vine entangling their leafy thighs.... 8 p.m. Do not fail me!
Yours in this, and in wish,
Mme. Sabatier
P.S. My husband is a clod.
P.P.S. Your language is divine. When you said "I am not I--I am an Idea," I blushed everywhere.
My dear Madam,
I regret to report that I am engaged to be groomed on Thursday this inst. My hair (such as it is) is to be curled and set. Perhaps the more shall I resemble your doggy Lonnie. You, above all others, know how one disappears once the façade of style is relinquished!
Vexed,
Chas.
P.S. I seem to have misplaced my diminutive datebook, but will encourage you in future by this same courier (Manet) should Time ever begin to tock forward for me again.
P.P.S. Plus, I haven't been to the aquarium in simply ages, and Thursday it is usually pretty empty. Plus, I heard that they have got a devilfish, you know, a manta ray, and I've never seen one--outside the precincts of a mirror, of course.
Ashy lady, damned Jeanne Duval! How she tears at my heart with her venomed claws, raking me to ecstasies that make me forget the regrettable ideals of the poet--his reclusive and rightful access to all that is permanent, and heavenly, and gauche in its limiless goodness! Those eyes spark dark fire, that skin is a palimpsest of tattooed wooing, black like the shadow under pine trees that calls the wanderer on--to die lost and forsaken. How that echoes with all my sense of my own livid life! These blackened leavings of an angel whose celestial being burned all the way to the ground, misting heavy clouds as she fell. Her very existence is a splinter in my heart! How I hate her! How I must have her, must rub my nothingness between her charcoal legs, churning everlastingly as the damned in Hell on their gerbil pinwheels. Black Venus, you are she whose eyelashes are incentive to suicides, and which calm the man of valor back to his habitual cowardice. Take me, and know my littleness; lower me into the dirt with your contaminating 'love.' I, who am nothing, ask nothing. Roll your midnights over me, as the printer rolls ink onto his plates. Where you stick, I have speech, where you leave no trace--that is the absence of you that men call virtue.
Paint me, taint me, till I am as black as you, my condemned, demented dear Jeanne Duval.
"Ma cherie, what can I do to put a Roman candle in your pants?"
My Baldy-laire sat there heavily, a puppet with strings cut, his back against the wall by the fireplace; its embers were sullen suns, fog-drops of fire; his eyes were two drops of ink ploosehed from a dropper.
"It is the absinthe. It has unmanned you. What you need is another draft of that incomparable liquid.... That will either bring you back, or set you sailing into carefree fancies. Either way, ma cherie, success."
Charlie said nothing, his enormous brow bent downward. I set about with candle and philter, wormwood and liquor, and in a few minutes--as the flame softly hissed--the distillation turned gray and green and was ready for my sad little man. I looked back at him, awake as a snake, and as motionless, the tragic penetration of his gaze directed--not at me, not at any living creature--but purely and irreducibly at the void. Such a sad little fuck, my pleasing poete maudit!
I positioned myself before him, lifted my dress and pressed against his cold, cold lips.
"Sniff this," I instructed.
I backed away and brought the green vial down to meet his cold, cold lips.
"Sip this."
As the chandelier flickered, a flare of blush rose in a blade up the side of his neck. His lids lowered dully, banking a renewed spark within. I bent before him to massage the front of his trousers. There he was, breathing shallowly, his blood club doubling in my palm.
"It is my unshakable conviction that men ought to be superior to women," he said, his eyes lidding with distracted desire. "They just never are."
"Come, my lazy lamb, what scourge would you apply to women to revenge yourself on their illogical supremacy? Surely such fainting fakers must pay some price for their deception."
"Morality's illusory. To live is to deceive," he said, losing me with his boyish sophistries. Are we ladies to be punished or not? The sting of the whip, the whispy roughness of a scar, both have their allure. He raved on.
"The commonest blossom paints her cheek to lure the bumbling bee to her breast. If women deceive the same, what of it? They but follow the plot concocted by God. It is we men who fail and flounder, pretending that our much-vaunted purpose connects some chaotic or cathartic here to some dizzily paradisiacal there. Where do these manly ambitions and illusions originate? No one knows.... With the human female, as with the bitch in nature, the goal is to cozen and conquer. With the lame male, who cannot entice but must be content to command, it is his own self that he deceives--and the benefit of it is that he lies cracked and dismasted by his dreams. Perhaps, if he is born nobly, or possesses natively some lively trick of the whore's art, he will have companions on his path to disaster. That is all. Should he awaken from his sleeper's parade and toss off his rose monocle, he will see that all the while he has been beguiled by the efficient deceit of a woman. Helpless in the hands that 'love' him. Ahh! Yes, faster, harder. Strangle the banana, baby! Oh, I am your hammy fan, lost in your molten folds. My black butterfly, my one, my only luuuuuhhh...."
Soon enough there was no more to the story than a washrag and warm water laving his iridescent thighs, erasing the traces of the rainbow he had made.
Before me, a table piled with debts, bills for the child, the wife,--the vet! How much more gracious life would be without these columns adding up defaults and credits, without pen and paper--without numbers! Red ink like a bloodshot eye peers from the dusty pile threatening leins and attachments to my precious property. If loans could be repaid in tears, or the butcher bought off with a diner's satisfied belch, how paradisiacal our mundane globe would be.
Baudelaire too, unwise in every measure as far as his accounts went, was eternally torn between the pleasureful pressure of a minute's indulgence and the capacity of his bank account to pony up for the previous night's ecstasies!
"Money, money, money! I require money so that I may see her again! I must pay to have my heart tortured. Isn't it ironic, Bonadventure? The romantic Poet must put his fingers into a filthy purse before he can wash them in the pure source of his mistress. She is very exact. 'Cash first.' And into the lamae lockbox it goes, franc after filthy franc. And all because my mistress is a prostitute, and I am discerning enough to require the professional touch in all my personal matters. My tailor--the best. My barber--a master with his little snippers, his oils and talc. My mistress--a prostitute! It is too late to regret my sensitive nature now; that Rubicon I have skated across far too long ago, that Jordan I have boiled in for far too long already to change now, or even wish that I had a desire to change. No, no. If I am a scoundrel, if I am a saint, I need the same thing: money!"
We walked the Rue Flambeau. It was late afternoon, and the paving stones shone out as if gilded in horse piss. Knowing how much Charles hated to rely on such a recourse, but seeing no other option myself, I was about to suggest to him his usual method of procuring extra capital. The golden ore of my own trust fund was simply not liquid enough to support more than one islet of leisure and indifference; namely myself.
"Write to your half-brother, Alphonse."
Baudelaire scowled, but gave no other indication that he had heard me. I watched an ambidextrous boy kill one bird with two stones in the distance.
"I have already written to Alphonse--for the last time! It is not that, not at all. That is not the difficulty, despite the manner in which the mauling knocks of the debt collectors trouble my contemplation at all hours. The difficulty..."
"Yes?" I prompted.
"Is tonight."
Now, I scowled. "What is difficult about tonight?"
"I must see her tonight."
We came upon the bird the boy had killed; its bright eyes had been mashed to the consistency of blueberries in a burnt muffin. Baudelaire lifted it up in one palm and addressed himself, and all of his 'difficulties,' to the murdered starling.
"Warm," he noted. "But what animates its chaff is fled." Baudelaire's aspect, as they say, darkened. "You are like me," he told the starling, "when I am denied the sight of Jeanne. We seem toasty as loaves, but we are dead."
Needless to say, I advanced him the money he needed on the assurance that Alphonse's 50 francs was to come first to me, and only then to his other necessities. After a curt nod of thanks, he said to me, as he pocketed the money:
"How alike the pair of you are! My friend and my mistress, Bonadventure and Jeanne. Both prostitutes!"
Here it comes again: the charity catcall for cash; but this time it is for the last time.... I'm tired of playing the wily prostitute to your flagging generosity; I will no longer help you to get it up, Alphonse.
But, with this excuse of its being the 'last time,' I feel free enough to ask you for double the amount I requested last time. If you can see your way clear to peel off 100 francs from the wad the crooked lawyers jam into your pockets, dear judge and brother...? Your last disbursement, you should know, went for books and medicines. I had an intolerable headache, brought on no doubt by too much late night reading.
You know I have been stretching my pen to its utmost. I review art and opera with a constancy such artistes pray to receive from their wives. I garner inches and influence in Le Monitor, Le Universal Optik, and even such English rags as The Times and Pantisocracy Today. But still, it is not enough! I'd be pinching pennies from the orphaned urchins in the street, were their fingernails not quite so sharp.
It seems I forgot about my tailor--an exquisite artist! An amputee would grow a new leg just to wear a pair of pants fitted by this nimble little man. But a tailor can ruin a gentleman's reputation faster than any other acquaintance a man might have. Everyone with any style sees Tripadore, and any one of these fellows might drop the question, in seeming generosity, 'I know Charles Baudelaire goes to you, of course; he's an impeccable man in his insane way, but tell me, if he owes you a little something, so I might clear it up for him. As a tribute to his dissolute genius, of course.' Ah! And Tripadore would let the terrible truth slip; the friend would be unfortunately short of the required cash, and... in all the clubs you are 'That deadbeat, Baudelaire.'
I tell you, it makes me feel like skinning a cat!
So, if it is alright, I will go over to your friend M. Guerin's tonight, and ask the advance of him with your guarantee, nes pas?
And again, I say the 'last time,' to bind myself to a line of honorable conduct in the execrable matter of money, and to assuage any alarmist jump that may travel through your nerves or your checkbook when you receive a letter with the blotted and black return address of
Yours Truly,
Chas. Baudelaire
666 Crossways Court
the Vampire Cave, just West of Paris
P.S. Am now involved in translating the fourth act of Timon of Athens, so don't worry about the future; this show will go big!
P.P.S. I send you my warmest regards for the new year, which I hope will find all your family in supreme health, etc. I have firmly deferred any reform in my general behavior until 1850, after the new year.
Charles,
My dear love for you is strained to the point where the viol of my affections is becoming the cat-scratch of a weary fiddle in an alley. Please tell me the names and addresses of all the men you owe money to--a fact which only you can know! You bemoan your affairs with the eloquence and despair of a modern Job, but when help arrives from the skies in the improbable shape of a purse, you spurn its disbursement and claim--falsely!--that you will 'take care of this small distress myself.' As if it were a pimple, and not a series of improvident debts that could land you in jail! You owe, not 2000 francs as you pretend, but closer to 4000. You send me that list of expenses you had very carefully and obligingly kept since our last set-to on the 'execrable subject,' as you call it. Do not spend all of your of inheritance before it is disbursed to you! You will find yourself in circumstances that you, with your delicate and languishing nature, will not abide.
Enclosed is cash for your immediate needs. But, I won't send over the whole of your debts in cash to you directly, as you proposed once, because I fear you will simply spend it all on whores and opium. Or, as you might say, 'to improve a single line in the, thus far, wierdly managed sonnet of my existence.'
There you go again! Trying, as you put it, to find a rhyme for God, whom you then decide to give the pet name of 'the orange.'
Alphonse
Good Alphonse,
Lets us consider like gentlemen and accountants what is to be done with your brother Charles. Two hundred francs to dress a woman in the finest crinoline! A woman, however fine her personal qualities--taken in dancing parade from a brothel!
Our cafe oleo last afternoon has enlightened me considerably as to your brother's current careen into the abyss. In the army, I have seen every sort of dissipation and twist of selfhood into ruination; those men had better cause than our Charles, and I have shot several of them for less glaring outrages. I have developed a plan of attack.... But I must see you again, face to face; we must pour over the sores in his soul and unearth the charitable being who once, in his long uncut hair at ten years of age, would totter over to my lounge chair, with his mother on my lap, to deliver, carefully and unspillingly, the Spanish scotch that was discovered closest to Cordova's corpse on that harrowing campaign among those dark and savage people who value independence over civilization.
Tell Charles nothing of any of this! You have always been so apt at straightening out his young poetic ass, that I beg you not to fail or lose nerve when I disclose my plan to you tomorrow.... Say threeish at The Victorie?
Yours cordially,
Pierre Aupick, Academy Militaire
"Mais oui, who is it? Enter!"
Jeanne came through the booming door, her hair impeccable, a fevered lion crouched in her stance, her eyes as lively and shameless as champagne.
"Good day, Mademoiselle. What is the envelope you have brought with you?"
"A communication from Charles, Counseil Judicaire!"
"What more can he have to say after yesterday's midnight refusal of a forty-five franc advance on next month's allowance? The terms of his inheritance have been completely settled between his mother, General Aupick, and himself. Not to mention the court of law."
"Yes, M. Ancelle. This is all well known to Charles. I myself have been fully informed on these matters between his bitter mutterings, his rants against fate, and his incessant chattering in his sleep. The terms, you see, are a literal nightmare for him. Nevertheless, he has implored me to bring you this communique post-haste! What it may contain, I have not the slightest notion."
"He dashed it off this A.M.?"
"No, he was up all night, leaving me in freezing sheets. He came back to the apartment last night from his visit with you, his brow contracted in pain, and sat lighting and snuffing a candle while contemplating the extinguished wick between ignitions."
"Well, my dear, be that as it may be, please do sit down. Have a clove cigarette, they are most soothing. There are no night terrors at the accountant's office, after all! This particular brand was recommended by Charles, and no doubt you will find them familiar enough."
I accepted the letter from Mlle. Duval, a fat one, and broke the wax seal, which was very fresh. Evidently Baudelaire's candle experiment had evolved into letter-writing at some point in the night. The scent of burning cloves was an anodyne to my mood, which, poor cat, had had no coffee applied to its incorrectly petted nap as of yet.
To say that the content of the transmission Mlle. Duval handed over was shocking is to say nothing at all. It was beyond brazen, past endurance, insufferable, and utterly unignorable all at once. I glanced up at Mlle. Duval; her haughty head was as wreathed with smoke as any Alpine mountain bastion.
"Mademoiselle, do not disturb yourself. I must find my man Gerard and send him on a minor errand, no more than that. I shall return in a moment. Some of M. Baudelaire's note touches on yourself, and we can discuss the matter fully when I return. Gerard!!!"
Some fortunate angel had delayed Gerard from sousing himself into oblivion that particular morning, and he was able to be dispatched to Baudelaire's rooms at once in an attempt to stop him from killing himself. For indeed, the contents of his missive were a last will and testament, and a declaration of suicide. He was anxious to provide for Jeanne--and, in my estimation, equally anxious to put a stake through the heart of his maman. The sacrilege! And after her endless pains to keep him from ruining himself financially so he could continue to play pat-a-cake with his poet and painter pals.
Still, he was as inconsolable as a kicked cur; and those overblown eyes told of his own immensities of suffering. Last night, begging for cash, he had had the haunted look of a petty burgher whose enterprise has been burned to its foundations by some uninsurable accident of lightning or riot. Who can judge another's pain? Human nature is such a fist of vipers....
But first, he must survive.
"Gerard!"
I tripped over the candlesticks. The apartment was in splendid disarray. Piles of papers, sketches, perfect color prints, scraps of lugubrious and obscene cartoons spilling everywhere in wheaty sheaves. Several pyramids of ashes dotted the corners of the dusty windows and the disheveled bed. And there, in the bed, just discernable under a wadded swaddling of cheap muslin, a chunky lump moaned indecipherable phrases.
"Horrible... void... cessation... punchline...."
A bloody puddle bloomed in the center of the soiled whites. After getting up from my logjam of candlesticks, I made my way toward the puddle, calling M. Baudelaire's name carefully, and finally turned down the bedsheets to reveal the suffering man.
His form seemed minimalized and dead pale, an albino capuchin monkey. Barefooted in his sweat-through night shirt, he shivered pitifully, as if in the final clasp of influenza. His forehead, normally so large and open, was sunken, clotted with a body's self-concern for survival--no matter what the mind within wanted. Dead pale, blanched, and wrinkled. It was as if his entire mentality had been momentarily erased and only a knot of hurting muscle remained where exalted thoughts had once unfolded their whitest wings....
He had stabbed his heart!
My breath caught in my throat, which was bone dry. Mercifully, the knife had been removed, sparing me that cadaverous task. (I later found the blade, a pewter letter-opener, stuck point-first in the floor behind the headboard.) I grabbed a small pillow--a sampler of his mother's with some bible verse embroidered in rainbow tones--and pushed it against the weeping leak in his chest.
"Hold this tight, just here," I instructed him. "I go to fetch the surgeon."
"They will curse your name for saving me," M. Baudelaire prophesied as I placed his hand firmly on his mother's pillow.
But he nodded his head weakly, a balloon tugged by its invisible string. This thin assurance would have to do; the situation, as they say, was dire. I took his doubtful accession to my command and hoped--if not for the best exactly, then at least for endurance enough for both of us to survive the present circumstances.
Later, after I had pointed the surgeon to his rooms, and informed one of M. Baudelaire's unsavory associates (whom I met along the way) of his predicament, I thought I'd stop in at Mme. Zazzy's gin shop, just off the side street that zips back to Ancelle's office. I needed a drink!
Maybe I'll try that new, blue vodka, clear and caustic as my Marie's eyes....
Love is a pastime for the middle-class. But passion! It is the command of all the gods, even that virgin-viper Diana. The lesson of the cards: the deck is shuffled--perhaps even by our own hands--but blindly. We cannot penetrate the design on the back of the deck; order exists, but is not revealed. Rules show themselves only randomly, and then assert their supremacy with the rigor of a priori dictates!
Thus my suicide--so perfectly planned and coldly and cunningly executed--timed to render justice to my Jeanne and to rest my racing mind, is overturned in a trice. What had the cards now revealed? Puzzling out their dictates--the insistent wishes of life itselfÂ--became a game of feral fascination to me. I was chained to the daemon of 'needing to know,' of being one with the supreme pattern that would unfailingly unfold.
My chest had been Xed by red, livid lightning. Must I mend and scar, I, who was so ready to sail into eternity? Would those far shores rear as exotically and grandly as my Afric daydreams had done, those chocolate bonbons of youth and sun? Would I arrive companionless and remain entertained? Eh, the cards have kept me ignorant of my fate--at least for this iteration of the deal. At least I did not die unredeemed by the Savior. Hmm, this coverlet itches. My lips are dry.
"Maman? A little water, water."
"Your mother is absent, Baudelaire. Like your God."
"Gerard? My savior! My saint!"
"No. It's me, Bonadventure. Your intimate and fellow inmate."
The chilly cup was pressed to my lips before I could offer protest. By evening, I was able to scribble a little something.
* * * * *
Dear Maman:
Your absence in my life is more cutting than the wound in my chest, where my vile heart still rat-a-tats abstractedly despite my attempt to cut it out from beneath my recalcitrant ribs. Why will you not come visit me in my sickbed? Today, I arose and dressed, while Jeanne, my constant and good-tempered nurse, was out on her errands. The doctor's strict insistence is that I stay in bed, but having no word and no motherly visit from yourself, I battled gravity and injury to discover what had become of our loving bond. When I made it to the door, it was locked against my egress. My doctor has become my jailor, but my health is your prisoner alone. I have slipped this letter under the door in the poor hope that some passerby will post it. If it reaches you, then these words must be my ambassador and speak with the pity and sincerity my ruined body would have to a mother's doting eyes.
I am weak as an infant, and I write this as if I were wearing mittens on my fists. Take some trouble to visit me, dear mother, of only to assure your progeny's survival! I tell you without shame, dear mother, I need you desperately. You will understand where others will not. I am at Jeanne's apartments on the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tete. Come, if only to scold me for residing with a woman of her class. Maman, it is your sympathy that will heal me, as it has been your alienation that has been the one scourge of my life. If only the General had not stolen you from me, how we would laugh these afternoons away. Surely even Aupick would not deny a wounded son a visit from his mother. Remind him of his wars, and that you have a soldier of your own, and come to me--at once, alone.
As ever, your loving son,
Charles
P.S. Sixty francs would do the trick for my medical expenses, and the current creditors who now, because of my injuries, find me constantly at home. Their insistence is tiresome.
P.P.S. Undoubtedly my injuries have crushed, not just my own physical and spiritual well-being, but also any plans Alphonse and your dear Husband have concocted between them to 'straighten me out.' I hope to hear no more of such 'solutions' in the future. My pattern of life is set; it simply requires a requisite amout of cash.
P.P.P.S. Hear me, heal me, divine creatrix of my being!
"Now I am well and truly damned: I have cut off my wings."
"Ach, Baudelaire, do not say such things. I have come with champagne to celebrate the miracle of your being alive. Come, we have survived a few 'campaigns of the cork' together, and now you alone have survived a 'night of the knife.' Think of how much closer you will be to those desperate characters of the streets now that you have demonstrated your own definitive desperation. You are now one of those characters whose infernal hymnal you compose both day and night."
"Bonadventure, you are an ass."
I was then set straight on the 'sensibility of the critic,' and the idea of a credible 'correspondence' between all of the arts, as among the various senses. In essence, a mysterious train network runs between subjects and senses, but we perceive this network only incompletely, or indirectly, or as various sensual apprehensions. I must admit, this lecture reminded me of my first memories of Catholic school. When the nun spoke of deserts and date and palm trees and their connection to our own young souls and to the life everlasting in Christ, it all seemed quite mysterious. At least the nuns put that gobstopper of a word in the center of it all: God.
Baudelaire had no such anchor. Only an ineffable trust in the poet's sensibility, which he swore the critic required as well. Baudelaire's nonsense word was 'Infinity'--which stands as well for God, since we poor mortals can know just as much of the one as of the other (i.e., very little indeed--not even the extent of our ignorance, honestly).
Baudelaire gave a frigid shiver of disgust--a cold thought had seized him.
"Imagine, the crass hands of that sticky cretin, Gerard, saving me. And entirely without my permission! I'd rather be poisoned and pinned by a pack of avid lepidopterists. Better crucified by men of breeding than saved by craven like that Gerard. I wouldn't have that ape pick a crumb from my cravat, let alone paw my sorely torn person."
"He was sent, and you were saved. 'Bounce in, bounce about,' as your Mother might say."
Baudelaire tilted his second champagne to its dregs, and his eyes began to evince a pleasanter shine. He still hoped to add a rosy tinge to his financial picture through successful art-reviewing for the larger-circulation magazines. He was a trend-setter when it came to praising and panning each year's new set of painters, and he was excited to tell me why he was able to hold this priviledged position in society. His reasons, if rational, were hardly enviable. Who would pay the ferryman's fee he described so enthusiastically, whatever the bonus in discernment accrued?
"The salon of 1849 is on the horizon and fast approaching, my wicked shipmate! Artists will be banging on the critic's door, hoping to infect him with their beauties. The great conversation between the viewer and the viewed is beginning a new season." Baudelaire was now exulting in a prospect of still-wet hues and nudes for his eyes, and some critic-writer's coin for his pocket. "Many and varied have been my thoughts on both the essence of the critical mind, and the critic's place in the bourgeois scheme of things as I lay here these past few weeks--outside the orbit of it all, and almost beyond the oblique oval of life itself. Almost, I have been a mirror without a face. Have you heard the Romanian folk tale of the vampire? Very interesting. They flit through the night, beyond it all, yet condemned to a death-in-life and a life-in-death. The vampire is the supreme critic, perhaps, were it not that he also needs the blood of living victims to go on with his half-existence. Personally, I feast upon my own heart, as my injuries attest, and I am sick to regurgitation with its rotten cornucopia. As for the blood of others, I much prefer this refined distillation of champagne. Ah, life's liquid breath! My compliments, Bonadventure."
At this point Manet stepped through the door unannounced.
"Manet! Welcome to my funeral!" Baudelaire crowed. "Won't you drink some of Bonadventure's excellent champagne?"
My first encounter with Baudelaire was soon after his attempted suicide... an event of which he himself, somewhat shockingly, apprised me at that time. He said it was the inevitable response of one too bored with the unimaginative repetitions of his own heartbeat; da-blah, blah-da, day in and day out. The metronome's monotony drove him mad!
I was just coming up to the Pont de Nada, just beyond the old Spanish Embassy, when I saw a vibrant fellow, young as myself, staring at his reflection in the still, mysterious waters beneath the bridge. His hair was dyed a splendid sky-blue, matching his dandy's waistcoat and a pair of large buckled shoes that were impeccably clean, even though he stood in the unbelievable mud of a busy roadway. By his side was a wooden box half-filled with empty wine bottles, an odd assemblage of old corks, many connected together with an able wire into suggestive shapes, and various scraps of scribbled parchment--sketches of an eye agape here, the slanted dash and cross-outs of poetic composition there.
As I approached, dodging carefully to the far side of a coach roaring down the main way, Baudelaire bent down, calmly as though the coach hadn't missed scalping his pate by inches, and began scribbling something on the blank back of a scrap paper in green ink. His face was concentrated like the string of a draw-purse scrunched to a wrinkly O. I could see it was a sonnet taking shape and waited quietly to see what would be the result of this silent fury.
In a few moments, as the shadow of an unsinging bird crossed at our feet, he was blowing on the paper. Then he stooped to retrieve a bottle and cork. He rolled the parchment into a tight tube expertly, dropped it in the bottle, and sealed it with the cork all in one expert motion, fluid as a swan's wing. And then, as if all the energy of his inspiration had dissipated as quickly as it had manifested, he let the bottle roll off the bridge and into the accepting waters, not even bothering to watch the plop!
Now he fetched one of his wire-and-cork models from his box, a dancing man, it seemed, with a cork for a top-hat, the bone of a cat's leg for a cane, feet of cockle shells, the rear-end made of an eggshell, and an obscene protuberance from the groin of four more corks threaded by a stiff wire. He danced this concatenation across the stone railing of the bridge, singing under his breath and gyrating in time to his grimly flashing grin. It all seemed extraordinarily mad to me.
"Monsieur, whatever are you doing?" I asked him, unable to contain my curiosity, and flustered enough to blurt out my question without so much as introducing myself.
"Garbage art," he said, his grin fixed, his eyes still on the pantomime before him as he toyed with the corks.
"Ah," I said. "Trash to treasure? Is that the idea?"
He grumbled, threw the now Pan-like dance-man over the side of the bridge dismissively. "Art made of garbage. A life made of garbage. Garbage art. Garbage life. Garbage. That is all."
"And the sonnet you consigned to the waves?" I would not be put off the scent by the jigsaw curves of this puzzle if I could help it. There was that in his eyes which bespoke of a loneliness, and a certain skewed (skewering?) vision. "I repeat, what are you doing?"
"Luring rescuers."
My face must have retained its uncomprehending expression, jaw slack and eyes aghast, for he soon continued.
"You see, each sonnet is a plea for help. A nugget of desperation and self-pity; gold salting the fake mine of my manipulations."
"I beg your pardon...."
"Begging, while amusing, is not necessary. When a sonnet, such as the several dozen I have composed and tossed away this afternoon, reach a sufficiently lively and sympathetic soul, one whose sense of superiority lies in the belief in his own generosity, the hook in my little lure will have bitten flesh. The 'rescuer' will be tugging, quite unwittingly, at my line."
The wind lifted the blue fringe of his wild hair, like an aurora borealis flaring above his sun-browned dome. His plot to "lure rescuers" seemed as implausible as punching a giraffe in the nose, but again, my curiosity drew me alluringly along.
"And what, pray tell, is to be the fate of this person, motivated by human sympathy, and generous enough to act upon it? What will the spider do with the pitiful fly?"
"Do not deceive yourself. It is their own good self-regard that they are rescuing by these New Testament 'acts of love' that they perpetrate!"
"And their fate?"
"Oh," he said, now appearing quite bored with our conversation, "one amusement or another--or should I dress up my own depravity by calling them 'experiments'?"
I did not know what to say to this rather extraordinary confession of depravity, and must have looked a bit like the proverbial fish out of water, for he continued again after a pause.
"Come, I see you are a country mouse in the city. It is quite rude of me to go on this way without offering any refreshment. My last dram of wine you have just seen roll into the stream. Pick up my box and follow me. My chest is still only incompletely healed from that blasted stab wound (I am an incompetent suicide). I shall let you in on the delights of a most amusing little establishment. Trust my weighty taste, and I shall trust your purse's heft."
So saying, he turned on his heel and strode away. There was nothing for it but to pick up his box and follow. He continued speaking without looking back over his shoulder to confirm my attendance to his whim. Perhaps the slight rattle of the bottles communicated that I now was 'hooked.' What could have lead to the poor man's self-stabbing? Lifting this load for him seemed the least I could do, given the circumstances, and the still-unwhetted thirst of my own curiosity.
I dream of icebergs. Impossibly white, blank-sided pyramids rising from the gorge of the brine, as hope arises from faith, as clarity comes from freezing one's tears with a mistress' wintry, heartless stare. With enough practice, when one looks inward at oneself, one only needs the perfected mirror of a practiced self-hatred to see the self's damnable essence--that nothing which God and the Devil eternally thumb-wrestle to obtain; it is a pewter spittoon of nothingness voiding the nightmare of life onto one's skeleton.
Oh, monstrous perambulation! How I long to enter the invisible catacombs of the ice and freeze there, a spiteful spit of poet-mote launched into God's crammed eye!
I abandon all worlds, all wonders to this present numbness of ice. Locked in a landscape of frozen vodka, this is my eternal crucifixion in the tundra. Time recedes to a shriveled snow pea lost in the whiteness....
And yet.... How pleasantly I lie on the plush couch of orange velvet paisleys.... Why did I ever want to die when I could lie thus crucified at a rate of a few francs per hour? It's an oblivion dungeon here at madame Tsu's. Here at Madame Tsu's, the client is always right... until his wallet runs out of frittery francs. And mine have run. Yes, Madame Tsu, this magic-carpet is reserved for another dreamer at four o'clock. Yes, I understand I have been too-long a-tarrying. But here, in your yellow arms, Madame Tsu, I have been at last abandoned, at last set adrift without the crosswinds of eager terror or tedious conversation. Only here, on this ratty couch, could I crouch in my arctic emptiness, with no auguring object for my randy eye to affix itself upon--other than my own abominable sins. This is my masterwork: a disaster divinely conceived--but not of God!
You do not see, I see. Yes, I see it is past four o'clock. Tso witty, Madame Tsu! You are a most punctual warden of my dram of dreams. You keep your corner of the creation as strictly patrolled as a death-rictus.... Tstiffly tschime the tserrible tsgongs of Madame Tsu!
"Our plans for Baudelaire's well-being have been delayed, not denied, General Aupick."
"Revolution, suicide and recalcitrance are no match for our age and guile, it seems, my good Alphonse."
"Ha ha! Yes, indeed, now that the dust has settled. And the best of it is, that young Baudelaire himself will benefit from our finesse--the same he has so ardently tried to deny!"
"Peter himself denied Christ thrice before the cock crowed, and yet became the rock of Mother Church. Perhaps Baudelaire's rocky road will turn an equally fortunate corner."
"The adventure we have planned for him will shape him, I trust."
"Let's shake on it."
"I will post your letter today, General Aupick, and forward the funds to the concerned parties."
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!
An ocean voyage! Improbable and frantic as any carnival. Hard men and the hard air of the docks swarm for a confrontation with the watery element of the wily ocean. My damned step-dad, General Aupick, has pulled off a miracle as surprising as any bouquet fluoresced from an old clown's sleeve. He has pulled the world out from under me and replaced it with mystic waters as salt as my blood. My troubles have edged me from the earth onto this splintery deck swiveling drunkenly under my feet.
Debts beset me. On every side I hear the cry of my creditors as persistent as seagulls. My inspiration has fled me after Jeanne (that damned prostitute--pinched in the face and vain as a queen) dismissed me from the cathouse steps with a pale finger. And now I go to my wounded drowning in the ocean. Perhaps... perhaps I will be transformed in the blue element. Perhaps, when I rear into the air and return to land someone will say of my yattering corpse 'those are pearls that were his eyes.'
So, a change of venue for my insanity and insouciance, as the General says; new stars for my ruined eyes. My first good turn from that quarter! Enough perhaps to balance out the rest of his nitpicky betrayals. Two days ago, I slung a gunny sack across my back, packed my finest cigars, and called for a stylish hansom to deliver me to the docks. On the S.S. Croesseus I put to sea, embarking as, of all things, a pilot's apprentice. But my periplum begins and ends in the spine, casting its vigor through the ribs perhaps, taking in the exotica of the splayed pelvis, and the rank pursuits of the hand and head. Those are the inner journeys that I endure and that pull all oceans into a single tear from my eye.
At the docks I met Capt. Souz, to whom I am 'apprenticed.' --Oh, a vile man, as full of tough talk as the sailors with their Spanish mustachios and idiot cynicism. None of them have read a literary journal out of Paris in their lives, and any talk of poetry or the sublime crimes of the heart come through an awkward discoursing on sea chanties, the Lay of Lillian and her Wagging Sea Beastie, or that sad masterpiece, whose pathos they could not parse to save their souls, Reginald, Reginald.
The commercial passengers are worse, for one comes to expect nothing at all from the seadogs, mere hooligans of the waterways, but the passengers seem like men on a Paris street, just misplaced--by the plucking of a puppet string--onto a jumping deck, the slick soles of their shoes causing them to slide into each other in a type of random hazard, a shuffleboard effect where the pucks are people.
They think their cheap perfumes and political opinions out of Le Monde make them gentlemen of consequence. Any idea that cuts against their piggy prejudices--inculcated in childhood--causes an expression to surface to their faces that I can only imagine describing as hideous.
The sailors, with whom I sling my hammock in a darkness clotted with the rank rot of a stable, are all about my age. I attempted on a few occasions to get some of them to unpuzzle a poem with me, but they merely used the occasion to mock by smallness, my delicate nature, and what they kept calling, in a sing-song dismissive way, 'the insanity of poetry.'
The abuses! Confined in my cloth coffin last evening, I lay inflamed by half wakeful dreams of Jeanne, the triumphant terror of her hair, the deranged insistence with which her clear cuticles kept thrusting themselves into my mind without a moment's respite! The constant loudness of the sea performed an unpitying act of mesmerization on me.
The ceiling swung back and forth in the gap of the hammock above me; then six strong and hairy hands leapt across the canvas and pinched the hammock closed, until I was shut in tight as the proverbial pea. Between my legs, the canvas thumped and bulged, once. I had no idea what was going on.
In the next moment, everything became deliriously clear, as blow after blow landed on the hammock, and was transmitted to my body and skull like a cascade of rocks. If I had rolled blind down a steep desert slope, my injuries could not have been more complete. My every inch suffered insult and assault.
The next instant, as I retched on myself in a shameful nausea of relief, the beating of the virgin sailor, his shrieking initiation--for that is indeed what it was--was over. I crawled like a sick dog onto the deck, unable to bear breathing the same cabin air as my persecutors. I stared at eternity from a lifeboat hanging to port until the sky herself shaded from its immense nightblue into a recognizable shade--of bruise.
A miserable man on a miserable boat. What a formula for misrule! On the high seas, the strange Parisian stood out among his hearty fellows. His spirits were always poor, his mien downcast and low as a whipped dog. His round head was full of the devil's wickedest thoughts, as anyone could tell from the sly bleak smile that would appear whenever some misfortune befell a shipmate. Nothing to hang a man for, but nothing to praise either. I recall the time nimble Nate passed over the taffrail into nothingness.
Nate had been logging our speed through the blue churn of the world, hoisting up the taffrail log, and paying out the knotted rope. Perhaps a moment's inattention as Nate caressed the bare wooden bulb of the mermaid's breast who adorned the stern was what did him in. Perhaps the tossed log jerked, or was caught a second in the rudder and tugged him over when he tried to haul her up. Nate ran on the ship's rigging like a rat, feet and hands a continual blur. With hands as leather as a sea turtle's fins (and almost as wide), no part of the ship was beyond his speedy reach. He wrapped his feet in a soft sort a saddle-leather he swore was better than the clogs we were issued, and even better than bare feet, and which he glossed with beeswax on the soles to give him extra grip. In the galley at meal times, or during some midnight revelry, a cold ghostly knocking would come through the battened porthole. Our spines would seize up, conjuring dead men from Davy Jones' locker crawling over the ship like ants on a corpse. Then one mate would be shamed into screwing open the porthole, and there'd be Nate's upside-down face, cackling loudly, his eyes wide with delight at having fooled his fellows again.
Death ashore, however grisly, leaves behind some naked totem of the mortal affair, some bent stick for Cerberus to play with, some maudlin evidence for loved ones to obsess over, a dismembered leg or bloody shoe. A thing for the mind to gnaw upon, a partial cadaver or chewed thumb. At sea, in the storm's raw roar, or during a duty awkwardly pursued, death's whisper swallows souls into its liquid All--a green engulfing of man's slender form in the sea's pewter landscape. Whatever importance man presumes is blandly sucked to dumb impotence, with not even the tart arch of a wishbone left behind to trouble the air's deaf evanescence.
Without belief
We come to grief;
Yet grieving gives best
Belief its acid test.
Over the side on a length of solid knots, Nate went winningly, his smile about a hand wide. There was neither a clack, a clunk, nor a thump, just a sudden slack in the line, and no more Nate.
And Baudelaire slinking by with that sly grin, calm as a cat.
Dear Aupick,
I have been unable to care for and form the character of your son as we projected over those hot whiskeys at port. He remains an absolute stranger to the fellows on-board. He finds the passengers execrable--an indifferent sample of all that was so boring and uninspired upon land, whose only further recommendation now is a salty baptismal.
To the sailors, he bears a very querulous face. His reaction is two parts horror and one part aristocratic snub; although he swears his only thought of them "is based 100% on smell." Indeed, his entire deportment is such a mystery to me, that I can think of no right way to encapsulate it in a phrase, or by analysis give you a right idea of its type and temper. He induces a morbid amount of thinking about--and, as the ship's captain, I certainly have much to think about on so wide-ranging a voyage, the Cape alone should supply my nightmares with material and my days with activity--indeed, I find myself doting on little else, but offers zero revelations.
Here is a sample of our dinner conversation from earlier tonight. His face was slightly discolored and clouded, as though he were withholding a judgement of lightning bolts for the sake of his dinner-table manners.
"So, M. Baudelaire, how are you taking to the sea? This cruise your father arranged for you would seem just the thing after cramped and cold Paris; it's a very healthy life we provide on shipboard, is it not?"
"It is extraordinary."
Then my first mate, oblivious to the ambivalence of this response--he is a 'character', and 30 years at sea have washed off his more sharp, perceptive edges--chimes in:
"Extra-extra-extraordinary, you might say, young Messier. I remember my first voyage as if it were yesterday and I was sober the livelong day. Everything about the life on board a ship pops out at you like crabs from a dark hole. The sea seems to mean a something extra, as well, like it was all a drama of some, ah, piquancy; ain't that the gospel, cap'n? Like it all stands out at you; how small you are on the face of the world, and yet, since there is nothing else human around for miles, how concentrated and exact the attentions of the universe seem. Like a drama, like I say."
"Well, that's quite an observation, Kreeger...."
"Hell must make a similar impression."
"Really? M. Baudelaire, please go on."
"The stunned aloneness of each corroded soul is like this desert of the water; nothing without, and all within. A concentration of the eye on everything inward must soon result."
"T'ain't a preacher alive made me feel my wrong so hard, young fella. You goin' to preaching school in Paris when you decided to jump ship and sail with us?"
"How I passed the time in Paris, I cannot say, for I cannot understand myself. A man would hardly be in hell if he could truly know who he was--and thus avoid himself."
"Know himself to avoid himself!" ejaculated Kreeger, "bit like a man meeting a mirror, and then deferring at the sight of its contents'."
"If only I had such a mirror. I would give my life, and all of your lives as well, to possess such an instrument."
"Don't you think such a statement," I interjected, "a bit, well... over-generous? With our lives, that is."
He looked at me with such a maturity and completeness of ice, that--although it was subtropical, and we were rounding the coast of Africa in its summer season,--I felt my sweat seize up in clear, cold rivulets upon my brow. And down my neck stung the needle of an inner shiver.
"Not a syllable, Mon Capitaine."
And then he beheaded a shrimp with a clack of his neat teeth.
Tomorrow, we make landfall at Mozambique.
She has that voluptuous selfness of a cat.
Hautiness and rigor battle at her brown brows; her mulatto lips, thick as a split caterpillar, are bloodied by her incessant nibbling on betel nuts. Her talk and manner of speech are indistinct and lazy-lovely; she pads about with the subtle self assurance of a calm Cleopatra. Never have I beheld any creature under the sun with her symmetry and sublime self-sufficiency. She never races anywhere, but always arrives at exactly the right time. Just when my crumple heart begins to gnaw after her elliptical absence, that is when she is bound to arrive, her hair wreathed in the perfumes of exotic trees. Half the time her arms are loaded with an offering of koko-l'taanga, the rich and subtle fruit heavy against her breasts, and graced with an astonishing pinkness when they are sliced and served, often with a dash of cayenne and brown sugar. Altogether, an experience that stimulates.
She is, I believe, one of the half-caste Muslims, descended from political prisoners brought hence a hundred years ago. I occasionally see her kneeling and touching her forehead to the dust, which smells of sheep, a fleecy affluence of the air. The quaking aqua of the water, peered at from every hill, makes one quite conscious of the embittered liveliness of the sea, as if God had but one huge eye, and it lay in the sea, and it watched you incessantly.
He is made of ashes. Like Kimbo, patted together from the ashes of the world-creation. Like Kimbo, his eyes are full of tricks and mischief, the original fires not yet quite out. Oh, the man is in love with thunder. Last night during the great shakedown from the sky, he took up B'llambe's short spear with the blade like a palmleaf to end the enemy's heart at one stroke, and danced, white and naked, in the lighting storm; himself a stroke of fallen starlight.
I must bring to him the blank tablature of my affection, on which he may write his desires. This is the way of all true women; mother has told the story many times. When their ship is repaired, they shall sail far away, to India, to France, blank tablets once, now thick with the dreams of their peoples.
Eat of the Guyana, I said with my hands, and he ate of what my own arms had plucked for him to covet. Our days commence in the charms of detail drawn onto the world by the great fire, each thing of the day waiting for us to touch it rightly, and burn ourselves upon it, and have the burn-scar in our life-memories for always. Each night sinks down to caresses, the last meal and lying like a soul and its shadow before the dying fire of which he was made, until the oblivion enters us, and we are for a timeless time all dream and daring.
He is blushing and getting dark with the days. His eyes pop out white with thoughts of me. I must find a way aboard the floating forest that his compatriots swarm over and thunder at day after day. Last sun, his eyes looked farther away than the moonshine. I am apprehensive, the Guyana fruit is like holding weeping stones from the river in my arms as I come to him. Heavy and wet and mourning the apart-time which must come. Soon, says B'llambe, they go, the great ship little like a dragonfly on the bold line of the world; and then, you blink once, and they sink into never-was. So B'llambe says. "But Patri'ce went," I say. "She went, and is she nothing now or a Frenchwoman? Have you seen her gossiping at the well, or fetching faggots, or dancing for a man? But she is, she is a tomaade," I say, remembering the word. B'llambe walked away, but I remember who she talked to at the trading post, the fat man in his white suit. I will go too. I will ride the ocean, and cross the bold line of the world.
I go to the fat man, but he will not help to send me over the seas. He says "wait here," and the sailors come and bring me to a yard full of smelly boxes. They lock me, dressed in a long cloth made all of scratches, into one of the boxes. They say I am "too in love" with "Shaarl". How can it be? I see him only once a day in a hurry in the magic glass in the wall. Is this what it is to be "mad?"
My stomach levers around like watching a fly too long with your whole head, turning your whole head this way and that with every zig-zag of the speedy fly, and not wisely following him with just your eyes. Ah, mother, have I been unwise?
I can see Marseilles from my hammock. My eyes tighten, and the ship's yaw and sway steady out to the stiff taps and clacks of some pegleg pirate rattling along the raw dock. I can see his greasy head, swathed in a kercheif of skull-and-cross-bones polka dots, a fantastic eye patch sewn from a sow's ear, still rough with pig fur. Closer in, as my meditation's spyglass reels in the seaside details, I recognize the old sea dog for who he really is: my rebel fellow traveller, Lucifer himself!
Lucifer lounges, with the dawn sun on his dirty brow gemmed with hellish sweats. Over his shoulder, the sun like a lapdog follows its namesake, leaping to Lucifer's side. He has learned to be a spear of light, arrowing-out the tyranny of that three-souled Person of Law! I, too, must brighten and burn to a point. I, too, shall pare my nails with a silver hatchet and smoke the parings in a stolen pipe and knock the dottle on my cloven heel. The docks are rotted, but the master of lights smokes above them, clean-limbed and craven. He waits for me at Marseilles, a glint-rip in the fabric of reality gleaming leanly. My forever friend, my fiend, my genie, all hail! Lucifer the lightning-bolt, all cool style in his libertine repose.
He knew that "God" had gamed the racetrack. And he refused to be a greyhound ground down in its go-roundness, ground to dust by the eternal circuit another's heart had hammered into a seamless globe and stars. J'accuse! roared the unsoiled boy, swift as Saint-Just to sweep his Creator to the guillotine. Swift as lightning! This would have been Lucifer's self-crowning act of creative destruction, this exiling of the Life-giver to death eternal. Then... what freedom, and what dance! Walpurgis-nacht is but its nickel imitation, a penny-poor parody of such all-ways wild and lively Chaos. I unbind myself from the thorns and briars of the Law, their papier-mache pastiche of freedom hung in the gloomy humidity of the Lawyer's courthouse. Let that be my final image of God the Good and God the Great: a Lawyer!
Is there madness in this kiss? The Devil and I see eye to eye: pirate and prisioner-sailor, both seeking to be free, to set the terms of our own release or damnation and manage a private jig with jilting Eternity. Will my Lucifer wait at the docks for me? If I were to prowl those bawdy boards whose backsides are slapped by the sea at the side of that piratical pegleg, what ribald adventures would ensue?
Perhaps it is merely a bad habit with me to pursue these theorums and piquant postulations, to ask these 'unaswerables' as often as I do. Sometimes, I feel as though I am nothing if I am not a question. Interrogating the real, the unreal, and all the possibilities in-between. Somehow, for me, this gives me the feeling of stretching into life, into existence. Otherwise, what is there for me... only boredom banal and ennui everlasting. I deride the questions of others, for they do not give me this sensation of reality. Clearly, it is not honest curiosity that motivates me, for then I would study and listen to others, gleaning knowledge and gaining certainty as my experience increased. Instead, I mope along metaphysical quays with my one-eyed rebel guide. Instead, I ply my brain and balls for experiences that are unique--so unique as to form their own basis, their own measure of what experience itself can be. It is a selfish motive, and an egoistic one as well. Limits should be discovered, not imposed. Such is my precis, such as it is.
Now, from my hammock, I can see that my adventure is nearly over. Soon I will be in Paris again and forever. There I am, taking in the evening air with Bonadventure, blathering on about his glad abstractions. Perhaps it shall be some summer ages hence, and yet he and I shall be the same. I will reminisce about my Afric adventure, and dutiful Bonadventure, reaching into his splendid gilt vest pocket, will extract a green twisted spliff he has aquired in some back alley marketplace.
"All the way from Haiti," he will say, raising his long eyebrows in dark arches.
"All the way..." say I.
Haiti! There is a luscious Hell of naked dances and red-blood rituals; there a man, a poet, can bite himself out a chunk of life and live it. Here, in Paris (I will think), on my iron balcony overlooking the Rue des Desparages, life is just another civic duty; a function to be fulfilled before the tax man registers your deficit or gain. Today (my future me will think), I can see Lucifer again, cool and lucid, living beyond all yardsticks, all inches. Bonadventure will be laughing heartily at some brat plashing in the mud, tossing a horse turd to its tottering compatriot. Catch! Will life have changed one iota from this filthy image for me? Of course not. I will be perpetually catching my friend's dirty turds. Bonadventure, I notice (in our future incarnation), speaks Turdish perfectly and perpetually. Still laughing at the children, he turns to me to speak: Turd, turd, turd.
And I? In essence, I am no better. Although my turds take on a certain formal stiffness through their becoming dried and sonnetized. I am no better than Bonadventure! No better than a filthy child wading in mud and piss. But they are laughing, all of them. The child delights in his play, and Bonadventure chuckles behind his weed cigarette. Even the horse laughs, when it passes, its teeth great ragged mad squares of white triumph: Ha, ha, ha!
I do not laugh. I would do much better altogether to stay out of this living mess. I should stand on the quay beside my friend Lucifer and pass back and forth before the brown froth a few dry, witty remarks. A few etherial in-jokes that mock the mire and satirize the shit and siphon the squealing hiss of laughter to... silence.
Surly to bed and surly to rise makes a man dyspeptic, skeptic and snide. How many and how often have been my dreams of death: my feet cold before me, unmourned and blue. These same crabbed feet that trespass so lightly upon God's sallow, hallowed creation! And did these feet in ancient times do more than dance in pagan parade, tripping in circular praise of the Christian Satan--the only adorable godhead who appealed to the prurient and true crux of man's toilsome experience on this globe of universal molestations? Why accept an absent, unprovable Paradise, when opium dens curl filled with yellow heavens? Why lash the soul to penance with anything more soiling than the feathery quickness of my quill? Flightless, perhaps, but final in its editorial quickness! And in any case, the result will be as edifying in the end, the conclusion just as cold and eternal as any damnation: I shall rictify and rot in my final lengthwise lodgings, the tomb.
"Hail, Bonadventure! You greet me on the docks of Marseille, a fine and faithful friend after your own morose and fickle fashion! Come, walk beside me on the planks while the gulls tear at the rats' innards under the weak sun of France. Africa was another land, another (wholly unannointed) dream of existence. I tell you, Bonadventure, I shall miss my Afric days, the grind of her freezing desert nights, the square glare of her endless afternoons. There one sees the life of man without civilization's fibs. Without the crock of comforts and querulous confrontations--both!--annoyances and evasions of the modern scene.
"Long shall I crave that elemental landscape, that sea of sand, charmless and arid. And why? It is only here, in France, indeed solely in Paris, where the stage may be set and the wicked feast appointed where my noble words can be properly disgorged and digested. Ah, Mystery, it is truly only You who can know the conclusion to this question, only You who can hold our unknowingness--both while we breathe and bleed on Earth, and hereafter. If my adventure of Africa is to exist beyond the besotted nights of my own consciousness, then it must be in the ears of bumpkin Bonadventure, or nowhere. Eh, my friend? All my grand peregrinations of the spirit, all my tides of talk, must have their sinkhole in the human ear! Ironic reprimand of the irenic savior! So I must dig my soul's home in my compatriot's ear and be an eager parasite in life 'while the worm turns.' And beyond this temporary abyss in the listener? Nada, neant. Only my cold feet keeping each other company in the tomb, and the occasional droppings of stony mold as I shed my choiring wings for a bony xylophone.
"And so I have returned home from my dear adventure, my defining vision of the not-here; this is the keystone to every artist's Edenic attempt to create, to name, in the plastic materials of his craft, the eternal carvings of his cravings. Here, in near Pariee, I will craft my misshapen missives to the African god of my Creole demoiselle. Dear, damned Aboulee."
I watched friendly billows of smoke pour from Bonadventure's clay pipe, tucked in a quirk of his smirk, as he listened and walked beside me, my heavy sailor's dufflebag over his lanky shoulder. Seeing my glance, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out another clay pipe, stuffed with fresh tabac, and handed it to me as he hopped a quick step and lit a match to ignite it. I have seen only the most adept puppeteers attempt to make their marionettes perform such a feat: at once so awkward and so graceful. But, this was Bonadventure's very métier, and who am I to deny him the fullest expression of his servant's gift? We walked on in silence as I watched the streets grow wet in the slow onset of a summer storm.
Spout, you Dickensean gutters, ripe with vile spillages from a weeping heaven! Pour up your spontaneous spoutings, puke ululatingly your dirty arias to a smoky sky. Ah, Marseilles! I know you as I know Paris--as the shame-filled covering for godless Luddites, the loin-wrap of pagans degraded into some savor of faith in the Hebrew God. Still, below your Gothic gutters, behind your green-filmed facades and the rickety glitter of your endless 'empresses of the comic opera,' you cry out unto the mud-pits, the snake pits, as surely as any tatooed tribesman of the Congo. Whirl vibrantly while you may in your gay saloons and witty salons--I know your blotted heart! How you ache to be a victim, an honest loser in life's catastrophe. Or, with equal thirst, how your throat burns to utter the humiliating cry, to pin the ancient crime onto the innocent's skin and inscribe unwarranted tortures there to alleviate yourself from the boredom, the ennui, that your lie of civilization forces you to live humiliatingly within: a shipping clerk purple with rage and impotence, yet accurately tapping at his accounts withal. What we do, what we are: all of these veils we have imposed upon our true, our reckless desires! Why do we imagine that any of the charade matters at all? It does not. There is only the mind's eternal oblation to its own ignorance of self--the simmering mystery that sex and pain force upon us against our wishes. Yes, I say against our wishes. For if our wishes were truly, nakedly known, we would far prefer the honest ignorance of infancy. There we did not know that we were a self. There, in the baby's eyes, there is only the primeval palliative of the senses, the effects of nature painting themselves on us in infinite variety. And, without prejudice or comment, we record the sensations. There, in infancy, we are one with what is--until that damaging day a pain too great to be merely enjoyed comes pinching our pink bubble.
Then, to survive, we must invent a self separate from the coiling cosmos that stung us, in order to crawl away from danger. The same occurs with the scorpion sting of desire that bruises our loins. There we must also invent a new self, and move that self, sell that self--in the same manner as any madame or mistress of the night--in order to move toward our desire, toward the consummation a hundred adolescent midnights conjured, our breaking bodies ruddy in the whirlpool of filthy sheets.
"We, my sad-sack listeners, have been had!" And here I coughed into my pipe. Bonadventure looked over at me a moment, but did nothing to signal any discomfort at this sudden re-eruption of my disquisition. "Prodded or promised, all that we have created ourselves to be of infinity is but a persona we program to fuck or flee. Frightening, is it not? By sex we torture those who trouble with us, who twine with the divine from which we have abjectly awakened, and by investing in our manifested skin-sack, we paint ourselves in pain to be the victim of every tyrant's whim. There is nothing else. All is a boulevard of carnival distractions where these menacing themes of victim and torturer play out, nothing more. Look honestly in that pearlescent mirror in your parlor, and know the infamous truth!"
After a pause in which we halted shoulder-to-shoulder to view ourselves in a shop window, I continued. "Bonadventure, I do hope that you have kept my rooms reassuringly arranged while I was away. I want no dollops of dust or ugliness to distract me from my etherial investigations when I return to my apartments. Come, let us away! Enough of this unmanly hugging."
A soapstone kilned in limitless Hell--such is my heart. Once, soft to the touch, easily carved, a semi-porous compact of talc, with some serpentines, to be sure, mixed in. Now, hard and small as a thrown marble. What colors I have are fixed deeply within, and are not amenable to change.
Baudelaire, his lies as distinctly tinted as a fabulist's list of imaginary beasts, barked the embroideries of his far travels on my then malleable heart. Riding elephants and writing poetry, daylong in the dust, brown faces with white smiles, the mysterious femme damne, who spoke her own indecipherable patois, and danced for her master in the campfire while he recited recondite sonnets on the sunlike nature of her hot skin. But what really happened, mon frere? Sick of ignorant India, philistine Africa? Was there nowhere for your soft talk and godless insinuations to roam, once you were out of the rancid aviary of Paris? You once laughed at a man who, 'Looks for his sins away from home.' Did you scan the skies, and miss the dirty laundry of your old back alley, crimped linens yellowed against the bricks?
To accept the General's advice and sponsorship of your 'cleansing' sea voyage--that engineered a failure for the old fuck right enough! He can't fix you, Baudelaire! To hell with his good intentions! His spic and span epaulets! Once out his sight again, and with his francs crumpled in your corduroys, you managed a quickie sin with a married Creole, and cut the bluster of his cause (your soul) with the saber of your sins. And a sonnet to celebrate! Oh, Baudelaire, I must love you....
Well, Baudelaire was always a liar; every true poet sees life in the light of such lies. It's a kick against the nastiness of Nature's necessities. Maybe, if we lash at Life with the acid of fictive alternatives long enough, a pear tree will bear a partridge, a rutabaga will blossom a rose, a tear will really ensnare a sigh, and love will, will really... love....
He came home ratty and burnt, and for once, I think, genuinely glad to see me, his teeth tight upon a whalebone pipe.
"Bonaventure."
"Baudelaire! I just received your letter yesterday that you had crashed in Africa, 'wave-born and wanton.' How have you made it home so suddenly?
"On the wet tongue, on the dueling wings of anguish and sanity."
I was too overcome, as they say, to talk, and held him in my arms for a moment--the last moments in which he was ever to tell me an uncut truth. He stiffened beneath me, creaking and a bit over-perfumed because of what I imagine must have been his relatively unclean accommodations aboard ship.
"Yes, well, my friend, I am afraid I am becoming something of a Mme. Guyon, and Paris is my wad of spittle," he said softly, with something like a small laugh following this statement.
"As God appoints it," I conceded, and thought of that Mme. Guyon who, ashamed that her own extreme cleanliness and abhorrence of slime was a rejection of the Creation, put a large gob of spit from the street into her mouth, and was transformed with the most joyous feelings of recorded Christendom since St Francis of Assisi licked a leper.
How opposite the aseptic impulses of the mass of men was every instinct and action of this charming and corrupting individual. General Aupick had sent him away to dissuade him from pursuing his vocation as a poet, to make him see the wide ways of the world at large, beyond the literary coffins of a few salons in Paris, or the habitudes of his sickly mistresses. Instead, what has occurred? The Albatross has been more surely cornered into his hunching identity as one familiar with 'stars and skies and all high things,' whom the rough sailors knock to the uneven deck to mock, and who 'cannot fly, he has such large wings.' But this albatross has been warned, and made more careful of his precious feathers, more sure in his imagination that flight is the only respite and the only reward. He has been irrefutably and eternally turned into both a saint and a liar at one stroke.
And still my mind runs hazards at the strange, dead man. My Baudelaire, what did you see, what did your senses register? The fluidity and strangeness of being at sea, on ship, the yaw and terror of the storm, the immense laxness of an inundating sun, thick scents of musk and lardy tar, the amazing demon of a woman's ash-and-honey face, the whipping of a black man in a dry square, the tumble of unknown tongues, vistas that would forever shrink the past into the miniature luster of a pearl, all lost... lost in a field of stars.
Sometimes things are much worse than they appear. A corpse in repose, dignified and dressy, is a very grave thing indeed. But a patina of prosperity, of success even, also holds the attention--the business of life has been correctly concluded, and now it is for others to gnash their teeth and mope around in sackcloth dumping ashes on their heads. You lie there in your finest suit, unperturbed, the eye of the grieving storm.
That, finally, is how Baudelaire seemed to me. A final and perfectly respectable totem of a life fully lived; the man on the wedding cake was lying down, his days of doom and despair turned tidy as a prom photo--which is so popular with the youngsters today.
His last days had been wordless (though not soundless, for he emitted muffled moans and snotty tears at regular intervals), as if ravening syphilis had eaten the fat sack of language that had been his brain, leaving behind only an inarticulate rind. And yet, there was some apprehension in his glance--a distinct anger that nailed you to the doorway if you were moved to visit him in his last rooms.
One day I had walked in on him, his hair white and greasy, hanging like a broken albatross' wing from his soapstone dome. His large head was nodding with an uncontrollable twitchy nod, as if forced by God to agree to all the torment heaped upon his thin poet's shoulders. He held his book in his hands, a sky-blue early edition of Flowers of Evil. He reviewed the page before him silently, unable to speak. It was a somber thing to see one so effortlessly elegant in his mode of expression, so spontaneous and pointed in all his remarks, so silent. He had been untongued, unable even to write a sentence, unable to understand what was said, it seemed, or perhaps, flambeyed in his own inferno, he was simply beyond anything I could do to reach him. He seemed to understand his own situation well enough. Defeat without resignation; it was an horrific punishment visited upon him, perhaps the only punishment to which he could muster no baying response.
A cloud broke away from the sun through a large Spanish window. It was then, in the renewed light, that I noticed. Beneath his hand the book lay open to the poem Cythera, and a single tear drooled down his cheek.
Yes, yes, as I say, God saw fit to punish him. At the fraying end of his tenure of torture on Earth, my Baudelaire became God's resourceful object lesson--a sort of quid pro quo gone awry--an arrangement between antagonists where neither would ever consent to relent or bend an inch. That was the arrangement--discordance in perpetuity! These two eternal wrestlers contended in the sweat of their souls, intimately interlocked, achieving stances and adopting postures impossible without their opponent's resentful support. What was the secret to their transfixing configuration? How could such hateful inter-reliance become so absolute? For, indeed, there was not a molten move that that Polymorphous God could attempt but that some thrown-down part of Baudelaire would oppose it. An elbow bowed out to halt a blessing, a bead of sweat running with salt and exhaustion to slow the inevitable working out of some long trope of justice God had been spinning since Abraham.
And God, too, would respond to Baudelaire, as we all did, draping something aching over the man's hubris and headstrong swings at a moment's weakness in the Diety. But, of course, God is God. Sometimes, for several balletic or awkward gestures in a row, God would let Baudelaire plow on unopposed, unswatted. For God, you see, is as patient as a snake with a mouse in its slick belly. At these moments of inattention, Baudelaire would smile. A small, intense light that always burned behind his veil of selfhood would mosey closer to the cheesecloth, and he would shine from head to foot, licking his lips in unbelievable joy at his minute of unexpected liberty.
"No, no, Bonadventure. Unhand your wallet, for today I am a rich man! The coffers of Nebuchadnezzer held not more wealth than my locked and guarded heart." And the gold coin would roll down the rosewood bar and the absinthe would rip my veins with a fanatic finesse. After midnight, he would dilate on the profundity of his richness, the wild wealth dripping from the rippling back of his beastly sojourn through Life.
"Sometimes, I think that there might be a way for me to stay alive forever and not regard the result as a curse. Sometimes, Bonadventure, blue skies are not only acid and sunshine. Sometimes they glimmer like a promise of health in a country as far away as Hope...." Oh, then what anxiety was in my skull! What trepidations tortured me! Was not this the very folly of the rebel angels writ on the tongue of man? How could my bible and my Baudelaire share the same language? Bach, perhaps, understood how this would turn out, with his rollicking concern for the contrapuntal.
That was Baudelaire, 'alone beyond the thought of solitude,' as he repeated to himself, thinking no one attending. Only against God, his great Enemy (whom Baudelaire on a whim oft represented as an exiled Irishman, apportioning the Lord of Hosts a broad brogue), could he define himself. 'I am the Enemy of God,' was, for him, not a statement of hatred, or even, really, adversarial intent; it was but a stamp on his passport into existence, a method of manifestation for one who would otherwise remain extinct--a mere 'posture of vapors' as he often mused aloud, stirring his white pipe-smoke with an inky finger.
Still, I must not admit to my weakness, my complicity. For I smiled when he expounded, and my chains felt lighter around me, and my brow less bound in iron. Ah, yes! I was assured that silken wings were rustling under my black frockcoat--that I could dream as ardently as any slave dreams of freedom. That immense, free feeling, the big spaces that open up within us at the uncauled contemplation--of owning the other slaves! Free to tyrannize in my petty majesty over all that I hated within myself. This was the vista I saw at Baudelaire's prompting. And yet, I am now not at all sure that this was the freedom Baudelaire's boasts proposed. There may have been something other, something more.... For Baudelaire, too, like God, was a snake; less patient, to be sure, but equally elaborate in his braid.
But, God is God, and the victor's wreath was only granted at the titanic end of the struggle. Long years after Baudelaire first laughed and dared his creator to the powdered mat he went down to ignominy like the rest of us.
The banality and absurdity of my life at first engaged, and then engulfed, me. Was it not enough for God to laugh at me from his sky-high catbird's seat? No. He must also disembowel me with the eerie cognizance of His cosmic snicker. I, whose belief in the deity amounts to no more than Eve's flight from irresponsibility and into the matronly mangle of sex and afterbirth. I would know what I am and what I do. Anything is acceptable, I proclaim. Anything, that is, except ignorance.
So these myths that cling to one, as clods of clouds trail the godhead from heaven to earth, are no more than a sonorous nuisance. I have prepared for death to accept me. Death is the lover who, however longed-for, however cursed, never fails to arrive. And so my Satanic insistence on the singleness of my sin is my gift to Death. I, my lover, am not a mere portion of the horde, the amorous mass who come to your fatal kisses. No, no. I am as far from my fellow mortals as flesh and errancy may stretch a man. If a spirit in this dungheap may do more than sleep and mate, then mine has done so. Once set on my track from imprisoning paradise, I have spurned the creator who set me in my sigil vigil. I know that none can regain their place as an innocuous parcel of that majesty. My feet were steaming to you, Death, who are not mere obliteration, mere reconsumption into the creases of God's smile. That must never be! History is an arrow that, once flown from the twanging hand, may never resume its bloodless innocence. Therefore, I hope without hope of holiness. I expect without expectation of heaven. Only Hell, only Death awaits. Those who cannot see this live in a pristine mockery of sin. Theirs are the hollow lives, the lies lived among the powdery clouds of amnesiacs. Their best hope is to forget that they were ever born. I, for one, will never forgive the fact.
As mythic or fictional as my meaning may be, never doubt that I am I. They would cover me in lies and guesses so that I would be but a sheep of their herd--a blackened and barbarous baa bleating from my opium-brown lips, perhaps--but a sheep nevertheless. But this is not to be. This cannot be. I cannot not be I. And, being myself, the one who will not gainsay the death of Death, nor long for the unloss of non-ness, I am the only one who can say anything at all. My silence alone would be God's ending. If I for once shut-up, as if I had never begun to have been, that would be my uncreation. If uncreated, there would be no creator. So, dear Deity, when I chant my magpie charms to Satan, recall that it is by your grace alone that Satan is so praised. I will not praise You, for I do not so denigrate this bitching gift of life to wish myself to go unmade to my maker. No, instead, I flee from You, taking my life with me in my errant hands, my life--to give it up only, and uniquely, to Death.
The quill whispered quick over the thick parchment. His eyes stared unseeing at the sea. A feather of smoke escaped his pipe, languorous and unacknowledged.
Baudelaire pulled the writing board in harder to his diaphragm. The quill licked the parchment, dipping with limber regularity into the inkstand on the arm of the heavy wooden chair, brought over to face the window. Baudelaire's knees were almost against the sill, and he was somehow almost leaning into the writing board, almost standing up from his chair. His body language, viewed more closely than a casual glance would reveal, showed an athlete at the starter blocks, all a poised readiness, an alertness. But not an alertness to the view, which was the feisty sea, nor to the room, which was a stripped, bare place rented for a few weeks of "scribbling down what my surgical tortures and acid experiments have revealed of my crabbed skeleton," nor his pipe, which puffed mechanically the burning weed, nor, even, the quick quill, although his gaze was locked to its mystically moving nib, sharpened with habitual periodicity by a handy penknife. Baudelaire was bending over the still pool of his mind. And the room, the writing board, the nicotine, and the entirety of his body were in service to this attention to the rills of the ever-arriving mind—the mind whose lucid mirror our own breath too-often clouds into a damnable obscurity. Even the sea served her part, providing the white noise that loving motherhood so often gives her toddlers. "Come on, honey, that's the way, good step, good step, oh how wonderful...."