1-wuipt/     2^-rv. c
The Bloody Chamber
I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and die pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from die white, enclosed quietude of my mother's apartment, into die unguess-able country of marriage.
And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my litde relics, die tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the concert programmes Fd abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughter's wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in becoming his wife.
Are you sure, she'd said when they delivered the gigantic box mat held the wedding dress he'd bought me, wrapped up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallized fruit. Are you sure you love him ? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, finer than anything she'd worn since that adventurous girlhood in Indo-China, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkfiil of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?
'Are you sure you love him ř'
'I'm sure I want to marry him,* I said.
And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluctance that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, scandalously,
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The Bloody Chamber
And even my mother had been reluctant to see her girl whisked off by a man so recently bereaved. A Romanian countess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating accident, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nanny kept in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorator's jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets.
Before mat ? Her face is common property; everyone painted her bat the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Waking m the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would never think she had beenabarmaidinacafe inMontraartre untoPuvisdeChavanncs saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elongated thighs to his brash. And yet it was die absinthe doomed her, or so they said.
The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to die opera for a birthday treat My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, stul alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to comfort me, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice.
Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate die eclecticism of his taste, be had mvited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow's child with my mouse-coloured hair mat still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist's fingers.
He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding - a simple affair, at the Maine, because his countess was so recently gone - he took my mother and me, curious coincidence, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached so during the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him, Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upon me. The whispering crowd in the foyer parted Hke the Red Sea to let us through. My skui crisped at his touch.
How my circumstances had changed since the first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in mem! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided, bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne in the
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interval The from spitted over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup runneth over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my reluctant mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have gone to him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skins, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. And everyone stared at me. And at há wedding gift
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat
After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where die blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon Eke me memory of a wound. And his grand* mother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance! That night at the opera conies back to me even now ... the whin; dress; the frail chQd within h; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.
I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on die slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of h; and it was strangely magnified by die monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with hist, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, die way die muscles in my neck stuck cut like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my bream away.
The next day, we were married.
The train slowed, shuddered to a hah. lights; clank of metal; a voice declaring die name of an unknown, never-to-be visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, dut I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my Hfe. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised die blind a litde and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at die dark platform towards those rectangles of domestic lamplight that promised warmth, company, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan on the stove for die station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick
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The Bkodj Chamber
house with die painted shutters... all me paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself.
Into marriage, into exile; I sensed it, I knew it - that, henceforth, I would always be lonely. Yet that was part of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsy's magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his scent of Russian leather - all had conspired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tar-tines and matnan that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a child's toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the distance it would take me.
The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an ddritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no change in his breathing but my heightened, excited senses told me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the ancient Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension in the pit of my stomach, to be so watched, in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a baby's arm.
'Soon,' he said in his resonant voice that was like die tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and fiDed the compartment with a remembered fragrance that made me dunk of my radier, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me and left me and died.
As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity of the ocean. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The beQ clanged; the straining train leapt its leash and left us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had descended. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his convenience. The richest man in France.
'Madame.'
la
'vr
The chauffeur eyed me; was he (he countess, the artist's model, the opei as if they were a system of soft shields.1? opal over my kid glove, a showy, thrhe ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmi lt was proof positive I was his master»1* widening dawn, that now streaked Hw of pink of roses, orange of tiger-lilies"» a sky from a florist The day broke
Sea; sand; a sky that melts into tffels with a look about it of being contb A landscape with all the deliquesceithe etudes I played for him, the reverie» "> the salon of the princess where ľdups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hi»«"" digestive of music
And, ah! his castíe. The &ery so^ts of misty blue, its courtyard, its spidie very bosom of the sea with seabird.*86-ments opening on to the green and i*h« ocean, cut off by the tide from lari> at home neither on the land nor on ŮW& place, contravening the materiality'}* the melanchory of a mermaiden w11*3» endlessly, for a lover who had drow«y> sad, sea-siren of a place!
The tide was low; at this hour, sc"*? rose up out of the sea. As die car n/een the slow margins of water, he rea< ™ji sultry, witchy ring on it, pressed1"™ extraordinary tenderness. His face stiU as a pond iced thickly over, yet his gdy red and naked between the black ed a little. He smiled; he welcomed his
No room, no corridor that did í ^ and aQ the ceilings, the walls on wB^JjJ of rank lined up with their dark «ye*™1 refracted light from the waves t *at luminous, murmurous castle of wH™e music student whose mother h» ner wedding ring, to pay the fees at tl
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The Bloody Chamber
First of aU, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary machine, this anchored, castellated ocean liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable race beneath the impeccably starched white linen head-dress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too much on my status... briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily incompetent, in her place. Ill-considered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family in the utmost feudal complicity, 'as much part of the house as I am, my dear*. Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be content.
But, here, it would be easy to be content. In the turret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantic and imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the music room and, on the wall, another wedding present - an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her celestial organ. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and crinkled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loving sensitivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vanished, the housekeeper set him chuckling with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newiyweds in her native Breton. That I did not understand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret
And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls, in stately frames of contorted gold, that reflected more white lilies than I'd ever seen in my life before. He'd filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had become mat multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chic navy' blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Henceforth, a maid would deal with everything.
'See,' he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. 'I have acquired a whole harem for myself! *
I found that I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness,
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The Bloody Chamber
and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip k from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off comes the skirt; and, next, the blouse of apricot hnen that cost more than the dress I had for first communion. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there.
And yet, you see, I guessed it might be so - that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world ŕ
He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke - but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of an etching by Rops from the collection he had shown me when our engagement permitted us to be alone together... the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tailoring; she, bare as a lamb chop. Most pornographic of all confrontations. And so my purchaser unwrapped his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring.
At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled.
Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love.
And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your lingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
This scene from a voluptuary's life was now abruptly terminated. It turns out he has business to attend to; his estates, his companies -even on your honeymoon f Even then, said the red lips that kissed me
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The Bloody Chamber
before he left me alone with my bewildered senses - a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the pointed tip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I wrapped a négligé of antique lace around me to sip die little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, since it was second nature to me, there was nowhere to go but the music room and soon I settled down at my piano.
Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beneath my fingers: out of tune ... only a little out of tune; but I'd been blessed with perfect pitch and could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if I'm to continue with my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappointment; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me ?
I shivered to think of that.
His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russian leather. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes; brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to recline on. A lectern, carved like a spread eagle, that held open upon it an edition of Huysmans's La-has, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of coloured glass. The rugs on the floor, deep, pulsing blues of heaven and red of the heart's dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of die sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines inside a glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squinted at a tide or two: The Initiation) The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandora's Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yellow paper; I wanted to curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would bring me chocolates.
Nevertheless, I opened the doors of that bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hinted that he was a connoisseur of such things? Yet I bad not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his
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The Bloody Chamber
prick, dut curved upwards like the scimitar he held. The picture had a caption: 'Reproof of curiosity*. My mother, with all die precision of her eccentricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was innocent but not naive. The Adventures ofEuIalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, according to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collector's piece. Had some ancestor brought it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to inspect his wares ... I turned the pages in the anticipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was another steel engraving: 'Immolation of the wives of the Sultan'. I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp.
There was a pungent intensification of die odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre.
* My Uttle nun has found the prayerbooks, has she ř' he demanded, with a carious mixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa.
'Have die nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustn't play with grownups' toys until she's learned how to handle them, must she ?'
Then he kissed me. And with, this time, no reticence, He kissed me and hid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beneath die sheath of ancient lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to die carved, gilded bed on which be had been conceived. I stammered foolishly: We've not taken luncheon yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight...
All die better to see you.
He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastened the thing about my neck. It was cold as ice and chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could die better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned: 'Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery.'
A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while die mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside.
I was brought to my senses by the insistent shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had
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The Bloody Chamber
been fighting with me. In the course ofthat one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.
I gathered myself together, reached into die cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that concealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent
I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, insolent incense reminiscent of pampered flesh.
When he'd finished with the agent, he turned to me and stroked-the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased flinching and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her í He's so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so... and this lover's recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it For a while, he murmured to me in a voice I'd never heard before, a voice like the soft consolations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent business that he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the casde? Leave France) And would be away for at least six weeks.
' But it is our honeymoon t *
A deal, an enterprise of hazard and chance involving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a litde girl, I did not understand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too many honeymoons to find them in the least pressing commitments. I know quite well that this child I've bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts won't run away. But, after he'd called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States next day - just one tiny call, my little one - we should have time for dinner together.
And I had to be content with that
A Mexican dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad;
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The Bloody Chamber
white, voluptuous cheese; asorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration of Krug exploded festively. And dien acrid black coffee in precious litde cups so fine it shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had Cointreau, he had cognac in the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to perch on his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me change into that chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of h, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, each one, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable, nor fasten up my descending hair, the sign of a virginity so recently ruptured that still remained a wounded presence between us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very litde.
1 The maid will have changed our sheets already,* he said. 'We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilized times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my interested tenants such a flag.'
Then I realized, with.* shock of surprise, how it must have been my innocence that captivated him - the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Terrasse des audiences au sum de hau played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my constant companion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrized my hair. To know that my naivety gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Courage! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default
Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great, mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket - key after key, a key, he said, for every lock in the house. Keys of all kinds - huge, ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his absence, it was I who must take care of them all.
I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspection. Until that moment, I had not given a single thought to the practical aspects of marriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had in plenty although they had been converted to cellars for his wines; the dusty botdes inhabited in
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The Shody Chamber
racks aO those deep holes of pain in the rock on which die castle was built These are the keys to the kitchens, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five centuries of avid collectors -ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there.
He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreau's great portrait of his first wife, the famous Saerifieial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike chains on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of mat picture ? How, when she took off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush mat reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought ofthat story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me,.. Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithic canvas: The Foolish Vhpm. Two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house whkh was called: Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous inheritance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, commissioned for a licentious ancestor who, it was said, had posed for the master's brush himself with his own two daughters ... He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly.
Your thin white face, ebene; he said, as if he saw it for the first rime. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect
A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt as giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity ti\m the rest of us, the presence that, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me... No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar stupes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet - might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them ŕ And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.
Here is the key to the china cabinet - don*t laugh, my darling; there's a king's ransom in Sevres in that doset, and a queen's ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five generations of plate were kept.
Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office,
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The Bloody Chamber
although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, when we returned to Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to change my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to change her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knocking sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so interested in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more.
Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unaccounted for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it back into his pocket and take it away with him. 'What b that key Í' I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. 'The key to your heart? Give it me!*
He dangled the key tantalizmgly above my head, out of reach of my straining fingers; those bare red Ups of his cracked sidelong in a smue. 'Ah, no,' he said. 'Not the key to my heart Rather, the key to my enfer.'
He left it on the ring, fastened the ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingung heap in my lap. I could feel the cold metal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead.
'Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,' he said. 'Promise me this, my whey-faced piano-player; promise me you'll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, and send them sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you - except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you ventured there. Oh, and you'd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it wefl alone. It is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I can go, sometimes, on those infrequent yet inevitable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I can go, you understand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless.'
There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, wrapped in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephoned the mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would
21
The Bloody Chamber
arrive to tale up his duties the next day. He pressed me to bis vicuna breast, once, and then drove away.
I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his ancestral bed until another daybreak discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridescent with the reflections of the sea. The perfume of the hues weighed on my senses; when I thought that, henceforth, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, contained that toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings of pregnant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hinted to me, in his flesh as in his speech and looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque intersections of flesh upon flesh ? I lay in our wide bed accompanied by, a sleepless companion, my dark newborn curiosity.
I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me.
Were there jewels enough in all his safes to recompense me for this predicament ? Did all that castle hold enough riches to recompense me for the company of the libertine with whom I must share it ? And what, precisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me- on my wedding night?
Then I sat straight up in bed, under the sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above roe, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank back on m the heaping pillows; I acknowledged that the jealous scare I'd just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief.
At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fát stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water.
Coffee and croissants to console this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Honey, too, in a section of comb on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an orange into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay in the lazy, midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this morning, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that
22
The Bloody Chamber
the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, costume of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes.
After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upon me although they could not see me. He was a blacksmith's son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play... for, you see, he loved music Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled.
After I dismissed him, even though I'd woken so late, it was still barely time for my 'five o'clock*. The housekeeper, who, thoughtfully forewarned by my husband, had restrained herself from interrupting my music, now made me a solemn visitation with > lengthy menu for a late luncheon. When I told her I did not need it, she looked at me obliquely, along her nose. I understood at once that one of my principal functions as chatelaine was to provide work for the staff. But, all the same, I asserted myself and said I would wait until dinner-time, although I looked forward nervously to the solitary meal Then I found I had to tell her what I would like to have prepared for me; my imagination, still that of a schoolgirl, ran riot. A fowl in cream - or should I anticipate Christmas with a varnished turkey? No; I have decided. Avocado and shrimp, lots of it, followed by no entree at all. But surprise me for dessert with every ice-cream in the ice box. She noted all down but sniffed; I'd shocked her. Such tastest Child that I was, I giggled when she left me. But, now... what shall I do, now?
I could have spent a happy hour unpacking the trunks that contained my trousseau but the maid had done that already, the dresses, the taUor-mades hung in the wardrobe in my dressing room, the hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on wooden feet as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me. I did not like to linger in my overcrowded dressing room, nor in my lugubriously lily-scented bedroom. How shall I pass the time?
I shall take a bath in my own bathroom! And found the taps were little dolphins made of gold, with chips of turquoise for eyes. And there wasa tank of goldfish, who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was. How I wished he had not left me. How I
*3
The Bloody Chamber
wished it were possible to chat with, say, a maid; or, the piano-tuner
... but I knew already my new rank forbade overtures of friendship -to the staff.
I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner vas done with, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrounded the castle, I could contain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when T heard her voice.
No, nothing was the matter. Mother, I have gold bath taps.
I said, gold bath tapsl
No; I suppose that's nothing to cry about, Mother.
The line was bad, I could hardly make out her congratulations, her questions, her concern, but I was a little comforted when I put the receiver down.
Yet there still remained one whole hour to dinner and the whole, unimaginable desert of the rest of the evening.
The bunch of keys lay, where he had left them, on the rug before the library fire which had wanned their metal so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if I'd set a trap for ber as I picked up the clinking bundle of keys, the keys to die interior doors of this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress and had scarcely seen. When I remembered that, I felt the exhilaration of the explorer.
Lights! More lights 1
At the touch of a switch, the dreaming library was brilliantly illuminated. I ran crazily about the castle, switching on every light I could find -1 ordered the servants to light up all their quarters, too, so the castle would shine like a seaborne birthday cake lit with a thousand candles, one for every year of its life, and everybody on shore would wonder at it When everything was lit as brightly as the café in the Gare du Nord, the significance of the possessions implied by that bunch of keys no longer intimidated me, for I was determined, now, to search through them all for evidence of my husband's true nature.
His office first, evidently.
A mahogany desk half a mile wide, with an impeccable blotter and a bank of telephones. I allowed myself the luxury of opening the safe that contained the jewellery and delved sufficiently among die leather boxes to find out how my marriage had given me access to a jinn's treasury-parures, bracelets, rings... While I was thus surrounded by
H
The Bloody Chamber
diamonds, a maid knocked on the door and entered before I spoke; a subtle discourtesy. I would speak to my husband about it. She eyed my serge skirt superciliously; did madame plan to dress for dinner ŕ
She made a moue of disdain when I laughed to hear that, she was (ár more the lady than I. But, imagine - to dress up in one of my Poirct extravaganzas, with the jewelled turban and aigrette on my head, roped with pearl to the navel, to sit down all alone in the baronial dining hall at the head ofthat massive board at which King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights ... I grew calmer under the cold eye of her disapproval I adopted the crisp inflections of an officer's daughter. No, I would not dress for dinner. Furthermore, I was not hungry enough for dinner itself. She must tell the housekeeper to cancel the dormitory feast I'd ordered. Could they leave me sandwiches and a flask of coffee in my music room? And would they all dismiss for die night? Mais oui, madame.
I knew by her bereft intonation I had let them down again but I did not care; I was armed against them by the brilliance of his hoard. But I would not rind his heart amongst the glittering stones; as soon as she had gone, I began a systematic search of the drawers of his desk.
All was in order, so I found nothing. Not a random doodle on an old envelope, nor the faded photograph of a woman. Only the files of business correspondence, the bills from the home farms, the invoices from tailors, the billets-doux from international financiers. Nothing. And this absence of the evidence of his real life began to impress me strangely; there must, I thought, be a great deal to conceal if he takes such pains to hide it.
His office was a singularly impersonal room, facing inwards, on to the courtyard, as though he wanted to turn his back on the siren sea in order to keep a clear head while he bankrupted a small businessman in Amsterdam or -1 noticed with a thrill of distaste - engaged in some business in Laos that must, from certain cryptic references to his amateur botanist's enthusiasm for rare poppies, be to do with opium. Was he not rich enough to do without crime ř Or was the crime itself his profit ŕ And yet I saw enough to appreciate his zeal for secrecy.
Now I had ransacked his desk, I must spend a cool-headed quarter of an hour putting every last letter back where I had found it, and, as I covered the traces of my visit, by some chance, as I reached inside a little drawer that had stuck fast, I must have touched a hidden spring, for a secret drawer flew open within that drawer itself; and this secret drawer contained - at last! - a file marked: Personal. I was alone, but for my reflection in the uncurtained window.
H
Tlu Bloody Chamber
I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
I could have wished, perhaps, I had not found that touching, ill-spelt note, on a paper napkin marked La CoupoU, that began: 'My darling, I cannot wait for the moment when you may make me yours completely.' The diva had sent him a page of the score of Tristan, the Liebestod, with the single, cryptic word: * Until...' scrawled across it But the strangest of all these love letters was a postcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave; this little scene, executed with the lurid exuberance of Grand Guignol, was captioned:' Typical Transylvanian Scene - Midnight, All Hallows.' And, on the other side, the message: 'On the occasion of this marriage to the descendant of Dracula -always remember, "the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil". Toutes amities, C*
A joke. A joke in the worst possible taste; for had he not been married to s Romanian countess? And then I remembered her pretty, witty face, and her name - Carmilla. My most recent predecessor in this castle had been, it would seem, the most sophisticated.
I put away the rile, sobered. Nothing in my life of family love and music had prepared me for these grown-up games and yet these were dues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he had been loved, even if they did not reveal any good reason for it But I wanted to know still more; and, as I closed the office door and locked it, the means to discover more fell in my way. 'Fell, indeed; and with the clatter of a dropped canteen of cutlery, for, as I turned the slick Yale lock, I contrived, somehow, to open up the key ring itself, so that all the keys tumbled loose on the floor. And the very first key I picked out ofthat pile was, as luck or ill fortune had it, the key to the room he had forbidden me, the room he would keep for his own so that he could go there when he wished to feel himself once more a bachelor.
I made my decision to explore it before I felt a faint resurgence of my ill-defined fear of his waxen stillness. Perhaps I half-imagined, then, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self-sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed in the storm of orgasm, occupied himself with pressing private business in the study at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. Yet, if that were so, it was imperative that I should find him, should know him; and I was too
26
The Bloody Chamber
deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him. I took the forbidden key from the heap and left the others lying there. It was now very late and the casde was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the silent ocean where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light And all silent, alt still, but for the murmuring of the waves.
I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mother's house.
Not a narrow, dusty litde passage at all; why had he lied to me? But an ill-lit one, certainly; die electricity, for some reason, did not extend here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a match to my little taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a penitent, along the corridor hung with heavy, I think Venetian, tapestries. The flame picked out, here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a woman spilling through a rent in her dress - the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some reason, it grew very warm; die sweat sprang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea.
A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the casde; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron.
And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neck, no prickling of the thumbs.
The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot knife into butter.
No fear; but a hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath.
If I had found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a litde of his soul. It was the consciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before, in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innocence, I turned the key and the door creaked slowly back.
"There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer,' opined my husband's favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage
37
The Bloody Chamfer
bed. And now my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, lite the ones I had seen in woodcuts of the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurse's little store of holy books. And -just one glimpse of it before my little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness - a metal figure, hinged at the side, which I knew to be spiked on the inside and to have the name: the Iron Maiden. Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation. Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had inherited nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-China. My mother's spirit drove me on, into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim, lugubrious light they gave! And yet, enough, oh, more man enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation. The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright At the four corners of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etruscan, perhaps, and, on three-legged ebony stands, the bowls of incense he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek. Wheel, rack and Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost consoled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for contemplation. Yet at the centre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissance workmanship, surrounded by long white candles and, at its foot, an armful of the same hues wirb which he had filled my bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar glazed with a sombre Chinese red. I scarcely dared examine this catafalque and its occupant more closely; yet I knew I must
Each time I struck a match to light those candles round her bed, it seemed a garment ofthat innocence of mine for which he had lusted fell away fromme.
The opera singer by, quite naked, under a thin sheet of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the whin; breast; she was cool, he had embalmed her. On her throat I could see the blue imprint of his strangfeťs fingers. The cool, sad flame of die candles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the ■ dead lips smiled.
Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white, nacreous glimmer; as my eyes accustomed themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last - oh, horrors! - made out a skull; yes, a skull, so
28
The Bloody Chamber
utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And mis skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air, and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride.
Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously tne face that had once existed above it, that I recognized her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on tie rim of night One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, next in the fated sisterhood of his wives; one falše step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled.
And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian countess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations ? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wound me through the castle towards it on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason - perhaps some change of atmosphere wrought by my presence - the metal shell of the Iron Maiden emitted a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its occupant was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there.
With trembling fingers, I prised open me front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overcome, I dropped the key I still held in my other hand. It dropped nun the forming pool of her blood.
She was pierced, not by one but by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed so newly dead, so full of blood ... oh God! how recently had he become a widower? How long had he kept her in this obscene cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the dear light of Paris?
I closed the lid of her coffin very gentry and burst into a tumult of sobbing that contained both pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them.
The candles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God - his eye - was upon me. My first thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it
I retained sufficient presence of mind to snuff out the candles round the bier with my fingers, to gather up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no traces of my visit I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, wrapped it m my hand-
39
The Bloody Chamber
kerchief to keep my hands clean, and fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell.
I could not take refuge in my bedroom, for that retained die memory of his presence trapped in the fathomless silvering of his mirrors. My music room seemed the safest place, although I looked at the picture of Saint Cecilia with a faint dread; what had been the nature of her martyrdom? My mind was in a tumult; schemes for flight jostled with one another... as soon as the tide receded from the causeway, I would make for the mainland - on foot, running, stumbling; I did not trust that leather-clad chauffeur, nor the well-behaved housekeeper, and I dared not take any of the pale, ghostly maids into my confidence, either, since they were his creatures, all. Once at the village, I would fling myself directly on the mercy of the gendarmerie.
But - could I trust them, either ? His forefathers had ruled this coast for eight centuries, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a common blind eye to his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of die ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further.
Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead.
Dead as his wives.
A thick darkness, unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin. I looked at the precious little clock made from hypocritically innocent flowers long ago, in Dresden; the hands had scarcely moved one single hour forward from when I first descended to that private slaughterhouse of his. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.
And yet die time might still be my friend; at that hour, that very hour, he set sail for New York.
To know that, in a few moments, my husband would have left France calmed my agitation a little. My reason told me I had nothing to
30
The Bloody Chamber
fear; the tide that would take him away to the New World would let me out of the imprisonment of the castle. Surely I could easily evade the servants. Anybody can buy a ticket at a railway station. Yet I was still filled with unease. 1 opened the lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could create a pentads out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself
from him ?
Mechanically, I began to play but my fingers were stiff and shaking. At first, I could manage nothing better than the exercises of Czeray but simply the act of playing soothed me and, for solace, for the sake of the harmonious rationality of its sublime mathematics, I searched among his scores until I found The Well-Tempered Clavier. I set myself die therapeutic task of playing all Bach's equations, every one, and, I told myself, if I played them all through without a single mistake - then die morning would find me once more a virgin.
Crash of a dropped stick.
His silver-headed cane! What else? Sly, cunning, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside die door I
I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head
defiantly. 'Come in!' My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity. The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive, irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mother's daughter would have been of the Devil himself. In the torture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moment's hesitation, the boy's face softened and he smiled a little, almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet.
'Forgive me,' said Jean-Yves. 'I know I've given you grounds for dismissing me, that I should be crouching outside your door at midnight ... but I heard you walking about, up and down -1 sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower - and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these -' And he displayed the ring of keys I'd dropped outside my husband's office door, the ring from which one key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on die piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday conversation.
3»
The Bloody Chamber
*Iťs perfect,' I said. "The piano. Perfecdy in tunc*
But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though T would
only forgive him for his impudence if he explained the cause of it
thoroughly.
'When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought I'd never heard such a touch. Such technique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso] So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listened - until my stick feu to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered.*
He had the most touchingly ingenuous smile.
'Perfectly in tune,* I repeated. To my surprise, now I bad said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: 'In tune... perfect... in tune,' over and over again. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see hun, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; bis figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After die dreadful revelation ofthat bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint.
When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner's arms and he was tucking the sarin cushion from the piano-stool ander my head.
'You are in some great distress,' he said. 'No bride should suffer so much, so early tn her marriage.'
His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, die rhythms of the tides.
'Any bride brought to this casde should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her,' I said.
'What's this?*
It was too late to keep sOent; and if he, too, were one of my husband's creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, die interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the skull, die corpses, the blood.
'I can scarcely believe it,' he said, wondering. "That roan ... so rich; so well-born.'
'Here's proof,' I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the sÜken rug,
'Oh God,' he said. 'I can smell the Wood.»
He took my band; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch.
'We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,* he said. "There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the
3»
The Bloody Chamber
mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. "A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, GuUlaume?" And it was the head of the blacksmith's wife.'
But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered.
* Oh, madame 11 thought all these were old wives' tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder ?'
How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I'd always known its lord would be the death of me.
'Hark!' said my friend suddenly. "The sea has changed key; it must be near morning, the tide is going down.*   '
He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wedy in die thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still fár away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist.
My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy.
"The key!' said jean-Yves. 'It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened.*
But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap. Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain.
The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter's drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots ... slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you can...
And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin.
'You have no more time,* said Jean-Yves. 'He is here. I know iL I must stay with you.'
33
The Bloody Chamber
'Yon shall not!' I said. 'Go back to your room, now. Please.'
He hesitated. I put an edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone.
'Leave me!'
As soon as he had gone, I dealt with the keys and went to my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean-Yves was correct, my husband had already entered die castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains round me as a pungent aroma of Russian leather assured me my husband was once again beside me.
'Dearest!'
With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimicking the new bride newly wakened, I Sung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiescence depended my salvation.
'Da Silva of Rio outwitted me,* he said wryly. 'My New York agent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love.'
I did not believe one word of it I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that inimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora's box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost Lost at that charade of innocence and vice in which he bad engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner.
His hand brushed my breast, beneath the sheet I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch from the intimate touch, for it made me think of the piercing embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault When he saw my reluctance, his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket. He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good bourgeois; scooped out his rattling loose change and now - oh God 1 - makes a great play of parting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searching for something that his been mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile.
'But of course! I gave the keys to you!'
'Your keys? Why, of course. Here, they're under the pillow; wait a
34
The Bloody Chamber
moment - what - Ahl No... now, where can I have left them ? I was whjling away the evening without yon at the piano, I remember. Of course! The music room!' Brusquely he flung my neglige of antique lace on the bed.
'Go and get diem.*
'Now? This moment? Can't it wait until morning, my darling?' I forced myself to be seductive. I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable, appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, men. But he half-snarled; 'No. It won't wait Now.' The unearthly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place ? And there was nothing for h but to go and fetch the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examine them too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind.
When I came back into the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that jangled at every step like a curious musical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands. And it seemed to me he was in despair.
Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russian leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore.
I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his wen-manicured fingers. The evidence ofthat bloody chamber had showed me I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognize me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die. The atrocious loneliness of that monster I The monocle had fallen from bis face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through k in his distraction. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game
35
The Bloody Chamber
of love and death shook a little; the face that turned towards me contained a sombre delirium that seemed to me compounded of a ghastly, ves, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sinned.
That tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disengaged the key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding.
'It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable,' he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certain great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God.
I could not restrain a sob.
'Oh, my love, my littíe love who brought me a white gift of music,' he said, almost as if grieving. 'My litde love, you'll never know how much I hate daylight!'
Then he sharply ordered: 'Kneel!'
I knelt before him and he pressed the key lighdy to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a brahmin woman. Or the marl: of Cain. And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut He clipped U back on the ring, emitting that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said that I would many him.
'My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.'
'What form shall it take?" I said.
'Decapitation,' he whispered, almost voluptuously. 'Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfather's ceremonial sword.'
"The servants?'
'We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you can see them going to the mainland.'
It was now the full, pale tight of morning; the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trooping every maid and scullion, every pot-boy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in that great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, she'd stowed as much as she could ransack from the larďer. The Marquis
36
The Bloody Chamber
must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a cortege and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for burial
But I knew no good Breton earth would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate.
' I have given them all a day's holiday, to celebrate our wedding,' be said. And smiled.
However hard I stared at the receding company, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant, hired but the preceding morning.
'Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the music room until I telephone for you. No, my dear!' And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead. 'One may call inside the castle just as much as one pleases; but, outside - never.'
I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I should wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on that white muslin shift, costume of a victim of an auto-da-fé, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women combed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be none. The mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death.
On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker.
Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I descended the spiral staircase to the music room but there I found I had not been abandoned.
'I can be of some comfort to you,' die boy said. "Though not much use.'
We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the ancient, reconciling smell of die sea that, in time, will cleanse everything, scour die old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid bad trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones.
'You do not deserve this,' he said.
'Who can say what I deserve or no?' I said. 'I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.'
'You disobeyed him,' he said. "That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.'
*I only did what he knew I would.'
37
1———'---------'.  'i i - - i^. j-jBajťiľBagise-aeasai
The Bloody Chamber
'Like Eve,' he said.
The telephone rang a shrill imperative. Let it ring. Bat my lover lifted me up and set me on my feet; I knew I must answer it. The receiver felt heavy as earth.
"The courtyard. Immediately.'
My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover's face quiver.
'Hoofbeatsl'hesaid.
I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse's fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow's weeds.
As the telephone rang again.
'Am I to wait aQ morning?'
Every moment, my mother drew nearer.
* She will be too late,' Jean-Yves said and yet he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so.
The third, intransigent call.
'Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint CecJha? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed P *
So 1 must go to me courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Tumbull and Asscr, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.
When my husband saw my companion, he observed: 'Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you are think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring ? Give it me back, whore.*
The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of h. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of bis little finger; it would go no further.
'It will serve me for a dozen more fiancees,' he said. 'To the block, woman. No - leave the boy; I shall deal with him later, utilizing a less exalted instrument than the one with which I do my wife the honour of her immolation, for do not fear that in death you will be divided.'
3»
The Bloody Chamber
Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the more time it gave the avenging angel to descend ...
'Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!'
He raised the sword and cut bright segments from die air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes, so recently raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway, have phinged into the sea.., One thing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die.
My husband laid my branded forehead on the stone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair into a rope and drew it away from my neck.
'Such a pretty neck,' he said with what seemed to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. 'A neck like the stem of a young plant'
I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of lus lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again, of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me. A Otrie green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world.
The whizz of that heavy sword.
And - a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse t The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not descend, die necklace didiwr sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in bis stroke, a sufficient split second of astonished indecision to let me spring npright and dart to the assistance of my lover as he struggled sightlessly with die great bolts mat kept her out
The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watching his beloved Tristan for die twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, then leapt from his bier in the last act, announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, crying over spilt muk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandon the rituals he had ordained for diem since time began and start to live for themselves; die long, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns.
You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her
39
The Bloody Chamber
black lisle legs exposed to die thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-stillj as if she had been Medusa, die sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs.
And then it was as though a curious chüd pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.
On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment's hesitation, she raised my fathers gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband's head.
We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though í pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, die door sealed.
I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a litde music school here, on the outskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opera, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the - what shall I call it? - the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps ?
The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused fanner, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left scandalized at home - what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon? - she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her litde girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer,
40
The Courtship of Mr Lym
widowed at seventeen in die most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion 1 But I do believe my mother loves him as much as 1 do."
No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it - not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart - but, because it spares my shame.
The Courtship of Mr Lyon
Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own; when the sky darkened towards evening, an unearthly, reflected pallor remained behind upon the winter's landscape, while still the soft flakes floated down. This lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores b the mean kitchen to look out at the country road. Nothing has passed that way aD day; the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin.
Father said he would be home before nightfall.
The snow brought down all the telephone wires; he couldn't have called, even with the best of news.
The roads are bad. I hope he'll be safe.
But the old car stuck fast in a rut, wouldn't budge an inch; the engine whirred, coughed and died and he was far from home. Ruined, once; then ruined again, as he had learnt from his lawyers mat very morning; at die conclusion of the lengthy, slow «tterapt to restore his fortunes, he had turned out his pockets to find the cash for petrol to take him home. And not even enough money left over to buy his Beauty, his girl-child, his pet, the one white rose she said she wanted; the only gift she wanted, no matter how the case went, how rich he
41
The Werewolf
of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour. Next day, his regiment embarked for France.
The Werewolf
It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.
Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lies.
To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naif style and there are no flowers to put in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out small, votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that
Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St John's Eve will have second sight When they discover a witch - some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours' do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinisteri follows her about all the time, they strip the crone, search for her marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it Then they stone her to death.
ioS
sr*-
TkeWeremf
Winter and cold weather.
Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I've baked for her on die hearthstone and a little pot of butter.
The good child does as her mother bids - five mites' trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar the starving wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife; you know how to use it
The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she
knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on die beast
It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineer's child would have died of fright at the sight of it It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father's knife and slashed off its right forepaw.
- The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolfs paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother's house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.
She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use h to make the old woman a cold compress, and die wolfs paw fell to the floor.
But it was no longer a wolfs paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she knew it for her grandmother's hand.
She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But die child was strong, and armed with her father's hunting knife; she managed to hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already.
The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and come rushing in. They knew the wart on the hand at once fór
ioo
The Company ofWohes
a witch's nipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, oat into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of die forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. Now the child Uved in her grandmother's house; she prospered.
The Company of Wolves
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you - red for danger; if a wolfs eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-stilL
But those eyes are aD you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you go through die wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows, they wul be like wraiths, grey members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long, wavering bowl... an aria of fear made audible.
The woUšong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.
It is winter and cold weather. In this region of mountain and forest, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat Goats and sheep are locked up in the byre, the deer departed for the remaining pasturage on the southern slopes - wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pehs, if they gave you lime before they pounced. Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops- of all
no
The Company ofWohet
S?*?!*^18 0f ** *$* "* ^ŕ"** t*106** hobgoblins, osres that grill Ubies upon gndmms, witches that fatten th* captivlfS cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is worst for he cannot &£ to
reason.
You are always m danger m the forest, where no people are Steo between the portals of the great pines where the shazVy hmJZ tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller in new as if th vegetation itself were m a plot with the wolves who live there « *„ ^ the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends - stepíetweenA gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite«ľ cautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves wffl eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as pbeue.
The graveled children of the sparse villages always carry kniv« with them when they go out to tend the lŕttle Socks of erats that provide the homesteads with acrid milk and rank, majn-otv ch«*«
^r^r^Wgw^^*cb^^^edS
But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. wl try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out There is nl winter's night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey faroJshed snout questing under the door, and there was a woman once bitten Z her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni
Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of alL the wolf may be more than he seems.                                                                             ™"
There was a hunter once, near here, that trapped a wolf in a nit This wotf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who used to hye by himselfm a hut halfway up the mountain and sine to Jesus all day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep, but she made such a commotion that men came with rifles and scared him awavand rned to track him into the forest but he was cunning and easUy «v-them the slip. So this hunter dug a pit and put a duck in it, for baitall ahve-oh; and he covered the pit with straw smeared with wolf dun7 Quack, quack! went the duck and a wolf came slinking out of the forest, a big one, a heavy one he weighed as much as a grown man and the straw gave way beneath him - into the pit he tumbled The hunter jumped down after him, slit his throat, cut off all his paws for a troDhľ
And then no wolf at all lay in front of the hunter but the bloody trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead.
A witch from up the valley once turned an entire wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on another girl. She used to order them to visit her, at night, from spite, and they would at and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery
m
The Company ofWohxt
Not so very long ago, a young woman in our village married a man who vanished dean away on her wedding night. The bed was made with new sheets and the bride lay down in it; the groom said, he was going out to relieve himself, insisted on it, for the sake of decency, and she drew die coverlet up to her chin and she lay there. And she waited and she waited and then she waited again - surely he's been gone a long time? Until she jumps up in bed and shrieks to hear a howling, coming on the wind from die forest
That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition. There is a vast melancholy in die canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet dut ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to die wolf from its own despair, only through, some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.
The young woman's brothers searched the outhouses and the haystacks but never found any remains so die sensible girl dried her eyes and found herself another husband not too shy to piss into a pot who spent the nights indoors. She gave him a pair of bonny babies and all went right as a trivet until, one freezing night, the night of the solstice, die hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should, the longest night, her first good man came home again.
A great thump on die door announced him as she was stirring die soup for the father of her children and she knew him the moment she lifted the latch to him although it was years since she'd worn black for him and now he was in rags and his hair hung down his back and never saw a comb, alive with Ike.
'Here I am again, missus,' he said.' Get me my bowl of cabbage and be quick about it.'
Then her second husband came in with wood for the fire and when die first one saw she'd slept with another man and, worse, clapped his red eyes on her little children who'd crept into the kitchen to see what all the din was about, he shouted: 'I wish I were a wolf again, to teach this whore a lesson!' So a wolf he instantly became and tore off the eldest boy's left foot before he was chopped up with the hatchet they used for chopping logs. But when the wolf lay bleeding and gasping its last, the pelt peeled off again and he was just as he had been,
112
The Company ofWahet
years ago, when he ran away from his marriage bed, so dut she wept and her second husband beat her.
They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on. Or, that he was born feet first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a man's but his legs and genitals are a wolfs. And he has a wolfs heart
Seven years is a werewolf s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabouts think it some protection to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf, as if clothes made the man. Yet by the eyes, those phosphorescent eyes, you know him in all his shapes; the eyes alone unchanged by metamorphosis.
Before he can become a wolf, die lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among die pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.
It is midwinter and the robin, the friend of man, sits on die handle of the gardener's spade and sings. It is the worst tíme in all the year for wolves but this strong-minded child insists she will go off through the wood. She is quite sure the wild beasts cannot harm her although, well-warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses. There is a bottle of harsh liquor distilled from brambles; a batch of flat oatcakes baked on die hearthstone; a pot or two of jam. The flaxen-haired girl will take these delicious gifts to a reclusive grandmother so old the burden of her years is crushing her to death. Granny lives two hours' trudge through the winter woods; the child wraps herself up in her thick shawl, draws it over her head. She steps into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas Eve. The malign door of the solstice still swings upon its hinges but she has been too much loved ever to feel scared.
Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise but this one, so pretty and die youngest of her family, a little late-comer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who'd knitted her die red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fault hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman's bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentade of her own
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virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.
Her father might forbid her, if he were home, but he is away in the forest, gathering wood, and her mother cannot deny her.
The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws.
There is always something to look at in the forest, even in the middle of winter - the huddled mounds of birds, succumbed to the lethargy of the season, heaped on the creaking boughs and too forlorn to sing; the bright frills of the winter fungi on the blotched trunks of the trees; the cuneiform slots of rabbits and deer, the herringbone tracks of the birds, a hare as lean as a rasher of bacon streaking across the path where the thin sunlight dapples the russet brakes of last year's bracken.
When she heard the freezing howl of a distant wolf, her practised hand sprang to the handle of her knife, but she saw no sign of a wolf at all, nor of a naked man, neither, but then she heard a clattering among the brushwood and there sprang on to the path a fully clothed one, a very handsome young one, in the green coat and wideawake hat of a hunter, laden with carcasses of game birds. She had her hand on her knife at the first rustie of twigs but he laughed with a flash of white teeth when he saw her and made her a comic yet flattering little bow; she'd never seen such a fine fellow before, not among the rustic clowns of her native village. So on they went together, through the thickening light of the afternoon.
Soon they were laughing and joking like old friends. When he offered to carry her basket, she gave it to him although her knife was in it because he told her his rifle would protect them. As the day darkened, it began to snow again; she felt the first flakes settle on her eyelashes but now there was only half a mile to go and there would be a fire, and hot tea, and a welcome, a warm one, surely, for the dashing huntsman as well as for herself.
This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket It was a compass. She looked at the little round glass face in the palm of his hand and watched the wavering needle with a vague wonder. He assured her this compass had taken him safely through the wood on his hunting trip because the needle always told him with perfect accuracy where the north was. She did not believe it; she knew she should never leave the path on the way through the wood or else she would be lost instantly. He laughed at tier again; gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth. He said, if he plunged off the path into the forest that surrounded
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them, he could guarantee to arrive at her grandmother's house a good quarter of an hour before she did, plotting his way through the undergrowth with his compass, while she trudged the long way, along the winding path.
1 don't believe you. Besides, aren't you afraid of the wolves?
He only tapped the gleaming butt of his rifle and grinned.
Is it a bet ? he asked her. Shall we make a game of U ř What will you give me if I get to your grandmother's house before you ?
What would you like? she asked disingenuously.
A kiss.
Commonplaces of a rustic seduction; she lowered her eyes and blushed.
He went through the undergrowth and took her basket with him but she forgot to be afraid of the beasts, although now the moon was rising,' for she wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the handsome gentleman would win bis wager.
Grandmother's house stood by itself a little way out of die village. The freshly falling snow blew in eddies about the kitchen garden and the young man stepped delicately up the snowy path to the door as if he were reluctant to get his feet wet, swinging his bundle of game and the gtrľs basket and humming a little tune to himself.
There is a faint trace of blood on his chin; he has been smacking on his catch.
He rapped upon the panels with his knuckles.
Aged and frail, granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises her and almost ready to give in entirely. A boy came out from the village to build up her hearth for the night an hour ago and the kitchen crackles with busy firelight She has her Bible for company, she is a pious old woman. She is propped up on several pillows in the bed set into the wall peasant-fashion, wrapped up in the patchwork quilt she made before she was married, more years ago than she cares to remember. Two china spaniels with liver-coloured blotches on their coats and black noses sit on either side of the fireplace. There is a bright rug of woven rags on the pantiles. The grandfather clock ticks away her eroding rime.
We keep the wolves outside by living well.
He rapped upon the panels with his hairy knuckles.
It is your granddaughter, he mimicked in a high soprano.
Lift up the latch and walk in, my darling.
You can tell them by their eyes, eyes of a beast of prey, nocturnal, devastating eyes as red as a wound; you can hurl your Bible at him and
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your apron after, granny, you thought that was a sure prophylactic against these infernal vermin... now call on Christ and his mother and all the angels in heaven to protect you but it won't do you any good.
His feral muzzle is sharp as a knife; he drops his golden burden of gnawed pheasant on the table and puts down your dear girl's basket, too. Oh, my God, what have you done with her?
Off with his disguise, that coat of forest-coloured cloth, the hat with die feather tucked into the ribbon; his matted hair streams down his white shirt and she can see the lice moving in it. The sticks in the hearth shift and hiss; night and the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair.
He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and texture of vellum.
A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples ate ripe and dark
- as poison fruit but he's so thin you could count the ribs under his skin
if only he gave you the time. He strips off his trousers and she can see
how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.
The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate.
When he had finished with her, he licked his chops and quickly dressed himself again, until he was just as he had been when he came through her door. He burned the inedible hair in the fireplace and wrapped the bones up in a napkin that he hid away under the bed in the wooden chest in which he found a clean pair of sheets. These he carefully put on the bed instead of the tell-tale stained ones he stowed away in the laundry basket. He plumped up the pillows and shook out the patchwork quilt, he picked up the Bible from the floor, closed it and laid it on the table. All was as it had been before except that grandmother was gone. The sticks twitched in the grate, the clock ticked and the young man sat patiendy, deceitfully beside the bed in granny's nightcap.
Rat-a-tap-tap.
Who's there, he quavers in granny's antique falsetto.
Only your granddaughter.
So she came in, bringing with her a flurry of snow that melted in tears on the tiles, and perhaps she was a little disappointed to see only her grandmother sitting beside the fire. But then he Rung off the blanket and sprang to the door, pressing his back against it so that she could not get out again.
The girl looked round the room and saw there was not even the indentation of a head on the smooth cheek of the pillow and how, for
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the first time she'd seen it so, the Bible lay closed on the table. The tick of the clock cracked like a whip. She wanted her knife from her basket but she did not dare reach for it because his eyes were fixed upon her - huge eyes that now seemed to shine with a unique, interior light, eyes the size of saucers, saucers full of Greek fire, diabolic phosphorescence.
What big eyes you have.
All the better to see you with.
No trace at all of the old woman except for a tuft of white hair that had caught in the bark of an unowned log. When the girl saw that, she knew she was in danger of death.
Where is my grandmother ?
There's nobody here but we two, my darling.
Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, die howling of a multitude of wolves; she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill.
Who has come to sing us carols, she said.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves. Look out of the window and you'll see mem.
Snow half-caked the lattice and she opened it to look into the garden. It was a white night of moon and snow; the blizzard whirled round die gaunt, grey beasts who squatted on their haunches among the rows of winter cabbage, pointing their sharp snouts to the moon and howling as if their hearts would break. Ten wolves; twenty wolves - so many wolves she could not count them, howling in concert as if demented or deranged. Their eyes reflected the light from the kitchen and shone like a hundred candles.
It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl so.
She closed the window on the wolves' threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid.-
What shall I do with my shawl?
Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won't need it again.
She bundled up her shaw! and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it. Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room.
What shall I do with my blouse ŕ
Into the fire with it, too, my pet
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The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird and now off came her skirt, her woollen stockings, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, and were gone for good. The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh. This dazzling, naked she combed out her hair with her fingers; her hair looked white as the snow outside. Then went directly to the man with red eyes in whose unkempt mane the lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.
What big arms you have.
All the better to hug you with.
Every wolf in the world now howled a protbalaimon outside the window as she freely gave die kiss she owed him.
What big teeth you have!
She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of die clamour of the forest's Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered:                        ,
All die better to eat you with.
The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in die face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and die old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.
Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.
She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put die lice into her mouth and cat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.
The blizzard will die down.
The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over diem, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.
Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
AH silent, all still.
Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves' birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.
Seel sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.
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Wolf-Alice
Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like we do she would have called herself a wolf, but she cannot speak, although she howls because she is lonely - yet 'howl' is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to make the noise that pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fát on the fire. Sometimes the sharp ears of her foster kindred hear her across the irreparable golf of absence; they answer her from faraway pine forest and the bald mountain rim. Their counterpoint crosses and criss-crosses the night sky; they are trying to talk to her but they cannot do so because she does not understand their language even if she knows how to use it for she is not a wolf herself, although suckled by wolves.
Her panting tongue hangs out; her red lips are thick and fresh. Her legs are long, lean and muscular. Her elbows, hands and knees are thickly callused because she always runs on all fours. She never walks; she trots or gallops. Her pace is not our pace.
Two-legs looks, four-legs sniffs. Her long nose is always a-quiver, sifting every scent it meets. With this useful tool, she lengthily investigates everything she glimpses. She can net so much more of the world than we can through the fine, hairy, sensitive filters of her nostrils that her poor eyesight does not trouble her. Her nose is sharper by night than our eyes are by day so it is the night she prefers, when (he cool reflected light of the moon does not make her eyes smart and draws out the various fragrances from the woodland where she wanders when she can. But the wolves keep well away from the peasants' shotguns, now, and she will no longer find diem there.
Wide shoulders, long arms and she sleeps succineüy curled into a ball as if she were cradling her spine in her tail Nothing about her is human except that she is nor a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
When they found her in die wolfs den beside the bullet-riddled
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corpse of her foster mother, she was no more than a little brown scrap so snarled in her own brown hair they did not, at first, think she was a child but a cub; she snapped at her would-be saviours with her spiky canines until they tied her up by force. She spent her first days amongst us crouched stockstill, staring at the whitewashed wall of her cell in the convent to which they took her. The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her. Then she might snatch bread from their hands and race with it into a corner to mumble it with her back towards them; it was a great day among the novices when she learned to sit up on her hind legs and beg for a crust
They found that, if she were treated with a little kindness, she was not intractable. She learned to recognize her own dish; then, to drink from a cup. They found that she could quite easily be taught a few, simple tricks but she did not feel the cold and it took a long time to wheedle a shift over herliead to cover op her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper; when the Mother Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recovery from the wolves, she arched her back, pawed the floor, retreated to a fár corner of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated - reverted entirely, it would seem, to her natural state. Therefore, without a qualm, this nine days' wonder and continuing embarrassment of a child was delivered over to the bereft and un-sanctified household of the Duke.
Deposited at the castle, she huffed and snuffed and smclled only a reek of meat, not the least whiff of sulphur, nor of familiarity. She settled down on her hunkers with that dog's sigh that is only die expulsion of breath and does not mean either relief or resignation.
The Duke is sere as old paper; his dry skin rustles against the bed-sheets as he throws them back to thrust out his thin legs scabbed with old scars where thorns scored his pelt. He lives in a gloomy mansion, all alone but for this child who has as Utde in common with the rest of us as he does. His bedroom is pamted terracotta, rusted with a wash of pain, like the interior of an Iberian butcher's shop, but for himself, nothing can hurt him since he ceased to cast an image in the mirror.
He sleeps in an antlered bed of dull black wrought iron until the moon, the governess of transformations and overseer of somnambulists, pokes an imperative finger through the narrow window and strikes his face: then his eyes start open.
At night, those huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself;
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he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upon the other side of things.
Sput, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphte weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when be runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas.
By die red early hour of midwinter sunset, all the doors are barred for miles. The cows low fretfully indie byre when he goes by, the whimpering dogs sink their noses in their paws. He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-eater, the body-snatcher who invades the last privacies of the dead. He is white as leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothing deters him. If you stuff a corpse with garlic, why, he ordy slavers at the treat: cadavre provencale. He will use die hory cross as a scratching post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up holy water.
She sleeps in die soft, wann ashes of the hearth; beds are traps, she will not stay in one. She can perform die few, small tasks to which die nuns trained her, she sweeps up the hairs, vertebrae and phalanges that litter his room into a dustpan, she makes up his bed at sunset, when he leaves it and the grey beasts outside howl, as if they know his transformation is their parody. Unkind to their prey, to their own they are tender; had the Duke been a wolf, they would have angrily expelled him from the pack, he would have had to lollop along miles behind them, creeping in submission on his belly up to die kill only after they had eaten and were sleeping, to gnaw the well-chewed bones and chew the hide. Yet, suckled as she was by wolves on the high uplands where her mother bore and left het, only his kitchen maid, who is not wolf or woman, knows no better than to do his chores for him.
She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another's pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all and her silence and her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talking beasts and flowers, she would be die bud of flesh in the kind lion's mouth: but how can the bitten apple flesh out its scar again?
Mutilation is her lot; though, now and dien, she will emit an involuntary rustle of sound, as if the unused chords in her throat were a
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wind-harp that moved with the random impulses of the air, her whisper, more obscure than die voices of the dumb.
Familiar desecrations in the village graveyard. The coffin had been ripped open with the abandon with which a child unwraps a gift on Christmas morning and, of its contents, not a trace could be found but for a rag of the bridal veil in which the corpse had been wrapped that was caught, fluttering, in the brambles at the churchyard gate so they knew which way he had taken it, towards his gloomy castle.
In the lapse of time, the trance of being ofthat exiled place, this girl grew amongst things she could neither name nor perceive. How did she think, how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and her primal sentience that existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there are no words to describe the way she negotiated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings. The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showed us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely knew it Then she began to bleed.
Her first blood bewildered her. She did not know what it meant and die first stirrings of surmise that ever she felt were directed towards its possible cause. The moon had been shining into die kitchen when she woke to feel die trickle between her thighs and it seemed to her dut a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? must have nibbled her cunt while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affectionate nips too gentle to wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin. The shape of dus theory was blurred yet, out of it, there took root a kind of wild reasoning, as it might have from a seed dropped in her brain off the foot of a flying bird.
The flow continued for a few days, which seemed to her an endless time. Sbe had, as yet, no direct notion of past, or of future, or of duration, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment. At night, she prowled the empty house looking for rags to sop the blood up; she had learned a litde elementary hygiene in the convent, enough to know how to bury her excrement and cleanse herself of her natural juices, although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it should be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so.
She found towels, sheets and pillowcases in closets that had not been opened since the Duke came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mother's nipple off and weep. She found once-worn ball dresses in cobwebbed wardrobes, and, heaped in the corners of his
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bloody chamber, shrouds, nightdresses and burial clothes that had wrapped items on the Duke's menus. She tore strips of the most absorbent fabrics to clumsily diaper herself. In the course of these prowlings, she bumped against that minor over whose surface the Duke passed like a wind on ice.
First, she tried to nuzzle her reflection; then, nosing it industriously, she soon realized it gave out no smell. She bruised her muzzle on the cold glass and broke her claws trying to tussle with this stranger. She saw, with irritation, then amusement, how it mimicked every gesture of hers when she raised her forepaw to scratch herself or dragged her bum along the dusty carpet to rid herself of a slight discomfort in her hindquarters. She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, and felt a cool, solid, immovable surface between herself and she - some kind, possibly, of invisible cage ? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, baring her teeth and grinning; at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yapping exultantly, but, when she retreated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstasy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size.
The moonlight spilled into the Duke's motionless bedroom from behind a cloud and she saw how pale this wolf, not-wolf who .played with her was. The moon and mirrors have this much in common: you cannot see behind them. Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her in the night Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a-step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she encountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innocence.
Soon the flow ceased. She forgot it. The moon vanished; but, little by little, reappeared; When it again visited her kitchen at full strength, Wolf-Alice was surprised into bleeding again and so it went on, with a punctuality that transformed her vague grip on time. She learned to expect these bleedings, to prepare her rags against them, and afterwards, neady to bury die dirtied things. Sequence asserted itself with custom and then she understood the circumambulatory principle of the clock perfectly, even if all clocks were banished from the den where she and the Duke inhabited their separate solitudes, so that you might say she discovered the very action of time by means of this returning cycle.
When she curled up among the cinders, the colour, texture and
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warmth of them brought her foster mother's belly out of die past and printed it on her flesh; her first conscious memory, painful as the first time the nuns combed her hair. She howled a little, in a firmer, deepening trajectory, to obtain the inscrutable consolation of die 'wolves' response, for now the world around her was assuming form. She perceived an essential difference between herself and her surroundings that you might say she could not put her jm$er on - only, the trees and grass of the meadows outside no longer seemed the emanation of her questing nose and erect ears, and yet sufficient to itself, but a kind of backdrop for her, that waited for her arrivals to give it meaning. She saw herself upon it and her eyes, with their sombre clarity, took on a veiled, introspective look.
She would spend hours examining the new skin that had been born, it seemed to her, of her bleeding. She would tick her soft upholstery with her long tongue and groom her hair with her fingernails. She examined her new breasts with curiosity; the white growths reminded her of nothing so much as the night-sprung puffbafls she had found, sometimes, on evening rambles in the woods, a natural if disconcerting apparition, but then, to her astonishment, she found a little diadem of fresh hairs tufting between her thighs. She showed it to her mirror littermate, who reassured her by showing her she shared it
The damned Duke haunts the graveyard; he believes himself to be both less and more than a man, as if his obscene difference were a sign of grace. During the day, he sleeps. His mirror faithfully reflects his bed but never the meagre shape within the disordered covers.
Sometimes, on those white nights when she was left alone in the house, she dragged out his grandmother's ball dresses and rolled on suave velvet and abrasive lace because to do so delighted her adolescent skin. Her intimate in the mirror wound the old clothes round herself, wrinkling its nose in delight at the ancient yet still potent scents of musk and civet that woke up in the sleeves and bodices. This habitual, at last boring, fidelity to her every movement finally woke her up to the regretful possibility that her companion was, in fact, no more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow she cast on sunlit grass. Had not she and the rest of the litter tussled and romped with their shadows long ago? She poked her agile nose around the back of the mirror; she found only dust, a spider stuck in his web, a heap of rags. A titde moisture leaked from the corners of her eyes, yet her relation with the mirror was now far more intimate since she knew she saw herself within íl
She pawed and tumbled the dress the Duke had tucked away behind
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the mirror for a while. The dust was soon shaken out of it; she experimentally inserted her front legs in the sleeves. Although the dress was torn and crumpled, it was so white and of such a sinuous texture that she thought, before she put it on, she must thoroughly wash off her coat of ashes in the water from the pump in the yard, which she knew how to manipulate with her cunntng'forepaw. In the mirror, she saw how this white dress made her shine.
Although she could not run so fast on two legs in petticoats, she trotted out in her new dress to investigate the odorous October hedgerows, like a debutante from the casde, delighted with herself but still, now and then, singing to the wolves with a kind of wistful triumph, because now she knew how to wear clothes and so had put on the visible sign of her difference from them.
Her footprints on damp earth are beautiful and menacing as those Man Friday left
The young husband of the dead bride spent a long time planning his revenge. He filled the church with an arsenal of bells, books and candles; a battery of silver bullets; they brought a ten-gallon tub of holy water in a wagon from the city, where it had been blessed by the Archbishop himself, to drown the Duke, if the bullets bounced off him. They gathered in the church to chant a litany and wait for the one who would visit with the first deaths of winter.
She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.
It seemed to her the congregation in the church was ineffectually attempting to imitate the wolves' chorus. She lent them the assistance of her own, educated voice for a while, rocking contemplatively on her haunches by the graveyard gate; then her nostrils twitched to catch the rank stench of the dead that told her her co-habitor was at hand; raising her head, who did her new, keen eyes spy but the lord of cobweb casde intent on performing his cannibal rituals?
And if her nostrils flare suspiciously at the choking reek of incense and his do not, that is because she is far more sentient than he. She will, therefore, run, run! when she hears the crack of bullets, because they killed her foster mother; so, with the self-same lilting lope, drenched with holy water, will he run, too, until the young widower fires the silver bullet that bites his shoulder and drags off half his fictive pelt, so that he must rise up like any common forked biped and limp distressfully on as best he may.
When they saw the white bride leap out of the tombstones and scamper off towards the casde with the werewolf stumbling after, the
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peasants thought me Duke's dearest victim had come back to take matters into her own hands. They ran screaming from the presence of a ghostly vengeance on him.
Poor, wounded thing... locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation, an incomplete mystery, now he lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Mycenaean tomb, howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds.
First, she was fearful when she heard the sound of pain, in case it hurt her, as it had done before. She prowled round the bed, growling, snuffing at his wound that does not smell like her wound. Then, she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheeks and forehead.
The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the rational glass, the master of the visible, impartially recorded die crooning girl.
As she continued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material construction. Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a fonnless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishing net, then in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke.
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'" V!Wi?;
A SOUVENIR OF JAPAN
When I went outside to see if he was coming home, some children dressed ready for bed in cotton nightgowns were playing with sparklers in the vacant lot on the corner. When the sparks fell down in beards of stars, the smiling children cooed softly. Their pleasure was very pure because it was so restrained. An old woman said: 'And so they pestered their father until he bought them fireworks.' In this language, fireworks are called bamabi, which means 'flower fire'. All through summer, every evening, you can see all kinds of fireworks, from the humblest to the most elaborate, and once we rode the train out of Shinjuku for an hour to watch one of the public displays which are held over rivers so that the dark water multiplies the reflections.
By the time we arrived at our destination, night had already fallen. We were in the suburbs. Many families were on their way to enjoy the fireworks. Their mothers had scrubbed and dressed up the smallest children to celebrate the treat. The little giris were especially immaculate in pink and white cotton kimonos tied with fluffy sashes like swatches of candy floss.
2                                          FIREWORKS
Their hair had been most beautifully brushed, arranged in sleek, twin bunches and decorated with twists of gold and silver thread. These children were all on their best behaviour because they were staying up late and held their parents* bands with a charming propriety. We followed the family parties until we came to some fields by the river and saw, high in the air, fireworks already opening out like variegated parasols. They were visible from far away and as we took the path that led through the fields towards their source they seemed to occupy more and more of the sky.
Along the path were stalls where shirtless cooks with sweatbands round their heads roasted corncobs and cuttlefish over charcoal. We bought cuttlefish on skewers and ate them as we walked along. They had been basted with soy sauce and were very good. There were also stalls selling goldfish in plastic bags and others for big balloons with rabbit ears. It was like a fairground - but such a well-ordered fair I Even the patrolling policemen carried coloured paper lanterns instead of torches. Everything was altogether quietly festive. Icecream sellers wandered among the crowd, ringing handbells. Their boxes of wares smoked with cold and they called out in plaintive voices, Icy, icy, icy cream ľ When young lovers dispersed discreetly down the tracks in the sedge, the shadowy, indefatigable salesmen pursued them with bells, lamps and mournful cries.
By now, a great many people were walking towards the fireworks but their steps fell so softly and they chatted in such gentle voices there was no more noise than a warm, continual, murmurous humming, the cosy sound of shared happiness, and the night filkd with» muted, bourgeois yet authentic magic. Above our heads, the fireworks hung dissolving earrings on the night. Soon we lay down in a stubbted field to watch the fireworks. But, as I expected, he very quickly grew restive.
'Are you happy ?' he asked. 'Are you sure you're happy ?* I
A SOUVENIR OF JAPAN                                 }
was watching the fireworks and did not reply at first although I knew how bored he was and, if he was himself enjoying anything, it was only the idea of my pleasure - or, rather, the idea that he enjoyed my pleasure, since this would be a proof of love. I became guilty and suggested we return to the heart of the city. We fought a silent battle of self-abnegation and I won it, for I had the stronger character. Yet the last thing in the world that I wanted was to leave the scintillating river and the gentle crowd. But I knew his real desire was to return and so return we did, although I do not know if it was worth my small victory of selflessness to bear bis remorse at cutting short my pleasure, even if to engineer this remorse had, at some subterranean level, been the whole object of the outing.
Nevertheless, as the slow train nosed back into the thickets of neon, his natural liveliness returned. He could not lose his old habit of walking through the streets with a sense of expectation, as if a fateful encounter might be just around the corner, for, the longer one stayed out, the longer something remarkable might happen and, even if nothing ever did, the chance of it appeased the sweet ache of his boredom for a little while. Besides, his duty by me was done. He had taken me out for the evening and now he wanted to be rid of me. Or so I saw it. The word for wife, ohuan, means the person who occupies the inner room and rarely, if ever, comes out of it. Since I often appeared to be his wife, I was frequently subjected to this treatment, though I fought against it bitterly.
But I usually found myself waiting for him to come home knowing, with a certain resentment, that be would not; and that he would not even telephone me to tell me he would be late, either, for he was far too guilty to do so. I had nothing better to do than to watch the neighbourhood children light their sparklers and giggle; the old woman stood beside me and I knew she disapproved of me. The entite street politely disapproved of me. Perhaps they thought I was contributing
4
FIREWORKS
to the delinquency of a juvenile for he was obviously younger than I. The old woman's back was bowed almost to a circle from carrying, when he was a baby, the father who now supervised the domestic fireworks in his evening undress of loose, white drawers, naked to the waist. Her face had the seamed reserve of the old in this country. It was a neighbourhood poignantly rich in old ladies.
At the corner shop, they put an old lady outside on an upturned beer crate each morning, to air. I think she must have been the household grandmother. She was so old she had lapsed almost entirely into a somnolent plant life. She was of neither more nor less significance to herself or to the world than the pot of morning glories which blossomed beside her and perhaps she had less significance, than the flowers, which would fade before lunch was ready. They kept her very dean. They covered her pale cotton kimono with a spotless pinafore trimmed with coarse lace and she never dirtied it because she did not move. Now and then, a child came out to comb her hair. Her consciousness was quite beclouded by time and, when I passed by, her rheumy eyes settled -upon me always with the same, vague, disinterested wonder, like that of an Eskimo watching a train. When she whispered, Irrasyaimast, the shopkeeper's word of welcome, in the ghostliest of whispers, like the rustle of a paper bag, I saw her teeth were rimmed with gold.
The children lit sparklers under a mouse-coloured sky and, due to the pollution in the atmosphere, the moon was mauve. The cicadas throbbed and shrieked in the backyards. When I think of this city, I shall always remember the cicadas who whirr relentlessly all through the summer nights, rising to a piercing crescendo in the subfuse dawn. I have heard cicadas even in the busiest streets, though they thrive best in the back alleys, where they ceaselessly emit that scarcely tolerable susurration which is like a shrill intensification of extreme heat.
A SOUVENIR OF JAPAN
A year before, on such a throbbing, volup dinous, subtropical night, we had been walkin: these shady streets together, in and out of the: willow trees, looking for somewhere to make glories climbed the lattices which screened th< houses, but the darkness hid the tender co flowers, which the Japanese prize because they I He soon found a hotel, for the city is hospitabl were shown into a room like a paper box. It cor but a mattress spread on the floor. We lay dov and began to kiss one another. Then a ma opened the sliding door and, stepping out < crept in on stockinged feet, breathing apologie tray which contained two cups of tea and a p She put the tray down on the matted floor backed, bowing and apologizing, from the re uninterrupted kiss continued. He started to ur and then she came back again. This time, she cs of towels. I was stripped stark naked when sh< third time to bring the receipt for his money. S most respectable woman and, if she was emba not show h by a single word or gesture.
I learned his name was Taro. In a toy stor those books for children with pictures whid made of paper cut-outs so that, when you tui picture springs up in the three stylized dimeni drop in Kabulri. It was the story of Momotaro from a peach. Before my eyes, the paper peacl there was the baby, where the stone should too, had the inhuman sweetness of a child b< thing other than a mother, a passive, cruel sw* immediately understand, for it was that o masochism which, in my country, is usual women.
6                                          FIREWORKS
Sometimes he seemed to possess a curiously unearthly quality when he perched upon the mattress with his knees drawn up beneath his chin in the attitude of a pixy on a doorknocker. At these times, his face seemed somehow both too flat and too large for his elegant body which had such curious, androgynous grace with its svelte, elongated spine, wide shoulders and unusually well developed pectorals, almost like the breasts of a girl approaching puberty. There was a subtle lack of alignment between face and body and he seemed almost goblin, as if he might have borrowed another person's head, as Japanese goblins do, in order to perform some devious trick. These impressions of a weird visitor were fleeting yet haunting. Sometimes, it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his race the aspect of a mask.
His hair was so heavy his neck drooped under its weight and was of a black so deep it turned purple in sunlight. His mouth also was purplish and his blunt, bee-stung lips those of Gauguin's Tahttians. The touch of his skin was as smooth as water as it flows through the fingers. His eyelids were retractable, like those of a cat, and sometimes disappeared completely. I should have liked to have had him embalmed and been able to keep him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
As they say, Japan is a man's country. When I first came to Tokyo, doth carps fluttered from poles in the gardens of the families fortunate enough to have borne boy children, for it was the rime of the annual festival, Boys* Day. At least they do not disguise the situation. At least one knows where one is. Our polarity was publicly acknowledged and socially sanctioned. As an example of the use of the word dewa, which
A SOUVENIR OF JAPAN                                 7
occasionally means, as far as I can gather, 'in', I once found in a textbook a sentence which, when translated, read: In a society where men dominate, they value women only as the object of men's passions.' If the only conjunction possible to us was that of the death-defying double-somersault of love, it is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all. I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator.
In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: 'For Young and Cute Girls Only'. When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch. I wore men's sandals because they were the only kind that fitted me and, even so, I had to take the largest size. My pink cheeks, blue eyes and blatant yellow hair made of me, in the visual orchestration of this city in which all heads were dark, eyes brown and skin monotone, an instrument which played upon an alien scale. In a sober harmony of subtle plucked instruments and wistful flutes, I blared. I proclaimed myself like in a perpetual fanfare. He was so delicately put together that I thought his skeleton must have the airy elegance of a bird's and I was sometimes afraid that I might smash him. He told me that when he was in bed with me, he felt like a small boat upon a wide, stormy sea.
We pitched our tent in the most unlikely surroundings. We were living in a room furnished only by passion amongst homes of the most astounding respectability. The sounds around us were the swish of brooms upon tatami matting and the clatter of demotic Japanese. On all the windowledges, prim flowers bloomed in pots. Every morning, the washing came out on the balconies at seven. Early one morning, I saw a man washing the leaves of his tree. Quilts and mattresses went out to air at eight. The sunlight lay thick enough on these unpaved
8
FIREWORKS
alleys to lay the dust and somebody always seemed to be practising Chopin in one or another of the flimsy houses, so lightly glued together from plywood it seemed they were sustained only by willpower. Once I was at home, however, h was as if I occupied the inner room and he did not expect me to go out of it, although it was I who paid the rent.
Yet, when he was away trom me, he spent much of the time savouring the most annihilating remorse. But this remorse or regret was the stuff of life to him and out he would go again the next night, or, if I had been particularly angry, he would wait until the night after that. And, even if he fully intended to come back early and had promised me he would do so, circumstances always somehow denied him and once more he would contrive to miss the last train. He and his friends spent their nights in a desultory progression from coffee shop to bar to paetínko parlour to coffee shop, again, with the radiant aim-lessnest of the pure existential hero. They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night. When it was time for the first train in the morning, he would go back to the mysteriously deserted, Piranesi perspectives of the station, discoloured by dawn, exquisitely tortured by the notion - which probably contained within it a damped-down spark of hope - that, this time, he might have done something irreparable.
I speak as if he had no secrets from me. Well, then, you must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfecdy. At times, I thought I was invent-ing him as I went along, however, so you will have to take my word for it that we existed. But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded,  spuriously  detailed  actuality  that  you  are
DP JAPAN
9
forced to beliiwant to practise such sleight of hand. You ily with glimpses of our outlines, as if yoof our reflections in the looking-glass of touše as you passed by the window. His o. I only called him Taro so that I could f the peach boy, because it seemed appro
Speaking oinese have a great respect for them and, in (one often finds them hooded with fabric case. He said; 'Mirrors make a room uncosy.more to it than that although they love to btve cosiness if one is to live so close togethedebration of the thing they feared, they sde the entire city into a cold hall of mirrory proliferated whole galleries of constantly ices, all marvellous but none tangible. If tip the real looking-glasses, it would be hanreal and what was not. Even buildings onobstantial had a trick of disappearing ovcng, we woke to find the house next door redt a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers ring, left out for the garbage collector.
I would need to me to possess the same kind of insubt his departure usually seemed imminent, urn as erratic but as inevitable as the weather, t and live in japan, you must be sure you a-o endure the weather. No, it was not insub rhetoric valid only on its own terms. When otestations, I was prepared to believe he behough I knew perfectly well they meant noi't fair. When he made them, he believed irihen, he was utterly consumed by convictiom was primarily to the idea of
ÍO
FIREWORKS
himself in love. This idea seemed to him magnificent, even sublime. He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drag, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an aflair so isolated from the real world was its principal appeal for him. But I had no means of knowing how far his conviction would take him. And I used to turn over in my mind from rime to time the question: how far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
This country has elevated hypocrisy to the level of the highest style. To look at a samurai, you would not know him for a murderer, or a geisha for a whore. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd. It was as if they all thought, if we believe in something hard enough, it will come true and, lo and behold! they bad done and it did. Our street was in essence a slum but, in appearance, it was a little enclave of harmonious quiet and, mirabiU Mttu, it was the appearance which was the reality, because they all behaved so well, kept everything so clean and lived with such rigorous civility. What terrible discipline it takes to live harmoniously. They had crushed all their vigour in order to live harmoniously and now they had the wistful beauty of flowers pressed dry in an enormous book.
But repression does not necessarily give birth only to severe beauties. In its programmed interstices, monstrous passions bloom. They torture trees to make them look more like the formal notion of a tree. They paint amazing pictures on their
A SOUVENIR OF JAPAN                                   11
skins with awl and gouge, sponging away the blood as they go; a tattooed man is a walking masterpiece of remembered pain. They boast the most passionate puppets in the world who mimic love suicides in a stylized fashion, for here there is no such comfortable formula as 'happy ever after'. And, when I remembered the finale of the puppet tragedies, how the wooden lovers cut their throats together, I felt the beginnings of unease, as if the hieratic imagery of the country might overwhelm me, for his boredom had reached such a degree that he was insulated against everything except the irritation of anguish. If he valued me as an object of passion, he had reduced the word to its toot, which derives from the Latin, potior, I suffer. He valued me as an instrument which would cause him pain.
So we lived under a disoriented moon which was as angry a purple as if the sky had bruised its eye, and, if we made certain genuine intersections, these only took place in darkness. His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanescence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intangible reflections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.
6o
FIREWORKS
hungry man. As if the sight stimulated bet own appetite, Madeline laughed and said: 'Goodness, Emile, the forest has even given us dessert!'
She sprang towards the exquisite, odoriferous tree which, at that moment, suffused in a tailing yet hallucinatory light the tone and intensity of liquefied amber, seemed to her brother a perfect equivalent of his sister's amazing beauty, a beauty he had never seen before that filled him, now, with ecstasy. The dark pool reflected her darkly, like an antique mirror. She raised her hand to part the leaves in search of a ripe fruit but the greenish skin seemed to warm and glow under her fingers so the first one she touched came as easily off the stem as if it had been brought to perfection by her touch. It seemed to be some kind of apple or pear. It was so juicy the juice ran down her chin and she extended a long, crimson, newly sensual tongue to lick her lips, laughing.
'It tastes so good!' she said. 'Here! Eat!'
She came back to him, splashing through the margins of the pool, holding the fruit out towards him on her palm. She was like a beautiful statue which has just come to life. Her enormous eyes were lit like nocturnal flowers that had been waiting only for this especial night to open and, in their vertiginous depths, reveal to her brother in inexpressible entirety the hitherto unguessed at, unknowable, inexpressible vistas of love.
He took the apple; ate; and, after that, they kissed.
FLESH AND THE MIRROR
It was midnight -1 chose my times and set my scenes with the precision of the born artiste. Hadn't I gone eight thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me? I had arrived back in Yokohama that evening from a visit to England and nobody met me, although I expected him. So I took the train to Tokyo, half an hour's journey. First, I was angry; but the poignancy of my own situation overcame me and then I was sad. To return to the one you love and find him absent! My heart used to jump like Pavlov's dogs at the prospect of such a treat; I positively salivated at the suggestion of unpleasure, I was sure that that was real life. I'm told I always look lonely when I'm alone; that is because, when I was an intolerable adolescent, I learned to sit with my coat-collar turned up in a lonely way, so that people would talk to me. And I can't drop the habit even now, though, now, it's only a habit, and, I realize, a predatory habit.
It was midnight and I was crying bitterly as I walked under the artificial cherry blossom with which they decorate the lamp standards from April to September. They do that so the
6z
FIREWORKS
pleasure quartets will have the look of a continuous carnival, no matter what ripples of agitation disturb the never-ceasing, endlessly circulating, quiet, gentle, melancholy crowds who throng the wet web of alleys under a false ceiling of umbrellas. All looked as desolate as Mardt Gras. I was searching among a multitude of unknown faces for the face of the one I loved while the warm, thick, heavy rain of summer greased the dark surfaces of the streets until, after a while, they began to gleam like sleek fur of seals just risen from the bottom of the sea.
The crowds lapped round me like waves full of eyes until I felt that I was walking through an ocean whose speechless and gesticulating inhabitants, like those with whom medieval philosophers peopled the countries of the deep, were methodical inversions or mirror images of the dwellers on dry land. And I moved through these expressionist perspectives in my black dress as though I was the creator of all and of myself, too, in a black dress, in love, crying, walking through the city in the third person singular, my own heroine, as though the world stretched out from my eye like spokes from a sensitized hub that galvanized all to life when I looked at it.
I think I know, now, what I was trying to do. I was trying to subdue the city by turning it into a projection of my own growing pains. What solipsistic arrogance 1 The city, the largest city in the world, the city designed to suit not one of my European expectations, this city presents the foreigner with a mode of life that seems to him to have the enigmatic transparency, the indecipherable clarity, of dream. And it is a dream he could, himself, never have dreamed. The stranger, the foreigner, thinks he is in control; but he has been precipitated into somebody else's dream.
You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen.
I had been attracted to the city first because I suspected it
FLESH AND THE MIRROR                             6}
contained enormous histrionic resources. I was always rummaging in the dressing-up box of the heart for suitable appearances to adopt in the city. That was the way I maintained my defences for, at that time, I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it - the Bovary syndrome. I was always imagining other things that could have been happening, instead, and so I always felt cheated, always dissatisfied.
Always dissatisfied, even if, like a perfect heroine, I wandered, weeping, on a forlorn quest for a lost lover through the aromatic labyrinth of alleys. And wasn't I in Asia? Asia! But, even though I lived there, it always seemed far away from me. It was as if there were glass between me and the world. But I could sec myself perfectly well on the other side of the glass. There I was, walking up and down, eating meals, having conversations, in love, indifferent, and so on. But all the time I was pulling the strings of my own puppet; it was this puppet who was moving about on the other side of the glass. And I eyed the most marvellous adventures with the bored eye of the agent with the cigar watching another audition. I tapped out the ash and asked of events: 'What else can you do?'
So I attempted to rebuild the city according to the blueprint in my imagination as a backdrop to the plays in my puppet theatre, but it sternly refused to be so rebuilt; I was only imagining it had been so rebuilt. On the night I came back to it, however hard I looked for the one I loved, she could not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect stranger who fell into step beside ber and asked why she was crying. She went with him to an unambiguous hotel
64
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with mirror on the ceiling and lascivious black lace draped round a palpably illicit bed. His eyes were shaped like sequins. All night long, a thin, pale, sickle moon with a single star pendant at its nether tip floated upon the rain that pitter-pattered against the windows and there was a clockwork whirring of cicadas. From time to time, the windbell dangling from the eaves let out an exquisitely mournful tinkle.
None of the lyrical eroticism of this sweet, sad, moon night of summer rain had been within my expectations; I had half expected he would strangle me. My sensibility wilted under the burden of response. My sensibility foundered under the assault on my senses.
My imagination had been pre-empted.
The room was a box of oiled paper full of the echoes of the rain. After the light was out, as we lay together, I could still see the single shape of our embrace in the mirror above me, a marvellously unexpected conjunction cast at random by the enigmatic kaleidoscope of the city. Our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who made love in that hotel anonymous. The mirror annihilated time, place and person; at the consecration of this house, the mirror had been dedicated to the reflection of chance embraces. Therefore it treated flesh in an exemplary fashion, with charity and indifference.
The mirror distilled the essence of all the encounters of strangers whose perceptions of one another existed only in the medium of the chance embrace, the accidental. During the durationless time we spent making love, we were not ourselves, whoever that might have been, but in some sense the ghosts of ourselves. But the selves we were not, the selves of our own habitual perceptions of ourselves, had a far more insubstantial substance than the reflections we were. The magic mirror presented me with a hitherto unconsidered notion of
FLESH AND THE MIRROR
6]
myself as I. Without any intention of mine, I had been defined by the action reflected in the mirror. I beset me. I was the subject of the sentence written on the mirror. I was not watching it. There was nothing whatsoever beyond the surface of the glass. Nothing kept me from the fact, the act; I had been precipitated into knowledge of the teal conditions of living.
Mirrors are ambiguous things. The bureaucracy of the mirror issues me with a passport to the world; it shows me my appearance. But what use is a passport to an armchair traveller ? Women and mirrors are in complicity with one another to evade the action I/she performs that she/I cannot watch, the action with which I break out of the mirror, with which I assume my appearance. But this mirror refused to conspire with me; it was like the first mirror I'd ever seen. It reflected the embrace beneath it without the least guile. All it showed was inevitable. But I myself could never have dreamed it.
I saw the flesh and the mirror but I could not come to terms with the sight. My immediate response to it was, to feel I'd acted out of character. The fancy-dress disguise I'd put on to suit the city had betrayed me to a room and a bed and a modification of myself that had no business at all in my lire, not in the life I had watched myself performing.
Therefore I evaded the mirror. I scrambled out of its arms and sat on the edge of the bed and lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the old one. The rain beat down. My demonstration of perturbation was perfect in every detail, just like the movies. I applauded it. I was gratified the mirror had not seduced me into behaving in a way I would have felt inappropriate - that is, shrugging and sleeping, as though my infidelity was not of the least importance. I now shook with the disturbing presentiment that he with his sequin eyes who'd been kind to me was an ironic substitute for the other one, the one I loved, as if the arbitrary carnival of the streets had gratuitously offered me this young man to find out if I eould act out of character and
66
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theo projected out intersection upon the mirror, as an objective lesson in the nature of things.
Therefore I dressed rapidly and ran away as soon as it was light outside, that mysterious, colourless light of dawn when the hooded crows flap out of the temple groves to perch on the telegraph poles, cawing a baleful dawn chorus to the echoing boulevards empty, now, of all the pleasure-seekers. The rain had stopped. It was an overcast morning so hot that I broke out into a sweat at the slightest movement. The bewildering electrographtcs of the city at night were all switched off. All the perspectives were pale, gritty grey, the air was full of dust. I never knew such a banal morning.
The morning before the night before, the morning before this oppressive morning, I woke up in the cabin of a boat. All the previous day, as we rounded the coast in bright weather, I dreamed of the reunion before me, a lovers' meeting refreshed by the three months I'd been gone, returning home due to a death in the family. I will come back as soon as I can - I'll write. Will you meet me at the pier? Of course, of course he will. But he was not at the pier; where was he?
So I went at once to the city and began my desolate tour of the pleasure quarters, looking for him in all the bars he used. He was nowhere to be found. I did not know his address, of course; he moved from rented room to rented room with the agility of the feckless and we had corresponded through accommodation addresses, coffee shops, poste restante, etc Besides, there had been a displacement of mail reminiscent of the excesses of the nineteenth-century novel, such as it is difficult to believe and could only have been caused by a desperate emotional necessity to cause as much confusion as possible. Both of us prided ourselves on our passionate sensibilities, of course. That was one thing we had in common! So, although I thought I was the most romantic spectacle imaginable as I wandered weeping down the alleys, I was in
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reality at risk -1 had fallen through one of the holes life leaves in it-, these peculiar holes are the entrances to the counters at which you pay the price of the way you live.
Random chance operates in relation to these existential lacunae; one tumbles down them when, for the tíme being, due to hunger, despair, sleeplessness, hallucination or those acd-dental-on-purpose misreading« of train timetables and airline schedules that produce margins of empty time, one is lost. One is at the mercy of events. That is why I like to be a foreigner; I only travel for the insecurity. But I did not know that, then.
I found my self-imposed fate, my beloved, quite early that morning but we quarrelled immediately. We quarrelled the day away assiduously and, when I tried to pull the strings of my self and so take control of the situation, I was astonished to find the situation I wanted was disaster, shipwreck. I saw his. face as though it were in ruins, although it was the sight in the world I knew best and, the first time I saw it, had not seemed to me a face I did not know. It had seemed, in some way, to correspond to my idea of my own race. It had seemed a face long known and well remembered, a race that had always been imminent in my consciousness as an idea that now found its first visual expression.
So I suppose I do not know how he really looked and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogenetically by the rage to love which consumed me. So his self, and, by his self, I mean the thing he was to himself, was quite unknown to me. I created him solely in relation to myself, like a work of romantic art, an object corresponding to
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the ghost inside me. When I'd first loved him, I wanted to take him apart, as a child dismembers a clockwork toy, to comprehend the inscrutable mechanics of its interior. I wanted to see mm tar more naked than he was with his clothes off. It was easy enough to strip him bare and then I picked up my scalpel and set to work. But, since I was so absolutely in charge of the dissection, I only discovered what I was able to recognize already, from past experience, inside him. If ever I found anything new to me, I steadfastly ignored it. I was so absorbed in this work it never occurred to me to wonder if it hurt him.
In order to create the loved object in this way and to issue it with its certificate of authentication, as beloved, I had also to labour at the idea of myself in love. I watched myself closely for all the signs and, precisely upon cue, here they were! Longing, desire, self-abnegation, etc I was racked by all the symptoms. Even so, in spite of this fugue of feeling, 1 had felt nothing but pleasure when the young man who picked me up inserted his sex inside me in the blue-movie bedroom. I only grew guilty later, when I realized I bad not felt in the least guilty at the time. And was I in character when 1 felt guilty or in character when I did not ? I was perplexed. I no longer understood the logic of my own performance. My script had been scrambled behind my back. The cameraman was drunk. The director had a trist 4t turfs and been taken away to a sanatorium. And my co-star had picked himself up off the operating table and painfully cobbled himself together again according to his own design I All this had taken place while I was looking at the minor.
Imagine my affront.
We quarrelled until night fell and, still quarrelling, found our way to another hotel but this hotel, and this night, was in every respect a parody of the previous night. (That's more like it I Squalor and humiliation! Ah 1) Here, there were no lace drapes nor windbells nor moonlight nor any moist whisper of
FLESH AND THE MIRROR
6?
lugubriously seductive rain; this place was bleak, mean and cheerless and the sheets on the mattress they threw down on the floor for us were blotched with dirt although, at first, we did not notice that because it was necessary to pretend the urgent passion we always used to feel in one another's presence even if we felt it no longer, as if to act out the feeling with sumcientintensity wouldre-createit by sleight of hand, although our skins (which knew us better than we knew ourselves) told us the period of reciprocation was over. It was a mean room and the windows overlooked a parking lot with a freeway beyond it, so that the paper walls shuddered with the reverberations of the infernal clamour of the traffic There was a sluggish electric fan with dead flies caught in the spokes and a single strip of neon overhead Ik us and everything up with a scarcely tolerable, quite remorseless light. A slatternly woman in a filthy apron brought us glasses of thin, cold, brown tea made from barley and then she shut the door on us. I would not let him kiss me between the thighs because I was afraid he would taste the traces of last night's adventure, a little touch of paranoia in that delusion.
I don't know how much guilt had to do with the choice of this decor. But I felt it was perfectly appropriate.
The air was thicker than tea that's »tewed on the hob all day and cockroaches were running over the ceiling, I remember. I cried all the first part of the night, I cried until I was exhausted but he turned on his side and slept - he saw through that ruse, though I did not since I did not know that I was lying. But I could not sleep because of the rattling of the walls and the noise of traffic We had turned off the glaring lamp; when I saw a shaft of light fall across his face, I thought: 'Surely it's too early for the dawn.' But it was another person silently sliding open the unlocked door; in this disreputable hotel, anything can happen. I screamed and the intruder vanished. Wakened by a scream, my lover thought I'd gone mad and
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instantly trapped mein a stranglehold, in case I murdered him.
We were both old enough to have known better, too.
When 1 turned on the lamp to see what time it was, I noticed, to my surprise, that his features were blurring, like the underwriting on a palimpsest. It wasn't long before we parted. Only a few days. You can't keep that pace up for long.
Then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling place. I woke up one morning and found it had become home. Though I still turn up my coat collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is.
The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful.
}
MASTER
After he discovered that his vocation was to kill animals, the pursuit of it took him tar away from temperate weather until, in time, the insatiable suns of Africa eroded the pupils of his eyes, bleached his hair and burned his skin until he no longer looked the thing he had been but its systematic negative; he became the white hunter, victim of an exile which is the imitation of death, a willed bereavement. He would emit a ravished gasp when he saw the final spasm of his prey. He did not kill for money but for love.
He had first exercised a propensity for savagery in the acrid lavatories of a minor English public school where he used to press the heads of the new boys into the ceramic bowl and then pull the flush upon them to drown their gurgling protests. After puberty, he turned his indefinable but exacerbated rage upon the pale, flinching bodies of young women whose flesh he lacerated with teeth, fingernails and sometimes his leather belt in the beds of cheap hotels near London's great rail termini (King's Cross, Victoria, Euston . . .). But these pastel-coloured excesses, all the cool, rainy country of his