The Secret Book of Paradys Read online

  I said, “But you do not like red. Are you insulting him then, madame, his poor helpless body?”

  She said, “My husband is just outside.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said, “the extensive branches of his horns would never let him through the doorway.”

  “You are so very insolent. Arrogant and rude. You were from the very first. Do you suppose the earth turns around you, monsieur?”

  “Around you,” I said. “ As I see it.”

  The candles lit her eyes, still veiled always from mine.

  “You observe,” she said, “how I am placed. I have a husband, and a position in society.”

  “And a lover, previously.”

  “There is nothing,” she said, “for you.”

  I could not mention that they had murdered Philippe, one or other or both of them, for she would then resort to the former accusation of blackmail. Otherwise everything just said was irrelevant. Neither the slab nor the box was very wide. I leaned across them and slid my hands around her throat and brought my mouth against her pale cool skin. Because she did not struggle, there was nothing turbulent or unwieldy, nothing to ruffle the deathly serenity of the tomb. It was also quite fitting that I should kiss her over his corpse.

  She let me, did not stay me or cry to implore help, but her lack of resistance was itself a stay. Neither did she concede. She had no scent, no odour at all, only perhaps the faintest fragrance in her hair, like the clean fur of a cat that has been out on a chill moonlit night. Her eyes were shut, to exclude me, no concession either there. Then they opened, and I saw them stare beyond me, to the horizon. I had only pressed her lips gently. I set my mouth to her cheek, and temple, and the smooth bone of the jaw beneath the ear. The lobe of the ear held no jewel, but a tiny incision remained in it, for a jewel’s piercing. With that, where I had not ventured to part her lips, I allowed my tongue an instant for its curiosity. Then I took her hands and kissed them in their turn, the palms, the strong and slender backs, where the two silver rings pressed against the knuckle-bones, the wrists; they were icy cold, dipped up from some lake within a piano of snow mountains, rinsed in liquid music, over and over, they burned ten freezing notes across my mouth, before I let her go.

  “You say to me,” I told her, “there is nothing for me, of you. Perhaps not, perhaps not.” I, now, did not look at her. It seemed to me that, this being the case, her eyes were fixed on me intently, terribly. “But there’s no use your telling me anything, or warning me in this conventional mode. I am beyond any such pale. What you say is meaningless. Do you think I have no spirit, Antonina, that I can be told, can be instructed, how I may or may not desire you? Do you believe my emotions are so volatile they will simply evaporate at one sensible soulless little word? What am I? Your servant? No. You are in my blood now. You’ve coloured everything, stained me, just the way blood stains. I’m marked by you indelibly. It will never come out, the bloody dye of what you are. Stained through and through.”

  Each act, even unfinished, or unbegun, knows for itself its proper completion. I left her at once, and went out, into the air and daylight which seemed neither.

  The wet heat almost struck me down, the darkness. Von Aaron was standing solicitously at my elbow.

  “Monsieur St Jean, you do not look well.”

  “How is it,” said I, “that you know my name?”

  “But you have been so good as to call on us, in company with your friend.”

  “Yes. I hardly thought it was through my literary glories.”

  “I must repeat, monsieur, you are not at all well. This shocking business of the gentleman who has died … Our carriage is below. May we have the pleasure of driving you to your home?”

  “Why did you come here?” I said. The rain teemed round me, making everything unstable, shifting and falling down; my condition would not matter.

  “To pay our respects, naturally.”

  “Naturally. You should dissuade your wife from wasting flowers on the dead. A silly custom. They do better in the houses of the living, or growing in the ground.”

  “Monsieur, monsieur, can’t I entreat you to reason?” He smiled, encouraging me. A wave of deadly nausea passed through me. I fought it away. On my lips, the touch of her icy fingers still burned ten times over, on and on.

  “You are too kind,” I said. “Your wife would perhaps not like it, some wretched stranger in your carriage, at such a moment. Good day.”

  As I crossed through the graveyard, I seemed to see an old man flitting about there, huddling down behind the stones, and two black dogs, slicked by wet, questing without hurry.

  On the cobbled alley, I walked in my trance. The rain rushed by, as it had that other day. I felt I might die before I reached the bottom of the hill. There was some sickness on me, some plague, something. Gladly I welcomed it. Come thou sweet night, close mine eyes.

  And all the books unwritten. Well, let them go.

  And all the songs unsung.

  And Philippe in his box, not hearing the rain.

  “They’re to close up the house.”

  “Like the damnable coffin itself.”

  “Boarded. The neighbours are complaining, there are noises in the night. Hoary old Father Mouse-whiskers, that priest, has been asked to perform an exorcism. But is afraid to. Must apply to his Holiness to see if he may.”

  “The servants meanwhile hold drunken parties in the basement. They don’t give a that for any phantoms.”

  “But whatever else, Andre,” said Le Marc, “if you don’t go there and collect those bits he left you, you will never get them. The bailiff’s men are also reportedly to go in. A debt or two unsettled, we are given to understand.”

  The onset of the soft and tender illness, which for a week now had sustained me with its shadow, had enabled me to resume my life. I would not have to put up with living much longer. So, as with an unwanted love shortly due to depart for ever more, I could afford to be polite. It might take months, of course, but months were nothing. Even a year or two was possibly to be borne. Every lissom overture of the malaise pleased me. It was sensuous, fastidious. A weakness, a loss of appetite, even of the appetite for drink, the desire to sleep a great while. The vague aching of the limbs was like a lullaby. I needed only to surrender, to collapse, for it to sink into a delicious nothing ambient to all the physical senses. There was the invalid’s concupiscence also, febrile, intense, and entirely easy to accommodate, uncaring of object. From the depths of slumber I returned with an awareness of wonderful dreams, glowing with enjoyment and colour. Free of me, I was whole. I had begun to write, an outburst that surprised and energised me. Working, I passed through the outposts of the dulcetly aching messenger of sleep or sexuality, passed through with bright banners of words starting from the pen almost faster than my thoughts could envisage them. Surely faster than the ink could set them down. Until undeniable exhaustion at length put paid to me, snuffed me out and let me free again for that other world inside, beside, beneath, above, wherever it was, the heaven of my invention, liberty.

  In this condition I was amenable too. I would heed, and sometimes be kind. Now I would get up and hire a carter for a few coppers with his cart, and go to Philippe’s house. I would climb, albeit slowly, up to the attics, and rummage, and take, and go away again.

  Despair, the worst of all the deadly sins, since it is denial of the self, of the god-in-self, since it is so seductive, like the snow-death, so warm. Ah, who would tear himself to pieces when he might lie down in such arms, in comfort, and cease. Bless you, my despair, my dear and loving despair. So painlessly you take my pain away. Oh Father, by no means dash the cup from my lips –

  The carter was solicitous. The wind was cold today, he said, blowing from the north. He tucked my muffler about my throat and did up the buttons of my greatcoat as if I were his child. It was entertaining. On the road where I was going, scarves and coats were not necessary. He had had a sad life, the carter, all about which he told me as he pushed the c
art, on our journey up to the Wall Quarter. Dear friend, I nearly said, Why not abandon hope. Why not do as I do, and escape. Perhaps he had already contracted the plague from me, if it was contagious. Then again, the thought of him as a companion on a trip to the Underworld, constantly retelling episodes of his misfortuned days, as now he did, decided me against his inclusion in my party. One might ask Charon, of course, to push him off the boat into the River Styx. But you could not be sure of Charon. I had seen ferrymen like him, plying their slender vessels through the morning mists along the City river, looking for fish, or that night’s drowning victims, who might offer a gem or a pocket-watch, or a fine head of hair to hack off and sell the wig-makers. Charon would be of that sort, maybe. Of some sort, anyway. For I did not suppose only nothing lay beyond the great gate.

  I fell asleep as I walked, and the carter woke me solicitously when we reached the house. I reminded him he should wait for me. He did not say, why else had he come?

  “Take care,” he did say. “You’re not looking too well, young gentleman.”

  The domestics were now all out of Philippe’s house, or else hiding under the boards like mice. Not a light showed, though the street was already cast for night. In the west, framed by the alligator scales of the roofs, a red sunset. The dome of the Observatory would appear to have a winged dragon seated upon it, but that was a cloud, or some hallucination. I turned from it in puzzled pleasure, and used the key with which Philippe’s executors had presented me.

  Inside, the dimming house would soon be black. I would not bother to light a lamp, I should be able to find some candles upstairs. As I ascended, here and there a carnation shaft struck through the shuttered windows from the sky. One such pierced through the ruby scarab, that today I had put on again, red through red, such a colour the eyes were besotted by it. I stopped a full minute, gazing, until the sun had moved. Were her lips as red as that, her cheeks that red, after she had drunk the blood of Philippe? The old stories said so, but I did not credit it, any more than I trusted her hands could ever grow warm.

  The Devil, the Devil is in it. But where?

  On each floor I paused to rest, supporting myself on the bannister, breathing with a wonderful awareness of air, the machinery of lungs and heart. I bypassed the floor of the bathrooms without a qualm or even a jibe. On the final landing, below the attic stair, something was different. I had begun to breathe in long gasps. My heart beat untidily. My head swam, but it was not from weakness but in a dreadful resurgence of strength.

  My sinews, my very skeleton, seemed to toughen. Blood coursed. My eyes went black, then cleared to a sharp perception.

  I stared upward, to shadows where the attics began. Then took the steps, opened the door, and went in.

  There was the clutter of centuries, much of it older than the house. Every one of the brief lizards had left something, like a pebble laid on a cairn. Remember me!

  What had Philippe left, then? What had he left for me? Some priceless volumes, some costume bodice of his mother’s, crusted with pearls? No, I did not care at all. Already, instantly, across the stacks and mounds, the pillars and tomb-stones of things, I was searching. And there, a round window, shutterless, was burning with the last of the red sky. In its path balanced the wooden rocking-horse, black lacquer, with his fearful grin of teeth, his maenad eyes, and thin blood skimmed on his back from the sunset.

  I walked on, stepping around and over things. As I passed him, I touched his rump, to make him go. He creaked and leisurely fell into the motion, sounding like an oar grunting in its lock. Such sins that black horse knew, such confessions. The first taste of lust from the thrust of his hard lacquer saddle between the thighs, the first taste of flight, of getting away, poetry, vision, death-wish, dreams –

  Books all over the floors and I stepped on them. Where the Italian chest squared across the window, a movement, too. Then she stood on glass-paned red fire, black-cloaked, cowled like a priest – Yes, the Devil was in it.

  I felt her eyes, before I saw them; they drew me forward. If I had been bound, unable, physically, to go to her, my spirit would have gone to her in spite of the flesh, and my heart leapt out of my body. No. There was no need of that. No chain could have held me, seeing her there, her eyes looking into mine.

  “I have been waiting for you,” she said. Her voice was very low, very dark. It did not seem to come from her at all, but out of the light, the shadow. “Since the funeral, I have come here each evening. Seven days, seven nights.”

  There must have been a key he had given her. Or did she melt through walls, the way her kind might do – not her kind. There was only Antonina.

  “Such protestations,” she said. “Then to make me wait.”

  “I was here with you,” I said. “I must have been.”

  “Yes, I think you were. Sometimes, a flicker of the edge of your sleeve, your hair catching a burnish. There, or there. Your ghost. But now, it is you.”

  There were also books scattered round the chest. Standing on them, careless of them as I had been, had made her taller than me. She stood above me, in the halo of the dying window, like a madonna. I could only just make out the pallor of her face, which I had kissed, the pale mouth, but the eyes, like the voice, were in a separate dimension. They lived and blazed on their own.

  I did not ask her why she had changed to me. It was superfluous; besides, only this made any sense. The denial was the lie.

  “Your husband?” I inquired, with no conviction.

  But she answered stilly, “He will do as I tell him. He is only my servant. He serves me. Him I may tell and instruct what he may desire of me.”

  “What now?”

  “Whatever you wish,” she said.

  “And you?” I said. “You, oh, you.”

  She put out her hand and touched me then, first my forehead between the eyes, next the base of my throat, then above the heart. Finally she took up my left hand and touched the ruby ring. I felt each touch, cold flame, like a kiss on my forehead, starting a race in my breast. Even through the stone of the ring, I felt her.

  She said, “I divine that you understand, Andre St Jean.”

  Her eyes held me, close to her, held me far off. I could do nothing to her yet, she would tell me when, and very soon.

  “Philippe’s not watching,” I said.

  “I thought that you imagined he might be.”

  “No. He believed in nothing. No god. Nothing beyond himself as he was. Nothing after death. He’s dead then.”

  “But you believe differently. In God, do you believe in God, Andre?”

  “Death is God,” I said. “Life is Man. The day we are born begins our love affair with death.”

  Now, said her eyes.

  I stepped up on the books with her and she slipped down to a little height, her head against my shoulder, tilted back, her lips parting. Her hair was like a river flowing through my hands, and the hooded cloak, and under it her skin, only some silken thing between us, and her small, her beautiful breasts –

  We slid down beside the carved chest, on to the dust and the books, with the window turning wan and grey above us. We slid into the dark –

  (Once, somewhere on the shores of those black spaces, the rocking-horse stirred, settling, as if someone had climbed up on to his back.)

  How slow the rhythm, now, the rhythm of Death’s River – it was she who guided me, through the deep spirals of the river’s course, its deepest pools. Stars filled the attics, splashed on the air.

  Ecstasy was always near, it came and went, swelling, singing, widening, never finished, never begun. Her coldness was warm now, like the snow. Her lips which had come to my throat so quietly, had begun to burn. Her lips were fire. She drew me down and down, into the caverns of the night, where sometimes, far away, I heard myself groan, or her murmuring voice like a feather drifting – Her mouth was fire and her body was snow and the cradling night held both of us. The long endless resonant spasms came and went and came and went like the throb of s
trings, like the circling wake of the slender boat. She was the ferryman. It seemed to me I had not ceased to look at her. That never once, meeting mine, her burning eyes had closed.

  It was almost morning, and all the stars had died … Whose face was this,peeking into mine so dolefully? And these damned hands, fiddling with me,worrying at me.

  I struck him off. He recoiled.

  “Oh monsieur. Christ knows, I thought you were a dead man.”

  I was lying flung across the volumes and the old carpets of the attics. Above me towered a hill of carven chest, and over there the wooden horse with its mad and pitiless eye. Between, miles up above me, the carter with a candle, and the bloom of false dawn on him from the window.

  “I waited for you, monsieur. And then, I confess, I went and got myself a drink or two. A cold study it was, waiting out there. But I thought, Well, he knows what he’s about I suppose. But then, having come back, and nothing in the cart, the bell goes for midnight. I knock on the door. No answer. So then I curl up, in my cart, see, and I take a mite of sleep. No trouble. Once some woman passes. I think to myself, Did she come out of the house, now? Is that it? But then she vanishes away and I forget her. Then I’m blowing on my fingers for the cold, wishing I could do the service for my toes, and finally I hear five o’clock. Up to the door again, and now it’s open. So I think then you meant me to come up, and up I come. What a house, monsieur. Horrible, so dark, and empty. They said in that drinking-place, it’s haunted by the young man that died here. Vicious murder. But you know that. Then I can hear a noise. I nearly perish of fear I don’t mind admitting.”