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Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sus the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish ehe city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the insolable season. In America, they call it "the Fall", bringing to mind the Fall of Man, as if the fatal drama of the primal fruit-theft must recur again and again, with cyclic regularity, at the same time of every year that schoolboys set out to rob orchards, invoking, in the most everyday image, any child, every child, who, offered the choice between virtue and knowledge, will always choose knowledge, always the hard way. Although she does not know the meaning of the >99liｂ.</samp>ord, &quret", the woman sighs, without any precise reason.Soft twists of mist ihe alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit, seep in through the cracks in the window frames so that the tours of their high, lonely apartment waver a. On these evenings, you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse to tears.
She sighs.
The custard-apple of her stinking Edehis forlorn Eve, bit -- and was all at oransported here, as in a dream; a she is a tabula rasa, still. She never experienced her experience as experience, life never added to the sum of her knowledge; rather, subtracted from it. If you start out with nothing, theyll take even that away from you, the Good Book says so.
Indeed, I think she never bothered to bite any apple at all. She wouldnt have known what knowledge was for, would she? She was iher a state of innoor a state of grace. I will tell you what Jeanne was like.
She was like a piano in a try were everybody has had their hands cut off.
On these sad days, at those melancholy times, as the room sinks into dusk, he, instead of lighting the lamp, fixing drinks, making all cosy, will ramble on: "Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the eree and yo<samp></samp>u ch sugar-e between your strong, white teeth, like you did when you were little, baby. Whe there, among the lilting palm-trees, uhe purple flowers, Ill love you to death. Well go bad live together in a thatched house with a veranda rown with fl vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way. . . the ship, the ship is waiting in the harbour, baby. My monkey, my pussy-cat, my pet. . . think how lovely it would be to live there. . ."
But, on these days, nipped by frost and sulking, nor pussy she; she looked more like an old crow with rusty feathers in a miserable huddle by the smoky fire which she pokes with spiteful sticks. She coughs and grumbles, she is always chilly, there is always a draught gnawing the back of her neck or ping her ankles.
Go, where? Not there! The glaring yellow shore and harsh blue sky daubed in crude, unblended colours squeezed directly from the tube, where the perspectives are abrupt as a childs drawings, your eyes hurt to look. Fly-blown towns. All there is to eat is green bananas and yams and a brochette of rubber goat to chew. She puts on a theatrical shudder, enough to shake the affronted cat off her lap. She hates the cat, anyway. She t look at the cat without wanting tle it. She would like a drink. Rum will do. She twists a flute of discarded manuscript from the aper basket into a spill for her small, foul, black cheroot.
Night es in o of fur and marvellous clouds drift past the windows, those spectral clouds of the night sky that are unily visible when no light is there. The whim of the master of the house has not let the windows alone; he had all the panes except the topmost ones replaced with frosted glass so that the inmates could pursue an uninterrupted view of the sky as if they were living in the gondola of a balloon such as the one in which his friend Nadar made triumphant asts.
At the inspiration of a gust of wind such as now rattles the tiles above us, this handsome apartment with its Persian rugs, its walnut table off which the Bias served poisons, its carved armchairs from whose bulbous legs grin and grimace the queto faces, the crust of fake Tios on the walls (hes an iigable oisseur, if, as yet, too young to have the sixth sehat tells you when youre being ed) -- at the invitation of the mysterious currents of the heavens, this well-appointed will loose its ms ireet below and take off, depart, whisk across the dark vault of the night, tangling a stillborn, crest moon in its ropes, nudging a star at lift-off, and will deposit us --
"No!" she said. "Not the bloody parrot forest! Dont take me on the slavers route back to the West Indies, fodsake! Ahe bloody cat out, before it craps on your precious Bokhara!"
They have this in oher has a native land, although he likes to pretend she has a fabulous home in the bosom of the blue o, he will force a home on her whether shes got one or not, he ot believe she is as dispossessed as he. . . Yet they are only at home together when plating flight; they are both waiting for the wind to blow that will take them to a miraculous elsewhere, a happy land, far, far away, the land of delighted ease and pleasure.
After shes got a drink or two inside her, however, she stops coughing, grows a bit more friendly, will sent to unpin her hair a him play with it, the way he likes to. And, if her native indolence does not prove too much for her -- she is capable of sprawling, as in a vegetable trance, for hours, for days, in the dim room by the smoky fire -- heless, she will sometimes lob the butt of her cheroot in the fire and be persuaded to take off her clothes and dance for Daddy who, she will grudgingly admit when pressed, is a good Daddy, buys her pretties, allocates her the occasional lump of hashish, keeps her off the streets.
Nights of October, of frail, sickle moons, when the earth ceals the shining aplice of assassins in its shadow, to make everything all the more mysterious -- on such a night, you could say the moon was black.
This dance, which he wanted her to perform so mud had especially devised for her, sisted of a series of voluptuous poses one following another; private-room-in-a-borde<bdo>?9９ｌｉb.</bdo>llo stuff but tasteful, he preferred her to undulate rhythmically rather than jump about and shake a leg. He liked her to put on all her bangles and beads when she did her dance, she dressed up i of king jewellery hed given her, paste, nothing she could sell or shed have sold it. Meanwhile, she hummed a elody, she liked the ones with ribald words about what the shoemakers wife did at Mardi Gras or the size of some fishermans legendary tool but Daddy paid no attention to what song his siren sang, he fixed his quick, bright, dark eyes upon her decorated skin as if, sucker, authentically entranced.
"Sucker!" she said, almost tenderly, but he did not hear her.
She cast a long shadow in the firelight. She was a woman of immense height, the type of those beautiful giantesses who, a hundred years later, would grace the stages of the Crazy Horse or the o de Paris in sequin cache-sexe and tinsel pasties, diviall, the colour aure of suede. Josephine Baker! But vivacity, exuberance were never Jeannes qualities. A slumbrous rese of anything you could , drink or smoke, i.e. burn, was her salient characteristiption, bustion, these were her vocations.
She sulked sardonically through Daddys sexy dance, watg, in a bored, fasated way, the elaborate refles of the many strings of glass beads he had giverag about above her on the ceiling. She looked like the source of light but this was an illusion; she only shone because the dying fire lit his presents to her. Although his regard made her luminous, his shadow made her blacker than she was, his shadow could eclipse her entirely. Whether she had a good heart or not underh, is anybodys guess; she had been raised in the School of Hard Knocks and enough hard knocks beat the heart out of anybody.
Though Jeanne was not proo introspe, sometimes, as she wriggled around the dark, buoyant room that tugged at its ms, longing to take off on an aerial quest for the Cythera beloved of poets, she wondered what the distin was between dang naked in front of one man who paid and dang naked in front of a group of men who paid. She had the impression that, somewhere in the difference, lay morality. Tutors in the School of Hard Knocks, that is, other chirls in the cabaret, where in her sixteenth summer, she had tunelessly croaked these same Creole ditties she now hummed, had told her there was all the differen the world and, at sixteen, she could ceive of no higher ambition than to be kept; that is, kept off the streets. Prostitution was a question of number; of being paid by more than one person at a time. That was bad. She was not a bad girl. When she slept with anyone else but Daddy, she never let them pay. It was a matter of honour. It was a question of fidelity. (In these ethical surmises slumbered the birth of irony although her lover assumed she romiscuous because she romiscuous.)
Now, however, after a few crazy seasons in the clouds with him, she sometimes asked herself if shed played her cards right. If she was going to have to danaked to earn her keep, anyway, why shouldnt she danaked for hard cash in hand and earn enough to keep herself? Eh? Eh?
But then, the very thought anising a new career made her yawn. Dragging herself around madames and music halls and so on; what an effort. And how much to ask? She had only the haziest notion of her own use value.
She danaked. Her necklaces and earrings ked. As always, when she finally got herself up off her ass and started dang she quite e. She felt almost warm towards him; her good luck he was young and handsome. Her bad luck his finances were rocky, the opium, the scribbling; that he. . . but, at "that", she snapped her mind off.
Thinking resolutely of her good luck, she held out her hands to her lover, flashed her teeth at him -- the molars might be black stumps, already, but the pointed es still white as vampires -- and invited him to join in the dah her. But he never would, never. Scared of muzzing his shirt or busting his collar or something, even if, when stoned, he would clap his hands to the rhythm. She liked it when he did that. She felt he reciating her. After a few drinks, she fot the other things altogether, although she guessed, of course. The girls told over the ghoulish litany of the symptoms together in the dressing room in hushed scared voices, peeking at the fortuelling mirror and seeing, not their rosy faces, but their ed skulls.
When she was on her own, having a few drinks in front of the fire, thinking about it, it made her break out in horrible hags laughter, as if she were already the hag she would bee enjoying a grim joke at the expense of the pretty, secretly festering thing she still was. At urgisnacht, the young witch boasted to the old witch: "Naked on a goat, I display my fine young body." How the old witch laughed! "Youll rot!" Ill rot, thought Jeanne, and laughed. This cackle of geriatriicism ill became such a creature made for pleasure as Jeanne, but ox not the emblematic fate of a creature made for pleasure and the price you paid for the atroixture of corruption and innoce this child of the sun brought with her from the Antilles?
For herself, she came , arrived in Paris with, nothing worse than scabies, malnutrition and ringworm about her person. It was a bad joke, therefore, that, some turies before Jeannes birth, the Aztec goddess, Nanahuatzin, had poured a ucopia of wheelchairs, dark glasses, crutches and mercury pills on the ships of the quistadores as they took their spoiled booty from the New World to the Old; the raped tis revenge, perpetrating itself in the beds of Europe. Jeanne ily followed Nanahuatzins trail across the Atlantic but she brought igeance -- shed picked up the germ from the very first protector. The marusted to take her away from all that, enough to make a horse laugh, except that she was a fatalist, she was indifferent.
She bent over backwards until the huge fleece of a black sheep, her unfastened hair, spilled on to the Bokhara. She ple acrobat; she could make her bato a mahogany rainbow. (Notice her big feet and huge, strong hands, capable enough to have been a nurses hands.) If he was a oisseur of the beautiful, she was a oisseur of the most exquisite humiliations but she had always been too poor to be able to afford the luxury of aowledging a humiliation as such. You took what came. She arched her bauch a small boy could have run under her. Her reversed blood sang in her ears.
Upside down as she was, she could see, iopmht-hand windowpane he had left unfrosted, the sickle moon, precise as if pasted on the sky. This moon was the size of a broad nail-paring; you could see the vague outline of the rest of its surface, obscured by the shadow of the earth as if the earth were ched between the moons shining claw-tips, so you could say the moohe world in its arms. An exceptionally brilliant star suspended from the her prong on a taut, invisible leash.
The basalt cat, the pride of the home, its excretory stroll along the quai cluded, now whined for readmittaside the door. The poet let Puss in. Puss leapt into his waiting arms and filled the apartment with a happy purr. The girl plotted tle the cat with her long, agile toes but, indulgent from the exercise of her sensuality, she soon laughed to see him loving up the cat with the same gestures, the same endearments, he used on her. She fave the cat for its existehey had a lot in on. She released the bow of her back with a twang and plumped on the rug, rubbiretched tendons.
He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes t dahey"ve got no legs, and he said, but kindly, youre an idiot, Jeanne; but she knew hed never so much as seen a snake, nobody whod seen a snake move -- that quick system of transverse strikes, lashing itself like a whip, leaving a rippling snake in the sand behind it, terribly fast -- if hed seen a snake move, hed never have said a thing like that. She huffed off and plated her sweating breasts; she would have liked a bath, anyway, she was a little worried about a persistent vaginal discharge that smelled of mice, something new, something ominous, something horrid. But: no hot water, not at this hour.
"Theyll bring up hot water if you pay."
His turn to sulk. He took to ing his nails again.
"You think I dont need a wash because I dont show the dirt."
But, even as she lauhe first darts of a shrews assault that she could have protracted for a tense, scratchy hour or more, had she been in the mood, she lost the taste for it. She was seized with sudden indifference. What does it matter? were all going to die; were as good a?s dead already. She drew her knees up to her and crouched in front of the fire, staring vatly at the embers. Her face fixed in sullement. The cat drew silently alongside, as if on purpose, adding a touch of satanic glamour, so you could imagih were having silent versations with the demons in the flames. As long as the cat left her alone, she let it alohey were aloogether. The quality of the separate self-absorptions of the cat and the woman was so private that the poet felt outmanoeuvred and withdrew to browse in his bookshelves, those rare, precious volumes, the jewelled missals, the inabula, those books acquired from special shops that incurred damnation if you so much as opehe covers. He cherished his arduously aroused sexuality until she repared to aowledge it again.
He thinks she is a vase of darkness; if he tips her up, black light will spill out. She is not Eve but, herself, the forbidden fruit, and he has eaten her!
Weird goddess, dusky as night,
reeking of musk smeared on tobacco,
a shaman jured you, a Faust of the savannah,
black-thighed witch, midnights child. . .
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