The Ape's Wife Part 16

Found him down on la Rue Saint-Denis (a/k/a rue des Saints Innocents et grant chaussee de Monsieur, Sellerie de Paris, rue de Franciade, et al) that First Century Roman slash of paving now so clogged with wh.o.r.es, male and female, though the latter holds so little interest for me these days. He, who spoke not a word of English I do not count the stray yes and no and various profanities and brand names, no, those I do not count at all and I think he was surprised that I wanted more than a quick blow in an alleyway. I brought him back to the flat, and f.u.c.ked him good and proper, then paid him extra to pose for me.

There's a heap of him still on the floor, a heap of charcoal approximation of that pinched face and lean a.s.s and eyes that were proud despite their sorry lot. But I found him, and little more matters. He had a name, of course. Still does, unless a name thief is lose in the Quartier Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, some beast that slinks the blacktop and storefronts in search of the praenomen and cognomen of boy wh.o.r.es. He might have been sixteen, seventeen, but no older. Had he been, I'd not have paid so much. I'd not have paid at all, but continued in my search. He called himself Gautier. I bent him over my bed and splayed open his a.s.s for my starving c.o.c.k. He made no sound at all. None. No complaint from my tapin (isn't that the current slang?), not like those whining boys in Munich and, also, yes, that one especial traekkerdreng in Copenhagen. In whose mouth I stuffed an overripe pear rather than bear the noises he made.

Gautier left before dawn. I said I would try to find him again sometime, one night or the next. He shrugged and left me alone.

Left me here with my stinking sins, taking sins away and leaving me with my greater d.a.m.nations, these hideous paints and brushes, all fire and brimstone and cold wastes and yes, yes, das Fegefeuer. I haven't slept. I've had too many cups of coffee to drive back the sleep, which is the coiled hive of dreams and almost nothing more. Not rest, and that's for f.u.c.king sure. No rest now in more years than I have fingers. Coffee, though, and nicotine, amphetamines, tiny ampoules of ammonia for desperate moments. How can I not be blessed with simple insomnia?

18/7/98.

The stars above cathedrals are shameless things, no less wicked than the leering, tongue-lolling gargoyles crouched by the vicious architects of Notre Dame de Paris and the Cathedral Saint-Etienne de Meaux. Only, those distant bodies in roiling rotation are so infinitely more truthful than the horrors of the Galerie des Chimeres, dream gallery, nightmare palisade of G.o.dly lies and sacred intimidations. Stars have no need of intimidation, which makes them mightier than all the G.o.dheads nightmared by mere humanity. You, Monsignor s.h.i.twit, you paint me a demon so voracious as a red giant or Sol, or a Tetragrammaton to match the electron-degenerate matter of a white dwarf, and then, then we'll talk of h.e.l.ls and heavens. I lay on my back in a forest flanking the Seine, though that must have been so very long ago: mammoth- and lion-haunted forests (though neither of these did I glimpse, for I am afforded no such mild phantasmagoria). I lay in the dew-damp gra.s.s, and the stars whirled above me, weaving celestial labyrinths with no beginnings and no endings, mazes no one enters or escapes des labyrinthes sans sorties, des labyrinthes sans entrees, so designated in my dictionary-shredded mockery. I'd have looked away, but that thought never once occurred to my sleeping mind.

Van Gogh never saw a sky like that, not in the deepest folds of his epileptic, absinthe-fueled anti-reveries. Nor Kupka, nor, nor, nor Munch with all his Madonna and spermatozoa. The Dome of Heaven whirled above me, condemning kaleidoscope that knows my every transgression because it looks on every night and, in daylight, pa.s.ses notes with the perfidious sun. Back here we come to stars. Plenty of G.o.ds et G.o.ddesses are stars: Helios, Hyperion, Ra, the seven Vedic Adityas. The dome wheeled above me without wings, though I feared those absent wings that would beat with no earthly thunder in the vacuum. Beating, they would be soundless as the dead.

The sky is black-blue indigo white adamantine alabaster blackest of all blacks. Blazing bright and yet absolutely, irredeemably tenebrous.

There is terrible purpose in the wheel.

This I saw, with sleeping eyes wide, and no man nor woman may gainsay these observations, not without showing themselves liars, and ignorant liars at that. I lay there forever, until she said my name, and I turned to the pale naked girl on the gra.s.s not too far away. Her knees pulled up beneath her chin, hiding s.e.x and b.r.e.a.s.t.s from view, modesty or habit or retreat from the chilly night air. I didn't need to ask her name; I've known all her names almost all my life. "Not wise to stare so long," she said, and smiled, showing all those teeth of hers packed in like sardine pegs on enamel and ripping incisor/canine/premolar ferocity. "Were I you, I'd look away."

I told her I already had looked away, to see her, instead.

"You stare too long at everything no sane man ought ever glimpse for a moment."

"You never have thought me a sane man."

"I never have," she agreed.

So there she sat, in the lotus folds of all her names, but let's be content with the one Le Pet.i.t Chaperon Rouge. No, never mind. One will never ever do her. Addend Little Red Cap, then. And Riding Hood. Und Rotkappchen. Goldenhood. Saint Margaret of Antioch. Spin them all about her as the sky spins, for now unsighted, above the Seine and the land before the coming of Paris.

"You'll not go to Gevaudan," she said with great finality.

"Why?"

"There's nothing left there for you to see, Albert. They slew her long ago. Cartel cut down La Bete twice a hundred and fifteen years ago. Her bones went to dust in Versailles.

I know she's confusing, conflating, two versions of the tale, that in which the beast is slain by Francois Antoine and that other, in which she was slain by Jean Chastel. It was Antoine sent the corpse to the Court of Louis XV, not Chastel. I don't correct her. Never have I corrected the girl, nude but for her woolen crimson and her wet black nose. She talks on while the sky wheels above the countryside: Jean Chastel's great red mastiff, maybe the beast's sire, maybe Chastel dressing the misbegotten hybrid in an armored boar skin and setting it upon peasants to slake his own perverse inclinations.

I listen, as always I listen when she speaks. Mostly, she wants to be certain I don't make the trip to Gevaudan, not even if Dorothee accompanies me.

I go back to watching that maelstrom sky, because I have guessed it's one of the missing elements in the unfinished painting. It has more to teach me than the red-capped b.i.t.c.h. It teaches me a labyrinth is not a place where one becomes disoriented and lost. It is a place into which one is born and may never escape.

The sun is setting when I wake.

19/7/98.

The morning post brought an envelope from Manhattan, from that c.u.n.t s.h.i.tbird f.u.c.k Larry f.u.c.king Tannahill. I'd have thought ending his salary would have ended his attentions. No. He sends a clipping, which I attach here (f.u.c.k knows why, that too), though the business with the film is well and truly over and done. He tore it from a magazine somewhere. It was not scissor-clipped, but torn: Excerpt from "L'homme qui a a.s.sa.s.sine Arthur Rackham: Une entrevue avec Albert Perrault," published in L'Oeil (Avril 1989, No. 452), by J. S. Molyneux (translated from the original French by J. S. Molyneux): L'Oeil: The "Little Red Riding Hood" sequence, for example? It was not what you had envisioned?

Perrault: No, it was not. It was so completely outlandish, because the director wanted a crude, outlandish film. He would look at my sketches and paintings, the sculptures I did with Rob Bottin, and say, "Yes, yes, that's a good place to start, but see, we can take it so much farther." And that poor actress. x.x.xXX x.x.xx.x.xx.x.x, I think that was her name. She had worked on something very similar with Neil Jordan, and so x.x.xx.x.xX insisted upon her, though I thought she was somewhat too old for the role. Six hours in makeup for this scene, and I think it was four consecutive days she had to go through that, because they couldn't get a take x.x.xx.x.xX was happy with.

L'Oeil: I've seen your sketches, and, in those, the wolf's p.e.n.i.s doesn't look like a sea cuc.u.mber.

Perrault: Of course, it doesn't. Because that was not my design. That was something that Bottin and his crew were asked to do, all their creation. But it is a perfect example of how outrageous x.x.xx.x.xX wanted this film to be, how he kept missing the mark because he wouldn't follow the work they were paying me to do. I'd wanted the "Riding Hood" sequence to be so much simpler, more eloquent, let the audience's imagination do more work, instead of relying heavily on prosthetics. But, no, x.x.xx.x.xX would have none of it, and it made him angry that I would not agree that his way was better.

L'Oeil: So you felt the sequence was a failure?

Perrault: Everything they shot was a failure. I was trying to speak to the dark forest of womanhood, and the liminal s.p.a.ces between virginity and a girl's first s.e.xual experience. But what they wanted was a freak show. By the time we were filming those scenes, I only wanted it to be over. I'd stopped arguing. By then, see, some of us were hearing that the financiers back in the States were not happy with what they were seeing, the rushes, and I was beginning to suspect we wouldn't get much farther. We'd done some footage for the mermaid scenes, on Stage A, and x.x.xx.x.xX's plan had been to shoot "Riding Hood" and the mermaid scene at the same time, back-to-back, but it was a logistical nightmare, and the set for the latter was so much more complicated. It was the sea cave, where the mermaid goes to find the old hag, but x.x.xx.x.xX was convinced the cave should look more like the inside of a monster, a sea monster's skeleton in which the hag had taken up residence. We did a lot of work on that, but it was simply impossible on his budget. I am still amazed that filming went on as long as it did, and that there was so little, in the end, to show for all that time.

L'Oeil: It's true you have not spoken to x.x.xx.x.xX since?

Perrault: Absolutely true. It is true, also, that I will never speak with him again. I heard some talk about the studio trying to bring in another director to revive the project, but no one ever called me, and I was relieved.

I was drunk, and only half recall granting that interview or speaking those words. I'll open no more letters from Tannahill, but instead mark them "return to sender" or burn them. And it was Tannahill, that Scots f.u.c.k, crossed out, Xed out, the names, not me. I hardly give two s.h.i.ts who knows the particular facts of the matter.

22/7/98.

Yesterday, I met a woman who said she knows a few of those cataphiles I mentioned. Said, too, that she'd gone down herself, into the belly of this rotten old cityscape. Nothing she did regularly, only a time or three to sate her curiosity. She told me of a chamber they've the cataphiles, urban spelunkers named the Beach. The earthen walls of the Beach are colorfully adorned after the style of Hokusai. Specifically, with a copycat mural of Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa. She talked of quarries down there where the intelligentsia hold secret court, and of abandoned subway tunnels. She offered to introduce me to a man who would take me down, and I declined. Is that my cowardice rearing it's brutal countenance? Or am I simply not in the mood for stumbling about in the dark with only an oil lantern or carbide headlamp to shine the way? I've wandered plenty other catacombs and low-ceilinged ossuaries, have I not? My feet and hands have been soiled with that dust enough times that I'll retract the question of bravery.

24/7/98.

Made a meager but sufficient dinner of cold chicken, radishes, and baby carrots tonight for Dorothee and myself. Talked some about the cataphiles, and she thought anyone who'd prowl about the underbelly of Paris quite the f.u.c.king fool. I wanted to begin a conversation about dreams, but didn't. She asked questions about the unfinished painting, and I toasted that murky folly and joked it might be named Last Drink Bird Head. She laughed, but I think only out of a sense she ought to be polite to her host. Dorothee is the sort of woman who has no taste for self-deprecation. Ah, well. She pressed, so I showed her the two paintings I finished in Ireland and have not yet sent back to NYC to the Agent: Leda and Clever Cinders. I took them out from beneath my sagging bed, unrolled the canvases on the floor so she might politely ooh and ah, though they felt more like obligatory oohs and ahs to me. She claimed to like the former better than the latter. I tried to give it to her, but she'd have nothing of it. Mark my word, it's hard to give away your demons.

(Admission to no one but myself: The subject of this painting occurred to me shortly after viewing an exhibit of photographs from the caves of Lascaux, near the village of Montignac. The cavern walls are famously adorn'd with Paleolithic graffiti, in the main large and extinct animals and the Cro-Magnon's who hunted them. Discovered September 12, 1940, one of the images portrays a bird-headed hunter being struck down by a bison. Archaeologists have a.s.sumed the bird-headed man to be raven-headed [or at least crow-headed], "because of their [crows et ravens] mysterious yet conspicuous a.s.sociation with death." It seems a spurious conclusion to me, a jumping to an unwarranted and ill-supported conclusion, shamanic and totemic a.s.sumptions and I will not say the man painted on the cave wall more than seventeen thousand years ago has the head of a raven, nor that of any other corvid. Only the head of a bird.) When Dorothee had gone back to her rooms, I cleaned the dishes and found myself at a loss, not wanting to pick up the palette and brushes. Last of all wanting to do that. Instead, went out in search again for the boy, uncomplaining Gautier, but walking three times up and down la Rue Saint-Denis, Avenue of Wh.o.r.es, I caught no sight of him, was afforded not so much as a fleeting glimpse, as if he saw and then avoided me. I was discouraged, yes, but no less hungry. I paid a transvest.i.te, in Gautier's stead. They could not have been less alike, sheheit and my missing Gautier. Sheheit (travesti, or is that in the lingua italiana?) wore proper clothes for a French street wh.o.r.e, and all perverse and sick of myself and angry and wishing to humiliate my own hubris, and rewarded the wh.o.r.e with a generous handful of franc lourd for letting me blow herhimit, which, said the being of fluid gender, was not usually on the menu. On my knees, I was where I should have been, the c.o.c.k in my mouth, then my mouth filled up with c.u.m and swallowing every drop, licking the swollen, pulsing phallus clean. Then I took the a.s.s, supposing my mortification of the spirit had earned me a more genuine concupiscence. I took the a.s.s with my d.i.c.k and my tongue and two fingers, and sheheit expelled all the sounds you'd expect from a transvest.i.te b.i.t.c.h b.a.s.t.a.r.d who prowls the streets like a solitary jackal in wolf's clothing seeking out a sc.r.a.p of carrion not unlike myself.

I am alone again now. If Dorothee notes the comings and goings of my wh.o.r.es at all hours of the night and in the early morning, she never comments on them. She's too discrete for such prying or violations of privacy.

Oh, almost forgot. The transvest.i.te left something behind. I keep it as a souvenir. It must have slipped from a red-taloned hand. A narrow silver band graven on the outer side with tiny flowers, and inside with a single skull. I can a.s.sign it, no doubt, a hundred meanings. I ought send it to a writerly acquaintance, because surely there's a story in that ring. But no, I think I'll h.o.a.rd it for my own. I'll place it in the cedar box I bought in Shannon.

25-26/7/98.

The moon tonight...no matter. No matter of the moon, as I finally pulled the tattered curtains shut and gave it no more thought than I give it now in this moment.

I sat down to write one thing, but my pen was out of ink, and while I scrounged about for a fresh cartridge, another thing distracted me. That most recent envelope from Tannahill. Which set me thinking about the day we met not too far from Inverness. He was living in a flat on High Street above a florist. I was only in Scotland for two weeks, but couldn't resist the lure of the Loch's peaty waters. Cannot ever resist the siren song of legends, be they derived from kelpies or surviving plesiosaurs or trapped seals or hoaxes. I was parked at a lookout on the A82 above Urquhart Castle. He stopped, and struck up a conversation, forcing me to lower my binoculars. I do not, as a rule, talk with strangers, but there was about Tannahill an infectious (good choice of adjective) this or that, and we stood together an hour in the chilling wind. He talked to me about the crumbling medieval edifice of Urquhart, how no one knows for sure when it was built, but surely no later than the Thirteenth Century. And that diggings and radiocarbon dates from the grounds go back to the Fourth and Sixth centuries, so something here fortified since at least as far back as that. He'd not even mentioned the "monster," which I found odd, not ribbing a tourist when a tourist deserves a ribbing. Me, I'd not have pa.s.sed up the opportunity.

He told me how the n.a.z.i's flew sorties over the lake, and also, in greater detail, of how a Wellington bomber, R is for Robert, bound for Heligoland, ran into nasty weather on the New Year's Eve of 1940. At eight thousand feet, the plane met with a snowstorm above the Monadhliath Hills, and somewhere over Foyers the starboard engine failed. Sputsputsputtersput. The pilot ordered six trainees to bail, and more I don't recall. Deaths. Men fly, men die. The plane was ditched in Ness, and sank, and lay on a slimy bed of silt at sixty meters down for thirty-six years, I think, until one September it was hauled back up to the light of day. Also, Tannahill told me of a woman who swam the breadth of the Loch at the age of sixteen, and that's more than eighteen hours in frigid waters. I have this memory and a head for numbers, though it never serves me profitably. I recall dates and figures that are at best, trivial. He talked of six-foot eels, but nothing more monstrous. We watched a peregrine falcon soar above the black expanse, and he asked me back to accompany him for a pint or two or three, and I went.

We f.u.c.ked the first time that night, and when I returned to the States, I thought I'd never see the man again, which was fine enough by me. I was busy arranging a show, not that show, but that other show, and had no time for any persistant love affair. But he came on his own, unbidden, six months later, and tracked me to Los Angeles. I managed not to start hating him for several months, which is almost a record. I told him to leave, but he remained persistently peripheral, and still does so.

f.u.c.k all. Now I need a new nib. I'm not even sure I have one.

26/7/98.

Another letter (with clippings, etc.) from Tannahill, and I should not even have opened it. But I did, because what I don't know is worse than what I do. More of the same, and I think this is becoming seriously f.u.c.king s.a.d.i.s.tic on his part (and m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic on mine, not tossing them unopened into the wastepaper basket right off): From Film Threat's "Top Ten 50 Lost Films of All Time" (posted to filmthreat.com, 7 January, 1997): #41 Albert Perrault's Court of the Sidhe (1987): "Believed to have never progressed beyond the early stages of production, the film would have presented various p.o.r.nographic re-imaginings of cla.s.sic fairy tales, including 'Little Red Riding Hood,' 'The Little Mermaid,' and 'Beauty and the Beast.' Despite occasional, unsubstantiated rumors of one or more test reels circulating among collectors, there is little evidence that any part of this film has survived."

EXCEPT:.

1.THE THREE REELS IN MY SAFE.

2.WHATEVER IT WAS, IT WASN'T p.o.r.nOGRAPHY 3.La Belle et la Bete was never PART OF THE PROJECT 4.I PERSONALLY HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF REELS IN POSSESSION OF "COLLECTORS"

~ and, something I wrote four years ago ~ "It rained the whole first two weeks we were out at Shepperton. It rained, the cold rain of an English summer, and there were all manner of electrical problems, and insurance troubles, and we had two of the actors walk out on us. I kept wondering, to myself, 'Where is all the G.o.dd.a.m.n money for this coming from?' Mostly, I was working closely with our makeup effects man, Rob Bottin, who had impressed me, first with The Howling, then The Thing, for John Carpenter, then Legend, the Ridley Scott film. I cannot recall who directed The Howling, but it wasn't a very good film, so I do not suppose that matters. The makeup was grueling, I know, and by the end of that second week, almost all the actors were ready to walk out on us, I think, though only two actually did quit.

"We got in one more week before the backers pulled the plug on the project and the money dried up. But by then, I was sick of the whole mess, anyway, and glad for it to end. I could see, already, from the dailies, that it wasn't what I'd hoped for or intended, not the movie that x.x.xx.x.xX promised me we were making. It was too graphic, and there was too much shown, too much shown that should only have been suggested. The emphasis on atmosphere and mood that I had been promised was being sacrificed for more blatantly prurient imagery. No one has ever yet called me a prudish man, I think, so it's not like that. I was not offended by the explicitness, but disappointed by it. Almost all of the pre-production artwork I did for the film, it belonged to the studio or the director, whichever, and was taken away to the rotten bowels of Hollywood, and I nevermore saw it again."

That was written for Cinefex, but the article was never published; the threat of lawsuits intervened. Which made no difference to me. I'm calling T. tonight and asking him to stop this s.h.i.t, the clippings. I have work to do and no need of G.o.dd.a.m.n ghosts of stillborn undertakings. No time for the head games he mistakes for flirtation.

27/7/98.

I've never been in a wood as dark as this wood. Black Forest, maybe, Schwarzwald, but that part is likely not of any relevance beyond...beyond, beyond. I ought be out on the rue, searching for Gautier or make-do she-males and not writing down nightmares. I ought to be f.u.c.king painting. f.u.c.king. Painting. I'm going to finish that ogre, whether it concludes in a mess or otherwise. I have all these things to be doing that trump any need to write down bad dreams. So, hah, I write down bad dreams. Hah. Ring around the rosies, pop goes the weasel, and make the impatient waiters wait impatiently a little longer.

I've never been in a wood as dark as this wood.

I stumble among the pines and h.o.a.ry oaks, fat toads and sleek hares and overhead is owl and crow song. I pick my way over and between the weave of this living Arthur Rackham tableau vivant. The air has a cinnamon tang of fiddleheads and the heady musk of decaying forest-floor detritus; leafy strata underfoot, tunneled by moles and earthworms, inhuman and untamed cataphiles. There is no path, so I cannot have strayed from any path. There is a labyrinth I think, and it does not begin and it does not end. I look up, but limbs hide away the writhing, star-scabbed sky. I push aside briers and hawthorn, and I see the wolf and I see the girl who sat beside me at the Seine, girl who's come to me down all my life. Here is only a fiction I'm going to hammer together from fading dreamstuff, and it's gonna make do or d.a.m.n me, f.u.c.k, I don't vex myself with accuracy. I'm only tracing, rubbing charcoal at best, and will settle for indefinite, happily or not happily. Makes no difference.

I have never been in a wood this dark. I push aside the underbrush: The wolf thing stands in a thicket of ferns and mushrooms, beneath the mossy boughs of unthinkably ancient trees, and it licks at its short muzzle. The actress kneeling before it is one of the two who walked off the set. Her makeup is almost as elaborate as the wolf's. The red cape has been made an integral part of her, something like folds of crimson skin hanging from her head and shoulders and spine, drooping from her arms like the membranes of a bat's wings. Latex or silicone prosthetics, I know that, sure, but the makeup is unnerving, and I feel faintly nauseous. The wolf thing looks down, running clawed fingers along the girl's fleshy crimson cowl, which seems to have been coated with some substance so as to resemble the slimy, glistening skin of a salamander. Hydroxypropyl cellulose, perhaps, or, more likely, methyl cellulose. The symbolism is obvious, I think, ham-fistedly f.u.c.king too obvious, this "red riding hood" grown into a sort of hypertrophied virginal hymen, as yet unbroken and all but smothering the girl.

"I'm bringing her bread and cream," she whispers. I lean forward, all the better to hear her. All the better to hear words I wrote, but never meant for me.

The "wolf," its scruffy, short pelt matted with leaves and burrs, it asks her, "Do you follow the Road of Needles, or the Road of Pins?"

"The Road of Pins," the girl replies. "Most a.s.suredly, I'll take the Road of Pins."

"Well, then. I suppose I'll take the Road of Needles, and we'll see who gets there first," the wolf says.

The forest becomes...maybe a city street...something that isn't a forest. Did I ever write, anywhere, about the night I held a loaded pistol to his head while I f.u.c.ked him? That b.a.s.t.a.r.d Tannahill, I mean. Did I ever tell me that. I hold so much back from myself, buried deep in mnemonic graves here in my own mental Le Cimetiere du Montparna.s.se, but devoid of headstones. They rise though, sometimes.

28/7/98 THREE MARGUERITES.

Walking in the cemetery yesterday, a Tuesday, I met a woman who recognized me (which is a thing that almost never happens) and who claimed to be a werewolf. I was out searching for the grave of Marie Dorval (1798-1849), an actress rumored to have been a lesbian lover of George Sands. I didn't find the grave, but, as I said, found this woman who claimed to be a werewolf. Or to have been a werewolf. Or that she was and wasn't, in some inconstant lunar cycle beyond my comprehension. To be sure, mad. Or I a.s.sume madness. Presumptuous c.u.n.t that I am, I a.s.sume. But she had an air of madness about her; wouldn't any woman, though, who was also, on occasion, a wolfish creature? More audacious still, she claimed a role in the slaughters at Gevaudan, to have been one among the several who came to infamy and to be known as La Bete Anthropophage du Gevaudan. Didn't point out this would have meant her to be quite advanced in years, a minimum of, say, let us say 248 years old, if she were, let us say maybe 14 when the depredations commenced. So, tatterdemalion and unwashed though she certainly was, my skepticism is not, I think, unwarranted. She looked, to my eyes, no older than thirty, but who knows the magick of lycanthropes?

Her name, she told me, was Marguerite. She gave me (like young Gautier) no surname. I asked for none. The French name daisies Marguerite. Chrysanthemum frutescens, start of summer into middle of autumn, long blooming and susceptible to infestation by thrips. Surely they grow in the Margeride Mountains, but that hardly even counts as circ.u.mstantial, unless she was playing a very allusive game. Who knows the sporting whims of lycanthropes?

She told me her name was Marguerite. She was a slender woman, slender nigh unto emaciated. I almost said so and wanted to buy her a meal. In the end, I didn't offer, fickle c.u.n.t that I am. She wore boots too large, a leather coat too large on her kite-frame bones, some manner of a frock beneath, torn stockings. Her head, all a matted mop of hair, was auburn. Most striking though, the eyes in the pinched and pale face: the left was brilliant green, the right an equally brilliant blue. Emerald and sapphire eyes set into that single skull. Single et singular. Her English was quite good, and I shall here do my best to reconst.i.tute our conversation, though I readily confess I'd been drinking only wine, but still. In fact, I had a bottle with me, a cheap merlot, and I shared it with the woman whose eyes were beautifully "afflicted" with what ophthalmologists or whatever call heterochromia iridium (a/k/a heterochromia iridis): "Yes," she said. "I was there. I'll not take all the credit, though. There were others."

I asked her to name her particular victims between 1764 and 1767, and she smiled a sly kind of smile and took a pull off the merlot. "Unless you've forgotten their names, or never knew them," I added.

"I've not forgotten, and I know them," she replied. "Well, not all their names, but all their faces. That first young girl at Les Hubacs, she was mine. We drew lots, at the start. And later, the bold girl, Marie Jeanne Valet la Pucelle who fought back with only a spear fashioned from a spindle. She was also mine, and such bravery in her, I let her carry the day. A statue was raised to la Pucelle back in '59. I gave the child immortality. And six-year-old Marguerite Lebre, she was one of mine, and I borrowed her name. I meant to be bold, so there were witnesses that day, as attested to by the Curate Gibergue at la Pauze..."

She went on. I'll not put it all down.

I cannot say I was even half convinced, as these are facts found anywhere one knows to look (La Bete du Gevaudan, M. Moreau-Bellecroix; Paris. 1945 and La Bete du Gevaudan. Felix Buffier in 1994, and, for that matter, La Bete du Gevaudan in Auvergne. Fabre, Abbe Francois. Saint Flour. 1901 and Paris 1930.) The sculpture at Place des Cordeliers, Marvejols, (where, notably, La Bete was never even seen) by Emmanuel Auricoste, that's a G.o.dd.a.m.n tourist attraction. I was tempted to tempt her back to my bed, to bed my raggedy loup faux, my self-proclaimed fantome de la bete (?). She'd not have accepted the invitation, and me in no mood for rejection. Also, why set out to spoil Dorothee's conviction or image of me as an exclusive and inveterate b.u.g.g.e.rer of the male s.e.x?

"You are a lonely man," Marguerite said.

"And how is that?"

"You smell very much of a lonely man, and I have read interviews."

"There are worse fates."

"Mais oui. Naturellement. But, one wonders, is it from choice, necessity, or..." and she trailed off and picked at a weed.

"Some men and woman are unsuited to anything else," I told her.

"You know this?"

"I believe this. And it's not such a burden. I get more work done without the distractions of constant companions."

I asked where she lived, and, at first, she seemed reluctant to discharge an answer. She smiled and gazed up at the bright summer sky above Le Cimetiere du Montparna.s.se. Then she told me she had a room not far from La Rotonde. A lie concocted then and there, I'd say, her needing an answer at the ready.

And then, echoing almost my dream my sky-tortured nightmaring red cap Marguerite said, sternly, solemnly and sternly, "Be lonely, then, if it suits you. But do not go to Gevaudan. Maybe there's nothing left there to see. Maybe there are old ghosts in the forests, and maybe they're still hungry. Stay here in Paris, Monsieur Perrault."

I made her no promise, one way or the other, and shortly after we parted, all polite au revoir and take cares and perhaps our paths will cross again. I think they won't. To be sure, I'll not seek her out, green- and blue-eyed liar that she is, apparently.

I almost decided not to mentioned her red-felt cloche, which might last have been fashionable in 1933. Then I undecided, so there it is. I'll make of it what I will. Or what I won't. Be done with this.

29/7/98.

THIS.

Oh, you greedy gormandiser, What a pity you weren't wiser.

Mr. Wolf, so false and sly, In the river now you lie!

THIS.

Vous m'amusez toujours. Jamais je m'en irai chez-nous, J'ai trop grand peur des loups. (Voyageur Songs; French-Canadian, ca. 1830; collected by Edward Ermatinger) ALSO.

Since I'm making lais, Bisclavret Is one I don't want to forget.

In Breton, "Bisclavret's" the name; "Garwolf" in Norman means the same.

Long ago you heard the tale told And it used to happen, in days of old Quite a few men became garwolves, And set up housekeeping in the woods.

A garwolf is a savage beast, While the fury's on it, at least: Eats men, wreaks evil, does no good, Living and roaming in the deep wood.

BISCLAVRET (excerpt) Marie de France, translated Judith P. Shoaf 1996 AND.

I left out this, this, this...snippet. In my recounting of meeting goodly f.u.c.ked weary plaguing-me nigh unto Perdition and back Mr. Peter Tannahill that day at the tumbledown lochside ruins near Drumnadrochit. An accidental omission, though it might well seem anything but and otherwise. At some point, he brought up Boleskine House, and that way did his conversation turn. Near to the village of Foyers, a mansion built in the late Eighteenth Century by a man named Archibald Fraser. And then, he told how Aleister Crowley, bete noir, that other Loch Ness Monster, came to and purchased Boleskine House in 1899. Crowley, usual flair and all, styled himself Laird of Boleskine and Abertarff. And maybe he did unspeakable rituals in those chambers above the all-but-bottomless lake. Maybe the "Abramelin Operation" out of something known as The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It all reeks to me to high f.u.c.king heavens of apocrypha and hype. But let's us just say yes, this transpired. Crowley sought a higher self in this incantation, but Tannahill said how, no, instead was conjured what Crowley named "the Abramelin devils" and much mischief, as of the antics of poltergeists darker, but reminiscent ensued.

"Those Led Zeppelin w.a.n.kers," said Tannahill, "That Yank Jimmy Page fellow, a right Crowley devotee, he owned the dump for a time."

There can be no denyin' that the wind'll shake 'em down And the flat world's flyin'. There's a new plague on the land &.

Still so dark all over Europe And the rainbow rises here In the western sky SO.

IN CONCLUSION.