The Ape's Wife and Other Stories (31 page)

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 fucking painting. Fucking. 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 hoary 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 damn me, fuck, 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 fucking
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 assuredly, 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 fucked him? That bastard 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 Cimetière du Montparnasse, 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 assume madness. Presumptuous cunt that I am, I assume. 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 Gévaudan, to have been one among the several who came to infamy and to be known as La Bête Anthropophage du Gévaudan. 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 circumstantial, 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 cunt 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 reconstitute 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 Lèbre, 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 Bête du Gévaudan
, M. Moreau-Bellecroix; Paris. 1945 and
La Bête du Gévaudan
. Felix Buffièr in 1994, and, for that matter,
La Bête du Gévaudan in Auvergne
. Fabre, Abbé François. Saint Flour. 1901 and Paris 1930.) The sculpture at Place des Cordeliers, Marvejols, (where, notably, La Bête was never even seen) by Emmanuel Auricoste, that’s a goddamn tourist attraction. I was tempted to tempt her back to my bed, to bed my raggedy
loup faux
, my self-proclaimed
fantôme de la bête
(?). She’d not have accepted the invitation, and me in no mood for rejection. Also, why set out to spoil Dorothée’s conviction or image of me as an exclusive and inveterate buggerer of the male sex?

“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 Cimetière du Montparnasse. 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 Gévaudan. 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

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

BISCLAVRET
(excerpt)

Marie de France, translated Judith P. Shoaf © 1996

AND

I left out this, this, this…snippet. In my recounting of meeting goodly fucked 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,
bête 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 fucking 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 wankers,” said Tannahill, “That Yank Jimmy Page fellow, a right Crowley devotee, he owned the dump for a time.”

&

&

SO

IN CONCLUSION

I see a pattern here, or I see no pattern at all. A pattern exists, or no pattern is here. Too much to drink, so little sleep, and a woman with eyes that are green and blue, and I cannot find my
beau garçon
– Gautier.

30/7/98

I sit on my stool before the easel. My hands are stained, acrylic stained, bleeding in reverse, and I sit on my stool and rage at this haunting, this abomination jokingly [Christ]ened
Last Drink Bird Head
a few days back. Now I know it wasn’t a joke, even if and though all the various connotations the title may summon allude me. Just as I am
eluded
by its completion. It’s a stillbirth, or placental afterbirth expulsion, postpartum blood only in countless avocado gangrenous black-greens instead of crimson and meat shades. All an avocado standing on a hill, also an avocado hill, roiling labyrinth sky, no in and no out, and HIM, whoever HIM might be. HIM. Ibis-crown’d dæmon from a dream I can’t recall to lord over this fucking canvas. I know HIM, I know HIS name, but I will not speak it here. I dab camel’s hair to napthol crimson and there you motherfucker, you deal with that hanging in your squirming goddamn sky. There. One dab or two or a third, but all a single body slumped in that worm welkin vault. Stürmischer Himmel don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky but my red damn’d splotch or even if that
is
Himmel.