The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (3 page)

—And what did you answer?

—I answered that such a thing is surely possible, like the
tunica molesta
—the shirts earlier described. I could easily imagine a fan treated with volatile poisons.

—Such as?

—Sulphur. Pitch. Naphtha and quicklime. One drop of rain and, yes, a tear could transform the fan into a torch. If the one who held the fan wore garments whitened or fixed with lime, why, in no time, he would be blazing like a pillar of fire!

—And did you make the fan?

—Yes.

—Evidence of your complicity in his murderous operations!

—[The fan-maker’s brilliant laughter fills the chamber with light.] I once made Sade a fan of horn cut to resemble a turreted fortress—an amusement to lighten his confinement. The fan was
ajouré
—as are the defense walls of a castle. And I once made him a fan of ladyfingers decorated with icing; the
panaches
were made of hard candy. The combustible fan was an experiment, you see. For the book. The book about Landa in the Yucatán. I made it only to see if it was possible. Then I informed him the thing had been done: A drop of water had set it to smolder; it quickly caught fire, blazed for an instant, and was gone. And I thought that this combustible fan was like a person, like love itself. These, too, blaze briefly.

—[Bewildered, as if to himself:] How do you come up with such ideas?

—It is the nature of thought—is it not?—to come up with ideas, although Sade likes to say “I’ve come down with a terrible idea” the way others say “I’ve come down with a cold.” My father, on the other hand, liked to “catch thoughts,” as if the brain were a deep pool and thinking akin to fishing. But then, he was a fisherman of sorts; he fished for old books and papers, just as my mother angled for rags or, rather, the beautiful things she was able, with a gesture and a word, to reduce to rags in the owner’s eyes.

—[To himself:
Mother was an illusionist
. He writes this down.]

—From her I inherited the capacity to, when necessary, forge ahead thoughtlessly; from my father, the capacity to think. When I was a girl, he had me study nature, the visible and the hidden; he had me study languages, the old and the new, so that I should appreciate the multiple paths thinking takes. I read philosophy; I have a knowledge of numbers; I am able to name not only the birds and the stars, but also the cats—

—The cats!

—Cats! Yes! Such as Tom, Tiger, Tortoiseshell, Mouser—

—Silence!
One might as well be among wizards and witches! [The president of the Comité claps his hands until order is restored.] You learned nothing from your mother?

—In our brief time together…[Her eyes darken, and for a moment, the fan-maker, although standing, appears to grow smaller.] She…taught me to love beautiful forms and to recognize a free spirit when I see one. From her I inherited a tolerance for…difficulty, and learned, above all, how to inhabit time, how
not
to chew over losses.

—A thing your friend Sade would do well to master!

—But hard to master in
captivity!
Kept in a tower like a toad in ajar! To tell the truth, Sade’s capacity to think is often badly scrambled by the inevitable violence of his moods.

“To calm the clatter in my skull,” he said to me not long ago, “to quiet my hissing nerves, to soothe my accursed piles, I become a brainless ticking; I count the seconds passing, the minutes and the hours. To this sum,” he said, “I add the ciphers my own body affords me: ten fingers, toes all pale as candles, the tongue as black as a bad potato, the nose like a bruised pear, two ears like broken umbrellas, one brain reduced to perpetual stupidity, a mood like Job’s, one bunion, a pair of creaky knees, a belly swollen like a wet haystack, a cock as irritable as a caged parrot, balls like last week’s porridge, teeth as untrustworthy as dice, an anus with a mind of its own. I use this number to divide my days spent in this tower, and then, by subtracting the sum of heads fallen since dawn, of letters received, dreams dreamed, of grains of salt scattered from a hard roll to my plate, of shadows leaking down the walls, I come up with the exact time to the minute of my release. Or of your next visit, beloved Comet in the Grim Sky of My Solitude. Also, the moment when Robespierre will be undone. This information I depend upon to reassure myself that I will one day feel the cobbles of the street beneath my feet, feel the rain beat against my joyous, my uplifted face, feel the caress of another human being, know the taste of another’s lips, kiss the nape of a beloved neck, feel the scratch of a cat’s tongue on my palm; I will awaken to the crowing of a cock and fall asleep to the sound of turtledoves cooing, cooing in the trees.

“The loss of the world has me reeling with longing. Locked away, I have come to know that the world is a food; it nourishes us. Without it, the soul starves. I feel like Gulliver caged among giants; sprawling in all directions, abundance is unattainable. You say they call me ‘the Apostle of Nothingness.’ But I am, if I am anything, ‘the Apostle of Muchness,’ ‘the High Pope of Plenty and of Excess in Everything.’ And if all my rights have been taken from me but one—the right to dream—I dream excessively. If they don’t like it, they will have to chop off my head!

“My pen is the key to a fantastic bordello, and once the gate is opened, it ejaculates a bloody ink. The virgin paper set to shriek evokes worlds heretofore unknown: eruptive, incorruptible, suffocating.”

—And brutal.

—Yes, citizen. As brutal as the world burning around us. Sade offers a mirror. I dare you to have the courage to gaze into it. [The fan-maker has totally recovered her aplomb. She is standing with her hands on her hips.]

—You dare me? [He laughs, bitterly.] Else—

—Else perish, perhaps.

—Mark my words, citizen. It is you who shall do the perishing. Now. Continue without irony, if you please. What else did Sade say?

—He said: [undaunted, raising her voice:] “And I don’t give a fuck if my inventions, unlike the guillotine, are not ‘useful.’” Sade is after new thoughts, you see. Thoughts no one has ever set to paper. Radical thoughts. “I am not simply dusting off the furniture!” he said. “When my pen starts thrashing, it’s like fucking a whore in the den of a famished lion. The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted. I am after Vertigo,” Sade said. “I am wanting a world in which the Forbidden Fruit is ascendant and rises just as the Old Laws fall—yes! Even the Law of Gravity.”

Sade was educated by the Jesuits, who, as you must know, punish their charges—and often violently—for misdemeanors large and small, real and imaginary. One particularly crazed master, whom the students called “the Broom,” forced his boys to stand in a circle and thrash one another with whatever was at hand, thus forming an infernal circle, what Sade calls “the Broom’s Infernal Machine.” “It seemed to me,” Sade said, “that we had become—the Broom, the other boys, and I—a gear in the diabolic mechanism that makes the world spin. Night after night, the Broom sent us to our beds in pain, the lower part of our bodies covered with welts. Night after night, I tossed about in a high fever caused by rage and humiliation: a murderous rage. We had heard of a Jesuit’s throat being slashed by a boy who could bear no more the blows he received. Among ourselves, we spoke of little else.

“It seemed to me that the functioning of the universe—planets in orbit about the sun, and moons about the planets—depended upon the torture inflicted upon us. I was convinced that the machine was eternal, that the torture would never end, that its end would cause the world to end. And then I wanted that desperately: wanted the world to end in a cataclysm of fire!” Already then, Sade, like Landa, longed for a holocaust.

“The night I read the transcripts you brought me of the case against Landa,” Sade continued, “and reviewed the outrages he had perpetrated in the Yucatán, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I was once again taking part in the Broom’s circle of fire. As I and the other boys ran howling like beasts, weeping and foaming, we produced so much heat, so much
perpetual heat
, that suddenly the Broom’s robes caught fire, the floor and walls caught fire, and then we, too, were burning! We formed a ball of flame that soared up into the sky: yellow and red, the color of pus and blood.

“Beneath us a crowd had gathered, everyone gazing up with astonishment. ‘A second sun!’ they cried. ‘What will become of us?’ An astronomer was called and arrived riding a broom. I stood among the crowd and saw that the stars on his peaked hat were peeling off. Pointing at the two suns with his wand, he shouted stridently: ‘Let us now speculate upon the inevitable disaster!’

“I believe,” Sade said to me, “that thanks to this dream I have seen the face of Truth. A hideous face, a monstrous face, eaten away by spite. Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good. All that is left is a stench at the bottom of a tomb.”

He told me: “I have seen a beauty’s cunt worn like a fur collar, seen the bodies of wags, innocent of every crime but vanity, cut into pieces and these carried aloft like filthy flags up and down the streets of Paris. I have seen carts in the night taking bodies to graves marked only by a stench. And I ask myself again and again: Is this the virtuous violence of which we dreamed? But what else could we expect from the rabble that continues to believe in warlocks and wizards and leper kings who bathe in the blood of babes, and whispers that the nobility stuffs itself on roasted peasant boys—an extravagant piece of nonsense when you consider that the famished peasants don’t have a spoonful of marrow or meat to be found on them anywhere but, perhaps, between their ears.”

Sade said to me just the other day: “Everything is clear now. The plan has always been to expel me first and eat me after. In other words, like a dog, the Revolution eats its own droppings, and it is only a matter of time before I will be on my knees with my own head between its jaws. Until then I dream the same dreams as Landa, that bastard son of the Inquisition. I share that monster’s fever; I am damned with the same
singularity
.

“The devastation ahead is immeasurable. I long for it night and day. Like Landa,” he concluded, “I long for the disappearance of things.”

—Do you continue to work on the Rue de Grenelle?

—Several years after my apprenticeship was completed, I found a shop on the Rue du Bout-du-Monde and set up on my own. The place had seen the production of marzipan and still smelled of sugar and almonds. Better still, a swan was carved above the door. The first thing I did was to make a sign of tin in the shape of a fan. This I painted with a picture of a red swan and hung over the street. I hired a girl to build the skeletons (for by then the guild rules had changed) and hired another, a beggar and an orphan whose father had died of beriberi and whose mother of chagrin, and who, once her face was scrubbed, proved dazzling. She was quick as a whip and became a great favorite, for she knew when and to whom to show the fan with double meanings, the fan with two faces or three. She was always smiling, and this is why Sade called her La Fentine—a name she assumes to this day with good humor, as she does all else.

“It’s a clean living,” La Fentine says of fan-making. “You spend the day flirting without risk, you drink all the tea you want, and you never, ever need to stand about in the wind and rain. All sorts come into the
atelier
, but barbers never do, nor beggars. So I can forget that once, because of ill fortune, I lived in the gutter like a dog.”

La Fentine knew how to read the eyes of the wealthy libertine in search of rarities, and the secret thoughts of the inexperienced maiden who wants a fan with which to inflame the youth she desires. My
atelier
is called The Red Swan at the World’s End, and my motto, painted in a fair red color above the door, is:

I specialize in eccentricities, in artificial magic—such as anamorphic erotica—and imaginary landscapes: Chinese pyramids and jungle temples, a map of the world under water, hanging gardens filled with birds, and grottoes illuminated by volcanic fire. There is no other
atelier
in Paris where you may buy a fan painted with the heraldic jaguar of the New World, which appears to the initiated in narcotic dreams. Painted on green silk, he leaps across the entire leaf, from left to right.

La Fentine has turned out to be a gifted fan-maker. She and I have together produced a series of two-faced fans: The seasons are painted on the back, and the games of love are on the front. Our “Diableries” are very popular—surely you have seen these—as are our “Tables of Paris,” with their recipe on one side and lovers at table on the other.

We are inspired by the Encyclopedia, but also by our memories and inclinations, those potencies that animated our childhood and the mystery of our adolescence. We believe this is why our fans are so popular, but also why we come to the attention of the lieutenant general of the police so often. Scholars collect our fans, you see, and they are often of the most vociferous sort. They engage in animated talk just outside the shop, talk the lieutenant thinks is seditious, and this only because he is too much of a numbskull to understand it. La Fentine likes to joke that the weather just outside our door is unlike that of the rest of Paris: “Hot, steamy, tropical!”

The shop is also a favorite haunt of literary madmen, some of them authentic visionaries, and others simply out of their minds. One of them, a surgeon, has been stunned by hallucinations ever since he was a child. He claims to have seen the Celestial Father, the Celestial Mother, Satan, Christ on the Cross, and a host of archangels. He came to us years ago to buy a fan large enough to hide him from the eyes of demons, to protect him from the devouring abyss of their glances, from the sulphur they farted in his face, to keep his own eyes safe from the appearances of intangible houris so captivating he feared his cock would run off with his balls, leaving him behind.