"Sucker!" she said, almost tenderly, but he did not hear her.
He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes cant dance: they"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 contemplated 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.
She sulked sardonically through Daddys sexy dance, watching, in a bored, fascinated way, the elaborate reflections of the many strings of glass beads he had given her tracking 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 underneath, is anybodys guess; she had been raised in the School of Hard Knocks and enough hard knocks can beat the heart out of anybody.
Though Jeanne was not prone to introspection, sometimes, as she wriggled around the dark, buoyant room that tugged at its moorings, longing to take off on an aerial quest for the Cythera beloved of poets, she wondered what the distinction was between dancing naked in front of one man who paid and dancing 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 chorus girls 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 difference in the world and, at sixteen, she could conceive 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 was promiscuous because she was promiscuous.)
But then, the very thought of organising 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.
Go, where? Not there! The glaring yellow shore and harsh blue sky dau九九藏书bed 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 cant look at the cat without wanting to strangle it. She would like a drink. Rum will do. She twists a flute of discarded manuscript from the wastepaper basket into a spill for her small, foul, black cheroot.
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 Borgias served poisons, its carved armchairs from whose bulbous legs grin and grimace the cinquecento faces, the crust of fake Tintorettos on the walls (hes an indefatigable connoisseur, if, as yet, too young to have the sixth sense that tells you when youre being conned) -- at the invitation of the mysterious currents of the heavens, this well-appointed cabin will loose its moorings in the street below and take off, depart, whisk across the dark vault of the night, tangling a stillborn, crescent moon in its ropes, nudging a star at lift-off, and will deposit us --
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 become enjoying a grim joke at the expense of the pretty, secretly festering thing she still was. At Walpurgisnacht, 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 geriatric cynicism ill became such a creature made for pleasure as Jeanne, but was pox not the emblematic fate of a creature made for pleasure and the price you paid for the atrocious mixture of corruption and innocence this child of the sun brought with her from the Antilles?
The basalt cat, the pride of the home, its excretory stroll along the quai concluded, now whined for readmittance outside the door. The poet let Puss in. Puss leapt into his waiting arms and filled the apartment with a happy purr. The girl plotted to strangle 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 forgave the cat for its existence; they had a lot in common. She released the bow of her back with a twang and plumped on the rug, rubbing her stretched tendons.
She sighs.
black-thighed witch, midnights child. . .
They have this in common, neither has a native land, althoug九-九-藏-书-网h he likes to pretend she has a fabulous home in the bosom of the blue ocean, he will force a home on her whether shes got one or not, he cannot believe she is as dispossessed as he. . . Yet they are only at home together when contemplating 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.
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 dance naked to earn her keep, anyway, why shouldnt she dance naked for hard cash in hand and earn enough to keep herself? Eh? Eh?
She danced naked. Her necklaces and earrings clinked. As always, when she finally got herself up off her ass and started dancing she quite enjoyed it. 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.
But, even as she launched the 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 as dead already. She drew her knees up to her chin and crouched in front of the fire, staring vacantly at the embers. Her face fixed in sullen resentment. The cat drew silently alongside, as if on purpose, adding a touch of satanic glamour, so you could imagine both were having silent conversations with the demons in the flames. As long as the cat left her alone, she let it alone. They were alone together. 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 incunabula, those books acquired from special shops that incurred damnation if you so much as opened the covers. He cherished his arduously aroused sexuality until she was prepared to acknowledge it again.
reeking of musk smeared on tobacco,
For herself, she came clean, arrived in Paris with, nothing worse than scabies, malnutrition and ringworm about her person. It was a bad joke, therefore, that, some centuries before Jeannes birth, the Aztec goddess, Nanahuatzin, had poured a cornucopia of wheelchairs, dark glasses, crutches and mercury pills on the ships of the conquistadores as they took their spoiled booty from the New World to the Old; the raped continents revenge, perpetrating itself in the beds of Europe. Jeanne innocently followed Nanahuatzins trail across the Atlantic but she brought no erotic vengeance -- shed picked up the germ from九-九-藏-书-网 the very first protector. The man shed trusted to take her away from all that, enough to make a horse laugh, except that she was a fatalist, she was indifferent.
a shaman conjured you, a Faust of the savannah,
She bent over backwards until the huge fleece of a black sheep, her unfastened hair, spilled on to the Bokhara. She was a supple acrobat; she could make her back into a mahogany rainbow. (Notice her big feet and huge, strong hands, capable enough to have been a nurses hands.) If he was a connoisseur of the beautiful, she was a connoisseur of the most exquisite humiliations but she had always been too poor to be able to afford the luxury of acknowledging a humiliation as such. You took what came. She arched her back so much a small boy could have run under her. Her reversed blood sang in her ears.
His turn to sulk. He took to cleaning his nails again.
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the 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 inconsolable 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 word, "regret", the woman sighs, without any precise reason.
"No!" she said. "Not the bloody parrot forest! Dont take me on the slavers route back to the West Indies, for godsake! And let the bloody cat out, before it craps on your precious Bokhara!"
Nights of October, of frail, sickle moons, when the earth conceals the shining accomplice 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 much and had especially devised for her, consisted of a series of voluptuous poses one following another; private-room-in-a-bordello 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 in the set of clanking jewellery hed given her, paste, nothing she could sell or shed have sold it. Meanwhile, she hummed a Creole melody, she liked the ones with ribald words about what the shoemakers wife did at Mardi Gras or the size of some fishermans legendary tool b99lib•netut 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.
Soft twists of mist invade the 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 contours of their high, lonely apartment waver and melt. On these evenings, you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse to tears.
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 Casino de Paris in sequin cache-sexe and tinsel pasties, divinely tall, the colour and texture of suede. Josephine Baker! But vivacity, exuberance were never Jeannes qualities. A slumbrous resentment of anything you could not eat, drink or smoke, i.e. burn, was her salient characteristic. Consumption, combustion, these were her vocations.
"Theyll bring up hot water if you pay."
The custard-apple of her stinking Eden she, this forlorn Eve, bit -- and was all at once transported here, as in a dream; and yet 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.
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!
But, on these days, nipped by frost and sulking, no pet 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 pinching her ankles.
After shes got a drink or two inside her, however, she stops coughing, grows a bit more friendly, will consent to unpin her hair and let 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 -- nevertheless, 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.
She was like a piano in a country were everybody has had their hands cut off.
Upside down as she was, she could see, in the topmost right-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-paringwww.99ｌｉb.ｎｅt; you could see the vague outline of the rest of its surface, obscured by the shadow of the earth as if the earth were clenched between the moons shining claw-tips, so you could say the moon held the world in its arms. An exceptionally brilliant star suspended from the nether prong on a taut, invisible leash.
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 canines still white as vampires -- and invited him to join in the dance with 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 was appreciating her. After a few drinks, she forgot 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 fortune-telling mirror and seeing, not their rosy faces, but their own rouged skulls.
Night comes in on feet of fur and marvellous clouds drift past the windows, those spectral clouds of the night sky that are uncannily 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 ascents.
"You think I dont need a wash because I dont show the dirt."
Indeed, I think she never bothered to bite any apple at all. She wouldnt have known what knowledge was for, would she? She was in neither a state of innocence nor a state of grace. I will tell you what Jeanne was like.
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 enamel tree and you can crunch sugar-cane between your strong, white teeth, like you did when you were little, baby. When we get there, among the lilting palm-trees, under the purple flowers, Ill love you to death. Well go back and live together in a thatched house with a veranda overgrown with flowering 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. . ."