Read The Fan-Maker's Inquisition Online
Authors: Rikki Ducornet
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #Literary Fiction, #The Fan-Maker's Inquisition
The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (14 page)
Restif was there, and his broadside hit the streets the very next day:
I have been called a pornographer. It is true that I am. I use the word “lightly”! My pen is clean, straightforward, and brisk. I am no fop, nor am I a libertine. It is one thing to extol a virile sexuality and another to trumpet bum-fucking—as does a certain marquis, or murderer—as does a certain Olympe de Gouges. You see: I do not mince my words!
To the despair of clean-living citizens, the collapse of morals is everywhere in evidence. I have elsewhere described the brazen effeminates—ten times more provocative than any harlot, their big feet dissimulated by high-heeled slippers—causing commotion in the cafés. Yet such sights could not prepare me for what I have just seen: a play, performed in our own National Theater, calling for the death of French colonials at the hands of their servants, a play written by a woman who would be a man, performed by actors against their own will and better judgment for an audience better suited for harvesting sugarcane!
There is more: The marriage of a certain fan-maker’s assistant took place in Neuilly last month. I had been told that this beauty—a bastard who had for years lived in the streets—was to marry a Turkish prince! The story amused me; I managed to inform myself as to the particulars and to slip onto the property without being seen. There I saw Olympe de Gouges, also in the bushes, embracing the fan-maker with an
empressement
to make a Turk blush! I left hurriedly to pen everything down while still fresh, thinking I might have been in Italy!
On my way home I was nearly knocked silly by a large marrowbone tossed from a window and into the street. I spent the evening in bed with a fresh cabbage leaf dressing the top of my head.
Restif a pornographer? Bah! He is not worthy of the name. Pornography is Satan’s seat: the place of eternal spontaneous combustion. Pornography is Hell’s capitol, hermetically sealed, impenetrable, and impassable. A place so corrupt that it is in fact an embolus in the body of Nature. A place of such acute congestion and stagnation that within its boundaries, time and space are clotted together and stilled.
La lenteur
is pornography’s primary characteristic,
La lenteur
and all the universe’s weight focused on one point. And that point is the conjunction of two bodies: the deliberate body of the pornographer-procrastinator—who is always the violator—and the body of his object, which shorn of will exemplifies the deceleration of the tomb.
Ah. But how weary am I and how sad. It is your letters, Gabrielle, that keep me sane.
As you know, dear friend, I matured in poverty. Yet each day unfolded in wonder, and this because of my mother’s gypsy ways—how she could from rags make petticoats to tempt a duchess—and because of my father’s endless supply of books in all shapes and sizes, and in all manner of disrepair. My books of fairy tales and travels to distant lands were riddled by worms, green with mold, and sometimes blackened and brittle because they had come so close to the fire.…
Of those who, like myself, were born beneath the sign of the Tiger, this is what the Indians of the New World said:
“All bad was his lot; misery befell him. He wallowed in evil and was covered in filth. Nowhere had he good repute. He committed adultery, was an adulterer, adulterous…”
I have always been combustible.
A very many years ago, a lifetime ago (I was six), I visited Genzano with that tireless tumble-nun, my uncle the
abbé
. We traveled by coach and were accompanied by my forlorn but stoic tutor and the strumpet Pélisse
(poih-aux-cuisses)
, who when she was not stuffing her face with seedcake was on her knees sucking Uncle’s rebounding cock—behind doors, trees, trellised nooks, confessionals, cemeteries: in other words, whenever we stopped (which we did often). The trip from Saumane to Genzano took forever. The
abbé
de Sade was indefatigable and Pelisse infinitely obliging.
When he was not reading pornography ill-concealed in theological treatises, my uncle was perusing a fantastic book on the Spanish Inquisition in the New World, illustrated with a multitude of copper engravings, a kind of catalogue of sexual terror, licentious extravagance, and murder. As the
abbé
was so often engaged with Pélisse, and as my tutor was on his own knees after some bug or other, or pressing flowers into a book, or mending his own frayed clothes, and as I was left alone in the coach, I had plenty of time to gloat over those instructive scenes that—as was later proved—assured my life would be ruled by
furia amorosa
and an unbridled imagination.
Of all the extraordinary images that book contained, the one that struck me most profoundly, struck me to the core and the marrow, was of a diminutive Indian maiden, hanging naked by her feet, as priests, leering or scowling, held crucifixes to her face, and as a figure in a hood whipped her vulnerable body, which, I could clearly see, was already tigered from bottom to top. Another exemplary image proposed a circle of youths, all neat and tight, buggering one another before an idol upon whose erect phallus burned a little lamp. Wetting my finger with drool and turning the pages with terror and excitement, I came upon another amazing sight: an iron crucifix heated to incandescence in the dungeon fire and used to brand six youths all chained by their ankles, necks, and wrists to the floor.
Ah!
thought I with a shudder of loathing and dark delight:
Ah! So nothing is forbidden by Nature! All is permitted!
(“All is permitted,” the
abbé
de Sade speculated several years later when I broached the subject of his secret library and in particular this one book. “All is permitted in God’s name.” “There is no God,” was my response, “and
that
is why nothing is forbidden.” Uncle roared with laughter.)
But back to our Italian voyage. Impervious to the delightful landscapes, the picturesque villages, the sumptuous woodlands, we passed, I, in my sexual impatience and curiosity, could think only of returning to Uncle’s casde on the hill, to idle away my hours in his sumptuous library of incendiary books.
No wonder
, thought I,
Uncle’s nose is always in a book! His fist busy in his breeches!
And indeed, marvels in vast numbers awaited me. A precocious reader, by the age of eight I had devoured
A History of Flagellants, Saintly Perversions, The Fetish Cults of Africa, Nights in a Turkish Harem, The Mirror of Pleasure, Le Curé et la Drôlesse, Petit Truc, Gros Machin, The Nun Who Ate Her Own Ordure
, and so on.
That night I could not sleep until Pélisse
(poib-au-pubis)
brought me a little glass of anise-seed water to soothe my mind; better still, she gave me
une petite branlette
—my first. This was to be a habit with us thereafter: the water, the
branlette
(not that it amounted to much!).
Even then my tastes were well defined. “Put your finger up my ass!” I told her. “Or I’ll tell the
abbé
what a slut you are!
“Your uncle knows what I am,” Pélisse retorted, her eyes flashing. “And you, monsieur le marquis,
are a monster.”
“If that is so,” I replied, made fearless by what I had seen, “I am in good company.”
This rebuke so impressed her that she no longer teased me but, instead, looked at me with new interest. She told my uncle that sooner or later I would be “a force to be reckoned with.”
“And what sort of ‘force’ would that be?” We were all together in the carriage; Genzano just visible in the near distance.
“Of
Nature
!
“
said I without hesitating. “I wish to be a force of Nature.”
“Nature! No less!” My uncle the
abbé
roared with laughter. “He wants to be a force of Nature!” He was still laughing as we entered Genzano.
The next day was Corpus Christi. Uncle insisted we eat
simply
—his joke! We ate no meat, it is true, but were served a feast of fish: raviolis stuffed with a
hachis
of crayfish served in a sauce of curried cream; the white, sweet flesh of eels
en croûte;
a salmon
pâté;
and for dessert a hazelnut
soufflé
, the
spécialité
of Genzano.…
Ensuite
, a little walk about the square and then off to bed and the brief ceremony Pelisse had instigated with such generosity.
“Take
ma broquette
into your mouth!” I cried, “just as you do to Uncle!”
“Fa! I dare not!” said she. “Your morsel is so small, I fear I might swallow it!”
“It is well attached!” I insisted, giving her the demonstration.
Thus was I indoctrinated in the ways of the world by my uncle’s mistress. Other mistresses awaited at home; the Château de Saumane was in truth a harem and a bordello rolled into one, and my uncle’s fortune and position a veritable Aladdin’s lamp! I was brought up to believe that the privileges of power were boundless—or, rather, that they were bounded only by the imagination.
Now I would turn from this conviction with horror, but until the abuses of power were made so palpable,
beneath my very nose
, you might say, I lived by the Laws of Vanity and Excess. Laws written in tears, fuck, and blood. Nothing at this time would give me greater solace than an affectionate tumble with a compassionate soul!
But I am forgetting: We are still in Genzano.…Sometime before dawn I heard subtle noises from the street below and awakened for an instant. Smells of flowers and freshly chopped heather filled the air and wafted into the room. I fell back into slumber again, only to awaken, perhaps an hour later, when the streets echoed with cries and the sounds of cart wheels on the cobbles. The air rang with voices: A girl was singing, a boy joined in; I heard laughter, shouts, a joyous clatter. In a dim corner of the room, my tutor slept fitfully, his hands clutching at his own throat as though he might strangle himself in his dreams.
I leapt from bed and, opening the shutters, peered down into the street, where elaborate and exquisite
tableaux
of multicolored flowers were forming with a swift and inspired sorcery before my eyes. These
tableaux
were of the armorial bearings of the local lords, the bishop, and the Holy See; griffins were rampant and lions
couchant
or
passant;
a sidelong-looking leopard was made entirely of purple pansies bedded down in the damp grass. Flittermice, a marigold tiger in a field of red roses, eight crocodiles, eleven lizards, twelve serpents—but no rabbits to be seen anywhere. Sheaves of wheat; chains of gold; one very white ass. I roused my tutor, and soon we were both delighting in the spectacle. Our room gave us a splendid view, and we took breakfast at the window, only later descending with Uncle and Pelisse
(poils au calice)
to join the admirably tricked out crowds and look on as monks, singing their insipid inanities, walked toward the church, trampling the gorgeous blossoms beneath their filthy feet. I was enraged to see the sumptuous images scattered and ruined and, with all the energy I could muster, shouted: “Miserable crows! Stop where you stand! Not a step farther!”
The
abbé
de Sade grabbed my ear and ordered me to remain silent, but such was my rage that it could not be contained.
It was then that the extraordinary happened: A little Italian dressed in a white frock, her head garlanded with white roses, summoning the fairy forces of a small tempest, began to cry out, too: “You are being very
bad
!
“
she shouted at the monks. “Surely Jesus hates to see you trampling His flowers!” The child imitated my rage exactly. “Miserable crows!” For the briefest instant we shared a burning look of jubilant defiance and complicity. “Boors!” she cried. “Brigands!”
This little scene so amused the
abbé
that he let go my ear and began to laugh. Pelisse joined in, and even my tutor—always so melancholy—smiled. Better still, the little Italian was laughing, as was her blushing and, it must be said,
superbe
mama.
“The children are of the same mind,
signora,”
said the
abbé
de Sade to the lady, acknowledging with an admiring look her uniquely seductive qualities. He bowed; she gave him her hand to kiss.
“My little Alessandra is a wild one.” She smiled. “I shall need to marry her quickly!”
“I will never marry!” cried the sublime Alessandra, shaking her black curls and tossing me another of her fiery glances. As it turned out, she was nine, a gifted student of the harp and as naughty as she was beautiful. To our delight, her mama’s own faith in the Catholic Church had been made both porous and malleable by the full radiance of her charms and a heretical interest in the pagan mysteries. As she and her daughter were to my uncle’s taste, we all ended up together in church—a service made palatable by the artifices of music, candles, and a profusion of flowers. Mass over, my uncle suggested dinner. His behavior, as always in the world, was cheerful and courteous beyond reproach; tactfully submerged in a jealous rage, Pélisse was silent and my tutor unusually entertaining. As the adults chatted about the Templars and the Cathars, the best way to stuff a turkey, and the escapades and intrigues that, Alessandra’s mama explained, “animated Genzano year-round,” I held Alessandra’s hand, concealed as it was beneath a voluminous linen napkin.
I recall that we sat on a ruined but glorious balcony with a view of lazy gardens, woodlands, and towers; and that we dined at an emerald-green table.
“The harp is like the heart,” Alessandra lisped. Her eyes were the bluest I have ever seen. “Its strings must be handled with delicacy.”
You see how I have never forgotten Alessandra, who, stunning at nine, must have been a danger to public safety at nineteen! The very thought of that beauty in full flower is enough—even after all these years!—to make me roar. That afternoon in Genzano, I fell in love. And then, upon our return to France and Uncle’s isolated castle, how many nights beneath the blind stars, a captive of those grim stones, did I dream of the flower pictures of Genzano and of the child whose memory, like the memory of a melody, became fainter and fainter with the passing of the years—only to burst into flame for an instant today.
