V. (58 page)

The lady V., one of them for so long, now suddenly found herself excommunicated; bounced unceremoniously into the null-time of human love, without having recognized the exact moment as any but when Melanie entered a side door to Le Nerf on Porcepic's arm and time - for a while - ceased. Stencil's dossier has it on the authority of Porcepic himself, to whom V. told much of their affair. He repeated none of it then, neither at L'Ouganda nor anywhere else: only to Stencil, years later. Perhaps he felt guilty about his chart of permutations and combinations, but to this extent at least he acted like a gentleman. His description of them is a well-composed and ageless still-life of love at one of its many extremes; V. on the pouf, watching Melanie on the bed; Melanie watching herself in the mirror; the mirror-image perhaps contemplating V. from time to time. No movement but a minimum friction. And yet one solution to a most ancient paradox of love: simultaneous sovereignty yet a fusing-together. Dominance and submissiveness didn't apply; the pattern of three was symbiotic and mutual. V. needed her fetish, Melanie a mirror, temporary peace another to watch her have pleasure. For such is the self-love of the young that a social aspect enters in: an adolescent girl whose existence is so visual observes in a mirror her double; the double becomes a voyeur. Frustration at not being able to fragment herself into an audience of enough only adds to her sexual excitement. She needs, it seems, a real voyeur to complete the illusion that her reflections are, in fact, this audience. With the addition of this other - multiplied also, perhaps, by mirrors - comes consummation: for the other is also her own double. She is like a woman who dresses only to be looked at and talked about by other women: their jealousy, whispered remarks, reluctant admiration are her own. They are she.

As for V., she recognized - perhaps aware of her own progression toward inanimateness - the fetish of Melanie and the fetish of herself to be one. As all inanimate objects, to one victimized by them, are alike. It was a variation on the Porpentine theme, the Tristan-and-Iseult theme, indeed, according to some, the single melody, banal and exasperating, of all Romanticism since the Middle Ages: "the act of love and the act of death are one." Dead at last, they would be one with the inanimate universe and with each other. Love-play until then thus becomes an impersonation of the inanimate, a transvestism not between sexes but between quick and dead; human and fetish. The clothing each wore was incidental. The hair shorn from Melanie's head was incidental: only an obscure bit of private symbolism for the lady V.: perhaps, if she were in fact Victoria Wren, having to do with her time in the novitiate.

If she were Victoria Wren, even Stencil couldn't remain all unstirred by the ironic failure her life was moving toward, too rapidly by that prewar August ever to be reversed.

The Florentine spring, the young entrepreneuse with all spring's hope in her virtu, with her girl's faith that Fortune (if only her skill her timing held true) could be brought under control that Victoria was being gradually replaced by V.; something entirely different, for which the young century had as yet no name. We all get involved to an extent in the politics of slow dying, but poor Victoria had become intimate also with the Things in the Back Room.

If V. suspected her fetishism at all to be part of any conspiracy leveled against the animate world, any sudden establishment here of a colony of the Kingdom of Death, then this might justify the opinion held in the Rusty Spoon that Stencil was seeking in her his own identity. But such was her rapture at Melanie's having sought and found her own identity in her and in the mirror's soulless gleam that she continued unaware off-balanced by love; forgetting even that although the Distribution of Time here on pouf, bed and mirrors had been abandoned, their love was in its way only another version of tourism; for as tourists bring into the world as it has evolved part of another, and eventually create a parallel society of their own in every city, so the Kingdom of Death is served by fetish-constructions like V.'s, which represent a kind of infiltration.

What would have been her reaction, had she known? Again, an ambiguity. It would have meant, ultimately, V.'s death: in a sudden establishment here, of the inanimate Kingdom, despite all efforts to prevent it. The smallest realization - at any step: Cairo, Florence, Paris - that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might have shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became - to Freudian, behaviorist, man of religion, no matter - a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh. Or by contrast, might have reacted against the above which we have come to call Puritan, by journeying even deeper into a fetish-country until she became entirely and in reality - not merely as a love-game with any Melanie - an inanimate object of desire. Stencil even departed from his usual ploddings to daydream a vision of her now, at age seventy-six: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heart-pump through butyrate veins and arteries. Perhaps Stencil on occasion could have as vile a mind as any of the Crew - even a complex system of pressure transducers located in a marvelous vagina of polyethylene; the variable arms of their Wheatstone bridges all leading to a single silver cable which fed pleasure-voltages direct to the correct register of the digital machine in her skull. And whenever she smiled or grinned in ecstasy there would gleam her crowning feature: Eigenvalue's precious dentures.

Why did she tell so much to Porcepic? She was afraid, she said, that it wouldn't last; that Melanie might leave her. Glittering world of the stage, fame, foul-mind's darling of a male audience: the woe of many a lover. Porcepic gave her what comfort he could. He was under no delusions about love as anything but transitory, he left all such dreaming to his compatriot Satin, who was an idiot anyway. Sad-eyed, he commiserated with her: what else should he've done? Pass moral judgment? Love is love. It shows up in strange displacements. This poor woman was racked by it. Stencil however only shrugged. Let her be a lesbian, let her turn to a fetish, let her die: she was a beast of venery and he had no tears for her.

The night of the performance arrived. What happened then was available to Stencil in police records, and still told, perhaps, by old people around the Butte. Even as the pit orchestra tuned up there was loud argument in the audience. Somehow the performance had taken on a political cast. Orientalism - at this period showing up all over Paris in fashions, music, theater - had been connected along with Russia to an international movement seeking to overthrow Western civilization. Only six years before a newspaper had been able to sponsor an auto-race from Peking to Paris, and enlist the willing assistance of all the countries between. The political situation these days was somewhat darker. Hence, the turmoil which erupted that night in the Theatre Vincent Castor.

Before the first act was barely under way, there came catcalls and uncouth gestures from the anti-Porcepic faction. Friends, already calling themselves Porcepiquistes, sought to suppress them. Also present in the audience was a third force who merely wanted quiet enough to enjoy the performance and naturally enough tried to silence, prevent or mediate all disputes. A three-way wrangle developed. By intermission it had degenerated into near-chaos.

Itague and Satin screamed at each other in the wings, neither able to hear the other for the noise out in the audience. Porcepic sat by himself in a corner, drinking coffee, expressionless. A young ballerina, returning from the dressing room, stopped to talk.

"Can you hear the music?" Not too well, she admitted. "Dommage. How does La Jarretiere feel?" Melanie knew the dance by heart, she had perfect rhythm, she inspired the whole troupe. The dancer was ecstatic in her praise: another Isadora Duncan! Porcepic shrugged, made a moue. "If I ever have money again," more to himself than to her, "I'll hire an orchestra and dance company for my own amusement and have them perform L'Enlevement. Only to see what the work is like. Perhaps I will catcall too." They laughed sadly with one another, and the girl passed on.

The second act was even noisier. Only toward the end were the attentions of the few serious onlookers taken entirely by La Jarretiere. As the orchestra, sweating and nervous, moved baton-driven into the last portion, Sacrifice of the Virgin, a powerful, slow-building seven-minute crescendo which seemed at its end to've explored the furthest possible reaches of dissonance, tonal color and (as Le Figaro's critic put it next morning) "orchestral barbarity," light seemed all at once to be reborn behind Melanie's rainy eyes and she became again the Norman dervish Porcepic remembered. He moved closer to the stage, watching her with a kind of love. An apocryphal story relates that he vowed at that moment never to touch drugs again, never to attend another Black Mass.

Two of the male dancers, whom Itague had never left off calling Mongolized fairies, produced a long pole, pointed wickedly at one end. The music, near triple-forte, could be heard now above the roaring of the audience. Gendarmes had moved in at the rear entrances, and were trying ineffectually to restore order. Satin, next to Porcepic, one hand on the composer's shoulder, leaned forward, shaking. It was a tricky bit of choreography, Satin's own. He'd got the idea from reading an account of an Indian massacre in America. While two of the other Mongolians held her, struggling and head shaven, Su Feng was impaled at the crotch on the point of the pole and slowly raised by the entire male part of the company, while the females lamented below. Suddenly one of the automaton handmaidens seemed to run amok, tossing itself about the stage. Satin moaned, gritted his teeth. "Damn the German," he said, "it will distract." The conception depended on Su Feng continuing her dance while impaled, all movement restricted to one point in space, an elevated point, a focus, a climax.

The pole was now erect, the music four bars from the end. A terrible hush fell over the audience, gendarmes and combatants all turned as if magnetized to watch the stage. La Jarretiere's movements became more spastic, agonized: the expression on the normally dead face was one which would disturb for years the dreams of those in the front rows. Porcepic's music was now almost deafening: all tonal location had been lost, notes screamed out simultaneous and random like fragments of a bomb: winds, strings, brass and percussion were indistinguishable as blood ran down the pole, the impaled girl went limp, the last chord blasted out, filled the theater, echoed, hung, subsided. Someone cut all the stage lights, someone else ran to close the curtain.

It never opened. Melanie was supposed to have worn a protective metal device, a species of chastity belt, into which the point of the pole fit. She had left it off. A physician in the audience had been summoned at once by Itague as soon as he saw the blood. Shirt torn, one eye blackened, the doctor knelt over the girl and pronounced her dead.

Of the woman, her lover, nothing further was seen. Some versions tell of her gone hysterical backstage, having to be detached forcibly from Melanie's corpse; of her screaming vendetta at Satin and Itague for plotting to kill the girl. The coroner's verdict, charitably, was death by accident. Perhaps Melanie, exhausted by love, excited as at any premiere, had forgotten. Adorned with so many combs, bracelets, sequins, she might have become confused in this fetish-world and neglected to add to herself the one inanimate object that would have saved her. Itague thought it was suicide, Satin refused to talk about it, Porcepic suspended judgment. But they lived with it for many years.

Rumor had it that a week or so later the lady V. ran off with one Sgherraccio, a mad Irredentist. At least they both disappeared from Paris at the same time; from Paris and as far as anyone on the Butte could say, from the face of the earth.

chapter fifteen

Sahha

I

Sunday morning around nine the Rollicking Boys arrived at Rachel's after their night of burglary and lounging in the park. Neither had slept. On the wall was a sign:

I am heading for the Whitney. Kisch mein tokus, Profane.

"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin," said Stencil.

"Ho, hum," said Profane, preparing to sack out on the floor. In came Paola with a babushka over her head and a brown paper bag which clinked in her arms.

"Eigenvalue got robbed last night," she said. "It made the front page of the Times." They all attacked the brown bag at once, coming up with the Times in sections and four quarts of beer.

"How about that," Profane said, scrutinizing the front page. "Police are expecting to make an arrest any time now. Daring early morning burglary."

"Paola," said Stencil, behind him. Profane flinched. Paola, holding the church key, turned to gaze past Profane's left ear at what glittered in Stencil's hand. She kept quiet, eyes motionless.

"Three are in it. Now."

At last she looked back at Profane: "You're coming to Malta, Ben?"

"No," but weak.

"Why?" he said. "Malta never showed me anything. Anywhere you care to go in the Med there is a Strait Street, a Gut."

"Benny, if the cops -"

"Who are the cops to me? Stencil's got the teeth." He was terrified. It had only now occurred to him that he'd broken the law.

"Stencil, buddy, what do you say to one of us - going back there with a toothache and figuring out a way . . ." He tapered off. Stencil kept quiet.

"Was all that rigmarole with the rope just a way to get me to come along? What's so special about me?"

Nobody said anything. Paola looked about ready to burst from her tracks, bawling and looking to be held by Profane.

All of a sudden there was noise in the hallway. Somebody began banging on the door. "Police," a voice said.