Who Made Stevie Crye? (22 page)

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THE MONKEY’S BRIDE

by

Stevenson Crye

Born of noble parents
in a far northern country where summer lasts an eyeblink and winter goes on like rheumatism, Cathinka was a formidable young woman nearly six feet tall. In mid-July of her eighteenth year, with the snows in grudging retreat, she passed her time roaming the upland meadows in the company of a stocky, fair-haired young man named Waldemar, whose diffident suit she encouraged because his parents were well situated in the village, and also because a startling flare-up of inspiration or temper would sometimes transfigure the dull serenity of his pale eyes. Cathinka still believed that in any important conflict between Waldemar and her, she would prevail. If she did not prevail, it would be by choice, as a secret means of persuading her future husband that she did
not
triumph in every decision or argument.

Fate dismantled Cathinka’s plans in the same indifferent way that a child’s fingers mutilate a milkweed pod.

Arriving home one evening from an outing with Waldemar, Cathinka found her mother and father awaiting her in the drafty library where her father kept his accounts and scribbled away at his memoirs. Once complete, the young woman reflected, these memoirs must assuredly take their place among the dullest documents ever perpetrated by human conceit. What had her father ever done but oversee his vast holdings, engage in stupid lawsuits, and so shamefully coddle Cathinka’s mother that the poor woman now regarded each blast of winter wind as a cruel assault on her personal comfort?

That both the Count and the Countess appeared flustered by her arrival annoyed, as well as surprised, Cathinka. Then she saw that they had a guest.

Wrapped from head to foot in rich white silk, a hood cloaking his features, a cape covering his hands, this personage stood between two of the black-marble pillars supporting her father’s gallery of incunabula. Although several inches shorter than Cathinka, the visitor commanded her awe not only because of his outlandish appearance, but also because of his bearing and odor. He slouched within his elegant garments, and the smell coming from him, although not offensive, suggested an exotic ripeness near to rot. Stammering, Cathinka’s father introduced their visitor as Ignacio de la Selva, her betrothed. She and the newcomer would be married in this hall in a ceremony one week hence.

“I am Waldemar’s, and he is mine!” Cathinka raged, storming back and forth like a Valkyrie. She cowed her father and reduced the shrewish Countess to a stingy sprinkle of tears. Out of the corner of her eye, however, Cathinka could see that Don Ignacio had neither fallen back nor flinched. He was peering out of his concealing hood as if enjoying the spectacle of an elemental maiden defending the romantic Republicanism of her young life. “Never have I heard of this man, Father! Not once have either of you mentioned him, and suddenly, your selection of the moment an irony too bitter to be laughable, you announce that I am to be this stranger’s bride! No!” she concluded, clenching her hands into fists. “No, I think not!”

Don Ignacio strode forward from the alcove and threw back his silken cowl. This gesture elicited a sharp cry from Cathinka’s mother and prompted the abashed Count to turn sadly aside. For a moment Cathinka thought that their visitor was wearing a mask, a head stocking of white wool or velvet. However, it quickly became clear that Ignacio de la Selva bore on his scrunched shoulders the face and features of a monkey, albeit a man-sized monkey. Indeed, his abrupt gesture of unveiling had also disclosed simian hands, wrists, and forearms, along with an ascot of white fur. Her betrothed—God have mercy!—was not a man like Waldemar, but a beast whose diminutive cousins were sometimes seen with gypsies and tawdry traveling circuses.

Cathinka barked a sardonic laugh. Seldom, however, did she disobey her parents, preferring to browbeat them by daughterly degrees to her own point of view. Tonight they would not be browbeaten; they deflected her rage with silence. Recognizing, at last, the hopelessness of converting them, Cathinka fell weeping to the flagstones. To escape marrying the monkey-faced stranger, she might kill herself or flee across a glacial desert—but, without the Count’s blessing, she would not marry Waldemar, either. Even as she wept, then, she began to adjust her sentiments into painful alignment with her parents’.

Perhaps her intended one (whose white whiskers and hideously sunken eyes must surely betray his great age) would not long outlive their wedding day. After all, his face reminded her of those chiseled icons of Death so common to the Lutheran churchyards of her country; and if Don Ignacio died within two or three years, or even if he persisted as many as five, she could take to Waldemar the amplified dowry, and experience, of a young widow. If she could tolerate for a while the unwanted affections of her father’s choice, perhaps she could increase her value and desirability to her own. Even so, Cathinka continued to weep and wring her hands histrionically.

“Come,” said the Count, rebuking his daughter without yet looking at her; “Don Ignacio deserves better. When I was young, a foreigner in a land of jaguars and snakes, I stumbled into circumstances that nearly proved fatal. For trespassing upon an arcane local custom, the chief of an Amazonian Indian tribe wished to deprive me of various parts of my body—but the timely intercession of Ignacio de la Selva spared me these sacrifices, Cathinka, and in gratitude I promised to grant him any boon within my power, either at that moment or at some future moment when my fortunes had improved. ‘Twenty years from now,’ said Don Ignacio, ‘is soon enough.’ Until this noontide I had forgotten my promise, but my friend —” nodding at the monkey-man—“arrived today to remind me of it, and the boon he demanded above all others, darling Cathinka, was my only daughter’s hand in marriage. I have broken a Commandment or two, but never a promise, and you must surrender to this fated arrangement without any further complaints or accusations.”

Said Don Ignacio, stepping forward, “I am a former member of the Cancerian Order of Friars Minor Capuchins, the white-throated branch. I renounced my vows many years ago, when my fellow monks abandoned me to take part in the latest leftist uprising or the most recent rain-forest gold rush (I forget which), and you will live with me, Cathinka, in the deserted jungle monastery that I have made my castle. We will raise our children unencumbered by political or religious dogma, and you will find freedom in the expansive prison of my devotion.”

Gazing up from the floor into her betrothed’s deep-set eyes, the unwilling bride-to-be replied, “But you’re a papist, while I am a devotee of Danton and the Abbé Sièyes.”

“Indeed, lovely one, we hail from different times, not just different worlds. However, I am no longer what you accuse me of being, a papist, and you are only a hypothetical revolutionary. Why, you cannot even bring yourself to rebel against the benign tyranny of your father and mother.”

At these words, the Countess swooned. Cathinka revived her with smelling salts while the Count and Don Ignacio looked on with unequal measures of interest. The matter was settled.

Because of Don Ignacio’s adamant prohibitions against displays of piety or politics, the wedding went forward without benefit of Lutheran clergy or any guests but a few befuddled family retainers. The Countess wept not only to see her daughter taken, but also to sanctify the bitterness with which the ceremony’s want of pomp imbued her. She had expected nobility from every corner of the land to pack the village cathedral. Instead she must listen to her own husband lead the couple in vows that Don Ignacio had composed himself, and she heard in his feeble voice the pitiful piping of a seagull on a forsaken strand.

Don Ignacio’s vows placed great stress on fidelity. Cathinka was certain that the erstwhile Capuchin had written them with her passion for Waldemar firmly in mind.

As for Waldemar himself, earlier that afternoon Cathinka had parted from him without once intimating that she was shortly to be married to another. With difficulty (for Waldemar did not enjoy those games in which lovers rehearse their steadfastness in the face of various hindrances to their love), she had induced the young man to declare that, should she vanish from his life without warning, he would remain a bachelor for at least ten years before losing faith in her intention to return. As she affirmed the last of her vows to Don Ignacio, Cathinka pondered the rigorous pledge she had extracted from her true lover. Perhaps she had been too stringent. Perhaps, in speaking to the elegant but ugly Don Ignacio words she could never mean in her heart, she had committed a mortal sin. . . .

To seal their vows, the wedding couple did not kiss (a departure from tradition for which Cathinka was deeply thankful), but grasped hands and stared into each other’s eyes. This ritual had its own unwelcome points, however, for Don Ignacio’s gaze seemed to propel Cathinka through a maelstrom of memories to some unfathomable part of herself, while his clawlike hands sent through her palms a force like rushing water or channeled wind.

The journey to Cathinka’s new home took many weeks. She and Don Ignacio shared carriages and ship cabins, but never the same bed. The former friar wore his white silk cloak and cowl whenever they ventured into teeming thoroughfares or the hard-bitten company of deck hands, but he was careless of these garments in the privacy of their makeshift quarters, whether a dusty inn room or the cramped cabin of a sailing vessel. Although he had no shame of his befurred and gnarled body, Cathinka would not even let down her hair in his presence; she slept in her clothes, washing and changing only when her husband resignedly absented himself so that she could do so. Their enforced proximity had made Cathinka more critically conscious of the fact that Don Ignacio was a monkey; his distinctive smell had begun to pluck at her nerves as if it were a personality trait akin to sucking his teeth or drumming his claws on a tabletop. She had married an animal!

Let a drunken sailor put a knife in his back, Cathinka profanely prayed. Let him fall overboard during a storm. But God disdained these pleas.

At last, by pirogue through the narrows of a rain-forest river, the newlyweds arrived at the crumbling monastery in the Tropic of Cancer where Don Ignacio had made his home. In pressing his case before Cathinka’s parents he had described this rambling edifice as his castle, but to his horrified bride it more closely resembled a series of rotting stables tied together by thatched breezeways and tangled over with lianas and languid, copper-colored boa constrictors. Satan had gift-wrapped this castle. The heat was unbearable, the fetor of decay ubiquitous, and the garden inside the cloister a small jungle surrounded by a much bigger one. Don Ignacio called the former monastery Alcázar de Cáncer, or Cancer Keep. His retainers were cockatoos and capuchin monkeys, salamanders and snakes, ant bears and armadillos. Cathinka wept.

Over the next several days, she sufficiently composed herself to explore her husband’s holdings. If she must live here, she would try to make, from shriveled grapes, a potable champagne. But what most surprised her was that, in spite of Cancer Keep’s outward disrepair, its dark and humid apartments housed a cunning variety of magic apparatuses, all of which Don Ignacio could awaken by a spoken word or a sorcerous wave of the hand. One machine lifted the contrapuntal melodies of Bach or Telemann into the torpid air; another disclosed the enigmatic behavior of strange human beings by projecting talking pictures of their activities against the otherwise opaque window of a wooden box; yet another contraption permitted Don Ignacio to converse with disembodied spirits that he said were thousands upon thousands of miles away. Cathinka was certain his communicants were demons.

The apparatus that most fascinated the young woman, however, was an unprepossessing machine that enabled Don Ignacio to translate his thoughts into neatly printed words, like those in a bona fide book. Cathinka liked this machine because she did not fear it. Its appearance was comprehensible, its parts had recognizable purposes, and the person sitting before it could direct its activities much in the way that a flautist controls a flute. Don Ignacio called the apparatus an electromanuscriber, and he taught his bride how to use it. She repaid him by continuing to spurn his tender invitations to consummate their union and by employing the machine to chronicle her ever-mounting aversion to both Cancer Keep and the autocratic simian lord who kept her there. She poured her heart out through her fingertips and cached the humidity-proofed pages proclaiming her hatred and homesickness in a teakwood manuscript box.

On errands myriad and mysterious Don Ignacio was often away in the jungle. Although he sometimes offered to take Cathinka, she refused to go. His enterprises were undoubtedly horrid, and she had retained her sanity only by committing to paper through the agency of the electromanuscriber each of her darkest fears and desires. She could not safely interrupt this activity. Occasionally in her husband’s absence, she would stop under a tree riotous with his retainers—birds of emerald plumage and ruby eye, monkeys in brown-velvet livery—to harangue them about their suzerain’s despotism and possible ways of ending it. The cockatoos clucked at her, the capuchins only yawned. Oddly, she was grateful for their want of ardor. She did not really wish Don Ignacio to be borne off violently.