No one dies from love, p.20
No One Dies from Love, page 20
It is only a simple sewing room. Hugo marches inside, and I hold my breath as he searches the small space from end to end, nothing about it resembling a boat whatsoever. There is no one here, neither person nor creature, and I cannot account for what occurred in this unassuming place, its own kind of sealed room. I do not know whether to feel relieved or tormented, whether my encounter was the result of a demonic visitation or simply a fantastical creation of my own fractured mind.
“See?” I cross my arms over my chest. “Now do you believe me?”
“Of course, my darling. I apologize for overreacting.” His expression slackens, and relief colors his cheeks. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rest for a few minutes? Can I get you something to drink, perhaps? I am sorry you are not feeling well.”
“Do not trouble yourself,” I say, and shut the door behind us. “Everything will be fine. I am feeling better already.”
I feign a smile, and curse myself for deceiving him. I may be a practiced liar, but soon I will become a prodigious one, and eventually Hugo will be unable to see through my deceptions to my authentic self.
“Shall we?” I take his arm and lead him down the hall, my thighs damp with saliva and my own fevered excretions. We descend the stairs and rejoin the party, our fellow revelers blind in their merriment to all that walks among them.
I wake in the night and reach for Hugo, only to find the space beside me empty. And so I step out of bed and throw on a negligee, the dogs fast asleep before the cindering hearth as I slip out of the room and down the stairs in darkness. In the strange, crepuscular shine through the windows, I make my way to the front door, which I discover has been left open. I cross the threshold, the air heady with the scent of night flowers as I enter the garden, the grass beneath my bare feet slicked with cool dew.
I realize now that I am dreaming, and stare back at the house and its wide face, its eleven shutters closed to the evening like slumbering eyelids. All save the center shutter, which is thrown wide, the glass of its window visible in the moon’s mellow glow. The sealed room has been opened.
The soft crunch of wet leaves, and I turn. There is a slight figure adjacent to the elm tree, past the drive and the far side of the fountain. A crouched and half-hidden shape, barely perceptible in the blue moonlight but there nevertheless, not ten yards away. I am too scared to move any closer, and yet I know I must puzzle out what is happening, that the answer will comprise the most important truth I have ever known.
“Maxa?” I whisper. Perhaps she has decided to pay me a visit after all, here in this twilit realm. “Maxa? Is that you?” The figure shifts behind the tree so that it is hidden, and I force myself forward. One foot before the next, and it takes all my courage to make the slow and inexorable walk to the tree and the fleeting shape beyond.
When I finally reach the elm, I travel counterclockwise around its formidable trunk, its branches swollen and dripping with moisture. There is no one here any longer, and only now do I realize I am holding my breath. I exhale a cloud of perfumed smoke and lean against the rough bark, my relief laced with a disturbing sense of unease, the source of which I cannot place. I close my eyes, and listen to the trill of a nightingale chirruping in the heavy leafage above.
“Have you forgotten me so soon?”
The stranger’s molasses voice shocks me to attention. A melodic baritone spoken everywhere at once, as if sung by a midnight choir of the damned. I attempt to run, but my spine is adhered to the bark, fixed to the elm’s rough trunk like a fly drowning in amber. My hands stick to the tree as well, and I thrash and struggle as I try to free myself. Soon, however, I am immobilized altogether.
“Come.” The invisible fiend whispers into the shell of my ear, the disembodied word seductive, ravenous. “There is so much more I want to show you.”
The heavy branches quiver and bend, and the elm’s dense and unseasonal greenery ripples and descends, draping me in a foliate shroud. I am forced against the meat of the tree, pressed into its bark as if into wax. The pressure increases, and I flail in terror, my gaze rearing up toward the house and the darkening sky beyond. At the open shutter, I see the slight figure once more. This time, she stands in the window of the sealed room, her small face staring down at me as I struggle against the tree.
It is myself. Or rather my younger self, maybe nine years old, my tiny hands pressed to the glass and following the proceedings below with an inscrutable interest. Behind my younger self is my father Joaquin, who looks down upon me as well, his gaze conveying a similar stony fascination. He stands very close to her, too close, his large hands on her shoulders, body pressed against her back the way the tree is fixed to mine. He is invading her just the same.
Invading me.
Rather than being crushed against the tree’s unwavering mass, I begin to pass into it. My flesh melts against and inside its expanding trunk, until the tree has swallowed me.
Once absorbed, I am released, and drop down onto a ground of coarse sand. My racing heart begins to slow, and I get to my feet, alone inside a humid and dimly lit cavern. The wet surfaces are made of pocked shale or perhaps some kind of coral, the distant echo of crashing waves reverberating against the walls. I shuffle my way toward a slit of light cast upon the far side of the cave, and suck in my breath as I wriggle through the narrow egress.
At once, a vast sheet of churning gray light blinds me. After a few moments my eyes adjust, and I discover I am perched atop a carved pillar of uneven stone. The crude slab rises from the bed of a flooded grotto, the puckered bowl of craggy earth draped in gauzy mist and carved from an eroded cliff face over what must be untold millennia. There are more pillars on the shore around me in a rough approximation of a circle, reminiscent of the pylons of an abandoned dock. A large wave crashes over the enclosure, the impact spraying upward in an angry fan before spilling out and away, back to the rocky shore and sea beyond. Above the smell of the salted sea is another scent, that of incense, and I become lightheaded with the holy aroma of sacred space. Another crash, and I throw my arm over my face to shield myself from the angry water. The tide recedes once more, and when I steady myself again, I find I am no longer alone.
Roosted upon the other pillars are a collection of unmoving figures. Two or three dozen of them, women, mostly, though there is a man or two scattered among them. Of varying ages and shapes, every one of them bound with their hands clasped behind their backs, all naked and frozen in the formal poses of classical statuary. They are all blindfolded, eyes obscured with the same tattered material used to bind their hands, the dirty cloth tied in crude knots. One of them is standing, while another is seated, a third crouched, yet another curled onto her side in a fetal position. All are motionless. The roar of the sea, the screeching of famished gulls wheeling overhead, and the battered headland is alive with a charged menace.
The anticipation is broken by a low blast. The blare of a ram’s horn, or the keen of an unknown animal, the sound skirls over the encircling cliffs. A shadow appears at the slim parting in the cave walls, long gloved fingers extending and emerging to take hold of the rock before the towering shape emerges. He is attired in the dark loden skins of a sea creature, a dreadful hooded face beneath coiled horns, an uneasy commingling of human and animal. It is the man from the masquerade, Maxa’s tormentor, and now my own. He strides toward me in his patchwork armor of ambergris and black leather, and whether to call him man or beast is of little consequence. I decide he is either a thing that was once a man, or perhaps a creature in the process of radical evolution, soon to become something unintended by Mother Nature herself.
I think to leap from the pillar, only to find that my own hands are bound behind my back. I am also naked as well, and aside from the absence of a blindfold I could be any one of them, another bound effigy set out upon a rock as if in sacrifice to Poseidon himself. His narrow yellow eyes focus upon me, and I look away, down at the spot between my feet where I would stare when I was a child and my mother would berate me, furious at whatever fresh shame I had brought to her doorstep.
The creature nears, calcified feet clopping like hooves over the wet stone, the snap and crunch of shells and stones and mermaid’s purses as he rears up and leaps with ease to an adjacent perch. He lands with a hard thud of bone upon rock, and takes hold of one of the frozen women by the waist. Only this woman stiffens, resisting his grasp as he pulls her closer. Her feeble effort to squirm free causes him to smile, a flicker of the cruelest face of humanity in his delight.
His hands, which I had thought sheathed in a shiny black material, are in fact formed this way, fingers hooked like deadly talons. He slides one of them down her stomach, through her dark thatch of pubic hair and down between her bare thighs. My eyes return to her face, and I know this woman: it is Maxa herself. She is fixed in a paralyzing rictus, her anguished expression familiar from both the Guignol and her flat alike.
“Release her at once,” I command, my voice weak and unassuming. His smile widens at my lackluster demand.
“Why would I do such a thing? She is luxuriant with feeling, is she not? As am I,” he says, the taut animal skin at his crotch straining as he grows engorged. “She chose to join me. To become a part of greater things, surrender to a sensuous realm that overflows with a dark voluptuousness. The same way you have given yourself over to me.”
“I chose no such thing,” I say, with as much volume as I can muster. “And if Maxa made any sort of pact with you, I can assure you that she was unaware of the terms.”
I chafe against that which binds me, but my ties fail to loosen. “What are you?” I ask. “Are you man or demon? Or are you both? What am I to make of you?”
He smiles once more, and my blood runs cold, naked skin turning to ice in the suddenly frigid wind. “I am many things,” he says. “Many things, to many people. You may call me Monsieur Guillard.”
He leaps across our divide and lands beside me with a hard thud that shakes the stone beneath my feet, the smell of his animal musk commingling with that of the sea, the same intoxicating admixture that captivated me earlier at the masquerade. It is a continuation of the very same exchange of pleasure and pain, a danse macabre performed as a pas de deux. He can find me anywhere, at any time that he desires, and this dance will continue as long as he wills the music to play.
“What is it that you want?” I whisper. “Tell me, and it shall be yours. Only let Maxa free. I beg of you that.”
“You know what it is I want.” His hand caresses my breast, skin prickling as he presses himself against me. Slick wet fingers travel down my body to my pelvis, until he finds the moistness between my legs. “I want the light inside of you, sweet Anaïs. As I once craved the light inside them,” and he sweeps a gloved hand toward the cliffs and the statues dotting the shoreline, all the many bodies forever suspended in their disturbing tableaux.
“You sought this very same annihilation,” he continues, his words a menacing rumble. The sky darkens with clouds, voice accentuated by a heavy growl of thunder as a storm rapidly approaches from the sea. “Like them, you came to me seeking oblivion. And now that you have tasted it, there is no turning back. For oblivion has already tasted you.”
He hunches down, his mouth traveling my skin, and my gaze drops to the ground. There upon the sand lies a scattering of shards, and it is only once my eyes focus that I recognize them as the fragments of a sculpture, the shattered remnants of one of the women. The pieces are large enough that I am able to piece them together in my mind, and glimpse the woman that they once embodied, her face long and equine like that of a Modigliani.
I stumble and rear back, and in doing so I face the cave mouth, where the woman with the Modigliani face watches from the darkness. She raises a finger to her lips, her wrist cuffed by torn cloth, though her binds are severed. Another figure hovers in the shadows behind her, an older woman, stooped and emaciated. What I can grasp of the older woman is weathered and formidable, hair a tangle of matted knots, her sticklike limbs corded with muscle and adorned with an array of beaded bracelets of turquoise and amber and gold. She holds a finger to her lips as well, imploring me to remain silent, lest their presence be given away.
I shift my body toward Maxa. Her blindfold is gone now, and she raises her head high, cheeks glimmering in the overcast light. Her once-obscured eyes are sewn shut, wisps of silver thread at her temples. Her jaw drops open and continues to lower, unhinging to an inhuman length so that her mouth becomes its own vast cave. As I watch in horror, she emits a savage cry of terror.
I awaken in my bed, a scream upon my lips. Shuddering and cold, I place my hand upon Hugo’s back, his bare shoulders still shimmering with glitter from the masquerade. I want to wake him so that he can hold me and comfort me, tell me that my terrifying encounter was only a dream. Only a dream, a dream. But not a dream alone. A dream also tells the truth, the same way fiction tells the truth, once it is distilled from reality. The same way I use this diary and my emotions and experiences as the fertile foundation for my stories. Indeed, there no longer seems to be a difference between dream and reality, between fiction and real life, as the barriers between realms are shattered one after the next.
Soon, the sun will rise over Louveciennes. Over the city of Paris proper, the whole of the continent and the waking world as well. Come morning, I must have a new resolve, make myself into a new form of creature myself. This being must be capable of resisting the embrace of my would-be tormentor Guillard, of vanquishing this brute birthed out of the vast and wine-dark sea, lest I succumb to the unknowable depths of his nightmare realm. And if I write this new resolve into being, it becomes a kind of truth itself. In order to transform my very life, the diary must turn grimoire. I must become my own sorceress at last.
I cling tighter to Hugo, who can do nothing to help me at all. Only I can save myself, now.
The next day, I return to the Guignol. The main entrance is unlocked, and I let myself in, the heat of the day diminished as I leave the bright sun for the dusty gloom of the former chapel. At once a woman’s blood-curdling cries echo across the empty foyer. My stomach knots, and I tighten my cape as I hurry forward, sure that I have found Maxa in her final moments, that the midnight fiend that stalks us both has set himself upon her once more.
When I enter the theatre proper, however, I find two players, a man and a woman, mapping out a scene upon the stage amid their rehearsal. Of course the scream was part of the act: any number of ghastly cries are bound to echo against the walls and ceiling and balcony of the Guignol, on any given day and hour. I linger at the back to watch, beside one of the private boxes that functioned as a confessional when this building was still a chapel.
“Louder, Hélène, louder!” the director barks from the front row, cigarette smoke spewing as he gestures with abandon, his hands glimmering with rings on every finger. “The audience is only going to find the lighthouse keeper menacing if you increase your hysteria. Remember, his face has already been slashed by now.”
“Louder. Of course. I understand.”
“Then do it again, please,” he says, his tone softening. “I’ve already had enough headaches today.”
After a few minutes, a stage manager emerges from the wings. He uses the small set of stairs to step down into the pews, and he approaches me. “This is a closed rehearsal, mademoiselle,” he whispers curtly. “I am going to have to ask you to leave.”
“My apologies, but I am a friend of Maxa’s. Is she here?”
“Unfortunately, no. She has missed the last three performances. We had to call in her understudy,” he says, and casts a baleful look at the actress onstage. “If you see her, please make it clear that Monsieur Jouvin is in a rage, and that he plans to let her go if she does not return at once. He is well aware of her vices, and any irresponsibility will no longer be excused.”
“I will let her know,” I say, the wind going out of me. “Thank you.”
Once I leave the Guignol, I hurry to Maxa’s place. I hope against hope that I will find her there, that she has not been harmed, or indulged in too much opium for her body to withstand. I ring the bell, and wait at the door to the building. When a distractible family exits the premises, I scuttle inside the vestibule and climb the stairs to her flat.
“Maxa?” I call as I knock on her door. “Maxa, are you inside?” I turn the knob, surprised to find it unlocked, and I slip inside. “Maxa?” I call again. “Maxa? Are you here?”
The apartment emits a chill of loneliness and abandonment, as if no one has been here in quite some time. It is dark as night here as well, the windows and walls draped in their heavy black velvets. I creep down the hall to the bedroom, terrified of what I might discover. That I might find Maxa bound and bloodied, tied to the bedposts in a grotesque display of gore and punctured flesh, a scene of blood-drenched Guignol staged by the unforgiving hand of Monsieur Guillard.
The room is empty, however, rumpled bedsheets the only vague reminder of the carnal scene I had witnessed when last I was here. I search the flat as best I can, comb through her drawers and her cosmetics kits, determined to find any clue as to her whereabouts. Did Maxa manage to flee, as is my profound wish? It is true there is no overt sign of struggle, yet I am no detective, and I wonder anew about contacting the police.
Though what would I say if I did? No doubt they would point to her opium consumption as confirmed by the Guignol, confirmable by anyone who may have crossed her path. Maxa was correct: the authorities would be of no use whatsoever.
Just as I am about to take my leave, one of the pictures pinned to the back of the door flutters to the ground, and I bend to retrieve it. It is the photograph of the young woman in a lace slip, curvy and Amazonian and luxuriating upon a red divan. Something about the woman’s ambivalent expression—how it is both welcoming and observant, the eyes vulnerable and unpitying in equal measure—causes me stare at her image for some time. Who is she?
And all of a sudden I know. The young woman standing in the mouth of the cave, her binds untied as she watched from the shadows, an imposing older woman lurking just behind her. The one whose statue was shattered upon the rocky sand, whose face resembled a Modigliani, and I bring the picture closer to my face. The woman on the dark beach, and this woman in the photograph: they appear to be one and the same.
