Beauty and the Beast
I woke early this morning.
The night had not passed, but lay pressed down upon the face of the earth like a soft and murderous pillow upon the face of a sleeping baby. The house was quiet amidst the hushed conspiracy of the Forest. And if night things were abroad, then they went about their nefarious business in silence.
Only the cock -- the poor, doomed cock -- proclaimed his foolish mastery of the stable yard. He little suspected the wily old she-fox would have him by daybreak.
And though I heard her strike, and the snap of her jaws, and the hysterical, brief cluckings of his concubines, yet I could not bring myself to stir from my bed.
For my heart was with the vixen, who rose betimes, and lived not well -- but well enough -- on whatever her own wits could find her.
* * *
"That's enough for his morning, puss."
I set down my pen and stroke the suede of his ears with a stranger's hand. Arthritis has robbed me of my fingers -- they are as twisted and wooden as the roots of old trees. I am forced to write slowly now, cursed in my bones by Time, that cruel misogynist, who has avenged himself on me for the liberties I took with him earlier.
Diderot growls his assent to pleasure. (I have named all my cats for the Philosophers.) His brindled fur beneath my hand is warm and creaturely; against my will it evokes in me forbidden memories of desire. He sprawls amongst the papers on my bureau with an ease I cannot bring myself to share. I let him stay -- but in my heart I know his presence here in the sanctum of my bedchamber is a small act of perfidiousness towards the ghost of my husband, who was never so freely admitted.
"Opportunist," I tease him, tickling the warm snowdrift of his belly.
Diderot yawns and taps my arm with his paw.
* * *
I came to this land as bruised as an apple -- a fingered and defective bride. I came in response to a letter, some sinister business between my husband and my father, a furtive bargain I never understood.
Know that a great wrong has been done to me. This rose is bleeding from its broken stem.
And one phrase in particular has always troubled me:-
Any attempt at denial, of acts longed for, real or imagined, will be duly recorded and taken as evidence of your guilt.
For whatever else he was, my husband was a denizen of the Forest, where the gnarled roots of meaning lie deep in the subconscious, and life itself has the malleable fabric of a dream.
I have quoted not from memory, but precisely. A copy of his letter lies unfolded on my desk; fissured and cratered by handling until the once- immaculate pages have acquired the texture of an old woman's skin. I remember the day that I found it -- a bleak day in the interminable summer of my youth, when the warm air buzzed with the scents of the garden and I wandered the silent Palace with an aching heart. Of my husband, there was no sign. He frequently absented himself; he never gave a reason. Yet some rooms had the air of being but recently vacated. In others, a fire was laid; the dry sticks dumb, as though in anticipation of their owner's kindling match.
Through ballrooms and staterooms I wandered; through salons white-shrouded like a woman's guilty conscience -- each one nursing beneath its dust covers small triumphs of the fabricator's art. Was this, truly, a newish panel by Boucher or Fragonard? And there, tucked away in an alcove, perhaps an unknown Bernini bronze?
Once, to my delight, I opened the door to a great library. It was, at first sigh, as large as a battleship, and the wooden shelves were lined from top to bottom with pungent, leathery books. For a moment I stood there, silent and humble in the doorway, and my eyes hungered respectfully across the many volumes of ancient knowledge. But as I watched, the vital timbers of the bookshelves seemed to creak and sag beneath the weight of that redundant learning. And then, instead of wisdom, I smelt merely the stale odours of neglected tomes.
Next I stumbled upon a picture gallery, so long it seemed to narrow, like a ship's telescope, to a point in the distance. But the portraits themselves made me shudder. For hung along the walls, in infinite regression, were the endlessly replicated faces of my husband's gloomy ancestors.
And it seemed to me, in my unease, that they eyed my fructiferous body with a greed more sinister than lust.
* * *
At length I descended the staircase, a frozen river of Sienna marble. Then I scurried like an insect beneath the vast, temporal vaulting of the entrance hall. I'd been brought to this place as its mistress -- but my instinct was to cower in the corners and tremble. I could feel all my loving, modest, human hopes -- so small, so timid, so reasonable -- being crushed out of shape by the dense and funereal weight of that immensity.
But I was bright and full of dreams. I was alone here, with the Beast as my mate and faceless automata as my servants. But I nursed an ambition in my heart that was just like the small, hard, shining stone my husband had given me to mark our betrothal. And so I was not crushed. Out of that despair came a sudden, choking exultation. It made me want to shriek out loud and pirouette. For I was not yet tested in the fire. My future stretched before me filled with grandeur, but as removed from my own endeavours as the stars and galaxies that seemed to whirl above me, in a thousand separate, diamond-studded constellations, each one blazing out its glory in the remote spans of the ceiling.
It was a relief to inhale the befugged masculine intimacy of my husband's study. I knew the place well -- for it was where, after supper, he sometimes beat me at chess. (And always so soundly and so meditatively that the moves themselves assumed an air of ponderous flirtation.) To my surprise, the chess set was out again today, two chairs drawn up around the folding table, and the pieces abandoned as if in mid-game.
Intrigued, I studied their positions more closely. At first it seemed to me as if the grand strategies of my husband as usual gripped the board. But then I perceived that something else was at work -- something agile, quick-thinking and mercurial, loosed from the bonds of the past and unhindered by any traditional principle. And whatever it was, this lack of faith, it rendered my husband powerless.
At that moment, I glimpsed a dreadful freedom.
Perhaps this is what prompted me to rifle his desk, for I had been till then a dutiful child, and it had never before occurred to me that I might profit by disobedience.
And it was in his desk I found it, that fateful document, though not with the rest of his papers, but instead folded away carefully inside a ledger with a few crushed petals of a flower. How well I remember that sudden cascade of roses, as I lifted the letter from the account book. Blood-red pigment stained the parchment and a perfume lingered with the heavier odours of animal musk and tobacco in the drawer. A strange letter, that seems still stranger on re-reading, the words as cold and empty as if they rang through marble halls.
* * *
Weary with the effort of remembering, I scrape back my chair. It is time to consult the Encyclopaedia, which I keep stacked, in clumsily stratified volumes, on the bureau beside my bed. (Although with the force of long habit, I avoid the sofa-table, since experience has taught me to be wary of any item of furniture in the Palace with wooden legs carved into paws.) I have my documents too -- the crumbling evidence of our union -- and of my oddly productive widowhood, which has lasted a dozen times as long.
When I open my notebook at random, this is what I find:-
Tonight at dinner I spoke five words to him. He did not speak at all.
Or turning the pages, further on:-
Today he told me I could use the library. But what good is this, when in every book I open I catch just a glimpse of meaning, before the letters rearrange themselves into a language I don't understand?
Recorded there too are the witchy, storm-filled nights, when the Forest crashed like an ocean and I retired early to bed. Hours without number, I would lay apprehensively in the darkness whilst my husband roared, and paced through the house. And sometimes, during those long nights of terrible privacy, when the world had contracted to the nervous beating of my heart, I would imagine -- no, more than imagine -- that I could hear his breathing outside my door. And how I wished then that he would simply knock and enter, like a hungry soldier at the door of a farmhouse kitchen, and not approach me like this, with feigned esteem -- a great Beast crawling on his belly, at once master and supplicant.
* * *
The woodland path grows steeper as the years slip by. But the path itself is so familiar that my crooked feet embrace each foothold like a friend. The Forest would not willingly let me stumble; not I, its chronicler and ancient Queen. Once again, I drag my body upwards, along these stony paths to the mausoleum.
But all the same, I keep my wits about me -- for who knows what fellow aberrants one might encounter, here in the wild lands beyond reason, when one rejects the witty logic of the salon for this banditry of dreams.
O what a joy it was, finally, to entomb him. That doleful patriarch whose rages shook the Forest. Even the monument is a gleeful act of treachery -- for in the first guilty transports of deliverance I had it marked with the symbols of grief.
Does it matter, that I lied? When over the years this story, of my perfection, has come to assume a sort of truth? (And in any case, no-one comes here now except me and the vixen, who finds it fit enough for her own purpose, and has reared many cubs in its shade.)
Dark memories prick me like the thorns on roses; a stab of pain and a trickle of blood. On the site of this tomb, there once stood a fountain. But I murdered him here, by refusing my love.
* * *
How my old bones ache. I have learned to mistrust the labile timbers of my body, a doubtful partner at the best of times, and reverting now to nature as my faculties fade. Oh, I have my books, I have my reputation. I have earned my place in history by giving shelter, and money, to Voltaire. But for all that, I'm still a prisoner. Here in the Forest and in the cold, diamond-scattered prisms of my own treacherous heart.
And now, with the seasons no longer so biddable, a sharp wind rises as though to taunt me. The brambles seem to snigger on the edge of the clearing, and a shiver of malice runs through the grasses. But, as is my custom, I sit for a while on the hard, leaf-blown steps at the foot of the monument, and whilst I rest I muse to myself, upon the strangeness of the land I inherited.
I examine the progress of time on the face of my favourite cherub. He's a love-child no longer, but a cold, stone orphan, cauled thickly in birdshit and cracked open by the weather. Venus, his mother, has lost her nose; she has a thrush's nest in her hair. It's a sad tableau, for unlike the Forest they cannot change or age. Instead, they are doomed to a slow corrosion.
I fight back the impulse to weep with self-pity. I made my choices, I built my tomb. And when the time comes, I will lie here, besides my husband, and form with him an effigy of perfect love.
And out there, somewhere, massing on the very borders of the Forest's imagination, are the grimy ranks of the Inheritors. They march in straight lines, with machetes and chainsaws. They will tear it up. They will chop it down..
Did I let them in?
From this cold throne I can see the Palace, spread out before me like the lost kingdom of Atlantis. It is all mine. Every part of it. Right at this moment, for as far as I can see, it all belongs to me.
But this morning, when I look at my empire, it is drowned beneath a mist. Only the roofscape is visible; the domes and towers, the hundreds of little spires. The gatehouse is smothered in ivy; tendrils have shattered a window, and flights of small birds dart in and out. And day by day, the Forest still encroaches, drawing who knows what richness and depth of meaning from that soft, black, corruptible earth.
* * *
You stole a flower. I demand recompense. I will take your youngest daughter, whose wit and beauty I have observed.
That's all I have, as evidence that he loved me -- a few cold words at the end of a letter. My husband is dead now, his pride buried with him. And dry leaves rattle in the corridors, as frangible as unwept tears.
THE END
I woke early this morning.
The night had not passed, but lay pressed down upon the face of the earth like a soft and murderous pillow upon the face of a sleeping baby. The house was quiet amidst the hushed conspiracy of the Forest. And if night things were abroad, then they went about their nefarious business in silence.
Only the cock -- the poor, doomed cock -- proclaimed his foolish mastery of the stable yard. He little suspected the wily old she-fox would have him by daybreak.
And though I heard her strike, and the snap of her jaws, and the hysterical, brief cluckings of his concubines, yet I could not bring myself to stir from my bed.
For my heart was with the vixen, who rose betimes, and lived not well -- but well enough -- on whatever her own wits could find her.
* * *
"That's enough for his morning, puss."
I set down my pen and stroke the suede of his ears with a stranger's hand. Arthritis has robbed me of my fingers -- they are as twisted and wooden as the roots of old trees. I am forced to write slowly now, cursed in my bones by Time, that cruel misogynist, who has avenged himself on me for the liberties I took with him earlier.
Diderot growls his assent to pleasure. (I have named all my cats for the Philosophers.) His brindled fur beneath my hand is warm and creaturely; against my will it evokes in me forbidden memories of desire. He sprawls amongst the papers on my bureau with an ease I cannot bring myself to share. I let him stay -- but in my heart I know his presence here in the sanctum of my bedchamber is a small act of perfidiousness towards the ghost of my husband, who was never so freely admitted.
"Opportunist," I tease him, tickling the warm snowdrift of his belly.
Diderot yawns and taps my arm with his paw.
* * *
I came to this land as bruised as an apple -- a fingered and defective bride. I came in response to a letter, some sinister business between my husband and my father, a furtive bargain I never understood.
Know that a great wrong has been done to me. This rose is bleeding from its broken stem.
And one phrase in particular has always troubled me:-
Any attempt at denial, of acts longed for, real or imagined, will be duly recorded and taken as evidence of your guilt.
For whatever else he was, my husband was a denizen of the Forest, where the gnarled roots of meaning lie deep in the subconscious, and life itself has the malleable fabric of a dream.
I have quoted not from memory, but precisely. A copy of his letter lies unfolded on my desk; fissured and cratered by handling until the once- immaculate pages have acquired the texture of an old woman's skin. I remember the day that I found it -- a bleak day in the interminable summer of my youth, when the warm air buzzed with the scents of the garden and I wandered the silent Palace with an aching heart. Of my husband, there was no sign. He frequently absented himself; he never gave a reason. Yet some rooms had the air of being but recently vacated. In others, a fire was laid; the dry sticks dumb, as though in anticipation of their owner's kindling match.
Through ballrooms and staterooms I wandered; through salons white-shrouded like a woman's guilty conscience -- each one nursing beneath its dust covers small triumphs of the fabricator's art. Was this, truly, a newish panel by Boucher or Fragonard? And there, tucked away in an alcove, perhaps an unknown Bernini bronze?
Once, to my delight, I opened the door to a great library. It was, at first sigh, as large as a battleship, and the wooden shelves were lined from top to bottom with pungent, leathery books. For a moment I stood there, silent and humble in the doorway, and my eyes hungered respectfully across the many volumes of ancient knowledge. But as I watched, the vital timbers of the bookshelves seemed to creak and sag beneath the weight of that redundant learning. And then, instead of wisdom, I smelt merely the stale odours of neglected tomes.
Next I stumbled upon a picture gallery, so long it seemed to narrow, like a ship's telescope, to a point in the distance. But the portraits themselves made me shudder. For hung along the walls, in infinite regression, were the endlessly replicated faces of my husband's gloomy ancestors.
And it seemed to me, in my unease, that they eyed my fructiferous body with a greed more sinister than lust.
* * *
At length I descended the staircase, a frozen river of Sienna marble. Then I scurried like an insect beneath the vast, temporal vaulting of the entrance hall. I'd been brought to this place as its mistress -- but my instinct was to cower in the corners and tremble. I could feel all my loving, modest, human hopes -- so small, so timid, so reasonable -- being crushed out of shape by the dense and funereal weight of that immensity.
But I was bright and full of dreams. I was alone here, with the Beast as my mate and faceless automata as my servants. But I nursed an ambition in my heart that was just like the small, hard, shining stone my husband had given me to mark our betrothal. And so I was not crushed. Out of that despair came a sudden, choking exultation. It made me want to shriek out loud and pirouette. For I was not yet tested in the fire. My future stretched before me filled with grandeur, but as removed from my own endeavours as the stars and galaxies that seemed to whirl above me, in a thousand separate, diamond-studded constellations, each one blazing out its glory in the remote spans of the ceiling.
It was a relief to inhale the befugged masculine intimacy of my husband's study. I knew the place well -- for it was where, after supper, he sometimes beat me at chess. (And always so soundly and so meditatively that the moves themselves assumed an air of ponderous flirtation.) To my surprise, the chess set was out again today, two chairs drawn up around the folding table, and the pieces abandoned as if in mid-game.
Intrigued, I studied their positions more closely. At first it seemed to me as if the grand strategies of my husband as usual gripped the board. But then I perceived that something else was at work -- something agile, quick-thinking and mercurial, loosed from the bonds of the past and unhindered by any traditional principle. And whatever it was, this lack of faith, it rendered my husband powerless.
At that moment, I glimpsed a dreadful freedom.
Perhaps this is what prompted me to rifle his desk, for I had been till then a dutiful child, and it had never before occurred to me that I might profit by disobedience.
And it was in his desk I found it, that fateful document, though not with the rest of his papers, but instead folded away carefully inside a ledger with a few crushed petals of a flower. How well I remember that sudden cascade of roses, as I lifted the letter from the account book. Blood-red pigment stained the parchment and a perfume lingered with the heavier odours of animal musk and tobacco in the drawer. A strange letter, that seems still stranger on re-reading, the words as cold and empty as if they rang through marble halls.
* * *
Weary with the effort of remembering, I scrape back my chair. It is time to consult the Encyclopaedia, which I keep stacked, in clumsily stratified volumes, on the bureau beside my bed. (Although with the force of long habit, I avoid the sofa-table, since experience has taught me to be wary of any item of furniture in the Palace with wooden legs carved into paws.) I have my documents too -- the crumbling evidence of our union -- and of my oddly productive widowhood, which has lasted a dozen times as long.
When I open my notebook at random, this is what I find:-
Tonight at dinner I spoke five words to him. He did not speak at all.
Or turning the pages, further on:-
Today he told me I could use the library. But what good is this, when in every book I open I catch just a glimpse of meaning, before the letters rearrange themselves into a language I don't understand?
Recorded there too are the witchy, storm-filled nights, when the Forest crashed like an ocean and I retired early to bed. Hours without number, I would lay apprehensively in the darkness whilst my husband roared, and paced through the house. And sometimes, during those long nights of terrible privacy, when the world had contracted to the nervous beating of my heart, I would imagine -- no, more than imagine -- that I could hear his breathing outside my door. And how I wished then that he would simply knock and enter, like a hungry soldier at the door of a farmhouse kitchen, and not approach me like this, with feigned esteem -- a great Beast crawling on his belly, at once master and supplicant.
* * *
The woodland path grows steeper as the years slip by. But the path itself is so familiar that my crooked feet embrace each foothold like a friend. The Forest would not willingly let me stumble; not I, its chronicler and ancient Queen. Once again, I drag my body upwards, along these stony paths to the mausoleum.
But all the same, I keep my wits about me -- for who knows what fellow aberrants one might encounter, here in the wild lands beyond reason, when one rejects the witty logic of the salon for this banditry of dreams.
O what a joy it was, finally, to entomb him. That doleful patriarch whose rages shook the Forest. Even the monument is a gleeful act of treachery -- for in the first guilty transports of deliverance I had it marked with the symbols of grief.
Does it matter, that I lied? When over the years this story, of my perfection, has come to assume a sort of truth? (And in any case, no-one comes here now except me and the vixen, who finds it fit enough for her own purpose, and has reared many cubs in its shade.)
Dark memories prick me like the thorns on roses; a stab of pain and a trickle of blood. On the site of this tomb, there once stood a fountain. But I murdered him here, by refusing my love.
* * *
How my old bones ache. I have learned to mistrust the labile timbers of my body, a doubtful partner at the best of times, and reverting now to nature as my faculties fade. Oh, I have my books, I have my reputation. I have earned my place in history by giving shelter, and money, to Voltaire. But for all that, I'm still a prisoner. Here in the Forest and in the cold, diamond-scattered prisms of my own treacherous heart.
And now, with the seasons no longer so biddable, a sharp wind rises as though to taunt me. The brambles seem to snigger on the edge of the clearing, and a shiver of malice runs through the grasses. But, as is my custom, I sit for a while on the hard, leaf-blown steps at the foot of the monument, and whilst I rest I muse to myself, upon the strangeness of the land I inherited.
I examine the progress of time on the face of my favourite cherub. He's a love-child no longer, but a cold, stone orphan, cauled thickly in birdshit and cracked open by the weather. Venus, his mother, has lost her nose; she has a thrush's nest in her hair. It's a sad tableau, for unlike the Forest they cannot change or age. Instead, they are doomed to a slow corrosion.
I fight back the impulse to weep with self-pity. I made my choices, I built my tomb. And when the time comes, I will lie here, besides my husband, and form with him an effigy of perfect love.
And out there, somewhere, massing on the very borders of the Forest's imagination, are the grimy ranks of the Inheritors. They march in straight lines, with machetes and chainsaws. They will tear it up. They will chop it down..
Did I let them in?
From this cold throne I can see the Palace, spread out before me like the lost kingdom of Atlantis. It is all mine. Every part of it. Right at this moment, for as far as I can see, it all belongs to me.
But this morning, when I look at my empire, it is drowned beneath a mist. Only the roofscape is visible; the domes and towers, the hundreds of little spires. The gatehouse is smothered in ivy; tendrils have shattered a window, and flights of small birds dart in and out. And day by day, the Forest still encroaches, drawing who knows what richness and depth of meaning from that soft, black, corruptible earth.
* * *
You stole a flower. I demand recompense. I will take your youngest daughter, whose wit and beauty I have observed.
That's all I have, as evidence that he loved me -- a few cold words at the end of a letter. My husband is dead now, his pride buried with him. And dry leaves rattle in the corridors, as frangible as unwept tears.
THE END