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from the walls.
What a macabre bedroom!
His colonel, an old goat with jaded appetites, had given him the
visiting card of a brothel in Paris where, the satyr assured him, ten louis
would buy just such a lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin;
offstage, the brothel pianist played the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst
all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the customer took his necrophiliac
pleasure of a pretend corpse. He had good-naturedly refused the old man's
offer of such an initiation; how can he now take criminal advantage of the
disordered girl with fever-hot, bone-dry, taloned hands and eyes that deny all
the erotic promise of her body with their terror, their sadness, their
dreadful, balked tenderness?
So delicate and damned, poor thing. Quite damned.
Yet I do believe she scarcely knows what she is doing.
She is shaking as if her limbs are not efficiently joined together, as
if she might shake into pieces. She raises her hands to unfasten the neck of
her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of
her dark glasses. She can't take off her mother's wedding dress unless she
takes off her dark glasses; she fumbled the ritual, it is no longer
inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it most.
When she takes off the dark glasses, they slip from her fingers and smash to
pieces on the tiled floor. There is no room in her drama for improvisation;
and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell
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in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and
ineffectively smears the tears across her face with her fist. What is she to
do now?
When she kneels to try to gather the fragments of glass together, a
sharp sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp,
real. She kneels among the broken glass and watches the bright bead of blood
form a drop. She has never seen her own blood before, not her own blood. It
exercises upon her an awed fascination.
Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the
innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an
exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his
own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the
wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would
have done.
All the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her
painted ancestors turn away their eyes and grind their fangs.
How can she bear the pain of becoming human?
The end of exile is the end of being.
He was awakened by larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the
long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom were all opened up and light and air
streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the
satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on
struts of wood, as in the theatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from
the roses outside in to the room and their crimson residue swirled fragrantly
about the floor. The candles had burnt out and she must have set her pet lark
free because it perched on the edge of the silly coffin to sing him its
ecstatic morning song. His bones were stiff and aching, he'd slept on the
floor with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he'd put her to bed.
But now there was no trace of her to be seen, except, lightly tossed
across the crumbled black satin bedcover, a lace negligee lightly soiled with
blood, as it might be from a woman's menses, and a rose that must have come
from the fierce bushes nodding through the window. The air was heavy with
incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess must have got up early to
enjoy the sunshine, slipped outside to gather him a rose. He got to his feet,
coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. At first, it
exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a long-caged thing, but, when he
tossed it up on to the currents of the air, it spread its wings and was up and
away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a
lift of joy in his heart.
Then he padded into the boudoir, his mind busy with plans. We shall take
her to Zurich, to a clinic; she will be treated for nervous hysteria. Then to
an eye specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist, to put her teeth
into better shape. Any competent manicurist will deal with her claws. We shall
turn her into the lovely girl she is; I shall cure her of all these
nightmares.
The heavy curtains are pulled back, to let in brilliant fusillades of
early morning light; in the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her round
table in her white dress, with the cards laid out before her. She has dropped
off to sleep over the cards of destiny that are so fingered, so soiled, so
worn by constant shuffling that you can no longer make the image out on any
single one of them. She is not sleeping.
In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first
time, fully human.
I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from
between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.
My keeper will attend to everything.
Nosferatu always attends his own obsequies; she will not go to the
graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialised, weeping, and roughly
gestured him to be gone. After a search in some foul-smelling outhouses, he
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discovered his bicycle and, abandoning his holiday, rode directly to Bucharest
where, at the poste restante, he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his
regiment at once. Much later, when he changed back into uniform in his
quarters, he discovered he still had the Countess's rose, he must have tucked
it into the breast pocket of his cycling jacket after he had found her body.
Curiously enough, although he had brought it so far away from Romania, the
flower did not seem to be quite dead and, on impulse, because the girl had
been so lovely and her death so unexpected and pathetic, he decided to try and
resurrect her rose. He filled his tooth glass with water from the carafe on
his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]