The Secret Book of Paradys (109 page)

“He doesn’t lack fire,” said the other man, who was only a runner for the squadrons of robbers, capable enough with a club, but mostly good at racing the alleys and climbing up to roofs. “No, it’ll cool him, this will. Mixed with snow, this beverage is, and hence the label of ice and freeze.”

But Martin was not interested in the bottle. Not yet – he would come to be. Now only the contents had his attention.

They saw to the drink for him themselves, and the runner stirred in sugar.

Then all three drank.

The eyes of Johanos Martin were as ever cold and clear and far away, yet he did betray now a slight nervousness. He said, presently, “You gentlemen are generous. But I hope you don’t believe you can rob me. I’m not such a fool I brought any valuables into these slums.”

“Rob you? Why, monsieur, what do you take us for?”

Martin smiled faintly.

“This inn,” added the big man, “is a kind of fellowship. You’re safe enough here. Although, I might say, your great-coat would be worth a little trouble to one or two, if they were to catch you before you reached the bridge.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Indeed not, monsieur. In fact, since you’re seen drinking with us, I think you can be easy on your way.”

“
He
is the important man,” said the runner, indicating the cutthroat. “Like yourself, monsieur. A star in the dark.”

“Oh, yes,” said Martin, so disdainfully his companions laughed.

And then Martin made a slight move, as if to get up, and a third man who had come into the corner from another table slapped him on the shoulder.

“We like you, monsieur,” said the cutthroat. “Don’t go. Have some more gin, and then do us a recitation from one of your plays.”

Johanos Martin had already been fairly drunk when they first approached him. (And afterward it was speculated upon that he might have been insane, that the jaunt to the asylum had sent him so, or why else had he risked his person in this sink?)

Martin said, “If you wish.”

And possibly he was willing to perform, unfed, for a table of creatures
such as these, where he would not for the supper tables of the upper City.

But it did not come to reciting. For something in the gin thickened Martin’s tongue, as his other tipples had not. Thickened his tongue, and paved his brain with luminous crystal thought that told him he was not in jeopardy, just as all men know they can never die.

Near midnight, they led him out, the cutthroat and the runner and the robber, and two or three others, and together they went along the worm trails of the low bank, through places very old, built over again and again, like some terrible painting that could never be finished.

It was winter, and cold. Above, only occasionally hindered by lamps, the stars were pocks of snow in the sky, the footprints of something, going somewhere. But Johanos Martin did not look at these. He was a great actor but he had no true spirit. Besides, he could not, after all the gin, properly see.

They led him into a house above a coil of the river.

It had not been planned, at least, not in their conscious brains. They let him lie down on a bed, and then they ripped off his precious coat, and then they tied him to the iron bed frame.

When they took from him other clothes, they found his body was pale and hard, in better condition than their own, from his exertions on the stage.

Although drunk, he cried out when, one by one, they invaded him.

In prisons, orphanages, aboard ships, in gloomy watches of the soul, they had found out this means of sodomy, which now they brought and worked out upon Johanos Martin. They raped him many times. Without a single kiss.

And finally it was the runner who thrust into Martin’s body the empty gin bottle. Who worked with that upon him.

Inside the anus of the helpless man the four-sided glass neck shattered. (Normally, only orgasm would be sufficiently strong to break such glass.)

Much later, after the deceivers had left him, he was found. And thus, later still, five days later, in a paupers’ hospital, Johanos Martin died of a bottle of Penguin Gin. The death was disgraceful, and hushed up.

No last words, or quotations, remained, for in a delirium of agony, such things did not arise.

No one mourned him in particular, yet the spectators of the City did so, for he had held many in thrall that he had not met. The love of strangers.

All that escaped was the rumor he had died of drink.

They did not mind that. It was romantic, tragic: usual.

Hilde woke, weeping in the darkness. Hearing her, some of the others began to cry, and the woman who made sounds made them, over and over, like a bell.

Judit came to Hilde across the moonless black.

“You must be brave. One day, we’ll be free. We will go to my country. Or into the heaven of snow, Penguinia. For that is the land’s name. Yes, I asked Maque. Don’t you recall?”

It was winter, and the room was icy. Hearing Judit’s voice, the women whispered and were mute.

“Think of the warm snow,” said Judit, “warm as feathers. And the sweet wine.”

“I’ll never see it,” said Hilde.

Judit touched her gently, her head, her neck, her shoulders and hands, Hilde’s stomach. There, Judit hesitated.

Like all the beings of the madhouse, Hilde was ferociously undernourished, and she had become very thin. Her hair they had let grow, but it was not as strong as it had been, not springing or bright. The woman Moule had said she doubted it would be worth trying to sell Hilde’s second crop of hair. Hilde’s belly, where Judit’s hands had paused, was hard and round, like the gut of a terrible hunger.

The warders had not noticed, for they did not investigate their charges once novelty wore off, and Hilde, so slight, looked only swollen in the way of malnutrition. But to Judit’s fingers, the fact of this pathetic taut belly now became apparent.

Judit, who had been a whore, sat back in queenly stillness. Within the black, Judit closed her beautiful eyes.

“We must prepare.”

She bowed her head in a gesture of acceptance and mourning.

Hilde said again, “I’ll never see the Penguin Land. The Penguinia. Never. It isn’t real.”

“Yes. And you will see it, child. Before I do. Penguinia is the country of joy that lies behind this place of pain.”

Far off, from the men’s dormitory, came the lonely hyena calling of despair.

It was not true that Maque had named the Penguin Land. Judit had done that. After the day the actors came to look at them, Maque had been punished in various ways, and he had grown silent. He did not climb on top of the hill of furniture, and one morning the warders dismantled it. They threw the old chairs out into a yard of the asylum.

Citalbo had become quiescent too, and no longer wrote his snatches of verse. The noise from the male dormitory reminded Judit of these silences.

While inside Hilde, a bud had formed, even as the hair grew from her shaven skull. After a few weeks, Marie Tante and Bettile had ceased fastening Hilde into the mad-shirt. As well, for otherwise, they might, even they, have seen.

But the child in Hilde’s womb was without quickness. Judit had felt such
things before, in her previous existence.

So she prepared, not for the arrival of life, but the advent of death.

Hilde Koster, in the madhouse, carried the dead child of dead Johanos Martin for a little more than five months. Any symptoms of her pregnancy she mistook easily for the constant malaise due to ill treatment, and the minor poisonings to which the inmates of hell were subjected, the lack of any care. And Hilde, who had once been “Little Hilde,” was ignorant of biological fact.

So she walked about in the straw of the white chambers, and sometimes in the stone court of exercise, and she slept in the room of the moon, stunned by the horrible cold, a dummy of flesh closed tight around this small lump of mortality.

At the beginning of the sixth month, about fifty days after Martin’s death in the paupers’ hospital, an incredible quiet sank on the asylum.

The warders prowled the rooms, sometimes slashing at the mad people with their sticks.

“What are they up to?”

Even the ones who crawled in circles or beat at flies did so in utter noiselessness.

Into the yard had been shunted a few of the men and most of the women, among them Judit and Hilde.

The day was frigid, like gray quartz, and up into it the biscuity walls rose, gray also in the stasis of the light. Hilde’s ruined hair was like a beacon, the only brilliant thing visible, a drop of autumn sun, the splash of a summer fruit. But under the trails of this hair Hilde was a white shivering Madonna of death, who suddenly dropped down, her mouth shaping into the grimace of a mask, a shock too vast for sound.

Figures of ice, the other women stood about, a chorus in a play without words, and without motion.

“Damn the pigs, why don’t they make a noise?” demanded Bettile. “Go over, Marie, and hit one of the bitches. Pull that fat one’s hair.”

The air was stony and silence hurt their ears.

Bettile took a step toward the group of women. And at this instant Hilde screamed in agony.

“Ah, there goes one. Again, again, you slut. Let’s hear you!” cried Moule.

And as all the women began to shriek, and inside the block the men yowled like dogs, the warders shook themselves and passed back and forth the brown bottle that only a shameful convulsion could shatter.

Like a hedge, the mad women solidified around Hilde on the ground, and
unseen, Judit kneeled by her.

There was no time for Hilde to question or protest. Death broke from her in a shattering spasm of water, and of blood.

Hilde screamed, and the women, her chorus, screamed.

The wardresses congratulated them. They smote one or two across the legs. These women skipped and grunted, and then resumed their outcry.

“Old Volpe will hear,” said Moule, with satisfaction.

They were tickled.

If Volpe heard, up in his apartment on his country estate, he pretended to himself that these were the cries of winter geese blown inland from the river miles away.

Something tiny and dreadful was squeezed from Hilde’s broken body, and lay on the stone ground, linked to her by a silvered cord.

It was if her soul had been squashed out in the shape of a monster.

The warders had gone in, it was too cold for them in the yard. The women stared down on the death that had been born of Hilde.

It was a child, a child in parenthesis, not wholly formed. In color – in color it was like the skin of a pumpkin. An orange child, the product of wronged blood or a damaged liver, the product of a flame that had burned out.

Judit took Hilde’s hands.

“It’s over,” said Judit, as in the back streets of her past she had said it to this one or that, silken girls murdered by reproduction, the task devised of a male god, or demon.

Hilde could not speak. Behind her eyes the sea was drawing away. She lay aground upon the beach. Hollow, adrift yet fixed, immutable and flowing.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Judit. “You ask me where you are going to? Now you’ll see Penguinia.”

For a second a light lit in the tidal windows of the eyes. Was it so? After this interval of the impossible, the redemption most human things hope for? Then the light flickered and faded. So swiftly, so clumsily and unbelievably, we must leave.

They were all dead now, the father, the mother, and the child of a cursory act one had wrought on the other.

Only the force and sorcery of the appalling event remained, and hovered there like the smolder of the blood, and was breathed in, through lips, through stones.

The women drew away. There was no more they could do. The ghastly orange gnome of the stillborn must be left for the warders to discover and remove, as the corpse of Hilde, the last door of all slammed on her, must be come on and tidied, roughly and with oaths. A piece of earth somewhere on the premises was kept for such debris. Dead lunatics were cast into sacks and
so into quicklime, that there should always be space for the next one.

Outside the walls, about one hundred and thirty meters along the road, and among some desolate somber trees, Tiraud and Desel stood in the dusk before dawn.

Tiraud was grumbling that he had hurt his back, lugging “that bitch.” Desel was sullen, in the grip of a sort of agoraphobia that often came on him when he had to go beyond the asylum precincts.

The burial of the dead female lunatic and her stillborn infant had been gone through on the previous evening. Dr. Volpe had not attended, and it was Desel who spoke the prayer over the dead – which consisted of a drunken burp. The warder had botched up some evidence of the correct event, and then laid the two corpses together in a stout sack. It had been more difficult in earlier years, when Volpe had nerved himself to oversee all obsequies. Frequently then there had been nothing to salvage for the sinister carts that came up the road, with the morning star.

“Here it is now,” said Tiraud, as he gave over the gin bottle to Desel, the Penguin of Joy. “Are they going to haggle again? He’s lucky to get it. Such a fresh one, and only a girl. And the abortion’s grand for study. Some doctor will delight in it.”

Such was the security of the house of madness that they had easily been able to carry out the pitiable sack between them. Those that saw knew and approved their errand.

The cart came rolling up the road, a bundle of shadow, the lean horse pulling it, like some medieval image of Death.

But it was a cheery, leering individual who craned down.

“What have you got for me, eh? Something nice?”

“A young girl of fifteen, only a day old. And a premature child of unnatural coloring,” said Desel. “Do you want to see?”

“No, I trust you,
gentlemen
. You know there’d be trouble if you lied.”

One bag was hoisted up into the cart. Another, lighter, plopped down.

“It’s not enough,” said Tiraud. “You promised more.”

“Ah, but there, you see,” said the carter, “you think this is a rare treat for me, this young lady and her calf. But they’re harder to dispose of, these oddities. More questions are asked. And some of my clients turn shy. They’ll take a strapping great man without a qualm. But a maiden and a monster baby – who can tell? Why, I may have to tip the lot in the river.”