Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (21 page)

Roustam on the mat outside could be heard stirring in his light watchdog sleep. “Sleep, sleep, black bastard,” N said with bitter affection.

Again a funeral, this time not a dreamt one, but whose? A lot of weeping women, some of his own family or Josephine’s, a bright gritty windy day at some cemetery in some northern city. Whose? There had been so many funerals and there were many still to come. But a civilian in black, a red-eyed mourner, a thin man who limped, had been emboldened by what was undoubtedly familial loss to speak out and question the worth of a man’s dying for his country. The cemetery path was a long one, N had had to suffer a long and grief-rambling disquisition.

He looked at his watch, read four-fifty-one, and sighed his way back into bed. A long day coming for all.

“Yes yes yes, believe me, I am not on the side of death either.”

“Why cannot the wars cease? Every year more sons taken from us and for what purpose? It seems to me that a man should be allowed to grow comfortably and dully into age, drinking his real Indian tea or real Blue Mountain coffee, warm in his Yorkshire wool, good Northampton boots on his feet, exulting in his boredom, his
boredom
, yes yes yes.”

“No no no!”

He willed himself to sleep, hearing nonsense: “And let him also wear galligaskins of Paisley purple and eat of the flesh of the fine lambs of the Sussex downs.”

“No no no!”

But now he was back in that dream again, bound, bound for the enemy water, what time the sneering bands played and the exultant enemy sang:

There he lies

Ensanguinated tyrant

O bloody bloody tyrant

See

How the sin within

Doth incarn

See the re-

Incarnate Cleopatra,

Barge burning on the water.

Bare

Rowers row in rows.

Posied roses interpose

Twixt the rows and the rose.

N
onsense, naturally, but rather charming played on flutes and oboes. And everything here seemed very sweetly absurd yet completely natural and
decorous
, even her almost total nudity save for swaths of tulle agitated by the spicy breeze and the golden serpentine headdress that the fat so sweet little brown boys kept, at her request, showing her from all possible angles in their really beautiful ormolu mirrors. The question was, she supposed, whether she was being worshipped as a queen or as a goddess. Well, it must be the latter, for she knew, with the so subtle as it were
layered
knowledge of dreams, that she was in waking life actually an
empress
, and she would hardly have taken the trouble, however thrilling the arrangement of the details, to mount this particular complicated dream, with all its really ornate decor, unless there had been a certain desire—perhaps naughty, certainly self-indulgent, but really
quite harmless
—for as it were elevation to the next rank. So here she was as a goddess, stretching out a lovely long white arm in greeting and acknowledgment of the crowd’s worship, smilingly reclining amid roses and the shrilling from the shore of trumpets and violins.

And yet, goddess as she was, there was nothing insubstantial or what was the word
ethereal
about the lucent flawlessness of the skin of the long fleshly languor that flowered into visibility (the visibility of herself
to
herself, that was) from just above her truly delightful breasts down. Ah, so delicately
solid
and not an ounce of flesh too much. And this, how miraculous, despite the banquet of last night in which an absolute
plethora
of delicate sweetmeats had been served after the truffled boar and the peacocks farced with a mixture of their own brains and livers pounded with mushroom and very sweet onion. Thus, for example, there had been a multicolored cake of pure butter and vanilla and chocolate
swamped
in Parma violets and redolent of a finely subtle Alexandrian resin wine, and she had taken slice after slice from the smiling intellectual Nubian slave who served.

Posied roses interpose

Twixt the rose and the

The rose, of course, was not really proper in this context of spicy
easternness
, but it was, after all, in her name. Marie-Josèphe-Rose, Marie-Rose Detascher—but at this point it was necessary to order to be hit away roughly with oars from the edge of the barge a really ugly dripping creature, a
satyr
she supposed, that kept trying to shout at her very unpleasant things which the flutes and oboes on board and the trumpets and violins on shore rather effectually drowned. The horrid
dirty
thing was soon to be seen dancing and gesturing from the shallow waters by the shore, belabored with reeds by brown tall men of
impeccable
musculature but still gibbering and really obscenely parodying the sacred act of love in swift jerks of his horrible
hirsute
body. He seemed, and this was very strange, to have the face of Tallien.

The nymphs, her serving ladies, who, also in almost
total
nudity, lay in smiling rose-strewn and rose-strewing languor all about her throne (whose arms were most intricately and really
magnificently
carved sphinxes), were the very rose-pink of beauty, and the rowing slaves whose black sweat gave off a delicious odor of concentrated rose could not keep their great rolling eyes off the
not excessive
opulence of their haunches and breasts.

Rayers ray in rays,

Paysied raises interpays

That was the very refined voice of Edmée Renaudin, wonderfully transformed into a slim shapely
odalisque
but, like all the attendant nymphs, minimally flawed in deference to her nonpareil mistress. Her flaw was a rosy mole on the left shoulder blade out of which grew a
tiny
filament that trembled in the cinnamon-breathing breeze. And Thérèse Tallien herself, at whose
utter
loveliness even a lovely woman could catch her breath and stare, had the tiniest tiniest tiniest downy growth on her truly delicious upper lip which, when stained with ferrous wine, could glitter like a real
mustache
. And now, as to confirm her own
divine
perfection, a little dimple-bottomed boy brought up his ormolu mirror again. To her surprise and annoyance her face, for some reason known only to the gods of mirrors, did not show in the flashing blue metal; instead there appeared a text of utter and silly and
impertinent
meaninglessness:
LA
LUTTE
ÉTAIT
TERMINÉE.
IL
AVAIT
REMPORTÉ
LA
VICTOIRE
SUR
LUI-MÊME
.
IL
AIMAIT
… But then it faded, and her face was there deliciously frowning. And here, at her right side, was a Silenus who looked like Talleyrand and, naked as he otherwise was, had a sort of silkweave bandolier about him to which a porcelain snuffbox was attached. He had taken a pinch, unseen by her and certainly without her permission (it was a
dirty
habit, the sight of snuff taking made her cross), and he now sneezed, spraying her right forearm so that she was ready to be
really
angry
, then said, without apology:
Une
sorcière.
Donnez-la
au feu
. She pouted prettily:
Mais le feu ne me plaît point
.

At once she was lifted by her own delicious-smelling and smiling nymphs out of the imperial divine seat and, kicking and laughing and screaming, was thrust to the river. This, she saw as she plunged (and it was
totally
without fear), was the true elevation, despite what appeared to be its opposite! She could breathe quite easily in the lovely perfumed waters, and the fish that came to greet her all had the cold snout of poor little Fortuné. When she rose to the surface it was to find that everything had changed—no barge, no attendants, no spicy Egypt.
But she had become Aphrodite
. Her hair was a golden fire, and she felt that her body was now somehow so delectable that great pieces should be broken from it like cake and munched, since it would all grow again in a twinkling, she now being
truly
a goddess. She was poised on the surface of delicious iced champagne foam, and her lovely back was protected from the wind by a really beautiful shell-like pavilion which rested, miracle, on the wild but mild and cool but warm waters. From the shore, she saw, great-muscled men, their faces of a brilliantly intelligent somehow
animality
, were plunging in to swim avidly toward her, all to do her pleasure, that was to say worship. But a Triton came over the surface from behind the shell to blow a feeble
ugly
blast on his conch and then to sing raucously at her, while a beautiful white-robed choir got ready on the shore: ET À PROPOS PENDANT QUE NOUS SOMMES À CE SUJET VOICI UNE CHANDELLE POUR ALLER VOUS COUCHER VOICI UN COUPERET POUR COUPER VOTRE TÊTE. For all that, the shore choir sang to the flutes and oboes and trumpets and violins:

See the re-

Incarnate Aphrodite.

Hail queen of love almighty!

Flesh

Fresher than a rose,

And maddening that rose

Twixt her nose and her toes!

She awoke in Malmaison to see in the dimmed lamplight monsters creeping toward her, panting and whimpering. She strangled her scream before proper utterance: it was only the puppies that had got out of their basket while their (miniature German wolfhound) parents slept. Pretty dears, tumbling and loving but apt to be incontinent with excitement on the rose counterpane. She had come out of that quite pleasant dream with a slight headache and was not in consequence (she kissed each in apology) ready for puppy-play. Besides, it was the unearthly hour, so the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece said, of four-thirty in the morning, a winter morning too. Claire had, before retiring, fed the little fire with small coal, so that the room was warm still. She wondered whether to call Claire, bid her make a tisane and sit and chat, but that chat would lead to
poor
madame
and so on. She poured the puppies back into their basket in armfuls, a task likely, she sighed, to be never-ending, but then their mother awoke and rushed to siphon them off with a horrible noise of relish, then lay on her side to feed them. Their father, how like a male, never awoke. Her parrot, under its night cover, squawked a gnomic syllable or two:
lutte
and
couperet
and something that sounded like
pendantquenous
, and then
hahaha
. The warmth of that dream water clung still to her limbs as she lay once more, the headache receding, in her silk. The pirogue from Les Trois-Îlets to Fort-Royal, the Convent of the Ladies of Providence, across the bay: how she had loved the journey. How she had loved the islands of perpetual summer, castles built on the shore with children’s screams and tired-runner panting of waves contending, paddling in the warm blue, native drums in the evening afar as they reclined on the veranda after spiced (heresy, that fat official from Paris had said at first, but later he succumbed as they all did)
coq au vin
. The island life, and what could be lovelier than the island life, except of course the
dreamt of
and as it were
remembered from other people’s memories
life of Paris? The sea had never been a big monstrous divider but rather a joiner of island and island, so it had seemed to her as a girl, and ultimately the sea, and the wind that rose from out of the sea, joined you to France, though not directly to Paris. To get to Paris meant that horrid jolting over land, somehow very
male
in its roughness. The sea, the warm spicy sea, she never feared the sea, the sea was her element, the sea was a woman,
la mere la mer
, and lapped round a man and enclosed him and made him yield, yes, yield all. And now the sea had failed her.

The headache began to return, and she could almost
foretaste
its promised quiddity, that of a true migraine. It had been a migraine of spectacular almost
majestic
intensity that had struck that evening before dinner, and it had made its own strange poem, in which she was a sea that could
feel pain
from the plowing of the prow of an iron ship into her brow. Ah, those two horrid islands with a staircase between them, her boudoir, his study, and he never knocked, never never. At the sound of the dinner bell she had had one of her great white hats pinned and arranged to shade her sore eyes, and dinner had been a nightmare, only ten minutes but
endless
, neither of them had tasted more than a dribble of soup and a morsel of chicken, and then, when it had come to the coffee—

Oh, he took his cup himself from the tray, roughly pushing her aside, not waiting as he had always done for her to put sugar in for him and then taste it to see if it was to his taste not tasting too sweet or not sweet enough not that he ever really had much of a sense of taste sometimes not seeming to know even whether it was sweet or not and then he.