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Island of Point Nemo. Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
Читать онлайн.Название Island of Point Nemo
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781940953632
Автор произведения Jean-Marie Blas de Robles
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
“But really, shouldn’t it be possible to track down this Martyrio Circus by some other means?”
“I checked,” said Grimod, “and as strange as it seems, this circus is no more real than the Ananke brand of shoes. And it was Chung Ling Soo himself who insisted that the journalist mention that particular detail.”
“If you say so,” grumbled Canterel, fanning himself with his program.
In the orchestra pit, the musicians were finishing up their tuning. The lights and the conversations died away gradually. A few prudent coughs accompanied the first bars of a dramatic overture in which the dissonance of the flutes mimicked a Chinese chorus. The spotlights came up, and at the crash of a gong, the curtain rose.
The set had changed completely, the action now taking place in the heart of Peking, beneath the walls of the Forbidden City. Preceded by standard-bearers, a band of Chinese drummers streamed onto the stage and arranged themselves in the background. Finally there appeared a squadron of Boxers in almond-green turbans and black tunics, all armed with rifles and led by a rebel officer from the imperial army. Decked out in a winged helmet topped with a plume, the man was wearing a thick belt of red silk from which his saber hung. The participants lined up on the left while a series of gong and cymbal crashes accented the appearance, stage right, of an ornate palanquin. Chung Ling Soo emerged from it slowly, wearing a buttercup-yellow Mandarin cap and a robe of yellow silk embroidered with dragons. He planted himself in front of his enemies, challenging them with his noble comportment. On the officer’s order, four of the soldiers stepped forward to form the firing squad.
An assistant, also dressed in the Chinese fashion, stepped toward the spectators.
“The Great Chung Ling Soo speak no language but his ancestors’, he send to you by my mouth his lamentable apologies. During Boxer Rebellion, His Excellency choose to stay true to Emperor Guangxu’s youth. Imprisoned by rebels, he was sentenced to horror of fiery squad. Exceptionally, he agree tonight to show you how he escape death, thanks to front teeth’s magic power.”
He went on in the same pidgin to convince two people from the audience to come up on stage and examine the ammunition, the powder, and the rifles, then asked them to identify the bullets by putting on each of them a mark of their choosing. With this done, the assistant loaded the weapons under their watchful eye and invited them to go back to their seats.
“Officer,” he pleaded, turning to the Boxer leader, “mercy for Chung Ling Soo!”
A drum-roll accentuated the officer’s scorn and the slowness with which he lifted his saber to give the order to fire. In this moment of extreme tension, the assistant crossed the stage and came to a halt for a moment by Chung Ling Soo. He saluted in farewell, then handed him a china plate. Smiling, the magician covered his torso with it, like an ersatz shield.
“Aim!” the officer bellowed.
The soldiers pointed their guns; the saber came down.
“Fire!”
The blast made the audience jump; even Canterel, who was finishing up some intricate origami with his program, could not prevent his lower lip from trembling a little. Through the thick whorl of smoke, Chung Ling Soo could be seen staggering under the impact. With the consummate skill of a mime, he opened his eyes wide, made one of those faces that, for his public, took the place of speech, and bringing the plate up to his mouth, he spat out one bullet, then two, then three, gave a look of amazement, searched around for the fourth with his tongue, and abruptly regurgitated it in a gush of astonishingly real blood. He fell to his knees, gasping.
“Fuck, something went wrong! Lower the curtain! Lower the curtain, damn you!”
Having set the plate on the floor, in an admirable gesture of professionalism, he collapsed.
This had been the first time in fifteen years that he had spoken on stage; it was also the last.
His fingers caress what look like the colorful bindings of the Collection Hetzel. There are millions of them, like books stored on their sides along the walls of the cave in which he is buried alive. Monte Cristo, Romeo and Juliet, The King of the World, Sancho Panza, Antony and Cleopatra, Don Diègue, The Crown of Diamonds, Excalibur, The Breath of the Jaguar, products that he had imported, for their more or less affirmed place in literature, others that he had produced from scratch, Athos, Les Esseintes, Vintage Peeperkorn, Abelard and Heloise, Extraordinary Raskolnikov, Baskerville . . .
After putting so much passion and care into manufacturing French cigars that would not yield in any way to the best of those produced in the Caribbean, Arnaud is unable to digest the injustice of his failure. A diffuse resentment has his stomach in permanent knots, it’s enough to make him scream sometimes, doubled over in the depths of his lair.
Now that Périgord has turned into an amusement park for tourists seeking out prehistory, it is almost impossible to imagine that France was, not so long ago, a Mecca for tobacco growing. Even so, it is still common, walking around this place, to spot at random large wooden sheds with vented sides that make them look a bit like belfries. These are the old, abandoned tobacco barns. One comes across them there, in the middle of the fields where farmers still grow a little corn and rapeseed, those remaining few who have not transformed into rough innkeepers, their farms turned into lodgings.
His grandfather had escaped this decline. His father, too, in a sense. When SEITA had refused to pay a fair price for his bundles of tobacco, Louis Méneste moved on to rapeseed so he could reach retirement and finish paying for his son’s engineering studies. The day his son was named top of his class at Epitech, Louis had called to congratulate him, then hanged himself. His wife followed him to the grave shortly after.
Having done well in school, Arnaud Méneste had accepted a generous offer from an American information security firm and emigrated to Florida, never suspecting that he would return twenty-two years later to take up the craft of his forebears.
Arnaud settled in on his ancestral lands, counting on the network of troglodytic dwellings that ran through the cliff bordering Dordogne. He had spent his childhood exploring these labyrinths, and was familiar with their every bend and curve and knew how intelligently the people who had sought refuge there in the Middle Ages had arranged them. There was always a fresh breeze blowing in the dog days of summer, as in the shaded hearts of Saharan medinas. In winter it was the reverse: the stone oozed stored-up heat, and a few embers in the hearth were enough to maintain a comfortable temperature; no one in human memory had ever caught the slightest whiff of mildew.
As he had foreseen, these grottos turned out to be perfect for drying tobacco leaves. Hung from the ceiling on hooks, the plants browned without rotting, all the while keeping the suppleness required for the shaping process. The perfect humidity. Even the Dominican workers he brought over at a steep price to make up his staff were astonished.
He set up the factory at the top of the cliff, just a hundred meters from the caves; it was a huge, rectangular stone building in the style of the region’s farmhouses, now marred by its new owners’ additions.
My god, what a shame . . . He has to stop thinking about all that, he tells himself, going into another room. This is an alcove with rounded corners and high ceilings, at the center of which stands a very simple canopy bed made of exotic wood. One of the few desires that Dulcie allowed herself to voice in all the time he has known her. She is lying perfectly still in a white cotton nightgown that belonged to her grandmother. Dulcie Présage . . . When she had first introduced herself, at the Dominican tobacco company he was visiting, Arnaud had been captivated by her name as much as by her beauty. An island girl with big lips and a limpid smile. Eyes the color of jatoba wood, though she has not opened them in six months. The feeding tube in her left nostril looks like one of the nose pins that Rajasthani women wear, it traces