The Salt Roads Page 21

  Joël took a cautious sniff.

  “Is it well?”

  “Smells like wine, like that posh wine Baudelaire’s always drinking.”

  “Now taste one little sip of it.”

  Joël obeyed.

  “The taste is to your liking? The bouquet fills your nose? The scent is pleasing?”

  Joël shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  Achille smiled. “Monsieur approves, then, and we can all drink.”

  He poured for all of us. The wine flowed into the glasses with scarcely a sound; smooth like the running river. Achille twisted the bottle as he poured, so that not a drop fell that he didn’t want to fall. I was purely astonished. He presented me and Joël with our glasses. He had done this before.

  “Are you someone’s servant, then?” I asked. Why was he dressed so poorly, if he worked in some rich house?

  “Moustique’s a cook,” Joël informed me.

  Achille sat back down. “A chef, if you please. All the gentry in Nantes crave to have food prepared by these hands.” He cracked his knuckles. “And I crave to play some cards, Joël. Where do you go for entertainment in this town?”

  “Now you’re speaking my language!” Joël laughed and slammed his wine glass down onto the table, so hard I feared he’d snap the stem. “Drink up, Mous; there’s a place I want to take you to.”

  And there it was. For all his fine ways, Achille was just another layabout like my brother, gambling away his earnings and spending any left on the whores in the jook houses. I sipped my wine to hide my disappointment. “Monsieur Achille,” I said, “how are things in Nantes?”

  He smiled at me. He had fine features. “Well, some of us are still black, you know.”

  Joël chuckled at that.

  Achille leaned towards me, his face eager. “But have you heard of the new wonder that is come to Nantes?”

  I shook my head.

  “A giraffe! From Africa!”

  “A what?” I said. “What is that?”

  “Oh, Madame Lemer; the most astonishing animal. From the place they took our forefathers from. Imagine a deer. Yes?”

  “Yes, I can picture it.”

  “Now, imagine a deer the height of, oh, a two-storey building.”

  “It’s a giant deer?”

  “In a way; but I’m not done yet. Imagine its legs, long and sleek, yet thick and strong enough to bear a body the size of a house. Now, imagine that the animal’s neck is also long.”

  “Long?”

  “Moustique, what nonsense are you feeding us?” laughed Joël.

  “No, it’s true! A long neck; long enough that the beast could stick its head to the top of the church spire I saw yonder as I was coming to you!”

  “No!” I said. “You lie!”

  “I speak only the truth, as my mother taught me. Now, give it a head like a horse’s.”

  I shook my head and drank more wine. “Nothing that looks like that could live. Its head would break its neck. Joël, tell him.”

  “Mous, stop telling tales.”

  “You must come with me to Nantes, then, and see it. And there’s more than that, you know? Its hide is tan, and covered all over in brown spots, like the leopard.”

  Joël got to his feet, laughing. “Oh, now you’ve gone too far.” He took Achille’s sleeve. “Come. Let’s go.”

  He pulled Achille out of the house, with the little man calling over his shoulder, “It was a gift! Really! From some Egyptian pasha to the English King George! It’s living in the botanical gardens in Nantes! People visit it every Sunday!”

  I followed them to the door, chuckling. I scarce noticed my dragging foot. Outside, Achille turned and took my hand. “Fabric printed like the giraffe’s spots is the height of Paris fashion nowadays.” I laughed and waved him away. He kissed my hand. “I’m telling the God’s truth, Madame. All the fine folk are wearing it.” He turned to my brother. Laughing, Joël put his arm around Achille’s shoulder and they headed off down the road.

  As I was about to go back in, I saw him coming. Charles. His head was down. His bald patch gleamed rosy-peach from the setting sun. His hands were stuck in his pockets, his face like storm clouds. He wouldn’t look at me.

  Hold fast, Lemer. The moves of the dance are happening yet. Step this way now.

  I stood and waited for him. I had to face him. I owed him that.

  Step lightly.

  His face was closed to me. He shoved past me into the house without looking at me once. I followed. “Charles, I’m sorry.”

  He went to our room. He closed the door in my face. “Charles!”

  I could hear him bustling about inside. Could hear things falling, closet doors opening.

  Step that way now. Now, twist.

  “I’ll send him away, Charles!” I called through the door. Nothing. The door opened. He was standing there, carrying a valise. He dared a glance at me. His eyes dampened with tears. He looked at the floor. Sniffed.

  “I’ll let you know where I’ve gone,” he mumbled, “in the event that you need anything. Don’t contact me otherwise.”

  “But Charles, please!”

  He waved me away. “No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. I’ll keep providing for you, but don’t touch me. Don’t see me. I’m going now.”

  He did.

  Yes, finished now.

  I heard him shut the front door, oh, so gently. I sat in the nearest chair. I couldn’t even cry. Charles, my man of words, gone, and only Joël left to me. But Charles wouldn’t beggar me, he’d promised. He always kept his word. And there I would be with Joël, love of my heart, of my body. Should I be glad?

  1 January 1861

  My dear mother, I have now been living here (Rue Louis-Philippe, Neuilly) for a fortnight, and, as usual, I’m very unhappy. Understand that in a moral sense, not a physical one.

  I have returned to my old idea of installing myself permanently at Honfleur, except for one week each month (for I have to go to Paris regularly on business) and then I should be able to pay my debts as I incurred them. Because, for reasons I may explain to you, I probably won’t return to Neuilly.

  I need more than this, Lemer.”

  I counted the last franc note into Joël’s hand. “It’s all I have.”

  He scowled. “Get him to send you more, then.”

  “Joël, he sends what he can. His mother holds the purse-strings, you know.”

  He said nothing, but he thumped the wall as he strode out. Big hands, Joël had. Heavy hands. He slammed the door.

  17 March 1861

  Dear mother; I confess that the woman was beautiful, and my indulgence therefore perhaps suspect. But last January something frightfully monstrous happened; it made me quite ill. I don’t wish to talk about it. It would tear my heart out.

  What have I done for seventeen years, but forgive? Yet if one yields to Jeanne, here’s the danger: the following month, the following week, she comes back requesting more money, and so on forever.

  A few days ago, Malassis told me that Jeanne had come to ask him to buy some books and drawings. Malassis is not a dealer. He prints new books. There are hundreds of dealers of old books in Paris. I rather suspect that she picked Malassis to hurt me, to wound my pride. It is all one to me, if she chooses to sell the souvenirs which every man leaves with a woman with whom he has lived for years.

  Saw

  Suddenly, an impulse of my will moves me. That is the only way I can describe it. A pulse, the way muscles feel when I am embodied. For the first time, I go, in a direction I choose! I flex my desirous will again, stronger this time. And I go, I go. I push through the clinging fog, I dive deeper into it. I swim and swim and swim, and reach a point where I can swim no more. The flow is stilled here. It’s stagnant. It coats me, and I feel filthy and sick. I turn and swim out of it, back into the rushing ectoplasm. I revel in the cleanness of it. I move in another direction. Move in time that is no time, until I flop into another stagnant pool. Again I clamber out of it and go another
way. This time I am beached, left gasping in a nameless, foetid horror of a place where there is no sustaining aether. There is nothing. It is undescribable. I twist and flap until I drop down into the mists again, gasping, thankful. What is wrong here? I do not know. I do not know how to understand. I swim slowly this time, thinking.

  Jizz

  Alexandria, Egypt, 345 C.E.

  I scurried back to the tavern to go and see to my customer Antoniou. A busy day in Alexandria today, so close to the big Rose Festival. When I got to the market, I had to push my way through the crowds. Plenty of people had come into town for the festival. Me and Nefer already had three nights of dancing lined up. I’d be able to get a new tunic, too, to go with my sandals. And some perfume.

  A donkey passed me in the opposite direction, headed for Canopic Way. It was weighed down with packs, and it was being pulled by a Nubian man, his feet dusty to the ankles from the road. He nodded to me. I dipped my chin at him. His deep brown skin and crinkly hair reminded me of my mother. Maybe with the money she got from selling me, she and my father had bought some land. Maybe there had been enough left over for her to get new combs for her hair. I remember that the old combs had lost some of their teeth. I remember.

  Someone is fucking the body I’m in. This is not Jeanne! Have I traded one cage for another? I try not to despair. There are ways to travel forth from my horse’s head, and I am learning them. Perhaps this body will not be a trap for me, as Jeanne’s is. I wriggle with joy at life, at another adventure. The wriggling brings a sigh from behind me. Hipbones slam against this person’s asscheeks, a pleasantly numbing percussion. A cock pumps in and out of . . . ah. This new body is a woman’s too. She’s on her knees on a stone bed, gripping the head of it for purchase. The man inside her is muttering a mixture of Greek and heavily accented Latin. He smells of the sea. She, this new she, smells of olive oil. Her body is slippery with it.

  It is dry here, and hot. That man, he feels good in us. She is distracted, and so she leaves me able to direct our movements. I spread our knees further, arch our back. Whisper to him to encourage him. The language in which our body whispers is Greek, a Greek from an older time of this Earth. She is dark-skinned, this beauty, and ruddy, like copper. Her head tells me that she lives in great Alexandria, and her name is Thais. Or something else. Or something else again, but she doesn’t think about her second and third names much. Three names. She’s another three-twist, this one. A braided girl, sister to the three who birthed me. No salt-pucker of bitterness in her, though. Perhaps this will be interesting.

  Jazz

  The man behind us—the sailor Antoniou, Thais’s head tells me—clasps me tight around our belly and pulls us closer. Against Thais’s back I feel the curled tangle of sweaty hair on his chest. He whispers hoarsely in Thais’s ear, “Pearl. Pretty Pearl.” Ah, that is her third name. The one she tells to people who pay her to fuck, or to dance. Antoniou says, “Dance for me now. Dance on my prick.”

  And so we do. I help Thais to shake and buck and leap. I spread our knees more and push our behind back at him and jiggle till he howls. Our cunt clenches happily. Ah, glorious to be in a fit, strong body again. He holds us tight, shoves deep, so deep into us, judders like a hooked fish before he pants once more, hard, and collapses upon our back, whispering grateful allelujahs to the Christian God.

  Antoniou had already paid Tausiris to fuck me, but still he left a few drachmas on my bed. I counted them. Enough to buy some sweets from Claudia in the market! She made the best halwah. I squatted, and with two fingers, reached deep up into my cunt.

  He was a good man, Antoniou. As I cleaned myself up, I could hear his deep, hearty voice out in the bar. Always telling stories from his travels. He’d been to Syria, he said, where Drineh’s grandparents came from, and even to Karakum, where the people have their heads in their bellies and their speech is only “Oomph! Oomph!” Me, I never went anywhere. Just boring old Alexandria.

  Ah. There it was. I pulled out the wad of lambswool, damp with Antoniou’s spunk and my juices. And something more, too; crumbs of wax. Shit! With all that shoving, Antoniou must have broken the pessary! I pushed my fingers inside of me again and bore down, the way that Nefer had taught me to do. I could feel small, softening lumps of wax inside me. I swept them out as best as I might. “Beshotep!” I called. I heard a resentful rumble in response from the direction of the kitchen. “Bring me water for washing with! Fast!”

  I didn’t want a brat, to be mewing at me all the time, and me never getting to go to the theatre, or hang around the market with Drineh and Judah. I didn’t want to be like Cups. I started jumping up and down, landing hard as I could. Nefer told me once that that would shake the man’s seed out.

  “A new dance, I see,” came Judah’s amused voice from the doorway. “Not graceful, but it definitely has vigour.”

  I ignored him, and took three more jumps for good measure. “Just give me the damned water. The cup broke.”

  He got serious then, and hurried into the room with the jug. He handed it to me, then turned his back while I squatted again and washed myself inside and out. “Will you be all right?” he asked in his soft voice.

  “Dunno.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Antoniou.”

  He made a knowing sound. “Yes, that one’s dick could plunge in deep as your liver.”

  “Fine for you to be appreciating his charms. You don’t have to worry about getting babies.”

  “You should take him in the ass, like I do.”

  I sighed. “Yes, I do that for the others. But Antoniou’s special. He’s nice to me.”

  “So nice that he’d take you and your child in?”

  I stood. Water trickled down my legs. “No, I guess not.” I found my shift and pulled it on over my head. “You can turn around now, Judah.”

  He came and embraced me. “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  I held his slim body tight to me, taking comfort in the warmth of him. “Yes, I guess. I’ll take Antoniou’s tip and buy a charm with it tomorrow.”

  “Better take some of his spunk with you, too. They’ll probably want to put that into the charm.” Judah sat on the bed, flicking his curly blond hair off his shoulder with one hand. He pulled his knees in together and tucked his feet under. Even when he was serious, he never forgot to show off how pretty he was. “Whose turn is it to draw money from the pot this month?” he asked me.

  I pulled my hair back into a knot and dragged the wig on over it. “Cups. Damn, this thing is hot.”

  He looked disappointed. “Not me? You’re sure?”

  “I think so.” I bent to knot my sandals. “You were two turns ago. It’s Cups, then me—I’m going to get a new pallia—then Nefer, then you. Why?”

  He just looked down, mouth pursed. “No reason.”

  I sat beside him and took his hand. “I thought you said I was like your sister, Judah.”

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  “Well, you can tell me then, can’t you? Brothers and sisters should trust each other.”

  He looked at me, blushing. “I wanted to buy Gallio Velius a present, that’s all.”

  “Hoho!” I shoved his shoulder. “I knew it! He’s really caught your eye, hasn’t he?”

  He looked down at his knees. “He’s all right.” Then he took my hands. Grinning, he squeezed them. “He says I’m beautiful! He says I’m his favourite boy! Can you believe it?”

  I chuckled. “Well, he’s right; you are lovely.” And Judah might even remain his favourite boy, too. Until Velius made a good marriage. Then he’d stop coming to the taverns, and Judah’s heart would be broken again.

  From a menu of questions that supplicants could ask the gods at the busy temple of Serapis in Oxyrynchus, Egypt, 3rd Century C.E.:

  72. Shall I receive the allowance?

  73. Shall I be reconciled with my child?

  74. Is the absent one alive?

  75. Shall I become a councilman?

  76. Shall
I be sold?

  77. Shall I profit from the affair?

  78. Shall I remain where I am going?

  . . . Well, then the sail went over, almost took my head off, it did, and this great wave washed over the ship. It tore me off the rowing bench I was clinging to and started to suck me over the side.” Antoniou waved his arms in the air as he was talking. The mug in his hand reached the end of its chain and stopped him short. The dregs of his beer splashed over the side onto his shoulder and the floor. He frowned and drained the mug.

  “What’d you do then?” asked Didyma. Little Helena was sitting in her lap, with Judah beside them. Judah and Helena played cat’s cradle with some string.

  “I?” Antoniou roared. “I nearly drowned, that’s what I did.” Judah snorted.

  Helena looked up from her game at him. “You’re not drowned,” she said in her clear child’s voice. A bunch of men at the bar laughed.

  So did Antoniou. He knocked his mug against the counter to let Tausiris know he wanted more, then let it go clanging toward the floor. “True enough, you little flea. You want to know what happened?”