Planus (3 page)

Rij was a windbag, a barrel of a woman who must have weighed seventeen or eighteen stone. I have never seen such a monument of crumbling, overblown flesh. She spent her days and nights in an upholstered armchair which had been specially made for her, and she was forever adorning it with ribbons and plaited rosettes, bows, gold and silver braid, embroidery and lace; as the padded head-rest was very high, rising well above her head, and she herself was always tangled up in her skeins of embroidery wools, she was enthroned there, in this kind of cradle or cocoon, like a knowing sow in the enchanted caravan, the ark of a fortune-teller, pontifical, with a mischievous eye, her heavy eyelids fringed with black mascara, swigging countless bottles of beer and smoking a long clay pipe, cramming the tobacco in with her fat, bejewelled, sausage-shaped fingers, her teeth gold, her legs bare, showing pale calves, her feet, in Turkish slippers of red and blue leather, resting on a foot-muff that concealed her chamber-pot, her hair hanging down below her knees, but with a bun on top crowned with combs set with brilliants, a mirror within reach of her hand, a Hand of Fatima hanging round her neck. There was something of the prize-winning mother rabbit about her, and also something of a Hindu idol. But she had a sentimental heart and was always in a tizzy about everybody and everything. She exercised great authority at Julia's, for she had a devoted clientele who came to the house especially for her, and in order to fornicate with this wallowing monster, the male, like an insect, had to squat, behind, in front, or underneath, since the woman, like a queen termite, would not deign to move herself.

'Fortunately, I have a large hole,' she was in the habit of saying, when the screen behind which she had done her stuff was drawn back (nothing would induce her to go up to the first floor), 'you can't bungle it with me. I am not shaped like a circumflex accent, a man can ride me astride or side-saddle. But not many men have the necessary equipment, and I don't like miserable beggars who show off and try to butter me up, it gives me a migraine and tires me out. If all women were made like me, making love would not be just an affectation. With me, a man gets good solid meat. Something he can screw. It's healthy. Look... .'

And she would slap her buttocks and smack her tits, moving her belly and hips, showing off her thighs, her knees, her phenomenal ankles, making you measure the roundness of her arm, and feel her neck and back.

'Creamy as a bar of soap, isn't it?' she would say. 'It's smooth and it smells good. And what's more, I froth. I am unique. Barnum wanted to take me to America. But I come from Antwerp, and besides, I have my self-respect as a woman. I would not exhibit myself like that. . ..'

The other girls in the house — there were eighteen of them, and that was the number on the lantern over the front door — clustered round, knitting placidly and listening to Rij's inexhaustible chatter. They were a fine regiment of sailors' girls, solid landlubbers, dairymaids and housemaids. They were not malicious. We took them out for boat-trips, upstream or downstream, or for picnics in the open air, improvised hops at the local inns, and, on rainy days, we took them to the cinema in the afternoon, or went on pub-crawls round the other estaminets in the port. In the evening, we brought them back to their cells, and the circle formed again round the vaticinating Rij.

The month of October slipped by. Life was becoming irksome. When we walked along the quays, I began taking an interest in ships again. I would really have liked to look for a job, as I had a longing to go to sea. But Korzakow had become my banker, giving me however little or however much money I asked for. With the money he had wheedled out of Sephira on the first day, he had taken my books out of Customs without waiting for them to be put up for auction, and now he was selling them, one by one, taking himself off as far as Brussels and Holland to hunt out collectors and hobnob with bibliophiles. I let him get on with it. Good riddance! We no longer had much to say to each other. We knew each other too well. And besides, he disgusted me in his new suit, reeking of eau-de- Cologne like a draper's assistant. What the hell was he still doing in Antwerp? Sephira, Rij. Mandaieff had been buried. It could not be serious, it simply didn't hold water. Rij, Sephira. Why didn't he just kick up his heels and run ? I felt like ditching him. Going off on my own. But fortunately, amongst the crew at Julia's, there was a girl such as only the earth and sky of Flanders can produce, and only Memling has been able to depict, by stealing the blue of the sky to paint the skin of her belly and the gold of cornfields to paint the tresses, the hair of his wise virgins and his foolish virgins, with their lucid, ultra-lucid eyes, who, in everyday life, behave like puppies, perfectly stupid and adorable.

Her name was Ledje.

Trying to make love to Ledje was like chasing a playful dog. What a joyful little animal! It began with a race, yelps, frolics, leaps, blows of the paw, bites, laughter and a breathless struggle. She attacked, I repulsed her. She charged, I stopped her short. We rolled head over heels on the floor. She escaped, I caught her again. We toppled on to the bed to indulge in a mock battle, which ended up with slaps and cuffs, just for fun, but carefully administered and striking home, as one administers them in the heat of the game to a young dog, with the aim of training him, and not as casual caresses.

When I said to her, 'Tell me, Ledje, you don't carry on like this with anyone else, do you? Eh?', she replied: 'That's what you think! You're not the first, and I detest you. I only like skunks. That's why I became a whore. Ugh! Men! .. .'

It was true. When she went upstairs with an anonymous client, she was totally different. She became cantankerous and disagreeable. With a towel in her hand, she climbed the staircase as stiffly as a sleep-walker, and when she came down again she was frigid, with a Satanic smile in her eyes as if she had just put the poor bloke to torture, degrading and mortifying him a thousand times in a single session; nine times out of ten, she jeered at him with her nose in the air, haughtily demanding more and more money, and finally booted him out of the door. Though she encouraged him to drink first, she herself would never drink with a client, no matter how courteous he was with her, but afterwards, once the man had gone, she poured tumblerfuls of eau-de-vie down her throat. She drank all her earnings. She had no regular customers. 'Once bitten, twice shy,' she used to say. She relied on all the stray birds of passage.

A strange girl. Unbalanced. Often, when she was waiting with the other wallflowers downstairs in the drawing-room, instead of joining the circle listening to Rij chattering on, she would strike attitudes in front of the full-length mirror, skipping a few steps forward, a few steps back, ceremoniously curtseying to her own reflection like a little girl who plays the princess and imagines herself the heroine of a fairy-tale, and, suddenly clapping her hands, leaping, dancing, pirouetting, fit to throw herself into hysterics and bring on an attack of nerves, she would start to sing in a thin voice, like a child joining in a game of ring-a-ring-o'roses:

It's easier to find a sky of bright red, Than a girl from Putte with her maidenhead, So come, let's dance and take our chance, Boys and maidens, Whores and virgins,

'Oh, she's off again, for Christ's sake stop her gob with a drink and lock her up in a cupboard !' exclaimed Rij, who was reduced almost to tears by this gloomy refrain.

'In the suburbs of Antwerp. A large borough. Nothing but distilleries. The kids drink gin from their mothers' breast till it pisses out of their eyes, then they put it back in the feeding bottles. The whores from Putte are proverbial. They fall into trances. . . . They go mad...

We were not sailing until midnight. I had time, plenty of time to go and drink a jar with that fat whore Rij, who had arranged for me to have a free kip at Madame Julia's, in November, when Korzakow had hopped it, the bastard, disappearing without warning and leaving me in the soup, stony broke.

It was the third or fourth time we had come to anchor at Antwerp. I was escorting emigrants from Libau to New York and acting as their interpreter. The
Volturno
was an old black tub, stained with minium, which went to Latvia to pick up the poorest emigrants from Europe and transport them to New York, where they were exchanged, at the pier in Brooklyn or Hoboken, for a full cargo of American oxen bound for Europe, mangy, misbegotten, beasts, together with a bunch of unfortunate wretches who had to take care of the livestock and clean the dung out of the stables during the return crossing. These men were the undesirables expelled by the American police; they were brought on board, just as we were weighing anchor, by the leading lights of Ellis Island, that hell for abject souls in the roadsteads of New York.

I would have loved to meet the ape-brain who dreamed up this system of exchange: European emigrants against American oxen; a stout-hearted, able-bodied labour force against a collection of tuberculous, syphilitic have-nots, prostitutes, thieves, criminals, and droves of industrially disabled men delivered to us by the steelworks of Pittsburgh and Bethlehem, and I often wondered what the capitalists of the Uranium Steamship Co. had invested in such traffic and what dividend it paid them. Did it really pay? I could hardly believe it. But there are so many mysterious dealings at sea! In short, we disembarked the whole lot at Antwerp. The oxen were destined to be canned for the nourishment of the army, then in the making, and those of the undesirables who still had four sous in their pockets took advantage of various devious methods to escape the clutches of the police, and counted themselves lucky; as for the others . . . the others, men, women and children, were, in any case, destined for the scrap-heap.

Nothing is sadder than the quays of Antwerp, at night, in the rain. . . . And now, the lamps are lighting up. . . . The high numbers. . .. Number 18... .

I go in.

There is dear old Rij! Apart from her, I no longer know anyone at Madame Julia's. In a few months the whole staff has changed, for, at the drop of a hat, the girls will move out and go to the convent across the road. But the good Mother Superior is still there!

At sea, a lighthouse beckons like a great Madonna To this pretty little Spanish town. On land, it is a dung-heap that has fertilized Two or three skyscrapers....

Nevertheless, the third or fourth time I called in at Corunna, I was tempted to take a turn ashore. It was raining as it can rain only in Galicia, and I was shivering in my raincoat. Everything was closed that day, there was no hope of getting a decent meal, visiting the Museum or leafing through the catalogues at the library, nor of going to the cinema, whose programmes in any case looked uninviting, nor even of resting for a while in the glacial churches. So I wandered about all day in the dirty streets, lingering in front of the mud-spattered shop-windows, which displayed nothing but rubbish and bric-a-brac, apart from the pharmacies, which seemed to be stocked with a profusion of products 'Made in Germany'; I was escorted everywhere in my perambulations by a band of scurvy and half-starved urchins who dragged around after me from one miserable little cafe to the next, and to an even more miserable bar, seedy and black with smoke, where the little brats refused the food and drink offered them, pestering me for cigarettes and money instead. It was so depressing that, when night fell, I was glad to take advantage of the emigrants' launch to return to the ship, although I had intended to go to a workers' meeting that was placarded all over the town.

...
The port is a river in flood

The poor emigrants who wait for the authorities to come aboard are rudely shaken in the poor little ships that huddle together without sinking The port has one eye sick and the other blind And a giant crane looms up like a long-range cannon. . . .

And that was how I wasted one whole day of my life in Corunna, that back-to-front Escorial, where Picasso, the Philip II of modern painting, was anointed by his abdicating father and crowned king of an 'empire on which the sun never rises', as I have just learned from a book by Jaime Sabartes, which sharply defines both the Spaniard and the decadent in Picasso.

Picasso. Pablo, Diego, Jose, Francisco de Paula, Juan, Nepomu- ceno, Crispin, Crispiniano de la Santissima Trinidad Picasso, into whose hands his father, Don Jose Ruiz Blasco, delivered up palette and brushes. The scene took place in 1894. Ah! If only I had known! I would have searched for traces of the event and gone up to No. 14,
calle
Payo Gomez, where racing pigeons were sold, and which was, in its day, the home of the Picasso family in Corunna.

Here is Jaime Sabartes' account of the abdication of the father. There is a touch of demonology about it, and one can understand why the godparents, moved by a strange presentiment, attributed so many patron saints to the little Catholic they were baptizing and who, nevertheless, was to become a man possessed, the very personification of the devil in modern painting. (I summarize the scene taken from the first chapter of a book which is otherwise very entertaining.)*

' "In Corunna, my father never went out," says Picasso, "except to go to the School of Arts and Crafts. When he came home, he painted. That was all. The rest of the time he gazed out of the window at the falling rain...

* Jaime Sabartes,
Picasso, Portraits et Souvenirs
(Paris: Louis Carre and

— N.R.

B

'Sometimes Don Jose took a pigeon to the art gallery to paint.

'In order to avoid going out, Don Jose even gave up going to the bullfights. He was bored at home. Painting distracted him for a little while, but it also tired him. From time to time he took up his brushes to paint a pigeon, but he had not the patience to fiddle with the details, the claws, for example, which he left to the child.

' ".. . How did you do them?"