The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (15 page)

"Too pedestrian. Too slavish," she said.

I paused for a moment and then asked, "A monkey?"

"Good heavens, Piambo, I think you are teasing me."

"I'm serious," I said. "What about a monkey?"

"Well, Mr. Darwin thinks I already am one," she said.

"I suppose, according to him, we all are."

"Some more than others."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"What do you think I mean?" said Mrs. Charbuque.

"Some, perhaps, have more primitive attributes. A jut-ting jaw, a low brow, more ... hair."

"Actually, I was speaking metaphorically," she said. "There are those who seem merely to mimic others, those who are more foolish, getting into mischief all the time."

"And your husband?" I asked, trying to catch her off guard.

Without missing a beat, she said, "Certainly not a monkey. A jackal, maybe. A hooded cobra, certainly. That is, if he were still alive."

"You are telling me he is deceased?"

"Some years ago. Of his bones are coral made," she said.

"A shipwreck?" I asked.

"You are astute, Piambo."

"Can you tell me more?" I asked.

"For you to understand the complexity of our rela-tionship, I must go back to the Sibyl.

Nothing in my later life will make sense without your knowledge of it."

"The Sibyl it is, Mrs. Charbuque. As you wish," I said, with the understanding that I was the most pathetic of strategists. I sat back, holding the charcoal pencil at the ready, determined to capture an image on paper that day. There was the sound of movement behind the screen— the scraping of her chair against the floor as she reposi-tioned it, the rippling of her dress like a distant flag blowing in a breeze. Then I heard something make contact with the cherrywood frame at the right side of the screen. I

looked quickly to catch a glimpse, for she was pulling it toward her an inch or two, as if what she was about to say made her feel more vulnerable than before.

The hand that gripped the wooden border, I tell you, was not human. I saw it from the lower quarter of the forearm to the tips of the fingers, and the sight of that thick black hair covering every inch to the second knuckle would have had Mr. Darwin reconfiguring his theory in a mad sweat. As for me, I simply gaped, wide-eyed, at that monkey paw with its dark cuticles and rough digits per-forming this human task. My glimpse of it lasted no more than a second or two, but it brought immediately to my mind the image of the Monkey Queen.

I might have sat there stunned all day, but another wonder followed hard upon the heels of the first—a half-dozen large green leaves flew over the top of the screen and fluttered down to land at my feet. To have had nothing but a voice for all those days and now to have something so substantial threw me into a state of confu-sion. I leaned over and lifted one of the leaves and found they were made of green paper. As she began to speak, I realized that they were the same as those we had discov-ered at the warehouse tied in a bundle in the crate of dry snow marked Londell.

"With my mother no longer casting her doubting glances, frowning those grimaces of disdain, there was no impediment for my father and me. We rushed headlong into belief. The Twins were our new religion. Firmly con-vinced that they conferred the power of second sight upon me, we looked everywhere for proof of prophecy and found it. The most insignificant happenstance was fraught with multiple layers of meaning, and all the connections formed a spider's web of paranoia we were ecstatic to be snared in. I know how ridiculous this all must sound, but when you are a child, and the one adult you are in close contact with, a parent you love, tells you again and again that every dream you have, every imagining, every word you pronounce is a valuable prophecy, this then becomes your truth.

"I'm not sure how it works, but I swear to you that there is something about this process of thought that once embarked upon propagates happy accident, quirky twists of fate, and eventually leaves one believing that she is at the very center of creation. Perhaps the truth was that my father and I were searching so diligently for these coinci-dences that in actuality we were willfully projecting them at every turn. Be that as it may, I became a magnet for felicitous circumstance."

"You need not convince me, Mrs. Charbuque," I inter-jected. "I am a recent student of the
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phenomenon."

"Every morning he would ask me what my dreams of the night had been. On one occasion I told him, T dreamed of a horse swimming in the ocean,' and I had. The day went on as usual, and then after lunch, he called me into his study to join him at the window. 'Look there, Lu,' he said, and pointed toward the sky. I looked but saw nothing. 'At what?' I asked. 'Look, girl,' he said. I looked harder, expecting to see a hawk or a buzzard, but there was noth-ing. 'I'm sorry, Father.

What am I looking at?'

'Dear God, girl, do you not see that large cloud? It is in the perfect shape of a horse. Don't you see its streaming mane, its galloping hooves, the blasts of steam coming from its nos-trils?' 'I see a ship,' I said.

'No, no, please look more closely.' Then I stared hard for a full five minutes, and all of a sudden the airy white frigate revealed itself to be a running horse. I clapped my hands. 'I see it, I see it,' I said. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned down to kiss me. 'Your dream, you see,' said my father. 'A horse swims in the vast blue ocean.'

"At other times, he would stop what he was doing and turn to me and say, 'Get a piece of paper and a pencil and jot down a number between one and a hundred.' Of course, I did as I was told.

In the evening, while we read in the sitting room, he would say, 'I will now think of a number,'

and close his eyes. Sometimes he would lift his reading glasses and pinch the bridge of his nose.

'Very well, I have it,'

he would say. This was my signal to go and fetch the piece of paper with the number I had scrawled earlier. 'Go ahead, read it to me,' he would say. I would read, say, the number thirty-five. 'Incredible,' he would exclaim, and then shake his head in wonder.

"In the final weeks before spring of the year my mother was taken by the wolf, my father devised the stage act that would eventually become my life and sub-sequently my cage. Even in my youthful excitement owing to all the attention he was lavishing upon me, I was overwhelmed by the fact that this previously unassuming man, a scientist who had been content to quietly study snowflakes his entire life, should exhibit such an intuitive facility for, not to mention interest in, the art of showmanship. Maybe he had his own premonition about how important the act would be to my survival and knew that before too long he would no longer be able to help me.

"His plan was that the audience members would ask questions of me, and I would then concentrate upon the Twins and offer up whatever images I was shown through their voices.

'Tell them nothing but what you actually see,' he said, for when he introduced me, he would let them know that I would merely give clues to the future and it was the individual's job to understand the message or to keep a watchful eye open for its realization in the near future."

"In other words," I said, "there was no chance of your being wrong.

The onus for the prophecy would be on the inquirer."

"Precisely," she said. "And that was the beauty of it. They loved it because they were given the opportunity to participate in the prophecy. No matter what question was asked and what images I

divulged, there was always a way to reconcile the two, given time and a modicum of imagi-nation.

"When we finally returned to the city, it was my father's plan that we should test out my act at one of

Ossiak's dinner parties. What was missing, though, in his estimation, was a certain air of mystery.

After again tak-ing up our summer residence on Fourth Avenue, we had a few days before the night of the gala. One afternoon after Ossiak had sent over my father's yearly salary, we were out shopping for a dress for me, and we walked into a store that sold all manner of exotic objects from around the world.

There were ostrich eggs, African masks, Eskimo harpoons. It was in that shop that he found this
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screen imported from lapan. No sooner did he see it and its design of falling leaves than he conceived the idea of the Sibyl. Are you familiar with this character of ancient lore, Piambo?"

"Only by name," I said.

"There were a number of sibyls in ancient Greece and Rome. A sibyl was a woman who foretold the future. The most famous was the Cumaean Sibyl, who lived in a cave, unseen by the populace. If someone desired to know the future, he would go to the mouth of the cave and speak his question. The sibyl would then write her answer on leaves and place them at the mouth of the cave. In our version of the legend, we reversed the procedure. The participants wrote their questions on paper leaves, and I

answered from my hiding place."

"Interesting," I said. "So the screen has a meaning."

"Everything has a meaning, Piambo," she said. "That day in the shop, we also bought another object of mystery to use in the act, something from Zanzibar."

"What was that?" I asked.

She did not answer, but I heard her chair move again behind the screen. Brusquely enough to make me jump, the monkey hand appeared at the top of the middle frame, its fingers curling around the cherrywood. I pushed my own chair back at the sight of it. The ugly paw did not rest there long but continued to rise up all the way to the elbow. Then abruptly, it fell forward over the screen and landed on the floor in front of me. I jumped out of my chair and gave a short scream. I blinked four times, my heart racing, before I realized that the appendage was the work of a taxidermist. At the shoulder end was a wooden pole with which to hold it.

Mrs. Charbuque was in a fit of hysterics. She laughed so hard she choked slightly and gasped for air. "What about a monkey?" I heard her barely get out before exploding into another paroxysm of mirth.

I stood frozen for the longest time, trying to compre-hend this woman. Then I stamped my foot angrily like a spoiled child. Folding over my sketchbook, I prepared to leave, but when I put my pencil in my coat pocket, I felt there the dry snow from the warehouse. I grabbed a mere pinch between my thumb and first two fingers, walked up to the screen, and threw it high over the top so that it would shower slowly down upon her. This done, I turned away. lust as I was closing the door behind me, Mrs.

Charbuque suddenly went silent. When I was halfway down the hall, she screamed my name, and I

smiled.

Happy Accident

"I tell you, I think she is mad," I said to Shenz. We sat at a streetside table in a cafe on the corner of

Park Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. The sun was beginning its late-afternoon descent, and although there was little wind, the air was quite cold. The waiter had looked at us oddly when we said we would like to be served out-of-doors, but we needed privacy from the other customers who crowded the place.

"Piambo, you are a regular Auguste Dupin. Insane, you say? Heavens, how did you chance upon such a remarkable notion?" he asked.

"Everyone is abusing me today," I said, lifting my cof-fee cup.

"We have a woman who hides behind a screen and asks to have her portrait painted—a woman, no less, who is in possession of a mummified monkey arm. I don't think it takes an assiduous application of ratiocination to determine that her reason has gone fishing."

"True enough," I said.

"But," said Shenz, closing his eyes as if to concentrate, "this sibyl thing is interesting in more ways than one."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"The Cumaean Sibyl lived a very long time. It seems that when she was young, she made herself very attractive to the sun god, Apollo. Overwhelmed by her beauty, he offered her anything in exchange for spending a single night with him. Her plan all along had been to gain a kind of immortality, so her wish was to have as many years as the grains of sand she could hold in her hand. The sun god acquiesced, but once the sibyl had her prize, she spurned his advances. In turn Apollo, not to be trifled with by a mortal, did not grant her as many years of youth, so as the years swept by she aged and shriveled but remained alive."

"There's an inconvenience," I said.

"Quite," said Shenz. "She withered to nothing but a small lump of dried-out flesh, but the pulse of life still beat within her. Her remaining form was placed in a hol-low gourd and hung from the branch of a tree. Children would come to her tree and ask her what she wished, and she would whisper that she wished only to die. In one story, she petitions Charon, the oarsman who rows the recently deceased across the river Styx from the shores of life to the land of the dead.

Charon, though, could not take those who were either still alive or not properly buried. These poor souls remained on the banks of the river forever, flitting aimlessly about, unable to pass to the underworld. At this point in the story there is a part I for-get, but as it turns out, the only time a person who is not truly dead or not properly buried can cross the flood to the underworld is when he is granted a golden bough by the sibyl. Charon honors this bough like a ticket on the el and takes them over."

"Shenz, I don't know who traffics in more of it, you or Borne. What does this have to do with anything?" I asked.

He laughed. "It has to do with you.

You have gone to Mrs. Charbuque for the golden bough so that you can make the passage to a new land."

"I was thinking more along the lines of cash," I said. "Let's not rush the Styx crossing."

"In mythology, Death is not always death. Very often it is symbolic of a great change. You seek freedom from this life of portraiture you are now trapped in."

"At times you amaze me," I said with true admiration.

Shenz waved off my compliment and said, "I checked the papers, and there was no news of our break-in. It seems we have pulled off the perfect crime."