The Shadow Of The Mole

The Mole’s Writings In The Grey Notebook I-1

The Mole’s Writings In The Grey Notebook I

i 1875The Eidolon floats in a sea of sadness.

What is real and what is not?

Who am I?

We are we within we within we…

We are worlds within worlds within worlds…

I will create one for him.

I must give the Eidolon its name.

Who’s standing behind my right shoulder?

No breath reaches my skin.

ii 1875Saint-Maclou is the anus of the Earth, Alain Mangin mused. The fifteen-year-old boy considered this trouvaille a literary feat.

Alain stood at the window of the attic in the manor house, overlooking the farmyard. The attic lantern, suspended from a beam, threw a honey-coloured shine on the wooden floor. Against the western wall, there stood a collection of big wooden puppets, carved by Alain’s grandfather in the tradition of the great Napolitano burattinai. In the middle of the attic, books from his father’s library lay scattered on the table. The morose atmosphere of the attic attracted the teenager.

Alain Mangin cherished a few vague memories of his father Raoul. The most beloved one was the image of Raoul in full military regalia during a parade in Paris ten years ago. Out of the same period came the strongest scene he retained from his early youth: a cacophony of voices in the shadowy environment of a raucous bar. His father’s laughter had been recognizable above all other sounds: heavy and testy, as though Raoul had to force each vibration from his throat.

The faces in Alain’s memory were distorted and eerie, like the faces of the puppets in the attic. A glass was held before his mouth. In a reflex the boy opened his lips and scowled when he tasted the sourness of the brew. The faces in the bar seemed to whirl like balloons, inflated, deflated, appearing, disappearing. In his memory, only the old woman in the back room had a body – bulbous breasts pressed together by a multicolour dress. The door behind him closed with a clap. The hubbub in the bar became a din. His father’s hand landed on his shoulders. He spoke to the gypsy woman. Alain heard the words, le futur.

The future was a thing without distinct meaning for a five year old.

The old gypsy placed her crystal ball on the table. During her long career in the working class districts of Paris, she had earned enough money to buy the finest counterfeit crystal. She also knew how a cunningly placed light source and a swift estimate of the customer could add an alluring aura to the tricks of her trade.

This customer was a godsend. The drunken fool wanted her to prophesy his young son’s future. The little one was spindly, with sheepish eyes, a petite bugger with an unhealthy blush on his cheeks.

“Gaze into my crystal ball, young sir,” the woman lisped, scratching behind Alain’s ear as she would caress a dog. “The whole world hides in it.”

The whole world hides in it. The ironic lie planted its fangs in Alain’s head and snuggled itself firmly in his brain.

Alain saw lights glittering in the ball, and his reflection, curiously changed, a dapple of yellow and shadows.

The gypsy took the glass-bead necklace on the table before her and held it behind her ball. A fake diamond oscillated at the end of the necklace. “Gaze into the stone of Padua, petit seigneur!” she said, with her phoney posh accent. “Through its magical powers, the world opens itself like a breaking egg…” With her fingertips, she deftly turned the counterfeit diamanté, which borrowed the light shining through the ball and scattered it from its many facets. She had learned that trick from her mother, who had learned it from hers.

“I foresee that your son has the ability to become a talented general, should Fate help him,” she said, glancing at the father. She smiled with parted lips – she had been beautiful once.

At home, Alain had a gaudy-coloured tin soldier carrying a rifle in his hand. General. He knew that word. He gazed at the glittering light emitted by the cut glass in the ball and saw himself in a white uniform with golden tresses and a shiny sabre.

The boy smiled.

“This young lad shall witness the world’s Fate,” the gypsy went on. She saw the father frown. Had she gone too far? She didn’t care. Fortune-telling in the back room of a bar was always the best – the boozers were easily besotted. What the hell, she would smear it even a little thicker. “In days yet to come all men shall know his name.” She liked the ‘In days yet to come’ and most of her customers were impressed by it.

Raoul Mangin, his head a cobweb of fleeting, colliding thoughts, burst into laughter. A funny old crone, worth a coin. “Here you go, toad-eater.” He handed her a copper and grabbed his son by the collar. Alain wanted to stay and look at the light-dazzling stone, like a tiny star that the gypsy held behind her ball. He tore himself free from his father’s hand. Raoul laughed again in his intense way. “Didn’t you hear what Madame said? Maybe you’ll become a mighty general. But even a general has to start as a soldier and follow orders.”

Alain, propelled by his father’s hand on his shoulder, stumbled back into a world of banter, harsh noises, red, puffed-up faces and wine.

Much later, at home, the noise was as deafening as in the bar. His mother’s angry shrieks exhausted him. He felt feverish. On the table stood a lamp with a big belly and beads dangling down from the lampshade. Alain sat at the table and imagined he was looking in the crystal ball again. The ball swelled before his sleepy eyes. He saw himself afresh in that lovely white uniform with golden tresses. Suddenly, his father’s hand appeared above the table, smashing the lamp. It scattered in fireflies of light, fading away quickly. Father’s voice, loud as usual, mother’s yelling. Alain put his hands on his ears and felt himself falling into a depth that made his body heavy like a lump of clay.

The boy didn’t realize that he was falling from his chair.

His body arched under the pressure of an invisible power.

Over and over again in his young life, Alain had revived the memory of his first epileptic attack. It stirred in him a longing for beauty, and summoned the tyranny of fear.

On the left wall of the attic, beside the bookcase, hung a small painting. His father Raoul had painted it. The military man had cherished artistic dreams for a while, but had been too proud to pander to the tastes of the Parisian bourgeoisie. “Those intellectuals like to pontificate about art,” he liked to say. “But Art cannot be analysed. Colours are like bodies, Alain, they must live.”

All those years Alain had listened to his father’s monologues, silent, trying to understand the man who introduced himself to visitors as ‘the painter-lieutenant’. His mother only praised his father when he was ready – in full regalia, though with a cranky face – to conduct her to a dance hall.

The painting presented a human form in rough, terracotta brush-strokes. Was it a man or a man-ape? The pot-belly was pushed forwards by the unnaturally crooked back. The creature held one hand up above its shoulders. The hand resembled a claw. All in all, the painting was a brooding collection of sweeping lines that conveyed a mixture of anger and disgust. The ‘face’, with its contorted mouth, resting without a neck on that crumpled body, had a tormented expression. Since the day of his visit to the gypsy woman, and his parents’ quarrel afterwards (which nestled in his mind as ‘the fight for the Stone of Padua’) he had regularly suffered from Grand Mal attacks. As he gazed on the painting of the man-ape, it seemed to Alain that his father had portrayed him.

An enigma, his papa. Two days ago, Alain had marked a passage in one of the books that were part of Raoul’s legacy: The male body has nothing in common with a reservoir, the female s****l parts act like one. Thus they incite the male toward the act of s*x by piquing his need to release and to detumesce. Due to the external shape of his s****l parts, this urge is very powerful in the male.

For days, he had been trying to decipher the meaning of these awkward sentences, wondering why his father read something like that, while he had many other books full of sonorous poems, or tales of wonderful adventures and travels.

He remembered his father as someone who stood for long periods at the window overlooking the garden of their Paris home. Sometimes, Alain went and stood beside him and before long, one of Raoul’s gnarled hands would rest against the nape of his son’s small neck and lightly squeeze it.

Then, without warning, he was gone, abroad. The house smelled like it was dusted and sprinkled with flower water, and his mother smiled and laughed melodiously when friends came to visit.

Like his father in Paris, Alain stood before the window overlooking the trees and the meadow, blurred by milk-coloured mist, behind the farm house. A cow lowed in one of the barns, a sound of inconsolable longing. The boy stood for a long time, transfixed, unable to tear himself away from the immobility that had seized him. He summoned an image of himself as a cat that would erupt in a blur of motion. It was his trick to overcome the catatonia of his muscles. It worked, but his movement was not a swift and powerful feline attack, only a lame half-turn of his body. It was the tableau outside, Alain told himself. It bewitched him. He tried to picture a military parade in Paris with his father in a brand new uniform as a Captain of the Emperor’s glorious army. Then, by a sheer act of will, he changed his father’s face into his own. When he couldn’t hold on to the mental picture anymore, he looked around the attic. Books and memories. Sly-eyed dolls. Crouching shadows. He sat at the table loaded with books. He had developed a game. With his eyes closed, he would open a book at random, then read the first words he saw. He told himself each time that those words would define his future. Sometimes, he caressed the leather-bound volumes for a long time before opening one of them, hoping for a phrase that would open up his inner prison.

Alain, with eyes closed, leafing through a book, had the impression that one of the dolls had moved and advanced stealthily toward him. His body tingled. He opened his eyes and stared at the page before him, not wanting to look into the room.

Sans cesse à mes côtés s’agite le Démon

Il nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable

Je l’avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon

Et l’emplit d’un désir éternel et coupable1

The boy looked up, met the eyes of the third doll in the row.

The tingling sensation became a winter’s electrical storm.

When Alain came back to his senses, he was standing at the window, looking at the moon. A familiar pain reached his heart, peaked, and disappeared like snow sprinkled with hot water. The boy knew from experience that le petit mal, that had paralyzed him for hours on end, was usually the harbinger of something worse.

The moon above the charcoal-coloured clouds was in its third quarter and seemed to fly at high speed through the fog patches hanging above the meadows. It was ivory pale and made the trees seem bigger than they really were.

Once he found a name for the longing that had him in its t****l, he would conquer it. He knew that this curious feeling, possessing the flavour of longing but also of something unknown, was not the same as other urges, not even ‘desire of the flesh,’ as his friend Pepain used to say, with a peculiar smirk on his face. A week earlier, Alain had accompanied Pepain, who had found a way to peep at young ladies in their underwear in his father’s tailor shop. Pepain had been lyrical about soft flesh bulging out of lacy brassieres. He told Alain, with an air of great self-importance, that you could clearly see the difference between ladies enjoying a health spa in the prickly fresh winds of Saint Maclou and the upstart peasant women of the region: real ladies had a milky white skin and small n*****s. Their areolas were not reddish brown like those of the farm women who had suckled many children. Alain had pressed his right eye against the little hole in the wall. The desire he had felt was easy to understand – it took him just his fantasy and his hands to quench that heat.