ADDRESSING THE EASTERN
IMMORTALITY FABLE

Mme. Adélie Tremier.

THE next day Mauriac drove the two women up boulevard St-Germain. When the horses balked at climbing a sidestreet, HE however, Adélie insisted they walk the final block lest they be late for the lecture. Henriette wanted to hear it so badly.

The cobbled hill rose, Adélie guessed, toward the Panthéon, though its great dome stayed hidden behind the tilt of neighbouring roofs. She regretted not having brought an umbrella, as Henriette had, to have leaned on as she climbed.

“I’m not so depleted as I look,” she called after her friend.

They came to an arched doorway with a slate propped against the step, and Adélie assumed it was the plat du jour menu for yet another bistro until Henriette produced her notebook and nub of pencil.

“I’ll jot this down for my brother before we step in,” she said, adjusting her pince-nez. “He’s fascinated to know how his part of the world is received.”

The Left Bank Orientalist League
presents a lecture & debate
“Addressing The Eastern Immortality Fable”

“Surely there’ll be a program,” Adélie said slowly—she did not wish to betray her lack of breath. “You might send him that.”

“Oh, you’re quite right!” Henriette clicked her tongue and slid the pencil back into her sleeve. “Though keep your gloves on. Their leaflets tend to smudge.”

“Is there time for co¤ee before we go in?” asked Adélie. “There’s a wonderful place in the Place de la Contrescarpe, but if that’s too far we—”

But Henriette had already lifted skirts and jogged merrily beneath the archway, rushing across the foyer toward the upward-spiralling flagstone stairs so as to report with all-the-greater efficacy to Marco, the lieutenant in Cambodia.

That morning Adélie had believed this would be one of those good days Bonheur had promised, but now the pain so racked her knees and hips she imagined she was climbing in a suit of armour. Even her blameless elbows ached—perhaps it wasn’t tuberculosis at all, but a vindictive rheumatism! But, no, now her cough struggled to assert itself and in her mind Berenice, withered as a centenarian, reared up yet again from her pillows.

Three boys in cloth caps hurried past on the narrowest turn of the steps.

“… and harem girls who won’t…”

“Adélie?” came Henriette’s echoing voice. “Shall I wait for you?”

There were enough empty seats that the two women could set their immense hats on either side of them.

“Are you still chair at the Anti-Penury League?” asked Henriette.

“I was asked to step down after Poulenc’s column.”

“Ladies and gentleman!” called the Orientalist League secretary. “A change this afternoon from our usual program of caliphs and camels, odalisques and Ottomans—”

“And none too soon!” called a woman muffled to the eyes.

“Female guests may have privileges revoked if we cannot keep order in the place, thank you. Yes, the Anarchist Society is one floor down!”

The hall was a theatrical studio with pink cherubs carved into its proscenium arch and a half-dozen rows of creaking, tobacco-imbued seats. A section of battlement stood at stage left behind Lacheroy, the secretary, as he stomped his boot at the podium. He wore liberal amounts of hair oil along with a Van Dyke beard.

“The impresario,” whispered Henriette.

“Yes, yes, this afternoon we move our sphere of inquiry from Asia Minor”—one hand waving low—“to Asia Major, as it were”—the other waving high, as though he stood astride a globe—“for the reason, yes, that our treasurer, Roux the Mystic, has only yesterday returned from his tour of China, Japan and our own delicate East Asian possessions, consulting dusty books and learned men as well as dusty men and learned books, while dallying, no doubt, amongst the local delicacies, yes? Roux, you peered beneath the veil, one might say?”

“Uh, why… no.” The respondent sat in the front row—Adé-lie could see only his bald head and a slender neck protruding from a high collar. “They do not generally wear veils in those parts.”

“Yes, yes, but you know I was speaking metaphorically, that to peer beneath a veil is to… be made privy, shall we say, to a woman’s secret places, and then—”

“Give Roux the stage!” shouted the muffled woman, though she’d pulled her scarf down the better to shout, revealing a face mottled with age-spots and heavily rouged. “We’ve a scholarly talk this time, not your dancing girls!”

“My wife, Louise, yes, ladies and gentlemen.” Lacheroy grinned like a cat. “She anchors me to this reality, bless her.”

“Is it true every sultan keeps a hundred girls?” chirped one of the cloth-capped boys.

This drew deep chuckles from several bearded gentleman, and a fat man with a torn lapel clapped enthusiastically. Henri-ette clicked her tongue.

“I’m afraid it’s true what she said, boys.” Lacheroy leaned heavily on the podium. “No dancing girls today.”

He unfolded a chair at the rear of the stage while the afternoon’s speaker rose and carried his carpet bag up four steps to the podium. Roux wore heavy glasses and a black-and-white tie, and something about his soft-cornered mouth hinted that it shied from strong cheeses. Henriette gripped her nub of pencil.

“Li Baozhen!” he shouted. “Sought immortality!”

With sheepish creaks of their vacated seats the boys crept from the hall.

“Eleven hundred years ago Li Baozhen was a Tang general who, like great men before and after him, sought to achieve life eternal. He engaged the alchemist Sun Jichang to mould pills of gold—now, can anyone suppose what supposition lay behind this belief that swallowing gold would lead to immortality? Yes?”

“Because of the exorbitant markup,” called the fat man with the torn lapel.

“From a practical perspective that’s quite likely, yet the purported theory was simply that gold does not tarnish. And so Li Baozhen ingested twenty thousand of these pills until he became exceedingly uncomfortable, yet one night he dreamt of flying on a crane to the court of Shangdi, which inspired him to practice balancing each day upon a wooden crane of his own design. A Taoist monk cured his stomach ills with a combination of laxatives and lard, at which point the alchemist upbraided the general, asking, ‘Why abandon the immortality you have so nearly achieved?’ So Li Baozhen swallowed three thousand more pills, at which point, understandably, he died.”

Gentlemen shifted in their seats, perhaps out of sympathy for Li Baozhen, as light applause rippled through the auditorium.

“Would it be safe to assume,” asked Lacheroy from his upstage seat, “that the general had serving girls at his disposal?”

Why abandon the immortality you have so nearly achieved? wrote Henriette.

“Do not consider what follows to be a scientific survey,” proclaimed Roux. “Nothing was preserved in formaldehyde and at no point did I so much as take my own temperature. Rather it is a survey of the rude art of the people, and if I tell you that certain things are done in a certain place, it is solely in the literature of that place. These things are real only to those who dwell in unreality.”

“I wonder whether the young woman with the masses of black hair might have a question,” called Lacheroy.

“To achieve life eternal,” Roux went on, “the three primary causes of death must be overcome, these being disease and old age as well as physical trauma. A man might live for centuries with his belly full of gold, for example, but if he is crushed beneath a millstone he will have no advantage over a man who is succumbing calmly enough to stroke…”

Adélie found her head increasingly heavy after the exertions of the day; she could only listen with half an ear.

“… in India there is an insistence that spiritual immortality can be achieved through metempsychosis—that is, jumping from one physical body to another, and in 1874 the yogi Vallalar disappeared entirely from a locked room, never to…”

Why had they turned up the radiators? She stared at the oiled mane of a gentleman in front of them while Roux’s voice flickered past like so many fish.

“In our Asian capital at Hanoi I chanced to meet a missionary recently returned from the great and royal city of Luang-Prabang, within our protectorate state of Laos.”

Hanoi! wrote Henriette, and circled the word.

“Equally versed in fables of lowland farmers and half-savage hill people, she enlightened me with the following tale over a supper of succulent noodles and dog.”

Lacheroy licked his chops with aplomb.

“To wit: atop a mountain shrouded in cloud there lies a spring, a holy lake, that anyone who set out to find it has never found. The spring has only been visited by hunters who’ve chanced upon it, and on its shores they have encountered fowl and deer which no arrow could harm, grandiose fruit which the vines refused to surrender, and the largest and most vigourous stalks of rice in the world, for the spirits tend them. These fortunate men were at the extreme of thirst and starvation, yet one sip from the spring so sustained them that they could descend and return home, and it is even said—and this is what drew Mademoiselle Fleeson and I together—that these men have gone on living thus forever. They have nothing to prove their stories but the evidence of their own bodies returning home, but, as I jotted down, ‘the little ones, who have hearts free from guile, believe.’”

Adélie realized she was sitting bolt upright.

“I attempted to achieve synthesis with my existing research.” Smiling, Roux produced a sheaf of papers which he dropped with a thud. “It is difficult, of course, to ascertain the exact whereabouts of Mademoiselle Fleeson’s delicious Lao spring. Mansarovar, the holy lake at the foot of Mount Kailash, leaps to mind, but as Kailash is in Tibet it seems unlikely that Lao hunters might chance upon it even in legend. In China the cult of Ma Gu, protector of females, is said to have centred on Ma Gu Shan in Nancheng and a second Ma Gu Shan in Jianchang, near Nanfeng.”

“Where are these places?” Adélie asked.

“Around about Laos,” whispered Henriette.

“There is one fable of a Maid Ma—doubtless an incarnation of Ma Gu—who could walk across water. She was murdered by her husband, of course, but at the close of each lunar month her ghost may yet be glimpsed walking through the mist across the water. Out of reverence to her, hunting on those shores has been forbidden, which in practice makes it rather like our Lao spring, though—”

“And where is Maid Ma’s lake?” asked the man with the mane of hair.

“Ah,” said Roux, mouth pursing again, “with such specifics, it does sound like an actual place, doesn’t it? I might also mention Yaochi Jinmu, Queen Mother of the West, who dwells beside a lake—perhaps the same one—where she tends a tree which produces p’an-t’ao, peaches which confer life eternal. And you will recognize this Yaochi Jinmu, should you chance upon her, by the Peaches of Immortality dangling from her headdress.”

“Wearing the headdress and nothing else?” asked Lacheroy.

“What’s more, there is the fable of the Monkey King, who tells his subjects—let me find it, here—‘Someday I will grow old and weak but I shall go down the mountain and wander to the ends of the earth ’til I learn how to be young forever and escape the doom of death.’ And he does just that! The first sage…”

Adélie gazed down the row to the seats vacated by the clothcapped boys. They’d been well-groomed—were their mothers still alive? And would their lives be markedly di¤erent if they were not? After she died, would the unspooling yarn of Manu’s days take an untoward turn? It would, yes, straight to St-Lucien.

“… yet for all that, the Cham of Indochina were amongst the most barbaric peoples in history, slaughtering six thousand subjects at a time that their emperors might bathe in the collected gall. Why? An attempt, yet again, to win life eternal.”

“Boo!” called Louise.

“My point exactly,” said Roux.

As the fabled Manu would be sacrificed.

“… and they reasoned, quite magnificently, that to venerate an infant was to call it to the attention of evil spirits, so that Dog, Rat and Weevil became common sobriquets, and a long line of Cham kings were named Excrement.”

The bearded gentlemen smiled and Adélie breathed a laugh out her nose—she might easily travel east, then, and leave Manu under the protection of a new name: Shit. But, no, she couldn’t go without him!

Called Excrement, wrote Henriette.

“Throughout my time in Phnom Penh, I reflected, as anyone might, on Chou Ta-kuan’s observations of the thirteenth century, that—”

“I understand, sir, one does not fall ill once an immortal,” Adélie called, climbing haltingly to her feet, “but if the monkey had been ill at the moment he became immortal, would he have become healthy, or would he have kept that affliction forever?”

Over his spectacles Roux regarded her balefully.

“Well, Madame, in theory—”

“Certainly, ‘in theory’—I don’t pretend any of this is real!”

“My dear, really!” whispered Henriette.

“In theory, the Monkey King would have simultaneously transcended death and illness, assuming he had not been so incapacitated by his theoretical illness as to fail the various tests o¤ered by the sages.”

“So it’s possible one might… already be too ill to achieve it?”

There was a pathetic catch in her voice. No one cast her a scornful look now, and even Lacheroy sat wide-eyed. She gripped the seat in front of her.

“My understanding,” said Roux, “is that a human being who achieves immortality has had his body propped up by the ascension of his spirit—I base that conclusion on my studies. But to draw upon my personal experience, I’ve seen a man’s spirit defeated by illness long before the body had deigned to succumb.”

“The hour grows near!” Lacheroy waved a pocket watch.

Adélie sank into the seat. Mucus churned in her lungs.

“If I may broach a question of a more practical nature,” Louise called. “Might it not be possible to arrange a tour of this Laos place and glimpse this hinterland for ourselves, but with comfortable beds and proper food? Any number of us could profit by a dip in a magic lake, I dare say!”

“Ignoring the fact that my spring exists only as a metaphor,” breathed Roux, “it gives me great pleasure to inform this assembly that Laos remains one of the most inaccessible countries upon the face of the earth. With enough time and money you might sail to the Orient via the Messageries Maritimes, true, but whether you then travelled overland east from Siam, south from Yunan or up the great Mekong during the rainy season, you would require weeks, if not months, to reach your destination, and only if you could secure translators and were willing to eat native slop and to sleep on the bare ground. Have your learned husband locate the place on a map, Madame, and you will observe that Laos may well be those very ends of the earth the Monkey King sought.”

“Yet you went there.”

“No, Madame. I travelled only for a year so I hadn’t the time.”

“Would the obstacles be insurmountable,” asked Adélie, “if travelling with a nine-year-old boy?”

“On the contrary,” said Roux. “I believe nine-year-old boys to be just as adaptable as thirteen-year-old girls.”

“What do you make of our position in the East?” asked the oily-maned man.

“Ah!” Roux removed his glasses to wipe his eyes with his handkerchief. “I believe there are diverse biomes of men just are there of plants and animals, but from what I know of France and of Indo-China, gentlemen, I will state unequivocally that we have as much business there as a tiger in a field of ptarmigan.”

“How dare you—?” cried one gentleman.

“And should Indo-China ever rouse itself in conflict, I hesitate to guess whether we should be the ptarmigan or the tiger.”

“Yes, yes, yes, my friends, yes!” Lacheroy very nearly pirouetted to the podium. “For his insights Roux the Mystic will doubtless achieve that immortality of our greatest thinkers, namely undying fame! And now to pass the cuspidor for the Eastern missions that those who sit in darkness will see the light! Fascination with pagan culture, my friends, is no excuse for allowing souls to fall to the wayside—so says our patron the bishop. A few centimes, gentlemen and ladies, to plant crosses upon their graves instead of bu¤alo skulls. And yes, to Guérande’s question, it is the very cuspidor Debré brought back from Turkmenistan.”

“I understood from the advertisement,” said one of the bearded gentlemen, rubbing his cropped head, “that there was meant to be a debate on the topic.”

“I had noticed that myself,” said Roux, adjusting a cufflink.

“THREE TIMES I’ve submitted my monograph on temple-building,” hissed Henriette, eyeing the men descending below them, “and still not a word!”

They passed beneath a great brass clock in the foyer.

“Quarter past three?” whispered Adélie. “Come, get a cab! I want to be there when Manu comes home from school.”

“But, my dear,” said Henriette, “on Mondays he’s home at noon. Surely he’s in dependable hands with his grandmother and a sta¤ of six!”

“The poor lamb. My mind is going.”

Her hips ached from that torturous chair; she thought longingly of her bed. She hurried down the hill and somehow kept upright, skipping over the uneven pavement though exhaustion clung to her like a shell. At St-Germain she heard a cry and turned to see Henriette on her knees.

“Just my idiotic notebook.” Henriette propped herself up with her umbrella. “Dropped the thing. Ought to make a fine letter for Marco.”

“I embarrassed you terribly up there,” said Adélie.

“I will recover,” her friend nodded.

Arm in arm they wandered toward the cab stand, forcing a knife-sharpener to steer his grindstone around them, then a hurdy-gurdy man and his seven children, bleak-eyed between songs. Without a backward glance Adélie slipped a franc coin into the sunburnt hand of the youngest.

“Café Gimlette,” she suggested. “Or would you rather go on walking?”

“I must stop. You may not realize it, love, but I’m carrying you.”

Adélie had not been in the place in years, yet the waiter set a demitasse before her even as he took Henriette’s order. A flowerseller came through and Adélie bought a carnation for Manu.

“There was no program after all!” laughed Henriette. “The Left Bank Orientalist League has fallen on lean times.”

Adélie swabbed herself with her handkerchief.

“I wonder what a Provençal Enthusiast League might discuss.”

“I beg your pardon, love? Your voice is going.”

Adélie repeated herself.

“I shudder to think!” said Henriette. “Those stories in the newspaper, when—”

“The wife who bit her husband to death,” rasped Adélie.

“Or those women killing each other with frying pans!”

“Then set each other on fire. Because of a chicken that got loose, wasn’t it?”

Henriette wiped her pince-nez on her apron.

“And each time they used an umbrella—”

“Or a pitchfork!” croaked Adélie.

“Or a pitchfork, it would be broken to pieces ‘from the force of the blows.’”

“And what shall the Provençal Enthusiast League conclude?”

“We conclude—”

“Friends—”

“Ladies and gentlemen, friends, we conclude that the nature of the Provençal is to keep beating at something until the matter is well and truly concluded.”

As Adélie laughed the afternoon light caught the delicate pink of her upturned nostrils and Henriette decided her friend was as lovely as a painting, until Adélie fell, inevitably, into a fit of coughing—eyes distended, handkerchief over her mouth— and Henriette lifted her mulled wine from the table to keep it from spilling.

“Get me a croissant to dip,” Adélie gasped, eyes streaming.

When they went out she insisted on walking unassisted.

“But you aren’t much better, dear, are you?” asked Henriette. “Heated gas in one’s behind is one remedy, I believe, though I shudder to mention it.”

“Well, I may yet travel to Laos, dear, in order to bathe in that magic lake.”

“Oh, don’t make fun of Monsieur Roux!”

“I will write to the Messageries Maritimes,” Adélie said plainly, “and if Bonheur can o¤er no cure Manu and I may simply steal away.”

“And wear the Peaches of Immortality at your next ball! You might have a thousand pairs made up—but don’t look at me like that, you weren’t serious!”

Adélie strove to keep pace with the draught-horses plodding up the street.

“Those things are real only if one dwells in unreality,” Henriette went on. “He said so very clearly, and I can’t see how anyone could justify journeying to an unchristian country just to end with her dead eyes closed by unchristian hands!”

Adélie leaned a shoulder against the rain-blackened wall.

“You’ve been too good to me today,” she stammered. “You mustn’t miss your omnibus.” She wiped sweat from her throat. “I’ve left that flower behind.”

A tradesman with a ladder stepped lithely around her.

“But my dear!” said Henriette. “Don’t cry!”

Adélie’s face was damp and creased. Mucus caught in the roof of her mouth but she refused to spit.

“I was only musing, wasn’t I?” soothed Henriette. “Just take my arm. This is the modern world, you must realize, and medicine can—”

“No one ever died of tuberculosis in our experience,” rasped Adélie.

Then ignoring her friend’s hand she stepped from the curb, so erect she might have been held aloft by diamond-shaped steel spans. A teamster twisted reins against his chest to keep his horses from running her down, their shod hooves sparking against the cobbles, while automobiles braked frantically. Every klaxon in Paris seemed to sound rancorously in her ear. Boys jeered from the sidewalk. In prim deference to them all Adélie pinched the brim of her vast hat and walked ever-forward; she would walk ever-forward until the matter was well and truly concluded.