18. Only His Eyes

It must have been a charm, a charm that had hung from a chain on a woman’s neck, or an earring, or almost certainly a talisman, a fish-man that conjured storms and attracted schools of fish to nets, in which case it would never have sparkled at a woman’s neckline; on the contrary, women would be banned from even looking at it because women and the sea, women and ships, women and fishing were a bad pair that brought endless misfortune, poverty, rot in the soul, and death in life. Perhaps in that case it would demand a tithe, how could it not if it could be avid and cruel but not always, if it could change with the light, time of day, season, and possessor; Mr. Pallud had known all that immediately in the store when it was nothing more than a little pile of promising metal, formless and waiting for only his eyes and touch; on the other hand it could be agreeable and generous in the morning, he suspected, but to see that he would have to wait until the next day, an entire night’s vigil with waterfowl, water to make dry land fertile, water currents that a ship left behind in its wake like his would, what fish breathe, and what its old silver, made from embers and scales, would reclaim. With his hand in his jacket pocket on the charm, he walked streets silent only for his ears, the light growing fainter, still not sure where he would put it. Would he know when he arrived, would he say here, would he feel the proper arrangement rising from his curved fingers up his wrist and arm to arrive in his brain? Or would doubt swirl like a whirlpool, truly waterlogged, mocked by uncertainty, not knowing what to do? It seemed to him, did it not, that true happiness was drowning him, that today he could, if he wished, sadly and quickly rid himself of all his treasures and keep only the fish-man no larger than one of his fingers, the ring finger, yet more gigantic than Cronus, able to fill all his shelves, cover the window, take over his rooms. He could enclose it, not really, he knew, but he could force his hand to close over it, and what was it his hand held, a shadowy tithe that he would pay possibly for his whole life or for just a few minutes; he could tie it up with string so nothing could escape, call Kati-Kati and tell her to throw it in the trash, without bothering to look at her as he spoke. Never had he had an unnameable presence so close: he often entered those vile little stores in which an old woman in rags warily croaked an impossible price for a bit of a shipwreck, and, although from time to time he would discover something worthwhile, he was accustomed to leaving those holes vexed and empty-handed. Inevitably mad, those old women pulled their dirty shawls tighter against the distant sea wind, loath to admit what they did and did not wish to sell, and this time behind that nasty woman from whom he had never bought anything, on the edge of a book that stuck out on a forgotten dust-covered heap, there was a little pile of metal that for him and only for him shone through long-gone water because otherwise how else could he have seen it? He stopped short, caught, staring, remembering that he would need to pay, not knowing if it would be for his whole life or just a few minutes, while he asked the old woman about the base of a lamp, the beads from a necklace in a broken cup, and the fish-man curled up on his cornice, murky from abandonment, dirt, and waiting. He almost stopped, no, he did not, he walked as if he were troubled, especially in the store compared to now in the street, fabricating indifference again on his face and gaze as if he did not want to haggle, as if the talisman did not interest him, but it did, he could not part from it, move his hand, open it and leave it somewhere and turn and talk about something else, but the old woman, farther from him and it than anything, had declared the three prices and left him to pay what he wanted without looking at him or it. Yet he knew he was in the street, he knew he was not far from the boarding house of Madame Helena, he knew that he was going to arrive and the fish-man was going to slide down the corridor, blazing, immortal, and unique, but in a mood that made men dream, he was still just outside the doorway of the nasty little store, now with his hand wrapped around the charm. In spite of impending nightfall, he could already hear the shouts of children playing on Scheller Street, they told him where he was and pulled him from his stupor. A charm? When he was in his rooms he would put it under a light to study it and see if the oval head did or did not have marks of broken or ripped metal that would tell him if it had ever hung from a chain, and if they were there he would file them off until they disappeared to make it into what it had always been. While he did not want to think about the setting, the reign, the water that would bubble up wherever he put it, or think about the treasures he would have to displace, set aside, move, or put away, the violinist, the bear, the shepherdess, the gargoyle, the mill girl, the sorcerer, the farm animals, the smith, the reader, the ballerina, the fat man, he did want to think about the blank notebook page in which he would mark it down as if it were one more item but with different handwriting or a different color ink, and he would note it as something he knew not yet what. As he took another step toward the house he recalled the hanged man who well past death would grimace if he blew on him to make him spin. How could he know or not know if the fish-man was not the executioner who carried out irrefutable sentences, a malign toy that he should have left with the leather-faced old woman in the cave of a store darkened by filth. Heindesberg would not be much help because Heindesberg only considered what was possible; he thought for a moment, pausing near a wall because there were other people in the world and they were even walking down this street, about the possibility of going to the municipal library the way the General went to the museum library and looking, looking for what? A history of aquatic religions, an essay about anthropomorphic animals, men with dog heads, eagles with women’s breasts, giants with lion haunches, serpents with girl’s faces, sirens, vampires, toads that talk, tortoises with hands, birds with lips; a bestiary, the oldest one there was: a nightmare zoology. He would see them in the jungle world and not in books, he would recall them, whether for his whole life or just a few minutes he did not know, he dared to be sure of that, he would guess what they were as they climbed and hung head-down from the highest branches of the most colossal trees, swimming upstream in the iridescent rapids at land’s end where ships disappeared toward other horizons. What toothy faces, what feet divided into a thousand joints, what ostentatious headdresses, what other life, what inscriptions on what walls would be his when the fish-man decreed another destiny and Scheller Street was less than a memory lost in the thick dust of nasty little second-hand stores. He believed he was at the point of discovering an order not very secret yet truly eloquent about how to turn the future into an inevitable landscape, a familiar scene which had always been there and for that same reason was only seen during visits or when the dice had fallen in one of those atrocious games commonly called games of chance, or fate, or god, and even then, with all the rest deprived of its transitory sense, the color of curtains or the arrangement of chairs around a table could be viewed without understanding them; but the instant passed without having shown him even a yellow fig dripping sweet juice, and he soon found himself almost at the house of Madame Helena, wavering in the half-light, his head echoing with the shouts of a hundred, thousand, million children who played on the canvas of the street, shouts like horns, like a trap, like a difficult to escape flood, where he did not know whether he had been turning things over in his mind for his whole life or just a few minutes.