Atmospheres Apollinaire

By Mark Frutkin

Short-listed for the 1988 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Ottawa-Carleton Book Award and Trillium Book Award

Paris, the City of Light, was once the scene of a brilliant magnesium flare, host to the belle epoque from 1900 to 1914. Tempting poets, painters, writers, and composers from across Europe, the city relied on one man to move among them all-Guillaume Apollinaire. His contemporaries called him brilliant, mad, whimsical. He was the bastard son of an Italian cavalry officer and a Polish woman addicted to gambling, but nevertheless let it be rumoured around Paris that he was the son of the pope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Sep 16, 1998
• ISBN: 9781554884957

Mark Frutkin

Mark Frutkin is an award-winning fiction author whose most recent novel, Fabrizio's Return, won the Trillium and Sunburst Awards and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean Region). In 2008 he published a memoir, Erratic North: A Vietnam Draft Resister's Life in the Canadian Bush. He lives in Ottawa.

Book preview

ATMOSPHERES APOLLINAIRE

ATMOSPHERES APOLLINAIRE

by Mark Frutkin

Porcepic Books

an imprint of

Copyright © 1988 Mark Frutkin

Revised Edition © 1988 Mark Frutkin

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage, retrieval and transmission systems now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is published by Beach Holme Publishing, #226-2040 West 12th Ave., Vancouver, BC, V6J 2G2. This is a Porcepic Book. First published by The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, Ontario.

The publisher acknowledge the generous assistance of The Canada Council and the BC Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture.

Portions of this work first appeared in Canadian Fiction Magazine and Descant, in slightly altered form.

The author offers special thanks to Geoff Hancock, Jonathan Williams, and Mark Polizzotti for comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for grants during the writing of this book.

Cover is after a photograph of a work by Charles Negre entitled Paris: The Vampire, courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

All poetry quoted in the text is translated by Roger Schattuck unless stated otherwise.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data:

Frutkin, Mark.

Atmospheres Apollinaire

A Porcépic Book.

ISBN 0-88878-3914

1. Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1880-1918~Fiction. I. Title.

PS8561.R84A86 1998 C813’.54 C98-910853-8

PR9199.3.F776A86 1998

CONTENTS

Prologue

Goldfinch of Alchemy

English Dove

The Speiss Blimp

Gargoyles, Quails’ Eggs and a Recurring Crow

The Bird of Benin

Wright’s Flying Machine

Three Archangels

A Caged Bird

Chanteur d’Afrique

Archaeopteryx

Sirens

Shooting Star

Griffolino d’Arezzo

Birds of Paradise for Faith

for Faith

PROLOGUE

Perhaps they were Senegalese or recent arrivals from the Ivory Coast. The women were tall and dressed in mammy cloth wraparounds and bright headrags while the men wore old, out-of-style, ill-fitting suits.

I had been walking down Rue St.-Denis, the street of prostitutes, which stretched for half a dozen blocks through a cramped and busy section of the city. Painted ladies leaned in doorways, bored and pouting. It was a street of marvellously exposed flesh, with a vitality that may pause but never dies. I had just passed three sisters, tall and talking spiritedly, when a black hooker, no longer young, smiled at me. I smiled back and, as she glanced down the street at a curious sound, the look on her face turned to horror and she disappeared into the narrow dark hall behind her.

It was then I saw the funeral, coming along the street, a black African funeral in slow procession, led by the wailing women in mammy cloth. Behind, the men walked in silence. All the prostitutes and their customers stopped as the cortege passed. Several of the older ladies of the night made the sign of the cross. An uncanny silence filled the air as if all were stunned by the strange wailing chant mouthed by the mourners.

The casket itself was on two large bicycle wheels and was pushed along easily from the rear by two elderly gentlemen. Inside, the exposed corpse of a decrepit old man was blanketed in flowers, hundreds of pure white carnations. The deceased, however, was facing the wrong way, looking back the way he had come, gazing with thoughtless closed eyes past the pair of men pushing him down the street. Perhaps he had been a renowned pimp and requested this final procession through his domain.

The Negro ladies danced along in a kind of frenetic, sorrowful way while the dozen or so men at the rear walked stiffly, looking uncomfortable in their dark suits. I watched as they disappeared down the street.

At first discreetly, almost apologetically, like revellers arriving at a wake, the prostitutes began whispering among themselves. For the moment, no one made overt signs to possible customers. Their eyes looked sad under long, painted brows. The quiet lasted but a short while. Soon, life returned to normal, the girls made coarse jokes and laughed at shy men, and pulses began to quicken again along the crowded, manic street.

Paris 1983

GOLDFINCH OF ALCHEMY

J’émerveille (I marvel)

(Apollinaire’s slogan)

A local perfume factory in southern France. The lab-coated worker loads choice white gardenias into the top of a chromed machine, using a three-tined fork of wood. A long tube extending from the boiler ends in a spigot over a table. On the table, a crystal beaker the size of a thumb, its mouth wide, lips curled back, awaits the first drop of perfume.

(Scene from a French film short)

1. Rome 25 August 1880

Today I was born. I heard my parents arguing before I made my appearance:

‘You will have to give me better odds than that, my dear, you know you are somewhat in control of this situation.’

‘You idiot!’ my mother shot back, as another contraction stretched her body taut along the bed. ‘You idiot,’ she repeated, breathlessly. ‘I’ve already given you better odds than you would get in any of the gaming rooms across the whole of the Continent—if you don’t like it, go try your luck at Monte Carlo, or perhaps you would prefer the lottery in Naples?’

‘I have seen Naples,’ my father said wryly. ‘I can do without that kind of comment.’

‘Besides,’ my mother continued, ‘you put me in this condition so you have as much to do with it as I do.’

‘My dear, my dear,’ he soothed her, momentarily, ‘that was nine months ago and it was very late at night and we were both quite drunk. At any rate, you were not a Polish virgin.’

I expected my mother to rise out of bed at this comment, my mother, in her condition, to strangle him. Unexpectedly, she became quite quiet and nostalgic as her last five or six lovers passed through her mind.

It was at this point that I realized I was not the New Christ. Nevertheless, even though my father was not the Pope, or even a cardinal, he was Italian and that was something. (Perhaps I should add here that my parents were not married, never would be married in fact. A short time later, Captain Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont of the Third Cavalry Division would go riding majestically into the distance, never to return from the fog that settled over the fields of my past.)

My father continued the discussion: ‘And let me say I still insist the child was fathered, not by me, but by our dear sweet friend, Cardinal Fucino.’

At this my mother raised herself up on her elbows in the bed, leaned over and spat on my father’s brilliant riding boots.

‘Five to one now, for that comment,’ she hissed.

‘Five to one?’ he questioned, taking a fresh handkerchief to his maligned humiliated boot, not bending down but resting the boot on a bedside chair. ‘You are out of your mind.’

‘Five to one on five thousand lire,’ she insisted. ‘You said the child would come before seven in the evening, I say after seven. We shook on it. That’s how it stands.’

‘We also shook on three to one odds.’

‘Things change. You’ll learn to hold your tongue.’

‘And you will learn to keep your skirts down in the presence of cardinals,’ he said as he walked to the window. The shutters were closed on the hot Roman afternoon. He opened them and a flood of light blared in, along with the sounds of merchants shouting, shoppers, dogs, cats and children scrapping in the streets of Trastevere. ‘It is now 3:15,’ he mused, looking at a nearby clocktower, as my mother was transported by another contraction.

It was a tight race. I couldn’t decide myself who was going to win. But, as it turned out, Olga Kostrowitsky, my mother, won her bet. I believe she counted the money before she took me from the hands of the doctor.

2. The dissolution of the body of matter after death is a slow explosion. Let us take note that a certain man, a poet named Apollinaire, died some years ago, that his form has gone through that process equivalent to scientific analysis, that now we can construct or synthesize a new life, a creation of alchemy, a melding of disparate parts, words, glances, tastes, humours, longings and fears: in short, a man, as ephemeral as any man that has ever lived or ever will dare to do so, as ephemeral as the memory of a goldfinch, lighting from a pine tree, sweeping low over the calm blue lake, causing on the surface the slightest, the most transitory, the most far-reaching disturbance, as if a single beat of its heart set to shimmering the pure sky and the most distant suns.

3. It was a book of twenty-four quartos. I bought it from one of the squalid bookstalls along the Seine. It was unread, for the pages had never been cut, so I took my penknife to it.

As I slit the pages up the side and along the top, I felt the release of a pent-up energy, a long-bound power. For fifty-one years, the words in the book had not seen the light, but slept one upon the other, whispering and mumbling to themselves. I felt like a doctor easing a birth with a scalpel.

4. Paris 1911

Apollinaire stood alone gazing from the window that looked over the gasworks near his apartment. A fine view for a modern poet, he thought. In the distance he could see a train snaking through the city, appearing and disappearing between the buildings. Iron snake. Time itself, a black cursive stroke.

It was a warm day in early September. A. could hear the sounds of men talking in the courtyard below his window, the swirl of traffic, pealing of bells. The world seemed to be ending and beginning all at once. Horses, motorcars, the young and the old, the sound of his wristwatch, the empty sky. A door slammed, another opened, always this coming and going in the apartment building. How could it be? How could the world die and be born in each moment? It was impossible and yet it was so. A horse on the street was overtaken and passed by a motorcar. The train, there and not there ... like the black stitches of his memory:

I must have been seven years old for it was in 1887. My brother, Albert, was five. We were on a train with mother, moving from Rome to Monaco. She was going to try her luck at gambling there. Someone had fronted her the money, I cannot recall who it was, many details are lost; I remember that train trip, however, with uncanny clarity.

When we boarded with the evening crowds at the station in Rome, the excitement was palpable. Hundreds of travellers, merchants with carts selling food, porters yelling, ‘Attenzione, attenzione!’ As soon as we found our place and settled in, the train pulled out.

Overpowering smells filled the car: the sweat of bodies, a cigar, an orange being peeled, cheap cigarettes that smelled like dung burning, sweet sickly perfume, and the smell of rum on mother’s breath each time she returned from the toilette.

Dark came on and people tried to sleep. The sound of the wheels, the steady tic tic tic, kept me awake. I heard them as if in a dream and yet I wasn’t dreaming. I felt the iron wheels begin to grind up through my bones with the acute sound of metal grating metal. It was a horrible sound and terrified me, yet I couldn’t escape it. And then I heard the voices of people and animals screaming inside the metal, the whinnying of terrified horses, cries of lost children. Then it stopped and went silent with a silence so overwhelming that I can still feel it, standing here at my window.

He shuddered and turned away.

North of Paris 1918: On a sidetrack, in the Forest of Compiégne, a single train car has come to a standstill. Black and silent, the car stands without an engine, no locomotive to pull it away, peaceful as a coffin.

Inside the car, a number of official-looking papers wait on the desk for the signing of the Armistice. A pen. A bottle of ink.

No one is around. The bottle of ink has been knocked over by a rat.

It is quiet here, so quiet in fact one can hear each drop of ink as it falls from the edge of the desk and splatters on the floor.

5. Monaco 1889

Guillaume and his young brother, Albert, stood holding hands outside their classroom at the College of Saint Charles in Monaco. A number of children waited for the dread Sister Henri to open the door. The boys were dressed in dark blue sailor suits with white trim and short pants. Guillaume, who had long curly chestnut hair, wore the additional decoration of two small ribbons pinned to his chest: a blue one for a first prize in geography and a red one for a second place in arithmetic. The Bishop of Monaco himself, Mgr. Theuret, had awarded them at the school the previous week. The boys talked in low tones with their friend, Rene Dalize.

Sister Henri pinned a map of Europe and Africa on the wall and went to the back of the classroom where she began asking the students questions. Guillaume, sitting in the front row, looked up from his notebook and noticed that the shape of France was like a primitive bird flying to the west. The large peninsula ending in the city of Brest marked the bird’s head. Its mouth was open, tongue flickering out. It had a winged paw as on a flying squirrel in the region of Cherbourg. The heart of the beast was Paris.

Guillaume lowered his head and continued working on a drawing in his notebook: he was depicting Sister Henri, who seemed at least eight feet tall, sitting on the Pope’s lap. He accentuated the nun’s subtle moustache, and gave her long teeth at the corners of her mouth, not realizing Sister Henri stood behind him at that moment, arms folded, glaring down. She cleared her throat. The boy froze in mid stroke, then felt two hard knuckles rap on the top of his skull.

‘Give me that.’ She held out her hand, took the sheet, tore it up.

Guillaume longed for a place to hide.

‘So, since you are so intelligent you do not need to listen, Kos-tro-witZ-ky, go to the map and point out the Jura Mountains.’ She held a long hardwood pointer in her hand.

The boy walked nervously to the map and pointed to the Jura Mountains in eastern France and Switzerland. The nun moved up beside him.

‘Now point to Algeria.’

He lowered his finger to north Africa.

‘Now point to the floor.’

A questioning look came to his face but he pointed down.

‘Now touch the floor with your finger.’

Thwack! The pointer came across his bottom as he bent over.

‘That will do,’ she said, sending him back to his seat.

Guillaume listened closely for the remainder of the class. I do not want to fall from Sister Henri’s good graces, he thought, fingering the ribbon for geography. ‘Mary, Virgin Mother of God, have mercy on me.’ He repeated the ejaculation over and over again under his breath.

He listened:

‘Farming and watchmaking are the major occupations of the Jura region and today many of the smaller communities combine the two. Unfortunately, some of these communities have become anarchist, embracing the godless theories of Proudhon, Bakunin and Prince Peter Kropotkin, the evil Russian, Satan’s willing tool ... The Crête de la Neige is the highest mountain ... I have here a pocketwatch made in La Chaux-de-Fonds, with fir trees engraved on its cover. You may pass it around—carefully, please.’

The hour ended and Sister Odile appeared for arithmetic class. She was young and beautiful and Guillaume was in love with her. She looked just like the Virgin on the holy card he kept in his favourite book: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.

6. It was a childhood soaked in space and light. Orange and lemon colours in the day, and their scent perfuming the air in the long evenings when he would walk down to the sea, the sea now grown calm, sighing with his sighs.

He was sad but content. The sea did that to him—a young boy in love with sun, earth, sea, roses and light. Looking across the water, he remembered that Africa was there, like a dream in his head. He thought about it constantly, wondered about Africa. The word rolled off his tongue, exotic, soft and clicking.

He imagined the jungle, the sands, strange wailing animals and the darkness—they all infected him.

‘Maman’, he had asked earlier that day, ‘what is in Africa?’

Olga was putting on one of her favourite hats, preparing to meet a friend at the casino. She looked strangely at her young son, then turned back to the mirror. ‘Wild black men with dots all over their bodies. Like dice.’ With that, the hat was settled and she was off, not giving the boy a chance to continue his unrelenting questions.

7. Olga sat in the third seat in the third pew. She had chosen it carefully. Three was her lucky number today. She loved the sound of coins dropping in the plate (‘Bets, messieurs mesdames, bets please’).

This church would make