RSSby Tom McCarthy
F.F. With Cyclamen orig pub Prague Literary Review, 2004
He’s most at home in public spaces: F.F. gliding down a tree-lined boulevard, his shoulders dappled by the branches’ candelabra. F.F. in smoky night cafés, his face reflected in a glass of absinthe. F.F. seeing in his generation’s springtime on the Rue Condé, shattering glass and masonry with a flower.
He leans against a lamppost. Beneath the silk top hat his face is angular; a goatee drops from the chin and then curls upwards, tapering to a fine point at the end. Cabs are standing in a row along the facing curb, cabmen reading papers, horses snorting. Behind them at the entrance to a park old men are talking on a bench. Around the corner comes a group of schoolgirls carrying croquet hoops and mallets. The girls wear sky-blue sailor shirts: the Legion of Honour uniform. Their voices drop to whispers as they pass him.
“I’ve seen him in a poster! He’s that dancer!”
“He’s not a dancer! He’s an actor. He’s that one in Faust. He’s Mephistopheles!”
His gold-flecked eyes narrow into slits: F.F. is smiling.
As a child he founds The Society of Easy Death. “You have to be like death, invisible,” he tells his fellow conspirators.
Elie the schoolboy paddles a wooden kayak through the mists along the Saône marshland waterways, pushing back the reeds. He slides into a large pool, climbs onto the bank and ties the kayak to a willow tree. Crossing his arms he pulls his sweater up over his head, then takes his shoes and trousers off. He stands beneath the willow branches naked with his feet apart, thin blue veins showing clearly through the goose-pimpled skin.
The surface of the pool is still and black. Elie lowers himself in and kicks off from the bank. The cold water tightens around his testicles and ribs; he feels his breathing deep inside his chest. After a while he stops swimming, turns around and treads water. The bank, the kayak and the willow tree have disappeared in the mist. Elie closes his eyes and turns on the spot a few more times, then swims off in the direction he now finds himself facing.
Monsieur Clandel has called Elie into his study at the Lyçée Lamartine. The shelves are lined with leather-bound books and photographs of sporting teams.
“Fénéon. Your first name’s Félix, is it not?”
“My mother calls me Elie, sir.”
“A Swiss name, Elie?”
“Burgundian, sir. My father is Italian.”
“Elie, your teachers speak well of you. I’ve put you down for the baccalaureate. You might like to sit the Civil Service examination afterwards. A clerical post, perhaps.”
Shouts and whistles drift in from the playing fields and die along the Lyçée’s long, clean corridors.
Cane swinging, F.F. strides out of the War Office onto the Boulevard St. Germain. It’s late afternoon, a Friday and the last day of January 1886: pay day. He crosses the boulevard’s stream of cabs and applecarts and steps into the Brasserie Gambrinus, where the barmaid brings him a glass of absinthe. She smiles at him as she turns to leave.
F.F. slides out of his right suit pocket an uncrumpled sheet of War Office paper and lays it on the table by his glass. It’s the outline of a psychological novel entitled The Muzzled Woman:
1st Part: Uh! 2nd Part: Two purplish butterflies alight on Jacqueline’s zygomatic muscle. 3rd Part: Paul’s Sa’s bed. 4th Part: The menacing eye of the lewd druggist.
F.F. sips his absinthe, smiles. He has no intention of writing the novel.
He’s twenty-five years old and goes by many names. Lautrec calls him The Yankee Magician because of his goatee; he sketches him melting, disappearing in a wisp of cigarette smoke. Pisarro calls him The Question Mark and draws his blank face hanging from a wallpeg on a curved hook. Lallamont at the War Office calls him “Finion” – a sharp, metallic bark. Long-haired Jarry calls him “L’homme qui silence”: the Silent One, the one who silences. Or is it “L’homme qui s’y lance?” – the one who throws himself into… into what?
He has even more names for himself. His articles in Libre Revue he signs Félix Fénéon; editorials in La Revue Indépendant he tops with the initials F.F.. In La Vogue he uses the name Gil de Bache, a seventeenth-century pirate who’d strip victims of their finery and set them ashore in long-johns. In letters he likes toying with feminine names: Félice, Thérèse, Dénise. For Zo D’Axa’s anarchist rag he calls himself simply Hombre: Man. Sometimes he drops the h and becomes an ombre, a shadow.
Our shadow-man is finishing his second glass of absinthe. By now the café is awash with gaslight. Rich men with white beards pass by, escorting perfumed ladies to a dance upstairs, but he can hardly hear the dance’s music for the din of the street swarming with cabs and people, the cries of program hawkers on the steps of a nearby theatre. Two pimps wander by: “She made ten francs pal.” F.F. pays the barmaid and drifts out onto the boulevard, drifts past prostitutes and shop windows, more and more pedestrians, alleyways incessantly vomiting and devouring people. Covered in a warm green absinthe cloak, F.F. feels contented, in his element. His patent leather shoe-soles sand and tap the cobblestones.
He boards an omnibus and rides up to Montmartre, past the half-completed Moulin Rouge, flags flying high above the wooden scaffolding. Outside the Cabaret Chat Noir a slim woman standing on a platform in black leggings plays a trombone; behind her the Cabaret’s doorman calls out to passing gentlemen. He nods at F.F., who touches the rim of his top hat in return.
Inside the Cabaret smoke curls around the flowers on the wall and around the mingling arms and collars of the spectators. A dancer in a light-green dress holds her right foot in her left hand level with her head; the faces of the players in the pits are turned up towards her skirts, her legs.
“It’s Uncle Sam! Hey Fénéon!” Maurin weaves towards him, flanked by a tall woman with brown hair. “You got the review of the Independents show?”
F.F. draws from his right suit pocket a shoemaker’s bill. He dips his hand again and pulls out a sheet of War Office paper. Maurin yanks it open; he’s drunk.
“‘…whines and stammerings of the bourgeois gents in front of Seurat’s industrial riverscapes sound like a chamberpot under a sick man’s arse.’ Ha ha! A chamberpot beneath a sick man’s arse! You’re a devil Félix! He’s a devil Marie! A chamberpot! Ah! Fénéon, I’d like to introduce you to Marie-Félicie Jacquin.”
F.F. bows. “My mother’s maiden name.”
“You’re also from Valle d’Aosta?” asks Marie-Félicie.
“From Burgundy.” A turbaned Moor is banging a set of drums at the back of the stage; the diamonds around the dancer’s neck are flashing in the artificial light.
“We’re both Celts, then, Monsieur Fénéon.”
It’s dawn when F.F. leaves the flat above Marie-Félicie’s laundry shop. He wanders past closed bookstalls on the Quai Malaquais and, finding an open café at Les Halles, sits and watches farm wagons unloading. Eventually he buys a dozen irises for his mother and walks home.
Exploding from a pinpoint on the upper left come orbital whirls of burgundy and convoluted arabesques of gold on violet. Yellow stars cascade across a blue strip that darkens as it moves out from the centre; beside it rises a light red streak studded with petals, while planets dance around a wave of yellow.
Signac is putting into practice Henry’s Theory of Colours and the Nervous System. On the floor beside the easel lies a list of formulae:
50 carmine violet + 50 Prussian blue = 47 cv + 4 black
(pigments) (light)
“…isolated on the canvas recombine… isolated colours recom- No, this is it: Colours, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina. Colours, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina.” Signac intones it every two minutes, but it slips away each time. “Isolated canvases…”
The title of the painting is: Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Measures and Angles, Tones and Hues, the Portrait of M. F.F. in 1890. “I know it’s long; I’ll write it small,” says Signac. F.F. stands in profile in the foreground, staring out beyond the frame, his goatee tickling a planet. He holds his cane and top hat in his left hand, the hat turned upwards like a conjuror’s, the cane a magic wand; in his right hand, pinched between the thumb and forefinger, he holds a cyclamen, its petals waving like an octopus’s tentacles.
“…coloured retinas – no: isolated – hell and damnation! We’ll take a break now Fénéon. You must be tired. Hey Félix! You can put your arm down now.”
“Oh!” says F.F. “I was thinking of something else.”
It’s February, 1894. F.F. is sitting in the office of Zo d’Axa’s L’Endehors, a dingy little basement where anarchists come to practice fencing. He’s finishing an entry for his Symbolist Directory:
Degas,
he writes,
Degas: a thigh, a flower, a chignon, ballerinas convoluted in the flurry of the tutu
The words and rhythms fall into place around the clash and twang of swords.
a boozer’s face
‘nose’ would be better –
a boozer’s nose, the hand of a milliner amidst a fluttering of feathers and ribbons. The expression of Modernity. The tricks of
Zo d’Axa runs in red-faced pushing back the blades. “The Deputy Chamber Fénéon! Forty-seven politicians maimed!” He throws a newspaper across the table.
It seems that a man named Vaillant has thrown a bomb into the crowded parliament building – and this not more than a month after Ravachol’s bombing of the Advocate General’s home. Lying side by side, the papers on the table merge together:
…this outrageous act of… ballerinas convoluted in the flurry of… the expression of… actions of political desperadoes who prey on innocent… appalling carnage… fluttering of feathers and ribbons… the tricks of… the expression of… the carnage of… a thigh, a flower…
After Vaillant’s execution the net comes down. Zo d’Axa flees to London. F.F. escapes the first wave of mass arrests but notices that two men in bowler hats are following him. They make no secret of it, shadowing him in cafés, on the omnibuses, in the street – but not, being good Christian, family men, on Sundays.
On a crisp, bright afternoon in February, 1894, F.F. jumps off the omnibus at Montmartre and turns into the Passage Tourlaque. With him is Emile Henri, the handsome young man whose bomb has recently taken out the Carmaux Mining Company’s headquarters. Henri carries a case of lock-picking equipment. The old concierge scowls as they enter number four and climb the stairs.
F.F.’s mother rises from an armchair to greet Emile, then goes to prepare tisane while F.F. pokes the fire. When she brings the tray she looks at Emile’s open case and smiles. “You didn’t tell me he was an artisan Elie!”
In F.F.’s study F.F. dresses Emile in an old dress of his mother’s and steps back to look at him. “The hands are wrong Emile. I have just the stuff.”
It’s the dress that does for Emile. Chased by two waiters after hurling his bomb among the tables of the Café Terminus, he trips on the hem outside the Gare St. Lazare, and is executed.
He chooses dinitrobenzene with a charge of ammonium nitrate, a recipe he found in the National Library. For the container, a flowerpot – his own touch, that, gives it a pleasant symbolic dimension and, of course, it’s very convenient: the fuse leading down through the hollow stalk of a single hyacinth, the clay pot tightly packed with bullets beneath a shallow layer of earth…
F.F. strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s the first Sunday of April; streaks of colour are moving across the flowerbeds. Beside the palace children dressed in hats and frocks sit on benches watching a puppet show. F.F. sets his hyacinth on the gravel, reaches into his right coat pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He places one in an ivory holder, then flicks open a silver lighter. Smoking, he watches the puppet show: a puppet-king is shouting at his puppet-general while behind the king a large black puppet-bear looms up. The puppet-general runs away. The children laugh. F.F. dips his hand again into his pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper. Unfolding it, he reads:
At 11:45 p.m. on Sunday, March 25th, 1894: a boy, Félix Patrique, to Marie-Félicie Jacquin. Recognised M. Félix Fénéon.
The children are shouting at the king now: “A Be-eear!” they shout. “What’s that?” shouts the king, cupping his hand to his ear. “A Beeeaa-r! Be-Hind you!” shout the children. F.F. slips the paper back into his pocket, picks up his hyacinth and strolls on.
The Café Foyot’s four back windows open onto the Rue Condé, presenting to the clientele a side-view of the opera house. F.F. lights another cigarette and looks in on the café. The room is filled with men in dining suits. Through the hum of conversation and the piano music waiters weave around the tables carrying glasses and champagne bottles. At one table a high-class tart with dark, thin eyebrows is kissing the greasy chin of a fat man with a balding head. The tart wears a black lace garter around her neck. Thick black hairs are spilling from the man’s large ears. His hand upsets a champagne glass. Through the open window F.F. hears the ping of the glass on the marble tabletop, watches the bubbly yellow liquid dribbling onto the floor.
F.F. sets his flowerpot on the windowsill. With a long, polished fingernail he taps his cigarette holder, knocking a column of ash to the ground. Then, touching the cigarette’s glowing end to the hyacinth’s stalk, he lights the fuse.
When the bomb goes off he’s sitting at a table outside the Café de l’Odéon. The explosion rocks the boulevard; gentlemen and ladies jump up from their tables and run into the street as a column of blue smoke rises above the Luxembourg Palace.
“Anarchist vermin!” snarls the waiter. “It came from the Opera House.”
“I rather think it came from the Café Foyot,” says F.F.. “Another absinthe here, my good man.”
Lallamont has called F.F. into his bureau at the War Office. Standing behind Lallamont is a man F.F. recognises as Clément, chief of anti-terrorist operations; behind Clément stand the two bowler hats.
“Probably the result of some misunderstanding, Monsieur Fénéon, but you would oblige me by coming down to the Prefecture.” Clément nods at bowler number one, who handcuffs F.F.. Bowler number two’s lips wrinkle in a malicious smile.
In the workroom of the Mazas Prison lines of men sit huddled over trestle-tables mending trousers under dim electric lamps. Unconvicted and therefore not required to work, F.F. moves through the narrow prison yard whose walls admit the sunlight for an hour each day; he enters his cell, hangs his top hat on a wallpeg and sits down on a chair that’s chained to the floor.
He’s been charged under the new Association Law – Liasing With and Abetting Malefactors. In addition the police have found a phial of mercury and eleven three-centimetre detonators in his desk at the War Office and are slapping an Intent to Construct Explosives charge on him. He told them it was fishing tackle and they hit him: just once, suddenly, when he said ‘fishing tackle’.
A warder marches into the cell accompanied by Misia Godebska, who is carrying a basket full of fruit. The warder remains throughout the visit and the conversation is stifled. Misia tells him that Mallarmé will testify for him at the trial and asks if there’s anything he needs. F.F. thinks for a while and tells her: shoe polish.
He’s tried alongside twenty-nine others. The courtroom is packed with reporters and with friends. Of the thirty defendants it’s F.F. who attracts the most attention. Le Figaro’s correspondent writes: “Rigid as justice and straight as a soldier at arms. M. Fénéon has the air of an adroit diplomat.” “He looked bored during the interrogation,” notes La République’s scribe. The courtroom artist sketches F.F.’s face in profile, no neck beneath it, no back to the head, a mask.
Judge Dayras is bald and red-faced. When the defence summons its first witness he calls a recess: “I must go and wash my hands. It will interest the jury to know that a group of anarchists pushed shit beneath my door last night.”
He cross-examines F.F. himself: “Are you an anarchist, M. Fénéon?”
“I am a Burgundian born in Turin.”
“Your police file extends to one hundred and seventy pages. It is documented that you were intimate with the German terrorist Kampfmeyer.”
“The intimacy cannot have been great as I do not speak German and he does not speak French.” (Laughter in courtroom.)
“It has been established that you surrounded yourself with Cohen and Ortoz.”
“One can hardly be surrounded by two persons; you need at least three.” (More laughter.)
“You were seen conferring with them behind a lamppost!”
“A lamppost is round. Can Your Honour tell me where behind a lamppost is?” (Loud, prolonged laughter. Judge calls for order.)
The jury acquits all thirty defendants. F.F. slips away from the celebrations to visit Suzanne Alazet des Meules, an actress. She winds a sheet around his body like a Roman toga and tells him of the women she’s seduced. “I licked Blanche, the virgin, yesterday.”
Paris is changing. Now automobiles chug along the boulevards beside the horses, chauffeurs wearing hats and uniforms. The Eiffel Tower stands like a spread-legged whore above the city. F.F. writes for Le Figaro. He’s invented the three-line news Haiku:
It was his turn at nine-pins when a cerebral haemorrage felled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was rolling, he ceased to be.
His wife, Fanny, is mad on the flicks. He sells the painting Seurat gave him twenty years ago and buys her a picture house. Together they spend whole evenings when the house is closed threading film after film around the spools and sprockets. Sometimes they set two projectors side by side and watch cowboys riding across the sky above the Alps or trains hurtling through the palace of a Tsar. His favourite part’s when hairs and speckles jump around the screen as each reel starts, then the first unsteady picture, empty canvas springing into life.
At weekends F.F. and Fanny visit Alfred Jarry, who lives in a stilted house on the banks of the Seine. Jarry’s into bicycling: “Just hold the bars and pedal with your feet now Félix. Point them straight! Straight! Félix!”
One Sunday afternoon the women set up a croquet game on the lawn and the men row out to fish for carp. “No detonators now, eh Félix. Give the little sods a sporting chance.” In a pool they see a round, black mass too large to be a fish; an oildrum maybe. Pushing back the reeds they ease the boat towards it and find the body of a drowned man, bloated, the face half decomposed.
In the evening, after the police have left and the women have gone to bed, the two men sit on the verandah drinking wine while moths and mosquitoes swarm around the oil lamp. They sit in silence, looking out across the river. After a while F.F. says: “That’s what death is, Alfred.”
“What’s what death is?”
“A black lake, like that, where you get lost.”
In the grey morning, lamps are still lit along the Quai d’Ivry. In front of the wooden shacks the cranes stand stiff-jointed and crooked, like insects reared up in the throes of some death agony. Smoke is drifting from the funnels of the barges moored side by side, three deep in places, moving off the river with the clearing mist.
The German guns could be heard from Paris yesterday, then they stopped and loudspeakers were set up in the streets. The Germans told the citizens to stay indoors and offer no resistance when they marched in, an event anticipated for some time around noon today, February 8th, 1940.
F.F. is dying of cancer, slowly, painfully.
Throughout the night the dockers have been loading a barge with documents: the Paris police files 1890-1940, over a million pages bound haphazardly with string and tape and stuffed into orange crates, banana boxes, clothes trunks. An hour ago the barge pulled out from the bank, then keeled over and sank until only the stern remained above water.
Papers are slowly floating up from the submerged hull now, lurking murkily an inch below the surface of the placid river. As the texts blot and run the papers darken, like photographs of night, the final night, developing.