PART I VOLUME I: VIOLENT DELIGHTS
“His soul shall taste the sadness of her might
and be among her cloudy trophies hung.”
Ode on Melancholy, John Keats.
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I should begin with the time I killed my father - though I feel I must first explain myself. It took me many years to realize the horror of my situation.
I tried to love him, truly I did, or as much as one could love a man such as him. But he was a man of stone, distant and omnipresent, who reigned with unquestionable divine right as he looked down upon your small person. If he made a decision - he was well within his rights. If he beat you - you deserved it. Over time the cracks showed and his body eroded and you would look up at his hard visage and feel no love, not even a shred of respect, and know that was the man who owned you.
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My father, his father, and all the other fathers have served the crown since the mists of time, ever since my my distant ancestor was given his land and titles in reward for his service to the crown. My father, ever the courtier, received some royal grace by giving His Majesty a horse during a hunt and since he waited on promotions, titles, and favors he felt himself entitled to but never came. His position of giving His Majesty his sword in the morning, and his mediocre apartments was all he had to show for his service. He pointed his finger to his sick wife, the bourgeois, and anyone but himself who, I can imagine, inspired dislike in anyone who could benefit him. Surviving merely on the purity of his blood, immense wealth, and the honors he had the rights to by the seniority of his title, he decided to retreat to our ancestral lands and rebuild the Chateau de Calais in the latest fashion.
My father was neither poor or sentimental. He only enjoyed the provinces for what it gave him - the freedom to do what he pleased and to be the Lord of His Lands and Family away from prying eyes. In Calais, there was nothing left for him to do but manage his estates with the upmost scrutiny and for his service he expected everyone in his family to regard him with the respect and obedience he was entitled to per his rights.
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I remember myself on the floor below the stairs. My body ached as I stared up carved ceiling. I could not move. I could not remember how I got there. I could only focus on the pain that show through my limbs and searing in my head.
“Maman!” I cried when I heard the rustle of my mother’s petticoats rush down the stairs as she called my name. Her tear stained face came before my own as she places her hands on the side of my face. She pulled a hand away from my head, and blood ran down her fingers. That’s when I felt the stinging slash on my face, where I cut myself on a sharp tile edge, that left a trail of bright red blood down the pure white marble of the grand staircase.
“Charles, what happened?” I heard my mother say but I could not break my focus from the warm liquid that ran down my face.
I could never recall the details. I lied to my mother that I had tripped while going downstairs. But the only thing I could remember before that was the image of my father and that I did something, said something, that compelled him to push me. I was forced to spend many days resting, to the annoyance of my father, as the cut on my head was worse than I had thought and I spent those days in a confused and nauseous haze. I was eight, I believe, and while these matters are quite blurred to me, I still can remember what I felt then and see the faded images that live in my mind - asleep or awake.
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There were many times, after my father had hurt me, that I would sit on my bedroom floor, my legs up to my chest, and I would keep my sight straight before me. I would focus on the bedpost, the curtain, a book, or anything in my room and watch as the world blurred out around me. I would stay in that position for hours, until I could feel my thoughts and emotions separate from me like water and vinegar, or until I fell asleep in my clothes, whichever came first. When I finally saw my father stiff, I wondered if he had felt in his final moments what I did then - frozen and helpless in a situation he could not control. I don’t know - but I can dream.
Many times in my childhood I was overcame with an odd sensation. It was felt usually at night, when i was alone, and the household asleep and cold. I would lay awake in bed, and felt in my bones as if it was the most intense chill, the severe silence of my surroundings. In those moments I felt that the home I saw around me was only a replacement, and that I was somewhere else alien and corrupt. I felt that if I left the confines of my room, to search for my mother, I would find her bed bare. If I were to venture, panicked and distraught, I would see only empty space as I wondered the land, white flakes falling about me. I would see no one, no villages, and not even animals. Only my person in an empty and dying world where no one would come to save me.
Reason told me that one day my situation would change, but I was stuck in amber and believed with my whole heart that I would feel as I did then forever.
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Filial obligation did not require me to understand my father’s reasoning. I only had to understand the hierarchy of our house. He resided firm at the top, then my brother, and then myself who - God forbid - would inherit if a spare was needed, and then my mother. It was she who was my true guardian and who my father resented more than any of us. I imagined she was once useful to him to give him his heirs but soon enough became annoyed with her petty concerns over her children’s well being, the rustle of her silk petticoats, and the minor annoyances and anxieties “prone to those of her sex”.
My mother was one of the few people I felt comfortable around. One of the few sources of warmth in the darkness. As I grew I spent my afternoon reading in her salon while she worked on her parfilage or took her tea. I remember how her hands looked like when she sewed, how interested she was in my studies and often tested me.
I suppose it’s only natural that I would assume her meek and unassuming silhouette. We both knew what our roles were and convinced ourselves that our lives were easier if we stayed in our places. My father didn’t care for her happiness. My brother, uncomfortable around heavy emotions, made himself sparse. The two of us were outcasts who either outlived or hadn’t yet obtained usefulness to our common benefactor and were thus shoved into our respective hovels. I assumed onto myself a duty to watch after my mother, make her happy, and care for her.
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One morning, I went into her apartments where she rested in her chintz daybed tucked into an alcove. She was still in her cream dressing gown, a white mule hanged off one of her feet, and her hair laid loose and unpowdered past her shoulders. Her lady’s maid slipped out of the room as I walked towards her bed. On the side table laid a few brown bottles of laudanum near a medicine chest. As her head was turned away from me I slipped one into my pocket.
“Maman?” I said as I knelt down at the edge of her bed and slipped my hand into hers. Her eyes were closed and breaths shallow. “Are you alright?”
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Her eyes fluttered open and with a low voice said, “Yes - only tired.”
That was one of the many small lies we would tell ourselves but I knew the truth. In my room, once the nursery and connected to her apartments by a door, I could hear everything. I heard the yelling, insults, and crying. During such times I would stay in bed, unable to move or sleep, until the pale sunlight replaced the dark. My father might have been a calm a stoic figure, a proper gentleman of reason, who deserved his role as head of a great house in the eyes of Society, but we knew the truth. No matter how well he behaved in public, or while in his good moods when he didn’t find his other half at the bottom of an empty glass, we were all reminded.
When I was five, I believe, I heard a crash and much yelling when I laid in bed. I moved quiet to the door that led to her cabinet, opened the door only enough to look in, and saw my father on top of her with his large hands around her throat and face red. I ran back to bed and covered myself in my blankets, sobbing into the bedding until I no longer heard any noises. I feared her dead, I feared myself next, and in the morning I found her still alive with cream concealing the bruises.
I should have done something - anything - then but I only cried. The night before, if I wasn’t such a coward, I would’ve done something. I could have barged into the room, hit him, forced him out. I could have. I was no longer a child but newly sixteen - a man grown. As the years drew on I would imagine my own hands and his neck squeezing until all the hatred and pain that culminated in my body disappeared and my father had no more life left to live. Instead I rushed to my brother’s room, who was already awake, and we stayed together in silence. My brother is a few years older than me, he could have done something, or the both of us together could. But, even if he wouldn’t admit it, I know that under his hard exterior that he was scared of him too.
“Let me see,” I said to her.
She didn’t move but turned her head away from the wall. A deep bruise marred the side of her face. I swallowed and a tight knot formed in the middle of my throat. I gently touched the side of her face but I took it away when she winced. Like always - we made the silent agreement not to speak of it.
“Do you need anything?”
“Yes I need,” she started but her hazed over eyes looked right through me, “I need-”
She stared off to somewhere behind me. I let her think but nothing was said.
“Maman?”
She looked down at the sheets of the bed, her brows knitted together. I saw whatever thought she had slip from her mind.
“Maman?”
“I don’t know,” she said with her eyes half-closed, “I’m tired.”
It was difficult to keep patience in that state. My father’s physician began to see to her a few years before. He said that she had become nervous, which wasn’t entirely false. There were many. times when me or my brother would find her sobbing in her room or refusing to leave her bed. My father hated her for it, for the same reasons he hated all emotions - especially those of the feminine kind.
Her nerves were in a restless state, said my father through his physician, due to her womb, that caused a hysteria that created too much movement, tension, inconsistency in her body that needed calming. I didn’t quite believe it and though the laudanum helped her in some ways, it also made her develop a sort of convenient languid uselessness. A shell of herself, tired and miserable, confined to her bed with no energy to do anything else. As a child I would often stay in bed with her, my head on her chest as she held me, as the hours passed by slow. When I think of her I try to think of her as she was then, in a peaceful warm rest, hoping she found her way to sanctuary.
“Sweet boy,” she said, as she lazily ran her fingers in my hair when I laid my head down on the edge of the bed, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“No,” I said, “why would I be angry with you?”
“I don’t know,” she said in an almost whisper, “but it’s alright if you are.”
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They were the petty years. An agonizingly slow life where nothing change. But that was. fine. I didn’t need to change. I only needed the ability to bear it. I managed, any feeling I had about my situation hit the outside of my heart and ricocheted throughout the rest of my body to rot elsewhere. There was nothing to do about it.
On an uneven ground I stood. As temperament of the King determined a day at court, I myself had a volatile liege. I stayed good, still, and careful. Not just with my father but anyone I can into contact with. My father instilled in me the fear of giving a wrong look, or using the wrong tone, and with it I formed the unique ability to make myself as small as possible. As a child I had the habit of shrinking into corners, quiet but observant, and of walking careful and quiet so the sound of my shoes on the floor wouldn’t set him off.
My life was easier that way, but as the years passed I grew restless. The solitude comforted and then devoured me as the days stretched infinitely before me. It was all to me a perpetual dance I grew tired of performing after the hundredth hour, but continue it would, and I could not stop it. What was the point of playing music or studying history if the only thing I was good for was to live and die exactly where I stood? If five or ten years from then I would be the exact same person suffering in the same place?
I would wake up, attend my lessons, call on my mother and brother, avoid my father, go riding and scream into the woods because I knew no one could hear me. That was my life in the countryside. I had no friends except my brother. There were no neighbors of our status that were received. Life continued in the same unfaltering cycles. I tired of it. I tired of his heavy footsteps, tired of the endless flatlands around me, tired of the marks on my mother’s skin, and the bottles of gin I used to drink the days away.
I tried. I tired desperately to be a good son. I was quiet, submissive, respectful, and paid attention to my studies. I never did anything on purpose to displease. I tried to make my mother happy only for her to be as miserable as she was before. I would plead for my not to hurt me just to get the living shit beat out of me anyway. Who cared? No one cared. What was would be. I didn’t know what to do about it - until I did.
At first, I never actually wanted to kill myself. I don’t recall where the idea came from. It was an odd joke, a game, a what-if I suppose. Except the images kept coming and sunk their teeth into my mind. I would stare off, unfocused, and I thought about them. It was only time until I took those thoughts more seriously.
When I imagined death I did not think of pain. I only thought that my days of a foggy and leaden head would be gone in an instant. Under my timid and harmless facade I was cold inside. That darkness of mine comforted me and I kept it hidden to myself because it was mine alone. It may not seem that pleasant but a cold warmth is still a warmth. I desperately wanted to disappear behind the veil and the only thing I needed to do was succumb and fall into it.
The sky was clear. One of my father’s horses kept stomping his legs, huffing and irritated from having been in the same place for over an hour. Wisps of white clouds passed by as I listened to the forest sounds around me. The laudanum rested in my hands but I shook far too much to open it. I focused on an image in my mind’s eyes - of my body in a forest, decaying and weathering until I was nothing more than bones. It all seemed so peaceful to me then.
A sore lump formed in my throat. My stomach twisted in on itself. I looked up to the sky for some sort of sign but the clouds passed me by. In my mind’s eye it was easier. I would only open the bottle, drink with no second thoughts or worries, but the reality constricted my lungs and covered me in a cold sweat.
I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t know if I would even be in any pain. I didn’t know if it was even enough to kill me. The only thing I knew was that it made my mother tired and calm and I gathered it would give me a calm death too.
I laid there long enough that I shook no longer from fear but the chill. I grew more and more uncomfortable in my position though the thoughts still gnawed on me - that it would only make me fall asleep and before I would know what was happening I would no longer wonder. The painful possibility corrupted the peaceful image my mind painted. It wasn’t long before a wet drop hit the center of my forehead. Rain did not match my vision. If I did it I would have to wait until the morning - weather permitting. I told myself if I felt the same urge I would do it again. I told myself that every time I thought about it seriously. There had yet been a time where I didn’t calm down enough to keep living.
I went home, the back of my greatcoat wet and muddy but if anyone asked I would only say I fell in the mud. I made haste to my plain room, where I put the bottle under my mattress next to a bag of coin. I no longer thought of it. I changed my clothes and warmed myself by the fireplace. I decided I would live. For now. Just live - nothing more.