Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [15]
“Now, Phoebe, would you mind doing me a favour?”
CHAPTER V
Phantasus & Phobetor
Yes, for three francs’ worth of opium he furnishes our empty arsenal, he watches convoys of merchandise coming in, going to the four quarters of the world. The forces of modern industry no longer reign in London, but in his own Venice, where the hanging gardens of Semiramis, the Temple of Jerusalem, the marvels of Rome, live once more.
Honoré de Balzac, Massimila Doni, 1837
It was a brooding Brentford who was driven back to New Venice by the Subtle Army aerosled. The day, a short, dubious affair of a few hours, had started its retreat, pretexting that the grass was greener elsewhere, which, to be honest, was certainly the case. The frosted snow, which cracked and crunched as they passed, had turned a greyish blue, and above the city, where dim golden garlands of lights had started to gleam, blurred as through a tearful eye, the black airship had begun to assume a certain melancholy air. April may be the cruellest month, but in North Wasteland, February was a tough bitch in her own right.
The airship’s shadow was not the only one being cast over Brentford’s brain. The meeting had left a bitter aftertaste, as was often the case when Inuit were involved. As much as he wanted to be useful to them, his duties to the city could not but get in the way.
Since the natives had come into contact with the Whites, and though it was very clear that without them all Westerners who ventured there would have ended up as a dirty bunch of half-frozen cannibal wrecks, they had been exploited, misunderstood, and underestimated in every possible way. Brentford remembered that the profit margin of the usual barter, furs for needles and nails, had been around 1,000 percent for the Whites, and still the Inuit—unconscious dandies prowling the icepack with fortunes on their backs—felt they were striking a bargain, because for them, exchange value was use value, and use value was survival.
When the first trading posts had been established, with a slightly more realistic price policy (but with false weights, bottomless bushels for blubber, and exchange wares of wretched quality), the Inuit had been almost disappointed with how much less expensive everything turned out to be, as this had seemed to take away the real worth of what they had gotten so far. It also made them realize how cheated they had been, and how miserable they actually were. What the Inuit failed to see was that, at that point, they were also being robbed of natural resources, with little or no redistribution of this wealth to compensate them. Maybe Brentford had been wrong: they would not know a fair deal if it came and bit them, because they had hardly seen one before. What sort of trade could it be, anyway, that involved two economies that were, literally, different as day and night?
The Whites’ contemptuous treatment of the Inuit was all the more maddening in that, given the city’s new circumstances, Eskimo economics (and therefore—and there was the rub—Eskimo politics) could be one of the keys to the city’s salvation. Until recently, and especially since its reconstruction, New Venice had been lavished with sumptuous gifts, colossal food supplies and enormous quantities of raw materials and luxuries. From what Brentford understood, the Forty Friends Foundation, which funded and maintained New Venice afloat, did not do so out of the goodness of their hearts (though they certainly had some kind of fascination with the place), but because they desperately wanted to ward off an overproduction crisis and to redistribute world scarcity along more advantageous lines. New Venice was a kind of bottomless pit