Paris Twilight (11 page)

I would like to say that I paused at this point to yell hello or otherwise announce my presence, would like to claim that propriety, or at least timidity, constrained me from going farther, but I don't remember any of that to be true. Somehow, the piano that had for so many nights so boldly invaded my space, irrespective of walls and borders, invited me now to return the favor. I padded softly—I had kicked off my shoes during my labors on the door and was barefoot—but without a qualm into the next room and the next and the next, surveying each of them slowly, each of them seeming to my astonished eye larger and more sumptuous than the last. They were successively easier to breach, too, as though their escalating grandeur allowed me to pretend I was touring some lavish public museum, not somebody's home. In one room the parquet gave way to polished marble, icy under my feet, and another had a skylight and was entered through a colonnade of smooth, fluted columns. There was a hunt room that looked like it had been carved—floor, walls, ceiling, molding, and mantel—from a solid block of walnut (racked over the fireplace: several of
grand-père
's long guns), and a library whose upper shelves were arrayed around a mezzanine balcony reached via a cast-iron corkscrew stair. All the rooms beyond the piano's conservatory were darkened by heavy drapes drawn across tall windows, and all beyond the conservatory were furnished and appointed opulently: dense rugs rapturous underfoot, the tables topped with flower vases, in which, however, there were not any flowers.

There was nothing anywhere remotely alive, askew, or out of place, no open novel or tossed cap or gray ash in an ashtray that betrayed a human presence, except those musical scores. The scores, and a couple smaller indications, like a copper pot—alone, out of dozens hanging from hooks above a bank of ovens—set with a spoon, and an upturned porcelain bowl in a drying rack on a kitchen counter next to one of the sinks, and, in the pantry (a storeroom larger than Saxe's quarters), which was otherwise barren of food, five cans of minestrone and half a jar of instant coffee. Then I reached the study.

The study—I call it such; it was dominated by a monumental mahogany partners' desk—wasn't what you'd call cozy, but it was at least more modest than the grand halls leading up to it. Within it was concentrated all the clutter and aroma of life that had been petrified out of its compatriots. What happy chaos! Clothes and books lay scattered about on nearly every horizontal surface, on chairs and couch and floor. Idly, I opened a couple of the volumes. They were textbooks. Like schoolbooks everywhere, they were each personally branded with a signature inside the front cover. The signature said
Bingham
. The desktop, oddly, was pristine, but a smaller writing table, set in front of an uncurtained window, was burdened with notepads and dictionaries. A straight-back chair was set before it; a lavender sweater was draped over the chair back. A small end table off to the side held an electric teapot, a crystal drinking glass bristling with pencils and ballpoint pens, a ceramic coffee cup, and an open box of tea bags, which explained the nice smell: orange pekoe, wafting into the air from the half-empty cup.

I froze. All the fear and trepidation I should have let gather with each successive room—nine rooms' worth of fear (not counting the pantry)—took hold of me. I leaned to lay my fingers against the cup. A thin wraith of rising steam coiled around my head and I thought:
Warm
. The ceramic was smooth as glass and flushed as fever. I straightened with a start. Was that a sound? A step? I scurried on tiptoe around the desk and paused at the door, plastering my back against the wall like the spy I was or the burglar I'd be mistaken for.

Nothing.

I steeled my resolve for a dash back to my own place, praying that nobody had settled down in the rooms between me and my refuge, but something stopped me before I could bolt as surely as if a hand had grabbed my ankle. Beside me was a low book cabinet, a mess of envelopes splayed across its top: manila envelopes, some creased and dog-eared, some crisp and new, their flaps unsealed, all of them apparently empty and each hand-labeled
M. Saxe—confidentiel
.

The discovery disoriented me, a confusion that would settle into distress later when I had a chance to consider the implications but that now just hit like a slap. Whatever generous invitation the piano had extended was rescinded by those envelopes, by my collision with that name in this place. What could it mean? I sensed an ensnaring malevolence. I was in the presence of something more knowing than I was. I felt run to ground, surrounded by what I did not understand, a conspiracy of coincidence, and just as my extreme vulnerability and the emergency of needing to escape struck home, another noise came, and this time it was definite, a loud, mechanical
ka-chunk
.

I burst from the room. Without caution, without any restraint or plan or control, I shot through the shadow realm, crazily dodging furniture, mewing with terror, spinning through the whole long array of chambers until I reached the sunny conservatory—if the piano had not had its lid raised, I honestly think I might have tried to leap it—and the oval salon, and I jumped through my portal as though one step ahead of the hounds and slammed the door behind me and leaned against it.

I leaned against it for a long time, until my panting died down and my heartbeat settled and my reasoning self, my half century of hard-won composure, could begin to reassert sanity.
No one heard you
, my composed self said.
You pounded away on that door for an hour and nobody came because nobody heard, and now you're back where you started from, and safe. But you must erase your tracks
.

I opened the door a crack: silence. I got the broom and dustpan and stepped back under that lovely, placid summer sky long enough to sweep up the worst of the evidence. The door, I observed, had no knob on the far side, and no escutcheon. It had been, from the palace point of view, just one more panel in the wainscoting until I'd erupted through it. Now it was not so invisible. My intrusion had pulled some paint away and splintered a piece of molding, which I tried to push back into place, without luck. I swept up plaster shards and paint chips and dust, and made it as good as I could get it. Then I retreated with my dustpan and broom and turned the vined key in the viney lock, except the lock wouldn't work—I seemed to have sprung that too—but anyway the door stayed shut and I jammed Saxe's shoe against it just to be sure and retired to the divan in exhaustion.

[No place]

November 24

Carlos, my only,

I am so terribly afraid to write to you. My whole existence pines to hear your voice tell me you've received this. But I know I'll have no word & no assurance—as soon as this letter leaves my hand my aloneness will be back & unbearable. But I must trust in luck, it is all that's left for me. Valentín gone. Communication getting more dangerous (for you, dear!), & I know it will get worse. I'll get you news as I can. Unhurt, a little sick recently, I guess to be expected. We've been warned to use an
adresse intermédiaire
, please note & watch for postmark Genève, and forgive if I sound not quite myself, it's how it will have to be for a while. Are you safe, my love? I'm sure you heard how the Ebro fell. A horror, unnecessary. Retreat a despair—how exultant we were those first weeks! Internationals decamped, do we even exist anymore, for the world? Trying to reach Barcelona. Things may settle, though I fear [illegible—three lines] poor little one, [illegible] less lonely with him coming, but it isn't so, only more aware of you. How could all this be happening in this way? Will write from B., maybe things stable there, we will see.

 

The letter—in an envelope addressed to Saxe and awaiting me in Portbou, and that I opened at Saxe's Portbou table—came bundled with two other documents: a flyer for an upcoming antiwar rally and another old letter, penned, for once, by someone other than A.

This second missive was nearly as confounding as A.'s letters, except that it contained an important key. A couple of them, actually (well, three, if you include the revelation that A.'s full name was Alba): a date, 1939, and a place, Le Vernet, that rang a dull bell in my mind. Here was a thing I'd heard of, courtesy of old Aunt Bettina, who had haunted my childhood like some incorporeal goad—never there physically, yet the source and locus and inspiration for a hundred breakfast lectures on the dangers and depravities of history, especially in the era of the Spanish Civil War. It seems my aunt had considered herself a great friend of Spain, and, traveling with her husband in Europe in the 1930s as part of a Quaker relief effort, was close enough to events to respectably claim an opinion. Roy and Alice, stay-at-homes that they were (unique among their conference-trotting faculty set, they'd never gone abroad), had treasured her adventures and regaled me with accounts, when I was far too young to care, of how the elected Spanish Republican government fought the revolt of the Fascist “nationalists” and of the horrors that had ensued and of the many defeated Republican loyalists who had ended up in French internment camps like the one named Le Vernet.

I recalled few of the details beyond the sulfur taste of unwanted extracurricular history lessons. But I did remember that the era was not one to enter unprepared, this war being more replete with atrocities on all sides even than your everyday, average war, and endless in its convolutions. Why can't Europeans ever learn to conduct their internal spats along simple, straightforward, blue-and-gray, Redcoat-and-Minuteman, easy-to-comprehend lines? Though, to be serious, I would later confound the stories, the cautionary family tales of the ancient bloodbath in Spain with the television newscasts of the American quagmire that overshadowed my youth, and robbed you of yours, and I would come to wonder if the sulfur taste wasn't the flavor of premonition.

The history book I would purchase on a subsequent outing to serve as a concordance to the letters and a guide through the thicket (and to repair my regret that I hadn't paid better attention as an eleven-year-old) had the effect of restoring Roy and Alice's depictions to full luster: how the Republicans, cut off from the world but supported by Russia and the volunteers of the International Brigades, fell to Generalissimo Franco's Fascists, who were supported by the Spanish Catholics and the ruthless Falange, Mussolini, Hitler, and Henry Ford. How when the war was over, Franco didn't relax in the afterglow of victory but continued with a brutal cleansing campaign of reprisal, murder, torture, terror, imprisonment, and exile, the exiles being the lucky ones among the leftists, the refugees who made it across the border to France.

 

Vernet d'Ariège

February 17, 1939

Dear Monsieur Landers,

You may remember your wife introducing us at Hospital Obrero on your visit. I'm also a nurse with Red Aid. I write concerning her and asking if you have news on her whereabouts. I must hope she is already with you, but I have recently heard she was captured. Here is what I can relate. She and I made it away after Ebro and it was our intention to head to Barcelona, but with some worry I would be hunted there by Communists, as last time. (I am with POUM. On the front such things never mattered.)

 

And that was just more of the mess, how the Republicans were riven by fratricide, much of it instigated by their Moscow allies, pitting leftist against leftist, anarchist against anarcho-syndicalist against Communist against Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, this woman's POUM), an anti-Stalinist organization Stalin tried to exterminate, and so I continued reading.

 

We did not take the train straight to the city, as I would be recognized, but were able to ride most of the way on convoys and stayed a couple of days in a village where Alba knew a family. They'd hardly enough for themselves. They thought we'd be stupid to go into the city, and so we walked instead towards the mountains. Open country where the roads were blocked. Alba well, and excited to be walking towards you, this meant everything. She decided she should make a last detour. Not to Barcelona but Madrid, to be sure friends were safe. Also she was feeling her condition and wary of the climb, I think. So we said goodbye. I write from a French camp. We are prisoners, so the dangers are different. The guards allow women to bicycle into the village to market and the post. I am so miserable with myself that Alba would be here with me now if I had only insisted. Please write with anything you have heard. Brigaders brought in last week recount they heard she was seized and taken to Jorge Juan police station. Maybe by Falangists, I'm not sure, but anyway she was seen to be detained. Can something be done? I will write you with any news.

Saludos
,

Salina Contrerras

PS: Arrival today confirms Falange. Saw Alba loaded on truck to Ventas. I do not know this man. POUM, though.

—S.C.

 

Mobilisation

CONTRE LA GUERRE!!!

LA VIOLENCE CONTRE LA VIOLENCE

quand c'est nécessaire!!

ARRÊTEZ L'IMPERIALISME AMÉRICAIN

Le moment, c'est maintenant!!!

OÙ ÊTES-VOUS???

 

Where are you???
The protest rally advertised by the mimeographed flyer was to take place this very night—
The moment's now!!!
—in some establishment (this alone made it sound possibly amusing) called the Winter Church.