Paris Twilight (15 page)

One of the latter group fulminated into an intermittently working microphone to intermittent cheers—he seemed alarmingly more roused than the people he was rousing—until, with some hideous shrieks and crackles, the microphone gave up the ghost entirely. A priest raced up—of unsure denomination; he wore a western leather fringe jacket over his vestments—and there ensued a lot of fidgeting and consulting under and behind the pulpit and many incantations of
Un, deux, trois
, and finally the priest gave a raised-fist victory salute that was greeted with a loud and general cheer. Right had triumphed, if only over the PA system. He introduced the next speaker, and another young revolutionary stepped forward to commence his reiteration. His chosen nom de anti-guerre was Che.

I don't know what contributed so to my reverie at this point. I can say there's no lullaby on earth more lulling than a good antiwar rally; the form is even more comfortingly formatted than the liturgies this chapel was built for, and the breviary more orthodox. I'd attended more than my share—they became quite the rage, you know, in the years after you left to go to war—and they'd done no good, for if they'd done any good, why were we here yet again? Oh, the rallies achieved what we'd wanted them to, and stopped an evil war, I suppose, eventually, in good time. But not in time to do any good for me, or especially you, and maybe that's where my thoughts went. They also went insistently to the opposite of all this shouting, to an intimate moment amid another (if smaller) gathering: Emil bending over the wheelchair handles to confide to his sister (as though offering her something delicious), “Another classics major.”

I'd smiled and nodded affirmingly, there among the cookies and the punch, though how my nod could possibly affirm anything to a blind woman, I didn't know, and I was left wondering two things simultaneously:
Why am I acting like an idiot?
and
How did he know that?

“Emil tells me you like the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont,” Odile had said, with a quick in-catch of breath that revealed how shy she was about making the opening conversational gambit.

“I've been,” I conceded. Evidently, she had also.

“To the island?” she asked, to which her brother conjectured, in all silliness, “Yes, to the sibyl's temple, to receive her oracle from the virgin.”

“Emil! Don't interrupt!” Odile reproved him. “Anyway,” she said, “sibyls aren't virgins.” As she delivered this corrective, she reached down and caught his knee in a painful pinch, and I could see where she'd make an effective educator.

“No?” he said.

“No! Emil, that would be a Pythian temple. A Pythia is a virgin. You always want to pretend to know everything, so you need to get that right.” Then, to me, with energy: “Right?”

I can tell you with precision the state of my knowledge of Pythias, which was absolute zero, goose egg. But I know all about girl bonding and understood what was required. “Right!” I declared, with energy. And then Odile expounded, for her brother's edification (and to flirt with me), on the essential difference between a Pythia and a sibyl. The Pythia, it seems, was the oracle of Delphi. She was always young (at least in Delphi's early years) and never spoke for herself during her trances but channeled the voice of the god she served. A sibyl was an older prophetesses subserving no deity. Her divinations flowed straight from the well of her bitter experience and out of her own pain and madness.

“Sounds like an important distinction,” Emil admitted, but his humility was dubious and Odile laughed and would have pinched his leg again if he hadn't yanked it away. I noticed that his jacket was open, and his tie gone altogether. I told Odile that unfortunately I hadn't made it to the temple yet.

“Oh, you must go!” she said. “I always leave a coin when we visit. Not because it's a tradition or anything. I just like to.”

 

Che wrapped up and relinquished the mike to Karl, and by the time Karl approached his peroration, I'd had my fill and couldn't bear much more and couldn't remember what profit I'd imagined from attending this enterprise in the first place. A myriad of humans mashed together, marinated in murk and packed in stone—what had I been thinking? I was grasping at straws in a haystack. As I began calculating the slim odds of an easy exit, the fringe priest's voice returned to thank Karl and introduce the next speaker, an American, he said, here from “
le
Middle West” to express the outrage of the American people at American capitalist aggression, and he turned the hall over to “Alba.”

The placards were in full flurry so I couldn't see the pulpit, but the name rang like a steeple bell and as soon as I heard it, I began to strategize in a different and opposite direction. Alba! With difficulty, I descended to the floor and headed east. It was ten times farther to the front of the church than to the exit, and at some point during that distance, the crowd underwent a change of state, transmuting from flood to solid, a single massive ingot of infragrant flesh. Movement was impossible, breath barely. “This will not stand!” the loudspeakers blared. “No, it will not . . .” and the words drew me on in an almost effervescent excitement—could this be her?—undimmed by the slimness of the evidence. “We offer our lives to this struggle!” the voice said. I was going on only a name, after all.

“. . . if a matter of
their
lives,
their
deaths, then no less for us!” The exhortations billowed like a sheet in the wind, but between the windy cheers (she had the crowd at full froth) and over my pushing and shoving (as though sound could be drowned out by exertion, but it can) I heard her harangue. “We're not afraid, if that's what is required of us. No, this shall not stand!”

The declarations poured direly forth, but as I powered my dreadnought purse through the impossible sea, my mind was consumed with nothing more radical than a delicate question of comportment. What would I say to her, if this was indeed her? I didn't know. I would know when we met, maybe. Even a good first look at her would give me some clue about how best to proceed. Sitting at l'Urquidi, I'd pondered the central question: If I found her, should I tell her about Saxe's demise? Despite all my guilt-tripping of Passim, I'd decided definitely not. Wouldn't that halt the letters, shut down our communication right from the start? Which was the opposite of what I desired. As I pushed my way toward her, I rehearsed my concocted alternative. I would tell her that Saxe had sent me, that I was his emissary, here to convey his greetings, that he wished us to meet and to confer.

By the time I made it close to the pulpit, the woman named Alba had long since departed the stage. The headliners were done and the dead horse had been turned over for flogging by second-stringers, and the rally had lost enough steam and spectators to permit a few atoms of oxygen back into the air. I stared at the frayed ranks in the presbytery and saw no women there at all, and I pressed up toward a carved wooden side door that looked as though it led backstage. A man sat on a stool by the door, reading a book as calmly and intently as though he were ensconced in a carrel in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I made for the door, and his arm shot out.

“Please, I need to meet someone,” I said.

“Credentials,” he stated. It wasn't a question, any more than he was swayable. He was tall and sallow and dressed in a ridiculous Sgt. Pepper jacket, with epaulets and brass buttons, and sucking on a bonbon in his cheek.

“I need to see Alba,” I said, and he gave me a look that said
Doesn't everyone?

When there's nothing left to do, I reminded myself, there's no risk in a chance. “Bingham,” I said, with energy. “Her name is Bingham. Please tell her Dr. Anselm's here.”

He mulled over this careful confection of specificity and title, sucked on it meditatively the way he did the bonbon, and then he stood and put the book on the stool and went through the door. Several minutes later, he was back.

“Sorry, lady,” he said, and made to sit back down. But before the door closed I caught a view of the person he'd been speaking with, and it seemed to me I could place her somewhere—something about her hair, her hair seemed to shine like fire. And then it clicked, and as it did and before the shock of it enveloped me, I put the probabilities together. The probabilities were precise—goose egg, absolute zero—but I thought:
If it's so, I must try
. I opened my albatross, my ship's anchor of a society purse, and fished around in it until I found the tattered cloth.

“Please, could you just give her this,” I said, my hand outstretched.

He sucked on the bonbon some more, this time with mild irritation, then disappeared, and after a much shorter interval the door flew open and Corie stood there, clutching the bandanna, her hair glinting red in the backlight and a look of confusion on her white face, verging on vague emergency. Her eyes went straight to mine. Could I call the look recognition? Hiding in her eyes was something I had seen only occasionally in my career and never outside the ward. I stood in her gaze for a length of time I couldn't and still can't measure because all the things I might have measured it by had ceased: the room's cacophony and the fidgeting of the bouncer had frozen into silence and a statuary stillness, and there was only the light off her shoulder and her hollow gaze, the tin gaze of a returner.

“Saxe is dead,” I said.

T
HE CAT WAS MOSTLY
black, with a white chest and forehead and long hair, and it was coming down the street following the child on the scooter. It had a housecat's character, I guess naturally enough, a berserk alertness to everything real or imagined, distracting it in so many directions that when a car passed or a pigeon flew by, you could watch the synapses sizzle—it would halt and dawdle, jolt and wander, and then, just often enough to stay in the game, jog full tilt down the sidewalk with its tail straight up till it caught up with the child.

I watched through the windows of Portbou, thinking about it: how differently we get through the world. The child was four or five and was wearing Day-Glo sneakers, taking a walk with her father on a placid morning—for her it's an event—and he a slight gentleman in a drab corduroy coat and woolen cap, and she'd insisted (on threat of a tantrum: I can hear the ultimatums!) on bringing along her scooter, which was yellow and had blue wheels and a red handle, and which she pushed with her right foot down the sidewalk carefully, at a snail's pace, her head bowed in focused concentration on the wheels and on her Day-Glo foot and on the pavement, trying so hard to get it all correct, it was serious work, learning how to scooter, learning how to scooter as a next installment in learning all there was to be learned, and by her side her patient, drab father—it's not an event for him; for him, it's an hour out of events—ambling in place with his mind far away, present just sufficiently to pleasantly attend to his daughter's progress, a soft lumbering bass line to the child's tense melody, and then zoom, here comes the electrified cat, the personification of a nonlinear line, blasted off course by every ion, by every backfire and stray thought and sun mote and passerby, but getting there, nonetheless, nonetheless the quickest of them all. I sat and watched them through the café window and waited for Corie to arrive.

That was how we'd left it: We'd agreed to meet. It was all we'd been able to manage amid the chaos and with her handler standing guard—not the bonbon gendarme, but one of the suited impresarios I'd spotted earlier loitering behind the cordon in the apse, a compact, too-well-appointed hard-faced man with a heavy gold bracelet and thinning hair pulled back in a ponytail who stepped out from the back room to eye me with open suspicion. “Massue—” she started by way of introducing us, but he was having none of the friendly with me. He shook my hand brusquely and herded Corie back behind the carved wooden door before we could trade more than two dozen words, though not before she'd assented, with a nod, to my suggestion of a time to meet. Then she was gone, a beefy forearm around her shoulder, and that brought an end to the evening, though the evening wasn't over. It lingered like a headache. I went home and got to bed past midnight, knowing there'd be no music, not tonight, but wondering what she might have chosen had she played, what ceremonial Internationale she would have picked as the soundtrack for her triumph.

I was dreadfully on edge, and every drift toward dream dead-ended in a recollection that brought me wide awake again. What on earth was it? Something Sahran had said, I thought, but pound as I might on my memories of the day, I couldn't quite dislodge it. The border of sleep was guarded by confabulations. A woman raced toward me down a garden path littered with bears, counting the bodies,
Un, deux, trois, deux, trois
, as she tapped them each blindly with her parasol. A man wheeled past in an office chair chased by puppets through a thicket of tree-sized flowers. Sahran had said . . . Sahran had said . . . The music caught me slumbering.

At first, her playing was exceedingly pianissimo, in deference, I suppose, to its being two
A.M.
Whether on account of the hour or not, her anthem was a brief one, a short, whispered Chopin nocturne that frightened me with its sadness. It was a piece more bare than any I'd heard her perform. I rose from the sheets and went into the closet to attend to the notes more closely, and as I did I edited my impression: the nocturne itself was familiar—no, not a nocturne, one of his waltzes. I'd just never heard it played so desolately.

Then, before I could press my ear to the door, the crash came: a horrible pounded mis-chord, as though the pianist were out to destroy the piano, chopping off the elegy midphrase with the violence of two hammered fists. I stood in the closet as motionless as one more garment suspended on a hanger, alarmed, on alert—but there was no coda. The silence got long, and after a while I returned to bed. At least the commotion had dispersed the sentry of Chimeras, for I slipped past them successfully into sleep.