Paris Twilight (19 page)

When the chaplain had done all the damage that words could do, the honor guard accomplished the rest, firing its volley into the air. The honor guard, Maxwell Daniel, being a day-labor cadet with a target-practice .22, and after the gun had been emptied, and the trumpet played by a high-schooler on loan from the halftime band, and the dirt shoveled onto the mahogany, and before everyone had made it back into the sorry cortege of a hearse and one sorry limousine, the sergeant sought me out to chat. He stood there in the drizzle, he having met you over there, he said, and having driven across the state when he learned the news, to be here at the graveside, done up in his dress greens, because he remembered you, and you'd struck him as a nice young man, someone to watch, that's what he said, someone to keep an eye on. In full dress greens, though I suspected he was no longer in the service, suspected the real reason for his extravagant long-distance courtesy call was not to bury the dead but to keep alive his own unresolved experience, to keep it unburied by time, and so he'd come here to me, wanting to reminisce, of all things, with me, of all people.

The torrent of light above me dimmed to a trickle, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, it dispersed in a last high scattering of sparks, leaving me with a standard-issue Paris night sky and with the realization that I was walking up rue Nin. My beautiful neon stream was sutured shut, and the street lay quiet and soft below the streetlights, the buildings dormant and mute. The only lit window on the block was on the top floor of 136, in the study of Carlos Landers's apartments.

I stopped across the street to peer up, wondering if she was busy at her translations, wondering why my happiness must ever be like this: not quite happiness, but a happiness now and then, systole, diastole, as the heartbeat goes—on again, off, a joy, an interminable contraction, another brief joy, the duration between my joys so deep that it would swallow you up if you let it, Daniel. And, oh, how I'd been swallowed. It was a terrible thing, always knowing ahead of time the end place of every runaway gladness—the smell of chestnuts in the night mists of Manhattan, the weight of Emil above me in the dark—to know how every gladness would end up: as a foil, a measure, a yardstick for grief, calipers sizing up sorrow.

Standing across the street from the Wisteria, I wished that I smoked cigarettes or that I had a broken heel or some other outward and evident excuse to linger like this, watching for a shape or shade to cross that square of light and provide me with a sign. Might I somehow glimpse the creature whose name, I now knew, was Corie? Might she somehow see me, if she looked out? If she did, what would I do? How would I explain standing here at such an hour, alone as I was? Or as I thought I was, until the shadow moved.

I feel that I saw it before I saw it move, but by then it was almost upon me, a vague apparition, some burlap pilgrim loosed from another time, the shawl that covered her bowed head clasped at the neck in cold fingers. When she passed under the streetlight I could see that it was the concierge, Céleste, in her tattersall coat, her feet shod in boots that looked as though she'd torn them off a Cossack, back when Cossacks existed. She reached the Wisteria's entry pergola and unlocked the gate and let herself into the yard but didn't proceed up the path. Instead, she crossed to a far back corner of the lawn, where she disappeared into blackness. I watched her through the pickets as she reemerged, and as she turned from closing the gate, she saw me too. She seemed shocked without being in the least surprised. “It's you,” she said, in her customary milk-of-kindness rasp, and asked me had I gotten lost or had I quite stupidly locked myself out, and I said no, I was only headed home, and she said, “Now?”

We walked together toward the end of the block—she would escort me all the way around the maze and back to our courtyard, grousing, “Alone at this hour,
complètement folle
, the crazy thing, doesn't she know she's not in New York anymore?,” as though my nighttime indiscretions didn't describe hers equally. My mind was still stuck in some other place, on the sergeant in his dress greens relating his story, the awful story I've never told you of the fated soldiers, and of lying on the grass beside the airfield, and I remembered how I'd listened, taking in his tale while I silently inscribed his name on the list of those whom I would ever after hate, the list that was now up to three and included the sergeant in his dress greens, and (in ascending order of importance) the duplicitous military chaplain, and you.

We weren't far down the sidewalk when the light snuffed out, and Céleste and I both noticed it, our heads jerking toward the darkened window, and noticed each other noticing, the window gone as dark as all the others.

P
ALMA
, M
AJORCA

Boo! It's a letter, my love, can you believe? They are letting us send mail! We're no longer categorized as
incomunicado
. Did you get that
carte postale
they permitted me, forever ago? “Señora Alba Solano Landers is pleased to announce, from her unending confinement, the end of her confinement . . .” I am well, generally. My current illness is worry and is chronic. They promise we can receive mail too, even packages. Please write today and say you are safe. May this long silence have been our last!

 

“Do you have this postcard from Alba?” I asked.

Corie shook her head. “Unless it's out of order,” she said. We were sitting in Landers's study drinking the orange tea, she in an armchair, me on the neighboring couch, clutching a blue aerogram in one hand, its English twin in the other. “So many are,” she said. “Anyway, it's the first one I've had like this . . .” Leaving “this” undefined, she stood and went over to her writing desk and began to rummage through her papers, and I turned back to the page.

 

I say “we” but that's not true. My privileges have been granted to only a few women deemed less criminal. And me! The matrons have got it in mind that I am some prize they've laid hands on, all because Carmen de Castro was a student in my father's school and she's now the director of prisons. So they exempt me from some of the favorite torments. I get more than sardines and biscuits & my mat isn't straw & I don't have to assemble for head count each morning and sing “Cara al Sol” & “Viva Cristo Rey,” and they don't lock me in a cell at night. I sleep with Alena in a room in the rectory. Of course it's locked, but it's clean, and on the top floor so it's bright & not damp & the window opens and I don't have to look through bars. I have a table!

 

“So grateful for a table,” I said. The exclamation mark was doubled in the original, per Catalan. Or not Catalan, as Corie had explained to me with evident pride (this being her area of expertise), but a subdialect of Aranese that Alba and Carlos folded into their correspondence, along with a smattering of other regional vocabularies, as their private language.

“Oh, I know,” Corie said, about the gratefulness.

 

Even flowers, when I rob the garden (Sister Serafina disapproves, but left me a vase to put them in). I pinch the stems with my fingernails. They would never trust a democrat with scissors! The price of my amnesty is only beginning to dawn on me.

 

“See?” Corie said, returning couch-side with a familiar white regulation-sized envelope familiarly tagged
C. Landers
and
40, rue Ganivert
.

“The first one to come like this,” she said.

I looked at the envelope and then, quizzically, at her, and her exasperation was as instantaneous as an exasperated teacher's before a balky student. She snatched Alba's letter from my grasp and shook it in my face.

“Regard!”
she commanded. “Aerogram!” and she turned the blue onionskin over to display the addressee, a name I didn't recognize, Corail Barayón, in Ginebra, Suiza, and then with her other hand she held out the regulation-sized envelope, her forefinger clamped so tightly above the postmark, Genève, Suisse, that the nail was white. “Envelope!” she declared. “She's using her intermediary, and he takes her letter . . . and puts it”—and she dipped the aerogram in the envelope with ostentatious helpfulness, twice for good measure, so the most abject of imbeciles could grasp the concept—“and relays it on.”

“But she's already been captured,” I said, abject. “They let her send mail.” It wasn't one of my most functional mornings.

“It's for him,” she said, her eyes bulging, “to keep from implicating Carlos.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “Got it.” I could hear from her voice that I clearly understood nothing about love. We returned to the letter.

 

. . . also a cigarette, every Tuesday. It's like permission to cut flowers without scissors: a cig but no match (you must ask Serafina for a light). The Mother Superior has a Blaupunkt, & on Friday eve the nuns gather in her rooms to hear the broadcast from Madrid, & they invite me. Alena gets to crawl on a real rug for a while (this is why I go) & teethe on Madre's spoons while the news fades in & out of atrocities we Republican loyalist traitors committed, all these garroted priests & ravaged nuns. They don't look at me. I feel them not looking. They take my pulse. Have I absorbed my error? They bring me to Mass. Will I repudiate my heresy and be accepted into the One Apostolic Faith? This is the price: they aim to baptize me! Whoever deemed me important enough to be treated humanely has deemed me human enough to be remade into a Catholic. It would be a nice demonstration for them, but, oh, well, their job is impossible. That I would consent to worship the pope who “lifted up his heart to God” on news of our torturers' victory! Dead clergy is no news to me. Dead anyone, for that matter. Could I forget the stadium at Badajoz? The Almería road?

 

And here I relied on Corie's explanations, of a town's population herded into a bullfighting arena and massacred, of a hundred thousand civilian refugees fleeing a battle along a coastal road being shelled by ships and strafed by Fascist planes and machine-gunned by Italian troops.

 

Or, as far as the radio goes, General de Llano's slobber on Radio Seville, urging the legions of his Column of Death to rape every woman they could. Anyway, if they would strip me of this one last shred of principle, the dignity of nonbelief, they should never have made it my last. With all else lost. A republic, and you, & the thing I have left is my stubbornness, which they will never get from me. And Alena, too, I have my Magdalena, she's my lovely and she's enough, she's all. She's so very much you! If you could only see her how she thrives, my little bliss! Right now her knees are red from crawling around the patio looking for grass to chew on, the stems sprout up through the concrete, it keeps me busy keeping the grass out of her hands & wiping the sand from her knees. She pulls up a stem and calls it a toy the way her mother plucks daisies and calls them
oreja de oso
, and she seems to have no idea she's growing up in a prison, & thank their god for that! And then the thought destroys me that you cannot know her, she who is all that I know.

 

“She's had a child,” I said.

“Right!” Corie answered, and then paused so long, staring at me in a sort of spooky suspension, that I worried she was suffering a seizure. “Summer?” she resumed. “Late spring? Anyway, a while ago. It's been more than a year since she wrote.”

This was the fourth of our morning huddles, and like the earlier three, it thrilled me. This was partly the relief of legitimacy reclaimed—I was entering through the front door, after all. Every time I rang from the street (Corie had labeled the apartment's doorbell
Alba Landers
to guide my initial visit) and was buzzed into the building, I felt honorable, felt I'd been given a dispensation for my crash through Landers's wall.
Where the crime's committed is where the crime's forgot
, as the master said. The remainder of my joy was proximity. I'd encouraged Corie to fly through her written translations (they were, as a consequence, notably inferior in word choice and penmanship to those she'd done for Saxe) so that we could go through the texts together. I wished to discuss each one, I said, to compare the versions sentence by sentence to be sure I was getting everything correct, but that explanation reversed effect and cause, means and ends, for the letters (for me) were mostly an excuse to talk. I'd felt since first meeting her that the girl had something to tell me, a confidential message to relate. Not knowing what the news might be, I hoped I might catch a clue in her voice and gave her voice every opportunity. And so the letters were both pretext and impediment. If I could, I would have tossed aside paper entirely and made her read to me aloud.

“And then there's this one,” she said, and held up the next scribbled page for us to muddle through.

Emil and I had by then spent more than a week together of outdoor mornings and indoor afternoons, robed and stylishly otherwise, of long walks, and of leisurely dinners in restaurants where we rarely had to order to be served. I hadn't repeated either my fisticuffs or my
folle
flight home but let Drôlet drive me back early enough to indulge my other secret infatuation and catch some music through the closet door. My infatuation with the man I comprehended. Lust and luxury required no new vocabulary. But what was it about the child that so intrigued me? I discerned in the accident of our meeting—our multiple meetings; the chance collisions on a street, in a church, in a study—a chain of coincidences so extremely unlikely, I saw no alternative to fate, and that was part of it: Who can turn away from fate? And, too, I was riveted by her multiple natures—angry, haunted, protective, intolerant—a convergence of contradictions I couldn't have combined in a carboy were I the world's best chemist.