Paris Twilight (31 page)

“And then,” she told me, “last summer he comes. And he tells me something I cannot stand to think of for the excitement,” that a long-lost relative of Carlos and Alba was alive. It seems on his escape attempt south from Paris, all those years ago, Saxe had made contact with some member of the Landers clan, someone he'd then lost touch with, but he now expressed an expectation that this person, or someone associated with her, might materialize, “and he told me I should expect a lady to come and stay in the flat, and that I should admit her and take care of her, but not say a word about the family business because that was her job,” to find out whatever she needed to know.

“That's what he said, and it's what I've done,” she told me, and crossed herself. I had the feeling Saxe's instructions would have been less compelling if he hadn't died after giving them. She was driven less by regard for the man than by terror of his ghost. “And then, she arrived,” Céleste said, and her voice held the wonder of prophecy.

“And you looked after her,” I stated.

“I have,” she said.

“When do you clean?” I asked, and if she recognized my prosecutorial turn, she mistook it for a slap at her professionalism. Every week was her adamant answer, “Thursdays!,” as she'd done for forty-some-odd years, even without anyone around to clean up for and nothing to do but beat the drapes and push the vacuum back and forth as if she were rocking an empty perambulator and run some water through idle pipes to keep the rust at bay, and no one to know if she did it or if she didn't, but she'd never once missed a Thursday, “bright and early!”

“You go in at other times too,” I said.

Céleste replied with silence—now she got it—and gave me the side of her head.

“For instance,” I said, “you repaired my door, where I damaged it.”

She pouted, sourly. “She's a Landers,” she explained to me with a telltale hint of haught, and I could see there was more restoration afoot than that of a family heir. “There's no need to expose her to all that other stuff. I did what I could.”

“A beautiful job!” I said sweetly, and then, “You were in her office too, one night. Or I suppose maybe . . . many nights?”

“Once!” she corrected fiercely before catching herself, and then stopped to calibrate a bit. “You rang from the street,” she confirmed, surrendering, then pushed back with a grievance of her own. “You mustn't make her read those letters!” she blurted, and blurted that,
pardonnez-moi, madame
, they'd lead to trouble. “Haven't they done enough damage?” Hidden safely away for all those years, and now pulled back out to resume their mischief, “what could that Saxe have been thinking of! Every week she reads a bunch more, and it's only because you make her.”

“What can you mean?” I asked, and I wasn't prosecuting now; I was genuinely perplexed. “What on earth's in them?”

She admitted she couldn't read them, “mostly,” and then caught herself again and insisted she would never be so nosy as to try, “and I couldn't begin to tell you what they say.” But there was one she'd read, all right, because she was the one who'd found it, lying on his bed on the night he killed himself, “and I've known where it is ever since, because I put it there myself, at the bottom of the stack, the very bottom, and I know the girl, and if she ever sees it, the blood will be on my hands.”

Céleste sat inert for a while, seeming to cogitate—the conclusion was foregone but she wanted to give it its due—and after a few seconds she pushed herself away from the table and stalked out of the room. I counted flowerpots until I heard her stalking back. She flicked on the ceiling light as she came through the door—a brazen noon overpowered rosy
crépuscule
—and flung a folded pink paper onto the table. “So I took it!” she declared, and with her confession complete, she crumpled unrepentant into her chair.

I picked up the letter and unfolded it. It wasn't a letter at all. It was a telegram, in French, and though the light lit the room like a stadium, I stood up to read it as though to bring it closer to the sun.

 

GENÈVE
15/14 16/02 1200

C. BARAYÓN

NL

C LANDERS RUE GANIVERT 40 APT 50 PARIS 7 FRANCE WITH DEEPEST REGRET RECEIVE NEWS ALBA DEAD FALL FROM PRISON WINDOW WEDNESDAY STOP UNSURE DETAILS ACCIDENT UNLIKELY DEMANDG OFFCL ACCT GOVS OFFICE STOP NO POSSESSIONS INTERRED IMMEDLY NO INQUEST STOP WILL SEE WHAT CAN FIND OUT RELAY SOONEST GREATEST SORROW FOR YOUR LOSS STOP CARLOS MY GOD WHAT HAVE WE LEFT STOP

CORAIL

 

I read it over several times, and when I'd finished reading, I refolded the page along its ancient creases and told Céleste I wished to take it with me. She didn't answer and I'm not sure I expected her to. She really gave no indication at all, of my request or my presence. I flipped off the overhead light as I left the room and then I thought of something I ought to say and stepped back into the glow.

“I agree, it would upset her,” I said. “So I won't show it to her.” I left the woman in the fluorescent twilight staring at her hands, at the little flower she spun between her fingers like a purple whirligig.

“O
REJA DE OSO,”
Rouchard said. We were in l'Urquidi, ensconced at the corner table that I was coming to think of as mine, having sat there once before. It was Friday night. The particular place was my idea. A restaurant—any restaurant—was his. He wanted to be out of the office, and, it seemed, a retreat of any caliber would suffice, though he hinted that what he had to tell me might go well with a decent wine.

“What's that?” I asked.

“A wildflower,” he said. “Like an African violet, but it grows only in the Pyrenees.
Oreja de oso
is to the Pyrenees what edelweiss is to the Alps, if you will. Daisy, calm down.” The last was directed at the creature of whom, previously, I'd met only the nose, who turned out to be an enormous red Airedale. She was now curled up under our table, albeit somewhat bumpingly—it wasn't an automatic fit. “I have hiked into valleys when it's blooming and seen cliffs painted like the sky,” Rouchard said. The only other place where he'd ever seen them grow was a microclimate in Paris. “Carlos figured out how to cultivate them,” he said. “He made a study of it.” A talent he must have passed on to Céleste. “He liked to keep a few around for comfort. He and Alba were both from that region, you know.”

I hadn't brought the telegram with me to l'Urquidi. I didn't want to be like some road-show vendor, always turning up with an antiquity to appraise. (Last time I'd brought the photo.) There was no news in it that Rouchard didn't already know.

“It devastated us,
bien sûr
,” he said, about the deaths of his friends. “There's no way to indicate how devastating it was.” Alba's murder, “or maybe she wasn't pushed, maybe she jumped, but anyway we know it happened on the morning she was to be forcibly given communion and baptized into the faith against her will, so either way, I'll call it murder. A
double
murder,” if you threw in Carlos's reaction. The news had chased Rouchard all the way to Mauthausen, “and I can tell you that any event that made a day in Mauthausen worse was a significant event.” Until exactly that moment, he said, he, like his friends, had thought there was a chance they would survive to rebuild their world. “Afterward, we knew better,” he said. “We might survive,” but their world was lost beyond retrieval. “That was the news. That was when we knew.

“It wasn't because of the violence,” he said, Carlos's copying Alba's fall. They'd seen too much killing to be impressed by that. It wasn't the violence “but the passion. You must understand that for those in Paris who remember it, the story of Carlos Landers's suicide is a great, tragic love story. He acted as we would not, and we were awed.”

Rouchard paused in genuine hesitancy, and then asked, almost shyly, “Would you permit a doddering old Frenchman who walks with a cane to give you his theories on love? I can promise to be every bit as pompous as you might expect.” Of course I said yes. It wasn't the sort of offer I would ever turn down.

“You know the old saying,” Rouchard said. “When it comes to love, Germans breed, the French flirt, the Americans sell, and the Spanish die. Ah, you cringe; it's offensive, yes, I agree. It's wise enough to omit the Swiss but doesn't include the Italians:
voilà!
I bring it up only to say that there's a geography to love. For instance: We French pride ourselves on being smarter than our emotions. Oh, we pretend to be destroyed by love, but it's only so we can demonstrate how amusingly we outwit it.” (He took a diversion here, with apologies fore and aft, to stipulate that American “love” was a mechanical impulse that we still couldn't manage to outsmart, that's how clumsy the Yanks were when it came to matters of the heart, “and when an American dies of love, it's mere incompetence, you will please again forgive me for saying these few truths.”)

The Spanish, though, were true romantics, too smart to let themselves be smarter than their feelings, so their brilliance is ever overmatched by their passion. For them, love was no more a plaything than a bull was. You stood before it as you stood before death, and never expected to survive. “If Elsa had leaped from a roof,” he said, referring to some others of his war-era friends, passionate lovers and French Resistance comrades, “Louis would have written her a poem. So would we all. Carlos was far too Spanish for that.”

This was why, for generations, his country and Spain had danced a dervish waltz, he said, “a tarantella.” Between French frivolity and Spanish mortality, French brain and Spanish blood, French abstraction and Spanish belief, a complete cosmology of love and all its meanings had spun on its Pyrenees axis. “It is why we have loved one another as we have. And between these two opposites, and only there, your violet blooms, your
oreja de oso
, you see. But now the center's gone. We won the war, we thought,” but only the shooting part. “Today all the world is breeding and selling. We've forgotten how to love and die. The way Carlos and Alba loved, and died. Their deaths destroyed us beyond repair. And now we will order this bottle, and have a good dinner, and I will tell you what I came to say.”

 

What Rouchard then revealed is something I must make you comprehend if you are to understand what I did and said some few hours later, back home, as it were, after the police arrived. The hour was still early when the attorney and I finished up, and the air was balmy—the day had been warm enough to melt all but the most obstinate islets of snow, and the evening kept a pleasant suggestion of its heat—and I walked back home through the Marais, past the Hôtel de Ville, crossing the river on the Pont d'Arcole, dawdling there to observe the lovers and the reflections of lights on the water, musing on what I'd learned, carried away as will-lessly as a bark on the river's tide. As I went, I tried valiantly to keep euphoria from drawing me over a cataract. How greatly I wished I could talk with Emil, whom I missed. But I wouldn't see him for another twenty-four hours, at his dinner party. I might have taken a taxi home from l'Urquidi, or taken the Métro, that is true, so I could quickly hole up alone with my new knowledge, but the thought of haste was as scary as the thought of happiness, and the only way to avoid the terror was to tamp down the euphoria, so I walked the long way, tamping with every step, and dallied on the bridge. I'd dispatched Drôlet that afternoon to fetch Corie home from the girls' school, and when I got to our neighborhood, I went around to welcome her and ask about her stay, which she'd extended from one night to two.

The girl who opened the door seemed transfigured, and not just by the floral hijab, which Odile had made her a present of and which she wore loose over her hair and tucked modishly into the collar of her blouse. The rest of her garb was her own again, and she'd set out my gum boots by the door so I wouldn't forget to carry them home. Attire aside, she seemed to my eyes remade, recast, rejuvenated. She clasped me lightly by the shoulders and gave me kisses when I entered—
trois fois
, cheek, cheek, cheek; I couldn't have been more astonished
—
and we retired straightaway to the library and she ran to the kitchen, a little bit gimpy on account of her ribs, to set a hospitable kettle on.

It was then that I noticed the photograph, on the mantelpiece where Corie had propped it. It jolted me. Alba and Carlos dominated the room, and more. I realized for the first time how bare were the walls of the otherwise fully furnished house. The portrait, amid this barrenness, seemed to saturate the premises. I went to the icon almost gravely and studied it in its all-new light, and when Corie came in with the teacups and saw me standing there she began asking me all the things she hadn't gotten around to the night before: where I'd got the picture, who was the guy on the left, et cetera, and I told her how I'd filched it from Portbou, with Passim's blessing, and how she really should get over there and have a look at the photo wall before he retired the entire collection to give the cruddy old joint its first fresh coat of paint in umpteen years, as he was threatening to do. He was already picking out the color.

“There are more of Alba?”

“Oh, definitely,” I said, and even in the silence I could hear her adulation reverberating, verging on belief, and there was very much more I wanted to tell her about telegrams and newspaper notices and my dinner across town and all the things I'd been finding out, but I dared not, and anyway, though I'd surely broken my vow to Emil, I still had my vow to Céleste to keep, to not reveal the fate of Alba. So for an hour I let Corie yammer, and she pleasantly did, about her stay at l'École Islamique de Jeunes Filles and how generously Odile had hosted her, how she'd joined with the faculty in morning prayers and how Odile had invited her to speak to her students and how she'd answered their questions about activism, about the lesser-known languages of the Iberian Peninsula, about music, about Missouri. She told me how Odile had taken the bandages off and she'd felt so much improved.