Paris Twilight (7 page)

We looked up into the chamber—isn't it one of those delicious things, to glimpse the crimson beating heart of
within
from the icy exclusion of
without
, to view our intimate life, usually so fuzzy and indistinct, from a clear and frozen remove? It's like floating in the cold of the cosmos and knowing all of Earth, its every hearth and campfire, furnace and candle. I can count the times I've experienced that duality, can count them on two hands, no fingers raised: once on a starry, motionless night in the December of my seventh year, or was it my eighth? It was near Christmas. I'd paused in the yard with the sled reins clutched in my mitten, home later than I'd promised, my urgency to arrive arrested by the stolen vision through the kitchen window of Roy and Alice walking out of and into the light, busily being my parents, busy getting our dinners ready, and knowing without regret that these belonged to me, these alive, these busy people, but that somehow I wasn't theirs, that their faces, framed in the window side by side, were impossibly far away.

So: that moment and this one, on the sidewalk in front of the conservatory, you, your violin case slung on its strap across your shoulder, eager to get to your teaching and to get inside and out of the chill before it wrecked your fiddle's tuning, and then the curtain parted and the window opened, and out slipped the adagio on a carpet of light. Who could separate sound and warmth? The two arrived entangled. We stood bundled in each other's breath, listening to the music as though the music were a way—as though it were intended as a way—of listening to each other's listening. We were engrossed in a deep, keen unison when the last chord hit. Do you remember the last note of that movement? A brief suspended silence as deep as a cleaver's chop, and then four hands find their tone exactly as one, landing so gently on a chord that fades to nothing. Systole, diastole: sound, silence, sound . . . silence.

Come in
, you encouraged,
and we'll hear the rest
. But I shook my head, preferring my prospect of the golden room to the experience of the room itself, and then you climbed the steps and went inside and I watched until the door closed before I walked off, and I suppose as I think of it that our idiot Willem, in all his snottiness, may not have been so wrong after all.

A
T FIRST GLANCE
, after I stepped inside, I found it hard to differentiate Café Portbou from any of its pestiferous brethren: an array of Cinzano ashtrays on a battered zinc, a bottle of pickled eggs and a basket of croissants, racks of cigarettes and phone cards and Métro tickets over the cash register, linoleum floor and mirrored columns and a handful of little round tables surrounded by pressboard-bottomed chairs, the whole smelling strongly of espresso and tobacco and mildly of disinfectant. Black-and-white photos from another era lined one wall, inevitably of celebrities long since forgotten who had stumbled in, the frames jostled slightly out of alignment and never set back straight. Near them, in the nether regions by the restrooms, a short bank of video games blinked through the shadows, erupting at intervals into blaring come-ons, in English, lamentably, desperate for some bored customer to pay attention and drop a coin. One console featured a lurid image of a fighter jet zooming straight toward me, wing guns ablaze, pilot grimacing hatefully through the cockpit glass. Air War, it was called, which seemed appropriate, or at least ironic. You could say the war had led me there.

I'd spent the week—the week that followed my chez Saxe cleaning frenzy—like any good salaryman, commuting crosstown twice a day. A very un-good salaryman, actually, I confess, for although my starting point and destination were unvarying, my journey was lackadaisical, and I wandered and lingered at will, gawking through the precipitation, coveting through shop windows (most obsessively admired: in a window on rue du Four, amid a bristle of stiletto heels and sexy flats, a pair of fleece-lined gum boots), stopping in at Shakespeare and Company to peruse the books, making sure to be in Saxe's room at the time each night when the music started. I bought a pretty, down-filled quilt to spread over Saxe's counterpane, and also three bottles of lamp oil—enough to last me several years, I realized later—to fill his glass lanterns, which emitted, after I'd wiped the soot from the chimneys and knocked the ash off the cotton wicks, a glow that was sufficient to read by yet still vague enough that the music was not outshone, and what could be seen never obstructed that which could be heard, and the softness of the room, its lack of edge and corners, complemented the strange indeterminate sourcelessness of the playing. Debussy joined Brahms on the program, and Mendelssohn and bits of Fauré and bits of other things I didn't recognize, all of it bits, fragments lingered over, repeated and repeated, around and around and around, yet the whole of it strangely beautiful, the playing accomplished, searching. At some point, I would lock up and wander home to my hotel, and make my call to the hospital.

One day early I rang Rouchard. His secretary explained that he was out of town on business and would be in touch upon his return. Was there something I needed? Not a thing, I said, and I headed out to begin my commute, descending in the elevator, striding through the lobby to the street, where no Drôlet awaited me. We'd struck a bargain: on the occasion that I needed a lift to the hospital, I'd contact him the night before. Otherwise, sayonara. His absence as I stepped through la Clairière's doors always gave me a little burst of happiness. I'd overthrown my jailer! I was practically a modern-day Marianne, wasn't I, bearing high the Revolution's standard! So, okay, it was a demitasse revolution; nevertheless, my first morning gulp of Paris sidewalk air always gave me a caffeine jolt, and each day started victorious.

The snow of my arrival didn't repeat, but the cold resumed and deepened, and the gray of the season set in with evident obstinacy, another reliable certainty. Half of the days, it rained, but never hard, and the scene I surveyed from under the hem of the hotel umbrella entranced me. The daylight hours grew more and more wan and sordid, but they diminished in number. The gay shop lights, illumined earlier and earlier, the slow glow through drizzle and music from somewhere else gave the impression of a world in night flower, a neon reveille to announce a nocturnal dawn. I stopped in, finally, and bought myself the boots.

On one of my longer and wilder excursions I ended up on a path through an emerald park, not realizing, until a soldier made the long march down the lawn to tell me so, snapping to attention directly in front of me with a click of polished heels and a spring-loaded salute, that I had managed to breach the grounds of the Élysée Palace. He was as inorganic as a lamppost and as splendid as a cockatiel, done up as Napoleon might have done him up, buttons bright in a tricolor swallow-tailed coat, a dress cap with a patent leather visor, but his barked
“Bonjour, madame!”
was clearly a request not a nicety, and an order not a request, and meant that I should go, now, and quickly. I was entertained by this, really—
“Bonjour!”
I trilled back, silly old thing—thrilled that my dowdy American cluelessness would elicit the same formality this centurion accorded his emperor.

But it wasn't entertaining, not really. Out in the larger world, a war was on the way, and the carbine slung across his ceremonious chest was straightforward, ugly business, and every day the protests chewed another grim bite out of the city. I could feel tension's grip tightening, even in the apostasy of my distraction, even in my luxurious isolation, even in my sumptuous hotel suite or in pretty neighborhood bistros, when the news came over the television. The news was of arrests and injuries as the street
manifestations
multiplied, and I never heard bulletins of these encounters without thinking of a spinning, tumbling body and red hair lank with rain. The brown bandanna was still in my purse.

On another day my favored route to Sèvres-Babylone was obstructed by barricades and sentries, and I detoured around to an alternate route and was scanning the corner for street signs when I encountered a familiar name scrawled across a window in chipped black and gilt. It hadn't been on my mind to seek Café Portbou out, but here it was, and I thought,
Why not
, and went in.

The only people in evidence inside were two customers standing at the zinc. I set my purse on a table by the window and eased into a chair. A waiter materialized in good time, a gaunt, middle-aged man who struck me as being almost as rigid, but not nearly as polite, as my Élysée soldier. His tunic was a black apron.

“Madame,” he said with disapproval, staring off somewhere else as though I were an impediment to his destiny soon to be circumvented, and I felt more an interloper than I had on the palace lawn. I asked him for a black tea, and managed to get in
“et aussi”
before he fled, for he'd sprung from my side as though jettisoned by a shock, and when he turned around, I asked if anyone here might know a man—at this the waiter backed up a dismissive step and his head began to shake—named Byron Manifort Saxe. That stopped the headshaking, all right, but I got no response; instead, he sped off as he'd tried to do before, and the hand that brought my tea, and with it a piece of cake, was very sweet and generous and slow, but it wasn't the hand of the waiter. It belonged to another man, young enough that his face was fresh and still unlined, though his sandy hair was thinning, who sat down across from me and introduced himself with a handshake as Passim.

He wore a tan suit without a coat, the vest buttoned across a starched white shirt. The jacket would be hanging behind a door in a back office somewhere; that would make him the manager. He pushed the plate with the cake in front of me. “This is our grande torte Portbou,” he said. “We are famous for it. In truth we order it from a bakery in the
banlieue
like everyone else, but the truck arrives early, and our wonderful customers are kind enough not to notice.” He pushed a napkin next to the plate and set a fork on the napkin. “You are searching for someone.”

I allowed that I was.

“Tell me, who might you be to this individual?”

Good question
, I thought to myself, and responded, “I understand he may have owed you some money, and I would like to settle the debt.” This had not been, in fact, remotely my mission in entering, for the reason that I'd had no mission at all, only a chance opportunity. On the spur of the moment, though, the phone charges seemed a plausible bandage to cover my raw curiosity.

“Ahh,” Passim said with relief. “I was worried I would have to inform you of the news.” He placed his hands flat on the table. “Byron was a regular here, yes. He was also a friend of ours. Cafés have friends, just as people do, and he and this room enjoyed quite a history. In truth, he doesn't owe us anything. He could have used the phone for free, of course; it was not a problem. He paid for his meals, which is more than some people do; he came every day, and paid by the week. But he insisted on reimbursing us whenever he made a call.” He shrugged. “That's okay; it's how he wished it. Then for a while he didn't come in, and I sent him that phone bill. Mostly, I was kidding him, trying to find out what was going on. Now I'm sorry. I will ask that you please ignore what you've received. Byron owes me nothing, and I am sure he owed nothing to anyone else.”

“Is there anything,” I asked, “anything you can tell me about him?”

I could feel Passim appraise me—who was this woman who knew too little to care so much? A wisp of suspicion crossed his eyes, then fled. “You must come visit us, madame,” he said. “As it turns out, you have chosen monsieur's favorite table, though he would have been here promptly at five, and I would have served him a beer.”

Passim left me alone to finish my cake, which indeed tasted famous and which the waiter, though still not seeing me, nevertheless refused to let me pay for, and when the fighter-jet game screamed “Air war!” I bolted back the dregs of my tea and left, but not so quickly that Passim couldn't meet me by the door, his hand outstretched, and if the thing he held in his hand had been a grenade, it could not have caused a greater explosion in my life.

“This may be yours, then,” he said. “I wasn't sure what to do with it.”

 

To tell you about that, I must explain about the letter—the first letter, signed
A
., from the woman whose name was Alba—and I am mystified that I haven't already done so. Perhaps it is because the letter, or rather the
event
of the letter (the letter itself being so obstinately unremarkable), occupies a space in my mind that is so nonplussed, so dumbfounded, that it exists as a kind of abeyance, a reality I still can't quite let myself admit to, though, God knows, it's a reality I'll never escape.

The large manila envelope I'd pulled from Saxe's mailbox had stayed safely sealed until one night in the apartment when I got the lamps glowing and settled down to wait for the music (with some anxiety! I was never sure on any given night if the serenade would commence again or not), and I decided the time had come. I say this like it was an occasion, but it wasn't, not at first. After all my avoidance of it, the envelope's content proved to be as ordinary as a shopping list, which, in fact, it was, in a way: the single page, carefully penned, was primarily about some shoes. It began with no date. That is, the first thing it said, at the top of the page, was
No date. No place
. This was in English, as was the rest of the text, which continued with
Beloved
.

 

Have I thanked you for your beautiful shoes? Oh, not enough! I know how you are, you won't even remember buying them. Or perhaps you will remember the abuse I heaped on you for your kindness. So I must also thank you for forcing them on me. Who ever could suspect that the item she sees for sale through a pretty vitrine on rue de Rivoli will save her life in some other and unimaginable world, & that's where I am now, for what I have seen these last recent days is nightmare. I write quickly because Valentín and Rosa will be departing with the mail. There were moments I didn't have the will to get to here, it was so very far. Even my faithful
alpargatas
would have given up, I'm sure, & it was only your lovely Rivoli boots that soldiered on, took one step and another and dragged me to safety. Oh, that they might abduct me home (is that what you instructed them, or did you just say to take me away? I wish I knew!). How I love you, my dearest & only & I will write more soon.