Electrico W (20 page)

Dad left no letter, nothing that explained anything. Paul and I searched through the house. Nothing. I resented him for that, I still do. I’d have been happier if he had left with a declaration of paternal love, the only one he would ever have made to us. A sort of absolution for having failed to see or notice anything. A few tender sentences we could have clung to while the coffin was being lowered into the ground. I spent many nights dreaming of that letter. It would have to start with the words “My sons, my dear sons …,” and I didn’t really give a damn about the rest. But Dad had always been the silent type, and it was a bit late now for him to change.

He must have lain down in his first-floor bedroom, the bedspread was still crumpled. He had taken out a few yellowed books—or perhaps they just hadn’t been put away. I had never known him to read those books, but I couldn’t see what to make of them. Still, I did note down the titles, as if they held some impenetrable secret: Mallarmé’s
Verse
and Prose
, the Teubner edition of the
Odyssey
, Jules Verne’s
Voyage to the Center of the Earth
, and an old 1898 edition of Leon Bloy’s
The Ungrateful Beggar
. Its epigraph was a quote from Barbey d’Aurevilly: “The most beautiful names borne by men were the names given by their enemies.”

Dad had forgotten to close the iron gate, as well as the door to the barn. Unless he had actually left them open deliberately so that someone would notice, would think there had been a burglary. That was what happened. A neighbor found his body the same day, shortly before nightfall. The pathologist had set the time of death at about four in the afternoon.

No, the insurance would not pay, and Lecourbe would bring in a lot less than anticipated. Paul also suggested dropping the price of Montcardon, to close the deal swiftly, and to give it to an estate agent’s office in Paris. I agreed: of course, the agents in Courtenay weren’t going around telling prospective buyers that the previous owner had hanged himself in the barn, but the facts always came out in the end, and the sale had already fallen through three times.

Paul said a few more words about what an idiot our father’s doctor was and the elegance of the bank’s last gesture, and we hung up.

Paul wanted to sort everything out as quickly as possible. It was his way of running away, of hurrying through grief. Back when our mother died, he had set up house in
Milan for no apparent reason. He found work in an architect’s office, pitching up for a few days every Christmas with a big panettone and some Asti Spumante. His exile lasted three years, then he came back to France. Once the inheritance had been carved up, I knew he would go away again, and that we would gradually become what we had always been to each other, although we never admitted it: strangers. I thought he would get back in touch with me when his children were born, when he had them. I hadn’t imagined for one moment that I myself might be a father.

I felt like calling Paul back, telling him what a family
could
be like, or just two brothers. Telling him about the affection I felt for him, for my younger brother who had been too many years younger for me for a long time, whom I got to know so little and so badly, also telling him how hard it would be for me to lose the scraps I had left of my childhood. I didn’t do it. I thought of writing to him. I didn’t do that either.

I HAD A
shower and went down to the cafe to read the
Diário
. It devoted most of page 3 to a long article about Pinheiro’s bronze coat of mail. This style of armor was a perfect copy of the
lorica hamata
that Roman legionaries took from the Celts and wore for six centuries. It was made of linked
rings: each ring was connected to four others and sealed with a rivet known as a barleycorn, and this was illustrated with a detailed diagram. The rings were flattened and had a diameter of just a few millimeters, so the coat of mail comprised several hundred thousand of them. A peculiar detail: some of the rings had been soldered to wires connected to 4.5-volt batteries, as in toning belts athletes used for their abdominal muscles. The setup was absurd, though, given that bronze is a very good conductor so the power would inevitably be dissipated in short circuits.

The
Diário
’s journalist had had an identical one made by a locksmith, who was kept busy for a whole week with the task. The alloy used was not commercially available, and he had had to order it from a foundry because no bronze sculpture had so much copper and so little pewter in it: there was also some arsenic which made the alloy harder, making the article more clean-cut. As he reproduced the original, the craftsman became convinced that Pinheiro’s coat of mail had been one of a limited edition of “at least half a dozen.”

For nearly three hours the journalist had worn the hat, bronze bangles, and chain mail, right next to his skin as Pinheiro had, although legionaries never actually wore it naked like this but over a linen shirt. Once the wires were connected to batteries, the experiment had become painful, far less because of the electrical current than because his body hair kept getting caught in the rings.

I covered all of this in my article, bolstering it with a few details on the capture of Rome by the Gauls under Brennus, to whom minor history owes the story of the geese at the Capitol—and to whom Roman military history owes this form of chain mail.

My brother Paul was given a Vercingetorix the Gaul outfit for his sixth birthday. A winged helmet as on cigarette packets, a brown cape in rough fabric, a wide sword, a round shield, and a plastic coat of mail. It was a family celebration, in the countryside at Montcardon. I was thirteen and bored, rereading old Tarzan and Bob Morane stories in our bedroom. My brother spent the day running all over the place in his Gallic chieftain’s costume; toward nightfall he wanted to go and play in the woods. My mother asked me to take him and play with him. I dug my heels in and she reprimanded me with a frown: “Vincent—it’s your brother’s birthday.”

I sighed and went out with Paul.

We simply had to follow a dirt track alongside the house. It was impracticable by bicycle because it was too rutted up by tractor tires. First we had to walk past two cornfields, then a vineyard, and you reached the woods after half a mile. You went into the woods on a path edged with ivy and brambles, cutting through an embankment. It was just a few dozen hectares of straggly, poorly maintained forest, but in springtime there were hundreds of daffodils under the trees, and even lily of the valley. My brother
liked going for walks there, bringing home moss, collecting gleaming blue beetles in jars where they scuttled under damp tree bark. Down below us, in the light of the setting sun, was the watercourse, the Vougre, where people swam in summer, although it was barely deeper than a brook. Nearby were the dark waters of a pond, known as the Tramen Pond, where people went boating. My brother could lie in the grass on the banks for hours watching the balletic moves of yellow-bellied newts, but never daring to catch them. In the middle of the forest there was also a dead tree with black, clawlike branches, the Devil Tree. It terrified Paul and that was my fault: I was the one who called it that, and I had told my little brother terrible stories, full of witches and monsters. When the tree appeared around a bend on a walk, Paul would run and hide behind me, scared. I protected him from the demon with incantations and curses. Paul’s disillusion when he grew up was in direct proportion to the admiration he had once felt.

I’ll never forget that afternoon. Paul is running ahead of me, pushing aside brambles with his shield. From time to time he strays from the path, pursuing one of the pond’s big green dragonflies with his sword. Then he comes back, laughing, victorious. I’ve brought a comic book with me and don’t pay much attention to him. At some point I can’t hear him anymore. I call him. He doesn’t answer. I shout his name again several times and, succumbing to genuine fear, start running toward the pond. He isn’t there. I run
to the river, climb back up the bank yelling Paul, Paul, with all my strength, all the way to a backwater of the Vougre even though he can’t have had time to get there. I go back to the Tramen, I search through the reeds, wading out into the water, I daren’t think the unimaginable, of finding a little blond-haired Gallic chieftain floating in the water, drowned in his chain mail, still wearing his helmet. I even go to the Devil Tree. Maybe Paul’s overcome his fear, maybe he’s waiting for me there, sitting on a low branch? But no. It’s getting dark. I can see less and less clearly. I stand with my back against a tree and start to cry. I’m paralyzed with guilt, and I’m also frightened of my mother’s fury, but I must go home and ask for help. I run along the path in sodden shoes. Again and again I trip in the deep ruts gouged out by farm machinery, grazing my knees and elbows and hands.

I barge through the door to the house and see Paul in the kitchen. He got hungry, wanted a jelly sandwich, looked for me for a while in the woods and, when he didn’t find me, came home on his own. My mother sees me in the doorway, dripping and filthy. She comes toward me, beside herself with rage and, unable to articulate a sentence, she slaps me to dispel her own anxiety. I don’t try to avoid the blow, one of the very few in my life. The pain in my cheek frees me from my own tension, tears well up immediately and I go to our room and throw myself on my bed. I sob uncontrollably. I know that that could have been
the day when my life turned upside down, when I would have been burdened forever with the atrocity of Paul’s memory. I imagine the nightmare of a life without Paul, a shameful life that would have to be lived in the shadow of his death, and yet, somewhere in that total darkness, in that abyss of misery, there is a vertiginous sort of appeal, as if I knew that only a glow as dark as that could give meaning to my own life, as if you had to be infinitely guilty to be truly saved.

I put down the
Diário
with its pictures of chain mail and drove away the images it had evoked. I went over to the hotel. Antonio had left a note for me with the porter.

“It’s early. I called your place, but you weren’t there. I’m going to the Estufa Fria. I need to talk to Aurora, to explain. Then I’m going to take some pictures around Belém, I’ll be gone all day. Let’s meet up this evening, if you can. Irene’s still asleep. Tell her I’ll be back at about five. You’ll think of an explanation, I know you’ll be discreet. Thanks. A.”

I didn’t have to wait for Irene, she was having her breakfast. I found an explanation, and was also discreet.

I said I was meeting someone. No, I couldn’t have lunch with her, or meet for coffee in the afternoon, and I probably wouldn’t be around this evening either. But tomorrow, it’s a promise. I stood up, pleased with my indifference. She looked at me as if she thought I was going to hurt her and she couldn’t give a damn.

IT WAS ALSO
the first day of the Pinheiro trial. I could have waited for the reports in the Portuguese press, but I had an official pass after all, and I was curious to see how he behaved in court.

The courtroom was packed, the press box heaving. Pinheiro seemed half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank. That morning they were giving an inventory of the murders. He had confessed to the police for all those that involved the Luger, but his lawyer made much of reminding the jury that, for three of these, he had a cast-iron alibi. The same weapon must, therefore, have been used by several assassins. That would be the position taken by the defense: Pinheiro, who had accepted the blame for all the murders, could in fact be innocent of them all, and why not also the last one, if the culprit had dropped the firearm in his pocket. Then he would simply have been the accomplice responsible for disposing of the gun, in a strange complex mechanism.

They then showed some images provided by the pathologist. They were poorly framed, workaday shots, showing blood-stained bodies frozen in death, captured on film out of respect for protocol, without humanity. This obscenity created an awkward tension among people in the public gallery, but Pinheiro didn’t look at them.