Feast of All Saints (101 page)

Pride bred into him by that bleary-eyed drunken planter who had ended his life under this very roof turning over one shiny playing card after another, and a mother who said to him all his life you must leave here to be a man, you must leave here, because she herself had loathed every man of color on whom she had ever set eyes. A groan escaped his lips.
Endless procession of women who want to look ten years younger, children who will not sit still
, and the stench of the chemicals twelve hours a day, the heat, the dampness, the haggling over prices, his head literally swam.

“And what you loved about that old man,” Anna Bella ventured softly, “was that he got his hands dirty with what he loved, he got down in the dirt with his chisels, his hammer and his nails…”

He put his hands to the side of his head. He stared still at the little picture, could see all the flaws in it, the fading at the edges, the face that had not been turned properly to the light. “But it could be more than that,” he whispered. “Much, much more!” Good Lord, what awaited him if he did
not
take this step, some abyss of meaningless labor separating him inevitably from all that made life bearable, when
this, this, the making of these pictures had always been what he loved, loved it as much as he loved to draw, to read, to walk about Christophe’s yard at twilight listening to Bubbles’s haunting and exquisite songs. His mind was on fire suddenly, all the mundane details which a moment ago had struck him as mean and debilitating were yielded up to him slowly in a new light. Work for Picard, he didn’t have to work for Picard, sell the cottage, no, he didn’t have to sell the cottage, the title to his property was his collateral, and there was money in his clip, that small fortune right here in his hands.

But fear gripped him, slowly, overtaking him it seemed even as he stood there on the verge of this decision, his hand out for that little picture which in a shift of the sun had become a mirror so that he wanted to set it right. It was that same fear which had overcome him in Picard’s studio, and it was working its way again stealthily to his heart. He reached for his winter cape, he stared numbly at Anna Bella, he bent to kiss her warmly on the cheek. And he did not know that her heart was breaking for him as she watched him, so mournful was his expression; or that after he left her, the door shutting behind him as he stepped into the sun, she put her head down to cry against her folded arms.

All the long afternoon he walked. Through the rain and the sun, and the rain and sun together, and the occasional thunder rumbling over the low wet roofs and the golden windows, round and back and through all the familiar and favorite streets he walked. He passed the studios of the Daguerreotypists with their little oval specimens shining silver in the dormers, and discovering Duval in the Rue Chartres stood for an hour before his small display, entranced with the perfection of a family portrait, each face molded magnificently by the light, figures exquisitely grouped even to the turn of each head. But he did not go up the stairs. And passing the hock shops with their old cameras, battered flotsam and jetsam of others’ dreams which he had often handled in the past, he did not open the doors. And his feet even carried him across the Rue Canal into the American city to view the plate glass show windows of the dealers in chemicals, cases, and plates for the Daguerreotype, but again, he did not turn the knob, he did not go in. And at twilight, though he stood for some quarter of an hour in his beloved waterfront street watching Christophe at billiards under the warm lamps of Madame Lelaud’s, he did not approach the open door.

It was midnight as he roamed the Place d’Armes, early morning when he prowled the deserted market, and dawn at last when he stood over the river where he could glance back at the twin towers of the Cathedral shining wet under the lightening sky or out over the immense
swell of brown water which ran on to darkness as though it were the open sea. He was not tired. He was no longer restless, rather his mind had that razor clarity with which he could best perceive. The masts of the ships made a forest under the fading stars, the glitter of a drifting steamboat played like candles on the faceted current, while on the wind there came in snatches the last melancholy and discordant music of a late night Negro band.

The fear was melting in him. Melting gradually as he weighed all about him, saw the world in which he lived, not the world he would some day escape, but the world to which he’d been born. And the desperation of his early years was mellowing into something somber and no longer important as he considered the choice at hand.

He knew the camera, knew the alchemy of vision, patience and precision it had always required. And though the years stretched before him in a heavy sentence of trial and error, he knew without doubt that he could use it well! He would risk all for it, and it would yield to him a treasure of those stunning and complex icons he had always cherished, just as the wood under Jean Jacques’ chisel had yielded to him again and again the perfect line.

And the small universe around him was his to capture, his to fix and frame at the perfect instant in light and shadow exactly as he perceived: the shabby grandeur of the old city, faces of all nations, ragged trees, the ever-drifting clouds—this time and this place as it had shaped his childhood and the man he had become—from the melancholy spectacle of the barefoot
vendeuse
who passed him now on her way to market, to the majesty of the mourners on the Feast of All Saints.

Time stopped in one sterling moment after another, time defeated in the little miracle of the Daguerreotype, time that was the destroyer of young men’s dreams.

He turned his back to the river. He felt the vibrant hum of the awakening port. The streets were silver in the morning damp, and a lone
marchande
in the Place d’Armes with her steaming cakes wound her way towards him, saluting him in a high-pitched song. The decision had been made, really; it had been lifted from him some time long before this moment, and he knew now what he must do.

But as he commenced the long walk uptown, toward the bankers and the shopkeepers and the landlords and the dust and the ink and the tinkle of brass, an even greater perception was breaking from the shell of his soul. A future lay before him, a future beyond the rosy image of the planter’s son roaming the capitals of Europe forever outside the things he loved. For this was something he himself could really do, something he himself could really be! And whatever happened, be it failure or the art in which he had always believed, no one
could take it away from him, no one could nullify it, no one could ever wake him rudely to say it had all been a dream.

He felt close to Jean Jacques. He felt the fragrances of that small shop. He felt near to Christophe at the lectern, or bent over the lamplit desk the pen in hand.

And as his steps quickened, as the sun leaked down over the gabled roofs and through the rusted gates, he gazed in wonder at the streets about him, at the same old splendor and min he had known all his life, and for the first time, he felt, perhaps the world in all its unspeakable beauty could really belong to him.