Feast of All Saints (15 page)

A tall freckled mulatto had stepped up before the tightening assemblage, rolling his pants above the knees and stripping the shirt from his back as he walked up and down, up and down, to show that he had no marks from the whip. “Now what am I offered for this lively boy,” came the guttural English. “What am I offered for this fine healthy boy, master hates to part with him, reared from a baby, right here in the city of New Orleans, but
needs money!”
And then in rapid rhythmic bursts of French: “The master’s misfortune is your good fortune, a household slave but strong as an ox, baptized right here at the St. Louis Cathedral, never missed Sunday Mass in his life, this is a fine boy, this is a good boy…”

And the boy, turning round and round on the polished block, as
though completing a dance, bowed to the crowd, a smile like a spasm in his taut flesh. He bowed low and whipped the shirt up, deftly closing the first two buttons with one hand. Then his eyes moved furtively over the shifting faces, down over the rows that surrounded him, and fixed suddenly on the face more nearly like his own, looking up at him, blue eyes into blue eyes.

Marcel, motionless, lips slack, was unable to move toward the winter street.

Slaves.

He had never seen the country fields, knew nothing of the coffles trudging overland with children wailing, and had never breathed the stench of the slave ships long relegated to the distant and thriving smugglers’ coves.

Passing the slave yards, he saw what he was meant to see: bright turbans, top hats, rows of men and women in idle conversation eyeing him casually as if he were on display, not they. But what went on inside the walls? Where mother was ripped from daughter, or listless old men, their grizzled sideburns stuck with bootblack, hunched to hide from the probing buyer a racking cough; or gentlemen, gesturing with walking sticks, insisted perfunctorily they must see this bright mulatto girl stripped if you please, the price was exorbitant, what if there were some hidden disease? Would you please step inside? Of these and other things, he could only guess.

What he did know was New Orleans, and all around him the city’s poor—black, white, immigrant, Creole—cooks driving bargains for fowl at market, the chimney sweepers roaming door to door, carters and cabmen, dark faces blank with sleep in the shadows of the
presbytère
arches, hands limply anchoring the lap basket of spices for sale. In dim sheds nearby, black men forged the iron railings to grace the balconies that lined the Rue Bourbon or the Rue Royale, and amid showers of sparks beat with rhythmic hammers on horseshoes in the stables after dark.

And all through the back streets near his home there had always been those hundreds upon hundreds of independent slaves who hired out their services, renting a modest room with wages, only sending a sum now and then to a master they seldom saw. Waiters, masons, laundrywomen, barbers, you gave their grog shops a wide berth in the evenings, if you had to pass them at all, hardly noticing the eternal rattle of dice, the aroma of cigar smoke, high-pitched laughter. And in those same streets, here and there the softened silhouettes of scant-clad black women against lamplit doorways, beckoning languidly, then letting the curled fingers lazily drop.

It was prosperous slave men who often came, spruced and shining, to hurry with Lisette on Sundays to the Pontchartrain railroad for
the ride in the starred Negro cars to the lake. And on holidays, in hired carriages, they came clattering to the gate, bright in new broadcloth waistcoats while she in her fine red dress would run to meet them, sidestepping the rain puddles in the narrow alley as if in a dance, her picnic basket rocking on her arm.

Slaves.

The papers complained of them, the world was filled with them, New Orleans sold more of them than any city in the Southland, and they had been here for two hundred years before Marcel was born.

Roaming aimlessly at a rapid pace, his eyes searched the faces that passed him, as if for some sudden illumination, some undeniable truth. “I am a part of this, I am a part…” he whispered aloud, and sat at last among the books and clutter of his darkened room, cold, but unwilling to light the fire, staring at nothing, as if the power to do the simplest things had left him.

He was afraid.

All his life he had known that he was not white, but snug in the tender advantages of his special world he had never for a moment dreamed that he was black. A great gulf separated him from the throngs on either side, but oh, how dimly he had miscalculated, misunderstood. And pushing his fingers to the roots of his hair, he gripped it, pulled it, until he could no longer stand the pain.

As winter wore on, he knew what it was to be fourteen. Richard’s sister Giselle had come home with her husband from Charleston for the opera, and the family invited Marcel to go with them for the first time.

And weak with anticipation, he had been led through the brightly lit lobby of the Théâtre d’Orléans, directed to the loges
pour gens de couleur
and hurried to take the seat given him in the very front of the Lermontant box. The spectacle of his people ringing the horseshoe tier stunned him as he raised his eyes, silk flashing in the flicker of candles, white linen all but luminous in the azure gloom. Faces both light and dark glowed above the beat of feather fans, and there hung about him, as it were, a wreath of low, sonorous chatter sweet to breathe like the perfume in the air.

Richard in his white gloves was a gentleman of the world with his elbow on the arm of the chair, legs easily crossed, and Giselle wore a cluster of tiny pearls on a chain around her neck like the buds of a flower set among gold leaves. Bending forward, she raised a pair of ivory opera glasses before her eyes, the thick glossy corkscrews of her curls shivering against her pale olive throat; and the scent of camellias suddenly surrounded her like an aureole.

Marcel let out his breath slowly, resting at last against the back of
the chair. Across the gulf he caught the animated face of Tante Colette and the subtle persistent wave of her gloved hand. He smiled. It had been months since he had seen her, though she had asked for him again and again. He had not seen her since that day he’d spoken to her at the door of the shop. But some sweet exhilaration warmed her distant features. She was happy to see him here. All but imperceptibly he gestured with the fingers that clung to the rail.

But at that vibrant moment when the lights went slowly dim, he found himself passing the inevitable glance across the parquet, and the white tier below, and realized with a start that he was staring down into his father’s upturned gaze.

His heart stopped. All around Philippe were his white family, women with petal cheeks, young men with Philippe’s long French nose and the same golden thatch of hair. Marcel could remember nothing of them afterward, only his father’s eyes. He felt himself a yellow flame against the mellow backdrop of the Lermontants. And shut his eyes as the lights at last went out. Only the sudden glow of the distant tiny stage soothed the pounding of his heart.

There was a world come alive above the footlamps, of painted windows, doors, bright candles, a brilliant and ornate room. A woman with outstretched arms unwound a plaintive lilting song that caught him at once with its power. He felt the chills rise. But it was when the orchestra swelled beneath her bright soprano that the tears suddenly blurred Marcel’s vision. Music rose violently and beautifully in the dreamy gloom. Diamonds winked like stars. It was too solid, too perfect ever to have been, this music. Its rich and startling rhythms were like pure gold, something mined from the earth, and burnt to send its vapor heavenward. He had only known it in flashes in the past, like glints of sun in winter windows, felt the mere promise of its spell at High Mass, or in those thin and distant ballroom violins. It was a discovery, this music, something inevitable, that might in fact devour him; he must know it forever, breathe it always, never let it get away.

Dragging his feet on the way home, he sang softly all the melodies he could remember, dreaming of Paris when he would stand with other gentlemen, on the parquet, so near to those magnificent instruments he could feel their vibrant music like the beating of a heart. He would stroll the boulevards afterward, or chat amiably of this or that brilliant new talent in glittering crowded cafés.

For days this music stayed with him, he sang it, whistled it, hummed it, until gradually one by one the phrases had slipped away.

He remembered now with a bitter bite of his lip how little he had paid attention the evening that Philippe had offered to buy Marie a small spinet, she was studying music with the Carmelites, he might
enjoy a little music himself. “Monsieur, you are too generous, no, indeed, you go too far,” Cecile had said so quickly, “These children, sometimes I think they have only to close their eyes and wish for things, not even to speak.” The sisters had said that at school Marie showed promise, played well.

But one afternoon finding the parlor empty at the Lermontants, he approached the piano stealthily, and tried the keys. Dissonance echoed through the room, and strain as he might he could make nothing of melody, only discovering, after long effort, a few simple but priceless chords.

It was almost summer when Philippe came again, and taking Marcel aside with a gravity that frightened him, told him only he should go to a notary in the Rue Royale every month from now on to get the money for the bills. It was foolish for Cecile to have such sums in the cottage, and Marcel was old enough to take this worry from her shoulders.

They never gave him anything to sign.

And there was something all but felonious about the envelope of cash that he slipped into his breast pocket, coming as it did from strangers. Stepping back out into the sun, Marcel was pricked again by a revelation of what he felt he had always known: not a scrap of paper kept the golden barge of day-to-day life afloat. He walked on water.

S
O IT WAS
this frame of mind that brought Marcel to misery in Monsieur De Latte’s class where the four walls of the classroom suffocated and the constant recitation of the younger boys scratched at him like insects on the blinds. With the crack of a ruler the old white man taught by rote, gave back without a spark of comprehension those basics dealt out to him some half century before, and disliking extremes, resenting questions, assigned again and again to his older pupils the same verses, theorems, platitudes and lies.

Marcel saved his money from week to week for the secondhand booksellers, and finding old texts of Latin, philosophy, metaphysics, brought these home and set to serious work on his own.

Trimming his lamp, and cutting himself a set of new pens, he turned to his Greek early on these warmer evenings, only to realize when the clock chimed ten that he had daydreamed for an hour after struggling with a few thick meaningless words, or had even drifted into sleep, obsessed in thin dreams with some simple phrase that Jean
Jacques had spoken or that disturbing image of the African head, its slits for eyes, gleaming by the firelight in some slave cabin in the land that was drenched with blood.

And turning to Thomas Aquinas, he would soon nod over the pages.
The Divine Comedy
confused him, the jests of Shakespeare’s clowns were unfathomable, and the couplets of Longinus stiff and without life.

But day after day he struggled in this manner. And week after week. While the afternoons found him drawing pictures idly in the Place d’Armes, the quick scratching of his charcoal pencil somehow soothing to the driving misery inside of him, or wandering along the levee bewitched as it were by the vision of black children and white children in the lapping brown water, dancing with thin legs atop a dipping, turning log.

But at last he came upon an inescapable truth about the shape and limits of his own mind, and he was seized with an awful despair. He could learn the rudiments of anything if he chose, but he could not progress. He needed teaching, guidance, the blazing flash of another intellect to stir the chilled waters of his own thoughts.
He was incapable of learning on his own
.

And if ever there was a time when he longed for Anna Bella, when he needed her, it was now. But this, in his private cataclysmic world was fast becoming an old pain. He was burying it deep within the recesses of his soul. While she, with her head bowed and a cautious hand on her lovely summer bonnet, never passed his gate without the old woman, Madame Elsie, clinging to her arm. He pretended he had not seen, and pretending, soon did not see her at all.

Late on still nights, when the cottages of the Rue Ste. Anne lay dark under the cloudy sky, he would emerge on the gallery outside his room and gaze beyond the rooftops at the distant rosy glow that hovered over the gaslit streets, listening for the subtle faraway sounds so often lost at midevening, the rumble of carriages, the fleeting melody of violins. It was Paris that he saw beyond the dark whispering trees, Paris of the
Quartier Latin
, the Sorbonne, the endless corridors of the Louvre. It was the Paris of Christophe Mercier. The years that lay between him and his dreams seemed endless and dreary, and his heart ached as he clung to the wooden railings feeling the comfortless river breeze. Oh, the wasted hours, the wasted days. He did not know what his life was supposed to be! And thinking of the white planters’ sons who at this moment sent the billiard balls rolling in the casinos of the Rue Bourbon or rushed up the stairs of the ballroom in the Rue Orleans, he wondered what vast stores of knowledge lined the walls of their palatial homes from which their tutors must have plucked books like flowers, rolling the Latin phrases on their tongues, explaining at
breakfast this marvelous philosophical point, that stunning historical conclusion.

Oh, if he had only known the truth! Of all Philippe’s children he was the only one who had even the pretense of an education, but comparisons were not the point.

He burned to be a part of the Great World, where empires fell, and poetry rang from the great stages; to argue in cafés the way to paint the human form, and stand breathless in the presence of the monuments of the masters. But it was not the surface that fascinated him. He had seen to the heart of things; a door had cracked on an endless vista, a door that now threatened to swing shut on him forever.