Feast of All Saints (6 page)

He had nothing but disgust for the profligate he had so recently become, but at the same time he understood what was happening to him, and was curiously without regret. His childhood had become a wasteland; or rather he had finally become aware of just how barren and desolate it had always been, and following Juliet, he felt as if he
moved toward life itself, the drudgery of his day-to-day disobedience left behind.

She bought clucking hens and ripe tomatoes, oysters in the shell and writhing shrimps, her cat darting in and out of the market stalls, arching its back against her dragging skirts. And for all this, she took money from the tight silk over her breasts under which Marcel could see the tiny raisins of her nipples so that he grew dizzy from the heat and lounged against the hogsheads like a roustabout, never taking his eyes from her straight back or from the men who leered at her, or stopped in their hacking or sweeping to watch her pass.

Of course the market men stared at him also, carters stared at him, black men with bushel baskets on their shoulders stared at him, this stiff-starched little gentleman getting hay all over his fine coat, with such wide and wild blue eyes fixed to the figure in front of him.

But Marcel did not see this. He saw only that Juliet had at last filled her basket, heaped it with yams and carrots and bunches of greens, tethering two hens to the handle by their feet so that they squawked and fluttered as she swung the whole enterprise up high onto the top of her head, and then dropping her hands idly at her sides, managed to walk swiftly through the bustling crowd, the basket perfectly balanced, her back straight, her steps rhythmic as those of a common African
vendeuse
.

“Mon Dieu,”
Marcel whispered. “She can do that!” Better than those slaves who came to market day after day from the outlying farms.

Of course it was positively shocking.

He was delighted by it! And mesmerized by her grace, he went after her out of the shocks and smells of the market, the gap closing between them, so that he was all but hovering in her wake with an air of protective menace. Let some sneering shopkeeper utter one word as he stopped to lean on his broom in an open door. Marcel would kill him.

But soon he was sick to see that they had all but reached the Rue Dauphine, and her gate lay only a few paces ahead of them. He drew up behind her so that he could almost touch the fringe of her shawl.

She stopped. Her arm went up, graceful, the wrist bent, and steadying the load on the top of her head, she turned as if on an axis.

“You’re following me!” she said. He was stunned.

Shoppers pushed past them, but she didn’t move. She was looking down at him, seemed in fact to tower over him, though they were almost the same height. She adjusted the teetering basket and he saw that her face was not cross at all, merely inquisitive.

“Come now, why?” she asked, and as she studied him her lips drew back in a cunning smile. He felt his heart slowing gradually to its regular pace. Her voice was lilting, rich with some suppressed laughter.
“You are going to tell me?” she asked with a gentle lift to her eyebrows. There was something in her speech which made him think of his aunts, even his mother, something that he connected with the wilds of Saint-Domingue where all of these women had been born.

And suddenly he felt the thrust he had awaited all the long day.

“Madame Mercier,” he said. “It’s a matter of what I’ve read in the Paris papers! Today! I have to speak to you about it, please, please forgive me for approaching you this way, but I have to…”

She was regarding him with mild astonishment, but seemed at once bored, as though she could not understand what he was saying. She gestured to something at his feet.

It was the black cat. It had been following them all the while, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, and now it rubbed its back on Marcel’s boot. He gathered it at once and lifted it to her outstretched hand. Clasping it to her bosom, she turned away and stepped off the curb.

“But it’s about Christophe!” Marcel said desperately.

“Christophe,” she whispered. She turned her head majestically to look at him over her shoulder. Something vicious showed itself in her eyes, and the change of expression was altogether so violent that he was frightened.

But with an indefinable sense of what must work, he went on, “The papers…they say he is coming home.” That was it.

“No!” she gasped, turning full round again. “They say this, Paris papers?” Behind her a cart had come to a halt, and a red-faced white man was shouting at her.

“But tell me,
cher
—” she started. The horse shied, and whinnied. “Where is this Paris paper, what does it say?” She looked Marcel up and down, on the verge of frenzy, as if she might see the paper bulging from his pockets and attack him in an instant to lay hands on it. He felt a ruthless regret suddenly for ever having surrendered the clipping to Richard.

“I saw it this morning, Madame, with my own eyes. I don’t have it with me, but I read it so many times I memorized it, I can tell it to you word for word.”

“Tell me, tell me!” she burst out. And at that moment the driver of the cart began to bellow. He raised his whip over Juliet’s head; shearing the leafy stems from the load in her basket. Marcel clenched his fist and started forward in a rage; but Juliet, faster by far, jerked around and lifting the black cat in her right hand, heaved it over the horse’s head into the man’s face.

A cry went up from the loose crowd on the banquette and someone in the door of a shop laughed. The carter was furious. The cat
scratched wildly, only to get a hold, and he could not get it loose until there was blood streaming down his cheek and the horse had lurched backward forcing the wheel of the cart up over the edge of the banquette. He was cursing Juliet in a strange guttural tongue.

And then in fast French came the warning from a black man on the pavement, “You beware, Monsieur, she put the evil eye on you, you beware, Monsieur…” only he’d broken into laughter.

But Juliet had reached out for Marcel’s hand and was dragging him across the street. “Come,
cher
, come…” she said. The carter was scrambling down to the pavement. Her grip was moist and amazingly strong. She pulled Marcel forward and to her garden gate. Someone on the far banquette had taken hold of the carter, was trying to reason with him. And they were inside the yard suddenly with the gate shut and Marcel found himself in a narrow passage where the ivy spilling from the wall had long ago found the side of the house and made the walkway a soft fluttering leafy bed.

Juliet stepped daintily through it ahead of him, and the black cat appeared behind her, its tail high in the air.

For a moment Marcel hesitated. Looking up he saw the stained walls, the weathered blinds, and beyond nothing but the blue sky. The tall banana fronds obliterated those high buildings which he knew to be across the street still, and he seemed alone for the moment in this alien place. There was a small window in the gate, partially covered with slime. He had strained to see through it many times before, as had others, and he found himself peering through it now. There was only a dim glimmer of shapes beyond.

“Come,
cher,”
she called to him. He turned, confused, and hurried toward her. She went into the backyard.

As he reached the end of the passage, the sun for an instant blinded him. Shutting his eyes, he saw the blazing outline of a ruined cistern clinging to the far fence, and the sloping roof of an ancient shed. He reached out to steady himself against the plastered brick, and realized that he had been running almost all day, but it was only an annoyance, this momentary weakness, this threat of a pain behind the eyes. He was within her walls! And with a reverent throbbing of the heart, he looked up into her sun-drenched yard.

It was a cistern he saw again, rising high beside the three stories of the house, its gray boards splintered against the sky, and hung with the writhing tentacles of the Queen’s Wreath, a bright pink flowering vine. Rust stained the rotting wood in long streaks from iron bands that had fallen away, and the soft dark of the broad base showed that it was still partially filled with water.

He did not like the look of it, to think of it, and had the awful sensation that it was falling slowly down on him, and on the woman
who stood in the high weeds before him, tending an iron pot that simmered over a heap of coals. She bent gingerly to taste from a large wood spoon as if that hulk did not menace them both. But she was troubled, brooding, and looked quickly, fiercely toward Marcel.

“Come, monkey,” she said. “You read the Paris papers, then you can read to me!” And quickly getting him by the wrist again, pulled him into the dark house.

It was ruin everywhere.

The rain had long beaten through the rotted shutters, and they walked softly along stained and buckling floors through desolate rooms where wallpaper, once flowers and ribbons, hung in yellowed strips from the damp ceilings and laid bare holes in the crumbling walls. Paint peeled from the frames of mirrors, cushions had fallen from the seats of chairs. A gossamer thing which had once been a curtain fell like dust from a window frame as if they had violently stirred the air.

But someone lived here still, that was the horror of it. A pair of new shoes stood before a gaping marble grate, and here lay a plate and a glass glittering with ants.

A packing case sat stranded on a faded carpet, and from its contents, still wrapped in yellow paper, protruded one large green glass vase. All the rest was left and under dust.

“Upstairs,” she whispered, and pointed to the banister beyond the parlor door.

It was unsteady when he grasped it. Tall windows let in only bursts of leafy light. Pausing, he shuddered at the rustle and the scent of rats. And from beyond the dusty slats there came suddenly the day-to-day chorus of the street—a man cursing at his mule, a child’s sudden sharp cry, and under all the rumble of wooden wheels. Gazing upward at a dim light on paneled doors that lay ajar, he felt himself wound up in the warp and woof of dream.

She led him to a dining room. Mosquitoes swarmed over a china pitcher which she stirred with an easy gesture of her hand as she passed, and reached to let in a stream of burning yellow sun on a chest that sat there, beneath the window, dusted and somewhat new. The table here still had its polish and a soiled napkin lay crumpled on a chair. The gilt-framed portrait of a black man in military dress hung on the wall.

“The Old Haitian,” Marcel whispered, remembering Monsieur Philippe’s long tale. But the sun pouring in had rendered the surface of it opaque and Marcel could make out nothing of him at all.

“Here,
cher
, here…” Juliet said quickly, as though he might forget why he had come. And dropping to her knees, she raised the lid of the chest.

It was letters, hundreds of letters. The correspondence of years! And Marcel had no doubt from whom all these letters had come.
He was breathless as he knelt down. He lifted one, then another, shifted a mass of them here and there to reveal the varied scribbled words, Istanbul, Rome, Cairo, London, and Paris. Paris, Paris, Paris. And dozens, scores of them, had never even been unsealed!

“No, no,” she whispered. “Here, these new ones…see.” She picked them up and put them into his hand. One had been torn open and from its bulk and creases he could see it had once contained something larger than a letter. A mere note was inside.

But the other was more recent, he could tell. The date was at the top of the page as he unfolded it, it was this year, this spring.

“Read it to me,
cher,”
she said. “Read it…hurry, now.”

She sank down sitting back on her heels and gazed at him, her hands clasped in her skirt, with the open expression of a child. She did not see the dizziness that swept over him, the vague disconcerting fear. It was awful the sight of these letters, sealed and piled here. Yet some pounding excitement dissipated the sadness that threatened at the edges of things, and he was staring now at the creased parchment page. It was Christophe’s letter all right, there was the scrawled signature at the bottom.

What would all of those on the outside have given for this moment, Richard, Fantin, Emile, so many of his friends. But there was no “outside.” There was only this place, and this awful waste, and something akin to tragedy. He looked at Juliet who lost in her thoughts or fears did not see him. It had its wild magnetism. His voice did not sound like his own as he began:

“Maman…”

“Go on!” she said; he hesitated. It was too personal. He felt it a crime.

“Read it to me,
cher!”
she clasped his wrist. Of course, he realized, she could not read any more than his own mother could read. She had no idea, no idea at all…

He showed it to her. But she had turned away, and let out a long sigh. She whispered softly that it was true then.

“Shall I read any more of them?” he asked.

“Why?” she murmured. She was not happy, not excited. He watched her rise slowly, steadying herself for an instant on the sill of the window. “He’s coming home then,” she said. She passed silently out of the room.

He looked after her, watching the low flounce of her dress move on the dusty floor, and he did not know what to do. Something held him where he was, near this chest with its hundreds of unopened letters, and looking down at it again, his fingers involuntarily closing, he was aware of a bright light at the end of the passage, and what seemed the flash of her shadow against the gray wall.