Feast of All Saints (65 page)

But Christophe was in the grip of a magnificent asceticism, Marcel sensed this, extreme perhaps as the excesses he had described abroad. In fact, he was forever shuffling through volumes of Augustine and Marcus Aurelius with his spy glass for some lost quotation that would give him no peace.

And once in a while Marcel, surprising him with a light step, would find him with a manuscript on his desk. A large sheaf of papers one time, a smaller at another, but always unmistakably a work over which Christophe was murmuring with a poised pen. But Christophe locking it away at once commenced some forceful discussion, cutting Marcel coldly though politely should he ask the slightest question on what he had just seen.

If there was loneliness Marcel did not see it; if there was an empty place Christophe kept that knowledge within.

But as the months stretched to the half year, the nature of Marcel’s secret life weighed upon him more and more heavily until it was, in fact, a persistent pain. If only he could talk to Chris, just put it into words! And it seemed the need was greatest, not when he was with them both in the Mercier house, but when he had to be at home.

Death permeated the atmosphere of the cottage as July came on, and Marcel could not and would not attempt to escape it as Zazu grew worse. But a glass divided him from those he loved. He saw his sister suffering sometimes beyond that glass, and Richard struggling with a boy’s restraints and a man’s work. And Lisette, in the shadows of the sickroom, head averted, staring in horror at her mother’s wracked and heaving frame. Cecile visiting the sickroom left it hurriedly, wringing her hands with short breaths under the night sky.

And Marcel, hearing those vibrating coughs through the walls, stared at the familiar objects of his own room. But why did it weigh on him, his secret love, he would ask himself pacing later, picking up his pen only to set it down and find the windowsill in back with its moist breeze. He loved her; she loved him, and what harm could this possibly bring? He ached to be with them both now where it would not matter,
and wondered at the fear that gripped him when he thought of it here alone.

Something was coming back to him, fainter than memory as he considered this, some picture conjured by Christophe of a man sitting in a Paris room. “It’s a decision the world would not understand,” the man had said. “I’ve come to it, the struggle is over…a decision the world would not understand.” And it was that word, decision, which loomed large, obscuring the picture as it grew more and more familiar, the Englishman Michael Larson-Roberts in that phantom hotel in Paris the night he’d vowed to take Christophe away.

“If I could only make that decision,” Marcel had murmured over and over, and finally, reckless and willing to jeopardize all the splendor of his clandestine world, he left the
garçonnière
the night before Lisette ran away, and found Christophe alone in the yard behind the Mercier house.

A lantern burned in the shed beyond the trees and there Bubbles sat playing the old piano which he had now restrung, and an eerie music, soft, tinkling, filled the yard. Christophe himself lay on a cot under the sky, his hands behind his head, one knee crooked, the arc of a lighted cheroot descending to his lips as Marcel approached.

“And how is she?” Christophe asked, the voice tender. Then, his eyes accustomed to the partial light, he could see that Marcel had not heard.

“Zazu,” Christophe whispered.

Marcel said, “The same.” Then finding a wooden stool by the shed he brought it near, sitting so that he might rest his back against the bark of a slender leafy tree. The night was alive with the sound of insects, but the mosquitoes for reasons unbeknownst to man, if known to God, were not their worst.

“We never speak of it,” Marcel said softly. “Your mother and me.”

Christophe said nothing. The lantern in the shed made a moon in his eye. Marcel heard the soft explosion of the smoke from his lips and breathed the sweet aroma of tobacco. He wanted to reach into his own pocket for a smoke, but somehow or other he could not move.

“Is silence consent?” he asked now, looking up at the dark windows of Juliet’s room.

Again Christophe did not answer. Marcel rose to pace the flags.

“It isn’t that I believe it’s wrong,” Marcel declared. “It isn’t that I have the slightest qualm about it! It isn’t that it does me harm. You would say if you thought it did me harm…or Juliet harm…or you harm, you would say…”

Again silence.

Then Christophe asked in a low monotone, “So what is it, then?”

“That it seems somehow impossible, impossible that it should be so easy and so forbidden, so good and yet supposedly wrong. That I
flourish doing what others would think patently evil, and it goes on under their noses and they don’t suspect. That’s what it is. It goes against the order of things!”

Christophe took another long draw on the cheroot and then sent it arching slowly across the yard. In the shed Bubbles’ music became lower and melancholy. As always it sounded disturbingly familiar as if made of fragments from a recent opera or theatrical that were altered and interwoven in undefinable ways.

“Is it that way, really? There is no real order to things!” Marcel asked. “There’s nothing, is there? You knew that when you conceded on the matter of bringing Bubbles into the classroom, didn’t you? You knew there was no undying principle, nothing for which you would go to the barricades like the mobs in the Paris streets…”

“You are very clever, my star pupil,” Christophe said softly. “But you may not thrust this responsibility into my hands. I refuse to accept it and you may interpret my silence as you please…”

“Christophe, help me!”

“Marcel,” Christophe laughed, “that is like the ocean asking for help.” He turned over on the cot, raising himself on his elbows and stared into the dark clump of leaf and tree that obscured the shape of the rising cistern. There was the rustling of paper, a hand in the pocket, and then the bright explosion of a match: his profile visible for an instant in casual concentration and then gone.

“I’m afraid,” Marcel said.

“Why?”

“Because if it’s really true that there’s no order, then anything can happen to us. Anything at all. There’s no real natural law, no right and wrong that’s immutable, and the world is suddenly a savage place where any number of things can go wrong.”

He walked slowly back and forth pondering this, and then continued quickly, “Juliet told me a story once of something she witnessed in Saint-Domingue. It wasn’t actually a story, it was one of those strange little details she lets slip sometimes in an airy way as if it’s been floating for years in her mind. It was an account of an execution, of three black men burned alive before a crowd. She told me…”

“I’ve heard,” Christophe stopped him.

“But the point is I couldn’t get it out of my mind for days after she’d told me, the vision she conjured, it was unspeakable to me that men could die like that, that people would watch…and if there is no real right and wrong, if there is no natural law that is immutable, then things like that can happen all over this world…dreadful things, worse things if there are worse things, and somehow it would never ever be made all right. There wouldn’t be any justice, and suffering ultimately would have no meaning, no meaning at all.”

“And suppose it’s the opposite,” Christophe said. “That there is a natural law, a real right and wrong?”

“Then I should not be sleeping with her because she is a woman of forty and I’m a boy of fifteen, and she’s your mother and you are my teacher and pupils come to this house every day, and those who might discover it would abhor her and abhor me. And yet it seems sweet and harmless, and I…I don’t want to give it up! I won’t give it up, not unless you force me to give it up or she sends me away.”

“But don’t you see?” Christophe said calmly. “It doesn’t really come to that day-to-day.” He sat up on the cot and faced Marcel. The light from the shed threw the shifting shadows of the leaves across his face distorting his expression, rendering it impossible to read. “When you find out that there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.”

“Decision…” Marcel murmured, “the Englishman’s word.”

Christophe did not answer.

“In Paris, the night he took you with him,” Marcel said tentatively, “ ‘it’s a decision the world will not understand.’ ”

It seemed to him Christophe nodded but he couldn’t be sure. He was very sorry he’d mentioned the Englishman. Bubbles’ music had died in the interval and Christophe appeared almost unnaturally still.

“Did you say?” Marcel murmured, “a moment before, did you say that the good and evil were very real?”

“I said it,” Christophe whispered.

“It’s never going to be easy, is it?”

“No,” Christophe answered.

“Not even when it’s only love.”

“…and when you really come to understand that,” Christophe said, “then whether it’s love or not love, you are really alone.”

Alone. The night had been restless, Zazu’s hoarse breaths, Monsieur Philippe’s tread on the porch, and the steaming heat that rendered the slowest gesture heavy and exhausting, until finally the morning had come with its wilting sun and Marcel had commenced his search for Lisette.

B
Y MIDMORNING
he had been all through the market and past a dozen or more of the little grog shops in which he’d caught her before. He
had stopped at the neighborhood kitchens, conferred with Bubbles, but Lisette had not been seen. And finally, after putting it off to the very last, he walked steadily and anxiously toward Anna Bella’s gate. However, the sight of the neat little cottage with its whitewashed walls and green shutters, the crepe myrtles sheltering its front path, stopped him in his tracks. He could not imagine himself slipping past those windows to find Zurlina in the back kitchen, and yet he could not bring himself even to knock on the door. It seemed the pendulum in his mind swung back and forth: he must ask, Zazu was receiving the Last Sacraments, and yet would Anna Bella want him here on this errand, unable even to remain for a moment’s talk? And then again the pendulum swung: he wanted to see her, to see her! And beneath that fragile conviction lay some sense of her now as settled in her new life and of himself so content in his own. Whether he would have gone up or not he was never to know for, within minutes, Zurlina had opened the front blinds and come down the path.

She wore her snow-white
tignon
like a turban and her face against that stark linen was very much the pale wax of some gnarled tree trunk, lined, yellow, and seemingly hard.

“Et Zazu?”
she rubbed her hands on her white apron.

“Where is Lisette, is she here?” he asked, and without realizing it, he ripped his eyes from the front shutters behind her, and turned to go. Anna Bella might be there, Anna Bella might see him at the gate.

A mean laugh escaped Zurlina’s thin lips, the skin above them wrinkled in vertical lines. Marcel despised this woman, she had been haughty to him always, some proud and blistering extension of her old mistress, and he turned his back on her now.

“Lola Dedé,” she said in a low scornful voice. “Go to Lola Dedé if you want Lisette.”

Marcel nodded but he did not look back. “Lola Dedé!” he muttered contemptuously. He had heard the name. So that was the voodooienne to whom Lisette returned again and again for powders and charms; he had often passed her dilapidated gray house sagging upon its long lot near the Rue Rampart and it disgusted him as did all of the voodoo about him, the whispers among the servants, those random nighttime drums. But he knew he must go there. “Tell your mistress,” he turned now to the departing Zurlina, “tell her I give her my best.”

The thin lips drew back in an ugly grimace and the low nasal voice, caricature of the dead Madame Elsie, snorted a vague assent.

Marcel took his time about it but at last he came to the shell yard outside Lola Dedé’s door and approaching with a bowed head, he knocked hard on the weathered wood.

Only an eye showed itself in the crack, and a rank smell, soiled
bodies, soiled clothes, seeped out into the fresher air. “She’s not here,” said the voice.

“You tell her for me her mother’s dying,” he said placing a hand against the door.

“She’s not here!” the voice averred again, and it seemed a rumbling commenced within, soft laughter. Marcel told himself this was fancy.

“You tell her to come home!” he said, as the door slammed shut in his face. He looked up in despair at the gray rain-washed shutters, the sagging roof, and then with a sudden sense of relief turned fast for home.

As soon as he reached the
garçonnière
he knew it was the end.

Marie and Cecile stood quietly on the porch and Monsieur Philippe was at the bedside alone.

“Go in now, if you want to take your leave of her,” Cecile whispered anxiously. She had twisted her handkerchief into a piece of ragged string. There was panic in her eyes, and her skin was moist.

“And Lisette, did she come back?” Marcel asked.

“No,” Marie shook her head. “Go in, Marcel,” she said gently.

He hesitated at the door. He had gotten off easy with Jean Jacques, he realized that now, and he had gotten off easy with the Englishman, but he wasn’t to get off now. For a moment he was absolutely incapable of moving into the room. Then Monsieur Philippe, looking up, motioned for him.

Zazu lay with her mouth open, the white of her lower teeth showing against her dark lip, her breath coming in labored gasps. And when his father pressed him against the bed, she opened her eyes. She knew him at once, she had come round, and feebly she took his hand.

It seemed his voice left him, and only when Monsieur Philippe said that he ought to go on out now, did he kneel down and say to her softly how much he’d loved her, how well she’d cared for him all these years. The sudden thought came to him that this would alarm her, but again she smiled. Her heavy black lids closed, but not all the way. And he whispered quickly, “Monsieur!”