The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (143 page)

‘My dear host,’ said Albert in Italian, ‘and you, Signora, forgive my astonishment. I am naturally amazed: here in the heart of Paris I find the Orient, the true Orient, not unfortunately as I have experienced it, but as I have dreamed it; and only a moment ago I could hear the sound of a passing omnibus and the lemonade-sellers ringing their bells. Oh, Signora! If only I could understand Greek; your conversation, in these enchanted surroundings, would make this an evening that I would always remember.’

‘I speak Italian well enough to converse with you, Monsieur,’ Haydée said calmly. ‘I shall do my best, if you like the East, to help you discover it here.’

‘What can I talk about?’ Albert whispered to Monte Cristo.

‘Whatever you wish: about her country, her childhood, her memories. Then, if you prefer, about Rome, Naples or Florence.’

‘Oh, no,’ Albert said. ‘There is no point in meeting a Greek if one is merely going to talk to her about all the things one would discuss with a Parisienne. Let me ask her about the East.’

‘Go on, then, my dear Albert. She likes nothing better than to talk of that.’

Albert turned to Haydée. ‘At what age did the signora leave Greece?’ he asked.

‘At the age of five,’ Haydée replied.

‘And do you recollect your homeland?’ Albert asked.

‘When I close my eyes, I can again see everything that I used to see. There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers for ever.’

‘What is your earliest memory?’

‘I could hardly walk. My mother, who is called Vasiliki – in Greek, Vasiliki means “royal”,’ the young woman added, tossing back her head, ‘… my mother took my hand and, both covered in a veil, after putting all the gold we had into the bottom of a purse, we went to beg for alms for prisoners, saying: “He that hath pity upon the poor, lendeth unto the Lord”.
⁵
Then, when the purse was full, we went back to the palace and, saying nothing to my father, we sent all the money that people had given us, thinking we were poor women, to the
hegumenos
⁶
of the monastery, who divided it among the prisoners.’

‘How old were you at that time?’

‘Three,’ said Haydée.

‘So you can remember everything that happened around you since the time when you were three?’

‘Everything.’

‘Count,’ Morcerf whispered to Monte Cristo, ‘please allow the signora to tell us something about her history. You forbade me to talk to her about my father, but perhaps she would say something about him, and you cannot imagine how happy I should be to hear his name on such lovely lips.’

Monte Cristo turned to Haydée and, furrowing his brow in a way that warned her to pay the closest attention to what he was about to tell her, said in Greek: ‘
,
,
.’ [Literally: ‘Tell us your father’s fate, but not the traitor’s name or his treachery.’]

Haydée gave a deep sigh and a dark cloud passed across her pure brow.

‘What did you tell her?’ Morcerf asked, under his breath.

‘I repeated that you are a friend and that she has no cause to hide anything from you.’

‘So,’ Albert went on, ‘this distant pilgrimage on behalf of the prisoners was your first memory. What is the next?’

‘The next? I see myself in the shade of some sycamore-trees, near a lake whose shimmering reflection I still glimpse between the branches. My father was sitting on cushions against the oldest and most leafy of them, and my mother lying at his feet, while I, a weak child, am playing with the white beard that falls upon his chest and the
cangiar
⁷
with the diamond hilt that hung in his belt. Then, from time to time, an Albanian would come to him and say a few words, which I ignored; and he would reply, without any alteration in his voice, either “Kill!” or “Spare”.’

‘It’s strange,’ Albert said, ‘to hear such things from the lips of a young woman, other than in the theatre, and to tell oneself: “This is not an invention.” With such a poetic horizon, such a wondrous past, how do you find France?’

‘I think that it’s a beautiful country,’ Haydée said. ‘But I see France as it is, because I see it with the eyes of a grown woman, while I have only ever seen my own country with the eyes of a child, so that it seems to me always enwrapped in a mist that is either luminous or dark, depending on whether my eyes perceive it as a sweet homeland or a place of bitter suffering.’

‘How can someone as young as you, Signora, have known suffering?’ Albert asked, succumbing despite himself to the force of banality.

Haydée turned to Monte Cristo who, with a barely perceptible gesture, murmured: ‘
’ [‘Speak.’]

‘More than anything else, it is one’s first memories that furnish the depths of the soul and, apart from the two that I have just told you, all my childhood memories are sad.’

‘I beg you to continue, Signora,’ said Albert. ‘I assure you that I am quite enchanted to listen to you.’

Haydée smiled sadly. ‘Would you like me to recall my other memories?’ she said.

‘Please do,’ said Albert.

‘I was four years old when, one evening, I was woken by my mother. We were in the palace at Janina. She lifted me off the cushions where I was lying and, when I opened my eyes, I saw that hers were full of large tears.

‘She took me away, saying nothing. But when I saw her cry, I started to do the same. “Silence, child!” she said.

‘Often, capricious like all children, I would carry on crying despite my mother’s consolation or her threats; but this time there was such a note of terror in her voice that I instantly fell silent.

‘She hurried away with me. I saw that we were going down a wide staircase. In front of us, all my mother’s maidservants were going or, rather, rushing down the same staircase, carrying boxes, bags, ornaments, jewels and purses of gold. Behind them came a guard of twenty men, armed with long rifles and pistols, dressed in a costume that has become familiar to you in France since Greece regained its nationhood.

‘I assure you,’ Haydée said, shaking her head and paling at the mere memory, ‘there was something sinister in this long procession of slaves and women half drugged with sleep – or so I thought at least, perhaps believing that others were sleeping because I was only partly awake myself. Gigantic shapes hurried down the stairway, their shadows cast on the ceiling by pine torches.

‘ “Hurry!” cried a voice at the end of the gallery. At the sound, every head was bent, as the wind blowing over the plains bends a field of corn. But I shuddered to hear it, because it was the voice of my father. He was walking behind us all, dressed in his finest attire, holding a carbine that your emperor gave him; and, his free hand resting on his favourite, Selim, he drove us before him like a shepherd with a frightened flock.

‘My father,’ Haydée said, looking up, ‘was an illustrious man, known in Europe as Ali Tebelin, Pasha of Janina, who made the Turks tremble before him.’

Without knowing why, Albert shuddered on hearing these words spoken in tones of such pride and dignity. It seemed to him that something dark and fearful shone from the young woman’s eyes when, like a pythoness
⁸
calling up a ghost, she re-awoke the memory of this bloodstained figure whose awful death made him loom gigantic in the eyes of modern Europe.

‘Shortly afterwards,’ Haydée continued, ‘the procession halted.
We were at the foot of the steps on the edge of a lake. My mother pressed me to her beating breast and, two paces behind us, I saw my father who was casting anxious glances to all sides.

‘In front of us were four marble steps, with a boat bobbing at the last of them. From where we were we could see a black shape in the middle of the lake: this was the pavilion for which we were heading. Perhaps because of the darkness, it seemed a long way away to me.

‘We stepped down into the boat. I remember that the oars made no noise as they touched the water. I looked over the side at them: they were wrapped in the belts of our Palicares.
⁹
In the boat, apart from the oarsmen, there were only some women, my father, my mother, Selim and I. The Palicares had stayed at the edge of the lake, kneeling on the bottom step and using the other three as a rampart, in case they had been followed. Our boat was flying like the wind.

‘ “Why is the boat going so fast?” I asked my mother.

‘ “Hush, child!” she said. “We are fleeing.”

‘I could not understand. Why was my father fleeing – my father, the all-powerful, before whom others normally would flee, my father whose motto was: “They hate me, and that is why they fear me”? Yet he was indeed fleeing across the lake. He has since told me that the garrison of the castle at Janina, tired of long service…’