The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (9 page)

BOOK: The Man Who Walked Away A Novel
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Several men happen by in a carriage; with a rope they help the weeping rider drag the enormous body of the horse out of the sucking mud. After everyone has gone, Albert watches the still surface as though something might rise up out of it.
It is better not to thrash.
He is thick and deaf with sludge. He doesn’t care anymore if the urge to walk comes or not. He is a shrouded version of a man who will leave behind only his simple, heavy body to be carried away. If he doesn’t thrash, will someone carry him away, out of this life?

But when he finds himself in a shambles of a public square—not even a monument to such-and-such general—he has not been carried away, not at all. He is still himself, though he seems to be disappearing with greater frequency. How could he ever be sure, but it seems as if he is himself less and less. It is a town so poor the people wear vests with old coins for buttons and hats of worn black felt. Some people have no shoes at all. A large greatcoat covers their misery.

“Would you like something to eat?” a child with a dirt-streaked face asks Albert, holding out a fat-fried potato in his pudgy hand. Nearby, his mother hangs clothes on a line. “He’ll come back,” she says through the clothespin between her teeth. She is speaking to her friend whose husband has gone on another bender.

“Or maybe he won’t,” the other woman says, “I should be so lucky.” The way she laughs, Albert knows she doesn’t mean it. There may be misery here, but every morning these women wake up into a family of the sort he will never have. To have a family requires being in one place. You cannot be the sort of man who ends up in Verdun with the echo of sheep bells in your head when you were meant to meet a woman who said she wanted to marry you at four o’clock somewhere else entirely.

“Would you like a potato?” the boy says, his hand still outstretched.

The boy’s kindness is more than Albert can bear. Better that the woman hanging clothes should run him off or have him thrown in jail. Better to tell him he is not fulfilling his duties as a citizen, to accuse him of causing the nation’s downfall.

What about love?
It is somewhere else. Not for him. Never for him.

He wiggles his toe through the rustling leaves in his shoes. He hopes the child will understand.

Understand what? What day? What gift?

What was the question?

There is no explaining, so he does the only thing he knows how to do. Though his legs ache, though all he wants is to stop, he walks away.

“Wait!” the child calls after him. “Come back! I can make it smaller. I will cut it in half.” The boy hurls the fat-fried potato after him in frustration. He was being kind the way his mother always told him to be. Why wouldn’t this man receive his kindness? A bird, startled out of a holm oak, swoops down to where the potato lies in the dirt, spears it with its beak, and flies away.

“Come back!” cries the boy, a tug in his stomach. He is filled with a powerful longing he doesn’t understand. He wants the man who is walking away to turn around more fiercely than he has wanted anything in his short life, but the man only becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.

“Stop your shouting,” his mother shouts, and though the boy will eventually stop his shouting, though he will return to playing games—stealing his father’s worn felt hat and dropping it down the well, for example—for days he will think about the man disappearing over the horizon. The boy’s heart will be heavy with that image, and though it will fade eventually, it will return to him when he is a man and feeling melancholy.
What was that
? He won’t be able to place it. It must have been a dream he had once long ago when he was a boy capable of conjuring such things.

“Don’t go!” Albert hears the boy calling out to him, but it is too late. The bird with the potato in its beak flies past his ear. He hears the boy calling him even after he has walked
so far away he couldn’t possibly hear him.
Don’t go!
As if there were a life for Albert there.

There is no life for him there. There is no life for him anywhere.

This is no life at all.

He discovers himself fading with the light, trembling with cold amid the rubble of a cemetery wall half pulled down to make room for more victims of cholera. Though he doesn’t know it, he is not far from home. He is not thinking of home. He wants only to sink into the mud.
It is better not to thrash
. Let him die right there in the cemetery. No one will have to drag him from a muddy rut; no one will have to shoulder his dead body out of town. Just dig a hole.

When he sees the lamplighter, grizzled and trembling with age, Albert believes he has gotten his wish: the man must be coming to bury him here where he lies.

“Is that you, boy?” the lamplighter says, pulling him up from the cold flattened gravestone where he has been lying. “I thought I saw a shape from the path that looked like a man. I wasn’t sure if . . . it’s been so long. Is that you, Albert?”

“Tell me you’re not a dream.”

“Stand up,” the old man says. Albert is tired, so tired, too tired; he leans into the warmth of the lamplighter’s body, the arm around his shoulder. “There is no need to cry. Come, now,” the lamplighter says, pulling Albert to his feet.

He is so cold and stiff he can barely walk even with the old man’s help, but he allows the lamplighter to guide him into the city, the home he is forever leaving, through the winding streets reeking of horse piss. He leans into the warmth of him as he escorts him past the public gardens with the Spanish chestnut trees under which the rats scurry, through the Cathedral Square where the men who live inside the tick-tock of regular days gather at the end of the work day, never worrying about wandering away. “Where has the time gone?” Albert imagines them saying to one another as he’s heard other men say so breezily. They don’t mean “Where is yesterday?” or “Where is the month of March?” Time has not really gone anywhere; it has not abandoned them, for example, in a cemetery to die.

“Look,” a man Albert doesn’t recognize says, though the laughing and pointing are familiar. “The man with the . . .
Oh! Oh!
My beautiful instrument!”

“What is wrong with you?” barks the lamplighter. “Go home. Leave him be.”

Once more, kindness is so much worse than ridicule. Albert wants only to return to the cemetery. He wants to lie down and sink into the earth. Cover him with dirt; he will become the dirt. But the lamplighter won’t let him go and then they are passing the little church of St. Eulalie, where during the day men and women, so appealingly clean, whisper up and down the aisles, bowing their heads, kneeling and praying.

And then,
tsk-tsk
, out of the cold darkness of the church a cloaked figure appears into the shadows of dusk, clucking its tongue.

“I have seen you,” hisses a familiar voice, throwing back a cloak to reveal her sharp eyes and clucking tongue. It is the witchy-looking woman who stands guard each day to harangue anyone who will listen and those who won’t on the subjects of good and evil.

“Be quiet,” the lamplighter says, though he knows as everyone does: She sees everything.

“Behind the cathedral, abusing himself.” Her loose neck jiggles as she speaks. “God curses you.”

“God would not even bother to curse you,” the lamplighter says.

“This man!” the woman shrieks at a group of men passing by. “He has committed unspeakable acts.”

“It sounds as though you’d like him to commit them again,” one of the men says, laughing.

The witchy woman grabs a bucket and hurls the filthy water. The lamplighter shouts and tries to pull Albert clear, but his clothes are drenched, the clothes he has taken such care to keep clean in spite of the dust and the mud of the road. He has walked great distances in search of rivers, in search of ponds.

It is better not to thrash
. He will not thrash. He goes limp in the lamplighter’s arms.

“You know nothing,” the lamplighter shouts at the witchy woman. “Nothing.” The filthy water has splashed him too, but it doesn’t matter. All those years ago, when everyone else turned their backs, the lamplighter remained friends with Albert and his father. He had done what he could, but it wasn’t enough. Once—it had been some time now, a year at least—he tied him to the bed, as Albert’s father surely would have done had he been there, to keep him from walking but it hadn’t worked. After that, from time to time, he would see the boy around town but recently he had not and he had come to believe Albert was gone forever.
Disappeared
was as much as he allowed himself to imagine, vanished over the horizon. To imagine the terrible end the boy might have met on the road, it was too much. Now the lamplighter has the chance to make it right as much as it is possible to make it right. He pulls Albert, heavy in his wet clothes, dripping with the filthy water, toward the large iron gates across the street from the small stone church.

“Are you taking me to the cottage?” Albert asks.

“You will be safer here.” The lamplighter does not tell Albert that his home no longer exists, and Albert does not ask. The cottage where he and his father used to live, the cottage by the river, caught fire when a neighbor’s gas lamp was blown over by the wind. A whole row of cottages, burned to the ground. He gives Albert a gentle push. “Go,” he says. He is a kind man, a loyal man, but he cannot bear to involve himself again. It was years ago, but the time he tied Albert to his bed still lingers; it did no good. Nothing ever has. It is more than his goodwill this boy who hasn’t been a boy for years needs, and so the lamplighter leans through the bars of the iron gates to call to a large man who appears to work here. “Will you let us in?”

A nurse who seems to glide just above the earth will take Albert by the arm and lead him through the empty courtyard of the asylum. “We will feed you,” she will say. “But first you must rest.” He will hear a woman crying out that her stockings have fallen down again; a man crying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” and making the sound of a shooting gun; a doctor calling for a nurse; the bell attached to the giant clock of St. Eloi’s ringing in the hour, and then another bell. Altogether, these sounds will create a new sound. Albert will listen to the new sound as the nurse leads him down a long hall. “We will find you a room,” she will say, and this will become part of the music too.

How could he know that someday the word for the convergence of these sounds—
fugue
—will also describe the sound of his astonishment and his anguish, the sound they make when they are played together?

It doesn’t matter. It has been so long since he has heard any song but his own; he had forgotten there were others.

Listen
.

Chapter 6

In the center of the public garden there is a lake, and in the center of the lake float a gaggle of sleeping geese, heads tucked beneath their wings. Each morning, the Doctor aspires to ride his bicycle so smoothly that its mechanical whisper—click-clickety-click—doesn’t wake the geese. With great concentration, he rides past the garden’s newly imported Spanish chestnut trees, the bicycle often trembling as it does now. The trees were a scandal when they first arrived. The story went that in an effort to keep up with that other gleaming city, the leaders of Bordeaux had purchased the trees at enormous expense. As if to punish this luxurious act of vanity, droves of rats immediately took up residence in the rich soil, scrambling over one another to fight for each fallen chestnut, upstaging the beautiful, expensive trees.

“Femur. Humerus,” the Doctor whispers. “Supraorbital foramen.” The sound of the words steadies him; it travels down through his skeleton into the metal, whispering back to the machine.

It’s worth the few small bugs he swallows to recite the words aloud. “Lacrimal bone,” he says again, in an effort to erase the sound of his sneeze in the amphitheater. Over and over, he’s replayed it.
Here I am.
He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t sorry. Why had he apologized? He hadn’t slept well last night after he returned from the docks, the keening of the great doctor’s girl still in his head.

“Lacrimal,” he says again. It is one of his favorite words:
Lacrimal,
lacrimal,
lacrimal
. The exquisite almond-shaped glands, an entire apparatus devoted to tears, keeping the eye moist and free of dust and also shedding the other sort of tears, the kind he was shocked to find himself shedding in the early morning hours. “Don’t be a stranger,” the bartender shouted as the Doctor climbed the stairs to his apartment when he returned from the docks, but he was a stranger, even to himself. There weren’t many tears; still, he didn’t understand them precisely.
Lacrimal.
Tears of a protective nature and the more mysterious kind passing through tiny openings in the corner of his eye, then into his lacrimal canaliculus, through a small sac and into his nasolacrimal duct, and into his nasal cavity.
Lacrimal
, one of his favorite bones:
Lacrimal, lacrimal, lacrimal.
The most fragile bone in the body. The hyoid bone—the horseshoe-shaped bone at the base of his tongue, which he did not think of as he ran his tongue over the woman’s hip last night—was nearly as fragile, but the lacrimal bone was the most delicate.
Lacrimal.
An elegant word, really, and there, at its core, the mystery of the water that he found on his face in the early morning hours as he lay in his bed unable to sleep.
Mother, I am frightened.
The girl’s voice, still with him, the look on her face that resembled love but wasn’t love at all but a kind of decoy. A decoy that distracted from a question:
What is the story of my invisible life?

BOOK: The Man Who Walked Away A Novel
8.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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