The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (16 page)

At least the men had remained with the women after dinner. At home, the females moved in a herd to a parlor to discuss trivialities while the men availed themselves of the chamber pots stowed in the buffet for their exclusive use, and retired to the library to smoke and drink brandy while they discussed the state of the world. How she resented that separation! She turned toward her new companion. “What is the subject of your book?”

He placed his shot glass on the deck, removed a pipe from his pocket, and began tamping tobacco into it, glancing up briefly for her permission to smoke. “I dare not say. You’ll think me a boor.”

“I promise I won’t. Cross my heart.” She made the motion.

“It’s about goodness and temptation, but mostly about goodness.” He struck a match and puffed at the pipe until it caught. “Which is
why, my friends tell me, it is perfectly dull and should be fed to the flames.”

“So, it is a book of philosophy?” She was amazed that he was a philosopher. The physiognomy was wrong—lips too full, eyes too wide, forehead not deep enough, not enough severity in the features. In sum, the face of a pleasure-seeker.

“No, it’s a novel about a saint. That is, apparently, one reason it’s so boring. It’s called
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
.”

“I see,” she said, somewhat surprised that the young Frenchman should find the topic of saintliness of burning interest.

“But do
you
think it’s boring?” She sipped at her wine.

“I’ve done a good job describing the temptations, but the saint is too stalwart, he’s never truly tempted.” He exhaled a plume of smoke over the water. “Maybe I should have chosen to write about an ordinary man.” He pointed to Max holding forth at the table. “My friend there says the demons and Satan are more alive than Anthony is. Should I ever publish it, it will make a great hypnotic for insomniacs.”

She laughed and raised her wineglass to acknowledge the quip. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Selina observing her, a smile on her face. Dear Selina. Charles and Max had moved on to grander subjects: railways and the industrial revolution. “I have no doubt there will be steamers on the Nile . . . railroads in Lower Egypt, and sooner than you think.” Charles’s voice was booming, stentorian. Du Camp did not contradict him.

She was not entirely in favor of the industrial revolution, having visited the Arkwright Mills in nearby Cromford, the most modern factory in the world, when she was sixteen. The noise of the spinners had been deafening, the air white with lint that caught in her throat and lungs. A supervisor had cuffed two girls in the spinning room as if it were completely natural. Flo knew that her family owned a share in the mills and in the lead mines near the Hurst, too. It was the ceaseless toil of others, of children, that paid for her fine paisley shawls, leather riding boots, and velvet dresses; for Fanny’s endless sets of porcelain and WEN’s wall of partridge guns. The village children
were sickly; they did not learn to read; they had no time for walks in the woods, no money for a pet pony or even a dog. How could such injustice be God’s will?

They had said nothing for a while, she realized, turning to gaze at M. Flaubert. Though he was droll, he still seemed sad. The gloom possessed his entire body. He moved little and only slowly. He seemed to require all his energy simply to converse, though the voice itself gave no hint of misery.

Should she do as she had been taught? Fill the silence, prop him up with encouragements, with flattery, with questions whose answers were already known or easily produced? She was not in the mood. And he seemed so sincere. “And are you writing now?” she asked. “Do you have some project under way?” She sipped more wine. It gave her something to do with her hands.

“Other than a personal journal, no. I am simply living, absorbing the colors of the East. And you,
mademoiselle
? Do you keep a journal and will you write a book of your adventures?”

Was he taunting her? His tone was polite, but his brevity almost dismissive. She fanned the pipe smoke from her face. It would be easy to take umbrage and to reply in cutting kind, but something prevented her. His large round eyes looked too vulnerable to endure the slightest cruelty. “No,” she announced. “I have been quite unhappy for a long time and I am trying to find my way clear of it.” She would leave it at that. If he answered in kind, fine and well. If not, she had gambled only a sentence, a single shocking disclosure. Dangled it, more accurately, like a worm. Was it flirtation if you admitted to a private weakness?

He stared at her face until she blinked and looked away. “You do not jest, I see.” Setting his pipe down, he took her hand. The gesture seemed
forward,
and yet completely without guile or affectation, offered with the certainty that she would naturally grasp his motive.

“I have a tragic flaw, you see,” she said.

He gazed at her hand. In the moonlight, her flesh was bluish, bloodless.

“And what is that?” he asked.

Now that she had his full attention, it startled and pleased her, the way his warmth had. She reminded herself that she might never see him again, that they were anchored at a four-thousand-year-old temple whose origins were as perplexing as life itself. “I am ambitious,” she began. “I want to change the world, make a mark in it. This is not acceptable. I have a mind and wish to use it, which is considered a great failing in a woman.” What had Fanny called her desire to palliate the suffering of others? Unthinkable? Impracticable? “My mother says she can never make peace with my ideas, that they are scandalous.”

“Your mother must be a conventional woman,” Flaubert said. “Perhaps she is frightened for you and wants to protect you.”

“Yes, that’s part of it.” Flo thought back to an early and especially painful rebuff. “But she doesn’t approve of me.” She looked him square in the face, her tone rising. “She’s never approved of me. She didn’t even want me to sing when I was a girl.”

“What sort of singing?”

“Opera.” Flo thought back to the family’s European tour. “I was quite young then, only eighteen, but still, she ruined it for me.” She explained that she had discovered the power of music in Genoa. She had had a voice tutor. But it was the performances nearly every evening—chamber orchestras and chorales, violin soloists, concerts by top tenors and sopranos—that had awakened her passion. When she attended her first opera, Donizetti’s
Lucrezia Borgia,
she was stricken with opera fever. “Music-mad” Fanny had called her, gleefully at first. “After that, I went to the opera three times a week and practiced my scales devoutly.”

“You are a soprano?” He smiled; his eyes widened.

“No, I’m nothing because I don’t sing anymore.” She continued the story. When her music teacher commented upon the drastic improvement of her voice, Fanny reminded her that divas were
famous,
and therefore unworthy of imitation or adulation. “It isn’t respectable, apparently.”

Still she had dreamed. And dreamed, allowing herself to pretend that hordes of aficionados might stampede through the doors of the parlor to throw themselves at her feet. Her ridiculous name now made perfect sense: Enter the golden-throated, Italian-born Miss Nightingale! Enter the Bird-Throated Gentlewoman Who Could Not
Help
but Be Called to a Career on the Stage! The English Thrush, the diva, holding forth in a lone spotlight center-stage or dying, tormented, closer to the footlights, in a pall of magenta satin and black lace—

“She forbade you to sing?”

“Indirectly, yes. And I had an unusually persistent sore throat for months that winter.” As if, Flo had thought at the time, God Himself disapproved and had sent her one infection after another. “The family moved on to Paris, and Fanny refused to hire any more singing masters.”

“That is awful,” Flaubert said.
“Je suis desolé.”

“Thank you. Now, of course, I have a different ambition—to be of use in the world. Still, my mother says she will never forgive me if I try it.”

He gripped her hand firmly, turned her into the shadow cast by the mast of the dahabiyah, and kissed her on the cheek. “You are . . . an Athena,” he said. “Brave and above all, clever and uncompromising.”

She was totally taken aback. His eyes were softer now, not with sadness or heat, but with sympathy.

“An idealist,” he continued. “Or a rebel. No, a revolutionary.” He seemed to be working out the details of her nature, half talking to himself.

“A freak,” Florence added, “of nature.”

“No, no, you will find your way, I am sure of it. I feel it,” he declared, “here in my heart”—he pointed to his chest—“and here.” He touched his temple.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for your compliments, but you hardly know me. Of course, I hope you are right, but what makes you so certain, M. Flaubert?”

“Please, call me Gustave.” He beamed at her.

“All right.”

“To answer your question: I trust my judgment, my animal instincts.” He smiled again. “Call it intuition.”

“Oh,
monsieur
—I mean Gustave—if only you were right! I have been so unhappy.” A silence had gathered nearby: the threesome at the table had stopped talking. Had they been listening?

Du Camp was packing up his prints, preparing to depart. A wind snapped at the furled sails; the boat creaked in response. Clouds resembling spindrift materialized, streaking the sky with a frothy layer. The world, for all she knew,
was
made of water. Flaubert let her hand drop, planted his pipe in his mouth, retrieved his whiskey and the wine, and escorted her back to the group.

Selina said, “Our friends are going to Philae, too. We shall have to meet again.”

“Indubitably,” Du Camp chimed in.

“That would be most pleasant,” Florence added, her hand still stung with warmth where
monsieur
—no, Gustave!—had grasped it.

He turned to her. “Perhaps you could help me with the squeezes, if that would interest you.”

“I’d be delighted,” she said. “I’m sure we could adjust our schedule to accommodate a lesson or two.” Hearing this, neither Bracebridge objected.

“Shall we plan to meet in Philae?” he asked.

“That would be grand. The Temple of Isis will be full of inscriptions.” She could feel a smile stretching across her face for the first time in weeks.

“Très bien,”
he said, kissing her hand and clicking his heels.

The men said their farewells, gathered up their packages, and started down the gangway.

“But you never showed us what’s in your valise!” Florence called out.

“Squeezes! From Luxor.” He turned and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll show them to you next time.” Max was already ashore. “I completely forgot.”

“Alors, au revoir!”
she shouted. She waved with both arms, in case he looked back. She realized she was standing on tiptoes.

A moment later, the clouds began to scud past more quickly. From his stool at the foredeck, the captain ordered the crew to secure the sails and anchor in case of a storm. Charles poured himself a last jigger of whiskey and carried it belowdecks, humming as he went. “Good night, dear ladies,” he said, blowing kisses.

“I think he had a very good time with Du Camp,” Selina confided, dropping an earring into her hand and unfastening the other. “And you?”

“Very nice. Were you bored to death by the talk of machines?”

“Oh, no, my dear, I enjoyed myself sneaking glimpses at you. The conversation looked quite intense.” Selina seemed about to burst with joy and curiosity.

Feeling slightly disloyal for withholding the details, Flo simply kissed her good night. “Very lively indeed,” she said.

Belowdecks, she stretched out, still dressed, on her divan, head propped on pillows by the window to breathe the fresh, roiling air. Beside her, Trout snored contentedly.

How strange he was, writing the life of a saint, when most writers were more interested in flaws. Their chat, without preliminaries or artifice, had created a hunger in her. She’d spoken her heart and he’d spoken his, both of them with the candor and intensity of the condemned. Because, yes, she felt condemned to live as either a misfit or a failure. Yet, he hadn’t been dismayed by anything she said.

She sat up. She’d prolong the evening on paper, unfolding yet another corner of her soul to him in a letter before she went to sleep. As she reached for her desk, the smell of impending rain gusted through the windows.

8

NOT A WOMAN

M
ax by his side, Gustave was pleasantly tipsy as he trudged home carrying his portmanteau with the half dozen squeezes he’d intended to show his hosts. No surprise, really, that he hadn’t. He hardly took pride in them or considered them relevant to his identity. He
had
shown the English party the ridiculous certificate charging him with authoring agricultural reports. The Bracebridges had pored over it admiringly after the meat course. Written the way a puffer fish would write if it could, he had joked, to their delight, it had the single virtue of making him sound like somebody of importance—just not somebody he would actually wish to be.

On the other hand, he had lied to Miss Nightingale when she asked if he were writing anything at present.
L’Encyclopédie du Con
was proving a marvelous exercise—a treatise on the cunt that would ignite glorious mêlées if it ever saw the light of day. He’d allow no treacly lyricism; neither did purely clinical description appeal to him. Being the son of a surgeon, he’d seen every part of the body on the dissecting table at the Hôtel-Dieu—the unlikely valves and pumps within the fist of the heart, the hinges and sockets of the joints, the fine seams of the skull. He knew that sheaths of muscles overlaid the organs like a divinely stitched corset. The body, even dead, had never frightened him.

In his
fantaisie
on the pussy, images bloomed in his mind, casting a wide net of metaphorical association. Kuchuk Hanem’s mons Venus took its rightful place alongside the warm tints of Provençal houses; her shaved labia plumped into sharp focus alongside sand dunes, plucked chickens, and jeweled glue pots. How had he begun his paragraph on the imagined twat of his brother’s wife? Yes—“a red light that shines on him the way the sun shines on manure.” The writing was not a literal record, but the result of imagination fused with invective and sometimes with love. For surely he had been in love with Louise, hadn’t he? He thought back to his second meeting with her. She had worn yellow leather gloves with a single button at the wrist that left a coin of flesh where he had pressed his finger, then his lips. They’d removed to his hotel for a sexual triumph that lasted two days and nights. Yes, hers was next.
Wheat fields after a rain, the open mouth of a chick . . .