The certainties, p.6
The Certainties, page 6
One by one, Pia lights the new candles. Her mother had made her attend mass as a child and the lighting of the wicks reminds her of those years of supplication, the smell of incense, the ease of ritual. Her mouth on the toes of the statue of the saviour, that gentle kiss.
And then she remembers the dog from the village by the sea—brown, a terrier of sorts, with perky ears. The dog was starving—her teats hanging sacs; fur patchy with mange. Pia fed her a scrap of meat in the yard—dry and tough from a stew her mother had made. The next day the dog was in the yard again and Pia fed her some greasy sausage stolen from the fridge, the dog licking Pia’s fingers. On another occasion the dog leaned in and nuzzled Pia’s cheek.
The terrier came to the yard four or five times that month—always tentative and warily watching the house. After the fifth or sixth visit Pia started to think of possible names for her, imagined holding her and brushing out her matted fur with a hairbrush—imagined her mother finally letting her have a dog.
One morning Pia and her mother left home to accompany Pia’s father on a business trip. He had a series of meetings in a nearby city and Pia’s mother wanted out of the village, even if it meant taking Pia with her. The gate closed behind them with a clang. They came home a week later. It was night and the sea was shushing quietly and the stars were out and a pickaxe of moon, and down below on the passeig people sat out on the patios. Tinny music came from a radio near a neighbour’s open window. Pia’s father was using his lighter to help his family see the way up the path. He kept burning his thumb and Pia remembers how her mother, who might normally have laughed at that, did not. When they got close to the door of the house, there was a stench. Raw, thick, spoiled. Pia’s mother covered her face and went inside and Pia’s father—with only the flame from his lighter—searched the yard between the gate and the door for what might be causing the smell, not noticing Pia was following him. He flicked the lighter again. Next to the pole for the laundry line was the dog’s carcass, already picked apart by buzzards.
WHEN PIA WAS VERY YOUNG, her parents constantly debated about whether Pia and her mother should leave the village by the sea and return home, or wait until Pia’s father’s business arrangements were sorted out. After the house was looted, Pia’s father paid privately for security. There was always a man—six over the years—in their yard or wandering into the kitchen to ask for a cup of coffee, a gun tucked into his belt. Sometimes it was a young cabo. There had been one in his twenties…Pia can still picture him wiping flakes of cocoa pastry and bits of sugar off the front of his shirt and looking at her sheepishly.
Pia was six when the kitchen help was let go and her mother taught her how to bake, and how to cook simple foods: rustic stews and grilled vegetables, spicy paellas made with local prawns. Some days Pia was allowed to go to the market or to the docks to buy fish, always with the cabo trailing behind her. Most days she was told to invent her own games, to entertain herself. This is just how it was—Pia never spoke about her loneliness to anyone, not even to her abuela, who, years later, would put her finger under her granddaughter’s chin and ask, ‘What’s going on in that head of yours?’ How to describe it? The village by the sea existed in a world where people were stunned by what they’d seen, where what you cooked with, how many prawns you could afford, said everything about your resources and your power.
And so Pia grew up to become someone who moved quietly, who studied other people’s introspection; whose gaze followed theirs as she listened to what they said and what they omitted. The men and women from her childhood in the village by the sea hadn’t joked about anything. They’d watched their own wrist bones becoming more prominent daily; their hands shook when they waited at the storehouse for rations, or when they were forced into begging. This storm, Pia thinks, as the wind buffets the hotel walls, is nothing. Here we are in our stone building, here is the food and the wine, here is the builder conferring with the night clerk and wiping his hands on a white towel, and here is the barman wagging an empty bottle of wine in the air and asking the wedding party with a laugh, ‘Come on now, who’s going to pay for this?’ Here we are in our warm clothes with no one coming to rape or kill us.
Pia stands up. She thinks about taking the nub of bread and slip of Camembert back into the kitchen but instead she gets up off the floor, says good night to everyone and walks upstairs past the wallpaper with its rich striping, the globe lamps with their dim amber light, the mirror on the landing. One of the books she’d taken from the widow’s library, one of the books from her close-your-eyes-and-point game, was a slim blue volume with no title on its spine and typewritten, not printed, pages. It began with a statement: The water is a mirror. This was followed by:
The mirror is a semblance of self, a way of knowing.
Mirrors are only preoccupied with their inhabitants when they’re awake.
(This applies to both the mirrors and the inhabitants.)
The world is a mirror. It will not remember us after we pass through it.
Pia glances into the mirror on the landing as she passes and sees, through her exhaustion and the hum of the wine, a veiled face looking back at her. She opens her eyes wider, focusing. But it’s just her own face—short dark hair, dark eyes: a woman close to the age her mother was when she was murdered, the resemblance startling.
A man sitting at a restaurant table once, in Pia’s childhood village, had tired eyes like this, two half-moons of purple ink below them. Her mother had reached out and touched this man’s hand, even though in those days she knew better than to reach out to anyone. ‘¿Triste?’ Pia had asked, when they’d walked a distance away. Her mother bent down to her. ‘Sí,’ she said, ‘sad.’ And then she cupped Pia’s cheek in her palm and asked, ‘¿Te gusta él? You like him?’ And Pia squinted because she did like his face, his eyes as blue as the swimming pool she’d once seen in her mother’s magazine. And her mother had looked back down the passeig to where the man was sitting and said, ‘So don’t forget him. This is all you can do.’
stand outside my room and peer down the hall toward the stairwell. The cabo, Alejandro, is nowhere to be seen, though he’s rapped on my door hourly, calling out ‘¿Señor?’ and waiting until I answer. When I neither see him nor hear him moving around on the ground floor I walk down the hall and knock lightly on Suzanne and Bernard’s door. The hotel’s hallway, with its blue paint and brass sconces, is a relic of the establishment’s better days—those years before the civil war when the rooms were stocked with decent towels and bars of soap, and breakfast arrived under a polished silver cloche.
Suzanne answers the door in the brown dress she was wearing yesterday. For months she’s alternated between this dress, and a pair of slacks and light sweater. She glances down the hall, then ushers me in. She’s been staying in the same room as Bernard since he became ill in Marseilles, making sure he’s resting properly and taking the sulphapyridine she sourced through an acquaintance in Narbonne. Bernard is lying in bed with a blanket tucked around him, a gleam of sweat on his forehead. He’s only thirty-four, roughly the same age as Suzanne, but he’s been steadily losing weight and his gauntness and jaundiced complexion make him appear a decade older. Beside him is the empty plate upon which the woman from the kitchen sent up bread and oil. It’s after ten a.m. now, maybe closer to eleven. I’m losing track of time.
‘I brought my bread,’ I say, holding out the plate, ‘if anyone wants it.’
Suzanne laughs. ‘No croissants? God, but I wake up and go to bed picturing Madame Clément’s patisserie window.’
‘How is he?’ I ask, nodding toward Bernard. Then I see that Bernard is awake and watching me and that I’m doing what most people do—what everyone did to my brother—enquiring about the ill or the infirm as if they aren’t capable of answering for themselves.
‘The same,’ she says. ‘I’m worried about his fever.’
‘What did you bring us, professor?’ Bernard’s voice is thin and reedy.
I turn the plate of crusty bread in his direction.
‘Ah, divine.’ He frees an arm from under the blanket, picks the bread off the plate and then sets it back down. ‘Are there no more of the olives you brought yesterday?’
Suzanne glares at me; my excursion angered her. I shake my head no. ‘Did I tell you there was an art gallery too, in the square?’
‘And to think you came back.’ Bernard laughs.
‘I’m not the one known to disappear,’ I say—a reference to our years in Saint-Germain-des-Prés when Bernard was famous for his unexpected departures: a group of us would head out to an exhibit, or to a friend’s house for dinner, only to discover we’d lost Bernard at some juncture in our travels. His decamping became so frequent we assumed he had a secret lover and was slipping away to be with him. Once, though, retracing my steps to where I’d last seen him, I found Bernard standing underneath the façade of a church, craning his neck to study the gargoyles studded over its fascia. His paintings, at that time, were dark—like a world painted at dusk or covered in ash. This image of him standing there in the last traces of the day’s light was like that—his head angled back, the gargoyles pawing the air above him. ‘Bernard!’ I called, and he turned and raised a hand, and came toward me. Years later I thought I could see some semblance of those gargoyles in his street scenes—the wide eyes of the pedestrians; the boy with the wooden tureen, begging.
* * *
—
In my youth I devoted long stretches of time to social studies. For one enquiry I drew a number of maps of our family’s country house. The house was not a grand one, but it came with property as my grandfather and his father before him owned and managed the wood lots that provided timber for the nearby villages. The house had a dozen rooms on the two main floors, as well as a subterranean kitchen and a small attic that sat behind a triangular gable and round window at the front. The main floor was comprised of communal spaces: an entry hall, a sitting room, a dining room, my father’s study and library—which sometimes doubled as my laboratory—and a loggia that looked out over a tidy garden. The upper floors contained five bedrooms and a lavatory. My parents’ bedroom was at the far end of the hall beside the nanny’s room, my room was across from my parents’, and Meira’s room—the former nursery to which I’d once been confined—was across from Nanny Bette’s. Our younger brother, Martin, was down the hall past the stairwell in a room hung with heavy green curtains capable of replicating the starkest hours of night in the middle of even the brightest summer day. Because Martin was ill throughout his childhood, he rarely caused the sort of trouble Meira and I did. I think if he’d been well he might not have been so docile, might have had Meira’s temper, but instead he lay in a distant orbit on the outskirts of my family’s day-to-day life. I’m ashamed to say it, but he was loved less than Meira and I were, as if my parents were too afraid to become attached to him. He died at seven, and even though we all wept, there was, for me, a sense that my parents’ strategy had been correct and that we did not diminish as a family because of Martin’s death, but turned toward each other with a renewed sense of commitment.
When I had drawn the maps of the house, Martin was still with us. As part of my experiment I measured the distance between the upstairs habitations and the various domains on the ground floor: the study my father spent his evenings in, the blue sitting room where my mother wrote letters and visited with guests, the cubby near the bay window where I was allowed to set up that day’s selection of books…My map and measurements yielded a thesis which I wrote out in careful ink and tried to prove mathematically: the notion that affiliation is borne by proximity, and that proximity is requisite for love.
I sit at the foot of the bed and rest my hand on Bernard’s leg. I think about what it would be like to have a younger brother at this advanced age and imagine I might feel toward him something close to what I feel for Bernard. In Paris, Bernard was often remote and I sometimes found him intolerably selfish, but when we met again at Gaston’s flat just before my internment our commonalities outweighed our differences. For reasons I have yet to fully fathom, it was Bernard, out of all our circle of friends, who did the most to try to secure my release from the camp in Nevers: gathering affidavits to give to the commission charged with reviewing the cases of foreign nationals, securing the support of six prominent academics who would not have recognized the poorly dressed artist knocking at their door and who would not have opened it save for his insistence. In the camp des travailleurs volontaires, we were allowed to send only two letters a week and allowed to keep no more than twenty francs. That was sixteen letters over two months. Were it not for Bernard’s visits and his work on my behalf, I might still be there on my bed of straw. I think now of the work a letter took, writing in those crowded rooms, or in the courtyard under the bowl of bad weather. How to ask for favours? How to make a case for myself and my work? This has always been an issue with me. It takes five hundred words, a thousand words to say, Would you please help? yet I didn’t have to ask Bernard at all.
After my release from the camp, I returned to the library and my research, though with more uncertainty than ever before. Again it was Bernard who kept coming to my flat and saying we must leave Paris. Meira was already in America, sending letters I did not receive and calling around to friends who had telephones to ask them to deliver me messages. Always, the message was Go. I knew in late May it was time, and not because Gaston told us that Auteuil and Passy were already abandoned—the sixteenth arrondissement’s consulates and embassies, the manors, dark at all hours…even the birdcage in the window of one stately house with its grilled door gaping open—but rather because of the archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Strange that I should forget his name when I can conjure his face so readily: his bulbous nose and squint eyes, the dark threads of hair across the top of his head thin and distinct, like the lines on an empty sheet of music. Michel! That’s it! It was Michel who told me, without words, to leave. He had been at his desk less and less often, and when I last saw him, after waiting impatiently for some manuscript or book I had requested days before, he was scuttling about with a large and unwieldy stack of papers. Libraries are places of precision; this stack and the ones that followed signalled that he had been tasked with moving the library’s most important documents to safety. I went home that afternoon, taking a long and circuitous route through the city, past two small parks and the Jardin du Luxembourg, which stretched off over my right shoulder like paradise. I walked through my local market, waved at the butcher, stood for a moment at the busy corner outside my patisserie and then went in, as was customary on my return home, to buy one perfect cake orange. Nina, always at work on the weekday, placed it in a small box with as much care as she might a great cake that would serve ten. ‘À demain,’ she said, as if this would happen again and again. That night I began to sort through my papers.
* * *
—
‘Dreaming again?’ Bernard teases.
I relax my mouth, can feel my face set in the pensive expression he’d been studying. ‘Do you think you’ll be all right when Suzanne and I go to the station?’ I ask.
‘I’ll be fine.’ As if to prove his point, he pushes himself up so that he’s sitting with his back against the wooden headboard. He struggles more than he’d like, but his smile, at the end of the effort, is still boyishly victorious.
I look at Suzanne, who’s standing just inside the open balcony inspecting the cuffs of her dress. She has lines on her forehead and around her mouth that I don’t remember from the few times we’d met in Paris.
‘We won’t be long,’ she says to Bernard. ‘It’s better if you stay behind, anyway—if we all go they can put us on a train back to France with no questions asked. If you stay and they decide to deport us, at least that buys us time to come back here and gather our things…’ She trails off, glancing around the room as if she’s forgotten where she set a pair of gloves or a favourite scarf.
‘How do I look?’ she eventually asks, holding her arms out from her sides. Her hair is damp from washing it, and falls softly over her shoulders and catches the light; the spots where she’s scrubbed her cuffs are still wet and I peer more closely to see if they look clean. We have hours before the appointment—hours in which Alejandro, like the cog in a clock, will regularly pester us to affirm our presence—but already we’re preparing. Suzanne steps fully into the room. Outside, above the balcony, the gulls squawk and swoop down toward the promenade, arguing over some scrap of food.
While we wait for our appointment Suzanne is given permission to make a few calls from the hotel lobby, albeit at a significant cost. Twenty minutes later she is back in the room, her face serious. What Porras told us seems to be true—they’re sending anyone with a visa from Marseilles back, though one of Suzanne’s contacts has heard that the border is temporarily closed to everyone. ‘As of yesterday,’ she tells us, pulling the writing-table chair out into the middle of the room and taking a seat.
Bernard rubs his eyes and surveys the side table where his pills are. ‘I could use a cigarette.’
‘You only have six left,’ Suzanne says. ‘Wait until you’re better.’
‘So do we bribe someone?’ Bernard asks.
Suzanne gets up, walks over to her purse, lights one of her own cigarettes and passes it to Bernard. After a minute she says, ‘It could be fine. Maybe Marco will be there, maybe they’ll honour the transit visas already issued, regardless of where they’re from. Or maybe this is just a ploy to refuse people with legitimate papers. Make it someone else’s problem.’ She uses the word ‘legitimate’ even though one of my papers—a residency card—and one of Bernard’s are forged. The American Foreign Service had also issued me a new passport in Marseilles. It was legitimate but identified me as Austrian—which we’d say was a clerical mistake if anything came of it. I didn’t want to test this, though; it wouldn’t take much to discover that I was, in fact, German.
