Feast of All Saints Page 5

  “I saw it this morning, Madame, with my own eyes. I don’t have it with me, but I read it so many times I memorized it, I can tell it to you word for word.”

  “Tell me, tell me!” she burst out. And at that moment the driver of the cart began to bellow. He raised his whip over Juliet’s head; shearing the leafy stems from the load in her basket. Marcel clenched his fist and started forward in a rage; but Juliet, faster by far, jerked around and lifting the black cat in her right hand, heaved it over the horse’s head into the man’s face.

  A cry went up from the loose crowd on the banquette and someone in the door of a shop laughed. The carter was furious. The cat scratched wildly, only to get a hold, and he could not get it loose until there was blood streaming down his cheek and the horse had lurched backward forcing the wheel of the cart up over the edge of the banquette. He was cursing Juliet in a strange guttural tongue.

  And then in fast French came the warning from a black man on the pavement, “You beware, Monsieur, she put the evil eye on you, you beware, Monsieur…” only he’d broken into laughter.

  But Juliet had reached out for Marcel’s hand and was dragging him across the street. “Come, cher, come…” she said. The carter was scrambling down to the pavement. Her grip was moist and amazingly strong. She pulled Marcel forward and to her garden gate. Someone on the far banquette had taken hold of the carter, was trying to reason with him. And they were inside the yard suddenly with the gate shut and Marcel found himself in a narrow passage where the ivy spilling from the wall had long ago found the side of the house and made the walkway a soft fluttering leafy bed.

  Juliet stepped daintily through it ahead of him, and the black cat appeared behind her, its tail high in the air.

  For a moment Marcel hesitated. Looking up he saw the stained walls, the weathered blinds, and beyond nothing but the blue sky. The tall banana fronds obliterated those high buildings which he knew to be across the street still, and he seemed alone for the moment in this alien place. There was a small window in the gate, partially covered with slime. He had strained to see through it many times before, as had others, and he found himself peering through it now. There was only a dim glimmer of shapes beyond.

  “Come, cher,” she called to him. He turned, confused, and hurried toward her. She went into the backyard.

  As he reached the end of the passage, the sun for an instant blinded him. Shutting his eyes, he saw the blazing outline of a ruined cistern clinging to the far fence, and the sloping roof of an ancient shed. He reached out to steady himself against the plastered brick, and realized that he had been running almost all day, but it was only an annoyance, this momentary weakness, this threat of a pain behind the eyes. He was within her walls! And with a reverent throbbing of the heart, he looked up into her sun-drenched yard.

  It was a cistern he saw again, rising high beside the three stories of the house, its gray boards splintered against the sky, and hung with the writhing tentacles of the Queen’s Wreath, a bright pink flowering vine. Rust stained the rotting wood in long streaks from iron bands that had fallen away, and the soft dark of the broad base showed that it was still partially filled with water.

  He did not like the look of it, to think of it, and had the awful sensation that it was falling slowly down on him, and on the woman who stood in the high weeds before him, tending an iron pot that simmered over a heap of coals. She bent gingerly to taste from a large wood spoon as if that hulk did not menace them both. But she was troubled, brooding, and looked quickly, fiercely toward Marcel.

  “Come, monkey,” she said. “You read the Paris papers, then you can read to me!” And quickly getting him by the wrist again, pulled him into the dark house.

  It was ruin everywhere.

  The rain had long beaten through the rotted shutters, and they walked softly along stained and buckling floors through desolate rooms where wallpaper, once flowers and ribbons, hung in yellowed strips from the damp ceilings and laid bare holes in the crumbling walls. Paint peeled from the frames of mirrors, cushions had fallen from the seats of chairs. A gossamer thing which had once been a curtain fell like dust from a window frame as if they had violently stirred the air.

  But someone lived here still, that was the horror of it. A pair of new shoes stood before a gaping marble grate, and here lay a plate and a glass glittering with ants.

  A packing case sat stranded on a faded carpet, and from its contents, still wrapped in yellow paper, protruded one large green glass vase. All the rest was left and under dust.

  “Upstairs,” she whispered, and pointed to the banister beyond the parlor door.

  It was unsteady when he grasped it. Tall windows let in only bursts of leafy light. Pausing, he shuddered at the rustle and the scent of rats. And from beyond the dusty slats there came suddenly the day-to-day chorus of the street—a man cursing at his mule, a child’s sudden sharp cry, and under all the rumble of wooden wheels. Gazing upward at a dim light on paneled doors that lay ajar, he felt himself wound up in the warp and woof of dream.

  She led him to a dining room. Mosquitoes swarmed over a china pitcher which she stirred with an easy gesture of her hand as she passed, and reached to let in a stream of burning yellow sun on a chest that sat there, beneath the window, dusted and somewhat new. The table here still had its polish and a soiled napkin lay crumpled on a chair. The gilt-framed portrait of a black man in military dress hung on the wall.

  “The Old Haitian,” Marcel whispered, remembering Monsieur Philippe’s long tale. But the sun pouring in had rendered the surface of it opaque and Marcel could make out nothing of him at all.

  “Here, cher, here…” Juliet said quickly, as though he might forget why he had come. And dropping to her knees, she raised the lid of the chest.

  It was letters, hundreds of letters. The correspondence of years! And Marcel had no doubt from whom all these letters had come. He was breathless as he knelt down. He lifted one, then another, shifted a mass of them here and there to reveal the varied scribbled words, Istanbul, Rome, Cairo, London, and Paris. Paris, Paris, Paris. And dozens, scores of them, had never even been unsealed!

  “No, no,” she whispered. “Here, these new ones…see.” She picked them up and put them into his hand. One had been torn open and from its bulk and creases he could see it had once contained something larger than a letter. A mere note was inside.

  But the other was more recent, he could tell. The date was at the top of the page as he unfolded it, it was this year, this spring.

  “Read it to me, cher,” she said. “Read it…hurry, now.”

  She sank down sitting back on her heels and gazed at him, her hands clasped in her skirt, with the open expression of a child. She did not see the dizziness that swept over him, the vague disconcerting fear. It was awful the sight of these letters, sealed and piled here. Yet some pounding excitement dissipated the sadness that threatened at the edges of things, and he was staring now at the creased parchment page. It was Christophe’s letter all right, there was the scrawled signature at the bottom.

  What would all of those on the outside have given for this moment, Richard, Fantin, Emile, so many of his friends. But there was no “outside.” There was only this place, and this awful waste, and something akin to tragedy. He looked at Juliet who lost in her thoughts or fears did not see him. It had its wild magnetism. His voice did not sound like his own as he began:

  “Maman…”

  “Go on!” she said; he hesitated. It was too personal. He felt it a crime.

  “Read it to me, cher!” she clasped his wrist. Of course, he realized, she could not read any more than his own mother could read. She had no idea, no idea at all…

  You’ve won. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes when I am distraught I imagine you are dead. But then some traveler I meet in the street tells me different, that he’s only been away from New Orleans a matter of months, and you’re alive, he’s seen you with his own eyes. Still no answer from you, no response. Charbonnet goes to call o
n you from the bank, and you do not answer the door. For six months you do not answer the door.

  Well, I won’t say that I’m giving up everything for you, that you haunt my waking thoughts and make my dreams nightmares. Nor will I say I love you. I sail at the end of the month.

  Chris

  He showed it to her. But she had turned away, and let out a long sigh. She whispered softly that it was true then.

  “Shall I read any more of them?” he asked.

  “Why?” she murmured. She was not happy, not excited. He watched her rise slowly, steadying herself for an instant on the sill of the window. “He’s coming home then,” she said. She passed silently out of the room.

  He looked after her, watching the low flounce of her dress move on the dusty floor, and he did not know what to do. Something held him where he was, near this chest with its hundreds of unopened letters, and looking down at it again, his fingers involuntarily closing, he was aware of a bright light at the end of the passage, and what seemed the flash of her shadow against the gray wall.

  He could well imagine what these letters contained. He could see packets, some torn, some sealed, the thick folded pages of journals protruding from their wrapping, it was a treasure, and yet he could not touch these things. He had no leave. He got to his feet, wiped the dust from his pants, and reaching for the open blinds gently pulled them shut. It seemed the darkness gathered around him like a cloud.

  He stood still for a moment. He was excited, perhaps more excited than he had ever been. Outside lay the everyday life that so frustrated him, driving him, pushing him toward all manner of petty mischief and petty defeat. Yet here he felt alive, marvelously alive, and he was afraid of being sent away. He turned quickly, brushing again at the dust on his pants, and went in search of Juliet.

  A soft sunlight flooded the end of the passage, aflicker with the shapes of leaves, and shading his eyes with his hand he found himself on the threshold of a vast room, and heard Juliet say to him, “Cher…come in.”

  She was sitting at a wicker table, her back to the open windows where the wild arcs of the Queen’s Wreath shivered with their tiny pink blossoms in the breeze. The air was cool here, and not stale, and had the tang of freshly cut oranges. Gradually he made out the shadowed features of Juliet’s brooding face. She was holding something small in her hands, a mirror perhaps, and was whispering to it though he could not make out the words. There was a bowl of fruit in front of her. But he was quickly distracted by the scattered contents of the room.

  A stack of feather mattresses made up her bed, and it was littered with the lovely fabrics she often wore—tarleton, silk, and flowered silk, flimsy things for which he did not know the name. The windows above it were shaded by the thick-leaved branches of the trees and bathed all in a green-tinted light. While along the walls sat trunks sprung and bursting, and here and there packing crates, papered boxes, clusters of bonnets with wide tangled ribbons, and bunches of crinkled shoes. Before a cluttered marble-top dresser there stood a magnificent Chinese screen. It was alive with slant-eyed maidens sketched in gold against painted clouds.

  Marcel drew in his breath. Every instinct in him responded to this place and to the silent beautiful woman who sat there, her rippling dark hair like a veil over her arms, intent upon the small object in her hands. Her deepset lids were languid with heat or with sadness.

  But one splendid detail touched him more deeply perhaps than all the rest. Throughout this place there stood vases of flowers: roses, lilies, fragile bunches of lavender, and wild clumps of jasmine withering there among the sturdier blooms with the thick arching fronds of ferns. She must have gathered these herself, and only she could have placed them so carefully amid this chaos. The table before her was shining clean as was the dresser mirror between the windows behind her head.

  A breeze stirred the dark leaves beyond the windows. It lifted the spun gold of the mosquito netting that hung above the mattresses from a peg, sighing with the netting, and dropping it softly back against the wall. It seemed an insignificant thing, yet made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

  Juliet leaned wearily to one side on her hand. And raising her eyes to Marcel slowly with a sweep of dark lashes, she smiled. “Look, cher,” she whispered, and held the small framed object out to him so that it exploded all at once with the light.

  He sank down in the chair beside her own. It was not a mirror at all.

  In fact, it was a portrait so finely drawn and so lifelike in its little ornate frame that it gave him an almost unpleasant start. All painting broke his heart over his own crude sketches, but this was quite beyond belief.

  “But what…” he murmured.

  “Christophe, cher…” she said. “My Christophe…he’s a man now, look at him. The boy is all gone…” She herself looked mournfully away.

  Marcel had realized this, of course. He had seen that face in numerous engravings, the frontpiece in his novel, on the published text of two essays, and once in a journal, and he had copied it himself in ink a dozen times. Pictures of Christophe covered the wall above Marcel’s desk. He had even cheated for the making of these pictures, using paper to trace or crude devices rigged from lamps to throw the printed image on fresh paper for him to copy it there with his pen.

  But here was such a lively picture and so perfect that the technique staggered the imagination. Marcel could all but feel the smoothness of the small square face, and the rougher texture of the dark coat. He rose, almost upsetting the chair behind him, and held the picture at the window in the light.

  The man was breathing there, and only the eyes seemed lifeless, like gems in the marvelous plasticity of the face. “But this can’t be a painting!” Marcel sighed. And with his nail he tapped it lightly to discover that it was made of glass. However, the most baffling aspect of it was the color; it was done entirely in muted tones of black and white. And suddenly with a loud gasp, he realized what he was holding in his hands. “Monsieur Daguerre!” he whispered. This was not a painting at all. It was the living Christophe in the frame, captured in Paris by Monsieur Daguerre’s magic box! All the newspapers had been on fire with the news of this invention, and yet he had not believed it until now! And as he realized he was looking upon a genuine photographic likeness, even to the slight scuff on Christophe’s boot, he felt the blood drain from his face. The implications of the picture dazed him, never had the world known such a miracle, by which men and women could be captured exactly as they were and the pictures, clear as the reflection in a mirror, kept for all time. And the papers had spoken of Daguerreotypes of buildings, whole crowds of human beings, the streets of Paris, moments in time fixed forever from the clouds in the sky to the expression on a man’s face.

  “Perhaps he lies in his letter,” came the voice, weary and rather deep behind him.

  Marcel was startled. “Oh, no, Madame, he’s coming home, I read this in the papers,” he said. He sat down beside her and placed the portrait against the bowl. It took an act of will for him to detach himself from it and look into her eyes. “They said he was coming back here to found a school, Madame…for us.” He touched his breast lightly when he said this. “You can imagine what this means to us, Madame…the way that we admire him, the way that everyone admires him. Why, we follow him through every bit and piece of news that we can find.”

  Again he glanced at the little Daguerreotype, Christophe in Paris as he lived and breathed. Christophe among the men who invented such magic, and on his way home.

  She was looking at him with that same dreamy expression that he had seen before in the street. It wasn’t clear that she was listening to him at all. “He’s a hero to us, Madame,” he went on anxiously, eyes lighting again and again on the small image. “We have his novel, copies of his stories, articles he’s written for the journals…I read everything I can lay hands on. I read his Nuits de Charlotte, it was magnificent, like Shakespeare in the novel form, Madame, I could see it happening before my eyes, and when Charlotte died, I died to
o.”

  She’s going to ask me to go, he thought, and I don’t want to go, not now, not yet. There was something severe in the tiny face in the picture, the eyes fixing him fiercely.

  “Of course, I copy his essays,…” he said quickly, “I have a notebook full of them, and sometimes I write essays—well I try—on my own. If he begins a school here…well, there is no telling how many pupils he’ll have.”

  He could tutor the best white families, Marcel thought sullenly, perhaps he doesn’t realize that.…But he said the school was for us, for the gens de couleur…Marcel put that thought out of his mind. “There’s no telling how many pupils will want to enroll. I imagine your parlor will be crowded with applicants.”

  “What parlor?” she asked in a flat, leaden voice.

  He was shocked. He had offended her.

  “There’s nothing here anymore,” she sighed, her voice so low that without realizing it he bent toward her. Her eyes were moving around the room slowly. “There’s only ruin here.”

  “But all that can be changed, perhaps…” He was afraid. She would lose her temper in a minute, tell him he was impertinent and that he should get out. He stared dismally, helplessly, at the surface of the table before him, and then at that little portrait of the man sitting so regally in the chair. Even the boots were so expertly rendered, and the boards of some polished floor a thousand miles across the sea. He shut his eyes.

  When he opened them again he saw that she was taking a ripe peach from the bowl. “Are you hungry, cher?” she whispered. It seemed little more than a soft explosion of breath.

  “No, thank you, Madame,” he murmured.

  She stared at him as her teeth cut through the skin of the peach and he saw the ripe bright fruit against her lips.

  “You were telling me things, cher…” she said in that same low voice. She ate the peach in great bites, the peeling and the fruit, with no other movement than the movement of her delicate jaw, her lips, her tongue…He felt some vague stirring in himself and shifted his weight in the chair.