The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  I had already begun preparing my lies on the passage over, writing them out with the help of a Spanish phrase book. That I was traveling alone drew great attention on the ship, all of it bad, and I was awakened several nights by inquiring knocks on my locked door. When we arrived in Buenos Aires, I paid too much for a double room at my first boardinghouse because I explained that I had come to Argentina with a husband, and that he’d taken work in the provinces and would return.

  “How soon?” the landlady asked me.

  “Soon?” I repeated, trying only to understand, but she took it as an answer. Then when a husband did not appear, soon or otherwise, I cringed at her pity and moved.

  Variations of this happened several times. I claimed the protection of an imaginary husband because I felt in need of any protection I could get. The only men who sought me out were those who did not care that I was supposedly married, and thus I did not particularly care for their attentions. I did not care for anyone in those years. I had had my skin flayed in France, and something hard and chitinous had grown over me instead. When I looked out through my new skin the world beyond was glassy and blurred, the faces threatening. It took me years before I told people that my husband was dead, and years after that to see that Buenos Aires is, at least in good weather, rather beautiful.

  I’ve often wondered if the women in my classes are telling their own lies, but now their truths have made me afraid to ask any questions at all. There are no safe inquiries, though I try: “What do you like to eat?”

  “I like to eat,” Oskar’s mother answers me in class.

  “What foods do you most like to eat?”

  “I am glad to have food,” she says, wary, as if I might report her to the Argentine government for insufficient gratitude.

  The room next door holds a children’s Spanish class, which we overhear through the thin wall whenever I ask a too-difficult question and my own class goes silent. The children are learning colors and animals. “The dog is purple!” a boy shouts, and the children giggle. I think it’s Oskar’s voice, but when I glance at his mother, she hasn’t reacted. She’s simply looking at me, waiting to learn the next thing. I try to figure out what the next thing is, what I might be able to offer any of these women.

  Corrections feel like obscenities, but the students demand them.

  “My most old boy, they taked him,” one woman says, then waits for me to respond with either a nod of approval or adjustments to her pronunciation. Instead, I’m frozen.

  “Please,” she says, “so I can fix.”

  “Took,” I say. “They took him. They took your eldest boy.”

  “Yes, eldest. Took. Do not look at me—so. Like that.”

  I can’t imagine how I’m looking at her, can’t imagine what loss is flooding out of my own face.

  “Do not let me say ‘taked’ because someone took my child,” the woman tells me. “Do not be sorry of me.”

  “For,” I say. “Sorry for you.”

  “Do not be sorry for me. Do not let me make mistakes because you are sorry for me. I did not come here to sound like a fool.”

  “Teacher, how to conjugate burn?”

  The house burns.

  The house burned.

  The house had burned.

  The village has burned.

  The village will burn.

  Is the village burning?

  Yes, the village is burning. So we leave. We left.

  “Teacher, my cousin takes the Tuesday-morning class. She says they learned set fire to.”

  “That is correct also,” I tell the women. “A man can set fire to a house; he can also burn it. It means the same.”

  “Teacher, you are French, yes? You are not Argentine?”

  It’s Oskar’s mother again, and I try to remember how she might know this. Did I announce it on the first day of the session? Did I say something to Oskar? She has never spoken of any other children, but then she also hasn’t spoken of the father Oskar must at some point have had. I don’t know if Oskar is her only child, or only surviving child. I don’t know which parts of her story she is keeping for herself or which parts of mine she might want.

  Yes, I tell her, I am French.

  How long have you been in Buenos Aires? Why did you come?

  I needed to start over, I say, speaking slowly to help them understand, though the slowness makes everything sound momentous and dour. I did not starve; I did not burn. I do not wish to compare with them types of fire, to compete in degrees of heat and height.

  In my head, I answer their questions like this: They taked my eldest son. My only son, they taked him. My family, burnt all to nothing.

  After Fortin’s death, the money stopped coming almost immediately, in response to an official ruling Cannu received from the same justice of the peace who had presided over the last Family Council. Cannu had filed copious evidence, the last twelve years of my life twisted into a story that made me burn. I was accused both of babying Joseph—his haphazard education, the hours we’d spent at play in the garden at Bellenau—and of giving him too much freedom: the truancy, the amount of time he spent roaming the neighborhood in questionable company. No decision was too small to be held up to scrutiny. The evening I’d left him alone while I attended Eugénie’s recital was listed as an example of poor judgment, for reasons I didn’t even understand. Was the idea that I’d been excluding him from my family, or that I should not have left him alone at all, as if there weren’t twelve-year-olds working ten-hour days in factories a few kilometers away?

  Cannu complained that I brought in no income, that I had lived first off my in-laws, then my son. While I had never been proud of this, neither had I ever been able to see a remedy. But in Cannu’s telling, the worst of it, hovering over and spreading through my supposed greed and incompetence, was my wickedness, my assignation with a divorced lover, my willingness to expose Joseph to sin. The justice forbade any further remittances going to me, making my physical guardianship—which had always been contingent on Cannu’s support and Fortin’s permission—nothing more than a stray thread that Cannu could snip at any moment. All he needed to do was request that Joseph be delivered into his care, a demand I assumed I would receive any day.

  I consulted a lawyer. “I need to dispute a story,” I said.

  “We can only dispute facts,” he answered.

  But taken individually, the facts were largely true. It was the portrait they made that was so warped and ugly. I did not recognize the woman in the filing as myself, only barely recognized the boy, so unschooled and wild, so in need of a firm hand.

  Widows were often too indulgent, the lawyer clucked. He’d seen it many times. Perhaps I should be grateful that my brother-in-law had decided to intervene?

  I stabbed the lawyer through the eye with his own pen. Except not. Rather, I imagined doing this, then scolded myself for fantasizing, and then reconsidered. What more could I possibly lose? Then a stranger, unlikelier thought bubbled up: what would Eric do in this situation? He’d never be in this situation, not even close, but perhaps I could adopt something of the right spirit.

  I lifted a little bottle of ink out of its ornate brass holder and poured it across the leather blotter, across the piles of legal papers that represented my biography as written by someone who hated me. The lawyer spluttered—I was a madwoman, a wastrel, I would owe him for his time, the blotter, the silk handkerchiefs he threw into the puddle to soak it up before it could drip on the carpet.

  “Go ahead and charge me for them,” I said. “I’ve got nothing.” I opened my empty hands at my sides. “You’ve read for yourself how much nothing I’ve got.”

  The papers had been so specific that I briefly wondered on the walk home if Cannu really had been crouched behind the sofa. But no—I realized much of the information in the filing could have come only from Joseph.

  His confusion offered my sole consolation.

  “I don’t hate you,” Joseph said, when I confronted him. His face at first was
scornful, but not of me. It was my vulnerability, or perhaps what he thought of as my gullibility, that irked him—had I really taken it seriously, all his adolescent sound and fury?

  “Do you understand what you’ve done?”

  “I don’t even understand what you’re talking about.”

  “All those things you said to Cannu. About me.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Do you really not remember?”

  He shrugged. I wanted to shake him. I imagined doing it, and had an echo of the moment in the lawyer’s office: should I just go ahead? Do all the things I imagined, nothing left to lose? No. I held my hand, held my tongue.

  “Did you want to go live with him? Instead of me?”

  “What? No.”

  This denial was a little slower, a little more shaded. He’d thought of it, at least, but his confusion seemed genuine. I didn’t think he’d actively worked against me. Was that to be my prize—that my son didn’t hate me, he was merely so naïve that he’d cheerfully handed over the information Cannu needed to destroy my life?

  On a Tuesday evening I received Cannu’s request that Joseph be delivered to Cherbourg by the end of the week. There was a bedroom awaiting him, a stocked bookshelf, school uniforms already ordered.

  Would they be the sort of books he liked? I wondered. The clothing correctly sized? And did I hope Albertine would guess rightly or wrongly?

  I wanted to flee with Joseph, but where would we go? Paris had railroads to every corner of Europe, and in all of them we would be penniless. I hadn’t saved more than pocket change out of the remittances. Without Cannu’s money and consent I had no way to care for Joseph. Not even to feed or clothe him, to say nothing of educating him or setting him up in the world. I might have had enough pride to choke myself on it, but not enough to starve my child. And I did not want to test his love for me against the loss of everything he had been raised to expect from life. When I imagined us holed up in a garret somewhere deeper in the Continent, or maybe in England, I could not quite picture us clinging to each other; in my mind’s eye I was clinging to him, and he was cursing how much I’d given up on his behalf. I did not doubt his love for me, but I was afraid of having to acknowledge that it might not be as all-encompassing as mine for him.

  I wrung my hands for two more days, somehow both frantic and paralyzed. I couldn’t sleep, although by Thursday evening I’d grown so tired I was seeing things that weren’t there. I packed and unpacked suitcases and trunks until the apartment looked like a flea market, pots and pans in the living room, piles of clothes on the kitchen counter. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Joseph what was happening, although he wasn’t an idiot. He knew something was very wrong.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, looking at my open trunk, which at that moment contained nothing except a bar of soap, a pair of stockings, and Joseph’s old christening gown.

  “We. Us. I’m not going anywhere without you.”

  “Then where are we going?”

  “Antarctica. China. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere. I’ve got a history exam on Friday.” After a pause he asked, “Have you talked to Uncle Conrad? Maybe he could help with whatever’s wrong. Whatever it is you won’t tell me.”

  Yes, I thought. Conrad. Steady Conrad, loaner of money, fixer of problems. He’d been keeping Eric afloat since our father died. Couldn’t it be my turn to climb up out of the waves and onto his shoulders? The good ship SS Conrad.

  On Friday I waited for Joseph outside his school with two hastily repacked suitcases. “We’re going to your uncle Conrad’s,” I said, although I hadn’t warned either Conrad or Mathilde that we were coming.

  After her initial surprise, Mathilde met our presence with equanimity, with rote offers of food and drink. I recognized the blankness on her face as the same one I’d so often donned, the face of someone who knows what’s expected of her and will continue the performance for however long it’s required.

  “Will you be needing a place to sleep?” she asked, with a sidelong glance at the suitcases.

  “If it isn’t a bother,” I said. There was a gas leak in the building, I explained, and the tenants had been evacuated until it could be fixed—words that I hadn’t realized would come out of my mouth until they did. But I didn’t want to confide in Mathilde, not yet. I wanted my brother.

  “Are my things going to blow up?” Joseph asked. “Did you pack my comics?”

  “Nothing’s going to blow up,” I said.

  “I wish you’d just tell me what’s happening,” he said.

  Mathilde’s cup rattled in its saucer, her hands betraying the surprise she was so carefully keeping from her face.

  “Go to your room,” I snapped. “I’m sure you have homework.”

  “What room?”

  “I’ll show you,” Mathilde said. “Follow me.”

  She ushered him into the second bedroom, which was still unfilled. I knew she and Conrad had consulted doctors, but there had been no remedy. Now here was Joseph, occupying her empty room the way he’d occupy the same childless space at Cannu and Albertine’s. How had this family made so few children? I pictured all of us adults circling Joseph like vultures, each of our shadows crossing his face from the air. It was a funny image, for a moment, before I pushed it away. Mine, he was mine. Let the scavengers pluck a child from some other nest.

  Conrad was late coming home and Mathilde apologized, saying he often worked long hours. I detected the annoyance in her voice, not for me or Joseph so much as for the regularity of his absence. She asked if I’d like to lie down for a bit while she prepared supper, and I declined but understood then that I must look as sleepless and wild as I felt.

  When the front door opened, she rushed around the corner to meet Conrad in the hall. There was whispering and then they came into the living room, Conrad still holding his hat and briefcase. “A gas leak?” he said.

  While I’d meant to quickly deliver the truth, I felt myself nodding. It sounded true, as if my life since Pierre’s death had been one slow, torturous leak and Cannu had finally lit the match. “Brooooosh,” I said, flowering my fingers like petals, as if I were holding an explosion in my lap and stroking the shrapnel headed for my face.

  “You’re not all right,” he said, with both kindness and matter-of-factness, as if making sure the three of us agreed before proceeding. He put his briefcase and hat on a chair and joined me on the sofa.

  “Cannu’s requested custody.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Conrad’s mouth opened slightly but no words emerged, and I knew I’d shocked him. He glanced up at Mathilde, who began walking backward into the kitchen, politeness pushing her from the room but curiosity preventing her from turning.

  “I know I should have come earlier. I haven’t known what to do.”

  “Come earlier to…? Forgive me if I’m missing something, but—I didn’t think you had any legal standing. To dispute.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how can we help?” He said this gently, too gently, and I felt too stupid to say that I had wanted him to proffer a solution, as if he might have come across this situation somewhere in all his textbooks, his experiments, as if this were some long and complicated chemical reaction he could still balance. I had made the mistake of thinking an education might yet be full of marvels.

  “I hate to ask…but if I had a loan. We could go elsewhere. Joseph and I. Somewhere he won’t find us.”

  Conrad looked at me pityingly.

  “I don’t know if you have it to spare,” I said, as if the most impossible part of what I’d said was only the money.

  “And what then? What would you do after it ran out?”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’ll figure it out. I can’t think now.”

  “I believe that’s correct. That you aren’t thinking straight right now.”

/>   “I can’t just hand him over.”

  “You can, if you have to. If that’s what’s best for Joseph.”

  How could my own brother think that separation might ever be for the best? I stood and looked down at him, my fists clenched. If I’d had a bottle of ink, I would have poured it down his face. Instead I grabbed his hat from the chair and threw it. It sailed unsatisfyingly across the room and landed on a console table as if it had been placed there on purpose. “You don’t understand,” I snapped. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a child.”

  I was not proud of how his face hardened then over something he never let anyone see. I was glad that Mathilde was in the kitchen, that it was at least possible she hadn’t overheard, although I imagined she and Joseph were both standing silently in their separate rooms, straining to listen.

  Conrad let his breath out slowly. “If he’s not in Cherbourg by tomorrow night, you’re breaking the law. You’re kidnapping.”

  “How can you dare call it that?”

  “I mean that’s how the law would see it. And if you’re both still here after tomorrow, I’d be harboring fugitives.”

  “You won’t let us stay.”

  “You can stay. You can stay as long as you need. But we have to take Joseph to Cherbourg.”

  “So you won’t help me.” I was moving around the room by then, in tight circles that offered me nothing to break, nothing to spill. I pushed his hat from the console table to the floor, as if that might convince him of anything.

  “I am helping. I understand why it doesn’t feel that way to you, but I am trying to keep this from becoming worse than it has to be.”

  “Never mind. I’ll ask someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Eric,” I said, the first name that came to my lips, and we were both surprised to hear it, although who else could I have said? I had no one. The only other name I’d churned through in the last few days was Philippe’s, and I’d already discarded it: I had no claim on him, didn’t even know where he lived, and going to him now would seem to confirm everything Cannu had alleged.