Eve waited; she knew when to wait. The sun reached the rim of the mountains. She heard the bell of St. Barthelemy’s begin to toll and finally went on, out of the sun and into the Rue Oscura—or, as its resident called it in Provençal, the “Carriera Scura.” She passed under suspended iron cages that had once held oil lamps and now contained low-wattage bulbs. She came to the house with barred windows, the iron woven bar through bar. The door was open a crack and Eve went in, switching on lights as she went.
She unfastened one shutter on the windows in the wall of the house that was continuous with the spur on which Dardo was built. Eve looked down on the crown of an ash growing on an outcrop, then farther, to the meadow, from which the smoke of chaff still went up in the wind.
Cold air breathed out of every room in the house, the cold of several months past, an April chill, not fierce but persistent—spring had seemed to take its time that year. The house had been shut up all that time—closed but not unoccupied. Eve listened and thought she heard a whisper, an endearment, as of a person soothing another who has had a bad dream.
She left the window and switched on the halogen lamp over the tilted plan table. She studied the parchment pinned there, the vivid intricacies of an illuminated picture. In the picture everything was in focus, a city escape piled up into a foreground, building on building like tiles. There was no air in the picture. Eve looked at the collapsed concrete slab construction, the rags pinched between masonry; spilled intestines of electrical cord; dangling nodes of a fuse box, an electric jug, a television; the whole structure oozing matter like an overfilled burger bun. Above the tiled cityscape was a row of hanging empty body bags. These were the nearest thing to bodies the artist had drawn in a long, long while.
Out of the corner of her eye Eve saw a foggy shape in one of the black doorways. Then he was standing beside her, looking at her with his clear, giveaway eyes. Eve could see that his skin was still papery and powdered-looking. He wasn’t yet up to speed. He looked sleepy but sane.
Lou Ila pointed at the window. Eve went and pulled the shutters closed and stroked their slats down. “Churr,” said Ila, imitating a shutter. He wasn’t really with her yet. He padded into the kitchen and she heard his long nails clicking together as he turned the tap. He came out a moment later with his face and hair damp, said hello to her in Provençal, and gave her a pair of nail clippers. They sat down and she trimmed his fingernails. After she’d done his hands he lifted his feet and held them steady, and at the right height, while she did those, too. She finished and he took her hand, kissed it, and slipped its edge into his mouth. Eve felt the spines on the roof of his mouth lift against the ball of her thumb. They flexed but didn’t pierce. She remained quite still while he tasted her, breathing softly, his eyes closed. After a time he released her hand, glossy with spit and thin strings of congealing blood—not her own. He smelled of pastis.
“I’m awake,” he said in Provençal. “But Dawn must sleep.” Then he said, “Tell me about Martine.”
Eve Moskelute’s translation of the Marquis de Chambord’s romance, Lumière du Jour, commences with these words, Chambord’s epigraph: “Whoever comes to these pages looking for illumination will find it in the form of candles, floating wicks, pitch-soaked link lights, moonlight, starlight, and fire suspended in fountains of crystal—but never the light of day, so-called cold.”
Chapter 8
FATHER OCTAVE’S PARABLE OF THE ALBINOS
At Ventimiglia, where he had to change trains, Bad put his pack on and trudged out to the tabac at the station entrance. There he found two maps, one of Nice showing the major streets on the Cap de Nice and the one Gino had said he’d need, a map of the Vallée de Roya showing the main routes into the Parc Mercantour, where they planned to meet in two weeks and do some rock climbing. Bad paid for the maps, then went back into the station to change his lire for francs.
Bad bought his ticket—Classe 2, Nice Ville—and found his platform. It filled gradually with people carrying bags, boxes, and even suitcases full of clinking bottles.
Bad’s map of the Roya didn’t have the Parc Mercantour in any detail, but he opened it to take a look at the topography. The chart was framed by photographs of the rock paintings on Mont Bego, hikers on sunny summits, and wildlife—le loup, le boquetin, le fier chamois. Bad stared at the chamois and thought of the butcher from Dardo, who had taken the chamois he’d found at his door with its neck broken as a gift from the partisans. He thought of the glow on Eve Moskelute’s face as she said, “Someone had seen the butcher …” “Someone had followed the soldier.” “There’s always someone,” she’d said. The butcher killed the soldier, and someone broke a chamois’s neck and placed it on the butcher’s step, as though in payment. Bad wondered, Who was “someone”?
Bad left his pack and ambled over to the edge of the platform. The rails and ties had been sanitized, sprinkled with quicklime. The lime was yellow already and melted over lumps of toilet tissue and other matter that had fallen from the bowels of trains. But Bad saw the lime as snow. He saw the slope of a mountain, a narrow path down which someone was walking, the chamois across his shoulders, its hooves gathered in his hands.
Bad took up his pack, went back down into the underpass and up into the station—where he purchased another ticket, to a different destination.
The train was elderly and each carriage had its own engine. Beyond Airole the gradient increased and these engines “put their shoulders to the wheels.” Bad was in the smoking section of one carriage. The train was full and he’d been lucky to get a seat. His pack was in a rack at the end of the compartment, beyond a partition of tinted glass. Bad kept his eye on the rack, though he couldn’t distinguish his own pack from the mass. The glass partition partly reflected the landscape so that the view in the window beside it seemed to pull away from itself. There was a line at which the image appeared and bled, the landscape apparently generated at the line as if it were pouring through a hairline crack and into the train from a place where all the colors and shapes of the outdoors were stored in a compressed form.
Thirty minutes out of Ventimiglia the air in the smoking compartment was at full saturation. Bad’s eyes were stinging. He chose to sacrifice his seat and went out to the noisy compartment beside the carriage doors, caught hold of a pole, and turned to face his pack again. He planted his feet and practiced patience. A few minutes later, through the window, the river widened and became a small aqua lake with one straight shore, where there was a dam. On the shore of the lake was Breil-sur-Roya, a town with red-roofed buildings and extensive rail yards, built on the last flat land before the Col de Tende.
The train pulled into the station and most of the people by the doors got off.
There were police on the platform. They waited for the doors to clear to board and, while they were waiting, a couple of young men slithered out windows on the train’s far side and pelted away along a fence whose barbed-wire top angled out over the carriage roofs. Several police went in pursuit. Bad saw a young man flash past the window. He put his face to the glass and watched the young man overshoot a gap where wire had been prized away from the foot of the fence. The man skidded to a stop, spraying gravel, then crammed himself through the gap, scrambled up, and pounded away toward a collection of engine houses, their cement streaked with black mildew. The officer who followed him was fatter and had a gun belt and buttoned epaulets to catch and slow him as he, too, squeezed through the gap. Bad craned his neck to follow the chase out of sight.
“Algerians,” said the only person left in the compartment by the door. “Illegal immigrants.”
Breil-sur-Roya was the first stop along that line across the border. The train, bound for Cuneo, would leave France again beyond Tende. This section of the rail line was in a little hemorrhage of the richer country into the poorer. Since the formation of the European Union the border itself was no longer patrolled, but Gino had told Bad and his girlfriend that they should always carry their passports when traveling
anywhere within a hundred kilometers of it. Bad had forgotten his once, on a day trip between Genoa and San Remo. The police got on the train and asked for Bad’s passport, and there was an uncomfortable moment when they were hardening into severity and signaling him up out of his seat. But when Bad told them he was from New Zealand they relinquished him—a time-wasting person of irrelevant and inconsiderable origins.
The train was slow to leave Breil but departed with a group of police on board. They eventually appeared and Bad gave them his passport. They looked at its cover and gave it back.
They stood over the other passenger, a slight, dark-skinned man perched on one of the fold-down seats with his bag tucked back behind his feet. He unzipped his jacket and handed his passport up to them. Bad peeked and saw a maple leaf. The police positively softened; they were deferential, hushed, and meek. They gave the passport back, touched their caps, and departed—didn’t even begin to swagger till they had passed through into the smoking carriage.
Bad flipped down the seat opposite the Canadian and sat, his arms folded, eyeing the man. He made a description: male, Indian or Eurasian, early forties, medium build, medium height, graying black hair, dark complexion, brown eyes.
The train turned a corner; sunlight struck down through a crevice in the cloud.
Green eyes. Dog collar. It was the dog collar that had inspired deference in the police, not the passport.
The tourist assessed Daniel point by point, as though he were thinking of buying him. The tourist was big and took up space beyond his skin; he shone with vitality. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and pushed up his sleeves, his palms rasping over the thick hair on his forearms. He looked into Daniel, and colored, so that Daniel could actually see the pulse pressing in his lower lip. “You’re Father Daniel Octave,” he said.
“I am,” said Daniel.
The tourist sat straight again. He looked immensely satisfied. He told Daniel that, before getting on the train, he’d bought a book about the Roya Valley. For the pretty pictures, of course, and the map with camping sites marked. But he had also wanted a brief history of Dardo. He’d heard a little about that saint, Martine Raimondi, and wanted to read up on her.
The tourist had a casual manner and a pleasant smile.
“Is my name in the guidebook?” Daniel was incredulous.
“No. Your name is on the Web site where I learned the little I know.”
The tourist was smooth. He had a kind of practiced plausibility but still gave off smoke, like a buried fire. He said, “The book is in French, and my French is pretty bad.”
Daniel asked the tourist what he wanted to know.
“I’d like to know about Martine Raimondi’s second miracle. From what I can make out the book talks about a boy, Jacques Palomba, age fourteen?” The tourist waited, then said, “It’s very convenient you’re here, Father. You don’t mind, do you? I’ve been in Italy for weeks, and a native English speaker is a bit of a treat for me.”
Daniel said that he wasn’t a native English speaker. He said he’d be brief.
In July 1992 there was an unexpected deluge in the Maritime Alps. It was a civil defense emergency and caused a number of deaths. “Twelve in total. Six in car accidents. And a couple were swept into the Bevera when they went down in the dark to inspect something at the edge of their property. And there were three fatalities in the mountains. Two climbers were knocked off a rock face by a hailstorm. Then there was Jacques Palomba. He was with a school party in a large cave system. He was carried off by a flooded subterranean river and swept deep underground. Every experienced caver from Milan to Marseille went into the caves once the water receded. There were other people trapped—the whole school party and other cavers. Six days later they’d gone over the whole system, rescued forty-five people, and recovered one body. Jacques Palomba was nowhere to be found. His family were from Dardo—though they lived in Monaco. His mother and his sisters and his mother’s sisters went to pray at the then unofficial shrine in the Grotte de la Hermit—a cave above the Roya River. They prayed to Martine Raimondi, for her intercession. They prayed for Jacques’s safety. Eight days after he was sucked into a flooded hole Jacques Palomba was found, damp and very hungry but intact, by a party of cavers whom his father had paid to continue to search for his body. The boy was scarcely dehydrated and was only two hundred meters from the surface, in an easy passage. He was wrapped in an ancient sleeping bag, one of a number usually kept in a huge cavern called the Salle de la Nef—the Nave. Palomba was very confused but did say later in the hospital that he had been asleep in an ‘underground chapel.’ There was a lot of traffic through the Salle de la Nef, but Palomba hadn’t been seen there. Still, he was asked if he meant the big cavern, and he said no, it was a small, warm cave with lights and paintings, like a church.
“When I interviewed him six months later he was able to tell me that he first regained consciousness, half-drowned and in the dark, and when he’d come to an exhausted end of his bout of panicked calling, he prayed. He prayed to God and to Mary; then he remembered Martine Raimondi’s first miracle, and he asked her for her help.”
Daniel finished his account as the train, engines making a determined clatter, came out of a tunnel on a narrow stretch of track, a flume of green-and-white rapids in the gorge below them and the cliff looming above, screened by a fence of steel cable, already bulging with trapped rubble. Horizontal cables lay across the uphill view like staves on sheet music, behind them a sparse tune of broken stone, broom flowers, and the rose-brown of blooming smoke bush.
It began to hail. The gorge went black, its rock instantly soaked. The hail cracked on the reinforced glass skylight on the carriage roof, and lightning flickered like a welder’s torch.
The tourist said something Daniel couldn’t catch above the rattle of the hailstones. Daniel saw him laugh and shake his head. The train went into another tunnel, and even above the echo of its engines on the tunnel’s walls Daniel could hear a mushy dripping as melted ice slid down the curve of the carriage roof.
Daniel looked hard at the tourist. If he could hear the water, even judge its composition, why couldn’t he hear the tourist? Daniel was not hearing things—which was a difficulty he sometimes had, to do with his mother, who was only ever silent when she was sleeping.
Daniel asked the tourist what he’d said.
The train came out of the tunnel and into the hail again. Pebbly ice was piled on the track. The train’s wheels hit the hailstones on the rails and began to slip, to revolve without catching. The engines surged, but the train was still; then it began to slide back downhill, and into the tunnel.
“Jesus!” the tourist said. He’d gone white.
The train stopped sliding. It idled, vibrating in the dark.
“Okay. He’s waiting,” the tourist said, of the driver. He looked into Daniel’s eyes. “I said that I was trapped in a cave, Le Lien Vert, by the flood in ’92.”
“How strange,” Daniel said. His ears were full of all the ambient sounds. He could hear the steel slats of the engine’s vents tinkle as the engine shook them—a high, glassy tinkling above the bass cacophony of the engine and its echo. But the tourist’s voice was muddy, his words scarcely distinguishable. Daniel frowned and tried to follow what was said.
“There was someone with me for a time,” the tourist said. “I lost her. She was the sister of a woman named Eve Moskelute, whom you might know. The widow of the artist Ares.”
“We haven’t met, but I know who she is,” Daniel said. “But I don’t know about her sister….” He felt the blood leaving his head. This conversation was too strange, too much in accord with Daniel’s own, private, thoughts.
“That’s not all,” the tourist said. “Four days ago my friend Gino and I helped recover a body from a sea cave in Riomaggiore. The body of a woman. A friend of Eve Moskelute. You knew her, too.”
Daniel said, “Who sent you?”
“To Riomaggiore?” the tourist said, then, “I
was just there. But do you mean who sent me to you? People don’t get sent, Father. I should know.” The tourist was shaking his head; the fluorescent lights behind their greenish plastic were cold on his glossy curls. “I should know,” he said again. He was a healthy young man, but for a moment his face, long and pale with feeling, looked like that of a corpse.
The train moved; it began to creep out of the tunnel. The hail had stopped and water was gushing down narrow flues in the cliff face. The wheels gripped and the train picked up speed.
“Something funny’s going on,” the tourist said.
Daniel shook his head.
“They had the same hair—Martine Dardo and Ms. Moskelute’s sister. That sounds silly, I know, but you’ve presumably noticed Ms. Dardo’s hair. That isn’t a style people choose; it’s not what hairdressers do. Even with a dark dye job and blond roots there’s a clear demarcation in the colors….”
“You’re being absurd,” said Daniel.
“Look,” said the tourist, and Daniel leaned in to listen to more testimony but got something else instead.
The tourist said that when he was a kid he was a real ratbag, always making his dad go apeshit. So Pops—his mother’s father—who had the family farm, and money, sent him to boarding school. He hated it and ran away all the time. The prefects used to hunt him down, beat him up, and haul him back, but he kept doing it. Eventually one of them said something to him, something that made sense. The school wasn’t the world, the prefect said, and he should be patient and wait to get out and in the meantime make something of the opportunities it offered him. The school wasn’t the world, but it was like the world in that its rules weren’t going to just go away. “He said, ‘Where were you running to anyway? What else is there?’ Which could just about be the motto of my life.” The young man frowned, thinking.
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