“By the seat of his pants.” Matias chuckled. He must have heard it too.
“He married young, but couldn’t cope with being tied down. He was a free spirit. He traveled about the country with his guitar and this incredible magnetism. I met him in Mexico. He was Jack Magellan, just plain Jack Magellan. But they all fell in love with him, even then. We were young, barely twenty. We got on and set up our business in New Jersey and he changed his name to Coyote, because that was what this old black fugitive called him when he was a child, running wild.”
“The Old Man of Virginia,” I said, hearing the satisfactory clink of another piece of puzzle. “The one who taught him to play the guitar. Why New Jersey?”
Matias’ eyes misted a moment with nostalgia. “Coyote took a map of America and closed his eyes. I turned him about a few times. He put his finger down on New Jersey and that was that.”
“But he fought in the war, didn’t he?” I asked, recalling the face in my dream.
“Yes; when America entered the war, Coyote wanted to be part of it. He loved adventure.”
“What about his family?”
“God knows whether his wife put up with it or not. He never talked about her and I didn’t ask.”
“Coyote was always running away, Mischa,” said Maria Elena kindly. “He ran from his wife and children. He ran off to war. When he returned he was rarely around. He traveled for business, picking things up all over the world. I think he was running from himself.”
“He was a different person in each county, hijo. I bet his name wasn’t even Jack Magellan. Coyote was a nickname that suited him. He was a wild dog!”
“I don’t think he really knew who he was,” Maria Elena added.
“So he ran away again?” I stated simply. “From us.”
“That is the part that baffles me, hijo,” said Matias, shaking his curly head. “Business was doing well. We were making money. He was happy with your mother and he loved you.”
“Oh, he was passionate about you, Mischa, and so proud,” said Maria Elena.
“Then why didn’t he come back?”
“I assumed he was dead,” said Matias gravely.
“At least then it would all make sense,” agreed Maria Elena. “Now we know he’s not dead, the mystery only thickens.”
“It doesn’t add up. You don’t think his disappearance had anything to do with the break-ins?” I suggested.
“Perhaps,” said Matias. “Coyote was a secretive man, while giving you the impression that you knew him. No, he was like an onion with many layers, no one knew what was at the core. I imagine there’s a story there that would knock our socks off if we ever found out. Coyote never did anything in the conventional way.”
“Or in an honest way,” Maria Elena chipped in. “He was a shadow one could never pin down. I might add that much of the stuff he sold at the store was either fake or stolen.”
“But no Titian,” I said.
“No Titian. Believe me, if he’d had a Titian stashed away in the warehouse he would never have left.”
That evening we dined at a fish restaurant in Viña del Mar, looking out over the sea. I noticed the women were very beautiful, with golden skin and long black hair, their eyes shining dark and mysterious in the flickering candlelight. I appraised them shamelessly, tracing their features appreciatively with lazy eyes. They caught my gaze and lowered their eyes hastily, with a coyness one wouldn’t find in America, like timid birds. Linda was now a distant memory, thanks in part to the thousands of miles that separated us. “I’m glad you’ve found your feet and made a success of your business,” said Maria Elena, looking at me with motherly affection.
“It was my mother who made it a success. It wasn’t hard for me to keep it going.”
“You must have an eye, though?”
“I love old things. I like to feel the pasts that lie within them. They all echo with the vibrations of the people who owned them and the places they’ve sat in. I love to imagine the English castles and French châteaux, the Italian palazzi and those great German schloss. The grand families who’ve lived in them and collected treasures from all over the world for hundreds of years. Those great tours they did, returning with their pieces of history. I love to run my hand over the wood and feel the heartbeat, because they do beat, you know, if you listen.” I was aware that I was opening up in a way that I had never opened up to anyone. I had never been able to talk about love, on any level.
“As a boy you loved a certain bureau made from walnut,” said Matias.
“I remember,” I said with childish enthusiasm. “It had secret drawers and beneath the floor of the desk there was a hidden lever. It was glorious!”
“You always asked about the origins of all the goods. You were fascinated by a tapestry,” he added, gulping down a mouthful of wine.
“I remember. Bacchus and his drunken nymphs. I loved it because it reminded me of the château where I grew up.”
“Your mother never spoke of France,” said Maria Elena softly.
“That’s because we didn’t live in the château. It belonged to a family before the war and my mother worked there. Then, when the Germans came, they occupied it and my mother fell in love with one of the officers.”
“She never told us that,” said Maria Elena, frowning. “I assumed he was French.”
“No, my father was a German and my mother was severely punished for her betrayal at the end of the war. I lost my voice because of her humiliation and because they nearly killed me.”
“Oh, Mischa, I never knew!” Maria Elena’s eyes filled with tears and she placed her hand on my arm. Without thinking, I placed mine on top of hers and left it there.
“You know, I’ve never spoken about this to anyone, not even Linda, my girlfriend for nine years.”
“You bottled it up all that time?”
“I never needed to communicate. My mother understood and she was my best friend.”
“I know. She loved you with every fiber of her body.”
“You said Coyote gave you back your voice,” said Matias. “I remember hearing you on the radio!”
“Gray Thistlewaite,” I chuckled. “In your living rooms, in your kitchens, and in your lives, making them better and brighter in my own small way.” I imitated her voice to perfection and Matias roared with laughter like an old lion. “I meant it when I said that Coyote was magic. You see, he arrived and everything changed. I can’t describe to you how people treated us before. We were outcasts. I was worse than the rats they set traps for in the cellars. Coyote played his guitar, sang old cowboy songs, and defrosted people’s hearts. First the children included me in their games, then the grown-ups began to forgive. He enchanted them all, or put them all to shame. I have a distant memory. I don’t know whether it’s true. That it was Coyote who rescued us from the crowd at the end of the war. My mother was naked and shaven, her face as hollow and pale as a ghost. They held me up to the crowd and all I heard were their cries and their hatred. Then I was in her arms and an American put his shirt around us. I swear it was Coyote.”
“It might well have been. Perhaps that is why he returned, because it was the town he helped to liberate,” said Maria Elena.
“It makes sense,” I said with a shrug. “I was only three.”
“Go on with your story,” she insisted. “I want to know everything.”
“So, one Sunday he came with us to Mass,” I continued. “I hated going because it was like running the gauntlet every week. Staring at me were the very people who had bayed for my blood. They had come with their pitchforks and hammers intending to beat us to death. Even the priest had stood by and let it happen. Yet, every Sunday my mother insisted on going to Mass, to sit in their midst and pray. I don’t know why she did it — defiance, probably. She wasn’t one to let people believe they had beaten her. But I was so afraid. When Coyote came with us, it was different. I saw admiration in their eyes, not hatred. Then, in the middle of the service, I thought I heard the v
oice of an angel. But it wasn’t an angel. It was my own voice, audible at last.”
Maria Elena wiped her eyes with trembling fingers. “Mischa, mi amor, you suffered so much and we never knew.”
“But Coyote put it all right, you see. If it hadn’t been for him we would have always lived in the shadows and I would have continued to live behind a screen, unable to reach anyone.”
“Then he left,” said Matias.
“And I lost my way.”
“It’s understandable.”
“But you owe yourself better,” said Maria Elena. “Coyote might have opened your heart, but you did all the rest on your own.”
That night I walked up the beach with Maria Elena, just the two of us. The sky was crisp and clear, the stars little eyes into another world beyond our senses where my mother existed with my father, in peace, I hoped, still holding on to her secrets that I was now unraveling one by one. “Now I understand why your mother was so protective of you,” Maria Elena said, taking my hand.
“We were always alone. It was always just the two of us.”
“Because there was no room for anyone else.” I frowned. She looked up at me, the lines on her face illuminated by the moon like rivers on a map. “You know I’m right. Don’t you think Linda might have felt like an outsider?”
“Perhaps, I never gave her a chance.”
“You were like the son we never had, Mischa, and your mother knew that. Why do you think you left New Jersey?”
“Because Coyote had gone, there was nothing left for my mother there.”
“No, because she couldn’t bear you to be close to anyone else but her.”
“That’s not true!” I exclaimed, but my voice was weaker than I intended.
“Yes, it is. She held on to you jealously. When you moved to New York, I tried to see her numerous times because I wanted to see you. But she was always busy with this or that. You slipped away.”
“I was going through my difficult stage,” I said with a bitter chuckle.
“And I wanted to be there for you. You’d had so little stability. After Coyote left, you went into a terrible decline. I wanted to help you through it, but your mother didn’t like it. I regret that I didn’t try harder. You left for the city and we were bereft. In the end the only way to move on was to start a new life in Chile.”
“I remember sitting in your garden playing with your dogs,” I said, suddenly feeling weighed down with sorrow.
“Gringo and Billy.”
“Gringo and Billy. Whatever happened to them?”
“They went the way of all creatures,” she said, raising her eyes to the sky. “Your mother was a good woman. Now I know more about your past, I understand why she held on to you. You were all she had.”
“And she was all I had, too,” I said.
Then something broke inside me. I heard the snap but I was too late to stop the flood. We sat down on the sand and Maria Elena wrapped her arms around me, a giant of a man in her frail embrace. I sobbed like a child and all the grief I had retained over the years was expelled so that the healing could begin at last.
26
I stayed with Matias and Maria Elena for a fortnight. During those long summer days we spent time just getting to know each other again. We drank far too many pisco sours, laughed until our jaws ached, and reminisced. With them I had nothing to hide. I opened up like a clam, whose shell, once prized apart, remains agape without any effort. We wandered up and down the beach, our feet in the sea, the warm amber light of sunset bathing us in an almost heavenly glow while the tides took my grief and washed it away. I watched Matias with his birds, the way he caressed them and fed them, nursed them and played among them, and realized that they, not I, were the children he never had. We had reunited but I couldn’t stay, as much as I wanted to. I had to return to Maurilliac and dig up the skeletons of the past. Matias and Maria Elena had given me the courage to do so.
I hated saying good-bye. I hated to see the pain in their eyes. Matias slapped me too hard on the back, then embraced me with such fervor I nearly suffocated. Maria Elena planted a kiss on my cheek. It remained on my skin the entire journey to France, like a whisper. They said they’d always be there for me. But that wasn’t true. Nothing in life is permanent. Time would carry us on, but it would run out eventually. One day they wouldn’t be there anymore and I’d be alone again. Always alone, a solitary chevalier.
I was anxious about returning to France. Logic told me that all the old demons would have died off, like Monsieur Cezade and Père Abel-Louis, or be so decrepit they’d no longer pose a threat. I was in my forties, and yet, inside, I was still the little boy who used to hide behind the chair in the corridor of the château in the hope of spying Joy Springtoe or Daphne Halifax.
I remembered everything and was afraid of change. I wanted the fields of vines to be the same as they had been when I had run up and down the narrow aisles with Pistou. I wanted Jacques Reynard to be in his workshop with his cap askew and his eyes twinkling with mischief, but if Monsieur Cezade and Père Abel-Louis were old and senile, then Jacques would be too. I wondered whether, as a man, I would see them all through different eyes, like the old teacher from New Jersey I had since bumped into in New York and shared a coffee with. I had never much liked him when I was a schoolboy, but I found, to my surprise, that we had more in common than I would ever have imagined. Would I then share a joke with Monsieur Cezade? Would I empathize with Père Abel-Louis?
Logic told me that I’d probably recognize no one. I was six years old when I had left. Faces from my past had faded with the years like photographs left in the sun. The few that featured in my nightmares I remembered too vividly, but the others were gone. Another generation would have grown up in the time that I had been away. New shops would have set down their roots in the Place de l’Eglise, children I did not recognize would play cache-cache among the trees until the shadow of the church would fall over them and they would scatter home like pigeons. Perhaps I’d recognize Claudine in the face of a little girl, or Laurent in the features of a dark-haired, black-eyed boy. If I had stayed, perhaps my children would be playing among them. And what of the people of Maurilliac? Would time have blunted their knives and dulled their memories? The war had finished forty years ago, but was forty years enough to wash away hatred such as theirs?
It didn’t surprise me at all that Coyote hadn’t paid his hotel bill. He had looked like a man of means, but that was his genius; he could assume any identity he wanted, like a good actor. In spite of all that Matias and Maria Elena had told me, I believed the Coyote I had loved was the real man and not a creation. I didn’t believe that love could be feigned. I remembered it in his eyes, I remembered the feel of it, like warm honey in my heart. No, the Coyote I knew had loved me.
I hoped to see Claudine. I hoped she hadn’t moved away from the village. So many French people did these days. I wondered whether I’d recognize her. I closed my eyes on the plane and remembered her: that toothy smile, her long brown hair and green eyes. She had enjoyed breaking the rules and defying her mother. She had shown great courage in befriending me. I remembered playing with her on the stone bridge, throwing pebbles into the river, stealing her hat and running off with it, panting with laughter. I remembered her encouragement in the school playground and the dead fish plot that went so badly wrong. I remembered, too, my confrontation with Laurent. I wanted to see her again, to thank her. She was my only childhood friend, except for Pistou. And what of Pistou?
With his dark hair and impish face and those deep-set brown eyes that were full of understanding, he had appeared in the night to comfort me when I suffered those terrible nightmares. I recalled him with clarity, as if he had been real and not imaginary. I realized now, of course, that he had been a figment of my imagination. I didn’t believe in spirits. Alone so much of the time, I had fabricated a little friend for company. Surrounded by so many enemies, I had created an ally in Pistou. Where I was so misunderstood, he had understood me compl
etely. With him I hadn’t needed to speak, for he could hear my inner voice. It wasn’t surprising that out of loneliness and fear I had invented a little boy like me who could do all the things that I couldn’t. Like pinch Madame Duval’s bottom and hide her glasses, and steal Monsieur Duval’s cigars. I had believed Coyote could see him, because I had wanted him to share something with me that no one else shared. In my memory, though, Pistou had been real. I remembered his touch, his smell, his voice, his laughter. But my grown-up mind told me that it simply wasn’t possible. If I hoped to see Pistou on my return, I would be disappointed.
The journey was long, the plane hopping from country to country like a grasshopper until finally I took a flight from Paris to Bordeaux. The moment I stepped out of the plane the scent of France caused my stomach to flip over. The day wasn’t hot, for it was February. The sky was gray and a light drizzle fell from heavy clouds, but there was something in the air that reminded me of home. I stood on the tarmac bewildered and becalmed, the years unraveling around me like a ball of string. I must have turned pale for a kindly flight attendant approached me. “Are you all right, Monsieur?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied in French. “I think I need to sit down.” She escorted me into the baggage reclaim where I sank on to a chair.
“Can I get you a glass of water?”
“Thank you,” I replied, my mouth suddenly dry and sticky. While she disappeared in search of water, I watched the people around me. Everyone had someone: mothers with children, husbands with wives, grandparents with grandchildren. There were a few men on business, in suits with briefcases, but even they wore the contented faces of those who surrounded themselves with friends. I was not like them. I was alone. I had built a wall like a fortress around myself; I hadn’t let anyone else in. Not even Linda, who had tried. No one had been able to penetrate those walls and I hadn’t left their security. While they had kept everyone else out, they had kept me in, a prisoner.
The flight attendant returned with a glass of water, which I drank thirstily. “Where are you staying?” she asked.
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