Iris de Valday, the little countess, thrived, and had her portrait painted by a great Parisian artist, fat-armed in a foam of lace on her nineteen-year-old mother’s knee.
Baptiste and Anne’s son was never well. He was large, but had rough, dark hairy skin and a terrible thirst, never seemed to keep enough water in his body. He died at eighteen months. The only words he ever learned were what he craved: ‘water’, ‘salt’.
The priest followed Sobran away from the grave. ‘Monsieur Jodeau?’ he said, hesitated, then took Sobran’s arm. ‘My son.’
Sobran said, ‘Christophe Lizet has just reminded me that it is only the fifth Jodeau family funeral in over thirty years. He’s keeping a tally, working up some figures on our luck.’ Sobran then laid the names between himself and the priest in order to keep the conversation polite. ‘Mother and Father, Nicolette, Léon, little Paul.’
‘God rest, and have mercy on, their souls. Will you come back to the Church now?’
‘Are you asking me whether I can forgive you for forbidding my brother the churchyard?’ Sobran loomed over the priest, but smiled. The priest scowled. Jodeau had just buried a grandchild but was standing there in his power, proud man, an affront to the place and the occasion. The priest bit his lip so that his face became all chin, a whiskery shovel.
‘The Church is no place for me,’ Sobran said.
‘Are you magnifying your sins against God’s mercy? No sin is greater than God’s mercy.’
‘I don’t know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me –’ Sobran said, which puzzled the priest – ‘so won’t vote for Him by attending church.’ He watched the priest cross himself. ‘I’m sorry, Father, penance and prayer are of no use to me. But please do offer every comfort you can to my son and his wife. Can I ask you for that? I’m not bargaining – but if you can bring them any comfort I’ll send my family back to your church.’
‘Do you think your sons will go where you won’t?’
Sobran was surprised. ‘My sons will do what I tell them.’
The letter read:
I couldn’t tell you where I’ve been. I don’t mean that I could tell you but won’t – I mean I don’t know. When people spoke to me I replied in whatever language they used. I had to invent things – like names. That was difficult for me and sometimes I said I was you. My feet became hard. I went around pretending there was nothing behind me – it was that conceit, or not move at all. After I was overpowered once I decided it was better to pretend to be someone and acknowledge the world at my back. It’s a shame about lepers, that there are no lepers now wandering around the landscape with their bells and wooden clappers and people leaping out of their paths. That would have suited me. I stole a Franciscan habit and played the begging friar but people kept giving me food and money I didn’t need. It was easier to accept the invitations of wealthy men and women and have a little conversation and contact – with the rest of it. What they wanted. And I came to like warmth and being clean.
This is my first letter. The first time I’ve put pen to paper. I’ve only ever read, and I thought writing would be like reading. I find it hard to believe I can alter a piece of paper in this way – like any other person.
‘Other people’ – I’ve learned that lie. I use the phrase because it is indispensable. We can’t live without ‘other people’. ‘Other people,’ I say to distinguish myself when explaining myself. When lying. Before, when I was honest, I seemed simple, an idiot and madman. Typical conversations used to go like this: A carriage stops where I’m walking along the roadside barefoot in the snow and someone says, through a scarf or veil, ‘You must be famished.’
And I agree that I must be – too heartily, because I want company but am not at all cold. Now I say, ‘God bless you,’ and knock my teeth together.
I borrowed his pen. He writes poetry. I think he thinks he’s another Lord Byron. He’s on the move all the time but with nothing whatsoever to run away from. He came back and was surprised to find me still in one of his rented villas, in dim rooms filled with shrouded furniture where the light comes through waterfalls of rain on the windows. He says he almost expects me to build a big web in the corner of the ballroom. Mirrors. I’m there now. He calls me his ‘fey’. I keep my back to the bottom sheet so that, without having laid eyes on the J’s and feathers, he doesn’t know how right he is.
I know you’ll mind this. I go through soap like nobody’s business. That’s his English expression and I like it. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am who I am’ – which is to say ‘That’s none of your business.’ I hope to learn that – how to repel by reflection. The scars on my back, the J and mirrored J, are Yahweh’s reply to Moses’s ‘Who are you?’ – the words of a God who will not explain himself, who won’t be questioned, who wants to be obeyed, not understood, who blinds people with their own light, their own world’s loveliness. I go through soap just thinking about soap – in my bath, rolling it between my hands, so smooth and pale and I keep hoping to be used up by handling as soap is.
I’ve learned too much about unhappiness. I have it now, a permanent condition, like deafness. When I go out and watch the creamy surf pouring into the cove I can’t hear it – I’m not here to hear – or something is crushing the sense out of me all the time.
I love you, Sobran, but I’m not coming near you until I stop wanting to burn away this pain with pain.
1842 L’Épluchage (the picking out of rotten and black grapes from the picked bunch)
Sobran did not show the letter to Aurora. Nor the next:
I found work as a gardener, promised the Head to work all day and that I could tell a weed from a cultivar. He laughed but did employ me. We’ve been grafting plum to peach. He says, ‘Who did you kill?’ That finding me is like finding a stray thoroughbred in the orchard, I have all the skills, I’m somebody’s gardener, he says. I invent a parent with whom I’ve quarrelled. That isn’t difficult. He’s offered to indenture me, and all the other undergardeners are bitterly jealous. ‘Other undergardeners’ – that’s more applicable than ‘other people’, I am not a person but am an undergardener.
I won’t stay here – before I got out of the last carriage in which I begged a ride I saw from its window a long ramp built on a bluff and, I think, some contraption intended for flight. I’ll go back there. I’ll have to walk or pay my way since I can’t stand any more to play Venus to various Tannhäusers in frockcoats or farthingales. I must be stronger, because the dark ones who used to find me when I was first wandering leave me alone now. I don’t know where they are. Maybe there are none in Germany. No one punishes me and I’m numb to all sensations without the sensation of pain.
Garmisch
5th March 1843
This Prussian count – he is forty-five – has lost one leg to cannon-fire and talks of having a surgeon take the other one off so that he can pilot his heavier-than-air machine. He says he’s not after a substitute for a man’s gait – he just needs to know if it can be done.
I’m working for him. I had no credentials of course and no one to make an introduction. I did take care to appear before him in something better than the shabby clothes I usually wander about in. ‘Usually’ – there’s a strange word. I usually haul water through the salt to my distillery. I usually lie on a rooftop, shaded by the palace’s bulk from the fires below, and read. I usually fly up where the air is thin and the horizon has a curve.
I got a new coat and shoes. I went and introduced myself, by another name. I told a truth – that I’d sat on a bench by the door of an inn in Bruges and watched a Scotsman sketch a glider. I told the Count that, if he wished, I could reproduce the Scots engineer’s drawing. The Count had his own plan book fetched, and I drew. I said I saw his glider when I passed in a coach last year. ‘Why didn’t you come then?’ the Count asked. I was about my father’s business, I said, then that I had thought by the look of it that it wouldn’t fly. ‘They won’t fly, young man,’ the count said, ‘they’ll glide, these machines.
’
I asked if I could assist him – for board and food alone and he took me in.
Early on I told him that I have no ideas, so he talks to me, theory and diagram – chalkdust sprinkling down from his messy calculations like the paint flaking from a painting of a divinity.
I like this man. Just now he saw me smiling at him and asked me what I was writing. I said a letter to a friend and he said he didn’t know I had any friends, he thought I’d just fallen out of the sky.
There are two contenders for the honour of the flight. One is an eager and unimaginative boy of fifteen. ‘You might break a bone,’ the other fellow tells him and the boy looks as if he’s never considered before that he has bones to break. He just can’t see it. The other fellow is a starved whippet of a man, the Count’s manservant, long ago infected by his master’s obsession. I want to be the one. I show how a man can make himself weigh less. I walk on a soft swatch of river sand leaving the slightest marks. I talk about balancing between each foot, and carrying my weight over the whole sole, and how softly to set each foot down. The Count gets fed up listening to me and roars that we’ll find out once and for all – he’ll weigh me himself. He’s as scientific as a bull when annoyed. He picks me up and his wooden leg is mired to a depth of nine inches. His eyes pop not from effort but surprise, and he drops me, declares that I’m as light as a feather and that I can fly the glider.
We sat in a draughty attic for three weeks watching the pigeons come in to land. ‘What is its tail doing?’ I’d ask, or, ‘Do you see how it isn’t the wings that fly? It’s the bird, the whole bird.’ We made models and, eventually, a wing, one wing, because he wanted to glide, not to fly. A wing of five fine bent bamboo wands sewn into silk. The struts are braced by diagonal wires. The glider has a harness with a pulley system that will haul a man’s body parallel to the wing after the launch so that he can use his legs like a rudder as birds do.
For years the Count has ruminated on the problem of what materials, then what shapes, offer the least resistance to air. Now he has directed his thoughts to how to make that resistance work for him, how the pressure of air lifts a wing. (Much easier to learn this by its sensation than from observation. I have had him watch birds and whispered to him, ‘It looks as if there is more air under its wings. I don’t mean the action of the wings – forget their action – think about their shape.’ This prompted him to spend weeks in his laboratory, which began to look like a game pantry, with feathered bodies stinking of methanol heaped high on long benches. We dissected wings, made cross-sections of the wings of doves, swift, waterfowl. He finds me crying in the corridor and compliments me on my soft heart but warns me that nature favours brutes. Then, at last, he sees it, and says to me, ‘There is more air under the bird’s wings, because the air is moving faster above than under its wings.’)
The test flight is in two days. He has me eating only honeycomb – every ounce counts, he says. And when I ask whether every count counts ounces he winces. And he says, ‘Have a little more, you’re light-headed.’ ‘Light all over,’ I say, then, ‘The light of the world.’ (The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I’m going up and going invisible like steam.) The Count wants the boy to go, or that sleepy, thirsty, starved manservant of his. ‘You’re an educated man,’ he says, ‘and I haven’t even begun to put you to work.’ Then he pays me. I give the gold back – too heavy, I say, ‘Carry it for me till after the flight.’ Then I tell him that what he is saying is it’s too great a risk, that he doesn’t like to think of my educated brains dashed out on ineducable rocks. ‘The boy and man want the pay they’ll get, and the boy wants to please you,’ I say. ‘But I want to be airborne. That’s why you’ll let me – you believe my desire will help elevate me.’
He’s full of peach brandy now, talking about seeing a man running on some English downlands hanging on to some winged contraption, kicking off and being borne along yards at a time. And I want to tell him that, however fine flight was, the arrested fall was most thrilling – to close your wings and go face down into the haze over seas or hills or into a mountainous chasm where you can judge the speed of a fall – a blur, then clarity, a full stop in the air, wings open, sky abruptly overhead and gravity grabbing at your body like a hungry flame reaching for fuel just out of its reach.
But you know how I liked that, Sobran, I so often did it right over your head.
Despair is gravity. What an appetite it has, hotter than hellfire. ‘Here, let me have you,’ it says.
1843 L’Émondage (pruning dead twigs and suckers off the vine)
June 1843
I hate the connective tissue in a story. I think of the time I’ve spent silent or speaking secretively and it seems impossible to me to describe even a short journey, for every step depends on other earlier steps and my whys and wherefores are as infinitesimal as atoms in the scent trails we leave in the air – negligible, not evidence, but there.
I am obliged to write what happened before telling you where I am. Yet I wish I could ignore the formalities and not say anything about the glider.
About the glider. We had a good day for it and were all up at dawn when the air was still. I’d persuaded the Count to launch from the ramp on the escarpment where his family’s former keep stands and from which he’d launched earlier, unmanned machines. The crag looks out over several forested miles.
The assistants strapped me to the glider. I could see that, finally, the boy was glad it wasn’t him going. He was pale and staring at me with blurry worshipful stupidity, as though I was doing this thing to save his life. The Count wrapped cords around my gloved hands, the cords that crossed the pulleys and would raise my legs once the glider was level in the air. He asked me why he felt that this was an act of faith on my part, that whatever faith he had in his machine was irrelevant – and he must have, for he wouldn’t let me go if he hadn’t. ‘Do you think this glider will fly?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know. I think you will. I’m mesmerised by your conviction – you must be the one to fly the glider because without you the glider won’t fly. That’s what you’ve made me believe. How did you do that, make me think something so unscientific?’ Then he took my arm. ‘If you fly it’s because the glider stays in the air.’ He said he shouldn’t let me do this – make my leap of faith. ‘I didn’t take your money,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m not your servant. I’m a scientist, like you. But lighter. That’s the whole point – I’m the least substantial person here.’
The boy knelt at my feet and unbuttoned my boots, removed them, rolled the stockings off. I was ready. The assistants licked their fingers to test the wind, the Count held up his silk handkerchief. Then they wished me good luck and got out of the way. I could feel an updraught through the boards under my feet. I ran the few steps to the edge and leapt far to make sure I cleared the end of the ramp with the glider’s tail. I wound the cords swiftly and smoothly to haul my legs up, then quickly moved my legs left to avoid too steep a bank, and felt the first shiver of a stall. The scars were writhing on my back because my brain wouldn’t stop trying to adjust the angle of wings – phantom wings. The shiver stopped and I looked down on fir trees the way they should look, like a bed of nails. I could hear the shouting behind me on the crag, faint, exultant.
Something came over me then. The moment contracted into stillness. I think it was despair. When I tried to cut my own side and the offensive signatures with the knife I took from you – do you remember? This was the same. But whereas that was the stillness in the spindle behind a body moving through the air, or the smooth water at the stern of a ship with the wake banked up beside it, this stillness had been spun by the forces about it into a hardness, a solidity. I solidified. I knew I’d flown out there to fall. So I reached with one hand and pulled the slip knot that unfastened first one then the other foot. The glider banked and I let go.
I lay on the air.
Then I fell through the trees, breaking branches, and landed on rocks. A rock split. For a ti
me I lay still and looked at the raw red of the broken branches above me. Then I picked up my wretched, indestructible body and walked away.
An hour later, from the crest of the next hill, I heard them searching for me. I could hear the Count calling your name – I’d used your name again – I could distinguish his voice from the others by the tears in his voice. I could see the glider, or a big piece of it, pierced by trees. I kept on walking.
Where am I now? With gypsies at the border near Strasbourg. When I arrived at their campfire in my torn clothes they let me sit down. They just stared at me. Then the oldest there took the pipe out of her mouth and said – in Romany, a language in which I am not very proficient – that I’d do better if only I’d cut my hair. ‘Do better?’ I asked. ‘Pass better,’ she said. She offered to cut it for me, she’d help direct the scissors, but I’d have to work them myself. We did that, cut it off at shoulder length, as neatly as we were able. The other women had put their children to bed under the wagons and had their backs to us, shawls over their heads. The men sat and watched and sweated. The old woman began to make a plait with the cut hair, then another – one each for the chief and his son, she said. To ward off evil, my hair was the very best thing, she explained. She promised to show me how to make up my face with rice flour, pale to hide my pallor, so I’d be able to play the carnivals at night – wire-walk perhaps, she was sure I could do that. ‘And you can ride in the wagon, with the shutters closed all day, so long as you don’t prey on my people.’ Then she signalled to one of the men and he produced a sharpened stick which she showed to me. ‘We all have to be careful,’ she said. I told her that her stick couldn’t hurt me – whatever was she thinking? And she poked it through a tear in my shirt and scratched at my skin – then, seeing no mark and very annoyed, put her gnarled old hands against my chest. She exclaimed, ‘His heart is beating and his skin is warm!’ And someone sniggered – I saw her authority waver for an instant – then she put her face into mine and demanded to know what I was if I wasn’t what she thought I was. I said, ‘I’m a man.’ She laughed, ‘If memory serves –’ and they all laughed at that – ‘no man is as fair as you are.’ But she didn’t pester me any more. I went with them, slept in her wagon, in her bed to keep her warm. She paints my face with rice flour every morning and evening, and dresses me in a big sleeved shirt, black velvet trousers and red velvet jacket, and I wire-walk or juggle, as the girls do (the men don’t perform for money, it’s beneath their dignity). The gypsies are going to Paris. The old woman says she’ll leave me at the Funambules – that if I’m going to go around saying I’m a man I belong in the theatre.
The Vintners Luck Page 22