The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  Miriam is there under the linden tree, where the streetlamp lays its blaze of white over the hollows of her face. She says, I was right, Daniel: it is you. And then there is a gap, a break.

  I remembered Mr. Michaels, my epileptic patient, how he experienced a seizure as a gap in time. Emerging from a seizure was not like waking up or coming to. It was merely the sense that time had snapped forward, had leapt from its groove into a different groove, as though into a parallel life. But there was no different life. Miriam had said it herself: I was right, Daniel: it is you. It is not that I remember nothing. I remember time passing, the flicker of day and night. Time was passing, moving, but around me. I was not moving with it. Or if I was moving, it was as a bridge pylon moves upriver by standing still.

  Reggie must have gone back to the States, because I was standing at the counter in my apartment, watching a letter with a Texas postmark burn unopened in the sink. I must have left my apartment for provisions: bottles emptied of Corsican wine reproduced themselves on the kitchen counter, by the bed. I must have gone to the maison de la presse for tobacco and rolling papers, because at times, alongside the bowl I used for an ashtray, twenty or thirty cigarettes lay in a row. (I had learned to roll them, steadying my hands against the table edge.) Sometimes the bowl held thirty or forty stubbed-out butts. I must have gone out because I must have gone to the café, Miriam’s and my café on the rue de Vaugirard. That was where he found me. His shadow had fallen across my table, and he said my name deliberately, first name and last, as though his purpose were to serve a subpoena. When I looked up, the sun was directly behind his head, and I had to squint to see his face.

  “Mathieu,” I said, as though informing myself of a name I had forgotten. Miriam’s neighbor. I had not seen him since the night I met Miriam. When he said nothing, I said, “Sit, please. A glass of wine? A pastis?”

  He would not have a glass of wine. He would not sit. He said, “You have not heard from Miriam.” I thought he was asking a question.

  “It’s been several—”

  “You have not,” he said. “Take this,” he said, placing a newspaper on the table in front of me. “It’s yours. Keep it.”

  The article, short, unsigned, had been printed below the fold.

  NEVERS: DIVERS RETRIEVE WOMAN’S BODY FROM THE LOIRE

  In the photograph, people in wetsuits stood in waist-deep water beside an inflatable boat. Behind them, a sandbar. In the distance, scattered on the bank, clumps of spectators. An autopsy would be performed, though police stated that the death was presumed a suicide. The deceased had been identified as Miriam Levaux of Paris, 27 years old. Police stated that Levaux had informed the police by letter where her body could be located. A quotation from an officer concluded the little article: “Of course we had hoped that the letter would prove a hoax, but in the end she was exactly where she said she would be.” How tender the expression seems to me now: “Finalement, elle était exactement là où elle nous avait indiqué”—just where she had said. Were I to live long enough to lose every other memory, to recognize no human face—the image of that article will remain with me, as an arrowhead might repose in the hollow of a collapsed rib cage a thousand years after the heart it pierced has returned to dust.

  And yet it was a surprise to receive in the post office box yesterday—or was it the day before?—a clipping of the article itself, yellowed and brittle now, taped carefully to a square of Bristol stock and sealed in a glassine sheath, frail as a moth’s wing.

  When I can no longer bear to look at it, I will turn it over. On the back of the Bristol board I will find written (in the familiar block print) the last stanza of the poem—the clock counting down—and once again the words will read themselves to me, in Miriam’s voice.

  Away with us he’s going,

  The solemn-eyed:

  He’ll hear no more the lowing

  Of the calves on the warm hillside

  Or the kettle on the hob

  Sing peace into his breast,

  Or see the brown mice bob

  Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

  For he comes, the human child,

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The last stanza. The clock that my correspondent has made ticks down. At times, when I think of Clementine, when I wake in the darkest, smallest hours, panic sets around me like cement. At other times, a different stillness enfolds me, the stillness of absolute conviction, conviction that when the end comes I will know what I am to do.

  For days nothing arrived in the post office box. Today, again, I thought it was empty, until I opened it and discovered one little buff slip indicating a package to claim. The package was a cardboard tube, perhaps twenty inches long, capped and taped at either end and addressed in block capitals. Please, please, I thought without knowing what I was pleading for.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of her junior year in high school, Clementine won a prize for an essay she had written. Her name as well as the title, “A Certain Slant of Light,” had been engraved on a plaque Clementine refused to let me hang in the apartment. (“If you put it up,” she said, “I’m hiding it the next time you leave for work.”) The title was a quotation from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

  There’s a certain Slant of light,

  Winter Afternoons—

  That oppresses, like the Heft

  Of Cathedral Tunes—

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—

  We can find no scar,

  But internal difference—

  Where the Meanings, are—

  None may teach it—Any—

  ’Tis the seal Despair—

  An imperial affliction

  Sent us of the Air—

  When it comes, the Landscape listens—

  Shadows—hold their breath—

  When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

  On the look of Death—

  When I looked up the poem, I was convinced that whatever Clementine had written, she had written about Miriam, even though she had never let me read it. But whom did Clementine imagine when she imagined her mother? I had no photographs to show her. The only one I had ever seen of Miriam had been in Miriam’s apartment, tacked to the wall by her bed. It was a snapshot of Miriam as a toddler, her father crouching down behind her to tie her shoes, only the top of his head visible, and his fingers, knotting the laces. Whoever had cleared out Miriam’s apartment must have taken it. Had it found its way back to her parents? Had it been pressed among the pages of a photograph album no one could bear to open?

  I had thought that my own halting descriptions and Clementine’s imagination had provided for her a familiar, companionate image of Miriam. (“Did Mom look like me, minus you?”) Did it never occur to me that she would also harbor a darker image, the image of Miriam after she had died? Her curiosity had always had a forensic edge. She had asked me, and I had described to her the events following a catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage: the accelerating cascade of pain, double vision, nausea, disorientation, loss of consciousness, seizures, coma, death. She’d asked me what Miriam had looked like afterward. Here my professional knowledge would be no help to me. Tired. I said she looked very tired, but also somehow relieved. Clementine said nothing. I tried to change the subject. The nurses told me (I said) how overjoyed Miriam had been, just an hour earlier, when the doctor had finally lifted a beautiful, healthy baby girl up onto her chest! Labor, after all, had been long and more difficult than expected.

  Had Clementine wondered how, precisely, Miriam’s head had looked on the pillow, how, precisely, someone had withdrawn the intravenous lines from her veins, sponged the crust of froth from around her
lips, or lifted her onto a gurney to take her away? Had she imagined Miriam’s eyes closed, or open, fixed now on an impossible distance? Had Clementine wondered what Miriam beheld then, no longer blinking? Had she imagined that Miriam watched, somewhere in that impossible distance, her beautiful newborn grown now to a gangly girl, now to a young woman? Did Clementine imagine that she could feel that look, had perhaps felt it often, had known it perhaps forever? Perhaps she had encountered it in a certain slant of light, in a particular oblique melancholy, a heavenly hurt dispatched to her as a kind of communication—not as an intelligible message, but as a signal nonetheless, sustained and unignorable, a wail, a keening….

  * * *

  —

  At home I place the tube on my desk, this desk I have cleared of all distractions. I unroll a black-and-white print, enlarged so that the face it reveals appears exactly life-size. It is in that face that I see it, know it, the look of death that Clementine must have so often contemplated: lips slightly parted, brow not furrowed but drawn, eyes open but hooded, as though in concentration, as though straining to peer through the camera’s lens.

  Were it not for the moonstone pallor of the skin, you would think Miriam was about to speak. The way her lips are parted, tip of her tongue just visible, you would think she was waiting for the right moment, letting someone else have his say before saying what she has been waiting to say. She has been waiting in the cold, with her shoulders bare, her damp hair smoothed back from her forehead. She seems not to have noticed the cold, or not to care. Neither does she seem troubled by the contusion darkening the right side of her neck, nor by the two descending incisions, beginning at each collarbone, passing at an angle above her nipples to converge midsternum, incisions closed up now with an even whipstitch. You would think she looks straight at you, or rather, straight through you. She knows what she has to say, and she knows she will say it, however long she must wait. Eyes hooded, slightly open, lips parted, she has waited now for eighteen years. In eighteen years Miriam has grown expert in waiting.

  * * *

  —

  On the back of the photograph, in the same block print, the final stanza has been pared down to six lines:

  Away with us he’s going.

  Sing peace into his breast,

  For he comes, the human child,

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I wonder today, as I have before: Do you pray for me? What prayers are to be offered up for such a man as I? And such a man as I, who is that? An addled man, no doubt, a tormented man. How mistaken you must think me to believe that I caused a death, Miriam’s death, that her death was not a suicide but my crime. You will think it no crime at all—a disaster certainly, a tragedy, and not least for me and Clementine, but certainly not a crime. Do you pray that I come to accept a judgment more merciful than my own?

  Do you pray that such a man might be made to see how life has been given back to him, not only his own life but also his daughter’s? If it is true that he betrayed his pregnant lover, surely he was not the first to do such a thing. He had not even known she was pregnant. And should that woman return home, to the city of Nevers, to give birth there, doomed by an old despair, surely he had not been the one to acquaint her with that despair in the first place. He was not her executioner, but merely a stand-in, a stay. Before he had met her, she had made her rendezvous.

  Knowing what I have told you, you will say that from the moment of her birth, the infant’s needs should have trumped all other considerations. What need was more peremptory than for a parent’s love and care, and to Clementine only one parent remained. My duty was clear, and I dispatched it with honor: the child acknowledged and fought for, custody wrested from the vindictive grief of Miriam’s parents, Clementine visited, hugged, and sung to throughout the long slog of the litigation, Clementine at last fastened in a car seat, a cab, an airplane, Clementine introduced to her new life in New York City. It would be wrong and vain to deny the hard-won stability, the prosperity attained, and the daughter flourishing. When the balances are weighed, you will say, such a man has no debt but that of gratitude.

  How mad I must be, you will think. You have no choice. Is this not your obligation? Are you not obliged to believe that no one, no adulterer, thief, demoniac, or murderer, is beyond the reach of grace? And would it not be madness itself to withhold oneself from grace?

  I concede: to withhold oneself, to elect to cut oneself off from grace, that would be madness. But to know that one has cut oneself off, has done so already, to know and avow what one has done—is that madness or the simple acknowledgment of fact?

  What I have yet to tell you must be told. It is what is required.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  After Mathieu found me at the café and set the article in front of me, I took the next train to Nevers. The train seemed at first to drift from the Gare de Lyon, gathering speed only imperceptibly but then faster and faster. I felt as though we were falling. Once in my seat I opened the half liter of vodka I’d bought near the station, swallowing its clear flame as a man across the aisle shot me puckered glances.

  The vodka dissolved all sensation of movement. I did not feel that I was leaving Paris but that Paris was being hauled out of me, in clumps and slabs, in snarls of swerving rail, knots of roadway and wire. For a long hour a stupor enfolded me until a river—the Loire itself, I realized—veered suddenly into view, hammered with sunlight. Appearing and reappearing through the bare trees, the river seemed in its languor to sap the train’s speed, dragging it first to a crawl, then at last to a stop alongside the station platform in Nevers. Nevers, where Miriam was born and where she had chosen to die.

  * * *

  —

  The bottle had vanished, and I was standing in the shadow of the station’s concrete facade, when a hand fastened to my arm. From a derelict’s mouth, an incomprehensible request reeked forth and repeated itself several times until I understood. “Monnaie, monnaie,” he was saying: Change, change.

  I jerked my sleeve free. Others like him sprawled around. Two junkies slouched behind a concrete planter, hugging their knees to their chests. Alongside them, curled on a patch of cardboard, a mongrel shivered, connected by a length of string to a girl pierced and dreadlocked, no more than sixteen or seventeen but heavily pregnant, her coat unbuttoned where her belly pushed through. A fine rain stung my face. The derelict pulled my sleeve again. “Quelques sous, monsieur…” A couple of coins.

  I reached into my pocket and withdrew a stack of coins. “Quincaillerie,” I said to him—hardware store—showing him the money in my palm but snatching it away when he reached for it. “First you bring me there,” I said. “Then I give you the money.”

  Without releasing my arm, he dragged me across a roadway into an upsloping tangle of cobbled streets. Abruptly he stopped at a storefront. The hand that had grasped my arm closed over the coins, and the man reeled away.

  It was a small storefront, in an old building. Had this been the place Miriam had found? Inside, the gloom smelled of rust and turpentine. A shopkeeper in a flowered housecoat emerged from a back room.

  Was there anything monsieur needed? Eh ben, nothing at all? Chain? What kind of chain? Monsieur would find chain on the far wall. On spools, by the rope. What gauge did monsieur require? How heavy? This one, obviously, was the heaviest. She had no idea: perhaps two kilos per meter. What length did monsieur require?

  I stared at the chain. The links swam and divided, and I had to cover one eye with my hand to keep the room from spinning. Had Miriam stood here herself? Had this shopkeeper asked what madame required? Had the shopkeeper asked what madame planned to do with such a quantity of chain?

  Monsieur…? Monsieur is not ill, I hope.

  Such a quantity o
f chain. The weight of it. How had she brought it down to the river? And the heavy flywheel, where had she found that?

  “Ah! No chain after all? Very well, monsieur. A chisel instead? A chisel and hammer?” With exasperation she turned from the spools and gestured toward a different aisle. She made no further attempt at conversation, and I paid for my hammer and chisel. When I asked her to direct me to the nearest liquor store, with a snort she vanished into the back office.

  * * *

  —

  And then it was night, and I was in a park, almost like a fairground, some sort of bandstand or carousel in the distance. I must have found a liquor store because I was aware that there was a half-empty bottle cached in the ivy behind my bench. The night was cold, but I was not, warmed by the vodka burning off in my lungs. In my hand was a paper bag, rumpled, weighted. Inside the bag I found a hammer and chisel and only then remembered the store. After pocketing the tools, I put the bottle in the bag and set out, allowing the slope of the streets to guide me down to the river, to the bridge.

  It must have been very late, or very early in the morning. Neither car nor passerby interrupted my work, and the mist blotted up the ringing of my chisel as it cut into the stone of the parapet. My fingers warmed to the chisel and the figures took on their crude form, rough like a homemade tattoo:

  ML12III90

  There it was, my blunt little epitaph, crude but clear enough, recording that name, this place. Miriam Levaux, 12 March 1990.

  And there it remains, even now, as my correspondent has made plain.

  When I was finished, I dropped the tools and the bottle, now empty, over the parapet. Did I think then, standing there empty-handed over the river, that I had accomplished what I had come for? Did I believe that something was over and done with?