The Limoges teapot had been a birthday gift from Adèle, a friend since childhood. She’d been standing beside her the first time Nelly heard herself called Madame. The fall of 1968, it happened at Le Mouret, a hat shop on rue des Marchands, the same day she fell head over heels for a brown fedora. Tilting the brim over one eye, she had admired the way it set off the curve of her jaw, but the salesgirl disapproved, hence the frosty, as you wish, Madame. Never one to miss an opportunity, Adèle had chided, Might as well marry now, your mademoiselle days are over.
As schoolgirls in the village of Ste. Cécile les Vignes, Adèle had admired Nelly’s boldness, but marriage to a notary had given her airs. She hinted then warned outright that a mature woman without a husband was courting disaster. What disaster? Solitude? Poverty? Nelly had a good job and never lacked for company. Jealousy, she thought. Not the first time she’d noticed the perverse craving of tightly married people to see the whole world bound. A woman should act and dress her age, Adèle insisted, keep her hair short and live with grey instead of wasting money in salons to keep it dark. But Nelly liked the feel of long hair wound up like a silk chignon, let loose at night to be brushed a hundred strokes. She liked good shoes and neat skirts that showed off her legs. She made an effort to stay slim and well into middle age could still turn heads. But attention is not enough, according to Adèle. A woman needs more.
It all began with the fedora. On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Nelly met Alphonse Reboul, a solid man who sold typewriters (owned the company, Adèle pointed out) and played boules on Sunday (every Sunday, Nelly sighed). Adèle was ecstatic and attached herself to the cause of courtship. A few months later, the matter of Madame was settled with a ceremony at the Mairie followed by a banquet at the Hôtel d’Europe, the Salon Baroncelli. How strange that day had seemed. She floated like a guest at someone else’s wedding. Alphonse, poor man — he took it all so seriously.
The clack of hard-soled shoes on the tiles interrupted her reverie. Expecting a knock, she stood up. Most nights Piers peeked in to say hello and if it was still early, share a glass of nut wine, but the footsteps went on by. Nudging the door open, she watched him disappear up the stairs taking two steps at a time. From now on everything will be different, she thought. He’ll slip away.
She closed her eyes, tried to recall the wedding banquet, the attention of the room when they entered as man and wife, but the melody was gone. The day had worn her out, yet she knew sleep would not come on its own. Reaching for a bottle of tablets in the china cabinet, she thought of the teapot, indigo with gold trim, so expensive. Adèle’s scolding voice insisting the pieces be glued back together. Climbing the stairs, she remembered: Adèle is gone. On her way past Piers’ door she stopped, listening for the click of his fingers on the keyboard, a hopeful sign, the author at work. But the room was silent. Behind Magali’s door, the faint throb of music. Somewhere in the dressing-table drawer was the photo of herself wearing that fedora. She had worn it the day she met Alphonse, at a reception hosted by the mayor. She’d noticed him looking, and walked away. He followed. After they were married, Alphonse took pains to praise a feminine look but she was sure it was the hat that had caught his eye.
Fair enough, Adèle would say. A man’s desire is often at odds with his taste.
At seventeen, Magali was sure adults were little more than prisoners of their addictions, families and jobs, which is why they liked to lecture the young. Most of them had taken a wrong turn somewhere, or were convinced they had. Her parents were a prime example, getting divorced in middle age. Marc claimed they should have split up years ago. At Easter, she spent a week with her brother in Paris, just the two of them. They sat up all night talking. Though twelve years older, Marc was still her best friend, he didn’t take their father’s side in every argument. He understood why she wanted to live in Paris instead of being banished to Avignon, a town of interest to no one but tourists. A punishment, surely. But for what? For being born? Marc promised that if things turned out badly, he’d help her get away. Give it a year, he said. Stay open, and keep an eye on Aunt Nelly. She’s a strange bird.
Of all the things her brother had said while they talked till sunrise, one bit of information stuck in her mind. She turned it over and over until his offhand remark came to dominate the memory of that night. He said their parents had been on the verge of divorce when she was conceived. An accident, but they took it for an omen, hoping a baby might fix the marriage. Seventeen years later, they realized they’d been wrong.
She might not have thought so much about what he’d said, but a few months after the visit, in the middle of summer, she was back in Paris at a private clinic with a mistake of her own. When it was over, she walked along the Seine wondering how long it would be until the feeling of emptiness went away. In the softest of tones, with no hint of accusation, Marc had urged her to embrace the future. Make something of your life, he’d said. Give it meaning through projects and goals. She’d listened quietly all the while thinking, a mistake does not ask the meaning of life. A mistake’s life has only one goal: to have as good a time as possible and avoid causing pain — especially to herself.
Nearly midnight. She had dragged the lumpy mattress into the centre of the room and lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for sounds of the Author, his strange nocturnal ritual. Pulling the duvet over her head, she reached for earphones and turned up the music and drifted off to sleep.
A burst of hall light woke her up. A figure entered the room and quickly closed the door. Even in the gloom, she recognised the outline of his posture, sloped shoulders on a lithe frame, as light as air. “Mouloud!” she whispered angrily.
He put a finger to his lips, crept across the floor and sank onto the mattress beside her. He smelled of gasoline, his eyes full of racing energy, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to look after you,” he murmured.
“I told you, I don’t want to be looked after. You’re supposed to be in Toulouse, at university. Your father’ll be furious.”
He reached for her hand, began kissing her knuckles, whispering her name. She tried to resist but he was holding tight. His boldness was annoying. Still, she was half glad to see this familiar face on the strange planet of rue des Griffons, half angry with herself for caring.
“Please, go,” she whispered, pulling her hand away. “You can’t stay here. My aunt’s strict. I’ll get in trouble. If you don’t leave right now, I’ll—”
She caught herself, remembering, Mouloud was the prince of threats. She would not be drawn into his game.
From the first time they smoked a cigarette behind a cabanon at Les Hirondelles, Mouloud had been sure they belonged together. The youngest child of Ahmed Mourabed, a Moroccan who had tended her grandfather’s vineyards for thirty years, he spoke French like a native and earned top marks at school. Though they shared a common childhood landscape — the vineyards, gardens and ancient stone buildings of a domain near Ste. Cécile les Vignes, in the foothills of Les Dentelles — their paths had never crossed. Each year, by the time Magali arrived for summer, Mouloud had left for Tangiers with his mother, Fatiha, until last year. In midwinter she was run down by a careless driver, died instantly. Mouloud refused to go back to Morocco. He promised he’d help his father if he could stay behind, but mostly he played music and wrote songs and spent his money on first-rate hash. On hot summer nights they hid out in a cellar full of Gigondas, a dark, dewy place smelling of oak barrels and fermenting grape. Smoking and talking, they discovered parallel childhood memories. Mouloud swore he’d end up knowing everything about her, how she loved the nutty aroma of wine yet hated the taste. The smell of dope made her queasy but she adored the floating sensation that came from holding a breath to the count of ten.
Finally, one night he brought a stash of the finest and held back until, groggy and giggling, she let him slip off her jeans. An act of
play, Mouloud sinking into her, whispering a prayer or a poem, she couldn’t tell which. A litany in Arabic, his words tripped over each other and caught in his throat. Afterwards he swore, “There is nothing more to gain from life. I’m sure of it.” The desperation of his voice had made her shiver.
A few weeks later, she told him she was pregnant. Mouloud went wild, started making wedding plans. He wouldn’t understand how crazy it was. He followed her to Paris, begged for a chance to be a father and love them both. Nothing she said made the slightest bit of difference.
Pulling the duvet over her bare shoulders, she drew away.
“How did you get in?”
He shrugged.
“You have to go. You can’t stay here. It isn’t allowed.”
“Hey! I’ve walked all day. Nobody picks up hitchhikers, at least not me. Just let me lie down, please, Magali, a few minutes, then I’ll go.”
Without waiting for an answer, he stretched out on the mattress and buried his head in the pillows. She saw a flash of brown belly. How thin he’d become. The belt was yanked to its last notch.
A new day broke lead grey and calm. In the distance a dog barked, persistent choking yaps of certainty that barking mattered. Piers sat back in his chair while the printer chugged through dozens of pages of type. Stretching knotted limbs, he gave his groin a friendly squeeze, threw off the bathrobe and began a series of warm-up exercises. Exhausted but too keyed-up to sleep, he looked forward to a run in the dawn light before traffic made the trip a hazard. Five kilometres around the walled city, dodging cars and slowing for intrusions. Even with shortcuts it could take the better part of an hour.
He took a final swig of water, opened the door and headed toward the staircase. A figure stood on the landing, poised to descend. A young male, slight of frame, stepped back into the shadows, as if to let Piers go first. Momentarily unnerved, Piers obliged, but a few steps down, he turned around. The stranger on his heels leapt past and bolted for the front door. Sure he was a thief, Piers followed.
Outside, a burst of dawn. The intruder strode calmly down the street. Piers rushed up behind, grabbed his jacket and wheeled him around until they were face to face. So now the recipient of noisy passion had a face. Fine features, startlingly feminine, eyes as dark as his hair, not a trace of fear, at most a glimmer of surprise mixed with contempt. Surprised by the unconscious sovereignty of great beauty, Piers released his grip, letting fall a fistful of soft brown leather and murmured, Pardon. The word slipped out, sounded foolish. The youth spun on his heel and walked away, as if nothing had happened.
Piers leaned against the stone wall, winded, as though he’d already circled the city. Retracing his steps up the stairs, he resolved to insist Nelly take action. She made the rules, she would have to enforce them. If the house turned into a hotel or worse, he could not work, and if he could not work he could not pay the rent. It was as simple as that. He was about to knock on her door when he remembered it was barely dawn.
By the time he reached his room his hands were shaking. Rummaging through the drawer in the table, he found a package of herbal cigarettes purchased ages ago when he’d set out to break the habit. He groped for a match, lit a dried fag and drew deeply, a sour, disappointing taste. Still, as his lungs filled up with smoke, the trembling eased. He was sweating though his hands were cold. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.
Dawn crept through the window casting a red glow along the border between sleep and consciousness. The image danced, surrounded by flames, a boy-man walking backwards, nothing solid under his feet, edging calmly toward some equally vague horizon. He turned and looked at Piers, his face twisted in a grin. Then Magali appeared, more real than the floating cipher, lovely and ineffably ripe and smiling as she leaned into the boy’s embrace. Watching them, Piers was seized by the certainty of danger. The kid reached out to pull her away and the two of them began to run. Piers tried to call out but no words came. His body spread like sand.
THREE
AOUENNION. AVENION. AVENNIO, from the Celts or Ligurians, a word meaning city of the river or city of violent winds — both are true. The Rhone is a bridge facilitating arrival, tempting invasion; the mistral, a devious gale from the north that can blow for days and unleash madness.
Civilization advanced slowly: the Abbey St. Ruf was built in the fifth century, a synagogue in 1017. In the mid-1220s, pissing in the streets was declared illegal. The punishment for starting a tavern brawl or frequenting brothels was to be thrown over the walls, fully clothed, into the deepest part of the Rhone. In the high Middle Ages, Avignon was the property of the Queen of Naples, who fell on hard times and sold it to the Papal Court in 1349.
A mule-like pace of change until the fourteenth century, the arrival of the Pope, an explosion, somewhere between a gold rush and a miracle. An unsuspecting town was burgeoned with foreigners — Italian bankers, Tuscan painters, French architects, Swiss guards, enough Germans to form a confraternity, lawyers and moneylenders, furriers, illuminators, bookbinders, booksellers, goldsmiths, bakers, butchers, pilgrims, prostitutes, diplomats, professors, soothsayers, midwives, and undertakers — a polyglot population eventually exceeding one hundred thousand. With the most sophisticated tax-collecting system since the Romans, Christendom’s Provençal capital at its height surpassed any of Europe’s secular courts in pageantry, luxury and intrigue. Property values soared, magistrates scrambled to keep the peace. No rogue talent languished for want of opportunity.
“A second Babylonian captivity,” wrote the Florentine-born poet Petrarch. Having grown up in Provence where his father served the Papal court, he stayed on and became Avignon’s most famous detractor.
Licence characterized the Papal years, but not to the exclusion of liberty. A community of Jews was given protection; a university welcomed thousands of students. The village landscape was transformed by convents, chapels, churches, cardinals’ palaces and, towering over them all, the Papal Palace. Thirty years under construction, it reconciled contrary styles, blending the walled austerity of introvert popes with the pomp and glitter of flamboyant spenders. Piers never tired of expounding new details from his ongoing research. Nelly listened dutifully. She’d passed the Palace every day for years and never set foot inside. She had no interest in the remnants of ecclesiastical power or architecture designed to impress the faithful. Scornful of religious fervour, she dismissed the bargains of prayer as pitiful superstition.
After training as a nurse in Carpentras, she had moved to Avignon for a position in the recovery ward at Ste. Marthe’s Hospital, which is where she’d heard there was a prison nearby, Ste. Anne’s. She had an inmate as a patient, nursed him through gangrene. His leg came off in bits, first at the ankle and then above the knee. Under the guise of delirious recovery he told his story, how he’d been honour-bound to kill a man and would surely have been pardoned if not for an excitable cur that got in the way of a stray bullet. He’d known he was doomed by the faces of the jury when the prosecution mentioned the dog. Twelve well-fed peasants, they were sure that men fight other men naturally and often for good reason, but a decent soul leaves a dog alone.
The story took Nelly’s breath away: a life sent reeling by a random act of fate. And yet he bore no grudge. A day, a week, a year, a decade — he seemed not to feel the difference, which is how she came to see that time is a fluid thing, immeasurable, elusive, somehow not quite real. Everything about the man had moved her. His pain, his humour dampened by resignation, yet underneath the performance, a keen desire for life. Most of all, she was captivated by the aura of mystery he constructed around himself. As the confession poured out, she could see he was watching for her response, savouring the tale’s bitter twist, expecting a laugh. Later, when the fever had passed, he made her swear an oath of secrecy. She’d been puzzled, could only assume he hadn’t told her everything.
Her first day at Ste. Anne’s, the clank of iron doors shutting had seemed th
e perfect antidote to the din of church bells, a thrill that never quite wore off. She had found her true calling as counsel to the condemned. Though impervious to charm and manipulation, she was on the inmates’ side, a position they could sense.
Excluding the brief interlude of marriage, her life at Ste. Anne’s spanned nearly forty years. Her retirement gift from the administration was a watch. The inmates gave her an olive tree, dedicated to a thousand years of life. The watch soon stopped but the olive tree prospered, and retirement didn’t last. Every Wednesday afternoon, she made her way along the familiar winding route to the prison library where she volunteered as assistant to the head librarian, Hervé Brunet.
A scrupulous bachelor with thinning hair, he spent his days muttering against the tide of forms and letters that floated down from Paris, leaving the matter of books to Nelly, who took great interest in the chatter of readers. Her latest task was dealing with several dozen boxes of books that had come to Ste. Anne’s following the death of an eminent Sorbonne professor. The bequest sparked an irate letter in Le Monde from a circle of intellectuals. Why a remote provincial prison had been chosen to receive such a valuable collection was a mystery bordering on outrage. Brunet had studied the cache, as if the books themselves might provide a clue. A minor scholar with a thin publishing record, the late professor’s sinecure had rested on a brief though highly acclaimed study of Genêt, often referenced by subsequent studies but out of print for decades. Dipping into a stack on his desk, Brunet had examined one volume after another.
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