Asunder

by Aridjis, Chloe

  Intrigued, I drew the book closer, opening it to a random page. Upon seeing the first pictures I was so startled I almost took a step back. Inside, dozens of black and white photographs of somewhat savage women, much more intense than the women I’d been seeing on the street, rose to greet me. Most of them wore nightgowns or else fitted dresses or two-piece outfits that called to mind brothel residents from another era. They stood, sat or lay in bizarre positions, one with her back arched into a bridge, another swooning in a chair with her right leg stretched outwards and her wrist twisted counterclockwise. One woman stuck out her tongue to the left, another smiled dementedly into the distance. Another sat with folded arms and a crooked mouth while disembodied hands jabbed pins into her temples. Another had a face like an empty cage, her agitated hands like the birds that had flown away. Others stood in odd, rigid positions, their arms at ninety-degree angles to their trunks. In every picture there was something deviant, one body part that refused to conform, like branches rejecting the sun.

  The text was in French but I didn’t need language to read the faces and bodies lost in disorienting studio black. Unframed, the figures floated like dying stars at the centre of the page, or, pinned to a bed, like cosmic butterfly nebulae without the symmetry. As much as I tried, I couldn’t understand who or what they were, what all this energy, white against black and body against bed, could mean.

  I closed the book and went to take a shower, making the water hotter and hotter until I could bear it no longer. Yet right after drying off I went straight back to the book, desirous to continue. New faces rose to meet me, together with some I’d glimpsed earlier, and I began to feel similar to that restless matter, whatever it was, somehow trapped in the wrong casing. Several of the women looked into the camera seductively but others seemed to push away an invisible aggressor; I couldn’t understand why they’d allowed themselves to be photographed.

  The rest of the afternoon, squandered. I couldn’t pull myself away. Over and over I thought of leaving the flat but would then pour myself another glass of water, make myself a sandwich, a cup of tea, then another, then another sandwich, more water. Every so often I returned to the living room and circled Daniel’s desk, or rather, the book, half expecting something to drift up from its pages and free me. Finally, at a quarter to five, I forced myself to go for a walk but by then the sun had withdrawn so I stuck to familiar streets in the neighbourhood.

  That evening Daniel decided to try out a recipe he recalled from his married years; dinner was pushed back an hour. While he rushed around the kitchen banging, clanging and dropping things, Pierre and I sat in front of the small black and white television whose surface was coated in a sticky layer of dust. Every now and then I got up to change the channel but found nothing I could understand, and Pierre didn’t really seem to be watching. I considered turning up the volume all the way to startle him into action but just as I was leaning forwards to move the dial Daniel announced the food was ready.

  Towards the end of our meal, wholewheat pasta in a peculiar mushroom, sesame and avocado sauce, Daniel asked me about my afternoon. I shrugged and said I’d taken a nap and then gone for a walk, to which Daniel replied I must be getting to know the area well. Pierre shook two tablets out of his medicine bottle and knocked them down with wine, his way, I couldn’t help thinking somewhat enviously, of flushing out the day.

  Once Pierre had merged with the sofa and our dishes were stacked in the sink, the person to wash them still undecided, I felt I’d waited long enough. Just as Daniel was about to get up from the table and head to his desk for a late-night session, I asked about the book.

  ‘Which book?’

  ‘The one with the women,’ I said.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Photographs . . . Of women.’

  ‘Oh, the hysterics.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Daniel didn’t answer.

  ‘Were they agitators?’

  ‘No . . . ’

  Daniel reached for the dented silver case Pierre had left on the table, extracted a cigarette and lit it, though he rarely smoked.

  ‘Victorian porn?’ I thought of Lucian’s abundant collection.

  He laughed.

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  ‘No, as I said, they were hysterics.’

  ‘Why do you call them that?’

  ‘I don’t. Their doctor did.’

  ‘They all had the same doctor?’

  ‘Yes, they formed part of his collection.’

  I couldn’t tell whether he was having a laugh.

  ‘Daniel, what are you talking about?’

  Lowering his voice a little though Pierre was way past hearing, he began to tell me about a doctor who at the end of the nineteenth century ran the largest neurological clinic in Europe at a hospital in Paris, a former gunpowder factory that was now starting to produce, one could say, a new kind of explosive, and how this doctor called the place his living museum of pathology, with a constantly updated collection.

  ‘And this is the catalogue?’

  ‘I guess you could say that . . . he manipulated his patients to pose in different ways to illustrate states of hysteria. And then took pictures.’

  His cigarette was more than half ash without him having drawn on it more than twice. He put it out and pushed the saucer to the other side of the table, as if disgusted by it.

  ‘Why do you have this book?’

  ‘Research.’

  ‘They turn you on, don’t they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You find them attractive.’

  I was about to mention the wayward eye at the Drunken Duck when he leaned forwards and asked darkly, ‘Marie, what were you doing at my desk?’

  ‘You were out.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re always out.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘And when you’re home you’re with Pierre.’

  ‘He’s our guest.’

  ‘No one invited him.’

  He threw a glance in Pierre’s direction.

  ‘You’re welcome to come with us on our walks.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  He shrugged and rose from the table.

  ‘I’m tired, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I said goodnight and remained seated, watching him limp off down the corridor and into his room.

  Once in bed and fuelled by darkness, my thoughts ran wild as I imagined women pinned down while men gathered round to capture signals and frame their unrest. I thought about this doctor’s gaze and how he’d reduced his patients to wraiths, the headboards of their beds like tombstones and the inscriptions on their pillows rewritten. Of female lives condensed into a series of dramatic gestures. The male gaze, nothing seemed free of it. It plundered the living and the dead, manipulating bodies cold and stiff or warm and supple; in either case, depriving them of tranquillity.

  I pulled the duvet up around me, half willing Daniel to reappear at the door though I knew that that night he wouldn’t, and tried to beckon sleep as I lay with the ghosts of the former couple and the ghosts of the hysterics and the image of our guest stretched out on the sofa, the flat becoming more populated with every passing hour.

  Twelve

  Given the fog in which he moved, I was surprised when Pierre announced that his last day in Paris was some kind of Journée du patrimoine, similar to our National Heritage Day, and suggested we go and see something old and stately. To this day I don’t know how he came to choose Challement, a hamlet in Burgundy with a little-known chateau, whether he’d been given a pamphlet or was told by a friend.

  We set out at ten and bought three tickets to Clamecy, the station nearest the chateau. Daniel surprised me by coming to sit by my side while Pierre took the seat opposite us. He pulled out a newspaper in German, opened it to the middle and frowned as he began reading something in the upper right-hand corner. Once the train left Paris we rushed through the suburbs and before long were hurtling
past wall after wall, or rather one continuous wall, of pine trees, thousands of green needles made one by velocity as they filled our windows. Daniel nodded off, his head resting on a shoulder, but I was eager to stay awake to the scenery. Every now and then Pierre would reach into his jacket pocket and extract a liquorice coin and slip it into his mouth, making loud smacking noises from behind his newspaper.

  After a while the trees fell away, revealing a second landscape hanging parallel to the first: that of the granite sky, which seemed suspended by a few rusted threads that could at any moment snap, leaving this heavy lid to collapse on to the fields and vineyards blanched by winter.

  Daniel had arranged for a guide. At Clamecy station a man was waiting for us, a tall figure in jeans and a parka slouched against his Renault. He was fluent in English and as he drove us down the country road, rolling up his window as the sky fought for expression, he explained he’d worked in Dover for two years.

  Off the main road we turned into a smaller one, then past a copse of trees, up a tiny hill, and towards a large piece of land enclosed by a low crumbling wall. The car came to a halt. We got out, Pierre last, and were led through a gate hanging off its hinges and into a thickly overgrown garden. Its paths were no longer distinct, the original layout blurred by a profusion of dandelions, thistles, nettles and other weeds. There was a brackish pond hemmed in by reeds and flagstone. Grass half a metre high. Overturned bottles and black rubbish bags with dirty rainwater in their dents. The open jaws of a pair of corroded garden scissors. A few metres in the distance, an old car with missing tyres.

  From the outside the chateau looked dark and unhappy; rather than a proud survivor, it seemed to resent the fact it had survived.

  The air closed in around us as we stepped from the garden into its bare, chilly shambles. During and after the Revolution, our guide explained, most of the building’s past had been effaced by both men and erosion, and now little more than its skeleton remained. Yet that skeleton, I saw, was full of character. Over the foot of a stairwell hung a mutilated coat of arms, as if its metal face had received multiple batterings. Between the eighth and eighteenth centuries a string of families—Cizelly, Pioche, du Vierne, La Ferté-Meung and Motte-Dreuzy—had reigned over the seigneury. But with each consecutive owner, our guide added, Challement had fallen into ever more dramatic disrepair and now so little was left, it required a real feat of the imagination to envision the place inhabited by anyone, the rooms so draughty even the ghosts would be blown about.

  We climbed a claustrophobic flight of stairs, a segment of the balustrade dangling like a broken arm, and wandered through a set of abandoned rooms. Everywhere I looked, I saw signs of deterioration and decay, of wondrously indifferent dilapidation. Doorways without doors, window frames without panes, deep splintery gashes in the floorboards, gloomy yawning fireplaces, a smashed metal crib. Here and there, the walls and ceiling looked singed and the air smelled faintly of smoke. I pressed my hand against one of the cold walls, the only parts that seemed impervious to time, yet there too I noticed pockmarks in the stone and bits missing from the mortar. Long strands of cobwebs swayed in the corners of the rooms, the absence of windowpanes drawing in currents of cold air from outside. Our guide said it was as if time had stood still in the chateau, but no, on the contrary, everywhere I looked I saw signs of its passage.

  At one point I heard the click of a door in another room but there were no doors. At another point, I thought I heard a window slam shut but there were no windows. It must have been the wind.

  Back on the ground floor we explored more rooms. Up in the corners I noticed a multitude of nests and wondered whether they belonged to bats or birds who had come to winter inside, though the difference in temperature between indoors and outdoors was minimal. I pulled my coat tightly around me and stuck my hands in the pockets. Daniel had removed his gloves and was writing in his notebook. Pierre stood quietly beside him.

  Towards the end of our tour, as we stood in an immense room with high ceilings, once a grand banqueting hall, our guide said, I caught sight of a sooty figure emerging from the fireplace and scurry out of the room. The thing seemed to detach itself from the stone like a shadow fleeing its owner. I cried out. Daniel quickly turned. After a second’s delay, Pierre turned too.

  The guide asked whether something was the matter. I told him I’d just seen a creature, man or giant rat, I wasn’t sure, come out of the chimney.

  ‘Oh, that’s our chatelain,’ he answered calmly.

  ‘Your chatelain?’

  ‘The owner of the chateau. Half the fee you paid goes to him.’

  We wanted to hear more. He hesitated. We clamoured. He hesitated. Daniel said we were soon leaving France, had come all this way, and wanted to depart with something more than what we’d just seen. His words seemed to work.

  So, as we stood with our arms huddled into our chests there in the banqueting hall that seemed to grow ever more gusty, we were told the tragic story of Marc Cointe, the chatelain of Challement.

  Marc Cointe, the man you have just seen, began our guide, was born into the wrong family and the wrong fate. He would have been better suited for just about any other life than the one he was handed. He detested all the trappings on which his family name was embossed yet it was as if the very lines of his life were in the silver before he was even born. As an only child he rode his wooden horse in the meadows and played with the fish and newts in the pond, but by the time he turned fifteen and searched in vain for friends beyond this little kingdom—he had private tutors, no formal schooling—his feelings towards his privileged background began to evolve in complicated ways.

  Sadly, nothing was to change. Cointe spent his entire life on the grounds of the chateau, with only two visits to Paris and one to Provence. Yet he was extremely cultivated, the villagers said, and well read.

  But a nihilist.

  At his father’s funeral he kept his distance, watching from under a tree as the coffin was lowered into the earth by four men, and then drank himself into a stupor in the library. When his mother died a year later, he watched her funeral from a castle window. Both parents were buried in a grove thirty strides from the house but no one ever saw him visit the site.

  Cointe had informed opinions on everything—he could hold his own in any debate—but he never wrote anything down. It was enough to share the fruits of his thought with a drunken audience of three: the local farmer, the local welder, and the master of keys of the canal lock.

  Until the age of thirty-five, our guide said, the chatelain had liked to entertain. On Friday nights he would invite acquaintances, for they were never true friends, from the village to sample the exquisite vintage wines in his vast cellar, bottles amassed by relatives over the decades. Before long, the contents of his entire cave were depleted, and while drinking down the wine, it was said a favourite pastime was to toss eighteenth-century Meissen plates into the air and shoot at them with an antique rifle, shards of porcelain flying asunder. Other family heirlooms met a similar fate.

  In those years the chatelain of Challement kept a flock of sheep on the grounds, twelve creatures to which he was famously attached, but one January he slipped into a three-day alcohol coma and when he resurfaced he found them all dead, frozen into different poses, some belly up in the snow with their hooves skywards as if already on their ascent towards animal heaven. He dug a trench, penitently gloveless as he worked, and buried them near his parents.

  The years wore on. Marc Cointe grew a beard, stopped washing, and inched closer and closer to clochard-dom, our guide continued. His entire inheritance had vanished in drink and nothing remained for the heating or upkeep of the chateau. His cousin, who since childhood had had his sights on the family home, despaired, but there was no legal way of intervening.

  The chatelain lost interest in human company. He withdrew from the world and stopped receiving people. Cigarettes, budget wine and round-the-clock fires became his favoured companions. Now wary of everyone, even the
master of keys of the canal lock, he rarely answered the door and when he did would be clutching a rusty shotgun. Excursions were limited to weekly visits to the village, where he ran up enormous tabs. The shop owners took pity; some had known him as a child.

  Good use was made of all the magnificent fireplaces in the chateau, our guide went on, encouraged by how intently we were listening. The following winter, having already sacrificed two dozen oaks from the estate to make fires, the chatelain began to chop and burn his own furniture. At night the villagers could see steady threads of smoke emerging from the chimneys. After the furniture came the window frames, every door except the main one, and the wood panelling. Then the family portraits. And, finally—he had no choice—the library, until all that was left were a few sacred volumes. Hundreds of books, part of centuries-old collections bound in leather, went up in flames. He had to keep warm.

  Over the past few months, the guide said, his descending tone signalling he was nearing the end of his tale, Marc Cointe no longer had a bed (the wood from his four-poster lasted nearly three days) and would sleep inside a mattress in one of the fireplaces. That was where I’d seen him emerge, roused from his slumber, most likely, by our sounds.

  I had listened in fascination, and Daniel too, neither of us stirring, oblivious to the cold that penetrated coats and walls.

  It was only once the guide finished speaking that we realised Pierre was no longer with us. After a startled exchange of glances the three of us searched the rooms downstairs with a growing sense of alarm. We peered through doorways and windows, tapped the scarred walls as if they might give way to secret passages. Dust reconfigured wherever we went. In the peaceful garden a large magpie had come to perch on one of the bare lindens, but no Pierre. Nor was he in the car. Our guide suggested we try upstairs.