“Do you have any spare strings?” I ask.
He points to a box on the table. I open it and find a tangle of strings. Trouble is, most of them look nothing like the strings I’m used to. Eventually I find what looks like an E. I replace the broken string, then try to tune my guitar. But it doesn’t work. The strings don’t sound right together. Probably because the one I got from Amadé is made of cat or dog or squirrel.
“This is no good,” I tell him. “I need a whole new set.”
“Go buy one.”
“With what? I don’t have any money. I just told you that.”
“Go to Rivard’s. My credit is good there. On the Rue de la Corderie. Just north of here. Go up the Rue d’Anjou.”
I get my Streetwise map of Paris out but the Rue d’Anjou’s not on it. What a surprise. “Way north? Or just a few streets north? Can you help me out here, Amadé?” I ask him.
He throws his quill down. “Fine! I’ll walk you there. Will that make you happy?”
“Yeah, it will. Will not starving make you happy?”
He doesn’t answer me, just shrugs into his jacket and stuffs the iPod into his pocket.
Outside on the street, I say, “You’ve got to give up on that chord progression. It’s not working for you.”
“I heard something similar on the music box. I wanted to try a variation.”
“Who were you listening to? Beethoven? Mozart?”
“Radiohead.”
I burst into laughter.
He pulls out the iPod. “Explain to me something,” he says.
“What?”
He points to the dial. “This one … ‘Fitter, Happier.’ ”
I shake my head. “Sorry, dude, not possible. I’d need the next two centuries to explain that one.”
75
It’s kind of beautiful, this scary world.
I still want to get out of it as soon as possible, but when I look around and stop thinking about how insane it all is and just see it without freaking out, it’s really beautiful. Stinky, but beautiful.
We’re walking north through the Marais. There are yards and gardens. I can see them through the gates of the houses. Flowers bloom inside them. A man drives a herd of sheep ahead of him through the narrow, cobbled streets. Another carries a cheese as big as a wagon wheel into his shop. A straight-backed girl in a slate blue dress, her gold hair coiled up on her head, washes windows. Men sit in a coffee shop, drinking from porcelain bowls and smoking clay pipes. Amadé stops and looks at them longingly.
“Come on, java-boy,” I say, tugging on his sleeve. “The sooner I get my strings, the sooner you get your triple grande double-caff soy crappucino.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
We keep walking. There’s no plastic in this world. No neon. No diesel fumes. No aluminum siding. No fluorescent lights. No loud tourists wearing T-shirts that say MY PARENTS GOT TO SEE THE KING GET HIS HEAD CUT OFF AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT.
We pass a woman who’s standing by a fountain, a cup in her hand. She’s wearing a black dress with a red, white, and blue ribbon pinned to it. She’s thin and sad. Two small, skinny children sit on the ground by her feet. The sight of them kills me.
“A war widow,” Amadé says.
I look back at her. I see her move. Hear her speak. She’s very much alive but I know I’m looking at a ghost. Two hundred years have gone by since she walked the streets of Paris. There’ve been wars and revolutions out the waz since then. So many people killed. And the ones left behind, the ones like her, always tell themselves that it was worth it, that something better will come from the mess and the death and the loss. I guess they have to. What else can they do?
“I wish I had some money. I would give her a few coins,” Amadé says.
“I wish I had some balls. I would tell her I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. I would give her an apology. From the future.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re still at it. You think the Revolution was bad news, you should check out World War One. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Didn’t turn out that way.”
“World War One?”
I try to explain it. And World War Two. But he can’t get past the tanks and airplanes.
We turn right onto the Rue d’Anjou. I take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. It’s sunny and warm and the guitar case is heavy on my back and I’m sweating like crazy. I haven’t had a bath. I’m greasy and smelly. But I’ve learned that stink soon reaches critical mass. You reach a certain degree of smelly, then level off.
We keep walking down a nameless street that’s so narrow, I can almost touch the houses on both sides. Amadé starts talking about the iPod again. He asks me why so many of the songs on it are in English. I tell him because English is the world’s most commonly spoken language. He refuses to believe it. He says there’s no way the world’s people would choose such an ugly language over French. Then he asks me about the man Led, surname Zeppelin, and what sort of instrument he used to make the sounds on “Immigrant Song.”
“An electric guitar,” I tell him. He gives me a puzzled look. “Do you know what electricity is?”
“Electricity,” he repeats, frowning. “I think I know this thing. The American ambassador invented it. Benjamin Franklin. Do you mean to say that Monsieur Zeppelin’s guitar is powered by lightning?”
“No, not by … actually, yeah,” I say, laughing. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“This is a wondrous thing,” Amadé says.
“Yeah, it is,” I say, thinking how cool that is—Amadé liking Jimmy Page’s guitar-playing. Because two hundred–odd years from now, Jimmy Page tells Rolling Stone how much he likes Amadé Malherbeau’s.
“Ah! Look where we are. Almost there. Come, we must cross,” Amadé says, taking my arm. We turn left onto the Rue de la Corderie, dodging a carriage, two sedans, and countless piles of horse poop.
And then I see it—an ancient, ugly building, looming above the stone wall that surrounds it. A dark tower rising into the sky. The Temple prison.
As I stand there, staring up at it, this whole weird trip becomes real. History itself becomes real. It’s no longer an account. A chapter in a textbook. Pages in a diary. It’s real. He’s real. He’s in there. He’s suffering. Dying. Not in the past. But now. Right now. I feel like I can’t breathe.
“Amadé,” I say. “There’s a boy in there. Louis-Charles.”
Amadé’s a few steps ahead of me. “I know,” he says brusquely. “There’s nothing to be done.” He walks back to me and takes my arm, but I don’t move.
“He’s only a child, Amadé.”
“What he is, is a lost cause,” he says. “Come on.”
But I don’t. I won’t. I just stand there, looking up at the tower. I remember Alex’s description of the dying boy. Of his suffering. Of her own. Of the despair she felt because she couldn’t save him. I remember her decision to stay in Paris when she could have left.
She died trying to help Louis-Charles. She died here. In Paris. In June of 1795. And now I’m here. In Paris. In June of 1795. Standing where she stood. Standing in her place. I put the guitar case down on the street, open it, and take my instrument out.
“Are you mad?” Amadé hisses.
I take a few steps back from the wall, wanting my sound to rise, to not get eaten up by the ugly stones. I’m not even thinking about the dodgy E string now. I don’t feel crazy anymore. Whacked out. Or comatose. In fact, I feel totally sane.
I start to play. I play “Hard Sun,” trying to hit those opening chords hard and perfect. I start to sing, channeling Eddie Vedder, wanting my voice to be strong and loud, wanting the sound to rise.
“Stop this! We have to get out of here!” Amadé shouts fearfully, tugging on my arm.
I shake him off and keep playing. Harder. Louder. I cut a finger. I can feel my blood on the strings. I hear shouting
. It’s coming from the prison gates. Amadé swears at me. He walks away. A man approaches me. He has a uniform on and he’s carrying a rifle. He came out of nowhere.
“Move on!” he shouts at me.
“Please, sir. Ignore him,” Amadé says, running back. “He’s not right. He hit his head and ever since, he—”
“Stop playing!” the guard shouts.
But I don’t stop.
“Did you hear me?”
And still I don’t stop. He raises his rifle then and hits me in the face with the butt. Lights go off in my head. I fall to my knees.
“Stop. Now. Or I will shoot you dead,” the man says to me.
I look up at him. “Where did you come from?” I ask him.
He raises his rifle again, presses the barrel to my forehead. I feel blood running down my cheek. Pictures flash before my eyes. Pictures of monks on fire. Of bodies in a pit. Of napalmed children running down a dirt road. I push the barrel away and get to my feet. I hold my guitar with one hand and wipe the blood off my face with the other.
“A decent man. Just doing your job,” I say to him. “You were always here. And you always will be.”
76
The same chords. Over and over. Never progressing.
Amadé’s sitting at one end of the table. I’m at the other end trying to get him to talk to me.
“You want me to say I’m sorry? I’m not sorry. I’d do it again.”
He doesn’t reply.
I left the Temple after the guard hit me. I got new strings, then went to the Palais and played. My drunken friend was there. He called me Pocahontas again. Said he liked the blood on my face, that it made me look even wilder. I told him I’d gotten splattered when I scalped the last idiot who tried to grope me. I told him I’d scalp him, too, if he put his hands on me again.
He’d pressed his hand to his heart, told me he loved me, and threw money in my guitar case. And this time I snatched it up before the blind kid did. I bought food, and a bone for Hugo, and half a pound of coffee. It cost the earth but I knew I wasn’t getting back into Amadé’s rooms without it.
“He’s a child, Amadé. Alone and dying,” I tell him now.
“Say one more word about it and I’ll throw you out.”
“Go ahead. I’ll take my coffee with me.”
He glares at me.
“He’s cold and hungry. Suffering in the dark.”
“That’s not so. He’s well looked after.”
“He’s sick and he’s in pain and he’s been that way for years, Amadé. For years”
“How do you know this?”
“Books. Dozens of them will be written on the Revolution. Hundreds. Two centuries after it happened people will still be trying to understand it.”
“The Revolution is past. It’s done with. Over.”
I start laughing. “It’s never over. You had a king. In another year or two you’re going to get another one.”
“What happens?”
“I told you. Bonaparte takes over. Has himself crowned emperor. Which is exactly what you all fought to get rid of. He wages war on the world. Screws everything up. Big-time.”
“I meant to the boy.”
I look away.
“If you know so much, tell me what happens to him.”
“He dies,” I say quietly.
Amadé snorts. “Then why are you bothering? What’s the use?”
I can’t answer him.
“You’re mad. Perhaps it’s from the fall you took. Perhaps you always were mad. I don’t know. What I do know is that you must never again do what you did today. They’ll kill you next time.” He stops speaking abruptly, looks as if he’s weighing his words. Then he says, “You must also stop what you do at night.”
“Um … what do I do at night? Snore?”
He brings his fist down on the table, startling the hell out of me. “This is no joke!” he shouts. “There is a bounty on your head! General Bonaparte wants you dead! You must stop setting off the fireworks, or you soon will be.”
I don’t get it. Not at all. And then I do.
“Wait a minute,” I say, laughing. “Amadé, you don’t think I’m the Green Man, do you?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just stares at me. After what seems like a really long time, he says, “Why do you think I helped you? Took you in? Kept you off the streets so the guards would not find you? I guessed who you are when first I met you in the catacombs. From the key around your neck. I saw the L on it. For Louis, the orphan in the tower. He’s the one for whom you light the rockets, isn’t he?”
“No, Amadé, you’re wrong. I’m not—”
He doesn’t let me finish. “And then today, at the Temple. If I had any doubts, what you did there took them away. I knew you for the Green Man then. You risk your life for the child. You light up the sky so that he will know he is not forgotten.”
“Look, I’m not the Green Man. I swear to God I’m not.”
He shakes his head, disgusted. He puts his guitar down and goes to the mantel. There’s a wooden box sitting on top of it. He takes something out of it and places it on the table in front of me. It’s a small ebony frame that contains two miniature portraits. They show a man and a woman, regal and elegant, both holding roses. I’ve seen them before. They’re in the portrait of Amadé, the one hanging in his house near the Bois de Boulogne. The plaque on the wall next to the portrait said they were thought to be Amadé and his fiancée, but looking at them now, I’m not so sure.
“Who are they?” I ask him.
“The Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne. My parents,” he says.
“Amadé, you’re a noble?” I say, stunned.
He nods.
“But the books … they don’t say that. They just say you came to Paris in 1794.”
“I do not know of which books you speak, but yes, I came to Paris in 1794. I had no choice,” he says.
He sits down then and tells me how they lived—his father, his mother, and him—in an ancient château in the countryside of Auvergne. It was beautiful there. He was happy. His parents were both musical and saw to it that he, too, studied music. He had lessons on the piano, the violin, and the guitar from a very young age. He showed great promise and was composing by the time he was eight. There were plans for him to go to Vienna to further his studies shortly after his fourteenth birthday. In the autumn of 1789.
“A few months before I was to leave, however, my father, as a member of the nobility, was summoned to a meeting of the Three Estates at Versailles. I put off my trip—just for a few weeks, or so I thought—so my mother would not be alone. It was the beginning of the revolution. And the end of my family,” he tells me.
“What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer.
“Like many of the nobility, my father supported the reforms the revolutionaries were demanding,” he says. “The country was bankrupt. The old regime was corrupt. France needed change and he saw that. However, after the attacks on the Tuileries, after the massacres, he’d had enough. He realized a monster had been created but it was too late to kill it. At the end of the year, the king was put on trial. Nearly all the delegates voted for his death. It was suicide to vote for clemency, but my father did it anyway. He was always loyal to his king. My family had a motto. It was on our coat of arms. It said—”
“From the rose’s blood, lilies grow.”
“You know the motto?” he asks me, surprised.
“Yes, I do,” I reply. I know it from the Auvergne coat of arms hanging in the stairwell at G’s house.
“My father was called a monarchist, a traitor to the Revolution. A few days after the king’s death,” he says, “my family’s property was confiscated. The revolutionaries took everything. Lands and buildings that had been granted to my ancestors by Henry I in the eleventh century. My father and mother were jailed. I went to my father the night before his trial. He told me where he’d buried some gold coins. And then he told me that no matter what I might hear at the trial
, I had his love always. In this world and the next. ‘Live, beloved son.’ Those were his last true words to me.”
Amadé pauses here and stares into the fire. A bit of time goes by before he starts talking again. “As the son of a traitor, I should have been tried myself and probably would have been, but in the middle of his own trial my father suddenly stood up and denounced the Jacobin officials conducting the trial, the Revolution, all of it. Then he turned to me. He called me a filthy Robespierrist and a traitor to the king. He said I was no longer his son. He called me liar and bastard.
“I was shocked. I argued with him. Shouted at him. All in front of the Jacobin judges, the entire tribunal. Which was exactly what he intended. His words had been lies, every one, but those lies saved my life. I was never charged with anything, never tried. After my father’s trial, the chief prosecutor, a greasy Jacobin with dirty boots and black teeth, moved into our house. A house where kings had stayed. Where writers and painters and musicians—the finest of their day—had stayed …”
His words trail off.
“And your parents?” I ask. “What happened to them?”
“They were guillotined. In the village square like common criminals. I was forced to watch.”
“Oh, Amadé,” I whisper.
His eyes are wet with tears now. “I left Auvergne for Paris. Changed my name. It used to be Charles-Antoine. I dug up the gold my father spoke of before I went. It kept me for a while. I knew how to play and compose, so I wrote pieces for the theater. Light, silly things, yet without them I would have starved. But I find I can no longer write them. I can write nothing at all. I try, but pretty melodies sicken me now. My heart, my soul, all of me grieves. For my parents, for our lost life, for this country—” His voice cracks. He covers his face.
My heart is breaking for him. I reach across the table and try to take his hand, but it’s knotted into a fist and he won’t open it. So I get my guitar instead and start to play. I play Bach’s Suite no. 1.
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