Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  “And I see things out of the corner of my eye. Ghosts? Spirits? Angels? I have no idea. But I always feel as if I’m in company. As if I’m watched over.”

  “That sounds creepy.”

  “No. It’s comforting. They’re definitely a benevolent presence. And I’m quite sure that my paintings have developed the way they have because of their guidance. I don’t think about it. It’s not conscious, really. But there’s a kind of reverie that comes over me when I paint. When I’m in that state, magic happens on the canvas.”

  “It’s affecting your writing too. Your last book was very deep, Calypso. It really touched me.”

  “Were you in Paris?”

  “No, in Cairo. Reporting on the debacle that the Arab Spring has become. I’d be out on the street all day, interviewing. Some of the interviews were tragic. Heartbreaking. Then I’d go to my hotel at night and find solace in your writing.”

  Calypso lowered her eyes, abashed. “I’m so glad, Walter,” she murmured.

  “So you’re still going to read me the story of the locket tonight, right?”

  “Well, I can start reading it. It’s a long story, you know. If you really want to hear it all, it may take a couple of nights. Maybe more. It took Berto a week to tell it to me.”

  “I have nothing but time.”

  Calypso smiled and nodded. “Unless, of course, something more urgent calls you.”

  “Nope. Let riot and mayhem prevail. Let hell freeze over. Someone else can scoop it. I’m here for the duration. This is the story whose time has come.”

  Calypso gave him a long look, its depth almost alarming. “Yes,” she finally said, “I think you’re right. This time, you intend to hear it all.” She rose, picked up their plates and headed toward the sink, saying over her shoulder, “You should go out and find Juan in the barn. He can saddle you a horse and show you the way. Pedro and his crew are moving the cattle to new pasture today. I think you’d be interested in the cattle drive.”

  Dismissed, Hill went outside, determined to involve himself in Calypso’s world for the day. But in his heart, he was focused on that moment when the sun would be westering, dinner would be finished, and the locket would open like a portal, spilling its history over him, like light coming through a long-sealed doorway.

  2

  The afternoon turned cool and cloudy and by nightfall, it began to rain. After dinner, Calypso and Hill sat in front of a pinewood fire, lounging deep into their chairs and stretching their feet toward the flames. Silence simmering with anticipation filled the shadowed room.

  Calypso sat with her long skirt petaled about her, her pale face like the pistil of a dark flower. Hill gazed at her, waiting, determined not to intrude on the deep innerness of her thoughts. At last, she began to speak.

  “This rain is the first break in a long drought,” she said, glancing at him. “We’ve been waiting for a month longer than usual for the monsoons to begin. Everything in nature is rejoicing tonight.” She raised her mug and took a slow sip of tea, then set it by her elbow on an end table piled with books.

  “It seems appropriate when Mother Nature is releasing her waters to let memory flow, too. I’ve been working a long time writing Berto’s story. It’s strange and complex. If I hadn’t experienced the power of the locket myself, I’d think it was one of those tales embroidered by successive generations until it was more fable than fact.

  “By writing it, I’ve come to understand how quickly life passes. How one generation succeeds another. How lives flame up and then die down to embers and vanish, far too quickly. But objects live on. They have lives of their own, possibly even intentions of their own. Who can say what that bowl knows, for example?”

  She gestured toward a cobalt and white porcelain bowl holding apples, on the coffee table before them. “It’s Chinese, from the Ming Dynasty. Did it pass along the Silk Road in a camel caravan, I wonder? Was it held in the hands of a noble or a thief? How did it get those little chips, and where? In a hut in the Gobi Desert? In a villa in Italy? And how did it end up in the thrift shop in Berkeley where I bought it? And now, it’s here in Chihuahua. It’s seen far more of life than we have, Walter, in its five- or six-hundred years. And it will continue, after we’re gone. Yet its life is a mystery to us.”

  She leaned forward and ran a fingertip along the pitted edge of the vessel. “And I wonder the same kinds of things about the locket. Except that I know a few of the details about it that I’ll never know about this bowl.”

  She stopped and glanced at Hill, a mysterious smile playing over her lips. “And so, Walter, at your insistence, the tale begins…” She wiggled her eyebrows teasingly, then bent to pick up a manuscript box from the floor and withdrew a handful of pages.

  §

  Guadalajara, Mexico, 1963

  §

  The Story of Father Roberto Villanova y Mansart Continues

  In an exclusive suburb of Guadalajara, behind a high stone wall and curly iron gates, beyond a garden anointed by a five-tiered fountain of pinkish-gray stone, stands to this day the villa of the Villanova y Mansart family. It is such an interesting architectural blend of the older Spanish Colonial style with the more recent French Colonial, that students from the local college are often brought there on field trips to pay particular attention to it. Of special noteworthiness and delicate refinement are the long French doors set into deeply carved, heavily ornamented chiaroscuro of stone, leading onto balconies of the most finely wrought and cast iron.

  It was on one of these balconies, with a frolicking spring wind picking up the corners of the lace draperies and flipping them out toward the parrot-green buds of the trees, that Roberto, then aged five, and his mother stood.

  “Berto, my sweetest darling,” his mother crooned in French, her accent slightly tinged with Spanish that was like salsa picante to her speech, “this is the most beautiful spring I shall ever see. Malheureusement, it is also likely to be the last.”

  Roberto looked up at her quickly, his dark eyes wide and serious. She was so beautiful, with her auburn hair sparkling gold in the sun. He gazed at her eyes but could not catch them. Her glance slipped off, following the hopping of a bird.

  “¿Que dices, Maman?” he asked, mixing languages, as he was apt to do. “What are you saying?”

  “I am sick, Roberto,” she said, switching to Spanish. “The doctor has just found it out. It seems I have a cancer in my brain. A horrid thing, like a big, red balloon slowly being blown up inside my skull.”

  Roberto began to cry. The fear he felt at that moment was terrible. He sensed in her announcement all the loss in the world—a rending so awful that words could never say it. And he also felt guilty for having pestered her in recent days about the locket.

  “Roberto, my love, I know you must cry. I have prayed to God for a way to comfort you at this moment. I have always believed that my prayers are answered, but this time I have gone without response. In God’s wisdom and mercy, He sometimes leaves us comfortless. Perhaps, He knows that out of our misery will come our greatest growth into Spirit.”

  Roberto listened as deeply as his child’s heart was able. Between her utterances, the silence was so complete that he was aware of the faint sibilance of water trickling in the fountain and of the distant, muted clinking of lunch preparations in the kitchen, on the floor below. He leaned into these silences, awaiting words that would bring sense to this moment.

  “I want desperately to leave you with something that will nurture and love and support you for a lifetime, the way I would if I were able. There will always be your father, of course, but you know how he is so busy with his business. There is only one thing, my darling, that I can offer you. It may not mean anything to you now, or for a long, long time. Yet, I know that eventually it will wrap its arms around you like a true mother.

  “So now, I am going to give you something. A token. You must try to understand that it is not the thing itself which has this power. It is a receiver only, like a radio. It holds
something so much greater than itself…” She looked into his troubled and uncomprehending face, so handsome, so fragile, and her voice caught in her throat.

  With her slender musician’s fingers, she undid the top buttons of her white linen blouse and pulled up from the depths of her bosom a long gold chain. On its heavy, curiously wrought length, she held up the locket which had so recently been his fascination. It swung in the spring sunshine like the pendulum of fate.

  “This, my darling, as I have told you, is a very wonderful thing. It is a religious medal from Egypt…oh, I know you’ve no idea where that is…but it’s very old. Twenty centuries before the birth of our Lord. That means almost four thousand years, Roberto, which is a long, long time.”

  She bent down so he could hold the locket in his hand. “It’s enamel on gold. A beautiful picture of the Blessed Mother of God, you see? And she is holding Her Son on Her lap. That is how I want you to see me—always, even when I am gone, holding you, helping you in every way possible. Even when you are a very, very old man. I will be there for you, I promise, if the will of God allows it.”

  “Why is the Virgin black, Maman? Her face and hands are so dark!”

  “Why, because she is like our very own Virgen de Guadalupe, son—one of the dark ones who brings the mystery of the cosmos, imprinted on her very flesh. In Egypt, she was called Isis. And before that, other names.”

  She slipped the chain around the chignon at the nape of her neck. Carefully, she placed the locket in Roberto’s hand, saying, “You must never wear this yourself. That is very important. Only a woman may wear it. I have written all about it in a letter that you will find in the box where this locket will live.

  “But more important, Roberto my little love, the Mother Herself will always be there for you. She is One who never sleeps, never forgets, never lapses. Her love is eternal and invincible.” His mother spoke with such radiance, such sonorous musicality, that she might have been standing beside the piano downstairs, singing while Tía Isobella played.

  “It’s very beautiful, Maman. How did you get it?”

  “It was given to me years ago when I was a student in Paris. There was a very refined and aristocratic man who was the very last of his family, that had lived in France so long that no one knew when they started there. But through various misfortunes, all his family died, leaving him alone, the last of his lineage.

  “He told me that the women of his family, his mother and grandmother and ever-so-many-great-grandmothers had worn this locket, and that it had magical qualities so profound that only the wearer could understand them.”

  Roberto turned the locket in his hands, examining it minutely. “How did his family get it, Maman?”

  “It came into his family during the Crusades. He told me it had the blessings of the Holy Mother Herself upon it. Who can say? But I have worn it every day of my life since then, and in spite of my present condition, I can tell you that it is a miraculous thing. I feel confident that its magic will protect you in the coming time, when I cannot.”

  “What magic, Maman? What miracles? Tell me one.” Roberto looked feverishly into her eyes, knowing somehow beyond a doubt that if she could tell him a story convincing enough, he could make the leap of faith that would bind him to the magic of this locket.

  “¡Precioso!” she crooned, stroking his warm, sunlit hair. “What heavy things I am laying on you, so young!” She turned toward the open French doors. “Come. Let’s go inside. I need to lie down for a little while. You can lie beside me and I will tell you a story.” Her long, thin arm was lightly furred with sun-shot gold, as she reached to push aside the lace curtain.

  She nudged Roberto ahead of her into the bedroom, and he was so blinded from the outside brilliance that he felt pushed into the lake of Death. He turned and grabbed her skirt, crying out in terror and burying his face in her legs.

  Lifting and carrying him with infinite gentleness to her bed, his mother sat with him against her breast, then reclined against the pile of creamy pillows and pulled a pale pink cashmere blanket, light as thistle down, over them. She settled him with his head nestled onto her shoulder. The crisp linen of her blouse smelled of starch and a faint trace of l’Heure Bleue.

  Slowly, his sobbing subsided and turned to hiccuping. The comfort of his head cradled on his mother’s breast and the subtle rocking of her torso to some internal rhythm, as if her whole body were singing inside, relaxed him. He closed his eyes in ecstatic comfort, listening as her beautiful voice began to speak, telling him a tale of magic.

  §

  Loire Valley, France, 1953

  §

  Maria-Elena Villanova y Mansart’s Story

  The countryside lying before her was bleak. Frost-burnt foliage of dull umber bordered a winding road with gravel the color of dirty white chalk. Evergreen trees, forming a tunnel overhead and bowed down by pillows of frozen snow, were so dark a green as to seem black in their somber wetness. The chauffeur eased the ancient car through shallow ruts with greatest caution.

  Maria-Elena reflected on the story her host for the weekend had told her about this car, as they dined at l’Etoile two weeks earlier. How during the World War II he had driven it into the family chapel, the doorway and windows of which were then sealed up with stone. Then, trees and shrubs were dug up and brought into the courtyard of the chateau and were planted before the newly rocked-up portals.

  By the time the Nazis commandeered the place as their strategic headquarters, the chapel appeared as nothing more than part of the old fortifications. Thus, the car had waited, immured in the chapel along with the altar’s rare twelfth-century limestone polychrome Christ, whose outstretched arms sheltered the entire property in unseen benediction throughout the War.

  “After the War, Christ and the Duesenberg were resurrected on the same day,” he recounted, with civilized glee. She remembered how they had laughed together, gazing out the window into the waters of the Seine, sémé with a million shards of light shattered on water black as oil.

  Maria-Elena was in Paris to study voice. As befitted the family of the great Eduoard Mansart, who had come from France to Mexico in 1763 to found the family’s fortunes in mining, sisal, and ranching, it was traditional for the young men of the family to take their educations in London. There they could learn sound business practices and so ultimately run the family enterprises, which had grown to include oil and the railroad. The Mansart women, however, were traditionally educated in the arts in France.

  Le Comte de MontMaran was an old friend of her grandmother’s from her college days, studying at the Art Institute. It was into his keeping that each successive wave of Mansart women had been proffered, both as a responsibility and a gift of refreshing jeunesse.

  Since Maria-Elena’s arrival in France, her grandmother, Maria-Amalia, had been on a nonagenarian spree of vicarious living. Her letters were filled with directives to go to specific places, view certain works of art, hear particular singers, all of whom were long since retired or dead, and to dine only in special restaurants, many of which no longer existed or the reputations of which had suffered in the intervening seventy years.

  Her granddaughter’s letters of protestation, begging to be allowed to discover France in her own fashion, only elicited more grandiose schemes and travel plans from Maria-Amalia. Maria-Elena hoped, during the coming weekend with the Count, to lay this burden at his courtly feet and to beg his intercession on her behalf.

  The tunnel of trees ended abruptly, and the ancient and perfectly appointed black car purred into a meadow still bent under winter frost and patchy snow. The grassy expanse rolled gently upward to the point where, crowning a small hill, the chateau was now clearly visible.

  The Count’s family had lived in France, as far as historians and family trees were able to ascertain, at least since the year 732. Men from the MontMaran family had participated with Charles Martel in turning the Moor from the gates of Tours. Later came the Crusades, the First and successive waves.

>   This inbred warrior mentality was reflected in the chateau, which bore architecturally the ancient imprint of a fortification, only slightly gussied up in the last two hundred years by more effete and less violent generations of MontMarans.

  Comte Henri bore all this with dignity and self-effacing humor. “One can scarcely imagine what to do with a thirteenth-century halberd,” he had sighed fretfully over dinner, “and I have twelve of them! The armory alone is a lifetime’s study—and there’s still the library and the religious artifacts and the paintings to consider. Little did my military ancestors know that all they were winning for future generations was the right to live as curators and conservators!”

  Maria-Elena stroked her hand over the satiny leather of the car seat, cast a wry eye over the window shades, aged to the color of vellum, and the teardrop-shaped silver vase filled with hothouse orchids, on its bracket on the door. Clearly, for all his protestations, the Count had done more than spend a life cataloging and dusting artifacts.

  Grand-mère Maria-Amalia had recounted stories quite to the contrary, in fact, of the Count’s student days, filled with a kind of Bohemian debauch involving artist’s models, Left Bank garrets, poets and painters, and nights swilling in music halls. Grand-mère had told all this, of course, as if it were hearsay and not a thing in which she herself might have been involved. Maria-Elena wondered if this might be why her grandmother was so insistent on filling every moment of her own European years with dry and pointless excursions.

  §

  The car creaked across a narrow drawbridge spanning a very deep and dry moat, through the dark tunnel of thick outer fortifications and into the castle courtyard, crunching to a halt on immaculate, creamy gravel. The chauffeur, a young and bland-looking fellow in a neat, dark uniform, came quickly back to open the door for her.