The Wanderess

by Roman Payne

  “Seriously Saskia, why don’t you leave today without me and go to a country where you can collect on your inheritance? You can avoid sleeping in this prison.”

  Saskia turned to me with a look of horror. Her eyes went searching into my eyes. “Saul! Listen to me! I was an orphan today, till you told me we were from now on family, you and me. You are my brother, my lover, the only husband I will ever know! I don’t care where I have to sleep, just so long as I am not far from you.” She held her hands as if to pray, and put them against my chest. I held her, and while I held her, I thought to myself about the way she used to talk about her fortune being everything, and about Adélaïse being everything. I asked her to whom she now gave her allegiance. “Is it to me you give your allegiance, Saskia? Or is your allegiance to your fortune, and to Adélaïse?” Saskia lied to me then and said it was to me she pledged her allegiance; and I believed her and held her even tighter.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  My wanderess and I walked back down the shabby streets around the rue Saint-Denis. I was torn between my honor and my wish to be with her, until finally I decided those sentiments were one and the same… “Saskia,” I said to her, “a man cannot watch the woman he loves suffer to sleep at night in a miserable place. Let us then pay for only two nights at this strange hostelry. The day after tomorrow, we will check-out in the morning and go to the post office to see if Juhani came through on the money. If he hasn’t, we will use the rest of what we have to buy you a ticket to Italy. I will then go to Madrid and take an advance from Juhani, and then come immediately to Florence to meet you. Can you promise me to go along with this? Otherwise, I won’t be able to sleep at night…”

  “I agree to this. We will both leave Paris the day after tomorrow, either together or alone.”

  At the hostelry, I paid for two rooms for two nights and gave the attendant one franc for a tip, telling him that I wanted our two rooms opposite each other in the courtyard, facing one another so that we could look out of our windows and see the other one. The attendant agreed to this and showed Saskia to her gate, and me to mine.

  My room was cold, there was mold on the walls; but the sheets were clean and the bed smelled fine. The night was clear outside and I could easily see across the courtyard, which was only about forty paces wide, to where Saskia stood in her room waving to me, bathed in the yellow light. That night we had several pantomime conversations through our closed windows. The cobblestone bed of the courtyard was six long floors down below. At a quarter past ten at night, the gas lamps in all the rooms shut off automatically and each prisoner in that hostelry was left to the dark world of his or her private cell.

  The first night there, I slept like a stone. In the morning Saskia signaled to me from her room across the courtyard as soon as she was ready to come downstairs. Just seeing her that next day was pleasure in itself, having spent the night in two separate buildings. She said she hated her room, but that it was a happy room because she knew I wasn’t too far away.

  That day was our last day of innocence together. That night would bring death and a new epoch. We enjoyed simple pleasures that day. We didn’t want to spend any money, as we were afraid we would need to buy Saskia a ticket to Italy the next day. At lunch, we shared a single loaf of bread. This was enough, for our spirits were joined through our refusal to separate; thus our very privations became our delicacies, we feasted together on our abstinence. I was even fine to go without wine—which was for the best, as the moon was waning.

  * * *

  The 1st Revelation…

  Ô, it matters not if I die in sorrow, ecstasy, boredom, or pain. Just so long as I die—not by day, but by night!—while the moon does wax, and not wane…

  Our last night at the hostelry, everything seemed to be slipping away: from the moon that grew blacker each evening, to the mild autumn evenings that slipped one by one into the frozen nights of winter. We returned to the hostelry just before the curfew after a happy and innocent day walking around Paris. The thought of coming back to sleep was dreadful, as our rooms were lonely and miserable places. After saying goodnight on the street, we walked under the foreboding arch towards the gates. I took a final look at Saskia as she disappeared through the silent gate of the women’s quarters. The attendant eyed me carefully from his station as I turned away from everything, and walked through the men’s gate, smelling the sour air.

  Once inside my room, after locking my door, I checked the bed for insects. I barely had time to get undressed before the gas lamps shut off. The night was clear yet the moon was thin, and the hostelry beyond my window was steeped in darkness. Only the lights in the halls remained burning, thus I could see a slim beam of light outlining the shape of my door. For a long time, I stood at my window, staring out. I tried to imagine Saskia in the pitch-black of her room. Had she been lying in her bed? Or was she at the window looking out to me, as I was looking to her? I eventually shrugged my shoulders, got into the bed, and lay on my back thinking of how Saskia and I would be abandoning Paris that next morning—come-what-may—whether we were together or separate, all that would depend on the whim of fortune. I was so soul-sick, I never did sleep that night. It must have been four or five in the morning, (the nights were so long, it could have been later), that I heard a short, quick knock on my door. It was a knock that belonged to a hard hand. I leapt up in the darkness, unable to determine where the door was.

  “Who is it?” I demanded, loud and sharp.

  “Maintenance!” called a man’s voice.

  “Damn you! I didn’t call maintenance… what time is it?!” While I stood in that utterly black room cursing, I heard the sound of the bolt on my door being unlocked, whoever it was had a key or else picked the lock. My door began to open slowly… the light from the hall then spilled into my room cutting the black silhouette of a very tall man standing in my doorway. He was carrying a lit lantern but held it in front of his face so that it obscured his features completely. The only thing I saw around the blinding hallow of lantern light was the illumination of the man’s black coat and his black hat.

  I clenched my fists, ready to leap on him. The man said calmly, “That won’t help you tonight, Saul.”

  “How do you know my name? Who are you?!” “Sit down on the bed, Saul. We’ll have a little talk.”

  I backed away from the intruder until my legs hit the bed frame, causing me to stumble and almost land on my back. It was then the intruder took away the lantern away from in front of his face and I recognized him… “You!” I called out, looking at that long and gaunt face that belonged to none other than the clairvoyant from Málaga.

  “It’s you! Dragomir! You’re in Paris?!…”

  “I knew you’d remember me, Saul… Relax your fists. Don’t try to strike me, there are others outside.”

  “How did you get in here? Past the guard? How did you get a key to my room?”

  “The attendant was ‘tied-up,’ as you would say— still is, actually—so I helped myself to his keys. Sit on the bed. I want to talk to you a moment.” Dragomir set the lantern on a wooden footstool near the door, and he closed the door. The other stool in my room, he pulled close to my bed and sat himself down on it. By now I was accustomed to the lantern-light in my room, so I could discern clearly the features of his face, his hands, his clothing.

  “Please, sit on the bed so we can talk. I have come for matters of peace, you have my word.”

  “Is your word good, Dragomir? Just as you said your poisoned opium was good opium? Did you come to finish what you wanted to finish by sending me to Penelope Baena’s?”

  “You thought that was a trap, did you? No, Saul. I did, however, hear what happened to you at Miss Baena’s home, and yes, I admit I gave you poisoned opium on purpose… but Saul, the poisoned opium was meant for Señorita Baena! You were not supposed to eat her opium. Your own opium was not poisoned! I could not have known you were going to eat her opium!”

  “…Going to be forced to eat it,” I corre
cted him, “So you didn’t want to poison me, alright, you just wanted me to commit murder?”

  “Not murder. It wasn’t poisoned to the extent it would kill the woman—only make her very sick, as you yourself unfortunately found out. But it all turned out well, didn’t it? You are in Paris, and you are with an absolutely gorgeous girl as a result! ..are you not happy?!”

  “How did you know about her?! How did you find us here?! Tell me, how did you know that I was in Paris?!”

  “Oh, Saul, come now… it’s impossible not to know where you are these days. Saul, ‘the son of Solarus of Tripoli,’ lives a very transparent life in Paris, you ought to know. I see you regularly at the Comédie-Française. I also saw you once on the Île SaintLouis… I was in a house talking out of the window to a woman in the yard…”

  I felt the blood rush out of me when he said this. I realized then, that mysterious man in the window, the mysterious man on the balcony at the Comédie-Française… they were both him… Dragomir! He was the “messenger,” the one who never stopped showing up in my life!…

  I shook my fist at him… “ So it was you! You were the man who followed me in Valencia… You were the one in Barcelona… You were the skipper at the docks, and you are the one who gave me directions to find a hospital the night after the night you poisoned me! You have been following me! You, Dragomir!… And whatever your motivation is, it the same motivation that brought you to Paris this time!… You have followed me here!”

  Dragomir simply raised his eyebrows… “Who knows whom I have been following, my dear Saul… but no, to reassure you, if I have been keeping tabs on you, it certainly was not to see that you poisoned Señorita Baena. Anyways, let’s forget it, please, for tonight I’ve come on business. I’ve come to help you, Saul. ‘How,’ you ask? I’ll show you how… Come with me to the window. Let’s look down at the courtyard.”

  I walked beside Dragomir to the window of my room. I watched his movements carefully, full of suspicion, mistrust. I opened the pane and felt the frozen chill of the late-autumn air against my face. The lights were off in the rooms of the women’s quarters across the way. Down in the courtyard, four tall street lanterns were lit to keep sentry in the night. All the gas lamps were unlit, as was usual while the tenants slept. Beneath the lanterns, the cobblestones of the courtyard shone slick and dark with the rain from the evening past.

  “In a moment,” said Dragomir, “you will see what looks like a very short and oddly-shaped woman enter this courtyard…” I stayed silent and watched below.

  “…I say ‘looks like’ a woman, because in actuality, it isn’t; it’s a man you know: my servant Pulpawrecho. He’ll be dressed like a woman. He wants more than anything to gain access to the female quarters tonight. He would even die for it…. Do you know why?…”

  I shook my head. He continued… “Remember in Málaga when we told you the story of how Pulpawrecho and I met? It started with a thirteen-year-old girl he was stalking in the streets. And how she kissed her hands as she read my name and title: ‘Clairvoyant.’

  “…Because Pulpawrecho knew that she had consulted me for her fortune, he assumed—and rightly so, by the way!—that I could keep track of her long into the future. This is why he begged me to let him be my servant. He knew that someday—yes, someday!—I would have the heart to pay him for his loyal service. And so he’s worked for me… waiting and waiting… Now he’s decided that tonight’s the night! So, tonight he has come here to collect on what he is owed…”

  I didn’t make the connection right away. So Dragomir continued with a twist of a smile, “Let us just say that it has taken Pulpy four years—yes, four long years!—to catch-up with the fee that he requested for his loyal service; but it was not for nothing— not for nothing, you see! Tonight, Pulpawrecho has now finally caught up with his little girl!”

  At that moment a crash sounded in the courtyard. It sounded like sheets of glass breaking on stones. And then there was the sudden light of a dozen fires: the gas lamps in the courtyard lit up with the crashing sound, they chugged their flames. I looked out the window, scanning the pools of light in the dark night, wondering why the gas lamps had come on. And then, there in the center of the courtyard, I spotted a terribly deformed feminine creature. She wore a sort-of dress: mud brown, with coarse twill fabric. In all actuality, it was not a dress, but a potato sack. The woman stopped in the middle of the courtyard looking left and right, and then… upwards… apparently sizing-up the hostelry. But when her head lifted up for the first time, it sent her knotty, long hair tumbling down to the ground— you see it was a wig! Then I understood what Dragomir had meant about the creature dressed as a lady, a deformed lady entering the hostelry; it was no lady—it was a Pulpawrecho!

  “Dragomir!…” I whispered loud and urgently, “What is your servant doing down there?! And dressed like a woman!…”

  “He has special reasons to want to get through the women’s gate tonight… You realize, don’t you son of Solarus, that tonight is only the second meeting between us two? Even if you say you’ve seen me ‘here and there’ since then, tonight is only the second night we meet together as Saul and Dragomir. And just as Pulpawrecho stole your gold watch on the first night we met you down in Málaga, on this second night he has decided to steal your girl.”

  Dragomir pursed his lips silent, while below, Pulpawrecho disappeared through the women’s gate. Dragomir the clairvoyant, meanwhile, resumed narrating scenes from my life, from my future… “In a few moments, you see, Pulpawrecho will be in your girlfriend’s room. And once he’s there…”

  “Once he’s there?!” I demanded, flashing my eyes from master above to servant below… “Where has he gone?!” I pounded the window of my room so hard that one of the plates of glass fell inside my room and shattered on the floor. I turned and started for the door… “I’m going downstairs!” I yelled furiously, “I will catch Pulpawrecho before he reaches her room.”

  ‘You will never make it on time, Saul. Too many stairs… Too many to go down, too many to go up; and by the time you make it to your girl’s room, Pulpawrecho will have had plenty of time to do what he came for… to rape her.”

  “To rape her?!” My head swarmed with rage. The first thought I had was to kill Dragomir then and there, to strangle him with my bare hands, in my bare feet. But I knew I had no time, I had to hurry to Saskia. I grabbed Dragomir by the throat and threw him against the wall, then I turned to run out the door… I didn’t get two steps, however. I heard him picking himself up from the floor and the distinct ‘click-clock’ of a loading gun. Knowing that Dragomir was now pointing a revolver at me, I stopped—my palms open, slowly, softly, and most carefully I raised my hands above my shoulders. How ashamed I felt turning around in submission with my hands raised, palms outwards like a man who fears death. I had no doubt that Dragomir was going to put a bullet in my head no matter how I took it. Yet when I finally turned around to see that it was in fact a revolver that Dragomir held in his hand, you can believe my shock to see he wasn’t pointing the gun at me… rather, he was giving the gun to me!

  “Now do you see what I’m saying about there being no time to wait on the stairs?” he said, insisting I take the gun, “Here you are son of Solarus, take this gun and go back to the window— and keep your eyes peeled! Don’t miss a movement…”

  I was struck dumb in astonishment, but I took the revolver from Dragomir’s hand, thought for a moment to shoot him, then walked back to the window where I aimed the barrel of the gun at the lightless form of the women’s quarters across the courtyard. Perfect timing… a light came on across the way. It beamed from the window of my belovèd. Just as a flower unfolds to bloom, Saskia’s room unfolded into a visible scene: Her door was opened, light infused within from outside. So as a dark insect creeps its feelers onto the fresh petals of a flower, so did the wretched Pulpawrecho creep his miserable feelers into the soft innocence of Saskia’s room. Just like Dragomir, he carried a lantern in front of his face; and see
ing his prey, he advanced slowly: short, rhythmic steps, one by one.

  Saskia who had been in her bed, apparently asleep, jumped up the instant the light came in from the hall. The instant Pulpawrecho came into sight, she gave a scream so sharp, so high-pitched, that even from the other side of the courtyard, I feared my ears would explode. Back on their side, in the women’s quarters, the hunched-back, black silhouette of Pulpawrecho, set his lantern down on a stool in her room to burn steady. This not only to give light to his conquest, no doubt, but to free his hands to devour his feast. Yet it also illustrated for us onlookers all of the colors, tones and shapes of the two bodies—both the human being, and the insect.

  Saskia screamed again—and again—and then again. She leapt onto her bed, backpedaled her bare legs toward the wall. Her back was up against the wall at the back of her bed when Pulpawrecho let drop his potato-sack dress to the floor to reveal his own bandy pair of legs, and an erect, purple penis that resembled the horn of a curly ram.

  “Shoot now,” Dragomir whispered to me, “Shoot before he gets too close to her, otherwise your girl will be in danger.”

  And so I shot. The moment I saw Pulpawrecho drop his brown twill robe, the moment I saw his genitals from forty paces away, I fired a roar of bullets into Saskia’s room, pulling the trigger: once, twice, three times, then four! Four bullets blew Saskia’s room apart. Four bullets blew butterfly clouds of smoke in the night air, leaving such trails through the courtyard that it was impossible to see what I’d done.

  There I stood with such fury, with such impatience, with such terror! There I stood at the window of our smoldering hostelry. I stood waiting for the smoke to clear. I stood terrified that Pulpawrecho had managed to harm the life of Saskia once he recognized that his own life was in peril. But I considered his nakedness, and saw no place he could hide a weapon. My impatience and fury were due to the uncertainty that my shots hit any flesh. Thus blinded by the smokescreens of my creation, and deaf from the powder blasts, that wicked beast: Pulpawrecho, he could have been violating the body of my friend, my child, my sister, my wife, my spouse, my undefiled Saskia… safe from anyone seeing or hearing anything.