The Wanderess

by Roman Payne

  Our mornings were happy, our evenings full of laughter. The murder of Pulpawrecho soon left our thoughts, along with all other unpleasant memories. Several times Saskia asked me why, if we were not looking for Adélaïse anymore in Paris, didn’t we go immediately to Tuscany to look for my mother and Adélaïse there. Whenever Saskia brought this up, I would remind her that she loves Paris. I would tell her that we were not going to travel to Tuscany just because Dragomir told us we would have good luck and a rich healthy life there.

  “Oh, so it’s Dragomir who decides in favor of us staying in Paris now?” would be the response of the clever girl, “I should thank him for his decision.”

  I told Saskia that I was ready to leave Paris as well, but that travel would be easier in spring. It was already winter when we came to live in the Marais, and the months seemed only to grow colder as they progressed. We waited on, and slowly time went by.

  I didn’t see anymore of my “messenger” in Paris, except one event occurred in late March that made me wonder if we were still being followed or not…

  There was a wine merchant at the great marketplace of Les Halles, about a quarter-hour on foot from our house. There one could find the best prices in all of Paris on the good wines of Bourgogne and Bordeaux. Maurice, the patron, was an old man with a large stomach who told nothing but jokes with his great accent from Marseille. It was already almost April, but this night was as cold as a night in the dead of winter. The moon was growing fuller, it was almost full. I left a café near Les Halles where I smoked a pipe of opium and drank a pitcher of vin chaud1; and although it was already very late, I decided to buy some wine for when I got home.

  1VIN CHAUD: (Fr) “Hot wine.” Heated wine is sweetened and flavored with cinnamon, cloves and other spices, as well as fruit.

  It was the first and only time that I went to this wine merchant’s that Maurice wasn’t in. A woman of about fifty years was keeping the shop. I asked where Maurice was and she said he was ill. I asked for a bottle of the Bourgogne that I always bought, and she told me that they had none, that the shipment didn’t come in. She recommended a bottle of Bordeaux that she said was just as good, it was about the same price; I didn’t want to take the time to look further. I bought a bottle of her wine and braved the cold streets home.

  Outside the window of our kitchen, a single lantern burned in the alley where there was a printing shop down below. Some stray gutter cats foraged for food in the alley, above the moon burned in the sky like melted silver cooling in an almost round black mould. Saskia was asleep and didn’t wake up when I came in making noise. Alone in the kitchen I uncorked the bottle of wine that woman sold me and poured a full glass. The color was deep red, with no purple in it, which meant it was old enough to drink. I was always picky about red wine… never so young that there should be a hint of purple in the color.

  As was my custom, I spilt the first large swallow from my glass out for the god of wine to enjoy, as superstition says that he who does not honor the gods will someday find his wine keg dry and no food in the pantry. His bed will be empty of his wife or his mistress…

  Since I was next to the window, I spilt the swallow on the windowsill looking out on the alley. The puddle of wine reflected the light and shape of the lantern burning. It was then, before I drank from my glass, that a stray cat jumped down from the gutter and began to lick my offering to the gods. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, cat,” I said, “that wine is for mighty Zeus and Apollo.” Shortly after I said this, the cat fell on its side. I pulled it in close to the windowsill so his death would not be caused by falling. The cat began to convulse slowly, his breathing was labored.

  I watched that cat for sometime. He didn’t grow any worse, but he didn’t get any better. I wasn’t completely sure if the wine was poisoned, or if it was the fact that the cat licked an offering to a god that made him sick. That bottle was all the wine in the house, so I hoped that it was a curse from the gods that struck him down. I didn’t look forward to pouring the wine down the drain. I decided then to test it on another cat, from wine that was not offered to a god. I found a piece of bread in the pantry and tore a piece off. I then poured a nice swallow of wine that thoroughly soaked the piece of bread; then I threw the bread into the alley. I saw a couple cats fight for it, then one cat—having won—ate the bread, let out a little cry, and then fell on its side.

  “Poisoned wine!” I decided to go to bed. But first I wrote on a little square of paper these words: “Don’t Drink Me!”—I then stuck the note to the bottle, tying a string around it to make the note stay. I then put the bottle under the sink where there were bottles of various household poisons. I went to bed thoroughly disgusted with the way my evening had to go.

  It was late when I woke, I had a headache. Saskia was already awake and was moving around in the kitchen. I jumped out of bed and ran to her and asked her if she had by any chance drunk any of the poisons under the sink. She looked at me with the strangest look! She asked me why on earth would she ever drink the things under the sink?! I reinforced her thinking, telling her one more time not to drink anything we kept under the sink; then I left her alone. Scratching my head in wonder, I went down to the alley to see about my cat.

  The printer’s shop was open and a worker was out in the alley eating his lunch. I bid him good day and looked around until I spotted the cat. He was stiff and silent, lying on his side on the dirty ground.

  Inspecting the cat, I found that he was still alive. His breathing was regular, although he looked ill and had a pained expression on his face. I thought the matter over… ‘That was twelve hours ago that I fed him that bread, and he is still alive! This poison is not strong…’

  Back upstairs at our windowsill, it looked as though the first cat had tumbled to his death in the night, as he was no longer on the windowsill. I eventually spotted him, however, on the ledge of the roof that sloped down beneath the window. He had apparently crawled on his own out to the ledge to sleep. I threw a walnut at him and it pounced off his body, he glanced around. He looked only half-sick. I knew he would be in fine shape, but I had to know for sure…

  So I took the bottle of poisoned wine and went into our bedroom where Saskia was tuning her guitar. That was good, I told her, as I needed to hear a song that morning. Once it was tuned, she played me a beautiful song about two wayfarers travelling through a rainforest together; and after it was over she asked me if I was going to get drunk for breakfast.

  “Oh, this wine? No, no, I’m not going to drink it. I’m taking it to go to poison a donkey.”

  For the second time that morning, she gave me the strangest look! I left her there on the bed with her guitar and walked out with the wine bottle through the cold, icy morning, down to the marketplace at Les Halles.

  Once at the market, I passed the wine merchant’s and noticed it was closed; so neither the woman who sold me the wine nor Maurice were there to question. It was just as well, I hadn’t come for that.

  I came to the Halle des Blés, where they sold flours and seeds, and I found a solitary donkey roped-up. Around him were piles of dried corn. I got on my knees, quickly made friends with the ass, and grabbed his snout. He resisted at first, but when I stuck the mouth of the bottle into his gourd, he obediently drank the wine.

  “Now I need to wait,” I said. I left the ass and went for a stroll and came back. As was expected, the ass was sick, lying on his side, labored breathing, slight convulsions, a desperate look on his donkey face. I left him there again. I went and ate breakfast in a bistro. I walked around awhile. I went then to drink a pitcher of vin chaud in a café. I took my time. Some hours later, I went back to visit the donkey. As before, he was lying on the corn. He was like before, but the desperate look on his face had relaxed—it appeared he’d gotten used to his condition by now. There was no doubt he would survive.

  ‘He’s a little donkey,’ I said to myself, ‘Perhaps it’s a donkyesse?… anyway, she’s smaller than I am, weighs a bit less than me, s
o she’d be easier to kill—yet she’s just sick. Whoever it is who wants to poison me… first off, it wasn’t that woman at the wine store. I’d never seen her nor wronged her in my life. And she alone couldn’t have influenced Maurice to take the day off from work—unless she’d poisoned him too, of course…

  ‘No, I can bet safely… whoever wanted to poison me did so not to kill me, but only to make me sick. And the last person to poison me was Dragomir. Still, the two can’t be related,’ I told myself, ‘I believe this was just an accident; Dragomir had no motive to poison me. I haven’t seen or heard from him since last fall. If it wasn’t an accident, then it was those same people who trashed our apartment on the quai… they’ve tracked me down in the Marais—bad news…”

  Thus I threw my hands up on the matter. But I did not stop giving the matter thought… it was because of this poisoning attempt that I decided we should leave our apartment on the rue de Vieille du Temple in the Marais, without delay, and with great secrecy.

  I told Saskia about the drunken donkyesse. She was sad that I had to poison a donkey of all creatures, but said that I did right; and that given the recent events in our lives, it was perfectly natural that somebody should poison our wine. They failed at making us ill, but they succeeded in chasing us out of France.

  “We are not being chased out of France,” I said, “We wanted to go to Italy this spring anyway.”

  “I can’t wait to be in Italy,” Saskia replied.

  We therefore moved our belongings from our apartment little by little, to not be suspected of moving. Each time we went out, we carried an extra bag with us, which we kept safe until our escape, in a storage attic owned by Madame Gazonette, on the rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard in the fifth arrondissement. Madame Gazonette was no longer furious with us. In fact, she loved us more than ever, since we were now in funds and we could afford to pay her handsomely to replace all that was destroyed when those people broke into our apartment. She wanted us to move back in, yet our hearts were set on Italy. And so, on the twelfth of April of that year, we took our things from Mme. Gazonette’s attic, and left Paris in the utmost secrecy.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Italy…

  With April, came the warm weather. It was sad to leave Paris when we saw how beautiful the city became at the coming of spring. We arrived in Florence on a Friday afternoon and came to a hotel overlooking the square my mother told me about: the Piazza della Signoria. It was right next to the bridge spanning the Arno river: the Ponte Vecchio. I knew that if she were in Florence, she would come to these places on Sunday. So, the day following the next day, Sunday, I walked the whole of Piazza della Signoria and the Ponte Vecchio from morning till night and I didn’t see her.

  Florence too is a beautiful city, but less amusing than Paris. I also don’t speak Italian. I do speak French, Spanish, English and two other languages, I think that’s enough. I wasn’t going to try to learn Italian. Saskia knows just as many languages as I do, if not more, from all her wandering around the world. She knows Italian since she was a schoolgirl in Verona. So while we were in Italy, she translated everything to me.

  The only person we told we would be in Florence was Juhani, and the first Monday following our arrival, a letter came from him to the post office in Florence. He had the good news that one of his friends owned a villa in Tuscany that he rarely used and was vacant then. Juhani’s friend had plans for his villa the next autumn, but now was spring. So if we wanted, we were welcome to stay in his villa for the next six months. The villa was in the famous city of Siena, about thirteen leagues south of Florence. Saskia and I both agreed that only good things could come from six months in Siena, as this would help us save money, and we thought we might find those we were looking for. Had the villa been in the rural Tuscan countryside we would not have accepted the offer, but Siena was a possibility in our search.

  We left Florence the next day. The road was terrible and the journey took a long time. They were building a new road, we were told, but it wouldn’t be ready for five years.

  The villa was a charming stone house on the Strada Malizia, just outside of the city-centre. It only had one-storey, but it was spacious and sunny, with an herb and vegetable patch outside. The house was built circular around an interior courtyard planted with lemon trees. We had all the food we needed for summer growing all around us. We were happy to have come, and our nights in that courtyard under the lemon trees were so bucolic—in the moonlight we would lounge on white cushions and drink wine, while Saskia played her guitar. I had no hobby while she played, except that of listening to her, and composing in my head verses to praise the beauty of her songs, her voice, the joy I felt beside her.

  By day, we searched for Adélaïse. When at night we felt like seeing the city and its people, we walked down to the Piazza del Campo, or to another square where the moonlight was generous, and we would eat and drink wine until half-drunk and merry.

  The most illuminating of these nights at the Piazza was a night when there was no moon at all and blackness shone on the earth. I could see nothing in that medieval square except for her face and hands, the contour of her neck; and in the background, the faint surfaces of the other diners on the terrace that glowed from the light of the candles on each table. Yet as Saskia and I talked, a bright star emerged from the darkness and gave shape to events in our past. Here is what happened…

  We ordered red wine. It was a good wine from a nearby village called Brunello di Montalcino, and it made us easy with words. After we finished two bottles of it and were more drunk than usual, we were so light-hearted and happy in our drunkenness that we decided to keep the wine coming. As we were toasting the third bottle, a startling incident happened… A handsome young man appeared in the piazza, at the edge of the restaurant’s terrace, and he looked into the crowd of diners where we sat and shouted loudly, “Clara! Clara!” while waving his hand. Hearing that name flashed me back to that fatal night in Paris. Saskia looked at the youth in alarm, I did too. A moment later a girl from a table behind us jumped up and broke into laughter, “Marco! Bello! Sei un idiota! Sei pazzo! Mi sei mancato1!” She ran towards him and they embraced for a long time. The couple then wandered off together and never returned.

  I turned to Saskia and said a clumsy thing that I should never have said: “I think every time I hear someone say the name ‘Clara,’ for the rest of my life, I’m going to think about that unknown girl who made me kill Pulpawrecho.”

  It was a tasteless remark: gloomy and sad. And, as a rule, it’s bad form to confess loudly to murders one’s committed while drunk in Italian piazzas; but beyond that, it was just a foul thing to say. I blame it on the enormous quantity of wine that we’d drunk… that, and the quality of the night. But, oh, what a night it was!… I was happily across the sea from the home that used to be the only place I knew on this earth before I grew up to taste the perfumed flesh of travel and the beautiful body of the world. Now I was in Italy, a country I thought I would never live to see. My mother had sent me there in dreams, through many a bedtime story when I was a small boy. But now, to think that I was in that far-away place, together with my wild-eyed enchantress. Saskia too looked enraptured to be with me. And with the wine flowing freely, the night progressed sweetly. That is, until I had to go and ruin the mood by saying, ‘forever will the name Clara make me think of that unknown girl who made me kill Pulpawrecho.’

  Saskia became flustered—angry one minute, then pleading with me—asking me to explain what I meant by such a horrid statement. I told Saskia that it was Clara’s fault that I had to kill Pulpawrecho.

  “Why her fault?”

  “Not her fault, but because of her... The Clara girl whom Dragomir mistook Saskia for was the same girl that Pulpawrecho fell in love with the night she came to consult the clairvoyant in Málaga. The moment that little madman saw Clara, he fell in love with her, pathologically, she became a perverse obsession. And because Pulpawrecho also mistook you for Clara, just as Dragomir had,
he tried to rape you.”

  1 MARCO…MENCATO!: (It) “Hey Handsome Marco! You’re an idiot! You’re crazy! I’ve missed you!”

  Saskia didn’t say anything. She looked puzzled, confused, and infinitely sad. Finally, she said, “So what you’re saying is that it is because of me, and no one else!, but because of me that you had to kill?!”

  “My dear, I didn’t mean that! Certainly if Pulpawrecho hadn’t thought you were Clara, he would have eventually found another girl of your age who reminded him of her, and he would have tried to rape her instead; and Dragomir would have sentenced Pulpawrecho to death for that girl instead of you. What do we care about all this! Do you think it weighs heavy on my conscience to have killed an insect such as Pulpawrecho? Dragomir himself wanted him dead.”

  I was so drunk while we were talking about this, that I didn’t notice at first when Saskia slipped-up… She made an error with words a little later in the conversation… “Tell me how this Clara girl inspired Pulpawrecho to want to rape me, Saskia?” she said, “I mean, if Pulpawrecho never even met this Clara girl, how could Pulpawrecho have fallen in love with her? It’s impossible! Dragomir is the one that met her…”

  Her cheeks turned fiery red then and she became flustered. I think it was at this moment that she realized where she’d slipped-up. For how did she know that Pulpawrecho never met this Clara?! …To cover herself, she added, “But you know what, Saul, you are right. It doesn’t matter who killed Pulpawrecho, or who inspired him to be a madman and a rapist… the fact is that he was by nature a madman and a rapist… so why should he not have been killed?!”

  “Hmm,” I said, considering everything, “Just how do you know that Clara never met Pulpawrecho? I’m just curious.” I waited and waited but Saskia didn’t answer me, she just sat there, nervously tapping on her wine glass. I decided to let it go. I took my own glass in hand and took so pleasurable a swallow that it made my head tingle with intoxication. I looked up at the dark sky, and over at the famous Palazzo Pubblico building that crowned the Piazza, then back at Saskia. “Why don’t you drink your wine?” I asked her.