Gorgeous East

by null

  Smith didn’t say anything to this, but he thought, what about the other half?

  Presently, Phillipe tossed the severed head of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam to Captain Pinard as casually as someone might toss a soccer ball to a fellow player after a game. A few minutes later, Pinard tossed it to Smith and a few minutes after that it went back to Phillipe again. And carrying this grisly trophy between them, first one, then the other, digging their fingers into the greasy, blood-matted hair, into the sockets of the eyes, they walked together down the trail and came to a narrow switchback that rose and fell sharply down the course of the ravine. The sun rose to the east as they descended. Dawn touched the heights, but not the desert below.

  14

  BRIDGE OF THE

  REQUITER

  1.

  Phillipe lay a long time dying in the hospital in Ceuta. The windows of his room, arched in the Arabic fashion and subtly tinted with gold-colored glass like an expensive pair of sunglasses, looked out on the white city, on the fortress of Monte Hoche, on the waters of the Mediterranean, wine dark, touched with whitecaps. The room was air-conditioned and clean. He was still in Africa, that is to say on the African continent, but actually in Spain. Ceuta is Spanish territory, as it has been for five hundred years, one of the last footholds of a vanished empire.

  Toward the end of Phillipe’s final struggle with death, an old-fashioned gentleman wearing a pair of pinc-nez spectacles and a velvet suit, his beard neatly trimmed, came to sit by Phillipe’s hospital bed on an odd, rickety-looking stool. The legs of the stool were needle-thin, but carved up and down with demonic little figures like gargoyles on a Gothic cathedral.

  These gargoyles grimaced and screamed, their screams making no sound at all, and they spit out a vicious black poison that was their deathless malice, the same terrible stuff that had afflicted the de Noyers down through the generations. The gargoyles would spit this poison into anyone who came near them with an open wound, and had found the de Noyers especially receptive hosts. They had penetrated Phillipe’s ancestor, Thibault, Conte de la Tour Grise in the following manner: This pious and valiant knight had gone on crusade to Egypt with St. Louis in 1277, was shipwrecked off the Egyptian coast, taken prisoner after a desperate fight, and thrown into the dungeons of the caliph of Damietta, no more than a damp hole cut deep into the earth and full of pestilence. In the caliph’s dungeon, Thibault sat down on a filthy, rickety stool just like this one, a sword wound on his thigh. From the contaminated stool, and through Thibault’s wound, the gargoyles entered his blood, chewing their way with their sharp teeth into his very marrow, into the fibery thickets of his most intimate material, where they then laid their poison like maggot eggs.

  But the gargoyles could not infect the blood or the marrow or the intimate material of the Velvet Gentleman, who was incorporeal and far beyond such terrors and who could not be touched by anything in this world, and who found the stool quite comfortable. He took Phillipe’s hand.

  “You recognize them, of course,” the Velvet Gentleman said gently. “I mean these malefic little demons.”

  “Yes.” Phillipe shuddered. “They’re horrible.”

  The Velvet Gentleman nodded. “They have been hiding inside your body, inside the bodies of your family, generation after generation, since the days of the sainted king, as a poisonous snake hides in underbrush. Sometimes they lie quiescent, asleep for fifty years, for a hundred years, and do not disturb the host. Other times”—the Velvet Gentleman offered a gesture—“we have your sad case, my dear de Noyer. They have gnawed away great gaping holes in the precious fabric of your brain like moths going at a suit.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “Where indeed?” The Velvet Gentleman shrugged. “I could say the East. That’s where such things come from, generally. Plagues, new ideas, new religions. Before that”—he shrugged—“they inhabited a universe that is not our own, that is infinitesimally small, so small that it exists and does not exist at the same time.”

  “Your paradoxes hurt my head,” Phillipe said. “I’m very tired . . .”

  But the Velvet Gentleman demurred. “We have fought them long and hard together you and I,” he said. “My music played through your fingertips made them quiet, made them slow their ceaseless gnawings, and so you have lived much longer than any of your ancestors. Think of it—six years without sleep! Who can claim to have experienced the same torment and lived! Now, granted, your body has reached its physical limits and you will die. But your death cannot be their victory. They feel your death coming and are getting ready to jump into a new host. We can’t let this happen. They must die too, this time, once and for all when your body dies. Understand?”

  Phillipe nodded.

  “Good. There’s not much time left. So you must tell your beautiful wife how to dispose of your corpse. You must keep enough strength in reserve to tell her everything, understand?”

  “All right.” Phillipe smiled weakly. “When I see her in Paris.”

  “But she is right here!”

  Phillipe turned his face to the window and saw someone, a woman, curled up in a hospital chair, asleep.

  “My love . . . ,” Phillipe rasped, barely louder than a whisper. Louise didn’t hear him, she didn’t stir. He tried to raise his hand but couldn’t. It was tied to the bedrails with plastic ties; tubes ran from the vein in the back of his wrist to a clear bag of fluids hanging above. He summoned what remained of his will: “Louise!”

  Louise awoke, alarmed. “I am here, my darling.”

  She came over to the bed and sat on the stool where the Velvet Gentleman had been sitting, but it was, fortunately for her, a different stool and the Velvet Gentleman wasn’t there anymore. She took her husband’s hand, though the touch of his yellow, papery flesh made her tremble with revulsion. Once a debonair, aristocratic Frenchman, her Phillipe was now nothing but dry skin and bones lacking even teeth. He reminded her of a mummy she’d seen once in the Louvre. He looked like he’d already been dead for a thousand years.

  “I was just talking to Satie,” Phillipe said.

  Louise smiled indulgently, the way you would smile at a child telling a crazy story. He could see she didn’t believe him.

  “I tell you he was here,” Phillipe insisted. “Right where you’re sitting.”

  “Yes, of course,” Louise said. Then, because she didn’t know what else to say: “I love you.”

  This wasn’t exactly true anymore. How could any woman made of flesh and blood and still full of life love a dried-up old mummy? But she had done what she had sworn she would do. She had found him after many hardships and strange adventures and was here with him now, during his final hours.

  “Then listen,” Phillipe continued. “Satie showed me the terrible things living inside me—like goblins, like gargoyles—what do they call them?”

  “You’re talking about,” Louise said, beginning to understand, “your disease. You mean the prions?”

  “Call them what you will. Prions, devils, gargoyles, hereditary infectious proteins—all the same thing. They’re cunning, they have a kind of brutal intelligence. They must die with me. Make arrangements to incinerate my body. I must be cremated immediately following my death. Then my ashes must be treated with lime and thrown into the sea.”

  Tears welled up in Louise’s eyes. Suddenly, the thought of not being able to visit her husband’s grave struck her to the core. She was already planning to pay her respects once a year, dressed in the most elegant black.

  “But you always told me you wanted to be buried in the vault,” she said. “In Honfleur. With your ancestors. You’re a Roman Catholic. Isn’t cremation against—”

  “None of that matters now,” Phillipe interrupted. “We must kill them. Swear you will have me burned. Swear!”

  Louise swore.

  Then her husband’s hand slipped out of her own and he faded into unconsciousness, sinking back into the desiccated yellow husk of his flesh. She pushed h
erself off the stool and hurried out of the room, tears in her eyes—though her tears were as much for herself as for him: With Phillipe dead, her life would be her own again, for the first time in many years. She had once almost thrown it away. What would she do with it now?

  2.

  Louise wandered the whispery, high-ceilinged corridors of the hospital for an hour, thinking about the future, which seemed to yawn before her like a giant mouth ready to swallow her up, and feeling an emptiness reminiscent of the despair she’d felt in the days leading up to her trip to Mont-Saint-Michel to drown herself in the sea.

  At last, she came out onto the wide loggia, its balustrades entwined with sweet-smelling, flowering vines. A lone figure sat in the courtyard below, in dappled sunlight by the fountain: It was the American Legionnaire, Caspar Milquetoast—besides her husband the only other survivor of the Massacre at Block house 9, his comrade in captivity among the Marabouts. Milquetoast was reading an American newspaper, the International Herald Tribune. He had arrived at the hospital nearly as emaciated as Phillipe, been carefully nourished, and was recovering nicely from the hardships of his ordeal.

  Concealed behind the flowering vines, Louise watched him there for long minutes, almost without breathing, her heart drumming beneath her ribs, as he quietly turned the pages of his newspaper: He was an attractive man; actually, very attractive. About her age, his hair wheat-gold in the sunlight. He looked like a movie star, she thought, like the American actor Brad Pitt. Or perhaps a little like Gary Cooper—he had that sort of long, ropy, Western look. She dried her eyes, straightened her dress, and came down the stairs.

  “Ah, Legionnaire Milquetoast,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Smith dropped his paper and looked up, squinting into the sun, which was behind her head.

  “Madame de Noyer,” he said, surprised, and made to push himself up off the bench, but she gestured for him to stay put and sat down beside him.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing your reading,” she said.

  “Non, non—je vous en pris.”

  “It’s this heat,” she explained awkwardly. “Nice and cool here by the fountain . . .”

  For a while, they looked at the water without speaking, the bright spray of droplets reflecting a rainbow against the Spanish tile work of the basin. The murmur of traffic came to them faintly; the muted bleat of cargo ships entering the harbor. Smith felt himself acutely conscious of Madame de Noyer’s presence—he hadn’t been this close to a woman in a long time. She wasn’t his type, really, too French and too small, almost birdlike. He preferred the big, brassy blondes of his Midwestern youth; beautiful, hungry, amoral farm girls like Jessica. And yet this woman was undeniably attractive—in fact, very attractive—and it was very pleasant sitting there with her. Then Smith experienced a sudden, powerful jolt, like an electric shock, to the psychosexual preceptors in his brain. All at once a vivid series of erotic images, an entire scenario, appeared on the movie screen of his imagination: A large bed, the sheets rumpled. There he was with Madame de Noyer—what was her name? Louise!—locked together, legs akimbo, one inside the other, through the length of a drowsy Sunday afternoon. New York? Paris, of course. They would fuck, talk, laugh, eat, walk in the Bois du Boulogne at dusk, then back to bed for more of the same. Erotic, companionable, intellectually matched, all the necessary components of a good marriage.

  No, impossible!

  Smith quickly shook off this self-indulgent daydream. Such a woman could have no interest in a common Legionnaire.

  “So how’s your husband?” he asked at last. One of them had to speak first.

  “Oh.” Louise made a sad gesture. “He’s delirious, I’m afraid. He raves about demons and Erik Satie.”

  “He had long talks with Satie up in the mountains too.”

  But she didn’t want to talk about her husband. “Tell me, where are you from in the States?”

  Smith told her.

  “I went to college in Virginia,” Louise began, and she told Smith about her years in Lexington, about the outrageous, drunken parties in the big antebellum fraternity houses there, lit up like ocean liners in the dark night of the Blue Ridges, the passengers, dangerously inebriated, hanging off the wrought-iron railings of the balconies, off the roof gutters. She had been terribly out of place, she said, but it had been exciting, like being a character in a novel by Faulkner. Didn’t Caddy from The Sound and the Fury somehow end up in France during the Occupation as the mistress of a Nazi staff officer? In Louise’s case, so to speak, it was the other way around.

  “Wow,” Smith said, laughing. “Hard to imagine you at Washington and Lee. Were you in a sorority?”

  “Chi Omega,” Louise admitted. “Only for one year. The girls were very Southern and all very stupid. But I did organize the first Fraternity-Sorority Tournée de Pétanque. You know this French game? With balls. Also called boules or bocce—”

  “Yeah, sure,” Smith said.

  “I understand they still play, that it’s become a college tradition . . .” They talked on for a long while as the shadows moved slowly across the courtyard and the day edged from morning to afternoon. They talked about America; then about what would happen next to both of them. She would tend to her château, she said. Maybe she would open a small, artisinal restaurant in Honfleur, which at this moment lacked a really good restaurant; she would specialize in hearty Breton dishes using produce and livestock from her husband’s estate. Smith supposed he might go back to the musical stage some day in supporting roles. Or get his Ph.D. in dramaturgy and teach at a small Midwestern school, like his alma mater, Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. And he told Louise about his previous life as an actor-singer, about some of his greatest triumphs, about the LORT A production of My Fair Lady at the Guthrie, and about doing Damn Yankees in summer stock in Vermont with the mosquitos so bad the entire audience was gone by the second act, and she laughed.

  After a while, they found themselves sitting closer to each other on the bench, almost touching. Louise suppressed an urge to run her fingers through his thick yellow hair, to kiss his face, which was both sad and handsome and still showed the marks—a series of thin white scars—of his recent ordeal. And Smith felt a genuine stirring, a reawakening—God, I’d like to fuck her! he thought—no, more than that: God, I’d like to fall in love! And these acknowledged desires sent a powerful surge, familiar but nearly forgotten, coursing through him.

  It was dreary being in the hospital. Drearier still waiting for someone to die. After their first hour together, Louise and Smith forgot the dying man upstairs. And the last promise Louise had made to her husband, that she would arrange for an immediate cremation and mix his ashes with lime and throw them into the sea, slipped completely from her mind.

  3.

  At about three in the afternoon, Satie returned to Phillipe’s room. He had abandoned the Velvet Gentleman costume of his Monmartre period and wore the tail coat and stiff white dress shirt of the years of glory, when he had become a national treasure, celebrated by le tout Paris; when he had outlived the eccentricities that had made him famous and become, at last, perfectly himself.

  As Satie sat back down on the prion-infected stool, Phillipe glimpsed a pair of pink, feathery wings neatly folded between the maestro’s shoulder blades at the back of his tail coat and knew suddenly that Satie’s presence in his hospital room was an illusion, a figment of his dying imagination. Phillipe wanted Satie to be real, to be there, and if Satie had pink wings, well, this had to be a good sign about Phillipe’s ultimate destination. But he was a soldier and had learned to be utterly hard-hearted when necessary.

  “You’re not Satie at all,” he said, with some bitterness. “You’re only a product of my diseased brain.”

  “Don’t put it like that.” Satie sounded hurt. “Of course I’m Satie. Look at me.”

  “You do resemble Satie,” Phillipe admitted.

  “That’s because I am Satie. Exactly as I was i
n life. Ah, that word”—Satie interrupted himself—“Life! Such a beautiful word, don’t you think? Implying as it does, sunlight, a field full of flowers, etc., etc. Streetlamps shining through the leaves of a tree. Wine. Glasses of beer. Stumbling home after a good long drunk—‘Good-bye, my friends, thank you for an excellent party! Yes, I’m fine, I know the way. . . . What’s this? Ah! I’ve fallen over the curb!’ . . . The sea, naturally. The wonderful, precious, inimitable sound of a nicely tuned piano. And the white arms, the breasts of women.”

  “Very nice,” Phillipe interjected. “But . . .”

  “Beautiful, eh?” Satie smiled charmingly. “La vie, quoi!”

  “Yes. But you’re here to tell me something.”

  “I am.”

  “Go ahead then.”

  Satie hesitated. He folded his long, delicate, spiritual hands in his lap, as fine as that famous pair engraved by Dürer, and his mood changed.

  “I must ask you a question, mon enfant,” he said, his voice serious. “And you must be absolutely truthful. The question is this: What kind of life have you led?”

  “How can I answer that?” Phillipe exclaimed.

  “As best you can,” Satie replied. “Everyone must try. You see that structure there? Look—”

  The hospital in Ceuta had vanished and they were walking on a narrow path through an unfamiliar forest, wildly tangled. Up ahead, stretched over a deep chasm, a suspension bridge, very delicate looking, nothing but ropes and thin pieces of wood. In the middle of the bridge stood a dim figure. At the apprehension of this person Phillipe was filled with foreboding.

  “There’s the bridge now,” Satie said.

  “Yes . . .” Phillipe was surprised by the tremor in his voice.

  “It has a name. The Bridge of the Requiter. Sooner or later everyone must cross it.”

  “Where does it lead?”

  “That . . .” Satie shrugged. “You see the bridgekeeper in the middle?”