The audience applauded with genuine enthusiasm. The waitress returned and gave Bruno a sheet of paper, a pencil and an envelope. He scrawled a note then felt in his pocket and detached a key from his chain. He sealed the envelope and gave it back with a nice tip. Françoise leaned in and kissed his neck, the bright red of her lipstick leaving a mark on his skin. His hand caressed her voluptuous backside as he said to me, ‘Well, enough art for one night, let’s go upstairs.’
‘It’s a bit —’ I couldn’t find the right word.
He stopped and looked at me, relaxing back into his chair. ‘Overwhelming?’ he asked, perhaps understanding me a little better now. ‘It’s quiet upstairs and the girls don’t simply offer themselves for fucking. You’ll find they’re consorts trained in providing friendship. Without them men would go mad.’
I put my hand on Bruno’s thick forearm, stopping him from rising.
His brow creased. ‘Is it a matter of religion? Or do you find it coarse to be in a place where women are paid for their skills?’
‘Neither. There’s nothing wrong with this place. But I’d rather go.’
Bruno’s smile was twinged with regret. ‘God allows us one life,’ he said, ‘and whenever you limit yourself you limit the experiences you have before your time’s up. Who knows when that will come? Please don’t get the wrong impression. I need my outlets, but the centre of my life is my family. Nothing makes me happier or more of a man than the embraces of my children and my wife. They’re the gifts heaven’s allowed me.’ He thought a moment. ‘But the idea of God and the eternal is so abstract. Now, are you sure?’
He used the pencil to write our address down, telling me to ask for help by showing it if I couldn’t find my way home.
‘Avoid beggars and damsels in distress, I don’t want to be collecting you from the morgue. Find a gendarme if you need directions.’
Rays filled my room, and the open windows let me hear men and women calling in a market somewhere. If there was any rush to go out and visit the second publishing firm I was sure Bruno would come banging at my door, so I let myself stay in the bed, French voices and drifting scents of cooking giving me the illusion that I was a part of Parisian life. When I finally did rouse myself I found that Bruno must have stoked the fire during the night – it still glowed warmly. I broke eggs over the griddle and added mushrooms, making coffee as they cooked.
I went to Bruno’s closed door and asked if he’d join me for breakfast. There was no reply. I thought I could smell a cigarette. Maybe for once Bruno wanted privacy. I went to the bathroom to wash my face, and as I pushed the door a young woman slowly turned and looked at me from the claw-footed tub. A magazine was open across a sort of half-table, which also held a daintily patterned teacup and an ashtray for her cigarette. Her hair was pinned up and her breasts were pert and the colour of snow. She exhaled a plume of smoke.
‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ was all I heard as I retreated.
The mysterious Celeste.
I checked the main bedroom and saw that the big bed had been slept in. Bruno wasn’t there. Delicate clothing and shoes were. He hadn’t returned home, even though she’d come and let herself in, using the key he’d sent her.
She emerged from the bathroom wearing a red, clinging dressing robe with blue and purple toucans embroidered into it. I thought she was maybe twenty or twenty-one but her eyes were infinitely more knowing, as if she’d lived a lifetime or two already. As she unpinned her hair she stood at the kitchen’s entrance, barefoot. Her toenails were painted a deep red, the colour of fire.
She spoke to me in French, very lightly, but I didn’t understand a word she said.
I stumbled over, ‘Made-moi-selle . . . Italiano . . .’
Her face slowly lit up. In French-accented but perfect Italian she replied, ‘And I’m certain you’ll tell me your name is Cesare Montenero.’
Turquoise Book
Celeste stood at an open window and used a towel to dry her long hair as I made her two fried eggs with thin pieces of ham. I sliced several ripe tomatoes and served them seasoned with olive oil and oregano. She draped the towel over a chair and poured two cups of coffee. We both took it black. She wanted to know why Bruno had brought me to this city. As I explained she listened and chewed. Though she was slim she ate passionately, which I liked. She wanted more so I made her more.
‘But you’re here and Bruno isn’t. Did you do the rounds with him last night?’
‘Just one place.’
‘The Gilded Cage. I see. And you had better things to do?’
‘Only to come home.’
Hazel eyes took me in as if I was some kind of surprising creature, then she surprised me herself by asking, ‘Have you met the wife?’
‘Only once . . . not for very long.’
‘I’m sure she’s very beautiful?’
I didn’t have an answer. She smiled quietly and for the second time finished everything on her plate. She helped herself to the tomatoes in the side dish and wiped that up with chunks of bread. Finally Celeste dabbed her lips, content with the meal but not with Bruno Pasqua’s absence.
‘For more than a year now he’s employed me to report on the manuscripts he thinks of acquiring. It’s an arrangement I like very much. When I’m not doing my other work, I like to read. Nice to be rewarded for it. He sent me yours, but only to satisfy my curiosity. Nothing was going to stop him from publishing you. Are things working out?’
‘He seems happy.’
‘But you don’t have an opinion?’ She looked at me with some interest, then found a cigarette. ‘I planned to be at the salon last night. Instead a Danish pig I had an appointment with decided nothing I could do was going to please him. The minor aristocracy, inbred as gorillas. What good do they do? He wanted to hurt me and he really did. I gave him a good kick between the legs and that settled him. I made him pay me my full amount and left him to his blackened balls.’
‘This happens . . . sometimes?’
‘I won’t put up with fools who enjoy hurting women. Let them go massacre one another in battlefields, I couldn’t care less. With me they can play-act all they want but to really cause pain, ugh! Lately there’s more of it. Like a pandemic. I don’t know what sort of mood is travelling around the world.’ Celeste lit her cigarette and lost all interest in the phenomenon. ‘Then when I passed by they gave me Bruno’s note. He’d moved on. I skipped here with wings on my feet – and nothing. I looked in your room, you were asleep. It’s always interesting to watch the way a stranger sleeps, don’t you think?’
No words would come. I could completely rewrite Domenico’s manuscripts, but every time life gave me the chance to say something interesting I could conjure no words for myself.
Celeste said, ‘You’re uncomfortable with the conversation. Sometimes I talk like a soldier, I know. Or are you uncomfortable with all conversations?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Apologies. I assumed a young man travelling with Bruno would be like Bruno.’
Celeste’s accented use of the Italian language had a lightness of touch that made me want to hear more. It didn’t matter if she used the language of a soldier or told me horrific stories of the life of a prostitute.
‘It’s not that I’m . . . uncomfortable,’ I started, pushing myself to speak. ‘It’s just . . . I don’t have a lot to say about things.’
‘But you fill books!’ She thought this over a moment then seemed content with what she came up with. ‘Well, good. Most men talk too much and usually about themselves and their achievements, or to complain about their wives and no-good offspring. Such absolute shit, so dull. Silence is so much more exciting.’
She turned her eyes to me again, widening them slightly. Then she exhaled smoke and took a sip of her coffee.
‘I should be quiet, I know, but you’re exactly the boy in You
ng Man and the diametric opposite of the bastard in Disappearances.’ Celeste let herself smile at the thought. ‘At least on a first meeting.’
I didn’t need to drop my eyes. I could meet her gaze, though my belly and chest felt tight.
‘You were alone a long time if your book’s to be believed,’ she said, peering hard at me. ‘Don’t try to convince me that’s not your direct story. It is and that’s clear. Someone so shy usually has a few secrets worth investigating. I wonder if your books offer more clues?’
Everything around us seemed to stop. The air didn’t move and the steam didn’t rise out of our coffee mugs, and for me at least the world lost form. We simply continued to look at each other. Neither turned away.
And that was how Bruno Pasqua found us when he came into the apartment.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, his tone gruff but good-natured. ‘Getting to know each other over breakfast? I’m jealous as a caveman.’
He had bags under his eyes but seemed happy. From the way Celeste had spoken about him I expected her to jump to her feet with delight. Instead she turned towards him slowly, lost in thought. She glanced at me again, then brightened, or made herself brighten, and went to him. Celeste helped him off with his coat and wrapped him in an entwining embrace, one of her slender legs curling around his.
‘I ran into Jean-Philippe Le Souef at the salon last night,’ Bruno Pasqua said to me over Celeste’s shoulder. ‘I tell you, more business is done in brothels than boardrooms. Le Souef is the second publisher we were meant to see. Another fool who doesn’t recognise your promise. At least we don’t have to waste time with him. So we’ve got the day off.’
Then he held Celeste and kissed her and she returned the kiss without shame. I couldn’t help overhearing what she whispered. It wasn’t in the scandalised voice of a lover but neither was it the curious voice of a child.
‘You smell of beautiful women,’ Celeste murmured, as if she couldn’t wait to taste him.
After that morning I could conjure Celeste and her eyes without trying. I wandered all day, then tossed and turned in my bed until it was Saturday and the goatherds were shepherding their flocks through rue du Roi de Sicile and the adjacent streets, Archives and Quatre Jeune filles.
Bruno and Celeste must have been walking with the goats, because they soon stumbled into the apartment, bringing the daylight with them, drunk and laughing. I waited until they locked themselves into the main bedroom. Then I made myself ready to go out. I couldn’t stay in that apartment with them and I didn’t have a clue how I would pass the weekend. If anything, I wished I was home in Catania with Signora Rosa; Paris was for people like Bruno Pasqua – and Celeste was for men like him, no matter what sort of longing I felt when I pictured her.
You smell of beautiful women.
You taste of beautiful women.
And her red robe and long hair falling.
Bruno Pasqua had told me there were others like her at The Gilded Cage, but from our visit there together, and the visit to that smaller brothel back in Catania, I already knew Celeste was Celeste, and to try and replace her with someone else would be like replacing gold dust with sulphur.
I’d heard about the markets in the rue Mouffetard and tried to make myself believe I wanted to visit them. I also tried to make myself believe that I wanted to walk slowly and thoughtfully through the museums and galleries that I discovered after a leisurely breakfast taken in a small dining hall. In reality I barely saw a thing. Images of long-dead people, of meaningless items, of endless bronzes in their imitation of life. Then I was heading up toward the observatory and through little streets full of rundown buildings stinking of poverty, following the map to Mouffetard. Children played among broken-roofed homes and threw loose cobblestones at one another in re-enactments of battles their fathers and uncles must have told them about. The area where Bruno had his apartment was by no means wealthy, but these streets and alleys reeked of the lowest rungs of Parisian existence.
Before coming to the market quarter I was conscious of the stench of the nearby cesspools. They had to find a way to accommodate all the shit and piss of these people until the tank wagons came by at night.
A boy leaning against a broken wall stared at me. I walked down the street and just after I passed him he stepped out and walked behind me, saying something in French. I didn’t need to understand the language to know he was asking for money. Two other boys jumped a wire fence to quickly walk in step beside me. At the next corner they grabbed my shoulders and pushed me out of common view, and a group of little boys playing nearby immediately squalled with excitement and followed us at a run into this narrow alley.
My arms were pinned and a punch to the belly was meant to knock the breath and fight out of me. A fist struck my cheek and then a meatier hand gave me a stronger blow. They thought I was done. Doubled over, I was leaning with my back against a stone wall. Hands were already scrabbling in my pockets. I raised my head, gasping for breath. The dirty face of someone much older than any of these boys was in front of me. He took my hair in his fist and pulled me forward, then made me fall and pushed my face into the ground. The boys gathered around, itching to kick me.
I reached up and took him by the wrist and squeezed until he let go of my hair. I kept squeezing and now I was twisting his arm. As I found my feet I pushed his arm back around and up almost to his shoulder blade. He was heavier than me and still fighting my grip, but his mouth was open wide in a grimace of pain. None of the boys tried to intervene. Their eyes said they liked a fight even more than a straight beating. I put my hand on this man’s face and shoved him backwards so that he slammed against the wall. He stood there, breathing hard, eyes wide – I would have left it at that, but he was both infuriated and humiliated. Gathering his nerve he came at me swinging, but I struck him first. He collapsed with his eyes rolled up in his head and what remained of his nose spread across one cheek.
Everyone backed away. I didn’t check my pockets; I didn’t care if anything was missing. The boys around me were panting. Their excitement was electric. They knew what they’d seen but they couldn’t quite believe it. No one spoke and neither did I. A part of me wanted the boys to call for their fathers and elder brothers. Why should there be only one man bleeding on the ground? Let’s have a massacre. Even these boys, why shouldn’t I start snapping them in two?
I forced myself to walk out of the alley and continue to Mouffetard. The dirty street children lingered behind. The good grace of the day was broken and I spent two hours in a hovel of a bar with the midmorning’s drunk men and women, all of whom stank as if they’d bathed in old wine.
On the way back to the apartment I skirted the direct route and passed via Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where I could find out about trains to Italy. I was tired of this trip and if I saw Celeste again I’d push her against a wall and put my hand between her thighs. I wanted to taste her; I wanted to penetrate every part of her. I knew how boorish I was, how much like a spoiled brat. Yet the feeling wouldn’t be controlled and I had no desire to rein it in. Why shouldn’t I take a woman like that exactly the way I wanted?
There was a departure at six fifteen a.m. the next morning, Sunday, and if I could just endure the Saturday night ahead I’d be on it.
Now I felt a certain coldness towards Bruno Pasqua. He could put it down to the fact that I’d turned out to be a country bumpkin, a dumb backwoods’ prude disgusted by his liberal ways. A fake who wrote like a libertine but who lived like a monk.
However my feelings only had to do with him in relation to Celeste. Bruno had a beautiful wife and family, and he had her. He had a successful business and great writers, and he had her. He bent as many women as he wanted to his pleasure, and he still had her. He was free to use her body as much as he pleased, and he also sent her manuscripts, and so he possessed both her flesh and her mind.
Some moments it seemed clear w
hat to do: leave the country then secretly return to Paris after Pasqua was gone, find her at The Gilded Cage and give her enough money that I could take her to a locked room. Offer her cash to open her mouth and her legs and cry out my name.
Those moments of clarity were fleeting. In truth I didn’t know what to do with my feelings. They were new and they frightened and excited me at the same time. Veronica had made me aware of my sexual appetite, but Celeste affected me in a different way. I longed for her body, yes, but a greater part of me wanted something else entirely. It was just as Domenico had said: There’s love and pain in equal measure, and people, they seem to be at their finest when they seek these things out. When I thought of her, I thought I was a better man. Or that I could be better. Someone deeper, with truer feelings. And I wanted to touch more than her skin; I wanted her mind and heart.
Celeste should be reading my manuscripts; she should have my thoughts inside her head.
My words should be the ones to make her want to eat and to fuck and to dance.
My words to make her think of me.
They were concerned about the state of my face, but once I convinced them it wasn’t all that bad Bruno stopped talking about a doctor and wanted to interest me in the evening’s festivities. He didn’t care if I looked like a boxer after a losing fight. He tried to apply an antiseptic medicament to my face but Celeste took over. She tended to me, and it was nothing like Signora Rosa’s care or any of the other nurses I’d known. I’d never experienced a touch so velvety as Celeste’s fingertips on my bruises and torn skin. I wished I’d been beaten worse, like some animal, so she’d have to give me even more attention. I wished Bruno Pasqua would go away. He was talking some tripe about a masked ball and now I saw him as an empty head who played the thrilling sexual adventurer. How pathetic he was. The disgust in my battered face must have been as clear as the bruises and lumps.
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