by Anne Rice
“Well, if it’s all the same to you, mon ami, I am going to try to bribe him, and get out of here now. Would you care to come with me and continue this conversation, or do you prefer to go on with whatever madness prompted you to come here in the first place?” He waited.
“I’ll go with you,” Marcel said timidly.
“Ah, what a refreshing display of common sense,” Christophe answered. The gatekeeper’s lantern had already appeared at the end of the path.
It was midnight when they drew near the waterfront and the roaring cabarets stood open along the banquette, the crowds dense around the long bars, air thick with smoke. Pianos tinkled in the din, and the shades of the flickering oil lamps were black with soot. White men and black men stood jostling on the stoops, gesturing, shouting, or gathered on the damp bricks in the leaking light of the doorways, squatted on their haunches over games of dice or coins flipped in the air. An impromptu cockfight was in progress a pace from the markets, and suddenly the knot of men there let out a roar.
“I want a drink,” Christophe said at once. He had made the same remark on leaving the cemetery and had not spoken again until now. Marcel’s eyes were wide. He had seen these streets often enough by day when they were just as heavily thronged, but the night gave them a savage aspect which he instantly and absolutely loved.
He was powerfully excited by Christophe as well as by everything around him, and in the dingy light he saw Christophe’s face clearly for the first time. It appeared as hard as it had seemed in the shadows of Juliet’s room, but it was by no means a cruel or insensitive face, in fact, the neat even features had a somewhat agreeable aspect, there was nothing out of proportion, yet the eyes blazed as if they must make up in intensity for their rather common color and size. They were curious, however, though suspicious, wide though a little flinty, and something about the straight mouth with its faint bit of horizontal mustache suggested anger, though why Marcel could not have said.
He wasn’t so afraid of Christophe now; rather he was utterly absorbed. And studied everything about him. There was something defiant about his walk, the ramrod straightness of his back and the manner in which the compact chest was thrust forward. It reminded Marcel more of the Spaniards he had seen than any Frenchman. It was almost arrogant. Yet Christophe seemed little conscious of the finely cut brown coat and lavish silk stock he wore, or the great streaks of whitewash and dirt on his dove-gray pants. His eyes lingered on no one and nothing with any particular judgment or challenge, and he had a somewhat selfless interest in all about him which attracted Marcel to him rather easily. He was darker than Juliet, could never have passed, rumor was wrong.
“There,” Marcel said suddenly, “Madame Lelaud’s.” He realized that he was burning with thirst. He could all but taste the beer already.
Christophe hesitated. The double doors were wide over the banquette, and the place was packed. They could hear the crack of the billiard balls over the low strumming of a banjo, and the vibrations of the piano within.
“This is not a place for white men?” Christophe asked in a low voice. An undefinable emotion flickered in his eye.
“There are men of color in there, too,” Marcel said and offered to lead the way.
Madame Lelaud herself was at the bar, a brilliant red tignon around her dark hair so that with the wide gold loops in her ears she looked somewhat the gypsy. Her black hair in tight waves fell to thin wisps over her shoulders and she had soft caramel skin finely wrinkled. “Aah, mon petit,” she waved to Marcel. The air about them was rife with foreign voices, Irish brogues, the guttural Dutch, the softer rapid Italian, and everywhere the Creole patois. Negroes in black broadcloth and top hats drank at the bar, foot upon the rail, and beyond in the open billiard parlor congregated about the luscious soft green felt were a handful of splendidly dressed dark men, their striped coats and vests of silk gleaming beneath the low-hung lamps. Dark faces everywhere mingled with the white, and might have been Greek, Hindu, Spanish.
Madame Lelaud had come around the end of the bar and moved toward them with a gentle sway of her red skirts, her white apron streaked and soiled though she placed a hand on her hip as if smartly dressed and reached for Marcel’s hair. “Mon petit,” she said again. “You want a quiet table, hmmmmm?”
Christophe was smiling at him coldly, one eyebrow slightly raised. “Just how old are you?” he asked.
A long row of small tables lined the rear wall where a door lay open to the yard allowing a weak but welcome breeze. Men played cards here and there around them, and at the front doors a great shouting commenced all at once, a stomping on the bare cypress boards, as a brilliantly colored rooster, flapping and squawking helplessly, was thrust for an instant over the heads of the crowd. Near the door of the billiard room an old black man played the spinet while a tall and very tired quadroon woman rested her weight against it, a glass of amber-colored whiskey clutched in her heavily jeweled hand. Her clothes were tawdry, her eyes half-closed. These people appeared and disappeared as the assemblage parted and came together in front of them, and a steady stream of men trooped to the rear stairs, their boots clomping heavily as they went up.
“Well?” Christophe said, settling back against the wall, his arm on the table. He surveyed the place and seemed to like it. Marcel had been on tenterhooks. He wondered if Christophe had already ventured into the Rue Chartres or the Rue Royale and seen the dozens of places of fashion where no one of color would have been served. “How old are you?” His face was somewhat gentler now.
“Fourteen, Monsieur,” Marcel murmured.
“Say that again,” Christophe leaned forward.
“Fourteen!” Marcel confessed. Now Christophe would know what a degenerate he was, and wonder naturally enough what would such a boy be doing at sixteen, and eighteen, and twenty.
“I’m to go to Paris, Monsieur,” he blurted suddenly looking up into the cold yellow-brown eyes. “For my education when I’m of age. I’ll be sent to the Sorbonne.”
“Splendid,” Christophe said with a rise of the eyebrows. He had drunk half of his beer in one swallow and already gestured for another round.
Marcel realized with a sudden lightness in the head that he had not eaten all day. He drained his glass.
“And in the meantime, you want to go to my school?”
Courage, Marcel thought. “Yes, Monsieur, I want that more than anything in this world. I can’t tell you what this means to me, to attend your school, I only learned of it this morning from a little article in the Paris papers, of course everyone will know about it by tomorrow, the news will be everywhere, you can pick and choose your pupils…” he stopped.
A shadow had fallen over Christophe’s face.
“They really do know of me here, then?” he asked.
“Monsieur, you’re as famous here as you are in Paris. Well, not that famous perhaps, but very famous.” Marcel was amazed. And that this did not seem to please Christophe amazed him further.
Christophe let out a long sigh. He let his eyes move over the throng at the bar as he drew a very narrow brown cigar out of his inside pocket and biting off the end of it spat it easily on the floor. He struck a match on the sole of his boot.
Madame Lelaud set two foaming mugs before them as Christophe was doing this and with a corner of her apron took a symbolic wipe at the wet table. “What’s the matter with you, mon petit?” she drawled, her hand going out for Marcel’s hair. He moved slightly to one side but gave her a strained smile. “What, no pictures?” she asked. “Where are all your pictures?” Marcel was mortified, especially when Christophe asked,
“What pictures are you talking about?” And when he did it, there was a slight sparkle to his eye, just the trace of a smile for Madame Lelaud. She turned, appearing to notice Christophe for the first time.
“This one is an artist,” she said drawing nearer so that her skirts brushed Christophe’s knee. “Sits here every afternoon and draws everything in the bar, little people who look like duck
s, but you, I haven’t seen you before, what’s your name?”
“Every afternoon?” Christophe said, eyeing Marcel with mock suspicion.
“You don’t want to tell me your name?”
“Melmoth,” he said to her, “they call me the wanderer. Every afternoon,” he turned again to Marcel, “then you’re not in school now at all?”
Marcel shook his head. Madame Lelaud had been distracted, drawn away, letting her skirts dust quickly over Christophe’s leg. He looked after her but only for an instant.
“Monsieur,” Marcel went on rapidly, “If you know how we admire you, we’ve read your essays, your novel…”
“Oh, you have my condolences, I can’t say I’ve shared your suffering,” Christophe laughed. “It’s much easier to write those things than to read them. But what sort of pictures do you draw?”
“They’re dreadful,” Marcel said at once. “The people look like little ducks…” he was ashamed of his pictures and showed them to no one except for those few more perfect sketches he had placed on his bedroom wall, and in those he’d cheated, with tracing paper and all manner of tricks. What he drew in the bar was so childish it humiliated him, and he had only allowed Madame Lelaud to see it because Madame Lelaud’s was a secret world of his, where no one knew to look for him, and he was dreadfully confused now, wondering why in the hell he’d brought Christophe here. But it was the best drinking place for men of color of which he knew.
“Monsieur when the news makes the rounds, I mean about the school, you’ll have more students than you can ever accept,” Marcel said. “It was our dream you would someday come home. But a school, we never so much as thought of that…”
Christophe made a short ironic sound. He put the beer to his lips for a deep swallow. His long narrow cigar had a sweet aroma.
“I feel stupid trying to put all this into words,” Marcel said.
“You do well enough,” Christophe said. “But why aren’t you in some sort of school now? Are things so bad here that there are no schools for you at all?”
“Oh, no, Monsieur, there’re a number,” and quickly Marcel told him of those he knew, all private academies like that of Monsieur De Latte, some taught by white men, some by men of color, some very much sought after and expensive, others not so. It was the fashion to seek Monsieur De Latte among those that Marcel knew, all his friends attended Monsieur De Latte’s, Monsieur De Latte was…well, an old man.
“Monsieur, you’ll be turning people away,” Marcel said finally. “If you would only give me a chance.”
“But why?” Christophe asked, and his eyes were hard again though the voice was sincere. “Why in particular my school? Because I’m famous? Because I wrote a novel, and got my name in the fashionable journals? What do you think will happen in my classroom, alchemy? That you’ll be swept up into some eternal after-theater crowd where the glasses are clicking and the wit is rippling and the actors and actresses never take off their paint?” He bent forward, “What do you want to learn from me there? Your name is Marcel, isn’t it? What do you want to learn, Marcel?”
Marcel’s face was suddenly a knot. He did not see the smile on Christophe’s lips.
“Hmmm!” Marcel began finally, “You have accomplished things of which most men dream, Monsieur. Your words have been printed, they’ve been read by thousands. I would think that would make for a different…a different point of view.” He looked up. “My teacher, Monsieur De Latte, the man who was my teacher…he handles books as if they were dead! Yes, dead.” He looked into Christophe’s eyes, saying this last word with a slight grimace. He could see perfectly what he wanted to say, and felt miserable that he couldn’t express it. Finally he decided to be true to the image that was in his mind. “My teacher believes in those books only because they occupy space, I mean he can hold them in his hand. And they are solid enough that when thrown against the wall they make a…a clonk!” He shrugged. “I want to know what’s inside of them, the way…what they actually mean. We forget all the time, I think, that things are made, that this table was made by someone for instance, with hammer and nails, and that what’s in books was made by someone, someone flesh and blood like ourselves wrote those lines, they were alive, they might have gone this way or that with a different word.” He stopped, bitterly disappointed in himself, and thought, This man is going to think me a fool. “I think, Monsieur, people forget this, and all that’s in books, it’s something dead to them, something to be acquired. I want to understand it, I want to…to find some key.”
Christophe’s lips were on the verge of a smile.
“You’re very clever for your age, Marcel, you understand something about the material and the spiritual which others often never come to understand, no matter how long they live or where they go.”
“That’s it, the spiritual and the material,” Marcel said, more intent on the idea than the compliment which Christophe had just paid him. “I have this feeling of late that all things are alive. I believed at one time that furniture was just furniture, objects that we used, and thought nothing more about it, as a matter of fact I loathed furniture and people who spoke about it with all manner of allusions to the price…”
Christophe’s eyes were wide.
“…until I watched a man make it and I learned that the curve of the leg of the chair can be a spiritual thing.”
Marcel had never spoken these words to himself before, they had just taken shape from all the chaos and pain in his mind. And they gave a beautiful order to his thoughts suddenly so that he sat back lost for the moment in the vision of Jean Jacques at work in his shop, balancing the gold leaf on the tips of the brush. “But there is some point where the spiritual act creates a material object and that object gets away from it and is merely material again for those around it. It does not continue to be spiritual…chairs, tables, books, what’s inside books. But if ever there was something that is obviously supposed to remain spiritual it’s the contents of books. Chairs could fool the best of us, I suppose. We take them for granted. But the contents of books…it’s by its very nature spiritual, poetry, philosophy, etc.…” He lifted his full glass of beer and suddenly drank it completely down.
“Wait,” Christophe said, “you’re going to get drunk.”
“Oh, no, no, I can hold much more than this,” he said. He felt reckless and wonderful. He gestured for Madame Lelaud.
“Some disciplinarian this Monsieur De Latte must be, do you report back to him after your afternoons here on how much you can hold? Maybe he sends you here to draw pictures?”
“Oooh!” Marcel put his hands to his head. “There’s something more I have to tell you. A lie right now would be a spiritual disaster. I have never spoken to anyone of all these things, my head is bursting. I was expelled from school, I was thrown out. So I have a bad record, a bad reputation, Monsieur De Latte will say terrible things about me if you ask him, or worse yet write a letter calling me names. These things came about because I couldn’t endure being there any longer, listening to those endless recitations…I know the multiplication tables, I know the names of the states and their capitals, I know the basic theorems of Euclid, I know the Seven Acts of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Twelve Gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Six Precepts of the Church, ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,’ ‘We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect government,’ ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts,’…‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ ”
“So he kicked you out, did he?” Christophe laughed. “The man’s a fool, obviously, how could I possibly believe a word that he might say?”
Madame Lelaud had brought their mugs. “Next time, cher, you draw my picture,” she said as she moved away.
“Of course,” Marcel said. “Madame Duck, and Monsieur Duck, and all the little Ducks!” He reached for the beer. “I’m in disgrace, Monsieur. But if you give me a new start…”
“Start by not drinking that down in one gulp,” Christophe sai
d gently, extending his hand above the glass. Marcel nodded.
“This is the greatest night of my life,” he whispered.
“And you read my novel,” Christophe mused, “and you admire me…”
“Monsieur, I lived Nuits de Charlotte! I was Antonio with Charlotte in my arms! When Randolph killed Charlotte, it was the death of innocence, I wanted to destroy him with my bare hands!…”
“Calm yourself,” Christophe smiled. “I was the one who killed Charlotte, and I should have killed Randolph and Antonio too.”
“Are you mocking me, Monsieur?”
“No,” Christophe shook his head. There was something sad in his laugh, but something whimsical. “And when were you expelled, may I ask?”
“I’ll never miss a day of class, Monsieur, I will be a changed person,” he said. He lifted the glass carefully so as not to spill the slipping foam and barely tasted it. Then he took a deeper drink. “A changed person,” he murmured again.
Christophe was studying him. His arms were folded on the table and he looked directly at Marcel. “I don’t care about that, Marcel,” he said. “If you care so little for what happens in my classroom that you absent yourself, that’s your affair. I won’t be teaching little boys, I won’t be training or disciplining anyone. I’ll teach the older boys, the ones who can appreciate it. And if what you say is true about there being so many students, it sounds as if I’ll have it the way I want it. They aren’t all as spirited as you are, though, are they?” he smiled.
“You mock me, Monsieur, for certain.”
“You are drunk, and you have to go home.”
“Oh, no, I don’t want to go home. My mother is sound asleep, besides, nothing wakes her in the night…” he stopped. The first lie. She was always waking in the night. “But my door is locked, she’ll think that I’m inside.” Had he remembered to lock it, he wasn’t sure. “Je suis un criminel,” he murmured.
“There’s something I want to take up with you first, and then I’ll walk you to the end of the block and you’re to go home. But this first, the matter of what happened in my house this afternoon.”