New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Ah, dear colleague,” Lavis said, glowing at the opportunity to speak French again. “A broken arm and maybe a case of railway spine. Can you take us to La Salpêtrière for an examination?”

  “There are some ambulances coming. I think you will soon be taken in charge. Let me see this broken arm.”

  Still uncertain on his feet, like a newborn foal, Brentford walked up to Gabriel, who was ferociously rubbing his temple.

  “That was some journey, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Gabriel looked daggers at him and did not bother to answer.

  “Well, I guess I’ll take care of the luggage, then …” Brentford said with a sigh, shuffling off towards the baggage cars.

  To be continued …

  I

  The Double Doctor

  The Seven had split up for a while, not without relief after so many weeks of forced coexistence. Brentford, Blankbate, and Tuluk—who was toting the Colonel in his satchel—took the luggage off in search of a hotel, while a horse ambulance took Lavis and his wounded cohorts down to the Salpêtrière Hospital.

  Paris was indeed going through a dreadfully wintry October. Gabriel observed that the traffic on the way to the hospital was, if not frozen, seriously slowed by the snow, and if the drive had not been downhill, the two miles’ distance would have taken maddening hours to complete—more than his nerves could have borne. Through the portholes in the back of the ambulance, he could see slanting carriages and improvised sleds crawling higgledy-piggledy over the snow like panicked insects. Here and there, hooded workers desperately tried to clear the way with shovels, while carriage drivers in box coats swore in cumuli of alcoholized breath. For a while, the ambulance fell behind a horse-drawn snowplough—a simple wooden frame bristling with twigs like a broom—which made progress slower rather than quicker.

  The boulevards that they tried to trot along were wide gashes of greyish slush, while the buildings on each side, banked with snow almost to the first story, seemed suspended in midair. Under the leaden sky weighing over their zinc roofs, the long rows of houses stood moodily monotonous, as if careful to align their typically striped shutters. Only the black curlicues and arabesques of the cast-iron balconies gave the dulled eye something to dance upon.

  Passers-by were muffled and stooped, indifferent to the news of the crash slowly reaching them through the steamy flourishes of newspaper urchins. It looked a lot like the Paris Gabriel had known on his previous visit, and whatever he did not recognize looked exactly like the Paris he had read about. But then, that was his reality, a curious blend of things and print.

  The Salpêtrière, a former gunpowder depot topped by a hydro-cephalic dome, was now one of the most famous hospitals in Paris, Lavis explained to the others in the back of the ambulence as they arrived in the main yard. For centuries, it had been a circle of hell, home to thousands of miserable madwomen with minds as ragged and torn as their clothes. But the great and now late Doctor Charcot had turned it into the Mecca of Mental Illness, thanks to his studies on female hysteria. Charcot had been a magician who could at will create and displace symptoms instead of simply curing them, as more vulgar minds would have done. People flocked from around the world to attend his Tuesday lessons, in which scantily clad patients, wearing peacock feathers upon their heads (the better to register their tremors), were mesmerized into compliant puppets and led through a series of tricks that would have made Barnum catatonic with envy. Actresses, singers, and dancers went to observe the patients’ epileptic and demented movements, then adapted them for their own cabaret acts. It was where it happened.

  As Lavis and the others exited the ambulance and walked past endless barracks and across wide squares where female patients stood still under leafless trees, he explained that in 1895 one of the house specialities had been “Railway Spine”—the traumatic shock that results from train disasters. It would have been an exaggeration to talk about luck that day, but in their present battered condition, the staggering members of the Most Serene Seven felt themselves fortunate to have among their number someone who knew about this place.

  The waiting room at La Salpêtrière was long and dark, and thanks to the accident extremely busy, the people huddling on the wooden benches that ran along the walls, blurred amidst a cloud of vapour that smelled of garlic and wet wool. From time to time, as the doors swished open or closed, a faint whiff of ether floated in, fresh and soothing. The New Venetians struggled to find seats for themselves, and after having passed days in their own train compartments, the lack of privacy was irksome. It seemed a nightmare that would never end. Gabriel sulked on a chair, his face buried in his hands, feeling so exhausted that he suspected his head would stay stuck to his palms when he attempted to raise it.

  “Don’t worry,” Lavis said, “I may know some people here.” He had worked as a young doctor in the Charcoterie, as he called it, and he knew the whole staff—well, had known.

  “They might find you changed,” Lilian remarked.

  “Oh yes. You’re right,” he answered, lowering his voice. “I keep forgetting. It’s all so familiar. I remember clearly the day of the Montparnasse accident …” A light flashed in his eyes as he realized the implications. “… Which means I may be still be here!”

  Thomas and Lilian looked at him quizzically. “You were here when the wounded passengers arrived?” she asked.

  “More or less, yes. I was working in the photographic laboratory, and I checked in quite a few times to lend a hand. Not that there were that many victims, fortunately.”

  “So you should remember us, then?” Lilian persisted.

  The doctor sighed and became visibly perplexed. “But I don’t,” he said. “I also don’t remember the snow everywhere, nor such a devilishly cold October. I don’t remember that the train driver died before the crash—I thought I remembered it had been a brake failure. There are other changes to what I remember that I can’t fathom. A fork in the future, that’s something I can understand, but a fork in the past—a different past is something that’s beyond me, I’m afraid.”

  He sat pensively for a few moments, staring at the floor. Then he said, “I’d better see if someone can help us.”

  “That wouldn’t be very fair to the other people,” said Lilian, pointing her chin at the crowd.

  “In Rome, do as the Romans do, or as we say in French, We must howl with the wolves,” Lavis said as he got up, shrugging his shoulders before shuffling towards the glass door that separated the waiting room from the corridor.

  “He’s troubled, isn’t he?” It was typical of Thomas to propose his psychological observations in the form of questions, perhaps because of his lack of self-confidence when it came to serious conversation.

  “You would be, too, in his place, I guess. Coming back to a past you don’t recognize,” Lilian observed.

  “I think so, yes,” Thomas answered with a grimace.

  “You arm hurts badly, doesn’t it?”

  He stretched his pale face into a defiant smile. It was impossible for him to whine in front of a woman, especially in front of a woman he was in awe of. He found Lilian deeply impressive, compared with the girls he had known. She was older, with a sharp sort of beauty, a quick mind, and a quicker tongue, and so far she had managed to parry effortlessly what he thought were his best moves. He was too young to remember her heyday as a singer, but he remembered vividly the day when, on the Cabot Canal, he saw her standing straight up in a gondola full of Sophragettes, a white feather stuck in her hat and a six-shooter in her kid-gloved hand. She had been a vision. That she showed any interest in him at all filled him with a kind of warm pride. But he also knew enough of her now to know that she would quickly cut him down to size if he behaved improperly.

  “Oh! Nothing I can’t handle, I guess,” he said as convincingly as he could.

  Suddenly, a nurse ran up to them, clutching her dress and apron.

  “Vous étiez avec le grand monsieur, là? Quelque chose est arrivé!”


  Lilian and Thomas looked at each other. Gabriel raised his head.

  “Something’s happened to Jean-Klein,” he translated.

  They rose from their seats and hurried after the nurse, who led them through a labyrinth of corridors and stairs until they reached a small side room, where a camera on a tripod was aimed at a hospital bed.

  Lavis lay on the bed, his eyes wide open, while an intern with an apron and black felt skullcap checked his pupils and pulse. A woman with long black hair, in a black dress, stood curiously motionless in a corner of the room, her hands joined as if in prayer, her eyes raised to the ceiling and empty, as if her spirit, too, had skipped out of time. The intern turned to them.

  It was Jean-Klein Lavis. But a much younger one.

  “Is this your friend?” he asked in French.

  Gabriel felt a chill run down his spine, and stood gaping for a while, before finally finding the words to confirm.

  “I’m afraid he has passed away,” the intern went on. He looked at the corpse, visibly ill at ease, and clearly not really knowing why. “I had my back to him but heard him drop as soon as he entered the room. I can only conclude that he suffered a heart attack.”

  Gabriel looked at Lilian. “Say nothing,” her eyes pleaded. She was right. It was, after all, a mental hospital, not quite the place where you want to discuss time-travelling with the doppelganger of a dead man. Gabriel could see that the younger, already dapper Jean-Klein Lavis suspected something but simply couldn’t recognize the corpse as himself. Reasonably so, Gabriel thought.

  “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. “He was in the Montparnasse crash. That may explain the shock.”

  “Ah. Of course, the crash.” The intern nodded. “I’ve heard about it. Have you any idea why he came up here?”

  “He had gone searching for a doctor. You see, we, too, were in the crash. Madame has a backache and this young man a broken arm. We’re in dire need of attention.”

  “I see. You will be taken care of. The nurse will escort you to the examination room, while we take care of the body. What was his name?”

  Gabriel panicked, but then realized that, by chance, Lavis’s passport wasn’t in his pocket, Brentford having kept it for the hotel formalities.

  “Jean-Charles Leclou,” said Lilian, in a flash of inspiration. “From Quebec.”

  The intern nodded and scratched his head under his felt cap, unable to loosen his frown. “My condolences,” he said eventually.

  Gabriel had liked Lavis but was too exhausted to feel anything but a deep-seated sense of persecution about the way his day was going. Lilian seemed to be a little more affected, or maybe she was simply pretending to be sad, because after all, technically speaking, Jean-Klein Lavis was very much alive, in fact younger and better-looking, with a whole existence ahead of him. What she wanted, probably, was to give the intern a big hug and tell him not to worry about the whole affair. Thomas, holding his arm, had already digested the whole incident and looked fascinated by the praying woman still motionless in the corner.

  “What happened to her?” he asked in English.

  Gabriel was about to translate, but it proved unnecessary.

  “Oh, routine hypnosis for some photographic project,” the young doctor answered in English with a strong French accent that was pure Jean-Klein Lavis. It made Lilian smile.

  “Now, if you please, go down and we will take care of your woes. We’ll let you know about the body.”

  Gabriel thanked him as warmly as he could, and so did the others, leaving the young man to wonder why they felt they owed him such unexpected and deeply felt sympathy.

  “Well,” he said to the motionless lady, after the New Venetians had followed the nurse out of the room, “I’d better get this body out of here before I wake you up.”

  But he stood there awhile longer, his eyes going from the woman in prayer to the corpse that was himself.

  It was about ten o’clock when they left the hospital to enter a cold, wet night. Their shadows fanning out beneath the blurry glare of gas lamps, they crossed an endless square whose black naked trees looked like charred nervous systems. Gabriel, who had spent the evening filling out maddening miles of official forms regarding the death and prospective obsequies of one Jean-Charles Leclou, had a bandage around his head, keeping in place a big swab of cotton on his right temple. It was, he thought, romantic and virile, even if the nurse to whom he had boasted of this had looked rather sceptical. “You think so?” she had asked, mercilessly.

  More virility, no doubt, could be attributed to Thomas, who, arm in a sling, crossed the square with his typical cloak-and-dagger gait, as if returning wounded but victorious from a duel. But in fact he’d had a shot of morphine and felt quite elated by the peppermint draught that circled in his head and pulsed out along his bones. Lilian, with nothing more than a benign pain in the back, had cajoled the doctor into giving her a shot as well, and the persistent smile on her face made Gabriel faintly jealous. For people who had just undergone a tragic loss, they looked rather jolly. But as a matter of fact, they were all having trouble coming to terms with their bereavement. After all, if dying simply meant being replaced by a younger version of oneself, well, death, where is thy sting? There was more cause to celebrate than to mourn.

  “There’s something strange in all this,” Gabriel said, as if to himself.

  Lilian looked at him with a smile that was either benevolent or ironic.

  “You don’t say.”

  Ironic, he decided.

  He persisted. “It’s not only Jean-Klein, you see. I mean, we were sent to a Paris that was undergoing a cruel winter, although this Paris here—which wasn’t the one we were sent to—is certainly suffering from a severe winter. And one, at that, that Jean-Klein did not remember, though he was, as we have seen with our own eyes, present on this very day.”

  Lilian stopped. Thomas did, too, but, as in all serious conversations, he kept his distance, a frozen smile on his face.

  “What do you mean?” Lilian asked. “That this is a different Paris from the real Paris of 1895?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There were, indeed, some serious winters in the nineties. But if there had been such weather on such a memorable day as that of the Montparnasse train wreck, the young Jean-Klein would probably have remembered it all his life. So there is a chance that the young Jean-Klein is experiencing a different present than the Jean-Klein that we knew did.”

  “I admit it’s puzzling,” said Lilian, sucking in her cheeks. “Something else strikes me: he had two bodies. I do not understand how the same man could have two bodies.”

  “Well, precisely—I’d say he can’t have two bodies,” Gabriel mused. “After all, one of them died as soon as it encountered the other. And just think, if the younger one had not been under the hood of the photographic apparatus at that very moment, perhaps he would have been struck dead as well. It reminds me of the superstition that seeing your double is an omen of death. Maybe that idea sprang from similar experiences of time travel.”

  Lilian shrugged her shoulders, dubious but clearly disturbed.

  They were now nearing the curbside where they’d been told fiacres awaited passengers. Given the harsh cold, however, demand was such that they were few and far between. A dark-skinned, dark-haired woman wearing a fur-collared coat and high-heeled shoes was waiting there, shivering with cold. It was Lilian who recognized her. She hurried towards her, a broad smile on her face, and by the time the men joined them, they had already exchanged names. Gabriel and Thomas looked at each other, thinking the same thing: Lilian had a way with girls that they both envied.

  “This is Morgane Roth,” she announced to Gabriel and Thomas. “And she speaks English.”

  “Oh. My mother was English,” she explained. “If gypsies are anything but gypsies, that is.”

  “We saw … your work at the photographic lab,” Thomas said, meaning it as a compliment.

  The woman chuckled. Her voice was hoarse from to
o much smoking, and it vibrated with cleverness.

  “You are closer to the truth than you think. It is work. There’s a bit more acting involved than the doctors would like to believe, though at the same time, that’s precisely what makes them happy and famous. So maybe they know and let it go.”

  “You didn’t see anything of what happened in the lab while you were mesmerized, did you?” Gabriel asked her.

  “Oh, I’ve seen things. But I don’t think you would believe me.”

  “Try us!” Lilian said pleasantly.

  “A kind of luminous cloud, or aura, went from the dead man to the intern, just after he died. But, probably, that’s only because auras are what is suggested to us nowadays.”

  The three exiles looked at each other in perplexity, not for the first time that day.

  “You are a medium, then?” Gabriel asked, as a jingling cab approached.

  “Oh, yes. Who isn’t nowadays? And a lot of us go through these photographic séances. I wish I didn’t have to do these somnambulist tricks to make ends meet … Listen,” she said, smiling, “I really have to take this cab. Why don’t you come to one of my séances tomorrow, meet a few friends? They’re very spiritual.”

  A bundle of clothes with a red nose, emitting a blur of breath that could have caught fire at the first match, bent down from its bench to open the door and let her in.

  “Here is my card,” Morgane said, giving it to Lilian before the coachman slammed the door.

  They watched the squealing cab carve its tracks into the snow.

  “Now, anyone care for a drink?” Thomas proposed.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep?” Gabriel muttered. Which was not what the young Gabriel would have said. But, Gabriel realized, the young Gabriel was as dead as the old Jean-Klein.

  II

  A Night on Mount Parnassus

  On the advice of Gabriel, who had lodged there previously during a stay in Paris that, technically, had not yet happened, the New Venetian diaspora had settled in the Grand Hôtel des Écoles on the rue Delambre. It was a slightly presumptuous place, its façade studded with lion heads and crescent-crowned Dianas, and Brentford wasn’t surprised that it had appealed to Gabriel’s unerringly New Venetian taste. Except for a few Englishmen, who relished the opportunity to see Paris going to the dogs under all this snow, tourists were rather rare at the moment, and there had been no difficulty in lodging their entire party. The rooms were tasteful and comfortable enough, some with a view onto a small courtyard. There was even running water, and therefore no need to spend three sous for the carriers to bring it hot to your room. However, the taps had to be left on at all times so they wouldn’t freeze, and the pipes gurgled constantly. Not exactly the conditions an ambassador and his retinue might expect, but then … an ambassador of what?