“Do you want to go back, perhaps?”
“I couldn’t go back if I wanted to,” I snapped. “All I ask is, if I tell you I love you, treat me with the dignity I deserve.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I cannot return your love, not because I could not love you, but because I am married.”
“But look around you!” I said. “What does marriage have to do with anything? Look at the count!”
She shrugged and smiled. “It’s not the same for us.” She drew the ledger toward her and began writing in her tiny, flawless script. I bit into a cake resentfully, but I didn’t leave her side.
A week later, the count had gone into the village with Le Jumeau.
I was in the library, up on the ladder, replacing some books on the highest shelf, a great distance from the floor, when the mirrored doors to the room opened and the countess walked in, shutting us in with a deliberate push.
“Madame la Comtesse,” I called down, assuming she did not know I was there.
“Come down, Gebeck,” she called up in her open-throated, sonorous voice. “I need to speak with you.” Fearing I was in trouble, I traveled down what now seemed like an endless ladder, acutely aware of my baggy britches. Reaching the ground at last, I bowed. The Comtesse de Villars was ghostly in a bone-white dress with four black silk bows tied adamantly up the front. The slender silk bodice emerged from the wide frame of the skirt like the neck of a precious vase containing a single perfect white flower. Her mask of daubed skin was unlined, yet she did not seem young to me. Her cornsilk-blond, lightly powdered hair was bedizened with flashing black birds. Diamonds spangled at her ears.
“Madame?” I asked. She walked over to the library table, surveying the messy papers spread across it and touching the edge of a portfolio thoughtfully.
“Have you ever wondered why my husband went to all that trouble to hire you as his second valet?” she asked, a little curl, like a snail’s tail, rising at one corner of her lips. “I mean, why you, and not a Frenchman, or someone not in prison, for that matter?”
“I have wondered, yes,” I answered.
“He hired you because he needs a Jew. He needs a Jew because, to put it bluntly, he needs money.”
“I don’t understand, madame.”
“He made a bet,” she said, walking to the window and looking out at the endless lawn with her large, heavy-lidded eyes.
“A bet?” I asked.
“My husband is a compulsive gambler. Some years ago, he bet Monsieur Cabanis four hundred louis that he could change a Jew into a Frenchman in six months. Like most of us, Monsieur Cabanis believes that your people are too obstinate, too steeped in their own primitive, superstitious world, and, moreover, too vain, to truly become a part of our civilization. My husband insists that all people are essentially the same, that all customs are learned, that there is no such thing as inherent Jewishness. If a Jew can change, anyone can change, he says. But let me ask you something. Do you think, in biblical times, hawks ate pigeons, when they had the chance?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Have hawks always eaten pigeons?” she repeated.
“I suppose so,” I answered.
“If hawks have always maintained the same character, it’s absurd to think Jews will change theirs. Human nature does not change.” Her deep-set large eyes were fixed, inhuman, as if made of gray glass. I peered through those glittering windows and glimpsed an intelligence so cold it stilled my breath.
“So you see, his interest in you is scientific as well as financial,” she continued. “But the thing is—and here is the truly difficult element: the count will lose the bet unless you are baptized as a Christian within the next two months. What do you make of that?”
“Madame, why are you telling me this?” I asked.
“I just wanted to know how you would answer.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You would do it? You would betray your faith to enrich him?”
Le Jumeau oozed into my room, slid onto my bed, and settled his stocking feet on my pillow. Two grimy middle toes protruded from the brown stockings like unearthed parsnips. I saw them through a blur of tears.
“What’s the matter, Le Naïf?” asked the valet. “What are you doing pouting in your room?”
Weeping with rage, I told him about the bet. There was a pause as he let it sink in. Then he chuckled. “And that fat little bastard kept it to himself all this time,” he mused.
“Would it have been better if he’d let you in on it?” I asked, folding my clothes jerkily and setting them into my small canvas satchel. “I don’t care to be used as a performing monkey to enrich that cynic.”
“Here’s what I would do,” said Le Jumeau. “Confront the count, and tell him you’ll only go through with the baptism if you get a third of the money. No, say half, and you’ll end up with a third.”
“But I don’t want to be baptized!” I said. “It’s completely out of the question for us.”
Le Jumeau sighed, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Gebeck. Do you truly believe in all your rules and regulations now? It seems to me you sank your teeth into that pork sausage pretty happily. I haven’t heard any of your chanting lately either. For better or worse, the count freed you, he’s educating you, and now you can earn a nice fat parcel if you just play along. Ah, forget it, you don’t deserve my advice. I don’t know why I bother. Go ahead. Pack up, get on the highway a penniless Hebrew, and see how the fates treat you.” He folded his hands over his taut belly and closed his eyes.
I stomped over to where the count was surveying a new building project. He was having a small pyramid built at the end of a path in the woods. Six strong village men were setting the slanted stones. The count stood, plans in hand. The architect, a tall man with a pointy beard, gestured grandly at the useless edifice. Villars turned, and, seeing me, lit up.
“Le Naïf! Have a look at my pyramid.”
“I need to speak with you privately, monsieur,” I said breathlessly.
“Has something happened?”
“It’s a private matter,” I insisted.
The count handed the plans to the architect, who rolled them up in an exaggerated show of discretion.
“I’ll be back,” said the count. “Come. We’ll walk through the park.”
As we walked through the magnificently organized park of the château, I unburdened myself, my voice shaking. The count walked for a long while in silence, his hands behind his back, a frown on his wide, froggy mouth.
“It’s not as simple as you make out, Gebeck,” he said. “I need money, it’s true, but there are other ways, easier ways, to get it. My wife has her own reasons to discredit me. I took you in because … I suppose I wanted to know if it was possible to … wash a Jew clean of his Jewishness. To make him simply a man. It’s a debate that’s all the rage, what to do about the Jews. How to make them more useful, less scheming, less ‘a nation apart.’ There are those who would love to ship you all to South America. I simply wanted to prove them wrong. That it’s a question of education and habit. Do you see? My project is simply … ideas made flesh. Instead of writing a treatise. You are my theorem. As for the baptism, that is Cabanis’s requirement. He’s an ardent Catholic. If it were up to me, there would be no religion involved whatsoever. I detest it, as you know.”
“Give me half,” I proclaimed, “and I will do it.”
“Half! Do you realize I am giving you a free Jesuit education, minus the beatings?”
“A quarter, then,” I said.
“Very well,” he said, chuckling. “I suppose there will always be a bit of the businessman about you, if you know what I mean.”
“It was Le Jumeau’s idea,” I retorted. “He suggested a third!”
The count stamped his small foot in mock outrage. “That con artist! He’s always looking for a way to fuck me up the ass.”
A date was set with the parish priest.
The count, Solange, and Le Jum
eau were in attendance as I stood bareheaded beside the baptismal font and became an apostate, swearing to the doddering priest that I believed Christ was Moshiach. I did not even bother to cross my fingers, as so many of my brethren had done when converting to save their own lives. I didn’t deserve to cross my fingers; my life wasn’t in danger. Try as I might to shrug the feeling off, I felt the Old Tyrant’s eyes boring into me, his fury gathering. “I am a jealous God,” he liked to say in the old days. Didn’t like competition. The old priest etched a wet cross on my forehead with his trembling digit: holy water trickled down the side of my nose, spread along the seam of my lips. It was done.
As my master and his valet looked on my conversion with a depth of cynicism difficult to find even in eighteenth-century France, I saw that Solange’s eyes were brimming with tears. Afterward, as we left the village church, I asked her tenderly, “What is it, Solange?”
“You are in the house of God now,” she whispered, her face glowing. “Whatever the reason for it, now you are safe.” That’s why she had helped the count find a Jew in the first place. If it were up to her, we’d all be converted.
I was paid within the week.
The holy day following my baptism, which was, unfortunately, Good Friday, Solange took me to afternoon Mass in the quaint country church where I had been baptized. We were celebrating the Passion of Christ. I sang out all the hymns and recited the special Easter prayers, one of which spoke eloquently about how the Jews had insisted Christ be killed.
And Pilate … said again unto the Jews, what will ye then that I shall do with him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil has he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him.
The congregation joined in lustily whenever it was time to yell, “Crucify him!,” playing the bloodthirsty Hebrews with passion. So did I. It was an awkward moment, but I got through it by pretending I was in a play.
The final ritual of my stay in the Château de Villars was a celebration in honor of the finished pyramid. There was to be an opening ceremony, followed by refreshments, music, and fireworks. The count invited the treasurer of the local assemblée générale, Lefèvre the architect, and various local bourgeois, who came dressed as if for a coronation. The countess was a disapproving cloud of black muslin, the stones at her neck flashing in the late pink light.
The count, dressed in his chestnut silk waistcoat and britches, his red stockings glowing, raised his double chin, readying himself for one of his speeches. He swayed slightly; I realized with alarm that he was drunk. The squat pyramid behind him had been wrapped with a cord of white ribbon tied in a sad little bow.
“Ladies and gentlemen, all of you gathered here, I am so happy to say that the wonderful work of our local stonemasons, as well as the superb architect Monsieur Lefèvre, has yielded this lovely edifice, an ancient shape with no purpose or use whatsoever but to perplex and entertain. And, in memory of the great people who were once enslaved by the Egyptians and yet came out of Egypt by divine intervention, according to our Bible, which so many of us here hold to be a historical document and not the product of feverish priestly imaginations—and in memory also of the character—or should I say man—revered, revered man, Jacob, also known as Israel, who, in our deepest past, wrestled with an angel of God …” By now the crowd, predisposed to enjoy the speech, was utterly lost and moving toward being insulted. Lefèvre cleared his throat.
“In honor of the great old biblical times,” babbled the count, “when an eye was an eye and a man was a man and God ruled the world, I am naming this small building ‘Jacob’s Folly.’ I shall have it etched in the lintel above the doorway. So that, for all time, as long as these stones stand, people passing will think of Jacob, and the past, and the Egyptians …” He looked at me and raised his glass. It was strange to hear myself called Jacob. I had nearly forgotten my name. The ribbon was severed. Champagne was poured. Fireworks ripped across the sky. The count disappeared and was found some hours later, passed out on a mossy rock.
32
Leslie kept working on the boat alone. Most days, Masha joined him, when she didn’t have anything else to do. She found him reassuring. He couldn’t admit it to himself, but the real reason he wasn’t putting any other guys on the Coe job was: he needed to be near this girl. He could have stayed in the workshop—at least part of the time—and sent Segundo, or Pete, or Mike Diggis to do the initial work on Sweet Helga. But he made out to Vera that eccentric, deeply rich Mr. Coe wanted only Leslie on the job. Leslie implied this without actually stating it—a slanted lie. He couldn’t help it. He needed to be near Masha.
I confess I had some input. In a metaphysical tour de force, I managed to funnel some old memories I had lying around—of Masha standing naked by the bathtub, for example—directly into Leslie’s brain, ruining an afternoon of his work and causing him to nearly buckle with desire during one of their little tête-à-têtes over bottled Coca-Cola. But even without my help, Masha caused the very atmosphere around her to shift. You couldn’t be near her and not sense the animal, alien power that drifted from her innocent body like perfume. Three weeks into my experiment, Leslie fell easy as a rotten tree pushed over by a toddler.
33
When we returned to Paris after my baptism, I hid my portion of the bet money, one hundred gold louis, in a dirty sack at the bottom of my linen chest. My employment continued as before, though the count no longer bothered to tutor me, now that he’d won the bet. A Christian man in a Christian country, with papers to prove it and money in my pocket, I moved through the world with new ease. Le Jumeau even had a degree of respect for me, and I no longer felt inferior to him.
In addition to my secretarial duties, I accompanied the count on some of his outings in Paris. He always sent me with messages to Mlle Giardina at the Comédie-Italienne or at her home, which was near the theater.
One morning, when I arrived at her apartment with a note from the count, she greeted me in a dressing gown the color of whipped cream, fastened by a flock of crisp blue-green ribbons just at the point where her décolleté became most interesting. Her honey-colored hair tumbling down her back, she led me through several rooms into an octagonal study. The eight paneled walls were painted with tableaux of wildlife: ducks, otters, a fox gamboling in the reeds were rendered in a playful, realistic style. The room was densely furnished with a clavichord, a chaise longue, a small round library table with a few folios of plays spread out on it, and a charming little desk. I walked into the room bewitched. Eventually my fluttering gaze settled on a small inlaid music box decorated with enamel birds. Mlle Giardina saw me looking at the box and opened it; a little tune piped up.
“Sit there,” she said, indicating the chaise longue.
I perched at the end of it. Closing the music box, the little actress sat down and placed her elbows on the table, folding her hands in a neat cradle under her chin. The lace of her sleeves flopped back from her arms like exhausted lily petals, revealing the firm pale flesh near her elbows. Oil-starved flames struggled behind the tortoiseshell sconces, conjuring copper strands from the coils of her hair. The light on her full face was most flattering, which, I believe, was no accident.
“Were you born in Italy?” I asked nervously.
“No. My father is Italian,” she said. “Though I never met him.”
“Fathers can be tiresome,” I ventured.
“Or protective,” she mused, sliding one slippered foot out from under the creamy folds of her dressing gown like a gangster revealing a tiny weapon sheathed in a silk holster. “My talent is the only thing my father ever gave me,” she added. “He was a singer.”
“I would love to be able to sing,” I said.
“I could teach you,” she said. “If you have an ear.”
She went to the clavichord and sat down. “Repeat after me,” she said, playing a tune, singing a string of notes. I did my best to mimic the sounds she was making. She la
ughed, and let herself fall back a bit, so that she was leaning against my side. I stood very still. Eventually our notes fell apart; the sweet tyrant led me back to the chaise longue.
Kneeling, she unbuttoned my britches and gently peeled the cloth away, as if unwrapping a delicate pastry. When she had uncovered me, she took in a little gasp. I lay back on my elbows, nearly weeping with shame at the long, wrinkled member with its bald head—the clue, I knew, of my provenance. The traitorous fellow moved a little, as if shrugging insolently at my humiliation.
“Gebeck!” exclaimed Mademoiselle Giardina delightedly. “You’re a Jew!” She leaned down and blew a little stream of warm air onto my sex in a matter-of-fact way, as if she were stoking a fire. Slowly my member inflated, staggering up into the air and weaving back and forth like a drunk. She marveled at it; I was filled with pride.
“Magic!” she whispered, darting out a pointy tongue to lick it.
From this point, all was delirium. When I was sent to deliver a message to Mademoiselle Giardina at her home, we paddled through each other’s bodies with the crazed will of drowning souls, reaching our respective pleasures in record time, then parting, sweaty and disheveled. Occasionally, if the count was out for the evening, I was able to spend a part of the night in her apartments.
Yet, my favorite way of seeing Antonia was during the day, at the Comédie-Italienne. I loved everything about the place. The smell of burning wax wafting through the theater from the candle-making room; the pong of rabbit-skin glue sizing, boiling in great pots in the scenery department; the rich dusty red velvet of the seats, the red damask walls. This internal-organ color scheme made the place feel cozy as a womb; fallopian passages led to the stage, which I often walked across when unobserved. Each chair, every footstool of a set seemed haunted, special. I could feel the ghost of the play that had been uttered there last, I could hear the music sung by Antonia. A set was more than a real place to me. This was, perhaps, the closest thing I have ever felt to a true metaphysical frisson. It beat my sputtering attempts at religiosity with Cousin Gimpel, hands down.
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