Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  And a curious thing – I stopped waking in fright at night. Within days of meeting her, I noticed I’d slept through the night for the third time in a row. With the end of my nightmares, a great and ancient burden was lifted from me.

  The only thorn in the happiness we shared was Madeleine’s fixation with the auction of the Baudelaire manuscript the following Monday. She was desperate to acquire it or, rather, for me to acquire it on her behalf. Of course, I wanted to see the Baudelaire manuscript for myself. I wanted to touch it, to hold it, to read it, if possible, in part if not in whole. I was a bibliophile, and as such I had obsessions of my own. Chief among them, coinciding neatly with Madeleine’s, was Charles Baudelaire. A new story by the great poet – the idea made my heart beat faster. I peppered Madeleine for specifics about it, and she indulged me by describing it in loving detail: a story in four parts, told in the first person. She’d even memorised the first sentence. She made me write it down so I could check it at the auction: As I write these words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. I would attend the auction, alone, and buy the manuscript on her behalf. Why alone? She wouldn’t say, other than that all would be revealed in time. How would I pay for it? Again, she wouldn’t say – money seemed to be almost an abstraction to her. She seemed to think that, if all else failed, I could simply steal the thing.

  It was when Madeleine was making no sense at all that I loved her the most. From the start, she suspected I didn’t take her tales as seriously as she did, and when she sensed her words were bumping up against a wall of incredulity her lips would quiver with hurt and her dark eyes glisten with tears, but she never lost her conviction or her composure. I must simply trust her, she kept saying, and so I did, or at least I pretended to. I devised a way of loving Madeleine without being ashamed of myself: I believed her and disbelieved her at the same time. To disbelieve her entirely was to risk losing her; to believe her entirely was to risk losing myself.

  The only time we were apart was in the evenings. Paris was not the glittering jewel it had been before the declaration of war. A dusk-to-dawn blackout meant the city of light was plunged into darkness. That was when Madeleine, who lolled about indolently during the day wearing one of my shirts, would spring to life, put on her black silk dress with red hibiscus, apply mascara to her lashes and red lipstick to her lips, and disappear without explanation. Again, I found this feline quality deeply seductive. When I asked where she was going, she kissed me tenderly and told me it was best I didn’t know, but that she would be back, in the early hours of the morning, and that I shouldn’t wait up for her. But I couldn’t help myself. I would stay up awaiting her return, unable to read or write or do anything other than pace to or fro in my room, in agonies of worry. Eventually, I would go to bed and close my eyes, mind whirring, until in the wee hours the door would creak open and she would slink in, smelling of cigarette smoke and alcohol, undress, and curl herself up beside me. She was small, and our bodies were a perfect fit, even for a single mattress. At sunrise I would wake and there she would be, sitting in the armchair, naked, reading Baudelaire, smoking a Salomé, the contours of her body streaked with rays of sunlight, and, seeing me awake, she would recite what she was reading.

  Come, handsome cat, come on my flaming heart lie;

  Sheathe the claws of your paw,

  And let me plunge into your handsome eyes,

  Where metal and agate alloy.

  Then we would head out into the streets for our morning walk.

  The German war machine rolled on, delaying its arrival in Paris by picking off the remnants of the French and British armies, cornered against the English Channel. The southbound traffic on the boulevards thickened, the traffic in the other streets thinned, and every day more shops were shuttered.

  The following Saturday afternoon, Arthur knocked on my door. Madeleine was dozing on my bed, so I stepped out onto the landing. I presumed he wanted to enquire about our traditional Saturday-evening poker party, which had entirely slipped my mind, but instead he told me he was leaving. His well-heeled English girlfriend had managed to buy a car and they were driving down to Bordeaux. ‘There’s room for you too, if you want to join us.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave.’

  ‘The French have pretty much capitulated, you are aware of that, aren’t you?’ he said, seizing me by the arm. ‘The Germans will be here in a week or two.’

  I hesitated, feeling foolish for throwing away this lifeline, an opportunity for which so many others would have willingly paid a fortune. ‘I’m not ready.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, momentarily downcast before perking up again and slapping me on the shoulder. ‘Well, we’ll see each other again sometime, I’m sure.’ We shook hands and he was gone, dashing down the steps three at a time. I went back into the apartment to see Madeleine, lying on my bed, turn her head sleepily in my direction.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

  I crossed the room, sat on the side of the bed and squeezed her hand. ‘No one.’

  That day and the next, she finished recounting the tale of the albatross. The nearer she was to the conclusion of her story, the harder it was to ignore the chasm of belief that divided us. The saga’s denouement was a first-rate paranoid delusion, in which Madeleine’s fantasies were so thoroughly entangled with the real world that it was hard to imagine her ever extricating herself from the web. She seemed to believe that Gabrielle Chanel, better known as Coco, a high-society dressmaker who lived at the Ritz Hotel, was also President of the Baudelaire Society, and that the two of them were enmeshed in a decades-old rivalry. She was convinced Chanel wanted her killed, and that the auction of the Baudelaire manuscript was somehow a part of her plot, with the manuscript as the lure that would entrap her. By the time she finished her story, I was so concerned by what I’d heard I couldn’t return her gaze. She must have sensed my despair.

  ‘Why don’t we try it?’ she said.

  ‘Try what?’

  ‘Crossing.’

  I gave a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t think that would be wise.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I’d never challenged her about her beliefs – what purpose would it have served? There were worse – she wasn’t a Fascist, after all. I had friends who believed in a god, in an afterlife, or in Stalinism – why couldn’t I tolerate Madeleine’s beliefs?

  ‘Well, for one thing, I don’t think you’d want to end up in this body.’ I pointed to myself. ‘I’d clearly be the one with the most to gain, but it wouldn’t be fair on you.’

  She let out one of her long, throaty chuckles. ‘I don’t want to end up in your body either. We would cross back.’

  ‘That’s possible?’

  ‘Of course. I would see to it.’

  ‘I thought crossing was a one-way affair.’

  ‘Most of the time, for me, it is. But there’s more than one kind of crossing. There’s the blind crossing, where afterward you have no idea what just happened. Then there’s the wakeful crossing, where we cross in such a way that at each moment you are wholly aware of everything that is happening.’

  She was beginning to frighten me. ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea.’

  ‘Are you worried about ending up a woman?’ she teased.

  ‘I would have no problem being a woman.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’ She smiled and tilted her head a little. ‘So what do you say?’

  For days now, I’d been wrestling with this, until now, hypothetical dilemma. On the one hand, I figured a failed crossing might pull her back to reality, but on the other I worried she might not be able to handle it if her elaborate fantasy-world was exposed as a fraud, that she would react badly and I might never see her again. But at that moment I decided the charade could not continue a moment longer, and that were I to refuse her invitation I would be complicit in her delusion. We were both lying on the bed. I had my head propped up on a pillow while Madeleine
lay on her back. We locked eyes. I couldn’t help but feel a little appalled that I had allowed myself to do this, but within a few moments I felt my body begin to tingle all over with pleasure. This, Madeleine had told me, was the first stirring of the soul, which all people naturally feel when looking into the eyes of another. She believed the ability to cross was latent in everyone, only the teaching of it had been lost. This, she claimed, was why looking someone in the eye was such a powerful, and occasionally dangerous, act, because even the untrained soul stirs when gazes meet. Now, staring into her eyes, I preferred to think of it simply as love. What sorrows had she endured in her life, I wondered, a life about which, for all her stories, I still knew very little? I thought of her as one of those people defeated by hardship and solitude who conduct one-sided conversations on the street, loudly berating someone who exists only in their imagination. And so, looking into her eyes, tingling all over with pleasure, I was all at once flooded with tenderness for this woman, and for her woundedness. Her tales were merely a cover, a disguise, a front. Underneath them was a deeply, perhaps irretrievably, mislaid soul. The sadness of it overwhelmed me, and the image of her blurred, and I looked away.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m distracted. I was thinking about the auction tomorrow.’

  Later that evening, Madeleine dressed and left the apartment as always. Before leaving, she gave me an exceptionally tender kiss. I thought she was trying to repair the unspoken rift that had emerged between us, but the next morning, when I woke and noticed she wasn’t lying beside me, I understood what it had really meant. She’d been saying goodbye. But she’d left me a gift. Lying on the bedside table was her derringer.

  I don’t intend to recreate the agonies I suffered that morning. Suffice it to say I didn’t leave the apartment for my usual morning walk, and in the throes of anguish I lost all sense of time. I had to hurry to the Hôtel Drouot on the other side of the river, carrying 873 francs in cash and coins – the sum total of my funds – which jangled ostentatiously in my trouser pockets, taking the Métro instead of walking, as I preferred to do, because round-ups were easier to avoid above ground than under it. The second-class compartment was lightly sprinkled with passengers, as if it were a Sunday rather than a Monday.

  Stepping through the arched corner entrance of the Hôtel Drouot, I entered a hushed, red-carpeted, high-ceilinged world that whispered promises of aesthetic pleasures. I’d attended many auctions here, always as a spectator. Each time I visited this elegant bazaar of all that is precious and exquisite, I felt a familiar heady rush. Room 10 was located up the stairs. There were barely a dozen people in the large room, including the auctioneer, Bignon, and his assistants, waiting glumly for the clock on the wall to strike two o’clock so the auction could begin. Bignon stood on his podium wielding his gavel like a judge, dressed in a fine dark suit, thinly disguising his contempt at the dismal turnout: a few middle-aged onlookers, peppering the empty seats alone or in small clusters.

  I’d wanted to arrive early. It was the custom, before an auction, for the items listed in the catalogue to be displayed for inspection. There was only one item of interest to me, but as I didn’t wish to draw attention to myself, I feigned interest in several others. I flicked through a first edition of Mallarmé and pretended to study some Daumier lithographs before turning my attention to the object of my real desire, the antique red leather-bound notebook lying open on a bed of blue velvet: The Education of a Monster, Ch. Baudelaire. I had to put on a pair of white cotton gloves to handle it. The manuscript had been bound in peau de chagrin, with gold-leaf embossing on the spine and cover. Inside, the yellowing pages were filled with the distinctive curlicue of the poet’s own handwriting. I read the first few lines and my heart began to palpitate with that excitement known only to collectors when they are within reach of a rare, once-in-a-lifetime prize: As I write these words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief (these two words were underlined) as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. Exactly as Madeleine had remembered – word for word. I read on. Yet nothing I have written has ever been so true. Paradox, all is paradox. I skipped ahead a few pages and found the dinner party scene, exactly as described. So Madeleine had not been imagining things. She was intimately familiar with the manuscript. I continued turning the pages, reviewing the chapter headings – ‘A Disgraceful Episode’, ‘A Touching Reunion’ and so on, just as she had described. Just then, chimes began to echo throughout the building as dozens of clocks waiting to be auctioned in adjoining rooms rang the hour all at once.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, the auction is about to begin.’ I looked up. A man in a sky-blue frock and white gloves was reaching for the book – one of the auctioneer’s assistants. If I pocketed the book and ran out of the room, I calculated, I’d never get away with it. Instead, I would end up in prison, no place to be when the Germans arrived. So I handed the book back to the assistant and found a seat. Suddenly I desired that book with my entire being, as if all the love I had felt for Madeleine was now transferred to the object before me, as if somehow Madeleine had become that book. But what chance did I stand with 873 measly francs to my name? Under normal circumstances, a manuscript of this rarity would not be cheap. Perhaps the invasion had chased away the serious collectors who would normally have dropped a small fortune, without a second thought, on such a rarity. In any case, if I were, by some stroke of luck, to snare the jewel, my destitution would be a small price to pay.

  The auction began with a brief introduction by Bignon, after which he started up his consoling, monotonal patter, reminiscent of a priest’s Latinate incantations. Against this stream of rapturous descriptions and figures hopping ever upward, like goats up a mountainside, three assistants buzzed to and fro, ferrying and displaying each item in turn, keeping a meticulous record of its commercial destiny. But for all their efforts, a discernible torpor presided over the occasion. Bignon’s voice betrayed little enthusiasm. The bidding was sporadic and many of the objects were passed in.

  ‘Now we come to the last item in the catalogue, undoubtedly the drawcard of today’s proceedings,’ said Bignon as one of the assistants proffered the Baudelaire manuscript as an altar boy would the Eucharist. ‘More than a mere curio, this is a work of genuine rarity and literary significance: a short story, previously unknown, written in Baudelaire’s own hand. The handwriting has been authenticated by the expert appraiser Monsieur Jacquenet. It appears to have been written at the end of Baudelaire’s life, in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Baudelaire was, as we know, the first French admirer and finest translator. The reserve price is two thousand francs.’

  My stomach sank. I was already out of the running. There were no bids, however, so I thought I might still stand a chance. Bignon’s face was stoic. He repeated the price, gavel hovering in the air, and all seemed lost until he spied something – a raised finger belonging to the old man standing alone a row in front of me – and the fall of the hammer was postponed another moment as Bignon’s voice barked, ‘We have two thousand. Do I hear two thousand, two hundred and fifty?’ I studied my competitor jealously: he was hatless and bald, grizzled and bent forward, dressed despite the weather in an outmoded, shapeless trench coat. His profile was vaguely familiar – I must have seen his face before – but where? There was another lull and another last-second bid. Again I looked around for the culprit: this time my attention fell on a thick-necked man in an expensive-looking suit at the back of the room. The two bidders continued the rally two or three more times before the old man’s tenacity carried the day and the man in the suit relented. The gavel struck the lectern at last, marking the manuscript’s sale, the auction’s end, and my own abject failure.

  I followed the successful bidder in the trench coat to the front of the room, where the purchasers had gathered to settle their accounts and collect their trophies. I overheard him spell out his name to one of the auctioneer’s assistants: V-E-N-N-E-T. The Baudelair
e manuscript was the only item he’d purchased. When he turned towards me, I saw his full face for the first time, and again sensed an untraceable recognition.

  One of the assistants tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Do you have something to collect?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘In that case, please make way for the buyers.’

  I went to the back of the room and smoked a Salomé while I waited for Vennet. Where had I seen that face before? An image of a riverside bookstall down by the wine market came to mind. Was he a bouquiniste? Having put the manuscript in a brown leather satchel, Vennet left the auction room. From a distance, I followed him as he descended the stairs and exited the building. He set off in the direction of the Rue de la Grange Batelière. I noticed, walking a short distance behind, that he was also being followed by not one but two separate men: the thick-necked fellow in the expensive suit who’d bid against him during the auction and another man, thin and bespectacled, wearing a grey homburg hat, whom I hadn’t previously noticed. From what Madeleine had told me, I’d expected one pursuant – an employee of the Baudelaire Society – but not two. When the bookseller turned right into the Passage Jouffroy, his two pursuants quickened their steps and also disappeared into the arcade.

  Against the cool, blue shade of the street, the interior was dazzling. Sunlight streamed in through the glass roof, ricocheting off the pale mosaic floor and the display windows of the shops lining both sides of the arcade. Unaware he was being tailed by three men, Vennet had gone into an antiquarian bookstore. The two other men were pretending, not very convincingly, to study the displays of two nearby shops. I stepped into the shop where Vennet was talking to the bookseller, showing off the manuscript he’d just purchased. Remembering what Madeleine had told me, I realised he was in some kind of danger, although I couldn’t say precisely what kind. I wanted to warn him without revealing myself. Speaking to him was out of the question, on account of my accent, so I took my notebook and pencil out of my shirt pocket and scribbled a note: You are being followed by two men. Your life may be in peril. Hide the manuscript and watch out for yourself. I tore the paper from the notebook, folded it, tapped Vennet on the shoulder and handed it to him without uttering a word, face averted. I didn’t wait to see his reaction – as he opened the note, I slipped out of the bookshop, hiding my face from the two men with my hat, then turned and began to run.