Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  ‘Slowly, unsteadily, I rose to my feet. I looked out of the hut’s solitary window. The world outside was a palette of pre-dawn blue, and a fine mist hovered delicately over the ground. My equilibrium had deserted me – I moved as if drunk. I swallowed some water from a jug. The old man was blinking and panting rapidly. Kneeling, I took him in my arms and laid him down on the nearby bed. I then slowly poured water from a cup into his mouth. As the fire had almost burned itself out, I took some wood from a pile beside the hearth, added it to the embers, stoked and blew on it and soon enough it was blazing once more. I sat in a rocking chair before the fire and closed my eyes, waking a short time later, wet with sweat, haunted by the vague memory of a nightmare. Roblet was in the exact same position I had left him in, lying on his back on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed, blinking and panting heavily. His lips mouthed words I could not interpret. Once more I gave him water to drink and left the jug beside his bed. Satisfied I could do no more for him, I stepped outside into the morning. At a loss as to what to do, I began walking, taking the same trail that had led me there the previous day.

  ‘I wandered in a daze along the path, descending through lush green hills towards Port Louis, meditating upon the events of the previous day and night. I could not say that I felt like a different person, but nor could I say I felt like the same person who had set off from Port Louis only a day earlier.

  ‘As I plunged deeper and deeper into the woods, surrounded by towering trees, I felt as if everything I saw was with someone else’s eyes. The forest I was traversing, for example, had seemed to me only the previous day nothing more than a tiresome cluster of verdant rot. Now it was transformed into a forest of symbols that watched over me familiarly, a kind of living temple whose pillars occasionally whispered some unintelligible word into my ear. Scents, colours and sounds answered one another like distant echoes melding to form a dark and profound unity, vast as the night. By the time I returned to Port Louis several hours later, I understood what it was that had changed in me. I would not continue my voyage to India. Instead, I would return to Paris, and devote my life to poetry.’

  Charles’s tale was at an end. ‘And so,’ I asked, trembling uncomprehendingly at the thought that I might have found you again, and yet straining to hide my excitement, ‘what do you make of the old man’s story?’

  ‘I think the old man was a lunatic, and for a time he charmed me into indulging his lunacy.’

  ‘You haven’t noticed any changes in you since?’

  ‘The only change I have noticed is indeed the same affliction about which Roblet complained: nightmares. They cause me to wake in the middle of the night, screaming with terror. But who knows, perhaps my sea voyage caused this, or some mysterious tropical disease, or perhaps the old man himself cursed me with his affliction.’

  We left the tavern soon after, the three of us, and walked together for a while before Charles left us to return to his apartment on the Île Saint-Louis.

  The next day I received an anonymous letter in which there was a poem praising my beauty. I had Gaspard read it out to me. ‘It could only be Charles,’ he said. I smiled. ‘The idea doesn’t seem to displease you,’ he said. I smiled once more. ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘I am incapable of being in love with any man.’

  ‘That’s a relief. It is one thing to be loved by a poet – indeed it is a fine thing. But it is another thing altogether to be in love with one. If you were in love with him I would forbid you to ever see him again. But if he is in love with you, go to him, my dear, with my blessing.’

  And so, after some fifty years, we had found each other again, and a new chapter began in our story: seventeen years of life together. In those days, Charles had money, having come into half of his deceased father’s estate when he reached his majority. He liked to spend it extravagantly. His fortune was one of those inconvenient sums, somewhere between being large enough to seem inexhaustible to a young man and small enough to worry his elders it would be soon be exhausted. He spent impulsively, mostly on art, antiques and, especially, on me. I was his exotic bird, his creature of display, his most precious jewel. While he was courting me, he set me up in my own apartment, on the Île Saint-Louis. It was a short walk from the Hôtel Pimodan, where he lived, a modest seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Quai d’Anjou that had been transformed into apartments. It overlooked the river and the Right Bank. A hive of young dandies and wealthy eccentrics resided there. Charles rented a three-room apartment on the top floor, and he began to fill it with rare objects, dubious antiques and paintings bigger than could possibly fit into his quarters. Eventually, his stepfather was forced to intervene to stop the dissipation of the inheritance. What was left of it was put in trust, and Charles was paid a modest monthly stipend. To anyone else, it would have been more than enough. But modesty was inconceivable to him. The thought of earning money by conventional means – as, one by one, most of his friends began to do – never so much as crossed his mind. He already had a profession: writing, translating and reading.

  To save money, I moved in with Charles. There is nothing more fatal to passion than when two lovers chain themselves together. Constrained by the modesty of his allowance, he began to sell off the objects he had accumulated so wantonly, only to discover that much of it was worthless. Soon enough it became apparent that he could no longer keep up the rent of the Pimodan apartment. We moved out and into another apartment.

  Between his stipend, funds his mother sent in reluctant response to his almost-daily letters begging for money, the money my gentlemen admirers gave me, and the credit he accumulated without the slightest intention of repaying, we lived for the next several years constantly on the move from one shabby furnished room to the next. Charles was always dreaming up a new endeavour to make him rich but in practice he had as little talent for making money as for saving it. He would spend it on clothes, wine, hashish, laudanum and, above all, books, the greatest of his vices.

  Having lost you once already, I did not want to lose you a second time. The memory of how Roblet had reacted when I’d told him about his crossing, all those years ago on the ship, still burned inside me. I resolved to be gentle with Charles, not to push him away with what I knew by foisting it upon him, but to lead him gently to the knowledge I wanted to share. This I did by telling him stories when he woke at night, consumed by his habitual horrors. He loved my stories. Among the many nicknames he devised for me – his Black Venus, his black swan, his giantess, his grande taciturne – he sometimes called me his Scheherazade. He said I was the most gifted storyteller he’d ever known, and that had I been born a man or an heiress I would have made a fine writer. I wasn’t interested in books I couldn’t read. I was secretive and prized discretion; for me writing was a kind of illness, and writers contemptible and untrustworthy, for they did not know how to keep their stories to themselves.

  My storytelling was a nocturnal activity intended to comfort and console as well as to educate. When he woke screaming and wet with sweat, I would ask Charles what he’d dreamed and I played the part of the interpreter. In this way over the years I was able to tell him about Koahu and Roblet, and Alula and Joubert. For a long time, I avoided mentioning that I was Alula and Joubert, and he Koahu and Roblet. I wanted the idea to be born in him. He listened gratefully to my stories – they were a kind of balm for him, soothing his frayed nerves. But he never took them seriously. He considered them brilliant improvisations, exotic fancies, and nothing more. As for his own story about Roblet, he stopped telling it. Rather, inspired by me, he began improvising stories of his own. In these fabricated tales, he had not returned to France from Mauritius at the earliest opportunity, but had continued to roam the Orient. He invented stories about life at sea, the tropics, travel, exile and adventure, tales designed to impress the impressionable salons of Paris, many of whose guests had never strayed far from the capital. He lied with relish about his fictional journeys in India, in Ceylon and Sumatra and C
hina, Tahiti and the Sandwich Islands, claiming to have travelled for years and suffered all manner of adventures and deprivations. There was always an enthusiastic gallery for his improvisations, and his audiences hungrily swallowed every preposterous word. Traces of my stories seeped their way into his poems too – an albatross, a tamarind tree, a storm-tossed sea – but how could I hold any of this against him? I saw him as a tragic figure: a man who had forgotten his past and, in forgetting it, had become lost in it. This helped me forgive him his flaws: his lies, his vanities, his inconstancies, his cunning, his rages and his self-absorption.

  Seventeen years passed in this way, seventeen years of making do, moving, fighting, reconciling, separating, reuniting, over and again, never the same and yet always the same. Our life together stumbled on, season after season, year after year, ever more nomadic and desperate. One by one Charles’s dreams of literary fame were extinguished – and every defeat sharpened the blade of his bitterness. He made enemies everywhere he went. His poems sold poorly; the one book he ever published was pulped; his journalism paid pittances; his ideas for plays and novels never amounted to anything more than notes scrawled in a notebook. In the meantime, we moved from furnished room to furnished room, boarding house to boarding house – each one slightly more rancid than its predecessor – ever watchful for the next place to stay once the proprietor of our current lodgings began to hound us for our arrears. Every few weeks or months, we found ourselves somewhere else, under another name or another combination of our old names, in perpetual motion, trying to keep a step ahead of creditors and bailiffs, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of debt and want.

  While we were waging our private battles, Paris was changing around us. The old Paris of our youth was being dismantled brick by brick and stone by stone, with pickaxes wielded by swarthy southern workers. The city became a strange and unwelcoming carnival of novelties. Even night was vanquished, as gas lamps were installed along every boulevard and street and the new city of light sparkled as seductively after dark as it did during the day.

  Our love was marked by stories, but in time Charles wearied of my tales. Rather than consoling him, they began to exasperate him. Eventually, if he woke in panic in the middle of the night and I tried to soothe him, he would become irritated. Certain subjects, even certain words, became forbidden: island, ship, soul, crossing. At first, out of fear of losing him, I obeyed his will, but later, when I realised that he was already lost to me, I shed my reserve. I became more strident: you are Koahu and I am Alula, I told him time and again, let me prove it to you. When I offered to cross with him, he dismissed me like a parent dismisses a child’s inventions. He responded to my provocations with increasingly virulent contempt, his fury heightened by the pox, from which we both suffered, and the great quantities of laudanum he drank for the pain.

  Then there were the separations. At first, he would disappear for a few days; later he would go for weeks or months. He took to moving to new lodgings without telling me where he was going. I would seek him out and find him, asking his friends where he was, looking into his favourite coffee shops and taverns, or simply scouring the streets. I couldn’t help but remain loyal to him, even in the face of his utter rejection. I felt responsible for him, as if I were his guardian.

  So it was fitting that it should be one of my stories that undid us. It occurred on one of those penniless nights when he had not drunk any wine or laudanum, and his temper was greatly frayed. A nightmare woke him. I asked what he had dreamed. He did not wish to tell me. I asked him again and he told me to be silent. ‘Did you dream of an island?’ I asked.

  He turned to me with his eyes narrowed hatefully and said, ‘Say the word again and I shall make you regret it.’

  ‘Did you dream of a sailing ship?’ For the first time since I had known him, he slapped me. The impact of the slap spun my head, but I would not be quelled. ‘Did you dream of an island?’ He slapped me again. ‘Did you dream of looking into another man’s eyes?’ Slap. ‘Did you dream of a sailing ship?’ By now, in a frenzy, Charles took his belt from his trousers and began flailing me as I cowered before him, crouched on the ground, my arms wrapped around my head. But I would not be stopped. He tore the dress from my back and whipped me, cursing me as he did so, calling me a slave. By the time he was done, as warm blood trickled from the welts on my back, Charles collapsed on the divan. I asked him one more time about his dream, but he was spent. It was the first and only time he ever beat me. I rose from the ground and, staggering into the next room, fell onto the bed and fainted. By the time I awoke the next morning he was gone, and this time I did not seek him out.

  I found myself bereft, a black woman alone in Paris, no longer in the first bloom of youth, nor even the second. I began working in a hotel in La Chapelle where rooms were let by the hour. There I met a Haitian man who believed he was my brother. I told him he couldn’t be my brother, but he insisted he was, and that he loved me with a fraternal love, and wanted to take care of me. He was a ragpicker and invited me to live with him here in Batignolles. Soon after I moved here, Charles went to Brussels, fleeing his creditors and censors and enemies. He wrote to me once. He told me about his plans to publish his banned poems and smuggle them into France. But of course nothing ever came of it.

  Now, I said to Mademoiselle Édmonde and Mademoiselle Adélaïde, my health is failing. I’m partially paralysed on the left side of my body. The eyesight in my left eye is dimming. I have no clients, and depend entirely on my brother. Otherwise I lie here on this mattress, remembering the past, resigned to never crossing again, resigned to never returning to the island, resigned to whatever end fate has in store for me.

  At last my tale was told. By now it was quite dark, the only light in the room that of an oil lamp that burned on a low table between us. The two young ladies stirred from the reverie in which they had spent the afternoon, thanked me for telling my story and stood to leave. Mademoiselle Adélaïde stoked the embers in the stove and added several lumps of charcoal. Mademoiselle Édmonde opened her purse and left several hundred-franc notes beside the lamp, parrying my meek protestations. I thanked them, and apologised for not being able to see them out. They turned to leave, but Mademoiselle Adélaïde hesitated. She turned back towards me and observed me for an instant. She approached the mattress and sat down on its edge, very near me. She leaned forward and I felt her eyes studying my face, almost drinking it. She raised a hand and a finger lightly traced the outlines of my nose, my cheeks, my lips. Mademoiselle Édmonde, standing behind her, was half-turned away, motionless. Mademoiselle Adélaïde leaned forward slowly until her lips met mine, and kissed me languidly and tenderly. ‘You are still a beautiful woman,’ she whispered, ‘a very beautiful woman.’ Then she straightened and returned to her companion’s side. They opened the door and, with a bustle of silken skirts, were gone.

  Several days later, there was another knock on the door. It was Mademoiselle Édmonde’s coachman. He delivered a sealed envelope, but I told him I could not read. He opened it and read it aloud: it was an invitation requesting the pleasure of my company at four o’clock the following afternoon at an address in the Lorette neighbourhood. A coach would be sent to take me there and return me afterward. It was signed Mademoiselle Édmonde de Bressy.

  The following day I arrived in front of a hôtel particulier. The coachman assisted me from the buggy and set me in a chair on wheels, which, with the help of a butler, was carried through the doorway and into an entrance hall decorated and furnished in a splendour I had not seen since my youth. I waited in silence, studying my surrounds. Every surface was exquisitely decorated. Every wall bore a work of art. Every object sparkled. Mademoiselle Édmonde and Mademoiselle Adélaïde appeared shortly after, walking side by side, the silks of their dresses whispering conspiratorially as they approached. As on the previous occasion, Mademoiselle Édmonde’s face was veiled. After the usual exchange of formalities, they asked that I join them on a tour of the residence.

&nb
sp; With Mademoiselle Adélaïde pushing the chair, we set off to inspect the ground floor of the building, room after room, each one decorated in its own style, each as richly ornamented as its predecessor. As we proceeded, Mademoiselle Édmonde described what it was we were seeing, the rooms on the levels above us and what they contained, as well as the other properties she owned, and a brief description of them. By the time the tour was over we had made a full circle – the residence was built around a courtyard in its centre – without having seen the same room twice. I had been given the description of a fortune that included several more buildings like this one, in Paris and in the provinces. Mademoiselle Édmonde’s mother had died in childbirth; her father had inherited a banking fortune and added to it railway interests. He had died only the previous year. There were no other heirs. The fortune was large enough that three men dedicated their lives to overseeing it, leaving Mademoiselle Édmonde free to live as she pleased.

  ‘Madame Jeanne,’ she said, ‘you are no doubt curious as to why we invited you to visit, and why I am telling you about my affairs in such detail. Mademoiselle Adélaïde and I were greatly touched by the story you told us last time we met. In fact, it is fair to say we have spoken of little else since. We would like to make a proposal to you, but in order to do so there is something you ought to see first.’

  She put her hands to her veil and lifted it. When the countenance behind was at last revealed, I was frightened by what I saw. Her face was grotesquely disfigured. No sooner had I seen it than she once again lowered the veil. ‘You can see,’ she continued, ‘why I keep it concealed. It is the result of an accident involving a candle in my bedroom when I was a child. There have been many times when I wish I had been altogether consumed by that fire, but had that happened I would never have had the joy of meeting Adélaïde.’ The two women turned to each other and clasped hands. ‘This is not a decision that we have undertaken lightly. The past week has been spent, for the most part, in earnest discussion. But by now we are of a common mind, and both of us speak to you today as one. It has always been a dream, nay, an obsession of mine to imagine what it would be like to be in another body, above all in another face. This explains my devotion to painting and literature. Character is destiny, according to Shakespeare. And yet our bodies, above all our faces, are so bound up with how others perceive us, one might say that, especially for a woman, they are just as powerful an influence over our destinies. Our faces influence the perceptions others hold of us, and those perceptions influence, in turn, our character. Wealth shapes our lives too, as does social position. But while character is malleable, and one’s wealth and social position can change for good or ill, one’s body is a fait accompli. One must accept its limitations, one must age with it, one cannot exchange it for another. Not, at least, under normal circumstances.