Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  ‘And so, as soon as you were old enough, you volunteered yourself – as a tribute, I suppose, to the man you loved.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does it trouble you when a man tells you he loves you?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Why? Because he’s dying?’

  ‘Because I have no love to give him in return.’

  I waited to hear if she had anything else to say, but she seemed to have come to a kind of rest. Even her hands were in a state of repose. In clinical terms, it was a promising sign. We were near the end of the session.

  ‘Mademoiselle, the method I use to treat patients is hypnosis. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Is it the same as mesmerism?’

  ‘Mesmerism is what it used to be called, but these days it’s only ever called mesmerism in circuses. The scientific name for it is hypnotism. It seems to have a therapeutic effect on my patients. In a minute, I’m going to put you into a hypnotic trance. It’s while you are in this trance state that we’re going to do all the hard work that is going to heal you. After, you won’t remember a thing. Will you allow me to do that?’

  I can only describe the expression on her face as one of imploring trust. I explained to her that, once hypnotised, she would remain in that state for a quarter of an hour before I ended the trance. Henceforth, she would undergo hypnosis at the beginning of our every session. The aim, I said, was for her to attain a state of deep relaxation that would relieve her neuroses.

  And so the crossing began. For a quarter-hour I wandered the corridors of her mind: a joyous childhood in Saigon marred by the early deaths of her parents (her father of influenza, her mother, soon after, of grief), a solitary youth spent orbiting indifferent relatives in France, and falling passionately in love at the age of fifteen. In my years of clinical work, I’d encountered the charred remnants of many a love cut short. But the quality of Madeleine’s love was different: here was a soul that had loved wholly and with abandon. It was so rare and so true that I found myself wishing I could stay there to be warmed in its afterglow. Yet I also sensed it with a certain awe: a love of this amplitude was powerful enough to burn everything in its wake, leaving nothing but ashes.

  I was writing up the notes on the session with Madeleine when there was a knock at the door. It was the registrar. ‘Sorry to disturb, doctor, but there’s been a change in this afternoon’s schedule. An officer. Claims to know you.’ He looked down at his clipboard. ‘Aristide Artopoulos.’

  ‘Artopoulos! Yes, we’re old friends.’ A pang of guilt pricked my heart. I’d received several letters from him since the beginning of the war, each of them urging me to see him. I’d set them all aside, unable to decide what to do about them, putting my response in a temporary but indefinite state of suspension. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I told him your schedule is full, which he didn’t take very well. He wouldn’t be denied, so I’ve slotted him in for two o’clock. Sorry to cut your lunch short.’

  ‘Thank you, Julien.’

  ‘I must warn you, professor. Don’t expect to recognise your old friend. He is a mess.’

  Not a day went by without a thought for Artopoulos. The word friend could barely contain the nature of our former bond. At one time, we had been more like brothers, with all the uneasiness brotherhood entails, but in the almost three years since the outbreak of war I’d only seen him a couple of times, by happenstance, while he was on leave. What had become of him? What had the war done to him? I took my coat and went for a walk in the park, my mind bursting with memories of a bygone friendship that stretched back seventeen years, to the time of my return to Paris.

  Moments after my crossing with Madame Édmonde in the train seventeen years earlier, I decided I must vanish. She and I had been seen speaking at length in the library car, and in my velvet smoking jacket, turban and walrus moustache, I attracted attention. I wished to avoid any suspicion that her sudden illness was attributable to our recent acquaintance. The last thing I wanted was to end up stuck in a Midwestern prison.

  I began rummaging through Madame Édmonde’s belongings, with which I was, of course, intimately familiar, having packed them myself. I knew where she kept her cash, her jewellery and a promissory note for a rather sizeable sum of money she had written out in my name only the previous evening. I took almost all of it, leaving a little for Lucien to get himself and Édmonde back to Paris. With my hand on the doorknob, my conscience stung me like an angry wasp. I considered leaving a note for Lucien, but what was there to say? I was inflicting a terrible shock on the man, I knew that, but I could not risk being detained. After all, I hadn’t left the island for his sake. I did not wish to return to Paris as Édmonde. Mehevi, or whoever he was now, would be looking out for her. He would not be looking out for Balthazar. I had no choice but to flee. I turned and stole a final glance at that contorted face, upon which the suffering of five lifetimes was etched. Her body had been the vessel that had allowed me to return home at last, but my attachment to her was far more profound. In patience, perseverance and kindness, Édmonde had been my finest incarnation. Now she was in a sorry state – another blind crossing. I was overcome with shame. What had become of me? I was little better than an ordinary criminal, a mountebank stealing the lives of others – and to what end? I consoled myself with the notion that the soul I had stolen was that of a charlatan. But it was undeniable that I had, by now, become a kind of predator. I could blame Mehevi, but as I myself was to blame for him, it came to the same thing.

  I had to remind myself, then, as I have countless times since, that there was a single and necessary purpose to my existence: if I had, as the Law prophesied, set in motion a cataclysm, no matter how slowly it unfolded, it was my duty to try to prevent it. My resolve thus stiffened, I fled the scene of the crime.

  I returned to my own, second-class cabin, shared with an insurance agent and two youths. I took my seat and pretended to doze. In fact, I was undergoing that surge of memories that occurs upon the occupation of a new body, as every stimulus triggers a series of memories latent within it, which bubble to the surface of the mind from unsuspected depths. The sensation is overwhelming, staggering even, and best borne in stillness and solitude. Around dinnertime, a steward appeared to turn out the beds. I removed my valise and retreated to the water closet at the end of the carriage, as if I was doing nothing more than changing into a dinner suit. There, I discarded my velvet jacket and turban, shaved my moustache and, in darkness, alighted from the train at the next stop. The following morning, at the post office in Junction City, Kansas, I dictated a telegram to Mathilde in Paris:

  AM RETURNING SOON AS HIPPOLYTE BALTHAZAR STOP LUCIEN RETURNING SEPARATELY WITH NEW EDMONDE STOP DO NOT TRUST ANY NEW ARRIVAL STOP

  The consequence of this unforeseen detour was that it took me several more weeks to arrive in Paris than I had hoped. By that time, it was early June, and the city was now a heaving, dazzling city of two million souls. There was no finer place to be in the world than Paris in the summer of 1900. The streets teemed with people and were crisscrossed in every direction by telegraph wires, while the ground underfoot was riddled with quarries, Métro tunnels and gas and sewage pipes. One could no longer saunter down the middle of the streets, for they were now cluttered with omnibuses, streetcars, carriages, rattletraps, velocipedes, deluxe coach-and-pairs and, for well-heeled adventurists, horseless carriages.

  The speed of existence had quickened: where life was once lived at walking or trotting pace, people now took underground trains to get from place to place. The arcades of yesteryear had been supplanted by giant department stores employing thousands of cashiers. The city’s markets received produce transported on trains from across the country. If one wished to communicate with someone on the other side of town, it was no longer necessary to wait all day or overnight for a reply: a network of pneumatic pipes could deliver blue-papered messages almost instantly. In wealthy homes there were telephones and, in the best houses, one could even l
isten in on performances at the Opéra on a theatrophone.

  The city had grown in size, too. The open fields that had once separated it from its walls were now filled in. More neighbourhoods had been demolished and replaced with wide boulevards, sparkling with electric illumination. Thousands of chimneys belched smoke into the air, so that the streets were frequently shrouded in mist. Paris had become decidedly sootier, but also finer somehow, one of those grandes dames whose every wrinkle serves only to make her more resplendent. Women wore ostrich plumes, men wore monocles. Newspaper kiosks and Morris columns advertising the latest shows were dotted through the city. Men no longer relieved themselves in the gutter but in Moorish-inspired vespasiennes. At every corner, grimy street urchins were enveloped in some neighbourhood conspiracy. And looming above it all was a great iron tower that seemed to have no purpose other than to proclaim the glory of the age.

  Millions had come from every country to witness for themselves the wonders of the Exposition Universelle, a paean to the wonders of the whole world. They marvelled at such modern miracles as a diesel engine that ran on peanut oil, talking films, escalators, and a device that could record sound called the telegraphone. Intoxicated by the mood of frivolity and pleasure, they took river gondolas and electrified conveyor belts between carnivalesque palaces and specially built pavilions, panoramas of the world’s great vistas, dioramas of life in the colonies, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, a gigantic globe displaying the constellations of the night sky, and, in the Russian pavilion, a matryoshka doll as tall as a horse containing forty-nine identical versions of herself, each nested within the other, the smallest no bigger than a pea. On Sundays throughout summer and into the autumn, the crowds applauded athletes competing in the Olympic Games. More than just the Olympic motto, Faster, higher, stronger was the credo of a whole new century. And yet I could not help but be wistful for the slower, smaller, gentler Paris I had known decades earlier.

  I took a modest room in a boarding house in the Sentier neighbourhood and slipped into this human sea unnoticed. The Hippolyte Balthazar I’d crossed into was little more than a stage musician, a vaudevillian, a trickster preying on human frailty, but I was determined, with the resources I had inherited, to reinvent myself, even if I could not yet imagine what form my next metamorphosis would take.

  While I waited for inspiration to befall me, I had a more pressing matter to attend to: I set out to find Mathilde, Lucien and Édmonde. On a fine morning soon after my arrival, I knocked on the door of the Baudelaire Society on the Quai d’Anjou. It had changed little in the three decades since I had left it as Édmonde de Bressy. The door was opened by an unfamiliar man. I asked after Mathilde.

  ‘Madame Roeg is not in,’ he replied.

  ‘What about Lucien?’ I asked.

  ‘Monsieur Roeg is not in either.’

  ‘Édmonde?’

  ‘Madame de Bressy has not been in for some time.’

  ‘Well, is anyone in?’

  ‘Monsieur Artopoulos.’

  ‘May I see him?’

  ‘Whom may I say is calling?’

  ‘Hippolyte Balthazar.’

  ‘What is the nature of your visit?’

  I had a feeling, deep down in my stomach, that I ought to choose my words carefully. ‘I wish to join the Society.’

  He stepped back, opened the door wider and admitted me into the building. ‘Please wait,’ he said before retreating down the hallway. It had been thirty years since I’d last been here. All was as I’d left it – the staircase, the drapes, the mosaic tiles, the rugs, the chandeliers and mahogany furniture. But I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in nostalgia. I was worried – worried for Mathilde and Lucien, of course, but also worried about Mehevi.

  After a wait of several minutes a tall, rotund man dressed in a fine black suit and pressed white shirt and cravat barged into the room. He sported a curled moustache and a monocle over one eye. When he first laid eyes on me, for a moment that lasted no more than a heartbeat, his entire body froze, his facial expression – eyes widened, mouth agape – that of one beholding a vision, before he snapped back to reality. He approached me, enveloped my outstretched hand between both of his, and introduced himself to me as Aristide Artopoulos. He was, he said, the president of the Baudelaire Society.

  ‘I’m on my way out the door to dine,’ he boomed. ‘Would you care to join me? It will give us a chance to discuss Baudelaire to our hearts’ content.’

  My natural inclination was to refuse the invitation, but before I could speak he had taken me by the arm and marched me out with him. There was something compelling about the man. Besides, what harm could it do to luncheon with him if it allowed me to interrogate him? I followed him out the door and into his waiting buggy.

  We trotted across town to La Maison Dorée, with Artopoulos talking the whole way, invariably about himself. I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation to Mathilde and Lucien. At the restaurant, he asked for a private cabinet and, once we were seated, a swarm of waiters descended upon us. He ordered – without any consultation – lobster thermidor for us both, accompanied by a bottle of Les Clos Chablis.

  The story of his life so far could be summarised thus: he’d been born in Alexandria into a Greek shipping dynasty. He’d attended boarding school in Switzerland and studied English and French letters at Cambridge. As the youngest of four boys, he’d been spared the duty of the family business and was free to dedicate his existence to the Muse, as he put it, adding that despite his passion for it he had no talent for literature whatsoever. ‘Like so many others,’ he said, ‘I developed an unhealthy obsession for Baudelaire, so naturally I decided to join the Society dedicated to the preservation of his work and legacy.’

  At last, here was my opportunity. ‘How was it that you took up the position of president?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s rather a dismal tale, I’m afraid. You see, the previous president has vanished. Technically speaking, I’m currently the Society’s only member – and thus its president by default.’ This news set my alarm bells ringing. Mathilde was perhaps the most sensible character I’d ever known. She was not the type to just vanish without good cause. I would have to proceed delicately. ‘How do you mean vanished – how does somebody vanish in this day and age, what with newspapers and telegrams and passports?’

  ‘It happens more frequently than you would think. People disappear all the time.’ He chewed on his lobster thoughtfully. ‘I’m afraid I suspect the worst.’

  ‘Is that so,’ I replied, wishing to keep him talking on the subject without betraying my stake in the matter.

  ‘My friend, you have arrived at the Baudelaire Society at a curious time in its history. At its height, around 1870, the Society had fifty-one members. They were the finest literary minds in Paris, all devoted to the work and memory of Baudelaire. Their patron saint was the Society’s founder, Madame Édmonde de Bressy. Sadly, she became involved in the Commune, and was exiled, never to return. She left the Society in the care of her companion, Mathilde Roeg. Madame Mathilde’s origins were, I understand, insalubrious. I knew her a little – she was practically illiterate. It’s unclear to me quite how she came to preside over such a prestigious organisation, but I was told she was the most trusted companion of Madame de Bressy.’ He leaned forward, confidentially. Again I was struck by the charm of the man – in his mouth, my own story was as enthralling as a newspaper serial. ‘It was even rumoured she’d been a prostitute before Madame Édmonde had taken it upon herself to raise the girl’s station in society.’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘Madame Mathilde managed the Society’s affairs until very recently, but I’m afraid she made a mess of things. We are in an awful state. As far as I can tell very little of Madame Édmonde’s fortune is left. It has been entirely squandered.’

  My anger flared at the travesty of the notion that Mathilde was capable of such incompetence, but I kept my feelings to myself.

  ‘When I joined the Society, only a few
weeks ago, it had only three remaining members: Madame Roeg, her son, Monsieur Lucien, a professional vagabond, and the infamous Madame Édmonde, living among the savages in the South Seas. Lucien had gone to fetch her, as no one had seen her in twenty years. It seems he not only found her, he somehow persuaded her to return with him to France. Tragically, both Lucien and Édmonde perished during their journey back to Paris.’

  Needless to say, Artopoulos’s news was a thunderbolt, but I was fortunate to be inhabiting the body of a vaudevillian. The scrutiny of the man sitting opposite me was palpable. Other than for a twitch of the eyebrows and a little, moderately interested grunt, I made sure to keep my face as still as possible. I picked up the glass before me, took a measured sip, set it down again and tilted my head sideways as if I were merely listening to a curious story about people I’d never met. Inside, I was reeling.

  ‘How terrible!’

  ‘They were on a train from Nantes to Paris, sharing a cabin. Madame de Bressy had recently suffered some sort of neuralgic attack, I’m led to believe. Lucien was supposed to be caring for her. It appears he killed her with a steak knife, and then he stabbed himself.’

  My heart was thudding. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’ I managed to utter.

  ‘That’s what all of Parisian society would like to know. It is an incredible story, is it not? In my opinion, it should come as no surprise that a man reared by two women should be prone to hysterics.’

  The look on his face was hard to read. If I had known the man better, I might have called it triumph. Inside this body, I suspected, behind those startling eyes, lurked a familiar malevolence: Mehevi.

  Artopoulos continued, apparently unaware of my discomfort. ‘Of course as the only member of the society, I had to take care of the burial myself. I even paid, out of my own pocket, for a plot in the Montparnasse cemetery. I took the liberty of interring them together in a crypt crowned by a fine pink-and-grey marble plinth under the name of the Baudelaire Society.’ Yes, all remaining doubts had by now vanished. I was certain this was Mehevi. My nemesis had laid his trap. Somehow he had crossed from the body of the sacrilegious sea captain into that of an exotic dandy – and now he was enjoying himself immensely. Had he guessed who I was? The turn of conversation suggested he harboured his own suspicions, at the very least.