by Paul Auster
But I do, I said. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
You can’t possibly know.
Believe me, I do. You were angry at Adam because he hadn’t called you for several days. The night before you went back to school, he had dinner with you and your mother at your apartment on the rue de Verneuil. After dessert, you played the piano for him—a two-part invention by Bach—and then, because you left the room for a while, your mother had a chance to speak to Adam one-on-one, and what she said to him, in your words, scared him off.
Did he tell you this?
No, he didn’t tell me. But he wrote about it, and I’ve read the pages he wrote.
He sent you a letter?
It was a short book, actually. Or an attempt to write a book. He spent the last months of his life working on a memoir about nineteen sixty-seven. It was an important year for him.
Yes, a very important year. I think I’m beginning to understand.
If not for Adam’s manuscript, I never would have heard of you.
And now you want to find out what happened, is that it?
I can see why Adam thought you were so intelligent. You catch on fast, don’t you?
Cécile smiled and lit another cigarette. I seem to be at a disadvantage, she said.
In what way?
You know a lot more about me than I know about you.
Only the eighteen-year-old you. Everything else is a blank. I looked for Born, I looked for Margot Jouffroy, I looked for your mother, but you were the only one I could find.
That’s because all the others are dead.
Oh. How awful. I’m so sorry . . . especially about your mother.
She died six years ago. In October—exactly six years ago tomorrow. About a month after the attacks on New York and Washington. She’d had heart trouble for some time, and one day her heart simply gave out on her. She was seventy-six. I wanted her to live to a hundred, but as you know, what we want and what we get are rarely the same thing.
And Margot?
I barely knew her. I was told she killed herself. A long time ago now—all the way back in the seventies.
And Born?
Last year. I think. But I’m not absolutely sure. There’s a slim chance he’s still alive somewhere.
Did he and your mother stay married until her death?
Married? They were never married.
Never married? But I thought—
They talked about it for a while, but it never happened.
Was Adam responsible for stopping it?
Partly, I suppose, but not entirely. When he talked to my mother and made those wild accusations about Rudolf, she didn’t believe him. Nor did I, for that matter.
You were so incensed, you spat in his face, didn’t you?
Yes, I spat in his face. It was the single worst thing I’ve done in my life, and I still can’t forgive myself for it.
You wrote to Adam to apologize. Does that mean you changed your mind about his story?
No, not then. I wrote because I was ashamed of what I did, and I wanted him to know how bad I felt about it. I tried to talk to him in person, but when I finally found the courage to call his hotel, he wasn’t there anymore. They told me he’d gone back to America. I couldn’t understand it. Why would he leave so suddenly? The only explanation I could think of was that he was so upset by what I’d done to him that he couldn’t bear the thought of staying in Paris. How’s that for a selfish reading of events? When I asked Rudolf to talk to the head of the Columbia program and find out what had happened, he reported that Adam had left because he wasn’t satisfied with the courses he was taking. That seemed utterly feeble to me, and I didn’t buy it for a second. I was convinced he’d left because of me.
You know better now, don’t you?
Yes, I know better. But it took years before I learned the truth.
Years. Which means that Adam’s story had no effect on your mother’s decision.
I wouldn’t say that. After Adam left, Rudolf couldn’t stop talking about him. He had been accused of murder, after all, and he was outraged, quite bonkers really, and he fumed and railed against Adam for weeks. He should be put in jail for twenty years, he said. He should be strung up and hanged from the nearest lamppost. He should be carted off to Devil’s Island. It was all so excessive, so over the top, that my mother began to feel a little annoyed with him. She had known Rudolf for a long time, many years, almost as long as she’d known my father, and for the most part he had been extremely gentle with her—considerate, thoughtful, gracious. There were a few hot-headed moments, of course, especially when he started talking about politics, but that was politics, not personal business. Now he was on a rampage, and I think she was beginning to have some doubts about him. Was she honestly prepared to spend the rest of her life with a man who had such a violent temper? After a month or two, Rudolf began to calm down, and by Christmastime the fits and crazy outbursts had stopped. The winter was tranquil, I recall, but then it was spring, May sixty-eight, and the whole country exploded. For me, it was one of the greatest periods of my life. I marched, I demonstrated, I helped shut down my school, and suddenly I had turned into an activist, a bright-eyed revolutionary agitating to bring down the government. My mother was sympathetic to the students, but right-wing Rudolf had nothing but contempt for them. He and I got into some dreadful arguments that spring, fierce shouting matches about law and justice, Marx and Mao, anarchy and rebellion, and for the first time politics was no longer just politics, it was personal business. My mother was caught in the middle, and it made her more and more unhappy, more and more silent and withdrawn. The divorce from my father was supposed to become final at the beginning of June. In France, divorcing couples have to talk to a judge one last time before he can sign the papers. They’re asked to reconsider, to rethink their decision and make sure they want to go ahead with it. My father was in the hospital—I imagine you know all about that—and my mother went to see the judge on her own. When he asked her if she had any second thoughts about her decision, she said yes, she had changed her mind and didn’t want a divorce. She was protecting herself against Rudolf, you understand. She didn’t want to marry him anymore, and by staying married to my father, she couldn’t marry him anymore.
How did Born react?
With tremendous kindness. He said that he understood why she couldn’t go through with it, that he admired her for her steadfastness and courage, that he thought she was an extraordinary and noble woman. Not what you would expect, but there you have it. He behaved beautifully.
How much longer did your father go on living?
A year and a half. He died in January nineteen seventy.
Did Born come back and propose again?
No. He left Paris after sixty-eight and started teaching in London. We saw him at my father’s funeral, and a couple of weeks after that he wrote my mother a long, heartfelt letter about the past, but that was the end of it. The subject of marriage never came up again.
And what about your mother? Did she find someone else?
She had some male friends over the years, but she never remarried.
And Born moved to London. Did you ever see him again?
Once, about eight months after my mother died.
And?
I’m sorry. I don’t think I can talk about it.
Why not?
Because if I tried to tell you what happened, I couldn’t begin to convey what a strange and disturbing experience it was for me.
You’re pulling my leg, right?
Just a little bit. To use your terms, I can’t tell you anything, but you can read about it if you want to.
Ah, I see. And where is this mysterious text of yours?
In my apartment. I’ve been keeping a diary since I was twelve years old, and I wrote a number of pages about what happened during my visit to Rudolf’s house. An on-the-spot, eyewitness account, if you will. I think it might interest you. If you like, I can photocopy the pages and bring th
em here tomorrow. If you’re not in, I’ll drop them off at the desk.
Thank you. That’s very generous of you. I can’t wait to read them.
And now, Cécile said, grinning broadly as she reached into her leather bag and pulled out a large red notebook, shall we get on with the survey for the CNRS?
The next afternoon, when my wife and I returned to the hotel after a long lunch with her sister, the package was waiting for me. In addition to the photocopied pages from her diary, Cécile included a short cover letter. She thanked me for the whiskeys, for tolerating her grotesque and unpardonable tears, and for giving up so much of my time to talk to her about Adam. Then she apologized for her illegible handwriting and offered to help me if I had any trouble deciphering it. I found it perfectly legible. Every word was clear, not one letter or punctuation mark confused me. The diary was written in French, of course, and what follows is my translation of that French into English, which I am including with the author’s full permission.
I have nothing more to say. Cécile Juin is the last person from Walker’s story who is still alive, and because she is the last, it seems fitting that she should have the last word.
CÉCILE JUIN’S DIARY
4/27. A letter today from Rudolf Born. Six months after the fact, he has only just now learned of Mother’s death. How long has it been since I last saw him, last heard from him? Twenty years, I think, perhaps twenty-five.
He sounds distraught, shattered by the news. Why would it mean so much to him now, after all these years of silence? He writes eloquently about the strength of her character, her dignified bearing and inner warmth, her attunement to the minds of others. He never stopped loving her, he says, and now that she has left this world, he feels that a part of him has left it with her.
He is retired. 71, unmarried, in good health. For the past six years, he has been living in a place called Quillia, a small island between Trinidad and the Grenadines at the juncture of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, just north of the equator. I have never heard of it. I must remember to look it up.
In the last sentence of the letter, he asks for news of me.
4/29. I have written back to R.B. Much more openly than I intended to, but once I started to talk about myself, I found it difficult to stop. When the letter reaches him, he will know about my work, about my marriage to Stéphane, about Stéphane’s death three years ago, and how lonely and burnt out I feel most of the time. I wonder if I haven’t gone a bit too far.
What are my feelings toward this man? Complicated ones, ambiguous ones, combining compassion and indifference, friendship and wariness, admiration and bemusement. R.B. has many excellent qualities. High intelligence, good manners, a ready laugh, generosity. After Father’s accident, he stepped in and became our moral support, the rock on which we stood for many years. He was saintly with Mother, a chivalrous companion, helpful and doting, always there in time of trouble. As for me, who was not even twelve when our world caved in, how many times did he lift me out of the doldrums with his encouragement and praise, his pride in my meager accomplishments, his indulgent attitude toward my adolescent sufferings? So many positive attributes, so much to feel grateful for, and yet I continue to resist him. Does it have something to do with our bitter clashes in May ’68, those frantic weeks in May when we were at perpetual war with each other, causing a rift between us that was never fully repaired? Perhaps. But I like to think of myself as a person who doesn’t bear grudges, who is capable of forgiving others—and deep down I believe he was forgiven long ago. Forgiven because I laugh when I think about that time now and feel no anger. Instead, what I feel is doubt, and that was something which began to take hold in me several months earlier—back in the fall, when I fell in love with Adam Walker. Dear Adam, who came to Mother with those horrible accusations about R.B. Impossible to believe him, but now that so many years have passed, now that one has pondered and dissected and endlessly reexamined Adam’s motive for saying such things, it becomes difficult to know what to think. Surely there was bad blood between Adam and R.B., surely Adam felt it would be in Mother’s best interest to call off the marriage, and so he made up a story to frighten her into changing her mind. A terrifying story, too terrifying to be true, and therefore a miscalculation on his part, but Adam was essentially a good person, and if he thought there was something tainted about R.B.’s past, then perhaps there was. Hence my doubt, which has been festering in me for years. But I can’t condemn a man on the strength of doubt alone. There must be proof, and since there is no proof, I must take R.B. at his word.
5/11. A response from R.B. He writes that he is living in seclusion in a large stone house overlooking the ocean. The house is called Moon Hill, and conditions there are quite primitive. The windows are broad apertures cut out of the rock with no glass covering them. The air blows in, the rain blows in, the insects and birds blow in, and there is little distinction between indoors and outdoors. He has a private generator for producing electricity, but the machine breaks down often, and half the time they light the rooms with kerosene lamps. There are four people in the household: a handyman-caretaker named Samuel, an old cook, Nancy, and a young cleaning woman, Melinda. There is a telephone and a radio, but no television, no mail delivery, and no running water. Samuel goes to the post office in town to pick up his letters (twelve miles away), and water is stored in wooden tanks above the sinks and toilets. Shower water comes out of a disposable plastic bag that hangs from a hook above your head. The landscape is both lush and barren. Profuse vegetation everywhere (palm trees, rubber plants, a hundred varieties of wildflowers), but the volcanic earth is strewn with rocks and boulders. Land crabs plod through his garden (he describes them as small armored tanks, prehistoric creatures who look as if they belong on the moon), and because of the frequent infestations of mosquitoes, not to mention the constant threat of tarantulas, everyone sleeps in beds covered with protective white netting. He spends his days reading (for the past two months he has been diligently plowing through Montaigne again) and taking notes for a memoir he hopes to begin in the near future. Every evening, he settles into his hammock by the window in the living room and videotapes the sunset. He calls it the most astonishing spectacle on earth.
My letter has overwhelmed him with nostalgia, he says, and he regrets now that he allowed himself to disappear from my life. We were once so close, such good friends, but after he and my mother parted ways, he didn’t feel he had the right to remain in touch. Now that the ice has been broken again, he has every intention of keeping up a correspondence with me—assuming that is something I would want as well.
He is saddened to learn of my husband’s death, saddened to learn of the difficulties I have been having of late. But you’re still young, he adds, still in your early fifties, with much to look forward to, and you mustn’t give up hope.
These are trite and conventional remarks, perhaps, but I sense that he means well, and who am I to scorn well-meant gestures of earnest sympathy? The truth is that I am touched.
Then, a sudden inspiration. Why not pay him a visit? The holidays are approaching, he says, and perhaps a little jaunt to the West Indies would do me some good. There are several spare bedrooms in his house, and putting me up would pose no problem. How happy it would make him to see me again, to spend some time together after so many years. He writes down his telephone number in case I’m interested.
Am I interested? It is difficult to say.
5/12. Information about Quillia is scant. I have already combed the Internet, which has yielded a couple of short, superficial histories and various bits of tourist data. With the latter entries, the writing is atrocious, banal to the point of absurdity: the resplendent sun . . . the glorious beaches . . . the bluest blue water this side of heaven.
I am sitting in the library now, but it turns out that there are no books devoted exclusively to Quillia—only a smattering of references buried in the larger volumes about the region. During pre-Columbian times, the inhabitants were the Cibon
ey Indians, who subsequently left and were supplanted by the Arawaks, who in their turn were followed by the Caribs. When colonization began in the 16th century, the Dutch, the French, and the English all took an interest in the place. There were skirmishes with the Indians, skirmishes among the Europeans, and when black slaves started arriving from Africa, much slaughter ensued. By the 18th century, the island was declared a neutral zone, exploited equally by the French and the English, but after the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris, the French decamped and Quillia fell under the control of the British Empire. In 1979, the island became independent.
It is five miles across. Subsistence farming, fishing, boat-building, and an annual hunt for a single whale. The population is three and a half thousand—mostly of African descent, but also Carib, English, Irish, Scottish, Asian, and Portuguese. One book reports that a large contingent of Scottish sailors was stranded on Quillia in the 18th century. With no possibility of returning home, they settled there and mingled with the blacks. Two centuries later, the result of this interbreeding is a curious mixed race of redheaded Africans, blue-eyed Africans, and albino Africans. As the author notes: The island is a laboratory of human possibilities. It explodes our rigid, preconceived ideas about race—and perhaps even destroys the concept of race itself.
A nice phrase, that. A laboratory of human possibilities.
5/14. A hard day. This afternoon, I realized that it has been exactly four months since my last period. Does this mean it’s finally happened? I keep hoping for the old, familiar cramps, the bloat and irritation, the blood flowing out of me. It isn’t a question of no longer being able to bear children. I never particularly wanted them. Alexandre more or less talked me into it, but we split up before anything ever happened. With Stéphane, children were out of the question.
No, it isn’t about children anymore. I’m too old for that now, even if I wanted to become pregnant. It’s more about losing my place as a woman, of being expelled from the ranks of femininity. For forty years, I was proud to bleed. I bore up under the curse with the happy knowledge that I was sharing an experience with every other woman on the planet. Now I have been cut adrift, neutered. It feels like the beginning of the end. A post-menopausal woman today, an old crone tomorrow, and then the grave. I’m too worn out even to cry.
