by Russ Rymer
I say “we” but that’s not true. My privileges have been granted to only a few women deemed less criminal. And me! The matrons have got it in mind that I am some prize they’ve laid hands on, all because Carmen de Castro was a student in my father’s school and she’s now the director of prisons. So they exempt me from some of the favorite torments. I get more than sardines and biscuits & my mat isn’t straw & I don’t have to assemble for head count each morning and sing “Cara al Sol” & “Viva Cristo Rey,” and they don’t lock me in a cell at night. I sleep with Alena in a room in the rectory. Of course it’s locked, but it’s clean, and on the top floor so it’s bright & not damp & the window opens and I don’t have to look through bars. I have a table!
“So grateful for a table,” I said. The exclamation mark was doubled in the original, per Catalan. Or not Catalan, as Corie had explained to me with evident pride (this being her area of expertise), but a subdialect of Aranese that Alba and Carlos folded into their correspondence, along with a smattering of other regional vocabularies, as their private language.
“Oh, I know,” Corie said, about the gratefulness.
Even flowers, when I rob the garden (Sister Serafina disapproves, but left me a vase to put them in). I pinch the stems with my fingernails. They would never trust a democrat with scissors! The price of my amnesty is only beginning to dawn on me.
“See?” Corie said, returning couch-side with a familiar white regulation-sized envelope familiarly tagged C. Landers and 40, rue Ganivert.
“The first one to come like this,” she said.
I looked at the envelope and then, quizzically, at her, and her exasperation was as instantaneous as an exasperated teacher’s before a balky student. She snatched Alba’s letter from my grasp and shook it in my face.
“Regard!” she commanded. “Aerogram!” and she turned the blue onionskin over to display the addressee, a name I didn’t recognize, Corail Barayón, in Ginebra, Suiza, and then with her other hand she held out the regulation-sized envelope, her forefinger clamped so tightly above the postmark, Genève, Suisse, that the nail was white. “Envelope!” she declared. “She’s using her intermediary, and he takes her letter . . . and puts it”—and she dipped the aerogram in the envelope with ostentatious helpfulness, twice for good measure, so the most abject of imbeciles could grasp the concept—“and relays it on.”
“But she’s already been captured,” I said, abject. “They let her send mail.” It wasn’t one of my most functional mornings.
“It’s for him,” she said, her eyes bulging, “to keep from implicating Carlos.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “Got it.” I could hear from her voice that I clearly understood nothing about love. We returned to the letter.
. . . also a cigarette, every Tuesday. It’s like permission to cut flowers without scissors: a cig but no match (you must ask Serafina for a light). The Mother Superior has a Blaupunkt, & on Friday eve the nuns gather in her rooms to hear the broadcast from Madrid, & they invite me. Alena gets to crawl on a real rug for a while (this is why I go) & teethe on Madre’s spoons while the news fades in & out of atrocities we Republican loyalist traitors committed, all these garroted priests & ravaged nuns. They don’t look at me. I feel them not looking. They take my pulse. Have I absorbed my error? They bring me to Mass. Will I repudiate my heresy and be accepted into the One Apostolic Faith? This is the price: they aim to baptize me! Whoever deemed me important enough to be treated humanely has deemed me human enough to be remade into a Catholic. It would be a nice demonstration for them, but, oh, well, their job is impossible. That I would consent to worship the pope who “lifted up his heart to God” on news of our torturers’ victory! Dead clergy is no news to me. Dead anyone, for that matter. Could I forget the stadium at Badajoz? The Almería road?
And here I relied on Corie’s explanations, of a town’s population herded into a bullfighting arena and massacred, of a hundred thousand civilian refugees fleeing a battle along a coastal road being shelled by ships and strafed by Fascist planes and machine-gunned by Italian troops.
Or, as far as the radio goes, General de Llano’s slobber on Radio Seville, urging the legions of his Column of Death to rape every woman they could. Anyway, if they would strip me of this one last shred of principle, the dignity of nonbelief, they should never have made it my last. With all else lost. A republic, and you, & the thing I have left is my stubbornness, which they will never get from me. And Alena, too, I have my Magdalena, she’s my lovely and she’s enough, she’s all. She’s so very much you! If you could only see her how she thrives, my little bliss! Right now her knees are red from crawling around the patio looking for grass to chew on, the stems sprout up through the concrete, it keeps me busy keeping the grass out of her hands & wiping the sand from her knees. She pulls up a stem and calls it a toy the way her mother plucks daisies and calls them oreja de oso, and she seems to have no idea she’s growing up in a prison, & thank their god for that! And then the thought destroys me that you cannot know her, she who is all that I know.
“She’s had a child,” I said.
“Right!” Corie answered, and then paused so long, staring at me in a sort of spooky suspension, that I worried she was suffering a seizure. “Summer?” she resumed. “Late spring? Anyway, a while ago. It’s been more than a year since she wrote.”
This was the fourth of our morning huddles, and like the earlier three, it thrilled me. This was partly the relief of legitimacy reclaimed—I was entering through the front door, after all. Every time I rang from the street (Corie had labeled the apartment’s doorbell Alba Landers to guide my initial visit) and was buzzed into the building, I felt honorable, felt I’d been given a dispensation for my crash through Landers’s wall. Where the crime’s committed is where the crime’s forgot, as the master said. The remainder of my joy was proximity. I’d encouraged Corie to fly through her written translations (they were, as a consequence, notably inferior in word choice and penmanship to those she’d done for Saxe) so that we could go through the texts together. I wished to discuss each one, I said, to compare the versions sentence by sentence to be sure I was getting everything correct, but that explanation reversed effect and cause, means and ends, for the letters (for me) were mostly an excuse to talk. I’d felt since first meeting her that the girl had something to tell me, a confidential message to relate. Not knowing what the news might be, I hoped I might catch a clue in her voice and gave her voice every opportunity. And so the letters were both pretext and impediment. If I could, I would have tossed aside paper entirely and made her read to me aloud.
“And then there’s this one,” she said, and held up the next scribbled page for us to muddle through.
Emil and I had by then spent more than a week together of outdoor mornings and indoor afternoons, robed and stylishly otherwise, of long walks, and of leisurely dinners in restaurants where we rarely had to order to be served. I hadn’t repeated either my fisticuffs or my folle flight home but let Drôlet drive me back early enough to indulge my other secret infatuation and catch some music through the closet door. My infatuation with the man I comprehended. Lust and luxury required no new vocabulary. But what was it about the child that so intrigued me? I discerned in the accident of our meeting—our multiple meetings; the chance collisions on a street, in a church, in a study—a chain of coincidences so extremely unlikely, I saw no alternative to fate, and that was part of it: Who can turn away from fate? And, too, I was riveted by her multiple natures—angry, haunted, protective, intolerant—a convergence of contradictions I couldn’t have combined in a carboy were I the world’s best chemist.
Superseding all these was another motive, rooted in my profession, for if I’m not the world’s best chemist, I’m yet a pretty good anesthesiologist (and, I want to say, not such a shoddy chemist either, pharmacology being, along with physiology and procedure, among the three Ps that Maasterlich drummed into us). Given my particular trade, I’m drawn to anyone whose vital signs hint of peril.
Ultimately, that’s how I explain it. Corie’s signs screamed trouble. I recognized the blankness in those eyes, and though I didn’t know its root, I knew the realm wherein she traveled, and knew that at its far frontier the precipice awaited, where sleep trips into profundity as suddenly as despair trips into violence.
It’s the anesthesiologist’s creed: in calm lurks danger. We are ever (forgive me; they’re Maasterlich’s words, not mine) alert to the inert. In the operating room, that alertness would have been partly, blessedly technological. I would have had a bank of blinking CRTs and beeping alarms to monitor her every hidden state, EKGs and pulse oximeters to keep me apprised of her condition, and I would have watched those signs like a hawk does a sparrow, the way a lover peers into a lover’s face, with just that sharp a hunger. Here on rue Nin, there was none of that to help me, only her eyes. So I watched her eyes, and listened to her voice, and tried fanatically to figure out where, within Corie’s calm, Corie’s disaster lay.
“More tea?” she said. We declared an entr’acte and headed to the kitchen to heat some water. She’d relocated the electric kettle and the tea bags from the study (Had she tidied up the joint for my inspection? I wondered, and I derived some self-importance out of that). Our kitchen jaunts and my occasional trips to the water closet (it was, may I assure you, no closet) had allowed me my only furtive glances into the interior of the mysterious palais, so I was glad that this time, after the kettle had boiled and we’d poured our libation, we didn’t plod back to our posts, per usual—kitchen to dining room (furnished with a Biedermeier banquet table, its both ends bristling with a silver candelabra) to marble-floored colonnade to study—but diverted to the library. Corie felt at home in the room, obviously, though guiltily so. She’d taken as gospel Saxe’s instruction to inhabit without a trace. She perched on her chair with a wren’s timidity, poised for flight. Getting that deep into the premises was tantalizing for me, and I snatched at the chance to draw her further astray. My artifice was transparent (embarrassingly: I professed an interest in period wall coverings), but it brought the invite I’d hoped for. Corie’s reservations—she was unsure if this was acceptable, though she accepted me as an authority—were in full blooming conflict with temptation. Temptation won by a nose.
I’d wondered if my memory had inflated the size and fineness of the rooms; now I found it hadn’t. If anything, their grandeur had been emphasized by Corie’s habitation here and the address on Alba’s letters; they made the place more actual. This impossible hallucination, this architectural confection, had been and still was somebody’s workaday residence, which rendered it all the more boggling. Cavernous room after cavernous room, I expressed my awe at everything we encountered. We came through the French doors into the conservatory, and, as Corie began effusing on the satin wallpaper, I reeled in sudden dread of the iceberg that lay just ahead. Damned idiot!
Oh, why hadn’t I picked another pretext! Surely she would insist on showing me the hand-painted pastoral and the tempera summer sky that were the pièces de résistance, in wall-covering terms, of the entire flat. And of course we would then stumble on the evidence of recent forced entry. Would she alert the police? Would I then confess that I lived next door and end my infernal ruse? I had wanted so, so much to do exactly that, over recent days, had wanted to confirm our friendship with this central admission of who I actually was, but not right now, and certainly not like this. I hadn’t figured out what context might best help me broach the matter. I was pretty sure trespass and vandalism weren’t ideal ingredients.
We approached the piano, me trying, in defiance of all known optical principles, to cast an eye around the corner. How much devastation had I actually wrought in there? Visions of wholesale wrack and wreckage billowed like cumuli in my overbusy brain, and I made up my mind to stall.
“Oh, look,” I said innocently, nodding to the music on the floor, “someone’s been playing! Is that you?”
Corie stared at the piano as though surprised that it was there, then shook her head, pursed-lipped. “No,” she said.
“You don’t play?”
“Not really.”
I took in her lie and set it beside my own, two candelabra on a table. They reflected each other, functional items of unexpected intricacy. Her denial disappointed me—I had fantasized adding a recital to our regular conversations, had anticipated listening to music unmuted by subterfuge. But her reluctance to play—to even admit that she could—placed in my path a denser obstacle than any closet door. Her insistence on secrecy reaffirmed my own, and on the spot I swore to myself that I wouldn’t reveal my abode, absolutely not. The moment I confessed that I lived within earshot, I would lose Corie’s music to Corie’s shyness forever, the music that had sustained me through so much and that now I saw (I was recalling the pounding finale of the waltz) as another and necessary vital sign requiring my monitoring.
At least our encounter with the Bösendorfer succeeded brilliantly as diversion, for Corie, morosely focused on the instrument, didn’t invite me farther, not at first. Not until I actually took a step back toward the study. Then she called out, “Oh, but you have to see this!”
“We should get back,” I said, trying to sound indisputably foregone.
“One more room!” she replied. “It’s the best.” And she ran on without me, out of the chamber of her guilty secret and into the chamber of mine.
I waited for the horrified scream, the gasp of concern, and when at last I followed her, it was mostly to find out why nothing of the sort had come. She was standing directly under the chandelier, twirling like a dreidel, making the clouds spin. I approached her, my face turned up to feign observation of the handiwork while my lowered eyes scanned the floor and the wall panels for the incriminating mess.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Corie asked, and, still peering skyward, she stepped to the wall and began tracing the room’s circumference with her hand, her fingers ticking off the groins in the wainscoting like a playing card counting bicycle spokes.
“Lovely,” I said, and she caught my vagueness and stopped, stopped precisely where my fear had feared she’d stop.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, and meant it. There, where I knew full well my eruption into this chamber had left its garish evidence, sugar swirls of gypsum dust and jagged splinters yellow as lightning, there was nothing to see, no indication at all. The floor shone so spotless and the transom I had split was so flawlessly intact that I had to guess which of several panels I had burst through. The one before which Corie stood? Or perhaps the one beside it? I had burst through, hadn’t I? Where, though? I was left with two prospects: that I had dreamed the entire adventure, or (far less plausible) someone had come along with glue and wax and carefully scoured away my signature.
I’m not sure which possibility was more alarming to contemplate, but my alarm, such as it was, took the form of giddiness. I was reprieved! Who cared how! “Nothing at all,” I repeated in wonderment, and Corie, faced with such enigmatic gaiety, gave me a big silly smile. It was a smile completely outside her usual stormy nature, a shiny new facet of her character. Here: one more contradiction to mix into the carboy! On impulse, I grabbed her hand and bowed, formally, stretching one leg behind me. If I couldn’t hear her music, I would imagine it for both of us.
“Mademoiselle?” I said, and straightened, and she picked up on my gambit and put a hand on my waist and took a step, and then another, and we waltzed a circle around the gleaming parquet, both of us laughing. We waltzed our way past fields and forests and picked up our pace past a flock of sheep and a flock of windows and began a second circuit of the room, and just as we reached again the entry into the conservatory our cotillon à deux collapsed as abruptly as if the plaster heaven above had fallen in shards around us. My tune—I’d begun humming our accompaniment—tailed off in tatters. She doubled over, clutching at her waist. I debated, startled, between comic and dire—a reciprocal curtsy? a burst appendix?—but my thoughts were severed by a l
ow solid growl, gagging out of her like a tumor being born. With another spasm of contraction, she lurched upright and bolted from the room.
I raced after, slowly enough to be sure not to catch her, unsure what I’d done or ought to do. She halted, panting, inside the study door, and I could tell that her flight from far precincts had only compounded her pain. She’d ricocheted out of her unaccustomed cheer and into torment. Her aspect had darkened like a mire about her. Instead of plunking down in her chair as usual (armchairs called to Corie’s inner skydiver), she stood with her back to me, erect and motionless.
Did I see, or could I only sense, her trembling? I reached a hand and gently pulled a distraught lock of hair from her shoulder. “It’s okay,” I lied, quietly, stroking her hair and lying. “It’s going to be okay.”
Then she turned, and the face that greeted me was in no need of consolation. With a forcible mobilization, she’d fought her way back to composure. I watched her cross the last yard, her defiance cresting in fear before settling back into the gaze. Her nostrils still flared with the exertion, but her voice was steady and empty. “Resume next time?” she asked me. It was not a question. In a flash her shape had shifted from wounded to hostile to impervious, and it was the last, the calm at the tail end of the storm, that chilled me. There was resolve in it, I just couldn’t tell for what.
XIV
BY THE TIME OF our resumption, two days later, her equipoise was immaculately repaired, its luster restored as miraculously as the woodwork in the oval room. All I could know, as I searched for a relic of the crisis, was that harm had sunk into oblivion, and the waters closed above it. We did our usual, amid the ordinary, no mention made.
