by Russ Rymer
With all the things Emil and I said to each other and all that we did on our trip that day, with all the happiness it gave my heart, why is it that when I think of it now, the phrase that comes quickest to mind is blood and snow? Because that’s how the evening ended? It was well into tomorrow when our little excursion got back home to Paris. Our return trip was slowed by another turn in the weather, which hit us before we made it out of Reims, hit us, in fact, before we could even get into the car.
It was pouring when we burst from the door of Le Chemin Vert. We huddled resolutely under our umbrella and raced down the street as though evading a fusillade of rifle fire, Emil’s urging arm around my shoulder, the rain pounding mercilessly. And then, halfway down the block, silence, complete and instantaneous. The last raindrop thrummed into the pavement with a snare-drum finality as though someone had twisted the tap and throttled the storm.
The air around us stood erect and glistening and mysterious and empty: anticipating. The wet, washed façades of the square’s old buildings, the washed giant ribs of the cathedral, the scrubbed glass domes of the streetlamps dripping slowly onto the wet curbs. Regardez! they instructed, and when we looked up—Emil had dipped his umbrella in his astonishment and was scowling at it accusingly—we saw it coming, a high, lace counterpane of snowflakes drifting down so, so slowly, billowing so motionlessly it seemed to suspend in the air forever before the first flakes reached our faces and mobbed us at last with their embrace.
I’ve never known as exact, or as thorough, or as instant a benediction as that snow. A mere degree had shifted, the sky had slipped a fraction of a Celsius degree and thrown the world from yin to yang, and every threat, dread, inclemency, and darkness was dispelled by the gentlest, most cold and weightless white. We headed back to Paris down a country highway brighter by far than the same one we’d traveled at noon.
The next morning, the snow was my evidence that the night before had happened, and I sped to the window of Emil’s bedroom and pulled the drape aside as though the miracle in my imagining could be made real only if corroborated by the other on the ground. How relieved I was to see its accumulation! And how frigid it would be an hour and a half later when we stepped out to make our way through it.
I wouldn’t have stepped at all, would have remained quite contentedly beside the red embers in Emil’s fireplace, if I weren’t drawn by a mission, sparked by the thing that Emil had been meaning to tell me. We were almost done with a late-morning breakfast of day-old croissants and marmalade and espresso set out not in the Sahran family dining room by the Sahran family housekeeper, who was off on account of the weather, but prepared by our helpless selves and consumed beside our self-assembled fire. Emil jumped up and ran off somewhere and I thought he was after more tinder. He came back with a large manila envelope that he dropped into my lap. “I keep forgetting to give you this. I ran down a couple things,” he said. “About your Saxe and Landers chaps.”
I sprang the metal tabs and extracted the contents, which weren’t much, some pages from a dot-matrix computer printer—Bureau of Vital Statistics stuff—and photocopies of several newspaper clippings, evidently, from the tatters and the typeface, very old ones. I went for the obvious first, that being the one with a photograph. It was an article from the paper Ce Soir. “Gala to Celebrate Election Victories in Spain,” the headline stated, and after a dateline in March of 1936, the story commenced about a “dance and dinner reception to be held by the Iberian Daughters of Marianne and Communards d’Espagne” to commemorate Spain’s newly elected government “hosted by the distinguished Carlos Perigord Landers, temporary honorary Spanish consul to the Élysée Palace, at Landers’s gracious home in the Seventh Arrond.” The consul, it was explained, was a dual citizen of France and Spain, son of an Aranese nobleman and a French heiress who had returned to Madrid last month to confer with members of the incoming administration. “Spain is unified in joy behind the prospect of a new era,” he told Ce Soir, “when workers and peasants will at last lead their beloved country into the front rank of modern democracies.”
It went on full of transformative zeals and halcyon expectancies. The halftone photograph above all this was grainy but distinct and exhibited the figures of a man and woman standing amid a crowd at some public ceremony, seemingly (judging from the looks on their faces) unified in joy. Might the woman be his wife? Though I hadn’t pictured Alba quite like this, a square figure draped in daunting black. Her contours suggested a cubist rendition of heroic womanhood, while the man beside her seemed an impressionistic tribute to fin-de-siècle aristocracy, dapper in a double-breasted suit and bow tie and fedora, round-rimmed tortoiseshell spectacles perched on an aquiline nose, the two of them laughing fondly together as a clutch of well-wishers gathers around. Then I read the caption and recalled the woman from my history book, a prominent Communist leader of the Republicans. The caption read, “Consul Landers with La Pasionaria in Barcelona Last spring.” I stared at them awhile; the photo called up some distant muddling association that I couldn’t quite manage to place, and so I quit trying.
That was the longest of the articles. The shortest was from another paper and whatever ballad the gala piece had crooned, this one spat its data in starkest semaphore. It was a single short paragraph long. Its opening sentence, which was not at all a sentence, was all that served for a headline: “Landers, Carlos P., b. Val d’Aran, 1903, philanthropist and statesman, Monday, at his home in Paris.” It went on to mention schools, degrees, and titles, while omitting, along with headline and photo and the Daughters of Marianne, any mention of cause of death.
“It’s clearer here,” Emil said as I set the obituary aside. He pointed to a line in one of the printouts.
“My Lord,” I said. “Do you know how?”
“My guess would be violently,” he said.
I inquired with an eyebrow.
“He’s an old-world aristocrat,” Sahran said, “and aristocrats didn’t die of poison if they could help it. Or pills. They preferred to duel with death, not cheat him. And consider the times.”
I had, indeed, already considered the times. The obit was dated 1942, not quite six years since the soirée diplomatique in Landers’s home. I kept to myself my mental image of a set of extraordinary seventh-arrondissement rooms as gracious now as they must have been when they hosted an A-list of Parisian high society on a gay night fifty-five years ago, or as they’d been almost forty-nine years ago, when their resident took his life.
My thoughts swirled upsettingly around this enigma—not for the first time I felt the susurration of a malevolent conspiracy of ghosts—and I said to Sahran, as I rifled quickly through the several sheets to be sure, “Is this all? Didn’t you say you’d found the other name?”
He shook his head, apologetic. “Mysterious guy,” he said. “There was a legal notice regarding an estate, and this.” And he pointed to the picture of La Pasionaria and the long-deceased honorary consul in Barcelona. In minuscule Helvetica in the margin beside the halftone was the “taken by” attribution for the photographer: B. M. Saxe.
I left the house on Île Saint-Louis soon after. Not expelled by any discomfort; just wanting to be elsewhere. For reasons I would comprehend only later, I was pulled quite strongly to another and particular spot. I asked Emil to drop me off at Portbou.
He’d kissed me goodbye and fishtailed off homeward before I realized my error, for the café’s window was dark and the door was locked. I cursed Passim’s fecklessness—such cowards, these Parisians! In the face of such an increment of snow! And then I realized it was Sunday and that he wouldn’t have been open were it daffodil time in the tropics. I sloughed off slushward toward my room.
As I made my way, another place where I might find companionship occurred to me, and I headed for rue Nin. The snow was still falling, but hardly; a few drifting crystals, that was all, the last pretty dwindlings of an uncertain storm. The sky remained gray; the air was crisp. I reached the Wisteria and pressed the button, and the
very next moment, or so I thought, I went to press it once again and then realized I had no idea how many moments had passed. My thoughts had fallen into a crevasse and had been arduously climbing their way back out, and how long I’d stood there waiting for them to resurface and waiting for an answering buzz, I couldn’t say. I pressed the button again.
How suddenly our fortunes change! The whistler, the imbecile soldier at the bar last night . . . or maybe the whistler hadn’t been a soldier when his adventure occurred, I couldn’t be sure. His friend was—his friend told us later of serving in the Indochine and fighting at Dien Bien Phu—but the whistler’s tale had transpired during an earlier generation of conflict, he may not even have been a man in ’forty-whatever, may have been only an adolescent, a civilian prisoner, perhaps. Emil and I fell silent when he interrupted. Then he placed his finger, the same long finger that had tapped against the scar on my hand, to a scar on the side of his neck, and exactly as though he’d pressed a button, his eyes snapped wide and his story commenced.
He mimed the posture of a man aiming a rifle. Then—snap—he showed me his hands, wrists pressed together as though bound, and then put them behind him and started to run in place, running and grunting and running and running, there by the bar with his hands bound behind him and his wide eyes on mine, and he stumbled forward onto the dance floor and let out a whistle from distended lips and pointed to his side with his finger—See, it hit me here—and then ran some more, stumbling but not far. This time the bullet that reached him knocked him bolt upright, stiff as a steeple until his knees buckled, and his terrified mute’s howl keened like a dog’s, and he placed his finger on the scar on his neck again and gave me the dolorous eye.
So that’s what had happened, some morning, afternoon, most of a life ago, to the man in Le Chemin Vert, in a field or a forest or on a road maybe not very far from here, and his whole long existence was suspended from that moment like the canvas of a tent from a tent pole, like a tablecloth lifted with a pinch. For better or worse, his moment had come early; soldier or not, he could hardly have been much older than a boy, and the question that it posed he’d had a lifetime to ask, of himself and of everyone he met, reenacting the seconds over and over for any stranger who came through the door on any rainy winter night who might know the answer at last, who might be the one to tell him what it all had meant. His friend studied the boards of the floor throughout this demonstration, absently, patiently, there was love in that, I thought, and no one else along the bar paid any mind whatsoever, theirs was indifference of a different sort, less personal, more communal, but I could see how that was their way of loving him too. With the passion play concluded, the two old buddies went back to their beers amid their oblivious friends.
Twenty minutes later, the eyes snapped wide with horror and surprise, and, as urgently as before, the whistler stepped over and tapped me again on the hand.
Poor whistler; poor Landers. Poor lucky Landers, his moment had waited till the very end; his question was answered before it could even be expressed. The consul’s fall seemed nevertheless spectacular. Its suddenness gave me vertigo. Not because of the disparity on display in the newspaper clippings, between party impresario and posthumous pariah—six years is plenty of time to wear out even the noblest welcome. He just didn’t bear the mark of such decline. I’d had a healthy glimpse of the injuries besetting him in 1938 and ’39 and ’40; they were documented in Alba’s letters. Yet her every dire letter gave cause for hope. That Carlos had been ground down seemed implausible. That he’d been struck down struck me as much more likely. But what had been the blow? In what precise moment had despair set its lever?
Again I got no answer from the impassive intercom—Mistress Corie must be out sledding—and I trundled my solitude back around the block, musing on the rooms I wouldn’t get to visit today. I was more than half glad about that, to tell the truth, and not because I might otherwise transgress my promise to Emil—oh, but my promise hadn’t even occurred to me! It was the rooms. I wasn’t sure I could confront them. They were where the suddenness of Landers’s death showed up. The disparity between his fortunes and his fortune (he was still so damnably well off when despair got its claws into him) was evidence of a calamity as sudden as the whistler’s rifle shot.
He was well off even today, albeit quite thoroughly deceased, and what sort of karmic affront was that, to be outlived by one’s dwellings? As though his possessions hadn’t needed his presence at all. As though moth and rust had forgone his earthly treasures to corrupt his heaven instead. Not to mention that at least one of these rooms that survived him had been spectator to his demise. And exactly which room was it? I wondered, with a shiver of nausea. And what faint signs of his final act had not been cleaned away? For wouldn’t you think a trace of such a history would remain? And whose hand had done the actual cleaning? Alba’s, possibly? Released with her daughter from a Majorca prison just in time to bury a husband and father, to sponge his gore out of the carpet and his mayhem off the wall? Or could it have been someone else, the same phantom hand that had tidied up after me?
These patient, traitorous, abiding rooms . . . they awaited a restoration I would sincerely have liked to abet, had I known how. As if I could reformulate the man through the lost-wax method, pour molten bronze into the vacancy left by his life—the empty rooms, the half a correspondence—and see what shape resulted when I broke the mold.
Then mostly, of a sudden, I simply wanted to escape, escape my thoughts and the specter of this petty gentry I’d never met and had no reason to care about, and I was incalculably glad to climb the stairs and turn the key and find myself back in my plain and meager digs. I dropped my purse on the divan and gave a quiet inner boo-hoo of gratitude at being alone again, away from all of it, from glamorous Sahran and nettlesome Corie and all thoughts of Landers and his grisly fate, and I was glad I had a closet door (even one held shut with a shoe) between myself and his gilt-trimmed abattoir.
The ultimate test of my alienation from Wisterian mysteries was the envelope awaiting me on the little table. I’d dropped it there the day before yesterday—it held a couple of Corie’s translations that we hadn’t had time to go through and which I’d planned to read today. Now I shunned it. Whatever its contents, it wouldn’t contain the sound of Corie’s voice, but that wasn’t my only reservation. I’d had my fill of envelopes, is all. I laid myself down to read a book instead, and then didn’t even do that.
Dearest Beloved C.
My resolve had persisted, to my extraordinary credit, I think, most of a late afternoon, but then I caved with a vengeance. It occurred to me that right there on my little yellow table by my little pink elbow might reside a crucial clue to Carlos Landers’s story, and at some time approaching cocktail hour (sans cocktail, unhappily: I wouldn’t be seeing Emil again until his house party, several nights hence) I tore into the envelope like a prosecutor into a material witness.
Oh, what misery my great good fortune’s brought! I am reeling, and cannot write you about those things I said I would, I’m shaken. This morning Pilar comes to me on the patio. She brings news. She’s been talking with the other women and already knows, after so brief a time here, what I had not figured out. Again the subject concerns my privileges, the comforts allowed me for Alena’s sake, for her! Of course for her. I was angry that the others couldn’t understand. And now Pilar tells me that the exact thing which I would most fiercely defend and which makes defensible my special status is the very one that other women here have already defended and lost, their children. Last year, before I came, the government ordered all children removed from the prison. A few were claimed by families. The others were taken by the Sisters and sent to the mainland to the Auxilio Social to be adopted and raised correctly (i.e., Catholic) by proper (Fascist) parents. Imagine the monstrosity! Oh, I have cried! Not just for them. I have bruised my hand trying to batter my fear. How many has this happened to? Pilar doesn’t know. The children born here, the mothers never see. Others
it seems were older when they were stolen, and no wonder I am looked on with hatred. My precious one doesn’t justify my privilege—no, she is, of my privileges, the most unjustifiable, the most unfair. How do I shield her? I always knew Alena would strengthen me. With her beside me I could fight them on anything. Now she is made their pawn and hostage. When they come to ask me, how do I resist, knowing what they are capable of? Privilege here is granted only so that it might be taken away. So it is with the mail. So it is with packages. If you don’t go to Mass, they tear up your letters right in front of you. How will they use her? What will they do when she’s no longer useful, on that day when either I submit to their wish or they give up on their wishing? The life in the balance isn’t mine.
The letter ended there, at page bottom and without a farewell, and the next letter was missing its greeting. Some mishap had corrupted its beginning, so that matters resumed in midthought, though Alba’s thoughts here were far more contemplative and calm—bemused, even. After the agony I’d just witnessed, I found her sudden complacency disconcerting, until I realized the pages were merely out of order and surmised that the letter I’d just picked up had preceded the one I’d just read.
