The Vexations

by Caitlin Horrocks

  “No,” I say. “I just need to tell you something. When I said I didn’t have children…I’m not used to having the conversation more than once, but if we’re going to—I had a son. He died twelve years ago, back in France. I have a grandson. Do you want to see a picture?”

  He can’t say no, of course. So I show him, and he says good, kind things.

  An old woman’s billfold, cracking open. Sepia, with a scalloped white edge. I don’t know what makes the yellow-brown color rather than the grays; Fortin might have known, or he might not have. No doubt photography has changed mightily since his time. Pierre-Conrad is almost twenty now, strong as an ox. Good lungs, his mother assures me. He’s handsome in the way a man is, no longer a boy, so that I feel strange about having his picture in my wallet, as if I might fancy us sweethearts. He’s in medical school—like his father, like his grandfather—and it’s looking like this war might be over in time for him to be spared it. I feel as though we are all due for a stroke of luck—what’s left of the Lafosse line, anyway. Though if you tell a story seventy years long, a lot of people are bound to die. They aren’t especially unlucky, just mortal. Let a story go on long enough, and everyone dies.

  At dinner, Mr. Valera suggests we switch from the formal to informal “you.” I agree, then point out that we also need to exchange first names.

  “Olga Louise,” I offer. “But I’ve always preferred just Louise.”

  “Felipe.”

  “Really?”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.”

  “I have a piano at home,” he tells me, so shamelessly it’s like an advertising jingle. I’m not for sale, some late-life wife to make his meals for him. If I were I’d charge a steeper price than a piano. But it would be so nice to live in a place with a piano again. Marriages have been made on less.

  With all of France closing around me like a rusty steel trap, I was trying to save my life and was willing to gnaw my own hand off to do it. The only future I could envision was one where I ran as far and fast as I could, lurching forward on whatever limbs I had left. Did I know it would be the last time I’d see Joseph, at the train station? I wondered and then refused to think about it any more, which meant it wouldn’t have to be true until it was. I could have guessed that I’d never have the money to return, but at the time I didn’t want to. My son was planning to be a rich man—he could come to me, or fetch me, or emigrate himself. Conrad and I each proved to be right: a thirteen-year-old doesn’t forget his mother, but he makes a life without her that he will be unwilling or unable to give up on her behalf. This is something I might tell Mrs. Valera, if we ever exchange more than pleasantries. If you have to run, run. If you have to go, go. You can survive it. But he’ll survive it too, in his own way.

  When I follow news of the Allied advance across northern France, I look for the name of the town with the train station. I can’t bear to say it, try not to even think it, which makes reading for it difficult, but I look all the same. I don’t know what I want: for it to be wiped off the face of the earth, or for monuments to be raised. But what kind of monument? The ones I’ve seen are all columns or rearing horses or generals, which would of course be all wrong.

  It would be a stone mother, a stone child. They’re sitting across from each other at a tiny, rickety table. The sculptor would not need to be as talented as one might think, because their faces stayed so still. They were both trying hard to be calm for the sake of the other. There are two white cups. The hot chocolate was terrible, watery and gritty, but I suppose that wouldn’t matter for the carving. There is a small stone valise on the floor under the table.

  On Cannu’s orders, most of Joseph’s possessions had already been shipped to Cherbourg after having been packed up, with my permission, by Conrad and Mathilde. On the train I’d brought a few keepsakes, things that had always been at least as much mine as his, like the book of wallpaper samples he’d once given Madeleine. I wanted Joseph to have them, and I’d imagined that lifting out and describing these items for him might be a way for me to survive the half hour we had together, without my voice dissolving completely. But once we were sitting there, I kept thinking about Erik’s knife and the forsaken look on his face when I didn’t remember it, or at least didn’t remember it in the way he’d hoped I would.

  I thought that Joseph might handle these objects in a similar fashion, filled more with my memories than his own. I did not want to see his face trying for my sake to remember, or feel, more than he really remembered or felt. He seemed much older than he’d been just a few weeks earlier, though he looked the same, and when I tried to place the change I realized it was his polite kindness, his consideration. After all his whining and raging since leaving Bellenau, I’d become a person to him. I’d become someone with feelings—the kind of feelings that might propel a woman to stand screaming in the street—and this was someone different from a mother. I both grieved and marveled at this solemn, sympathetic boy in front of me. This is the person who comes next, I thought. This is the Joseph you won’t get to know.

  In the end we said almost nothing. He stood, and I worried he was going to curtail our meeting for some reason, but then he dragged the little table away from my chair. He was making room to sit in my lap. He didn’t fit, of course, his knees sticking out and his toes scraping the floor. But he managed to tuck his head beneath mine, and I pressed my nose into his hair, which smelled of an unfamiliar soap, and put my arms tight around him. We sat like that until the next trains arrived, whistles shrieking, and we had to rise. I pressed the valise into his hand and told him to open it later, or not at all, if he didn’t wish to.

  Better, then, to imagine the whole place annihilated rather than enshrined. Crush the station, the town, and—why stop there?—the rails all the way north to Cherbourg. I imagine a bomb flattening the stone house with the pharmacy underneath as an elderly Cannu cowers inside. I imagine him shot through the head by the Germans, but then I imagine he’s the sort of person—coward or collaborator—to skulk successfully through an occupation. Then I imagine Albertine shot by the Resistance, or by a British or American soldier who offers some pithy insult in English that she can’t even understand, so that her last earthly thought is confusion: Why is this happening to me?

  These are the biggest events on earth, and I can’t help making them small. This war, and the last one, but—but—me! Always I come back to myself.

  I thought for a long time that this made me small-minded and womanly—that men were superior thinkers because they could hold larger ideas in their heads, hold them in a pure way, without the contamination of petty or private concerns. I’d written a letter to Erik, in fact, in which I described the way Fortin had convinced me that great men could hold a big idea like a jeweler, coldly, with calipers, raising it up to the light. Erik’s reply was the kindest letter he ever sent me.

  But we’re all trying to make something small, he wrote back. It wouldn’t fit in people’s ears, otherwise. Take a look in the mirror—just a tiny little dark space, full of earwax to boot (speaking in a general way—I’m sure your ears are no waxier than the average, and perhaps considerably less). You can hardly expect to jam something enormous inside it. The only way big ideas get inside is by making them small.

  Once I left France I was a ghost to Erik, invisible except for the occasional moan from the rafters. In the twenty years that I was in Buenos Aires while he was alive, he sent me only a handful of letters. I tried not to be hurt. He’d finally gained the work he wanted. He was very busy, becoming the person he’d wanted to be. The last letter he sent me, which I did not know would be the last when I received it, was mostly about his work. He was composing music to accompany the projection of a silent film (the only kind then), which posed a fearsome set of challenges, he explained. One couldn’t anticipate projector speeds, so the whole score had to be constructed out of modular phrases that could be repeated or omitted, the organist or conductor able to speed or slow the s
core to sync with the images. I read the letter waiting to encounter his affront at the prospect of his notes being chopped up and rearranged. But instead I sensed only pleasure: the satisfaction of having been asked to do it, the excitement of the challenge, the joy of the work. He complained about money but did not mention that his lack of it was owing to an unreconciled quarrel with Conrad.

  With the Allied troops closing in on occupied Paris now, I worry sometimes about Conrad before I remember that I don’t have to worry about him anymore. He’s gone now too, taken six years after Joseph. I had already guessed, from how many letters in a row went unanswered, before I knew for sure. He never remarried, and it took Nancey some time to let me know. I wouldn’t have heard about it in any other way. Perhaps there are chemistry trade journals or alumni bulletins that might have carried a mention? I don’t know. I don’t know what became of the cat he adopted and wrote fondly of, or whether he ever finished the book he often mentioned to me: a new encyclopedia of perfumes that occupied him after he retired. The early retirement came as a surprise, and I got the feeling that it had not been entirely voluntary, although he continued to mention M. Jeancard without bitterness.

  I did not wish to pry, but I wondered, selfishly, what might become of his remittances. Without steady earnings, did he have enough for both of us? Or maybe he had far more squirreled away than I guessed, and now that he was no longer working he would ask me to come back to France and keep him company, or decide himself to retire in Argentina. Daydreams, but I tested them out in my mind, wondering what I’d say if he ever suggested either. I realized that I liked the life I’d made, that I was proud of myself for making it, even though I’d had his help, and that Buenos Aires had become much more familiar to me than France would ever feel again. In any case he made no dramatic suggestions, and in time I understood that he could not have, as the sums he sent grew smaller and smaller, until, shortly before his death, they stopped.

  Whenever I die, there will likewise be no easy way for anyone in France to know. There will be only my silence. My death will not be news, and I mean this both because I am old and will presumably be dead in some thoroughly ordinary way, and because I will have done nothing extraordinary.

  Felipe calls me Luisa. It took seventy-six years, but I’ve one-upped Erik. My brother changed a single letter. I’ve changed languages. Though I am called nearly the same in both.

  Felipe always pays for our dates, which in the abstract are not extravagant—films, meals, walks in Palermo Park with stops to rest, since neither of us walks as far at a stretch as we used to. But compared with my previous routine our courtship feels dangerously luxurious. Since Conrad’s death I have accustomed myself to exactly what I can afford, and no more. But now there are breaks from the monotony of the boardinghouse food, and theater tickets again—good seats, not stuck behind a pillar or squinting from the second balcony. I enjoy myself, but I’m afraid of what will happen if my daily life starts to look too straitened. Not afraid of Felipe losing interest, but of myself coming to want something that might, like so much else in my life, be taken away.

  Felipe gifts me a piece of imported cheese, which he does not suggest we share, as if he guesses I want to take it to my room and savor every scrap of it myself until I have licked my scratched white plate clean. I start to think that perhaps he’s getting to know me too well, but then he gives me an ashtray printed with music notes along the gold-painted rim, and I think he does not know me at all. Then he gives me a monthly bus pass, and I think, Well, maybe. Maybe there’s hope.

  For years I looked for Osprey, old Uncle Osprey, my father’s weird brother, around every corner. He’d emigrated years before me and deliberately disappeared; beyond “America,” no one in the family knew where he’d gone, or even whether “America” meant north or south. But when I stepped off the boat in Buenos Aires, he was the only person I knew on this entire side of the ocean. I didn’t really expect to stumble across him, of course, but I wondered, and I planned what we might say to each other. “We’re the black sheep,” I could announce. “Every generation has one. You probably thought it was Erik, but look where I’ve ended up!” We’d have a meal together, and it would be so much fun, remembering old times, but at some point I’d have to dump my drink on his head for abandoning his wife and daughters. Little Louise, keeper of all the old crimes.

  I looked for him more infrequently as the years passed, needing an old familiar face less once the newer ones had become familiar to me. I moved boardinghouses several times in those first years, sometimes for better food or a better room, and sometimes because I was becoming someone more at ease in my own life and I didn’t want to live alongside the same people who’d known me as a wraith with no Spanish, afraid of her own shadow, constantly confused by the bus schedule. Wherever Osprey ended up, he’d be a hundred this year, so it seems safe to assume he’s dead. One more ghost.

  My ghost family is now much larger than my living one. I imagine myself moving through and beyond them, the gathered generations, a little like walking through a closet of fur coats. They brush my cheeks, my arms, they gather round, gather me up. They are soft and heavy, with a smell of something that was once animal and alive, but isn’t any longer. Don’t tell the priest. I’m sure the notion of souls like fur coats isn’t in any encyclical.

  But one morning I put on my nicest dress. I go to one of the handful of smart department stores or boutiques here that sell fur coats. It doesn’t usually get cold enough for anyone to want one, but I ask them to assemble a rack for me. (I can do this only once in a very great while, or a clerk will escort me out. Kindly, but firmly. We think you do not really want a coat today, señora. Perhaps we can interest you in something else. Perhaps this is not a good day for shopping.) I hold my arm up, palm out, and walk along the rack. I should have invited Mrs. Valera, and Oskar’s mother. It’s silly, but this feels like something I could finally offer them, something more pleasant than words of wisdom or encouraging exhortations. One by one I put the coats on, feel their sleek weight across my bent shoulders, take them off. There has been no one in this country who touches me, although there is someone now who might want to. I press my cheek to the fur. Hello, ghosts. You are so, so soft.

  Felipe invites me to his apartment. To play the piano, he says. He’s extended the invitation several times, and I’ve always invented some excuse. But eventually I decide that whether or not “playing the piano” is meant as a euphemism or pretext for something else, I am willing to find out what the something else might be.

  On a Sunday afternoon, the weather bright and chilly, I try to decide what music to bring. No Leybach, both because it means too much to me and because it’s too nakedly romantic. In trying to conjure the opposite of the Leybach, I think of Erik’s “Cold Pieces.” They’re opposite only in name, though. They’re slim ladies in gloves and scarves and interesting hats, not snowmen with stone eyes. But it would feel strange to play them either way, whether mentioning or omitting that I know the composer. That I am, or was, related to the composer. I end up grabbing a book of Mozart’s sonatas—not difficult and not at all amorous.

  The apartment is small and cluttered, but the clutter is orderly and clean. No foul bachelor’s den. Whatever he wants a woman for, he’s managing the cleaning on his own. I thought Felipe might only have been offering me the use of the piano, and that he would putter around while I played, doing whatever he normally does on a Sunday afternoon. But he sits and listens attentively. His voice-teacher wife trained him well.

  “If I’d known I was giving a concert,” I say, “I would have brought more music. Let you choose.”

  Then he sits beside me on the piano bench and asks me to marry him. The question hangs glowing in the air. Both because of what the question is and because it’s a real question. It’s a choice I get to make. I can say yes or no, or anything in between. There’s no Scylla and no Charybdis, just two plausible options, laid at my feet. When else have I ever truly gotten to make such a d
ecision? Even when I said yes to Pierre, eagerly and wholeheartedly, I knew that Fortin was listening in the next room, awaiting the one answer he considered acceptable. Now no one, except Felipe, is listening.

  “May I say maybe?” I ask.

  “I’ll be hoping it turns into a yes, but certainly—if you aren’t ready, I’d rather you say maybe than no.”

  “Then the answer is maybe. Please don’t be hurt, just patient.” For now, there is nothing that could feel more delicious than the choice itself.

  I’ve been teaching at the French Institute for over thirty years but suddenly some paperwork is lost, or someone notices it was never filed. I am asked for my work permit, passport, an ancient visa application, both married and maiden names listed.

  “Like the composer,” the secretary says.

  Is she Erik’s single fan in Buenos Aires? Or one of thousands? I have no idea.

  “He was my brother,” I say, and the secretary’s eyes nearly fall out of her head. She runs around the administrative office, then up and down the hallway into the classrooms: how have they been working all this time with someone born alongside greatness, and never known?

  “Greatness?” I say, not disagreeing, but curious. Is that the consensus?

  “Are you musical too?” asks the instructional coordinator, who has come out of his office to see what the commotion is. When I mention that I teach piano lessons, the coordinator expresses dismay that the Institute has only ever had me in the language classroom. Would I be willing to teach a course on Erik’s music? he asks.

  “I’d have to figure out what to say.” The look on his face tells me that this is the wrong answer, and I revise: “Yes. I’d love to. I’d be honored.”

  He asks me if I have any pictures of the two of us together. Something they can use to market the course. Or even something candid of him, something people won’t have already seen?