Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Daniel had realized that the inner wall was a series of steps, the internal dome built like a rough hive. The wall was climbable. He asked the other man to turn off his flashlight and switched off his own. At first the space was black, the darkness a heavy gas that seeped into them at the eyes. Then Daniel saw a smear of light above him. He turned his flashlight back on and began to climb the stepped inner wall, squeezing between timbers. As he got higher up the curve, the gap between the two domes narrowed, for of course the walls were designed to incline together for support. The man below called up to Daniel, “Come back, Father. It can’t be safe!” Daniel waved to show he was all right and went on out of the man’s sight. At the end Daniel was slithering, pushing himself up the now shallow slope with his hands and soles against either wall. There were no timbers to impede him now; the walls were tied together by bolts, the gilded studs of which showed on the cupola in the church interior as a crude constellation. Daniel was nearly at the top of the arch, within sight of the rotunda that pierced the apex of the dome and tied it all together. The rotunda had windows giving onto the inside of the church, Daniel recalled. Only an hour before he’d been watching a condensation of breath materialize in their light.

  Daniel reached the rotunda. Through the few centimeters of free space under his chin Daniel saw that he was above the lower set of windows, those visible from the church, and that the inner wall ended against the rotunda, which these windows pierced. Above these windows, at a ninety-degree angle, was another set, between the top of the rotunda and the outer dome, through which the sun shone, dazzling and distorted through thick, flawed old glass. Daniel forced himself up another few feet and into the space between the two sets of windows. He examined them. He looked down and saw, below, the tiled floor of the central nave and the ends of pews. He looked up and saw that the lead had been picked away from three sides of one exterior window and only pushed back in places so that the glass was held like a gem in claw clasps. The heavy glass shivered in the wind. Daniel spotted a wad of cloth dropped into a gap beside one of the lower windows. Fawn and white cloth. He lay on his stomach and stretched for it, caught it with two fingers, and lifted it into the light.

  It was dusty and faded but recognizable as the white cowl and fawn veil worn by sisters of the Order of the Daughters of Grace.

  Daniel had taken this latest revelation into his final interview with Antonio Vail. He told Vail how it seemed to him. The theft of Martine Raimondi’s body was bizarre, and its replacement with her executioner’s was an absurdly dangerous and strenuous task—so covert an act it could be said to have originated at a level below secrecy. “There’s too much poetry in its justice.”

  Vail laughed at Daniel and called him “Father Jesuit.” So Father Jesuit imagined there was a realm below secrecy?

  Chapter 7

  DAYLIGHT

  Eve was parked on a narrow street in Nice, facing the Rue d’Angleterre. She could see there was still a line to the club whose entrance was just around the corner. She’d allowed herself to close her eyes once and had gone to sleep. When she woke, disoriented and unable to judge the duration of her nap, she was reassured to see that the line was only a little smaller than when she’d last looked.

  It was nearly two when Eve saw the couple appear from behind the line. As they appeared, the line shuffled forward and two more bodies were admitted into the club, which was observing fire safety rules and counting heads, not imposing a dress code on its clients. It wasn’t that kind of club. The couple, a man and woman, stepped off the curb. He turned his ankle and the woman caught him. He was dizzy drunk but not otherwise inebriated, Eve thought. She understood the woman’s preferences—knew that she liked clubs where people drank and those with “encounter spaces,” low-lit rooms with padded benches and toys. The woman didn’t like big dance parties where people took the kind of drugs that made them stay on the dance floor and pour sweat. She didn’t like to be surrounded by the ecstatic—it was unflattering, she said; their attention was superficial, skipping like flat stones tossed glancingly at smooth water. The woman preferred the muddled malleability of drunks or the mesmerized seriousness of the stoned. She was, she’d say, old-fashioned.

  The couple crossed the street. The man had one arm around the woman, but she steadied him as they went, heads together, into the narrow Rue Victor Juge and out of sight.

  Eve waited only ten minutes.

  The woman reappeared, bounded across the intersection, her high-heeled sandals in one hand and swinging by their straps. She came to the driver’s door and opened it for Eve. They swapped places.

  Eve’s sister reeked of pastis. She put a small bundle of banknotes into Eve’s lap and started the engine.

  “You robbed him?” Eve said.

  “He’d expect me to rob him,” said Dawn, practical.

  Eve Moskelute’s English translation of the Marquis Guy de Chambord’s romance, Daylight, was published in 1969. Eve was in London for its publication. The book had caused a small stir in France, where it appeared the year before, also in translation, for the marquis had written it in Provençal. The text itself was of considerable interest. The marquis was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan man, who in his fifty-something years traveled as far west as Dublin, north and east as Riga, and south as Syria. He wrote poetry in French but chose to write his one work of fiction in the local “dialect”—although in a letter to a friend he claimed that its “legitimate inspiration” was a German text, Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther.

  In her introduction, Eve argued that the heroine of the romance, Grazide, was represented as speaking an aristocratic version of the peasant tongue. She was like Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio; her Provençal had an antique nobility.

  “Grazide tells the hero that matters of the heart cannot be communicated in a language that is strange to the land,” Eve told an interviewer in London. “I realize that it is difficult to ask modern English-language readers to take on faith what this twice-translated text has to say about language and authenticity. In France Lumière du Jour is published with its verses in Provençal and French, the two versions on facing pages, so that scholars can make a comparison.” Eve said, “The thing that Chambord does so well—and we must remember that his is a minor work; it isn’t Rousseau or Goethe or Kleist—is create a heroine whose sensibilities are utterly foreign to the hero. Strange and transporting—so that gradually in the course of the story the hero finds that his beloved’s appetites and values have completely replaced his own. As this happens, the hero moves fully into a world that, since childhood, he’s only inhabited, not lived in. Grazide both seduces and converts him, so he feels that his ancient, unhealthy provincial home—Avignon—has become a kind of paradise, a paradise of the senses. So much of this depends on the heroine’s fluency in Provençal. Chambord gives Grazide his best lines. His choice of Provençal is clearly intended to be an homage to his heroine. Scholars have so far failed to identify a historical figure with Chambord’s Grazide, but I am sure that Grazide is a portrait of someone the marquis knew and loved.

  “The book,” Eve said, “was clearly as influenced by Rousseau as it was by Goethe. It takes pains to create an alternative reality where family fealty and citizenship are illusory—false laws. The book advocates instinctive feeling; its ideal life is alert and sensual but also infantile and self-gratifying. Unlike in Rousseau, however, there is little discussion of social organizations. The work has nothing to say about the monarchy, or the Church. It is interested in being alive, not being human; in consciousness, not moral agency.”

  Eve wasn’t particularly surprised by the attention both her biography and her translation received in France. The success was a matter of timing, she believed—of fashion. It was an intriguing work, but it had been around for some time. Her translation had the luck to coincide with the aftermath of ’68 in Paris and America’s Summer of Love. The Marquis de Chambord was something of a libertine, Daylight a romance with a touch of the infernal. Daylight was
also fashionable in its ambiguities. For instance, the heroine’s manservant, an enameler’s journeyman whom Grazide lures away from his trade and day job with public promises of patronage and private promises of pleasure, was, in the book, less a rival to the hero than a figure the hero both hates and covets. The hero is equally happy to pay the manservant to leave Grazide and work for him or to pay him to go away altogether. In the romance it is the journeyman who inspires the heroine’s more sinister sensuality. At one point Grazide assures the hero that he is her love, while the journeyman is only her larder. She tells the hero that she treasures the journeyman for his vigor and the hero for his finesse; the journeyman for his brawn, the hero for his imagination; the journeyman for his brute ignorance, the hero for his erudition.

  “A fascinating triangular relationship,” said Eve in interviews.

  It was when Eve was on her promotional tour that her twin sister died.

  Dawn Moskelute was living in a commune on a farm near St. Agnes. Every few days Dawn took the bus from the village down to Menton to check on their apartment, the apartment the twins’ Russian grandfather had bought in 1919 and had left to his daughter-in-law, their mother.

  Eve and her sister were close despite their different lives. They saw each other frequently, usually spending one or two days of every week together—often doing a little work on the interior of the apartment, unimproved since the thirties, when the family last had any money. Dawn had been down more often while Eve was away. She had been collecting Eve’s mail.

  The day Dawn died she had just come back up to St. Agnes from the coast. She’d taken the bus up the road with its hairpin bends. She was expected—a friend from the commune was in the village, waiting in a café in the lowest piazza, near the place where all heavy traffic stopped and turned. The friend saw Dawn’s bus arrive and its passengers disembark. Dawn was the last off. She remained by the wall on the far side of the road while the bus turned to park facing downhill and its driver got out to amble up to the village and have his mid-morning coffee and marc. The friend saw that Dawn was draped across the wall, catching her breath, perhaps queasy from the trip up the twisting road. After a time she straightened and turned. Her friend stood and waved to her.

  There was a truck near the bus stop. Its driver had finished his deliveries and had waited for the bus to get out of his way; he was leaning out the open door of his cab, his foot on the running board, preparing to reverse. He was looking where he was going. Perhaps Dawn saw her friend waving to her—but her friend believed she saw nothing. She seemed dazed, faint, disoriented. She started across the road—and walked right into the path of the backing truck. She was only two feet from its flatbed as she stepped in its path. The truck driver saw her and moved his foot to the brake. But his foot slipped, and the truck stalled. And as it stalled it lurched and struck Dawn. A bolt that closed the back gate of the truck’s bed hit her hard a few inches under her ear, breaking her neck. When her friend reached her, seconds later, he found a pulse, but in the next half hour, while they waited for an ambulance, her heart stopped.

  Eve was called and came home.

  Together she and the commune arranged Dawn’s funeral. Eve did allow a blood test—which showed only the tiniest amount of alcohol. “She was always moderate,” Dawn’s friend said. An initial examination also found a bandage on Dawn’s right wrist and a short, deep cut beneath the bandage. This was a shock—the twins had been together only two weeks back and Dawn had seemed perfectly happy. Her friends agreed with Eve, then said, “Dawn was fine, as far as we knew.”

  Eve told the coroner that the cut could have been an accident—it was on Dawn’s right wrist and she was right-handed. “Surely accidental?” Eve said. “We were doing some carpentry.”

  The friend said that when he’d phoned from the village the night before to fix a time to pick her up Dawn had seemed quite normal. “She was tired, she said. A little off-color. Perhaps coming down with something. Perhaps a little sick from the paint fumes.” (Dawn had been painting a wardrobe. Eve found the wardrobe, finished but still surrounded by paint-spattered newspaper.) “It might have been an infection, or fumes, or car sickness, or drowsiness, or simply inattention—how will we ever know?” Dawn’s friend said.

  Eve wouldn’t allow a full autopsy, and Dawn was interred in a shroud, in keeping with the commune’s beliefs. Dawn was laid in one of the big lead-lined stone sarcophagi in the Moskelute family mausoleum in the old cemetery at Menton—the most impressive real estate the Moskelute family had left to them. The mausoleum was a marble building with an onion-shaped dome covered in faded ceramic tiles. Dawn’s friends from the commune carried her temporary hardboard coffin from the hearse at the gates and up to the top terrace. Eve unlocked the tomb’s bronze door, and the mourners opened the twins’ grandmother’s grave. It took ten people to raise the lid and carry it two feet to rest on another sarcophagus. They lifted Dawn out of her coffin and slipped her into the tomb on her side and curled around her grandmother’s slight, dry skeleton. Then they replaced the marble lid.

  Eve shone her torch around the tomb, at the memorials. The oldest were in Cyrillic script, which she couldn’t read. She noticed the corner where the floor was broken by cypress roots, and the long crack in the wall above it. Eve didn’t like to leave her sister in the dark. She remembered how distressed they had been when their mother finally died—confused, exhausted, unwilling—in a ward of the Hospital St. Roch. The twins had confided to each other that for months whenever they went within sight of the hospital they would be seized by an impulse to go in and find the mother they felt they had forgotten and left behind. The hospital was the last place they had seen her alive, so they felt they might still be able to find her there, waiting for them to come.

  Eve had last seen Dawn when they’d had a scratch dinner together after finishing laying a timber floor over the tiles in one bedroom. They’d sat at their table on the terrace, while in the room behind them the displaced bedroom furniture loomed like a forest. There was light on the sea still, and warmth radiated from the concrete face of the apartment building. When it was dark Dawn had plugged in the outdoor lamp for the first time that summer, and its light shone softly, diffused through an accretion of dusty spiderweb.

  Eve closed the door on her sister.

  Several days later, at five in the morning, Eve woke her nearest neighbor by leaning on their doorbell. The neighbor came to the door to find Eve in her nightdress. She had one wrist wrapped in a bloodstained towel.

  A doctor on the psychiatric ward at St. Roch said to Eve that it was unusual for anyone contemplating suicide to get ready for bed before making the attempt, even more unusual for someone to try it first thing in the morning. What was in her mind? This was an impulse, but what was its trigger? Her own face in the mirror? Not self-loathing of course—but her sister’s face.

  Eve could remember what had happened but wasn’t clear in her mind, and it didn’t make sense. She felt dead already—her life taken—so why would she try to do what had already been done? She remembered that she’d been up in the night. She’d had a dream in which Dawn was calling her from another room, a room Eve couldn’t find no matter how hard she looked. She thought that she perhaps had wandered about from room to room in her sleep, looking for her sister. She remembered that, in her dream, she found herself standing at the marble-topped vanity in the bathroom. Someone stood behind her, holding her wrist and letting her blood—so that it trickled to form a silky red pool on the marble. The person—a man—was already inside the apartment but kept asking for the key. He persisted: “Where is the key?” He walked her around the apartment opening drawers. Then he wrapped her wrist and sat her in a chair in the entrance hall, under the portrait of her mother. The door was open, so Eve staggered out and leaned on her neighbor’s bell.

  “But none of that can be true,” Eve said to the psychiatrist. “I know it was a dream, because the man was speaking Provençal.”

  Eve and Dawn went over
the Col de Nice—that crumbling country—then through Sospel in the dark, then over the Col de Brouis and down through a forest of ash, and limes in feathery bloom, to the Roya. Dardo appeared, on its spur of rock, the river swinging wide around the base of the spur and its half-moon river meadow. They drove on, crossed the bridge, and circled back. The sun was up over the sea already, but sun and sea were hidden behind the peaks to the east, back toward Ventimiglia. It was a clear day and the sky above the mountains was an airy, voluminous blue.

  They drove up the avenue of plane trees, whose mottled trunks made a regular paddling swish as the car passed. They parked in the first space on the wide end of the Avenue 19 Septembre 1947. Eve’s sister jumped out of the car, leaving the door open. Eve took her time. She got out and watched Dawn sprint up under the plane trees. Dawn ran fast, her hair gleaming, fair and dark. She disappeared around a corner.

  Eve followed slowly. No one was up, it seemed. In the silence the fountain by the Hotel de Ville was making an emphatic water noise. It was surrounded by buckets full of wild broom. There were broom flowers in wreaths outside the Hotel de Ville and in the porch of the smaller church, St. Eloi’s.

  Eve went on and up. She paused again at the escalade that went down to a landing paved not in pale cobbles but in green schist, a landing like a gallery above the sheer cliff and the river meadow. Someone had cut and stacked a first crop of hay in the meadow. There was a wind pushing up the valley, a warm wind—another change in the weather. As Eve waited, the wind carried a dry smell to her, and some glossy hay stalks flew, funneling up the cliff face and the spiral of the escalade. The stalks circled above Eve, then, moving out of the channeled current of air, fluttered down onto the cobbles.