Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  Bad fell silent. He watched a powdery gray lizard scuttle along the balustrade, in sharp relief against the white grit of Eve’s garden terrace, a terrace surrounded by dry-voiced date palms, whose leaves trapped rippling shadows, like eels in coral. A path went down through the date palms, turning into steps through a stand of spiny aloes and prickly pears—some autographed by tourists as far back as 1980. The steps went on down to the sea, today a calm, transparent turquoise.

  “I’m so light-headed,” Bad told Eve. “I keep losing myself. One moment I’m here; the next I’m at home. I feel as if I’m in a holding pattern.” He made his hand tilt and turn in the air. “I can’t seem to come in to land.”

  Eve said that she was making them roast chicken, stuffed with finocchio and flambéed in pastis. “I’ll put it on now,” she said, pushed back her chair, and went indoors, through the yellow curtains.

  Before Daniel Octave phoned Eve Moskelute, he finally had his postponed talk with the bishop.

  He sat in a chair set squarely before a massive desk in the bishop’s somber audience room—perhaps the least Niçoise of any room in Nice. He kept his hands clasped so that he wouldn’t fidget. He told the bishop what had happened to Jacques Palomba.

  The bishop listened, then asked a few questions pertinent to Daniel’s revelation. Then he inclined his head against his high-backed chair and asked Daniel when he had last spoken to his confessor.

  “The week before I left Rome.” Daniel’s confessor had asked, as he must, the ritual questions: “Are you happy in the Company? Do you still pray every day?” Questions to which Daniel had returned his usual affirmative answers. But the bishop was not a Jesuit, and it wasn’t these questions that concerned him.

  “This is difficult,” Daniel said. His hands escaped him, and he found his thumbs caressing the big rivets that fastened the upholstery to the arm of his chair, smooth in the velvet’s nap, like the round pads on the paws of a cat. He put his hands together again and stabbed his thumbnails into their opposite palms. “Nonsense always appears to me as a vile imposition. I take it too personally. And there is nothing more nonsensical than spurious connections.”

  “You are going to explain, I hope, Daniel,” the bishop said.

  Daniel said that, in the investigation of miracles, it could be said that the testimony of witnesses was never fully complete—couldn’t be complete—till those witnesses were dead.

  “Do you mean to take Jacques Palomba’s life—subsequent to the miracle—and his death as farther testimony from him?”

  “No, Your Grace. Because a miracle isn’t conditional.”

  The bishop nodded. “Then … where is your trouble?”

  Daniel said that at one point in his original investigation he had suspected that Martine Raimondi had had a child—that her namesake, the Dardo woman, who’d had Raimondi’s letters, was that child.

  “Did you air this suspicion?”

  “It was short-lived,” Daniel said. “Alberto Vail’s testimony removed any doubts I had about the Blessed Martine’s virtue.”

  Daniel said that when he learned that Palomba had been murdered he remembered, however, something else Vail had told him. Vail had said that, two days before the Germans caught Martine Ramondi, he’d visited her, where she was laid up, sick, in a house above Tende. “Alberto told me that she’d expressed fears for the future of the men preserved by her miracle.”

  “And, thinking of Palomba’s fate, you recalled her fears?” the bishop said. Then, compassionate, “Daniel, these are your doubts. This is your test.”

  “No,” Daniel said, then found that he wasn’t able to tell the truth. To tell what was tormenting him, a series of spurious connections—indecent, unreasonable connections. He didn’t tell but backed off into cover, a hide made of light, not shadow. He offered the bishop an ethical argument. He said, “We’re all invited to partake of events, to respond morally and emotionally to things that haven’t happened to us and that we witness only remotely, usually on television. We’re asked to regard current events in the light of history. We’re given examples—I have my own, the Jesuit fathers who resisted Vichy and the Nazis. I have asked myself—as we’re encouraged to ask ourselves—in their place what would I have done? It’s the wrong question. And what equips us to ask the right ones? We’re always being asked for our opinions—our tastes—or to imagine ourselves in other lives. We watch films or read stories and see our surrogates, because that’s the way stories sell themselves to us. I wrote a book about Fathers Fessard and de Montcheuil and Chaillet and I still haven’t found a way to think about them. Some way that isn’t polluted by that vain question: What would I have done? What I’ve learned about Fessard and de Montcheuil and Chaillet isn’t finished till I can either answer that question or learn not to ask it. Yet if I say, ‘I haven’t finished learning,’ I’m still putting their lives in the wrong perspective, as if these men are something made by the past to be revealed to the present—to me. As if their lives exist to provide examples. All I can honestly think is that I can’t leave the Company because, unlike Fessard and de Montcheuil and Chaillet, I haven’t been tested.”

  The bishop blinked at Daniel. Then he said, “Are you thinking of leaving the Company?”

  Daniel raised his hands and rubbed his temples. “No,” he said. “But Jacques Palomba shouldn’t have had his head cut off. And yet what happened to him isn’t something I should regard as a test of my faith. This isn’t about my doubts. Yet it must make me go back to the evidence I’ve gathered and look harder at Martine Raimondi’s doubts.” After a long moment Daniel looked up at the bishop. The man had waited, had kept quiet, but Daniel saw that the bishop’s face wore a most extraordinary look—that love and pity and admiration were shining out of the bishop’s rather ordinary, heavy, sallow face. The bishop said, “Your mentor, the man who first brought you back to the Church when you were a boy, the Supplician, Father Gaston Groux, who was killed in El Salvador, wasn’t his head cut off?”

  Daniel turned his face sharply, as if from a blow. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’d forgotten.”

  “There’s no sense we can see in what has happened to Palomba. But there’s sense in your distress, Daniel.”

  No life was a closed system—Daniel knew that. A car is a closed system. A car with engine trouble can’t contaminate the one parked beside it so that it, too, won’t start. But Jacques Palomba’s and Martine Dardo’s lives should have been a little more like closed systems than they were. The two shouldn’t have anything more in common than that they both had parts—great and small, respectively—in the Blessed Martine’s life. Daniel could accept the proximity in time of their deaths. He didn’t like it any more than the detective, from his side, liked the fact that he found himself investigating the deaths of two people who had been interviewed by Father Daniel Octave in connection with one saint’s story. But Daniel had begun to think about other interviews and had remembered Vail saying that, before her arrest, during her illness, Martine Raimondi had expressed anxiety about the future of the saved men of St. Barthelemy’s. Daniel had called the nursing home in Breil where Alberto Vail now lived. Like a good investigator, Daniel checked his facts, his quotes.

  “I never said that, Daniel,” Alberto told him. “That was your interpretation. You said it, and I didn’t even nod my head. I said that Martine was troubled. Her trouble hurt me because I knew her faith was all-important to her. We had argued in the past. We were young, always rushing about and trampling the green wheat in each other’s hearts. I had wanted Martine to see the light—socialism and … not atheism, but pragmatic unbelief. Because I admired her I wanted her to see things my way. But she was very sick, and I was concerned for her morale. So when she said to me, about having led the men of Dardo to safety through the dark, that she had prayed to God for help and God had sent her a devil, I was unhappy. I am still unhappy that it’s the last thing I heard her say.”

  Daniel felt hurt, disappointed. He said, “Why didn’t you
tell me this, Alberto?”

  “Because it still makes me unhappy!”

  This discovery wasn’t good. But there was worse. Daniel thought he should see Eve Moskelute—because he had missed Martine Dardo’s funeral and because Eve and Martine’s odd mutual friend had said he should. Daniel had a reflex respect for scholarship. He never liked to be on the back foot with other scholars, so whenever he planned to meet one he made sure he read some of what they’d published. Eve Moskelute’s biography of Guy de Chambord was years out of print, but Daniel acquired a copy of her translation of Chambord’s Lumière du Jour. He read it at one sitting. Near its end Daniel found this passage: I was trapped in a pit, a narrow place in my life. I prayed to God for help, and God sent a devil to guide me. A beautiful devil, whose dusty incoherence I was able to see only by the daylight she shunned.

  Eve finished putting on her chicken and went back to the terrace. She had wine and a bowl of figs. She split a fig for Bad, put it down before him, where its perfume would rise to his nose.

  Bad looked dazed. His eyes floated above purple cradles of bruising. It was as though someone had punched him. He picked up the fig and Eve watched him eat. She broke several more and gave them to him—hand-fed him. Then she poured him a glass of wine and took his free hand and held it, fondled it. His fingertips were tacky from the fruit and his knuckles from other juices. His hands were heavily callused—from rope, he said when she asked.

  Eve remembered the first time she had taken Tom Hilxen’s hand in her own. They were at a concert, and she picked up his hand and drew it into her lap to hold. She inspected it, fascinated by the dappled bark effect of his freckles and the sandy hair on his knuckles. She would know this hand, she thought. They would be lovers, it was inevitable, and her taking his hand was their affair’s first premeditated move. But Tom’s hand wasn’t Ares’s and, as Eve enjoyed the sensation of its weight and warmth and latent mobility, she also understood that it wouldn’t make much of a print on her; its warmth wouldn’t make her malleable again in that place Ares’s had printed forever by troweling smooth again—the place she’d been injured by the loss of her sister. Ares, the old man, was the love of her life. Eve understood that. Ares was dead and she was young, and yet for her he’d have no equal, no late rival. When she took Tom’s hand into her own Eve felt intrigued but not tender. She held his hand firmly, excluded all the air between them. He was a graft she hoped would take. Her sap should still be rising. Ares was gone, but Eve had her sister back, and her sister’s beautiful friends, yet she could only accept the attentions of this clever young American as an inheritance, something else Ares had left in her care.

  Eve put Bad’s hand back down on the table and gave it a few friendly pats.

  “I might go for a swim,” Bad said. He rubbed his hands down his shirtfront, not to clean them but as if he were checking his own substance.

  “That’s a nice idea,” said Eve. She touched her own throat, the place tears were pressing.

  Bad looked at her. “Ila,” he said. “Dawn says that if I know why he’s called the Island I’ll know why he took her to Corsica.” He waited, then said, “He has a story. They all have stories.”

  “All right,” said Eve.

  Chapter 14

  CHAMBORD AND GRAZIDE

  His given name was Agricol, an eighth child—fourth son—born on that saint’s day. His family lived on Île de la Barthelasse, the green, sparsely wooded, low-lying island in the stream of the Rhône. The island over which the twenty-two arches of Saint Benezet’s bridge had once marched. The bridge was all but gone by Ila’s day, and the people would travel by ferry from the island to Avignon.

  His family were farm laborers, but despite his name Ila didn’t like the life, and at fifteen he crossed the river to the city. He spent the little money he had on a water carrier: a harness and canvas-covered container, with a padded belt, a tap, and a cup fastened by a chain to the container. The man he bought it from sported a flat place on his shoulders that corresponded to the shape of its yoke. Ila took over the old man’s territory. He carried water from the Fountain of the Innocents, around a fanned segment of streets. He cried, “A ’leau!”—perhaps his first words of French. He climbed the stairs with the heavy container, topped up jugs in third-floor households. Like the man from whom he bought the water carrier, Ila might have spent his days in that work and his nights sharing the straw with other plow-shy peasants, if it wasn’t for a conversation he had with a man who painted signs.

  The man was employed mending a painted panel. The panel belonged to an order of sisters who ran a hospital at the edge of the parkland behind the cathedral. The painter had carried the panel outside, into the street and sunlight, so he could see what he was about. He was puzzling out his main problem when he noticed Ila passing with his hollow, slopping burden. The man was thirsty, so he called Ila to him. He paid his coin and unhooked the chained cup himself and turned the spigot on the tap. Ila looked at the panel and could immediately see the painter’s problem. The picture was a Madonna Misericordia—the Virgin with a crowd of people sheltering under the spread tent of her mantle. Someone had gouged out the Virgin’s eyes. Her painted sockets were scored and empty, raw chisel holes in the wood. Ila asked the painter how he was going to fix it. The man wondered whether clay from the brickworks by the river might do the trick. Ila frowned and pondered, then told the man that he had once used wax to stop up a hole in an attic floor where some very enterprising ants would come through, in great numbers, to eat his bread. He had used a little beeswax—in fact, he’d broken the bottom off a small votive candle in the nave of the Chapel of the Gray Penitents. Tallow wouldn’t do, he said; the ants would only have eaten it. “You could paint a pair of eyes on paper or cloth, then set them in wax.”

  The painter put the cup back on its hook and said yes, he would try that.

  Ila didn’t see the panel again, but he ran into the painter some weeks later, at work on the sign for a tavern—the Silent Woman (she was headless). The painter said that the eyes in wax had worked. He climbed down from his ladder and began to clean his brushes while Ila admired his sign. Then Ila asked if he could use the paint the man still had on his palette and borrow a brush. He wanted to decorate something. He gave the man a drink and showed him the canvas sling in which his copper vessel rested. Ila had just washed the sling and he thought, since the padding on his yoke was embroidered, a little decoration elsewhere wouldn’t go amiss.

  The painter passed Ila his palette and brush. He leaned into the tavern to call the landlord out to inspect his work.

  Ila sat down on the cobbles with the vessel and its clean canvas sling between his feet.

  The painter, who had accepted part of his payment in wine, hunkered down on the tavern’s step with a bottle and watched Ila paint. There was a blob of fleshy pink on the palette, with black and white, red, and yellow. The painter thought that, at best, he would see a clumsy female figure appear under his borrowed brush. Or, more likely, a decorative sun and moon and stars. But instead he saw the boy had begun, with the brush dipped only in the white, to draw the shape of an animal—white on the yellowed bone color of the canvas. After a time, Ila dabbled the brush in the marbled border of the black and white paints and mixed an even gray. With this he outlined his animal—a calf, its head turned back over its shoulder.

  The painter offered some advice—where the line was too thick, on the calf’s flank, the boy could scrape some paint off with the brush handle. Ila did so, then picked up a rag and wiped the brush’s bristles. He dipped in black and painted a cow behind the calf, framing its white body. This animal, too, he outlined in pale gray, made gray nostrils in her black muzzle, and gray long-lashed cow eyes. After that Ila quickly and carefully made a thin carpet of red trefoil flowers on which the cow and her calf were standing. He stopped and looked up at the painter, who gestured with his bottle. “Please, go on. There’s paint left on the palette.”

  Ila mixed red and gray and yellow to ma
ke a donkey brown. With this color and the black and white, he painted a rabbit, its ears back, sniffing at an arrow that lay on the canvas ground. The rabbit was clearly in the foreground and in proportion to the calf and cow. Though the picture had no perspective, its proportions imagined perspective.

  The painter took another swig of wine and cleared his throat. “I’m no master to take on an apprentice,” he said. “I travel about with all my tools in this.” He patted his scratched brass-bound box. By way of apology he uncapped a jar of blue and spread a dab on his palette.

  Ila added red to his brown to change its tone. He painted a tree, mixed blue and yellow to add green leaves, and outlined each leaf in a yellower green, which made them seem to shine. He painted red apples on the tree and at its base another rabbit, ears at a clock’s five-to-one, up on its hind legs with one paw resting on the tree trunk and the other before it and bent at the wrist.