Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

  “I knew the country, the walking distances between each village, a safe summer night’s run for me. I knew the grottos, the houses whose roofs were fallen but whose fireplaces were deep enough to hide in from daylight.

  “I made it a point of honor—and practicality—not to trouble the people among whom I lived. There were always enough travelers in the mountains. For centuries there were soldiers. The coastal towns and mountain villages had always changed hands between the Savoyards, the king of Naples, the Lascaris, the Grimaldis, Napoléon, even the Templars of Segovia. I knew how I should live. My habits followed my learning—I spoke Provençal, then French, Ligurian, then Italian, Catalan, then Spanish. I knew what lay underneath time’s alterations.”

  Ila said, “Eve’s angry about the euro; she’s not looking forward to fumbling her change like a foreigner. But the nations of Europe are inventions. It’s all new. I remember Grazide looking at an old map I’d copied. In my map the hill behind the cathedral in Avignon was bare of everything but windmills, and Grazide said, to herself, ‘I remember that.’ I hope you understand what I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Daniel.

  His word was echoed by a splash, a fish jumping in the black water beside the boat, attracted by the light.

  Ila’s eyes glowed, irises silver, pupils pulsing with every alteration in the intensity of the light, with every tilt of the boat on the gentle swell.

  “Tell me about Martine,” said Daniel.

  The Grotto of the Hermit had a view to the east of the mountains and the sky. When the sun was past its zenith, Ila had liked to go there to watch mowers in the water meadow or ravens skimming the rock face of the Col de Baus, the view in a frame fringed by fangs of stone.

  One day, when Ila was wedged comfortably in a shadowy crack at the back of the grotto, a young woman in fawn and white came up the passage from the crypt of St. Barthelemy’s. Ila was surprised—he had only just arrived and hadn’t heard the Germans breaking open the grate.

  When she knelt where the hermit had—long before Ila’s time—Ila recognized her habit: a young nun.

  She knelt and prayed. She said not “God, save us,” but, “God, save them.” Her voice quivered. “God, save them, or if You won’t save them, give me the courage to go with them into the dark.” Her hands seemed to be washing themselves, moving continually, slippery with sweat. “Please, Father,” she said, “let me not be tempted to save myself. Give me the courage to go with them.”

  The nun stopped praying, or perhaps went on in silence. The grotto wasn’t like the dry depths of the cave proper; it wasn’t perfectly quiet. Ila could hear the village—goats bleating, a truck engine turning over, heaving and backfiring and dying.

  Ila made deductions. The grate had been removed by the Germans, the ones who’d put it up in the first place. The Germans were going to imprison some people in the caves. And, he deduced, this woman wasn’t necessarily among the condemned. Ila would have been surprised if the Germans were killing nuns. But this particular invading army had surprised him already. They did things with—it seemed to him—unique dispatch. He was wary of them.

  The nun was weeping, her hands locked together as though wrestling. She jumped when Ila spoke, spun around, and fell onto her hip—the hip that she had held higher than the other when she’d first come limping up into the grotto.

  Ila said, “I can’t give you courage, but I can save you. I could lead you safely through the dark. Because it’s my dark.” Ila unfolded from the crack in the grotto’s back wall. The nun—Martine—stared at him. And in her stare Ila saw how much he’d changed. He could bear a casual scrutiny—but not this. He had become like one of those things Chambord had kept in spirits—leached and changed.

  She said to Ila, “Will you?”

  He said, “I will.”

  She said, “Will it cost me?”

  He said, “It will.” Though he hadn’t thought till that moment to make her pay, to make any claims. It was her question that made him want to keep her. Perhaps, as she thought, she lacked moral courage. But she was fatalistic. And fatalism was a flavor Ila liked. He’d had many rapt surrenders but few sober ones. Martine felt she was being asked to bargain, so Ila made a bargain with her.

  She went back down to her grandfather and the other villagers, and Ila whispered after her as she went. He said, “I won’t let them see me. You take the lead.”

  And, indeed, Ila was as invisible as God.

  Martine led the men into the cave. She carried a lamp, a jar full of oil with a floating wick. Its flame was a stunted bud. Martine wasn’t trembling anymore; she kept the lamp steady, didn’t swamp its seed of light. The way was rough enough and she had a limp, but she kept the lamp steady.

  Ila walked backward. Only Martine could see him, the dim smoke of his face and hands at the very limit of the lamplight. Ila used the light, too. He couldn’t see in the dark, but there had been times when he’d crossed from the high entrance to Dardo without light, and he knew the way by touch, by the degree of the slope, the architecture of the tunnels, the temperature and purity of the air.

  The villagers lit a second lamp. They hurried. When they reached a larger chamber they paused to nurse the flame, which was failing. Ila moved closer to them while they were all busy looking at the light, its clear gold sinking into clear blue around the black matter of the wick.

  The lamp went out.

  Ila heard the people panting with fear.

  Martine’s grandfather lit a match. In its light the walls glistened. The men and woman were like the translucent flowstone of the cave. Their breath gave the match a halo. The match went out. But there was another. There were others. To Ila the people looked, in the light of each, like a church picture, like a gathering of saints.

  By the light of the second-to-last match Ila beckoned to Martine. She said to the others, “Come on.” The people went on, without light, and Ila took Martine’s hand in his. He led her, put her hand to touch the low places in the roof, guided her feet over the rough places on the floor, kept her from side passages, dead ends, and openings onto the rest of the system.

  As they came near the exit, Ila asked Martine if she could see the light—it was evening. “No,” she said. And, “No,” again, later.

  Eventually Ila asked did she not want him to leave her? And a moment later she said she could see the light. She sang out to her grandfather and the other villagers. Ila stuffed his dusty self into a hollow in the passage, and the men blundered past him. Their figures made a jumble of thick shadows against the grainy dark of night. Then they were out. But Martine had waited. She stood with her hands by her sides—as later Ila heard she had stood before the irresolute guns of the terrified men of the firing squad. She waited for her guide to take his payment or to tell her what it was to be.

  But Ila had decided to let her go. When he was younger her certainty would have provoked him. He’d have wanted—as Dawn wanted when making Tom—to make Martine see that the world worked differently than she believed it did. That the world wasn’t populated by souls that were either safe or imperiled and there weren’t devils everywhere, like hot spots of bacteria in a culture, a growth medium that was God, or God’s creation—everything else inside Him and dependent on Him. The younger Ila would’ve been provoked by her fatalistic complacency, but Ila was feeling uncertain and short on knowledge himself. He wasn’t up to the pedagogical exercise of teaching this young woman.

  “I wanted to be rid of her,” Ila said.

  Daniel saw that the vampire was regarding him as though he were a resource. That is, Ila was planning to use what he knew Daniel would know in order to make himself understood. When Ila had first spoken to him, in Menton, Daniel had thought, I could be anyone. He’d thought Ila was like his mother, to whom Daniel had often appeared only as a mask between two apparently cocked ears. But it was clear to Daniel now that Ila was talking to him—to Father Daniel Octave—and that he wouldn’t have spoken in the cemetery if he hadn’t found himsel
f faced with a priest.

  Ila said that he imagined that Daniel, in his line of work, often came upon people at prayer. “If I walk into a church I expect to see people praying. I mean, I don’t see them. It’s too everyday. Martine came into my cave with her prayer. When people pray they do so out of the thick of themselves. If they make modifications to their feelings it’s only to better direct the flow of those feelings toward the person they imagine God is. They try to please their idea, but they don’t pretend, as they might do to friends or family. Martine came into my cave and brought herself, her life and times. I preyed on them—people. But I was like a naturalist in his hide; I watched them, too.

  “Eve says I don’t draw people because she thinks it hurts me to try to. If I was to draw you, Daniel, I’d draw the way you’re sitting, your clothes—but without head or hands. As I became older and more retiring it became impossible for me to look closely enough at people to want to draw them. I focused on their apparel, not their faces. It was a kind of tenderness. I’d look and feel lonely, not touched but bruised.

  “Martine came into my cave with her limp, her distress, her moral dilemma, her circle of frightened firelit faces, and her thin, Gothic hands. It clawed at me, and I wanted to be rid of her.”

  Martine Raimondi came back to the caves, transformed, wearing boots, trousers, a patched shirt, and a leather jacket. She carried a flashlight. She walked a distance in, calling, trying to raise her demon. Ila came to see what she wanted. He didn’t want to see her get into any more trouble. She said she wanted him to help her. Had the Germans restored the grate between the crypt and caves? If so, could Ila shift it?

  They had, and he could.

  For some weeks Ila kept her from harm by carrying messages to the confessional in St. Barthelemy’s—from partisans in the hills to those in the village. She asked Ila to guide men with guns through his cave. He refused. She asked his price. He told her what he was. He was a vampire—an immortal. What could his price possibly be? He told her that she was asking a wolf for the use of his lair.

  Martine was with the partisans for four months. During that time she came to value their struggle more highly than her own vocation. She came to believe that she should use this devil God had sent her. And she did see Ila as a devil, a cannibal, a murderer. If he sometimes seemed meek, he was only trying to deceive her, she thought. She made it abundantly clear to Ila that that was what she thought. Martine wanted what Alberto Vail and his friends did, what the Maquis over the border wanted—the watch on the pass removed, that platoon and the radio in the ruined tower of Castel Abelio. She’d seen Ila wrench the grate from its bolts, and she imagined his hands dripping German blood.

  She said to him, “You’re a killer; kill them for us.” She tried to tempt him: “Imagine the feast you could have.”

  Martine was whispering to him in an olive grove—one night when the new moon gleamed in its hollow socket of shadow. “Fifteen men,” she said.

  And Ila asked her, “Do you think that if you use me as your instrument, you haven’t got blood on your hands?” He was thinking of the tongs used by priests to give plague sufferers Holy Communion.

  “The moment I met you I gave myself up for lost,” Martine said. She was shaking, as she did when moved, this time to anger.

  Ila asked her, “Who do you think is making these decisions about us? Do you think I’m a demon you raised, that you’re damned already, so you might as well use me?”

  “Yes!” Martine was fierce.

  He pointed uphill: “That’s my cave, and I chose to help you through it.”

  She pushed him then; she shouted at him, “You’re a monster! Be a monster!”

  Ila tried to explain. He opened his mouth to talk about the butcher and the soldier, why the soldier had stopped, what the soldier saw, the gesture he made, that it was the soldier’s gratitude to God for the sight of the snake—a little trickle of fluid darkness—that made Ila want to help her and the condemned villagers. He hadn’t saved the soldier, true, and had drunk from him and thanked the butcher for killing him, but it seemed to him that, whatever its outcome, the gratitude, all of it, had belonged in a different world from the condemnation, and Ila had wanted to live in that world. But Martine hadn’t let him talk. She lost her temper and struck him in the mouth.

  He walked off, sucking his split lip. He went back into his caves.

  It was weeks till he saw her again. He stopped her on the mule track that came down from Castel Abelio to Dardo. There was a full moon, and he recognized her at some distance by her painful rocking gait. He followed her, closed the distance gradually till he was able to warn her: “If you go any closer to Dardo you’ll be putting yourself in danger.”

  Martine stopped and waited for him. She said she’d been looking for him. She’d been calling at the high entrance for two days now, and he hadn’t come.

  “See,” he said. “You can’t conjure me.”

  Martine began to shake again and Ila kept his distance, supposing she was angry. She eased herself down to sit on the path.

  He said that it was September and he could range farther; the nights were longer now. She couldn’t expect to see him.

  Martine told him she’d been ill. She held out her hand and unwound a bandage and showed him the gash on her knuckles. It looked fresh, uninfected. When she’d hit him, she’d cut her hand, she said. It hadn’t healed or changed, and she’d been sickening. She said, “I thought your vampirism was a curse. I thought it came from some kind of carnal connection—or from some sin, or weakness. But now I think it’s a disease, and that I’m infected.”

  Martine told Ila that she’d studied pharmacology at the University of Turin. She was a pharmacist—a scientist. She’d thought it all through and it seemed to her that what this was, was some kind of disease.

  “It usually takes quickly,” he said, “from a bite. I didn’t bite you, so perhaps you’ll fight it off. If it’s a disease.”

  She nodded. She was swaying with exhaustion. She said to Ila that she’d thought he was dead. A walking corpse.

  “But you’ve held my hand,” he said. “Felt my warmth.”

  “I’m going to keep to my bed till I’m well,” she told him. “Shall I show you where I’ll be?”

  Ila put his arms around her shoulders and under her knees. He picked her up and she let him carry her to the house in the mountains above Tende.

  Five days later Giesen’s men found Martine at the house and took her back to Dardo. She was already under a sentence of death, so she didn’t need any further processing. She wouldn’t tell Giesen how many others had escaped—of the men he’d sent into the caves. She was asked about Alberto Vail and wouldn’t say anything. They sent a priest to her, a father from Tende. He heard her confession, and when he tried to console her with the idea of her martyrdom she said that she’d rather live on and fight.

  She was executed. Mother Pauline of the Order of the Daughters of Grace, who saw Martine’s body before her coffin was sealed, said there was only one wound, in her chest. The firing squad had aimed wide—all but one. Giesen had unclipped his holster but hadn’t drawn his gun. He hadn’t put its muzzle to her skull. In the end that was too much, even for him. The doctor who examined her body—held upright against the pole by the belt around her middle—found no pulse in her neck.

  By the time Ila discovered what had happened, Martine’s body was already on the train to Turin. He’d gone to the house above Tende and found it empty, its door hanging by one hinge. He asked after Martine the next night, after the late mass at St. Barthelemy’s. (He’d broken the grate again. Giesen had only just had it restored—he hadn’t thought of it till the nun made her reappearance.) The villagers at the mass took Ila for a partisan. They told him that Martine Raimondi had been arrested and shot. Hadn’t he known? Word had been sent to Alberto Vail before the execution, but no one had come to save her. The old women clutched at Ila, crying about the Raimondis and Martine’s poor grandfather.

&n
bsp; Ila stopped speaking. Daniel watched Ila pause to brush at his own arms as though at hands holding him. Then he brushed them off, those importunate phantoms, those black-scarved, bandy-legged, distraught old women from fifty years before.

  Ila said that he’d run out of the church, through the town, and up the mule track. He went up the mountain, all the way to the Castel Abelio. They hadn’t time—those soldiers—even to think to shoot at him before he was over the lowest part of its broken wall. They opened fire. They were frightened and, without thinking, they followed him with their guns. He ran around the top of the wall, then down its side, around the hollow tower, his momentum keeping him on the wall, running at a ninety-degree angle to the ground. One circuit, moving diagonally down, so that the man at the machine gun, following him, felled a number of his own friends before he had time to take his hands off the trigger.

  “I tore them to pieces,” Ila told Daniel. “I think Alberto Vail’s men can’t have looked closely at what they found. It was all over in a minute, maybe. A minute of screaming mayhem. The dogs rushed about, demented with fear. I remember tripping over a dog, then catching them all, and lowering them by their legs, snapping and writhing, into the dry well. I remember peering in at them when it was finished. They were mad, seething over each other, howling and biting. They had lost all fellow feeling in their terror. But after a moment they noticed me; then they all cowered down, and began wriggling on their bellies, as puppies do to their fathers. I remember that. And I remember looking around at the radio, shedding solid orange sparks, and the smoke hanging in the air—smoke and steam from the opened bodies. Then I left the fortress. When I’d been gone a moment the dogs began to yammer. It was the dogs, by their homage and then by their howling, who told me what I’d done, and what I was.

  “I never knew,” Ila said. “I hadn’t understood. I hadn’t exercised my abilities. I was proud of my knowledge, my memory—I was a farmer’s almanac, a hundred-year tide table, a library of maps and plans. That’s how I was able to save Martine. The old women in the church knew where Martine’s order meant to take her—Santa Maria della Fiori, in Turin. The order let the right people know where she was. They were cultivating a cult. They had their eyes on the prize from the moment she was executed—a martyr and a miracle worker. I knew the church, Toronelli’s double-walled dome. I have pictures of plans stored in my mind. That’s my talent. I remembered pictures even when I was still living on bread and cheese and wine. It was the talent I was born with.