They were standing in front of a beautiful house at the bottom end of the Champs-Élysées.
“The rooms aren’t bad. But I live up there.”
She looked up. A hammock could be glimpsed hanging between two lightning conductors on the roof.
“I’m claustrophobic.”
“Pleased to meet you! I’m paranoid.”
They smiled and shook hands, and she hobbled off.
From that day on, they spent many nights on the Paris skyline. She taught him how to slide down the roof of the Théâtre du Châtelet and how to venture into the flies above the dancers during a performance.
He showed her the Saint-Jacques Tower, close by. An obsessive security guard spent all night long patrolling it. This was a game for them. They had to climb seventy-seven meters in under ninety seconds, which was the time it took the caretaker to walk all the way around. Once they were up there, they could see the winding Seine with its islands; they could see the ship of Notre Dame standing out in a sea of gray rooftops.
They became friends without knowing anything about each other. Sometimes they would accompany each other back home. But both of them only knew the front door of where the other lived. And this door would close again without them being able to glimpse, through the gap, any hint of the rest of their lives.
One day in April, Vango didn’t show up. After a few hours of waiting, the Cat stood at the main entrance to the building where she knew he lived. From the caretaker’s expression when she asked, “Could you let Monsieur Vango know that the Cat is waiting for him,” she immediately realized that something was wrong. She narrowly missed the police.
During the hours and days that followed, she tried to figure it out.
From positioning herself nearby, listening at the entrances to cafés where those conducting the investigation were sitting, she was able to piece together the story.
Her first surprise was to discover that Vango was training to become a priest. She didn’t know any priests personally, she barely knew what that life involved, but she certainly couldn’t imagine a priest hanging upside down off the Eiffel Tower or sleeping in the park trees, as the two of them had often done.
She was almost less shocked to learn that he was accused of having killed a man. Perhaps he had his reasons. And anyway it was none of her business. Now she understood why he hadn’t come, and that was all she wanted to know.
And so she thought that she would be able to pick up her everyday life again.
But one night, lying in her hammock, she felt something in her ribs.
It wasn’t a pain exactly, but it climbed up as far as her chest and shoulders. She turned over on to one side, then the other. She sighed. She took a few steps in the darkness, on the roof.
She watched the flame in a streetlamp flickering.
After a while she crossed her arms, clutched her shoulders, and sighed again. Perhaps this was what books referred to as loneliness.
It was something she had never experienced before.
The Cat had grown up alone.
She had three much older brothers. The last one had left home the day after she was born. They were all over thirty-five now, which to the Cat was the age of her ancestors in the family’s oil paintings.
She was the offspring of her father’s second marriage. Her parents were very busy. They lived in three cities at the same time, never emptied their suitcases, and even kept their fur coats on when they popped home to give her a kiss.
She had been through twenty-two governesses, who’d had the bad idea of calling her Mademoiselle Atlas and of wanting to make her stay inside the walls of the house. The last one had fallen from a tree, trying to catch her.
The Cat had ended up taking up the post herself. She had become her own governess. The twenty-third.
But never, in all her fourteen years, had she experienced loneliness. Not even when the seventh governess had locked her in a cupboard all night long to stop her from sleeping on the roof, nor even when she’d spent a year in a sanatorium in the mountains because she was sick, had she ever really felt alone.
And now this idiot Vango had knocked her armor right off, with a din that sounded like the clattering of saucepans.
The Cat decided that she had to find him in order to settle the score.
And so she moved into the small bell tower at the Carmelite seminary and waited for him. She didn’t want to stray too far from the site of the drama. She was convinced that this was the only spot where she’d be able to find something out.
Nothing happened for three days.
The memory of the murder had, little by little, become diluted.
On the fourth night, someone started playing the foxtrot on the organ below her. She didn’t know that it was Raimundo Weber, the Capuchin caretaker, who was resuming his nocturnal concerts after a brief period of mourning. Life went on.
The following day, the police came to empty the victim’s bedroom. A large van drove off with a desk, a chair, a few boxes of books and notebooks. Five boys from the seminary sluiced down the floor and the walls, before opening the window so that the memory of Father Jean would evaporate.
By the fifth night, the Cat was beginning to think she was too late.
It was a very mild night, partly because a May breeze filled the city with the scent of cherry trees, and perhaps also because Weber was playing more peaceful music than usual on his organ. It didn’t consist of more than four notes, but he was playing them in a magical order that changed with each new musical phrase.
The Cat strained an ear.
Someone was ringing, by the grille at the entrance to the seminary.
Weber was too heavily under the music’s spell to hear anything.
Judging from the appearance of the person waiting behind the grille, the Cat realized this was an unusual visit. She had only seen priests, nuns, a bishop, seminarians, and policemen entering on the other days. But this person was wearing a street urchin’s cap. He was carrying a black case as well as a leather briefcase, like the students in the Latin Quarter.
The Cat was watching him. He might give up if nobody answered his ringing, which would be very frustrating for her.
So she slithered down to the bottom of the roof and looked in through a window that gave onto the chapel. Weber only seemed to be half conscious. His small body was motionless, hunched over the instrument, but his great big hands were spread wide like bats dancing over the keyboard. He had moved on from the four opening notes now. From the deepest to the most high pitched, he didn’t want to leave a single note unplayed.
The Cat flung her blanket like a fishing net. She glided a bit under the dome before landing on the organ pipes, which started wailing like a sick elephant. In a flash, Weber emerged from his musical ecstasy. He could hear someone calling out. He jumped up off his stool and exited the chapel, muttering, “I’m coming, I’m coming. . . .”
The hem of his dressing gown trailed over the courtyard cobbles.
He peered through the grille and saw a young man on the other side.
“Are you lost, my boy?”
“Good evening. I’m a boarder at the school across the way, on Rue Madame. I’m locked out. Could you find me somewhere to sleep?”
“To sleep . . .” repeated the Capuchin monk, biting his lip.
Weber patted the keys in his pocket; he seemed to be bothered about something.
“Normally, I would have opened up for you. . . .”
He glanced around and whispered, “But I’ve been asked to be extra careful. There have been some things happening. . . .”
“I’ll leave very early,” the boy promised in a Russian accent.
“I believe you, my son, but I have my orders.”
The boy nodded.
“Under normal circumstances . . .” Weber went on.
“I understand. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
The boy headed off down the sidewalk.
“Hey!”
Raimundo W
eber called him back. The boy returned to the grille.
“What have you got in that case?”
“What case?”
“There, in your left hand.”
“Nothing. A violin.”
Weber inserted the key into the lock. He opened the door.
“A violin?”
The caretaker shook the boy’s hand.
“Do you play?” He was eager to know.
“Yes.”
“Zing zang zang zaaaaaang.”
Weber was singing and miming on the sidewalk.
“Ziiiing . . .”
He was looking questioningly at the boy.
“Zaaaaang zooing . . . Do you recognize that?”
“Shostakovich,” the boy declared.
Weber almost leaped into his arms.
“Are you Russian?”
“Yes.”
“Come with me.”
The Cat saw him ushering the boy inside and leading him over to the chapel. Weber climbed back up to his organ. He started playing a new piece of music.
“Take out your violin!”
They played together for an hour.
It sounded like a village feast day in Stromoski, Siberia. Even the kneelers wanted to dance. At the end of that hour, an exhausted Weber slid down between the organ pedals, dead to the world.
The Cat didn’t take her eyes off the young man.
He put the violin back in its case, checked that Weber was sleeping soundly, stole his keys, and left the chapel. He went over to the small house in the second courtyard, opened the door with the biggest key, and went upstairs.
The Cat followed him via the roof.
The boy soon reappeared and walked back over to the grille. He went out into the street.
The Cat trailed him to where he was staying, in student accommodation, and the next day, to the burial of Father Jean in Montmartre Cemetery, and finally all the way to the Ritz Hotel at the end of the afternoon.
There, she discovered that he worked for a man named Boris Petrovitch Antonov and that he was also looking for Vango.
By the time she was back home, safely on her roof, the Cat was feeling very pleased with herself. She had a lead, that lead was named Andrei, and he was a violin student. The Cat knew the sound of his voice, his address, and the name of the person he worked for.
That evening, though she wasn’t yet ready to admit it to herself, this lead, with his violin and his tousled hair, with his sad eyes and his handsome face from a cold climate, made her heart beat as fast as the hoofbeats of a crazy little horse in the Siberian taiga.
Aeolian Islands, May 1, 1934
Vango had been dropped off by the Graf Zeppelin on the islet of Basiluzzo. He had instantly recognized that rock perched in the sea between the volcano and the island of Panarea.
At dawn, he’d called out to the fishermen who came to comb the rocks just above sea level, to dislodge fish and octopuses. They didn’t ask what he was doing there. They just let him slip in between the baskets of fish. One of them, at the bow of the boat, was singing.
Listening to them speak, and feeling the swaying of the boat, Vango understood that he was back.
The fishermen came from Lipari. They took him to their large island.
From there, he caught a regular boat for Salina. There were no seats left. Vango squeezed in behind a man sleeping on his suitcase. He watched the twin peaks of his island slowly getting closer. He was at the stern of the boat, the only traveler without any luggage, while the other passengers were transporting enormous packages of supplies and hardware. Some of them wouldn’t be leaving their islands before the autumn. They would have to hold out until then.
The boat sailed around the pumice stone quarries of Lipari. The current was against them. The journey felt terribly long to Vango — even though his island was right there, behind that big square sail, which wasn’t coping well with the wind.
Vango was huddled with his arms across his knees. Around one ankle, he’d knotted the blue handkerchief that never left him. He had time to rehearse his big reunion with Mademoiselle several times over in his head.
He knew she wouldn’t reproach him for anything, that she would stand back a little to see how tall he’d grown, that she would run a hand through his hair, apologize for her dress, put his plate and glass on the table, say it just so happened there was still a warm vegetable gratin in the oven, and some sweet biscuits, and then she would add a tender word or two of endearment in one of the languages she loved, before immediately giving herself a telling-off because he wasn’t a child anymore.
She would do everything to ensure he didn’t have time to ask her forgiveness for not coming back, for only having written four letters in five years, four letters that gave no address and that simply said:
Four letters as empty as letters written by soldiers in a war. Health good, morale good.
Vango advanced in life by erasing all trace of himself. He didn’t call this paranoia but survival. He was like a man on the run, dragging branches behind him so as not to leave any tracks.
He believed he was protecting Mademoiselle by not telling her anything.
Thanks to his silence, they wouldn’t be able to get to her.
They had been spying on him for five years.
Those who wanted him dead.
Those whom Father Jean had referred to as “your illness,” but who had managed to take Father Jean’s life in the end.
But at Notre Dame everything had changed. Thousands of people had seen bullets exploding all around him.
And Vango had felt the urge to call out, “See! See! Am I really mad? They’re real! They’re here!”
For a moment, when he was up at the top, he had even stretched out his arms, ready to receive the shot in his heart so that there would be a mark on his body, the kind of evidence that a surgeon could remove with his tweezers and place on the table. But instead, the impossible had happened. He had seen a sparrow flying toward him in slow motion, batting its wings feebly, almost to the point of stopping, in a way that no sparrow can do.
A gunshot rang out, and the sparrow had stopped, pierced through, before plummeting the full height of the cathedral.
The bullet had been knocked off course, so that it only brushed against Vango’s side rather than piercing his heart.
In Salina, Vango disembarked at the port of Malfa.
It was growing dark. People were waiting for the boat.
They were out on an evening stroll, turning up to see the crew, to help them unload the packages, to watch those passengers who remained on board headed for another island, or to dream about seeing new faces. Vango could tell that nobody recognized him. There were couples sitting, legs dangling just above the water. An old man was counting the fish in his basket again.
As Vango took a few steps on the quayside, he sensed how much he had changed. He was no longer the same person. The boy who had spent his childhood running away from the inhabitants of his island was now interested in looking at them.
“Can you help me out, young man?”
A man had put his hand on Vango’s shoulder.
“I’ve got to carry the mail up. One bag each.”
Vango took the bag and slung it on his back.
He recognized this man, Bongiorno, who handled the mail and the boat tickets, who sold vegetables and shoes, and who repaired broken windows. A man who had replaced five or six of those who had left to try their luck on the other side of the world.
“Normally,” said Bongiorno, “that fellow comes with his donkey, but he isn’t here this evening. We’ve just got to get it up as far as the square. I’ll pay you something.”
“Don’t worry,” said Vango. “I’m going that way anyway.”
He was watching some children diving off a rock. They disappeared into the inky black water. A man and a woman were running down the winding path toward the boat. They were calling out, begging for it to wait. Someone struck the ship’s bell, just for the fun of makin
g them run even faster. The young girls sitting on crates burst out laughing. A boy dived off the prow. Vango wondered why he’d never swum with the children from his island.
He saw a woman who looked like a vagabond, crouching under a roof of planks that hung off the seawall of the port.
“Who’s she?”
“You’re not from here!” said Bongiorno.
“No.”
“But you’ve got a faint accent from these islands.”
“I came here a long time ago.”
Bongiorno was walking in front of Vango.
“That woman is mad. She’s been waiting for her husband for . . . I don’t know how long . . . many years. She stays there so she’ll be able to see him when he arrives.”
“Where did he go?”
“If you ask me, I think he’s dead. I feel sorry for her.”
He threw her a coin and shouted, “You need to eat, Donna Giuseppina!”
Vango slowed down as they walked past. He had just recognized Pippo Troisi’s wife.
“She’s always there,” Bongiorno said. “She stays to weep.”
Vango couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“What about you? Where are you going?”
“Me?” asked Vango, a bit lost.
“Yes. Where are you going on to, afterward?”
“I’m going up there, to the Madonna of Terzito, on a pilgrimage.”
Vango was referring to the tiny forgotten sanctuary on the pass, between the mountains. He couldn’t think of anything better to satisfy Bongiorno’s curiosity.
And it worked: the postmaster didn’t ask any more questions on the way to the square in Malfa.
When they got there, Vango left Bongiorno with his bags, explaining that he wanted to complete his climb before it was fully dark.
“Take these coins,” the man offered. And when the boy refused, he added, “Light some candles to the Madonna for me. You won’t be alone; there were two foreigners this morning who were headed that way.”
Vango took the coins. He left the village on the west side. He was almost running. In less than an hour, he was above the crater of Pollara. A light was shining in the village, hundreds of meters below him.
Vango Page 15
