Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  I told Sylvie about a patient I was seeing, a four-year-old boy who insisted he had been born to different parents in another town, that his real papa was rich and let him play with coins of gold. My colleagues dismissed it as a common case of wishful thinking, but something had struck me as unusual, and based on the specifics of the boy’s story, I had tracked down Madame Virely in Grenoble, asking her to verify a few particulars. She had written back, confirming that her husband was a goldsmith but he had passed away several years ago; sadly, they had never had children.

  “I must admit it’s baffling, but the boy refuses to give up his delusion.”

  “Maybe he feels you’re taking away the one thing that makes him singular. My parents always wanted me to be more like the other children, as if I needed to be ‘cured’ of being different. Only Madame Wanda understood, she noticed how I hid behind the door to listen and one day she called me into the salon to ask me what kind of music I liked. I didn’t know any of the names, so I just said, ‘The music that sounds like water.’ She smiled. ‘Chopin, naturally. Did you know he was like you, half French, half Polish? My husband always lays claim to Chopin and points out his tomb at Père-Lachaise, but though Chopin’s body lies in Paris, his heart, ah, his heart is buried in Warsaw.’ And then Madame Wanda started paying for piano lessons for me, and all of a sudden I discovered a world where my shyness wasn’t an affliction but a gift.”

  Well, I thought, well! But given my field, it wasn’t her confidences that surprised me, it was the way she succeeded in drawing me out. Sylvie was interested in my work, listening with sympathy, with understanding, her quick intelligence making up for the gaps in her education. And when I mentioned the directorship, she said, “You were right to refuse if it means giving up your patients, that’s your passion.”

  How different her response was from Isabelle’s, but that was hardly surprising, they were opposites in every way. Isabelle was an excellent woman but not given to laughter, another reason she was easy to admire but hard to love. I told her Freud’s favorite joke once, about a husband who says to his wife, “If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.” Isabelle looked at me blankly and said, “How absurd, we’re already in Paris.” But when I repeated the joke to Sylvie, her eyes lit up with laughter.

  I took her face between my hands. “Chère amie,” I said, and kissed her.

  For days afterward, Sylvie replayed that thrilling moment to herself and couldn’t decide which moved her more, the ardent kiss or the caressing words: dear friend.

  Fabienne was incredulous when Sylvie told her. “You mean you haven’t made love yet? What in the world do you do?”

  “We talk, mostly.”

  “Talk? You?”

  Sylvie smiled at her friend’s scandalized tone. “I know it’s hard to believe.”

  “I suppose he wants to hear all about your childhood first, en psychologue.”

  “You’re wrong, it’s not my childhood we discuss.” It suddenly struck her that after all, he had drawn her to speak of her own childhood, without her even being aware of it.

  “Listen, sleep with him or not, just as you please, but don’t skip any more rehearsals, the St. Éphrem concert is only two weeks away. And how long does it take to choose a piano for the brats, anyway, it’s not as if you’re picking out a Stradivarius.”

  “They’re not brats,” Sylvie protested, but she did not admit that she had known almost from the first that the piano was less about the children than about herself. And she had already made her choice.

  When the Pleyel was delivered, the staircase leading to the upper floors proved too narrow and the movers had to hoist it up on a platform from the outside. Sylvie watched nervously as the piano glided over the treetops in its stately, surreal ascent, and as it came higher and higher, she thought, If a rope should break now! If a pulley should slip! But her fears were groundless, the movers knew what they were doing.

  They brought in the instrument through the balcony and Sylvie watched impatiently as they fitted the pedals, screwed the legs back on, turned it upright. The front door had barely shut behind them when she lifted the lid and ran her fingers along the keys, the sound pure and intimate, perfectly suited to the works of Chopin. She was tongue-tied with words, but music was a language in which she could be eloquent.

  As the first notes of the barcarolle filled the room, I listened intently, trying to make out something hidden behind that rippling veil of music. Only when Sylvie played the final fortissimo chords did I let out a deep breath. For the rest of my life I would remember those last notes, how they had asked “Do you?” and the answer came firm and clear, “I do.”

  That was us then.

  And this is us now.

  She plays alone in a lighted room, as I stand in the shadows below and listen to the notes drift down into the courtyard. What an affliction it is, this strange double vision.

  When I lay in a hospital bed at the Salpêtrière, where I had spent much of my working life, I remarked the progression of my disease both with a scientist’s detached expertise and a patient’s painful helplessness. And now I consider my new state with a similar doubleness, observing how, as I am slowly being absorbed into the past, the past is also being absorbed into me.

  The particularities of my life are gradually dissolving into a general undifferentiated flow like the mingled waters of tributaries and distributaries, time a river no lock-tender can sluice as it floods its banks, blurring the lines between then and now into a continuous present, its swirls and eddies buffeting me into other times, other lives.

  But sometimes the water flings up an object from the depths which snags itself on a rock to arrest the ceaseless flow, and I cling fiercely to that rock, which tethers me still to this life, this world: a quest cut short but not abandoned, and a yearning for Sylvie that is quickened to life by the music.

  Ever since he heard her play, Will has been gripped by a strange fascination with Sylvie. He studies her surreptitiously, casting an eye over her letters as he brings up the mail. Every time he hears Sylvie’s door open, he steps out on some pretext or other and sees how she squares her shoulders before going downstairs, as if it’s a daily struggle to face the world.

  Observing her so constantly, he feels he knows Sylvie better than he actually does, which is why when he casually mentions his work to her one day, it all comes tumbling out, how he must finish the revisions to his manuscript this summer, as incoming department chair he’ll be swamped in the fall, and then there’s all the paperwork for the adoption, after ten years of trying to conceive, they’re finally ready to adopt. Will stops, feeling foolish for having confided his disjointed anxieties at great length to a stranger, but Sylvie doesn’t seem to find it odd as she listens to him with such sympathy, such understanding.

  “It’ll change our lives forever and maybe I’m too old for this transition.”

  To his dismay, Sylvie’s eyes fill with tears and he feels like kicking himself for his thoughtlessness, his concerns so trivial in the face of her great transition. But before he can stammer out his apologies, she excuses herself abruptly and shuts the door.

  Ridiculous, Sylvie thinks, to let it affect her, the American meant no harm. She was naïve to assume that having people next door would be a safeguard against self-harm, nothing more. But the presence of someone in the abstract is entirely different from coming face-to-face with people, dealing with their questions, their curiosity. How can they understand anything of her life if they don’t know what Julien had been to her? She can’t begin to tell them, her eloquence lies in music, not in words.

  Too old, Will had said, and he not yet forty! Thankfully, Julien had never felt that way; at forty-eight, he had taken a leap into the unknown to start a new life with her. Sylvie had never once thought him too old, not then, not thirty years later. Only when she saw the X-ray of his lungs did she become suddenly aware that Julie
n was seventy-seven years old, would not live to be seventy-eight.

  Thirty years. How short in retrospect, though more than twice as long as he had been with Isabelle, and yet Sylvie still thought of her as the rightful wife. Which she was, of course, she had never agreed to a divorce, and even when enough years had passed that Julien no longer needed her consent, it was Sylvie who had said, “Let it be, let it be.” Let Isabelle have the artifacts of the failed marriage, Sylvie had the man himself. And the children…she had often said she loved Julien’s children as if they were her own, it was the same thing. But now she wonders, is it the same, does it even come close? Every time they visit her, she knows they will also cross the bridge to rue de Bièvre, where Isabelle will be waiting for her children, while Sylvie can never say the words “my children,” or even “my husband’s children,” or even “my husband.”

  But she is grateful, at least, that during Julien’s great illness she found the words to tell him what he was to her, the sun, dazzling her with his light, warming her with his warmth, that without him every morning of her life would be filled with bleakness, she could not bear it, and it broke her heart when he put his arms around her and said gently, “One survives, somehow.” And now she realizes why Will’s remarks have cut her to the quick: She’s going through the dreary motions of existence with no idea how to make it a life worth living.

  Of all her empty days, Sundays are the worst, knowing that in other homes children gather at their parents’ table for the ritual dimanche en famille. Music had always created an exalted space where her spirit found solace, but it no longer seems enough; now she seeks comfort in the nearby church, destroyed by lightning and tempests and fire but rebuilt time and again as a bulwark against despair. As the sun slants through the stained-glass windows, Sylvie’s eyes remain fixed on the Hebrew letters spelling out the name of God: I AM.

  I follow her gaze, but the words offer no consolation to my spirit. When I was alive, I stubbornly refused to bow my head before man or God, and death has not muted my quarrel with authority. I feel a now familiar eddy and swirl of memories not my own, but which have taken up residence in me through the osmosis of death. I see a king pacing this strip of land which one day will bear his name and I recognize that ascetic face, that emaciated frame. Louis IX is wearing a hairshirt and clutching his breviary, proud of his reputation for piety, consumed with his hatred of infidels. He rides to the Crusades abroad, he roots out unbelievers at home, and decrees that Jews must wear a yellow insignia which will make it easier to find them and expel them once and for all. But it’s not enough that France should be a Christian nation, the French must be true Christians.

  It amazes me that the same king who built the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle to house a crown of thorns and a fragment of the true cross should welcome the Inquisition into France. I would have thought these hallowed relics arguments against torture, not for it. But what I view as stunning hypocrisy, the Holy See regarded quite differently; for his relentless piety Louis IX was awarded an honor higher than his earthly throne: In 1297, he became the only French king canonized by Rome.

  That’s what the world calls him now: Louis the Saint.

  For whom this church is named. Where Sylvie kneels, contemplating the words: I AM.

  The answer to a prayer, if one is a believer.

  Which I am not.

  But I do believe in an enduring and intertwined life greater than the little lives we lead, so small, so separate. Like the island I love, once a spit of land fit only for grazing cows and fighting duels. A bridge is all it took to create this storied isle, where moneyed Rothschilds opened their doors, where penniless writers wrote their books, where Marie Curie worked on the radiation that saved countless lives but claimed her own. On this isle, Chopin played and Wagner composed, Baudelaire and Gautier and Voltaire wrote, Daubigny, Corot, and Chagall painted, Camille Claudel chiseled her way to madness, and thousands of ordinary people lived and loved and died, their names obliterated by time. All on one small island in but one city. How much more the world.

  Alice runs with a long, easy stride around the island, glad that this early in the morning there are few cars about, except for the streetsweeper’s truck spraying torrents of water to wash away the dog droppings from the previous day. Mist rises off the river, the poplars rustle in the breeze, and the perspiration dries on her skin as soon as it forms. Even in the heart of Paris, one can almost imagine oneself in the country, especially at the weekly markets with their mounds of earthy vegetables, the pig snouts garnished with parsley, the wild strawberries that perfume the air. Her favorite is the covered Marché des Enfants Rouges, but when she asks who were the red children, no one seems to know.

  Returning from the market one Sunday, Will and Alice find the courtyard filled with birdsong, Ana Carvalho has brought out her birdcages now that the weather is fine. She would let the birds fly about in the courtyard, she tells them, but a raptor carried off one of her darlings once, so now she is more careful. Have they seen the kestrels nesting at Notre Dame? Now, that’s a sight worth the airfare to Paris.

  She removes a singing finch from its cage and holds it in her hand. Will smiles as Ana croons to the bird and it responds with ecstatic cheeps. This was what he had hoped for—real people living real lives, scenes they would never have witnessed if they stayed at a hotel. He had just passed lines of tourists queuing up at Berthillon’s for ice cream and he could not help thinking that on previous trips he and Alice had been like them, clutching Michelin maps and museum guides, perennial onlookers rather than participants. But on this balmy Sunday, Will feels he is finally penetrating the polished surface of the city. He hopes to go deeper still, to be invited inside a home, though Fabienne says it’s rare for an outsider to cross the threshold.

  Sylvie returns from church dreading the long afternoon ahead. She sees Will and Alice in the courtyard and thinks of asking them over for lunch, a simple fortune du pot, whatever is on hand. But just then the judge and his wife drive in, and Sylvie loses her nerve and hurries upstairs.

  After thirty years, the Cheroiseys still make her feel like an impostor, smuggled into this aristocratic enclave under false pretenses, unremarkable in every way and unworthy of their acquaintance.

  Nonsense, Julien said, she was remarkably fine, remarkably brave.

  Brave? Surely Julien was making fun of her—everyone knew how she shrank from the world.

  But he was perfectly serious. “Coeur de lion,” he said.

  It seemed meager comfort whenever she came across the haughty couple who looked her up and down with such disdain. Once Madame de Cheroisey had knocked on their door to ask if Docteur Dalsace would speak to the concierge about her birds; the courtyard was white with droppings and the smell was “très nasty.” She liked to sprinkle English words into her conversation like parsley on potatoes. Julien said that certainly Sylvie would have a word with Ana Carvalho. Léonie de Cheroisey recoiled. “Yes,” she said sourly, “one can see they’re très chummy.” And indeed Sylvie felt more at ease with Ana Carvalho than she did with the patrician inhabitants of the building. She had often stopped by for coffee in the concierge’s loge, but after all these years, she had never entered the Cheroisey apartment and had spoken to them only on the stairs or in the courtyard.

  Now, rinsing some mâche leaves for a salad, Sylvie glances down into the courtyard where the Americans are chatting with the Cheroiseys, who ration their smiles as if they’ll run out of them if they aren’t careful, while the Taylors laugh with their usual happy exuberance. But perhaps she is romanticizing the Taylors’ marriage as she once romanticized Isabelle and Julien’s. With a sigh, she turns back to her lunch, but the mâche, still squeezed tight in her hands, is bruised and discolored.

  Abruptly, Sylvie pushes away her plate and goes to Julien’s desk. She slides open the secret drawer and pulls out the sealed envelope, uncertainly turning it over in her hand as
she remembers Isabelle’s strange summons right after Julien’s death. Sylvie had hurried across the bridge, Coco trotting at her heels as she turned onto the familiar street, patrolled by gendarmes now that one of its inhabitants, François Mitterrand, had become president. But when she reached Isabelle’s house, she remembered they were supposed to meet in the public garden next door. As soon as he saw the NO DOGS sign that barred him from all the city’s most inviting patches of grass, Coco heaved a deep sigh and flopped down on the pavement outside as Sylvie went in through the gate.

  Isabelle was already seated on a bench, reading a magazine. She still cut a handsome figure, though the pitiless sunlight revealed her thinning hair, her papery skin. Unaccountably, Sylvie felt a lump come into her throat. They shook hands formally, and Isabelle’s distinctive perfume lingered on Sylvie’s hand.

  The hortensia bushes were in full bloom, and their white lacecaps nodded in the breeze. It was so quiet that they could hear bees buzzing in the vine that clambered over the garden walls.

  “I imagine the last few months have been difficult,” Isabelle said. At least her voice was still the same, clear and carrying.

  Sylvie nodded. Seeing Julien suffer was unbearable, she would gladly have driven them both off the embankment into the freezing waters of the Seine. But they had sold the car, and Julien was hooked up to machines at Salpêtrière, and all she could do was sit there and keep watch, so that at first it had seemed like a relief when the doctor led her out into the courtyard shaded by sycamores and said it wouldn’t be long now. She had nodded, thinking anything would be better than this prolonged and final leave-taking. But when the moment came, she found herself utterly unprepared.