Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  “Don’t look,” I want to plead, “don’t look.” But it is too late, she gazes longingly at the face she sees, a face so like her own. The world spins slowly on its axis, the sun slants into the river, the water flows toward the sea, but for one long moment she freezes into immobility as she looks into the reflected visage, searching the depths for secrets not meant for the living.

  When was it she first sensed her mother’s presence? During those long winter nights in the laundry when a draft fanned the dying coals into flame? On still summer days in the courtyard when a sudden breeze lifted her hair? How cleverly she has flushed her out! But only those about to join our ranks can see us; and once they have, there is no retracing one’s steps.

  Delphine holds on to the coping and pulls herself back. Wrapped in her thoughts, she stands there as the sun sinks into darkness, streetlamps cast their pools of light, and windows glow with the warmth that attracts all wanderers home. But she is homeless and alone, with only her mother’s ghost for company.

  Her face is pale as plaster in the lamplight and her mother bends to kiss her forehead, the first caress that lonely girl has known. Delphine turns back toward the river, her countenance transfigured by a smile of such beauty that I could weep. Then she climbs up on the parapet, closes her eyes, and leaps into the water, breaking the surface once, twice, thrice, before the undertow carries her away, leaving behind only the aftershock of ripples. And then the water is smooth again.

  She has the same smile on her face when she is displayed on a slab at the morgue. Curious spectators jostle one another before her corpse, and a buzz of speculation fills the air. “They gaffed her at quai de Louvre, drowned recently I reckon, see that smooth skin, it would have peeled right off if she soaked too long.” But the voices fall silent as they look at her peaceful face. They say even the mortician, hardened to such cases, wept when he saw the unknown woman fished out from the Seine.

  No one comes forward to claim the body. She is buried in a pauper’s grave, abandoned in death as she was in birth. But her death mask sells briskly. Everywhere I turn I’m confronted by a thousand Delphines, she has become a rumor dispersed around the city. No one knows her name; they call her L’Inconnue de la Seine. It becomes the fashion for young girls to copy her appearance, for young men to write sonnets to the unknown beauty. I cannot dispel the last sight of Delphine’s face, the sound of her body hitting the water, and yet the river flows as it has always done, undisturbed by one body more or less when so many thousands have been cast into its depths.

  I have learned from the mistakes of the past: Sylvie must not see me. I forced myself to hide from her in uncongenial corners of the city, in obscure patches of history, condemning myself to the long ache of exile. I missed the sight of her dear face, the sound of Schubert from her window. Yet I resolved to keep away from those peaceful quays until it was safe to be in her company again.

  What an effort it had cost me then to banish myself from Sylvie’s presence till the waves of madness receded; only when the danger had passed did I return to this stretch of quay. But now I wonder if I have underestimated her fragility, if I have come back too soon. I had felt a deep ambivalence about burdening Sylvie with the sorrows of my past, about drawing her into the obsessive and futile quest that my death had brought to an end. With her accidental discovery of the folder, fate had taken the decision out of my hands.

  But when I see the bleakness on Sylvie’s face, I fear that finding the envelope might tip the scales of a mind still precariously balanced between life and death. Must I leave here again, so that if by chance she turns her head…but she does not.

  Sylvie crosses the bridge to the Left Bank without lingering by the river, without feeling its pull. She enters the Jardin des Plantes, hurries down the allée of chestnuts, and stops at the entrance to the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, where a wave of grief so strong washes over her that she feels unable to move. She knows that reminders of her loss lurk everywhere, triggered sometimes by a memory, sometimes by nothing at all. Grief still ambushes her every morning when she reaches for Julien, and each time the realization hits her afresh. Never again will she wake to find Julien by her side. Never again. Never again will he walk home by that path from the hospital where he had been a doctor for so long and a patient before his death. Never again. In the immediate aftermath of her loss, those words had led her to the brink of madness, and she wondered how many women locked up howling at the Salpêtrière in a different time were only mad with grief, how many women even now in the modern hospital on the grounds of the old insane asylum were only mad like her, being treated in the psychiatric ward by someone like Julien.

  But it was Isabelle’s words that had pushed her over the brink: with him only for his money. How patiently Isabelle had waited to exact her revenge, how unerringly she had struck when Sylvie was most vulnerable. For Sylvie the house on rue de Bièvre had always existed on a different plane, a vision seen through a window, and she had yearned to be part of that world; but Julien’s leaving had destroyed that vision, had broken that world into fragments. People might wonder what he saw in Sylvie that compelled him to wreck his marriage, but no one could doubt what she saw in him, no one could wonder why she had fallen in love. And now Isabelle had made a mockery of that love, turned it into something shabby, something sordid. Surely Isabelle was wrong, surely people hadn’t thought that of her. Julien hadn’t. But never again could she ask him, never again would he reassure her. Never again. The words were like a ceaseless chord in the silent apartment, turning it into a deafening bedlam from which death offered refuge, like the bitter comfort of cyanide to captured résistants. Looking down from the balcony at the iron spikes below, she would gather herself to fly through the air. Or she would stare at the river, swift and dark. One graceful leap, and then sudden, blessed silence.

  And then, after weeks of such torment, Sylvie had heard a sound, a bar of music, separate and distinct from the din in her mind. A shimmering phrase that hovered tantalizingly in the air, just beyond her reach. It was drowned out again, but she knew that it existed now, on the other side of madness.

  Some months later, a passing car stopped on the quay and she heard it again on the radio, that achingly lovely phrase, then the one that followed, then the one after that, and nine wistful bars later, the cello gliding into the conversation, both voices mingling in a liquid stream that drew her beyond tumult and sorrow to a consoling expanse of calm. Many years ago she and Fabienne had played that Schubert sonata at St. Éphrem for an audience made up of pensioners from the nearby maison de retraite, who listened as if the music could restore to them all that had been robbed by age and infirmity. That memory recalled her to her senses. Reluctantly she had turned her face from the river, from the iron spikes, from the temptation to leap. She shuttered her windows and contemplated the long years ahead.

  Fabienne’s remedy was perpetual motion, and indeed dividing up the apartment had kept Sylvie occupied for weeks, but the mindless activity tired her without engaging her interest. Fabienne called frequently, and sent her postcards filled with brief imperatives—don’t mope, keep busy, start teaching. Sylvie knew she should resume the piano lessons she had given up during Julien’s illness, but she didn’t feel ready, not yet, the music still too closely tied to him. But when the folder came to light, she had felt the first stirrings of curiosity.

  No, she thinks now, it was much more than curiosity, it was the beginning of a quest. Making sense of its contents might help her reclaim Julien, might stifle the sound of Isabelle’s words. But most of all, the photograph of Clara made Sylvie feel she might finally be able to do something for Julien, and she realizes what she has lacked since his death is a sense of purpose.

  Sylvie turns away from the entrance to the hospital, and walks quickly down a side street, looking for the name of a bank. She enters the glass door, hands Julien’s card to the receptionist, and asks for the manager. In a
few minutes she is ushered into Monsieur Billey’s office and she places Julien’s checkbook before him. He looks through the register, at the regular sum taken out every month. There is still money in the account, not a fortune but a substantial amount, as if Julien had envisaged the payments would continue for several years.

  “Yes, we had standing instructions from Docteur Dalsace for a monthly remittance to be made from this account. Every year, he reauthorized us to continue with the deposits. But we did not receive authorization last year, and the account has gone dormant.”

  “He passed away in the fall.”

  “My condolences.”

  Sylvie wonders if he can tell her into whose account the money was deposited.

  Monsieur Billey spreads out his hands; although refusals issue from his lips all day, he takes great care to avoid actually saying the word non. “Désolé, that information is confidential.”

  Sylvie asks if it is possible to reactivate the account and continue the payments.

  “Dommage, it’s not a joint account.”

  Sylvie thinks for a moment. “Well, could I withdraw the funds?”

  “Possibly. You have a notarized copy of the will?”

  Sylvie has come prepared with all the necessary paperwork. Monsieur Billey glances through the will.

  “And the death certificate?”

  As she hands it over, she thinks sadly, it’s all that is left of a man’s life in the end, dates on paper scanned indifferently by a stranger’s eyes.

  “And the marriage certificate?”

  Sylvie hesitates. “I’m afraid I don’t have it.”

  “In that case, je regrette, Madame…”

  Sylvie gathers all the papers and puts them back in her folder as she considers the best course of action. Perhaps they can sort things out when Julien’s son comes to Paris in the fall, Charles is a banker himself, he will know what to do.

  Monsieur Billey repeats that he is désolé he cannot help her further. “It is not I who makes the rules, you understand, but I have to follow them, evidently.”

  Evidently. An image flashes into Sylvie’s mind, Isabelle brandishing the marriage certificate at the bank manager. That’s mine, evidently, she says, and dormant accounts come to life like seeds waiting for rain, vault doors open wide to reveal their secrets and disgorge their contents into Isabelle’s waiting hands. Sylvie sighs and rises to her feet. But the thought of being powerless to do something for Julien awakens a fierce streak of resistance. Whoever the recipient, whatever the reason, Julien thought it important enough that he hadn’t missed a single payment for more than forty years.

  Sylvie takes a deep breath and says, “I would like to open my own account here.” She signs all the forms and writes out a clear set of instructions: the amount remitted from Julien’s account is to go now from her account to the same recipient. “I suppose you cannot tell me even now who that is?”

  “Désolé…”

  But if the person wants to contact Sylvie, can the bank manger put them in touch?

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, you can be sure of that.”

  It might turn out to be nothing, she thinks. Someone Julien was helping out, repayment of an old debt, completely innocuous remittances. But the seed of suspicion that Isabelle had so skillfully planted has borne its toxic fruit. Sylvie can still hear the terrifyingly casual tone in which Isabelle had talked about paying off a servant in the family way, as one does. Had Julien had a child outside his marriage? Were these payments over decades intended to maintain that child? To support a former mistress? She may never find out. Is she even sure she wants to know? She’s afraid of what it might say about Julien, about their life together, that he could keep something so momentous from her. Was there a side to his character that she’d never suspected, something that would diminish him in her eyes, would take the edge off the fineness she had always admired? She can’t bear to look back on the life they lived through this prism of doubt.

  But it’s done now, she has sent out a flare into the darkness. Leaving the bank, Sylvie thinks it’s unlikely Julien’s wife will ever discover what she has done. If she knew, perhaps Isabelle would take back those ugly words: with him only for his money. She shakes her head and thinks wryly that it’s ridiculous how much time she spends brooding about Isabelle, when it’s doubtful Isabelle has ever given her a second thought.

  But seeing Sylvie after all this time had shaken Isabelle much more than she had imagined. All the old bitterness had risen to the surface, like frogs hiding in mud till the ice thawed. She remembered as if it were yesterday the moment she realized Julien was never coming back.

  At first she was confident the affair would blow over, even though she simply couldn’t understand how Julien had lost his head over a woman in every way inferior to herself. Isabelle’s family and friends had warned her that Julien was “not their kind,” but she had defied them to marry him, and indeed she was right, things had turned out well, Julien’s work, their children, their home, no one ever declined an invitation to dine chez Dalsace. And Julien had walked out on it all.

  Was it worth it, she wanted to ask him, was it worth it to lose everything they had together merely for the devil in the flesh that could never be appeased? At the thought of him with Sylvie, she felt an emotion that was both primitive and powerful. Surely it was not jealousy, it was inconceivable that she should be jealous of such a woman. But the emotion spread through her like loosestrife, its invasive roots choking out all thought until she felt herself drowning in that vast purple sea.

  A year after he left, Isabelle still believed Julien would return to rue de Bièvre, though fewer and fewer traces of his presence remained. The fragrance of his tobacco no longer swirled into the air when the drapes were pulled back, his desk was cleared of papers. Isabelle had taken to working in his study, her tapestries and silk threads laid out on his table.

  Odile often joined her there for tea in the afternoon. Berthe brought in the tea tray and poured Lapsang souchong into cups of porcelain so fine it was translucent. Helping herself to one of Berthe’s macarons, Odile said, “These are divine, better than Ladurée.”

  Troublemaker, thought Berthe scornfully, everything always divine or heavenly, but the first one to carry tales, why when Monsieur left, it wasn’t five minutes before she had spread the news all over the city. As for herself, she missed Monsieur Julien, a kind word for everyone, she wondered how he was getting on, could that young girl even roast a chicken, never mind anything else.

  Odile questioned Isabelle about the terms of the separation, oblivious of Berthe’s presence; to her, servants did not count as an audience. Isabelle did not say anything at first, one discussed finances only with one’s banker. But then she said briefly that money was not an issue, Julien had been more than generous.

  “Take a trip, then, get away for a bit.”

  Isabelle said she might go south for a couple of weeks in the fall, the children would be with Julien then.

  “Don’t bother with the Côte d’Azur, it’s ruined. Go to Greece, find a young lover.”

  Berthe pursed her lips and left the room, and Isabelle said coolly that it was much too soon to think of love.

  “Love, what does that have to do with women our age?” Odile twiddled Isabelle’s silk threads, irritated by her friend’s composure. Not that she wanted her to have hysterics, but surely it was acceptable to show a little emotion under the circumstances. A pity, Odile thought, that Isabelle hardly entertained anymore. Understandable, but a pity all the same. Those wonderful dinners. Since Julien had left her for that creature, Lucie or Sophie or whatever her name was, Isabelle had withdrawn from society, and the sooner she started circulating again, the better. Too long a retreat, and the world finds it can get along without you.

  Even after Odile had left, her remark continued to rankle Isabelle. Women our age. Odile h
ad an elastic notion of age considering she was a good twenty years older. Isabelle picked through the skeins of silk she had steeped in infusions of olive leaves and weak tea to match the faded greens and browns of the old tapestry, not an original verdure by Oudry, but valuable all the same. Deftly she repaired the depredation of moths, sunlight glinting on the needle as it darted in and out. A stroke of luck that the museum had offered her this employment, it had made the last few months bearable. And of course it suited her perfectly to work from home. She looked at her surroundings with satisfaction, her eyes resting on the Daubigny she had recently moved into the study.

  How soothing it was to look upon that sunlit rill; like the tapestries she worked on, an immutable landscape, a changeless France. Perhaps that’s what had attracted so many to pétainisme, the promised return to an idyllic past. Isabelle shrugged, Julien was the analyst, not she. So brilliant at penetrating people’s minds, but unable to see what was going on right under his nose, completely taken in by that sly girl.

  Julien wouldn’t look at paintings, he claimed that after the horrors of the war, art seemed an indulgence. Isabelle had argued he was inconsistent, he loved music, didn’t he? But still, she had respected his sentiments, had left the walls of his study bare. Even now, the Daubigny rested on an easel, she hesitated to hang it in case he returned. But the silence of the house struck her suddenly and she realized she was deluding herself; Julien would not return. A sob rose in her chest and burst out into the stillness, then another, then another, grating harshly in her own ears.