I barely heard what he said anyway. Celeste was just out of her bath and the red robe was loosely belted around her narrow waist. Inside her wide sleeves her white skin again seemed to me to be like snow, but not cold; she held the promise of warmth. Her knees; the barely visible, intricate tracing of veins at her wrists. Her hair was out and wet at the tips. Rosewater scent.
‘None of this suits you Cesare, and if that’s the way then all right,’ Pasqua said, but not without a touch of sympathetic humour. ‘With the masks there’d be nothing to stop you taking whoever you want. The only limitation would be your own energy. But if you don’t want to join us, keep living like an aesthete.’
He was a satyr, a strange combination of artist, intellectual and peasant. Celeste left my bedside and was getting herself ready, but when she heard me tell Bruno Pasqua that I had a ticket for the morning train she returned to my door and said, ‘And I can imagine you’re not coming back. You hate it here don’t you? You hate us all.’
This time my silence wasn’t for being tongue-tied but for all the things I wanted to say and couldn’t. There was a curious expression in her eyes. An even more curious expression came into Bruno Pasqua’s face – but he was worldly enough to take stock and conceal it.
‘What is it? Do you think he’s hurt worse than it looks?’
Celeste searched for words that didn’t come. Something was dawning inside her and I had no idea what it was.
‘We’ve never met before . . .?’
‘You read his books and I suppose they’ve stayed with you,’ Bruno interrupted her. ‘So you think you know him.’
He took her hand in a proprietorial grasp and now I knew that he understood my desire for his woman. What he didn’t know was what thoughts were or weren’t in her own mind.
‘You really won’t stay for our meetings, Cesare?’ Bruno asked briskly. ‘Monday and Tuesday. They’ll be quick and then our work will be done. It is your future.’
I shook my head.
The man observed me for a moment, simply observed me. Then with that firm grip of ownership he led Celeste into their bedroom and shut the door. I heard their sounds. In all likelihood he wanted me to hear them. I imagined him stinking of other women and ravishing her with violence. The man was a king and I was a clown. My thoughts wouldn’t let me be, and I dreamed of smashing down the door.
The rest of the apartment wasn’t so much empty without Celeste as it was dead. I thought about a final walk around the city to do something, to occupy my mind, but once I’d eaten and packed my bag for the morning train the side of my head continued to throb and the lump on my cheek seemed to have a heartbeat. A quarter bottle of Bruno Pasqua’s whisky didn’t help, so I downed what was left in a flask of brandy.
I fell asleep thinking, Thank God I’m leaving this place, then I dreamed of stinking cesspools and drunken louse-ridden bodies singing wartime songs. An old street-witch with pendulous breasts said, ‘You’ll never have your own woman so why not give a sou for my cunt?’ The me of milky skin and no face was standing behind her, fucking blindly and without passion, then he picked apart her spine and took out her heart, which was a dripping sack of wine.
Finally I was able to open my eyes. My pulse was racing. I wasn’t alone. A naked woman in a gaudy theatrical mask of fake jewels and glitter was sitting on the bedside and she was gazing at me, as she’d been doing for some time.
It’s always interesting to watch the way a stranger sleeps, don’t you think?
There was no scent of perfume or soap, only of her skin, damp with perspiration. She didn’t move closer. The moonlight entering the window was the only light she wanted. Slowly I discerned the shine of her eyes behind the slits of the ridiculous mask. Long hair was draped over one shoulder and fell over her white full breast. Her hips were slim; her skin had a honey glow and would taste the same.
Celeste didn’t speak. I didn’t know where Bruno Pasqua was. He could have been in the apartment or out fucking somewhere else. I didn’t care. I didn’t need to ask Celeste what she was doing here; her body spoke. For whatever reason I was in her mind as much as she was in mine. Not a time for talk, only for drinking her in. I could see that she liked the way I didn’t let words intrude.
Silence is so much more exciting.
The rise and fall of Celeste’s breast and the walls turn to vapour.
Celeste’s skin glows but she only wants me to look into her hazel eyes.
She stops when she wants to stop then she’s under me and I lift her mask.
I opened my eyes onto a grey morning of gorgeous rain, in a fifth floor flat on the rue Saint Louis en L’Ile, in a building that dated to the 1550s. I rolled over and pulled Celeste to me. This was how it had been for weeks.
Other than Celeste, Signora Rosa was the only person who knew that instead of taking the morning train to the French–Italian border that Sunday, I’d simply walked across the nearby bridge, Pont Marie, carrying my bag. I had an address that I was to find and a borrowed key that I could use. Two small rooms, a bath, a kitchen and a new water closet installed down the hall. The finery of a young woman. Clean plates and cutlery and glasses, flowers in vases, Peppermint tea. Bed linen and pillows touched by her skin and hair.
That Sunday, I put my head down and dreamed where she dreamed, but it wasn’t enough.
That Sunday, hours and hours of sitting and waiting.
Books on her table, piled in corners, absently pushed under the bed. They were all in French except for something in Catalan. A night awake at every sound, still waiting.
Monday she turned up at noon, finally having escaped her paramour. She had to bathe before we could lie together, to get him off her, his touch, his spit, his semen. Hours spent lying in the bright afternoon sunshine of her rooms then she was gone again. Veronica was forgotten. Celeste, my second woman. No, my first. Veronica no longer existed.
She couldn’t return until Pasqua’s train had departed, then she ran – ran! – to me, breathless and excited, falling to her knees and devouring me as if she hadn’t had a man in months or years. I was reborn, heartaches, troubles, loneliness, all gone. Only Celeste and her hands and her mouth and getting out of her clothes all at the same time.
These rooms were her private world. Bruno Pasqua had never been here, nor any man who’d paid for her. Once or twice there had been men she’d loved, but never to stay, to sleep.
‘Then why me?’
Her eyes said, Yes, why you, Cesare?
It curbed my jealousy a little. Pasqua had never experienced life with her here. This was ours. He’d never slept in her bed or woken up sharing her pillow. One hundred other beds and one hundred other pillows, but not these.
‘I’m not going back to work,’ Celeste said.
‘Good.’
‘Maybe you won’t want me for very long, because of Bruno and all the others.’
I brought her into her own living room. Sat her on the wooden dining table and parted her thighs. She wasn’t acting when she shivered.
It was like this every day, punctuated by sleep, food and long trips into Parisian streets and quarters which no longer enervated me. Very little talk. We hadn’t spoken that first night she’d come to my bed in her mask; we’d made our plans with so few words it was as if we read signals in our skin.
Celeste had Bruno Pasqua’s collection of new manuscripts to work on. He liked to send her one or two a month. She wrote reports on good points and bad and suggested things that might be improved or reconsidered. It wasn’t her job to do this with every book that passed through his hands, only those he was in two minds about. Mine had remained his pet projects; Celeste understood why. Ironic that our longest conversation so far was about him.
‘He was a slave in that family of his. Love and hate between father and brothers. They sailed and fished; he dreamed. Love and ha
te also for the island and sea. He escaped like the boy in your book. Into the north. They hunted him and beat him and dragged him home. He escaped again and made his life the way he wanted it. Decades to reconcile. That’s what he sees in what you write. Himself, his family, his homeland. That’s why he goes back so often.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll never go back.’
‘Never’s too long.’
‘Then what’s next?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You and me,’ I told her.
‘How?’
‘In whichever way you want.’
‘What if I change my mind and decide I really do like to please men and be paid?’
‘You worked in the salon and didn’t need my permission, so why look for it now?’
‘I can open myself to any man I want?’
‘If you don’t do what you want then who are you?’
‘You’ll stay if I do and you’ll stay if I don’t?’
‘One or the other, yes. But I have an alternative to offer.’
We moved to the bed. She relaxed back. I gazed into those eyes, hazel with tiny motes you could see if you looked closely.
‘Tell me about this alternative,’ she said and she slid me into a beautiful place no one would pay for again.
‘I’ll tell you. Whenever I look at you there’s no more world.’
‘And?’
‘And that’s how we live. Inside a circle that’s for us. Outside of it wars go on, men fight, politicians lie and all the good people of the world continue to be robbed blind.’
She was panting, urging me to go in harder. I moved more slowly.
Celeste squeezed her eyes shut and said, ‘Women go on doing the bidding of men and slaves try to get free and promises last no longer than the time it takes to make them.’
‘Except in our circle.’
‘How will we eat?’
‘My books might give us money.’
‘And I’ve got savings,’ she sighed. ‘I can sell the jewellery my amants lavished on me.’
‘No, give it away, burn everything, throw it all out, that’ll be better.’
‘Everything must go.’
‘Yes. And we stay.’
‘You and me.’
‘You’ve got one man.’
‘I’ll have to dress in rags for him.’
‘Why dress at all?’
Fools could sell their souls and give their fortunes for her but I’d only had to find a road out of hell. She gazed ahead into her own eyes in the mirror. The glass vibrated. She didn’t want me to stop; I didn’t want anything to be different to the way we were today, and didn’t think to ask myself why.
Small cheques arrived from Bruno Pasqua’s company, redirected to me by Rosa, but they weren’t enough. The book wasn’t selling and he hadn’t been able to interest publishers in other countries, France included. I didn’t care. I went and found myself work. It was an easy thing to get a common job for a week or a month, and make the most of the sun and air. No labour was going to hurt me, whether it was with the stonemasons or on construction sites, the marble cutters or the gravediggers. Some employers paid well and others were miserly as ticks. Some work offered good clean effort with sweat and exertion, and some like the gravedigging kept me ankle- and knee-deep in mud and bogs.
The cheques, Celeste’s savings, the piecemeal odd jobs: we ate well enough and went out when we wanted, drinking wine in cafés and taverns, sitting in movie houses and watching all the latest pictures and newsreels. When it came to dances or glittering clubs Celeste wasn’t interested. She went from taking a line of men in a single night, to me. Her friendships moved from lovely women and glamorous lesbians, to me. She was happy to forget fat wallets and expensive gifts and preferred to greet me as I was, caked in mud, sweat and grime, at the end of every working day.
I discovered she had no friends, no confidantes, no family. Her work had been her life, and her flat with its books and manuscripts, her sanctuary.
One evening as I was coming up the stairs a man I didn’t know was coming down the other way. He was dressed well enough but I smelled the meat and black blood of him.
‘What is it? Who was that man?’
‘He said my vacation’s gone on long enough. If I don’t come back to work by Friday there’ll be trouble.’
I took the spiral staircase two steps at a time and didn’t catch up with him until I saw him crossing the street towards the back of Notre Dame. We were in the grounds and with the element of surprise I was able to push him away from passers-by and forward into a copse of trees. I slapped his piggish cheeks. His knife glinted but it was useless at his feet before it could do its job. His eyes bulged. I held him by his fat throat hard against the tree trunk, the dappled leaves like musical notes in the golden rays of the sun.
‘She won’t come back,’ I whispered to his ear.
The man was passing into unconsciousness and I let him slide down. I crouched with him so that we remained face to face. As he gasped, his colour returned and he came back to life. I straightened his collar but loosened his tie, readjusted his vest and rebuttoned it where it had come open.
He started to take me in. I picked up his knife and opened his coat. A leather scabbard in his armpit. I slid in the thin, razor-sharp blade and clipped the handle in place. This man saw nothing but a dirty, grimy, sweaty boy. A boy of no standing. I could see what was in his eyes. It wasn’t hatred, only the knowledge of what he was going to do.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
He wouldn’t answer.
I spat in his face and left him sitting in the dust.
Celeste bathed and fed me and we held each other all the way through the night. In the morning I rose and stretched, but only to make coffee. I didn’t get ready to go out to work. I wasn’t going to leave her. We stayed in all day, then as evening fell went out to bars where we drank too much and forgot our troubles. Dinner was in a small kitchen full of the lonely and forgotten. Down by the Seine we strolled along the quays where prostitutes sucked and jerked their clients and more men came along looking for their relief. I wondered if this was where Celeste had her start. I didn’t ask. We didn’t talk. Silence was all we needed between us and it was right and the way we had to be.
When we slept I kept a small axe and a wood-handled machete by the bed. The door was locked and barricaded with a propped chair. I’d scattered crumpled newspaper pages around the floor so that any creeping footsteps would wake me. We knew that soon we would find a new home; this one was tainted. We’d go somewhere we’d never be found, into the provincial countryside maybe, think about settling in some picturesque little town. Maybe we ought to have left already, but in those days I had too much confidence in my abilities, I was too arrogant to be afraid of anyone.
Two or three times I snapped straight awake; later I dreamed I had no eyes. In my dream the man with the piggish cheeks and fat neck finally came calling, but I couldn’t see him at all. He didn’t arrive with other men and he didn’t burst in through the door, but he was here as smoke which seeped through the cracks of the floors and the walls and the doors. He filled the stairwell and he passed into our rooms, running his fingers through our hair and lingering over Celeste’s sleeping face. Let me see you, I told him. Then I was awake and choking in the dark and I grabbed Celeste by the arms and rolled her out of the bed onto the floor. That man had done his work – she lolled like a ragdoll and I found her face and slapped her but she only murmured and was very still again.
There was no light. I kept us low, but the floorboards were hot with the fire rising from below. It was black and acrid in these rooms and my eyes were burning, my chest already constricted. I couldn’t see where to go or where anything was. Now the crackling and cooking filled my ears, and as the fi
re intensified it actually glowed through the smoke; finally I saw the outline of our front door in an aura of red, and that’s how I knew where not to go, to not even try to get out that way.
I dragged Celeste with me, but the only thing I could do was to stand, and that was worse because now my head was enveloped in the dizzying smoke. I threw Celeste over my shoulder and ran towards the indistinct radiance of the windows and when I kicked the first set open there was an instant whoosh of thunder and storms and the rooms ignited.
We’d tumbled like fallen puppets to a lower adjoining roof where neighbours were already helping people through their windows, out of the blaze. Someone had quickly thrown an overcoat over Celeste’s hair and put the fire out. Two people were dead: a forty-nine-year-old bachelor and a grandmother living alone. Both from floors below us.
When the doctors at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital continued their lung capacity tests, they found I’d regained normal functioning in only a matter of days. In fact, my lungs appeared to be better than normal. Incredulous, a group of doctors wanted to keep looking me over, discussing various elite athletes, professional Tour de France bicyclists whom they knew approached my capacity. I shied away for obvious reasons but there was something else too: the hospital made my skin crawl. In a whispery voice Celeste explained its name. In Pitié-Salpêtrière’s original incarnation its buildings had been a gunpowder factory, then a prison for prostitutes. Twin revulsions for me.
The doctors would tap my chest and back and say things like: ‘What a constitution!’; ‘The development!’; ‘Do you have any idea how lucky the both of you are?’
Celeste coughed up more black sputum than me and seemed to be in worse condition, but it wasn’t very long before the doctors came to like Celeste’s recuperative powers even more than mine. The words ‘miracle’ or ‘miraculous’ were used, then dropped. Instead I saw raw confusion, curiosity, and an acute concentration in their frequent ministrations. All of which set me to thinking.
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