by John Elliott
‘My old name. Call me Lucas.’
‘Lucas.’
The line went dead. In spite of the warmth indoors, Lucas sensed both the chill of the mist outside and that of his recovered Atlantic dawn. Lucky rolled over once again on the shingle at his feet. She yammered then bounded ahead to the water’s edge, her paws and legs in and out of the receding tide. Above, the sea birds mewed and cawed in complaint and response, their wings tirelessly hovering as if they swooped forever over some perennial, gigantic rubbish dump. Only the ocean’s distinctive beat and roll was missing. Its absence brought him a vague sense of unease.
He left the hall and let the hot tap run freely in the bathroom sink before inserting the plug. All he needed to do was concentrate on Sylvia. Her image would fill the gaps. He decided to go earlier than he had planned to the Rag Market.
‘Free,’ he muttered as he soaped his hands. No Walter, no Emmet, no Chance Company, no Sylvia’s benefactor, nor any present or past mists were going to disturb his inner resolve. While he brushed his teeth, his mouth grinned back at him in the mirror. He buried it in the nearest towel, thinking of the yellow towel Sylvia had used. ‘Free,’ he repeated when he switched off the light.
*
‘De quoi s’agit il?’
The question floated up from the open window on the bottom left of the building’s inner well. A man’s voice answered from somewhere inside the same apartment, the exact nature of his reply too faint for Fernando to make out. Madame Vernon, however, seemed satisfied, for she did not repeat her query.
The uncertain whine and the whistling, crackling sound of Radio Toulouse came from above as unseen fingers fumbled with the tuning dial.
Halfway down a door slammed followed a moment later by the crack of two slaps and the ensuing wail of le pauvre Emil.
At the Morsom’s directly opposite, plates were being taken from the dresser and deposited on the table, ready for the evening meal. Fernando hoped he might catch a glimpse of Juliette, but if she was already at home she lacked the generosity or the grace to appear in his line of vision.
Juliette. The truth was he should have been doing his homework, or at least practising his scales rather than idly sticking his head out of the kitchen window, eavesdropping on the neighbours. Juliette.
He imagined her in the white and black polka dot frock she had worn on the previous Sunday when she had come back from visiting her cousins in Lanemazan. He thought about the ascent his hand might make underneath that frock as it touched first the back of her knee and then encountered more warm flesh as it moved from her thigh to the curve of her buttock. He thought about the wonderful, entrancing moment when, while she picked up a bottle from the bottom of the cupboard, a shaft of sunlight had clearly picked out the shape of her bare legs and the outline of her pants. She had laughed and her face had reddened at his father’s crude remarks until Madame Morsom had said, ‘Tiens, tiens, sois le bienvenu, mais ça alors!’
Juliette. What would his hand meet if, instead of having her back to him, she faced him eye to eye? He knew, of course, but what would it feel like? He unbuttoned his fly and placed his hand over the base of his balls. It would be . . . No words were needed, only the movement of his fingers and the image.
He finished masturbating in the toilet on the landing that they shared with the Darshels on the same floor. ‘Les gogues,’ as Jacques Darshel, a carpenter from Paris, referred to it.
Agnes shuddered and dropped the page. She tried to visualise the boy’s face during the solitary act, cooped up, his trousers at his feet, in what she imagined was the cramped space of the sordid lavatory. It had been early evening then, all those years ago, as opposed to early morning now. Had he put on the light to masturbate just as she, unable to sleep, her mind endlessly racing with images of her father transmuted into the guise of Joe May, the founder of Chance Company, had eventually turned on her bedside lamp and begun to read the further instalment of the life of Fernando Cheto Simon which Roberto Ayza had handed her at the Berengaria Hotel?
This time no list of ‘witnesses’ was appended. There was simply this abrupt start to presumably his new life in France. What did he look like? How different had he been from the large portrait which had unexpectedly stared down and beyond her at the entrance to the exhibition? She needed some kind of proof, something more tangible than the coincidence of a neighbour’s name before she would accept that he, too, was in all probability her father, and yet her instinct told her he was, just as, when faced with the final bloated appearance of May, it had told her he might have died but René Darshel continued to live. Controlling her emotions, she located the subsequent passage and, steadying the rest of the pages against her upturned knees, read on.
*
Batiste now ate at French hours. He drank French drinks. At the moment his son dreamily relinquished the voluptuous image of Juliette in the realistic awareness that she was not likely to be interested in a younger kid, his father stood four-square at the zinc counter of Chez Alain, downing his first petit Ricard of the evening before bidding the company ‘à demain’.
A brisk two-minute walk took him to the Bar Zèbre where he had time for a couple more leisurely ones and a chat with la patronne about the day’s PMU payouts and the forecast state of the going at Saint-Cloud next afternoon. Over at the Tabac, he purchased his habitual packet of Boyards and then it was one more, or maybe two, at the Café des Cygnes, which steadied him for his arrival home and the preparation of the customary soup.
Since Fernando had come with himself and Thérèse from Llomera, he had not returned to Miranda. His adventures or ‘petites vacances’ as he called them were a thing of the past. He still kept his Party card, but, when someone asked him about the strength of the Workers’ Commissions or mentioned a planned strike, he smiled apologetically and said he knew nothing about it. Even when he bumped into fellow Mirandans he distanced himself from their embraces, their hullabaloo, their nostalgic lists of food, wine and whores, making himself scarce at the earliest opportunity. He much preferred to drink on his own or to go up the narrow stairs to the top floor of the Hôtel Régence to visit Odile, Fanny or Clothilde.
The truth was he was wounded inside, only it had taken him time to recognise the fact. The black bull they all dreamt of and worshipped, the fallen god they bred wild and free so that they could sooner or later encumber it with barbs, bewilder it with trumpets, then plunge their sword through the folds of its flesh, guiding the curved blade past its muscles and tendons to sever its arteries and stop its heart, its juddering body, which they hitched up and dragged away to butcher and to turn into triumphal meat, had gored him secretly. It had twisted its horn deep in his gut, while the world, in which he thought he had a place, maintained its usual show and composure, its implacable surface of this will ever be. His wound was not susceptible to treatment. It could not be assuaged by meat or drink or the placing of his cock into any known or unknown vagina. Nor was it like the wounds of his dead companions, Iusebio and Manolo, who one day had simply ceased to exist.
‘Not there’ was its name. ‘Condemned to be here’ was its prognosis. Not there with Antonetta to feel his lust subside into day by day domesticity. Not there to await the birth of his son. Not there to settle down in the place where he had been born and had always known. Not there when she fell ill and needed him. Not there when she died. Not even there when others bore her aloft and stood at the edge of the hole into which he had never gazed, and never would gaze, though he knew every step of the way, every turn of the road, every peeling patch of the cemetery wall. Each time he closed his eyes, he tried to be there. The brief time they had been together—in particular the night when she had asked nothing of him and he had been alive, more truly alive and sentient than at any other time of his life—he relived while the alcohol kept him tossing and turning, unable to sleep. Yet the face he saw, the body he so eagerly uncovered, was not utterly hers. A part of her had vanished during his long absence, which, to his horror, he repl
aced with the glances of others, the nape of a fractionally longer neck, the small of a surely slimmer back. The rapturous moments they had stolen together dissolved in an unwanted montage of other women who had looked in his eyes and had liked what they had seen. Antonetta was gone. She had eluded his beholding. Her grave was forever closed. No futile scratching of his at the covering dirt could allay his loss and pain.
*
Fernando, meanwhile, had been shipwrecked by his father’s increased moroseness. As the months went by, the vigour of Batiste’s decision to bring him to France had evaporated in broken-off conversations and more and more impenetrable silences. He could have returned to Llomera. It was not entirely impossible. Indeed, his aunt begged him to do so in her weekly letters, and at times it was his dearest wish, yet an irrevocable stubbornness, a determination come what may to brave the fates, kept him where he was.
As a stab at his father, he had insisted on enrolling under the name of Fernando Simon at the Lycée Jean Moulin where he soon picked up French with an ease that Batiste and the neighbours could only marvel at. Naturally, he spoke with the local accent of the Languedoc, but he was soon able to soften his consonants into the ‘langue d’oui’ when he went to his music lessons with Arsène Gil, a one-time inhabitant of Senlis in the Île de France. Within the building, Jacques Darshel introduced him to the strange utterances of ‘Paname’, and a weekly reading of the raffish exploits of ‘Les Pieds Nickelés’ completed his education.
‘If a Breton were here or an Ougagalo,’ declared Madame Morsom, ‘Nando, within half an hour, would be gassing in Celtique or braying in Bargouine.’ Juliette noticeably had not joined in the resultant laughter.
On this particular evening, however, Fernando encountered his father in a more expansive mood. They chatted amiably enough over their reheated chickpea soup. Batiste yarned about the hard times before the war and how Manolo Ayza’s kid, Sonny, used to dog his footstep nearly every day. Fernando, for his part, chatted about Louis Roupier, his best friend at school, and M. Gil’s squint, which made you think each eye was looking at the other.
After he had cleared away the plates, Batiste did not leave immediately for his nightly game of cards at Les Quatres Coins. Instead, he drank several more tumblers of red wine, and, as he watered a second one for his son, he began to curse at Sebastian Marva in what soon became a repetitive refrain. ‘He always got it right, boasting that he was the greatest daredevil when we were boys, yelling that he was always the first to jump where others hesitated, the bravest to take the blows when others flinched. Always calculating, always sucking up to those with power and influence, positively oozing the impression that he was instinctively on their side though, of course, for him music was his excuse, his sole concern. Then he dares to set himself up as the protector of Manolo’s wife and kids. The ideal family man. Everything he does tolerated and sanctioned by the state.’
Fernando tried to interrupt by asking about Marva’s compositions and what they were like, but his father was not listening. ‘Look at these,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got talent.’
For the umpteenth time, he drew out the dirt-lined sheet of folded paper he kept in his wallet. Fernando, by now, knew each of the eight thumbnail sketches off by heart. He loathed them with the same intensity that Batiste reserved for Sebastian Marva. Without glancing at their grubby surface, he visibly sneered as his father’s finger pointed in turn to a face at a window, top left, then three bottles, two squat and one long-necked, an oyster in a half-opened shell, an old woman’s face, a skinny dog with its tail curled up, two empty peanut husks, a thumb and four fingers, laid side by side, and finally, bottom right, a bayonet stuck in the ground with a man’s cap over the butt. If only they had been in the bluebird tin, he wished, they, too, would have been torn into shreds instead of being paraded for him to gawp at when Batiste got sentimental over young Sonny.
Refolding the paper carefully and putting it back in his wallet, Batiste rose from the table and went out. He was unlikely to return before the small hours. Fernando was left on his own again. ‘It was the epoch of my long exile, my exile from myself,’ he declared years later. Because I realised I was an exile like my father: he by circumstances, which were cruel, I by choice, which turned out to be my birthright.’
Music rescued him. It and the proximity of Juliette leavened his isolation during the otherwise flat and tedious daily round.
In the beginning, it had reached him from afar on the very first Sunday morning he had spent in Muret. A capricious wind, carrying now and then the faint sounds of a band, had ruffled his hair when he and Batiste had turned the corner and crossed the bridge over the railway tracks already shimmering in the heat towards Toulouse. The street ahead dipped then twisted and climbed. The strains of music came and went as they walked. All eyes and ears, Fernando drank in the Frenchness, the exciting foreignness of his new surroundings.
Together, they passed the shuttered shop fronts of first a bookshop, Librairie Éloise, among whose stacks he would later meet and get to know Louis Roupier; then an exotic fish emporium, Aquaia Variés; an outfitters, Les Modes D’Aujourd’hui, its twin display windows open to view; an ironmongers, S. Pepin Et Fils; a haberdashers, Au Coin Du Bon Tissu; and an electrical goods shop, P. Perez, which he pointed out to his father who said no, they weren’t Mirandan.
Farther along, the only shop open was La Patisserie Béarnaise, in whose white and gold interior he was destined to lust over the brown-freckled cleavage of Mlle Becquot after Juliette had snubbed his silly chatter. The blare of a radio and the insistent clack and trill of a pinball machine from the opposite side of the street momentarily obliterated the sound of the still elusive music, but then they passed through an archway in the old town walls and gained, between high rose-brick buildings, the flank of an open square lined with plane trees.
The municipal band stood in a semicircle at its far end. They were clad in dark-brown uniforms with orange piping. Their ranks consisted of cornets, trumpets, trombone, flute and clarinet. A girl flautist and an older woman playing the clarinet broke up the otherwise solid male presence of sturdy patriarchs and sallow youths.
Fernando stopped where he was in wonder and growing delight because, although their timing was idiosyncratic, their intonation and pitch faltering, their grasp of harmonics rudimentary, their maintenance of the melody line erratic, something within him, which he had never experienced before, became vividly alive. He saw his own fingers dab the keys, his lips fit round a mouthpiece. He felt a reed vibrate with his own breath. A possible future opened up in front of him, and for that intense moment he was no longer in a strange and unfamiliar place. His mother had died, but he was alive. His father was a virtual stranger, but music existed in the world. One day, almost unimaginably, he, too, would die and be gone, but before that happened he would play music. These imperfect notes, cadences and flourishes that he was listening to could be transformed, of that he was certain, and, when the band stopped to indifferent, scattered handclaps, the music continued in his head. Out of nowhere, he grasped that music never really stopped even when its strains had faded and died. Its will to multiply, to replicate, to shift by half and quarter tones, to sustain and energise its crescendo, was too insistent. If it was written, others would play it. He had to be one of them.
After a pause, the band struck up another tune. Fernando ran towards them. He fixed his gaze on the clarinettist. Her individual face and body disappeared in his urge for knowledge and became solely the embouchure of her lips and the movement of her fingers opening and closing the keys.
Batiste regarded him with surprise. Fernando’s attention was so rapt it was as though the boy were hearing music for the very first time. ‘Come on, he said. ‘Let’s go. There’s nothing here.’
‘Can’t we wait at least till they’ve finished. I’ll be okay if you want to go and come back. I’ll wait here. I promise. Don’t worry.’
Batiste repressed a surge of annoyance. He felt like seizing his son�
��s arm and dragging him away. Fernando had chosen to come with him to France, but he was still a Simon. He recognised sadly that the boy would never obey him in the unquestioning way he had obeyed his own father. ‘Not there’ demanded its price. He said, ‘Ten minutes more and then we’ll go.’
Fernando nodded contentedly. The musicians reached a wavering conclusion. Their conductor bowed and announced, ‘To the inspiring memory of Fréderic Mistral.’ People clapped politely. Looking around, as the players started to pack up their instruments, Fernando wondered who he could find to make his new dream come true. Who, among these faces, now busily discussing he knew not what, would have the insight to let him learn to play and one day join the band? ‘A clarinet,’ he whispered.
‘What did you say?’ Batiste asked.
‘A clarinet. I’d like a clarinet.’ Fernando searched for the words he needed to make his meaning clear and serious. ‘More than the food I eat.’
Batiste laughed. ‘Music’ll get you a drink, a pretty girl’s smile perhaps, but it won’t pay the rent or guarantee a full belly.’
Fernando fell silent. He did not speak during the rest of their walk. In his heart, he accepted that his father would not help him. Out here in this new world of France, however, there was bound to be someone, as yet unknown, who he was fated to meet; someone who would open an attic door and retrieve a battered, disregarded case for him to unclasp and take out the half-forgotten clarinet that their grandfather used to play in the municipal band. ‘Here’s a photograph, they would say. ‘You can make him out in the second row, third from the right.’
As things worked out over the ensuing weeks and months, he never did get his hands on a clarinet. Instead, he started to learn an instrument he had never heard of: namely a valve trombone.
The way it came into his possession caused him a lot of shame and guilt, so much so that for a long time he persisted in a series of lies and evasions, which gradually evolved into half-truths before years later becoming what truly happened.
