Human Pages

by John Elliott

  The valve trombone had been deposited in the left luggage office of the Muret railway station by a certain Taji Mohammed, a one-time musician with the court orchestra of Rabat. He informed Julien Coras, the railway employee who gave him the receipt, that he would return in two hours’ time to catch the mid-afternoon train to Montrejeau. Why he had alighted at Muret no one ever found out.

  The meagre facts, as collected in the line of duty by Sergeant Rabotte of the local gendarmerie, confirmed that he paused underneath the station clock for a full five minutes prior to leaving. Once outside he turned right then, changing his mind, walked left down Stalingrad Avenue towards the industrial zone. Part way along, some kids, picking on his genial expression and somewhat rolling gait, began shouting abuse, followed by a few random stones hurled in his direction once he had passed. At that stage, he seemed to be on the point of approaching the gates of the abattoir, but an exiting van, Yves Préjean, Livestock, hooted at him, and Luxor, Préjean’s Alsatian, thrust its muzzle out of the window, bared its teeth and snarled.

  Half an hour later, he pushed open the door of the Café des Sports and ordered ‘un petit express.’ Rèmy, who was fooling with the coffee machine, pretended not to hear him, so he repeated his request when Madame Opins herself came through to the bar. She looked him up and down in return and, not unkindly, according to her deposition and that of seven others present, suggested that he find somewhere else, somewhere ‘plus convenable’ where they had, as she put it, ‘plutôt le gout exotique, Marseille par exemple.’

  Odile spotted him as she came out of the back stairs at the Régence. ‘There was something about him,’ she said. ‘Vraiment un drôle de mec mais avec un petit air du gaillard. He whistled that tune of Mischa Xavier’s, “Le Printemps M’Accompagne”.’ She called out to him, ‘Ohé, le gars!’ But he cocked a deaf one and went on his way. ‘A religious type, un Mussulman,’ she concluded, ‘ou bien sans le fric.’

  Next he halted to buy some lemons from Béatrice in the Place des Laitiers. At the adjoining stall, he showed a keen interest in the girolles and chanterelles Loulou Gossard had picked that morning, but without making a purchase he turned into the Rue du Sénéchal.

  Nobody it seemed had noticed him from then on until he paid for the room at the Hôtel Mimosa: room 15, off the second-floor stair turning. The notes he gave to Sévèrine were genuine and in crisp condition. His passport, also in order, and his completed Carte du Séjour were still in the desk drawer of her cubbyhole when the police arrived.

  After entering the room, he had not wasted any time: time only to quarter the lemons and set them on the faded blue coverlet of the bed, to smoke half a pipe of kif and let the rest go cold, to remove all his clothes, to hang up his jacket and trousers in the wardrobe and drop his shirt, pants, socks and shoes in a pile beneath the shuttered window which overlooked the corner of Rue des Bonnes Eaux and the Passage Ducasse; time only to sit down and slit his wrists with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, time to bleed towards unconsciousness and death in a town where no person knew him and where he had no discernible reason to be.

  One death more, another body for the authorities to take away, some stubborn stains that could not be removed, yet, all in all, the regulars of the Mimosa were needfully a philosophical bunch. They knew only too well one could cop it anywhere, and who amongst them could truthfully say they had never given topping themselves the time of day. ‘Un pauvre diable evidemment, mais ainsi gavotte tout le monde,’ was their envoi.

  In due course, Sergeant Rabotte submitted his dossier. The town gossiped a little then grew bored. Within a week, the investigating magistrate from Toulouse signed the release papers for the body. Taji Mohammed’s suicide was properly processed and his fleeting contacts soon forgotten.

  As no next of kin had been identified, the valve trombone left at the railway station joined other found and uncollected items in a monthly sale. On Arsène Gil’s advice, Batiste bought it for Fernando.

  Getting over his initial astonishment, Fernando surreptitiously studied his father’s face when, after opening the case, he took out the instrument and the mouthpiece. His recent awareness of Batiste’s vulnerability made him try hard to disguise his disappointment that he was not holding a clarinet. Batiste, however, simply said, ‘That’s that’ and disappeared into the kitchen.

  In between his mouthfuls of rabbit stew when they were seated at the table, Fernando fingered the valves and spat experimentally into the mouthpiece, wondering what the sound would be like when he was able to control his breath flow. Batiste watched him indulgently without scolding. Across the plates, he appeared more at ease with himself, more the way he had been at the Cheto’s farm when Gloria had confronted him, more ready to deal with whatever choices other people made. A clarinet can come later, Fernando decided. This is my beginning. He stood up and embraced Batiste. ‘Thank you, father,’ he said.

  ‘It’s yours, son. Do what you want with it. Arsène will give you some lessons. I can afford a few.’ He hugged Fernando and let him go.

  From that evening on, he showed no interest in the trombone or his son’s playing progress. It seemed as far as he was concerned the transaction had ended and the matter, apart from paying for supplementary sessions with M. Gil, was outwith his control.

  In the event, Fernando’s first lessons went well. Within a few weeks, thanks to his ever-increasing appetite for practice and his copying of his teacher’s embouchure and fingering, he secured the start of a basic technique. The trombone soon became his most treasured companion. He played it out in the open on the scrubland by the railway siding or under the bridge near the industrial zone when it rained.

  As he grew more proficient, he began to play at home, listening with mixed apprehension and pleasure to his neighbours’ comments, which accompanied his muffed, stilted, and eventually successfully sustained, melodic line. In the airless trap of the inner well, a few voices cursed him to hell, but the majority were encouraging, especially Jacques Darshel’s, whose bass sallied through the partition wall with a ‘Vas y le môme! On guinche ce soir.’ Fernando increased the volume in response, while in his mind’s eye Juliette, dressed in a midnight-blue strapless gown, her hair pinned up, her breasts tremulous after the exertion of the dance, gazed up at him adoringly as he stood above her on the crescent of the bandstand.

  His peers at school, however, took a different view. ‘You know whose that was?’ Laurent Pavier called out jeeringly after him when Fernando set off for another music lesson. ‘I’ll tell you whose it was. A dirty Arab who wiped his arse with his hand. He was so ashamed of himself he cut his throat, and now his donkey brays through you.’

  ‘Perhaps you knew him,’ Jacky Mermoz shouted. ‘Perhaps he came here to see you. Maybe he’s your real father,’ he added with a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘You’re not Mirandan. You’re Arab.’

  Others took up the chant. Their stupid jibes lasted for days and nor did they stop when Fernando managed to corner one of his tormentors and land a punch. With an increasing sense of shame, he began to feel that Taji Mohammed’s shade stood listening when he played, that he could hear it audibly sigh whenever he fumbled the notes, that it was permanently on the verge of ordering him to quit, to put away forever the instrument which he had unwittingly usurped. This ghost possessed an added, dreadful allure because in Fernando’s imagination, given the nature of the death, all the blood must have flowed from Mohammed’s body leaving the corpse unnaturally white like an albino’s. The situation demanded an urgent resolution. A new history had to be found, a plausible alternative, which would convince and silence his classmates.

  The first thing he invented was that M. Gil had really bought the trombone at a sale of old band stock in Toulouse after failing in his bid for Taji Mohammed’s at the railway station. M. Gil had revealed the truth only when he, Fernando, had shown how troubled he was by owning something belonging to a suicide. Secondly, he made sure he talked about his father as much as he could. At every opp
ortunity, he poured out tales of Batiste to anyone willing to listen. He was the best mechanic. There was nothing about tractor engines he did not know. He was a good shot. He had been a ‘résistant’. Why he had even met Jean Moulin.

  ‘The Lycée Batiste Cheto,’ Jacky Mermoz sneered derisively. ‘Pull the other one.’

  Fernando realised he had gone too far. He quickly tried to backtrack, but Lisette Daran piped up, ‘How come you’re called Simon when your father’s name is Cheto?’

  Fernando blushed. He felt like pauvre Emil awaiting another taunt, another blow. ‘It’s my mother’s name,’ he said. ‘In Miranda we can choose which name we want.’

  ‘Arabe, Arabe, Arabe,’ they began to chant. The day was lost. He trailed home alone.

  That night, Taji Mohammed awoke him with a smile. He took Fernando by the arm and led him down a corridor and then through an open doorway into a courtyard, where a trickle of water dripped from a pipe into a narrow stone trough. While he watched, Taji untwisted the ties of a sack which lay under a lemon tree. A pile of tiny dead birds dropped at his feet. The stone of the trough, which Fernando supposed would be cool and smooth, turned out be rough when he laid his cheek against it. It burnt his skin. Taji began playing a clarinet. Antonetta joined them. She danced as Taji played, laughing at her son. Her final peal was so piercing it released the bluebird from the cover of its tin. Fluttering over her head, its wings encouraged the other little birds to come alive. Drawings. There were ever more and more of those damned drawings for him to remember and destroy. With relief, he felt his hand rest on female flesh, his brow meet a rounded female belly. Juliette. He was about to reach up and kiss her when Paca spoke to him. It was her hand he was holding. It was her belly in front of him. The whole thing had been one of her tales about Moors and Christians. ‘Work it out for yourself, Nando,’ she said. ‘Sometimes Moor, sometimes Christian. It depends on the times and how the wind is blowing.’

  Similar confusing dreams involving Taji Mohammed, coupled with other playground confrontations, continued to bedevil his progress with the valve trombone until the day arrived when he met and talked at length to Louis Roupier, an older boy three years ahead of him at school, and through him heard for the first time the music he felt he had been born to play.

  The chanced upon grail resided in a series of scratched and hissing second-hand 78s stacked in Louis’s bedroom. Its inscription read ‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra’, and its exemplar, Fernando’s new-found guide and mentor, bore the name of Lawrence Brown. He listened over and over to Brown’s trombone lead and solo on ‘Rose of the Rio Grande’, while Louis buried himself in the tome he had recently bought at the Librairie Éloise. At first, crudely blowing along to the record, then stabbing at the melody line, he at last managed one day to match his phrasing with some of the passages. The achievement of Brown’s control and legato fluidity, however, was completely beyond him, and with a growing sense of humility he recognised that the way ahead was going to be long and demanding.

  Louis, his new French pal, had always lived in Muret. His parents, Adèle and Gilles, worked for the Post Office: she behind the counter, he in the sorting office and on the mail run to and from Toulouse. In spite of this background, Louis in his imagination lived totally in the United States of America.

  He transformed his narrow, cramped bedroom into an expanded, ever evolving transatlantic space whose location he notified by a sheet of paper tacked to the door. It shifted from a brownstone on Brooklyn Heights to a low-ceilinged cantina in Gallup, New Mexico, from a broken-down shack on the banks of the Missouri River to a drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where at any time of the day or night Lana Turner or John Garfield would drop in to check the latest Variety in-dope or picture gross. During the day, in the street and in school, he talked in French to French people, but at night, sequestered in his cold-water apartment, he hobnobbed in Yankee phrases with loggers and grease monkeys, Navajos and Seminoles, stockyard workers and soda-jerks, flophouse night clerks and the cute stenographer who had just moved in with the folks next door.

  Louis garnered his know-how from Republic Pictures cowboys, Warner Brothers gangsters, M.G.M. musicals and the funnies section, which arrived intermittently from cousins settled in Montreal. Month by month, he unravelled the mysteries and tracked the adventures of Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Mandrake the Magician, Prince Valiant and the saucer-eyed, haunted face of Little Orphan Annie, while he listened to the swing and jazz records he had unearthed amidst the random detritus of M. Comenichi’s Toulouse bargain shop.

  Whenever he had more money to spend, he purchased translations of American books at the Librairie Éloise: James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, read and reread, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, read, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, read, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, five chapters read, John Dos Passos’s USA, one volume read.

  On one particularly lucky day during a weekend foray to M. Comenichi’s, he rescued, from the dusty piles of miscellaneous junk, two battered boxes full of gold. One held the dilapidated and well-thumbed pages of a Tumbleweed Tales series, illustrated, when the front cover was intact, by a tall cowpoke spinning a lariat towards the reader. The other contained back numbers of American Crime Magazine and, joy of joys, their French version Les Gens Du Milieu, USA.

  Later, through continuing research, he found to his chagrin that the authors of the Westerns were Europeans who, like himself, had never even seen the range, never mind having had to fight their way out of a box-canyon ambush. This unexpected blow, however, was more lightly borne because of his discovery of his true American hero, Jack London, at the same time. Through his treasured pages, Louis slid blissfully into the old pre-war USA of oyster pirates, night-time hobo jungles and the march of the tramp army with its own appointed generals to Washington DC. By torchlight, under the bedclothes, he experienced the delights and dangers of John Barleycorn and suffered the apprehension and terror of icy death in the Alaskan winter when, to no avail, the live-saving fire could not be lit.

  Fernando, too, was intrigued and curious about the space and grandeur Louis described, but to him the books and comics were secondary. The stack of scratched records, which unfortunately added no further Lawrence Brown, remained his focus. ‘Sont tous les nègres?’ he asked hesitantly one day.

  ‘En jazz oui, mais en swing il y ont des chefs blancs,’ Louis replied, leaving Fernando to ponder the situation with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  At his next lesson, he put the matter tentatively to M. Gil who told him, ‘Music is music. Learn to read well. If you can play from notation, it doesn’t matter whether it was written by a Negro or a White.’

  Fernando was reassured by this to an extent, but he still wondered about the parts which were not written down. As he pressed the stops on the valves, he still sensed the ironic gaze and lingering presence of the trombone’s erstwhile practitioner creep into the room and make his notes vanish as soon as he had imperfectly formed them.

  Agnes put down the six remaining pages. The lists of books had bored her. She felt no need to read the rest. They could wait now she knew for certain her father’s beginnings in the world. He was Fernando Cheto Simon, a Mirandan born in Llomera. He had journeyed to Muret in France and from there to America, where he had become René Darshel, Joe May and perhaps others in a sequence she had yet to determine. At the same time, she had gained a grandfather, a grandmother, a great-uncle and several great-aunts whose existence she had known nothing about.

  The words she had read were his words, of this she was certain. Only he could have written them or vouchsafed them to another as yet unknown to write down on his behalf. At last, she knew the boy he had been. She now grasped a hint of the man he had become, but where he was and in what guise he would appear still eluded her. She could only hope that either Chance Company or the mysterious Elizabeth Kerry or the ex-policeman, Alakhin, held the answers, because th
e anger she bore him had not abated within her. She would not allow him to brush aside his disappearance as, no doubt, he had brushed aside the ghost of Taji Mohammed over the intervening years.

  ‘I promise,’ she said out loud.

  *

  Emmet inserted the jemmy into the crack of the doorframe and tugged. After a few concerted exertions, the wood began to splinter and buckle. In the old days, under Wallace’s organisation, he would have stood back and waited while a specialist did the job, but these were different times. Now it was each man for himself. He applied one final wrench. The door gave. A burglar alarm went off. Behind the door, he found a utility room. The downward directed beam of his torch showed him the way through to the kitchen. The continuing noise of the alarm was all to the good. It added to the sense of impending mayhem. Rather than drag a sleeping man from his bed, the chances were the target would now come to him.

  He opened the first door off the central corridor. The moving light pieced together a snug den, which no doubt was Lambert’s personal hideaway. As yet, there were no voices to be heard above the unrelenting clamour of the alarm. He tried the second door. It revealed a spacious sitting room furnished with a giant TV, audio stack, wall cabinet and three-piece suite. Lambert lived well. Here in his suburban ranch-house, as Greenlea fund-raiser for the Socialist Regeneration Party, he was comfortably sheltered from the vicissitudes of his native land’s cash-crop economy which guaranteed ever deepening poverty to his potential voters.

  A light suddenly came on under the fourth door on the right. Emmet entered quickly. Lambert was sitting on the edge of the bed, trapped in the act of pulling on a pair of slacks over his underpants. His wife lay beside him, propped up against the pillows. Her mouth opened in a scream. Lambert tried to say something like, ‘I’ve called the police,’ but his words were garbled. Dropping his torch, Emmet hit him twice in the solar plexus. Lambert was a puny guy in his late-forties, incapable of much resistance. Emmet twisted his neck in an arm lock and sat down on the bed. Lambert’s wife kept on screaming, her body now rigid. She watched in terror as Emmet took out a revolver from his pocket with his free hand and pressed it against her husband’s temple. Her scream segued into broken, racking sobs.