A spyhole opened almost immediately.
“What may I do to help you?” a little voice inquired.
Ophelia showed her tickets, and, after the click of a lock, the door opened on a child. He was wearing just a simple loincloth, doing justice to his chocolate-hued skin; being barefoot on cobbles scorched by the sun didn’t seem to bother him. Politely, he ushered them in, turning the key behind them. On the other side of the door there was a small courtyard, open-air and ill-paved, which might have once served as a changing room for the ancient baths.
Without a word, the child lit a gas lamp, one of many hanging around the entrance. He handed it to Blaise, who took hold of it looking traumatized, as if he’d just entrusted him with a stick of dynamite.
“Follow the arrows,” the child said, indicating an entrance on the other side of the courtyard. “I wish you, Messieur-Dames, a happy sauciness!”
Ophelia and Blaise plunged into the darkness of a staircase that led deep underground. The tropical temperature of the outside world began to plummet. A hundred and thirty steps later, it had become freezing, as they arrived at the beginning of a vast, subterranean corridor. Ophelia shivered all over. She was wearing the toga and light sandals Ambrose had given her the day she’d arrived in Babel; not exactly suitable garb for exploring cellars.
“Mon Dieu . . . ” muttered Blaise. The light from his lamp had just revealed an arrow, barely visible among the graffiti, which had been chalked onto a wall. Except that it wasn’t a wall; it was human bones. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of tibias and skulls, placed one on top of the other like bricks.
Catacombs.
“Whatever you do, don’t stay close to me,” Blaise warned. “I’m likely to set off a landslide at any moment.”
Their steps resounded like explosions in the silence of the ossuary, as they went deeper into the tunnel.
“Animists’ family power only works on objects,” whispered Ophelia. “This basic principle means that, logically, I should be incapable of reading organic material. When I was an adolescent, I got the chance to have a prehistoric necklace in my hands. It was made of human teeth, Mr. Blaise, and yet I read it just as I would have read any other necklace. I didn’t question it too much at the time.”
The tone of her voice was distorted by the reverberations of the place; she sounded like a foreigner. She rubbed her frozen arms and looked at Blaise, walking awkwardly ahead. “At what moment?” she asked him. “At what moment do we cease to be humans and become objects?”
Blaise continued to make his way in silence, carrying the lamp at arm’s length to spread its light as far as possible. When he finally replied, it was in a different voice from usual, deeper, calmer, and without the slightest stutter: “Some humans are objects while they’re alive, Mademoiselle Eulalia.”
Ophelia was struck by this insight, but Blaise didn’t get a chance to elaborate. The ossuary had just opened onto a large, vaulted room.
It was full of people.
Men and women were swaying their hips ecstatically under orange-shaped lanterns. Those who weren’t dancing had taken over the bars and pedestal tables, sitting one against the other. One on top of the other, in some cases. They were clinking glasses, smoking, gesticulating, chatting, hugging, fighting . . . without making the slightest sound. Ophelia felt as if she were watching a gathering of mime artists.
“Such soundproofing can only be the work of an excellent Acoustic,” Blaise commented, impressed. He turned off the lamp and studied the silent spectacle unfolding before them, much as he would have tried to analyze a painting that had come to life. He then took off his turban. Awkwardly, he placed it on Ophelia’s curly head and unwound the fabric so as to cover half of her face. “I don’t know what has brought you here, mademoiselle,” he whispered to her, “but this is no place for an apprentice virtuoso. If Lady Helen hears where you have been today, she will have no option but to expel you from her conservatoire.”
“But . . . what about you?” Ophelia stammered from under the fabric, while trying to straighten her glasses.
Blaise broke into a joyless smile and pressed the slender tip of his nose. “Can you see me wearing a veil with a profile like this? Ne t’inquiète pas! I’m just an assistant, I have no reputation to protect.”
Barely had they moved into the subterranean room than the silence was shattered. Ophelia was jostled by a whirlwind of dancers, musicians, smokers, wrestlers, artistes, and gamblers, not one of them taking any notice of her.
Miraculously, Blaise found them a table where they wouldn’t get trampled on. He apologized effusively when the chair he offered to Ophelia gave way under his weight, and then asked her a question that she didn’t hear due to the surrounding hubbub.
“Are you looking for something specific?” he repeated, raising his voice.
With her head swathed in his turban, Ophelia looked around her. Her eyes were assailed with movement, her nostrils with absinthe, her ears with jazz. Mediana had sent her to gather compromising information. She was spoilt for choice. Alcohol, tobacco, dueling: Ophelia had been in Babel long enough to know that everything going on and everything being consumed in this cabaret was illegal. The game of darts on its own would have meant prison for all those taking part in it. It was as if all the tension accumulated aboveground in the city—the right-thinking, the taboo subjects, the countless rules of good conduct—was released in the cellars. Rarely had Ophelia felt so intrusive: she was here to spy on them, but, really, she would have preferred to be one of them.
And then there were the oranges. They were everywhere, forged into every wrought-iron table, printed on every lampshade. Once again, Ophelia couldn’t help but think that this wasn’t the fruit of coincidence.
She jumped when a man approached her, opening one side of his coat. An impressive collection of books burst out of every pocket: detective novels, erotic journals, revolutionary manifestos. Prohibited books only. She shook her head as respectfully as possible to decline. In any case, she would have struggled to pay him. As an apprentice virtuoso, she received, weekly, a paltry sum in the form of a punch card, but it only gave her access to a precise list of public services. The black market was certainly not one of them.
Her eyes met Blaise’s. They were both so stiff and starchy on their chairs, in the midst of all these forbidden pleasures, that they ended up bursting out laughing. Ophelia hadn’t laughed like that for an eternity, but she became serious again when she noticed Blaise looking intently at her. He was sitting with his hands folded on the table, twiddling his thumbs nervously, as though hesitating. Without his turban, his pepper-and-salt hair stuck out in all directions. His black eyes shone with a timid, slightly concerned, brightness.
He finally decided to articulate two syllables, which, although drowned by the music, could easily be read from his lips: “Thank you.”
Ophelia was then struck by a sense of awful misgiving. By making a date with a bachelor, wasn’t she misleading him as to her intentions? She had rapidly felt close to Blaise, and had known the feeling was mutual, but at no time had she envisaged the possibility of a misunderstanding over the nature of that closeness.
“There’s . . . um . . . something I must admit to you.”
Blaise cupped his hand around his ear to convey to Ophelia that he couldn’t hear her. She picked up a playing card from the many carpeting the floor and, on the edge, where nothing was printed, she wrote a message that turned her glasses crimson. It was infuriating to realize how right Mediana was.
THERE’S A MAN IN MY LIFE.
Blaise tried to make out the spidery scrawl in the orange light of the table lamp. His straggly eyebrows shot up high enough to turn his forehead into an accordion. He remained like that for some time, playing card in hand, unable to look away from it, putting Ophelia through torture.
Then he wrote a reply on the opposite edge.
IN M
INE, TOO.
Ophelia had to read these three words several times to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. When she raised her glasses back at Blaise, he was kneading the rubbery skin of his face, seemingly awaiting her reaction with apprehension, as if the rest of his life depended on it. Ophelia wasn’t prone to great demonstrative outbursts, but she couldn’t stop her hand springing towards his. For the first time, Blaise’s tormented features relaxed. She found him handsome. Their fingers clasped clumsily, firmly. A friendship sealed.
“May the sauciness be with you, citizens!”
The dancers froze, the laughter died, and the musicians silenced their instruments. Everyone turned to the stage, from where the voice had erupted, like the roar of a lion. A voice that Ophelia had recognized without a second’s hesitation: that of Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless. It was the first time she was seeing him in the flesh, this elusive rebel, and she couldn’t believe her glasses. The individual standing behind the footlights was so puny, so balding, so ordinary, she could have passed him a hundred times without ever noticing him. One couldn’t but wonder where he got his thunderous voice from.
He pointed up at the high, vaulted ceiling. “Above our heads live the lambs!” he exclaimed. “A great docile herd that bleats whatever those hypocrites of LUX ask it to bleat. A herd whose freedom is curtailed with every new law, every new code, and yet still it bleats!”
Anarchic applause and whistling rose in the room, stopping as soon as Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless spoke again:
“Down here, citizens, we become free voices again. We say all that we think just as we think it. We are not the model little pupils, we’re the little brats of Babel!”
An eruption of joy set the room alight.
“Down with the Index!” Fearless concluded. “Death to the censors!”
Ophelia kept shrinking into her chair. This cabaret was the haunt of the public enemy of the city and all its supporters. What would they do if they discovered that two representatives of the institution they hated the most were seated at a table in their midst?
“Let’s go,” she mouthed in Blaise’s direction, rising discreetly from her chair.
At first, she didn’t understand why he insisted on remaining seated, stiff as a statue. It took her a moment to notice that the child who had opened the door to them had now joined their table. And that he was pointing a pistol at them.
“Grant us the honor of staying a little longer, Messieur-Dames,” he said, with extreme politeness. “My father will receive you in his dressing room, if you would care to follow me.”
THE WILD BEAST
Ophelia had already had the opportunity to visit a diva’s dressing room, at the Family Opera House in the Pole. The one to which she and Blaise were forcibly led bore no resemblance to it. There was no velvet, no carpet, no mirror, no wardrobe to be found here. There was, on the other hand, some impressive radio-communication equipment, and, pinned to the walls, detailed maps of each minor ark that made up the city of Babel.
With the pistol, the child calmly indicated a bench, on which Blaise and Ophelia were only too willing to sit. For a small boy with dirty feet, he had persuasive manners.
“My father will be with you when he’s finished his speech. That can take time—he finds it hard to stop once he gets warmed up. I’ll put the radio on for you, to fill in the time.” The child turned the knob on a radio set, and it immediately broadcast the solemn music of a symphonic march. He whistled along to it and waved his pistol like a conductor’s baton.
I’m vraiment désolé,” Blaise whispered, eyeing the firearm like someone seeing one for the first time. “My bad luck has struck again.”
“In fact,” said Ophelia, “I think we were more foolhardy than unlucky. It is I who apologize to you for dragging you into this business.”
She began to think hard. How could they get out of this trap unscathed? They were now somewhere within the maze-like cellars, and a child had a gun trained on them. An attempt to escape seemed problematic.
Ophelia looked more closely at the dressing room. The radio-communication equipment and the maps on the walls appeared to have been installed here in haste; it wasn’t a place that had been occupied for long. She noticed some sepia photographs leaning on the radio-communication instrument panel. On the oldest and palest of them all, a pair of young women clasped each other, cigar in mouth and glass in hand. Ophelia pushed away the scarf of her turban to be sure she was seeing clearly. One of them was wearing a polka-dot dress of totally inimitable bad taste.
Mother Hildegarde!
It was extraordinary to find her here, in Babel, in a spectacularly younger and lovelier version. And it confirmed the intuition that had struck Ophelia on seeing the cabaret’s sign in the form of an orange.
“Ah,” the child suddenly said, stopping his whistling. “Here’s my father and his bodyguard.”
The dressing-room door had indeed just opened on to Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless. He was wiping his streaming face, as if his stint onstage had exhausted him. The gigantic proportions of the saber-toothed tiger accompanying him were those of a Beast. One wondered by what miracle such a creature managed to fit through the door frame. With such a bodyguard, this man could indeed allow himself to be afraid of nothing and no one.
Fearless gave the sign to his wild beast to sit, and to his son to leave. Then he leaned over the radio that was still broadcasting its symphonic march. Ophelia thought he was going to turn it off so they could talk, but instead he increased the volume and parked himself up on the radio set as if it were a seat. He placed a forefinger on his mouth to indicate to everyone to keep quiet and concentrate on the music.
Ophelia had experienced some unusual situations in her life. Listening to the radio in the same room as a saber-toothed tiger would now be up there with them.
A long time went by in this eerie way when, suddenly, the radio malfunctioned, repeating the same musical passage twice. Fearless instantly turned the knob to cut the sound, as though that was what he’d been waiting for from the start.
“Echoes are a vrrraiment fascinating phenomenon,” he said, with a very strong Babelian accent. “Our scientists are capable of lighting up towns and sending men into the sky, and there’s not a single one—not a single one, do you hear me?—who’s ever been able to explain that particular quirk of nature. Since I’ve launched into the subtle art of radio-piracy, I’ve heard plenty of duplicating wavelengths like the one you just heard. At first, I found it vrrraiment tiresome, but then I ended up becoming fascinated by the subject.”
Fearless’s voice was so sonorous that, even without raising it, he seemed to be roaring every sentence. Ophelia wondered, not without some apprehension, what he was driving at.
“I’ve done a whole load of experiments on echoes,” he continued, unperturbed. “Have you ever seen duplicated images on a photograph? Have you ever heard your own words continually returning to you through a telephone receiver? I have. Countless times. And yet I’ve never been able to understand what an echo is, and what conditions trigger it. I have, however, made a vrrraiment interesting discovery.”
He had adopted a confidential tone, but his voice, unsuited to whispering, carried absolutely everywhere.
“For a few years now, the frequency of these phenomena has increased exponentially. There are more and more echoes, more and more often, in more and more places. Would it interest you to know my conclusion on the subject?”
Ophelia nodded her head stiffly. In truth, she was having all the trouble in the world following what Fearless was saying: the bench was shaking due to the quaking of Blaise, who couldn’t tear his eyes away from the saber-toothed tiger. If she was scared, he was petrified.
“I deduced that it was the entire universe endeavoring to send us a message,” Fearless declared, bombastically. “A vital message. An urgent message.” He then tapped his temple, theatrically, and put on
a fearsome voice: “‘Think for yourself, you stupid little man, instead of foolishly repeating what you hear!’”
His throat then let out a laugh that reverberated throughout the surrounding catacombs. Ophelia was awestruck. How could such a puny body produce such an explosion of sound?
The next moment, Fearless had returned to being serious and was scrutinizing his two guests without the slightest congeniality. “Eulalia, eighth-degree Animist, recently admitted to the conservatoire of the Good Family as an apprentice Forerunner,” he recited, half-heartedly. “Blaise, third-class Olfactory, assistant at the Memorial of Babel,” he continued. “Don’t ask me how I know this. The only question worth asking, here and now, is: what on earth are two lambs like you doing in the wild beasts’ den?”
Matching gesture to words, Fearless laid a hand on the enormous head of the tiger. The mighty purr that ensued made Blaise’s cheeks turn the same gray as his hair.
Ophelia’s heart was also in her boots. The wild beast’s size was so out of proportion to that of the dressing room, she found herself obliged to tuck her feet under the bench so as not to tread on its tail. In her mind, she ran through all the possible replies that came to her, but none seemed wise.
“I also knew Mother Hildegarde.”
Fearless barely batted an eyelid. “Vrrraiment? Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”
Ophelia glanced at the photographs lined up on the radio console. Had she been on the wrong track? Were the oranges and the polka-dot dress mere coincidences?
A blink of an eye later, she understood her mistake. “Maybe not that name, but that’s what she called herself where I met her. Meredith Hildegarde. Her real name must have had a more Arkadian ring to it. She had three passions: architecture, cigars, and oranges.”
The Memory of Babel Page 19
