Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  You remember the livestock farmers in their royal blue smocks and black berets and knee-high rubber boots gathered at one end of the square, over by the river, auctioning cattle and sheep. Behind them under the plane trees a couple of games of boules going on, and in the middle of the square the café with the dilapidated pinball machine and the teenagers half crazed with boredom, and the Produits du Quercy shop with the fancy tins of foie gras and bottles of eau de vie. Also—one performance only—a ground-floor apartment through whose open window I happened to spy a woman in a head scarf sweeping her living room while happily belting out, in heavily accented English, the theme song from Titanic.

  Everywhere stalls were set up where people sold clothes or cheap luggage or housewares or produce. Corinne and I strolled among aubergines stacked like fairy-tale artillery, shimmering trout in beds of crushed ice, disks of cabécou on wax paper, round flour-dusted loaves of bread. Dogs trotted at our feet and the cobblestones ran with water, voices rang out saying Fish or Cheese or Bread, a man in an apron dispensed wine from an oak cask into dark green bottles that customers brought from home. Corinne went purposefully from stall to stall, buying what appealed to her, and I bought nearly as much as she did. On this day my appetite had finally come back, she saw, and every so often she’d turn and look at me with approval.

  March 14

  Today I walked to our ruined fortress. It took me a while to find it. First I went down a path that led to somebody’s house, and a small boy with a dirty face opened the door and stared at me without saying a word. His expression was so solemn and his face so dirty I thought maybe he was an orphan, but then just as he was closing the door he said Bonjour in a small high voice, and I said it back.

  When I finally found the right path, I looked for the donkey we saw that day. How long do donkeys live? She was gone, of course, and where she used to stand the grass was up to my knees and full of nettles.

  The ruin was deserted, just as it was that day. I came to the spot overlooking the valley where you lifted my hair and put your hand on the back of my neck, and today it was clear again, the view was no different, and behind me the fortress seemed no more or less of a ruin than it had seemed then. To a ruin thirteen years is nothing, I imagine, except the added weather. Walls don’t collapse in thirteen years, or stones bleach in the sun. It’s a slower clock, more patient, and it’ll be ours too eventually. But until then, wherever we are or aren’t, I’d rather feel the time than not, I’d rather know what thirteen years without you really feels like than take the long view, the historical perspective, the clock set to eternity rather than the days as I have counted them. I’d rather be weak than strong, if strong is being a wall that takes four centuries to fall down and another four centuries to turn white. I have fallen down and turned white and it didn’t take as long as that. I know exactly how long it took.

  March 19

  After dinner at Corinne’s last night we were sitting by the fire with Gaston stretched out on the floor at our feet when she reached down and put her hand on his head. Just put it there. Feeling her touch, he looked up as if expecting something, or as if he was listening very hard to something she was saying without words, and gazing back at him she said softly, Je te donne la main, Gaston, I give you my hand, and with that he lowered his head and went to sleep. The house was quiet then except for his breathing and the fire and the wind outside.

  Soon afterward I began to talk about you for the first time, and once started I kept going, and Corinne sat and listened.

  March 24

  Not yet warm in this part of the world, but less cold. The days are not the battle they were. For stretches, even, they are no battle at all, and I find myself infused, inexplicably, with a heartfulness that just might be hope, tilting at sunspots where, ever since you left, only darkness ranged.

  March 26

  The plan was not to send these. The plan, you understand, was that these were for me, and not for you. But forgive me, my love, I’m beginning to question the plan.

  I woke a little while ago, picturing you reading these words. Picturing you with the clarity of one who knows your image, your face and body, better than my own, and wondering what you’d think after reading my words to you, and what you might do.

  Perhaps nothing. That’s the risk if I send them, such a huge risk, it feels.

  In my head now is the image of Burne-Jones’ picture of a young woman holding a ball inscribed with the medieval proverb, “If hope were not, heart should break.”

  How strong our hearts have turned out to be, Julian! How strong, and strangely hopeful, and mysterious.

  March 29

  Spring has come early, the thaw in the mountains has begun, the Dordogne is running high. I walk everywhere and for the first time am glad not to have a car. I’ve figured out a walk from my house to Corinne’s—down the sheep path about a mile and across acres of fields to the river and over a little crumbling Roman bridge and then a last half mile to the wall enclosing her plum trees, where Gaston greets me without fail and barks me in as though I were a visiting dignitary. In the dusk he looks like my shadow. If dinner runs too late or the weather turns, I stay the night in the room where I recovered from my illness, which is starting to feel like my own room. The walls are pale blue, the bedspread is yellow, and outside the window is the small orchard of plums, and the whiteness of their blossoms.

  April 2

  If I could give you anything, it would be my eyes opening this morning in my own house, which is yours, too. From the bedroom window I watch the sheep going out. Their steps are lighter now; all winter when they had nothing but stubble to eat they trudged like condemned men, but no longer. The new grass springing up everywhere is delicate, almost translucent, and they dip their heads, chewing steadily. Below them the fog, suffused with sunlight, is lifting, turning into sky, the river gleaming through it, centering the valley and telling me where I am.

  I am here. The dark raked earth around the walnut trees whorled like a giant thumbprint; the moss-covered roots and black humus in the stands of scrub oak; the underground streams and caverns; the goats perched on rocks; the hens testing the mud; the Romans gone; the Gauls dead; the shepherd with his wand saying Go, go and Come, come.

  Far too late I walked away from the life I had, the marriage I had, missing you too much to go on, regretting everything and expecting nothing. It wasn’t courage but necessity. Now these riches have found me here, and I want to give them all to you.

  seven

  THAT WAS THE FINAL ENTRY.

  I sat unmoving with the notebook open against my chest. I felt as if through hearing her voice like this a great rock had been levered off me and I was lying now in the crater of its impression, the ground still cool where the weight had been for so long.

  After a while, I got up and went out to the terrace, wanting to see what she had seen on her last day.

  It was early evening and the declining sun cast a lustrous glow over the valley. I stood taking long drafts of air. Birds were singing in the stand of old oaks just below the house. Beyond was the bare, raked field of walnut trees, and beyond that a grass-covered sheep path, and then the slope of walled pastures to the river. In the distance the river’s surface was slate and blue with a fine misting of gold. Nearer, I could see the sheep massing in one corner of the fields, and hear their childlike bleating and the tinny, irregular rhythm of their bells. A man with a long stick was calling to them. In the transforming light the stick seemed to dance like a wand, and the sheep wore veils of gold on their newly shorn backs. I watched as they filed through an opening between two walls and onto the path that wound up through the hamlet, the dusky shuffling of their hooves and plaintive sound of their cries rising steadily up the valley like a mourning procession.

  I stood seeing all this as she had seen it. And then I went through the house and out the front door and up to the gate, where the sheep were passing. Here on the paved road their hooves clicked like a constant hail of stones. They w
ere close to home now and had begun to hurry, throwing off their attitude of somnolent mourning and filling the air with occasional bleats of expectation. The man followed the rear of the flock. He was silent now, no longer needing voice or stick. From ten yards he offered me a nod, sober though not unfriendly, and then he too was past and the sheep were well up the road toward his farm. Soon the road was empty. The hamlet was utterly quiet except for the cawing of a crow and the distant tonk of a bell. And I stood at the gate, not yet ready to go inside, the notebook still in my hands.

  Not long afterward a car approached, coming from the village. It slowed to a stop in front of the gate, and a woman dressed in beige pants and a black cotton shirt climbed out. She was thin and striking, with cropped white hair and fine-boned hands. She stood observing me across the hood, her large dark eyes moving slowly from my face to the notebook in my hands, and back to my face. Strong lines at the corners of her mouth gave her an initial expression of severity or hardness. Then that shifted, and her eyes were lit with recognition and deepened by intense feeling; her mouth softened.

  “So, it is you,” said Corinne Conner.

  eight

  WE SAT IN FRONT of the cold fireplace like two people who had known each other a long time, and she told me many things. She spoke a strongly accented English, and she told me about being the first person in the house after Claire’s death, and how she had found the two notebooks on the floor by the bed and recognized the handwriting inside and then taken them home with her. She described the arrival of the husband soon thereafter, his arrogance and bad manners that would be remembered in the region for many years to come. He had stayed in an expensive hotel in St.-Céré rather than in the village nearby, and had chosen to speak only to the police, rather than to any of the local people who might have corrected his false impressions of the nature of her death; and so, because of this, no one but the police had chosen to speak to him. Then, two days later, he had departed, taking with him back to America her body and her things and his misconceptions, her heart still, as ever, unknown to him. And then the house was as empty as it had been before her arrival, nothing left of her but the notebooks, which Corinne had read and then read again.

  “I bring them back to the house,” she told me. “Her letters to you. She did not have time to send them. I put them in the closet, the old place, to save for you if you come. I know you will come, because about you I have this sentiment that we are not strangers. And then yesterday I return, and Monsieur Delpon tells me you are here. So I open the house and wait. I do not want to hurry you. And now you are here, knowing the words she wanted you to know.”

  She fell silent. The open room was a patchwork of shadows. And up by the road, as I sat waiting for my voice, a three-wheeled truck was heard puttering through the hamlet, and an old woman called out a greeting.

  Finally I said, “So you don’t believe she killed herself any more than I do.”

  Corinne Conner’s eyes cut through the shadows with sudden light, and she shook her head. There was compassion in her gaze, perhaps affection. Slowly, she got to her feet.

  “Come,” she said, “and I will show you.”

  In her car we drove back through the village. Delpon, standing with a glass of wine outside the auberge, solemnly raised a hand in greeting as we passed, and we nodded in return. Corinne followed the road that led down the mountain. She drove slowly and we hardly spoke, and all around us the light kept seeping away. We crossed the river on a one-lane steel bridge, and then by degrees the road began to rise with the bowl of the valley, and in a little while she turned onto a rutted dirt lane lined with poplars that circled back toward the river. At the end of the lane was a stone house three or four hundred years old. It stood on a slight incline adjacent to a small plum orchard, and its front windows glistened as though oiled by the last of the day’s light.

  As we got out of the car, a large black dog came bounding over, barking and sniffing at my legs. Corinne half raised her hand and instantly the dog quieted and stood back, his velveteen muzzle tilted up, something very like a smile spreading across his face: joyous shadow. Then Corinne, offering me her arm, led me beyond the house in the direction of the river. Against my side her limbs suggested a matchstick fragility, but her stride and voice were firm. The dog followed at a short distance.

  Reaching the edge of the plum orchard, we stopped.

  “Claire came here often,” she said. “She did not have a car, you understand. She did not have money. She came by foot, in all weathers. The long walking she adored. Voilà sa route.”

  Her free arm swung out, a finger extended, drawing, in the magic hour quickly filling with shadows, an invisible map, a way. Left of the plum trees, along a perpendicular stone wall stark as a jetty, down the gradual slope and over the dark tiled roofs of other houses (one already a ruin), there shone, like a mirror flashed in code, a stitch of the river. Then, gently ascending, my eyes followed her finger up the far side—over empty walled fields and pockets of trees and acres of grass greener at this hour than at any other—rising finally to the sheltered hamlet where, standing apart, gray and blurred, I saw the house and barn that I knew.

  I asked her how Claire had crossed the river.

  Corinne’s arm moved two inches to the right, her finger marking the river. “There is a metal bridge for the cars, the one we came over. But Claire detested its ugliness and noise. So, un jour, she finds for herself another route, this way—” The arm swung again, now to the left half a foot, the place there hidden behind a stand of trees and the one ruined house. “Here the river is not so wide. There is a very old bridge made of stones by the Romans, in bad condition, with signs of warning from the département saying attention, do not walk, en réparation. This is what Claire liked—the chance to have it for herself.”

  Corinne’s arm had begun to tremble in the air, and she lowered it.

  “I was expecting her for dinner. She was coming by foot. Half the hour, maybe the hour it takes. And each time she brings me always these things, petits cadeaux—bottle of wine, sometimes books, stones she finds, n’importe quoi. Objets trouvés, like a conversation between us. Because it is in these small things, these beautiful small things, that I see her best. You understand? Son âme, tout ce qu’elle était.”

  Corinne paused, her head turning, and in a moment the dog had appeared at her side—so quickly that I had no idea where he’d come from. He stood still, leaning imperceptibly against her legs as if to shore her up. She began to stroke his back.

  “I wait, but she does not arrive. I telephone but there is nobody. Éventuellement I begin to look. Je la cherche. To the river I take Gaston. I find the place there, la route qu’elle préfère, the stone bridge where it crosses and the fast water just beneath. The light is like this now, not so easy to see. The bridge I know well. I have lived here all my life. There are the signs of warning as before—attention, en réparation—and the river at this time of year is fast, plein, dangereux. Too much rain from the winter and the water so high under the bridge. Stones wet, mouillé, not for crossing. And on one edge I see that a piece is missing. Next to the sign that says attention is a hole where before there was stone. I tell Gaston to stay and carefully I go on the bridge. And it is true. On one edge the stone is gone, fallen into the water. And I begin to understand. I remember how her pockets are heavy with the things she brings me always, and the water is high and fast like this, and the darkness. And no one to help her.”

  Corinne stopped petting the dog and her shoulders slumped, and now she looked old.

  “C’est tout,” she said in a voice full of sorrow.

  “What about the police?” I asked.

  “The police?” Suddenly her voice was hard and she turned her eyes back to me. “He comes the day after to talk to me, l’agent de police. To say a farmer has found the body, floated almost to Carennac. To ask me stupid questions of his own imagination. Was Claire happy? Was she sad? Does she drink too much wine? A boyfriend who does not lov
e her? And I say to him, ‘Pourquoi? Pourquoi vous me demandez ces questions?’ And then he says, ‘Parce qu’elle s’est suicidée.’ He says this to me as he sits in my house. About the accident, the bridge that falls away into the water—nothing. The idea of her misery is what he likes. He says to me how they find all these things in her pockets—heavy things, two books, bouteille de vin, piece of stone, et cetera, and how this proves her wanting to drown herself. And I call him a fool. What kind of wine? I ask him. Maybe it is one I talk about with her before. What kind is this stone? Is there not maybe a picture on it, a shape, something maybe she brings to show me? It is beauty she loved, the taste of life. She could not get enough. It is more of life she wanted, not less. But of course he does not know what I am talking about. He does not listen. It is not written sur son papier. He does not know why I am crying. To him she is just a body—un objet trouvé, without desire.”

  It was dusk, the day deepening to its end. Lights were shining now from most of the houses. But by the river the ruined dwelling remained cloaked in darkness, and from one end of the valley to the other the tight walled fields appeared as smoothly impenetrable as floodplains at midnight. The hamlet, the house and barn—all had vanished.