Leper Tango

by David MacKinnon

“There was a girl in my class at the lycée. She was demure and modest. A real egghead. But, she had obviously never had a boyfriend. I had been observing her for some time. Initially, I ignored her completely, or I would mock her. Oh, here’s crâne d ’oeuf, how is crâne d ’oeuf doing today? Just that simple comment, I could see it crushed her. Because I was convinced that she found me very attractive and was thoroughly intimidated by me. Then, from one day to the next, I seduced her. We became best of friends. When she told me her sixteenth birthday was upcoming, I immediately insisted that she must come for dinner, my parents will be absent, I said, it’ll only be the two of us. During the week preceding her birthday, I would bump into her physically, as if by accident, and I could see it was having an effect on her that she didn’t even dare confess to herself. So, on her birthday, when we arrived chez Maman et Papa, oh-la-la, if you could have seen the suppressed fear and embarassed desire in her face as we climbed the hill ... like Jesus during the passion or St-Sebastien as the arrows pierced into his torso. I was explaining to her that I wanted to “do her up” like a real lady, that I could see the unbelievably sex y woman hiding beneath, well, Franck, I have always been amazed at the hidden vanity of even the homeliest people, it is amazing how easy it is to bring it out. Upon entering, I brought her directly upstairs to the boudoir. Tu t’ imagines, Franck? Can you imagine? I was terribly aroused.”

  “By her?”

  Sheba brushed her hair, surveying the waves rather than me as she considered the question. “Don’t be a fool. No. I saw the possibilities of transforming human beings. Moulding them. But, there was something else.”

  A young girl walking along the shoreline before us. The tide turning to low, and the waves lapping lazily onto the shore before receding. Sheba frowned.

  “It was an energy entirely contained with me. I had wound myself into a real state. But it wasn’t desire. No. Something else ...”

  She paused. A jagged, crepuscular streak of crimson now traced a path across her cheekbones.

  “No. I felt angry somehow. I wanted to hit her, slap her hard across the face. As punishment. She was a superficial fool to renounce her intelligence for the cheap parlour game I was playing. I detested her for it.”

  “But not enough to stop.”

  “Of course not. I commanded her to disrobe immediately.”

  “In those words.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I was very ... imperious,” she responded, her eyes now limpid, vacuous. She smiled at her tendentious, arcane language. “Besides, Franck, I had no choice. Makeup demands control if it is to be a weapon.”

  She fell silent again for several minutes. Then she wound her torso, until her eyes met mine. I looked past her. Three more windsurfers ogling her, commenting.

  They appeared to recognize her. They had definitely noticed her.

  “Have you ever seen photos of Dachau or Auschwitz, Franck? You would never guess these people had once been lawyers, doctors or bankers. Pillars of society.”

  The phrase pushed her lip into a curl, as if her taste buds had unexpectedly come across a sliver of lemon rind. “Once the person has surrendered her right to her appearance, you are more than halfway there. Not that the issue was ever in doubt. Once I knew I had her, I became increasingly stern with her. It was so interesting, Franck. As if she were inside one of those medieval torture devices, and I was turning the wheel crank methodically, according to my own rhythms, until I had her whimpering. It was extraordinaire. I think it was the first time that I had watched a human being completely surrender her will.”

  She fell silent. “That’s it?” “That’s it.”

  “Sorry, that doesn’t cut it as an end of story.”

  “Non? Well, too bad, Franck. The rest isn’t worth telling. Besides,” she added coquettishly, “it’s privileged information. But trust me. The rest was easy, Franck.”

  A strange image appeared in the mind’s eye. Her skin a tropical aquarium, and lurking inside, a lime-green reptilian shape, eyes bulging from the head, unblinking, prehistoric, the real driving force of her being, and the rest just a shell. The grains of sand had heated up the beach, making it increasingly difficult to remain seated.

  “The next day, once we were together in class again, I chose a reverse role. I treated her abominably. As if I had caught her defiling herself in a sacred place. I whispered things to her, told her she was dégueulasse, that she had defiled me. I had orchestrated the whole exercise from A to Z, but I insisted to her it was a sign of dementia. Then I flew into a rage, and started shrieking at her that she was a slut, depraved, a whore.”

  “How did she take that?”

  “First, you must tell me what you think.”

  “I don’t think anything. She entered into the bargain freely. It was her problem.” “ The following day, while walking home from school, we spotted the S.A.M.U. ambulances outside the house and a long trickle of blood on the sidewalk outside. She had hurled herself right through the window of her fourth floor study, committed suicide.”

  She had been in front of me throughout this conversation, and I could not see her eyes. Now, she pivoted to the side and faced me, examining me in the process of examining her.

  “What do you make of it all, Franck?”

  “Well, speaking as plaintiff counsel, a dead person isn’t worth much, quantum-wise. Now, if she’d broken her neck, or suffered brain damage, but survived, different ball game altogether.”

  She frowned.

  “Franck, I want to know your personal opinion. What you really think.”

  “Let me put it this way. You never actually shoved her out the window, right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “In fact, you weren’t even there at the time she jumped.”

  “No.”

  “Case closed. Motion for dismissal. No triable issue.”

  “Franck. You don’t believe me, do you? That it really happened.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? This stuff happens all the time.

  Sur vival of the species and all that. Not everybody makes it. Sounds to me like her time was up. Maybe she thought she could fly.”

  She mulled that one over for a moment or two, then reached for a hairbrush and began pulling at a tangle in her hair.

  “So, what’s with all the questions? Police look into the matter?” “Oh, there was an investigation, but nothing much. No, it’s just sometimes I think about the expression on her face the last time I saw her. It intrigued me. Like something had crumbled inside her. It really left an impression on me, Franck. Later, I went home, and tried to imitate the expression she had in my mirror. But I couldn’t do it. Somehow, it escaped me.”

  She shrugged.

  “She was naïve. Nothing more. Une pauvre fille.”

  A few days later, we took a day trip on the Poitiers line in Vienne. She had brought a small picnic basket and was wearing a red and white checkered summer dress to the knees. Outside the train, the land a long, uninterrupted stretch of reclaimed swamp. She had just informed me for the first time that, unlike an earlier version she had served up, her father was still alive.

  She wore a slight trace of makeup, and her hair was tied back in a bun, Simone de Beauvoir style. Demure, placid, timid, dutiful.

  She reached inside her purse; and pulled out three black and white photos. The first showed a soldier, his face agape, the jaw hanging and his body slack, as he was carried down a stretch of road in front of a military barracks. He was in a state of drunken hilarity.

  “He looks a fool. But it is the only picture where I have ever seen him happy.”

  The second photo showed three men standing in the midst of a stretch of the Algerian desert. Each of the three were dressed in standard issue khaki-coloured uniforms of the paras. The man in the middle had his left foot propped on a box. He stared into the camera. The nose aquiline, and the features dark, Mediterranean, saturnine.

  “My father ... no one has met him before you. He lives as a recluse. He was a
n Indochina veteran. They took him prisoner after the Dien Bien Phu debacle. Later, he was a para in A lgeria. He is lunatique, my father. Very moody.”

  The third photo showed the same man, this time standing in the doorway of a villa, overlooking a rocky, chalk-white promontory on the shore of the Mediterranean somewhere. The man wore broad cotton pants, and what appeared to be a denim shirt. His face young, but now his hair grey and cut crew. Like a crag of an eroding limestone quarry. The shirt was pinned up on the left hand side at the elbow.

  “He lost his arm in the war?”

  “No. That happened later. In Algeria. He was trying to defuse a bomb.”

  The train slowed to a halt in front of a small, yellow building. SNCF Lusignan. We descended, and stood for a moment on the quay. An outdated schedule half torn from the outside wall of the building. A uniformed man, wearing thickly rimmed glasses walked past, ignoring us.

  “We have to walk from here. There is no other way.”

  The house was perched on the upper rise of a road leading towards the village centre. The rear garden was a graded, mezzanine of tiered plots overlooking a deep ravine. The old man sat in a chair under the shade of a pear tree. He was holding a chamois, which he used to strain blackberries into a large metal vat. The nose thick and the face hidden by a thick bacchantes moustache, t wisted upwards at the extremities. When he caught sight of us, he stared for a moment without making any move to rise or extend a greeting.

  A pre-school infant held his forearm, watched us without moving forward. Her shoulder-length, stone-grey hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore a white blouse over a navy-blue pleated skirt. She lifted her arm, pointed at me.

  “Papy, c’est lui mon nouveau papa?” “Tschh. Embrasse ta mère.”

  She skipped towards Sheba. Stopped short in front of her and curtseyed. Dutifully kissed her on each cheek, then reached for her hand, a little on the coy side, I thought, for a kid.

  “Bonjour, maman. Je suis contente de te voir.”

  The two of them turned together, descended a set of curving steps, and entered a wine cellar. He pointed at the flat surface he was working on, the stump of a fallen oak.

  “Rabelais lived in this house. He is thought to have planted this tree, while it was still a tree. Until the storm, at the beginning of the year. I had to take it all down.”

  Sheba and the girl reappeared, Sheba carrying a bottle of champagne and three glass flutes. She placed the champagne on the table. The old man motioned towards her.

  “Open it.”

  Sheba popped the cork. We watched the bubbly flow over the neck of the bottle onto the ground. She poured the champagne. The girl watched me, saying nothing.

  The old man pulled her closer to him, turned towards Sheba.

  “Have you paid your respects to your mother?”

  “We will visit the cemetery this afternoon.”

  “Bien,” he responded. The tone was flat, pro-forma.

  He shifted his unsmiling gaze back to the girl.

  “Now you will have a new home. But not before the marriage.”

  Sheba interjected.

  “We haven’t yet set a date, papa.”

  She turned around and walked towards the house.

  She now wore a white apron over the dress, which was tied in a bow behind her back at the waist. He tracked her with his eyes until she disappeared.

  “How long have you known my daughter?” I shrugged my shoulders.

  “A year,” I hazarded.

  “Not long. She has been odieuse with you?”

  I said nothing.

  “If she hasn’t yet, don’t worry. Ne vous inquiétez pas.

  You will know her before long.”

  He glanced at the girl.

  “I raised that child.”

  Sheba re-emerged from the rear of the house. She approached us, keeping her eyes on her father.

  “We cannot remain any longer, papa. Monsieur Robinson has an appointment.”

  “Bien.”

  He turned towards the young girl.

  “Viens, chérie. On accompagne ta mère à la gare.”

  The girl ran towards her mother, stopped, curtseyed once. Kissed her mother on the cheek.

  “Merci pour la visite, maman.”

  For an impromptu performance, it looked pretty rehearsed. I wondered what the old man’s wife might have to say if she were still around. The girl and her grandfather escorted us out the gate and down the road towards the train station, Sheba and I behind, the girl hopping and skipping alongside her grandfather, filling in the space of the missing limb.

  We arrived at the Lusignan quay three minutes prior to departure. The tracks were lined with uprooted trees and the rain was starting to fall. Work crews were surveying the damage from the storm, pulling fallen trees further away from the tracks and cutting them into portable pieces with electric handsaws. We walked past the unmanned ticket office and onto the quay, the young girl singing:

  ... lundi matin, l’empereur sa femme et le petit prince sont venu chez moi, pour me serrer le pince

  comme j’ étais parti, le petit prince a dit puisque c’est ainsi, nous reviendrons mardi ...

  Then stopped suddenly and covered her ears as the screech of the train halting drowned out all else. The old man whispered something into his daughter’s ear. The young girl kissed her mother. Now, the old man turned towards me, shook my hand, then turned away. Just a series of freeze-frames and sketches for a future composition. Title: Départ sur le quai. Watercolour. Artist unknown. Title: Le Manchot. Oil on canvas. Discovered in the attic of a local prefect murdered five years previous. He trudged down the length of the quay, his shoulders slumped, the girl skipping alongside to keep up. He never said much during the visit, other than that laconic “we raised that child.” He had obviously not regained whatever he had lost on the bigger battle field a long time ago. He had the girl. That seemed to be enough for him.

  As for his daughter, maybe he even loved her, if love is a taciturn stare into the bottom of a glass, or a rueful shake of the head. Or maybe, if he didn’t love her anymore, he once did. Or maybe, before civilian life did a job on him, he enjoyed his life in the military, if a photo of an infantry gunner being dragged dead drunk across a stretch of Saigon road is enjoying life. But, by the time I got to him, he was a one-armed silhouette you would scarcely notice walking down the main street of Lusignan, a village of seventy-five people. He even walked down that railway platform like it was a gangplank, after planting a kiss on Sheba’s cheek that looked more like a warning than anything else I could make out.

  The train rolled out of the Lusignan gare. We watched the old man and the girl climbing the road outside the train slowly exiting the Lusignan station. Then the train rounded a corner and they were gone.

  “Un vrai salaud,” she pronounced delicately, still gazing out the window.

  She remained silent for a long moment. When she looked back at me, she faintly smiled, as if recalling my existence upon emerging from a coma.

  “Do you know, Franck, I wanted to kill my parents when I was young?”

  “How did your mother die?”

  “It doesn’t matter how. It is why.”

  “All right. So, why did she die?”

  “She died because her time was up, Franck.”

  I followed her gaze. The train was passing through an open field towards a small forest in the shape of a figure eight. It didn’t really matter where we were going.

  Somehow the visit confirmed for me that Sheba could take care of things, that it wasn’t my turf, and that I should stop worrying about it. I relaxed slightly. Things would happen. I would deal with them then.

  “Have I ever told you the legend of the Mélusine fairy?”

  “No.”

  “Every day, she could be seen drawing water from a well in the village of Lusignan. Her presence drove many men mad, unable to stand the sheer force of her beauty. One day, a brave man, very handsome, courted her. You may love
me, she responded to his courting, but during the night, from Saturday to Sunday, I cannot see you. Ever.” I half listened to her, while performing my own usual mind split. She was a pure lunatic, but from my standpoint, what woman wasn’t, or for that matter, what man wasn’t? Nobody looked very good close up.

  “The man loved her, became possessed by her within hours, until finally it was not enough to have her six days out of the seven. All of this happened within a short time. When Saturday fell, he followed her back to the well. And took her against her will.”

  As far as I could make out, it was either a warning, or some way of punctuating recent events. According to her psychic talmudic tablets and ethical scrolls, and her need to be clean, papa had been dealt with and would never enter our lives again. As for the little girl, only time would tell. Maybe she would become a whore like her mother. Or reverse the trend and become a chartered accountant. These things are impossible to predict in advance. When you come right down to it, it’s a question of personal taste more than anything.

  Several hours later, we arrived at gare Montparnasse. As we emerged above ground, I caught a view of boulevard Montparnasse where it crosses Vaugirard. I could see the signs for La Rotonde and Le Select. The last time I had been in Le Select, it was for a champagne breakfast before catching a plane for the Dry Tortugas and a photo shoot of barracudas. And now, centuries later, I was touring the city with a whore, my life mate. Til death do us part.

  “Wait,” she ordered, disappearing into a Guerlain shop. As I lit a Marboro, a young woman approached, but instead of entering the boutique, she lingered, peering into the display window of the shop. She was a sassy looking henna-streaked thing, wearing a pastel, cut-away dress. Her whole appearance had something accidental about it, in appearance unplanned, but in fact a collage of items and impressions which had been carefully prepared to deliberately produce the effect referred to by the French as insouciant. A partially executed brush stroke on the canvas. Spoiled and self-indulgent, right down to the crocodile stickpin on her skirt and the pillbox hat with the veil. On the other hand, she looked sane. I lit another Marlboro and considered for a moment what it might be like to live with someone who both gave good head and paid taxes. The thought didn’t seem sustainable as a world-view, but it stayed there long enough for the girl to evaporate. I stared through the spot where she had been standing, down the gullet of the 14th arrondissement of this whore of a city, reviewing my remaining options.