Emma was impressed and a little envious. No-one had ever tried to kill themselves on her behalf. She searched for a comparable experience of her own.
‘I was desperately ill too. I nearly died when Rodolphe sent me a letter saying the elopement was off and he was leaving. In fact I was just going to throw myself out of the window when Charles happened to call me down to supper. It would have been better if I’d done away with myself then. Better that way than arsenic, I can tell you. Anyway, I had a nervous collapse that lasted for months.’
The two women lapsed into silence, each of them caught up in her own thoughts.
After a few minutes, Emma got up and walked across the wooden floor to the window on her side of the room. Calico curtains hung there. The canary-coloured wallpaper around the window was peeling with damp. She leaned her elbows on the window sill and looked out over the market square of Yonville l’Abbaye. Nothing had changed. The plaster figure of a Cupid with his finger on his lips still stood on the gate of the notary’s house opposite. In the distance she could see the flat and characterless landscape typical of that region of France. Before long she was overcome with the familiar feeling of suffocation. She was stifled with ennui. ‘Oh why, dear God, did I marry him?’ she repeated again and again. Down in the depth of her soul Emma Bovary was waiting and longing for something to happen. That was the enduring image of her existence. The summary of her life. Waiting and longing. After a while she broke away and returned to her conversation with Anna:
‘Was it love at first sight for you?’ Emma enquired, inspecting the heel of her boot as she settled back down beside her companion. ‘I always thought love should strike like a clap of thunder.’
Anna Karenina gave the matter careful consideration.
‘Well no, not really. I met Vronsky in a railway station. Nothing happened at the time although I could sense I had made an impression on him. There’d been an accident. A guard died. Vronsky very generously offered money to the man’s family. I knew immediately that he’d done it to impress me. I saw him later in the house . . . there was something. But nothing really happened until the ball that was being held for Kitty, my young sister-in-law. I shouldn’t have behaved as I did.’ Anna turned to Emma and made a slight grimace of remorse. ‘Vronsky was more or less betrothed to Kitty. But what happened between me and Vronsky that night was irresistible. It was overpowering. We were both incapable of withstanding it.’ Anna rolled her eyes and threw her head back and for a moment Emma looked at her and saw in her eager face something strange and diabolical and enchanting. ‘But when I was leaving Moscow the next day to catch the train home to Petersburg I remember thinking, ”Thank goodness that bit of excitement is over and from now on my life, my nice everyday life, will go on as before.” But halfway home when I got off the train for some fresh air, Vronsky was there on the platform. He’d followed me.’ Anna’s eyes shone as she leaned against the high back of the settle.
Not to be outdone, Emma chattered on.
‘I went to a ball once. We were invited to the home of the Marquis de Andervilliers. Charles had cured his abscess. That one contact with the rich changed me forever. I saw that my provincial life was dull, dull, dull. I longed to go to Paris and mix with . . . well . . . a better class of person. The day after the ball I bought myself a street map of Paris so that I could imagine shopping there.’
But Anna Karenina was not listening. At that moment, she left the seat, frowning, and hurried towards the window on her side of the room. The tall leaded window was set in wooden panelling. It overlooked a Moscow courtyard which had its gates already wide open to receive a carriage. Anna glanced out of the window and then began pacing up and down. Why did Vronsky always have to stay out so late? He was growing cold towards her, no doubt about it. He must know how miserable she was in Moscow. And there was still no news from Karenin about a divorce. She thought she heard the sound of carriage wheels on the cobbles and hurried back to the window. No. No sign of him. This is not living, she thought. Endlessly waiting for a solution that never comes is not living. I know he’s getting tired of me. Why doesn’t he come? It doesn’t even matter if he doesn’t love me. As long as he’s here. The strain and anxiety of her situation caused a change in Anna’s characteristically cheerful temperament. She bit her lip, shook her head and returned slowly to where she had been sitting.
Emma could not help noticing how graceful Anna was when she walked.
‘How do you keep that lovely figure? I had to drink vinegar to keep slim.’
Anna ignored the question and posed one of her own as she sat down: ‘What happened anyway with your Rodolphe and your Leon?’ There was something sharp, almost dismissive, in the tone of her voice.
Emma sighed. ‘Well Rodolphe was rich. He owned a chateau nearby. He was really attracted to me. We went riding together. Charles encouraged it – he thought it was good for my health. We started an affair. I became really bold. I couldn’t stop myself. One morning when Charles was at work I ran all the way over to the chateau and burst in on him.’ Emma held her hand to her mouth and her eyes flashed with amusement as she recalled her own behaviour. ‘It was lust,’ she admitted. ‘I couldn’t keep away from him.’
Anna found Emma Bovary entertaining and a welcome distraction from her own thoughts. She could see how men would be attracted to this pert creature with her red lips and wayward manner.
Emma rattled on: ‘After that I went to the chateau whenever I could although Rodolphe warned me that I was becoming reckless. Now I realise I gave him too many gifts, expensive riding-whips, cigar cases, that sort of thing. I became over-sentimental too, talking to him in baby language which got on his nerves. And I was borrowing money like there was no tomorrow, ordering clothes and travelling bags for myself, thinking we were going away together. Then, out of the blue, he did a bunk. How despicable is that?’
Emma let out a hiss of disgust. She took some eau de cologne from a small bottle and sprinkled it on her arms.
‘Go on.’ At that moment Anna chose to be a listener, fearful of what she might reveal about herself if she talked.
Feeling flattered, Emma continued: ‘Well then, Leon was somebody else I’d taken a fancy to. You’ve no idea how boring life is in the provinces. But Leon moved away to Rouen before anything happened. Then after the disaster with Rodolphe, I bumped into Leon again. He was sweet. We had this amazing ride in a horse-drawn cab. We just pulled the curtains and got on with it. I’d been worried that he’d be too timid. But he wasn’t. I don’t know why but after that I became more careless, sort of slapdash. I didn’t really bother about anything anymore. I paid everything on credit. Signed promissory notes. Spent a lot on clothes. I forged bills for the piano classes I pretended to Charles I was having – my excuse for going to Rouen. I was getting into huge debt. Trying to dodge bailiffs. Now I can see that everything was going to pieces.’
‘Were you jealous?’ asked Anna.
Emma held her hands in front of her to study the nails she had shaped so carefully. She thought for a moment and then replied: ‘Not really. But I was pushy. I see that now. I demanded Leon wrote me love poems. I kept turning up at his office and he didn’t like it. I’d made the same mistake with Rodolphe. Were you jealous of Vronsky?’
Anna stared straight ahead with a brooding look in her grey eyes.
‘I was jealous of everything. Jealous of every minute I was not with him. I was even jealous of my child’s nurse. I wanted total possession. “Love for man is a thing apart. ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” Have you read any Byron?’
Emma shook her head. ‘I used to read Walter Scott at the convent. And I loved all those romances and the stories about martyred women. Passion. That’s what I wanted.’
Anna gave a wry smile.
‘I wrote a little myself. Children’s stories, mainly. And I once re-wrote the first sentence of that famous novel by Jane Austen. She was all the rage with us at the time. My version went: “It is a truth not universally acknowle
dged that all married women, even when they are perfectly contented, are still looking for a husband.” It’s a sentence almost as famous as the one at the beginning of my own life story.’ She pointed to the Penguin Classic copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin that lay beside her on the bench.
Emma gave a puzzled shrug and pulled her own Penguin Classic copy of Madame Bovary out of a drawstring bag. She frowned at the cover.
‘I don’t know why they’ve put me in that weird outfit. They should have used my ball dress. Pale saffron yellow with three bouquets of pompom roses trimmed with green. Satin slippers too.’ She flicked through the pages of her life story. ‘Oh, I’m such a fool. I hadn’t realised that Leon held such a candle for me for all that time. I should have guessed and done something about it before he left.’
She came to the part of the book which described her long, drawn-out death. Her lips puckered with distaste.
‘Why did he have to say my tongue was protruding like that? And black liquid was coming out of my mouth? Sometimes I wonder if Flaubert even liked me.’
Anna felt a surge of affection for her. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Kill myself?’ Emma took a deep breath. ‘Debt. It was poverty that did me in, not adultery. I was desperate. Always fleeing debt collectors. Running from bailiffs. I just rushed into the pharmacy, grabbed a handful of arsenic powder and that was that. What about you?’
Anna Karenina took a while to reply. She played with a loose strand of her black hair before turning directly to Emma, a strange gleam in her eyes.
‘Vengeance. Vague fury and a craving for vengeance.’ She shuddered as she remembered the heavy iron blow of the train’s wheel on her head. ‘Revenge was more or less my final thought. Of course, I was upset and confused too but if men knew our capacity for vengeance they would tremble in their socks. Never have I hated anyone as I suddenly hated that man. Love turned to hate. I can still see his stony face when we began to quarrel. All I wanted to do was hurt him. Death was my way of reviving his love for me, punishing him and finally gaining victory in the contest.’
Emma was slightly shocked. She did not think she had it in her heart to be as ruthless as Anna. She closed Flaubert’s novel and laid it on her lap.
Anna looked at her in surprise: ‘Have you stopped reading? Do you not want to know what happened after you died? I do.’
Emma, with some reluctance, opened her book again and turned to the last few pages. She reached the point when her mother-in-law moved in to comfort Charles after her death.
‘Oh, I see the old bat got him back after I’d gone. She was always jealous of me.’
Anna laughed. ‘Vronsky’s mother hated me too. He’d given up a prestigious military career for me. She adored me at first then she thought I’d ruined her son’s life.’
‘How do you mean?’ Emma tried to hide her prurience.
The colour rose up through Anna’s neck and into her cheeks at the memory.
‘Well, Vronsky and I chose to live together without my being divorced. That meant we were social outcasts. We were refused invitations. Spurned by old friends. Nobody would visit us. And once I was at the opera when the wife of a couple in the next box ostentatiously rose and left rather than be seen to be sitting near me.’
For a few moments Emma was quite glad she did not move in those circles. It crossed her mind that maybe the French Revolution hadn’t been such a bad thing. She read on.
‘Oh it seems that Charles really did love me. He kept a lock of my hair and gave me a very grand tombstone.’ Then her hand shot up to cover her mouth. ‘Oh no.’ She looked up in horror at Anna. ‘He’s found all my love letters. The ones to Leon and the ones to Rodolphe. Now he knows everything.’ She continued to read. ‘Shit. Now he’s actually bumped into Rodolphe in the market at Argueil. This is dreadful.’ She covered her face with her hands and then peeped back at the book. ‘Oh and now he’s died. Just as well, probably.’
Anna was studying the last pages of the Tolstoy novel with great intensity.
‘Good. I’m so glad I was looking beautiful when Vronsky came to see my dead body at the train station.’ She put the book down and said with sarcasm: ‘I suppose we have to be thankful that Kitty and Levin carry some hope of happiness in the world.’ She explained to Emma, ‘Kitty couldn’t get Vronsky so she had to make do with Levin. Vronsky always thought Levin was a crackpot with his communist ideas. Anyway, I got what I wanted. Vronsky rejoined the military and went off to war. He would almost certainly have been killed. At least nobody else would have him.’ She snapped the book shut with triumph and offered it to Emma. ‘Do you want to read it?’
‘I don’t think so. Not if it doesn’t have a happy ending.’ Emma continued to grumble about her author. ‘I don’t think that Flaubert could have approved of me if he gave me such an unattractive death. I like books where death is more romantic.’
‘I’m not sure that Tolstoy liked me either. Anyway, apparently Tolstoy was a complete pain in the neck but look at what he created.’ Anna’s eyes flashed with humour and she pulled the cashmere shawl around her shoulders.
‘Do you think people will remember us?’ asked Emma.
‘Oh yes,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘People will remember us more vividly than they remember their own relatives.’
Soon the women were drawn back to their respective windows. As long as they were residents in that city of waiting much of their time was spent at the window, re-living certain short but very particular moments in their lives.
THE DARK PHOTON
Even as I write, I think of the time when the pages will have turned to dust, the computers long since disintegrated and all life vanished, leaving nothing behind but the cold universe. And then the universe itself gone out. Total extinction. But I write anyway.
It was either February or March – I’m not good on dates and it was a while ago. I was staying in the Nunez area of Buenos Aires, having returned to Argentina after many years (assuming that I didn’t just dream I’d returned, as it sometimes seems). Unwilling to pick up the threads of my former life I told no-one I was coming back. Instead I rented a small apartment and spent the evenings on my own, cooking for myself or eating pizza and preparing my conference paper on the dark photon – that elusive portal into the world of dark matter – which I was to present at the university later in the week. Earlier that same evening I had gone to the trouble of making a beef stew which I was mopping up with tortillas, while keeping half an eye on the television in order to catch one of the crazier soap operas.
The loud knocking on the front door of the building signalled distress. It came late at night. I looked out of the window of my fifth-floor flat. My friend Bernardo Brach, whom I had not seen for years but who was immediately recognisable, was standing on the pavement outside. I had to go down five flights of the narrow staircase because, for some reason, he refused to let me throw down the keys. The lights on the stairway didn’t work. When I reached the ground floor Bernardo stood there in the glare of the street lamp. He looked more haggard than when I had last seen him in the United States. To my alarm he had a suitcase with him. He caught my disconcerted glance at his bag.
It’s all right. I’m not staying. I need to ask you something then I’ll be on my way.
We embraced each other and went upstairs to my flat.
How did you know I was back?
I keep an eye on what’s happening. You’re here for the science convention, aren’t you? I saw your name and cajoled one of the secretaries into giving me your address. I’ve been back here myself, looking into some things . . .
His voice tailed off. The stubble on his face suggested that he had not shaved for at least two days. He was staring intensely at the floor with the closed sweaty look of a man who is living a secret life in his head.
We wasted hardly any time discussing what we had both been doing since we last saw each other. I now lived in London and worked in the physics department of Imperial College. Bernardo had settled in
North America. We had been close friends at school and since then had kept in touch, if only infrequently. He told me he had worked at various jobs and tried running an unsuccessful art gallery. His own artwork was an eccentric mix of installations built from old Meccano and Lego sets combined with whatever industrial bric-a-brac caught his eye on the streets or in the boatyards of Miami, where he now lived. He never sold much but nor did he waver from his commitment to this type of work.
Bernardo had sought me out for only one reason. He wanted to know if I remembered a teacher we had at school and if I thought I would still recognise him. He paced around the room and smoked.
Did you take history at school?
Yes. Briefly.
Then you must remember him.
I did indeed remember Felipe Guzman.
In the last year of our school days I was the window monitor in charge of opening or closing the windows according to the temperature. In summer, the afternoon sun baked our stuffy classroom which smelled of wood, polish and chalk. I remember the way the cords looped down over the radiators because in winter I made sure I sat huddled next to the heating system. Our school was in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a city which thought well of itself even in those unsettling days, a sophisticated city, the perfect mix of Europe and Latin America.
We were all impressed by the new history teacher. There was something cavalier in the way he tossed his front lock of black hair and smoothed it back with his hand as he spoke. His face had an extraordinary pallor as if he had never seen the South American sun but his lips were red and well defined. He sported a simple but impeccably stylish wardrobe consisting of a white open-necked shirt, black trousers and a waistcoat. All told, he was nothing like our other shabbier and less charismatic teachers. There were rumours about him. Who knows where these rumours came from but pupils love to speculate about the lives of their teachers outside the classroom. We knew he came from an illustrious naval family and his uncle was a hero in the national polo playing team. But they said that, for a while, he had abandoned the family to hang out with low-life petty criminals in the villas miserias; that he was the artist responsible for some notorious and shocking graffiti in the Plaza de Mayo. Maybe we just invented all that. Then there was some story about his making provocative or scandalous gestures, thumbing his nose at a high-ranking naval officer – something unheard of in those days. But, if indeed those stories were true, he was never arrested or even cautioned, perhaps because of his family’s influence.
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