‘Crénom, I didn’t understand a thing. What is it, then?’
‘A poem,’ I snarled. ‘Do you even know what such a thing is?’
‘Of course I do. Sister Bernadette had us learn one by heart, about Jesus. But why would you write one about a bird? What is an albatross, anyway?’
‘It’s a kind of big seagull,’ said Édmonde. ‘Thank you, Mathilde, you did very well. Why don’t you go wait for us outside and we’ll call you in again very soon.’
You nodded, curtsied again and shuffled off towards the church’s main entrance. You had barely left when I erupted. ‘Impossible! Simply impossible! Charmless, witless, allergic to poetry and she can barely string a sentence together. That accent is dreadful, not to mention the profanity. Crénom, crénom! She’s insufferable.’
‘It’s a truncation of sacré nom. Surely, being a poet, you appreciate the sentiment. “Holy word”.’
My entire body was quivering like a violin. ‘I know perfectly well what it means. It’s not the point. The point is that not only is the girl hideous to contemplate, she doesn’t even have a sense of beauty. And what is a woman without beauty?’ As soon as I had uttered the phrase, I realised I had committed a cruelty.
Édmonde sat beside me and took my hands. ‘My dear Charles, do you think I have never asked myself the same question?’ I looked up at her. She had lifted her veil. The ugliness of her face was once again on full display, mocking my suffering and the anger it had spawned. ‘All I am asking you to do is live. And all she wants to do is die. She has told me herself.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s pregnant – and not for the first time. She had to give the first child away to the nuns, which is where I found her – imprisoned in a convent laundry. She didn’t even get a chance to hold her child before it was taken away. Since then, she has been riven with despair, and tried to kill herself more than once. The same thing will happen this time. But since it is her second time she will now be sent to a workhouse. Her child will grow up in an orphanage. She doesn’t want that. She wants her child to grow up lacking for nothing.’
‘How did you get her out of the convent?’
‘I told the prioress that I was seeking to raise up in society a fallen girl, that I would train her and educate her to eventually become my personal secretary. The prioress believes Mathilde is a lost cause, to which I replied that a lost cause is exactly what I’m seeking.’
‘And what have you told her about the nature of the crossing?’
‘Everything.’
It is ten minutes to two o’clock in the morning. I am lying in a bed in an upstairs room of Namur’s only inn, exhausted, barely able to hold my pen, surrounded by empty bottles of laudanum and sheets of paper upon which I have scrawled by candlelight the last of this, the finest and truest tale I have ever recounted. Édmonde is in the next room. We will meet with you tomorrow at the same splendid church where we met today. Édmonde reassures me that I am able to cross, that the power is in me even if I can’t remember. All I have to do, she says, is look into your eyes for a few minutes. Soon enough, a feeling of frothy joy will overtake us, she says, and the crossing will take place naturally, effortlessly. If, when we meet tomorrow, nothing of the sort happens, then I will simply have been deceived by a prankster or a lunatic. But if a crossing does take place, if events do transpire as Édmonde has foretold, then this story will stand as the testimony of it, so that if all you remember of your previous lives is in your dreams, then this story will serve you, dear girl, as both reminiscence and evidence of the man you once were.
Charles Baudelaire, Namur, Belgium,
Thursday, 15 April 1865.
{256}
City of Ghosts
The Cemetery
SHE STOOD IN front of the poet’s grave, smoking a cigarette, lost in her thoughts, in the Montparnasse cemetery. It was a brilliant May afternoon in Paris – not today’s Paris, vanquished and humiliated, but the city as it once was, only a short time ago but already far distant and forever lost. She wore a black silk dress printed with blooms of red hibiscus. The skin of her bare arms was golden, her raven-black hair curled into a chignon. It was nearly closing time, I remember. I was walking past her along the cemetery alley, headed for my apartment. I glanced at her without slowing – although perhaps, if it is at all possible, there was a flicker of hesitation, a hint of desire, a fleeting urge to stop, to approach her, to ask why she was standing there in front of this particular grave, a grave I myself had stood before many times, on this sunny and too-warm weekday afternoon in May. The sky was a dazzling and pure azure. My tie was loosened and my jacket slung over my shoulder. The grave she was standing before was that of Charles Baudelaire, the poet to whom I had, in a way, devoted the best years of my life.
It was Monday, 27 May 1940 – not even four months ago, and yet it might as well be many years, an age, an epoch. Seventeen days earlier, after keeping the world in suspense for nine months, the Germans had finally launched their invasion of Belgium and France, sending their tanks through the Ardennes forests, circumventing the famous Maginot Line, crossing the Meuse River before the French could destroy the bridges – or had the French defence been sabotaged by traitors, as many believed? In a little over two weeks, the Germans had pinned the armies of three nations back against the English Channel. Boulogne and Calais were cut off, and Dunkirk was next.
I had stopped reading and listening to the news. I should not have been there to begin with, in that graveyard. I should have already left Paris. I was a refugee, after all, a Jew, an ex-German. My papers were not in order. They were substitute papers. The nearer the Germans advanced, the more danger I was in. For several weeks, a black suitcase had stood upright behind the entrance door of my apartment, a reminder that I ought to go, to vanish. But one wearies of vanishing acts. I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I tried not to think about it. I was in a state of denial, preoccupied more with the past than the present. For years, I had been working on a book that remained unfinished. It gave me an excuse to stay, to keep wandering these streets I knew so well, forever dawdling, in secret communion with the phantoms of the past, ready to join their ranks, to become another spectral presence in this city of ghosts. If that was not enough, there was no shortage of other, more mundane excuses: the imminent arrival of a telegram, an application for a visa, a request for a letter of recommendation, the chaos at the railway stations. And at the very moment when there could be no more excuses, I was about to be granted another, in the form of this woman. She would, for a time, be my alibi, my reason to stay, to surrender to the city and be swallowed into it, once and for all.
After the declaration of war the previous September, the city’s libraries and museums were closed, their collections packed away in crates and sent to storehouses in the country, as were the artworks and artefacts in the museums, leaving the palaces of art and learning standing darkly empty, like, in certain ports, hulks that have been stripped of their fittings and are permanently moored. I’d spent the last several years burrowing into those libraries, writing a book about this city, a never-ending book in a constant state of expansion, a book that grew faster than it could be written. Now that the libraries were closed, I began to contemplate the possibility that my book would never be published.