‘What does he know of our intent?’
‘Only that your soul needs saving,’ she replied. ‘Which is not untrue.’ We entered the coffee house. Édmonde looked about a moment and, still gripping my forearm, started off in the direction of a young man sitting alone at a wooden table. The youth was so gaunt and angular in appearance he reminded me less of a man and more of a praying mantis, with a wispy beard and longish hair carefully arranged to fall over one eye. On account of his unusual height, he had adopted a permanent stooped posture and seemed to be folded into his chair rather than seated upon it. ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Roux. Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Monsieur Baudelaire.’
Roux stood and suddenly towered above me. My eyes reached only his shoulders. We bowed our heads and shook hands. His was clammy and insipid. There was a heavy pause for a moment as I found my kerchief and wiped the hand the seminarian had just held. ‘Madame Édmonde tells me you are in need of spiritual counsel,’ the young man finally said, in a high, nasally voice that, I suspected, was intended to sound urbane.
‘Quite,’ I replied, and we fell back into an involuntary silence. I looked helplessly across to my co-conspirator but, as her face was veiled, found no clue of how to proceed. ‘And you are pursuing religious studies?’
‘Why, certainly, I am resolved to serve God’s mission in the tropics – life among the savages of the Congo, saving the souls of the cannibals, bringing them into the light of Christ and so forth.’ He began to describe to me, in a pinched, precious tone, the righteous future that lay before him. The impression his discourse made was not so much of vocation but of vanity, and yet he was completely unaware of his effect. As I listened to him, I began to consider the possibility of inhabiting that elongated body, of speaking in that whine, of using those spindly, spidery fingers for every task, of stooping my head every time I had to pass through a door. The thought of it was not a pleasant one. Would I, in the new body, comb my hair the same way? Would I speak with the same insufferable tone? If I retained no memory of my previous existences, and I entered such a body, what kind of fate was it that I was condemning myself to? He, in turn, was completely unaware of the fate that would befall him, were we to execute our designs. He would cross into my body, which teetered on the edge of permanent decrepitude. Such a fate was hardly better than mine. The thought of crossing with the seminarian seemed suddenly obscene.
‘Charles?’ I heard Édmonde’s voice. The youth had stopped talking and must have asked me a question, which, lost as I was in my meditations, I had not heard. I affected a toothache and begged my leave.
When Madame Édmonde joined me outside moments later, I was leaning against the wall of the coffee house, deeply troubled. Once more she took me by the arm and we began walking back in the direction of the railway station. ‘What is the matter, Charles? Are you displeased with the fruit of my labours?’
‘The man is a simpleton, there’s no question about it. The thought of a life in that body is unbearable. But there are other considerations: if we were to cross, his soul would die in the misery of my body and, as contemptible as he is, I cannot consent to that, especially if it were to happen without his knowing it. It would feel too much like theft. I would rather undertake no crossing at all, and die and be done with it.’
We entered the station’s waiting room and Édmonde helped ease me onto a seat. ‘Charles, you stipulated a man, and not just any man, but a healthy, educated man. Can you conceive how difficult it is to persuade such a person to take seriously the idea that a crossing might be possible? And even if it were done, to then convince him to give his body away, especially for one that is ill and frail? There is not a man in all of Europe who would agree to such a thing.’ Even from behind her veil, I could sense Édmonde’s ire radiating from her. ‘If you are now insisting that you will only cross with someone knowingly, you have made my task almost impossible. For who will believe such a story? It took you more than twenty years to believe me.’
‘I cannot agree to it.’
‘Very well,’ Édmonde sighed, ‘I will find someone who wishes for death. But Charles, I beseech you, the streets abound with young women in despair, women whose circumstances are so straitened that to them death seems preferable to life. Think on it.’
We parted in disagreement.
On my return voyage to Brussels that same evening, I was at first alone in my compartment. With Édmonde’s words still ringing in my ears, the pain of my neuralgia flared as never before. I swallowed an entire bottle of laudanum to dull the aches and entered into euphoric somnolence. When the train stopped at Genappe, two young women entered the compartment. They appeared to be sisters. Upon their entrance, they greeted me by saying, in French, ‘Good evening, Father.’ It was not the first time in my life I had been mistaken for a man of the cloth, no doubt on account of my gloomy visage and dark vestments. The two demoiselles sat opposite me and retreated into each other, speaking Flemish. Because I was invisible to them, they were behaving quite naturally. I watched them discreetly, so as not to diminish the spontaneity of their comportment. I sat so that I appeared to be looking out the window at the passing pastures, but as it was dark there was little to see, other than the reflection of the illuminated interior of the compartment. I fixed my attention on the reflection of the two women in the glass and listened to that strange language, which always reminded me of the gurgling of a stream. I studied their femininity – their voices, their movements, the clothes they wore, the intimacy they enjoyed. Surrounded by women every day, I have nonetheless never ceased to be astonished by their strangeness. What is it like, I wondered, to be a woman? What is it like to be able to conceive life? I’d always flattered myself that, as a literary man, I had the imaginative wherewithal to answer the question poetically – and that poetry was my only available means of answering the question. But could writing alone cross the gulf that separates men and women? For the first time in my life I was willing to admit that I doubted it, and from that admission sprang a succession of thoughts that led me, by the time the train arrived in Brussels, to a conclusion diametrically opposed to the opinion I’d held when it had left Charleroi. If a crossing was indeed possible, what did I have to lose by exploring that other manifestation of the great human duality? Woman. Womanhood. Observing those sisters, I was for the first time intrigued by the possibility of such a crossing – by the thought of no longer being imprisoned by the tomb of manhood – the freedom, the release from that dungeon of violence, ambition and lust! The only person I’d known whose life had been more difficult than mine was Jeanne – and I had contributed mightily to its hardship. I decided I could justify refusing womanhood on no moral grounds other than cowardice.
{87}
An Unsuitable Candidate
AS I WAITED FOR Édmonde’s next missive, I continued – between bouts of neuralgia, when I was too debilitated by laudanum to even pick up my pen – to write the words you have been reading. Despite the pain I was suffering, I felt a kind of ecstatic serenity that was hitherto unknown to me. My nightmares, which had tortured me throughout my life, were no longer a tribulation. They were replaced by dreams that were at once lucid and consoling. My body and my soul were detaching from each other. The one was racked with pain, dying, while the other was beginning to look forward to its next journey.