Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (30 page)

I turned heavily on my heel
and climbed back into the hospital. Sat down exhausted in the row of plastic
chairs outside the door through which Charles had disappeared.

I am a lover of one thing,
Charles. Like you I have no name for that thing, only aliases. For a long time
it was art, a great imposing house at the door of which I camped out, waiting,
almost glad when
les événements
came to carry me away.
Then, for a little while, it was you. A man I should have hated for having
everything, being
everything, that
I was not: money,
looks, a golden tongue, above all that ease of movement, gesture, insolence.
Instead I loved you, and in your own way you requited that love. For an even
littler while, I loved what you professed to love: the revolution. Not because
I wanted the servant to at last be the master, but only because I was an
outcast, invisible, neither student nor worker, not even a peasant any more,
young in a way you’ve never been, without the beauty of youth. I didn’t love
your cause, only your face, its pride and haughtiness, its cruel humor. So beautiful
all the faces, all the young men and women, the faces I tried to capture in my
sketchbook, many faces united in single transcendent moods of outrage,
euphoria, attentiveness, like so many dogs listening to the same inhuman
frequency. Faces to stand behind, faces in the grips of bodies, thousands of
faces floating down boulevards toward perfect destruction and loss. Even now
past the end I see those faces facing the faceless—the cops and their sticks,
their gas, their guns. Have you seen these men, have you seen a man like your
horseman with his helmet off? I have. He is neither young nor old.
A kind of savage humor in the set of his jaw, the line of his
mouth.
No eyes, even without the visor, without sunglasses. If he ever
had eyes he lost them in Algeria or Indochina. He fought there and committed
atrocities so you, Charles, could grow your own beautiful face, like a
sunflower in a jar, all of you, thousands of sunflowers, until the time came to
harvest them, to reap youth, to ensure that future in which nothing happens.
A sunflower like Van Gogh’s, vivid with madness and joy, most alive
the moment it’s torn from its roots.

But Charles, there was
another face, another flower, with invisible roots, arcing downward forever out
of sight, inscrutable in perpetual half-light, a face neither old or new, the
face of M. She puzzled you, challenged you. She gave you what the others had,
but contemptuously, and she let you feel her contempt. She showed you nothing
of herself that you didn’t have to invent for her.
On my
canvas that you have not seen and never will see.
Her pain makes her
beautiful: in that we are guilty of the same crime, seeing that or not seeing
it. It sets her apart from the world, a foreigner wherever she may be. In
America too I’d wager.

A bright morning.
Summer was beginning to
pierce the heavy damp cloak of the long spring. The light was paralyzing,
falling directly on my face from the window opposite where the still swathed
form of Charles lay. And it took another moment to recognize whom the regal
woman of more than middle height with her ash blonde hair in a chignon must be,
standing next to a lean greyhound of a man in sunglasses and a gray mustache,
both of them looking in from the doorway with fixed expressions of horror.
Directed at me, I somehow felt, and not at the wreck that had been their
son—for their son he surely was—in the bed there. I tried to stand, but a surge
of nausea bent me double, and I sat down again.

They were in the room. It
was narrow; they had to stand in front of me where I sat in the green plush
chair to look at their son, so that I saw only the backs of their coats. They
stood close together and yet not touching, haloed by the glare of the sun from
the window behind them. I managed with difficulty now to stand, and with
greater difficulty to edge past them toward the doorway, almost believing they
hadn’t seen me, that I might get away. But I felt a hand grip my arm.

What happened to my son?
the
woman demanded.

All I could see in her
face—the blue eyes, the refined cheekbones, the fullness of her upper lip—was
Charles. I opened my mouth and closed it.

They say you brought him
in, she said. I should call the police.

It was the police that did
this to him, I said.

She creased her brow and removed
her hand from my sleeve. It was as though I spoke in another tongue. Her
husband did not change position, but I saw his hands gripping the bar on
Charles’s bed, the knuckles flexing pink, then white; pink, then white. I could
not take my eyes off of them.

How could you say such a
thing? How could this have happened to my boy?
My beautiful
boy?

Standing at the foot of the
bed I saw Charles’s face inside its margin of white bandages. It looked small
and impossibly pale, severe as the carved stone face saint. And that other
face, face of a mother, identical to his but for the touch of lipstick and
blusher, the plucked eyebrows, the blue eyes holding my gaze for a moment
longer.
Then her eyes closing, slowly.
Turning her face away.
Leaning now into the body of her
husband, both gazing mutely, crossed shadow of the window falling on them, on
the antiseptic bed, barring what would not ignite in whiteness.
The cross.

Flight, then.
Into the slumbering
submarine streets of Paris after the revolution, the crested tide of youth,
irrefutably itself, and me what I had been at the beginning, once again.
A stranger.

Charles was in hospital for six weeks, as long as the
Events themselves had lasted.
Longer.
A lot happened, nothing happened.
L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts had
been the last stronghold to fall, but fall it had and classes had resumed. I
attended a few times to see what it felt like,
then
stopped because it didn’t feel like anything. The young people no longer moved
in invincible masses; they stood around in little clusters of three or four,
talking softly or not talking, shoulders hunched, sheltering cigarettes, filing
into and out of exam rooms. Men in green uniforms made the mountains of trash
disappear, brought in saplings from the country to replace the uprooted trees.
Work crews were everywhere putting fresh impenetrable layers of asphalt on top
of the remaining paving-stones. Some graffiti was left; already these bits of
brick and granite had become tourist attractions, flocked to by groups of
Austrians and Italians with cameras clicking, while a self-appointed docent,
subsidized by the state for all I knew, stood underneath a furled umbrella and
blared
the facts about the revolution that wasn’t, that
hadn’t. The summer vacation was on; the city began, again, to empty. The
concierge told me one afternoon as I came in from a rain shower that Charles’s
share of the rent payment had not been forthcoming, and I would have to come up
with the extra francs or vacate the premises by the end of July. I went
upstairs, dripping, and lay down in my wet clothes on the floor. Someone had
come for Charles’s things while I was out; his clothes were gone, the record
turntable, the set of gold pens he’d received as the winner of a prize at lycee
he’d somehow never gotten around to pawning. Of M and myself there was only my
old trunk, the electric tea kettle, my paintings and sketches, and a small red
suitcase which I opened and rummaged through without compunction. On top of a
small collection of blouses and underthings was a stack of letters, postmarked
Queens, New York, rubber-banded in a stack and unopened. I hefted them, flipped
through them like the pages of a book; collectively they represented about a
year and a half of steady correspondence, a letter every month or so. I held
one up to the light. I sniffed it: clean paper, slight stink of ink from a
ballpoint. The handwriting appeared masculine.
Another lover?
A teacher?
Her father?
I knew
little of American geography but the American ambassador-at-large did not, I
thought, live in Queens. She had been gone for almost a month. I heated up
water in the kettle, got up a head of steam; it didn’t whistle any more, no one
could possibly detect my violation, or the barefaced need that led me to it. I
held the most recent of the envelopes over the steam, not caring if it singed
my fingers a little. The envelope’s dampened flap curled upward like a lip. I
sat by the window and slid the single sheet of blue paper into my palm. But I
couldn’t read it. It was in a strange language, profligate with accents.
Finnish?
Hungarian?
A language that I’d never seen, or heard, or suspected that M might
speak.
Perhaps she didn’t speak it. Perhaps the letters were unopened.
It was signed
az
 Apád
. I stared at the meaningless clots of syllables for a
while, then carefully replaced the folded letter in its envelope and resealed
the flap. It rejoined its brothers in the suitcase full of similarly mute
objects. There was one more item aside from clothing: a small leatherbound
diary, with a rawhide strap winding it shut. I opened it. All the pages were
blank.

One afternoon not long
after that I climbed upstairs with a few groceries and discovered a padlock on
the door to the flat, my trunk and M’s suitcase standing at attention on the
mat. My sketches were in the trunk, the painting of M was not. I called the
concierge, got no answer that was clearer than the lock on the door: something
had
ended,
it was time to move on. But I couldn’t move
on. An acquaintance from the art school took me in temporarily while I tried to
get my bearings. I was no longer a student. I no longer sketched or painted.
M and my picture of M, both gone.
My mornings were given
over to reading detective novels—my friend had long shelves full of them, in
French and English—and my afternoons to wandering along the Seine or the
Luxembourg Gardens. I ate comparatively little and my big belly began to hollow
itself out. If I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I saw only the skull
beneath the skin. I went by the old building with some money I’d borrowed and
the concierge let me into the still vacant flat. The walls smelled of fresh
paint. There was no sign of the picture of M, she hadn’t seen it, had no idea
what had happened to it, some blacks cleaned the place out, she shrugged, maybe
they took it. I looked in the trash bins but too many days had passed. I heard
Simone was back in town and sought her out, to see if M had been in contact
with her. She had a part-time job in a handbag shop in the Marais; I found her
standing in its doorway smoking a cigarette, half an hour before closing time.
Simone’s beauty had become more angular, an effect enhanced by what she’d done
to her long hair: she’d chopped it all off into a sort of bob, poised
disconcertingly between Louise Brooks and Joan of Arc. I look like a
collaborator, she said laughingly, offering me one of her cigarettes. We smoked
together. An older woman in a short-waisted black frock watched us from inside
with her arms folded.

Don’t look at that bitch,
Simone said. She thinks she owns the street.

Is she a customer?

Simone blew smoke. She’s my
boss.

Have you seen Charles? I
said after a while.

She shrugged, shook her
head. Is he recovering?

I don’t know. I suppose so.

What about M?

I was hoping you’d seen
her, actually.

Simone shrugged again. No.
I have some mail for her, though.

Letters?
From New
York?

How would you know that?
Simone said suspiciously.

It’s just a guess. That’s
where she says she’s from.

I wish I were from there,
Simone said fervently. I wish I were from anywhere else. I wish I weren’t stuck
in this shithole. The spiraling gesture she made with her cigarette encompassed
the shop, the street, all of France. You know, he really believed that a new
age was dawning, Charles did. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. There ought
to be a revolutionary committee right now, with Charles on it, running the
show. Rich little cunts like her (flashing her sweetest smile) pushed up
against the wall and shot like the counter-revolutionary pigs they are. Now,
I’m selling fake alligator bags to women just like her. And when fall comes
again I’ll go back to school and meet some guy like the kind of guy I knew
before I met Charles. He’ll want to take care of me. And I’ll let him.
The fucker.
The poor fucking bastard.

I don’t understand anything,
I said, crushing out my smoke.

That’s why I always liked
you, Gus, Simone said, looking up at me through her bangs. You know what you
don’t know, unlike the rest of them. And you’re gentle, and sweet. Did you ever
show M that giant dick of yours?