Salamander (10 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
Instead of persevering he stepped out for a breath of air and a leg-stretch on one of the parapets. He walked up and down, rubbing his hands together, glared at by gargoyles with long icicle noses, their gaping jaws dribbling water into an abyss of cornices, spires, slate roofs, and flying buttresses. He stood gazing out at the outside world that for days now he had virtually forgotten. How long had he been here? Today made it … eleven days. Only eleven days.
The river was frozen over but for a narrow scar of black water. The pines on the mountains were cloaked with snow, the ribbed white roof of the sky streaked with smoke rising from the village. From the forested hillsides came the sound of trees being cut, the axes striking the wood in an irregular tattoo that somehow soothed him. If not for that vaguely pleasing sound, the world would have seemed locked away in crystal.
Had anything ever changed in this valley? For all he could see or hear that revealed otherwise, it could be the year 1000. Or the year 1400, Gutenberg’s invention of movable type still half a century away.
What would he be if he had lived then? A scribe, a monk, if he was fortunate. But more likely he would be down there in the forest with the timber-cutters, one of those who had likely never held so strange an object as a book in their callused, dumbfounded hands.
About the time this castle was built, according to the Count, the Mainz goldsmith had begun his cataclysmic innovations. And now, three hundred years later, the world was just beginning to drown in books. Like the magic wine cask in the old story, the press, once set flowing, could not be stopped by human power. Everyone, rich and poor, inquisitive or merely bored, was clamouring for things to read, and here he was, in this spellbound corner of the world, busily adding his own trickle of inked paper to the biblical deluge that was surely coming.
Someday books would even spill into this valley, and the people down there would scoop them up out of curiosity and drink, and learn the taste of knowledge, which always left one thirsty for more. And then that pleasantly distant sound of axes would grow much louder, as freshly sharpened blades started biting into the roots of this castle.
He heard a sound near him and peered around the corner of the parapet to see the Abbé de Saint-Foix, wrapped in a thick cloak, pacing and reading a letter. When Flood approached he glanced up as if emerging from a deep cavern.
– You’re only in your shirtsleeves, Mr. Flood. Aren’t you afraid to catch a chill?
– I thought winters in Quebec were a lot worse than this.
– They are. Why do you think I left?
For the first time, they shared a smile.
– I see that the Countess Irena takes quite an interest in your craft. If only I was staying on here. The three of us might have worked together on your impossible project. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Book without end, Amen.
– It sounds like you’re planning to leave soon.
– I must. In any event I have found life inside this giant clock a little confining. I will be returning home, to Quebec, at least for a while. This letter informs me that my brother, Michel, has gone to his eternal reward.
– I am sorry.
– You needn’t be, the Abbé said, meticulously folding the letter and tucking it into his cassock. He was brother to me only by accident of birth. Life under his rule, after our parents died, was rather like life here at the castle. Come to think of it, Mr. Flood, I have a story about my childhood that may be of use to you in your labours for the Count.
THE ABBÉ’S NARRATIVE
During Sunday Mass, wedged with his squirming brother and sisters between the sombre bastions of his parents, Ezequiel listened to the priest expound upon the eternity of bliss enjoyed by the righteous in heaven, or, more often, the eternity of torment awaiting sinners in hell. He would attempt to form a picture of it –
what would an eternity of bliss be like?
— since he never seriously contemplated the possibility that God would send him elsewhere, and in any case the priest already supplied a
vivid description of the other place. He had much to say about what activities would be occupying the hours of the damned in hell, but he never went into similar detail about what the blessed would be doing with all the time at their disposal, other than singing the same hymns they sang here in church, only even more interminably.
What did it mean to say that for those in heaven, bliss would never end? How could that be? A thing only made you feel good because there was a time when you didn’t have that thing, and so when you did, you could remember how much less enjoyable life had been not having it. Eternal bliss meant you were happy always and at every moment, without ever passing through a time when you were not happy. Every moment of that timeless time you would be aware that, yes, you were in heaven and this was bliss. Always. An unpassing passage of time, it seemed to him then, that might be like the long, dark winters of this land, like the fields of snow that stretched out endlessly beyond the walls of Quebec, perched on its rocky height above the silent white river.
His mind, like his delicate stomach the day his brother forced him to eat a scrap of the leathery cured meat favoured by
les coureurs de bois
, instinctively rejected the idea. That was no escape. It was mindless, the dream of slaves. He realized quite early how life in the colony was ruled by the clock. Each spring, when the ice broke up and he waited with everyone else for the arrival of the first ships from France, it occurred to him that time was their creator. Quebec did not believe in its own existence until those white sails were sighted on the
horizon. Then the people around him, the pale ghosts of winter, would jerk to life like marionettes, pat one another on the back, drink toasts, observe that the ships were early this year, or late, or right on time, and place bets on just when the wind was likely to bring them into port.
Every year, the same performance.
He burned with the feverish desire to grasp time, hold it and cage it, so that he might find out what was left in its absence. He wanted not so much to escape his enemy as to subdue it. He became obsessed with numbers, and during Mass would keep a running tally of coughs and sneezes, or do sums with the rows of pearl buttons on his coat, in the hope that even such exercises in futility would use up a little more of that hated all-pervading element.
On that particular Sunday, he was attempting to count slowly enough that one tally of all the buttons from collar to skirts and back would last from the opening hymn to at least the profession of faith. But he swiftly tired of this old ritual and was left with things as they were, with himself as he was, stiff and itchy in his starched jabot, trying to ignore his older brother’s finger jabbing him mercilessly in the ribs under cover of his folded arms. Far from a state of bliss.
All at once he felt the dim approach of something, a presence, first as the faintest trembling in the air. Then the wooden pew beneath him began to vibrate, like the grinding of the river ice as it broke up in the spring. He glanced furtively at his brother and sisters, his parents, the other members of the congregation. No one
seemed to have noticed it. No one else but him even seemed to be breathing.
And then, descending towards him through the clouds of incense came a dark sphere, revolving and growing larger by the moment, the deep vibrato of its ponderous spin growing louder, pressing like a physical force against his eyes, drumming through his bones, roaring in his blood.
His adversary.
– Each instant, the Abbé said, gazing out across the wintry valley, and every insignificant thing it contained, like the counting of those buttons on my coat, all my moments of weakness and humiliation, my every movement and eyeblink and thought, every twitch and tremor and cough of each and every other soul in that church, in the colony, in the world, not only flowing into the next moment and the next incarnation of itself, but solidifying. Each instant, each button and jab and cough and thought accreting into this grey impenetrable mass. This was the universe, and the universe was only this, an iron prison I was helping to build with every breath. This was time.
The Abbé smiled.
– You look pale, Mr. Flood.
– For a child to see, or even to imagine, such a thing …
– Well, I assure you its terrors have faded somewhat in the intervening years. I’ve come to see it as a sign, if you will, that with such powers of fancy I was destined to be an author. But at the time, yes, it did make quite an impression.
It was then that he suffered his first bout of the recurring apoplexy that was to leave him unfit for any career
but the church. A thunderclap to the brain that pitched him forward, the crown of his head colliding with the back of the pew in front of him. His body lying rigid, his mind aware of everything that was happening but unable to will a limb, a muscle, an eyelash to move, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of the church and into the indifferent gaze of an archangel, until he was at last lifted and carried out by his red-faced and puffing father, his weeping mother dabbing at his bleeding head with a handkerchief, his older brother, Michel, and his sisters trailing after, their eyes fixed on him in mingled fear and suspicion.
He was brought home and installed on the sofa. The doctor, who had followed the family from church, knelt to examine him, lifted his hand by the wrist and let it drop, poked the soles of his feet with a penknife, waved a lit taper in front of his unblinking eyes. When at last he ushered Ezequiel’s parents out for a whispered consultation in the next room, his brother suddenly appeared and stood over him, his face as expressionless as the stone archangel’s. Finally Michel leaned forward, placed a hand over Ezequiel’s mouth and stuck two fingers up his nostrils.
His body began to scream silently for air. He closed his eyes, unable to bear Michel’s impassive gaze, then opened them again when panic overpowered him. Finally, as his vision clouded over and he felt himself sinking into black flames, the hands went away. His lungs shrieked, flooding with air.
That evening, Ezequiel defied the doctor’s sombre prognostications, got up off the sofa as if nothing
unusual had taken place, and joined his astounded family at the supper table where they had been eating their soup in morose silence. Michel, eager to forestall any mention of his little prank, led everyone in a prayer of thanksgiving for his brother’s recovery. It did not occur to Ezequiel to turn informer. Michel, like time itself, was a tribulation as inevitable and pointless to protest against as an illness or lessons in Latin.
And there was of course his secret refuge: the library. His father used the room only on those rare occasions when he wished to impress an important visitor from France. Most days the room remained locked up, and, ever since Ezequiel could remember, forbidden to the children. His brother’s relentless persecution, however, had led him to steal the key from the steward’s cupboard and shut himself up from time to time in the library, where one day he discovered the blank books.
Since all books were meant to be read, he assumed that these called for a particular kind of reading, one which he hadn’t yet been taught. Perhaps these books, and not the tall glass cabinet filled with frosted decanters of red and black liquor, were the reason the room was forbidden. And so he read the books, one at a time, not starting a new one until he had worked his way through every page of the one before, each volume a compact Canada of perfect snow-white pages. He would touch the cool, creamy surface of the paper with his fingertips, his cheek, his lips. From the marbled endpapers rose the faintly intoxicating, hermetic smell of binding paste.
When he turned the pages they rattled softly, like far-off thunder.
The vision of time he had glimpsed that day in church still haunted his sleepless nights, but now he had something, a bulwark of books to seal himself in against it. Here and there among his treasures he found a printed volume. The sight of its neat blocks of text was distressing, as if a thorny hedge of words lay between him and the other book, the one he truly wished to read. The only ordinary printed book he treasured was his father’s atlas of the world, in which the names of fabled places like London and Paris were neatly printed alongside tiny fairy-tale countries of blue and pink and green. Perhaps in one of those true places he might be something more than a figment of time.
When he was twelve, his parents died at sea, while making a crossing to France, and Michel was now officially the master of his brother’s destiny that he has always considered himself to be. By then Ezequiel had come to understand that the blank books were not meant to be read, that they were in fact only part of the façade of gentility that was his father’s life. Still, having read through more than half of them by this time, and looking forward to making his way through those that remained, he was crushed when Michel sold off the entire library, to finance the building of a gaming salon.
– For six years, the Abbé said, I endured the prison that my house, my city, had become under my brother’s merciless and arbitrary dominion. Michel was now the lord of time. Of the cycles of the year, the epicycles of the months, the stations of the week. Every hour of my day and every minute of every
hour circumscribed and entered in advance in his ledger. Every moment of idleness, unless it were his own at the gambling table or the brothel, ruthlessly punished. Finally, at the age of seventeen, when it seemed to me my life was already over, I was suddenly free. Michel had already had our sisters tucked safely away in convents and now he wanted me out of his sight, too. So I was sent to Paris, to the Jesuit College, to begin my studies for the priesthood.
There, he discovered Versailles. Or rather, like so many exiles before him, he was caught by it as if by gravity, and revolved in that glittering orbit like a grubby coin circling a collection plate. Before long, his greatest ambition was to become confessor to the true power in the realm, the king’s mistress.
