The Dream of Scipio (42 page)

Occasionally, when the solitude began to overwhelm even her, she would pack her bag and walk down the crumbly, slippery track to the village, to buy food or water, or sketch in the sun of the little square. She became, indeed, a figure of curiosity and some small suspicion; many were concerned at an outsider interfering with the shrine, and were fearful of her intentions. Within the first week of her discovery of it, she had numerous visitors—old women, young girls, shepherds—who just happened to find themselves nearby and came to investigate. Initially she was irritated by the waste of time, put off by the blank, dumb way they stood behind her as she worked, never asking questions, never showing any real interest that she could meet, never giving her a chance to explain herself.

But slowly the power of place settled over her; she no more resented them than she resented the goats whose bells clanged noisily outside as they fed, or the occasional sheep that wandered in out of idle curiosity. And eventually she discovered that they were proud of this saint, eager to answer questions about her. She began to jot down the stories they told her in a notebook before the setting sun made it too dark to read anymore, and as the weeks passed, she also jotted down variants in the stories, grouping them into themes and categories, trying to distinguish the few kernels of truly old legend from recent accretions or borrowings. The saint’s reputation for curing poor sight was one constant theme, as was her prowess at giving good advice, but she also, it seemed, had other powers, particularly in curing all sorts of maladies. The affectionate way her limitations were recognized was also notable, and Julia first paid attention to this when the blacksmith’s wife, Elizabeth Duveau, came up to the chapel one day.

She was working hard and didn’t notice that anyone had come in behind her. Eventually a slight rustling sound made her stop her work and turn round. Elizabeth was standing a few feet away from her, staring stonily at her back.

“Oh, hello,” Julia said. Elizabeth nodded and continued to look at her. Eventually, Julia realized she was looking at her left hand; she followed the gaze to try to work out what she found so interesting.

“No,” she said when she thought she’d worked it out. “No ring.”

“You won’t be having children,” she commented.

“I doubt it.”

“You left it too late.”

“Probably.”

“Why was that?” came the question with that alarming directness she was slowly becoming used to.

She put down her paper with a sigh, her concentration gone. “I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone I needed to live with until now.”

Elizabeth wiped a bead of sweat from her nose. “Nor have I. But I’ve been married to Pierre for fifteen years. Her fault.”

Julia looked perplexed. “Whose fault?”

She gestured in the general direction of the altar. “Pierre proposed to me in 1925. September, it was. I didn’t love him, and I knew already he drank too much, but I was past twenty and laughed at as an old maid. I dreamed someone else might ask, but he didn’t and no one else was likely to come along. So what could I do? I could go to the town and work as a servant or stay where I was and marry Pierre, who had good money as a blacksmith. A catch, he was. So I asked Sophia. She’d given good advice when I’d asked before.

“But not this time. She is not reliable in this area. Of course, she was never married herself, so perhaps that explains it. But she said I most certainly should marry him, and I took her advice.”

At least it got the conversation off Julia’s own life. “How did she tell you this?”

“The usual way. I dreamed that I was cold and hungry, living on the streets of Marseille, that no one would talk to me or give me work or food. So I took the warning, and stayed where I was, in the village, and married Pierre. And I have spent the last fifteen years wondering whether she was really trying hard enough.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “How long have you known Julien?”

“Oh. Years. Fifteen years. Something like that.”

Julia felt the dark, inquisitive eyes studying her. “I’ve known him since he was eight.” She said it in almost a proprietorial fashion, as though it gave her a superior claim of some sort.

“Does everyone know she is not very good at this sort of advice?”

She was thinking of something else, and Julia had to repeat the question before she came back. “Heavens, yes,” she said eventually. “Even children know it. When they see a girl walking out with an unsuitable boy, they say she must have been talking to Sophia.”

“How do you know she wasn’t married?”

Elizabeth paused to consider a question she found strange. “Why would she have spent her life up here if she’d had a man and a hearth to tend?” The practicality of the response was unanswerable. “No; she was alone, and came up here to live in prayer. And was a good person, which is why people came to ask her advice even before they knew she was a saint. There were many miracles after she died, which is a sign. Of course, there are old stories.”

“Which ones?”

She looked sheepish. “Old wives’ tales,” she said. “My mother used to tell me. But even she didn’t believe them.”

“Please tell me.”

“Oh, it’s about the blind man she cured. It is said that the first thing he saw when he began to see was Sophia’s face, and he cried out in delight and said that he had seen her face in his dreams many a time, and that he had loved her all his life. And that he asked her to marry him, but she refused because she was virginal and pure. And he pined away with sorrow until she talked to him and brought him to God. But he always loved her, and swore that he would wait for all eternity until he could be united with her, and have her acknowledge his love. And she said she would wait until he understood what love was. It’s something old women say to daughters to make them go to sleep. That’s all.”

She turned away to the altar, and Julia walked outside to leave her in peace. She sat on the steps in the sunshine, basking in the heat like one of the lizards that sat motionless all around her, looking down across the valley to the lavender fields beyond the woods. She fell asleep; must have done, for when she opened her eyes once more, the blacksmith’s wife was already far in the distance, slowly picking her way through the stones and weeds.

Julia waved, but got no acknowledgment, then sat down for one of the best meals she had ever eaten, of bread and wine and salami. She felt entirely safe, and utterly happy.

 
 
 
FOR THE NEXT eight months Julien lived a strange double life; supposedly he was still an employee of the state, doing the tasks he had taken on in the autumn of 1940. But he allowed the lassitude that grew from his discomfort and increasing unease to take him over. He even went to his colleagues back at the university and described what he was doing. Should he resign? No, they said, one after another. You have a duty, and we are glad you are doing it. Think of who might take the position. He described the compromises he made, and again they replied, Stay where you are. He even once went to Marcel and appealed to him, but met no help from that quarter either.

“Don’t you see, Julien, that there is no room here for your delicacies?” Marcel replied with a sigh. “That your fastidiousness is out of place? Selfish? We have to keep government going. Have to keep it in the hands of men of moderation. Don’t you see that?”

Julien continued to look uneasy, unconvinced. “And you are a man of moderation?” he felt like asking, but he knew the answer. Yes, Marcel was indeed, in comparison to those others snapping at his heels.

ONLY JULIA SUGGESTED a different course of action when he went back to what he now considered his real home to be with her. “You are doing things you dislike so that others won’t be able to do worse. Are you sure that is not the case for everyone? Isn’t that what your friend Marcel is doing? The policeman who arrests people in the night? The prime minister? Even Pétain himself? They are all doing things they would prefer not to in order to prevent worse. The evil committed by good men is the worst of all, because they know better and do it anyway. Isn’t that what that manuscript of yours says?”

Her opinion contradicted those of so many others, but then she would not be affected by his resignation; all the librarians and journalists and newspaper owners and academics and teachers would be. He thought about it some more, anguishing in his indecision. And as he writhed, he came in late, if at all; memoranda and orders lay on his desk for weeks before anything was done with them, and then any work was bungled and performed incompetently. He read more, found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the life of Olivier de Noyen, to the exclusion of all else. His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in France in that period; laziness became political.

More and more, he left Avignon altogether and went east to Julia, traveling however he could. Sometimes there were buses, sometimes he managed to get a ride with a farmer on a horse and cart; most of the time he rode on his bicycle, the tires now long worn away and replaced with cloth, which he bound tightly to the rim of the wheels with wire. Once there, he would stay often for ten days at a time, finding excuse after excuse not to leave. When he did return to Avignon, he hoped to find he had been dismissed in his absence; no such good fortune ever awaited him.

When he came, he brought gifts for her, all sorts of things he would never have considered before the war. He spent time going around book-stalls finding old books with blank end pages that she could use for her printing, cutting them out in a way that previously would have appalled him. He knew every pharmacist in the city who would set aside the acid she needed for biting her plates. Ironmongers and scrap merchants received constant visits also, and would collect plates of copper for him, beating them flat into a usable shape once more. Once he discovered some oranges, and bore them to her in triumph; they ate them together on the flat grass outside the chapel door, getting themselves sticky as the juice ran down their faces and clothes. The wasps came, and Julia ran away screaming in fright; Julien ran after her, pounding at them with his hat to drive them away before they both scuttled into the chapel and shut the door, sitting in the darkness and laughing themselves silly.

Both of them were happy in a way neither had ever imagined. Often they scarcely even talked for days on end, but were merely in each other’s company. She did her work, outside when possible, inside if not, and he did likewise. They would take such food as they could find with them up to the chapel and spend the day there, often sleeping there at night, waking up at dawn and eating a crust of bread together before washing each other down with the water Julien brought up from the river in an old metal bucket. Or she would go on her own and Julien would busy himself in the garden. He grew potatoes and tomatoes; there was an olive tree and a fig tree, and he carefully tended four tobacco plants, whose leaves he would pluck and press and dry and shred. They smoked the result with a couple of old clay pipes when cigarettes were unobtainable.

Julia returned to herself, and to her work, in his company and with the stimulus of the chapel. She slept, for the first time in two years, she said, and slept so hard Julien could scarcely wake her in the morning. Then she would bustle about making tisane, for there was no coffee, and went to see if the hen she’d acquired had laid any eggs. Generally it hadn’t, but occasionally she would return from the henhouse she’d built, bearing the egg with the most immense pride in the bird’s achievement. And she would boil Julien the egg, and serve it with all the ceremony of Escoffier himself, concocting one of his fragrant masterpieces in an age now long forgotten.

They were playacting, they knew, and the realization made it the more precious. They were living out the pages of a child’s book, pursuing the life of bucolic simplicity to fend off the ever grimmer news that came through from the outside; the shortages, the arrests, the Allied landings, the bombings, and the murders that became daily events. There was nothing they could do about it except survive, and celebrate their survival and the love that grew stronger with every glance and every shared moment.

It was Julia who pointed out, when she read some of the late poetry of Olivier de Noyen, tossed onto the floor as Julien worked, that whomever he might have loved, this “woman of darkness, wisdom touching the light” (to quote one of his latest poems) surely could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus, at least not if her supposed portrait was truly her.

“Look,” she said impatiently one evening, brushing her hair out of her eyes in the way Julien had first noticed on his Mediterranean cruise, and which he had loved ever since. A competent, businesslike gesture of someone whose profession was seeing, done with a slight toss of the head and which always left her face and neck and hair arranged in a perfect harmony. “Look at the damned woman.”

Julien had finished his article for perhaps the fourth time, but was still not pleased with it. It had lain now for several months on his desk, and every time he had gone back to it, he had a feeling of impatience welling up inside him; he could not settle down and work on it again. It was true; everything he said about the poet was right. About the betrayal of Ceccani, the casting off of all accepted obligations. Yet he knew he did not have the whole picture, for although he could reinterpret some of the poems, others were stubbornly intransigent. They were love poems, and however much he might reconsider Olivier as a man, as a poet he could not persuade himself that his last words were anything but remarkable.

He mentioned this and she read both the poems—struggling through in the Provençal—and listened to his argument. Then she looked at the portrait of Isabelle reproduced in a guide to the
Musée des Beaux Arts
in Lyon. It came from a book of hours, and the attribution was venerable enough to be believable; Pisano had given it to her. Then she stated the obvious.