The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(20)

Andrew Was grateful for Charles’s gesture, but the affair could not be ended so easily by removing the cause of it all.

No, it was something that was impossible to deny. Thanks to his father’s generosity, Andrew got back his old life, but being reinstated as heir to the vast fortune his father and brother continued to amass meant nothing to him now. All that money could not heal the wound inside, although he soon realized that spending it in the opium dens of Poland Street did help. Too much drinking had made him immune to alcohol, but opium was a far more effective and gentler way of forgetting. Not for nothing had the ancient Greeks used it to treat a wide range of afflictions.

Andrew began spending his days in the opium den sucking on his pipe lying on one of the hundreds of mattresses screened off by exotic curtains. In those rooms lined with flyblown mirrors that made their dimensions seem even more uncertain in the dim light cast by the gas lamps, Andrew fled his pain in the labyrinths of a shadowy, never-ending daydream. From time to time, a skinny Malay filled his pipe bowl for him, until Harold or his cousin pulled back the curtain and led him out. If Coleridge resorted to opium to alleviate the trifling pain of toothache, why should he not use it to dull the agony of a broken heart, he replied when Charles warned him of the dangers of addiction. As always his cousin was right, and although as his suffering abated Andrew stopped visiting the opium dens, for a while he was secretly obliged to carry vials of laudanum around with him.

That period lasted two or three years, until the pain finally disappeared completely, giving way to something far worse: emptiness, lethargy, numbness. Those events had finished him, obliterated his will to live, severed his unique communication with the world, leaving him deaf and dumb, maneuvering him into a corner of the universe where nothing happened. He had turned into an automaton, a gloomy creature that lived out of habit, without hope, simply because life, real life, had no link to the way he spent his days, but occurred quietly inside him, like a silent miracle, whether he liked it or not. In short, he became a lost soul, shutting himself in his room by day and roaming Hyde Park by night like a ghost no longer concerned by the affairs of the living, to whom even the action of a flower coming into bud seemed rash, futile, and pointless. In the meantime, his cousin Charles had married one of the Keller sisters—Victoria or Madeleine, he could not remember which—and had purchased an elegant house in Elystan Street. This did not stop him from visiting Andrew nearly every day, and occasionally dragging him to his favorite brothels on the off chance that one of the new girls might have the necessary fire between her legs to rekindle his cousin’s dulled spirit. But to no avail; Andrew refused to be pulled out of the hole into which he had dug himself. To Charles—whose point of view I shall adopt at this juncture, if for the purposes of dramatic effect you will consent to this rather obvious switch of points of view within one paragraph—this showed the resignation of someone who has embraced the role of victim. After all, the world needed martyrs as evidence of the Creator’s cruelty, his ability to produce terrible fates. It was even conceivable that his cousin had come to view what had happened to him as an opportunity to search his soul, to venture into its darkest, most inhospitable regions. How many people go through life without experiencing pure pain? Andrew had known complete happiness and utter torment; he had used up his soul, so to speak, exhausted it completely. And now, comfortably installed with his pain, like a fakir on a bed of nails, he seemed to be awaiting who knew what: perhaps the applause signaling the end of the performance, because Charles was certain that if his cousin was still alive it was because he felt compelled to experience that pain to the hilt. It was irrelevant whether this was a practical study of suffering or to atone for his guilt. Once Andrew felt he had achieved this, he would take a last bow and leave the stage for good. Thus, each time Charles visited the Harrington mansion and found his cousin prone but still breathing, he heaved a sigh of relief. And when he arrived back home empty-handed, convinced that anything he might be able to do for Andrew was useless, he began to reflect how strange life could be, how flimsy and unpredictable it was if it could be altered so drastically by the mere purchase of a painting. Was it within his power to change it again? Could he alter the path his cousin’s life would take before it was too late? He did not know. The only thing he was certain of was that, given everyone else’s indifference, if he did not try, no one else would.

In the little room on Dorset Street, Andrew opened the cutting and read for the last time, as though it were a prayer, the account of Marie Kelly’s mutilations. Then he folded it up again and replaced it in his coat pocket. He contemplated the bed, which bore no trace of what had happened there eight years before. But that was the only thing that was different; everything else remained unchanged: the blackened mirror, somewhere inside which the crime had been immortalized, Marie Kelly’s little perfume bottles, the closet where her clothes still hung, even the ashes in the hearth left from the fire the Ripper had lit to make slitting her open cozier. He could think of no better place to take his own life. He placed the barrel of the revolver under his jaw and crooked his finger around the trigger. Those walls would be splattered with blood once more, and far away on the distant moon, his soul would at last take up its place in the little hollow awaiting him in Marie Kelly’s bed.





6


With the revolver barrel digging into the flesh beneath his jaw, and his finger poised on the trigger, Andrew reflected about how strange it felt to have come to this. He had chosen to bring about his own death even though most of his life he had, like everyone else, been content merely to fear it, imagine it in every illness, see it lurking treacherously all around him in a world full of precipices, sharp objects, thin ice, and jumpy horses, mocking the fragility of those who claimed to be kings of Creation. All that worrying about death, he thought, only to embrace it now. But that was how things were: it was enough to find life a sterile, unrewarding exercise to want to end it, and there was only one way to do that.