Warlight(58)
Some months later Felon walks with Rose, as he had once promised they would, into the Bibliothèque Mazarine. They have lunched at La Coupole long into the afternoon, watching each other swallow oysters, drink champagne from slender flutes, until they finish their meal with a crêpe they share. When she reaches out for a fork, he sees the scar above her wrist.
“A toast,” she says. “Our war is over.”
Felon doesn’t raise his glass. “And the next war? You will go back to England, and I shall stay here. Wars are never over. ‘Seville to wound. Córdoba to die in.’ Remember?”
In a taxi, dizzy, she will lean against him. Where are they going? They swerve onto the Boulevard Raspail, then the Quai de Conti. She is full of uncertain senses, tethered still to this man, guided by him. The past hours have slid into each other unaccountably. She has woken alone across her bed so wide she believed she was drifting on a raft, just as at La Coupole this afternoon the hundred or so empty tables spread in front of her like an abandoned city.
He puts his hand on her shoulder as they walk into the brown building—the great library of Mazarin, who, he announces, was “the default ruler of France after Richelieu’s demise.” Only Felon, she believes, would use the word “demise” so unconsciously, this man with barely an education before the age of sixteen. The word from a secondary vocabulary he memorized, just as he re-trained his own handwriting away from the coarse script she’d seen in his childhood notebooks beside those precisely sketched molluscs and lizards he would draw from the natural world. A self-made man. An arriviste. Therefore not trusted as authentic by some in the trade, not even himself.
Entering the Bibliothèque, Rose realizes she is, well, vaguely drunk. Her mind drifts from the sentences he is speaking. Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters. And now they have somehow entered the fifteenth century, with a thousand or so remnants confiscated from monasteries or surrendered by overthrown aristocracies, even incunabula from the infancy of printing. All of it gathered and protected here after once being damned and therefore hidden for generations. “This is the great afterlife,” Felon tells her.
On an upper floor he watches her silhouette move against the luminous windows of the building as if she were being passed by a lit train. Then she is standing in front of a great map of France with its thousand churches, just as he once imagined she would, so this feels like it is a replica of an earlier desire in him. Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend. He prefers older maps that are cityless, marked only by contour lines so they can even now be used for accurate reconnaissance.
Felon stands beside a gathering of marble scholars and philosophers, turning quickly as if he might catch a look or a thought in them. He loves the permanent judgement on the faces of statues, their clear weakness or deviousness. In Naples he stood before a brutal emperor, and he remembers still how the eyes in that evasive stone face never met his, no matter how much he moved from side to side in order to catch his attention. There are times he feels he has become that man. Rose prods him with her fingers and he turns to her. They walk beside a row of antique desks, each lit with its own amber light. One reveals the hurried handwriting of a saint, another that of one executed in his youth. A chair holds Montaigne’s folded jacket.
Rose inhales everything. It feels like the continuation of their meal, the taste of oyster suddenly alongside the smell of desk varnish and ancient paper porous in the air. She has barely spoken since arriving here. And when he points out a detail, she does not respond, eager to discover only what this means for herself. She has adored this man all her life but feels the clash of herself against this ancient place. This is the great afterlife. Just as she perhaps is his. Did he always see her this way? She’s drunk with this small perception.
—
She ignores a light rain as she walks the city alone, having slipped his leash. When she loses her way, she does not ask for directions, intent on uncertainty, laughing as she passes the same fountain twice. She wants accident, freedom. She has been brought into this city for a seduction. She can imagine everything, how it will occur. His clearly visible ribs that she will lean her head against. Her hand on the fur of his belly, rising with the twitch of it. Her mouth open with praise and kindness as he turns, enters her. She crosses a bridge. It is four in the morning when she comes back to her room.
She wakes at first light and walks into his adjoining room. Felon is asleep in the more modest bed he has chosen. He insisted when they arrived that she take the grander room. He is on his back, eyes shut, hands at his sides, as if praying or tied to a mast. She draws back the high, heavy curtains so the room fills with wintry light and furniture, but he does not wake. She watches him, conscious of him now in some other world, perhaps as the uncertain boy he was in his teens. She has never met Felon as an uncertain person: it is the remade man she knows. He has shown her over the years the great vistas she desired; but she thinks now that perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty.
She moves through the brocaded room of the hotel. She has not taken her eyes off him, as if they are in the middle of a mimed conversation they have never had. There has been this long twinned story between them, and she is no longer sure how to remain still allied to him. A Paris hotel. She will remember the name always, or perhaps she will need to forget it. In the bathroom she washes her face to clear her thoughts. She sits on the edge of the bathtub. If she has imagined his courtship of her, she has also imagined hers.