Leper Tango (19 page)

A pre-school infant held his forearm, watched us without moving forward. Her shoulder-length, stone-grey hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore a white blouse over a navy-blue pleated skirt. She lifted her arm, pointed at me.

“Papy, c'est lui mon nouveau papa?” “Tschh. Embrasse ta mère.”

She skipped towards Sheba. Stopped short in front of her and curtseyed. Dutifully kissed her on each cheek, then reached for her hand, a little on the coy side, I thought, for a kid.

“Bonjour, maman. Je suis contente de te voir.”

The two of them turned together, descended a set of curving steps, and entered a wine cellar. He pointed at the flat surface he was working on, the stump of a fallen oak.

“Rabelais lived in this house. He is thought to have planted this tree, while it was still a tree. Until the storm, at the beginning of the year. I had to take it all down.”

Sheba and the girl reappeared, Sheba carrying a bottle of champagne and three glass flutes. She placed the champagne on the table. The old man motioned towards her.

“Open it.”

Sheba popped the cork. We watched the bubbly flow over the neck of the bottle onto the ground. She poured the champagne. The girl watched me, saying nothing.

The old man pulled her closer to him, turned towards Sheba.

“Have you paid your respects to your mother?”

“We will visit the cemetery this afternoon.”

“
Bien,
” he responded. The tone was flat, pro-forma.

He shifted his unsmiling gaze back to the girl.

“Now you will have a new home. But not before the marriage.”

Sheba interjected.

“We haven't yet set a date, papa.”

She turned around and walked towards the house.

She now wore a white apron over the dress, which was tied in a bow behind her back at the waist. He tracked her with his eyes until she disappeared.

“How long have you known my daughter?” I shrugged my shoulders.

“A year,” I hazarded.

“Not long. She has been
odieuse
with you?”

I said nothing.

“If she hasn't yet, don't worry.
Ne vous inquiétez pas
.

You will know her before long.”

He glanced at the girl.

“
I raised that child
.”

Sheba re-emerged from the rear of the house. She approached us, keeping her eyes on her father.

“We cannot remain any longer, papa. Monsieur Robinson has an appointment.”

“
Bien.”

He turned towards the young girl.

“
Viens, chérie. On accompagne ta mère à la gare
.”

The girl ran towards her mother, stopped, curtseyed once. Kissed her mother on the cheek.

“Merci pour la visite, maman
.”

For an impromptu performance, it looked pretty rehearsed. I wondered what the old man's wife might have to say if she were still around. The girl and her grandfather escorted us out the gate and down the road towards the train station, Sheba and I behind, the girl hopping and skipping alongside her grandfather, filling in the space of the missing limb.

We arrived at the Lusignan quay three minutes prior to departure. The tracks were lined with uprooted trees and the rain was starting to fall. Work crews were surveying the damage from the storm, pulling fallen trees further away from the tracks and cutting them into portable pieces with electric handsaws. We walked past the unmanned ticket office and onto the quay, the young girl singing:

... lundi matin, l'empereur sa femme et le petit prince sont venu chez moi, pour me serrer le pince

comme j' étais parti, le petit prince a dit puisque c'est ainsi, nous reviendrons mardi ...

Then stopped suddenly and covered her ears as the screech of the train halting drowned out all else. The old man whispered something into his daughter's ear. The young girl kissed her mother. Now, the old man turned towards me, shook my hand, then turned away. Just a series of freeze-frames and sketches for a future composition. Title:
Départ sur le quai
. Watercolour. Artist unknown. Title:
Le Manchot
. Oil on canvas. Discovered in the attic of a local prefect murdered five years previous. He trudged down the length of the quay, his shoulders slumped, the girl skipping alongside to keep up. He never said much during the visit, other than that laconic “
we raised that child.
” He had obviously not regained whatever he had lost on the bigger battle field a long time ago. He had the girl. That seemed to be enough for him.

As for his daughter, maybe he even loved her, if love is a taciturn stare into the bottom of a glass, or a rueful shake of the head. Or maybe, if he didn't love her anymore, he once did. Or maybe, before civilian life did a job on him, he enjoyed his life in the military, if a photo of an infantry gunner being dragged dead drunk across a stretch of Saigon road is enjoying life. But, by the time I got to him, he was a one-armed silhouette you would scarcely notice walking down the main street of Lusignan, a village of seventy-five people. He even walked down that railway platform like it was a gangplank, after planting a kiss on Sheba's cheek that looked more like a warning than anything else I could make out.

The train rolled out of the Lusignan
gare
. We watched the old man and the girl climbing the road outside the train slowly exiting the Lusignan station. Then the train rounded a corner and they were gone.

“
Un vrai salaud
,” she pronounced delicately, still gazing out the window.

She remained silent for a long moment. When she looked back at me, she faintly smiled, as if recalling my existence upon emerging from a coma.

“Do you know, Franck, I wanted to kill my parents when I was young?”

“How did your mother die?”

“It doesn't matter how. It is why.”

“All right. So, why did she die?”

“She died because her time was up, Franck.”

I followed her gaze. The train was passing through an open field towards a small forest in the shape of a figure eight. It didn't really matter where we were going.

Somehow the visit confirmed for me that Sheba could take care of things, that it wasn't my turf, and that I should stop worrying about it. I relaxed slightly. Things would happen. I would deal with them then.

“Have I ever told you the legend of the Mélusine fairy?”

“No.”

“Every day, she could be seen drawing water from a well in the village of Lusignan. Her presence drove many men mad, unable to stand the sheer force of her beauty. One day, a brave man, very handsome, courted her. You may love me, she responded to his courting, but during the night, from Saturday to Sunday, I cannot see you. Ever.” I half listened to her, while performing my own usual mind split. She was a pure lunatic, but from my standpoint, what woman wasn't, or for that matter, what man wasn't? Nobody looked very good close up.

“The man loved her, became possessed by her within hours, until finally it was not enough to have her six days out of the seven. All of this happened within a short time. When Saturday fell, he followed her back to the well. And took her against her will.”

As far as I could make out, it was either a warning, or some way of punctuating recent events. According to her psychic talmudic tablets and ethical scrolls, and her need to be
clean
, papa had been dealt with and would never enter our lives again. As for the little girl, only time would tell. Maybe she would become a whore like her mother. Or reverse the trend and become a chartered accountant. These things are impossible to predict in advance. When you come right down to it, it's a question of personal taste more than anything.

Several hours later, we arrived at
gare Montparnasse
. As we emerged above ground, I caught a view of
boulevard Montparnasse
where it crosses
Vaugirard
. I could see the signs for
La Rotonde
and
Le Select
. The last time I had been in
Le Select
, it was for a champagne breakfast before catching a plane for the Dry Tortugas and a photo shoot of barracudas. And now, centuries later, I was touring the city with a whore, my life mate. Til death do us part.

“Wait,” she ordered, disappearing into a Guerlain shop. As I lit a Marboro, a young woman approached, but instead of entering the boutique, she lingered, peering into the display window of the shop. She was a sassy looking henna-streaked thing, wearing a pastel, cut-away dress. Her whole appearance had something accidental about it, in appearance unplanned, but in fact a collage of items and impressions which had been carefully prepared to deliberately produce the effect referred to by the French as
insouciant
. A partially executed brush stroke on the canvas. Spoiled and self-indulgent, right down to the crocodile stickpin on her skirt and the pillbox hat with the veil. On the other hand, she looked sane. I lit another Marlboro and considered for a moment what it might be like to live with someone who both gave good head and paid taxes. The thought didn't seem sustainable as a world-view, but it stayed there long enough for the girl to evaporate. I stared through the spot where she had been standing, down the gullet of the 14
th
arrondissement
of this whore of a city, reviewing my remaining options.

I briefly considered leaving her. Letting her work the thing out herself. Whatever the thing was. Paris was good for that. You could walk around the corner, lose someone and move on. People did it every day. I had employed the strategy myself, but doing it now would call for a different approach. I had improvised before.

But I was lethargic. My will was fading. Something vital was being steadily sucked out of me.

IV

I was driving a steel-gray Renault Talisman down a Vaucluse road in the direction of the Luberon mountain range. The Talisman was designed and drove like

a smart bomb, as if the Pentagon were tele-guiding you towards an as yet undetermined target. The road divided the
Côte du Rhone
vineyards from those of
Châteauneufdu-pape
. On the left side, the caked clay soil of the
Côte
. On the right, a chalky soil covered by small stones which surrounded the vines planted in the bitumic soil, reflecting the sun onto the base of the stock of the vine.

She slipped a CD onto the player, a Rojas tune called ‘En la Orilla del Mundo'. She closed her eyes, her features relaxing into a posture of pleasure, or at least as close to pleasure as she could come. It didn't matter what went on in her head. It was a core realization — my own form of satori — that you never really knew what was going on in anyone's head, not even your own. Just because people cried didn't mean they were sad. It just meant tears were rolling down their faces. We were on another
route nationale
, well into the Luberon range now, approaching a village named La Coste, perched on a hilltop, and principally known as the childhood abode of Donatien, Marquis de Sade. The sun hard and glaring, the high whistle of the Mistral wind causing the car windows to rattle.

“Sade was right, Franck. Not everyone deser ves freedom. Some people defile the gifts they have been granted.”

I pulled onto roadside, stopped, turned off the ignition. “I'm beginning to think you were right. It was in the cards, you and me. We had to finish things off together.

It was meant to be.”

I shoved the car seat back and she crawled on top of me. She looked at me, another question in her eyes, riding up and down. She could do things that would look ridiculous on anyone else, like the bandana she had wrapped around her temple. I'm fucking her, looking past her out the window at cars passing by, she is talking to me in a rhythmic monotone, trying to explain something through her desire, the only thing that could hold her captive.

“Franck,” she's saying, “it's a two
-
way street. When I fuck, I want to extinguish life, and when I extinguish life, I want to fuck. Can you understand, Franck?”

The chateau was a few hundred metres away, jutting out of a steep, rising promontory overlooking the departmental road where we had parked. I started up the car, then turned onto the access road, which wound upwards in an S curve, over a river, then through a tree orchard, and lands cultivated with corn, soya, sunflowers. The remainder of the property was forest and heath, with a spring running through it. Closer to the chateau itself, a large round swimming pool, several older dwellings, a large hangar. Outbuildings, the signs of a farm manor or former estate. Then a series of tiered gardens, leading up to an asphalt driveway to a four-car garage at a lower level on the East side of the manor.

“They call this a
Maison de Maitre
. The Manor of the Master. Positively feudal. Wait until you see the inside, Franck. And the owner. Some people, they occupy positions in society, Franck, and they are nothing better than
merde
.”

She slammed the door, and walked up a path rising towards the main entrance, with two Corinthian pillars marking the perimeter of a hemicycled porch. After a few minutes, she still hadn't returned. I walked up towards the entrance, lit another cigarette. As I approached, I noticed the door was partially ajar. I could hear her voice. An elderly male voice, responding in a rapid, tremolo register.

“This is just not appropriate. You must leave.” And her mild, but firm rejoinder.

“It's time for your check-up,
monsieur le baron
.” “Really, I just cannot see you now. Please, go.”

I entered a large lobby, decorated with Louis XV furniture. At the entrance, an Egyptian mosque lamp and a Bohemian enamelled humpen, for welcoming guests.

17th century Venetian glass. Clear, colourless cristallo, decorated with enamelled and gilt decoration. The wall was covered with paintings. Still, nobody visible. On the west side of the room, another door ajar, leading into an oval drawing room. I followed the sound of Sheba's voice and the high strung elderly voice. The man looked like he might be the president of a yacht club, or a freemason. An ascot tightened around his neck. Blue blazer, My eye caught a glass-enclosed wall case with a collection of Montoyo cigars. “I have something for you.”