A Trip to the Stars (53 page)

At the end of this frustrating cycle, a well-known promoter in Rome contacted me with a proposition: if I left Gaspard and signed with him, he would send me on tour as a solo headliner—tripling my income while cutting my performing time in half. Over a sumptuous lunch he declared that I had become a major attraction whom people came to see in her own right. “You are a star now,
signorina
,” he smiled, raising his wineglass, though I had trouble thinking of myself in that way. When I turned him down flat, I told myself it was because I wanted to get out of the mind-reading business, not because I couldn’t leave Gaspard. Yet, perversely, I continued playing second
fiddle to Gaspard, letting him work me silly without giving me any real autonomy. By this time, my salary was about seventy thousand dollars a year, but unlike my early days with him, I was banking less than a third of it.

Money aside, what neither the promoter nor Gaspard knew was that I had not only grown weary of entering people’s memories, but also felt that my ability to do so was waning. The burst of clairvoyance I had enjoyed since the car accident was drawing to a close. Eventually, over Gaspard’s objections, I had to shorten the act accordingly; the lie I told him I couched in prima donna terms, complaining that nine audience volunteers was simply too taxing. So we went to five, then four—and, even then, the strain was such that, by the time I walked offstage, I was suffering severe headaches. Knowing my performing days were numbered was yet another impetus to stash away as much money as I could, which made it even more puzzling that I would pass up the chance to earn more in so much less time.

Though I had been plagued by terrible bouts of insomnia for months, suddenly during this period I had the opposite problem: some nights I slept so deeply I could not even be roused by a pair of powerful alarm clocks and a wake-up call from the concierge. I saw a doctor in London, and he told me I must be depressed. Well, of course I was depressed—tired of the act, hostile toward Gaspard, increasingly wanting out—but I knew there was more to it than that.

Soon I became convinced that I was receiving visitors while I slept. At first I thought they must be from the spirit world, but gradually decided that they were very much of this world. That they were, in fact, Gaspard himself, coming into my room after hypnotizing or drugging me. This seemed an incredible, if not paranoid, notion, but I had come to see him as someone—like Francis Beliar—capable of doing anything to retain power over people. Unlike Francis, he was motivated by greed, not lust. And with my psychic energies ebbing and my defenses shaky, I felt susceptible. A master of subliminal hypnosis, Gaspard could easily have been hypnotizing me hours before I went to bed in such a way that I didn’t know it was happening and only felt its full effects while asleep, absorbing first and foremost the notion that I should not leave him.

It was in Barcelona I was inspired to test my theory by buying a small sound-activated tape recorder and placing it under the bed in my
hotel room. It was an exceptionally quiet room. The first two nights the tape recorder remained off. The third night it was activated twice: once when I coughed, the second time when I cried out in my sleep.

The next night, in Madrid, I went to bed directly after our performance, leaving Gaspard at the theater. Though by the clock I had slept for nine hours, I was as usual tired in the morning. The tape recorder had again been activated, and this time when I played it back, I froze at the sequence of sounds: a rustling of clothes, the chair by the bed creaking, and then whispering so soft I could not make out a single word or distinguish whether it was a man or woman’s voice. But I knew it wasn’t me. The whispering went on for a full minute, then the chair creaked again, and the tape recorder clicked off.

My hands shaking, I played the tape over twice, turning up the volume, but still I couldn’t identify the whisperer. All the same, this was the proof I had been seeking: someone had entered my room, I thought, and attempted to hypnotize me. Who could that be but Gaspard? I knew there was no point in confronting him with the tape: he would feign bewilderment, deny everything, cover his tracks, and I would never be able to catch him in the act, which I thought I must do.

The next night I returned to my room, drank two double espressos, and got into bed. And nothing happened. We flew to Paris, where I fell asleep exhausted after a lackluster performance, only to find that the tape recorder picked up the rustling and whispering again. In Venice the pattern was repeated: I forced myself to stay awake and heard nothing; when I slept, there was whispering. By the time we arrived in Athens, I thought I had better confront Gaspard with the tape recordings before I lost my mind altogether. But then something completely unexpected decided the entire matter for me.

Gaspard usually stayed at the Grande Bretagne in the hub of the city, but there had been a mix-up and no rooms were available. So we checked in to a small dark hotel called the Aldebaran on an obscure square in the Kolonaki district, near the National Garden. Gaspard took a taxi to the theater where we would be performing and I went up to my room. At first, in the shuttered darkness, I didn’t see that there was someone else present. Catching a glint of silver across the room, then the gleam of a pair of eyes, I dropped my suitcase with a cry and jumped back to the door, groping for the handle. At that
moment, a switch was thrown and a lamp came on, illuminating a woman sitting in an armchair.

“I’m sorry I startled you, Mala,” she said in a low, softly accented voice.

Blinking hard, I saw that she she was about sixty, thin, with a long nose and a wide mouth turned downward at the corners. Legs crossed, she looked relaxed in a gray pants suit that matched the color of her hair, which was pulled back tightly in a bun. Her eyes shone just as brightly in the lamplight as they had in the darkness.

“Who are you,” I said, “and how do you know my name?”

“How could I not?” Somehow her voice was familiar to me, though I was certain I had never seen or spoken with her before. “You’ve been working for my husband for five years.”

“Your husband?” I said in astonishment.

She nodded. “I’m Heléne Gaspard.”

I just stared, for I had never expected to meet her. In fact, I had begun to doubt her very existence. Gaspard never talked about her. And until that moment I had only a vague idea of what she might have looked like, for he always mysteriously claimed to have no current photographs. In the only ones he showed me, glossy old promotional shots, a woman with jet black hair was sitting onstage in a long dress; half her face was concealed by the same sort of domino mask that I wore during performances, below which her wide mouth was firmly set, unsmiling. In the years I had been with Gaspard, Heléne was a phantom to me, alive only by way of her vaunted mind-reading technique, which in turn lived in me. Many times Gaspard had said, “You
are
Heléne when you are onstage”; it was his way of complimenting me, but it always made me feel anxious.

“I am pleased to meet you,” she said.

I shook my head. “What are you doing in my room?”

“Waiting for you,” she replied simply. “I didn’t think you’d mind since you hadn’t yet checked in.”

I wondered why the concierge hadn’t told me she was waiting.

“Because he didn’t know,” she said, cutting into my thoughts as effortlessly as if I had spoken aloud.

Though I knew secondhand her skills as a mind reader, this still took me by surprise.

“But where did you come from?” I asked.

“Venice. I was there when you were. And Paris before that. Jorge didn’t tell you?”

“No, he didn’t.” And of course she would have known that he didn’t, I thought. “Were you in Madrid, too?” I asked quickly.

“No, I have not been in Spain in many years,” she said with a thin smile, rising slowly from the chair and opening the shutters onto the night. It was only then, with a shiver, that I saw what had glinted in the darkness when I entered the room: she was wearing a silver pin on her lapel in the shape of a scorpion, with a ruby at its center. “The food in that country does not agree with me,” she went on. “But I know a fine place here, at the foot of Lykabettos, if you’ll join me for dinner. I must speak with you.”

I would never find out why. With a hot breeze blowing in, sticking to my skin, I felt sick to my stomach; convinced that Heléne, not Gaspard, was the one invading my hotel rooms and my sleep, I decided at that moment to carry through on the impulse I had been suppressing for weeks: I would flee Gaspard and not look back. Finding Heléne in my room unannounced—even proprietary—had clinched it for me.

Trying to keep my mind blank, I told Heléne I would be glad to dine with her after I showered and changed. She peered at me closely—and I used all my willpower to project something, anything, other than what I was really thinking—then went down the hall to her own room, agreeing to meet me in the lobby in a half hour. Within five minutes, grabbing my suitcase and leaving my performer’s trunk, I bypassed the lift and rushed down the stairs. Making a fuss—so the clerk would remember—I called the airport from the front desk and reserved a seat on an eleven
P.M
. flight to London which I had no intention of taking. Then I hailed a taxi, and entering the fast-weaving traffic of the coast highway, headed straight for the docks at Piraeus.

I never saw Gaspard or Heléne again. I would be surprised if they fell for my ruse of flying to England, but I doubt they even considered the possibility that I would board a ferry for a random island in the dead of night. I don’t know what I thought they could have done to me—ongoing hypnosis, brainwashing?—and within days, as I put distance between us, my fears diminished. But that night in Athens, everything in me had told me not to fight those fears, but to run.

I remained wary for a time that Gaspard might try to trace my whereabouts. But how? I didn’t worry about his hiring a private detective; my own experiences with them had been so abyssmal. First, in New York when Loren was abducted, and then in Las Vegas in 1974 when I was sure I had crossed paths with him at The Stardust Casino. (And the further I got from that experience, the more I doubted it, fearing that what I had “seen” was an agglomeration of my own memories of Luna and my mother, short-circuited into being while I was performing, rather than some highly specific memory of Loren’s.) Before leaving Las Vegas the following day, I had hired a former Pinkerton detective to track down the young man whose memories I thought I had glimpsed during the act. A number of people had seen him and his female companion in her red dress; it was the kind of assignment the detective himself had called difficult but routine. Yet he had come up with nothing—
zilch, zero, nada
, as he cabled me in Copenhagen two months later. So I wasn’t quaking at this notion of a gumshoe on my trail in the Aegean.

Several months after settling into my house on the southwest coast of Naxos, one last mention of Jorge Gaspard crept into my life. I had brought home a bunch of newspapers—the international
Tribune, The London Times, Le Monde
—as I did every couple of weeks, to catch up on the news. I didn’t even keep a radio in that house, and I had no interest in reading the papers daily. In the theatrical listings in
Le Monde
an announcement caught my eye: Jorge Gaspard, the world-famous mentalist, was beginning a twelve-country tour with a new act and a new assistant, one Zuléifa Turais. And good luck to her, I thought, with a small sigh of relief.

I had spent that particular autumn day in typical fashion. Here was my life on Naxos in miniature: up early for a swim in the sea, walking a mile and back to the market for fruit, bread, and goat cheese, lunch, reading, siesta, a longer swim, and then riding into town for dinner. I had given up my Vespa and was leasing a four-wheel-drive jeep with which I explored every road on the island, dirt or paved, from the village of Moni, nestled like a white chess piece on a mountain precipice, to Apóllonas on the shore of a rocky cove. Occasionally I stayed in town late to listen to music at a taverna or have coffee with the one real friend I had made on the island, a woman about my age named Melitta, a silversmith with a studio in the maze of the Kastro.

Melitta was a small woman with short blond hair, finely shaped hands, and a high-pitched laugh. A native of Corfu, she had come to Naxos when her on-again, off-again engagement to a doctor in Athens remained stuck in its off-again stage. She had set up shop for a year, and five years later had no plans to leave. She liked to wear long embroidered dresses and velvet berets fashioned in the old Venetian style, prominent in the oil paintings I had seen in the former governor’s fortress. A sly, vivacious woman, she had managed to expand not only her business but her love life—quietly taking on a series of lovers—without compromising her privacy. In the closed and scrutinizing society of the island, this was no mean trick. She had many sides to her, and many friends to go with them, and through her I came to know people on the island I might not otherwise have met, from the abbess at the convent of St. John Chrysostom in Grotta to the Czech artist in Lionas who had come to Naxos in order to paint the sea.

That night I had dined with her at an ouzeria, where a tinny bouzouki band played loudly and a fire crackled in the blue brick fireplace. It was the middle of October and, unlike Kauai, on Naxos no matter how warm the days, the nights were always chilly. I washed down small plates of grilled octopus and fried mullet with mineral water while Melitta tossed back smoky shots of barrel ouzo. In nearly eight years, since New Year’s Day 1972, when I was dragged blind and half-dead from the tangled wreck of Francis’s sports car, I hadn’t touched a drink. Nor smoked, sniffed, or shot any drug. In the company of someone like Melitta, with whom I felt safe, I was tempted to have some wine with dinner, but the longevity of my abstinence always outweighed these desires. I didn’t see any percentage in gambling with the one portion of my sanity that I could truly control.

After dinner, we met a new friend of Melitta’s at a café on the harbor. He introduced himself to me as Sergius Voël, a onetime cat-tamer from a Belgian circus who the previous year, on his seventieth birthday, had retired to the island. Voël was his new name, he added, formally adopted after he had left the circus. “Not an uncommon thing to do,” he said in his bass voice that pitched and rolled like a boat at sea, “when beginning a second life. Did you know that El Greco, born in Crete, was in his first life known as Doménikos Theotokópoulos?” I thought of Zaren Eboli—a lifetime ago—telling me that Jelly Roll Morton’s original name was Ferdinand La Menthe.