Forgetfulness (4 page)

Racehorse piss, the blind man muttered. But now his friends had their hands on his elbows and were moving him toward the door, awkwardly, as if he were a heavy piece of furniture. They took their time, five finely dressed American tourists, out of place in the café. They were through the door at last when the blond woman turned and looked Thomas up and down as if she were appraising a piece of meat.

You were a big help. There was a time, Americans stuck together, members of the same tribe. Cut one, the others bleed.

I don't remember that time, Thomas said. When was that? Pearl Harbor?

New York, she said. Right now. This minute. It's beautiful.

So is St. Michel du Valcabrère, he said.

What's that?

The village you're in.

Shit, she said and laughed.

He said, It was a terrible thing, nine-eleven, but—

But nothing. But
nothing.
Jock's life is ruined. And he's angry. He's going to stay angry and that's his right because his life is ruined. He might have been you, except you don't live in New York. You jerk.

The others stood in the doorway, listening. The blind man, towering above them, had his back turned so he was facing the street, though perhaps he didn't know that.

Come on, Helen. Leave them to their racehorse piss.

Old Bardèche asked Thomas to translate.

Thomas said, They're sorry for the damage.

Bardèche said, Tell them to leave at once.

They're leaving, Thomas said.

Watch your mouth, asshole, the woman said.

Close the door behind you, Thomas said.

The blind man turned. Thomas noticed that in his mirrored dark glasses, the interior of the café was caught in a frozen moment. He moved his head left and right. It seemed to Thomas that he was straining to see what was before him.

Goodbye, Thomas said.

Bardèche watched them leave, then slowly turned and walked back to his place behind the bar.

When Thomas returned to their table, Florette embraced him. Everyone in the café was talking, the noise level rising like that of an excited theater audience at the end of a powerful performance. No one knew precisely what they had just witnessed. Did the gravely injured have special rights? There was something mortifying about the blind man, lunging and missing, swinging at Thomas and missing again. He must have had a terrible ordeal, the tiny scars and the long scar and the sneer on his mouth. You sympathized with him even as you realized he was out of control. Well, they were gone now but there was no guarantee they would not return. Men crowded around their table congratulating Thomas. They had no quarrel with Americans generally but these Americans were no good. There were bad apples in every nationality, the Germans and the Belgians especially, and the Dutch. All nations had bruta figuras, even Italy. When old Bardèche sent over a bottle of the racehorse piss, everyone drank to Thomas's good health and Florette's also.

When they were alone at last, Thomas and Florette sat in a zone of silence, working the incident in their minds. There seemed nothing of it to discuss usefully except the question of forgiveness, mercy offered to a man living in darkness and hating every second, knowing all the while that those most directly responsible were dead and could not be called to account. He was an awful son of a bitch but his situation was not enviable. Grievous injury did not ennoble a man except in special circumstances. Later they would refer to the incident often, how it began and how it ended and Thomas's role in the departure of the Americans, everyone in the café crowded at the windows watching them climb into their Mitsubishi van and speed away, the blind man in the front passenger seat, the others in the two rear seats.

Will you marry me? Thomas asked.

Of course, Florette said.

Her body showed no signs of exhausting its pain ration but the memory of the Sunday afternoon in the café with the wretched
Americans and his proposal at the end of it warmed her and brightened her spirits. Thomas would not fail her but she wondered again what had detained him. They were so close. Thomas was always within earshot, working alone all day long without interruption except for lunch. He worked in the downstairs room that looked south up the couloir, the land rising until the roads ended and the snow-covered summit began, the route of smugglers for many centuries and refugees of the Napoleonic War at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Francisco Goya's war. There had been a stream of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Thomas claimed that at the end of the day when he looked up from his easel to the panorama beyond his window he could hear the sound of marching feet, the strangled cries of the wounded, and the creak of leather and weapons. Thousands fled Catalonia in the miserable years 1937 and 1938, settling mainly in Aquitaine. A few were still alive, men and women of very great age, and their descendants were scattered all over southern France, a Spanish diaspora. Not even Franco's death could reconcile them to their homeland because so much had been lost, too much to forgive. Forgiveness was a blasphemy. Thomas thought often of the Spanish refugees when he was working because he was a species of refugee himself, a displaced person.

He told her that with no explanation.

And you still feel displaced?

Not often, he said. Almost never.

Florette heard piano music and immediately raised her head to discover its source. The notes rose and faded away and when her head fell back to the canvas she realized the music was inside her, refugees abruptly assuming the guise of a tune that she could not identify, though it stayed with her, the tempo resembling a heartbeat or the pain-throb in her ankle. She lay still, trying to imagine herself in other circumstances. She wondered what Thomas would do and what he would be thinking; at least he wouldn't have to worry about a pee. Thomas was good under pressure, as he had been that day in old Bardèche's café. She had never told him about Bardèche-on-Monday-evening—where was the need to do so? Certainly that was not the occasion, the afternoon in the café when he
shyly proposed to her. You never knew how men, even worldly men, would react to such a declaration. It was always a mistake to believe you knew someone's heart, even if it was the person closest to you in all the world. Publicly, Thomas kept his thoughts to himself, using courtesy to disarm his adversaries. Now and then people came to the house to see him. Thomas said they were journalists and sometimes they were, critics from newspapers and magazines eager to know whom he was "doing." But there were others who didn't look like journalists, in their business suits and city hats, their polished shoes, always carrying briefcases, even the women; the smaller the woman, the larger the briefcase. They were often brusque. Thomas would usher them into his office where they could take account of the photographs on the walls, Thomas in a variety of locations and wearing a variety of hats, a bowler, a trilby, a beret, a kaffiyeh, a topee, before being directed to admire the view, the mountain route of refugees.

A trail of misery, he would say.

And what the refugees found was scarcely better than what they had left behind, except for the killing.

Thomas would close the door, having arranged with Florette to knock in one hour and propose tea. She would bring in the tea tray and watch while the visitor, with evident chagrin, switched off the tape recorder; and all this time Thomas was looking at her and beaming, as if tea at four
P.M.
were the most important moment of the day. Thomas poured the tea and made small talk before explaining that he and Florette had chores, a trip to the market or the post office, a long-delayed visit to the dentist because a molar was acting up. And the visitor would look appropriately crestfallen, how disagreeable for Mr. Railles. Then, rising reluctantly, the visitor would point to the canvas on the easel and say, Very interesting. It definitely has your signature. Who is it? And Thomas would reply, An old friend. Does the friend have a name? the visitor would inquire, offering an encouraging smile. And Thomas would reply, I have been painting him for many years, in his youth and now in his old age. As for his name, I have forgotten it. As you can surmise
from our conversations, my memory isn't what it was. The years wash into one another, a watercolor memory. One fact bleeds into another. Emotions bleed. Faces bleed. I am forced to make lists, the latest list of familiar train stations, Santa Lucia in Venice, Keleti in Budapest, Atocha in Madrid. I have inventories of the natural world also, mountains and rivers, deserts, seas. It helps having a list of hard facts, don't you agree?

Facts anchor the work, whatever it is you're composing, a picture or a piece of music or a novel or poem.

But memory has to anchor the facts, alas.

And so I fall short.

Florette can vouch for that, can't you, chérie?

And the visitor would turn to her with a pained expression and she would give him chapter and verse on simple things her husband forgot, bills unpaid, letters unanswered, ordinary tasks ignored. She spoke with conviction because everything she said was true. The visitor would smile and Thomas would smile back and murmur something ambiguous. Forgetfulness is the old man's friend. Forgetfulness is a dream state, wouldn't you agree? When the visitor took one last look at the canvas, Thomas announced that the portrait was far from completion. He needed more time, perhaps a lifetime's worth. This man's personality changed with each season. Probably he would never finish it. The portrait would be an uncompleted work of great but unfulfilled promise, like Mahler's Tenth Symphony or Fitzgerald's
Last Tycoon.
The other portraits were safely locked away elsewhere, in another region of the country. Arson and theft were common in St. Michel du Valcabrère, owing to the many itinerant travelers, so often undocumented.

Then the visitor would leave and the portrait returned to the closet, where it would remain until the next inquiry. Florette thought these briefcase-wielding visitors were colorless people, with the closed and locked faces of suspicious landlords. She objected to them. She didn't like them in her house but Thomas insisted it was altogether easier talking to them for an hour than refusing to talk to them at all. They were persistent. They could make things difficult
for him, and for her, too, if they chose. Trouble was, they didn't know specifically what they were looking for. There was something they wanted but they didn't know precisely what it was. Unk-unks, in government argot: unknown unknowns. Still, they had to say they tried. They had to make the journey. And they're gone now, he said, touching wood.

We can be ourselves again.

You were superb, chérie.

Would you like a tisane?

Florette listened now for his step but heard nothing except the movement of the men in the woods. She had forgotten where she was. She opened her eyes and saw that the snow had ceased. Stars burned overhead and off to the south. Through the branches of the trees she saw the horned moon. She was counting the things she had and the things she was missing, a warm coat and gloves, wool socks, a cigarette, and the company of her aunt, always a welcome presence. When she was young and ill with the usual childhood diseases, Tante Christine was always on hand to nurse her. Her own mother couldn't be bothered. Her mother was not on speaking terms with illness. When illness was in the house, her mother went away and Tante Christine arrived. Tante Christine had a saying about the horned moon but she couldn't remember what it was except it was lewd. One more lost story. She and Thomas forgot things all the time and now she knew that in her life she had forgotten much more than she remembered, fragments of herself gone forever. Soon she would be a tree stripped of leaves, bare to the winter wind. Thomas claimed that things were never forgotten, merely stored in momentarily inaccessible places, usually in l'esprit profond; so it was not unknown for the inaccessible to become accessible, such as when you were in a dream state or otherwise bewitched. She supposed that was why he made his lists of train stations and the rivers of the capital cities of central Europe. Thomas was so American. Nothing was ever lost, only misplaced; and when something unwelcome entered his mind, he knocked wood. Now she craved a cigarette. The
Gitane smell was close but wafted away. She shut her eyes and put her hands on her face, her hands like claws, her fingers so very cold against her skin. Her nails were like chips of ice and she wondered if she was feverish. Her throat was sore, constricted as if a hand had closed around it. She did not understand why Thomas did not come for her. She was waiting for him.

He was occupied with his friends. She tried to remember why the Americans were with them for lunch. Yes, of course. They had come for the funeral the day before. The funeral of the Englishman who lived in the farmhouse adjoining their own. He was over one hundred years old when he passed away in his sleep. Thomas and his two friends were pallbearers at the service, sparsely attended, only a few loyal neighbors and the mayor besides herself and Ghislaine, the village woman who cooked and kept house for the Englishman. The abbé was circumspect in his eulogy, a generic affair that took account of Monsieur Granger's long life and quiet death, his modest habits and unobtrusive character, before commending his soul to the grace of God, though the abbé's manner suggested that God might wait awhile before attending to it. The light was soft inside the church, yellow flowers banked beside the casket. Florette had picked them herself from the Englishman's greenhouse. Thomas and his American friends listened attentively, solemn expressions broken now and again by raised eyebrows. They buried the Englishman under the cherry tree by the wall in the meadow beside his house. There were no tears because the Englishman had led an agreeable life for a very long time, and if he had a complaint no one ever heard it. Ghislaine had turned to Florette and said that the Englishman had left her nothing, not a sou, after all the years she had looked after him and his wretched dogs, cairn terriers, filthy brutes, biters, six in all over the many, many decades he had lived in St. Michel du Valcabrère. Ghislaine looked after the dogs and the dogs graves, can you imagine such a disagreeable chore? The dog remains were on the south side of the cherry trees, while he will be on the north. They were all under the shade of the tree. Wasn't it appalling and unwholesome? And that was not all. He left the farmhouse and its contents, including the wine cellar and the English silver, to a niece in America and she was selling everything sight unseen. They had never met, Monsieur Granger and the American niece. They were perfect strangers. Yet for me, there's nothing. An irregular situation, Ghislaine said. She had only come to the funeral so that she could curse him silently and in person, another foreigner who arrived unbidden to enjoy French hospitality but refused to honor his debts. Debts were for other people. Also, he was not amiable, was untidy in his manner, often curt, one of those who thought the French owed him something. Yes, that was true. He had a grudge against us. He believed all France should be grateful that he chose to come and live among us, as if it were not his choice but our choice. They think we are innkeepers to the world! That was the way with foreigners estranged from their own countries. Wasn't it true that a person deserved to die under his own flag, among his own people? He will never be at rest. And I will say this also, Madame, between us two only. He had a stone in his shoe, something concealed. He had a dark past, that one. As with so many foreigners. He should not have been here. Ghislaine heaved a great shrug, her mouth turned down at the corners. No one asked him to come. Yet here he was.