Lost (50 page)

She put her things together. She left all of her cash except for a few francs for the Moroccan maid. There was no one behind the counter, so Winnie scribbled a note in English—“Charge my card; thanks, WR”—and got on the road again. Would her accountant be required to pay that bill if it turned out she had gone schizoid on this trip? If she let Gervasa have more of the view, and Winnie retired to a dark back corner of her own body? Or, in the event things went wrong, would her estate have to honor the debt if it was posted after the moment of her death?

She had gassed up the car before stopping and had no trouble finding the road back toward Rennes, and peeling off at last around Vitré toward Fougères. She coursed through what looked like the county seat, taking no care in the minute traffic circles, since no one else was on the road at this hour. If Gervasa was taking in any of this, she made no comment. Well, even if she were using Winnie's eyes, how could she recognize such things—not just the automobiles and streetlights, more or less universal around the world and certainly familiar to Winnie, but also the small details that make this place superficially, or subtly, different from Paris, from England, from Massachusetts?

Fougères must be prosperous. Lights left burning the night through. Green neon crosses, denoting pharmacies. And
everywhere, colored Christmas lights, that ubiquitous necklacing of the world to guard against solstice panic.

“Gervasa,” said Winnie—driving alone was proving the least self-conscious way to converse with the phantom—“Gervasa, what about that mark?”

The mark?

“The Christian cross, through which strokes are drawn. It showed up here, and there; on the boards, on the computer . . . in Allegra's plaster of Paris.”

A kind of prohibition. Laid upon me. It says, to anyone who sees my dying body or my corpse, do not pray for the repose of this soul.

“Oh.” And Winnie didn't dare ask if it referred to the child who might or might not have died with her. And what about the Madonna and child statue laid in the tomb? “How can all this be, and I not quaking with born-again faith? I don't believe in Christian charms anymore. They obliterated the sacraments of my own senses, so I left all that years ago.”

Gervasa did not reply. The notion of choice seemed beyond her.

The sky was lengthening and the black terrain taking on definition as, behind them to the east, dawn light seeped through damp clouds. The car sped on a track of wet pavement, between fields, past isolated houses of brown stone. On the road toward Saint-Malo but not that far, passing signs announcing Saint-Brice-en-Coglès.

What did happen to you?

Past a stand of poplars, past an abandoned car with its blinkers flashing.

“It all came to a crash, my whole life. It wasn't just poor Vasile being dead. We were going to call him Basil, you know, an odd name for an American boy, but it means king, or prince. Basil Pritzke. It wasn't just that he died, while John and I, in panic and
surprise, had fallen into love at last, briefly, and into bed with each other too. It wasn't that. This is now. You can survive adultery now. You can recover, you can go on. Since I don't believe in God anymore, I can't believe in punishment. Just the banality of coincidence, just fate, that John and I should be screwing ourselves warm while Basil was succumbing to hypothermia. If the snowfall hadn't come, we'd have arrived four days earlier; he was still alive then. Awful as that was, I could have survived all that.”

Into Antraín and through it in a whisker, and a few cars on the road now, and a little spotted fawn looking up from some bracken, and flashing away. Turning north, the sun now in real evidence. It was what, nearly seven o'clock? Winnie shifted the visor on the passenger's side to block the glare.

“It was losing Emil on top of losing Basil,” she said. “He didn't leave me because of my infidelity. Which after all hadn't been my first. Nor because of the last-minute death of our baby. He left me because I couldn't find my way back to being myself. I got lost. For the same reason, John is leaving me too.”

Here the sign: D976, Mont-Saint-Michel–Pontorson.

“John knew that though I did love him, in some ways I had been using him to stand in for Emil. The State Department having said that Emil couldn't safely travel in the former Eastern Europe. But I wanted Emil to risk it. I wanted him there. This was our child, and he was letting John go in his stead.”

So why not deed it to me, since your life is worth nothing?

Gervasa was not being ironic, not Dr. Laura or Dr. Ruth or Dr. Oprah. She meant it. When you lose all, there is nothing to relish. The sun comes up as it does right now, streaking the land with buttery blandishments, gray-blue shadows; a few birds wheel high in the sky, suggesting the nearness of the sea. Every hour past present and to come emerges out of this very moment, here on this road
barreling toward a headland: every last sensation of life has accelerated toward this day and is derived from it, somehow. But birds can wheel all they want; all they do is define the emptiness of the sky. The whole planet spreads out from this Renault Elf, corrupt and formidable and regenerative, wrinkling into Himalayas and Alps and Andes, rocking with Atlantics and Pacifics, pocked with Aleutians and Azores and Falklands and Cyclades, sectored into time zones, blanketed with weather, gripped in space, lost in admiration of itself, and none of it has the power to charm anymore. Not the smallest swallow on that ledge, pecking
a crumb. She'd as soon kill it as look at it. The magic world, the world of childhood, was dead.

“There was so much promised us, as kids,” she murmured at last. “It was all lies and adults should be shot. There was a poem—you won't know it. Grandma used to rock me to sleep with it.

 

“How many miles to Babylon?

Three score miles and ten, sir.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again, sir.

 

“Poetry is all charms and promises. The impossible journey made possible. In poetry maybe you can get to the holy city and back again, even before it's time to sleep. But it's not really true. You can't get anywhere but to the slow understanding of how, every day, you die, until there's nothing left to die and you are dead.”

Then change with me. All you do with your life is lie.

Winnie could think of no argument against this. By trying to lie about who she was, she had been bounced by Forever Families out of the informational meeting.

The land, looking north, began to seem hurrying, rushing to meet the sea that must be just beyond. The terrain dipped and rose.
On either side of the road, the last several miles of approach were sentineled by big tatty Alpenhuis hotels and souvenir shacks, though the local stone was still the color of golden pears, and the poplars shook their branches in the strengthening wind. Then, at last, looking like a Byzantine monastery from this distance, only brown, the color of dung and wet bark, Mont-Saint-Michel.

Gervasa had paid no attention to the charms of Normandy. She had made no mew of pleasure at being on home territory. Now she began to be more alert, as if she could sense the age of this holy site. Perhaps it was not so much place as time in which a creature could sense being at home.

And how much of Mont-Saint-Michel was as it had been in 1350? At least some of it, no doubt.

From a distance, an island joined by a causeway, Mont-Saint-Michel looked more remote and spectacular than Notre Dame, or the Agia Sophia, or St. Peter's. Perfect, tiny, spectacular, like a child's sand castle writ large, all one color in this light. Winnie parked. Hers was the first car in the visitors' lot. She walked the sands up to the gate. She, who knew herself incapable of anything approaching religious feeling, was relieved to see that the entire rock wasn't peopled by mendicants, clerics, and pilgrims, but shored up and buttressed by the needs and pleasures of commerce.

A center street wound and zigzagged up the hill. Houses, some dating from the late Middle Ages, were crammed on every inch, one rooftop craning over the other to see out, toward the mainland or the sea. And the ground floors of every building featured plate glass and open windows and outdoor shelving. The houses were gutted in the service of floor space for shops, crêperies. Selling plastic junk, holy nothings. Winnie stopped and bought a guidebook in English at a shop just being opened by a sweet-faced red-haired boy
about ten, who smoked a Gitane and spoke polite and perfect English.

“I shouldn't be offended,” said Winnie. “If I don't believe in the Church, or any of this, why not make a buck off the site? The Church surely sold indulgences here. This is a different kind of indulgence, I guess.” Still, she was glad she was so early, and didn't have to dodge crowds rocking from one stall to the other.

She took her time. The incline was steep. She stopped halfway up, to catch her breath, by a graveyard decorated with flowers and Christmas trees. In the spirit of the season, some sort of fake snow had been trained to adhere to the branches of real trees. But the air had a kind of winter warmth to it, and the snow looked idiotic.

She read a bit in the guidebook, to postpone restarting her climb. Mont-Saint-Michel, she saw, was originally called Mont-Tombe, from the Low Latin word
tomba,
meaning both mound and tomb. Well, they got that right, she thought. How many ghosts does this place have? Is this as good a place as any, in this foreign and unwelcoming world, to give myself over?

She rose. From this height she could see other tourists arriving. The parking lot was beginning to look busy. Visitors were making a slow progress up the hill, but she was ahead of them, and at this hour she was still alone except for the residents going about their work of opening for business. She drew a deep breath. “Are you happy?” she said to Gervasa.

Gervasa didn't answer. Winnie assumed the concept was beyond her, and maybe, really, the expectation of personal happiness was one of the especial sadnesses that democracy had ushered in.

On she went. A Wednesday morning in mid-December, a bit ahead of the tourist traffic that no doubt would flood the place come the solstice and Christmastide. Winnie paid forty francs to get into
the chapel and mounted dozens of more steps to look at a room the color of toast. If Gervasa were religious, she might have thrilled to be back in a sanctified zone again, but she made no comment. Biding her time.

Then up yet more steps, arriving at last at a lofty enclosed garden, where the light was welcomed in a fresher way. A cloister aerie, with an actual lawn, almost as high as one could get if one was not about to scale the buttresses or the leaded roofs of the chapel.

No one else was here.

Roses, red and white, rustled in a small wind. Silver king in the garden, boxwood in good trim, and the grass in its rectilinear inset richly, improbably green. A space as close as you might ever get, Winnie guessed, to featuring all landscape pleasures at once: the wind buffeted in, but lightly; the sun stroked the stone and pooled on one corner of the grass. You were safe in a fisthold of the strongest stone, yet you could move to the three arches that looked out over the sand and sea, feel the pleasure of height. You were higher than the birds, whose wings flashing with sunlight made a dancing punctuation of the view of the rooftops below.

The village fell so steeply beneath that Winnie might have been in a helicopter over it.

And still, there was nothing to love, no way to wrench anything from this. There was language to talk about it, sure, but that wasn't the same as love.

Will you do it? Will you exchange places with me? Give me your life?

“If my life means little to me, it can hardly mean more to you,” she said. “Not that I mind if you have it. But what you need isn't my life, since you can't find in it what you want. What you need—”

She looked around to see how it might be done.

“I could just leap through this glass. Then, think how in between
things you would be: in between the earth and the sky, the water and the wind. Neither in Babylon nor home again. I could just die, and if I die”—she started to laugh, for when had this hoary old line ever been said as a charitable offer?—“if I die, I take you with me.”

An old priest pattered in with a breviary. He looked up at Winnie and heard her speaking. He probably thought she was saying her Matins. He bent down over his prayerbook again.

“Why not?” said Winnie to herself and Gervasa both.

Why not?

Winnie went up to the glass and felt it with her hands. It was impossible to tell if it was Plexiglas or standard window glass. Could she get far enough back to make a real running start at it? No half efforts now.

She moved around the perimeter of the garden. If it was to be done, it should be done quickly, before the place grew more crowded. The elderly priest was keeping to his side of the cloister, turning up and down the walk so as not to interrupt her conversation. But, she saw, he was talking into a cell phone. He pocketed it as she came nearer to calculate the distance and speed it might take to break the barrier.

“My apologies,” he said. English with a lovely soft accent. “Moments for prayer, even here, are never as many as one would like.”

She didn't answer. She felt Gervasa stiffen.

“Do you suffer visions?” he asked.

Don't answer
.

“I don't believe in visions.”

He smiled, lifting a red satin ribbon with care and replacing it when the page was turned. “Neither did Saint Paul until he was halfway to Damascus.”

Get away
.

“What a beautiful antique French you speak,” he said, but still in English, as if knowing French could not be her first language.

I accept your offer. Do it now
.

“What offer is this?” said the priest. “Would you like to sit down on this bench and speak to me?”