Poe shadow (13 page)

That had once been Duponte. It was
that Duponte
I had to bring to America. Nor had my limited communion with him proved totally void of his talents. One afternoon, during one of Duponte’s walks, the heat was strong and I convinced him to share a coach with me. After some time driving through Paris in silence, he pointed out the window of our coach to a cemetery. “That,” he said, “upon the other side of the wall, is the small burial place of your people, Monsieur Clark.”

I saw a sign in French for the Jewish cemetery. “Yes, it
is
quite small…” I paused, leaving my statement in the air. Thinking of what had just been said to me, I turned in astonishment. “Monsieur Duponte!”

“Yes?”

“What did you say a moment ago? Of that burial place?”

“That in it are the people of your faith, or perhaps partially of your faith.”

“But, monsieur, whatever leads you to believe I am Jewish? I have never said so to you.”

“You are not?” Duponte asked in surprise.

“Well,” I answered breathlessly, “my mother was Jewish. My father, Protestant; he has died too. But however did you think of that?”

Duponte, seeing I would press the question, explained. “When we neared a particular lodging house in Montmartre some days ago, you realized from the newspaper accounts that it was the place where a young girl was brutally murdered.” Articles about the gruesome case, indeed, had daily pervaded the Paris newspapers I had been reading to improve my French. Duponte continued: “Feeling it was something of a sacred place, a place of recent death, you reached for your hat. However, rather than taking off your hat—as the Christian does automatically upon entering a church—you secured it tighter on your head—like the Jew in his synagogue. Then you fumbled with it for another moment, showing your uncertain instincts in the matter to remove or tighten it. This made me consider that you had worshipped, at times, in church and in synagogue.”

He was correct. My mother had not yielded her Jewish heritage upon entering wedlock, despite the collective urgings of my father’s family, and once the Lloyd Street Synagogue was completed in Baltimore she had brought me with her.

Duponte returned to his usual silence. I kept my excitement to myself. I had begun to break down Duponte’s walls.

I tried delicately to solicit Duponte for more facts about his past, but his face would stiffen each time. We developed a friendly routine. Each morning I would knock at his door. If he was stretched on his bed with the newspaper, he would invite me inside for coffee. Usually, Duponte would announce his departure for a walk and I would ask permission to accompany him, to which he would assent by ignoring my question.

He had an impenetrability, a
moral invisibility
that made me want to see how he would be in all the possible variations of life: to see him in love, in a duel, to see what meal he would select at a certain establishment. I burned to know his thoughts and wished him to desire to know more of me.

Sometimes I would bring him an item related to my original purpose that I hoped might strike his interest. For example, I found a guidebook of Baltimore in one of the Paris bookstalls and showed it to him.

“You see, inside there is a folded map—and this part of town is where Edgar Poe lived in Baltimore when he won his first newspaper prize for a tale called ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle.’ Here is where he was discovered in an insensible state in Baltimore. Look here, monsieur; that is his burial place!”

“Monsieur Clark,” he said, “I am afraid such things are of as little interest to me as you can imagine.”

You see how it was. I tried every approach to uplift him from his inactive trance. For example, one hot day when Duponte and I were walking across a bridge over the Seine, we decided to pay twelve
sous
each to one of the floating establishments on the river to take a bath under a canvas roofing. We plunged into the cooling water opposite each other. Duponte closed his eyes and leaned back, and I followed his example. Our bodies were rocked up and down by the happy splashing of children and young men.

Quentin: “Monsieur, surely you know the importance of Poe’s tales of C. Auguste Dupin. You have heard of them. They were published in the French journals.”

Duponte (inattentively, a question or statement?): “They were.”

Q: “Your own achievements in analysis provide the character of the main figure with his abilities. That must mean something to you! The exploits involve the most intricate, seemingly impossible, and miraculous triumphs of reason.”

D: “I have not read them, I believe.”

Q: “Not read the literature of your own life? That which will make you immortal? How could this be?”

D: “It is of as little interest to me as I could imagine, monsieur.”

Should that last comment have an exclamation mark? Perhaps a grammarian could answer; it was quite sharply enunciated but without any greater volume than a waiter at a restaurant repeating an order back to his customer.

It was just a few days later when there came an important turn in my companionship with Duponte. I had walked with Duponte through the Jardin des Plantes, where not only the finest plants and trees were enjoyed in the summer but one of Paris’s best scientific zoological collections. After a tunnel of clouds had darkened above the trees, we had begun walking for the exit when a man rushed up behind us. He spoke with great consternation.

“Kind monsieurs,” he said, panting out the words, “have you seen somebody with my cake?”

“Cake?” I repeated. “What do you mean, monsieur?”

He explained that he had walked to the street-vendors and purchased a seedcake, a rare indulgence for him, to enjoy on what had been a beautiful sunny day before the rain began. This fellow had placed his treat lovingly on the bench beside his person until such a time as he would feel his earlier dinner properly digested. He had turned his back only for a brief moment to secure his umbrella from the ground upon noticing the storm gathering overhead. However, when he turned back finally ready to savor his sweet luxury, it had vanished completely, and there was not a man around!

“Perhaps a bird picked it up, monsieur,” I suggested. I tugged at Duponte’s arm. “Come along. It is beginning to rain, Monsieur Duponte, and we haven’t any umbrellas.”

We parted from our cakeless friend, but after a few steps Duponte turned around. He called back this despondent man.

“Monsieur,” said Duponte, “stand where I am now and likely your cake shall return in two to seven minutes. Approximately speaking.” Duponte’s voice exhibited neither joy nor particular interest in the matter.

“Indeed?” the man cried.

“Yes. I should think so,” said Duponte, and he began walking away again.

“But—how?” the man now thought to ask.

I, too, was held dumbstruck by Duponte’s proposition, and Duponte saw this.

“Imbeciles!” said Duponte to himself.

“What?” the man asked with offense.

“Pardon, Monsieur Duponte!” I said, also protesting the insult.

Duponte ignored this. “I shall demonstrate the conclusion,” he said. We two waited at the very edge of anticipation. But Duponte simply stood there. After a space of three and a half minutes, roughly, a regular stampede of hurried noises was heard nearby and there—I must reveal—came a piece of cake from around the corner, floating in the air, right near the nose of its rightful owner!

“The cake!” I pointed.

The confection was attached to a short string of some sort, and followed behind two small boys running headlong through the gardens. The man chased down the boy and untied his cake from its thief. He then ran back to us.

“Why, remarkable monsieur, you were entirely right! But how have you recovered my cake?” For a moment the man looked at Duponte suspiciously, as though he had been involved in some scheme. Duponte, seeing he would have no peace without explaining, offered this simple description of what had transpired.

Among the most popular attractions in the natural collections of the Jardin des Plantes was the exhibition of bears. Before being accosted by the cake-widower, Duponte had casually noticed that it was near the time in which the bears usually stirred from their sleep. This was also known by the many local devotees to these animals, and it was a daily occupation to try to make the waking bears perform various antics and climb the pole provided for them, an effort that often involved dangling some item of food into their pit by twine or string. Indeed, the vendors at the gates to the gardens sold as much of their wares for these purposes as for human nourishment. But since among the lovers of the bears who would come from miles away for this sport were many young boys, and since most of these
gamins
had no spare
sous
in their pockets for such delicacies, Duponte reasoned that as the man had turned to secure his umbrella at the sign of rain, one of these boys had snatched the cake on his way to the bears. Because the bench was quite high, and the boy short, the man, on turning around again, saw no one nearby and thought the source of the theft fantastic.

“Very well. But how did you know the cake would return, and at this very spot?” the man asked.

“You may have noticed,” continued Duponte, seeming to talk more to himself than to either of us, “that upon entering the grounds of the gardens, there was a larger group of officers of the garden in the vicinity of the zoological attractions than usual. Perhaps you remember reading of one of the bears, ‘Martin,’ having recently devoured a soldier who leaned over too far and fell into their domain.”

“Indeed! I remember,” said the man.

“No doubt these guards were stationed to prevent young men and boys from any longer climbing the parapets to get close to the monsters.”

“Yes! You are likely right, monsieur!” The man stood open-mouthed.

“It might have been further essayed, then, that if a boy had in fact taken possession of your cake, the same lad would be turned away from his plan by these vigilant guardians within the first few minutes of the bears’ stirring, and the bandit would return by the most direct path—a path which crosses the grounds where we now stand—to the attraction second in popularity only to the wells of the bears for this sort of spectator: I mean the wire house of the monkeys, who, at the delivery of a bright piece of cloth or item of food, could be made to chase one another in, presumably, a manner almost as enchanting as the bears’ climbing of the pole. None of the other popular holdings, the wolves or the parrots, will make such an exhibition over one’s cake.”

As delighted by this explanation as if it had been his own, the grateful man, with a magnanimous air, invited us to share in his cake, even though it had been in the grubby hands of the boy and had since been made flat by the rain. I politely declined, but Duponte, after a moment of thought, accepted and sat with him upon a bench. They ate with great relish as I held the man’s umbrella over them.

That evening, I met the same man at a crowded café near my hotel. The bright lights of the interior presented a dazzling effect. He was playing a game of dominoes with a friend, whom he dismissed when he saw me come in.

“Monsieur, bravely done,” I said joyfully. “Quite well done!”

I had met this man the day before in the same Jardin des Plantes. He was one of the
chiffonniers
of Paris, men whose occupation was to search through the rubbish heaps put out from the houses of Paris. They would use sticks and baskets with great expertise to collect anything of remote value. “Bones, scraps of paper, linen, cloth, bits of iron, broken glass, broken china, corks of wine bottles…” he explained. These men were not vagrants; rather, they were registered for this activity with the police.

I had inquired of the fellow how much he collected each day.

“Under King Philippe,” he said of the former monarch, “thirty
sous’
worth a day! But now, under the Republic, only fifteen.” He explained, with a sad tone of nostalgia for the monarchy, “People throw away less bones and paper now! When there is no luxury we who are poor can do nothing.”