The Wanderess (19 page)

I left delighted by the encounter and returned around
noon to our home on the quai. Saskia had never left, she had only
finished dressing. I was charmed to see her dressed in a way I had
never seen her before. She looked like a beautiful piece of
candy—color on her lips, long lacquered eyelashes, her hair back
in braids. I kissed her forehead and she wrapped her arms around
my neck.

“I missed you, kiddo,” I said, “I found a beautiful island in
the city. An island with many a bridge. And now I come back to
find you in braids, what a pleasure! You know, a girl without
braids is like a city without bridges…”

“I met a girl, though,” I told Saskia, and described my
meeting with Mademoiselle Lingot, saying that we now had an
entry into a good home on the island. Saskia seemed jealous,
although she only replied, “That’s good you talk to girls. You
don’t want to forget what they sound like… I’m going to the Île
Saint Louis now for my own detective work. Will you be good?”

“A saint,” I said, “I might go for a walk and drink more
wine. Let me give you some money.” I knew that Saskia was out
of funds until she went abroad to draw on her inheritance. I
searched through my pockets to give her a handful of écus, and in
doing so I realized that our wealth was quickly diminishing. For
her it was clothes and guitar sheet-music, for me in was opium
and wine. I needed to think of ways to fill our purse without
depending on Saskia’s inheritance, which we could only draw-on
abroad. Paris had us glued to it, the way that city glues so many
wanderers. I knew that Paris was reputable for gaming rooms
where they say that ruined adventurers often made back lost
fortunes in a single day. I think we had under a hundred louis at
that time. ‘If only I could get my hands on two-thousand gold
louis d’or,’ I thought. ‘With two thousand louis, Saskia and could
live in comfort long enough to find Adélaïse and find my mother
in Florence; it would take us all the way to Saint Petersburg to see
the white nights. Just two-thousand louis d’or, and we will no
longer need Saskia’s uncle’s money. We can live together openly
for the whole world to know…’

Still, and no doubt wisely, I decided to
not
go to the
gaming tables that day. As far as adventurers go, I had always
been one of the more successful. But as for gamblers, I was a
disaster. With my passionate temperament, I knew a day at a
roulette table would leave me and Saskia in the street: two
paupers without bread or clothes.

“I’ll be back when I can!” Saskia planted a kiss with her
candy mouth on the tip of my nose and skipped out of our
apartment. Her gaiety, her freshness, made me infinitely happy. I
think that this time with her, with us living together in Paris in
that apartment on the quai of the river Seine, was the happiest
time I had ever known up till then in my life. I stood at the
window and watched her bouncing happily across the bridge over
the Seine. And I thanked then the generosity of the gods for my
luck, and my life, and the city of Paris, and I thanked Saskia and
all that had led up to her finding me that night in Barcelona.

I was indeed a saint while Saskia was tramping around Paris
looking for Adélaïse. I smoked myself to heaven in an opium den
on the rue Saint-Honoré. I then got lost in my fog of pleasure and
explored the old streets of the Rive Droite
¹
. I contemplated all the
possible reasons why the sun shines. I contemplated the moon
too, knowing that the day is beautiful but that night would soon
come and the moon would be almost full. I knew that some
adventures would present themselves in the coming days, and
new adventures are always exciting when one is in a new city.

I sold my sword on the rue de Rivoli—that beauty of silver
and steel with the emerald handle which I bought in Barcelona
the day of that horrible night at the theatre in Barcelona—a night
I hoped to erase forever from my memory. With the money I
received for the sword, I purchased a pair of diamond earrings for
Saskia at the Place Vendôme.

When I returned home, everything was quiet. Saskia was
still out. I poured a glass of wine to drink, and before I sat down
to enjoy it, I opened the door to our patio and spilled the first sip
on the ground to appease the gods, as is my custom. That was
when Saskia entered. She was all in a tizzy…

“That stupid island!” she huffed, throwing her purse down.
“
You
go there and the people are nice.
You
meet people. One girl
even picks up on you and invites you to her home! Why aren’t
people nice to
me
?”

“No, no, that won’t help… First of all, the island was
empty and desolate. I was desolate too. Nowhere was there
anyone or anything that had to do with Adélaïse. Oh, I did see a
few people! There were some here and there, and I tried your
trick. I went up to each one and asked if they spoke English.
They all shook their heads and said, “Français!” So I then asked
them in French if they knew a lot of people on the island. One
lady growled at me.
“Ça ne vous regarde pas,
²
”
she howled at me.

One man responded to my question by sneering at me:
“Vous êtes
bien trop jeune et trop jolie pour être inspectrice de police!
¹
”
Just
then I’d had enough! I decided to come home. So when I was
leaving the island, I passed a yard where an woman was sweeping
up leaves. Her grey hair was all knotty and she had a dirty old
broom. She reminded me a lot of the old gardener woman I met
on that exact same island years before…”

“Yes, that one… my famous fortune that is the reason you
and I are together. Both women had similar faces, both had icy
grey eyes; although the one today looked like a mule, whereas the
fortune teller didn’t look like a mule. Anyway, I decided to talk to
her, not thinking that there was any way in the world she too
would humiliate me. Boy, I was sure wrong…

“‘Bonjour Madame!’ I greeted her cheerfully, ‘Did we not
see each other here once before?’ She set down her old broom
and looked at me in a mean way and said, ‘All I can tell you, little
girl, is that you are being followed. Not just here on this island,
where you’ve been coming every day for over a week now on some
kind of unknown business, but you are being followed elsewhere
too.’…

“I was speechless! The old broom-lady continued, ‘You
know the people on the Île Saint-Louis talk about you, don’t you?
Many close their shutters when you approach their houses. Have
you not noticed all the closed shutters? Isn’t it a little hot out to
be closing shutters?’…

“I didn’t reply to the old witch, she made me furious! I
simply turned around and headed to the bridge to come back
home, deciding never to return to that stupid island again. How
come I don’t have your talent for getting people to open up to
me?”

“Still, I think you should take over the job of finding
Adélaïse. The only way I will ever find her is if I spot her with my
own eyes, whereas you can charm somebody who might know
her.”

“Do you want to go to the theatre tonight?” I asked.
“Oh yes!”

I was glad to have changed the subject away from the Île
Saint-Louis and Adélaïse, and Saskia was in heaven when I
presented her the diamond earrings I bought for her. “No man
ever offered me earrings! Not even my uncle. And these are so
beautiful!” She threw her lovely arms around me and hugged me
with all her might. I was thrilled that I made her happy and it was
with great joy we dressed for the theatre that night.

That night, Saskia was as beautiful as the sky when night’s phase
possesses the moon and every constellation. When she appeared
at the Comédie-Française, wearing a silk taffeta gown, her
shoulders nude and neck perfumed, with diamonds in her ears,
she excited all of Paris. The production was Molière’s
Dom Juan.
At intermission, we drank champagne, and many came up to us to
pay compliment to Saskia’s beauty. Afterwards, we returned to
the parterre where our seats were; but before we sat down, I saw
something very disturbing:
Above us, in a box at the right of the
stage, a man was seated alone, no lady beside him. I recognized
him as the same man who had been in the house that morning on
the Île Saint-Louis, talking to the peasant woman through the
plate-glass window—he looked different now as he wasn’t wearing
a hat. But this was not what disturbed me. It was that even that
morning, when he was at the window, I decided he was the same
man who followed me in Valencia. That morning I made other
connections, but nothing that grasped me. Now, seeing him
clearly, his face, stature, the serious way he composed himself, I
realized that
this was the man!
…not just the man from Valencia,
but from Barcelona too; and not just Barcelona, but elsewhere…

Watching him flashed pictures in my mind: tangible
memories arranged with vague associations. I flashed-back to the
night I met Saskia, remembering that strange man on Las
Ramblas who stopped me when I was poisoned; and, telling me
how sick I looked, he advised me to go to the hospital that was on
the very street where I would meet Saskia. If he hadn’t stopped
me and told me about that hospital, Saskia and I would have
never met. Looking in the theatre that night at that long face
with those dark, gaunt features, I recalled the ship captain in
Barcelona at the port who announced that all boats to Florence
were either canceled or heavily delayed. It was also thanks to this
announcement that Saskia and I reunited after I escaped from her
apartment in El Ravel. Had the boats been running, I would have
left Barcelona on the spot, damning that city to the dogs. And I
would probably have forgotten Saskia.

They say that when we dream at night and see a figure
who tells us the path we need to follow, the direction we need to
take in life, it is always the same figure in each dream. He or she
may vary slightly in form between dreams, but it is always the
same figure. It seemed to me that the messengers in my life—the
ones who have guided me towards unbelievable experiences, led
me to the people I’ve cared about—these messengers all
resembled the same man, a man I now saw outside of a dream.
He was in the same theatre as me, seated in a box for a
performance of Molière’s
Dom Juan
, on my first night at the
Comédie-Française in Paris: that strange city that would forever
leave its mark on me.

The presence of this man in the theatre made me uneasy.
“Let’s go to the bar to get some champagne,” I said to Saskia. She
didn’t reply, so I excused myself, saying I would come back with
champagne. Saskia was talking to two other girls when I
returned. They were about her age, both elegantly dressed.
Saskia appeared very jealous when I arrived—a strange thing,
considering the girls were not as beautiful as she. She didn’t
introduce me to them, so one of the girls introduced herself to
me. Saskia stared at her with angry eyes when she did this, and
without further conversation, she uttered an insincere goodbye to
them and turned to face me, her back turned to them in a way
that seemed very impolite. She then began to tell me how
wonderful she thought the play was. This show of jealousy
charmed me completely. Saskia was now more beautiful than
ever in my eyes. So I told Saskia how beautiful she was to me, and
how I loved her more than Molière. She took my arm and we
wandered away from the two girls, and from all other people, and
we found a corner of the theatre where we could be alone. Saskia
hugged my shoulders, and she asked me if I was a little tipsy.
Before I could answer, she said, “Not now, I meant
then
. When
you said you loved me more than Molière.” I tried to respond but
she hushed me, saying that it didn’t matter. She didn’t care if I
was a little tipsy when I said I loved her. Either way she said she
was happier at that moment than she had ever been in her entire
life. I told her that
she herself
was tipsy to say such a thing, and
she admitted that she was a little tipsy… “More than a little,” she
said. Then she smiled in a sneaky way, and she said,
“Regardless…” and she told me that she loved me too… more than
Molière, and more than Racine and more than Beaumarchais,
even more than Shakespeare. Her words made me dizzy with
pleasure, and I gave her a hundred caresses and covered her hands
in kisses. My heart was aflame when we left the ComédieFrançaise that night, and I gave no more thought to the presence
of my “messenger” in that theatre. I only thought of that gypsy
child named Saskia.

That night after the theatre, Saskia told me the first part of her
fortune. It was her fortune, I came to realize, that had seduced
her; her fortune that had seduced me. It was her fortune that was
the true author of our lives. It was just as intangible as love, as
intangible as disease; and just as love and disease are invisible
entities that take over the mind and body of the infected, so did
that fortune work like an invisible disease: it worked through the
body and mind to construct our mysterious relationship and build
the outcome of this story. You will see as I go on…

After the theatre, we found a restaurant on the quai of the
Seine which looked elegant, called Chez Lefèvre
¹
. Inside, it was
dim. Every single table was empty, but we didn’t take that as a
bad sign. There was a summer storm that night and a blustery
wind had cleared the entire quai of all souls. The restaurant only
had one waiter. He heard us come in and came from the back
patio and welcomed us to a table. He was a small, tired-looking
man: an Italian from Mantua, he told us. He explained that the
owner of the restaurant wasn’t in; that the chef was there, but
there had been no customers all evening. The waiter showed that
he was a little drunk as he opened up to us…

“I received some very bad news today,” he said, “I don’t
want to spoil your meal… it was personal news about my family.
So if you don’t mind, except when you need me, I’ll be out back
on the patio smoking and drinking.”

His frankness was endearing. Saskia, always moved by
tender scenes, asked the waiter if he wanted us to leave so he
could be alone… “Since we are the only customers,” she said, “if we
leave, you can close up and go home to be alone.” The sad waiter
replied that he didn’t want to be alone; that he wanted most of all
to be out on that patio smoking and drinking, knowing all the
while that the chef was there in the kitchen and that we were here
in the dining room. Saskia thanked him, with damp eyes she
whispered to me that he was breaking her heart. I ordered a
bottle of Bourgogne; and a moment later, she and I were alone at
a table with good wine to drink.