Читать книгу Woman in Battle Dress - Antonio Benítez-Rojo - Страница 14

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I HAVE SEEN THE SOLDIERS of many nations in my lifetime. I’ve seen them dressed in black, green, gray, white, yellow, blue, and red; I’ve seen them in shakos, fur caps, plumed helmets, and turbans; I’ve seen them on the battlefield, in taverns, in hospitals, in parades, in concert halls and in theaters; I’ve seen them in times of war and in times of peace, in triumph and in defeat. And so, I can attest to the fact that none of them could ever compare to the allure of the French Hussars of 1805. Of course, their resplendent uniforms had something to do with it. But there was something else, a rare magnetism that radiated from within them and that united them despite their different ages and features. The night I met Robert, I couldn’t put a finger on what made him so irresistibly attractive. Nor could I in Vienna. It wasn’t until after the peace at Austerlitz that I figured it out, when his regiment was stationed in Bavaria and I spent a good deal of time with several of his friends. It’s that the Hussars under Napoleon lived to die, and it was the enchantment of death that defined them, that fleeting splendor of twilight, the rose unfurled, the autumn leaf. “Any Hussar who hasn’t died by the age of thirty is a coward,” General Lasalle, the most respected among the Hussars, would always say. And that terrible sentence had become popular in the Grand Armée; it was the sentence Robert had left unfinished that morning in Vienna.

The ten months of peace that we enjoyed were more than enough time for me to realize that Lasalle’s words would be prophetic for Robert. The first sign occurred in Passau, where he was recovering in the hospital from a severe saber wound. We were strolling peacefully through the hospital’s garden, surrounded by thrushes and tulips, when the postman arrived, carrying a bundle of letters and several small wooden boxes. “They’re crosses,” said Robert, letting go of me. “Crosses of the Legion of Honor.” And, leaning on his cane, he limped eagerly over to the bench where the postman had sat down to remove the medals from his haversack. Somewhat perplexed by the brusqueness of his behavior, I hung back on the path. From that vantage, I saw him gesticulating and scolding the man for taking so long to lay the boxes out upon the bench. I saw him pick one up, open it nervously and hold the medallion in front of his nose as though it were a glass of fine wine. I heard him exclaim, exhilarated: “My cross, my cross has arrived at last!” And, turning to look at me, he cried: “Look, my little Turk, my cross! When they kill me, they’ll bury me with it!”

But the thing that most convinced me was listening to him read the Moniteur, the French newspaper that arrived consistently, although somewhat delayed, in the cafés in Munich. Surrounded by Hussars, the table covered with mugs of beer, I listened to Robert read every article, every official communication aloud, in search of some indication that the war they all yearned for would soon begin. “It will come, soon, it will come, there’s no reason to worry, we’ll soon have another go at the Russians, at old Kutuzov, at Bagration, and at the Prussians too, that herd of perverts, if you’ll forgive me, citoyenne, they’ll be the first, followed by the Saxons, that accursed breed, just you wait, Robert, just you wait, Michel, just you wait, Jean-Louis, just you wait, Constant, and those cowards have the gall to call themselves the Hussars of Death. Merde, we are the true Hussars of death!” Hours went by like this, pining for the war, their sabers ever sharp, the barrels of their pistols clean, their horses healthy and well trained. Oh, the horses! Early on, I discovered that Robert had a good deal of the centaur about him, that he and Patriote were a unified and effective war machine, deployed daily, parting only at sunset: Patriote to the barracks’ stables, Robert to the cafés, where I would find him speaking excitedly, smoking his pipe, his mustache dripping with beer, singing the praises of the saber over the lance, of the light horse over the Percheron draft.

Apart from Robert, none of those Hussars were married. None of them shared their wine or their dinners with the whores who’d come along from Metz and Strasbourg, or with the German girls they dabbled with. They were a brotherhood of single men, a type of chivalric society with Napoleon as Grand Master, all of them young and tall and beautiful and conceited and doomed. I never knew why they tolerated my presence. Perhaps because of their collective admiration for Robert, or because they saw me riding in culottes and hunting jacket, or because I had learned to hold my liquor almost as well as them and because whenever anyone would finish speaking I would say things like: “That’s right, monsieur,” “I do agree,” “well said,” and the like. Probably, although I don’t like to think of it, they also accepted me because they knew that Robert’s money came from my dowry—now fully cashed, thanks to the ministrations of Herr Kessler and my lawyer in Toulouse—and that, of my own accord, I was the owner of valuable lands and a château in the Languedoc. Rare was the week that Robert didn’t put on a grand five- or six-course banquet, or an evening of musicians and singers, or lost a hundred francs on the gambling table, or surprised me with a piece of diamond jewelry. We bought a large house and I finally had my enormous bed with white pillows and my cuckoo clock; he, a stuffed crocodile and a rhinoceros horn—old fantasies for each of us. The rooms quickly filled with furs and animal heads, rugs, drapes, flower vases, tapestries—one depicted a courtly tableau and the other, the head of a deer—tailors, dressmakers, fencing instructors and incompetent painters who did portraits of us together, and separately, and even on horseback. We didn’t have a cook because Robert wasn’t accustomed to home-cooked food and preferred to allow the hostelry to take care of meals. For a maid, we had Ma Valoin, who, seeing her clientele diminish in this time of peace, had decided to shutter her wine and cognac wagon, and accept the irresistible salary that Robert had offered her. Another presence in the house was Bernard, an orderly who spent his working hours shining boots, ironing uniforms, and pilfering coins from our pockets. One might say that I was foolish to allow such squandering of our money, or even that I was weak. One might also believe that I was too timid or insecure. But, though it’s true that when I first met Robert I was all of those things, the march from Boulogne to Vienna, the death of Aunt Margot, my friendship with Maryse, my relationship with Uncle Charles, the dangers of war, the company of the Hussars and the discovery of physical pleasure had changed me into a different person altogether. If I never suggested to Robert that he limit his spending, that he should think of the future and of the children we might have, it was because it would have been utterly useless. What’s more, I didn’t do it because I, too, had learned to squeeze every drop out of the moment, because I knew that come the next war, or the war after that, death would separate us.

We made love almost every night; we did it in the big white bed or on one of his furs; we did it limitlessly, without forethought, whenever the mood struck us, sometimes tattooing each other in scratches and bite marks, at others, trembling with tenderness. After midnight, our fountains gone dry, floating, we would find each other again, through words, professing our love and saying that everything was just right and how lucky we were to be together and that when the war ended we would move to Foix and go hunting and give grand banquets and dances and watch many children grow up and grow sweetly old together among horseback rides and pastoral violins. Sometime we fought. We fought over silly things and he would shout at me and I’d hurl shoes, bottles, and elaborate Hussar insults at him. But soon we’d make up, each of us taking the blame for having started the quarrel. On Sundays we’d stroll through the city and have lunch at the hostelry or at a café. In the afternoons we’d entertain ourselves playing cards or chess, although we played other games too; that we were God and could create the world anew, for example, beginning with a second Earthly Paradise—which we would describe in exhaustive detail on the embossed Intendance paper—full of everything except forbidden fruits, talking serpents, and trees of the knowledge of good and evil. Other times we played the difficult-to-attain-treasure game, searching the house for an imaginary prize, guided by a crack in the parquet floor, the gaze of the Florentine lady in the painting that hung in the vestibule, the slant of a nail, or a sudden ray of sunlight filtering through a slit in the window, finally reaching a hand under a piece of furniture to pull out a stray stocking, a button from his fur cape or a dusty plum, finds we would celebrate with great merriment and Rhine wine, pretending that life was an eternal lark, as if, in some way, we already knew that it was to be our last summer together.

And in the middle of the summer Corinne arrived, with her beautiful eyes and her shabby shoes. I can still see her in the doorway, a cheap traveling case in her hand, asking resolutely after her brother Robert. Stunned, with no idea what to say, I stepped aside to allow her in.

“Robert is away for Field Exercises. Four days. He’ll return on Saturday,” I said, motioning for her to sit on the davenport.

I knew for certain that she was Robert’s old lover. Surely she had presented herself as his sister in order to avoid any uncomfortable explanations; perhaps, in her place, I would have done the same. I don’t know why but, seeing her seated rigidly on the edge of the sofa, looking obliquely at the tapestries, it occurred to me that she’d had a baby by Robert and had now come seeking money. But as she spoke, I realized with growing alarm that she seemed not to be lying, that Corinne was revealing herself to be, quite plausibly, Robert’s sister, and not just that, but his Jewish sister because, to begin with—as difficult as it was for me to believe—Robert’s name wasn’t Robert, but Yossel Dorfman, although she’d always called him Yossi. They had been born in Haguenau, near Strasbourg, first him and then her, as she was a year his junior.

“My father, like his father before him, was a shoemaker, a poor man, though not uneducated,” she said, after drinking a glass of wine, hurriedly, in the same way she was telling her unlikely story. “Yossi and I left home years ago, although not together. Times had changed and it was the young people’s moment. It was not uncommon for Jewish boys of Yossi’s age to buy a birth certificate with a Christian name and go off in search of a better destiny, a patriotic destiny. Wars claim lives, madame, but they also offer opportunities. My experience was also fairly common. I went to Italy with a man, Jean Blanchard, a quartermaster who obliged me to be baptized before he’d give me his name. He wasn’t a bad person. He died in a dark alley, stabbed to death. I never found out why. In any case, with what little I had, I went to Paris. There I found work as a seamstress in a uniform factory. Do you know how many stitches there are in a Hussar’s dress uniform, madame?”

“Many, I’m sure,” I said, perplexed, asking myself what this woman, who’d fallen on my home like a mortar shell, could possibly want from me.

“Many, no, madame. So many. Thousands upon thousands. You have no idea how long it takes to sew an entire uniform. I made sleeves. How many sleeves must I have made! Thousands and thousands. As for Yossi, I can tell you that he always dreamed of becoming a cavalry soldier. When he was twelve years old, when he was still a shoemaker’s apprentice, he ran away from home to go to work as a stable boy at the guardhouse in Strasbourg. From there he went to war under a different name and has not been home since. He doesn’t even write. And it’s not that Yossi is a bad son, madame. Surely you’ll understand that being Jewish is quite a disadvantage,” she said, pausing, as if to give me time to take in her turbid tale which, for some reason, although I told myself it couldn’t be true, was slowly turning my insides to ice. How could I ever accept Robert’s deceit, his hypocrisy?

“Of course Yossi will have told you all of this. And it’s not just religion that makes us different; it’s also our customs, our traditions. My father, for example, used to throw my letters into the fire without reading them, and if my mother heard anything from me it was because I wrote to her at a friend’s address. Even today, mute and paralyzed though he is, I can read the rage in my father’s eyes at my presence. Our tradition is strict. Don’t misunderstand me, madame, but I know Yossi much better than you do. You should forgive him his . . . how shall I put it? His eccentricities. It’s not easy to pull the past up by the roots, the name of one’s father and grandfather, the rituals of the faith one was born into. It’s not easy, madame. You must know of the poverty, of the filth of our neighborhoods, and, more than anything else, of the hatred and the scorn that we inspire; that’s the worst part. Jews are conscripted into the army, but only as cannon fodder. You’ll not find a single Jewish name among the Hussars. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to go to Boulogne and pass myself off as his lover.”

“But what do you mean, madame? Please, explain yourself!” I said, standing up and backing toward the wall.

“Well, just think of it. The troops had been deployed for so long, for more than two years, and Yossi would have called attention to himself had he not had a woman in all that time. After all, he was a Hussar, a man of honor and reputation. But is it possible that you didn’t know that we lived together in Boulogne?” she said, seeing my expression of disbelief. “Well, if you don’t believe me, just ask his friend, Madame Polidor. She visited us on occasion. An enchanting woman. Yossi fought a duel for her. Don’t worry, madame, it was not a romantic entanglement. Her lover, an officer with a foreign-sounding last name, hit her in public and Yossi cuffed him. ‘A lovely gesture that will add to my reputation,’ he told me when he returned home. Reputation. That’s the most important thing to Yossi, madame. To have a good reputation. To be respected in his regiment. To be loved by women such as yourself.”

Crying with indignation and shame, I let myself sink down the wall to the floor. Crouched in the corner, I covered my face with my hands. Just when I thought I’d hit the bottom of that well of humiliation, along came the biggest insult of all: “But what camp follower in Boulogne could be trusted? They’re all whores, madame. If Yossi didn’t sleep with them, they would say he was impotent; if he did, they would tell everyone that he’s circumcised, a Jew. I served as his cover, until he met you.”

But if what that woman said were true, Robert had remained celibate for more than two years, an unimaginable situation knowing, as I did, the blazing urgency of his desire. Who, then, had been his lover, if not his very own sister?

Corinne’s voice broke: “My God, madame, you don’t think that Yossi and I—!”

“What is the purpose of your visit?” I asked, incensed, wiping my eyes with the hem of my dress. “Tell me what you want. I have things to do.”

“The purpose of my visit? I need money, something that you and Yossi have plenty of. You see, my father, as I’ve said, has suffered an attack of paralysis and mama has nothing. I wrote to Yossi at the barracks, as I always do. I had already written to him at the Passau hospital to tell him that I had returned home to Haguenau, but he’s stopped responding to my letters and we have run out of time. We are penniless, madame. Plain and simple. I had to sell our grandfather’s watch, the only thing of his we had left, to pay for this visit. If only Yossi had been at the barracks. . . . ”

“How am I to know that you aren’t lying?” I interrupted her, defiant.

“Look at my face, madame. Look at it carefully and tell me that you don’t see him. Don’t you recognize your Robert’s eyes, his lips? They are our mother’s.”

“Enough! You shall have your money!” I said, standing up suddenly. I had recently received the rent from my tenant at Foix through my lawyer, Monsieur Lebrun. I ran to the bedroom and emptied the desk drawer of money into a pillowcase.

“Here. This is all I can give you,” I said, holding out the bundle. She grabbed it from my hands and looked inside.

“It’s a lot,” she said with an ironic smile. “Enough to buy Yossi’s entire past—no? But what am I saying? I meant the honorable Hussar Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste-Robert Renaud. Neither you nor your husband will ever see my face again. Take care, madame,” she added sarcastically, and abruptly turned her back to me.

How I missed Maryse in the days that followed! But Maryse was traveling through the Grand Armée encampments in Germany with a wagon and three carriages—one of them mine—putting on shows with the help of Pierre and Françoise, who, as I learned from her letters, had become actors. Though, in truth, the fact that I weathered that spiritual storm alone had its benefits; it allowed me to discover a part of myself I’d never known existed, a shameful part, I must admit. Because not only did I reproach Robert for his inexcusable deception; I also reproached him for being a Jew.

During those days I barely ate, and drank nothing but water. I locked myself in the bedroom, a prisoner to my own mind. Standing in front of the mirror in my nightshirt, my hair uncombed, I confronted a hypothetical Robert, practicing my harangue, throwing his betrayal in his face, demanding that he go back to the barracks and leave me alone until Maryse came back with my servants and my carriages. But in the end, I threw myself on the bed with choking sobs, knowing that I wasn’t going to break with him, that I didn’t have the strength to leave him. And it was my love for him that hurt the most, my unjustifiable love for that traitorous and opportunistic Hussar who only wanted me for my money, my love that, come what may, he would never deserve. But in a small corner of my pain I soon found a handhold, something to grab onto, an excuse that I held up in front of my own eyes that would allow me to stay with him: the war with Prussia was imminent. Robert would die and the least I could do was to bury him with his cross. It was the certainty that he was going to die that, for an instant, dissuaded me from leaving him, that made me swing, like a pendulum, from one conviction to another, trapped between rupture and reconciliation. If only he weren’t a Jew. Did Maryse and Uncle Charles know? And if someone were to find out? And if Corinne continued to blackmail me and the day came when I could no longer pay her? And even if that didn’t happen, why assume that she and Robert hadn’t been lovers, hadn’t rolled about like pigs in the muddy filth of incest? How was it possible that I had fallen in love with an incestuous Jew? How would I feel entering a dancehall on his arm, people whispering behind our backs? And once again, the pendulum would swing back the other way. What did it really mean that he was Jewish? What was written on his face or in his character that would damn him? Because eyes like his were common among the Marseillaise, the Spanish and the Italians, not to mention the Corsicans and the Creoles from the islands, and even Josephine and Napoleon himself. And really, what proof did I have that he and Corinne had been lovers, why not believe that he’d had a secret lover in Boulogne, some married woman with whom he couldn’t be seen in public? And in any case, aside from their reputation as leeches, I had to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about those men in black overcoats who had followed us from the Rhine all the way to the Danube, buying silver, clothing, shoes, and stolen objects at one tenth of their value, then turning around and selling them at a profit. But silly me—I remembered with relief—what of the clockmaker in Strasbourg? He could not possibly have been kinder to me. Maryse and I had slept in his bedroom, his distant songs sweetening our dreams. And wasn’t I in favor of equality for all in the eyes of the law, had I not always defended this principle against Aunt Margot’s contrary opinion? In short, what harm had the Jews ever done to me? There didn’t seem to be any in Foix, or if there had been, I’d never noticed. I had to admit that, for me, they were little more than a vague entity that came into being who knew when: a scattered biblical tribe that didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God; a passionate and miserly people who attended temples called synagogues in which rabbis officiated and who circumcised their male babies. (“Circumcision,” a word I’d discovered in Aunt Margot’s dictionary—my secret source of knowledge—along with “penis,” “foreskin,” “testicles,” and “semen,” words that aroused me just to read them, and made me want to masturbate. How was I to know that Robert was one of them, I, who’d only ever seen the gardener urinating from a distance?) Ultimately, I had no reason to reproach Robert for having been born Jewish—he wasn’t stingy, wasn’t a money-lender, and didn’t practice Judaism—but even so, he was circumcised, and that thought alone was enough to torment me.

Joyful shouts from the other side of the door shook me from the exhausting seesawing of my emotions: Robert had returned. That night we made love, as was to be expected after an absence, my gaze seeking out his penis, trying to guess what it had originally looked like, wondering what other men’s penises, untouched by the rabbi’s knife, might be like. But, as the days passed that pernicious curiosity waned. Almost without realizing it, the moment arrived when the only thing I faulted him for was his deception, his lack of honesty. And for that, I had not forgiven him.

I chose to remain silent. What would I have accomplished had I thrown his lies in his face? But even if it’s true that I never told him about Corinne’s visit, it’s equally true that my reserve, joined now with his, drew new parameters around my love, a less luminous configuration, still beautiful, but mediated by the compromises of guilt and blame. Soon my relationship with Robert ceased to be the absolute surrender that it had been in the days before Corinne. My orgasms, which before had always opened the doors to heaven, were now limited, even mediocre. Yes, my love had lost not only passion but also innocence, freshness, and the game of playing God now seemed stupid to me; I preferred to match him, hand to hand, on the green cloth of the game table. The get-togethers with the other Hussars began to bore me with their predictability, and instead of going down to meet him in the café I would wait for him at home, playing the piano or lying on the sofa reading what Madame de Staël had to say about literature, or an enormous tome of Shakespeare in translation.

Robert, for his part, threw himself into winning me back, without knowing that nothing could ever restore things to the place where they had shined the brightest, to that place of illusion. He did everything within his power: gifts, kind gestures, professions of love. Like a child who needs to be the center of attention, he did extravagant things like shaving his head and trying to make me jealous by flirting with the magistrate’s daughter. When he’d tried everything, he got drunk and told me the truth, told me he was Jewish and that his last name was Dorfman and that he’d been born to a shoemaker in Haguenau.

“I already knew that you were a Jew,” I said, hoping to wound him, to make him pay for the suffering he’d caused me. “I’ve known since that night in Strasbourg. There are some things that can’t be hidden.”

Oh, human nature!

But oddly, in belittling his confession, in seeing him defeated and drunk—in his last months he never stopped drinking—a feeling of compassion moved me to thank him for his belated honesty with a caress to the cheek and a: “I’m glad you told me.” I led him by the hand to the bed and began to undress him tenderly, as if he were a child. Afterwards, he fell asleep, and I remained there, pressed up against him.

The reinitiation of the war did us good. As soon as Field Marshal Lannes arrived from Paris, I went to see him in his office. As Robert was on duty, guarding the barracks, I was perfectly content waiting in the foyer until nearly midnight. Lannes received me without interrupting his work. He had a pleasant face and a beautiful mouth. Through Robert, I knew that he was thirty-six years old and that Napoleon considered him his friend.

“Yes, citoyenne?” he said, seeing me enter, almost without lifting his eyes from the enormous map spread across his desk. Standing before him, I spoke quickly, and got straight to the point: I wanted to accompany my husband to the war because I knew that he was going to die. I had followed him from Boulogne to Vienna and did not fear long marches.

“And how did you manage to enter Vienna?” he asked, placing the point of his compass on the map.

“First I dressed as a Mameluke and then as a sutler,” I replied.

“I see. Congratulations, citoyenne. You are a good patriot and you love Renaud well,” he said and, turning to one of his assistants, he ordered: “Tell Huet to name this woman as second sutler to the 9th Hussars.”

Saalfeld, Jena, Auerstedt. . . . It took only two weeks in October to sweep away the Prussian army. Since Ma Valoin’s wagon traveled at the rear of the regiment, the only time I saw Robert was when he turned up wounded. He came on foot, his fur soaked in blood. A musket ball had opened a furrow in his neck and he was walking with his head exposed and rigid. The surgeon had insisted that he go to the wagons for the wounded but he’d refused, explaining: “Do you imagine, my little Turk, that I would ever pass up an opportunity to sleep with you?” Ma Valoin made space for us and, curling up in her sheepskins, she spent the night between the wagon’s wheels. We didn’t sleep; he couldn’t. Excited from the battle, he told me how the Prussian cavalry had been decimated, how a Hussar named Guindet, an old friend of his, had killed Prince Louis Ferdinand with his saber.

“But this is only the beginning. You’ll see. A great battle is coming. We’ll take Berlin, just as we took Vienna,” he said, enthusiastically.

As I listened to him talk in the darkness, hoping in vain that he’d offer me a kind word, or even take an interest in me, I decided once and for all that Robert was not made for times of peace. As much as he loved me, he would always love the war more. In the end, Corinne had been right: Wars claimed lives, but for people like Robert, they represented the means to achieving a personal destiny, and this was something that neither I, nor anyone else, could ever offer him. At the break of dawn, he drank his glass of cognac while I changed the bandage on his wound. Then he put on his clean uniform, gave a gold coin to Ma Valoin, and kissed me on the forehead. “Off I go, my little Turk. It’s time to reap some Prussian hay.”

A short time later, Berlin already occupied, we celebrated his promotion to captain. He was ecstatic: Lannes had given him a leopard skin to drape over his saddle. We were happy again for a few days, but it was a provisional happiness, one we had to feed continuously—usually by trying to make one another laugh—like a bird that required constant care to ensure that it would keep singing. We no longer spoke of the things we would do together after the war was over. In December, in a shabby guesthouse in Warsaw on the eve of a somber winter campaign, Robert, already very drunk, suddenly stopped laughing. On the way back to the hotel, he had slipped on a sheet of ice covering the street, pulling me down with him as he fell. Later, in our room, with a melancholy smile that I’d never seen before, he stood up and staggered toward the window, broke one of the frosty windowpanes with his fist and hurled his glass of vodka to the street.

“You could have thrown it into the fire,” I said, from the bearskin rug where we’d been stretched out.

“No, my little Turk. If I’d done that, you would never have remembered this moment. We only remember the exceptional things, the strange things.”

“And why do you want me to remember this moment? The room smells bad, the soup is cold and I’ve had too much to drink. So have you, don’t you think?”

Robert, leaning against the wall so as not to fall over, raised his cut hand to his face and began to lick the wound with all the gusto of a stray dog. He looked pathetic.

“It’s not only this moment, my little Turk. It’s all of them, it’s everything,” he stammered. “I mean, you and me . . . every moment. It’s hard to explain. Don’t pay me any mind.”

Then he zigzagged his way back to me and collapsed at my side, his left arm encircling my waist. (Odd, how inconsistent our memories are. Once again, I’ve tried to remember the music of our first waltz, to no avail. And yet I can still feel the weight of his motionless arm on that night, smell his vodka-and-tobacco-laced breath on my cheek, and hear the ceaseless wails of a small child in the next room.) It took me a very long time to fall asleep. When I awoke, he had already left.

After the terrible battle at Pultusk, widowed and weeping in desolation, I stared at length at his uniforms, his pipes, his things on the dressing table. I had decided not to take any of his things with me. What purpose would it serve? Everything would remain there, just as he had left it in that frigid room in Warsaw. As I was leaving, my eyes came to rest on the piece of newspaper covering the hole in the windowpane, and suddenly I understood what he’d been trying to say that night. It wasn’t just that moment that I should remember, but all of the moments I had lived with him. Breaking the window, hurling the vodka glass and licking his wound marked out the sequence of a metaphor for our marriage; a compact poem that alluded to the space where, bewitched at first glance by his persuasive charm, I’d been drawn into a kind of emotional duel whose feints, retreats, attacks and blows I would carry in my memory like indelible scars. Taking his death as a given, he had shaped me as if I were one of those miniature oriental temples that, patiently carved out of a piece of marble, represent the entire life of the artisan. Even his final words, terrible and sad, which he’d uttered in the hospital, throwing up blood, had been to that purpose: “Ah, it’s you. Doesn’t it seem that spring is awfully late to arrive here in Foix?”

Yes, it’s true that there is reason to think that Robert married me for money. There is also reason to think that it was Robert himself who sent Corinne to test the strength of my love. But the threads of life are not tied together with reason. He saw something in me that impelled him to choose me as his great work, his grand project; so that his memory would live on in the world of my dreams, so that he might reign supreme in the limbo of my memory, my nostalgia, in the place where loneliness is less perishable. And I’m grateful to him for it.

Did he achieve his goal from beyond the grave? Yes and no. The deep chord of his presence still vibrates within me. How could it fail to be so, when it was he who launched me into the world? But it vibrates alongside other, no less sonorous chords, which come together to form something like an arpeggio. Did he truly love me? I believe he did. He loved me as much as he was capable of loving, as much as a man who no longer belongs entirely to this world can love. A man who had risen above his lineage and religion in order to become someone, in order to conquer me and his cross of honor and his posthumous rank as squadron leader; in order to prove to himself that he was no less than the best of them. Robert made me a woman so that I would never forget him, so that I’d become his funeral urn, his great pyramid. He loved himself through me. His love—there really is no other way to see it—was as selfish as the pharaohs. “But, my little Turk, is there any love in this world that isn’t selfish?” he’s just whispered in my ear. Robert, my Hussar of death.