Читать книгу The Descartes Highlands - Eric Gamalinda - Страница 10
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I’m in a time warp.
An elderly woman has been standing outside the post office in La Napoule for an hour, waiting for it to open. Walking with Janya past her, along the slope behind my parents’ apartment, I find myself in a bizarre flashback. When I was a young boy, I would always see an old woman who looked just like the one waiting there, and who kept forgetting that the post office wasn’t open on Saturday. She would spend hours outside the door, ignoring people’s advice to come back the next week. Standing under the searing sun, or sometimes in the rain, she seemed to believe her defiance alone would prove everyone wrong, that this was in fact not Saturday, that a small miracle was going to happen, and the doors would open soon.
That could be the same woman, exactly as she was some thirty years ago. She is wearing the same black billowing skirt that once terrified me, the same scarf wrapped loosely around her head, its butter-yellow print dulled by repeated washing.
I tell her the post office isn’t open today.
“Eh,” she rasps. “Don’t believe everything they say.” She turns around and walks away, muttering curses to herself.
This is a day when everything is significant. Everything is a sign. I’m thinking of a story by Nabokov that Janya had me read on the plane, about a boy suffering from referential mania. Maybe it’s time for a little referential mania of my own. This, for the moment, is important and necessary. I have a very good excuse.
Across the rotunda, at the librairie managed by the same Italian family that moved here from Ventimiglia when I was a kid, Janya stops to buy a pack of cigarettes.
A lady from Florida, an anorexic grande dame with blindingly bleached hair, has been chatting with the manager and interrupts their conversation to ask me if Janya and I are a couple.
I tell her we’ve just met in Bangkok, and, pulling her aside, I confide that I’ve decided last night to ask Janya to move in with me. I’ve been trying to find the right moment to say it.
She’s overjoyed by the news and, confident that we have made a connection, she tells me that the most amazing thing happened to her this morning: her husband turned the radio dial to some local station airing an old American pop tune—Irving Caesar’s “Tea for Two”—the very same song he sang to her on the day they moved here thirty years ago.
“I can tell he was listening with me,” she says.
“Who?”
“My husband. He died last April, but this morning, when the song was playing, it was as if he was back, listening with me.”
I look to see where Janya’s gone, hoping she’ll rescue me. She’s chatting with the manager’s son, whose pregnant wife is waiting silently at the door.
The lady from Florida whispers in my ear, “There’s something about your girlfriend.” She’s leaning very close to me, her dark red lips all but smudging my ear. “Something new,” she says. “Something about to begin.”
I ask her if she means Janya’s going to be okay about moving in, and she gives me a wink. I add that she’s terribly sweet and her husband must miss her a lot.
“Oh, no,” she says. “He’s right here, as we speak.”
Janya joins us and I wrap my arm around her waist. She’s purchased a pocket-size journal and wants to show it to me. The pages are lined with grids and held together by one large staple, like a metal navel. The cover is a shade of blue exactly like the sea, which can be seen from here. She holds it up against the blue horizon to compare. She’s right, it is the exact same shade, the notebook seems to disappear against the Mediterranean, and her hand appears to be holding nothing but the staple. Somehow that discovery seems so important, so touching, and I clasp her hand as we walk out.
I glance back and see the lady from Florida following us with her gaze, her lips moving as she silently hums a tune.
* * *
Farther down the block, the weekend market is already open. A dozen tables have taken over a small parking lot, displaying a modest if rather pathetic array of local vegetables and kitschy souvenirs. La Napoule is a weird town, one of those intermediate places that people don’t really stop for, overshadowed by its larger, grander cousin, Cannes. My parents moved here to work in Cannes. Its anonymity has always appealed to me, and I never saw any reason to give up their apartment.
Janya’s been looking at a bunch of souvenirs. One of them is a clay figurine of a little boy, a little imp poised to take a leak, its little hand wrapped around its penis. Beside it is a replica of a grinning gargoyle, an elongated tongue sticking out of its wide mouth. Both were designed by the late eccentric American millionaire Henry Clews, whose outlandish chateau by the shore is probably the town’s most prominent attraction.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to get that,” I tease her.
“The peeing boy or the gargoyle?”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re equally disgusting.”
“I think the boy’s pretty cute. Reminds me of the boy in your films.” She holds it up to the light. “Kind of looks like him too.”
“All little boys look the same.”
“I want to look at the real thing. Let’s go there.”
“The chateau?”
“It’s right across the street, right?”
I agree to go reluctantly. I’ve been inside the place just once, when I was a kid. It didn’t really impress me much. Walking toward the chateau, I ask her, “What about your story? I’ve told you a lot of things nobody else in the world would ever know. What dark, delicious secret will you share with me?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Not fair.”
“Compared to yours, my life story is really dull. I’m almost ashamed to even talk about it.”
“Try.”
“Okay. I have eight brothers, and twelve uncles, and I’ve always wanted to be a boy.”
“Hmm. Interesting.”
“I’m not a lesbian.”
“Okay, just a passing thought.”
“You’re my first real relationship.”
“Hmm. And the others were, what, unreal?”
“False starts.”
We reach the chateau’s gates and walk around the garden. The castle itself is closed. Janya’s disappointed. I lure her farther into the gardens, beside the shore. There’s a moss-covered sundial surrounded by a topiary garden of odd-shaped trees whose chopped-off branches, she says, remind her of the upraised hands of the screamer in Munch’s The Scream. We can see the outlying islands from here. No one else is around.
“I want to suck your cock,” she says.
“Right here?”
“Al fresco.”
I look around, hoping not to see any other visitors. There’s a Japanese couple walking toward the castle, seemingly lost in the garden’s maze. Janya’s mouth feels soft and warm.
“Oh, Janya.”
“Call me Vasin.”
“What?”
“It’s a man’s name.”
“Uh, okay.”
The sound of the waves is both harsh and soothing, drowning the loud moans that I can’t help from coming out of my mouth. I try to pull out when I come, but Janya grips my butt and presses me closer. The sensation of pleasure and pain as she keeps sucking overwhelms me. My knees buckle. When it’s over, she’s looking up at me, smiling.
“I want you to move in with me,” I tell her, gasping heavily.
“Thought you’d never ask,” she says.
* * *
I am alone in the apartment. That much I know. Janya’s headed out to go back to the market before it closes. She wants to get the figurine of the little boy for me.
I can see the entire apartment as if through a wide-angle lens, the corners distorted, the walls coming up toward me. I am floating above everything. It seems to me like I’m dying, or dead. Yet I am conscious of the fact that this is an event, that I am in the midst of something happening. Everything is still. Time stops.
There are small, almost imperceptible signals at first. It’s like what happens when a DVD gets stuck, and the image freezes for just a fleeting, disorienting second. Then, in a series of stroboscopic images, I see things as their opposite: trees are red, the sky is yellow, my hand, held before me with a mix of shock and wonder, appears as in a film negative, a shadow, the skin translucent and the bones showing through.
Now I can see Janya coming in. She stops at the door, frozen in shock. Something, maybe a cry, comes out of her mouth, but all I hear is a fuzzy sound, like a drawl. She drops the paper bag she’s been carrying. There’s a dull crack as it hits the floor, like something splitting inside my head.
I don’t see what’s happening as much as I feel it. I’m in her arms. She grabs a pencil and holds it between my teeth to prevent me from biting off my tongue. The pencil cracks in two. I’ve stopped convulsing. My body goes limp. I’m breathing slowly. My eyes are wide open. I’m gazing blankly at the ceiling, gazing, it seems, at me. She holds my head up, dabbing her scarf on the sweat that’s beaded on my forehead.
I don’t want to move. I fear that the slightest movement, the slightest noise, will dispel such a clear, unmistakable vision.
“Something’s happened,” I tell her. “Someone’s spoken to me.”
“Who?”
“Mathieu.”
“The lost boy?”
“The same fucking one.”
* * *
“Was that what the vertigo was all about?” Janya asks me.
“What vertigo?”
“Bangkok. My apartment. Mai tai.”
“No. I don’t know. This hasn’t happened in a while.”
“When was the last time it happened?”
“Not sure. Months before my parents’ accident. Since then, I’ve been completely well.”
“How did you get well?”
“I was in a monastery.”
“What?”
“My parents put me in a monastery. They asked the monks if they could, you know, heal me.”
“This is getting really bizarre, Mathieu.”
“It’s right there, half an hour by ferry from Cannes. You can see it from here. I often wondered if they ever remembered me, and asked themselves if I was okay.”
“And does that have something to do with the lost boy?”
“It’s got everything to do with the lost boy.”
She’s looking very distressed.
“I feel like telling you the whole story, but I’m not sure I want to.”
“No boundaries,” she says.
“You sure?”
“We made an agreement.”
“There are dozens of other reels left by Sylvain and Annette—discarded films of an aborted project that took them from Normandy to the Philippines. They contain the rest of the story.”
“You said you think the boy’s spoken to you. What could he have possibly said?”
“I don’t know. He said everything’s already been revealed. I think.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either. I think it’s something to do with his being lost. Maybe he’s trying to tell me what really happened.”
“That’s so Stephen King.”
“I know. Yet I didn’t feel spooked at all. I wanted to know.”
“Did you, like, you know, speak to him?”
“I think I tried. But I was kind of frozen. My words were coming out weird, like what happens during a nightmare, when you want to do something but can’t.”
“So that’s all he said, that everything’s been revealed?”
“One boy will be lost and another will be saved.”
“What?”
“That’s what else I remember him saying.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s something from one of my parents’ films. It was a prediction some mystic in Normandy told Annette.”
“Maybe it’s your mind, Mathieu. That happens, you know. Maybe it’s you recalling your mother’s film.”
“You know what? I think you’re right. Of course that’s what it is. It just sounded so real. The voice, I mean. Like it was whispering close to my ear.”
“I’d like to see them.”
“The other films?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a whole bunch of them.”
“We have a whole bunch of time.”
“Okay. Get yourself comfortable.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“You sure?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s absolutely nothing. A little wine would be nice.”
She goes to the kitchen to open a bottle. Along the way, she picks up the paper bag she had dropped coming in, to throw it in the trash. I haul the boxes out and lay out the reels in as chronological an order as possible. As I spool the first reel, I hear the sound of glass crashing, and a loud gasp from Janya.
I rush to the kitchen to see what’s happened. A dark red puddle has spread around her feet. At first I think she’s hurt, but it’s the wine from the bottle that slipped from her hand. She’s staring at the trash can, where she’s just emptied the bag. At the bottom of the can, instead of the figurine of the little boy she thought she’d purchased, the grinning gargoyle has been smashed to smithereens, hardly recognizable except for its perfectly intact face, its long, pointed tongue sticking out.
* * *
It begins in Oslo, in 1981. A copy of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is found in a closet of a mental institution. No one’s seen a print as well preserved in over fifty years. When the film is shown to patients at the institution, several reportedly suffer epileptic seizures. A few others reportedly get healed, and are released some months later.
Completed in 1927, the film’s original negatives were destroyed in a fire at the UFA studio in Berlin the following year. Dreyer reassembled the film using alternate shots, but nothing compared to the original version. Surviving copies deteriorated through the next few years. No one would see Dreyer’s masterpiece again until the discovery in the Oslo sanatorium.
In that same year, Annette is working on a documentary on popular hysteria and psychic phenomena. She has just gotten married, and Sylvain has just begun working with the Centre national de la cinématographie. She wants to become a film archivist, to ride the crest of the Nouvelle Vague. Sylvain helps her get a grant to investigate a strange incident in Dozulé, Normandy. Some whacked-out church worker named Madeleine Aumont claims to have seen an image of the cross one morning and to have spoken to God. This is the time of Medjugorje, and Mother Mary has been packing crowds in that obscure Yugoslavian village. It’s a good time to be God. Needless to say, even the bishop of Bayeux takes her case seriously:
“Madame Aumont has been quoting from the Scriptures and the liturgy. As far as we can tell, she knows neither Latin nor the gospels. She speaks only French and has a lisp. When she repeats the messages, her lisp is gone, her Latin is perfect.”
And this is what Annette says to herself (also on film) after that interview: “I don’t think I believe in these things, but it does make an interesting subject for a documentary. I think it’s the mind that makes you see things. The mind can even make you hear the voice of God. And it’s the mind that convinces you it’s all true. We’ll see what she says about that.”
When she finally gets to meet Madame Aumont, she asks if the voice from the cross had personal messages for individuals. Madame Aumont says it has none. “God deals with creation in universal terms. His relationships with individuals are private, unique, and cannot be shared.”
And then, just when Annette is about to run out of film, Madame Aumont adds: “One boy will be lost, another will be saved.”
* * *
Flash-forward: Annette’s just had a son, and her documentary project has grown bigger. As soon as the boy is old enough, the three of them travel to San Crisostomo, in the cluster of islands in northern Philippines, where Annette wants to report on the growing international popularity of faith healing in that country.
This is where the gaps in the story happen, because no other footage of that trip survives, except this:
Annette’s in a canoe with little Mathieu. She’s using a paddle to push the canoe away from the craggy shore. It’s hard to keep them both in the frame. The water’s rough. The canoe bobs up and down. She’s saying something difficult to hear against the crash of the waves. She’s trying to paddle back now. She’s having a hard time. You can hear Sylvain’s voice behind the camera: Oh my God, oh my God. The camera’s dropped, and now all you see is the water sideways. All you hear is Sylvain’s voice grown faint, drowned out by the sound of waves.
* * *
What follows is a series of jerky footage apparently shot on the run, as Marcos declares martial law and the country descends into chaos. What you see gives the impression that Sylvain may have had the camera on randomly, continuously—an unedited journal of the next few days.
Everything happens quickly. Shortly after they return from the island to catch a flight out of Manila, Sylvain comes back to their hotel with a newborn baby in his arms. He’s just heard a horrific story. There are newborn Amerasian babies for sale in the country—children abandoned by GIs in the US base towns. It’s an illegal but relatively easy transaction. None of the usual red tape, none of those pesky social workers Vietnamese babies come with. The babies have to be sold. Unsold ones are thrown back into the litter of mixed-race orphans and wind up as street kids or child prostitutes. In other words, there’s a perfectly humane reason for being an accomplice to the crime.
Here is that clip again. Annette’s holding me in her arms. There’s an indescribable expression of relief and anxiety on her face. You can hear Sylvain’s voice telling her they can use Mathieu’s passport—These monkeys wouldn’t know the difference. She wants to say something, What if they find out it’s not him? Her lips move but something’s wrong with the sound, and no words come out. She seems unable to figure out what to make of this situation. She appears gaunt, bewildered. She lifts her eyes to look at the camera. Her eyes are swollen, like she’s lost a lot of sleep.
* * *
Then there’s a brief and ghostly shot of a TV screen. Marcos is announcing the reasons he’s placed the country under martial law.
Jump cut to Annette nervously boarding the plane, the baby in her arms. She’s bobbing in and out of the frame. Everything’s jerky, and it’s obvious the camera’s being kept on surreptitiously. Soldiers are everywhere, on the streets, at airport security, in the plane before takeoff. A tense moment, off-camera, as we stare at nothing, at what looks like the floor of some room somewhere, and we hear the voice of a customs security officer asking for Annette’s papers, and then Sylvain’s, and then the baby’s.
Months later, they hear that the dictator has dealt decisively with crime. There’s a newspaper clip tucked into the box of this reel. For some reason Sylvain and Annette may have thought the story was important. Quoting the Philippines’ government-run press, the story says that every member of the adoption ring has either been jailed or executed.
* * *
Flash-forward. Clips of my parents’ apartment on rue Cazotte, in Montmarte. Stacks of film everywhere. An editing console looming over one side of the living room. Images of Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc flickering on the monitor.
Sylvain and Annette have been commissioned by the Service des Archives du Film et du Dépôt Légal to digitally restore the recovered print of the film. The images in the video copy are muddy. The light that made Dreyer’s work famously transcendent is barely discernible. But the situation isn’t hopeless. One scene is exceptionally preserved. It’s the one where the monk Massieu, played by Antonin Artaud, warns Jeanne that the tribunal’s question is going to entrap her, and advises her to remain silent.
The question is this: “Are you in a state of grace?”
Jeanne takes a long time to respond. Finally, ignoring the monk’s warning, she replies: “If I am, may God keep me there. If I am not, may God grant it to me.”
I’m watching the scene behind my parents’ backs. The suspense of those fourteen interminable cuts between question and response is too much for me to bear. Something in me shuts down.
When I come to, I find myself lying in my mother’s arms. My father is still on the phone, calling for an ambulance. I’ve drooled all over my shirt. My body feels weak and numb. I look toward the freeze-frame on the monitor. The ghostly, tortured close-up of Renée Maria Falconetti looks down on the three of us. I’m hoping I’m dead, and this is all there is to it: I have, at the age of nine, what you might call a revelation.
* * *
As work on the restoration progresses, Annette and Sylvain take turns looking after me. Improbable causes seem to provoke the seizures: aspirin, milk, even Darjeeling tea. Equally improbable remedies seem to calm me down: the sound of the mistral, the presence of water.
On the rare free weekend, we spend hours walking along the promenade, idly watching the nodding yachts. Even just bowls of water soothe me, which Annette, having quickly read a book on feng shui, places uncomprehendingly each night beside my bed.
Nothing makes sense. My condition challenges everything they believe in. Everything outside of reason is coincidence, illusion, mystery—like chicken entrails that faith healers pull out of sick bodies, Annette says; like Madame Aumont’s visions of the holy cross.
Street scenes, Cannes. Rue d’Antibes, packed with cars and pedestrians. One morning, en route to the lab, Annette asks Sylvain to park for just a few minutes. She wants to get out and call home, to make sure the Moroccan nanny they’ve hired doesn’t forget to place the bowl of water beside my bed.
There’s nowhere to park. Sylvain lets her out and keeps the motor running. She dashes into a tobacco shop, frantically places a call, and for some reason has a hard time explaining to the nanny exactly what to do.
A traffic cop tells Sylvain to move on. Sylvain has already backed up traffic all through the street. He honks, she glances quickly, a look of panic in her eyes.
The cop has lost his patience now, slams his fist against the roof of the car, and suddenly Sylvain is yelling at him, telling him this is an emergency and he shouldn’t slam the car so strongly like that, because it will leave a dent. He gets a ticket, drives around the block, hoping to catch Annette by the time she’s done.
When he reaches the same spot, after a grueling cruise around three or four jam-packed blocks, Annette is nowhere in sight. He heads slowly past the tobacco shop (the same cop is eyeing him with suspicion), then moves on, taking the same congested route, and drives back again. Annette is still missing. He drives on.
Finally, in the rearview mirror, he sees her running after the car. She catches up, breathlessly opens the door, and slips in, annoyed that she has been walking round and round the block, looking for him. Caught in the morning’s interminable traffic, the car hardly moving from the same spot, they argue heatedly, their voices heard all across the street.
By the time they reach the lab, they are exhausted, unable to even think of work. Sylvain finally says what they’ve been trying not to say. The options are clear. For the sake of the boy, they will have to abandon the restoration altogether.
* * *
In the summer before I turn fifteen, my parents take me on a short cruise to Île Saint-Honorat. In the chapel, I keep my eyes shut as the Cistercian monks chant the liturgical service. Sylvain and Annette quickly usher me out, thinking I’m about to have another seizure.
It’s impossible to explain what has happened. I feel as if my entire being has been turned inside out, and every part of my body is susceptible to the slightest sound, to softness, to this wonderful mystery that is assaulting me, for which I can think of no other word but beauty. My eyes brim with tears, my body trembles all over. I have begun to feel the first pangs of love. But this love is directed toward something abstract and ungraspable—almost, in a way, inhuman. And I realize, also for the first time, the sorrow that such a love can bring. Because it can never be expressed or shared, it condemns those it has ensorcelled to a lifetime of solitude.
From then on I can bear to go nowhere else. Here are clips of the chapel. Bare and austere, the walls a pristine white, the stained-glass windows unspectacular, the altar a single slab of ancient wood, bare-bones and ascetic. There is nothing to hold a visitor in thrall, but like a paramour who has idealized his lover to the point that no imperfection is possible or admissible, I am hopeless, deranged by the fervor of my desire. There is no way to placate me but to keep bringing me back to the place where that fever began, to let me sit through the entire service, which to me is as exquisite as it is torturing. To leave me, in short, mesmerized by my infatuation. CDs are no good. They’re only as good as a lover’s photograph—it evokes the lover’s memory, maybe some remembered happiness. But it also underscores the absence, and creates a deeper melancholy for the beloved.
Over time Sylvain and Annette conclude, against all logic, that the chanting produces a startling effect on me: I am starting to heal. They begin to look for signs that things are turning providential, that everything good is going our way. They want to believe it so much they’re willing to accept anything. Forced to accept what they can’t explain, for them everything has become serendipitous.
It so happens that at this time the monastery is in dire straits and has been sending out calls for support. They have begun to offer board and lodging to people who want to escape from the bustle of the Côte d’Azur, for a minimal fee. Sylvain and Annette offer them substantial financial support if the monks will watch over me and expose me to a healthy dose of daily chanting.
It’s supposed to be for just one summer. I stay three years, the time they need to finish restoring the film.
* * *
One afternoon, a novice catches me lying prostrate before the Eucharist in the chapel. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something I suddenly feel like doing. I tell him I’ve been replaying in my mind the final scene from Dreyer’s Ordet, a film I once found in my parents’ library. I’ve been projecting that scene, through my mind, to God. I want to get God’s opinion, to ask if that scene was, in God’s view, credible. It’s a joke, a kind of serious joke. But the novice doesn’t get it. His mind has been dulled by faith, the unconditional surrender of reason that God demands. He walks away, shaking his head.
I check my watch and notice that quite some time has elapsed. Sylvain and Annette should have been here an hour ago. In another hour, it will be sext, lunch will be communal in the dining hall, and the rule of silence will mean we can’t talk till sometime before nones, when I’ll be asked to clean the barns. At vespers, they’re still not around, and by the end of the day, all I can think of is the novice who caught me lying prostrate in the chapel, and how, walking away, I heard him mutter, “You better shape up soon or they’ll send you back to Cambodia.”
Sylvain and Annette do come, but not till the following morning. Yesterday’s conference took longer than expected, and they missed the last ferry. Highly in demand in the digital restoration business, they already have a backlog of about half a dozen films. They tell me how happy they are, how great their work is going.
Nothing registers in my head. I am consumed by an emotion that floods my entire body, so potent I feel it coursing through my veins. I taste something bitter lingering in my mouth. I want something that can’t happen—that everything be turned back to the day before we first took the trip to the island, back to the point before all this truculent, sickening happiness began.
And so, abruptly, as Annette talks about yet another new project (her voice fades in and out, “. . . might have to go away,” “in Paris for another couple of weeks . . .”), I tell them exactly what I feel.
“I don’t give a fuck. You don’t have to come see me again.”
These words have the intended effect: both my parents burst in tears. Inelegant as my few well-chosen words may seem, I am satisfied that I have made myself clear.
But Sylvain tries to placate me and says he has an idea. He suggests to Annette that they transfer me to a couple of aunts in Fréjus who can look after me. They drive directly to Fréjus to make arrangements. I can imagine them snaking through the sinuous roads of the Massif de l’Estérel, which they loved to shoot, over and over, mounting the camera on the car’s dashboard, the reckless daredevils zipping past in their open convertibles. The southern air must have become suddenly more soothing, the view even more breathtaking. The mistral, a brief squall of gloom, is lifting off the Mediterranean. The road is wet and slippery. They are driving fast, unable to control their exhilaration, knowing their problem at last is virtually solved. As they maneuver a hairpin turn through the rocky outcrops past Saint-Raphaël, they don’t see another car speeding from the other direction. Sylvain loses control. The car skids and shoots off the cliff, landing on the jagged rocks below.
* * *
There are more reels and more boxes, but we’ve finished an entire bottle and, not surprisingly, Janya and I are both exhausted.
The next morning, Janya suggests that we take the ferry to Île Saint-Honorat. There’s not much to see there, especially at this time of the year. We walk around the island and linger at the ruins of the tower, where we have a 360-degree view of the bay. Below, we can see the back of the abbey’s barn. A monk comes out, stands against a wall, lifts the skirt of his soutane, and takes a piss.
“Well, this is it,” I tell her. “This is where the story ends.”
“Or begins,” she says.
“Now that I’ve told you my life story, I’m afraid to lose you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Weird to think about it, but it would be like losing a part of myself.”
“Well, isn’t that what this game is all about?”
“I wish we wouldn’t call it a game anymore.”
“Well, it’s certainly beyond that now.”
“I wish I hadn’t told you so much, but we do have this agreement. I wish you’d tell me something as outlandish or as intimate from your own life. Then I wouldn’t feel so, well, vulnerable.”
“I could make something up.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Or I could start something outlandish right now.”
“Hmm. What did you have in mind?” I slip my hand inside her blouse. The wind has picked up and is getting icy cold. Her nipples are hard. I pull her other hand down to my crotch.
“Not here,” she says.
“Why not?”
She points to the stone slab behind me. There’s a carved inscription of the Twenty-Third Psalm written in Provençal. She reads it aloud. “Bewitching,” she says. “I don’t get it, but it almost makes me want to believe.”
I check to see that the pissing monk is not in sight. It’s late afternoon. Cannes is all lit up now, a gaudy jewel. “I want to fuck right next to the Twenty-Third Psalm, Janya. I want to do something really, really bad. Let’s fuck right here.”
She presses close to me. I can smell her skin, a scent like orange blossoms which always reminds me of Bangkok.
“Don’t ever leave me,” I whisper in her ear. “I’d go nuts if you did.”
She looks at me in the eye, smiling, wondering.
“What?” I ask her.
“You are so full of surprises. Maybe I should pull one of my own.”
“No, don’t. I hate surprises.”
“Not fair.”
“Okay, but make it nice. Like Christmas or a birthday.”
“Or a baby.”
“No, no babies. Babies scare me. They’re loathsome and full of themselves. Egomaniacs.”
“We were all babies once. Some of us still are.”
“Hmm. Broad hint.”
She presses her lips to mine. “Shut up, baby. Close your eyes and open your heart.” And then she mumbles something strange, and I realize she is reading the psalm again. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. I will fear no evil.”
