Copyright © 2011 Ernest Bloom.
Unlooked-for, it bursts forward out of sleepy surroundings right at you, screaming and inescapable with the kill reflexes of a Bengal tiger, like you're staring down the fiery throat of the hurricane that lurks at the end of the universe. Call it Ragnarok. Apocalypse. All those tomorrows, and tomorrows, and tomorrows. That's what it's like, to me. Or. . . .It's like peering into the dark tubes of twin barrels, getting a whiff of a blue metallic oily smell in that infinitesimal instant when you know you've pulled the triggers: certain death, only you know it's only a cruel, self-deceiving game you're playing because it ends nothing. It can't. Something happens. You slip or stumble backwards by some autonomic reflex, recalling bitterly that taboo place in the underbelly of your mind that you found and touched quite by accident when you were so young you forgot about it long ago. Maybe it's like an auxiliary and untapped vestibular function of the middle ear, a kinesthetic mechanism of balance that operates in the fluctuations of fate, an involuntary dodging of the silken spider web snares that catch the rest of them. I don't know. It's only guesses, and not even that. Cheap simile. But what else is there? Not much else. Or everything.
Now and again I produce a small pocket notebook and pen and I scribble down a few words; on a good day, when my mind is more clear, maybe even a whole sentence. But it's random, my thoughts adrift in time and memory. Someday I hope to rearrange the words I've put down. Make a more coherent story of it. But mostly I do not write, but I only sit still on this low, padded bench and stare straight ahead. Over time the guards have lost their curiosity for me. They tried to speak to me sometimes in the first few weeks, but I've no use for small talk. Now they leave me alone, knowing I am not right in the head. Me on my bench, and this clumsy, Lilliputian sketch, which is my own cruel idiot tale. But how to tell it? For the entrée into my story I choose late summer in Paris, 1799.
Ahh, summer in Paris. You know how that goes. I was there on military business, in the loosest sense of the term. Guard duty, and occasional fortuitous plundering, at Versailles. It was a plum detail and I made sure the assignment fell to me rather than venturing abroad as so many of my countrymen were doing. I needed the respite. Une entr'acte, a brief interval for personal reformation. I was coming out of one of my dark spells, you see, and don't think I mean a bout of depression. One embraces the times or goes mad. Perhaps, as I've heard it said, the lives and deaths of human beings is the medium in which all great art is made. I don't know or much care. Such philosophical absorptions leave me cold. Nevertheless I, as so many in those days, longed for a measure of absolution. I could have found it easier elsewhere in Europe, or even in America. And yet Paris is Paris, and maybe she is the exclusive cure for her own disease. And I know how it sounds, but it's true: I really did see Belinda for the first time framed against the velvety cool twilight of evening in the Bois de Boulogne.
It was not yet the real Bois de Boulogne, of course, but no matter. I was astride my roan Jerry, riding home among the mulberry trees, when I saw her sitting on a white park bench, her little five year old girl sitting close by her side. As I rode up I saw her long nose and black hair falling in rings around her white neck. She was looking toward the ground, at first, although she must have heard my approach. And then, slowly, she raised her eyes. They were the blackest and saddest eyes I've ever seen, before or since. Immediately my heart was pounding. That was strange. Unusual. An almost forgotten sensation.
I saw right away that they were starving, the familiar semicircles of darkness under their eyes. Having just come in from the countryside, I would later imagine that they were fortunate it was I who encountered them first. Belinda's beauty was an impossible temptation, and these woods were unsafe. She raised her chin at Jerry's clopping approach. Such surrender in her shining eyes, black in black. I knew what she was seeing, me in my uniform. Who would want to see a soldier? Still, when I was a dashing thirty-two year old I must have decided I would age no more. My red-brown hair tends to fly around my head in an unkempt boyish way, and I know from experience that my smile can work wonders. I did smile at her, and I remember marveling at that, because I had not smiled in years; at least, not that way. And then she smiled a little, tentative and obviously fearful. I could tell it was an almost forgotten expression for her, too.
That's how it began, much the same as it always does. The details are unimportant. I told you. This is only a sketch. She told me, in a few sentences, how the two of them had come down from the north. They were tired and hungry. Belinda needed food for herself and for her child, and I. . . .I found I needed Belinda. I offered her a warm meal and a warm bed for the night. I'm afraid all I had was a fairly thin stew, but they seemed grateful enough to devour it. They took my tenuous tick-mattress by the fire, and I spent the night in the barn with Jerry. I didn't sleep much.
Belinda and little Fawna stayed on with me. The first arrangement we made was that I would provide their meals in exchange for Belinda modeling for a portrait I wanted to paint. She heisted at the proposition until I made clear what I had in mind: I only wanted her to sit in a chair in the room while I painted her, working by candlelight in the evenings when my guard duties were over. Fawna would be present at all times. Although I visited the salons and always tried to keep up with current trends, I hadn't painted in ages, and the portrait took me many weeks to complete. Very much I desired it to be right. The dark hair, and the sad, dark eyes, so sad and lovely, looking away to her right, away from me as I painted. Was she so unaware of her beauty as she seemed? I wondered. I used to look straight at her for a long time while I was painting. She would blush and I would smile, but I would go on starting. I could not help myself. Perhaps I didn't want to finish the painting, for then I would lose the excuse to stare at her. I would never let Belinda see the painting while it was in progress, covering it carefully with a light white sheet each night when I had finished, but Fawna used to sit behind me and watch as I worked.
So the days passed. Belinda and little Fawna gradually became more trusting of me. They were happier times than I can tell, but only in subtle ways which most people, I'm certain, would have overlooked -- even Belinda. But yes, she could not know how she affected me. It was those tiny details of human connection that mattered most. Fall was in the air and each night was a bit more crisp than the one before, but within my soul the opposite was true: the deep pack of ice seemed to be breaking and thinning at long last. Ghostly traces of humanity stirred and curled someplace deep in my chest. I became more aware of my surrounds, and of the wider world outside.
When I came home at night, approaching the little château where we lived -- so we called my rude little shack -- I would sometimes hear her soft voice floating out through a window singing some country folk song while she worked. I would pause outside in the frosty cold under the stars, secretly floating in the gently lapping ripples of her Calais accent. She had taken on the housework, tidying things up, cleaning up the messes I'd accumulated over the years, making something more like an authentic home for us all. In those sweet few months I watched the two of them eating regularly so that, eventually, each meal did not seem to them a miracle out of Heaven. In the warmth of day they strolled together under the sun, and when it was cold or rainy out they stayed safe and warm by the fire, out of the elements. They grew healthier. The dark circles under their eyes began to fade, and more color infused my dear Belinda's soft cheeks. Each day I thought her fears receded a little more and her mind, like mine, grew proportionately serene. It was a magical season. She never spoke of her past or of her daughter's father, and I never wanted to know about it. There was no past in those days. None of us wanted to have a past. We did not want to think of a future, either. The present was all that there was, all that there needed to be. It was a beautiful maintenant that could never end. No one could ask for more.
I think it was already October -- Brumaire -- when the portrait was finally finished. We held a feast with a fine pork roast and much wine, and even oranges I'd managed to pluck from the palace. The feast was a great success, with the three of us sharing numerous little trivial tales from these carefree days of our lives. We all laughed and sang as though there were no happier place in the world to be than my little hovel, and maybe that was even true. Both Belinda and I were feeling just a little heady with the wine when it was time for the ceremony of the great unveiling. I brought the painting on its easel to the center of the room and, with a great flourish, I swept the covering sheet away.
Fawna was clapping energetically but Belinda, I noticed in a moment through my intoxication, seemed astonished, and maybe somewhat stupefied. I looked closely into her face. She was not reacting. She looked stunned. Momentarily Fawna fell quiet, realizing that her mother was in some strange distress. I grew apprehensive. What was the matter?
Belinda continued to sit speechless for a long moment, gazing steadily at the portrait. Finally, very slowly, she raised her head toward me where I stood behind the enormous canvas. Her eyes moved up to meet mine. They shone very brightly. Today, all these years later, I can still hear the exact intonation of every trembling syllable of her hushed voice: «Vous m'avez trompé, le capitaine Lurant. Je n'avais aucune idée que vous étiez un peintre magnifique.»
Then suddenly I could breathe again, although my heart was thudding laboriously against my sternum, just as it had a few months earlier one fateful evening in the Bois. I knew she could see clearly in the painting precisely what I saw in it, and what I saw when I looked at her, as I was doing now. She was looking directly at me and she did not look away. I covered my confusion with a laugh and by pouring more wine. Later, when little Fawna had gone to sleep, Belinda and I went for a little walk outside in the cold moonlight. In the nights that followed, Jerry had the barn to himself once again.
I never spoke of such matters to my Belinda, but during all this time I kept myself apprised of news from the wars, our losses and recoveries. With my general knowledge, or better, of the continuing difficulties wracking the country, I had a premonition of what was to come. And so I was not much surprised when, soon, Paris passed again through the thin waist of revolution's hourglass. One government falls and another one rises, and I was ordered to quit Versailles for the front. I could have easily digressed myself from this venture by the usual method, but life is in the living and not in disengagement from work and duty, or so we often deceive ourselves. And anyway, I knew with certainty that I could go to war without fear of falling in battle, and I admit this Napoleon intrigued me. With promotions I could make a better life for my two wards, and then we could all get about the business of living happily ever after.
But preparations were required to keep my Belinda and little Fawna safe during my absence. One very cold day in February (Pluviôse) I hired a coach to conduct us into Paris. It would be their first time to see the city-proper. We bundled up under furs in back of the carriage with Belinda's hand in mine and Fawna sitting on my lap and watching out the window as we jounced along. They were both very happy and excited to see the city, and when we had arrived and disembarked I jubilantly showed them the sights. Even though it was cold the markets were crowded with people. Belinda looked with wonder upon the massive, towering buildings and the teeming swarms of people. We stayed in a hotel that night, and the following morning the three of us went to a small chapel near Bercy. There, Belinda and I were wed. One week later I departed to join my regiment for its march on Genoa.
How do we live with our past mistakes? How do we bury our tragedies and forget lost love? But those unanswerable mysteries, I have learned, are nothing compared to the future's burdensome weight. I hold my destiny in my own hands, but no one else's. Since the days of Midas, and before, it's been the same old story, and that story is this one, too. Each man kills the thing he loves. Oscar Wilde was treading over ground long since picked clean when he wrote those words. That doesn't mean he was wrong, though.
Within ten days of my departure I received a letter from my beloved Belinda. Our little Fawna was down with the smallpox. Despair seized me, but I was far away and powerless. She had contracted the illness during our trip to the city, I knew. Two days later I had a second letter, only one sentence long. Poor Fawna had succumbed.
I wrote many letters home in the days to come, but I heard nothing in return for three weeks. Finally I received a letter from an old man whose hut was located a mile from my own. The disaster was complete. Belinda had not told me that the same sickness had befallen the mother as well. In desperation some few days after her last letter to me, she had managed to walk to my neighbor's house, where she died the following day.
Of such wicked comedy and tender tragedy is life's tapestry woven.
I remained abroad for years then, fighting across Europe. Burying my memories of a few happy months. Wherever the fighting seemed heaviest, I was there. Trafalgar. Prussia. Madrid. I was still among the living when we crossed the Berezina at the end of that sorry, freezing year of 1812, and I knew it was finally time to break with the past. Enough French bombast. Quaint America could use an experienced fighting man.
But before I sailed I thought to return home one last time. It was thirteen years since my wife's death. Time enough. I went back to the little shack where the ice over my mind had, for a brief season, been melted. But there was nothing left to see. The place where I had lived had long since burned down, and the old man who had been my neighbor, who had notified me of my wife's death, was himself decomposing in some lonely grave. Nothing remained for me. I looked on the ruins for less than an hour before setting out on the long road that would bring me to New Orleans.
After that. . . .everything else.
One day, many years later, I was in the capitol of my adopted country. I'd had occasion to travel to Washington several times before. How the city had changed over the years; but then, how everything has changed. I was there for pleasure on this trip, not business. It was an early April morning, and I found myself walking along the Tidal Basin near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing where so many visitors from Japan tend to congregate. Why shouldn't they? The Yoshino cherry trees were in full bloom, reminding them of home. The first trees were sent as a gift from Japan in 1912, three decades before that friendship would be tested at Pearl Harbor. Now, as I strolled the city in 2010, relatively few veterans of the Second World War were still to be counted among the living. I'm one, but that's another story.
How, you ask? I don't know. All I have is similes to tell you what it's like. With each new generation the scientific understanding of space and time changes. So to put it in our most current idiom, perhaps it's like shifting between alternate parallel universes. Maybe it's like that -- who knows? Every time two outcomes of an event are possible, maybe the universe splits into two alternate branches and both outcomes occur, but we only occupy a single branch, so we only experience a single outcome. Maybe it's all in our minds how we perceive infinitely branching reality. Maybe, when I was young, my mind accidentally stumbled upon a way to control which branch I land in. Yes. Through an act of will, of determination, I can control what will or won't happen to me. You see? I choose. Like I chose the branch where I'm always thirty-two years old. Where I'm safe from undo injury.
The branch in which I can never die.
I walked along the mall on Jefferson Drive and crossed on 7th Street to the National Gallery of Art which, for some reason, I'd never visited before. I'd been there for perhaps two hours when I began to discover the French impressionists. As I ventured deeper, each new room was like a chamber of memories opening before me. You see, some time previously I had returned to Paris to paint for a few decades, the better to cleanse my mind of the smoke and wails of the American Civil War. And now there they suddenly were again, Degas and Manet, like a bolt out of the blue. I had watched them paint a few of those canvases that were on display. I remembered the sounds of the sea on the rocks, the cries of the seabirds, the smell of their paints. . . .
Not just Degas and Manet. I remember Robspierre and Murat, and so many others. Remember them? I knew them, personally. I actively supported the cause. And so I know something about the Terror they unleashed -- the Terror we unleashed. That ran rampant as the bands of long repression finally burst.
And now I think I know something that Robspierre never knew, although I suspect maybe Murat did. I know how all that terror can come together and condense and settle into the brain of a single individual, eating away behind a single pair of eyes. It is a singular variety of horror that no one else has ever known, my own private Hell in life.
I came around the corner into another gallery and the hidden, crouching Bengal tiger that was past-and-future cruelly unified lurched out at me, took me by the throat. For immediately, on the far wall, bursting toward me, I saw Belinda.
Sometimes two or three of the security guards will meet by chance in a corner of the room and speak softly together, usually about basketball scores. They pay me no heed. Sometimes a young woman will watch me as I sit staring forward, unmoving, at the portrait on the wall. When this happens I usually see it from the corner of my eye. It is now a familiar and tedious drama, she imagining how it would be to run her fingers through my fly-away red-brown hair. It is usually the hair that first captivates them. She will try to engage me in conversation, almost invariably asking me about the painting from which I cannot turn away. I try not to be rude, but I do not encourage them, and eventually they go sadly away.
Belinda. To see you again now in such splendid, excruciating detail! How did the portrait survive? How did it end up here, in Washington? I don't know; it is an unimportant tale from the past. Belinda! To be so close to you, to see you a few feet away, dark eyes, dark hair, the blush in your cheek, but to be unable to touch you. Your mournful lips that I can never kiss to the smile that for only one week I saw bloom like a perfect rose. Your dark eyes are forever downturned. Never will you raise them to look at me with passion as once you did. There have been many wives and lovers since you, and there were many times many before you, but never again can I touch your hand or kiss your lips in this never-ending parade of cold and empty faces that is life without end.
Mon Dieu! How can I embrace this hollow modern world? I am incurable with love for a woman who's been dead for centuries.
THE END.
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