The Crime of Julian Wells

17

We must imagine a little girl looking up from her manacled hands, seeing a woman approach, and believing in that instant that she is surely saved. For this woman is the mistress of the castle, she whose delicate white fingers hold authority over the secret chambers of Cachtice. With a gesture, she can open every barred door, pull down all the ropes and chains, order Ficko to the gallows and Dorottya to the pyre for what they have done: stripped her naked, forced her onto this sticky straw mat, and placed the manacles on her wrists and ankles, crimes for which she knows they will now be punished. It is beautiful Elizabeth she sees enter her cell, approach her, and, after a short pause and with a gaze no innocent should ever face, bid Ficko fetch her whip.

It was not Julian’s words that awakened me, but my visualization of what the passage described: I’d seen Countess Bathory in her gown, weighted with jewels, her fingers sprouting precious stones, drawing nearer to me, her deception so perfect and so humbling. I’d glanced down, like one presented to royalty.

I was not prone to nightmares. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time one had shaken me from sleep. But this one had been extraordinarily vivid, and I’d felt the manacles around my wrists, the gummy straw beneath my feet.

In memory, I thought the scene was much longer and more detailed, but in one of Julian’s surprises, as I saw when I found the passage in the book, he had cut it short, then gone into a brief meditation on the added horror, as he supposed it, of being tortured by a woman rather than a man, the ordeal intensified, he said, by a horrifying turn in which humanity’s oldest vision of female comfort is suddenly and terrifyingly reversed.

Rene arrived at the hotel just after nine, looking quite rested, clearly a man who never did battle with himself or questioned his past deeds, even the dark ones he’d probably committed in Algeria.

“You look like Julian,” he said when I joined him at the little outdoor cafe not far from my hotel. “In the morning, he looked like a man who’d spent his night being chased by dogs.”

“This happened often?” I asked.

“Many nights, yes,” Rene answered. “Nightmares.” He lit his breakfast cigarette, though I suspected it was not his first of the day. There’d probably been one when he rose, one before he shaved and one after, one before he dressed, one on the way out into the morning light. “Julian had terrible ones.”

“I had a nightmare of my own last night,” I told him. “It had to do with Julian’s book The Tigress. The scene where we see the countess through one of the girls’ eyes, a girl she is about to torture and murder.”

“Julian was always doing that,” Rene said absently. “Putting himself in the place of the victim.” He glanced toward the street and seemed to lose himself in the traffic, until he said, “Perhaps he did not like to live in his own skin.” He shrugged. “But we can live only in the one we have, no?”

The question was so rhetorical I felt no need to answer it.

“Last night, I got a call from a man in London,” I told him. “He had a file on Marisol. He implied-well, a bit more than implied-that Marisol was something more than a guide.”

Rene blew a column of smoke out of the right side of his mouth. “Perhaps a dangerous woman? We had one in Algeria. She was called ‘the Blade,’ and we feared her more than any of the men.”

“Feared that she would do to you what you did to Khalida?” I asked cautiously.

“Algeria was a bad place, and in such places, bad things happen,” Rene said. He looked at the lit end of his cigarette like one considering an ember from hell. “She was a torturer and an assassin, this one. These things she did, as you say in English, ‘by night.’” He smiled as if admiring of her cunning. “By day, she was an ordinary woman. A teacher in a school.” His smile widened and became more cutting. “She deceived everyone. Only her lover knew. And he was as bad as she was. They were-what do you say-‘partners in crime’?”

I thought of the pictures of Marisol that Julian had placed in that unmarked file, Marisol looking entirely unaware, going about her business, except when she was with Emilio Vargas. In that picture she had looked quite intense. Had she lived a secret life? I wondered, with Emilio Vargas her partner?

I left Paris by way of Gare du Nord the next morning. On the high-speed train it was a journey of a little more than two hours, a pleasant ride through the French countryside, then under the channel and on to London. On the way, I thought of nothing but Marisol, though it was one particular memory that triumphed over all the rest.

Julian and I had gone to the Gran Cafe Tortini to meet her. It was on one of Avenida de Mayo’s busy corners and had been long favored by Argentina’s greatest artists and performers. Before more or less leaving the country, Borges had been a frequent visitor, along with a number of playwrights and actresses less well known to the outside world. The tavern had even gone so far as to commission wax figures of its most famous customers, so there was Borges, frozen in time, seated at a small table, in conversation with Carlos Gardel, the renowned tango singer, the great writer rendered so peacefully that I could hardly imagine him in the Argentina that now swirled around this serene representation of himself, the violence and the chaos, his beloved country very much in the turmoil my father had recommended that we see.

Marisol, so very punctual on all other occasions, was late. Her failure to appear shook Julian in a way that surprised me, and he’d begun to fidget and glance about.

“She’s always on time,” he said.

“She’s only five minutes late,” I reminded him.

“But she’s always on time.”

“I think you’re overreacting a little, Julian,” I said. “It’s only five minutes.”

“Yes,” Julian said pointedly, “but it’s five minutes in Argentina.”

He meant in a country where anything could happen, of course, where a couple could be seized in broad daylight at the obelisk, where in La Plata ten high school students could be kidnapped, raped, and tortured, as they had been some years before in what was known as “The Night of the Pencils.”

“Borges at first favored the junta,” I said, “but now he attacks it. Usually from Europe.”

“Where it’s safe,” Julian said. He peered out over the avenue, searching the morning crowds for Marisol.

“Sometimes that’s the only choice,” I said. “What would be the point of staying here?”

“To fight,” Julian answered in a way that made me wonder if he’d begun to entertain the romantic notion of adopting Argentina, making its struggle his struggle, Julian a one-man international brigade.

I might have said something to that effect, but then Marisol came rushing up from behind us, looking a bit in disarray, but with her customary energy and good cheer.

“Ah,” she said brightly, but with a smile that seemed painted on. “So we have arrived at the cultural center of the city.” She glanced toward the wax figures, Borges, blind, holding his cane, and with that glimpse, an uncharacteristic shadow passed over her. “He wrote once that ‘the present is alone,’” she said, then looked about at the other customers, most of them well dressed, smoking quietly, sipping coffee. “He was not so blind that he could not see the junta’s knife coming for him.”

Never until that moment had I seen a trace of mockery in Marisol, and although she quickly brushed it aside and assumed her apolitical station as a cheerful guide, her disdain for Argentina’s greatest living writer was clear.

“He wrote that kindness is not what a dagger wants,” Julian said, his gaze quite intense.

Marisol looked at him in a way that suggested she had never seen him in exactly the same light. “You are reading Borges?” she asked.

“After you quoted him in Recoleta, how could I not?” Julian said.

“What did you read last?” Marisol asked.

“A short story called ‘The Zahir,’” Julian answered.

Then he smiled softly and repeated a line from the story: “In the drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger’s dream.”

Tiger.

Dagger.

What in the name of heaven, I wondered as my train hurtled toward London, did any of it mean?