Invisible

IV

Riding back on the plane from San Francisco to New York, I searched my memory for the exact moment when I had first spotted Walker in the fall of 1967. I hadn’t known that he had gone off to study in Paris for the year, but a few days into the semester, when we held our first editorial meeting of the Columbia Review (Adam and I were both on the board), I noticed that he wasn’t there. What happened to Walker? I asked someone, and that was when I learned he was in Europe, enrolled in the Junior Year Abroad Program. Not long after that (a week? ten days?), he suddenly appeared again. I was taking Edward Tayler’s seminar on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century poetry (Wyatt, Surrey, Raleigh, Greville, Herbert, Donne), the same Edward Tayler who had taught Milton back in the spring. Walker and I had been in that class together, and we were both of the opinion that Tayler was hands down the best professor in the English Department. Since the seminar was primarily for graduate students, I felt lucky to have been admitted as a third-year undergraduate, and I worked my head off for the sly, ironical, tight-lipped, ever-brilliant Tayler, wanting to earn the respect of this demanding, much-admired person. The seminar met twice a week for an hour and a half, and at the third or fourth session, with no explanation from anyone, there was Walker again, unexpectedly among us, the thirteenth member of a class officially limited to twelve.

We talked in the hall afterward, but Adam seemed distracted, unwilling to say much about his precipitous return to New York (I now know why). He mentioned that the program in Paris had been a disappointment to him, that the courses he was allowed to take had not been interesting enough (all grammar, no literature), and rather than waste a year in the sub-basement of the French educational bureaucracy, he had opted to come back. Quitting the program on such short notice had caused some upheavals, but Columbia had acted with unusual kindness, he felt, and even though classes had already begun when he bolted from Paris, a long talk with one of the deans had settled the matter, and he had been reinstated as a full-time student in good standing-which meant that he didn’t have to worry about the draft, at least not for another four semesters. The only problem was that he had no permanent place to live. He had shared his old apartment with his sister in July and August, but after he left for what he had thought would be a full year, she had found another roommate, and now he was out in the cold. For the time being, he was crashing with different friends in the neighborhood while he hunted for a new apartment of his own. In fact, he said, glancing down at his watch, he had an appointment in twenty minutes to look at a small studio that had just opened up on 109th Street, and he had to be off. See you later, he said, and then he began running toward the stairs.

I knew that Adam had a sister, but this was the first I’d heard about her being in New York-a resident of Morningside Heights, no less, and doing graduate work in English at Columbia. Two weeks later, I caught my first sight of her on campus. She was walking past Rodin’s statue of the thinker on her way into Philosophy Hall, and because of the strong, almost eerie resemblance to her brother, I felt certain that the young woman flitting past me was Walker’s sister. I have already mentioned how beautiful she was, but saying that doesn’t do justice to the overwhelming impact she had on me. Gwyn was ablaze with beauty, an incandescent being, a storm in the heart of every man who laid eyes on her, and seeing her for the first time ranks as one of the most astonishing moments of my life. I wanted her-from the first second I wanted her-and, with the passionate obstinacy of a daydreaming fool, I went after her.

Nothing ever happened. I got to know her a little bit, we met for coffee a couple of times, I asked her out to the movies (she turned me down), I invited her to a concert (she turned me down), and then, accidentally, we both wound up at a large Chinese dinner one night and discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson for half an hour. A short time after that, I persuaded her to go for a walk with me in Riverside Park, tried to kiss her, and was pushed away. Don’t, Jim, she said. I’m involved with someone else. I can’t do this.

That was the end of it. Several swings of the bat, failure to make contact on any pitch, and the game was over. The world fell apart, the world put itself together again, and I muddled on. To my great good fortune, I have been with the same woman for close to thirty years now. I can’t imagine my life without her, and yet every time Gwyn enters my thoughts, I confess that I still feel a little pang. She was the impossible one, the unattainable one, the one who was never there-a specter from the Land of If.

An invisible America lay silent in the darkness beneath me. As I sat on the jet from San Francisco to New York, revisiting the bad old days of 1967, I realized that I would have to write her a condolence letter first thing the next morning.

It turned out that Gwyn had already been in touch. When I walked through the door of my house in Brooklyn, my wife gave me a warm, fervent hug (I had called from San Francisco, she knew Adam was dead), and then she told me that earlier in the day a message had been left for me on the answering machine by someone named Gwyn Tedesco.

Is that the Gwyn I think it is? she asked.

I called her at ten o’clock the next morning. I had wanted to write a letter, to express my feelings on paper, to give her something more than the empty platitudes we sputter forth at such times, but her message had sounded urgent, there was an important matter she needed to discuss with me, and so I called her back and never wrote the letter.

Her voice was the same, remarkably the same as the one that had mesmerized me forty years ago. A lilting gravity, crystal enunciation, the barest residue of the mid-Atlantic accent of her childhood. The voice was the same, but Gwyn herself was no longer the same, and as the conversation continued, I began projecting various pictures of her in my head, wondering how well or badly her beautiful face had fared over the course of time. She was sixty-one years old now, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no desire to see her again. It could only lead to disappointment, and I didn’t want my hazy memories of the past to be blown apart by the hard facts of the present.

We exchanged the customary platitudes, rambling on for several minutes about Adam and his death, about how difficult it was for her to accept what had happened, about the rough blows life deals us. Then we caught up on the past for a little while, talking about our marriages, our children, and our work-a comfortable back-and-forth, very friendly on both sides, so much so that I even found the nerve to ask her if she remembered the day in Riverside Park when I tried to kiss her. Of course she remembered, she said, laughing for the first time, but how was she to know that scrawny Jim the college boy would grow up to become James Freeman? I never grew up, I said. And I’m still just Jim. Not so scrawny anymore, but still just Jim.

Yes, it was all quite amiable, and even though we had vanished from each other’s lives decades earlier, Gwyn talked as if little or no time had elapsed, as if those decades amounted to nothing more than a month or two. The familiarity of her tone lulled me into a kind of drowsy openness, and because my defenses were down, when she finally got to the business at hand, that is, when she finally explained why she had called me, I made a terrible blunder. I told her the truth when I should have lied.

Adam sent me an e-mail, she said, a long e-mail written a few days before he… just a few days before the end. It was a beautiful letter, a farewell letter I now realize, and in one of the paragraphs toward the bottom he mentioned that he was writing something, a book of some kind, and if I wanted to read it, I should contact you. But only after he was dead. He was very insistent about that. Only after he was dead. He also warned me that I might find the manuscript extremely upsetting. He apologized for that in advance, asking me to forgive him if the book hurt me in any way, and then he said no, I shouldn’t bother to read it, I should forget the whole thing. It was terribly confusing. In the very next sentence, he changed his mind again and told me to go ahead if I wanted to, that I had a right to see it, and if I did want to see it, I should contact you, since you had the only copy. I didn’t understand that part. If he wrote the book on a computer, wouldn’t he have saved it on his hard drive?

He told Rebecca to delete it, I said. It’s gone from the computer now, and the only copy is the one he printed out and sent to me.

So the book really exists.

Sort of. He meant to write it in three chapters. The first two are in fairly good shape, but he didn’t manage to finish the third. Just some notes for it, a hastily written outline.

Did he want you to help him get it published?

He never talked about publishing, not directly in any case. All he wanted was for me to read the manuscript, and then it would be up to me to decide what to do with it.

Have you decided?

No. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even thought about it. Until you mentioned publishing just now, the idea had never crossed my mind.

I think I should have a look at it, don’t you?

I’m not sure. It’s your call, Gwyn. If you want to see it, I’ll make a copy and FedEx it to you today.

Will I be upset?

Probably.

Probably?

Not by all of it, but one or two things might upset you, yes.

One or two things. Oh dear.

Don’t worry. As of this moment, I’m putting the decision in your hands. Not a word of Adam’s book will ever be published without your approval.

Send it, Jim. Send it today. I’m a big girl now, and I know how to swallow my medicine.

How simple it would have been to cover my tracks and deny the existence of the book, or tell her that I had lost it somewhere, or claim that Adam had promised to send it to me but never did. The subject had caught me by surprise, and I couldn’t think fast enough to start spinning out a fake story. Even worse, I had told Gwyn there were three chapters. Only the second one had the potential to wound her (along with a couple of remarks in the third, which I easily could have crossed out), and if I had said that Adam had written only two chapters, Spring and Fall, she would have been spared from having to go back to the apartment on West 107th Street and relive the events of that summer. But she was expecting three chapters now, and if I sent her only two, she would call right back and ask for the missing pages. So I photocopied everything I had-Spring, Summer, and the notes for Fall-and shipped them off to her address in Boston that afternoon. It was a rotten thing to do to her, but by then I no longer had a choice. She wanted to read her brother’s book, and the only copy in the world belonged to me.

She called two days later. I don’t know what I was expecting from her, but I had taken it for granted somehow that intense emotions would be involved-angry tears, threats, shame that her secret had been exposed-but Gwyn was unnaturally subdued, more numb than insulted, I think, as if the book had clobbered her into a state of puzzled disbelief.

I don’t understand, she said. Most of it is so accurate, so exactly right, and then there are all those things he made up. It doesn’t make any sense.

What things? I asked, knowing full well what she was referring to.

I loved my brother, Jim. When I was young, he was closer to me than anyone else. But I never slept with him. There was no grand experiment when we were kids. There was no incestuous affair in the summer of 1967. Yes, we lived together in that apartment for two months, but we had separate bedrooms, and there was never any sex. What Adam wrote was pure make-believe.

It’s probably not my place to ask, but why would he do such a thing? Especially if the other parts of the story are true.

I don’t know that they’re true. At least I can’t verify that they’re true. But all those other things tally with what Adam told me back then, forty years ago. I never met Born or Margot or Cécile or Hélène. I wasn’t with Adam in New York that spring. I wasn’t with him in Paris that fall. But he did talk to me about those people, and everything he said about them in 1967 matches up with what he says about them in the book.

All the odder, then, that he should make up those things about you.

I know you don’t believe me. I know you think I’m trying to protect myself, that I don’t want to admit those things could have happened between us. But it wasn’t like that, I promise. I’ve been thinking about it for the past twenty-four hours, and the only answer I’ve come up with is that those pages are a dying man’s fantasy, a dream of what he wished had happened but never did.

Wished?

Yes, wished. I’m not denying those feelings were in the air, but I had no interest in acting on them. Adam was too attached to me, Jim. It was an unhealthy attachment, and after we’d been living together for a while that summer, he started telling me that I’d spoiled him for other women, that I was the only woman he could ever love, and that if we weren’t brother and sister, he would marry me in a second. Sort of joking, of course, but I didn’t like it. To be perfectly honest, I was relieved when he went to Paris.

Interesting.

And then, as we both know, less than a month later he was back-booted out in disgrace, as he put it to me at the time. But I had another roommate by then, and Adam had to look for a new apartment of his own. We were still friends, still the best of friends, but I started to put a little distance between us, to back away from him for his own good. You saw a fair amount of him during your last two years of college, but how often did you see him with me?

I’m trying to remember… Not a lot. No more than a couple of times.

I rest my case.

So what happens to his book now? Do we put it in a drawer and forget about it?

Not necessarily. In its present form, the book is unpublishable. Not only is it untrue-at least partly untrue-but if those untrue pages ever found their way into the world, they would create misery and disaster for untold numbers of people. I’m a married woman, Jim. I have two daughters and three grandchildren, dozens of relatives, hundreds of friends, a stepniece I’m very fond of, and it would be a crime to publish the book as it stands now. Agreed?

Yes, yes. You won’t get an argument from me.

On the other hand, I was deeply moved by the book. It brought my brother back to me in ways I hadn’t expected, in ways that utterly surprised me, and if we can transform it into something publishable, I would give the project my blessing.

I’m a little lost. How do you make an unpublishable book publishable?

That’s where you come into it. If you’re not interested in helping, we’ll drop the matter now and never talk about it again. But if you do want to help, then this is what I propose. You take the notes for the third part and put them into decent shape. That shouldn’t be too hard for you. I could never do it myself, but you’re the writer, you’ll know how to handle it. Then, most important, you go through the manuscript and change all the names. Remember that old TV show from the fifties? The names have been changed to protect the innocent. You change the names of the people and the places, you add or subtract any material you see fit, and then you publish the book under your own name.

But then it wouldn’t be Adam’s book anymore. It feels dishonest somehow. Like stealing… like some weird form of plagiarism.

Not if you frame it correctly. If you give credit to Adam for the passages he wrote-to the real Adam under the false name you’ll invent for him-then you won’t be stealing from him, you’ll be honoring him.

But no one will know it’s Adam.

Does it matter? You and I will know, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re the only ones who count.

You’re forgetting my wife.

You trust her, don’t you?

Of course I trust her.

Then the three of us will know.

I’m not sure, Gwyn. I need to think about it. Give me a little time, okay?

Take all the time you need. There’s no rush.

Her story was convincingly told, more than plausible, I felt, and for her sake I wanted to believe it. But I couldn’t, at least not entirely, at least not with a strong doubt that the text of Summer was a story of lived experience and not some salacious dream of a sick and dying man. To satisfy my curiosity, I took a day off from the novel I was writing and went up to the Columbia campus, where I learned from an administrator at the School of International Affairs that Rudolf Born had been employed as a visiting professor during the 1966-67 academic year, and then, after a session in the microfilm room of Butler Library, the same Castle of Yawns where Walker had worked over the summer, that the corpse of eighteen-year-old Cedric Williams had been discovered one May morning in Riverside Park with more than a dozen knife wounds in his chest and upper body. These other things, as Gwyn had called them, had been accurately reported in Walker’s manuscript, and if these other things were true, why would he have gone to the trouble of fabricating something that wasn’t true, damning himself with a highly detailed, self-incriminating account of incestuous love? It’s possible that Gwyn’s version of those two summer months was correct, but it’s also possible that she lied to me. And if she lied, who can blame her for not wanting the facts to be dragged out into the open? Anyone would lie in her situation, everyone would lie, lying would be the only alternative. As I rode back to Brooklyn on the subway, I decided that it didn’t matter to me. It mattered to her, but not to me.

Several months went by, and in that time I scarcely thought about Gwyn’s proposal. I was hard at work on my book, entering the last stages of a novel that had already consumed several years of my life, and Walker and his sister began to recede, to melt away, turning into two dim figures on the far horizon of consciousness. Whenever Adam’s book happened to make an appearance in my mind, I was fairly certain that I didn’t want to get involved with it, that the episode was finished. Then, two things happened that led me to reverse my thinking. I came to the end of my own book, which meant that I was free to turn my attention to other things, and I stumbled upon some new information connected to Walker’s story, a coda, as it were, a last little chapter that gave the project new meaning for me-and with that meaning an impetus to begin.

I have already described how I revamped Walker’s notes for Fall. As for the names, they have been invented according to Gwyn’s instructions, and the reader can therefore be assured that Adam Walker is not Adam Walker. Gwyn Walker Tedesco is not Gwyn Walker Tedesco. Margot Jouffroy is not Margot Jouffroy. Hélène and Cécile Juin are not Hélène and Cécile Juin. Cedric Williams is not Cedric Williams. Sandra Williams is not Sandra Williams, and her daughter, Rebecca, is not Rebecca. Not even Born is Born. His real name was close to that of another Provençal poet, and I took the liberty to substitute the translation of that other poet by not-Walker with a translation of my own, which means that the remarks about Dante’s Inferno on the first page of this book were not in not-Walker’s original manuscript. Last of all, I don’t suppose it is necessary for me to add that my name is not Jim.

Westfield, New Jersey, is not Westfield, New Jersey. Echo Lake is not Echo Lake. Oakland, California, is not Oakland, California. Boston is not Boston, and although not-Gwyn works in publishing, she is not the director of a university press. New York is not New York, Columbia University is not Columbia University, but Paris is Paris. Paris alone is real. I managed to keep it in because the Hôtel du Sud vanished long ago, and all recorded evidence of not-Walker’s stay there in 1967 has long since vanished as well.

I finished my novel late last summer (2007). Soon after that, my wife and I began organizing a trip to Paris (her sister’s daughter was marrying a Frenchman in October), and the talk about Paris got me thinking about Walker again. I wondered if I could track down some of the players from the unsuccessful revenge drama he mounted there forty years ago, and if I could, whether any of them would be willing to talk to me. Born was of particular interest, but I would have been glad to sit down with any of the others I managed to find-Margot, Hélène, or Cécile. I had no luck with the first three, but when I googled Cécile Juin on the Internet, abundant amounts of information came flying up onto the screen. After my encounter with the eighteen-year-old girl in Walker’s manuscript, I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had grown up to be a literary scholar. She had taught at universities in Lyon and Paris, and for the past ten years she had been attached to the CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research) as part of a small team investigating the manuscripts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French writers. Her specialty was Balzac, about whom she had published two books, but numerous other papers and articles were mentioned as well, a whole catalogue of work spanning three decades. Good for her, I thought. And good for me, too, since I was now in a position to write to her.

We exchanged two short letters. In mine, I introduced myself as a friend of Walker’s, told her the news of Adam’s recent death, and asked if it would be possible for us to get together during my upcoming visit to Paris. It was short and to the point, with no questions about her mother’s marriage to Born, nothing about Walker’s notes for Fall, simply a request to meet her in October. She wrote back promptly. In my translation from the French, her letter read as follows:

I am devastated to learn of Adam’s death. I knew him briefly when I was a young girl in Paris many years ago, but I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life, and then I did him an ugly turn, a thing so cruel and unforgivable that it has been weighing on my conscience ever since. I sent him a letter of apology after he returned to New York, but the letter came back to me, marked Addressee Unknown.

Yes, I will be happy to see you when you come to Paris next month. Please be warned, however. I am a silly old woman, and my emotions tend to run away from me. If we talk about Adam (which I assume we will), there’s a good chance that I will break down and start crying. You mustn’t take it personally.

Fifty-eight wasn’t old, of course, and I doubted there was anything about Cécile Juin that could be described as silly. The woman’s sense of humor was apparently intact, then, and successful as she was in her narrow world of academic research, she must have understood how peculiar a life she had chosen for herself: sequestered in the small rooms of libraries and underground vaults, poring over the manuscripts of the dead, a career spent in a soundless domain of dust. In a P.S. to her letter, she revealed how sardonically she looked upon her work. She recognized my name, she said, and if I was the James Freeman she thought I was, she wondered if I would be willing to participate in a survey she and her staff were conducting on the composition methods of contemporary writers. Computer or typewriter, pencil or pen, notebook or loose sheets of paper, how many drafts to finish a book. Yes, I know, she added, very dull stuff. But that’s our job at the CNRS: to make the world as dull as possible.

There was self-mockery in her letter, but there was also anguish, and I was somewhat startled by how vividly she remembered Walker. She had known him for only a couple of weeks in the distant days of her girlhood, and yet their friendship must have opened up something in her that altered her perception of herself, that thrust her for the first time into a direct confrontation with the depths of her own heart. I have neverforgotten him. He was the first love of my life. I hadn’t been prepared for such a forthright confession. Walker’s notes had dealt with the problem of her growing crush on him, but her feelings turned out to have been even more intense than he had imagined. And then she spat in his face. At the time, she must have felt her anger was justified. He had slandered Born, he had upset her mother, and Cécile had felt betrayed. But then, not long after that, she had written him a letter of apology. Did that mean she had rethought her position? Had something happened to make her believe Walker’s accusations were true? It was the first question I was intending to ask her.

My wife and I booked a room at the Hôtel d’Aubusson on the rue Dauphine. We had stayed there before, had stayed in several Paris hotels over the years, but I wanted to go back to the rue Dauphine this time because it happened to be smack in the middle of the neighborhood where Walker had lived in 1967. The Hôtel du Sud might have been gone, but many of the other places he had frequented were not. Vagenende was still there. La Palette and the Café Conti were still open for business, and even the cafeteria on the rue Mazet was still dishing out inedible food to hungry students. So much had changed in the past forty years, and the once down-at-the-heels neighborhood had evolved into one of the most fashionable areas of Paris, but most of the landmarks from Walker’s story had survived. After checking into the hotel on the first morning, my wife and I went outside and wandered through the streets for a couple of hours. Every time I pointed out one of those places to her, she would squeeze my hand and emit a small, sarcastic grunt. You’re incorrigible, she finally said. Not at all, I replied. Just soaking up the atmosphere… preparing myself for tomorrow.

Cécile Juin showed up at four o’clock the following afternoon, striding into the hotel bar with a small leather briefcase tucked under her left arm. Judging from Walker’s descriptions of her in the notes for Fall, her body had expanded dramatically since 1967. The thin, narrow-shouldered girl of eighteen was now a round, plumpish woman of fifty-eight with short brown hair (dyed, some gray roots visible when she shook my hand and sat down across from me), a slightly wrinkled face, a slightly sagging chin, and the same alert and darting eyes Walker had noticed when they first met. Her manner was a bit skittish, perhaps, but she was no longer the trembling, nail-biting bundle of nerves who had caused her mother so much worry in the past. She was a woman in full possession of herself, a woman who had traveled great distances in the years since Walker had known her. A few seconds after she sat down, I was a little surprised to see her pull out a pack of cigarettes, and then, as the minutes rolled on, doubly surprised to learn that she was a heavy smoker, with a deep, rumbling cough and the rough-edged contralto voice of a tobacco veteran. When the barman arrived at our table and asked us what we wanted, she ordered a whiskey. Neat. I told him to make it two.

I had prepared myself for a prissy, schoolmarmish eccentric. Cécile might have had her eccentricities, but the woman I met that day was down-to-earth, funny, enjoyable to be with. She was simply but elegantly dressed (a sign of confidence, I felt, a sign of self-respect), and although she wasn’t someone who bothered with lipstick or nail polish, she looked thoroughly feminine in her gray woolen suit-with silver bracelets around each wrist and a bright, multicolored scarf wrapped around her neck. During the course of our long, two-hour conversation, I found out that she had spent fifteen years in psychoanalysis (from age twenty to thirty-five), had been married and divorced, had married again to a man twenty years older than she was (he died in 1999), and that she had no children. On this last point she commented: A few regrets, yes, but the truth is I probably would have been a terrible mother. No aptitude, you understand.

For the first twenty or thirty minutes, we mostly talked about Adam. Cécile wanted to know everything I could tell her about what had happened in his life from the moment she lost touch with him. I explained that I had lost touch with him as well, and since we hadn’t resumed contact until just before his death, my only source of information was the letter he had written to me last spring. One by one, I took her through the salient points Walker had mentioned-falling down the stairs and breaking his leg on the night of his graduation from college, the luck of drawing a high number in the draft lottery, his move to London and the years of writing and translating, the publication of his first and only book, the decision to abandon poetry and study law, his work as a community activist in northern California, his marriage to Sandra Williams, the difficulties of being an interracial couple in America, his stepdaughter, Rebecca, and her two children-and then I added that if she wanted to learn more, she should probably arrange to meet with his sister, who would no doubt be glad to fill her in on the smallest details. As promised, Cécile broke down and cried. It touched me that she understood herself well enough to have been able to predict those tears, but even though she knew they were coming, there was nothing forced or willed about them. They were genuine, spontaneous tears, and although I had been expecting them myself, I genuinely felt sorry for her.

She said: He lived around here, you know. Just thirty seconds away, on the rue Mazarine. I walked past the building on my way to see you just now-the first time I’ve been on that street in years. Odd, isn’t it? Odd that the hotel should be gone, that terrible, broken-down place where Adam lived. It’s so alive in my memory, how can it possibly be gone? I was there only once, one time for an hour or two, but I can’t forget it, it’s still burning inside me. I went there because I was angry at him. One day early in the morning. I cut school and walked over to the hotel. I climbed the rickety stairs, I knocked on his door. I wanted to strangle him because I was so angry, because I loved him so much. I was an idiot girl, you understand, an impossible, unlikable girl, a gawky imbecile girl with glasses on my nose and a sick, quivering heart, and I had the temerity to fall in love with a boy like Adam, perfect Adam, why in God’s name did he even talk to me? He let me in. He calmed me down. He was kind to me, so kind to me, my life was in his hands, and he was kind to me. I should have known then what a good person he was. I never should have doubted a word he said. Adam. I dreamed of kissing him. That was all I ever wanted-to be kissed by Adam, to give myself to Adam-but time ran out on me, and we never kissed, we never touched, and before I knew it he was gone.

That was when Cécile broke down and started to cry. It took two or three minutes before she was able to talk again, and when the conversation continued, the first thing she said opened the door onto the next phase of our encounter. I’m sorry, she mumbled. I’m blathering on like a madwoman. You have no idea what I’m talking about.

But I do, I said. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

You can’t possibly know.

Believe me, I do. You were angry at Adam because he hadn’t called you for several days. The night before you went back to school, he had dinner with you and your mother at your apartment on the rue de Verneuil. After dessert, you played the piano for him-a two-part invention by Bach-and then, because you left the room for a while, your mother had a chance to speak to Adam one-on-one, and what she said to him, in your words, scared him off.

Did he tell you this?

No, he didn’t tell me. But he wrote about it, and I’ve read the pages he wrote.

He sent you a letter?

It was a short book, actually. Or an attempt to write a book. He spent the last months of his life working on a memoir about nineteen sixty-seven. It was an important year for him.

Yes, a very important year. I think I’m beginning to understand.

If not for Adam’s manuscript, I never would have heard of you.

And now you want to find out what happened, is that it?

I can see why Adam thought you were so intelligent. You catch on fast, don’t you?

Cécile smiled and lit another cigarette. I seem to be at a disadvantage, she said.

In what way?

You know a lot more about me than I know about you.

Only the eighteen-year-old you. Everything else is a blank. I looked for Born, I looked for Margot Jouffroy, I looked for your mother, but you were the only one I could find.

That’s because all the others are dead.

Oh. How awful. I’m so sorry… especially about your mother.

She died six years ago. In October-exactly six years ago tomorrow. About a month after the attacks on New York and Washington. She’d had heart trouble for some time, and one day her heart simply gave out on her. She was seventy-six. I wanted her to live to a hundred, but as you know, what we want and what we get are rarely the same thing.

And Margot?

I barely knew her. I was told she killed herself. A long time ago now-all the way back in the seventies.

And Born?

Last year. I think. But I’m not absolutely sure. There’s a slim chance he’s still alive somewhere.

Did he and your mother stay married until her death?

Married? They were never married.

Never married? But I thought-

They talked about it for a while, but it never happened.

Was Adam responsible for stopping it?

Partly, I suppose, but not entirely. When he talked to my mother and made those wild accusations about Rudolf, she didn’t believe him. Nor did I, for that matter.

You were so incensed, you spat in his face, didn’t you?

Yes, I spat in his face. It was the single worst thing I’ve done in my life, and I still can’t forgive myself for it.

You wrote to Adam to apologize. Does that mean you changed your mind about his story?

No, not then. I wrote because I was ashamed of what I did, and I wanted him to know how bad I felt about it. I tried to talk to him in person, but when I finally found the courage to call his hotel, he wasn’t there anymore. They told me he’d gone back to America. I couldn’t understand it. Why would he leave so suddenly? The only explanation I could think of was that he was so upset by what I’d done to him that he couldn’t bear the thought of staying in Paris. How’s that for a selfish reading of events? When I asked Rudolf to talk to the head of the Columbia program and find out what had happened, he reported that Adam had left because he wasn’t satisfied with the courses he was taking. That seemed utterly feeble to me, and I didn’t buy it for a second. I was convinced he’d left because of me.

You know better now, don’t you?

Yes, I know better. But it took years before I learned the truth.

Years. Which means that Adam’s story had no effect on your mother’s decision.

I wouldn’t say that. After Adam left, Rudolf couldn’t stop talking about him. He had been accused of murder, after all, and he was outraged, quite bonkers really, and he fumed and railed against Adam for weeks. He should be put in jail for twenty years, he said. He should be strung up and hanged from the nearest lamppost. He should be carted off to Devil’s Island. It was all so excessive, so over the top, that my mother began to feel a little annoyed with him. She had known Rudolf for a long time, many years, almost as long as she’d known my father, and for the most part he had been extremely gentle with her-considerate, thoughtful, gracious. There were a few hot-headed moments, of course, especially when he started talking about politics, but that was politics, not personal business. Now he was on a rampage, and I think she was beginning to have some doubts about him. Was she honestly prepared to spend the rest of her life with a man who had such a violent temper? After a month or two, Rudolf began to calm down, and by Christmastime the fits and crazy outbursts had stopped. The winter was tranquil, I recall, but then it was spring, May sixty-eight, and the whole country exploded. For me, it was one of the greatest periods of my life. I marched, I demonstrated, I helped shut down my school, and suddenly I had turned into an activist, a bright-eyed revolutionary agitating to bring down the government. My mother was sympathetic to the students, but right-wing Rudolf had nothing but contempt for them. He and I got into some dreadful arguments that spring, fierce shouting matches about law and justice, Marx and Mao, anarchy and rebellion, and for the first time politics was no longer just politics, it was personal business. My mother was caught in the middle, and it made her more and more unhappy, more and more silent and withdrawn. The divorce from my father was supposed to become final at the beginning of June. In France, divorcing couples have to talk to a judge one last time before he can sign the papers. They’re asked to reconsider, to rethink their decision and make sure they want to go ahead with it. My father was in the hospital-I imagine you know all about that-and my mother went to see the judge on her own. When he asked her if she had any second thoughts about her decision, she said yes, she had changed her mind and didn’t want a divorce. She was protecting herself against Rudolf, you understand. She didn’t want to marry him anymore, and by staying married to my father, she couldn’t marry him anymore.

How did Born react?

With tremendous kindness. He said that he understood why she couldn’t go through with it, that he admired her for her steadfastness and courage, that he thought she was an extraordinary and noble woman. Not what you would expect, but there you have it. He behaved beautifully.

How much longer did your father go on living?

A year and a half. He died in January nineteen seventy.

Did Born come back and propose again?

No. He left Paris after sixty-eight and started teaching in London. We saw him at my father’s funeral, and a couple of weeks after that he wrote my mother a long, heartfelt letter about the past, but that was the end of it. The subject of marriage never came up again.

And what about your mother? Did she find someone else?

She had some male friends over the years, but she never remarried.

And Born moved to London. Did you ever see him again?

Once, about eight months after my mother died.

And?

I’m sorry. I don’t think I can talk about it.

Why not?

Because if I tried to tell you what happened, I couldn’t begin to convey what a strange and disturbing experience it was for me.

You’re pulling my leg, right?

Just a little bit. To use your terms, I can’t tell you anything, but you can read about it if you want to.

Ah, I see. And where is this mysterious text of yours?

In my apartment. I’ve been keeping a diary since I was twelve years old, and I wrote a number of pages about what happened during my visit to Rudolf’s house. An on-the-spot, eyewitness account, if you will. I think it might interest you. If you like, I can photocopy the pages and bring them here tomorrow. If you’re not in, I’ll drop them off at the desk.

Thank you. That’s very generous of you. I can’t wait to read them.

And now, Cécile said, grinning broadly as she reached into her leather bag and pulled out a large red notebook, shall we get on with the survey for the CNRS?

The next afternoon, when my wife and I returned to the hotel after a long lunch with her sister, the package was waiting for me. In addition to the photocopied pages from her diary, Cécile included a short cover letter. She thanked me for the whiskeys, for tolerating her grotesque and unpardonable tears, and for giving up so much of my time to talk to her about Adam. Then she apologized for her illegible handwriting and offered to help me if I had any trouble deciphering it. I found it perfectly legible. Every word was clear, not one letter or punctuation mark confused me. The diary was written in French, of course, and what follows is my translation of that French into English, which I am including with the author’s full permission.

I have nothing more to say. Cécile Juin is the last person from Walker’s story who is still alive, and because she is the last, it seems fitting that she should have the last word.

CÉCILE JUIN’S DIARY

4/27. A letter today from Rudolf Born. Six months after the fact, he has only just now learned of Mother’s death. How long has it been since I last saw him, last heard from him? Twenty years, I think, perhaps twenty-five.

He sounds distraught, shattered by the news. Why would it mean so much to him now, after all these years of silence? He writes eloquently about the strength of her character, her dignified bearing and inner warmth, her attunement to the minds of others. He never stopped loving her, he says, and now that she has left this world, he feels that a part of him has left it with her.

He is retired. 71, unmarried, in good health. For the past six years, he has been living in a place called Quillia, a small island between Trinidad and the Grenadines at the juncture of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, just north of the equator. I have never heard of it. I must remember to look it up.

In the last sentence of the letter, he asks for news of me.

4/29. I have written back to R.B. Much more openly than I intended to, but once I started to talk about myself, I found it difficult to stop. When the letter reaches him, he will know about my work, about my marriage to Stéphane, about Stéphane’s death three years ago, and how lonely and burnt out I feel most of the time. I wonder if I haven’t gone a bit too far.

What are my feelings toward this man? Complicated ones, ambiguous ones, combining compassion and indifference, friendship and wariness, admiration and bemusement. R.B. has many excellent qualities. High intelligence, good manners, a ready laugh, generosity. After Father’s accident, he stepped in and became our moral support, the rock on which we stood for many years. He was saintly with Mother, a chivalrous companion, helpful and doting, always there in time of trouble. As for me, who was not even twelve when our world caved in, how many times did he lift me out of the doldrums with his encouragement and praise, his pride in my meager accomplishments, his indulgent attitude toward my adolescent sufferings? So many positive attributes, so much to feel grateful for, and yet I continue to resist him. Does it have something to do with our bitter clashes in May ’68, those frantic weeks in May when we were at perpetual war with each other, causing a rift between us that was never fully repaired? Perhaps. But I like to think of myself as a person who doesn’t bear grudges, who is capable of forgiving others-and deep down I believe he was forgiven long ago. Forgiven because I laugh when I think about that time now and feel no anger. Instead, what I feel is doubt, and that was something which began to take hold in me several months earlier-back in the fall, when I fell in love with Adam Walker. Dear Adam, who came to Mother with those horrible accusations about R.B. Impossible to believe him, but now that so many years have passed, now that one has pondered and dissected and endlessly reexamined Adam’s motive for saying such things, it becomes difficult to know what to think. Surely there was bad blood between Adam and R.B., surely Adam felt it would be in Mother’s best interest to call off the marriage, and so he made up a story to frighten her into changing her mind. A terrifying story, too terrifying to be true, and therefore a miscalculation on his part, but Adam was essentially a good person, and if he thought there was something tainted about R.B.’s past, then perhaps there was. Hence my doubt, which has been festering in me for years. But I can’t condemn a man on the strength of doubt alone. There must be proof, and since there is no proof, I must take R.B. at his word.

5/11. A response from R.B. He writes that he is living in seclusion in a large stone house overlooking the ocean. The house is called Moon Hill, and conditions there are quite primitive. The windows are broad apertures cut out of the rock with no glass covering them. The air blows in, the rain blows in, the insects and birds blow in, and there is little distinction between indoors and outdoors. He has a private generator for producing electricity, but the machine breaks down often, and half the time they light the rooms with kerosene lamps. There are four people in the household: a handyman-caretaker named Samuel, an old cook, Nancy, and a young cleaning woman, Melinda. There is a telephone and a radio, but no television, no mail delivery, and no running water. Samuel goes to the post office in town to pick up his letters (twelve miles away), and water is stored in wooden tanks above the sinks and toilets. Shower water comes out of a disposable plastic bag that hangs from a hook above your head. The landscape is both lush and barren. Profuse vegetation everywhere (palm trees, rubber plants, a hundred varieties of wildflowers), but the volcanic earth is strewn with rocks and boulders. Land crabs plod through his garden (he describes them as small armored tanks, prehistoric creatures who look as if they belong on the moon), and because of the frequent infestations of mosquitoes, not to mention the constant threat of tarantulas, everyone sleeps in beds covered with protective white netting. He spends his days reading (for the past two months he has been diligently plowing through Montaigne again) and taking notes for a memoir he hopes to begin in the near future. Every evening, he settles into his hammock by the window in the living room and videotapes the sunset. He calls it the most astonishing spectacle on earth.

My letter has overwhelmed him with nostalgia, he says, and he regrets now that he allowed himself to disappear from my life. We were once so close, such good friends, but after he and my mother parted ways, he didn’t feel he had the right to remain in touch. Now that the ice has been broken again, he has every intention of keeping up a correspondence with me-assuming that is something I would want as well.

He is saddened to learn of my husband’s death, saddened to learn of the difficulties I have been having of late. But you’re still young, he adds, still in your early fifties, with much to look forward to, and you mustn’t give up hope.

These are trite and conventional remarks, perhaps, but I sense that he means well, and who am I to scorn well-meant gestures of earnest sympathy? The truth is that I am touched.

Then, a sudden inspiration. Why not pay him a visit? The holidays are approaching, he says, and perhaps a little jaunt to the West Indies would do me some good. There are several spare bedrooms in his house, and putting me up would pose no problem. How happy it would make him to see me again, to spend some time together after so many years. He writes down his telephone number in case I’m interested.

Am I interested? It is difficult to say.

5/12. Information about Quillia is scant. I have already combed the Internet, which has yielded a couple of short, superficial histories and various bits of tourist data. With the latter entries, the writing is atrocious, banal to the point of absurdity: the resplendent sun… the glorious beaches… the bluest blue water this side of heaven.

I am sitting in the library now, but it turns out that there are no books devoted exclusively to Quillia-only a smattering of references buried in the larger volumes about the region. During pre-Columbian times, the inhabitants were the Ciboney Indians, who subsequently left and were supplanted by the Arawaks, who in their turn were followed by the Caribs. When colonization began in the 16th century, the Dutch, the French, and the English all took an interest in the place. There were skirmishes with the Indians, skirmishes among the Europeans, and when black slaves started arriving from Africa, much slaughter ensued. By the 18th century, the island was declared a neutral zone, exploited equally by the French and the English, but after the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris, the French decamped and Quillia fell under the control of the British Empire. In 1979, the island became independent.

It is five miles across. Subsistence farming, fishing, boat-building, and an annual hunt for a single whale. The population is three and a half thousand-mostly of African descent, but also Carib, English, Irish, Scottish, Asian, and Portuguese. One book reports that a large contingent of Scottish sailors was stranded on Quillia in the 18th century. With no possibility of returning home, they settled there and mingled with the blacks. Two centuries later, the result of this interbreeding is a curious mixed race of redheaded Africans, blue-eyed Africans, and albino Africans. As the author notes: The island is a laboratory of human possibilities. It explodes our rigid, preconceived ideas about race-and perhaps even destroys the concept of race itself.

A nice phrase, that. A laboratory of human possibilities.

5/14. A hard day. This afternoon, I realized that it has been exactly four months since my last period. Does this mean it’s finally happened? I keep hoping for the old, familiar cramps, the bloat and irritation, the blood flowing out of me. It isn’t a question of no longer being able to bear children. I never particularly wanted them. Alexandre more or less talked me into it, but we split up before anything ever happened. With Stéphane, children were out of the question.

No, it isn’t about children anymore. I’m too old for that now, even if I wanted to become pregnant. It’s more about losing my place as a woman, of being expelled from the ranks of femininity. For forty years, I was proud to bleed. I bore up under the curse with the happy knowledge that I was sharing an experience with every other woman on the planet. Now I have been cut adrift, neutered. It feels like the beginning of the end. A post-menopausal woman today, an old crone tomorrow, and then the grave. I’m too worn out even to cry.

Perhaps I should go to Quillia, after all, in spite of my reservations. I need to shake things up for myself, to breathe new air.

5/17. I have just spoken to R.B. Odd to hear that voice again after all this time, but he sounded vigorous, in top form. When I told him I’d decided to accept his invitation, he began shouting into the phone. Splendid! Splendid! What excellent news!

One month from now (in R.B.’s words), we will be drinking Samuel’s rum punches, taking turns filming the sunset, and having the time of our lives.

I will book the tickets tomorrow. Five days in late June. Subtract the two days of travel, and that leaves three full days on Quillia. If I’m having the time of my life, I can always extend the visit. If I find it unbearable, I don’t suppose three days will be too much to bear.

6/23. After a long flight across the Atlantic, I am sitting in a transit lounge at the Barbados airport, waiting for the small, one-propeller plane that will take me to Quillia two and a half hours from now (if it leaves on time).

Insufferable heat, everywhere a dense circle of heat closing around my body, the heat of the tropics, a heat that melts the thoughts in your head.

In the main terminal, a dozen soldiers patrolling the floor with machine guns. An air of menace and mistrust, hostility in every glance. What is going on? A dozen black soldiers with machine guns in their hands, and the crowds of grim, sweating travelers with their overstuffed bags and cranky children.

In the transit lounge, nearly everyone is white. Long-haired American surfers, Australians drinking beer and talking in loud voices, Europeans of various unknown nationalities, a couple of Asian faces. Boredom. Fans circling overhead. Piped-in music that is not music. A place that is not a place.

Nine hours later. The one-propeller plane was the smallest flying machine I have ever been in. I sat up front with the pilot, the other two passengers sat directly behind us, and the instant we took off, I understood that we were at the mercy of every puff of wind that might blow our way, that even the smallest disturbance in the surrounding air could throw us off course. We lurched and wobbled and dipped, my stomach was in my mouth, and yet I enjoyed myself, enjoyed the feathery weightlessness of the ride, the sense of being in such close contact with that unstable air.

Seen from above, the island is no more than a small dot, a gray-green speck of cooled lava jutting out of the ocean. But the water around it is blue-yes, the bluest blue water this side of heaven.

It would be an exaggeration to call the Quillia airport an airport. It is a landing strip, a ribbon of tarmac unspooled at the base of a tall, hulking mountain, and it can accommodate nothing bigger than planes the size of toys. We retrieved our bags in the terminal-a tiny cinder-block hut-and then went through the ordeal of customs and passport control. Not even in post-9/11 Europe have I been subjected to such a thorough examination of my belongings. My suitcase was opened, and every article of clothing was lifted out and inspected, every book was shaken by the spine, every shoe was turned upside down, peered into, searched-slowly and methodically, as if this were a procedure that could not, under any circumstances, be conducted in haste. The man in charge of passport control was dressed in a snappy, neatly pressed uniform, a symbol of authority and officialdom, and he too took his sweet time before letting me go. He asked the purpose of my visit, and in my mediocre, heavily accented English, I told him that I’d come to spend a few days with a friend. Which friend? Rudolf Born, I said. The name seemed to ring a bell with him, and then he asked (inappropriately, I believe) how long I had known Mr. Born. All my life, I said. All your life? My answer seemed to have thrown him. Yes, all my life, I repeated. He was a close friend of my parents’. Ah, your parents, he said, nodding in contemplation, apparently satisfied by my answer. I thought we had come to the end of our business, but then he opened my passport, and for the next three minutes he scrutinized it with the zealous, patient eye of a forensics expert, carefully studying each page, pausing over each marking, as if my past travels were the key to solving the mystery of my life. At last, he took out a form printed on a narrow slip of paper, positioned it at right angles with the edge of his desk, and filled in the blanks with a small, meticulous hand. After stapling the form into my passport, he inked his rubber stamp, pressed the rubber onto a spot beside the form, and delicately added the name of Quillia to the roster of countries I have been allowed to enter. French bureaucrats are notorious for their maniacal exactitude and cold efficiency. Next to this man, they are all amateurs.

I stepped out into the broiling four o’clock heat, expecting to find R.B. waiting for me, but he wasn’t there. My escort to the house was Samuel, the handyman-caretaker, a strong, well-built, exceedingly handsome young man of around thirty-with exceedingly black skin, which would suggest he is not descended from that band of Scottish sailors marooned here in the 18th century. After my encounter with the remote and taciturn men at the airport terminal, I found it a relief to be smiled at again.

It didn’t take long to understand why the job of accompanying me to Moon Hill had been given to Samuel. We rode in a car for the first ten minutes, which led me to assume we would drive all the way to the house, but then Samuel stopped the car, and the rest of the journey-that is to say, the bulk of the journey, the more than one-hour journey still in front of us-was made on foot. It was an arduous trek, an excruciating climb up a steep, root-entangled path that sapped my strength and left me gasping for breath after five minutes. I am a person who sits in libraries, a fifty-three-year-old woman who smokes too many cigarettes and weighs twenty pounds more than she should, and my body is not cut out for exertions of this sort. I was thoroughly humiliated by my ineptitude, by the sweat that poured out of me and drenched my clothes, by the swarms of mosquitoes dancing around my head, by my frequent calls to stop and rest, by the slippery soles of my sandals, which made me fall, not once, not twice, but again and again. But even worse, far worse than my petty physical woes, there was the shame of watching Samuel in front of me, the shame of seeing Samuel carry my suitcase on his head, my too heavy suitcase, loaded down with the weight of too many unnecessary books, and how not to see in that image of a black man carrying a white woman’s possessions on his head the horrors of the colonial past, the atrocities of the Congo and French Africa, the centuries of affliction-

I mustn’t go on like this. I’m working myself into a lather, and if I mean to get through these days with my mind intact, I must maintain my composure. The reality is that Samuel wasn’t the least bit distressed about what he was doing. He has been up and down this mountain thousands of times, he carries provisions on his head as a matter of course, and for someone born on an island as poor as this one, working in the house of a man like R.B. is considered a good job. Whenever I asked him to stop, he did so without complaint. No trouble, ma’am. Just take it nice and easy. We’ll get there when we get there.

R.B. was napping in his room when we reached the top of the mountain. Incomprehensible as that might have been, it gave me a chance to settle into my own room (high, high up, overlooking the ocean) and pull myself together. I showered, put on a fresh set of clothes, and did my hair. Minor improvements, perhaps, but at least I didn’t have to live through the embarrassment of being seen in such a sorry state. The walk up the mountain had nearly destroyed me.

In spite of my efforts, I could see the disappointment in his eyes when I entered the living room an hour later-the first look after so many years, and the sad acknowledgment that the young girl of long ago had turned into a frowsy, none-too-attractive, postmenopausal woman in late middle age.

Unfortunately-no, I think I mean fortunately-the disappointment was mutual. In the past, I had found him to be a seductive figure, good-looking in a rough sort of way, something close to an ideal embodiment of male confidence and power. R.B. was never a thin man, but in the years since I last saw him, he has put on considerable amounts of weight, a truckload of excess poundage, and as he stood up to greet me (dressed in shorts, with no shirt, no shoes or socks), I was astonished to see how large his stomach had grown. It is a great medicine ball of a stomach now, and with most of the hair gone from his head, his skull reminded me of a volleyball. A ridiculous image, I know, but the mind is always churning forth its quirky nonsense, and that was what I saw when he stood up and approached me: a man composed of two spheres, a medicine ball and a volleyball. He is much bigger, then, but not whalelike, not blubbery or drooping with flab-just large. The skin around his stomach is quite taut, actually, and except for the fleshy creases around his knees and neck, he looks fit for a man his age.

An instant after I saw it, the crestfallen look vanished from his eyes. With all the aplomb of a practiced diplomat, R.B. broke into a smile, opened his arms, and hugged me. It’s a miracle, he said.

That hug proved to be the high point of the evening. We drank the rum punches Samuel prepared for us (very good), I watched R.B. film the sunset (I found it inane), and then we sat down to dinner (heavy food, beef drowned in a thick sauce, inappropriate fare for this climate-better suited to Alsace in midwinter). The old cook, Nancy, is not old at all-forty, forty-five at most-and I wonder if she doesn’t have two jobs in this household: cook by day, R.B.’s bed partner at night. Melinda is in her early twenties, and therefore is probably too young to fill the latter role. She is a beautiful girl, by the way, as beautiful as Samuel is handsome, a tall, lanky thing with an exquisite gliding walk, and from the little looks they give each other, I would guess that she and Samuel are an item. Nancy and Melinda served us the food, Samuel cleared the table and washed the dishes, and as the meal wore on I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t like being waited on by servants. It offends me somehow, especially in a situation like this one, with three people working for just two others, three black people working for two white people. Again: unpleasant echoes of the colonial past. How to get rid of this feeling of shame? Nancy, Melinda, and Samuel went about their tasks with stolid equanimity, and though I received a number of courteous smiles, they seemed guarded and aloof, indifferent. What must they think of us? They probably laugh at us behind our backs-with good reason.

The servants got me down, yes, but not as much as R.B. himself did. After his warm welcome, I felt as if he no longer knew what to do with me. He kept saying that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out, that jet lag is a modern invention designed to ruin the human body. I won’t deny that I was exhausted and jet-lagged, that my muscles ached from my battle with the mountain, but I wanted to stay up and talk, to reminisce about old times as he put it in one of his letters, and he seemed reluctant to go there with me. Our conversation over dinner was brutally dull. He told me about his discovery of Quillia and how he had managed to buy this house, discussed some of the particulars of local life, and then lectured me on the flora and fauna of the island. Mystifying.

I am in bed now, encased in a dome of white mosquito netting. My body is smeared with an odious product called OFF, a mosquito repellent that smells of toxic, life-threatening chemicals, and the green anti-mosquito coils on either side of the bed are slowly burning down, emitting curious little trails of smoke.

I wonder what I am doing here.

6/26. Nothing for two days. It has been impossible to write, impossible to find a moment’s peace, but now that I have left Moon Hill and am on my way back to Paris, I can pick up the story and push on to the bitter end. Bitter is precisely the word I want to use here. I feel bitter about what happened, and I know I will be tasting that bitterness for a long time to come.

It started the next morning, the morning after my arrival at the house, the 24th. Sitting over breakfast in the dining room, R.B. calmly put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye, and asked me to marry him. It was so far-fetched, so utterly unexpected, I burst out laughing.

– You can’t be serious, I said.

– Why not? he answered. I’m all alone here. You have no one in Paris, and if you came to Quillia and lived with me, I would make you the happiest woman in the world. We’re perfect for each other, Cécile.

– You’re too old for me, old friend.

– You’ve already been married to a man older than I am.

– That’s just it. Stéphane is dead, isn’t he? I have no desire to become a widow again.

– Ah, but I’m not Stéphane, am I? I’m strong. I’m in perfect health. I have years and years ahead of me.

– Please, Rudolf. It’s out of the question.

– You’re forgetting how much we adored each other.

– I liked you. I always liked you, but I never adored you.

– Years ago, I wanted to marry your mother. But that was only an excuse. I wanted to live with her so I could be near you.

– That’s ridiculous. I was a child back then-an awkward, undeveloped child. You weren’t interested in me.

– It was all working so well. It was about to happen, it would have happened, the three of us wanted it to happen, and then that American boy came to Paris and ruined everything.

– It wasn’t because of him. You know that. My mother didn’t believe his story, and neither did I.

– You were right not to believe him. He was a liar, a twisted, angry boy who turned against me and tried to wreck my life. Yes, I’ve made terrible mistakes over the years, but killing that kid in New York wasn’t one of them. I never put a hand on him. Your boyfriend made it all up.

– My boyfriend? That’s a good one. Adam Walker had better things to do than fall for someone like me.

– And to think… I was the one who introduced him to you. I thought I was doing you a favor. What a miserable joke.

– You did do me a favor. And then I turned around and insulted him. I called him a crazy person. I said his tongue should be torn out of his mouth.

– You never told me that. Good work, Cécile. I’m proud of you for showing such spirit. The boy got what he deserved.

– Deserved? What does that mean?

– I’m alluding to his hasty departure from France. You know why he left, don’t you?

– He left because of me. Because I spat in his face.

– No, no, nothing as simple as that.

– What are you talking about?

– He was deported. The police caught him with three kilos of drugs-marijuana, hashish, cocaine, I can’t remember the substance now. They were tipped off by the manager of that putrid hotel he lived in. The cops searched his room, and that was the end of Adam Walker. He had two choices: stand trial in France or leave the country.

– Adam with drugs? It isn’t possible. He was against drugs, he hated them.

– Not according to the police.

– And how do you know that?

– The examining magistrate was a friend of mine. He told me about the case.

– How convenient. And why would he bother to talk to you about a thing like that?

– Because he knew I was acquainted with Walker.

– You were involved in it, weren’t you?

– Of course not. Don’t be silly.

– You were. Admit it, Rudolf. You were the one who got Adam kicked out of the country.

– You’re wrong, my darling. I can’t say that I was sorry to see him go, but I wasn’t responsible.

– It’s so far in the past. Why tell lies about it now?

– I swear on your mother’s grave, Cécile. I had nothing to do with it.

I didn’t know what to think. Perhaps he was telling the truth, perhaps he wasn’t, but the moment he started talking about my mother’s grave, I realized that I didn’t want to be in the room with him anymore. I was too upset, too close to tears, too distracted to go on talking. First his insane proposal of marriage, and then the ghastly news about Adam, and suddenly I couldn’t sit at that table a second longer. I stood up from my chair, told him I wasn’t feeling well, and quickly retreated to my room.

Half an hour later, R.B. knocked and asked if he could come in. I hesitated for a few moments, wondering if I had the strength to confront him again. Before I could decide, there was another knock, louder and more insistent than the first one, and then he opened the door himself.

– I’m sorry, he said, as his large, half-naked body lumbered toward a chair in the far corner of the room. I didn’t mean to unnerve you. I’m afraid I took the wrong approach.

– Approach? Approach to what?

As R.B. lowered himself into the chair, I sat down on a small wooden bench just below the window. We were no more than three feet apart. I wished he hadn’t walked in on me so soon after my abrupt exit from the dining room, but he looked sufficiently contrite for me to think that further conversation might be possible.

– Approach to what? I repeated.

– To certain… how shall I put it?… to certain future… to certain possible domestic arrangements in the future.

– I’m sorry to disappoint you, Rudolf, but I’m not interested in marriage. Not with you or anyone else.

– Yes, I know. That’s your position today, but tomorrow you might have a different view of the matter.

– I doubt it.

– It was a mistake not to share my thoughts with you. I’ve been living with this idea ever since I received your letter last month, and after turning it around in my mind for so long, it felt real to me, as if all I had to do was say the word and it would happen. I’ve probably been alone too much these past six years. I sometimes confuse my thoughts about the world with the world itself. I’m sorry if I offended you.

– I wasn’t offended. Surprised would be the appropriate word, I think.

– Given your position-the position you hold now, in any case-I would like to suggest an experiment. An experiment in the form of a business proposal. Do you remember the book I told you about in one of my letters?

– You mentioned that you were taking notes for a memoir you wanted to write.

– Exactly. I’m nearly ready to begin, and I want you to help me with it. I want us to write the book together.

– You’re forgetting that I already have a job in Paris. A job that means quite a lot to me.

– Whatever salary they give you at the CNRS, I’ll double it.

– It isn’t a question of money.

– I’m not asking you to quit your job. All you have to do is apply for a leave of absence. The book should take us about a year to write, and if you don’t want to stay with me here after we’re finished, go back to Paris. In the meantime, you’ll be earning twice what you earn now-with free room and board, by the way-and in the process you might discover that you want to marry me. An experiment in the form of a business proposal. Do you see what I’m talking about?

– Yes, I see. But why would I be interested in working on someone else’s book? I have my own work to do.

– Once you know what the book is about, you’ll be interested.

– It’s a book about your life.

– Yes, but do you know anything about my life, Cécile?

– You’re a retired professor of government and international affairs.

– Among other things, yes. But I didn’t only teach government, I worked for it as well.

– The French government?

– Of course. I’m French, aren’t I?

– And what kind of work did you do?

– Secret work.

– Secret work… Are you talking about espionage?

– Skullduggery in all its many forms, my dear.

– Well, well. I had no idea.

– It goes all the way back to Algeria for me. I started young, and I went on working for them straight through to the end of the Cold War.

– In other words, you have some gripping stories to tell.

– More than gripping. Stories to curdle your blood.

– Are you allowed to publish these stories? I thought there were laws that prevented government workers from exposing state secrets.

– If we run into any difficulties, we’ll redo the manuscript and publish it as a novel-under your name.

– My name?

– Yes, your name. I’ll keep myself out of it, and you can have all the glory.

I no longer believed a word he was saying. By the time R.B. left the room, I was convinced he was mad, that he had lost his mind and gone stark raving mad. He’d spent too many years on Quillia, and the tropical sun had cooked the wires in his brain and pushed him over the edge of sanity. Espionage. Marriage. Memoirs that transformed themselves into novels. He was like a child, a desperate child who made up things as he went along, saying whatever popped into his head and then spinning it out into a fiction that would serve his purpose at any given moment-in this case, the bizarre, wholly preposterous idea that he wanted to marry me. He didn’t want to marry me. He couldn’t want to marry me. But if he did, and if he thought he could, then it only proved that he was no longer in his right mind.

I pretended to play along with him, acting as if I took his experiment in the form of a business proposal seriously. Was I too afraid to challenge him, or was I simply trying to avoid an unpleasant scene? A little of both, I think. I didn’t want to say anything that would provoke his anger, but at the same time I found the conversation unbearably tedious, and I wanted to get rid of him as quickly as I could. So you’ll think it over? he asked. Yes, I said, I promise to think it over. But you’ll have to tell me more about the book before I make my decision. Of course, he answered, that goes without saying. I have some chores to do with Samuel now, but we can talk about it over lunch. Then he patted me on the cheek and said: I’m so glad you’ve come. The world has never looked more beautiful to me.

I didn’t go to lunch. I said that I wasn’t feeling well, which was partly true and partly not true. I could have gone if I had pushed myself, if I had actively wanted to go, but I wasn’t in the mood to push myself, and I didn’t want to go. I needed a break from R.B., and the fact was that the trip had taken its toll on me. I felt exhausted, jet-lagged, spent. Without bothering to take off my clothes, I lay down on the bed and napped for three solid hours. I woke up in a sweat, perspiration gushing from every pore of my body, my mouth dry, my head pounding. Stripping off my clothes, I went into the bathroom, hung one of the water-filled plastic bags on the shower hook, opened the nozzle, and let the water rush down onto my head. A lukewarm shower in the midday heat. The bathroom was out in the open, a small, nichelike space carved into the stone and perched on top of the cliff, with nothing below me but the immense, glittering ocean. The world has never looked more beautiful. Yes, I said to myself, this is beyond doubt a beautiful place, but it is a harsh beauty, an inhospitable beauty, and I am already looking forward to leaving it.

I thought about writing in my diary, but I was too agitated to sit still. Then it occurred to me that I should suspend all writing for the duration of my visit. What if R.B. sneaked into my room and found the diary, I wondered, what if he saw the things I was saying about him? All hell would break loose. I might even be in danger.

I tried to read, but reading was beyond my powers of concentration just then. All the useless books I had packed for my holiday in the sun. Novels by Bernhard and Vila-Matas, poems by Dupin and du Bouchet, essays by Sacks and Diderot-all worthy books, but useless to me now that I had reached my destination.

I sat in the chair by the window. I paced around the room. I sat down in the chair again.

And what if R.B. hadn’t gone mad? I asked myself. What if he was playing with me, proposing marriage in order to tease me and make fun of me, having a good laugh at my expense? That too was possible. Anything was possible.

He drank heavily at dinner that night. A couple of tall rum punches before we sat down at the table, then ample doses of wine throughout the meal. At first, it seemed to have no effect on him. He solicitously asked if I was feeling better, and I said yes, the nap had done me a world of good, and after that we talked about small, inconsequential things, with no mention of marriage, no mention of Adam Walker, no mention of books about undercover intelligence work that can be turned into novels. Although we were speaking French, I wondered if he preferred not to talk about these matters in front of the servants. I also wondered if he wasn’t going senile, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia, and had simply forgotten the things we had talked about earlier in the day. Perhaps thoughts flitted through his head like butterflies or mosquitoes-ephemeral notions that came and went so fast that he couldn’t keep track of them anymore.

About ten or fifteen minutes into the meal, however, he began talking about politics. Not in any personal way, not with any stories about his own experiences, but abstractly, theoretically, sounding very much like the professor he had been for most of his adult life. He began with the Berlin Wall. Everyone in the West was so happy when the wall came down, he said, everyone thought a new era of peace and brotherly love had dawned on earth, but in fact it was the most alarming event of recent times. Distasteful as it might have been, the Cold War had held the world together for forty-four years, and now that the simple, black-and-white binary world of us versus them was gone, we had entered a period of instability and chaos similar to the years prior to World War I. Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. It was a frightening concept, yes, but when one half of humanity is in a position to blow up the other half, and when the other half is in a position to blow up the first half, neither side will pull the trigger. Permanent stalemate. The most elegant answer to military aggression in the history of mankind.

I didn’t interrupt. R.B. was talking rationally for once, even if his argument was rather crude. What about Algeria and Indochina, I wanted to ask him, what about Korea and Vietnam, what about U.S. interference in Latin America, the assassinations of Lumumba and Allende, the Soviets rolling their tanks into Budapest and Prague, the long war in Afghanistan? There was little point in asking these questions. I had sat through enough lectures of this sort as a girl to know that tangling with R.B. wasn’t worth the trouble. Let him rant, I said to myself, let him spout forth his simplistic opinions, and before long he’ll talk himself out and the evening will be over. This was the R.B. of old, and for the first time since I’d set foot in his house, I felt I was on familiar ground.

But he didn’t talk himself out, and the evening dragged on much longer than I thought it would. He was only warming up with those comments about the Cold War, clearing his throat, as it were, and for the next two hours he subjected me to the most blistering harangue I had ever heard from him. Arab terrorism, September 11th, the encroaching war in Iraq, the price of oil, global warming, food shortages, mass starvation, a world depression, dirty bombs, anthrax attacks, the annihilation of Israel-what didn’t he talk about, what dire, death-rattling prophecy did he not conjure up and spew in my face? Some of the things he said were so mean and ugly, so vicious in their hatred of anyone who was not a European with white skin, of anyone who was not, finally, Rudolf Born himself, that a moment came when I couldn’t bear to listen to him anymore. Stop it, I said. I don’t want to hear another word. I’m going to bed.

As I stood up from my chair and left the room, he was still talking, still preaching to me in his drunken, rasping voice, not even aware that I was no longer sitting at the table. The polar ice caps are melting, he said. Fifteen years from now, twenty years from now, the floods will come. Drowned cities, obliterated continents, the end of everything. You’ll still be alive, Cécile. You’ll get to see it happen, and then you’ll drown. You’ll drown with all the others, all the billions of others, and that will be the end. How I envy you, Cécile. You’ll be there to see the end of everything.

He didn’t show up for breakfast the next morning (yesterday). When I asked Nancy if he was all right, she made a small sound in the back of her throat, something akin to a muted, inward laugh, and said that Mr. Born was still in dreamland. I wondered how long he had gone on drinking after I left the dining room.

Four hours later, he emerged for lunch, apparently in good cheer, his eyes bright and focused, ready for action. For the first time since I’d been there, he had taken the trouble to put on a shirt.

– Excuse my intemperate remarks last night, he began. I didn’t mean half the things I said-less than half of them, actually, almost nothing.

– Why would you say something you didn’t mean? I asked, somewhat thrown by this odd retraction. It wasn’t like him to examine his own behavior, to back down from anything he said or did-intemperate or not.

– I was testing out certain ideas, trying to get myself into the proper frame of mind for the work ahead.

– And what work is that?

– The book. The book we’re going to make together. After our discussion yesterday morning, I’m convinced you’re right, Cécile. The true story can never be published. There are too many secrets, too many bits of dirty business to expose, too many deaths to account for. The French would arrest me if I tried to talk about them.

– Are you saying you want to give up the project?

– No, not at all. But in order to tell the truth, we’ll have to fictionalize it.

– That’s what you said yesterday.

– I know. It popped into my head while we were talking, but now that I’ve had time to think it over, I believe it’s the only solution.

– A novel, then.

– Yes, a novel. And now that I’m thinking novel, I understand that limitless possibilities have suddenly opened up to us. We can tell the truth, yes, but we’ll also have the freedom to make things up.

– Why would you want to do that?

– To make the story more interesting. We’ll be basing the action on my life, of course, but the character who plays me in the book will have to be given a different name. We can’t call him Rudolf Born, can we? He’ll have to be someone else-Mr. X, for example. Once I become Mr. X, I won’t be myself anymore, and once I’m not myself, we can add as many new details as we like.

– Such as?

– Such as… maybe Mr. X isn’t the person he appears to be. We present him as a man who leads a double life. The world knows him as a dull professor, a man who teaches government and international affairs at some dull institute or university, but in fact he’s also a special undercover agent, fighting the good fight against the Soviet Communists.

– We already know that. That’s the premise of the book.

– Yes, yes-but wait. What if his double life isn’t a double life but a triple life?

– I don’t follow.

– He seems to be working for the French, but he’s actually working for the Russians. Mr. X is a mole.

– It’s beginning to sound like a thriller-

– Thriller. Don’t you just love that word? Thriller.

– But why would Mr. X betray his country?

– Any number of reasons. After years of work in the field, he becomes disillusioned with the West and converts to the Communist cause. Or else he’s a cynic who doesn’t believe in anything, and the Russians are paying him good money, more money than the French are paying him, which means that he’s earning more than twice as much as he would if he worked for just one side.

– He doesn’t seem to be a very sympathetic character.

– He doesn’t have to be sympathetic. Just interesting and complex. Think back to May sixty-eight, Cécile. Do you remember all those terrible arguments we had?

– I’ll never forget them.

– What if Mr. X, the double agent in league with the enemy, is in perfect accord with the young Cécile Juin character? What if he’s delighted to see France erupt in anarchy, bursting with joy over the disintegration of France and the imminent fall of the government? But he has to protect his cover, and to do that he espouses views directly opposed to the ones he believes in. It adds a nice little twist, don’t you think?

– Not bad.

– I’ve thought of another scene. It might be difficult to pull off, but if we stick with the idea of turning Mr. X into a mole, it would be crucial-one of the darkest, most lacerating moments in the book. Mr. X has a French colleague, Mr. Y. They’ve been close friends for many years, they’ve lived through some harrowing adventures together, but now Mr. Y suspects that Mr. X is working for the Soviets. He confronts Mr. X and tells him that if he doesn’t quit the service immediately, he will have him arrested. These are the early sixties, remember. Capital punishment was still in force, and arrest means the guillotine for Mr. X. What can he do? He has no choice but to kill Mr. Y. Not with a bullet, of course. Not with a blow to the head or a knife in the belly, but by more subtle means that will allow him to escape detection. It’s summer. Mr. Y and his family are vacationing in the mountains somewhere in the south of France. Mr. X goes down there, sneaks onto the property in the middle of the night, and disconnects the brakes of Mr. Y’s car. The next morning, on his way into town to buy bread at the local bakery, Mr. Y loses control of the car and crashes down the side of a mountain. Mission accomplished.

– What are you saying, Rudolf?

– Nothing. I’m telling you a story, that’s all. I’m describing how Mr. X kills Mr. Y.

– You’re talking about my father, aren’t you?

– Of course not. Why would you think that?

– You’re telling me how you tried to kill my father.

– Nonsense. Your father was never in the service. You know that. He worked for the Ministry of Culture.

– So you say. Who knows what he really did?

– Stop it, Cécile. We’re just having a little fun.

– It’s not funny. It’s not the least bit funny. You’re making me sick to my stomach.

– My dear girl. Calm down. You’re acting like a simpleton.

– I’m walking out of here, Rudolf. I can’t stand to be with you for another minute.

– Right now, in the middle of lunch? Just like that?

– Yes, just like that.

– And I thought-

– I don’t care what you thought.

– All right, go if you want to. I won’t try to stop you. I’ve done nothing but shower you with kindness and affection since you came here, and now you turn on me like this. You’re a ridiculous, hysterical woman, Cécile. I’m sorry I invited you to my house.

– I’m sorry I came.

I was already standing by then, already making my way across the room, already in tears. Just before I reached the hall, I turned around for a last look at the man my mother almost married, the man who had asked me to be his wife, and there he was, sitting with his back to me, hunched over his plate, shoveling food into his mouth. Total indifference. I hadn’t even left the house, and already I had been expunged from his mind.

I went into my bedroom to gather up my things. There would be no Samuel to accompany me this time, and since I wouldn’t be able to get down the mountain with the suitcase in my hand, the bag would have to stay. I transferred some clean underwear into my purse, kicked off my sandals and put on a pair of sneakers, then checked to make sure that my passport and money were where they should have been. The thought of leaving my clothes and books behind caused a small twinge of regret, but the feeling evaporated after a couple of seconds. My plan was to walk to the town of Saint Margaret and buy a ticket for the next available flight to Barbados. It was twelve miles from the house. I could do that. As long as I was on flat ground, I could walk forever.

Climbing down the mountain was less of a challenge than climbing up had been. I broke into a sweat, of course, I was bedeviled by the same aerial attacks of gnats and mosquitoes, but I didn’t fall this time, not even once. I moved at a moderate pace, neither too plodding nor too rushed, pausing every now and then to examine wildflowers by the side of the road-bright, beautiful things whose names were unknown to me. Burning red. Burning yellow. Burning blue.

As I approached the bottom of the mountain, I began to hear something, a sound or collection of sounds that I was unable to identify. At first, I thought it resembled the chirping of crickets or cicadas, the persistent metallic cries of insects in the afternoon heat. But it was too hot for insects to be calling to one another just then, and as I drew closer, I understood that the sounds were too loud, that the rhythms of the sounds were too complex, too pulsing and intricate to be coming from any living thing. A barrier of trees blocked my view. I kept on walking, but the barrier didn’t end until I reached the very bottom. Once I got there, I stopped, turned to my right, and finally saw where the sounds were coming from, finally saw what my ears had been telling me.

A barren field stretched out before me, a barren, dusty field cluttered with gray stones of various shapes and sizes, and scattered among the stones in that field were fifty or sixty men and women, each holding a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, pounding on the stones until they broke in two, then pounding on the smaller stones until they broke in two, and then pounding on the smallest stones until they were reduced to gravel. Fifty or sixty black men and women crouching in that field with hammers and chisels in their hands, pounding on the stones as the sun pounded on their bodies, with no shade anywhere and sweat glistening on every face. I stood there watching them for a long time. I watched and listened and wondered if I had ever seen anything like it. This was the kind of work one usually associated with prisoners, with people in chains, but these people weren’t in chains. They were working, they were making money, they were keeping themselves alive. The music of the stones was ornate and impossible, a music of fifty or sixty clinking hammers, each one moving at its own speed, each one locked in its own cadence, and together they formed a fractious, stately harmony, a sound that worked itself into my body and stayed there long after I had left, and even now, sitting on the plane as it flies across the ocean, I can still hear the clinking of those hammers in my head. That sound will always be with me. For the rest of my life, no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, it will always be with me.