Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

28. The Tomb of Victor Noir

Racing through Kent, Eurostar was due at the Gare du Nord at 12:23. Really, I thought, why all this speed? Things are already coming at me much too fast. There were no vents through which thoughts could escape, and I was being suffocated by mine. Probably other people’s thoughts were adding to the air pollution as well. Why couldn’t they have a red circle on the window enclosing a brain with a diagonal red line through it?

‘Have you read this?’ said Serafina, showing me her book, The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl, by Adalbert von Chamisso.

‘Yes.’ I’d have felt better if she’d brought something else for the trip.

‘That’s quite an idea,’ she said, ‘selling your shadow to the Devil for a purse that never runs out of gold.’

‘He was sorry for it later when he lost the woman he loved.’

‘Well, she wanted all of him, didn’t she. What’re you reading?’

‘Carmen — not the opera but the Prosper Mérimée story.’

‘May I have a look? I want to see the ending.’ She found it and read aloud, ‘“She fell at the second thrust, without a cry. It seems to me that I can still see her great black eyes fixed on me; then they became dimmed and closed.”’

‘She told him she couldn’t love him any more, so he killed her,’ I said.

‘That’s one way of dealing with it. Do you think he’s on this train?’

‘Don José?’

‘Don José Rinyo-C. Do you think changing the booking did any good?’

‘Yes, I think he’s probably on this train, so it follows that I don’t think changing the booking did any good. But I don’t think he’s got rape and murder on his mind at the moment — he’s just fondling my unripe death while mentally replaying his afternoon with you.’

We ate sandwiches, drank tea, and were informed by a voice, first in English then in French, that we were entering the tunnel and would be out of it in twenty minutes. ‘What worries me,’ said Serafina as Eurostar plunged through the darkness beneath the English Channel, ‘is that maybe everything is connected by tunnels: you think A is separate from B but no, below the surface things are constantly sliding around and making connections.’

Monstrous creepy-crawlies came to mind, wet and slimy. ‘The things below the surface, they’re not all necessarily bad,’ I said.

‘They’re hidden though, aren’t they. You’ve no idea what’s there till it jumps out at you.’

I thought it best to say nothing for a while. Through the tunnel and out into France we read or closed our eyes in meditation. We were going to be in Paris for one night only, returning tomorrow morning. ‘What I don’t want,’ Serafina had said, ‘is some pathetic attempt to recapture what’s gone. I’m full of pointy thoughts and sharp edges and all I’m looking for is clarity. You want to see Au Tonneau and I want to see Victor Noir and that’s it, OK?’

Our passports were checked, and after a time the voice spoke again to say that the train had attained its maximum speed of one hundred and eighty-six miles an hour. Beside me Serafina was moving a little faster than that and leaving me behind. I wanted to taste her mouth, her body, I wanted her to be my Serafina again. I wanted never to have met Mr Rinyo-Clacton.

The voice told us that we were approaching the Gare du Nord. People were getting their bags down from the racks and standing in the aisle. The terminal appeared outside the windows and we stepped out of the train, looking anxiously to right and left but seeing no Mr Rinyo-Clacton. I think it was only then that the full weirdness of my situation hit me with the realisation that Death is always waiting for any door to open at any time.

Ahead of us was a modern clock with a black face and yellow hands. The dial had yellow hour markers but no numbers. Some distance beyond it was an older clock with a white face and Roman numerals. The time was 12:28. I was thinking that clocks in railway stations are more momentous than the ones in airports but it seemed an unlucky thing to say.

‘Clocks in railway stations are more momentous than the ones in airports,’ said Serafina.

‘Yes, and here we’ve got one with a black face and one with a white face.’

‘The black face is for tunnel travellers; the white face is from a long time ago.’

I’d booked us into the Hotel Bastille Speria in the Rue de la Bastille where we’d stayed last time: one room, two beds, as specified by Serafina. We had no luggage but our rucksacks, so we took the Métro to Bastille and walked from there. The sky was grey and promising rain. We checked in, then took the Métro to Pére Lachaise.

It was raining when we came out into the street, scattered herds of umbrellas moving slowly or swiftly over the glistening pavements. We had lunch at a brasserie on the corner, then went to the florist next door where Serafina bought three long-stemmed roses and I bought a map of the cemetery. Then we made our way under our umbrella down the Boulevard de Ménilmontant to the entrance of the necropolis.

Once inside we walked steadily uphill on rain-freshened cobblestones and wet brown leaves, tombs on either side of us compounding silence and slow time and the presences of absence. Deaths of all kinds watched us pass: deaths by age and illness and violence; by accident or intention; by one’s own hand or someone else’s; in bed, on the street, on the field of honour or against a wall. Here and there we saw other hooded and umbrellaed pilgrims with maps, heading for Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, Héloïse and Abélard, and others of the many celebrities gathered here. The grey rainlight was like a bell-jar of quiet over all. There was no sign of our friend. ‘It’s so tranquil here,’ I said.

‘Well, all their troubles are behind them, aren’t they.’

Onward and upward we went, past angels and obelisks and yew trees, past the Avenue de la Chapelle and Avenue Transversale No.1. Victor Noir was in Division 92, Avenue Transversale No.2. Rowan trees diminished goldenly to vanishing points in both directions. There was a little huddle of visitors at the tomb on which were plastic-wrapped bouquets of irises and chrysanthemums, a pot of cyclamen, and one gorgeous long-stemmed pink rose emerging from the hat and lying across Victor’s burnished crotch. The huddle dispersed and we moved in for a closer view.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a freshly killed statue before,’ said Serafina.

‘It’s a startler.’ Bronze Victor looked as if he’d been alive only a moment ago, his mouth still slightly open — handsome fellow with a moustache. How am I going to look when I’m dead? I wondered.

‘Looks as if he might have been a good dancer,’ said Serafina.

‘Aren’t you going to give him the roses?’

‘In a moment.’

A slender black woman wearing a sky-blue turban hesitantly approached the tomb. Under her umbrella and the vivid blue her face looked out with a delicately melancholy air. She was carrying a bouquet of red and yellow chrysanthemums.

‘I think she wants to be alone with Victor,’ said Serafina. We moved down the line a little way and she peeped round the corner of a tomb. ‘She’s put the flowers between his legs and she’s rubbing his boots,’ she reported. ‘Now she’s leaving.’

The woman’s departing figure grew small in the rowan-lined Avenue Transversale No.2. The rain was coming down a little harder, and we moved to the tomb next to Victor Noir and sheltered under its portico. ‘What now?’ I said. ‘Are you going to give Victor a rub and make a wish?’

‘Maybe I am, and I’d rather you didn’t watch me while I do it.’

‘Right. Here’s the umbrella.’

‘No, thanks.’

I guessed that she needed both hands free to get a grip on his boots which stuck up like handles and I hoped that Victor was as good against HIV as he was for pregnancy. I turned my back and waited two or three minutes until she tapped me on the shoulder. ‘He must be pretty efficacious,’ I said, ‘if women are still giving him flowers and a rub after all these years. I wonder how many husbands, lovers and babies he’s delivered.’

‘You used to know when to keep quiet, Jonathan. It was one of the nice things about you.’

‘Sorry. Just tell me, are we finished here?’

‘Yes.’

She took my arm; her body rubbed against mine as we walked and the pattering of the rain on the umbrella was a cosy sound but there was nothing said between as we made our way back to the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Our return route from Division 92 was slightly different from the one we’d taken going there. Père Lachaise offered view after view of the shadowy grey houses and monuments of the dead gracefully framed by foreground trees and backed by shapely dark and pale recessions of yew, larch, rowan and chestnut. Fallen chestnuts lay smashed on the shining cobbles. From one of the tombs two bronze arms, as if breaking through the stone, reached up, the hands grasping each other and a wilted iris, ‘DIEU NOUS A SÉPARÉS; DIEU NOUS RÉUNIRA,’ said the chiselled words.

‘Where to now?’ said Serafina. ‘Pigalle?’

‘Right: Au Tonneau.’

The Métro is one of my favourite Paris things; it’s sleeker and shinier than the London Underground; the doors of the carriages open and shut in a snappier way; the whole system inspires confidence that things can be arrived at in an orderly manner.

Au Tonneau is just over the road from the Pigalle Métro station. I hadn’t realised, the first time I saw it, that its emptiness had been taken over by the Ciné Video which has its entrance next door. The barrel-face was even more desolate than the last time, stripped of its Harry Belafonte posters and whatever else had been pasted there. The blind barrel-face with its gaping Gothic mouth seemed a paradigm of everything — all the problems of my life and my self reduced to one simple image: an empty vessel, the wine all gone. And in front of the boarded-up doorway Mr Rinyo-Clacton, debonair in a belted mac, smiling at us from under his umbrella.

‘Look!’ I said. ‘There he is.’

‘I see him,’ said Serafina. ‘What does he want, for Christ’s sake?’

‘He wants us to see him, he’s teasing us. Wait here for me.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Just give him the attention he craves. Maybe he’ll leave us alone after that.’ I crossed the road to where he stood.

I had my knife in my pocket and I felt reasonably comfortable.

‘Bon jour, Jonny,’ he said. ‘Ca va?’

‘Can’t complain. Are you enjoying Paris?’

‘All the more for seeing you and the lovely Serafina. Are you sleeping together again or have I put her off lesser lovers?’

‘If you’re serious about being a great lover you should do something about your breath.’

‘You say that but you don’t mean it; I know what you like. My breath didn’t bother Serafina either. I tell you, that girl is really something — even in the heat of passion with her legs wrapped around you she’s somewhere inside herself that’s cool and far away. Inspired me to heroic efforts which were well and truly appreciated. Maybe we can make it a threesome tonight, eh?’

‘Maybe you can make it a onesome.’

‘Your trouble is that you don’t know how to loosen up and enjoy yourself. Actually, it’s your uptightness that makes you so sexy — if you’re not careful I’ll have your trousers down right here.’

‘It could damage your health, Thanatophile.’

‘Why? Have you picked up something since the last time?’ His mouth was laughing but his eyes were hard. ‘Jonny, Jonny, you’d like to kill me because you’re afraid of me, and you’re afraid because you recognise in me an aspect of yourself that scares you. You’ve surrendered your life to me but you’re trying to keep a tight sphincter. And of course, now that you’ve had the million you can’t help thinking how nice it would be to go on living.’

‘It’s always a pleasure to talk to you,’ I said. ‘We’ll be in touch. Bye bye.’

He mouthed a kiss as I turned and went back to Serafina. ‘What were you two talking about?’ she said.

‘He likes to wind me up, that’s all. He needs to be noticed.’

‘You shouldn’t have given him the satisfaction.’

‘He’d have had more satisfaction if I’d tried to avoid him. Now that he’s had his fix it’s even possible that he won’t turn up again until we’re home.’

We took the Métro to Bastille, bought two glasses and a corkscrew in the Rue St Antoine, acquired two bottles of Cêtes de Beaune in the Rue de Turenne, and arrived shortly at the Place des Vosges which was only sparsely peopled now. I had a couple of carrier bags in my rucksack and I put them on the wet bench for us to sit on.

‘I’m not trying to bring back the past,’ I said as I poured; what a pleasant gurgle. The wine looked full and red and juicy. ‘It’s just that this is my favourite drinking spot. Here’s looking at you, Fina.’

‘Cheers.’

The wine tasted as good as it looked. How marvellous it is, I thought, when something is what you expect it to be. Of course sometimes it isn’t marvellous. No oasis this October.

‘I was just thinking’, said Serafina, ‘of the Kris Kristofferson song where he says, “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday”. I can’t believe anyone would really say that unless he was about to be stood up against a wall and shot. Would you trade all your tomorrows for a single yesterday?’

‘No — I think we’ve still got good tomorrows up ahead, don’t you?’

‘I’ll answer that after we’ve been HIV-tested.’

I was looking past Serafina at one of the four fountains. The trees behind it were artfully massed as in a drawing by Claude Lorraine; against this golden backdrop the water cascaded from the rim of the upper bowl to fill the lower one, and from vents all round the lower bowl it spurted in silvery streams to the basin below. Like time, I thought — my minutes, hours, days and weeks falling, falling, but not recycled like the fountain water. Beyond the golden trees were dark ones, their trunks black in the grey light. Around the square the elegant houses stood and looked historic.

‘The Place des Vosges dates back to the seventeenth century,’ said Serafina. ‘I looked it up in the guidebook. It’s perfectly symmetrical.’

‘That’s a relief Our glasses were empty; I refilled them. ‘Did the visit to Victor Noir do what you wanted it to do?’

‘I don’t know that I can explain the Victor Noir thing — somebody tells you about something and you get a picture in your mind and a feeling. I’d never been to Père Lachaise and I thought of his tomb as being on a little hill away from the others. I was expecting something to come to me there — I don’t know what. And then there he was, lying on top of his tomb in a long row of tombs as if he’d just been dumped there. I thought, Jesus! he’s so dead! Somebody killed him and that was the end of him. It was strange that a statue should make death suddenly so real. It made your death terribly real, your death that you’ve sold to Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Just think — if only you’d never met him! If only you hadn’t sat down on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station!’

‘Nothing to be done about that now; “the past is action without choice”.’

‘That’s deep. Who said it?’

‘Krishnamurti; it’s the one line I remember out of the ten pages I read.’ Our glasses were empty. I divided what remained in the first bottle, then opened the second and topped up the glasses.

‘I’m glad we got two bottles,’ said Serafina. ‘This is not a one-bottle situation.’

‘I hope two are enough. Bottles seem smaller than they used to be.’

‘It’s because the universe is expanding — it’s a relative thing.’

‘Did anything come to you at Victor Noir’s tomb other than the reality of his death and mine?’

‘I don’t know yet, maybe I’ll know later. What about Au Tonneau?’

‘It’s empty.’ I refilled both glasses.

‘We knew that before. What else?’

‘It’s full of absence.’

‘Go on.’

‘Like me.’

‘What absence is that, Jonno?’

‘The absence of you and the absence in me that made you asbent. Absent.’

‘What absence is that, the absence in you that made me asbent? Absent, that made me absent, what?’

‘I don’t know if I have the worods for it. The woordos.’

She moved closer to me and put her hand on my arm. ‘Find the worods and the woordos, Jonno. You were always good with worms. Words.’

The sky was getting darker and there was a little chill in the air. Our glasses were empty and so was the second bottle. ‘What made you absent,’ I said, ‘was the absence in me of what would have made you stay.’

‘What was that? What was absent in you?’

‘A real understanding of what was between us, Fina, and what there was to lose. You’re my destiny-woman and I behaved as if you weren’t. I wouldn’t have wanted you to treat me the way I treated you.’

‘Took a lot of woordos to get there, Jonno.’ She squeezed my arm. The day was completely gone; the sky gave itself over to evening. The park attendant came out of his kiosk, blew his whistle several times and began his gate-closing round. ‘Fermeture du soir!’ he said as he passed us.

We packed up the glasses and the corkscrew and dropped the empty bottles into the litter bin. Serafina took my arm and we found our way to Ma Bourgogne by the corner of the square, where after a short wait we were given a table in a corner. The place was crowded and noisy and the conviviality and good cheer around us made me feel suddenly alone and lost. All through dinner we were mostly silent; I knew that Serafina was thinking, as I was, of the coming night and morning and the rest of our lives.