A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (7 page)

The voice of the old man broke into my thoughts: But there’s little sense in preserving these books for posterity. I tell you, the day they lose their perishable nature they will cease to interest us. Only through their mortality do they live in us.

I instantly thought of the Web – which is nowhere and everywhere, a well of immortality. As if he could read my thoughts, as if we were already at a level where words were useless, he added: I’m told in cities these days there’re invisible libraries where everything is stored in dockets that don’t grow old, aren’t
destroyed by the excesses of time or water, heat or cold, that exist yet not exist at the same time. Of course, there isn’t a need of such a system up here. An old friend who is a librarian at a city college came visiting last year. Unlike previous times, he said, the boundaries of information have now become porous, that a new age had dawned, an age where one could go anywhere with a click of a button.

He was now looking into the distance where broad beams of light were pouring through the glass ventilators. Believe me, he spoke again, all this speed, this information is our curse. We suffer from it and in the end will die of it.

Later he told me how in the night when his sight failed him he could locate a book simply by directing his thoughts to it. With him I saw, as time moved on, what I had always known – that books cast a spell too. The last bit of magic left to us.

I asked him if I could look around. He nodded his small head and, dismissing me, promptly returned to his task of smothering sheets with slim purple letters that he formed with great attention and a little stress.

Leaving him to his work, I went past tall cabinets looking for a book that may have interested me. In one place I found an old book by Novalis and began to leaf through its pages that were beginning to come apart from the spine, uttering aloud a phrase now and then. The man’s voice filled the silence: Novalis. Good choice. Not even a ghost has touched it in years.

I turned round and saw that he hadn’t moved from his place. What was more, he hadn’t even raised his head and was absorbed as before. But how then could he tell? I know them, my books, very well, his voice came from somewhere far away. I haven’t spent these last many years for nothing. I can even tell them from the sound they make.

It left no doubt that he still possessed a sharp ear which allowed him his little amusement. I asked if I could borrow the book for a while.

We shook hands, and he asked me to come again. Then he spoke aloud the name I had given him. At that moment, for the first time in years, I was reminded of Tahiti, the Luxembourg Gardens. Strange thing memory is! De Quincey was right. Nothing goes away. All the ghosts dance around us in a circle. Forever and ever.

As I descended the hill, a dog began to follow me. Eyes with a sombre look in them, he was wasting away for lack of food. I had nothing to offer the poor beast, but I took him along. Reaching the fork, I went down towards the bazaar. I came to a tea-stall, big glass jars with tin lids lined its counter. Here I bought a pack of biscuits and fed the dog. He ate hurriedly, without rest. Three boys playing marbles nearby watched the spectacle with interest. Once full, the dog receded to a corner and closed his eyes. I had little inclination to walk down further and turned back to the cottages. No sooner had I begun than I found the dog yet again on my trail. However, by the time I reached the cottage, he had given me a slip.

With no desire to eat, I went straight to my room and stretched out on the bed. In no time, I had fallen into a deep sleep.

It was already evening. I asked for tea. Watching the vapours rise from the cup, a thought came to me. Somewhere in that thought was a way to begin again. How long has it been then? I rolled the word in my mouth.

I found some blank sheets, and settled down to write. Something. Anything. I was drawn back in time to that gloomy afternoon in London when I had written those first words. If I could only bring back some of that desire, that amazement.

The Novalis lay on the table. I stared at it awhile. Then I began. How else, if not with these mountains, and with this settlement so delicately sewn into them?

VII

Sleep came easily that night. Sleep carried me far off into a deep dark well where nothing could reach me. The past was one vast plain of sleep and dream, an immense steppe that would slowly come to cover everything.

All the same there remained the small matter of a meeting. Had the boat ride been for real? The image warmed a distant nerve somewhere.

The sun shining through the large windows was troubling me, with effort I helped myself out of bed and went into the balcony. I wasn’t expected at the Luxembourg until noon, so I consumed the hours unhurriedly. I shaved, took a long slow shower, and ate a breakfast of toasts and cereals and coffee. Then I went out into the street. Soon I was walking along Boulevard de Port Royal where at that hour the traffic was light. It is, however, a task to keep the mind free of thoughts – thoughts of any kind. It requires an unswerving faith in the path given us. I had little of it to spare at the time. With each step a slow ache rose in me. For once, I even thought of abandoning the meeting and turning back, yet, unsure, I kept walking.

I see her now. She has the demeanour of a queen, dressed in a blue sleeveless blouse and an asymmetrical skirt that flutters about her legs. It doesn’t take much from me to surrender. Thoughts evaporate and I begin to feel warm again. She has not seen me and is still looking away, towards the gardens. My voice startles her a little, just a little. She kisses me on the cheek. When she moves away, part of a café’s striped awning is visible in the curve of her neck. This is how, I think, paintings are born.

We are in the park already. She is telling me something she read in the papers. But she cuts it off abruptly, it has just occurred to her that she doesn’t know my name. No, don’t tell me, she pleads, when I try to speak. We will find one for you. A new one. The old name won’t do. There is mischief in her voice
and a swing in her step. Alright, I say, and allow her time. She seems to turn a few names in her head before she settles on one. Because you write too, she tells me.

We found two empty chairs next to the pond, where not far from us some children played with their tiny yachts and paper-boats. People lounged here and there, many walked leisurely round the palace enjoying the sun. Under a palm tree – so pleasing to the eye that it appeared artificial – a young couple kissed passionately. Birds cooed in the green lawns and amid the flowers that circled them.

I tell her about what I write. Crisp clean books. No philosophy, no moral in tow. About stars at dawn and wind through the pines, that sort of thing. Oh, I see now, she joins in. You’re an artist. A real one. Always aloof. Not caring much about people. The world and its horrors. Well, nothing wrong in that.

But I do care about people, I object. I do care. That’s why I write what I write.

How could I explain? I try anyway. I tell her that art has a precise function. To offer a glimpse of what it is
to be
. Every artist, every poet knows this and strives for this. All his attempts are to catch, if only fleetingly, a pure image, or even a shimmer of it. But, alas, this isn’t an easy task – not by a long shot. Only art that is playful can begin to move towards this end, content that it is to simply flirt with life, not arrest it.

She appears to see my point. And anyway, she says, she was just joking. Her face though gives off a thoughtful look. A few very white clouds move unhurriedly across the sky. Then she asks if I will read to her one of my stories.

Later she tells me about the poetry she loves, about her life in Amsterdam, where she worked at a flower shop, where she read Rilke, Keats, Emily Dickinson, even Whitman, by the canal when the day was warm, where she grew enchanted with their verse and forgot to tend to business properly, where the lady who owned the shop was nice to her, where poetry was her sole indulgence,
where she read on Sundays in her small attic-room, where she stretched on the bed and stared at the roof moving images in her head, where she prepared her dinner over an old stove and ate silently by herself, where she spoke aloud those lines to the night sky. Oh, how pleasant it was then.

She doesn’t know why she came here. It seems a long time. An unexplained impulse. Or wait – why should she not tell – there was the dream. A vision perhaps. The night was cold and she had left the old stove burning to warm the room a little. Soon she was asleep. Then, all of a sudden, she heard a man’s voice call her name. What was her name then? Didn’t it begin with an E? Erica. Elinita. Anyway it isn’t important. The voice roused her and she nearly jumped in bed, looking for its source. In the dim light of the stove, she saw a velvet curtain. It was slightly parted and behind it was some sort of an iron structure woven intricately with thick iron threads. From somewhere far off came the sound of moving water. The voice called again, distant this time, layered in the murmur of water. But now she understood it all. The Eiffel. The Seine. Paris, it seems, was beckoning her.

What a tale she wove. What a lament of longing. A voice imploring her to pass through a magic-curtain. From Amsterdam to Paris in three steps!

We both break into a sudden raucous laughter. Now I am certain I will never know what happened the night before. That man must already be on his way to Egypt. She is like a book in an unfamiliar script. I can love it, but I can’t read it. Then, like a stab, the thought pierces me – why of all places was she sitting next to the river, so close to the Tower?

My musing was interrupted by a slight commotion nearby. One of the boys, going a little too far in his adventure, had fallen into the water head first, taking down his tiny yacht with him. He was quick to find his bearing and stand up. Standing waist deep in water assessing his loss, he cut a tragic figure. But the woman who I suppose was his mother did not share my sentiments.
She pulled him out of the water and gave him a generous beating, which the boy received with what appeared to me a mix of stoicism and gratitude.

Love is a double-edged sword, she says to me. There’s always a chance that you may cut yourself deeply.

VIII

We walked past the palace and then turned left from where, amid two lines of maples, the dome of the Panthéon entering the sky finished the picture quite agreeably. Crossing the Médicis Fountain, we came out into a narrow street. A light wind was blowing and the streets lay more or less deserted, buildings quiet, except some voices that erupted here and there from a shop or a tavern. People who passed us in the street looked at us with smiling eyes. A smell like that of ripe oranges wafted through the air and excited me. How perpetually surprising was the day with all its vicissitudes.

Exchanging one street for another we soon reached St-Germain-des-Prés. It was beaming with activity at that hour. Although the cobblestones pinched through my heelless moccasins, the air certainly had something encouraging about it. We went into a brasserie and ordered lunch. She ate with appetite, directing all her attention to the fare before her. This gave me the occasion to observe her. My mind drifted back to what she had told me. I recalled how on the previous day she sat reading Mallarmé next to the river, and how she had dismissed me without a thought. I had not held her interest for a moment then, passing through her eyes like all else that is routine passes through them, without stimulating the mind. Yet here I was, watching her, thinking about her, trying to forge a link between dream and reality.

She has caught me in my thoughts. To top it all, I have hardly eaten anything. She probes me. I tell her nothing is the matter.
Now I must swiftly recover. For she is still watching me, straw in her mouth, sipping her iced-tea. I order a café au lait. I slide back into the chair, rest my elbows on its lacquered arms, and coolly look around. A girl is sitting alone in a corner, dexterously punching the keys of her mobile phone, neglecting the cup before her.

I go back to her story. Surely, there’s an image worth rescuing. I see her walk, arm in arm, with the man whose face I cannot see into the fading Parisian sun. And it is there, I think, I will begin my narrative, in the backwards: beginning with the two silhouettes growing dim in the distance as the sun once more leaves us in darkness to settle our abstruse, shadowy affairs.

But we are inexplicably open to oversimplify our desires. I was hopelessly unaware then of how the dice would roll. It rolled sooner than I had expected, and there I was – entering her story. Yet I did not write it for a long time, and when finally I did, she had become but a phantom floating through its pages, shrouded in mystery.

The silence is growing. I must do something. So I ask her about the plan for the evening. She gives it out in two words – the tango. The word fills me with dread. I can already feel my legs stiffen. Lewd dance of the slums.

Ah, the tango, I say finally. No need to say more. She has already sensed it. A smile is entering her face.

An old woman has seated herself on the adjoining table. She is observing us not without interest. Her hands rest on its edge, with the index and middle fingers of the right she drums rhythmically on the left closed into a fist. I smile at her and she smiles back.

We left the café and began to walk along Boulevard Saint-Germain. We talked, browsed books at second-hand dealers, discussed fashion as we walked past the mannequins put to display in store windows. Time seemed to gallop. Or was it not moving at all? It did not matter. Upon reaching the end of the
boulevard, I offered to take her to Musée d’Orsay. But once near the museum we changed our minds. It was about six in the evening. The sun already appeared vague and decrepit, and a half moon was slowly forming in the sky. We found a bench close to the river. Then I told her a story I had written a few months ago. Slowly, the world, like a ball pushed into a dark corner, seemed to roll about us into the night.

A little after eight we reached the club in Montmartre. Her friend Amelio, the musician, had been informed beforehand. This Amelio, I was given to understand, could play many instruments, a virtuoso in the true sense of the word. Inside the lighting was dim, interspersed with thin red rays, as if made of fine dust, whose source you could not divine. At the time, there weren’t many people in the club. Tables lay more or less vacant, and those present were all around the bar. Some were perched on stools, drinking and talking freely. Others stood in groups of two and three in dark corners. The air was still, but not stifling. Someone was playing a trombone. The notes emerged from the organ and moved sluggishly in a queue, the newer ones prodding the older ones, till they reached me. There was no sign of Amelio.