Eddie Signwriter (31 page)

She looked up at that and he knew she was disappointed and he shrugged.

She turned back to arranging the flowers.

She said that it was all right.

No, he told her, it wasn’t all right. He told her that he knew the burden that his caution placed upon them. That it made no sense. He’d lived with the possibility of being picked up all his time in Paris, even before he met her, and all his life before that with the tyranny of chance.

She said, “I told you it was all right.”

But he told her again it wasn’t. He told her, “It’s easy to be indifferent when you have nothing to lose,” and how in the last few months before his episode he’d been more free than at any other time. Whatever he had, he’d chosen himself. That perhaps was why he’d been afraid to choose her.

She moved away from the flowers.

“So now do you choose?” she asked cautiously.

“Yes,” he said.

“So then I choose you back,” she said.

They were now standing at the window against the kitchen fixtures, and he reached out and took her hand. She gave him a tired, happy smile.

Then he told her he’d stopped by his old house. That Denis was
gone. He’d almost forgotten the rent money, which he wriggled to get out of his pocket of his jeans.

“A gift from the past,” he said.

He told her that the Refuge was still closed. Nobody was left, though the old man from the Moroccan restaurant had given him a number for Fawad.

She asked him if he was going to phone.

He said that he didn’t know. What for? To try to put that world back together? The Refuge was gone. That life was gone.

She said, “But it’s only gone because it’s gone. Make it again. Isn’t that what Mamadou did, the first time? He came straight back.”

“Why? It will only get broken again.”

“And then somebody else will make it again. And on and on, and in that way it will never stop, it will go on forever.”

He folded the piece of paper into a neat square and put it under the telephone.

“Let’s see tomorrow,” he said non-commitally, though inside he felt lucky to be falling in love with such a wise person.

His employment with Madame la Fleuriste was nothing like the hard work which he was used to. Every now and then there were early mornings, meeting the delivery trucks from the flower depot at around six a.m., before the
quartier
woke up and cars came out and the traffic turned the roads to glue. Sometimes there was heavy lifting—bags of compost as on the first day; pallets of seedlings from the truck; plastic pots stacked like ice cream cones; terracotta moulds packed with newspapers and balanced between multiple layers of plywood, like baking bread. Sometimes, when business was brisk he’d help out thinning leaves, cutting stems, pre-cutting ribbons, plastic and paper wrap. Other times he’d go round with Madame la Fleuriste on the three or four large deliveries she did every week, from the back of the old van she had parked in the back—of metre-high floral constructions in faux-stone urns, which he carried for her into the drawing rooms and lobbies of the neighbourhood’s great residences.

But a lot of the time there were long periods where not much was
to be done. Madame would work away at a small order, or prepare bouquets for supply to the local fruit shops and chemists, and they’d listen to the radio and talk, while he paged through the magazines and papers she bought each morning, and sometimes help her with the less complicated tasks.

She already knew of his interest in painting—from their brief interactions in the previous year, in the days when he stopped by on his way to Bernadette’s and so intrigued her with his remarks on what he’d recently seen in the museums or bookshops she had told him of. She was not surprised to learn, when the topic of conversation shifted to his home, of his previous employment in Accra as a signwriter, which is what led her, after a few weeks, to suggest that he undertake a small commission for her, right here in her shop—a tropical scene, she suggested, on the three walls of one of the side rooms. What she had in mind was a forest, something to go along with the plants she stored there—verdant, brimming, dangerous, secretive, like the forests of Rousseau’s tiger paintings, she said—had he not seen one in any of the museums? (Yes he had.)

For a week then, instead of helping with the flowers, he painted—a forest as she’d asked for, covering the walls, as high as the sky-coloured ceiling, and in which, if you looked closely, there were camouflaged birds, their feathers the colour of leaves, monkeys the colour of bark, butterfly wings in the shadows, eyes in the undergrowth like speckled pebbles.

“This is too beautiful,” Madame la Fleuriste said when she saw it complete. She stood in front of it and laughed out loud.

“But no tiger?” she asked.

“No tigers in Paris,” he said.

She walked around looking at the details.

“Too beautiful,” she said. “There must be more,” but not—she said—for the shop. She said, “This is not for the world,” and would he consider doing the next painting not in the shop, but downstairs—in the cellar, he could paint what he wanted, they would clear it out, clean it, it would all be undertaken just as he directed.

“But why down there?” he asked.

“Let it be something that needs to be found,” Madame said.

“Or not found, but hidden,” she later suggested when he started planning the commission and it occurred to her that the cellar, insulated by three feet of stone from the ears of the world, would be a perfect venue for a reincarnated Refuge de l’Ouest (of which he had told her much over the previous weeks), where its old patrons, dispersed around the city, could meet from time to time, hidden beneath the flagstones of Paris’s wealthiest
quartier
.

And so in the space of a few months Le Refuge Clandestin was established in the cellars beneath the florist. The walls of the narrow staircase leading down from the rear corridor of the shop were painted to resemble the flow of water falling down a chute. The water was painted in strands, like a twisted plait, of which the topmost extended up into the corridor above, where it resembled a scrape mark against the white paint, and gave no hint what lay below.

In the staircase itself, tumbling into the cellar, the water was interspersed with images of flowers that stuck to the strands like burrs, and larger images of the paraphernalia of the shop—the marble figure of a naked lady, stately and oblivious to her descent into the underground cavern, a piano, its keyboard unraveling like a scarf, upended tables, a radio, magazines, birdcages and books, and right at the bottom, a bathtub containing a figure, calmly waving, unambiguously that of Madame la Fleuriste.

The staircase now ended in a small specially constructed space, separated from the rest of the cellar with a thin drywall, and which contained the ordinary contents of the shop’s stores, stacked tightly up to the ceiling. The only signs of anything out of the ordinary were the small angels he painted, surrounding the room at the junction between the walls and ceiling, figured identically to those in the paintings of the medieval galleries of the Louvre, but for their mischievously grinning West and North African faces.

In the Refuge itself, which you entered through the false back of a cupboard behind a pile of compost bags, the fluorescent lights from the ceiling were taken out, and replaced by many small standing and table lamps, which they bought one afternoon in the secondhand
shops in Saint-Denis. Each cast a thin low-wattage pool of light, no two the same, so that when the Refuge was full the room was illuminated in shifting patterns, as the light flowed between the movement of the people, and as a result of which the images on the walls and ceiling shifted in and out of visibility, and appeared to be moving themselves.

The Refuge Clandestin was simply furnished with what could be easily obtained. Aside from the lights, it had three tables with chairs, a small sofa with a Moroccan-style leather table, two large beanbags, and at the back, a counter made of crates and an old door, from which food and drink were served, and where they stored the music that was always playing when every fortnight or so, always on a Saturday, the room was in use.

Over the course of a few weeks the survivors of the original Oberkampf community were able to reestablish contact. Fawad the Algerian was the first, who was in touch with Fawad the Moroccan, who had heard that two of the Senegalese contingent had found a situation in the 11th, who in turn had kept their links with Janetta, who being Beninoise was able eventually to contact a few of the West African contingent.

Nobody knew of the new Refuge other than those who were invited, and those who came as their guests. Given the small size of the Refuge, and the need for discretion, numbers were kept low and people signed up for alternate weekends. Simple plans were established to allow the participants to enter the premises, through the florist shop, without attracting attention. In some cases they borrowed Madame’s small truck, and so passed for a crew from the depot making a late afternoon delivery. Others came dressed up as foreign dignitaries, others as tradesmen, one or two as customers. Madame would always keep the shop open until the last of the guests were in, at around six in the evening, and then would close up and come down to the Refuge herself.

The new Refuge was still under construction when the meetings began. At first, the walls and ceiling of the room were covered by only a light gray wash, to form the undercoat for the depiction of a cavern, in which he intended to paint a number of vignettes, only the first of
which he had completed by the time of the first meeting. Close to the door, it was a scene depicting his train journey across the Sahel, the one end of the train in Bamako, the other edging into the cathedral of Dakar station, and in between the desert, the baobab trees, circling birds, the border post, the family left behind, the hawkers, the small towns. It was Fawad the Algerian who had asked him to explain the picture, and who afterwards suggested he complete the wall with depictions of all the journeys to Paris of the people gathered at the Refuge; and this was how—over a number of months—the walls and ceiling of that room came to be populated with fantastical vignettes of the stories of each of those gathered there: of farms, villages, towns, cities across Africa, of car journeys, desert walks, container ships, overpacked dinghies, mountain hikes, beach landings, sojourns in hospitals, detention centres, safe houses.

The Refuge Clandestin was completed three months after Madame la Fleuriste first thought of transforming her cellar. Sometimes he would go down to work when business in the flower shop was slow, but most of the painting was done in the evenings after work, and on the weekends, when Bernadette could join him. Then they would take down the radio and open the air vents at the back, and the stairwell at the front, which brought a cool breeze flowing through the cellar, and she would keep him company—reading, or studying for her English for Foreigners course, or taking care of letters or bills, her papers spread out around her where she sat cross-legged on the floor.

The patrons of the Refuge would collectively decide whose story would next be figured on the cellar wall, but they left it to the signwriter to interpret in images the stories that they painted in words. Sometimes people might drop by to see the progress of the work, but it was only Bernadette who would be there from start to finish.

She loved to watch him paint, to see these pictures come out of this man who in his own life was so slow to show himself, and so awkward. Painting spared him speech. Whereas he stumbled with words, he could express himself articulately through a vocabulary of images she learned to interpret as the scenes slowly worked their way from the entrance to the Refuge, towards the vents at the back.

“Why are there no people in this town you have drawn?” she would
ask. “What does the smile on this lady’s face mean?” “Why is the bed floating on the sea?” “What are the crying people crying about?” And in his telling her she would know: the loneliness of empty space, the pocketed hands of loss; the meaning of clothes billowing on a washing line; women floating up into the trees; the gutted meat; the orange on an out-held hand; the slimmed eyes of desire that the clenched muscles of the mouth turn to cruelty, then shame.

Into the stories of their friends he implanted his own. Bernadette learned to look for the characters hidden in a crowd, in the corner of a scene, who seemed just slightly out of place, or whose faces were rendered more real by an unexpected detail or gesture, and so hinted at a meaning beyond the paintings themselves. These were the aspects that she asked about. The lady with the outstretched arms, Bible in her hand. The man in the desert on the balcony of his house. The small man with his books. One man driving a taxi—his eyes, she noticed, closed. Another man, fat as a tub, walking, it seemed, through blossoms. And the two women who appeared more than once across different vignettes: in one domestic scene, setting a table together, the younger’s hand caught in midair by the elder’s; in another, as the heads of snakes intertwined; in another still, figured through the window of a building in the background—the younger, standing at a mirror, recognizable from the back by her braids, the elder in her reflection; and in their last appearance, as the cellar was close to completion, at the corner of an image: standing on the top of a misty hill, surrounded by trees, plants, birds, and animals, painted initially in sharp relief, but in the last moment of their creation, late on a Saturday afternoon that he and Bernadette had spent quietly together, obscured in a fine patina so as to be recognizable only in their shape.

It was the sharp smell of the paint thinner that had made Bernadette look up from the magazine she’d been reading, sitting against the wall behind him, as he completed the image. He was standing in front of the mural in process, on a paint-stained sheet with which he protected the floor, his tins around his feet, his thumb hooked in the streaked back pocket of his jeans. In his other hand he held a piece of
cloth which—getting up to see what he was doing—she saw he was dabbing on the image of the two women.