Galilee (68 page)

“Yes.”

It was Zelim,
Cesaria said.
He knows I don't like the light. But he was being overzealous. Zelim? Where are you?

There was a sound off in the far corner of the room like buzzing of bees, and it seemed to my somewhat befuddled eyes that the murky air knotted itself up, and something that resembled a human form appeared in front of me. It was only rudimentary; a slim, androgynous creature with large dark eyes.

Make your peace,
Cesaria said. I assumed the instruction was for me, and I proceeded to apologize but she broke in:
Not you Maddox. Zelim.

The servant bowed his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “The error was mine. I should have spoken to you before I struck you.”

Now both of you can leave me,
Cesaria said.
Zelim, take Maddox into Mr. Jefferson's study and make him a little more presentable. He looks like a schoolboy who's just been in a brawl.

“Come with me,” said Zelim, who by now had reached such a level of corporeality that his nakedness was somewhat discomforting to me, despite the naïve form of his genitals.

I followed him to the door, and was just about to step out when I heard Cesaria call my name again. I looked back. Nothing had changed. She lay as she had, completely inert. But from the direction of her body there came—how can I describe this without stooping to sentimentality—there came a wave of love (there, I've stooped) which broke invisibly but touched me more profoundly than any visible force could have done. Tears of pleasure ran from my eyes.

“Thank you, Mama,” I murmured.

You're very welcome child,
she said,
now go and be tended to. Where's Zabrina by the way?

“She's outside.”

Tell her not to be a ninny. If I were truly dead I'd have every creature in the county weeping and wailing.

I smiled at this. “I think you would,” I said.

And tell her to be patient. I'll be home soon.

M
r. Jefferson's study, as Cesaria had referred to it, was one of the small rooms I had passed by on my way to the bedroom. I was ushered into it by Zelim, whose newfound politeness did nothing to sooth my unease at his presence. His voice, like his appearance, was wholly nondescript. It was as though he were holding on to the last vestiges of his humanity (I say
holding on,
but perhaps it was the other way about; perhaps I was simply witness to the final and happy sloughing off of the man he'd once been). Whichever it was, the sight of him, and the sound of a voice that barely sounded human, distressed me. I didn't want to spend any time in his company. I told him there was nothing he need do for me; I'd quite happily mend myself once I got back downstairs. But he ignored my protestations. His mistress had told him to make good the damage he'd done, and he plainly intended to do so, whether I considered myself an injured party or not.

“Can I get you a glass of brandy?” he said. “I understand you're not a great imbiber of brandy—”

“How do you know that?”

“I listen,” he said. So the rumors were true, I thought. The house was indeed a listening machine, delivering news from its various chambers up to Cesaria's suite. “But this is a bottle we seldom touch. It's potent. And it will take away the sting.”

“Then thank you,” I said. “I will have a little.”

He inclined his head to me, as though I'd done him great service by accepting the offer, and retired to the next room, allowing me the freedom to get up and wander around the study. There was plenty to see. Unlike the rest of the rooms, which were empty, it was filled with furniture. Two chairs and a small table, a writing desk set in front of the window, with its own comfortable leather chair tucked in beneath it, a bookcase, weighed down with sober tomes. On the walls were a variety of decorations. On one hung a crude map, painted on the dried pelt of some unlucky animal: the territory it charted unfamiliar to me. On another a modestly framed drawing, in a very academic style, of Cesaria reclining on a chaise longue. She was dressed prettily, in a high-waisted gown much decorated with small bows. An unfamiliar Cesaria; at least to me. Was this the way she'd looked when she'd been the glory of Paris society? I assumed so. The rest of the pictures were small, undistinguished landscapes, and I
passed over them quickly, saving the chief focus of my attention for the strange object which sat on Jefferson's desk It looked like a large, carpentered spider.

“It's a copying machine,” Zelim explained when he came back in. “Jefferson invented it.” He pulled out the chair. “Sit please.” I sat down. “By all means try it,” he said. There was paper on the desk, and the pen already fitted into the device. Now that I knew its purpose it wasn't hard to fathom how it worked. I raised and dipped my pen—which, courtesy of a system of struts, automatically raised and dipped the second pen, and proceeded to scratch out my name on a second sheet. Glancing over to my right I found my signature replicated almost perfectly.

“Clever,” I remarked. “Did he ever use it?”

“There's one at Monticello he used all the time,” Zelim explained. “This device he used only once or twice.”

“But he definitely used it?” I said. “I mean . . . Jefferson had his fingers around this very pen?”

“Indeed he did. I saw him with my own eyes. He wrote a letter to John Adams, as I remember.”

I couldn't prevent a little shudder of delight, which you might think strange given the divine company I've kept. After all, Jefferson was only human. But that was perhaps the reason I felt the
frisson.
He was mortal stuff, reaching for a vision that was grander than most of us dare contemplate.

Zelim handed me my glass of brandy. “Again, I apologize for my violence. May I wash the blood off your face?”

“No need,” I said.

“It's no trouble.”

“I'm fine,” I told him. “If you want to make amends—”

“Yes?”

“Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About what it's been like for you, over the centuries.”

“Ah . . .”

“You're Zelim the fisherman, aren't you?”

The pale face before me, despite its lack of specificities, seemed to grow troubled. “I don't ever think of that any longer,” he said. “It doesn't seem to be my life.”

“More like a story?” I ventured.

“More like a dream. A very distant dream. Why do you ask?”

“I want to be able to describe everything in my book.
Only everything,
that was my promise to myself. And you're a unique individual. I'd like to be sure I tell it all truthfully.”

“There's nothing much to tell,” Zelim said. “I was a fisherman, and I was called into service. That's an old story.”

“But look what you became.”

“Oh this . . .” he said, glancing down at his body. “Does my nakedness trouble you?”

“No.”

“The longer I live with her the more I tend to androgyny, and the less important clothing comes to seem. I can't remember how I looked any longer, when I was a man.”

“I've got a picture of you in my head,” I said. “On the shore with Cesaria and Nicodemus and the baby. Dark hair, dark eyes.”

“My teeth were good, I do know that,” he said. “The widow Passak used to love to watch me tear at my bread.”

“So you remember her?”

“Better than most things,” Zelim replied. “Better than my philosophies, certainly.” He gazed toward the window, and in the wash of light I saw that he was virtually translucent, his eyes iridescent. I wondered to myself if he had bones in his body, and supposed that he must, given the blow he'd delivered. Yet he seemed so very delicate now; like a frail invertebrate visitor from some deep-sea trench.

“I forgot her for a while . . .” he said, his voice gossamer.

“You mean the widow Passak?”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I moved on through my life, and the love I felt for her . . .” The sentence trailed away; his face fluttered. I didn't prompt him—though I badly wanted to hear what more he had to say on the subject. He was in a deeply emotional state, for all the colorlessness of his voice. I didn't want to disturb his equilibrium. So I waited. At last, he picked up the thread of his ruminations: “ . . . the love I felt seemed to pass away from me. I thought it had gone forever. But I was wrong . . . the feelings I had toward her come back to me now, as though I was feeling them for the first time. The way she looked at me, when the wind came off the desert. The sweet mischief in her eyes.”

“Things come around,” I said. “Didn't you teach that to your students?”

“I did. I used the stars as a metaphor, I believe.”

“The Wheel of the Stars,” I prompted.

Zelim made the faintest of smiles, remembering this. “The Wheel of the Stars,” he murmured. “It was a pretty idea.”

“More than an idea,” I said. “It's the truth.”

“I wouldn't make that claim for it,” Zelim said.

“But the proof of it's right here. You said yourself that your feelings for Passak have come back.”

“I think it may be for the last time,” Zelim replied. “I've run my course, and I won't be rising again after this.”

“What do you mean?”

“When L'Enfant falls—as it will, as it must—and everybody goes out into the world, I'm going to ask Cesaria to put an end to me. I've lived as a man, and I've lived as a spirit, and now I want an end to it all.”

“No more resurrections?”

“Not for me. I think it's what comes naturally, after androgyny. Out of sexlessness into selflessness. I'm looking forward to it.”

“Looking forward to oblivion?”

“It's not the end of the world,” he said with a little laugh. “It's just one man's light going out. And if it's no great loss to me than why should anybody else be upset?”

“I'm not upset, I'm just a little confused,” I said.

“By what?”

I thought about the question for a moment before I replied. “I suppose living here I've got used to the idea of things going on.”

“Or rising again, like your father.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Zelim's features fluttered again, as they had when he'd first begun to talk. His Socratic calm disappeared; he was suddenly anxious. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have—”

“Don't apologize,” I told him. “Just explain.”

“I can't. I'm sorry. It was inappropriate.”

“Zelim.
Explain.”

He glanced back toward Cesaria's chambers. Was he fearful that she'd come to punish him for his indiscretion? If so, his glance reassured him that he was not being overheard. When he looked back at me, his agitation had almost gone. Apparently Cesaria was off on her way to meet with Cadmus Geary.

“I'm not sure I could explain anything where your father's concerned,” he said. “Explanations and gods are mutually exclusive, aren't they? All I can do is tell you what I
feel.”

“And what's that?”

He took a deep breath. His body seemed to grow a little more substantial with the inhalation. “Cesaria's life is empty here. Completely empty. I know because I've shared it with her, day after day after day for the last God knows how many years. It's an empty life. She simply sits at the window, or feeds the porcupines. The only time she steps outside is when one of the animals dies and we have to go out to bury it.”

“I have something of that life myself,” I said. “I know how wretched it is.”

“At least you had your books. She doesn't like to read any longer. And she can't abide television or even recorded music. Remember this is a woman who has been the toast of every great city in the world at some point in her life. I saw her in her glory days, and they were beyond anything you could imagine. She was the very essence of sophistication; the most courted, the most adored, the most emulated woman in the world. When she left a room, they used to say, it was like a kind of death . . .”

“I don't see what this has got to do with Nicodemus.”

“Don't you think it's strange that she stays?” Zelim replied. “Why hasn't she pulled this house down? She could do that. She could raise a storm and trash it in a heartbeat. You know she raises storms.”

“I've never seen her do it, but—”

“Yes you have. It was one of her storms that came in the night your father mated Dumuzzi.”

“That I didn't know.”

“She was angry because Nicodemus was showing more interest in his horses than he was in her, so she conjured a storm that laid waste to half the county. I think she was hoping the animals would be struck dead. Anyway, my point is this: if she wanted to bring this house down she could. But she won't. She just stays. She watches. She
waits.”

“Maybe she's preserving the house for Jefferson's sake,” I suggested. “It's his masterpiece.”

Zelim shook his head. “She's waiting for your father. That's what I believe. She thinks he's coming back.”

“Well he'd better be quick about it,” I said. “Because if the Gearys get here there'll be no more miracles—”

“I realize that. And I think so does she. After all these years of idling, suddenly things are urgent. This business with Cadmus Geary, for instance. She would never have stooped to meddle with one of the Geary family before this.”

“What's she going to do to him?”

Zelim shrugged. “I don't know.” His gaze left me; he looked off toward the window again. “But she can be very unforgiving.”

If he had more to say on the subject of her lack of compassion, he didn't get a chance to say it. There was light rapping on the study door and Zabrina appeared. She'd sought out, and found, some comfort for her anxieties about Cesaria. She carried not one but two slices of pie in between the fingers of her right hand, and like a card-sharp manipulating aces at a poker table, delivered first one then the other to her mouth.