The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (23 page)

She stared at him, mouth slightly agape.

He hadn’t planned to tell quite so much, but in all likelihood, they’d never meet outside Egypt. Of course, they could continue a
friendship by mail. She seemed to enjoy writing letters and was at ease on the page. But the prospect was unappealing. Rossignol was much more interesting in the flesh, more mercurial, more chemically alive, like a fire. By comparison, her letters emitted only sparks. Anyway, he mused, it was impossible for a man and a woman truly to be friends the way he and Bouilhet were friends. The way he had been a friend with Alfred, the way, mostly, he and Max were friends. Women were more like household accoutrements—walking, talking furnishings with especially alluring appendages and apertures. Except for whores, who had no interest in conversation, other than bantering about price. It was better that way. Prostitutes kept alive his ideal of an honest love unfettered by gingerbread morality. As for Miss Nightingale, she was, apparently, another sort of being—female and an intellectual (unlike Louise, who was more enamored of her own career than of ideas). Plus, Miss Nightingale had a touch of severity that was aesthetically pleasing. He had never met anyone like her. Nevertheless, he was sure that if he told her the truth of himself, she’d be appalled. And there was nothing worse, nothing more enraging, nothing that caused his gut to churn more than the expression of disapproval on a woman’s face. It made him feel like a bad smell. He was especially susceptible to his mother’s outrage, even when it was unjustified.

“I, too, shall never marry,” Florence said, breaking his reverie. She seemed proud of it, her chin tilted up, her expression defiant. He’d never heard a woman say that. “But
continue,
Gustave. I didn’t mean to interrupt, only to second your notion.”

Leaving out his seizures (known only to his family, Bouilhet, and Max), he recited all his recent desolations: failing law school, the tragic year when Alfred, his father, and sister had been flattened one after another, like stick puppets at a saint’s fair. She listened attentively, with murmurs of sympathy. “When I was a younger man, I took refuge in the Romantics,” he explained. “I thought I’d found my life’s work and a way to rise above the petty world—like Byron, Wordsworth.”

“Yes, great poets. And Byron, so heroic, a martyr to Greek freedom.”

He and Alfred had dressed like the dashing Byron for a time. After Gustave dispensed with the cape and scarf, he retained the stance of the man, who was as notorious for his scandals, debt, and sexual appetite as for his verse.

“Later I came to reject the writers who held an optimistic view of humanity. How,” he asked her, “could Rousseau think the common man noble? How could anyone? For the common man is uncouth. Boring. He is married to tradition, distrustful of new ideas, of art itself!” He could feel the blood of his convictions coursing through his neck and head. Even in the twilit room, his face must be red as a boil. “Only Rabelais and Byron wrote in a spirit of malice, only they dared laugh at the human race.”

“It is true,” she said, unperturbed. “The common man is dirty. He cannot read and therefore barely thinks. But how can he rise above his station without education and the right to determine his destiny? That is why I felt so much sympathy with the Italian reformers,” she added. “I knew some of them in France and Switzerland, the great social and political thinkers in exile there.”

Amazing! While he was laboring all night until dawn in his study on
Saint Anthony,
she had been discussing the fate of the Italian states with visionaries. Perhaps
he
was the naive one. Of course, he
had
been in Paris for the revolution of 1848, though not by design. He had ventured out once from Max’s flat to observe from the ramparts but had never participated. The truth was that without the guidance of his friends, he had few opinions about politics. Mostly, he had to admit, he was simply
against
things. He aspired to misanthropy, though he had trouble pulling it off face-to-face. There was always the danger, too, that he would end his days as a sullen windbag. He had to take the measure of himself. He had to succeed. The failure of
Saint Anthony
had nearly broken him.

How much time had passed—half an hour? An hour? The light inside the temple seemed brighter than before, the silence denser, more liturgical.

“Luckily, you have had advantages,” she said. “You are not a common
man and never could be. And most important, you have a calling, which your first failure has not altered.”

“Yes,” he muttered. “But it has made me cynical.”

“Then that is another thing we share,” she announced, looking almost excited. “I have grown cynical myself.”

“About what, Rossignol? The music?”

“No, not that. I’ve grown cynical about people, my own class of people. They are so smug, so comfortable sitting in judgment.”

“The bourgeois herd.”

“Two years ago at church, I . . . well . . . sort of lost my temper and made my opinions known.”

He pricked up his ears. “Oh?”

“The vicar had the gall to say it was extraordinary that Jesus arose from the working classes, as if only the rich had a brain or sentiment.”

“And not at all in the spirit of the man Himself.” He loved the thought of her dressing down a cleric.

“I wanted to shout,
We are all Pontius Pilate here,
but instead, as I went through the receiving line, I told him it would have been more extraordinary if Jesus had arisen from
this
class of people. Whereupon he pinched my elbow and steered me outside and asked why I hated my own kind.” She shook her head with resignation.

“Perhaps your vicar has never actually read the Bible?” he joked.

She did not respond at first, staring grimly at the floor. “I was so angry, but then I thought, ‘Look at me. I have been educated primarily to
enjoy
my life, to play the pianoforte, to speak French, to attend lectures and recitals. Who am I to judge him? I am no better—”

“You are, you are much, much better!” He touched her cheek.

“But all my luxuries and leisure depend upon the drudgery of people who are barely acknowledged as human beings.” Sighing, she looked into his eyes.

“No, you are better. You are nothing like those people.”

“Perhaps you are right. At least I notice the inequity.” She smiled a little. “At least I do not say what the wealthy always say of the poor: ‘Let them suffer here below becau—”

“‘Because Heaven will be their recompense. They are not like us.’ Blah-blah-blah-blah.”

“Exactly!”

They looked at each other beyond the few seconds allowed in the presence of other people, who were always monitoring the length and propriety of a glance. He was aware of the soft skin of her cradling hand. But instead of an awakening in his groin, he felt his bottom itching. In her presence, he couldn’t just reach around and scratch his ass. Pity. Had he ever felt that free in front of Caroline? He couldn’t recall.

“You have laid bare your heart,” she whispered. “Will you keep a secret of mine that only one other human being knows?”

“
Mais oui.
On my life!” He thought back to the day he and Alfred had commingled their blood with finger pricks as boys. Secrets thrilled him.

She yawned and hiccuped, her manners apparently suspended during extreme spiritual distress. Might she next burp or pass wind in his presence? The thought excited him, like the voyeur’s fantasy that the woman he has been secretly watching continues to undress, knowing she is being watched.

“Promise you will not laugh or think me crazy if I tell you.” Her voice was firm and serious.

Could he promise that? He thought he must, whatever he might actually believe. “Again, on my life.”

She scooped up sand from the floor and let it sift through her fingers, gathering her thoughts. “I, too, have a calling.”

At last, he thought, the mysterious source of her despondency and of her fierce commitment would be revealed.

“My calling is from God.” She closed her eyes, rapturous, then opened them, looking stunned. “I mean to say that when I was seventeen, God spoke to me.”

“I see,” Gustave whispered respectfully. He added a weight to the scale in his mind on the side of her craziness. In France, many people conversed with God, most of them wretched peasants desperate to
distinguish themselves from the flock, to leave off being sheep. He was crestfallen to think that brilliant Rossignol was similarly deluded: Joan of Arc redux. He cleared his throat. “Are there many mystics in England?” He might have been asking about the weather.

“Mystics?” It was clear from the tone of her voice that she had never applied the word to herself. “No, I’ve never heard of any. Is that what I am, then, a mystic?” Her voice was shaky, tinged with fear. Or was it anger?

“I don’t know,” Gustave floundered. “That is what we call them in France, the people who speak to God.”

“But I didn’t speak to God!” She lurched forward, her back ramrod straight. “He spoke to
me
. He called me to His service. I had no say in it. I was merely the vessel—”

“I’m so sorry. I hope I haven’t offended you—”

“Offended me? No, but clearly you think me mad.”

Anger, then. She made to move away from him, but he held on to her arm. A rivulet of sweat streaked between his shoulder blades. The room had disappeared from awareness for a time. Now it was stifling again.

“I don’t think you are mad,” he lied. “I am sometimes rude or tactless without meaning to be.” A pressure was building behind his eyes, a headache coming on. Or was he about to have a seizure? He’d never been able to identify the warning signs before he vanished into the black maze of nonexistence. To prevent or at least anticipate future episodes, he tried to remember afterward what he had been doing or feeling. But only afterward, when it felt like he’d died and revived, after a chunk of his life had been severed with an ax. “But please, tell me how and when it happened to you, Rossignol.” If he did have a seizure, would she know what to do?

“Gustave? Are you quite all right?” Her head was inclined toward him, an expression of care on her face so intense it seemed that her whole life force were focused on him in a single beam of attention.

“I am fine.” The pain was receding. He breathed more easily. “I have been thinking that we should swear to have no secrets today, no
shame between us.” Did he dare divulge the secret of his illness? He wanted to, but not quite yet. “I myself have done things I would be ashamed to tell you—”

“But I am not
ashamed
!” She pulled her arm free and scooted away on the floor, horrified, though she did not leave. A wave of gratitude washed over him—gratitude to Philae and its ancient architects. Where but in such a sacred and exotic quarter could this chimerical conversation continue?

“You must forgive . . . my ineptitude.” His words issued from his throat like thread catching on a spool. “I was only saying
I
have secrets, I have things I am ashamed of.” The words kept coming, colored this way, then that, like the endless silk scarf of a magician. “Ashamed of my behavior on occasion with women. I have, in short, sinned. But you! You are blessed. You are blessed that God chose you.” He felt utterly lost. How had one remark altered her mood so sharply? His words lay at his feet, a tangle of knots, a hatful of failed tricks.

“You understand nothing of this event,” she said sharply. “I am not blessed. He called me to His service, but that was twelve years ago and I still do not know what I am to do.” She kicked at the floor, raising a flurry of dust motes that settled erratically, like bits of gold leaf.

It took every drop of his self-control not to laugh: a woman considering suicide because her god was fickle or had a poor memory? He took several deep breaths to vanquish the hoot that hovered in his throat like a sneeze in the nose. He could feel a smile forming in his face, a disembodied grin in the sepulchral gloom. He bit his lip until his eyes teared.

She began to keen, to sob. She covered her face with her hands, as if to block the anguish from issuing forth. He had never seen such a display, not of grief, but of grief denied, of grief beat back with a hammer, of great blockades erected and then broached. He was unable to look away, like an onlooker at a fire. He had paid to watch women masturbate, but that was not nearly as intimate as watching this young Englishwoman try to subdue the beast of her raw feeling.

She looked up, her nose dripping. “It is not a blessing, but a curse.” Her voice was thin as a wire.

He crawled across the space between them and rested his head against her shoulder. Philae held them in its silted-up silence. Barely touching her for fear she’d collapse under the weight of an embrace or move away again, he encircled her with his arms. “I am waiting for the muse to visit me,” he managed to whisper, “just as you are waiting for God to speak to you again.” Were they not both self-made pariahs? He felt himself in complete sympathy with her, as if they
had
mingled their blood in the purity and innocence of childhood.

She wiped her face on her sleeve and, still within the crook of his arm, raised her head and in a small voice asked, “What sins have you committed with women?”

He thought for a moment, considering his options. Did not the location alone cast the whole enterprise in a unique and liberating light? He was inside a derelict temple in Egypt where, for all he knew, orgies had been conducted with sacred whores, and hearts excised and weighed on golden scales. He decided not to consider custom or pride, which could only lead to lies and silence. “Because I cannot betray my calling by marrying,” he began, “I no longer court proper women.”

Florence listened while he explained how disillusioned he had been that Louise, a fellow artist, had tricked him into believing that she yearned for something other than a bourgeois existence when in fact she wanted a husband
and
a lover, and that was not revolutionary in the least. “That marked the beginning of my life as a cynic,” he explained.