you were from Nîmes.”
“I was born in Nîmes. The town was settled originally by the Roman legions that had taken Egypt from Antony and Cleopatra. When we go there, we will walk through the ancient part of the town, see the city’s coat of arms, which shows a crocodile leashed to a palm tree, representing the founders’ capture of Egypt.”
When we go there, when we go there.
“Caesar Augustus…” Jacques said, and then interrupted himself while he lit a cigarette. She reached up and took it from between his lips, took a drag, returned it to him.
“Caesar Augustus, no fool he, knew that having overthrown one great empire, those legions might take it into their heads to overthrow another—to wit, his own. But of course he did not want it said that he didn’t treat his loyal soldiers well—so he granted them tracts of land, but in the far-off south of Gaul. These demobilized soldiers of Augustus brought with them a colony of Egyptian slaves, whose descendants intermarried with the local population, with the sons and daughters of the Romans. The researches of Friar Mendel have let us know that ancestry does not mix smoothly, a pureed soup, but rather in discrete clumps. Even now, nearly two millennia later, a child will sometimes be born with half-almond eyes and olive skin. I was such a child. I warn you—I have an ancient nature, cold and pitiless—exacting.”
“I’ve been warned.” She smiled. (Years later, he would say, “I told you, very early on, about my Egyptian nature. You mustn’t wail: you knew what you were getting into.”)
The train dropped them off in mid-afternoon. A few porters and taxi-drivers managed to rouse themselves to implore their business. Jacques shook them off, and they set out, their hands clasped, walking along the narrow streets, the flat planes of ancient houses and churches looming above them. The houses were shuttered, the occasional muffled cry of a cooped-up child issuing forth from behind the stone walls. Their footsteps sounded against the cobblestones: the echoes of their footsteps. The heavy mid-day meal had been eaten. The pots and pans and plates and saucers had been washed and were now set on racks to dry in the still afternoon air. Tubs of mucky water festered, waiting to be dumped in the back garden, while the inhabitants of these houses drowsed on divans and daybeds.
As their elongated shadows walked ahead of them, she rocketed out of time, saw this walled city as a ruin, when humanity itself would have ceased to exist, when these stone walls, these cobblestoned streets, might be observed by the eye of a rook, perched atop the wreckage of one of the turrets above them.
The servant who opened the door, inclined her head and said, “Mme. Melville, Monsieur.” Simone fought to keep a grin from her face.
“Did you tell them we were married?” Simone whispered, as they were climbing the uneven flight of stairs towards Joë’s redoubt.
Jacques shrugged: “People make assumptions.”
“Wouldn’t it be more practical for him to have a room on the ground floor?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth: practical, I sound like a peasant, not like the lover of an intellectual.
The smell of beeswax candles, the scent given off by the polished mahogany of his bedstead, the bookcases, the musty odor of antique Oriental carpets—later, Joë would tell her that the most threadbare of them had been brought back from the Seventh Crusade by an ancestor, but she wouldn’t know whether he was telling the truth or one of his delightful stories. His room seemed less a sickroom than a grotto within a church. (Simone had always been drawn to those alcoves tucked away within the majesty of cathedrals, half-hidden places safe from the masculine pomp and business of the popes and archbishops, where it was possible to imagine Mary squatting and straining to expel the holy infant in a shed which smelt of cow farts and damp hay.) Joë sat upon his bed as if it were a throne, thick blinds drawn against the afternoon light. A single kerosene lamp on the bed table illuminated the magnificent dome of his forehead. The shape of his head surprised her: she’d made a picture of him in which he was elongated, a gaunt Donatello.
“Ah, Simone! You must come to me, yes, closer, closer, I can’t come to you—closer, closer, yes, there’s only a single chair, let Jacques have that, you come sit right here on the bed, it’s all right, I won’t hurt you. I don’t bite. That is,” he giggled, “unless you want to be bitten.
“Closer, closer. I want you next to me. The female body gives off a heat the male body never does. Let me smell you. Yes, yes. Jacques told me all about you. Oh, and you are just as beautiful as he said. Did he tell you all about me, too?”
“He told me you were a quite talented poet.”
“Ah, no, I am shattered. ‘Quite talented’? Bah! Look, there’s my heart, it’s lying there in shards on the floor. In the military hospital, the chief surgeon gave me two cyanide capsules, he said, ‘We’ve done all we can, if life ever becomes unbearable for you…’ They’re in the drawer, fetch them for me, would you? I thought I could endure anything—pain, paralysis, isolation—but faint praise, that I can’t abide. Go, go, the top drawer, right over there—”
“She doesn’t know you are teasing her,” Jacques said.
Joë fluttered his long-fingered right hand above his heart, a gesture that might have been cribbed from the repertoire of an actress in a melodramatic film, and declared, “I am not joking.”
“Come, come, Joë, the poor girl is on the verge of tears.”
“Perhaps suicide isn’t the right course of action here. I think instead that I ought to challenge you to a duel. Yes, at dawn, in the grove just past the duck pond. ‘Quite talented!’ Did he tell you, Simone, my love, that my father’s head man has rigged up the most wonderful contraption for me, a combination bicycle and bath chair. I turn the pedals with my hands?” He began to mime the motions he made while propelling his device, counting, as if measuring off paces, “One-two-three—what’s the customary number of paces one takes before drawing one’s weapon? Is it five or ten? Simone, you’ll be my second, won’t you?”
“I don’t—I really don’t see what—”
“Joë, I warned you, she really is an innocent, a child, she’s not used to the monstrous egos of poets. And anyhow,” Jacques said, holding up his two hands as if surrendering, “I didn’t describe you as a ‘quite talented poet.’ She just doesn’t understand the subtle gradations.”
“I’m not a child,” Simone protested. “I have two children. I have traveled to Istanbul. Twice. I have overseen a villa with a considerable staff. I hardly think it is fair to talk about me in this manner.”
“Ah, Simone, Simone, you must forgive me. I’m simply terrible. I create these little dramas—here, let me put my head in your lap”—and Joë leaned forward, grasping hold of his legs and shoving them to the side—“yes, there we go, now stroke my head as if I were your puppy, your bad little dog. You forgive me everything, don’t you? I rather treat this little room as my kingdom, or perhaps my laboratory—”
“Jacques told me, he said that I must know, that you didn’t have any truck with small talk, no how-was-your-journey and I-hope-the-weather-will-be-fine-during-your-visit. That, well, you didn’t know how much time you had left, so you lived your life, conducted your relations, with great urgency. But I expected you to be—well—”
“Saintly?”
