A band of juvenile delinquents marched by, singing.
'Look at the moon,' one of them called.
A used contraceptive came floating along the stream. A girl, built like a garbage-truck driver and holding in one hand a sodden brassiere which trailed behind her, trudged after the rubber, head down.
Somewhere else a traveling clock chimed seven. 'It is Tuesday,' said an old man's voice, half-asleep. It was Saturday.
But about the night-park, near-deserted and cold, was somehow a sense of population and warmth, and high noon. The stream made a curious half cracking, half ringing sound: like the glass of a chandelier, in a wintry drawing room when all the heat is turned off suddenly and forever. The moon shivered, impossibly bright.
'How quiet,' said Stencil.
'Quiet. It's like the shuttle at 5 p.m.'
'No. Nothing at all is happening in here.'
'So what year is it.'
'It is 1913,' said Stencil.
'Why not,' said Profane.
Chapter Fourteen
V. in love
I
The clock inside the Gare du Nord read 11:17: Paris time minus five minutes, Belgian railway time plus four minutes, mid-Europe time minus 56 minutes. To Melanie, who had forgotten her traveling clock - who had forgotten everything - the hands might have stood anywhere. She hurried through the station behind an Algerian-looking facteur who carried her one embroidered bag lightly on his shoulder, who smiled and joked with customs officials being driven slowly to frenzy by a beseeching mob of English tourists.
By the cover of Le Soleil, the Orleanist morning paper, it was 24 July 1913. Louis Philippe Robert, duc d'Orleans, was the current Pretender. Certain quarters of Paris raved under the heat of Sirius, were touched by its halo of plague, which is nine light-years from rim to center. Among the upper rooms of a new middle-class home in the 17th arrondissement Black Mass was held every Sunday.
Melanie l'Heuremaudit was driven away down the rue La Fayette in a noisy auto-taxi. She sat in the exact center of the seat, while behind her the three massive arcades and seven allegorical statues of the Gare slowly receded into a lowering, pre-autumn sky. Her eyes were dead, her nose French: the strength there and about the chin and lips made her resemble the classical rendering of Liberty. In all, the face was quite beautiful except for the eyes, which were the color of freezing rain. Melanie was fifteen.
Had fled from school in Belgium as soon as she received the letter from her mother, with 1500 francs and the announcement that her support would continue, though all Papa's possessions had been attached by the court. The mother had gone off to tour Austria-Hungary. She did not expect to see Melanie in the foreseeable future.
Melanie's head ached, but she didn't care. Or did but not where she was, here present as a face and a ballerina's figure on the bouncing back seat of a taxi. The driver's neck was soft, white: wisps of white hair straggled from under the blue stocking cap. On reaching the intersection with the Boulevard Haussmann, the car turned right up rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. To her left rose the dome of the Opera, and tiny Apollo, with his golden lyre . . .
'Papa!' she screamed.
The driver winced, tapped the brake reflexively. 'I am not your father,' he muttered.
Up into the heights of Montmartre, aimed for the most diseased part of the sky. Would it rain? The clouds hung like leprous tissue. Under that light the color of her hair reduced to neutral browns, buffs. Let down, the hair reached halfway over her buttocks. But she wore it high with two large curls covering her ears, tickling the sides of her neck.
Papa had a strong bald skull and a brave mustache. Evenings she would come softly into the room, the mysterious place walled in silk where he and her mother slept. And while Madeleine combed the hair of Maman in the other room, Melanie lay on the wide bed beside him, while he touched her in many places, and she squirmed and fought not to make a sound. It was their game. One night there had been heat lightning outside, and a small night bird had lit on the windowsill and watched them. How long ago it seemed! Late summer, like today.
This had been at Serre Chaude, their estate in Normandy, once the ancestral home of a family whose blood had long since turned to a pale ichor and vaporized away into the frosty skies over Amiens. The house, which dated from the reign of Henri IV, was large but unimpressive, like most architecture of the period. She had always wanted to slide down the great mansard roof: begin at the top and skid down the first gentle slope. Her skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe matte against a wilderness of chimneys, under the Norman sunlight. High over the elms and the hidden carp pools, up where Maman could only be a tiny blotch under a parasol, gazing at her. She imagined the sensation often: the feeling of roof-tiles rapidly sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump, the wind trapped under her blouse teasing the new breasts. And then the break: where the lower, steeper slope of the roof began, the point of no return, where the friction against her body would lessen and she would accelerate, flip over to twist the skirt - perhaps rip it off, be done with it, see it flutter away, like a dark kite! - to let the dovetailed tiles tense her nipple-points to an angry red, see a pigeon clinging to the eaves just before flight, taste the long hair caught against her teeth and tongue, cry out . . .
The taxi stopped in front of a cabaret in the rue Germaine Pilon, near Boulevard Clichy. Melanie paid the fare and was handed her bag from the top of the cab. She felt something which might be the beginning of the rain against her cheek. The cab drove away, she stood before Le Nerf in an empty street, the flowered bag without gaiety under the clouds.
'You believed us after all.' M. Itague stood, half-stooping, holding the handle of the traveling bag. 'Come, fetiche , inside. There's news.'
On the small stage, which faced a dining room filled only with stacked tables and chairs, and lit by uncertain August daylight, came the confrontation with Satin.
'Mlle. Jarretiere'; using her stage name. He was short and heavily built: the hair stuck out in tufts from each side of his head. He wore tights and a dress shirt, and directed his eyes parallel to a line connecting her hip-points. The skirt was two years old, she was growing. She felt embarrassed.
