How mad I must be, you will think. You have no choice. Is this not your obligation? Are you not obliged to believe that no one, no adulterer, thief, demoniac, or murderer, is beyond the reach of grace? And would it not be madness itself to withhold oneself from grace?
I concede: to withhold oneself, to elect to cut oneself off from grace, that would be madness. But to know that one has cut oneself off, has done so already, to know and avow what one has done—is that madness or the simple acknowledgment of fact?
What I have yet to tell you must be told. It is what is required.
THIRTY-EIGHT
After Mathieu found me at the café and set the article in front of me, I took the next train to Nevers. The train seemed at first to drift from the Gare de Lyon, gathering speed only imperceptibly but then faster and faster. I felt as though we were falling. Once in my seat I opened the half liter of vodka I’d bought near the station, swallowing its clear flame as a man across the aisle shot me puckered glances.
The vodka dissolved all sensation of movement. I did not feel that I was leaving Paris but that Paris was being hauled out of me, in clumps and slabs, in snarls of swerving rail, knots of roadway and wire. For a long hour a stupor enfolded me until a river—the Loire itself, I realized—veered suddenly into view, hammered with sunlight. Appearing and reappearing through the bare trees, the river seemed in its languor to sap the train’s speed, dragging it first to a crawl, then at last to a stop alongside the station platform in Nevers. Nevers, where Miriam was born and where she had chosen to die.
—
The bottle had vanished, and I was standing in the shadow of the station’s concrete facade, when a hand fastened to my arm. From a derelict’s mouth, an incomprehensible request reeked forth and repeated itself several times until I understood. “Monnaie, monnaie,” he was saying: Change, change.
I jerked my sleeve free. Others like him sprawled around. Two junkies slouched behind a concrete planter, hugging their knees to their chests. Alongside them, curled on a patch of cardboard, a mongrel shivered, connected by a length of string to a girl pierced and dreadlocked, no more than sixteen or seventeen but heavily pregnant, her coat unbuttoned where her belly pushed through. A fine rain stung my face. The derelict pulled my sleeve again. “Quelques sous, monsieur…” A couple of coins.
I reached into my pocket and withdrew a stack of coins. “Quincaillerie,” I said to him—hardware store—showing him the money in my palm but snatching it away when he reached for it. “First you bring me there,” I said. “Then I give you the money.”
Without releasing my arm, he dragged me across a roadway into an upsloping tangle of cobbled streets. Abruptly he stopped at a storefront. The hand that had grasped my arm closed over the coins, and the man reeled away.
It was a small storefront, in an old building. Had this been the place Miriam had found? Inside, the gloom smelled of rust and turpentine. A shopkeeper in a flowered housecoat emerged from a back room.
Was there anything monsieur needed? Eh ben, nothing at all? Chain? What kind of chain? Monsieur would find chain on the far wall. On spools, by the rope. What gauge did monsieur require? How heavy? This one, obviously, was the heaviest. She had no idea: perhaps two kilos per meter. What length did monsieur require?
I stared at the chain. The links swam and divided, and I had to cover one eye with my hand to keep the room from spinning. Had Miriam stood here herself? Had this shopkeeper asked what madame required? Had the shopkeeper asked what madame planned to do with such a quantity of chain?
Monsieur…? Monsieur is not ill, I hope.
Such a quantity of chain. The weight of it. How had she brought it down to the river? And the heavy flywheel, where had she found that?
“Ah! No chain after all? Very well, monsieur. A chisel instead? A chisel and hammer?” With exasperation she turned from the spools and gestured toward a different aisle. She made no further attempt at conversation, and I paid for my hammer and chisel. When I asked her to direct me to the nearest liquor store, with a snort she vanished into the back office.
—
And then it was night, and I was in a park, almost like a fairground, some sort of bandstand or carousel in the distance. I must have found a liquor store because I was aware that there was a half-empty bottle cached in the ivy behind my bench. The night was cold, but I was not, warmed by the vodka burning off in my lungs. In my hand was a paper bag, rumpled, weighted. Inside the bag I found a hammer and chisel and only then remembered the store. After pocketing the tools, I put the bottle in the bag and set out, allowing the slope of the streets to guide me down to the river, to the bridge.
It must have been very late, or very early in the morning. Neither car nor passerby interrupted my work, and the mist blotted up the ringing of my chisel as it cut into the stone of the parapet. My fingers warmed to the chisel and the figures took on their crude form, rough like a homemade tattoo:
ML12III90
There it was, my blunt little epitaph,
