umbrella with a violet canopy is strapped to her luggage. The handle is gold, no thicker than a pencil. No polish on her fingernails. She sits motionless now and stares out the window, her mouth curved in a vague expression of resignation. The little girl who is opposite me cannot take her eyes from her.
I begin to look out the window. We are coming close now. Finally, in the distance, against the streaked sky, a town appears. A single, great spire, stark as a monument: Autun. I take my bags down. I have a sudden, little spell of nervousness as I carry them along the corridor. The whole idea of coming here seems visionary.
Only two or three people get off. It’s not yet noon. There’s a single clock with black hands that jump every half-minute. As I walk along, the train begins to move. Somehow it frightens me to have it go. The last car passes. It reveals empty tracks, another
The Wheatlands’ house is in the old part of town, built right on the Roman wall. First there is a long avenue of trees and then the huge square. A street of shops. After these, nothing, houses, a Utrillo-like silence. At last the Place du Terreau. There’s a fountain, a trifoil fountain from which pigeons are drinking, and looming above, like a great, beached ship: the cathedral. It’s only possible to glimpse the spire, studded along the seams, that marvelous spire which points at the same time to the earth’s center and also the outer void. The road leads around behind. Here many windows are broken. The lead frames, formed like diamonds, are empty and black. A hundred feet farther is a small, blind street, an
It’s a large, stone house, the roof sinking, the sills worn. A huge house, the windows tall as trees, exactly as I remember it from a few days of visiting when, on the way up from the station I had a strange conviction I was in a town I already knew. The streets were familiar to me. By the time we reached the gate I had already formed an idea that floated through my mind the rest of the summer, the idea of returning. And now I am here, before the gate. As I look at it, I suddenly see, for the first time, letters concealed in the iron foliage, an inscription: VAINCRE OU MOURIR. The VAINCRE is missing its c.
Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in the blue of autumn, it reappears, this old town, provincial autumn that touches the bone. The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four—the years turn dry as leaves.
[2]
THIS BLUE, INDOLENT TOWN. Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels lying in the corners. The uneven curbstones, their edges worn away. A town of doctors, all with large houses. Cousson, Proby, Gilot. Even the streets are named for them. Passageways through the Roman wall. The Porte de Breuil, its iron railings sunk into the stone like climbers’ spikes. The women come up the steep grade out of breath, their lungs creaking. A town still rich with bicycles. In the mornings they flow softly past. In the streets there’s the smell of bread.
I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed. Three boys on motorbikes going by, almost holding hands. And then the pure, melancholy, first blue of morning begins. The air one can bathe in. The electric shriek of a train. Heels on the sidewalk. The first birds. I cannot sleep.
I stand in line in the shops, no one notices. The girls are moving back and forth behind the counters, girls with white faces, with ankles white as soap, worn shoes going at the outside toe, dresses showing beneath the white smocks. Their fingernails are short. In the winter their cheeks will be splotched with red.
“
They wait for me to speak, and of course it all vanishes then. They know I’m a foreigner. It makes me a little uneasy. I’d like to be able to talk without the slightest trace of accent—I have the ear for it, I’m told. I’d like, impossible, to understand everything that’s said on the radio, the words of the songs. I would like to pass unseen. The little bell hung inside the door rings as I go out, that’s all.
I come back to the house, open the gate, close it again behind me. The click is a pleasing sound. The gravel, small as peas, moves beneath my feet and from it a faint dust rises, the perfume of the town. I breathe it in. I’m beginning to know it, and the neighborhoods as well. A geography of favored streets is forming itself for me while I sleep. This intricate town is unfolding, detail by detail, piece by piece. I walk along the river on the bank between two bridges. I stroll through the cemetery that gutters like jewelry in the last, slanting light. It seems I am seeing an estate, passing among properties that will someday be mine.
These are notes to photographs of Autun. It would be better to say they began as notes but became something else, a description of what I conceive to be events. They were meant for me alone, but I no longer hide them. Those times are past.
None of this is true. I’ve said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I’m sure you’ll come to realize that. I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It’s a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn’t exist, no, no, but this is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.
Cristina Wheatland—she was Cristina Cabaniss and born Cristina Poore—has a cool face, a little bony, and large, pale eyes. Her father was an ambassador. They led a brilliant life. She went to school everywhere, Argentina, Greece, the Philippines. I don’t remember just how Billy met her, only that she was twenty-three and they fell in love right from the start. She was just getting her divorce. He was the one she should have married in the first place. He knew how to handle her. He’s the only man who knows how to make her feel like a woman.
“Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” she says.
“That’s right, Bummy.”
He’s selecting cubes of ice from a silver bucket and talking with his back turned. She sits at the far end of the room, her legs curled beneath her. Paris. It’s three in the morning. Their daughter, the servants, the whole building is asleep. She leans forward to let me light her cigarette and then falls back, floats really, into the soft cushions. She can’t live in America any more, she says. That’s the only thing that bothers her. She’s gone back to visit. It just isn’t for her. In the first place, she doesn’t even know how to drive. Billy hands her the drink. She gives it back.
“Sweetheart,” she says, “I only wanted a half.”
He walks to the end of the long room once more. I see him pick up a new glass. There’s a mysterious slowness to all his movements, it’s almost as if he is thinking them out. Even so, they have the grace of a dream. Billy Wheatland—he was on the hockey team, a great forward, one of the best ever as they always say, and forever surrounded by friends. You never saw him alone. He was standing in front of a mirror, combing black hair still damp from the shower. When he smiled, a little, heroic scar gleamed in his lip.
He comes back with the second drink and hands it to her without a word.
“I adore you,” she says.
He sits down and crosses his legs. He’s wearing expensive shoes. Cristina is running her fingers inside the strand of single pearls around her neck, back and forth. To me, Billy says,
“Well, you know it’s very quiet down there. I mean it’s a very small town. You were there, but I don’t think you realize.”
They begin to talk about whom he can write a letter to for me. I sit there listening and feeling a mild excitement, like a child in front of whom a year at boarding school is being discussed.
“The water’s turned off,” he says. “I don’t even know how to turn it on. There’s an agent who handles all that. We’ve never been there during the winter.”
But a letter will handle that, too, or he can call. It’s arranged. I’m going down, any time I like. Cristina begins
