“But then there’s the problem of Henri Languille.”
This was clearly a signal that I should make further inquiry, and so I did.
“Henri Languille?” I asked.
“A condemned prisoner,” Danforth said. “He was executed by guillotine in 1905. His death was meticulously recorded by a certain Dr. Beaurieux.”
“I see.”
“Dr. Beaurieux’s observations called the guillotine’s efficacy into serious question,” Danforth continued, now completely in that lecturing tone he used to escape, however briefly, from the more emotional parts of his tale. “Of course, there’d been other observers before Beaurieux. For example, when Charlotte Corday was beheaded, someone grabbed her severed head out of the basket and slapped her face. The people who saw this later said that Charlotte had glared at her assailant with what they described as unequivocal indignation.’”
I shivered. “That’s rather ghastly.”
“Indeed, but getting back to Dr. Beaurieux,” Danforth went on. “He said that immediately after the decapitation, Henri Languille’s eyelids and lips continued to move for five or six seconds. When those movements stopped, the doctor called to Languille in a loud, sharp tone, as if he were summoning him. At that summons, Languille’s eyes opened languidly, as if awakened from a light sleep. According to Beaurieux, there was no spasmodic movement in the eyes at all. They stared at him very evenly, then, after a moment, they closed. At that point, the doctor called to Languille again, and once again his eyes opened. He looked like someone torn from his thoughts, Beaurieux said. The eyes were motionless and the pupils were focused. There was nothing dull about their appearance. Nothing vague or faraway in their look. The doctor was convinced that Languille was staring directly at him. After several seconds, the eyes closed again, this time about halfway. Beaurieux called out for a third time, but Languille’s eyes didn’t open, and they began to take on the glazed look of the truly dead.”
All of this struck me as a gruesome excursion, a reaction Danforth recognized and immediately addressed.
“The question is why I would read about such an incident,” Danforth said. “It’s because I could not stop thinking about Anna, and this incessant thinking sent me off in odd, nearly crazed directions. She’d been executed by guillotine, so I read everything I could find about that process. Scores of eyewitness accounts. The history of the thing. It’s called a
This was all decidedly off the point, I thought, save for the way it exposed the obsessive nature of Danforth’s research, the fact that he’d been driven to do it as a way of. . . what?
“It was a way of not abandoning Anna or allowing her simply to be erased,” Danforth said as if he’d heard the question I’d posed in my mind. “My purpose in doing all this reading was to keep her with me, keep her alive, prevent her from sinking into obscurity, becoming one of history’s nameless victims.” He shrugged. “But of course, reading can only take a man so far, and so, in the end, it was something else that saved me.”
I suddenly feared that Danforth might have fallen to some predictable form of redemption. Religion, perhaps, or another woman.
Hesitantly, I asked, “Which was?”
“War,” Danforth answered. “I was still a young man when it broke out, and so I might have used it to accomplish some noble end or do some great, heroic deed.” His smile was as soft as the white flakes that fell beyond the window. “But for me it only intensified what soon became my single purpose.”
“Which was?” I asked.
“To make the Germans pay,” Danforth answered. His gaze darkened. “To kill as many as I could because they had killed Anna.” He let his lethal gaze sink into me. “I had left Europe as a grieving lover,” he stated. “I returned to it as a murderer.”
~ * ~
Southern France, 1942.
Below him, the fields of night-bound France spread out like a gloved hand. He was falling into its darkness, the earth rising toward him like a blessing in disguise.
They were waiting for him below, and when he reached them he thanked them in their native language, then gathered up and buried his parachute as he had been taught in the long sweltering summer of his training.
They were French farmers who greeted him, and for the rest of his life, the memory of their rugged courage would remain with him, the rough texture of their hands when he shook them, the heartbreaking care in their hushed voices as they guided him across the fields and into the small house where they hid him until the next night, when he set off, alone, for the Spanish border.
On that long walk, he thought of Gurs, the train journey he had made with Anna, the ragged clothes of the withered Spaniard who’d met them, and at last the look on Anna’s face as the trees had parted and she’d gotten her first glimpse of the camp. A thousand years ago, he thought, a different man than he was now.
For the next year he played the vagabond Spaniard as effectively as Anna had played the disordered street grotesque on that long-ago night in the Old Town Bar. He wandered from village to village as he’d been instructed. To appear Spanish, he dyed his hair and darkened his skin beneath the Spanish sun. From mountain outcrops and village alleys, he watched the roads and railway stations and lived as an itinerant farm hand and sweeper; he slept in barns and back rooms and storage sheds, always speaking the low Spanish of the poor and dispossessed and in every way acting the part of one of Goya’s
During these nomadic days, he killed two men, one with a knife and the other with a garrote, both German intelligence operatives, and in both cases he felt as little for their deaths as he’d felt for their lives, and he told himself as he thrust the knife or tightened the garrote that this he did for Anna.
By the early months of 1943, it was clear that his work in Spain was done. Spanish neutrality was enforced by Spain’s utter poverty. As a country, it was as starved and desolate as the Spanish refugees of Gurs had been, which was exactly what Danforth reported. There was no point to his remaining in Spain, he told his superiors. They agreed, and on their orders, he’d made his way to Gijon, hired an old fisherman and his ragtag boat, and through
