‘I was born in Bucharest in 1874,’ he began deliberately, ‘and as you know, I believe, I lost my father a few months after I was born. The first man I remember being with my mother was a German, my uncle, Baron Heldenbrück. But as I lost him when I was twelve, I only have a rather vague memory of him. Apparently he was a financier, a very good one. He taught me his language and how to do arithmetic in such clever and roundabout ways that I enjoyed it hugely. He made me what he affectionately called his cashier, entrusting me with a small fortune in cash wherever we went together and putting me in charge of what we spent. Whatever he bought (and he bought a lot), he insisted that I add it up in the time it took me to pull the change or the notes out of my pocket. Sometimes he weighed me down with foreign money and I had to work out the exchange rate. Then there were discounts, interest, loans, and even share-dealing. I fairly quickly became quite clever at doing multiplications and even divisions of several sets of figures in my head, without paper. Don’t worry’ – he saw Julius starting to frown – ‘it didn’t give me a taste for money or for arithmetic. In fact, if you want to know, it’s probably why I never keep accounts. The truth is that my early upbringing was all practical and positive, and none of it struck a chord with me … Heldenbrück was also something of a genius where children’s physical education was concerned: he persuaded my mother to let me go barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and leave me out of doors as much as possible. He gave me a cold bath himself every day, winter and summer. I enjoyed it greatly … But you’re not interested in those details.’
‘Yes, I am!’
‘Then he had to go to America on business and I never saw him again.
‘In Bucharest my mother’s salon attracted the most brilliant and, as far as I can judge from memory, the most varied people, but her closest friends then, who were there most often, were Prince Vladimir Bielkowski and Ardengo Baldi, who I never called my uncle, I don’t know why. Russia’s interests (I was going to say Poland’s) and Italy’s kept them both in Bucharest for three or four years. They taught me their language, in other words Italian and Polish, though not Russian which, even if I read it and understand it without too much difficulty, I’ve never been fluent in. Because of the people my mother received I was rather spoilt for company, and there was never a day when I didn’t have the chance to use four or five languages, all of which I spoke without any accent and interchangeably by the time I was thirteen. All the same, it was French I spoke by choice, because it had been my father’s language and my mother had been determined that I should learn it first.
‘Bielkowski took great care of me, as did everyone who wanted to please my mother: I seemed to be the one they paid court to. But what he did was, I think, without ulterior motive, because he always gave in to his whims, as soon as they came over him and wherever they led him. He took care of me even more than my mother realised, and I never stopped feeling flattered by the special attachment he showed to me. He was outlandish in lots of ways, but he transformed our slightly stuffy existence into a kind of endless party. Actually that’s inaccurate: he didn’t give in to his whims, he raced to meet them in a hell-bent rush. He threw himself at his pleasure in a sort of frenzy.
‘For three summers he took us to a villa – it was more like a castle – on the Hungarian side of the Carpathians near Eperjes, which we often used to drive to. But more often we went out on horseback, and there was nothing my mother enjoyed more than roaming the countryside and forest around the villa, which are very beautiful, wherever her fancy took her. For more than a year the pony that Vladimir gave me was the thing I loved most in the world.
‘The second summer, Ardengo Baldi came to join us. It was then that he taught me to play chess. I’d been so well-versed in mental calculations by Heldenbrück that pretty soon I acquired the habit of playing without looking at the chessboard.
‘Baldi and Bielkowski got on very well together. In the evenings in our lonely tower, basking in the silence of the park and the forest, the four of us stayed up late into the night, dealing the cards over and over again, because although I was still only a child – I was thirteen – Baldi (who hated being dummy) had taught me how to play whist. And to cheat.
‘He was a juggler, a conjurer, an illusionist, an acrobat, and the first time he came to us my imagination was only just emerging from the long dormancy that Heldenbrück had imposed on it. I was thirsty for marvels, credulous and naïvely curious. Later Baldi taught me how to do his tricks, but no amount of penetrating their secrets could dispel the feeling of mystery I experienced when, on the first evening, I saw him calmly light his cigarette from the flame at the end of his little fingernail and then, having just lost at cards, pull out of my ear and nose all the roubles he needed to settle his debts. It literally terrified me, but it made everybody else roar with laughter as he kept saying, as calmly as anything, “Thank heavens this child is such an inexhaustible goldmine!”
‘The evenings he was alone with my mother and me he was always inventing some new game, some new surprise or joke. He took off all our friends, pulled faces and made his own face completely unrecognisable, did people’s voices, animal noises, musical instruments, produced the weirdest noises from somewhere, sang and accompanied himself on the gusle, danced, did somersaults, walked on his hands, vaulted tables and chairs and, with his shoes off, juggled with his feet, Japanese-style, spinning a screen or a side table on the tip of his big toe. He juggled even better with his hands: he’d make dozens of white butterflies appear out of pieces of torn-up tissue paper and I’d chase them round the room, blowing on them, while he’d keep them fluttering in the air above a flapping lady’s fan. Objects that were near him lost mass and reality, even presence, or took on new, unexpected, weird meanings that were far removed from any sort of utility. “There are very few things that aren’t fun to juggle with,” he used to say. And he was so funny at the same time that I would be choking with laughter and my mother would shout at him, “Stop, Baldi! Cadio will never go to sleep.” And actually my nerves must have been pretty calm not to be affected by all the excitement.
‘I gained a tremendous amount from what he taught me. In fact, after a few months I could do more than one of his tricks better than he could, and even—’
‘I can see that you’ve had a very well-balanced education indeed,’ Julius broke in.
Lafcadio started to laugh, delighted by the novelist’s appalled expression.
‘Oh, none of it went in very far, don’t worry! But it was high time Uncle Faby came on the scene, I agree. He became close to my mother when Bielkowski and Baldi were both summoned away to new postings.’
‘Faby? The one whose handwriting I saw on the first page of your notebook?’
‘Yes. Fabian Taylor, Lord Gravensdale. He took me and my mother to a villa he had rented near Duino, on the Adriatic. I grew up a lot there, physically. There was a rocky peninsula that jutted out from the coast, and that was the villa’s grounds, all of it. I spent every day among the pine trees, on the rocks, down in the creeks, or swimming and paddling in the sea, living like a savage. The photograph you saw was from that time. I burnt it with the notebook.’
‘It seems to me,’ Julius said, ‘that you might have presented yourself a little more decently for the occasion.’
‘That was just what I couldn’t do,’ Lafcadio answered, laughing. ‘Pretending that I needed to get a suntan, Faby kept all my clothes under lock and key, even my underwear …’
‘And what did Madame, your mother, have to say?’
‘She thought it was funny. She said that if any of our guests were scandalised, all they had to do was leave, but it didn’t stop anyone we invited from staying.’
‘But all that time, your education, my dear boy!’
‘It’s true. I learnt so easily that my mother had neglected it a bit. She seemed suddenly to take notice as my sixteenth birthday was coming up, and after a wonderful trip to Algeria that Uncle Faby and I had together – I remember that trip as the best time of my life – I was sent to Paris and handed over to a sort of unfeeling jailer person who took charge of my schooling.’
‘After enjoying such excessive freedom, I can easily comprehend that a period of constraint must have seemed very hard for you.’
‘I’d never have put up with it without Protos. He had come to the same school, to help his French apparently, but he spoke brilliant French and I’ve never understood what he was doing there – or me for that matter. I was languishing, I really was. I didn’t exactly make friends with Protos, but I turned to him as if he was the one who was supposed to deliver me from that hell. He was a lot older than I was and seemed even older than his age, with nothing childish left in his manner or tastes. He had extraordinarily expressive features when he felt like it, that could convey anything at all, and yet when his face relaxed he looked like an imbecile. One day, when I joked about it, he replied that in this world it was a good idea not to look too much like what one really was.
‘He couldn’t be satisfied with just looking ordinary. He wanted people to think he was dim. He liked to say that men’s downfall lay in their preferring the parade to the exercise, and not knowing how to conceal their talents, but he only said it to me, not to anyone else. He didn’t mix with the others – he didn’t even mix with me, the only boy in the school he didn’t despise. Whenever I could get him to talk, he spoke with extraordinary eloquence, but most of the time he said very little. Then he looked as if he was hatching dark schemes, which I’d have liked to know about. When I asked him, what are you doing in this place? his answer was, I’m starting my run-up! He claimed that in life the way to get through the most difficult situations was to be ready to tell yourself: don’t give a damn! That was what I said to myself just before I ran away.
‘I left with eighteen francs in my pocket and made my way to Baden in short stages, eating anything, sleeping anywhere … I was a bit done in when I arrived, but mostly I was pleased with myself because I still had three francs – it’s true that I picked up five or six on the way. My mother was there, with Uncle de Gesvres, who thought my escape was very funny and decided to take me back to Paris: he said he was inconsolable at the thought that Paris should have left me with bad memories. And the fact is that when I came back here with him I did see Paris in a different light.
‘The marquis was addicted to spending, fast and furiously: it was an unrelenting need with him, a craving. You might say that he was grateful to me for helping to satisfy it and for increasing his appetite with mine. He was the exact opposite of Faby: he taught me to have a taste for clothes. I think I wore them pretty well – I had a good teacher in him. His elegance was perfectly natural, a kind of sincerity in action. We got on very well. We spent whole mornings together at shirtmakers’, bootmakers’, tailors’… he paid particular attention to shoes. People judged each other by their shoes, he said, as surely and more deeply than by the rest of their clothes or their facial features … He taught me to spend without counting the cost and without worrying whether I’d have enough to satisfy my impulses, my desires or my stomach. It was a principle with him that you should satisfy your stomach last, for (I remember his words) desires and impulses make fleeting appeals, while hunger never goes away and only gets more insistent, the longer you keep it waiting. He also taught me not to appreciate a thing more because it happened to be expensive, or less if, by chance, it turned out not to cost you anything at all.
‘That’s where I was when I lost my mother. A telegram came, calling me back to Bucharest urgently. She was dead by the time I got to see her. I found out that after the marquis had left she had run up a lot of debts that her estate only just covered, so that I couldn’t hope to inherit a single kopeck, a single Pfennig, a single Groschen. Straight after the funeral I went back to Paris, where I thought I’d find Uncle de Gesvres. But he had taken off for Russia without warning and hadn’t left a forwarding address.
‘I don’t need to tell you everything that went through my mind. Of course I had a few skills up my sleeve, the sort that can be useful to get yourself out of a tight spot, but the more I thought I’d need them, the more I disliked the idea of resorting to them. Luckily, one night when I was roaming the streets, feeling a bit confused, I happened to meet the woman you saw, Carola Venitequa, who’d been Protos’s mistress, and she took me in. A few days after that I received notification that a small allowance would be paid to me, rather mysteriously, at a notary’s office on the first of each month. I can’t stand explanations, so I started drawing it without trying to find out any more. And then you came …
‘Now you know more or less everything I feel like telling you.’
‘It’s fortunate,’ Julius said solemnly, ‘it’s fortunate, Lafcadio, that you have an allowance coming to you at this stage in your life. Without a profession, without an education, obliged to live from hand to mouth … I see that you were ready to do anything.’
‘On the contrary, I was ready to do nothing,’ Lafcadio responded, regarding Julius gravely. ‘Despite everything I’ve told you, you still don’t know me very well. Nothing makes me balk quicker than need: I’ve only ever gone after what can’t be any use to me.’
‘Paradoxes, for example. And do you believe they’ll sustain you?’
‘It depends on your stomach. You like to call the ideas that conflict with yours paradoxes … Personally I’d prefer to starve if all I had in front of me was the stew of logic I’ve seen you feed your characters on.’
‘The hero of your new novel, anyway. Is it true that you based him on your father? The care you take to ensure, in every situation and on every occasion, that he’s consistent with you and with himself, that he’s faithful to his obligations and his principles, to your theories in other words … judge for yourself how that makes someone like me feel! … Monsieur de Baraglioul, believe me, because I’m telling you the truth: I’m nothing if not inconsistent. And see how much I’ve been talking! Me, who only yesterday considered myself to be the most silent, the most unforthcoming, the most withdrawn of creatures. But it was good for us to become acquainted with each other without delay – so there’ll be no need to go back to it. Tomorrow – tonight – I shall creep back into my shell.’
The novelist, thrown off balance by Lafcadio’s words, made an effort to regain his composure.
‘Be assured, first of all, that there is as little inconsistency in psychology as there is in physics,’ he began. ‘You are a being in the making and—’
He was interrupted by a knocking at the door. As no one showed themselves, it was Julius who left the room. Through the door he had left open, a confused sound of voices reached Lafcadio. It was followed by a deep silence. After he had been waiting for ten minutes, Lafcadio was preparing to leave when a liveried servant came into the room.
‘Monsieur le comte says that he will not detain Monsieur le secrétaire any longer. Monsieur le comte has had some bad news about Monsieur his father and is sorry not to be able to take his leave of Monsieur.’
From the tone in which this was said, Lafcadio gathered that news had come that the old count had died. He steeled himself.
‘All right!’ he said to himself as he arrived back at Impasse Claude-Bernard. ‘The moment has come. It is time to launch the ship.7 Whatever direction the wind may blow from in future will be the right one. Since I cannot be close to the old man, it will make no difference if I go as far away from him as I want.’
As he passed the porter’s room he handed the man the little box he had been carrying around since the previous day.
‘Be so kind as to give this package to Mademoiselle Venitequa this evening when she comes back,’ he said. ‘And make up my bill.’
An hour later, with his case packed, he sent for a cab. He departed without leaving an address. His notary’s would have to suffice.