Born circa 1771
First crossing 1791
Second crossing circa 1840
Died circa 1840
MY NAME IS ALULA. I am the one who remembers. Your name is Koahu. You are the one who forgets. You were my beloved once, all those lifetimes ago. I loved you the way the seashell loves the sea: when people put their ears to my mouth it was your song they heard. I loved you the way the sand loves the water: always receiving you with hushed pleasure. I loved you the way thunder rolls through the night, the way butterflies attend to the flower, the way the moon follows the sun. Since childhood, we had longed for nothing—you, Koahu, and I, Alula—other than to be united, although we belonged to rival bloodlines that would not be conjoined by the Law. I was older than you, a fully initiated woman, a master of the crossing. You were barely a man, still a student of the crossing, but you were more interested in other pleasures: laughing, singing, dancing. Each animal on our island had its own dance, and you knew them all. I was a scholar, and you were a dancer.
You were the first to see it. Do you remember? You must have dreamed about it a thousand times since. We were lying together on the grass, in the shade of a hibiscus tree on the hill between the village and the sea. It was where we went whenever we wished to be alone together. The morning sea was calm, the sky was still, and a dappled sun played on your skin. I was looking so closely into your eyes, I could see my reflection in them. Then something caught your attention, and you looked away. You cast your gaze behind me and out onto the sea. In one motion, you narrowed your eyes, creased your eyebrows, and the smile on your lips vanished. Oh, that moment when everything changed. Do you dream about it still? It lasted no more than a second, but it marked the end of our happiness.
You jumped to your feet. I turned to look in the direction in which you were pointing. I saw it and sat up with a start. It was a wonder to behold, drifting cloud-like on the water, shattering in a single moment our every notion of the universe and all it contained. My heart fairly leaped out of my chest at the sight of it. As you watched in silence, drinking in that most miraculous sight, I covered my eyes for a moment, for I could not be sure that what I was seeing wasn’t a dream. After a moment, I lowered my hands and looked once more; it was still there, floating on the becalmed water like an island of miracles. We were in such a state of wonder at the sight of it, our eyes could not look enough. I decided we should tell the others. I took your hand but you would not be moved. I pulled again and you told me to go without you. I ran back to the village while you stayed there on that hilltop overlooking the water.
I went to our chief, Otahu, and described what we had seen, you and I, out on the hilltop. He listened carefully and, when I’d finished, looked down at the ground and considered what he’d heard. He bade me follow him as he sought out our sage, Fetu, and had me repeat what I’d told him. Fetu also listened carefully, and stroked his beard, which he did whenever he was considering a delicate matter. Then Fetu and Otahu spoke to each other in murmurs. Otahu took the horn that hung around his neck and blew it to call all the people to council. When the people had gathered together to hear, I was once again asked to describe what I’d seen.
“The boat,” I told them, “is like one of our own, with masts and sails, but as if made for giants to sail in. Upon it, three great trees are fastened, the one in the middle being the tallest, as high as any tree on our island, but straightened and stripped of all leaves, twigs, and branches. Only the trunks remain, as well as three straight boughs, fastened crosswise to each. Sails of cloth are attached to them, but greater in size and number than our own, each one wide enough to hold within it one of our pirogues. There are so many of these sails fastened to the masts that, rather than calling them sails, one might imagine them a flock of great, captive birds, paler than the sun, the largest of them in the middle and the smaller ones on the outer branches, with their enormous wings outstretched and fastened by a tangled web of threads, pressing the birds into the service of the wind. These great wings, unfurled, drive the boat forth just as the sails of our own pirogues do, only without oars.”
When I told the people this, they asked me to take them to where I’d seen the boat. I led them to the hilltop, where you were still standing, entranced, in the same place I’d left you. The people marveled at the sight of the ship floating in the distance. The flock of great birds perched upon its branches was gone, and it drifted still and naked on the water.
We waited for Otahu to speak. “We will honor them as our guests and invite them to a feast,” he said.
Then Fetu, the sage, spoke: “The Law speaks of all things,” he said, “even of this. It tells us to welcome these strangers but to remain wary of them. These boats carry not gods but people like us. Their tongue, their dress, their ways—everything about them is strange to us. We know not what they seek, nor what they bring. Though these men are strangers to us, they are not strangers to the Law, which sees all and knows all. At the feast, I will cross with their chief to learn his designs.” Fetu finished his discourse with the usual incantation: “Our highest duty is to the Law, and above all else the Law demands this of us: There can be no crossing without a return crossing.”
The Law was our most prized possession, our most sacred jewel. It did not belong to us; we belonged to it. The Law gave life and took it away. All depended on it, all sprang from it, all returned to it. Studying the Law was my greatest joy, and I was Fetu’s favorite student. I sat by his side at all the feasts and ceremonies. He devoted more of his time to me than to any other, teaching the Law’s highest, most secret aspects.
The Law’s greatest gift was the crossing. To look into the eyes of another, to sense the stirring of one’s soul, to be transported into the body of the other and dwell therein until the time came for the return crossing—this was the treasure the Law had bestowed upon us. Our teachings taught the crossing, our songs praised the crossing, our dances acclaimed the crossing. The Law forbade all tattoos except those of eyes. With every crossing, another eye would be etched into our skin, until our very bodies became hymns exalting the crossing.
We spent our entire childhoods learning the crossing. We learned there were three different kinds. The first, a crossing between two initiates, is the easiest, although many years of training are necessary to achieve it. The second, requiring years more practice, is a crossing between an initiate and a novice, after which the latter is left in an unknowing state. This is called a blind crossing. The third and highest form of crossing is the wakeful crossing: it too takes place between an initiate and a novice, only once it is complete the novice can remember everything about it. This kind of crossing takes a lifetime to master.
Of all the Law’s commandments, the greatest was this: There can be no crossing without a return crossing. All must return. The Law was clear: to break it would bring about the destruction of the world. Only a sage could cross without returning, for the sake of the Law’s preservation, so that it might be passed on undiminished. When the time came and the sage felt death approaching, parents would bring their youths to him, hoping their own child would be chosen to be the inheritor. Great honor and influence came to the family of a child chosen to cross with the sage. The family of the designated youth would ask the best stonemason to carve a statue to mark the occasion. At the appointed time, a ceremony would be held during which the youth and the sage would sit before each other, looking into each other’s eyes, and the spirit of the sage would pass into the body of the youth, while the spirit of the youth would cross into the body of the sage. When the crossing was complete, the inheritor would plunge the sacred whalebone knife into the heart of the old sage, and gouge out his eyes. The sage’s remains would be buried and the carved statue placed upon the burial site. Thus there was only one among us who was deathless. All others must die. So spoke the Law.
Fetu had decided that, when the time came for his last crossing, I would be his successor. And so, when that time came, my own soul would pass into his body, and his into mine. I would become Fetu and, for the sake of the Law, the body I had only just vacated would kill the body I had only just entered.
About love the Law was all-knowing and all-powerful. Only the elders could unite a woman and a man. If a man and a woman should desire a union forbidden by the elders, the Law was clear: the lovers must leave the island and sail the currents and winds eastward, and find another island, and begin a new life there, with a new Law. So it was that our own island had been settled by our two ancestors, young lovers whose union, on another island to the west, had been forbidden.
Sometimes we spoke of eloping, you and I, of sailing east and finding a new island, our own island. But when we were not together our resolve weakened. As much as we wanted each other, we didn’t have the courage for the sufferings of exile.
We saw the strangers lower a small pirogue from their ship, and fill it with men, and begin rowing to shore. We descended the hill to the beach and awaited them. We studied the newcomers, in their stiff, brightly colored clothes and hats, and noted how strange everything was about them. They looked wherever and at whomever they pleased, without fear, even though their spears were short and thick and blunt. Did they not know the teachings of the Law about where to look, at whom, and in what manner?
They gathered together on the beach and their chief spoke in a strange tongue, and the others raised their spears, and thunder and lightning exploded from the ends of their spears and into the clear blue sky. Their chief tied a stone leaf etched with strange markings to a tree, and finally they approached us, bearing beads, coins, nails, and mirrors, which they held out to us, smiling at us, placing their gifts into our hands. Of course, we didn’t know what these things were and we studied them and were awed by their strangeness. Their chief issued orders that the others followed, but there was a second one among them who did not labor, instead gathering leaves and plants and putting them in a bag, as if harvesting medicines as Fetu did. He marveled at our tattoos. Meanwhile, other strangers were sent to a stream carrying empty barrels, which they filled with water, and carried back to their pirogue.
As I watched them, I was also watching you, Koahu, how drawn to them you were, how easily you communicated with them, despite the strangeness of their tongue, with your eyes and face and arms. Your quick wit, your smile, the way you moved—all were tools with which you bridged the differences between you and the strangers. And your eyes, those eyes I had gazed into so often, now betrayed no other desire than for the foreigners and their strangeness, which you found full of wonder and delight. You admired their brazenness, for you yourself were born brazen.
With your body, with the expressions on your face and the movements of your hands, you somehow made yourself understood to them. Through you, Otahu invited them to feast with us that evening.
Throughout the day, the strangers were near us or among us. Some of them spent the day filling their barrels with water or hunting for wild pigs and fowl. Others repaired sails on the beach. Their medicine man collected plants and examined our tattoos. Otahu had warned us to keep our distance, and this most of us did, although we kept a watchful eye on them. I helped prepare the feast, but I was watching as often as I could all the same. Whether from near or from afar, we drank in their presence, we studied their strangeness, we observed everything we could about them, noting every last detail, so that, when they were gone, we might feast on our memories of them. Several among us approached them, especially the children, especially you. You helped them wheel their barrels to and from the stream. You helped point them in the direction of the pigs and the fowl.
The feast was held after nightfall, in the glow of a full moon, in a clearing within earshot of the water. Two great fires burned for light. Otahu wore his ritual cloak of carmine feathers and Fetu wore his ritual cloak of white feathers. They sat side by side. I sat by Fetu’s side, as his favorite. A score of the most senior of the people sat in the circle—I was the youngest—and about ten of the strangers. Others stood or sat nearby, watching the proceedings or talking among themselves. Then everyone in the circle was served kava, which caused the strangers, upon drinking the liquid, to grimace with such distaste that we laughed. Otahu made a speech, extolling the virtues of the strangers, and the honor they did us with their visit. Then you stepped into the circle and stood between the two fires. The front half of your body was painted with white stripes and adorned with clusters of white albatross feathers. The back half of your body was streaked with lines of gray and clusters of gray albatross feathers. Slowly you spread your arms and, singing the songs that went with it, you began to perform our most sacred dance, the dance that related how our people had come into being: the Dance of the Albatross.
In the old days, two young lovers from rival bloodlines had been exiled from their homeland far away to the northwest. Back then, people could assume the form of the animals for which they had been named, a skill that was later lost. In order to make their journey into exile, the two lovers took the form of the birds whose names they carried. The woman took the form of Pueo, the owl after which she was named. The man took the form of the bird after which he was named, Para, the white tern. Together, the two set off across the ocean. Para the tern darted ahead of Pueo the owl. The island from which they had been banished was barely out of sight before Para began to tire. By the time Pueo caught up with him, Para was floating on the water, dying. “I want to go back,” he said. “I’d rather die in my homeland, at the hands of my own people, than drown at sea.”
“We no longer have a homeland,” Pueo told him. “If you are tired, I will carry you in my claws. We will both spread our wings and beat them in unison, and that way we will traverse the great distances of the ocean without tiring.” She picked him up from the water, taking care not to wound him with her talons. When they spread their wings and began beating them together, they became one bird, the greatest of birds: Toroa, the wandering albatross. This is why the albatross is gray from above and white from below, and why it is so clumsy when it walks upon the land. And so, as one, the two lovers wandered the skies over the oceans, from island to island, for a thousand years. As one, they learned to drink from the sea by separating the salt from the sea water and expelling it in their tears. They were turned away from every island they went to. Finally they found an island that was the shell of a giant sea turtle that had run aground on a coral reef. No one lived on this island. Here, they assumed their human forms again and named their new home Toroa’eetee, which means “Home of the Wandering Albatross.” Over time, this was shortened to Oaeetee. The albatross became our totem. We used its bones for hooks and spear tips, and its feathers, symbols of peace, we wore in our ceremonies.
Everyone watched you dance and sing the story of Pueo and Para, admiring how with your arms, your back, your legs, your face, you brought to life each of these two birds. Simply by turning your body around you switched from bird to bird, and thus, flickering with firelight, you were able to tell the story of each of the two birds at one and the same time. When you were finished, the strangers did a most unusual thing: they began to clap their hands together. This was a gesture we only ever used to express anger at our children, but it appeared that the strangers used it as a sign of appreciation. This caused us to laugh, and the strangers in turn also laughed, although not exactly understanding why. When the dancing was done, the children stepped into the circle, carrying great leaves laden with food, and went from person to person, serving an abundance of roasted meats, fowl, fish, and breadfruit. As at all feasts, the meat of the albatross was also served, cooked in its own fat, but only to the visitors and the most senior men and women in the circle, as was the custom.
The chief of the strangers was seated opposite Fetu. When all had eaten and drunk their fill, Fetu looked across the circle at him with a smile of such kindness and charm that the stranger looked back without reserve. They continued to hold one another’s gaze in this manner for some time. I knew exactly what was happening inside them both, that pleasant sensation that overtakes one in the throes of a crossing, that giddiness, that feeling that one is dissolving into the air, that one is filling up with stars. How I wished I was in Fetu’s place, that I could cross with the stranger and explore his mind and heart and soul at will. Fetu was such a high master of the crossing that it was soon complete, and I knew the soul of the strangers’ chief was now in the body sitting beside me, fully aware of himself, looking around with the unfamiliarity of one who has only just crossed for the first time. Otahu, who was seated on the other side of Fetu, leaned over to speak to him.
“It is a great honor,” said Otahu, “for us to receive you, and it is an even greater honor that you do us in making a crossing with our sage, Fetu.” Though Otahu was speaking in our language, the stranger in Fetu’s body understood him.
“By what witchcraft is this possible?” asked the stranger.
“It’s no witchcraft,” replied Otahu, “but a gift from the gods that, of the many islands in our ocean, has been lost by all those who possessed it—all, that is, but my people. We have protected and perfected it, so that we may all possess the gift.”
“And what do you call it?”
“We call it the crossing,” said Otahu. “Fetu is the greatest master of it among us. Only he is capable of the highest level of the crossing, the one you are currently experiencing: a crossing with a novice, in which the novice can converse in the new body, without losing his sense of himself, as you are doing with me. To perfect this kind of crossing takes lifetimes of discipline and devotion.”
Otahu asked the stranger his name. “My name is Captain Étienne Marchand. The name of my ship is the Solide. We come from a faraway place called France.”
Each of these words Otahu repeated like an incantation: Marchand, Solide, France.
“And how far is this island, France?”
“It isn’t an island,” replied Marchand-in-Fetu, “but one place among many, one great island divided many times over, called Europe. It is so far away that it has taken us many months to reach you, and it will take us many more months to return home.” Otahu and I were astonished at this revelation. “And what is the name of this island?” Marchand-in-Fetu asked, but all at once his face appeared startled. “How strange,” he said. “No sooner had I asked the question than its answer naturally occurred to me—Oaeetee. How is this possible?”
“While you are in the body of Fetu,” Otahu replied, “his memories and his knowledge are available to you, just as—while he is in your body—your memories and knowledge are available to him.”
“I see. And the drink—you call it kava. Is the kava the cause of the crossing?”
Otahu laughed. “The kava is for celebration, but it isn’t necessary for the purpose of crossing. The art of crossing must be learned. It takes many years. All our children receive training in it, although not all are equally gifted.” Otahu took Fetu’s right hand as an expression of friendship. “But tell me, friend, why have you come here? What are your intentions?”
“My country is exceedingly cold. We are on our way to islands far to the north of here, to barter for animal skins, and trade them when we return home, and by this means become prosperous.”
“You have come a long way, and sacrificed much. What are your intentions relating to Oaeetee, friend?”
“Everything we need, we must carry on our boat. But fresh water spoils. Meat goes bad. We were in need of water and food, and thanks to your generosity we have all the water and food we can now carry. We thank you for your welcome, and now that we have taken our fill of your hospitality, we will leave you tonight in peace, as we still have far to travel.”
“And what is the object you tied to the tree at the cove this morning when you arrived?”
“It’s a message to my countrymen,” the stranger replied, “to indicate to them that we found friends here.”
“Is it a magical object, that speaks?”
“No, there are drawings upon it that my countrymen can interpret.”
“And you—you will not return?”
“No, for it has taken too long to come this far, and it will be almost two years before we return home.”
Otahu was astonished. “But your countrymen, they will come later?”
“Perhaps, when they learn about Oaeetee, they may wish to visit the island for themselves.”
“When will this be?”
“I cannot say. It may take many years, for it is an arduous journey.”
“In that case, we will pass on the memory of your visit to our children, and they to theirs, until your countrymen return, at which time they will be welcomed as friends.” Otahu smiled. “And your fire-sticks, what purpose do they serve?”
“We call them muskets, and they are our weapons, which we use in battle.”
As Otahu spoke with Marchand-in-Fetu, on the other side of the circle, Fetu-in-Marchand was deep in discussion with the strangers’ medicine man.
“And Fetu,” asked the man sitting beside me, “is he now in my body?”
“Yes, he is visiting your mind and your body, just as you are visiting his,” said Otahu, gesturing toward the other side of the circle. “He is conversing with your countryman, just as you are conversing with his.”
“That countryman is our medicine man, Roblet.”
“Roblet,” Otahu repeated. “Fetu will be very pleased, because he is our medicine man, and the keeper of the crossing.” At that moment, Fetu-in-Marchand looked in our direction to signal it was time to make the return crossing, which the Law required of all. Otahu squeezed the hand of Marchand-in-Fetu. “Friend,” he said by way of farewell, “I wish you well in your journey.”
The gazes of the two men met once again. Looking at each other thus, each underwent the same process as before, which is to say the dissolution of the bodily union followed by its restitution in the other body, so that each man found himself entered once more into his own body and his own mind, with no difference in sensation. None of the other strangers seemed to have noticed anything even slightly out of the ordinary.
“I have learned much,” said Fetu, upon his return to his own body.
“And the stranger?” asked Otahu.
“The return crossing went well. He will remember nothing of it.”
Otahu grunted his approval. On the other side of the circle, the surgeon Roblet, who had been seated beside Marchand, keenly observing all that was happening about him, stood and left the circle. I saw him approach you, Koahu, and speak with you. With his hands, he signaled that he wished to study your eyes, beckoning to you with smiles and friendly gestures. From my place in the circle, separated from you by the flickering lights of the fires, I could barely make out what was happening in the darkness. I stood and approached you. I saw Roblet lean over you and look into your eyes, while another stranger held up a flame and yet another stood nearby, holding his musket. I was the only one among our people to notice this turn of events, for Fetu and Otahu were immersed in a conversation, and the others in the circle were enjoying the revelry. You, Koahu, allowed Roblet to look into your eyes, and you in turn looked into his, for such a long period that I began to fret. As much as I wanted to hear what Fetu was telling Otahu about what he had learned during his crossing, there was danger in what I saw taking place between you and Roblet. Despite the prohibition on crossing with the strangers, I knew a crossing was about to take place between the two of you. Your curiosity was too powerful, as was the surgeon’s. I approached you discreetly, keeping to the shadows. This was the moment I ought to have intervened, I realize now, before anything happened, but I hesitated, and hid behind nearby shrubs.
I witnessed the fateful moment with my own two eyes. Of what can I be certain? Only that I heard you cry out in a panic. A last-minute doubt, perhaps? Too late—a shiver passed through your body, while the surgeon slumped to the ground. I came rushing out from my hiding place to try to stop what was happening, but my sudden panicked appearance startled the men holding you—holding the body that had, until just now, been you. They let go of your body to attend to Roblet’s, which now lay on the ground. I ran to catch you, but you lost your balance, you teetered, you stumbled, you fell upon Roblet. One of the strangers, perhaps fearing you were attacking Roblet, took his musket and pointed it at you. It exploded with thunder and lightning, and its lightning bolt shattered your body open. As the noise subsided, you staggered back into my arms.
Your eyes were still open, but when they met mine there was nothing of you in them. Where your stomach had been, that stomach upon which I’d so often rested my head—where that stomach had been was now a spill of blood streaming over your honeyed skin and dripping into the sand. The mouth I had kissed so often was gasping with shallow, desperate breaths, racked with pain. Worst of all, there was no recognition in your eyes. The body I held was your body, but it wasn’t you. I know it now just as I knew it then. There’d been a crossing—of that I was certain. You were in the surgeon’s body, which was now surrounded by the newcomers. Had I not been so certain of it I would have gladly crossed with you then and there, so that I might suffer instead of you.
More strangers left the feast and rushed to the scene. They were shouting and brandishing their muskets. They began to drag Roblet’s body away, in the direction of the beach. As they moved, they aimed their muskets at the people, so that all kept their distance and waited for the strangers to retreat.
I’ve played that moment over and again in my mind ever since, trying to remember it in every possible detail. It’s an exercise in futility: the more I try to pin down the truth, the more evasive it becomes. Did you mean to cross? Did you want it? Did you desire it? I didn’t even think you capable of it, not with a stranger. Your initiation was still incomplete, your technique imperfect. But a crossing occurred, of that I am certain, fueled by the surgeon’s curiosity and your own wanderlust. The alternative would be too terrible to contemplate—the alternative would be that you actually did die that night, after all, and that everything that has happened since has been in vain.
There are occasions when one is seized by a terror so great, the heart suddenly sees further than it has ever seen, and the mind is granted an unexpected cunning. This was such an occasion. In the ensuing panic, I disappeared into the brush, found the path to the beach, and ran there like a hurricane wind. There, slumped against a boat the strangers had rowed to shore, was a sailor who seemed oblivious to the distant commotion I had just fled. I approached him and saw that he was drunk. I slowed my breath, smiling at him, touching him tenderly and pointing to the parts of myself men consider desirable. He was wary, at first, and disbelieving, no doubt having heard the musket shot earlier, but the temptation was more than he could resist and, as there were no more shots to be heard, he relented, and allowed himself to be disarmed by my advances. He placed his musket in the boat and let me circle my arms around his neck and kiss him lustfully on the mouth. I led him by the hand to a secluded spot behind a dune, in the full glow of the moon. I unclothed him as if I could wait not a minute more to satiate my desire. He was but a young man, shy and clumsy at first, and in his eagerness he seemed not to hear the party of outraged strangers as they reached the beach, carrying Roblet’s body. Perhaps he thought he could have his way with me and still reach them in good time, or perhaps he had no intention of joining them but wished to remain among us on the island. At any rate, he was drunk, and completion eluded him. The strangers embarked upon the boat and rowed away from shore. Twice, in the throes of our embrace, as I swayed my hips above him and felt him inside me, he closed his eyes with the pleasure of it. Twice I had to prize them open with my fingers. I took his face in my hands and held it still so that our gaze would meet. With only the light of the moon to see each other, crossing was no easy task, but the youth eventually understood what was being asked of him and was most compliant. His eyes met mine, and did not stray.
The crossing occurred just as I felt the first shivers of his pleasure.
Born 1771
First crossing 1791
Second crossing 1825
Date of death unknown
THE EYES I WAS now looking into were the same eyes I had looked through only moments ago: the dark eyes of an island woman. They now returned my gaze with an expression of bewilderment. I’d just seen a very similar expression on Koahu’s face, and I would come to see it over and again: the stupor of a soul that has just been ripped unknowingly and without warning from its moorings—a blind crossing. The unknowing soul awakens in the new body in a state of shock, unaware of what has just occurred.
I withdrew from my embrace with Alula with a pang of sadness that I was leaving my body behind. I rose to my feet and ran to the water. In the moonlight, the beach was deserted, the longboat nowhere to be seen. From the ship I heard a whistle I recognized as the bosun’s and the muffled sound of men’s voices barking orders. I threw myself into the water and began to swim, but while, in my previous body, swimming was something I had always done without a second thought, I now discovered that this new body could barely float, let alone move forward in the water. I had, there and then, to teach myself how, using all the memories of a previous life. They were barely sufficient to the task. It was slow and difficult going, all thrashing and gasping for air. Water seeped up my nostrils and left them stinging. Still, I did not sink, and before long I was past the surf and making progress.
The closer I swam to the ship, the more I feared I would be left behind. In the confusion and flailing movement, I heard the thud of canvas unfurling and the crackle of sails filling with air. This, despite my exhaustion, excited my endeavor. I was closer to the ship now than to the shore, and all but spent. Should I not make it aboard, it would be the end, for I hadn’t enough life in me to make it back to shore. I cried out with all my might, which only slowed me down the more. The ship had just begun to move forward when I heard the lookout’s cry and those two blessed words, Man overboard! Moments later, the slap of a rope hit the water. I was exhausted. I clung to it desperately while a trio of sailors hauled me up and over the bulwark. I lay on my back on the deck amidships, gasping for breath. Orders were still being barked and men dashed to and fro as the sails were set to the desired trim. I was paid no mind, other than by my friend Brice who, in passing, said, “I thought you couldn’t swim, you devil!” and the bosun Icard, who muttered, “I hope she was worth it, boy, because you will pay for her with your blood, make no mistake.”
The ship’s course now set, the frenzy on the upper deck quietened. Once the beating of my heart slowed I raised myself onto my elbows. My first thought was to find you, but you were nowhere to be seen. Another whistle blew and the men of the larboard watch began descending into the hatchways, one after the other. Before I could join them, Icard took me before Captain Marchand, who asked why I had deserted my station. I invented a lie but to little effect. He turned his back on me. “You’ll get what’s coming to you at noon,” he mumbled wearily.
At that moment my punishment was of no consequence. I went below deck and found my hammock and stretched it out in its usual place, hauling myself into it without changing out of my wet clothes. Compounding the weariness of my body was the dizziness of my mind, swimming with novelty and strangeness. Upon crossing into a new body, one takes up the course of a new life, scrambling, at first, to master the mechanism. One is like a weaver who has just sat down at a strange loom, upon which is a carpet already half spun with an unfamiliar weave. Yarns of different colors are already threaded through the spools. One must trust that the skill to continue weaving the carpet is embedded within the very muscles of the fingers, and that the correct sequence will arise of its own accord at precisely the moment it is needed.
Surrounded as I was by strangeness—the strangeness of my body, of the clothes I wore, of my surrounds—sleep eluded me. I lay in my hammock listening to the creaking of the ship and the snoring of the crew, watching slivers of moonlight creep back and forth across the boards with the motion of the water. My mind was beset by questions. What had I done? I’d broken the Law—and why? For your sake, Koahu—impulsively, unthinkingly. And then, from the other end of the ship I heard a man’s voice in the masters’ quarters screaming as if struck by a mighty blow.
Shortly before dawn, the quartermaster woke the midshipmen and the mates while the bosun stood at the main hatchway and barked instructions. “All hands! Larboard watch ahoy!” Shortly after, I smelled charcoal smoke as the cook lit a fire in the galley. For a moment I was at a loss as to what to do, but like an automaton my body stirred into action, storing my hammock, taking a holystone from the hold, climbing the hatchway, and setting to polishing the deck and flemishing the lines. Everything felt habitual and unhabitual at once. At eight o’clock, the bosun’s mate piped breakfast. Most of the crew had slept poorly and were hungover, and we ate our miserable stew of rotten oatmeal in silence.
I looked out for you—for the new you, in the body of the strangers’ sage. But I now remembered, without any effort on my part, that the strangers were not strangers but French, and that the medicine man was a surgeon, and his name was Roblet. And so the memories of my new body came to me in this way, naturally and of their own accord, like bubbles to the water’s surface.
At eleven, Icard called all hands on deck and the captain addressed the crew. Finally I saw you, standing among the masters on the quarterdeck. Your eyes darted here and there, as if, unsure of your surrounds, you wished to draw as little attention to yourself as possible, while observing proceedings closely for clues as to how to behave. Captain Marchand issued orders that three men were to be flogged as a result of the events of the previous day: twelve lashes for the helmsman Bonicard for drunkenness; twelve for Roussetty—the man who had shot you—for the reckless discharge of his firearm; while I was to receive twenty-four lashes for my disobedience and desertion of my station. As he spoke, Icard and two sailors rigged a grating for the flogging. I was to be last.
First Bonicard had the flesh on his back flayed by the cat-o’-nine-tails. Then it was Roussetty’s turn. The crew watched on silently with a combination of horror, sympathy, amusement, and boredom—the sight was clearly no novelty to them. Then I was called forth. I removed my shirt and the bosun’s mate, Infernet, strapped my wrists to the grating and walked back several paces with the whip in his hand. The first lash landed upon my back, and could hardly have inflicted more pain than had I been slashed with a knife. It was followed by another, and another, each more terrible than the last. Icard counted aloud as each blow flailed my skin. I fainted for the first time at the eleventh stroke, and several times thereafter. Each time I fainted I was revived with a bucket of sea water that served only to excite my afflictions. Afterward I had to be carried down the hatch, while a man followed me with a mop and bucket to wipe away all trace of blood.
I was hauled to the sick bay and laid upon my stomach on the surgeon’s table, whereupon I fainted once again. At the next seizure of pain I opened my eyes—and there you were, mere inches away from me, tending to my wounds with a cloth in one hand and a bottle of spirits in the other. You moved slowly, tentatively, as if every movement you were making was for the first time. I recognized the same hesitation in myself. Reynier, the surgeon’s mate, stood by your side, looking at you quizzically, sensing all was not right with you. He could not know what I knew: that, not knowing what to do, you were waiting for the impulse to come to you from somewhere unknown, that in your hesitation you were searching for some intuition of what to do next. You were listening to your new body, waiting for the memories of what to do to come to you, one at a time: take the rag, dab it with spirits, press it gently upon the wound, and though it hurts the man, undoubtedly, it cleanses him too.
I continued to sink in and out of sleep, each time awakened by the throes of suffering my wounds inflicted upon me. You bent over me, alleviating my pains by adding to them, aided by Reynier, who sensed your uncertainty and gently suggested the techniques as were normally used in such situations. In my pain, I was consoled by your nearness. When you brought a cup of water mixed with spirits to my lips and told me to drink, I took comfort in your touch.
“Koahu,” I whispered in the old language through my veil of agony. You seemed not to have heard me. “Koahu,” I repeated in our language, “it’s me, Alula.” I thought I saw you freeze for just an instant, and glance at me, before you resumed your activity. “Koahu, I saw what happened with the medicine man,” I said. “I followed you. I crossed too.” The words came out with great effort, as the new mouth was unaccustomed to making such sounds.
You put your hand on my forehead. “Speaking in tongues,” you said in the new language, “hallucinations, but thankfully no fever.”
“Koahu,” I repeated, “can you not hear me? It is I, Alula, I have followed you, can you not understand?”
“Reynier,” you said, again speaking the new language, “go tell the bosun Joubert is to be relieved of duty for two days. He needs rest. Work would only finish him off.” Once more you put the cup to my lips to drink. “Do not fear, your suffering is a commonplace thing. Flogging is cruel and stupid and utterly futile, serving only to break men and to set them against their masters.” You cradled my hands in your own and I began to weep. To relieve my torment, you gave me laudanum to drink. Unable to sleep on my back in a hammock, I fell into a fitful slumber right there on the surgical table, lying on my stomach. You settled into a chair beside me, to spend the night keeping vigil over your patient. I was woken in the middle of the night by your screams.
My wounds healed quickly enough. Before long I was back at my post, standing on lookout high among the sails, where I could meditate at my leisure upon recent events. The Solide continued to be carried by the trade winds into the fogs of the north Pacific. But from a distance, every night, I heard you calling out in your tormented sleep. The nightly hullabaloo you raised soon began to stoke the flames of superstition in the crew. Sailors sleep poorly even in the most placid sea, and are in the habit of stewing on their grievances like a cook stirring his soup. These nocturnal disturbances became a favorite topic of conversation among the more conspiratorially minded, who gathered together below decks, whispering at first and later declaring their speculations boldly to all who would listen: the doctor had been possessed, they said, that night on the island, by the spirit of the dead boy.
I avoided the idle gossip and wild speculations, though they were truer than any reasonable man might have imagined. I had speculations of my own to confirm. I could not understand what had happened. To begin with, I’d been certain that you had made a crossing. But in denying me you had planted in me the seed of a doubt, a seed that found fertile ground. Was I all alone on this boat? Had I left the island for no good purpose? Had I desecrated the Law in error? My intent had been to follow and protect you, to help you return to the island, to uphold the Law and our love, but now it appeared that in trying to honor the Law I had only succeeded in desecrating it. This thought tormented me.
I sighted, from my lookout one morning, an island in the west, my heart thudding with joy at the thought that we might have miraculously returned to the island so recently left behind—but the island was one of those known as the Sandwich Islands. We did not stop or even deviate from our northerly course, for this archipelago was already well explored and the captain was anxious to arrive at our destination before the northern autumn, when conditions for sailing become anything but pacific.
The day after this sighting, I saw an albatross that had set its course to that of the ship, eyeing, no doubt, the school of pilot fish following in our wake. The crew, much perturbed by the nightly screams emanating from the doctor’s quarters, were delighted at the omen. The albatross continued to follow us for three days, gliding overhead hour after hour, waiting for the cook to throw his kitchen scraps overboard and for the pilot fish to rise to the surface to feast on them. Then it would dive to the water to eat its fill. At night, it would perch atop the foremast and rest there. On the third day it flew off, taking with it the little glimmer of happiness it had brought us.
The Solide continued to sail north across the ocean. I tried to mind my own affairs, attending to my chores and keeping lookout at my post. I became accustomed to my new body. It was, for the most part, an easy body to inhabit. Though Joubert was but twenty years old, he had been at sea more than half his life. Before that, he had lived the life of a street urchin in Toulon. I loved the freedom and the rigors of the sailor’s life. The freedoms of port life, on the other hand, I could not abide: I had inherited a taste for rum, a cunning mind, and a vindictive temper to match. I bore bitter grudges that I could never let die. I was the most loyal of friends, but in the role of foe, the merest unresolved slight might become, in the shadows of my heart, a lifelong vendetta bearing little resemblance to the modesty of its origin.
I never stopped seeking out a way to speak with you directly—in vain. This was no straightforward thing, for I was but an ordinary seaman and you a master. Other than in illness and injury, a ship’s surgeon has scant opportunity to commune with the crew. Oft-times I doubted such an opportunity would ever come. My old friend Brice noted the sullenness into which I had fallen, barely guessing its true cause, and began to badger me about it. Although I had little tolerance for such banter, and told him so, still he continued, often alluding to it at the mess table. One night, as we chewed without appetite on our biscuit dipped in foul brackish water, Brice addressed me with tender-hearted exasperation. “What’s taken hold of you, Joubert? Ever since you cavorted with that savage you’ve been acting strangely. Are you in love? Are you afflicted with some malady of the loins?” I felt a rising tide of rage so strong I launched myself at him with a view to landing a blow that would shatter his jaw and quit his badgering. Thankfully I missed, for I would have been flogged once more and might not have survived another ordeal. But my only friend was lost to me, and for the rest of the voyage I never passed over an occasion to slight him.
In the heavy fogs of autumn, we sighted land once more, and a cheer went up among the weary crew. We had come to our destination, the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. The aim of our expedition was to purchase furs from the natives, which we would take to Macau to sell to the Chinese. At each landing, we made it known that we wished to trade their skins of beaver, seal, otter, bear, elk, and wolf in exchange for guns, iron nails, knives, blankets, and spirits. But on each occasion we learned that all their best furs had been sold to another ship only weeks before, leaving us a meager assortment of second-rate merchandise. Our luck was no better in the Queen Charlotte Islands. And so, with winter approaching and our commerce left greatly in want, we set sail for China, hoping there to sell what furs we had procured. By the time we departed Alaska, a wintry pall was set in across the sky and the ocean had become stroppy and cruel.
I barely said a word to you over the next few weeks, but I thought of you constantly. A crossing is a perilous venture. Each one is slightly different. Some crossings fare better than others, and no two crossings are the same. You had been young, not yet fully initiated. Then there was the musket shot. Perhaps it had interrupted the crossing somehow, cutting it short. And now, though you seemed to remember nothing of your previous life, every night you were racked with nightmares. What was left of you? I longed to speak to you at greater length, but for now I could only bide my time and watch you from afar. With the passage of time you shed your hesitations and became more assured in your work. The memories buried within you of your craft were retrieved by the demands placed upon you, the knowledge returning not all at once but in a drip, one remembrance at a time. Perhaps, I reasoned, your memories of your other, previous life would return to you in a similar way.
There is many an idle hour when a ship is at open sea. A man’s mind, in such slackness, can twist upon itself like old rope. So a sailor devises all kinds of ways to amuse himself, with cards and dice, with song and dance, with the telling of stories and jokes, with the whittling of driftwood and the knotting of lines, and the inventing of designs with which to adorn his body. Since our passage through the South Seas, tattoos had become something of an obsession among masters and seamen alike. Before the crossing Joubert had been esteemed as the finest aboard for his drawings on paper and skin. It was no strange thing for a seaman to approach me asking that I draw a sea monster upon his back, or the name of his sweetheart upon his shoulder. But on occasion a man would come with no specific drawing in mind, simply the desire to feel the satisfying prick of the needle piercing his skin. Whenever I was left at liberty to draw whatever I fancied, I liked to tattoo upon their skin the figure of an eye, such as the eyes that were tattooed on the skins of my island people. After I’d drawn several of them, these tattoos became admired among the crew as a memento of our circumnavigation, only the second such expedition by a French vessel. Even some of the masters came to me, requesting that I ink the design into their skin. Such is the superstitious tendency of a sailor’s soul, they believed that this tattoo was an omen of good fortune.
On a calm Sunday afternoon, as we neared the coast of Formosa after an especially wrathful storm had besieged the ship for two days, I was in the hold, inking the image of a whale on Mozoly’s back by the light of a porthole, when you approached us. You paused to observe my technique, as if I were undertaking a medical procedure. You asked questions of me. You watched me dab the needle in the ink and sink it deep into Mozoly’s skin. You explained how the needle penetrated the skin’s outer layers and went so deep as to set the ink permanently upon the body. Mozoly hid his discomfort, with the pride of a veteran sailor. Once the picture was done, he walked away sore but with a smile, to display his new adornment to his shipmates. You asked if I might draw one of my tattoos on the back of your shoulder. An eye? No, you said, the Virgin Mary. You admitted having prayed to her during the storm, promising her that if the ship were spared you would have her image engraved on your person.
When Mozoly was gone, you removed your shirt and sat on a chair before me at an angle so that your shoulder was directly before me. I dipped the needle into the India ink and began puncturing your skin with holes of blue. When a man is having his skin tattooed, it takes him some time to become accustomed to the sting of the needle. Once habituated, he learns to ignore the sensation, even to enjoy it. “Tell me, doctor,” I said when I sensed that you were used to the pain, “for some time you have been greatly tormented in your sleep. I have heard your afflictions—we all have. What are these nightmares that torture you so?”
“I admit,” you replied, “it is irksome for me to know that I make such a din. The dreams themselves are strange and confused. Oftentimes I cannot remember anything of them, and if I do it is but a glimpse. They seem to take place on that island where the boy was shot.”
“Koahu,” I said. “The boy’s name was Koahu.”
“Koahu,” you repeated. “I cannot get this Koahu out of my head.”
“Perhaps,” I said as I dipped the needle once more into the ink and then plunged it into the skin of your shoulder, trying to be as gentle as possible, “perhaps there is a reason for this.”
“The reason is surely nothing more than guilt. But it was an accident. How can I be guilty if it was an accident?”
“Perhaps it is more than guilt.” I continued my work as I spoke: needle in ink, perforation of skin, stain of midnight blue. “Perhaps if you think back to that moment you will remember something that might help you understand what happened. Perhaps it is not guilt that bothers you but something else—something unusual, something perhaps miraculous in its nature.”
You were looking ahead now, into the darkness of the hold. “I am a surgeon. I have seen many a corpse. Many a man has died in my care, some even in my arms. And yet the memory of that boy haunts me still.”
“Perhaps it is more than a memory that haunts you, doctor. Have you not considered the possibility…” I began, and paused, waiting for the words to come.
“What possibility?”
“The possibility that the boy—the boy…” I knew not how to continue, so I pushed a needle into you, only in my nervous state I plunged it too deep. You flinched. I removed the needle, but blood had begun to seep from the puncture.
“I thought you knew what you were doing!” you snapped.
“Forgive me,” I said, wiping your skin clear of the scarlet drop.
“I ought to leech the wound.”
“Wait, I beseech you, I’m almost done. It won’t happen again.”
“If you talked less perhaps you would work better. And such idle talk! Such futile conjecture!”
In silence, I resumed dipping the needle in the ink and puncturing your skin. The auspiciousness of the moment had passed, and yet I was so close to my goal that I could not stop now. “What I am trying to suggest,” I continued, as calmly as I could, “is that perhaps the cause of your nightly torment is that … you are not who you think you are. Or rather, you are more than you realize. Perhaps, on the island, you divined something about the customs of the natives. Perhaps your curiosity led to an exchange of some sort, completely unexpected, an exchange of souls—do you see what I am trying to say? Perhaps Koahu is in you. Perhaps he is you.” The drawing was finished. I poured sea water upon it to cleanse it and cool the reddened skin. I had not drawn the Virgin Mary, as you had asked. I’d drawn an eye, the finest eye I had ever drawn. I knew you would be enraged, that there would be consequences, but I wanted that eye to be there whenever you espied a reflection of yourself. For as long as you were alive in that body, that eye would be there, returning your gaze in the mirror’s reflection, reminding you of our conversation. I gave you a looking-glass to hold, and held up a second one so that you could see the reflection of it.
“What have you done?” you said, your face aghast. “Where is the Virgin I asked for? Why have you drawn that terrible pagan symbol?”
“As a reminder of who you are,” I said, determined to impose my message upon you. “That boy is you. You are the boy. I saw you cross, I saw it all with my own eyes, and I, too, crossed, for I could not let you cross on your own.” You said nothing, yet I felt a hardening in you. You had become perfectly still. “I am Alula. I am the one who loves you. I followed you. I crossed too. I’m here with you.” You stood and took your shirt and slung it over your shoulders with your back turned to me. The moment was over, I could tell, but I could not stop. I could not stop until I had told you everything you needed to know. “Something happened in the crossing, something went wrong. You can’t remember, or perhaps you can only remember it in your dreams. But this is who you are: you are Koahu, never forget that. You have crossed once, and you must cross again. The Law says there can be no crossing without a return crossing. I am Alula, and I will never abandon you.” Still you said nothing, but only continued to button your shirt. “We must return to the island before it is too late.”
It was once your shirt was buttoned that you turned to me and, voice trembling, declared, “You will be punished for this, Joubert, mark my words. You are a madman and a fool, and you have humiliated the very man who saved your life.”
Then you walked away into the darkness without so much as a backward glance.
Later that day, the bosun Icard approached me. “What did you say to Roblet?” he asked.
“Nothing of consequence.”
“Whatever it was, he’s complained to the captain. You’re not to speak to him again. If you do, you will be flogged—and this time Roblet won’t be there to tend to your wounds.”
Our luck only worsened in Macao. Just weeks before our arrival, the Emperor of China had granted the Russians a monopoly on the fur trade. After a fruitless month spent repairing the ship, with second-rate furs moldering in the hold and tempers faring no better above deck, we continued our course toward the French colony of Isle de France, off the east coast of Africa. We moored in Port Louis for eleven weeks, waiting out the worst of the summer storms, and while the sailors caroused in the portside taverns and brothels, I was melancholic all the while, for I took what I saw on this island—the poverty, the sickness, the slavery—as a premonition of the fate of our own. In that time, I barely saw you. You were with the masters, guests of the colonial officials and plantation owners, attending balls and luncheons in their estates in the surrounding hills.
We set sail once more at the end of the storm season, and it wasn’t until Isle de France was little more than a smudge of blue ink on the horizon that I noticed your absence. I went looking for you in the sick bay below decks but I found only Reynier.
“Roblet?” he said. “He decided to stay in Isle de France. They were in great want of a surgeon. Perhaps I can help you?”
I turned away from him, masking any hint of my heart’s sorrow. I climbed down into the hold to sit among the rats and foul water, for at least here I could be alone and allow my heart to grieve in peace. When the bosun’s whistle blew soon after for the changing of the watch, I somehow took hold of my senses and climbed the ropes to the crow’s nest. I cannot say how I climbed those ropes without falling—for falling is what I wished for. I wanted to break my neck, I wanted to drown, I wanted to be swallowed by a whale. But my body acted in defiance of my heart. I climbed the rope-ladder and I stood upon that platform, looking out upon the sea and the sky.
It was dusk. The ship sailed sou’-southwest toward a tropical sun sinking into the ocean. It would have been as nothing to imitate that golden orb, to leap from my perch high on the mizzen mast and disappear into the water, leaving me to sink into my own everlasting night. My absence, most likely, would not have been noticed until the ship was long gone. Behind me, still within view but by now no more than a drop the size of the head of a pin between an infinite sea and an infinite sky, was Isle de France, the island we had left that very morning. Even though I could still see it with my own eyes, it was already as unreachable as if it had been on the other side of the world. I watched it until it was nothing more than an illusion of the eyes. Still I watched it, until the futility of the task impressed itself upon me: it was gone, and so were you.
The ship sailed onward. In the twilight, the evening star shone steady and true. One more time I wondered, should I let myself fall? Should I surrender to the longing for oblivion? The sea seemed to beckon to me, promising unending peace. But I did not succumb to its call. Instead, I made a vow. I cannot say to whom I made it, whether it was to me or you, to the gods above, or simply to the evening star shining in sweet solitude in the blushing sky ahead. To whom or what I cannot truly say, but I made a vow. And I did not fall.
By the time, weeks later, we finally arrived in Marseille, I immediately set about seeking a return passage to the island by way of Isle de France. It was already more than a year since we had left Oaeetee. In stifling August heat, I trawled the dens of the Vieux Port, visiting the offices of the shipping agents in search of a ship bound for the South Seas. When I told them where I wished to travel, some laughed at my foolishness while others gave me looks of contempt or pity. There were, I learned, no ships sailing to such places. The Solide’s expedition had been the first voyage to those parts to have ever sailed from this port, and it had stripped its investors of their fortune. By now, what’s more, all of France was gripped by revolution. The seeds of republicanism had sprouted all over Europe, and the continent’s monarchs were mobilizing for war. Voyages of discovery, which had seized the public imagination for a generation, were now of little interest to the fledgling republic. If I wanted to travel to the remotest parts of that ocean, I was told, I should join a ship trading in furs or sandalwood or the oil of the sperm whale, as such vessels sailed the globe in search of their merchandise, and sometimes ventured as far as the South Seas.
But before I could return I had to find you again. I hatched a plan that would take me to Isle de France, where I might find you, convince you to come with me, and together we would find postings upon a ship bound for the Indies, then another bound for the Spice Islands, and another for Formosa, and thus by and by we would sail once more the oceanic waters of our home. I thought it might take me several months to find you, and perhaps several years before returning to the island. Whenever such thoughts entered my mind, I would be cast into despair, and only the most resolute determinations kept me from becoming altogether unmoored: what did it matter, I told myself, if it should take ten years or twelve, or even twenty years, for us to return? The only thing that mattered was that we should arrive, after all, and restitute the Law that our actions had offended.
Once more I took up the life of the sailor. I found a passage to Isle de France and searched for you there. I asked in all the taverns of Port Louis after the surgeon Roblet. I learned that only weeks earlier you had joined a ship bound for Coromandel, and thus I contrived a posting aboard a ship bound for that Indian colony. Once there, I learned that you had taken a position aboard a ship bound for Malabar.
And so began the years of searching: a dozen years chasing rumors of you from port to port, crisscrossing oceans and seas, asking in taverns and coffee houses after the surgeon Roblet, moving from table to table, sailor to sailor, asking the same questions over and over, so that my pursuit of you became my regimen, my raison d’être, my life. Countless times I engaged in the same conversation, and countless times I met the same reply: “What is his description?” To this I had no special answer. In body, you were a man of no uncommon height and weight, with blue eyes and dark hair like so many of our compatriots, and no discernible deformities. You were possessed of both your eyes and ears; your nose and mouth were neither large nor small, your skin pocked by no illness, and the sum of all your fingers and toes was twenty. I could not say, “He has upon his shoulder a tattoo depicting an eye,” for, other than a surgeon’s mate, an ordinary seaman would rarely spy a master in a state of undress. But there was one particularity I knew of that would never be forgotten by any man who had sailed with you. And so I would reply, “His description is not special; he is a man like any other. Yet every night in his sleep he suffers such terrors that he is known to scream like the Furies.” And thus at every port I went to I would soon find someone who had recently sailed with a man of that description, or who knew someone who had done so, and who would attest with various admixtures of bitterness and pity that the poor bedeviled soul had been relieved of his post at the nearest port, sailors being so thoroughly prone to superstition that such nocturnal behavior had half the crew convinced a great curse had fallen upon them.
As well as being superstitious, sailors are also gifted tellers of tales. As a story passes from mouth to ear, ear to mouth, each teller adds to it some ingredient of his own. So it was not long before I noticed that the tales of you I encountered began to stretch and widen. The first time this happened was on the island of Gorée in Africa. I entered a rum shop and asked after you. One young lad claimed he had sailed on a ship with you the previous year and that you had traveled on to Argentina. Another sailor, an old salt, claimed to have been with you aboard a completely different ship only weeks previously, and that you were now on your way to New South Wales. Such contradictory reports began to occur ever more frequently until I realized that a myth of you had been born, and sailors, as is their wont in the idle hours of drink and card games, had added your story to the book of legends that they carried around in the libraries of their minds—your legend being that of the man of medicine cursed with a spiritual affliction without remedy, the surgeon whose malady was such that no ship would keep him. The greater the legend, the more distant you became. Eventually I felt I was no longer seeking a man but rather shadowing a ghost who was both everywhere and nowhere in particular. The legend of the accursed surgeon continued to grow and over time the stories of you became more vivid and varied. In Montevideo I heard tell of a dwarfish doctor with miraculous healing properties whose demons were so powerful the ship he sailed was cast into a vengeful maelstrom, killing all aboard save the surgeon himself—and the teller of the tale. Then, only months later, in Zanzibar, another sailor—a Moor—told of a doctor seven feet high with a great mane of red hair, whose terrors had proven such a malediction upon a ship bound for Ceylon that it had been becalmed for weeks on end and, by the time another ship had come upon them, all had died of thirst and hunger—all, that is, but the surgeon himself—and the teller of the tale.
And so, in the knowledge that it was one thing to pursue a man and another altogether to pursue a legend, I determined, several years after the dawn of the new century, with France no longer a kingdom or even a republic but a great empire stretching from one end of Europe to the other, to abandon my search for you and to take up another. Over the course of the following years, I sailed upon several ships that plied the furthest reaches of the oceans, ships that traded in fur and sandalwood and whale oil, in the haphazard hope that one such vessel might some day pass near our island, and I might somehow convince the captain to moor there. As the years followed one another, I must have circumnavigated the globe a dozen times, and neared the island on at least two occasions, but never more, at a guess, than within several hundred leagues. The first time was on a passage from Lima to the port of Manila, around the year 1805; the ship having recently moored at Easter Island for fresh water, we continued to sail without pause. The second time was in 1811, on a Nantucket whaler. When the lookout called land nor’-northwest, I watched the captain on the poop deck for his reaction. Again, there was none: the ship did not veer from its northerly direction, in search of the next whale. I was suddenly seized with a sickness to see my island so strong that I rushed to the larboard bulwark for a glimpse of dry land, but from the deck there was no such thing to be seen. I began to climb the rigging in the hope that I might catch sight of it from the crow’s nest. The bosun ordered me back to the deck but I pretended I did not hear. At the crow’s nest, I explained to the astonished lookout that I was landsick and wished to lay my eyes on solid ground—such madness is known to every sailor. The lookout explained that what he had taken for land had been nothing more than a dark bank of storm clouds on the horizon. I returned to the deck in a forlorn state only to find the bosun awaiting me. He pronounced a punishment of twelve lashes at next noon watch.
Both times I felt the nearness of it—I recognized the shapes of the sea and the wind, the color of the sky, the smell of the air, the display of the heavens at night. But a seaman’s influence on a ship’s direction is akin to that of a flea on a dog. The power of setting a ship’s course resides solely in the hands of the captain. I would never have that power, for I was an ordinary seaman and my prospects were those of an ordinary seaman. My station in the world of men was to be my destiny.
Years passed. I traveled the length and breadth of every sea and ocean in the world. When I grew too old for work on deck, I cooked in the galley. Eventually, I grew too old even for this. In the spring of 1814, as the French Empire crumbled to dust and its emperor began his first exile, I found myself stranded, whale-like, on an island on the other side of the Atlantic, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The end of our youth invariably takes us unawares, and I had little intimation, having arrived in that famous port on the whaler Illumination, that this would be my last circumnavigation. I spent all summer in Nantucket seeking a berth on another whaler, and on each occasion some long-faced Quaker would reply that his crew was fully accounted for.
I took jobs on other ships, plying shorter routes between ports on the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean. I sank into melancholy. I worked harder than any other sailor and, when I was not working, I drank. There can be no crossing without a return crossing. The phrase hounded me day and night. Now that I was too advanced in age to sail vast distances, what was I to do? How could I return to the island before dying without making another, second crossing? I was trapped—to redeem my first sin, I would have to commit another. It was better to accept that there would be no return. After all, the world had not ended as a result of our betrayals. I began to doubt the Law. Perhaps it had been wrong. Perhaps it had been invented by humans rather than passed down from the gods for the purpose of regulating the traffic of souls, to preserve the order of identity, to prevent the chaos of untrammeled crossings. I began to entertain the idea that there was no consequence to a crossing without a return crossing—only this was no less of a torment than the preceding idea. If it was true, it meant that all my efforts to find you and to return had been in vain. I might as well have thrown myself into the sea after all.
And so, my faith in the Law diminished, the temptation to make another crossing was never far from my thoughts. The first imploring look from some wretched girl in a brothel somewhere, or some shackled boy below decks on a slave ship between Baltimore and New Orleans, and I felt my soul begin to stir. It would have been a trifle to make a crossing with such a girl or a desperate captive, exchanging old age for youth, but it would have been futile, for its effect would have brought me no closer to my destination. Only a crossing with a ship’s captain could advance me. I still yearned to return home, but to do so I needed to become a man possessed of the power to set a ship’s course. Such an endeavor was easier said than done, for how often does one have the occasion to look such a man in the eye? A ship’s captain must be a hard man, not given to prolonged gazing into the eyes of even his wife, let alone one of his crew. To look someone uninterruptedly in the eye for the several minutes it takes to make a crossing is a revelation either of the deepest love or the deepest hatred, and it is the duty of every sailor to earn the love of his captain, and the interest of every captain to withhold it. I never crossed eyes with a captain for more than an instant—to do so any longer would have earned me nothing but trouble.
With age, it became harder to find employment, and sometimes I would find myself in one port or another—Nantucket, Baltimore, Caracas, Havana, or Port-au-Prince—for weeks or months on end. Whenever this happened, I whiled away the hours in various taverns, coffee houses, gambling dens, and brothels, waiting, with a deck of cards marked especially for the purpose, for a ship’s captain to sit at my table and take up a party of whist, like the orb spider who spins his nocturnal web and waits patiently in its center for the passing insect, only to dismantle it in the morning. But not once did the spider trap his fly.
The very last days of my life were spent in the port of New Orleans, Louisiana. Having all but surrendered hope of making another crossing, I had just enough money to buy myself a bumboat, and spent my days running small errands for a few coins upriver and down, from town to plantation or plantation to town, between ship and shore, shore and ship, or making river crossings, ferrying people or cargo from one riverbank to the other. By night I drank and played cards, still spinning my nightly web, though more out of a taste for liquor, women, and gambling than any higher purpose.
On a Monday afternoon in July 1825, I was in the back room of an inn playing widow whist for pennies with two other boatmen. It was late in the afternoon and outside a thick summer rain had emptied the streets, with peals of thunder that threatened to crack open the sky itself—a great thunderstorm of the tropics. The clatter of heavy raindrops upon the tin roof was like the applause of an audience in an opera house, making conversation impossible. Throughout the room, glints of droplets trickled through the rusty tin overhead and fell with a thud to the sawdust floor.
In the tumult of the rain, the entrance door opened and in walked a man in a dark woolen suit unsuited to the climes, so soaked through he looked as if he had just stepped out of a river baptism. I did not recognize him, nor, from the looks upon their faces, did my companions. He stood for some time in the entrance, accustoming himself to the darkness, rivulets of water trickling from his sleeves and the hem of his coat. He carried in each hand a leather satchel, which appeared heavy and well traveled, marking him a man of modest means, for a wealthier man would have engaged a porter to carry his luggage, and there would have been more of it.
The stranger continued to stand in the open doorway undaunted by the attention he was attracting, staring out into the empty darkness as if he had just witnessed a spectral apparition. He bore the demeanor not of the sinner, but of a man long and greatly sinned against. He was thin of body, wore a pencil mustache along his upper lip, and a wispy goatee on his chin. His flaxen hair, from under a wide hat, was grown long over his collar. Even wet and bedraggled it was evident that his suit was good, tight fitting, and well cut, such as is only seen in the port of New Orleans among the scions of the upriver plantations or the well-to-do young Yankees lately settled in the city.
Whist being a game best played by a party of four, I was gladdened by the sight of a newcomer to square our triangle. I called out in English to invite him to join us, but he remained mutely standing and looking into the darkness, staring down some great, secret demon. I tried again, in Spanish, with the same effect, and a third time in French. This caused him to flinch, as if startled from a mesmeric episode. He then asked, in the most perfect French, the kind of French rarely heard in these parts, what game we were playing. Widow whist, I replied, although we would prefer a game of Boston if he were willing.
Without another word he sat and we began to play. He played Boston with neither skill nor luck, and gave no indication that he had any interest in winning. He played by rote, more machine than man, paying scant attention to the cards. He had to be constantly prodded and prompted, suggesting that his mind was as distant as his person was near. After the game, as my companions were leaving, he asked them to return his money—he must have lost a dollar or more in a short time—and by way of reply my two friends laughed, judging his request an attempt at humor. Their reaction left him in a state of even greater despondency.
When we were alone, I resolved to satisfy my curiosity about the youth, and asked if he had just seen a phantom, for he had the countenance of a man so confronted. He assured me that he had seen no such thing. It took but little prompting for him to begin—tentatively at first, and then, assisted by a bottle of rum, with gathering confidence—an account of his life, both recent and ancient, of which the following is a summary.
The newcomer’s name was Jean-François Feuille. That very afternoon, he told me, he’d waded fully clothed into the muddy waters of the Mississippi with every intention of never returning to shore alive. Once fully submerged, he changed his mind and, after a great struggle, managed to haul himself out of the river despite the pull of the current and the added burden of his sodden woolen suit, which he had worn to prevent this precise eventuality. Thus, he told me morosely, he had proven himself a coward twice over—retreating out of cowardice from committing a coward’s act. The young man intrigued me, and I asked him his provenance.
Feuille was the youngest son of a wealthy, ambitious Bordeaux farmer. I told him I was from Toulon and he seemed somewhat uplifted by this compatriotic bond. Although his father had envisaged a career in the priesthood for him, as a child Feuille had instead developed a love for the paintings adorning the walls of his parish church. His father’s disapproval only fanned the flames of his ardour, and at the age of sixteen, against the wishes of the paterfamilias, he’d set off for Paris, determined to become an artist. Thanks to a letter of introduction penned by an aristocratic family acquaintance, he’d studied under the tutelage of the master Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. Feuille, by his own admission, was a devoted and conscientious student but not an especially gifted one, and at the end of his studies he’d spent several fruitless years scrounging an existence in Paris, garnering few commissions of his own.
When word of the successes of certain French portraitists in America began to filter back to France, Feuille resolved to emigrate. He inherited a modest sum after the death of his father, sold all he possessed (which didn’t add up to much) and bought a passage to New Orleans, determined to establish himself in the New World. His emigration did not, however, mark the slightest upturn in his fortunes—if anything they worsened. He was afflicted, he complained, by a profound timidity that prevented him from making the acquaintances and friendships required to prosper in his trade. To make matters worse, he had lost a good deal of his inheritance, such as it was, playing cards during his passage across the Atlantic. Upon his arrival he discovered a compatriot, Jean Joseph Vaudechamp, had arrived from France only a month earlier and set himself up in a studio in the city’s French quarter. Moreover, unlike himself, Vaudechamp had arrived with a benign temperament and substantial capital: he had placed advertisements in the Orleans Gazette boasting of his renown in the royal houses of Europe, and had furnished and decorated his quarters in the style of the artist’s studios of Paris, with a divan, vermilion silk-screened wallpaper, ancien régime furnishings, velvet drapery, and, on the walls, a gilt-framed portrait of a plump young woman—his sister, although the astute Vaudechamp hinted to prospective customers that it was, in fact, a noble woman for whom he had suffered an unrequited passion.
Feuille had, in the several weeks since his arrival, spent almost all that remained of his father’s wealth and was now on the verge of ruin. All was lost, he said, including his honor, for even if he had the money to make the return passage to France, it would be as a failure.
I’d had occasion, in the course of my life as Joubert, to become acquainted with many unfortunates who had suffered the most accursed fates. None of them had borne their burdens with such lack of grace. I ventured to remark that perhaps not all was lost, that if he so chose he might discern silver linings to the clouds that palled his horizons. No, he continued relentlessly, on the contrary—everything, everything was lost. He was damned, he cried, his head in his hands, cursed and damned, and did not wish to live another day.
As I listened to the painter’s tales of woe, I felt welling up within me a most unexpected combination of feelings that I can only describe as envious contempt. What wonders I might do, I thought, in his circumstances, endowed as he was with a young, handsome body, an educated mind, and good standing. As the natural and almost immediate consequence of this sentiment, an idea sprouted that, despite all efforts to banish it, quickly colonized my mind, as if every attempt at suppression merely hastened its triumph. Picture the scene: the two of us alone except for the innkeeper, wiping glasses with a bored look on his face at the far end of the empty room. The thunderstorm now at an end, a brilliant sunshine poured through the inn’s small, solitary window.
He was not a ship’s captain. He wasn’t even a sailor. In fact, he told me, he’d been seasick the entire journey across the Atlantic. But I was suddenly seized with the desire for the very thing he wished to throw away. If he cares not for his life, I thought, I shall care for it in his stead.
At times the best plans come to us fully fledged, as if bestowed from the heavens. So it was on this occasion. I told Feuille all he needed to do to revive his fortunes was to paint a portrait as an advertisement of his powers, which he might subsequently exhibit to attract more customers. It should be a portrait of a remarkable visage, one that would arrest the attention of every passerby with its virtuosity. I offered to commission such a portrait of myself, as I was at the end of my life and wished to have my countenance, such as it was, memorialized. Afterward, he would be welcome to display it in his studio for a time until other commissions were asked of him. At first, he refused my offer—in fact, he evinced a most disagreeable stubbornness. I had to insist upon it several times, and cajole him into accepting, which was only further evidence of his foolishness, for my suggestion was plainly as wise as it was generous. Finally he agreed, although not without a look of doubt upon his face. He suspected me of exploiting him but was not able to divine exactly how. I gave him my winnings from the card game we had just played—some three or four dollars—then twenty dollars more as a guarantee of my sincerity, and so that he might buy any supplies as were necessary for the agreed purpose. We even fixed the date—on the morrow—and the time—two o’clock in the afternoon. I poured two last glasses of rum, emptying the bottle, as a celebration of our agreement.
Then came the moment of inspiration. He raised his glass to his mouth with an avidity that suggested a weakness for liquor. I put my hand on his arm to stop it momentarily from lifting any higher. “The eyes,” I said, leaning forward, “are the thing. Render them well and you capture the soul of a man. Render them ill and you have missed him altogether.”
He nodded his agreement. “The eyes are at once the most important feature of any face and also the most difficult to paint,” he said. My hand was still on his arm. I felt it lifting upward once more but prevented it from doing so. I asked him if he had a preference for painting eyes of a certain color over eyes of another color—did he prefer to paint blue eyes, for instance, or dark eyes? He thought about this a moment and replied that in his experience dark eyes were generally easier to paint than blue or green eyes, for oftentimes they were less variegated, and the tint easier to imitate. Ah, I said, then I shall ensure my eyes are brown tomorrow. Feuille gave a puzzled look and asked me to repeat what I had just said.
“In that case, I shall ensure my eyes are brown tomorrow,” I said, “to make it easier for you to paint them.”
“But your eyes are blue,” he replied.
“They are blue today, but tomorrow they will be brown.”
“By what magic will they have changed color from one day to the next?”
“There’s no magic in it,” I said. “In a short time I can change their color from blue to brown.”
This visibly astonished the poor man. “Is this some kind of joke at my expense?”
“Not at all, merely an ability I’ve possessed from birth, just as some contortionists have the ability to bend themselves backward in two, or others can speak in tongues.”
“How is it done?”
“I merely concentrate my mind for three or four minutes and the color is transformed.”
“You do this with your eyes closed?”
“Quite the contrary, it can only be done with my eyes wide open.”
“Can you demonstrate this to me?”
“Of course,” I replied, “I won’t say it is a trifle, but it is no great thing. All that is required is the utmost mental concentration. You must look into my eyes without looking away. Shall we try it now?” He nodded vigorously. “Very well,” I said, “watch very carefully.”
Born 1797
First crossing 1825
Second crossing 1838
Date of death unknown
DESPITE THE STING of his temper, there had been something resolute about Joubert: his dogged nature, his dependable body, his old sailor’s ways, his indefatigable ethic of work and purpose. It was not so with Feuille. He was a man of feeble spirit and great appetite—a glutton, a squanderer, a débauché. If he did not hold grudges, as Joubert did, it was because of his prodigality. Even before the crossing, I had detected a dissipation in him. After it, I could not help but sink into its mire. I now had youth, good looks, education, talent, and even a little social standing, and yet in every other respect the man I was now was the inferior of the man I’d been. Where Joubert was resilient, Feuille was easily discouraged; where Joubert was vivacious, Feuille was sullen; where Joubert made friends, Feuille collected enemies; where Joubert was resourceful, Feuille was incapable and disorganized. Forever after, it was as if the part of me that had crossed over and the part of me that was already there were in constant battle with each other. I found myself the prisoner of impulses I could barely master.
During a crossing, one enters into a body and inherits its capacities and incapacities, its appetites and proclivities. But one also enters into a mind. When I crossed with Feuille, I brought with me all the memories I had accumulated in the course of my previous two lifetimes. I also inherited a corpus of new memories, the memories of this new me, all its pleasures and tribulations, its qualities and flaws. How much more frightened of pain was my new host than Joubert had ever been! And how much more in need of pleasure!
The crossing itself, though complete and unimpeded, had been decided upon on the spur of the moment. As soon as it was done a part of me regretted it. There was Joubert in front of me with the same expression of bewilderment in his eyes that I had seen in Alula’s: the bewilderment of the ambushed soul—a soul that knows something has happened without knowing precisely what. For once the crossing has begun, its effects are so strange and pleasant that it is a rare will that is strong enough to resist it. Resistance, after all, is simple: all that is required to prevent a crossing is to look away. But few who have begun a crossing can defy its seductive pleasures. It was sad to look upon the man I had just been, the body in which I had lived for more than three decades, now sitting directly in front of me with that look of shock upon his face. I took all the money in his possession—he was too deep in his stupefaction to murmur a word of protest—then I wished him well and was gone. Knowing exactly how much more money he kept hidden in the skiff he slept in, I went to the river, found his boat, and took the rest.
Almost as soon as I had left that coffee house in New Orleans I realized something was amiss. I had committed a wrong, perhaps even an evil, and try as I might I would never shake the shadow of my guilt. My first crossing had been motivated by my love for you, but the purpose of my second was more nebulous. It did not take long for the enormity of my wrongdoing to take hold. For as long as I was Joubert, there remained the possibility, however remote, that restitution of the Law might still be possible. Now that I was Feuille, there was no such possibility. Now there could never be a return crossing. I had thrown away any chance that the Law might be preserved. It was desecrated now, once and for all, and I was the one who had desecrated it. But—or so I reasoned to myself—a thing can only be broken once. Once broken, it can be broken again and again, and the result is the same.
I forgot about you too, Koahu—or rather I did everything I could to erase you from my mind. I put my convictions at the service of my interests. The Law, I told myself, was merely the superstition of a backward people. A crossing would not—could not—bring about the end of the world. The Law was merely the invention of men, men who sought power and control over others. The Law served only to limit our freedoms. I renounced my faith in it and yielded to all the freedoms within my reach, and in so doing became something terrible to behold: a charming persuader who sought only the satisfaction of his basest desires.
I began touring the cities of the American south, promoting myself as France’s finest portraitist, offering the planters, merchants, officers, and other eminences the occasion to have their likeness, and those of their families, their houses, and animals, even their slaves if they so wished, forever memorialized by the application of oil on canvas. Wherever I went, prosperous men would give me foolish amounts of their money to sit in a room with them, their wives, and their daughters for hours and days on end, while in the evenings I would spend their money on women, cards, liquor, and roast meats.
Customarily, a portraitist arrived at the home of his subject with a canvas already painted in all respects save the face. If the subject was female, the canvas would show the figure of a woman in the center, with a large empty space where her face would be. For the standard fee, the background would be an Arcadian scene. For an additional fee, the client might specify the particulars of the portrait. He or she might request a classical or a bucolic scene, or ask that a dog be included in the subject’s lap, or that a particular object—a pair of elegant hands, a jewel, an item of clothing—be displayed. Such things were all subject to negotiation, and every particular represented an additional profit for the portraitist.
This was how I met the woman who would become my wife, Hortense Michaux, only daughter of the widower Desire Michaux, owner of the famous Desire plantation of Louisiana. He sauntered into my rented studio in Lafayette one day and said, “I wish to immortalize my daughter.” She couldn’t travel, he explained, so I would have to displace myself to the Desire plantation, some ninety miles upriver of New Orleans in the Saint James Parish. I would be in want of nothing, he promised, and would be paid twice my usual fee.
I departed New Orleans on a steamboat two days later, in Desire’s company. I quickly realized that, as Feuille, I suffered from an especially vicious form of the landlubber’s affliction: seasickness. It’s a wonder I ever crossed the Atlantic. Desire distracted me from my travails with tales of himself, his primary theme of conversation. He had been born the third in a line of sugarcane planters and married a cousin who died in childbirth. He was a heavy-drinking braggart, unpleasant in every way but one: he loved his only daughter more than anything else in the world.
When I finally met Hortense, on the porch of the master’s house, she was sitting down. I was not struck by her beauty so much as an innate, sincere goodness. The chair she sat in had four small wheels at the ends of its legs and handles sticking out of the back of the frame. She had been struck by polio as a child and was unable to walk. I unrolled the canvas I had earlier prepared, a figure of a faceless woman wearing a silk mother-of-pearl evening gown. Hortense, however, insisted that I paint her wheelchair, as she called it, with a scene of the plantation in the background. When I told Desire this would add several days and several scores of dollars to my fee, he said, “Take your time, boy, take your time,” and clapped me on the shoulder. “Pronay votrah toe,” he added in his mangled Acadian French. He was very proud of his ability to speak French, but just about every time he did I nodded and smiled in reply without understanding a word he had said. It mattered little. On such occasions, a nod and a smile were all that was required of me.
The Desire plantation was not one of the biggest in the parish, nor was it one of the smallest. The master’s house had cost Desire Michaux forty-eight thousand dollars, and so he was fond of boasting. It was a two-and-a-half-story building with galleries twenty feet broad all around, supported by fluted columns. The stately apartments were fitted with old oak and rosewood and filled with priceless furniture and antique portraits. Hortense, Desire told me, was determined to turn it into a treasure house of art, statuary, and books. It had a library with the latest tomes she ordered from Europe, a music room with a grand piano made in New York, a wine cellar that stocked only French wine, and a dungeon for the punishment of slaves. The lawns between the house and the river levee were planted with magnolias, orange trees, and large, twisting oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Around the main buildings were an assortment of outbuildings: a kitchen, bachelor apartments, a dovecote, stables, a greenhouse where orchids grew, and a cellar to store the great blocks of ice shipped downriver from Canada in the winter. The Desire plantation, boasted its master, was entirely self-sufficient and wanted for nothing.
A grove of cypress trees separated these buildings from the slave quarters, which were organized in four rows of six two-roomed, open-windowed cabins, each of which was shared by two families. At the center of this slave village was a planting of great sycamores growing around a belltower that rang morning, noon, and night, dividing the day into a routine that with the passage of time became as familiar as one’s own heartbeat. Beyond the slave quarters was the sugar mill; beyond the mill were the sugarcane fields; and beyond those the impenetrable Louisiana bayou.
It was in the drawing room of the master’s house that Hortense and I would meet every morning after breakfast. As I painted, I would tell her stories. I told her stories of a childhood in a family impoverished by the revolution, whereas in fact my father had profited immensely from the turmoil of that generation. I told her stories of my time spent as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp during the Hundred Days, how I was there at Waterloo and had seen the Prussians entering Paris, whereas in fact I had, through well-placed connections and counterfeit illness, avoided the military altogether. She had a weakness for blue blood, so I told her stories of painting the portraits of some of Europe’s most illustrious grandees by day while carousing with some of the continent’s most notorious artists and conspirators by night. All lies. The artists and conspirators with whom I had caroused had labored in near-complete obscurity, penury, and illness. But with her romantic sensibility, Hortense swallowed whole the stories I told her, day after day while I painted, and night after night at the dinner table.
Sometimes it is the plainest who are bravest. On the evening of the last sitting day, which was also the eve of my departure, Hortense gave me a scented envelope as a token of her esteem, suggesting I might read it on my journey back to New Orleans. Of course I opened it as soon as I got back to my quarters. It was a poem about flowers called “Love’s Bouquet.” It mentioned the pansy, the gardenia, the apple blossom, the bachelor’s button, and the forget-me-not. It contrasted the heather and the holly, praised the ivy and the violet over the amaryllis and the passionflower, and finished with the star-of-Bethlehem. I had to consult a book on the subject in the New Orleans library to decipher it. The girl had written me a coded declaration of love. I was only too delighted to feign reciprocity. Somehow, the motherless Hortense had grown to be a tender and amorous soul despite her father’s brutish instincts. As delicate as she was plain, an old maid in years when I met her and yet still almost a child at heart, Hortense had developed a stubborn passion for me that her indulgent father could not refuse, despite the antipathy he bore toward all of humanity, other than his daughter, and toward artists in particular. Old Desire, a man who so clung to the manners of the French ancien régime that he still wore buckled shoes and silk stockings, was for all his foolishness not so easily fooled. When he looked at me, he saw a mystery so beneath contempt it did not even require solving. He tolerated me only for Hortense’s sake. On the night before our wedding, as we smoked cigars and drank claret together, he told me that his daughter, who had since childhood been of melancholic disposition, had never been happier. He clapped his broad hand on my still slender shoulder and said, “As long as my daughter remains happy, you’re welcome at Desire.”
At the Desire plantation, the daughter’s every wish was indulged. The great majority of her whims sprang from her love of beauty. Hortense loved art more than I did. She herself painted—landscapes of the plantation and its surrounds, which were all extravagantly framed and hung on the walls of the master house. Her style was that of a precocious child: a little skill and complete artlessness. When she played the piano, she was so careful not to make a mistake that she slowed to a near stop for all the difficult passages. When she sang, with much practice she could almost manage to sing in tune. She subscribed to literary journals, which arrived, months out of date, in the post, and from them she memorized long passages of the latest verses by the most notorious French and English poets. After dinner she liked to recite at length verses by such fashionable poets as Lamartine or Byron, or if she was feeling especially bold she might recite one of her own verses, over which she labored with infinite patience. She favored poems about the wonders of the European landscape, landscapes she would never see with her own eyes. Her recitation style veered between the wooden and the floral: here and there, she would stumble or omit a crucial word and, flushing crimson, would reach for her book and flick to the right page so that she might correct herself. Her guests, as gracious toward their host as they were immune to the charms of lyric verse, listened with seemly attention. Daydreaming politely until it was clear the recitation was at an end, they would applaud and liberally praise a blushing Hortense, marveling at her talent and those of Europe’s most renowned poets, so that the one seemed indistinguishable from the other. Though I did not love Hortense, it would be untrue to say I loathed her. My attitude was more one of benevolent self-interest. I was, above all, glad to put the life of the traveling portraitist behind me.
The bloom of youth wilts, as is universally known, but beauty lingers longer on some faces than others. A short decade after my crossing, I was no longer the dashing, romantic hero I had affected in my youth. I had done little in the meantime other than indulge myself in every pleasure plantation life can afford an idle man, which are, in the main, eating, drinking, and lording it over the servants. As a result I had become obese. My hair had fallen out in uneven clumps. My skin was blotched with gin blossoms. My teeth, rotting one after the other, were extracted and replaced with teeth of gold. I suffered from the gout, what’s more, and was barely able to raise myself from a chair. Hortense spent her days in her wicker chair on wheels, fretting endlessly over my welfare while I parried away her attentions. Between meals, I liked to sip great quantities of rum, mint, and lemonade on the porch in the mottled sunshine, watching the comings and goings of plantation life, and giving myself over completely to poisonous thoughts, until it was time for the next meal.
As the years passed, my thoughts began to circle increasingly around one particular subject: my next crossing. I had already twice desecrated the Law, and on the second occasion passed a point of no return. I was beyond redemption, and yet the world was not destroyed. On the contrary, it appeared as intact as ever. There was, other than the lack of a body, nothing to stop me crossing again. I debated this question endlessly, sitting on the porch, observing, studying, and scheming my escape from the prison-within-a-prison in which I was trapped. I was determined that my next crossing would not be as impulsive as the last. All I needed was to find a suitable body with which to cross, and a means by which to do it.
When I first spied the girl, crossing the yard alongside her mother, a scullery maid called Berthe, she must have been no more than twelve or thirteen years old. I was sitting in my usual position, sipping iced rum, lemonade, and mint. I noticed her reserve, her languid grace, how quiet and imperturbable she was. She was so contained she gave the impression she existed within a soapy bubble that might pop at any moment. Only it never did. The effect of her was thus always slightly miraculous. Having never seen her before, I made inquiries about her. Her name was Jeanne. She had been loaned out to a neighboring plantation for some years. She was lighter of skin than the field slaves, and it was assumed her father was Desire, as there were rumors that Berthe was his favorite. Half-castes were spared the field and worked inside the house.
Now that I had seen her once I began to see her often. Although she never paid me the slightest mind, I made her the object of my fascination. I studied her every movement. She seemed near and far at once, as if she knew everything there was to know and was indifferent to it.
Hortense quickly divined my interest in Jeanne and despised her for it. In spite of my hideous appearance, Hortense’s love for me continued to burn, perhaps because it never found its satisfaction. She asked her father to banish the girl from the house but this was a rare whim that Desire did not indulge. He even defended me, calling it proof that I was a red-blooded Frenchman, proof he was glad to have, as he had often doubted my manliness. I denied everything, of course. In truth Hortense had every reason to be jealous, but she mistook the nature of the desire. The bronze glint of the girl’s skin, her reserve, her youth—when I looked upon her it was not lust I felt, for my bloated body was no longer capable of such outbursts of passion. It was recognition. She reminded me of myself, of the girl I had once been, lifetimes ago.
For eight months of the year, dinnertime on the Desire plantation—always an elaborate affair—was conducted on the porch. Michaux père et fille flaunted their French heritage, and dinner was invariably served in the continental manner, in courses that followed one another rather than all at once, on Limoges crockery, with wines from Bordeaux served in crystal glasses. At such times, seated at the head of a long table opposite Hortense, with Jeanne and other servants hovering nearby, Desire Michaux was irrepressible. He enjoyed an audience, and we were ever faithful to the call, Hortense and I, along with the overseer, Champy, and more often than not several invited guests, either planter families from neighboring estates visiting for a day or two or visitors from downriver staying several days or weeks.
After a drink, Desire was fond of launching into a long disquisition on one of a handful of favorite themes, and no discussion would be entered into. He fancied himself an amateur philosopher, especially regarding the subject of the races—the Negro, the failings thereof, and the advantages servitude brought thereunto. Regarding the full-blood slave, Desire had little to say: the full-blood Negro was beyond human redemption because of the curse of Ham, but could nevertheless receive divine redemption, which depended not on man but on the mercy of God. But was the half-caste subject to the same curse? There were, he admitted, undoubtedly many instances of half-castes in Louisiana who had flourished in their freedom, which indicated that they possessed certain qualities that might, in certain circumstances, approach those of a white man. But was the half-caste capable of human redemption? He would continue on this theme night after night, often alluding directly to one of the half-castes present, including Jeanne, all of whom had been trained to remain perfectly oblivious to the nature of the conversation being conducted by the masters they served. The disquisition always ended with its customary conclusion: that the Negro was better off in his bestial state than burdened with the ennui of the white man’s life.
Over the years, by force of repetition, one could follow the course of his argument paying only the slightest attention, and otherwise enjoy a moment of perfect solitude. It was best, when Desire was drunk, to keep one’s attention firmly fixed on one’s plate. As what was on my plate was my chief delight, I was only too happy to comply. I questioned his racial theories just once and regretted it instantly. He saw my words as a challenge to his unassailable authority. The viciousness of his retort was such that he stopped only when Hortense burst into tears. It was a most unpleasant episode, and I resolved never to provoke another like it. But the seed of defiance was planted in my mind and was watered nightly by Desire’s monologues.
Meanwhile, I continued my own, sad metamorphosis into a sight ever ghastlier to behold. I could barely stand to see my reflection in a mirror—and the house was filled with them. I had a sweet tooth that could never be satisfied, and a sugarcane plantation is no place for a sweet tooth. Subjected to a fatal admixture of gluttony and idleness, my body continued to swell, and my teeth to rot. Every toothache set off a nauseous trip downriver to the dentists of New Orleans, with tearful farewells from Hortense and a procession of servants to navigate the passage of my monstrous body over and around the hazards of the outside world. Eventually, for expediency’s sake, my few remaining teeth were removed all at once. By the time I was hauled out of the dentist’s office, my jaws were worth several slaves.
Year after year, I observed the girl’s metamorphosis into a young woman with a proud, dignified bearing. The resemblance to the young woman I had once been only grew. I watched Jeanne become my double, my likeness, my sister. Of course, she never paid me the slightest attention. Her only acknowledgment of my existence was the minimum necessary for the fulfillment of her duties. I began, in the solitude of my thoughts, to contemplate the prospect of making my next crossing with the slave girl who served me my every meal. But if I was to cross again, I wished to avoid making the same mistake I had made with this one. I was lost, cast adrift here on this Louisiana plantation, and what I yearned for was a new beginning, morally as well as physically. Jeanne became the symbol of the fresh start I craved. And as I did not wish to live a life of slavery, before crossing with her, I would need to procure her freedom.
Obtaining the freedom of a slave was no simple undertaking. I could either buy her myself and free her or organize her escape and expose her to the risk of capture and punishment. In the dungeon under the same house where, nightly, we gathered to eat our fill, recalcitrant slaves were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. I was determined to avoid that fate. However, having no money of my own, I was unable to purchase the girl myself—and even if I had, the act would have caused more problems than it solved. For whenever Jeanne was near, Hortense’s gaze blazed in my direction, envious of the attentions I devoted to the girl; all Hortense ever received from me was politeness. Sometimes, when she caught me gazing longingly at Jeanne, she would slip into an uncontrolled rage and, in tears, beg her father to send the girl away. Desire would reply that he had nowhere to send the girl, other than the slave market. “Send her to the slave market, then, Papa!” she would plead, knowing it was the banishment of his own daughter, her half sister, that she was asking of him.
At dinner on the porch one evening in the autumn of 1838, with fireflies flickering softly in the darkness of the garden below and all the world soft and gentle, Desire finally relented after another of Hortense’s fits of pique. Jeanne was attending to us impassively as always. She was standing within earshot not a few feet away from him when he announced, “If it makes you happy, I will sell the girl.”
Hortense looked up, wide-eyed with happy astonishment. “What did you say, Papa?”
“Jeanne. If it makes you happy, I will send her away.”
The news sent me into a panic I was at labors to disguise. Instantly I looked in Jeanne’s direction. She did not blink or falter or startle. She betrayed no emotion at all. Desire might have been speaking about some distant stranger. We might just as well have been discussing repairs to the belltower or the price of sugar.
Hortense, by contrast, was delighted. She did not say anything, not wishing to gloat, but all the same she beamed with satisfaction. Finally her triumph was in sight. It had taken her years to persuade her father to sell his half-caste daughter. She now had her wish, and in her mind her responsibility was to accept victory with as good a grace as she could muster. The signs of her happiness were subtle: the liveliness of her eyes, the inflections of her voice, the vivacity of her movements. The pronouncement had been made, and there was to be no more talk of it.
As usual, after the madeira was poured and cigars lit, Hortense picked up the book she had been reading to us nightly. It was a book, she’d assured us, that was much in vogue across Europe. She began reciting, taking it up at the point she had finished the previous night, the scene where Victor Frankenstein climbs the Glacier Montanvert:
“‘Alas!’” she read, “‘why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.’”
She continued:
We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.
We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.
We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh, or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same; for, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free.
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but mutability.
Later that evening, as I lumbered past the door of Desire’s apartment, I noticed it was slightly ajar. Hearing the murmur of voices, I peered in discreetly and saw Jeanne’s mother Berthe kneeling at Desire’s lap, beseeching him tearfully not to send Jeanne away. He stroked her hair tenderly. “There, there,” he said, “there, there.”
At dinner the next evening, with Jeanne and Berthe both attending to us, Desire announced that he had decided to sell Berthe as well as Jeanne. Again, the young Jeanne betrayed no emotion, but her mother picked up the hem of her skirt and scurried away, sobbing. Her inconsolable wailing continued for hours thereafter until, in the middle of the night, Desire’s booming voice was heard commanding that she be taken to the dungeon and placed in shackles so that he might sleep in peace.
I knew Hortense would ensure I had no opportunity to approach Jeanne before her departure. My best chance at a crossing would be to devise some plan that would allow me to credibly leave with them. On the eve of their departure for New Orleans in the company of the overseer, Champy, gathering together all the little courage at my disposal, I put my plan into effect: I reluctantly hauled myself to the summit of the grand staircase and, after several minutes of hesitation, abandoned myself to gravity’s cruelties in such a way that my front teeth were knocked out in the fall. As blood was gushing out my mouth, and with my golden teeth clutched in my hand, it was decided I would go to New Orleans instead of Champy, have my teeth attended to, and subsequently see to the auction of Jeanne and Berthe at the slave market. I would be gone for a week. I will never forget the stricken look in Hortense’s eyes as she kissed me on the cheek. Perhaps she somehow sensed we were saying goodbye.
As I sat with the two women in the buggy that would take me down to the jetty, Desire approached, gave me Jeanne’s and Berthe’s ownership titles, and said in a whisper that I might sell them separately if the price was better. He turned away without farewelling his daughter—who, as usual, betrayed nothing of her thoughts or feelings—or her mother, whose distress was clearly etched upon her face.
The boat trip to New Orleans took all the rest of that day and a good deal of the next, a bone-shaking, nauseating journey on the steamboat Phoenix, whose boiler was too powerful for the boat’s frail frame. A terrible tremble shook us throughout the journey. Down the river we rattled, through burning fields of sugarcane, with thick smoke billowing into the sky all around. I spent the entire journey in a fog of laudanum to dull the pain in my mouth, which only made my seasickness worse.
Having arrived in the port of New Orleans, I immediately took two rooms in a hotel by the river and went directly to a shipping agent and asked for two tickets on the next boat to France. A steamboat bound for Marseille was scheduled to leave three days hence, I was told, so I bought two first-class passages there and then. I returned to the hotel and found Jeanne and Berthe locked in the room where I had left them. I reassured them that they would not be sold and showed them the tickets I had just purchased.
We spent the following two days running endless errands in preparation for our journey. I went to the dentist and had my broken gold teeth replaced with new gold teeth, which I charged to the Desire plantation. Then I hocked an array of precious objects I had stolen from the Desire plantation. I accompanied the mother and daughter to various Creole clothiers, buying dresses and luggage and such provisions as would be needed for their journey, all of which I charged to the Desire plantation. And I bought a small hammer, which I also charged to the Desire plantation. The morning of our departure, we returned to our rooms after breakfast and I told the women the time had come for their escape to freedom. I took all the money Desire had given me and placed it on the table beside the window. I removed my wedding ring, signet ring, and fob watch and did the same. I took my old gold teeth and added them to the loot, piling all these riches together. All this, I said, was theirs, and they were greatly pleased.
“Before I grant you your freedom,” I said, “there is one small matter we must attend to, after which you will be free to go.” I turned to the mother. “Berthe,” I said, “I would like you to leave me alone with your daughter for a short while.”
Berthe looked at me pleadingly, tears filling her eyes.
“I insist upon it,” I replied. “I cannot let you go until you grant me an hour alone with your daughter. I promise you nothing untoward will occur.”
Berthe let out a single sob before regaining her composure. She looked sorrowfully at her daughter, whose eyes returned the look with just as much sorrow.
“Please, Maman,” said Jeanne, her voice shaking, “do what monsieur asks.” The women embraced and Berthe, with a heavy sigh and tears trailing down her cheeks, left. Jeanne was standing in the middle of the room with an expression that betrayed no feeling. I took my last bottle of laudanum in hand and swallowed its contents.
“Now, Jeanne,” I said, sitting on one of two bentwood chairs I’d placed opposite each other, “this is what I would like you to do.” I took her by the wrist and dragged her close to me, handing her the hammer I had bought the previous day. “I want you to use this to knock out all of my teeth, making sure you retrieve all of them and let none of them fall down my throat.” A look of panic flickered across her face. “Yes, it will hurt, but that is not your concern. I won’t get angry at you. I won’t punish you. I want you to do it. In fact, I insist on it. Come now.” I tilted my face toward her and opened my mouth wide as I had at the dentist two days earlier. If Jeanne had any hesitation, she of course showed nothing of it. She simply gave a little nervous sigh and began hammering. I made such a commotion that Berthe opened the door a little to see what was happening. I waved her away with one grunt and, with another, urged Jeanne to continue. When she was done, she washed the gold teeth in a glass of water without a word and placed them with the other precious things procured thanks to the unwitting generosity of Desire Michaux.
I felt as beaten up as after a flogging, and spent some minutes hunched over, blood drooling from my mouth. Admittedly, I might have made things easier on myself by crossing with Jeanne first, and then chiseling the gold teeth from Feuille’s mouth, but I was determined to inflict no needless suffering on the girl, considering that what I was about to do was cruelty enough. It would be a blind crossing, and she would inherit a broken body, but I appeased my conscience with the thought that at least it was the body of a free man, a white man, a wealthy man. It would be assumed that he’d been the victim of a violent robbery.
I could hear Berthe fretting outside. My bloodied mouth was throbbing and swollen and I could not speak, so it was with gestures and grunts that I instructed Jeanne to sit on one of two chairs. Then I locked the door.
Born 1822
First crossing 1838
Second crossing 1864
Date of death unknown
ON A FROSTY day shortly before Christmas 1864, around noon, there was a knock at my door. I lived, at the time, in a small room I shared with a ragpicker in Batignolles, a dreary worker’s suburb outside the Paris city wall. That day I was alone, which, at this advanced stage of my life, was how I spent most of my days, reclining on the bed or on a tattered divan in a corner of the room, reduced to infirmity by the pox. I had, several months earlier, suffered a paralysis of the left side of my body. Such a simple task as answering the door was beyond my capacities.
When the door opened, I saw in the gloom of the landing the silhouettes of two slender women. Entering the room in their wide dresses, they gladdened it like two upturned bouquets, the first of iris purple and the other of lily white. I invited them to be seated on the divan, which they approached hesitantly before accepting the invitation. In the pearl-gray light that entered the room through a single dirty window, I noticed how exquisitely dressed they were. For warmth, they were draped in furs of fox and ermine, which they did not loosen upon entering as, despite the stove, it was barely warmer inside than out. The woman dressed in mauve wore a veil over her face, which she did not raise. The other had a young face of rare beauty, with alabaster skin and great wide turquoise eyes set far apart. Under the little hat she was removing was a mane of chestnut hair, tied in two chignons at the nape of her neck, with ringlets covering her ears. The other’s hair was, like her face, hidden by a veil, and when I invited her to remove it she replied most politely that she preferred to leave it on if it was all the same to me.
My visitors introduced themselves. The one dressed in purple who would not remove her veil was Mademoiselle Édmonde, while the pretty one introduced herself as Mademoiselle Adélaïde. They spoke in turns, shyly, hesitantly, almost in whispers, as if overawed by a great occasion. They did not tell me their family names but it was evident, by their demeanor, their dress, their manners, and their speech, that they were of the most rarefied provenance, and that such rooms as the one in which I lived were unknown to them. The demoiselles said they were relieved to have finally found me, as some people believed me already dead, while others claimed I had left Paris for the tropical climes of my birthplace.
“As you can see, I am very much still alive and here,” I said. “I’m afraid I only have tilleul to offer you.” When she saw the difficulty with which I heaved myself from my mattress, Mademoiselle Adélaïde offered to boil the water and prepare the infusion. As she busied herself, I asked Mademoiselle Édmonde why it was they had come. She explained they were readers of Charles Baudelaire, and they wished to meet his muse, the woman who had inspired his greatest poems. Such was their fondness for Charles, in fact, that they had founded a society devoted to his work, which naturally enough they had called the Baudelaire Society. They had written to Charles care of his publisher in Brussels, she said, expressing their admiration for his poems, but they had received no reply. So they had begun making inquiries among his friends—Courbet, Manet, Champfleury, Madame Sabatier, and so on—in an attempt to find me. They had even engaged the services of a private detective for the purpose.
Mademoiselle Édmonde’s discourse ended as Mademoiselle Adélaïde approached with her pot of infusion and three cups. I was embarrassed—I did not possess two cups that looked the same, nor saucers on which to place them. But, judging by the smiles on the faces of the young ladies, my cups were of little interest. They beheld me as if I were on display in a museum, saying nothing, waiting for me to respond. I took several small sips from my infusion. “So,” I finally said, “Charles has readers?”
“Yes,” replied Mademoiselle Édmonde from behind her veil, “although we are more than readers—we are devotees, acolytes, disciples. Though small in number, our devotion has no limits. We are determined to ensure that his work shines forever. We think Monsieur Baudelaire is a great genius.”
“Greater than Hugo?”
“Without a doubt.”
“So Charles was right.” I reached forward stiffly for a lump of sugar.
“Let me help you,” said Mademoiselle Édmonde, taking my cup, dropping sugar into it, and stirring.
“What do you desire of me?” I asked.
The two young women looked at each other momentarily and smiled. “Only to meet you and to learn about you,” replied Mademoiselle Édmonde. “Nothing of you is known, other than what is in the poems.”
“That is already too much.”
“Please,” said Mademoiselle Adélaïde, giving me a doleful look with her wide green eyes, “we have gone to great lengths to find you. Tell us about yourself. Tell us your story. We will not betray your confidence. We may even be able to provide assistance, make your remaining days more comfortable.”
I thought about this a moment. “Do you know the painting by Courbet known as The Painter’s Studio?” Mademoiselle Édmonde replied that she had been taken to see it at the Palais du Louvre as a girl, and that many of the figures in it had been friends of her parents. “I’ll tell you something about that painting you may not know: I was once in it. I, Jeanne Duval, a mere slave girl who can barely read or write, was portrayed standing among France’s most brilliant men—Champfleury, Proudhon, and the others. Charles is also in it, seated at the right of the painting, reading a book. When Courbet first painted it, I was depicted standing by Charles’s side. What had I done to deserve this great honor? I had been his muse—his grande taciturne, his Black Venus.” I sighed as memories I had long fought to smother began to resurface. “And yet, when Charles told me about the painting, I fell into such a fury that the very next day he went to Courbet and told him that I was to be removed from it, erased, painted over. Courbet did what Charles asked, but if you look hard enough, you can still see the trace of my image, hovering like a phantom over Charles’s right shoulder as he reads his book.” I looked directly at the two women. “That is how I wish to be remembered. As a ghost.”
“Don’t you desire what you deserve?” asked Mademoiselle Édmonde from behind her veil.
“What is that?”
“Immortality.”
“Immortality is a curse.”
My two interlocutors were silent for a moment before Mademoiselle Adélaïde asked, in as sweet and imploring a tone as I have heard, “Please, madame, tell us your story.”
I had never breathed a word of my life story to anyone other than you, Koahu, but now that I was living in the shadow of death I yielded to the temptation of finally unburdening myself. “Very well,” I said. “But I warn you, the telling will take all day. It is a tale full of wonders, many of which you will not believe. You will consider me mad, but your opinion is, I assure you, of no consequence to me. If I say anything to which you wish to object, I pray you keep your outrage to yourself. And you must make me a solemn promise that you will never repeat what I tell you, nor commit it to writing.” The women agreed to my terms. After they’d sent their coachman out to bring us cakes and coffee, I began to tell them the tale of the albatross.
I began by telling them about us, Alula and Koahu, and our lives on the island. I related the tale of our crossings with Joubert and Roblet and our subsequent separation. I recounted the crossing with Feuille and Feuille’s life on the Desire plantation. Finally, I told them about the crossing with the slave girl Jeanne. The two women sat side by side, holding each other’s hands as they listened.
After I’d told them these tales, I requested a pause. I was not used to such exertions and my head was dizzy. It was midway through the afternoon. The sky would darken in an hour or two. The ladies waited in respectful silence, chewing their cakes and sipping coffee politely, worried that I would revoke the privilege they’d been accorded. But now that I’d begun, I would not be stopped. The tales poured out of me, one after the other, like pearls on a necklace.
I took up my own story in the moments following the crossing with Feuille. When one has crossed into a new body, I explained, there is always a period of familiarization with it—with its history and idiosyncrasies. The manner in which the soul adheres with the new body is never quite the same. What’s more, the body’s memories do not come all at once. Rather, in the first few hours there is a flood of them, triggered by countless exterior sights, sounds, and smells. Over the next few days, the stream of memories slows so that by the third day they are but a trickle. Some memories are deeply buried and can surface weeks, months, or sometimes years after a crossing.
Having just crossed into the body of this girl in that New Orleans hotel room, I turned to take one last look at my previous body, that of Feuille. He sat directly before me, a ghastly sight, his mouth encrusted with streaks of dried blood, the result of the removal of his gold teeth before the crossing. In his gray-blue eyes a dazed new soul was now blinking timorously in perfect ignorance of what had just occurred. The guilt occasioned by my act of thievery stabbed me into action. I gathered together all our belongings, including the money and gold that would launch us into our next lives, and stepped out into the hallway, where Mother was anxiously waiting. Upon seeing me she burst into tears and hugged me. The sight and touch of her prompted a hailstorm of memories in me so great and vivid I almost fainted. I composed myself and told her not to cry but to rejoice, for now we were free.
During our passage to Marseille, I accustomed myself to my new mind and body, glad to be rid of both the venality and the seasickness I had known as Feuille. And I discovered the extraordinary power that lay in the body of a desirable young woman. As the number of men on board vastly outnumbered the women, many of them directed their attentions toward me with indefatigable zeal. The thought crossed my mind on more than one occasion to make another crossing with one of them, for it would be surely more advantageous to me to be a white-skinned man than a dark-skinned woman, but now that I was once more a woman I did not covet manhood. After Feuille, there was something redemptive about being Jeanne. Although given to episodes of melancholia, she was resilient and composed. The great cruelties she’d already witnessed in her short life had endowed her with an aloofness that acted as a protective shell. And so, as Jeanne, I remained unmoved by the gallantries I was paid. Those men that fell in love with me aboard that steamer were only the first in a long line of those who loved me unrequitedly. I myself have only ever once fallen in love, and it was with you, Koahu. I remained for the most part in our cabin, attending to Mother, who was wretchedly sick the whole voyage and pining for the plantation. I thought it prudent to take a protector, on the rare occasions I ventured out of the cabin, to shield me from the excesses of my most ardent admirers. I chose for the purpose Louis Meyerbeer, a man of business based in Lyon. A middle-aged father of seven, he was garrulous, shrewd, and unfailingly polite. He sat beside me at every meal and offered all kinds of useful counsel about what to do with my newfound liberty. He advised me to travel to Paris, the most extraordinary of cities, he claimed. There, I could cultivate my gifts and use my beauty to advantage, for an attractive woman of talent had better prospects in Paris, he said, than just about anywhere else in the world. I found Louis thoroughly persuasive—the young woman in me yearned to see something of life and society, and as I’d long since abandoned hope of ever finding you again, Koahu, or of finding a means to return to Oaeetee, I decided to take his advice.
Having arrived in Marseille, I found the port no less squalid than when I’d last passed through, as Joubert, more than two decades earlier. And so within days of our arrival in Marseille, with Louis as our chaperone, we traveled upriver by steamer to Lyon. We farewelled Louis there and continued by diligence to Paris, a journey of a little over a week. Although we’d bought tickets for inside the coach, several of our fellow passengers objected to traveling in such close proximity to us, and my mother and I were thus forced to travel on the roof, beside the driver. Everywhere I went, I found myself an object of curiosity. I could attract a crowd solely on the basis of my skin color and my freedom, for slavery had yet to be abolished in the kingdom.
It was no different in Paris, where I could silence entire rooms simply by entering them. The Paris we encountered was not the modern city of wide boulevards, train stations, and gas lighting but a dark, damp, gothic place. This was the old Paris, the Paris of the last King of the French, a more intimate Paris, where the poor lived above the rich, where barefoot children thronged at every corner, where rats roamed the streets, and where rivulets of sewage trickled down twisting alleys. Nights were lit by candles and the stars and moon above. Misery was on constant public display and opulence hid behind the high walls of hôtels particuliers. When it rained, the streets would flood and Parisians would retreat into the arcades to inspect the shop windows. On Sundays after church, all over the city, people would gather around a guitar to sing and dance. At such times I was happy, for I remembered how, at the Desire plantation, my people would gather around a banjo on Sunday afternoons, singing and dancing to their own songs, and I felt connected to them, even though so far away.
I was a beautiful young woman of sixteen, and I immediately found myself beset by men. The most gifted among them—ambitious dreamers and schemers, professional and amateur plotters, devourers of words and ideas—had grown up on tales of Napoleonic adventure only to enter, in their maturity, a society that discouraged novelty. Their nostalgia for imperial glories extended to a fashion for dark-skinned beauties. They did not wish to marry me, but considered me an ideal mistress to share among themselves. My admirers helped us find lodgings in a respectable rooming house, paid for my visits to couturiers, milliners, and bootmakers, and for lessons in deportment, singing, and acting. I made progress in every art but one: I could never learn to read or write. These were skills that did not cross from one body to the next. No matter how hard I tried, those black marks dancing upon the page never stilled long enough to allow me to interpret them.
When, four years after arriving in Paris, I first met Charles, we were both at the height of our powers. I was leading a life of ease as the mistress of Gaspard Tournachon, who later came to be known simply as Nadar, doubly famous as a photographer and hot air balloon enthusiast. He was among the most turbulent and magnetic men I’d ever known and thoroughly incapable of containing himself to just one woman. Other than this elegant flaw, he was unfailingly charming and respectful. He had, in a few short months, already begun to tire of me. In readiness, I was looking out for my next benefactor.
I was engaged in a drama troupe at a theater by the Porte Saint-Antoine, going by the stage name Berthe, in honor of my poor mother, who had never recovered from our emigration and had died of loneliness. I was playing a slave girl in a farce designed to amuse and be forgotten as soon as the curtain fell. Afterward, Gaspard came to see me backstage, with Charles trailing in his wake like a raincloud. The three of us went to a tavern on Rue des Lampes. I said little, half listening to the conversation of the men. I noticed Charles was trying to find a way to impress me. He had a high forehead, a weak chin, and eyes like two drops of coffee. What little handsomeness he had was spoiled somewhat by his woundedness, which betrayed itself in his eyes and lips. His face flickered with all kinds of grimaces and his gait was jerky. He spent lavishly on clothes of the finest quality: polished boots, black trousers, a blue workman’s blouse that was the fashion at the time, bright, unstarched linen, a red cravat, rose-colored gloves, and a long scarlet boa in chenille, the kind working-class women like to wear. He refused to wear hats, which all men wore as a matter of course, and instead wore his dark hair long, with a faint mustache under his nose and a wisp of beard. To be beautiful and shocking at once was his aim, the aim of every dandy, and Charles was among the finest, most shocking dandies in Paris.
I noticed that he was looking at me with a fascination bordering on the uncouth. Eventually, after he and Gaspard had spoken for a time, he asked me where I was from.
“There’s no point asking,” said Gaspard, “she won’t tell you. She never reveals anything about herself.”
“A woman of intrigue,” said Charles, a smile curling on his lips. The beam of his gaze narrowed on me. I felt it in my stomach. “But you’re not from around here, are you? I can hear it in your accent.”
“No,” I conceded, “I’m not from around here.”
“So where are you from?” he asked. I had never told a soul who I really was or where I was really from. It was better to let their imaginations run wild. “Come now,” he cajoled, “why the secrecy? Or would you prefer that I guess? I’m very good at guessing such things. I’m never wrong.”
“Is that so?” I asked, feigning interest. “Please, do try.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Gaspard. “Charles is quite the traveler.”
“Is that right?” I said.
“Indeed,” he continued, turning toward Charles. “You should tell her one of your splendid stories.”
Charles wasn’t listening. His attention was entirely fixed on me. “Let me guess.”
“By all means,” I replied.
“But if I guess, you must admit it.” I smiled and nodded. He narrowed his eyes and studied me for some time. “There are a number of possibilities—Araby, Sumatra, Haiti, Pondicherry, even Mexico, at a pinch, although perhaps your hair is too wavy for a Mexican.”
“I have known Mexicans with wavy hair,” Gaspard chimed in.
“It is known to happen,” said Charles, “but I don’t think any of these is quite right. I think I know exactly where you are from.”
“Do tell,” I said.
“You’re from Mauritius.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s an island off the east coast of Africa. Until recently it was called Isle de France.” I smiled sadly at the memory of it—it was where I’d seen you last. I hadn’t known its name had changed. “You give yourself away!” he exclaimed. “Are you impressed?”
“I could not be more impressed. How did you guess?”
“I was there recently,” he said, “and as soon as I saw you I was reminded of that island colony. How long did you live there?”
“Oh, I left when I was very young. I remember almost nothing.”
“Tell her that story you told the Hashish Smokers’ Club at the Pimodan,” said Gaspard. He turned to me and winked, as if what I was about to hear was a rare privilege.
“It is rather long,” said Charles.
“Go ahead,” I said, relieved that the attention had finally turned away from me. “If it is as good a story as Gaspard says, I would be delighted to hear it.”
“Very well.” He cleared his throat as if preparing to launch into a well-rehearsed discourse. “My stepfather, a military man, intended me to pursue a career in law or to follow him into the foreign service,” he began. “But I was an unhappy child, overly prone to solitude and jealous of my mother’s love for him. I read insatiably, devouring any and every book I found, but especially literature: novels, short stories, poetry, essays, everything. Around the age of twelve, I began to read a book by Hugo, which a schoolfriend had lent me. I think it was The Last Day of a Condemned Man; and then in quick succession I read everything I could find of his: Les Orientales, Notre-Dame de Paris, Lucrezia Borgia. I read anything I could find that Hugo had written. And suddenly I decided that I wished to do nothing with my life other than write. Though I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to write.
“I’m sure my dear father, were he still alive, would have been proud of my decision, but my stepfather was against it. You’ll end up poor, bitter, and mad, he predicted. To cure me of my folly, he decided to send me to India. This plan had twin advantages: having gotten rid of me, he would secure the full attention of my beloved mother, for one thing, and for another it would toughen me up and make a man of me—or so he thought. He bought me a passage to Pondicherry on a ship captained by a friend of his, and organized a clerk’s position with the colonial administration to be made available for me upon my arrival, despite my complete lack of training and aptitude for such work. I was still young enough to wish to please my stepfather, so I went along with his plans.
“I was seasick the entire way. During one particular storm, as we were rounding the Cape of Good Hope, I was so ill and miserable I contemplated throwing myself over the bulwark and into the roiling maelstrom of the sea. But at that instant I thought of my stepfather, and I realized that he would undoubtedly be gladdened by my death. And so I tightened my grip on the bulwark and survived the storm.
“When we arrived in Port Louis, it was the rainy season. The storm had left our ship damaged and in need of repairs, and I was told that our stay in Mauritius might last two or three weeks. At first I took a room in a decrepit inn near the waterside frequented only by Hindus, Cantonese, and Creoles, but the conditions were so hot and humid, and the state of the hotel so foul, that very soon I determined to go into the hills for respite. Leaving my luggage in the hotel, I packed some bread and wine and Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient, and set off walking along a road that seemed to lead in the direction of the mountainous hinterland, which in that season is permanently covered in mist and cloud.
“It was raining. Before long I was drenched, as was my book, and I began to reconsider my foray into nature, for which, at any rate, I have no great affection. A short time later I was overtaken by a donkey pulling a cart, and was grateful when it stopped and the driver, sitting under a canvas tarpaulin that was keeping him dry enough to smoke a pipe, asked me what I was doing walking on this road alone in the rain. I was astonished to hear myself being addressed in a perfect, if antique, French, punctuated with old-fashioned pronunciations that would be ridiculed now in France, and tinged with a Provençal accent, even though the old man was tanned the same color as the Creoles. I told him I was marooned on the island and was bound for the mountains to escape the heat of the township. He told me he was traveling into the hills and invited me to ride alongside him.
“I boarded the cart and sat beside the old man. He had a haggard visage, so ancient he resembled one of those tortoises that are said to live seven thousand years. Long wisps of white hair crowned his otherwise bald head. From his jaw grew a long gray beard that reached his navel. The natives of Port Louis were dressed with greater civility than he: his ragged trousers were torn at the knee and his shirt was sleeveless. On his bare shoulder I noticed an old blue-green tattoo of an unblinking eye that had dulled over the years. For all his wildness, the old man spilled over with kindness and bonhomie. I will never forget the sparkle of his eyes. He told me his name was Roblet. He said he’d been born in Marseille. When I asked him his age he said he didn’t know what year it was, but he remembered having been born in 1762. I told him it was 1841, and he was therefore seventy-nine years old. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘So it has been half a century,’ he said, more to himself than to me.”
Thankfully Charles was too engrossed in his storytelling to notice the look of astonishment my face must have betrayed at this revelation, despite my prodigious capacity to mask my feelings. I said nothing, but never have I listened with such close attention to anything anyone has ever told me as I did to the remainder of his tale.
“At first we continued into the hills in near silence, my companion puffing on the sweet-smelling tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, which he told me was mixed with hashish. Eventually he asked me how it was I had been stranded on this island, and I told him my tale: I was nineteen years old and bound reluctantly for the French East Indies. I then asked Roblet how he had come to live on this tropical island.
“‘My friend,’ he said, ‘my tale is scarcely believable and, if you allow me to tell it, you will no doubt consider me to have taken leave of my senses.’ I denied this, promising him I was a most sympathetic audience. The old man paused and looked at me out of the corner of his eye for a moment, as if taking stock of me. Finally, as the donkey pulled the cart that carried us on the narrow and bumpy path into the mountains, he launched into his chronicle. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you who seem so well read, so cultured, so thirsty for knowledge, you are perhaps familiar with the notion of metempsychosis?’ I told him I believed it referred to the Oriental belief of the rebirth of the soul after death. He paused and looked somewhere in front of him, although nowhere in particular, as if in a profound meditation. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘that is the Oriental point of view. But it would appear there is another kind of metempsychosis that is not described by the Oriental sages. It is the metempsychosis of the living. I have come across it only once, and according to what you have just told me I now know it to be exactly fifty years ago. I am a surgeon by training, and in my youth I plied my trade in the merchant navy. The incident I am about to relate occurred while sailing the ocean the mapmakers call the Pacific, although it is anything but that. Our ship, the Solide, discovered a previously unknown island. The natives of this isle called it Oaeetee. They practiced a strange kind of metempsychosis of the living, if you will, which they called crossing. It is done simply enough, requiring only that two people gaze into each other’s eyes for several minutes. While on this island, I looked into the eyes of a boy scarcely younger than you in an effort to discover this rare phenomenon for myself. Afterward, I had no memory of it, other than in my dreams—but what dreams! I should rather call them nightmares. Such were my terrors that I became a pariah on board any ship I sailed. But I was too far changed to return to France, so I decided instead to settle here and dedicate myself to the welfare of the natives and Creoles.’
“‘If you cannot remember your metempsychosis,’ I asked, ‘how can you be sure it ever happened?’
“‘Another sailor, a fellow named Joubert, had the same experience as me. Later, he tried to explain what had happened, but I denied him. It was Joubert who engraved this.’ Roblet pointed to his tattoo of the eye on his shoulder. ‘And while he did so, he told me what had happened. Of course, I am a child of the Enlightenment, a man of science and reason, trusting only the measurable and verifiable. I thought the poor man mad and avoided him. Soon after, we parted company—right here on this very island. I was glad I would never have to see him again, or consider his tidings. It was only later, after many years of nightly torment, that what I had dismissed as Joubert’s lunacy began to assume the dimensions of a truth that beggared belief. And so, for many years now, I have been looking out for Joubert whenever I go into Port Louis for supplies, trusting that he is looking for me. Twice, sometimes thrice a week, I check the lists of names on the registers of the ships. But as I am an old man now, so too must he be, and it is unlikely he is still working the ocean-going vessels. Still, I go to the shipping office and check the registers, waiting patiently.’
“‘Waiting for what?’ I asked.
“‘For him to come find me.’
“Upon hearing the old man’s words, an excited shiver ran along my spine, such as one feels when reading a fine novel—one need not believe it to feel it. I asked Roblet if he had ever attempted to make another such crossing, as he called it. ‘Oh, I’ve tried,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never been able to convince anyone to look me in the eyes for more than just a brief moment.’ I replied that his tale had piqued my curiosity, and told him if the notion was still of interest to him I would be willing to attempt it. Of course, I didn’t lend his notions any credence, but all the same I considered myself in pursuit of a fine lark. Roblet seemed delighted by the prospect, clapping my shoulder as if we were suddenly the best of friends. He said his hut was but another hour or two up the road. If I was willing to continue the journey with him we might venture such an undertaking upon our arrival. ‘It has none of the luxuries to which a Parisian gentleman would be accustomed, but it is clean, and the roof keeps me dry.’
“A short while thereafter, with the sun setting, we arrived at a crude thatch hut at the foot of the volcano that dominates the island. Here the donkey pulling the cart came to a stop. It was raining, and the verdant jungle that surrounded us was enveloped in a thick gray mist that hushed all but the patter of rain. The old doctor alighted from his seat and carried the boxes of supplies he had purchased in Port Louis into the hut, bidding that I follow him. He lit candles and kindled a fire while I found a place to sit on the earthen floor. I sat, legs crossed, with Roblet sitting likewise directly opposite. He poured two cups of rum and we drank a toast to metempsychosis. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked. I nodded, nervous with anticipation. He told me all I needed to do was look into his eyes, without looking away, while he would look into mine.
“And so we began. At the beginning, there was a sense of unease, such as one feels whenever one is looking directly into the eyes of another person, especially when that person is a stranger, or almost so. This did not last long, however, and soon enough I began to lose all awareness of my surroundings, so that those eyes, although at an arm’s length from me, became the only things I could see. This was followed by a most pleasant sensation, as if the inside of my body was suddenly no longer flesh and blood but a freshly poured glass of champagne, full of bubbles ascending upward and out the top of my head and into the sky. This feeling continued to grow ever lighter and more pleasant, more so than any intoxicant I have known. Wine, hashish, laudanum, even opium do not compare.”
Charles paused and looked down at his hands, which were lying clasped together on the table between us.
“When I next opened my eyes, I had been lying on the ground for some time. Roblet was also lying on the ground, not far from me, although I couldn’t remember who he was at first. Nor could I remember where I was, or how I had arrived here. When I leaned over the stranger beside me to check if he was sleeping, I noticed that his eyes were open, and he was breathing rapidly, looking up at the ceiling above him with a look of terror in his eyes. ‘What happened?’ I asked, but instead of answering Roblet simply opened and closed his mouth as if wishing to say something but being unable to do so.
“Slowly, unsteadily, I rose to my feet. I looked out of the hut’s solitary window. The world outside was a palette of pre-dawn blue, and a fine mist hovered delicately over the ground. My equilibrium had deserted me—I moved as if drunk. I swallowed some water from a jug. The old man was blinking and panting rapidly. Kneeling, I took him in my arms and laid him down on the nearby bed. I then slowly poured water from a cup into his mouth. As the fire had almost burned itself out, I took some wood from a pile beside the hearth, added it to the embers, stoked and blew on it, and soon enough it was blazing once more. I sat in a rocking chair before the fire and closed my eyes, waking a short time later, wet with sweat, haunted by the vague memory of a nightmare. Roblet was in the exact same position I had left him in, lying on his back on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed, blinking and panting heavily. His lips mouthed words I could not interpret. Once more I gave him water to drink and left the jug beside his bed. Satisfied I could do no more for him, I stepped outside into the morning. At a loss as to what to do, I began walking, taking the same trail that had led me there the previous day.
“I wandered in a daze along the path, descending through lush green hills toward Port Louis, meditating upon the events of the previous day and night. I could not say that I felt like a different person, but nor could I say I felt like the same person who had set off from Port Louis only a day earlier.
“As I plunged deeper and deeper into the woods, surrounded by towering trees, I felt as if everything I saw was with someone else’s eyes. The forest I was traversing, for example, had seemed to me only the previous day nothing more than a tiresome cluster of verdant rot. Now it was transformed into a forest of symbols that watched over me familiarly, a kind of living temple whose pillars occasionally whispered some unintelligible word into my ear. Scents, colors, and sounds answered one another like distant echoes melding to form a dark and profound unity, vast as the night. By the time I returned to Port Louis several hours later, I understood what it was that had changed in me. I would not continue my voyage to India. Instead, I would return to Paris, and devote my life to poetry.”
Charles’s tale was at an end. “And so,” I asked, trembling uncomprehendingly at the thought that I might have found you again, and yet straining to hide my excitement, “what do you make of the old man’s story?”
“I think the old man was a lunatic, and for a time he charmed me into indulging his lunacy.”
“You haven’t noticed any changes in you since?”
“The only change I have noticed is indeed the same affliction about which Roblet complained: nightmares. They cause me to wake in the middle of the night, screaming with terror. But who knows, perhaps my sea voyage caused this, or some mysterious tropical disease, or perhaps the old man himself cursed me with his affliction.”
We left the tavern soon after, the three of us, and walked together for a while before Charles left us to return to his apartment on the Île Saint-Louis.
The next day I received an anonymous letter in which there was a poem praising my beauty. I had Gaspard read it out to me. “It could only be Charles,” he said. I smiled. “The idea doesn’t seem to displease you,” he said. I smiled once more. “Are you in love with him?”
“I am incapable of being in love with any man.”
“That’s a relief. It is one thing to be loved by a poet—indeed it is a fine thing. But it is another thing altogether to be in love with one. If you were in love with him I would forbid you to ever see him again. But if he is in love with you, go to him, my dear, with my blessing.”
And so, after some fifty years, we had found each other again, and a new chapter began in our story: seventeen years of life together. In those days, Charles had money, having come into half of his deceased father’s estate when he reached his majority. He liked to spend it extravagantly. His fortune was one of those inconvenient sums, somewhere between being large enough to seem inexhaustible to a young man and small enough to worry his elders it would soon be exhausted. He spent impulsively, mostly on art, antiques, and, especially, on me. I was his exotic bird, his creature of display, his most precious jewel. While he was courting me, he set me up in my own apartment, on the Île Saint-Louis. It was a short walk from the Hôtel Pimodan, where he lived, a modest seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Quai d’Anjou that had been transformed into apartments. It overlooked the river and the Right Bank. A hive of young dandies and wealthy eccentrics resided there. Charles rented a three-room apartment on the top floor, and he began to fill it with rare objects, dubious antiques, and paintings bigger than could possibly fit into his quarters. Eventually, his stepfather was forced to intervene to stop the dissipation of the inheritance. What was left of it was put in trust, and Charles was paid a modest monthly stipend. To anyone else, it would have been more than enough. But modesty was inconceivable to him. The thought of earning money by conventional means—as, one by one, most of his friends began to do—never so much as crossed his mind. He already had a profession: writing, translating, and reading.
To save money, I moved in with Charles. There is nothing more fatal to passion than when two lovers chain themselves together. Constrained by the modesty of his allowance, he began to sell off the objects he had accumulated so wantonly, only to discover that much of it was worthless. Soon enough it became apparent that he could no longer keep up the rent of the Pimodan apartment. We moved out and into another apartment.
Between his stipend, funds his mother sent in reluctant response to his almost-daily letters begging for money, the money my gentlemen admirers gave me, and the credit he accumulated without the slightest intention of repaying, we lived for the next several years constantly on the move from one shabby furnished room to the next. Charles was always dreaming up a new endeavor to make him rich but in practice he had as little talent for making money as for saving it. He would spend it on clothes, wine, hashish, laudanum, and, above all, books, the greatest of his vices.
Having lost you once already, I did not want to lose you a second time. The memory of how Roblet had reacted when I’d told him about his crossing, all those years ago on the ship, still burned inside me. I resolved to be gentle with Charles, not to push him away with what I knew by foisting it upon him, but to lead him gently to the knowledge I wanted to share. This I did by telling him stories when he woke at night, consumed by his habitual horrors. He loved my stories. Among the many nicknames he devised for me—his Black Venus, his black swan, his giantess, his grande taciturne—he sometimes called me his Scheherazade. He said I was the most gifted storyteller he’d ever known, and that had I been born a man or an heiress I would have made a fine writer. I wasn’t interested in books I couldn’t read. I was secretive and prized discretion; for me writing was a kind of illness, and writers contemptible and untrustworthy, for they did not know how to keep their stories to themselves.
My storytelling was a nocturnal activity intended to comfort and console as well as to educate. When he woke screaming and wet with sweat, I would ask Charles what he’d dreamed and I played the part of the interpreter. In this way over the years I was able to tell him about Koahu and Roblet, and Alula and Joubert. For a long time, I avoided mentioning that I was Alula and Joubert, and he Koahu and Roblet. I wanted the idea to be born in him. He listened gratefully to my stories—they were a kind of balm for him, soothing his frayed nerves. But he never took them seriously. He considered them brilliant improvisations, exotic fancies, and nothing more. As for his own story about Roblet, he stopped telling it. Rather, inspired by me, he began improvising stories of his own. In these fabricated tales, he had not returned to France from Mauritius at the earliest opportunity, but had continued to roam the Orient. He invented stories about life at sea, the tropics, travel, exile, and adventure, tales designed to impress the impressionable salons of Paris, many of whose guests had never strayed far from the capital. He lied with relish about his fictional journeys in India, in Ceylon and Sumatra and China, Tahiti and the Sandwich Islands, claiming to have traveled for years and suffered all manner of adventures and deprivations. There was always an enthusiastic gallery for his improvisations, and his audiences hungrily swallowed every preposterous word. Traces of my stories seeped their way into his poems too—an albatross, a tamarind tree, a storm-tossed sea—but how could I hold any of this against him? I saw him as a tragic figure: a man who had forgotten his past and, in forgetting it, had become lost in it. This helped me forgive him his flaws: his lies, his vanities, his inconstancies, his cunning, his rages, and his self-absorption.
Seventeen years passed in this way, seventeen years of making do, moving, fighting, reconciling, separating, reuniting, over and again, never the same and yet always the same. Our life together stumbled on, season after season, year after year, ever more nomadic and desperate. One by one Charles’s dreams of literary fame were extinguished—and every defeat sharpened the blade of his bitterness. He made enemies everywhere he went. His poems sold poorly; the one book he ever published was pulped; his journalism paid pittances; his ideas for plays and novels never amounted to anything more than notes scrawled in a notebook. In the meantime, we moved from furnished room to furnished room, boarding house to boarding house—each one slightly more rancid than its predecessor—ever watchful for the next place to stay once the proprietor of our current lodgings began to hound us for our arrears. Every few weeks or months, we found ourselves somewhere else, under another name or another combination of our old names, in perpetual motion, trying to keep a step ahead of creditors and bailiffs, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of debt and want.
While we were waging our private battles, Paris was changing around us. The old Paris of our youth was being dismantled brick by brick and stone by stone, with pickaxes wielded by swarthy southern workers. The city became a strange and unwelcoming carnival of novelties. Even night was vanquished, as gas lamps were installed along every boulevard and street and the new city of light sparkled as seductively after dark as it did during the day.
Our love was marked by stories, but in time Charles wearied of my tales. Rather than consoling him, they began to exasperate him. Eventually, if he woke in panic in the middle of the night and I tried to soothe him, he would become irritated. Certain subjects, even certain words, became forbidden: island, ship, soul, crossing. At first, out of fear of losing him, I obeyed his will, but later, when I realized that he was already lost to me, I shed my reserve. I became more strident: you are Koahu and I am Alula, I told him time and again, let me prove it to you. When I offered to cross with him, he dismissed me like a parent dismisses a child’s inventions. He responded to my provocations with increasingly virulent contempt, his fury heightened by the pox, from which we both suffered, and the great quantities of laudanum he drank for the pain.
Then there were the separations. At first, he would disappear for a few days; later he would go for weeks or months. He took to moving to new lodgings without telling me where he was going. I would seek him out and find him, asking his friends where he was, looking into his favorite coffee shops and taverns, or simply scouring the streets. I couldn’t help but remain loyal to him, even in the face of his utter rejection. I felt responsible for him, as if I were his guardian.
So it was fitting that it should be one of my stories that undid us. It occurred on one of those penniless nights when he had not drunk any wine or laudanum, and his temper was greatly frayed. A nightmare woke him. I asked what he had dreamed. He did not wish to tell me. I asked him again and he told me to be silent. “Did you dream of an island?” I asked.
He turned to me with his eyes narrowed hatefully and said, “Say the word again and I shall make you regret it.”
“Did you dream of a sailing ship?” For the first time since I had known him, he slapped me. The impact of the slap spun my head, but I would not be quelled. “Did you dream of an island?” He slapped me again. “Did you dream of looking into another man’s eyes?” Slap. “Did you dream of a sailing ship?” By now, in a frenzy, Charles took his belt from his trousers and began flailing me as I cowered before him, crouched on the ground, my arms wrapped around my head. But I would not be stopped. He tore the dress from my back and whipped me, cursing me as he did so, calling me a slave. By the time he was done, as warm blood trickled from the welts on my back, Charles collapsed on the divan. I asked him one more time about his dream, but he was spent. It was the first and only time he ever beat me. I rose from the ground and, staggering into the next room, fell onto the bed and fainted. By the time I awoke the next morning he was gone, and this time I did not seek him out.
I found myself bereft, a black woman alone in Paris, no longer in the first bloom of youth, nor even the second. I began working in a hotel in La Chapelle where rooms were let by the hour. There I met a Haitian man who believed he was my brother. I told him he couldn’t be my brother, but he insisted he was, and that he loved me with a fraternal love, and wanted to take care of me. He was a ragpicker and invited me to live with him here in Batignolles. Soon after I moved here, Charles went to Brussels, fleeing his creditors and censors and enemies. He wrote to me once. He told me about his plans to publish his banned poems and smuggle them into France. But of course nothing ever came of it.
Now, I said to Mademoiselle Édmonde and Mademoiselle Adélaïde, my health is failing. I’m partially paralyzed on the left side of my body. The eyesight in my left eye is dimming. I have no clients, and depend entirely on my brother. Otherwise I lie here on this mattress, remembering the past, resigned to never crossing again, resigned to never returning to the island, resigned to whatever end fate has in store for me.
At last my tale was told. By now it was quite dark, the only light in the room that of an oil lamp that burned on a low table between us. The two young ladies stirred from the reverie in which they had spent the afternoon, thanked me for telling my story, and stood to leave. Mademoiselle Adélaïde stoked the embers in the stove and added several lumps of charcoal. Mademoiselle Édmonde opened her purse and left several hundred-franc notes beside the lamp, parrying my meek protestations. I thanked them, and apologized for not being able to see them out. They turned to leave, but Mademoiselle Adélaïde hesitated. She turned back toward me and observed me for an instant. She approached the mattress and sat down on its edge, very near me. She leaned forward and I felt her eyes studying my face, almost drinking it. She raised a hand and a finger lightly traced the outlines of my nose, my cheeks, my lips. Mademoiselle Édmonde, standing behind her, was half turned away, motionless. Mademoiselle Adélaïde leaned forward slowly until her lips met mine, and kissed me languidly and tenderly. “You are still a beautiful woman,” she whispered, “a very beautiful woman.” Then she straightened and returned to her companion’s side. They opened the door and, with a bustle of silken skirts, were gone.
Several days later, there was another knock on the door. It was Mademoiselle Édmonde’s coachman. He delivered a sealed envelope, but I told him I could not read. He opened it and read it aloud: it was an invitation requesting the pleasure of my company at four o’clock the following afternoon at an address in the Lorette neighborhood. A coach would be sent to take me there and return me afterward. It was signed Mademoiselle Édmonde de Bressy.
The following day I arrived in front of a hôtel particulier. The coachman assisted me from the buggy and set me in a chair on wheels, which, with the help of a butler, was carried through the doorway and into an entrance hall decorated and furnished in a splendor I had not seen since my youth. I waited in silence, studying my surrounds. Every surface was exquisitely decorated. Every wall bore a work of art. Every object sparkled. Mademoiselle Édmonde and Mademoiselle Adélaïde appeared shortly after, walking side by side, the silks of their dresses whispering conspiratorially as they approached. As on the previous occasion, Mademoiselle Édmonde’s face was veiled. After the usual exchange of formalities, they asked that I join them on a tour of the residence.
With Mademoiselle Adélaïde pushing the chair, we set off to inspect the ground floor of the building, room after room, each one decorated in its own style, each as richly ornamented as its predecessor. As we proceeded, Mademoiselle Édmonde described what it was we were seeing, the rooms on the levels above us and what they contained, as well as the other properties she owned, and a brief description of them. By the time the tour was over we had made a full circle—the residence was built around a courtyard in its center—without having seen the same room twice. I had been given the description of a fortune that included several more buildings like this one, in Paris and in the provinces. Mademoiselle Édmonde’s mother had died in childbirth; her father had inherited a banking fortune and added to it railway interests. He had died only the previous year. There were no other heirs. The fortune was large enough that three men dedicated their lives to overseeing it, leaving Mademoiselle Édmonde free to live as she pleased.
“Madame Jeanne,” she said, “you are no doubt curious as to why we invited you to visit, and why I am telling you about my affairs in such detail. Mademoiselle Adélaïde and I were greatly touched by the story you told us last time we met. In fact, it is fair to say we have spoken of little else since. We would like to make a proposal to you, but in order to do so there is something you ought to see first.”
She put her hands to her veil and lifted it. When the countenance behind was at last revealed, I was frightened by what I saw. Her face was grotesquely disfigured. No sooner had I seen it than she once again lowered the veil. “You can see,” she continued, “why I keep it concealed. It is the result of an accident involving a candle in my bedroom when I was a child. There have been many times when I wish I had been altogether consumed by that fire, but had that happened I would never have had the joy of meeting Adélaïde.” The two women turned to each other and clasped hands. “This is not a decision that we have undertaken lightly. The past week has been spent, for the most part, in earnest discussion. But by now we are of a common mind, and both of us speak to you today as one. It has always been a dream, nay, an obsession of mine to imagine what it would be like to be in another body, above all in another face. This explains my devotion to painting and literature. Character is destiny, according to Shakespeare. And yet our bodies, above all our faces, are so bound up with how others perceive us, one might say that, especially for a woman, they are just as powerful an influence over our destinies. Our faces influence the perceptions others hold of us, and those perceptions influence, in turn, our character. Wealth shapes our lives too, as does social position. But while character is malleable, and one’s wealth and social position can change for good or ill, one’s body is a fait accompli. One must accept its limitations, one must age with it, one cannot exchange it for another. Not, at least, under normal circumstances.
“Madame Jeanne, the beauties of your body have been immortalized in verse and in paintings. You have been a muse to great works of art. Men who knew you still dream of you today. Though no longer the body it once was, it is a desirable body all the same, a jewel whose tarnish only adds to its rarity. Your face is still the face of a great beauty, one who has lived a singular life. My proposal is simple. Perhaps you have guessed it already. I would like to offer you my body, and half of my fortune, in exchange for yours. If I had a choice, I would no doubt choose a younger body, a healthier body, but I don’t have a choice. A crossing into your body is the only crossing I will ever be able to make. I would like to take that chance, even if it means I will not live as long. I am not in love with life itself. I don’t desire to live a long life. I would rather live a life of sensuality and pleasure. I would gladly give up this body and half the fortune it was born into to be kissed by Mademoiselle Adélaïde the way she kissed you last week, even if it is only for a few short years.”
I could scarcely believe my ears. “You would like to cross with me?”
“Yes. On one condition. I do not wish it to be a blind crossing. I must be able to remember my previous body, and bring across with me all my memories. I must be able to remember who I am, who we are, after the crossing. Can you promise me that?”
I assured her that such a crossing was indeed possible, even when crossing for the first time.
By the time the coach left, several hours later, it was loaded with luggage, and there were two women in the carriage: Madame Jeanne and Mademoiselle Adélaïde.
Born 1845
First crossing 1864
Second crossing 1900
Died 1900
“DO YOU BELIEVE in metempsychosis?”
It was mid-afternoon on a bright day in late March 1900, and I was in the parlor car of Union Pacific’s Overland Limited, hurtling across the American Midwest. Through the window, a snow-dusted prairie sparkled under a wintry noonday sun. I was lost in a daydream, seated in a leather armchair with a book in my lap, selected at random from the car’s library shelf, when I heard those words repeated in French in a deep, beguiling voice:
“Madame, do you believe in metempsychosis?”
I looked up and beheld a handsome, olive-skinned man seated in the armchair opposite mine, sporting a thick walrus mustache for which he was much too young, wearing a purple smoking jacket and a carmine turban, gazing at me intently with eyes of Japanese lacquer. It was odd, I thought, that he should address me thus in French.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“Metempsychosis—do you believe in the existence of such a thing?”
“The transmigration of souls after death? Young man, I’m quite sure it is none of your business.”
“On the contrary, it is more than my business, it is my living! Behold, my name is Hippolyte Balthazar,” he said, extending his hand across the aisle of the carriage and holding it there a few seconds until I could not help but shake it. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”
“Madame Édmonde Duchesne de Bressy,” I said, and instantly regretted it.
“I am an Orientalist,” he said.
“What is that?”
“Why, a scholar of the Oriental races! I have an especial interest in the question of metempsychosis, and have just completed a lecture tour of the United States and Canada, during which I spoke at length on the subject.” A part of me had taken an instant dislike to Monsieur Balthazar. Another was already in his thrall. My natural instinct was to stand and leave the buffet–library car at once, but in the confinement of journeys by rail or sea it is necessary to be diplomatic with one’s fellow passengers. It is no small inconvenience to avoid a passenger for the entirety of a long voyage all because of a slight or a cross word. “Madame de Bressy,” he continued, “as a student of the Oriental arts of meditation I have become adept at the perception of aura. Do you believe in such a thing, madame?”
“Monsieur, you keep asking me questions on subjects to which I have never given a moment’s thought.”
He leaped out of his chair and came to sit beside mine. “Madame,” he said, “I noticed your aura at once. Behold! It is a most remarkable aura, perhaps the most remarkable aura I have ever come across, more so even than that of President William McKinley, with whom I dined only a few months ago, and who really has a most magnificent aura.” And so he continued in this way for some time longer, and offered to read my aura—at no charge, of course—an offer that I refused with more firmness than politeness. But he continued all the same, despite my entreaties, until I determined to leave the buffet–library car, at which time, just as I was leaning forward to stand, he said something that arrested me.
“Madame,” he said, “there is a way out of the hall of mirrors in which you are imprisoned.”
I sat in that chair for some time looking at the young man, lost for words, before I lifted my veil and said to him, very slowly and low enough so that only he could hear: “Monsieur Balthazar, as you can clearly see, mirrors are of no use to me. If you speak to me again, I will see to it that you are ejected from this train.” I stood and, simulating an unhurried determination, walked off in the direction of my compartment, where I spent an agitated day and a restless night. A way out of the hall of mirrors … The phrase ricocheted in my mind.
I did not venture from my compartment the following morning, but had breakfast delivered to me. After breakfast, a steward came to the door holding a silver bucket, inside of which were a bottle of champagne and a champagne glass.
“Compliments of Monsieur Balthazar, who requests the pleasure of your company in the dining car for luncheon.”
I sent the steward away with the unopened bottle and the glass, but all the same, all morning I hesitated about accepting Balthazar’s invitation. By midday my resistance was beginning to wilt. This strange young man was possessed of an equally strange power, compelling me to do things I did not wish to do. At one o’clock, I made my way to the dining car. I found Balthazar sitting alone at a table for two, a contented little smile playing on his full lips.
“Behold!” he exclaimed, beaming with pleasure. He stood to greet me, kissed my hand, and helped me into my seat before returning to his. “I’m honored you decided to take up my invitation, madame.”
“My curiosity got the better of me. You seem to be able to make me do things no one else can. How is that?”
“In the course of my studies, I learned the art of mesmerism from a Sufi dervish in Cairo. I am an expert in the technique, madame. I have hypnotized the great and the good across the world, not to mention certain members of Europe’s most illustrious royal households.”
“I see.” It was impossible not to be charmed by the man. “And so is it with mesmerism that you make people do what they don’t want to do?”
“No mesmerist is capable of such a thing, madame. It is not the mesmerist who mesmerizes, it is his subject who wishes to be mesmerized.”
“Are you saying I wanted to come to dinner all along?”
“Of course you wanted to come. You said it yourself. Curiosity got the better of you. Perhaps other urges too, which are more deeply buried within you. We are all conflicted creatures. There are things we want that we don’t want to want. Yet we want them all the same.”
“And what do I want from you?”
“At a guess, solace. It’s what most people want.”
“If I am like most people, why take a particular interest in me?”
“You are not like most people. On the contrary, madame,” he said, “you are most interesting. You have a unique presence. You conduct yourself with the dignity and grace of an ancient soul.”
“And I suppose you consider yourself an expert on the matter?”
“Most assuredly! I have devoted my career to it. I have made it my life’s work.”
I admit I was more than a little amused that so young a man could refer to his life’s work. Despite my veil, I felt more than usually exposed by the candlepower of his gaze. “So let me ask you this,” I finally ventured, “is there such a thing?”
“As a soul? Most decidedly.”
“The work of a certain Englishman concludes against it.”
“Monsieur Darwin? I completely concur with all his ideas. The man is a genius. But on the subject of the soul he has nothing to say.”
“What do you have to say about it?”
He stroked his walrus mustache for a moment as he considered his reply. “I myself have nothing to add to the body of knowledge that already exists. But I concur with the Persian poet who said, A soul is more than the sum of intellect and emotions, more than the sum of experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three.” He leaned forward, holding up an index finger for emphasis. “It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance.”
And so Balthazar began to tell me about his life, which, though young, overflowed with event and variety. It was a pleasure to listen to his tales, following each other like brightly painted carousel horses. He told stories with all the skill of a coffee-house raconteur. His brief but complicated existence could be summarized thus: he was the son of a Hungarian duchess, a famous beauty who had fallen in love with an Armenian maritime painter. His mother died giving birth, when Balthazar was eight. In his childhood he had been given, in his words, the finest education possible, consisting of Sufi poetry, the Arabian Nights, the writings of the ancient Greeks, and the algebra of the great Muslim mathematicians. He was a polymath: right now, he said, he was writing the music to a ballet that would represent the synthesis of all his teachings. He spoke seven languages: French, Russian, Magyar, English, Italian, Armenian, and Ancient Greek. He had learned hypnotism and mesmerism at the hands of French neurologists and Oriental mystics and claimed to be a master of the yogic and tantric arts. It was impossible to tell if he was an ingenious fraud or if he truly believed his preposterous claims.
And now, said Balthazar, he was returning to Europe, and then to Alexandria, traveling up the Nile to Khartoum, where he would attend the marriage of his sister to an Ethiopian prince. After that, he declared, he intended to settle in Paris, where he was determined to establish himself as a mesmerist. It was his life’s work, he said, to help others.
“And how may I assist you, madame?” he asked, leaning forward with his great brown eyes wide open, chewing on candied chestnut pudding.
“Give me peace,” I said, once again finding myself ceding to unknown desires I could not control. “Give me consolation. Take away this burden I carry within me, I beseech you.”
“What is the nature of this burden?”
“Its name is heartbreak.”
That evening, I dined with my traveling companion, Lucien, who had a cabin of his own. It was a bittersweet affair for me because I suspected it would be the last time I would see him, and I was very fond of him indeed.
After breakfasting alone in my compartment the following morning, there was a knock at my door. It was Balthazar. He entered my compartment with a smile, locked the door, and sat in the armchair. I was already lying on the narrow bed, sitting up on a pile of cushions.
“Shall we begin?” he asked after we had exchanged pleasantries. I nodded. “By the time I count backward from ten to one,” he said, “you will be asleep. Then, when I ask you a question, you will open your eyes and look into mine. You will answer it as honestly as you can.” He counted slowly, looking me directly in the eyes. When he had finished counting, he asked, with the softest imaginable voice, “Tell me about the happiest day of your life.”
“The happiest day of my life was the twenty-second of March, 1881, almost nineteen years ago to the day. It was the day I was finally able to return home.”
“And where is home?”
“The island of Oaeetee. It is a small island in the eastern Pacific Ocean, between the Sandwich Islands and the Marquesas archipelago.”
“This is where you were born?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“And you left there when you were young?”
“I did, not realizing how long it would take to return home.”
“How long did it take you?”
“Lifetimes.”
Balthazar hesitated. “How many lifetimes?”
“I am now at the end of my fifth.”
He leaned back. “We are not playing a parlor game, Madame Édmonde,” he said with a look of poorly concealed annoyance. “Mesmerism is not something to be undertaken lightly or frivolously.”
“I am not being frivolous,” I replied. “I am utterly sincere. It took me ninety years to return to my island.”
He narrowed his brown eyes, cocked his head sideways, and clicked his tongue, lost in thought. “What is this strangeness? Yesterday you told me you didn’t believe in metempsychosis.”
“Metempsychosis is the transmigration of souls after death. As such, what I am talking about is not metempsychosis, because there is no death. I call it ‘crossing.’”
He considered what I’d said a moment before his face lit up with epiphanic joy. He knelt by my side and took my hands in his. “Behold!” he said. “I was certain that your soul is uncommon—and this is the proof!” He kissed my fingers rapturously. “Please, madame, do me the honor of telling me about your lifetimes. All of them.”
I knew I was within striking distance of my prey. But I also knew that outwitting the trickster would not be easy. I would need to lull him into dismantling his defenses, and there is no better way to lull a professional charlatan than with feigned guilelessness. “Very well,” I said. “But the story will take all day to tell, and I will brook no interruptions.” I began at the beginning, with Alula and Koahu.
On the twenty-second of March of the year 1881, standing on the deck of the Equator, a trading schooner that plied the waters between Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Oaeetee, I truly believed my long journey of several lifetimes was finally nearing its end. For this was the day I returned to the place I’d abandoned so thoughtlessly, a place to which I’d dreamed of returning ever since. The veil I wore in public concealed more than a disfigured face—it hid more than a century of memories. At thirty-six years old and still unmarried, I was considered an old maid. Thankfully, my considerable fortune shielded me from ostracism, for the merest whiff of a fortune can magically transform a defect into an idiosyncrasy and impudence into eccentricity. But money does not soothe every distress.
Hours before the lookout’s call of Land ahoy, I had sensed signs of our approach all around: I recognized the shape of the clouds and the scent of the winds. The night stars, the breezes, the way waves played on the water’s surface—all of these were signs to me that my return was nigh. I recognized those carmine-red flying fish, the ones with two sets of fins that leap out of and into the water with the simple joy of being alive. When the island came into view at last, no more than a blue smudge on the horizon, my heart began to beat wildly. When I caught sight of terns up ahead, diving repeatedly into the sea in search of food, it almost leaped out of its cavity altogether. The more we neared the island the more of its forms I recognized: the obelisk-shaped rock at the southern tip called the Black Crane, the countless forested valleys and hills, the waterfall known as the Silver Tear, the belltower-shaped pilasters, and, looming above it all, the mountains.
My joy was mixed with trepidation, for along the way I had seen enough of other islands to fear the worst for my own, and its people. I had learned that the island was ruled by a king called Mehevi, but it was the French who had made him king, and he was a king in name only. The island had, for almost half of my absence, been a part of the French empire.
As the ship moored at a jetty extending from the same beach where I had left the island all those years ago, I was grateful to be wearing a veil, for I did not wish anyone else to guess at the tears that fell behind it.
Upon disembarking, I was immediately mobbed by a throng of young children and infants. Evidently these children were unused to the sight of a woman in a black riding habit, top hat, and veil. I cursed myself that I had not thought to pack toffees to offer them. An official brushed the children aside and ushered me into the customs building, one of several dockside tin sheds. Inside, it was intolerably hot. The official sat himself behind a rickety desk and introduced himself as Lieutenant Perrault. Perspiring profusely, he hunched over a large ledger, murmuring the words he scrawled under his breath as he wrote. I was questioned on my background and my intentions. I replied, truthfully, that I was a wealthy woman dedicated to the instruction of native children, and that I intended to establish a school. This gave him a start. He sat back as if he had just been given troubling news. As a frown of disapproval congealed on his forehead, I took from my purse several letters of introduction from important personages in the colony of New Caledonia, recommending me to King Mehevi and the island’s Resident-General. The official, with the immaculate instinct of self-preservation universal among colonial officers, refused them, instead advising me to take a room at the only hotel on the island, the Hôtel Hibiscus, to await further instructions. In the meantime, he said, I was to stay within the confines of Louisville under all circumstances. “This is no place for an unmarried woman,” he added, “of any age or description.”
I stepped out of the customs building, crossed a wide expanse of vacant land, and walked into Louisville, followed by a Chinese porter carting my luggage on a trolley. To call Louisville a town would be an embellishment. In 1881, it was barely a village, a forlorn cluster of tin sheds and whitewashed wooden cottages linked by dirt tracks, better described by that vague term, “settlement,” although the most settled aspect of the scene was the fine, dry-season dust that covered everything. Behind Louisville rose the hill where I had first seen Marchand’s ship, ninety years before. Behind the hill, clad in violet shade, were the mountains.
Louisville boasted a population of fewer than a hundred foreigners, most of whom were French—soldiers, gendarmes, functionaries, priests, merchants, a handful of wives, a dozen children, a couple of beachcombers, and some farmers. Among them were smatterings of Englishmen, Germans, and Americans who monopolized the few shops and businesses, as well as some Chinese laborers and merchants. As for the islanders themselves, they’d converted to Christianity and were settled in a mission near the beach outside of Louisville.
I began walking down a main street flanked by modest commercial buildings: a general store, a post office, a tavern, and a bank, next to which was the Hibiscus. Behind the hotel was a school and a little mudbrick church with a steeple. Further up the hill stood residences with whitewashed timber walls, pitched pandanus roofs, and dusty little gardens bordered by white picket fences. The Hibiscus itself was an unassuming two-storied inn, whose upstairs rooms were rented.
That night, I was kept awake not just by a flood of remembrances of my youth, but also by the noises from the corridor and neighboring rooms, as men trudged up and down the stairs to pay their respects, judging by the noises emanating through the walls, to women who occupied the adjacent rooms. Having finally fallen asleep as the eastern sky lightened, I was woken only two or three hours later by a heavy knock at the door. It was Lieutenant Perrault delivering a letter bearing the letterhead of His Majesty Mehevi, King of Oaeetee. Mehevi was inviting me to the Royal Palace that very afternoon. The lieutenant offered to accompany me there.
That morning, I wandered the streets of Louisville, a promenade that did not last more than a quarter-hour before I had walked every path. After luncheon, Perrault took me to the Royal Palace in a horse-drawn buggy. I asked him where all the islanders were, as there were few to be seen in the street. He replied that natives were permitted in Louisville by permission, and that after sunset a strict curfew was enforced. Other than the King and his retinue in the palace, they were not permitted to stay overnight in Louisville. We passed a modest church flanked by a hut that doubled as a presbytery and a school for a dozen European children. The Oaeetian children, Perrault told me, attended the mission school. I asked if I could visit the mission. He replied that it was outside the confines of the town, and thus off-limits to me without the King’s consent.
Located on a hill overlooking Louisville, the palace was hardly palatial. It was, rather, a two-storied wooden structure, not much larger than the Hibiscus, also whitewashed, and, as its only sign of distinction, was surrounded by columns on all sides. It occupied the summit of a hill that overlooked the settlement and a stately garden with a neatly trimmed lawn, adorned with breadfruit trees, mimosas, guava trees, and delicate touch-me-nots. Within a watchful distance of the palace, slightly higher up the hill, was another building in the same vein, more modestly proportioned and featuring columns only on the front facade. This was the Residence-General, where lived the chief representative of the French empire.
We alighted from the buggy. A servant opened the grand carved entrance doors that led inside the palace, and we were guided to an antechamber. Once I had taken a seat, Lieutenant Perrault requested that I remove my veil out of respect for His Royal Majesty. I refused.
“The King will consider it an impertinence,” said Perrault without further protest, and left.
There were half a dozen islander people with me in that antechamber, waiting to petition the King. Presently Perrault reappeared and invited me into the Royal Hall. I pointed to the petitioners who had been waiting longer than I, but the lieutenant shook his head. “They’re used to waiting,” he said. The teak doors opened and I followed him into a long, white, high-ceilinged room with wide, open windows, through which the plants of the palace garden extended their tendrils. At the end of this great hall sat three men, the one in the middle seated higher than those at his sides. I approached them, the silks of my dress rustling and the leather soles of my shoes clacking ostentatiously on the parquetry.
The man sitting in the middle seat was King Mehevi. His Royal Majesty’s military uniform, stiff with gold lace and embroidery, decorated a great and powerful chest, and where his heart beat all kinds of silks, ribbons, and medals were proudly arrayed. His neck seemed broader than his head, while his shaven crown was concealed by a wide chapeau-bras, waving with peacock plumes. A dark ribbon of tattoos stretched across his face, in line with his eyes, which shone all the whiter in their frame of blue ink. The throne he sat in was burnished with silver and gold and carved with biblical scenes. On Mehevi’s right-hand side was Colonel Mirabelle, the Resident-General, sporting gray mutton-chops and dressed in the iridescent uniform of a senior officer of the French Navy. On the King’s left-hand side was a bald, round-shouldered man in a clerical collar, a long black cassock, and a purple skullcap. Perrault announced him as the Archbishop of Oaeetee, Monsignor Fabien.
Colonel Mirabelle asked why I had come to the island. I described at length my vocation to spread the gospel among the pagan natives. Monsignor Fabien asked what experience I had in education. I described my years spent teaching the native children of New Caledonia. Colonel Mirabelle asked how I had come to be in New Caledonia. I replied that, though not a radical, I had once become embroiled in the Commune, but that my time as an exiled convict had impressed upon me that only Christ’s salvation can bring true happiness. I held out my letters of recommendation, which were taken, at a sign from the King, by Lieutenant Perrault, who was standing by my side. Monsignor Fabien asked if I was aware of the activities of the missionaries, and I replied that their mission was renowned, and that I did not wish to encroach on their work but rather teach those children still living in a state of savagery. Colonel Mirabelle asked me how I intended, as a woman, to communicate with heathens who had yet to repudiate their primitive language, manners, and customs and whom even the most dedicated of Christ’s servants had been unable to bring into the bosom of civilization. I replied that I had learned to speak the islander tongue in New Caledonia, and had also become acquainted with native manners and customs. At this point, King Mehevi, who for all this time had said nothing, merely observing and listening to the conversation, emitted a sort of contemptuous snort. Colonel Mirabelle asked how I would finance my work, and I replied that I was the heiress to a substantial fortune and intended to spend it on spreading the message of Christ to the remotest corners of the world.
At length the questions came to an end and both the Resident-General and the archbishop fell silent. King Mehevi still had not said a word. Finally he spoke, in as mellifluous and charming a voice as I have ever heard, in as pure a French as was spoken in any Parisian salon: “Madame, why do you wear a veil before the King? Were you not informed that it is forbidden?”
“Your Majesty,” I replied, “my veil is not intended to slight you but to protect you.”
“How so?”
“It masks a deformity best left unseen.”
“Surely I am the best judge of what I should see or not see.”
“In all other matters I would agree with you, Your Majesty.”
“In that case, remove that thing at once.”
“Very well, Your Majesty.” I lifted my veil and watched the faces of the Resident-General and the archbishop crease with disgust. The face of the King, on the other hand, did not change. He watched me from above, on his throne, with an inscrutable expression. Then, from the depths of his magnificent throat, I heard a chuckle rise. It grew louder, transformed into a cruel laugh, an open, extravagant derision that did not stop as most laughs do but continued to echo throughout the halls of the palace and into the gardens outside. He turned to his fellows as if expecting them to join in the revelry, and, sure enough, they picked up on the cue and also began to laugh, hesitantly at first but, before long, heartily. When the laughter had died down at last, the King’s expression resumed its customary coolness.
“Lower your veil, madame,” said Colonel Mirabelle. “And pray keep it lowered in our presence in the future.”
Mehevi leaned over to whisper something to Colonel Mirabelle, who whispered a reply. He did the same with Monsignor Fabien, with the same result. Then I was addressed by Colonel Mirabelle: “His Royal Highness King Mehevi, Sovereign of Oaeetee, will consider your petition. You will remain within the limits of Louisville until you receive his royal assent. Good day, madame.” With that, I curtsied and left the room, and indeed the palace, without anyone saying another word to me, or I to anyone, and returned to the Hibiscus on foot.
Thus I set out to wait for the King’s decree. Day after day, as I waited, I remained in my room, staring at the lumpy whitewashed walls, or else took short walks around the settlement, beyond which I was not permitted to stray. Day and night I heard the clomping of heavy boots in the stairwell outside my room as men marched up and down from the tavern below, visiting the four island girls in the neighboring rooms. Smiling at one of them in the corridor one morning, I ventured to speak with her. Her name was Rahama. She barely spoke French, I quickly gathered, and so, after making sure we could not be overheard, I began to speak in the island language. I realized, when she replied, that the language had much changed since I had last spoken it ninety years earlier, but not so much that I could not understand her. When they learned that the strange new Frenchwoman could somehow speak their native tongue, the other women who worked in the adjoining rooms began to approach me. They asked how it was that I knew their language. I repeated the lie I had told at the palace—that I had learned it in New Caledonia, where a different form of it was spoken.
The days passed at a crawl. I yearned to be free of the strictures I’d been placed under, to walk barefoot on my land, to swim in the waters unimpeded by the encumbrances of a white woman’s dress, to be with my people, to learn what had become of them and the Law. But on the threshold of my heart’s satisfaction I’d been shackled. Even if there were no chains around my ankles, I was a prisoner all the same. I took the silence of the palace not as a sign that I’d been forgotten but that I was being watched and scrutinized. I imagined the King, the Resident-General, and the cleric hesitating about what to do with me. Knowing I must prove my trustworthiness, I did not venture beyond the limits set for me.
After several days of this pacing to and fro, I sat at the writing desk in my room to write a letter to Mathilde. But no sooner had I had inked the words, My dear Mathilde, than my mind’s eye was flooded by remembrances that halted my letter-writing altogether.
Sixteen years earlier, after Charles had crossed with Mathilde, she and I had returned to live in Paris. I resumed running the affairs of my businesses as well as those of the Baudelaire Society. For a brief time, Mathilde appeared delighted by her new surrounds, and smiled at me with a semblance of affection. Now that we were finally reunited, I took such moments as an occasion to mention a return to Oaeetee. Although I knew the Law was long since beyond repair, I felt, over and above my yearning for our home, a duty to return, if only to observe what havoc our actions might have wreaked, and what restitution might be possible. But as soon as the topic of a return was broached Mathilde’s smile would vanish, and her usual sullen expression would take its place. She claimed, when I gently interrogated her about it, to remember nothing of her crossing, nor of her previous incarnation as Charles. There was no doubt in my mind that they had actually crossed, despite her denials. I had evidence enough: after the crossing, she began to have nightmares every night, as had Charles before her.
After several months, Mathilde brought a son into the world. She called him Lucien. I waited several months more to raise once again the subject of our return. “Lucien is too young to undertake such a journey,” Mathilde replied. But I never could bring her around to the idea of the crossing. Her mind was too practical to entertain its possibility, despite my convictions. Over time she came to consider me and my tales as a kind of lunacy, just as Charles had. I gave her the story Charles had written before the crossing, which he’d entitled, “The Education of a Monster,” but she could read only a little and she resisted every attempt I made to read it aloud to her. Like Charles before her, she dismissed my offers to cross with her and then cross back to prove that I was telling the truth. It was all sorcery to her, black magic, the devil’s work. There is no way of forcing someone to look you in the eye, after all—I have spent enough time trying to find a way to do it. It wasn’t long before the mere mention of the subject incited an expression of contempt, and I began to avoid it. I decided I ought to be patient with her. As much as my own veil, her face was a blank surface behind which she lived a life that was carefully hidden from me.
As for Charles, he never fully recovered from the crossing. The doctors diagnosed a neuralgic attack brought on by advanced syphilis, but I knew it was the crossing that had caused it. Sometimes the shock of the new soul is too much for a body weakened by age and disease to withstand. His mother brought him back to Paris and placed him in a clinic. I arranged for one of the nurses there to report back to me on his condition. He spent his last days sitting in a big armchair, his skin pale, eyes searching and fixed. He was incapable of walking, of even sitting at a writing desk, and was ill-tempered and frequently driven to paroxysms of rage. Somehow in the crossing he had lost his powers of speech. His vocabulary was reduced to one solitary word that he repeated over and again: “Crénom! Crénom!” No matter how hard he tried, no matter how many doctors and experts were consulted, it was the limit of his self-expression. Crénom. Now he moaned it, he sneered it, and, with little cries of anger and pleasure, used it to translate his every need and thought.
He continued in this state for more than a year, slowly deteriorating until only one eye remained open a fraction, and his head hung down too heavily on the shoulder. In this eye, like a fading gleam, memory kept watch. His last days, in the summer of 1867, were cruel, and he was buried in the family crypt at the Montparnasse cemetery with his stepfather, where, years later, his mother would join them.
As I waited for Mathilde to decide that Lucien was old enough to travel, I continued to occupy myself with the Baudelaire Society. It now served the dual purpose of library for safekeeping Charles’s writings and charity for young poets in need. I purchased the Hôtel Pimodan, where as Jeanne I’d lived with Charles, to serve as the Society’s headquarters. The three of us lived upstairs. Meanwhile, I also began preparations for our forthcoming voyage to the South Seas. I became the first woman to join the Société de Géographie on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In that little reading room, I read every book and magazine article I could find on the subject of Oaeetee and the nearby South Sea Islands. I devoured the descriptions of the islanders and their habits, studied the illustrations, and pored over the missionaries’ reports and newspaper accounts.
And so we settled into our parallel lives, Mathilde and I, together but separate, each as stubborn as the other. She raised Lucien with utter devotion while I, equally devoted, prepared for our eventual return. Every time I raised the subject of the voyage, Mathilde would evade it. Lucien was still too young, she’d say, and we should wait at the very least until he had learned to walk, then talk, then read. And in the meantime I conceived an entire imaginary expedition, with a chartered boat and crew and provisions to last several years.
Lucien was the bridge that kept us connected. I ensured, from a polite distance, that he lacked for nothing. From the earliest, he considered us his two mothers. He addressed Mathilde as Maman, naturally, but for some reason he took to calling me Mère. At first, we accepted it as a natural childish confusion. Each time he did so, Mathilde would correct him: I was his aunt, she told him, not his mother. But on this subject the boy was not to be corrected, even when Mathilde scolded him. As soon as Mathilde disappeared into another room, he would come to me, and ask me to take him in my arms, finishing the supplication with that magical word, Mère, which I could never resist, and I would cradle him as he sucked his thumb.
But this domestic scene, the closest I had known to peace and family for generations, was not to last. In the summer of 1870, when Lucien was only three years old, the Prussians, who wished to make a modern German nation out of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, baited the emperor of France, the second Napoleon, who called himself the Third, into declaring war. The French Emperor was humiliated, the Empire capitulated, and a new republic—the Third—was declared. The Prussians continued their advance to Paris and, in the winter of 1870, the coldest in memory, laid siege to the city. I never saw such deprivation. On my way to or from the Société de Géographie, I would step around barely living corpses shivering in the gutter, or see starving children chasing rats to take home to eat. So Mathilde and I opened our house to all who needed shelter, turning it into a makeshift canteen at first, and soon thereafter an infirmary, a nursery, and a school.
Finally, the government decided to capitulate to the Prussians. Parisians refused to go along with the capitulation and revolted, and the siege turned into the Commune. Throughout these upheavals, our doors remained open. The makeshift canteen, infirmary, school, and nursery now tended to wounded Communards and their families. At the end of spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms, the soldiers of the Third Republic, fighting the Communards now rather than the Prussians, finally breached the city walls. Over the next week, Paris’s finest monuments were set ablaze and its walls were reddened with rebel blood. Tens of thousands of Communards were shot on sight, and tens of thousands more were taken prisoner. I was among them.
Like so many others, I was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor and exiled to New Caledonia, leaving Mathilde in charge of my affairs. I departed for my exile convinced I would never see her, or Lucien, or Paris, or Oaeetee, again. My exile in the penal colony of New Caledonia comprised years of want and cruelty. But there were unexpected mercies too. Those female convicts who were literate became teachers, instructing the native children in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In order to better forget my sufferings, I plunged myself into my work.
Three years into our exile, we were given permission to bring our families to New Caledonia to be with us. I sent a letter to Mathilde inviting her to join me. From here, I wrote, we might sail on to Oaeetee, rather than return to France. Her reply arrived several months later. She had decided to decline my invitation, offering instead to stay in Paris and continue to manage my affairs in my absence. She never learned to read or write fluently, but through all those years she managed my business affairs with unfailing competence all the same. Later, when he was old enough, Lucien would stand in as her amanuensis.
After ten years of exile, the Communards were granted amnesty. I was free to return to France. But I felt I was too close to Oaeetee not to continue onward, so once again I wrote to Mathilde to urge her to join me. Once again, she declined. And so I set off alone from Noumea bound first for Sydney and then for Auckland, from where I would, at long last, set sail for my final destination. It seems I was, as ever, destined for solitude.
After a week of voluntary captivity at the Hibiscus, I could suffer my confinement at the King’s behest no longer. On the morning of the following Sunday, April 3, 1881, I finally summoned the courage to disobey His Majesty’s orders. Knowing it was within walking distance of the settlement, I determined to visit the mission. I left the Hibiscus at a time I knew most people would be at church, using the back entrance reserved for the hotel staff. Soon, I entered into bedraggled fields pocked with coconut and breadfruit trees, goats, pigs, and an occasional buffalo. I approached a squat stone building that I supposed was the prison. It had few windows and from the inside emanated sorrowful groans. Next, I came upon a little wooden church, inside of which I heard the incantations of a priest and, in reply, the singing of a congregation in harmonies so rich and consoling I stopped awhile to listen, and was reduced to tears.
Soon thereafter I stepped through the mission’s entrance and looked about. It had been built on the very location of the graveyard where, a century before, our sages had been buried. I had only ever set foot upon this once-sacred ground a handful of times, always at the express invitation of Fetu for some ritual. Our holiest and most secret ceremonies had been conducted here, hidden by the lush forest. But where trees had teemed, there were now four rows of six two-roomed, open-windowed cabins. In the center of the mission village, deserted other than for some mangy dogs sitting in the shade, was a planting of great breadfruit trees growing around a belltower.
I approached the nearest of these cabins and peered through an open window. At first, with my eyes habituated to the dazzling sun, I saw only darkness. I raised my veil to better see inside. The hut had an earthen floor, with straw mats overlaid upon it. Lengths of tapa cloth were stretched out to mark the place where the hut’s residents slept at night. I peered into several huts until, through the window of one such cabin, I breathed in a fetid stench I recognized as that of a body long unwashed. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I noticed, stirring from a corner, a silhouette of a body lying on its side, its back facing me, under a length of cloth on the ground. Stepping through a doorway, I entered the hut. I approached the body and knelt over it. It was a very old man. I could not see his face but, as he was not moving, I presumed he was asleep. Only his limbs, sticking out from under the tapa cloth, were visible. I gently lifted the cloth and saw that he was in a state of advanced decrepitude, his muscles wasted, his joints swollen, his skin covered in sores. He appeared to be at death’s threshold. I heard him whisper something. Unable to make out what he was saying, I lowered my head to hear him better and realized he was repeating the following words as if they were an incantation: “I welcome you, spirit, and beg you to guide me to the spirit world.”
“I am no spirit,” I said in the island language, unable to tell if he was talking to me or to an imagined being. “I am a creature of the real world.”
The old man’s eyes blinked open. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, while the irises, once brown, seemed covered over with a graying hue. “I cannot see you,” he said after a pause. I realized he was blind. “But I can hear you, and I know you are a spirit.”
“And yet I have a body, just like you.” I took his hand in mine by way of evidence.
“Then you are a spirit in disguise. You have taken on bodily form, but you are not of this world.”
“Why do you accuse me of such deception?”
“Because you speak the language of the ancestors.”
The dying man before me recognized my speech from his youth. “It is true,” I said, “I speak the language of our ancestors.”
“Where have you come from?” he asked.
I considered my reply for some time. Where had I come from? “I have come from the spirit world,” I said at length, “just as you said.”
“Ha!” He chuckled almost imperceptibly. “I knew it. About such things I am never wrong.” He slipped into a paroxysm of coughing. When it had passed, he whispered, even more softly than before, so softly I had to raise my veil and lower my ear so that it was next to his lips. He repeated his question. “And have you come to avenge us?”
“Avenge whom?”
“My people—your people. The People of the Albatross.”
“Against the foreigners?” I gave him the answer I presumed he wanted to hear. “Yes,” I said, taking his hand and squeezing it. “Yes, I have.”
“What is your name?” he asked.
I paused. “My name is Alula.”
The old man’s eyes opened fully with surprise, and his mouth widened into an astonished smile. “So you have returned!” he said, instantly revived by the news. “Fetu was right after all!”
“He was,” I replied, my eyes welling up with tears. “And what is your name?”
“My name is Koroli.”
“Koroli, the son of Nani?”
“Yes, that was my mother’s name.”
The hand I was holding I had held once before, when the wizened man before me was but a newborn child, ninety years earlier.
At that moment, we were interrupted by the tolling of bells from the nearby tower and, soon after, the laughter of liberated children could be heard pealing across the mission as congregants spilled from the church. Mass had just ended.
“Go,” Koroli hissed. “Go quickly. Don’t let anyone see you here. There are enemies all around us.”
“But I must talk with you more.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, “we will talk, but not now. Come back tonight, late, after dark. I will be waiting for you. We will talk then. But go now, while you can, and take care not to be seen.”
As I made my way out of the mission, walking back in the direction of Louisville, every passerby stared at me as if they had never seen such a sight in their lives. Other than the priest in his black cassock, all were dressed identically—women in white muslin tunics and men in white muslin shirts and trousers.
I spent the rest of the day pacing to and fro in my room at the Hibiscus. Finally, well after dark, I returned to the mission. The entrance gate was shut, but a boy was waiting to greet me. He guided me to a hole in the fence hidden by a mimosa shrub. Once inside the compound, the boy took me by the hand and led me in the near-complete darkness to a clearing in a copse of breadfruit trees near the old man’s cabin. All was dark and silent except for the soft light of candles burning in the cabins and, drifting from a distant place, the sound of voices singing in melancholic harmony.
The old man was waiting for me in the moonlight. He was lying on the same blanket as before and was somewhat revived from the near-cadaverous state I had witnessed earlier. He had been carried here on the pretext that it was time for his passage into the spirit world, and that he wished to die alone and in sight of the spirits in the sky. I told him I had held him in my arms once, only days before my departure. He replied that, although he could not remember me, he remembered the old people speaking of me in his childhood, awaiting my return.
“Why did you wait so long?” he asked. “All the old people are gone.” I told him about what had happened at the time of the crossing, that there had been two crossings, that Alula had crossed with Joubert and Koahu had crossed with Roblet. He was not surprised by this, and he explained that the sage Fetu had guessed that this was what must have happened. Then I explained all that had happened to me as Joubert, how Koahu’s crossing with the surgeon Roblet had been incomplete, and how I had become separated from Roblet. I told him about Jean-François Feuille and Jeanne Duval and finally I told him my story, and that of Charles and Mathilde. At the completion of my tale, Koroli shook his head in astonishment. “You have seen much and suffered much. But let me tell you what happened to us after you left.” He proceeded, in his soft, rasping voice, to tell me his story.
“In the hours after you left, the old people did not suspect that there had been even one crossing, let alone two. Koahu was mortally injured. That was all they knew. No one noticed Alula was missing. It was only the following day that she was discovered, wandering along the beach, lost and confused. She was brought to Fetu, who spoke with her in his hut for an entire afternoon. When he finally emerged, he declared two crossings had taken place. You had committed a great crime against the Law, he declared, as had Koahu. It was futile to punish them, for the soul in their bodies had committed no crime. Alula was to be treated by all as if nothing had happened. There was no choice but to hope and wait for the return of those who had made the crossing. ‘They know the Law,’ said Fetu, ‘and when they realize their mistake they will return. Of that I am certain.’ Fetu was greatly wounded by your betrayal as you had been his favorite, but he resolved to look after the new Alula, to nurse her to health, to teach her the ways of the people, to explain what had happened to her, and to wait patiently for your return, when you would restore the world to its natural order.
“Alas, the body of Koahu never recovered from the blast of the musket. Several days after the feast, Koahu died of his injuries. This caused great sadness among us, as we understood what his death meant: there would be no return crossing. The Law had been irretrievably broken.
“Still we waited for your return. Over the years, more ships arrived, but you were on none of them. Some simply sailed on without stopping. Others traded with us. Soon enough, only the children considered these ships a novelty. When the strangers came ashore, they, too, carried muskets. Now that we knew the power of the musket we were more careful not to startle them. They traded with us: for water, meat, and fruit, they gave us nails and hammers, mirrors and beads. They told us with gestures that they were hunting seals and asked where they were to be found.
“The incident that had killed Koahu was soon forgotten. The people welcomed the arrival of every ship. New worlds appeared to open up for us. It seemed anything was possible, and everything that was new was desirable. The people became emboldened. The women began to disregard Otahu’s orders and brazenly swam to the ship to trade for mirrors, beads, and cloth. The men paddled to the ships in their pirogues filled with pigs, fowl, breadfruit, and coconuts. The sailors taught them to smoke tobacco and drink rum. But of all their possessions, none was more highly prized by the people than the strangers’ muskets. They could kill and maim better than any spear, and from a great distance. And whereas the crossing was a discipline that required many years of training from the youngest age, the foreigners’ magic simply resided in an object.
“It was a woman who first traded for such a thing, holding it above the water like a trophy as she swam one-armed back to shore. It was coveted among the people and studied among the elders, but no matter how closely they imitated the strangers it would not explode with thunder and lightning. They could not understand how to make the magic work. So Fetu crossed with Alula to explore Joubert’s memories, and learned that, in order to make the musket’s magic work, a musket ball and gunpowder are necessary. From that day on, whenever a ship arrived, Fetu sent the women with the instruction to bring back more than trinkets with which to adorn themselves. They were to trade for ammunition.
“One woman swam to a ship and never returned. On another occasion, one of the men joined the ship and sailed away with it. With every ship the authority of Otahu and Fetu, of the Law itself, was weakened. Children were born who could not be conjoined by blood with the other children. Soon, like a stone under a waterfall, the Law was gradually reduced to a grain of sand, until even that grain was washed away.
“Then the tide began to turn. First the visitors hunted the seals until none were left alive. Then sickness came upon us. People would find wounds on their skin that would not heal. Day after day Fetu would apply ointments and tinctures, but the sores grew larger, and opened like a flower, and wept tears of their own, and multiplied in number, and when the sick finally died it was a blessing that their suffering was over.
“Others noticed a cough that would not go away. Over time the coughs grew broader and deeper and began to rattle, and their lungs seemed to be slowly filling up with water. Eventually, they drowned from all the water that had filled up inside them. Fetu nursed the sick as well as he could, without saying what was on his mind, but his thoughts could be read in the frown on his face: this was the Law’s retribution for our sacrilege.
“Fetu lived a long life, longer than most. Each time another ship was sighted, he welcomed all who visited the island in the hope that one of them was the one he was waiting for. But there was no return. Eventually he died one morning, in the company only of Alula. She came back to the village in tears, telling us Fetu had died of one of the mysterious new illnesses, before they could make a crossing. The line of succession was broken once and for all. As Fetu’s favorite, Alula appointed herself the new sage.
“By this time, I was a youth, on the cusp of manhood. I had been studying the crossing for some years. Fetu had taught me well, and he died just as I was preparing for my first unassisted crossing. Out of respect for Fetu, Alula said, there were to be no more crossings for twelve moons. This was not in our tradition, but as she was the new sage, the people respected her decision. Alula had become feared for her temper. Any perceived slight would send her into a rage that lasted days. By the time twelve moons had passed, the young people, having lost their appetite for the rigors of its instruction, never sought to resume their education. Thus the teaching of the crossing fell away, and I never made an unassisted crossing.
“After the sealers, other ships came in search of whale oil or sandalwood. Sometimes they stayed a day or two, when they were in a hurry, and sometimes they stayed for weeks, when rest and repairs were needed. They cavorted with the women, and traded with us; sometimes they would get drunk and occasionally a musket would be fired and cause heartbreak among us. Every once in a while, one of the people would leave with a ship, only to return years later, or never at all. Sometimes, one among us would cross with a stranger and thus leave the island. Whenever such a thing occurred, Alula’s reaction was different from Fetu’s. She insisted that, after such a crossing, the old body be sacrificed. After the sacrifice, she ostracised the family of the one who had crossed, banishing them to live on the far side of the island, where the breadfruit trees are fewer. And so we learned to keep the crossing to ourselves.
“The next calamity to befall us was the death of Otahu, whose lungs, like those of so many others among us, slowly filled with water, until he, too, drowned from the inside out. Before he died, Otahu designated his favorite child, his daughter Fayawaye, to be the new chief, as was the tradition.
“The first foreigner to stay and live among us arrived at the time when I was a father of my own young family. Much taken with the easy life here compared with that of a sailor, he jumped from the ship as it began to leave and swam to shore. We welcomed him as one of our own. He married and begat children, but several years later he joined the crew of another ship and returned to his faraway place. After him, there were others. They introduced us to their ways, and we became accustomed to them.
“Next to arrive were the missionaries—a dozen French priests. By this time, I was a grandfather already. They took possession of this place, our sacred ground, and destroyed the old, sacred statues that stood upon the graves. In its place, they raised this mission, and built walls around it. They taught us how to dress, how to plant vegetables, and how to read their sacred book. Again and again, they urged us to abandon our Law, promising their heaven in exchange. Several among us were persuaded, especially those who were afflicted with the foreigners’ new diseases. They went to live on the mission. But the strange clothes they were made to wear chafed, the vegetables they planted wilted, and their sacred book made no sense. What’s more, at the mission it was forbidden to sing our songs and dance our dances. So these people came back to be among their own, and we waited for the missionaries to leave.
“By now, Alula was a very old woman, an ancient. All these years, she had preached to us about her crossing with Joubert, and that of Koahu with Roblet. With every sermon, her anger became more vehement: she blamed all of our misfortunes on your impetuousness. Meanwhile, the people continued to waste away and die of strange new illnesses, for which we had no cures.
“The knowledge of the crossing was disappearing with the death of each of the old people. By now, Alula spent her days lying down. All the people knew that her death would be the death of the last teacher of the crossing. The people implored Alula to make one more crossing before she died. Finally, in a whisper, she called for a child to be brought to her—the strongest, healthiest child on the island. At that time, Mehevi was only five years old. He was an impertinent and imperious boy, but he was strong and never sick. When he was taken to her, Alula pointed to a tapa cloth that contained a sacred object. Inside, Mehevi found a whalebone knife, with fine engravings showing scenes from the old stories of the gods. On her command, all the people except Alula and Mehevi left the hut. Finally, Mehevi emerged from the hut and into the daylight, his hands slick and red. There was an expression of terrible triumph on his face that I shall never forget. He was holding the knife in one hand. It dripped with blood. In the other hand, he held Alula’s eyes, which he had gouged out according to the custom. The new chief Fayawaye went and knelt before him out of respect, and the other people present followed her example. Mehevi was our new sage.
“It was now generally agreed that the Law was irreparably broken. And so the people naturally divided into two camps. On one side were those who still feared the Law, and insisted we reject the foreigners and all their ways, and return to the Law with increased devotion. They remembered the prophecies of the old people, and when they looked about at the sickness that afflicted so many of us they believed these prophecies were now being fulfilled. On the other side were those who believed that the Law was now outmoded, that it was time to leave the old ways behind and adapt to the new ways. The foreigners had shown us how isolated and backward we were. We had to embrace the new life offered us, turn our backs on the past, and look toward the future with hope.
“Then the French navy arrived. Three boats made of stone and puffing out smoke reached our shores. They seemed like nightmare visions, nothing like the ships the foreigners had sailed before. Sailors rowed to our shore and the admiral declared the island a possession of Louis Philippe, King of the French. Enormous muskets aboard the ships exploded in celebration of the occasion. Later we learned that they were called cannons, not muskets, and that the weapons the French soldiers carried were no longer called muskets but rifles.
“Swarms of soldiers came upon the island and began to build a wharf, a barracks, and a prison. The ships sailed away several months later, but some of the soldiers remained. Ever since, the ships have come and gone but the soldiers are always here, building, always building: cutting down trees, digging up stones, laying down foundations. They went on to build an infirmary, a prison, a courthouse, a customs building, houses to live in, sheds to store things in, gardens to grow vegetables in, shops to sell things in, and above all they built roads. After the French navy came, more foreigners arrived: officials and workers, farmers and businessmen, teachers and storekeepers, wives and children. They built a village, called it Louisville, and settled there. They took possession of the low-lying land and cleared it of trees. They built wooden fences around it and when the people climbed over the fences or took one of their animals they would shoot at us, or else soldiers would come looking for us and take us to the prison. The breadfruit and banana and coconut trees were fenced off in this way, and the foreigners planted new plants like sugarcane and cotton and rice. Chief Fayawaye went to complain to the French about the sufferings of the people. The French insulted her, threatening her with prison if more animals were stolen or any of the French property damaged. She returned to the people and told them that the land the French had claimed for themselves no longer belonged to everyone. The people had never thought of things this way before. It was a strange idea to them that the land could be divided into little pieces, and that these pieces would then be the property of one person or another, who could do as they wished with it, including keeping other people from using it.
“The people talked for a long time, over many moons, about the new ways the French had brought with them, and considered how to make the French compromise, or even go away altogether. Between us we had six rusty old muskets and precious little gunpowder, whereas the French had rifles and pistols and cannons, and could put the people in windowless cells with iron doors that could only be opened with keys.
“When the French learned of the plotting by some of the people, they approached Mehevi, who had grown to be an impetuous youth. Mehevi was fascinated by the foreigners’ ways. He in turn fascinated them, partly because he spoke the language as if it were his native tongue, although he never spoke of Alula or the Law. The French told Mehevi that Oaeetee needed a king, a great and mighty warrior. They offered to make him king, and build him a palace, and respect him as the lord of all the island and its people. Mehevi agreed, and told them that he was in fact Oaeetee’s rightful monarch, that his throne had been usurped by Fayawaye, and for proof he showed them the plaque that Marchand had left on the island all those years before, which he had received from Alula, who herself had received it from Fetu. The French were pleased by this, and saw it as evidence that their scheme was righteous and just.
“And so the division in the people widened: those who valued the Law and wished to restore it gathered around Fayawaye, whereas those who valued the new ways and wished to abandon the Law gathered around Mehevi. Over the years, the Fayawaye people left the lowlands and retreated ever higher into the mountains, where life was colder and harsher, and to the far side of the island, where they could continue to practice the old ways in peace. They came to be known simply as the highland people. The others, those who wished to live in the new ways, came to be known as the lowland people. Their leader was King Mehevi who, from his palace, became known for his ruthlessness and terrible anger.
“Other than Mehevi in his palace, the mission was the only place the French would allow the lowland people to settle. In time, they were joined by those who could not abide the cold of the mountains or the hunger of the far side of the island. The sick went to the mission hospital in search of a cure. Everyone was welcome to stay on the mission for as long as they liked, and eat the food of the priests, on the condition that they set aside their nakedness, abandon their songs and dancing, and toil in the field from dawn to dusk every day except Sunday, when they were expected to attend Mass.
“The sickness among us continued to spread. There were fewer and fewer highland people, and the French were always complaining about them, accusing them of stealing from the farms. They are still there, and Fayawaye is still their queen, but she is an old woman now.
“I myself lived with the highland people for many years. As I watched others leave, I was determined never to join them. But as I grew old and became sick, I could not continue to live in the mountains. So with shame in my heart I, too, came to the mission. But now that I know you have returned, now that I have told you my story, now that I know the People of the Albatross will be avenged, I can die in peace. I am weary of this life, and ready to join with the divine breath.”
The morning after my reunion with Koroli, I heard three sharp knocks at the door of my hotel room. When I opened it, Lieutenant Perrault stood before me, holding an envelope in his hand. It was a summons from the palace.
Once more I was ushered into the Great Hall, only this time King Mehevi sat alone on his throne. He beckoned me forward. I approached and curtsied.
“Madame Édmonde,” he said in a soothing tone.
“Your Majesty,” I replied, bowing my head.
Mehevi smiled. “Please raise your veil.”
“But—”
“Please, madame, indulge me.”
I lifted the black tulle over my head and looked the King directly in the eyes, trying to maintain my composure, for despite his calming demeanor I sensed a tension in him straining to be released. He stood from his throne and stepped down from the dais, hands clasped behind his back. “I have it on good authority that you have disobeyed my orders.”
“How, Your Majesty?”
“Yesterday, you went to the mission.”
“Yes. I thought it would be useful to familiarize myself with the conditions in which the natives live.”
“Useful?”
“For pedagogical purposes.”
A mirthless chuckle rose from deep within him, as if he were indulging a child. “So much so that you decided to visit a second time, after dark?”
It seems I had been followed. “I couldn’t sleep. I needed to walk.”
“And you had a long conversation with the old imbecile Koroli.”
“Yes.”
“What did he say to you?”
“I didn’t understand very much. His dialect was near impossible to make out.”
“Alula, let’s drop the pretense.” I was doubly startled—not just by the name he called me, but also because he addressed me in the islander language. “I know who you are. I know why you have come here.” Now I understood why he’d wanted to see my face—to scrutinize my reactions. I remained mute. “Do you know who I am?”
“You are King Mehevi,” I replied in French.
“I am the King, it is true. But I am also someone else. Can you guess who?”
“No, I cannot.” We continued to speak in two different languages.
“Yes, you can. Think.”
“Forgive me, Your Majesty.”
He paused a moment and then tried a different approach, giving me a hollow smile. “It’s me, Joubert,” he said. “Joubert—you’re very familiar with that name, aren’t you?” His words were tinged with menace. “There’s no point hiding, Alula. I spoke with Koroli myself earlier this morning. He told me everything—what he told you, what you told him. He was under the impression you’ve come to avenge the people. Surely you’re not so foolish as to believe that?”
I told myself to remain as still as possible, but my mind was racing with calculation. Was he bluffing? Did he subject every newcomer to the same treatment? It was intuition, and the memory of what Koroli had told me about Mehevi, that prevented me from unveiling the truth of my identity.
“And so I’m left wondering—why is it that you have returned? Surely you don’t believe the Law can be mended, do you?”
“Your Majesty,” I said, finally, in Oaeetian, speaking slowly and haltingly, as if the language was difficult for me to speak, disguising my words with an accent, “with respect, I know not of what you speak.”
He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, his fingers curled around my neck. “Drop the pretense. I know everything. So do you.” By this time he was near enough that I felt a gust of hot breath with every word.
“The poor fellow was so close to death, he was hallucinating,” I said, slipping back into French. “I merely consoled him as best I could.”
“Why have you come back?” he snarled, his fingers tightening around my neck. I gasped, as much with surprise as with pain. He was now so near to me I could see the reflection in his eyes. I realized with a shot of panic that he was searching out my gaze. Was he attempting to cross with me? I fixed my sight on the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. “Are you not the very cause of your people’s misery? Are you not the one who destroyed the Law with your recklessness? So why are you really here? To wreak more havoc? To destroy what little hope they have left? Haven’t you done enough harm?” He paused, awaiting my reply.
His grip hardened. I gasped. “Please,” I sobbed, “Your Majesty…”
His mouth was curled in a terrible grimace. “Did you really think you could hide behind that loathsome face? Did you really believe it would protect you?” He turned my face this way and that, studying it. “You are truly a hideous creature. Just like me.” He pulled me closer to try to catch my gaze, but I kept it locked on that spot between his eyes. “Look at what you have done to your people, and the horror of their lives. Did your actions not bring this on them? Look what you have done to me! Yes, I am a monster, it is true what the old man told you. I am cruel and I am vengeful. But I am your monster. You created me! And every cruelty I commit is the offspring of your cruelty!” Our bodies were now conjoined. “You stole my life from me, and all this time I have waited for you to return. Shall we undo now what you did ninety years ago?” My entire body trembled. “Shall I administer the penance for your sin?” His lips curled into a vicious smile. “Vengeance is not yours to take—vengeance is mine!”
“Your Majesty,” I gurgled.
“Admit it,” he whispered as he loomed above me. “You are Alula. Your refusal to look me in the eye simply confirms it. Just nod your head, and I’ll let you go at once.” I kept my gaze resolutely locked in between his eyes. “Look at me!” he shouted, convulsing with the pleasure of his rage. I felt my life force drain out of me. If it had not been for a commanding knock at the door I might have perished at that very instant. Mehevi suddenly withdrew and, turning his back to me and the door, retreated to a more seemly distance. I lowered my veil and smoothed my dress.
Through the door stepped Colonel Mirabelle, the Resident-General, holding his pith helmet under his arm. Mehevi sat back on his throne. “What is it, Colonel?”
“Your Majesty summoned me?”
“I did no such thing, but no matter. The woman will leave the island on the next departing ship. Until then, she is to remain under confinement in her quarters.” He turned his head away from me with an expression of disgust. No sooner had I begun to mouth a protestation than he erupted. “How dare you speak without my permission!” He gestured to Mirabelle. “Get her out of my sight at once.” As Mirabelle ushered me out, Mehevi began rubbing his forehead vigorously, as if greatly troubled. I myself was clutching my throat and trembling with a violence I could barely control.
Outside, Lieutenant Perrault was waiting for me in the buggy. We made it most of the way back to the Hibiscus in silence. I was still shaking when he finally spoke. “Don’t be too disappointed,” he said as we neared the hotel. “He’s like that with all the newcomers.” I glanced at him with disbelief. “Oh, yes. Everyone who arrives on the island receives the same interrogation—I know who you are, I know why you came here, and so forth.” The officer gave a wan smile. “And you’re not the first to have been kicked off the island. The last Resident-General had barely set foot on dry land before Mehevi sent him back. The man is a lunatic.”
He was interrupted by a strange and melancholic sound: choral music like the singing I’d heard the previous day at the mission. At the top end of the main street, a crowd of islanders, dressed in white muslin, were shuffling toward Louisville’s cemetery.
“Mourners,” said Perrault.
“Who died?”
“An old man at the mission, an ancient fellow by the name of Koroli. The last of the old-timers. They found his body this morning. In the tropics, the dead are quickly buried.” As we observed the funeral procession, he tut-tutted. “It’s most strange,” he said. “It seems when the old man’s body was found, his eyes were missing.”
I was to be kept under guard in my hotel room until the departure of a ship bound for Valparaíso two weeks hence. But my encounter with Mehevi left me doubtful that I would last that long. I feared the King would have me murdered before then. I spent a sleepless night devising a means of escape. The next morning, when Rahama came to visit, I gave her a note to take to Fayawaye. Alula has finally returned to the island, it read. She is being held captive by Mehevi at the Hibiscus Hotel and wishes to escape and join with your people. “It is very important that Fayawaye receives this note quickly,” I said. “Bring me back her reply. And above all make sure no one knows about any of this.”
Two young gendarmes took it in turns to sit on a wooden chair outside the entrance to my room at the Hibiscus, and for twelve hours at a time they would doze or flirt with the women. Three days later, I received Fayawaye’s reply urging me to flee immediately, promising to meet me in the mountains the following day. In the dead of night, I made my silent escape, taking the stairwell at the back of the building, which was left unguarded, accompanied by Rahama, with only what could be carried on our backs. We ran as far as we could in the moonlight, and when we could run no longer we walked. By the time the sun rose we were halfway up the mountain.
The sun was at its zenith when we stopped to rest by a stream gathered in the hollow of a rock. There, Fayawaye awaited us with her most trusted highland people. The daughter of Otahu, she was now an old woman, and nearing death. “Now I can die with a tranquil heart,” she said when she approached me. After we had embraced, a young woman approached us and knelt before me. Fayawaye introduced her as Faïmana, her granddaughter, the great-granddaughter of Otahu. This young woman before me was to be the next chief of the highland people. Kneeling before me, Faïmana welcomed me and called me Ne’Alula: the second Alula. “The people have long awaited your return,” she said. As I was introduced to the gathering of people, many a tear was shed, until Fayawaye warned it was time to continue our journey, lest the French discover us. We continued our march higher still into the mountains with happiness in our hearts. At long last, I was among my people. There I would remain for the next nineteen years.
One sunny morning early in the year 1900, I was bathing in a mountain cascade when I was overcome by the intuition that I was being observed. I looked around and saw by the water’s edge a white, very white, almost spectrally white man in his early thirties, wearing a khaki suit and a pith helmet. On his face he sported a monocle and a curled ginger mustache, expertly waxed. Behind him a mule swayed under the weight of an enormous pack. We blinked at each other for a moment before the man uttered the last word I expected to hear.
“Mère.”
And then he blushed.
Only one person had ever called me by that name.
“Lucien?” And then I recognized him—the face of the child burst through the face of the adult, through his pale green eyes above all, and thirty years of separation evaporated in an instant.
That evening, we sat around a large bonfire lit in Lucien’s honor, in a clearing deep in the woods surrounded by my beloved people. They watched and listened, wide-eyed with wonder, as we talked long into the night. The occasion was distinguished at first only by the bliss of our reunion. I told Lucien about my years living in the highlands, and how I had devoted them to teaching my people about the Law and trying to revive the crossing among the children. Lucien explained that he was now a writer employed by the Société de Géographie to travel throughout the world. He wrote articles that he would send back to France to be published in magazines and newspapers. He had come to Oaeetee specifically to find me. In France, he said, I had become somewhat notorious for my exploits.
“What exploits?” I asked.
“Why, your life as a savage, evading the police, and fomenting rebellion.” I was aghast to learn of this. “In Paris, you are known in certain circles as the Queen of the Cannibals.”
When they heard this, the people laughed. “But I am no such thing,” I said. “And my people are not cannibals.” I began to describe the pleasures and the rigors of mountain life.
“The truth of the matter is not important,” he replied. “It is the legend that counts. And according to the legend, you are the leader of the oldest, most stubborn colonial rebellion in the empire. Even old King Mehevi is curious about you.”
Curiosity was not a quality I readily associated with the King, who had launched several punitive expeditions upon my people over the years, as a result of which we had endured great hardships. These, combined with disease and the natural scarcity of our surrounds, had depleted our numbers. “What does Mehevi have to do with it?”
Lucien explained that, upon his arrival on the island, he had been granted an audience with the King, during which the monarch had, as was customary, inquired about his intentions for visiting the island. “I know why you are here,” the King had said. “I know why you have come.”
“So you know about Madame de Bressy,” Lucien had replied.
At this point, Lucien said, the King’s demeanor had changed. “Of course,” said Mehevi. “I’ve known all along.”
“You know about Alula? And Koahu?”
“Yes!” the King exclaimed. “Yes, yes, I know, of course I know. But there are aspects to the story that remain confused for me. Tell me everything you know, young man.”
At this point, Lucien told me, he proceeded to tell the King the story of how I had known his mother, about Charles and Jeanne and the Baudelaire Society, and the stories I had told her about Koahu and Alula.
“You told him everything?”
“Should I not have?” He discerned the distress on my face, which even my scars could not hide. “But you don’t believe those primitive superstitions, do you?” I realized that his mother had taught him to be as skeptical as she was.
“It’s not a matter of belief, but of fact. All of these things did happen.”
“Well,” Lucien replied, “you needn’t worry about Mehevi any longer. He has fallen gravely ill.” The day after their exchange, he said, the King appeared to have descended into a mania and was confined to bedrest. His malady was unknown to the doctor. The news about the King’s illness took the people by surprise, for he was famous for his strong constitution, but they were even more surprised by the next revelation: the French had taken immediate advantage of the King’s illness to declare him unfit to rule and—pointing to the treaty Mehevi had signed with them all those years ago—annexed the island. The new Governor, who was none other than the old Resident-General, took up residence in the former Royal Palace, which was now called Government House, while the King was confined to the old Residence-General, now called the Royal Palace, where he lay in his regal bed, a king in name only.
“What was the nature of the illness that befell the King?” I asked. Lucien replied that he seemed to have lapsed into a kind of trance from which he would not be awoken. The only thing Mehevi could say was a single word, an exclamation that he repeated over and over, much to the discomfort of his attending priest: Sacrilège! He would shout it so loudly and so often that it had hastened his removal from power. The King now lived, in his enfeebled condition, shouting, “Sacrilège! Sacrilège!” over and over, day and night, from the comfort of the royal bedroom.
A shiver ran the length of my entire body. I thought of Charles shouting Crénom! over and again until the day he died.
“Tell me,” I said to Lucien, “when you first met him, how did the King react to what you told him about the crossing and about me?”
“He was most fascinated, and deemed it a story worth telling in great detail.”
“And—think back carefully before you answer me—how did his manner change upon hearing the story you had to tell?”
Lucien paused to remember the occasion. “Perhaps,” he finally replied, “if there was a change, it was a subtle one. It wasn’t anything he said so much as his bodily attitude. Yes, now that I think about it, there was a change in his demeanor. Especially in his eyes. His gaze became more inquisitive and searching, as if he was trying to hold my own. But I could not return it.”
“Why not?”
“There was something about it that made me nervous, something terrible. And besides,” he added, “Maman always taught me never to look too long in a stranger’s eyes.”
I asked Lucien to make a solemn vow not to repeat a shred of what he had just told me to another living soul. When we finally turned in for the night, I could barely close my eyes. I rose from my bed and went walking in the moonlight. I was deeply troubled by what Lucien had told me—by the prospect of Mehevi, of Joubert’s soul, unleashed upon the world. For I knew that Mehevi must have crossed with someone—someone in the habit of peppering his speech with the word sacrilège. But why?
When I had arrived on the island, and for most of the two decades I had lived upon it, I had been quite certain that I would die there, that there would be no more crossings for me. I had tasted enough of life’s bitter fruit. I had caused too much harm. I had lost too much. But Lucien’s appearance dashed all of these notions. More than dread, I felt a great mischief might be unleashed upon the world—a mischief for which I was responsible. What if the Law had been right after all—only not in the manner I had expected? What if, when I had crossed with Joubert more than a century ago, I had indeed planted the seed of the world’s destruction, precisely as the Law had prophesied? What if Mehevi was the evil flower of my sin—a soul with no conscience, only rage, an adept of the most esoteric forms of crossing, roaming free in the world, motivated by terrible, unknowable desires? And what if I was the only person in the world with the power to curb his vengeance?
So it was that, several days after our encounter at the waterfall, after farewells marked by sorrow, we descended from the mountains to the lowlands and I returned to Louisville for the first time in nineteen years. As we journeyed, I turned the conversation back to the subject with which I was most preoccupied: Mehevi’s crossing. I asked Lucien to cast his mind back to his arrival. Had he met anyone, in Oaeetee or on the ship on which he had sailed here, who habitually exclaimed sacrilège? After a moment of remembrance he replied: “I well remember the captain of the ship that brought me here. His blasphemies were a running joke among the ship’s crew, and the passengers too. All day long one heard him shout, ‘Sacrilège! Sacrilège!’” Lucien looked at me. “Do you think this is related to the King’s condition?”
“Perhaps,” I replied, but of course my worst suspicions had been confirmed. I was convinced Mehevi had crossed with the man. “When we return to Louisville, I will no doubt be arrested and imprisoned. I fully expect to be banished from the island. While the wheel of justice turns, I’d like you to run an errand for me. See if you can learn where we can find this captain.”
Word of my return spread quickly. On the outskirts of Louisville, greatly enlarged since my departure two decades earlier, a crowd had gathered, of islanders and foreigners both, lining the streets to witness the spectacle of the surrender of the Queen of the Cannibals. We marched, Lucien and I, all the way to the old palace, now Government House, accompanied for the last portion of the journey by an escort of mounted gendarmes. As soon as we arrived, I was handcuffed and placed in the charge of two gendarmes. In theory, I was under arrest, but as there was still no prison on the island for European women, I was detained instead, as I had been nineteen years earlier, in exactly the same room at the Hibiscus. The hotel had barely altered in all that time. Only the faces of the women working by the hour had changed.
The following day, I was to be taken to see the Governor, who was also the island magistrate. But when his aide-de-camp—no longer Lieutenant Perrault, who had left long ago, but a Lieutenant Thibault—knocked at the door and saw that I was dressed only in a tapa cloth, as islander women dress, he escorted me instead—by way of the bank, where a substantial sum of money was still deposited under my name—to the clothier. There, I purchased a set of clothes worthy of a European lady: a chemise, bloomers, a corset, a busk, a corset cover, a decency skirt, a bustle, an underskirt, a suit, a taille and garniture, leather shoes, a hat, gloves, a parasol, a nightdress, a veil, and a trunk in which to store it all.
The next morning I was marched once more to Government House. The Governor, no longer the Colonel Mirabelle of nineteen years earlier but Colonel Marie-Georges Duhamel, informed me that I was to be deported at my own expense, accompanied by Lucien, on a schooner leaving Oaeetee three days hence, bound for the Sandwich Islands, and then San Francisco. I asked to see Mehevi, the former king. The Governor refused. “His Royal Majesty, Mehevi, King of Oaeetee, is not receiving visitors.”
I returned to my room at the Hibiscus and spent the next several days under lock and key. The girls working in the other rooms were banished. This time there would be no duping the guards.
Deprived of my liberty, I became like a wild animal caged in a zoo. Lucien finally came to visit on the second day of my incarceration, apologizing for my compromised condition and promising my freedom as soon as we had left the island.
“What did you learn about the ship’s captain?”
“He left the island a week ago on the same ship that brought us here.”
“And what is its destination?”
“Marseille.”
My worst fears were realized. I would have to leave the island. I would have to make another crossing. I would have to return to France. I would have to attend to the monster of my making.
I opened my eyes in my sixth body and blinked several times. Through the window, the oceanic Iowa prairie through which the train was whistling was drenched in the golden light of dusk. Madame Édmonde sat before me, her body rocking with the motions of the train. Her face was marked with that stupefied expression I had come to know so well: the look of a fish that has just been taken out of the sea, no longer flopping about but simply wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if it cannot quite grasp the strange turn of events that has befallen it. Only, with the scars on her face, it was a strange, monstrous fish she resembled, a fish from the darkest depths of the ocean.
No one is harder to mesmerize than a mesmerist. It was only near the end of my story that I felt the resistance in Balthazar loosen a fraction, and the possibility of a crossing finally open. The change was almost imperceptible, but there it was: as I recounted my story, looking him directly in the eye all the while, I felt that familiar swelling of desire, that peculiar wanderlust of a soul wishing to escape its prison, which we all feel at one time or another, especially when captivated by the charms of a storyteller.
Now, here she was, no longer me but rather inhabited by that young man’s wonderstruck spirit. Édmonde’s mouth opened and closed slowly. I leaned forward to try to catch what, if anything, she was saying. After a moment, I heard it. It was unmistakable. “Behold!” she whispered, “Behold! Behold!…”
Born 1876
First crossing 1900
Second crossing 1917
Died 1917
“HE TOLD ME he loved me and wanted to marry me.”
Her words, hoarse as they were, seemed almost miraculous. They were the first words she had spoken in almost three weeks. We were twenty-three minutes into our first session. It had taken her all that time to answer the question I’d asked at the beginning of the session: What seems to be the matter? I’d been waiting patiently for her reply since. She looked down at her hands, which were fretting on her lap. Two tears hurried down her cheeks and softly plopped on the lap of her woolen skirt. In every other respect she was perfectly calm.
She cleared her throat. “He was one of the most mutilated men I’ve seen,” she continued in a clearer voice. “A frightful mess.” Another pause. “He had the most horrific burns and blisters all over his body. He was clearly not going to survive. The doctors and other nurses had left him for dead.” The words were starting to flow now. “Sometimes, when a patient is a lost cause, there’s nothing else to do but administer painkillers and concentrate on the men who still have a chance of making it. But I took it upon myself to care for him all the same. He’d been in the ward for two days, on a lot of morphine, but in agonies. And, despite all that, whenever I was with him, dressing his wounds, he talked. The skin of his lips had been shredded and scorched in the mortar attack, but somehow despite the pain he managed to speak in a whisper. I had to put my ear close to his mouth to make out his words. He just needed to tell someone, anyone, what had happened to him. Not just how he was wounded, but who he was, where he came from. He was Australian, just a boy, really. He must have lied about his age when he volunteered. I couldn’t understand why anyone on the other side of the world would volunteer for such a hell as this. I even remember the name of the place he was from: Ballarat. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I try to imagine what kind of place Ballarat could be. I imagine it to be flat and bright and very quiet, with great trees swaying in the breeze.”
“You speak English?”
“I speak four languages. My father was a diplomat.”
I looked down at my notes. Madeleine Pernety, I read. Volunteer nurse since May 1916. Born 1898, Saigon, Indochina. Father French, colonial official, deceased; mother Indochinese, deceased. Symptoms of shellshock and neuralgia. Admitted 10 February 1917. “What did you say, when he declared his love to you?”
“I said, ‘That’s what they all say, when…’ And I had to stop myself short. But it was too late. He guessed what I was going to say.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say, When they’re about to die. But he finished the sentence for me anyway.”
She was reclining on the couch in front of me, but she wasn’t really here at all. She was back by the soldier’s bed, reliving the moment. Her recollection of an incident that had occurred weeks earlier was, at this moment, more real to her than the fact of her lying on a leather couch in a psychologist’s consulting room in the Villejuif military asylum in the suburbs of Paris.
“Then what happened?”
“I left him to attend to another patient who’d begun making a lot of noise in the meantime.” Another long pause. I said nothing. “Then we heard the whistles of the first mortars and all of a sudden everything was on fire. The casualty ward was in a converted barn, you see. I dived into a corner and curled up into a ball, thinking I was about to die myself. By the time it was all over there was barely a ward left. The barn was in ruins. But I came out unscathed. Not a scratch.” She sat up and turned to look at me. “Not a scratch, doctor. I had some ringing in my ears that lasted a few hours, and that’s it. The Australian died, as did the others—twelve soldiers, two nurses, and a surgeon. I was the only survivor. And then it was all over.”
“And you had your first seizure that night.”
“Yes.”
I’d treated scores of men for shellshock since the start of the war, perhaps more than a hundred, but Madeleine Pernety was the first woman to have walked through my door. Women weren’t supposed to suffer from shellshock, yet Madeleine exhibited all the classic signs: catatonia, insomnia, chronic nausea. And seizures—trembling that lasted a quarter-hour or more, trembling that became so violent she would have to be restrained.
“Surely,” I said, “he’s not the first soldier to have died on your watch. What was it about this particular soldier that you’re having such a hard time forgetting?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it that he told you he loved you?”
“No. That happens all the time.” Her hands began fretting again.
“How often?”
“I suppose men have told me they love me about twenty or thirty times.”
“What about you, Mademoiselle Pernety, have you ever told a man you love him?”
“Just once.” Another long pause. I clocked it: four minutes. “We were engaged to be married. Then, when the war started, he was called up. He died in April 1915. At Ypres.”
“And so, as soon as you were old enough, you volunteered yourself—as a tribute, I suppose, to the man you loved.”
“Yes.”
“Does it trouble you when a man tells you he loves you?”
“Very much.”
“Why? Because he’s dying?”
“Because I have no love to give him in return.”
I waited to hear if she had anything else to say, but she seemed to have come to a kind of rest. Even her hands were in a state of repose. In clinical terms, it was a promising sign. We were near the end of the session.
“Mademoiselle, the method I use to treat patients is hypnosis. Do you know what that is?”
“Is it the same as mesmerism?”
“Mesmerism is what it used to be called, but these days it’s only ever called mesmerism in circuses. The scientific name for it is hypnotism. It seems to have a therapeutic effect on my patients. In a minute, I’m going to put you into a hypnotic trance. It’s while you are in this trance state that we’re going to do all the hard work that is going to heal you. After, you won’t remember a thing. Will you allow me to do that?”
I can only describe the expression on her face as one of imploring trust. I explained to her that, once hypnotized, she would remain in that state for a quarter of an hour before I ended the trance. Henceforth, she would undergo hypnosis at the beginning of our every session. The aim, I said, was for her to attain a state of deep relaxation that would relieve her neuroses.
And so the crossing began. For a quarter-hour I wandered the corridors of her mind: a joyous childhood in Saigon marred by the early deaths of her parents (her father of influenza, her mother, soon after, of grief), a solitary youth spent orbiting indifferent relatives in France, and falling passionately in love at the age of fifteen. In my years of clinical work, I’d encountered the charred remnants of many a love cut short. But the quality of Madeleine’s love was different: here was a soul that had loved wholly and with abandon. It was so rare and so true that I found myself wishing I could stay there to be warmed in its afterglow. Yet I also sensed it with a certain awe: a love of this amplitude was powerful enough to burn everything in its wake, leaving nothing but ashes.
I was writing up the notes on the session with Madeleine when there was a knock at the door. It was the registrar. “Sorry to disturb, doctor, but there’s been a change in this afternoon’s schedule. An officer. Claims to know you.” He looked down at his clipboard. “Aristide Artopoulos.”
“Artopoulos! Yes, we’re old friends.” A pang of guilt pricked my heart. I’d received several letters from him since the beginning of the war, each of them urging me to see him. I’d set them all aside, unable to decide what to do about them, putting my response in a temporary but indefinite state of suspension. “Where is he now?”
“I told him your schedule is full, which he didn’t take very well. He wouldn’t be denied, so I’ve slotted him in for two o’clock. Sorry to cut your lunch short.”
“Thank you, Julien.”
“I must warn you, professor. Don’t expect to recognize your old friend. He is a mess.”
Not a day went by without a thought for Artopoulos. The word friend could barely contain the nature of our former bond. At one time, we had been more like brothers, with all the uneasiness brotherhood entails, but in the almost three years since the outbreak of war I’d only seen him a couple of times, by happenstance, while he was on leave. What had become of him? What had the war done to him? I took my coat and went for a walk in the park, my mind bursting with memories of a bygone friendship that stretched back seventeen years, to the time of my return to Paris.
Moments after my crossing with Madame Édmonde in the train seventeen years earlier, I decided I must vanish. She and I had been seen speaking at length in the parlor car, and in my velvet smoking jacket, turban, and walrus mustache, I attracted attention. I wished to avoid any suspicion that her sudden illness was attributable to our recent acquaintance. The last thing I wanted was to end up stuck in a Midwestern prison.
I began rummaging through Madame Édmonde’s belongings, with which I was, of course, intimately familiar, having packed them myself. I knew where she kept her cash, her jewelry, and a promissory note for a rather sizeable sum of money she had written out in my name only the previous evening. I took almost all of it, leaving a little for Lucien to get himself and Édmonde back to Paris. With my hand on the doorknob, my conscience stung me like an angry wasp. I considered leaving a note for Lucien, but what was there to say? I was inflicting a terrible shock on the man, I knew that, but I could not risk being detained. After all, I hadn’t left the island for his sake. I did not wish to return to Paris as Édmonde. Mehevi, or whoever he was now, would be looking out for her. He would not be looking out for Balthazar. I had no choice but to flee. I turned and stole a final glance at that contorted face, upon which the suffering of five lifetimes was etched. Her body had been the vessel that had allowed me to return home at last, but my attachment to her was far more profound. In patience, perseverance, and kindness, Édmonde had been my finest incarnation. Now she was in a sorry state—another blind crossing. I was overcome with shame. What had become of me? I was little better than an ordinary criminal, a mountebank stealing the lives of others—and to what end? I consoled myself with the notion that the soul I had stolen was that of a charlatan. But it was undeniable that I had, by now, become a kind of predator. I could blame Mehevi, but as I myself was to blame for him, it came to the same thing.
I had to remind myself, then, as I have countless times since, that there was a single and necessary purpose to my existence: if I had, as the Law prophesied, set in motion a cataclysm, no matter how slowly it unfolded, it was my duty to try to prevent it. My resolve thus stiffened, I fled the scene of the crime.
I returned to my own, second-class cabin, shared with an insurance agent and two youths. I took my seat and pretended to doze. In fact, I was undergoing that surge of memories that occurs upon the occupation of a new body, as every stimulus triggers a series of memories latent within it, which bubble to the surface of the mind from unsuspected depths. The sensation is overwhelming, staggering even, and best borne in stillness and solitude. Around dinnertime, a steward appeared to turn out the beds. I removed my valise and retreated to the water closet at the end of the carriage, as if I was doing nothing more than changing into a dinner suit. There, I discarded my velvet jacket and turban, shaved my mustache, and, in darkness, alighted from the train at the next stop. The following morning, at the post office in Junction City, Kansas, I dictated a telegram to Mathilde in Paris:
AM RETURNING SOON AS HIPPOLYTE
BALTHAZAR STOP LUCIEN RETURNING
SEPARATELY WITH NEW EDMONDE STOP
DO NOT TRUST ANY NEW ARRIVAL STOP
The consequence of this unforeseen detour was that it took me several more weeks to arrive in Paris than I had hoped. By that time, it was early June, and the city was now a heaving, dazzling city of two million souls. There was no finer place to be in the world than Paris in the summer of 1900. The streets teemed with people and were crisscrossed in every direction by telegraph wires, while the ground underfoot was riddled with quarries, Métro tunnels, and gas and sewage pipes. One could no longer saunter down the middle of the streets, for they were now cluttered with omnibuses, streetcars, carriages, rattletraps, velocipedes, deluxe coach-and-pairs, and, for well-heeled adventurists, horseless carriages.
The speed of existence had quickened: where life was once lived at walking or trotting pace, people now took underground trains to get from place to place. The arcades of yesteryear had been supplanted by giant department stores employing thousands of cashiers. The city’s markets received produce transported on trains from across the country. If one wished to communicate with someone on the other side of town, it was no longer necessary to wait all day or overnight for a reply: a network of pneumatic pipes could deliver blue-papered messages almost instantly. In wealthy homes there were telephones and, in the best houses, one could even listen in on performances at the Opéra on a theatrophone.
The city had grown in size, too. The open fields that had once separated it from its walls were now filled in. More neighborhoods had been demolished and replaced with wide boulevards, sparkling with electric illumination. Thousands of chimneys belched smoke into the air, so that the streets were frequently shrouded in mist. Paris had become decidedly sootier, but also finer somehow, one of those grandes dames whose every wrinkle serves only to make her more resplendent. Women wore ostrich plumes, men wore monocles. Newspaper kiosks and Morris columns advertising the latest shows were dotted through the city. Men no longer relieved themselves in the gutter but in Moorish-inspired vespasiennes. At every corner, grimy street urchins were enveloped in some neighborhood conspiracy. And looming above it all was a great iron tower that seemed to have no purpose other than to proclaim the glory of the age.
Millions had come from every country to witness for themselves the wonders of the Exposition Universelle, a paean to the wonders of the whole world. They marveled at such modern miracles as an engine that ran on peanut oil, talking films, escalators, and a device that could record sound called the telegraphone. Intoxicated by the mood of frivolity and pleasure, they took river gondolas and electrified conveyor belts between carnivalesque palaces and specially built pavilions, panoramas of the world’s great vistas, dioramas of life in the colonies, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, a gigantic globe displaying the constellations of the night sky, and, in the Russian pavilion, a matryoshka doll as tall as a horse containing forty-nine identical versions of herself, each nested within the other, the smallest no bigger than a pea. On Sundays throughout summer and into the autumn, the crowds applauded athletes competing in the Olympic Games. More than just the Olympic motto, Faster, higher, stronger was the credo of a whole new century. And yet I could not help but be wistful for the slower, smaller, gentler Paris I had known decades earlier.
I took a modest room in a boarding house in the Sentier neighborhood and slipped into this human sea unnoticed. The Hippolyte Balthazar I’d crossed into was little more than a stage magician, a vaudevillian, a trickster preying on human frailty, but I was determined, with the resources I had inherited, to reinvent myself, even if I could not yet imagine what form my next metamorphosis would take.
While I waited for inspiration to befall me, I had a more pressing matter to attend to: I set out to find Mathilde, Lucien, and Édmonde. On a fine morning soon after my arrival, I knocked on the door of the Baudelaire Society on the Quai d’Anjou. It had changed little in the three decades since I had left it as Édmonde de Bressy. The door was opened by an unfamiliar man. I asked after Mathilde.
“Madame Roeg is not in,” he replied.
“What about Lucien?” I asked.
“Monsieur Roeg is not in either.”
“Édmonde?”
“Madame de Bressy has not been in for some time.”
“Well, is anyone in?”
“Monsieur Artopoulos.”
“May I see him?”
“Whom may I say is calling?”
“Hippolyte Balthazar.”
“What is the nature of your visit?”
I had a feeling, deep down in my stomach, that I ought to choose my words carefully. “I wish to join the Society.”
He stepped back, opened the door wider, and admitted me into the building. “Please wait,” he said before retreating down the hallway. It had been thirty years since I’d last been here. All was as I’d left it—the staircase, the drapes, the mosaic tiles, the rugs, the chandeliers, and the mahogany furniture. But I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in nostalgia. I was worried—worried for Mathilde and Lucien, of course, but also worried about Mehevi.
After a wait of several minutes a tall, rotund man dressed in a fine black suit and pressed white shirt and cravat barged into the room. He sported a curled mustache and a monocle over one eye. When he first laid eyes on me, for a moment that lasted no more than a heartbeat, his entire body froze, his facial expression—eyes widened, mouth agape—that of one beholding a vision, before he snapped back to reality. He approached me, enveloped my outstretched hand between both of his, and introduced himself to me as Aristide Artopoulos. He was, he said, the president of the Baudelaire Society.
“I’m on my way out the door to dine,” he boomed. “Would you care to join me? It will give us a chance to discuss Baudelaire to our hearts’ content.”
My natural inclination was to refuse the invitation, but before I could speak he had taken me by the arm and marched me out with him. There was something compelling about the man. Besides, what harm could it do to luncheon with him if it allowed me to interrogate him? I followed him out the door and into his waiting buggy.
We trotted across town to La Maison Dorée, with Artopoulos talking the whole way, invariably about himself. I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation to Mathilde and Lucien. At the restaurant, he asked for a private cabinet and, once we were seated, a swarm of waiters descended upon us. He ordered—without any consultation—lobster thermidor for us both, accompanied by a bottle of Les Clos Chablis.
The story of his life so far could be summarized thus: he’d been born in Alexandria into a Greek shipping dynasty. He’d attended boarding school in Switzerland and studied English and French letters at Cambridge. As the youngest of four boys, he’d been spared the duty of the family business and was free to dedicate his existence to the Muse, as he put it, adding that despite his passion for it he had no talent for literature whatsoever. “Like so many others,” he said, “I developed an unhealthy obsession for Baudelaire, so naturally I decided to join the Society dedicated to the preservation of his work and legacy.”
At last, here was my opportunity. “How was it that you took up the position of president?” I asked.
“It’s rather a dismal tale, I’m afraid. You see, the previous president has vanished. Technically speaking, I’m currently the Society’s only member—and thus its president by default.” This news set my alarm bells ringing. Mathilde was perhaps the most sensible character I’d ever known. She was not the type to just vanish without good cause. I would have to proceed delicately. “How do you mean vanished—how does somebody vanish in this day and age, what with newspapers and telegrams and passports?”
“It happens more frequently than you would think. People disappear all the time.” He chewed on his lobster thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I suspect the worst.”
“Is that so,” I replied, wishing to keep him talking on the subject without betraying my stake in the matter.
“My friend, you have arrived at the Baudelaire Society at a curious time in its history. At its height, around 1870, the Society had fifty-one members. They were the finest literary minds in Paris, all devoted to the work and memory of Baudelaire. Their patron saint was the Society’s founder, Madame Édmonde de Bressy. Sadly, she became involved in the Commune, and was exiled, never to return. She left the Society in the care of her companion, Mathilde Roeg. Madame Mathilde’s origins were, I understand, insalubrious. I knew her a little—she was practically illiterate. It’s unclear to me quite how she came to preside over such a prestigious organization, but I was told she was the most trusted companion of Madame de Bressy.” He leaned forward, confidentially. Again I was struck by the charm of the man—in his mouth, my own story was as enthralling as a newspaper serial. “It was even rumored she’d been a prostitute before Madame Édmonde had taken it upon herself to raise the girl’s station in society.” He leaned back in his seat. “Madame Mathilde managed the Society’s affairs until very recently, but I’m afraid she made a mess of things. We are in an awful state. As far as I can tell very little of Madame Édmonde’s fortune is left. It has been entirely squandered.”
My anger flared at the travesty of the notion that Mathilde was capable of such incompetence, but I kept my feelings to myself.
“When I joined the Society, only a few weeks ago, it had only three remaining members: Madame Roeg, her son, Monsieur Lucien, a professional vagabond, and the infamous Madame Édmonde, living among the savages in the South Seas. Lucien had gone to fetch her, as no one had seen her in twenty years. It seems he not only found her, he somehow persuaded her to return with him to France. Tragically, both Lucien and Édmonde perished during their journey back to Paris.”
Needless to say, Artopoulos’s news was a thunderbolt, but I was fortunate to be inhabiting the body of a vaudevillian. The scrutiny of the man sitting opposite me was palpable. Other than for a twitch of the eyebrows and a little, moderately interested grunt, I made sure to keep my face as still as possible. I picked up the glass before me, took a measured sip, set it down again, and tilted my head sideways as if I were merely listening to a curious story about people I’d never met. Inside, I was reeling.
“How terrible!”
“They were on a train from Nantes to Paris, sharing a cabin. Madame de Bressy had recently suffered some sort of neuralgic attack, I’m led to believe. Lucien was supposed to be caring for her. It appears he killed her with a steak knife, and then he stabbed himself.”
My heart was thudding. “Why would he do such a thing?” I managed to utter.
“That’s what all of Parisian society would like to know. It is an incredible story, is it not? In my opinion, it should come as no surprise that a man reared by two women should be prone to hysterics.”
The look on his face was hard to read. If I had known the man better, I might have called it triumph. Inside this body, I suspected, behind those startling eyes, lurked a familiar malevolence: Mehevi.
Artopoulos continued, apparently unaware of my discomfort. “Of course as the only member of the society, I had to take care of the burial myself. I even paid, out of my own pocket, for a plot in the Montparnasse cemetery. I took the liberty of interring them together in a crypt crowned by a fine pink-and-gray marble plinth under the name of the Baudelaire Society.” Yes, all remaining doubts had by now vanished. I was certain this was Mehevi. My nemesis had laid his trap. Somehow he had crossed from the body of the sacrilegious sea captain into that of an exotic dandy—and now he was enjoying himself immensely. Had he guessed who I was? The turn of conversation suggested he harbored his own suspicions, at the very least.
“And what of Madame Roeg?” I asked as casually as I could muster.
“We have heard nothing. Disappeared for good I think. For all I know she simply abandoned her life and went wandering.” Artopoulos looked reflective. “It happens from time to time. Someone will set off one day, and never come back. I’ve heard of some nomadic cultures whose religions revolve around this kind of peregrination. The alienists call it ambulatory automatism.”
He turned his attention back to his lobster. He ate quickly, packing his mouth with food and then chewing like a rabbit. I, on the other hand, had lost my appetite altogether. Noticing this, Artopoulos stopped eating and looked up at me with his mouth open, his fully laden fork hovering near its entrance. “What is the matter?” he asked, putting down the fork. Again, I felt the intensity of his gaze.
“Pardon my ignorance, but what is an alienist?” I asked, deflecting the conversation to a safer subject.
Artopoulos was visibly surprised. He lifted his eyebrows so that they formed two perfect circumflexes. “Damnation, man, where have you been for the past twenty years?” I noticed there was a little morsel of lobster flesh spiked in his mustache.
“Forgive me.” An alibi sprang unbidden to my mouth—the inherited talents of the born liar. “My education consists of four years at a seminary in Rome.”
The eyebrows rose higher still into the middle of his forehead. “How extraordinary. And what finally drove you from the seminary?”
“A crisis of faith.”
He laughed. “How charming! And pray tell, what was the nature of this crisis of faith?”
“I began to question the catechism. I began to doubt the existence of the soul.”
He studied me with narrowed eyes for a moment before resuming his feast. “Well, dear boy, it sounds like you would make a wonderful alienist yourself. But I can assure you I have no such doubts.”
“Is that so? You believe you have a soul that will go to heaven, or hell, depending on your actions in this lifetime?”
“I didn’t say I believe in an afterlife. I believe in the existence of the soul, which is quite a different matter.”
“What makes you so certain that there is such a thing, if there is no afterlife?”
Once again, Artopoulos scrutinized me. He seemed to come to a decision. “Dear boy, I think we are going to be the best of friends.” He gestured to a waiter to fill our glasses. When they were full, he took another sip, sloshing the wine in his mouth. Once he’d swallowed he resumed his speech—for even when one was alone with Artopoulos, he spoke mostly in speeches, each one delivered as if to a vast assembly. “There is no more exciting field in all the sciences than that of alienism. The alienists proclaim that society stands finally on the threshold of unravelling man’s deepest mysteries. In the future, they say, there will be no suffering. There will be remedies for our moral torments as efficacious as those for our physical afflictions.” He shoveled another forkful into his cavernous mouth, chewed, rabbit-like, several times, swallowed, and took up the thread once more. “I, for one, am not so convinced. If we have no soul, we are little better than animals. I am no different from this lobster here, for example,” he said, pointing toward the crustacean’s mutilated carcass. “But which of us is devouring the other?” He half smiled. “The simple fact that I am eating this lobster, in this restaurant, in this city, is proof enough for me that there is no moral equivalence between us. I have a soul, and as long as I am alive it is eternal. You really do drink far too slowly. We shall have to remedy that.”
Before I could stop him he’d taken my glass and filled it. On that afternoon, as forever after, Artopoulos was one of the most entertaining men I’d ever known, and not without a certain guile. He asked me about my family, provenance, education, station, and knowledge of poetry. The picture I painted for him in reply was that of a young man of inherited means, a gentleman at large, newly arrived in Paris, with exotic origins and a taste for dilettantism.
As we ate and drank, Artopoulos elaborated his plans for the Society. He seemed to covet an elevated social station and believed the Society was his means of achieving it. But first, he said, the Society must be restored: as it was, its library was in disarray, its finances a mess, its popularity so diminished that the members could now be counted on a single finger—“Unless, old chap,” he added, slowly lifting another finger, “I haven’t altogether discouraged you, and you still wish to join?”
What choice did I have? “Of course.”
“I’m delighted to hear it. I fully intend to return the Baudelaire Society to its rightful place as the most prestigious literary society in France. But currently, I am its only voting member. Without another member to second my motions, nothing can be done. The Society is in a state of complete paralysis.”
So am I, I thought to myself. Despite my misgivings, he was so relentlessly compelling that he left me no opportunity to leave him without causing offense. As the afternoon progressed, I decided that perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing. I’d left the island to find him, after all, and now, apparently, here he was. And with the others gone, now that I’d found him, I had nowhere else to go.
After we had eaten, he persuaded me to return to the Society on the Île Saint-Louis. He wanted to show me something, he said. He led me to the library. I studied my surrounds discreetly as we went, once again astonished at how little things had changed in the three decades of my absence. Once at our destination, Artopoulos pulled out a slim volume bound in carmine leather and embossed in gold. He opened a page at random. I immediately recognized the long, sloping handwriting. “A short story by Charles Baudelaire, completely unknown to the world. ‘The Education of a Monster.’” Artopoulos was testing my composure to its limits. I had to suppress the mnemonic torrent that came with the sight of it. Once again I felt myself under an especially perceptive scrutiny, and once again I felt compelled to dissemble my emotions and simulate a perfect ignorance. No easy task.
“Is it any good?”
“It is, perhaps, the truest thing he ever wrote.”
I hesitated, unsure how to proceed. “I should very much like to read it.”
“And you shall have your wish, old chap, once you are a member. We shall attend to that this very day.”
From the Society, we proceeded to his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann. He kept me enthralled so long into the night that, at his invitation, I slept in his guest room. We had, somehow, become instantly inseparable. But below the surface, something far more sinister was afoot, and I had confirmation of it the following day, in the Labrouste Reading Room at the national library, when I found a newspaper article reporting on the recent deaths of Édmonde de Bressy and Lucien Roeg. The account Artopoulos had given me was entirely accurate, other than the omission of a single, crucial detail: the two bodies had been found with their eyes gouged out. I wept hot, silent tears right there in the reading room. I thought of Koroli, the old man at the mission who, after speaking with me, had been murdered in the same way. The evidence wasn’t conclusive, but all the clues pointed in the same direction: it seemed I had found my target. Mehevi, or rather Joubert, had positioned himself at the exact center of the web. And yet, having caught me, why hadn’t he finished me off? It would become the enduring mystery of our friendship.
For the next several years, Artopoulos and I remained inseparable. We luncheoned at noon most days, mostly at La Maison Dorée, but occasionally at the Café Anglais or the Café de la Paix, and we often dined in the evening too. We sent each other several letters a day, either by post or by pneumatique, and as soon as it was possible we had telephones installed in our respective homes. We were regular guests at the Lemaire salon on Rue de Monceau and Laure Hayman’s salon on Avenue Hoche. We shared a box at the Opéra and sponsored the same dancers at the Russian ballet. Artopoulos was fond of racing horses, and we were often seen together at the Hippodrome. With the help of connections, he eased my admission into the Jockey Club, despite my obscure origins. On Sundays we would go hunting, driving to his country estate in his Richard-Brasier, or riding along the shaded paths of the Bois de Boulogne, saluting the carriages of the grandes dames of Paris’s demimonde. In the summer, we holidayed in Cabourg.
Artopoulos was the epitome of the modern gentleman. His cigars were banded with personalized gilt paper rings. His shirts were from Worth or Redfern and were sent to be washed and pressed in London. When he hosted a dinner, he made sure there was always one footman for every three guests. All year round, he filled his home with great bouquets of flowers—preferably chrysanthemums—ordered weekly from Lachaume or Lemaître. He only drank coffee bought from Maison Corcellet, served from a small silver coffee pot engraved with his initials, AA, and with piping hot milk in a porcelain jug. At tea, he served petits fours from Rebattet and brioches from Bourbonneux. And, without ever asking for anything in return, Artopoulos always made me feel a welcome and natural part of his world, a world of soirées and masquerade balls, hunts and boating expeditions, cabarets and casinos. His generosity to me had no bounds. His only complaint, which he used on many occasions to taunt me affectionately, was that I would never look him in the eye.
Throughout this time, the Baudelaire Society flourished, thanks mostly to Artopoulos’s charisma and connections. He rebuilt it into the glittering social salon he’d described to me when first we met, using it to make his inexorable climb to the highest echelons of society. At its peak, around 1910, the Society boasted among its members such luminaries as the Comtesse de Chevigné, Robert de Montesquiou, Lucien Daudet, Comte Henri Greffulhe, Antoine Bibesco, and Anna de Noailles. The guestbook was pocked with such names as the Duc d’Orléans, the Empress Dowager, the King of Greece, the Serbian pretender Karageorgevich, Prince Karl Egon von Fürstenberg, and the banker Bischoffsheim. Even the Prince of Wales attended on one occasion, as the guest of Odile de Richelieu.
What did he see in me? What did I mean to him? What did he want from me? He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. Not once did we attempt to breach our respective alibis. The truth was suspended between us, binding us, unacknowledged and ever-present. It was sufficient to me to be near him, a friend and ally on the surface, but always keeping a watchful eye over him, like a guardian, looking out for a sign that he might once again wreak the havoc I knew he was capable of. I felt a responsibility for him. I never had a plan as such, and in the glow of our friendship, the violence I knew was in him never revealed itself. It seemed I might achieve my purpose simply by being by his side. In all our years of friendship, there were no murders, no eye-gougings. Did I need to wait for him to kill again to act? And, if so, what could I have done? I would surely have had to kill him in turn. I never felt even remotely capable of such an act. What would I have used for the purpose? A pistol? A knife? Poison? It was all unthinkable, and given how perfectly content we were in each other’s company, I deemed it preferable to let things slide.
I’d decided I didn’t wish to spend my life as a glorified vaudevillian preying on the credulity of the uneducated and broken-hearted. I wished a more respectable destiny for myself. Artopoulos had planted a seed in me, that day over lunch, a seed that grew, watered by my inherited skills in mesmerism, by his encouragement, and by my own interest in understanding the mechanism behind the act of crossing. I would become, I resolved, an alienist. I began to study psychology, at first as an observer of the lectures, for I had no formal qualifications. At the Sorbonne, I took meticulous notes in the lecture hall and, afterward, read everything I could in the libraries. I took tutors and volunteered to be a laboratory assistant. Artopoulos pulled some strings on my behalf and before long I was admitted as a student.
Within a year of my arrival, I had been accepted into the preparatory classes to study medicine. In 1908 I graduated as a doctor, and began higher studies in psychology. From the start, I’d resolved that my methods would be unorthodox: I would use hypnosis in the treatment of my patients. The idea was not new. It had already been entertained and, ultimately, rejected by the previous generation of alienists. But I had one advantage they didn’t have.
Along the way I studied under Alfred Binet at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology. Later, I researched retrograde amnesia under Théodule-Armand Ribot, assisted Théodore Flournoy in his study of cryptonmesia, and attended the lectures of Pierre Janet at the Collège de France on memory, trauma, neurotic dissociation, and the subconscious.
I established a private practice treating patients suffering from melancholia or neurosis with the aid of hypnosis. I benefited from Artopoulos’s high-society connections and many of my habitués were members of the Baudelaire Society. My method was unique and controversial: first I would hypnotize, and only then would I analyze. My growing reputation began to attract the attention of the younger generation. Some of them courted my favors, intrigued by the reports of the breakthroughs my clients achieved, which they themselves could not replicate, no matter how closely they imitated me. Little could they guess the secret of my success—I was using the art of crossing to look inside the minds of those I treated. For my patients, there seemed to be something beneficial about it, something restorative and healing simply in the fact of, however briefly, no longer being held captive by an overactive imagination. And while visiting their bodies and minds, I would explore their memories, dreams, illusions, and delusions, their secrets, pretenses, and lies. This way, during the analysis that followed the crossing, I could detect every self-deceit, every avoidance, and every dissemblance. I came to know my patients better than they knew themselves. I knew when they were lying to me, and more importantly I knew when they were lying to themselves, an all-too-frequent occurrence.
Around this time, the profession of alienist was undergoing profound changes. It became fashionable, in certain high society circles, to seek the assistance of an altogether new kind of doctor. In March 1910, I attended the Second Congress for Freudian Psychology in Nuremberg and, upon my return to Paris, stopped calling myself an alienist and instead took up the title of psychoanalyst. My method, however, didn’t change.
If it was a sham of a kind, it was a sham with indisputable results. I was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne, and later at the Institut de France. I published essays in medical journals and popular magazines, and occasionally my name was printed in the newspaper society pages, usually alongside that of Artopoulos. He would tease me about my progress—his favorite joke was to beg me to hypnotize him. In the spirit of the joke, I always refused him good-naturedly, telling him we were too close, that I knew him too well, that he wasn’t suggestible enough. Joking aside, I never trusted him enough to hypnotize him. His friendship was akin to keeping a tiger for a pet: I never allowed myself to forget I might be mauled to death at any moment.
Perhaps inevitably, I developed a particular interest in the fugue state, which in those days went by several names: traveling fugue, psychogenic fugue, ambulatory automatism, dromomania. The fugue state is extremely rare, so rare it is at best a medical curiosity, hardly the kind of condition upon which a psychoanalyst might build a career. But over time, having published several articles on the disorder, I came to be recognized as its pre-eminent specialist. My interest was, of course, more than merely professional. I had witnessed a fugue state of sorts several times, after each of my blind crossings. On each occasion, I had been its cause. I was haunted by the faces of the bodies I’d just vacated, the physiological mark of the bewilderment that follows an unforeseen crossing. But there was also a practical dimension to my interest: it was a way of looking out for Mathilde. I hoped that, if she was still alive, Mathilde would remember what I’d told her, decades ago before I had gone into exile. If she did make a crossing, if her body was left flailing with bewilderment, and if some doctor somewhere diagnosed it as a fugue state, there was every chance that I, as the only specialist in the field, would be called upon to treat it. As schemes go, it may have been far-fetched, but it was my only hope of finding you.
Only I didn’t find you. Rather, it was you who found me. I was looking out of a window at the Baudelaire Society one morning in the winter of 1911 when I saw a hunchbacked old woman laboring across the Pont Louis-Philippe and then up the Quai d’Anjou. She was dressed in rags, her face obscured by a hood, and was pushing a cart laden with old books. It was a remarkable sight, for she was bent over in two, and getting the wooden wheels over the cobbles of the street was no easy feat. As she neared the entrance to the Society, she was overtaken by the valet, Renand, carrying several loaves of bread that would be served at lunch. As he passed her, the old woman said something to him that I could not hear. He answered her briefly, shaking his head, and then entered the building. I made my way to the kitchen, where the valet had set about helping the cook, Carlotta. I asked Renand what the old woman had said to him.
“Which old woman?” he said.
“The book peddler you just spoke to outside on the street.”
“Oh, her! She’s a lunatic, not a book peddler. Her books are worthless. I often see her loitering about. She’s always asking me the same thing.”
“Are you talking about the old Belgian woman?” said Carlotta.
“Yes,” Renand and I both said at once.
“She does the same thing with me! She’s been asking me for years, the pet. I feel so sorry for her.”
“What does she ask you?”
“Every time I see her,” Renand said, “she asks if Madame Édmonde has returned.”
“She asks me the same thing,” added Carlotta.
My heart skipped a beat. “And what do you say?”
“I tell her Madame Édmonde is dead,” said Renand, “but she never remembers. She’s lost her wits.”
I felt a charge like being plunged under cold water.
“I asked her once why she wanted to know,” said Carlotta. “Hard to imagine it, but it seems she and Madame Édmonde were both Communards.”
Excusing myself as politely as I could without drawing attention to myself, I dashed out of the building, grabbing my jacket and hat on the fly. I looked up and down the street. The woman was nowhere to be seen. I turned left and ran around the corner, to the end of the island, where the cathedral and the Île de la Cité come into view. I saw her from a distance: she had just stepped onto the Pont Saint-Louis, headed toward the cathedral. I ran after her.
“Madame!” I shouted as I neared her. The hunchbacked figure stopped and turned. It was some four decades since I’d last seen her. She had aged terribly, but she was still recognizably Mathilde. “Madame, I’m told you’re looking for Édmonde de Bressy.”
“Yes.”
“Unfortunately, Édmonde passed away several years ago.”
“I see. You’re quite sure?”
“Quite sure, madame. You can stop looking for her.”
“Thank you for letting me know.” I could hear her familiar, sing-song accent.
“You’re welcome,” I said. Mathilde turned to continue her way along the bridge. “She did manage, however, to make a crossing before she died.”
Mathilde froze for a moment and then straightened her back. She turned to face me. “What is your name, monsieur?”
“My name is Hippolyte Balthazar.”
“And what is mine?”
“Your name is Mathilde Roeg.”
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”
We must have made a curious sight, she and I, beggarwoman and dandy, embracing on that bridge for so long.
I could not lodge Mathilde in my apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, as it was too close to that of Artopoulos. I feared what he would do if he discovered I was harboring her. Instead, I found her a comfortable room in an out-of-the-way hotel where we might converse to our hearts’ content. There we talked for the rest of the day. For eleven years, Mathilde told me, she had been in hiding, moving from boarding house to boarding house, making a living of sorts peddling books. She had never received the telegram I’d sent her from Kansas, or if she had, she’d never read it. Although a bookseller, she was still illiterate. Stubborn as she was, she had never even attempted to learn. When Lucien traveled, she told me, she would put all her correspondence in a pile on her desk at the Baudelaire Society, awaiting his return. When I heard this, I could not suppress a shiver of horror. Artopoulos must have read the telegram. It was the first definitive sign that he was who I’d suspected him to be, and that he had known who I was from the very beginning. He must have been expecting me, when I first appeared at the Baudelaire Society. And ever since, he had been toying with me, never once saying or doing anything that gave himself away, even though he must have known that I suspected him in return.
Why had he indulged me so? I have considered the matter many times since, and my only answer, unsatisfactory as it may be, is the memory of that first glance he gave me the day of our first encounter in the lobby of the Baudelaire Society. Perhaps he had found an unexpected solace in our friendship, a relief from what would otherwise have been a crushing loneliness. And as I was the only soul in the world who truly knew him and his secrets, he showed me something I would never have expected of him: he showed me mercy. That mercy mixed with solitude and became love. I in turn had found solace in him, I in turn had loved him, the way one loves a sparring partner, a cellmate, or an enfant terrible, knowing it to be dangerous, painful, wrong even, but doing it anyway, out of fatalism, defiance, or compulsion.
As for the mystery of Mathilde’s disappearance, I never received a satisfactory explanation from her, but I suspect there was more to it than just grief. The double loss—and in such dreadful circumstances—of her son and Édmonde would have unhinged the sturdiest mind, but there was more to it even than that. Artopoulos had only just joined the Baudelaire Society, the first new member in more than a decade. I imagine, upon his arrival, he assumed his characteristic quasi-aristocratic entitlement over the place, as if Mathilde had merely been keeping the chair warm for him. Something had occurred between the two of them, soon after the news of the murders of Lucien and Édmonde, something that forced her to flee. Perhaps he’d attacked her, perhaps he’d admitted to his crime, perhaps it was something else altogether. Whatever it was, it was something vicious, something cruel, something unforgivable. Mathilde never told me the full story, and what little she revealed was only ever let slip or hinted at, but I remembered my encounter with Mehevi on the island decades earlier and no further explanation was required. Thereafter, my vigilance around Artopoulos was only heightened, and I began orchestrating an almost imperceptibly gradual cooling of our friendship.
I rented Mathilde an apartment on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and saw to it that she lived a life of ease. I was overjoyed that—despite everything—she had survived. I visited her every day. We shared our sorrows about Lucien. Other than Artopoulos, she was the only person in the world who knew me truly, but I kept them hidden from each other. On one occasion, I managed to smuggle the story Charles had written out of the Baudelaire Society library and read it aloud to her. She showed me none of her previous resistance. Time, memory, our reunion, the death of her son, perhaps even the shadow of her own mortality, all of these seemed to have softened her opinions on the subject of crossing. When I raised the possibility of undertaking another crossing, she didn’t dismiss me as she once might have done, but rather listened with an open mind. Within a few months, she agreed that the time had come. She never gave up peddling books—it was her way of finding a new body. The only problem, she often complained, was that no one ever wanted to look an old woman in the eye.
In the spring of 1913, I was called one day to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital to attend to a woman who had suffered, that very morning at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a fugue state. There was Mathilde, her eyes wide open, her lips whispering something indecipherably Germanic, her head shaking as though in disbelief—all symptoms of that bewilderment that haunts the ambushed soul after a crossing. I asked the policeman who’d brought her there what he knew of what had occurred. Witnesses had reported, he said, that at the time of the incident she’d been telling the fortune of a German tourist. Precisely what had happened was a mystery—the young man had left the scene. That was all the policeman knew.
My relief that she had managed a crossing was tempered by the sorrow that whoever she’d crossed with was now somewhere far away. How much of his previous existences did he remember? What were the chances of our ever crossing paths again? I placed the shell of Mathilde in a home for the elderly. She never recovered from her fugue, and some time later she died in her sleep, a year before Europe began to tear itself apart. She was buried in a grave in a suburban cemetery marked only by her initials. I’d managed to keep our reunion a secret from Artopoulos, and I wanted to keep it that way.
Like so many others, the outbreak of war brought out a bloodlust in Artopoulos hitherto disguised as a fondness for hunting and social advancement. He enlisted at the declaration of hostilities and urged me to do the same. Having gone through the horrors of the Commune, I was a little more circumspect, but I figured I might do some good in the Medical Corps. Artopoulos pulled some strings and received a captain’s commission in the cavalry. The war only widened the distance that had grown between us. As the conflict dragged on, its barbarity seemed to shatter the artifice of our already dubious friendship. I found my distance from him a relief. Our letters became less frequent and more guarded until eventually we stopped writing altogether.
The man who was wheeled into my office at two o’clock that afternoon was unrecognizable as the man I’d once counted as my closest friend. His body, face, and limbs were contorted, distended, and racked with convulsions—one of the worst presentations of shellshock I’d seen. The war had wrecked him.
“Bonjour, Artopoulos,” I said as the nurse handed me his case notes.
“B-b-b-b-bon-j-j-jour,” he labored as I skimmed the paperwork. The notes revealed his rank was second lieutenant. This surprised me. The death rate of commissioned officers in battle was such that promotion was almost guaranteed, and his battalion, stationed in Champagne, had seen some of the worst of the fighting. But Artopoulos had been demoted, twice. The notes explained several of his men had complained of unwanted, forceful advances.
The nurse cleared her throat. I looked up from my reading and sprang to my feet, pulling her by the arm until we were both outside my office door. “Can you stay?” I asked in a low voice. “In case he takes a turn for the worse?”
“I’m sorry, doctor,” she replied, “I must attend to my rounds. If you need me, just ring the bell.”
As soon as I had closed the door behind me, Artopoulos jumped up, smiled, and, taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket, began to smoke as he sauntered to the couch and let himself plump happily into it.
“Sorry about the histrionics, but it isn’t easy getting an audience with Your Highness these days.”
“Is this one of your pranks, Artopoulos?”
“Not at all, old chap. In fact, this whole war is a little on the serious side, wouldn’t you agree? Not that you would know it, from this island of tranquility.” He flashed one of his trademark smirks, laced with irony.
“I know all about it through my patients. I was assigned this role because somebody thought I might make a difference here. And so far that has tended to be the case.”
“You could have insisted on active combat, I suppose,” said Artopoulos. “But I don’t blame you for avoiding it. It’s hell out there.” He stood and began pacing the room. “Balthazar, you need to get me out of this war.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because we’re friends,” he said, turning toward me. He raised an eyebrow. “Are we not?” No, I thought to myself, we are most decidedly not friends.
“How do you suppose I might go about it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A medical discharge perhaps? Write me off as an incurable case.”
“But you’re not sick.”
“They don’t know it.”
“I wish it were as easy as you presume, but I can’t do that with a stroke of my pen. I don’t have the authority. There are processes in place precisely to avoid that kind of…” I realized I could not finish the sentence politely.
“Of what?”
“Of cheating.”
“Cheating?” Now it was his turn to be taken aback. “I’m sorry you feel that way after I’ve taken such trouble to find you.” There was a hint of menace in his voice.
Artopoulos paused, standing at the windowsill, looking out at the park that surrounded the asylum. “Careful someone doesn’t see you,” I said. He returned to the couch. My mind was bursting with questions. Why had he come to me? Why had he not crossed with someone else?
“Well, since you’re here, why don’t you tell me something. A little talking cure could be very helpful.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Tell me about your demotions.”
Artopoulos froze, giving me a very serious look, as if deliberating on some thorny dilemma. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Most unfortunate. I—I was … I was trying to…” His voice trailed off, his mouth open as if about to speak, but unable to articulate the words intended to pass through it. He was perfectly conflicted between two equal and opposite desires: the desire to reveal himself and the desire to remain hidden. At last, I thought, the veil of civility is about to fall away. At last, he is going to tell me who he really is. He is going to tell me what he can do. He is going to tell me that in fact he wasn’t making advances on those men at all, that what he was actually doing to those men was holding their faces still so that he could look them in the eyes. He is going to tell me that it is impossible to force a man to look you in the eye, that an eyeball is a slippery and rubbery thing that cannot be controlled, that it is easier to pop it out of its socket than to keep it still, that it is simpler to blind a man than to make him look. Then finally he is going to tell me why he is here, and what he wants from me. He is going to tell me that he was responsible for the murders of Lucien, of Édmonde, for their eyeless bodies, for their lives cut short. And finally he is going to tell me that I am the one ultimately responsible for his crimes, that I started it all, all those generations ago, when I deprived him of his body, his friends, his world.
“There’s something you should know,” he said at last.
“What’s that?”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
“I know that you know.”
“And what do I know?”
“Everything. Everything there is to know.”
“So why speak in circles, why not just say it?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to push you away. Because you’re the only friend I have. You’re the only friend I’ve ever had.”
“Nonsense. You have many friends. Many more than I have.”
“No. Without you, I have no one. You’re the only one who knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Everything.”
Evidently, that was all I was going to get out of him. I suppose it was a confession, of sorts, or as close to one as someone as secretive as Artopoulos could manage. I waited for him to say more, but by now he was just sitting on the couch opposite me, staring sadly into nothing.
“Well, your performance has earned you twelve weeks’ respite here at the hospital,” I said. “It’s a start.”
“What good will it have done if I have to go back? The war won’t end in three months.”
“But you’re not sick. So technically you’re on a holiday to which you’re not entitled.”
“Entitled? Do you think anyone is entitled to what is going on out there?”
“Of course not. Every day, I treat men—and now it seems also women—whose psyches have been destroyed by what they’ve endured out there. But I can’t end the war.”
“What can you do?”
“I can alleviate suffering.”
“Alleviate mine!”
“You’re not sick!”
“So you refuse to help me?”
“Oh, I’ll help you, don’t worry. I’ll keep the secret of your charade to myself. But I can’t get you out of the war. You see, I’m rather good at my job. My patients tend to get better. To get you a discharge, you would have to be too sick to go back. That’s quite rare. It would require some first-rate acting on your part. And the decision is out of my hands. Of course, I can make a recommendation, but ultimately it’s the Medical Review Board that decides. You’d have to convince them, and they don’t like me very much.”
“Why is that?”
“Because no one else can replicate my success rate.”
“Your success rate!” he spat. “Tell me, how do you achieve your success rate?”
“The same way I’ve always done it. I hypnotize, and then I analyze.”
“So hypnotize me. I’ve asked you often enough—dozens of times, probably, and you always fobbed me off.”
“I didn’t fob you off.”
“Do it now. Don’t you think you owe me that much?”
Of course I owed him. I owed him everything, in a way. But crossing with him was out of the question. Obviously I didn’t want to cross with him only to be sent back to the trenches, who would? But equally I didn’t want him in my position, occupying my life, colonizing it. “Well, for one thing, you’re not sick. And for another, we know each other too well. As I’ve said to you many times, I don’t think you’re suggestible.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense.”
“Not at all. It’s a fact. Not everyone can be hypnotized.”
“How do you know I can’t? You’ve never even tried.”
“Well, even if I could, there’s another problem. You see, recently, treatment of shellshock has changed. When analysis doesn’t work, they send you off to electric shock therapy.”
“So they’re torturing men back into the trenches?”
“Precisely.”
“Ah,” he huffed, “you’re just making excuses.” He slumped back despondently in the couch. “I think you’re being most unreasonable. After all, I welcomed you when you were a nobody. I cared for you. I paid for your studies. I gave you your career. And the one time I ask you for help, you refuse me.”
“I’m not refusing you. I’m telling you I can’t give you a discharge.”
“Then hypnotize me, at least!” he shouted, loud enough for someone in the corridor to hear. The menace had returned, this time as more than a hint.
“Please, keep your voice down,” I said, placating him. Perhaps, I thought, there was a way I could squirm my way out of the corner I was backed into. “Very well. We’ll try it. But if it doesn’t work, don’t blame me.” With a sigh, I dragged my armchair closer to the couch and sat on its edge. I had no idea what to do. Improvising, I pulled out my pocket watch and opened it.
“What are you doing?” asked Artopoulos.
“I’m going to hypnotize you.”
“Not with your watch! Do you take me for a fool? We’re not in a circus. I know your methods. With your eyes! Hypnotize me with your eyes, damnation.”
“Yes, yes, keep calm, I beg of you.”
Until now, I’d never looked into someone’s eyes for any length of time without wanting to cross. This situation—not wanting to cross—was completely unknown to me. Moreover it wasn’t just anyone’s eyes I was looking into. It was Artopoulos. There was nothing I knew about crossing that he didn’t know.
Our gazes met and settled into each other. The key, I told myself, was to keep my soul completely still. I had to stop it from reaching out. I had to stop his, somehow, from reaching in. But almost as soon as our eyes met I felt the forward lurch, the tingling, the beginnings of dissipation. A tide of panic began to rise in me. I had to do something. I had to abandon ship. So I looked away.
“Just as I thought,” I said. “Nothing’s happening. It’s no good.”
“Try again,” snapped Artopoulos.
“No. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Try it again, damnation, and this time don’t look away!”
“I’m sorry, Aristide, no.”
Artopoulos rose, lunged toward me, and slapped me. “You fraud!” he snarled. “You liar! You snake! After all I have done for you!”
“How dare you!” I said, standing so that we were face to face. I slapped him in return.
He began pummeling me with both hands, fists clenched, over and again, cursing me as he did. “You are a monster!” he said. “You are evil!” I covered my head with my arms but I was no match for him. From under his blows, I fell back against the desk, reached behind me and somehow managed to grab the bell, ringing it vigorously before, with a swipe of his arm, Artopoulos knocked it from my hand. Now, consumed by a scarlet rage, he threw himself upon me until we were both writhing on the desk. He wrestled me onto my back. With one hand, he grabbed me by the throat and began to throttle me while, with the other, he reached his hooked fingers toward my eyes and began digging into them around their edges. At that same moment, the nurse entered the room, saw our imbroglio, and screamed. Soon, several orderlies had rushed in, lifted Artopoulos expertly off me, and strapped him into his wheelchair, where he continued, as they wheeled him out of the room and down the corridor, to shout, “You are evil! You are evil! You are evil!”
I was left breathless and trembling. I rubbed my eyes and my throat and straightened my collar. From my mouth and nose I felt a trickle of blood. The nurse sat me down and went to fetch some gauze and alcohol. Monsieur Julien the registrar rushed in and asked what had happened. As the nurse daubed my wounds, I assured him that no great damage had been done, that no disciplinary action was necessary, that the patient’s outburst was merely the act of a troubled mind, that such things were a professional hazard, that if anything it was a good sign, an indication he would, sooner or later, make a full and complete recovery, only it would not be me treating him, needless to say, no, it would certainly not be me.
When, the following morning, I next saw Madeleine, I was still shaken by the events of the previous day. I’d barely eaten or slept and my mind was racing. That incantation, You are evil, was still ringing in my ears. Was it meant as an insult or a condemnation? I didn’t know then and to this day I still don’t know. It is a profoundly disturbing experience to be judged evil by someone upon whom one has delivered the same judgment.
My entire therapeutic method consisted in making a blind crossing with a patient—that is, a crossing of which the patient would afterward have no recollection, other than a faint, residual impression of psychic relief or alleviation. I had performed it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, and never had a patient ever expressed the slightest hint of awareness of what had just happened. But on this occasion, something went wrong. Perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I’d make a mistake. Perhaps I was run down, or distracted by my reunion with Artopoulos. Perhaps it was subconsciously intended, or provoked by something about Madeleine herself. Whatever the case, it was my intention, as always, that after the return crossing she should have no recollection of what had occurred. But as soon as the initial crossing was complete, I felt something was amiss. I must have overlooked something, or been careless somehow in my method. All the same, I proceeded in my exploration of the patient’s body and mind when she, in my own body sitting in the chair opposite me, spoke.
“Please,” she said, in my own voice, “I don’t want to go back.”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want to go back,” she repeated with more emphasis.
“Go back where?”
“To my body. To Madeleine. Don’t make me. Please.”
“You want to stay in that old man’s body?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
I watched in horror as Madeleine-in-Balthazar rose from the chair and leaned over me, whispering the following words very slowly: “You cannot make me go back to that body.”
“I would remind you that you are under hypnosis, which you entered into voluntarily. When I command it, you will look again into my eyes and you will return to the body that is rightfully yours.”
Balthazar paused, as if considering mutiny, but after a long moment he sat back in his chair and we began the return crossing. I was more determined than ever to leave in Madeleine not a trace of a memory of what had just occurred, but naturally I was also perturbed. My confidence in my abilities was shaken. The technique of crossing is based on a kind of mental purity. Obstructions, distractions, hindrances can tilt the entire process off-kilter. When the return crossing was complete, Madeleine didn’t say anything untoward, but there was something about her expression that suggested her state of mind was not how it was supposed to be. She beheld me with an expression somewhere between wonder and suspicion, markedly different from that depressed countenance that had characterized her demeanor before the crossing.
“What just happened?” she asked finally.
“You were under hypnosis.”
“How long did it last?”
“A little under thirty minutes, as we discussed.”
“And what happened in that time?”
“You were in a state of deep relaxation the entire time.”
She mentioned nothing more of it, but when we launched into the analysis I found her to be distant and standoffish, and nothing was achieved. I ended the session early.
A fraud lives in perpetual fear of the cataclysm of his unmasking. Days later, I received a letter from the Medical Review Board. I was under investigation, it said, after a patient had made a complaint against me. My methods were to be reviewed by a panel of three specialists the following week: Gustave Roussy, André Léri, and Jacques Jean Lhermitte. Until then, I was suspended from my duties. The board had been stacked against me, as if handpicked specifically for the purpose of discrediting me. I knew I had enemies in both the military and medical hierarchies, all of whom considered my methods suspect. Léri, in particular, was my professional nemesis, a champion of electric shock treatment, hostile to any doctor who advocated analysis as treatment for shellshock. He thought hypnosis was quackery. The letter didn’t name the complainant, but I guessed it was Artopoulos. He was going to force me to hypnotize him in front of the review panel. I would be his ticket out of the war after all: he would make a crossing, and I would be the one to return to the trenches, only in his body. In the seventeen years of our friendship, he’d never shown me the slightest enmity. There had never been any question of violence. If one of us had wished to harm the other, we’d forsaken countless opportunities to do so. As his creator, his only link to the past, I’d always been exempted from his vengeful nature. No longer.
The morning of the review, I was pacing up and down in my office when there was a knock at the door. It was Madeleine.
“Madame,” I said, “I didn’t expect to see you here this morning.”
“Why not?”
“My appointments have all been canceled. Surely you were told. I’ve been suspended. Someone’s made a complaint about me. I’m supposed to meet with the Medical Review Board in the Great Hall this afternoon. I have to defend my methods before a panel of three doctors.”
She looked at me with a confused expression. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I have no complaints about your methods, professor.”
“I wasn’t suggesting it,” I said with a smile, “but I’m glad to hear it all the same.”
“My only complaint,” she continued hesitantly, “although it’s not a complaint at all really, is the one I expressed last time, while I was under hypnosis.”
I played dumb. “Remind me?”
“That if there is the possibility of passing over into another body, I wish to take it.”
I considered my predicament briefly before concluding I had nothing to gain by insisting on the pretense. “Madame, I must be honest with you. Something went wrong. You’re not supposed to remember that.”
“But I do. I remember everything about it. Most of all, I remember thinking, I don’t want to go back. I meant what I said, professor. I still do.”
I tried to reason with her. “I’m sorry, madame, I can’t accept your proposition. It would be a travesty. Do you really want to forsake your youth, health, and beauty to live the rest of your days in the body of a middle-aged bachelor?”
“I want to live someone else’s life. I don’t want to live mine. It’s too painful. Don’t you understand? When I look in the mirror, I look at myself with someone else’s eyes—the eyes of the man who loved me, the man I lost, the only man I will ever love. It is painful for me to look at myself. I cannot extinguish the love that is in me, and every time I see myself I am reminded of it. In order for me to be fully alive I need to leave this body—or I shall have to take my own life.”
“But you have so much to look forward to, so much still in front of you.”
“Do I? I’m a widow and an orphan. I’m penniless. I have only a basic education. What do you imagine I have to look forward to if love is out of the question? An empty marriage? Raising the children of a husband I don’t love? A convent? Praying to a god I don’t believe in?”
“You could be a nurse—you’re obviously very good at it.”
“There’ll be little need for nurses when the war is over. No, I see nothing in front of me. A long, vast stretch of nothing.” She turned and looked around the room, and as she looked around it I looked too, following her gaze across the bookshelves and the paintings and the certificates on the walls. “Whereas,” she continued, “if I were to spend the rest of my days in your body, even if there were fewer days to live, they’d be better days. I’d be surrounded by books and luxuries. I’d be educated and never want for anything. I’d heal people and move in high circles. If ever I was bored I would simply go back through your memories, and relive for myself one of your many adventures. I imagine there are enough memories in you to last me a lifetime. And of course there is the not inconsiderable advantage that I would be a man.” She turned to me, took my hands in hers, and gave me an imploring look. “What do you say, Professor Balthazar? Please, won’t you set me free?”
I looked into her dark sparkling eyes and wondered if I should warn her about Artopoulos, about what had happened to Édmonde and Lucien, about the Baudelaire Society and Charles’s manuscript. If I did so, would she change her mind? Would she decide that her own body, her own life, were not so insufferable after all? But as I wondered these thoughts, I felt that familiar flicker of pleasure as the first stirrings of the crossing began, and I decided that she already knew everything she needed to know.
Born 1898
First crossing 1917
BALTHAZAR SAT IN his chair very close to me, staring vacantly at nothing in particular. For a moment, I thought I’d made a blind crossing. “How are you feeling?” I asked.
Balthazar shook his head a little as if recovering from a blow. “Fine, I think.”
“No regrets?” I asked. “No second thoughts? Once I walk out that door, there’ll be no turning back.” For the sake of my own conscience, I needed to make one last gesture of goodwill before making my escape forever.
“No,” he replied, “you have granted me my wish. I’m grateful to you.”
To be certain he was fully lucid, I questioned him about his current name, his former name, where we were, the day of the week, the name of the President of the Republic—he remembered everything. “You’re not in a fugue state, which is a good sign,” I said. “But I should warn you: you are going to need all your wits about you. This very day, you will face a tribunal inquiring into your clinical methods.” As I spoke, I saw that memories of the matter came to him, and he nodded with recognition. “They will ask you to hypnotize a man called Aristide Artopoulos. I urge you to reflect a moment upon the history of your acquaintance with him.” Balthazar nodded as memories of Artopoulos rushed to the surface of his mind. “The critical thing is that you must not look him in the eye, or he will cross with you. And, believe me, you don’t want that.”
As I shook Balthazar’s hand, I suppressed a shudder at the thought of what might happen if Artopoulos were to divine that this was not the man he was after. I knew I must once again vanish. I didn’t want to lose the advantage I had over Artopoulos—he didn’t know what I looked like. I fled the Villejuif military asylum with nothing more than the clothes on my back. I caught a suburban train to the center of Paris and went to a shirtmaker’s workshop in the Arts et Métiers neighborhood run by a Saigonese family I knew from my childhood. They did not turn me away. I stayed with them until after the war. I burned my identity papers and took on the surname Blanc.
From that day on, I lived in hiding—and with good cause. Two weeks later, I learned that Hippolyte Balthazar had been murdered in his own bed. According to the newspapers, his body was found with the eyes removed. My grief was compounded by guilt. There could be no doubt about his killer. As with Édmonde and Lucien, Artopoulos had either had Balthazar murdered by proxy or done the deed himself. I could not know if he had discovered my deception, but I assumed the worst. Either way, the removal of the eyes felt more than just a message or a demonstration of power, I interpreted it as a kind of macabre vow. From now on, the price I would have to pay for my freedom was the torture and murder of innocents.
In ordinary circumstances, such a murder would have scandalized Paris. But the relentless slaughter occurring only a day’s drive away had inoculated Parisians to individual acts of violence. Balthazar’s death was soon forgotten. Artopoulos had him buried with Édmonde and Lucien in the Baudelaire Society crypt at the Montparnasse cemetery—yes, at the very spot we were to meet, you and I, twenty-three years later. It isn’t every day one has the occasion to attend one’s own funeral. It was a modest affair held on a rain-soaked morning. I stood at the back of the small gathering, my identity vouchsafed by my veil. There were barely more than a dozen mourners, all of whom I recognized: clients of Balthazar’s and members of the Baudelaire Society. Artopoulos was there, of course, standing by the graveside. He had given up feigning the tremors of shellshock. Beside him was a striking, square-jawed woman I’d never seen before. Later, I would learn that her name was Gabrielle Chanel, better known by her nickname Coco.
Shortly before Christmas 1920 at the Saint-Quentin market, I spied Renand, the Baudelaire Society’s valet, from across a crowd. We locked eyes momentarily before I managed to duck out of the way. Thankfully, the Christmas throng was thick enough for me to make my getaway before he could catch me. I’d been shopping there since my flight from the asylum, knowing Renand normally went to the Place Maubert market on the other side of the river to buy provisions for Artopoulos and the Baudelaire Society. The encounter rattled me for months. I could not be sure that Renand had been there looking specifically for me—he’d never seen me, after all, and I’d taken care to avoid all cameras in the intervening years—but I haven’t been back to the Saint-Quentin market since.
I resolved to leave the family I’d been boarding with and vanish more completely. I took to living underground, as generations of Parisian fugitives had done before me. For many years I have made my home in the labyrinth of quarries, sewers, tunnels, and catacombs below the city’s surface. The subterranean life is easy enough to enter into: all one needs is a belt buckle with which to lift the grates that lead below and a map of the maze of old limestone quarries and abandoned Métro tunnels under the city. Dry, spacious, and temperate, they make excellent habitations. I have made a home of several such places, moving only when another fugitive discovers my hideout or when some above-ground construction work makes it unsafe to remain there.
For the last few years, I have resided in the quarry below the Montparnasse cemetery—the grate is very near the crypt of the Baudelaire Society. An iron ladder leads into the quarry. Every afternoon, toward closing time, I stand in front of Baudelaire’s grave until the guardian blows his whistle. That’s what I was doing when we met. When I’m certain I can’t be seen, I hide among the gravestones until the guardian, having locked all the gates, returns to the gatehouse. When I am alone, I take my belt buckle, lift the lid of the grate, and slip into my abode. There are other grates outside the cemetery walls that I can use if, for one reason or another, I cannot be sure that I am alone in the cemetery, but as they are on the street I can only ever do so in the dead of night, and even then, between the homeless men and the streetsweepers, I am courting danger each time.
By far the most joyous occasion of this lifetime has been to find you again, dear Koahu, and to love you again. I never abandoned the hope that somehow we might be reunited, you and I. I never entirely lost faith that your nightmares would lead you back to me somehow. Like a spider in a dark corner, I waited for you. My faith in you has been vindicated. You came to me, even if you don’t know it. Something in you sought me out—how else could you possibly explain it? And though, with your little round glasses and funny mustache, you are much changed, the spirit of Koahu still lives in you.
All this time, I have tried to keep a watchful eye on the happenings at the Baudelaire Society. I have spent my days doing the rounds of booksellers and bouquinistes, keeping up with book gossip, which is always rife with scandal and conspiracy, or when the weather was inclement holing up in a library to browse the newspapers and magazines, study auction catalogues, and dissect the annual Gazette de la Société Baudelaire. This is how I learned, several years after the war, about the death of a bookseller who was said to be selling an unpublished short story manuscript by Baudelaire called “The Education of a Monster.” When I read that his eyes had been removed by the murderer, there was no mistaking the culprit. Artopoulos was baiting me, hoping to flush me out of hiding. Whether he had committed the act himself or through some third party mattered little. It was a coded message intended only for me: Here I am, the monster I had created seemed to say. Come and get me if you dare. The longer you wait the more harm I will do. Only you will be to blame.
It was also in the newspapers, the following year, 1923, that I learned of the death of that same monster. He too was buried in the Baudelaire Society crypt, although this time there was no question of my attending the burial. I knew he would not have died without crossing, so when, soon after, I learned that Gabrielle Chanel was the new president of the Society, I naturally assumed he’d crossed with her. Still I had to wait a decade for definitive confirmation. It came when the body of a Belgian industrialist was found, eyeless, in the Bois de Vincennes. A book collector, he’d come to Paris to buy the same previously unknown manuscript by Baudelaire. The soul of Joubert lived in that woman, I knew, and was mocking me still.
Nowadays, locked in my stalemate, I lead a quiet life. I prefer the dark to the light, night to day, underground to above ground. I shun society and have only one friend, the singer you met at the Shéhérazade. I work as a waitress there. Never in my previous lives have I been as alone as I am now. Sometimes I watch people passing by, yearning to live as they do, in the certainty of their mortality.
Since my last crossing, I am beset as never before by a surfeit of memory. Every place I go reminds me of another place, or of the same place at another time, or of several places at once. Every scent reminds me of other scents, every melody of other songs. I take a bite or a sip of something and I am instantly transported to another time and place. A word, a face, a birdcall, a cloud, and I am plunged into other worlds. Perhaps there is a natural limit to remembering, beyond which it is simply impossible to bear the weight of all that remembrance.
Sometimes, I wish I was more like you, Koahu. I wish I, too, could forget. This is my seventh body. I hope it will be my last. Every crossing adds a lifetime of memories to the hoard. As Chanel, Joubert is in his sixth lifetime, and you are in your fifth—but he has his rage and you have your forgetting. I only have my guilt to sustain me. I have lost all desire for making another crossing. All of my lifetimes, combined with the hundreds, perhaps thousands of crossings I undertook as Balthazar, seem to have taken a toll. I find myself living in a constant state of exhaustion. Perhaps there is something in Madeleine that contributed to it too—the fatalism I noted before our crossing.
Time and again I ask myself why I am still alive. I’m not proud of myself. I’ve been a thief. I’ve made a mess of things. I’ve tried to undo something that cannot be undone. I only seem to have made things worse. The world we came from is gone forever and nothing can bring it back. There can be no crossing without a return crossing. I think about that often. It torments me day and night. Perhaps the world doesn’t end all at once, but slowly, imperceptibly, as a chain of seemingly innocuous events measured across generations.
If it wasn’t for Joubert, I would already be dead—and once I no longer have to worry about him and what he might do, I look forward to my ultimate release. I have yearned for death long enough. Chanel is getting closer, I know it—sometimes I imagine I can feel her hot breath on my neck. She has a network of informants looking out for me, I’m sure of it. Perhaps Massu, your friend at the Quai des Orfèvres, is one of them.
Whenever a murdered corpse is found with its eyes missing, like Vennet the bookseller, it is Joubert playing on my guilt, taunting me, luring me, daring me. One day I will take up the dare. One day I will finish this story once and for all. You, Koahu, may be my beloved, but he is my destiny. I hold myself responsible for him and all his acts of cruelty. Now that I have seen you, now that you know all you need to know, now that you’ve written it down, perhaps my story is finally approaching its end. Perhaps you can take on the legacy of our sin, all those lifetimes ago. Chanel doesn’t know about you. She doesn’t know for sure if you are even still alive. But if she finds out, she will want to destroy you just as surely as she wishes to destroy me.
You have the manuscript now, but it alone is not enough. You must write down your own story—the story of our meeting at the cemetery and everything that has happened since. You must write down my story too, the story of my seven lives. Add to it the story you wrote as Charles Baudelaire. The true tale of the albatross is all of these stories, together. They unite us. Keep them close to you so that, next time you cross, they will be the first thing you see. It is the only way to ensure you won’t have to piece together your true self over a lifetime of nightmares. Let the stories be your guide.
Perhaps you still don’t entirely believe me. Perhaps you never will. I’ve become accustomed to your skepticism. But when we met your nightmares stopped. And when we crossed you saw yourself staring back at you. When the opportunity to make a crossing comes, I know you will take it. You always have. Choose your inheritor wisely. Choose someone who wishes to die, and if you cannot, choose someone who deserves to. A crossing is no small thing. Every crossing is a theft of a life, and all that goes with it.
When this war is over, we’ll meet again. I’ll be waiting in my usual place: in the cemetery, standing by Baudelaire’s grave, in the late afternoon, smoking a cigarette just before closing time. Until then, all that is left for me to say is farewell, my beloved. Farewell, good luck, and bon voyage.