3. Treasures

Mr. Pallud heard the women pass his door. He heard the steps of the formidable Lundgren, mistress owner madam and proprietress of the house, and other steps, muffled and faint, light but not hasty or imprudent, alongside Madame Helena’s unmistakable steps; steps on a known surface, obedient and dominated from time immemorial, steps of the type the general might take when he went out to the field to count the dead after a battle while he awaited the arrival of the king who came to congratulate him for the success of the campaign—do generals count the dead or do they assign that dirty job to their most unlucky noncommissioned officer? In any case, the general would not walk that other way over the field of battle or any other ground; he would walk with a straight back, head set between raised shoulders, eyes scornful but not moving in any direction with respect to nearby buildings, or left or right according to who may be speaking or coming to speak to him, but instead gazing far away at the misty road where the king would be arriving. The conquistadors must have strode through the New World the way Madame Lundgren moved through her house from sidewalk to garden and basement to mansard, Mr. Pallud was certain of that each time he thought about the day when he would leave: with confidence and admiration, firmly, without deceit or divine heralds or purveyors of death, frightened but with no trace of it on his face, sporting his worn boots and the fine tooled leather breastplate stained by sweat and wine: is it possible that I have crossed the sea, defeated scaly monsters, and traveled back here? Possible that the plants earth sky women rivers mission to propagate the true faith and the gold and the silver cities and storms belong to me? It was then that he decided that yes, he would leave, not only the house and the city but the region country continent and known world: to leave for the Americas, put his clothes and treasures in a giant trunk—and whose could be those other steps, those fickle and almost noiseless steps swallowed up by the rug, dampened by the walls, half-heard on the other side of the windowed door, whose?—to take a ship with a gold and blood-red keel and a sharp cutwater, a ship five hundred feet long, with an irascible captain, goblets of icy wine on the deck, confidantes at dawn, jackets in the afternoon, to debark in a port on the other side of the world, Lima perhaps or Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires, that’s it, buildings of glass streets paved in gold brown women with swinging hips cloying music next to a warm sea. The new guest, the source of the unrecognized steps, they would be hers, the new guest who had been announced by Katja, Kati-Kati, that insolent girl who cleared away the platters and plates with an almost festive curtness, they would be hers, golden steps, no, silken uncertain steps, a lady’s steps. Talkative Kati-Kati, high collar and long sleeves decreed by that Lundgren woman, but if you stretched out your hand, since in the end she was only a servant, in a move slipping down her backside toward the unobtainable, she would act as offended as if she were the Madame. In those distant countries of white cities populated by squat men smoking cigars beneath moustaches and enormous straw hats while they watched their women with baleful eyes, Mr. Pallud could win admiration for his bearing, his still-blond hair, his clear eyes, his fine white hands. He would open a store to display his treasures and set the prices so high no one could buy anything. He would drink sickly sweet coffee and liquors, traverse the streets beneath the sun wearing a raw silk suit leaning on a bamboo cane with a gold haft, and he would marry the heiress of some millionaire rancher who would of course be unfaithful but it would not matter to him. He would have friends. Perhaps he would hold some quasi-official position. He would acquire influence. He would be surrounded by mystery and very young girls who would serve him day and night with smiles full of bright white teeth. He hoped the new guest would be lodged one floor up in the exterior room that had been unoccupied for so long: he would prefer someone who walked lightly like young Gangulf, who moved like a fox, light like someone under suspicion, light like the sparrow hawk that hunted barely touching the ground, like a sloop that veered to catch the final wind, like the vole and the sundew, like venal sin.

Mr. Pallud’s room did not face Scheller Street or the garden; it faced a side patio. Mr. Pallud spoke of “my rooms” but it was only one room with an arcade that formed something like an angle, a corner that authorized him to use the plural although it was in no way another room. There he had placed a table and around it shelves where he exhibited his treasures. He often moved them around, looked for locations more favorable to each of them when he cleaned them; he would caress them, play with them, talk to them; he would invite the other guests to look at them while he recounted where he had obtained each one, how much it had cost, how he kept it shining or soft or how he had restored it, the history he knew or imagined. The rooms, the room cut by the arcade’s jambs and lintel almost in two, had very pale wallpaper, just right to reflect the light that entered through the only opening to the outside, a large window wider than it was tall in the wall opposite the door, which was also off in the corner. This window had a false balcony outside with a stone balustrade against a blind wall below the windowsill held up by small columns, nine of them, on whose curved sides were carved interlaced oak leaves. Mr. Pallud, when he took the room, had asked that the blinds and lace curtains that covered the window be removed, and although that request had seemed strange to Madame Helena, she had agreed, thinking that it was no more than the whim of a bachelor and involved no inconvenience, no risk to leave this window bare since the side patio was closed and no one could see it from a neighboring house. This false balcony and true window were well protected from sight and noise: from coach wheels on the pavement and the shouts of children who played on Scheller Street during good weather. So, without curtains, in silence, and with white walls, the room was well-lit by day and Mr. Pallud could busy himself with his treasures and fill notebooks, now about to finish the fifth one, with sketches, descriptions, and the history of each piece. At night Mr. Pallud would light a lamp on the mantel of the fireplace, pull up a chair with its back to the circle of light, and read until late. He read the seven volumes of Heindesberg about the history of toys from the neolithic to 1850 and the treatise of Des Moines about miniatures. At times he also read a copy of The Life of Paeonius of Menda, published in Nuremberg in 1799, by an unnamed author.