To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
—Walter Pater
And then, and with zero fuss, for the first time in a long, long time, there was just one. Just one, that is, apart from the latest passenger, Johan’s new traveling companion and nurse-in-waiting, the girl in the tatty blue dress. Catalina Boadicea Rodríguez. When Johan returned to the car, Catalina was sitting on it. She seemed genuinely sad when she heard that Cicero had gone to war. Johan was delighted to have the company and, after the previous evening’s talk with Blair, fully aware that they both had to leave Spain, and soon. He was also now responsible for the welfare of another human being, which he had not been since Cicero had been a young (and quite sick) boy.
Johan drove Catalina east into France on the high, winding, treacherous roads of the Pyrenees. Their route then hugged the road along the Mediterranean through Marseilles until they reached the small coastal village of La Napoule, outside Cannes. There they took refuge in a wonderful old château on the waterfront, the young and roguish owner of which had fallen for Catalina as they took coffee in the town square. Catalina never encouraged their host, le Comte de Benoît-Benoît, nor did she respond to his frequent and often desperate advances. She suspected that she was in love with Cicero, and as the date of their supposed rendezvous approached, she confirmed this to herself many times a day. She kept her own counsel for almost three years, but without an outlet, she later confessed, this caused feelings toward him to magnify in a violently romantic Spanish way.
It was here in the crumbling majesty of the castle on the waterfront where Blanche began to write again, the latest a story of distant love which had as its pivot a young fool’s moment in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, followed by a weak man fleeing, a horrific civil war in Spain, a chance meeting with Dorothy Parker, and a secret begged from two readers in particular.
It explored the concept of a Jesus not related to any god, his being just a really good bloke. Its every detail, arc, and character was so close to the truth of Johan’s adult life that Dorothy would be sure to recognize it as his. Johan had figured out a way of using the great and mighty Dorothy to accomplish a task that he really ought to face himself: to communicate with Lorelei.
Dorothy may have been swifter than he on those Spanish steps that night, and was likely a consistently vicious adversary, but his maneuver now reminded him of chess moves once made against him. The difference this time was that it was he, Johan Thoms, who was playing black, he who was closing in on an unlikely victory, he who was mouthing the single, doom-laden syllable, “Check!”
If Lorelei then wished to reveal Blanche’s identity to the world and to tell of the man guilty of starting the Great War, then so be it.
But when Blanche looked up from her typewriter in the château, the swishing, cerulean Mediterranean just beyond through the stone arches, she saw in the ancient mirror in front of her a man, no longer a boy, called Johan Thoms. It was through Blanche, not Dorothy, that Johan, finally, would speak to Lorelei. This was not a game. Thereafter he would write to Lorelei, albeit from a great distance, through the scribblings of Miss Blanche de la Peña.
Before long, her latest work was the subject of idle chatter from Bloomsbury dinner parties to tutorials in dusty college lecture halls and under preternatural tulip trees within earshot of a Cambridge punt. It was to prompt this from Blanche’s friend Archibald DeWitt-Vultura the Manchester Guardian:
ARCHIBALD’S FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE CHRIST AND BUDDHA; BLANCHE AND A GRIM REAPER
My Darling-est Blanche!
Where does one start? You illuminate old Manchester with more fire and light than Mr. Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever could! Hemingway, Parker, Orwell in the same room as a blasted grim reaper. Though perhaps not the grimmest of reapers, this chap seems intent on inducing his own personal Apocalypse, a mere microcosm of the larger version, as he might say. And all of this in the smoky-alleyed, trinket-rattling Sarajevo and my luscious, bubbling España, too! Were it that You were there also, My Most Obsidian of Angels!
I despise dream chapters; however, the passages where Christ and Buddha become supremely pie-eyed on bourbon should be read aloud in every school at the start of every term. How astonishing this planet would swiftly become if we all followed the hungover, bleary-eyed, crusty-tongued Buddha’s example of politely refusing his new pal’s immediate miracle cure. Yes, Christian Atheism is the finest of approaches and the most marvelous of concepts. My immaculate love for you is matched only by my firing desire to think of these blasted revelations before you do.
Yes to Christ. No to god.
I am away to purchase the lilac-est of paints to daub this nabbed slogan for a new world around this gray, gray citadel; a collection of dwellings lit up by you. And I shall grin and grin and grin as I do it, my Blanche, hoping that I shall meet you as you take in the gentle delights of your midafternoon flâneuseries.
Miss de la Peña, stop not what you do, we beg! However, I simply must stop before I fawn myself via the most wondrous hyperbole to a mere sublimate. Yes, a cheering, guffawing, and jackknifed-from-joy sublimate, for you are unreasonably good. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
* * *
Cap d’Antibes, August 24, 1937
My dearest J.,
You’re alive! You’re alive! You’re alive! You made me cry with happiness today, you great cad! I spoke with Dorothy. Oh my, what the hell did you say to upset her? Anyway, I hope you leave Spain straightaway, my darling. She suggested you might be doing just that. Oh, let me see your lovely cowardice up close, Johan! Please! I am on the Cap d’Antibes at her place. I await you with the excitement of a schoolgirl. I spoke to Carl, and he is a happy man today. It is still not too late, my love.
I promise that we will find each other soon, for I sense we are in France together right now.
Yours, with a joyous and trembling hand,
Lorelei xxx
Ernest looked at Johan, who diverted his eyes.
“I didn’t see this for almost a decade. Who knows what I would have done at the time? That France was about to fall might just have been the excuse I had needed not to go. And that, too, was my fault.”