The Vexations Read online

  Diego lives out by the Morón Cemetery, and I’m usually running late by the time I arrive. I never want to cut into the time his family has paid for, but then I also hate to cut into their dinner hour. If we don’t finish on time his mother seems to feel she has to invite me to stay, and Diego flames with embarrassment, his piano teacher sitting at the family table, worlds colliding. Maybe that’s why he keeps his hair so long and falling forward, trying to hide a face that turns red so easily. How he peers through all the hair to see his sheet music and fingers, I don’t know.

  This week he answers the door himself, and even as the lesson winds down there are no cooking smells, no sign of anyone else in the apartment. The front door opens as he plays the final page of a Clementi sonatina. I’ve never seen the man who eventually shuffles in, but he looks too much like Diego and his father to be anyone but family. Standing together they’re a before-and-after photograph, and I wonder if it is comforting or dismaying to know with such accuracy what will happen to one’s face. They all have very round dark eyes, the grandfather’s shadowed under eyebrow hairs long enough to tangle. With a comb and a trim he would look kindly, but perhaps that is not how he wants to look. Perhaps as an old man he clings to any ability to intimidate, wherever it comes from. He is tall, and his jacket fits him as if he were once a broader man.

  “He sounded all right?” he asks me, and Diego looks up, curious for the answer.

  The parents and I don’t often discuss the children’s progress unless there is either an egregious lack thereof or a great leap that necessitates some decision: additional or longer lessons, or a move to another teacher altogether, one who can drive them harder, challenge them more. I give up the ones who might be great and send them on to someone who can help them become whatever they’re meant to become.

  “He played well today,” I say, although in truth he played indifferently, and it was clear that he had practiced only his songs and not his finger exercises. But he practiced, which is more than some, and I will not betray him to a stranger. I reach down and touch the boy’s shoulder and he relaxes a little. I hope it is only his own anxiousness that makes him tense, and that his grandfather is not a taskmaster or an ogre. Diego’s shoulder is narrow and bony, as I suppose most boys’ shoulders are, but he feels so specific and familiar that I squeeze too hard, as if he is mine and I can hold on to this moment, keep him from slipping away and belonging again to his family.

  Mr. Valera sends Diego to the bakery downstairs to break a bill for the lesson fee and tells him to pick up bread for dinner and a treat for dessert while he’s at it. At first I’m annoyed by the delay—my own dinner is waiting at the boardinghouse, and Diego seems the kind of child who will agonize over choosing his treat. But once Diego is gone Mr. Valera clears his throat and I realize he’s done this on purpose.

  “I wanted to let you know that my daughter-in-law isn’t well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m helping out a bit while she’s in the hospital. Not that I’m much of a help. But she’s got no family, and my wife’s passed.”

  “Which hospital?” I don’t know her well enough to visit, but I have it in mind to send a card.

  He pauses, then says, with a guardedness, “Hospicio de las Mercedes.”

  This is a massive building on the Calle Ramón Carrillo, but it still takes me a moment to place it, as it is referred to less often as a hospital than as an asylum, and less often as an asylum than as el loquero, the madhouse.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” I shuffle through what I’ve seen of Diego’s mother. Is there something I should have noticed, a madwoman under my nose? But that is uncharitable. I know nothing of her life. Perhaps she has some very excellent reason for running mad and she can tell me later what it was, and whether it’s better to fall completely to pieces rather than scraping along. Maybe they can put you back together more solidly then, and you don’t have to limp along the rest of your life cracked through. Of course, assuming I ever see Diego’s mother again, we probably won’t talk about any such thing. We’ll nod and she’ll hand over my money and we’ll exit each other’s lives until the next week.

  “If you could go easy on the boy, it would be appreciated. His mother can have visitors on the weekends, and he likes to see her, but then that’s time lost for schoolwork and practice.”

  “Of course. I haven’t meant to be harsh. I didn’t know.”

  “You haven’t been harsh at all, not that Diego’s mentioned. I just wanted to get out in front of the thing.”

  I’m not sure what to say next, and feel relieved when Mr. Valera changes the subject.

  “My wife taught singing,” he says.

  “So you know the business.”

  “I know I didn’t get a hot meal on a weeknight for the first ten years we were married,” he says with a scowl.

  In the privacy of my own imagination I roll my eyes, then ask, brightly, what changed in the eleventh year.

  They finally had the money to hire help, Mr. Valera says, a woman from Extremadura, in Spain, straight off the boat. “All she knew how to do was scorch potatoes, but she trained up all right. We sent her on a cooking course at the French Institute.”

  “I teach there sometimes.”

  “Cookery?”

  “Lord, no,” I say, laughing, although he doesn’t know me well enough to know what’s funny. I tell him that I’m from France, originally, and teach French-language classes. Was his family from here? I ask.

  “Is anybody really from here? My wife and I came over from Spain. Altafulla. On the southern coast, near Tarragona.”

  “Really? I used to know someone from Tarragona. Not here—back in Paris. More than forty years ago now. Any chance you’d know him?”

  “The place wasn’t that small,” he says. “But what was his name?”

  “I—I suppose I don’t know what it would have been in Spain,” I admit, realizing that I don’t. I know only the pseudonyms and pen names that Philippe had settled into by the time I met him. He wore them comfortably, like tailored clothes, without the impression of ungainly false glasses or mustaches.

  Mr. Valera crooks an eyebrow. He thought I was only a piano teacher, and now I’m someone who once consorted with people employing aliases. He seems to be wondering what else about me he doesn’t know.

  I wasn’t by nature superstitious, but it was as if Albertine naming Pierre’s illness had unlocked a Pandora’s box, and alongside my humiliation and fear, out flew the sickness itself. Within a month of her departure he started coughing more. Within another he stopped arguing about the horses or haranguing the bicycle company. He pottered in the library and even in the little garden workshop, with its bones and branches and pinned insects. He woke us both coughing every night, and the dark circles under his eyes grew darker. He insisted on moving me to a different room—so that I could get enough sleep for the baby to develop healthily, he claimed. He would say nothing of contagion. He was merely under the weather, he insisted. Just a bit under the weather.

  His parents urged him to see a doctor.

  “Who?” he said. “The old fart who’s been stringing me along? Useless.”

  It was obvious to everyone that it was a relapse, but this time there was no hospital to blame it on, no city air. We were spooked: if it had followed him here, it could follow him anywhere. But of course it hadn’t followed him at all. He’d brought it with him to Bellenau, tucked inside, the way I’d brought our baby. It had been a guest at our wedding, a guest at Fortin’s house, a guest at the fireworks. The consumption had already chewed up his lungs, and when its jaws started again to work, his body offered little resistance. There had probably been more damage than they realized before his remission in Deauville, the doctors said, once he finally agreed to see some. Pierre had been right about them being useless. There was little to be done, they said. He’d get better or he wouldn’t, and if he got better it would probably be only a matter of time before he got
worse again.

  I tried not to be angry with Pierre, either for being ill, which was not his fault, or for not having warned me, which was. Knowing wouldn’t have changed anything, I told myself. I wouldn’t have refused him. Knowing might have put the same dark veil over him that he had tried to fling over Bellenau, and wasn’t it better to have had him as a prince, whisking me off to a happily-ever-after? Yet if I had known, I argued with myself, perhaps I could have better prepared myself.

  But there was no preparing for it, not really. Not once Pierre stopped being simply ill and began actively to die. There is no describing it, no metaphor to take refuge in. Picture the garden destroyed, silted up and broken as a man’s dissolving lungs. That won’t do it. Nor will any music you can listen to capture it. I nursed him until Madeleine grew worried about the strain on the baby and hired a nurse, who kept me at a distance. That was no better. I made myself a maternity apron and washed my husband’s blood out of it.

  The bicycle finally arrived. I remember that. No one said anything to him, but three days later, out of nowhere, he asked after it.

  “Yes,” the nurse said, surprised. “It came.”

  “No,” I said. “She’s mistaken.”

  I didn’t want him asking to ride it and having to be refused, nor did I want to watch him try to lurch out of bed and discover for himself that he couldn’t. I didn’t know whether he understood what was happening to him, and I didn’t know which would be better, that he understand or that he not. There were so many conversations we should have had, and didn’t, because neither of us wanted to name what was happening. Practical words and grand ones, legal wills or our child’s future: we replaced them all with silence, with the great unspoken lie that Pierre would somehow recover.

  The bargains I offered to God were ugly and desperate: my father’s life and Eugénie’s, Estelle’s and Fortin’s. I offered up Eric, said I wished I’d never tended him, never helped him, in whatever small way I had, to turn around on the road Pierre was now traveling. I even offered up Conrad’s life, as if it were mine to offer, and not because I thought Pierre was more deserving but because of how lonely I’d been before him, a kind of loneliness I didn’t know how to survive again. The only life I didn’t offer was my own, which means I also offered the baby. I didn’t ask that Pierre be spared long enough to meet his child. It was unthinkable that he wouldn’t, that his life could end before the baby’s began.

  But unthinkable to whom? Only to me. Not to God, who took Pierre in my seventh month of pregnancy, and whom I still have not entirely forgiven. I understand that that is my failing and not His, but then perhaps He should have made my heart larger, or my faith stronger, or simply not snatched back every goddamned thing He ever gave me.

  After Diego’s lesson, not feeling like making conversation in the boardinghouse dining room, I stopped at the market and took an antisocial little dinner upstairs. I ate two bites and then looked down at the scratched white plate and the hardboiled egg and tinned tuna and bread, and was enraged. It was awful and pathetic and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I could jump out the window, but was it high enough? Not quite, not enough to be sure, I’d have to find somewhere taller and I didn’t want it that badly. I didn’t want it at all, not really. I carried my dinner to the window that overlooked the alley. I opened the sash and stuck my head out, breathed deep. I carefully dropped the quartered egg out the window, piece by piece, and watched the bits disappear in the darkness, only to re-emerge in the orange glow of the sodium streetlights and plop onto the pavement. I was already feeling calmer, but not enough to eat, so I sent the bread and tuna out the window too. Rats would be happy enough to dispose of the evidence.

  I hurried to brush my teeth and put on my nightgown while I still felt empty and peaceful. I wanted to go to sleep before my mind could start skipping again like a bad phonograph disk.

  The next morning I awoke out of a dream that vanished immediately but ambushed me later in the day as I stood on the bus, headed to the first of that day’s lessons. The top handrail was too high for me to grip, and I lurched back and forth as we rounded corners, remembering that Diego’s mother had been there outlined by a window frame. In real life I could barely remember what she looked like, but in the dream I knew it was her. I was standing far beneath her, in an orange pool of light from a street lamp. She was looking down at me, and I was supposed to tell her not to do it.

  “Go ahead,” I said, “jump,” and she did.

  “We never have to do that again,” I told my son. It was the first thing I said to him after he was born.

  “True enough,” the midwife said. “We’re only ever born the once.”

  But I think she was wrong. Humans are born over and over, as inconstant as caterpillars. A ferry can be a cocoon, a garden an egg. A train car a chrysalis, with a woman emerging from it a wet-winged butterfly.

  The second thing I said to the baby was “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” the midwife asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, hazy with exhaustion and—not quite pain anymore, by that point, but perhaps shock that there had been so much pain and I had somehow endured it. How had my mother ever steeled herself to do this more than once? “That his father isn’t here, I suppose.”

  “That’s hardly your fault. It’s just a thing that’s happened to you,” she said, with the practicality of her profession. “And you’ll survive it. You both will.”

  The baby needed so much, so constantly, that survival became the extent of my ambitions. I looked for his father in every inch, every crease, every expression. But for weeks there were few expressions: even at his most genial, the baby exuded a surly distrust of the world and everything in it. Most of the time he was a crumple-faced meteor of outrage, shrieking his way finally into fits of blank, unconscious sleep. He was not his father’s gentlemanly son. He screamed like he was no one’s son, like he was a changeling made of furious noise.

  Madeleine was thrilled with him. “After what you’ve been through,” she said. “That he turned out healthy. Listen to that racket.” She said I’d love him better if I’d consent to receive a little help, at least a night nurse to assist with the wakings.

  But I already loved him so much it terrified me. He was mine, and there were so few things I’d ever been able to say that about. I wanted to be his everything, the hands that held him when he woke, day or night.

  “You’d like him better, if you’d accept help,” she amended. “I know you love him.”

  Becoming a mother had peeled the scabs off my childhood abandonment, and in the hours of darkness, with the baby nursing constantly and sleeping too fitfully in my arms to allow me any sleep myself, I’d begun writing letters. Stupid, angry letters, to people both living and dead, to God, once to the Atlantic Ocean, for reasons that made no sense to me as soon as the sun was up. My father’s was the only one I had the nerve to send. I thought there was nothing else he could do to hurt me.

  There had been no question that I would name the baby Pierre, as there wouldn’t have been even if Pierre was alive, but after he was christened I found that I couldn’t say the name aloud, neither about nor to him. “The baby,” I called him, to anyone else. To his face I said only “you.”

  His screaming cleared out a train compartment on the way to the district courthouse. There had to be a hearing, before a justice of the peace, so that I might be assigned guardianship of my own child. If Pierre had survived and I had died in childbirth, the baby would have been his without question. But without Pierre the law would not call the baby mine until the law had approved it. This meant convening a Family Council, composed of the child’s nearest of kin on both sides. On Pierre’s side stood his parents plus Cannu, given that women other than mothers and grandmothers were ineligible. On the other stood me, Fortin (Estelle had accompanied him from Le Havre but couldn’t enter the chamber), and Eric, who had shown up in place of the man who was supposed to be there, Alfred. “He said he didn’t want
to upset you further,” Eric said. “After the letter you sent. I haven’t read it. But he said he thought he’d do more harm than good by coming.”

  “He’s such a coward,” I said.

  Eric shrugged, unwilling or unable to disagree.

  The hearing, which would end in a vote, was short but humiliating, consisting of questions the justice put to the Council members: was there any reason to suppose that Pierre was not the natural father of the child? Or that my behavior or morality in any other way disqualified me from motherhood? Could I be trusted to assume both physical guardianship and conservatorship of the child’s financial assets? Since the child had no assets, the latter was a simple matter. The grandson of a rich man is still penniless as long as the rich man holds possession of the entire estate. Considering our mutual lack of assets, the justice inquired, could the mother provide the child with the necessities of life?

  “She can return to Le Havre,” Fortin said. “She and the baby will always have a home there.”

  “That’s…terribly kind,” Madeleine said, “but we assumed she would stay at Bellenau. It’s Pierre’s baby.”

  “It’s Louise’s baby as well,” Fortin said, and it was so strange to hear my name aloud. Who was this person who’d gone and married a dying man and had a baby she couldn’t care for? I had nothing: no income and no home and no employable skills. The fact that I had family on both sides brandishing their charity was my only recommendation. In which case why not just give the baby to them, to Madeleine or Fortin, to someone who could care for him better? For a moment I thought of my father not with anger but recognition. Then the baby shifted his weight in my arms, fought a small fist free of the blanket, and I wrapped my arms around him tighter.