Page 77 - Vol V. #8

“Parisians keep their air of liberty, even if equality and fraternity
may be sadly lacking.”
When she moved in, L insisted that N should go. It was the right time. N had met an American impre- sario who was dying to show her New York, and I had sensed for a while that it was long past time for her to be among her own kind, the sighted,
“She was dull, and untalented,” L began.
One November morning J sat on the balcony smoking with us, and described her people down in the park in the fog, wading into the pond and breaking the swans’ necks and bagging them to take them home to eat.
“Oh.” Despite L’s painted assertion of paternity, and the havoc it had wreaked upon us all, I’d still fallen to the odd suspicion that the child could have been mine, but this news confirmed that she wasn’t. “But... what happened to her?”
I then recalled how one day soon after N’s arrival we had been in the park, and N had explained the splashing commotion I could hear: two black swans were mating with vigour, which had made me harry N back upstairs so that we too could mate. The memory silenced me.
Even as an unacknowledged child of privilege, L’s child had been allowed to go anywhere she wanted to. This included the animal cages at the palace zoo where, one day, a gibbon bit her. The wound festered, and she died, closely followed, probably, by the monkey keeper and the nanny.
“Swans mate for life.” L was outraged.
“Were you sad?” I wondered.
“Well,” I told her, “if a swan dies, its partner can always get another one. I mean, they all look the
“She was my child,” L snapped. “Of course I was sad. People close to you don’t have to be perfect for you to miss them. You’re not perfect. I missed you.”
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the young; I had been feeling uncomfortably like a jailer. She was replaced by a rotund Romany woman called J.
country was in the audience, a real lady in black lace and pearls. But then any roaming Romanov or hapless Habsburg with dumpling skin and a scratchy voice was said to be from my country. When the musty aristocrat was shown into my dressing room, she was revealed as no lady, but celebrity émigré artist LM.
“The blind leading the blind,” L became fond of saying, “led in front by the drab.”
The first time L called on me, N left me to remind L of the evening her crazy lover ordered the blinding of the artist, the conductor, and the orchestra, N’s unfortunate classmates. It wasn’t long before L was contrite, wailing, “I spent my life loving monstrous men.” I brought this par- ticular drama to a close by asking about L’s child. What had become of her?
But I liked the straightforwardness and sense that J brought to our lives. One night, when L was sleeping off what she claimed was a particularly Parisian strain of depression—I was sure all the bottles of plonk didn’t help—J told me about the cheerful vagabondage of her people in France, how they made their dark children and their bright pots and cloth flowers and played a gothic kind of jazz on guitars. I told her about the Gyp- sies I had once met, and their stories and their food and their fire, and about their red threads in the hedges, and she dismissed them thus: “Cop- persmiths, they never laugh.” And I couldn’t recall any of them laughing. But who had anything to laugh about in those times, and in that country of mine, except me, clutching my contraband music?
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