The Dream of Scipio Read online

  Her opinion contradicted those of so many others, but then she would not be affected by his resignation; all the librarians and journalists and newspaper owners and academics and teachers would be. He thought about it some more, anguishing in his indecision. And as he writhed, he came in late, if at all; memoranda and orders lay on his desk for weeks before anything was done with them, and then any work was bungled and performed incompetently. He read more, found himself obsessed with the minutiae of the life of Olivier de Noyen, to the exclusion of all else. His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in France in that period; laziness became political.

  More and more, he left Avignon altogether and went east to Julia, traveling however he could. Sometimes there were buses, sometimes he managed to get a ride with a farmer on a horse and cart; most of the time he rode on his bicycle, the tires now long worn away and replaced with cloth, which he bound tightly to the rim of the wheels with wire. Once there, he would stay often for ten days at a time, finding excuse after excuse not to leave. When he did return to Avignon, he hoped to find he had been dismissed in his absence; no such good fortune ever awaited him.

  When he came, he brought gifts for her, all sorts of things he would never have considered before the war. He spent time going around book-stalls finding old books with blank end pages that she could use for her printing, cutting them out in a way that previously would have appalled him. He knew every pharmacist in the city who would set aside the acid she needed for biting her plates. Ironmongers and scrap merchants received constant visits also, and would collect plates of copper for him, beating them flat into a usable shape once more. Once he discovered some oranges, and bore them to her in triumph; they ate them together on the flat grass outside the chapel door, getting themselves sticky as the juice ran down their faces and clothes. The wasps came, and Julia ran away screaming in fright; Julien ran after her, pounding at them with his hat to drive them away before they both scuttled into the chapel and shut the door, sitting in the darkness and laughing themselves silly.

  Both of them were happy in a way neither had ever imagined. Often they scarcely even talked for days on end, but were merely in each other’s company. She did her work, outside when possible, inside if not, and he did likewise. They would take such food as they could find with them up to the chapel and spend the day there, often sleeping there at night, waking up at dawn and eating a crust of bread together before washing each other down with the water Julien brought up from the river in an old metal bucket. Or she would go on her own and Julien would busy himself in the garden. He grew potatoes and tomatoes; there was an olive tree and a fig tree, and he carefully tended four tobacco plants, whose leaves he would pluck and press and dry and shred. They smoked the result with a couple of old clay pipes when cigarettes were unobtainable.

  Julia returned to herself, and to her work, in his company and with the stimulus of the chapel. She slept, for the first time in two years, she said, and slept so hard Julien could scarcely wake her in the morning. Then she would bustle about making tisane, for there was no coffee, and went to see if the hen she’d acquired had laid any eggs. Generally it hadn’t, but occasionally she would return from the henhouse she’d built, bearing the egg with the most immense pride in the bird’s achievement. And she would boil Julien the egg, and serve it with all the ceremony of Escoffier himself, concocting one of his fragrant masterpieces in an age now long forgotten.

  They were playacting, they knew, and the realization made it the more precious. They were living out the pages of a child’s book, pursuing the life of bucolic simplicity to fend off the ever grimmer news that came through from the outside; the shortages, the arrests, the Allied landings, the bombings, and the murders that became daily events. There was nothing they could do about it except survive, and celebrate their survival and the love that grew stronger with every glance and every shared moment.

  It was Julia who pointed out, when she read some of the late poetry of Olivier de Noyen, tossed onto the floor as Julien worked, that whomever he might have loved, this “woman of darkness, wisdom touching the light” (to quote one of his latest poems) surely could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus, at least not if her supposed portrait was truly her.

  “Look,” she said impatiently one evening, brushing her hair out of her eyes in the way Julien had first noticed on his Mediterranean cruise, and which he had loved ever since. A competent, businesslike gesture of someone whose profession was seeing, done with a slight toss of the head and which always left her face and neck and hair arranged in a perfect harmony. “Look at the damned woman.”

  Julien had finished his article for perhaps the fourth time, but was still not pleased with it. It had lain now for several months on his desk, and every time he had gone back to it, he had a feeling of impatience welling up inside him; he could not settle down and work on it again. It was true; everything he said about the poet was right. About the betrayal of Ceccani, the casting off of all accepted obligations. Yet he knew he did not have the whole picture, for although he could reinterpret some of the poems, others were stubbornly intransigent. They were love poems, and however much he might reconsider Olivier as a man, as a poet he could not persuade himself that his last words were anything but remarkable.

  He mentioned this and she read both the poems—struggling through in the Provençal—and listened to his argument. Then she looked at the portrait of Isabelle reproduced in a guide to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon. It came from a book of hours, and the attribution was venerable enough to be believable; Pisano had given it to her. Then she stated the obvious.

  “I’m a mere painter,” she said. “But were I a poet, I would never dream of describing someone with fair hair as a woman of darkness, whatever I might mean. It would be lazy, not to say incompetent. I think I would make myself work a little harder to make the metaphor match the physical appearance.”

  Julien grunted, then chewed his lip. “Well,” he said reluctantly. “You’re right, I suppose.”

  “Of course I’m right,” she replied cheerfully. “Sorry.”

  Afterward, he let the remarks brew on their own in his mind. Of course she was right; of course this woman of darkness could not have had fair hair. Could not have been Isabelle de Fréjus. But the fact remained that Olivier had loved someone. Did it matter whom he had loved?

  His mind turned the question upside down and presented him with a different solution many months later. From the notion of Wisdom he thought of Sophia, then of the chapel that Olivier had written about. This came to him in Avignon, and the next time he visited—in winter this time, when even Julia had stopped going up the hill because of the lack of light and warmth—he asked her about how the painter had portrayed Saint Sophia. She rummaged in the large folder she had made to protect her precious paper.

  “I did some watercolors,” she said, handing one over. “They’re not so good. But she does have dark hair.”

  “And these?” he asked, picking up a pile of papers wrapped up in the same bundle.

  “Ah, well,” she said, settling down on her haunches, an air of anticipation, pleasure, about her.

  So Julien looked, and instantly understood the self-satisfaction in her tone. He looked for a long time, picking up one, then the next, then the next. Eventually he looked up. “Congratulations.”

  It was deserved. She had finally overcome the barriers that he had so harshly pointed out to her some ten years before and attained a simplicity and originality that was breathtaking. Pisano had set her free; Julien never considered that he might have had a hand in it as well. She had taken his work and allowed herself to range over it; sketching parts of it time and again, renewing and revisiting, bending and breaking, stripping the image down and building it back up again. She gave the faces depth, then flattened them to abstraction, reduced them to a mere line, stressing first one feature then another, until she came to her goal, which was an almost perfectly harmonious blending of herself with his pictures. S
he now neither broke with the past nor imitated it; rather she grew out of it, extended it in unimagined directions.

  She was leaning back against a chair by the fire and lit a cigarette; it was an important moment for her, she had three to get to the end of the month. “What do you think?” Still a little anxious, wanting compliments, but sure of getting them.

  “These I would buy. Alas, now I don’t have any money. You just don’t have any luck, do you?”

  She laughed. “I was going to give them to you anyway. They’re my wedding present to you.”

  She picked up a pencil, and inscribed each one. “To Julien, with love from Lady Wisdom. January 1943.” And she signed it with her own name. Next time he went back to Avignon, to his other life, he took them with him; he could not be without them.

  And Julia begins with his painting, releasing what has been locked up in it for nearly six centuries. When she finished—the hour late and the light long since faded—she knew that she had found something she had been looking for for years.

  Just as she had prodded Julien, so he had pushed her. He had made the connection between the Sophia of the Dream and the saint of the chapel, hinted they were one and the same, or at least derived from a common model. So she had used this; the blind man is not the recipient of a Christian miracle; rather he comes to knowledge; Sophia is not some evangelical saint but the vessel conveying that wisdom.

  It was Marcel, of all people, who pointed out the obvious. Julien hung them in his apartment, removing some prints then on the wall to reuse the frames. Marcel saw them on one of his visits, rare now but all the more valuable to him for that, a reminder of the normality of friendship that Julien, despite everything, was still able to offer. Julien found his company ever more uncomfortable, but his need was so obvious he could not deny him.

  On this occasion, Marcel looked at one of the pictures carefully, he who had no serious interest in painting beyond a conventional contempt for the modern.

  “If you are going to have your portrait done, you really should get someone who can paint, you know,” he said with a smirk. “I can tell it’s you. But many people would miss it entirely. And don’t think I don’t recognize the woman, either. She left, didn’t she? She did go?”

  Julien nodded, cautiously.

  “Good. If she’d stayed here she’d be in danger. If she was found, they’d take her. You do know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded again.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m hearing bad things. Very bad things.”

  Julien didn’t ask him to elaborate. Marcel turned back to the pictures and grimaced. Then, abruptly, he picked up his hat and left.

  Julien mentioned his comments about the pictures the next time he saw her. Julia turned deathly pale.

  It was a day’s ride, and he arrived in the evening and went straight to Gersonides’s house. This was a kindness, for he knew that no one had yet told Rebecca that her master was safe and well, and he knew also that she would be frantic with worry lest he had come to some harm. So he knocked just as the rain, which had been falling in a light drizzle for the past hour, turned into a downpour, and stood there with water dripping from his hat and cloak and face as she opened the thick wooden door.

  She thought he had come with bad news; the look on his face, made pale by the journey and the cold, suggested so, and she cried out with alarm to see the apparition on the doorstep.

  “Oh, no,” she cried, holding her hands to her face. “Oh, no.”

  Her grief was so real, and so wrong, that Olivier felt a similar hurt at having caused it, and stepped into the door and embraced her to give reassurance.

  “No, no,” he said softly, stroking her cheek, “you must not be afraid. I have not come to upset you. He is perfectly well. And is perfectly free.”

  These words, designed to calm her, seemed to have the opposite effect. Rebecca sank to her knees, sobbing loudly and with the tears rolling down her cheeks. Olivier let her go and suddenly became aware that the water dripping off his cloak was making her almost as wet as he was; also that a large puddle of water was forming on the floor and that the winds blowing through the door were about to blow out the candle. So he shut the door quickly then knelt down beside her.

  “He has been commissioned by His Holiness to search for the cause of the plague,” he said. “And I may say will be well rewarded for his assistance. He has agreed to help, and is staying in a fine apartment in the palace. He needs his papers, and he needs you. So I have come to get both. He sends his greetings. And that is quite all.”

  He put his hand under her chin and lifted it toward him, and when he saw her disheveled, tear-stained face, his heart melted in a way he had never dreamed possible. He had read the poetry and heard the songs since his youth. For more than two years he had willed his love into being, fixing on the abstraction he had glimpsed in the street and determining that he would feel the truth behind these songs. Then when it was in his grasp he had recoiled from it, wished it away and almost come to hate the reality that spoiled the simplicity of his vision. He had believed he was ill, gripped by a sickness as virulent as the plague, and he ardently desired a cure. And when he looked into her face that rainy night, he gave way, and wished to be sick forever.

  When he touched her cheek he was at last rid of all artifice. He did not know whether she was beautiful or not, although some thought her so, a robust, rugged beauty that was a great distance from the soft, slightly pampered attractions of a woman like Isabelle de Fréjus. Her skin was too dark, her frame too strong, her hair too thick, her features too pronounced for her to excite any other poet than Olivier. But he knew at that moment that all the poems he had written had been for this woman, not for some ideal, and that he had loved her since before he was born, and would love her long after he had died.

  Even though he had been brought up with the feelings of the troubadours, Olivier’s reactions went far beyond any of the extreme but stylized emotions sanctioned in their songs, and the poem he wrote a few days later, just before the catastrophe struck him, was so excessive that even after the passage of centuries it has the ability to cause shock or, in the less sensitive, derision. But it was a real song, stripped of all mannerism and conceit, pouring out, however ineptly and inaccurately, something of what was within him.

  As for Rebecca, she, too, felt winded by the intensity of his gaze and the surfeit of emotions that he caused deep within her. The way he dissipated her anxiety, the gentleness of his touch, and the reassurance of his presence stirred her in a fashion that was as irresistible as it was unwelcome. She had not spent much of her youth listening to songs of love and the forgiveness that awaits those who follow love’s dictates. Rather, her sense of obligation and fear had deep roots and could not be torn out so easily.

  She pulled back—gently, though, and with no anger, encouraging him even as she snapped the strong link that so briefly bound them together.

  “You are welcome, for your kindness and your news,” she said, and she could not disguise the tremor in her voice, nor its cause. “My thanks. Please sit by the fire and dry yourself.”

  “It is good of you to think of my comfort.”

  “You are dripping on my floor.”

  They looked at each other once more, and then both began to laugh without restraint. Every few moments one tried to stop, then looked at the other and erupted again. Olivier knew that he should take her in his arms then and there, and she knew he should do so, but the rules of life prevented him. The fact that he did not, that there was an absence where there should have been movement, made the stillness even more potent, lasting until both, finally, managed to wipe their eyes and stop.

  Both knew full well what would happen sooner or later; the inevitable, fate, God’s will—none of these can be denied or avoided or even postponed for long. But Rebecca tried her best, becoming the guardian of household purity in her master’s honor even though he was absent. But the times were as extreme as their emotions, otherwise she woul
d not have dreamed of allowing him to stay; would not have allowed him to eat with her, and would not have allowed him to help collect her master’s papers—not that he was much help as he could not read the writing on most of them. Olivier noted that she, too, had trouble; indeed that she could barely read.

  “I have heard it said that Jewish women are often well taught,” he mentioned.

  She hesitated for a moment and looked at him carefully. “Indeed,” she said. “Some are. But all the education in the world would not help with handwriting like this.”

  She put down the papers. “I cannot do this now,” she said, “not while I cannot see properly.” They had a few good wax candles in the house, jealously saved for high days, and she had recklessly gotten two from the kitchen and lit them, only to find that the yellow sputtering light they gave off was little better than darkness. Gersonides’s handwriting was as illegible in Greek and Latin as it was in Hebrew, so bad, indeed, that only he could even tell which alphabet his terrible scrawl was using. To make out in the darkness which manuscript was which was almost impossible.

  “Come and sit by the fire,” she said. “I will get some food while you warm yourself, and then you can tell me news.”

  “I thought you did not encourage Christians to eat in your houses? Or am I wrong?”

  “We will not eat in yours, because your food is unclean. You may eat as much of ours as you wish. It is just that we do not like Christians in our houses. In fact, we do not like Christians, on the whole. But you may sit down. Unless you are uncomfortable being in a Jew’s house.”

  “I am not at all uncomfortable,” he said. “The fire is as warm as a Christian fire, the roof as strong, and the food will be welcome whether it is clean or unclean. I am merely confused, that is all. You are serving me with food, even though it is Friday and darkness has fallen.”

  “Rules can be broken under necessity.”