Salamander Read online

  Every year, the same performance.

  He burned with the feverish desire to grasp time, hold it and cage it, so that he might find out what was left in its absence. He wanted not so much to escape his enemy as to subdue it. He became obsessed with numbers, and during Mass would keep a running tally of coughs and sneezes, or do sums with the rows of pearl buttons on his coat, in the hope that even such exercises in futility would use up a little more of that hated all-pervading element.

  On that particular Sunday, he was attempting to count slowly enough that one tally of all the buttons from collar to skirts and back would last from the opening hymn to at least the profession of faith. But he swiftly tired of this old ritual and was left with things as they were, with himself as he was, stiff and itchy in his starched jabot, trying to ignore his older brother’s finger jabbing him mercilessly in the ribs under cover of his folded arms. Far from a state of bliss.

  All at once he felt the dim approach of something, a presence, first as the faintest trembling in the air. Then the wooden pew beneath him began to vibrate, like the grinding of the river ice as it broke up in the spring. He glanced furtively at his brother and sisters, his parents, the other members of the congregation. No one seemed to have noticed it. No one else but him even seemed to be breathing.

  And then, descending towards him through the clouds of incense came a dark sphere, revolving and growing larger by the moment, the deep vibrato of its ponderous spin growing louder, pressing like a physical force against his eyes, drumming through his bones, roaring in his blood.

  His adversary.

  – Each instant, the Abbé said, gazing out across the wintry valley, and every insignificant thing it contained, like the counting of those buttons on my coat, all my moments of weakness and humiliation, my every movement and eyeblink and thought, every twitch and tremor and cough of each and every other soul in that church, in the colony, in the world, not only flowing into the next moment and the next incarnation of itself, but solidifying. Each instant, each button and jab and cough and thought accreting into this grey impenetrable mass. This was the universe, and the universe was only this, an iron prison I was helping to build with every breath. This was time.

  The Abbé smiled.

  – You look pale, Mr. Flood.

  – For a child to see, or even to imagine, such a thing …

  – Well, I assure you its terrors have faded somewhat in the intervening years. I’ve come to see it as a sign, if you will, that with such powers of fancy I was destined to be an author. But at the time, yes, it did make quite an impression.

  It was then that he suffered his first bout of the recurring apoplexy that was to leave him unfit for any career but the church. A thunderclap to the brain that pitched him forward, the crown of his head colliding with the back of the pew in front of him. His body lying rigid, his mind aware of everything that was happening but unable to will a limb, a muscle, an eyelash to move, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of the church and into the indifferent gaze of an archangel, until he was at last lifted and carried out by his red-faced and puffing father, his weeping mother dabbing at his bleeding head with a handkerchief, his older brother, Michel, and his sisters trailing after, their eyes fixed on him in mingled fear and suspicion.

  He was brought home and installed on the sofa. The doctor, who had followed the family from church, knelt to examine him, lifted his hand by the wrist and let it drop, poked the soles of his feet with a penknife, waved a lit taper in front of his unblinking eyes. When at last he ushered Ezequiel’s parents out for a whispered consultation in the next room, his brother suddenly appeared and stood over him, his face as expressionless as the stone archangel’s. Finally Michel leaned forward, placed a hand over Ezequiel’s mouth and stuck two fingers up his nostrils.

  His body began to scream silently for air. He closed his eyes, unable to bear Michel’s impassive gaze, then opened them again when panic overpowered him. Finally, as his vision clouded over and he felt himself sinking into black flames, the hands went away. His lungs shrieked, flooding with air.

  That evening, Ezequiel defied the doctor’s sombre prognostications, got up off the sofa as if nothing unusual had taken place, and joined his astounded family at the supper table where they had been eating their soup in morose silence. Michel, eager to forestall any mention of his little prank, led everyone in a prayer of thanksgiving for his brother’s recovery. It did not occur to Ezequiel to turn informer. Michel, like time itself, was a tribulation as inevitable and pointless to protest against as an illness or lessons in Latin.

  And there was of course his secret refuge: the library. His father used the room only on those rare occasions when he wished to impress an important visitor from France. Most days the room remained locked up, and, ever since Ezequiel could remember, forbidden to the children. His brother’s relentless persecution, however, had led him to steal the key from the steward’s cupboard and shut himself up from time to time in the library, where one day he discovered the blank books.

  Since all books were meant to be read, he assumed that these called for a particular kind of reading, one which he hadn’t yet been taught. Perhaps these books, and not the tall glass cabinet filled with frosted decanters of red and black liquor, were the reason the room was forbidden. And so he read the books, one at a time, not starting a new one until he had worked his way through every page of the one before, each volume a compact Canada of perfect snow-white pages. He would touch the cool, creamy surface of the paper with his fingertips, his cheek, his lips. From the marbled endpapers rose the faintly intoxicating, hermetic smell of binding paste.

  When he turned the pages they rattled softly, like far-off thunder.

  The vision of time he had glimpsed that day in church still haunted his sleepless nights, but now he had something, a bulwark of books to seal himself in against it. Here and there among his treasures he found a printed volume. The sight of its neat blocks of text was distressing, as if a thorny hedge of words lay between him and the other book, the one he truly wished to read. The only ordinary printed book he treasured was his father’s atlas of the world, in which the names of fabled places like London and Paris were neatly printed alongside tiny fairy-tale countries of blue and pink and green. Perhaps in one of those true places he might be something more than a figment of time.

  When he was twelve, his parents died at sea, while making a crossing to France, and Michel was now officially the master of his brother’s destiny that he has always considered himself to be. By then Ezequiel had come to understand that the blank books were not meant to be read, that they were in fact only part of the façade of gentility that was his father’s life. Still, having read through more than half of them by this time, and looking forward to making his way through those that remained, he was crushed when Michel sold off the entire library, to finance the building of a gaming salon.

  – For six years, the Abbé said, I endured the prison that my house, my city, had become under my brother’s merciless and arbitrary dominion. Michel was now the lord of time. Of the cycles of the year, the epicycles of the months, the stations of the week. Every hour of my day and every minute of every hour circumscribed and entered in advance in his ledger. Every moment of idleness, unless it were his own at the gambling table or the brothel, ruthlessly punished. Finally, at the age of seventeen, when it seemed to me my life was already over, I was suddenly free. Michel had already had our sisters tucked safely away in convents and now he wanted me out of his sight, too. So I was sent to Paris, to the Jesuit College, to begin my studies for the priesthood.

  There, he discovered Versailles. Or rather, like so many exiles before him, he was caught by it as if by gravity, and revolved in that glittering orbit like a grubby coin circling a collection plate. Before long, his greatest ambition was to become confessor to the true power in the realm, the king’s mistress.

  – Things did not turn out that way, Flood said.

  – Fortunately, they did not. I soon
discovered I was not cut out to be another painted lackey, scurrying to the palace every morning to witness the awesome spectacle of the royal toilet. Dukes standing at attendance with towels, while others vied for the honour of holding his chamber pot. The great achievement of Versailles, I saw, was to make time turn in a never-ending circle around the sun of ceremony. But it was a false eternity, an illusion inviting its own demise. I turned away from it, and began to write. And since one cannot expect people to read a book of blank pages, I wrote a novel.

  While the Abbé was telling his story, light flakes of snow had begun to fall. The two men looked at one another, shivered and went inside, laughing and brushing the snow from their hair.

  – You must have overcome your dislike of print, Flood said. You know so many of the Count’s books so well.

  – Of course, the Abbé said. Within every book there lies concealed a book of nothing. Don’t you sense it when you read a page brimming with words? The vast gulf of emptiness beneath the frail net of letters. The ghostliness of the letters themselves. Giving a semblance of life to things and people who are really nothing. Nothing at all. No, it was the reading that mattered, I eventually understood, not whether the pages were blank or printed. The Mohammedans say that an hour of reading is one stolen from Paradise. To that perfect thought I can only add that an hour of writing gives one a foretaste of the other place.

  – What are you working on now? Flood asked. To his surprise the Abbé’s face darkened.

  – Don’t you know, Mr. Flood, that is the one question you must never ask a writer?

  Irena was always the first member of the household to awaken. Long before the servants had begun their daily circumnavigations she would open her eyes. The sun would not yet be up, and since she had never overcome a childhood fear of the dark she would quickly light a candle.

  This morning, as always, her bed was back in its chamber, motionless for the moment, and in the stillness she could listen to the rest of the castle. All around her, the clock ticked. Far below, the boilers rumbled. All sounded as it should.

  She rose in her shift, pulled on a morning gown, and hurried on bare feet through the corridors, to a tall oak cabinet set into a niche. Slipping a small brass key from her pocket, she stepped up into the niche, unlocked the cabinet, swung open its narrow doors, and gazed upon the tarnished silver of her mother’s face.

  When she was a little girl Irena had asked her father where the poor Countess was that the nurses often talked about in sad whispers. The Count told her that her mother had died bringing her into the world. On Irena’s twelfth birthday he brought her to this cabinet and revealed his gift, the first of the automatons fashioned by the Venetian metallurgist: a mother of polished steel and brass. The creature shuddered to life, whirring like a startled pheasant, tilted forward, and spread its arms wide to take the girl into its embrace. Irena screamed, bolted in terror, and could not be made to go near the thing again, despite her father’s command that she do so. Eventually the Count locked the automaton away and forgot about it, and only then, much later, did she come to the niche on her own, when no one else was there to see her. She opened the cabinet, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to be caught by these cold, metallic limbs.

  Now it was a ritual for her, even though, after years of neglect, the automaton’s inner workings had rusted and the arms no longer moved when the cabinet was opened. Irena said nothing to her father, not wanting him to know about her secret morning visitation.

  She leaned forward and kissed the gleaming forehead, held the immobile hands in hers and felt the warmth of her own body flowing almost imperceptibly into the icy metal, until she could no longer tell where she began and the machine ended. She wondered why it was not possible for that warmth to bring a pink flush of life to cold metal, to light a spark in eyes of glass, as her father had tried to do with the replica of Ludwig. On mornings like this she would stay as long as she dared, listening to her own heart beat against the automaton’s unyielding skin, until she heard the clanking of pots and dishes from far below as the cooks began their day.

  And the printer. She closed her eyes and heard it, barely audible amid the clatter of the awaking castle, but there nonetheless, running on its own time, apart from her father’s clocked and precise system. The creak of the press. She felt her heart quicken, and smiled. There was no hiding it from herself here. She would be seeing him soon, when she brought him more of the books he requested. She wondered why his scroll had disturbed her so much. Or perhaps it was his obvious pleasure at having created the thing. Just like her father when he posed a particularly difficult riddle.

  – She is beautiful. The image of her daughter.

  The Abbé stood just below the niche, his hands clasped behind his back.

  – This is not my mother, Abbé Ezequiel.

  – But I gather it was intended as a kind of surrogate.

  Irena looked away.

  – I see I’ve intruded upon your privacy, the Abbé said with a bow, and I will take my leave.

  – No, said Irena, swinging shut the doors of the cabinet. You’ve reminded me I should be getting to work.

  – Well, at the very least please forgive my crude attempt at flattery. When a man admires a woman, such trite phrases are woefully inappropriate, are they not?

  – There was no harm done.

  He bent his head.

  – You are very gracious, Countess. May I tell you what I admire in you?

  – This will be a more refined attempt at flattery, then?

  The Abbé laughed.

  – It is so refreshing, he said, to talk to someone like you. Do you know, you must be the only woman I’ve met in my travels who is capable of more than rehearsed coquetry.

  – I doubt that. Perhaps you did not give those women enough time. To show you who they really were.

  – Well, with you, may I say, very little time was needed. I saw enough right away to incline me to stay and learn more.

  – I’m glad. But now I should be getting on with my chores …

  The Abbé stepped forward.

  – At the risk of offence, let me tell you, Countess, what it is I’ve learned. You are most pleasing to look upon, but vastly more important, you are the most intelligent woman I have ever met. If my awkward declaration offends, let me excuse myself by admitting that I would be more at ease with a woman whose mind did not continually surprise me. And yours does. Surprises and delights me, challenges me. I can only confess that you’ve crumbled all my defences.

  Irena locked the cabinet doors. She turned to face the Abbé.

  – It wasn’t a planned attack, she said coldly. I’ve enjoyed the conversations we’ve had, certainly …

  – That is precisely the point, the Abbé said. We’ve begun without the usual tedious moves and countermoves.

  – Begun what?

  – You and I, Countess, have the opportunity to be what few men and women dare to be in this painted, mercenary age.

  – And what is that?

  – Friends.

  – We are that already, I had thought.

  – True friends who speak candidly to one another, keeping nothing back. Baring their hearts.

  – Abbé Ezequiel …

  – Countess, I am speaking of feelings that rise above our differences in other matters. Believe me, I am well aware of your reservations concerning the ideas put forth in my novel.

  – Tell me, then, do you believe your own theory of the soul?

  – Were I not here, your father would find someone else to encourage him. Like the Englishman, for example. Perhaps you should ask Mr. Flood how long he plans to spend trying to print an infinite book.

  – It is not my place.

  – I agree. This is not your place at all.

  He turned and walked to the nearest window.

  – You belong out there, he said. In Paris, Vienna, Milan. Your place is among men and women who think and act and change the world, not here in this madhouse.

>   – That is not what I meant, Irena said.

  – Then let me state more plainly what I meant, the Abbé said, facing her again. I have inherited my brother’s estate in Quebec, and I must return there before the government or the Church tries to appropriate it. So as you see, I have no intention of further encouraging your father’s dreams. On the contrary, I have dreams of my own. Dreams which can only become reality with your help.

  – I don’t understand.

  The Abbé stepped up to Irena and took her hand.

  – Countess, in the months I’ve spent here I have come to see that with you as my confidante, my intellectual sparring partner, my severest critic, I might accomplish a truly great work.

  Gently, Irena slid her hand free of the Abbé’s grip.

  – Is this a declaration of your feelings, Abbé Ezequiel, or are you simply looking for an editor?

  The Abbé frowned.

  – I am thinking of a coupling of minds, yes. But I also dare to hope our concord would be ratified as often as possible with communion of a more physical nature.

  – Abbé, you are a handsome man, and a fine writer. But as any reader will tell you, there’s no accounting for taste.

  The Abbé stepped back. Muscles pulsed in his jaw.

  – This has nothing to do with taste, he said, his voice trembling. I am speaking of love. The divine madness.