"I never thought I'd hear myself say this but what that woman feels for Galilee may be the saving of us all. Do you not like the cigarette?"
"No, it's fine."
"I think they taste like camel dung personally, but they have sentimental associations."
"Yes?"
"Your father and I spent some blissful weeks in Cairo together, just before he met your mother…"
"So when you smoke them you remember him?"
"No, when I smoke them I remember an Egyptian boy called Muhammed, who fucked me among the crocodiles on the banks of the Nile."
I coughed so hard tears came to my eyes, which amused her mightily.
"Oh poor Maddox," she said when I'd recovered myself somewhat, "you've never really known what to make of me, have you?"
"Frankly, no."
"I suppose I've kept you at a distance because you're not mine. I look at you and you remind me of what a philanderer your father was. That hurts. After all these years, that still hurts. You know, you look very like your mother. Around the mouth, especially."
"How can you say that it hurts you to be reminded that he was a philanderer when you were just telling me about fucking with some Egyptian?"
"I did it to spite your father. My heart was never really in it. No, I take that back. There were occasions when I was in love. Jefferson of course. I was completely besotted with Jefferson. But doing the deed among the crocodiles? That was for spite. I did a lot of things for spite."
"And he did the same?"
"Of course. Spite begets spite. He used to have women morning, noon and night."
"And he loved none of them?"
"Are you asking me whether he truly loved your mother?"
I drew a bitter lungful of the cigarette. Of course that was what I wanted to know. But now it came time to ask the question, I was tongue-tied, even a little emotional. And even as I felt the tears pricking my eyes another part of me-the part that's dispassionately setting this account on the page-was thinking: what's all the drama about? Why the hell should it matter, after all these years, what your father felt for your mother the day they conceived you? Would you really feel better about yourself if you knew they'd been in love?
"Listen carefully," Cesaria said. "I'm going to tell you something that may make you a little happier. Or at least, let you understand better how it was between your parents.
"Your mother was illiterate when Nicodemus met her. She was really a sweet woman, I have to say, a very sweet woman, but she couldn't .even write her name. I think your father rather liked her that way, frankly, but she was ambitious for herself, and who can blame her? They were hard times for men and women, but for a woman like her, her beauty was her only advantage, and she knew that wasn't going to last forever.
"She wanted to be able to read and write-more than anything in the world-and she begged your father to teach her. Over and over she begged him. It was like an obsession with her-"
"So you knew her?"
"I met her a few times only. At the beginning, when he was showing her off to me, and at the very end, I'll come to that in a moment.
"Anyway, she tormented your father night and day about teaching her to read-teach me, teach me, teach me-until eventually he consented. Of course he didn't have the patience to do it the way ordinary folks would do it. He didn't want to waste his precious time with A B Cs. He just put his will into her and the knowledge flowed. She learned to read and write overnight. Not just English. Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Sanskrit-"
"What a gift."
"So she believed.
"You were about three weeks old when this happened. Such a quiet little baby; with that same frown you have on your face right now. One day you had a mother who couldn't read a word, and the next day the woman could have made intelligent conversation with Socrates. Let me tell you, it was quite a transformation. And of course she wanted to use what she'd learned. She started to read, anything your father could bring her. She'd be sitting there with you suckling, and a dozen books open on the table, going from one to the other, holding all these ideas in her head at the same time. She kept demanding books and he kept bringing them. Plutarch, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ptolemy, Virgil, Herodotus-there was no end to her appetite.
"Nicodemus was proud as a peacock. 'Look at my genius girlfriend. She talks dirty in Greek!' He didn't know what he'd done. He didn't have the first clue. Her poor brain, it was cooking in her skull. And all the while she was suckling you…"
It was quite an image. My mother, surrounded by books, with me pressed against her breast, and her head so filled with words and ideas her brain was frying in its pan.
"That's horrible…" I murmured.
"It gets worse, so prepare yourself. Word started to spread, and in a couple of weeks she'd become a celebrity. Do you have any recollection of this? Of the crowds?" I shook my head. "People started to come from all over England, eventually all over Europe, to see your mother."
"And what did father do?"
"Oh he got tired of the hoopla very quickly. I'm sure he regretted what he'd done, because he asked me if maybe he should take back what he'd given. I told him I didn't care what he did. She was his problem, not mine. I regret that now. I should have said something. I could have saved her life. And when I think back, I knew…"
"You knew what-?"
"-what it was doing to her. I could see it in her eyes. It was more than her poor, human brain could take.
"Then, one night, she apparently asked your father to bring her pen and paper. He refused her. He said he wasn't going to let her waste time writing while she should be tending to you. Your mother threw a fit, and she just took herself off, leaving you behind.
"Of course, your father had no idea how to deal with a tiny child, so he handed you over to me."
"You looked after me?"
"For a little while."
"And he went to find my mother?"
"That's right. It took him a few days, but he found her. She'd gone to the house of a man in Blackheath, and exchanged her sexual favors for an endless supply of what Nicodemus had refused her: pen and paper."
"What did she write?"
"I don't know. Your father never showed it to me. He said it was incomprehensible. Whatever it was, it must have been very important to your mother, because she'd worked night and day on it, scarcely stopping to eat or sleep. When he brought her back to the house she was a shadow of herself: thin as a stick, her hands and face all stained with ink. She didn't make any sense when she talked. It was a crazy mixture of all the languages she knew, and all the things she'd read. Listening to her was enough to make you crazy yourself: the way she spewed out all these bits and pieces that had nothing to do with one another, all the time looking at you as if to say: please understand me, please, please-
"I thought maybe she'd feel better if she had you back in her arms, so I brought her to the crib, and I gently told her you needed to be fed. She seemed to know what I was saying to her. She picked you up and rocked you for a little while, then she went to sit down by the fire where she always fed you. And she'd no sooner sat down then she gave a little sigh, and died."
"Oh my God…"
"You rolled out of her arms and fell to the floor. And you began to cry. For the first time, you began to cry, and from then on-having been the quietest, most gentle little baby-from then on you were a monster. You wept and you screamed and I don't think I saw you smile again, oh for years."
"What did my father do?"
"About you or her?"
"Her."
"He took her body and he buried her somewhere in Kent. Dug the grave himself, and stayed with her, mourning her for weeks on end. Leaving me to take care of you, I may add, which I didn't thank him for."