“He’s fat,” said Carlotta. “Victor. He wanted to take me to a casino, but you have to be eighteen to get in. They ask to see your passport. I wouldn’t have gone with him anyway. He’s a very old man. He shouldn’t be running round to casinos. He might have a stroke, or something.”
“He had no business inviting you anywhere.”
“I know. I was still tired after the movies in Nice, and then Irma gave me an art lesson.” I was silent. “So?” she said. “Victor lived up here?”
“Some of his relatives. Before them, there was a Cuban. He gave extravagant masked balls and parties. There are people still living down here who can remember the music, the dancers, the thousands of candles.”
“Where does a Cuban get that kind of money?” She answered her own question: “Vice.”
I started to say, “Long, long before Fidel Castro,” but to Carlotta no such time existed. The repeated collapse and inflation of events continued to perplex me, even though I had once written a thesis on Talleyrand and published a number of afterthoughts. Since the arrival of Carlotta, the flattened present, the engorged past had scarcely quit my mind. They were like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has swallowed history whole. I said, “Before the Cuban, an American couple named Primage paid for extensive repairs. They didn’t own the place and never lived here. One wonders how they got up the hill. Mules and a guide, I suppose.”
“Why did they bother?” said Carlotta. “It came off their taxes?”
“Income tax barely existed. Americans were like that. They loved France and wanted the French to love them. They hadn’t yet worked out that France and the French are entirely different.”
“The state wouldn’t get a cent out of me,” said Carlotta. “You saw those trees?”
The cost of admittance was seven times greater than in Lily’s day. “You could get in cheaper,” said Carlotta. “Have you got a senior card?”
“I am not sixty-five.”
“I’m sorry. I thought Mummy said you’d retired.”
I wondered where Lily picked up her information. For years I had been turning my back on anyone likely to say, “I’ve met your ex-wife.” Sometimes I still came across a couple by the name of Lapwing, Harry and Edith, who had been young and hard up in France with Lily and me. Edie and Lily had gone to the same Catholic school; that was the connection. It was a wives’ story, with the women (“the girls,” we had said then) whispering and laughing and trading stories about the men. The Lapwings now lived out West and were entirely taken up by their own affairs — university machinations, mostly.
Carlotta stopped to consider four rusted cannons in the flagged courtyard. She said, “They ought to be boiled down, or whatever it is you do with weapons. My mother’s a committed pacifist. She won’t even let Ben keep a gun in the house.”
“They were brought here during the French Revolution,” I said. “Never used. They can’t hurt anyone.” She still seemed troubled. Revolution? Soviet walkabout? Will miles, gallons, Fahrenheit temperature hold the line? “Long before that time,” I said — thinking, The vaguer the better; less alarming for the child—“the castle belonged to the tax collector for a powerful local count. There was an ancient line of counts in the region, older than the French royal family. They spoke a dialect you can still hear in one or two villages.”
“I guess it’s a pretty old place,” said Carlotta neutrally.
Guides and touring groups packed the stone entrance hall, which was brighter and cleaner than I remembered. The guides wore badges—“English,” “Français,” “Deutsch,” “Italiano”—and looked, to me, too young to know about anything. As for the visitors, they resembled nothing so much as migrant labor waiting to board one of those long trains with dirty windows. Like migrants, they hung on to radios, cameras, extra clothes for a change of weather, plastic bags of fruit and chocolate, newspapers. Most of these articles had to be left at a cloakroom, after fierce argument. A “No Tipping” sign stood propped behind a saucer set out for tips. Tourists responded by unloading small change from foreign countries. Carlotta’s shoulder-strap bag held only Kleenex and her passport. During the drive, she had got out her passport and examined it, frowning over the facts of her birth date and height. She was dressed in white shorts, a blue shirt, running shoes, and wore around her neck a gold heart on a chain.
In Lily’s day, women tourists had dressed in flowered nylon blouses, pleated white skirts, white nylon cardigans with pearl buttons. I recalled a man in a gleaming white shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal a tattoo of peacock blue — a long number, like the number of a freight car. Outside, he and his wife took pictures of each other, then asked me to take pictures of them. They sat down on the dry grass, after searching in vain for a sign saying they mustn’t. They put their heads close together and smiled up at me. The moat was fed by a shallow stream. Some people sat along the edge, which was high and straight, like the bank of a canal, and let their legs dangle. The legs and thighs even of young people looked veined and pale. Everyone over here had seemed like that, to me — bruised, pallid, glancing around to look for rules and prohibitions.
Carlotta said, “Let’s stay with the French group. We’ll learn more.” I wondered if it would be interesting or instructive to describe my tour with Lily, and the man in the white shirt, and how it had been thought bad taste to flaunt that kind of tattoo. The sight affected people; some young men and women had had their tattoo effaced by means of plastic surgery, out of regard for the feelings of strangers.
“Steve,” said Carlotta. “I want to ask you something. Why wasn’t Irma at that dinner last night?”
“Miss Baes doesn’t know many people. This is her first summer down here.”
“All the more reason to ask her. She’s nice. We talked a long time. She showed me her work.”
“You could hardly fail to see it.”
“She’s got some little stuff inside. She makes things out of paper.”
“We don’t seem to know many artists.”
“You could know her.”
“We are probably too old to interest Miss Baes. You made the remark that Victor was an old man.”
“You’re around the same age as Ben and Mummy,” said Carlotta. She may have thought I was feeling hurt over the business of the senior card.
Lily had wanted to know if the fee went to the sardine canners. She had soft fair hair, pale skin; was allergic to sunlight; wore a limp straw hat tied on with a colored scarf. She had on that day new rope-soled shoes, bought at a local market.
Half the fee went to the canners, half to the state, said the guide. He was a veteran of the First World War, wore all his ribbons. Lily said that seemed reasonable. Some tourists nodded, agreeing. Sharing was a popular concept. A woman with a Central European accent said, quite loudly, that the whole thing should go to the state, thus to the people. The man with the tattoo whispered something to his wife. They seemed troubled. They had known at least one state that deserved absolutely nothing.
Swallows darted round the tower at the time of Lily. The moat, brown and still, reflected long flanks of stone, threw sparks of reflected sunlight on dark portraits and tapestries. The canning family kept a suite of private rooms, one or two of which could be inspected from the doorway. Chain ropes prevented visitors from wandering inside. Lily slipped to the front line of tourists, without actually pushing, as artlessly as a child. She saw a television set and one book, a paperback about flying saucers. It was quite tattered, as if every fish canner in the world had read it in turn. This was a rich period for space apparitions. There was an uneasy feeling — not quite a fear; something more prickly and insistent — that superior creatures were on their way to judge us and might go back with a poor report.