Yes. There was a letter for him. It must be one of the official notices that arrived from time to time, always inordinately late, for the almost total collapse of the postal services was a normal fact in an epoch when everything that a hundred years earlier signified progress had ceased to function with either efficiency or promptness. No chlorine purified the water, the mail did not arrive on time, and microbes had imposed their triumphal reign over vaccines: defenseless humans, immune worms.
Pollo leaned closer to look at the envelope and noticed that the letter bore no recognizable stamp; gripping the newly born infant against his chest, he slipped the letter from the frame. It was sealed with ancient, grimy sealing wax; the envelope itself was old and yellow, as the writing of the sender seemed old, and curiously antiquated. And as he took the letter in his hand a few quivering drops of quicksilver rolled across it and dropped onto the floor. Still clasping the child, Pollo broke the ancient red wax seal with his teeth and extracted a fine, wrinkled sheet of parchment, as transparent as silk. He read the following message:
“In the Dialogus Miraculorum, the chronicler Caesarius von Heiterbach warns that in the city of Paris, the fountain of all knowledge and the source of the Divine Scriptures, the persuasive Devil inculcated a perverse intelligence in certain few wise men. You must be on the alert. The two forces struggle between themselves not only in Paris but throughout the world, although here the combat will seem to you more acute. Chance has determined that it was here you would be born, spend your youth, and live your years. Your life and this time could have coincided in a different space. It does not matter. Many will be born, but only one will have six toes upon each foot and a wine-red cross upon his back. This child must be baptized Iohannes Agrippa. He has been awaited through long centuries; his is the continuity of the original kingdoms. Further, although in another time, he is your son. You must not fail this duty. We are expecting you; we shall find you, make no effort to look for us.”
This extraordinary missive was signed Ludovico and Celestina. Astounded by this reversion from the death he had smelled in the smoke of Saint-Sulpice and divined in the zealous vultures to the life he held in his single arm and believed to have extracted but not introduced, as the letter so mysteriously indicated, Pollo had no time to reread it. Twice he shook his head in negation: he knew no one named Ludovico or Celestina, and he had never slept with the ancient woman. He dipped his fingers in the bloody water, sprinkled a few drops on the head of this infant as exceptional as recently born, and in accordance with what the letter had requested, he murmured: “Ego baptiso te: Iohannes Agrippa.”
As he did so, he winked an eye in the direction of the robust poilu killed in some forgotten war of trenches, tanks, and mustard gases who was the ephemeral, the certified, the only husband of the aged Madame Zaharia; he placed the child in the arms of the startled old woman, rinsed his hand, and without a backward look left the room with the satisfaction of a duty well done.
Truly? He opened the heavy street door onto the rue des Ciseaux, that imperturbable narrow little street that for centuries has stretched between the rue du Four and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and he had to struggle against a new alarm that threatened anew his wish to enjoy this glorious July morning. Was the world growing younger? growing older? Pollo, like the street itself, was partly bathed by the sun but partly in deserted shadows.
The open doors and sidewalk tables and chairs of the Café Le Bouquet, usually filled with the faithful, looked inviting, but the mirrored wall behind the bar reflected only orderly rows of green and amber bottles, and the long copper stripping showed only light traces of hastily smeared fingerprints. The television had been disconnected and bees buzzed above the cigarette showcase. Pollo reached out his hand and directly from the bottle drank a gulp of anise. Then he searched behind the bar and found the two large posters advertising the bar-café-tobacco shop. He thrust his head between the panels and adjusted the leather straps that joined across the shoulders. Thus outfitted as a sandwich man, he returned to the rue du Four and without concern walked by the open and abandoned shops.
Buried in Pollo’s young body, perhaps, was an ancient optimism. Sandwiched between his posters, he was not only doing the job for which he received his modest stipend. He was also adhering to a code according to which, when the subway has been stalled for more than ten minutes and all the tunnel lights go out, the proper thing to do is continue reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened. Pollo Ostrich. But as long as none of the things that had happened to Madame Zaharia happened to him (and considering the times, who was going to stick his only hand into the fire?), he saw no reason to interrupt the normal rhythm of his existence. No. Just the opposite: “I still believe that the sun rises every day, and that each new sun announces a new day, a day that yesterday lay in the future; I still believe that, as one page of time closes, today will promise a tomorrow invisible before and irrepeatable afterward.” Immersed in these reflections, Pollo did not notice he was walking through thicker and thicker smoke. With the innocence of habit (which inevitably is solidified by the malice of the law), he had walked toward the Place Saint-Sulpice and was now prepared to parade before the faithful, the usual café customers, the posters that fore and aft covered him to the knees. His first thought when he saw he was surrounded by smoke was that no one would be able to read the words recommending the choice of the Café Le Bouquet. He looked skyward and realized that not even the four statues on the Place were visible; nevertheless, they were the only witnesses to the publicity posters trussed upon Pollo, and entrusted to Pollo. He told himself, idiotically, that the smoke must be coming from the mouths of the sacred orators. But not even Bossuet’s teeth, Fénelon’s lips, Massillon’s tongue, or Fléchier’s palate — aseptic stone cavities all — could be the source of that nauseating odor, the same stench that had been so noticeable at the window of his garret room. What accentuated it now, more than proximity, was the beat of unseen marching feet his ear first located on the rue Bonaparte. Soon he realized what it was: the sound of universal movement.
Smoke enveloped him, but someone besieged by smoke always believes there is clean air about his own body; no one trapped in haze feels he is devoured by it. “I am not become haze,” Pollo said to himself. “The haze simply swirls around me as it surrounds the statues of the four sacred orators.” From smoke, but also toward smoke, Pollo extended his only hand, then immediately drew it back, frightened, and thrust it behind the panel that covered his chest; in that brief instant his outstretched fingertips, invisible in the smoke, had touched other flesh, fleeting, naked … other flesh. He hid the fingers that remembered and still bore the traces of a film of thick oil almost like butter: other bodies, invisible but nevertheless present bodies … swift, grease-covered bodies. His only hand never lied. No one had seen him, but Pollo felt ashamed for having been afraid. The true motive of his fear had not been the casual discovery of a quickly moving line of bodies marching toward the church in the obscuring smoke, but the simple image of his only hand, his outstretched hand, devoured by the smoke. Invisible. Vanished. Mutilated by the air. I have only one. I have only one left. With that recovered hand he touched his testicles to assure himself of the continuance of his physical being. Higher, far from his hand and his genitals, his head whirled in a different orbit, and reason, again triumphant, warned him that causes provoke effects, effects propose problems, and problems demand solutions, which are in turn, by their success or failure, converted into the causes of new effects, problems, and solutions. This is what reason taught him, but Pollo didn’t understand the relation between such logic and the sensations he had just experienced. And he continued to stand there in the midst of the smoke, exhibiting his posters for no one to see.