Arc d'X

11

BY THE END OF winter he’d taken her to his own bedroom. By the middle of spring she slept all her nights there. Before everyone she openly called him Thomas. Sleeping in his room she couldn’t hide the carving knife beneath her pillow anymore, so she kept it wrapped in the one glove she still had from the day on the bridge when she’d lost its mate to the crowd. At night after sex, when she was still awake, it seemed to her that she felt the bed beneath her flutter as though it were alive with wings, waiting to take flight.

The storm gathered in Paris. While winter chilled the turmoil in the streets it also raised the price of wood, further enraging the populace. One morning James found Thomas’ carriage dismantled in the snow, broken to slivers and burned in stoves all over the neighborhood. By spring no one could afford bread. Bureaucrats frantically distributed stale crusts among the people while marauders ambushed flour wagons and hijacked grain barges. Roving bands torched the vineyards of the aristocracy while rioters looted merchants’ houses and scattered the innards up and down the avenues. An anarchy of bodily fluids flooded the city, torrents of blood and shit and vomit running in the gutters. Soldiers vacillated nervously in their alliances, from the king one moment to the people the next. Among any accumulation of citizens and soldiers there was certain to be shooting, though who would fire upon whom was never known until the shooting began, at which point soldiers might suddenly become revolutionaries. “You must remain in France,” James told Sally, “you mustn’t go back to America with us.”

“With us?” she repeated.

“He’s agreed to set me free,” James stammered, “if I return to Virginia as his cook.”

“In other words,” she retorted, “he’s agreed to set you free if you remain his slave.”

“Don’t twist this around, little sister,” James said angrily. “It’s not the same, I’m not the one he beds. He’ll never free you in America. He couldn’t if he wanted to, not if he wants to continue as a white man having a black woman’s body.”

After this conversation she hid the knife wrapped in the glove behind the headrest of Thomas’ bed. Tied by the wrists she listened to the beating wings of the bed beneath her, his cock far up inside her on the night Thomas said, We’re going home soon. He pulsed with the news. He throbbed with the prospect of having her on American soil, where her slavery was irrefutable and the delight of her body was his with the crack of a whip. Until she felt him throb and pulse like that she hadn’t really known what her answer would be. Will you take me back slave or free? she asked, and felt him stop, desire fading before her question. Collapsed on her breasts he lay still long enough for her to believe he was unconscious until he said, I cannot take you back free.

“You’ve freed my brother.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Then I’ll stay in Paris,” she replied, and for a long time they were this way, his head in her breasts and her wrists bound.

When she woke it was in a panic of her own. In this panic she realized for the first time she’d never see him again. If in the way he had debauched her she became isolated from everyone around her, then he was her only human connection, denied though that connection was. At this moment she wanted him to drink her dry as before. She felt not only like a jilted lover but an abandoned daughter, and thus his sex became not only a master’s rape but a father’s incest; like the molested object of any such incest, she not only reviled but cherished it. There in the dark it was more than she could stand. It wasn’t enough simply to remain in France, it wasn’t enough to free herself by an act of no: only an act of yes would see her through the nightful panic. She tore her wrists apart, the frayed ribbon of his dead wife’s bedroom curtains exploding in bits of blue. She seized the knife from behind the headrest of the bed and, raising it above her head, brought it down into him; she could hear the penetration.

She threw herself back from the knife and tumbled out of bed, sobbing. She picked herself up from the floor to see fly out of his body a hundred black moths which filled the room. She grabbed her dress and rushed into the hall naked; she was still pulling the dress onto her as she dashed from the Hotel Langeac out into the July night.

On the balcony above her, Thomas watched her go. He’d been standing there for some time, since rising from bed unable to sleep. The loss of Sally was different from the loss of Maria or the loss of his wife; in them he’d lost a part of what he constantly revealed of himself to the world. In Sally he lost a part of what the world never knew, of what he had never known about himself, and now he believed he’d never know it. In the short run this was a relief. In the long run he knew that what he couldn’t release between her legs would eat away his heart. He had no choice about America. As a free black she could not sleep in his white American bed. It was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take his pleasure in something he possessed, in the same way it would ultimately be the nature of America to define itself in terms of what was owned. So he had no choice about that. If he’d had one he would have freed her, so long as he could have her. Once, if he’d had the choice, he would have freed them all, before it became easier for him to believe it was too late for such a choice, that such a choice had already been made for him. Now he watched her run down the street and disappear into the dark. Not very far away, over the spires of the city, was constant gunfire, into the light of which she’d rush to be obliterated by the flash of freedom. He turned from the balcony, back to the hallway, only to be overtaken by a plague of black moths. Calling out in alarm, he swatted them frantically as they flew over the balcony’s side. In the doorway of his bedroom lay one of the gloves he’d bought for her; he found somewhat less curious the gash in his bed where the knife was plunged. On many nights while feigning sleep he’d felt the knife against his neck as she spoke to him. Just the previous afternoon he’d taken it from the glove and inspected it, before replacing it where she’d stowed it away.

She left without anything. She didn’t have her clothes or the money she had saved from the wages he paid her. She knew a few French words and phrases from her tutoring. All night the city was rocked by explosions and rioting; she wandered the Parisian maze, now grateful for what had been an unbearable summer’s heat. Only before dawn, on reaching the river, did she become cold.

On the banks of the river an old man gave her bread and wine. Then she walked eastward into the rising sun until it became too hot, at which point she left the riverside and meandered back up through the Right Bank. When she came to the rue St-Antoine, an enormous mob was gathering at the gates of a huge black building with eight towers and walls as high as fifteen men. Around the black building was a moat. For an hour Sally sat in the shade of an inn next to a perfume shop. A pregnant woman explained that the crowd intended to invade the prison, free its captives and seize the gunpowder held by the garrison stationed inside.

As the day dragged on and the heat became worse, the demonstration by the prison grew angrier. More people were pouring into the square and a huge cheer greeted an arriving wagon of guns, followed by a cannon that had been liberated at Invalides. As negotiations went on inside the prison between its commander and a representative of the crowd, the mood of the throng fluctuated between wild celebration and mounting frustration. People passed out in the street from heat and drunkenness. Others shouted insults at the soldiers high above them on the prison ramparts, while the eyes of horses hitched to carts of straw became lit by a dark malevolence, as though the animals were possessed. Sally was gripped by the exhilaration and fear that winding its way through the streets of Paris at this very moment was word that Thomas was dead, murdered by his lover. Suddenly, perhaps irrationally, she was certain the news would sweep the crowd and she’d be recognized by someone. Any minute someone would say, Yes I know this girl, the black one; and point to her, and hold up the glove that had been taken from her that day the mob almost pushed Thomas’ carriage into the Seine. She wore this glove, the witness would say, I took it from her myself. Sally was watching the prison, wondering how it would be to spend the rest of her life in one of its towers, when the shooting began.

Where the fire came from first wasn’t clear. It might have been from the prison itself or a hotel across the street. But then there was a tremendous volley, muskets exploding and the crash of cannons from the high walls of the prison, answered by the crowd’s own cannon. The wagon horses reared as the straw was torched to fill the square with billows of smoke, obscuring the vision of the soldiers above. The window of the perfume shop erupted in a rain of glass, and a maelstrom of fragrances overwhelmed the square, mixing with the smell of smoke and wine and blood; a warning from someone in the crowd was followed by the loudest explosion of all, and Sally looked up just as the drawbridge of the prison came thundering down, cut loose by someone who had scaled the walls. People began rushing through the prison gates. The water in the moat beneath the bridge sizzled with the debris of smoldering iron from guns and cannons. Through the gates a howl rose from the people as though it were coming from the black towers themselves; and as the stampede threatened to carry Sally along with it, all she could think of was getting away. She was trying to turn against the momentum of the crowd when the pregnant woman grabbed her by the arm: “But where are you going, mademoiselle?” she said, before sliding lifelessly to Sally’s feet, the back of her head smoking. Sally felt herself lifted off the ground by the surge.

A horse with its fiery wagon bolted wildly in the riot, people trying to make way for it. Reaching into the flames of the passing wagon, Sally hoisted herself onto it.

Across the square and past the drawbridge, through the revolution and into the dusk, she rode down the Paris streets with a ball of fire at her back. She could feel its heat. When the heat felt like his body, when it felt as if it were going to take hold of her hair and make her submit to it on her knees, she leapt from the wagon and rolled into a gutter, where she lay watching the flaming wagon disappear down the road before she lost consciousness.

Sometime in the night she picked herself up from the gutter. She walked until she came to the city gates. She left the city behind and continued in the dark toward what she believed were the woods in the distance, where she finally fell asleep again in the grass.