Arc d'X

13

THOMAS SAYS, I NEVER saw Paris again. In the beginning my dreams were of the Paris I’d come to after my wife died: languid gardens and rambunctious streets, the sensual exuberance, the ferocious quest. As the news from France traveled to Virginia over the years following my return, my dreams changed and in the last one I was walking the rue d’X and felt a tide about my feet, some thick hot river; and then I saw bubbling up from the gutters the blood, and I looked up to a wave of it rushing toward me. Often I’ve defended it. Often I’ve said to those who here decried it that the nutrients of the blood of tyrants are drunk by the soil of freedom’s storms. But in my dreams the blood keeps rising, flooding the terrain until no soil remains. And if I could never openly condemn it, now I would secretly hate Paris for how it betrayed what it fought for if only there were not more intimate, firsthand treachery to despise.

On the other hand, some small more intimate treachery on the part of the King of France might well have saved his head…. He needed a slave of his own. He needed some black vessel to receive the blackness in his heart and soul and leave him strong enough for the right and good. He needed to commit some trivial duplicity, betraying his vain, viperous little Austrian queen; in so identifying the part of him that cried for redemption he might have redeemed his country if not his throne. Now his blood bubbles up with all the rest, and so does his queen’s.

One should not make the rash promises of one’s ideals before so many witnesses. I told her I would never marry another. Perhaps I wouldn’t have anyway. Perhaps I said that not so as to ease her passage into death but to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it. In a year I’ll be fifty. I passed some time ago that point where I was closer to the end than to the beginning. I spent all the years up to that point as the slave of my head’s convictions rather than my heart’s passions, and never felt as alive as the first night I took her. Never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I’d done something that could never be forgiven. In the nights that have passed since, I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me. I’ve asked myself whether I love Sally. I believe I have come to love her, even if it’s not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn’t so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.

When I was young, the state of Virginia did not allow a man to free his own slaves. Such was the bond between the slave and the man who owned her. Such was the state that would not loosen such a bond. At the age of twenty-five I offered to the state a law that would allow a man to free his slaves, freeing not only the slave but the man who owned her. The state was outraged. Twenty years later I took her in the Paris night and cannot free myself from it: such is the bond between us. And no law will set me free of the thing I own, the thing that possesses me in return.

I believe in time the black one may be whole. The state hates me for saying so.

I’ve invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It’s a contraption halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast. I’ve set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It’s a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor: it will test most those who presume too glibly to believe in it. But I know it’s a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me. Just as the white ink of my loins has fired the inspiration that made it, so the same ink is scrawled across the order of its extinction. The signature is my own. I’ve written its name. I’ve called it America.