Gill Alderman - The Memory Palace

‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled, dry; some are pregnant and some are as beautiful as Aphrodite. Lèni was such a one –’

Guy stopped reading, irritated by the present tense, drama-documentary style; plagued by recollections which streamed up as unstoppably as mist from wet ground in the sun. He had never known Lèni – how could he? She was dead – like the first Alice. He had not known Lèni, but he had read her diary, all the closely written confidential pages of it and could visualize her neat letters exactly and the brown limp-covered book itself, soft leather binding worn bald. It used to live, a landmark amongst the paperbacks, on the little shelf above the bed-place in the gypsy vardo and Helen, rising from him in her resplendent nakedness, had brought it down and shown it him, revealing at the same time her inmost thoughts, for she kept her own diary in it, and also in French. Somewhat bewildered he had read there that he, Guy Parados, was un trésor and also mon amant très fort et infatigable . Schoolgirl stuff on reflection, these days. He had grinned at her and said ‘Thanks! I hope I am,’ and had asked her why she wrote in French, not Romany.

‘It’s the language of lovers, isn’t it?’ she had replied.

He remembered some of Lèni’s entries. She had, he thought, compared her priestly lover to a stallion and herself she had personified as his breakfast. She had also implied that he was stupid: quel imbécile, quel désastre! Nothing else could be retrieved – except – yes, a homily as vapid as every cliché: ‘Fortune favours fools’, in Helen’s translation; but the French was Aux innocents les mains pleines which, translated literally, meant ‘To simpletons, filled hands’. The innocent, the idiot son of the family downstairs certainly had those, clasping tight his bread and biting into its crust. Guy leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes.

‘ Pleine ’ had another meaning, probably several, for sense in French was, as in English, governed by context. Ah! It meant ‘complete’ or ‘whole’.

Complete hands to fools . A good hand, a complete flush. No! Nonsense. He was dozing when there was work to do. He skimmed the short introduction, noting the facts: Lèni’s lover, Father Paon (absurd name! – but how it characterized him) was the nutter, a slave to every vice and luxury and deeply involved with other Satanists of the time, in particular Olivia des Mousseaux and a second priest, Henri Renard. They were famous at the time: the decadent novelist, Huysmans, had interviewed them and it was said that their erotic practices had inspired both the Marquis de Guaita and Aleister Crowley. Paon took Lèni to live with him and abused her – yet she remained with him, loyal as a spaniel, and more, she watched him bloodily murder the girls they lured to his Black Masses. Petites rosses insaissisables , Elusive little nags: that was what she had written about the girls! Guilt and revulsion kept Guy fascinated: that this obscure Lyon seamstress whose diary he had held … But the place to which they were brought, that had not sounded like a maniac’s lair. It had another, haunting, name, un paradis inconnu.

An unknown Paradise. Death, he supposed, and the Otherworld: Heaven, Hades, Hell, Avalon, Elysium and the Land of Youth. The Isles of the Blessed. It had many names, as many as man’s fears. He read the denouement of the extraordinary tale:

‘Their own over-confidence betrays Lèni and Paon. They kidnap the daughter of a consul, a dark Mexican lovely. Respectable Lyon and the demi-monde are equally horrified but, even so, it is necessary for the arresting civil guard officers to bribe the militant Canuts or silk workers and to have their protection in order to enter the district, find and arrest the couple, and discover the horrors they have perpetrated. This is what they found:

‘The door of the apartment wide open and Paon, dressed like a dandy in silks, reclining on his ornate bed of shame, his new telephone receiver in his hand and the noise from a disconnected call the only sound. He wore a blank look and offered no resistance. In the kitchen, Paloma Diaz del Castillo lay in a welter of blood on the scrubbed deal table, horribly maimed and quite dead.

‘Paon was guillotined in Lyon in 1884 but his mistress, the beautiful devil Lèni la Soie, was never brought to justice. Helped by her silk worker friends, she had fled into her native territory, the local warren of alleyways or traboules , and there disappeared.’

He wondered how Paon had defended himself at his trial. Historic Lyon was a depository of hatred, a place in which many had been brought to book. He had visited it three years ago with his wife: for a day and a night, time enough for Jilly to spend an afternoon in the Silk Museum, for him to find and choose the best restaurant. They had left the children in England with Thérèse and were trying hard to live harmoniously together. It wasn’t a second honeymoon but they had a good holiday and went on to the Alps. In Fourvière he had explored some of the alleys or traboules with a sense of trespass, for many were gated, others obscure and damp and all along them stairways and doors led to inhabited apartments. He had found a likely restaurant and was standing contentedly in the warm afternoon sun reading the menu when, further down the narrow street, there was a flurry of cars and heavy motorbikes ridden by helmeted men.

A wide façade, cramped up against the pavement, was the back of the Palais de Justice. He had witnessed the departure from it of Klaus Barbie whom the Lyonnais were trying for his crimes against Jews and gypsies in the War. They had even found a lawyer who would defend him.

Who would, or could, defend Lèni? He began to read the narrative which was couched in her words and taken from her journal intime:

‘You, man or woman of the future time, you my Reader and my Judge, will observe that my spirit, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse, goes in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart, that too has its yearnings, for my father, for my lover, but most of all for the unknown paradise. I liken it to the hills beyond Fourvière in whose long shadows we lived happily before these centuries of revolution

And I am in Arcadia, he thought suddenly. What have I to do with this miserable stuff? He looked at the girl asleep beside him. Et in Arcadia ego – where, in a perfect, sylvan paradise, Death intrudes. He would wake her and comfort himself with her body.

The black ribbon was tight. He wondered, fingering its soft surface, how she could bear such tightness and he felt under her hair for a fastening. There was a bow, which he untied, and the ribbon slipped off and fell upon the bed while he, recoiling, saw the mark it had concealed, a dark ring of blemishes about her neck. Ghostly Alice wore such an ineradicable necklace, her hangman’s keepsake.

Alice Tyler opened her eyes, blinked pale lids across the blue and put both hands up to her throat.

‘You beast,’ she said.

He was not able to respond. Alice sat up. She switched on the bedside light and retrieved the ribbon. With electric light to illuminate it, the mark diminished. It was not very big.