Pete Hamill - Forever

Now he knew much more about the countess than he had learned in all the months that came before, but the knowledge gave him no comfort. His stomach churned. He wanted to go down the hall and lie with her. He wanted to confront M. Breton. He lay there until night melted into dawn.

He paid for the burial of Beatriz Machado and her son and the girls. The adult coffins cost two dollars each and the children’s seventy-five cents. A preacher from the African Methodist Church spoke over the coffins, and they were placed in the earth of a small cemetery near the Bowery. Some of the neighbors were there, and when it was over they hugged, whispered words of regret, and went their separate ways. Cormac thought: I have gone to too many funerals.

For four days he worked harder than ever at the newspaper. On one of the days, he talked to three politicians about the way New Yorkers were at last able to elect a mayor, and what that would mean to the future. He covered the suicide of a stockbroker, caught embezzling, and wrote a story that was not printed. “I know the poor lad’s family,” said Bryant, waving the story away. “They’ve suffered enough.” On the following day, he visited a house overrun by rats, where women were beating at them with shovels while policemen laughed and small boys took target practice with rocks. He wrote a story about the American settlers in Texas and their revolt against Mexico, which refused to let them own slaves. He interviewed Samuel Colt, visiting from Hartford, who was showing off his new invention, the six-shooter. He did an article about the men who were paving lower Broadway, all of them Irish. He wrote for the Evening Post . He read the New York Herald .

He left the house on Duane Street early each day and returned late. He dined one night with Jennings, who was still sickened by the slaughter of Beatriz and her grandchildren, and did his best to console the man. He found an inn where the steak was tender. On the third night, he bathed alone in the room where the women of the house washed away the aromas of their work. He saw little of the countess. Then, on a rainy Saturday night, he was at his pad of paper again, working up finished drawings from tiny sketches made on the street. His fingers ached for the piano, wanting to bring music out of his head and into the air. The door burst open and M. Breton stood in the frame. His hair was unruly. His shirt was open to his chest. His mustache needed trimming.

“You, Irishman,” he said in English. He had been drinking.

“Come in,” Cormac said.

“I am in.”

“Then close the fucking door.”

M. Breton closed the door and gazed around the small studio. He glanced at the books and studied the drawings.

“Laurence Sterne?” he said. “Jonathan Swift. Théophile Gautier ? Goethe… You’re a reader.”

“When there’s time.”

“I’m a musician,” he said with a shrug. “Musicians don’t read. They feel. They play.”

“I’ve heard you play,” Cormac said.

M. Breton waited as if expecting a blow.

“You’re very good,” Cormac said.

M. Breton sighed. “Not as good as I once dreamed of being.”

“But very good, nevertheless.”

“ Merci. Do you have anything—”

“I don’t drink. But I can pull that cord near the door and—”

“Cognac,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Cormac ordered cognac from the black servant who answered the pull of the cord.

“I came to apologize,” M. Breton said, and asked if Cormac understood French, and switched with Cormac’s affirmative nod. “I’ve come here, Irishman, to apologize.” There was a scatter of rain on the windowpanes. “I have disrupted your life. My wife has told me the story, and of your… arrangement, and of how you have comforted her.”

The hall porter arrived with a bottle of cognac and two glasses. M. Breton poured a glass for himself, offered the bottle to Cormac, who declined, then inhaled the aroma of the drink. His features seemed to loosen.

“I loved her from the day I met her,” he said, staring into the glass. “She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.”

“She’s beautiful now.”

“Of course. But then she was still innocent. Then she was still flowering in music. I would see her, and sing. I would think of her, and play.”

Cormac thought: Please don’t say “We were meant for each other.”

“We were certain to destroy each other,” M. Breton said. “Music made her innocent. It made me corrupt. And corruption is always stronger than innocence.”

He drained the cognac and poured another. The rain spattered the windowpanes now, and from away off to the west, Cormac heard thunder.

“So, Monsieur Breton, why did you come here?”

He looked at Cormac for a long beat.

“To die.”

He didn’t know where he had picked up syphilis. He was sure it was after he abandoned his wife in New Orleans. It could have been in Mexico City, where he played violin in a bordello on the Calle de la Esperanza; or in Vera Cruz, among the Africans and Indians and mestizos of the waterfront; or in Havana, where he lived for three years in a house on the Malecón facing the sea. He wanted the sun, not the cold drizzle of Paris. He wanted bodies warmed with the sun. He wanted to coarsen his talent with drink and women and the smothering stupor of heat. He found his way to Martinique, so that he could speak in French, and cursed Bonaparte for a fool, with his dreams of conquering arctic Russia while he had Louisiana and New Orleans and the islands of the southern sea.

“He could have ended his days glazed by the sun, a free man,” he said. “But his vanity was too strong. He ruined himself. He ruined France. He ruined Europe.”

He was happiest in Italy, where he landed in 1829, playing in Frenchified Milano, wandering on foot south to Tuscany, to Florence, listening to madrigals in cathedrals, on to Rome, then back again, instructing the children of the Italian rich. He was already sick, although the first stage had faded, and cognac was the only consolation. Until suddenly some guttering ember of his youth burst into flame. Charles X in France decided to bring back the hard old authority of the hard old regime, smashing freedom of the press and dissolving parliament, and M. Breton knew what would happen next. He took a coach to Paris in time for the July Revolution.

“I wanted to die on the barricades,” he said. “A properly romantic death. One that would absolve all my sins.”

He was wounded in the taking of the Hôtel de Ville, with a bullet through his side that just missed his kidneys, and did not see the celebrations after the August abdication. A woman nursed him back to health, a woman who loved him, who took him to the countryside near Lyons, who fed him, who dressed him and bathed him. When he could walk again, he fled.

“I could not give such a woman what I had,” he said. “Could not kill her with my prick.”

He shrugged again, shook his head. He was quiet for a long time. The storm rumbled around the New York streets. The windows trembled.

“I don’t sleep with her,” he said, motioning at the door and the apartment of the Countess de Chardon. “You should not worry.”

He stood up heavily.

“I wish you’d play something,” Cormac said. “There’s some melody of yours that I’ve never heard before….”

“Berlioz,” he said. “It’s from the Symphonie Fantastique. …”

“It’s beautiful.”

M. Breton sighed. “Yes.” He gazed around the room. “But not tonight.”

Three nights later, M. Breton insisted on a dinner for three in the suite of the countess. The service was handsomely laid out, with golden light from gas lamps and candles and the silver gleaming. There were oysters, and cheeses, and chilled wines, and veal and asparagus and small roasted potatoes. He had bathed and was crisply dressed, his shoes polished, his cravat precise, his fingernails scrubbed. The countess looked at him in a cautious way, laughing at his jokes, accepting his pouring of the wine, nodding at his ruminations on the fevers of politics.