Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud - A Life on Paper - Stories

I wrote a check for the remainder. The shopkeeper made me out a receipt in due form, accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

"Hold on to this, for insurance purposes, in the event-fire, theft, nothing's safe. These days, everything disappears or goes up in smoke. Make sure you're insured," he sighed. "I assume you haven't yet decided where you'll display it?

"Not too cold, and not too hot. Watch out for dust and dampness. Leave her mask on as much as possible; it protects her," he said before calling a cab.

When I got home half an hour later, I congratulated myself on the lightness of my precious burden. The elevator was quite old and didn't go very fast. I had time to look myself over in the mirror on the back wall. What was the proper demeanor to assume in an elevator with the mummy of a young woman in one's arms? I reached the eighth floor without finding an answer to this no doubt frivolous question.

My feelings for the mummy whose "proud owner" I'd become followed a predictable course. First, passion: I sometimes stopped in the middle of my work to gaze on her fondly. As a translator, I was lucky enough to work from home. I'd set her across from my desk. My apartment was mostly filled with books and a collection of musical instruments I've since then scattered. I am not a musician. The cases fascinated me more than the instruments themselves. For me, the cases of musical instruments were great brown or blackish shells that harbor strange creatures in their fluffy, satiny, or felt-lined insides. Walking-stick-thin or beetle-round, wooden or metal, matte or glossy, inlaid mandolin, stiff flute, or austere violin, most musical instruments looked like insects, and like them had carapaces bristling with antennae, mandibles, rostra.

I collected instruments in their cases because for me their charm resided mainly in the perfect complementarity of container and content, and the contrast of materials and colors. Contemplating the nickeled keys of a clarinet, set in ebony sections nestled in their padded blue sateen dwellings, or the gleaming body of a concert guitar in plush garnet, inspired feelings of luxury if not lust in me.

How long do we remain aware of the presence of someone or something beside us? Perhaps it's scandalous, in a way, to equate the two… but what of it? At the time I was greatly inclined to prefer objects, which reassured me, to people, who often frightened me. I was what one called a confirmed bachelor, hardened in his lonely ways. Hardened: well on the way to drying out and becoming a fossil, an object. That was my life when the mummy, and then Delia, came and turned it upside down. But I'm getting ahead of myself I should tell this story calmly, carefully. It matters little that I should seem at that moment a confirmed young bachelor, prematurely pickled at age thirty-five in his habits and collections.

Sooner or later we wind up tiring of objects as we do people-we lose interest-because other objects, or people, have in turn entered our lives, pushing earlier ones aside. Perhaps what matters most to us in all the world can be safely banished to the very depths of our being. But should disaster threaten our inner attic, it is the one thing we try to save, without regard for all the rest.

My initial wonder dulled as weeks, then months, went by. After so constantly occupying my thoughts, the mummy began to blend into its surroundings in my cramped apartment. My gaze strayed over my possessions and only rarely picked it out; it was just another furnishing.

Then, suddenly… A man who hears a strange voice singing or humming in the night faces a choice: disbelief, rapture, or terror. Should the phenomenon persist, disbelief goes away by itself. Then the choice between rapture and terror becomes one of temperament. One can also waver a long time between the two, to feel them both at once. When this happened to me, I was charmed by what I heard, and at the same time terrified that I was going mad. No one could be singing in my bedroom at that hour, it had to be in my head. ,The first time I clung to the idea that it was a dream, just a dream, a rather poetic one at that. The late hour and the fact that I was in bed supported this theory so well that I managed to fall back asleep, dodging the essential question: Who was singing?

The second time, both theories, dream and madness alike, were shattered. Someone was definitely singing in my room and not in my head. I turned on the light and got up. Trembling, I looked for whoever had woken me. It was a melancholy tune. The voice was soft and sad, and also muffled. The words remained incomprehensible to me.

I'd given up on a bed to leave my books as much room as possible. All I had instead was a sleeping bag on a sofa between my desk and a French window I opened just a crack, once a year, to air the room out. I'd made my way round my desk when I found myself facing the spot the voice was coming from. It was welling up from the mummy. Her features were hidden by her mask, a simple piece of wood sculpted and painted in a summary but not tasteless fashion. It evoked the face it covered with greater precision than might a mass-produced mask slapped on a factory mummy. And that song issued from beneath this mask, through lips supposedly sealed forever.

I reached out my hand. I'd done so often, my heart pounding at first, and then with less emotion as time passed. Now my hand trembled and my heart pounded anew.

The singing didn't stop when the mask fell away. Had she noticed a difference? Could she even do so? Nothing led me to believe she could. Her expression hadn't changed, her gaze was fixed as ever, mysterious as I'd always known it to be. It was just that her thin lips were moving, rounding or flattening to form words that didn't make any sense to me. What breath, from what oblivion, lent her life? But did I myself even know why I was here in this world? I hadn't the slightest, but did my best to accept my condition. In her way, this creature shared that condition of being alive. None of the rest was any of my business.

Little by little, her voice faded away, like that of someone dying. What was I to do? Call the police, or an ambulance? Alert the press? To do so felt like informing on an infinitely innocent and vulnerable being. I made do with replacing the wooden mask as gently as possible, and then I went back to bed.

On other nights, which followed at ever closer intervals, I was awakened by the mummy singing the same melancholy song. I soon knew it by heart without understanding the words. It sounded Breton to me. One day, while delivering a manuscript to an editor, I ran into Paol Keruzore. He was known to be neither patient nor polite, but we'd met before. With his surly permission, I sang him the lament I'd learned phonetically.

"You should be ashamed, slaughtering a charming song like that!" he finally said.

"It's because I don't understand a word of it. What does it mean?"

"It means-let's see… `Too early in the season falls the apple, no hand will polish it upon a sleeve to make it shine… No mouth will bite into the apple fallen still green, hard as a rock, without sweetness or sap… Pity the fallen apple, fear the wind that blows through the orchards, the wicked wind that spared me not…' Where did you dig that up, anyway?"

I told him the first lie that came to mind. My nursemaid had sung it to me as a boy,

"A pity you didn't learn to speak Breton at her teat," Paol spat.

Then, with an uncharacteristically civil wave, he walked off, humming a Breton air.

I always took the mummy's mask off when she was singing. At first, for as long as it lasted, I sat on a chair I'd pulled up beside her. Later, I fell into the habit of going back to work. One night, a little while after my encounter with heruzore, she stopped and turned her head toward me. Up till then, I'd thought she was only singing for herself. To tell the truth, I wasn't sure she knew I was there. I was proved wrong that night. I saw a pale, thin smile cross her lips. The contrast was striking between the deep, fixed brilliance of her eves and the hesitant expression on the rest of her face.