Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

At one point during the service Uncle Simon leaned over to us and tilted his chin toward the back of the nave. A rather chubby woman with permed blond hair and a veil was hanging back, standing beside a pillar, clutching an embroidered handkerchief. We didn’t know her: could this be “Solange”? Dad had once admitted to Simon that he had a mistress, a client from his bank branch, a “very beautiful woman” (those were his words) who was also married. Their relationship began in the safety deposit room, under neon lights, surrounded by locked drawers, a setting that made their liaison all the more unimaginable. According to Simon, she and Dad were still seeing each other even when our mother had to go into the hospital. They had broken off all contact after her death, as if, with Mom dead, it was now impossible for Dad to be unfaithful to her. It must have been Solange: she left very quickly, without saying hello to anyone.

The police inquiry had retraced what Dad did on his last day. He must have caught the 10:15 train to Courtenay and the bus to Montcardon, sitting at the back, as he always did, then walked to his little house on the rue du Mail. There he set up his incident in the barn, a cinder-block building attached to a windowless wall. But beforehand he had had lunch in the local restaurant. The owner hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Dad had the dish of the day, mushroom lasagna, drank a glass of Côtes du Rhône, and had a decaf coffee. It was this decaf that most surprised the inspector. Our father’s doctor had warned him to avoid caffeine, but what difference would it make on a day like that? Perhaps he wasn’t yet thinking about dying. Or had simply developed a taste for decaf.

Dad left no letter, nothing that explained anything. Paul and I searched through the house. Nothing. I resented him for that, I still do. I’d have been happier if he had left with a declaration of paternal love, the only one he would ever have made to us. A sort of absolution for having failed to see or notice anything. A few tender sentences we could have clung to while the coffin was being lowered into the ground. I spent many nights dreaming of that letter. It would have to start with the words “My sons, my dear sons …,” and I didn’t really give a damn about the rest. But Dad had always been the silent type, and it was a bit late now for him to change.

He must have lain down in his first-floor bedroom, the bedspread was still crumpled. He had taken out a few yellowed books — or perhaps they just hadn’t been put away. I had never known him to read those books, but I couldn’t see what to make of them. Still, I did note down the titles, as if they held some impenetrable secret: Mallarmé’s Verse and Prose , the Teubner edition of the Odyssey , Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth , and an old 1898 edition of Leon Bloy’s The Ungrateful Beggar . Its epigraph was a quote from Barbey d’Aurevilly: “The most beautiful names borne by men were the names given by their enemies.”

Dad had forgotten to close the iron gate, as well as the door to the barn. Unless he had actually left them open deliberately so that someone would notice, would think there had been a burglary. That was what happened. A neighbor found his body the same day, shortly before nightfall. The pathologist had set the time of death at about four in the afternoon.

No, the insurance would not pay, and Lecourbe would bring in a lot less than anticipated. Paul also suggested dropping the price of Montcardon, to close the deal swiftly, and to give it to an estate agent’s office in Paris. I agreed: of course, the agents in Courtenay weren’t going around telling prospective buyers that the previous owner had hanged himself in the barn, but the facts always came out in the end, and the sale had already fallen through three times.

Paul said a few more words about what an idiot our father’s doctor was and the elegance of the bank’s last gesture, and we hung up.

Paul wanted to sort everything out as quickly as possible. It was his way of running away, of hurrying through grief. Back when our mother died, he had set up house in Milan for no apparent reason. He found work in an architect’s office, pitching up for a few days every Christmas with a big panettone and some Asti Spumante. His exile lasted three years, then he came back to France. Once the inheritance had been carved up, I knew he would go away again, and that we would gradually become what we had always been to each other, although we never admitted it: strangers. I thought he would get back in touch with me when his children were born, when he had them. I hadn’t imagined for one moment that I myself might be a father.

I felt like calling Paul back, telling him what a family could be like, or just two brothers. Telling him about the affection I felt for him, for my younger brother who had been too many years younger for me for a long time, whom I got to know so little and so badly, also telling him how hard it would be for me to lose the scraps I had left of my childhood. I didn’t do it. I thought of writing to him. I didn’t do that either.

I HAD A shower and went down to the cafe to read the Diário . It devoted most of page 3 to a long article about Pinheiro’s bronze coat of mail. This style of armor was a perfect copy of the lorica hamata that Roman legionaries took from the Celts and wore for six centuries. It was made of linked rings: each ring was connected to four others and sealed with a rivet known as a barleycorn, and this was illustrated with a detailed diagram. The rings were flattened and had a diameter of just a few millimeters, so the coat of mail comprised several hundred thousand of them. A peculiar detail: some of the rings had been soldered to wires connected to 4.5-volt batteries, as in toning belts athletes used for their abdominal muscles. The setup was absurd, though, given that bronze is a very good conductor so the power would inevitably be dissipated in short circuits.

The Diário ’s journalist had had an identical one made by a locksmith, who was kept busy for a whole week with the task. The alloy used was not commercially available, and he had had to order it from a foundry because no bronze sculpture had so much copper and so little pewter in it: there was also some arsenic which made the alloy harder, making the article more clean-cut. As he reproduced the original, the craftsman became convinced that Pinheiro’s coat of mail had been one of a limited edition of “at least half a dozen.”

For nearly three hours the journalist had worn the hat, bronze bangles, and chain mail, right next to his skin as Pinheiro had, although legionaries never actually wore it naked like this but over a linen shirt. Once the wires were connected to batteries, the experiment had become painful, far less because of the electrical current than because his body hair kept getting caught in the rings.

I covered all of this in my article, bolstering it with a few details on the capture of Rome by the Gauls under Brennus, to whom minor history owes the story of the geese at the Capitol — and to whom Roman military history owes this form of chain mail.

My brother Paul was given a Vercingetorix the Gaul outfit for his sixth birthday. A winged helmet as on cigarette packets, a brown cape in rough fabric, a wide sword, a round shield, and a plastic coat of mail. It was a family celebration, in the countryside at Montcardon. I was thirteen and bored, rereading old Tarzan and Bob Morane stories in our bedroom. My brother spent the day running all over the place in his Gallic chieftain’s costume; toward nightfall he wanted to go and play in the woods. My mother asked me to take him and play with him. I dug my heels in and she reprimanded me with a frown: “Vincent — it’s your brother’s birthday.”