Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

This, however, was not what C experienced that day in 1887. He didn’t perceive the word as a familiar one that he’d once known. The letters were so unrecognizable that infidel wasn’t even a word to him. It was a solid blankness, a splotch of spilled ink, an absolute nothing.

He removed his spectacles, rubbed them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his face. The one printed word he didn’t recognize became two, and two seeped into a sentence. He squinted and shifted in his chair. He opened the window shade. He tried to reread the preceding paragraph. With relief, he experienced some recognition: he knew what pyramid signified, and bones, and defeat. Yes, he knew what each of those words meant, thank God. Pyramid, bones, defeat.

Awareness was painfully brief. Py… ra…, bo… n…, defe… a…. It was as if the light within each letter went out one by one, until each word was dark.

With rising concern, he turned to words in his native language. He tried and failed to read the front page of the newspaper that lay open on his desk. The titles of the books on his shelves were unintelligible. He couldn’t even read the name printed on his own stationery.

Naturally, he consulted his doctor. His doctor referred him to a specialist, who would go on to study him with interest and publish his case history. That C retained his speaking fluency gave the scientific community much to ponder. If you had conversed with him, you wouldn’t have seen signs of his impairment, which affected only his perception of printed words. In other ways, he lived a normal life.

For our purposes, however, it is enough to know that once C fully lost his ability to read, he never recovered it. I won’t even bother telling you about his first appointment with his doctor. What concerns us here is C’s adventure that day after he decided that all he needed was a good, brisk walk around the square to clear his confused mind.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was a student studying in Paris, I used to make my way to the Place des Vosges to get away from the bustle of the city. I remember how the streams of clear water gushed from the mouths of stone lions in the central fountain, and the groomed lawns bordered by metal wickets looked as perfect as if they’d been painted green. Linden trees grew in stately rows. An artificial hush seemed to mute the noise of traffic on the adjacent streets, as if a volume dial had been adjusted.

It was a warm spring that year, and I would sit on a bench and enjoy the sunlight on my face. One day, I fell into conversation with an old woman who was feeding crumbs to the pigeons. She saw my backpack and identified me as an American. She asked if I liked Paris. I said I liked it very much. She asked if I liked the Place des Vosges. I said I thought it was beautiful. Though the sky was clear, the woman wore a tan raincoat that was oversized on her small frame. Her cheeks had the deep creases of leather boots that had gone unworn for decades. She was eager to talk, and I was glad to have the chance to practice my French. When she asked, out of the blue, if I believed in ghosts, I said, “ Oui, madame, ” just to play along.

And so it was from this old woman that I learned something about the bloody history of the Place des Vosges. Long ago, she explained to me as she tore off pinches of bread to toss to the birds, the large square was occupied by the Palais des Tournelles, named for numerous turrets that decorated its rim. It was here, in the courtyard of the palace, that Henri II was wounded in a tilting match with the Duke of Montgomery, whose spear splintered against the king’s visor, sending shards through his eyes and into his brain. The king suffered for eleven days in painful agony before finally dying. In mourning, his wife, Catherine de’ Medici, ordered the palace to be destroyed.

This is where a ghost enters the story: the old woman claimed the Place des Vosges was haunted by Henri II. I asked her whether she had ever seen the king herself. “ Bien sûr! ” she said. It was impossible to predict when he would make an appearance. Some said he came on the nights when Venus was closest to earth, while others maintained that he could be seen during a lunar eclipse, or on the anniversary of his death, or birth, or marriage. He would appear in his suit of armor walking slowly across the grass to the fountain. He would remove his helmet with his broken visor and dip his hands into the water being spit out by one of the stone lions. He would wash the blood from his face, then he would put his helmet back on and walk away.

The old woman was fourteen years old when she had first seen him, on her way home from a tavern where she worked sweeping the floors. She had seen him three times since then. With a theatrical grimace, she tried to convey how frightening he was to behold. When her lips peeled back, I noticed that she was missing several upper molars.

I didn’t bother to wait around to see if the ghost of Henri II would make his entrance that evening. It had become increasingly obvious to me that the woman was suffering from senility. I could only hope that she was receiving adequate care. As for me, though I appreciate a good ghost story, I thought I could tell the difference between fiction and fact—until I stumbled across the story of C.

My sense of C is that he was even more of a skeptic than yours truly. Though he was a dutiful Catholic and went to confession once a week, he much preferred forms of knowledge that could be verified. When in doubt, he would always side with replicable proof. As for human attempts to expose the secrets of mortality, he believed that the truth was visible in every corpse: you could see just by looking at a man without a heartbeat that death was the end of life. There was no world elsewhere. C was convinced that heaven and hell existed only as imagined places. His pragmatic mind had no room for phantoms.

The fog that had settled over the city of Paris the day C lost his ability to read was so dense, and the winter dusk had come so early, that he could barely make out the outlines of the tall buildings across the square. He felt the unnerving sensation of being lost, though he knew exactly where he was. He resisted the urge to grab the arm of a woman who was walking ahead of him along the gravel path. Feathers sticking up from the bulb of her hat shook in the swirling mist. C gasped, mistaking the feathers for a live bird. He took a few steps backward and would have stumbled, but luckily his hand found the iron armrest of a bench. He lowered himself onto the seat. With a few deep breaths, he was able to calm his agitation.

The quiet of the square had a restorative effect, and he began to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the fog. It would have been fine weather for spectral illusions. C smiled at the thought. Of course he’d heard the silly stories about Henri II. He enjoyed the feeling of superiority that overcame him when he considered how susceptible other people were to superstition, how easily they would mistake a tree trunk, blurred by the heavy cloud, for the ghost of a dead king.

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Voices of passersby seemed to come from far away. He could almost fancy that he was at the seashore. He found himself remembering the sensation he’d loved so much when he was a young boy and let the gentle waves wash the sand over his toes.

A nearby cough had the startling effect of shattering glass. C blinked. That’s when he noticed the man at the opposite end of the bench. He didn’t know how long the man had been there—probably he had just arrived. He wore an old-fashioned sack suit with a tailcoat that was unbuttoned, revealing a plaid vest and the froth of a white ruffled shirt. His black cravat was tied in a bow and brushed against the rough curls of his white beard. He had a pencil out and was writing on a piece of paper. His expression had the fixed aspect of a statue and gave little indication of his thoughts. From C’s perspective, there was a melancholy air about the man, a perfuse, sad loneliness that kept him helplessly sealed off from the rest of humanity.