The Club Dumas

She looked at him in silence. “You surprise me, Corso,” she said at last.

“I don’t know why. Anyone can read Milton. Even me.” She moved slowly around the bed, in a semicircle, keeping the same distance from it, until she was standing between him and the lamp. Whether by design or not, her shadow fell across the fragments of The Nine Doors spread out on the bedcover. “You’ve just mentioned the price that has to be paid.” Her face was now in darkness, against the light. “Pride, free­dom ... Knowledge. Whether at the beginning or at the end, you have to pay for everything. Even for courage, don’t you think? And don’t you think a lot of courage is needed to face God?”

Her words were a soft murmur in the silence that filled the room, the silence that slipped under the door and through the gaps around the window. Even the noise of the traffic in the street outside seemed to fade. Corso looked at one silhouette, then the other. First the shadow stylized across the bedcover and the fragments of the book, then the body standing against the light. He wondered which was more real.

“With all those archangels,” she, or her shadow, added. There was bitterness in her words, a contemptuous breath, a sigh of defeat. “Beautiful and perfect. As disciplined as Nazis.” At that moment she wasn’t young. She seemed to be car­rying the weariness of the ages: an obscure inheritance, the guilt of others, which he, surprised, couldn’t identify. He thought that maybe neither the shadow across the bed nor the outline against the light was real.

“There’s a painting in the Prado. Do you remember it, Corso? Men with knives standing before horsemen with their swords. I’ve always thought that the fallen angel looked like that when he rebelled. With the same lost expression as those poor bastards with only knives. The courage of desperation.” She moved slightly as she spoke, only a few inches, but as she did so, her shadow came nearer to Corso’s, as if it had a will of its own.

“What do you know about any of that?” he asked. “More than I want to.”

Her shadow now almost touched his. He retreated instinc­tively, leaving a section of light between them, on the bed.

“Imagine him,” she said in the same absorbed tone. “The most beautiful of the fallen angels plotting alone in his empty palace... He clings desperately to a routine he despises, but which at least allows him to hide his grief. To hide his failure.” The girl laughed gently, joylessly, as if from a great distance. “He misses heaven.”

The shadows had now come together and almost merged among the fragments of book snatched from the fireplace at the Quinta da Soledade. The girl and Corso, on the bed, with the nine doors of the kingdom of other shadows, or maybe the same shadows. Singed paper, incomplete clues, a mystery shrouded in several veils, by the printer, by time, and by fire. Enrique Taillefer swinging, his feet dangling in empty space, at the end of a silk cord. Victor Fargas floating facedown in the murky waters of the pond. Aristide Torchia burning at Campo dei Fiori, shouting the name of the father, not looking at heaven but at the ground beneath his feet. Old Dumas writing,

sitting at the top of the world. While here in Paris, very near where Corso now was, another shadow, of a cardinal whose library contained too many books on the devil, held all the threads of the plot.

The girl, or her outline against the light, moved toward Corso. Only a single step, but enough for his shadow to disap­pear under hers.

“It was worse for those who followed him.” It took Corso a moment to understand who she meant. “Those he dragged down with him: soldiers, messengers, servants by trade and by calling. Some mercenaries, like you... Many didn’t even realize that they were choosing between submission and freedom, be­tween God and mankind. Out of habit, with the absurd loyalty of faithful soldiers, they followed their leader in rebellion and defeat.”

“Like Xenophon’s ten thousand,” teased Corso.

She was silent a moment, surprised by his accuracy.

“Maybe,” she said at last. “Out in the world alone, they still hope that their leader will one day take them home.”

Corso bent to look for a cigarette, and his shadow reap­peared. Then he switched on the other lamp, on the bedside table, and the dark outline of the girl disappeared as her face was illuminated. Her light eyes were fixed on him. She seemed young again.

“Very moving,” he said. “All those old soldiers searching for the sea.”

She blinked, as if now, with her face in the light, she didn’t understand what he was saying. There was no longer a shadow, on the bed. The fragments of the book were merely pieces of charred paper. All he had to do was open the window, and a gust of air would blow them all over the room.