Chapter 2
“Your shoes, Cesar,” Carl spoke, delivering the latter his boots, which glimmered neath the feeble light.
“Danke, Herr.” Cesar stood, his feet yet shod in the leather cabaret flats, now part of them and rejecting their primordial skin.
“May I have my shoes returned or do you insist upon keeping them? I had yours ever so finely cleaned that it would be a shame were you not to don such shoes,” Carl told him. Not once did it occur to Cesar that in Carl’s fabrication of the shoe shop of a companion, the altruist would have had to traverse the city barefoot in the mire that is Parisian February.
Taciturn as always, Cesar removed the cabaret shoes and on Carl’s feet he slipped them, an act so foreign in its tenderness he shuddered.
“Where are you from, Cesar?,” another voice suddenly inquired. Clement had drawn himself up from the ground and, lilting in his speech, interrogated Cesar.
“What an intrusive, improper question. Alas, I am from Chester, Cheshire, Britain. I presume you are a local, a parisian.”
Proud he was, yet shuddering at the thought of his hand unto the German’s foot.
“I am indeed Parisian. You need not be so pompous, I only tried inquiring about basic knowledge we should know as colleagues. Britain is a country of a most rare beauty.”
“Another snobbish Frenchman who finds Britain idyllic, pink and ribboned. Have you seen the prices, Monsieur? I would starve to death were I back in my nation of birth. Pray, Lord, I have escaped hell!”. His hand gesticulated viciously, his blazer flagellating the air and his visage, once apathetic, now looking as if one hand grasped as they would a plastic bag.
“Come here, Clement, my baby, come here. You need to pay heed to the whims of Monsieur Cesar. He’s being funky, pay no heed,” Tanzi called, dragging Clement as a mother would in attempting to remove her child from a swingset.
“Mademoiselle Constance, leave me, for I am a grown man and can take care of myself. It was no episode or occurrence, it was merely me speaking to another man. Take your leave.”
“No, no Clement. You mustn't get upset.”
“I did not get upset, Mademoiselle. I was merely conversing. Do you sight displeasure upon my countenance?”“Oh, but I see nothing but I am aware you feel such things. It is impossible for you, an ill man, not to feel so.”
“I am not ill, Mlle. Constance, I simply suffer. I am not an infant, so treat me not as one but as a man.”
He could not adequately terminate his argumentation, for the guard(which had hitherto lacked in presence) had been summoned at once and all of them ushered away.
Once in the street, they all parted with frigid goodbyes, save Cesar, who had taken his departure with no declarations.
In such tedious times, one shan’t follow Cesar to his dull lodgings, in his monotony and nausea. One shall go down the steps of the Saint-Placide station, turn, hop in the car, glance around in hopes of sighting a lone man, his hair like a wheaten field and his hands unto a lawyer’s tome. How deeply he, Clement, wished for his soul he would feel clemency. He desired that he should no longer feel that guilt which pervaded his life, a life afore joyful yet now drenched in condemnation.
How I wish I would not disappoint Maman and Papa. How I wish everyone would treat me like a grown man! I am no longer a child, yet as such they treat me. O, what have I done but prove myself? Nothing I have done in this life was for myself. I wish they would see that, all of them, that I chose criminology not to be selfish but because of them. They told me I wasn’t lawyerish enough, that my manner was not diplomatic and with my illness I shan’t have succeeded yet now, now they reproach me for having done so. They tell me in their steps I too should have stepped, not tracing a path of my own. Shall jump into the Seine, cut the path short? No, I shall strive. Were I to give in to this, they would never realise the wrong and solely blame that psychosis which tears me apart. Why do I strive so for the admiration of those who shunned me as a child? Why must I satisfy them, why do I crave such things? Oh, my name is all a sham, I bear no clemency for any solely for those parents who offered me so many opportunities yet I failed them. Epochs of lawyers and yet, I chose to disobey. They never told me they disapproved and yet I feel it in tonality and gaze. How my papa still treats me like a child and mama like a grown man who needs succor and care. I did nothing for myself. All I did was won a criminology grant. That I truly worked for and I deserved.
And with this last element Clement found solace in, he slept soundly, his sleep undisturbed by the bustling metro carts passing neath’ his sill or by the weeping of another on the road.
Little did this sleeping seraph know that nothing he had ever built for himself had his parents not tampered with. The quilts he believed his own money had bought was the allowance his parents offered him. The grant on which he had studied had been placed in his hands by the gentle mutterings and offers of his maman. The call which had offered this occupation to him had been naught but the fruit of his mother’s ringings, her nails scratching upon the rotary dial. His sleep was so sound solely due to his mother’s tender hand which crammed his gullet with drugs.
All Clément would seem to say to the entourage was-
“Maman, Papa, I promise I shall the following year pursue le Droit.”
He turned twenty. Thirty. Fourty. Fifty. Yet, le Droit never came.
“Oui, mon Clément, I am most certain you will.”
That was all they would say when such promises would be hearkened year after year.
Alas, the investigations pursued. One day followed another in rapid succession and all was but a haze to them who investigated the inquities of the museum’s easternmost wing. Many documents they studied, into origins they inquired and evidence they laid their hands upon yet of naught sense could be made.
“M. Cesar, but oh, that is not how you must deal with such delicate evidence,” Tanzi would scold. “M. Cesar, I am certain that who murdered these innocents was nothing but some wretched atheist in lust for removing the lives of blessed Christians.”
“Where do such bastardly ideas spur from, Constance?”, he would inquire. The reply would be one of great lengths. How see, yonder neath’ the murdered girl’s bosom, lay a rosary and upon her lover’s, a catholic pendant depicting the infant Jesus. In the third’s bag, a Bible, stained by the crimson which had flown from his chest. Their sinful killing had occurred in the presence of a precious depiction of Saul of Tarsus, whom the wretch most certainly took for influence. In hatred for the blessed, the killer had extracted the unorthodox weapon by the name of sword and the three stabbed in viscera, breast and nape.
“But Constance, they were stabbed with a kitchen knife. Christianity has no significance,” he would present his appeals to reason, yet she would cry.
“It was one of the wretched heathens, I tell you Monsieur. They shan’t leave unscathed. If we do not catch them, God shall send the guilty to damnation.”
“I shan’t let God do the job I’ve been hired to fulfil.”
Thus they bickered, their voices disturbances to the seraphims residing on the walls and the women of the tableaus. In night and day no harmonious plane was found or sought and the five found themselves in constant argumentation. In Cesar’s mind all but pragmatism remained, yet, the memory of Carl’s leather cabaret shoes still retained its puissance in his mind.
“My Clement, that is such stupidity. How could it be an exhibit committing these murders? Carl, move, dear,” Tanzi would cry out and her hands would strike the little German aside.
“Touch me not!”, he would say, drawing into the shadows.
“Constance, that is not how one behaves. Come Carl, sit yourself,” Cesar would tell him and Carl would, upon the marbled ground sit.
An endless cycle it was, and for days this abuse pursued. Her hands would fondle his fine silks, he would retreat and once more be summoned and his head would then lay upon Cesar’s knee. To the unthreaded tweed his hairs would stick, be drawn from their root and carried to Cesar’s home, unto his quilts and cabinet.
“Cesar, I must thank you for being so gentle to me,” Carl would say, his ceramic visage staring at the other as a doll at the girl who, with her last cent, purchased it from the antiquity stand. Only Cesar was much coarser than she and the doll he would drop when he spoke harshly. The ceramic would fall unto the frigid floor and be torn asunder by its cruelty and ineptitude to cushion the descent.
“I am not gentle, I am merely polite,” Cesar would respond and he would draw to his feet, brushing his trousers, those fine blackened stems springing off and to the ground whirling.
“Now I must thank you for being so cruel to me, Cesar.”
“Why, why do you thank me for that?”
“For you show me that you are imperfect. Were you unerring, I would not bear such affinity for you.”
And thus, their days continued. An incessant cycle of abuse, adoration and lethargy.
“Carla Ndiaye, bring me a coffee,” Cesar would order the girl in the kaftan.
“I am not a maid, I am an investigator and my name is not Carla,” Carlotte would tell him, but to no avail. Nobody would come to her defense for much too absorbed were all in their own problems.
“I don’t truly care, I merely want coffee. You don’t look like an investigator with those frilly clothes and improper braids.” His eyes narrowing, he would look her down as a scarab unto a wall who, given the opportunity, would squash as a mere fly neath’ his thumb.
She would comply, for fear of consequence, and the coffee to him would bring. How dearly she wanted to tell him ‘and you look naught like an investigator in your unthreaded clothes and with hair unwashed’ yet, for fear of everything, she stood in silence, a cappuccino in her left hand.
Out of the quintet, her work was vital yet she, taciturn. She existed and to the room gave life and essence, her braids unto her knees and her kaftan silks unto the ground. To all in the room she was nothing. To all but Clément, for she was the sole to whom he was more than a child in the finely tailored suits of a middle-aged man. To his theories she would listen and her head nod, to him in times hard she would listen and his tie would arrange not as a wife but as a friend.
“Carlotte, I must prove myself. To them I am nothing but a decrepit soul in a body which has not yet ceased its biological workings. O Carlotte, they treat me as a child or as a danger, naught betwixt. Why is Ophelie calling me now?” Clement spoke, his sleeved hands tearing at his jacquard redingote.
“No one isn’t calling you, Clement. Let us go outside where we can talk without another overhearing. Come, then.”
“No, no I don’t want to go! Take me not, take me not. I wish to see my Ophelie, where is she? They took her from me. Were I a man of the law I have promised myself, I could have, perchance, still have a right to see her. Yet, I refused. I refused, for it was the law which took her from me. My sole child, the fruit of my love, taken away and for what, Carlotte? Because of a diagnosis written on a paper? My actions never showed anything but love. I hear her callings and I weep. Yet when I hear her, I hearken a baby’s gentle coo, for I shall never know true her voice now that she is a woman.”
“Why did you let them take her from you, Clement? You are a man of wealth, anything could do with bribes and monetary means in such ages.”
“Why, indeed. I had morals and I fought the just way, yet nobody would take me seriously solely because of a paper. My own maman, unto the witness’ stand, testified I had taken vicious action against my baby in its very crib. Papa spoke of times I smited and battered his reliquary, how his law books I tore and knives unto my flesh fondled. Yet none of this I recall, it is solely in my mind for they have projected it thus and I have come to undoubtedly believe such conceptions. Coralie, she pledged that I had assaulted her and the crib set on fire. A madwoman, how could I have done such a thing to my own infant? To have endangered my child would have rendered me useless, paralysed by guilt which yet benumbs me.”
“I understand, Clement.”
“No, you do not.”
On such sour notes, the investigation always came to its diurnal conclusions. Clement would speak and be disregarded, Carl would lay strewn across the marble floor, the women would talk and the statue that Cesar Jowitt was would stand upright, steadfast and taciturn, pondering.
Upon being uprooted from his apathy, drawing up from the ground he would go.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Cesar!”Carl would call after him. Yet to no avail, for a reply was never returned, only frigidity and tacitness.
Upon the metro steps his foot he laid, in the insalubrious cart once more glanced around and in sighting solely meagre, wretched persons, he withdrew his gaze and shifted it to the bedraggled seats, besmirched in what could be either mud or excrement.
“Why people romanticize such hideous a city befuddles me.”
Yet, as he so defamed the city which hosted him ever so warmly, afore him, through the window, presented Montmartre. Mid its clamor and by its steps beams of eventide struck, their gentle light falling unto his patched coat.
What a most hideous city.
Comments