The Blind Accordionist Read online

  Ellis didn’t come to the door to see what the noise was. They went to the bedroom, but the bed was empty. He’ll have gone out painting, they told each other, a day like this. So they went to look for him, by the shore, looking inland, but he wasn’t there, and he wasn’t in the field either, and they walked farther, but he wasn’t there, or there, or there.

  They went back to the town, because—obviously—Ellis would have gone there to find Paul, because Ellis would have worried. They would find him, surely, sitting in the post office, or eating soup at the Widow’s House.

  When they got to the quay, they saw Paul’s boat moored there. Paul felt a cold shadow cross his path. The boat shouldn’t be here, at the quay. It was out of place. Paul hadn’t noticed it missing from its usual mooring, what with the chaos of the night, and didn’t understand why it was here now. His boat was empty.

  One of the other men had towed it back in, to this side of the island, empty.

  “It must have been the storm,” he said. “The storm must have dragged it out,” he said, full knowing his boat was always tethered so firmly the strongest of winds couldn’t take it. “The storm,” he said. “It must have been the storm.” But it hadn’t been the storm, and he knew it hadn’t.

  “Ellis,” they told him. “Last night. After you’d gone. Ellis took it out. He wanted to find you. He went after you. We found it drifting, this morning, after you’d left.”

  Ellis had taken the boat, Paul’s boat, Ellis who never went to sea, the night Paul had chosen the land because he knew the water was treacherous.

  “Hope?” he asked, and no one replied.

  And here we could talk of the passing of time, but time did not pass for them. Time folded into itself. Paul told himself the story over and over and over again, to get its details right, to think of the forks and turns of it, to think of how it could be told differently and reach a different ending, then rued the treachery of the story itself, which always came to the same conclusion, no matter how many possibilities it offered. Jenny stopped singing. Paul and Jenny did not even notice each other grow older, only slower, perhaps, a grey hair or wrinkle appearing, but this seemed nothing more than a cloud passing, or driftwood washing up on the shore. They thought of the years, years, they had passed together, and they were nothing more than minutes, all that memory compressed into a few moments of sensation that had impressed themselves onto their minds like the burn of lightning. The immensity of their experience did not escape them; a sense of scale did. This story is nothing but a tiny speck on a vast map, a mere blemish in the eye of the creator.

  Little changed on the island. Life happened. They heard of wars, of countries being formed, then no longer existing. Maps were redrawn. They heard of the spread of railways, the invention of the telegraph. A French photographer came and took pictures of the town and its inhabitants, but not of Paul or Jenny. Bigger ships began to arrive, taking advantage of the deep, cold water. The tide came in and went out; the wind blew; the grass grew, and the cows ate it. Paul and Jenny lived alone for the next forty years. Bushes grew from the eaves of the house, buckets placed to catch the drips from the leaking roof rusted, the whole place slouched, making its own unspoken accommodation with the wind. Some days they passed together, others apart. Jenny still gathered flowers, and sometimes, when she believed herself alone, sang, the wind her only harmony, her songs without metre or time, and any melody as slow as the land. Paul’s boat let in water, and his beard grew. He continued to fish or to carry when he could.

  At this point, there should have been a third storm, but there wasn’t, although Paul would later remember the sulphurous light, the green ray. It was one of the new ships, the big ones Paul had seen in the offing or up close, looming over the small port. Too big to sink, they’d said, so big you wouldn’t even know you were on a ship, with huge nets that could rake the depths. It had docked with a strange cargo: tangled amid the silvery thrash and heave of its trawl, a young man, drowned, quite dead. At first they’d thought him one of the crew, gone overboard, a terrible accident, such things happen, but once laid on a slab, they saw he wasn’t, and word went around, and they called on Paul and Jenny.

  And there he was, as pale and beautiful as the last dawn they’d seen him: Ellis, still dressed in the only coat he had, as if sleeping.

  “He must be cold, he must be so cold,” said Paul when he saw him, and pulled a blanket over his face.

  When they laid Ellis’s body in the shifting ground, Paul wore his Sunday best, and Jenny sang a song no one recognised but everyone felt they knew.

  I heard this story from my father, but I never believed it, and now he is dead, too.

  SOSIA AND THE CAPTAIN

  “COINCIDENCE IS INDEED a strange thing,” said the lawyer, in the dining room of a hotel in a town that, in all honesty, had seen better days, following up a tale told by someone I’ve now quite forgotten, about another chance encounter or unexpected recognition. “I once heard this story about a young woman, somewhere in France, I believe,” he continued, being a man who liked the sound of his own voice but who was nevertheless interesting, “who’d discovered her husband was having an affair, and decided in her grief and distraction to throw herself off the top of a parapet. She did so, and on landing hit the errant husband on his way back into their house, killing him stone dead. She survived, I believe, though I have no idea what then became of her.”

  “A fine tale indeed, but it surely never happened,” replied one of his fellow diners. “Some piece of gossip or tittle-tattle, something fashioned for the mere sake of a barroom anecdote.”

  “It surely did, Sir,” replied the lawyer, who was my brother. “I read of it in a newspaper and have kept the illustration.” He had, it is true. He kept a large collection of cuttings of such unlikely tales, and their gruesome illustrations, in several languages.

  “An illustration?” retorted the sceptic. “The handiwork of an overheated, underpaid mind, I shouldn’t wonder. Now, if there were a photograph…”

  The conversation turned to the various merits of the art of photography (and, indeed, if it were even worthy of being called an “art”) and its pretensions (or otherwise) to truth (and, therefore, beauty) before turning back in on itself (as conversations involving my brother the lawyer were wont to do) to consider the nature of coincidence once again, and its role in photography, photography being the very “coincidence of time, place, and light,” as one gentleman (myself) suggested.

  “But this is not a story about coincidence,” interrupted a voice from the back of the room, the voice of someone who, up until now, had been quietly seated alone, taking little apparent notice of us gabbling topers. Though the voice was deep, its lilt suggested something other to us, and as we turned to look, we noted that what we had, from the corner of our eyes, taken to be merely yet another solitary gent was in fact a woman—a rather mannishly dressed one, perhaps, but notably handsome—in her later middle years. “Not coincidence, no, nor irony, nor tragedy. It’s a story about love.”

  “Love?” asked the lawyer.

  The woman nodded.

  “And what form of love would that be?”

  “Love takes many forms,” she said, “but there is only one way to speak of it.”

  The lady was invited to join us, but declined and continued her speech from where she sat. Despite having remained near invisible for most of the evening, the woman was, it seemed, rather used to being able to command attention when necessary, as we all found ourselves turning toward her as if we were heliotropic plants.

  “Your story is most interesting,” she continued, scarcely moving her glass of brandy or raising her voice, “and though I cannot vouch for its authenticity, the truth is that such things happen more often than we may care to admit.”

  “It sounds very much like you have your own story to tell,” said someone (possibly myself).

  “The story is, I own,
in its way, rather similar to a story in which I once found myself a participant.”

  “And what story would that be?”

  She paused, and took another sip of the brandy. “It’s all so long ago now,” she said. “I’m not quite sure I can remember it all.” But we were primed and implored her to continue, and she did.

  “I was in Paris,” she began, and we settled, and we listened. “I travelled widely in those days, unlike now, when I am so much more limited. I was passing one of those riverbank bouquinistes when my eye happened to be caught by a particular photograph on sale. Upon closer inspection it turned out it was not exactly a photograph but a very carefully pencilled drawing. I had a professional interest, you see. Back then, I was a practising photographer. An unusual profession for a woman, certainly, if it was indeed a ‘profession’ at all—needless to say, I made a scant living from it—but an unusual profession for anyone in those days, though it was already burgeoning, even back then.

  “The picture that had piqued my curiosity was that of what appeared to be an opera singer, a slender yet full-throated woman in an extravagant gown and clutching an even more extravagant bouquet in the act of taking a bow, having triumphantly acquitted her role as Violetta, or Marguerite, or Eurydice, perhaps.

  “I asked the vendor who the drawing depicted and was greeted with some surprise. Why, said the little man in a tone of astonishment, it is Frieda Capgras! I had never heard of the woman, and told him so, only to be informed that she was currently the étoile of the entire city, making me feel somewhat the ignorant foreigner. I immediately purchased the print and asked him if he had any other images of the woman, but he told me they were selling so quickly it was impossible to get hold of more. Before he could say anything else, I slipped the picture into my bag and made off, having already resolved to find this woman as soon as was humanly possible.

  “You are wondering, of course, what had intrigued me so about this picture, and what had made me take such a course of action. The reason is a strange one, and I scarce believe it myself, even now. When I saw that picture that day, I was amazed, because I was looking at myself. Famous opera singer Frieda Capgras was the exact image of me, identical, indistinguishable. Two drops of water could not have been more similar. Despite her flamboyant attire, her features spoke—the line of the jawbone, the arch of the brow, the prominence of the nose, and the lips set like a stormy horizon…This was my face, my physiognomy, my self. The effect was astonishing, to the extent that I found myself briefly wondering if I had ever sung in an opera and been feted for my performance, despite full well knowing that no such thing had ever occurred.

  “I made enquiries and found that she was due to sing again in a week’s time, at the Palais Garnier, no less, but not a single ticket was available and no amount of money or influence would be enough to procure one. I tried to find out where she was staying, if she were resident in Paris or, like myself, a visitor to the city, but was told that her whereabouts were a closely kept secret, and that she guarded her privacy fiercely. Many admirers had pursued her, all in vain—not because they had been rebuffed, merely because they had failed to find her.

  “In the meantime, as sometimes happens when one chances across a hitherto unknown word or phrase or idea and begins to see it everywhere, I found I could not escape from La Capgras. Her image stared at me from bills pasted to walls, from the covers of the Petit or the Siècle or other collections of faits divers that populated the newsstands, or from postcards that I bought whenever I saw them. And whether painted or drawn or gravured, and whether in the role of farmgirl, princess, or ancient divinity, no matter how her hair had been arranged or what outlandish makeup she wore, she was always, always identical to me.

  “The week passed, and I decided to go to the theatre anyway, and to loiter by the artists’ entrance. Although the street was murky, a significant crowd had already gathered. No one saw anyone entering or leaving, and yet, from inside, word emerged that Capgras had taken the stage. The same eerie thing happened at the end of the performance—even from outside, we could hear the thunder of applause, the cries, the cheers, the whistles, and we waited, for hours, it seemed, for even a single figure to emerge, until all the lights of the house had gone dark, but none came. It was only when the crowd of well-wishers had begun to disperse, disconsolate, that I noticed a small, shambling figure wearing the ill-fitting uniform of a concierge seem to lock the door of a storage cellar and merge into the night. The figure walked with exactly the same gait as mine.

  “Capgras had no further engagements in the capital, though the papers announced a tour with appearances in Biarritz, Nice, Lausanne, Baden-Baden, and Karlovy Vary. I eventually tracked her down in Milan, a bleak place at its best, though the fog there is rather special.

  “Though of the gentler sex, I am not without my wiles, so forewent the opportunity to see her sing and instead gave a small favour to a friendly maschera who in turn handed me the key to La Capgras’s dressing room. Yes—when one is truly determined, almost anything can be achieved. I sat and waited, listening to her—finally!—as her voice trailed through the winding backstage corridors, as enchanting as night, at once aethereal and corporeal. Such a sound I had never heard before, and, to be frank, never have since.

  “When eventually the applause and calls for yet another encore died away, the door burst open and she entered alone, a cloud of perfume and silk, the odour of her perspiration and heavy stage makeup distinct beneath it. She seemed unsurprised to find me waiting, as if dressing room intruders were a commonplace—which, perhaps, they were—or, knowing what I would come to know later, as if she had been waiting for me all along.

  “I myself, on the other hand, was astonished. I could almost have been looking in a mirror. Although I had seen her likeness, pictures are often heavily tinted or pencilled, and I wasn’t prepared for her actual appearance. The possibility of twinship, that La Capgras and I had somehow been separated at birth, had, of course, occurred to me as soon as I first saw her picture, though my family circumstances being what they were—another story, one which we do not have time for now—I knew this an impossibility. And now that I saw, I could see that we were not quite identical: She was younger than me. Only by a few months—a year, perhaps, no more—but she definitely retained a flush of juvenescence that I, alas, had lost.

  “She sat at her dressing table and hurriedly began to remove her makeup while almost casually asking who I was. I began to tell her my name but immediately found myself struck by a kind of stammer, which has from time to time afflicted me since my early youth. To explain: My given name is Cecilia, but as a child—due to this impediment, or perhaps mere childish verbal stumbling—I found the name, my own name, difficult to pronounce, and instead came out with an approximative Sosia. The name has stuck to me ever since.

  “ ‘Sosia,’ she said, flatly, without surprise, as though trying the word out in her mouth. It seemed to please her. ‘Welcome! My name, as you must know, is Frieda Capgras, but also Letizia Shartz-Metterklume, and sometimes Mathilde Schwob, though I have also been called Jane Shore, Jára Cimrman, Pierre Andrézel, and—once—Elsa Plötz.’ As she listed her names, she hastily undid her gown and began rummaging in a voluminous canvas travelling bag from which she whisked a military uniform, its nation and rank unfamiliar to me, then slipped it on as easily as a shift. ‘But you, Sosia my dear,’ she continued, ‘may call me—the Captain!’ She saluted, and I saluted back, having no other idea of what to do. ‘When in trouble,’ she proclaimed, ‘or when in doubt, or when in time of difficulty—pretend to be someone else!’ We stole out of the back of the theatre and I, of course, was immediately enamoured.

  “It was a ruse, she claimed, as we hurried through fog-lined streets, to avoid the mass of her adoring fans, many of whom could be positively tedious, if not worse. We soon found ourselves in a cab, and then, not long after, in a shabby hotel somewhere on the road to Lodi. It was the kind of p
lace I would become familiar with over the next few months, as we made our way through the flat hinterlands of northeastern Italy, subsisting on dishes of sloppy rice and boiled chicory served up in railway station cafés and roadside osterie. I had never, I thought, been so happy in my life. I had always wanted a life of adventure, and now one was being handed to me.

  “In Treviso, we posed as twin sisters from an aristocratic family, inventing our own private language for the whole evening to conceal our origins from a generous admirer. In Rovigo, we had to spend the night under a hedge after the Captain believed she had been spotted. In Bassano del Grappa, we had to escape in a hurry when the aforementioned generous admirer’s pocketbook was discovered in one of the Captain’s many travelling bags by an overcurious laundrymaid. Despite her fame, the Captain had much to conceal, it seemed.

  “It was only when we reached Venice that she seemed to achieve some form of tranquillity. She was due to sing again, and this always gave her peace. Only when performing, perhaps, could she be her true self—though what that true self might have been, I was never quite sure. It was during our stay in La Serenissima that she finally began to tell me something of herself. She was a singer, of course, a divine one, but that, she told me, was not her real vocation, merely a mask to cover her true profession: the Captain was a spy.

  “I wasn’t taken aback by her revelation. Things began to make sense. Not only her capacity for disguise and the rapidity with which she accomplished it, nor her constant worry about being found out, but mostly—I own—the mystery about the contents of her travelling bags. We had, after all, managed to adventure all this way in near-constant possession of her numerous valises, suitcases, Gladstones, satchels, clutches, and carpetbags. Apart from the few occasions when she had trusted someone enough to take them on for us, she had never let her collection leave her sight. It was only in Venice that I was allowed to explore the riot of costumery and millinery they contained: stage costumes fashioned from peacock feathers, sequins, and wonder; a quartermaster’s store of military uniforms—dress and battle; one very large black overcoat that was big enough to house the both of us; shoes ranging from the most delicate of ballet pumps to stout Oxfords to fiendishly high leather boots that would take an age to lace; two men’s suits; bolero jackets of French satin and Florentine velvet; hooks and eyes; buttons, of pearl, of brass; masks.