I stayed in the basket for some time. I imagined it lifting from the roof, the floor littered with mail. Letters from men and women about to die, letters from the already dead. I would fly at last. Perhaps I would go to my death, my body broken and the pieces strewn across the forests around the border with Germany or tossed into the sea. Or perhaps I would land in Belgium, a place no one knew me. I would land, survive, walk free into a new city, raise a family there, teach them to sing opera. My very own García family.
I took the ring from my neck, slid it off its chain, tried it on my finger once again. The finger nearly took it. Another month of meals like the last and it might fit.
Eugène’s question about the ring had directed me to my own feelings, quiet all this time—the owner of the ring had not come once, had not written. He seemed to have accepted my departure. I thought of him standing at the door to the Empress’s chamber. My ruby rose glinting there by her bracelets.
The only death I feared was the one that kept me from him.
I loved him still.
§
As I undressed slowly in front of the mirror that afternoon, a terrible truth became visible.
My figure had returned but the color of my complexion had not. I was as white as the tree bark I’d eaten. Only my mouth, the aureoles of my breasts, my notch—only these had the faintest pink. I had undressed in some anticipation of preparing to undress entirely for Eugène. Aristafeo’s ring was a lurid green spark at my throat.
I took a rouge pot up and then set it down and withdrew to my bedroom instead, in horror, climbing into the bed and pulling the curtains at the sides shut, as if that could help. I remembered a story Natalya had told me once, in Baden-Baden, of a story her grandmother told her. We were speaking of Amina, of her nightly walks through town, how she had terrified her neighbors in the night, and Natalya said, She was most likely a vila.
Vila? I asked.
Vilas are very pale, she said to me. One day they wake up all white like a good tooth, and she pulled her lip and pointed. My own grandmother explained it to me this way when she told me this, she said, laughing. She didn’t have one good tooth. She was trying to get me to behave, to be a good girl, and told me they were women who wasted their lives in selfishness, she said, made to care for the forest.
If you hear them singing, you must run, Natalya had said. They sing so beautifully you will sit and listen forever until you die of hunger or grief, all your needs forgotten in listening to them. They can take the shapes of wolves, or swans, or . . . falcons.
She gasped then. Perhaps you know this! Perhaps you are one. This is your secret, is it not? And she laughed finally, and I relented and began to smile.
They are also equestriennes! They can ride horses without a saddle. Clearly, you are one. She told me if you charm them, you can get them to punish a man who broke his word. Will you punish a man for me? How can I charm you?
The present must be very fine, I’d said to her. We are a fickle kind. But, of course, I loved her best, and said I would do anything she asked.
How I missed her. I missed them all.
A crack of thunder came from outside, shocking me. The thunder shook the mirrors in my room, rattling them against the wall so that I swept the curtain back to see a swift blaze of lightning go by the window, like the passing of a god.
Rain fell next, hard, a torrent. I sat listening to it, my eyes closed. It had been so long since I’d heard thunder, I went to the windows and opened them then closed them, thinking to do better. I wanted to feel the rain on my skin.
The building was empty—if a neighbor or the concierge remained here, there was no sign. The tenor had taken me to the roof to show me the view early in our time here, and so I remembered the way as I climbed it.
I feared I would find him there, but there was nothing, not even the cats.
The streets below were empty, there was no one to see me naked on the roof as I let my bedclothes flutter around me in the wind. Paris seemed entirely empty but full of blooms—the flowers had returned with the spring, and someone, most likely the Commune, had lined the Place de la Concorde with bouquets at the monuments. The effect was like that of flowers for a vast funeral. Paris for a tomb. The rain now come to wash it clean, as it cleaned all graves.
The wind turned and the rain flensed me then, the cold spray shocking me. More lightning came, more thunder. I watched the bolts fly down and strike Paris and wished to be struck also. To be consumed by the storm. I wanted to run the silver rooftops of the city until I was taken up, and if I was a Vila now, watch as my arms turned to swan’s wings lifting into the sky. Wreathes of lightning for my crowns, and palaces of thunder, the size of mountains, mine to command. This would be how I would leave, and I would never return.
Instead, I stood there until I was sure I, too, would die soon. And I did not wish to die just yet, not before I could sing for Aristafeo one more time.
After that, I would welcome it.
I had no intention of leaving, of surviving Eugène, you see, despite his plans. There was no life after this. Nothing I wanted would remain, certainly not me. If everything I loved was to die again, I would be sure death took me, too.