The Fugitivities, стр. 87

in a flash, waving to him in the rain on the rue des Écoles. Taking off her wet shoes, one foot undressing the other, and humming along to the score as Ingrid Bergman wandered through the ruins of Pompeii. Reading on the green bench with a piece of hair in her mouth. The loveliness of her forearms in the scattering sunlight at the café with the terrible omelets. Those moments and others recombine as they ride the Métro together, always to stations near the end of the line. Visit the palm trees in the greenhouses at Auteuil. The book market at the Parc Georges-Brassens. It’s summer and they walk together in the dusk as the great murmuring of the city surrounds them. They argue about poetry, about the poem of the future. He says it must be made of the best of the new and the best of the old. Arna says it will be what it always was, a form of music. And he knows she is right. That it could start right here, at a moment like this, in the thick of the midsummer’s night when the scent of hidden blossoms pulls an arrow through the spirit and all the songs of the human past seem close, as closely held as a letter in the hand. And set deep in the grain of this poem, she says, is the map of a feeling waiting to be discovered, the keys to our own language, which are always in reality just out of reach, like the lamps of the Luxembourg Gardens after dark. And he knows then, he is certain, that Arna will write it. Her whole life she’s been wanting to write songs, not one or two, but whole albums full, with words that will catch all the music she’s always carried in her head. They go along together, passing beside an old stone wall covered in ivy. Arna fingers the leaves and they clatter softly. He remembers then that this is the wall of the cemetery, one full of the illustrious dead, where Richard Wright is buried, and one branch of Arna’s ancestors shares a dilapidated crypt. They say nothing more until they reach the halo of a subway entrance at a little tree-ringed roundabout. They stay there a moment, inhaling the rank blossoms of the giant horse chestnuts, pulping their flowery, clotted droppings underfoot. The dry five-fingered chestnut leaves form a papery darkness, a ladder of shadows leading up into the unfathomable blackness beyond reach. Let’s go home, Arna says. Yes, he says. And they drop down below, waltzing into the Metropolitan’s musty electric air.

It was dawn and the bus thrummed along, following a small stream and a rail line that ran beside it. Jonah shook himself awake. He was cold and there were specks of crystallization in the windows. Every five miles or so they passed small clusters of abandoned buildings, sheds, faint chalk marks in the wilderness. The cordillera was long behind them and they had started coming out of the ravines and into the rolling foothills. The bus continued to descend on a long sloping turn into the vineyards of Mendoza. Jonah looked back. The distant rose-tinted peaks of the Andes were glowing in the clear morning air. Then the mountains disappeared, and they followed a river that wound through the plains and larger roads that passed through vineyards and cattle ranches before merging onto the highways where they joined the dusty big rigs and the commuter traffic roaring onward toward the capital.

—

The first thing Jonah did when he arrived in Buenos Aires was to email Octavio to tell him that he was going back to Paris. To his surprise, Octavio responded immediately, telling him to wait, insisting he needed to come down to BA anyway and that he would arrive in time to see him off. Jonah agreed to the plan and booked a plane ticket for the coming weekend. There were even more tourists than he remembered in San Telmo. He watched tango dancers performing to the music from The Godfather. He found a low-key bar where he could drink and generally keep to himself. He was done. He was ready to be home, to get back on his feet, to start over.

But then it was all undone. It was terribly wrong. The day before he was to leave, he learned that something had happened to Arna. He was getting a flood of emails about it now. The actual accident had happened several days before. He had sets of forwarded emails, and updated notes from his mother. Basically, they all told the same story. A bad collision, heavy impact and trauma. She had been stabilized but they needed to operate again. Her parents were insisting they bring her to the American Hospital in Neuilly where they had specialists.

Jonah tried to find out something more. But naturally there was nothing really to be gained by it. He circled the block. All day he was in and out of the cybercafé checking the emails again. Updates. No updates. The time he had paid for was up. He felt drained and consumed with rage all at once. The faces of perfectly ordinary people looked hideous, detestable. He tried to gather his thoughts rationally and calm himself. Of course, she would pull through this. But constantly the awful sense of falling backward returned. Arna dying was impossible. The universe would never allow something so grotesquely unfair to happen. For some inexplicable reason it seemed to him important to think it aloud. So, he said it, even as he grasped feverishly at images, memories, words.

Octavio showed up the next day as he had promised. They met in a café in San Telmo. There was just enough time to have a coffee before Jonah had to head out to the airport. Octavio was looking great. He was animated as usual, and he had a healthy glow about him. Immediately, he was catching Jonah up about his time