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Previously: Un Monde Nouveau
I had been in the city for only three nights when I first learned the shape of his sorrow.
The first nights were for listening. That is always my way, though few would believe it. They imagine I arrive blazing like a torch, scattering modesty and propriety in my wake. No. I let the air press its secrets into me. And New Orleans, mon Dieu, how she whispered.
The Quarter throbbed with invention. Brass in the street corners, laughter spilling from shutters, the clink of glasses in courtyards hidden by ironwork. A thousand flavors folded into a single breath: magnolia cloying on the breeze, sweat and powder, cheap gin poured like a benediction, the faint metallic tang of the river that would never stop moving. It was a city both young and ancient, born each night and buried each dawn. I could taste its rhythm in my blood, and it thrilled me.
But still, I waited. For what, I did not know. Perhaps for him.
I walked through the Quarter as if these streets were my own drawing room, though carriages and motorcars jostled and men called to one another in Creole, French, and English without caring for time. Most did not look at me. Or rather, when they did, their eyes slid away as if the sight were too much, too sudden. A gift of mine, you see. A kind of cloak I wear when I choose. I am not modest by nature, but I savor anonymity as one savors the silence before the first note.
It was in that silence that I heard him. Not his voice, not yet. His heart.
You will smile at the confession, but it is true. Across the street, beyond the hiss of a gas lamp, there was a cadence unlike the others. Not frantic like the revelers. Not sluggish like the drunkards. Steady, deliberate, weighted with thought. A man walking with his mind as much as with his body. I turned, and there he was, moving beside another man, two figures carved in the amber light.
Louis de Pointe du Lac.
Of course I did not know his name then. But I knew him.
They were brothers walking close enough for quarrel, Paul the noisier of the two, his voice a cracked bell of prophecy and indignation. Paul spoke in scripture’s fever, flinging accusations like stones. Louis responded little, his silence a blade kept at the ribs. How carefully he wore that restraint, this mask of duty, of Catholic sonship. How tightly he held himself against the world’s gaze.
I lingered on a balcony in the shelter of ironwork, unseen. Paul’s voice rose and fell, a tide of righteous fury. I watched Louis move as if the silence itself weighed something on him. The crowd gathered in those small ways that crowds do, pausing in doorways, peering from shutters. The gaslight made saints of their shadows.
Then something in the air turned. A spasm. The quarrel crystallized into motion. Louis’s hand went to his coat. Steel flashed in the lamp’s kindness. He drew a knife, not to spill blood for sport but to mark a boundary, to silence a demon who would not be silent. “Go home,” he said, and the hiss of that word was a prayer and a threat all at once. He leveled the point not at the public but at the private rupture between them. You could have mistaken it for madness. I did not. I saw the absolute necessity of the act.
Paul did not cower. He raged on, eyes bright with the fervor of a man who has found a gospel to drown in. He cried sin and ruin and damnation, each syllable flung to wound. Louis’s jaw tightened. The sinew in his hand bunched around the hilt. He looked like a man who had learned how to live under the weight of promises and finally refused them. I should not have laughed, but I did. Softly. The delight of it. The audacity.
There is a sweetness in a soul that snaps. I have seen men become angels and devils in a single breath. This man who went to Mass and bent his head with the others but who could, when pressed, draw steel on his own blood, became more riveting than any pageant of gods. He burned with violence and guilt in equal measure, and the sight of him made something in me ache. That contradiction is rare. A man who can pray with reverence and threaten with a whisper - he is the very definition of temptation.
When Paul stormed away, cursing the street and his brother both, the crowd dispersed with the rumor of scandal trailing behind them. Louis lingered. He sheathed the knife like one who has lost and yet feels oddly absolved. His face, in the sudden quiet, crumpled. Guilt rose on him visible as a tide. Shame for what he had done, for the sin he had let loose, for the knife that had felt necessary enough to hold. He might have muttered a prayer. He might have clutched at his conscience until the breath returned. I could see the silent litany forming in him: forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive him. I thought, and the word tasted like a promise I had no right to make. But I would not forgive him. I would exalt him.
I wanted to leave the balcony then. I wanted to go to him, to lay my hand upon the fever of his shame and make of it a sacrament. I wanted to speak the one true word he had never been given, the small and perfect yes that loosens the throat and lets a man breathe. Desire is a commandment in me, but so is patience. I kept very still and let the railing bite into my palms until the wanting passed from a blaze into a steady flame I could tend.
The street exhaled. A shutter clicked. Somewhere a woman laughed as if she had been spared. The gaslight hummed in its glass like a trapped bee. He stood a moment longer with his head bowed, and then he moved, that careful stride of his, as if each step had to be paid for with thought. I followed at a distance, close enough to hear the metronome of his heart, far enough to be a rumor. The Quarter made a corridor of light around him, balconies above like dark wings held in check.
He paused at a corner where the smell of chicory rose from a private courtyard. He had the look of a man who wishes to pray but has misplaced the words. His hand went to his pocket and came away empty. The gesture betrayed him. He wanted a cigarette to quiet himself and would not allow it. I loved him for that small cruelty, that proof that he had not yet forgiven his own body for its tremor.
I wanted to go to him then. I wanted to offer him fire and call it absolution. Instead I leaned my weight against the brick and listened to the city write the next line for me. A trumpet bled a single note from somewhere in the Vieux Carré. A carriage wheel caught in a rut and the horse stamped once as if insulted. The river spoke to itself in low consonants. The night kept our counsel.
He moved on. He kept to streets that gave him shadows, not because he feared the eyes of men, but because he feared his own. The house he came to was modest and exact, shutters clean, the gate with a tired hinge. He did not look up at the balcony. He would not look for me. Good. I prefer to be discovered by fate and not by habit. The latch clicked. The door closed. The ripple of him went quiet on the other side of the wood, and I was left with the temperature of the place he had been.
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