Page 3 of Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt
I was just about to add the polite ‘Yours’ and my name before I stopped myself. I folded the paper neatly in two and then four, and wrote their names on the front of it. I would put it on the silver dish that held the post tomorrow.
Even if I had not reached the place I had set out for, I was near enough. Compared to the distance I’d already completed, it was the equivalent to a stroll along the Rue Moisson Desroches and back. But I did not want to leave yet. As the doctor had said to Berthe, I needed to build up my strength, not just in my body, but in my mind. Even if the doctor could not see into it, I could have told him that the worst thing wasn’t the physical punishment I’d taken, but the fear that clawed inside me still. Both the maids, probably because they’d got bored of complaining about everyone else in the house, had told me that I cried out in the night, waking them up. On my long journey, I had become so used to it and so exhausted besides, that I’d been able to fall straight back to sleep, but here, being rested and warm in my own bed had made me soft. Often, I couldn’t return to sleep after the nightmares had come. I wasn’t even sure that ‘nightmares’ was the correct way to describe them. So often it was my cruel mind making me relive things that had really happened to me.
Standing up and walking over to my bed, diary in hand, I climbed under the sheet and the blanket I did not need because the weather at present wasstifling. I took the diary and rammed it down the inside of my pyjama bottoms, so it sat snugly against my inner thigh. Then I removed the leather pouch that hung from my neck and put it in the same place against my other thigh. If my long journey had taught me anything, it was where the safest hiding places were for such precious things.
I lay back on the mattress – another thing Elsa and Antoinette had complained about, yet to me it was like sleeping on a cloud of angels’ wings – closed my eyes, said a quick prayer for Papa and my mama, wherever in heaven she might be, and tried to drift into sleep.
A thought was nagging at me as I did so. As much as I hated to admit it, there was another reason for me writing my thank you letter to the Landowskis: even though I knew I must continue my journey, I was not quite ready to give up the most wonderful feeling of all – safety.
‘So, what do you think of him, young man?’ Monsieur Landowski asked me as I looked into the eyes of our Lord, just one of which was almost as big as I was. He had just finished perfecting the head of what in Brazil they called theCristo Redentor, and who I would call Jesus Christ. I had been told by Monsieur Laurent Brouilly that the statue would stand on top of a mountain in a city called Rio de Janeiro. It would be thirty metres tall by the time all the pieces had been put together. I had seen the miniature versions of the finished sculpture and knew that the Brazilian (and French) Christ would stand with his arms wide open, embracing the city beneath him. It was clever how, from a distance, you might just think it was a cross. How they would get the statue up the mountain and assemble it had been a matter of great discussion and worry over the past few weeks. Monsieur Landowski seemed to have many heads to worry about, because he was also working on the sculpture of a Chinese man called Sun Yat-sen, and was fretting over the eyes. He was a perfectionist, I thought.
During the long, hot summer days, I had been drawn to Monsieur Landowski’s atelier, creeping in and hiding behind the many boulders that sat on the floor, waiting to be shaped into a form. The workshop was usually busy with apprenticesand assistants who, like Laurent, were there to learn from the great master. Most of them ignored me, although Mademoiselle Margarida always gave me a smile when she arrived in the morning. She was a great friend of Bel, so I knew she was one of the trustworthy ones.
Monsieur espied me in the atelier one day and, like any father, reproached me for not asking permission before I entered. I shook my head and put my arms out in front of me, backing away towards the door, then the kind monsieur relented and beckoned me towards him.
‘Brouilly here tells me you like to watch us at work. Is this true?’
I nodded again.
‘Well then, there is no need to hide. As long as you swear never to touch anything, you are welcome here, boy. I only wish my own children showed as much interest as you in my profession.’
Since that moment, I had been allowed to sit at the trestle table with a piece of unwanted soapstone, and provided with my own set of tools.
‘Watch and learn, boy, watch and learn,’ Landowski had advised. And I had. Not that it made any difference to my own methods, banging the hammer onto the chisel upon my piece of rock. No matter how I tried to shape it into the simplest of forms, I always ended up with a pile of rubble in front of me.
‘So, boy, what do you think?’ asked Monsieur Landowski, gesturing to the head of theCristo. I nodded vigorously, as always feeling guilty that this kind man who had taken me in still tried to elicit a vocal response from me. He deserved to receive one just due to his perseverance, but I knew that as soon as I opened my mouth to talk, I’d be in danger.
Madame Landowski, now knowing I could write andunderstand what was being said to me, had handed me a pile of scrap paper.
‘So, if I ask you a question, you can write the reply, yes?’
I’d nodded. From then on, communication had been very simple.
In answer to Monsieur Landowski’s question, I took my pencil from my shorts pocket, wrote one word that took up almost the entire page, and handed it to him.
He chuckled as he read it.
‘“Magnifique”, eh? Well, thank you, young sir, and let us only hope that your response is the one theCristowill receive when he stands proudly atop Corcovado Mountain on the other side of the world.Ifwe can ever get him there...’
‘Have faith, sir,’ countered Laurent from behind me. ‘Bel tells me that preparations for the use of the funicular railway are well underway.’
‘Does she indeed?’ Monsieur Landowski raised one of his bushy grey eyebrows. ‘You seem to know more than I do. Heitor da Silva Costa keeps telling me we will discuss how to ship my sculpture over and then erect it, but the conversation never seems to take place. Is it lunchtime yet? I need some wine to calm my nerves. I am beginning to feel that thisCristoproject may be the end of my career. I was a fool for ever saying yes to such madness.’
‘I’ll fetch the meal,’ Laurent responded, and headed for the tiny kitchen, every detail of which I would always remember as being my first safe haven since I’d left home all those months ago. I smiled as I watched Laurent open a bottle of wine. As I often did when I was awake early, I’d crept down to the atelier at dawn just to be amongst the beauty it contained. I’d sit there and think about how Papa would have laughed that out of all the places I could have ended up, such as the Renault factory only a few kilometres from here, I’darrived instead in a place that he himself would have called an artistic temple. I just knew that it would please him somehow.
This morning, as I’d sat amongst the boulders and looked up into theCristo’s gentle face, I’d heard a noise from the room behind the curtain where we ate our food. Tiptoeing over to it and peering behind, I had seen a pair of feet sticking out from under the table. It transpired the sound was the gentle snoring of Laurent. Since Bel had gone back to Brazil, I’d noticed he often seemed the worse for drink in the morning, his eyes red and bleary, and his skin sallow and grey as if he might have to go and heave up the contents of his stomach at any moment. (And I had hada lotof experience in knowing when a man or a woman had sailed well past normal boundaries.)
As I watched him now pour a healthy glass for himself, I worried for his liver, which Papa had said was most affected by drink. But it wasn’t just Laurent’s liver I was concerned about; it was his heart too. Even though I understood that it was impossible for the organ itself to be physically broken by love, something inside the manhad. Maybe one day I would understand the wish to drown away pain with alcohol.
‘Santé!’ the two men said as they clinked their glasses together. As they sat at the table, I made myself useful in the kitchen, collecting the bread, cheese and bulbous red tomatoes the lady down the road grew in her garden.
I knew this because I had watched Evelyn, the housekeeper, appear in the kitchen with a box laden with vegetables. As she was not a thin lady, and well into middle age, I’d run across the room to take the box from her and place it on the side.
‘Goodness, today is a hot one,’ she’d panted as she’d sat down heavily on one of the wooden chairs. I’d fetched her aglass of water before she’d even asked for it, and taking some paper and a pencil out of my pocket, I wrote down a question for her.
‘Why don’t I send the maids?’ she read, then eyed me. ‘Because, little boy, neither of those two would know a rotten peach from a perfect one. They’re both city girls, with not a notion of fresh fruits and vegetables.’
Taking the paper back from her, I’d written another sentence.
