Elementals - A. S. Byatt [9]
‘I should be happy,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘if you would come with me to the ethnological museum. I should like to show you . . . ’
‘Oh, no.’
‘I should like to show you the tombstones of the gladiators. So young. We can read the life of a city, in its monuments – ’
‘No, no – ’
‘Forgive me, I think you should make some change. I am impertinent. When I first lost Liv, I wished the whole world to be dead, too. Frozen stiff, I wished everything to be. But I exist. And you, forgive me, you exist.’
‘I don’t need company, Mr Isaksen. I don’t need to be – entertained. I have – I have things to do.’
Before his intervention, something had been going on, in the silence. He had spoiled it. She stared angrily at him.
‘Forget I spoke, please. I am in need of speech, from time to time, but that is nothing to do with you, as I can understand.’
The dreadful thing was that her refusal had made more of an event, had brought them closer together.
The next day she decided, as she walked along the Boulevard Victor-Hugo, that she would certainly leave Nîmes. She kept in the shelter of the plane trees, like a southerner. She decided that, since she was leaving, she would do the city the courtesy of going to the Maison Carrée. Ezra Pound had said it was a structure of ideal beauty. She had read the guidebook. It was made of the local pierre de Lens, shining white when quarried in the garrigue, turning golden with time and sunlight. It was tall, high on a pedestal, with Corinthian columns ornamented with acanthus leaves, and a frieze of fruits and heads of bulls or lions. It had been the centre of the Roman forum, part of a Franciscan monastery, owned and embellished and pierced by Visigoths, Moors and monks. Staircases had been raised and razed round it. In 1576 the Duchess of Uzès had decided to transform it into a mausoleum for her dead husband, but the City Fathers had resisted. It had been a place of sacrifice according to Nils Isaksen, who had a Viking bloodthirstiness under his bloodless skin.
She climbed the high steps of the portico, and looked out between the columns at the human space around the ancient house. She could see the discreet, vanishing gleam of the Carré d’Art, across the place. The guidebook told her that the square house was now a museum for the city’s archaeology, the endlessly unearthed Pans and nymphs, dancers and gladiators. But the guidebook was out of date. There was nothing there but red ochre paint, and a few informative placards. What do you do in a dark red space, full of stony art? Patricia walked along, around, and across. She remembered wondering when it made sense to stop looking – at a pictured dandelion, a windbreak, a frozen avalanche. She went out of the Maison Carrée in a dreamy rush, across the portico and down the steps. Between the place and the narrow maze of little streets runs a cobbled lane, along which cars and motorcycles run, occasionally and unexpectedly. The heat and the light dazzled her. She blinked at the dark, bright blue, at the burning white. She narrowed her eyes, and plunged forward. Several things happened. A screaming – brakes and a bystander – a grip like a claw on her wrist, twisting and dragging. She was on her knees in front of the square house, looking up at the violet form of Nils Isaksen’s face above her, framed by his white-gold curls, and the spiky rim of his hat. Somewhere beyond, a dark driver, with the Nîmois nose, was making a speech of mingled reproach and regret.
‘You cannot make him an accomplice – that is to say, responsible –’ said Nils.
‘Don’t be absurd. I was dazzled.’
‘You looked neither to right nor to left. I saw. You threw yourself under his wheels.’
‘I did not. I could not see. The sun dazzled me, after the dark.’
‘I saw you. You threw yourself.’
‘And how did you come to be there?’ asked Patricia, one human being to another. She stood up, wiping dust and blood from her knees and the palms of her hands like a schoolgirl. She bowed to the driver, and made a gesture