Beyond Homer. Benjamin W. Farley
(only he pronounced it ‘Sue-lee-von’), “would you care to see our own archives, or let me run a special article on you. If you could come by my office tomorrow, say around eleven, we could have coffee, and talk and the like. I should love for all France, or at least Paris, to know how an American scholar views his country’s war through the lens of the grand classics. If only we had done the same before Dien Bien Phu, or relinquished North Africa decades before we did! Alors! Please, don’t say Non.”
“Well, I write every morning, but, I suppose I could forego that ritual, just once. Une fois. I accept.”
“And you, Mademoiselle? You are invited, too.”
“Merci, but no thanks. I’ll just sleep in, or wander about les Tuileries.”
“Please be my guest,” I volunteered. “We can wander together. I’d like to know more about Alabama and your own project, or dissertation, no doubt?”
“Watch him,” warned Sullivan, with a trusting smile, this time. “You can never be sure about a Virginia Cavalier.”
“Nonsense,” interjected Mme. Gibert. “I’d invite myself to go with you, but I’ve several deadlines,” she yawned sleepily.
“Why don’t I meet you near the entrance to the gardens, say around ten a.m.?” Julene suggested.
“Fine.”
“May I send a cab for you? Our own limousine?” Gibert asked the professor.
“No, I can take the metro.”
“Then here is my card,” said Gibert. “5, Rue de Forbage. The sixth arrondissement.”
“Very well.”
Mme. rose, smiled, and shook everyone’s hand, in typical French style. She presented her perfumed cheek for me to kiss. It was very soft and tender. I brushed against it gently with my lips.
“We must meet again,” she whispered.
“Yes. I agree.”
It was hard not to look into her eyes, but she was deliberately glancing away, as if to ignore any freshness on my part, which she had intentionally awakened. I thought of Goethe’s line:
I gazed into your eyes and lost my soul.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said to Julene. “Good night, to all.”
2
Morning came noisily through the thin fog of the French capitol. In spite of the closed windows, I could hear the claxons’ wails and the murmur of the traffic in the streets below. I rolled to my side, sat on the edge of the bed, then walked to the curtains. I opened them and the double windows and stared out across the city.
I was staying in a pension near the Garden of Luxembourg, about a thirty-minute walk from the metro stop where I promised Julene I would meet her later in the morning. An overcast sky added a somberness to the dull gray scene, appropriate to the slight headache that throbbed in my frontal lobes. I could see the numerous chimney pots on the tin roofs opposite the pension, as well as the iron grillwork and narrow balconies that protected the windows on the building opposite mine.
Two weeks ago, the major topic at the dinner tables on the second floor had been the bizarre murder of an elderly woman who lived on the third floor in a neighboring building beside ours. I couldn’t help but listen with interest to the conversation of the two patrons who sat at the table next to mine.
“Oui. The killer must have gone mad, slipped out of his room, crept across the balconies to hers, entered through the windows, and slit her throat! Alors! Stabbed her body nineteen times. Nineteen!”
“Why did he do that? Could that happen here?”
“Ah! Who is to say! I don’t know. Perhaps it was a foreigner.”
“Do we have any here?”
“Oui! The American,” he smiled, pointing his fork toward me. “The Belgian, three Japanese, and that quiet British girl.”
“Ah, yes! But I hardly think of them as les estrangers any more.”
In my case, I think that was because I frequently shared my bottle of wine with them.
“Ah, Monsieur, you are too kind,” the shorter, black-haired man of the two would respond.
“Do they have any clues?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. But yesterday a reporter from Le Miroir Français was there. I saw her from the balcony. Ohhh! was she quelque chose! Petite, feisty, glamorous! Ohhh la-la!”
“How do you know it was she?”
“I have seen her picture in the paper and in magazines. Ohhh, she is something!”
I wondered if he was referring to Mme. Gibert. “Do you know her name?”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t recall it at the moment,” he grinned. “Is monsieur interested?”
“Who’s to say?” I smiled.
After shaving, a quick shower, and dressing, I walked the two flights down to the second floor for the petit déjeuner. I thought of Sullivan and wished I had his book in front of me. His chapter on “The Chthonic World” had genuinely impressed me. It was about the caves and caverns and puzzling labyrinths that archeologists kept encountering on Crete. It had been preceded by a tedious chapter on recent archeological and anthropological research on the Cretean, Minoan, and Mycenaean sites. He argued that “such minutia is critical to any discussion of Homer’s poetic worldview.” His footnotes were rich in details, wherein he cataloged the numerous artifacts, designs, excavation levels, soil compositions, ash depth, implements and potshards. Such entries constituted the indispensable data requisite for bolstering his Introduction. But what Sullivan seemed most after were those recondite and audacious inferences and cryptic nuances that a scholar might venture without overt censure from his peers; those reasonable conjectures as to why these ancient peoples might have engaged in their supposed rites, or used the paraphernalia listed and tagged by the archeologists. Indeed, neither his Preface nor Introduction ever quite clarified his real purpose, but only hinted at “those dark and lost motivations that enabled them to endure and that permit us to probe our own subconscious.” His goal was as psychological as it was noetic. Then followed a chapter on caves, grottoes, and labyrinths; the haunts of serpents and monstrous bulls; the symbolism of the womb, the vagina, the sepulcher; the place of birth and death, of fear and protection, of home and sanctuary, of hearth and nurture. I thought of all the times I had crept frightened to bed alone as a child, up the stairs in the loft of the farmhouse, though my mother and grandmother rocked in the parlor by the fireplace below. “We are never that far from our roots, from the eons of those primitive ancestors who preceded us,” Sullivan had concluded. I had to agree and found comfort in that chapter.
After breakfast, I took the metro to the Tuileries station. Julene was already present, waiting near the top of the steps. She appeared to be admiring a sidewalk vendor’s art work. She wore a pale yellow sleeveless dress of medium length. Her lithe arms and legs brought to mind the image of a gaunt mannequin, except her full breasts filled the bodice of the dress with erotic appeal. She smiled as I indulged my eyes.
“You are so transparent,” she laughed. “But I do like it, uuumm, but I do.”
“Forgive me,” I smiled, “but it’s been a long cold winter, and lonely at that.”
“I bet you’ve had opportunities,” she replied. “I noticed you right off the bat last night. Who wouldn’t?”
“I’ve had a few,” I said. “I’ve not been interested until now. I was once in love with a beautiful girl, a woman of thirty-two, but all she wanted was sex. And once satisfied, she dropped me like a rock.”
“The wounded lover! I’m glad I revive you. Carl treats me the same way.”
She