Famous Last Words (5 page)

the boy away towards the bathroom, watching him go: a vorv well-made boy, if rather thin, of maybe twelve o,r thirteen years. His hair was almost white, it was so very blond.

Once the boy had gone, Herr Kachelmayer stood for a

moment in the alcove of windows, staring at the marvellous view as if he had invented it himself. Then he turned to Mauberley and beamed.

“Fifteen marks a day—the boy.”

Mauberley was more amused than affronted.

“Are you selling me your son, Herr Kachelmayer?”

Kachelmayer fumbled around for a proper response.

Mauberley watching fascinated all the while.

Finally, Kachelmayer made his choice.

“It is true he is not my son.”

“I see.”

“Very clean, this boy; a most useful servant. He will briny your food; he will run your errands; he…”

i|[| “And how many of the fifteen marks a day will he see, this boy who is not your son?”

Herr Kachelmayer shrugged. “Maybe five.”

Mauberley just stared at the concierge, in order to shame him. But this was impossible.

“He must be fed,” said Kachelmayer. “And I must feed

him. And—if he is to be your servant—then he will require an extra ration. Fifteen marks. Yes—or no.”

The boy himself was standing, now, in the doorway to the [I1!! bathroom watching and listening. His face was completely without expression.

Mauberley thought of the others in the cellar: die Ratten.

This boy was so very pale, so very blond he was almost an albino. So he christened him die weisse fiatte. Later he would discover the boy’s real name was Hugo.

Mauberley nodded at the boy and said he should go along with Herr Kachelmayer. “I will ring when I want you,” he said. “Do the bells still work, Herr Kachelmayer?”

Kachelmayer shrugged.

“Will they work for another five marks a day?”

“But of course.”

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Kachelmayer pushed the boy from the room.

“Now tell me,” he said to Mauberley, every trace of the unctuous man he had been but a second before having disappeared, “how much trouble are you in?”

Mauberley thought about it: not the trouble, merely what to say. Then he said, “I am in every kind of trouble you can think of. On the other hand—” he looked Herr Kachelmayer straight in the eye “—I am not in any trouble at all that you are not in, now that I am a guest in your hotel.”

Kachelmayer swallowed.

“Have you been followed?”

“Aren’t we all?”

Kachelmayer drew his blanket around him.

“How long will you be with us.”

“Until it is over.”

Kachelmayer nodded. “The war.”

Mauberley looked away. “No. Not the war, Herr Kachelmayer.”

Kachelmayer regarded the attache case and the cardboard valise with a new kind of interest. Perhaps an arsenal…

He said no more, and went away afraid.

Mauberley looked across the room at the trav of food. An egg. Three carrots. Cheese. A piece of bread and a bowl of cabbage soup. On plates. With a napkin. Silver utensils and a bottle of Monlrechal.

He burst into tears.

Later in the bathroom, he turned on the taps and picked up the bar of soap and held it to his nostrils. It smelled of something dark and warm, like moss. Mauberley closed his eyes and drew in the scent as deep as he could make it go, unable to believe he was standing in a bathroom—safe—

with a bar of soap in his hand. Opening his eyes. the first thing he saw was all the bright towels hung up along the wall, three of them suspended from a silver rail. Dazzling.

On the floor the tiles had been set in an intricate design by hand and he wondered when it could have born that people had the time to labour over something casual as this—a floor

of blue and white octagons laid out like waves for some transient Aphrodite to stand on.

After the first few days of paranoiac seclusion, during which he slept with the attache case and cardboard valise in pillowslips beside him in the bed, Mauberley ventured into

the hallways not quite certain he was the only ghost that haunted them. Every sound and every smell evoked both

fear and sadness. Every door along this corridor had opened to him, once, revealing friends and laughter; cocktails and evening dress; orange juice and tennis whites; mulled wine and Iceland sweaters. From his own room he could see the terrace down below with its low stone wall. Now these were only summer memories on the Alpine edge of his mind:

Isabella, with her pale red hair swept back and her furs laid up against her cheek and her hand making shade against the sun; both of them smiling, staring off through the valleys towards the city where they had met—the only city in the world whose name could still make Mauberley’s senses

quicken. Venice. The distance here, in his mind. was indefinable; all the horizons hidden in the haze of river mists

and brilliant rains that never fell.

His suite of rooms had always been the same: third door on the left of the second floor—and across the hall might sometimes be the Allenbys or the Hemingways and Shirers, or Willy Maugham with his drunken Gerald. The Hemingways and Shirers were mostly winter visitors; the Allenbys

and Maugham exclusively Sonnen und Sommerkind, basking

on their balconies, feeding on salads and marching out

in boots too large for English feet to struggle up the mountainside on paths that had been cut by goats. It had always

been a laughing time and the talk was always gossip, never work and never, never politics—the politics being audible enough in the faces of the German and Italian tourists and the marked proliferation of the uniforms from year to year.

But the atmosphere was mostly one of slightly giddy laughter: the joy of high altitudes, brought on by lack of oxvgen and the presence of the most exciting and talked about peo—

pie in the world. The richest woman in the world, for instance, Marielle de Pencier, had a penchant for the northern

prospect and would book the whole of the “Austrian” side of the hotel for two weeks every June and install the most outrageous people in its rooms and suites: circus performers dangling from the terraces above the Otztalsee; midgets and dwarfs sliding down bannisters; a great detective, once, who organized a game of “murder” involving all the guests; and another year, a pair of nude adagio dancers dipped from head to toe in gold who collapsed at the end of their performance due to the fact their skin could not breathe and

one of them nearly died. All this besides the fact that Marielle de Pencier brought along her lover and his lover and his lover’s “friend” so all night long there was a scuttling in the halls and the pipsqueak scurrying of midgets and dwarfs and of monkeys on chains. And, once, Greta Garbo took up residence next to Mauberley and Mauberley—shameless—

listened to the walls, though all he heard was hours and hours of coughing and a telephone that rang and rang until Garbo answered it and all she said was; “no” and hung it up.

Now, there was nothing but the wind that whimpered for

admittance at the doors and billowed under the carpets

making a patterned sea to walk on, while the chandeliers called from overhead in muffled voices like the echoes of the midgets and the dwarfs long dead. And Mauberley would take up candlesticks provided by Herr Kachelmayer and

wander out amongst the shadows—not quite brave enough

at first to knock upon the doors and certainly not brave enough to open them. He stood, one night, emboldened by his wine and brandy, daring the staircase into the lobbies, but something real was there, eine Ratte maybe, so he turned again and locked himself inside his rooms. But in the end he could not bear the absence of his friends and went to seek them in their rooms. Fortified with a five-point candelabra, he drew his fingernail across the surface of Isabella’s door and turned the handle, pushing it open.

The room he entered was the salon, furnished with remembered chairs, a littered desk, some tables and a Recamier

couch. The carpets were rolled against the furthest walls and the drapes had all been stripped away from the win

dows. Everything smelled of slightly perfumed dust and thr frost on the panes had the look of Venetian lace, all rucked and torn in places by the breath of birds that had been trapped inside the room and lay along the windowsills like stones. And there was a gramophone.

Mauberley walked across the floor on tiptoe, fearful thr gramophone would disappear before he reached it. On the table, close beside it, was a pile of records, some of which were broken, most of which were not: Schubert, Mahler,

Brahms and Strauss—a Viennese concert. Not that he dareil to play them: but he stood and stared and touched them

with his fingers—just the labels—running his mind around and around the grooves until the music rose up like a hand and pushed him into a chair. But the chair did not restrain him and he left it several times on journeys to the past where he lounged with his father on the roof of the Arlington Hotel in Boston, waded with Ezra in the pond at Rapallo and

danced with his mother in the corridors of her asylum at Bellevue.

That night Mauberley got so drunk he fell asleep on the Recamier couch—almost setting fire to the hotel because he forgot in his drunkenness to blow out the candles. When he woke in the morning there was a large red welt where the wax had scalded the back of his hand.

But he was not alone. Die iveisse Ratte was asleep across the room on the rolled-up carpets, lying under the brocade drapes. After Mauberley had awakened him by reaching out and knocking over his empty bottle, the boy said: “you were making noises in your sleep.”

“Oh?” said Mauberley—wary. “What sort of noises?”

“Music,” said die weisse Ratte. “Waltzing.” He smiled.

“I found these records,” Mauberley said. “I wonder whose they can be.”

“No one’s,” said the boy. “I do not know.” A lie—and

Mauberley could see the lie quite plainly written in the pale blue eyes with their pink, unhealthy rims.

Die n’eisse fiatte sat up frozen on the mound of carpet.

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drawing the brocade curtains over his head and shoulders.

“My mother,” Mauberley told him, thinking he just might draw a confession from the boy, “was a musician; very fond of music such as this. She was a pianist, you know. I spent my childhc id—all my childhood—listening to her play.”

Die iveisse Ratte shuffled his feet and edged along the carpets, seeking a softer place to sit. But was silent.

Mauberley fished in his tatters, fumbling with his buttoned layers, finally producing money in a folded lump and

holding it up for the boy to see.

Die weisse Ratte stared at the money like a starving child at loaves of bread spread out in buttered slices on a plate.

Mauberley knew what he had to say, but had never uttered such words before.

“I need a friend,” he said. “I mean someone who will help me.”

Now, die weisse Ratte smiled. Friend was the word he

had waited for. Friend would be certain to produce money from Herr Mauberley’s mitt. Friend, in die iveisse Ralte’s whole, and only. concept of the word. was just a synonym for cash-and-favour. Not that he knew any better, for in all his life, he had never had a friend who had not crossed his palm in order to gain his favours. Now Herr Mauberlev was opening up his mittens and showing more money than Hugo had ever seen.

Friend.

Die weisse Ratte brightened. Even the pink of his eyes

grew more intense.

But Mauberley knew this look too well to be fooled. He

smiled. “A friend—in times like these—and if I find one—

must be mine alone. He can have no other friends, not even Herr Kachelmayer. Do you understand?”

Hugo began to nod. which brought a certain colour to his cheeks, white on white.

Mauberley needed to know how far his new-found friend

would go to play this game. He removed two banknotes from his mitt. “I want a gun.” he said. “Can you get me a gun?”

Nothing.

Three banknotes.

The boy stood up. The brocade fell aside. He walked across the room until he stood so close to Mauberley that Mauberley could smell him. Sour—like soup. Then, with a gesture only a child could make and get away with, the boy pinched the money, still held up in Mauberley’s hand, and squinted at it. Real; not counterfeit. He took it.

Mauberley watched die weisse Ratte, amused and wary.

The boy was very bold to stand so close, to take so much proximity for granted. Bold and dangerous—reaching for the bills. They stood so close together, part of their clothing touched. And then the boy undid the buttons of his shirt, exposing for an instant one pale nipple and a flaunting exhibition of his skin so raw that Mauberley wondered what

might be going to happen next and how this gesture would end. But when the boy withdrew his hand, it held a small, bright nickel-plated gun of the sort that women carry in their handbags: snub-nosed and cold in spite of its recent resting place. All this seduction was silent: not a word being spoken.

Now die weisse Ratte said; “it’s loaded,” and handed the gun to Mauberley.

Mauberley was forced to take a step away. Almost to his surprise the gun went with him. Never had he held a thing so icy cold.

The boy was folding his money.

“Thankyou,” said Mauberley, losing all the rest of what he had meant to say in the shock of the gun’s so sudden appearance.

Die weisse Ratte started to make his retreat towards the door. “I shall be wanted in the cellars,” he said. “I shall be wanted to bring your breakfast. Herr Kachelmayer will be waiting for me. …”

“Wanting the news of how I spent the night?” Mauberley’s distrust of Kachelmayer was suddenly absolute. “It was him, wasn’t it, who sent you here…?”

“No,” said the boy, who had got as far across the room

as the gramophone. “I sent myself.”

Their eyes met; shifted; parted.

“You were singing,” said the boy.

Mauberley smiled. “And you wanted to hear the music7

Die iveisse Ratte shrugged.

“No one ever sings any more.”