“I’m Wellington,” he said in his languid accent, “as you might already know.”
Ladivine let out a little laugh.
“Why no, how could we?”
He laughed along with her, as if delighting in her repartee.
“Come with me, I’ll show you around the museum.”
“We don’t need a guide,” she exclaimed, just as Marko was avidly accepting.
She raised one hand to take back what she’d said, and she saw Marko’s relief, his eagerness to let himself be taken in hand and entertained by a spirit of congeniality.
The boy started off with the children, and she held Marko back, whispering:
“We’ll have to give him money, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Suddenly he turned anxious again, and a little lost:
“How much?”
“I don’t know, we’ll see.”
Annika and Daniel were usually reserved children, not difficult or capricious but private and hard to charm. And yet they were already laughing with Wellington when their parents caught up with them in the entrance, and, Ladivine observed with a tiny premonitory twinge in her heart, particularly Annika, usually so restrained and aloof, who was looking up at the boy with a gaze of complete, almost love-struck trust, pushing up her hair and clasping it to the back of her head with one hand.
Suddenly this eight-year-old was a ravishing little girl.
“Now, you pick up the tickets, and I’ll wait for you here,” said Wellington in his unctuous voice.
Past the ticket-checkers, he led them into a deserted first gallery, where huge canvases very realistically depicted various massacres
— here a squadron of soldiers armed with bayonets skewering wild-eyed rioters, here three men slicing intently into the belly of a living woman pathetically endeavouring with blood-soaked hands to protect the foetus contained in that belly, there a man in an elegant suit bearing an expression of boundless disgust as he whipped the back, now a hash of flesh and blood, of an adolescent boy who must have been his servant, as the scene was set in a book-lined drawing room.
Enchanted, Wellington undertook to describe each painting as if they were blind; that’s right, thought Ladivine, mystified, exactly as if they couldn’t see or understand what they were looking at, as if they needed Wellington’s words to help them grasp the very obvious horror of each scene.
Not understanding English, Annika and Daniel merely stared at the paintings with a dumbstruck, fascinated gaze.
In the next room, the gore and sensationalism far surpassed Ladivine’s grimmest fears.
She reflexively covered Daniel’s eyes with one hand, but the boy wrenched himself away, and, standing immovably in the middle of the room, turned his gaze in every direction as quick as he could, greedily, as Wellington’s fine, velvety voice gaily recounted the events of each canvas.
“Here they’re torturing two poor old people who tried to escape, they were locked up in that cage you can see in the background, and you can tell from the broken door that they managed to escape, but look, the overseers have caught up with them, and now they’re pulling out their toenails with red-hot tongs, looks like they’re having a good time, it’s fun, they’re laughing. In this next one there’s a burning house. Who’s that trapped in the flames on the second floor? Two women and their babies, and these people down here, the masters, they’re all safe and sound now, they won’t even look their way, they’re thinking about their own children, who’ve all been rescued. Yes, that’s just how it is.”
Marko’s lips were pinched, his jaw taut and aggrieved.
“Is he trying to make us feel guilty or something?” he whispered in Ladivine’s ear.
But in fact the toxin of guilt seemed to have attacked him already, she observed, saddened and anxious, knowing she herself was secretly protected.
And in any case, Wellington rarely looked her way.
Cool and watchful, gently severe, he kept his eyes trained on Marko’s face, as if wanting to be sure that his words were getting through, and especially that Marko made no attempt to fight them off.
And so highly developed was Marko’s moral conscience, so longstanding and deep-rooted his acknowledgement of the most horrific crimes and his compliance with a duty to be above all reproach, that he never tried to evade Wellington’s gaze but rather latched onto it, as if demanding to be told of the most unthinkable tortures, again and again, so that he might feel for his forebears the shame they themselves never felt.
Ladivine was appalled. She told herself she should snap Marko out of that ridiculous trance and drag them all to the exit.
But the possibility that Wellington might be gravely insulted, the thought of so soon losing the sort of friendship he was offering them, stripped her of her courage.
She herself, with the dog at her side, with that big all-knowing beast to rely on, felt more than a little indifferent about Wellington’s friendship.
But she understood that Marko and the children might feel they’d abruptly been rescued from self-consciousness, boredom and fear, thanks to a boy who made his home in this country and had chosen them as the beneficiaries of a very real and undeniable thoughtfulness.
He knew what he was doing, she observed.
The way he casually raised one hand in front of Daniel, urging the child to do the same, then slapped his palm with a wink; the courtly, understated, but winsome voice he used with Annika, visibly respectful of her femininity; the mild, intelligent glances he cast at her, Ladivine: that was all typical of a clever but not cunning boy, perceptive and perhaps, she told herself, perhaps even sincere.
But could he not see what an aggressive thing it was to be showing them such paintings?
The third room was all carnage, with similar victims (my ancestors, said Wellington proudly), and the very same torturers. Marko was ashen.
He nonetheless forced himself to study each painting, and suddenly Ladivine had had enough, finding this childish.
He didn’t have to work so hard at flattering the boy — or did he?
Was it actually necessary?
But weren’t those paintings just trash?
“Alright, let’s go now,” she said firmly.
She took Marko’s arm and ordered the children to follow, noticing that they waited to see Wellington’s reaction before they obeyed.
Gracious, charming, he turned on his heels and made for the exit himself, the children trotting gaily along at his side.
“All those horrible things,” Ladivine whispered into Marko’s ear, “it’s too much, don’t you think? Are you sure this is the museum they recommend in the guide?”
“Yes,” answered Marko, in a halting, confused voice. “But the paintings they talk about aren’t anything like this. I can’t understand it!”
Lowering his voice, he added, urgent and anxious:
“How much do we give him?”
“Two euros’ worth,” said Ladivine.
She was exasperated by the fear she sensed oozing from Marko’s every pore, the fear of not living up to expectations, of not being generous enough, grateful enough, deserving enough of their approval.