He yawned. On the table, next to the board that represented the battlefield on a scale of 1 to 5,000, among reference books, charts, a cup of coffee, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts, his wristwatch showed that it was three in the morning. To one side, on the liquor cabinet, from his red label the color of a hunting jacket, Johnny Walker looked mischievous as he took a step. Rosy-cheeked little so-and-so, thought Corso. Walker didn't give a damn that several thousand of his fellow countrymen had just bitten the dust in Flanders.
Corso turned his back on the Englishman and addressed an unopened bottle of Bols on a shelf between Memoirs of Saint Helena in two volumes and a French edition of The Red and the Black that he lay before him on the table. He tore the seal off the bottle and leafed casually through the Stendhal as he poured himself a glass of gin.
Rousseau's Confessions was the only book through which his imagination pictured the world. The collection of Grande Armée reports and the Memoirs of Saint Helena completed his bible. He would have died for those three books. He never believed in any others.
He stood there sipping his gin and stretching his stiff limbs. He gave a last glance to the battlefield, where the sounds of the fighting were dying down after the slaughter. He emptied his glass, feeling like a drunken god playing with real lives as if they were little tin soldiers. He pictured Lord Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, handing over his sword to Ney. Dead young soldiers lay in the mud, horses cantered by without riders, and an officer of the Scots Greys lay dying beneath a shattered cannon, holding in his bloody fingers a gold locket that contained the portrait of a woman and a lock of blond hair. On the other side of the shadows into which Corso was sinking he could hear the beat of the last waltz. And the little dancer watched him from her shelf, the sequin on her forehead reflecting the flames in the fireplace. She was ready to fall into the hands of the spirit of the tobacco pouch. Or of the shopkeeper on the corner.
Waterloo. The bones of his great-great-grandfather, the old grenadier, could rest in peace. He pictured him in any one of the blue formations on the board along the brown line of the Brussels road. His face blackened, his mustache singed by the explosions of gunpowder, the old grenadier advanced, hoarse and feverish from three days of fighting with his bayonet. He had the same absent expression Corso imagined that all men in all wars had. Exhausted, he raised his bearskin cap, riddled with holes, on the end of his rifle, with his comrades. Long live the emperor. Bonaparte's solitary, squat, cancerous ghost was avenged. May he rest in peace. Hip, hip, hurray.
He poured himself another glass of Bols and, facing the saber hanging on the wall, drank a toast to the faithful ghost of Grenadier Jean-Pax Corso, 1770–1851, Legion of Honor, knight of the Order of Saint Helena, staunch Bonapartist to the end of his days, and French consul in the Mediterranean town where his great-great-grandson was born a century later. The taste of gin in his mouth, Corso recited under his breath the only inheritance left him by his great-great-grandfather, transmitted across the century by the line of Corsos that would die with him:
And the Emperor, at the head of
his impatient army,
will ride amidst the clamour.
And armed, I will leave this land,
and once more follow
the Emperor to war.
He was laughing to himself as he picked up the phone and dialed La Ponte's number. In the quiet of the room you could hear the record spinning on the turntable. Books on the walls; through the dark window, rain-soaked roofs. The view wasn't great, except on winter afternoons when the sunset, filtering through the blasts of centrally heated air and pollution from the street, turned red and ochre, like a thick curtain catching fire. His desk, computer, and the board with the battle of Waterloo sat facing the view, at the window against which the rain was falling that night. There were no mementos, pictures, or photos on the wall. Only the saber of the Old Guard in its brass and leather sheath. Visitors were surprised to find no signs here of his personal life, none of the ties to the past that people instinctively preserve, other than his books and the saber. Just as there were objects missing from his house, so the world Lucas Corso came from was long since dead and gone. None of the somber faces that sometimes appeared in his memory would have recognized him had they come back to life. And maybe it was better that way. It was as if he had never owned anything, or left anything behind. As if he had always been completely self-contained, needing nothing but the clothes on his back, an erudite, urban itinerant carrying all his worldly possessions in his pockets. And yet the few people he allowed to see him on such crimson evenings, as he sat at his window, dazzled by the sunset, his eyes bleary with gin, say that his expression—that of a clumsy, helpless rabbit—seemed sincere.
La Ponte's sleepy voice answered.
"I've just crushed Wellington," announced Corso.
After a nonplussed silence, La Ponte said that he was very happy for him. Perfidious Albion—steak-and-kidney pie and gas meters in dingy hotel rooms. Kipling. Balaclava, Trafalgar, the Falklands, and all that. And he'd like to remind Corso—the line went silent while La Ponte fumbled for his watch—that it was three in the morning. Then he mumbled something incoherent, the only intelligible words being "damn you" and "bastard," in that order.
Corso chuckled as he hung up. Once he had called La Ponte collect from an auction in Buenos Aires, just to tell him a joke about a whore who was so ugly she died a virgin. Ha, ha, very funny. And I'll make you swallow the phone bill when you get back, you idiot. Then there was the time, years earlier, when he woke up in Nikon's arms. The first thing he did was phone La Ponte and tell him he'd met a beautiful woman and it was very much like being in love. Any time he wanted to, Corso could shut his eyes and see Nikon waking slowly, her hair flowing over the pillow. He described her to La Ponte over the phone, feeling a strange emotion, an inexplicable, unfamiliar tenderness while he spoke, and she listened, watching him silently. And he knew that at the other end of the line—I'm happy for you, Corso, it was about time, I'm really happy for you, my friend—La Ponte was sincerely sharing in his awakening, his triumph, his happiness. That morning, he loved La Ponte as much as he loved her. Or maybe it was the other way around.
But that was all a long time ago. Corso turned off the light. Outside it was still raining. In his bedroom he lit one last cigarette. He sat motionless on the edge of the bed in the dark, listening for an echo of her absent breathing. Then he put out his hand to stroke her hair, no longer spilling over the pillow. Nikon was his only regret. The rain was coming down harder now, and the droplets on the window broke the faint light outside into minute reflections, sprinkling the sheets with moving dots, black trails, tiny shadows plunging in no particular direction, like the shreds of a life.
"Lucas."
He said his own name out loud, as she used to. She was the only one who'd always called him that. The name was a symbol of the common homeland, now destroyed, that they had once shared. Corso focused his attention on the tip of his cigarette glowing red in the darkness. Once he'd thought he really loved Nikon. When he found her beautiful and intelligent, infallible as a papal encyclical, and passionate, like her black-and-white photographs: wide-eyed children, old people, dogs with faithful expressions. When he watched her defending the freedom of peoples and signing petitions for the release of imprisoned intellectuals, oppressed ethnic minorities, things like that. And seals. Once she'd even managed to get him to sign something about seals.