"My mother was a delicate and beautiful woman, the photographs of her reveal," Didier continued. "She was only eighteen years old, when I was born, and not yet twenty when she died. The influenza claimed her. But there were whispers-cruel whispers, and I heard them many times-that my father had neglected her, and was too, how do they say it, tight with his money to pay doctors when she fell ill. Whatever the case, she died before I was two years old, and I have no memory of her.
"My father was a teacher of chemistry and mathematics. He was much older than my mother when he married her. By the time I started at school, my father was the headmaster. He was a brilliant man, I was told, for only a brilliant Jew could rise to the position of headmaster in a French school. The racisme, the anti-Semitism, in and around Marseilles at that time, so soon after the war, was like a sickness. It was a guilt that pinched at them, I think. My father was a stubborn man-it is a kind of stubbornness that permits one to become a mathematician, isn't it? Perhaps mathematics is itself a kind of stubbornness, do you think?"
"Maybe," I replied, smiling. "I never thought about it that way, but maybe you're right."
"Alors, my father returned to Marseilles, after the war, and returned to the very house that he had been forced to leave when the Jew-haters took control of the town. He had fought with the Resistance, and he was wounded, in hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. Because of that, no-one dared to challenge him. Not openly. But I am sure that his Jewish face and his Jewish pride and his beautiful young Jewish bride reminded the good citizens of Marseilles of the thousands of French Jews who were betrayed and sent to their deaths. And it was a cold triumph for him, returning to that house he had been forced out of, and to that community that had betrayed him. And that coldness claimed his heart, I believe, when my mother died. Even his touch, when I think of it now, was cold. Even his hand, when he touched me."
He paused and took a sip from his glass, replacing it slowly and carefully in the precise circle of moisture it had left on the table in front of him.
"Well then, he was a brilliant man," he continued, raising his eyes to mine with a hastily gathered smile. "And, with one exception, he was a brilliant teacher. The exception was me. I was his only failure. I had no head for science and mathematics.
They were languages I could never decipher or understand. My father responded to my stupidity with a brutal temper. His cold hand, it seemed to me when I was a child, was so large that when he struck me my whole body was shocked and bruised by the giant's hard palm and the whips of his fingers. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of my failures at school, so I played the truant very often, and fell into what the English call a bad company. I was many times in the courts, and served two years in the prisons for children before my thirteenth birthday.
At sixteen, I left my father's house, my father's city, and my father's country forever.
"By chance I came to Genova. Have you seen it? I tell you, it is the jewel in the tiara of the Ligurian coast. And one day, on the beach at Genova, I met a man who opened my life to every good and beautiful thing that there is in the world. His name was Rinaldo.
He was forty-eight years old then, when I was sixteen. His family held some ancient title, a noble line that reached to the time of Columbus. But he lived in his magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. He was a scholar, the only true Renaissance man I ever met. He taught me the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, the music of poetry, and the poetry of music. He was also a beautiful man. His hair was silver and white, like the full moon, and his very sad eyes were grey.
In contrast to the brutish hands of my father, with their chilling touch, Rinaldo's hands were long, slender, warm, expressive, and he made tenderness in everything that he touched.
I learned what it is to love, with all of the mind and all of the body, and I was born in his arms."
He began to cough, and attempted to clear his throat, but the cough became a fit that wracked his body in painful spasms.
"You've got to stop smoking and drinking so much, Didier. And you've gotta do a little exercise now and then."
"Oh, please," he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided.
"There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call-I almost never recovered."
"Sorry," I smiled. "I don't know what came over me."
