Wonder (14 page)

Laughing, Garance tried to explain why he might take an interest in these inventions.

“It’s like music,” she suggested.

“Absolutely not,” Edward retorted, cut to the quick. “On the contrary, music is methodical, it doesn’t tolerate errors. Of all the arts, including architecture very likely, it is the most mathematical.”

“Of course, it respects rules, it originates in calculations and harmonics … But do you really think it’s the mathematics in music that makes us love Mozart and Bach?”

“I don’t know Mozart well enough to say so,” he confessed. “But Bach, yes, certainly. You must realize better than anyone that he made frequent use of the Fibonacci sequence and of the golden mean. Even better, with his tremendous interest in numerology, he carefully coded his own name into
The Art of the Fugue
, as if to sign his work indelibly but hidden from laymen—”

“I know all that,” Garance broke in impatiently, “but what it hides is, precisely, the essential.”

“Which is?”

“Imagine for a moment you’ve translated
The Art of the Fugue
into numbers, and that you’re reading that series of numerals – or even easier, imagine that nothing has ever existed save the score, that it has never been played and never will be, that it is sufficient unto itself … Is Bach’s genius still present?”

“Of course!”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s there in a virtual state, as something latent but complete.”

“You see, music is what begins to exist once that virtuality is expressed, which disappears immediately afterwards. Mathematics is nothing but its acts of birth and of death.”

He enjoyed being wrong at the end of such discussions, no matter how they were concluded. It seemed to him that Bach always emerged as the winner.

On Sundays and days when Edward did not go to the university, they explored the town together, visiting every corner on foot, walking along the Thames until they found themselves surrounded by ancient hamlets seemingly unchanged for centuries, where people still lived off carp fished from the brown waters of the river. Avoiding the main roads, they passed through working-class neighbourhoods where faded laundry hung out the windows and children stared at them, eyes widened by curiosity or hunger. Going home, they admired the majestic façades of the opera house and the Royal College of Music. Their favourite walk, though, took them to the British Museum, where they spent whole afternoons getting lost together in exhibition spaces that housed Roman, Egyptian, and Asian artifacts, then ending up in one of the libraries: the Grenville, perhaps, with its narrow, dark wood bookcases behind whose glass doors the books themselves appeared to be treasures, not so much exhibited as protected from indiscreet eyes; or the gigantic Reading Room with its gently curved cerulean ceiling.

There, they plunged into unknown books whose mere existence seemed nearly miraculous. Garance gleaned haphazardly, asking for one gilt-edged volume that attracted her like a jewel; leafing through another with crumbling pages that gave off a white powder and a faintly mouldy smell; consulting a third written in an indecipherable language but with prints eloquent enough for her to reconstitute or invent the story. From their words as from their silences, she drew material for complicated symphonies that she noted on music paper. Conversely, Edward’s reading since childhood had respected a single principle from which he had never departed, despite its disadvantage: as soon as he’d finished a book, it imposed five or ten new ones, which meant that his ignorance grew infinitely faster than his meagre knowledge. The principle demanded that whenever a volume referred to another – whether to contradict, praise, support, disclaim, cite, or mock it – he would note the title of this second work on the ever-growing list of books he had to read. Over the years this list had taken on the appearance not simply of a tree whose trunk split into more and more abundant boughs that in turn divided into countless branches, but of an entire forest, where paths wound between luxuriant inflorescences, marking relationships that united the different works and the relative importance of each. Unaware of the passing of time, he would not look up until,
surprised, he heard the guard announce that the building was closing, and discovered that the light seeping through the high windows in the blue vault had changed and night had fallen. They would go home then, slightly dazed, each with the impression of returning from a journey to a different continent, which they described as they walked in the setting sun.

One afternoon as they were coming back from a walk in the Victoria Tower Gardens, Garance stopped in front of a tiny display window piled high with rolls of rice paper, a fat, beaming Buddha, two gilded dragons, some jade statuettes, and a large white ornamental vase decorated with blue flowers. Inside, a tiny, wrinkled Chinese woman greeted them with a resounding
ni hao
. Startled, they bowed slightly, hands joined at chest level as they had seen figures do on Japanese prints. The old lady invited them to explore the boutique. Coughing slightly in the cloud of incense, Garance immediately began to rummage among the odds and ends, exclaiming blissfully when she found some exquisite figurines carved from ivory as white as snow and marvelling at a particular bronze vase. Its sides supported eight dragons, heads down, seven of which held in their partially open jaws a metal ball the size of a quail’s egg. Beneath them, frogs with gaping mouths were poised to take in the sphere hanging above them. There
was nothing especially decorative about the object; also, it was very heavy, as Edward realized when he tried to lift it after his young wife expressed a desire to see it in the light.

Trying to be diplomatic, he pointed to the slightly chipped porcelain vase and exclaimed cheerfully:

“This one is lovely! I’ll buy it for you if you want, it would look wonderful on the mantelpiece.”

But to no avail. Garance wanted the impractical and cumbersome urn, which Edward had to carry home, stopping at every corner to put it down for a moment, long enough for some energetic stretching exercises under the amused looks of passersby and the delighted gaze of his wife, who was admiring him as if he had slain a genuine dragon of flesh and blood and scales for her. It was well worth the lumbago he knew he would suffer the next day.

Garance’s interest in the object didn’t stop there. Once it was placed conspicuously in the parlour, she used every means possible to discover where it had come from and what it could be used for. Edward agreed to ask a few colleagues in the Asian Studies department but none could provide the slightest information about the dragon urn, one actually saying that since he had never heard of it, the urn was quite possibly not genuine. That was all it took to drive Edward to consult in chronological order everything the British Museum libraries had on the Jin, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.

When he came back empty-handed from his last bout of research, he finally thought about calling on the old Chinese woman who’d sold it to them, but he came up against a closed door and drawn shutters. According to the shopkeeper next door where Edward had gone for information, the merchant had disappeared, taking with her figurines, porcelain, and oriental vases. She had been replaced by an Italian dealing in prints and antiquarian books.

After this series of setbacks Garance, not satisfied but apparently resigned to never knowing more, nearly succeeded in convincing him that the endless questions surrounding the object only added to its value. As long as they knew nothing of where it came from, how it was used, or how it worked, she explained, it offered infinite possibilities. If they learned just what it was about, it would be sadly reduced to being nothing more than what it was. “Imagine,” she concluded, “that someone comes to demonstrate to you by
a + b
that it’s a common tea-kettle or a kind of kitchen scales or, I don’t know, simply a child’s toy: can you swear that it wouldn’t instantly be worth less in your eyes?” Implacable as Garance’s logic was (it was true that he would admire the object less – the dragons so exquisitely carved; the delicacy of the mechanism holding the copper spheres above the mouths of the frogs; the movement that seemed almost to bring the
creatures to life – if he had found out that he was gazing at a mere spinning top, a simple flowerpot), something in his nature drove him in spite of it all to want to clear up the matter. He refused to agree that ignorance could be preferable to knowledge. “It’s not ignorance, it’s mystery,” protested Garance, smiling. To that he could give no response but a kiss.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF THE YEAR
1904, E
DWARD
and Garance accompanied Mrs. Love to Bath, where she had gone for several years now, where the waters, she assured them, were beneficial to her sciatica. She was usually accompanied by her elder daughter (who suffered from psoriasis and also swore by the miraculous springs in the famous spa), who unfortunately was confined to home because of exhaustion near the end of her pregnancy. And so Edward and Garance packed their bags, fearing the worst. The journey lived up to their expectations.

Every morning they followed Theresa Love to the baths where she soaked for an hour, watch in hand. Resembling an immense underground cavern, the room threw back the least murmur with an echo effect that gave the slightest sound, every word, even a whisper, a multiplied and magnified presence. The light from the narrow windows seemed rather to emanate from the healing waters and was then mirrored on the ceiling. Every day they found there, strangely devoid of bodies,
the same heads bathing in the watery light and floating on the surface.

The diet the hotel imposed on its guests was Spartan. In addition to the sulphur-smelling water, legendarily rich in minerals, drawn from the Pump Room and served still tepid in long glasses wrapped in dainty white napkins, those taking the waters were presented with a boiled egg in the morning; boiled vegetables at noon; and poached fish in the evening, again accompanied by vegetables cooked in water. Garance, dreaming of roast mutton and spit-roasted chicken, came to muse whether, through a kind of osmosis, those vegetables could be the cause of the greenish tinge that she saw on all the swimmers in the pool.

In this city of old women and long diaphanous young girls, they soon noticed that everyone was walking around with a novel by Jane Austen, once the most famous of its inhabitants, as if her works were an essential guide for making one’s way through the city, although the streets were clearly identified. One morning when his mother, eyes closed, was immersed up to her neck in the lukewarm water, breathing deeply as if not to waste an atom of the precious vapour given off by the pool, an incredulous Edward observed three ladies who appeared to be unacquainted, but were sitting in neighbouring chairs along the pool, all plunged deep in
Sense and Sensibility.
Catching his eye, Garance whispered to him, in a voice just loud enough to travel the distance between them, nevertheless with the result that her words were immediately picked up and amplified by the echo: “You know, Jane Austen hated this place.”

He didn’t know. Nor, apparently, did the three ladies, who stopped reading for a moment and pricked up their ears in spite of themselves.

“She thought the life here was deadly, society unbearable, the gossip insufferable, and the famous water undrinkable. She’d be horrified to see how she is venerated here, in this place she loathed, and without a doubt by the descendants of those she despised.”

Edward, who had never since childhood felt like opening a novel, not having enough hours in a day to read books that would enlighten him concerning the world as it really was without also having to worry about those that held pure ravings, now told himself that he wouldn’t have minded a conversation with that Miss Austen.

After a few days, Edward and Garance decided to take advantage of Theresa Love’s daily nap to explore the sand and ash-coloured city whose two poles of attraction, impossible to miss or to confuse, were the thermal baths and the theatre. The first was devoted to treating the body;
the second, so they said, to resting the mind, although its programming was generally a letdown, careful as it was not to impose on those taking the waters any entertainments that would have forced them to think too hard.

They went first to admire the Royal Crescent, the city’s pride. They stood side by side at the end of the vast and verdant lawn, before the huge structure whose proportions were strangely reminiscent of the winter palaces in certain northern cities. The façade curved in a half-moon shape. They looked at one another, perplexed.

“It looks nice,” Edward ventured to say.

“Yes,” added Garance. “It’s very … how can I put it … orderly.”

He agreed.

But it was when they took it into their heads to walk around the impressive structure that for the first time they felt some affection for the grey spa town. The back of the building was an untidy mix of architectural schools, styles, and periods: while the façades of various dwellings merged to present a single, smooth surface, their backs were adorned with overhangs, gables, corbels, and small round windows as surprising as a red slip showing under an austere mourning dress. Even the roof line was broken by slopes of different angles, and a plethora of dormer windows that were followed at times by half a turret. From then on, they tried to look at the entire town as if it
had been built entirely in the manner of the famous crescent, like a stage set whose public front was painted but whose back conceals far richer discoveries.