6

6

Soft piano music came from downstairs. Rodolphe rolled over in sleep and mee-mee’d. Napoleon paced and paced, full of plans as usual. He looked lovingly at Rodolphe with disdainful glances. The black servant in the corner sat and drank coffee and awaited their pleasure. Outside the cool spring air smelled of dew and evening walks and music. Rodolphe seemed to be psychically comforted by this observation and his face drooped into an even deeper expression of rest, pratiquant la politique de l’autruche. Out there the dew hung, the people walked, the music caressed the insane and brought smirks to the face of the rich.
With crazed boot he awoke Rod, who grinned strangely and rolled over. The servant jumped a little in his chair from a doze, looking even more unseated with the unaccustomed attention of his master shot across the sleeping man. He started to rise, reached for the coffee pot and was about to phrase his soft, illiterate question when Napoleon raced around the bed, pushed him gently back down in his seat, and instead topped off his own mug. His mouth was an open o. The air seemed to twitch and electricity flowed up Napoleon’s arm as he prodded and shook Rodolphe. The day seemed largely unresolved, a mirror of his heart, skipping and faltering. He wanted breakfast and a long bath but knew he would have neither if he was truly listening to himself today.
Soft piano music played from the sitting room as he passed through the antechamber and out the door, alone.
The sad little window which hid his desultory and somniac friend parted a lid and white eyes followed him as he crossed the small avenue onto the lakeside promenade. The smell of music had proven to be telling. And as he walked he could feel the stress leave his stomach in a mindless rush, the coffee leaving his bile and entering his bloodstream, buoying out his limbs and bringing an automatic smile to his face, like the leavening of bread. The lake had a wistful, rindy smell and the air tasted of it and also of nothing, a palate cleanser after the clogged dusty air of the bedroom. As he crossed the road and the grass to the dirt path wound into grooves from wagon wheels and dotted with the footholds of equestrian machines he felt an unfamiliar connection with others. He seemed unconsciously to know the faces of each person who had walked this road before, the ones who walked it now in ritual as familiar to him as himself. By being there on the circular path he was committing his time to the act of being human, of needing to walk in circles and feel the same feeling every day, and he felt most unlike himself. His plans and stratagems and learning faded away and the simplicity of merely walking became everything to him, and nothing at all, his small white eyes registering only what was in front of him, unclouded with the unreality of his thoughts. He felt a distant dismay, like the clanging bell of the clock-tower ahead of him in town, at not being ever-presently intimate with his own thoughts. Yet it nagged him as would a tiny flea, eventually symbiotic and abiding as he forgot its presence, rooting him by a single mote of skin to his true self, while the rest of him thrummed and percolated in harmony with every particle of the day sky, the brooding trees, the green and yellow and tawny light, the vibrations of the groaning cellos, and his walking companions, all separate and yet bound by one cyclical purpose.
There was a moment of breathlessness, all of time stilling, and then the reverie broke, and Napoleon came flooding back inside his shoes.
In town he could passively harass his aspirant to go and listen to music with him, finding an excuse to sit down and become introspective with his own aspirations. The boy was arrogant and closed off to his fantassin, in reaction to his own fate, which did not suit him. Yet he would always chuckle and accompany Napoleon, if only to mock his accent and assuage his own aimlessness as he awaited the inevitability of war on station in Valence. Yet he felt great despair at the familiarity of this situation, and though he walked through the hotel and past the reclining officer at his usual position in the lobby, he merely stopped to passively stare at the wall in attention in case anything was needed from him. The boy did not look up from his book and kept flipping pages every few seconds, cheek pressed to his fist. He sighed a little and walked back out. The sun seemed hotter and more oppressive now, his euphoria long forgotten. The tick of agitation had grown to the size of a dog and now snapped at his ears from his nesting shoulders, and madness threatened to contort his features and scare away the gentry. Needing to destroy, he headed for the brothels. Aimee and love of self, love of his ability to realize his power on her flour-stained buttocks with bloody ringed fist, drove him on with passion and peace at attrition in his heart.