One for you: I want to blurt it all out, but I'm forcing myself give you an entire explanation.
One for me: "I've just finished reading your dissertation," it began.
Now that was a sure-fire way of getting my attention. As far as I knew, the only people who'd ever read my dissertation were the three professors on my review panel. They'd gotten me my Ph.D., which entitled me to a shot at some beggarly adjunct spot in Beaufuque, Tennessee, that might keep me in espresso and scones if I economized and gave up eating actual food.
But here was somebody outside that world who had read also it.
Sure, the dissertation was good. Sure, it was fascinating! I mean, how could something not be fascinating with a title like "Reconstructing a Symbolist Hymn to the Guillotine: Finding Meaning in the Argot of a Fin-de-Siècle Paris Crime Scene Graffito"? It was all about how I had solved--or thought I had solved--a real puzzle.
OK, so it wasn't the Rosetta Stone, but it took a lot of doing to produce an answer good enough to convince three hoary scholars of epigraphy and French linguistics that it was the answer.
It had all started the way epigraphy always seems to start--with the construction of a sewer, in this case the upgrading of a sewer line in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Workmen came upon a subterranean room that had a wall with an intact graffito so mysterious and so lovingly inscribed that the crew foreman himself cut it out and delivered it to the Institut français.
The graffito was not of any great age, but the civil authorities soon discovered that it came from the house that had produced a notorious murder in 1875: a woman had killed her husband--probably after she had suffered years of abuse--by decapitating him with a home-made guillotine, which crime earned the murderess the same fate beneath the judicial blade.
But the obscurity of the inscription was such that before long the civil authorities issued a call for help decoding it, via a notice in a bulletin somewhere, which my advising professor happened to notice. "Here's your dissertation," is what she'd said.
It was four lines of French gibberish. You will forgive me if I bore you with it. I know French isn't your thang, but, believe me, it's essential to my reason for writing this letter, so here it is:
Bob Echafaud seconde tous 'ciWhy, you ask, bother with gibberish? If the history of language demonstrates anything, it is that today's gibberish is yesterday's everyday speech. And for me, for some reason, after reading it for the first time, I couldn't get it out of my head. I ran it over and over when I was trying to get to sleep that first night. It sounded like something I knew! It seemed to be calling me with a siren call I couldn't resist.
S'il--verts beaux culs ennuis anis--
y compacte Tue-Mari immisce:
Prie-Dieu, Bob Echafaud!
My non-resistance turned into seven years of work. People who have not done scholarship have no appreciation for what I mean by "work," either. I was possessed: I followed every lead, mined every obscure lexicon with a toothpick, looked at every worm-eaten scrap of archival evidence, talked or wrote to every specialist in the arcana of the Parisian monde and the demi-monde of the late 19th century, and basically lived, breathed, and shat those words for seven whole monastic years. Sure, I went on dates from time to time, but I always wound up sitting at a table alone, because who wants to hang out with someone who is obsessed with translating four lines of French gibberish? It was like I was Dan Brown before DaVinci Code.
I did translate it, and here it is, for what it's worth: "Everybody here, Bob Scaffold is your second. That is, unless his green-ass absinthe issues get in the way and he's only packing a sawed-off Hubby Killer. In that case, Bob Scaffold, you're just a kneeling bench."
But what did it mean? The best part about the dissertation was that I could only say a truly final, conclusive answer, ahem, "awaited further research." Which meant I could publish-or-perish about this damn thing for-fucking-ever. This was truly going to be my lifelong ticket to espresso and scones.
"Bob Scaffold" was most definitely a guillotine. But was it the homemade one or the official one awaiting the murderess? "Kneeling bench" provides a savory equivalence in terms of furniture: the literal translation is "pray-God." Would it be seen as an instrument of divine justice? Even more tantalizing was the fact that the murderess was known to run in the same social circles as Symbolist poets, whose verse made mincemeat out of meaning (but it was very delicious mincemeat). She had met the poets Verlaine and Mallarmé. As far as is known, this was her only poem: etched in plaster, probably after beheading her husband. Even after seven years, I had just bored a hole in the explanation big enough for my head.
And into that breach stepped the letter: "I believe I have some information that can shed some light on your puzzle," it went on. "Your thorough research brought you part of the way, but I feel certain that, with all the work you spent on it, you will be very interested in learning something that will take you the rest of the way."
Interested? No no no I wasn't interested. With that letter I was a fly on the lashes of a Venus flytrap.
There she goes with the piano again. The letter-writer. I was trapped from the beginning.
I responded immediately to the anonymous sender at the address provided: something along the lines of "please I will kill anyone or debase myself in any way you wish if you will only share your information with me," only couched in socially conventional expressions. After a month of sleepless, pins-and-needle agony I received a reply: a carte de visite inscribed "Toussaint, 2017, noon, 947 Ursulines Ave., New Orleans, LA."
Fine. I didn't have to kill anyone or debase myself. I just had to go to the French Quarter on All Saints Day.
It turned out to be a tiny house: a one-storey shotgun with two shuttered apertures in front. I knocked at the one at the top of four crumbling steps. A tiny, white-haired woman answered the knock and asked if it was I, saying my name with a pronounced swallowed "r," French-style. Being told yes, she invited me in. There was a small front room with a couch and a baby grand piano that pretty much filled the room. She invited me to sit on the couch while she went to get a light refreshment for me. She brought some espresso and a beignet, the New Orleans equivalent of a scone. "I will play something for you," she said. It was a very short piece. When it was over, she stood up and said, "That was Bob Echafaud," which didn't really clarify anything. My face must have reflected this sense of unclarity, because she said, "Never mind. Follow me."
She led me through a small kitchen and a smaller bedroom at the back of which was a door. On the other side of the door was ... but wait, not yet.
Here's the deal. She said I could write one letter, so I decided to write to you. You are my last hope.
She is very old: a centenarian? Her mother had her late: "I was a surprise baby," she said. Her mother herself came to New Orleans from France as a young child--orphaned--bringing with her nothing other than the clothes on her back and two pieces of paper: music manuscript of the piece the old woman had played for me and a poem, which she showed me:
Bob Echafaud seconde tous 'ciThat's right: it's the same as the inscription.
S'il--verts beaux culs ennuis anis--
y compacte Tue-Mari immisce:
Prie-Dieu, Bob Echafaud!
She tells me that even though the words look French, they're actually English when they're sounded out. But she doesn't know what the English words are. It's some kind of rhyme--nonsense in French, but an actual rhyme in English. Maybe it is a lullaby? Her grandmother sang it to her mother, who sang it to her. "These are silly English words all dressed up in French," is what mother said to daughter become mother said to daughter said to me.
She sings it in a small voice and accompanies herself on the piano. She doesn't really like to sing, so mostly she just plays it. And constructs palaces of meaning for the nonsense words. It's like all her life she has lived in a Symbolist poem of meaningless symbols.
Here's the deal: she wants to know what English rhyme this is. If she finds out, she will let me go.
"Look," I say, "let me go and I will help you find the answer." No, she says. She has gone too far for that. She couldn't believe what she was hearing when the French consul came to her Creole French circle to talk about the original discovery of the inscription; after that she made it her business to keep up with developments. "It was like being born again," she says. And now that she has found the one person in the world who has the most knowledge of this puzzle, she feels that it is only just that I should die if I cannot give her the answer she seeks. "And if I find the answer?" I ask. I will release you, she says. That is a promise; I have made my plans, she says.
The door on the other side of the bedroom? There was something in that espresso or in that beignet that knocked me out before I saw it opened. I am now on the other side of that door: in a room with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, a nursing Madonna and Child, an undressed dress form, and a smoking cigar with an absinthe distiller's band; as well as an actual, working guillotine, named--of course--Bob Echafaud. I am chained to the guillotine.
I watch the old woman slice watermelon with it. Surely you have guessed that her mother was the daughter of the woman who guillotined her husband in 1875. "If there is no answer, you will beg me to die this way, eventually," she avers in a comforting purr before slicing another watermelon.
I need the English rhyme that sounds like these French words. You are my last hope. You have the address. I await the kind favor of a reply.
I know you will understand when I say I wish you were here.
Instead of me.
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