“Bernadette is in training. She’s learning to hunt truffles. You can make a good living with a truffle pig. Isn’t that right, Bernadette.”
The pig watched her.
It can’t speak, I didn’t say.
“A farmer near Sazerac traded them a weaned piglet in exchange for vegetable deliveries and their plan was just, fatten her and eat her!”
She tossed a couple of the old lettuce heads from the crate in her back seat onto the ground. The pig nudged its face into the rotten lettuces and began chewing their slimy leaves.
“A babe as young as she was when they got her can be trained to earn thousands. By the time the season starts this fall, she’ll be ready. Take our yield to the gourmet markets. People will pay a fortune for just a few ounces of black truffles. The Moulinards have no imagination beyond converting animals to food. Eat your pig in winter, then be hungry and broke.”
Bernadette had finished the lettuce. Nadia commanded her back into the trunk by banging twice on the rear quarter panel, a signal in a language the animal seemed to know.
It leapt up but missed its mark. It took a couple of tries, plus Nadia helping with a boost to its hindquarters, for the pig to clear the lip of the trunk, because it had quite a long body, as I suppose all pigs do. They haven’t been bred to hurdle over barriers.
It lay down in a pile of hay she had back there, snorting and grunting.
“Black truffles,” I said. “In this area?”
She said yes and closed the trunk lid.
“So that’s also Neire,” I said.
“What?”
“Neire,” I said. “Black. An ancient color. The secret of this place.”
She looked at me like I was crazy, but she was the one who was crazy.
BACK AT CHEZ DUBOIS, my aristocratic flophouse, I had forgotten to put the bad beer from Boulière into the refrigerator, so it was very warm bad beer, almost hot. I drank it, its carbonation a fraying patter on the tongue instead of the sharp pop of cold bubbles filling the mouth and throat.
I lay on the bed in the upstairs room I’d chosen, the open windows letting in cool night air and allowing me to detect any sounds as I researched this unexpected American, Burdmoore.
If a single pebble on the gravel shifted, I would hear it. I heard nothing. The lockboxes had been undisturbed. There had been no Citroën panel truck waiting for me upon my return.
It was not a common first name, and with my guess of his age, and his New York accent, my yield on him was low effort, high reward.
Burdmoore’s rap sheet was stunningly long: vandalism, petty theft, felony theft, check fraud, mail fraud, possession of stolen property, fencing of stolen property, battery, violating the terms of a restraining order, driving a stolen ambulance, driving a stolen box truck, driving under the influence, a host of other convictions and bench warrants and parole violations, various weapons charges, and deep into the record, from 1977, a guilty plea of arson and second-degree murder, for the death of two people trapped in a burning building.
The details painted a portrait.
My impression, upon meeting him, had been that he was something of a joke and a novelty, a geezer taken in by the Moulinards out of charity. But from his criminal record it looked to me like Burdmoore was the actual heavyweight among them—perhaps the only serious one.
I was on my second “hot one” and relaxing, as I sifted through a stack of Bruno’s emails that a word search for “Neire” pulled up. I found one I had not read before and downloaded it.
Caves are uniquely black, he began this email.
Unaided by a fire or a torch or a flashlight, in a cave you encounter a blackness that is much more extreme than what in normal life is thought of as “black.”
Bruno said that what most interested him about the dark of a cave was the way in which outer darkness seemed to spark an explosion of activity inside the mind.
In absolute dark, he said, you turn inward. It is in true dark that one’s mental scenes are most full of light and color and movement, as if the dark of a cave were the secret pathway to our own inner world, the same path taken by our hominin brothers and sisters, who went down into the earth where no light leaked in order to see.
Bruno had gone into the nether chambers of his own cave without any artificial light. He arranged food and drink around him in an assembly he could locate by touch. He was committed to remaining fourteen days.
He wrote to the Moulinards that in his darkest hour—and he meant that literally, the apex of extreme dark, which occurred on the first night, when he was unaccustomed, rather than the expression’s more common and figurative usage, to describe a psychological crisis—it was in his darkest hour that he began to see.
An image in his mind, he told them, came into view: it was a black-and-white silver-nitrate studio portrait of the American icon for the blind, Helen Keller. She was seated, noble, in a black high-necked dress, and holding in her lap an enormous magnolia blossom. Her pose emphasized her beautiful upright posture and her handsome profile. Her gaze was of pristine beatitude, blessed and transparent.
He understood that this image he could see in his mind of Helen Keller was a real photograph that he had once looked at in a book. The power of this portrait of Helen Keller was to conjure, without having to explain, her sense experience as a blind person, her communion with this magnolia blossom in her lap. She cannot see it, but its lemony and delicate fragrance is rising to her. She can feel the thick and spongy consistency of its petals, and the sturdy structure of its leaves, which frame the flower like the points of a star. Leaves that would be slippery on top, fuzzy and soft on their undersides.
In the darkest region of his cave, in absolute blindness, Bruno had pictured a blind person apprehending beauty by smell and by touch.
To Bruno, the meaning of this paradox was self-evident: to not be physically blind, as he was not, was to be blind to what it means not to see.
He put this another way for them, in an attempt to clarify: He could not abandon his own capacity for sight, he wrote. Even if he wanted to.
I see in the light, he said. I see in the half-light. I see in the dark. And it is imperative that I embrace this capacity. That I give in to it. That I insistently see.
Some of what he pictured that fortnight in his cave was testament to the kaleidoscopic talents of the mind to make patterns, to make art, even as his own visions, he told them, were strikingly similar to late 1960s and early 1970s psychedelic poster art—a graphics style, he said, that was inescapable for those who lived through that era. He said that poster art might itself point toward, and even establish, a common counter-reality, the swirls of color that people see in heightened states, a lake-in-the-earth in which we all swim, he said, whether induced by hallucinogens or by extreme dark.
The good and the bad of this counter-reality, he told them, our “inner seeing,” was that it sometimes lifted debased fragments from the commodified world. We are all sieves, he said, and we catch and hold on to all sorts of things, and not just the images we want to return to. Take an inner trip, and it will not be just the beautiful and the sacred that you find. From the depths of my own mind might come a jingle I heard on the radio as a child, advertising tooth-whitening powder, or I might see Tintin’s dog, Milou. We pick up things along the way that are of no use at all. The trick, he said, is to acknowledge these images, and to let them float past.
My iPhone rang. It was Lucien. He knew reception was bad, which gave me a perfect excuse to be unavailable, but I was expecting his call and ready to answer.
He asked about Le Moulin, but I understood that what he wanted to know was what Pascal had said about him, where he stacked up in Pascal’s judgments.
I invented quotes about how much Pascal respected Lucien and the choices he’d made.