A Thousand Forests in One Acorn by Valerie Miles

Author:Valerie Miles [Miles, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781940953083
Publisher: Open Letter

A THOUSAND FORESTS

FROM A WORLD FOR JULIUS

[A NOVEL]

Remember how during those trips that our mother would take us on when we were children, and we used to escape from the sleeper cars to run through the third-class cars. We were fascinated by the men we used to see sleeping against strangers’ shoulders, or simply stretched out on the floor, in the packed cars. They seemed more real than our families’ friends. At the Toulon station one night, during our return to Paris from Cannes, we saw the third-class travelers drinking from the water fountain on the platform; a worker offered you some water from a soldier’s canteen and you gulped it down, looking quickly at me like the little girl who had just had her first adventure in life . . . We were born to travel in first class but, in contrast to the rules of the great ocean liners, it seemed to prohibit us from third class.

— Roger Vailland, Beau Masque

Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. The mansion had carriage houses, gardens, a swimming pool, and a small orchard into which two-year-old Julius would wander and then be found later, his back turned, perhaps bending over a flower. The mansion had servants’ quarters that were like a blemish on the most beautiful face. There was even a carriage that your great-grandfather used, Julius, when he was President of the Republic, be careful, don’t touch! it’s covered with cobwebs, and turning away from his mother, who was lovely, Julius tried to reach the door handle. The carriage and the servants’ quarters always held a strange fascination for Julius, that fascination of “don’t touch, honey, don’t go around there, darling.” By then his father had already died.

Julius was a year and a half old at the time. For some months he just walked about the mansion, wandering off by himself whenever possible.

Secretly he would head for the servants’ quarters of the mansion that, as we’ve said, were like a blemish on a most beautiful face, a pity, really, but he still did not dare to go there. What is certain is that when his father was dying of cancer, everything in Versailles revolved around the dying man’s bedroom: only his children were not supposed to see him. Julius was an exception because he was too young to comprehend fear but young enough to appear just when least expected, wearing silk pajamas, turning his back to the drowsy nurse and watching his father die, that is, he watched how an elegant, rich, handsome man dies. And Julius has never forgotten that night—three o’clock in the morning, a lit candle in offering to Santa Rosa, the nurse knitting to ward off sleep—when his father opened an eye and said to him poor thing, and by the time the nurse ran out to call for his mother, who was lovely and cried every night in an adjoining bedroom—if anything, to get a bit of rest—it was all over.

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