Map of Another Town by M.F.K Fisher

Author:M.F.K Fisher [M.F.K. Fisher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911547389
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2019-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Man and the Words

Ah! what avails the classic bent

And what the cultured word,

Against the undoctored incident

That actually occurred?

Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Benefactors’

On my invisible map of Aix, the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta has two lines of sad and bloody ink in its printing that should make it a distressing street for me, but that do not keep me from walking often there with gratification. They are both connected with the old Law School, and one is for a man and both are for words.

Brondino is the man. He is indelibly alive for me, although the last time I saw him he was dying, and later I read that he had indeed snuffed out, like the final inch of a very slender candle. For weeks before that, his bookshop was locked, with a quickly dusty card stuck in the door saying Closed because of illness, and the reprints of pictures which he used to clip on cords strung across his small window were curling and losing their colours in the dampness and the rare sun of the dark narrow street.

That last time, he was climbing painfully out of a taxi to go into his shop, with of course a pile of framed reproductions on the sidewalk and under both his arms. I helped him with them, and he told me that he had been very ill and had submitted to all kinds of tests, which proved at least that his heart was a strong one.

He spoke somewhat hysterically of a miraculous cure that he was being given by a radical young doctor who was despised and feared by the established physicians of that most radically conforming of all towns, Aix. From there he went on to a poster of an exhibit he had sponsored several years before, when his choice of a Picasso sketch of bathers was banned by the City Fathers as lewd. And that reminded him of another case of provincial stupidity, and another, and all the time he was weaving with weakness against his table.

I left as soon as I could. In one direction or another it was Brondino’s usual pattern, impossible to alter or arrest: a half-hour of agreeing and listening, mute in his feverish flow of scorn and erudition … I had an appointment I must keep, and I never saw him again.

The time before that, the next to the last one, I was walking down the Cours past the open-fronted flower shop on the Place Forbin, and there stood my poor little twisted friend leaning against the wall.

He was shocking to see, and I knew that although he actually looked much the same as always, he was in deep pain this time, so that his normally green-grey pallor and the normal suffering in his large sunken eyes were suddenly shocking. It seemed improbable that he would recognise me, so intense was the expression of agony in him; but he took his hand away from the wall when I spoke, and I shook it gently in the inescapable habit of the Midi.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.