Music-Box Melody
Written for Sarah.
Aouda likes nothing better than curtains, though Phileas has never understood why. She says that she has never lived in a house with curtains, long brocade curtains that reach down to the floor, burgundy with roses and leaves embroidered thickly and stiffly upon them. She likes to touch them and look at them and press them to her cheeks, and she both loves and regrets it when the time comes that they must be replaced, and she is able to sort through bolts of material to choose new ones, and must reluctantly take down and fold away the old ones.
She looks so peculiar sometimes, with her beautiful dark skin and her fine dark eyes, her Indian face, wearing an Englishwoman's clothes, in an Englishwoman's house. Sometimes she looks strange, sometimes she looks a little lost--but it is the truth that she never looks out of place. She never looks as though she doesn't belong.
Phileas has taken a fancy to watches lately. He likes to take them apart, slowly, picking through the pieces inside over a period of many hours. It's like opening a treasure-box to lift the back plate and find a mine of springs and hinges, tiny pieces of clockwork all fitted together. He takes them apart and puts them back together again, regular as the minute hand inching forward, slow as the hour hand sliding by on the white face.
He isn't an old man, yet, but he isn't a young man, and his hands occasionally do shake when he works. Sometimes little pieces fly across the room. Phileas doesn't ever seem to mind. He merely gets up, and slowly walks to the little thing that's lying nearly invisible on the floor, and retrieves it, returns to his seat and fits in back in. He is more meticulous than he ever was.
Passepartout spends his spare time, when he has any, at the Oriental Theatre. Nothing, he says, could ever hope to be as interesting as his journey (he says it warmly, fondly, as though he can still picture it running through his mind in a series of perfect photographs) his journey with Mr. Fogg around the world. Still, he likes to look at the girls with fans and feathers, the men who balance plates on sticks and spin them 'round. He likes to watch the silent Indian gentleman with the baby elephant, because, he says, it reminds him of when they first found Aouda.
He isn't by rights Passepartout any longer, because he's been serving Phileas and Aouda for ten years by now, but who would think of changing his name? He is always right on time with meals, right on time to call them up in the morning; he knows how to iron the newspapers and properly clean the house (he does this because Aouda likes to try, but simply isn't very good at it; cleaning, that is); appears to know every cabbie in London because he always has someone right at the door the moment they want to go anywhere. Aouda calls him Jean, and he smiles cheerfully at her. Phileas feels as though he has been watching them all get old, though they are not old yet, of course they are not old yet--still, he feels, they are getting old. Passepartout doesn't like to laugh about Mr. Fix, the way Aouda did when she got braver, and Phileas suspects he is missing a friend.
They are all somewhat changed. How could they stay the same? They all have new habits, new ways of moving and talking. Passepartout has the same genial French voice, but the way he uses it is different. Aouda is as fine and kind and clever at learning as she ever was, but she doesn't often need to learn now; sometimes she knows what he means before he has finished saying it, which quietly annoys him. And he, he, is so exact, so precise, so routine; he does everything on time by the times he chooses; he never has a crease in his clothes, never a change in his expression; but all the same, there are times when he suddenly thinks he's forgotten something. He!--Phileas Fogg!--he is sure there is something he has left behind.
That is why it is so important that they all take care of one another. Aouda reaches out her dusky dark Indian hands through the English bedclothes and touches Phileas and Passepartout in the night, as though she were steadying them. She is like the outline of one's own country from a ship, showing through the fog. Passepartout, loyal, good, makes them laugh so that they do not become too grave as the years pass. He has his funny habits that he does without even thinking, such as the tweaking of his cuffs, the way he has of brushing imaginary dust off his sleeves, that grin which creeps across his face at the oddest times. He is like chestnuts and autumn bonfires and silver spoons, a hoard of memories and objects that one must treasure.
Phileas does not see his own importance, however. He is there because he loves Aouda and because she loves him, because if Passepartout were gone he would cease to be a Gentleman of Habits and instead become an eccentric old buffer. He thinks of himself taking apart watches in his room, and remembers that sometimes he does it alone, and sometimes with Aouda looking over his shoulder, pausing to kiss the top of his head, wandering about the room to look at her curtains, so pleased, so proud! Sometimes it is Passepartout, stopping in to make absolutely certain he is all right, to announce that supper is ready, to declare that the afternoon post has arrived, to bring in a visitor's card--and always to bow, always to gaze in interest at the inner workings of the clockwork piece, and always to sneak fond glances sideways at Phileas when he deems it proper.
Even when it is only he, Phileas, working in his room, he knows he is not alone. They are always there, somewhere, in the house, in the world. But he does not see his own importance to them. He knows that it would not be the same without him, of course--without him, Aouda and Passepartout would be a scandal, a shiftless Frenchman and a refugee Indian--but presumably he serves no real purpose. That is what he thinks when he thinks about it.
Most of the time, he does not think about it. Most of the time, he thinks of them.
He does not see that the reason they need him is because they love him, both of them. They love one another, but they would be incomplete without him. He is the saviour of both, the master of both, the man whom they most respect and revere. They love him; but he does not see it.
So they live together in the house in Saville Row, and Passepartout has his Oriental Theatre to go to and remember the journey around the world, and Aouda has her dear curtains which are her pride and joy; and Phileas has his watches.
One day, while he is working, he thinks of something, and wonders why it had never occurred to him before. We are like clockwork, is what he thinks. We're like the inner parts of the watches, and we fit together properly to make everything work as it is meant to.
Then he understands. The watch would, of course, fail to work if a part were removed. That is apparent to him every time he takes one apart. They are like clockwork; and he is important because he if were not there, their watch would fail to work.
At that time, Phileas smiles to himself, a wintery, private smile, conservative but pleased. He finishes with the watch, and then he goes downstairs at his usual time, and he kisses both Aouda and Passepartout when they go in for dinner. Aouda's dark Indian eyes glow, and Passepartout's companionable grin is appreciative and glad. Then, with brief handclasps on everyone's part, they sit down to the meal, just as they have every evening. Just as they always do.
Just like clockwork.
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