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"Jeanne's stories were a child's fairy tales—a lunatic's delusions!" I said, thumping an armrest with a clenched fist.
Madame Édmonde remained perfectly still until she finally said, in almost a whisper, "Do you remember the last occasion you saw Jeanne?"
"How can I forget?"
"How many people have you told about it?"
"No one." How could I have told anyone? I was too ashamed.
"If I told you, now, would that be sufficient proof?"
I nodded. "Yes. I suppose it would." And yet I didn't want to hear.
"You had just awoken from one of your nightmares. Jeanne began to console you, as she had done throughout the years. But that morning you would not be consoled. Her tales had long since ceased to comfort you. And on this occasion you were especially inconsolable." Madame Édmonde paused. "Do you remember how you responded?"
I nodded shamefully. "Yes," I murmured, "I'm afraid I do."
"You lost your temper. You told her she was a hysteric, that you could have her locked up, that if she did not stop her nonsense you would have her committed to the Salpêtrière."
I hung my head. It was all true.
"Of course, it wasn't the first time you'd lost your temper. But this occasion was different, wasn't it?"
"Yes," I groaned. "Yes, it was."
"And what made it different was that you took out your belt and you began whipping me."
I opened my mouth, as if by reflex, to both protest and defend myself, but caught between the two reflexes I could only stammer, unable to find the words for the task.
"You tore the dress from my back, and you whipped me, over and over, until the skin was streaked with blood. And do you remember what you said?"
"No, please don't…"
"You said you were whipping me like the slave I was, like the slave I would always be…"
"Enough!" I cried. Despite my injuries, I sprang from my seat and, cane in hand, limped over to the window that overlooked the courtyard. The pain in my heart now rendered me oblivious to that of my ankle. "You want me to believe that you are Jeanne?" I looked back at her, but no reply emanated from behind the veil. "How can such a thing be possible? It contravenes the fundamental laws of nature—of science and physics. I simply cannot accept the notion that the woman who is speaking to me right now was once another woman, one I knew intimately, the woman with whom I shared the best and worst moments of my life. It is utter nonsense—the worst kind of flim-flammery."
"You who are a poet, do you not see that the power of the crossing is within every human soul? Whenever you look another person in the eyes, do you not feel within the pit of your stomach a kind of forward yearning so powerful that it frightens you? Do we not avert our gazes in polite society precisely because of the vertigo that comes from looking into the eyes of another? And isn't that vertigo not so much the fear of crossing as the fear of the desire to cross? Are not our souls constantly reaching out toward the other, striving for the freedom of the crossing?"
"And now you dare suggest that this ability, altogether too strange to believe, is available to any poor fool?"
"Yes, it is within us all, only it takes many years of training to undertake it, and many more to master it. It should begin early, as early as possible, as a child learns to walk and speak. Once that moment is past, it is almost impossible to learn. But the potential to cross lies within every single human being."
I turned back to face the woman whose voice seemed to be floating to me not from across a room but from across an ocean.
"The knowledge of the crossing has all but disappeared," she continued. "And yet, in classical times, it was known to many peoples. The myths and legends have survived—all those stories of metamorphosis are vestiges of a time when the practice of crossing was commonplace."
Excerpted from Crossings by Alex Landragin. Copyright © 2020 by Alex Landragin. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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