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eat were things he wished to put aside forever: of taking care never to meet a white man’s eyes and always to appear slightly stupid, slightly lazy. Of avoiding anything that might possibly be construed as a threat. And hand in hand with all that had gone the knowledge that anything in his life could be taken away from him without warning, explanation, or recompense.
    In France it would not be so, he had told himself. In France he would be truly free.
    Then Ayasha had died. As if the wall between past and present had shattered like a pane of glass, pestilence flowed through the streets of Paris. The city took on for him the aspect of nightmare, a nightmare in which she was always about to come around the corner, she was always just a stall ahead of him in the market buying apples … she was always lying on the reeking bed amid the filth in which she had died, reaching for the empty water pitcher, praying for the strength to hang on until he returned home.
    Like a termite-riddled post under a hammer blow, his life had crumbled with her death. He had returned to New Orleans, to the world that, if it had not cherished him, at least was one he knew. He was forty. Some day, he thought, springing over the offal of the gutter and seeing ahead of him the pink stucco walls of his mother’s house, some day he might collect the strength to leave Louisiana again. To return to France—though probably never Paris—or Vienna, or London, or Rome.
    But right now he was like a man with fever who can crawl no farther than his bed, where he lies waiting to heal.
    Someday, maybe, he would heal.
    He didn’t know.
    His mother still owned the house on the Rue Burgundy given her by St. Denis Janvier, when that gentleman had died in 1822. Livia January had married a respectable upholsterer named Levesque, and a few years ago he had died, too. Though January had the impression she was less than pleased about admitting she’d ever borne a son in slavery—to hear his mother talk she had never cut cane in her life—she had extended a temperate welcome and agreed that he could reoccupy his old room above the kitchen, the room next to the cook’s quarters. These rooms—garçonnières—were the custom in a countrywhere the presence of growing sons under the same roof was regarded with less than enthusiasm by their mothers’ protectors. Being his mother, she charged him three Spanish dollars a week.
    Livia Levesque was currently renting chambers in a comfortable boardinghouse in Milneburgh with a number of her better-off cronies, having let the cottage she owned there to a wealthy, white sugar broker. She had taken Bella, her cook, with her. January’s shift at the Charity Hospital officially ended at eight in the morning, though it was frequently noon before he left. He was usually too exhausted, and the day too sweltering, to even attempt to start up the open brick stove in the kitchen: he either had beans and rice bought out the back door of one of the local groceries or went without.
    Today he had gone without and was wondering if he should seek out a meal at Gillette’s Tavern, or bribe the cook at Breyard’s for a dish of something, before returning to the Hospital in a few hours. First, he thought, pushing open the gate into his mother’s yard, he wanted to get rid of this hell-begotten wool coat and waistcoat and cravat. What lunatic Frenchman had dictated that the formal dress that marked him as a professional had to be the same in a tropical city like New Orleans as it was in London or Paris? He couldn’t dispense with it, of course. Leaving out the fact that his mother would kill him if she heard he’d been abroad in his official capacity less than fully and formally attired, he could say good-bye to any chance of professional employment as a musician if those who hired him saw that he dressed like a day laborer.
    But at least he could sponge off again and put on a clean shirt and a slightly less excruciating garment.
    It