Jules Verne — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

At seven minutes past nine, on the fourteenth of November, in a city whose name I withhold only because it might have been any of a dozen European capitals grown newly fashionable to strangers who labor from a distance and belong properly nowhere, I first observed the fracture in the mirror of the Café Excelsior.

I had been three months a tenant of that city and of that corner table; my mornings apportioned, with the regularity of a chronometer, between the glow of a laptop screen, the murmur of colleagues eight time zones removed, and the small, unwitnessed ceremony of ordering a single espresso at half past eight. My employer knew me as a signature on invoices; my neighbors knew me not at all; the waiter alone, a boy of perhaps twenty who changed the paper tablecloths with the gravity of a sacristan, could have sworn to my existence. It is a peculiar variety of solitude, this working alone amid multitudes, and I had begun, out of an old scholarly habit, to measure it as I would measure any other natural phenomenon: in hours of silence, in cups consumed, in the widening intervals between one human sentence addressed to me and the next.

The Café Excelsior itself deserved a chapter of its own architecture. Vaulted in stucco laurel leaves gone the color of weak tea, its counter of Carrara marble worn into a shallow trough by a century of leaning elbows, it held against the rear wall a mirror some nine feet by four, framed in gilt wood carved into acanthus and vine. A stranger, glancing up from his correspondence, might have called it merely handsome. I confess that on the fourteenth of November I called it beautiful, in the manner one calls beautiful a thing not yet examined: a plane of captured dusk, holding the whole brown room in cool suspension, deepening every lamp to amber and every face to something kinder than its original.

It was only on the second glance, the scholar's glance, that I found the flaw. A hairline fracture ran diagonally from the upper left corner downward some eleven inches, no wider at any point than a human hair, silvered along its edges where the backing had begun, imperceptibly, to oxidize. I learned later, from the proprietor, that the glass was Venetian, cast about 1868, its reflective coat a tin-mercury amalgam of the old process, since abandoned everywhere for silver nitrate as being less poisonous to the workmen who applied it; that the frame had survived one change of ownership, one flood in 1966, and one attempted theft; that the crack itself, so far as anyone could say, predated living memory. A romantic definition would have called it a scar of time. The chemist in me preferred the truth beneath: glass, like any solid, carries within its structure microscopic strains laid down at the moment of cooling, and such a strain, given a sufficient span of years and the ordinary vibration of traffic, cellos, and slammed doors, will eventually find its release along a single geometric line.

I was still bent close to the surface, breathing on it in the manner of a man testing a diagnosis, when a voice addressed me in English inflected by no country in particular.

"You are the fourth this year to notice it before noon."

The man who had spoken settled into the chair across from mine without invitation, in a tone that did not admit of a reply, and ordered, with two fingers lifted toward the boy, a coffee he did not intend to pay for. He wore a suit cut for a narrower man than himself; his shoes, expensive once, had been resoled by an amateur. Between us he set down, with the unhurried ceremony of a card sharp, a small brass key.

"The mirror," he said, "conceals a compartment. I have the key. You have, I think, the patience of a man with nothing better to do at nine in the morning, in a country not his own."

I answered him courteously enough, remarking that I doubted very much whether a mirror of that antiquity, and that thinness of frame, could conceal any compartment at all worth the concealing; but beneath the courtesy I registered, as one registers a change of temperature, the small humiliation of having been so accurately read: a foreigner, alone, hoarding hours as a miser hoards coin, ripe for any proposition that promised him, at last, a plot.

That was the whole of the premise, stated plainly and only once. The fracture ran eleven inches; the key was two inches of brass; and the distance between my solitude and my folly, though I did not yet know it, had already been measured and found perilously short.

It was with that measurement still fresh in my mind that I turned back to him and spoke. I told him, in the same courteous register he had used on me, that a compartment concealed for a century and a half in a frame no thicker than a man's wrist strained credulity past the point where politeness could carry it further; and I asked, since we were being frank, how he came to know the mirror at all.

"I have sat where you are sitting," he said, "on four separate mornings, in four separate years." He turned the little key once between finger and thumb, as a man turns a coin he is fond of, without meaning to spend it. "The crack widens by a fraction each winter. I have watched it. So, I think, has someone else, who left this key behind a radiator in 1966, during the flood, when the frame was lifted from the wall to save it from the water."

I confess that for the better part of four minutes, from 9:11 by the café clock to 9:15, I entertained him. My pulse, which I noted afterward with the same disinterested attention I gave to any other instrument, had risen from its accustomed sixty-eight to something nearer ninety; my breath had shortened to the quick, shallow rhythm of a man listening for a footstep behind him in an empty corridor. It is worth setting down, for the instruction of any other solitary laborer in a foreign capital, that loneliness is not cured by company; it is only anesthetized by it, briefly, the way a limb gone numb feels nothing until the blood returns and the true ache begins.

The boy who changed the tablecloths — Emilio, I had at last learned his name, on the ninth of November, after eleven weeks of silence between us — set down the stranger's coffee, glanced at the brass key, and did not withdraw his hand from the tray.

"That is the fourth key this year," he said, to me and not to the stranger, in the flat, closing tone of a man reading a balance sheet. "The first belonged to a wine cellar in Trieste. The second opened nothing at all; he had filed the teeth himself, badly, in a hardware shop on the Via Roma. The third was a house key, quite genuine, quite useless, belonging to an apartment three streets from here that he had once, briefly, been asked to leave."

The stranger's face did not fall so much as settle, the way a scaffold settles when a single strut is drawn from beneath it: no collapse, only a several-degree subsidence, silent and complete. He did not protest. He did not even color. He drank the coffee he had not paid for, set the cup down with the exact care of a man determined to leave no further evidence of himself, and said, to the room in general, that the morning trade in that quarter had grown regrettably well informed.

The proprietor, summoned by Emilio's raised chin, arrived at 9:19 with the mirror's true history folded into three sentences, delivered as a chemist delivers a correction to a poet's wonder. The compartment did exist, he said; it had been cut into the plaster behind the frame during the 1966 restoration, to house the junction box for the electric wiring that had replaced, that same year, forty gas jets; it held presently two fuses, a spare length of flex, and a calendar from a defunct printing firm, dated 1971. The key the stranger held would not turn in its lock, because that lock had been changed, along with the wiring, in 1989. He knew this because he had ordered the work himself, from his father's ledgers, which he kept, as men of a certain temperament keep everything, in a drawer beneath the register.

The stranger rose at 9:22, adjusted a coat cut for a narrower man, and left by the door without the small courtesies of departure, taking with him a humiliation that no one troubled to make crueler than the facts already were.

I sat some while longer before the glass, and found, once my pulse had returned by 9:31 to its ordinary sixty-eight, that the fracture had not altered in the telling: eleven inches, diagonal, silvered at the edge where the old amalgam had begun its slow surrender to the air. I took out a ruler, from the same bag that held my laptop, and measured it properly, for the first time, in inches and in millimeters both, and wrote the figures in the notebook I keep for such things.

Then I opened the laptop, at the half hour precisely, as I had done every working day for three months, and answered the first of the morning's messages from colleagues who did not know, and had no need to know, that I had that morning been offered a plot and had counted, instead, a crack.