Read Online The Destiny of Nathalie X by William Boyd - Free Book Online Page A

on his way south. Every year there’s a different one.”
    “Different wife?”
    He looked at me knowingly. He drew heavily on his cigarette, his eyes wistfully distant. “They’re from Paris, these girls. Amazing.” He shook his head in frustrated admiration. Once a year Saint-Barthélemy was graced by one of these astonishingwomen, he said, these radiant visitors. They stayed in the Hôtel des Voyageurs … One day, one day he was going to go to Paris and see them for himself.
    Tuesday
    At the Café Riche et des Sports in Bergerac, I finish my article on Sainte-Beuve. I pour a cognac into my coffee and compose a telegram to Douglas canceling my visit.
O qu’ils sont pittoresques les trains manqués!
That will not be my fate. I unfold my road map and plot a route to Hyères.

N
ever
S
aw
B
razil
    O N ONE of the sunniest of bright May mornings Senator Dom Liceu Maximiliano Lobo needlessly ran his comb through his neat goatee and ordered his chauffeur to pull off to the side of the road. On mornings like these he liked to walk the remaining five hundred meters to his office, which he maintained, out of sentiment’s sake, and because of the sea breezes, in Salvador’s Cidada Alta. He sauntered along the sidewalks, debating pleasantly whether to linger a moment with a coffee and a newspaper on the terrace of the hotel, or whether to stop off at Olímpia’s little apartment, which he kept for her, at very reasonable expense, in an old colonial building in a square near the cathedral. She would not be expecting him, and it might be an amusing, not to say sensuous, experience to dally an hour or so this early before the day’s work called. How bright the sun was, this fine morning, Senator Dom Liceu Maximiliano Lobo thought as he turned toward the cathedral, his heels ringing on the cobbles, and how vivid the solar benefaction made the geraniums. Life was indeed good.

    The name was the problem, he saw. The problem lay there, definitely. Because … Because if you were not happy with your name, he realized, then a small but sustained lifelong stress was imposed on your psyche, your sense of self. It was like being condemned to wear too small shoes all the time; you could still get about but there would always be a pinching, a corn or two aching, something unnaturally hobbled about your gait.
    Wesley Bright. Wesley. Bright.
    The trouble with his name was that it wasn’t
quite
stupid enough—he was not a Wesley Bilderbeest or a Wesley Bugger; in fact it was
almost
a good name. If he had been Wesley Blade, say, or Wesley Beauregard he would have no complaints.
    “Wesley?”
    Janice passed him the docket. He clicked the switch on the mike.
    “Four-seven? Four-seven?”
    Silence. Just the permanent death rattle of the ether.
    Four-seven answered. “Four-seven.”
    “Parcel, four-seven. Pick up at Track-Track. Going to Heathrow, as directed.”
    “Account?”
    Wesley sighed. “Yes, four-seven. We do not do cash.”
    “Oh yeah. Roger, Rog.”
    He could always change his name, he supposed. Roger, perhaps. Roger Bright. Wesley Roger … No. There was that option, though: choose a new moniker, a new handle. But he wondered about that too: hard to shake off an old name, he would guess. It was the way you thought of yourself, after all, your tag on the pigeonhole. And when you were young, you never thought your name was odd—it was a source of dissatisfactionthat came with aging, a realization that one didn’t really like being a “Wesley Bright” sort of person at all. In his case it had started at college, this chafing, this discomfort. He wondered about these fellows, actors and rock musicians, who called themselves Tsar, or Zane Zorro or DJ Sofaman … He was sure that, to themselves, they were always Norman Sidcup or Wilbur Dongdorfer in their private moments.
    Colonel Liceu “o Falção” Lobo opened his eyes and he saw that the sun had risen sharp and green through the leafmass outside his bedroom. He