The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 36: Social Issues
One night we are walking on the beach together. It is a warm night, the warmest since we have arrived. Late September is not the prime tourist season, so we've been able to exist comfortably within the space that the uncrowded city gives us during the still-warm days but cool nights. There are other tourists. An elderly couple from Israel, a two middle-aged women from Spain, one of them an invalid, and the gay couple from Denmark who learned quickly that their attempts to befriend us were unwelcome.
The locals sense that I'm not exactly French and that makes me the ideal tourist for some reason—someone who speaks perfect French but has none of the exacting habits of tourists from Paris. Harry and I are just quietly, absurdly grateful for everything and that never fails to win friendliness.
A blind man would know that we're in love, but the ten-or-so year age difference between Harry and my new face is no longer so enormous, particularly because Harry looks older. We are not inhibited in public—for the first time!—but for that reason, perhaps we have been discreet in our affections.
But on the first warm night, our sixth in France, I've lost another bet due to Harry's remarkable verbal vitriol. That, and sometimes I engineer a loss because the stakes Harry sets are so delightful. This time, the wager was that I would walk, in my true form, outside with him. If I haven't done so before now it's not out of fear of being recognized by the muggles so much as not wanting to confuse them with Harry walking, very much in love, with two different men.
When I reverse the transformation that is becoming second nature, it feels wonderful to have the wind on my face, in my hair (braided in the gypsy style), and looking down and seeing my arm on Harry, well, it makes me a little more daring than usual. We're working on Harry's French pronunciation the best way I know how—by my shaping his mouth to make the right sounds with my own.
Harry has learned the words of everything we had at dinner and is working on the verb forms to order for himself the next morning at breakfast when we hear it.
"That's right disgusting, that is."
"It's bad enough he's a queer, but to carry on with that old queen."
"Ay mate, why don't you blow a real man?" This last is accompanied by ribald laughter and the three young men pushing each other to get first in line for what they think is an irresistible offer for Harry. Since they are obviously drunk, they end up stumbling in the sand.
Hermès, I need to become more attuned to threats from muggles! I exclaim inwardly while adjusting my shield. The three brats, obviously moneyed students who have escaped from some British university for the weekend, couldn't hurt us if they tried, now, so I say, "Come, Harry, I think you need a few more tutorials," I say, my hand on his arm promising some enjoyable new shapes.
No one else would be able to tell from his calm face, but his arm feels like molten iron. "Where are you lads from?" he asks in a friendly tone.
"Leeds," one of them says, surprised that Harry isn't defensive.
"I was at University College in London, but only for night courses," the filament vibrating at a high frequency beside me says. "Here on holiday like us?"
The group's collective sneer that had slipped a bit with surprise is now firmly in place again. "No, man, we're not fucking nasty old queens like you are. My father's company has a time share in town, and no one was using it."
"Well then, enjoy yourselves, the one bakery with the fish on the sign, how do you pronounce the name?" he turns to me.
"La truite zébrée," I say in my clearest French.
"La truite zébrée is fantastic. Croissants like you've never had them." Harry turns to go and then says, "By the way, my lover can kick all of your asses all at the same time."
There is a chorus of ugly laughter.
"That scarecrow?"
"Actually it looks more like the crow."
"That one looks like she'd be afraid to get her hair messed up."
"You don't believe me?" Harry does a good imitation of surprise. "Maybe you'd like a little wager?"
"Harry, no," I say, wishing I hadn't indulged his anger at these inconsequential boys.
"Harry, no," one of them says in high, fluting voice that couldn't be more unlike my own.
"You see, this isn't about us. Let's just go on with our night."
The look in Harry's eyes effectively translates to, "If you walk away right now don't expect me to come back with you."
I sigh and turn to face my would-be attackers, who whoop with delight at the prospect of beating me up.
"What do we get?" asks the largest one.
"Besides the pleasure of putting a queer in his place, I'll give you fifty pounds," he pulls out some of the English money he has left.
"This is our lucky night, mates," the medium-sized one chortles. "You sure you want it to be all of us at once? It doesn't seem sporting."
"We wouldn't want anyone to be deprived of their sport," I say to Harry drily.
They're taking off their shirts and prancing a little bit for my benefit thinking it will distract me, these dull muggles who think I could feel anything for them. "Are you ready, Nancy?" one says.
Who knows what a few drunken boys unused to any type of combat proposed to do to me, but it was extremely difficult not to kill them by fending them off. Promising myself I'll give Harry a good tongue-lashing for putting me in this position, I allow them in to my shield far enough so they can be dispatched on a short arc through the air and land without too much force in the sand.
After their initial surprise they try again and again, growing stubborn and then angry. "What are you, some kind of martial arts mary?" one says, picking himself up off the ground after a fourth go.
"Can we go now?" I ask Harry.
"Certainly, love, you were wonderful, as always," he says and gives me a kiss that nearly knocks me over the way these boys weren't able to. "Now I need a cigarette," Harry says. "Can any of you oblige?"
The cigarette is lit easily from within my shield, the lighter handed back, and we're on our way at last.
"Why did you put those ridiculous students in harm's way?" I begin my tirade.
"So, how do you feel?" Harry says, grinning at the way I scowl at the smoke coming out of his nose.
"Feel? Relieved I didn't snap their necks." He gives me a look. "I suppose it was good not to just take that kind of unpleasantness lying down."
"Good. I'm glad you feel good, Severus. Because I can't bleeding well believe you sometimes!"
This promises not to be a dueling match with blunted weapons.
"I don't know about you, but I've had precious little to be happy about in my life, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let three bored idiots take so much as five seconds of my first holiday ever."
"But Harry, if we'd just kept walking we could have—"
"What did you think of them calling you an old queen?"
"It was not the worst thing I have been called."
He throws the cigarette away and bores into my eyes. "You let them get to you. Right now part of you is thinking about it. You're going to add it to the list of things you obsess about."
There is a mad look to his face, but it is the madness of the prophet. "I knew that people would object to the age difference," I say lamely.
"You are such a fool!" Harry is shouting full throttle—luckily the wind carries most of the force away. "You don't get it, Severus. We're not back in your time, when you could think it was all just little you who liked other boys, your conflict about it—"
"I think that my sexual problems are probably unique on this earth," I protest, starting to get annoyed.
"But you're not the only one. People my age know that there are tons of gay people everywhere. We don't have the luxury to think it's about one coming out drama more or less. It's this whole institutionalized system that makes it stupidly hard for us to be who we are."
"As soon as you tell me what we're arguing about I'm more than happy to argue back, Harry."
"You want to know what my definition of a queen is?" Harry wheels on me, suddenly white with anger. "To me, a queen is someone who thinks it's all about him and his boyfriend and his right to be a bitch for how hard it was for him coming up. I've known people like this, Severus, and they make me sick. You of all people, I would have thought understood—there are some things you just can't let people get away with in the grand scheme of things."
"Grand like drunken teenagers? You wish I cared more about what those three simpletons think about me?"
"In a lot of countries it's against the law to be gay. And even when it's not against the law people have a way of making your life unnecessarily miserable, humiliating and dangerous," he lists. "They all start with that kind of ignorance. Why should you pass up the chance to educate people? I never do, and sometimes they seem to understand at the very least that I'm not going to give them that little charge they're after, the one where they take my evening and put it in their control."
"Harry, please don't take offense—there is nothing anyone can say or do that will make me care what a muggle thinks of me. It's not my culture. You were raised in their world. I was not. Precisely what I've been enjoying so much about being here is that I am surrounded by people who don't think I'm an anomaly. For the first time I can be around people without them shrinking away fro me. I've come to rather enjoy how much they ignore me. And now you want me to start caring what people think again?"
"This isn't about muggles and wizards. Whether you like it or not, Severus, you're part of a movement."
"A movement? A movement that would have me?" I laugh with real enjoyment.
"The gay rights movement, idiot," Harry says as if I'm truly dumb.
"Harry Potter always did like to have a cause," I say, trying to lighten the mood, but he looks deeply offended, so I continue, "You think our age difference isn't going to give people pause in any part of society, gay or not? It wouldn't be hard to find a young man your age of similar inclinations who would think this 'old queen' was a less than suitable partner for you."
"I swear by Merlin's beard, Severus, if I ever hear you call yourself that again, I am leaving you for good. How can you be so stupid as to internalize something that some yob from Leeds said on a drunken spree in France, right before they probably went back to their flat and circle-jerked over us?"
"You want me to take them more seriously, but less seriously, you think that our age difference is meaningless but you fault me for not understanding the times. How many more double-binds do you plan on putting me in this evening? I find them somewhat less stimulating than your usual bonds and just as easy to slip out of."
"Do you know what's been going on in Uganda with the anti-homosexuality legislation? Do you know what the American Defense of Marriage Act is? What about all the places that can't have a gay pride parade in peace because they get attacked?" He takes my mystified expression to denote ignorance "Do you know how many places in the world we might get killed for being love? When was the last time you read a newspaper—not that French answer to the Daily Prophet?"
"I knew about Uganda and have heard a little about violence at parades," I say. "The Defense of Marriage act doesn't sound familiar."
"And where did you hear about them?"
"From the birds."
He sits down on the sand. It's getting cold; we're all alone. I put my jacket over his shoulders and he doesn't throw it off.
"Who ever heard of someone getting their news from birds?" he seems deflated by the bizarreness of it, as if totally unprepared for the entrance of animals into the argument he was winning up until this surprise development.
How to explain to him that the birds have the longest uninterrupted oral history on earth? They have the greatest reach of any group of animals, and are usually more objective than people. Perhaps it has something to do with their being attuned to atmospheric changes, but sometimes the birds can sense things before they happen. Like all species, certain things are more likely to catch their interest than others. The day I tried to cut my arm off and it reattached is etched in their long memory as the Cry That Made the Land of Snow Tremble because it was heard in Iceland. They have their own pet name for me, which roughly translates to "The Big Lout Who Nevertheless Knows How to Speak the Ancient Tongue," which is what they call their language.
"They're more objective than journalists," is all I can think to say.
He snorts. "You just don't want to come into the modern world because it scares you, having to take a stand outside of your little personal bubble."
My arms encompass the electric lighting on the shore. "I am in the modern world. It's just not the same one they seem to have filled your head with at university. You've always lived your life divided between two worlds—why set one against the other now?"
"I've worked very hard at my schooling," he snaps. "We can't all be a prodigy."
I ignore the gibe. "Have they taught you grammar? Unlikely, because I've seen your letters to your friends. History? Classics? Science? Languages? Hardly. What then have you learned that gives you right to ruin a greater portion of my holiday than those three thugs did with this rant of yours?"
He opens his mouth and shuts it. "They taught me how to win an argument on Social Issues," he says, the capitals audible and then grins. "Mostly it comes down to being the one who started it first."
"Apparently."
He pulls me down on the ground and we take off our shoes to bury them deep in the still-warm sand. I think this confusing argument is over and then he says, "It's like your whole Incongruent thing."
"What?" That word always riles me.
"You see, you take it as an insult, but to me, to a lot of people, it's a good thing—being different, it's erotic and important in and of itself." He kicks sand on me to kneel next to me. "Whoever heard of a man with hair down to his knees? You are incongruent in so many ways." His eyes pick them out. "You don't fit. And I love you for that, I'm hot for you because of that."
And he is hot, his skin is blazing hot when he presses it against mine.
"When I think of all the shit you've had to go through, Severus, before me, with me, all the reasons you almost aren't here with me today," his voice breaks, "I can't help but think that that has something to do with a big plan that exists somewhere—'stamp out the Incongruents.' Doesn't that sound like something on the books at the ministry?'
"You read the court transcripts. It is on the books!" I exclaim. "That was one of the charges against me: 'Fomenting an Unrecognized Form of Indecency,' which carries five more years each count than 'Fomenting a Recognized Form of Indecency!'"
"Charges against you? You don't even remember the trial. You were safe in Azkaban." I snort. "No really, you started digesting the walls and the magic that kept people in there. You were the only one who was safe there."
My mouth sets at the reference to me digesting walls, but he continues, "I was the one who was perfectly sane and subjected to all those interrogations."
"I read the transcripts, Harry, and though it might have felt like it was worse than that, they only called you to the court once."
He throws sand at me. "You must be joking. They had me in chambers half a dozen times, and then the court-ordered doctors and counselors. And the Prophet doing everything it could short of kidnapping me to get the story? It was like that case, you know the one where the witness was locked up instead of the murderer she saw—"
"Grungerford."
"Exactly like that. I had done nothing wrong! I'd killed their evil wizard, more like! But they got one whiff of some sexual practice that didn't square with their idea of what any boy, much less the Boy Who Lived, should be doing, and they were after me like a bunch of cats after the scent of a mouse. They asked me my sexual preference three times under Veritaserum in open court. They had the kindness to submit me to Veritaserum behind closed doors to ask me about my sexual fantasies about my classmates. And the wizard papers you like so much—"
He is crying now, he's so angry, but I can't look away.
"They had to keep up appearances so they couldn't hound their savior too much in public, so they went after my friends. You want to know why I don't see Hermione and Ron and Nigel and some of the others very often? Because the ministry, but mostly the reporters, they followed them around and demanded to get their side of the story. But there wasn't any other story, as you know, because I bloody well bawled my way through the entire truth when I was on the stand. So for months anyone who knew me at all at Hogwarts was questioned and sent owls and—"
His man's voice is raw.
"They don't blame me for it. None of them do. You know they signed that petition vouching for your innocence just as everyone else at the school did, but I still don't like to face them. Knowing that my choices, my fucking lack of choices, whatever it was, affected them like that."
"But you went to work for the ministry!" I protest. "Each administration claims to be different than the last, but all they do is carry out a short purge of the most loyal and it's back to business."
"Precisely. I wanted to change them from the inside. It's easy to have an opinion about me, about anyone you don't know well. Everyone thinks they know the Boy Who Lived because they've read lies about him in their morning paper for years. Severus, I can tell when someone's looking at me, versus what they think about me. I've been patiently teaching them to look at me since I was eleven, and I've gotten jolly good at it. Since the trial I had to start all over again, but my coworkers would find themselves just talking to me like a regular bloke at some point, and they'd look at me, and from that look in their eyes I could tell I'd made one more person understand."
Harry stops and realizes that the look in my eyes is transmitting anything but understanding of his mission to reform the ministry.
"I'm sure that the Minister himself and those three muggles have benefited from the lessons you've imparted in sexual politics. As I am at the moment. Richly," I drawl.
"Ugh!" Harry gets up and stalks back towards the hotel.
For some reason the whole strange experience reminds me of Harry's mother, and how angry she used to get when she felt slighted or left out because she was a muggle-born within the wizarding world. Could Harry be harping on the symbolic slight from the Leeds boys because he's beginning to sink into paranoid delusions like Lilly?
Hiding my fears, I follow him to a cinema where they are showing something neither of us is familiar with—me because this is only the second time I've been in a movie theater, and him because he knows nothing of French film. It's a way to be together without having to listen to each other talk. Sitting in the darkened room I forget that I'm with Harry—to me, brought up in a world where magic was commonplace, this is truly magical. And the French actress is stunning. Maybe because she reminds me a little of my mother, with her wavy black hair and pale oval face, I find her mesmerizing. There are tears running down my cheeks at the dramatic ending, and I remember Harry, whose face is thankfully his own again and not the champion of any society.
"This was a beautiful experience, mon amant," I say, resting my hand on his back as we walk out. "That woman was so moving in the speech about her little sister."
"Little sister? I though it was her daughter," Harry says, as we re-emerge into the French night.
"Weren't you wearing your Rosetta ring?"
He pats his pockets and retrieves the ring from his pants. "I didn't care what they said so much, I just wanted to experience what it was like to be in a French cinema and surrounded by the language without having to think about what it meant."
"Much like I feel about muggle society?" I ask.
It was then that I discovered one of the great pleasures of being in a relationship: that of pretending to be annoyed so that one can engineer just the right sort of making up.
The next morning Harry orders breakfast and his pronunciation is markedly improved.
As we have done every morning since we arrived, I apparate to Paris to pick up a copy of the wizard newspaper and then walk with Harry to a café, usually La truite zébrée. We order bread that tastes very much like house elf bread, or like my grandmother's biscuits—like a pure idea made barely solid and about to become a pure experience on the tongue. Harry buys whatever English language newspaper he can find, and we settle with our periodicals and our tea, and in Harry's case, a series of potions I have him take with meals.
This morning I'm reading The Revealer—which is just as much of a rag as the Daily Prophet, but which I have a soft spot for because it's named after the technical term from potion-making. The main difference with the English paper Harry and I detest so thoroughly is that it has a philosophy section in which amateurs and professional pundits alike carry on debates about the sort of obscure topics that would get Lessmore's old academics up in arms. Their rivalries are intense and completely incomprehensible to the outsider, but no less hilarious for it.
I burst out laughing and draw looks from the tranquil patrons of the café. "Listen to this," I say to Harry and translate some of the more vicious repartee,
"I humbly recommend that Monsieur Lefèbvre actually read the Emerald Tablet of the Thrice-Great, a matter that can be accomplished with a decent decoding charm bought for a dime a dozen at your neighborhood Spell-shop, rather than busying himself with muggle translations like Newton's or—worse yet!—that so-called translation by the mountebank Viroux, who had it as "a fire that becomes earth." Even Bacstrom had it, "has been united with a spirituous earth," which is to say, the nature spirits imbued in the soil whose many and varied existence has been confirmed by such august investigators as Madame Borrell and Monsieur Levy.
As I have said many times, the problem is not raising any spirit, but specifically which variety of spirit, because the next line, mark it well, says "Separate that spirituous earth from the dense or crude by means of a gentle heat, with much attention," before it goes on to describe the animal or creature, we know not what it is, that is to be raised by this operation.
Until Monsieur Lefèbvre orients himself within these very few—but very finely wrought!—verses on the Tablet, I am afraid he will only be able claim "as above, so below," in terms of the wit to be found in his Northern and Southern hemispheres."
Normally Harry would laugh with me. Today he puts his paper in front of his face to hide his smile.
Lessmore would have laughed herself silly.