Encore: The Fall that Began at the Beginning
From The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles, 1946
It was in the middle of the beginning, or perhaps the other way around, that I bought the estate. It had once belonged to a Marquis, though “belonged” is too possessive a word for a property that seemed to unhouse its owners. The pigeons had returned before the people did. The house had the shape of an apology—all arches and quiet sighs—but its corridors could hum when the wind came from the hill. Naturally, I moved in at once.
My man, Blandy, swore the place was haunted by the century itself. “Which one?” I asked. He refused to specify; it would, he said, spoil the surprise.
From the first afternoon, the garden misbehaved beautifully. Roses lifted their heads before the sun allowed it, and one of the apple trees, being philosophically inclined, began dropping fruit upwards. I applauded it for the innovation and made a note in my ledger: gravity may yet be persuaded by charm alone.
Time on the estate was courteous but inconsistent. The mornings tended to arrive before their dialogues were written; evenings came rehearsed but skipped their cues. I myself became temporally irregular. One night I dreamt an entire century and woke to find my pocket watch applauding the effort by ticking in waltz time.
There was a lake—more or less—shaped like an ear turned toward heaven. When I threw pebbles, it answered in metaphors. “You again,” it would say, “always mistaking the surface for the event.” Once, while shaving beside it, I saw my reflection betray me by smiling earlier than I did. That is when I realised one must never rush into honesty; mirrors, like people, prefer to edit their truths.
A friend—the Comtesse de l’Écho, who claimed to have survived both wars simply by altering her adjectives—visited and told me the estate reminded her of “the end of enchantment, but in rehearsal.” I took that as a compliment and asked her to stay a week. She lingered for three years, insisting daily that she would depart “once the moment arrives.” The moment never did.
The fall, yes—for it is a fairy story, and every fairy story needs one—had taken place before my birth, or perhaps during lunch. A charming inconvenience, really. The locals mentioned it rarely, except when praising the harvest, as though ruin were actually an agricultural technique. They said, “Before the Fall, everything was immortal; afterwards, only the onions improved.”
I tried to trace the event. In the library (which had its own weather), I found documents referring to the “Provisional Descent” of 18-something-imaginary. Margins full of notes by someone who wrote like a mirror thinking backwards. Their conclusion: The Fall persists as a rhythm, not an event. I closed the book, trembling with agreement.
Each evening, when the air smelled of punctuation, I would walk the grounds and feel the slope of time tilting beneath my boots. The crickets chattered in counterpoint to the stars. Once, I caught one speaking in verse:
The leaf began before the stem,
The fruit remade its root;
We climb toward where the branch has been,
And fall that we may suit.
I thanked it sincerely and carried on, pretending I had understood.
Letters arrived in strange tenses. Some were from friends who had not yet met me, congratulating me on decisions I had not made. Others came from past versions of myself, always excessively polite, reminding me to avoid repeating certain gestures that were clearly irresistible. One dispatch from 1932 cautioned me never to trust Wednesdays; another, dated 1953, included a recipe for perpetual astonishment.
I began to suspect that chronology was not declining but looping—a minuet of cause and effect. I told Blandy as much; he yawned and said time was merely the countryside’s way of keeping gossip warm.
Around midsummer, a clockmaker passed through, some itinerant philosopher of mechanism. He stayed to repair the hall’s great pendulum, which had begun swinging sideways. After days of tinkering, he declared proudly: “It is fixed, monsieur! It measures expectation instead of duration.” I thanked him lavishly but noticed that from that moment the evenings became longer the more eagerly I awaited them.
The Comtesse blamed the air. “Ever since the fall,” she murmured, “our patience has been secretly circular.” Then she fell asleep in a chair and remained asleep through several seasons. When she awoke, she asked for breakfast and news of the Republic; I told her both were slightly overcooked.
A local poet, Éloi les Brumes, wrote a ballad about the estate called “Journeys Without Itineraries.” It enjoyed a modest scandal because no stanza repeated the same vowels twice. At its premiere, he explained to the villagers that rhyme was elitist because it assumed symmetry. The festival committee expelled him mid-sentence but later awarded him a medal for “conceptual agriculture.”
When I complimented him on his originality, he looked confused. “But monsieur,” he replied, “I only transcribed the wind.”
At that moment, the wind blushed—or maybe that was the sunset rehearsing its entrance.
Autumn began in spring; then spring began again, a little embarrassed. The estate refused to decide which it preferred. I learned to accept the blur. Certain trees bore fruit labelled simply perhaps. I tasted one and discovered the flavour of postponement: sweet, remote, oddly reassuring.
The villagers grew fond of visiting my lands, claiming the air here smelled of forgotten beginnings. Children came to feed crumbs to the feathery shadows that followed them, while old men debated whether paradise was lost, or merely misplaced under the hedge.
By then I had abandoned my ledger. Truth, I decided, was more comfortable when evenly lit but slightly rearranged. I began to curate my memories, polishing them like family silver—not to deceive anyone, but to preserve their glint.
When a priest once came to bless the manor, the house exhaled in satisfaction and promptly put itself to sleep. I apologised to the priest, who admitted he had not been ordained since 1874 but had “kept the gesture out of sentiment.” We shook hands out of sequence, a most gratifying arrangement.
One winter that arrived late (and left early, from pride), I sat by the fire attempting to compose an editorial on the nature of the Fall for my private journal. I wanted to describe it precisely, to protect it by arranging it, as one might fold the wings of a luminous insect before placing it in amber.
Yet whenever I wrote the word “beginning,” the ink dried into the shape of an ending. And when I tried “ending,” the letters drifted off the page, seeking elsewhere to start.
So I abandoned chronological integrity altogether. Instead, I invited the story to waltz with itself—round and round, feeling no need for gravity. It obliged.
On certain nights, when the moon hummed softly against the orchard walls, I sensed that everything had already happened but remained undecided about its sequence. The lake shimmered in applause. Time bowed graciously, accepting our confusion as devotion.
And though each dawn repeated itself with slightly improved manners, I realised—gently, absurdly—that the fall we feared had already occurred, before any of us had names for loss or recovery. We were its graceful residue, its delayed beginning.
So I continue in this circular tranquillity, my pen tracing loops upon loops. When the ink runs out, I dip the nib into memory, which works nearly as well.
I am not deceived. I am merely well-arranged.
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