Another Country

by James Baldwin

  Sometime in the course of the afternoon, though they had only come down from Paris for the day, they decided to spend the night. It was Yves’ suggestion, made when they returned to the cathedral and stood on the steps, looking at the saints and martyrs trapped in stone. Yves had been unusually silent all day. And Eric knew him well enough by now not to push him, not to prod, even not to worry. He knew that Yves’ silences meant that he was fighting some curious war of his own, was coming to some decision of his own; presently, later today, tomorrow, next week, Yves would abruptly retrace, in speech, the steps he was taking in silence now. And, oddly enough, for it seems not to be the way we live now, for Eric, merely hearing Yves’ footfalls at his side, feeling Yves beside him, and watching that changing face, was joy enough— or almost joy enough.

  They found a hotel which overlooked a stream and took a double room. Their windows overlooked the water; the towers of the cathedral loomed to the right of them, far away. When they took the room, the sun was setting and great streaks of fire and dull gold were splashed across the still, blue sky.

  There were trees just outside the window, bending into the water; and there were a few tables and chairs, but they were empty; there did not seem to be many people in the hotel.

  Yves seated himself in the large window and lit a cigarette, looking down at the tables and chairs. Eric stood next to him, his hand on Yves’ shoulder.

  “Shall we have a drink down there, old buddy?”

  “My God, no; we shall be eaten up by bugs. Let’s go and find a bistro.”

  “Okay.”

  He moved away. Yves stood up. They stared at each other.

  “I imagine that we must come back early,” Yves said, “there is surely nothing to do in this town.” Then he grinned, mischievously. “Ça va?”

  “It was your idea to come here,” Eric said.

  “Yes.” He turned to the window again. “It is peaceful, yes? And we can be gentle with each other, we can have a moment together.” He threw his cigarette out of the window. When he turned to Eric again, his eyes were clouded, and his mouth was very vulnerable. After a moment he said, softly, “Let us go.”

  But it was very nearly a question. And, now, both of them were frightened. For some reason, the towers seemed closer than they had been; and, suddenly, the two large beds, placed close together, seemed the only objects in the room. Eric felt his heart shake and his blood begin to race and then to thicken. He felt that Yves was waiting for him to move, that everything was in his hands; and he could do nothing.

  Then it lifted, the red, dangerous shadow, the moment passed, they smiled at each other. Yves walked to the door and opened it. They descended again into the sleepy, the beautiful town.

  For it was not quite the same town it had been a few hours before. In that second in the room, something had melted between them, a gap between them had closed; and now the irresistible current was tugging at them, dragging them slowly, and absolutely surely, to the fulfillment of that promise.

  And for this reason they hesitated, they dawdled, they deliciously put it off. They chose to eat in an unadorned bistro because it was empty— empty when they walked in, anyway, though it was taken over after they had been there for a while, by half a dozen drunk and musical French soldiers. The noise they made might have been unbearable at any other time, but, now, it operated as a kind of protective wall between themselves and the world. It gave them something to laugh at— and they needed to laugh; the distraction the soldiers afforded the other people who had entered the bistro allowed them, briefly, to clasp hands; and this small preamble to terror steadied their hearts and minds.

  And then they walked through the town, in which not even a cat seemed to be moving; and everywhere they walked, the cathedral was watching them. They crossed a bridge and watched the moon in the water. Their footfalls rang on the cobblestones. The walls of the houses were all black, they walked through great patches of blackness between one far-off street light to another. But the cathedral was lighted.

  The trees and the tables and chairs and the water were lit by the moon. Yves locked their door behind them and Eric walked to the window and looked at the sky, at the mighty towers. He heard the murmur of the water and then Yves called his name. He turned. Yves stood on the other side of the room, between the two beds, naked.

  “Which bed do you think is better?” he asked.

  And he sounded genuinely perplexed, as though it were a difficult decision.

  “Whichever you prefer,” Eric said, gravely.

  Yves pulled back the covers of the bed nearest the window and placed himself between the sheets. He pulled the covers up to his chin and lay on his back, watching Eric. His eyes were dark and enormous in the dark room. A faint smile touched his lips.

  And this look, this moment, entered into Eric, to remain with him forever. There was a terrifying innocence in Yves’ face, a beautiful yielding: in some marvelous way, for Yves, this moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here. He was turning to the lover who would not betray him, to his first lover. Eric crossed the room and sat down on the bed and began to undress. Again, he heard the murmur of the stream.

  “Will you give me a cigarette?” Yves asked. He had a new voice, newly troubled, and when Eric looked at him he saw for the first time how the face of a lover becomes a stranger’s face.

  “Bien sûr.” He lit two cigarettes and gave one to Yves. They watched each other in the fantastic, tiny glow— and smiled, almost like conspirators.

  Then Eric asked, “Yves, do you love me?”

  “Yes,” said Yves.

  “That’s good,” said Eric, “because I’m crazy about you. I love you.”

  Then, in the violent moonlight, naked, he slowly pulled the covers away from Yves. They watched each other and he stared at Yves’ body for a long time before Yves lifted up his arms, with that same sad, cryptic smile, and kissed him. Eric felt beneath his fingers Yves’ slowly stirring, stiffening sex. This sex dominated the long landscape of his life as the cathedral towers dominated the plains.

  Now, Yves, as though he were also remembering that day and night, turned his head and looked at Eric with a wondering, speculative, and triumphant smile. And at that moment, Madame Belet entered, with a sound of knives and forks and plates, and switched on the lights. Yves’ face changed, the sea vanished. Yves rose from the hassock, blinking a little. Madame Belet put the utensils on the table, carefully, and marched out again, returning immediately with a bottle of wine, and a corkscrew. She placed these on the table. Yves went to the table and began opening the wine.

  “She thinks you are going to abandon me,” said Yves. He poured a tiny bit of wine into his own glass, then poured for Eric. He looked at Eric, quickly, and added more wine to the first glass, and set the bottle down.

  “Abandon you?” Eric laughed. Yves looked relieved and a little ashamed. “You mean— she thinks I’m running away from you?”

  “She thinks that perhaps you do not really intend to bring me to New York. She says that Americans are very different— when— in their own country.”

  “Well, how the hell does she know?” He was suddenly angry. “And it’s none of her fucking business, anyway.” Madame Belet entered, and he glared at her. Imperturbably, she placed on the table a platter containing les crudités, and a basket full of bread. She re-entered the kitchen, Eric staring malevolently at her straight, chauvinistic back. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s malicious old ladies.”

  They sat down. “She does not really mean any harm,” Yves said. “She thought that she was speaking for my good.”

  “She thinks it’s good for you to distrust me— just when I’m about to get on a boat? Doesn’t she think we have enough to worry about?”

  “Oh, well. People do not take the relations between boys seriously, you know that. We will never know many people who believe we love each other. They do not belie
ve there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.”

  Eric was silent, chewing on the raw vegetables which seemed to have no taste. He took a swallow of wine, but it did not help. His belly tightened and his forehead began to be damp. “I know. And it’s going to be worse in New York.”

  “Oh, well,” said Yves, with an odd and moving note of finality in his voice, “as long as you do not abandon me, I will not be afraid.”

  Eric smiled— at the tone, at the statement; but he felt his forehead flush hotter, and a strange fear closed his throat. “Is that a promise?” he asked. He asked it lightly, but his voice sounded stifled; and Yves, who had lowered his head to his plate, looked up. They watched each other. Eric stared into Yves’ dark eyes, terribly aware of Yves’ forehead, which gleamed like a skull; and, at the same time, with the most immense desire, he watched Yves’ curving, parted lips. His teeth gleamed. Eric had felt those teeth on his tongue and on his cheek, and those lips had made him moan and tremble many times. And the short length of the table seemed to tremble between them.

  “Why don’t we pay Madame Belet now?” Eric asked, “and let her go home?”

  Yves rose and walked into the kitchen. Eric munched again on the raw, garlic-flavored vegetables, thinking, This is our last night here. Our last night. Again, he heard their voices in the kitchen, Madame Belet seeming to protest, then agreeing to come in the morning. He finished the last of his wine. Then the kitchen door closed and Yves returned.

  “I think, perhaps, she is a little angry,” Yves said, smiling, “but she is gone. She will come again in the morning, especially to say good-bye to you. I think that is because she wants to make certain that you know how much she dislikes you.” He did not sit down again, but stood at his end of the table, his hands on his hips. “She says the chicken is ready, we should not let it get cold.” He laughed, and Eric laughed. “I told her it does not matter with chicken, if it is cold or hot, I like it either way.” They both laughed again. Then, abruptly, silence fell between them.

  Eric rose and crossed to Yves, and they stood for a moment like two wrestlers, watching each other with a kind of physical calculation, smiling and pale. Yves always seemed, a moment before the act, tentative and tremulous; not like a girl— like a boy: and this strangely innocent waiting, this virile helplessness, always engendered in Eric a positive storm of tenderness. Everything in him, from his heights and depths, his mysterious, hidden source, came rushing together, like a great flood barely channeled in a narrow mountain stream. And it chilled him like that— like icy water; and roared in him like that, and with the menace of things scarcely understood, barely to be controlled; and he shook with the violence with which he flowed toward Yves. It was this violence which made him gentle, for it frightened him. And now he touched Yves lightly and wonderingly on the cheek. Yves’ smile faded, he watched Eric, they moved into each other’s arms.

  There were the wine bottle and the glasses on the table, their plates, the platter, the bread; Yves had left a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the table, it was nearly nothing but ash now, long and gray; and the kitchen light was on. “You say you don’t care about the chicken?” Eric whispered, laughing. Yves laughed, giving off a whiff of garlic, of peppery sweat. Their arms locked around each other, then they drew apart, and, holding hands, stumbled into the bedroom, into the great haven of their bed. Perhaps it had never before seemed so much like a haven, so much their own, now that the terrible floodwaters of time were about to overtake it. And perhaps they had never before so belonged to each other, had never before given or taken so much from each other, as they did now, burning and sobbing on the crying bed.

  They labored together slowly, violently, a long time: both feared the end. Both feared the morning, when the moon and stars would be gone, when this room would be harsh and sorrowful with sunlight, and this bed would be dismantled, waiting for other flesh. Love is expensive, Yves had once said, with his curiously dry wonder. One must put furniture around it, or it goes. Now, for a while, there would be no furniture— how long would this night have to last them? What would the morning bring? the imminent morning, behind which were hidden so many mornings, so many nights.

  And they moaned. Soon, Yves whispered, sounding insistent, like a child, and with a terrible regret. Soon. Eric’s hands and mouth opened and closed on his lover’s body, their bodies strained yet closer together, and Yves’ body shook and he called Eric’s name as no one had ever called this name before. Eric. Eric. Eric. The sound of his breath filled Eric, heavier than the far-off pounding of the sea.

  Then they were silent, breathing hard. The sound of the sea returned. They were aware of the light in the living room, the light left burning in the kitchen. But they did not move. They remained still in one another’s arms, in their slowly chilling bed. Soon, one of them, it would he Yves, would move, would light two cigarettes. They would lie in bed, smoking, talking and giggling. Then they would shower: what a mess we are! Yves would cry, laughing a laugh of triumph. Then they would dress, they would probably eat, they would probably go out. And soon the night would end. But, for the moment, they were simply exhausted and at peace with one another and loath to leave the only haven either of them had ever found.

  And, in fact, they did not move again that night, smoked no cigarettes, ate no chicken, did no talking, drank no champagne. They fell asleep as they were, cradled, spoon-fashion, against each other, lulled by the pounding of the sea. Eric woke once, when the kitten crawled into bed, trying to place itself around Yves’ neck. But he forced it to the foot of the bed. He turned around, leaning on one elbow, watching Yves’ sleeping face. He thought of getting up and turning off all the lights; he felt a little hungry. But nothing seemed important enough to take him out of bed, to take him away from Yves, even for a moment. He lay down again, closing his eyes, and listening to Yves’ breathing. He fell asleep, thinking, Life is very different in New York, and he woke up with this thought, just as the sun was beginning to rise. Yves was awake and was watching him. Eric thought, Maybe he’ll hate New York. And then, maybe he’ll hate me, too. Yves looked frightened and determined. They were silent. Yves suddenly pulled Eric into his arms as though he were angry, or as though he were lost. By and by they were at peace again, and then they lay there in silence, blue cigarette smoke circling around them in the sunny air, the kitten purring in the sunlight at their feet. Then the sound of Madame Belet in the kitchen told Eric it was time to make tracks.

  2

  Eight days later, Eric was in New York, with Yves’ last words still ringing in his ears, and his touch and his smell all over his body. And Yves’ eyes, like the searchlight of the Eiffel Tower or the sweep of a lighthouse light, lit up, at intervals, the grave darkness around him and afforded him, in the black distance, his only frame of reference and his only means of navigation.

  On the last day in Paris, at the last moment, they both suffered from terrible hangovers, having both been up all night, drinking, at a friend’s house; their faces were gray and damp; they stank with weariness. There was great shouting and confusion all around them, and the train breathed over them like some unimaginably malevolent beetle. They were almost too tired for sorrow, but not too tired for fear. It steamed out of them both, like the miasma rising from the Gare St. Lazare. In the deep black shadow of this shed, while their friends stood at a discreet distance from them; and the station attendant moved up and down the platform, shouting, “En voiture, s’il vous plait! En voiture! En voiture!”; and the great hand of the great clock approached the zero hour; they stared into each other’s faces like comrades who have been through a war.

  “T’ne fait pas,” Eric murmured.

  “En voiture!”

  Eric moved up to stand in the crowded doorway of the train. There was nothing to say; there was too much to say.

  “I hate waiting,” he said. “I hate good-byes.” He suddenly felt that he was going to cry, and panic threatened to o
vertake him because of all these people watching. “We will see each other,” he said, “very soon. I promise you, Yves. I promise you. Tu me fait toujours con fiance, j’espère?” And he tried to smile.

  Yves said nothing, but nodded, his eyes very bright, his mouth very vulnerable, his forehead very high, and full of trouble. People were screaming out of windows, were passing last minute items to each other through windows. Eric was the last person standing in the door. He had an awful feeling that he had forgotten something very important. He had paid for Yves’ hotel room, they had visited the American embassy and the French authorities, he had left Yves some money— what else? what else? The train began to move. Yves looked stunned for a moment, Eric raised his eyes from Yves’ face to say good-bye to all the others. Yves trotted along the platform, then suddenly leapt up on the step, holding on with one hand, and kissed Eric hard on the mouth.