by Jean Rhys
Now, what are they saying? 'Marthe, montrez le numero douze.' And the price? Four hundred francs a month. I am paying three times as much as that for my room on the fourth floor. It shows that I have ended as a successful woman, anyway, however I may have started. One look at me and the prices go up. And when the Exhibition is pulled down and the tourists have departed, where shall I be? In the other room, of course - the one just of the Gray's Inn Road, as usual trying to drink myself to death....
When I get upstairs the man next door is out on the landing, also yelling for Marthe. His flannel night shit scarcely reaches his knees. When he sees me he grins, comes to the head of the stairs and stands there, blocking the way.
'Bonjour. Cava?'
I walk past him without answering and slam the door of my room. I expect all this is a joke. I expect he tells his friend on the floor below: 'An English tourist has taken the room next to mine. I have a lot of fun with that woman.'
A girl is making-up at an open window immediately opposite. The street is so narrow that we are face to face, so to speak. I can see socks, stockings and underclothes drying on a line in her room. She averts her eyes, her expression hardens. I realize that if I watch her making-up she will retaliate by staring at me when I do the same thing. I half shut my window and move away from it.
A terrible hotel, this - an awful place. I must get out of it. Only I would have landed here, only I would stay here....
I have just finished dressing when there is a knock on the door. It's the commis, in his beautiful dressing gown, immaculately white, with long, wide, hanging sleeves. I wonder how he got hold of it. Some woman must have given it to him. He stands there smiling his silly smile. I stare at him. He looks like a priest, the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion.
At last I manage: 'Well, what is it? What do you want?
'Nothing' he says, 'nothing.'
'Oh, go away.'
He doesn't answer or move. He stands in the doorway, smiling. (Now then, you and I understand each other, don't we? Let's stop pretending.)
I put my hand on his chest, push him backwards and bang the door. It's quite easy. It's like pushing a paper man, a ghost, something that doesn't exist.
And there I am in this dim room with the bed for madame and the bed for monsieur and the narrow street outside (what they call an impasse), thinking of that white dressing gown, like a priest's robes. Frightened as hell. A nightmare feeling....
This morning the hall smells like a very cheap Turkish bath in London - the sort of place that is got up to look respectable and clean outside, the passage very antiseptic and the woman who meets you a cross between a prison wardress and a deaconess, and everybody speaking in whispering voices with lowered eyes: 'Foam or Turkish, madam?' And then you go down into the Turkish bath itself and into a fog of stale sweat - ten, twenty years old.
The patron, the patronne and the two maids are having their meal in a room behind the bureau. They have some friends with them. Loud talking and laughing...."Tu n'oses pas," qu'elle m'a dit. "Ballot!" qu'elle m'a dit. Comment, je n'ose pas ? Vous allez voir que je lui ai dit: "Attends, attends, ma ille. Tu vas voir si je n'ose pas." Alors, vous savez ce que j'ai fait? J'ai'
His voice pursues me out into the street. 'Attends, ma ille, attends...."
I've got to find another hotel. I feel ill and giddy, I'd better take a taxi. Where to? I remember that I have an address in my handbag, a brochure with pictures. Le hall, le restaurant, le lounge, a bedroom with bath, a bedroom without bath, etcetera. Everything of the most respectable - that's the place for me....
There is a porter at the door and at the reception desk a grey haired woman and a sleek young man.
'I want a room for tonight.'
'A room ? A room with bath?'
I am still feeling ill and giddy. I say confidentially, leaning forward: 'I want a light room.'
The young man lifts his eyebrows and stares at me.
I try again. 'I don't want a room looking on the courtyard. I want a light room.'
'A light room?' the lady says pensively. She turns over the pages of her books, looking for a light room.
'We have number 219,' she says. 'A beautiful room with bath. Seventy five francs a night.' (God, I can't afford that.) 'It's a very beautiful room with bath. Two windows. Very light,' she says persuasively.
A girl is called to show me the room. As we are about to start for the lift, the young man says, speaking out of the side of his mouth. 'Of course you know that number 219 is occupied.'
'Oh no. Number 219 had his bill the day before yesterday,' the receptionist says. 'I remember. I gave it to him myself.'
I listen anxiously to this conversation. Suddenly I feel that I must have number 219, with bath - number 219, with rose coloured curtains, carpet and bath. I shall exist on a different plane at once if I can get this room, if only for a couple of nights. It will be an omen. Who says you can't escape from your fate ? I'll escape from mine, into room number 219. Just try me, just give me a chance.
'He asked for his bill,' the young man says, in a voice which is a triumph of scorn and cynicism. 'He asked for his bill but that doesn't mean that he has gone.'
The receptionist starts arguing. 'When people ask for their bills, it's because they are going, isn't it?'
'Yes,' he says, 'French people. The others ask for their bills to see if we're going to cheat them.'
'My God,' says the receptionist, 'foreigners, foreigners, my God....'
The young man turns his back, entirely dissociating himself from what is going on.
Number 219 - well, now I know all about him. All the time they are talking I am seeing him - his trousers, his shoes, the way he brushes his hair, the sort of girls he likes. His hand luggage is light yellow and he has a paunch.
But I can't see his face. He wears a mask, number 219....
'Show the lady number 334.'
The lady-like girl - we are all ladies here, all ladies - takes me up in the lift and shows me a comfortably furnished room which looks on to a high, blank wall.
'But I don't want a room looking on the courtyard. I want a light room.'
'This is a very light room,' the girl says, turning on the lamp by the bed.
'No,' I say. 'I mean a light room. A light one. Not a dark one.' She stares at me. I suppose I sound a bit crazy. I say: 'Yes....Thank you very much - but no.'
The receptionist downstairs ties to stop me and argue about other rooms she has - beautiful rooms. I say: 'Yes, yes, I'll telephone,' and rush out.
A beautiful room with bath? A room with bath? A nice room? A room?....But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof of everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is. Why should I worry about changing my room?
When I get back to the hotel after I have had something to eat, it looks all right and smells as respectable as you please. I imagined it all, I imagined everything....Somebody's Times Literary Supplement peeps coyly from the letter-rack. A white-haired American lady and a girl who looks like her daughter are talking in the hall.
'Look here, look at this. Here's a portrait of Rimbaud. Rimbaud lived here, it says.'
'And here's Verlaine....Did he live here too?'
'Yes, he lived here too. They both lived here. They lived here together. Well now, isn't that interesting?'
The commis is on the landing. He scowls at me and at once goes into his bedroom and shuts the door. Well, that's all right, that's all right. If we both try hard to avoid each other, we ought to be able to manage it.
The room welcomes me back.
'There you are,' it says. 'You didn't go off, then?'
'No, no. I thought better of it. Here I belong and here I'll stay.'
He always called that bar the Pig and Lily, because the propr
ietor's name was Pecanelli. It is in one of those streets at the back of the Montparnasse station. Got up to look like an olde English tavern. I don't see why I shouldn't revisit it. I have never made scenes there, collapsed, cried - so far as I know I have a perfectly clean slate. We used to go there, have a couple of drinks, eat hot dogs and talk about the next war or something like that. Nothing to cry about, I mean....
'We ?' Well, he was one of those people with very long, thin faces and very pale blue eyes. After working in a Manchester shipping office until he was twenty five, he had broken away and come to Paris, and was reading for his medical degree at the University. A loving relative supplied him with the money - that was one story. But another was that he really kept going on money he won at cards. That might have been true, for he was the sort that plays cards very well.
He loved popular fairs, this boy - the Neuilly fair, the Montmartre fair, even the merry-go-rounds at the Lion de Belfort - and he had painfully taught himself to like music. Bach, of course, was his favourite composer. The others, he said, he preferred to read, not to listen to. 'Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter' - that sort of thing. He was a bit of a fish, really. Sometimes he made my blood run cold. And in spite of his long, thin face, he wasn't sensitive.
One day he said: 'I'll take you to see something rather interesting.' And, wandering along the streets at the back of the Halles, we came to a cafe where the clients paid for the right, not to have a drink, but to sleep. They sat close - pressed against each other with their arms on the tables, their heads in their arms. Every place in the room was filled; others lay along the floor. We squinted in at them through the windows. 'Would you like to go in and have a look at them?' he said, as if he were exhibiting a lot of monkeys. 'It's all right, we can go in - the chap here knows me. There's one fellow who is usually here. If you stand him a few drinks and get him really going he tries to eat his glass. It's very curious. You ought to see that.'
When I said: 'Not for anything on earth,' he thought I had gone shy or sentimental. 'Well,' I said, 'all right. I'll watch you eating a glass with pleasure.' He didn't like that at all.
I arrive thinking of this boy, and screw myself up to go into a room full of people. But the place is empty - dead as a door-nail. There is a new proprietor - a fat, bald man with a Dutch nose. He has only been here for two years, he tells me.
The speciality now is Javanese food, and the English hunting-scenes on the walls look very exotic....Tally-ho, tally-ho, tally-ho, a-hunting we will go....The cold, clear voices, the cold, light eyes....Tally-ho, tally-ho, tally-ho....
A party of three comes in - two men and a girl. One of the men stares at me. He says to the girl: 'Tu la connais, la vieille?'
Now, who is he talking about? Me? Impossible. Me - la vieille?
The girl says: 'The Englishwoman? No, I don't know her. Why should you imagine I know her?'
This is as I thought and worse than I thought....A mad old Englishwoman, wandering around Montparnasse. 'A Paris il y a des Anglaises, Oah, yes, oah, yes, Aussi plat's comm' des punaises, Oah, yes, oah, yes....This is indeed worse than I thought.
I stare at the young man. He looks embarrassed and turns his eyes away. Not French....
This is indeed worse than I thought. That's what I was told when I came back to London that famous winter five years ago. 'Why didn't you drown yourself, the old devil said, 'in the Seine?' In the Seine, I ask you - but that was just what he said. A very proper sentiment - but what a way to put it! Talk about being melodramatic! 'We consider you as dead. Why didn't you make a hole in the water? Why didn't you drown yourself in the Seine?' These phrases run trippingly of the tongues of the extremely respectable. They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extra ordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope.
Then the jam after the medicine. I shall receive a solicitor's letter every Tuesday containing �2 10s od. A legacy, the capital not to be touched....'Who ?'....When I heard I was very surprised - I shouldn't have thought she liked me at all. 'You may consider yourself very fortunate,' he said, and when I saw the expression in his eyes I knew exactly why she did it. She did it to annoy the rest of the family....And of course it was impossible to tell me of this before, because they didn't know my address. There was nothing to say to that except: 'Goodbye, dear sir, and mind you don't trip over the hole in the carpet.'
It's so like him, I thought, that he refuses to call me Sasha, or even Sophie. No, it's Sophia, full and grand. Why didn't you drown yourself in the Seine, Sophia?....'Sophia went down where the river flowed - Wild, wild Sophia...."
Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two pound ten every Tuesday and a room of the Gray's Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in - what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone. No more pawings, no more pryings - leave me alone....They'll do that all right, my dear.)
'At first I was afraid they would let gates bang on my hindquarters, and I used to be nervous of unknown people and places.' Quotation from The Autobiography of a Mare - one of my favourite books....We English are so animal conscious. We know so instinctively what the creatures feel and why they feel it....
It was then that I had the bright idea of drinking myself to death. Thirty five pounds of the legacy had accumulated, it seemed. That ought to do the trick.
I did try it, too. I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled 'Dum vivimus vivamus'....'Drink, drink, drink....As soon as I sober up I start again. I have to force it down sometimes. You'd think I'd get delirium tremens or something.
Nothing. I must be solid as an oak. Except when I cry.
I watch my face gradually breaking up - cheeks puffing out, eyes getting smaller. Never mind. 'While we live, let us live,' say the bottles of wine. When we give, let us give. Besides, it isn't my face, this tortured and tormented mask. I can take it of whenever I like and hang it up on a nail. Or shall I place on it a tall hat with a green feather, hang a veil over the lot, and walk about the dark streets so merrily? Singing defiantly 'You don't like me, but I don't like you either. "Don't like jam, ham or lamb, and I don't like roly-poly" ' Singing 'One more river to cross, that's Jordan, Jordan'
I have no pride - no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don't belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad....It doesn't matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where every thing is stagnant, everything is calm. Two pound ten a week and a room just of the Gray's Inn Road....
All this time I am reading the menu over and over again. This used to be a place where you could only get hot dogs, choucroute, Vienna steak, Welsh rabbit and things like that. Now, it's more ambitious. 'Specialites Javanaises (par personne, indivisibles): Rystafel complet (16 plats), 25.00, Rystafel petit (10 plats),17.50, Nassi Goreng, 12. 50....' The back of the menu is covered with sketches of little women and 'Send more money, send more money' is written over and over again. This amuses me. I think of all the telegraph wires buzzing 'Send more money'. In spite of everything, the wires from Paris always buzzing 'Send more money.
The three people at the next table are talking about horse racing. The two men are Dutch.
I get a pencil out of my bag. I write in a corner of the menu 'As-tu compris? Si, j'ai compris. I hope you got that. Yes, I got it.' I fold the menu up and put it in my bag. A little souvenir....
The door opens. Five Chinese come in. They wal
k down to the end of the room in single file and stand there, talking. Then they all file solemnly out again, smiling politely. The proprietor mutters for a bit. Then he pretends to arrange the forks and knives on a table near by, and tells us that before they ordered drinks they wanted to see the fire lighted in the open grate, which is part of the olde English atmosphere. They wanted to see the flames dance. For a long time, he says, he has known that every body in Montparnasse is mad, but this is the last straw.
'Tous piques,' he says, with such an accent of despair, 'tous dingo, tous, tous, tous...."
I am not at all sad as I walk back to the hotel. When I remember how one well-directed 'Oh, my God,' lays me out flat in London, I can only marvel at the effect this place has on me. I expect it is because the drink is so much better.
No, I am not sad, but by the time I get to the Boulevard St Michel I am feeling tired. I have walked along here so often, feeling tired....Here is the fountain with the beautiful prancing horses. There is a tabac where I can have a drink near the next statue, the quinine statue.
Just then two men come up from behind and walk along on either side of me. One of them says: 'Pourquoi Stes-vous si triste?'
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad....Or perhaps if I just said 'merde' it would do as well.
I don't speak and we walk along in silence. Then I say: 'But I'm not sad. Why should you think I'm sad?' Is it a ritual? Am I bound to answer the same question in the same words?
We stop under a lamp-post to guess nationalities. So they say, though I expect it is because they want to have a closer look at me. They tactfully don't guess mine. Are they Germans? No. Scandinavians, perhaps? No, the shorter one says they are Russians. When I hear that I at once accept their offer to go and have a drink. Les Russes - that'll wind up the evening nicely....