“‘Propriety, no, Monsieur, but decency.’
“‘It seems to me, however, my love,’ I said, ‘with the greatest mildness in the world, that night-chemises that are high-necked protect decency more than day-chemises that are very low-necked, not to mentioned that they keep the torso warmer…and that is even, my dear Betty, what you understand for yourself.’
“With that, my unfortunate wife suffered a redoubling of frightful fury, vociferating inconsequential words, among which I distinguished the phrases: vile debauchee, lubricious man and disgusting individual, all epithets addressed to me, and finally, the word camisole, which I had the misfortune to emphasize by saying: ‘As regards camisoles, it’s you who need one at present, but a camisole de force.’34
“Immediately, I saw her eyes, her poor eyes, widen immeasurably, and I saw her fall down dead…dead, alas!”
Having spoken thus, the worthy Mr. Little burst into sobs. I tried to console him, by representing to him a host of god reasons why, after all, he had nothing for which to reproach himself, and I succeeded, albeit with great difficulty.
During Mr. Little’s poignant story I continued looking at Mrs. Little, or at least her mannequin, whose veil was still lifted, and I admired the perfection of the stratagem. I admired it even more when, Mr. Little having asked me to touch his wife’s wrist with my finger at the level of the good-luck bracelet that ornamented it, I felt skin as elastic as if it had been covered in veritable flesh. There was also no stiffness in the arm, the articulations operating with a perfect ease.
“Everything is becoming,” Mr. Little told me, “and the mechanisms that make the body move allow it an almost natural flexibility...there’s only the gait that is slightly jerky, as you’ve been able to see. The external organs are reproduced with an admirable fidelity. You only have to look at the ear, the cartilages of the nose, and the mouth, which is equipped with my wife’s veritable teeth, perfectly enclosed in artificial sockets, just as the bare scalp is garnished with her own hair.”
As he said that, Mr. Little used his thumb and index finger to agitate the cartilages of his wife’s nose gently; he pinched the lobe of an ear; and, again gently, he opened the mouth, showing me a seemingly fleshy tongue, although naturally a trifle dry, and, pressing lightly on the tongue, she showed me a palate and an epiglottis, and even tonsils, the mucus of which was slightly better imitated.
“As for the internal organs,” he added, “notably those of digestion and respiration, they don’t exist, but are replaced by the automatic mechanism, which it was necessary to lodge somewhere; and there’s still room in the abdomen for a small heating apparatus.”
“A small heating apparatus?”
“Yes, it’s necessary that by night, when she’s lying next to me, I feel the gentle warmth of her body.”
I admired that precaution, which was evidently not to be disdained. In addition to the fact that it added to the illusion for Mr. Little, Mrs. Little thus seemed much more alive to the touch; in winter, if she were armed by a few degrees more, it become an element of comfort.
“But it’s very practical,” the worthy Mr. Little told me, while agitating it in a manner that would have seemed absolutely insane to many people. “It is, in truth, very practical.”
And, looking back on my condition of bachelorhood, which, if it has its good points, also—I don’t hide it from myself—has as many bad ones, I thought that a marriage of Mr. Little’s second fashion…for instance with a prettier mannequin that, instead of trailing it around with me from one railway carriage to the next, I could put in my trunk, only taking it out at bed-time…yes, I thought that a marriage of that sort would fill in the void in my soul somewhat, while being able to keep me warm on winter nights.
I even asked myself, although that became, involuntarily, somewhat extravagant, whether the artist who had fabricated Mrs. Little—the artificial one—might not, in fabricating a wife for me, arrange matters so that she had several exchangeable faces, in order that, although always having the same companion next to me in my bed, I could at least see her under different aspects.
I refrained from communicating that thought, which he would not have understood, to Mr. Little. He, the prototype of conjugal fidelity, wanted to show me, if not the mechanisms that made Mrs. Little move—he even made me understood that I kind of modesty would prevent him from ever showing me—at least the exterior switches that corresponded with them, and were found principally at the nape of his wife’s neck, her waist and in the palm of her hand.
He explained to me how, once it was set up to work in the morning, Mrs. Little’s automotive apparatus could be stopped at will by turning in one direction a simple button set in her belt, and restarted by turning it in the opposite direction; how, by touching Mr. Little lightly on the nape, at a point in the lace frill of her dress, he could make her nod her head; and finally, what was out of order in her arms, which had greatly intrigued me when I believed her to be alive.
On that subject, Mr. Little said to me: “The mechanician artist had found a means—which is truly admirable—according to whether I turned this little button on Mrs. Little’s elbow one way or the other, of making her extend a hand and shake one that was offered to her, or raise to her nose a bouquet that she had in her left hand. Unfortunately, the mechanism of the right arm was disabled in Como, and the one in the left in Venice, and, when the latter misfortune occurred, it caused me such a great chagrin that I remained locked in my room for several days with my poor love, without wanting to go out any longer.
“Then the reflection came to me that, after all, as Mrs. Little did not know anyone in Italy—I had no idea then that we might encounter you—she would not have to shake anyone’s hand, and that she could easily do without respiring a bouquet, whatever pleasure I would have had in seeing her do so, given that she no longer had the sense of smell, any more than the others. I therefore resumed going out with Mrs. Little, to see the curiosities of Venice with her and those of the other cities of our itinerary—and that is how we found ourselves together in the cathedral of Pisa.
“And now, you know, my dear friend, what frightens me is thinking that at any moment, another mechanism of locomotion in my wife’s body might break down, which would result in a great embarrassment for me. That is why you see me making the slightest excursions with her in a carriage, for fear that too much exercise might fatigue her mechanisms. There is only one man in the world capable of repairing them, and that is the mechanician artist who designed them, who is in London.”
“I’m astonished,” I said, “That you have not brought him with you, for greater security.”
“I thought of that momentarily, but one consideration caused me to renounce the idea.”
“I understand...the annoyance of always having a third party between Mrs. Little and you…an annoyance that perhaps I am causing you myself.”
“Which you are certainly not causing me, my dear Monsieur Le Bref. No, it wasn’t that.”
“Then too, the considerable augmentation of expense that would have resulted for you.”
“Much less that, Monsieur Le Bref.”
“Then I don’t follow.”
“It’s quite simple. That mechanician knows my wife as well as, if not better than, I know her myself, since he’s the one who made her. Well, just between ourselves, that doesn’t please me—no, that doesn’t please me. So it would require an absolute urgency for me to give him something to refit inside Mrs. Little’s body.”
As Mr. Little said that, his ordinarily ruddy face had become and even deeper shade of crimson. That excess of modesty, with regard to a simple mannequin representing his wife, demonstrated better than anything else the extent to which he identified it with her.
“And obstetric physicians,” I objected, “would be even worse.”
“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” said Mr. Little, increasingly troubled.
VI
Like all Frenchmen who go to Rome I had the custom of lodging a
t the Hotel Minerva. But Mr. Little proposed to take us to the large Hotel di Spagna on the Piazza di Spagna, in memory of the voyage that we had made together on the Iberian peninsula, when poor Mrs. Little was still flesh and bone, and I hastened to consent to that.
It was, therefore, at the door of the Hotel di Spagna that we got down from the carriage, and as we descended, Mr. Little did not fail to show me the switch that he operated in Mrs. Little’s belt in order to put her legs in movement.
As I followed Mr. Little, with his artificial wife on his arm, up the staircase of the hotel, I admired his ability to oblige himself to endure the embarrassment that such a comedy caused him to for the sake of the pleasure, so great it was, of having with him the consistent shadow of the person who had charmed him in life. I thought that in Mr. Little’s place, I would at least have wanted to make other arrangements.
Why, I wondered, had that second Mrs. Little not been designed in such a way that she could be dismantled and reassembled, and consequently lodge in a trunk. She would have been infinitely more comfortable when traveling with her husband thaw he she was alive, whereas today, towed around all of a piece, she was infinitely less so.
As for me, a great traveler, always up and down mountains and valleys, it was thus that I would accommodate a wife, discreetly wrapped up with other luggage.
A declaration of principle subversive to that extent of the most elementary gallantry provoked in the feminine fraction of Monsieur Le Bref’s audiences a series of exclamations, of which the charming Mina took charge of disengaging the disapproving character.
“I beg the pardon of the ladies who are listening to me, “ Monsieur Le Bref said, but that is my opinion, and that opinion, let it be remarked, cannot be as shocking in a traveler as it would be in a sedentary man... Furthermore, let it be understood that I would unpack my wife every evening in order to give myself the nocturnal illusion of a companion, save for repacking her every morning, in order not to disillusion myself...”
That, therefore, is what I was thinking about on the staircase of the Hotel di Spagna in Rome, at the sight of the worthy Mr. Little guiding the hesitant steps of his artificial wife with a touching attention.
Suddenly, those reflections were interrupted by the passage of a maidservant of remarkable beauty, certainly one of the most beautiful women in Rome, where there are so many beauties.
She was coming down the stairs as we were going up. I could not help admiring her, and I saw clearly that Mr. Little was admiring her as much as me, and even more, for he turned round three times in order to look at her.
Oh, if he had acted in that fashion when Mrs. Little was on his arm in flesh and bone, what a quarter or an hour he would have spent! But, now that she was no longer anything but leather and sheet metal, there was not the slightest storm to endure. Mrs. Little seemed—and, in fact, was—absolutely indifferent to the incident.
The stairway of the Hotel di Spagna in Rome having reminded me of that of the hotel in Burgos, where poor Mrs. Little had made an abominable scene under the pretext that her husband had received in his arms the young Amparo, after she lost her equilibrium under a pile of white linen, I could not help congratulating Mr. Little on the amelioration that had occurred in the character of his wife, in that regard.
“That,” he said to me very calmly, “is the sole superiority that my poor Betty’s artificial personality has over her defunct personality, and yet…!”
There was in that exclamation a kind of implicit admission that the absence of the scenes of jealousy made to her husband by Mrs. Little relative to hotel maids—scenes from which I had seen him suffer a great deal in Burgos—did not leave him without a certain regret. What a strange thing human nature is!
I wanted to clarify that.
“Would it seem preferable to you if Mrs. Little still had the gift of making scenes?”
“Well...yes, my dear friend.”
“I understand…you mean that if she made them, it would be because she was still alive.”
“Undoubtedly, but in certain respects, I would not be annoyed if the mechanician had been able to give it to her automatically, with the faculty for me to accelerate or cut short the scenes.”
“Really?”
“Yes—and that’s perfectly explicable. My poor Betty was never as alive as when she was angry with me. It was only them that she seemed, as one might put it, to light up. The rest of the time she was, as you know, almost extinct. Thus, nothing could give me more fully the illusion that she is still alive that those sorts of tantrums, although so irrational, just as nothing takes away that illusion more completely than a calmness, so unnatural in her, when she sees me ogling as pretty maidservant, as I did just now.”
VII
During the first week that we spent in Rome, I obtained from Mr. Little, not without difficulty, that he sometimes spared himself, and spared me, the inconvenience of towing around his automation—which is to say, his wife; for, now that I was aware of the substance of which Mrs. Little was made, not having the same motives for illusion as Mr. Little, I found her constancy utterly tedious and our role somewhat ridiculous.
When he went out without her he had the custom of locking her in her room and putting the key in his pocket. And to the hotel staff who asked him whether Madame was ill and whether she might need something, he replied that she was indeed slightly indisposed, but only wanted one thing: not to be disturbed.
As, in addition, he brought her out from time to time, and had a cup of tea or brother sent up to her twice a day, which he absorbed secretly, suspicions were not awakened regarding his stratagem.
However, it was Mr. Little who could not resolve himself to a daily separation of several hours from his wife, whose company was evidently dearer to him than mine. Thus, it was necessary for me to endure his mania to take her almost everywhere. We returned with her to the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Vatican and the Pineto, the Borghese and Doria galleries, the Basilicas of St. Peter, St. John Lateran, Saint Mary Major and St. Paul outside the walls, to the Villa Madame, etc., etc.
Mr. Little even wanted to take her to Albano and the Tivoli, but I made him renounce that ludicrous project, by representing to him that such repeated excursions would end up causing Mr. Little’s automotive mechanism to break down.
Events proved that I was right.
One evening, when the three of us were walking in St. Peter’s, I suddenly heard something like the sound of a breaking spring, and I saw Mrs. Little fall down full length on the pavement. By a bizarre coincidence, Mrs. Little, although her husband was giving her his arm, collapsed abruptly without him having time to retain her, at the very moment when she had been touched by the rod of venial sins.
You know, of course, that in the confessionals of the basilica of St. Peter’s, priests are on duty, holding a long flexible rod, with which they touch passers-by on the head or the shoulder in order to absolve them of the small fry of sins.
Alarmed by the result of the touch of his rod, not because he thought that it had done Mrs. Little any harm, but because imagined that she had fainted from fright, the absolver emerged precipitately from the confessional and came to help us lift her up, not without babbling apologies.
We tried to sit Mr. Little’s artificial companion down, but were unable to succeed in doing so. Evidently, the mechanism that permitted sitting had broken, or at least gone awry. I gazed sadly at poor Mr. Little, whose expression was consternated. He doubtless feared that the accident would reveal Mrs. Little’s automatism, and I confess that I dreaded that as much as he did.
Our anxieties increased further on seeing a young man approach who said that he was a physician, and who offered us his services. Without being authorized to do so, the young man even asked Mrs. Little where her pain was, but when she did not reply, as you can imagine, he must have assumed that it was out of modesty, the place where she was suffering probably being one of those that Englishwomen cannot name, even with the aid of circumlocutions, and he did
not insist.
“La signora non puo sedersi?” he asked Mrs. Little.
As Mr. Little seemed not to understand, I said to him in English: “The doctor is asking Madame whether she doesn’t want to sit down.”
Mr. Little, whose presence of mind had returned, repeated the doctor’s question to his wife, pressing her hand in such a fashion as to make her reply.
“No,” she replied.
Mr. Little continued: “Are you in pain, my dear Betty?”
To which she replied: “Ho yes, Tom.”
“In the region of the loins?”
“Ho yes, Tom.”
When, translating Mr. Little’s question for the physician, I had informed him of the affirmative response that Mrs. Little had made, he said that it was urgent to put the patient to bed and massage the region with an emollient. But how were we to get Mrs. Little back to the hotel?”
We could not take her there on foot, because it was impossible for her to walk, nor in a carriage, because it was impossible for her to sit down.
The physician thought that it was necessary to transport her on a stretcher and he left the basilica immediately in order to give the order one of the facchini who are always prowling around the doors of St. Peter’s to bring one.
Then he came back.
“Si tiene in piedi?”35 he asked me.
“Well,” I said, “she wouldn’t be if her husband and I weren’t holding her up.”
The man from the confessional, who thought himself partly responsible for the accident, then insisted that we take the victim into one of the sacristies until the stretcher arrived.
When we had laid her down on a bench therein, to the great curiosity of the priests who were there, and we had accommodated her head on a cushion, the doctor claimed that it was necessary for him to lift her veil in order for her to be able to breathe. Mr. Little opposed that energetically, as you might think, and even made his wife say, by mean of a clearly audible “no,” that she did not want it.
Singular Amours Page 25