Women

by Mihail Sebastian

  About a hundred paces away, a large ring of people had formed. We approached, apprehensively. There had been an accident. We intuited this from the whispers of the people gathered there and from the respectful distance they kept from what they were looking at. Only when I was very close did I see that it was a wounded person. They all stared at him from a distance, intimidated, not daring to approach. It was a boy of about sixteen who had been passing through on a bicycle and had been crushed by an automobile moving at speed with its headlights off.

  Arabela pushed her way through the people and went forward, alone among them. A lock of her black hair had fallen over her forehead and she didn’t bother to brush it aside, so intent was she. She kneeled beside the injured boy and gazed at him unflinchingly. Then she rolled up her sleeves, looked for a clean handkerchief and asked for some water. Somebody hurried to bring her some. I don’t know from where; perhaps from the carburetor of one of the automobiles. She lifted the wounded boy’s head and laid it in her lap. The headlights showed a cracked skull and a clump of bloody hair. A woman next to me wearing an elegant dress began to scream hysterically. It was clear from her flushed cheeks and heavy breathing that the accident had interrupted her moment of passion. Arabela stared her down—a gaze I don’t think I could have met, had it been directed at me.

  There was nothing to be done. It had been obvious from the first moment that the boy lying there on the wet earth was dead. I could tell that much, from whatever remained of my old medical knowledge. Meanwhile, the police arrived. I took Arabela by the arm and pulled her away from there. We walked for a long time in silence, grateful for the sound of the rain pattering around us, helping us not to think about anything, and particularly not about ourselves. Finally, we came upon a stray taxi, and it brought us home in half an hour. During the ride, Arabela sat completely still, unreachable. As soon as we were home she threw herself down on the bed, fully clothed, and wept with abandon, like a child, her body racked with sobbing. It was all that could be done to redeem that night.

  FIVE

  We never discussed what had happened. For several days, we tiptoed around one another and spoke little, trying to keep busy to avoid looking one another in the eye. In the end, we forgot about it. Looking back today, Arabela’s violent reaction that evening, her fear and her disgust at perversion and death, which turned several days later into a weary smile, now strikes me, on reflection, as less silly than it did at the time. I didn’t understand then the strange halo she seemed to wear. It’s hard to understand some things when you’re too close to them.

  And still, these qualities were probably expressions of what critics would later refer to as her “genius.” So many articles have been written about Arabela, about her art, about her moving stage presence—and none of them get to the heart of it. I myself, accompanying her on the piano with all my attention, yet startled by the charm of her voice, was intrigued by the mystery of that feeling. It was like the mystery of a plaything you’d invented but which slips from your hands and the limits of your understanding. Who could have foretold, that day when we were offered the chance to perform a set of chansonettes in that little provincial cabaret-theater, where our little adventure would lead? Not I, in any case, because it was a ridiculous proposal.

  —A hundred and sixty francs per evening, said Arabela, isn’t an offer you get every day.

  —It certainly isn’t. But you’re an acrobat, or a dancer at a stretch, so I can’t see how you’re going to sing, dear girl, even for a hundred times that sum.

  She laughed, astounded by my reasoning. Hers was more straightforward. We’d been offered a chance to sing in a provincial cabaret. To sing, not to dance. So we’d sing.

  —Darling, she said, I’ve spent my whole life doing what’s been asked of me. Nobody has ever asked what I want, what I know how to do, what I’m able to do. So I’ve never taken the time to tell anybody. You say this offer we’ve got is a mistake. Maybe so. But it’s still a contract and it’s not to be spurned, it’s to be signed.

  It wasn’t my first time yielding to Arabela and adventure. Several days later our act was ready. We rehearsed frantically—me at the piano, Arabela while doing housework—several fashionable songs, a couple of classic melodies, and, as a crowd-pleaser, an old ballad from Auvergne, the region where we’d be performing. We’d got the ballad from the musical friends of Monsieur Pierre, the owner of the glassware store, and an excellent baritone and a clarinet player in the arrondissement’s brass band. I found Arabela’s voice pleasant, but nothing more, and I certainly didn’t anticipate the dizzy, overwhelming success that would keep us at that theater for a month, followed by some big cities in the Midi, opulent seaside towns and old-style holiday resorts.

  They were glorious evenings, with perhaps excessively warm enthusiasm from the audience. They encouraged us boisterously, as though at a match, but there were also charged moments of silence, with the whole room holding its breath at the last note of that ballad from the Auvergne, as Arabela drew it out like a thread of silk, passing the gleaming thread between her fingertips. That was when I felt that note of personal sadness suspended in Arabela’s song, struggling out despite her limitations and her attitude and bearing as an “artist.” The deep seam of feeling I was mining was beyond my comprehension, but I decided to try to simplify our act and to create a set that was more coherent than that grab bag of melodies we’d started with.

  Those who later heard Arabela in Paris that evening at the Empire, now famous in the annals of the music hall, will never know the metamorphoses through which our act passed before becoming that perfect incarnation later popularized in the illustrated magazines. Everything was hard won, day after day, through numerous modifications: from Arabela’s dress to her sleek, straight-cut hair, the black curtains that framed us, the way I sat at the piano, the order of the songs in the set, the silver bracelet on Arabela’s left wrist, and the way she let her long arms hang lazily at her sides, with her hands clasped about her knees. And, if I forced myself, perhaps I could still recall today when and where each detail in our music hall act emerged, whether in Brest or in Nîmes, as we refined our stage presence and décor with each new appearance in each new town.

  The hardest thing was how to position Arabela onstage. Though she was calm and absolutely immune to stage fright, she was completely unable to find a natural pose while she sang. She didn’t know what to do with her hands or how to move or what to lean on. We tried everything. Standing next to me at the piano, as though reading the music over my shoulder. Up at the front of the stage, on the right, leaning against a small podium. And finally, on the right, leaning slightly over the rear of the piano. Nothing worked, until one glorious day, when we were rehearsing, I yelled at her in exasperation and told her to get onto the piano. She seated herself very comfortably, as though on an armchair, and she immediately recovered her self-confidence. Settled there, with her legs crossed and her hands clasped over her knee, it was as though she were sitting again on that silk swing in her old circus days. And that melancholy, indifferent smile that illuminated her from within came back—the one from the evening we first met.

  No, I don’t know the source of that current of feeling in her voice or the stark yet sometimes mysterious beauty of her singing. I sometimes still listen today to the gramophone records we made then (fortunately they are few and hard to find) and I wonder why I don’t have the key to their mystery, even though I participated in it and it took place before my very eyes. She had a weak, flat voice, slightly off-key, but from the moment she opened her mouth it was as though she were drawing back heavy curtains and opening a doorway to a world of dreams. Her singing was spirited but awkward at the same time, like a beginner who has mastered a melody on the piano and is herself surprised to hear a note of hesitation later on, after success should have allowed a sense of confidence. But she sang without verve and without any appealing gestures or smiles. She always sang—whether it was a ballad or some
thing lyrical—in that same even, diligent tone, like a sad child.

  I don’t think she was ever theatrical or even had moments of pride. She believed the job she was doing was no better or worse than any other, and I’m sure that if she’d had to sew or embroider she would have applied herself with the same degree of conscientiousness. Her attitude of honesty and decency had nothing to do with “art,” and if Arabela’s singing was indeed moving it was not due to her technical ability or her modest voice. It was due to the weariness of her soul, the depth of her melancholy, and the dim light which suffused her life, circumstances, and memories.

  One day, before our return to Paris and our debut at the Empire, I recalled a vacation I’d spent a long time before, in my student days, in a village in the Alps, where I had met and loved a young girl for one night. The girl then disappeared utterly from my life. Remembering those days, I asked Arabela to sing me some verses from a song from a game from that time.

  Il court, il court le furet,

  Le furet du bois joli,

  Il a passé par ici,

  Le furet du bois, Mesdames,

  Il repassera par là…

  I didn’t know that in asking her to do this I’d accidentally stumbled across the most beautiful song in our repertoire, the one to which we would very soon owe our fame, the melody that would go around the metropolises of Europe for a whole year and be played on gramophones, on the radio, in jazz clubs, by Viennese orchestras, and be whistled at night in deserted streets by people who’d stayed out too late. The song was astounding from the first for its simplicity (it was daring to perform a song children sang in the playground on the stage of a prestigious theater), but it was its very ingenuousness that must have made it appealing and created a crowd of imitations. It was the revival of the waltz, of the songs of 1900, the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard, of long dresses and three-pointed hats, all in one and reduced to the tastes of the moment, with a certain sweet nostalgia for those happy years before the war.

  The only personal credit I can claim for our lucky, glorious career is for intuiting the poetic potential of a set of old-fashioned songs. While our friends urged us to perform modern music and Arabela was tempted to do one of the new songs, I insisted we limit ourselves to outmoded melodies from between 1900 and 1920, knowing that a decade-old song, when revived, has the advantage over a new one of being able to infuse all our little feelings about the past with nostalgia and lightness.

  So, from the amnesia of the fashionable generations, I saved an entire repertoire of songs that had been wept to and danced to at another time, and made them contemporary. There was no attempt at irony about their bad taste. On the contrary, they were sung with the same sincerity which animated them in previous times, in their days of glory. I gathered outdated songs from all over—from France, Germany, Britain—from before the war and immediately after, and then made a selection. Arabela’s preferences were decisive, because she didn’t judge on aesthetic criteria. She went for what any nice girl likes when she hears a “lovely song” in the parlor, copies it on a scrap of paper, and sings it later that evening when she’s sad and feels like having a cry.

  Perhaps “Adelaide’s Dream” and “When the Red Bill” are still hummed somewhere today. We discovered both of them in the attic of a secondhand bookstore among a stack of sheet music. One was from 1890 and the other from 1920, and we launched them in a bar for Anglo-Saxons, with Arabela singing of Adelaide’s fin de siècle dream with real feeling. Later, when we went to London for the first time, with our reputation as a European success preceding us, more for the oddness of our repertoire than our mastery of it, we had to construct an entirely English set (oh, those tender, funny evenings of cabaret in London, when the whole theater hummed along with Arabela to that silly “Venetian Moon,” a lost song from 1920…), which then obliged us to construct a special set for each capital on our tour, plundering the past for old waltzes and tangos. Even I became sentimental when Arabela was rehearsing “Wien, du Stadt meiner Traume” in an awful accent for our Vienna debut—and I didn’t understand half of the words.

  Indeed, we were at the peak of our popularity and the illustrated theater magazines had begun to publicize how much we were earning per evening in their gossip columns, along with the anonymous love letters that arrived each morning for Arabela.

  ARABELLA AND PARTNER! Blue, white, red, and green posters appeared throughout Europe like little multicolored flags planted across the continent, testifying to a victorious campaign, with our names hurrying ahead of us, on theater billboards, in tram windows, and on packets of expensive cigarettes. I loved the picture of us on the front of the program; Arabela in the foreground, drawn in crude blue—a color that suited her admirably—and me in the background, at the piano, drawn in a few black strokes that shaded my face and preserved my anonymity.

  I think Arabella and Partner contained the right dose of mystery that a cabaret act needs. And, without hiding from anybody, as I had no intention of returning to my previous life, I was happy to be spared the curious attention of those who had once known me. I remained nothing more than Partner, which kept me out of the spotlight and the papers. Though I never admitted it to myself honestly, I was very glad that nothing was going to get back to Bucharest about it.

  On several occasions we nearly got a booking back in Romania, and offers came by telegram in all our hotels when we were playing Vienna and Budapest, which would have made refusal all the harder, as I would have had trouble explaining to Arabela that I didn’t want to appear there for fear of being seen by a certain woman. It was ridiculous of me, as I well knew.

  When we made the film with Paramount, I had a grinding struggle with the director, who wanted both Arabela and me illuminated equally under the same bright lights. It took all my skill and stubbornness to make him see that the purity of the song and the simplicity of the image depended on my remaining in the shadows as a plain black silhouette, with just enough light to discern the play of my fingers across the keyboard for a moment before being lost against the background of the drapes. All that remained in frame was a white circle, for Arabela, who was too indifferent to it all to be troubled by the army of spotlights trained upon her.

  The truth was, I was terrified by the thought of that short film making its inevitable way to Bucharest and when I thought of the spectacle being projected in a cinema to people I knew, it all seemed trivial to me. I was particularly horrified when I thought of Maria—a great lover of cinema—watching me from her seat in bewilderment, with Andrei, of course, leaning toward her and whispering casually, “That Stefan Valeriu! Told you he’d never amount to anything!”

  Masterpieces are probably composed of just such tricks, as the premiere of our film received an avalanche of praise and attention, with all the critics explaining, authoritatively and in technical terms which I didn’t understand, the use of light and shade in our short film. Maybe they were right, but it’s hard for me to take all these aesthetic judgments seriously, knowing that all they did was hide a frivolous love affair in which, God is my witness, nothing was premeditated. Which doesn’t stop me going sometimes, when I have a free evening, to a neighborhood cinema where our film is running, to see Arabela and listen to her. She is simple and moving on the screen, just as she was on the stage and at home, with her vague smile, reminiscent of a kiss.

  SIX

  I couldn’t say when exactly the little incident I’m about to relate occurred. I didn’t take it seriously at the time and even today I’m not entirely certain that it had anything to do with our later breakup. One day we were talking about her old circus partners. There was sufficient detachment in our voices that the possibility of regret was not allowed to enter. Then Arabela told me straight-out, as though she’d just remembered it:

  —Did you know Dik was my husband?

  Of course I hadn’t known. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to think it. Dik, that ageless, bald, alcohol
ic creature? The revelation was more comic than troubling.

  —And why are you telling me this only now?

  —I don’t know. It never came up.

  —You’re extraordinary, Arabela. Extraordinary. We’ve been living together all this time, you go into detail about all kinds of things, every day we banter for hours about whatever crosses our minds—and it doesn’t occur to you until this moment to tell me something so much more significant?

  —That’s the way I am, Stefan. Absentminded.

  I said nothing for a moment, disarmed by the simplicity of her reply. Then I blew up:

  —And why Dik? Of the four of them, why did you choose him?

  —Perhaps because it was easiest with him. See? It was very hard to live the way I was, like in a family, with four men. Married to one of them, the other three had to behave. In this kind of a situation, the most important thing is to avoid love affairs and complications. And at least with Dik the idea of love couldn’t enter into it—right?

  Then I remembered catching Beb’s look that evening at the Medrano, in the changing room, and right then I began to wonder if Arabela’s decision to leave them was a more serious matter than I’d first believed, and whether her bond with them was more than just an arrangement between performers. Perhaps that boy Beb might have had an opinion on the matter. When on tour not so very much later, in a cabaret theater in Germany, I came across news of her ex-colleagues and I have to admit I was the one whom it jolted. They had performed there two weeks earlier and had since moved on to their next engagement, wherever that was. We came across their name and photograph in the theater sections of the local newspapers and I learned that their act had met with some success. They’d progressed since we’d seen them last. They weren’t big stars but they put on a decent show as a warm-up act. I looked at the photographs with great interest and noted how they’d simplified their equipment, poses, and colors greatly.