Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They just gave it to me.”

  “I could watch you dance for an eternity.” He looked beyond her, eyes staring. “No!” His forefinger lifted, perpendicular, into the air. “Longer!”

  Eventually, we made our way back to the foyer, where Dalí was himself surrounded by a group of admirers, and I didn’t see him again for several years, and then only from a distance.

  Not long afterwards, I dreamed I had traveled to a country somewhere in Africa. It was the custom, in that place, for the king’s children to be fed both by their mother and by a wet nurse. This made good sense, I thought, until I noticed that the wet nurse had only one breast, and that the other one had been cut off. The left side of her chest was flat as a man’s, except for the harsh ridges of the scar, which were even darker than her skin.

  “Like everybody else in the world,” the king told me, “you have doubtless observed that when a baby suckles on one breast he tends to hold or fondle the other. It seems to work best that way.

  “But we have discovered that if one of the wet nurse’s breasts is removed babies learn to talk more quickly. They worry at the absence until they produce a word with which to question those around them—and the word they come up with is always the same.”

  “Really?” I said. “What’s the word?”

  “Apricot,” he said.

  An absurd dream—unnerving too—but people were always amused when I told them about it, and Michaux liked it so much that he put it in a book of his.

  Claude’s most important written work, Disavowals, was published in the spring of 1930. She had harnessed her intelligence, her poetic gift, and her talent for provocation in an attempt to jolt the literary world out of its complacency—she longed to have an effect—but the book was received, for the most part, with a resounding silence. She had confronted all her doubts and fears—about love, about her family, and about what she referred to as her “badly-made body”—and no one cared. She felt rage, but she also felt ashamed. She continued to go out, often dressed as a man and wearing a monocle—it was said that André Breton would leave cafés as soon as Claude arrived because he found her appearance so disturbing—and yet, at the same time, she felt the urge to hide away. There were whole weeks when she refused to leave the apartment. She wouldn’t look out of the window, but kept the curtains drawn. The world had turned its back on her. It was over, even before it had begun.

  Several months after publication, on a chalky, gray-white September afternoon, we went out to buy bread and flowers and some flea powder for Kid. As we passed Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach’s shop, she saw us through the window and insisted that we come in for a drink.

  “Adrienne’s here,” she said, tossing the words casually over her shoulder as we followed her to the office at the back.

  I felt Claude hesitate. Her book was so intimate that she had seen Adrienne’s refusal to publish it as a condemnation not just of her writing but of her as a person, and they hadn’t had much contact since. It was very like Sylvia to pretend not to have noticed any awkwardness.

  Adrienne was sitting at an untidy desk, going through a pile of receipts, the smoke from her cigarette blue in the chill gray air. When she saw Claude in the doorway I thought I detected a flicker of concern or apprehension in her face.

  “Claude!” She stood up and kissed Claude on both cheeks. “It’s good to see you. Marcel, how are you?” Her necklace of heavy wooden beads knocked against my collarbone as we embraced.

  “Sylvia’s keeping you busy, I see,” Claude said.

  Adrienne smiled. “Sylvia has no interest in money. It’s beneath her.”

  Sylvia uncorked a bottle. “Some wine, perhaps?”

  Later, when we were seated, Sylvia told Claude she had seen her book in the window of a shop on rue de Clichy. Claude responded by saying that she had been overlooked by all the most important newspapers.

  “They aren’t interested,” she said. “No one’s interested.”

  Sylvia glanced at Adrienne, but Adrienne didn’t appear to notice.

  “They will be,” I said. “In time.”

  “It’s not even the kiss of death,” Claude went on. “It’s the kiss of utter indifference.” She turned to me, cheeks flushed. “How do you know they’ll be interested—in time?”

  I drank from my glass. The wine was cold and inky.

  “Well?” she said.

  We were living in an era when women’s voices were only just beginning to be heard, I said. It was a profound shift, and society was still struggling to adapt. But she—Claude—had treated the concept of a woman who is powerful and independent as the norm, and she had pushed that concept one stage further. Maybe people weren’t ready for that. Maybe they weren’t prepared to see a powerful, independent woman take herself apart in public. It was too much. It was too soon.

  “Since when did you become such an expert on women?” Claude made no attempt to keep the sneer out of her voice.

  I shrugged. “It’s just a theory.”

  Sylvia reached for one of Adrienne’s cigarettes and struck a match. “I think Marcel’s right,” she said. “You’re ahead of your time, Claude. You’re early.”

  “You’re all in this together,” Claude said, “trying to make me feel better about my own irrelevance.”

  “You’re saying difficult things.” Sylvia rolled the tip of her cigarette against the edge of a saucer. “Someone has to be brave enough to do that.”

  “Or foolish enough,” Claude said. Then her defiance collapsed. “I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I was trying to be beautiful.” She put her hands over her face, and her shoulders began to shake. She was like a child suddenly.

  “You are beautiful,” Sylvia said. “To the people who understand these things.”

  “Three of you,” Claude muttered. “It’s hardly an audience.”

  “Michaux loved your book,” Adrienne said.

  “That makes four—or is it still three?” Claude gave Adrienne a pointed look.

  We left the shop soon afterwards.

  Claude would not be consoled. She stopped eating. She smoked and drank instead. She wanted to “kill her feelings,” as she put it. Sleep eluded her. At night she wandered through the city, and I went with her. We met drunks and prostitutes—or sometimes, if it was late enough, we didn’t meet anyone at all. Claude was reminded of Boiffard’s photographs of deserted streets and doorways. The pictures were deliberately mundane, she said—they looked like pictures of nothing—but they suggested a secret life, a life hidden by time. Was that empty square the site of a forgotten catastrophe, or was it the scene of a crime that had yet to be committed? We walked for miles, often until dawn. Once, beneath a railway viaduct, we saw people fighting over a pile of old clothes. If you value something, Claude said, does that make it valuable?

  She thought of Soulef, the fortune-teller, and imagining that Soulef might be able to give her some direction, or steady her at least, we traveled to Porte de Clignancourt. Almost a decade had passed, and the brick building where Claude claimed to have spent the night had been demolished. We asked everyone we came across if they knew of Soulef’s whereabouts. Nobody had heard of her.

  A few days later, Claude remembered Soulef’s daughter. Once again, I went with her. The corner bar where she and Soulef had stopped for a glass of calvados was still there. When we walked in, an African woman of about our age was wiping the zinc counter with a rag. Her name was Eugénie. Claude began to ask her about Soulef. At first, Eugénie seemed suspicious, and would only answer in monosyllables, but then Claude told her the story of how she had spent an entire day guiding her mother through the city.

  Clicking her tongue, Eugénie shook her head. “It’s not the first time she’s played that trick. She always did like company.”

  “So it’s not true,” Claude said, “that she needs help?”


  “Not as much as she makes out.” Eugénie folded the rag and draped it over a tap. “And something else: she’s not my mother.”

  “But she said—”

  “She’s my aunt. At least, I think she is. It was her sister that was my mother.”

  “Do you know where I might find her?”

  “Soulef? I haven’t seen her in a year or two. But she might walk in that door at any moment.”

  Claude asked if they could be photographed together. Eugénie let out a short, sharp laugh, half startled, half dismissive. It would be the first time, she said, that she had stood in front of one of those machines. Claude told her the machines could give her a kind of immortality. In one hundred years, complete strangers might happen on the photograph, and they would see her exactly as she was. But she’d be gone. Long gone.

  “All right.” Eugénie dried her hands and came out from behind the bar.

  As I took the picture, I was surprised to see an awkwardness in Claude. She looked humble, shy. Uncertain of her ground. She had laid one hand over Eugénie’s forearm in a gesture that seemed familiar, almost possessive, though you might at the same time be forgiven for thinking that she was clinging to Eugénie for support. This ambiguity felt truthful. Where Claude was hunched, Eugénie stood upright, her weight evenly distributed. With one hand tucked into her jacket pocket and a piece of cloth wound round her head, she gave off a sullen nonchalance.

  It was overcast when we left the bar, but as we walked down rue d’Hauteville the clouds parted and hot yellow light spilled through the gap.

  “I feel better now,” Claude said.

  Without another word we crossed the street, moving from the shade into the sun.

  In the spring of 1931, while in the bath, I found a small lump in the upper slope of my left breast. When I told Claude, she immediately assumed the worst: it was cancer, and I was going to die.

  “You can’t leave me.” She gripped my hand so hard that she almost crushed the bones. “I have to go first. You promised, remember?”

  She was referring to a late-night conversation we had had in Le Croisic when we were young. Nothing should be allowed to come between us, she had said. Not circumstances, not people either—but what to do about death? She fell silent. Through the open window I could hear boats shifting in the harbor. I have to go before you, she said at last. She looked at me. You’re not saying anything. I agree, I said. As if death was something I could influence or manage. You’d let me go first? she said. You’d do that for me? Yes, I said. It wasn’t because I didn’t love her as much as she loved me, nor was it because I could bear the thought of her being gone. It was because she was more fragile than I was, and more vulnerable. Even at the age of twenty, I somehow knew I would find it easier to carry on alone.

  Luckily, the tumor was benign, though my doctor advised me to have the breast removed, and the procedure was carried out in July. I was unprepared for the extreme discomfort that followed. For at least two months, I couldn’t raise my left arm, which made simple tasks like getting dressed almost impossible. Also, I had the feeling ants were swarming just beneath my skin, a sensation caused by the severing of highly sensitive nerves. Worse still, there were moments when it seemed someone was gouging a hole in the left side of my body with a rusty knife.

  It was during my convalescence that Claude recalled my dream about the woman with one breast.

  “Uncanny,” she said, “don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “I don’t think you’re clairvoyant, though.”

  “Don’t you?” I watched her from the bed as she paced up and down, in the grip of an idea.

  “No,” she said. “We know ourselves—better than we think we do.”

  I wasn’t sure she was right. My theory had always been that the dream was a comment on our relationship, but since I had yet to work out what exactly it was saying I decided not to mention it.

  That year, we went to Jersey later than usual, at the end of August. We were both debilitated. Only a few weeks before, Claude had learned of the death of her mother. Georges had telephoned, informing her that Toinette had died in his apartment. He had arranged for her removal from the clinic. He had that authority, he said. He had realized that she was nearing the end, and thought it important she was with her family.

  Claude stood facing the wall. “What about me? I’m not family?”

  As Georges began to try to justify his behavior, she dropped the receiver and walked away, leaving it hanging from the edge of the hall table on its black cord. I picked it up and listened as Georges talked on. He had acted in their mother’s interests, he was saying. He knew what was best for her. At no point did he apologize.

  I didn’t speak until he finished.

  “Thank you for letting us know,” I said.

  “Suzanne—?”

  I replaced the receiver.

  Claude believed that Georges had deliberately kept the news from her because he wanted to punish her both for siding with their father over the divorce and for approving of his marriage to my mother. Georges had been vengeful, she said, and cruel. In 1928, she had tried to visit her mother—she hadn’t seen her since our stay in Le Pradet some seventeen years before—but she had been turned away by the staff at the clinic. Georges had ensured that Toinette was concealed in death, just as she had been concealed while she was alive. There was a terrible symmetry about it. I agreed. But perhaps, in a way, I said, her mother’s passing should come as a relief. The absence that had so tormented her had been one that people like Georges manipulated and controlled. It had been an absence that could be altered—though not by her. This new absence did not discriminate. It was permanent, and irrevocable. She didn’t turn on me, as she had done in the past. Instead, she lit a cigarette and stared at the floor, and when she had finished that cigarette she lit another. At night, I often woke to find myself alone, Claude’s half of the bed untouched. As I lay on my back, I would hear the piano. A piece I didn’t recognize. Later, she told me she had written it herself. It was through music that she grieved—everybody in the building sleeping, the glimmer of white keys in the dark…

  In Jersey, the weather was cold and wet. We wrote to Robert and Youki, asking them to join us, but Youki had already gone away on holiday, and Robert was so short of money that he had taken a job as an estate agent. The rain did not let up. We spent more time in the cinema than on the beach. We went to the new Greta Garbo film and one that starred Marlene Dietrich, but the highlight of the summer was Monkey Business. With their ludicrous but deft routines, the Marx Brothers inspired us to laugh at our misfortunes, and at ourselves. For them, the world was simply an excuse to wreak havoc, and there was no situation that did not have its funny side.

  I think we saw the film three times.

  It was through our friend Jacques Viot that Claude first met André Breton. One spring afternoon Jacques brought Breton to our apartment on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Breton wore a green suit and a pair of spectacles, and he carried his famous cane on which were carved vaginas, erect penises, and slugs. Sylvia had told us that his spectacles were an affectation. The lenses were made of ordinary glass.

  Things got off to an awkward start.

  “I understand,” Breton said in his somber, somewhat pedantic voice, “that Robert Desnos is a friend of yours.”

  “Yes,” Claude said.

  “We were also close once, but he disappointed me.” Breton stuck out his lower lip. “I no longer expect anything from him.”

  Claude lit a cigarette. She was dressed conservatively, in a dark-blue dress and a wool beret. Her hair was short, but not cropped.

  I spoke to Breton. “I read your novel. I admired it very much.”

  Breton inclined his enormous head in thanks, but made no comment.

  Jacques leaned forwards. “Claude has also written a book.
”

  “I’ve heard great things,” Breton said, “though I have not, as yet, had the pleasure of reading it.”

  Claude took a copy from her bag and put it on the table in front of him. “A gift.”

  Her boldness surprised me, but if Breton was taken aback he gave no sign of it. He merely nodded and said, “How kind.”

  Before he left, he admired our collection of primitive and Cubist sculptures.

  Not long afterwards, he invited us to the Cyrano, where he and his fellow Surrealists liked to gather for aperitifs. Since the café was next to the Moulin Rouge, and just down the street from the Cirque Medrano, it attracted an eclectic clientele. You might find yourself sitting next to a trapeze artist, a pimp, or an American. We arrived early. For almost an hour we had Breton to ourselves. He repeated a sentiment expressed in the letter he had written to Claude after their first meeting—namely, that although he didn’t know what to make of her and her work, somehow her presence moved him. He believed that, in time, he would feel less disconcerted. He blamed what he called his “straightforwardness.”

  At five o’clock more people arrived. They ordered oxygénés, a drink made with white pastis. The noise level rose. A young man began to talk at the top of his voice. He was telling a story about a princess and a decommissioned submarine. He had the eyes of a stone angel in a graveyard, wide and serene, but also astonished. I asked Jacques who he was.

  “That’s René Crevel,” he said.

  René was a talented poet, Jacques told me, but he took too many drugs. Hashish, cocaine. Opium. His life was chaotic. He slept with people of both sexes. He was a member of the Communist Party and of the Surrealist movement, neither of which approved of homosexuality. He worshipped Breton, though, and followed him everywhere. Jacques paused. He had heard a rumor, he went on. He wasn’t sure if it was true. When René’s father hanged himself, his mother had forced him to look at the body. René was only fourteen at the time.