Fermina Marquez (1911)

by Valery Larbaud

  As soon as Santos had so to speak discovered Montmartre, Demoisel never missed a single spree. Santos had permitted the Negro to accompany him, because, requiring a companion and shrinking from dragging his brother Pablo into these perils, he had found in Demoisel an audacity as great as his own. The two friends became popular in a certain world of revellers, head waiters, gypsies and alluring girls. The Negro, tall, too lanky, with his short nose curiously snubbed at the tip: the irregular but not unattractive nose of a Parisian dressmaker's assistant, but truly remarkable in his African features — an inheritance perhaps from his mother, the 'Pahisian' of Port-au-Prince? - Demoisel, I repeat, nature's oversight, did not have any success with these girls if the truth be known. Moreover he was violent, brutal and malicious, and

  so strong that nobody dared to contradict him, particularly when he was drunk. At moments such as these, Santos alone was able to restrain him and bring him back to school in time. The other Negroes we had at Saint Augustine's were model pupils; hardworking and highly intelligent, these boys were inoffensive and sparing of words and they had an occasional glimmer of melancholy in their eyes. Demoisel was therefore an exception and a terrible one at that. In certain groups, there were stories told of his deplorable exploits in hushed voices. It seems that, despite Santos, he would enter heaven only knows what dives during these famous nights and pay the girls there to beat them. And these unhappy creatures who doubtless went hungry, acquiesced in this degradation! Today on calm reflection I think this was pure myth, some incident distorted by the imagination of a depraved child. But I well recall the distress this story threw us into, the first time it was related to us. The majority of us were spoilt children and this is what degrades character the most and what hardens the soul, but several amongst us shed tears of indignation and pity on learning of this thing; we used to think about it constantly in spite of ourselves and at night, before falling asleep, it was like a suffocating weight which our hands sought to lift off our chests . . .

  Santos, quite on the contrary, was welcome everywhere. No sooner did he enter a restaurant, his head held high, his hat tilted back, than there was always a beautiful woman in some merry group to say: "Well, here's my hearthrob." Santos Iturria was indeed very good-looking. Between eighteen and nineteen years of age, he already had the build, the full-fledged vigour, the confident air of a twenty-five-year-old man. A liveliness normal for his age added, by contrast, a further charm to his appearance. His face was not exactly long, but large, and was always closely shaved which emphasized the characteristics of cleanliness and candour his whole person exuded. His colouring was light, even a little pink. His chestnut hair with its hint of waviness nobly crowned his high

  brow. But his eyes above all were remarkable: they were blue, but a deep blue which was almost black. They astonished. And all the more so since their unfaltering, manly expression full of gay insolence entirely belied his very long, dark, almost feminine eyelashes.

  Santos learnt about life by going to Montmartre to amuse himself in this way. Initially, there had been a certain churlishness in his manners and occasionally he had put himself in the wrong. One evening, as Demoisel and he were running up the stairs of a fashionable restaurant behind a young ladyfriend of theirs, they came across a group of men who were descending this same staircase. The young woman went past, but Santos, wishing to follow, dashed after her and knocked into an elderly man who immediately stood in his way saying: "Sir, I have let the lady go by but it is for you who are young to give way to me now. People have no idea ..."

  The old boy persisted in his reprimand for a few moments and Demoisel was already laughing at the thought of the sharp riposte that Santos was about to make. But Santos meekly listened right to the end. Then he bowed, stepped aside and said unaffectedly: "You are right to rebuke me. I apologize to you Sir."

  Somebody on the nearby landing shouted out: "Bravo Sir, you know how to play the game!"

  "As for you, I didn't ask for your opinion," retorted Santos and he went past.

  Soon, he was able to move with ease in this rather intricate world. He even became a force for the good here: a champion of the disreputable woman and the pet hate of one or two of those mincing fellows seen hanging around certain beautiful girls too much.

  These young men are extremely elegant. You enter into conversation with them and they first announce that they are "sons of privileged families" in the process of ruining themselves; they are on the brink of being sought in justice and once they have "squandered" everything, they will blow

  their brains out. Only, and this is very curious, they will also say: "I am going to tell you an anecdote!" or else, "The atmosphere is heavy this evening"; they have confided that they studied at Janson and yet they have no foreign accent. So you observe them more closely and you note that they appear ill at ease in their tails and speak to the waiters as rudely as is possible. And then when a wealthy man, a serious client, seems to find their woman companion pleasing, you see them disappear on some pretext or other, allowing their place to be taken without getting upset. And then you understand (but too late) with whom you have been dealing . . .

  Santos Iturria could not stand these fellows of the demi-monde. He began by rejecting their overtures with a briskness that did credit to his courage. With great ostentation, he would congratulate the one whose love was sincere on the tact with which he left the way clear for the suitor whose love came at a price in such-and-such a circumstance he recalled. To another, he would speak of love and money with an offensive insistence. His conversation was elegant and highly vivacious; ungossipy but full and adorned with comic expressions, tremendous jokes, delivered with an earnestness which was quite hilarious. And the tone of his voice itself which had something musical would give an added zest to these jests. Soon he took the offensive against these fine fellows he did not like. And with these witless folk, who were quick to anger and to use ugly language, he had a rare time of it. They were his enemies and his butts. He drove them wild. He persecuted them. He made them feel that he was always ready to cuff them as soon as they became crude. And they themselves did not dare to behave boorishly for fear of being shown the door. In these onslaughts of impertinence, Santos invariably had people — both men and women — laughing with him. This was liable to end in real disaster. And one night in the roadway, Santos received a shocking blow on the back of the head. However, Demoisel dealt with the assailant so thoroughly that he did not come back again. Santos recovered from this by spending a few days in the infirmary; as far as everybody was concerned, he had taken a fall in the gymnasium.

  Thus, to return Fermina Marquez her bracelet was not really very difficult for Santos. Throughout evening prep and even going upstairs to the dormitory, he played with this bracelet. And the following day when the girl held out her hand to us, the trinket was on her arm. This filled us with pride: Iturria's audacity lent distinction to all of us.

  VI

  We were now the girl's habitual escort. There were ten or so of us. All those who came near her, those to whom she spoke, with whom she larked about, made up a sort of love's following around-her; these were her knights. So the knights of Fermina Marquez were admired by all the pupils and even possibly by the youngest of the monitors. We would no longer bring back the smell of tobacco smoked on the sly from those wonderful walks in the grounds, but rather the fragrance of the young South American girls. Was it geranium or mignonette? It was an indefinable scent, a scent which conjured up blue, mauve, white and pink dresses; large, floppy straw hats; dark hair in ringlets or curled like shells; black eyes so huge that the whole sky must be mirrored in them.

  Pilar was only a child; her fingers were always stained with ink, her elbows, chafed — those blatant, fatuous signs of little girls aged between eleven and thirteen. But Fermina really was a grown-up girl. It is for this reason that her appearance had something which so affected us. A girl! On seeing her, we would want to clap our hands and dance around her. So what is it that
sets her apart from a young woman to such an extent? I watch a young woman, a young mother surrounded by her children, and she watches me in turn and recognizes me: it is my hand which drew her and only released her once I had received her kiss. She watches me and has all these images stored within her: I am a man, similar to the father of her children. Whereas for the girl, I am an unfamiliar person, a strange country, an enigma. A poor, unfamiliar person, all clumsiness and stammers in her presence; a pitiful mystery who loses his entire composure at a peal of her laughter.

  And yet we are not so unfamiliar to each other: when life leaves me quite alone with myself, I discover aspirations and feelings of a woman within me; and I am sure that those women who know how to explore themselves, can perceive the lucid and well-ordered mind of man beyond their own bountiful woman's heart. But since we will never be able to understand ourselves clearly, will we ever come to know that part of the opposite sex which we all contain, both men and women? At twenty, it was our mistake to believe that we had fathomed life and womankind. Neither the one nor the other will ever be fathomed; only objects of astonishment and an uninterrupted succession of miracles prevail everywhere. Santos thought he had got to know about women in the cafes of Montmartre; and we too who had only gone — and then infrequently — to tea parties and soirees at the houses of our guardians in Paris, we too would say to ourselves: "That's a woman all over."

  VII

  However, the scandal of our absence at break; our unsanc-tioned walks and our games of tennis in the grounds finally disturbed the school authorities. And one day, each of Fermina Marquez' knights heard that he had been forbidden entrance to the grounds on pain of the most severe disciplinary action. Leniot, a fifth-form pupil, was alone given special permission to accompany these ladies. Mama Dolore had asked this favour because Leniot had become the protector of little Marquez and was steering him through the early pitfalls of school life.

  VIII

  Joanny Leniot, at fifteen and a half, was quite simply a schoolboy good at composition. His physiognomy was not pleasant; he was taciturn and never looked people straight in the face. He lived, moreover, in relative isolation. He was even suspected of using break to go over his lessons in his head, while all the time pretending to sleep stretched out on a bench. He had a somewhat drab nature about which nobody would have been able to say anything precise. He was there, sitting in his place or standing in his row; that was all. But on prizegiving day when his class was read out, none but his name would be heard, he alone could be seen on the rostrum; and since in the end he was a credit to the school, all the pupils applauded him with such vigour they would hurt their hands. Yet nobody liked him.

  He had come to Saint Augustine's when he was nine, barely able to read. At first, he had felt so lonely — surrounded by these schoolfellows who spoke a language unfamiliar to him — so like a captive, so abandoned that he had begun to work frantically to stop being affected by the wretchedness of his existence. He started to study as a man might start to drink: to forget. He was one of those characters whom a boarding school can stamp with an ineradicable flaw; he knew it and did his best to struggle against its influence.

  His progress astounded everybody. At the end of one year, he was moved from the juniors' penultimate class into the senior school's first form, and in this new class he came top in the first composition of the year. From that moment on he dug his heels in, determined never to lose first place. He had been excluded from outdoor games; his clumsiness guaranteed the defeat of his side; the team captains themselves asked that he be excused from participating in the games. Of this he was glad. Henceforth, nothing interested him except this first place, his idee fixe. And it was an unstinting daily effort, for even the ordinary prepared work was given an order of merit after it had been corrected. The actual subject matter of his studies hardly mattered to him: science, literature, grammar, geography, they were simply opportunities for satisfying his obsession with scholastic distinction. He could have been taught anything at all since this ambition had been kindled in him. This goal blinded him; he had reached the point of no longer experiencing life's daily movement around him, of no longer seeing its monotony, its dullness and banality: the prep monitor who yawns over the authors he is studying for his degree, the idlers who are rushing slapdash through their proses and the dunces who are catching flies or gazing wistfully out of the windows, where a mother-of-pearl sky deepens to the blue of night. The melancholy of those evenings at Saint Augustine's no longer even made any impression on him — those forlorn village evenings of the outer suburbs, when you can hear until sleep overcomes you the distant moaning of trains which seem to flee towards Paris terror-stricken . . . Joanny Leniot's every effort was strained to what he used to call, in his heart of hearts, success.

  And so this is what would happen: the boys would return to their classes; the master would be seated at his desk; in front of him, a pile of corrected scripts. Once silence had fallen, he would say: "I have given 18 out of 20 to Mr Leniot's unseen: it is without any real errors; I will read it out to you."

  Or else, it would be the results of the last composition. They were only given in each form every week on Saturday evening in the presence of the prefect of studies and a chief monitor. They would begin with the highest forms: the upper and lower sixths . . . For a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, Joanny Leniot, seated at his desk, listened to the different stages of the ceremony. The sounds of footsteps and voices, the pupils' din as they all stood up at the same time on the entrance of the authorities - he heard all this and his doubts and anxieties drove him out of his mind. And these noises would be repeated from one class to the next. Now these gentlemen were entering the formroom next door. Finally it would be the turn of Leniot's class. In frock coats and top hats, the authorities made their entrance; the pupils and master stood up.

  "Sit down, gentlemen," said the prefect of studies who assumed a solemn expression. And then the master would read out the results of the last composition. What a moment! "First: Leniot (Joanny)."

  He hurriedly got to his feet; the prefect of studies smiled at him; then he sat down again shakily. It caused an upheaval, a shock to his mind, an unhinging of his nervous system. Until the end of the class, he continued to tremble inside from this, to retain a sort of feverishness. At the doorway, he would hear: "Did you have an order called in your form? Who came top?" "Leniot again of course!"

  He allowed no trace of his joy to surface. Besides, he knew how little all that mattered to the vast majority of the pupils. And he did wish to be modest as well. But this joy was so great that he wanted to cry out, that he walked with stooping gait, wholly bent beneath the weight of his pride. Just as in the pictures of adventure stories a pirate can be seen carrying a beautiful white girl captive, so it seemed to him as though he were walking dazzled, holding his glory in his arms right against his heart. It was a fresh victory: for a further eight days, he would be seated in the form's place of honour. It was a bit like after Communion: he felt purified; he had more respect for himself.

  The prefect of studies and all the masters used to congratulate him: high hopes were founded on him. He was so intelligent, he absorbed everything so quickly. This was the widely held opinion, for Joanny Leniot had the pride to conceal his dogged exertions. If he permitted himself a slack half an hour in prep, he would spend it demonstrating to everyone how idle he was, by getting up twenty times from his place, by having himself constantly admonished by the monitor. He would affect to copy out his prepared work at the last minute. He even managed to sleep during lessons. All this was deceptive and his mental swiftness aroused wonderment. In fact, his emotions were always more lively and distinct than his thoughts; they obscured his intelligence which was dominated by them, and all in all, despite his reputation for being intellectually able, Leniot was remarkable only for his boundless ambition, which truly was above that of his peers. His parents (who lived in Lyons) used to write him letters of encouragement, full of praise for eac
h of his successes. Leniot senior would tell himself that his son understood the sacrifices being made for him, and that as a sensible boy he would take advantage of the education which was being placed within his reach. And his mother would reflect: "It's to please me that he works so much!" Joanny discerned these thoughts behind their congratulations. No, his parents would never understand . . . and he tore up their letters with smiles of pity. Nobody would ever understand that what he wanted and what he worked so hard for was solely this upheaval of the mind, this spasm occurring in response to the call of glory: "First: Leniot (Joanny)". These insignificant little feats of a schoolboy with a good record became the triumphs of a Roman emperor in his adolescent imagination.

  Yet the adult world does not guess — life has so deafened, so blunted it — that these laurels might well never fade on the brow of this gifted pupil. At Saint Augustine's, wreaths were not awarded at prizegiving; but engraved on their covers, the books bore escutcheons in gold, set with the school's initials:

  S.A. which, according to the old pun handed down from generation to generation since the school's earliest days, also meant: Sleazy Alehouse. The escutcheon was about as wide as a hundred-franc piece. For a long time, Joanny had gazed reverentially at this golden disc. It was like the permanent reflection of the memorable "first ray of glory" of which several fine authors speak; and although this deference was already nothing more than a childhood memory for him, at the mere sight of his prize books from the preceding years, his boyhood stood revealed with all its bitter taste, sadness and earnestness. Yet, throughout his life he would have prizes; throughout his life he would feel the warmth of this golden disk resting on him. His whole life would breathe that studious gravity, that quiet, unremitting tenacity to excel in everything. For him, his whole life would have that precious bitterness, the bay leafs self-same savour. And outside, far from prep rooms and dark corridors, there might be the vast open air and the whole summer with its full-scented breezes which make you dizzy; or again, there might be the autumn and the first warm mists which settle like a hand on your heart; there might be Paris and all its nights full of sins — such wonderful, such terrible sins, you would not dare imagine them; there might be all the women of the earth, who are so beautiful that you would want to find them names to express their beauty; and there might be Fermina Marquez' eyes, in which the tropical sun dazzles; — Joanny Leniot turned his face to the wall and thinking of the prepared work he had to do, experienced in his innermost self a joy which was greater than all these joys.