By moonlight too I remember the mustaches of the old French gentlemen who use to talk to me and bum cigarettes. I’d lift them up on the wall beside me. In their quavering voices they’d speak of Pétain and De Gaulle and Paris before 1940. They hated the Germans as a father hates the man who has ravished his daughter. Shaking palsied hands in the moonlight, they’d vow that France would rise again. Only my country wasn’t helping her enough.
—What in God’s name do you want, monsewer? We have our own war to win, you know.
—Frogs, frogs, frogs. First and last and always frogs. They kicked us in the pants in 1919 and they’ll do it again. Mark my words. That goddam little teakettle still thinks she’s in the eighteenth century. You may talk of the perfection of their culture and the polish of their language. But you must consider too their penury and their bigotry for anything that isn’t France. And her squat little men with the braided caps were caught snoring in 1940. France had graft and filth within her . . . and that disease has sapped all the frogs.
I remember how some nights I’d walk up from the sea wall through a little park into the Place de l’Opéra. I’d climb a flight of stairs into that intimate theater. I heard Tosca and the Barber of Seville in French. There was also the Desert Song with asides in English to please the Americans. I heard opera in a warm frenzy because I could drink white wine between the acts. The orchestra was thirty. The singers looked better than they sang. In the intermissions the white wine tempted me to slide down the Lon Chaney staircase and mistily eye the people there: chic women of Alger fanning themselves in the heat, French naval officers, British holding receptions in bad French. I soon discovered that the Opéra of Alger was a great meeting place, classier than the parks or the sea wall. For to the opera came coiffured ladies whose husbands had died in France or in Tunisia.
—Jeez, what a dainty little auditorium! Like Liederkranz Hall.
—What the hell is all this movement that goes in theaters? I came to see the show even if they didn’t. Why don’t they have some consideration for others? I didn’t come to be stared at.
—And those ushers that make ya stand in line till they get around to showin ya to ya seat. They just want my tip.
—Of course, of course, butch. You’re beginning to see into the parasitical life of Europe.
—And while we’re on the subject, it burns me to haveta shell out five francs to some old doll every time I take a notion to relieve myself in the little boys’ room. What’s she there for, ta see that I don’t spill it all over myself?
Or I remember how some nights I used to climb the interminable stairs to the Salle Pierre Bordes for concerts. There the Orchestre Symphonique gave a concert of modern English music. All the French walked out when they heard Vaughn Williams and Arnold Bax and Delius. And there too Lélia Gousseau used to play the piano. I’d sit and watch the somber trance in which she floated onto the stage of the Salle Pierre Bordes. She played Ravel with a rush of silver. Lélia Gousseau never seemed to me to be fully awake. But she was something miraculous and noble. She leaned over the keyboard and stopped breathing while she played.
—Ya see how that babe plays the pianer? Ya know what she needs, don’t ya?
—Ah, can it. Every time I try to get kultchah, ya open ya trap and talk like ya was at a stag party.
At one of her concerts a Negro corporal started a ballet on the stage behind her. She simply lifted her hands off the keys and laughed without a sound till the drunk had been removed by two French janitors. Then I was sure that Lélia Gousseau was a great artist.
I remember that in Algiers, because I had too much time to think and because the Mediterranean lay in front of me like a soft yet cynical mirror of time, I began to ponder on variety and difference. I lost something, because I became other people by thinking about them. For better or for worse I think I annihilated myself at this time.
—Just wait, said the pfc with the horn-rimmed glasses, everything we know is going to be swept under.
—But sex is here to stay, the mess sergeant said, chewing on a toothpick.
—I didn’t say it wasn’t, the pfc said. But so many things are coming into your life that you can’t imagine. Imagine a world in which there’s a flatter plane of possible experience, in which the levels of poetry and prose come closer together than they ever have before. There’s too much difference between the people of the world, yet surprisingly little variety . . . What sort of world do you want, anyway? A world in which no one speaks to anyone else, like the people in a New York apartment?
—If ya’d take off ya glasses, the mess sergeant said, and look at the world insteada books . . .
—Well, that’s my tragedy, the pfc said. I’m steeped in the past. I’m not yet convinced that the break with the past is going to be complete. . . . I hope not, anyhow.
I remember the tiny dark Ayrab kids with brilliant eyes who shined shoes in front of the Red Cross. What was the difference between them and me, except that they were Ayrabs? They were so much smarter than I, but they hadn’t been born in Detroit. They had the same mouths as I; they loved American chewing gum. But they lived in a world where people didn’t even pretend to have ideals. Consequently they lived in a world realer than my own. And I wondered who was equal to the world in 1944, who was capable of seeing and understanding everything. Why wasn’t I a prostitute? or a French child begging? or a Foreign Legionnaire with scars instead of milky skin? Why was I alive at all? How had I possibly managed to live?
—You won’t go mad, the pfc said laughing. You’re attempting to be great in the old patterns. You have the disease of empathy. You try to enter into the minds of others. Perhaps you do.
—When I see an Ayrab child watching the chocolate bar in my hand, something tears at me.
—It should. You’re arriving at the focus of the modern world. People are killing one another right and left. The newspapers don’t say why. It’s very simple. There’s an unfair distribution of the world’s goods. . . . We’re heading either for world socialism or complete destruction.
—You mean I’m not crazy when I feel like crying all the time?
—You’re hopelessly sane. Most people have to go to the movies to bawl. A few do it over the life they see around them. . . . The only advancement made by the human race is because some guy discovered pity. He found out that everyone was really quite like himself, with unimportant differences. We all must die alone. And we start dying with our birth. And a thousand years from now we’ll all look equally silly: the movie star, the Ayrab whore, the financier, and the hustler. . . . If only we could publicly acknowledge our silliness for the few years that we are alive, we could then pool whatever dignity we possess. Then life would be worth living for all, instead of for the few.
I remember that in Alger, through too much thinking, I did something I never used to do in the States. I’d leave the boys and go into the city by myself. Perhaps it was because I was getting to know them too well. When you live only with men, something in you revolts after a while. Men by themselves are sterile; they tend to become brutal and onetrack. Night after night the same jokes keep popping up, the same crap games, the same vocabulary, the same weary comedy. So everyone in a group of men grows to hate the others with affection, as people do after a long marriage in which they’ve had no children to distract them from themselves.
To this day I don’t know what I was looking for in the dark streets of Algiers. But I was alone; I heard my blood softly boiling. My brain was going like a stove. I started again to justify my own life. Why had I been born? Was there some scheme from which I wasn’t distracting, some harmony that I was smashing? In those evenings whatever God I believed in receded from me like a comet. I found myself walking in a world in which I was an alien. I’d just come out of the womb, but there was no mother to take me by the hand.
Often around midnight in a glacial fever of horror and loneliness I thought I hated everyone in the world, which had thrust me into exile. And all the cordialities t
hat men pay to one another seemed to me only a polite uproar to drown the rattle of death. All men, I came near deciding, were secretly enemies. I’d wonder what would happen to three men who found themselves alone at the end of the world. Would they kill one another? Was society therefore simply a charade to ease the torture of life? Were we all more divided than we were united? At such times I’d lay my head on the concrete wall along the Mediterranean. I wanted to cry, but nothing came except some dry hiccoughs. You’re a monster and a misanthrope, I’d tell myself. . . .
I remember that one night in June, 1944, I was walking in the garden leading from the Place de l’Opéra to the port of Alger. It was near midnight. The lights flickered yellowly through the trees. Sometimes an Ayrab working at the port would stumble past and cadge a cigarette. Little old men muttering to themselves made their way home. I thought of my tent at Maison Blanche. I wasn’t sorry for myself, but I felt passionately displaced, a body already buried alive. I chattered in my bones with a paroxysm of anguish. I put my hands tightly against the suntans on my back and called out to the leaves and the moon and the sky:
—O my God, my God! . . .
I was still sane enough to laugh after my outcry because something in a safe corner of my brain said I was acting like a Shakespearean ham. But all the same I was alone, and for the moment out of my mind. I heard a noise behind me and turned to look, with my cry still dribbling on my lips.
Behind me was a Frenchman of Algiers, not a man, not a boy. Under the twittering uncertain French bulbs his face was like a hawk’s in repose. He was wearing shorts and a torn faded blue shirt that was open in the June heat. Under his arm he had a sheaf of typewritten papers.
—Qu’est-ce que tu as, Yank? Nous autres Français, nous connaissons bien la mélancholie.
I felt compelled, like a little child, to give him my arm. He took it naturally.
—Je suis écrivain, he said, flourishing his manuscripts with a smile bitter and consoling.
And I knew he’d been farther down than I’d ever yet known. He talked of Rimbaud and Verlaine and Debussy. His voice was all around me in a stream of cool elegance. He told me he’d been born in Rio, but had sought out Paris:
—Parce que c’est là, tu vois, ma patrie spirituelle. . . .
His room smelled of the linen on his cot and a dish of fruit on his night table and the leather of his books. These were his only riches. He poured me a glass of sweet yellow wine. I sat in his one chair while he read me verses out his few books. He made shooting gestures of delight with his hands, often looking at me to see whether I was following him. Evidently he desired to know how good an audience I was. Sometimes he reached over and took a cigarette out of my breast pocket. He knew some magic of disenchantment and exorcism. He told me that I was still young, and that all was vanity. But not yet. He said that men had wept before I was ever born. . . .
SIXTH PORTRAIT
The Leaf
SOMETHING KEPT TELLING HIM THAT THE WAR OF 1918 HADN’T been the last. He’d enough of the Virginia gentleman in him to know that men always have fought and always will fight over women or more abstract ideals. And he’d a degree from a southern university which had inculcated on him a certain esprit de corps. He decided to get himself a reserve commission. So he wrote to the adjutant general in Washington, went to camp each summer, and before he knew it he was a second lieutenant. He wore his uniform on state occasions: at the Rotary Club, at the Elks’, at the Masons’. At their luncheons they called him captain or colonel with a certain manly affection. They spoke of him as a young man with an eye to the future of his country and of himself.
He spent his time in his laboratory at Roanoke. He was a petroleum engineer. By nature he was a dreamer. He thought of himself as a catalyst of the aristocracy of the Old South who’d somehow made the conversion to the world of 1930. He never spoke of the Civil War because he liked to assert huffily that he lived very much in the present. And he’d married a dreamer too. She was a belle of Roanoke, belonged to the DAR and the Methodist Church. She wrote poetry with the rapt efficiency in which most women cook. And when no editor took her verses, which fluttered and sighed like herself, she published them herself. Though she had no children, each year she Brought Out a slim lavender or ocher or mauve book containing her thoughts on love, flowers, and life. She said that she loved life with a fierceness known only to the elect. She’d married him because great loves, unlike butterflies, can be pinned down.
Yet they saw little of each other in their Roanoke apartment. She wrote her poems and read them at women’s clubs, where she was applauded by wrenlike elderly ladies who then drank iced tea and champed on shortcake. He in his laboratory brooded on the possibilities of gasoline. Sometimes he forgot to take any food for a whole day, and she was too preoccupied with what she called her muse to bring him anything.
—Ours is the ideal love, she’d say with a towel round her head in the steaming Virginia summers. Few men or women have had a relationship as spiritual as ours.
Or sometimes when a visiting business associate was about to slide under the table from bourbon, he’d read him excerpts from his wife’s poetry.
—Has she any children? the business associate would say.
In 1941 his hour struck. He was already a captain in the reserve of the Army of the United States. This, he told himself, was no small potatoes. With the passage of selective service he found himself ordered to active duty to a new infantry camp in South Carolina. So he had all his uniforms dry-cleaned. And he polished his jewels, as he called his brass, with a blitzcloth. On his final night at home they gave the nigress the evening off and went out to dinner. It was the first time they’d appeared together in public in five years. They’d had few friends. Lucinda’d been busy with her poetry. And he—well, a petroleum engineer is like a priest.
Lucinda sat across from him over her lobster salad and iced coffee. Her eyes were crinkling, for she had a splitting headache. Bravely she rolled her gentian eyes in torment:
—I should have stood in bed tonight. I’m doing it for you, lovey. Who knows how often we’ll see each other during this frightful emergency? . . . As I wrote today in blank verse, Europe has again invaded us. . . . We Americans try to lead decent lives on our own continent, and those Europeans always manage to suck us in. I see now why our ancestors left Europe. She’s rotten through and through. . . . Perhaps it would be better if she were destroyed utterly.
—Or perhaps we should send the goddam nigras there, he said laughing.
Since tomorrow he was going on active duty, he was now permitting himself a modicum of profanity. After all, he was going to have to emerge from the cloister of his laboratory and deal with men from every state in the Union. He looked down at the crossed rifles on his dinner jacket, seeing himself shouting at his company. Yes, he’d have a company, his very own. He thought long about that company. He’d already planned the precision of his whole organization. He saw an order emanating from himself and passing down Through Channels and being put into effect with clarity of detail and economy of effort.
He was silent over the strawberry shortcake. He and Lucinda never spoke much except about her poetry. That was the excellence of their marriage, that neither needed to say much. Since they both had the temperaments of dreamers, the essential thing was that they shouldn’t get in each other’s hair, or dreams. Now a sheet of silence hung between them like plate glass. He broke it.
—If you like, I could take an apartment for you near camp. It’s not fair that you should hang around Roanoke like a goddam grass widow.
Lucinda held up her little cramped hand on which the solitaire glittered like a hag’s eye:
—Lovey, don’t. You’ll make my migraine worse. It’s caused by your leaving me. Please don’t make me suffer any more than I’m doing, lovey. . . . I’d go mad in the red sand of South Carolina. I need green grass and the fluting of the birds of Virginia. . . . Besides there’s my “Ode on Thomas Jefferson.” Outside this state, I’d
lose all feeling for the mood. . . . I’m an honest artist, lovey. I write only what I see and what I feel, not what the public wants. That’s why my books are so sad and solitary. . . . And in South Carolina I couldn’t recapture what I feel right now in Virginia. . . . Perhaps around Christmas I might be down. But right now there’s something in me that says No. . . . Lovey, don’t urge me. You know what my soul is like . . . a bird at dusk. . . .
So he put out his hand and stroked her wrist. He’d never been much of a caresser; possibly his mind was a trifle chilly. He remembered how in college the boys would run after spirits and nigresses, while he’d sit in his room and read. Lucinda withdrew her hand and poked at the swilled whipped cream on her plate.
—Oh lovey, she said, I thank you for our love. There’s something perfect between us. Because it’s not . . . passionate . . . it can never burn itself out.
—Lucinda, he said, your name is you. . . .
It was the wildest transport of fantasy he’d ever permitted himself. And after a while she said she was cold and her headache worse. He got her wraps. At the house before going to her room she kissed him on the corner of his mouth.
—You’ll be gone when I get up in the morning, she said. And I wonder if you know how sometimes I wish I could be the sort of wifey who could get up and cook your breakfast and do all those little things that wifeys do. . . . But I can’t, lovey. When a woman sets out to write poetry, she sacrifices most of herself . . . for a higher good. Sappho knew it. So did Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
—Goddam it, hush, he said gallantly. I’d rather you gave me a ticket to immortality than slave over a hot stove. Any wife can do that.
—I swore, she said, making a gesture of weary renunciation in the dim hallway among the antiques, that I’d never marry. But you dissuaded me, lovey. And I’ve never regretted it. For I’ve had you and my art too. . . .
The Gallery Page 22