The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The next day, as I stalked the shoot like some intruder on a closely-knit family, I realised I shouldn’t have come. It wasn’t that the crew weren’t perfectly polite. It was simply as if I didn’t exist. I was as invisible as a servant in a Victorian household and far less useful.

  There was no place for me in this household. Its inward-looking intensity was total, even more pronounced than the theatre troupe’s. Perhaps it was because its members didn’t come home to a different home than the working one every night. Perhaps it had to do with the presence of cameras. I don’t really know. All I know is that they inhabited a world utterly removed from the rest of us.

  When I told Madeleine that night that I would leave the next day, she studied my face in grave silence. ‘Yes, that would be best,’ she murmured. ‘You do understand, don’t you Pierre? This thing,’ she waved her hands, ‘it just takes you over.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Hold me.’ It was a whisper edged by breathlessness, as if she was slightly afraid that she had already flown away in the balloon of her artificial world - even before I had gone.

  I held her and while I held her she told me they would be shooting interiors in Paris next week and perhaps, there, it would be better. If I could hang on. If I could stay. She also told me that her director had broached the possibility of another film. After Cannes. After the festival. She said it all tentatively for my sake, but I could feel her excitement.

  On the drive back to Paris, I did some serious thinking. I told myself that if I really couldn’t live without Madeleine then I would have to learn to accomodate myself to her absences either from a distance or from closer to hand. There was no question in my mind but that this film wouldn’t be her last.

  About that if about little else, I was right.

  In Paris, I worked. I interviewed politicians and diplomats and officials in the Quai d’Orsay. I made contact with journalists at Le Monde and with members of various delegations. I stayed in a flat which belonged to a friend of my editor’s. I think it was the flat which by the end of the week gave me the impression I was already a Parisian. I couldn’t wait for Madeleine to arrive there.

  It was tucked into a tiny alley of a street just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain and as one walked up the curving staircase to the fifth floor, a magical vista opened out from the windows. The building opposite was small, Balzac’s old printing house. I could see beyond it into tree filled courtyards, gaze on roofs, the spire of Saint-Germain and the dome of the Panthéon. Inside, everything was white and freshly painted and simple, two rooms with a mezzanine and a kitchenette tucked away behind louvred doors. But it was the view that counted. A view with two rooms. I pounded away at my typewriter and looked out at the view.

  When Madeleine came, she loved it. She loved me better too. Maybe it was simply that the rooms and the view were mine, if only by referral. She was in my space. I was no longer an intruder.

  ‘Pierre. There you are.’ Giorgio Napolitano waves at me from the bottom of the hill.

  I walk my clumsy snow-shoe walk towards him, a penguin with big net feet.

  ‘I was a little concerned when you didn’t turn up to breakfast.’ He casts me a quizzical look, but he is too courteous to turn it into words.

  ‘I wanted some exercise.’

  ‘And now some breakfast?’

  ‘Coffee will do me.’

  As we near the hotel, he pauses. ‘I had a phone call this morning from a Detective Contini. He wants to see me. About Madeleine’s death. Does the name mean anything to you?’

  I nod.

  ‘I don’t know how he came across me. We… Madeleine and I hardly moved in the same circles.’

  Partly in order to gauge his reaction, I say. ‘Could be through her journals.’

  ‘I see.’ Do I imagine the muscle fluttering in his cheek?

  ‘So nothing is settled yet about the manner of her death.’ He pushes open the door so hard that it hits the wall, ushers me towards the dining room and disappears.

  A moment later he comes back with a jug of coffee. Close behind him is a woman with the darkly dramatic looks of a flamenco dancer. She is all voluptuous curves, from the waves of her hair through the sweep of nose and lips, to the arch and sway of hips beneath a full skirt. She carries a tray brimming with croissants and rolls and jams and fruit and once she has placed it on the table, she candidly examines me for a long moment.

  ‘My wife, Paloma.’ Giorgio says.

  ‘I am pleased to meet you, M. Rousseau, even if it is in a time of great sadness.’

  I sense that Giorgio has told her I was once a husband. What else can he have told her to elicit this frank scrutiny?

  ‘We all loved Madeleine. She had a particular flame. Perhaps it can still warm us a little. But I know from your face, it is not the time for small talk.’ A look I can’t interpret passes between her and Giorgio. ‘You will come back to us, I hope.’ She places a sudden kiss on my cheek and with a wave vanishes into the kitchen.

  I drink my coffee which is strong and hot and for a moment can’t meet Giorgio’s eyes.

  He laughs. ‘You’re thinking that now you know why I left the priesthood. Well you are at least three-quarters right.’

  I have an uncanny certainty that the other quarter is to do with Madeleine.

  The narrow road is made narrower by its banks of snow. Cars, topped with skis, whizz past me heading in the opposite direction. On the hills, the lifts have already creaked into motion dragging or hoisting their eager passengers up to the cold peaks.

  Perhaps that’s where I should be, out on some tricky slope, the wind biting my face and whistling in my ears, the danger of speed, the battle between gravity and skill voiding my mind of thoughts.

  Madeleine skiied far better than I did, but it was not until I saw that first film of hers that the sheer miracle of her grace came home to me. She pooh-poohed this when I mentioned it to her, told me the grace was all in the camerawork, told me I was an innocent to believe in everything I saw. But that was really one argument cloaking another. By that time our arguments had become more frequent. Not that they were necessarily voiced. They were an atmosphere which inhabited us and didn’t let us rest.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. I don’t want to think about that. There were a few more relatively unsullied months before all that began.

  After the shoot in France, Madeleine came back to Montreal to do another play, Racine’s Iphigenia this time. She wanted to try her hand at the classics.

  They were good months. We moved into an apartment on Sherbrooke near the Main. Perhaps, in memory of that week in Paris, we chose to live high up in the air, our own eyrie, buffeted only by wind and sky. A place to be private in away from the turmoil of the streets below, where we lived our adamantly social and often separate lives. We were kind to one another in our eyrie, solicitous, tender.

  Later it occurred to me that Madeleine was making up for something, either in the past or perhaps in the future. But that was later.

  It was in those months that I grew close to certain key figures in the Parti Québecois. My articles had begun to cause a stir. I was invited onto platforms. I spent time in the provincial and federal capitals. I took part in media debates. One night, after she happened to see me in one of these, Madeleine looked at me with shining eyes and told me she was very proud of me.

  I think I managed to say the same to her after the premiere of her film at the Cannes Film Festival. I am no longer sure.

  In May, we flew to Cannes together. Though I wanted to, I wasn’t sure I should go. But Madeleine insisted. We were put up in the turn of the century splendour of the Carleton. Through our window we could hear the beating of the waves on the shore and gaze out at that wondrous sea. But it’s magic wasn’t that of the previous summer. It was simply a scenic backdrop to the mad whirl of activity we were caught up in. I say we, but I mean Madeleine. There were parties and cocktails and breakfast and lunch meetings, on yachts, in grand hotels and tiny resta
urants on the steep streets of the old town. There were countless interviews and countless flashing cameras. Madeleine was a star in the making and by the end of the week she had been made.

  I still distinctly remember that moment when flanked by her director and male lead she slowly emerged from a white convertible and climbed the stairs of the old festival building.

  There was electricity in the air. The crowd, amongst which I hovered, pushed against the police who had cleared a path for the celebrities. Television cameras rolled, bulbs flashed, and in the midst of it all, Madeleine played the star. She did it well. She did it naturally, as if she had been born to it - the extra swing to her hips, the glowing skin, the erect carriage in that long gown which shimmered like moonlight on water when the bulbs flashed. The enigmatic smile, the lowered lashes which raised themselves to reveal shining eyes whose gaze only ever rested directly on individuals, somehow making them feel larger, singled out.

  I watched every inch of her progress and sensed the magnetic force of her glamour. I didn’t envy her the limelight. I was excited for her, happy. The problem between Madeleine and me was never one of competition, though the fact that we both led frenetic working lives could cause logistical difficulties, as eventually did her fame. No, the problem was elsewhere, less tangible.

  I began to sense it the moment she appeared on the screen. Maybe it had something to do with the sheer size of her, the extra huskiness in her voice, the hint of tragedy in the curve of her lips.

  Each gesture, each tantalizing movement of the eye, took on mythic proportions. Yet at the same time, each was intensely intimate. The touch of her hand on another’s shoulder, the shimmy of stockings as she pulled them up her legs, the reflective glance in the mirror, the flurry of her hands as she worried over something - I recognized each of these movements and yet didn’t recognize them. They were strange, removed. I had seen them, yet never altogether registered them, not in this way. They were mine, they were meant for me as myself and as a spectator, yet they no longer had anything to do with me. They were public.

  It was as if our intimacy had been plundered, stolen away, transformed into an act which floated uneasily between the brazenly public and the deeply private. To add to my visceral confusion, there was Madeleine herself, sitting beside me in the dark, nervously gripping my hand, wanting the comfort of mine.

  Maybe I only began to feel all this when that first screen kiss came, that slight raising of her head, those half-closed eyes. I could sense the pleasure on both sides. I was bewildered, beside myself. I was watching my wife perform intimate acts with another man.

  And the images haunted me, well after the uproar of applause, the speeches and flowers and more applause, the party which lasted the length of the night. The images hovered and endured, appeared to me when I least wanted them, took me over, so that even when the living and breathing Madeleine was beside me, they would intrude, public, intimate, unwanted, inescapable.

  I didn’t know or think all this at the time. I only knew that I had never felt like this when I watched Madeleine on the stage. Had never sensed either this disturbance nor this odd and occasionally rapturous dislocation. For she was very good. She was that young guiless woman she played. For long stretches of time I forgot and yet knew she was Madeleine.

  I didn’t confess any of this to her. What was there that could be said? I had no words for anything except the congratulations that were her due and these I made with what I hope wasn’t a false enthusiasm. After that, I moved into the sidelines where I belonged.

  It was already dawn when we returned to our hotel room. We looked out at the glimmering expanse of sea, the stretch of pale sand, the rows of umbrellas, still neatly folded and we kissed.

  Those other kisses floated into my mind and I held Madeleine more tightly to whisk them away. When we stretched out on the vastness of the bed, I asked her, ‘What was it like kissing Luc?’ I stumbled over the name of her lead.

  She gave me a curious glance, then laughed lightly. ‘Have you ever tried kissing with a camera hovering at your right nostril?’

  I chuckled, hiding my unease. But I couldn’t let it go.

  ‘And lying beside him? Touching his skin? Having him touch yours?’

  I touch Madeleine and she moves away.

  ‘Pierre, if you’re asking me whether I was aroused, the short answer is no.’ She laughs again, more nervously this time. ‘When you’re asked to repeat a gesture for the fifth take, arousal is not what you feel.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the lights are beating down on you and you’re worrying about your forehead growing shiny with perspiration. Or about your next line which has vanished into the ether. Or your leg has suddenly seized up because of the odd angle you’ve had to force it into. And then the make-up woman suddenly appears to powder your cheek or your shoulder or some technician drops a coil and you have to start all over again… It’s not sex, Pierre. It’s cinema.’

  ‘It looks like sex.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  She turns away from me, gives me her back.

  ‘You believe what you want, Pierre.’

  ‘I want to believe you.’

  I do. I really do. But somehow I can’t control those images. They intrude themselves, place themselves between Madeleine and me at the most delicate moments. I touch her and I see another man touching her. I kiss her and feel her responding to someone else. Sometimes it stimulates me to passion. At other times it turns me cold. It always troubles me.

  I know that men sometimes fantasize about other women when they make love to their wives. But my fantasies are of my wife as another. Of myself as other too. I do not know what to do with these ghosts. I do not allow myself to talk about them to Madeleine. It is too demeaning. Instead, I struggle to put them out of my mind.

  At first I am almost successful, but as the toll of Madeleine’s films mounts, so does my predicament. Her face and body leap out at me seductively from hoardings in the streets and in the metro. They leap out at every one else too. Her latest film has scenes of such graphic and felt passion that I cannot believe her earlier humorous descriptions of the jokes and pitfalls of filmed sex.

  We are living more or less consistently in Paris by then. It is 1977. Madeleine has chosen a large courtyard apartment in the Marais and from the outside our lives seem more than enviable. Mine too. I am a correspondent with a wide brief - European trouble spots, France, French-speaking Africa. I have a desk at France-Presse who also use my services. I have learned to live with the jokes about my accent and I spend some of my time lobbying the Quai d’Orsay on Québec’s behalf. We are on the select guest list for the historic reception at the Palais Bourbon for the new Québec Premier, René Lévesque, a man of integrity and one I have long respected and championed.

  Madeleine and I are successful, busy, affluent, privileged.

  I repeat this litany to myself as I steal away from work early one afternoon to watch Madeleine’s latest film quietly on my own in a small cinema near the Odéon. The notion has taken hold of me that I can verify the reality of the flow of filmed sex by counting the number of cuts in any given scene. The less cuts the more reality.

  The cinema is all but empty for this first of the day’s screenings. I find a seat towards the far end of a row in the middle of the hall and wait impatiently for the run of trailers and publicity to stop. As the film starts, I try to keep myself vigilant. But the story sucks me in.

  It is the end of the first year of the German occupation of Paris. Madeleine plays a shop assistant, a rather severe, cooly self-sufficient woman whose life centres around the repetitive routine of work and the care of her invalid father. A Nazi officer falls in love with her. Madeleine resists, resists ferociously for the added reason that her father is Jewish. Yet the play of attraction between them is evident. One day, because of her fear of his greater power, because of their mutual desire too, Madeleine allows herself to be spirited away into the countryside.

  I w
atch the sequence which begins with the officer pulling a grip from her hair with taut fascination. The rich golden strands break free. Madeleine’s face is transformed. Like a daffodil just opened to the sun, her head sways languidly. The camera lovingly, slowly travels up the distance of her arched neck. As the officer bends to kiss her, I lose track of the camera. I lose count of the cuts as well. I cannot see any. The painfully charged sensual play of skin and limbs and clasped, rolling bodies goes on in unendurably real time.

  From along the row beside me, there is an audible release of breath, a low aching moan. In the flickering light I see a lone dark-suited man. His legs are splayed out in front of him. For a moment I think he has been taken ill and then I notice his hand in his pocket, the rhythmic jiggle of his trousers.

  Rage takes me over. My fists clench. I want to beat him to a pulp.

  ‘Cochon,’ I hiss. ‘Sal cochon.’

  He turns white startled eyes at me as I stumble towards him. ‘Dirty pig,’ I repeat.

  A pleading hand reaches out to fend off my assault. The man whispers a ‘shhh’. Suddenly, he looks so ordinarily respectable, that I restrain my hands, rush past him instead into the blinding brightness of mid-afternoon.

  I walk. I try to still myself. I tell myself that I cannot really blame that man for the terrible impact of the visual. I ask myself for the hundredth time what Madeleine felt for her lead man. For feel something I am now certain she did. As certain as I am of the effect her sexuality had on the man sitting next to me. Or am I?

  For the first time, I acknowledge that I am jealous. Painfully, hopelessly jealous. It is an invidious emotion and a humiliating one. I feel sullied, ashamed. I cannot think straight. I am of the generation which doesn’t believe in jealousy. Women are not property - possessions to be kept and conrolled. They are free. I have always loved Madeleine for her spirited freedom.

  My jealousy feels doubly insidious. I am not even certain that there is a basis for it in the real. It is a phantom jealousy, jealousy directed at an illusion made up of the play of shadows and light. I am a reasonable man, I tell myself. And I talk to myself reasonably. There is no need to feel any of this.