The Prince's Boy

by Paul Bailey

  In bed, between the starched and lavender-scented sheets, I began to weep. God, in His infinite wisdom, knows why I did, for I had no knowledge myself. I surrendered to the insistent tears. I gave in to a grief it was impossible to comprehend.

  I was awoken by birdsong at dawn. I said my morning prayers and heard myself apologizing to my irreplaceable mother for my brazenness. As I washed and dressed, I vowed that Honoré, whoever he was, was out of my life now. Let him continue his sordid activities without me. Let him be the plaything of rich, elderly lechers. Let him be out of my sight and out of my thoughts. Let him be gone.

  I went to my writing table and stared about me, waiting for inspiration, my pen in my eager hand, until Mlle Simone knocked on the door and startled me out of my reverie.

  ‘There is a letter for you, M. Dinu.’

  It was from my cousin Eduard. He had booked tickets for Les Folies Bergères. The phenomenal Josephine Baker, who was the toast of Paris, was on the bill that very evening. I was to dress smartly and be ready on the dot of eight. He promised to do his cousinly duty and take me to dinner after the show.

  The phenomenal Miss Baker was a Negro, as were all the musicians who accompanied her. She was the star in a piece called The Plantation. She and her troupe were all happy slaves, for I have never seen, before or since, so many pure white smiles on any stage. Josephine rolled her eyes, wriggled her bottom and tap-danced whenever the mood suited her. She wore the tiniest of shorts, displaying long and agile legs. I enjoyed the performance, even as I was mystified by it.

  ‘Why is she considered phenomenal?’ I asked my cousin when we were seated at a banquette in Café Larivière.

  ‘She is such a free spirit,’ he answered. ‘She has made her home here because the enlightened Parisians are indifferent to a person’s colour. You cannot imagine her singing and dancing in Bucharest, can you?’

  No, I couldn’t, I replied.

  ‘What has the young genius been writing?’

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘You, of course. How many pages have you filled?’

  ‘A few. Just a few. Only a few.’

  ‘Cezar is expecting nothing less than a masterpiece, Dinu. You must try not to disappoint him.’

  ‘I shan’t,’ I said, and added ‘I hope.’

  ‘My dear, dear cousin, he is expecting nothing of the kind. He simply wants you to see the world and enjoy life while you can. I recommend the boeuf bourguignon.’

  Towards the end of the meal – after oysters and champagne, and the beef, and an entrancing blood-orange sorbet – I was tempted to tell Eduard about my encounter with the swarthy Honoré. I knew it would be insane to mention him even, but at that moment there was a madness in me that needed to find expression, in however indirect or opaque a form.

  ‘You are your mother’s boy, aren’t you, Dinu?’

  ‘I love my father, too,’ I assured him, without much conviction.

  ‘There is another mother’s boy who is a great writer, I am reliably informed. His name is Marcel Proust.’

  ‘I have been meaning to read him.’

  ‘I think you should. Perhaps it might encourage you to write about Elena. I hear that Proust’s mother was sparing with her affection, unlike the woman who stroked and petted and worshipped her one and only Dinu. She is foremost in your thoughts, as we both know, and I don’t believe you will be a novelist or poet, or whatever it is you want to be, until you have discovered a way of coping with her loss. That is my considered, cousinly advice.’

  This story that is the strangest of my life really began that evening in Café Larivière. My adventure with Honoré was a prelude, an overture, to the drama that would soon take place. I heeded my cousin and went out the following morning and bought the first two volumes of Proust’s labyrinthine novel. Reading of the narrator lying alert in his bed, unable to sleep until his mother blessed him with her soothing presence, I accounted myself fortunate in being the son of Elena. Marcel – I assumed it was Marcel – had no such good fortune. He had to wait for his conciliatory goodnight kiss, whereas I received as many kisses as Mamã felt like bestowing upon me, and sometimes there were many. My grief in 1927 was that of a young man who had known maternal love; his unhappiness, I began to understand, was made more poignant because of the terrifying element of doubt. He had wanted her to demonstrate her abiding affection, not to say devotion, for him, but her demonstrations were brief and inadequate. There were guests to entertain downstairs and it was important that she joined them. A single quick kiss, little more than a peck, would have to be sufficient. It was never, ever enough for him. It would constitute a lasting absence in his life.

  I purchased three more volumes. I read them in my ivory tower, in cafés, in parks. I had discovered a complicated – oh, how complicated – soul mate. I wrote to my father that Proust was the writer, above all other writers, I wished to emulate. He replied on a postcard that he hoped I was well and happy and enjoying the unique pleasures of Paris.

  There was one unique pleasure I wished to enjoy once more, despite my vow not to see or think of him again. The exploratory talents of the man I knew could not be called Honoré were beckoning me back to the house on rue d’Arcade. On two occasions I walked to the corner of the street and found myself incapable of venturing further. I heard the priest chiding me; I fancied I caught my mother sighing; I listened to what I thought might be my conscience warning me of the dangers ahead. The voices caused me to retreat, to retrace my steps to rue des Trois-Frères and the comfort and privacy of my attic and yet more chapters of Marcel Proust.

  ‘Welcome to my Temple of Immodesty,’ said M. Albert. ‘I was certain you would make a return visit. I know that Honoré, my irreplaceable Honoré, will be pleased to see you.’ He flashed his faded teeth in a smile as he added: ‘It is Honoré you want, is it not?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I shall wake him presently. If he has a failing, it is that he sometimes indulges in wine and other alcoholic beverages to excess. He arrived for work this morning in a most dishevelled and unhappy state. I was so perturbed by him that I nearly disposed of his services. I was on the point of slamming the door in his face when I instantly thought of you, my dear young rich Romanian, and the disappointment you would feel if he wasn’t here on the premises to satisfy your every delightful and wayward desire. Your appearance today is, I declare, something akin to a miracle.’

  ‘How long must I wait?’

  ‘Be patient. Try and cool your ardour. Make yourself comfortable on Mme Proust’s chaise longue while I conduct an investigation into Honoré’s physical and mental condition. I shall tell him you have arrived and are anxious – I think ‘‘anxious’’ is the right word – to see him.’

  He had darted out of sight before I could ask him if the chaise longue on which I was seated had really belonged to a Mme Proust. It was covered in a light green material that had seen better days a forbiddingly long time ago. Was ‘Proust’ a fairly common name in France, I wondered.

  ‘He is washing and shaving and preparing himself for his sweet Jean-Pierre, alias Silviu Golescu. You are Silviu Golescu, are you not?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘Who is, or was, Mme Proust, M. Albert?’

  ‘Oh, such innocence. Mme Proust is the mother of the novelist –’

  ‘Marcel?’

  ‘There is no other. Yes, yes. M. Marcel Proust considered it an honour to have gained my friendship. When I opened my first indecent establishment, he presented me with some unwanted items of furniture that had once belonged to his parents – such as the chaise longue on which your cherished bottom is currently resting. It was extraordinarily kind of him. He has been dead five years, but I often imagine that he is here with me, particularly on Wednesday afternoons, when the monstrous Russian Safarov reduces a ludicrously wealthy, and unashamedly common, industrialist to a bleeding, gibbering wreck. Oh, the screams, the excitement. I have dukes, princes,
counts among my clients, but it is only that vulgar man and his need for the brutal Safarov who keeps me in business. It pains me that this should be so, M. Golescu, but it is nevertheless the truth. Allow me to show you what I call the Vatican Library.’

  The Vatican Library, which was housed in an upstairs room above the reception desk, contained volumes of the Almanach de Gotha and Burke’s Peerage and several books on heraldry, and nothing more.

  ‘The aristocracy is my passion, Silviu Golescu,’ he explained. ‘And their foibles, their peccadilloes. For me, they are like manna from Heaven. I seek them out and make them my own.’

  The doorbell rang. M. Albert advised me to stay where I was, among the crowned and titled heads of Europe.

  He reappeared with the news that another, richer, titled gentleman was demanding an hour, at least with – he was embarrassed to inform me – Honoré.

  ‘I shall go then,’ I said. ‘I cannot compete for his favours.’

  ‘No, no, M. Silviu, I insist on your staying. There is no competition, I do assure you. Nothing so coarse. You are Honoré’s preferred one, anyway.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘That is what he confided in me. You are favoured.’

  I parted with a hundred francs, which M. Albert had the courtesy not to count. He poured me a glass of fine sherry, from the estate – he hastened to inform me – of a Spanish marquis who was a devout connoisseur of the pleasures M. Albert’s unholy Temple provided.

  I sat in the Vatican Library and listened to its bald and pudgy librarian as he regaled me with stories of his former beauty. ‘My hair was golden. Nothing as common as blond. Prince Radziwill was not alone in remarking that I looked like an angel with my flowing locks and azure eyes. Alas, I am a fallen angel now, I fear, for ever excluded from the paradise the young and beautiful inhabit. I function on the periphery of paradise, you might say, where I am able to bring Honoré and Jean-Pierre together in happy union, as I trust I shall be doing within the hour.’

  He consulted his pocket watch and clicked his tongue in annoyance.

  ‘Within the hour, yes.’

  Another, louder bell sounded from below.

  ‘Ah, the clarion call of duty. That will be him. He is prepared to see you at last.’

  He was standing in the doorway of his elected cubicle, smoking a Turkish cigarette as before and smiling on me as I stumbled into his presence.

  He greeted me, softly, in Romanian. In an instant, he had ceased to be Honoré. I cast Jean-Pierre aside for ever when I replied to him in the language we shared by birth.

  ‘I have missed you, my pale one.’

  ‘And I you,’ I heard myself admitting. ‘And I you.’

  He pulled me into the tiny room and held me to him, kissing my hair, my ears, my eyes, my nose, my lips in what I understood to be a frenzy of passion.

  ‘My name is Rãzvan.’

  ‘I am Dinu.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly. And you are truly Rãzvan?’

  ‘I am. Believe me.’

  I said I believed him. I was glad we were no longer impostors. I was happy beyond all words to be with him again, to be his Dinu. I said all this as his arms encompassed me.

  It was an afternoon of mutual, tender exploration. I was a navigator, too, with every spot, every blemish on his body subjected to my determined, microscopic investigation. His pimples and warts and blackheads were mine to worship. They were among my treasured possessions now.

  I shared a cigarette with him, the first of many shared cigarettes, afterwards. Oh, that word ‘afterwards’, suggestive as it is of both satisfaction and desolation. ‘Afterwards’ came to mean something final to me, a last parting of the ways, long before Rãzvan and I became estranged. I hated the very idea of ‘afterwards’, wanting our love-making to happen in a perpetual present.

  It is love I am writing about here, in this memoir of a life half-lived. I have mentioned the railway porter and my inexplicable longing for him and his re-emergence as Honoré and then Rãzvan. I have documented as a fact that I was drawn in my youth to men who were hairy and muscular, who represented a manliness denied me by nature. That fact, which alarmed and mystified me in the summer of 1927, causes me wry amusement now, for the brute I met in squalid circumstances on May 26 of that fateful year was none other than a prince’s boy, the adopted child of a man of exquisite refinement, who had shaken the limp hand of Marcel Proust and mingled with artists I could only dream of meeting. Rãzvan, at the age of thirty-eight, had entrancing stories to tell the pale beauty whose heart he was happy to possess. My explorer became my teacher in those habits and ways of the world I was unable to imagine or conjure up at the writing table in my pristine attic.

  ‘I have much to share with you, my sweet,’ he said softly. ‘This will be the last time we meet in M. Albert’s house of sin. From tomorrow, you will be my guest at the apartment the prince purchased for me.’

  ‘Prince? What prince?’

  ‘You will discover who he was soon enough.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me now?’

  ‘Not now. Not here. It is a long story and I need to stay calm to make sense of it. If I ever can, Dinu. If I ever can.’

  I yielded to him again, at his encouraging insistence, and was soon in the timeless space that only lovers inhabit. And then, satisfied, we slept in each other’s arms until M. Albert woke us with the message that someone very distinguished was requiring Honoré’s services.

  ‘I have finished work for today. I am going home. Inform the gentleman that Honoré is tired and unable to cope with his demands, whatever they may be.’

  ‘You are breaking my rules. You are not showing me the respect you should.’

  ‘I shall be leaving with Jean-Pierre as soon as we have washed ourselves.’

  ‘You are acting irresponsibly.’

  ‘I am not a machine, M. Le Cuziat. May I remind you that I am not a machine? Even you cannot make me do what you want me to do by order.’

  The speechless M. Albert glared at the naked Rãzvan, who kissed me and said:

  ‘You may not believe it, you snobbish pimp, but I have fallen in love.’

  We stopped at a bar where the waiters knew Rãzvan. They greeted M. Popescu as an honoured customer.

  ‘This is Dinu, my new friend from Romania. He has come to Paris to write a book. He is a very romantic young man.’

  Rãzvan ordered a large bowl of mussels and some bread to soak up the juices.

  ‘And the Sauvignon de Sainte Brie.’

  He found subtle ways of touching me across the table, convincing the other drinkers and diners that he was like a father to me, if not my father himself. I revelled in the deception. I was even tempted to call him Tatã, whenever his fingers stroked my arm or ruffled my hair.

  ‘What I said to Satan is nothing but truth, Dinicu. I am in love with you. Hopelessly, I think.’

  Dinicu – that old diminutive from a bygone age was the name my mother gave me. I last heard it on her lips as she lay dying on the fifteenth of September 1920.

  (‘Oh, my dearest Dinicu. I have to go away from you, my son. You must trust in the Lord. We shall be together again one day.’)

  ‘I seem to have upset you with Dinicu. Will you be my Dinuleþ instead?’

  ‘That is so childish, Rãzvãnel.’

  ‘This is baby talk, Dinuleþ.’

  ‘But aren’t I your baby, as the Americans say, Rãzvãnel?’

  ‘You are Dinuleþ, you are.’

  Rãzvan walked me home to the house on rue des Trois-Frères which boasted my ivory tower. It was a balmy evening, I remember. Mlle Simone, wine glass in hand, was in the street, talking and laughing with another concierge. She saw her lodger and his companion approaching and ran towards us.

  ‘My dear M. Dinu, you must introduce me to the very handsome friend you have been hiding from us.’

  ‘I haven’t been hiding him. I did not even know he was in Paris until I met him by accident a few days ago. We
lived close to each other in Bucharest,’ I lied convincingly.

  ‘Let us celebrate your reunion then.’

  And that is what we did, in a nearby bistro, with Simone and Françoise, for another hour or so. Rãzvan, drinking more wine than all of us, suddenly became incapable of coherent speech, in either French or Romanian. He muttered that I was his sweetest Dinicu, which I hoped and prayed they didn’t understand.

  ‘Where does he live?’ Mlle Simone asked me.

  ‘On the other side of Paris,’ I answered. ‘Would it be possible–?’ I began the question but was too embarrassed and shy to continue.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Would it be possible for him to pass the night in my room?’

  There was a silence, during which I think I froze with the terror of immediate castigation and rejection.

  ‘Of course it is possible. You will be uncomfortable, I predict, but it is certainly possible. Oh, just look at him – he’s already asleep.’

  Mlle Simone held his left arm, I his right, as we laboured to guide him up the Everest of stairs that led to my attic. I loved her in those precious, awkward moments as surely as I had ever loved my mother.

  ‘I shall leave you to undress him, my dear. I shall bring you coffee – a great deal of coffee for him – and croissants in the morning.’

  I managed to undress him, though he tried to fight me off, thinking perhaps that I was someone else, and hauled him into my bed, and nestled in the arms I dexterously contrived to wrap around me, for the entire blissful night. I couldn’t sleep as I lay beside my snoring and farting and occasionally garrulous Rãzvan, out of sheer wondrous happiness. I kissed all the blemishes that now belonged to me, every blessed one of them.

  ‘What’s that smell, Dinicu?’

  ‘It’s lavender.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In my room, Rãzvan. In my bed, to be precise.’

  ‘How did I get here?’