The Prince's Boy

by Paul Bailey

‘Heaven knows.’

  ‘That’s no answer.’

  ‘You were very drunk and very tired. You walked with me to Montmartre from M. Albert’s Temple of Immodesty. We stopped for moules marinières on the way. You told me many times that you love me. You met Mlle Simone and Mlle Françoise and drank glass after glass after glass of your favourite claret. Mlle Simone and your beloved – I hope, I hope – Dinicu or Dinuleþ dragged you upstairs. And here you are, beside me. Is that a satisfactory answer?’

  ‘It will do.’

  ‘It’s the gospel truth, Rãzvan.’

  ‘I need to piss, sweet one. I have a tremendous need to piss.’

  I showed him where the nearest tiny room was, on the landing one floor down from my ivory tower.

  He returned to my arms. We savoured each other’s garlicky breath. There were parts of our bodies we hadn’t previously explored, but we did so now. We were quiet in our endeavours, out of respect for Simone, who was waiting below with coffee and croissants, we hoped.

  We talked about our mothers to begin with. His was called Angela, as befitted her angelic nature. Rãzvan was the youngest of her four children, born a month and a day after his father’s death.

  ‘My brothers and sister were old enough to work on the estate. That is how our family survived.’

  ‘Which estate? Where?’

  ‘You are very curious. You want to know everything, don’t you?’

  ‘Everything, yes. And more.’

  ‘It’s in a place you will not have heard of. It’s in a remote part of our great country.’

  From the age of six, or was it seven, he too was toiling in the fields, digging up potatoes and turnips and picking apples and plums off the trees. He went to school twice a week, learning his alphabet and his numbers, and listened to the stories about fairies and goblins and evil spirits his mother, Bogdan, Mircea and Irina recounted to him. Angela was the best of all storytellers, frightening him in the sweetest and gentlest ways by reminding him that everything she said was make-believe as she tucked him into his bunk with a goodnight kiss. She always made the sign of the cross, to ensure that the Holy Ghost would take care of the Rãzvan who was not to know a father’s love.

  ‘I want to hear about Elena.’

  To my astonishment, I was tongue-tied. I might have been with my cousin Eduard, not the man with whom I was infatuated. I struggled to find the words that would convey the depth of my feeling for her. All I could say, at the start, was:

  ‘She was beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, Dinu, all mothers are beautiful, even when they have the faces of cows or pigs. You are a clever boy, my dear one, who reads Marcel Proust. If I tell you that Angela has lost every tooth in her head but is still glowingly beautiful in my eyes, you will have a picture of her. Describe Elena to me, you wretchedly inadequate writer.’

  I had revealed to him that I was waiting for inspiration. The moth or butterfly had yet to break free from the caterpillar and spread his wings wheresoever he wanted.

  ‘Now tell me, dearest caterpillar, what kind of woman Elena was.’

  ‘Is. She is still in my thoughts.’

  ‘I should hope so. I am anxious to learn more.’

  ‘She lived,’ I said, to my surprise, ‘in the shadow of my father. He is a forceful, clever, opinionated man. His name is Cezar and he could easily have been a Roman emperor. My mother never contradicted him, never doubted his word. Once, when he wasn’t there with us, she begged me to try to forgive him.’

  ‘Forgive him, Dinuleþ? For what?’

  ‘I did not understand then and I am not entirely certain that I understand today. I assured her that I would forgive Tatã because he was my Tatã.’

  ‘Was he cruel to her?’

  ‘He wasn’t warm or loving to her, as you are to me.’

  ‘Has he been cruel to you?’

  ‘No, no. I am here in Paris, thanks to him. It’s due to his generosity that I have met you. The two hundred francs I paid M. Albert were his. I think I can say that Cezar Grigorescu has been excessively kind to his one and only son.’

  Rãzvan’s apartment on rue de Dunkerque, in which he had lived for thirteen years, was sparsely furnished. There were framed photographs on the tables on either side of his bed and icons of St Nicholas and the Virgin on the walls. These added colour and mystery to the otherwise drab room we transformed, from June until September, into our universe.

  ‘Who is that man with the moustache?’

  ‘He is no ordinary man. He is my prince. He’s handsome, wouldn’t you say?’

  I think I shrugged.

  ‘Is my Dinuleþ jealous?’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘Because you love your Rãzvãnel passionately, blindly, and blind and passionate lovers are invariably jealous.’

  ‘He doesn’t look happy to me.’

  ‘Happy? My prince? He had little cause to be happy. It’s true he was rich and had privileges and was free to travel anywhere in the world he wished, but his smiles were so rare they surprised you.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘I honoured him, Dinu. I shall always honour him. If you are asking me if we slept together the way I sleep with you, the answer is no. I was a simple boy when he adopted me and a clever boy when he died. I owe my cleverness to him.’

  ‘What kind of cleverness?’

  ‘My elegant French. My knowledge of church architecture. My appreciation of beauty in the form of Domnule Dinu Grigorescu – these are the hallmarks of the cleverest of men.’

  ‘You sound convincing.’

  ‘We are no longer in business, you and I, as it happens.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You do not have to pay me – and by ‘‘me’’ I am referring to Albert Le Cuziat – for my services. They are services no longer. My love for you cannot, and should not, be bought and sold.’

  ‘I am flattered,’ I said. I wanted to say more – I wanted to say much, much more – but found it impossible to speak.

  ‘I am looking at you and reading you like the book you haven’t written yet and perhaps will never write. You are wondering why a cultivated man has been working in a professional capacity for the devilish M. Albert, yes?’

  ‘I could be.’

  ‘I know you are, and I adore you for being curious. I have some questions for you, too. Between now and September, we shall enjoy many illuminating conversations. At this very moment, I am feeling lonely and abandoned lying here. Please join me.’

  I joined him.

  One morning, days later, I woke up in my lavender-scented bower and knew despair of the blankest, bleakest kind. I write ‘knew’ because I seemed to be beyond feeling. I was in possession of a knowledge I could not begin to fathom. It was there, inhabiting my body. It was telling me that I would never weep again, however much I felt the desire to. I had entered, overnight, an unfeeling universe.

  I had been taught that Hell was a place for the restless, that their dissatisfactions would continue into eternity. I wasn’t restless now; I was numb. I was no one. I had a name, Dinu Grigorescu, but it was without meaning or significance. I could as well have been called a stone or a cabbage.

  I could as well have been dead.

  ‘Cezar instructed me to thank you for your letters,’ Eduard said the next time we met. ‘He is a very busy man, Dinu. He is dealing with a case that occupies every one of his working hours and some of those when he should be sleeping. He was on the telephone for five minutes at most. I told him you are in good health and content with your bohemian life. I was right to do so, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Absolutely right.’

  I said nothing of Rãzvan, of the pleasure he afforded me, for I was Dinu Grigorescu again, the prince’s prince’s boy, and no longer a stone or cabbage. I had passed the night in my beloved’s bed, from which I had risen reluctantly as the bells of a nearby church struck noon.

  ‘Have you made any friends, Dinu? Or acquaintances?’

  This
was the occasion to be inventive. I could see that he was genuinely curious and was suddenly desirous to satisfy his curiosity.

  ‘Many, Cousin Eduard. Many friends and acquaintances.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  ‘We could be here a long time if I described each and every one. This poulet à l’estragon is delicious.’

  ‘So it should be, at the price they are demanding. I am listening, Dinu.’

  He listened, seemingly enthralled, as I ran through the names of totally imagined bohemian friends. They were aspiring painters, musicians and poets, but there were others who had no artistic ambitions at all. I spoke of Michel and Yves and Celeste, of Raymond and Jacques, and – this was daring of me, for it tested my cousin’s knowledge of Proust’s novel – a certain M. Vinteuil, a composer of densely subtle chamber works, to whom I had been introduced by a man from Brittany, who knew everyone in Paris it was worth knowing.

  I paused for breath, amazed at my daring. Vinteuil? Albert? I waited to be exposed as the charlatan I was.

  ‘For such a shy and reticent young man, you seem to have developed a remarkable capacity for friendship. You have truly blossomed in Paris, Dinu. I congratulate you.’

  The fraudster in me refused to be contained.

  ‘I have met someone who once shook hands with Marcel Proust,’ I said, stating a truth at last. ‘He tells me Proust’s handshake was very limp.’

  ‘Who is this privileged person?’

  Why, it was Rãzvan, my solicitous cousin Eduard, I did not say. It was Rãzvan, whose spell I am under, whose arms I have deserted to be with you.

  ‘A man I met at the Opéra, at a performance of La sonnambula. It was one of those chance encounters.’

  ‘Ah, yes. What would our lives be without them? Did this gentleman give you his card? Will you be seeing him again?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘That is a pity. I should have enjoyed meeting him.’

  ‘Perhaps our paths will cross one day. Paris isn’t so very large a city.’

  ‘You have more colour in your cheeks, Dinu. You no longer resemble a ghost. Your healthy complexion must be due to the food and wine you eat and drink with such evident relish.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘I have a strong appetite for the finer things in life these days.’

  The finest of them being Rãzvan, whose name I wanted to pronounce in the unmistakeable voice of love. My appetite for Rãzvan is the strongest of my appetites, I acknowledged in silence.

  ‘Cognac, I think.’

  If there is a single phrase guaranteed to bring my once dear, justifiably dead cousin Eduard back before me it is ‘Cognac, I think.’

  Beneath the icons of St Nicholas and the Virgin Mary, my true, and lasting, education began.

  ‘You must promise not to interrupt me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You will be the first and last person to hear my story as I wish to tell it.’

  I nodded, for fear already of interrupting him.

  ‘Which means, my dear one, that you will have to be patient with me.’

  He was staring at the carpet, I remember now, with his head in his hands, waiting – I supposed – for something akin to inspiration to strike him. I waited, too, with the patience he demanded of his worshipper.

  ‘It seems so long ago. I was eleven, Dinu, when the prince first noticed me. It was a summer’s day, as it is now, and I was weeping, to my shame, because my mother had slapped me for disobeying her. The prince saw me and stepped down from his landau. He asked me, in his refined Romanian, why I was unhappy. I had no words for him. How could a peasant, a serf, have words fit for a prince? I know I wiped my tears away, but I remember little else except for my embarrassment.’

  He smiled at me and fell silent. His recording angel, for such I already considered myself, waited for him to continue.

  ‘The prince advised me to be cheerful and said that he desired to know my name. I answered that I was Rãzvan Popescu, the son of Angela and Ilie Popescu, and brother of Bogdan, Mircea and Irina. They were alive, and my mother was also, but my father was dead. I had never seen him, because he had died before I was born.’

  It was towards the end of the summer, at harvest time, that the prince appeared in the doorway of the modest shack the Popescus called home. Rãzvan’s mother curtseyed on seeing him, but he told her such a courtesy was misplaced as he pressed her hand in his. He wished to speak to her in private in his house on the estate. He had an urgent matter to discuss with her before returning to Paris in September.

  What could this ‘urgent matter’ be? It was very mysterious, a man of his noble birth wishing to meet with one of his peasants in the privacy of his grand mansion.

  ‘The prince’s valet served my mother tea, much to her mortification. The mystery began to be solved when the prince observed that her youngest child, the boy who had entered the world without a father, had impressed him with his polite and gentle way of speaking.’

  He paused, catching – again I supposed – my disbelieving look.

  ‘Yes, Dinicu, the words are mine and far beyond the limited extent of my mother’s vocabulary. The sophisticated Rãzvan is trying his best to convey her confused feelings as the prince made his unexpected proposal to her in August 1901. His proposal was as simple as it was preposterous. He wished to adopt me, to educate me, to transform the boy Rãzvan Popescu into a man of substance.’

  What happened next, he said, would be revealed later. It was time to make love, and then it would be time to eat and drink.

  Perhaps this is the book I could not write in Paris in 1927 or in Bucharest in the 1930s, or in the lonely decades that followed. I was inspired – ah, that word ‘inspired’ – by a dream in which the railway porter of July 1920 carried my bag out of the station and joined my parents and me in the family car. Cezar and Elena smiled on the youth as he held their son in his plebeian embrace – a demonstration of genuine affection from one who might be described as the ‘salt of the earth’ – and dared to kiss him. They were entranced, or seemed to be, by the youth’s boldness. It was then, as the lips of Dinu Grigorescu brushed against those of the for ever unnamed porter, that Elena said, ‘I shall die happy now, Dinu. I shall die very happy two months from now.’

  If my mother did indeed die happy, it was not in the knowledge that her only child had found a replacement for her affections in the love of a hirsute railway porter with neither money nor prospects. This much her grieving Dinicu understood within minutes of awakening from the worst of all bad dreams.

  ‘You must trust in the Lord, my darling Dinicu.’

  ‘I will, Mamã.’

  ‘For the rest of your days.’

  ‘Yes, Mamã, I promise.’

  It is a promise I have attempted to honour for her sake, though often with difficulty, for forty-seven years. I am putting my limited trust in Him now, I think, as I continue writing about those I loved and tried to love in two European cities that once resembled each other.

  Rãzvan would stay in Corcova for another year after his bewildered mother at last accepted the prince’s strange proposal. A tutor was found to refine his Romanian and teach him French. The lessons with Alin Dãnescu, a prematurely silver-haired graduate from the University of Timiºoara, took place in the library of Prince E’s grand house.

  Doctor Dãnescu was a rigorous teacher, unsparing with his sarcasm when the student inevitably made mistakes.

  ‘Oh, stop insulting me with your foolishness, young Popescu. It is tiring for me to even attempt to teach someone who knows so much more than I do. Let us reverse roles. Educate me, if you please, mon maître, in the eternal art of idiocy.’

  Rãzvan scowled. Rãzvan glared at his teacher. Rãzvan did not respond or reply to Alin Dãnescu’s taunts, for he realized – this simple peasant boy, who had yet to sit, enraptured, in a theatre – that the man with the slightly twisted mouth filled with insults was an actor, a pretend-person. He was like one of those me
n who impersonated angels or demons on feast days. He was putting on a show.

  They read the stories and memoirs of Ion Creangã together and the poems of Mihail Eminescu in those early lessons. Under Alin Dãnescu’s tutelage, Rãzvan Popescu blossomed into literacy. Within six or seven months, the prince’s boy, as he was known now to peasants and servants alike at Corcova, had progressed to the Fables of La Fontaine. There came a day, an important one for the attentive student, when Rãzvan asked the momentarily startled Alin Dãnescu if he had instructed him sufficiently in the ‘eternal art of idiocy’. Rãzvan had phrased the question in his new-found French, to his own delight and his tutor’s surprise.

  ‘You rascal. You rogue. You devil.’

  They became friends at last, and would remain so for years.

  ‘Do you still see him?’

  ‘Only in my mind’s eye. He’s dead. My mind’s eye, when not clouded by drink, is constantly occupied. It sees into hundreds of dark places, my dearest.’

  I lay beside Rãzvan, beneath the icons, listening as he described his unusual schooling, of a kind the railway porter was denied, and marvelling, as I’d continue to marvel, at my absurd good fortune.

  ‘I am a leisurely storyteller, wouldn’t you say, Dinicu?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I enjoy keeping you in suspense.’

  ‘You appear to.’

  ‘But not for much longer. All will be revealed by the time you return to our homeland. How far into the future is that? Eight weeks? Seven?’

  ‘Eight, I hope. Eight, I sincerely hope, Rãzvãnel.’

  I bought the remaining volumes of Proust’s novel, a book so complex and subtle that it dulled all my silly inspirational aspirations. I knew nothing, then, or very little, of life beyond the confines of Dinu Grigorescu, and yet Proust appeared to be aware of everything diversely and peculiarly human. My admiration for Marcel Proust coincided with my love for Rãzvan Popescu, the prince’s boy who had shaken the master’s limp hand. I encountered them both in the final days of May 1927, when I was eager and ready to be beguiled. I suppose I have lived in that state of beguilement ever since.