by Paul Bailey
‘“I have made the peasant boy a bonjouriste and I am very proud of my achievement” is what the prince said.’
My lover’s suitcase contained not only clothes and toiletries but tattered, much read, books as well. Creangã and Eminescu were there with Baudelaire and Maupassant and the final volumes of Proust, in which our mutual acquaintance, in the guise of Jupien, appears in all his mischievous splendour. Few Pandars have been immortalized while they were still living. It would be Albert Le Cuziat’s privilege to remain as constant a presence as Vautrin or Rastignac, those somewhat more beguiling literary villains. He would never now be completely anonymous, like the majority of the human race.
I began to understand, as the almost blissful days went by, that Rãzvan had no resting place. He had been expelled, or banished, from Corcova and he was lonely in Paris since few of the prince’s friends wanted to spend time in the company of somebody they considered glum. Was I to be his saviour, his refuge? I dared to hope so. I dared to hope beyond hope that his promise that we would be together for the rest of our lives might become reality.
I was determined to find out more about his past than he had granted me in our previous, quickly curtailed conversations. I needed to be subtle and tactful. I had to catch him in the relative calm before a drunken storm. I loathed to tell myself that I was beginning to be afraid of him.
It was in just such a state of calm that I asked him why he had chosen to work for Albert Le Cuziat.
‘I have been waiting for that question, ever since we gave ourselves to each other five years ago.’
‘And now I am waiting for your answer.’
‘You will be granted it, rest assured. I will give it to you slowly and carefully, for it demands unclouded thought.’
It was early in the day. He was drinking Turkish coffee. I saw him again in the doorway of his cubicle, smiling on the stumbling boy who would soon reveal his identity, as he would his. It had been, for me, the prologue to enchantment. I wondered, for the briefest of moments, if I was still enchanted by him, and just as briefly I decided I was.
‘Did I work for M. Albert?’ he asked himself. ‘I honoured his House of Mischief – oh, he has a hundred names for the place – with my baleful presence, but I cannot say, with my hand on my heart, a cliché the prince would have deplored, that I actually worked for him. No, no, Dinicu – there are two kinds of work that I recognize. One is the work of the body and the other is that of the mind. My forefathers, my father and mother, my sister and brothers have all toiled for a living, but I have an intelligence denied to them. It was the prince’s gift to me. Did I say gift? Curse, perhaps. My work of the mind was learning French, studying the architecture of Chartres – the prince’s church par excellence – and reading the books, looking at the paintings and listening to the music that met with his discerning approval. Are you impressed by my erudite use of language?’
I said I was.
‘That is about all I have left.’
‘Rãzvãnel, please answer my question.’
‘Be patient. I will answer it.’
I waited for him to speak again.
‘You are the only client – I hate to use that word – I ever made love to.’
‘Is that the truth?’
‘Why should it not be? The prince had been dead a few years when Le Cuziat invited me to become one of his ‘‘purveyors of naughtiness’’. That is another of his many fancy phrases, his ‘‘curlicues’’. I accepted his offer, but on my own carefully considered terms. I was to be untouchable. I would show his aristocrats – some of them rich, most of them married – what they wanted to see of the prince’s boy’s body, but there was to be nothing beyond that. They could feast their eyes on me and that was all. I was indifferent to their displays of affection, their promise to buy me the jewels and trinkets of which I had no need. I became adept at sneering. If they dared to put a hand on me, I reprimanded them for being so brazen. They were breaking my rules. Oh, Dinicu, I had to endure much sobbing and whimpering and accusations of being callous, but I think – indeed, I know – that they enjoyed themselves. If there is such a place as a seventh heaven, they were occupying it when they were with me. They knew who I was – the surrogate son of a cultivated prince – and that knowledge excited them almost to a frenzy. Until I met you, I was a brilliant actor.’
‘You aren’t any more?’
It was the silliest, the most heartless, question of my life. He looked wounded by it. He was wounded by it.
‘I am so sorry, Rãzvan. You have never acted for my benefit. You have always been sincere with me.’
He averted his gaze, preferring to smile at the ‘silly cow’ who had flirted with him.
‘Oh please, Rãzvãnel. Please, my darling. Please forgive my stupidity.’
He turned back to me. He shook his head. He sighed.
‘I am acting now for you, for the only time. I am pretending to be offended. And now the pretence is over. Your father is impossibly in love with his fragile son. Impossibly, impossibly. Room 9 beckons. Let us not waste another second getting there. Come on.’
I am tempted to weep now at the grace he bestowed upon me that day. We went to room 9 and transported its confines, as the English poet John Donne says, into an everywhere.
There are times when kisses are much more persuasive, and adequate, than words.
When the ‘silly cow’ came to our table and asked if she could buy us a bottle of champagne, Rãzvan replied that we would be honoured to drink it with her.
Her name was Luiza, she told us as she sat down. She had been newly widowed. She was here to enjoy the sea air. We were quite the handsomest father and son she had ever seen. She had not embarrassed us, had she? Before we could reply, she continued by commenting on my exquisite pallor and his suntanned attractiveness. Rãzvan was delighted to see that she was already emboldened by drink.
‘You have such strong hands, Domnule Popescu,’ she said, stroking one of them.
‘My son’s are prettier. His fingers are very finely tapered. They are much prized by me.’
I wondered if she understood exactly what he was implying, but she seemed not to. I hoped he would stop teasing her.
‘Where is your wife and young Dinu’s mother?’
‘She’s dead, like your husband. Her passing was an enormous loss to us.’
‘I can believe that.’
Oh, you silliest of silly drunken cows, I thought, hearing her expressing commiseration. We have different mothers, I wanted to say – the Elena who was still chastising me; the Angela whose Rãzvan had perplexed and maybe even frightened her. Our enormous losses were subtly diverse. I was beginning to hope the champagne would run dry and the evening come to an end.
Then she fell instantly, and startlingly, asleep, as if some Puck or Ariel had dropped a magic potion into her eyes. We left her. We drifted quietly away. We talked of my exquisite pallor and his suntanned attractiveness as we climbed the flight of stairs that led us to room 9, our drab and unimaginatively decorated paradise.
His exceptionally strong hands and my finely tapered fingers were soon conjoined, and the night passed, as I recall, blissfully.
There was a thunderstorm the following day.
‘It might be the end of the world, Dinicu. This isn’t ordinary rain, it’s a monsoon.’
I found the sight and sound of it exhilarating. I swear the sky turned green with every bolt of thunder and flash of lightning. I felt insignificant, happily so, as the sea boiled over and the trees swayed.
Rãzvan had hidden himself under the bed.
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I am terrified. I always have been,’ he whimpered.
‘Why?’
He was too frightened to answer. He was huddled up like a foetus.
I opened the windows and went out on to the balcony, enjoying the near-warmth of the raindrops that fell on the lover of the abject coward inside.
‘It’s getting closer. It is get
ting much closer.’
‘What is?’
‘The lightning.’
‘You are talking nonsense. The storm is abating. You are being very childish.’
He emerged from his hiding place two hours later, when something close to tranquillity had been restored.
‘I need a very strong drink – a brandy or a whisky.’
I went down to the bar and returned with a triple measure of cognac – enough, I reasoned, to calm every one of his shattered nerves.
‘I saw someone struck by lightning, Dinu, when I was a very little boy in Corcova. She was a pregnant woman, so two lives were incinerated – is that the word? – at once. She was set afire. She was standing under a tree, to protect herself, but she wasn’t spared. I see her whenever there’s a storm.’
I held him to me. I was the comforter now. I was his protector, his mother and father, for many precious moments. He said he was sorry that I should see him so wretched.
I realized that I loved him in his cowardly state. He had become a Rãzvan hitherto unknown to me, a man more fragile than I had ever suspected.
Rãzvan said he would accompany me to Bucharest and take another train on to Paris. He had seen enough of Romania. Everyone, with the delicious exception of his Dinicu, irritated or bored him. He then revealed that he was in the mood to write a memoir. He was thinking of calling it The Prince’s Boy, for that was who he was. His real father was the mystery of mysteries, a man whose gentleness had been denied him by unanticipated death. It was Prince E who had moulded and created the clever individual he was today. It was Prince E who should be praised, or blamed, for Rãzvan Popescu’s present condition.
‘Have I the will to do it, Dinicu? Have I the determination?’
‘Of course you have,’ I answered, extracting even the tiniest hint of doubt from my voice.
The letter I read that morning, while Rãzvan was taking a last swim in the Black Sea, is in my possession now. The paper has yellowed, the purple ink has faded, but to my inner eye it looks the same as when I opened it in the summer of 1932. He had asked me to pack his valise in a tidy fashion, since he was embarking on a long journey. His sophistication did not extend to the neat arrangement of clothes and toiletries, of books and personal mementoes, in a suitcase.
It fell out of his copy of Une Vie. The envelope had a London postmark. I opened it cautiously, fearful of its contents. I felt guilty at reading what the prince had written to his protégé in 1919, a few days before he took his life, I surmised.
My Dear Rãzvan,
It is my sincere wish that you prosper. Continue your studies. The Paris apartment is yours for life. There is money in the bank at your disposal for the future. Spend it responsibly to better yourself.
You will have noted how despondent I have been since my return from Japan. The mirror offers me no solace because the face that is reflected horrifies its once proud owner. I am not so much ugly as grotesque. I have the twisted expression of a freak in a chamber of horrors. I am repelled by what I see.
‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,’ as Hamlet says. I am the ‘quintessence of dust’, nothing more. Remember me without rancour if you can.
E.B.
I placed the letter back inside the book and said nothing of it to Rãzvan when he returned to Room 9. It would soon be time to leave Eforie. We were still father and son as we sat on the bus that took us to Constanþa.
We found ourselves a table in the salon at the Gara de Nord. We had another hour and a half together before the train that would terminate in Paris was due to depart.
‘You could come with me, Dinicu. You could come and live with me.’
‘Not yet, my love. Not just yet.’
I had explained to him during our stay in Eforie why I had to remain, without him, in Bucharest. I had commitments to honour. I was a respected teacher and a moderately successful journalist, reviewing books and plays for moderately liberal magazines and newspapers. I hoped, in time, to be financially independent.
‘There are outlets for your cleverness in Paris, Dinicu. There are plenty of them. I will pay for your ticket.’
‘No, no. I can’t go with you to Paris. I want to. You must never doubt that I want to. Please send me letters from now on, Rãzvãnel, instead of those bland postcards.’
‘I shall be lonely.’
‘So shall I.’
The truth was, and is, that I feared to be with him. I sensed that the time had come for us to hurt each other. A few more weeks or months apart might be beneficial to both of us, absurd though it seemed. Besides, I craved his respect. I was beginning to be too old and cynical now to have him think of me solely as his beautiful boy. Hadn’t we progressed beyond attractiveness, enchanting as it was? I said none of this as I looked at him, as I would always look at him, with adoration.
‘Trust me, Rãzvan. We shall be reunited for ever, I promise you.’
He raised his glass and smiled. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do.’
There are occasions when even the most sophisticated lovers indulge themselves by sounding like the vapid characters in a cheap romantic novel, of the kind consumed by lovelorn schoolgirls and regretful old maids. That is how we sounded now.
‘There is a man at the bar who is staring at us.’
I turned and saw one of the clerks in my father’s practice. I nodded by way of recognition and he did the same.
‘He is a novice lawyer, much prized by Cezar Grigorescu.’
‘He seems to be sneering.’
‘That is his permanent expression. I think he was born with it. He will find it useful in the courtroom when he is acting on behalf of the prosecution.’
‘He is studying my reflection in the mirror. Perhaps he considers me a criminal.’
‘If he does, he is seriously misguided. Rãzvan, I will join you in Paris as soon as possible, I swear to you. Let us be patient a little longer.’
‘Patient? Longer? We have been separated for five years.’
‘Yes,’ was all I could manage to say.
‘You have not asked me how many lovers I have clutched to my hairy bosom.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Then ask me now.’
I hesitated before asking him to let me know how many lovers he had clutched to his hairy bosom.
‘As it happens—’
‘As it happens?’
‘As it happens, none. Not one. I have been conducting an affair with your image and my right hand. Until two weeks ago, that is.’
‘So have I, Rãzvãnel. I mean your image and my right hand.’
We kissed one another’s right hands. It was a kiss that transcended formality. It wasn’t the kiss Romanians bestow on ladies they intend to seduce. It was the kiss – for both of us, then; for me, today – that specifically defined our love.
We said what we hoped would be a temporary farewell on platform 4. I was weeping and so was he. We Romanians cry easily. It is our national gift, to weep for our sorrows.
‘You are my everlasting sweetheart,’ he whispered.
My cousin Eduard dined with us the following evening. He had severed his business links with London and Paris and was now in residence again in Bucharest. He was to act as broker for the rejuvenated National Bank, which the previous year had forced the Marmorosch, Blank & Co. bank, a predominantly Jewish concern, into liquidation. Under its governor, Mihail Manoilescu, a man Eduard Vasiliu was proud to be personally acquainted with, the bank’s intention was to represent the interests, and protect the interest, of its Christian customers. The Jews had held sway over the nation’s money for too long.
I had never heard such talk at the Grigorescu family’s table before. Cezar’s criticism of politicians, his fellow lawyers and men in high office had contained no references to Jews. The word ‘Jewish’ had not been employed, in my presence, as a term of abuse. Yet here he was endorsing Eduard’s opinion that the Hebraic fraternity had been a pernicious influ
ence on Romanian affairs.
‘I hope you are not including my heavenly Jewish dressmaker Leon Becker in your pernicious Hebraic fraternity, Eduard,’ said Amalia. ‘I should be helpless without him. Since Cezar restricted my clothes allowance to a shadow of what it was when he married me, Leon has copied the designs of Worth and Chanel on my instructions at a mere fraction of the Parisian price. Do you wish me to look dowdy – Eduard? Cezar? Dowdiness is not my métier.’
‘Your humble Domnul Becker is neither a financier nor a politician, my love.’
After dinner, when Amalia and Elisabeta had left the gentlemen to drink cognac and smoke cigars, my father remarked casually that I had been spotted saying an emotional farewell to a middle-aged man at Gara de Nord.
‘Is he the Popescu to whom you introduced me in Paris, Dinu?’
I looked at my cousin in silence for long minutes. ‘Yes, he is,’ I replied. ‘The very same.’
‘He is, I believe, the peasant boy Prince E adopted some thirty years ago.’
‘Your belief is well-founded.’
‘What is the nature of your friendship, my son?’
‘I am confused by your question, Tatã. Rãzvan and I are friends, that is all.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes. We are soul mates.’
‘Soul mates?’
‘Soul mates. We love the same books, the same art, the same music, the same language.’
‘You must find yourself a wife, Dinu. There is already speculation about you.’
‘Speculation?’
‘I fear so.’
‘Of what kind?’
‘It was your refusal to enjoy yourself at Mme Laurette’s that alarmed us,’ observed my increasingly uncousinly cousin. ‘It seemed strange behaviour for a hot-blooded youth.’
‘I was not attracted to Sonia.’
‘You remember her name?’
‘I cannot forget it.’
‘There is a psychiatrist on Victoriei who may be able to help you. I shall arrange a consultation with him.’