by Jean Rhys
There you are! And there she was – the tragedy of Montparnasse – called ‘Poor Carlo’ by the charitable, and ‘that awful woman’ by the others . . .
Now she powdered her face, pulled her hat over her eyes and got up.
She said:
‘Well, I’ve got to go and meet my Arab. D’you know my Arab? He’s got a beauty spot on his left cheek like somebody out of the Thousand and One Nights. Awfully good-looking. But a bit of a rotter on the quiet, I should think . . . Good-bye, dear – sorry I cried – idiotic to cry.’
I watched her red hat in the sun as she crossed the Boulevard.
The Grey Day
One of those cold, heavy days in spring – a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen.
A day without joy or romance, or tenderness – when joy and romance and tenderness seem impossible, unthinkable – ridiculous illusions – and sadness itself is only a pale ghost.
The poet walked solemnly along the Boulevard Raspail and longed for the sight of a pretty woman – a useless creature with polished nails, expensive scent and the finest of silk stockings – marked and warranted – For Ornament Fragile –
They cheer one up sometimes . . . But not one was to be seen.
All the women he met marched heavily with sensible feet and carried parcels. One even held a green broom and looked as if she’d like to sweep the poet out of existence with it.
He groaned, rushed into a café, and ordered a drink. He felt like the Princess who had to spin a beautiful garment out of nothing at all, or have her head cut off.
Imagine being a poet in a world like this!
Imagine being obliged to write one poem (at least) every morning!
Then his despair faded again to greyness in that dark, quiet café, where two men with hooked noses and greasy, curly hair, played draughts.
He shut his eyes and tried hard to think of blue seas in the sunshine, of the white, supple arms of a dancer dressed in red – of the throb that lives in a violin and the movement of flowers in the wind.
It was quite useless.
Besides, flowers have stupid faces and so have dancers for the matter of that.
He ordered another drink.
It was a grey day – between heat and cold, summer and winter, youth and age.
The poet meditated on all the sensible people in the world, on all the lumps of beef waiting to be eaten, on all the children waiting to have their noses blown – on the Ugliness of Virtue and the Sad Reaction after Vice.
On Mornings. On Getting Up.
He was a young poet and he realized that before him in all probability stretched endlessly thousands of mornings. On every one of which he’d have to get up and bathe. No, he could not bathe, for he was poor and lived in Paris. Get up and wash then – slowly – bit by bit.
It was the last straw.
The poet paid for his drinks . . .
The Sidi
It was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.
Soon a bell would warn the prisoners that officially it was night and time to sleep in the prison of the Santé.
No. 54 made his simple preparations for repose. He spread his mattress on the floor, for the bars of the iron bed were broken, and to lie on it was torture. Then he stretched himself out fully dressed, eyes wide open, staring at the damp, dirty white walls of his cell. Further and further the walls seemed to recede into the shadow . . .
His neighbour on the right began a persistent drumming on the wall: Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap . . .
A code, doubtless; it happened every night.
No. 54 did not answer. The drumming became faster, redoubled its vigour for a time, then stopped slowly as if regretfully.
A heavy step followed by someone walking quickly and lightly. No. 54 heard the door on the left open with loud creaking of its rusty hinges. He heard the warder’s voice explaining the way the bed must be made and unmade, the exhortations to be of good behaviour, obedient, orderly, clean – above all clean: the same exhortations he had heard when he had been entombed in his own cell, the walls of which swarmed with vermin, oozed with a black damp.
‘Tiens, a new one,’ thought No. 54.
He began to picture the new one in the obscurity, preparing to lie down on his horrible bed, the mattress stained, the sheets grey and damp, the coverlet foul . . .
No. 54 dozed. But in the middle of the night he was awakened by a monotonous chant, a plaintive, minor chant, tuneless, wordless, without other rhythm than that of a high, sharp note at intervals.
It sounded like a dirge in the obscene darkness, and the silent walls of the prison began to wake. The other prisoners were banging with angry fists for silence. But the chant persisted, a wave of sound without end or beginning – an obsession.
When it stopped at last No. 54 was unable to sleep and he lay making conjectures about his neighbour for the rest of the night. A madman, perhaps – there were madmen in the prison – or a habitué who wanted to show that he did not give a damn.
Not that he had sounded joyful or even defiant – it was more like someone praying. And suddenly No. 54 remembered the days before the war when it was fashionable to represent scenes from Moroccan life on the stages of Paris music-halls, and the Moroccan troops on the French front in 1914.
He thought:
‘Of course, a Sidi, a Bicot.’
Why not? One of those Arabs who came over in masses during the war, who stayed in France the war over ‘to become good Frenchmen’. They stayed, naïvely hoping to make fortunes out of the lowest and the worst paid work, living in colonies in the popular quarters of Paris, always at odds with the law which they did not understand, and with the ‘Roumis’ whose wives and daughters they coveted in defiance of Allah – drinking wine in floats notwithstanding the Koran.
One of those Arabs – ragged, verminous, thieves, quarrelsome. That was it. That monotonous complaint in the night – he had already heard it when the Bicots on the front chanted their invocations to Allah, the Compassionate.
During the morning exercise No. 54 caught sight of his neighbour. He was an Arab, but not an Arab of the expected type, haggard with privations and drink, covered with vermin, devoured by a secret malady. This was quite a young man and beautiful as some savage Christ. A head sharply cut, as it were, out of ivory and ebony, two long, very black eyes under heavy eyelids and long eyelashes, a red-lipped mouth with teeth marvellously white and even in the emaciated, copper-coloured face. Among his squalid companions he looked like a chief, a king.
As the prisoners descended the staircase in Indian file the Sidi turned:
‘You – tobacco?’ he demanded.
‘Yes,’ answered No. 54, deftly handing him a little tobacco hidden in the hollow of his palm.
At the turn of the staircase a warder bawled:
‘Ah! You there! You, le Bicot, forward! Eyes front!’
The Sidi shrugged his shoulders disdainfully and spat on the ground.
As soon as they were out of the sight of the warder he spoke again:
‘Me – not guilty – me not know why in prison – Me sick, very sick.’
‘They all say that,’ thought No. 54. ‘They don’t understand, naturally, poor devils.’
‘You a long time here?’ asked the Sidi again.
But another guardian appeared making any answer impossible.
About ten o’clock, after the distribution of the morning soup, at the hour when all the prisoners whose turn it was to appear at the Palais de Justice had left their cells and the day’s canteen had been given out, the Sidi began to chant again: the long, guttural complaint filled No. 54’s cell, made there as it were a thick curtain of melancholy which smothered the power of thought. It was lugubrious as the howling of a dog in a still country night, and it broke off suddenly without an end, without a final note.
A tap on the wall – one, two, three taps. In the prisoners’ code: letter C. No. 54 rapped in answer.
The Sidi knocked seventeen times – Q – Then eight times – H.
No. 54 did not reply. C-Q-H did not make a word. The Arab could not know the letters of the alphabet, useless after all to try to communicate with him.
About four o’clock in the afternoon the Sidi intoned his prayer, always the same, the only recognizable word:
Allah – Allah – Allah!
It was a persecution, something relentless and terrible.
He chanted regularly at stated hours. At night the sound dragged like an uneasy and agonizing dream; in the day it was fierce, obstinate, high, shrill above all the noises of the cells:
Allah – Allah – Allah! . . .
Every morning No. 54 saw the Arab. Every morning they had the same conversation:
‘You – tobacco?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me – not guilty – me not know why in prison.’
One morning the Sidi was absent when the prisoners went for their morning exercise.
‘He must be at the Palais de Justice,’ thought No. 54.
(For it is at the Santé that the accused spend the time, sometimes months, which elapses between their arrest and their trial at the Palais de Justice.)
But back in the cell he heard a warder unlock his neighbour’s door.
‘Comment, salaud, in bed! Espèce de sale Bicot! Get up and get a move on you!’
‘Very sick!’ moaned the Arab.
‘Sick! Couldn’t you have said so this morning? Get up! Allez! Oust!’
‘Sick,’ repeated the Sidi.
The warder’s voice swelled with rage and pompous irritation:
‘Wait a bit – I’ll give you sick, you lazy devil you – Tu te f— du monde – Wait a bit, you lousy nigger – espèce de c—’
The dull thud of a blow – another – another . . . Not a sound from the Arab. Then a chair overturned, a heavy fall.
The hinges of the door creaked again:
‘You want to stay on the floor; well, stay on the floor, but leave the bed alone or I’ll give you bed, salaud.’
The door of the cell shut, the heavy clump of hobnailed boots along the corridor – silence.
That day the Sidi did not chant, but his life seemed to be draining itself away in a plaintive, endless litany of moans.
When the hour came for food to be served:
‘Tiens,’ said the warder, ‘he is still on the floor, the salaud – He’d better be careful – faut pas qu’il m’em—!’
And to the auxiliary who was serving a quarter of a tin bowl of uneatable rice soup to each prisoner:
‘The Bicot doesn’t need to eat. Il peut crever!’
All that night the frail, thin, moaning sound continued with the regularity of water dripping from a leak. Towards morning it stopped.
‘Gone to sleep, poor devil,’ thought No. 54 with relief.
At seven o’clock, when the warder came to inspect the beds, there were again loud curses from the direction of the Sidi’s cell.
Then a cry – half astounded, half annoyed:
‘M—, il a clamsé, le Bicot!’ (He’s kicked the bucket.)
Then No. 54, horrified, knew that his beautiful neighbour was dead. He began to imagine those big, laughing eyes which had been full of images of the vivid colours and the hot light of Morocco, closing on the cold, sombre walls of a French prison, the untidy, dirty bed, the fat fist – black-nailed, the red, furious face and the loose mouth that spat curses of a ‘Roumi’ functionary.
At the Villa d’Or
Sara of Montparnasse had arrived that afternoon at the Villa d’Or, and it was now 9:30 p.m.; dinner was just over, it was the hour of coffee, peace, optimism.
From the depths of a huge arm-chair Sara admired the warmly lovely night which looked in through the open windows, the sea, the moon, the palms – the soft lighting of the room.
The very faint sound of music could be heard from the distant Casino at intervals, and on the sofa opposite Mrs Robert B. Valentine reclined, dressed in a green velvet gown with hanging sleeves lined with rosy satin. Mr Robert B. Valentine, the Boot-Lace King, sprawled in another huge arm-chair, and five Pekinese were distributed decoratively in the neighbourhood of Mrs Valentine. It might have been the Villa of the Golden Calf.
‘And very nice too,’ thought Sara.
Charles came in to take away the coffee-tray, and to present Mr Valentine with a large, blue book.
Charles was like the arm-chairs, English. He was also, strange to say, supple, handsome, carefully polite. But then Charles was definitely of the lower classes (as distinct from the middle).
‘The chef is there, sir,’ said he – and ‘Anything more, Madame?’
‘Nothing, Charles,’ said Mrs Valentine with a hauteur touched with sweetness.
Charles retreated with grace, carrying the tray. He looked as though he enjoyed the whole thing immensely. His good looks, his supple bow from the waist, his livery . . .
‘It must be fun,’ thought Sara, ‘to be butler in a place where everything is so exactly like a film.’
Mrs Valentine’s daughter of Los Angeles, Cal., was the most famous of movie stars. She received a thousand love-letters per month. In London she was mobbed when she went out . . . There was a glamour as distinct from money over the household . . .
Mr Valentine put on horn-rimmed spectacles and opened the blue book which told of risotto of lobster, of bécassine glacée sur lac d’or, of green peppers stuffed with rice.
After a prolonged study of it he announced like some saint turning his back on the false glitter of this world:
‘He’s got haricots verts down for to-morrow, darling – wouldn’t you like some rice for a change?’
Mr Valentine was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker, an example of the law of compensation like most American millionaires.
Mrs Valentine moved a little impatiently on her sofa, and through her dignified charm pierced a slight fretfulness.
‘I’m just dead sick of rice, Bobbie,’ said she. ‘Couldn’t we have some ham for a change?’
‘He says he can’t get a ham,’ said Mr Valentine doubtfully. ‘He says he’ll have to send to Paris for a ham.’
The lady sat up suddenly and announced with energy that it was all nonsense, that she had seen lovely hams in the corner shop in Cannes – that anyone who couldn’t get a ham in Cannes couldn’t get one anywhere.
‘I’ll speak to him, darling,’ Mr Valentine told her soothingly.
He got up and walked alertly out. He wore a purple smoking suit and under the light his perfectly bald head shone as if it were polished. He was extremely like some cheerful insect with long, thin legs.
When he had gone, Mrs Valentine leant back on to her sofa and half closed her eyes. She was such a slender lady that, sunk into the soft cushions, she seemed ethereal, a creature of two dimensions, length and breadth, without any thickness. Her shoes were of gold brocade and round her neck glittered a long necklace of green beads with which she fidgeted incessantly – her hands being white and well manicured, but short, energetic and capable, with broad, squat nails.
A Romantic, but only on the surface; also an active and energetic patroness of the Arts, fond of making discoveries in Montparnasse and elsewhere.
So Mr Pauloff, a little Bulgarian who lived in Vienna, occupied a sumptuous bedroom on the second floor. He painted.
Sara, who sang, was installed on the third floor, though, as she was a female and relatively unimportant, her room was less sumptuous.
‘It makes me feel sad, that music in the night,’ declared Mrs Valentine. ‘The man who is singing at the Casino this week is Mr van den Cleef’s gardener. Isn’t it just too strange? A Russian – a prince or something. Yes. And he only gets – what does a gardener get? I don’t know – so he sings at the Casino in the evening. Poor man! And so many of them – all princes or generals or Grand Dukes . . . Of course most unreliable . . . Why, my dear Miss Cohen, I could tell you stories about the Russians on the Riviera
– Well! Strange people – very strange. Not like us. Always trying to borrow money.’
She went on to talk of the Russian character, of her tastes in music, of Mr Valentine’s eighteenth century bed, of the emptiness of life before she became a spiritualist, of automatic writing.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Sara patiently at intervals.
After all, this was a tremendous reaction from Paris. In Paris one was fear-hunted, insecure, one caught terrifying glimpses of the Depths and the monsters who live there . . . At the Villa d’Or life was something shallow . . . that tinkled meaninglessly . . . shallow but safe.
Through Mrs Valentine’s high-pitched drawl she strained her ears to hear some faint sound of the sea and imagined the silken caress of the water when she would bathe next morning. Bathing in that blue jewel of a sea would be a voluptuousness, a giving of oneself up. And coming out of it one would be fresh, purified from how many desecrating touches.
Poor Sara . . . also a Romantic!
As Mrs Valentine was describing the heroism of a famous American dancer who acted as a secret service agent during the war and averted catastrophe to the Allies by swallowing important documents at the right moment, Mr Pauloff and Mr Valentine came in.
‘Well, I’ve told him about that ham, darling,’ said the Boot-Lace King brightly.
He added in a lower tone: ‘Yes, nood, but not too nood, Mr Pauloff.’
‘There will be a drapery,’ the Bulgarian assured him.
Mr Pauloff had painted Mrs Valentine two years ago surrounded by her Pekinese, and made her incredibly beautiful. Then he had painted Mr Valentine with exquisite trousers and the rest, brown boots and alert blue eyes.
He was now decorating the panels of Mr Valentine’s bedroom door with figures of little ladies. And a tactful drapery was to float round the little ladies’ waists. After all he had been a court painter and he had learned to be miraculously tactful. A polite smile was always carved – as it were – on his ugly little face; in his brown, somewhat pathetic eyes was a look of strained attention.