The Tale of the Rose

by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery

  TONIO ALWAYS HELD MY HAND very tightly in his gigantic fist. He loved me, but I was wounded to the quick by the injustice being done to me. Nothing troubled me more than injustice. I was beginning to find certain defects in my future in-laws. Still, I wanted to smooth over the difficulties; I tried to be forgiving. Simone, his older sister, was a highly cultivated, brilliant woman who for her erudition and imagination could have been a close friend. But there it was: I was going to be her sister-in-law. I had taken her brother and was therefore a thief, and she was the victim of my robbery. He was her only brother. Later she wrote a line about me that was both funny and cruel: “Consuelo, that countess of the silver screen . . .”* I decided to take up the gauntlet, but I wept all the same.

  Tonio’s mother alone, with her exceptional intelligence and Christian faith, thought only of her little boy’s happiness. The fact that I hadn’t been born in France was no crime in her eyes. I was the woman her son loved, that was all. I had to be all right if Tonio loved me. She gave me all her sympathy, and I rested against her white hair. She laughed long and hard at my stories of the Pacific. And as a true Christian, she could not allow us to be nothing more than lovers for the rest of our lives. She didn’t care in the least what her cousins thought. She had raised her children until they were grown, and no one but she had the right to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted. Tonio wanted Consuelo, so Tonio would have Consuelo, no matter what the family thought! Or, for that matter, André Gide!

  7

  I LOVED GOING to the flower market in Nice with Tonio trailing along behind me: it reminded him of planes taking off at dawn, into the wind, because it was very early in the morning—the smell of the sea, the heaps of violets, carnations, chrysanthemums, and mimosas, and the bouquets of Parma violets that were grown in the mountains an hour outside of Nice, where the snow sometimes stayed on the ground all summer.

  My former friends, those I’d met through my first husband, began coming to the Mirador: the Pozzo di Borgos, Dr. Camus. . . . We came back from the market, Julie Dutremblay and I, our arms loaded with flowers, with little Toutoune, my dog, in tow. Our days were like one long schoolgirls’ outing. The Mirador smelled wonderful, but the very sweetness of this life made my fiancé brood. I wondered if he was already bored by my presence. “No,” he said, “quite the opposite.” He couldn’t stand it when I was away, even for an hour. He didn’t like it when I drove. “You could hurt yourself,” he would say every time.

  Deep down I wondered what he was afraid of. It was the two of us, no doubt, and the strange pair we made. I convinced myself that we were not safe, that we were out of step with society. Yes, we would have to find a way to live together in harmony, for eternity. But how would we find it?

  One Sunday, at mass, Tonio, seeing me so pensive and morose that I didn’t even take communion, burst out laughing. He said out loud, as if speaking to himself, in a prayer he seemed to have been muttering since the mass began: “But it’s very simple, we’ll just have a religious wedding!” People turned to look at him, but he had already disappeared. I found him sitting in the car in his shirtsleeves, reading a newspaper. “Consuelo, I would like us to be married by a priest,” he said, “but without going to city hall as we did before. I want us to be married in church so that if we have children we’ll be at peace and in order.”

  I laughed. “But Tonio, in France, you have to go to city hall first. It’s in Andorra, or in Spain, I’m not sure which, that people can marry in church alone.” A civil marriage would have meant forfeiting my income as Gómez Carrillo’s widow.

  “We’ll go wherever we have to go,” he said. “Agreed?”

  “Yes, Tonio,” I replied, “that would be wonderful. I wouldn’t even have to change my name, so everything would be fine. And the day you stop loving me, you can leave with my heart in your hands, and it will be blessed.”

  “And you, if you ever love another man, you’ll have proven yourself faithless—but I don’t want you to leave!”

  We kissed each other and swore we would never forget this promise.

  His mother arrived one day, not long after that, dressed all in black. She told us, “My children, you are going to be married on April 22, at the city hall in Nice. It will take only a few minutes. I’ve arranged everything. Give me your papers, I want to register you today for the exact time.”

  “Consuelo, find our papers,” Tonio ordered, “and give them to my mother.”

  And that was that, with no further discussion.

  ON APRIL 22, at the preordained hour, we were at the city hall in Nice. A few minutes more, and we would be married. Tonio and I had not exchanged a word on the subject since his mother’s visit.

  It was about that time that he began to write again. He started with “Le ventilateur” (“The Fan”), a kind of poem that began like this: “A fan is turning on my forehead, image of fatality . . .” He had started it on the boat that had brought him back from Argentina, his young puma constantly disturbing him as he wrote. (He’d taken it into his bathroom to give it a rest from the cage in the hold where it was kept.) He threw himself back into the text and told me, “Consuelo, I’ve never walked away from anything I started. I want to finish ‘The Fan.’” At the same time he wrote some other poems, “The Cry of America,” “The Extinct Suns” . . . I’ll try to gather them all together someday and publish them.

  Pierre d’Agay offered to let us use his château for our religious wedding on April 23. That was the wedding we passionately wanted. And so we were married at the old fortress of Agay, tucked away in its tranquil bay. An ancient castle that had withstood all the caprices of history and the mistral, Agay was built in the shape of a great prow, like a ship jutting out into the sea. An immense terrace, full of rhododendrons and geraniums, made its deck more beautiful than anything I’d seen on any boat, overlooking the pure blue of the Mediterranean. The discretion of the d’Agays, who avoided society, had kept the fishing boats and motorboats half a mile away all around. The family had lived at the castle for generations, and various members also lived throughout the village. I’ve never really been able to distinguish between all the sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law of the d’Agay sisters. I do know, and am grateful, that they were all very kind and very good to the two of us. Antoine was a little like their own child. Pierre d’Agay, his brother-in-law, considered him a brother.

  Inside, the château was very simple, with large rooms made of stone and flagstone floors that several lifetimes could not wear out. The day of the wedding, flowers and liqueurs from the d’Agay farm were distributed by my sister-in-law Didi among all the local families. We laughed and sang.

  My mother-in-law had thought of everything. She had arranged a honeymoon for us on the nearby island of Porquerolles.

  We left Agay, exhausted by the wedding party and all the photographs.

  “Clear sky, good wind,” Tonio said as he used to during his night flights for the Aéropostale, to give courage to the radio operator and the copilot as they flew along the great stretches of the Río de Oro where, if their plane had broken down, they’d have been chopped into little pieces.

  He was sleepy—he didn’t like all the kissing and exuberant manifestations of joy he’d had to endure all day. We left the car to go up onto the pier. The sea was choppy. My aviator, who could usually do hand-to-hand combat with dragons, was seasick, and that only worsened his mood.

  Other young couples like us were staying at the hotel, where everything catered to the needs of newlyweds. We found the atmosphere stifling. Tonio went to sleep fully clothed, on a sofa. He woke up the next morning at daybreak and begged me to go back to the Mirador with him. He had only one desire, he said, to finish “The Fan.” It hurt me a little that he didn’t know how to play the bridegroom.

  “Forgive me, but I find all of this idiotic,” he said, thinking of all the young married couples exchanging polite remarks over breakfast after their first night of intimacy.

  And without a word to
the family, we went back to our Mirador.

  SO THERE WE WERE AT LAST, in order and at peace. My name would be different from then on, but I wasn’t used to it yet and continued to sign “the Widow Gómez Carrillo.” Tonio scolded me and asked me to forget Gómez Carrillo because he was dead. I was never again to have anything to do with him or his books, or to travel to Spain to see his editors. Even today, fifteen years later, I’ve never written a single letter to collect the smallest portion of the handsome inheritance he so graciously left me. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I was young—that’s my only excuse. My young husband wanted to write; he didn’t want another writer in our home, and I understood.

  I thought Tonio was a little isolated in Nice, a little melancholy. I had the idea that a character like the famous writer Maeterlinck,* a great friend of my first husband, would do him some good. Maeterlinck had always felt a strong bond with Gómez Carrillo. How would he receive the young aviator who was replacing him at the Mirador?

  Buzzing around like a little bee, I called and wrote to Sélysette Maeterlinck, a delightful woman who, while Gómez Carrillo was alive, had been a true friend to me. Immediately, she invited us to Orlamonde, their new residence. I was on tenterhooks—you’re always nervous with people who know you—as I took my Tonio to see the Maeterlincks.

  One minute after introducing him, I was reassured: Tonio had been examined and approved as a worthy successor to my late husband. Maeterlinck offered him a drink and even went down to his cellar to get a bottle of old brandy. Tonio talked to him about everything and nothing, about life. I can still see them there in the palace of Orlamonde, in that marble-and-crystal drawing room. Tonio had the beauty of a Roman; he was almost six and a half feet tall, towering straight into the sky, but light as a bird. He raised his hand, holding an enormous crystal goblet, and drank joyfully as he discussed the quality of different kinds of paper and of books, for a book printed on good Holland paper had just fallen to the ground. The brandy gave color and heat to the conversation. Maeterlinck was won over, even charmed. I felt I had been saved, reinvigorated.

  “I’m writing a book right now, just some personal experiences,” Tonio said. “I’m not a professional writer. I can’t write about anything I haven’t experienced. The whole of my being has to be involved in order for me to express myself—or, I’d even say, in order for me to grant myself the right to think.”

  8

  WITH THE FINISHED MANUSCRIPT of Night Flight in hand, we left for Paris, for the little apartment at 10 rue de Castellane that my first husband had left me. It was a strange place, far too small for two people, but we loved each other madly. The entryway was full of books, and the living room was hung with old tapestries. Verlaine and Oscar Wilde* had both lived there during bad times, and a woman we called “Our Lady of the Green Eyes” had tried to commit suicide there; her portrait still hung on the wall. A man had thrown himself out the second-floor window, which was conveniently situated for that kind of thing, but he had succeeded only in breaking his legs. Another woman had shot herself with a revolver; the blood could never be completely removed from the rug. She hadn’t died, either. Only Maître Gómez Carrillo had died there, in my arms.

  In fact, it was his little pied-à-terre, his hideaway for gray and rainy days. He’d also owned a lovely country house at Nelle-la-Vallée, only an hour away from Paris.

  So I brought my gigantic bird of a new husband to this apartment, a little vexed that I couldn’t offer him a better home in Paris. But he thought it was perfect; he liked working in small rooms and assured me that if I didn’t want to live anywhere else we would never move.

  Gide had offered to write a preface for Night Flight. Despite his stubborn hostility toward me, I forced myself to be extremely pleasant and polite with him. Too bad if he didn’t like me and preferred the company of men and old women.

  Tonio was delighted with the preface, and so was I. I thought he fully deserved the admiration of Gide, Crémieux, and Paul Valéry. When you follow a work of literature day by day, page by page, and the fruit is finally ripe for other people to savor, you tend to think of it as a marvelous gift you’ve given the world. The warm welcome my husband’s manuscript received seemed to me entirely natural and fitting. We knew Night Flight by heart, while the rest of them, the friends, relatives, and admirers, had barely seen the manuscript.

  The congratulations and exclamations of enthusiasm, whether feigned or real, began to grow tedious after a while. However, when they came from the beauteous women of Paris whose great admiration made them “overflow,” my husband almost blushed; encounters like these thrilled him. My heart began to rage with jealousy; my Spanish blood began to boil.

  “DO YOU KNOW what I dreamed last night?” he asked me one morning when he woke up. “No? Well I dreamed that God had met me on a path; I knew it was God because of a strange candle He was carrying in his hand. It’s idiotic, this dream, but that’s how it is. And I ran after Him to ask Him something about mankind, only the candle was shining, and I was afraid.”

  This happened during the period when the N.R.F.* was in the throes of its great passion for my husband. He came home with his handkerchiefs covered in lipstick; I didn’t want to be jealous, but it was starting to depress me. People would tell me, “We ran into Tonio in a car with two women.” “Yes,” he explained, “two secretaries from the N.R.F. who invited me to stop off and have some port at their place on my way home.”

  Paris worried me; all I could think of anymore was the pretty women who were constantly pestering him.

  Oh, it’s a profession, a religious vocation to be the companion of a great creator. It’s a profession you learn only after years of practice—for it can be learned. I was a fool. I thought that I, too, had a right to be admired for his work. I thought it belonged to both of us. What a mistake! In fact, nothing belongs more fully to an artist than his creation—even if you give him your youth, your money, your love, your courage, nothing belongs to you.

  It’s pure childishness to say, “Oh yes, I helped my husband, I did.” First of all, no one ever knows if the opposite isn’t true. Perhaps with another wife, the writer would have been able to write something else. Certainly a woman always helps a man to live, but she can also make it more difficult for him to work. Every woman in an audience, after an hour of listening to him speak, dreamed of being Tonio’s intimate friend, the only faithful and understanding admirer of her favorite author. To be the driving force behind the pilot of Night Flight, the great writer! And then, right at that moment, I had to put on a wifely face and say, “Come along, husband, it’s late. Let’s go home.”

  That was all it took. What a wife! What a shrew! How tactless! Just when she, the admirer, invited or introduced by chance, was going to have a private talk with her pilot, the legitimate wife appears! That, believe me, is unforgivable. And yet how could I never feel sleepy, never speak to him during those endless evenings? I would have had to be made of stone! Little by little I began to understand that it was best to let him go by himself, since I had faith in him. Like a child, I thought, let’s trust in fate. There must be a God, for children and for wives!

  But Tonio often grew bored during the long evenings when he went out without me, so he asked me to phone him wherever he was going. “Call me, I beg you,” he told me. “I hate the endless chitchat, the lectures, the dinners. I’ve already said everything I have to say. Believe me, ma femme, I’d rather waste my time than my breath. It doesn’t matter if the hostess is angry because you want me to come home right away. You know how I am; I’m very polite, and if you don’t call, I can’t come home!”

  I’d gotten into the habit of going to the movies when he left and then passing by to pick him up at his friends’ homes. Oh, I thought I was very clever! I told myself he was tired of going out so much, he was invited against his will, he felt obliged to accept, without knowing why.

  He was unsociable and solitary, but he also loved company. When the phone rang, it frightene
d him. His friends would talk to him for hours on end, and then he would want to go on with a conversation that had lasted until three in the morning the night before and would still be talking on the phone at two in the afternoon. We had breakfast with the telephone on the table. I felt completely powerless around him; I lost all common sense, like a little girl.

  9

  THE ARGENTINE AIRMAIL SERVICE was disbanded, and Tonio lost his post as its director in Buenos Aires. “You’re unemployed, my love—relax!”

  “No, Consuelo, we have to pay the rent, and for the drinks and the nights out.”

  He was constantly assailed by friends who invited him out to restaurants, where he loved to pick up the check for the whole table. When he found himself short of money, he was crushed. In Buenos Aires he had earned twenty thousand francs a month, a handsome salary. And now here he was in Paris without a penny.

  “I want to accept a position with Renault,” he told me, speaking slowly, “at a fixed salary. It’s more secure. I’ll go to the office every day. It’s a good job, I think. Some friends have found it for me.”

  It upset me a great deal to see him submit so meekly to the imprisonment of an office. “I’ll start next month, if you want, darling.”

  “No, Tonio,” I said. “I don’t want you to take this job. Your path lies across the stars.”

  “Yes, you’re right, Consuelo,” he said. “Across the stars. You’re the only one who understands.”

  That line about the stars, which was all I ever said to him on the subject, did the trick. He quickly changed his mind about the job with Renault. It was as if I had galvanized him, given him new hope.