The Tale of the Rose

by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery

  He began to dream again, and to sing his “war song,” as I used to call it in Buenos Aires—for every time he set off on a trip, whether by car or by plane, he would sing

  Un poteau lugubre et sombre devant moi toujours se tient

  Et je vois la route d’ombre dont nul homme ne revient.

  (A dark and mournful finish line stands always in my path

  And I see the shadowy road from which no man ever comes back.)

  Ever since then, I hear those words every time I start off on a journey.

  ONE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER DAY, Tonio announced that he had to leave for Toulouse to meet with Didier Daurat.

  “I want to go back to work as a simple mail pilot,” he told Daurat. “Assign me a taxi, quick!” (In pilot slang, an airplane was a taxi.) “I’m bored in Paris. I’ll go anywhere, I’ll fly wherever you send me. My wife will come with me. I’m ready to go. Tomorrow, if you want. I await your orders.”

  He had great respect for Didier Daurat and had based the character of Rivière, in Night Flight, on him.

  Back in Paris, he started opening drawers and cupboards, sniffing his leather flying gear, his coat, helmet, and straps, his safety lamps, his compasses, spreading them out tenderly on the rug. The phone rang all the time. His Parisian friends wanted to invite him out, but he turned them all down.

  “I’m busy,” he would say. “I’m going back to work as a mail pilot. I’ve had enough of getting fat in the cafés and brasseries of Paris. Good-bye, I don’t have another minute, I’m packing my bags. My wife will tell you.” That meant he was completely out of their reach.

  He pulled on his stiff leather coat, hardened by lack of use, the old comrade of many flights. From its pockets, he took little slips of paper. One day as he was reading them, he burst into uproarious laughter.

  “But why are you laughing like that?” I asked. “What’s so funny? Why are you laughing like a madman?

  “I can’t tell you, it’s idiotic,” he said, laughing harder and harder.

  “Come on, please . . . tell me!”

  “Well, it has to do with a noise, and with my radio operator a long time ago, flying over Patagonia.”

  “But I don’t see anything funny about that.”

  “Because I was afraid of the noise, I didn’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I was afraid, until my radioman handed me a note about the noise. Read it for yourself. I’ve just found it again, here it is.”

  I took the piece of paper and read: “The noise isn’t coming from the plane. Don’t be afraid. It is a fart. I’m very ill, monsieur.”

  It was my turn to laugh out loud. He took me in his arms. “Oh darling,” I told him, “I’m so happy. I can’t imagine you anywhere except in the sky. Am I wrong?”

  “Why are you crying?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never liked your life in Paris. It’s less frightening for me to have you up among the stars than down among Parisian women.”

  He lay me on the ground, right in the middle of all his things, and tickled me madly.

  “Ow, ow, Tonio, stop! You’re hurting me—seriously,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Here, in my stomach.”

  “Ah, the appendix,” he said sagely. “It will be removed this very night. Dr. Martell, I hold him in the highest esteem. . . . Let’s go to the hospital. Tomorrow your appendix will be far away. We won’t be taking it with us to Morocco!”

  It was all childishly simple. I felt I had nothing to fear when I was with him.

  MONSIEUR DAURAT had already called Tonio back in to give him his orders: for the time being, he would be piloting the Toulouse–Casablanca line.

  As soon as a pilot accepted a job, he no longer knew where he would be spending the next night. If the night went well, he would arrive somewhere in the world—Barcelona, Casablanca, Port-Etienne, Cap-Juby, Buenos Aires . . . and then there were the routes to the Orient, including the legendary Paris–Saigon . . .

  Everything happened just as Tonio had said it would: I saw his doctor, and the operation was performed. His mother took loving care of me while I spent a few days in Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, convalescing. Then she sent me to Toulouse to join her son at the Hôtel Lafayette. There I had the pleasure of meeting Daurat and seeing him up close. He was a very serious man; what most impressed me about him was his iron will.

  Toulouse was a dead city—it didn’t exist for me at all. I devoted myself entirely to my friendship with the pilots, who risked their lives every day and were oblivious to the dangers they faced and the importance of their task, which gave other men an example of heroism. To them it was just a job, and I admired them even more for that.

  These pilots had traveled across nights and strong winds, and it bored them to hear their own praises sung. They wanted to drink beer, to play dice or poker. I was a quick study at poker; from time to time, timidly, I would ask what the names of the other pilots were. At the end of the first evening, I risked one small request for information about my husband. I learned to be guarded and to act tough around the pilots. I had been alone in Toulouse for a week while my husband was in the skies. I was living in his room and waiting for news of him.

  “Ah, oui, Saint-Ex, they had him take a ‘taxi’ all the way to Dakar. He’ll replace a pilot there.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the pilot was killed. Look, Madame de Saint-Ex, that’s three times now that I’ve taken three spades from you.”

  “Really, is that what you heard?” My heart felt as if it were skipping rope in my chest, it was pounding so madly. Where was my angel?

  The next day when I awoke, my husband at last appeared in our room, but only in order to empty out all the drawers. We were leaving for Casablanca, with a stop in Spain. We always lived at this bohemian pace, in a perpetual state of urgency.

  “Maybe you’d like to have a swim in Almería,” he said; “it’s summer down there.”

  “Yes, Tonio darling,” I said. “I’d love to.”

  “Uh-oh, look—the suitcase is full. You can’t bring all these things. Choose two dresses, that’s enough. Your nightgowns are of no use; it’s too hot in Morocco.”

  A few hours later, we were in Alicante. We went to the beach. He swam very quickly and I wanted to catch up, but the scar from my appendix operation kept me from showing off my talents as a water nymph. It still hurt.

  WE WERE HERE TODAY, gone tomorrow. At times I felt like a fugitive. He didn’t know what his destiny was, and neither did I, but I certainly had no regrets about his not taking the job with Renault.

  In the middle of the night he would hold me very tenderly, as if I were a small, beloved animal. One night, begging my forgiveness, he said, “I don’t yet know how to be your husband. Please forgive me. I get all tangled up in your ribbons. I’m still surprised to have a little girl like you beside me.” I was half asleep, and he lifted me up in his strong arms.

  “Ninety pounds,” he said. “I weigh three times more. My cherished little dwarf, tomorrow you’ll arrive in a beautiful country. You will love it, if you really love me. A friend has already rented a nice apartment for us in the palace of Glaoui. You’ll often be alone—you’ll have time to enjoy yourself, take walks, maybe even think of me.”

  I slept very little that night. I imagined the palace of Glaoui surrounded by desert sands. I was already following him to his destiny.

  AT LAST the much-talked-of palace was revealed to me. The stairway was made of marble, the rooms were very large, and the furniture was almost nonexistent, in keeping with Arab sobriety. There were huge carpets on the floor and walls, large copper trays used as tables in all the rooms, divans, blue and white tiles, and very low beds.

  The wives of the other pilots took me to the marketplace and instructed me in the ways of the provincial city of Casa, where the sun is eternal. The Roi de la Bière café, at cocktail hour, reunited us with the other pilots. Poker . . . Pernod . . . eggs in
aspic . . . racy stories. I heard such a collection of them that I could put together an anthology. But life gave us much more than other people’s stories.

  I spent my time reading at a bookstore owned by Madame Allard, dreaming about my life, strolling around the Arab city. A pilot named Guerrero came in one day while I was chatting with the bookseller. “Bonsoir, Madame de Saint-Ex,” he said. “Would you like to have dinner with me this evening? Here, this is from your husband; he bought you some fresh spiny lobsters in Port-Etienne and asked me to bring them to you.”

  “Yes, Guerrero,” I said. “Come over to my place, and we’ll cook; Madame Allard will come, too.”

  “I’m flying the same route as your husband,” Guerrero explained. “By chance I had a problem with my leg, so I stayed over in Cisneros to rest up. Saint-Ex was looking very careworn to me. ‘Well, old man,’ I said to myself, ‘for a young newlywed, you look positively papal.’ But we don’t actually say anything to each other. Suddenly, Saint-Ex shouts, ‘Fantastic! Eggs in aspic are fantastic, don’t you think, Guerrero?’

  “‘What about eggs in aspic?’ I asked. ‘Would you please explain?’

  “‘All right,’ he said. ‘I had my first fight with my wife over eggs in aspic. We were eating out, at the Roi de la Bière. I come home dead on my feet after a night of flying and she wants me, nonetheless, to have dinner at the Roi de la Bière. I don’t say much at home, you know, I don’t open my mouth. . . . At the café, the waiter asks me what I’ll have, and my wife looks at me, worried. I answer, “Eggs in aspic”; there was a dish of them right there in front of us. I hadn’t thought about ordering a full meal. “Are you sick? Are you upset?” she asks me.

  “‘I don’t answer. They bring me two eggs in aspic.

  “‘And then, Monsieur, what will you have as a main course?” the waiter asks.

  “‘Two eggs in aspic.”

  “‘My wife didn’t say a thing. I wanted to laugh. But for the second time, they brought me eggs in aspic. And for dessert, the same story.

  “‘I didn’t want to say anything. Or think. It was all the same to me if I ate six eggs in aspic or anything else. But it irritated Consuelo. She was sitting there on the banquette, and then, right there in the middle of all the other customers, she stood up and shouted, “Look at them, your eggs in aspic . . . I like eggs in aspic, too!”

  “‘She took all the eggs that were on the table and crushed them between her fingers right there in front of everyone, made a purée of them, and then ran home crying.

  “‘I couldn’t keep a straight face. I burst out laughing. The waiter and the woman at the cash register looked so funny, watching Consuelo attacking the eggs. After a few minutes I left, too. Go tell her that the scene is forgotten, Guerrero. Tell her I’m not angry and I’m coming home tomorrow for my birthday. I’m sending her these lobsters to make her happy. And most of all, tell her she shouldn’t mistake their claws for eggs in aspic.’”

  THE PILOTS’ LIVES were simple and orderly, like those of all men of action. My husband flew the mail route between Casablanca and Port-Etienne.* A few years earlier a single pilot had been responsible for the entire route from Casa to Dakar, but Monsieur Daurat had persuaded the government to make some improvements. The pilots had changed, and the planes had been partially modernized.

  Staying over in Port-Etienne was no fun: there were hardly more than a dozen men there, including the Arab laborers who were slaves of the Maures. My husband often told me, “One day I’ll take you to see Madame la Capitaine. She’s French, and she has a garden there, in that country where nothing green grows. She gets fresh-water in by boat from Bordeaux and soil from the Canary Islands. In a little wooden box, she’s growing three lettuces and two tomato plants. She washes her hair in fresh-water from Bordeaux, then waters her garden with the same water. To shelter her little vegetable patch from the desert sands, she has the box lowered to the bottom of a well. . . . When we stop over on our way through, she invites us to dinner; we always have canned food to eat, but she has her garden pulled up out of the well and displays it on the table. Her two miserable tomato plants, her three lettuces . . . It’s touching!”

  When he came back, Saint-Ex told me, “You can understand that after spending time out in the desert sands like that, I come home a little wild. Down there, I think crudely; I’m a big bear, as you call me. It makes life easier. . . . I’m a bear, I tell myself, and I retreat into my silence. I’m like a different man there, I have a different skin, I need rest, calm, peace. So you make conversation for me all by yourself, giving me details about the letters we’ve received from France, about our friends in Casablanca, you talk to me about your life, about life in general. I admire you, you forget nothing, you keep me informed about this country. The doctor in Casa did this, the colonel said that . . . The latest news from the papers. But when I see you exhausted because I’m a bear who devours your words, your tender gestures, I’d like to dance for you alone, the way a bear dances, to entertain you, to tell you that I’m your bear, yours, for life.

  “Listen, some funny things happen to us during the stopovers. The other day, a Christian association for the protection of women, near Dakar, sent us some fifteen-year-old girls to keep the pilots company during their night off!

  “They sell those poor creatures in the market as slaves, you know. The association let us know its schedule of fees. We were to pay these virgin girls four French francs for the evening. To them, it’s a lot of money, in their far corner of the desert. We often ask them to sweep out the shack, wash a glass for us, clean a gasoline lamp. One day, Mermoz,* who was coming back quite late from a café in Dakar, found a little girl of about fourteen at his door. He had drunk a lot, and he told her to leave. But the little girl grew upset and started to cry; it was the only way she had of showing her despair since she didn’t speak French. So Mermoz told her, ‘Come in, you can sleep with me.’ He starts taking her clothes off, taking off her burnous, but she weeps all the harder. He gives her the four francs, not wanting to pay any more than the official rate, for the sake of the other men. He puts her burnous back on. The tears don’t stop. He takes the burnous off again and gives her a second fistful of money. ‘To hell with the official rates, you’re nice, you’re going to sleep.’ But the little girl, almost naked in the darkness, doesn’t want to leave and goes on sobbing. He no longer knows what to do. He gives her presents: his watch, which fills her with wonder, his eau de Cologne. She calms down for a moment, then plunges back into her despair. Mermoz becomes enraged. He shouts, ‘I’ve had enough! Leave, I want to sleep; go home.’ The little girl just stands there, looking lost, immobile, like someone who hasn’t yet done what she came to do. Her deep eyes gleam with an anguished light. Her mouth half open, she can’t say anything in the language of this white man who flies, who comes down out of the sky. Sounds emerge from her throat softly, as if she were speaking to herself. In the face of her immense sorrow, the pilot takes pity on her; once again he takes off the white cloth that covers her and looks her over attentively. She wasn’t like the other Bedouin women, who come submissively, their eyes lowered before wickedness. . . . The pilot finds her beautiful, even more beautiful with her strange expression. He tries to soothe the look of a hunted animal out of her eyes. ‘That’s how several of my fellow pilots have married Arab girls,’ he says to himself. At dawn, he pushes the girl out of bed. ‘Go away.’ She feels the order in the pilot’s muscles. She leaves the bed. She understands that she must go. But she sits down on the ground again, to show him she will not leave. This is more than Mermoz can bear. ‘Oh, right, you want to follow me like a slave, a dog . . .’ And he says the word in Arabic. She screams in indignation. An airplane comes rumbling down the runway. Mermoz looks at her, then shuts his eyes. Maybe, he thinks, if I pretend I’m asleep, she’ll leave. He still has long hours of flying ahead of him. He must sleep. If he falls asleep in the middle of a flight, it will be this stubborn girl’s fault. She’s stronger than he is. The pilot si
ghs. The two of them sneak quick glances at each other. He laughs nervously; the girl does, too. The door of the shack opens, and the pilot who just landed comes in. ‘Hello, old man!’ ‘Is that you, Tonio?’ ‘Yes.’

  “‘I haven’t slept all night, look,’ Mermoz says, pointing to the little Arab girl sitting on the ground. ‘I’m exhausted, she doesn’t want to go. I’ve given her everything already, my money, even my pocketknife!’

  “The little Arab girl gets quickly to her feet. ‘Perhaps you speak Arabic, monsieur?’ she says. ‘You see, I am the laundress. I can’t leave here without the dirty sheets. As for the rest of it, I’m perfectly satisfied; he’s generous, your friend!’”

  Tonio translates the little Arab girl’s desires. Mermoz lets out a curse, then loads her up with all the dirty laundry. She’s finally happy and leaves.

  Mermoz claimed that this story happened to Tonio, but Tonio swore that it was Mermoz who had lived through it.

  I loved listening to him tell stories like this. I’m only sorry that I repeat them awkwardly because I have no way of reproducing his laugh, his voice. He was spellbinding when he told stories about the desert.

  ITS NAME was the only palatial thing about the palace of Glaoui. In fact, it was a large and luxurious block of flats—the rental apartments of Glaoui, really. The architecture and décor were in the modern Arab style, influenced by our French civilization. What hard work it was to give a personal touch to those square rooms with their hard, unforgiving light! I understood the wisdom of the Arab sheiks: the only thing that can stand up to light like this is light itself: space. You cover the mosaics with white rugs and the walls with Arab weavings that give off a warm glow, and you set large gilded copper trays opposite each other as tabletops. You have to find the largest ones possible. They’re sold by weight; some are silver-plated, it’s rare to find any in gold. Tonio loved one great, gloomy tray, which was grayish, almost black, with timeworn designs. The more you looked at it, the less you understood the images engraved on it. We tried to read them, and it became a pastime, an obsession.