The Tale of the Rose

by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery

  “Why can’t we go for a walk in the city for a change of scene?” I proposed.

  By seven A.M., they were the ones leaning on me.

  The next day a different woman was assigned to me, along with a thickset man, and those two were tireless. After three weeks of forced marches, I still couldn’t fall asleep.

  ONE DAY, AT LUNCHTIME, my husband appeared. He was led into the dining room, where each table had a number. I didn’t have the strength to eat even the lone potato I had been allotted. A familiar and somewhat brusque voice called, “Consuelo!”

  For three weeks he had forgotten me, or else his letters had not been delivered.

  All my bitterness suddenly rose up in my heart. His hand rested on my shoulder. “They told me: it’s number seven. Forgive me, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “What do you want?”

  I was pale and thin. He took me in his arms.

  “Come with me right now. I’ll take you away from here.”

  “They’re killing me. I’ve written you several times. I’ve begged you to come at once, and you haven’t answered me a single time!”

  I wept in his arms. The attendants had pushed us into a small side room. “Tell me that you’re feeling fine,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m going to ask them to put your clothes on.” But the nurse was already pulling me out of his arms, saying it was time to take a shower.

  I saw nothing more of Tonio after that. I no longer wrote to him. I had lost all hope of ever leaving that hellish place. His brief visit had been like a dream. I wasn’t even sure that he had actually been there. I was hungry, very hungry. The smell of food reached me from far away, from the other building, through the window. I began filching bits of bread from the neighboring room, which was occupied by a man with a goiter who never ate a thing. I mustered up a little energy, and with the help of a priest who came on Saturdays to administer confession to the patients I managed to send a long telegram to a woman friend in Paris, describing my situation.

  My husband was busy at that time writing the script for his film Anne-Marie. My friend had a hard time finagling an invitation from his group, which was staying in a little city on the outskirts of Paris.

  She finally got there and cried to Tonio, “Consuelo has to steal bread just to stay alive. If you’re too busy to rescue her, I’ll have to be the one to do it.”

  My husband knew I wasn’t allowed to have any correspondence. He told the story to his companions. “What a magnificent subject for a film,” they said. “But your wife is dying, Saint-Ex!”

  Tonio explained that the doctor had assured him I was making progress and was in good enough condition to undergo his infallible treatment. It was extremely important that he refrain from spoiling me or writing to me.

  The actors and the director protested and persuaded him that after the anguish I had endured during his disappearance in Libya, this was enough to drive me mad. They bundled him aboard a train bound for Switzerland, and he arrived at the clinic once more.

  His first gesture was to show me two tickets for Paris. I didn’t understand, I couldn’t hear very well, he had to repeat everything. He was weeping like a child and begging me to forgive him. I had lost about thirty pounds, and he had to use a piece of string to hold my skirt up around my waist.

  We spent three days in a hotel in Bern. He made me drink milk, eat; he gave me some peanuts I barely touched.

  In the train that took us back to Paris, he reproached me for not having given him a clear description of how severe the clinic’s regime was and swore to me that he had known nothing about it. I wasn’t well enough to bear the idea of going back to Paris, into the maelstrom that always surrounded him. I told him I wanted to go to El Salvador and stay there until my skirt would stay up around my waist again.

  “I’ll follow you to the end of the world,” he swore.

  In the end he followed me only to Thonon-les-Bains; he knew a doctor there who could help me regain my strength.

  His Parisian friends, the women, the movie people, found this inadmissible: he was becoming my nursemaid. One day I read the draft of a letter in which he said to one of his Egerias that she was beautiful but her way of thinking was not and that he didn’t spend his days at the foot of his wife’s bed, caring for her like a nanny. He was writing, and when he had written a page, he read it to his wife, which gave her the strength to eat a meal with him and gave him the courage to work.

  Around Thonon there were a number of spots where will-o’-the-wisps sometimes appeared. That was Tonio’s favorite pastime. He was constantly going out to watch them, for he believed in the fantastic. He would spend whole nights with a pharmacist who was staying at our hotel, pursuing and studying those tremulous flames that flare up from the belly of the earth. I was beginning to come back to life, and I felt like laughing with him again.

  When he decided I was well, he took me back to Paris, to the Hôtel Lutétia. I couldn’t conceal my distress at being in that hotel again, with all the memories. “Will we always live in a hotel?” I asked him.

  He asked me to stay inside all afternoon and relax. And meekly I obeyed; I was beginning to breathe freely again, through sunny days of love.

  It was the beginning of a new era. Parisian life, the decorators and their silks, the overstuffed armchairs, the Baccarat crystal champagne flutes, the rare perfumes, the refinements of the salons were nothing but the playthings of degenerates. Death was already in them. Life would soon prove me right on that point. The women who organized opium smoking parties and all the rest of the dolce far niente were obscene. I knew Tonio was not like those people.

  I realized I was not cut out to be the wife of a fashionable writer. Sharing our laughter and our intimacy with others was always catastrophic for me. I wanted to stand beside my husband like a fierce sentinel, intensely jealous of anything that could rob him of his power, his invulnerability. I knew intuitively that he was made to die, but I wanted him to arrive at his own end, the one God was leading him to.

  So I waited for him as usual, but this time with the strength our reunion had given me. Around five o’clock he came back, a piece of paper in his hand. “There’s your present!”

  I took it and read: it was a receipt for a duplex apartment at the top of a building on place Vauban. I looked at the floor plan: two terraces, ten rooms. I was overwhelmed! I was crying, but I wanted to move in that very night.

  He took an interest in every curtain, every detail of the decor. What color did I want the walls to be?

  “The color of water in a bathtub,” I answered.

  He had some painter friends come over to find exactly the right color. Only Marcel Duchamp found the secret, one gray day.

  It was the first real home we had had since our marriage. Our friends, who had been waiting a long time, made up for lost time. The doors of our home were always open. They would say to Boris, our Russian butler, “I’m not invited, but here I am. I’m a friend of Madame.”

  Every woman said, “I’m not invited, but I know Monsieur very well.”

  Boris fed borscht to the whole company.

  TONIO WAS DOING LESS PILOTING, but his love of aviation only grew. Generous and unthinking by nature, he brought home all his friends from the boulevards and the cafés, and they came back to visit more often than he would have liked. He would go out to dream on the terrace, which overlooked the dome of the Invalides, while the Paris International Exposition flooded the night with sound and light.

  The sounds and lights of our intimacy, meanwhile, were beginning to wane. There was too much coming and going at home. I still hadn’t completely recovered from my stay in Bern. At night I wandered down the long hallways of our apartment, sometimes dreaming of a little village on the African coast where I could live serenely with Tonio, immersed in the manuscripts that would be the only thing to separate us.

  The evenings, full of guitars, were also full of pitfalls. The faces of Picasso, Max Ernst, Duchamp, other Surrealists, and so many oth
er writers, painters, and filmmakers weren’t what I needed to put my mind at rest: I needed intimacy, a silence shared by two. Tonio understood and suggested we take a trip around the Mediterranean in our plane, a Simoun.

  IN MOROCCO, the French army, accompanied by drums, trumpets, and vivid cavalrymen mounted on Arab horses, paraded in front of Lyautey’s coffin.* This was our first stop. We took our place among our military friends, draped in their capes of black, light blue, bright red, and white, with embroidery and golden tassels. The luxury of all the rippling fabic was like a kind of music. The natives, in their immaculate, starched capes, covered kilometers of hot sunny ground with a layer of white snow.

  A colonel who looked like a handsome parakeet in his splendid uniform came to kiss my husband familiarly on both cheeks.

  “You’re my prisoner, and your wife is, too,” he told us. “I know you’re on a lecture tour, and I have to find time to see you as best I can, and the only way is for you to leave with me right now: I’m off for Cairo.”

  After lunch, my husband suddenly decided to go and leave me there. The trip, he claimed, would be too long, too fatiguing, I had visits to pay to our old friends in Casablanca, the plane from Casa to Athens was comfortable, and so on. In short, he said he would meet me in Athens in two weeks. Before I had a chance to protest, the two of them had dashed off into the crowd, which hadn’t yet dispersed, and I was left alone among the Arabs and the camels.

  Once again the waiting began.

  I took the plane two weeks later, as agreed, arriving in Athens just in time for the coronation of King George. Everyone was in a state of great excitement. My husband was delivering his lecture in a theater. I took a seat in the first row, after having promised him to take off my hat if he was speaking too softly, and to pull it down over my eyes if everything was going well. When he spoke in public, Tonio’s voice tended to be faint, timid, and subdued. That night he began to speak calmly and with great composure, explaining that he had lost his voice but would do his best to recount his experiences as an aviator anyway. In fact, he was speaking in a high-pitched voice, like a little boy repeating his lesson with absolute confidence. I had always seen him with his hands shaking whenever he found himself behind a podium, and when I saw him suddenly so much at ease, so sure of himself, I fainted. My Tonio had been transformed.

  I came to with the help of some smelling salts, very confused. He continued his lecture, undisturbed. It was an unqualified success.

  THE NEXT DAY we left for Rome. M. de Chambrun, the ambassador, recommended, in light of the diplomatic situation, that Tonio not give his lecture. We were delighted by the chance to escape from a visit to Il Duce and went home. The trip in the Simoun, which for me had been only somewhat enjoyable, nevertheless provoked the jealousy of all his women friends in Paris, each of whom believed she was destined to play the role of the ideal companion for Tonio, a role for which they all found me extremely unsuited. Back on place Vauban, he told our friends about the storm we had ridden out over the Adriatic, between Athens and Rome, when I’d been gnawing on my handkerchief. He added that in Rome I had disguised his mechanic, forcing him to put on a habit in order to go and see the pope.

  At the other end of the table, a few yards away from my husband, I continued to preside over dinner parties with guests I did not know. At home I kept silent, but at other people’s houses I became actively unpleasant. Around midnight, Tonio always brought home a few very pretty women with compliant husbands, and everyone settled into our place until dawn. The songs, the card tricks, the stories about the African desert, everything Tonio talked about, all of which I knew by heart, was replayed every evening. Around one in the morning, Boris would ask my permission to go to bed. And I would be the only one left to make sure everyone had something to eat and drink.

  Soon I was unable to cope with the innumerable phone calls that succeeded one another all morning, and a secretary had to be hired, though we were already short on money because of the plane, the apartment, and Tonio, who was no longer writing. Despite that, the secretary settled in and manifested a fervent devotion to her boss. She had the face of an umbrella and was no longer very young, but she rendered us a thousand services, including some that no one had asked her to render. She was like a bell that rings all by itself. She did all she could to keep me away from everything. She had decided that I should ignore all phone calls for my husband. There were unexpected visits at the most extraordinary hours. The secretary would say, “Monsieur made that appointment.” And I had the right only to remain silent.

  Tonio was never free to go with me to the circus, which I adored, or to the movies. I no longer understood what was happening in my home. I wondered if I still had his permission to be there. On weekends he asked me to accept invitations to places outside the city, where I went against my will, convinced that on place Vauban, meanwhile, a very good time was being had without me. In vain I sought the reason for the distance that was growing between us, though there had been no quarrel or any clear reason for it. Sleep abandoned me once more. But where he was concerned, my patience had no limits.

  Everyone complained of my irritability. “How can you stand a woman like that?” his friends asked in perfidious amazement.

  Amid all the evenings of guitar music and card tricks, the only thing left of our intimacy was worries about money, for those parties cost a lot—liquor, flowers, services, all the rest—and the laughter that I forced myself to draw from somewhere, I don’t know where, from a country that all of us carry inside ourselves for times of agony. My husband asked me why I was so pale, why I wasn’t having any fun. A friend of mine, a poet, declared one day, “Forced labor would be easier than what your wife is going through. This is your sixtieth night of merrymaking. You’re killing her! If you’re out to destroy her, at least tell her so. Are you enjoying this? When are you ever going to let her sleep?”

  After that, the guitars went somewhere else for a few days and Tonio stayed home. He plunged into the blackest kind of work: his bank accounts. There was nothing left. He became edgy and unfair. Only the dog found grace in his arms. From time to time he came to my room to look in on me. Fortunately, I had gone back to sculpting.

  “Are you there, Consuelo?”

  “Yes, Tonio, I’m still here . . .”

  The secretary had broken a finger, and we had a short stretch of peace. Things weren’t going well with Tonio, but I could do nothing for him.

  HE HAD PREPARED HIS SIMOUN for a Paris–Timbuktu flight: he had to write an article for Paris-Soir. He’d been paid in advance for the article, but all the money had gone to pay his debts. He was irritable and taciturn and paced whole miles through the house. He was as agitated as a windmill, grinding out blackness. Finally I made up my mind to speak to him; the look of indifference he put on as soon as I went in augured badly for what was to follow.

  “You’re unhappy,” I began. “Tell me what is tormenting you. With all my heart I want to help you. It isn’t curiosity that moves me. But I feel that you are far from me. Be my friend and tell me about your troubles.”

  “For more than two weeks I’ve been running all over Paris doing all I can to find the money I need for my flight. Fuel and insurance alone already cost more than sixty thousand francs. I hardly have enough to keep the household fed. And of course that doesn’t include the rent, the secretary, the servants who haven’t been paid . . .”

  He had never confided in me at all about his finances.

  “I think Paris-Soir could advance you that much, no?”

  “They’ve refused.”

  “And your publisher?”

  “He also refused. He doesn’t care about my flights, only my books, which is natural.”

  “Will you let me try?”

  “Do whatever you want,” he concluded petulantly. “All I know is that I have to leave in ten days.”

  I went into the sitting room and asked my dear friend Suzanne Werth to accompany me on my mission. But when I left the office
of Prouvost, the editor of Paris-Soir, I was not only disappointed at having been turned down, but anguished. Prouvost had complained emphatically that my husband hadn’t lived up to his commitments to the magazine.

  I rested for an hour at Suzanne’s place on rue d’ Assas, and then, drawing all my courage from my love for Tonio, I went to see his publisher. He received me immediately with the utmost courtesy but explained that it was his brother who handled all financial matters.

  “I know,” I told him, “that you have advanced Tonio a certain amount of money for his forthcoming books, and I want to be loyal to you. A movie studio would like to buy a screenplay by Tonio titled Igor for five hundred thousand francs. He’s also going to make it into a book, probably a novel. You know very well that he doesn’t want to hear anything more about the movies after his first two films. Since your brother is involved in the movies, he may be able to negotiate a better deal than I can. Tonio told me to come to an agreement at any price because he needs sixty thousand francs immediately, for his flight. What should I do?”

  “Tonio must come and see me. He will have his money.”

  I threw myself at him and kissed him. I ran to do the same to Tonio. But I didn’t receive as warm a welcome as I had expected.

  “You’ve undoubtedly misunderstood something.”

  “No, Suzanne can attest.”

  “Is it true?”

  He passed up the chance to thank me in order to go and pick up his check.

  Since his accident in Libya, his liver had been bothering him. He couldn’t sleep. One of my women friends, who was my confidante at that time, gave me a bed that allowed me to sleep in another room, on another floor. The bed was much too large to fit into our bedroom. She also suggested I have my own telephone line installed so that I would be disturbed less often.

  CHRISTMAS WAS COMING. I thought a visit to his mother would bring my husband a little calm. His sister insisted that I bring him to Agay to celebrate the anniversary of the miracle that had saved him from the Libyan desert. Tonio instructed me to pack my bags. It was December 22. That evening, he drove me to the Train Bleu. He was held back in Paris by business matters, and the Simoun was being repaired; he promised to join me the next day.