I arrived at a house where he was the one they were waiting for, not me; I was used to this, but now, for the first time, I took it badly. I told his mother and sister, “Instead of Tonio, it’s me. He’s not coming.”
He had promised to come, but I was sure he wouldn’t. I could feel it in the way he had sipped his drink, the way he had spoken to me.
“I don’t know what’s happened. He’s changed, that’s all. I’m worn out. I’m very sorry about this. He forced me to come. Accept me, but believe me, I’m not happy about it.”
“Mais non, Consuelo, he’ll arrive tomorrow, you’ll see. Go and rest,” my mother-in-law reassured me.
Christmas. The château was in a festive mood. All the village children were invited to come and receive their toys. Everyone was laughing, singing, the children were dressed as angels, the stuffed turkeys smelled of golden chestnuts, and everyone rejoiced as midnight approached. Still no Tonio. The telephone rang a few minutes before that solemn hour. He was calling his mother. He barely said a word to her and wanted to speak to me. I refused.
“Tell him from me that he is supposed to be here at midnight; he promised.”
“But he’s asking for your help, he needs you in Paris. If I had a husband like him,” his mother added, “I would follow him to the ends of the earth.”
She won.
“It’s very late,” I conceded. “I can’t go back to Paris by myself tonight.”
For the first time, I asked someone to go with me.
“All right,” Tonio’s sister Didi said. “We’ll leave after midnight.”
At Saulieu, in Burgundy, our car crashed. Luckily, I was not at the steering wheel.
My sister-in-law was in the hospital when Tonio came to get me. A fine Christmas that was! There was some risk that she would be permanently disfigured. We took her back with us to Paris, where I gave her my room and moved into the living room. She smiled at my husband, her head covered with bandages. Finally the specialists calmed our fears: there was no longer any question of surgery. With rest, they promised, everything would be fine and her face would be back to normal. I took tender care of her, surrounding her with my knickknacks, offering her my radio. Tonio spent long hours at the foot of her bed. One thing was strange: she begged me to leave whenever she was with Tonio or E.* The three of them spent long hours together in my room. When I went in, silence fell. Once I went in to ask my sister-in-law what she wanted for lunch. I was friendly, I said laughingly: “You look as if you’re conspiring. What’s up?”
They all adopted an absent air. I was afraid to go into my own bedroom. I didn’t understand what was going on, but Didi was doing better. She was laughing again; the radio was doing the trick. I tried to make sure that Tonio was getting enough sleep: his Paris–Timbuktu flight was only a few days away. But the evenings with my sister-in-law stretched very late into the night. I felt as though I were surrounded with pitfalls, there in my own home. Tonio seemed like an actor who had never read his lines but found himself suddenly pushed onto a stage to act out an interminable play in which everyone knew their part except him, and he had to improvise.
One night, very late, I asked Tonio to join me. He hadn’t once come to see me since Christmas Day. I was living on the upper floor. I shouted down the stairs, “Tonio, will you bring me the thermometer, I think I have a fever.”
He arrived with the deck of cards he always had with him, either to help himself concentrate or to delay his responses at problematic moments. I gripped his wrists hard, my eyes full of tears. “Let’s end this game, Tonio. Nothing, nothing is right anymore. You know that perfectly well.”
“What?” he repeated.
His voice, however, expressed a desire to know what I meant.
“You don’t love me anymore. I bother you. I bother your sister. You try not to look at me. Even when we’re eating together. Right now, the touch of my hands on yours is distasteful to you. But I won’t let you go, you’re going to have to listen to me.”
The telephone in his part of the apartment rang. Tonio tried to extricate himself from me.
“You won’t answer. Every evening, I listen to you talking on the phone for hours. You lower your voice as if you were afraid of being heard when I go to the kitchen to get a glass of milk to help me sleep.”
At that moment my telephone rang, though it must have been at least four o’clock in the morning. I answered. It was E., who asked me some question, I don’t remember what, and excused herself for having called at that hour; she knew, she said, that Tonio wasn’t sleeping.
“No, you must excuse me,” I replied. “I’m talking to him right now.”
Tonio was sitting on my bed, silent and immobile.
“Since you don’t want to talk,” I went on, “I will. Do you understand this? Someone pursues me into my own bedroom because there’s no answer on your line? Yes, I am jealous! Though I have no reason to be, because you don’t love me. You hate me right now, God knows why. Yet you know that nothing ugly, nothing bad has ever happened to you because of me. Could it be the opposite that you love? You have never lied to me, even now when you’re silent as a tomb. I would so like to know what you’re thinking! I have the right to know and to stop feeling constantly threatened. You’re doing card tricks to distract me, but your face is growing sad. I know it well. I’m not a saint or a healer. I’m sure I can do nothing for you because you’ve stripped me of my power to help you with my love. What’s more, I don’t believe there’s anything you can do at this point to set my mind at ease. Sleep. Forget my voice, if it’s unpleasant to you. But don’t forget what I’m going to say to you: the most terrible dramas are those veiled in mystery.”
His telephone rang again. This time I told him to answer it.
HIS PUBLISHER gave a big party to celebrate Didi’s recovery. Morand, Pourtalès, and many other writers were there. Didi, thrilled, never left her brother’s side, and he never left the side of E., who was at her most beautiful that evening, as long as she didn’t show her teeth.
Around one in the morning, I reproached my husband for not having spoken a single word to me all evening. He answered, “I’ve known my sister for thirty-five years, and I’ve only known you for seven!”
I felt as if I’d been banished from the planet. I took the key to our apartment from my purse and gave it to him.
“Here’s the key. I do not want to stay with a husband who repudiates me.”
I had spoken very loudly. The conversation around us stopped. Everyone thought I was a horrible woman. A shrew. I felt that my life was over. The lady of the house gave me my coat without a word. I felt as if I were falling into a void.
I woke up in a bed in Vaugirard hospital, in a ward with people who had no papers. I’d been picked up during the night, on the sidewalk. The cries of my fellow patients had awoken me. I raised my head. One man had had a knife stuck in his belly. A woman was gesticulating, standing on her bed, held back by two nurses who struggled to calm her down while a male nurse sprayed her with cold water. An injection finally quieted her down; then it was my turn.
“Thanks,” I told them, “I’m sleeping very well.”
After my stay in the clinic in Bern, I knew how to act with nurses and their stern treatment. I pretended to sleep. My ruse succeeded, and they moved to another bed. I tried to piece together my memories.
I repeated to myself, “There is, in Paris, a man who is my husband. He will come to get me.” I finally fell asleep with that thought. But very soon I began shaking with fever. The next morning, the man who brought the patients their food appeared. He was coughing. In my most angelic voice, I advised him to take some pills. “They’re too expensive,” he answered.
“Here, take my pearl. I don’t need rings in the hospital.”
I took off a ring and handed it to him.
“If I can do anything for you, tell me, but quickly.”
As he was biting the pearl to see if it was fake, I sighed. “Oh, it’s difficult. You won�
�t be able to.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“You’ll have to get me out of here. I’ve kept my dress on under the nightgown.”
“Can you walk?”
“Yes, of course. Run, even!”
“I’ll leave the door at the end of the garden open for a minute. Go slowly, don’t run; if anyone sees you, tell them you came to visit a patient.”
That was how I made my escape and went home to place Vauban. Humiliated, in despair. I had been locked up!
It was very hard for me to walk past my concierges in an evening gown, shivering with cold—I’d lost my coat during my late-night blackout—my hair in a mess. I later found out that they knew all about my night’s misadventures; in fact, they’d been the first to know, as was always the case in Paris.
The police had gone to the apartment twice to confirm that my husband had no intention of collecting his wife from that ward full of derelicts, but they hadn’t been able to see him or speak to him over the phone. It was therefore difficult for them to make a decision about my case. Tonio’s door had remained shut, and my sister-in-law’s voice had answered that her brother was sleeping and they were sending a friend to see the patient. The police had had to fall back on the concierge, who had gone to the hospital while I was sleeping to identify me.
I went into my room and found a woman sleeping in my bed, fully dressed.
Tonio was leaving at four o’clock on the Paris–Toulouse train. For the first time, I hadn’t taken the trouble to pack his bags. That nagging thought prevented me from getting any sleep, and I finally got out of bed to see to that little task, which I had never failed to carry out.
Part Four
Paris–Guatemala–El Salvador– Paris, 1938–1940
17
THERE WERE THREE OF US at lunch the next day; my sister-in-law was looking radiantly happy. No mention was made of my night. My husband sat down at the piano; he hadn’t said a word to me since the day before. I looked awful and didn’t dare budge from my chair. He gestured for me to come over to the piano and sit down on the bench next to him. He wanted to ask my forgiveness for not having gone to the hospital that night.
“I told Gaston to bring you back here,” he said. “It would have been too painful for me to go myself. It took him two hours to find you. Since he didn’t have a note signed by me, they didn’t want to let him take you away. But I waited up in anguish, drained by the quarrel, imagining the worst. I was given some pills to take, and I fell asleep.”
He went on plunking at the piano keys with one hand while the other caressed my hair, which was hanging down piteously in my face.
“You are not being good, little girl,” he sang to the rhythm of his notes.
“Maybe you aren’t, either!”
“You think?”
“I’m never sick when you are well.”
“Maybe so,” he answered, melancholy.
And he stopped playing. “I’m leaving for Toulouse at four o’clock.”
“I’ll talk to you on the train.”
I kissed him, then ran to lock myself in my room.
“All aboard, all aboard . . .” Quick handshakes all around, then he hurried on board the train ahead of me. My sister-in-law took me by the shoulders and announced, “I’m the one who’s going with him.”
The train was starting to move. He stretched out his hand to Didi, to help her up.
That evening, around midnight, he called me. He spoke to me for more than an hour. He begged me to take the first train and come join him; his departure for Timbuktu* had been postponed for two or three days. But I no longer had the strength or the courage.
WE SAW EACH OTHER once more when he came back to Marseille. The mere thought of the meeting made me shake, I didn’t know whether from fear or from love. I was surrounded by good friends. I hadn’t received any message from him except the one laconically announcing his return.
Between his descent from the plane and dinnertime, everything was easy; all conversation was put off until later, and our true reunion was delayed. At the hotel, in front of his two closed suitcases, he stood immobile, staring fixedly at the floor. I began opening the latch of one of the suitcases. He jumped like a man startled out of sleep. “What do you want?”
“A pair of pajamas for you. Which suitcase are they in?”
Both of us rummaged in the suitcases, or rather in the jumble of clothes, until at last we found both a top and a bottom.
“I know, I know—you’re going to tell me I mixed the dirty laundry in with the clean clothes. . . . But it’s late. Let’s go to sleep.”
He needed to give an impression of composure.
Hotels in Marseille are not heated. In theory, the sun reigns unfailingly over the South. No native of Marseille will ever admit to being cold, even during the gray days iced over by the cold wind known as the mistral, which, in combination with the odors of the port and the salty sea air, has given the locals their low, husky voices. Through the window I watched the docks, which were always teeming with activity. As the night grew darker, the port’s wealthy pimps became more active.
I couldn’t think. I had waited for my husband to come back so eagerly, and there he was before me, cold as a marble statue, distant as the stars. I no longer felt any pain. I told myself that I had, once more, to wait for his return. Making an effort to open my mouth, I asked him, “Are you sleepy?”
“Oui, oui. I’m very tired. Let’s go and lie down.”
I lowered my head and my whole body and plunged into the chaos of his suitcases to try to establish a little order. I had hardly picked up a pair of socks and some dirty handkerchiefs when he snatched them away, shouting, “Don’t touch my things. I beg you not to touch my things. I am an adult, and I am entitled to fold my shirts and put them away by myself!”
I had always carefully packed and unpacked his suitcases. I was the only one who knew how his clothes had to be arranged. I felt a chill in the small of my back at his sudden change in attitude.
I thought he was ill or in a foul mood. Maybe he was worried about money. Half dressed, I slipped into bed. My heart was colder than his arms, colder than the blankets, which were frozen by the mistral. He closed the windows tightly, put out the lights, and gently sat down on the edge of the bed. He too could feel the fear that had filled my whole body.
Our return trip in the train took place in the same silence: we treated each other so formally that it was as if we were strangers forced to travel in the same compartment. We reached home, but that evening was just like the previous one. He fell asleep, but my female nerves kept me awake. Wary as a cat, I started across our big apartment. I went to the farthest room, where the sound of my anxious insomnia was least likely to be heard. Never before had I seen him so distant, so silent, without a word for me. One of his suitcases was sticking out of a cupboard stuffed with books. What was that suitcase doing there, still closed? I attacked it immediately as if it were the enemy. I opened it and dug through it ferociously. The dirty laundry he had grabbed away from me the day before was still there, and lying among it were a hundred or more perfumed letters. The scent of the paper alone was enough to explain my husband’s behavior. I opened the first letter: yes, it was his handwriting. And I read, “Darling, darling . . .” But the letter was not for me. Who was this lucky “darling”? I couldn’t read another word. My tears kept me from understanding. In my distress, I deciphered only a single line: it said that he couldn’t keep his wife from coming to London; she was invited, and it would be cruel and futile to stop her. But if my rival were to ask him tomorrow to spend seven years at sea with her, he wrote, he would leave without even telling me good-bye.
I couldn’t bear to read any more. The other letters were from the “darling” in question.
What to do? I had no experience of this kind of situation. Well, I did now. I went to the bedroom, woke him up, and showed him his letters.
“So you went through my things?”
My tears cut s
hort his anger.
“Now that you know, it’s better this way.”
He lowered his head timidly, like a son in front of his mother.
“What are you going to do?” he asked me.
“Me? Nothing. Something has just been broken inside me; you yourself will never be able to repair it.”
I held my hand to my heart, which was beating too fast. I felt idiotic, as if I were in one of those farces where adultery is suddenly discovered. I jeered at myself.
“And you?” I threw back at him. “What are you going to do? I have no reason to reproach you. You don’t love me anymore, and that’s your right. We had an agreement. I was the one who proposed it: ‘When one of us stops loving the other, we’ll have to tell each other, to confess.’ Love is a fragile thing, sometimes you can get lost in its immensity. . . . And there it is, I’m the one who is lost, but if you are happy with her, I don’t wish either of you any ill. Leave as quickly as possible, and for good, with her. Don’t ever see me again; go live in another country. Distance will make us forget.”
I knew the name of his new country, and I told him so, talking fast without pausing for breath. “If your passion, your love for her is real, you must not leave her. I promise I won’t die. I’ll try to live and I’ll remember that I was the one who allowed you to find your true love. So go, you can go off to sea for seven years or seven thousand years, without saying good-bye.”
He was pale and serious.
“I admire you,” he said, pulling me slowly toward him. “I’m sorry you found that letter, I should have warned you. I was afraid of making you suffer, very afraid. I love you from the bottom of my heart. I love you as a sister, as a daughter, as my homeland, but I can’t escape her. I can’t spend a single day without seeing her, without hearing her. She is like a drug to me. She is destroying me, she is bad for me, she is tearing us apart, but I can’t leave her.”
The Tale of the Rose Page 14