The Tale of the Rose

by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery

  So we took two rooms at the hotel: one for Monsieur, the other for Madame. It was like something out of the English novels then in vogue.

  “Do you really want two rooms?”

  “Yes, it will be more comfortable,” Tonio told me. “I work at night, and that would keep you awake. I know you.”

  “All right, as you wish.”

  At the front desk I asked for two rooms, but not on the same floor.

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “No, no. That way you’ll bother me less when you come in late.”

  “Very well, but you will regret it.”

  “Oh, I’ve already regretted it. For a minute, just one minute. A single minute. It was when I went home to place Vauban for the last time and all our furniture, all our things were gone. You hadn’t said a single word to warn me. Oh yes! That was the moment when I had regrets, I want you to know that. But you too, I think you’ll regret it one day, too.”

  “It’s a simple matter of saving money.”

  “Saving money? But at a hotel we’ll pay twice what our rent on place Vauban was, not counting meals. Enfin, your accounting methods are mysterious—you must have learned them in the sky. Maybe it is a better bargain, after all. Maybe this way it will be easier for us to separate. There’s the savings, I understand. You want to leave me quietly and discreetly. You’re so very kind: thank you.”

  We were shown to our rooms. One was on the sixth floor, the other on the eighth. He gave a melancholy thank-you and muttered, “But who’ll give me my shirts, my handkerchiefs?”

  “I’ll go up to your room when you’re there, and you’ll have clean shirts and ties.”

  “You’re very kind,” he echoed. “You know I broke everything in my body. My gallbladder is damaged and it’s impossible to operate—the crash in Guatemala left everything in my body all mixed up. My heart is touching my stomach, and I always feel as though I’m about to vomit.”

  “Instead you vomit up your life, you vomit everything. What will be left when you’re done?”

  “Oh, women never want to understand men!”

  “Men? All men? No. One man, yes: you. I know, you need to be entirely alone. Your days must be entirely free, without meals, without a wife, without a home. You want to come and go like a ghost. Have I understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you call me back from Guatemala? Why? To put me up in a hotel room? To wait for what?”

  “Me?”

  “You’ve gone too far! I will never be able to follow you! Here we are in a hotel again. In one week your stomach will be upset from the restaurant food, the liquor, the mess . . .”

  “I’m already sick. I’m going to Vichy to have my liver looked after.”

  “Let’s go this evening, if you like.”

  “No, I’ll go alone. I need solitude. I’ll meet you back here afterward.”

  “Thank you. And how would you like me to spend my time?”

  “Finding us another apartment.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “In your room, then.”

  “If you want.”

  “But if someone calls me on the phone, you’ll have to go into the bathroom. You’ll let me talk alone?”

  “I have never prevented you from speaking on the telephone. The things you ask me to do make me sad. Me, I have nothing to say to anyone, nothing to hide. Let’s go to sleep.”

  His E. continued to dominate him, but not as much as she once had, since he was asking for my help and he was so sad. That night I decided to look for a new apartment. Something bitter, a rain of ashes and stones, was pounding down on our home. A woman, that’s all. There was no laughter left in my heart. I knew this had to end. What were these interludes in hotels for?

  By midnight I had forgotten all my woe in his arms. That was how our life was, with all its tos and fros, its love and separations.

  THE NEXT MORNING I set out to look for an inexpensive apartment. There had to be one somewhere in Paris, with a kitchen where I could make him vegetables and rice and a little room where he could put away his books. A place where he would always be in my arms, it didn’t matter where it was as long as he was in my arms. Half asleep, he asked me again to find a roof to shelter us.

  At L’Observatoire I discovered a sixth-floor apartment above the treetops, with no elevator, that was free right away. I waited for Tonio to visit it, groaning with impatience. We went there together. He was ecstatic. He thanked me with tears in his eyes. I was thrilled.

  His room had a large balcony from which he could see the park. The rent wasn’t at all expensive. We were young, and climbing five flights of stairs was nothing for us. On the balcony I could have birds, flowers. . . . The kitchen was large, with a big coal stove that would heat half the apartment. We’d put a smaller stove in his study, and that would be it. In two weeks, we could be all moved in, just in time for Christmas.

  He invited our dear friend Suzanne to visit the apartment with us, and she proved as happy with it as I was. We paid the first three months’ rent and were given the keys.

  The next day he didn’t come back to the hotel but left me a message saying he would be traveling for a few days. I was so happy with my apartment that I didn’t worry. Then, around noon, his business manager called and asked me to give him the keys to the apartment at L’Observatoire. My husband had thought it over; he didn’t have the means to heat an apartment just then, since the price of coal had gone up.

  My God! The hotel was ten times more expensive. I argued, but it was an order. I gave the keys back, weeping.

  Three days later, he arrived, pale, haggard, and troubled. One of my friends told me she had run into him in Paris: he had lied again.

  I was sad and desperate.

  “Consuelo, do you want to find a little apartment again, a pretty one, for you alone? I swear that I really will rent it, and that I will come to see you often.”

  I understood that he no longer wanted to live with me. It was up to me to decide to live alone.

  “Yes, Tonio, I’ll ask my agency.”

  Fortunately, some friends of ours were renting out a two-floor apartment on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, very cheap and with a view of the Seine. Tonio took me to the agency at once and paid a year’s rent. I was given the keys. I went to pray at a church, and he went with me. We wandered the quais, looking at books. I was careful not to take an interest in any costly book that he would have wanted to buy me, and I talked about the shadows on the water. On January 1, I said, I would be living on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. He would find the upper floor very pleasant for his work. We would fill it with books and turn it into a lovely little library. He promised he would come back that night. I stayed in his room, but he never came.

  Nor did he come the next morning. He phoned me so I wouldn’t worry. His car had broken down out in the country, and he would be there for dinner.

  That evening, the two of us ate dinner at the Brasserie du Lutétia, without saying much. A great fatigue, a great lassitude had come over us.

  “Let’s go to sleep, my wife,” he said at last. “I want to rest near you.”

  “Yes, Tonio.”

  We slept like brother and sister, tenderly intertwined, until noon. He got dressed slowly, begged me to stay in bed, and announced that he had to go to Algeria, where he would be staying at the Hôtel Aletti. He would write me.

  He begged my forgiveness for leaving me alone so close to the new year, especially with the moving to do. I didn’t even have the strength to protest. My eyes were half closed when he kissed me good-bye.

  The agreement with the landlord on the Quai des Grands-Augustins was that as soon as the painters were finished I would move in. I had nothing else to do for Christmas and the painters were finished, so I rented a truck. The movers advised me to move the furniture well before the holidays. On November 26, therefore, the truck loaded with my things arrived at the quai. The concierge greeted us with a
scowl and told us that we could not bring the furniture in. I called the secretary of the landlord, who was on vacation. I had to keep the truck, fully loaded, on the quai, which cost me two hundred francs per day. Finally, on January 2, the landlord came back and informed me that my husband had paid a penalty in order to break the contract and let the apartment go.

  I thought I would go mad. But the human body is much stronger than we think. It seems to laugh at the cobwebs of despair that the heart weaves before our eyes in order to blind us to our fate. The body walks and goes on walking. My husband was in Algeria, and I was alone: I bore with my solitude that New Year’s Eve. I was learning that I had to live from one day to the next.

  With Suzanne to accompany me, I went to rent a studio on rue Froidevaux. I put a table, three chairs, a big coal stove, and my old piano there. And I left the Hôtel Lutétia, where my husband had never stayed for more than a few hours a week. Some friends informed me that he was back and had rented a small bachelor flat in Auteuil, where the lovely E. spent her afternoons with him. My sculpting was all I had left to console me.

  Tonio thought my decision was courageous. My studio pleased him. I heard out his compliments like a dead woman counting the blows of the hammer that is nailing her coffin shut.

  So we were separated. The view of the Montparnasse cemetery was chilling, but little by little I grew used to it. My concierges, father and son, made tombstones. The son worked faster than his father; the old man struck long, slow, muted blows, while the son’s little hammer fell to a different rhythm. I listened to the sound of hammers against tombstones from morning to night; those stones would seal off the lives of other people who, like me, had laughed, loved, and suffered.

  I explained this strangely syncopated background noise to Tonio. His visits came almost every day but were very brief. I also told him about my anguish.

  “You’ll get used to it; human beings get used to everything,” he assured me.

  “Yes, I remember how they make slaves out of people on the Río de Oro. Once you’ve accepted the humiliation of no longer being yourself, no longer being free, then you’re happy, isn’t that it? It’s the same with me. You’ve made me get used to living alone, on the edge of a cemetery, on a thousand francs a month. You bring me two hundred fifty francs a week; I feel like a maid on vacation. Why can’t you give me the whole amount at once?”

  “I’m not rich, Consuelo. I’m earning our living. If I gave you a thousand francs a month, what would you do, little one? You’d spend it all at once.”

  “I’ll work, as poor women do. Maybe I would be happier. . . . Maybe I would earn more than a thousand francs a month.”

  I was pale and struggling for breath. I spent whole nights weeping, but I didn’t want to reproach him in any way. He didn’t love me anymore, and that was his right. You cannot berate another person for having ceased to love you. He was helping me survive, nevertheless, in good times and in bad: a thousand francs a month, that covered the rent and the coal. I lived on coffee and brioche, and sometimes only bread and sausage. But the idea of being a slave living on two hundred fifty francs a week was becoming unbearable.

  “Thank you, Tonio,” I told him one day. “I don’t want any more money from you. Is that the only thing you and I still have in common?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said sadly.

  “Then, starting from today, we’ll have nothing more in common. Take back your two hundred fifty francs and buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate my freedom, if you want: we’ll drink it together.”

  “But tomorrow how will you eat?”

  “That doesn’t concern you since we no longer have anything in common. But if you’re curious, I’ll tell you that I am going to find a job.”

  “Work? You? But you’re far too fragile! You only weigh about ninety pounds. You can barely carry a full bottle of wine.”

  “Give me those two hundred fifty francs. In five minutes I’ll bring you a full bottle of champagne, and you will never come back here again to pay me my weekly wage as if I were an employee.”

  “All right, but don’t go out. We can order the champagne over the phone.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  A long moment passed before the champagne arrived.

  “To your freedom . . .”

  “To yours . . .”

  “Tomorrow I’m sure you’ll call and ask me to bring you money. It will be difficult because I’m very hard pressed right now. I’ll bring you your weekly wage again, as you call it. I earn four thousand to five thousand francs a month, and I have to pay the rent, the telephone, the restaurant bills, and give a thousand francs to my mother and a thousand francs to you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything more after today.”

  “We’ll see.”

  After this scene, he kissed me tenderly on the mouth the way he used to, then left. He had put some more coal in the stove, he had played the piano, he had made his eternal scrambled eggs in the kitchen. For the first time he had felt at home and had even told me, “If you want me to spend the night, I’ll stay. You’re still my wife.”

  “No, no,” I cried. “Tomorrow I’m going to work. I’m going to work.”

  “You’re crazy. You really don’t want me to?”

  “No, I want to work. I want to be free. Enough of this slavery! Enough of being your wife by the month!”

  Yet I loved this very large boy who was my husband, and he loved me, I knew he did. But he wanted to be a free husband, and I reproached myself for making him come back to me every time I needed to pay for my room, my food, my telephone. We held each other for a long time, our champagne glasses in our hands, and swore we would love each other forever. He stayed in my bed, but at five in the morning I found myself alone, half asleep. He had left a little note and a pretty sketch that was his portrait: a clown with a flower in his hand, very embarrassed, an awkward clown who didn’t know what to do with his flower. I later learned that the flower was me, a very proud flower, as he says in The Little Prince.

  It was difficult to go from my dream to reality. I had celebrated my independence; now it was up to me to keep my word. I could hardly comb my hair, get dressed, make myself a coffee. I smiled: it really was like a scene from a cheap novel. I was looking for work. What kind of work, anyway?

  I went to sit at a table on the terrace of the Sélect to think. It was urgent that I come up with a plan. There were only twenty francs left in my purse, barely enough to buy half a baguette and two tomatoes.

  I was at my table in the Sélect, reading my newspaper, when suddenly light flooded into my mind for, as in a dream, Spanish words were ringing in my ears. The café’s radio was announcing, “Cigarillos La Morena, cómpralos, señorita!” I leaped from my chair. The message was meant for me. I had found the work I needed: radio advertisements in Spanish. I could certainly earn my living that way. I knew a lot of people in Paris. Crémieux gave lectures over Radio-Paris for Spanish-speaking countries; he would help me.

  No sooner said than done: the next day I was settled in front of a microphone, speaking Spanish. I wasn’t only reading advertisements but also presenting songs and plays.

  I was saved.

  20

  TONIO’S FINANCIAL SITUATION eventually improved. His promotion to the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor and the success of Wind, Sand, and Stars* had made him a well-known, much admired writer. We were no longer living together, but we hadn’t separated either. This was our love, the inevitable destiny of our love: we simply had to get used to living that way. He rented me a large house in the country, the estate of La Feuilleraie. He was enjoying his new life, half single, half married. He lived in his bachelor quarters, and I lived in the country. He told me, “You’re very happy here in the country. You’re better off here than on place Vauban, aren’t you?”

  He had moved heaven and earth to get coal for me that winter. He was earning a little money writing for L’Intransigeant, and he told me that he had written th
ose magazine articles without much wanting to, just in order to buy me coal: “So we can have central heating installed for you and buy you furniture for the garden, benches and chairs in different colors, lemon yellow and blue.”

  He came regularly to La Feuilleraie, more often than I wanted him to, actually. He would arrive, and if he found that I had friends over for lunch or dinner, he would go to a little bistro in the village where he wrote me letters ten or fifteen pages long, love letters such as I had never received before.

  The garden was marvelous. Lilacs grew everywhere, but I still felt alone. The flowering of spring after heavy rains, the orchards loaded down with fruit, the scent of the lilacs, and the silence of the garden, which was like something out of Lamartine, all cried out for lovers to come and sit on the moss-covered benches.

  A faithful old spinster went everywhere with me, sometimes as the cook, sometimes as the maternal comforter of my tears. I also had a pair of old gardeners, Monsieur and Madame Jules, but I missed having someone young around. I asked my dressmaker’s daughter to come and live at La Feuilleraie. She was Russian, very pretty, and laboriously earning about fifty francs a week in Paris by spending all day bent over magnificent dresses that other people would wear. I offered her the same salary if she would move into my garden, love the flowers, put away my handkerchiefs, and choose pretty dresses and hats for me. Her name was Véra; she was barely twenty years old. Quickly, she became La Feuilleraie’s young girl. She loved climbing the trees, repotting plants in the greenhouse, and growing strange flowers, black orchids or Chinese roses.

  Véra began to love me like a sister. She took devoted care of the goats, the ducks, the rabbits, the donkeys, and even a pregnant cow named Natasha, who would soon begin giving us milk. Véra awaited the calf’s birth with great concern.

  She asked me questions about my childhood, which I answered evasively, for she thought I had always lived at La Feuilleraie. I let her dream. She had an odd way of dressing; sometimes she looked like a Russian ice skater or a peasant woman from the Circassian mountains, sometimes like an Indian.