One day when she had drunk a little more champagne than usual because it was her birthday, she decided to insist: “But why doesn’t your husband come to stay? And you, don’t you ever visit him in Paris?”
It was a serious question, a problem I couldn’t explain even to myself. It was understood between my husband and me that he would live in Paris and I would live here. The answer wasn’t very cheerful, and without thinking I told Véra the truth: “Why, Véra, I suppose I hadn’t thought of that. I could go and visit him one day.”
“Let’s go!” she said with great excitement. “I would love to see his apartment. I want to see how he lives, what furniture he has, what neighborhood he lives in. To see his servants.”
We were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Tonio himself, who had just driven up with a friend. He was in the habit of making these unexpected visits, for he knew how good-natured my cook was and how much pleasure Véra and I took in welcoming him to lunch, even if we were already having dessert.
That day, our table was covered with forget-me-nots. For her party, Véra had wanted the table to look like a flower bed full of blue flowers. Her name, Véra, was written on it, and mine, too, in letters made from dark mauve violets, along with a heart that had a little metal airplane inside it that she had put there.
“God, how beautiful you are!” Tonio cried out when he saw us. His friend had joined him at the door of the dining room, but he stopped him from joining our intimate lunch party, I don’t know why, and abruptly sent him away. “Sorry, old man, my wife has finished with lunch. Thanks for the car. I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon here.”
He looked like an Arab sheik, and his black eyes shone with a singular gleam that made us tremble. I didn’t ask him why he had made his friend go away. Perhaps he wanted this feast of forget-me-nots for himself alone. He sat down at the table as if he owned all the perfumed loveliness around him.
“My children, you are eating flowers,” he said. “Flowers taste good!”
“It was Véra who prepared this marvelous table to celebrate her twentieth birthday. We’re alone, and you know I have to work this evening. You’re welcome to attend her birthday party. Véra was just talking about you: she was wondering what your apartment in Paris is like.”
His face closed. He lowered his eyes and, with his right hand, put some violets on his plate, as if to perfume the rice he was eating. Jules arrived at exactly the right moment with his present for Véra. It was a little tortoise; he and his wife had spent several days painting its shell silver. Vera’s name was written across the poor creature’s back in tiny gold letters. He presented us with the tortoise inside a large seashell. Tonio played sommelier and had us drink more and more. We watched the figure of my giant husband, tall as a tree, moving across the dining room in the dance of a conqueror.
“You are happy here, Consuelo. The light in this room is wonderful. Look out the window at that lawn, those colors—it’s like a dream. Here both of you are like princesses in some enchanted tale.”
“Why don’t you live with us?” Véra asked. “We have quite a number of rooms, you’re sure to find one you like. Every day you will have a feast of flowers on the table, I promise.”
“Thank you, Véra. Let’s go outside and have our coffee in the little pavilion.”
“But Madame Jules is expecting us to be here,” I said. “She’s planning to serve us the coffee and a surprise cake for Véra.”
Nevertheless, we walked down paths lined with flowering lilacs, throwing twigs at one another’s hair, our cheeks bulging with cherries, for we put whole handfuls in our mouths at once.
Véra and Tonio were both leaning against the trunk of an old cherry tree. They were staring into each other’s eyes like young animals who suddenly fall in love and want to prove it to each other immediately. I let them stand there with their gazes full of desire, telling myself serenely that in a harem the sultan gratifies several women in turn. And now it was Véra’s turn.
As we ate Madame Jules’s cake, we were all as well behaved as children at Sunday school. Tonio was taken aback by the desire of this half-dressed young girl who was openly offering herself to him, touching his hand shyly as if it were the stem of a rare flower. Madame Jules was dismayed. At her age, the old gardener knew what that meant. Tonio was not eating his cake or drinking his coffee. I was concerned for Madame Jules, who, in turn, was worried about me and shed maternal tears as she looked at me.
“But Tonio,” I said very loudly, “why aren’t you eating your cake? Drink your coffee while it’s hot. If Véra is caressing your hand, that’s nice, but please don’t pain Madame Jules or me. Come on, liven up! I haven’t done you any harm. Taste the cake, drink the coffee, it’s very good.”
The two “children” woke up, and Tonio murmured, “Yes, excuse me, my wife.” He pushed Véra’s hand away and began eating the gardener’s cake.
Véra was melancholy after her twentieth birthday, and I sensed she was in love with Tonio. He began to visit La Feuilleraie less often. Véra was my only friend, my only companion, and to him she was nothing but a child who had wanted to have fun for an hour. He didn’t want to destroy the peace and equilibrium that I had managed, with great difficulty, to achieve amid the poetry of La Feuilleraie.
THE WEEKS PASSED, and then one day Tonio fell ill. After several days of fever and lethargy, the doctor became concerned: the fever had risen. He warned me that it could become dangerous, even fatal, since Tonio’s heart had been severely strained by the airplane crashes. He wouldn’t be able to fight off the fever if it persisted.
Véra called him every fifteen minutes to find out how he was. My husband answered her brutally, “I want to speak to my wife.”
“Why don’t we go and see him?” Vera finally suggested. “He’s really very sick.”
She had always longed to see his apartment. There is nothing more curious or more tenacious than a young girl head over heels in love. Weakly I answered, “Yes, Véra, you’re right. Perhaps I should go and look after him in his apartment.”
“We’ll bring him back with us to La Feuilleraie,” she said. “We’ll take care of him here. He’s your husband, after all, you have the right and the obligation to take care of him.”
She was young. She knew nothing about the terrible scenes, the ruptures, the pacts of silence when husbands are no longer faithful or in love. Carefree young girl that she was, Véra gathered an enormous bouquet of hawthorn blossoms that would barely fit into the trunk of the car. Bedecked with flowers and carrying a basket of fresh fruit, we left to pay a visit to Tonio at his home.
Véra was outfitted in some sort of folkloric Russian peasant garb. She could barely squeeze into the elevator at Tonio’s building in Auteuil. I thought I would die when, for the first time, I rang my husband’s doorbell. Véra was sneezing from the perfume of the wild roses she was carrying. A maid opened the door. The huge bouquet went in first, and as the branches of hawthorn pushed the maid back into the room a little gap opened that Véra leapt through.
“He’s here,” she said, pushing the bouquet against a half-open door behind which voices could be heard.
A door slammed violently, and I saw a bit of green skirt sticking out, the skirt of a woman who had hidden in the bathroom. My husband was red with fever and screaming with rage. “Consuelo, my wife, who asked you to come here? Go away! This is not your place!”
The flap of green skirt was twitching madly. The whole thing was so tragicomical that no clown skit could ever reproduce it. Véra had set her huge bouquet down on the floor. She was pale, crestfallen, confused to see that a woman had hidden in the bathroom. If I hadn’t held her back, she would have gone to hide in there too. Tonio was shouting, “Go away! Go away! I want no visitors.”
Gently I took his pulse. He let me have my way, telling me, “I want to die, I don’t like complications. My wife, I beg you: leave.” And he gestured toward the green skirt, which was waving like a flag.
“I’m
worried about you,” I said calmly. “Nothing else matters. I was only thinking of your health. Calm down and rest assured, we are going to leave. I came here to take care of you because you are very ill. It’s the first time I have come to your home, and you’re throwing me out. But you are so feverish, you don’t know what you’re doing . . .”
“I’ve never treated you like this before,” he said miserably. “Shouting to chase you away . . .”
Both of us were weeping, and Véra was sobbing as she watched.
“You are a monster!” she cried. “If you knew the trouble I went to to make this huge bouquet. All so I could bring it here to you. I’m the one who told your wife to come.”
I pushed her out the door. I believe Véra finally understood then that just being pretty isn’t enough for a woman to become and remain part of a man’s life.
THE DAY AFTER THIS misadventure, my husband called. He complained of sleepless nights but said that the fruit and flowers from La Feuilleraie had brought all of spring to him. His fever was going down, and he begged me to come and have a cup of tea at his bedside, without Véra.
Our conversation at his apartment was very short. I didn’t want to stay long. I was afraid of having to go through the previous day’s scene once more. His maid looked me over from head to foot. The tea was bad, but I drank it in order to keep up appearances. My husband spilled the teapot onto my clothes. He wanted me to go into the bathroom and dry off my dress, but I refused to go into the room where, the day before, a woman had hidden, wearing a skirt as green as spinach.
That Sunday he paid me a visit with his dog, and since I went to work late at night, regardless of the weather, I asked him if we could leave together.
“If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I’ll stay at La Feuilleraie. But I would like to be alone. I need calm, in order to think about the two of us. Take your governess with you, I don’t need any help.”
When I came back he was lying in my bed, the way he used to. I was surprised but didn’t allow myself to show it. I told him about my radio program and chose, for my own peace of mind, to sleep in Véra’s bedroom.
The next day my husband declared that he could not move from the bed, that it was impossible for him to stand up; he needed a man, the gardener perhaps, to help him get to his feet. Véra whispered in my ear that if the servants knew he had spent a night in my bedroom, I would no longer have the right to ask for a divorce.
The idea of divorce had been running through my head. Tonio knew it, and he confessed to me later that he had arranged for a witness on purpose to ensure that no divorce could take place because he had slept in my room, fair and square.
After that deft little piece of staging, Tonio asked my gardener to bring him a yellow bench from the garden and put it in front of the window. I laughed because the room had comfortable armchairs but he absolutely insisted on having a garden bench. So Jules and his wife brought one in. Tonio announced that this room would be his from now on and that it was very important to him that no one else should ever sit on this bench. It would be “the bench of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
He spent the day in the henhouse, strolling through the vegetable garden and talking tomatoes with Jules. He left that evening, carrying eggs, fruit, and flowers with him.
In those days I was interviewing a number of famous men on the radio. I began the series with my friend Léon-Paul Fargue. Next, I invited . . . Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He told Radio-Paris he would do it for a fee of three thousand francs. He added that he spoke Spanish badly but would be willing to say a few things.
My guest was announced. I had my husband led into the sound studio one minute before the red light went on. He recognized me. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed loudly.
“Silence, please, monsieur. In one minute, the whole world will be listening to you. Here is a script in both languages. I’ve prepared it carefully. Read slowly. I ask the questions, and you answer.”
“But what’s going on?”
“Silence. Now, to begin: How did you learn Spanish?”
“In Buenos Aires, with my pilots.”
He spoke without stopping, asking himself the questions and then answering them. After a few minutes of this, I took the microphone away from him, speaking Spanish myself now: “You have just heard the famous aviator, your friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He is dressed in light gray, and is very moved to find himself speaking Spanish. He begs your pardon for his heavy accent, but that is a contract between the French and the Spanish, an unbreakable contract. The Spanish will always roll their r’s and the French will never be able to pronounce the Spanish j. Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry will now say good-bye in Spanish!”
He was beside himself, and gazed at me helplessly.
“Bonne nuit.”
“Now, the next item . . .”
My secretary pushed Tonio out by the shoulders as Agnès Capri began to sing.
Tonio came back later that night to pick me up at the office. “Madame de Saint-Exupéry, s’il vous plaît?” he asked a secretary.
“No such lady works here.”
“Yes she does; she speaks Spanish.”
“Mais non, monsieur, the lady in charge of Spanish programming is named Madame Consuelo Carrillo.”
“Thank you. That’s the person I want. Where is she?”
“She’ll be coming out soon. Today is her birthday, and we’re all going with her to her house outside the city. Perhaps you know that her husband is a great aviator but she lives alone in the country, in a big house in Jarcy called La Feuilleraie. And we’re all going there this evening.”
“But where is she?”
“Here she is. Madame Gómez, Madame Gómez! You have a visitor.”
“Thank you.”
And turning toward Tonio, the secretary said, “Come along on the bus with us. There’ll be about twenty of us. We’re going to have a housewarming party at La Feuilleraie.”
He came. But no one knew that the tall gentleman was my husband.
During the party, someone told him a lovely story about me. It was the story of the rose fields on the road from Paris to La Feuilleraie.
“Madame Gómez takes that road home every evening after work,” a guest told him. “So of course she’s gotten to know all the rose growers. One frosty evening, Madame Gómez saw that her friends the growers were panicked and in tears. The frost was killing the roses. That same night, she sent them dozens of large linen sheets embroidered with crowns. They say the sheets were inherited by her husband, who is an aristocrat, a count, I believe, or in any case the descendant of a great family. You can imagine, white sheets like that, lying on the ground. It was the middle of the night, but she revived the rose growers’ hopes. They went back to work. She herself worked alongside them, and with their help, she built an enormous tent, white as snow, to save the roses. The next day, all of us went to help. Each of us, monsieur, took along a piece of wrapping paper, newspaper, it was a real madhouse beneath those ‘tents.’ We crawled along on all fours, lighting little fires, and, monsieur, it was truly a miracle: the rose crop was saved. Heaven helped them, it can’t be denied. The weather grew a little warmer, and the roses managed to survive. Of course the sheets were left in rags, but the love that the rose growers bear Madame de La Feuilleraie, I mean Madame Gómez—that, believe me, is far more beautiful than a thousand sheets, even if they were embroidered with crowns. The growers spent several days at La Feuilleraie to help out in the orchard and the vegetable garden. They cut back the undergrowth. You understand, monsieur, work that is not paid, work that is done out of friendship, out of love for the earth—that is far more precious than any other kind. And everything at La Feuilleraie has bloomed. If you’re interested, I can give you the exact figures. Almost a ton of pears have been harvested from the orchard and sold in the marketplace. . . . She loves roses, Madame Gómez, she loves to save them. She herself is a rose.”
Part Five
The War, 1940–1941
&nbs
p; 21
THE THIRTY-ODD MILES that I went over every day on my drive through the Bois de Vincennes to Paris had become a very pleasurable habit. Along the way I saw enormous fields of beets and vegetables that were trucked into Paris by night to be distributed in the early morning at the great marketplace of Les Halles. But the traffic was becoming heavier and heavier. Something was happening that all the gallant peasants who were bringing in their harvests found tremendously strange. I observed and shared in their worries. There was talk of mobilization, of war. Soon France would be going into battle again. We Parisians clung to peace at all costs; we didn’t want to hear the word “war.” No one wanted it to come, but it was already only a few hundred miles away from us. Our only remedy was to go on pretending, to ignore the rumors and live in peace during those last sunny days of the spring of 1940.
Tonio continued to invite himself to lunch at La Feuilleraie. It was the only meal I had at home, among my dogs and my good friends the gardeners, Jules and his wife. Jules acted as my sommelier and knew how to pour both rosé wines and champagne without letting a single drop fall onto the cloth that covered the legendary table of La Feuilleraie. My husband was already in uniform; the aviators had been mobilized, though they had no airplanes. Nonetheless, they were preparing for this war, which promised to be more of a farcical butchery than a war, since they had no weapons with which to combat a nation that was armed to the teeth.
The months went quickly by. We avoided mentioning the war but spoke instead of the hawthorns that were in bloom, the preserves that needed to be put up, the hunting lodge that would have to be repainted. One day I told Tonio I was going to use all my savings to buy grain to feed my hens and the other animals.
“I’m also going to convert the tennis court into a henhouse, to increase production. And use the pond for raising ducks.”
The Tale of the Rose Page 18