To all the flatterers who surrounded you I was always little Consuelo, the Spanish woman who made scenes. Even though it wasn’t true, you would say, “Excuse me, I have to go home because otherwise my wife will make a huge scene.” In fact, you went home to write, for you had so little free time in Paris. Whenever you were at our house, it was always with other people—men, women. At four in the morning you’d announce, “I’m going out for a walk with Léon-Paul Fargue,” and you’d go all the way to Versailles on foot. You would stroll for hours, until just before dawn, and then you’d call: “Come pick us up in the car, we don’t have money for a taxi.”
You see the kind of life I had? But I’m not complaining, my darling, because you never wasted your time; as soon as you had an hour you would work, anywhere, even in the bathroom, if you had to work out an equation for some aviation problem. My God, being the wife of a pilot is a whole career, but being the wife of a writer is a religious vocation!
We would go through difficult periods. There would sometimes be a tempest in my heart, and to soothe me you would stroke my forehead with your hands, your archangel’s hands, and speak to me in those magical words of yours about love, about things that are sacred, about tenderness, fidelity, and it would all begin again.
“Don’t be jealous,” you would say at those moments. “My true career, as you know, is to be a writer, and when your enemy is kind enough to send me some little gift, a pair of ivory dice or a suitcase embossed with my name, my heart softens toward her and to thank her I write her three or four pages, do some little drawings, and that’s all. But don’t be afraid; I know what you have gone through for years, and I thank you for it, my wife. I am joined to you by sacrament, so don’t ever listen to what people say.”
But at that point, in Oppède, I had to keep busy. There were ten of us by then. We made our own bread, we spun wool, we knit sweaters out of wool recycled from old mattresses. We didn’t have much left to eat, we were so strictly rationed. But a miraculous idea came into my mind. It was like a revelation. I remembered a conversation with Tonio at Pau when he told me that the Germans were buying the peasants’ crops “in the field,” which meant that they bought grapes, for example, before they were ripe and took delivery of them only once they had ripened. Since they were printing up as many ten-thousand-franc notes as they wanted, it cost them nothing to pay out whole sacks of banknotes. The peasants were satisfied, and that way the Germans were sure of starving the French. After having sold our jewels and watches to the peasants—eggs cost three hundred francs apiece—we had to resort to eating the fragments of asparagus they left in the ground and melons that grew almost wild. We couldn’t survive like this for long. We held a council: Florent Margaritis and his wife, Eliane; Bernard Piboulon and his charming wife, who was also studying architecture; and Albert Bojovitch, whose brother was the editor of Vogue in New York but who had no desire at all to leave for America; he wanted to stay and resist. They decided, “Let’s go back to Paris, because things have become impossible here.”
“Wait another twenty-four hours,” I asked them.
“I’m leaving for Avignon,” I declared the next day. “That’s where the Germans store the crops that they buy, in trains. We’ll steal them. The cars are full of salt pork, mutton, and butter.”
I climbed over rocks and low stone walls until I finally reached the trains. I managed to board one, though the steps were very high. I found a pig, which I dragged over the rails. A sentry saw me but didn’t shoot. Why not? I went home with the pig and the friend who had been keeping lookout for me. It took us four or five hours to get back to Oppède. The cook, who was Moroccan and, unfortunately for him, did not eat pork, nevertheless resolved to prepare the animal: “I’ll cook it for you, I know how it’s done. You’ll eat well this evening.”
Our feast was marvelous. There was even wine, old red wine, stolen from the cellars of abandoned houses. I made the trip to the trains several more times; after that, the young men went. No one was ever killed.
One day a car appeared, and we were very much afraid that the authorities were coming for us. We had binoculars and could see from the ramparts that a woman was driving it. She was named Thérèse Bonnet, and she was coming . . . to get me.
“I know you’re settled in here,” she told me. “But why aren’t you with that fine strapping husband of yours in New York, where he’s doing card tricks and going out with every millionaire American blonde in the city? What are you doing dying of hunger here?”
I gestured toward my friends. “Here we are,” I said. “We’re a group, all for one and one for all. I’m waiting for my husband to send me money or a ticket, to give me some way of joining him.”
Soon after that, I went to see my mother-in-law in Marseille. She spoke to me in a grave voice. “Tonio is ill,” she said, “and your duty as his wife is to be at his side.”
I had indeed received a telegram. My husband was in a bad way and could not be operated on because his organs were all mixed up after the accident in Guatemala: if he was alive at all, it was only by the will of heaven, and his own will. “I don’t have any papers,” I answered his mother.
“You’re from El Salvador, your consulate will give them to you without a problem.”
“No, I’ll wait; I’ll wait for Tonio to ask me.”
At last I received the telegram: “Go to the home of Monsieur X to pick up money for the trip; all your papers are arranged. Our friend Pozzo di Borgo has received instructions to give you.”
Suddenly the sky looked brighter to me. I announced the good news to my friends: Tonio was finally asking for me. I had been at Oppède for eleven months. They all raised their eyes to the sky and exclaimed, “You know, if you leave, we’ll all leave; we won’t stay here any longer.”
I WAS HAPPY to be going back to you, but my heart was torn; with my friends at Oppède I had experienced a state of honest intimacy, a different way of thinking, and the idea of leaving Bernard made me particularly sad. He was a great and noble gentleman, a young man not even thirty years old who sang from morning to night, who saw to it that we were all cheerful and that our community worked well and at a good rhythm. The workshops were immaculate, and beautiful things were made in them.
The day I left Oppède I felt more imperiled than ever. A poorly transmitted telegram from New York was enough to make me imagine that everything there was more dangerous and menacing than my beautiful stones, which were stable and eternal. Once more I was on the road, unable to explain to myself why I was on this new mission or to clarify the mystery of my errant life. I desperately needed to find some outlet for the anguish in my heart.
Once I was on board the airplane, I thought about my reunion with Tonio. It had been more than a year since we had last seen each other. Despite the comfort of the German plane that was taking me to Portugal, I imagined that an accident might still deprive me of him. I so longed to see him again! I’d been told that if I was lucky, once I was in Portugal I’d be able to continue my journey to New York by boat. If I’d been given a choice, I would have preferred to wait for us to be reunited among the stones of Oppède.
I felt weak from lack of food and also from a fear of seeing him again. My inelegant appearance brought a childish smile to my lips—I didn’t feel like an adult. I would have wished to be glamorously arrayed, as if for a ceremony. But my heart was drab. I said to myself, “If only I would turn into a woman made of glass when he looks at me . . .” My mind was overpowered by bizarre images, and I gazed longingly up at the sky. I caught a glimpse of myself in the plane’s opaque windows and saw my poor hair, which was cut very short; I had had to cut it myself in Oppède. I dreamed of the latest hairstyles in New York and was irritated at being out of fashion. My hair wasn’t going to grow back overnight! I was thin, very thin: less than a hundred pounds with my clothes on. I felt ill at ease in the goatherd’s clothes I was wearing. There was a woman on the plane who never took her eyes off me: Was she a spy?
Barely
an hour after takeoff, the loudspeaker announced that the flight was being interrupted: we would be stopping in Barcelona. The following day some of the passengers might be able to continue on to Portugal.
The airport restaurant in Barcelona was no great affair, but the meat and soup smelled good, bread was set out on the counters for the taking, and all the passengers who landed rushed there immediately to take the edge off their hunger. I had just ordered a bowl of soup and a plate of rice when the barman asked me what currency I was planning to pay with. I was in the depths of despair, for I had no pesetas. The waiter understood my problem and took the steaming soup, which had just arrived, from under my nose.
The “spy” saw how confused and helpless I was and gave me a hundred pesetas. I used the money to leave the airport and look for a hotel in the city. The concierge’s first question was “What currency are you traveling with?”
I took a box of syringes from my suitcase; at the bottom, underneath some cotton, I had hidden three five-thousand-franc bills. It had been a year and a half since I had had a full meal, a hot bath, or a bed with sheets. That hotel was paradise for me. I would have liked to spend several days there; the staff was very pleasant, and I saw nothing of the legendary misery of Barcelona. There was dancing in the dining room, and lovely women in evening gowns flowed by with that smile of ease that everyone you pass in the corridor of a hotel is wearing. I ordered a bottle of wine, a roast chicken, and an assortment of desserts. I couldn’t help thinking of our garlic soup in Oppède. I was melancholy at the thought of having left Bernard and my friends, who weren’t sharing my chicken, and a whole series of memories flooded over me as I drank my bottle of wine alone. I saw each of their gestures again, weeping as I listened to old waltzes, and told myself that it was as if I’d left my childhood home. However, I had to move onward, forever and forever, until I became an old woman somewhere on the planet.
The luxury of my bedroom felt alien to me. I wished I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t sleep, and I was increasingly feverish. I was about to call for help when the door opened and my companion from the airplane, my “spy,” said my first name and whispered, “I arranged to be on the same floor as you. Let’s run the water in the tub and speak very softly.”
We sat on the floor next to the tub, like two thieves, and began exchanging words, almost into each other’s ears.
“Oh, how lovely of you to have come to visit me.”
“I’m feeling down, too. I’m not allowed to speak to anyone.”
“I could make you lose your job, then?”
“No,” she said, with a bitter smile, “my head, more likely. I’ve had it with espionage. It’s not even dangerous. It’s boring.”
I was rather alarmed to learn that my new acquaintance’s job consisted of informing on people. Meanwhile, she found it merely boring. She took a bottle of liqueur from a small attaché case and poured each of us a glass.
“Yes, it disgusts you to drink with a spy, doesn’t it? I can see that. But it pays. If you want my advice, stay in Spain. You speak Spanish, French, and English well. You can have a good salary, make yourself a small fortune, and retire after the war. In any case, I know it’s not going to last much longer. And that way we could work together . . .”
I had taken a single swallow of the drink she gave me, which had a funny smell. It was odd—I was having a hard time making out what she was saying. Then I realized that there was a powerful narcotic in her liqueur, and that she wanted to go through my suitcases. I had demonstrated my skill at concealing money in my luggage, and she undoubtedly imagined that I was also concealing plans. Panic gripped me as I remembered scenes from spy movies I had watched. What effect would the narcotic have on me? I struggled to make a decision as quickly as possibly. She was habituated to the narcotic, and it no longer affected her. She wanted at all costs to make a thorough inspection of the contents of my luggage. Since I was carrying nothing that was at all compromising, it was best to let her do so. I told her I was going to the hotel pharmacy to buy some cosmetics and asked her to be patient and wait for me if it took a few minutes. I added that I had promised a dark-haired man who had eaten dinner next to me that I would chat with him in the lobby for a bit, but that I wouldn’t be long. She started to laugh, and I thought I heard her say, “You can take care of all of that quickly, because I know how to work fast, too.”
Before I went out, she handed me a glass of cold water and told me, “Drink this down in one go.”
When I returned, there was no one in the room. I found only a note, in Spanish. “I like you because you’re not an idiot. Thanks. Don’t worry about your trip to Portugal. You’ll leave tomorrow. Signed, Liliane.”
THE PLANE LANDED in Lisbon on a windy day. My body was numb. Drunk with fatigue and emotion, I couldn’t control my limbs, and I sprained my ankle getting off the plane. I limped through my entire stay in Portugal.
The evening before my departure, I finally succeeded in phoning Tonio, but we couldn’t talk because no one was allowed to speak over the phone in any language other than English, which Tonio didn’t speak. I heard only “Consuelo,” and I answered “Tonio.” The operators left the line open a few minutes longer, but we were as mute as young lovers who are transfixed with each other.
Just as we were boarding the ship, a rumor made the rounds: there was a fire on board and the ship wouldn’t be able to leave port until the following morning. Several travelers went home with their wives, children, and luggage, but I had seen no smoke so I stayed close to the boat, waiting for the end of the story. I had my reward: we left the port that evening.
We had no electric light during the entire trip. We were forbidden to use a match or possess a camera. Every morning, floating on the gray winter sea, we saw bits of wood and debris, all that remained of the boats that had been destroyed a few nights earlier or that very night as we slept on the bridge. We were usually roused two or three times a night by a bell, an exercise intended to keep us on the alert, so we would get used to the gymnastics of running for our lives and be able to take our places in the lifeboats in orderly fashion should the torpedoes the German radio broadcasts threatened us with come down and surprise us on the open sea. Preposterous rumors circulated among the passengers: the boat would not be sunk because it was carrying spies to America. A few of the bolder and more imaginative gossips claimed that the entire boat was a pack of spies. Or they said that the ship’s prisons were choked with travelers and that it wasn’t seasickness that was diminishing the number of sleepers on the bridge. . . . I knew that the captain was in fact uncompromisingly severe with people who broke the rules by turning on a flashlight or even striking a match. Even so, a strange feeling of security prevailed; we were not afraid.
As we arrived in Bermuda, a pregnant woman gave birth in the darkness of the bridge, not far from me. The doctor did his duty: it was a difficult case, a pair of twin girls whose mother had the courage to name Bermuda. Our twins were the great event of the day. When we arrived in port, we were forbidden to go on land; we were held there on the boat for several days because it was the last American ship to leave Lisbon since the war broke out. The orders were strict; all books and letters the passengers were carrying with them had to be examined. We all had to hand over our papers. Jean Perrin, a great French scholar, was on board; he saw all of his calculations and equations confiscated and watched in despair as they were crumpled up by ignorant, unscrupulous hands. His poems were cause for great concern, as were his geographic maps and the little doodles he would make in the margin of a book when something he’d just read suggested an idea.
We were all afraid of being ordered to leave the ship in Bermuda. We had already suffered so much in France that we felt like guilty sinners. Three anguished days passed, but the inspection of the scholars’ and writers’ papers turned out to be completely fruitless. We set off once more our journey.
Every hour brought me closer to Tonio.
23
THE DAYS WERE GROWING COLD
ER and grayer. Winter was on its way when New York finally came into view. We were very far north. The water seemed denser, as if made of steel. The boat glided gently toward the city lights, reflected in the clouds. Our minds were blank. We passengers had nothing more to say to one another. We were in a hurry to arrive: the final minutes of a journey are always the hardest.
While we were still in the choppy waters of the bay, I was called over to the table where the officers were checking our passports. It’s always unpleasant to be asked if you are indeed yourself and to have your signature verified. The boat had stopped moving. No one spoke. I admired the orderly way in which our arrival took place, the American sense of organization that presided over everything. We poor sheep, lost in the storm on the other side of the Atlantic, had by the greatest of good fortunes been sent to a safe land.
I’d grown friendly with one of the other passengers, S., a man in his forties, tanned as a Portuguese, levelheaded, full of good health and good spirits. He too was traveling to be reunited with his wife, whom he adored. Not a day had gone by that he didn’t show me a photo of her and of their little cat. Smiling, he told me with some embarrassment, “Yes, I have great affection for that little beast. We call her Maria—I don’t know why. A cook gave her the name. I must confess that I’m a little ashamed of my feelings for a cat at a time when thousands of children are dying of hunger in Europe. I was employed by an organization that worked to save people, especially Jews. We were ordered to save the intelligent men. How was I to know who was intelligent and who wasn’t? How could I possibly intuit such a thing when a man stood there pale with terror, stammering incoherently and begging, ‘Save me, save me, give me papers, otherwise I’ll be sent to a camp’? I sometimes asked people their profession, and they had forgotten even that. All they could do was live and hope to save their remaining hours on this earth.”
The Tale of the Rose Page 21