“Doesn’t Madame feel well?”
“It’s emotion,” Oliveira said. “She’s getting over it now. Where is her coat?”
Among easels and creaky tables, a harp and a coatrack, there was a chair with a green raincoat on it. Oliveira helped Berthe Trépat, who kept her head down but was not crying any more. They went out through a little door and along a dark passageway and came out on the boulevard. It was drizzling.
“It’ll be hard getting a taxi,” said Oliveira, who barely had three hundred francs in his pocket. “Do you live far?”
“No, near the Panthéon, I’d really rather walk.”
“Yes, it would be better.”
Berthe Trépat moved ahead slowly, swaying her head from side to side. The hood of the raincoat gave her a martial look or something like Ubu Roi. Oliveira huddled into his lumber jacket and pulled the collar up high. The air was crisp, he was beginning to get hungry.
“You’re very nice,” she said. “You shouldn’t bother. What did you think of my Synthesis?”
“I’m just an amateur, madame. Music for me, if I can say so …”
“You didn’t like it,” Berthe Trépat said.
“A première …”
“We worked for months with Valentin. Night and day, trying to bring the inspirations together.”
“Of course you must admit that Délibes—”
“Is a genius,” Berthe Trépat said. “Erik Satie admitted it one day in my presence. And no matter what Doctor Lacour says about Satie’s pulling my leg … what would you say. Of course, you must know what the old man was like … But I can read people, young man, and I know full well that Satie was convinced, yes, convinced. What country are you from, young man?”
“From Argentina, madame, and I’m really not a young man, by the way.”
“Ah, Argentina. The pampas … And do you think they would be interested in my work there?”
“I’m sure of it, madame.”
“Maybe you could get me an appointment with the Ambassador. If Thibaud was able to go to Argentina and Montevideo, why not me, I play my own music. You must have noticed that, it’s basic: my own music. Almost always premières.”
“Do you do much composing?” Oliveira asked and felt like a mouthful of vomit.
“I’m working on my Opus Eighty-three … no, let’s see … Now that I think of it, I should have spoken with Madame Nolet before I left … It concerns money, of course. Two hundred people, that means …” It was lost in a murmur, and Oliveira asked himself whether it wouldn’t really be more merciful to tell the truth outright, but she already knew, of course she knew.
“It’s scandalous,” Berthe Trépat said. “Two years ago I played in the same hall, Poulenc promised to come … Do you understand? Poulenc himself. I was on the pinnacle of inspiration that afternoon, it was too bad that a last-minute commitment stopped him from coming … but you know, musicians who are all the rage … And that was the time that Madame Nolet charged me half the take,” she added angrily. “Exactly half. Of course it came out the same, counting on two hundred people …”
“Madame,” Oliveira said, taking her softly by the arm and leading her into the Rue de Seine, “the lights were out and maybe you had trouble seeing how many people there were.”
“Oh, no,” Berthe Trépat said. “I’m sure I’m right, but you’ve made me lose track. Excuse me, I have to figure …” She was lost again in a dedicated whispering, and she kept on moving her lips and fingers, completely unaware of the way Oliveira was taking her, and almost even of his presence. Everything she was saying aloud she could have said to herself, Paris is full of people who go along the street talking to themselves, Oliveira himself was no exception, in fact the exception was that he was playing the fool as he walked along beside the old woman, seeing this tarnished puppet home, this poor blown-up balloon in which stupidity and madness were dancing the real nighttime pavan. “It’s repulsive, I ought to fling her down against a step and stamp on her face, squash her like an insect, make her fall apart like a piano dropped from the tenth floor. True charity would be to get her out of her world, stop her from suffering like a dog with all her illusions which even she does not believe, which she builds up so that she will not feel the wetness in her shoes, her empty room, or that dirty, white-haired old man. She bugs me and I’m going to cut out at the next corner, and who will know, after all. What a day, my God, what a day.”
If they could only get to the Rue Lobineau he would take off like a bat and the old woman could get on home by herself. Oliveira looked behind, he waited for the right moment, shaking his arm as if something were hanging down from it, something that had sneaked up and was hanging from his elbow. But it was Berthe Trépat’s hand there, clinging with resolution. Berthe Trépat was hanging on with all her might to Oliveira’s arm and he was looking out for the Rue Lobineau as he helped her cross the street and went with her towards the Rue de Tournon.
“They must have lit the stove by now,” Berthe Trépat said. “It’s not that the weather is so cold, really, but we artists like our warmth. Don’t you think so? You must come up and have a drink with Valentin and me.”
“Oh, no, madame,” Oliveira said. “No indeed, it’s been a great pleasure and honor just to have seen you home, besides—”
“Don’t be so modest, young man. You are young, you know, isn’t that so? I can tell that you’re young, your arm for example …” Her fingers dug a little into the sleeve of his lumber-jacket. “I always look older than I am. You know, an artist’s life …”
“Of course,” Oliveira said. “As for me, I’m over forty, so you’ve been flattering me.”
That’s how the words came out of his mouth and he couldn’t help it, it was too much, really. Hanging on to his arm Berthe Trépat talked about other times and every so often she would stop in the middle of what she was saying and seem to be putting something back together in her mind. Sometimes she would stick a finger in her nose and look at Oliveira out of the corner of her eye; in order to stick her finger up her nose she would quickly pull off her glove, pretending that she wanted to scratch the palm of her hand (after delicately removing it from Oliveira’s arm), and would raise it up with a motion worthy of a pianist to scratch one nostril for a split second. Oliveira pretended to look away, and when he looked back again Berthe Trépat was clinging to his arm again with her glove back on. They went along like that in the rain talking about many things. On passing by the Luxembourg they spoke about life in Paris, more difficult every day, the pitiless competition of young people whose inexperience was matched only by their insolence, a public that was incurably snobbish, the price of beef in the Saint-Germain market or on the Rue de Buci, places where the elite go to get a good cut of meat at reasonable prices. Two or three times Berthe Trépat had asked Oliveira in a friendly sort of way what he did for a living, about his ambitions, and especially about his failures, but before he could reply everything suddenly had to do with Valentin’s inexplicable disappearance, the mistake of playing Alix Alix’s Pavan out of consideration for Valentin, but that was the last time that would happen. “A faggot,” Berthe Trépat muttered, and Oliveira felt her hand tighten on his lumberjacket. “Me, mind you, having to play a shapeless piece of shit for that son of a bitch when I have fifteen pieces of my own that are waiting to be played in public …” Then she would stop in the rain, peaceful inside her raincoat (but Oliveira began to feel water coming in through the collar of his lumberjacket, a collar made from rabbit skin or rat skin, which had begun to stink like a cage in the zoo, it always did that whenever it rained and there was nothing he could do about it), and stand there looking at him as if waiting for an answer. Oliveira smiled in a warm sort of way, tugging at her a little to lead her towards the Rue de Médicis.
“You’re too modest, too reserved,” Berthe Trépat was saying. “Tell me about yourself, let’s see. I’ll bet you’re a poet, right? So was Valentin when we were young … The Evening Ode, a hit in the Mercure de F
rance…A card from Thibaudet, I can remember it as if it had been just this morning. Valentin was weeping in bed, whenever he had to cry he would lie face down on the bed, it was very touching.”
Oliveira tried to picture Valentin crying face down on the bed, but all that came to mind was a little Valentin red as a crab, he was really imagining Rocamadour crying face down on the bed and La Maga trying to give him a suppository while Rocamadour resisted and arched his back, slipping his little ass out of La Maga’s clumsy hands. They must have given the old man who had been in the accident a suppository in the hospital too, it was incredible how popular they had become, he would have to make a philosophical analysis of this surprising vindication of the anus, its elevation to a second mouth, into something that no longer limited itself to excretion but which could swallow and digest those rose green white little anti-aircraft shells. But Berthe Trépat would not let him concentrate and again she wanted to know about his life and held his arm sometimes with one hand, sometimes with two, turning towards him a little bit with a girlish air which made him shiver even in the middle of the night. All right, he was an Argentinian who had been in Paris for some time, trying to … Let’s see, what was he trying to do? It was hard to explain it all at once like that. What he was looking for was—
“Beauty, exaltation, the golden bough,” Berthe Trépat said. “Don’t say a word, I can make a perfect guess. I also came to Paris, from Pau, quite a few years ago, looking for the golden bough. But I was weak, young man, I was … What’s your name?”
“Oliveira,” Oliveira said.
“Oliveira…Desolives, the Mediterranean … I’m from the South too, we’re panic, young man, we’re both panic. Not like Valentin, who is from Lille. Northerners, cold as fish, like quicksilver. Do you believe in the Great Work? Fulcanelli, you understand … No need to answer, I can see that you’re an initiate. Perhaps you haven’t reached the experiences that really count yet, while I … Take the Synthesis, for example. What Valentin said is right, radiesthesia points out kindred souls to me and I think that shows through in the piece. Or don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You have a lot of karma, you can spot it in a minute …” her hand gripped him strongly; the pianist was ascending to a state of meditation and to do that she had to hold herself tightly against Oliveira who resisted only slightly, just enough to get her to cross the square and go up the Rue Soufflot. “If Étienne or Wong sees me they’ll give me a hard time,” thought Oliveira. But why should he care what Étienne or Wong might think, as if after the metaphysical rivers mixed with dirty pieces of cotton the future might have some importance. “Now it’s just as if I’d never been in Paris and still here I am stupidly attent to what is happening to me and it bothers me that this poor old woman is starting to come on with the sadness bit, the clutch of a dying man after the pavan and the complete flop of the concert. I’m worse than a kitchen rag, worse than dirty cotton, I really have nothing to do with my own self.” Because this idea stayed with him, at that hour of the night and in the rain and stuck to Berthe Trépat, he began to feel like the last light in a huge mansion where all the other lights had gone out one by one, he began to get the notion that all of this was not he, that somewhere he was waiting for himself, that this person walking in the Latin Quarter hauling along an old woman who was hysterical and maybe a nymphomaniac was only a Doppelgänger, while the other one, the other…“Did you stay there in your Almagro neighborhood? Or did you drown on the voyage, in whores’ beds, in meaningful experiences, in the well-known necessary disorder? Everything seems to console me, it’s comfortable to think of one’s salvation even though it’s just barely, the guy who is going to be hanged must keep on thinking that something will happen at the last minute, an earthquake, a noose that breaks twice so that they have to pardon him, the phone call from the governor, the uprising that will set him free. And now this old girl is just about ready to start grabbing at my fly.”
But Berthe Trépat was lost in didascalic convolutions and had begun to tell with enthusiasm of her meeting with Germaine Tailleferre in the Gare de Lyon and how Tailleferre had said that the Prelude for Orange Rhombuses was extremely interesting and that she would speak to Marguerite Long about it so she could include it in one of her concerts.
“It would have been a success, Mr. Oliveira, a triumph. But you know impresarios, little dictators, even the best artists are victims … Valentin thought that perhaps one of the younger pianists, someone who wouldn’t worry, could do it … But they’re just as ruined as the old ones, they’re all cut from the same cloth.”
“What about yourself, in another concert …”
“I never want to play again,” Berthe Trépat said, hiding her face although Oliveira was careful about looking at her. “It’s a shame that I still have to appear on stage to introduce my music when I should really be a muse, you know, the one who inspires artists; they would all come to me and beg me to let them play my things, beg me, yes, beg me. And I would give them permission, because I think my work is the spark that should ignite the sensibility of the public here and in the United States, in Hungary … Yes, I would give them my permission, but first they would have to come to me and ask for the honor of interpreting my music.”
She clutched Oliveira’s arm, and without knowing why, he had decided to go along the Rue Saint-Jacques and was walking along with the pianist gently in tow. An icy wind was blowing into their faces, filling their eyes and mouths with water, but Berthe Trépat seemed indifferent to any kind of weather, hanging on to Oliveira’s arm as she began to sputter something that would be broken every few words by a hiccup or a short cackle that could have been one of spite or mockery. No, she didn’t live on the Rue Saint-Jacques. No, but she didn’t care where she lived either. She would just as soon keep on walking like that all night long, more than two hundred people for the première of the Synthesis.
“Valentin is going to get worried if you don’t go home,” Oliveira said, mentally grasping for something to say, a rudder to steer this corseted ball who was rolling along like a sea urchin in the wind and the rain. From out of her lengthy and disjointed rambling he was able to piece together the fact that Berthe Trépat lived on the Rue de l’Estrapade. Half-lost, Oliveira wiped the water out of his eyes with his free hand and got his bearings like a Conrad hero standing in the prow of a ship. He suddenly had a terrible urge to laugh (and it hurt his empty stomach, cramped his muscles, it was strange and painful and when he would tell Wong about it he wouldn’t begin to believe it). Not at Berthe Trépat, who was going on about the honors she had received in Montpellier and Pau, with an occasional reference to the gold medal. Nor at his having been stupid enough to volunteer his company. He wasn’t quite sure where the urge to laugh was coming from, it came from something previous, something farther back, not because of the concert, which should have been the most laughable thing in the world. Joy, something like a physical form of joy. Even though it was hard for him to believe it, joy. He could have laughed with contentment, pure, delightful, inexplicable contentment. “I’m going crazy,” he thought. “And with this nut on my arm, it must be contagious.” He didn’t have the slightest reason to feel happy, water was seeping through the soles of his shoes and down his collar, Berthe Trépat was grasping his arm tighter and tighter and suddenly she began to be racked by a great sob, every time she mentioned Valentin she would shake all over and weep, it was a kind of conditioned reflex which in no way could have produced happiness in anyone, not even a madman. And Oliveira, while he wanted to burst out laughing in the worst way, carefully took hold of Berthe Trépat and was slowly leading her towards the Rue de l’Estrapade, towards Number Four, and there was no reason to think so, and much less understand it, but everything was just fine that way, taking Berthe Trépat to Number Four Rue de l’Estrapade, seeing as much as possible that she didn’t step in any puddles or go under the water pouring out of the spouts on the cornices at the corner of the Rue Clotilde. The idle m
ention of a drink at her place (with Valentin) didn’t seem bad at all to Oliveira; he would have to climb five or six floors towing the pianist after him, go into an apartment where Valentin had probably not lit the stove (but there would be a miraculous salamander, a bottle of cognac, they could take off their shoes, put their feet next to the fire, talk about art and about the gold medal). And he might even be able to come back some other night to Berthe Trépat and Valentin’s place with a bottle of wine and keep them company, cheer them up. It was something like going to visit the old man in the hospital, going anywhere where until that moment it had not occurred to him to go, to the hospital, to the Rue de l’Estrapade. Before the joy there came the thing that was giving him terrible cramps in the stomach, a hand clasped underneath his skin like a delightful torture (he would have to ask Wong, a hand clasped underneath his skin).
“Number Four, right?”
“Yes, that house with the balcony,” Berthe Trépat said. “An eighteenth-century mansion. Valentin said that Ninon de Lenclos had lived on the fourth floor. He’s such a liar. Ninon de Lenclos. Oh, yes, Valentin lies all the time. It’s almost stopped raining, hasn’t it?”
“It’s not raining so much,” Oliveira conceded. “Let’s cross here, all right?”
“The neighbors,” Berthe Trépat said, looking at the café on the corner. “Naturally, the old woman from the eighth floor … You can’t imagine how much she drinks. Do you see her there at the side table? She’s looking at us, tomorrow the gossip will start …”
“Please, madame,” Oliveira said. “Look out for that puddle.”
“Oh, I know her, and the landlord too. They hate me because of Valentin. I’ve got to admit he has done some … He can’t stand the old woman on the eighth floor, so one night when he came home quite drunk he daubed cat turd all over her door, from top to bottom, he made drawings with it … I’ll never forget the uproar … Valentin in the tub taking the crap off, because in his true artistic enthusiasm he had got it all over himself, while I had to deal with the police, the old woman, the whole neighborhood … You can’t imagine what I’ve gone through, and me, with my standing … Valentin is awful, like a child.”
Hopscotch: A Novel (Pantheon Modern Writers Series) Page 13