Heaven Has No Favorites

by Erich Maria Remarque

  “What about the Eiffel Tower then?”

  “The Eiffel Tower? Thither I’ll go with thee, beloved!”

  “So I thought. Are you happy?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t you know yet? But who really knows what it is? Dancing on the head of a pin, maybe.”

  Lillian was on her way back from Uncle Gaston’s dinner. The Vicomte de Peystre was driving her to her hotel. She had spent a disconcertingly boring evening over excellent food. The company had consisted of several women and six men. The women had been like hedgehogs, so sharply had they bristled with inquisitive hostility. Of the men, four had been unmarried, all wealthy, two young, and the Vicomte de Peystre the oldest and wealthiest. “Why do you live on the left bank?” he asked. “For romantic reasons?”

  “By chance. That is the best reason I know.”

  “You ought to live on the place Vendôme.”

  “It’s amazing,” Lillian said, “how many people know where I ought to live better than I do.”

  “I have an apartment on the place Vendôme which I never use. A studio, completely modern in its appointments.”

  “Would you care to rent it to me?”

  “Very gladly.”

  “How much is the rent?”

  Peystre shifted in his seat. “Why talk about money? Look at the place some time. If you like it, you may have it.”

  “With no conditions attached?”

  “None whatsoever. Of course, it would give me pleasure if you would dine with me now and then—but that, too, is not a condition.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” Lillian said.

  “Would you like to visit it tomorrow? We could have lunch together tomorrow afternoon.”

  Lillian studied the narrow face with its white brush of mustache. “My uncle really wanted to get me married,” she said.

  The Vicomte laughed. “You have plenty of time for that. Your uncle has old-fashioned views.”

  “Is the apartment large enough for two?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “In case I want to share it with a friend.”

  Peystre studied her for a moment. “That is a possibility, too,” he said then. “Although, to be candid, the apartment would be rather too small for that. Why not live alone for a time? You have only been in Paris for a few weeks. For the present, you ought to come to know the city. It has so much to offer.”

  “You are right.”

  The car stopped, and Lillian got out. “Well then, when? Tomorrow?” the Vicomte asked.

  “I must give the matter thought. Would you mind if I asked Uncle Gaston’s advice?”

  “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. It might give him quite the wrong impression. You wouldn’t do it anyhow.”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  “Not when you tell me beforehand that you will. You are very beautiful and very young, Mademoiselle. It would be a pleasure to set you in the environment that is proper for you. And take the word of a man who is no longer young: you may find this sort of life picturesque, but it represents lost time for you. What Uncle Gaston may think is quite irrelevant. What you require is luxury. Grand luxury. Forgive my speaking so, but I know about these things. Good night, Mademoiselle.”

  She mounted the stairs. Uncle Gaston’s gallery of prospective husbands had amused and depressed her in a macabre fashion. At first, she had felt like a dying soldier to whom someone is telling stories about a plushy life. Then, she had imagined that she was on a strange planet where people lived forever and had corresponding problems. She had not understood what the other guests were talking about. Things she was indifferent to were of the highest importance to them—and what she was seeking was surrounded, for these others, by a curious taboo. Vicomte de Peystre’s offer seemed to her the most sensible thing she had heard this evening.

  “Was it a nice party?” Clerfayt asked from the corridor.

  “Are you here already? I thought you would be out drinking somewhere.”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”

  “Were you waiting for me?”

  “Yes,” Clerfayt said. “You are turning me into a respectable person. I don’t any longer want to drink. Not unless you are drinking with me.”

  “Did you used to drink a lot?”

  “Yes. Always between races. And often between accidents. Out of cowardice, I think. Or to run away from myself. That’s over now. I spent this afternoon in Sainte-Chapelle. Tomorrow, I’m going to the Cluny Museum. Someone who saw us together mentioned that you look like the lady on the unicorn tapestries they have there. You’re having a great deal of success. Would you like to go out again?”

  “Not tonight!”

  “You’ve spent the evening with sober people who believe that life is a kitchen, a parlor, and a bedroom, not a sailboat with far too many sails, which may turn over at any moment. You have to offset all that.”

  Lillian’s eyes began to shine. “So you have been drinking, after all?”

  “I don’t need to, with you. Wouldn’t you like to drive around a little?”

  “Around where?”

  “Down every street and to every night club you’ve ever heard of. You’re gloriously dressed—a shame to waste it on Uncle Gaston’s candidates. At the least, we must take this dress out—even if you yourself don’t want to. Dresses carry responsibilities along with them.”

  “All right. Let’s go driving. Slowly. Through many, many streets. Not one of them covered with snow. With flower girls on the corners. Let’s take a carload of violets with us.”

  Clerfayt fetched Giuseppe out of the tangle of parked cars on the quay and waited in front of the hotel door. The restaurant next door began to close.

  “The pining lover,” someone said at his side. “Aren’t you too old for such a part?”

  It was Lydia Morelli. She had come out of the restaurant ahead of her escort.

  “Much too old,” Clerfayt replied.

  Lydia draped the end of her white fur stole over her shoulder. “A new role! Rather ridiculous, my dear. With such a young chit.”

  “What a tribute,” Clerfayt answered. “When you talk like that, it means she must be fascinating.”

  “Fascinating! That little fake with her room in a fourth-class hotel and her three Balenciaga dresses!”

  “Three? I thought she had thirty. They look so different every time she wears them.” Clerfayt laughed. “Lydia, since when have you taken to doing detective jobs on young chits and little fakes? Haven’t we outgrown that long ago?”

  Lydia was about to throw some retort at him, but her escort came out. She took his arm as if it were a weapon, and walked past Clerfayt.

  Lillian came down a few minutes later. “Someone has just told me that you are a fascinating person,” Clerfayt said. “It’s about time to hide you.”

  “Was it dull, waiting for me?”

  “No. When you haven’t waited for anything for a long time, waiting makes you ten years younger. Twenty years younger. I thought I would never again be waiting for anything.”

  “I’ve always waited for something.” Lillian’s eyes followed a woman in cream-colored lace who was leaving the restaurant accompanied by a bald-headed man; she wore a string of diamonds, each the size of a nut. “How they flash!” she said.

  Clerfayt did not answer. Jewelry was dangerous territory; if she had a taste for that sort of thing, there were men better equipped than he to satisfy her desires.

  “Nothing for me,” Lillian said, laughing as if she had guessed his thoughts.

  “Is that a new dress?” he asked.

  “Yes. It came today.”

  “How many do you have now?”

  “Eight, counting this one. Why?”

  Lydia Morelli seemed to be well informed. That she had said “three” meant that she knew the exact figure.

  “Uncle Gaston is appalled,” Lillian said. “I’ve sent him the bills. And now let us drive to the best night club you know. You’re right
, clothes makes demands.”

  “Shall we go on to still another?” Clerfayt asked. It was four o’clock in the morning.

  “Yes, one more,” Lillian said. “Or are you tired?”

  He knew that he must not ask whether she was tired. “Not yet,” he said. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s wonderful.”

  “Good, then we’ll go to another club. One with gypsies.”

  Montmartre and Montparnasse were still burning with tardy postwar fever. The garish colors of the cabarets and night clubs were softened by the fog that regularly filled such places. The entertainment was all the usual fare, pure cliché. Without Lillian, Clerfayt would have been horribly bored. But for Lillian it was new; she did not respond to it as it was or as it struck him, but as she wanted to see it and saw it. To her, the clip joints were places of pure entrancement, the fiddle players hoping for tips became, in her eyes, inspired musicians, and the gigolos, nouveaux riches, shady and empty-minded men and women, people who did not go home because they did not know what to do there, or who were on the lookout for an adventure or a good deal—all these she saw as celebrants of a sparkling bacchanal of life, because that was how she wanted it and that was why she had come.

  That’s it, Clerfayt thought, that is what makes her different from all the others sitting around here. The others want an adventure, a deal, a little tuneful noise to fill their emptiness; but she is on the track of life itself, of life alone, and she seeks it like an obsessed huntress pursuing the white stag and the fabled unicorn, hunts it so passionately that the passion is contagious. She has no inhibitions, does not look to either side, and while I myself feel alternately old and used up or young as a child in her presence, there suddenly rise up for me out of forgotten years faces, desires, shadows of dreams, and, above all, like a flash of lightning in the twilight, the long-lost sense of the uniqueness of life.

  The gypsy fiddler hung about the table, bending over his instrument, his velvet eyes alert as he played. Lillian listened, carried away by the music. For her, this is all real, Clerfayt thought; for her, it is the Hungarian steppe, the lonely nocturnal lament, solitude, the first fire at which man sought protection, and even the oldest, most banal, most sentimental song is for her a song of mankind, of its sadness, and its seeking to hold what cannot be held. Lydia Morelli might well be right—it was provincial, if you wished to take it that way. But goddamn it, you had to adore her for that very thing.

  “I think I’ve drunk too much,” he said.

  “What is too much?”

  “When one no longer recognizes oneself.”

  “Then I always want to drink too much. I don’t love myself.”

  She is afraid of nothing, Clerfayt thought. Just as this night club is the temple of life to her, so every banality has for her the force it possessed when it was said for the first time. It’s unendurable. She has to die and she knows it; she’s taken the knowledge into herself as another might take morphine, and it transforms everything for her; she fears nothing, nothing is blasphemy, nothing banality. And, damn it all, why am I sitting here and feeling this mild horror of it all, not also throwing myself into this uncritical whirl?

  “I adore you,” he said.

  “Don’t say that too often,” she replied. “One has to be very independent to say a thing like that.”

  “Not with you.”

  “Say it all the time,” she said. “I need it like water and wine.”

  Clerfayt laughed. “What you say is as true as what I say. But who cares whether a thing is true? Where are we going now?”

  “To the hotel. I want to move out.”

  Clerfayt made up his mind to be surprised by nothing henceforth. “All right. Let’s go and pack,” he said.

  “My things are already packed.”

  “Where do you want to move to?”

  “To a different hotel. For two days, someone has been telephoning me at this time of night. A woman who tells me to go back where I came from—and a few other things besides.”

  Clerfayt looked at her. “Haven’t you told the night clerk not to put the calls through?”

  “I’ve told him that. But she manages to get through. Yesterday, she told him she was my mother. She speaks French with an accent.”

  Lydia Morelli, Clerfayt thought. “Why haven’t you said anything to me about it?”

  “What for? Is the Ritz full?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Uncle Gaston will faint tomorrow when he hears where I’m staying.”

  Lillian had not packed. Clerfayt talked to the night clerk and was able to borrow a huge wardrobe trunk that a German major had left behind during the retreat. He stowed Lillian’s dresses away in it. She sat on the bed, laughing. “I’m sorry to leave here,” she said. “I’ve loved everything so much. But I love without regrets. Do you know what I mean?”

  Clerfayt raised his head. “I’m afraid I do. You don’t regret leaving anything.”

  She laughed again, her legs outstretched, a glass of wine in her hand. “It no longer matters. I’ve left the sanatorium; since then, I can leave any place I like.”

  No doubt she will leave me, too, in the same way, Clerfayt thought. Like changing a hotel. “Here is the German major’s sword,” he said. “He must have forgotten it in the excitement—impossible laxness for a German officer. I’ll leave it right here in the trunk. Incidentally, you’re charmingly drunk. Luckily, I reserved a room for you in the Ritz two days ago. Otherwise, it would be difficult to get you past the concierge in your present state.”

  Lillian reached for the major’s sword and saluted, still sitting. “I’m very fond of you. Why don’t I ever call you by your first name?”

  “Nobody else does.”

  “That would be a reason for me to.”

  “Now, I think you’re all packed,” Clerfayt said. “Do you want to take the sword with you?”

  “Leave it here.”

  Clerfayt pocketed the key and helped Lillian into her coat. “Am I too thin?” she asked.

  “No. I think you’ve gained a few pounds.”

  “That’s the only thing that counts,” she murmured.

  They had a cab follow them with the suitcases and trunk. “Does my room in the Ritz face on the place Vendôme?” Lillian asked.

  “Yes. Not the rue Cambon.”

  “How is it you were there during the war?”

  “I went there after I escaped from prison camp. It was an excellent hiding place. Nobody would have dreamed of looking for me there. My half-brother lived on the place Vendôme. We are Alsatians. My brother has a German father; my father was French.”

  “Couldn’t your brother have done something for you? When you were in camp?”

  Clerfayt laughed. “He would have loved to have me in Siberia. As far away as possible. Do you see the sky? Morning is coming. Hear the birds? In cities, you only hear them at this time. Nature lovers must go to night clubs, so they can hear thrushes on the way home.”

  They turned into the place Vendôme. The broad gray square was very still. Under the clouds, the morning gleamed a rich gold. “When you see how wonderfully people built in the past, you assume they must have been happier than we,” Lillian said. “Do you think they were?”

  “No,” Clerfayt replied. He let the car coast to a stop before the hotel entrance. “I am happy at this moment,” he said, “no matter whether we know what happiness is or not. I am happy at this moment, in this stillness, on this square, with you. And when you have had a good sleep, we’ll drive south, and make our way to Sicily and the Targa Florio by easy stages.”

  Chapter Twelve

  IN SICILY, SPRING was in full torrent. The sixty-seven-mile course of the Targa Florio, with its nearly fourteen hundred curves, was closed to traffic for several hours every day, so that the racing drivers could train. Since the drivers also went over the course outside the official time, in order to memorize the curves, the pitches, and the condition of the road, the roar of heavy motor
s hung over the white highway and the white landscape from dawn to dusk.

  Clerfayt’s second driver was Alfredo Torriani, a twenty-four-year-old Italian. Both men were out on the road almost the entire day. Evenings, they returned sunburned, hungry, and thirsty.

  Clerfayt did not want Lillian to be present during the training runs. She was not to become involved in the business like the wives and mistresses of the other drivers, who sat with stop watches and score cards in the booths erected by the various auto firms for repairs, tanking up, and changing tires. Instead, he had introduced her to a friend who had a house by the sea, and had installed her there. The man’s name was Levalli and he was the owner of a tuna fishing fleet. Clerfayt had considered him an ideal guardian for Lillian: Levalli was an esthete, bald, fat, and homosexual.

  All day, Lillian lay on the beach or in the garden that surrounded the villa. The garden was neglected, romantic, full of marble statues. Lillian never felt any desire to see Clerfayt driving, but she loved the low growl of the motors which penetrated into the stillness of the orange groves. The sound was carried in by the wind, together with the heavy fragrance of orange blossoms. It merged with the murmur of the sea to form an exciting concert—as if modern jungle drums were mingling with the oldest sound in the world, the murmur of water, from which all life came. To Lillian, it seemed as if Clerfayt were speaking to her. The sound hung invisibly above her all day long; she abandoned herself to it as she abandoned herself to the hot sky and the white sheen of the sea. Clerfayt was always there—whether she slept under the stone pines in the shadow of some god’s statue, or sat on a bench reading Petrarch or Augustine’s Confessions; whether she curled up by the sea without a thought in the world, or sat on the terrace in the mysterious hour before twilight, when the Italian women were already saying feliccissima notte and back of every word there seemed to linger the question mark of an unknown god. Always, the distant rumble was there, the drum roll of sky and evening, and it always awoke a resonance in her blood, which throbbed gently and responded.

  Then, in the evening, Clerfayt would come, accompanied by the growl, which rose to thunder when the car came close. “Like the gods of classical times,” Levalli said to Lillian, “our modern condottieri appear amid thunder and lightning, as if they were sons of Jupiter.”