Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  And that was where we went shortly after breakfast that first morning: Peter and Andrew and Dorothy and I, though Dorothy sunburned with the slightest exposure, and stayed only for a minute before going back to the room. The rocky ledge above the waves led along at the foot of the cliffs, under the garden walls of villas on the top, and out to the end of the cape, and around it. Some of the rocks were the size of elephants. The flashing green-blue water was transparent. We could see every stone and piece of coral and seaweed on the bottom, ten, twenty, forty feet down. We dove off the rocks into another sunlight.

  When we came back Alan was standing on the terrace outside the dining room with a tall, slender, dapper man of about Alan’s own age, who looked at once elegant and a little seedy. Alan introduced him as Georges Fratacci. As we stood talking before I followed the others upstairs to change, I was told that Georges was an architect, currently underemployed and working on entries for an architectural competition, and that he was a tenant of Alan’s, or a guest of Alan’s, or some combination of those that was never stated clearly. He and his wife and daughters were living in the modest, yellow, vaguely neoclassical house across the road from the villa, which also belonged to Alan. We could see its roof from our bathroom window. Georges had a fine-boned, lean, handsome face, set off with a trim Ronald Coleman moustache. He was wearing a pale linen suit, slightly rumpled, and a tie, and two-toned shoes, white with brown wingtips.

  He had no English at all, though he had done architectural work, he said, for the American embassy. He alluded to architectural designs on which, apparently, he and Alan had worked together. He spoke to me proudly of being a Corsican. Alan had told him that I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and to Georges that was a clear recommendation. We were both artists. He was staying for lunch, where he would expand upon that theme.

  André served us lunch on the terrace, and in the afternoon Alan drove us into Nice. On the way he and Georges pointed out the sights, telling us the names of the villa owners on the cape, and talking of the owner of the hotel and café, the Voile d’Or, beside the small harbor. They pointed out the other café, on the place, run by a couple they both knew. The wife, as they told it, had come from the demimonde in Toulon or Marseilles, where she had once run an advertisement in the evening newspaper, ending with the phrase “every discretion, near the railroad station.” Everyone liked her. Now she was pregnant and the café regulars were looking forward to being honorary uncles and aunts.

  We retraced the winding street to where we had turned off the main road the night before, and made our way along the corniche lined with bicycle traffic, two and three bicycles abreast, with no intention of getting out of the way of cars and trucks, and then down the steep switchbacks into Nice, our first glimpse of a Mediterranean city, of metropolitan France, of the architecture and civilization of Provence. The traffic was negligible in comparison with what was soon to come, but it was all strange, composed of old cars, wagons and carts, unfamiliar shapes, and so it seemed that there was a lot of it revolving around the white-gauntleted policemen standing at the centers of the principal places, blowing whistles. Behind them rose the plain, inherited symmetry of the facades, the sand-colored limestone and harmonious proportions, the rows of shutters—jalousies—pale gray or gray-blue or gray-green, reflecting the southern sunlight that had filled the days of the later troubadours and of Dante and Cavalcanti and Petrarch.

  Alan had a few routine matters to take care of, calling at his bank and the insurance office. Georges, meanwhile, led us past the big stores and into back streets and older sections of Nice, with overhanging upper stories and tables set outside small cafés in the shade, covered with socca—onion and black olive pie. Peter was absorbed by displays of French fishing harpoons, reels, and snorkeling gear. I knew so little that when we came to shoe stores with stacks of rope-soled shoes outside I supposed that the rope soles were a heritage of the shortages of the war years. Georges found us a bookstore. I pounced on the poems of Supervielle and the essays of Camus, an unknown volume of Gide, Valéry’s Monsieur Teste. (French paperbacks cost little then. They represented a spirit of publishing in which books could be produced cheaply in small editions, according to considerations not hypnotized by the hope of profit. Paperback publishing in the States was still confined to “dime novels.”) Alan would raise his eyebrows, of course, when he saw them.

  He met us and took us all to lunch in a restaurant on a side street, a place that he had known, he said, all his life. Georges explained the Mediterranean specialties on the menu. We were all celebrating an arrival, only superficially aware of how different the occasion must have been for each of us. To Andrew, who knew no French at all and next to nothing about France, it must have seemed very strange. Dorothy and I welcomed it with blanket and determined approval. Alan, I suppose, was trying to sort out his own plans for the summer and decide how they might include all or any of the four of us. I could see that I was meant to play an important part in his decisions, watching over the activities of Peter and Andrew, making sure they were happily occupied. I scarcely considered that our situation was virtually as new to Alan as it was to the rest of us, and it would be a while before I tried to guess what combination of liberality and loyalties, affections, hopes, and heaven knows what else, had prompted and shaped his idea for the summer.

  24

  Swimming, walking along the rocks around the cape, and sunbathing took up part of most days, especially at the beginning. Peter wanted us to have underwater harpoon guns. Alan took us to buy them, and followed directions to a small, dark, upstairs office in Nice where I filled out a form, sat for a photograph, and was issued a harpoon fishing license. Peter was too young for one, but if I had one I could officially be his “instructor.” Neither of us was much good with a snorkel, and neither was Andrew. Dorothy did not even try. We never speared any fish at all, but for a while Peter liked to have the harpoons with us when we were out on the rocks, and we kept them in the cupboard with the yellow inflatable boat, which soon exuded a murky smell of rubber and cats.

  One morning we came in from the water to find that another young couple had arrived at the villa as Alan’s guests. Sometimes he announced such things in advance; more often it seemed not to occur to him to do that. Alan introduced them as Gilles Quéant—dark, saturnine, floridly handsome—and his beautiful wife, Françoise, who turned out to be my friend Alain’s elder sister. Both of them, Alan said, were movie actors. I was startled that Alain had told me so little about his family, and especially about his sister.

  At lunch, Gilles seemed particularly happy to meet young Americans. He spoke of the world of acting and the film industry in France in a low confiding voice, his model perhaps Louis Jouvet. Françoise and I converged on the subject of her brother and our friendship, which had led me to Alan and France, and she talked a little of their childhood. She was at once friendly, as though we already knew each other, and reserved, giving the impression of being shy rather than wary. Gilles and she might have been riding in different sections of the same bus. There was a glazed distance between them. In the week or two that they were there at the villa, in a room across the hall from ours, he picked up his conversation with me as a continuing thread, easily, casually, in a manner suggesting that we were old friends, and that I knew the main details of this life. I was surprised by his apparent candor, though I was aware at the same time that it was his way of presenting himself, a pose he was rehearsing.

  One afternoon, a few days after they arrived, when he and I were sitting by ourselves in the garden after lunch, he asked me whether I was in love with my wife, and then without waiting for an answer told me that he was not in love with Françoise and was not sure that he had ever been, it had just been fun to begin with, in the circles they went around in. It had just happened like that. He described the social and professional world they shared, parties and studios and filming, in a way that was not easy for me to envisage. I was thinking of what he had said about Françoise, and why he
would ever have said it to me, whether he was about to divulge affairs of his own, or to describe a marriage in which they both had affairs, or even whether he was about to suggest a bit of wife-swapping. His question, which he seemed to have forgotten was a question, flashed a passing light on something that I knew very well. I was not in love with Dorothy either, but I felt guilty about it, would not have admitted it readily, and was repelled by the thought of announcing it behind her back to someone I scarcely knew, whose possible interest in the subject I could not even guess.

  Gilles came and went on his own, into the place and on walks around the cape, and he talked at length on the telephone, and continued our after-meal conversations, sitting in the garden. Françoise came swimming with the boys and me. Bikinis still seemed a welcome novelty. We all dutifully tried out the snorkels, and she probably managed them best. Without effort we became friends. She had the reserve that Gilles lacked, and grace, and poise, and she did not tend to talk about herself. Neither of us did that. We did not feel free to, in those circumstances, and there never were any others. Everyone in the villa knew when we were alone together, and we were aware of it.

  Georges Fratacci often turned up in the garden when some of us were sitting there after lunch. If Dorothy was there and I was not, he would unfold in his mind the one thumbed, painful sentence of English he could muster, tighten his face and say, “Wear Ease Ure Eyes Burn?” Dorothy managed to understand, after several failures, that he was asking where her husband was, and she would answer in schoolbook French, and I would be called or he would come and find me. Georges would have been happy to include Gilles in his fraternity of artists, but Gilles scarcely noticed Georges.

  Georges wanted to show me his studio. He talked of the artist’s devotion to his art, his craft, his métier, as though it were a quasi-religious vocation, utterly personal and innate, something that the French, he assured me, understood and knew how to respect. He developed the subject as he led me out through the small door set into the big double doors of the villa entrance. We crossed the road to the house set behind a waist-high, yellow stuccoed garden wall and a wooden gate. It was a modest Mediterranean building dating from sometime in the nineteenth century, any time after the Napoleonic era. It was probably much older than the present villa standing between it and the sea. In style it could have been a Palladian gatehouse. The front door opened into a bare, symmetrical hall, with a dining room and kitchen to the right. Georges’s wife, a plain, pleasant, withdrawn woman, emerged from the kitchen, and when Georges had introduced me she offered us coffee. Georges led the way after her into the kitchen, where I met their two pretty daughters, eleven and fourteen years old. Georges and I sat down to tins of cookies and coffee, but they waited on us and did not sit down with us or participate much in the conversation. In the days that followed I realized that this was the way of the house, and of Georges’s background and perhaps of his wife’s too, although I was never sure of that, for I never managed to talk with her by herself. I came upon Georges several times having his meals or a coffee alone at the table in the kitchen, or in the dining room, or outside under the arbor, with his wife or daughters waiting on him but never sitting down with him. I saw, of course, that this was a significant cultural difference and none of my business, but it never ceased to make me uncomfortable, and I observed too that it was a custom that did not extend to other circles of French society in which Georges moved.

  In a moment Georges stood up, told me to bring my coffee along, and led the way back through the hall and the evidently scarcely used sitting room beyond it, and with a certain air of caution as though he might be disturbing someone, he eased open the door on the far side of it into another room of the same size, with the blinds of the windows drawn down to the sills, which gave the room a dim, yellow light. He shut the door behind us, raised the blinds, and led me to the long table filling one side of the room. It was covered with a roll of tracing paper, and under that was a drawing board. He rolled back the paper and showed me a long half-finished architectural drawing of a neoclassic facade, with columns, a portico, recessed wings, a wide terrace at one end, trees and bushes drawn in as shadows, darker than the other shadows. Then views from above, from the ends, from inside, and structural details. It was a building design for a competition related in some way that was never clear to me to the American embassy, perhaps for a consular building, and Georges hoped it would lead to a grant and a permanent position, maybe at the embassy itself, all of this with Alan’s encouragement. Georges told me that he worked here at night when everything was quiet and he could get the light just right. Sometimes he found that he had worked all night and was still standing at the drawing board when the light began to return through the olive leaves outside the window.

  From his studio he led me to the place, to the café with its soccer tables, and introduced me to the owners there, the local man risen to proprietor’s status, and his evidently popular, pregnant wife “avec tache.” Then in turn Georges took me to the other café, the more fashionable, expensive, done-up one under its huge awning, on the terrace above the harbor at the Hotel Voile d’Or. There the specialty was Guinness stout, either straight or with champagne. At both places, to my embarrassment, Georges insisted on introducing me as an American poet, which the proprietors responded to with polite, perfunctory bows. The Voile d’Or host, in brass-buttoned blazer and yachting cap, spoke well-practiced English with an accent from the movies, and told me that he knew another American poet who lived above Monte Carlo, an old man named Robert Service, and asked whether I knew him. He told me that Service came there to the café from time to time, or used to, and that he could find Service’s address if I wanted him to. I had just arrived, and was too gauche, green, and snobbish to take him up on it, and have lived to regret that, though in fact it might not have been easy for me to get over to call on the old author of The Face upon the Bar-Room Floor even if I had had the address. It was some distance. I had not mastered the few bus routes, and I would not have wanted to go with Alan even if the idea had appealed to him.

  Georges on his own had assumed the task of introducing this newfound young American poet to the lore and ways of the arts in the Old World. He sang a few French cabaret songs from Georges Brassens and others, and Corsican drinking songs, not particularly well, in a scratchy voice. One day as we sat on the place looking over the water, he introduced me to a French writer of his own age or a few years younger who was shopping for lunch, carrying a string bag that had a baguette, a bottle of wine, a bit of hard sausage, and a head of lettuce in it. The young writer, whose name was Georges Belmont, had rented a house for the summer a few steps away from where we were sitting, and was staying there with his wife and small daughter. He was earning his living at the moment, he told me, by translating from English, which he spoke beautifully. Just then he had a deadline to finish a translation of The Egg and I. He invited me to visit him, and made sure I knew how to find where he lived.

  Georges Fratacci, for reasons that I had not yet picked up, seemed to be showing me off, as though I were a member of his own family. He began to urge me to go to Paris in the autumn, where he would be working for the Embassy and would introduce me to people who would understand and appreciate me. As he said it I thought I detected a suggestion that Alan perhaps could not be expected to “understand” me, which led me to wonder whether Georges’s dependence upon Alan was nourishing his doubts about himself. But I thought of his kindness as an agreeable example of a Mediterranean open temperament, happy to find new, sympathetic company.

  25

  A few mornings after we arrived, Alan had an ancient Ford, a 1908 Model A, delivered to the courtyard of the villa. The local garage between the place and the main road had been keeping it there in storage, up on blocks in the back. Alan walked around it smiling with the pleasure of a child to whom a favorite toy has been restored. I could see that the car represented moments of his youth that he remembered with fondness, from summers when he and his bro
ther had been growing up, but his allusions to those times were oddly featureless and elusive, whether because he realized that they would serve as deplorable examples or because he wanted to keep them to himself, I could not guess. He spoke of the ability to master the peculiar workings and niceties of the archaic vehicle as a new test of my real worth. I suppose I passed, but his attention was on the Ford and he kept to himself any doubts about how practical it would be to have the old car back in the stable again. He had good reason to wonder about such things. By now I no longer remember some of the fine points of coaxing it into action and keeping it awake and tractable, but I recall brass tubing around and under the dashboard, with beautiful antique brass valves, all of which the garage had kept oiled and polished. The main valve controlled the flow of gasoline from the tank to the carburetor, and had to be opened before undertaking the arduous rituals of getting the motor running, which usually—perhaps always—required the use of a crank. Sometimes the operation took two to make it work, one out in front bowing and grunting over the handle of the crank, the other in the driver’s seat with a hand on a lever attached to the steering rod, which I suppose was one of the throttles, for there may have been more than one. All this, of course, was before the day of safety inspections. The car had been registered once for all time, and the card was somewhere in it.

  Peter had seen the Ford before. He may even have ridden in it, in earlier summers. He now seemed to regard it as an exotic ancestor of the Deer Park jeep, which in a way it was, and Alan allowed him to climb into it and go with me on a tentative sortie along the one road leading past the villas on the cape, where there were no cars to speak of. Peter’s hilarity from the summer before, when I had been learning how to manage the clutch on the jeep, came back to him as we inched and chugged out the gate. There were subtleties and protocols to this clutch and gear system too that kept eluding me. For such a simple car the controls were remarkably elaborate, and I did not know whether to ascribe the old car’s uncooperative behavior to its age and condition or to my ignorance or to its recalcitrance at having been taken over by a barbarous stranger. Not all of the gears would work, and one of them—I think it was second—liked to change its mind after I had wheedled it into place and had released the clutch, and was driving on, depending on it. It would let me start ahead and then skip back out of engagement again, the motor suddenly racing free with a happy shriek, and the auto’s forward momentum, such as it was, dying in one winded exhalation, the wheels giving up instantly. And the brakes puzzled me. They worked, sooner or later, but out of a long sleep, and not always in quite the same way. Still, we made it out to the end of the road and back, and Alan, André, Gilles, and Andrew were waiting in the courtyard to cheer us in, looking a little surprised that we had made it.