A Moveable Feast (16 page)

Zelda was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold colour and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk's eyes were clear and calm. I knew everything was all right and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned forward and said to me, telling me her great secret, 'Ernest, don't you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?'

Nobody thought anything of it at the time. It was only Zelda's secret that she shared with me, as a hawk might share something with a man. But hawks do not share. Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane.

19 A Matter of Measurements

Much later, in the time after Zelda had what was then called her first nervous breakdown and we happened to be in Paris at the same time, Scott asked me to have lunch with him at Michaud's restaurant on the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Peres. He said he had something very important to ask me that meant more than anything in the world to him and that I must answer absolutely truly. I said that I would do the best that I could. When he would ask me to tell him something absolutely truly, which is very difficult to do, and I would try it, what I said would make him angry, often not when I said it but afterwards, and sometimes long afterwards when he had brooded on it. My words would become something that would have to be destroyed and sometimes, if possible, me with them.

He drank wine at the lunch but it did not affect him and he had not prepared for the lunch by drinking before it. We talked about our work and about people and he asked me about people that we had not seen lately. I knew that he was having great trouble with it for many reasons, but that was not what he wanted to talk about. I kept waiting for it to come, the thing that I had to tell the absolute truth about; but he would not bring it up until the end of the meal, as though we were having a business lunch.

Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said,

'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'

'No, I didn't.'

'I thought I had told you.'

'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'

'That is what I have to ask you about.'

'Good. Go on.'

'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'

'Come out to the office,' I said.

'Where is the office?'

'Le water,' I
said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are OK. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'

'Those statues may not be accurate.'

'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'

'But why would she say it?'

'To put you out of business. That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to see a doctor.'

'I didn't want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.'

'Now do you believe me?'

'I don't know,' he said.

'Come on over to the Louvre,' I said, 'It's just down the street and across the river.'

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still be was doubtful about himself.

'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.' I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.

'There is one girl,' he said, 'who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda said

—'

'Forget what Zelda said,' I told him. 'Zelda is crazy. There's nothing wrong with you.

Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.'

'You don't know anything about Zelda.'

'All right,' I said. 'Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I've tried to give you an honest answer.'

But he was still doubtful.

'Should we go and see some pictures?' I asked. 'Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?'

'I'm not in the mood for looking at pictures,' he said. 'I promised to meet some people at the Ritz bar.'

Many years later at the Ritz bar, long after the end of the World War II, Georges, who is the bar chief now and who was the
chasseur
when Scott lived in Paris, asked me,

'Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?'

'Didn't you know him?'

'No. I remember all of the people of that time. But now they ask me only about him.'

What do you tell them?'

'Anything interesting that they wish to hear. What will please them. But tell me, who was he?'

'He was an American writer of the early Twenties and later who lived some time in Paris and abroad.'

'But why would I not remember him? Was he a good writer?'

'He wrote two very good books and one which was not completed which those who know his writing best say would have been very good. He also wrote some good short stories.'

'Did he frequent the bar much?'

'I believe so.'

'But you did not come to the bar in the early Twenties. I know that you were poor then and lived in a different quarter.'

'When I had money I went to the Crillon.'

'I know that too. I remember very well when we first met.'

'So do I.'

'It is strange that I have no memory of him,' Georges said.

'All those people are dead.'

'Still, one does not forget people because they are dead and people keep asking me about him. You must tell me something about him for my memoirs.'

'I will.'

'I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night - in what year?' He smiled.

'He is dead too.'

'Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?'

'His first wife wrote very beautifully,' I said. 'She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I ever read. Except Sir Samuel Baker's book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia. Put that in your memoirs. Since you are interested in writers now.'

'Good,' said Georges. 'The Baron was not a man that you forget. And the name of the book?'

'Out of Africa,'
I said. 'Blickie was always very proud of his first wife's writing. But we knew each other long before she had written that book.'

'But Monsieur Fitzgerald that they keep asking me about?'

'He was in Frank's time.'

'Yes. But I was the
chasseur.
You know what a
chasseur
is.'

'I am going to write something about him in a book that I will write about the early days in Paris. I promised myself that I would write it.'

'Good,' said Georges.

'I will put him in exactly as I remember him the first time that I met him.'

'Good,' said Georges. 'Then, if he came here, I will remember him. After all, one does not forget people.'

'Tourists?'

'Naturally. But you say he came here very much?'

'It meant very much to him.'

'You write about him as you remember him and then if he came here I will remember him.'

'We will see,' I said.

20 There Is Never Any End to Paris

When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when you got used to it. I could always go to a cafe to write and could work all morning over a
cafe creme
while the waiters cleaned and swept out the cafe and it gradually grew warmer. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a cafe in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie, the
femme de menage,
had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.

But when you are poor, and we were really poor when I had given up all journalism when we came back from Canada, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a baby in Paris in the winter. At three months Mr Bumby had crossed the North Atlantic on a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January. He never cried on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather. But our Paris was too cold for him.

We went to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Liechtenstein and stopped at Bludenz where there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to Schruns, which was a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.

The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. The meals were simple and excellent and the dining-room and the wood-planked public bar were well heated and friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and poverty as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down, but its longer course was down.

There were no ski-lifts from Schruns and no funiculars, but there were logging trails and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on foot carrying your skis and higher up, where the snow was too deep, you climbed on sealskins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leave payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hutte, the Madlener-Haus and the Wiesbadener-Hutte.

In back of the Taube there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tschagguns across the valley where there was a beautiful inn with an excellent collection of chamois horns on the walls of the drinking-room. It was from behind the lumber village of Tschagguns, which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing went all the way up until you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.

Schruns was a healthy place for Bumby who had a dark-haired beautiful gkl to take him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town were very friendly. Herr Walther Lent who was a pioneer high-mountain skier and at one time had been a partner with Hannes Schneider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski-waxes for climbing and all snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled. Walther Lent's system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols.

Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.

Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain country where there was no one else and where the snow was untracked and then travel from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps.

You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.

Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and later at Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.

We loved the Vorarlberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about Thanksgiving time and stay until nearly Easter. There was always skiing even though Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in a winter of heavy snow. But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.

We were always hungry and every mealtime was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best. For other drinks there was kirsch made in the valley and Enzian schnapps distilled from mountain gentian. Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best cost twenty cents a litre. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in kegs to the Madlener-Haus.