The Foundling's War (26 page)

Jean was discovering that this careless and chaotic woman possessed a feeling for poetry that was genuinely harmonious. She truly loved the music of words, and Palfy had not been exaggerating when he declared that she could have made an entire auditorium weep
by reciting the telephone directory. She was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rolled into one, or at least with such a brief interlude between the two that it was frightening. Absorbed in
La Jeune Parque
while the lighting was being readied on set, she would awake from her reverie and, seeing Duzan hiding behind a camera, yell, ‘Get him out of here!’

‘Nelly, he’s the boss!’ the studio manager would implore her.

‘The boss is an arse … Everyone repeat after me: The boss is an arse… the boss is an arse …’

Duzan left, pursued from the studio by the shouts of the technicians and the actors. When the scene had been shot, was in the can, and on its way to the lab, Nelly called him.

‘I’m waiting for you! You and your bicycle-taxi bum! You surely don’t think I’m going home by Métro?’

Duzan ran to her. He felt like weeping, but instead took her out to dinner in a restaurant where he hoped everyone would recognise her.

‘It’s Nelly Tristan!’

And his assurance would return as she recounted her day to him, her tiffs with the other actors, or complained at length about the screenplay’s excessive vulgarity. Then, if he was too high-handed with the waiters, she would summon the head waiter or the restaurant’s owner.

‘Pay no attention. He’s very spoilt. He’s just playing at the producer-taking-his-star-out-to-dinner.’

To Jean, when she saw him the next day, she admitted, ‘He’s never loved me as much as he has since I’ve been cheating on him with you. I need to cheat on him much more. What a bore! Because then you’ll start getting jealous.’

‘No. Not a chance!’

‘Oh well …’

She was not at all put out. She knew Jean had another love.

‘Is she kind to you?’ she asked.

‘Very.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Claude.’

‘Is that a woman or a man?’

‘A woman.’

‘Are you sure she’s not a transvestite?’

‘Absolutely sure.’

‘Phew!’

If Claude had dinner at her mother’s – which seemed to be happening more frequently, as though Anna Petrovna, apprised of the danger her daughter was running, was doing her best to take her in hand – he stayed the night at Nelly’s. Sitting on a deep-pile carpet in front of the fireplace where a wood fire crackled, she would question him.

‘What have you read, then?’

‘
The Thibaults
.’
20

She shrugged.

‘Average. What else?’

‘
Remembrance of Things Past
.’

‘Better. Who’s your favourite poet?’

‘Before I met you, I didn’t know anyone who knew how to recite poetry.’

‘What do you want to hear?’

‘Whatever you like.’

She closed her eyes, suddenly absent again, and her voice rose, so poignantly that it enveloped Jean.

‘Who’s that by?’ he asked.

‘Reverdy.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘You scrumptious boy.’

When they were alone together, she did not drink.

‘With you,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to be unbearable in order to exist. You’re kind. You’re actually extraordinarily normal. Not
machosistic
, as old Madame Michette would say, not machosistic for a second. I might be unhappy for a few minutes the day you leave me.’

‘Who says I’m going to leave you?’

‘Me. I know you are. And deep down I don’t care, just like I don’t care about you. You’re not irreplaceable.’

‘I know. What about Duzan?’

‘Dudu? Oh, he’s for life. I’m his Omphale.’

‘He’s not Hercules.’

‘No, he’s not … but I’ve told him he’s an arse so often that he believes it.’

‘He told me you had an unhappy childhood.’

‘Me? Not for a second. I love my papa and maman. He works on the railways, she’s at home. Stationmaster at a little village in the
south-west
. He’ll never get another promotion and he doesn’t mind a bit. Ever since he was a child he’s written poetry, and all his poems are as bad as each other, but he doesn’t know that. He’s a member of the Société des Gens de Lettres and he thinks it’s something very similar to the Académie Française. He’s kind and generous and has always got his head in the clouds. A poet, you see. He’s had several
near-misses
changing the points. Otherwise he’s a very good stationmaster. One day we’ll go and see my parents. You’ll see my mother look at me wide-eyed. She says I’m like my father, artistic. He adores me because I’m his revenge on the people who don’t understand him. When a magazine rejects his poems he’s unhappy and shouts at everyone at the station. Otherwise he’s awfully nice. One in a million. I tell myself it’s from him that I have inherited the little light burning in me, that makes me not like the other actors around me, and him not like the other railway workers around him.’

Jean should have been torn between Claude and Nelly and he felt confused not to be, failing to grasp, in the happy surprise of it all, that the two women complemented each other and left him no freedom whatsoever. He went from one to the other as if to two different pleasures. Claude’s beauty had the appearance of tranquillity, yet was anything but tranquil. Nelly’s was that of a charming, false muddle. One was half hidden behind a stubborn secret, the other was open and laughed and glittered like diamonds. He could not have borne Nelly without Claude, and without Nelly he would not have been able to put up with the kind of relationship Claude offered him. Nelly was visible to everyone. Claude remained hidden. That was why he did not want Palfy to see her again or want Madeleine to know her. He thought about Jesús and decided that he was allowed.

Earlier it seemed to us unimportant for this account of Jean’s life to know whether he went to the Chevreuse valley with Nelly the day after their first night together. This was a mistake. In fact it was extremely important, and let us say here and now, having made enquiries, that they didn’t, giving in instead to Madeleine’s pleading that they should come and meet her Pole, another key individual in the Germans’ organised plunder of France. But Jean felt that Jesús was one person he wanted to introduce Claude to. He wrote to him. From Paris, where she returned to work every day, Fräulein Bruckett telephoned Jean’s office. They would expect him that weekend.

‘That’s good timing,’ Nelly said when she heard the news. ‘I was about to feel bad about leaving you on Saturday and Sunday. Dudu’s taking me to a château whose name I’ve forgotten. Some people he swears aren’t in the least bit annoying. Go to your friend’s. A bit of fresh air will do you good.’

Jesús was waiting for them at the station at Gif-sur-Yvette. He had got fatter. Not in his face so much, but his waistline had thickened. He carried Cyrille on his shoulders for the two kilometres to the farm. Laura came home early every evening, and left again at dawn in her little car. She was the vital force of their house. As soon as she arrived she would shed her field-grey uniform, put on a pair of corduroy trousers and a sweater, and cook, dust and pickle vegetables. Jesús had turned a barn into his studio. Jean saw immediately that he was working for himself, feverishly and with a pleasure that transformed him.

‘You see, Jean, I’m on my way again. I’m paintin’, do you hear, I’m paintin’. No more bollocks. I am an artis’! No’ a clown for La Garenne. You know’e came to see me?’

‘When?’

‘Yes’erday.’

The previous day, in fact, La Garenne had turned up at the farm, puffed out from the two-kilometre walk, brandishing a piece of paper.

‘I’ve got the certificate, I can reopen my gallery! Jesús, you can’t leave me now. All this nonsense has cost me a fortune. Not counting my mother’s burial. She wanted it all first-class, the organ at
Saint-Sulpice
, six horses, mountains of red roses and invitations for all of Paris society …’

Jean disabused Jesús. Louis-Edmond had conducted his mother to Montparnasse Cemetery with the least possible pomp. As for the certificate, it was yet another fraud. A Professor Montandon, a
so-called
ethnologist approved by the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs, had certified on official notepaper that the subject of his examination had been circumcised in his youth for medical reasons. La Garenne had sworn that his name was unimpeachably authentic, that he was indeed the descendant of a crusader, and that because his true father was not in a position to recognise him he had had him adopted by a proxy. So yes, he was officially called Levy and had suffered for it since childhood, because he could not stand Jews.

‘’E disgust’ me,’ Jesús said. ‘I’ave chucked him out. In Spain is no Jews! We is all a lil’ bit Jewish, thanks to thee Inquissición. Yes, all converted an’ good Christians. If you’ad seen him! He was cryin’ … Get out, filthy antisemite, I tol’ him. Laura drove him back to the station …’

The studio looked out onto an orchard whose trees were bare with the approach of winter. Beyond the orchard a line of poplars bent in the wind. Jesús took no notice of the gold and grey
Île-de-France
countryside. His easel stood in front of the window, and he painted the Andalusia he knew, the Mediterranean, its skies purged of all content by the noonday heat. Jean wondered if Jesús really was a great painter, a marvellous force of nature exploding into colour.

‘Wha’ do you think?’ Jesús asked, anxious at his friend’s silence.

‘Very beautiful.’

‘Then don’ say me anythin’ else.’

Laura appeared before nightfall. She brought a suitcase of food and a present for Cyrille, a model car made of painted wood. Jean would not have recognised her if he had met her in the street. Physically small, a brassy blonde, she was as insignificant as a woman can be. Despite her strong accent and timid voice, she spoke excellent French. This nondescript person had had the wit to keep Jesús, to isolate him so he could work, feed him properly and divert him enough at night so that he didn’t go looking elsewhere. Under her spell, he had forgotten his theories on love. He had spent far more than two nights in a row with Laura – six months of nights – and settled into the
well-considered
comfort she had organised around him. Every evening she brought back from Paris food she was able to obtain as a result of her post in the Department of Supply for the occupying army. Jesús, with the help of a carpenter and a stonemason, had refurbished and installed the big kitchen, his studio and two bedrooms. Each morning
he pushed down the pump handle three hundred times and the pump, connected to the well, pumped water into a tank in the attic. He strongly recommended Jean to have a go himself: the exercise would transform him from a weakling into a bodybuilder. Sawing wood for the farm’s fires and stove also helped Jesús stay fit, because the rest of the time he was in his studio, working without a fire, in shirtsleeves. An Andalusian is never cold. It was only people in the north who complained of the cold and people in the south who complained of the heat. A world government endowed with a modicum of common sense ought to organise, in the near future, when the war was over, massive migrations to make people happy once and for all. Jesús was convinced that if ever he returned to live in Spain one day, he would paint nothing but the landscapes of the Île-de-France, or Rue Norvins in the snow.

Cyrille was playing with his car, crawling across the flagstones of the kitchen. Laura was lighting the stove and getting dinner ready. Claude was setting the table. The two men had their feet up in front of the fire, glasses in hand. Outside the wind whistled. A passing hailstorm pattered on the windows. Jesús said carelessly that, despite being not the slightest bit bothered by the cold, he would rather be inside a house with walls a metre thick than outside in the open countryside.

‘Not everybody has your good fortune,’ Laura said gently.

She was thinking about her brother, an infantry lieutenant in von Bock’s army. The previous day in a letter he had begged her for socks and sweaters. The Russian winter was starting and the Wehrmacht had still not taken Moscow. A thousand leagues from that turmoil Jesús painted and gave La Garenne the boot, and tonight was welcoming his friend Jean. An unknown small boy was playing on the kitchen floor. Laura and Claude seemed to be getting on, busy around the stove. Apart from the hail that came to beat on the windows for several
minutes, the rest of the world might not have existed. Jesús was not even aware that Laura was closing her eyes and, far from her office where she spent her day balancing figures, doing her best to forget the war. It was enough for her to know that he was working enthusiastically on a picture of which she understood little but which could only be beautiful. The future? Was there one? She didn’t believe it any more. Death struck swiftly and often. Those she spent her day with and the man she spent her nights with belonged to two different universes. She didn’t confuse them or forget them. Jesús was beginning to tell himself he no longer needed anything, that he had had enough of other women and Laura was what he wanted now, and he had seen enough of other artists’ paintings not to feel curious any longer. The moment had come to create a vacuum and only exist for himself, to discard all theories and send all the professors home, in order simply to be himself. If he went exclusively in his own direction, he would go further. Money? He would not have less than if he were working to fatten Louis-Edmond de La Garenne. In any case Laura had money. She was ready for anything. For an artist it was not a right but a duty to be a pimp. Pimp for a woman, for a society, for the wealthy. It was the greatest honour you could pay them.