Villa Triste (17 page)

She’d fallen asleep. Her head had slid down the bars of the headboard. She looked five years younger, with her slightly swollen cheeks, her almost imperceptible smile. She’d fallen asleep the way she used to do while I read her the
History of England
, but even faster this time than when listening to Maurois.

I sat on the windowsill and looked at her. Someone set off a firework somewhere.

I started packing our bags. So as not to wake her up, I’d turned off all the lights in the room, except for the night-light on her bedside table. I took her things and mine from the closets as I went along.

I lined up the suitcases on the floor of the “living room.” She owned six, of various sizes. With mine added in, we had eleven, not counting the wardrobe trunk. I gathered together my old newspapers and my clothes, but her things were more difficult to organize, and every time I thought I’d finally finished, I discovered a new dress, a bottle of perfume, or a pile of scarves. The dog sat on the sofa, following my comings and goings with an attentive eye.

I didn’t have enough strength left to close the suitcases, and I collapsed on a chair. The dog put his chin on the edge of the sofa and gazed up at me. We stared into the whites of each other’s eyes for a good long time.

Dawn was breaking when a faint memory visited me. When had I lived through a moment like this before? I saw the furnished apartments in the sixteenth or seventeenth
arrondissement — Rue du Colonel-Moll, Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse, Avenue du Général-Balfourier — where the walls were covered with the same wallpaper as in the rooms at the Hermitage, where the chairs and the beds cast the same pall of desolation over the heart. Drab rooms, precarious stopping places you must always evacuate before the Germans arrive, abodes where you leave no trace.

I slept until she woke me. She was staring at the bulging suitcases. “What’d you do this for?”

She sat on the largest case, the one in dark red leather. She looked exhausted, as if she’d helped me pack our bags all night long. The beach robe she had on was open over her breasts.

So then, keeping my voice low, I talked to her about America again. To my surprise, I heard myself declaiming the sentences rhythmically, and they became a monotonous chant.

When I ran out of arguments, I told her that Maurois himself, the writer she admired, had gone to America in 1940. Maurois.

Maurois.

She nodded and smiled amiably at me. She agreed completely. We would leave as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to upset me. But I needed to rest. She stroked my forehead.

I still had so many little details to consider. For example, the dog’s visa.

She smiled as she listened to me and never flinched. I spoke for hours and hours, and the same words kept
coming back: Algonquin, Brooklyn, the French Line, Zukor, Goldwyn, Warner Bros., Bella Darvi … Yvonne had a lot of patience.

“You ought to get some sleep,” she repeated from time to time.

I was waiting. And what could she be doing? She’d promised to meet me at the station a half hour before the arrival of the Paris express. That way, we wouldn’t run the risk of missing it. But it had just pulled out of the station. And I was still there on the platform, watching the rhythmic procession of the departing carriages. Behind me, around one of the benches, were my suitcases and my wardrobe trunk, arranged in a semicircle with the trunk standing upright. A harsh light threw shadows on the platform. And I had the empty, dazed feeling that comes over you after the passage of a train.

Deep inside, I’d been expecting it. It would have been incredible had things happened otherwise. I gazed at my baggage again. Three or four hundred kilos I was still hauling around with me. Why? At the thought, an acid laugh shook my sides.

The next train would arrive at six minutes past midnight. I had more than an hour ahead of me, and I walked out of the station, leaving my bags on the platform. Their contents could be of interest to no one. Besides, they were much too heavy to move very far.

I went into the rotunda-shaped café next to the Hôtel Verdun. Was it called the Dials Café, or the Café of the Future? Chess players occupied the tables in the back. A
brown wooden door led to a billiards room. The shivering pink light in the café came from neon tubes. I could hear the crack of billiard balls at very long intervals, and the continuous sizzle of the neon. Nothing else. Not a word. Not a sigh. When I ordered some linden-mint tea, I kept my voice low.

America suddenly seemed very far away. Did Albert, Yvonne’s father, come here to play billiards? I would have liked to know. A torpor was overcoming me, and I felt in that café the calm I’d known at the Lindens, with Madame Buffaz. By some phenomenon of alternation or cyclothymia, one dream followed another: I no longer imagined myself with Yvonne in America, but in a little provincial town oddly like Bayonne. Yes, we were living on Rue Thiers, and on summer evenings we’d stroll beneath the theater arcades or along the Allées Boufflers. Yvonne would take my arm, and we could hear the
plunk
of tennis balls. On Sunday afternoons, we’d walk around the ramparts and sit on a bench in the public gardens, near the bust of Léon Bonnat. Bayonne, haven of sweetness and rest, after so many years of uncertainty. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Bayonne … 

I looked for her everywhere. I tried to find her at the Sainte-Rose, among the numerous diners and all the people dancing. It was an evening party that figured in the program of the season’s festivities: the “Scintillating Soirée,” I believe. Yes, scintillating. Sporadic, brief showers of confetti covered the dancers’ hair and shoulders.

At the same table they’d occupied on the night of the Cup, I recognized Fossorié, the Roland-Michels, the
brunette, the president of the golf club, and the two suntanned blondes. Essentially, they hadn’t left their places for a month. Only Fossorié’s hairdo had changed: a first wave, glossy with brilliantine, formed a sort of diadem around his forehead. Behind that wave, a trough. And then another, very full wave rose well above his skull and broke in cascades on his neck. No, it’s no dream. They stand up and walk to the dance floor. The orchestra plays a pasodoble. They mingle with the other dancers out there, under the showers of confetti. And it all whirls and swirls, wheels and scatters in my memory. All dust.

A hand on my shoulder. The manager of the place, the man named Pulli.

“Are you looking for someone, Monsieur Chmara?”

He speaks in a whisper, close to my ear.

“Mademoiselle Jacquet … Yvonne Jacquet …”

I say her name without much hope. He can’t know who she is. So many faces … A steady stream of customers, night after night. If I showed him a photograph, he’d surely recognize her. You should always carry photos of those you love.

“Mademoiselle Jacquet? She just left in the company of Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx …”

“Are you sure of that?”

I must have made a funny face, puffing out my cheeks like a child about to cry, because he took me by the arm.

“Yes. In the company of Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx.”

He didn’t say “with,” but “in the company of,” and I recognized in this subtlety a refinement of language
characteristic of high society in Cairo and Alexandria, when French was de rigueur there.

“Shall we have a drink, you and I?”

“No, I have a train to catch at six past midnight.”

“Well then, I’ll drive you to the station, Chmara.”

He pulls me by the sleeve. He’s acting familiar, but also deferential. We pass through the crowd of dancers. Still the pasodoble. Now there’s a steady, blinding downpour of confetti. All around me, a great deal of laughter and movement. I collide with Fossorié. One of the tanned blondes, the one whose name is Meg Devillers, flings her arms around my neck.

“Oh, you … you … you …”

She doesn’t want to let me go. I drag her for two or three meters. In the end, I manage to break free. Pulli and I find ourselves at the top of the stairs. Our hair and our jackets are covered with confetti.

“It’s the Scintillating Soirée, Chmara.” He shrugs his shoulders.

His car is parked in front of the Sainte-Rose, at the side of the lakeshore road. A Simca Chambord, whose passenger door he ceremoniously opens for me.

“Step into my jalopy.”

He doesn’t start the engine right away.

“I had a big convertible in Cairo.”

And then, point-blank: “Your luggage, Chmara?”

“It’s at the station.”

We’d been rolling along for some minutes when he asked me, “Where are you bound?”

I didn’t answer. He slowed down. We weren’t going over thirty kilometers an hour. He turned to me and said, “… Travel …”

Then he was silent. Me too.

“One must settle somewhere,” he finally said. “Alas …”

We were driving beside the lake. I took a last look at the lights, those of Veyrier on the opposite shore, and the dark mass of Carabacel on the horizon ahead of us. I squinted, trying to see the cable car. But no. We were too far away from it.

“Will you come back here, Chmara?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re lucky to be leaving. Ah, these mountains …”

He pointed at the saddle of the Aravis mountains, distantly visible in the moonlight.

“They always look as though they’re going to fall on you. I’m suffocating here, Chmara.”

This revelation came straight from his heart. I was touched, but I didn’t have the strength to console him. He was older than I was, after all.

We drove into town on Avenue du Maréchal-Leclerc. Close to the house where Yvonne was born. Pulli was driving dangerously, on the left like the English, but fortunately there was no traffic in the other direction.

“We’re early, Chmara.”

He’d stopped the Chambord in the station square, in front of the Hôtel Verdun.

We walked through the deserted station hall. Pulli didn’t even need to get a platform ticket. My bags were still in the same place.

We sat on the bench. No one else around. There was something tropical about the silence, the warm air, the lighting.

“It’s funny,” Pulli said. “We could be in the little Ramleh station …”

He offered me a cigarette. We smoked solemnly, without saying anything. I even think I blew a few defiant smoke rings.

“Did Mademoiselle Yvonne Jacquet really leave with Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx?” I asked him in a calm voice.

“But yes. Why?”

He smoothed his black mustache. I suspected that he wanted to tell me something deeply felt and decisive, but it didn’t come. His brow was furrowed. Drops of sweat were surely about to run down his temples. He looked at his watch. Two minutes after midnight. Then, with an effort: “I could be your father, Chmara … Listen to me … You have your life ahead of you … You must be brave …”

He turned his head left and right to see if the train was coming.

“Myself, at my age … I avoid looking back at the past … I try to forget Egypt …”

The train was coming into the station. He followed it with his eyes, hypnotized.

He wanted to help me with my luggage. He passed the suitcases to me one by one, and I stacked them in the corridor of the train. One. Then two. Then three.

We had a lot of trouble with the wardrobe trunk. He must have torn a muscle heaving the thing up and pushing it toward me, but he worked in a sort of frenzy.

The guard slammed the doors. I lowered the window and leaned out. Pulli smiled at me.

“Don’t forget Egypt, and good luck, old sport.”

He said those last two words in English, which surprised me, coming from him. He waved his arms. The train lurched into motion. He suddenly noticed that we’d forgotten one of my suitcases, a round one, by the bench. He grabbed it and started running. He was trying to catch up with my carriage. At last he stopped, panting, and made a broad gesture of helplessness. Then he stood very straight, still holding the suitcase, under the lights of the platform. He looked like a sentinel, getting smaller and smaller. A toy soldier.