by Jean Rhys
'No, it isn't amusing,' I say. 'Especially on a rainy day.'
'Well, what do you think? Do you think this letter can be genuine? What do you think ?'
Every word has been chewed over by the time we have finished our second drink.
'Besides,' he says, 'even if it is genuine, I mustn't send the money at once. That would never do. If she thought she had only to ask, to have - that would never do. No, no, I must keep her waiting.'
Chew, chew, chew....
'No. I think she's lying.'
All the time he is staring at me, sizing me up. He has his hand on my knee under the table.
He is not a Parisian. He lives in Lille. He is staying at a friend's lat, he says, and it's a very nice lat. Will I come along there and have a little porto?....Well, why not?
What does this man look like? I don't remember. I don't think I ever looked at him. I remember that he had very small hands and that he wore a ring with a blue stone in it.
We get out into the street. And, of course, vlung - first breath of fresh air and I'm so drunk I can't walk.
'He la,' he says. 'What's the matter? Have you been dancing too much?'
'All you young women,' he says, 'dance too much. Mad for pleasure, all the young people....Ah, what will happen to this after-war generation? I ask myself. What will happen? Mad for pleasure....But we'll take a taxi.'
We cross the road unsteadily and stand under a sickly town-tree waiting to signal a taxi. I start to giggle. He runs his hand up and down my arm.
I say: 'Do you know what's really the matter with me? I'm hungry. I've had hardly anything to eat for three weeks.'
'Comment?' he says, snatching his hand away. 'What's this you're relating?'
'C'est vrai,' I say, giggling still more loudly. 'It's quite true. I've had nothing to eat for three weeks.' (Exaggerating, as usual.)
At this moment a taxi draws up. Without a word he gets into it, bangs the door and drives of, leaving me standing there on the pavement.
And did I mind? Not at all, not at all. If you think I minded, then you've never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature - isn't it worth something?
I expect that man thought Fate was conspiring against him - what with his girl's shoes and me wanting food. But there you are, if you're determined to get people on the cheap, you shouldn't be so surprised when they pitch you their own little story of misery sometimes.
In the middle of the night you wake up. You start to cry. What's happening to me? Oh, my life, oh, my youth....
There's some wine left in the bottle. You drink it. The clock ticks. Sleep....
People talk about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many mis fortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.
As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you.
Walking to the music of L'Arlesienne....I feel for the pockets of the check coat, and I am surprised when I touch the fur of the one I am wearing....Pull yourself together, dearie. This is late October, 1937, and that old coat had its last outing a long time ago.
We go up the stairs of a block of studios into a large, empty, cold room, with masks on the walls, two old armchairs and a straight backed wooden chair on which is written 'Merde'. The answer, the final answer, to everything?
The friend is a Jew of about forty. He has that mocking look of the Jew, the look that can be so hateful, that can be so attractive, that can be so sad.
He keeps putting bits of screwed-up newspaper into the stove. 'It won't burn. It's in a bad mood today. I'll get tea,' he says. 'The water will be boiling soon.'
'West African masks?'
'Yes, straight from the Congo....I made them.
'This one isn't bad.'
He takes it down and shows it to me. The close set eye holes stare into mine. I know that face very well; I've seen lots like it, complete with legs and body.
That's the way they look when they are saying: 'Why didn't you drown yourself in the Seine ?' That's the way they look when they are saying: 'Qu'est-ce qu'elle fout ici, la vieille?' That's the way they look when they are saying: 'What's this story?' Peering at you. Who are you, anyway? Who's your father and have you got any money, and if not, why not? Are you one of us? Will you think what you're told to think and say what you ought to say? Are you red, white or blue - jelly, suet pudding or ersatz caviare?
Serge puts some beguine music, Martinique music, on an old gramophone in the corner and asks whether I'd like to dance.
'No, I'd rather watch you.'
He holds the mask over his face and dances. 'To make you laugh,' he says. He dances very well. His thin, nervous body looks strange, surmounted by the hideous mask. Delmar, very serious and correct, claps his hands in time to the music.
(Have you been dancing too much?) 'Don't stop.' (Mad or pleasure, all the young people.) 'Please don't stop.' The gramophone is grinding out 'Maladie d'amour, maladie de la jeunesse....'
I am lying in a hammock looking up into the branches of a tree. The sound of the sea advances and retreats as if a door were being opened and shut. All day there has been a fierce wind blowing, but at sunset it drops. The hills look like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills.
Pain of love, Pain of youth, Walk away from me, Keep away from me, Don't want to see you No more, no more
Then we talk about Negro music and about various boites in Montparnasse. The Highball? No, the Highball isn't nice any more. It's a dirty place now. Oh, is it? Yes, it is. Nobody goes there now. But the Cuban Cabin in Montmatre, that's quite good. You might like that. They play very well there. It's gay.
I am talking away, quite calmly and sedately, when there it is again - tears in my eyes, tears rolling down my face. ( saved, rescued, but not quite as good as new....)
'I'm so sorry. I'm such a fool. I don't know what's the matter with me'
'Oh, madame, oh, madame,-' Delmar says, 'why do you cry?'
'I'm such a fool. Please don't take any notice of me. Just don't take any notice and I'll be all right.'
'But cry,' le peintre says. 'Cry if you want to. Why shouldn't you cry? You're with friends.'
'If I could have a drink....'
'A drink. I have some porto somewhere.'
He bustles around. He produces three very small cups - the things you drink sake from.
'Japanese,' I say, intelligently.
He doesn't answer. He is searching for the bottle of port.
He pours out what is left of it. It just fills one sake cup. That, a drink!
I have an irresistible longing for a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me.
I say in a loud, aggressive voice: 'Go out and get a bottle of brandy,' take money out of my bag and offer it to him.
This is where he starts getting hold of me, Serge. He doesn't accept the money or refuse it - he ignores it. He blots out what I have said and the way I said it. He ignores it as if it had never been, and I know that, for him, it has never been. He is thinking of something else.
'Don't dink just now,' he says. 'Later, I'll get some, if you like. I'll make you some tea now.'
He comes back with the tea and puts lemon into it. It tastes good to me.
'I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men - at least they can cry.'
We seriously discuss the subject of weeping.
Delmar doesn't cry easily, he says. No, not so easily as all that. Le peintre, it seems, cries about Van Gogh. He speechifies about 'the terrible effort, the sustained effort - something beyond the human brain, what he did.' Etcetera, etcet
era....
When he gives me a cigarette his hand is shaking. He isn't lying. I think he has really cried over Van Gogh.
We drink more tea. The stove has quite gone out and it is very cold, but they don't seem to notice it. I am glad of my coat. I think I ought to ask to see his pictures, but he is in a low of talk which I can't interrupt. He is relating an experience he had in London.
'Oh, you've lived in London?' 'Yes, I was there for a time, but I didn't stay long - no. But I got a fine suit,' he says. 'I looked quite an Englishman from the neck down. I was very proud.... I had a room near Notting Hill Gate. Do you know it?'
'Oh yes, I know it.'
'A very comfortable room. But one night this happened. Talking about weeping - I still think of it....I was sitting by the ire, when I heard a noise as if someone had fallen down outside. I opened the door and there was a woman lying full-length in the passage, crying. I said to her: "What's the matter?" She only went on crying. "Well," I thought, "it's nothing to do with me." I shut the door firmly. But still I could hear her. I opened the door again and I asked her: "What is it? Can I do anything for you?" She said: "I want a drink."
'Exactly like me,' I say. 'I cried, and I asked for a dink.' He certainly likes speechifying, this peintre. Is he getting at me?
'No, no,' he says. 'Not like you at all.'
He goes on: 'I said to her "Come in if you wish. I have some whisky." She wasn't a white woman. She was half Negro - a mulatto. She had been crying so much that it was impossible to tell whether she was pretty or ugly or young or old. She was drunk too, but that wasn't why she was crying. She was crying because she was at the end of everything. There was that sound in her sobbing which is quite unmistakable - like certain music.
. I put my arm round her, but it wasn't like putting your arm round a woman. She was like something that has been turned into stone. She asked again for whisky. I gave it to her, and she started a long story, speaking sometimes in French, sometimes in English, when of course I couldn't understand her very well. She came from Martinique, she said, and she had met this monsieur in Paris, the monsieur she was with on the top floor. Everybody in the house knew she wasn't married to him, but it was even worse that she wasn't white. She said that every time they looked at her she could see how they hated her, and the people in the streets looked at her in the same way. At first she didn't mind - she thought it comical. But now she had got so that she would do anything not to see people. She told me she hadn't been out, except after dark, for two years. When she said this I had an extraordinary sensation, as if I were looking down into a pit. It was the expression in her eyes. I said: "But this monsieur you are living with, what about him?" "Oh, he is very Angliche, he says I imagine everything." I asked if he didn't find it strange that she never went out. But she said No, he thought it quite natural. She talked for a long time about this monsieur. It seemed that she stayed with him because she didn't know where else to go, and he stayed with her because he liked the way she cooked. All this sounds a little ridiculous, but if you had seen this woman you'd understand why it is I have never been able to forget her. I said to her: "Don't let yourself get hysterical, because if you do that it's the end." But it was difficult to speak to her reasonably, because I had all the time this feeling that I was talking to something that was no longer quite human, no longer quite alive.'
'It's a very sad story,' I say. 'I'm sure you were kind to her.'
'But that's just it. I wasn't. She told me that that afternoon she'd felt better and wanted to go out for a walk. "Even though it wasn't quite dark," she said. On the way out she had met the little girl of one of the other tenants. This house was one of those that are let of in floors. There were several families living in it.
She said to the little girl: "Good afternoon...."It was a long story, and of course, as I said, I couldn't understand everything she said to me. But it seemed that the child had told her that she was a dirty woman, that she smelt bad, that she hadn't any right in the house. "I hate you and I wish you were dead," the child said. And after that she had drunk a whole bottle of whisky and there she was, outside my door. Well, what can you say to a story like that? I knew all the time that what she wanted was that I should make love to her and that it was the only thing that would do her any good. But alas, I couldn't. I just gave her what whisky I had and she went of, hardly able to walk....There were two other women in the house. There was one with a shut, thin mouth and a fat one with a bordel laugh. I must say I never heard them speaking to the Martiniquaise, but they had cruel eyes, both of them....I didn't much like the way they looked at me, either....But perhaps all women have cruel eyes. What do you think?'
I say: 'I think most human beings have cruel eyes.' That rosy, wooden, innocent cruelty. I know.
'When I passed her on the stairs next day I said good morning, but she didn't answer me....Once I saw the child putting her tongue out at the poor creature. Only seven or eight, and yet she knew so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to. One must admire Nature....I got an astonishing hatred of the house after that. Every time I went in it was as if I were walking into a wall - one of those walls where people are built in, still alive. I've never forgotten this. Seriously, all the time I was in London, I felt as if I were being suffocated, as if a large derriere was sitting on me.'
'Well, some people feel that way and other people, of course, don't. It all depends.'
'But it's six o'clock,' he says. 'I have someone I must see at six o'clock. Would you mind if I leave you here with my friend, and he will show you everything. Please stay. I'll be back in an hour. But I must go now. I promised, and I shall be already half an hour late. Vous etes chez vous.'
A dialogue with Delmar as to the best way to get to this place, which seems to be in the Rue du Bac. He turns at the door and, with the mocking expression very apparent, says something in Russian. At least, I suppose it's Russian.
Delmar puts on a feeble light in the middle of the room, then comes up to me and, in a hesitating way, takes my hand and kisses it. Then he kisses my cheek.
'When you cried I was so sad.'
I kiss him. Two loud, meaningless kisses, like a French general when he gives a decoration. Nice boy....
'What did he say before he went out?'
'He said that if you didn't want to buy a picture you needn't buy one. Nobody expects you to.'
'Oh, but I do. I absolutely want one.'
'Wait, I know how we can arrange it, so that you can really see the pictures.'
There are a lot of empty frames stacked up against die wall. Delmar arranges them round the room and puts the canvases one by one into them. The canvases resist. They curl up; they don't want to go into the frames. He pushes and prods them so that they go in and stay in, in some sort of fashion.
'Ought we to do this? What will he say when he comes back?'
'Oh, it doesn't matter. It's all right. I want you to be able to see them.'
When he has finished pictures are propped up on the floor round three sides of the room.
'Now you can see them,' he says.
'Yes, now I can see them.'
I am surrounded by the pictures. It is astonishing how vivid they are in this dim light....Now the room expands and the iron band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy.
Looking at the pictures, I go of into a vague dream. Perhaps one day I'll live again round the corner in a room as empty as this. Nothing in it but a bed and a looking glass. Getting the stove lit at about two in the afternoon - the cold and the stove fighting each other. Lying near the stove in complete peace, having some bread with pate spread on it, and then having a drink and lying all the afternoon in that empty room - nothing in it but the bed, the stove and the looking glass and outside Paris. And the dreams that you have, alone in an empty room, waiting for the door that will open, the thing that is bound to happen
It is after seven when Serge comes back. He rushes in, panting: 'I'm sorry I'm late.' He t
alks to Delmar in Russian. Is he saying: 'Well, was she any good?' or is he saying: 'Will she buy a picture and is she going to pay up?' The last, I think - the tone was businesslike.
'I want very much to buy one of your pictures - this one.'
It is an old Jew with a red nose, playing the banjo.
'The price of that is six hundred francs,' he says. 'If you think it's too much we'll arrange some other price.'
All his charm and ease of manner have gone. He looks anxious and surly, I say awkwardly: 'I don't think it at all too much. But I haven't got the money'
Before I can get any further he bursts into a shout of laughter. 'What did I tell you?' he says to Delmar.
'But have it, take it, all the same. I like you. I'll give it you as a present.'
'No, no. All I meant was that I can't pay you now.'
'Oh, that's all right. You can send me the money from London. I'll tell you what you can do for me - you can find some other idiots who'll buy my pictures.' When he says this, he smiles at me so gently, so disarmingly. The touch of the human hand....I'd forgotten what it was like, the touch of the human hand.
'I'm serious. I mean that. Take the picture and send me the money when you can.'
'I can let you have it tonight.'
We argue for some time as to where we shall meet.
'I can't stand Montparnasse now,' he says. "Those faces, those gueules! They make me sick. Somewhere in the Quartier Latin.'
We decide on the Capoulade at half past ten. He rolls up the picture in tissue paper, ties it round with a bit of sting and I take it under my arm. Then he gives my hand a long, hard shake and says 'Amis'.
When he shakes my hand like that and says 'Amis' I feel very happy....
We get out into the courtyard, Delmar and I. It is a very cold, clear night. The outer door is shut. Business with the concierge.
Now I am not thinking of the past at all. I am well in the present.
