Women

by Mihail Sebastian

  And yet…I’d forget the neighborhood and my neighbors, the stained walls of the house, the yard festooned with damp long johns flapping in the breeze, the windows, the stairwell with its damp wallpaper and artistic name cards—forget it all, as soon as I opened the door and entered our sixth-floor room which Arabela, with her genius as a homemaker, had rendered tidy and tasteful and harmonious, from the polished wooden furniture to the cold winter flowers that were never absent from our table, even on days when we had no money for bread! I should laugh when I remember the honest-to-goodness beauty of that room, presided over by the white apron Arabela wore with a hint of pride—but if I don’t laugh it’s primarily because I’ve always lacked taste and secondly because I left something in that room which is not to be laughed at.

  We were soon well-known in the neighborhood. Arabela first made it her business to know the storekeepers, aware that hard times could lie ahead. She cultivated them with charm and determination. She was well in with the saleswoman at the Maggi dairy store on the corner, exchanged friendly greetings with the butcher, asked after the baker’s children, who were always sick and with whom Arabela shared her knowledge of various home remedies. As a result of these useful connections, we went up in the estimation of our neighbors, and I remember how Arabela was almost proud when one day, a week before it happened, the baker confided that the price of a loaf was going to drop from 2.40 to 2.35. I can’t recall if I was flattered also by this, but it gave us a certain local standing.

  When we crossed the place Vaugirard on our way home, usually arm in arm, either because we were in love or from the cold, our acquaintances would smile at us from their respective stores and more than once I heard the whisper behind us, Voilà la jeune ménage du sixième qui passe. I didn’t dislike this description of us, and the respectability it conferred to our arrangement made Arabela truly happy.

  We’d stop on the way to buy our groceries for the evening meal and every time I’d admire her ability to turn a tight budget and limited ingredients into a new and surprising dish. I’ve tried many times since to improvise a similar feat and never succeeded, which—silly as it sounds—makes me despair. I find myself thinking of Paris sometimes and dreaming of going back and seeing those streets that I love so much as if they are people, but I have to make the ridiculous admission that the first thing I’d like to do on returning there is to go into a charcuterie and spend one franc twenty-five centimes on a quarter kilo of céleri rémoulade. I’ve given the recipe to all my hosts here in Romania but on every occasion the celeriac in mustard sauce that’s served up bears no resemblance to the piquant, flavorsome, engaging céleri rémoulade which graced our dinners in a little room on the sixth floor of a building on the rue d’Alésia, under the eyes of Arabela, who gladly indulged our appetites, especially such inexpensive and innocent ones.

  She, who to my knowledge was utterly lacking in vanity, and back at the circus would respond to compliments with a tired shrug, and later, when she’d achieved glory, responded to critical acclaim with a confused smile, would redden and be absurdly proud when I said I liked something she’d cooked or told her a sauce was good. She loved me doubly and when we went to bed I could feel her even more tender and grateful than I knew her to be usually, as a young, healthy, undemonstrative girl. They were her private pleasures as the woman of that poor household. A household we could barely keep together on the last of those dwindling savings, despite our scrimping and saving. I’d left the housekeeping to Arabela and had nothing in my pockets but the pennies she gave me for cigarettes and even when I happened to get hold of some money—a loan, or by selling a book or pawning a watch—I handed it all over to her, and she gritted her teeth and dealt with the poverty and the debts to shopkeepers who were becoming ever harder to reckon with.

  The hardest thing was not being able to pay the rent. I can manage a certain nostalgia for the days without enough to eat, and walking to save on buses, and worn-out clothes, but the memory of not having 175 francs to give to the landlord for a month’s rent still makes me shudder with fear, and it’s something I wish I could forget. Those winter mornings when we slipped quietly down the stairs so that nobody would catch us escaping! And late at night, when we walked about outside, avoiding going home until after midnight, when the light went out in the concierge’s office, so that we could creep back up the six flights of stairs, close to the wall, holding our breath—one more to go, just one—trembling for fear that at any moment somebody could shout out and stop us on the road to our salvation. Our salvation was the door at the top of the stairs, which we closed behind us with a sigh of relief, double-locking it and leaning against it as though it were a fortress we’d struggled to take.

  Then we would sink into a long night filled with forgetfulness and peace, wishing it would never end, holding each other in a long embrace that we took in voluptuous stages, from kiss until release, until sleep delivered us from the exhaustion caused by poverty and love. Arabela’s head would fall heavily on my shoulder. In the dark I liked to look at her hair, shining like wet coal.

  FOUR

  It was still midwinter and the moment had come when we really had to figure out what we were going to do. I was nervous and ineffectual, Arabela was calm and practical.

  —I may be back late this evening, she said one day. Wait for me in the square, across the road from the post office, between six and seven. We’ll see what happens…

  What she came back with that evening was an offer for a paltry, dubious opening in an acrobatics act in a cabaret theater on the periphery of the city. Twenty-two francs per evening.

  —All right Arabela, so you want to go back to that?

  —I don’t want to go back to anything. Particularly not to “that.” I want for us to be able to pay the rent.

  She went back to “that” without disgust or complaint, with the simple knowledge that she had to work to earn some money. She had no doubts or hesitation.

  —What else can we do?

  She invoked the same simple logic a month later when she asked me to come to the theater to accompany her in a duet.

  There are abominable things like this which become absolutely natural when referred to in a simple tone such as that which Arabela used. Though you realize the enormity of what was being asked, you go along with it.

  —You see, next week the program is changing. I finish up with the acrobatics and start with dancing. An Apache dance. I need an accordionist and I think you play the piano.

  I accepted. If I had to explain to someone I knew why I accepted, I’d only talk nonsense and I’m sure they wouldn’t understand a thing. I accepted, that’s all.

  Oh, the evenings at Montrouge, at that cabaret—half theater, half dance hall—where I accompanied Arabela on an off-key accordion. Her dance was comically amateurish (she’d never been a dancer) and yet attained elegance through her body’s natural ability to respond beautifully to melody! Outside was that other life that I’d fled precipitously, and to which I could always return, with a little effort—but the feeling of having thrown it all away of my own free will made me love my fate tenfold, among those tables of eager consumers and their long glasses with mint-green drinks. No doubt about it, I liked my new career and sometimes when I was doing well and I was asked to repeat a song, and every drinker in the place joined in, I felt a little shiver of pride, which announced that the performer in me was coming out.

  From there we moved on to local movie theaters and musette dances, adapting our act to each show, with me presenting Arabela’s light acrobatics act one day and accompanying her dance routine on the piano the next, and sometimes, if necessary, taking a few steps with her when her dance required a partner.

  The timing was perfect for us, in that year when the main-street movie theaters were showing their first talking pictures and the local silent-movie theaters, alarmed at the competition from this innovation, were trying to keep their audiences with “extra attractions�
�� (as the posters described them). In those days you came across a lot of “snake-men,” “mermaids,” “magicians,” and acrobats and imitators, among whom we found a niche, as demand was high and the programs were always changing, which forced us to make epic tours of the gates of Paris, from quarter to quarter, but without ever leaving an area that stretched from Denfert-Rochereau in the south to Batignolles in the north. I thought we’d never escape the borders of that suburban world and break into the center of Paris, where the names of the theaters were written in lights and where the colored billboards shone inaccessibly in the distance. But I very soon got to know a young pederast poet with connections in the world of nighttime entertainment. The young fellow had seen Arabela dancing and was fired up about her art and swore he’d get her a shot. Sure, he was a flake, and throughout all this I was skeptical about the value of my love’s dancing and took these promises of glory with a pinch of salt. And yet it was all thanks to him that we got a place in the program at the Bobino, the famous Montparnasse cabaret, and so danced there with Arabela for two weeks, right on the rue de la Gaîté. True, none of the critics ever remarked us, but we earned the fabulous sum of hundreds of francs.

  Naturally, we moved out of the sixth-floor garret, but we stayed in that quarter, which in a way we’d now become dependent on. Arabela, because of the good relationships she’d built up there, I for the color of the place and because of the harmonious background noise of neighborhood sounds that I now felt so at home with that I couldn’t have thought or read better than I did in that sea of sounds—the rumbling and clattering of a store’s shutters going up, a factory whistle, the fading melody played on a harmonica, or raucous swearing from the street where a couple of drivers were coming to blows.

  Place de la Convention! Some nights, when I had trouble sleeping, I imagined wandering with my hands in my pockets and my overcoat unbuttoned through that square, toward the Porte de Versailles and heading slowly up, first taking the sidewalk on the right, then the sidewalk on the left, stopping attentively before every storefront to revisit every detail; the name of the store, the window with its display of goods, whether cheap or sumptuous, and the fogged glass…The smell of boiled potatoes, raw meat, bananas…A cornucopia of goods was scattered around me: calico, fish, oranges, buttons and braces, butter, eggs, and tinned goods. And voices ringing in the air and lights shining from one side of the street to the other…I see again the familiar faces of the people there; the smiling old lady in the lobby of the Hotel Messidor, the young woman selling artichokes on the corner of rue Blomet, the glassware vendor on the other side of the road who looked like Napoleon III and who, because the number 10 bus stopped outside his store, had adopted the manner of a stationmaster…And I see Arabela coming down from the rue de Croix-Nivert, where we lived, in her rain jacket, hurrying through the passersby only to stop at length at the entrance to a store to buy a spool of thread, looking with childlike wonder at the big display windows and calculating how much money she had in her pocket, then moving on and buying a bottle of wine from the Primistère, where they handed out the prize coupons she collected assiduously in the hope of one day winning the “twelve-person” table set displayed in the photograph in the window. And not only in the hard times, struggling with unpaid rent and the last of our bus tickets, but later too, when we’d earned a bit of money and made a pleasant home of our new apartment in Croix-Nivert. Arabela stubbornly refused to accommodate herself to our new situation as artists who had played the Bobino and as a result of the show had come to know many people from “good society” who came to see us perform. She still wanted to be a housewife, sometimes ostentatiously exaggerating her domestic chores.

  Hard to define what kind of people our new friends were. One was some kind of a painter, another some kind of a poet, another some kind of a critic, and so on—all of them young and disillusioned, drawn from late-night Montparnasse cafés. Some were homosexuals, others just snobs (as far as debauchery and exhibitionism were concerned). Others, the great minority, were decent fellows, but lazy, and in the meantime unemployed. I couldn’t really figure out what their situation was, though almost all of them painted, wrote, or acted, and some of them made a point of mentioning their literary connections (going so far as showing me a signed letter from Cocteau) or their successes in the distant past—which they’d prove by pulling out an old poster or a few lines of praise in Nouvelles Littéraires. I enjoyed the color and liveliness they brought to our two rooms, which otherwise would have been dominated by Arabela’s gentle, slow temperament, which was like an ember buried in ashes. I have no idea if any of them had any talent or artistic vocation. Perhaps they had! I’m not competent to judge that kind of thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of them have since achieved something, and if I were to pick up one of the foreign newspapers today to find good news written there about them.

  There was a vague whiff of rebellion about us, as it was undoubtedly revolutionary of them to despise the productions at the opera and to admire instead a dancer of popular numbers from the suburbs. Hadn’t one of them written in one of those avant-garde publications—one of those incendiary publications read by exactly seventeen people, each ready to turn the world upside down—that everything Wagner had written should be burned and that Bruno Walter (who was directing Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Opéra at the time) should be thrown out, in order for Wagner’s place to be taken by my darling Arabela? The same Arabela who couldn’t stand any of them, because she only liked decent, orderly people and utterly detested anything adventurous, bohemian, or “artistic.” This girl, who had come from the world of the circus, after an unsettled childhood and endless wandering from town to town, this girl who was more easy than virtuous, having surrendered to me at any rate on the first night, without my pressing her, had a bourgeois aversion for all that wasn’t legitimate and clean. She suffered in the company of the pederasts and lesbians who abounded around the bars where we played and was horrified by the morals of our recent friends, among whom she passed with a chaste, judgmental frown.

  One evening, after a long dinner of mussels and white wine in the studio of a young painter, where we happened to meet a group of crazy girls and drunken boys, I was hustled off in a friend’s car to the Bois de Boulogne, to attend a partouza. Arabela and I had heard this word used but neither of us had more than a vague idea what it meant, other than that it involved certain sexual rites with groups of people and that it occurred among the darkest laneways in the Bois. The experience began mysteriously, with the automobiles signaling back and forth to each other by flicking their headlights on and off a number of times. It was explained to us that this was how the initiates communicated their presence to each other. A long line of limousines rode forward with their headlights off toward the center of the woods, and from time to time two or three separated from the group. After the necessary signaling, they would turn off to the right or left together. It seemed that the basic condition for a successful partouza was for the partners not to know one another: the men swapped places, going from one automobile to the other, thereby swapping women also. They loved in the dark, with the lights out and curtains drawn, without any preliminaries, without being seen, almost without speaking, spurred on by the cheap mystery of darkness and anonymity.

  Up to that point the matter seemed mythical to me. But now I had before me this mysterious procession of vehicles, observed the signaling of the headlights through the passenger window, saw the shapes of those who had reached an understanding slipping through the darkness. My curiosity was so aroused by the intensity of the spectacle, I admit, that it blocked out any trace of moral reserve I might have possessed. No, it wasn’t disgusting. It was thrilling. You would have needed Arabela’s lack of imagination and her fundamental sincerity to have been revolted there in the name of decency. She gripped my arm and shouted that she wouldn’t have anything to do with such filth (yes, she said “filth,” to my shame and to the embarrassment of the peop
le of taste in our company). In the meantime, however, our friends had spotted a blue limousine and were hurrying after it, to get away from that busy laneway and to find a more suitable place for the first advances. I was taking part in the journey with genuine excitement, astounded by the simplicity of the escapade and waiting with bated breath to see how it would all turn out—but Arabela wouldn’t settle down. She thrashed about in my arms, screaming that she wanted to go home and threatening to smash the windows if we didn’t stop.

  —You’re pigs, you hear? Pigs! And you, you’re the same as the rest of them. Why won’t you stop? I want you to stop! You bandits! I’ll report you to the police. Give me a pencil to put down their number. I said, give me a pencil!

  She took an envelope from her purse and, because she didn’t have a pencil, took used lipstick to record the number of the automobile hurtling ahead of us. Her hand trembled as she formed the five figures in thick, bright-red, childish strokes. There was something about this panicked gesture that only increased the tension of our adventure and made me feel as though I were in a detective story.

  A long, panicked screech sounded from somewhere in front of us. A screech and a shout, perhaps. We jolted to a halt. A moment of tense silence ensued. Nobody moved. Everybody listened for another sound to come through the darkness. It was like a train stopping unexpectedly at night on a bridge in the middle of the countryside. Nobody knew what had happened or dared to guess. A collision? A catastrophe? A threat? All that could be heard was the distant mechanical panting of the locomotive…

  Then human figures and voices could be made out around us. Men were running ahead to see what had happened. Beyond the shut automobile doors, the alarmed whispering of a woman could be heard. I got out. A gentle rain was falling. In the distance was a cluster of agitated lights. Arabela stepped out also and walked wordlessly alongside. We made our way past parked automobiles and could hear the long sighs of impassioned embraces which the panic had not interrupted. The cold air of that March night had an unbearable smell of intimacy, perfume, and blood—I found it hard to tell them apart.