Maria settled herself on the upholstered bench, leaned her head back and immediately became absorbed in the music. On barstools, lighted by the dim orange lamps, black men moved their shoulders rhythmically in a stationary “twist” to the music.
Maria said, “This is what I like. Music, enjoying myself, with no problems.” She smiled at him. “How do you feel, Simeon? About being here? About our life?”
“I like it. Feel a bit restless sometimes, though. I don’t want to go back to the States, not yet at least, but I feel . . . idle here. Life is pleasant, but I’m not doing anything. Just sort of . . . watching the sands trickle out.”
He exasperated her. “But what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged helplessly. “Just not simply stand on the sidelines, watching life go by.”
“Goes by anyway.” Nervously she lit a cigarette. “Makes no sense. What kind of terrible world is this? I go crazy when I think of the labor camp and my parents and how the prisoners were and the gas chambers. It makes no sense, none of it. So I try not to think.”
Simeon had asked himself metaphysical questions years ago, a child looking at the stars, but he knew now that there were questions you could not answer. He knew now that the infinite was ungraspable, that one had to circumscribe one’s world and live within it and its values if one wanted to live at all. A child starving to death was simple and clear, you did not have to know the destiny of Man to know you should give it food.
“Maria.” He hesitated at the edge of the question, afraid of it. “Tell me something. Do you love me?”
She laughed, teasing. “Must be careful with that word.”
“I am careful.”
“Do you love me?”
“I think so.”
She would not look at him. She watched the Africans dance with their shoulders. “I like to be with you all the time, with you and with nobody else. That’s all I know.”
It was the nearest she had ever come to saying she loved him. What was she so afraid of? It was as though she were terrified by words. He realized again that her hold on him was much stronger than his on her. She was whole and round, distant, independent of him. But he could no longer imagine existence in Paris without her. He would lose her, this dark whisp of smoke would vanish from his life. He felt sure of it.
He wanted to force her to live in the real world, and asked, “Would you marry . . . a Negro?”
“Without hesitation,” she said, turning to look at him. “There is only one thing—that he must be content to live and love in peace. He must not go around seeking complications, seeking ‘causes’ and problems. You understand? He must be able to live a normal life.”
“There is no ‘normal’ life.”
“Yes. Yes, there is.”
“You mean a nice, middle-class suburban life, in a cocoon, cut off from the rest of the world?”
“Cut off from the troubles of the world. Yes. Doesn’t have to be middle-class, how you say. But yes, this is right.”
“That kind of life might not be possible for a Negro if he thinks and feels.”
“Would be possible if he tries. If he loved me, he would try.”
“The Jews in Poland during the war—was it possible for them to lead a normal life?”
She hesitated. She was fighting him, but also fighting with herself, against some consciousness or some truth she did not want to recognize. She almost shouted, desperately: “Yes! It was possible if they fled. You fled, I fled, no? In Poland, I am not talking about those captured or killed. Nothing could be done about that and I would not complain if it was situation where nothing could be done. I talk about those with free will. Those who could have fled and did not. My parents could have fled, they saw friends who fled, but they did not because they did not want believe the world was so terrible as it is. When they realized, it was already too late!”
Simeon wanted to stroke Maria’s brow and soothe her. He wanted to take her in his arms and rock her like a baby. But the words he spoke were necessary—he was defending himself, too:
“Perhaps the Negro who might want to marry you might not be able to flee. Not forever. Because of something inside . . .”
Maria looked at his face, at the patch and the eye. “He can flee. He will be able to flee. If he loves me and wants to.”
“You’re selfish, Maria.”
“But no!” She looked at him in hurt surprise. “Perhaps I am selfish in other things, but I am not selfish about this, what I am talking about now. But a man who loved me and married me would want me to be sane. I know what I feel, and what I can bear, and I don’t want go crazy. I’d rather be alone, anything, but not that.”
2
Lovers were kissing in a doorway up the street from the Caméléon. Near the Boulevard Saint-Germain, five or six tramps were piled together sleeping on a grill over the subway to benefit from the warm air rising from below.
“You stay with me tonight?” Simeon asked.
“Yes.”
Maria hummed a tune they had heard in the night club. Her mood had changed completely now, and she seemed gay.
“I want lots of music. We’ll buy records?”
“Yes.”
“And we give a party. You have nice apartment to have a party in. You agree?”
“Wonderful idea.”
“We invite Babe and Doug and Lou and Betty. I like Lou, he’s a good American, you heard how good he talked today? And the Brazilians and maybe some of my Polish friends, too.”
They slipped quickly into bed. Maria said, “I am happy about something. A movie director, the friend of the woman who runs our acting school, came to see us rehearse. He said I had talent and maybe someday would have a small part for me in one of his films.”
“Marvelous. Let’s celebrate.” Simeon jumped out of the bed and fetched a bottle of beer with two glasses. He filled the glasses and returned to the bed where Maria was staring pensively at the ceiling.
“Don’t you want the beer?”
She shook her head. Her look troubled him. He climbed back into bed, putting the beer glasses on the night table.
“Simeon, I talked to doctors. They’ll operate on my eyes in a couple of months. I’m afraid.”
Simeon was afraid, too, but did not want to show it. “Try not to be nervous, baby. It’ll be all right. It’ll be successful and then you’ll be free, you won’t have to worry any more.”
“Yes.”
She smoked a cigarette, exhaling heavily. “You know what I think sometimes?”
“What?”
“I think I am three persons. I am the Maria now, waiting for the operation. I am the potential Maria, the Maria who has had operation and can see and has a whole bright future ahead. And I am potential Maria with operation that has failed, a Maria who is blind.”
She thought about it, flicking her ash absently onto the floor.
“You know what I think sometimes? That it would be better if the operation failed. That is the Maria I like best of all. It is the only one of the three I like.”
VII
1
SIMEON stared for a long time at the photograph in the Paris Herald Tribune. Little Rock? No, another Southern American town where a handful of black children were going to school through lines of soldiers and howling mobs. The pictured showed five black girls and boys walking with heads held high through a crowd of white adults whose faces were twisted by hatred. Because five children with black skins were for the first time going to sit side by side with white boys and girls in a formerly all-white school.
The soldiers sent by the government were armed, standing between the black children and the white parents, between the black children and violence, between the children and death.
Simeon felt like weeping. He studied the white faces. Yes, he knew them, recognized them: the faces
of the stone souls. Could these people really exist? As he stared at the photograph, the old terrors and hatreds swept over him again.
If he had a gun and saw these faces he would shoot. There was no doubt about that. So nothing had changed in him. He was still the same.
His eyes rested on the face of one of the black girls. The universe was the face of the girl. The face did not betray the fear the body felt. And what did she know, that girl of ten or twelve years old? Mama had said: “You’re gonna go to the white school tomorrow, Lulu Belle. Gonna be a lot of white folks around, and they gonna shout nasty things, but don’t you mind. It’s important. You can’t understand yet, but it’s important for black people. You hear me? And we behind you, Papa and me and all the black people in America. So you just walk straight. Don’t mind what they shout. Just walk straight, and tell yourself they stupid, and remember we all right there with you, Papa and me and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Wig and all the colored folks in town and all the colored folks in the world.”
He was sitting on the terrace of the Café Tournon. At a table nearby sat Doug, discussing something with Clyde and Jinx. Simeon paid no attention to them. He was not interested in them.
“God’s on our side,” Lulu Belle’s mother said. “He ain’t with them dirty white folks, screamin’ hate from their hearts. You hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You ain’t scared, are you honey? We can’t let ’em keep us down forever, you understand.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you scared?”
“No’m,” she lied, almost choking from the pounding of her heart in her throat.
And she’d walked the next morning through purgatory. Not turning to look at them people shouting dirty things. Scared, but proud. Because Mama and Papa were there, someplace back there, even though she couldn’t see them. And all of the black people in town were back there, paying attention to her. And some white men were there taking her picture, and that would be in the papers, and colored people all over the country, all over the world, would see it. Mama had said so. And they’d all be proud of her. Because she didn’t show she was scared.
“Nigger bitch, you ain’t gonna go to that school long!”
“Black bastard, we gonna kill you before the term is out!”
“Go back to your nanny’s hangin’ titties where you belong!”
She heard them. But they wasn’t gonna know how hard her heart was beating! They wasn’t gonna know she was scared! Because maybe she wasn’t scared! Because she was mad, she didn’t like them crazy people nohow, and why should she be scared anyway? She wasn’t scared! She wasn’t scared! Them people was scared of little ole her! ’Cause they was crazy! Sweet Jesus, they was crazy! How come Jesus made crazy people like them!
Just walking straight ahead, not scared, into the school.
2
People talked to Simeon, there on the terrace, and he listened with only half an ear.
Joey the Drunk, who came staggering by: “Been working on my novel.”
“That so.”
“It’s gonna be a bitch of a novel. Nearly finished. Benson and Dick Wright and Chester Himes—they ain’t the only novelists around here in the quarter. Gonna be a bitch.”
This was the novel Joey had been working on for years. Benson had read parts of it and had been embarrassed to find the writing of an eight-year-old child. He had not known what to say.
“A bitch of a novel,” Joey said. “Let you read it some day.”
Doug, who left Clyde and came to sit next to Simeon: “Hell, ain’t it, them school riots?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing but bad news in the papers these days. Been reading ’bout the Congo, fighting and all. What you s’pose is going on down there?”
“Belgians don’t permit any Congolese to get an education, then pull out. What do you expect?”
“Yeah. Looks bad, though. Simeon, I been wantin’ to talk to you. Listen, I got a sort of woman problem. I’m in the Embassy, and that means I’m a State Department employee, right? Well, there’s this white American girl, this girl Babe and them calls a heiress, and she’s got a sort of crush on me, see what I mean? Now, her father’s a high State Department man, got a lot of money, and he knows about the girl and me, but he don’t mind, he’s a liberal, see? So what do you think?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, see, the trouble is, I’m sorta in love with another girl, the sweet little French girl you seen me with a few times, remember? I feel like marrying the French girl, we get along fine, all soft and nice together; she understands me. The American girl don’t understand me worth a damn.”
“Okay, marry the French girl.”
“Well, it ain’t that simple. I mean, how do I know how long I’m gonna want to stay in France? But I want to make a career in the State Department, and, hell, the American girl’s pa could help me. See what I mean? I know it sounds materialistic, but, hell, man, life is materialistic. You ever try to eat soul? I got to think of the future.”
“Marry the American girl. You deserve each other.”
“Me and the American chick ain’t talked about marrying, man. Her father ain’t that liberal. Just having an affair. What would you do if you was me?”
“I’d jump in the Seine,” Simeon laughed.
He found himself on his feet, walking slowly, inhaling the cold air, walking with the image of the little girl he had named Lulu Belle. White faces passed him. Lulu Belle. What was he doing in this white world, anyway? Who were these people? What was this strange tearless language they spoke? What could they see through their unscarred eyes?
He did not hear Jinx until she fell in step beside him, breathless from running. “You must be deaf as well as half-blind, Simeon. I called you five times, yelling at the top of my voice. . . . That sonofabitch is crazy!” The horse-tail of hair cracked over a shoulder.
“Who?”
“Clyde. Always whining, always griping. I wonder why I was crazy enough to marry him. Where you going?”
“Just walking.” He did not feel like talking to Jinx.
“Let’s have a drink at the Mephisto. I need to calm my nerves.”
They ordered rum punch. The well-dressed Martiniquans in the Mephisto were laughing and talking in a Creole dialect. The bright neon lights were garish but somehow fitting and gay, and the place somewhat lifted Simeon out of his mood.
Jinx turned her small light-gray eyes on him. She really was attractive in a crazy sort of way.
“Happy, Simeon?”
“Jinx, let’s not start this. Let’s not start asking these American Greenwich-Village-intellectual kind of questions. No psychoanalysis and no orgone boxes.”
She laughed. “I’ve been psychoanalyzed and I’ve sat in an orgone box. Fat lot of good it did. God, what a life we had in the States, Simeon. All those New York painters, Christ! All those crazy, fucked-up people. Me, too. Only I wanted to get away from it. Wanted to get away from that wholesale hysteria, relax in Paris.”
“I bet you seek out the same kind of people over here, and do the same things.”
“More or less. It’s a rat race. I met Clyde here, thought that Southern calm might work on me. Woeful day! Can you imagine me taking that back to New York with me! He wouldn’t fit in. He wants me to go down to Georgia and live with him and his parents. Georgia! Are you kidding! Can you see me in one of these mobs, throwing rocks at little Negro schoolchildren?”
“No, Jinx. That’s one place I can’t see you,” Simeon said more softly.
They ordered a second round of rum punch.
“How do you manage to stay so calm?” Jinx asked.
“Calm? Now?”
“In general. Not just you, but Babe and Benson and Doug, all the Negro Americans. Haven’t you noticed it? Look at the difference between the white America
ns and the Negroes over here. The whites, except for Lou, are drinking themselves silly, bursting their seams, getting nuttier and nuttier, trying to live like Tropic of Cancer or The Sun Also Rises. No hold on life. Just spinning like tops and scared to stop. Haven’t you noticed it? The Negroes aren’t like that. They take it easy, take it slow. They don’t drink so much. They seem to have something to occupy themselves, something to think about, something to do—even when they’re not doing a damn thing. Haven’t you noticed?”
“No.” He had not been conscious of it, but now that Jinx said it it seemed true.
“Why do you think it is?” Jinx asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe life makes more sense to us.”
“That’s a funny statement.”
“When you have to get out from under the stick, life has a purpose. But life must get pretty senseless if you’re the one who’s wielding the stick. Unless you’re sadistic.”
“But none of us over here are stick-wielders.”
“It’s figurative. Listen, what sense can life have to the average white American with money? What kind of goal can he have? To make more money? Hold on to what he has? That’s not much of a goal. But even making money can be some kind of a goal for a poor bugger with a sick wife and nine kids.”
Jinx smiled brightly and beckoned to the waiter to bring two more. The drink was rising to their heads. Simeon thought of Lulu Belle. Would Lulu Belle approve of him sitting way over here in this cafe, drinking and passing the time away?
Jinx took Simeon’s arm and squeezed it. “I like you, Simeon. One-eyed Simeon. Lord Nelson. Wasn’t it Lord Nelson who had a black patch over one eye? I forget.”
A couple of Martiniquans waved at Simeon. He smiled and waved back.
“Do you know them?”
“No.”
“Why did you wave? Because they have black skins?”
“Yes.”
“You feel close to them? Closer than to white Americans?”
“Yes.”
“That’s strange.” She thought about it. “Do you hate white Americans?”
The Stone Face Page 13
