Madame Demarais had reported that her agents had found Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry under medical care in Montreal. (As always, Consuelo wondered what she called him when they were alone.) First he had been held up by border issues. Then his fever had hit with rare force, and he had been hospitalized. He had been too incapacitated by medication to send a telegraph or make a phone call. Madame Demarais had flown to his side and was awaiting his imminent release into her care.
Consuelo had thanked her and had let her return to her vigil. It wasn’t a question of acceptance or nonacceptance. It was something more than sharing a husband or overlooking an affair. Only Madame Demarais could come close to understanding Consuelo’s burden. She had been sharing Consuelo’s ministry for at least a dozen years.
Montreal was quaint.
Consuelo smiled as she dug a few Canadian dollar bills from her purse. She amused herself, she really did. To think she had felt like royalty during her year in the deserted village of Oppède—with only a kingdom of rocks—but after scant months of living in New York, already she was judging a small metropolis to be provincial and unevolved. Well, but why not? The fact was, the citizenry here didn’t even know how to nab a taxi outside the train station. They waited politely in well-behaved lines; that was fine, it calmed Consuelo’s nerves. As in New York, the handiest cabs were reserved for men in uniform. The complacent Canadians, in their sensible shoes, had evidently accepted that they would walk to their destinations. Good for them; let them walk. Consuelo, on the other hand, had perfected a technique.
When a soldier opened the door to a cabbie’s backseat, Consuelo pressed a handful of bills against the driver’s window. “After you drop him off,” she said, “continue on with me.”
It was a trick that could transport one through any country of the world—and it worked flawlessly here, outside the Montreal station. Soon Consuelo was passing through the noble old streets she remembered from her last visit to the city. What she had forgotten was the ready courtesy of the young men here. The soldier who shared Consuelo’s taxi had insisted that the cabbie deliver her to her destination first; the young man would pay the entire fare. For his trouble, Consuelo put her delicate hand on the fellow’s smooth cheek.
But his response was less than genteel. She hoped it came of an abundance of formality, and not horror at the touch of a woman twice his age.
She had told Tonio to expect her that evening at his Hotel Windsor suite. It went unsaid that Consuelo would find his mistress with him there. Although the two women generally avoided being in public in the same room at the same time, they had certainly seen each other often enough. Back in Paris, the older woman had often called and even visited their various homes. In North America, Consuelo had somehow expected to be beyond the reach of Madame Demarais. Stupid thought. Nothing was beyond that woman: no borders, no encounters, were a match for the forces of her grace and wealth.
Not the slighted trace of discomposure showed on Madame Demarais’s elegant, narrow face. The woman’s ancestry was in metals and in oil, while Consuelo could claim only coffee plantations, an inheritance of limited depth. Of course, it wasn’t just about the well of the woman’s bank account (though that was important enough—and necessary for treating Tonio to gifts on the scale of his own airplane). There was also her ability to live life as she chose. The Madame Demaraises of the world had so little to worry about. Their ability to get what they wanted wasn’t threatened by the appearance of a few wrinkles on the forehead or by the erosion of their claims on the heart of a famous man.
Indeed, Tonio’s mistress bore her status with a quiet, dignified pride. She seemed content to be a shimmering shadow in the periphery, ever ready to come to Tonio’s aid. Ready to the end of time and from the beginning, yes, for Madame Demarais was no young chinchilla scampering after the tails of this season’s celebrity. She was several years older than Tonio and had been a fixture—and occasional godsend—from the start.
Tonio had long submitted to Consuelo’s insistence that the woman be deemed a mistress, not simply a friend, though he assured his wife that he and his female supporter had never shared a bed, rarely so much as shared a kiss. “What does she get from you?” Consuelo had asked him, to no avail—but she had known the answer then and she knew it ever more piercingly now. Tonio allowed the woman to help him. Others might fool themselves that the arrangement seated all strength in the hands of the recipient, but Consuelo knew firsthand how barren and devalued it made one feel to have one’s aid scorned. To help was to hold power. Madame Demarais had been helping for at least a dozen years.
Madame Demarais didn’t rise from her armchair on the far side of Tonio’s bed. “Good evening, Madame de Saint-Exupéry. It is well that you’ve arrived. I have a flight to catch, and it’s best that Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry not be left alone for long.”
Tonio was sleeping. He looked peaceful and well rested with Madame Demarais at his side.
“How is he?” asked Consuelo tremulously. She wanted to throw herself over him and sob away what remained of her exhausting fears—but she’d save that for later, when Tonio was awake and Madame Demarais gone. She sank into the leather chair at the desk. How she’d love to kick off her shoes and rub the tautness out of her arches.
“He’s fine. Obtaining his discharge from the hospital was something of an ordeal. The attending doctor had arranged for him to be medicated quite thoroughly. Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry was unable to tell us whether he still had pain. I’m not certain he knew if he still had legs.”
Ah, poor Tonio. He was the claim of every man and woman; he was to the world whatever his writings led them to believe. Whoever had him in their grasp wanted to keep him, to minister to him and fix him; it had always been so. Yet only Consuelo knew how to heal him for good. It was she who had brought him back to life with an ammonia rub when he drowned in his plane, she who had cured him with sips of warm milk when a crash made his head swell to five times its size. If he would only stay by her side, Tonio would be living a healthy and carefree life. Instead, he was forever being torn apart. One day France and America would be fighting over his remains.
Well, not if Consuelo could manage to survive him. She must start taking better care of herself. Eat more vegetables. Stop suppressing her voluptuary impulses. That was how one grew crippled from the inside out: by denying oneself the pleasures that kept one young. For Tonio’s sake, she had to remain beautiful and brave and strong.
Madame Demarais pulled on her ivory kid-leather gloves. “He was recovered enough to explore the city today, though the effort took a toll. I’ve given him a pill to help him sleep.” She permitted herself to briefly touch the back of Tonio’s hand. “You will take him home soon?”
“I’m going to take him to stay with a colleague in Quebec City for a while. And then … it depends on when there are tickets available for the train.”
Madame Demarais unsnapped her purse. She delved into it and produced a checkbook. She signed a check, made out to Tonio, and placed it on the blanket for Consuelo to retrieve. “Allow me to insist. Please take Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry home by airplane.”
Tonio awoke in the night to find his wife warm and naked in his bed, planting kisses in the thick forest of his chest. Consuelo wished she had gotten the name of the sleeping pills, which were wondrous. Not only had they allowed Tonio a most satisfying slumber, upon waking he only sighed in relief and said her name and rolled over to return to sleep. Consuelo sighed, too—in happiness. What a precious gift it was, this shared night of intimate privacy and peace. They were together at last, away from all that kept him from her. There was no need to rush. She could tell him in the morning where her hands and lips and hungry hips had been.
20
Tonio had never been voluble in the mornings, but this morning—after hearing Consuelo’s gleeful confession and responding with a disgusted “This is how you would tame me?”—he had become all but mute.
Checking out of the Windsor Arms required a
minimum of words: a bill settled, a car and driver arranged, an umbrella accepted, a tip proffered. Fine. But surely to God a woman could expect to hear her husband’s voice at least once during a monotonous three-hour car ride, and not just the abrasive progression of his pen.
Rain flopped around the Cadillac’s exterior, dreary as a string mop spreading effluent on a floor. Give me lightning, thought Consuelo. Thunder. What we need is a good, hair-stiffening storm.
The city outskirts gave way to highway, and the highway to only more highway and more rain. “How do you expect me to amuse myself?”
Scritch, scritch.
Why the hell had she married a writer? Self-indulgent. Stony. Telling secrets to their treasured bits of paper with their scratchy pens. “You’re writing about me, aren’t you?”
His mouth was tight and silent. His pen fell silent, too. He was staring through the side window as the car approached a bridge. They passed under it; the rain slapped down hard, all at once, and Tonio startled, his arms jolting up like a baby’s at the sudden sound.
Consuelo laughed. So he was alive, was he? There was hope yet. She wriggled her bottom closer to his on the seat. “You can’t still be mad about last night, my love. It was entertaining for both of us. How you could be anything but amused is beyond me.” Amused and honored. And gratified! Most men would think they’d gone to heaven. But Tonio? Fussy as a woman these days. Everything had to be analyzed, required a decision, was contingent upon an assessment of right or wrong. As though there could be anything wrong with wanting intimacy with one’s husband. His attitude was the problem. That and his depressive silence. It couldn’t be good for Tonio to bottle everything up; no wonder he was so often ill. If he could only get his head out of the clouds, he’d see the cure right next to him.
Slowly the rain abated. Tonio found a fresh page and again began to write.
The landscape around them lifted into soft hills, quite lovely in the emerging sunshine. Remarkable Mother Nature: she knew best how to buoy the heart. Consuelo could break this impasse. Tonio seemed keen to stay huddled in his corner, but it was the job of a wife to be gracious and bend. “What are you writing now, darling? May I see? I’m sure I could help.”
Scritch—Damn him! Consuelo made a grab for the notebook on his lap. He pushed her back. With his free arm outstretched to keep her at bay, he bent his body into a protective arch over his work. His pen moved quickly, furiously blackening a word or two at the top of the paper, then all at once he tore out the page.
“Read, since you insist,” he said. “See if I still amuse you as you seem to think I should.”
It was a letter. She held it up to the window, but his frenzied scribbling had fully obscured the addressee’s name.
Quebec City, June 3, 1942
Dear XXXXXXXXX,
After all our time spent apart—each in our separate country, growing into our separate strivings and grief, sharing only silence—still in my voiceless hours my thoughts go to you who once taught me to speak.
“I want an apple. I am a student.” How crude our early words were—mine truant, careless, childishly cruel; yours the unvarnished speech of a half-orphaned girl.
Consuelo checked the defaced salutation again. His oldest sister? Half orphaned, yes, for their father died when Tonio was three. With the mother raising the children alone, no doubt Marie-Madeleine would have been called upon to perfect her brother’s speech.
Simple words were the first kindness you showed me. Only simplicity is honest and beautiful: the worker’s uniform, the naked mouth, the unadorned breast.
Breast?
It is rare (as much in language as in fashion) to hide nothing, to promise nothing, to strive for truth and not simply to impress.
She skipped back. What naked mouth? Whose unadorned breast?
It is rare, yet there is nothing more vital. For how else can one human trust another, or know love? No milestone, no invention, no great love, no great life, is built through any but the simplest and most unambiguous steps.
I asked you to do something for me before I left. Another might have read cruelty into my words. But you took them for what they were, a plain and practical request.
For this I thank you.
For I have grown very tired of being misunderstood.
I wish words had proven to be as simple as you made me hope they could be. Even now there are things I cannot put into words … or not into speech … Memories of your young body,
Consuelo frowned.
and mine—young again with you. For a year, we were two children chasing squirrels, tossing whirligigs, wishing on stars …
An older schoolgirl, then? An early, never-forgotten crush?
he with his mind dominating his body and his heart; she all heart, at home in herself, as sure of her eager body as he was awkward and insecure in his own.
Who was this girl—middle-aged woman, now—to whom he would write so freely, confessing embarrassments that were so at odds with his adult facade and physique? This was not her Tonio; he never talked to Consuelo this way!
The girl had to be a memory and nothing more. He hadn’t intended on delivering this letter, but destroying it. He only wanted for his wife to see him this way—more vulnerable even than a man drugged to sleep. He was testing her, daring her to make light of his troubles again.
Answer me this: How is it that one can believe the body to be sacrosanct, inviolate, the image and creation of God … and yet know it to be more destructible and error-prone than lowly structures created by man?
My brother died at the age of fifteen. He had been wise as a king, as diligent in the care of our friendship as a lamplighter in the tending of the flame. He had been my anchor, the angel to my devilry, my mirror in a household in which only sisters and mother remained. My brother had called me to his deathbed, not to speak of his pain but to soothe my own. His body, he confided, would die and be gone … but the rest of him would stay.
How can a child know himself as other than body? How did my brother know what he would be in both our world and in the world that waited?
What am I to do with the secret he shared?
You spoke so wisely of the spirit and the body on the day we met. What is this body, like a soul in its power to torment and exhilarate? Mine so worn now, fickle, creaking in heavy weather, limbering to life with the return of sun … or with the thought of sunshine such as you have been to me.
When I remember your blond hair holding light—just as did mine as a boy—your undimmed innocence as intoxicating as perfume … It pains me less to think of us growing apart than to think that your light might one day grow weak.
These are dark days in the country of our fathers. They will grow darker still, and colder, before the threat subsides. You asked me once if the sky was cold …
Enough. Consuelo couldn’t turn back time. She couldn’t become the little blond friend he had long left behind. Did he want her to return to the soil, to her mother, and arrange to be rebirthed?
All she could do was change the atmosphere of the moment. All he needed after his month of lethargy was to do a job and to do it well, as well as Consuelo did her own.
There were times when a wife had to grovel and bend; there were times when a wife had to snap.
“Give me the sleeping pills. Let me kill myself!” She tore at his jacket, batting away his hands. The car wobbled in the roadway as she pushed his head into the window. Her long nails caught the skin of his forehead and ear.
Tonio yanked her to him, locking her flailing arms against his chest. She showed some resistance; no more than was necessary. She cried a little. Tonio spoke to the driver, who had adjusted his mirror to frame the scene, and swayed Consuelo into silence.
She had had to whip up a proper storm to give him a chance to calm the seas. He would be fine now; it was like letting a toddler fight his way to sleep.
Tonio touched his fingers to his forehead, checking for blood. “You’ll kill us all,” he muttered. �
��Rabid cat.”
“Don’t call me that.” She slid away from him, indignant as a flower standing straight in a chilly wind. “You know I hate cats.”
The De Koninck home in the historic old quartier of Quebec City was a grande maison of quiet grey limestone. Staid, thought Consuelo. Sedate. But Tonio loved its leaded windows, its heavy banisters and soaring ceilings; he examined it like a doctor with a patient and happily proclaimed it constitutionally secure.
The hosts were similarly well settled. Charles De Koninck, in his mid-thirties, had already been a Dean of Philosophy for years. His wife …
What was the damn wife’s name?
The fuzzy drone in jet planes these days: it’s like sitting in an aerosol can. Makes it impossible to think. She’d rather have a 1930s propeller plane, whose massive racket numbed the ears and extremities but left the mind free to soar and to think … To think of nothing but the exciting suitor in the pilot seat beside her … His hands on the controls but his eyes on her … Her thoughts turning wild as she reads his moving lips …
She is there.
Then: turbulence; marbles strewn across a courtyard; her mind trips.
It was June. The wife introduced herself when Consuelo disembarked from the Cadillac. Charles De Koninck and …
Who cares! Only the boy mattered. Little Thomas De Koninck with his blond curly hair. Tonio’s little prize. Little Tonio’s lost twin. The small, blond boy who would become a little prince.
21
Their stay at the De Konincks’ had been shaping up to be the usual: impeccably gracious hosts, elaborate meals, engrossed attention paid to Tonio, polite questions put to Consuelo. She was obliged to represent her husband at breakfasts and spend the mornings with Madame De Koninck while Charles put in time at the university and Tonio slept. “It’s what your husband needs,” the wife said approvingly each day, proud to give him succor and rest. But each night, dawn had been near the horizon before Tonio joined Consuelo in their bed. He claimed he was staying up only to write—not on paper but in his head. It infuriated her to realize he might never put his thoughts onto paper in her presence again.
Anio Szado Page 12
