Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die

by Howard Waldman

Chapter 19

  Gentille

  During the first spring and summer of outside time, some of the functionaries drop in on them quite often. Henri, the little middle-aged man in the filthy beret, sidles up to Seymour and Louis (but not too close) and slyly formulates questions about women they’d known, biblically, back then out there. Louis glares and marches away. Seymour tells a little. The bilingual perfumed young functionary is an even more frequent visitor. He mainly gazes at Louis and begs them to describe Paris streets and squares. Sometimes the lower echelon female functionaries spy on them from the corner of the corridor. When the guests say hello to them they giggle hysterically and disappear like a cloud of twittering sparrows.

  The visitors stop coming when Turnkey posts a notice on the walls of the corridors leading to their rooms. It enjoins those whose duties are not directly involved with the guests to avoid all contact with them on pain of (“sous peine de”) ZTV3. The guests don’t know what ZTV3 is but it sounds very painful. They imagine that the stern-faced iron-bunned woman functionary administrates it, thoroughly and with great satisfaction. The notice also informs the guests that, if approached, failure on their part to break off illicit contact with functionaries will be sanctioned by a loss of thirty (30) points.

  The one functionary they continue seeing regularly is the young scared girl who does their rooms inefficiently at long intervals and brings them their atrocious food. She’s a little different from the other functionaries, her face less inhumanely frozen. There’s no color to it but it’s not inorganic, not chalk or zinc or lead or gunmetal. It’s closer to weak or recent life. There’s less rigidity to her features, as though a face of flesh were struggling against a stiffening translucent mask. The features of most of the functionaries seem frozen in one predominating caricatural mask-like expression. For Henri, the little man on the ladder, it’s libidinous cunning; for the middle-echelon female functionary, pitiless severity; for the perfumed young man, tragic petulance; for Sub-Prefect Marchini, the exaggerated imperiousness of a would-be or a deposed emperor. Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque, though, seems to bear a perfectly inscrutable death mask.

  There’s nothing inscrutable about this girl’s dominant expression, which is fear. When she encounters Seymour in a corridor, she bites her pale lip, maintains exaggerated distance from him and looks about fearfully before she asks, in a whisper, about the condition of his leg. She keeps on asking long after the gray scabs have crumbled off. It’s her only subject of conver-sation. He doesn’t know what to say to her, except to assure her that his leg is all right. Small talk is difficult here. The days are eventless and the weather outside, theoretically a rich subject for exchange, doesn’t exist for her.

  With the posting of the ZTV3 threat even small talk becomes superfluous. For a long while the cleaning girl visibly concentrates on saying nothing to him or to the others.

  “What’s your name?” Seymour asks one day, just to say something. He’s standing in the doorway. She’s scrubbing the floor out in the corridor. The question startles her. She glances over her thin shoulder at the corridor behind her and whispers between stiff pale lips to her scrubbing brush: “I’m not supposed to talk to you. Stupid.”

  With that fearful expression and voice of hers, Seymour can hardly believe his ears. She isn’t at all the kind of person (if you can call her a person) who insults. She’s the kind of quasi-person who’s insulted. That’s confirmed when Seymour asks her why she called him stupid. She looks up and stammers:

  “Oh sir, not you, never never you. How … how could I dare? Me, of course. I’m Stupid. You asked my name. That’s my name here. Stupid. I don’t remember my real name back then. Maybe it was Stupid back then too.”

  Grief tries to break through her mask. Two solitary tears appear in the corner of her eyes. They haven’t the vigor to roll down her cheeks. He guesses that back then it would have been a tempest of tears. Here, in this place of diminished things, it’s all grief can manage.

  To calm her down, Seymour says, “You’re not stupid at all,” even though he thinks that she is, a little, more than a little. “I can’t call you that. You’re the first nice person I’ve met here. I’ll call you “Nice” (Gentille), okay?”

  Now the tears do roll down her cheeks and to make her stop he tells her that his name is Seymour.

  “Saymore?”

  “Not Saymore, ‘Seymour’. In English, ‘Seymour’ sounds like ‘see more.’ Most of the time I didn’t see anything at all.”

  “Oh, English. Then you are English. And I who stupidly thought that you were all Americans and spoke American.”

  He has to explain that they speak the same language, more or less, in England and America. She is a little stupide. But also gentille in a ghost-like bloodless way.

  So each time he sees her he says, “Bonjour, Gentille,” and so do the others, except for Max who calls her “Dummy.” Of course Gentille doesn’t dare call any of them by their first name. It’s always “Monsieur” and “Madame.” But Seymour is always a whispered “Monsieur Saymore.”

  Despite the peril of mysterious ZTV3, she finally overcomes her fear of punishment and talks to Seymour whenever their paths cross. He learns things about the functionaries. They nearly all have nicknames. The fat one with the thick glasses is called “Hedgehog” (“Hérisson”). The severe middle-echelon female functionary with the gray bun is called “Nasty” (“Méchante”). “And O she is, Monsieur Saymore, she is.” Seymour doesn’t need to be convinced. The Five already have a name for her: “Sadist,” which they’ve shortened to “Sadie.”

  Gentille goes on. The effeminate young man who wants to be called Philippe is called Pédale. “I don’t know why, Monsieur Saymore, but he doesn’t like the name so I call him “Philippe.” Maybe I’ll ask him to call me “Gentille” now instead of “Stupide”.” She tells him that the Sub-Prefect is “Little Napoleon.”

  How about the Prefect? Seymour wants to know. Gentille looks scared. “Oh no, no, Monsieur Saymore, no one would dare call Monsieur le Préfet anything but Monsieur le Préfet.”

  As for the Arrivals, they’re referred to by numbers. Madame Williams is Number One. Madame Ricchi is Number Two. Monsieur Forster is Number Three. Monsieur Pilsudski is Zero. He, Saymore, is Number Four. “But I don’t like calling people by numbers. I would never call you Number Four, Monsieur Saymore.”

  Seymour is surprised to learn that love exists here (but why shouldn’t it, he thinks bitterly, if this is, as he believes more and more, a place of torture). Gentille tells him that Sadie (“Nasty”) is in love with the Prefect but that she also hates him. Pédale – Philippe – is in love “with … with … someone you know.” She breaks off. Hedgehog, she resumes, is in love with one of the lower-echelon women. And so it goes: so-and-so in love with so-and-so who loves so-and-so who loves … She goes on and on with her recital of one-way love. Love is never returned, Seymour learns.

  “How about you?” he asks indiscreetly.

  “Nobody would love me,” she says. “If somebody did, of course I would love him in return. How cruel not to.”

  He’s tempted to ask her if she’s in love with someone. Instead, he asks who the Prefect is in love with.

  She stares at him with widening eyes. “It’s not love, it’s … it’s …” She breaks off and runs away.

  One day Seymour asks Gentille to look out of the window and describe what she sees. “Fog, sir,” she says without looking. Again Seymour asks her to look. She says that looking out of the window is forbidden. She looks anyhow and says that she sees fog, doesn’t he too? Seymour describes what he sees: the couples at the sidewalk café tables, the barges, the enlaced lovers along the tree-shaded cobblestoned quays. Can’t she see that? He longs for shared vision. Only Helen can see his year, which is hers too. But she seldom bothers looking.

  “No. There’s nothing for us out there except fog. You’re lucky. You’ll soon be out there. I hope you will. If I had permission to pray I’d
pray for you to be out there. We can’t, ever.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Can’t. Can’t.”

  “Why not, Gentille?”

  “Nasty says praying is ‘short-cir-circuiting the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of command.’ I don’t know what that means. She says it all the time. I don’t know what it means.”

  “I meant why can’t you go outside?”

  “Can’t. Can’t.”

  “Tell me why not, Gentille.”

  “They say the fog would torture us something terrible if we tried to go out there. So that’s the way it is: can’t, can’t.”

 

  Gentille’s subjects of conversation are limited and circular. She repeats them like an old record with eroded grooves. Every time they meet she catalogues her endless chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning the toilets, doing guest rooms, washing mountains of dishes, dusting Turnkey’s (Skull’s) Key Rooms. There are millions of keys hanging there, she says, and she has to dust them all. At the time, Seymour doesn’t realize the importance of that last piece of information, even though he hears it a hundred times. Also hears a hundred times the functionaries’ nicknames, their unrequited love, the nastiness of Nasty, the ban on prayer. Gentille says the same things day after day as though her memories were sand castles built at low tide and washed away hours later by high-tide.

  One of the things she says over and over is this: “A mistake was made with me I think. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know where I should be. Some days I think I see real things out there. When I’m alone I stand before the window even though that’s forbidden and I think it’s not all fog. Sometimes the fog thins and I think I see dunes and the sea with a lighthouse and even sails on the horizon. I think it’s home. I see those things in dreams too. Most of the time I don’t remember the dreams but sometimes I remember dreaming that.”

  She gets into the habit of standing before the window alongside him, careful to maintain distance though. He goes on wanting her to see what he sees, as though her vision of that blankness they call ‘fog’ negated the golden domes and the sidewalk cafés and the river with its barges and quay-side lovers. Try, he says. Once, finally, she presses her forehead against the pane and after a while says: “Yes, I think I do see something. Alongside you I see something. That’s a great gift and I thank you for it. Yes, yes, I see more too, like you.”

  But when he asks her to describe what she sees, for conformation of what he himself sees, she speaks again of the sea, here in Paris, hundreds of kilometers inland. He’s irritated at her for having fragilized his vision of the nearby place he longs to reach and he almost calls her ‘Stupide.’

  She goes on. “When you go out there and one day you visit the seaside remember me and try to find my village. My village is by the sea. There’s a saint in the name of my village, I can’t remember which one. If I could I’d pray to him or her. But prayer is forbidden here because of the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of command. There are dunes and breakers and a lighthouse. That’s all I remember. I often dream about it.”

  It’s pathetic the first few times he hears it. He now understands her rite with the wine-stained map of France tacked up in the men’s room. Each time she comes to clean up she closes the door. She wedges a chair under the knob. She stands on tiptoe in front of the map and beginning at the Belgian border starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline. Her nose practically touches the paper. She lingers on Brittany, exploring the peninsula’s coastal complications. Then her body follows the plunge of the coastline down to the Pyrenees. As she goes past Lorient, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and finally reaches Biarritz and the Spanish border, her knees slowly flex. It’s like a slow motion preliminary to forbidden prayer.

  Seymour’s relation with Gentille (all that moldy chocolate) provides the other men with comic relief, badly needed here. They often address him as “Monsieur Saymore.” Louis refers to the girl as “your sweetie-pie.” He says over and over: “She’s carryin’ a torch for you.” Max’s remarks are much more offensive. “Nice piece of ass you got there” or “Get into her yet?” Each time he sees Seymour and Gentille together he chortles ambiguously: “Jesus, what a pair!” Does he mean the ex New York intellectual and the dumb zombie girl or is he referring jeeringly to Gentille’s barely existent breasts?

  Once, she says: “Monsieur Saymore, when you are transferred (she’s really gentille, she never says “if” but always “when”) could you take me with you, out there? They all say that the fog is poison and torture for us but there’s no fog for you so I would be safe by your side. And, listen, Monsieur Saymore, if they ever try to exit you instead of transferring you, and they send the Black Men after you, I won’t let that happen, ever, ever let that happen, oh no. I’ll hide you in another room nobody knows about with a nice window. I’ll bring you food and try to find books for you and keep you company, sometimes, for a short time, if you permit me to do so.”

  Seymour thanks her and to make her happy (it costs him nothing) says that yes of course he’ll take her with him if he’s transferred. He says “if,” not “when.”

  Gentille helps Seymour with his great artistic project.

  Seymour is finally tempted by creative expression. It’s a nobler activity, he judges, than stickball and poker and forging US treasury notes. He longs to reproduce the street where his sweetheart had lived (lives, still lives, he corrects himself). He wants to account for all of the details he remembers from the black-and-white enlargements. The oysters and heaps of mussels and the mackerel in the fish store. The patterns of the old decorative dishes in the antique shop window. The horse head effigy above the horsemeat butcher’s. The carafe with the legend Ricard on an outdoor café table. Hundreds of other tiny things. Thousands, even.

  And of course the major thing: the heavy door of her building that had once swung open for him.

  His street has to be life-size to work all that detail into his drawing, he tells himself. Maybe half-consciously he wants a life-size street so that one day he’ll be able to pass into it. When the others, alarmed at his long absence, find the room, he’ll no longer be in it but on the other side of that massive door next to the butcher’s horse head, golden now, finally reunited with his sweetheart by the power of art and madness.

  A corridor wall would be ideal, he thinks. But a corridor is dangerously public. How many points would Turnkey dock him for large-scale deterioration of State property? Seymour reduces his ambition and his scale. He hunts for a discreet room with a bare wall. Hunts and hunts. The best he can come up with is a dingy bit of free wall in Room 302. How can he get all those remembered details onto a measly four-foot stretch of plaster?

  He sets to work sullenly on his shrunken inauthentic street. One day Gentille sees it and asks if he would please draw the sea for her. Seymour has trouble concealing his irritation. He hasn’t got enough room for a short 6th arrondissement Paris street, he says. How can he possibly squeeze in the Atlantic Ocean or even the smaller Mediterranean?

  That evening, under the plate of hash, he finds a sheet of paper with a message in childish scrawl full of spelling mistakes.

  Monsieur Cémaur,

  If you please distroy this paper but dont do that untill you have red this paper its about your street. I know a better room for your street then Room 302 Skull never goes their and their are nice big empty walls. Dont worry Monsieur Cémaur about the dust in the coridor I will clean your footprints their so nobbody will know ecept you and me.

  Jentille

  PS I can sign my name because Skull and Meanie dont know that Jentille is my real name now. I’m so glad you dont call me “Stupid.”

  PS 2 May be you could draw the Sea too? Theirs plenty of room for the street and the Sea on the walls.

  PS 3 I almost forgot! Please turn this paper over!

  Seymour finds a crude map full of arrows going up and down staircases, twisting about corners to a part of the Prefecture where none of them had e
ver been. Room 1265 is circled heavily. He rummages in Louis’ hoard of salvaged items and comes up with a small stepladder, sandpaper, rags, a knife and an assortment of pencils. He sets out.

  The corridor floor is very dusty, as she’d said. He sees tiny footprints, almost certainly hers, going to and away from Room 1265. Sure enough, it’s practically empty. The walls are filthy and covered with penciled graffiti but free of shelves.

  He sands the grimy surface down to clean white. He reduces the penciled graffiti to dust, one of them the enigmatic Keep up the Work on Independence Day! A deeply scratched inscription is still faintly legible, though: OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS. He tries to ignore that bitter warning as he begins blocking out the corner antique shop, the fish store, the wine-and-coal café, the horsemeat butcher’s with an oval for the golden horse head, (golden in the abstract knowledge he has of it, but a shade of gray in his mind’s image and on his drawing). And of course Marie-Claude’s building with the massive door. The next day he starts in on the corner antique shop. He knows it will take a whole season just for the remembered contents of the window.

  The first time Gentille sneaks a visit to Room 1265 he’s working on a detail of a decorative dish, the seventh of the thirty-odd roses surrounding a peasant girl. “You remember all that, Monsieur Saymore?” she says. “All those roses?” “Every petal,” says Seymour.

  One day Gentille timidly asks Seymour to draw the sea, the Atlantic, but not all of it, just a village with dunes and a lighthouse. She asks him each time she comes. It’s not persistence but memory failure.

  Finally, he does a fast job. He’s not good at seascapes. A couple of puffy clouds and Vs for seagulls define the sky. Below, wriggly lines for waves define the sea. He sticks a lighthouse on a rock. His dunes look more like muffins than dunes.

  “Something’s not right,” she says. “I don’t know what.”

  Seymour thinks he knows what’s troubling her. It’s the thing that troubles him with his street.

  “The sky should be blue, not gray.”

  “Blue?”

  “Of course the sky can be gray but it’s better blue. And the sea should be green. It can be gray too but it’s nicer green.”

  “Green?”

  He gives it up. She’s forgotten what color is, as though she’d been born blind to it. How long has she been here?

  He wonders if one day, still here, he too won’t look blank at the words ‘blue’ and ‘green.’