The King of Fools

by Frédéric Dard

  The room had only one chair, so I sat on the edge of the bed, taking care to fold the flaps of my robe over my hairy legs.

  Now she was looking at the photograph of Denise on my bedside table. The picture stood in a small leather frame, a gift from Denise herself, who had made me promise to take it everywhere I went.

  “Is that your sister?”

  “No, the very idea!”

  “She looks like you.”

  “By some kind of osmosis, then. I spent six years of my life with that woman.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it’s over, provisoirement.”

  She was interested, and watched me intently, anxious to catch every word.

  “What does that mean, provisoirement?”

  “It means that once or twice a year we say our goodbyes, but get back together again three weeks later. One of us calls the other and we carry on.”

  “Is that love?”

  “Of a kind.”

  “One day you won’t call.”

  “I know. Perhaps that day has come.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Much more than in that picture.”

  “She’s got plenty of character. Sharp eyes.”

  “Yes, plenty.”

  “Do you live together?”

  “No, that’s how we keep going.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She has a little couture house near the Champs-Elysées. Practically the size of this room. She never has more than three or four dresses for sale, but those three or four are like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  Now she knew more about Denise than she did about me. Oddly, Denise formed a kind of bond between us. The patron saint of our relationship.

  “Are you still leaving tonight?”

  “Yes. My husband’s expecting me.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Serious type. Tall and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple.”

  “Any children?”

  “No.”

  We had nothing more to say. She stood up and flattened the front of her shorts in that way all women do. She hooked the string of her black bag over one finger and swung it gently back and forth. From time to time, it knocked against her lovely, tanned legs with a soft thud. I can tell an unhappy person, especially one who tries to keep it hidden. I sensed she was burdened with a sorrow she was struggling to conceal. But sorrow is like rust: it will surface, however thick the layer of paint we apply to cover it up.

  “Well, er, I’ll be going then…”

  It was an infinitely fragile moment. A word, a gesture, even a look, and it would be gone.

  “Delighted to have met you, Monsieur Valaise.”

  We shook hands and she left. I should have seen her to the door but I stayed sitting on the bed, my head lowered, sunk in an ill-defined feeling of anguish. Every woman has her own aura. Marjorie’s manifested itself above all when she left a room. Her aura remained, stronger and more troubling than her presence. I stared at the pink and green chintz-covered chair. I felt a terrible sense of having lost something beautiful. Just a few seconds before, anything had been possible. The merest hint. A hint that she – or I – could have acted on. But she hadn’t dared. And neither had I. A faint light had glimmered between us, and now it had gone out.

  Shyly, the door reopened. She stood framed in the doorway, not daring to step over the threshold. A short time ago she had marched straight into my room, like a conquered territory, and now she was afraid to come back in. I saw she was holding something out to me. The little toy lion from her beach bag.

  “Take this,” she stammered, “if you like?”

  I moved towards the door. But it was her wrist I took hold of, leading her into the room. I pushed the door shut with my elbow and took Marjorie in my arms. She gave no sign of resistance, no tremor of excitement. She was passive, like a drowned person pulled along in the current. And the strangest thing of all was that I actually compared her to a drowned woman, there and then. Heavy in my arms, docile to the point of inertia, she leaned her weight against mine, burying her face in the opening of my bathrobe, stock-still. After a while, I lifted her head gently and saw she was crying.

  “Tell me what’s wrong, Marjorie.”

  She recovered herself as quickly as she had let go. She hardened her features, and dried her eyes in a blink.

  “I’m sorry. So stupid of me.”

  She pressed the toy lion into my hand.

  “I call him Pug,” she said, “because he looks like a dog I had when I was little. I hope he brings you good luck. Take good care of him!” she added, with an embarrassed smile.

  Pug was a cheap fairground trinket, but I could see Marjorie was making a sacrifice.

  The tiny lion had a debonair expression and his mane looked a little like Fidel Castro’s beard; grains of white sand escaped from a small slit in his side.

  “I will,” I promised.

  This rather ridiculous scene reminded me of a film that had made a great impression on me as a child. It was the story of an aviator who goes to war with a small teddy bear around his neck, given to him by his young wife. One day, he leaves the bear behind in his room and, naturally, is shot down in flames during a dog fight. The film ended with a close-up of the abandoned bear lying on top of a trunk. I cried myself to sleep for days after, thinking about the little lost animal, the symbol – in my eyes – of every lost love, every thwarted destiny, the misery of the whole world.

  “May I write to you, Marjorie?”

  My question seemed to surprise her.

  And then her face lit up and she answered in a smiling, lilting voice, “Oh! Yes!”

  “Thank you. I just need your address.”

  Her face darkened for a moment.

  “My address – that’s impossible. Send your letter poste restante to the London GPO.”

  “I will.”

  “I don’t want to force you. Promise me you’ll only write if you really want to!”

  “I promise.”

  Seconds before, I might have kissed her, perhaps even taken her to my bed. But now once more we were a man and woman who barely knew one another, and we parted on a handshake.

  3

  She could scarcely have turned the corner of the street before I began my letter.

  My dear Marjorie,

  When I first saw you in my car, I should have got behind the wheel before you had time to get out, and driven off like a madman…

  I wrote six pages that I felt like tossing into the waste paper basket, for I was certain they could never express or even come close to reflecting my state of mind.

  There are people we get to know gradually in life, and then there are others we meet and recognize straight away. Such people stay in our hearts for ever. I had “recognized” Marjorie. Since leaving the room, her memory was stronger with every passing minute. I had spent six years with Denise, and our relationship had brought nothing. After less than an hour with Mrs Faulks, I was a richer man. I refrained from reading my letter back, knowing that if I did, I would never post it.

  It was an odd day: neither happy nor sad. White, like the sky. By tossing my letter into the post box, I set the mechanism in motion, and could decide nothing until it had run its course.

  I lazed at the beach, indifferent to the other bathers, or the extraordinary green sea shimmering on the horizon. I took no lunch, nor an afternoon siesta. Curled in my parasol’s dark circle of shade, I wriggled bad-temperedly in the sand, following its orbit.

  I told myself that Marjorie was still in Juan-les-Pins, until that evening. I could have searched for her in the happy crowds, but I had no desire to try. I would have to wait a while before risking a reunion. I needed to wait for her! When I reached my hotel at the end of the afternoon I was hungry and tired from lying for so long on the beach, doing nothing. The proprietor was bringing in a basket of lobsters. He called out to me.

  “Monsieur Valaise! Did you see the lady waiting for you on the
terrace?”

  I felt a flash of heat at the back of my skull.

  “A lady,” I muttered, staring at the lobsters awkwardly waving their antennae.

  The hotel owner was a large, pleasant man, invariably clad in a short-sleeved blue shirt and linen trousers, both lacking their share of buttons. He winked.

  “Not a bad-looking lady.”

  Marjorie! I dashed through the lobby. Beyond, there was a terrace of sorts where the hotel residents would take a last drink before bed. A green-tiled water feature added an exotic touch, decorated with tubs of banana trees and a palm with bark like the hide of an elephant.

  Denise was sitting in a swing seat, its chains mewing under her weight. My disappointment was so strong it crashed over me like a wave of nausea.

  Wearily, I approached the swing seat. Denise wore a white silk two-piece suit. She had taken off her shoes and folded her legs under her. The dainty pumps, woven with threads of gold, looked out of place on the patio tiles.

  “Try not to look so pleased,” she declared, with a hearty, sad laugh.

  She was beautiful, enticing. Around her floated the discreet scent of Parisian elegance. She was Paris itself.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to visit,” I muttered, delivering a lukewarm kiss.

  “To visit! Hark at you! Since when do we pay visits to one another, you and I?”

  She caressed my cheek and her touch was full of tenderness.

  “So you’ve found a replacement?”

  “Don’t be silly!”

  She stared into the depths of my soul, then nodded like a doctor reserving her final diagnosis.

  “I decided on the spur of the moment,” she said with a sigh, stroking her velvet hand against my sand-pocked face. “I still wasn’t sure whether to come this morning. Then it struck me at lunchtime, on the Champs-Elysées, looking at a travel agent’s window. Posters have a strangely evocative power, don’t they? I went in and asked if there was a plane to Nice this afternoon. There was. Do you still love me?”

  “Je t’aime.”

  “How’s it been without me?”

  “It’s been.”

  “Good or bad? Do try and be a little charming, at least? Tell me some lies.”

  “It’s been all right. Grey, mild, dull, neutral, it’s been…”

  “OK, OK. Me too. Any conquests?”

  “None.”

  Marjorie’s face loomed in my mind with extraordinary force, then slowly broke apart. The effect was like a slip of the hand, when you reach out to place the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  “You surely wouldn’t have me believe you’re a holiday virgin?”

  “I may not have you believe it, but it’s true all the same.”

  She stood up and searched for her shoes with her feet, across the tiles. A fat green-and-blue dragonfly hovered around a banana leaf like a tiny helicopter in distress.

  “Your hotel’s not bad, but the neighbourhood looks rather like back home in Asnières, don’t you think?”

  “I prefer Asnières,” I assured her.

  She burst out laughing. She was standing in her shoes now, holding out her hand to me with an inviting look.

  “Are you coming?”

  Her cases were in the hall, near the coat stand. The owner had been watching and came over as I bent to grasp the handles.

  “Leave those, Monsieur Valaise, I’ll bring them up.”

  “No need!”

  We were already on the stairs when he asked, with a barely suppressed smirk, “Two breakfasts for tomorrow?”

  “That’s right, two!”

  4

  I woke next morning feeling in tune with the whole world. I was happy and relaxed. Why this comforting sense of having escaped some form of danger? I felt like a man recovering from a bout of illness.

  I rose, feeling wonderfully light on my feet. The sun poured through the chinks in the shutters, streaking the room with gold. I walked over to the window and propped the slats half open. The garage mechanic opposite was polishing a little red sports car. It looked like a toy, and gazing at it, by a process of association, I thought of Marjorie Faulks. I had forgotten all about her until that moment. She tormented me no more. Already, she was one unlikely face among many. I was surprised at my sudden infatuation of the day before. How could I have felt such a blaze of passion for that pleasant little Englishwoman on her holiday?

  “I don’t care what you say, it’s never this sunny in Asnières!”

  Denise shielded her eyes with one hand, blinded by a ray of sunlight. I adjusted one of the shutters so as not to dazzle her. She lay naked on the bed, the cast-off sheets strewn over the floor.

  “It’s quite wonderful,” she sighed, flinging her arms wide in the shape of a cross.

  “What is?”

  “This! The summer! The Côte, the sun… To think there are Eskimos in ice houses right now, and English people under umbrellas.”

  English people under umbrellas. I imagined Marjorie Faulks on Regent Street beneath a blue umbrella. I hoped desperately that she wouldn’t go looking for my letter. And if she wrote to me, at any rate, I had determined not to write back. How could I have penned six pages of heated declarations to that unknown woman? I pictured her in my MG, and my initial irritation returned. With her sunburn, and seawater matting her hair, I had found her ugly. And detested her sharp, acid voice.

  “Something on your mind, O man of my life?” Denise had been watching me.

  “Nothing. Just drifting.”

  “You’re drifting off without me. I think something’s happened.”

  “What, an accident?”

  “Nothing physical. In the mind, perhaps.”

  I dived three metres across the room and landed at her side on the bed. The springs gave a sinister twang. Kneeling beside Denise, I tapped her forehead, as if knocking on a door.

  “Pardon me, my good woman, things are sounding a little hollow in there this morning! You’re the one talking about accidents of the mind, when I feel so happy I could shout for joy.”

  “I know what I mean.”

  But I was quite sure I did not. Denise was never one to talk in riddles. She was spontaneous and direct, even when she was joking.

  “You don’t love me any more, Jean-Marie!”

  “Is that a joke?” I asked quietly.

  But in my heart of hearts, I was not proud.

  “I wish it was!”

  “If you can think such a thing, Denise, then I shall hate you. You know very well I can’t live without you. Yesterday life was unbearable, and this morning I feel like singing.”

  “What does that prove? You needed to make love to someone and you’d had enough of being alone. You see, the biggest difference between a man and a woman is psychological. A man is always amazed to discover that the woman he loves no longer loves him back. She has to announce it to him, and even then he will persist in believing she’s making it up. Whereas a woman knows when her man has fallen out of love, even before he knows it himself.”

  She spoke solemnly, staring up at the ceiling, but her ironic smile played at the corners of her mouth.

  “You little bitch!” I protested, getting up off the bed. “Anyone would think you were determined to ruin my day.”

  She held her lovely, sensual arms out to me.

  “Come and forgive me, you handsome, selfish beast!”

  For four days we behaved like a couple of kids revelling in sunshine and freedom. I have always loathed sentimental film scenes of couples chasing one another on the beach, rolling in the surf, like a photograph on some lurid poster! But images like these are the stuff of life. We struggle our whole lives to recreate corny calendar scenes: beaches, mountains, an ivyclad cottage, children on a swing, a basketful of kittens. For four days, I didn’t give a thought to Marjorie Faulks. She was lost somewhere inside me, like most of the women who had crossed my path before Denise.

  It happened on the fifth day. We were coming down from our room, dressed for
the beach, and Denise went to hang our key in its pigeonhole.

  I waited in the hall, watching the maids lugging the bundles of laundry. The air smelt of warm petrol.

  “Here! Some mail for you.”

  Denise came towards me, holding out a long, narrow envelope on the head of her badminton racket. The stamp bore the image of Queen Elizabeth II.

  I felt a sudden rush of hatred for the slanting, thoroughly British hand, with its characteristic flourishes.

  The foolish, emotive girl had found my letter and replied. I caught Denise’s mocking, enquiring eye.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “Whatever can this be?” I muttered, seizing the missive.

  “The accident!” she answered, twirling her racket. “Don’t play the hypocrite, Jean-Marie dear. The accident has written you a letter.”

  I wanted to object, take the upper hand. I felt ridiculous, but there was nothing I could say. I would put on a brave face. And stop staring at Denise in defeat and embarrassment. Angrily, I ripped at the envelope with my teeth and pulled out a letter torn in two. I held the pieces together and read:

  Perhaps you don’t know London. But you’ve been dwelling here for three days…

  Music has the power to change a mood in four beats. This opening phrase was like certain passages of Mozart. Immediately, an enchanting ode filled my heart and Marjorie’s absence hit me like a fist in the throat. The lines danced before my eyes, and my hands trembled with emotion as I held the two parts of the letter.

  Now I know what it means to belong to an island nation, Jean-Marie. I am in exile here. From you! And yet, I don’t know you. I remember a look, a tone of voice, the colour of your skin in the hollow of your cheek…

  “Has something happened?” Denise asked, urgently.

  I shook my head. And yet something had happened, indeed.

  “You’re pale as death.”

  “Not at all!”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Wait, be quiet a minute…”

  She left. I saw her lithe shadow stretching across the lobby’s tiled floor. And then she vanished into the rectangle of light filling the entrance. Perhaps I should have run after her, but I didn’t feel up to the task.