ON WITH THE NEW IN FRANCE
(1981)
THE NEW MINISTER of the Interior has announced that no more phones are being tapped. Mr. Police Commissioner, my phone is still being tapped. The tapper is Mlle. Delphine Véhicule, aged 43, living at No. 79 Avenue de la Dislocation de l’Empire Carolingien, Building D, Staircase Z, third floor, second door to the right, between the elevator and the hot-water pipes. The basic qualities of Mlle. Véhicule’s character are envy and jealousy, and this, Mr. Commissioner, has led her to tapping. She usually calls at about ten o’clock at night. When I place the receiver to my ear, I hear a rhythmic tapping sound (I believe Mlle. Véhicule uses her fingernail) accompanied by light, regular breathing. Sometimes in the background can be heard vibrant echoes of the ten-o’clock news. Mr. Commissioner, Mr. Minister should remember his campaign promises. The best moment to arrest Mlle. Véhicule would be when she leaves the house at 7:45 in the morning on her way to work (floral displays). She takes the Métro when the weather is bad. Otherwise she takes the No. 96 bus.
I am disappointed that the change has not been as thorough as I, as a voter, had a right to expect. Not only has my daughter failed her end-of-term examinations but martial music is still being performed at public ceremonies. Could not this aggressive heritage from an obsolete past be replaced by the recorded words of our great Humanists and Philosophers? I would be honored to offer to the nation a tape of Jean-Paul Sartre ordering lunch at La Coupole in November, 1960. Above the clatter of cutlery, much of it right-wing, his voice can be heard saying clearly and decisively, “Veal Marengo for two.”
What I am trying to say is that my clients, M. and Mme. Ambroise Ballon, were simply victims of a joke of their own making. On the night after the election, M. and Mme. Ballon made a lighthearted wager as to how many five-hundred-franc banknotes could be stuffed under the seats of an ordinary Mercedes. Mme. Ballon won the bet with the figure of thirty-three million. In the merriment of the hour, my clients forgot to remove the money from under the seats. Some time later, after that long rainy spell so injurious to agriculture and the vineyards of Burgundy, my clients decided to lunch somewhere in sunshine on the Swiss side of the border. For the rest, you have the biassed version of events as presented by the Public Prosecutor.
In the last act of the ballet, La Marseillaise rises and mingles with Cod Fishermen of Brittany – “Unite! Unite!” (Berlioz orchestration) – while a large fishing net drops over the orchestra seats, symbolically holding the bourgeoisie captive. The balcony audience then throws chocolate minnows into the net as the entire company fills the stage and the dancers coöperate in hauling in the catch. The chocolate could then be distributed to the deserving, or eaten on the spot. I think this fulfills the spirit of your instructions: “Halt! No aesthetic delusions at this most proletarian hour!”
I noticed that while he was reading the news tonight, Firmin Roman-Fleuve deliberately mispronounced the name of the Minister for Wormwood Control. One could tell it was deliberate from the way Roman-Fleuve paused and looked in a conspiratorial way into the camera. My family and I are among the thousands who have been waiting twenty-three years for the establishment of disinterested wormwood control, and we wholly approve of Mme. Emeline Lune as Minister. Roman-Fleuve is an unwelcome reminder of the days when wormwood had virtually taken over our institutions, with the help of banks and to the detriment of small shareholders. As you may be thinking of making some necessary changes soon, we are sending along a video cassette of my brother-in-law reading some poems of his own composition.
“Hope Undeferred” was commissioned in the heady days of the Popular Front, but the government of that time never got round to paying for it. By the time my late husband had completed his monumental group, three decades had gone by and the nation was in the grip of artistic reaction. The time has come to move the monument out of the studio and into the street. The center of the group is formed by three city Councillors with their arms linked. To the left, kneeling, is the figure of Veracity, who bears the features of the wife of one of the Councillors. On the right is the charming figure of the Socialist-Populist leader Apollinaire Crocus, portrayed as a child wearing a sailor suit. Crocus has his eyes fixed in wonder on a secular, Republican angel flying over the Councillors’ heads and bearing a garland of grapes, apples, melons, and hops, signifying the four great regions of France. The clear gaze of the angel is particularly well rendered. All the figures in the monument are fully clothed. The most suitable niche for the monument might be opposite the Stock Exchange, as a reproach, or perhaps at the top of the staircase before the Sacré-Coeur, where it would act as a counterpoise to superstition. The group is made of plaster. The cost of casting it in bronze could be met by public subscription.
Inter-Ministerial Note: Many new staff members are still lodged on a barge tied up to a quay forty kilometers from the Ministry. Melancholia caused by a feeling of Ministry rejection and an epidemic of septic-throat infection have sadly decimated this enthusiastic administrative unit; worse, creeping damp rot has rendered most of the files unreadable – particularly some valuable statistics on pet food. Our mortification may easily be imagined, as the Old Order had turned over the pet-food figures quite dry. I know that the Prime Minister has ordered the government to be “transparent,” but if we could in just this one instance remain opaque, the Sub-Ministry (barge division) would be grateful.
THE BURGUNDY WEEKEND
(1970-1)
1
WHY DID THE GIRARDS let Lucie’s cousin Gilles drive them to Burgundy? Lucie and Jérôme could so easily have rented a car or asked someone in their hotel about trains. The offer was not even a kindness: Gilles had to be in Dijon that weekend and he wanted company on the road.
In youth Gilles had looked like Julius Caesar, but now that he had grown thickly into his forties, he reminded people of Mussolini. Sometimes a relation from Quebec ran into Gilles – the cousin who had chosen the States, educated his daughters in Paris, had never come back to Canada except for funerals. “Gilles is like Mussolini now,” Lucie had heard, but it was said with admiration.
As Mussolini might have been cavalier with lesser visitors, so Gilles kept Jérôme and Lucie waiting for seven hours, in Paris, on a Saturday in June. First he called at breakfast time (the Girards were already sitting in the hotel parlor with a packed suitcase between them), and then he called just before lunch, and again at three. It was Lucie who took the calls. She could not quite hear what Gilles’ delays were about. The telephone at the hotel desk was greasy and certainly microbe-laden; she held it an inch away from her ear. The line was also being used by strangers frying bacon and popping corn. They lived under a tin roof on which hail was falling. A woman cried, “I told you he was a fool!” This thin, hysterical ghost voice was the tone for that weekend, a choir leader setting the pitch. Through the hail and the bacon frying came the Canadian voice of cousin Gilles making excuses.
After each of these calls, Lucie sent a telegram to a village in Burgundy, to a woman who was an old friend of Jérôme’s, and who had been expecting the Girards in time for lunch. The telegrams were variations on a single mournful apology: “Desolated to inform you the unexpected retards our arrival.” She signed Jérôme’s name and trusted the choice of words to be suitable for Madame Henriette Arrieu, so important in … what? In recent French history? In the kind of history that was turned into films? Jérôme had never described her. Lucie, obliged to invent, composed someone slender and aged, not frighteningly clever, above all kind. She gave her creation a cloud of white hair, put five or six gold rings on her fingers, dressed her in pale chiffon. Henriette Arrieu, suddenly alive, approached Lucie across an acre of flawless grass, with her hands outstretched and her rings on fire and her weightless sleeves pushed back by the slightest, warmest movement of June – as if wind were the day.
I see pictures because I don’t know as many words as Jérôme, said Lucie to herself, pleading inadequacy the way Gilles gave grounds for latenes
s.
Jérôme did not seem at all disturbed by the long wait. He stood looking over a window-box of plastic geraniums at the traffic on Quai Voltaire. Perhaps he was seeing only the pinpoint concentration of his thoughts, which Lucie imagined to be a minute ray of light in a dark curtain.
He is going to be all right this weekend, she said. The best signs were in place when he got up. Sun at the window. Breakfast. He seemed happy. The French coffee reminded him of something. Something pleasant, yes. His first cigarette. He showed me a map and explained about Burgundy. Only God could have known what he was thinking, but if you live with Jérôme you live without God, and so nobody knows anything.
Jérôme turned to speak to her (an excellent sign), but the traffic outside was like the purring of a monstrous cat. She had to close the parlor window – her gestures were gradual, calm – before she could hear. “About that advertisement in the Métro.”
“Yes, which one?”
“The one I pointed out to you, to show what they are selling in Paris now. ‘In Solitude, in Anguish, in Despair, call VAL 70-50. SOS Friendship.’ They used to sell soap, coffee, Dubonnet.”
“Jérôme, you won’t make sad remarks all weekend, will you?” said Lucie. “Or to Gilles while he’s driving?”
Of course, it was the worst thing she could have said. He would not speak to her again for hours, might even refuse to acknowledge Gilles’ greeting.
Every marriage is different, she said, and ours is like this. It can’t be helped. I don’t know of any that can be called better – only different.
Gilles had warned Lucie that he would not be allowed to park in front of their hotel. If he were to pause longer than it takes to shift gears the car would be hauled off to a motor graveyard, their passports would be impounded, and Lucie would be taken away by the police and shut up in a cage full of prostitutes. Gilles would slow down somewhere close to them, he had said, that was the best he could do, and the Girards would need to be poised, ready to leap like gazelles. And Lucie had promised that she and Jérôme would do that; they would leap like gazelles straight into Gilles’ car. At three o’clock Gilles announced, “Twenty minutes from now. Remember what I told you.” Jérôme and Lucie moved out to the edge of the pavement with their raincoats folded and their suitcase between them and stood without speaking until a quarter to four, at which time a blue BMW pulled out of the westbound flux on the quai and stopped dead. Gilles reached back and opened a door. “Hurry!” he said. He wore a tweed cap and 1910 goggles. Lucie started to get in until she saw a slavering black Labrador retriever sitting where she was meant to sit. She cried, “No, you go with him,” to Jérôme and she ran round the front of the car to climb in next to Gilles. Jérôme put the coats and suitcase between himself and the animal and immediately closed his eyes. The car stank of cigars. The radio was turned on to a concert. “Hurry!” said Gilles again. They moved off at a crawl into the stream of traffic flowing west, then south.
Lucie leaned close to Gilles and said in a low voice, “He will probably sleep most of the way. He gets tired in cars, unless he happens to be driving. The time change was bad for his sleep. For his appetite, too. He’ll say he’s hungry and then he won’t eat. I keep chocolate in my handbag. He is underweight for his height. He may seem indifferent sometimes. It is only tiredness. Pretend you don’t notice.”
Gilles said to himself, You would think he was her dog. You would think he was her infant. Christ, he must be what, now – thirty-nine? More?
Partly in French and sometimes in English, for he slid without hearing himself, Gilles began to speak as though Lucie had just recently interrupted him: “I don’t want you to think I’m boasting. I don’t need to boast. My first research grant was a personal one, one hundred thousand dollars.”
“What kind of dollars?” said Lucie.
“I’m over in the States about ten months of the year,” Gilles went on. “I was my own administrator when I got that first grant. No strings. I was about the age you are now. I’m a lot more sure of myself than when you remember me.”
“I think I was twelve,” said Lucie. “I didn’t much notice how people were.”
“I must be one of the top three or four in my field now,” said Gilles. “Not in the States. In the world. I’ve published in the Soviet Union. I keep the apartment in Paris just for the girls’ education. I want their French to be good. I don’t want them to have what we had. Anyway, Laure won’t live in the States. Our apartment is in Neuilly. André Maurois – you know? – used to have a place practically in the same building. Laure and the girls stay here most of the year. I’ve got this other beautiful place in New Haven built in 1728. Laure furnished it but she wouldn’t stay. I don’t insist. I believe in individual freedom. Laure feels she has more to contribute here. She wrote to the Prime Minister when they cut down the chestnut trees on Place Saint-Sulpice. Got a nice answer, too. I don’t work over there just for the money. If that’s what you think, and if that’s what they think at home, well, you don’t know me. I’d take a lousy research-teaching job in a lousy French university any day if I thought it had real meaning. No, the reason why I’m there is because of my collections. Drawings, furniture. I’ve got these collections, they’re so valuable I can’t have them insured. Can’t afford to. And I could never bring anything out of the country. The Americans would never allow it. They would say it was part of the national heritage.”
“Do they say that about drawings?” said Lucie. “I thought heritage was just culture.”
“Paris is the right place for my daughters,” said Gilles. “They play with the Ruwenzori children, the little princesses. The Ruwenzoris send a car for them. Their mother was a Soplex, of the Soplex mineral water family. When the girls were in New Haven last year I had them tested. Sophie’s I.Q. was one-eighty, Chantal’s was one-seventy-five, and Diane’s in between. We have to watch what they read, who their friends are. I’m not boasting. They get their brains from Laure.”
All this was in English, of which Lucie understood a fair amount. She was a nurse; she had taken six months’ special training in the psychiatric wing of an American hospital. She did not mind English, but Jérôme did. He lived in his own climate; he had made language one of the elements. Sometimes he seemed to be drenched by sleet no one else felt, or else he could not see out for a curtain of snow. Jérôme was more intelligent than anyone Lucie had ever heard of. He had taken university degrees in France. Lucie wanted her cousin to appreciate this; she wanted Gilles to respect Jérôme, who was careless with people but was not afraid of the night or of dying.
She turned her head slowly. His eyes were shut; his breath moved slowly and evenly. “Jérôme is asleep,” she said to Gilles, who did not care one way or the other.
Jérôme was tuned to the radio, to a program of music by the composer End. The music was familiar, but who was End? It came to him as he saw a record sleeve with Jacqueline du Pré; he could see even her wedding ring. He opened his eyes and looked at Gilles’ long graying-reddish hair fanned over a suede collar. Gilles was on his way to Dijon for an antiquarians’ trade fair. He was to be the guest of famous professor somebody, a celebrated authority on medieval church carvings.
“Some medieval saints look like crocodiles,” said Jérôme. “Some look like de Gaulle.” No saint has ever looked like Gilles.
Gilles was a master of knowledge about saints, silver, tapestries, paintings, porcelain; he bought some things to keep and some to sell in America. He made a lot of money that way – so he was telling Lucie now.
The autoroute might have been taking them anywhere. The end of the road might even be Montreal.
“How is he?” said Gilles suddenly, with a slight jerk of the tweed cap. “I mean how is he really?”
“Who said anything was the matter with him?” said Lucie.
“Lucky thing you never had children,” said Gilles. “He never had a job. I don’t mean never held one, I mean never had one. Am I right?” He did not require an answer
. “Did he ever write anything, finally?”
“I never heard him say he wanted to,” said Lucie. “So I’m not sure what you mean by finally.”
“Then why did he take degrees in literature?” said Gilles. “He could have taught. They were screaming for teachers then. Too late now. Degrees like his are a dime a dozen. Well, you aren’t tied with children. That’s one good thing.”
“It isn’t too late for children,” said Lucie. “I’m twenty-eight.”
“At least you’ll never have problems like what to do about superintelligent daughters,” said Gilles. “Are you still a Catholic, Lucie? Practicing, I mean.”
“Not now.” That was something she could answer.
“Our upbringing was a disease,” said Gilles.
“That’s what Jérôme says. I don’t know. God never hurt my feelings.”
“It was easy for your generation,” said Gilles. “You had a choice.”
“No one mentioned it at the time,” said Lucie. “Excuse me, Gilles, but your dog is slobbering on our raincoats.”
“Saliva is only a saline solution,” said Gilles. “It washes out.”
“… for cello and orchestra, by the composer Eye-hend,” said the same announcer who had mentioned “End.”
Gilles snapped the radio shut. “The French are twenty years behind the times,” he said. “Still playing the wrong Haydn. Only Michael Haydn matters.”
It occurred to Lucie that she had no clear early memory of what her cousin had been like before Mussolini and Julius Caesar; before Neuilly, New Haven, the goggles, the Labrador retriever, and the right Haydn.
Going Ashore Page 36
