Bella...A French Life

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  The weather has turned raw, cold. Above us wispy clouds are gathering.

  It is just after four o’clock.

  Colin suggested we drive for a while before we return to Le Presbytère. He is sitting with his hands on his lap. They are pressed palm to palm as if he is in prayer. The Praying Hands of Albrecht Dürer and I hate them so much. Once, at Chartreux Hospital, there was a couple whose baby was born prematurely at eight months and was jaundiced and had to be put on a ventilator. I told them that their little one would be fine and grow up into a great big rugby forward, but they did not believe me. They brought their parish priest to the hospital. The priest, a tall thin man with little hair and no eyebrows (chemotherapy?) said prayers and sprayed holy water over the baby and over the ventilator as well. I had tried to stop him from spraying the holy water, unsterilized as it would have been, over the child and the machine, but the baby’s mother had violently pushed me out of the way.

  “Doc, shall I call security?” Nurse Bonnec wanted to know.

  “Let’s handle it ourselves,” I told her.

  As soon as the couple and the priest left, Nurse Bonnec washed down the baby and sprayed the ventilator with an anti-septic fluid.

  The following morning when I came on duty I saw neither the mother nor the father, but someone - perhaps it was the priest - had, during the night pasted a large reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Praying Hands on each of the room’s walls.

  “Doc, do I take these down?” Nurse Bonnec wanted to know.

  I told her to leave them but each time I was in that room I felt that at any moment those hands with the bulging veins were going to point an accusing finger at me for no longer believing. Believing God is the anchor, the only anchor, in this world of ours, so full of falsehood and cruelty.

  “Come to think of it,” Nurse Bonnec said to me once the couple had taken their baby home, “the priest’s drawing might have saved the baby’s life.”

  “Dürer’s drawing, Nurse Bonnec,” I corrected her. “And what had saved the baby’s life was man’s science.”

  “Whoever,” she replied.

  I hated those hands long before that incident at Chartreux Hospital. I hated them - and I still do - because one of my mother’s brothers had on one of my father’s birthdays given him the gift of a small sculpture of those hands and stuck between them was a gun. On the card which accompanied the sculpture that uncle of mine had written: “Hitler’s hands. Ha!” “Sick bastard!” my mother said, throwing the sculpture in the bin in the kitchen. My father had not said a word. In the afternoon, no one around, I went to retrieve the sculpture because I wanted to smash it to bits. Morsels of domestic waste clung to the hands and rubbed off on mine. I put a hammer to the sculpture. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  “Dürer,” I say to Colin.

  He looks at me, surprised.

  “Huh?”

  “Your hands.”

  He laughs but drops his hands to the seat.

  “You must think I am praying you don’t turn over the car.”

  Overhead the clouds are breaking up and beside the road, on the shore, a gull, its wings flapping, is trying to land on the water.

  “Shall we head home?” I ask.

  Home. My home. Not his.

  “Yes let’s, Bella. We’ve had a lovely outing. A great lunch. And all.”

  -0-

  Back at Le Presbytère Colin says he will not be able to eat a thing this evening.

  It has started to rain.

  “I feel like getting some writing done,” he tells me.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t be typing.”

  In my room, I stand at the window. Night has fallen. There are only a few lights lit on the mount. A yellow tourist coach drives along the causeway taking the last of the day’s visitors back to the mainland.

  I must go downstairs to silence the clock.

  Passing Colin’s room I hear his voice. He is reciting a poem.

  It swept, it swept on all the earth ... At every turning ... A candle on the table flared... A candle, burning ... Snow-moulded arrows, rings and stars ... The pane adorning ...A candle on the table shone ... A candle, burning ...

  I stand still. I listen. I love the sound of the English tongue … when it is being spoken by a man. I stand stock-still, too frightened to move in case the floor boards under my feet should squeak and alert Colin that I am outside his room.

  And drops of molten candle wax ... Like tears were rolling ... And all was lost in snowy mist ... Grey-white and blurring ... A candle on the table stood ... A candle, burning ...

  I recognise the poem. It is Pasternak’s A Winter Night. Once, as part of a poetry lesson, Miss Matigot had asked me and my classmates to each choose a poem which the class would discuss. Having no clue which poem to choose, my father had suggested Pasternak’s A Winter Night. He knew it by heart and recited it to me and he suggested in order for to make a good impression on Miss Matigot I should learn the poem by heart myself. I did, but alas, it had made no impression on her because my classmates had learnt their so-called favourite poem by heart too.

  All February the snow-storm swept ... Each time returning ... A candle on the table wept ... A candle, burning ...

  Colin falls silent.

  “Bella, is that you?”

  I almost run to the staircase.

  The door of Colin’s bedroom flings open.

  I turn round.

  “Sorry, did I disturb you? I’m just going downstairs to silence the clock.”

  “I thought one of the nuns may have come to pay us a visit.”

  “That was Pasternak,” I say. “The poem.”

  “Yes. A Winter Night. I’m sorry. Was I … speaking too loudly?”

  “Good heavens, no. Not at all. That was beautiful. The poem. Pasternak. It was a favourite of my fathers. He knew it by heart. I wasn’t eavesdropping though. Please don’t think I was eavesdropping. I was just passing … ”

  I am sure I am blushing but fortunately the hallway is in semi-darkness.

  “Of course I won’t think that,” says Colin. “This is your house, Bella, and you are free to do whatever you wish in it."

  “Well … goodnight, Colin,” I say.

  “Nice day it was, Bella. Thank you.”

  I run down the stairs.

  -0-

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  So La Presbytère’s winter guest likes a woman to be intelligent.

  Jean-Louis used to say he liked his women to be intelligent at the workplace and stupid in bed.

  “What am I?” I asked him.

  “You are well balanced, but I would like you to be much, much more of a bad girl in bed.”

  It was a Saturday and I was spending the night at his place. He should have had the girls to stay but his wife had made a last minute decision to take them to her widowed mother’s place outside the town of Fontainebleau.

  “Give me some guidelines, Jean-Louis?” I requested.

  “I would, for example, like it very much if I were to find your undergarments lying all over the living room in the morning, because it would mean there was urgency in your desire.”

  “Who is conservative now?” I retorted. “Undergarments! I ask you!”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We were lying on his large bed, our naked bodies two small white boats in the dark blue sea formed by his fusion mattress, and I, shooting glances at Dali’s Sacrement of the Last Supper and thinking Jesus was staring at us with disapproval.

  “Undergarments!” I repeated.

  “Bof,” he said with a titter in his voice.

  I swung my legs off the bed and my sweat-streaked body followed.

  “This is called a panty, for chrissakes. And this, Jean-Louis, is a bra. B-r-a.”

  I had retrieved my panty and my bra, both of white lace, from the chair beside the bed where I had undressed earlier, and I stood beside the bed, holding up the two.

  I dropped both
onto the bed, but as quickly I grabbed both and ran from the bedroom.

  Downstairs in the living room I draped the bra over the backrest of Jean-Louis’ black Chesterfield sofa and the panty I put down on his scarlet-red dining table. I placed his salt container in the crotch.

  Back in the bedroom Jean-Louis lay on his back, his head resting in his cupped hands.

  “What you’ve gone to do?” he asked.

  “For me to know and for you to find out,” I replied just as I used to do when, as children, Marius and I played our because-because game.

  “Oh hell, Bella,” he groaned.

  Slowly, he sat up, slipped from the bed, and naked, he walked from the room.

  Standing beside the bed, I did not take my eyes off his body for a moment.

  His legs were well-shaped, almost like those of a woman, and he had two dimples of Venus above the groove between his firm oblong buttocks. Fossae lumbales laterales… created by fibrous tissue between the posterior superior iliac spine and the skin … is genetic … considered a sign of beauty … Also from that anatomy text book from my first year at ‘uni’. His waist was slim, too slim perhaps for a man, although when he was dressed this was not the impression I had. His back upright, smooth, but for a small beauty spot just below his right shoulder. “You must watch this and if it grows or changes colour consult a dermatologist,” I had told him in Geneva after our first night of sex. “I have a gorgeous doctor who will watch it for me,” he had replied.

  His neck was smooth. “How do you manage to shave at the back of your neck?” I had asked him in Geneva. “Don’t be silly,” he had replied.

  His brown hair, cut short, was tousled from lying down and glistened with perspiration; his ears, small and a little protruding. My mother had once told me having such ears was a sign of kindness. “I hope he will be kind too, Bella. Kind to you,” she had said.

  I lay down on the bed and soon I heard Jean-Louis’ bare footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Damn!” I heard him say.

  He must have knocked a toe.

  Good grief. He was wearing my bra and panty.

  “How do I look, Bella?” he asked.

  He looked awful; I told him. He had pushed an apple into each bra cup and in his crotch, his manhood, half erect, protruded from the panty.

  “I did not take you for someone suffering from eonism,” I said.

  He walked over to the bed; voluptuously he swayed his hips. At the bed, he struck a seductive pose, one foot on the bed and both hands on his hips.

  “What’s that? Eonism?” he asked.

  “The male perversion to dress as a woman.”

  “How disgusting!”

  Immediately, he stepped out of the panty and ripped off the bra, the two apples falling to the floor.

  I patted the bed.

  “Lie down. And what was that in my panty?”

  “What should be in there now again.”

  He fell down beside me.

  “The Court is in session,” he said.

  The Court is in session!

  Oh, how those words gave me a thrill.

  “Come here, Bella,” he said.

  He fell on to me, his face, always so beautiful, but at that moment distorted with concentration, right above mine. His manhood was rigid and straight and in its fullness it was searching for the sanctuary it wanted from me.

  “Jean-Louis, I’m ready, darling,” I whispered.

  We climaxed together.

  Later, I watched Jean-Louis walk to the bathroom. I heard water running: he was having a shower. I pulled the top sheet over my naked body, wet with perspiration. The Eiffel Tower, dark and silent, stood behind the large window which faced the bed.

  As I was working the late afternoon shift at Chartreux Hospital, I allowed myself to fall asleep.

  When I woke, there was no sign of Jean-Louis, but I saw a note stuck to the mirror above the basin in the bathroom.

  Bella, darling, here you are, do please take a taxi home. Kisses and love from your J-L.

  From the note protruded a 200 franc note.

  It was nine in the morning.

  I got back into the famous ‘undergarments’ which I picked up from the floor in front of the bed where Jean-Louis had dropped them.

  I telephoned the Taxi Bleu company.

  -0-

  But I must stop remembering.

  Who said God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December?

  Whoever it was, I can tell this person, that I always, even in December, have an abundance of roses.

  -0-

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Each evening over dinner Colin tells me whether he will be in for dinner the next evening.

  “Tomorrow evening I won’t be here for dinner, Bella,” he said.

  He said this last night.

  He wanted to know how one reached Paris from here. I told him he will have to get a local train at Avranches to Rennes and there he will have to get a train to Paris.

  “It will take about an hour from Avranches to Rennes and about two hours from there to Paris.”

  He did not say whether he wanted to know because he was planning to go to Paris and I did not ask. My parents never questioned guests and neither do I.

  “Also don’t do breakfast for me, Bella,” he added.

  This morning, my room still dark, I heard him move about the house and I heard the click of the front door closing. I did not hear the vroom of his motorcycle’s engine springing to life, but later I saw the bike was gone. He must have pushed it to the road so as not to wake me.

  So, Le Presbytère’s guest was going to spend a day in Paris. Often guests do. “Being so close to Paris we might as well go there,” is what they always say.

  Colin is probably meeting up with friends in Paris. Or a friend. And why not a lady friend? He is attractive. He is not a poor man. So?

  -0-

  Overhead the clouds are breaking up.

  It had rained during the night, and the smell of sodden earth drifts through the open window to my left. I have decided to spend the day, or part of the day, on the mount, and here I am on this road I know so well. I slip a tape into the Merc’s recorder and Lionel Richie’s voice fills the silence. Say you, say me; say it for always… That’s the way it should be… Say you, say me; say it together… Naturally…

  Despite that I have not inherited my father’s good voice, I sing along at full voice.

  I had a dream I had an awesome dream… People in the park playing games in the dark… And what they played was a masquerade… And from behind the walls of doubt a voice was crying out…

  One thing about being alone in a car, of being alone, is one can sing as loudly as one wants. One can also scream and shout and cry as loudly as one wants.

  A mounted gray mare trots across the pasture land on my right, the lean frame of its horseman moving rhythmically up and down. I wave to the horseman; it is a refined ‘royal’ wave, its politeness making it a waste of time. I do not expect him to return my wave, but he does with his left hand, holding the reins with his right hand only, his heels pushed down into the stirrups.

  As we go down life’s lonesome highway … Seems the hardest thing to do is to find a friend or two…A helping hand – Some one who understands … That when you feel you’ve lost your way… You’ve got some one there to say “I’ll show you.”…

  Now, the mare is cantering. A narrow, shallow stream, blue because of the distance, is ahead. The horseman, sitting up and leaning forward, is one with the mare. Before reaching the stream, the mare quickens her pace with three short strides. Next, mare and man are airborne, flying like some giant prehistoric bird. Once, on the other side of the stream, the horseman starts to pull back gently on the reins.

  I step on the Merc’s accelerator.

  Lionel Ritchie is still singing. Say you, say me; say it for always…That’s the way it should be… Say you, say me; say it together…Naturally…

  The horsem
an, again holding the reins with just one hand, waves goodbye to me with the other.

  -0-

  I pull up close to the mount’s Porte du Roi, the main entrance.

  There are few cars parked here on the causeway - the digue - in front of the fortified gateway. The night’s rain has probably persuaded those who were going to come here to Saint Michael’s Mount today that the mount will be wet and windy.

  One side of the gateway is ajar as it always is when the mount is open to visitors and behind it I can see Grande Rue. Several tourists, overdressed in anoraks, woollen bonnets, scarves and boots, are studying menus already on display outside restaurants, while others are choosing postcards from stands outside souvenir shops.

  A young monk, dressed in the long, loose, black tunic and the black apron of the Benedictines, his feet in brown open-toe sandals, comes walking towards me. I know his face, but not his name. He walks past me, his open-toed, open-heeled, sandaled feet wet, obviously from having stepped into puddles of rain water. He passed without having acknowledged the smile I offered him. I look back and see him walk fast along the causeway: I can see a wicker basket hangs from around the back of his neck. He must be on his way to a shop on the mainland and will be returning with the basket filled with provisions.

  Gertrude’s mother, Mrs Yvette, no longer with us, used to cook for the monks and Gertrude tells a story of what a healthy appetite they have. Each Easter, the forty days of fasting of Lent over, her mother had to cook them her special of bread-crumbed monkfish baked in the monk’s outdoor wood-fired clay and stone oven. A monk always accompanied her to the fishmonger in the nearby town of Saint-Malo to ensure the specimens she was going to buy had large and strong teeth: the monks made necklaces with the teeth for the souvenir shops to sell. It was before I had come to settle here, so I can only repeat what Gertrude tells us, and she says the tourists loved those necklaces. Today, Mrs Yvette in her grave, the monks cook their own meals so those monkfish necklaces are no longer to be found here on the mount.