The House at Belle Fontaine
Page 9
In the afternoon, Michel leaves to play in his band in Montpellier, and Nina drives Sophie to a ballet lesson. Anne stays with Paul, who has turned on an old black-and-white television set to watch cartoons. The picture has a grainy quality she remembers from her own childhood.
When Anne wakes up it takes her a few seconds to remember where she is. “Paul?” she asks.
“He’s here, he’s fine.” Nina says, standing in the doorway. “You fell asleep.”
Apparently, while she was sleeping, Paul went outside to pile stones on the side of the road. “I can’t believe I did that,” Anne says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nina tells her. “As the youngest, Paul has a highly developed sense of self-preservation, and there’s never much traffic on our street. Look how perfectly this fits me,” she says, changing the subject and twirling around in Anne’s suede jacket. Then, remembering dinner, Nina says, “You must be starving, Anne. And I told you, didn’t I, that Michel is a vegetarian?”
“Do you have anything to drink?” Anne asks Nina, who is boiling water for spaghetti. “Wine?”
“Wine? Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll ask Michel to get some tomorrow.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just thought if you did . . . Here,” Anne also says, “let me do something useful.”
As Anne is setting the table she can hear Nina humming in the kitchen. Nina had a beautiful singing voice. When she sang, everyone said, Nina was transformed. She became powerful, important.
Although fairly sure of the answer, Anne calls out to Nina in the next room, “Are you still singing?”
In bed, that night, underneath the flimsy Babar quilt, Anne keeps all her clothes on—except for her shoes—the room is so damp and cold. Disoriented and uncomfortable, she does not sleep much. She hears Michel come up the stairs—by the luminous hands on her watch, which she has not bothered to change, it is ten o’clock in the evening on the East Coast of the United States—and for a moment she confuses him with George, about whom she has been dreaming. (In the dream, she is in a crowded room, at a party perhaps, where George, who does not smoke, is smoking and offering everyone at the party a cigarette—a special blend, George keeps repeating in a boastful and unfamiliar way.) Later, at seven and while it is still dark, she hears Nina get the children ready for school. Anne waits until she hears Nina drive off, then she gets up and dresses—she merely puts on another sweater and brushes her hair. On her way downstairs, she stops off at the bathroom. Wearing the red checked shirt, Michel is sitting on the toilet, reading a magazine.
“Oh!” Embarrassed, Anne quickly shuts the bathroom door.
Barely glancing up, Michel says, “Pas de problème.”
“How about a walk?” Nina suggests when she returns. “We can go up to the castle, but it’s a bit of a hike. I’ll take July—it will be good exercise for her.”
Rue du Bout-du-Monde—End-of-the-World Road, Nina translates for Anne. A steep and narrow road, and Anne is grateful that she has on her walking shoes. Even so, she slips on the loose stones and pebbles. On either side of her, the ground is covered with mostly impenetrable scrub and oak thickets.
“Michel took me up here when we first met. I didn’t notice how steep it was then,” Nina says with a little laugh. She has July on a leash and the dog is pulling her.
“Perfect if you’re a goat,” Anne says.
“Or a sheep. In summer, the place is filled with them. Each year the shepherds bring up their flocks. You should see all the lambs—” Nina stops. “But I’d rather hear about you, Anne.”
“The two girls are all right,” Anne begins in an expressionless voice. “They’re in school, they’re getting good grades, they’ve already decided on careers: Danielle wants to be a doctor, Joyce a lawyer.”
“And George? Is there someone else?”
Anne shakes her head. “Sometimes, I wish there was. There’s nothing I can really point my finger at. It’s just . . .” She hesitates. “It’s just so trivial and predictable. And I guess it always boils down to the same thing—sex, which in our case is nearly nonexistent. I know, I know, I am being incredibly spoiled, but I want more and I want it to be different.”
“Different is not necessarily better,” Nina says.
They walk on in silence—except for Nina occasionally telling July to stop or to heel—until they reach the top of the ridge and the castle. All that remains of it is the curtain wall and the sixty-foot-high keep faced with huge limestone blocks, but it is the view that draws them. The sheer drop from the cliff and the gorge hundreds of feet below.
“So what happened to Guilhem?” Anne asks.
“After his wife died, Guilhem gave up all his worldly possessions and became a monk. He spent the rest of his life in a cell, fasting, praying—” Far down in the village, a church bell begins to ring the hour—eleven o’clock. “And according to the legend,” Nina continues, “when Guilhem died, all the church bells began to ring at once of their own accord without anyone pulling on the ropes.”
Again, that night, Michel leaves to play in the band, but at dinner Nina holds up a bottle of wine. She pours Anne a glass, then herself a glass as well. “I know it’s funny,” she says. “Most people, including my family, think that musicians drink, smoke and are completely dissipated, but Michel isn’t like that. And he’s a wonderful father.”
Anne takes a sip of wine. “So, you’re really happy, Nina?”
Nina shrugs. “Happy? Sure, I’m happy. I miss a lot of things. I wish Michel did not have to struggle so hard to get work. But I love him and I love the children.”
Except to say good morning and good-bye and making sure to knock before she uses the bathroom, Anne has barely spoken to Michel. “You don’t mind not being married?”
“I don’t think about it anymore. And, in a funny way, I like Eliane. Sophie and Paul like her, too.”
That night, Anne cannot go to sleep, but instead of tossing and turning under the flimsy Babar quilt, she turns on the light and reads in a guidebook how first Guilhem captured the city of Nîmes by hiding his soldiers in wine barrels, then how he lost the tip of his nose fighting off the pagans in Rome. Hours later, Anne wakes up to find the light on in her room and, after a moment of confusion, to the sounds of Michel and Nina making love. Couchons! Anne is reminded of the man who followed her in Paris—he was not bad-looking in a foreign sort of way. It would have been easy.
“What kind of music do you play?” Anne asks Michel in the morning. Nina is taking the children to school, and Michel is making coffee in the kitchen. “Rock?”
Michel nods. “And whatever people want to hear. Would you like some coffee, Anne?”
“I’d love to hear you play,” Anne goes on, handing Michel her cup. “Maybe, one of these nights I can go with Nina. My husband—you should meet him,” she hears herself say, “he’s a great music . . .” Anne’s voice trails off—how to explain the word fan?
When Nina gets back to the house, she has a headache, the start of migraine, she says.
“I hope it wasn’t the wine,” Anne says.
Nina shakes her head. “I’ll be fine later.” She smiles at Anne but her eyes look watery and unfocused. “I just need some sleep,” she says.
“Don’t worry about me, Nina. I’ll go for a walk,” Anne says. “Oh, can I get you something? Tea?” she adds too late—Nina is halfway up the stairs and does not hear her.
“You can walk to the Grotte de Clamouse,” Michel tells Anne after Nina has left.
“The grotte? Is it a cave?”
Michel nods. “It’s three kilometers from here. I can start you on your way, if you like. Show you a shortcut, so you won’t have to walk on the main road.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Anne answers. “I’ll go and put on my walking shoes.”
When Anne comes back, Michel,
too, has changed. He is wearing a different shirt, a clean white cotton one.
“Some of the caves are so far underground they have never seen the light of day, yet bunches of green ferns grow inside them,” Michel tells Anne as they set off through the village. Michel walks fast and Anne has to nearly run to keep up with him. “You can see beautiful crystals in the shape of flowers,” he says. “Bouquets of flowers made from pure white aragonite.”
“Aragoneat?” Anne repeats after him, mimicking his pronunciation. She feels stupid. She knows nothing about caves or crystals.
“My father often worked as a guide, he took tourists to visit the caves. He also had the good fortune to go on several exploratory expeditions with Martel.” When Anne does not answer, Michel continues, “Édouard-Alfred Martel, the famous how do you say, spéléogiste.”
“Ah, yes. Spéléogiste.” Anne feels as if she was having a conversation with someone from another planet; uncharacteristically, she is tempted to laugh. She bends her head so that Michel cannot see her while she tries to compose her face. After a while, so as to say something, she asks, “Your father is from this region? This région?” Anne repeats it the French way.
They have reached the outskirts of the village and instead of answering her, Michel points out a path that runs parallel to the main road. “One of the oldest transhumance in the Cévennes begins right here. When I was a boy I went every summer with my father when he took up the ships.”
Again, Anne is tempted to laugh.
“Yes. Sheep, Nina told me how—” she starts to say when, without warning, Michel takes her in his arms and tries to kiss her on the mouth. Letting out a cry of surprise, Anne shakes herself free of him.
Anne has tied a scarf around her head. Now the ends of the scarf whip around and hit her face, startling her. The day, which started out mild, has turned chilly, and the wind has picked up. Fast-moving clouds hide the sun; any moment it looks as if it might rain. No one else is on the path, which, instead of running parallel to the road, winds more and more steeply up the hillside, who knows to where? And who would find her if she twists an ankle or breaks a leg? There are no signs or markers, and Anne is angry with herself for taking Michel’s advice and not walking on the road instead. Also, she is angry at Michel. Fool, she thinks, not sure whom she means. Then she stops so abruptly she almost loses her balance. She was about to step on something that she does not immediately identify—a mass of dirty white wool.
A year to the day after Anne leaves St. Guilhem-le-Désert, Nina dies of a brain tumor—the cause of the headaches, Anne supposes. Michel telephones at two o’clock one morning—eight o’clock in St. Guilhem-le-Désert—to let her know, and it takes Anne, who is in bed asleep next to George, a while to understand who Michel is and what he is telling her. “What time is it there?” she asks foolishly, at the same time that, in the background, she hears the bells begin to ring. The St. Guilhem-le-Désert church bells. Next, still only half awake, Anne asks Michel if there is anything she can do for him or the children. “I am going to go back and live with my wife, Eliane,” Michel says. “Perhaps this time we can work it out.”
The dead sheep was lying right across her path. Underneath the matted wool, Anne could see a row of startlingly white rib bones, and underneath the rib bones, the ground. The sheep must have been dead for quite some time. Anne had to step over the dead sheep and continue on the path or else go back down.
My Music
The only song my father, who could not sing, sang was one he learned while he was in the French Foreign Legion. He sang it with his fellow legionnaires as he marched in North Africa during World War II. The brisk pace and repetitive lyrics roused his spirits and helped him endure the oppressive heat of the Sahara Desert.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon dormir
Later, my father claimed that his time in the Foreign Legion was one of the happiest in his life. He reminisced about drinking the cheap yet good Algerian wine and his friendship with Josephine Baker—a lifelong one, as it turned out—whose lover was also a legionnaire. Later, too, when he tried to sing “Auprès de Ma Blonde” to my mother, who was in fact blonde and beautiful, she did not pay the song or my father much attention.
Briefly, when I was seven years old and living in Paris—a gray Paris, suffering the deprivations and food shortages that resulted from the war—twice a week I had piano lessons. I don’t remember very much about those lessons except that I learned how to play the scales and read a little music because soon, my teacher, whose name I long ago forgot, in her blunt French way told my parents that they were wasting their money and, she, her time. Instead, the person I remember best from that period was the one-armed elevator man at the Hotel Raphaël, where my parents and I were staying temporarily, whom my parents had engaged to walk me to school every morning. Maurice was a thin, dignified, gentle man who had lost an arm in the First World War and who always wore his high-collared, gold trimmed, hotel uniform, the empty sleeve neatly tucked inside the pocket. As we walked together down avenue Kléber, where the hotel was situated, past the Trocadero and up avenue Georges Mandel, where my school, Les Abeilles, was located—I holding his one hand—Maurice taught me to sing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine.
A few years later, when I was living in America, and during my school holidays, I was sent to visit my stern German-born grandmother. Determined to improve me, she set herself the thankless task of giving me a classical music education. For an hour every afternoon, she had me sit in the modest living room of her Cayuga Heights apartment in Ithaca, New York—in Bonn, where she was from, her house had been destroyed by Allied bombing—and listen to the local classical radio station. An hour that dragged into an eternity; outside the sun was shining and I could hear the boys in the fraternity house across the street getting ready for another party. But one afternoon turned out to be different. I was listening to Beethoven’s Fidelio (my grandmother had outlined the plot and told me to listen for the sound of trumpets, which would signal Fidelio’s release from prison) and, to this day, I can recall the feeling of accomplishment and of triumph—especially of triumph—when I heard those trumpets.
In college, where I was delinquent in all my studies, I spent my time either in Boston taking ballet lessons —I had a sudden and unjustified desire to become a ballerina—or lying on my unmade bed, listening to records. I loved Adolphe Adam’s Giselle, for obvious reasons; Renata Tebaldi singing arias brought hot passionate tears to my eyes and furious banging at my door: “Turn the damn music down!”; Elaine Stritch singing “The Saga of Jenny” was another favorite, as was the English musical Salad Days; and I especially cherished a scratched recording of Noël Coward’s reedy voice singing “Someday I’ll Find You.”
While he was courting me, my former husband, who prided himself on his voice, which indeed was good, used to sing a song about how anything could happen on a “lazy, dazy, golden” afternoon. I had never heard the song before nor have I since, but for a short while then I fancied I would be the one to fill the nebulous and abstract role of anything, which in my mind translated itself into love, happiness and a marriage, all of which it did for a bit. For a bit, too, we lived in a large, elegant house in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had once belonged to my husband’s aunt. Along with the house, we had inherited her piano, a Bechstein. His aunt, a glamorous and charming woman, had been married to a Russian prince—one of the princes who unsuccessfully tried to kill Rasputin—and had lived in Paris. Among her many acquaintances—Colette, Coco Chanel, other exiled Russian princes—was Arthur Rubinstein, who, according to one of her stories, at lunch one day, announced that he was going to a Bechstein auction to buy a piano. “Of course, Arthur dear, you must buy yourself the very best piano,” said
the aunt, “but will you buy me the second best?” A few days later, a piano was delivered to the aunt’s avenue Foch apartment—it was hauled up through the window—and a few weeks later, Arthur Rubinstein himself came to lunch again. After lunch, the aunt asked him to play something on her new Bechstein and Arthur Rubinstein sat at the piano and began to play a Bach prelude but, after only a few minutes, he banged down on the keys and abruptly stopped. “Arthur, Arthur, what is wrong?” cried the aunt and Arthur Rubinstein answered, “I bought you the very best piano.” Once a year, at great expense, I hired a piano tuner who came all the way down from Richmond to tune the “best” Bechstein. No one, except for an occasional guest, ever played the piano and, to compensate, the piano tuner suggested that I run my thumb down all the keys once a day. I tried to do this a few times but the ivory keys hurt my thumb and mostly I was too busy raising three small children.
I used to joke—only it was partly true—that if I could have only one wish, I would wish that I could sing. To this day, I would wish the same thing. What a pleasure and what a gift, I think, it must be to open one’s mouth and have a beautiful song effortlessly come out. Unfortunately, I cannot carry a tune. Nevertheless, when my children were small, to put them to sleep, I sang to them in French:
Il était un petit navire,
Qui n’avait ja-ja jamais navigué,
or my favorite, the less soothing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,
Ne sait quand reviendra,
Ne sait quand reviendra.