The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  Once across the border, we’re in a different world. At Cannobio Jean-Émile knows the senior customs officer and we pass without showing our passports. Jean-Émile’s driving style relaxes. At the lakeside at Brissago I look for the café where Catherine and the tenente americano had breakfast. There are four or five. We stop at Ascona, which is unchanged. What year was it? ’Sixty-five, ’sixty-six probably … After a frantic week I’d telephoned Zava to tell her that the deal was done and that never again in my life would I negotiate such a contract with the Swiss. They had insisted on providing for every eventuality, from the purchase of a vacuum cleaner to the rape of their grandmother. She listened to me without comment, but I know the silences of that admirable woman. ‘I didn’t doubt for a second that you would reach an agreement. Why don’t you come over here for a few days? Your godson’s asking for you. We’ll go to the Adirondacks and find some bears. At this time of year they’re starting to wake up.’ Me: ‘I’m not going anywhere. The Swiss have robbed me of the will to move.’ She: ‘In that case call Brustein; he told me about a marvellous hotel in the country near Ascona where everything’s black and white like your club on 37th Street.’ Shortly afterwards Brustein: ‘Go breathe the pure air of innocence at the Hotel Monte Verita. The owner’s a friend of mine, a collector of modern art. So nobody’s perfect. But you’ll see some interesting pictures that his customers walk past without noticing. He even has a Picasso in the lift.’ Like a good boy I do as I’m told. Since going on my own is out of the question I telephone Madame Claude, who gives me the address of a colleague in Zurich. The result: a girl with a figure like a hairpin. (The first one they suggested was a Rubens; I turned her down.) This one was neither blonde nor brunette. Before I spoke she asked, ‘Do you speak Cherman?’ Me: ‘Twenty words. Won’t that be enough for us?’ She: ‘Nein. So we speak English. I hate French, such a rough language. Not musical. Listen … in German …’ She lifted her little finger, as if drinking a cup of tea with the concierge. ‘Die Vögel zwitschern in dem Wald … in French: Les soisseaux kassouillent dans les pois. OK?’ I agreed straight away. The Monte Verita is definitely a hotel after my dear friend Brustein’s heart. In the lounge, where no one bothers to go, there are two Leonor Finis, a Magritte, a Balthus, some Kandinskys and a Dalí. The lift bears aloft, from ground floor to second floor and back down again, a Picasso, a simple etching, an artist’s proof, hurriedly signed. I have a week of perfect rest, rereading for the nth time André Suarès’s Le Voyage du condottière, and while the matchstick girl undressed, walking back and forth across the room, looking for coat hangers and opening drawers to put away her underwear, I realised he was talking about her, as if she was a Botticelli: ‘That long body, so elegant, so flimsy, so supple and so wiry, that reed of tender passion, stronger than an oak at resisting the tempests of love, that grace of a whole being, that womanly shape with the breasts of a young girl and the delicate hips of a cypress or a Ganymede, that deceptively skinny frame, as we say in Paris …’ She stuffed herself as I have never seen a woman stuff herself. And yet there wasn’t a fold of fat on her tummy or her thighs, her body was well muscled and she was full of life. Unfortunately she mangled her words in English as badly as in French and spent too long sitting on the toilet with the door open. I kept having to get up to close it. She tried to talk to me about her fiancé, who was able to finish his degree in medicine thanks to the little extras his bride-to-be was providing. She told me her name was Greta. Why not? They nearly all discard their real names, which they feel are too low-class, and bestow magical new names on themselves, borrowed from movie stars and princesses. After three days, tired of her conversation and of seeing her enthroned, I sent her back to Zurich with a generous present. As she left she said to me crossly, ‘You don’t like vimmen!’ Oh yes, I do. But only certain ones. ‘Pardon, Monsieur?’ Jean-Émile says. Now I’m talking out loud … ‘I said: I don’t intend to get out of the car. I just wanted to see the hotel from the outside. Let’s head for Lugano.’ What would be the point of going in? Everything is in our memory, and we need to let it tell us its lies. I shan’t confuse it by accusing it of misleading me. It has every right to do so. The better part of wisdom isn’t to go digging to find out whether your memories are illusions or not. This was Augusta on the phone a month ago, saying in a dying voice, ‘I’ve got flu; wait till I’m back on my feet again. Today you’d only see a ghost.’ Me: ‘I love ghosts.’ Her: ‘Ghosts hate living people. You wouldn’t recognise me.’ Me: ‘Yes I would, by your voice …’ Her: ‘I’m just a shadow of Augusta Mendosa.’ Me: ‘If you saw me, you’d hesitate: getting a paunch, ageing, bald, false teeth, doubled up with sciatica.’ Her: ‘Liar. Elizabeth saw you in New York a month ago. You’re younger than you were at twenty. Listen to me … I want to see you, but in a week or two. My head’s in a mess. Come on the train.’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I’ll hire a car and driver and I’ll be there.’ Her: ‘You have a chauffeur! Things must be going well. Getulio claims he often saw you riding round Paris on an old bicycle. Are you still broke these days?’ Me: ‘Did I look like such a big loser when you knew me?’ Her: ‘That’s what Getulio said.’ Me: ‘Why do you have a brother?’ Her: ‘Listen, this isn’t a good moment. I’ve got no voice left, I’m just a poor thing buried under my sheets.’ Me: ‘I love your voice so much, I could spend hours listening to you. You’ll see that when we meet face to face, we won’t have anything left to say to each other: I’ll read the paper and you’ll knit by the fireside.’ Her: ‘I don’t know how to knit.’ She hung up. The lovely mountains are still here, with their forests of firs all in perfectly straight lines, neat and tidy; there’s still snow on the summit of Monte Tamaro. The year I set up the Zurich office I used to go hiking at the weekend in the Engadin and Ticino and the Bernese Alps: cleated boots, knee-length breeches, a stick and a haversack with a snack. My mountaineering period. The need to suffer. It was all too easy for me. I met families dressed the way I was, we exchanged our Grüss Gott!s, them in single file: father, mother, pink-cheeked children. They offered me their water bottles. Everywhere there were freshly painted benches, taps of drinking water tightly turned off so as not to waste a drop, litter bins at every view that invited meditation. Sanitised mountains, like something from a Walt Disney movie. In Paris I’ll read Augusta what Chateaubriand writes about Ticino. He crossed it in haste, but he took it all in. He even believed the guide who told him that when the weather was fine you could see the Duomo in Milan from the top of Monte Salvatore. The last words of his lament come back to me: ‘… to die here? To make my end here? Is that not what I want, what I’m looking for? I have not the faintest idea.’ No one has the faintest idea, even those who aren’t particularly clever. Chateaubriand hasn’t the slightest desire to die. All he wants to do is bring a tear to his reader’s eye, a ‘No, no, maestro, you mustn’t let yourself die here!’ It’s impossible not to like the old thespian, with his dramatic flourishes and those choked-back sobs that take such advantage of sensitive souls! Of course no one knows, no one chooses. Concannon’s reasoning was correct when he insisted that the sequence of historical events was down to chance. Why, in the last twenty years, have I met Getulio three times and Augusta never? She and I must have missed each other a hundred times. A matter of minutes, seconds even. Without a second thought I’ve delegated every decision about my personal life to fate, while my public life has been entirely bent to my will. Brustein calls me ‘the bulldozer’. Having two faces – one for business, the other for myself – is exhilarating, my most secret possession. I’ll say to Augusta, ‘You don’t know me. I have two faces. Which one would you like? Me, or my double?’ The girls I hire watch me, dumbstruck, leading a life in their company they did not expect: I read, I daydream, I listen to music, I take them to the theatre, to a concert, on boat trips. They get bored with me. I’m afraid that if they complain I become rather charmless, remind them I’m paying them. I have no scruples. They’re with me for the siesta, for the night. There have been perha
ps two at the most who have been offended. It’s unimportant. There was the one I took to Cannes, who I booked a separate room for and only saw at mealtimes. I wanted to test my resistance to the most easily satisfied temptations. As we went our separate ways – she called herself Griseldis! – she said how sad she had been to find out I was ‘impotent’. I didn’t disabuse her. What a face she’d have made if another girl of Madame’s had told her what we got up to. So that’s my secret! How could I have borne Augusta’s disappearance if my remorse at not having seen Maman had not obliterated it, a remorse I cauterise every day by realising her wish: that I’m moving in the world of ‘the great and the good’. The moment of truth is approaching. To say I know Lugano well is an exaggeration. All lakeside towns look alike. Riva Caccia. Griseldis – or was it Greta? – bought herself some costume jewellery in a hideous Italian jeweller’s here. The promise of a fine weekend has brought the tourists out. They’re eating outside on the terraces by the lake shore, surrounded by plastic bags, haversacks, children who won’t keep still. ‘Let’s stay away from the crowds, Jean-Émile. Take the road for Gandria.’ I have good memories of the village at the foot of Monte Brè, just below the place where we’ve arranged to meet. I’ve always liked it, a neat, clean perch between the road and the lake. They serve an excellent risotto at Il Giardino. Waiting time: twenty minutes. Not to worry: we’ll have a Campari. Better still, I’ll order a carafe of that light red wine they serve, Bardolino, that has an aftertaste of strawberries. ‘Not in glasses, please, signorina. We’ll drink it in your pretty blue-and-white earthenware cups.’ ‘You mean a boccalino, signore?’ Yes, a boccalino; I’d forgotten the name. She’s not in her folk costume, thank God. She speaks French, German, Italian, English. Jean-Émile has left his cap in the car. He looks as uncomfortable as a rooster in a pond. Perhaps I should have let him have lunch on his own. He feels so awkward he’s cutting his bread with a knife. I haven’t asked him if he thinks the risotto and wine are a good choice, but still, it’s hardly a punishment, is it? ‘Coffee?’ ‘Yes, no milk, thank you.’ I know the cows with their cowbells would be condemned to death from hypertrophy of the udders if the Swiss diet forbade cream, but too much of it makes you feel sick. ‘The telephone’s at the far end, on the left.’ Shall I call? Or shall I turn up without warning? If I tell her I’m quietly having my coffee on the terrace at Il Giardino twenty minutes away from her, she’ll be furious. I can hear her already. ‘Who are you with?’ Me: ‘With Jean-Émile.’ Her: ‘How can you travel with someone with a name like that?’ Me: ‘He’s the chauffeur.’ Her: ‘Too complicated, you can explain to me later. Come!’ In the end I don’t call her. The element of surprise. No time to touch up her make-up, to look her calmest. The biggest difficulty is finding a florist in a place where the gardens are bursting with flowers. The waitress asks the manageress and comes back with a red rose still in bud. Let’s take the thorns off. Silver paper from a chocolate vending machine. All that’s left for me to do is paint my face white and put on a squashed top hat like Marcel Marceau. ‘We’ll take the little road to Brè, Jean-Émile. The house we’re going to is called the Villa Celesta. Do you know it?’ The Bardolino has put some colour in his cheeks. He doesn’t dare say no and drives with one hand. It wouldn’t take much for him to start whistling. A pretty zigzag road. On the hairpin bends you stare almost vertically down at the green-bronze lake. What persuaded her to live here? As if she feared a tidal wave. A traffic jam. Inevitably! We hardly have room to squeeze past the badly parked cars. I’m sorry: it’s the cemetery; there’s a funeral. I have a horror of funerals. It’s enough knowing that I’ll have to go to mine. Jean-Émile is a driver of genius. Without him I’d have gone round in circles, not daring to ask for directions, but he finds the house at the first attempt. The gate wide open onto the uncared-for garden, a semi-wilderness that makes me wonder whether the frost-damaged palm tree, the puny lilac, the ampelopsis timidly climbing the front wall, the chronically wasted geraniums, aren’t all intentional, the expression of a sense of ruin and decadence that has always tempted her. We’re from another world, she used to say, and she wasn’t talking about class but about another era when she and her brother were clinging together like two castaways on a desert island after a storm. Jean-Émile brings his car to a gentle stop in front of the villa’s steps and, in grand style, doffs his cap to open my door, his heels together. Two blue sphinxes, their paint flaking, a discreet smile on their identical faces, with broken noses, guard the ten steps up to the villa. Must not take the steps two at a time, red rose in hand, calling out, ‘You see, I haven’t forgotten a thing,’ but calmly and unhurriedly, like a man whom nothing ruffles. The door is open, the shutters on the first floor closed, apart from one. If she’s at home, she must have heard the tyres crunch on the gravel in the garden. A dingy hall, painted chocolate-brown. On the coat hooks on the wall hang Getulio’s old Inverness cape and the cloche hat and coypu coat she wore on the Queen Mary’s promenade deck. Like a stage set. All it needs now is for her to appear in a sari. A door to the dining room, one to the sitting room, a small study. A glance is enough to know that Augusta hasn’t furnished this house: its rustic mountain style, combined with an excessive reliance on ebony veneer, speaks volumes. The staircase has a chocolate-coloured carpet: it’s obvious that this house, already gloomy in its design, has not gone out of its way to be cheerful. There are china nameplates on the door panels, Johanna, Margret, Leonor, Wilhelm, and at the far end, ‘Facilities’! The coyness of it! No sign of life in Johanna’s or Margret’s room. They’re empty, curtains drawn, beds made, but visibly no one lives there. Wilhelm’s door is locked. There’s only Leonor’s to go: my last chance. Or have I got the wrong house? Villa Celesta, Brè, Ticino, and we talked on the telephone. The silence is the worst part of it. The stairs didn’t even creak as I came upstairs; the doors open noiselessly. I would, just now, give anything to hear a phone ring or a shutter bang or the wind howl over the roof. If I don’t open the door named ‘Leonor’, if I leave now, I won’t have lost anything. But she’s there, I can hear her. Augusta, I’m opening the door …

  He was leaning his bicycle against the wall of the little garden when the front door opened.

  ‘Why don’t you bring it in and close the gate? I’m not saying people steal things around here, but don’t tempt fate.’

  She was exactly the way he had imagined her from Elizabeth’s descriptions: a stout, tall woman with a face that was astonishingly unlined for her age, her white hair parted in the middle and wound in plaits at the side of her head, pink cheeks, a deep voice with a touch of authoritative severity, dressed in grey and black with a white cotton openwork shawl around her shoulders. Arthur put his bicycle inside the garden, which was blooming with anemones and sweet peas. Above the door the clustered flowers of two wisterias intertwined. The single-storey house, in pale Touraine stone with a roof of Angers slate, its two front windows framed by climbing roses, had little to distinguish it from the other houses of Saint-Laurent-sur-Loire. As he had pedalled from Les Aubrais, where the train from Paris had stopped, he had glimpsed dozens of a similar modest charm, grouped protectively around their churches, all along the banks of a broad river that flows through the memory of France.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Only a glass of beer and a sandwich at Cléry.’

  ‘I thought so. I’ve made you a snack. Elizabeth’s at Blois. She’s educating herself. Yesterday it was Chenonceaux.’

  The snack was waiting under a glass dome in the kitchen. She laid a place with a blue plate, silver cutlery, and a carafe of golden white wine.

  ‘It’s a Roche-aux-Moines,’ she said. ‘Whenever my father had something on his mind he would open a bottle and sing softly to himself,

  ‘When Madame Joséphine

  Is despairing

  She drinks a little glass of it …

  After all, it’s her right

  To be tight …’

  The light voice was a little reedy for h
er height and obvious strength. She poured herself a glass and swirled the wine before tasting it and showing her pleasure with a clicking of her tongue.

  ‘Madame Joséphine was the empress, obviously. She was easily consoled. I made the pâté myself. The bread’s from the village. We don’t ask the rest of the world for anything here.’

  ‘You’re very wise.’

  She took a bowl of strawberries and a pot of cream out of the refrigerator.

  ‘Strawberries from your labour / Cream from your neighbour … Everybody talks in verse here, ever since Ronsard.’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed being French so much,’ Arthur said.

  They went through to the sitting room, a grand description for a room cluttered with a large sofa and two deep armchairs. There was a loom with a piece of tapestry in progress, and photos covered one wall, photos of Elizabeth at every age and in many different roles (except, as may be imagined, that of the psychopath cured by her psychiatrist. Did Madeleine know about that episode in the life of ‘her’ child?).

  ‘Do you want to rest? Your legs must be tired after those thirty kilometres from Orléans.’

  ‘I’ve never felt better.’

  She sat in front of her loom, disentangled a ball of wool, and put her glasses on.

  ‘It seems I’m starting to get cataracts. Elizabeth wants me to have an operation in America. Honestly … as if we didn’t have just as good doctors in France. Are you looking at the photos? That’s her whole life … well, what she wants me to know of it. I’ve got albums too, if you’re interested. As she hardly ever comes more than once or twice a year, at least I have them to look at.’

  There was Elizabeth in a short smocked dress riding a sheep on wheels between her father and mother, on a lawn in front of a grandly colonnaded house. The following year the parents had disappeared and the child held Madeleine’s hand, then a chubby girl who was clearly dressed in hand-me-downs from Madame’s wardrobe, with a feathered felt hat pulled down over one eye.