The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘At midnight Matilde came out and we both looked at the street for a moment. It was icy cold and I was shivering. She put an arm round me and said in English “Gérard loves you, so you and I must not be strangers.” Then she kissed my mouth. I remember thinking, in many ways she is like a man, with her dark skin and her strength, and I’m glad there is this friendship between us; it’s part of all I wonder at.

  ‘It was very difficult to find a job. Unemployment was high. You saw despair in the cafés – the young men who had fought in the war had been promised a better world to come home to and many of them had come home to nothing, to a job here and there, to vagrant lives. The gulf that separated these people from the rich was enormous. But at that time, the rich kept mainly to the other side of the river, the writers and painters were a smelly lot; they didn’t often come near us. But if you crossed the Pont de la Concorde you saw them. They began at the Place de la Concorde outside the Crillon Hotel and the Champs Elysées was their bridleway. In spring and summer they paraded there. We used to walk past Fouquet’s and hear their clattering; we imagined huge stone bowls of foie gras, sole cooked in champagne, and I’d remember Chadwick’s passion for restaurants: “the moment of sheer delight, Erica, when a waiter unfurls your clean linen napkin!” I tried to translate this saying of Chadwick’s for Gérard: “le moment exquise, Erica, lorsqu’ un garçon se deroule ta serviette de toile frais!” and he laughed until he had hiccups. He made me repeat the saying countless times and he would always double up with giggles! Then sometimes he’d say, quite seriously yet with an edge of sadness: “When the revolution comes there will be nothing more like that.”

  ‘In the end I found the very job that I was supposed to have had in London: I went to work in a large patisserie on the Boulevard St Germain run by a Corsican called Mr Saladino. Being a kind of immigrant, he wasn’t prejudiced against foreigners, in fact he thought it was rather a snappy idea, having an English girl to serve tea in his shop. He put up a sign saying “English Spoken” to attract American and English tourists and quite a few of these came and the English people would tell me how lucky I was to have missed the General Strike and who did coalminers think they were anyway? I hated this kind of talk. I asked Mr Saladino to take his “English Spoken” sign down, but he refused. He earned quite a bit from the tourists.

  ‘Now and again Gérard would come to the patisserie and sit in a corner waiting for me until I was free. I gave him brioches and even cakes. I think Mr Saladino knew but the only thing which fascinated Saladino apart from money and confectionery was love. He said lovers were more beautiful than mille feuilles, more complex and wonderful than profiteroles! Whenever he saw Gérard come in, he would run to shake his hand. Yet he never asked his name: he always called him “Monsieur le peintre”.

  ‘I worked from half past eight in the morning till six or seven. In the winter I walked to work in the dark and walked home in the dark, but I don’t think I minded. To be earning money, not just spending Chadwick’s, made me feel my independence with a poignancy I’ve never forgotten.

  ‘But I ought to try to tell you about Gérard’s work. He was on the edge, I suppose of the surrealist movement, yet never part of its inner circle. Breton was interested in him for a while and we used to spend some evenings up in Montmartre at the Café Cyrano. Politically, his heart was with the surrealists: to liberate the irrational in man is to touch man with a new notion of himself and of what is possible in society. He wanted change. His nightmares were almost all of the fat man, the military man, all draped about with medals. The fat man had a tambourine and the little bells on the tambourine made the small tinkling noise of his existence. With the tambourine he announced “I am in command!” And he would bang the stretched skin of the tambourine to remind the world of all the artisans and labourers, all the growers of lavender and the clog-makers and the miners of salt he has pushed before him to the front line – the front line of war and the front line of poverty and ignorance. And Gérard’s nightmare of the fat man informed a great deal of his work. Like Breton and his lot, he did believe, to a certain extent, in the omnipotence of dreams and he wanted to shock, not to please; he tried to give his work power, not beauty.

  ‘I think in 1924 he had been closer to Breton than he was when I arrived in 1926. He couldn’t, you see, accept the idea of automatism. He thought it was idiotic to let his hand idle about on a canvas because he could always see his paintings and his sculptures as things complete before he started them. To begin a piece of work was to see it already done. It hardly ever changed or became in its execution so that the actual execution was sometimes quite tedious; it was in the vision of the work that his excitement happened. So you see he couldn’t ride along hand in hand with the believers in automatism. He didn’t understand how form can sometimes creep out of apparent chaos, out of sand or a blood splodge or pieces of paper on the floor. He did a lot of experimenting with textures though. In one of his pictures he cut off his pubic hair and stuck it on the head of his fat man which by that time had become a gargantuan head with the dewlaps of a cow. He painted over the pubic hair with scarlet and let the paint dribble down into the mouth. It looked very frightening – as if the brains of the fat man were bursting out and slithering down his face.

  ‘I expect you’ve read bits about Gérard in those heavy books they write, those shiny, serious ones, about the art of this or that time. The thing is there’s never a sparkle of humour in any of those kind of books. They treat themselves with such reverence! And this reverence was the nub of all that Gérard couldn’t stand. Even the reverence of the Mass disgusted him; he could see no light in it. At one time, he did a series of paintings of all the pieces of ourselves we’ve turned into stone statues so that we can bow down in front of them. He did a very fine sculpture of a person’s intestines crammed with bits of strawberry flan and the bones of tiny birds. He believed we’d even turned sex into a ritual; sex and marriage he believed we’d turned to ashes. For one of his pictures he made hundreds of journeys to the Rue Blomet to collect the ashes and clinker from André Masson’s stove. Then he invented these two heads, one in a bride veil, one in a large top hat almost covering his eyes. Their bodies are the bodies of innocents yet have the quality of stone. The faces have genitals for nose and mouth, yet the faces are full of agony, terribly sad. And Gérard put the ash everywhere, in their mouths and ears, on the top hat and the veil. So they’re trapped in three ways: by their stone bodies, by the suffocating ash, by their inability to communicate except by the tiny movements they can make with their sex. I used to say to Gérard “They’re the saddest people in the world.” And I think they were so sad because in spite of Gérard’s rearrangement of their bodies, they looked pathetically alive. He called the painting: “Monsieur et Madame Dupont” but I always thought of them as “The Smiths” and they’re still struggling of course, poor souls, still blackened by the ash from André Masson’s stove, but in New York now and you could go and have a look at them one day, Ralph. You could tell them, “Erica sends a petit bonjour.”

  ‘I think it was about the time that Gérard made “The Smiths” that I sat down in my attic one evening and finished The Angler. It wasn’t a novel, nor was it a short story, it was something in between and I called it An Allegory. Gérard read it, but he couldn’t understand a lot of the English words so he found it very mysterious and odd. It was rather odd. Patterson Tree rejected it. They said they didn’t know what to do with it because it was much too short for a book. I thought of sending it to Sam, but I didn’t. Sam had written me two very nasty letters saying the devil in him was going to burn my cupboard and that his life had gone brown like a leaf.

  ‘In the end, I showed it to Valéry Clément who was very happy at that time with a friend of Matilde’s, a theatre designer called Andreas who came from Barcelona. He liked the story so much that he took it straight round to Maison Cambier, but they wouldn’t publish it. They said, “make it twice as long and then we’ll take it.” But I c
ouldn’t do this. To finish it, just as it was, had been a labour. It was as if I’d left the idea behind in England and now it was quite irrelevant; it said nothing at all. So I shut it away. I could have tried to publish it – perhaps in two or three parts – in Littérature, but I didn’t. I made it my excuse for doing nothing more for three years. I told Gérard that, in discovering happiness, I had simply lost that part of myself which wanted to create books. I thought at that time that it was gone for ever and that my life with Gérard would be my own private work of art.’

  She had rummaged about in the cupboard under the clothes and found two thin exercise books. In these were the ‘diary’ she had kept of her life in the years 1927–1936. They were sporadic jottings. Weeks passed and she was silent, then some event or thought would be described in meticulous detail. The handwriting, often done in pencil, was bold and fluent. Certain pages were smudged, some stuck together. The cahiers themselves had life.

  Travelling inspired her to write. The first entry, dated July 30th 1927, described her last day at Mr Saladino’s patisserie before leaving for Aix with Gérard, Matilde and Fernandez:

  ‘I am voracious for the sight of Provence, waking through its haze. No bicycles this year. We’ll go on foot or by bus and Fernandez is bringing a tent the size of a dog kennel. Gérard and I have no tent, but to lie out in the darkness is to have dreams of flying.

  Mr Saladino spent the afternoon retouching his new English Spoken sign; this in spite of the fact that English will not be spoken in his patisserie for more than two weeks. I reminded him of this and he snapped: “I speak it myself! Tea, sugar, hot water, milk. Excuse me. Thank you very much. Tip not included.”

  I am amazed to have stayed with Saladino so long. I often wonder how far I walk each day, back and forward from the counter to the tables. I think it’s several miles. And hardly a day differs from the next: the same impatience, the same puffs of conversation from the well-dressed women I serve. The money I earn keeps me here and I have grown fond of Saladino who is so like the Fat Man who stalks Gérard’s mind that I sometimes think, he is the model, the archetype. Yet he’s not idle and his gourmandizing at least has no ceremony round it. Nobody unfurls a linen napkin for Saladino unless, in their short evenings, it’s Thérèse, wife and mother he calls her (“Take your fat boy in your thin arms, mother, mother dear and make him wholesome!”) when they sit down to their soup and Saladino sighs at the brevity of each night’s sleep, at the paucity of each sleep’s dreaming. And is it in the night that he beats her – for her refusal of him, his great belly smelling of sugar and flour – or in the morning when he wakes at four to start work and she lies there, worn out by this night of his, his trumpeting release of himself, his snout buried in the pillow in blissful oblivion?

  Then the mistress who comes, in her alligator shoes with an eye of the salamander. Orders a cup of tea, unseen by Thérèse, washing linen upstairs, scraping turnips with her head in a bandage. “Celestine!” he wails with joy, “angel of Monday afternoons, angel of every second Thursday! Celestine!” I bring her a japonais cake today and one of the soft paper napkins we offer with the cakes.

  Her lipstick is glossy and thick – “the better to kiss you with, my little Saladino, the better to implant the red of my heart on your huge thighs.” She is thin, like Thérèse. The fashionable call it slim. They walk without bandages round their heads.

  But at six, when I should have been leaving to rush home to make all secure in my attic before departure Mr Saladino puts up his new English Spoken sign and says to me in abject misery, “nothing to do with my time off any more. Might as well study English in my time off – excuse me, not today thank you very much, milk, sugar, cakes, Buckingham Palace, would you prefer cream” – might just as well buy an English book and try to study it because Celestine is going to Evian les Bains for two months and you, even you, Erica, are leaving me.”

  Left at six thirty.’

  On August 10th, an entry recorded a day of extraordinary weather, a day of discovery:

  ‘Woke up in a room. After our nights on hard ground, the chewed old mattress swallowed us. We felt a kind of seasickness. The curtains kept out the sunlight, however, and we didn’t wake till eight. No sooner awake than Gérard tells me he has dreamed yet again of hot chestnuts and cream. I promise him we will go in search of a chestnut tree, but I fear it’s too early for the fruit.

  We’re at Thoziers, a village quite high in the Cevennes. It was raining when we arrived, very worn out, and we were grateful for this room which is above a café painted brown inside and out. Matilde and Fernandez got a barn full of fresh hay. They came to breakfast (in our café) smelling of the hay. They look brown and healthy but Matilde often complains about the cold in the early mornings. I never feel the cold, nor does Gérard or Fernandez. Fernandez now wraps Matilde in a big shapeless cardigan he bought at the market in Aries and we all hope she isn’t ill.

  We pack up and set off in search of chestnut trees, Gérard and I alone for a few days, while Matilde and Fernandez are taking buses to Nîmes. Our ability to lose ourselves is directly connected to Gérard’s longing to stray from the track. We bound like ungainly mountain animals up cols and escarpments. Ravines appear. We jump and slip. We save our lives holding little tufts of brush.

  We have lunch on a hillock and beneath us is pine and scrub. The air smells of thyme. No chestnut trees. None discernable. We eat stale rolls and a strong goat cheese, then the watermelon Gérard had carried for us all morning. Then we look for some shade, to sleep. I begin to imagine orchards and soft grass but up here all is white and hard and full of thorns. We climb lower, where the pines are more dense. There is shade and a flat basin of scrub where we lie and listen to the crickets.

  Sleep doesn’t come. Lust travels from our early morning seaside bed and we lose ourselves. For a second I see us as two snakes tangling in the heat! Our backs are brightly coloured, our tongues are silver. And then from my snake’s body, from my eye near the dry grass I see the two leg bones of a man sticking out from a clump of gorse and I hold my breath. I stare and stare. Gérard’s heavy breaths fan my hair. Then he falls on to me and I gently turn his head, very slowly turn it towards these two white bones I can see. I want to shut my eyes and listen to his heartbeat. I imagine his body with no heartbeat in it and I want to wail, “those are not his dead bones, not his!”

  Even in the shade, the heat is stifling. We are damp and exhausted, on the skittering edge of fear. We can move only slowly. We stand up naked and walk forward till we are above the gorse bush. Below us is the dead man, not a scrap of flesh on him, bones dried by countless summers and camouflaged on the white rocks. Only his feet are missing. His feet are missing!

  Yet we’re no longer afraid. We pull him out and all his frame is light. When we pull the skull stays behind, half embedded in the shallow soil. Now he has no feet and no head, just a centre. We stare at his hands, the minute bones. Then we lift them and hold them. Gérard strokes his rib-cage, bone by bone, then his pelvis. I go and pick up his skull. It is split from between the eye sockets to the back of the neck.

  The sweat dries on us and we are cold. The sun goes and we see big silent clouds bringing rain. Colours go from our high landscape; as we dress I envy Matilde her heavy cardigan, Gérard’s mouth is stretched, white. “I want to take him,” he says, “I think this is a big discovery of the greatest importance.” But I confront the officialdom of death, the town hall at Thoziers? Name? Next of kin? Age? You must not steal bodies, I begin a protest but Gérard is tense, watching the approaching rain, measuring time for our descent. To where? There is no village in sight, and we can see for miles. I scan the trees for a bell tower, an old roof the colour of coral.

  “Take him where?” I say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where,” comes the answer, “as long as we get him to Paris.”

  The rain begins as we start our walk. I carry the empty rucksack and Gérard has the bundle of bones in his arms. I imagine our processi
on into a village, if we should ever find one, old woman in black staring as we go boldly to the one hotel or café: “a room for three, s’il vous plait.”

  But then Gérard finds an old sack. Earwigs cling to it and he shakes them off. He asks me to hold the sack wide and our white friend is pushed into the sack. We try to tie the neck of the sack with some grasses, but they snap and won’t hold, so we bunch the sacking together like that and we go on. We are drenched and tired but something in Gérard is on fire with excitement. “The miraculous”, he says several times “is everywhere.”

  At six we hear a bell chiming and we try to follow its direction. The sound is peaceful and seems to summon a gleam of warm sunlight from among angry clouds. And the clouds take off – west, north, south? I have long ago lost all knowledge of direction: all I know is that the sun’s gleam is hesitantly to our right and that the bell is ahead, in front of us. But as the clouds speed on, we can see that we’re walking more or less due south. At dusk we reach Thoziers les Colombes.’

  Intrigued by the story of the skeleton, Ralph searched in the first volume of the diaries for another entry which would tell him what became of it. But the next two entries were devoted to Erica and Gérard’s arrival at Nîmes (still carrying the sack?) where they found Matilde seriously ill with bronchitis. Fernandez literally carried her from their hotel room to the hospital and in bleak silence the three friends wandered about Nîmes, waiting each day to visit her, waiting for her recovery. In his desolation at her illness, Fernandez recounted miserably to Erica and Gérard how many times he had been unfaithful to her.