After each of their fights Antonio would threaten to leave her.
She wanted the baby to be legitimate, even if they did not stay married. She wanted the baby to bear Antonio’s name. Otherwise the humiliation, the hostility of the rest of the world, its contempt, would be unbearable.
They walked past small open air markets, past the ancient Catholic church she loved with its beautifully carved Virgin in a darkened niche that smelled of incense, where the stained glass gleamed in soft hues. They passed the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter. It was cloudy and cold. Over the yellow dress she wore a dark blue coat. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders. Her lips were chapped.
She glanced again at Antonio who was holding her by the arm. He was slender and had a long, pointed face with classical features. Chestnut hair fell loosely over his forehead. His face was weatherbeaten. His eyes were icy bluish-grey. He had the look of a mariner, she thought. In fact, he had grown up on the seacoast of southern Chile. He was so handsome, so deft and graceful in his movements, his gestures, his mentality. When he was not in one of his crazy, drunken, nasty moods, his intuition was keen.
What did he see in her? She felt clumsy, felt her face red and shiny with cold. Her eyebrows were too thick, her nose too short, her lips too thick. Beside him she felt coarse. Her hair and her clothes were never quite right. Everything came across to the world as a trifle askew, off-key. At times she wished she could jump out of her skin from the frustration of trying simply to exist as a human being. Antonio held the keys to secret doors. He alone could release her from this prison of her awkwardness, could strip away illusions that blinded her. He might even make her beautiful, make her someone that people could love.
They walked through the open door of the courtyard and across the cobblestones, their heels clattering. Philippe, Anna, and Elena were waiting for them, huddled together, laughing and talking. Elena, clad only in a sweater and skirt, was dancing up and down to keep warm.
“Jean!” Philippe yelled up at a window on the second floor across the way from Antonio’s apartment. Jean, the photographer, stuck his pale, round face out. “They’re here!”
“I’ll come in a minute,” Jean said.
Philippe was a poet who worked at night at Orly as a control operator. He had craggy features and was nearly bald although only in his late twenties. He wore a ski cap and heavy sweater. Anna, his wife, seemed always to be secretly smiling to herself in a pleasant, almost childlike way. She had soft straight brown hair and even features.
They climbed up the creaking wooden steps to Antonio’s apartment on the fourth floor. Just as they reached the door, Jean ran up and joined them. He clapped Antonio on the shoulder. “Eh bien, mon vieux, how long do you think it will last?”
Antonio glanced at his watch in the light of the hallway window. “It’s twelve-fifteen now,” he said. “Maybe until three o’clock.”
They all laughed.
The laughter seemed strained to Rosa. Jean did not seem to like her.
Weary, she sat down on the edge of the bed in the main room.
The apartment looked out over a courtyard where the old women in the building loved to gather and gossip. There were three rooms in the apartment. The front room was bare except for a sink and a long table. In this room Antonio planned to put the baby’s crib as well as a refrigerator.
In the crowded main room the peeling cream-colored paint had been scraped off and the cracks covered with splotches of putty. Antonio was preparing to paint. The walls had been this way for over a month. The main room contained a bed, the dining table, several chairs, a couch, a huge closet with built-in drawers which held all their clothes, and a bookcase in the corner. A small heater hissed next to the bed.
The back room, long and narrow, housed the stove. A blue and white striped shower curtain separated the cooking area from the shower stall and a not-yet-operable toilet that Antonio was installing.
Philippe, who was wandering around the apartment, picked up a faded paperback. “So this is it—your novel, El Sueño de Manuel.”
“Yes,” said Antonio.
Philippe leafed through it. “I see it was published in 1956,” he said. “Quite some time ago, eh? It looks interesting. I read some Spanish. May I borrow it?”
“It’s yours. You may keep it,” said Antonio.
“But it’s your only copy!” cried Rosa. It upset her that he was so magnanimous, so heedless about his few valuable possessions. The book was out of print.
“Be quiet!” said Antonio.
“We’ll return it,” said Anna.
“Of course,” said Philippe. “Your only copy! Say . . . this place you have here isn’t bad. How much do you pay a month?”
“Two hundred francs. I’m the janitor,” said Antonio. “I clean out the WCs on each landing, mop the stairs, fix electric lights, talk to the old women.”
“He courts them,” said Anna, giving Antonio a smile that Rosa thought too intimate.
Often when Philippe was at work, Antonio would visit Anna, confide in her. Rosa wondered if they ever made love.
Elena, a large, dark-haired Spanish girl, asked for some toilet paper for the hallway WC.
Rosa got her some.
“You could use the new toilet Antonio put in, if it only worked,” said Jean.
“It needs a special pipe run through to the mainline,” said Antonio.
“She’s pregnant too, you know,” said Anna.
“I know,” said Antonio.
“Do you know who the father is?”
“She told me it’s the man who used to share her room on the Boul Mich—the one she swore up and down last month had never touched her,” Antonio said. He spit a fleck of tobacco out of his mouth onto the red tile floor. “Vive la maternité!” he said. “Shall we drink to la maternité?”
There was a loud knock on the door. It was Roland and Françoise. Françoise, a plump, flushed blonde in her thirties, worked in real estate. Roland was a tall, slender man around the same age who made experimental films in a loft near the Bastille. Françoise gave Antonio and Rosa a huge box, inside of which were a dozen wine glasses packed in straw. “Ah thank you, how kind you are,” said Antonio.
“Yes, thank you very much,” said Rosa. Antonio commanded her to rinse out the glasses so they could use them. Anna and Françoise helped her dry them.
Rosa sat down on the edge of the bed again to rest. The baby kicked inside her.
“You’re so skinny,” said Anna.
“She can’t keep anything down,” said Antonio.
They clustered around the dining table with its rickety legs while Antonio poured champagne for everyone.
“Rosa, get the chicken!” he shouted.
Repressing an impulse to scream out against the way he was ordering her around, she went into the back room where two large roast chickens rested on a table next to the stove. She’d cooked the meat last night and had to leave it out, hoping the air was cold enough so it wouldn’t spoil. She took the wild rice that Antonio cooked this morning out of the warm oven, carved slices of chicken, and poured salad dressing over the endive, watercress, and tomatoes. As she handled the food, she felt queasy. The baby was so heavy inside her stomach.
Towards dessert Mohammed arrived. He was drunk, bleary-eyed, dressed in ragged trousers, a torn sweater, and a golf cap. He was waving a wine bottle. With great solemnity he said, “Congratulations, Madame Cortes de los Piños,” and he smacked Rosa on the temple with a wet kiss. He smelled unwashed, with alcohol on his breath.
Antonio introduced him to the others. He told them that he and Mohammed were going into business together as handymen. The guests laughed. “You’re going to put in more toilets that don’t work?” asked Philippe.
Antonio started to protest. Rosa reached for the bottle to refill her glass. “No more champagne for you,” he said. “It’s not healthy for the little one on the way.”
True, she already had a headache. She did not like to drink very much bu
t wanted to ease the tension. She was angry with the others for not taking Antonio seriously. Yet she herself dreaded the outcome of this new venture.
It seemed to consist of Antonio and Mohammed going out to drink until the early hours of the morning, and God knows, Antonio did enough of that anyway. Later this afternoon he and Mohammed were going to look at an apartment belonging to Mohammed’s aunt in Belleville that needed painting.
“You are a journalist. You have written a novel,” said Françoise, “and yet you’re painting apartments and putting in toilets and showers for a living.”
“What else can I do in Paris?” asked Antonio. “I’m also writing an article on the reaction in Paris to Kennedy’s assassination for La Nación.” He gestured towards his typewriter on the corner bookshelf, covered with a sheaf of papers. “Maybe it will be published in six months and pay one hundred francs—enough to buy a few groceries.”
“It seems a shame,” said Françoise.
Rosa thought of the hundreds of hours of work Antonio had put into their apartment and of the entire days they had wandered around Paris looking at parts of sinks, showers, toilets in the hardware sections of department stores and at plumbing supply outlets. He threw himself into this work as if he wanted to forget everything else, and his frequent failures aroused his rage. She was unable to write at all, or even to read while he worked on the plumbing, because he insisted that she participate.
Once he had torn the Tibetan Book of the Dead from her hands and tossed it out the window, to the shocked delight of the old women below. Then he stood over her, pregnant as she was, and forced her to mop up the floor in the back room on her hands and knees. She wept as she mopped. Afterwards he said, “I did that because I love you. I care about you. You’ve been spoiled, and I’m making you into a normal woman. I want you to be sensitive to my needs.”
Furious, she had turned her back. He’d grabbed her. “Let’s go out and have a drink,” he’d said. He had kissed her on the lips. “Who loves you?”
“You do,” she had murmured, still furious and in a state of shock, but somehow convinced that he was right.
Now he was suggesting that they all go out to a café. Francoise and Roland said they had to leave.
“Just a minute,” said Antonio. “Before you do, I want you to realize that if it’s a boy, I want a briss, which is a Jewish circumcision ceremony.”
“I want the baby christened Catholic,” Rosa said.
“Why?” asked Antonio. “You’re Jewish.”
“In name only,” she said. “I’ve never been inside a Jewish temple. I want the baby to be christened Catholic because almost every day since I became pregnant I’ve gone to the church on the Rue Saint Antoine. It’s so beautiful there. It calms me. I pray in front of the Virgin. I want the baby christened.”
“She’s a romantic,” said Philippe.
“She knows nothing about Catholicism,” said Antonio. “Damn the Catholics. I was raised by Jesuits and by a mother who was a religious fanatic but who had no heart.”
“I was raised by Jews who pretended not to be,” said Rosa. “I have no sense of what the Jewish religion is all about. . ..”
“I really must go,” said Francoise.
“Come on, let’s go out and have a drink,” said Antonio. “Come on Rosa, Mohammed, Philippe, Jean. Your purse, Rosa. Do you have ten francs?. . . Elena, you have no coat! It’s too cold for you to go out like that!” He put his arm around Elena and caressed her stomach, moving his hand up to her breasts. Rosa stifled a scream of protest. “Rosa,” he said, turning to her, “take your trench coat out of the closet. . . . Elena, try Rosa’s coat on.”
The coat, a trifle too large for Rosa, fit Elena perfectly. Elena twirled around in it after she had buttoned it and buckled the belt. Elena was so pretty with her glossy dark curls, so chic, so frighteningly self-assured. Rosa did not like Antonio giving away her coat, but then she rarely wore it and Elena needed it.
She felt queasy in the pit of her stomach. The baby stirred and kicked. Poor baby. Get born soon, baby, before it gets any worse. She rubbed a spot beneath her left eye where Antonio hit her four nights ago after an especially fierce argument. Luckily the bruise had healed in time for the marriage ceremony.
Much later that night, while Antonio was out with Mohammed and she was alone in the apartment, she thought of going out herself, but when she tried the front door found out that Antonio had locked her in, perhaps inadvertently. He had taken the only key, a large, old-fashioned one he claimed he could not get duplicated. On occasion Rosa had climbed in and out through the window in the front room which led to a window on the landing, after walking precariously over the gabled roof. It was too dark and too cold to try this now, and the baby felt too heavy inside her.
The dim lights of the apartment oppressed her. She could barely see to read or write, and her fingers were numb with cold. She turned the heater up, but that didn’t help. Finally she curled up in bed and tried to rest. Antonio had a record of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” which he played over and over again. She put this on the stereo.
She must have fallen asleep because she felt someone shaking her, and when she opened her eyes, she looked into Antonio’s face and smelled the wine on his breath. He needed a shave, she thought, even though he had shaved only yesterday. His beard grew so fast. Tenderly he stroked her soft hair. “Do you know,” he said, “once I had a dream that you and I were skating along, gliding so smoothly. . . .”
“Stop it!” she shouted, pummeling his chest. “Stop it! Stop treating me like this! You locked me in and you gave away my coat!”
He drew away from her and raised his fist as if he were going to strike her, then looked at his hand as if in a daze and lowered it. “You’re pregnant,” he said, “or I’d beat the shit out of you.”
“Antonio, it isn’t fair. Don’t lock me in again like that!” she screamed. “Suppose there was a fire—I couldn’t even shit if I had to—I couldn’t get to the WC—and with the baby—we’ve got to get another key!”
“Petite,” he said, lowering his voice. “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to. I am absent-minded. I’m sorry. As for your coat—Elena has no coat. Do you know what it means to be cold because you have no money to buy a coat? No. No. You are rotten. You are spoiled by too much money!”
Ashamed, she looked away. He was right about the coat. He touched her again. His hands were shaking. She buried her face in his shoulder. Then, feeling an electric surge of energy, she got out of bed and put the Gershwin record on again. “Come on,” she said. “Will you dance with me?” She pulled him to his feet. He was still in his heavy jacket with a muffler around his neck. She wore her white flannel nightgown with tiny red roses. They whirled on the floor, cold to her bare feet. They whirled and whirled with the music.
Inside her the baby stirred. Quiet baby. Let me be. Give me some rest. As if it heard her, the baby quieted. Suddenly she felt very hungry, and she had a premotion that she must eat all she could because the baby would come soon, and even a bite of apple might make the difference between life and death. She pulled herself away from Antonio and went to the front room where there was a bowl of fruit. She took an apple to munch on, although it was difficult to swallow. But she forced herself to. She could feel the baby needed the nourishment. Brass instruments whirled the cells of her body in a waltz rhythm.
“Françoise is the only one who gave us a gift,” Antonio said. Still in his outdoor clothes, he was sitting on the edge of the bed. He drew her to him and stroked her hair and her shoulders. “She is the only one. If the baby is a girl, I will give her the middle name of Françoise.” Unashamedly, he was weeping.
CHAPTER TWO
Shortly after her marriage, Rosa decided she must find work. She cast off all thought of her physical condition. If she earned money, then perhaps Antonio would too. She had tried it once before in the early summer when she went to Hamburg, but that had been a foolish venture. That had failed. Now she would be mo
re sensible.
She put a classified advertisement in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune for general office work. On the day of her first job interview she rushed down the street trying to find Antonio. Her interview was at three o’clock, but she must telephone and cancel it because she did not feel at all well.
Mohammed and Antonio had had a violent blow-up two days ago. Afterwards Antonio lay back on their bed and said, “Rosa, je m’en fou. Je suis foutu. I’ve made my last effort. You wanted the baby. Now it will be up to you to provide for it.”
“We both wanted the baby.”
“You wanted the baby, Petite,” he said.
It was useless to argue with him, because he would only keep repeating himself. She felt he was over-tired, over-strained. He and Mohammed had gone off at eight each morning, not returning until late in the evening; and Antonio was not used to rising early. His hands trembled. His face was lined with fatigue, and he seemed to have aged many years.
The Rue des Lions, which ran near their apartment, was lined with small cafés. Her intense nervousness gave keenness to her perceptions. Like a wild, frightened animal, she could feel where he was a great deal of the time by a kind of telepathy. Antonio, too, could often tell where she was. He joked that they had no need of telephones.
He even sensed her sexual fantasies. While at first this had delighted her, later on it enraged her because he gave her no privacy. His clairvoyance, she thought, was rude, cruel, lacking in tact. He gave vent to jealous rages over mere fantasies! And this in turn had incensed her to carry out the fantasies—since he would give her no peace, since he punished her for the thought before the deed, since above all he flaunted his liaisons with other women and refused to give her her sexual due.
She rushed into the small café on her left, and there, thank God, he was, standing at the counter in his dark flannel suit, holding a glass of cassis, with the incongruous air of an aristocrat among all the working men and women, who were dressed in overalls and blue smocks.
Longing Page 2
