by Michel Déon
‘Every day,’ Jean said, ‘but yesterday she had to go away for a few days …’
‘So everything going all right there then. Good!’
Jean and Jesús looked at each other. Why say more? If Claude returned, her sudden departure – once explained – would be no more than a moment’s upset that was swiftly forgotten, and if she failed to return Palfy would not even notice. Jean’s affairs of the heart had always seemed to him to be pointless aberrations, weaknesses unworthy of a young man destined for a great future. So Jean said nothing: Jesús knew what had happened, and that was enough. In any case Palfy had already moved on, asking Jesús to recount in detail La Garenne’s rackets. The scale of the gallery owner’s hoaxes thrilled him. He immediately wanted to meet this master swindler and have lunch with him.
‘He doesn’t have lunch with anyone,’ Jean said. ‘He’d be too afraid he’d be left with the bill.’
‘I’ll take him out!’
‘You haven’t got any money!’
‘I’ll borrow some from him.’
They burst out laughing.
‘Even supposing you succeed,’ Jean said, ‘which, just between ourselves, would be a stroke of genius, I ought to warn you that as soon as he opens his mouth to speak he’ll start spitting into your food.’
‘I’ll buy him some new dentures.’
‘He’ll resell them as a Surrealist sculpture.’
‘You won’t stop me, you’ll see.’
Jean believed him. His friend had spotted an opportunity and was already plotting to join forces with La Garenne. After all, yes, why not? Jesús was delighted by Palfy.
‘This La Garenne ’e’s a slob. ’E put everyzin’ in iz own pocket. What I like ’e’s that ’e’s connin’ the Boches. For that you need a hombre with big cojones.’
‘No hurry. Let’s give it some thought. I have a few ideas. Today I’m having lunch with Madeleine and her Julius, at Maxim’s, where else?’
‘It’s their local,’ Jean said.
‘I saw this Julius fellow yesterday for the first time. Not uncongenial. A great music lover.’
‘Like that SS officer Karl Schmidt, the one who wanted to shoot us to the strains of his violin?’
‘No grudges, Jean. Very unbecoming. The SS and Wehrmacht are worlds apart. One day the Wehrmacht will wipe out the SS. Julius may not be a Prussian nob but he’s a solid businessman. One of his daughters is married to an English banker in London and one of his sons is at Bern, as an attaché at the embassy. All doors open for him – and he can’t live without Madeleine. You should see her, dear boy. Your attitude upsets her.’
Jean promised. One day … In the meantime he would arrange a meeting with La Garenne. Palfy wrote down Blanche’s name.
‘A Rocroy? That rings a bell. I’ll do some research. By the time I meet her I’ll know everything about her family. What a performance! You’ll see. Come on, come to lunch at Maxim’s, both of you. Madeleine will be so pleased.’
‘Will there be black pudding?’ Jean asked.
‘Black pudding at Maxim’s? You are joking, dear boy.’
Jesús felt as Jean did.
‘I am like ’im, I wan’ black puddin’. They ’ave it in a little restauran’ …’
Palfy shrugged.
‘You’re pathetic, the pair of you. I’ll leave you to it. See you soon.’
He was already halfway down the stairs.
Everything worked out. Very well. La Garenne, whom it cost nothing, suggested an address to Michel du Courseau. A gallery offered him hanging space. For a modest fee. Jesús was unsurprised. According to him, the ascetic nature of the paintings and their religious inspiration made them powerfully prophetic pictures in wartime. They would show the French how to suffer, now that they were without bread and butter, cheese and meat, and going through their own Passion. Their natural masochism would find an outlet in Michel’s display of suffering.
‘Your uncle ’e’s very talented,’ Jesús said approvingly. ‘You’re no’ nice to ’im. Et look like ’e bore you.’
It was true. Michel bored Jean enormously. Not a word he spoke rang true, despite his sincerity. The excessive self-confidence he had always felt spilt over into his art. All around him he saw skilful mediocrities trying to establish themselves in the general confusion. Once he had obtained what he desired, there was no question of his showing his contemporaries any indulgence. Jean who, in reality, barely knew him, so divided in enmity had they been in their childhood, discovered that behind his humble exterior Michel maintained a view of himself that was so superior that no one else actually existed – an idea intensely comforting to a young person aspiring to genius. Even the failure of his first exhibition in spring ’41 – a failure that was unjust because even though there was nothing new in his sombre, passionate approach to his subject, it was still a revelation of a painter brave enough to go against fashion – even that failure was a source of pride to Michel. In the essentially biographical idea he had of what counted as glory, a failure was one more ‘proof’, a necessary expiation that would help him make a name for himself.
But if we occasionally proceed too slowly as far as Jean is concerned, we ought not to go too quickly with the characters in his life. We have scarcely reached the end of 1940, and here we are already talking about Michel du Courseau’s exhibition of religious paintings from spring 1941, just before Hitler sets his Panzer divisions on the Soviet Union; about the death of the prince, also in ’41, in the course of that summer; and a year later about the death of Albert Arnaud. Our only excuse is that our real preoccupation is the unexpected and hasty departure of Claude Chaminadze, shortly before the first Christmas of the occupation. We therefore request that the reader return with us, for a moment, to the three days that followed this dreadful blow to Jean’s existence. He felt he had returned to the aftermath of the departure of Chantal de Malemort in that same building in Rue Lepic where they had lived together so carelessly and happily. With Chantal, however, the disaster had been definitive and complete at the instant of its discovery. With Claude, hope remained: an explanation might be forthcoming that would return their life to what it had been before. Jesús commented, perhaps shrewdly, that Michel du Courseau had the evil eye. Had it not been at the concert he had given in 1939 at the Pleyel that Chantal had run into Gontran Longuet again? Now Michel had reappeared and Claude had vanished. Jean did not believe in the evil eye, but he listened to the Andalusian’s grumbling ruminations and they distracted him from his anxiety and pain. It was Jesús’s belief, in any case, that women went up in smoke several days a month. They returned transparent, as immaterial beings. In reality they no longer existed: it was a proven way for them to rest and not get older, an old trick they had exploited ever since they arrived from that unknown planet to cause us anxieties that only a real, open friendship between men could attenuate … Jesús did not deny that these absences had something magical about them, but refused to explain them to himself in those terms because Spaniards and certainly not Andalusians did not believe in magic. Magic was a Lapp invention at best, or a Scandinavian one at worst, a migratory invention whose effects were most noticeable at the start of winter, when the days shorten and night closes in. Fairies do not exist in hot countries, where the sun wipes out imagination.
So there were three dreadful days when, like an automaton, Jean listened to La Garenne shouting for all he was worth and then mysteriously – La Garenne, most sceptical of men – allowing himself to be dazzled by Palfy, who simultaneously conquered Blanche with his extensive knowledge of her family tree and information about several new international branches of the family that she knew nothing about; when he listened to Michel who thought of nothing but his exhibition; and to Jesús who talked non-stop simply to make sure his friend was not left alone with his thoughts. At last, on the fourth day, the telephone rang at the back of the gallery and, picking up the receiver, without even having heard her voice, he knew it was her. And it was all over. She was waiting
for him. He would be there as soon as he could after the gallery had closed. And when she opened the door Cyrille ran at him and threw his arms around his neck.
‘Why didn’t you come and see me at Grandma’s?’ he said. ‘I was really bored.’
And so he discovered, for the first time, that he had been deprived of the little boy as much as of his mother, who offered him her cool cheek and whose light eyes were unreadable with some unexpressed emotion. All Jean could take in at that moment was that she had left Cyrille, her little guardian, behind for three days and gone off, alone, heaven knew where. This realisation cast a shadow over the joy of the reunion. They had dinner together without being able to speak, because of Cyrille. Eventually she put him to bed and came back to where Jean was waiting for her. He put his arms around her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not tonight. You’ll understand when I explain it to you.’
‘Explain it then.’
She sighed.
‘If you love me, just a little, you’ll give me some time. One day it’ll all become clear. For now, I don’t know myself. All right … I wanted to get away, to breathe again, and then for us not to part any more.’
‘It wasn’t me who left you.’
‘No, it wasn’t you. And it wasn’t me who left you either. You have to believe me.’
She smiled through her tears and kissed him on the lips, very quickly. He wanted to take her in his arms again. She stopped him.
‘No. I told you: not today.’
‘Then I’m going.’
He thought: for good, and he honestly believed it. She misunderstood his words.
‘You’re a good man. There aren’t many good men. In fact I think you must be the only one and perhaps that’s the reason I love you.’
‘Do you love me?’
‘And you’re also very silly because you doubt it when I say so.’
‘I don’t know where I stand with you.’
‘Nor me.’
He left her early and climbed back up to Montmartre on foot in the blackout. Figures loomed out of the darkness on the same pavement and stepped aside as he went past. He realised he was walking at an intimidating, brutal pace through the shadowy closed-down city. Opening the studio door, he heard a scuffle and a woman’s cry. A single low lamp lit Jesús’s bed, where he was lying with the girl he had sent away the evening he and Jean had had dinner.
‘Sorry!’ Jean said foolishly.
‘Can’t a man ’ave a fuck now and then!’ Jesús murmured with unexpected shyness.
‘I’ll come back later.’
He returned just before the curfew and found Jesús alone in a dressing gown.
‘I’m getting in your way,’ Jean said. ‘I’d better find myself a room.’
‘Listen, Jean, you gettin’ on my nerve. You is too little to live alone. Now tell me: what is with Claude?’
‘She’s here.’
‘And she explain to you?’
‘No. And it doesn’t matter?’
‘Aïe!’
‘What?’
‘You is really en lov’.’
‘Do you think so?’
Jesús held out his arms and swore it was so, on the Madonna of the Begonias.
‘How often does it happen in a lifetime?’ Jean asked anxiously.
Jesús assured him that certain men never experienced what it felt like to be in love, and that others in contrast fell in love with every girl they met. He personally had never been like that. No feverishness or sweaty palms, ever, and as soon as his passion was satisfied, an irresistible desire to chuck the girl out. He could not remember having made love to any girl twice. He tried to remember their names, tried to recall a moment of sweetness or tenderness that they might have spontaneously shown him. He couldn’t. He inspired sweetness and tenderness in them as little as they did in him. Jean commented that in that case, deep down, he was still a virgin. The Spaniard protested. He was not a virgin, he suffered from an ailment. His blood possessed an antibody that destroyed love. Jean, on the other hand, was in the grip of a virus and his love affairs made no sense to him unless they felt as if they were for ever.
‘Is always the lov’ of your life!’ he said with a despairing expression. ‘I canno’ keep up with you.’
‘Claude is the love of my life.’
‘You is twenty years old!’
‘Twenty-one.’
Jesús roared with laughter. The difference was, of course, vast. In fact it demanded celebration. They opened the magnum of champagne that Madeleine had brought. The bottle had been cooling on the window sill and they drank it from tooth mugs. Jesús’s unmade bed gave off the scent of the woman who had been in it an hour before. On the bedside table lay a silk scarf she had left behind. Jean pointed at it.
‘She’ll be back for that tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? No. I will no’ be ’ere. You too.’
‘Why?’
‘We are ’avin’ dinner with Mad’leine.’
‘I didn’t say yes.’
Jesús had said yes for him. The situation was becoming untenable. Madeleine was deeply offended. One day or another they would need her, or to be more specific her Julius, whom it seemed everyone in Paris had fallen for. Without him, women would go naked, and the theatres and film studios close for lack of costumes. The Germans made Jesús as anxious as Fu Manchu. Yet what real reason did he have to keep out of their way? He was a Spaniard and could not give a damn whether they had won or lost a war, because it was not his war. Julius could not be as bad as all that. He did a thousand small favours, handing out travel permits, clothing coupons, fuel coupons for heating, cigarettes, liquor. At home his door was always open to fashion designers and fashionable young hairdressers, and on certain evenings, mixed up haphazardly with his suppliers, writers, poets, actors, dancers, art critics and film directors. As for Jean, the thought of going without Claude for a whole evening made him more reluctant than the bad memories he had of the Germans from his participation in the brief battle of France. He admitted as much to Jesús, who pretended to tear his hair out and called him a very sublime moron. What was he talking about? Claude disappeared in a puff of smoke for three days, and he hesitated to stand her up for a single night? If he went on that way, she’d start thinking she could behave however she liked! A man who was really and truly in love could not behave more stupidly. Jean did not know what to say.
Madeleine lived on Avenue Foch in an imposing panelled apartment whose owner, a Jew who was also a great art lover, had taken refuge in the United States as soon as the Germans had attacked. Julius kept up the same staff: two hoary manservants, two maids and a butler whom he had had freed from a POW camp to resume his old post. There were rumours that, under the guise of a requisition, the Jewish art lover and Julius had come to a working agreement: a luxury apartment in return for an assurance that the treasures on show would not be subject to any confiscation. Although he had been forewarned at length by Jesús, Jean was nonetheless dumbfounded to find Madeleine in the new role she had created. He tried to remember her the way she had looked two years earlier, standing in a peignoir on the landing of the building in Rue Lepic, taking refuge with him and Chantal one morning when Jesús had nearly set fire to his apartment, and again in 1939 when she had played the ambiguous part of Madame Miranda at Cannes, a little more polished than before but still retaining some of the gestures of the humble streetwalker she had once been. Refusing to colour her hair, she had a fine head of grey hair that softened her tired-looking expression. The make-up artist’s skills had turned a previously vulgar mouth into a worldly pout and smoothed the first signs of crow’s feet. Palfy’s lessons had borne fruit: the suburban accent had gone along with most of her mispronunciations. In short, to all intents and purposes – though she still did not know who was who – she could be mistaken for a woman of the world, even in the rare letters she wrote, in which there were so many spelling mistakes that nobody believed they were not deliberate. As time went on Palfy, who w
as a bit fogeyish about such things, urged her to give up writing altogether, and she, more than happy, concurred.
‘I thought you were avoiding me,’ she said, kissing Jean. ‘And why haven’t you brought your divine lady friend?’
‘Divine’ was a word much in vogue, which the fashionable young hairdressers with whom she spent a couple of hours every day in order not to look as if she had been to the hairdresser – oh subtle accomplishment of long toil! – used to describe the least of their amazements.
‘She’s not divine,’ he answered. ‘She’s just a woman with a little boy she can’t leave on his own in the evenings.’
He tried not to feel he had been right to hesitate to come and allowed himself to be led towards a group surrounding a bald, plump man with a scarred cheek. Julius Kapermeister had none of the cold, condescending distinction of a Rudolf von Rocroy. The son of a solid line of Dortmund industrialists, he certainly possessed a more than modest opinion of himself, but concealed it beneath an unctuousness that was excessive, particularly if you knew the extent of his official functions – and even later, when you learnt what their objective was. Unused to Germans, Jean had a feeling of unease he found hard to shrug off. Julius spoke precise, heavily accented French, but we shall spare the reader a phonetic transcription of his words. One is enough, and Jesús will for ever chew his French into a sort of pidgin, while Julius had already made considerable progress in less than a year and could express himself relatively fluently in correct French.
‘So here you are, Jean Arnaud!’ he said with affected surprise. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Madeleine, yet never seen you. I was beginning to think you were refusing to meet us! There are one or two French who, it must be said, are rather stubborn – though in one sense I forgive them – they’re reluctant to understand …’
Taking Jean by the arm, he steered him to a sideboard covered in bottles of champagne, whisky and vodka. The dozen or so other guests present looked at Jean with mingled curiosity and envy. Who was the badly dressed but rather good-looking young Frenchman whom Julius was favouring with a private word?
