Reasons of State
Page 31
“I shall give orders for all this filth to be taken down!” cried the master of the house, suddenly becoming the Master of the House and seizing hold of the picture of the Cacodylic Eye.
“What d’you think of it?” said Ofelia, who had just come into the room dressed in a dark blue tailor-made, her hair rather wild, her mascara smudged, and very obviously under the influence of drink.
“My dear girl!” said the Head of State, crushing her in his arms so suddenly and fondly that his voice ended in a sob. “My girl! My own flesh and blood!”
“Darling little papa!” she said, weeping also.
“So sexy and so lovely!”
“And you, so strong and splendid!”
“Come and sit beside me … I’ve got so much to talk to you about … I’ve so much to tell you …”
“It’s only that …” And over Ofelia’s shoulder, on which an orchid smelling of tobacco had finally finished fading, the Ex saw appearing, like the grotesque figures in a Flemish kermess, dishevelled, painted faces, faces that had been up all night and were certainly drunk.
“Some friends of mine … they shut the dance hall where we were having supper … We’ve come to go on with the party.” People, more people; unbuttoned, ungainly, slovenly people; rude, disrespectful, impudent people; people who made themselves at home—more than at home: as if in a brothel—sitting on the floor, fetching bottles from the pantry, rolling back the carpet so as to be able to dance on the waxed wooden boards, regardless of the harm they might do. Women with their skirts above their knees, with their hair in a fringe that was the mark of a whore over there; young pederasts, with checked shirts that looked as if made out of cook’s aprons. And now the gramophone: “Yes, we have no bananas” (he had already endured this horror on board the boat throughout the whole Atlantic crossing), “we have no bananas today.” Ofelia was laughing with her friends, went away, turned, took records from the bookcase, came back with more drink, filled glasses, wound up the gramophone, and, as the Ex sat himself down resignedly on a divan, there was a dialogue of truncated scrappy sentences, never answered, and remarks that were left incompletely expressed between turns around the room: Ofelia hadn’t gone to the Gare Saint-Lazare, because the marconigram announcing his arrival had arrived yesterday afternoon when she was at a vernissage; from there they’d gone to celebrate and it wasn’t till now that she was given it by the concierge, who had only just got up: “But now we’ll really be happy; you mustn’t go back to that country of savages.” (“St. Louis Blues” was starting on the gramophone, bringing painful memories: it was what the Consul had played that afternoon.)
“Listen: I’ve brought the Mayorala.”
“And where is she?”
“Asleep upstairs.”
“Frankly, I wouldn’t have brought her,”
“She was the only person who didn’t betray me over there … why, even Peralta!”
“I always felt in my bones that he was a skunk.”
“Worse than that: a pocket Machiavelli.”
“Not that even: but Machiavelli’s pocket, perhaps.” (Again: Yes, we have no bananas.) “I wouldn’t have brought the Mayorala: I can’t imagine her in Paris: she’ll be one more responsibility.”
“We must talk about that, we’ve got lots to talk about.”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.”
“But it already is tomorrow—it’s day already.” (“St. Louis Blues” again.)
“I say, are you going to leave all that filthy rubbish on the walls?”
“Oh, don’t be such a back number, my old darling; this is the art of today; you’ll soon get used to it.”
“And what about my Jean-Paul Laurens, my Wolf of Gubbio, my seascapes?”
“I sold them at the Hôtel Drouot; of course, I only got a miserable sum for the lot: people aren’t interested in that stuff now.”
“Damn it all! You might have asked me first!”
“How could I ask you when the papers kept saying at the time that they’d shot you? I got the news at the Seville Feria.” (Yes, we have no bananas once more.)
“And when they told you, did you cry much?”
“I cried and cried and cried.”
“Of course, you wore a black mantilla.”
“Wait, I must wind up the gramophone.” (“Yes, we have no …” rose in pitch from the depths where it had descended.)
“I say, are these people going to stay much longer?”
“If they want to stay, I won’t chuck them out.”
“It’s just that we’ve so much to talk about.”
“Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow …”
“But it’s tomorrow already.”
“If you’re tired, why not go and have a sleep?” (A new record: Je cherche après Titine, Titine, oh! ma Titine: another obsessional tune from the boat.)
Now Ofelia left him alone on the divan and began dancing wildly with an Englishman with curly hair, whom she introduced to me as she passed, but without letting go of him, as Lord—I forget his name—whom she’d met in Capri and who—so I was told by the cholo Mendoza, now sitting beside me—had got into a scrape with the French police for using schoolboys from the Lycée Jeanson-de-Sailly in artistic scenic productions of one of Virgil’s Bucolics, yes, the one about Alexis, the shepherd boy; I know it, I know it. The Ex looked at his daughter and at all the others with growing irritation: those two women dancing together cheek to cheek. And those two men clutching each other around the waist. And that other short-haired female kissing the skinny blonde in a yellow shawl. And those stupid, incomprehensible paintings on the walls. And that obscene white sculpture, the marble phallus, surrounded by bottles of whisky with a horse on the label—white, too, but which had at least come to signify sterling worth. His face turned suddenly red in an access of rage—Mendoza recognised the symptoms—he crossed the room, lifted the sound box of the gramophone, threw several records on the floor, and stamped them to pieces.
“Clear all this drunken rubbish out of here!” he shouted. Standing protectively in front of the astonished few who remained, it was now Ofelia’s turn to look at her father with growing anger, like the chief of a tribe, measuring the strength of the adversary before attacking. The “darling little papa” was growing before her eyes—growing, blowing himself out, turning into a giant, breaking the walls with his hands and raising the roof with his shoulders. If he regained his old authority, and if she let him dominate her, order her about and make decisions in a house where she had dispensed with his presence very pleasantly for several years; if she didn’t humble his pride, and check his impulsive behaviour, he would end up just as much of a tyrant here as he had been there—for he was accustomed to be a tyrant always.
“If you don’t like my friends,” she said, adopting the dry, cold tone that he had sometimes been afraid of, “if you don’t like my friends, take your bags and go to the Crillon or the Ritz. They have good rooms. Room service and an elegant atmosphere.”
“Sodom and Gomorrah!” yelled the Head of State.
“That’s why they got rid of you; for talking drivel,” said Ofelia.
“And who is this?” asked all the others.
“Mon père, le Président,” said Ofelia, suddenly solemn, as if to mitigate the brutality of her earlier remarks.
“Vive le Président! Vive le Président!” they all shouted together, while one imitated a clown’s foolish antics, and sang the “Marseillaise.”
“Go to bed, Papa.”
The sunlight shone through the drawing-room curtains in spite of the electric light still on in the room. Morning had begun for the whole city.
“Let’s go to Bois-Charbons,” said the Ex to the cholo Mendoza.
“Bye-bye!” said Ofelia, and while the two men went down the great staircase, the others leant over the balustrade with masks on their faces, singing to the music of “Malbrough”:
L’vieux con s’en va-t-en guerre
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine.
Et n’en reviendra pas!
“Alors … on a eu des malheurs, mon bon Monsieur?” said Musard, looking more than ever like the moustachioed leader of the Arc de Triomphe, when he saw us arrive. (It was clear he had come across my portrait in some newspaper recently.)
“Oh! Vous savez—les révolutions …” I said.
“Les révolutions, ça tourne toujours mal,” said the wine merchant, taking out a bottle. “Voyez ce qui s’est passé en France avec Louis Seize.” (I thought of the frontispiece of Michelet’s La Convention in Nelson’s edition, with Citizen Capet on the scaffold, very dignified, with his shirt open at the neck as if he were consulting an otolaryngologist.)
“Ce sera pour la prochaine fois,” I said, raising my hand to my neck. Possibly realizing, rather late in the day, that his reference to Louis XVI had been slightly unfortunate, Monsieur Musard tried to mend matters:
“Les révolutions, vous savez … Il paraît que sous l’Ancien Régime on était bien mieux. Ce sont nos quarante rois qui ont fait la grandeur de la France.”
“This chap has been reading Action Française,” said the cholo Mendoza.
“He’s treating us to a bit of Barrèsism,” I said.
“Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé,” said Monsieur Musard, filling three glasses. “C’est la maison qui règale.”
I drank my wine with delight. From the back of the humble café came a pleasant smell of resinous wood, such as was sold in little bundles fastened with wire, to light coal fires with. There on the shelves, as if no time had passed, their shapes and labels unchanged, stood the bottles of Suze, Picon, Raphaël, and Dubonnet.
“What are you going to live on now?” I asked the cholo. “You’re not an ambassador anymore.”
“A man who thinks ahead is worth two. I’ve got more than enough money.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“Thanks to me the population of our country has thirty thousand new citizens, who don’t figure in the census or know what our map looks like; forged passports and cards of citizenship for them … Poor people without any country. Victims of the war. White Russians. Expatriates. Heimatlos. I was doing good. Besides, the transactions went through the diplomatic bag. I wouldn’t have been the only one. I’m no saint. Other people use it for worse things.” (He made the gesture of someone sniffing.) “That business is a great temptation, because now it brings in a lot. But it’s dangerous. However, with the passports, I keep a duplicate of the Embassy stamps and seals. So the shop stays open … discreetly, of course.”
“Excellent: our compatriots deserve nothing better” (a sigh). “Oh well! It’s difficult to serve one’s country, old man!”
We returned to the Rue de Tilsitt. As I went in, out came a new porter, a war casualty, probably, because his left cuff was fastened with a safety pin to the shoulder of his blue jacket, and he wore a badge on his lapel. I had to explain that I was the master of the house before he let me pass, with theatrically embarrassed excuses. The drawing-room curtains were still drawn. Several of last night’s revellers were asleep on the divan, in armchairs or on cushions scattered on the carpet. Stepping over their bodies—some of them interlaced or piled in heaps—I at last reached my bedroom. I took my hammock out of the cupboard and hung it on the two rings put there for it. On the Arc de Triomphe, Rude’s Marseillaise was singing, as yesterday, as always.
But if the Marseillaise was still there, with her vociferous leader and the boy hero between sabres and palm trees, to me Paris seemed deserted. I realised that this very afternoon when, after a long sleep, I tried to make a list of what could be rescued of my life in this city. Reynaldo Hahn didn’t answer the telephone. Perhaps he’d gone to live in the suburbs. “Abonné absent,” said a female voice from the exchange. The Distinguished Academician, always so understanding, to whom I wanted to confide my sadness and disappointments and whose advice I wanted to ask about—possibly—writing my memoirs, had died months ago in his flat on the Quai Voltaire, the victim of an incurable disease, after a mystical crisis that created a considerable stir in Catholic circles and caused him to spend whole days praying in the cold church of Saint-Roch, associated for me with a novel by Balzac I read as an adolescent in Surgidero de la Verónica. (I don’t know why churches connected with Bossuet or Fénelon—in style, I mean, like Saint-Roch, Saint Sulpice, or the chapel at Versailles—fail to inspire me with devotion. To get the feel of a Christian church, I need it to be shadowy, enveloping, full of relics and marvellous images of decapitated saints, blood, sores, tears and sweat, lifelike wounds, jungles of tapers, silver limbs and gold viscera on the altar for ex-votos.) I knew that after Gabriele D’Annunzio had got caught in Fiume, he had retired—so they said—now a prince—so they said—to his Italian house, where with his back against a wall of rock he could see the prow of a battleship, raised up there in memory of some brave deed or other. I learned that Ofelia had told the truth and that Elstir’s paintings had fallen out of public favour: his delicious seascapes could still be found in the less successful galleries, mixed up among any pictures containing waves, boats, sand, and foam that appealed to those who had made fortunes out of the war. Embittered by the fall in the price of his work, Elstir had retired angrily to his studio at Balbec, where he tried to achieve some sort of “modernity,” which distorted but added nothing to his individual style, giving a sense of uneasy effort, as little appreciated by his admirers of yesterday as by those who were today following new currents. In music something similar was happening: nobody played Vinteuil’s work anymore—least of all his Sonata—except schoolgirls, who put away his music in a drawer, after their piano lessons, and devoted themselves to the strange subtleties of “La cathédrale engloutie” or the “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” unless they were indulging themselves with the vulgarities of Zez Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys.” And the young, those “in the know”—of what?—the snobs, amazed by the Russian music brought over by Diaghilev, treated the fine maestro Juan Cristóbal as a “vieille barbe,” and disowned him just as they used to disown Rhinegold. And worse, inconceivable things had happened: Anatole France, who could well have remained in the world of Thaïs and Jérôme Coignard, had irrelevantly declared himself a socialist at the last moment, proclaiming the necessity of a “universal revolution,” including America—no less!—and giving large sums of money to that abominable periodical L’Humanité. Things were going very badly for others: the Comte de Argencourt, Belgian Chargé d’Affaires, formerly a ceremonious, stiff diplomatist in the grand style, had been seen by the cholo Mendoza a few days earlier opposite the puppet theatre in the Champs-Elysées, in a state of utter collapse, imbecile, with the face and expression of a smiling beggar, apparently about to stretch out his hand for alms …
During these days, I didn’t dare telephone Madame Verdurin, now a princess by marriage. I was afraid a princess—or someone with the presumptions of one—would scorn a man who was, after all, only a Latin American president thrown out of his palace. And I thought bitterly of the deplorable end of Estrada Cabrera; of many dictators dragged through the streets of their capitals; of those expelled and humiliated, like Porfirio Díaz, or of those who had gone to ground here in France, after a long stretch of power, like Guzmán Blanco; of Rosas of Argentina, whose daughter, tired of playing the part of unselfish virgin, or magnanimous intercessor against the cruelty of her terrible father, suddenly revealed herself as she really was at heart, and abandoned her stern parent when she got the chance, leaving him to die in melancholy solitude in the grey town of Southampton—he who had owned boundless pampas, rivers of silver, moons such as are seen only there, suns rising every day above horizons he had ruled over since he was in breeches, and watched the heads of his enemies go by, hawked as “good, cheap watermelons” in the carts of his rejoicing followers.
The days passed, and I hardly saw Ofelia, who was always involved in fun and games. The Mayorala, curled up into a b
all under her feather eiderdown, refused to be attended by a French doctor and suffered the high fever of pleurisy without accepting any remedy but Santa Inés rum and balsam of Tolu—since none of the sort of herbal concoctions that performed miracles over there were to be had here. And I resumed my walks about Paris with the cholo Mendoza, going from Notre-Dame de Lorette to the Chope Danton, from an Avenue du Bois that hadn’t been there before to Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, without experiencing a single quiver of the city life, the air, the atmosphere that my nose and my memory sought in vain. The smell of petrol had taken the place of the country aroma—formerly everywhere, knowing no frontiers, belonging as much to the capital as to a hamlet—of horse dung. In the early morning one no longer heard the cries of the old-clothes man, the seller of watercress and birdseed, nor the rustic pipe of the scissors grinder. In the purlieus of the Place des Ternes, makers of porous jugs from Badajoz no longer arrived after a very long journey, with their donkeys decorated in the Extramaduran style. The only place that seemed permanent and unchanged was Aux Glaces at 25 Rue Saint-Apolline, where (among scagliola or mosaic tables, coloured glass windows, floral transfers on the long backs of leather settees, a pianola with a loud tone, two waiters in white aprons with bottles on tray-covered trolleys—like those on the Raphaeël labels) women were waiting for me, who in spite of the passage of years, difference in generations, changes in personnel, a new hairdo, a certain delicate restraint now being preferred to the opulence of the end of the century, restored me to the early chapters of my history, with its first pleasures and a thousand rejuvenating memories, and far-off events, whence—as in other Continental countries—everything had been transformed, turned upside down and perverted by the accelerated changes in ways of life. Languages had been mixed together, values degraded, adolescents corrupted, patriarchs insulted, palaces profaned, and the just expelled …