by Ursula Bloom
He went home much later to tell his people that he was no longer a fisherman, but a waiter.
They had had no idea of what had become of him, or why he was away so long, and were standing in the doorway of the one-roomed house where they lived. The children were lying in little heaps on the floors, rather like the shambles of some liliputian battlefield, for they slept this way.
‘I am proud,’ said he, and he showed them some francs that the rich American man had given him for getting him iced melon and some wine.
‘It is wealth,’ said his mother, greedy-eyed.
His father thought differently. He watched his son coldly, because he cleaved to his own task in the world and felt that his life had received a mortal wound, and his ship was deserted.
‘But how will the boat sail?’ he demanded.
III
The boat had to sail without Jan, because he was now permanently installed at the hotel, and, being so quick and uncomplaining, he won much praise from Madame.
Madame was susceptible to flattery, which he had discovered long ago. She had grown large and gross with the years; once she had been a lovely willowy girl, though now her figure, with its round set bust like a pouffe, gave little reminder of that past. Her hips had spread, but were armoured closely with coutille and whalebone, because she was still vain. Her waist was ample. Her one little tip-tilted chin, which had fascinated Les Petits Chasseurs in her youth, had now unfortunately duplicated itself not once, but many times, and was like a series of bibs; once it had attracted the head waiter, who had chucked her under it and had called her ‘little chicken’, saucily.
But the mirror never showed Madame how badly she looked, for the change in her appearance had come about so slowly that she had never actually recognized it.
‘Just small defects,’ said Madame, eyeing her reflection; and she had waved her fat hands, as though to waft them from her.
Jan knew quite well that she was vain, and that it was his job to pander to her, and he did so, with well-concealed compliments. He was always tenderly concerned for her, and she, believing in her powers of attraction, came to treat that concern as the forerunner of something more.
‘Pauvre garçon; he is in love with me,’ she would say, shrugging her massive shoulders, and making rather a joke of it, as though she were some pretty girl with a dozen such scalps dangling from her belt.
Naturally, it became a joke in Villefranche.
But Jan kept his job, and Madame was very good in giving him scraps for the family, and he was very good in finding means of amplifying these scraps without being noticed, so that his family, after they had overcome the initial blow of losing him from the nets, accepted the move as something in the nature of providence, and looked to him to supply the entire food for their table.
Things would have gone well in this way if the Padrone had not come to stay. The Padrone was rich. He was not like the English and American tourists who came in spring, and who danced in the salon, and who laughed over the aperitifs on the bund, and who threw their money about as though it meant nothing in the world to them, but was there for the picking up.
The thrifty French found it natural to despise the English and the Americans, and although they were always obsequious to them, in their hearts they thought it most foolish the way they squandered useful money! Insane; so stupid! said they.
But the Padrone was not made of that mettle. He came from Italy and he had a restaurant in Sicily which he had just sold very profitably, because the little place had been so fashionable.
He was a man with ideas.
He went about the country, always looking for one of those little spots shortly to become chosen by the fashionable, and in this way he made a great deal of money, because he was always on the spot. It had been he who had started the Cap d’Or at Juan les Pins, at a time when Juan les Pins was nothing but a rubbly beach running between Golfe-Juan and Antibes. He had sold the Cap d’Or for a small fortune.
The Riviera having been so good to him once upon a time, he was searching for yet another gold mine, but this time he found that the Riviera was a mine that had been exploited too much. It was now nothing but a long line of straggling houses. Gone were the fields of anemones which had been so abundant during the latter part of the last century. The carnation nurseries at Nice were cut down, and it was all town. It was a long line of men and women, with shops, and hotels, and tabacs, eager to make money out of those who loved luxury, and were willing to pay the top price for it.
‘I shall find nothing here,’ said the Padrone, and because of this he gave up the quest, and said that he would not be staying a fortnight.
He took a fancy to Jan.
Jan was the one who brought him up his cafe and croissants every morning, and had acquired the knack of shaking up the Padrone’s pillows as he liked best.
Jan was at that stage in his career when he wanted to make everybody like him very much, and as it happened he thought the Padrone was a good fellow who could help him.
One morning the Padrone said: ‘How about coming back to Italy with me? I have heard of a little place there with a ready-made restaurant. It is at Amalia. You think it would be good?’
At the particular moment that the proposition was made to him, Jan did think that it would be good.
He had had a dreadful quarrel with his family, because lately they had been growing uppish, and had inflated ideas. No longer did they demand the simple bags of scraps which he brought, but they expected whole chickens, and jellies, and all manner of luxuries, which, although he could acquire occasionally, he certainly could not take every day! Madame would be sure to find out. Madame was close with her money, and once or twice she had made trying inquiries about missing birds, so that he had to go more carefully.
The family did not see eye to eye with Jan about it. Their whistles, once whetted to good food, did not care to go back to the ordinary stale bread and scraps on which they had existed before.
There had been a sharp scene.
His mother was a virago when she started, and she had started with a vengeance. What was more, she had gone on. He had stood for an hour in the dim light of the fetid little room where they had all been born and reared, and which smelt of fish, and stale air, and people who were overcrowded together.
‘I can’t do it,’ he said.
His mother would not believe it. He could do it if he would, she said. She felt that he was a magician who had but to wave the wand, and beautiful food appeared! Madame would never miss it, she was so rich, argued his mother.
‘She is also very clever,’ he said, ‘she knows what is in her larder, because she counts every crumb. If she were to discover, she would dismiss me immediately, and then we should never get anything more.’
But his mother could not reason along those lines.
She argued like a shrew, and as he could not quieten her, he had to stand there listening to the tirade, whilst all the time he felt a little sick. He was ambitious, and he wanted to go further. Already he had come to realize that this small frowsty room was horrible, and that he had no real love for the people who had brought him up, who had blamed him for coming into the world and adding to their burdens. He could not stand much more.
He felt that he was like a bird that wanted to spread its wings. He had done all that he could for his people, he knew that he had been a good son, and had faithfully brought home as much of his money as was possible, and had stolen for them from Madame’s larder as much as he dared. But he could not go further.
At the end of that frightful scene, he went out into the street. He saw the mountains stretching down to the sea, and the cobbles where the nets lay, and the distance which is never very far away in the Riviera, but near, like a piece of lovely embroidery. He thought, it is a large world, I want to spread my wings, I want to get away.
So when the Padrone said: ‘How about coming to Italy with me?’ he said, Yes, he would like it very much.
He would break the
news to the others later.
Two
I
He said nothing to his people, because there was no need, and there was enough for him to do, with Madame hanging round his neck, fat tears coursing down her inflated cheeks.
‘You would not serve me so, mon petit? I, who have made you what you are? I, who took you in rags, and who now have dressed you in fine black trousers, and a good coat?’
But he had made up his mind that he would go.
He managed to disentangle himself from the loving embraces of Madame, and to promise that he would come back in a year’s time and be her head waiter, and flick napkins about the dining-room, and bow people in to déjeuner, and make a great impression upon them. This pacified her a little.
He hoped that he would never see his people again, but the night before he was leaving it was very hot, and he went out on to the bund, and sat at the far end, his legs swinging over it into the sea which his father had fished so zealously, and for so long. He stared down into its clearness, and believed that no other sea could be as lovely, and perhaps he would grow homesick, and he quailed before that.
As he sat there, he heard a voice, and saw that a woman had overtaken him. It was his mother. She wore a dirty apron, and had a shawl twisted round her body, whilst her hair blew away from the pins, which usually held it in a bun on the back of her neck. The hair blew like a fine dark cloud round her face, and out here, away from the background of the frowsty little room, she looked as though she were a new creature, and he could see instantly how once she had been young, and her beauty had made his father fall in love with her.
She said: ‘Jan, Jan, mon petit,’ gently, almost as though she really loved him, and she sat herself down on the cobbles which were hot with the sunshine.
She said: ‘Is it true that you are going away?’ If she had not been in that gentle mood, he could not have told her, but now he confessed.
‘I want to see the world, Maman.’
‘It is a hard, cold place,’ she told him.
‘But how do you know? You who have always lived here in Villefranche?’
She said: ‘I know,’ slowly, and her tired hands, stained and old with work, were folded in her lap.
He said stubbornly: ‘The young always want their chance, and that is why I am going away.’
‘But us, Jan, what will become of us?’
‘You have my father,’ he reminded her.
For, when he had been a little boy, his father had had to work for them all. It was true that now when he was in his late teens there were other children, for his mother was always having children, and there were a crowd of them; Babette, and Henri, Marie and Alice, Andre and Roby, a whole tribe who clung to her skirts and, growing past that age, went to school, and in their spare time ran errands, and so gradually grew up. This year Roby would be old enough to go out with the boats.
‘But you are the eldest one,’ she said.
‘You cannot tie me here for ever.’
She said: ‘No, no I suppose not,’ rather tiredly. ‘You want to see the world, and I wanted to see the world too; I had my dreams when I was young, but dreams are poor things, they never came to very much.’
They all had a right to their dreams, and he told her so!
She said: ‘I was so in love with your father once upon a time. I believed that he was a hero, and that I was a princess. It was that room, that dirty ugly little room; you cannot put beauty in a cage. It was having no money, and life being so hard. Once I did not mind if I sewed my fingers to the bone for him as I darned the nets; then I did mind. Oh, if I had my time again!’
‘It is because time does not offer itself twice,’ he reproached her, ‘that I want to go away.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
He sat there talking to her, and he never remembered having been able to talk to her in this intimate way before. He told her of dreams, and knew that he must have inherited them from her. She too had once been young and had danced here, light of body and of heart. Then she had been a bride. But soon the children had started coming, one after the other, and her body grew tired; her mind changed too, because she realized that she was now in a blind alley, into which dreams could only flash for a second, but never live. Once she too had had that same wander thirst of Jan’s, which aches to see the world beyond this sea and these mountains.
‘Go, my son,’ she said, ‘and be happy!’
He knew at this particular moment that he loved her, and was sorry that he had not known her better. Just as when he was a little boy, the only one for three years, he could remember toddling along these very cobbles, and holding fast to her full skirts, and knowing that she was a star in his world, and looking for her smile. Then he had loved her too. He loved her that same way now, suddenly, for a moment.
‘Love will come to you, mon petit,’ she said, ‘for you are almost a man. Love will come, and maybe it will be kind to you, maybe it will be hard! Be brave. Do not set too much store by the smile of a woman, for it is not really great. Go far, but come back to Villefranche in the end.’
‘I will,’ he said.
He would always remember sitting here beside the sea with his heels kicking the stone wall of the bund, and the cap dark against the water beyond, and the little fishing boats coming jauntily back across the water, with white frills in their wake. He would always remember his glimpse of her just for the moment when they had sat here together, so that he saw her as she had been as a young woman, and not as a hard shrew, which she had become through hunger and weariness, and the continual grind of one hard day after another.
The next day he started for Amalia.
II
The journey was very tedious, he had had no idea that it would take so long, and he travelled in a carriage which was like a cattle truck; he sat on the hard board seat, gripping his luggage with his hands, and surrounded by men and women, crammed into the tiny space, some chattering, some crying, some laughing, but all hot, and anxious to get the uncomfortable journey done.
The world flashed past the windows of the railway carriage, and he stared out at it in surprise. He had believed that Villefranche was the only really beautiful place, but here were fields, and mountains, and a warmer sea. Here was Rome, with its aged splendour so that he almost caught his breath when he saw the hulks of grey ruins which started many miles before they arrived, and showed how great a world had once been here, and how finely chiselled this love of art.
Eventually they came to the Adriatic.
Amalia was undiscovered in those days. It was on the threshold of adventure. He thought of it afterwards as being a little pearl of a town, nestling into the niche between two green hills. The hills were white with flowers, for the big-eyed daisies were out, and were laid in a shimmering silver cloud upon the face of those hills. The village itself was snug. There were winding cobbled streets, and oleanders in blossom of cream flecked with pink; the scent of magnolias came from their great clumsy flowers and hung like an incense over the place. There was the Golden Galleon, clean and lovely, and so different from the hotel, so that it almost took Jan’s breath away. Here was nothing of Madame, big-busted in her little box-like office surrounded by glass, with the parrot set in its cage, surrounded by old, tired books; he always remarked Madame and her bottle of the best cognac concealed in the lowest drawer of the writing table, labelled disconcertingly, ‘L’addition’.
Here there was nothing that had been so prominent at the hotel at Villefranche, which had always been a trifle passé, for this had a certain freshness, a new outlook, and Jan felt as though he had opened a door, and had stepped into a new world, which was gaily exciting. Here was courtesy among the staff; none of Madame’s shrieking (she was as excitable as a pea-hen when roused and would scream with the best to get her own way). Jan liked the restfulness of Amalia.
He was shown into a tiny room, a mere cubicle, but it was spotlessly clean and he liked the scrubbed boards. He was given fresh clothes too. There were short
white jackets in cool drill, and nothing of the ridiculous long coat with the streaming tails, which had reminded him so often of the swallow. The trousers were green cloth the colour of young leaves, and they fitted well, also they were new. Madame had only handed on the trousers which had been the late lamented husband’s, and he had bought them second-hand, for he had been an incredibly mean man.
Here a man could live, felt Jan, and have confidence in himself. He knew that he liked it from the moment that he arrived, even though he was wearied with the long journey, and had a headache, and his eyes had grown tired with watching the ever-moving panorama.
‘You will be happy, Jan?’ asked the Padrone.
He nodded.
Suddenly he knew that he liked it so much that had he said so aloud, he would have wept. For this was the new world, and it was brave with beauty.
III
He accustomed himself to it at once, because everything here was so easy. The restaurant was large, in coral and lime, and always crowded. The people who came were courteous. They left large tips, so large that he bought himself a savings box and began to store against the time when he should be able to buy a restaurant of his own, for he had ambitions. It might be hard to run a place, but one of these days he would run it, and the money was his for the asking.
He liked the Maestro who played on the dais.
Every evening at seven the little Maestro would come strutting into where the pianist waited for him. He wore a pot hat and had a little goatee beard and a coat which was almost like a skirt too. Matina helped him. Matina was not beautiful, but always so very gentle that it gave her the impression of beauty. Her hair was dark as silk, and she wore it as silk, parted in the middle and smoothed down on either side of her face, folded into a knot on her neck! Her eyes were the kind eyes of a madonna, but her cheeks were colourless, and her lips pale. Nobody had ever heard Matina speak a single unkind word, and she had studied so hard to play the piano, going without bread so that she might learn.
