🫀 "The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose"by Theodora Keogh

—W. B. YEATS

The Rose of the World

ONE

Journal:

My name is Rose. It doesn’t really suit me. I’m not the Rose type of girl; but I like it anyway. A rose—fresh as a rose—the flower of morning dew with the drops on its petals as clear as crystal, pure and immaculate as a rose—Rosemund, rose of the world.

Roses can wither, of course; their petals can grow black and sear. In this case one puts them in a bowl and they give out a musty fragrance that recalls grandmothers in country houses—or what one has read about them, anyway.

Did I say I was a girl? It seems to me I did. I get confused. I’m not a girl, you know (and by the way, who is you? Perhaps I’ll have to go into that later on); I’m a woman. I’m nearing thirty already and I’ve been married seven years. The number seven always sounds magic, doesn’t it?—like those stories in which children are turned into slaves by witches. They give the children a brew which tastes suave and transforms them into ugly shapes and there they are for seven years. When they get back home no one knows they’ve been away because living dolls have been put in their places.

There is a doll in this house, a bewitched doll who eats and talks and lies beside my husband in his bed. Sometimes he makes love to it and dolls don’t like that. They aren’t made for it, you see.

`Again that “you”! But who are you? Are you my father, dying away slowly on the Mediterranean shore? I think not. No, really, poor old man, setting up his final canvases and trying once again to pit himself against God. God? Well, perhaps that’s who you are—or should it be “thou”?

I’m tired already and I haven’t even mentioned the bugler. How his face quivered in the market place that day and how long ago that was! It’s fall now, but it was spring that day.

No, I must tell you more about myself first: thy servant Rose. Do you know what I look like? So-so; not pretty and not ugly either. Or rather that’s the way I was last spring. Do you remember? I had the same hair: short, black, girl’s hair, with a barrette on one side the way I’ve always had since the age of one and a half. But my eyes were blue then, not purple-black the way they sometimes are now, and my skin was sallow, ivory if you like. It’s not sallow any more, as you can see, with that staining flush on the cheekbone; a dull sort of flush that looks like badly put on rouge.

Anyway I live in Paris at 28 Rue des Grands Augustins and my father is American; an expatriate, as some people call them. That’s why I’m writing in English, which nobody else around here can read. My mother was a concert singer; a Jewess with eyes the color of mine. But she was beautiful, beautiful! Her long, black hair came to her haunches, to her full haunches, which swayed as she walked. I’ve not inherited her figure. My own is (was?) tight and muscular and I’m small and compact. That’s all, I believe, except that I married Pierre Flamand seven years ago when I got out of music school. He’s a journalist and I ought to say a writer, too. Should I tell about him or does it feel too uncomfortable? Perhaps I could skip him for the moment and go on about the bugler. You see, I have to tell about him because when I saw him I was still one person—there was no doll or anything—and it’s only by using him as a sort of landmark that I can see behind him to that united Rose Flamand.

ROSE ceased writing and rubbed her forehead fretfully. As she sat thus with a lined tablet in front of her, she looked more like a schoolgirl than the woman she claimed to be. Her flexible hand (her hands and feet were the most limber parts of her body) held the pen roundly and there was a home-washed sheen on her bent head. Rose led a double life. Sometimes the strain of it was like a rift in her brain and at other times she forgot about it altogether and simply lived whatever life she was in at the moment. It was only lately that these forgetful times had begun to make her afraid. Now she sighed and continued to write.

Journal:

On certain days, clear fall days like this, I try and think back to the moment when everything—my life and my head and my feelings—was joined. And I try to remember the bugler.

You see, it was the bugler who started the whole thing. No, of course that’s not correct. He was there at the start, that’s it. He was the first symbol, the first warning, as it were. Have you ever reflected on first warnings? I mean, how it’s impossible to heed them because one doesn’t know what they are warnings against. Or perhaps something inside, way down inside, knows. I dare say it does, but that’s not enough for most people. I am like one of those antique heroes, Theseus I think his name was, who had to unwind a clue through a labyrinth. He wanted to discover and to conquer the monster at its center. I too am trying to hold a thread, but I must find it first, and around me on every side the walls of the maze are twisting and turning. Because my thread, unlike his, is already laid down; I laid it down myself. Now if I can only rediscover it in the darkness, isolate it, and hold it in my hand—why then, the monster will be there waiting for me. Pathetic or terrible, I don’t care so long as I can see it at last face to face.

That’s why I’m trying to think of the important things. And it’s important for me to think of the bugler; how he stood in the brief spring sunlight with the rest of the band and blew.

I was coming out of the bakery when I heard the music. I had gone into the shop while it was pouring rain, but when I left it the sun shone and there was a band playing.

Do such things happen in all the market places of the world, or is it only Paris? Nobody was surprised. They never are at anything. They were busy hurrying to surround the players and to take their ease in the rare sunshine. I followed along and I recall trying not to march in step with the beat, but of course that’s impossible. I even found myself marking time with my long stick of bread. I too was pleased with the sun. Anyone would be after a Paris winter, and I jostled myself into the front row.

The band was dressed in green; a uniform of some sort, although it was impossible to know whom they represented or why they were there at all. The bugler was standing a little apart from the rest with his cap on the back of his head. He must have been very young, for there was an adolescent boniness in his hands, and in his wrists, which were too long for his jacket. His thick hair sprang from his cap and he was straining his lungs. A hundred swollen veins quivered in throat, cheek, temple and brow. They lent a sort of gay mobility to his face. Only the eyes were rigid. They had a glassy look, as of someone in pain, and were tightly fitted into their sockets. And I thought those tight, stiff eyes were looking into mine. Of course everybody tends to think that. They want so to be signaled out and set apart in some safe way. But I really felt sure of it and even the play of his veins and muscles seemed to be telling something to me alone.

Then, as suddenly as they had started, the band stopped playing. The musicians smiled or bowed slightly and after a brief conference they moved off down the Rue Mazarin in the direction of the river.

As I walked home the clouds gathered again and my bread was half broken and felt all limp. Large, cold drops began to fall. It was as though all the sunlight, all the lovely feeling of spring, had been centered around the band and had followed them on their way toward the river. There was nothing left for me but to put up the collar of my coat. I have a camel’s-hair coat and it’s very soft. I like to feel it on my ears. I was rubbing alternately one side of my head and then the other against the collar as I walked along, and I wonder if any intimation came to me then.

Did something inside me stir as I went, first on the windy St. André des Arts and then on my own street, the crooked, the narrow Rue des Grands Augustins? Did something try to warn me that my path was dividing? Perhaps, but I was dense. I was thinking of my warm collar, of the icy drops of rain that had fallen on my nose. And yet the bugler was there now, fixed forever, a two-armed signpost in the middle of the road. Beyond him the same road seemed to stretch, broad and single. I could not see the hair-thin rift that widened slowly, slowly; the gap where, over the hill, grass would soon grow. No, not until later. Then I saw. Now, today, it’s only by thinking of the bugler that I can picture once again the old Rose of last March. The Rose who lived and still does at 28 Rue des Grands Augustins, and who climbed to the fifth floor that day.

Bernice let me in. She’s our maid and we’ve had her for several years. She’s very nice and in those days we used to laugh together a lot—giggle, rather. She’s a Celt, from Brittany, with short, reddish, haystack hair and she’s one of those people whose face and body are of different ages. When you see her from the back, walking or doing something active, she’s like a girl—an awkward-age, girl-scout sort of girl—and then you see her lined, weather-reddened face. Of course that kind of skin is too fragile to last without care and Bernice thinks a good scrubbing is all it ever needs.

I told her about the band. “It was horrid really,” I said, “but it sounded nice when I heard it.”

She agreed. “I know, it depends on the time and the place.”

But now I must tell you that when she said that, those words about the time and place, I got a funny feeling, a sort of thrill, like when, as the saying goes, a wild goose flies over one’s grave. Or perhaps it wasn’t her words at all that gave me this feeling, but the sound of an accordion coming from one of the attic rooms, a sound which sets my teeth on edge. I hate that instrument as much as I love the piano.

I was still standing there at the door and feeling the remains of that thrill when Pierre came in with Simon.

TWO

Journal:

Yesterday morning when I started writing this journal (but is that the word for it?), I did so with the express purpose of rereading it. You see, one has to remember what one has put down. There it is in one’s own writing. I write a bold hand, I am told, not a very womanly one, but with traces of childishness in it. Simon analyzed it and of course you don’t know who Simon is, or at least I haven’t told you yet. You don’t know much about Pierre yet either, except that he’s my husband. He married Rose Latham seven years ago at the Mairie du Septième. That’s our quarter.

Pierre was almost the same then as he is today except that he has a stomach now, not a big one though—and he always says it could go away in a fortnight. He was rather heavy-set to begin with; solid and fresh-looking like the country boy he is. I used to walk in the Luxembourg gardens with him hand in hand after we met. Do you know that garden? There is a fountain that blows slightly dirty water in the wind. I liked to kiss his mouth, which is rather soft. The lower lip sticks out a little and is red, much redder than mine. Pierre has pink cheeks, too. Why does that fact hurt me now? Can you tell me? I think of those trusting pink cheeks and my heart is squeezed, wrung with a protective pity, a regret too.

Regret! Ah, there’s a word to write.

Anyway I can think back clearly to the time when I met Pierre. How comfortable I felt with him! I was still in the conservatory, planning to be a concert pianist, the way my parents had always wished. Pierre was just finishing at the university and he was going to write a book (he’s still writing it, by the way). Marrying Pierre didn’t seem like a break at all, just a continuation of life as I had always known it; the quiet, studious, wise life of an artist’s only child, more liberal in one way than other children’s, but sterner too, since one may not accept the everyday values and ideas of companions of one’s age, nor those of the world either, for that matter. And of course one is usually with the grownups. One gets used to them and likes them better. Artists don’t keep children out of their lives and they don’t create a special universe on their account as do most other parents. They don’t have to, I guess.

Anyway Pierre and I were going to continue living that life. He would write and I would go on being a pianist and we would have clever children, two of them or three. I pictured it that way. But now I see Pierre didn’t even know what I was talking about. Perhaps he thought all girls spoke like that. Perhaps they do; I mean they do want not to change. Things just automatically get different. I realized it almost at once in my case. Yet today, now, is the first time I’ve admitted the real reason; or rather, I’ve not yet done so but I will. Here goes: Pierre is not an artist! He is a hard-working man whose job is with a publication. I think my father, Mark as I call him, knew this all along, but Mark would never tell me something like that. He would think I should make my own decisions as he has brought me up to do, and I suppose he thought that when it was a question of my life, my being wrong was better than his being right. When I asked him how he liked Pierre he said Pierre seemed very nice, very dependable.

Anyway being an artist or not isn’t important in a marriage and although Pierre isn’t one and doesn’t consider me one either, we have been very happy. You know we have. We didn’t have children as it turned out, but we might yet, who knows? We both want them certainly.

I am talking now as if that doll weren’t there in bed with Pierre. Is that a vulgar way of putting it? My values seem to be lost or twisted, or perhaps I never had any but didn’t notice before. Pierre’s hair is soft and fine. It’s not curly and crisp. Nor does he ever put cologne on it like . . . But why do I say that? Heavens, how my head aches! Not in back—in front, between my eyes. I understand now why people frown—when there is nothing wrong with their sight, I mean; something contracts there and makes them. When I see someone with a heavy frown on their face coming down the street toward me I wonder if they feel the way I do: as though something were dividing that they had to keep together—solder, as it were, by the strength of their own muscles. It’s a pity it aches so, because I want to write more. I want to write about Simon for instance. Oh don’t misunderstand! Simon isn’t the one that—the one who . . .

ROSE, who had been sitting writing at the table, got up abruptly and stared out the long window at the gloom of the courtyard.

The Flamand apartment wound snaillike around this yard. One might say that the large part of the snail’s shell was the big studio living room in which Rose stood. The rest of the body was composed of the kitchen and of two small rooms looking out on the street. A terrace completed the circle by making a bridge from the inner back door to the outer one on the public stairway. Thus the visitor could stand on the landing and, without moving, could ring either bell, front or back.

Above the Flamands were three small, windowless rooms, which were not a floor at all, but simply carved into the roof of the building. To reach them one had to go up the stairs and out onto a narrow balcony. Heatless and waterless, they were illumined nonetheless by the first rays of the morning sun. Often, from the long window, or from the terrace still in shadow, Rose would look up in envy to see those three doorways aglow. Bernice slept in one of the rooms and beside her an old woman who was called “La Cigale” or “The Grasshopper” after Aesop’s fable. La Cigale was supposed to have been a famous singer in her youth and to have had rich lovers. Now she was poor and, having no curtains, covered the glass top of her door with burlap.