Journal:
Now that I’ve described myself, the apartment and the people in and around it, I feel rather at a loss. There’s the frame—or perhaps the labyrinth in which I wander. Do you think my life narrow? Are most people’s lives more rich and full? Perhaps you want to know if I have friends or if we go out into society? The answer is no to the first part of the question. I was an only child and I don’t care for friends much; that is, the kind of friends one went to school with and with whom one has long, intimate talks. I’ve heard that in America women go out with their friends to lunch and then they all play cards. They even go to bars, two women together in the middle of the afternoon, or so I’ve heard. I’m curious about America, but I don’t think I’d like that much. Anyway, French husbands like to eat at home and I don’t play cards. About society, I’m not so sure of my answer. Sometimes we have people for dinner and sometimes we go out. We go to the theatre too, and the opera and so forth. Pierre quite often has to review films, but I don’t go with him then as they are never the ones I want to see.
I intend to write about the cold spell today. It’s the last chance I’ll get to talk about the old Rose, the flower blooming peacefully away in domesticity with a little music thrown in by way of soil food, and a few withered petals caused, no doubt, by the dry wind of Simon’s talk.
As I write this page it seems to me that through all my words a soft breath is breathing. Do you feel it? In—out—like a man who is tired—valiantly tired, as they say—who rolls over and sleeps with his arm up over his head, whose temple is pressed by the round smooth muscle. Oh I’ve seen that, I can tell you, and it’s a sight to melt the marrow of a woman’s bones.
Anyway, the cold spell came when everybody was congratulating himself on having had an easy winter. They expected spring next. Then one morning it was freezing. The papers were full of it. They said it was the lowest temperature in generations and, according to their politics, blamed the atom experiments of Russia or America. Tramps were found frozen stiff in the streets, old people and babies died in heatless garrets and, as I’ve said, the pipes burst.
Here we spent a lot of time trying to keep warm. Of course we had no water, neither hot nor cold, and Bernice and I never came upstairs without bringing up a jug from the yard fountain. There the faucet always worked. I had a tall blue jug, a brau as it is called, which I used for our basin so that Pierre and I could wash. It was funny because before the frost I had filled this brau with weeping-willow branches for our room. They were just at that yellowish-greenish stage which goes away if you look too close and yet is the brightest thing you can imagine. It seemed impossible that winter could break the pledge of those branches.
I got another petrol stove too, but I returned it because the hardware-store man was out of petrol. Luckily we have a little cellar in the basement and a reserve of wood and coal, because the coal vendor was all out of everything too. So I banked the fire at night and I became expert at getting the most out of it. We roasted potatoes in the embers, but neither Pierre nor Simon would eat them. Simon said it was a nasty American habit but of course I am half American and I like that sort of thing. Mark—my father, if you remember—used to cook that way; fish and meat and shellfish; delicious. Anyway Bernice wasn’t so fussy and she and I used to eat the potatoes together around six o’clock when for all our efforts the cold came in through every pore of the house.
On the second day, just as I was burning my fingers trying to get one of the potatoes out of the fire, I happened to look out of the window and saw in the failing light the burlap square of La Cigale’s window-door. How grim and dark it looked and how icy! She didn’t have electricity up there and the thought of her all alone in the bitter darkness struck me painfully. But as I think I told you—or did I?—I am rather timid. I hold myself back from many impulses because of it. That is, I used to; now I am bolder, much bolder.
Boldness! There’s a subject to talk on. It’s one of the qualities I most admire in the world. It gives me pleasure simply to know that it exists. A man should be bold. If he has no other virtue than that he is still saved. I don’t know if Pierre is bold. Simon is insolent, but that’s something else. What I have just written is bold because it betrays me. And it makes my heart ache. Do you know what that’s like? They say it’s not true medically, but I don’t think they’re right. I think they’ll discover that they’re wrong one of these days. Hearts do ache. It almost makes you sick with pain and then sometimes they beat and miss as though they were remembering a breathless thing.
ROSE laid down her pen. She pressed her hand over the heart in question. With one of those clear pictures that are different from reality only in time value, she reviewed the cold spell again in its minutest detail. Then, in a slightly larger and more flowing hand, she continued:
Journal:
Anyway, timidity prevented me from going up there that evening, but the next day was even colder so I took action. I wound a big plaid shawl around myself, went up to the balcony and rapped on the glass behind the burlap.
Inside, the old woman was sitting perfectly immobile on her bed. She might have been already frozen and fixed there to be found in the thaw. “Won’t you come down and sit by our fire?” I asked with my own politeness sounding ridiculous in my ears, as though I were rehearsing a speech learned from parents. For a moment La Cigale made no reply and for all I know might have been too numb to do so. Then, breaking the icy silence, an accordion gave its first wheeze and she was brought to life.
“He has a stove, that one!” she cried hoarsely.
By way of answer a musette tango slid into the air and I saw La Cigale’s eyes stand out from their sockets with a blurred shine as if she would have liked to weep but couldn’t make the tears come out. I fought down a shudder of repulsion as I opened the door and held it for her to come through. She walked haughtily despite those unshed jealous tears and she came to our flat and sat at our fire. Her attitude was a curious mixture of condescension and suspicion, rather like that of a caged wild animal.
The cold spell lasted on and the papers now described it as a fight between Siberian and American winds. On the fourth day, and while the Siberian winds were still victorious, La Cigale had her revenge.
“He’s run out of coal,” she said when I came up to fetch her in the morning. Yes, she had to be fetched each morning and by me personally.
“Why doesn’t he ask the landlady to lend him a little?” I asked without much interest.
“Because he hasn’t paid his rent, that’s why,” said La Cigale, who was probably in the same position. Her lips, on which the dark paste had congealed, parted and she grinned. “He doesn’t play his accordion now,” she said.
Something in the way she said this made me respond in an unexpected manner. It was so spiteful and yet it had in it a primitive purity which lifted it above the kinder sayings of other people. To her surprise I shouted with laughter. But after a minute I stopped. “I must go and fetch him too in that case,” I said.
It wasn’t far to go and in front of his door, at the outer edge of the roof, the wind bit savagely at the room. Like a mountain hut, frail and exposed, it seemed to sway with the recurrent blasts. I had a sense of peril as one does in high wastelands and I felt dizzy so that I forgot to knock and just pushed open the door. He was standing up near his bed on which he had laid his instrument. His room, larger than the others, had two doors: one through which I had entered and which ended the balcony, and the other leading out onto a flat roof-top. The draft whistled through the cracks but could not animate the icy, still air of the chamber. I saw that his face was pinched and almost blue.
“You mustn’t stay here,” I cried. “You must come down to our flat at once. You’ll get sick if you don’t.”
With numbed acceptance he prepared to follow me, first stooping to pick up his accordion.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t like accordion music. You must come without it.”
That brought him up sharp. A look of outraged masculinity crossed his features. “Oh, so it’s like that is it?” he growled. “Well then, go back to your fire and leave me alone!”
What could I do? I was exasperated, but those hands red with cold and still faintly groping for his spurned instrument touched me. I had the impression he wanted to stamp his feet for circulation but was too proud to do so in my presence. “Oh come on then and bring it if you must,” I said crossly, and I recall that I threw out my hand in a gesture of irritated surrender.
At this a winning smile showed me the triangular set of his bones. “Tiens,” he said, “I didn’t realize that you were so pretty!”
SIX
Journal:
I wanted to show myself up a little, to expose myself, to make it easier for us both to recognize Rose. I thought perhaps the cold spell, writing about it I mean, would do it. Telling for instance about how I laughed at what La Cigale said about his being cold and how my father’s neighborliness, which I’ve inherited, won out. Were there two sides to my nature even then? I realize that all my life I’ve had a special kind of sense of humor. At first it wasn’t noticeable because I was still a child and all children have that kind more or less. It was only later that I noticed I still had it unchanged. I became aware of it through the reactions of other people. They were surprised. They didn’t see why I laughed at those things and so unrestrainedly. It made them uneasy and it didn’t go with what I seemed to be at all; with the studious Rose whose professors, although they thought she had promise, wished she would show a little temperament.
Pierre used to be almost shocked by my sense of humor and he was hurt by it. I recall one time, shortly after we married, there was a deep snowfall. We were still in the honeymoon stage and one night when he had to work late I met him at his office and we went out to the market place to have something to eat. You know the central market of Paris, don’t you? Les Halles, as it is called. Enormous sheds with space all about them for the trucks to draw up. Around this space are restaurants of all sorts and some of them famous. It’s a picturesque place to go to, what with the various costumes worn by the marketeers. Butchers take the prize in my opinion. They are dressed in white like charlatan surgeons and stained all over with great red patches. They smell of blood too, and that’s sickening. Well, there was a whole group of these butchers in the restaurant we chose, standing at the bar and drinking. One had to pass them to get to the tables beyond. Pierre is fastidious about some things. Did I tell you? He can’t stand dirt and smells, which is strange when you consider he was brought up on a farm. Perhaps that’s why he left it. Anyway, just as he got to the group the wind must have veered and he got a real whiff of them. He threw back his head—literally, he shied like a horse. It was very obvious, but what made it worse was that he slipped on the floor which was tracked with snow. He fell sprawling with the same bad-smell expression on his face.
I couldn’t stand it. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. The big veins on my neck felt as though they would burst and all the butchers laughed with me just as hard. We were convulsed, and to cap everything a little dwarf who is the doorman there ran over and pretended to help Pierre up. Dwarfs are often clowns, I’ve noticed. Kings were right about them. This one certainly was and he made the most of the situation.
Pierre wouldn’t speak to me afterward and do you know, I felt horribly sad. Not because he wouldn’t speak to me but for some other reason that I don’t understand. Perhaps you think that if Pierre couldn’t laugh too, he should have reacted in some way; tripped me up, for instance, or waited until we got home and given me a hiding. Was that why I felt so sad? Because of his lack of reaction? A laugh should be turned, I guess. But maybe it was something else—something in me. Anyway I lay awake for a long time that night and just sighed and I thought of the snow too as it lay on the streets and around Les Halles; so thick and white and so oblivious with its star-like flakes. I felt it falling, falling, covering up the grime of Paris, lying on the tops of cars and trucks and on the bloody shoulders of butchers and surgeons.
All this is only an example so that you’ll know. And that kind of thing didn’t happen often. Yet perhaps that was why, when La Cigale said that about her neighbor, I was touched. A responding chord had quivered in both our breasts.
When I came back with him La Cigale wasn’t pleased at all. She gave us a baleful look and deliberately pulled up her chair so that no one else could get the full heat of the fire. She was reading, or looking at, a big scrapbook. She had been poring over this book constantly through sternly imposing glasses, but she never offered to show it to me. She acted as though each page were of absorbing interest; that is to say, containing long articles in her honor from her professional days. For all I knew it might have.
Now, as she sat square in front of my fire she muttered something about our having to put wax in our ears. My new guest took her up directly.
“It’s as good as that caterwauling you used to do, grandmother, before I was born!” he said with a laugh, and he walked up to the fire with that preening gait I told you about.
She turned up her face to hiss at him, “Insolent animal!” And she continued in dramatic tones, “I was a concert singer!”
“Yes,” he agreed, mocking, “concerts in cheap cafes.”
I realized almost at once that despite the rudeness of their words there was no malice in them, not profoundly. They were enjoying themselves and each other in their own way and they understood. I felt happy to have them there, warm and quarrelsome like that, and I was smiling when Bernice came in from marketing. Her skin was blue-red from the cold, a sort of neon color.
