“Ah, good morning, Jason,” she said cheerfully.
When I heard that his name was Jason I was delighted. It made everything just right somehow, as though there were a little fair in the room; a fête foraine such as travels all over France. One could just see them, both with their trailers and their various claims to renown. Over his door would be painted: “Jason, Hero of ancient Greece, with his magic accordion.” Perhaps it would go on to say that he had rediscovered the lost secret of Homer’s art or had caused Helen’s fall from virtue. They love to mix things up like that and talk about the high-sounding names of antiquity.
There’s only one more thing I have to say about the cold spell and that’s about the way those two behaved when night fell—when at last it came after so much waiting. But I don’t think I can do it. I feel confused. That part of my brain I told you about, that rift—well, I feel it. They say we are all made in two pieces, sewn up the middle of our bodies; and there does seem to be a suture. It’s traced by the spine, by the muscles, by faint lines of hair, by mistakes too: harelips and strange openings.
Yet only one side contains a heart.
FOR the first time that season Bernice had built a fire and Rose now went up to it, put her forearms up on the mantel and leaned against them the uncertain brow of which she spoke. Then what she could and could not remember burned there among the coals; what she wished or did not wish to forget, what cleared her head or made it spin, what eased her heart or made it ache. The coals pulsed and devoured her sensations in their midst, as perhaps they had devoured Jason’s dreams or La Cigale’s past glories when the two of them had sat there side by side last winter waiting for night to come.
After a while and with a grimace, Rose went to the piano and started to play. For an hour or so she abandoned herself, half closing her eyes and as if listening, not to the music but to some higher, thinner sound which the music might liberate. Upon her lifted face the heavy frown was partly smoothed away. All at once however, she rose and went into the kitchen.
“Bernice!” she called urgently.
Bernice was sitting at her table, sewing the hem of the kitchen curtains. She sewed like a sailor, as though she were using a palming needle, and when she looked up at Rose her eyes were blue stabs.
“Bernice, what did my husband say when he found those two in front of the fire during the cold spell?”
“You were there, Madame Flamand, you should know.”
“But I don’t remember,” said Rose humbly. “I just know Pierre came in with Simon and that’s all.”
“Well, they had lunch here in the kitchen,” said Bernice, “so your husband didn’t see much of them and then in the evening you know how they were.” Bernice spoke in a moody voice and she kept on plying the needle, using her whole arm at every stitch.
Rose stood there waiting apparently for more to come and after a while she was rewarded. Bernice spoke again, still moodily, in the voice of a woman whose ancestors have lived by the sea, who knows in her blood that there are powers one cannot fight. “Yes, I think you must know well enough how they were at night since you yourself—since I have seen that same look on you.” For was the night not like the sea, a devouring magnet before which one could only submit?
As for Rose, these words must have been the ones for which she had waited because she hurried back to the studio, her body taut as though for muscular effort. She wrote:
Journal:
Those two stayed in this room together three entire days so I watched them. They were bored; warm but bored. Yet what would they have been doing otherwise? Neither went out much during the day. Jason played his interminable tunes and La Cigale stayed behind her burlap, presumably looking at her scrapbook. They didn’t change their habits just for me you may be sure. Perhaps they were always bored in the daytime. It was only at night that they could live. They waited for dark, those two. They thirsted for it like birds with gaping beaks, and at its merest approach they would look at the window with eyes that were strangely alike. They shifted restlessly in their seats. Then, at a given moment, simultaneously but separate and distinct from each other, they would mutter their adieus and hasten out into the icy streets. They would go their mysterious ways in the dark.
SEVEN
Journal:
Today is one of those thrilling fall days. The clouds are a brilliant white and never cross the sun and the blue air mixes with the wind. I went for a walk this morning and it did me good. I walked by the Seine and saw the Garde Républicain trotting along the Quai on horseback. Behind them and bringing up the rear was a little boy astride a stick. He was the most impressive of all, with his wild eyes, and his imaginary horse was more beautiful surely than any of the real ones. A mysterious note was added because he hadn’t quite decided whether he was the rider or the steed. I could tell this by the way he arched his neck and tossed his head and snorted.
Pretty soon a tired-looking woman called him to her side; monotonous and ordinary life that is forever calling her children in from their best games. But some don’t obey; some, like the bugler, for instance. And like the gypsies Pierre and I saw a week later when we went out to lunch with his family.
It was rainy again and chilly; the endless drizzle of a Paris spring when it wants to show up the songs written about it. We were going out to my in-laws’, which is a thing I detest. They are all so good, so heavy-jowled and earnest, and they turn Pierre into one of themselves so that he doesn’t seem like a young aspiring writer any more or even a journalist—or even young for that matter. He is just another Flamand: fresh-colored, stout, and devouring the roast. His brother and his brother’s wife would be there with their enormous two-year-old child all done up in white and everybody would once again try and understand Pierre’s work and why he had chosen such an unhealthy profession. Meanwhile I would be expected to talk about domestic things with the women.
I sound horrid about them, especially as I know they try their best to like me. But they can’t succeed any more than I can with them, since it’s hard to like a vacuum and that’s how we appear to each other. So I am just polite and respectful, that’s all.
Anyway, we started out about ten as the Flamands live quite a ways out of Paris. Pierre has a little car and we went in that. It leaked over my ankles; icy drops which combined unpleasantly with the heat coming up through the floorboard. I felt as though I were catching a cold too. The Flamands live just outside a village and as we were maneuvering through its back streets a band of gypsies came by. They were breaking camp, I suppose. A horse-drawn van with slats for sides led the way, clattering across the railroad tracks. Through the slats peered various mournful animal faces and behind the van a pair of camels was being pulled along unwillingly. They were mangy and had disagreeable expressions, but then they always do as far as I’m concerned. Five or six riders trotted laughing in their wake with straight backs and legs dangling.
“They look happy,” I remarked to Pierre, who had drawn up to the side of the road.
A few seconds later a last straggler came galloping along, riding bareback. It was a young woman with long, tangled, greasy hair and a sullen mouth. Her eyes, still full of sleep, glanced at us sideways.
Later, when I was sitting in front of my meat, I thought of them again and the words came into my mind, “They are like that.” And it was at about the same moment that I realized that my mother-in-law had a distinct smell. She was serving us, stretching out her arm over the table, so that’s why I noticed. It was a kept-in sort of odor that “good” material had altered. Gypsies must smell different—strong but different.
ROSE bit her lip thoughtfully as she looked down at what she had just been writing. Then she burst out laughing, showing to the empty room her small, white, even teeth. Yet as she laughed her eyes remained aloof from joy. Enveloped in their crystal waters they glittered between half-closed lids.
“Yes,” she murmured, “but what’s that got to do with it?”
Closing her journal she put it amongst the stacks of sheet music as usual and then sat down to play. But every note she struck sent an unpleasant shiver up her spine as though it were false. An almost unbearable desire came over her to play a certain popular tune. It was like an itch or like a burning spot somewhere inside which only the playing of this tune would ease. But when she finally gave in to it her face was contracted and a feverish flush came up on her skin.
Afterward she could not sit there anymore. She wandered past the kitchen where Bernice, stuffing a fowl, did not look up, and then into her bedroom.
Just opposite the back door to the terrace, this room was fairly small. With its sloping roof and checked curtains, it resembled in some respects the girlhood room in which Rose had spent many happy hours as a child. All her books were here, French and English, and she had only to look at their worn covers to find herself at that particular age when she had read the book for the first time. Some dated to the days before she could read and these brought back her mother’s soft, accented voice and the thrilling fairyland in which children so perilously wander. And was not she, the grown-up Rose, wandering there once again?
Opening a volume at random, she saw a pressed flower in its leaves, but she could not recall having picked or put it there. Nonetheless a painful throbbing agitated her breast and her throat, and suddenly she cried out almost with horror, “It’s the old woman’s flower!” She brushed it off the page and when it fell on the floor, stamped on it again and again as some people do with insects.
As she was thus occupied, she heard a ring at the outer back door and, glad to escape her own sensations, she ran across the terrace and opened it. A thin, dark girl stood there with a sack over her shoulders. Black locks escaping from a scarf around her head gave her a gypsy look as did a certain sly expression in her long eyes. But her face was marked unbecomingly with large, pale freckles. In a whining voice the girl told Rose that she had come from Lourdes with sheets to sell. “Pure linen thread,” she said vehemently and before Rose could comment she had stepped inside the door, undone her sack, and spread one of them out on the terrace.
It was an ordinary linen sheet of coarse quality and although as yet unbleached, it would grow whiter and softer with every washing. But the price, as the girl was now quoting it, was too high.
“I can do better than that right here in Paris,” said Rose, although this was probably not true. As a matter of fact she was undecided, or, rather, incapable of making a decision. The girl observed this and said quickly, “Look, Madame, I will leave it with you for a while. I’m not leaving Paris until tomorrow.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to make you come all the way back up here,” said Rose.
The girl smiled and the sly look of her eyes was thus accentuated. It lent piquancy to her unhealthy face which was like that of a young girl exhausted by a religious adolescence. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m staying with my friend up there on the top floor.” She jerked her head at the attic rooms above them. “It’s he who sent me,” she said.
“Is that why you are asking so high a price?” asked Rose. “So you can share the dividend with him?” Her voice had a tight, flat sound as though it were being squeezed in her throat, and she found her words coming out with such slowness that she finished them mechanically. Their track inside her brain was already lost.
The girl shrugged. Her shiny, unhealthy, freckled face showed only the boredom of habit. She was used to insults on her wares. Most people bargained that way. “Pure linen,” she repeated in a colorless tone.
“Go away,” said Rose. “Go back upstairs and tell him you failed and that I’m not such a fool as he thought.” With her foot she shoved the linen sheet aside.
