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

No, that’s all wrong—I mean the things I’ve been writing—because I think the old Rose was asleep: the slumber from which one afternoon she wakened and stood up. Do you know that when a woman awakes like that everybody gets into a panic? Yes, a real panic. Ah they hear that trumpet sound! They feel the trembling in their walls! Simon is listening with locked jaws. Pierre too looks from time to time at the doll who is near him with a strange expression in his eyes. I am not used to a look of interest in Pierre’s eyes.

I want to tell you about how I was having a baby, but first I must explain something else. You know the way I keep going back to the bugler and say the road divides from him on? Well, really it is my head dividing, as I think you’ve gathered or I’ve told you. But from that day when I went up to Jason’s a new thing began to happen. You see, although I had this cleft in my thoughts even then, both sides could still communicate. After that day they couldn’t any more—or if they try, it gives me headaches. It’s as if suddenly their languages had grown too different. And besides, everything got hazy. I began to forget. Sometimes when I was sitting with Pierre of an evening I would think about Jason, but he was like an uneasy dream to me. It was almost a story in my thoughts:

‘Once upon a time there was a young woman called Rose. She had a lover whose name was Jason. He might have been a handsome man and it’s possible he lived on a roof, but it’s an old story and parts of it are lost.’

On the other hand, when I was with him, Jason, I could hardly remember Pierre at all—just as a sort of numbness somewhere, something that would hurt later, like a toothache with Novocain.

And why am I putting all this in the past? You know it’s the same now, even worse. It’s only when I’m writing this journal that things get straighter, that I can hold onto the thread and be a little sure.

Simon knew how it was from the beginning. He knew (or at least I think he did) that nothing confused me more than his constant references which only I understood. He should remain in one life with Pierre and with that good, quiet, well-mannered Rose whose only fault is that she laughs a little too hard. But he won’t and in a way I was the instrument since I took La Cigale’s article to give to Pierre. Simon got to know her that way. He likes her and it’s with her help that he crosses from one road to another, my roads you know, striding with his bony knees over the wasteland between. It makes my head ache and he rejoices. Simon is my enemy.

I told you I wanted children, but when I found I was pregnant in July I didn’t want that. People always have the idea that one could have children with several men and the husband wouldn’t know the difference. How can they think such absurdities? Already, formless inside of me, Jason’s child cried out its father’s name.

I was supposed to “come around” on the twenty-fifth or so of June and I’ve always been regular, early in fact. So by July I knew. I felt different too; my breasts burned and grew tight inside the skin. I’ve never been the voluptuous type and it makes a change. Also, right away I felt fat in the waist; as though I’d eaten too big a meal.

I was afraid. Whenever I thought about it I grew hot with fear. Have you ever felt that particular fever? It’s like the first time one really understands that one must die. I remember it well in my case. I was fifteen years old. It was at sunset and I was just coming home from the beach. Looking up at the house, I saw a face in one of the windows. It wasn’t the face of my father or mother, and aside from me they were the only people who lived there. It was just an unknown face, pale, blank and terrible. The face of death! I felt sick and in that moment I realized that I must die, that it was all a cruel joke; the olive trees, the blue, stretching sea, the familiar dwelling, all, all, since in the end was only death.

The fever mounted then, the blush of fear. I wondered how anyone could stand the terror of a death agony and yet everyone must—the coward and the hero both. There’s no getting out of it.

When I looked up again the face was gone.

It was rather the same way when I felt afraid in July. Here was something quick yet fatal growing inside of me, a fact, and there was no getting out of it or pretending it wasn’t there. I tried to think of all the things women do in such cases, but even if I knew what I didn’t know how. There was no question of asking a doctor. I was certain no doctor would know. None that I knew anyway. They’d just say to go ahead and have it and that Pierre wouldn’t know the difference. I’ve already explained about that. Besides, the Rose that lives with Pierre could never stand to bear Jason’s child. It would tear her limb from limb. It would break her flanks like glass. So I was afraid and felt sick with fear and thought about nothing else.

It was approaching the fourteenth of July. Pierre and I always go to a party the night before, a literary affair given by an American woman who is a friend of Mark’s and who lives on the quai. It’s a good place to see the fireworks from and one drinks whisky. Afterward many of us went and danced in the streets. Pierre does this religiously once a year.

Paris was very pretty with the lights strung across the streets, and each little café had its music and its decorations. We went for several blocks dancing here and there and sometimes I would have as my partner someone vaguely familiar who would turn out to be the local butcher or the baker. I saw Heidi walking through the crowds of the Carrefour de l’Odéon. She was hand in hand with a curly-haired consumptive boy. They looked like two children who haven’t long to live and must take their pleasures young. Once I saw them jitterbug languidly, fixing their eyes on nothing and with blank faces. They were dressed exactly alike in black sweaters and blue jeans and one could not really say who was the more masculine or feminine.

Near Saint-Germain des Prés we saw Simon who was alone. He was standing beneath the arching lights and staring around him eagerly and with venom. When he saw us he came up and asked me to dance.

“It’s not the same, is it?” he remarked when we had moved two or three steps in the crowd.

“The same as what?” I asked.

“As dancing in the O.K. ballroom—as dancing with your friend there.”

I didn’t say anything but I could feel my heart begin to race. Simon may have felt it too. He stopped dancing. “Is there anything more sickening than women?” he cried loudly. “They are nausea itself!”

Something very like triumph welled up in me. I don’t know why. I gave him a sideways look.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said furiously. “I’m not your lover!” But I kept my eyes like that, sideways, until I could actually see him tremble.

“I thought you liked to live, Simon,” I mocked him. “Aren’t women a part of life?”

“There is no such thing as women,” he retorted. “There are only whores.”

“Men too are disappointing,” I said, “when they make that kind of remark, and one might have expected a little originality from you.”

I knew he hated me and that he would have liked to grind me down in that crowd until I disappeared, until I became the dust under his feet. Actually I understand his attitude although it’s hard for me to put it into words. I think most men have it more or less and in this case it was aggravated because of Simon’s not being attractive. He looked down on Pierre and on Pierre’s wife even more, yet as I’ve explained, I think secretly I always troubled him a little. He couldn’t fit me into the niche that he had prepared and that is so conveniently labeled “bourgeois.” But it tortured him when I too lived, as he puts it. It upset the whole balance of his theories. He was supposed to admire me for it you see, and yet he couldn’t. Have you ever had a school friend, not a friend that you truly love, but one whom you’ve known for years, and then that rather dull child turns out to have had a hidden capacity, becomes the world-champion figure skater, for instance, or writes a book which people you look up to praise? Well, if that happens are you sincerely happy about it?

Ha, ha, you see? Oh I know it’s a bad comparison: innocent glory compared to betrayal and shame and—but it’s the best I can do.

After shame I almost put “vice.” But vice, in love I mean, is something abnormal isn’t it? Is the feeling I have abnormal? I die in Jason’s arms you know. I spin around into a whirlpool and at the bottom is the most heavenly, the most blissful death. The cords of my body tighten to the limit and then go slack. There is a winged chaos like when a sailboat goes about in a storm. It’s only afterward, when we are already dressing, that I become aware of the sordid room, the greasy, dark walls, the sheets at which one daren’t look too closely. I’m afraid to be left behind and I pull on my clothes hurriedly and with unsteady hands.

What has this to do with Simon? I’m confused. I really don’t know how to get myself out of Simon’s arms and back home that night. I’ll just skip it I guess. We didn’t see anyone else to tell you about. But in a way I wanted to continue on the subject of that evening because it was then that I reached the peak of fear. I decided that I must do something at once and yet I hadn’t the least idea of what it must be. And all the time while I was smiling and dancing and talking, the current of my fear was running like swift, cool water through my blood.

When we got home the day was breaking. The stars faded as I trailed across the terrace behind Pierre. I was exhausted and that swift current in my blood seemed with each minute to reach new boundaries. First only the extremities had felt it; my hands and more especially my feet. Now my heart itself was chill. I pictured its chambers desolate with cold. How many chambers are there by the way for every heart? And how gracious they sound: scarlet and lofty rooms—but in them something palpitates and causes pain.

I’m cold now too.

ROSE was sitting, not at the table where she usually wrote, but at the piano with her notebook propped up against the edge of the keys. Dusk was already thickening the air and with the quickness of which she was capable, she leaped up and ran to the window, leaning her palms against the pane.

Just then, from somewhere out in the autumn darkness a small leaf blew against the glass; pale, moist, star-shaped, it resembled, in its helpless cling, the blind hand of an infant. It groped there for a few seconds, fumbling timidly yet insistently. Then, finding as contact only the cold glass, it dropped away again into the night.

Rose sprang back and laced her fingers together. “Is that the way it was?” she asked urgently. “Is that it?”

But in the empty room there was no one to answer.

NINETEEN

Journal:

How shall I describe the fourteenth of July in a clear way? So many things happened on that day and yet it was shorter than others. I didn’t get up until noon. Pierre was still asleep, his cheeks pink. I told you how that made me feel. He frowned when I left the bed, but he didn’t wake up. I went out for a walk. I couldn’t bear to stay in the house.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed Paris on the fourteenth of July. The charlatans and mountebanks have taken over. In front of every sidewalk café the most extraordinary acts are performed; magic tricks, feats of strength, acrobatics, trained monkeys. There are even short plays whose art has bypassed the modern theater and whose gestures go back to another, a harsher and a holier time. In fact it’s altogether as if these people came out of the Middle Ages. One can’t imagine what they do the rest of the year. Certainly one never sees them. Perhaps they troop back silently into the air, into the foggy vapors of the Seine whose children they are. I can see them gradually mingling with the mist, their day of living over, looking ahead with their dark mist eyes toward their dim abode.

It’s the same in the market place. The carts that only yesterday were stacked with fruits and vegetables are replaced by others with different wares: strange herbs and spices that are touted to cure all ills, powders from the horns of real and mythical beasts, mandrake roots, sired supposedly by hanged men in their agony and whose twisted forms assume the mortal shape. All this, superimposed upon the familiar street, gives the market a bewitched appearance. Someone has cast a spell over it. The same and yet not the same, it makes you want to rub your eyes.

On the day I was telling you about, the weather heightened my impressions. The sky was luminous, a silver-gray color, and a soft haze enveloped the near distance. I walked on for a bit, examining the charts on the stands, with their crude drawings and their extravagant statements. If what they claimed were true, one could buy eternal health and life here for a few francs. Such claims, despite all reasoning, give one an extraordinary feeling of hope. Perhaps after all modern medicine has gone astray and these people alone have the answer. One recalls reading of cures in jungles, of hypnotists and healers.