It came over me suddenly that any one of these people might have the answer to my own problem. I looked at them more carefully, at their hunched shoulders, their furtive and fluttering hands, their bony faces full of craft. I looked into their narrowed eyes.
There was a couple amongst them selling whole spices. The man’s long, red nose and blotched skin gave him a brutal expression, but the woman’s face seemed kind. She was obviously nervous and someone, probably her companion, just once had dealt her a blow on the side of the neck. It had destroyed her muscular control so that when she wanted to speak she had to hold her neck steady with her hand. Even so, her voice trembled.
As I came abreast of them the man muttered something and went off in the direction of the café. I stood in front of the booth and asked what she was selling.
“Cinnamon sticks,” she said, “and cloves and saffron.” After she’d finished answering me she took down her hand and I saw the scar. It hadn’t been a blow at all. Someone had tried to slit her throat.
“Who did that?” I asked. “I daresay you’re surprised at my asking such a personal question of a stranger. And it’s true I’m not usually that bold.” But when I spoke it was as though a voice inside me had dictated the words; another, a more desperate voice whose echo was my own. The woman wasn’t offended although I think she blushed a little. Yes, I’m sure she did, and her mouth, which had a sweet expression, quivered.
“It’s him,” she whispered, looking fearfully in the direction of the café. “He was drunk,” she added.
“And yet you stayed with him,” I remarked. I was still speaking through that other voice and she gave me a glance full of such experience, such bitter and accepting knowledge of the world that I felt my own breast permeated.
“Who else would have me now?” she said and it wasn’t even a question.
“Will you help me?” I asked. There was a sandy feeling in my throat.
“What do you want?” She seemed to have divined my thought, to have grown sterner. Her eyes were yellow beneath the silver sky. There was mockery in them. “So you want to escape!” they seemed to say. “So you want to bypass the brutality and the revenge of man! I didn’t. Why should you?”
“Tell me how to do it. Give me something!” I could hear any voice stammering and I was so convinced that she knew my problem that I skipped putting it in words—or else I forgot I hadn’t done so. At the same time instinct made me smoothly hold out a thousand-franc note in my hand, not openly, but so she could see it. When she did her whole attitude changed. Still with the same sweet expression (but I think it had something to do with the pull of her scar), she said softly, “Take this.”
I was astonished. I use saffron in fish and I thought she was making fun of me. But in her quavering voice, very low, she explained what else I must get.
“If you take them together my little lady it’s sure to work, but you’ll be sick, very sick. That’s your lookout.” Her hand came out like the tongue of a lizard and the thousand-franc note cleaved to it. She thrust the money down the front of her dress just in time. Her companion was coming back wiping his mouth on his sleeve and giving me an appraising look.
“That will be one hundred and fifty francs for the saffron,” she said with her hand back up to her neck. I hadn’t expected to pay for the saffron at all, but I realized that the man probably kept count.
“Good morning, Miss,” he now said with a leer and intercepted the money just before it went into her pocket. With the same gesture he pushed her roughly aside and took the king place behind the stand.
And these people too would disappear with their wares when the day was over and be seen no more all year. Already as I looked back their outlines were vague. The mist could hardly wait to dissolve their substance.
As for me, I felt as though a great load had been lightened from off my mind. I had complete confidence in what the woman had said. I was sure everything would be all right. You see I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know . . .
ROSE set her teeth. Turning in her chair she looked for a long time at the dark window where the leaf had clung, that small, groping leaf which had been blown away without a trace.
“Yes, that’s the way it was,” she murmured softly between those clenched teeth. “Yet how was I to foresee it?”
And indeed only a leaf endowed with diabolical cunning could have reached in through the window thus to twist her heart.
Journal:
When you’re well it’s hard to picture being sick. It doesn’t mean anything, the word “sick.” It didn’t to me, in any case, on that day I was telling you about. I found a drugstore that was open and bought what the woman said to buy. I don’t have to tell you do I? It’s a bitter thing meant for fever and you don’t have to have a prescription. But I thought the man looked at me rather hard. I thought I had to explain why I wanted it and I told him about how my husband suffered from malaria and how the attacks came back now and then. He made no comment and as he handed me the package there was such indifference in the way he held out his hand that I felt confounded. He didn’t care what I did with the drug and if it was true about my husband and his malaria he didn’t want to hear it.
So I went home where Pierre was reading the newspaper and drinking coffee. He takes a long time to digest the news and rereads each column. He looked so peaceful sitting there and pushing out that lower lip of his. One of his slippers was dangling, almost off, and I stooped and put it on again. I wanted to sit on his knee and tease him and prevent his reading, but I didn’t dare. All those playful, innocent and wifely things which had once been my right seemed now to be forbidden me. It was hard to know what was left. The worst of it was that Pierre himself appeared not to notice any lack. Perhaps he was glad to be able to read his paper in peace, not to have me tease him anymore or mess up his hair or laugh at him. Perhaps he had only tolerated it before and had always disliked it and the things he really would have liked I never gave him. Well you see what I mean and I could not give him those other things now because they were already given.
So I went into the kitchen while Bernice was out, and boiled down the saffron and took it with the other just like the woman said, and then I waited.
By-and-by Pierre went out to a film that he had to review for Jouvence and I was alone. I lay on my bed and read one of the books I’d loved long ago and it was about half an hour before I noticed the ringing in my ears. It was deafening and I wondered how I’d been able to ignore it when it started. Again you see—that moment when things start and of which one is ignorant. Anyway I didn’t get much chance to wonder about it as I began to feel very strange from then on. There was a sensation of loneliness, of being cut off from the world, and when dysentery forced me to rise I staggered without direction. My feet were weighted and yet the top of me was foolishly light. And I saw animals too. I think drunkards must see the same kind. There was a giraffe I remember with the face of a man who bent his tall neck to look me in the eyes. But his eyes were giraffe’s eyes with long, dirty lashes. And there was a freak elephant with two trunks which he wound this way and that around my shoulders. They were all African animals. I wonder why? Is it circus recollection, that first outside thrill in most children’s lives? Or perhaps those animals are the nearest to prehistoric creatures left on earth and the sick brain vomits ancient memories.
I wasn’t afraid. I thought I was dying but I wasn’t in the least afraid. It seemed all right to die in company with these strange beasts and only the wavering and distressed vision of Pierre standing near the bed disturbed me. At first I didn’t think he was real, but then he kept asking me what was wrong and I had to answer. I was surprised to find myself able to speak and my voice too was that of a drunkard, slow and thick-tongued. What amazed me the most was my own guile. I told Pierre that I had eaten a little bag of shrimps in the market place that morning and that at the time of tasting them I had sensed something wrong. I get sea-food poisoning easily, as Pierre knows, so it worked. I think he did call our doctor and found he was out. Doctors are difficult to find on a holiday.
The cramps began soon after that and my head cleared. The blood when it came was startling in its brightness. For some reason I thought it would be black.
TWENTY
In August Pierre took his wife away for a vacation of three weeks. They went south and stayed with Mark. Pierre did not like to stay with his father-in-law much, but Rose was run-down. She had not seemed to recover too quickly from her attack of ptomaine poisoning on Bastille Day and he thought a quiet place would do her more good than a resort.
Pierre did not understand Mark, whose sadness he mistook for disappointed conceit. His job on Jouvence had made him intensely aware of what was up to date. He could no longer (had he ever been able to do so) see the intrinsic value in a work. It had to be fashionable or, worse, “significant.” Neither did he stop to reflect that what had seemed to him the only mode of expression a year ago was now dust in his eyes. Perhaps this flaw in Pierre’s judgment was what made him so useful to Jouvence. He threw himself body and soul into each day’s policy and was not divided as Simon was. Thus when he heard last year’s viewpoint in any field still praised, he was sincerely indignant. Seeing a woman in the past season’s dress, for instance, would cause him to exclaim, “How ugly she makes herself!” He would forget how he had applauded that very style, how he had explained it as the only possible flattery for a woman’s looks.
Rose of course had no style at all, but he was dismayed to find that she had bought a bikini bathing suit.
It brought back a time just after they were married and were, as now, visiting Mark. Rose had disappeared into her father’s studio for several hours a day and it was not until the holiday was almost over that Pierre had realized his wife was posing for her father naked.
“I don’t look at you myself,” he had repeated outraged and blushing.
“Well, you could,” she had replied mildly. “Besides, it isn’t the same thing. My father’s an artist.”
“Artist, artist—how I hate that word!” he had cried. “It’s just an excuse for taking liberties of all sorts.”
“I can’t see it as a liberty,” had countered Rose, “to paint the body you yourself helped fashion.” The jewel-blue irises of her eyes had fixed themselves on his and she had added slowly, “I thought writers were artists too.”
Pierre had said no more and had never mentioned the subject to Mark. One day however, when both the father and the daughter were absent, he had examined the painting furtively and with a curious fascination. So this was his wife; this young woman with her greenish shadows. He noticed how the start of her slight bones was belied by jet patches of hair. They lent a sensual atmosphere to the figure. Traces of the East. The Jew waiting patiently behind the flesh; the antiquity, the sorrow, the faithful and unvanquished blood. Pierre had not thought of it before and now an uneasy feeling took him by the nape. He had hurried out of the studio.
This half-buried incident returned to Pierre when he saw Rose in her bikini.
“Bikinis aren’t being worn any more,” he said and even as he spoke recalled that in his novel Gloria always wore one. But Gloria and Rose had nothing in common. Gloria, with her sun-brightened curls, her small sunburned nose. She was, this girl of his creation, a boyish type of creature whose long, smooth, brown limbs looked just right in a bikini, whose body had a golden glint. The thought of her made him critical of his wife, of her total lack of blondness, her muscular line that had no boyishness to excuse or classify.
Then for a moment, with an almost mystic double vision, Pierre saw in front of him, not the quiet, neat Rose with her girlish dresses, her smooth hair, but a stranger vital with dark heritage. Her lean body seemed to him in that instant more voluptuous, more terrible than the roundest curves. And why were those eyes so heavy, those ocher shadows so far spread and that straight mouth so feverishly dry? What fever wasted the lips of his wife Rose? He shook his head like a spaniel and the illusion went away.
