Claudine and Annie Read online

  Embarrassed, I got up to go.

  ‘It’s your activity that galvanizes me, Marthe. Alain won’t be so surprised as you think. He always prophesied that you’d have an excellent influence on me. Excuse me, but I’m going indoors to write letters . . .’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Calliope.

  She did indeed come with me, without any encouragement on my part. She slipped her dimpled arm under my thin one.

  ‘Annie, I’ve got a very great favour to ask you.’

  Her face was infinitely seductive. Between the sharp-pointed lashes, the lapis-lazuli eyes glittered at me in a suppliant stare, the Cupid’s bow mouth was half-open as if on the verge of pouring out the most intimate confidences . . . One has to be prepared for anything with Calliope.

  ‘Tell me, dear . . . you know if it’s anything in my power . . .’

  When we reached my bedroom, she took my hands with an overdone imitation of an Italian actress.

  ‘Oh, you will, won’t you? You’re such a pure! That’s what decided me. Je suis . . . lost if you refuse me! But you’ll be kind for me . . . no?’

  She rolled a little lace handkerchief into a ball and dabbed her eyelashes with it. They were dry. I felt extremely uneasy.

  Then she stood very still, fumbling the dozens of curious charms that jingled on her chain (Claudine says Calliope sounds like a little dog when she walks) and staring at the carpet. She seemed to be muttering something to herself.

  ‘It’s a prayer to the Moon,’ she explained. ‘Annie, come to my aid. I need a letter.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘Yes. A letter . . . epigraphion. A good letter, that you’ll dictate.’

  ‘But to whom?’

  ‘To . . . to . . . a very dear friend. A man.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Calliope swung up a tragic arm.

  ‘I swear, on oath, on head of my dead parents that he is only Platonic friend!’

  I did not answer at once. I wanted to know more.

  ‘But, my dear, why do you need me for that?’

  She wrung her hands but her face was extremely calm.

  ‘Understand! A very dear friend I love . . . Yes, I love him, I swear, Annie! But . . . but I not know him too well.’

  ‘Yet you love him!’

  ‘Yes. He wants to marry me. He writes passionate letter and I réponds . . . answer very little . . . because I not know very well how to write.’

  ‘I never heard such nonsense!’

  ‘The truth . . . on oath! I speak . . . two, t’ree, four, cinq, languages, enough to travel with. But I can’t write. Especially French . . . so complicated if . . . if I not find the word . . . My friend thinks me . . . educated woman, unique, walking encyclopedia . . . and I’d so like to appear as he thinks! Otherwise . . . as you say in France, don’t you? . . . the affair’s in a cart.’

  She looked piteous, she blushed, she twisted her little handkerchief, she turned on all her charm. I asked reflectively, in a very chilly voice:

  ‘Tell me, Calliope, whom did you count on before me? After all, I’m presumably not the first . . .’

  She shrugged her shoulders tempestuously.

  ‘A little boy of my country, who wrote well. He was . . . in love with me. And I copied his letters . . . but in the other gender of course.’

  This calm villainess, instead of arousing my indignation, reduced me to helpless laughter. I can’t help it, I can’t take Calliope seriously, even as a wicked woman. She had completely disarmed me. I opened my blotter.

  ‘Sit down there, Calliope, and we’ll try. Although you’ll never know how strange it is to me to be writing a love-letter . . . Come on. What am I to say?’

  ‘Everything!’ she cried with passionate gratitude. ‘That I love him! . . . That he’s far from me! . . . that my life has no savour . . . that I am fading away . . . In fact, all the things one usually says.’

  That I love him . . . that he is far from me . . . I had already treated that theme, but with so little success! Sitting beside Calliope, with my elbows on the table and my eyes on the hand that glittered with rings, I dictated as if in a dream . . .

  ‘My beloved friend . . .’

  ‘Too cold,’ interrupted Calliope. ‘I shall write “My soul on the sea!”’

  ‘Just as you like . . . “My soul on the sea . . .” I can’t do it this way, Calliope. Give me the pen . . . you can copy it out and alter it afterwards.’

  And I wrote feverishly:

  ‘My soul on the sea, you have left me like a house without a master where a forgotten candle still burns. The candle will burn down to the end and passers-by will think the house is inhabited but the flame will burn low in an hour and die out . . . unless another hand restores it to glowing life . . .’

  ‘Not that, no!’ Calliope intervened, leaning over my shoulder. ‘Not good, “another hand”! Write “the same hand”.’

  But I was no longer writing anything. With my head on the table, buried in the crook of my elbow, I was suddenly weeping, furious with myself for being unable to hide my tears . . . The game had ended disastrously. Kind little Calliope understood . . . not quite correctly . . . and overwhelmed me with hugs, with her scent, with condolences and cries of despairing self-reproach:

  ‘Darling! Psychi mou! How bad I am! I not think you were all alone! Give me, is finished. I not want more. And, besides, it’s enough! The begin, good if I change little. I shall put palazzo instead of house and I shall search in French novels for the rest . . .’

  ‘Forgive me, Calliope dear. This thundery weather has put my nerves in a wretched state.’

  ‘Nerves! Ah! If women only had nerves!’ said Calliope sententiously, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. ‘But . . .’

  The simple cynical gesture she made completed her sentence so oddly that, in spite of myself, I smiled. She laughed.

  ‘That’s so, eh? Addio, mille remerciements, and forgive me. I take away beginning of letter. Be with your courage.’

  Already outside in the corridor, she reopened the door and thrust her face round it, the face of a mischievous goddess:

  ‘And I’ll even copy it twice. Because I have another friend.’

  ‘“Being of a saline and sulphurous nature, the waters of Arriège are indicated in the case of chronic affections of the skin . . .”’

  Claudine was reading aloud the little panegyric, bound in an attractive cover, that the thermal establishment provided for the benefit of people taking the cure. We were listening for the last time to the dismal orchestra that always played fortissimo, with a rigid strictness of rhythm and not the slightest variation of tone. Between a Selection from the Dragoons of Villars and a March by Armand de Polignac, Claudine was initiating us, against our will and not without acid comments, into the virtues of the sulphurous spring. Her diction was impeccable, her tone magisterial, her calm imperturbable.

  Her white cat, on a lead, was asleep in a wicker chair. ‘A chair that costs two sous, like a lady’s,’ Claudine has insisted. ‘Not an iron one because Fanchette feels the cold in her behind!’

  ‘I’m going to play a game!’ she cried, suddenly inspired.

  ‘You make me slightly apprehensive,’ said her husband with his usual loving glance.

  He was smoking fragrant Egyptian cigarettes and sat, for the most past, silent and detached as if he had transferred all his life to the woman he called his ‘darling child’.

  ‘A nice party game! I’m going to guess from your faces what diseases you’ve come here to cure, and when I make a mistake, I’ll pay a forfeit.’

  ‘Pay me one straight away,’ cried Marthe. ‘I’m as fit as a fiddle.’

  ‘Me too,’ growled Maugis, whose face was purple under the panama pulled down as far as his moustache.

  ‘Me too,’ said Renaud quietly.

  ‘So am I!’ sighed Léon, pale and exhausted.

  Claudine, enchantingly pretty in a white straw bonnet, tied under the chin with white tulle strings, mena
ced us with a pointed finger.

  ‘Attention, all! You’re going to see that every one of you has come here for pleasure . . . just like me!’

  She picked up her little book again and distributed her diagnoses like so many bouquets.

  ‘Marthe, for you “acne and eczema”! For you, Renaud . . . let’s see . . . ah! “furunculosis”. Pretty, isn’t it? It sounds like the name of a flower. In Annie, I divine “intermittent erysipelas” and in Léon “scrofulous anaemia” . . .’

  ‘He won’t thank you much for that,’ broke in Renaud who saw a sickly smile on my brother-in-law’s face . . .

  ‘And in Maugis . . . Maugis . . . oh, bother, I can’t find anything else . . . Ah! I’ve got it! In Maugis, I diagnose . . . “recurrent pruritus of the genital parts”.’

  There was an explosion of laughter! Marthe showed all her teeth and impudently directed her laugh straight at the furious Maugis who lifted his panama to pour out a stream of invectives against the brazen hussy. Renaud tried half-heartedly to impose silence, for a respectable group behind us had just taken flight with much scandalized clatter of overturned chairs.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ cried Claudine. ‘Those people who’ve gone are just plain jealous’ (she picked up her book again); ‘they’ve only got miserable little diseases not worth having . . . they’re just . . . “chronic metritises”, petty “aural catarrhs” or miserable twopenny-halfpenny “leucorrheas”!’

  ‘What about you yourself, you poisonous little thing?’ burst out Maugis. ‘What the hell have you come here for, besides making yourself a thorough pest and disturbing everyone’s peace?’

  ‘Hush!’ She leant forward, with an impressive mysterious air. ‘Don’t tell anyone. I’ve come here for the sake of Fanchette, who suffers from the same complaint as you.’

  SIX

  BAYREUTH.

  Rain. Rain . . . The sky melts into rain, and the sky here is coal-dust. If I lean on the window-sill, my hands and elbows are smeared with black. The same impalpable black powder snows down invisibly on my white serge dress, and if I absent-mindedly stroke my cheek with the palm of my hand I crush a gritty sticky smut into long black streaks. Drops of rain have dried on the flounce of my skirt in little grey spots. Léonie is eternally brushing my clothes and Marthe’s. As she does so, she wears a blissful expression that makes her look like a sentimental policeman. It reminds her of her native Saint-Étienne, she declares.

  In the west, the sky is turning yellow. Perhaps the rain is going to stop and I shall see Bayreuth otherwise than through this fine, open veil, otherwise too than through the distorting prism of my tears.

  For, the moment I arrived, I dissolved into water like the clouds. I feel ashamed to write down the puerile reason for such a crisis of misery, but I will.

  At Schnabelweide, where we changed from the Nürnberg—Carlsbad line, the train rushed on in a heedless hurry most untypical of German trains, carrying my trunk and my dressing-case off on their way to Austria. As a result I found myself – after fifteen hours of travelling and sticky all over with this German coal-dust that smells of sulphur and iodoform – without a sponge, without a clean handkerchief, without a comb, in fact without everything absolutely essential. This blow demoralized me, and while Léon and Maugis tore off to the Information Bureau, I began to cry. I just stood there on the platform, shedding great tears that made little pellets in the dust.

  ‘This Annie of ours was obviously born under Aquarius,’ murmured Claudine philosophically.

  As a result, my arrival in the ‘Holy City’ was pitiable and absurd. I was not amused by Marthe’s snobbish ecstasies over the postcards, the red glass Grails, the carvings, the plates, and the beer jugs, all stamped with the image of the god Wagner. Even Claudine, unkempt, with her boater over one ear, hardly raised a smile from me when she brandished a smoking sausage she was clutching triumphantly, right under my nose.

  ‘Look what I’ve bought!’ she cried. ‘It’s a sort of postman who sells them. Yes, Renaud, a postman! He’s got hot sausages in his leather satchel and he fishes them out with a fork, like snakes. You needn’t make a face, Marthe, it’s delicious! I shall send one to Mélie – I shall tell her it’s called a Wagnerwurst . . .’

  She went off, dancing, dragging her gentle husband towards a lilac-painted Konditorei to eat whipped cream with her sausage . . .

  I recovered my luggage, thanks to the zeal of Léon, egged on by Marthe, and the polyglottism of Maugis. The latter speaks as many German dialects as there are tribes in Israel and, with one sentence I found totally unintelligible, he galvanized the smiling, apathetic officials into action. I got my own things back at the very moment when Claudine, moved by my plight had just sent me one of her linen chemises . . . so brief, it made me blush . . . and a little pair of Japanese silk knickers patterned with yellow moons. With them was this note: ‘Take them, anyway, Annie, if only to dry your tears, and remember I’m a St Martin type. Query: would St Martin have given away his trousers?’

  I am waiting, without impatience, for lunchtime, and for the rain to stop. Now and then a rift of blue shows through two heavy sailing clouds, then vanishes. My window looks out on the Opernstrasse, over a boarded footpath that conceals the stagnant water below. The staircase smells of cabbage. My curious coffin-like bed is boxed in during the day under a lid covered with sprigged material. The top sheet buttons on to the eiderdown and my mattress is composed of three pieces, like a Louis XIV chaise longue . . . Do I feel the faintest touch of the sacred fever? No, most decidedly no. I envy Marthe who, the moment we arrived at the station, began to sparkle with conversational enthusiasm, already breathing what her husband pompously calls ‘the fervour of all the nations who have come to worship the man who was greater than man . . .’ On the other side of the wall, I can hear that neophyte furiously banging about among her trunks, and emptying the tiny jugs of hot water with a single splash. Léon’s voice reaches me only as an inarticulate buzz. Marthe’s total silence seems to me ominous. I was not altogether surprised just now when I heard her exclaim in a loud, shrill voice, anything but suggestive of Marie-Antoinette:

  ‘Hell! What a filthy hole!’

  Only one pleasurable sensation makes me almost content to sit perfectly still in front of this window, at this rickety little mahogany table: the feeling of being very far away, beyond anyone’s reach . . . How long is it since Alain went away? A month, a year? I have lost all count of time. I shut my eyes and try to conjure up his fading image; sometimes I strain my ears, as if I thought I heard his footsteps . . . Am I awaiting his return or am I dreading it? Often, I turn round sharply with the vivid impression that he is there, that he is going to lay his heavy hand on my shoulder, and my shoulder automatically droops to receive it . . . It is over in a second, but it is like the flash of a danger signal. I know all too well that, if he returned, he would once again be my master. Once again, my neck would bow meekly to the yoke that it has hardly had time to miss. After all, it is as used to wearing it as my hand is to the ring Alain put on it the day we were married, the ring that is a little too tight and has worn a permanent groove in my finger.

  For people on a pleasure-trip, how gloomy the three of us were, in that Restauration this evening! Certainly the novelty of the place, the feeble, hissing gas-light, the cold wind blowing through the gaps of the tent did not excite me personally to gaiety but I was surprised that Marthe and her husband looked equally lost and constrained. Marthe stared at the chicken and stewed pears on her plate. Léon made notes in a little pocket-book. On what? The place seemed in no way remarkable. This restaurant, the Baierlein, whose vogue is due to its serving meals on a terrace under a striped tent, seemed to me, apart from the stewed pears, much like the one at Arriège. More Englishwomen dining there perhaps, and little brown jugs of Seltzwasser on the tables. What a lot of Englishwomen! Whoever told me they were stiff and reserved? Léon informed me they had come straight from Parsifal. Flushed, their hats askew, their admirable hair clumsily t
wisted up anyhow, they shrieked, wept over their memories of the opera, waved their arms, and never, for a moment, stopped eating. I stared at them – I who was not hungry, who was not weeping, I who was keeping my chilly hands sedately folded inside my wide sleeves – as if they were drunk, wondering half-enviously, half-disgustedly: ‘Shall I be like that on Sunday?’ To tell the truth, I hope I shall.

  Marthe uttered not a word as she studied the diners with her insolent eyes. She must have found their hats unworthy of interest. My brother-in-law went on taking notes. So many notes! People were staring at him. I stared at him too. How extraordinarily French he looked!

  In spite of an English tailor, a Swedish bootmaker, and an American hatter, this effeminately handsome man is a supreme example of the French type in all its colourless correctness. I began to wonder what betrayed him at once as a typical average Frenchman, with no great qualities and no great defects. Was it no more than the suavity of his over-frequent gestures and the total lack of character in his regular, well-proportioned features?

  Marthe brusquely interrupted my ethnological speculations.

  ‘Please don’t talk at all once. Honestly, this place bores me to tears. Isn’t there somewhere even more giddily exciting?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Léon, consulting his Baedeker. ‘The Berlin restaurant. It’s smarter, more French, but it has less local colour.’

  ‘I don’t care a fig about local colour . . . I’ve come here for Wagner, not for Bayreuth. All right, let’s go to the Berlin tomorrow . . .’

  ‘We shall have to pay ten marks for a truite au bleu . . .’

  ‘Why worry? Maugis is good for . . . for standing us a meal . . . maybe a couple . . .’

  I decided to intervene.

  ‘But, Marthe, I feel embarrassed letting Maugis pay for me . . .’

  ‘All right, my dear girl, you can go off by yourself and eat in some cheap little restaurant.’

  Léon irritably put down his gold pencil.