I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed. Three boys on motorbikes going by, almost holding hands. And then the pure, melancholy, first blue of morning begins. The air one can bathe in. The electric shriek of a train. Heels on the sidewalk. The first birds. I cannot sleep.
I stand in line in the shops, no one notices. The girls are moving back and forth behind the counters, girls with white faces, with ankles white as soap, worn shoes going at the outside toe, dresses showing beneath the white smocks. Their fingernails are short. In the winter their cheeks will be splotched with red.
“
Monsieur?
”
They wait for me to speak, and of course it all vanishes then. They know I’m a foreigner. It makes me a little uneasy. I’d like to be able to talk without the slightest trace of accent–I have the ear for it, I’m told. I’d like, impossible, to understand everything that’s said on the radio, the words of the songs. I would like to pass unseen. The little bell hung inside the door rings as I go out, that’s all.
I come back to the house, open the gate, close it again behind me. The click is a pleasing sound. The gravel, small as peas, moves beneath my feet and from it a faint dust rises, the perfume of the town. I breathe it in. I’m beginning to know it, and the neighborhoods as well. A geography of favored streets is forming itself for me while I sleep. This intricate town is unfolding, detail by detail, piece by piece. I walk along the river on the bank between two bridges. I stroll through the cemetery that gutters like jewelry in the last, slanting light. It seems I am seeing an estate, passing among properties that will someday be mine.
These are notes to photographs of Autun. It would be better to say they began as notes but became something else, a description of what I conceive to be events. They were meant for me alone, but I no longer hide them. Those times are past.
None of this is true. I’ve said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I’m sure you’ll come to realize that. I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It’s a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn’t exist, no, no, but this is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.
Cristina Wheatland–she was Cristina Cabaniss and born Cristina Poore–has a cool face, a little bony, and large, pale eyes. Her father was an ambassador. They led a brilliant life. She went to school everywhere, Argentina, Greece, the Philippines. I don’t remember just how Billy met her, only that she was twenty-three and they fell in love right from the start. She was just getting her divorce. He was the one she should have married in the first place. He knew how to handle her. He’s the only man who knows how to make her feel like a woman.
“Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” she says.
“That’s right, Bummy.”
He’s selecting cubes of ice from a silver bucket and talking with his back turned. She sits at the far end of the room, her legs curled beneath her. Paris. It’s three in the morning. Their daughter, the servants, the whole building is asleep. She leans forward to let me light her cigarette and then falls back, floats really, into the soft cushions. She can’t live in America any more, she says. That’s the only thing that bothers her. She’s gone back to visit. It just isn’t for her. In the first place, she doesn’t even know how to drive. Billy hands her the drink. She gives it back.
“Sweetheart,” she says, “I only wanted a half.”
He walks to the end of the long room once more. I see him pick up a new glass. There’s a mysterious slowness to all his movements, it’s almost as if he is thinking them out. Even so, they have the grace of a dream. Billy Wheatland–he was on the hockey team, a great forward, one of the best ever as they always say, and forever surrounded by friends. You never saw him alone. He was standing in front of a mirror, combing black hair still damp from the shower. When he smiled, a little, heroic scar gleamed in his lip.
He comes back with the second drink and hands it to her without a word.
“I adore you,” she says.
He sits down and crosses his legs. He’s wearing expensive shoes. Cristina is running her fingers inside the strand of single pearls around her neck, back and forth. To me, Billy says,
“Well, you know it’s very quiet down there. I mean it’s a very small town. You were there, but I don’t think you realize.”
They begin to talk about whom he can write a letter to for me. I sit there listening and feeling a mild excitement, like a child in front of whom a year at boarding school is being discussed.
“The water’s turned off,” he says. “I don’t even know how to turn it on. There’s an agent who handles all that. We’ve never been there during the winter.”
But a letter will handle that, too, or he can call. It’s arranged. I’m going down, any time I like. Cristina begins talking to him. I hardly hear. A glory of which I could not speak filled me then like a shimmering of sunlight. It was the ten thousand famous photographs Atget had made of a Paris now gone, those great, voiceless images bathed in the brown of gold chloride–I was thinking of them and of their author, out before dawn every morning, slowly stealing a city from those who inhabited it, a tree here, a store front, an immortal fountain.
I saw before me the calm, the sheltering of many diligent hours while this town of mine exposed itself to me, its only stranger, day by day. Of course, the whole thing was impulsive. I didn’t mention it to a soul, these ideas can vanish. I went no further than imagining the moment I displayed them all for the first time. Morning in the gallery. The prints are being turned over, one by one. Ashes fall softly to the table. A hand distractedly brushes them away. Do you like them? I stand there still fresh with the aura of Europe. Even my clothes were bought there. I wait for the answer. These can make you famous, he says finally. I am dizzied. For a moment I permit myself to believe it.
“How big is it actually?”
Billy doesn’t know. He turns to her.
“It’s very small,” Cristina says.
“Fifteen thousand,” he guesses.
“It’s not that small,” I say. “It’s bigger than that.”
“It’s small,” he warns. “Believe me.”
Beloved town. I see it in all weathers, the sunlight falling into its alleys like fragments of china, the silent evenings, the viaduct blue with rain. And coming back– this is much later–there are long, clear stretches with fields on either side, and we fly down an aisle of trees, the trunks all white with lime. Roads of France. Restaurants and cemeteries. Black trees and hanging rain. The needle is on one-forty. The axles are cracking like wood.
The Grand Hotel Saint-Louis. The small court with its tables and metal chairs. Shutters of inside rooms pushed open through a wall of dense ivy. Grillwork is buried within it, forgotten balconies. Above, a section of the sky of Autun, cold, clouded. It’s late afternoon–the green is trembling, the smallest tendrils dip and sway. That penetrating cold of France is here, that cold which touches everything, which arrives too soon. Inside, beneath the
coupole
, I can see the tables being set for dinner. The lights are already on in the marvelous, glass consoles within which the wealth of this ancient town is displayed: watches in leather cases, soup tureens, foulards. My eye moves. Perfumes. Books of medieval sculpture. Necklaces. Underwear. The glass has thin strips of brass like a boat’s running the edges and is curved on top–a dome of stained fragments, hexagons, hives of color. Behind all this, in white jackets, the waiters glide.
Small, mirthless town with its cafés and vast square. New apartments rising on the outskirts. Streets I never knew. There are two cinemas, the Rex and the Vox. Water is falling in the fountains. Old women are walking their dogs. Morning. I am reading
An Illustrated History of France
. There’s a dense mist which has turned the garden white, in which everything is concealed. An absolute quiet. I hardly notice the passing of time. When I go out, the sun is just burning through. The spire seems black. The pigeons are grumbling. There’s always the desire to talk to somebody about this time, I can’t escape it. I start out beneath the long, sulking flank of the cathedral and then begin descending. I know all the streets. Place d’Hallencourt. Rue St. Pancrace, curving down like a woman. I know the fine houses. And, of course, I know some people. The Jobs–she’s the thinnest woman I think I’ve ever seen. The waitress at the Café Foy. Madame Picquet. Now, that–I have to ask Wheatland about her.
[3]
T
HE ELEVATOR RISES, HUSHED
, to a splendid apartment above the Avenue Foch. The rooms are filled with people, some of them in evening clothes. The Beneduces have given a small dinner. Everyone else was invited to come by afterwards. Two waiters in white jackets are serving coffee. I stand near the window. Below, through the dark and still fragrant trees, the traffic floats past on headlights. Paris seems wondrous to me now, even a little too rich. I’m strangely devout, I find myself defending the meager life of the provinces as if it were something special. It’s not like the life of Paris, I say, which is exactly like being on some great ocean liner. It’s in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights.
“There’s Anna Soren,” Billy whispers.
She has been a famous actress, I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It’s all in silence–she is made out of yesterdays. He is pointing out Evan Smith, whose wife is a Whitney. There are girls who work in the fashion houses, publishing. One meets a certain kind of people here, people with money and taste.
“Definitely.”
“There’s Bernard Pajot.”
Pajot is a writer, short, the face of a cherub with moustaches, enormously fat. His life is celebrated. It begins in the evenings–he sleeps all day. He lives on potatoes and caviar, and a great deal of vodka. He not only looks like, they say he
is
Balzac.
“Does he write like him?”
“It’s enough of a job looking like him,” Beneduce confides.
I overhear Bernard Pajot. His voice is deep and richly hoarse. He smokes a thin, black cigar.
“Last night I had dinner with Tolstoi…” he says.
Behind him are tiers of fine books laid on glass shelves and illuminated from below like an historic façade.
“…we were talking about things that no longer exist.”
Beneduce is a journalist, a bureau chief. Straight, brown hair which he wears a little too long, blue eyes, unerring knowledge. He has the calm irreverence one achieves only from close observation of the great. And he knows everybody. The room is filled with marvelous languages. People from Switzerland. People from Mexico. His wife is a lynx. Even from across the room she imposes her assurance, her slow smiles. She’s a friend of Cristina’s, I know her from afternoons on the boulevard. I see her leaving cafés. She favors knit suits, her breasts moving softly within them, but I don’t think she meets men. Her husband is too potent. He could cut them to pieces. He’d know exactly how to do it.
She’s talking to Billy. He’s very elegant, very slim. Hair, I notice, turning grey along the sides. Everything else has become gold, the chaste gold of cufflinks, a gold watchband, the mesh dense as grain, a gold lighter from Carrier. I don’t know what they’re talking about, nothing, I’m sure it’s nothing because I’ve had a thousand conversations with him myself, but still he can hold her there somehow, Billy, to whom Cristina used to whisper in those early days that she wanted to leave the party and go make a little boom-boom. He has that white line of a scar on his mouth. One’s eyes always fall to it. He lights her cigarette. Her head is bent forward a little. Now it straightens up. They continue to talk. I notice she’s never really still. She seems to writhe in one’s gaze with slight, almost imperceptible movements.
I wander away towards more quiet regions of the apartment which is very large. The ceilings become silent, the voices fade. It seems I am entering an older, a more conventional household. The dining room is empty and dark. The table is just as it was, not cleared. The cloth is still spread on it, the chairs are in disarray. Glass plates bear the remnants of brie and the halves of pears already becoming brown. In front of the windows is a zone of tall plants, a conservatory through which noise does not penetrate, through which, in the daytime, the light diffracts. It is a room in which I can imagine the silence of leisurely mornings, the pages of
Le Figaro
turning softly as Maria Beneduce glances over them, the pages of the
Herald Tribune
. She is in a short robe printed with flowers. She drinks black coffee stirred with a tiny spoon. Her face is natural and unpainted. Her legs are bare. She is like a performer backstage. One loves this ordinary moment, this pause between the brilliant acts of her life.
Suddenly someone is behind me.
“Did I scare you?” Cristina says, smiling.
“What? No.”
“You jumped about a foot,” she says. “Come on, I want you to meet somebody.”
A friend from Bristol, Tennessee, she tells me as she leads me back. No, but I’m going to like her, she’s very funny. She’s married to a rich, rich Frenchman. She puts flowers in all the bidets. He gets furious. Already I dread her.
People are still coming in, even this late, appearing after other dinners, the theatre. Beneduce is guiding a handsome trio into the room, a man and two stunning women in suede boots and tightly belted coats. Mother and daughter, Cristina tells me. He’s marrying them both, she says. Near the bar Anna Soren listens to the conversation around her with a wavering, a translucent smile. She doesn’t always know who’s speaking. She looks at the wrong person. Her false eyelashes are coming loose.