Music for Chameleons (4 page)

From a distance I hear her voice—smoky, serene, cultivated: “And so you had a friend who was murdered here?”

“Yes.”

“An American?”

“Yes. He was a very gifted man. A musician. A composer.”

“Oh, I remember—the man who wrote operas! Jewish. He had a mustache.”

“His name was Marc Blitzstein.”

“But that was long ago. At least fifteen years. Or more. I understand you are staying at the new hotel. La Bataille. How do you find it?”

“Very pleasant. In a bit of a turmoil because they are in the process of opening a casino. The man in charge of the casino is called Shelley Keats. I thought it was a joke at first, but that really happens to be his name.”

“Marcel Proust works at Le Foulard, that fine little seafood restaurant in Schoelcher, the fishing village. Marcel is a waiter. Have you been disappointed in our restaurants?”

“Yes and no. They’re better than anywhere else in the Caribbean, but too expensive.”

“
Alors
. As I remarked, everything is imported. We don’t even grow our own vegetables. The natives are too lackadaisical.” A hummingbird penetrates the terrace and casually balances on the air. “But our sea-fare is exceptional.”

“Yes and no. I’ve never seen such enormous lobsters. Absolute whales; prehistoric creatures. I ordered one, but it was tasteless as chalk, and so tough to chew that I lost a filling. Like California fruit: splendid to look at, but without flavor.”

She smiles, not happily: “Well, I apologize”—and I regret my criticism, and realize I’m not being very gracious.

“I had lunch at your hotel last week. On the terrace overlooking the pool. I was shocked.”

“How so?”

“By the bathers. The foreign ladies gathered around the pool wearing nothing above and very little below. Do they permit that in your country? Virtually naked women parading themselves?”

“Not in so public a place as a hotel pool.”

“Exactly. And I don’t think it should be condoned here. But of course we can’t afford to annoy the tourists. Have you bothered with any of our tourist attractions?”

“We went yesterday to see the house where Empress Josephine was born.”

“I never advise anyone to visit there. That old man, the curator, what a chatterbox! And I can’t say which is worse—his French or his English or his German. Such a bore. As though the journey getting there weren’t tiring enough.”

Our hummingbird departs. Far off we hear steel-drum bands, tambourines, drunken choirs (
“Ce soir, ce soir nous danserons sans chemise, sans pantalons”
: Tonight, tonight we dance without shirts, without pants), sounds reminding us that it is Carnival week in Martinique.

“Usually,” she announces, “I leave the island during Carnival. It’s impossible. The racket, the stench.”

When planning for this Martinique experience, which included traveling with three companions, I had not known our visit would coincide with Carnival; as a New Orleans native, I’ve had my fill of such affairs. However, the Martinique variation proved surprisingly vital, spontaneous and vivid as a bomb explosion in a fireworks factory. “We’re enjoying it, my friends and I. Last night there was one marvelous marching group: fifty men carrying black umbrellas and wearing silk tophats and with their torsos painted with phosphorescent skeleton bones. I love the old ladies with gold-tinsel wigs and sequins pasted all over their faces. And all those men wearing their wives’ white wedding gowns! And the millions of children holding candles, glowing like fireflies. Actually, we did have one near-disaster. We borrowed a car from the hotel, and just as we arrived in Fort de France, and were creeping through the midst of the crowds, one of our tires blew out, and immediately we were surrounded by red devils with pitchforks—”

Madame is amused: “
Oui. Oui
. The little boys who dress as red devils. That goes back centuries.”

“Yes, but they were dancing all over the car. Doing terrific damage. The roof was a positive samba floor. But we couldn’t abandon it, for fear they’d wreck it altogether. So the calmest of my friends, Bob MacBride, volunteered to change the tire then and there. The problem was that he had on a new white linen suit and didn’t want to ruin it.”

“Therefore, he disrobed. Very sensible.”

“At least it was funny. To watch MacBride, who’s quite a solemn sort of fellow, stripped to his briefs and trying to change a tire with Mardi Gras madness swirling around him and red devils jabbing at him with pitchforks. Paper pitchforks, luckily.”

“But Mr. MacBride succeeded.”

“If he hadn’t, I doubt that I’d be here abusing your hospitality.”

“Nothing would have happened. We are not a violent people.”

“Please. I’m not suggesting we were in any danger. It was just—well, part of the fun.”

“Absinthe?
Un peu?
”

“A mite. Thank you.”

The hummingbird returns.

“Your friend, the composer?”

“Marc Blitzstein.”

“I’ve been thinking. He came here once to dinner. Madame Derain brought him. And Lord Snowdon was here that evening. With his uncle, the Englishman who built all those houses on Mustique—”

“Oliver Messel.”

“
Oui. Oui
. It was while my husband was still alive. My husband had a fine ear for music. He asked your friend to play the piano. He played some German songs.” She is standing now, moving to and fro, and I am aware of how exquisite her figure is, how ethereal it seems silhouetted inside a frail green lace
Parisian dress. “I remember that, yet I can’t recall how he died. Who killed him?”

All the while the black mirror has been lying in my lap, and once more my eyes seek its depths. Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.

“Two sailors.”

“From here? Martinique?”

“No. Two Portuguese sailors off a ship that was in harbor. He met them in a bar. He was here working on an opera, and he’d rented a house. He took them home with him—”

“I
do
remember. They robbed him and beat him to death. It was dreadful. An appalling tragedy.”

“A tragic accident.” The black mirror mocks me: Why did you say that? It wasn’t an accident.

“But our police caught those sailors. They were tried and sentenced and sent to prison in Guiana. I wonder if they are still there. I might ask Paulot. He would know. After all, he is the First President of the Court of Appeals.”

“It really doesn’t matter.”

“Not matter! Those wretches ought to have been guillotined.”

“No. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them at work in the fields in Haiti, picking bugs off coffee plants.”

Raising my eyes from the mirror’s demonic shine, I notice my hostess has momentarily retreated from the terrace into her shadowy salon. A piano chord echoes, and another. Madame is toying with the same tune. Soon the music lovers assemble, chameleons scarlet, green, lavender, an audience that, lined out on the floor of the terra-cotta terrace, resembles a written arrangement of musical notes. A Mozartean mosaic.

II

Mr. Jones

DURING THE WINTER OF
1945 I lived for several months in a rooming house in Brooklyn. It was not a shabby place, but a pleasantly furnished, elderly brownstone kept hospital-neat by its owners, two maiden sisters.

Mr. Jones lived in the room next to mine. My room was the smallest in the house, his the largest, a nice big sunshiny room, which was just as well, for Mr. Jones never left it: all his needs, meals, shopping, laundry, were attended to by the middle-aged landladies. Also, he was not without visitors; on the average, a half-dozen various persons, men and women, young, old, in-between, visited his room each day, from early morning until late in the evening. He was not a drug dealer or a fortuneteller; no, they came just to talk to him and apparently they made him small gifts of money for his conversation and advice. If not, he had no obvious means of support.

I never had a conversation with Mr. Jones myself, a circumstance I’ve often since regretted. He was a handsome man, about forty. Slender, black-haired, and with a distinctive face; a pale, lean face, high cheekbones, and with a birthmark on his left
cheek, a small scarlet defect shaped like a star. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with pitch-black lenses: he was blind, and crippled, too—according to the sisters, the use of his legs had been denied him by a childhood accident, and he could not move without crutches. He was always dressed in a crisply pressed dark grey or blue three-piece suit and a subdued tie—as though about to set off for a Wall Street office.

However, as I’ve said, he never left the premises. Simply sat in his cheerful room in a comfortable chair and received visitors. I had no notion of why they came to see him, these rather ordinary-looking folk, or what they talked about, and I was far too concerned with my own affairs to much wonder over it. When I did, I imagined that his friends had found in him an intelligent, kindly man, a good listener in whom to confide and consult with over their troubles: a cross between a priest and a therapist.

Mr. Jones had a telephone. He was the only tenant with a private line. It rang constantly, often after midnight and as early as six in the morning.

I moved to Manhattan. Several months later I returned to the house to collect a box of books I had stored there. While the landladies offered me tea and cakes in their lace-curtained “parlor,” I inquired of Mr. Jones.

The women lowered their eyes. Clearing her throat, one said: “It’s in the hands of the police.”

The other offered: “We’ve reported him as a missing person.”

The first added: “Last month, twenty-six days ago, my sister carried up Mr. Jones’s breakfast, as usual. He wasn’t there. All his belongings were there. But he was gone.”

“It’s odd—”

“—how a man totally blind, a helpless cripple—”

TEN YEARS PASS
.

Now it is a zero-cold December afternoon, and I am in Moscow. I am riding in a subway car. There are only a few other passengers. One of them is a man sitting opposite me, a man wearing boots, a thick long coat and a Russian-style fur cap. He has bright eyes, blue as a peacock’s.

After a doubtful instant, I simply stared, for even without the black glasses, there was no mistaking that lean distinctive face, those high cheekbones with the single scarlet star-shaped birthmark.

I was just about to cross the aisle and speak to him when the train pulled into a station, and Mr. Jones, on a pair of fine sturdy legs, stood up and strode out of the car. Swiftly, the train door closed behind him.

III

A Lamp in a Window

ONCE I WAS INVITED TO
a wedding; the bride suggested I drive up from New York with a pair of other guests, a Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, whom I had never met before. It was a cold April day, and on the ride to Connecticut the Robertses, a couple in their early forties, seemed agreeable enough—no one you would want to spend a long weekend with, but not bad.

However, at the wedding reception a great deal of liquor was consumed, I should say a third of it by my chauffeurs. They were the last to leave the party—at approximately 11
P.M
.—and I was most wary of accompanying them; I knew they were drunk, but I didn’t realize
how
drunk. We had driven about twenty miles, the car weaving considerably, and Mr. and Mrs. Roberts insulting each other in the most extraordinary language (really, it was a moment out of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
), when Mr. Roberts, very understandably, made a wrong turn and got lost on a dark country road. I kept asking them, finally begging them, to stop the car and let me out, but they were so involved in their invectives that they ignored me. Eventually the car stopped of its own accord (temporarily) when it swiped against the side of a tree. I used the opportunity to jump out the car’s back door
and run into the woods. Presently the cursed vehicle drove off, leaving me alone in the icy dark. I’m sure my hosts never missed me; Lord knows I didn’t miss them.

But it wasn’t a joy to be stranded out there on a windy cold night. I started walking, hoping I’d reach a highway. I walked for half an hour without sighting a habitation. Then, just off the road, I saw a small frame cottage with a porch and a window lighted by a lamp. I tiptoed onto the porch and looked in the window; an elderly woman with soft white hair and a round pleasant face was sitting by a fireside reading a book. There was a cat curled in her lap, and several others slumbering at her feet.

I knocked at the door, and when she opened it I said, with chattering teeth: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve had a sort of accident; I wonder if I could use your phone to call a taxi.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t have a phone. Too poor. But please, come in.” And as I stepped through the door into the cozy room, she said: “My goodness, boy. You’re freezing. Can I make coffee? A cup of tea? I have a little whiskey my husband left—he died six years ago.”

I said a little whiskey would be very welcome.

While she fetched it I warmed my hands at the fire and glanced around the room. It was a cheerful place occupied by six or seven cats of varying alley-cat colors. I looked at the title of the book Mrs. Kelly—for that was her name, as I later learned—had been reading: it was
Emma
by Jane Austen, a favorite writer of mine.

When Mrs. Kelly returned with a glass of ice and a dusty quarter-bottle of bourbon, she said: “Sit down, sit down. It’s not often I have company. Of course, I have my cats. Anyway, you’ll spend the night? I have a nice little guest room that’s been waiting such a long time for a guest. In the morning you can walk to the highway and catch a ride into town, where you’ll find a garage to fix your car. It’s about five miles away.”

I wondered aloud how she could live so isolatedly, without transportation or a telephone; she told me her good friend, the mailman, took care of all her shopping needs. “Albert. He’s really so dear and faithful. But he’s due to retire next year. After that I don’t know what I’ll do. But something will turn up. Perhaps a kindly new mailman. Tell me, just what sort of accident did you have?”