Parrot and Olivier in America (14 page)

Thus, by our own lights, we were doing very well.

Very soon after the fall of Charles X, the last Bourbon, and the coronation of the fellow from the House of Orleans, I was ordered to present myself urgently at the
petite maison
where Monsieur received me, not in the anteroom but in the salon.

Of course I knew this room, right up to its domed ceiling whose amorous scenes had been painted by Mathilde's master. Mathilde herself had lain up on the scaffolding and, although Monsieur did not know this, and I was forbidden to tell, the most personal aspects of the cherubs had been made by her.

The salon, at once so beautiful and commonplace to me, was a most particular paradise. The candles were alight, all thirty of them, held by a chandelier and girandoles of Sevres porcelain arranged in brackets of gilded bronze. These thirty candles were reflected in beautifully crafted mirrors set in lilac-colored panels. With the room arranged, as for a scene in a play, I entered.

There were a pair of gilded chairs placed in comfortable relation to a low table, its surface painted by none other than Proudhon.

"Sit," Monsieur said, tapping his table with the stem of his pipe.

Then I was afraid.

"I want you," he said, "to take young Garmont to America."

I imagined Mathilde, her mother shelling peas, her portrait of her studio, her portrait of the Comtesse de Polignac. I am not leaving my place for anyone, I thought. I have walked down too many roads, slept under too many hedges, lost too many homes. I am almost fifty years of age and if my body is still strong it is also scarred like an old cat.

My refusal came out so fast and rough it startled me.

Monsieur studied me. Then his lips twisted and his eyes opened wide.

"Your floozy," he cried.

I could have killed him.

"Oh, Chevalier." He laughed. "Please."

Please nothing, I thought. I am a free man. I have pleased enough.

"You know, Chevalier," he said, "her master has been working the Bourbon side exclusively. The tide will be against him now. The portrait of the Comtesse de Polignac will do her no good now," he said. And when he said this he looked so happy that I was even more afraid.

"If so," I said, "she will need me even more."

He considered me as if appalled. "She is pretty enough," he admitted.

This from him, always in a lather about the scrawny Comtesse de Garmont.

"You are English," he said at last. "You can't hear how she speaks."

"And how might that be, sir?"

"Like a fishwife, Monsieur le Chevalier. Like a fishwife from Marseille."

I took it.

Monsieur smiled agreeably. He was one of the few men alive who knew my history. He had known me first at twelve years of age and in certain respects he was my intimate, in other ways a stranger. He was a man of amazing strength and extraordinary limitations. As he had spent many years selling off his father's library, he had a considerable reputation as a connoisseur but in truth he had no eye--I could show him the engravings I had done for Jean-Baptiste Staley's
Lettres
and all he could see was that the ducks were not French ducks.

At this point he rose and I heard him rustling in the bedroom, and when he emerged he had some engravings which he flung across to me.

"Here is what I'll do for you," he said.

I imagined he was making me a gift of these landscapes, both of which showed small neat cottages on a high hill above a broad river. I guessed this was America.

"What do you think, Chevalier?"

"Very pretty."

"Which would you like?"

Both of these works were very poor, but the smaller one had some dexterous crosshatching.

"This one."

"No, no, no," he cried, snatching it back from me, laying it on the table, holding it flat with his big blunt hand. "Which one?" And he jabbed his thumb at the bigger of the houses which had two stories and perhaps ten windows. Only then did I understand he was up to his old tricks--he was offering me a house.

"It is never cold," he said. "It is like summer continually."

"It is America?"

"The Hudson River."

I was thinking of the other house he had tricked me into leaving. Even now, years later, he would not admit his fault or the hurt he had caused those I'd left behind. Enough. There is no cause to talk about that business.

"Why would I need a house in America?"

"In New York, houses are cheap."

"Which one is cheap?"

"All of them. They are the same price as a cow."

I knew this could not be true. He knew I knew it and was already moving rapidly along. "You could speak English there," he said.

"I can speak French here."

At which, of course, he pursed his ugly lips and rolled his eyes.

"Sit," he ordered, although I was already sitting and he meant, Please stand. "Have a drink with me. You must."

At the cabinet I found Scotch whisky.

"No, the Armagnac. Bring the bottle."

I obeyed him like the lackey I had let myself become and was not even rewarded with a drink. Instead he used the Armagnac bottle, together with its cork, his pipe, and his glass, to explain his plan--I would be a spy and protector of Lord Migraine and his friend. As both young men were presently reluctant to commit to the plan for their own rescue, it was I who must make the preparation for their journey. I would buy their clothes, pack their trunks, and arrange whatever financial instruments they would require. In packing my own trunk I would, on no account, omit the clever invention he would shortly show me.

Among my many duties, I would serve as a
secretaire
much as I did for the marquis. This would include making fair copies of correspondence and taking dictation for the report his lordship would later submit to the government.

"I will demonstrate," Monsieur said. "Do not roll your eyes you scoundrel. There is much you do not know."

Then, bustling back and forward, for he only had one hand to carry things, he assembled before me the instruments required for dictation--quill, ink pot, a secretary's notebook.

"Write this down," he ordered. "Dear Perroquet," he cried.

"You wish me to write to myself?"

"Write this--Dear Perroquet, The great land of America calls you across the waves, ha-ha. There, that will do." And he snatched the notebook back and in the process sent a great splash of ink across the Proudhon.

"No, no, don't worry about that. It is nothing in comparison."

He held the book in his teeth and removed a piece of very thin black paper he had secreted within the pages.

"Look," he cried, the notebook still clenched between his teeth. I watched his hand turn black before my eyes. I removed the notebook from his mouth, rather as one takes a ball from a Saint Bernard, and here was revealed to me a second secret page which contained an extraordinary duplication. This was the first time I saw carbon paper. It was this spanking new invention which would allow me to make copies for Garmont's mad mother who was almost as anxious for his safety in his place of refuge as in his homeland.

"Take your floozy to America," Monsieur said, holding out his blackened hand as if the cherubs would descend to bathe him. "She can paint in America. All that space, and never cold."

"She has no patrons in America."

"Pish. There are no end of patrons. Chevalier, you know these new countries."

"I do?" I said, for I knew very well what other new country he referred to and I wished, with the fierceness of my eye, for him to admit my loss.

"You do indeed," he said, avoiding my gaze. "No end of patrons, no end of walls. It is
culture
that they lack. In America they will think she is a genius. You too, if you like. In America there is no one who can paint a horse."

"You know this, sir?"

"I have been there, Parrot. I have been there. It is a country for an artist and all you need to do is write down what his lordship says."

"She has a mother, sir."

"We all have mothers."

"I hope we do, sir."

"She can take the mother. Why not? It is a large country. Your
petite amie
can paint. You can be his lordship's
secretaire
. It will be amusing. You can go around the prisons with him. Why, citizen, I'll lay you a gold louis you'll meet men you already know."

He was not drunk, but he was entering into the kind of mood which I would almost call a fit and I chose that moment--the Hero of the Vendee drinking Armagnac with his single black hand--to leave him alone with his invention.

III

MATHILDE AND HER MOTHER lived up six flights in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. The landlord was a carpenter who ran two floors of workshops, employed a dozen journeymen, and owned four other houses in Paris, one of them in the rue Saint-Honore. Yet he would not repair his own crumbling premises.

I could be sentimental about the smell of sawdust, even glue, but my stomach frequently rebelled against the stinking damp which rose up from the marshy foundations and seeped down from the roof, creating a confluence between the fourth and the third floors, a glistening sour-smelling sheet of scum.

Yet two floors above was heaven, glass panes in the ceiling and a small stove with a fearful zigzag flue which ran like Zeus' lightning bolt from the corner near the door to the uppermost sections of the roof.

Of course it was cold in winter, but now it was warm, and I returned from
the petite maison
to find the windows thrown wide open and the air perfumed by woodsmoke from the yard below.

In one corner, serving as a screen to hide the old lady's cot, stood a single painting as tall as a man--or woman--for it was Mathilde's self-portrait--the painter in her studio with her fallen angel's marble legs protruding from a silken sheet. Around the walls were models in plaster, a head of Niobe hanging from a nail, a Venus, a hand, other things all being the property of the woman portrayed in that shocking painting, no less a beauty in the living light than on the canvas. The confrontation in the painted eyes was gone that evening, and in its place such a warm and lovely glow.

Her Parrot entered. She rose, wineglass in hand, barefooted, her arms open, and all the velvet shadows of the room held inside her gorgeous clavicles. She smelled of wine and onions, and when she kissed me on the mouth I breathed her deep and pulled her hard against me. She pushed back and looked into my eyes so frankly, and I could already smell that musty rutty salty perfume our parts made in the night. Six years we had been like this, and never a day was less passionate between us. I kissed the old lady too, on her crown, and she lifted her lined face to kiss me on the lips and poured me
un verre
--un cup in fact--and began to recite the story of the beef
daube
. Did I think it was too early in the year? Had I felt the change of season? And so on. They were, both together, so dear, so familial, so fond of me and I of them, and if they had been at the wine an hour or two before I got there, that was how we lived. I liked it, our sour red mouths. Soon I would have to give the news of Monsieur's offer, but for now Maman sang to me, the Lord knows what it was, Provencal perhaps, quavering, Moorish. I did not doubt it was her love song to me, but who she really was or what she meant I could not say. I rubbed her swollen knuckles.

She was an extraordinary old thing, and if her spine was as twisted as the stairs, her eyes were like bright stones in water.

I sat at the yellow card table and they waited on me. The
daube
was rich and perfect and the wine flowed, and I asked my darling how would she like to come to live with me in America, and she laughed, and drank, and left gravy on her glass.

"And I will build you an enormous studio," I said, thinking of the house on the Hudson and wondering which way it faced.

"Oh Parrot, you lovely man."

"And we will look at the river, and have a yacht. And sail."

"Sweetheart." She leaned forward and kissed me, all that smeary wine and meat and fat glistening on her lips and her mother stood and took her plate to the scullery and when she had washed her plate she announced she would sit in the yard and watch the children.

"And we will have a garden, and geese."

"Do you hear him, Maman?"

The old lady made an agreeable sighing sound and then she was gone and we could hear her making her cautious way down the stairs.

"He is mad," Mathilde said, and her face was now close to me, kissing, nuzzling.

"There are many walls in America," I said, "and very few artists."

She cocked her head, a way of looking. She had heard another voice in mine.

"What are you up to?" she said, and she had changed, still smiling but questioning. I felt her gaze and knew I could not hide from her.

"I am asking, Do you like America?"

It was my face she was now reading, certainly not my words.

"You are running away?" she asked, as if amused by me.

"How could I?"

She pushed her chair back. "You are running away!"

"My darling."

"You
know
I cannot go to America. Why are you saying this? It is that dirty old marquis."

"It is you, my love." But she was on her feet--clatter and scraping in the scullery.

"No, it is you.
You
are running away."

"You are mad," I cried, not believing what I said.

In the scullery--by which I mean a wooden plank, a pail, a bowl--I found her face awash with tears.

Gently, I touched her salty cheek.

Violently she slammed my breastbone and beat me as if I were a prison door. "Liar," she cried, casting aside her pinny and falling backward upon our bed, her face a seeping rock, offered to the sky.

Kneeling, bundling, I told her I loved her, would never leave her, would never go to America in all my life, and in little cautious stages, with a kiss finally permitted, persuaded my little wild creature into my open shirt, and there, in the familiar dark, she lost her armor, sloughed it off so it joined the jumble of fabrics, castings, pictures, frames without paintings, and paintings without frames, the graveyard beside our bed.