Léa gives a start because Chéri has just come back, shivering and grumbling, in his bathrobe.
“You’re not getting up today? But, Léa, you’ll get so fat!”
She sizes him up and does not deign to respond.
“A young girl . . . a pretty, tender girl, a little dopey . . .”
“Is it my wedding that’s bothering you, Léa?”
She hesitates, then decides to say it: “Yes . . . Listen, my dear, you shouldn’t . . . I really wish . . .”
How can she say what she’s thinking? Chéri files his nails; but beneath his distracted exterior he is waiting, he is listening for . . .
“They’re going to make him the guardian, the support, the master,” she thinks to herself, “of a child so young and so weak. It’s terrible. She’ll think she’s marrying Prince Charming and the next day she’ll find herself face to face with an old coquette. Because really, it’s extraordinary, but of the two of us, he’s the old coquette. He’s the one who’s always scrubbing himself, plucking hairs, and sleeping with cucumber cream on his face, and not one night of lovemaking goes by for him without a good facial massage afterward! An old coquette doubling as a rich and greedy petty bourgeois, who quibbles over tips, who yells if the bathwater is too hot, and counts the number of bottles of champagne in the cellar; a fussy, idle, petty bourgeois . . . With me, it didn’t matter, because I’ve had so many of these naughty nurselings. I was the tree they blunted their nails on; I was the warm rug they curled up on to sleep. My God, the poor little girl! If only someone could stop it!”
Léa looks at Chéri almost with anguish—she forgets to raise the corners of her lovely, tired mouth. She makes one more effort: “Listen, child . . . I assure you, don’t get married. You mustn’t get married . . .”
It is exactly what Chéri was waiting for. He bursts out laughing and shakes Léa by the shoulders, with insulting hilarity. “Aha! You jealous . . .” he shouts at her.
THE RETURN
Half past midnight. Léa closes her book and thinks that it is time to sleep. She marks her place with a postcard from Chéri, which arrived the day before, in which he concisely expresses the boredom of being married. “I’ve had it! I’ve had it!”
Tomorrow she will file the card away with Chéri’s other letters: a dozen telegrams, a few
pneumatiques
, two or three notes scribbled on hotel stationery . . . The telegrams composed pidgin-style, without needless tenderness or niceties: Chéri, like nearly all children of the rich, knows perfectly well that they cost by the word. His letters have a singular tone to them, sometimes that of one schoolboy to another, sometimes that of a child to an old and very dear nanny: “My darling Nounoune . . .” Léa smiles, thinking about it.
“Poor thing . . . He was so used to me . . . What an orphanage that must be, him and his child bride!”
She relaxes and reminisces, alone in her big bedroom of which, though it is somewhat
démodé
, she is quite fond. An elegant and tractable young woman up on the style of the day would like it to be more airy, with fewer cushions and fewer crimson curtains, but Léa holds on to her knickknacks and her big, heavy bed, made entirely of chased brass, which shines in the dark like a suit of armor.
The lace bed linen and the sheets heavy with embroidery also give away Léa’s age, her fifty wise years, her bourgeois taste for fine, long-lasting linen. This sturdy luxury sits well on Léa, enthroned in its midst, plump and healthy, adorned only with cool, clean lawn, not the least tempted by the frills of soubrettes and the little bonnets described as “young-looking.”
She looks approvingly at the order which reigns in the room: “It’s easy to see that Chéri doesn’t come around anymore,” she thinks.
A serious ring of the bell in the courtyard gives her a start. She has just enough time to make out the sound of muffled footsteps and whispers; the door is pushed open roughly.
“It’s me,” says an angry voice.
There is Chéri standing under the chandelier. The overhead light chisels his high cheekbones and grazes his feminine chin. He knits his eyebrows over his eyes, which are too dark to be seen.
Léa does not cry out. She sits on the edge of the bed and, with instinctive modesty, merely arranges the short braids she has fixed her hair in for the night.
“I was afraid it was you,” she says at last.
He looks thinner to her, he seems even more surly. He is wearing a suit beneath his open overcoat; his hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers, and with his tousled hair and rumpled shirt he resembles a drunken best man.
“What do you want, my dear? Where did you come from? This is no way to make an entrance,” she observes calmly.
He takes two or three sharp breaths and lets his stiff, raised shoulders fall, as if beginning to melt in the warmth of the room; he smiles vaguely, letting his extreme youthfulness show on his face, and sighs softly.
“Hello . . .”
“Hello . . .” says Léa in the same tone. “So, what brings you here? Has something happened? Where are you coming from?”
“From my wife’s, of course.”
He says “my wife’s” awkwardly, with excessive vanity in his voice.
“It’s late to be going out,” remarks Léa discreetly.
“And it’s too late to go back there!” shouts Chéri. “That’s one place you’ll never see me again!”
He throws off his overcoat as if ready to fight and falls dumbstruck into an armchair near the bed. “You know, Léa, I . . . don’t you . . .” He says nothing more and shakes his head, sulking.
“Of course I know,” says Léa indulgently.
She leans over and runs her hand over his tousled head, enhancing its disorder and his anger. She knows very well that Chéri does not speak easily and that he does not take great pains in choosing his words. She also knows that what he has to tell her could be summed up in three phrases: it is the story of his four months of marriage and travel in close quarters with a little girl, young like himself, rich like himself, and who perhaps resembles Chéri like one half-tame colt resembles another . . .
Under the familiar caress, Chéri leans his head back, closes his eyes, and his nostrils flare as if he was on the verge of crying.
“Nounoune . . .” he whispers despite himself.
He fights back his tears with the spiteful pride of a child, and Léa helps calm him. “There, there, Chéri.”
Until his magnificent, moist eyes open again with a burst of laughter. “Can you imagine the look on their faces?”
“Whose?”
“Why, Mama’s! This’ll give the old girl a shock! And everybody else, too!”
“And . . . your wife?”
“Oh, this’ll be the last straw for her!”
Léa shakes her head angrily. “But will she be upset?”
Chéri jumps furiously to his feet. “Upset? Of course she’ll be upset! That’s all she ever is—upset! For the last four months . . .”
He tears off his jacket and tie, which he throws on the dressing table. “You don’t know what kind of life I’ve been living for the last four months! A child like that who isn’t even twenty-one years old! Who doesn’t know anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t understand anything! She’s bored, she’s afraid to be alone, she cries if I say anything, she hides under the table if I yell . . . I’m not a nursemaid!”
“Neither is she, unfortunately,” thinks Léa.
“So, you see, it’s not working out for me. And then always hanging on me, despite all that, saying I’m handsome and that she loves me! Do I even know her? I’m telling you, I’ve had it! Up to here!”
He kneels down beside the bed and rolls his head in the cool sheets. Seeing him, one would think it was the return of a smitten lover. But Léa does not fool herself. She understands the mysterious power of habit; she understands even better Chéri’s closed heart, hard and belated like the buds of the oak . . . He had smiled at the fragrant bedroom; he had fallen, relieved, into the familiar armchair. A caress that was not in the least passionate had nearly opened the floodgates of his egotistical tears; what he longs for now is the bed in which he slept the long sleeps of his adolescence. But he had not yet kissed either Léa’s hand or her face . . . He does not give a thought to the suffering of an abandoned child.
Pensively Léa brushes Chéri’s clear cheek and his handsome, thankless forehead with the tips of her fingers. “Chéri . . .”
He groans lazily. “What?”
“You can’t stay here, you know. You have to go back . . .”
He opens terrible, dark eyes. “Go back? You must be kidding! I’d rather die! I’m through with being married! Get me out of it, if you can!”
He has wrapped his strong arms around her . . . Léa shrugs her shoulders, powerless . . .
“Send Chéri back? Where will he go? He doesn’t understand yet that the one waiting there for him is a woman . . .” He is too young, this child hanging on to his old friend, trying to heal a sickly love bruised by its own emergence . . . “Well, too bad, I’m keeping him!” Léa decides with calm fatalism. “Worse things could happen . . . Let him stay—in the meantime.”
And loosening Chéri’s grip, she makes a place for him in the hollow of her comforting side like a mother animal.
THE PEARLS
“We’ll have the coffee in the lounge, won’t we, Chéri?”
“Of course.”
“And Turkish coffee, like yesterday?”
“Of course.”
“You’re so sweet here. You have a delightful disposition when you travel.”
“Yes, but I don’t want anyone telling me I do. It immediately makes me want to start acting up.”
He laughs and his laughter arouses in his handsome face the ferocity of a wolf cub. His perfect mouth is nearly innocent of smiling; after brief outbursts of a stinging joke, it closes back up like a sullen flower. But today Chéri, languid and subdued, laughs lazily, turned toward the garden, which is blue with shadows and greenery.
Léa gazes at her young friend and admires him without servility or bitterness.
“You’ve never looked better than you have since we arrived in Tunis. What a face! And your eyes! Exactly like the eyes of the women here! You wouldn’t happen to be part Tunisian by any chance?”
Blasé, Chéri does not deign to look at her with his dark eyes; but with a finger moist with saliva he shines his thrilling lashes and his gleaming eyebrows like plumage. They both fall silent, like satisfied lovers with nothing left to say to each other, like old friends resting together. A simple white dress and a white hat brighten Léa’s healthy complexion and are not intended to make it look younger. With her beautiful, solid shoulders, her tranquil blue eyes, and without the dye in her hair, she might be taken for a very agreeable mother accompanying her son . . .
No one looks at them all that much at the Arabian Palace. In Paris they have been forgotten, and in any case, their running off together did not cause a big to-do. Chéri’s attempt at marriage was so brief—four months!—he had barely had time to leave his more mature friend for his young wife.
And he has come back to her with the rage of a deceived child, impatient to rediscover in her, by turns obliging, calm, indifferent, and good, what for him takes the place of love. She took him back, peevish and wheedling, she looked after the ill-tempered, detestable little king, and they began living together again.
As before, he insults her, he strokes her naggingly; as before, she lets him play and destroy all around her with an indulgent disdain which dwarfs him. He wields a powerless spite against her. When he feels like shouting at her, “The least you could do is cry! That other one cries, that little girl I abandoned cries!” Léa smiles, strokes Chéri’s forehead, and says only, “Poor baby.”
Humiliated, bristling, he sometimes bites the appeasing hand, then little by little loosens his bite and stays there, eyes shut, lips closed around the skin he has bitten, as if slaking his thirst for her . . .
They came to Tunis as innocents, expecting to find on the other side of the sea a land without winter, a city with the whiteness of sugar, crisscrossed with blue shadows. With the first disappointment behind them, they gave in to their idleness, the one as unadventurous as the other, both incapable of any lasting curiosity but amused by a passing burnous or a veil worked with gold, and imagining that the entire Orient fits into a Jew’s stall cluttered with rolled carpets and big silver jewelry.
Within a week this rather singular couple of lovers reverts to a Parisian use of time, mundane and inflexible. Before lunch, a stroll through the souks where Chéri fingers the gandurahs, the Bokharan embroidery. Léa takes her time picking out antique rugs, with a short pile, those whose red threads, worn with light, pale to a silvery pink. They make their way slowly toward the hotel and Chéri turns to look at the passing veiled women, sees his dark eyes in theirs, dark and magnificent like his.
After lunch, after the quiet hour of Turkish coffee and cigarettes, the car takes Léa and Chéri outside the city; they are going to Carthage for tea, or to some other Turkish café in Sidi-bou-Said, it being too far to the Pre-Catelan or the pavilion at Bellevue.
They can look at the mountains without their souls rushing toward the white sand, toward the desert they conceal; they can walk along the green and white sea without their hearts filling like a sail. Léa, growing older and wiser, has lost forever the thrill of travel, and Chéri, young, ardent, robust, carries with him, in him, something convalescent, belated, languid . . .
“It will be hard for you to go back to being married,” says Léa, shaking her head.
They are alone in the hall, and Chéri can stretch out on the rattan chaise lounge. He inhales deeply the delicious aroma of the Turkish coffee prepared for him in a corner of the hall on the glowing coals of a tiny brazier. Léa leafs through the illustrated magazines and affectionately oversees the dozing Chéri, whose beautiful eyelashes flutter, heavy with sleep . . . Suddenly he opens his eyes with a start.