The Tale of the Rose (18 page)

Everyone complained of my irritability. “How can you stand a woman like that?” his friends asked in perfidious amazement.

Amid all the evenings of guitar music and card tricks, the only thing left of our intimacy was worries about money, for those parties cost a lot—liquor, flowers, services, all the rest—and the laughter that I forced myself to draw from somewhere, I don’t know where, from a country that all of us carry inside ourselves for times of agony. My husband asked me why I was so pale, why I wasn’t having any fun. A friend of mine, a poet, declared one day, “Forced labor would be easier than what your wife is going through. This is your sixtieth night of merrymaking. You’re killing her! If you’re out to destroy her, at least tell her so. Are you enjoying this? When are you ever going to let her sleep?”

After that, the guitars went somewhere else for a few days and Tonio stayed home. He plunged into the blackest kind of work: his bank accounts. There was nothing left. He became edgy and unfair. Only the dog found grace in his arms. From time to time he came to my room to look in on me. Fortunately, I had gone back to sculpting.

“Are you there, Consuelo?”

“Yes, Tonio, I’m still here . . .”

The secretary had broken a finger, and we had a short stretch of peace. Things weren’t going well with Tonio, but I could do nothing for him.

H
E HAD PREPARED HIS
S
IMOUN
for a Paris–Timbuktu flight: he had to write an article for
Paris-Soir.
He’d been paid in advance for the article, but all the money had gone to pay his debts. He was irritable and taciturn and paced whole miles through the house. He was as agitated as a windmill, grinding out blackness. Finally I made up my mind to speak to him; the look of indifference he put on as soon as I went in augured badly for what was to follow.

“You’re unhappy,” I began. “Tell me what is tormenting you. With all my heart I want to help you. It isn’t curiosity that moves me. But I feel that you are far from me. Be my friend and tell me about your troubles.”

“For more than two weeks I’ve been running all over Paris doing all I can to find the money I need for my flight. Fuel and insurance alone already cost more than sixty thousand francs. I hardly have enough to keep the household fed. And of course that doesn’t include the rent, the secretary, the servants who haven’t been paid . . .”

He had never confided in me at all about his finances.

“I think
Paris-Soir
could advance you that much, no?”

“They’ve refused.”

“And your publisher?”

“He also refused. He doesn’t care about my flights, only my books, which is natural.”

“Will you let me try?”

“Do whatever you want,” he concluded petulantly. “All I know is that I have to leave in ten days.”

I went into the sitting room and asked my dear friend Suzanne Werth to accompany me on my mission. But when I left the office of Prouvost, the editor of
Paris-Soir,
I was not only disappointed at having been turned down, but anguished. Prouvost had complained emphatically that my husband hadn’t lived up to his commitments to the magazine.

I rested for an hour at Suzanne’s place on rue d’ Assas, and then, drawing all my courage from my love for Tonio, I went to see his publisher. He received me immediately with the utmost courtesy but explained that it was his brother who handled all financial matters.

“I know,” I told him, “that you have advanced Tonio a certain amount of money for his forthcoming books, and I want to be loyal to you. A movie studio would like to buy a screenplay by Tonio titled
Igor
for five hundred thousand francs. He’s also going to make it into a book, probably a novel. You know very well that he doesn’t want to hear anything more about the movies after his first two films. Since your brother is involved in the movies, he may be able to negotiate a better deal than I can. Tonio told me to come to an agreement at any price because he needs sixty thousand francs immediately, for his flight. What should I do?”

“Tonio must come and see me. He will have his money.”

I threw myself at him and kissed him. I ran to do the same to Tonio. But I didn’t receive as warm a welcome as I had expected.

“You’ve undoubtedly misunderstood something.”

“No, Suzanne can attest.”

“Is it true?”

He passed up the chance to thank me in order to go and pick up his check.

Since his accident in Libya, his liver had been bothering him. He couldn’t sleep. One of my women friends, who was my confidante at that time, gave me a bed that allowed me to sleep in another room, on another floor. The bed was much too large to fit into our bedroom. She also suggested I have my own telephone line installed so that I would be disturbed less often.

C
HRISTMAS WAS COMING
. I thought a visit to his mother would bring my husband a little calm. His sister insisted that I bring him to Agay to celebrate the anniversary of the miracle that had saved him from the Libyan desert. Tonio instructed me to pack my bags. It was December 22. That evening, he drove me to the Train Bleu. He was held back in Paris by business matters, and the Simoun was being repaired; he promised to join me the next day.

I arrived at a house where he was the one they were waiting for, not me; I was used to this, but now, for the first time, I took it badly. I told his mother and sister, “Instead of Tonio, it’s me. He’s not coming.”

He had promised to come, but I was sure he wouldn’t. I could feel it in the way he had sipped his drink, the way he had spoken to me.

“I don’t know what’s happened. He’s changed, that’s all. I’m worn out. I’m very sorry about this. He forced me to come. Accept me, but believe me, I’m not happy about it.”

“
Mais non,
Consuelo, he’ll arrive tomorrow, you’ll see. Go and rest,” my mother-in-law reassured me.

Christmas. The château was in a festive mood. All the village children were invited to come and receive their toys. Everyone was laughing, singing, the children were dressed as angels, the stuffed turkeys smelled of golden chestnuts, and everyone rejoiced as midnight approached. Still no Tonio. The telephone rang a few minutes before that solemn hour. He was calling his mother. He barely said a word to her and wanted to speak to me. I refused.

“Tell him from me that he is supposed to be here at midnight; he promised.”

“But he’s asking for your help, he needs you in Paris. If I had a husband like him,” his mother added, “I would follow him to the ends of the earth.”

She won.

“It’s very late,” I conceded. “I can’t go back to Paris by myself tonight.”

For the first time, I asked someone to go with me.

“All right,” Tonio’s sister Didi said. “We’ll leave after midnight.”

At Saulieu, in Burgundy, our car crashed. Luckily, I was not at the steering wheel.

My sister-in-law was in the hospital when Tonio came to get me. A fine Christmas that was! There was some risk that she would be permanently disfigured. We took her back with us to Paris, where I gave her my room and moved into the living room. She smiled at my husband, her head covered with bandages. Finally the specialists calmed our fears: there was no longer any question of surgery. With rest, they promised, everything would be fine and her face would be back to normal. I took tender care of her, surrounding her with my knickknacks, offering her my radio. Tonio spent long hours at the foot of her bed. One thing was strange: she begged me to leave whenever she was with Tonio or E.
*
The three of them spent long hours together in my room. When I went in, silence fell. Once I went in to ask my sister-in-law what she wanted for lunch. I was friendly, I said laughingly: “You look as if you’re conspiring. What’s up?”

They all adopted an absent air. I was afraid to go into my own bedroom. I didn’t understand what was going on, but Didi was doing better. She was laughing again; the radio was doing the trick. I tried to make sure that Tonio was getting enough sleep: his Paris–Timbuktu flight was only a few days away. But the evenings with my sister-in-law stretched very late into the night. I felt as though I were surrounded with pitfalls, there in my own home. Tonio seemed like an actor who had never read his lines but found himself suddenly pushed onto a stage to act out an interminable play in which everyone knew their part except him, and he had to improvise.

One night, very late, I asked Tonio to join me. He hadn’t once come to see me since Christmas Day. I was living on the upper floor. I shouted down the stairs, “Tonio, will you bring me the thermometer, I think I have a fever.”

He arrived with the deck of cards he always had with him, either to help himself concentrate or to delay his responses at problematic moments. I gripped his wrists hard, my eyes full of tears. “Let’s end this game, Tonio. Nothing, nothing is right anymore. You know that perfectly well.”

“What?” he repeated.

His voice, however, expressed a desire to know what I meant.

“You don’t love me anymore. I bother you. I bother your sister. You try not to look at me. Even when we’re eating together. Right now, the touch of my hands on yours is distasteful to you. But I won’t let you go, you’re going to have to listen to me.”

The telephone in his part of the apartment rang. Tonio tried to extricate himself from me.

“You won’t answer. Every evening, I listen to you talking on the phone for hours. You lower your voice as if you were afraid of being heard when I go to the kitchen to get a glass of milk to help me sleep.”

At that moment my telephone rang, though it must have been at least four o’clock in the morning. I answered. It was E., who asked me some question, I don’t remember what, and excused herself for having called at that hour; she knew, she said, that Tonio wasn’t sleeping.

“No, you must excuse me,” I replied. “I’m talking to him right now.”

Tonio was sitting on my bed, silent and immobile.

“Since you don’t want to talk,” I went on, “I will. Do you understand this? Someone pursues me into my own bedroom because there’s no answer on your line? Yes, I am jealous! Though I have no reason to be, because you don’t love me. You hate me right now, God knows why. Yet you know that nothing ugly, nothing bad has ever happened to you because of me. Could it be the opposite that you love? You have never lied to me, even now when you’re silent as a tomb. I would so like to know what you’re thinking! I have the right to know and to stop feeling constantly threatened. You’re doing card tricks to distract me, but your face is growing sad. I know it well. I’m not a saint or a healer. I’m sure I can do nothing for you because you’ve stripped me of my power to help you with my love. What’s more, I don’t believe there’s anything you can do at this point to set my mind at ease. Sleep. Forget my voice, if it’s unpleasant to you. But don’t forget what I’m going to say to you: the most terrible dramas are those veiled in mystery.”

His telephone rang again. This time I told him to answer it.

H
IS PUBLISHER
gave a big party to celebrate Didi’s recovery. Morand, Pourtalès, and many other writers were there. Didi, thrilled, never left her brother’s side, and he never left the side of E., who was at her most beautiful that evening, as long as she didn’t show her teeth.