The Tale of the Rose (19 page)

Around one in the morning, I reproached my husband for not having spoken a single word to me all evening. He answered, “I’ve known my sister for thirty-five years, and I’ve only known you for seven!”

I felt as if I’d been banished from the planet. I took the key to our apartment from my purse and gave it to him.

“Here’s the key. I do not want to stay with a husband who repudiates me.”

I had spoken very loudly. The conversation around us stopped. Everyone thought I was a horrible woman. A shrew. I felt that my life was over. The lady of the house gave me my coat without a word. I felt as if I were falling into a void.

I woke up in a bed in Vaugirard hospital, in a ward with people who had no papers. I’d been picked up during the night, on the sidewalk. The cries of my fellow patients had awoken me. I raised my head. One man had had a knife stuck in his belly. A woman was gesticulating, standing on her bed, held back by two nurses who struggled to calm her down while a male nurse sprayed her with cold water. An injection finally quieted her down; then it was my turn.

“Thanks,” I told them, “I’m sleeping very well.”

After my stay in the clinic in Bern, I knew how to act with nurses and their stern treatment. I pretended to sleep. My ruse succeeded, and they moved to another bed. I tried to piece together my memories.

I repeated to myself, “There is, in Paris, a man who is my husband. He will come to get me.” I finally fell asleep with that thought. But very soon I began shaking with fever. The next morning, the man who brought the patients their food appeared. He was coughing. In my most angelic voice, I advised him to take some pills. “They’re too expensive,” he answered.

“Here, take my pearl. I don’t need rings in the hospital.”

I took off a ring and handed it to him.

“If I can do anything for you, tell me, but quickly.”

As he was biting the pearl to see if it was fake, I sighed. “Oh, it’s difficult. You won’t be able to.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You’ll have to get me out of here. I’ve kept my dress on under the nightgown.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yes, of course. Run, even!”

“I’ll leave the door at the end of the garden open for a minute. Go slowly, don’t run; if anyone sees you, tell them you came to visit a patient.”

That was how I made my escape and went home to place Vauban. Humiliated, in despair. I had been locked up!

It was very hard for me to walk past my concierges in an evening gown, shivering with cold—I’d lost my coat during my late-night blackout—my hair in a mess. I later found out that they knew all about my night’s misadventures; in fact, they’d been the first to know, as was always the case in Paris.

The police had gone to the apartment twice to confirm that my husband had no intention of collecting his wife from that ward full of derelicts, but they hadn’t been able to see him or speak to him over the phone. It was therefore difficult for them to make a decision about my case. Tonio’s door had remained shut, and my sister-in-law’s voice had answered that her brother was sleeping and they were sending a friend to see the patient. The police had had to fall back on the concierge, who had gone to the hospital while I was sleeping to identify me.

I went into my room and found a woman sleeping in my bed, fully dressed.

Tonio was leaving at four o’clock on the Paris–Toulouse train. For the first time, I hadn’t taken the trouble to pack his bags. That nagging thought prevented me from getting any sleep, and I finally got out of bed to see to that little task, which I had never failed to carry out.

T
HERE WERE THREE OF US
at lunch the next day; my sister-in-law was looking radiantly happy. No mention was made of my night. My husband sat down at the piano; he hadn’t said a word to me since the day before. I looked awful and didn’t dare budge from my chair. He gestured for me to come over to the piano and sit down on the bench next to him. He wanted to ask my forgiveness for not having gone to the hospital that night.

“I told Gaston to bring you back here,” he said. “It would have been too painful for me to go myself. It took him two hours to find you. Since he didn’t have a note signed by me, they didn’t want to let him take you away. But I waited up in anguish, drained by the quarrel, imagining the worst. I was given some pills to take, and I fell asleep.”

He went on plunking at the piano keys with one hand while the other caressed my hair, which was hanging down piteously in my face.

“You are not being good, little girl,” he sang to the rhythm of his notes.

“Maybe you aren’t, either!”

“You think?”

“I’m never sick when you are well.”

“Maybe so,” he answered, melancholy.

And he stopped playing. “I’m leaving for Toulouse at four o’clock.”

“I’ll talk to you on the train.”

I kissed him, then ran to lock myself in my room.

“All aboard, all aboard . . .” Quick handshakes all around, then he hurried on board the train ahead of me. My sister-in-law took me by the shoulders and announced, “I’m the one who’s going with him.”

The train was starting to move. He stretched out his hand to Didi, to help her up.

That evening, around midnight, he called me. He spoke to me for more than an hour. He begged me to take the first train and come join him; his departure for Timbuktu
*
had been postponed for two or three days. But I no longer had the strength or the courage.

W
E SAW EACH OTHER
once more when he came back to Marseille. The mere thought of the meeting made me shake, I didn’t know whether from fear or from love. I was surrounded by good friends. I hadn’t received any message from him except the one laconically announcing his return.

Between his descent from the plane and dinnertime, everything was easy; all conversation was put off until later, and our true reunion was delayed. At the hotel, in front of his two closed suitcases, he stood immobile, staring fixedly at the floor. I began opening the latch of one of the suitcases. He jumped like a man startled out of sleep. “What do you want?”

“A pair of pajamas for you. Which suitcase are they in?”

Both of us rummaged in the suitcases, or rather in the jumble of clothes, until at last we found both a top and a bottom.

“I know, I know—you’re going to tell me I mixed the dirty laundry in with the clean clothes. . . . But it’s late. Let’s go to sleep.”

He needed to give an impression of composure.

Hotels in Marseille are not heated. In theory, the sun reigns unfailingly over the South. No native of Marseille will ever admit to being cold, even during the gray days iced over by the cold wind known as the mistral, which, in combination with the odors of the port and the salty sea air, has given the locals their low, husky voices. Through the window I watched the docks, which were always teeming with activity. As the night grew darker, the port’s wealthy pimps became more active.

I couldn’t think. I had waited for my husband to come back so eagerly, and there he was before me, cold as a marble statue, distant as the stars. I no longer felt any pain. I told myself that I had, once more, to wait for his return. Making an effort to open my mouth, I asked him, “Are you sleepy?”

“
Oui, oui.
I’m very tired. Let’s go and lie down.”

I lowered my head and my whole body and plunged into the chaos of his suitcases to try to establish a little order. I had hardly picked up a pair of socks and some dirty handkerchiefs when he snatched them away, shouting, “Don’t touch my things. I beg you not to touch my things. I am an adult, and I am entitled to fold my shirts and put them away by myself!”

I had always carefully packed and unpacked his suitcases. I was the only one who knew how his clothes had to be arranged. I felt a chill in the small of my back at his sudden change in attitude.

I thought he was ill or in a foul mood. Maybe he was worried about money. Half dressed, I slipped into bed. My heart was colder than his arms, colder than the blankets, which were frozen by the mistral. He closed the windows tightly, put out the lights, and gently sat down on the edge of the bed. He too could feel the fear that had filled my whole body.

Our return trip in the train took place in the same silence: we treated each other so formally that it was as if we were strangers forced to travel in the same compartment. We reached home, but that evening was just like the previous one. He fell asleep, but my female nerves kept me awake. Wary as a cat, I started across our big apartment. I went to the farthest room, where the sound of my anxious insomnia was least likely to be heard. Never before had I seen him so distant, so silent, without a word for me. One of his suitcases was sticking out of a cupboard stuffed with books. What was that suitcase doing there, still closed? I attacked it immediately as if it were the enemy. I opened it and dug through it ferociously. The dirty laundry he had grabbed away from me the day before was still there, and lying among it were a hundred or more perfumed letters. The scent of the paper alone was enough to explain my husband’s behavior. I opened the first letter: yes, it was his handwriting. And I read, “Darling, darling . . .” But the letter was not for me. Who was this lucky “darling”? I couldn’t read another word. My tears kept me from understanding. In my distress, I deciphered only a single line: it said that he couldn’t keep his wife from coming to London; she was invited, and it would be cruel and futile to stop her. But if my rival were to ask him tomorrow to spend seven years at sea with her, he wrote, he would leave without even telling me good-bye.

I couldn’t bear to read any more. The other letters were from the “darling” in question.

What to do? I had no experience of this kind of situation. Well, I did now. I went to the bedroom, woke him up, and showed him his letters.

“So you went through my things?”

My tears cut short his anger.

“Now that you know, it’s better this way.”

He lowered his head timidly, like a son in front of his mother.

“What are you going to do?” he asked me.

“Me? Nothing. Something has just been broken inside me; you yourself will never be able to repair it.”

I held my hand to my heart, which was beating too fast. I felt idiotic, as if I were in one of those farces where adultery is suddenly discovered. I jeered at myself.

“And you?” I threw back at him. “What are you going to do? I have no reason to reproach you. You don’t love me anymore, and that’s your right. We had an agreement. I was the one who proposed it: ‘When one of us stops loving the other, we’ll have to tell each other, to confess.’ Love is a fragile thing, sometimes you can get lost in its immensity. . . . And there it is, I’m the one who is lost, but if you are happy with her, I don’t wish either of you any ill. Leave as quickly as possible, and for good, with her. Don’t ever see me again; go live in another country. Distance will make us forget.”

I knew the name of his new country, and I told him so, talking fast without pausing for breath. “If your passion, your love for her is real, you must not leave her. I promise I won’t die. I’ll try to live and I’ll remember that I was the one who allowed you to find your true love. So go, you can go off to sea for seven years or seven thousand years, without saying good-bye.”

He was pale and serious.

“I admire you,” he said, pulling me slowly toward him. “I’m sorry you found that letter, I should have warned you. I was afraid of making you suffer, very afraid. I love you from the bottom of my heart. I love you as a sister, as a daughter, as my homeland, but I can’t escape her. I can’t spend a single day without seeing her, without hearing her. She is like a drug to me. She is destroying me, she is bad for me, she is tearing us apart, but I can’t leave her.”

I lay down again because my legs were wobbling. It hurt, it hurt very badly. We were both crying with desperate sobs, like two children being burned alive in the same fire with no hope for a miracle that might save us.

In the early morning, I was the one who started talking again.

“I will be your friend,” I said. “I will go home to my mother’s house the way I did when I skinned my knees as a little girl. I’ll go and let myself be consoled by my roses, my palm trees, my enormous volcanoes in San Salvador. When you are old, maybe you’ll come and see me someday.”

He left to stay in a hotel, for we couldn’t look at each other without crying, falling into each other’s arms, and losing our days to futile sobs. Nevertheless, he looked happy. I took to my bed. My faithful friend Suzanne took care of me, and I made inquiries about the next boat that could take me back to San Salvador.

My husband began writing me tender letters that grew more and more loving, and soon he begged me not to leave. He asked me to wait six months for him, “six short months,” he said.

And he swore that afterward he would take me to China, where we would be happy, the two of us, alone together. I believed in China, in our Chinese happiness, and I waited, still suffering, curled deep in my bed.