The Tale of the Rose (25 page)

Our conversation at his apartment was very short. I didn’t want to stay long. I was afraid of having to go through the previous day’s scene once more. His maid looked me over from head to foot. The tea was bad, but I drank it in order to keep up appearances. My husband spilled the teapot onto my clothes. He wanted me to go into the bathroom and dry off my dress, but I refused to go into the room where, the day before, a woman had hidden, wearing a skirt as green as spinach.

That Sunday he paid me a visit with his dog, and since I went to work late at night, regardless of the weather, I asked him if we could leave together.

“If you’ll allow me,” he said, “I’ll stay at La Feuilleraie. But I would like to be alone. I need calm, in order to think about the two of us. Take your governess with you, I don’t need any help.”

When I came back he was lying in my bed, the way he used to. I was surprised but didn’t allow myself to show it. I told him about my radio program and chose, for my own peace of mind, to sleep in Véra’s bedroom.

The next day my husband declared that he could not move from the bed, that it was impossible for him to stand up; he needed a man, the gardener perhaps, to help him get to his feet. Véra whispered in my ear that if the servants knew he had spent a night in my bedroom, I would no longer have the right to ask for a divorce.

The idea of divorce had been running through my head. Tonio knew it, and he confessed to me later that he had arranged for a witness on purpose to ensure that no divorce could take place because he had slept in my room, fair and square.

After that deft little piece of staging, Tonio asked my gardener to bring him a yellow bench from the garden and put it in front of the window. I laughed because the room had comfortable armchairs but he absolutely insisted on having a garden bench. So Jules and his wife brought one in. Tonio announced that this room would be his from now on and that it was very important to him that no one else should ever sit on this bench. It would be “the bench of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”

He spent the day in the henhouse, strolling through the vegetable garden and talking tomatoes with Jules. He left that evening, carrying eggs, fruit, and flowers with him.

In those days I was interviewing a number of famous men on the radio. I began the series with my friend Léon-Paul Fargue. Next, I invited . . . Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He told Radio-Paris he would do it for a fee of three thousand francs. He added that he spoke Spanish badly but would be willing to say a few things.

My guest was announced. I had my husband led into the sound studio one minute before the red light went on. He recognized me. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed loudly.

“Silence, please, monsieur. In one minute, the whole world will be listening to you. Here is a script in both languages. I’ve prepared it carefully. Read slowly. I ask the questions, and you answer.”

“But what’s going on?”

“Silence. Now, to begin: How did you learn Spanish?”

“In Buenos Aires, with my pilots.”

He spoke without stopping, asking himself the questions and then answering them. After a few minutes of this, I took the microphone away from him, speaking Spanish myself now: “You have just heard the famous aviator, your friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He is dressed in light gray, and is very moved to find himself speaking Spanish. He begs your pardon for his heavy accent, but that is a contract between the French and the Spanish, an unbreakable contract. The Spanish will always roll their
r
’s and the French will never be able to pronounce the Spanish
j.
Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry will now say good-bye in Spanish!”

He was beside himself, and gazed at me helplessly.

“Bonne nuit.”

“Now, the next item . . .”

My secretary pushed Tonio out by the shoulders as Agnès Capri began to sing.

Tonio came back later that night to pick me up at the office.
“Madame de Saint-Exupéry, s’il vous plaît?”
he asked a secretary.

“No such lady works here.”

“Yes she does; she speaks Spanish.”

“
Mais non, monsieur,
the lady in charge of Spanish programming is named Madame Consuelo Carrillo.”

“Thank you. That’s the person I want. Where is she?”

“She’ll be coming out soon. Today is her birthday, and we’re all going with her to her house outside the city. Perhaps you know that her husband is a great aviator but she lives alone in the country, in a big house in Jarcy called La Feuilleraie. And we’re all going there this evening.”

“But where is she?”

“Here she is. Madame Gómez, Madame Gómez! You have a visitor.”

“Thank you.”

And turning toward Tonio, the secretary said, “Come along on the bus with us. There’ll be about twenty of us. We’re going to have a housewarming party at La Feuilleraie.”

He came. But no one knew that the tall gentleman was my husband.

During the party, someone told him a lovely story about me. It was the story of the rose fields on the road from Paris to La Feuilleraie.

“Madame Gómez takes that road home every evening after work,” a guest told him. “So of course she’s gotten to know all the rose growers. One frosty evening, Madame Gómez saw that her friends the growers were panicked and in tears. The frost was killing the roses. That same night, she sent them dozens of large linen sheets embroidered with crowns. They say the sheets were inherited by her husband, who is an aristocrat, a count, I believe, or in any case the descendant of a great family. You can imagine, white sheets like that, lying on the ground. It was the middle of the night, but she revived the rose growers’ hopes. They went back to work. She herself worked alongside them, and with their help, she built an enormous tent, white as snow, to save the roses. The next day, all of us went to help. Each of us, monsieur, took along a piece of wrapping paper, newspaper, it was a real madhouse beneath those ‘tents.’ We crawled along on all fours, lighting little fires, and, monsieur, it was truly a miracle: the rose crop was saved. Heaven helped them, it can’t be denied. The weather grew a little warmer, and the roses managed to survive. Of course the sheets were left in rags, but the love that the rose growers bear Madame de La Feuilleraie, I mean Madame Gómez—that, believe me, is far more beautiful than a thousand sheets, even if they were embroidered with crowns. The growers spent several days at La Feuilleraie to help out in the orchard and the vegetable garden. They cut back the undergrowth. You understand, monsieur, work that is not paid, work that is done out of friendship, out of love for the earth—that is far more precious than any other kind. And everything at La Feuilleraie has bloomed. If you’re interested, I can give you the exact figures. Almost a ton of pears have been harvested from the orchard and sold in the marketplace. . . . She loves roses, Madame Gómez, she loves to save them. She herself is a rose.”

T
HE THIRTY-ODD MILES
that I went over every day on my drive through the Bois de Vincennes to Paris had become a very pleasurable habit. Along the way I saw enormous fields of beets and vegetables that were trucked into Paris by night to be distributed in the early morning at the great marketplace of Les Halles. But the traffic was becoming heavier and heavier. Something was happening that all the gallant peasants who were bringing in their harvests found tremendously strange. I observed and shared in their worries. There was talk of mobilization, of war. Soon France would be going into battle again. We Parisians clung to peace at all costs; we didn’t want to hear the word “war.” No one wanted it to come, but it was already only a few hundred miles away from us. Our only remedy was to go on pretending, to ignore the rumors and live in peace during those last sunny days of the spring of 1940.

Tonio continued to invite himself to lunch at La Feuilleraie. It was the only meal I had at home, among my dogs and my good friends the gardeners, Jules and his wife. Jules acted as my sommelier and knew how to pour both rosé wines and champagne without letting a single drop fall onto the cloth that covered the legendary table of La Feuilleraie. My husband was already in uniform; the aviators had been mobilized, though they had no airplanes. Nonetheless, they were preparing for this war, which promised to be more of a farcical butchery than a war, since they had no weapons with which to combat a nation that was armed to the teeth.

The months went quickly by. We avoided mentioning the war but spoke instead of the hawthorns that were in bloom, the preserves that needed to be put up, the hunting lodge that would have to be repainted. One day I told Tonio I was going to use all my savings to buy grain to feed my hens and the other animals.

“I’m also going to convert the tennis court into a henhouse, to increase production. And use the pond for raising ducks.”

I spent my afternoon in the car, transporting enormous sacks of grain that I bought here and there, for the peasants were already doing as I was and hiding what they had.

Then France went to war and was defeated in a flash of lightning. My mother, who was in San Salvador, sent me a telegram ordering me to leave Europe as quickly as possible and come home like an obedient little girl.

I told my husband about that telegram. For the first time he begged me, like a child in tears, to stay in France whatever happened. I must not abandon him; if I left he would feel completely unprotected, he would be shot down on his next mission. He would lose his hold on life.

I promised to do as he wished. Since it was almost impossible by then to reach Radio-Paris by the roads, I had decided to live in the city in order to go on working. But Tonio persuaded me to give up my work at the radio station and stay at La Feuilleraie, to feed my rabbits and make jam. I accepted, for Tonio’s airport wasn’t far from the estate and he often came to stay there, one or two days a week. Despite the instability of our lives, we had several days of happiness among the ocean of leaves and roses that was La Feuilleraie.

The Germans bombarded the little train station at Jarcy, about half a mile from the house. Several coaches of a train were blown up, and my cook went mad from fear. The valet had to join the army, and Monsieur and Madame Jules were the only ones left to keep me company.

One Monday, I’m quite sure it was the tenth of June, my husband arrived at the house, frantic.

“We have to leave in five minutes,” he told me.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. It isn’t serious; bring along a little suitcase, just what you need for one night. You’ll soon be back home, I hope. But I don’t want you to stay here alone. The Germans are closing in on Paris. You can hear them already . . .”

“Yes, I hear them, especially at night. The other day we saw some planes fighting just above the edge of the property.”

“Hurry; you’ll take the little Peugeot. Bring as much gasoline as you can, so that you can go as far as possible. I think the best place for you is Pau.”

“Pau? But I don’t know anyone there.”

“Doesn’t matter, you’ll soon meet good people. All the gold that belongs to France is being evacuated to Pau in armored trucks. Follow one and stay close because the Germans will never bombard France’s gold. They’ve been informed and know it is going to be stored in a safe place. So they will know where to find it after the negotiations. It’s in their interest for that gold to be well guarded.”

And so I left in the car. I was trembling with fear and cold.

“I beg you, no tears,” he repeated. “You’ll have plenty of time to cry later. If you want to know how I am, you’ll have to be in the free zone. If you stay in Paris, you’ll never hear a thing, even if I’m dead.”

I still wonder by what burst of energy, what mysterious intuition, I managed to follow his advice and, like a sleepwalker, struck out on the road to Pau.

I left him with my eyes closed so I could hold on to the memory of his face, the smell of him, his skin. We went in opposite directions. Gréco, my favorite dog, followed me for several kilometers, running behind the car, but thirst and exhaustion discouraged him, and I soon lost sight of him, too.

I
ARRIVED IN
P
ARIS
but couldn’t go any further without sitting down one last time on the terrace of a café where I had so often sat before. At the Deux Magots, the tables were as crowded as ever, and everyone was talking about leaving Paris. Evacuate Paris: that was the order.

A voiceless rage rose up inside me. Why run away? Why leave your house to your enemies? Why not stand up to them? Even with a gaze? I found those orders very unwise. My own case was different. If I wanted to have news of my love, I had to go to Pau. I could not live without any information on what was happening to him in the turmoil into which he and his squadron had been thrown.

In one minute I had lost my house, my husband, and this adopted country that I loved and respected. My mouth tasted of ashes, and nothing, not even liquor, could quiet the feeling of hatred and defeat inside me. For the first time I was running away. It was a strange feeling. You run from the enemy, you go anywhere you can, and you feel even more threatened. It was my turn to be engulfed in the panic experienced by the forty million French people who had received the order to evacuate their homes, their beloved villages, to mill around in circles like animals, using up the last of their energy without suspecting that their strength and their resistance was leaving them.