The Tale of the Rose (26 page)

I was going to Pau, then, so I could receive letters from the man I loved. I would willingly have stopped anywhere. I would willingly have laughed in the face of a German who would then shoot me against a tree. The only thing that frightened me was the poor Frenchmen, once conquerors and today fleeing through the streets like a flock of sheep without a shepherd, at random, with no star to guide them.

It was impossible to think in the uproar of the bombardments the Germans were raining down on the endless progression of human beings who spilled out over the countryside and roadways of France. Each one believed he was going somewhere, but if he had taken one minute to think it over he would have stopped wherever he was, because it was a delusion to believe that the millions of people who were all on the move could find the food and lodging they needed somewhere else. But they continued pushing against one another, like beasts being led to the slaughter. You could hear the moaning of those who fell beneath the bombs that were dropped on us almost at point-blank range. Only the armored trucks that were transporting the gold were spared. Tonio had been right.

I managed to slip in between two of those trucks. In the night, we received the order to crawl under our cars and switch off our side lamps, which had already been painted blue or gray in order to be invisible from a meter away. By then we were used to seeing in the dark.

I fled like that for five days. At my first chance to go to a post office, I asked if I could send a telegram to my husband. After being questioned at length and showing my papers, repeating my husband’s name, with his rank of captain in the French Army, writing it down on several forms, and carefully specifying the name of his squadron, I was finally authorized to write out a telegram to him without having any guarantee that he would receive it. But I seized this slight chance. I needed to write his name down on a form, not in ink but in tears. Then I stopped in a village to write a letter.

I finally reached Pau. My landing place had been arranged; I was expected. The next day, I went to the post office. It was like a religious duty I was fulfilling: every day I would go to the post office, where I would wait for news of Tonio. Since heaven had allowed me to cross the distance from La Feuilleraie to Pau, heaven would also send me a message. Hundreds of people were waiting at the post office just as I was, hoping to find a letter there. In this jumble of uprooted beings, far from all that was dear to them, people started making one another’s acquaintance. None of us was proud to tell the story of our flight, our defeat, or the tearful hope that made us stand at the post office waiting for a letter that would connect us once more to those we loved.

I vaguely recalled, as if it were the distant cry of a drowning man, the few words Tonio had spoken to me before we separated: “Monsieur Pose, the director of the Banque de France, is a friend. Remember that name: Pose, like Pau. You’ll go to the window of the bank to ask him to help you if you lose your money. He knows us. I’m sure he’ll help you.” I ran to Monsieur Pose’s bank and shouted at the windows, “Monsieur Pose, Monsieur Pose, Monsieur Pose!” An employee asked me what I wanted.

“I only want to see Monsieur Pose. I am Madame la Comtesse de Saint-Exupéry.”

“He is in a meeting, madame. He told me to help you. He has had a message from your husband. What do you want? What would you like?”

“A room—I’m not finding anything. I cannot stay with the people who have taken me in, and I’ve tried all the hotels.”

He asked an employee to go with me. The government had requisitioned some more-or-less habitable rooms in private houses, cold attic rooms with no running water. But I was very happy to find a bed in the home of a local woman, who had me sleep in the same room as a soldier and an old woman.

My stay in that attic was difficult, but waiting for news of Tonio, who had gone to fight in North Africa, was worse. I didn’t know what saint to commend myself to in order to get news of him, and my emotions subsided from anxiety to resignation, and finally to the patience that would allow me to endure this ordeal.

On a day like all the others I was at the post office, waiting my turn among hundreds of idle people who had been arriving since seven in the morning to take their places in line at the windows. The employee, who knew me, sometimes gave me a wave of the hand to let me know that there was nothing. That day, I heard his voice saying, “A letter for Madame de Saint-Exupéry.” I felt as if a shooting star had stopped for me in midflight. The sun was shining for me alone, among all these wan, lonely faces waiting for their letters day in and day out.

An old woman took me by the arm, and, going to the window before my turn, I accepted the envelope. All eyes were on me, on my clothes, my feet, my face. Their envy was so strong that I fell down in a dead faint on the marble floor of the post office. All the people standing in line ran to help me up, but what each of them really wanted was to catch a glimpse of the handwriting on the letter, which I was clutching against my chest as if someone had been trying to rip it from my hands.

The old lady who had led me to the window helped me down the stairs and went with me to a nearby café. She adjusted her glasses and advised me to stay calm and take some time to think before opening it.

“I’ll go with you to the church to thank Heaven. Now read your letter, my child,” she added, deeply moved.

I recognized Tonio’s handwriting, but it was impossible for me to see clearly. I no longer knew how to read: I’d gone blind. Lights of all colors danced in front of my eyes, and I was shaken by a fit of weeping. The old lady took the letter from me and told me that he had arrived safely in Africa, that he had sent this letter by the one and only mail delivery to France, on the last France-bound military flight out of Africa. “I promised I would let you know how I was,” he said. He promised to see me again and never again to leave me.

Until late in the evening we sat in the church; it was the only place where it was still possible to relax, for the city had ten times its normal quota of inhabitants. When the old woman left, I wondered why I hadn’t asked her for her name and address. By then it was too late: she had disappeared into the crowd.

I laughed all alone, chanting Tonio’s name. I caressed the letter as I would have caressed my own child. I decided to choose a good restaurant and have a real meal at last. I was full of courage. Since leaving my first hosts’ home, I had not had a chance to sit down at a table, for the restaurants, though they had three seatings every meal, would not give a table to a person eating alone. But that evening I was determined to sit down in front of a white tablecloth and savor a meal that would make me wait for my husband in all serenity.

He would see me again. He would see me again, and he had said he would never leave me. God was showering me with gifts. Tonio’s love had come back to me. I felt blessed, singled out from the crowd, I felt like giving thanks to God out loud in the street. My joy was hard to control, and I walked in a zigzag along the sidewalk of Pau’s main avenue. The faint electric blue light of the blackout led me to a restaurant. A long stream of famished heads were jostling against one another as they surged through the door of the restaurant. When my turn came, I headed for the bar. The smoke, the light, the smell of food and people almost made me sick to my stomach, but I had been hungry for days, eating only dry bread and cheese that I bought from peasants, without even a glass of cool water.

A middle-aged man, dressed in gray with an absurdly gaudy tie, asked me, a certain malice in his voice, if I was alone. “You’re sitting at the bar,” I answered. “Would you like to order me a port? Or make that a double port. I’ll pay.”

He smiled, ordered a double port, and told me, “It’s on me, mademoiselle. I’m alone. With two people, it’s easier to get a table. I’m from Pau and I know the maître d’. He’ll give us a table at the second sitting. Here, take my bar stool.”

He grabbed me around the waist, more affectionately than even a friend would, and lifted me up onto the stool. I began savoring my port, dreaming of the African sky that would protect my husband. I forgot the gentleman in gray who had touched my bare arm so familiarly. He insisted I have another port. I accepted, and we went on drinking. I heard him telling me that he was making a fortune selling old ties that he would never have been able to sell in his boutique in peacetime, and that business was very good.

I was too happy to be shocked by his familiarity. I was finally going to have dinner in a restaurant, for the first time since I had left Paris. I had to start living again! I looked around at all the faces. Perhaps a friend would turn up among the other clients. Faces and more faces went by, but I didn’t recognize any of them. My shoulders drooped. I bent over the bar, ordering another port every fifteen minutes. I had my letter against my heart like a talisman, so I was afraid of nothing.

Heavy, muscular arms seized me, and I heard a shout, “Consuelo, Consuelo, is that you? Come with us.”

“Consuelo, how long have you been here?” asked another voice.

Soon I was sitting in front of the white tablecloth I had dreamed of, surrounded by three old friends of Tonio’s, three soldier friends who had risked their lives in this war, a captain and two majors, all three wounded, two in the leg and the third in the arm. They were bandaged and walked with canes, which meant that we had better service and a better meal than the rest of the clientele. I realized that I had abandoned my gray fellow without a word. None of the three men knew what had become of their wives after the evacuation of Paris. No communication was permitted, and they had had to stay in the hospital to attend to their wounds. They had initially been in Biarritz, but when the Germans invaded that city they had escaped to Pau in an old truck driven by a nurse they called the “virgin of Biarritz.”

I thanked heaven for having sent me these true friends. We wept as we talked about the French defeat, and at the end of the meal all three of them declared at once, “You’re coming with us. We have some rooms in a little hotel. There are five of us, and with you that will make six. The women have beds, the men sleep on the floor.”

I followed them like an animal that has finally found a cave to take refuge in. We went in through the courtyard, for the rooms were all tiny attic rooms without curtains or running water: maids’ rooms.

When I had recovered from my emotions, I had an offer for them: “I’ll take you to my country house outside Pau.”

“What? You have a country house near Pau? A real house? In the country? That’s too good to be true. Are you joking?”

“No, not at all. Today, for the first time, I received a letter from my husband. I ran through the streets to the garage where I had left my car so that I could hide my treasure there, my letter. Well, just imagine, I had ten liters of gas left. Since I have a small car, I could go as far as a hundred kilometers on ten liters. I set out for the hilltop fields where a Greek family I know lives. ‘Why don’t you come and live out in the country?’ their maid suggested. I don’t have a house in the country. Her parents, she thought, would rent me the Castel Napoli, a house on their farm, a very old house surrounded by large wells of potable water and fig trees. I went to see her father, and for a thousand francs a month, I rented the house so that Tonio could have a place to rest when he came back. Tomorrow I’ll take all of you there.”

“Not tomorrow!” my friends shouted. “Right now! We’re sick of sleeping on the floor!”

Like an infantry unit, they buckled up their satchels and piled into their car. As wounded soldiers, they were entitled to a certain amount of gasoline. We invaded the Castel Napoli. Each one took a bedroom by assault, and we all lived on the large farm as a family. From time to time we heard news from soldiers who were leaving the army in Africa to go to England, where they would continue to fight the war.

My wait at the post office was shorter now because soldiers were given priority. But I had no further word from Tonio.

Then, in a café, we learned from a pilot that Tonio was back in France. It was as if I’d been struck dumb. How could he not have let me know? It was impossible! I had received a letter, my letter, his last love letter. A letter of fidelity. He had sworn to me that if he came back alive, he would never leave me again.

I had just spent three months in perfect serenity with my soldier friends. One of them, understanding my chagrin, had tears in his eyes. The handsome pilot who was talking to us did not understand the damage he was doing, for my chest was heaving and a torrent of tears was flooding my cheeks. The major questioned him about my husband’s demobilization, and he gave us all the information he had, adding that he was quite sure he had heard Saint-Ex say he would rejoin his family at Agay, in the Var.

I was in despair. I could hardly stand up, overwhelmed with fever and anguish. My legs were collapsing under me like the legs of an animal lying down in a field to die. Only death could free me from this fever of waiting.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
I received a telegram from my husband, telling me to meet him at the Hôtel Central in Pau. I went to that meeting like a sleepwalker. From the moment I had received the message, my friends had kept a close watch on my every move. My rendezvous was theirs as well. They sat in a circle in the farmhouse kitchen, begging me to come back quickly with Tonio.