The Tale of the Rose (31 page)

And indeed we went to her house the next day. There I found trees in bloom, young people drinking, and the atmosphere of a real home. The day passed quickly, and I went home that evening to my solitary apartment.

My mother asked, in a letter from Central America, why my New York address was different from my husband’s. I showed the letter to Tonio, and as quickly as possible, he managed to procure an apartment for me with an address almost identical to the one at 240 Central Park South, where he was living.

And so I began to settle into New York. From time to time my husband would come eat a meal with me at some strange hour, for he ate around two or three o’clock in the morning. I had wisely resolved to work. Work is the only thing that will allow you to keep your balance and find your way out of the confusion of events. I decided to go back to sculpting and enrolled at a school just two buildings away from mine: the Art Students League.

By the end of my first week, I had befriended several young people who were devoting themselves very seriously to art. Some of them went with me to the movies; we ate meals together and even had fun reading the old French newspapers we managed to dig up. These friends were a great comfort to me. I still felt unable to sculpt pure forms, but the professor pampered me a great deal; I was a refugee, that much was clear from my skinniness and the gratitude I displayed at the least sign of affection from him.

My husband would come to visit me at the school. One day I was glad to see him peering down at my most recent statue. It was a little askew, like a tightrope walker. He told me not to despair. With great assurance, he predicted that if I touched it with my fingers every day, if I learned how to caress the clay just right, the statue would soon become beautiful and straight. I looked into his eyes with astonishment. His advice gave me an idea: if I were to go see him every day, to caress him with my loving gazes, if I went every day to show him my fidelity, my faith in the sacrament of marriage that had united us forever, perhaps in the end he would listen to me and be my husband again, as he once had been.

Meanwhile I continued to sink into a kind of depression. I often went into churches on little pilgrimages. Sometimes I laughed about it, sometimes I thought I was going mad. I went to confession and told the priests my secrets.

I had a lovely apartment and on the surface lacked for nothing. Sometimes I reread Bernard’s letters from Oppède and remembered the privations, the fear, and the cold we had gone through in that stone village, swept night and day by the mistral that constantly carried the sound of the enemy to our ears. Then I thanked heaven that I was there, safe and sound in a sunny white room. But the comings and goings of my husband-neighbor, certain sounds, certain female voices, certain laughs, certain silences that I perceived through the thin wall made me shake with jealousy, asphyxiating in my solitary existence as a neglected wife. I felt a bit like a queen who is not stripped of her title although she’s sent into exile. At moments like that all the white tablecloths, all the luxury, all the lights of the skyscrapers were unbearable to me. I wanted only one thing: a shoulder to sleep on.

During that period, I reread
Letters of a Portuguese Nun
*
and certain other works that made me burn with love for Tonio all the more. I realized that it was unhealthy to live so near him that I could see the lights of his apartment from my windows.

I asked him, very calmly, to find me another place to live, farther away from him. I explained that I couldn’t be indifferent to what went on at his place, that seeing pretty women coming and going from his apartment was torture.

He took me silently by the hand, kissed my hair, and told me, “You are my wife,
ma femme chérie,
for I cherish you at every hour of the day. You must come to understand me as a mother understands her son. That is how I need to be loved. I’ve done great things in aviation, but as you know I’ve broken my arms, my shoulders, and my ribs, and sometimes I feel as if my head were splitting open. The first time I crashed, when I was learning to fly, I must have damaged something inside it. Ever since then I’ve suffered from terrible migraines that make me fall silent or fly into a rage.

“It does me good to have you there with me, not speaking or moving, asking for nothing. It may be that there’s nothing more I can give you, but perhaps you’re the one who can give me something—make me grow, plant your seeds in me, enrich me, make up for what I’m losing so that I can create, so that I can go on with my great poem, the book I want to put my whole heart into. You’re the first to have believed in me, you are the woman for whom I wrote
Night Flight.

“Do you remember the letter I wrote you during my stopovers in tiny South American villages? You understood that letter. You told me, ‘More than a declaration, more than a love letter, this is a cry for help to the only being who can help you—help you during your hours of solitude in the sky, help you when you’re endangered by the stars, which in your exhausted state you confuse with the lights of mankind on the earth, help you when you are once again among men and have to learn again how to live, help you not to forget that you, too, are a man of flesh and blood, an ephemeral man.’

“You were the person I was looking for. You were the port where I could take shelter from the storm, and you were also a very beautiful young girl, already anguished by my night flights, anguished by the threat of the end. So if you love me even a little, protect in me the essence of the man that I am, because you believe in its value. One evening you said to me, ‘You have a message to deliver to mankind. Nothing must stop you, not even me . . .’ That day I decided to marry you forever, for all of life and for all the lives we will be given to live beyond the stars. And you began creating a world where I would walk straight toward that message, which you believed in.

“Often in the bitterest moments of our separation I walked again, full of confidence, alone in the big attic room in Tagle, back in Buenos Aires, where you used to lock me up in front of a table to write, to write a page of
Night Flight,
like a child being punished. Even in my moments of anger with you, my lips can still taste the port that you would serve from a small cask whose golden spigot looked so pretty in that loft where you condemned me to forced labor. Consuelo, I haven’t forgotten any of your tenderness, your devotion, your sacrifices. I know how deeply you’ve been wounded by the anguish, the torments, the difficulties of the wandering life I have made you lead. I know how hard your women friends have been on you when it came to criticizing our relationship. They judged it only with their feminine minds. But you, you understood me, and later you loved me, but you were painfully bruised by the struggles of our daily life. Your impatience grew out of your weariness, and mine as well. Worry took the place of love, and I left you in order to protect us from each other. Our friends have been wrong to hold you responsible for my happiness or unhappiness. You must know that I have never stopped loving you. But I see your forehead wrinkling up, I hear you raising your voice, which is about to separate us again.”

“No, Tonio, I am not bitter,” I said. “I learned a long time ago to digest the venom of jealousy. There will be no more arguments between us, no more crying. I want to see things clearly. I came from far away to be near you, and the days go by without our even having a meal together. I do not know how I can be of any use to you, living in a different apartment, forever outside your door. Even a dog is allowed to gaze on its master.”

“Be quiet,” he cried, “you’re hurting me! I’ll find you an apartment in my building today. That way we’ll see each other every day, and we’ll go on talking about us.”

And so I moved again, this time into an apartment that was like a greenhouse. My husband sent me flowers, plants, a silent typewriter, and a Dictaphone. “That way, when you’re alone you can tell your beautiful stories to this machine,” he said, “and if I feel like listening to you, I’ll put one of your recordings in and hear your voice. For you are a great poet, Consuelo. If you wanted, you could be a better writer than your husband.” My housewarming party was very lively. My husband brought some friends, and we had a pleasant evening.

After the move, he changed. He came to visit me every evening before going to bed, to prove that he was going back to his cage every night. Sometimes he would phone me to read a few pages he had just written, and he would talk to me about the future as if we were going to be together until the end.

M
EALTIMES IN OUR HOUSEHOLD
were a bit of a muddle. Tonio would say he was coming to lunch or dinner, but he would never show up. My mood was certainly not pleasant. Often I fled in anger from the table I had prepared and went down to the Café Arnold to eat by myself. And there I would find him, surrounded by men and women, striving to amuse his guests—he, the most melancholy Frenchman in all of New York. He didn’t like to see me sitting alone at a table in silent reproach. He would ignore me, and if by chance someone who knew me was there and gave me so much as a quick handshake, I could see something approaching hatred for me in Tonio’s stare.

No matter what transpired during the day, it had no effect on our nightly conversations: he would come to me or call, speaking in his tender voice, wishing me good night and talking about the day to come with love. But happiness was always postponed.

On the first day of spring I risked going to his apartment. Though I had moved into the same building, I had yet to be invited there. He was always the one who came up the three flights of stairs that separated us. That day, the fresh sunlight shining on my green leaves and flowers had encouraged me to put aside all shyness and run to him. The door was never locked. I went in and found a dozen people there, just finishing their lunch. Immediately I put them at ease by informing them I had come to serve the coffee. The light touch with which I returned to my role as lady of the house amused Tonio. But the relaxation I had noticed in his expression didn’t last long.

Among his guests was a musician friend who was giving a concert at Town Hall the next day. He insisted to my husband that I attend. I pretended to forget the invitation, but Tonio wanted, for the first time, to be seen with me in public.

We had seats in the orchestra section, very much in view of everyone. The entire French community of New York was there, since our musician friend was their compatriot. I was happy to be listening to good music, but I could sense that my husband was terribly nervous because of the smiles and sly remarks of the people around us, who were seeing him out with his wife for the first time. At the intermission, he fled without a word. I found myself alone and all the more exposed—even the musician, busy conducting his orchestra, noticed it. I hadn’t brought my purse with me, thinking Tonio would take me home.

After the performance I felt lost, both in my heart and in the streets of New York. I walked along the sidewalks in my evening gown for half an hour, my eyes full of tears, passersby staring at me, until I happened to meet my musician friend, who was stepping out of his car to go into a large restaurant. He took my arm, and I followed him. From that day on, I had another friend in this city where I felt so foreign, and again I began to think long and hard about life and the hearts of men. My friend made me understand, little by little, very gently, that if one member of a couple is at fault, it’s the other one who has to make things right, whatever the cost. He took me to the country and showed me the beauty of the American forests. When I returned to the city, I felt more sure of myself.

My husband was a little disturbed by this three-day absence, which I had informed him of laconically in a simple note. Our conversation was friendly but rather ironic. Normally, he was the one who went away on the weekends, I didn’t know where, but this time it was me. In appearance, nothing had changed between us. I gave it a lot of thought, and one evening I asked him if he would grant me an hour so we could talk seriously. He wanted to put the conversation off until the next day. I accepted, on the pretext that the delay would give me a chance to see a great singer who was appearing in a club. Immediately he changed his mind: he would come see me that evening.

For the first time he showed up exactly when he’d said he would. I offered him a large glass of milk, as usual, but he asked for a whiskey. We drank several whiskies and then I told him I had finally understood what I had to do: divorce him.

A few days later, we met with a lawyer to resolve our situation. The lawyer insisted that I move to another building immediately. My husband told me to answer in English—I was the one doing the interpreting—that this could not be done. He would agree to give in on the question of money, but he didn’t want me living anywhere else.

The argument grew heated; the lawyer told him in bad French that he was treating me like a mistress, not a wife, and that he, my lawyer, was prepared to defend me.

My husband stood up and planted a kiss on my lips. It was the first kiss he had given me in the six months I had been living in New York. It made me angry, because he wasn’t doing it seriously.

“I don’t give a damn about laws,” he concluded. “I love you.” Furious, he slammed the door.

And so it all began again. I remembered Almería . . . the orange trees in flower along the coast . . . the love of our young lives . . .

I
T WAS SUMMER
, and the heat was tropical. “We have to leave New York, you see, and live out in the country,” I suggested to Tonio hesitantly. “You won’t be able to stand it here.”

“I dream of being in the country and feeling cooler. Not going anywhere, just working, writing, night and day.”

“Give me some money,” I said. “I’ll ask an agency for information.”

“No,” he said, “I’ll take you to the train station. You’ll get on a train heading north, a lovely electric railcar, the fastest one.”

At Grand Central Terminal in New York, I climbed aboard a train without knowing where it was going. I looked at the names of the stops and read “Northport.” There, I said to myself: it’s north, there must be a refreshing breeze.

I bought a ticket to the last stop on the line. I remember, Tonio, that you paid quite a few dollars, so I could go to the ends of the earth, but the ride turned out to last only forty-five minutes.

When I stepped off the train, I looked around for a taxi to take me into the city. No taxi. But I had a little trick, à la Consuelo. I was the only woman in New York who could find a taxi when everyone else was looking for one. Among the cars stopped at red lights, there were always taxis for members of the military, the sick, the handicapped. I would catch the driver’s eye and try to put on my friendliest and most pleasant face, then slip up to his window, open my handbag, and show him a five-dollar bill, telling him, “Oh, I’m going quite far.” Then he would say, “I’m driving. Can’t you see I’m busy?” “Yes,” I would persist, “we’ll drop this person off first, and then me.” That’s exactly what I did in Northport. “Afterward you can take me to the big white house,” I told the driver. For I had seen, from the train, a three-story white colonial house like something out of a storybook.

The car stopped in front of the house, which had a magnificent garden stretching out around it. Since the gate was open, I went in as if the place belonged to me. A gentleman with a watering can in his hand looked at me with a smile. “Sir,” I said, “this is very bold of me, I realize, but I am a foreigner. My husband, back in New York, is a writer. His name is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I’ve read his book
Wind, Sand, and Stars—
it’s a best-seller. Would you like to come in?”

He ushered me into the living room of that house, which we later called Bevin House, I don’t know why.

“I’m looking for a house to rent around here,” I explained. “My husband can’t endure the heat any longer. He had a very serious accident in Guatemala a few years ago, you know, and he can’t parachute anymore because his elbow hasn’t yet fully recovered. He has rheumatism in several joints and suffers from being forty-three years old. . . . They say he’s too old to join the war effort with the Air Force. He’s a pilot, too, you see.”

“I know, I know all that. I’ve read
Night Flight,
and my wife even uses the perfume named after it: Vol de Nuit, by Guerlain, which we like very much.”

These words were a balm to my heart; I was already looking at the ceiling, the décor, the rooms, the hallways, as if the house belonged to me.

“Do you live here?” I asked. “Does your wife come to spend the summer holidays with you?”

“Alas, my wife is handicapped,” he said. “She cannot leave the hospital, and I have no children. I come here from time to time because we planted rosebushes and dahlias in the garden, and, as you can see, it’s easy to go swimming. Look at the beach.”

“And there’s a pleasant little breeze, too. You know, in New York everyone is roasting.”

“I love your accent,” he said. “You speak like Salvador Dalí.”

“So I’ve been told. He’s a friend of ours. I’ll introduce him to you whenever you like,” I promised.

“Listen, Madame,” he said then, “you can tell your husband that you have found your house. But make sure you tell him I won’t rent it to him: I’m offering it to him at no cost. He can stay as long as he wants. Here is the key. This one here is for the front door, this one is for the gate. Would you like me to show you around?”

I called Tonio at once. “How much time does it take to reach that house from here?” he demanded.

“Well,” I said, “in the train it took about three quarters of an hour, but it would take less time by car.”

“Would you like coffee, tea, chocolate?” the gentleman asked me.

“Yes, I would love some chocolate,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any. My husband will be here in less than an hour.”

I began telling him about my life in Oppède. And whenever I started talking about that village, nothing could make me stop; the stones themselves seemed to speak through me, and the conversation could go on forever, or at least for hours.
*

Tonio finally arrived with his secretary, his dog Hannibal, and his tape recorder. We toured the house from top to bottom, and then our landlord, who had a train to catch, left us there, adding, “It would give me great pleasure if you would invite me over one of these Sundays.”

“You must come back whenever you want,” I told him. “You can live here with us: choose a bedroom—there are so many . . .”

That house became the house of the Little Prince.
*
Tonio continued to work on the manuscript there. I posed for the Little Prince, and all of the friends who came to visit us did too. Of course, when a drawing was finished, it wasn’t of them but of a bearded gentleman or some flowers or a small animal, which sometimes made them angry. It was a house made for happiness. “Do you remember the room in Buenos Aires, the one where I started writing
Night Flight
?” Tonio asked me one day. “Do the same thing for me here.”

“Yes, Tonio, I’ll find you a little cask with a golden spigot, which we’ll fill up with port. I’ll give you thermoses full of hot tea, and I’ll surround you with mint pastilles, pencils of all colors, colored paper, and a large table.”

Tonio often left for Washington on the weekends. I didn’t know who he was going to see, and after a while it began to make me anxious. He would call me on the phone and come home on Monday, worn-out, without saying a word. I never asked him what he was doing there. Later I found out: we were having lunch at the Café Arnold when an American general came over to our table.

“
Mon général,
may I introduce you to my wife, Consuelo? She is Spanish but speaks English.”

“I speak French myself,” the general replied with a heavy accent.

“Has your husband told you about the fine work, the extremely valuable assistance he is giving us every Sunday with our plans for the invasion—the day when we’ll land in France?” he added. “He knows the sea like no one else; he’s the man who knows how best to approach the Mediterranean coastline and even the Atlantic coast.”

There was peace in Northport. All our sweet pleasures had returned.

T
ONIO DID NOT KNOW
how to talk about himself, or did not want to. His way of seeing the world, of experiencing it, had undoubtedly come to him from his childhood. He never referred to himself, never talked about himself. He tried every day to grow, to use past experiences to increase the likelihood of success, not only for himself but for others. He didn’t talk just to make noise with words or spew out hot air; he always said something that had meaning. He never allowed his physical and emotional suffering to interfere with the rest of his life; he put them completely out of his mind. He always gave himself over entirely to whoever was listening to him. I remember a line of his: “You must love others but without telling them so.” It explains his character: he loved people but wasted no time explaining the attention and love he was capable of giving them.

For him, love was a natural thing. Those who lived with him found him hard to bear because when he left he took the whole of his being away with him, completely and utterly. But he was also capable of returning completely and utterly, without leaving a particle of himself anywhere else. His physical and psychological strengths were united, in harmony with each other, and almost inexhaustible. When I would scold him because he was working himself to exhaustion on mathematical equations that seemed alien and forbidding to me, he would answer with a huge laugh and then invariably say, “I won’t be wearing myself out any longer when I’m dead!”

I loved him for his clumsiness, his poetic appearance, the way he had of looking like a giant who is concealing a sensitive soul. He knew how to move very heavy weights effortlessly, with the same grace he employed in cutting little airplanes out of lightweight white paper, airplanes he would then launch into the sky from our balcony over the neighboring houses . . .

He would forget that he was tall as a tree and was always, inevitably, knocking his head against doorways. Every time he got into a taxi, he banged his forehead. He would smile and declare that he was only keeping himself in training for more serious accidents. Often he would say to me, “I think of myself as a handsome youth with curly blond hair, but when I run my hand over my head I have to face the facts: I’m bald.”

His clothes were always wrinkled because he would lie down on top of them or sleep fully dressed—I never managed to press the folds back into his pants. He didn’t untie the knot in his tie when he went to bed; he knew how to pull on one of the ends so that the knot would yield, the tie would loosen, and he could slip it off over his head. He often managed to lose his shoes within the confines of the bedroom. He’d ask his friends to help him look for them: the shoes might be on top of the fireplace, in his desk drawer, among his papers, or hiding under a stack of newspapers.

He wanted his pants and jackets to be all alike. He was always delighted to find pants that were just like the ones he’d been wearing except clean and new, and he would kiss me, saying, “Someday I’ll go to the tailor myself and order some magnificent clothes: a navy blue suit, for example, which will look superb with my curly blond hair.” And he would laugh. His shirts were always a certain gray-blue color, but for the evenings, our grand evenings out, he would wear white shirts, giving in to me on that one point. I never saw him wear suspenders. He loathed them as much as he loathed garters; he much preferred having his socks droop. When he discovered the electric razor, he was as proud as a child and exhibited it throughout the apartment. He shaved several times a day, and the sound of the electric razor became a comfort to him. It accompanied his musings.

At Bevin House, he was really very happy. We christened the estate “The House of the Little Prince.” He spent a lot of time in the attic, which I fixed up for him. One day, the wife of André Maurois
*
asked me, “Who is the young woman who arrives at five o’clock every day? Your husband locks himself in with her up there. We see her only at dinnertime.”

“She comes to teach him English,” I answered.

In fact, I was the one who had convinced him to take lessons. “All right,” he said at last, “but only if you put a notice out asking for a pretty young woman who speaks English well and will take up no more than ten percent of my time.”

“I’ll make it sound as appealing as I can,” I said. “We’ll give it to the Havas agency.”

About twenty women responded—there was quite a traffic jam at our doorstep. We decided to skip the interviews. “Listen, just choose the prettiest one,” he said. “You have better taste than I do.”

“But I don’t know if you prefer a brunette, a blonde . . .”

“I want the prettiest . . .”

So I chose the most stunning blonde in the group, who was holding a little cat in her arms. “But the cat might bother you,” I noted.

“Oh, not at all,” he said. “Ask the others politely to go away, but pay them for their gasoline, I don’t know—something like five dollars per person . . .”

“One dollar,” I said.

“Don’t be miserly,” he scolded. “You know we’re soon going to die, and then there will be nothing more of us.”

After I had explained all this to Madame Maurois, she asked, “How long has this been going on?”

“Since we rented the house. Several months already.”

“And you’ve never gone upstairs to see what they’re doing?”

“You know, I’m not indiscreet. I’m sure that if it were your husband, you would react in much the same way.”

“Ah, non,”
she said. “Me—I’m going up!”

After a moment, I heard something like a rain of little stones rattling down the stairs. It was chess pieces. The empty box in your hand, you appeared, your shirt wide open, a little angry. I was a little angry too, and sad. That young woman had learned to play chess, but you, you hadn’t even wanted to learn the colors of the rainbow with me.

I told the young woman she had not fulfilled the terms of her contract.

“It’s all my fault,” Tonio interrupted. “In any case, I no longer need to teach her chess, she’s now a very good player. And I, for my part, will never learn English.”

“Mademoiselle, how much severance pay do you want?”

“Please keep me on, I beg you,” she answered, tears in her eyes. “I’ll come for free!”