Climates (5 page)

“What a wonderful garden!” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed, “and what I love best about Florence is that wherever you are, you can see the mountains and trees. I loathe cities that are simply cities.”

“Guardi told me the view from behind the house is quite delightful.”

“Let’s go and see,” she said gaily.

We found a thick screen of cypress trees and, through the middle of it, a stone staircase leading up to a rocky recess that housed a statue. Farther on to the left there was a terrace with views of the city.

Mademoiselle Malet leaned on the balustrade close to me for a long time, silently gazing at the pink domes and wide, gently sloping roofs of Florence, and, in the distance, the blue mountains.

“Oh! I do love this,” she said, enraptured.

With a very young, very graceful movement, she tipped her head back as if to inhale the scenery.

From that first conversation, Odile Malet treated me with trusting familiarity. She told me that her father was an architect, that she admired him a great deal, and that he had stayed in Paris. It pained her to see the general as her mother’s escort. After ten minutes we had moved on to truly intimate confidences. I told her about my Amazon and how impossible it was for me to have any appetite for life if I were not sustained by potent and deep-seated feelings. (My cynical tendencies had been instantly swept aside by her presence.) She described how one day, when she was thirteen, her best friend, whom she called Misa, had inquired, “If I asked you to, would you throw yourself off the balcony?” and she had nearly jumped from the fourth floor. That story enchanted me.

“Have you visited the churches and museums much?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “But what I like best of all is strolling through the streets … Except I do so hate walking with Maman and her general, so I rise very early in the mornings … Would you like to come with me tomorrow morning? I shall be in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock.”

“I think I would … Do I need to ask your mother for permission to walk with you?”

“No,” she said, “leave that to me.”

The following morning I waited for her at the foot of the stairs and we went out together. The wide flagstones along the embankment gleamed in the sunlight; a bell was ringing somewhere; carriages trotted past. Life suddenly seemed so straightforward; happiness would be always having this blond head beside me, taking this arm when crossing a street and, for a moment, feeling beneath her dress the warmth of her young body. She took me to the Via Tornabuoni; she loved shoe shops, florists, and bookshops. On the Ponte Vecchio, she stood for some time looking at necklaces of large pink and black stones.

“Aren’t they fun?” she said. “Don’t you think?”

She had some of the tastes I had once condemned in the poor Denise Aubry.

What did we talk about? I do not really remember. In my diary, I see:
Walk with O. San Lorenzo. She described the large light above her bed at the convent, coming through a shutter lit from the outside by a streetlamp. As she fell asleep she would watch it grow larger and believed she was in heaven. She told
me about the Bibliothèque rose;
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she hates Camille and Madeleine; she herself cannot bear the role of the “good little girl.” Her favorite reading matter is fairy tales and poetry. She sometimes dreams of wandering under the sea with skeleton fish swimming around her, sometimes of a weasel dragging her underground. She likes danger; she rides horses and jumps difficult obstacles on horseback … She does the prettiest thing with her eyes when trying to understand something; she furrows her brow slightly and looks forward as if having trouble seeing, then says “yes” to herself; now she understands
.

I am well aware as I copy those words out for you that I am powerless to describe the happy memories she conjures for me. Why did I feel such a sense of perfection? Were the things Odile said remarkable? I think not, but she had what all the Marcenats lacked: a lust for life. We love people because they secrete a mysterious essence, the one missing from our own formula to make us a stable chemical compound. I may not have known women more beautiful than Odile, but I knew plenty who were more brilliant, more perfectly intelligent, yet not one of
them managed to bring the physical world within my grasp as she did. Having been distanced from it by too much reading, too much solitary meditation, I now discovered trees and flowers and the smell of the earth, all sorts of things picked by Odile every morning and laid in bunches at my feet.

When I had been alone in the city, I had spent my days in museums, or I stayed in my room reading about Venice and Rome. It was as if the outside world reached me only through masterpieces. Odile immediately introduced me to the world of colors and sounds. She took me to the flower market under the lofty arches of the Mercato Nuovo. She mingled with local women buying sprigs of lily of the valley or branches of lilac. She liked the old country priest haggling over laburnum shoots coiled around tall reeds. On the hills below San Miniato, she showed me narrow roads framed by stiflingly hot walls above which burgeoning wisterias trailed their clusters of flowers.

Did I bore her when I explained with my characteristic Marcenat earnestness the rivalries between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Dante’s life, or Italy’s economic situation? I do not think so. Who is it who said that, between man and woman, it is
often a naïve, almost stupid, utterance from the woman that makes the invincible man want to kiss that childish mouth, whereas for the woman it is often when the man is at his most serious and most uncompromisingly logical that she in turn loves him best? Perhaps this was true of Odile and me. In any event, I know that when she murmured pleadingly “Do let’s stop” as we passed some shop selling fake jewelry, I never criticized her but simply thought “how I love her,” and I heard ever more powerfully the theme of the guardian knight and of devotion unto death that had gone hand in hand with my notion of love ever since childhood.

Every part of me picked up on this theme again now. Just as in an orchestra where one isolated flute outlines a short phrase and seems to waken by turns the violins and cellos, then the brass section, until a great rhythmic wave sweeps through the concert hall, so a picked flower, the smell of wisteria, black and white churches, Botticelli and Michelangelo all successively joined the formidable chorus that expressed my happiness in loving Odile and protecting her perfect fragile beauty from an invisible enemy.

On my first evening, I might have wished for the inaccessible privilege of a two-hour walk with the
young lady I had glimpsed. But a few days later, it felt like intolerable slavery having to return to the hotel for dinner. Not knowing much about me, Madame Malet was anxious and tried to slow the progress of our intimacy, but you know what the first stirrings of love are like in two young people; the forces they awaken feel irresistible. We genuinely felt waves of empathy forming wherever we went. Odile’s beauty alone would have been enough for that. But she told me that as a couple we were even more successful among this Italian population than she had been on her own. The Florentine coachmen were grateful to us for being in love. Museum attendants smiled at us. Boatmen on the Arno looked up to watch indulgently as we leaned on a parapet, standing close together to feel the warmth of each other’s body.

I had wired my father to tell him I believed I could make a full recovery if I stayed another week or two. He consented. I now wanted Odile to myself all day. I hired a carriage and we took long drives together through the Tuscan countryside. On the way to Siena, we felt we were traveling through the background of a Carpaccio painting. The carriage launched up hillsides the shape of children’s sand
castles, and at the top we found improbable crenellated villages. We were enchanted by Siena’s vast shadows. As I lunched with Odile in a cool backstreet hotel, I already knew I would spend my whole life looking across at her. On the way back, in the darkness, her hand came to rest on mine. The day of that outing, I find in my diary:
Undeniable affection toward us from coachmen, chambermaids, and farmhands. Doubtless they can tell we love each other. The professionalism demonstrated by the staff in this little hotel … What I find exquisite is that with her I feel mere contempt for everything that is not her, and she for everything that is not me. She does something quite delectable with her face to express abandon and delight. There is a touch of melancholy in it, as if she wanted to capture the moment and keep it in her mind’s eye
.

Oh! I still so love the Odile of those weeks in Florence! She was so beautiful that I sometimes doubted she was real. I would turn to her and say, “I shall try to last five minutes without looking at you.” I never managed to resist longer than thirty seconds. There was extraordinary poetry in everything she said. Although she was very cheerful, there was occasionally something darker like the note of a cello in her words, a melancholy discord
that promptly filled the air with a strange and tragic threat. What was the phrase she would quote then? “Fatally condemned.” Wait, yes: “Under the influence of Mars, fatally condemned, oh girl with the golden hair, beware.” In what puerile novel, what melodrama had she read or heard those words? I forget. The first time she gave me her lips, at dusk in a warm furtive olive grove, she looked at me with the sweetest air of sadness: “My darling, do you remember Juliet’s words? … ‘I am too fond, and therefore thou mayst think my behavior light.’ ”

It is a pleasure remembering our love in those days; it was a beautiful emotion, equally strong in Odile as it was in me. But with Odile, emotions were almost always restrained by pride. She explained later that first the convent and then life with her mother whom she did not love had constrained her to “closing herself” like this. When this hidden fire appeared, it was as brief violent flames that warmed my heart all the more keenly because I knew they were involuntary. There is a comparison to be drawn with women’s clothing: some fashions entirely hide women’s bodies from men’s eyes, thereby contriving to give more impact when a dress subtly skims the figure; similarly, a modest
hold on emotions veiling the usual signs of passion brings out all the value and grace of imperceptible nuances in the choice of words. The day my father finally recalled me to Paris with a fairly disgruntled telegram, I had to announce the fact to Odile at the Guardis’ house because she had arrived there before me. Other guests, who were quite indifferent to my leaving, went back to a rather unlikely conversation about Germany and Morocco.

“That was interesting, what Guardi was saying,” I said to Odile on our way out.

“I heard only one thing, that you were leaving,” she replied, almost in despair.

I left Florence
an engaged man. I needed to discuss my plans with my parents, and I contemplated this not without anxiety. For the Marcenats, marriage had always been seen to concern the clan as a whole. My uncles would intervene and glean information about the Malets. What would they find? I myself knew nothing of Odile’s family and had never even laid eyes on her father. I have already said that peculiar Marcenat traditions meant serious news was never transmitted to the concerned parties, but through an intermediary, and tempered by endless precautions. I asked my aunt Cora, my favorite confidante, to tell my father of
my engagement. She was always happy to prove the efficiency of her information-gathering service, which was indeed remarkable, although it had the drawback of comprising agents too highly placed in society, for if one wanted details on the life of a corporal, Aunt Cora could only consult the minister of war, or on some local doctor in Limoges, only a surgeon in a Paris hospital. When I gave her Monsieur Malet’s name, she replied, as I expected, with, “I don’t know him, but if he is anyone, I’ll find out right away from old Berteaux, you know, the architect at the institute who comes to a couple of Tuesdays in the winter because poor Adrien used to go hunting with him.”

I saw her again a couple of days later and found her pessimistic but animated with it.

“Oh, my poor dear!” she said. “You’re lucky you consulted me; this is no marriage for you … I saw old Berteaux. He knows Malet very well; they were in lodgings together for the Prix de Rome scholarships. He says he is a pleasant man who had some talent but has not had any success because he never does any work. He is the sort of architect capable of designing a project but who fails to oversee the work and loses all his clients … I was aware of that
when I had Trouville built … Your Malet married a woman I once knew, when she was Madame Boehmer, it came back to me when Berteaux reminded me … Hortense Boehmer, I think … He is her third husband … Now it seems, as you told me, that the daughter is ravishing, and it’s only natural that you should be taken with her, but, please believe my experience, my little Philippe, don’t marry her, and don’t mention this to your father or your mother … It’s not the same with me—I have seen so many people in my life—but your poor mother … I cannot picture her with Hortense Boehmer, Oh! Good Lord, no!”

I told my aunt that Odile was quite different from her family, and besides I had made my decision and it would be better if Odile found approval with my family immediately. After resisting a little, Aunt Cora consented to speak with my parents, partly because she was kind, partly also because she was like an old ambassador with an impassioned taste for negotiating who views a period of international difficulties ahead with both fear, because he likes peace, and secret glee, because it will allow him to exercise his true talent.

My father proved calm and indulgent. He asked me to think things over. As for my mother, she
initially greeted the idea that I was to be married with joy, but a few days later she met an old friend who knew the Malets and told her they moved in circles with very liberal customs. Madame Malet had a bad reputation; she was still said to take lovers. Nothing precise was known about Odile, but there was no doubt she had been badly brought up, went out alone with young men, and was far too pretty besides.