Love in a Bottle (10 page)

Y
ES, INDEED
, ‘a garden party in St Cloud, in summer’… but, splendid as that may sound, the reality won’t prove quite so grand—as with this friend of mine who never uses his aristocratic Hungarian middle names because of the ‘intolerable
poesie
’ of his life. A ‘garden party in St Cloud’ has an air of ‘tea with Rasputin in the Hermitage in the days of the old carnival’ or ‘one of those fine days in Aranjuez’. This tale has nothing to do with such wonders of the past. The garden in question is not the famous one with the green-bearded marble steps, nor is there the
slightest
hint of snobbery in my thoughts. This particular party had been organised by a gentleman named Robinet (the name means ‘tap’ in English) who ran a boarding house, and quite how I came to be there is not at all clear. Marcelle had been invited, and I trailed along—or it may have been the other way around.

The lamp-lit veranda was crammed with guests
speaking
every sort of language. Among the Spanish and South Americans was the only person I recognised, a little girl called Concepción. She had once had a fiancé, a gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár in Transylvania, who had
undertaken
to do what no one had done before—ride his horse
across the Amazon. He raised the money for his trip, bought a steed and a gun, had his picture in all the major South American papers… and promptly vanished. Concepción had since overcome her grief in Paris. Also present was an elderly Russian lady, a countess I need hardly add, as was only to be expected when every Hungarian in Paris had
prefixed
a ‘de’ to his or her barbaric-sounding name. There was also a well-known young man, a friend of the same wealthy Comtesse to whom Napoleon III had declared just four days before his coronation: “Madame, as long as there are still ladies like you in France, it will be worth being Emperor.”

But present in the greatest numbers were
English-speaking
girls, from that veritable League of Nations the United Kingdom and its associated Dominions. Monsieur Robinet had in fact spent some years as a boots in a little hotel in London, studying the peculiar tastes of the
Anglo
-Saxons
and learning how to satisfy the more basic needs of his English guests. He could moreover profess a wife and a niece, presently attired as monkeys. In the boarding house for five guests the three of them carried out all the daily renewed Herculean tasks collectively known as ‘service’ and, indefatigable and resolute in their money-making Frenchness, they never wearied of it. True, there was also a waiter from Alsace, but he was still very young and able to make himself understood to the guests only through myself as interpreter. I was the poor fellow’s sole channel of communication with the non-German-speaking world, and the channel was mostly one-way. I was like the disciple of a reclusive scholar who, though loyal, nonetheless finds
his situation impossible, for I in my turn couldn’t follow his dreadful regional dialect.

Rapidly, and by foreordained necessity, I set about flirting with a little Highland Scots girl, an Arts student. With my usual boyish enthusiasm, and looking for an easy topic we might have in common, I expounded St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of time to her. “Yes, yes,” she replied—
pronouncing
that ‘yes’ with the wonderfully impenetrable
simple-mindedness
that makes British girls so attractive. Eighty per cent of Marcelle’s acquaintances were young people, and when I finally caught up with her group the following scene was taking place:

“Actually, I was brought up in a forest. My father was a coal miner, you know. But what do you people know about such a life? I slept in a hollow tree; I found my way home by the stars. I know how to trap rabbits with a necktie—which is no great thing, really. You watch the place the rabbit always goes back to, and then you tie the tie into an open knot to make a noose. The rabbit runs along its usual path and doesn’t look where it’s going: he runs bang into the noose and you’ve got him.”

Everyone listened with a mixture of astonishment and respect, and I feel compelled to say a few words about who Marcelle was. Essentially, she was the girlfriend of my friend Gábor Pilaszanovits, and, as such, mine. The difference lies only in the ambiguity of the word ‘girlfriend’: to say that she was his girlfriend is somewhat to understate the reality; to say that she was mine would be going too far. Besides, Gábor wasn’t my friend in the sense that we had any shared
intellectual interests. I loved the way everything about him was so impressive, so flamboyant, from his name to his way of speaking. His tall, somewhat stooping form had the silent dignity of a Transdanubian poplar; his physical movements suggested the graceful lines of a classic limousine, and in his permanent lack of cash I detected the devil-may-care attitude of the true gentry. I adored him for the fact that he despised books and could still like me, which seemed to show that there was something more in me than mere bookishness. I adored him because women doted on him. Wistfully I contemplated that do-or-die quality he possessed that I so clearly lacked. These ‘negative friendships’ do sometimes happen, like that between the crocodile and the ibis in the world of nature.

Marcelle worshipped Gábor, referring constantly to him as her ‘Lord and Master’: such were her feelings about the aristocracy. She was always telling people that she was Swedish, partly because Swedes live so far away, and partly because her hair was ginger-blonde. She spoke that exquisite French you so rarely hear in France. Her sentences came across like so many casual accounts of an aristocratic world she had never been part of. Making impeccable use of the imperfect subjunctive she would assert that she had been raised in the most exclusive girls’ boarding school in the most clericised
département
of all, and gave you to understand, in a manner not to be gainsaid, that her mother had withered away in mourning for the Bourbons.

This was why the story about the coal miner had
produced
such astonishment and dismay. What it told me was
that she had already started drinking. These occasions had two, somewhat contradictory, endings: she would kiss all the waiters because they ‘reminded her of her uncle’, and then scold her knight errant furiously if he tipped the driver a sou more than was absolutely necessary.

The moment she spotted me she abandoned the young men, dispatched the little Highland Scot at my side with a well-placed remark and hauled me off to the tables.

“Milord,” she said, reverting to aristocratic mode, “you are neglecting your duty to Venus and Bacchus. But tonight I intend to play the role of Venus for you. But not the Venus de Milo, poor thing, who never steps out of her evening dress.”

The reality of her own arms was not in question, and as if to prove it, perhaps a little unnecessarily, she slid one into mine and gripped me by the neck, making me lean over at an angle that can be attained only in Paris. Through the stiffness of my wing collar I discovered the power that lies in a woman’s arms on a summer evening. There are people who, when searching for images of a life of storm and tempest, rhapsodise about cars, machines and surging crowds, but what is an entire industrial city compared to a woman’s arm? I was a prisoner, led by the neck—like a calf, or a man to the gallows, or a husband.

By the time we had knocked back a large bottle of cognac swimming with ice cubes, I had gathered the courage to kiss that arm.

“You were a great success, Marcelle,” I said, for something to say.

“Oh, yes, with all those… Martians and eunuchs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Martians, because they’ll never get any closer to me, and if they did, they might as well be eunuchs, so far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ve been your Martian for a long time now,” I said gently.

“Not any more. Today the good Lord hung the stars up upside down… Look, the English girls are already drunk and you’re still sober. Perhaps that’s rather wise of you.”

I drank and marvelled at her chameleon-like nature. To tell the truth, she had always deeply attracted me: I loved both her wonderful two-sidedness and its very transparency, in the same the way that I had always been secretly attracted to walking sticks that could turn into umbrellas, slide rules that could be used as laryngoscopes, and the symbols in Ibsen. I was also drawn to her for the reason that men are generally attracted to women: that is to say, I have no idea why. But this particular attraction I had dismissed as just another of the hopeless loves with which I serially
embellished
my young life.

I knew that Marcelle adored Pilaszanovits with the tragic fidelity of a
midinette
, which tempted me to believe that
La Dame aux camélias
might not be entirely nonsense. But Pilaszanovits treated her with the tender casualness of a con man fingering a dud chequebook. (Though, later, when Marcelle left him for a rayon manager in a morning coat at the Galeries Lafayette, Pilaszanovits killed himself. Every year I laid flowers on his grave in the Montparnasse cemetery, the ones which featured in his favourite song:
lilies of the valley, purple carnations, common larkspur, sweet marjoram. But that’s a long way in the past now, and experience tells me no one would believe the story anyway.)

But how could I, or perhaps more precisely in this context, how could my humble self, have believed for a moment that Marcelle might think me worthy of a single glance, in the meaningful sense of that phrase, when Pilaszanovits could treat me as follows in her presence: “Tamás, old chap, you’re a terribly clever man. You’re so clever you’re quite unlike anyone else. You’re so clever no normal woman will ever understand you. So clever that women invariably treat you as a bit of a joke.”

And if I ever did ever mention one of my conquests, however tentatively, he would be secretly convinced that the woman in question must be a hunchback, only I had failed to notice this fact, being so caught up in my wonderful rationalising myths.

The only reason I’m telling you this is to emphasise how totally unforeseen it was, that summer evening, when Marcelle suddenly took me by the arm, after countless light years of the cosy, eunuch-like friendship in which she had so hopelessly confined me. But when I looked about myself, under the Chinese lanterns theatrically lighting the great Corot-like trees from below, with all the summer stars out in the sky above, it was a really miraculous summer night. One of those nights when dumb animals open their mouths and utter wise sayings.

Whether I had been drinking—or everyone else had—is hard to determine. A French gentleman in a hat was telling
stories in which St Denis entertained his Gallic
contemporaries
before valiantly gathering up his decapitated head under his arm. The ugly Spanish girls around him were shrieking with laughter. I didn’t see the Spanish boys, because they had already vanished into the darkness of the shrubbery. M. Robinet was giving his magic show, with an egg, some bicarbonate of soda and the ship’s hooter with which his brother-in-law the captain had signalled the presence of his vessel as it made its way placidly along the Louvre-Suresnes, and which he had subsequently bestowed on M. Robinet during a family picnic. The famous young man gave a display of solo dancing, his legs apparently detached from the rest of his joints and twisting about in the wild rhythms with such daring that they were more like electrified trousers than actual legs. Music sounded, like a madness. Everyone was on his or her feet, and only the Alsatian waiter stayed sitting gloomily beside a large bottle of beer. But the English girls—my God, the English girls!—set aside their native cold-bloodedness and really let themselves go, the protective powder slipping from their faces and those faces
becoming
even more babyish than usual. There was electricity in the air, forgotten jealousies and secrets spilling out—it was another Koriandolis, where snake-like desires for other men’s women boiled over, as if everyone had staked all their
emotions
, heads or tails, on this one hour; and when M. Robinet in his endless benevolence extinguished the light, there seemed every possibility for sexual adventure.

On the veranda where we were sitting the darkness seemed to increase as the music fell away. It was made all
the more intense by tumultuous voices coming at random from every side. How could I deny that my first action was to feel around with my hand in the blackness for Marcelle, with no particular purpose in mind but with a happy smile on my face? But Marcelle was most decidedly no longer there. I set off in frantic haste to look for her. The light might be switched on again at any time.

My hand came upon someone at random and I took her firmly by the arm. The girl I was holding said, “Ooh,” ending in the final ‘u’ of the English. I cut it short by kissing her, with uncharacteristic vigour, full on the mouth.

That kiss was an even finer instrument of self-expression than the sonnet, and at moments like this much more promising. The opening lines of the kiss said little: more important than the technical aspect was the simple joy felt in them, the joy of the mischievous adolescent and the woman’s delight in the unexpected. But the second strophe, with its daring seriousness, was already establishing a theme. In a spirit of reverence, and with a yearning that drew on my most distant memories, I paid homage to the stranger who embodied the beauty of the night, the Unknown Goddess in my arms, as the kiss proclaimed her to be through its ecstasies of pain. The third strophe concluded the theme: because I cannot see you, because I don’t know who you are—because you are Everywoman—you are the Supremely Beautiful, the She who smoulders at the base of all my passion, and my devotion to you is, like the night, eternal. But the final strophe… was no longer a strophe, and the sonnet was no more—it was nothing, simply a kiss,
without duration, and I was so immersed in it, with every atom of my being, that my head spun, and I let go of that mysterious someone. When I came to again, she was no longer there, and I “thrice embraced the empty air”, as Virgil puts it so beautifully, in his Latin.