Parrot and Olivier in America (18 page)

"The want of intellect? Principally," he said, "it is the inheritance law."

And with this he filled my glass again, this time from the bottle, and the champagne frothed excessively but was not, for that, unwelcome.

"I can still remember," said Mr. Peek, and settled himself in a manner which gave warning of a lengthy disquisition. "I can still remember a time when my country was peopled with rich proprietors who lived on their lands like the English gentry. They cultivated the mind, and followed certain traditions of thought and manners. High morals and distinction of mind then existed among this class of the nation. But all that is gone," he said. "The old estates are being divided. Now a man will mostly own what he has bought himself. As for leisure, there is none."

I thought, What am I condemned to? I asked, "Then how do the wealthy classes take such a state of affairs?"

"What offense?"

"Affairs,"
I said and was once again reminded that I must speak more slowly if I was to be understood. "State of
affairs
. How do the wealthy classes regard this state of affairs?"

He grimaced so wildly that the whole of his upper lip was reduced to a single pencil line beneath his haughty nose. "They bear it," he said. "For instance, the plutocrat and the lowly worker shake hands in the street. Ha-ha," he cried. "You like that, no? Good morning, good to meet you."

At that moment the captain rushed in like a wet dog.

"Ah Captain," I cried, relieved to see him. "We have a matter to settle."

He looked at me bleakly.

"No, no." My companion restrained me, allowing the captain to continue on his course. He bowed and twisted while walking backward.

"It will pass," my new friend said, meaning what I did not know. "Before we know it we will be in civilization."

I feared that most unlikely.

Parrot

ONE DAY BLED into the next. I lay in my coffin, assaulted by the screams of ducks and geese being slaughtered upon the deck, the cries of passengers, the push and bustle, the plates and bottles crashing to the floor of the main cabin. So close was my pillow to the dining table that my ears were soon poured full of gravy, the voices, opinions and histories of Mr. Peek and his wife and two daughters, of Mr. Hill, and of Mr. Defenpost, and what they thought of Mr. Eckerd and his actress, and all of this got mixed up with my ear wax and my nausea, so I was sick of them a week before they shook my hand. Driven from my bunk by hunger, I was in time to see my raving mad Mathilde emerge from her cabin, frail as eggshell, in a sweeping gray skirt and a simple white blouse with a high collar
a la chinoise
. She had her hair pinned high to show the Americans her tiny ears.

The captain had finally judged it safe to set more canvas but my paramour and her mother were the only ones--excepting Mr. Eckerd and his pigeons--to brave the deck. I had seated myself by a doorway and Mathilde's skirt brushed my knee. I smelled her. Her jasmine. It was intolerable she would ignore me still. To be so separated from she whose thighs I had seen shining with desire, who had opened herself to me so ardently that I knew the crying tunnel of her mouth, the secret teeth, the tiny tonsil, and my own hard body shivering as she slapped the bed and cried Don't stop, to be separated by no more than the brush of a wing was an agony. My salty lover, transformed, as cold as halibut.

As for the old lady, if she knew what secret wound had opened in her daughter's heart, she dared not say. And what had I ever done but love her offspring and herself? And was I not Mathilde's model in a way that would have made another man's balls shrivel up and drop like rotten plums among the summer grass. For I loved her without limit and therefore would most happily play the vanquished male, drained lover, sucked of his juices, laid out on the sheets and dead of love and loving.

And was she not, aboard the
Havre
, still the recipient of my largesse--for what reason had Monsieur accommodated her on board at such expense? That she was mine. I loved her to death. I might have held her, screeching like a hard-eyed indignant sea bird, lifted her squirming angry body high above the rail and smashed her down into the green-glass waves. There--she drowns.

She thought she knew me. My awful scars invisible. In any case, she had already found some new protectors, and before too many hours had passed I saw that the elder Miss Peek was teaching her English. This Miss Peek was a tall winsome girl with fine flaxen hair and pale, pale blue eyes, a glass of water a man might drink in a long slow draft. The two of them, dark and light, buxom and lithe, woman and girl, remained at table long after the last plate had broken and the final duck bones been removed, and then, when the lanterns were swinging back and forth, the girl helped the woman with her English lessons. In short the French beauty made herself their pet, and I could not escape her, not even with my pillow pulled across my ears.

Lord Migraine dictated a whining letter to his mother, and then, having no more need of my services, acted as if I was not born. The little bastard occupied our narrow cabin with a lack of modesty that should not have surprised me, given the gross slanders he made against me in his letter to the Comtesse de Garmont. In any case, it meant nothing for him to display his member in full and proud erection every morning, its surprising size not diminishing until he had managed to pee into his pot. I never saw such bad behavior in a boardinghouse.

Being unable to stand the sight of either Mathilde or Migraine I resorted to the poop deck, although I was obliged to move each time the captain changed his mind about his sails. When Mathilde contrived to set up with her oils and brushes by the longboat, I retreated to the cabin. Migraine awaited me, his neat little legs folded, his pretty book in his pretty hand and his shoulders collapsed down from his neck and running to his arms like a ficus tree espaliered to catch the sun.

Back on the deck Mathilde was portraying Miss Peek in the manner of the disgusting past--that is, in the style of Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, who had once made Marie Antoinette look like a healthy piece of fruit. Such shameless flattery was not wasted on this new subject, or her father and the latter had soon gone mad with the lust of ownership.

I went to sleep at night hearing Mathilde telling her punters she would not sell the portrait--a comic English monologue for which she was adored.

I was at table one breakfast when she presented it as a gift to Mr. Peek, and I, alone and bitter with my lumpy porridge, witnessed a new aspect of my darling. I had watched her paint and draw for hours and hours, but I had never thought of how she had managed to find her customers. This had been of as little interest to me as my work with Monsieur was to her. Now I saw how cunningly she offered a sample of her wares. It was handed from one rich American to the next.

She was warm to them, cold to me. I thought I was man enough to take her torture, but I was very wrong indeed.

The first time I found her alone, I caught her between a coil of rope and the cow cabin. It was just on dusk.

"Mathilde!"

She turned, her two balled fists pressed both against each other and her breasts.

"You left me," she said. "You chucked me away like an old rag."

"Mathilde, you threw my trousers out the window."

"Yes. Like an old rag," she repeated, as if she had won her point.

"Then why are you here?"

"I had to leave everything," she said. "My studio, my patrons. Everything!"

And with that she hammered on my chest, and when she was sick of that she slapped me across the face.

"I will not be left," she said.

As she hurried away, her skirt flying, I saw Lord Migraine and Mr. Peek spying from the porthole. To hell with them, I thought. I stayed out on the deck and felt the salt wind on my injured pride and determined that, once we were landed, they could all go to damnation. With this final unwanted exile, I would have paid Monsieur back for my life.

These hard thoughts were interrupted by Lord Migraine knocking on the glass and indicating that I should come inside so that he might dictate one more letter to his mother which, it soon turned out, was not so different from the previous two, e.g., he had lost his best friend and had been prevented from attending the funeral. I--at least in the beginning--wrote exactly what he said, and therefore traced the outlines of his feelings with my hand. In spite of this, it was hard to know, as with all that class of Frenchman, what was going on. With their smooth waxy faces and their extended arms, with the careful lippy shaping of their words, these people always seemed like actors, and even Monsieur himself, a rough old man when required, would adopt this rouge-and-powder style of declamation. Maybe it was sincere enough, and when I changed a word here or there I was acting more in mischief than in malice.

Later that night I lay in my bunk and had no choice but be an audience for the conversation of Mr. Peek and Lord Migraine in the main cabin, which might as well have been inside my head.

PEEK: But sir, is it the custom in your country that you would permit a servant to know your private business?

MIGRAINE: Yes, it would depend upon the servant and the business. Generally speaking, one has nothing to be ashamed of in one's conduct. What is the quality of servants in America? How would you compare them with the French?

This was me they spoke of, a thing with no volition, blown like a seed or feather from the palaces of Paris to the harsh wilds of the earth.

PEEK: Oh generally very poor I would say, but for myself I would hesitate to share my heartfelt feelings with an employee of any nation.

MIGRAINE: We would see it as no different to being dressed by one.

PEEK: Dressed, sir?

MIGRAINE: Is that not your custom?

PEEK: To stand naked? Sir I would not stand naked with my wife.

MIGRAINE: We do not call it naked with a servant.

PEEK: What do you call it?

MIGRAINE: We call it getting dressed.

There was a long pause before Lord Migraine spoke again, and then the subject had its clothes on.

MIGRAINE: Lawyers are then very common with you, I believe you said.

PEEK: Much more so, I think, than in any part of Europe.

MIGRAINE: What is their position in society and their character?

And they were off to the races, as they say, and I was so bored by them I finally dozed, not understanding that I had once again slept through history, for this is as close as damn it to the beginning of Lord Migraine's mania to interrogate Americans. On the following day--that is, about two weeks out of Le Havre--he set me to making a fair copy of his smudgy notes. It was a mistake to trust it to me, for he never had the patience for the proofs.

Olivier

AS A CHILD I was shortsighted but could always shoot a sparrow on the wing. I could not
see
it but still I shot it dead. On the first occasion the
Havre
was becalmed we came upon a floating barrel, and this soon became a shooting target. Of course I won. And who would know me to be a citizen of Myopia whose lands are furred like watercolor washes, whose king is as smudgy as a dancing moth. I had followed the actress from Les Lilas, but when she appeared aboard the
Havre
, why, I had never seen her in all my life.

But when she punched his chest and smacked his face I understood she must be my servant's lover and therefore, by association, that creature with a glory of black hair, creamy white skin, that generous bosom I had admired so closely, so excessively, that I had followed the pair of them into the lanes.

Like a demented man who loves again the wife he does not recognize, I was fascinated once more, not only by her extraordinary appearance but by the reckless portraits she soon produced of the other passengers--or, should I say rather, the aura she produced as she pursued this activity. What I thought was, This can save me from my awful grief. I will have her. With this, I knew, my dear Blacqueville would have heartily agreed.

Of the paintings, I was no judge. This was in no sense an obstacle. In any case, the arts that most appealed to me were those of the philosopher, the metaphysician, the economist. I could follow a rococo line of argument and find my mind led to veritable
palaces
of thought, but these likenesses she essayed seemed, quite honestly, like puddles of mud or sunshine, depending on what I did not know.

The Americans, whatever their level of connoisseurship, which I would not have expected to be elevated, had no doubts as to their ability to judge her work--it was, they declared, of the highest quality. Yet these same judges also proclaimed her attempts at English to be charming, whilst I, who could hear her French, knew she sounded as musical as a barrow wheel.

None of this is to suggest she was unattractive to me, for many is the country girl, around Auteuil particularly, in whose voice and smells the farmyard is everywhere apparent, and no bad thing, for my blood was never more hot than when my ennui was most deadly, when the air was rich with summer hay and the orchard fruit lay among the grass, rich rotten peaches, bees crawling the blossoms, wax melting, honey dripping from the beehive frames.

And if it be (as Plutarch reports, as Montaigne repeats) that in some part of the Indies there are men without mouths who live only by the smell of certain rich odors, then let Olivier be placed among their allies.

This woman, named Mathilde Christian, was adorable, not only in this respect but in the very particular contrast between the rough texture of her voice and the silky smoothness of her skin, and once I had seen her beat the Parrot and slap his face I saw I might further assist her with this punishment.

Next day she set to "do" my new friend Peek, a banker who--proud and decent though he was--I would not even think to label bourgeois. That is, dear Peek lacked so many of the cultural pretensions with which the bourgeois, wishing to ape his betters, always cloaks himself. Of literature and philosophy he proudly declared himself a dunce. When I mentioned Proudhon, and even Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, he did not know who they were. And this, I supposed, was what one should expect of this new democracy which made itself without the benefit of a noble class.