The House of Dreams (15 page)

You wouldn't be going to meet Breton if Fry knew the truth,
I told myself. I'd already come to picture my conscience as me as a schoolboy. I imagine the little fellow even now, sitting on my right shoulder, swinging his legs, his shoes shined.
You're a bad boy, Gabriel,
he says. But it's not my voice. Who said that to me, and when? My mother, perhaps? I don't know whose voice it is, but I know that sense of mortifying shame only too well, the sickening feeling of having been caught.

To hell with them,
another voice piped up as I gazed out of the tram window, squinting at the bright light bouncing off the distant waves. This voice is more like my father, lounging around on my left shoulder with a glass in his hand. I have him under control most of the time now, but then … well. I was so messed up and broken inside, most of the time he made his voice heard.

You go out there, and you have a good time,
he said.
Drink their wine, soak up their ideas, suck them dry. Don't let them give you any nonsense. You can hold your own with them.
“I am Gabriel Lambert,” I said under my breath.

A few people jumped down from the tram at La Pomme, just before the railway bridge, and I followed them at a distance. I turned up the collar of my overcoat and tucked my head down, the wind whipping through my hair. They chatted among themselves—they were obviously friends, relaxed in one another's company. They turned into a long driveway, and the last of them—a tall, good-looking fellow with a beautiful woman on his arm, held open the iron gate for me.

He had fine features, and his hand on the gate was slender, long fingered, his skin the color of burnished teak.

“Are you here for the salon?” he asked.

“Yes. I'm Gabriel Lambert,” I said, offering him my hand.

“Wifredo Lam,” he said. “This is Helena.” The girl smiled at me and walked on.

“Are you a painter?”

“Yes. I've been studying with Picasso.”

“Picasso?” The name of the great man stuck in my throat like a fishbone. I almost ran at that point, I felt so out of my depth.

“Are you managing to work at all?”

“A little.” My voice sounded unnaturally high.

“It's the only way,” he said, walking up the drive to the house. “I feel my drawings are changing here. I'm illustrating André's new poem.”

“André?”

“Breton,” Wifredo said, laughing. He chatted on about the poem,
Fata Morgana,
and introduced me to the others on the terrace, to Óscar Domínguez, and André Masson. I was so relieved that Wifredo had taken me under his wing, I have no recollection of what we talked of at all. I do remember him saying that he had fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and thinking how unlikely it was that this tall, gentle man should be caught up again in conflict. I was just happy to listen to them all talk, happy to blend into the group. I could hear music drifting from the house, some wild Count Basie jazz tune with screeching trumpets and thundering drums on the radio. I began to sweat, thinking of that night only a few months before with Vita, the sound of the band and the pounding beat.

“Lambert!” I heard Varian call, but I could not see him. Through the open French window, I saw André Breton dancing with Jacqueline. His head was lowered, his cheek resting tenderly against her temple. They were surrounded by people but seemed lost in each other. “Up here!” Varian called, laughing. I turned and looked back across the terrace to the trees.

“Good heavens,” I said, “what on earth are you doing?”

“We're having a little auction,” he said, waving from the branches. “Would you mind passing me that last canvas?” I flipped it around and handed it carefully to him. I whistled softly, realizing I had a Max Ernst in my hands. Varian casually swept it up into the branches. He took a length of string and tied the wire on the back of the picture to the tree, holding one end of the string in his teeth as he tightened it. “There,” he said, and scrambled down. The paintings spun in the breeze, bright paint glimmering against the trees, the air like flowers in the park.

I could hear the sound of voices behind me, exclamations and greetings as Breton welcomed his friends. I was too nervous to turn around and introduce myself.

“What do you think?” Varian asked me.

“It's incredible…,” I started to say.

“It is marvelous!” Breton cried, and clapped his hands. The trees on the terrace were strung with thirty, forty paintings. Looking back now, I realize that it was a collection any fine-art museum would kill to have. “We shall hold the auction later, but first, we play!” I trailed inside, following the young boys I had seen at the ARC office, too shy to introduce myself to Breton.

I hung back, observing the artists from the edge of the room. It was freezing cold—they say 1940–41 was the coldest winter on record—and everyone was done up in their overcoats and scarves, sitting around the huge polished wood table. It was impossible to stay still for more than five minutes without the cold becoming unbearable, and everyone was restless, blowing on their hands. Breton had put magazines, scissors, paper, and glue at the center of the table, and glasses with pencils and crayons. I couldn't make out what was going on. A single sheet of paper was passed from artist to artist, and they folded down the section they had drawn before passing it on to the next person.

“What are they doing?” I whispered to Varian.

“They are playing games,” he said. “They call this one
cadavre exquis
. I think before now, they have used words, made chance sentences. Now they seem to be experimenting with images. Breton calls them
les petits personnages
. After they have drawn a few pictures, he decides the best.”

It's rare that people surpass your expectations, but André was magnificent—every bit as provocative and extraordinary as his writings had led me to hope. He presided over the gathering, stooping occasionally to murmur words of encouragement to the artists. When they had finished, he sorted through a sheaf of papers and raised a drawing of a head in the air.
“Stupéfiant!”
he cried. “A true collaboration. We shall call this ‘The Last Romantic Has Been Buggered by Marshal Pétain'!” The table erupted in cheers and laughter.
“Formidable.”

“Do you not want to join in?” Varian asked me.

“No, no,” I said. “I'm happy to watch.”

“You should! A lot of the games they play seem to be collaborative.”

Only now do I realize what those games meant. When all around us the world was turning dark, the surrealists were focused on the light. They believed in absolute freedom, and this is what those crazy-looking games were all about. They wanted to free the unconscious mind. They showed us the luminous, random beauty around us and in our dreams, and everything Breton and the others did has changed the way we look at the world forever. Air-Bel became the house of dreams. In that little room in the falling winter light, I watched men and women who, for an afternoon a week, put aside their fear and hunger and created, and at the beating heart of them was Breton. I still wish I'd had the nerve to talk to him, but the greatest lesson Breton taught me was that the most effective course against despair is to preserve your freedom of mind.

“As I have said many times before,” Breton said to one of the men, raising his voice above the crowd. “When one ceases to feel, I am of the opinion one should keep quiet, my friend.” The group dissolved into laughter, and one of the artists loped off, red faced. It was like seeing a badly behaved cub get a clip around the ear from the head of the pride. I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant, what was this “pure psychic automatism” they kept talking about, but the words tightened in my throat. I was afraid of getting the same treatment.

I felt completely out of my depth around them all, like the new kid at school. I wanted to belong here, in this beautiful house, with these incredible people, but I felt like a phony. I pushed my way out onto the terrace and gulped down the cold air. The hum of voices, the clear notes of the music, fell away as I walked across the lawns. Yet more people were heading up the driveway with their heads bent against the wind like pilgrims. I turned away toward the parkland at the back of the house and walked on.

I heard children laughing up ahead, and I followed the sound. There was a little blond girl with a red ribbon in her hair, and a small boy about the same age, five or six, I guess. They were on the ground, arcing their arms and legs, making snow angels. It looked like fun, so I lay down beside them and started kicking and swinging my arms. The milk sky was heavy with snow above me, and sound was muffled, so when I heard a girl laughing beyond the garden wall, the note of her voice was clear and pure as a bell. “Who's there?” I said, turning my head. The snow was cold against my cheek. “I said, who's there?”

A snowball arced over the wall and hit me squarely on the chest. I blinked, flakes wet in my lashes, on my lips. “Hey!” I cried out, and scrambled up. I could hear footsteps crunching through the snow on the other side of the wall, running away. I chased her, deeper into the woods where the wall began to fall away and a tall, dark hedge marked the boundary. I was breathless, my heart pounding. The grounds weren't tended well this far away from the house, and the hedge was old and patchy. I caught a glimpse of her once or twice—a flash of blond hair between the dark leaves, a pale hand or cheek. I squatted down and breathed deeply, the cold air hurting my lungs, my breath a pale cloud in front of my face. I could see her slender legs between the trunks of the hedge—her dark stockings and boots, the hem of her dress. She had her back up against the leaves, hiding against the trunk of a tree. I crept forward on my belly, silently, pushed my way through a gap in the hedge a little farther up. Everything seemed to slow down. My breath trembled in my throat. Then, just as I poked my head through into the light, my foot must have caught on a dry branch. A twig snapped, and she spun around, startled, her eyes wide and alert like a fawn. You hear people talk about love at first sight in songs, but that was it for me. Looking back over my life, I see that there are a handful of moments like that, which I can recall with perfect clarity. Not all the in-between times we lose along the way, but the moments that matter. The first time I saw Annie, I was absolutely present. Not thinking about the past or worrying about the future, but there, with her. Too often when you're young, you fall in love with your idea of a person. I always reckon people stay happy just as long as their idea of each other fits. Annie's never wavered for me, not once. I saw her for the first time, and I knew her—recognized her, even—and she knew me.

Annie's hair swung after her, pale and luminous. Her face registered fear, then amusement when she saw me, and she scooped up a handful of snow, molded it into a ball as she backed away from me. Just as I scrambled clear of the roots, she swung her arm back. She was grinning now, and I saw she had a little gap between her front teeth. Her lips were unnaturally bright, full and red in the cold, her cheeks flushed pink. She was, she is, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I was unmanned, and she knew it. She threw the snowball with the aim of a marksman and it clocked me between the eyes.

“That does it,” I yelled, scooping up a big handful of snow. On open ground she was no match for me, and I sprinted after her, stumbling. The snowball hit her on the back of the head. She shrieked, fearful and excited as I grabbed her by the waist and we fell into the snow. “Now, we're even.” We lay in silence, face-to-face—aware, I guess, that we had never met. She looked uncertain, suddenly. “My name is Gabriel,” I said. Her blue eyes gazed at me. The truth is, it felt as though I'd known her, had been waiting for her, my whole life.

“I'm Marianne,” she said.

Like an echo, I heard a woman's voice calling, “Marianne!… Marianne!” She sat up quickly and glanced back over her shoulder at me, smiling. “But you can call me Annie. I have to go.” She leapt to her feet, looking down the woods to the little stone house by the road. I could make out a plump, shrewish-looking woman dressed in a black coat bustling through the back garden gate.

“Wait!” I caught at her hand. “Who are you? Where do you live?”

“I'm always here,” she said, slipping away.

“Can I see you again?”

She laughed, as if it were the most natural question in the world. She glanced down the hill; the woman—her mother, I guessed—was steaming up the hill, her breath puffing out of her like a train. “Do you live there, with all those crazy people?”

“Me? No. I'm an artist, though. I'm just … I'm visiting.”

“Good.” She inclined her head toward her mother. “She would not like it if you did. My parents think Air-Bel is full of Communists and sex maniacs,” she said. “It's quite the scandal in the village that the old miser Thumin has rented the villa to them. Who is the woman who goes shopping with bracelets around her ankle and a stuffed bird in her hair?”

“That must be Madame Breton.”

“People are talking. They do not like things that are different around here.”

“Do you care about that?” I asked, pulling myself up from the snow. I was about a head taller than her, and as I looked down at her all I wanted to do was take her hand and keep on running, away from her parents, the village, the war, away from everything.

“Of course not.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I love art, in fact I want to study, after school.” It was impossible to tell how old she was. Sixteen or seventeen, perhaps. She seemed older. I think sometimes now that young people like that who have grown up in one place, who have only ever known certainty, the sureness of where they belong in the world, have a confidence I'll never possess, even as children. Of course she was beautiful, and exhilarating, but I think that is what drew me to her as surely as north follows south. When people ask how we met, she always says it was love at first sight—and that's true. But there was more to it than desire. I recognized something in her that I needed like air, like water. I coveted her roots—how real she was. Marianne, my Annie, has always only ever been herself. Unlike me.