The Tale of the Rose (12 page)

So I went to the airfield to keep from upsetting him, very quiet and well behaved, but withdrawn. He was adorable.

“Au revoir, chéri,”
I told him. “Don’t forget, I put some vegetables in your provision basket, some tomatoes. They’re well wrapped up but delicate, and you’ll have to take them out as soon as you arrive or the heat will cook them. The lettuce, the cucumbers, the radishes—put them in water as soon as you arrive. You have enough to last all week, even for your fellow pilots. They’ll be glad to have something besides canned food to eat.”

I was the only wife who went to the market and packed oddly shaped bundles into empty gasoline containers. He didn’t like fresh milk, but I would fill thermoses with ice cream, fresh meat packed in ice chips, and chicken soup, all of them labeled. My husband was happy as he handed out his provisions; he himself ate bread and cheese. These preparations took time. To me, that was life: I was providing him with the energy he would use during his nights of flying. And coffee: it had to be very strong. I stuffed his pockets with chocolates and mints. He always pro-tested, “But,
chérie,
I don’t need anything, believe me.” But then, when he came back, he brought me presents from the other pilots who had eaten my soups and vegetables. They were the ones who worried about Tonio’s eating habits. “Otherwise,” they said, “Madame de Saint-Ex will stop sending the supplies that make our meals a little better . . .”

That day, when I didn’t want to go with him to the airfield, Tonio was watching me out of the corner of his eye. I tried to leave before the plane took off. “Darling, I’m a little out of sorts from all the noise and the smell of gasoline,” I said. “It’s hot, I’d like to take a cool bath. I’ll go to the hairdresser. Then I’ll pay a visit to Madame C.”

“One favor, please,” he said. “Whenever you’re doing something you want to hide from me, don’t give so many pretexts. A single one is sufficient, otherwise it makes me suspicious.”

I went home, calm: he was gone. Now I could get started on what I had to do. I worked all day. When nightfall surprised me, I hadn’t yet finished. I sent my Ahmed and my Fatimas home and lay down in the enormous bathroom on the divan used for massages, collapsing with exhaustion.

In the middle of the night, there were footsteps on the mosaic tiles, agile footsteps, a thief’s footsteps . . . I was terrified. How rash I had been to send all my people away. Only the cook was there, sleeping across from the kitchen. I held my breath as the footsteps moved away and returned. Someone was there in my house, making himself at home. The visitor switched on a light. I was shaking. My jewels . . . I tore the rings off my fingers and crawled into the laundry basket. The thief wouldn’t look in there. I was scared; there was no revolver in this room. The thief, emboldened at not seeing anyone there, continued to walk through rooms that were empty because I had moved everything into a maid’s room in order to wash and repaint the walls and rearrange the furniture. That was my plan. Finally, the thief, flashlight in hand, came into the bathroom and calmly used my toilet. I caught a glimpse of his head from my hiding place in the basket. It was my husband! I started to move, and the laundry I’d taken cover under began erupting like a volcano. Tonio was truly afraid. I shouted, “Help! Help me, I can’t breathe!”

He stood there motionless, petrified. He had found all the rooms empty, but now he heard me crying out and saw me battling against some shirts that were wrapped around my neck. He thought he could see two people in the movements of his shirts. Finally I managed to struggle out of the laundry basket on my own. He was pale, breathing hard. I was enraged.

“You terrify me in the middle of the night and then you can’t even help me out of my hiding place! I could have suffocated in there . . . I thought there was a thief. I put my rings in the basket. My watch must have been crushed. You’re horrible.”

“Listen, my crazy, crazy little girl, don’t you see that I’m having even more trouble breathing than you are? I turned back in midflight. I came home. I thought, ‘Consuelo doesn’t love me anymore. And she’s right: she’s always alone. When I’m there, I’m thinking, I’m writing—I’m not a good companion. But it’s better to say everything, know everything, settle everything. I don’t want to hurt her. She must be with the man she loves. I can’t leave her like that,’ and so I didn’t go. I asked Guerrero, who’s on vacation but was at the airfield by chance, to fly the taxi for me and spent the day wandering aimlessly around the city. I wanted to write to you, instead of coming here. But I thought, ‘I haven’t noticed her acting remote or distant.’ And I prayed. Finally I decided, ‘All right, I’ll go and tell her everything.’ That’s why I’m here. When I didn’t see any furniture in our bedroom, in the salon, anywhere, I was terrified. You were really, definitively, gone, even the furniture was gone. I decided I would run away to China tomorrow. I looked for a letter, some trace of you: nothing. And there you were in the laundry basket! But what are you doing there?”

“Oh, Tonio, and you claim you’re not jealous? Idiot!”

“But answer me: Where is the furniture?”

“You imbecile, you didn’t see the buckets of paint next to the front door? The painters are coming tomorrow. I wanted to surprise you, and instead you’ve given me a terrible fright . . .”

I couldn’t get over my fear. I wept, I searched for my rings and my bracelet. Tonio found a mattress and lay down on the ground, fully dressed, clinging to one of my ankles as his only consolation for my tears and my love.

Later, in answer to my tears, my bracelet, my broken watch, the most beautiful words anyone ever spoke to me told me that I wasn’t crying over my lost bracelet that night—I was already crying over death, which would separate me, “dear and ephemeral little girl” that I was, from everything.

I
COULD NO LONGER SLEEP
. The anguish of the night flights, which Tonio set off on twice a week, kept me awake. When he spent a few days with me between two mail flights, I thought of ways to please him, to take care of him. He isn’t like other men, I said to myself. Such a child, such an angel fallen from the sky. I could have gone out like the other women, taken walks, gone to parties, but the mail flights were the only thing that mattered to me. They were my despair.

One day he took off around three in the afternoon. If all went well, he would land at his three stops, Cisneros, Port-Etienne, and Cap-Juby.
*
I asked the radioman for information about my husband’s flight. The other pilots were also asking him for information. He had to guide them through the sky. And then there was Madame de Saint-Ex, who was always phoning: “Has my husband landed at his first stop?” “Yes” or “no” would be the reply, nothing more.

I had to wait a whole hour before I dared ask the same question again. “You are too nervous, Madame. Why don’t you go and have a swim, it’s a beautiful day. I’ll take care of your husband’s flight. The other pilots’ wives aren’t nearly as anxious.”

The next day, I would start making phone calls again. “Your husband arrived safely” or “Your husband’s had a breakdown. We’re trying to get the plane fixed.” And that was all. I had moved heaven and earth in order to live near the radio office, and if I didn’t phone, I went by the office and stuck my head inside, smiling and waving my handkerchief to the other pilots who were there. They were superstitious and didn’t like to see women around the office, but I was different, I was their neighbor. I would ask them to come up to my place, where I had freshwater, anchovies sent from Paris, and sugared almonds, and I would promise them that the prettiest of my women friends in Casablanca would join us for cocktails. I always managed to collect one or two pilots. I waited on them as if they were gods; they were my messenger angels. They would come and go, and finally, without my asking them anything, they would tell me, “Don’t worry, your husband skipped a stop. The wind and the fog pushed him into the desert or out to sea. He thinks he’ll arrive in Cisneros soon.” And the hours would go by. They would take their leave of me with many a glass of Pernod under their belts. “Well, then, Madame de Saint-Ex, come to the restaurant,
chez l’Arabe,
yes . . . see you soon.”

At the restaurant later that night, I would learn if he had reached Cisneros. Sometimes there was not another word, just tenderness, sweetness. The pilots were becoming my brothers. “But Madame de Saint-Ex, don’t worry about it so much. Tonight we’re going to paint the town red.”

Dear God, it was no fun: the bars, the women, the smell of tobacco and kif
*
that permeated even the more or less decent places. If no one took me home at midnight, I knew my angel was in danger. One day, my good-hearted, kind Guerrero “took me to the country.” The other pilots wanted to sleep. “Going to the country,” in our lingo, meant “going to see the radioman.”

Ah, the pilots’ wives! It wasn’t easy for the men or their wives. They felt sorry for us, and they loved us. Our husbands needed to win out against the night, to reach the next stop, because we were waiting for them. The rest of it—the exhaustion, the hours of struggle against the unforeseeable weather, the fog, the stupid orders from the head office in Paris that several liters of gasoline be removed in order to lighten the load—none of it mattered. “If we could land in fifteen more minutes, we’d be saved,” wrote a pilot before falling into the sea and drowning. But orders had to be followed. They climbed aboard their machines like robots setting off to make war. War against the night.

Their homecoming was simple. We didn’t talk about anything; we were all alive. They’d be off again in five days. For now, we would eat and drink. But Tonio, no: he wanted to read, he wanted to write. And so I had to make myself very small and scarce, had to live inside his pockets. I made sketches that bore no resemblance to anything. If that bothered him, I embroidered. Heaps of embroidered pillows piled up on the sofa. He liked for me to be in the same room with him when he was writing, and when he was out of ideas, he would ask me to listen and would read back one, two, or three pages, waiting for my reaction.

“So what are you thinking about? That doesn’t evoke anything from you? Not interesting? I’m going to tear them up. It’s ridiculous, they mean nothing!”

And then I would invent God knows what, I would dig down into my fund of stories and talk for an hour about a page he had just written.

Once this ordeal was behind us, he would look at me, very happy. “I’m sleepy,” he would say. “Let’s go to bed.”

Or he would decide “I’d like to take a fast walk. Put on your walking shoes, we’re going to the beach. Let’s go have some oysters and play some songs on the player piano at L’Oiseau Bleu, that little open-air dance hall by the sea!”

L’Oiseau Bleu had a bad reputation, but it was the only comfortable place, with no pretensions, in town. You felt right at home as soon as you walked in; you’d put a few coins in the piano and the music played. Food and drink would arrive at our table, and there was always a different waitress. Whichever one was free attended to the pilots who came with their “ladies,” the others would keep the sailors company. You could almost say it had become the fashionable meeting place for all of Casablanca. There were hardly more than twenty families in the whole city who knew how to read and write correctly and had been baptized and married. There were two or three couples from our social milieu; though they had been in business, we shared a few topics of conversation with them. We were happy together.

W
HEN
T
ONIO LEFT
on one of his mail runs, I practically had to be hospitalized. Anxiety would not let me sleep. I started back in on the same old dance around the radio operators, the same steps, the same anguish.

One day, two pilots who were standing in front of me said, “I’ve just come from the radio office. Everything’s in a mess. Antoine has crashed. They’ve just sent another plane out to look for his body, and for the mail if it can be saved.”

My ears were ringing. I made the sign of the cross and dashed to the radio office like a crazed gazelle. I was suffocating in the noonday heat. I had just run across the city, instead of taking a taxi; my legs had to fly—I hadn’t stopped to think. At the doorway of the office I found a woman weeping with loud sobs; it was my friend Madame Antoine. So the pilot Jacques Antoine was the one who had gone down and not my husband, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I laughed like a madwoman. “Oh, Madame Antoine, what an idiot I am, it’s your husband who’s crashed.” And I laughed, I couldn’t stop laughing. The doctor arrived, and Madame Antoine and I both slept a whole day under the effects of a dose of morphine.