The Tale of the Rose (13 page)

P
INOT WAS SUPPOSED
to be getting married. Pinot was our friend; he liked to spend time with us. He had decided to leave the desert sands because he was engaged. His mother had arranged everything back in France: the trousseau, the house, all of it. Tonio told him, “We’ll get all the pals together in my big apartment and say good-bye to your life as a pilot and a bachelor.” Pinot accepted. Tonio spent half his monthly salary on champagne for the party.

Pinot was leaving Dakar forever. On his last mail flight, another pilot was supposed to replace him. But Pinot insisted, “Come on. Let me fly the plane one last time.” The pilot let him take over. He had a bad takeoff, the engine misfired several times, and he crashed on the runway. Good-bye, family, fiancée, party that was ready and waiting for him . . .

The sight of our banquet made Tonio melancholy. With his customary generosity, he had ruined himself to celebrate his friend, who was leaving the line forever. Yet we were no richer than the other pilots. Quite the contrary: we both had to live on just four thousand francs a month and a few other resources. The rent had to be paid for the Paris apartment on rue de Castellane and for the apartment in the Glaoui, which was considered insanely luxurious by the other pilots, who lived in little rooms with their wives, without ever having guests.

But Tonio needed space; he liked beautiful parquet floors, walls that weren’t closing in on him, and nothing to encumber his footsteps. All he had to do was touch something in order for it to break. Even a piano he leaned against one day at a friend’s house collapsed. He had no concept of his own weight, or his height. He often hit his head against the doors of cars or houses. He forgot he was as tall as a tree. This man who could fly over the desert and the sea didn’t know how to strike a match without hurting himself. Safety matches were a terrible affliction to me. He struck them very hard, against anything, in order to light his cigarettes (he always lost lighters or destroyed the wick). Once, striking a match against a window, he made a deep cut in his thumb. I wept; he laughed. I couldn’t get over the loss of the little piece of finger and nail that his beautiful hand would lack from then on. He thought he was invincible, for he constantly made use of all his forces, both physical and moral. He would grow irate if anyone was unjust to him or anyone else. One day, in a bistro, a man insulted us because of a little Pekinese I had that I loved dearly: Youti was part of our life. As he drank his Pernod, Tonio listened to this individual’s insults. When the man fell silent, Tonio grabbed the chair the man was sitting on and set it down, with the man still on it, right in the middle of the street. The man stayed there on his chair for a few seconds, stunned; the people in the café laughed, and we left, giggling all the way home.

Youti was always a problem on our excursions: he was so small that we often forgot him. Several times, when we were already well on our way home, I cried, “Tonio, we left Youti at the restaurant.” He made a U-turn and went back to get him. Once he had to go all the way to the home of an Arab who had already adopted him and given him a new name. The whole thing took him more than an hour, but he bore Youti triumphantly back to me.

As soon as I took my eyes off of him, Youti would dash off on errands of his own. Once in Casablanca he ran away from the apartment. For hours I looked for my beloved dog, crying like a baby. When Tonio came back from his flight, he said, “Darling, why didn’t you come to meet me at the airfield?”

“Youti has left me,” I sobbed. “The service entrance was left open and he ran away. The servants have been scouring the city for him in vain since three o’clock.”

“All right, don’t cry. Give me a kiss instead, and I’ll bring you back your Youti.”

He had a quick bath and then went out to look for the dog. People in Casa are still talking about the ruses he used to find him. “He cost us almost three hundred francs,” he told me with a pensive air, “but I can’t stand to see you cry. Here he is, your
toutou.
”

Our walks through the city were our greatest indulgence. We didn’t buy anything. We ate on the ground with the Arabs, meats seasoned with roasted herbs, fresh mutton. Tonio conversed with the legionnaires, men who had lost all their fortune in Paris and had gone to Morocco to rebuild their lives. And it could be done. A close friend traded his coat for a horse in the marketplace, then traded the horse for some goats, the goats for sheep, the sheep for slaves. He ended up having his own stable of horses, along with herds of animals that brought him considerable income. He married the daughter of a local
cadi
. He had a harem, children; he owned a house and land.

One day, on one of our walks through the hot streets among the snake charmers, I caught a strange microbe that began to eat into my foot, making a little hole half an inch wide that smelled awful and seemed to be rotting. My dog caught it after I did. He cried even harder than his mistress. I couldn’t wear shoes. My foot was wrapped in bandages. The doctors held a lengthy conference about me, at which Tonio was present. He came out of the meeting a changed man. He said, “I won’t go on my mail flight tomorrow.”

“Why, Tonio?”

“Because I want to take care of you, to look after you. You won’t heal if you’re alone for long nights. I don’t want to fly anymore.”

“Then how will we live, Tonio?”

“Oh, we’ll always find a way to eat. I know how to drive a truck.”

“But no, Tonio, I’d rather you be a pilot. I want you to leave tomorrow on your mail flight. The vegetables have already been bought and packed up, I’ve made all the soups, everything is ready. Take this cake to Madame la Capitaine, please . . .”

“As you command, my wife. And when I come back we will leave for the islands.” I thought he was joking.

Youti was moaning all the time. I sang songs to him. My Fatima and Ahmed took us to a veterinary sorcerer, and I gave him fifty francs for an ointment that smelled very good. My dog healed in three days. The hole he had had for a month went away, and the skin grew back; there was no more pus. I was delighted, but my own foot wasn’t healing at the same rate. It smelled worse and worse. A second hole had appeared, on my calf. I was shaking, and I prayed to God to heal me. I became very melancholy and stayed home all day. To distract myself, I reread some pages my husband had just written, which he had left scattered across the table. As I was putting away his papers, I saw a word written in larger letters than the others: “Leprosy.” I read it again: yes, “Leprosy.” It was a letter to God, no less, in which he pleaded with the Lord not to abandon me because the doctor didn’t want me to have any further contact with other people. He would, he wrote, go away with me to the islands where lepers live.

I understood why my friends were no longer visiting as often. I was afraid. Youti gave me a kiss. I cried.

We had come to this country to work, full of hope, full of energy. I never complained about anything. I had no money to buy new dresses or perfumes, but it didn’t matter; the flowers smelled wonderful, and in my white summer dresses I was as elegant as my friends in Casa who wore the latest styles from Paris. My husband loved me. Could I destroy his life because of my leprosy? Had I infected him already? I should run away with an Arab who would accept me with my foot like that. In any case, I could go and beg in Fez, but what if I gave my disease to everyone? No, I had to leave for the islands all alone, to wait and see if Tonio had been infected.

I looked at my little hole as if I were looking at my coffin. It was time to take care of Youti—I had his bandages ready—and I decided to use the same ointment on myself. What did it matter? Things couldn’t possibly get any worse. During the night, I couldn’t breathe. I was purple, feverish. I put on more of the ointment, then took a hot bath, leaving my foot dangling outside the tub. Morning found me there, my body covered in red spots. The next day, same treatment. But my hole was clean. The itching was gone. The day Tonio came back from his mail flight, I was at the airfield, wearing my walking shoes, without a cane. And with Youti. He saw that the dog had recovered and understood at once.

“You used the same medicine as Youti?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over, but my whole body aches.”

My husband took me in his arms and carried me off the airfield to the car. “Where is the sorcerer who saw to Youti?”

“Near Bousber.”

We found him in a brothel; the girls served us tea. The Arab was very calm. “What your wife and your dog were suffering from is going to be cured,” he said. “You must bathe your wife’s body in milk. And then it will be over.”

Tonio took baths in boiling milk with me. The remedy was a little costly, so we mixed some goat’s milk in with the cow’s milk. But I was well again.

Tonio told me, “I would have gone with you to the islands,
ma femme.
You are my reason for living. I love you as much as life itself.”

W
E WERE STILL LIVING
in Casablanca when
Night Flight
finally went on sale in the Paris bookstores.
*
We were worried about how it would be received. Every day, I bought the most important newspapers
—Comœdia, Le Figaro, Les Nouvelles Littéraires.
I cut out all the good reviews and pasted them in a notebook—sometimes two copies of them, because it tickled me to see so many photos of Tonio. When he came back, he laughed to see the same photos, the same articles. Then
Night Flight
won an important literary prize, the Prix Fémina, and became a favorite for the Prix Goncourt.
Gringoire
printed a funny cartoon that showed a winged aviator being ravished by the female judges of the Prix Fémina. They had changed the date of their meeting for him. In general, they awarded their prize after the Goncourt, but that year they met before the Goncourt was announced. Tonio and I were very pleased by this distinction.

Tonio’s publisher called him back to Paris again. Tonio was beginning to find all the traveling back and forth quite an impediment to his sense of freedom. What was more, he couldn’t get the company to give him more leave every month. So he decided, without telling me, to be a pilot no more. One day out of the blue he announced that we were leaving. And I followed . . .

T
HIS TIME WE WERE SETTLING
in Paris for good. The apartment on rue de Castellane was far too small, but it was impossible to find a place to rent at that time—the prices were unbelievable. You had to bribe the concierges, pay key money, and run all over Paris, only to find nothing.

By chance we stumbled on a lovely apartment not far from where André Gide lived that was available, though many people were eager to rent it. But my husband was the man who had won the Prix Fémina, and the owner gave us his preference. The street was pleasant, and the apartment overlooked a garden, but we had to wait several months before moving in.

Tonio was overextended, forever busy with appointments, visits to the ladies of the Prix Fémina, photo sessions, invitations, and admirers, male and female. His success grew greater by the day. Distant cousins who had never before noticed that they were related to him were suddenly laying claim to the succesful writer. They even came to wish him a happy birthday, which they had never done before. Importunate lady admirers besieged us from all sides. I could no longer keep track of all the names, and we missed half our appointments. Tonio wasn’t writing anymore; we spent our life in other people’s houses; we didn’t even have lunch alone together anymore.

Finally, one of his cousins took us off to her château, six hours out of Paris. At last, some green, some peace! Little old ladies sat by the fireside in the château’s large, chilly rooms; I was delighted. But our stay ended all too quickly and our return to Paris was a nightmare once more. My husband was constantly on the telephone, even in the bathtub. My nerves could no longer take it. In the evening, we had to travel to Deauville, Honfleur, or Bagatelle, a constant coming and going that made no sense. There was talk of seizing the moment to make films of
Southern Mail
in France and of
Night Flight
in America. Editors, journalists, and agents were all sitting on his bed. We no longer had a single minute alone. At three in the morning, when the telephone finally quieted down, Tonio would fall into a dead sleep, and then, very early, the telephone would start in again. He had no secretary, there were only he and I, doing our best. After the calm of the white villas of Morocco and my anguish over his night flights, I was becoming almost hysterical. He would often ask me, “What can we do?”

He couldn’t walk ten yards down the street without meeting up with some intellectual who spent his life in a café, such as Léon-Paul Fargue
*
and countless others. And then they would go off drinking and talking. It was hellish. No more home life, no more time spent thinking; we lived as if we were on public display in a shopwindow.

But Tonio loved the sky too much. He knew how the clouds changed, how the winds could be treacherous. He saw himself at the apogee of his career, but he also knew that everyone was waiting, watching, always hoping for the vertiginous fall of the current man of the hour. That was why he decided one day to run away from Paris. But it was harder now than it had been before. Rivière, the great Rivière of
Night Flight,
who was none other than Didier Daurat, director of the French airmail service, the Aéropostale, had been threatened with the worst: imprisonment based on false evidence, false testimony. He was accused of having stolen some mail, he had been dismissed from his position as head of the airmail service in Toulouse, and he was being called a forger. Chaumié, the head of civil aviation at the Ministry of Aviation, had been charged as well. Daurat and Chaumié: two men whose honesty could withstand any ordeal. The newspapers were full of the latest news of their trials. My husband stood firmly behind them; his confidence in the two accused men never wavered. He was right. It was like something from a Sherlock Holmes mystery: the real forger was finally discovered, and Daurat and Chaumié were acquitted. But the company had changed hands and would now belong to the state. Those who wanted to fly for it would have to meet special, very exacting requirements. Tonio did not persist. An airplane manufacturer had asked him to come to Saint-Laurent-de-La-Salanque, near Toulouse, to help perfect the prototype of a new plane. He accepted. He told me he had found work again, somewhat difficult work. The prototype had already drowned several of its crews. The manufacturer had tinkered with the motor a little and wanted to take the plane through some new tests with new pilots. Tonio left for Saint-Laurent. He gave me as his address the Hôtel Lafayette in Toulouse and begged me to stay in Paris. It was winter, but the apartment was heated only by two fireplaces. I was too weak to bear the chill, so he put me up in a room in a charming hotel on the Left Bank, the Hôtel du Pont-Royal.