The Tale of the Rose (14 page)

I had asthma. I didn’t know much about the disease and thought Morocco had given me its last gift: sand in my lungs. I couldn’t breathe; I thought I was dying. My husband had disappeared to Toulouse a week before. I was going mad. I heard nothing from him. I asked my sister in Central America to come and help me, and fifteen days later she disembarked in Le Havre. On the telephone, my husband’s voice was always half asleep and absent; by night he wrote or did whatever he wanted, and by day he was working in Toulouse. He very rarely flew the plane, which had endless mechanical problems.

“Little sister?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I was shaking.

“Lie down,” she told me.

“Little sister, do you love me?”

“Yes, I love you. Now lie down. The doctor said you have to sleep.”

“Little sister, I want to speak to my husband.”

“If you’re a good girl, I’ll get him on the phone for you.”

I could hear the distant voice of my husband saying, “Yes, Consuelo, I know, you’re ill. Your sister is taking care of you. I’m not worried.”

“Little sister, how long have I been sick? Three weeks? Four? Oh, little sister, why doesn’t my husband come to see me?”

“Because he’s working,” she said.

“Little sister, I don’t have any letters from my husband. He left a long time ago. Little sister, I know: he has nothing more to say to me.”

“Don’t think like that. I’m tempted to be angry with you. You are ill. You must not think of anything, anything . . .”

“Little sister, I feel better. For four days now, I haven’t had asthma. Why do you keep me lying in bed with the shutters closed?”

“It’s the doctor’s orders.”

“Little sister, ask him if I can get up.”

The next day, I went to see the doctor.

“Madame, I do not invite all my patients to my home,” the doctor told me. “But you are so alone. I’ve asked a very intelligent friend to dinner tonight. Promise me that you will not refuse to join us.”

“I feel so unhappy, Doctor,” I whispered. “I’m miserable.”

“These things can happen to the happiest couples: distances, misunderstandings. Two people sometimes grow tired of each other.
C’est la fatigue à deux.
”

That evening, at dinner, the doctor’s friend was there.

“May I introduce my patient, Madame de Saint-Exupéry, wife of the famous writer and pilot,” he said with a flourish. “She thinks she is very sick, in other words, no longer loved by her husband. I’ve allowed her to get out of bed, and she’s begun taking flying lessons. She wants to run away into the sky.”

After dinner, the doctor’s friend, André, a poet, took me back to my hotel. All the lights in the generally lackluster lobby were glowing. I asked him to join me in the bar for a moment, and he was happy to do so. We talked for a long time. Both of us had been despondent before we met, but by the end of the evening we found ourselves comforted and increasingly cheerful.

André came with me to my flying lessons, which he found absurd. He gave me poems to read, wonderful stories, and soon I was well again. I wanted to live, to play, to read more and more poems, more and more stories, ever more marvelous. With him I had found magic. I began to dream again. Through him I found the strength to go back to the apartment on rue de Castellane.

One evening after dinner, when I was back home, he told me the story of his last love. She was a married woman. He swore to me that never again did he want to love a married woman. I was in despair: I knew what he was driving at. He told me that he loved me, that I must go and see my husband in Saint-Laurent, or wherever he was, and tell him good-bye, tell him that I loved another man. That day, André believed I was free.

I was young, and André’s wonderful nature ruled my heart. I left for Toulouse on a third-class ticket. My husband did not come to the train station, where I was expecting him to meet me. I went to his hotel. He asked me to let him sleep until one o’clock. I waited in his room, which smelled strongly of smoke, stale air, and leather flying gear. I shivered at the thought of the speech I would have to give him when he woke up. In my head, I repeated André’s words. I wanted to carry my mission through to its end. But suddenly there was our friend Dubordier, another pilot, coming into the room.

“Do you want to have lunch?” he asked Tonio.

“No, but take my wife,” Tonio yawned. “It’s Sunday. I don’t like taking my wife to restaurants on Sunday. You’re granting me some time to sleep—thank you. She has to go back after that, take her to the train station. I’ve got to leave for Saint-Laurent in an hour. Good-bye, Consuelo. Kiss me, dear wife, and give your sister a kiss for me, too.”

“But Tonio, I didn’t come all the way here for this,” I said. “I want to speak to you.”

“I understand. You probably need money. Take all you want,
chérie.
I live on café au lait and croissants.”

I went back to Paris.

“Oh, André, I couldn’t tell him anything,” I said miserably.

“Why?”

“He was asleep.”

“You don’t love me, but if you tell me that you do, I’ll believe it. So write him, then.”

“Yes,” I said with new determination. “I can do that.”

And the letter went off. When it reached Tonio, he hopped on a plane at once and came back to me.

“Yes, yes,” I told him. “I’m leaving you for André.”

“I’ll die if you leave. Stay with me, I beg you. You are my wife!”

“But I love André, Tonio. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any pain. I had no news of you from Saint-Laurent. I thought I was nothing more than a thing to you. A thing that you leave parked in a hotel. And André loves me. He’s waiting for me.”

“Then tell him to come and get you.”

“Yes, I’ll ask him to come.”

I called him, and a few minutes later, André was at my house. He came with some of his friends. We talked, we drank. Tonio received them bare-chested. He looked very strong with his hairy chest, and he was also very cheerful. He served them Pernod on a silver tray. We all drank together, and I stayed with my husband for life.

We never mentioned it again.

T
HE NEXT DAY
we flew to the south of France, where he wanted finally to fly in his great monster of a hydroplane. We arrived in Saint-Raphaël while my little sister, her role as nurse at an end, sailed back to her volcano in San Salvador.

“Tonio, I’m afraid of that plane of yours; it doesn’t want to swim,” I told him.

“I’m not,” he said. “Every day, I fly a few minutes longer over the water. It groans, it cracks. You see how my arm is swollen, almost black and blue; well, that’s because I had to hold the door shut—it was coming open. It needs a certain number of hours in flight; after that it’s the manufacturer’s business.”

“But this whole comedy with the little boat that tracks your flights, the deep-sea diver, the nurse, the respirator, and you up in the air, it drives me crazy. You know, I would like to see you open up a shoe repair shop on some street corner.”

“But today I know many things,” he said. “I’m no longer afraid to go far away from you. You love me as if I were your father, you take better care of me than a wife your age should know how to. And it’s a bald man you’re mothering. Look at me: I really am bald. Darling, today I’m going to finish testing our monstrous creature. Come and see it; tell it to behave itself.”

“That’s all fine, Tonio,” I said, “but where will we go then?”

“We’ll fly somewhere else, wherever there’s work for me to do. I prefer stormy nights to the café chatter of Paris, and airplanes are my only way of saving myself. You mustn’t hate them; if I do the long-distance flight I’m thinking of and win the prize, I’ll buy you a little plane, a Simoun. What color would you like it to be? You can have a bar installed inside, throw in some colored pillows, flowers, and we’ll fly it around the world.”

“Oh yes, Tonio, I love to dream, but on the ground. In the air, I grow fainthearted thinking of the long flights when you are alone. If you were to hurt yourself very badly someday and I couldn’t come to help you, I would go mad.”

“You can always help someone you love just by loving them very much, with all that you are.”

“Yes, I know, Tonio . . .”

“All right, it’s time to go. Forgive me, I have to be in the air in ten minutes. Tomorrow I’ll be paid for the flight. It’s a stroke of luck for us, we’ll be rich, rich. Think about what present you’ll want to give me once I’ve tamed the monster.”

This was the time of the Great Depression in America; the Côte d’Azur was deserted, abandoned by its faithful visitors. The hotels stayed open nevertheless. The staff had to be paid and fed, and from time to time a French clientele would take advantage of their presence. But for the most part the great palaces were empty. My husband put me up at the Hôtel Continental. His entire family lived on the Côte, and for the price of a room we had a whole floor with full service and fires burning in the rooms. What luxury! My husband’s friends, military pilots all of them, gathered at our place in the evening for cocktails, and we sang old French songs.

During Tonio’s absence, I looked at the empty rooms, their unbelievable luxury. My dog chased itself through the suites. What peace, I thought to myself, what calm . . .

Suddenly I heard a violently loud noise that echoed through the city. Everyone ran to their windows, and so did I. I saw nothing but the sea, which had risen into the air like a cloud and then fell quickly back down, as if cannon balls were being thrown into it. As I watched the surface of the water, my dog took off and I ran to get him—the rascal had discovered another Pekinese. I carried Youti back angrily, and from my window, looking out at the sea, I slowly understood, as night fell on the icy water, that the cloud of water that had alarmed the population of Saint-Raphaël was my husband’s monstrous hydroplane. It had slammed into the sea so fast that the water had risen several yards, only to fall back down with the terrible sound that had startled the whole city. As night fell, the sea was smooth again, smooth as the Dead Sea. I didn’t move from my window. I don’t know how long I stayed there, immobile. Someone knocked at the door, but so softly that my dog didn’t even bark. It was strange. I hesitated to move from where I was, and I let them knock harder. After a few minutes, I went to the door. My husband was carried in on a stretcher, like a wounded man. We laid him down on the bed. He’d been given all kinds of medicines, artificial respiration, oxygen, and so forth. They left me alone with him.

“Ah, Tonio,” I said, “you crashed into the sea. You’re freezing. Your pants are all wet, they’re getting the bed all wet. My little one, I’m here, let me give you a rubdown . . .”

In my great haste, I picked up the first bottle that came to hand. It was pure ammonia, which I used to bleach my dog’s fur.

“Yes, that will warm your chest up, because you’re so cold!”

His furry chest absorbed the ammonia until I was choking from it. It worked much better than eau de Cologne. The ammonia entered Tonio’s lungs when he was already on the other side and made his bronchia react. He began breathing again, he stirred; water was coming out of his nose.

Stricken with fear, I shouted, “Help, my husband is dying, I’m all alone!” But by a miracle Tonio came back to himself. I pulled him into the bathroom by the head, like a huge doll, in the process banging his skull, which bled into the bathtub. A bellboy came to help me. We plunged him into boiling water. I wanted to cook him. He cried out, “Ow, it’s too hot! Do you want me to die?”

“But darling, it’s very good for you,” I said.

“My clothes are still on.”

“Yes, but what does it matter?”

“Help me take off my pants, I’m all stiff.”

“Here, let me do it. You fell into the water.”

“Ah, now I remember. Let me tell you what happened. My hydroplane didn’t want to land on the water. I’m cold.”

“But
chéri,
you’re sitting in boiling water.”

Captain Marville came up with the bellboy to see me, then the journalists arrived. The telephone began its frenetic ringing again—everyone wanted an interview.

A few hours later, we had a party in the Air Force barracks. We laughed and danced on the tables. But after that day, Tonio no longer wanted to sleep at night. He would press his nose against the window as I stood behind him in my nightgown, pulling him by his hand toward the bed. He would get up again and again. I would go and bring him back. It lasted a month, maybe two.

He had been as if dead. He had passed through death itself. Now he knew it.

“I
T’S EASY TO DIE,
” he told me. “To drown. Let me tell you. You have very little time to get used to the idea that you can no longer breathe oxygen. You have to breathe water into your lungs. You must not cough, the water must not go in through your nose. You are, as I was, relieved to breathe in the first mouthful of water. It’s cool, and everything is fine afterward. I realized that I had gone into the water with my plane. Water was already inside the cabin. If I didn’t get out of there immediately, I was going to drown, to die. If I managed to find an open door and get back up to the surface, I would escape from death. I wasn’t far from the coast, and even as tired as I was, I could swim. The rescue boat would see me. I groped, stretching my hand out to the right, then to the left. What an effort! I felt a great emptiness. My hand touched nothing. It was so dark, I had no notion of what position I was in. My plane had fallen backwards, I had my head down and my feet up. I thought of the turkey you had bought for me from some peasants the day before, which I had driven back to the Mirador. You wanted to celebrate Christmas in our home. The turkey was waiting for me; I couldn’t drown. I wanted to go through an opening that my hand could feel, but my foot was caught in something metallic, like a chain around my ankle. I had a knife, but by the time I had cut off my leg or cut through the metal, I would have suffocated. I resigned myself to death, but I wanted to be in a more comfortable position. I didn’t know that my head was down. I said to myself, “I want to die lying flat: let’s go!” I pulled my legs out abruptly and decided to swallow my second mouthful of water once I was in the right position. I forced my legs to move. The leg that was stuck came loose. With a superhuman effort, I threw myself into the hole my hand had felt. It was the door leading into the passengers’ cabin. I was swimming, suffocating, and I felt myself struggling to rotate into an upright position. My body reacted on its own until my head was upright again. I was able to stand up, and my head bumped against the ceiling. I was bleeding. But there was still a pocket of air up there. I took a good long breath. Then I took stock of my situation.