The Tale of the Rose (15 page)

“The plane I was in had an upper section like a convertible car where the engineer had been sitting, along with the mechanic who had been looking after the plane’s last flight. In the fall, the two men were thrown free of the plane, into the sea. The little boat that ‘baby-sat’ my flights saw them fall and went immediately to their rescue. The mechanic had a very thorough acquaintance with this prototype, which had already drowned several of its crews. The last time, near Marseille, they had died because they couldn’t get out of the plane. It was close to the coast, but the metal had been twisted in the fall, the doors were stuck, and the men had died because they were unable to open them.

“Immediately after he was rescued, the mechanic dove down with all his strength and courage to the bottom of the sea. Perhaps it was because he was used to working on the ill-fated flights of this particular prototype, perhaps it was chance or simply the will of God, I don’t know: on his very first dive he came upon the wing of the submerged plane. He tore up his hand trying to open the door. He needed air and went back to the surface. That was all he could do. The others rushed to his rescue. As for me, down in the bottom of the sea, I had heard a vague sound. Through the door, which he had managed to pry open a little way, a dim greenish light entered the passengers’ cabin where I was, and I tried to think. The water was already up to my mouth. I tried to win a few more seconds by putting my nose against the ceiling to get the last of the oxygen left in the plane. The blood flowing from my head wound refreshed my palate a little. I understood that my only chance of saving myself was to throw myself towards that greenish light, which couldn’t be anything but the bottom of the sea, the open sea.

“If I could manage it, I would find myself back outside this steel prison, and return to the surface. I gathered the last of my strength, checked my knees and feet, which were hurting, clenched and unclenched my hands, and after a great yawn against the ceiling of the plane, which made me smile because it was like a kiss good-bye to this machine that had wanted to drown me, I threw myself toward the green light and quickly found the limpid water of the Mediterranean. I rose to the surface. My hands were seen by the rescue boat, and they fished me out of the high seas, senseless, stiff, as if dead. The nurse, the diver, and the mechanic gave me first aid. They had forgotten the respirator. My heart wasn’t beating. It was a little too late. That was why they took me to you at the hotel, where the ammonia rub you gave me woke up my sleeping bronchia.

“Life, my little wife, oh, Consuelo—I owe you my life.”

O
NE DAY MY MOTHER-IN-LAW
, Marie de Saint-Exupéry, took us to the château where Tonio grew up and which he had so beautifully described in
Southern Mail.
It was an old provincial château. The parquet floors in its vast salons gleamed as only the French know how to make them gleam. Made of small pieces of inlaid wood, they had become, with the caress of many footsteps and the famous French method of waxing, as smooth as a vast platter. The library of Saint-Maurice, with its red felt and baronial furniture, seemed like something from a fairy tale, and the stairway was so long it looked as if it went up to Heaven. The shadows cast by the trees in the region’s famous light made the sunsets magical.

All the neighbors came to see us, kiss us, and wish us all kinds of wonderful happiness once again.

However, Tonio had to think about his career as a pilot. Our vacation under the tall branches of Saint-Maurice was soon over, and one morning we had to go back to Paris, to our new apartment on the rue de Chanaleilles.

Our new home was flooded with light, and the rooms were well proportioned. The walls were painted green, the green of a forest in early spring, and I hung curtains of pale green tulle at the windows, one at a time, for we were quite poor then. But we were together, and we were happy. Tonio rested. He would walk through the apartment for hours without doing anything, looking at me, talking to me. I played the lady of the house, serious and diligent.

Creating intimacy in three small rooms on the ground floor, with simple furniture and a telephone that never stopped ringing, required a great deal of energy and imagination and all the courage of a young, devoted, and loving wife.

After a week of work, I was very tired. Our maid came back to us, but she stole; Tonio caught her at it. A man, an Arab, replaced her. He adored Tonio. Life was easier that way. Tonio was happy as a child with his big Arab servant. It reminded us of our life in Morocco. We gave parties; the servant prepared enormous platters of couscous that we ate sitting on the floor, and we had as many as twenty people over at a time. We read, we sang. . . . But we were seriously in need of money. Tonio was hard at work developing an idea for a film, but it didn’t bring in any income.

“Consuelo,” he told me, “you know very well that I can’t stay here between these four walls waiting for the good Lord to rain fistfuls of gold down upon me.”

“It could happen, Tonio. Your book is selling very well. Your screenplays are in the hands of good agents. You’ll see, they’ll come to find you here with pots of gold.”

“I’m tired of doing nothing. It’s very nice of you to play a record for me on the gramophone every day when I wake up, and I do love Bach, it’s true, but I’m starting to get bored. Though I’d love to have been a composer, like him, to be able to say things without words, in that secret language that is given only to the elect, the initiates, to poets . . . I often wonder if there are different breeds of men.”

“Yes, Tonio, I believe we’re all very different from one another. A flower, a white tablecloth, and the sound of your footsteps are enough for me. I like to hear them as much as the music of your Bach. They speak to me, they explain life to me. You are my key of sol, my key of fa. Through you, I come to God more quickly.”

“And for me you are my child, even when I am far from you, even for a day. When I fly away forever, I will be holding your hand. But you mustn’t act like a frail child who weeps and gazes at its guardian with sobs and tears. I have to leave, leave, leave . . .”

One day a lady presented herself at our house and offered to be Tonio’s agent. She told him she would teach him to write screenplays. He asked me to let him go out alone with her. I didn’t understand why I had to be absent in order for him to learn, but I trusted my husband. They went out together all the time, to cafés and other places, and spent long hours talking. But Tonio still wasn’t writing. I suffered, all alone between my green walls.

A friend of ours asked him for some articles for the magazine
Marianne.
Tonio said he didn’t know how to write for magazines and refused. But we had to pay our rent—we were already two months late. So Tonio went through his papers and found a short story, “Prince of Argentina.” His text was accepted, and he was paid for it. He gave them another one. For my part, little by little, by making myself small, simple, and tender, I was able to get him to sit down at his table and write his screenplay. He quickly became involved in what he was doing. He liked his characters, and when his admirers came knocking at our door, he was annoyed. He was traveling, flying, dying with his characters, and those were sunny days in our home. Alas, I knew it couldn’t last long.

He was offered a chance to go to Moscow to write an article. The idea thrilled him.

“I’m leaving, Consuelo, I’m leaving tomorrow for Moscow. I need to see men and nations as they evolve. I feel like a eunuch tied down at home by your ribbons.”

My poor ribbons! He asked me for the one I was wearing in my hair, to carry with him in his wallet. His face was already distant, as if carved out of wood or steel. He was already in Moscow, sharing in the rigors of the five-year plan being developed there. From time to time, he muttered a few thoughts. “I know the Russians have very good planes,” he said once. “They’re doing advanced research. They’re very strong.”

“Yes, Tonio, the Russians are strong,” I said skeptically. “They’ve forgotten their songs, they’ve forgotten love. I hear that they no longer have families there. The children are placed in nurseries from the moment they’re born.”

“That may be true for now. They need all their strength. They’re preparing for a great struggle, they no longer have time to sing or to love. But one day they’ll go back to their music, their songs, their women, their lives as men. I’m sorry I’m not taking you with me. I’ll tell you everything. The phone lines between Paris and Russia are very good and not expensive. Every evening I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. Pack my bags.”

Before leaving, Tonio gave me some money. This time his absence didn’t make me sad. I would work on the house a little and have some surprises ready for him when he returned.

I also decided to take some sculpting classes at the Académie Ranson. The sculptor Maillol encouraged me to do it. The Académie was my Russia. One day, at sunset, drinking a glass of Pernod with my studio friends, I heard the cries of a newspaper vendor: “Fatal accident! The
Maxime-Gorki,
the giant Russian airplane, crashes! All passengers dead!” Saint-Ex was supposed to fly on the
Maxime-Gorki.
It had been planned as part of the article he was writing. Everything around me dissolved into a haze of huge newspaper headlines shouted out by vendors who jumbled together all the day’s stories to tempt prospective buyers.

As it turned out, my husband had flown in the giant airplane the day before. It was another of the miracles of his life, for he was supposed to have made the flight on the day of the crash. During that period, the Russians guarded all their airports closely; they were already making ready for their fierce war against the Germans. But they had found Tonio to be a true devotee of aviation, and the head of the airport hadn’t been able to wait until the next day to show him the enormous plaything they had invented. Thanks to him, Tonio had flown alone with the crew of the
Maxime-Gorki
one day before the catastrophe. I held the newspaper on my knees. One of my classmates read me the article. Little by little, I read in his expression that my husband had not been on board the plane when it crashed.

I went back to rue de Chanaleilles, where I stayed glued to the telephone, waiting to hear my strolling minstrel’s voice. The phone call came exactly on time, as it did every evening. And I was able to fall asleep that night, still dreaming about the new horizons he was discovering.

In the morning, the concierge woke me up. In her sourest voice, she demanded that I get dressed immediately. My apartment was being seized. The furniture and all the little possessions I cherished would be sold at auction on the spot. I persuaded them to give me a few hours, to refrain from piling the furniture up in the street, and to let me stay in the apartment waiting for my husband’s call.

It came at the expected time. When I told him about the events of the day, he laughed and begged my pardon for not having warned me.

“I have a letter in my pocket that will explain the whole story to you,” he added. “In any case, our furniture is worthless. The proceeds from this seizure will satisfy the government, and it will save us from having to pay huge taxes on the money I earned during the years in Buenos Aires.”

He added, “After this I’ll have a clean slate and we’ll be very careful to pay our taxes every year. Please rent a small apartment at the Hôtel du Pont-Royal, where I’ll come to join you soon.”

Of course, at the hotel our life was more public. His article about Russia, which was published in a Parisian daily paper, once again enlarged our circle of admirers and flatterers. Our brief life of intimacy was beginning to unravel.

“C
ONSUELO
, C
ONSUELO
, I’m bored! I’m bored to death. I can’t sit in an armchair all day, or in a café. I have legs, I need to walk, to walk . . .”

“I know, Tonio, cities make you sick to your stomach. You love your fellowmen for their work. You don’t understood what we call the sweetness of life, those exquisite moments of sharing nothing more than good or bad weather. Unfortunately for me, and for you too sometimes, you’re the kind of man who is constantly in need of struggle, conquest. Leave, then. Leave.”

I sensed that Tonio was suffering for all mankind, that in some way he wanted to make them better. He was a man who chose his own destiny, but he had to pay a high price for his freedom, and he knew it. There were no more long dinners now, no more evenings of dancing, no more losing ourselves in parties. Not one spare second was granted him, for something almost divine had made him a kind of seed, destined to sow a better race of men on the earth. He had to be helped in his struggles, in the painful process of giving birth to himself and to his books, amid all the everyday cares that harried him and among all those who had not yet perceived that something in his heart was speaking with God.

I was still very young then, and I didn’t fully understand all these things. I observed my husband the way one watches a great tree grow, without ever being conscious of its transformation. I touched him as if I were touching a tree in his garden, a tree in whose shadow I would have liked, much later, to fall into my final sleep. I was used to my tree’s miracles. His detachment from material things had almost become natural to me. And we lived in expectation of discovering a better world that would not be unattainable.

Every evening in our modest rooms in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal, he unfolded and refolded his maps. He spoke to me of Baghdad, of strange cities still undiscovered, and of the white Indians who are supposed to exist somewhere along the course of the Amazon.

“Consuelo, don’t you think that in the water, in the ocean, there are pathways, and beings moving about who think as we do but simply do not breathe as we do, and whose proportions are probably elastic—I mean, who enlarge and shrink in a minute?”

“Certainly, Tonio,” I would say, carried away with the notion of letting my imagination fly. “I think that the whales, the giant fish that we see, may be no more than pebbles in the ocean, or earthworms. I believe that these characters you’re imagining move through the water more easily than we do on land. Perhaps, at this very moment, a woman like me, her body covered with eyes and endowed with greater sensitivity than I have, is thinking exactly what we’ve just said to each other. Maybe she’s dreaming, ‘On earth, the existence of thinking beings must be difficult. It’s so green there, there are so many plants, stones, minerals, things that are so hard! The trees are so large they can’t possibly leave any space where living beings can be born and live!’”