The Tale of the Rose (24 page)

T
ONIO’S FINANCIAL SITUATION
eventually improved. His promotion to the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor and the success of
Wind, Sand, and Stars
*
had made him a well-known, much admired writer. We were no longer living together, but we hadn’t separated either. This was our love, the inevitable destiny of our love: we simply had to get used to living that way. He rented me a large house in the country, the estate of La Feuilleraie. He was enjoying his new life, half single, half married. He lived in his bachelor quarters, and I lived in the country. He told me, “You’re very happy here in the country. You’re better off here than on place Vauban, aren’t you?”

He had moved heaven and earth to get coal for me that winter. He was earning a little money writing for
L’Intransigeant,
and he told me that he had written those magazine articles without much wanting to, just in order to buy me coal: “So we can have central heating installed for you and buy you furniture for the garden, benches and chairs in different colors, lemon yellow and blue.”

He came regularly to La Feuilleraie, more often than I wanted him to, actually. He would arrive, and if he found that I had friends over for lunch or dinner, he would go to a little bistro in the village where he wrote me letters ten or fifteen pages long, love letters such as I had never received before.

The garden was marvelous. Lilacs grew everywhere, but I still felt alone. The flowering of spring after heavy rains, the orchards loaded down with fruit, the scent of the lilacs, and the silence of the garden, which was like something out of Lamartine, all cried out for lovers to come and sit on the moss-covered benches.

A faithful old spinster went everywhere with me, sometimes as the cook, sometimes as the maternal comforter of my tears. I also had a pair of old gardeners, Monsieur and Madame Jules, but I missed having someone young around. I asked my dressmaker’s daughter to come and live at La Feuilleraie. She was Russian, very pretty, and laboriously earning about fifty francs a week in Paris by spending all day bent over magnificent dresses that other people would wear. I offered her the same salary if she would move into my garden, love the flowers, put away my handkerchiefs, and choose pretty dresses and hats for me. Her name was Véra; she was barely twenty years old. Quickly, she became La Feuilleraie’s young girl. She loved climbing the trees, repotting plants in the greenhouse, and growing strange flowers, black orchids or Chinese roses.

Véra began to love me like a sister. She took devoted care of the goats, the ducks, the rabbits, the donkeys, and even a pregnant cow named Natasha, who would soon begin giving us milk. Véra awaited the calf’s birth with great concern.

She asked me questions about my childhood, which I answered evasively, for she thought I had always lived at La Feuilleraie. I let her dream. She had an odd way of dressing; sometimes she looked like a Russian ice skater or a peasant woman from the Circassian mountains, sometimes like an Indian.

One day when she had drunk a little more champagne than usual because it was her birthday, she decided to insist: “But why doesn’t your husband come to stay? And you, don’t you ever visit him in Paris?”

It was a serious question, a problem I couldn’t explain even to myself. It was understood between my husband and me that he would live in Paris and I would live here. The answer wasn’t very cheerful, and without thinking I told Véra the truth: “Why, Véra, I suppose I hadn’t thought of that. I could go and visit him one day.”

“Let’s go!” she said with great excitement. “I would love to see his apartment. I want to see how he lives, what furniture he has, what neighborhood he lives in. To see his servants.”

We were interrupted by the sudden appearance of Tonio himself, who had just driven up with a friend. He was in the habit of making these unexpected visits, for he knew how good-natured my cook was and how much pleasure Véra and I took in welcoming him to lunch, even if we were already having dessert.

That day, our table was covered with forget-me-nots. For her party, Véra had wanted the table to look like a flower bed full of blue flowers. Her name, Véra, was written on it, and mine, too, in letters made from dark mauve violets, along with a heart that had a little metal airplane inside it that she had put there.

“God, how beautiful you are!” Tonio cried out when he saw us. His friend had joined him at the door of the dining room, but he stopped him from joining our intimate lunch party, I don’t know why, and abruptly sent him away. “Sorry, old man, my wife has finished with lunch. Thanks for the car. I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon here.”

He looked like an Arab sheik, and his black eyes shone with a singular gleam that made us tremble. I didn’t ask him why he had made his friend go away. Perhaps he wanted this feast of forget-me-nots for himself alone. He sat down at the table as if he owned all the perfumed loveliness around him.

“My children, you are eating flowers,” he said. “Flowers taste good!”

“It was Véra who prepared this marvelous table to celebrate her twentieth birthday. We’re alone, and you know I have to work this evening. You’re welcome to attend her birthday party. Véra was just talking about you: she was wondering what your apartment in Paris is like.”

His face closed. He lowered his eyes and, with his right hand, put some violets on his plate, as if to perfume the rice he was eating. Jules arrived at exactly the right moment with his present for Véra. It was a little tortoise; he and his wife had spent several days painting its shell silver. Vera’s name was written across the poor creature’s back in tiny gold letters. He presented us with the tortoise inside a large seashell. Tonio played sommelier and had us drink more and more. We watched the figure of my giant husband, tall as a tree, moving across the dining room in the dance of a conqueror.

“You are happy here, Consuelo. The light in this room is wonderful. Look out the window at that lawn, those colors—it’s like a dream. Here both of you are like princesses in some enchanted tale.”

“Why don’t you live with us?” Véra asked. “We have quite a number of rooms, you’re sure to find one you like. Every day you will have a feast of flowers on the table, I promise.”

“Thank you, Véra. Let’s go outside and have our coffee in the little pavilion.”

“But Madame Jules is expecting us to be here,” I said. “She’s planning to serve us the coffee and a surprise cake for Véra.”

Nevertheless, we walked down paths lined with flowering lilacs, throwing twigs at one another’s hair, our cheeks bulging with cherries, for we put whole handfuls in our mouths at once.

Véra and Tonio were both leaning against the trunk of an old cherry tree. They were staring into each other’s eyes like young animals who suddenly fall in love and want to prove it to each other immediately. I let them stand there with their gazes full of desire, telling myself serenely that in a harem the sultan gratifies several women in turn. And now it was Véra’s turn.

As we ate Madame Jules’s cake, we were all as well behaved as children at Sunday school. Tonio was taken aback by the desire of this half-dressed young girl who was openly offering herself to him, touching his hand shyly as if it were the stem of a rare flower. Madame Jules was dismayed. At her age, the old gardener knew what that meant. Tonio was not eating his cake or drinking his coffee. I was concerned for Madame Jules, who, in turn, was worried about me and shed maternal tears as she looked at me.

“But Tonio,” I said very loudly, “why aren’t you eating your cake? Drink your coffee while it’s hot. If Véra is caressing your hand, that’s nice, but please don’t pain Madame Jules or me. Come on, liven up! I haven’t done you any harm. Taste the cake, drink the coffee, it’s very good.”

The two “children” woke up, and Tonio murmured, “Yes, excuse me, my wife.” He pushed Véra’s hand away and began eating the gardener’s cake.

Véra was melancholy after her twentieth birthday, and I sensed she was in love with Tonio. He began to visit La Feuilleraie less often. Véra was my only friend, my only companion, and to him she was nothing but a child who had wanted to have fun for an hour. He didn’t want to destroy the peace and equilibrium that I had managed, with great difficulty, to achieve amid the poetry of La Feuilleraie.

T
HE WEEKS PASSED
, and then one day Tonio fell ill. After several days of fever and lethargy, the doctor became concerned: the fever had risen. He warned me that it could become dangerous, even fatal, since Tonio’s heart had been severely strained by the airplane crashes. He wouldn’t be able to fight off the fever if it persisted.

Véra called him every fifteen minutes to find out how he was. My husband answered her brutally, “I want to speak to my wife.”

“Why don’t we go and see him?” Vera finally suggested. “He’s really very sick.”

She had always longed to see his apartment. There is nothing more curious or more tenacious than a young girl head over heels in love. Weakly I answered, “Yes, Véra, you’re right. Perhaps I should go and look after him in his apartment.”

“We’ll bring him back with us to La Feuilleraie,” she said. “We’ll take care of him here. He’s your husband, after all, you have the right and the obligation to take care of him.”

She was young. She knew nothing about the terrible scenes, the ruptures, the pacts of silence when husbands are no longer faithful or in love. Carefree young girl that she was, Véra gathered an enormous bouquet of hawthorn blossoms that would barely fit into the trunk of the car. Bedecked with flowers and carrying a basket of fresh fruit, we left to pay a visit to Tonio at his home.

Véra was outfitted in some sort of folkloric Russian peasant garb. She could barely squeeze into the elevator at Tonio’s building in Auteuil. I thought I would die when, for the first time, I rang my husband’s doorbell. Véra was sneezing from the perfume of the wild roses she was carrying. A maid opened the door. The huge bouquet went in first, and as the branches of hawthorn pushed the maid back into the room a little gap opened that Véra leapt through.

“He’s here,” she said, pushing the bouquet against a half-open door behind which voices could be heard.

A door slammed violently, and I saw a bit of green skirt sticking out, the skirt of a woman who had hidden in the bathroom. My husband was red with fever and screaming with rage. “Consuelo, my wife, who asked you to come here? Go away! This is not your place!”

The flap of green skirt was twitching madly. The whole thing was so tragicomical that no clown skit could ever reproduce it. Véra had set her huge bouquet down on the floor. She was pale, crestfallen, confused to see that a woman had hidden in the bathroom. If I hadn’t held her back, she would have gone to hide in there too. Tonio was shouting, “Go away! Go away! I want no visitors.”

Gently I took his pulse. He let me have my way, telling me, “I want to die, I don’t like complications. My wife, I beg you: leave.” And he gestured toward the green skirt, which was waving like a flag.

“I’m worried about you,” I said calmly. “Nothing else matters. I was only thinking of your health. Calm down and rest assured, we are going to leave. I came here to take care of you because you are very ill. It’s the first time I have come to your home, and you’re throwing me out. But you are so feverish, you don’t know what you’re doing . . .”

“I’ve never treated you like this before,” he said miserably. “Shouting to chase you away . . .”

Both of us were weeping, and Véra was sobbing as she watched.

“You are a monster!” she cried. “If you knew the trouble I went to to make this huge bouquet. All so I could bring it here to you. I’m the one who told your wife to come.”

I pushed her out the door. I believe Véra finally understood then that just being pretty isn’t enough for a woman to become and remain part of a man’s life.

T
HE DAY AFTER THIS
misadventure, my husband called. He complained of sleepless nights but said that the fruit and flowers from La Feuilleraie had brought all of spring to him. His fever was going down, and he begged me to come and have a cup of tea at his bedside, without Véra.