The Tale of the Rose (28 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Tonio was the one who brought me steaming hot café au lait, as he murmured in my ear, “My Consuelo, I beg your forgiveness for all the pain I have given you and will give you again and again. Yesterday, I never phoned the major.”

The coffee fell from my hands.

We spent another night in the hotel. But my husband truly was a bird of passage. The next morning, he announced, “My darling wife, I must leave you and perhaps for a very long time. I’ve been given a mission outside France, and you must stay here alone to wait.”

I
TOOK REFUGE IN THE VILLAGE
of Dieulefit, a place admirably well suited to a life of seclusion. The trees bathed me in peace and hope. The crops were starting to ripen, and the scent of the harvest was in the air. I wept as I dreamed of the orchard I had left behind in Jarcy, which must have been filled with pears and red apples just then. Who would eat my fruit? I was overcome with a frantic love of nature and wondered when I would ever return to the sweet shade of my apple trees.

My loneliness grew every day. In vain I told myself that God has given us the whole earth and that it is up to us to be wise. I struggled to believe, to believe to the very last, but I felt a need to resist, which insinuated itself into me almost against my will.

In the evenings I went on long walks, rich with all the wealth of the earth. I imagined Tonio close to me in a thousand ways, but I never found anything but emptiness when I tried to seize his image. We were separated by oceans, and I could only cross them in my dreams.

Then, like a sign, an offer came from Bernard Zehrfuss, an architect friend I had met during the debacle in Marseille, to revive an old stone village, fill it with artists, and thus resist defeat and the terrible blows being dealt to civilization. That was how I went to Oppède.

Oppède: a small hamlet in the Vaucluse with houses dating back to the Middle Ages, all abandoned or in ruins, and a château built by the Comte de Toulouse, Raymond VI. That was where we settled to found our little community of artists and perpetuate our art. I decided to call myself Dolorès.

The old utopian ideal of fraternal, monastic, or socialist communities was taking root in me. My friends in exodus had convinced me: “It’s marvelous,” they said, “they’re planting gardens, building houses, hunting wild boar, they’ve reopened the wells. They’re living, in short! Think of it: they are completely free.”

And so I arrived in that beautiful, mad village in the middle of a howling mistral.

Bernard Zehrfuss, the young architect who had won the Prix de Rome, welcomed me. “We must take each other by the hand, Dolorès,” he said. “We must form a chain. We’re going to become stronger. Oppède, you’ll see—it’s nothing, and it’s everything. It is our heart and our strength. Our civilization is being dragged through the mud right now, but it has left us its teachings. It has given us a taste for form, for design. When the world collapses, when there is nothing left but ruins, all that matters is workers or artists, whichever term you prefer, I mean the people who know how to construct.”

The glow of the setting sun played over the buttresses and the walls with their high, arched windows. This pile of giant stones seemed utterly improbable, rising over the pure bluish line of the Lubéron mountains. That was Oppède.

I clunked around in wooden shoes that I wanted to take to New York, where you were, Tonio, to show you.

In Oppède, I learned about life. I thought I already knew everything, that I had learned everything on my father’s coffee plantations, but this apprenticeship still remained. I asked myself a thousand questions, all centering on you, and as I watched the eagles circling the château, diving in through the gates and escaping through the windows, I wondered where you were at that moment. But I knew you were safe, there in America. Every day I waited to hear from you. I especially loved your telegrams, which were always searing, anguished, loving.

I thanked you, my angel. You do not know what those telegrams meant to me. You called me Consuelo,
ma bien-aimée.
You told me that spending Christmas far from me had plunged you into despair, that you had aged a hundred years just thinking of me, and you claimed to love me more than ever. “Be certain of my love,” you said.

I thought again of the last time we had been together. When I told you I was going to live in Oppède, you had invited Bernard Zehrfuss to come see us. “I’m leaving you my wife, I’m entrusting you with her. Take care of her, for you will have to answer to me if something happens to her.” Then Bernard said, “Listen, if you really care for your wife, give up your trip to America and stay with us. We will form a resistance here, among these stones that cannot speak.” But we could not hold you back; I stayed in Oppède alone. I was proud to be here: our community would awaken these stones.

I spent my time writing you letters, letters that did or did not reach you. I received only telegrams. All of those messages made me live with you again, made me understand all that united us. And all that separated us, too. Especially the lovely E., who nonetheless had once been my friend. I was the one who asked you one day to read her manuscript because I was moved by it. She was charming to me then, as all women are to the wives of the men they intend to seduce. I even gave her my aviator’s helmet to wear in our little airplane, so you could teach her to be a pilot. I wasn’t jealous of her, I never thought you would betray me with her, and I still don’t believe you have betrayed me. I thought it was a great friendship; I wanted to ignore the malicious tongues.

One day you told me, “Listen, my wife, I often go out alone. I go to dinners with people who are a bit outlandish, because in
N.R.F.
circles—where you are well liked, by the way—there are some rather odd people. You remember once when one of the guests took you into the library to show you the deluxe first editions, and also
Le Con d’Irène
[Irene’s Cunt], which shocked you a great deal. That’s why I don’t take you with me anymore.”

Yes, that was true. . . . I also remember that some of the gentlemen were trying to put their hands down the front of my dress, which was easy to do since I was wearing an evening gown. I let out a little shriek, and you heard me and came to my rescue, although a woman friend of yours was sitting on the floor at your feet with her guitar, singing very beautiful melodies. She’d even let her hair down and was leaning her head between your legs, with funny little jerking movements: it all made a delightfully erotic tableau. I was too young; I wasn’t used to the lax ways of Parisian artistic circles—the “high life”—and you told me, “Go back home,
ma petite fille.
I know you’re shocked by certain types of behavior, but they’re entirely natural. It’s just that I need my freedom. Consuelo, stay home. You love to paint, even at night—I’ll install a light for you that will be exactly like daylight.”

Perhaps I was behind the times, but I remember my bitterness and anxiety when you would come in late at night, or at dawn. Ah, Tonio, such anguish! I didn’t know which you preferred: to be lost among the stars in the sky or among the pretty blond heads of Paris.

To all the flatterers who surrounded you I was always little Consuelo, the Spanish woman who made scenes. Even though it wasn’t true, you would say, “Excuse me, I have to go home because otherwise my wife will make a huge scene.” In fact, you went home to write, for you had so little free time in Paris. Whenever you were at our house, it was always with other people—men, women. At four in the morning you’d announce, “I’m going out for a walk with Léon-Paul Fargue,” and you’d go all the way to Versailles on foot. You would stroll for hours, until just before dawn, and then you’d call: “Come pick us up in the car, we don’t have money for a taxi.”

You see the kind of life I had? But I’m not complaining, my darling, because you never wasted your time; as soon as you had an hour you would work, anywhere, even in the bathroom, if you had to work out an equation for some aviation problem. My God, being the wife of a pilot is a whole career, but being the wife of a writer is a religious vocation!

We would go through difficult periods. There would sometimes be a tempest in my heart, and to soothe me you would stroke my forehead with your hands, your archangel’s hands, and speak to me in those magical words of yours about love, about things that are sacred, about tenderness, fidelity, and it would all begin again.

“Don’t be jealous,” you would say at those moments. “My true career, as you know, is to be a writer, and when your enemy is kind enough to send me some little gift, a pair of ivory dice or a suitcase embossed with my name, my heart softens toward her and to thank her I write her three or four pages, do some little drawings, and that’s all. But don’t be afraid; I know what you have gone through for years, and I thank you for it, my wife. I am joined to you by sacrament, so don’t ever listen to what people say.”

But at that point, in Oppède, I had to keep busy. There were ten of us by then. We made our own bread, we spun wool, we knit sweaters out of wool recycled from old mattresses. We didn’t have much left to eat, we were so strictly rationed. But a miraculous idea came into my mind. It was like a revelation. I remembered a conversation with Tonio at Pau when he told me that the Germans were buying the peasants’ crops “in the field,” which meant that they bought grapes, for example, before they were ripe and took delivery of them only once they had ripened. Since they were printing up as many ten-thousand-franc notes as they wanted, it cost them nothing to pay out whole sacks of banknotes. The peasants were satisfied, and that way the Germans were sure of starving the French. After having sold our jewels and watches to the peasants—eggs cost three hundred francs apiece—we had to resort to eating the fragments of asparagus they left in the ground and melons that grew almost wild. We couldn’t survive like this for long. We held a council: Florent Margaritis and his wife, Eliane; Bernard Piboulon and his charming wife, who was also studying architecture; and Albert Bojovitch, whose brother was the editor of
Vogue
in New York but who had no desire at all to leave for America; he wanted to stay and resist. They decided, “Let’s go back to Paris, because things have become impossible here.”

“Wait another twenty-four hours,” I asked them.

“I’m leaving for Avignon,” I declared the next day. “That’s where the Germans store the crops that they buy, in trains. We’ll steal them. The cars are full of salt pork, mutton, and butter.”

I climbed over rocks and low stone walls until I finally reached the trains. I managed to board one, though the steps were very high. I found a pig, which I dragged over the rails. A sentry saw me but didn’t shoot. Why not? I went home with the pig and the friend who had been keeping lookout for me. It took us four or five hours to get back to Oppède. The cook, who was Moroccan and, unfortunately for him, did not eat pork, nevertheless resolved to prepare the animal: “I’ll cook it for you, I know how it’s done. You’ll eat well this evening.”

Our feast was marvelous. There was even wine, old red wine, stolen from the cellars of abandoned houses. I made the trip to the trains several more times; after that, the young men went. No one was ever killed.

One day a car appeared, and we were very much afraid that the authorities were coming for us. We had binoculars and could see from the ramparts that a woman was driving it. She was named Thérèse Bonnet, and she was coming . . . to get me.

“I know you’re settled in here,” she told me. “But why aren’t you with that fine strapping husband of yours in New York, where he’s doing card tricks and going out with every millionaire American blonde in the city? What are you doing dying of hunger here?”

I gestured toward my friends. “Here we are,” I said. “We’re a group, all for one and one for all. I’m waiting for my husband to send me money or a ticket, to give me some way of joining him.”

Soon after that, I went to see my mother-in-law in Marseille. She spoke to me in a grave voice. “Tonio is ill,” she said, “and your duty as his wife is to be at his side.”

I had indeed received a telegram. My husband was in a bad way and could not be operated on because his organs were all mixed up after the accident in Guatemala: if he was alive at all, it was only by the will of heaven, and his own will. “I don’t have any papers,” I answered his mother.

“You’re from El Salvador, your consulate will give them to you without a problem.”

“No, I’ll wait; I’ll wait for Tonio to ask me.”

At last I received the telegram: “Go to the home of Monsieur X to pick up money for the trip; all your papers are arranged. Our friend Pozzo di Borgo has received instructions to give you.”

Suddenly the sky looked brighter to me. I announced the good news to my friends: Tonio was finally asking for me. I had been at Oppède for eleven months. They all raised their eyes to the sky and exclaimed, “You know, if you leave, we’ll all leave; we won’t stay here any longer.”

I
WAS HAPPY
to be going back to you, but my heart was torn; with my friends at Oppède I had experienced a state of honest intimacy, a different way of thinking, and the idea of leaving Bernard made me particularly sad. He was a great and noble gentleman, a young man not even thirty years old who sang from morning to night, who saw to it that we were all cheerful and that our community worked well and at a good rhythm. The workshops were immaculate, and beautiful things were made in them.