The Tale of the Rose (7 page)

My friends in Argentina kept asking, “So when is the wedding?” Two of my former husband’s friends came to tell us that we were the scandal of Buenos Aires, that I owed it to the memory of Gómez Carrillo not to behave like this. I let Tonio answer them.

The date we had set for our wedding was not far off. When it arrived, we went to city hall together to put our names down in the register. I was glad. If his mother wasn’t coming . . . well, we’d wait for her to arrive before having the church wedding. We were in agreement about this, and our diplomat friends agreed with us, too. After all, we were in charge of our own lives. I was wearing a new outfit that day, and so was he. When our business at city hall was over, we had decided to go to the Brasserie Munich, just the two of us.

“Name? Address? The woman first.”

I gave my name and address, then it was his turn. He was shaking. He looked at me, crying like a child. I couldn’t do it. No, it was too sad. “No, no,” I blurted, “I don’t want to marry a man who’s weeping. No.”

I tugged at his sleeve, and we careened down the steps of city hall as if we’d both lost our minds. It was over. I could feel my heart beating in my throat. He took both my hands and said, “Thank you, thank you, you are good, you are very good. I can’t get married so far from my family. My mother will arrive soon.”

“Yes, Tonio,” I said quietly, “it will be better that way.”

Neither of us was crying anymore.

“Come,” he said, “let’s have lunch.”

In secret, I swore to myself that I would never go back up the stairs to city hall. I was still shaking. I was certain that I had come to the end of my adventure.

T
HE HOUSE IN
T
AGLE
, which had trilled and warbled with birds and with our dreams, became gloomy. I felt as if I could no longer breathe. Our friends stopped coming to visit as often, and I spent hours looking out across the plains in front of the house, my head empty, my heart shattered. I was in love with a boy who was afraid to get married. He had seduced me, and now he was growing more and more distant.

My Argentine friends no longer invited me to their homes. In their eyes I was shameless, a merry widow. My pilot went out alone. I prayed to God and decided never again to speak to Tonio about our botched plan to marry. After he thanked me outside city hall, he didn’t bring the subject up again. I had lost my return ticket to France. As the widow of an Argentine diplomat, I should have been entitled to a pension, but I no longer dared ask Gómez Carrillo’s friends for anything.

I shut myself up in the house in Tagle. Tonio often found reasons not to be there for meals. It was like an unspoken agreement between us; even if he was staying in Buenos Aires, he no longer ate any of his meals at home. He would come home at night to change his shirt and shave, while I stayed in my little boudoir, pretending to read a newspaper or a book. He would say, “I’ll see you soon,
chérie,
” and give me a guilty kiss, then flee into the night, trembling.

He would come home very late and find me waiting for him, always wearing an evening gown, smiling as if I were on my way to a ball; I would have a literary anecdote at the ready, a story from former days. We would drink very cold champagne, he would relax a little, and though I was dying of sadness I pretended nothing had changed between us. I would say, “Only five pages of tempest this evening.” And he would go to his study.

“Lead me by the hand,” he would say. “I don’t know my way up the stairs.” He loved to act the child. I set him down in his armchair, kissed him, and repeated in his ear, “You must write, write. Crémieux said so: ‘He must write.’ So hurry!”

“Thank you, thank you,” he would mumble. “I’ll write, because you ask me to.” And in the morning I would find a few illegible pages on the little desk in my boudoir.

He would leave early for work, and I would sleep away the whole morning. Around three or four in the afternoon I would emerge from my bed, exhausted. I wasn’t eating, and Léon would say, “If Madame does not eat, my wife and I will not eat, either.”

An invitation for tea at the home of one of our lady friends arrived one day, but it was for Tonio alone. He came home to change and shave, as usual. My heart couldn’t bear it any longer. I asked him to stay home with me, but he refused.

“I have a dinner to go to as well,” he said.

I dressed in black and went out into the street, mad with grief. I wandered about at random and insulted my reflection in the windows. Suddenly, a young man stopped in front of me. He was a great admirer of Gómez Carrillo.

“Consuelito, are you all alone?”

“Yes, Luisito,” I replied forlornly.

“But come, come!”

“Where?”

“To a tea.”

“I’m not invited.”

“But it’s being given by my aunt,” he said. “Come, quickly!”

I was welcomed with open arms and a certain degree of malice. On my friend’s arm, I recovered my courage. Suddenly I was fine, far from my Don Juan pilot who told his stories about the desert with such great success. I announced that I was leaving on the next boat, that urgent matters were calling me back to Paris.

After that flowers filled the house once more, and Enrique’s friends, too. They showered me with their affection. Now it was my turn to receive invitations. As for my pilot, he stayed home alone in Tagle, waiting for his mother.

I finally reserved a cabin on the next ocean liner.

“When your mother arrives,” I said to Tonio, “you can tell her I had something to do in Paris. Lucien is waiting for me, I am going to marry him. It’s my destiny.”

He didn’t say a word.

The days rushed by. Friends came to visit; we went to the movies and took endless, rambling walks. Finally I found myself on the boat that was taking me back to France, my heart in ruins. My cabin was full of flowers: my friends had understood my sadness.

I fell asleep before the boat had begun to move. When I woke up, we were out on the open sea. The steward brought me a telegram. It was from Saint-Exupéry. I was also told that he was flying his plane over the boat. He would surface on the horizon from time to time and signal me from the sky. I was frightened almost to death.

I didn’t leave my cabin until Rio de Janeiro, where I saw my teacher and friend, the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes. I was told that Tonio’s mother was on another boat anchored there in the bay for a few hours. I tried to ignore this.

After eighteen days, we arrived: Le Havre, customs, my apartment on rue de Castellane. I was back in Paris. When I asked for Lucien, my concierge said he had not arrived. Where was he? There was a knock at the door: it was Lucien. Then the telephone rang, and I picked it up before I’d even had time to greet him.

“Allô?”

“Buenos Aires calling, please stay on the line.”

Then: “It’s me, Tonio.
Chérie,
I’m coming on the next boat to join you, to marry you.”

“Oh, really? Listen, I have a visitor.”

“Lucien?”

“Yes.”

“Well, send him away. I don’t want you to see him. I’m bringing you a puma.”

“What?”

“A puma. I’ll disembark in Spain so I can see you sooner. Leave for Spain right away. The trains are bad, so have a rest in Madrid, then wait for me in Almería.”

“Excuse me, I thought I told you I had a visitor.”

After that it was the same conversation, night and day. Finally I gave in after he told me, “Since you left, Léon, the valet, is always drunk, the rice is undercooked, and my underwear is being stolen. I will come to get you and marry you in any country in the world and you’ll arrange a lovely room for me, but without a cask with a golden spigot, because that’s been stolen, too. I’m not writing anymore. I’m making my mother cry because I’m in despair. Our separation is driving me mad.”

I loved him, but I also realized how calm my life was without him. I had a considerable income as the widow of Gómez Carrillo, but if I married anyone else I would lose it. I had a lot of work to do, putting things in order, and I needed time for serious reflection, but the phone calls from Buenos Aires, from the little house in Tagle, drove me out of my mind. So one day I yielded. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll meet you in Almería.”

I left without telling Lucien, who was behaving very badly. My dog would stay with the secretary, who said she loved it fiercely, as much as she loved my car. Everything was as it had been before.

I have a very precise memory of the local train, the hot bricks and copper boxes filled with boiling water to warm us up. Someone in another compartment was playing the guitar. To the rhythm of the train’s rocking movement, I heard the chorus
“Porque yo te quiero, porque yo te quiero,”
and I traveled toward my Tonio telling myself, “Because I love you . . . because I love you . . .”

Madrid, and then Almería, the day of his arrival. I managed to get a special permit and went out to meet the ocean liner in a little rowboat. The ocean liner had had a breakdown, a broken propeller, and wouldn’t be able to dock for a few days. My presence was announced; someone shouted: “The wife of the aviator Saint-Exupéry.” He heard that and left his mother on the boat with the puma to throw himself into my arms. He told me that the whole family was waiting for him and his mother in Marseille. But he didn’t want to introduce us right away. We had so much to say to each other, he said. His mother had hinted that marriage to a foreigner would shock the elderly members of the family. She had concluded, “But everything always works out in the end, with patience.”

She was very diplomatic with him. She knew he was a child at heart and if you handled him the wrong way he would run away forever.

“I don’t want to rush things with my mother,
tu comprends
? I’ll leave the ship secretly in Almería, we’ll buy an old car, hire a driver, and cross Spain on our honeymoon.”

I said yes to everything.

Valencia . . . the people in the little inns . . . the laughter of our young lives . . .

A
NTOINE REALLY WAS UNLIKE
any other man. I told myself I was insane: I had a house in France and a fortune, thanks to the generosity of my late husband who had made me his heir. Why torment myself further? Everything could be so simple . . . I had friends in Paris, and if I gave up the idea of marrying Tonio I could keep my fortune, for Gómez Carrillo had been rich, he had published books in Spain, in Paris; everything would be easy for me if only I kept his name.

But I always went back to Tonio. In my mind, I had already begun to organize our life together. We would go and live in my house, the Mirador, in the south of France; it had been Gómez Carrillo’s final home. Tonio would finish his book, and then we would travel to Italy, Africa, China. He would be a pilot again, for the Compagnie Aéro-Orient. Plans ran through my head . . .

We had said nothing to each other about our difficulties. In every village we passed through, he gave me presents. “I want you to lose everything you have,” he said, “so that every single thing you’re wearing will have come from my hands.”

He was thin; he looked as if he had suffered. The first evening we were together again, we couldn’t leave Almería. Our feelings were too strong, and mingled with them were shyness and pain.

“I have only one question to ask you,” he murmured, pale and worried, trembling with tenderness. “I haven’t slept for the last several nights, though you know I’m never bothered by a lack of sleep, but only by the hours that separate me from you. My puma was unhappy on the boat—I couldn’t feed it very well, and it tried to bite one of the sailors—I’m sure they’re going to put it to sleep. But I was even more unhappy than the puma. I couldn’t think of anything but your face, your way of talking. Speak to me, speak to me! I beg you. You’re not saying anything, why? Do you think I haven’t suffered enough? The phone calls I made from Buenos Aires were torture, and you never wanted to speak loudly or distinctly. Why? Did you always have a visitor with you? But I’m mad, I have no more time for unhappiness, I’m with you again now and no one in the world will ever be able to separate us. Will they?”

“Yes, Tonio,” I said quietly. “Love is like faith. I left because you didn’t trust me. Your family, too, they were asking for information about me, which, you must understand, was very painful to me.”

“Listen, little one, let me explain. Where my parents live, in Provence, the men marry women of their own background, whose parents know their parents and grandparents, and so on from generation to generation. Someone new, in our country, it’s like an earthquake, and so they wanted more information, in order to know, to be reassured. In Paris it’s less unusual, the young men from good families marry rich American girls. But in Provence, no—we’ve kept the old ways. My poor dear mother lost her head and made us wait a little while, that’s all. Besides, I’m very happy with the way you’ve handled things. If you hadn’t left, my mother would have married us off in Buenos Aires, and I would have been uncomfortable. I don’t really understand what happened when we were at city hall. I said to myself: this is for life, but I’m not sure I’ll make her happy. Then I thought, since she wants to go, let her go; she’s the one who’ll take responsibility for the break, and that’s for the best right now. At the time I had some very complicated matters to settle at the office with the Argentine airmail service. I was signing checks without knowing what they were paying for and my sweet mother was taking her time in coming across the Atlantic. Then you left me, and I was glad. Yes, I was glad, because you proved to me that you could live your life on your own. I knew you were sad, and so strong, so beautiful, and I wanted to see where your strength would take you. Only I didn’t think much about what it would actually mean. When you were really gone, I could have thrown myself into the ocean. My mother can tell you about the trip we took to Asunción Lake in Paraguay. I never once opened my mouth. I was counting the hours, waiting to take the boat to come and find you. I would have carried you off no matter what, even if you hadn’t come to Almería, even if you had married Lucien. But speak to me! Tell me that you need me too.”