The Tale of the Rose (8 page)

“Ah, Tonio,” I said. “The truth is that I’m here now but I’ve gone back to Lucien. I told him our whole story, all my grief, and he consoled me and promised he would make me forget it all. And yet here I am. I’ve vanished from Paris without saying a word to him. I sent him a telegram from Madrid in a moment of remorse—I don’t know what I told him.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Don’t think about anything except us.”

“But he’s only human, and I’m making him suffer . . .”

“Don’t be afraid, I’ll go see him. I’ll explain that we’re mad, the two of us, dangerously mad, mad with love. And that he, my God, is an old friend of yours, a friend for life. I don’t hold the fact that he loves you against him. The whole world should love you! And I’ll get your dog back, and your car, and your papers. Promise me we won’t ever talk about him again, never. You don’t need to know anything about it, I’ll arrange everything in a very friendly way.”

“Very well, Tonio,” I said. “I entrust myself to you forever, forever . . .”

After that we stayed at the hotel in Almería for several days. He decided to hire a taxi to make excursions in the city and then to cross Spain. He didn’t want to drive; we would be too far from each other, he said. The Valencia oranges, the little villages perched on white rocks, the places he had visited in his youth, he wanted to show me everything. He laughed like an oversized child. Our constant chattering in French drove the Spanish driver crazy.

At last we had to go back to France, because of my dog or Lucien or his family, I don’t remember. He wanted to stay a few days longer, but I was afraid of keeping him from his family for too long; they were waiting for him and didn’t know where he was.

B
ACK IN THE SOUTH OF
F
RANCE
, we were happy at the Mirador, not far from Nice. Nothing troubled us except the smell of the mimosas, which was sometimes too strong. We couldn’t bring ourselves to burn the bouquets, so we were constantly sneezing. Oh, the mimosas and the handkerchiefs in all colors! I was a newly engaged woman, but this time I wasn’t waiting for a wedding. We said we were going to break with tradition, that we wouldn’t go the way of people who hate each other because they’re forced to marry or who marry to please their families. “You are my freedom,” he told me. “You are the land where I want to live for the rest of my life. We are the law.”

Agay, the home of Tonio’s brother-in-law where his sister Didi lived, was only an hour away from the Mirador. Didi came to see us. The two of them walked in the gardens for hours, and I stayed behind, sitting in an armchair, waiting for their conversation to end.

“I beg of you, young future bride,” Tonio said, “you who read books, don’t wait for us. There is no end to a conversation when it is about you. The end is your disappearance—so sing, read, work!”

One day his sister told us that one of their cousins was coming to see Tonio and his young fiancée. I was nervous. Who was this cousin, really?

“A duchess,” Tonio told me.

“Oh no, Tonio, I won’t come with you. You go and see her on your own.”

“She’s coming with André Gide, you know,” he said.

“Really?”

“André Gide is a great friend of my cousin’s. He wants to speak to me. Come along with me.”

At the request of the old writer and the duchess cousin, I decided to go. I was sure the cousin wanted to introduce some rich woman to Tonio. My God, the things that I, a slight young woman from the land of volcanos, was experiencing and coming to understand! I didn’t know what tactics duchesses used or what kinds of intrigues relatives might devise in order to arrange a suitable marriage.

Gide did indeed come to Agay with the famous cousin. His voice was sugary and sometimes saccharine, the voice of a female worn out by sorrow and unconsummated love. There was nothing extraordinary about the cousin; she was elegant in her beautiful car, nothing more. She made a great show of being kind, but only Tonio’s mother was really nice to me, at once attentive and compassionate.

The examination was going well, but then, during the meal, I drank something the wrong way and choked. The hairdresser had made my hair too curly, I was sweating, and my digestion was sluggish—to top it all off, I spilled wine on Tonio’s pants. I don’t remember anything else after that; a powerful migraine erased the faces of friends and guests for two days, and I stayed in darkness at the Mirador. I could hear Tonio circling like a caged puma. Still, he was beginning to feel at home at the Mirador; he would leave, come back, go out again.

He also took care of me. He had stayed clear of the doctors in Nice and was reading strange medical treatises written by Spanish scholars. Among Gómez Carrillo’s books he had discovered some famous works on magic that my former husband had written, and he spent whole days and nights bent over those arcane recipes, laughing like a child at his new game. He repeated the strange stories I told him during my delirium, a peculiar delirium without fever.

I was trembling with weakness and fear. He reassured me as best he could. He wanted me to be confident in life, but I was terrified at the prospect of seeing his family and friends again. What love-stricken young woman wouldn’t tremble before a whole tribe that thought it owned her fiancé? I was of a different stock—I came from another land, another tribe, I spoke another language, I ate differently, I lived in a different way. That was why I was afraid, but my fiancé would give me no hint as to how I should behave.

I did not understand why there had been, from the beginning, so many misunderstandings about this marriage. Money could easily be acquired through the books and goods of Gómez Carrillo—one trip to Spain, and pesetas would have rained down over the pinecones of Agay. There were titles of nobility, even a marquis, among the Carrillos, and the Sandovals were of the highest class. I had priests and even cardinals in my family. Through the Suncins I had a good dose of Indian blood, Mayan blood (which was then fashionable in Paris), and had inherited legends about the volcanoes that would have amused Tonio’s family. But something deeper held them back, something to do with mixed blood . . .

In vain, Tonio tried to make them accept me. I wasn’t French. They didn’t want to see or know me—they were blind to my existence. I often complained of this to Tonio. He said it gave him a headache. He was greatly tormented by the situation and decided not to write for a while. He couldn’t. He tried, but in vain. These dissensions between the Mirador and Agay did not gladden his heart. I stopped speaking.

One day he confided in me that he would soon be given a job as a pilot. I was delighted. “Oh yes, I’ll go to the end of the world with you. You are my tree, and I’ll be the vine that clings to you,” I said eagerly.

“No, you’re my graft,” he told me, “my oxygen, my dose of the unknown. Only death can separate us.”

I asked him to tell me stories about the dangers of flying, the moments when death was inescapable, and we laughed at death.

L
ATER, THE COUSIN AND THE WRITER WITH
the womanly voice wrote to Tonio and gave him their opinion of me: negative. Gide, in his aversion to me, wrote this sentence in his
Journal,
which can still be read there: “Saint-Exupéry returned from Argentina with a new book and a new fiancée. Read the book, saw the girl. Congratulated him heartily, but principally on the book.”

T
ONIO ALWAYS HELD MY HAND
very tightly in his gigantic fist. He loved me, but I was wounded to the quick by the injustice being done to me. Nothing troubled me more than injustice. I was beginning to find certain defects in my future in-laws. Still, I wanted to smooth over the difficulties; I tried to be forgiving. Simone, his older sister, was a highly cultivated, brilliant woman who for her erudition and imagination could have been a close friend. But there it was: I was going to be her sister-in-law. I had taken her brother and was therefore a thief, and she was the victim of my robbery. He was her only brother. Later she wrote a line about me that was both funny and cruel: “Consuelo, that countess of the silver screen . . .”
*
I decided to take up the gauntlet, but I wept all the same.

Tonio’s mother alone, with her exceptional intelligence and Christian faith, thought only of her little boy’s happiness. The fact that I hadn’t been born in France was no crime in her eyes. I was the woman her son loved, that was all. I had to be all right if Tonio loved me. She gave me all her sympathy, and I rested against her white hair. She laughed long and hard at my stories of the Pacific. And as a true Christian, she could not allow us to be nothing more than lovers for the rest of our lives. She didn’t care in the least what her cousins thought. She had raised her children until they were grown, and no one but she had the right to prevent them from doing whatever they wanted. Tonio wanted Consuelo, so Tonio would have Consuelo, no matter what the family thought! Or, for that matter, André Gide!

I
LOVED GOING
to the flower market in Nice with Tonio trailing along behind me: it reminded him of planes taking off at dawn, into the wind, because it was very early in the morning—the smell of the sea, the heaps of violets, carnations, chrysanthemums, and mimosas, and the bouquets of Parma violets that were grown in the mountains an hour outside of Nice, where the snow sometimes stayed on the ground all summer.

My former friends, those I’d met through my first husband, began coming to the Mirador: the Pozzo di Borgos, Dr. Camus. . . . We came back from the market, Julie Dutremblay and I, our arms loaded with flowers, with little Toutoune, my dog, in tow. Our days were like one long schoolgirls’ outing. The Mirador smelled wonderful, but the very sweetness of this life made my fiancé brood. I wondered if he was already bored by my presence. “No,” he said, “quite the opposite.” He couldn’t stand it when I was away, even for an hour. He didn’t like it when I drove. “You could hurt yourself,” he would say every time.

Deep down I wondered what he was afraid of. It was the two of us, no doubt, and the strange pair we made. I convinced myself that we were not safe, that we were out of step with society. Yes, we would have to find a way to live together in harmony, for eternity. But how would we find it?

One Sunday, at mass, Tonio, seeing me so pensive and morose that I didn’t even take communion, burst out laughing. He said out loud, as if speaking to himself, in a prayer he seemed to have been muttering since the mass began: “But it’s very simple, we’ll just have a religious wedding!” People turned to look at him, but he had already disappeared. I found him sitting in the car in his shirtsleeves, reading a newspaper. “Consuelo, I would like us to be married by a priest,” he said, “but without going to city hall as we did before. I want us to be married in church so that if we have children we’ll be at peace and in order.”

I laughed. “But Tonio, in France, you have to go to city hall first. It’s in Andorra, or in Spain, I’m not sure which, that people can marry in church alone.” A civil marriage would have meant forfeiting my income as Gómez Carrillo’s widow.

“We’ll go wherever we have to go,” he said. “Agreed?”