The Tale of the Rose (9 page)

“Yes, Tonio,” I replied, “that would be wonderful. I wouldn’t even have to change my name, so everything would be fine. And the day you stop loving me, you can leave with my heart in your hands, and it will be blessed.”

“And you, if you ever love another man, you’ll have proven yourself faithless—but I don’t want you to leave!”

We kissed each other and swore we would never forget this promise.

His mother arrived one day, not long after that, dressed all in black. She told us, “My children, you are going to be married on April 22, at the city hall in Nice. It will take only a few minutes. I’ve arranged everything. Give me your papers, I want to register you today for the exact time.”

“Consuelo, find our papers,” Tonio ordered, “and give them to my mother.”

And that was that, with no further discussion.

O
N
A
PRIL
22, at the preordained hour, we were at the city hall in Nice. A few minutes more, and we would be married. Tonio and I had not exchanged a word on the subject since his mother’s visit.

It was about that time that he began to write again. He started with “Le ventilateur” (“The Fan”), a kind of poem that began like this: “A fan is turning on my forehead, image of fatality . . .” He had started it on the boat that had brought him back from Argentina, his young puma constantly disturbing him as he wrote. (He’d taken it into his bathroom to give it a rest from the cage in the hold where it was kept.) He threw himself back into the text and told me, “Consuelo, I’ve never walked away from anything I started. I want to finish ‘The Fan.’” At the same time he wrote some other poems, “The Cry of America,” “The Extinct Suns” . . . I’ll try to gather them all together someday and publish them.

Pierre d’Agay offered to let us use his château for our religious wedding on April 23. That was the wedding we passionately wanted. And so we were married at the old fortress of Agay, tucked away in its tranquil bay. An ancient castle that had withstood all the caprices of history and the mistral, Agay was built in the shape of a great prow, like a ship jutting out into the sea. An immense terrace, full of rhododendrons and geraniums, made its deck more beautiful than anything I’d seen on any boat, overlooking the pure blue of the Mediterranean. The discretion of the d’Agays, who avoided society, had kept the fishing boats and motorboats half a mile away all around. The family had lived at the castle for generations, and various members also lived throughout the village. I’ve never really been able to distinguish between all the sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law of the d’Agay sisters. I do know, and am grateful, that they were all very kind and very good to the two of us. Antoine was a little like their own child. Pierre d’Agay, his brother-in-law, considered him a brother.

Inside, the château was very simple, with large rooms made of stone and flagstone floors that several lifetimes could not wear out. The day of the wedding, flowers and liqueurs from the d’Agay farm were distributed by my sister-in-law Didi among all the local families. We laughed and sang.

My mother-in-law had thought of everything. She had arranged a honeymoon for us on the nearby island of Porquerolles.

We left Agay, exhausted by the wedding party and all the photographs.

“Clear sky, good wind,” Tonio said as he used to during his night flights for the Aéropostale, to give courage to the radio operator and the copilot as they flew along the great stretches of the Río de Oro where, if their plane had broken down, they’d have been chopped into little pieces.

He was sleepy—he didn’t like all the kissing and exuberant manifestations of joy he’d had to endure all day. We left the car to go up onto the pier. The sea was choppy. My aviator, who could usually do hand-to-hand combat with dragons, was seasick, and that only worsened his mood.

Other young couples like us were staying at the hotel, where everything catered to the needs of newlyweds. We found the atmosphere stifling. Tonio went to sleep fully clothed, on a sofa. He woke up the next morning at daybreak and begged me to go back to the Mirador with him. He had only one desire, he said, to finish “The Fan.” It hurt me a little that he didn’t know how to play the bridegroom.

“Forgive me, but I find all of this idiotic,” he said, thinking of all the young married couples exchanging polite remarks over breakfast after their first night of intimacy.

And without a word to the family, we went back to our Mirador.

S
O THERE WE WERE AT LAST
, in order and at peace. My name would be different from then on, but I wasn’t used to it yet and continued to sign “the Widow Gómez Carrillo.” Tonio scolded me and asked me to forget Gómez Carrillo because he was dead. I was never again to have anything to do with him or his books, or to travel to Spain to see his editors. Even today, fifteen years later, I’ve never written a single letter to collect the smallest portion of the handsome inheritance he so graciously left me. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I was young—that’s my only excuse. My young husband wanted to write; he didn’t want another writer in our home, and I understood.

I thought Tonio was a little isolated in Nice, a little melancholy. I had the idea that a character like the famous writer Maeterlinck,
*
a great friend of my first husband, would do him some good. Maeterlinck had always felt a strong bond with Gómez Carrillo. How would he receive the young aviator who was replacing him at the Mirador?

Buzzing around like a little bee, I called and wrote to Sélysette Maeterlinck, a delightful woman who, while Gómez Carrillo was alive, had been a true friend to me. Immediately, she invited us to Orlamonde, their new residence. I was on tenterhooks—you’re always nervous with people who know you—as I took my Tonio to see the Maeterlincks.

One minute after introducing him, I was reassured: Tonio had been examined and approved as a worthy successor to my late husband. Maeterlinck offered him a drink and even went down to his cellar to get a bottle of old brandy. Tonio talked to him about everything and nothing, about life. I can still see them there in the palace of Orlamonde, in that marble-and-crystal drawing room. Tonio had the beauty of a Roman; he was almost six and a half feet tall, towering straight into the sky, but light as a bird. He raised his hand, holding an enormous crystal goblet, and drank joyfully as he discussed the quality of different kinds of paper and of books, for a book printed on good Holland paper had just fallen to the ground. The brandy gave color and heat to the conversation. Maeterlinck was won over, even charmed. I felt I had been saved, reinvigorated.

“I’m writing a book right now, just some personal experiences,” Tonio said. “I’m not a professional writer. I can’t write about anything I haven’t experienced. The whole of my being has to be involved in order for me to express myself—or, I’d even say, in order for me to grant myself the right to think.”

W
ITH THE FINISHED MANUSCRIPT
of
Night Flight
in hand, we left for Paris, for the little apartment at 10 rue de Castellane that my first husband had left me. It was a strange place, far too small for two people, but we loved each other madly. The entryway was full of books, and the living room was hung with old tapestries. Verlaine and Oscar Wilde
*
had both lived there during bad times, and a woman we called “Our Lady of the Green Eyes” had tried to commit suicide there; her portrait still hung on the wall. A man had thrown himself out the second-floor window, which was conveniently situated for that kind of thing, but he had succeeded only in breaking his legs. Another woman had shot herself with a revolver; the blood could never be completely removed from the rug. She hadn’t died, either. Only Maître Gómez Carrillo had died there, in my arms.

In fact, it was his little pied-à-terre, his hideaway for gray and rainy days. He’d also owned a lovely country house at Nelle-la-Vallée, only an hour away from Paris.

So I brought my gigantic bird of a new husband to this apartment, a little vexed that I couldn’t offer him a better home in Paris. But he thought it was perfect; he liked working in small rooms and assured me that if I didn’t want to live anywhere else we would never move.

Gide had offered to write a preface for
Night Flight.
Despite his stubborn hostility toward me, I forced myself to be extremely pleasant and polite with him. Too bad if he didn’t like me and preferred the company of men and old women.

Tonio was delighted with the preface, and so was I. I thought he fully deserved the admiration of Gide, Crémieux, and Paul Valéry. When you follow a work of literature day by day, page by page, and the fruit is finally ripe for other people to savor, you tend to think of it as a marvelous gift you’ve given the world. The warm welcome my husband’s manuscript received seemed to me entirely natural and fitting. We knew
Night Flight
by heart, while the rest of them, the friends, relatives, and admirers, had barely seen the manuscript.

The congratulations and exclamations of enthusiasm, whether feigned or real, began to grow tedious after a while. However, when they came from the beauteous women of Paris whose great admiration made them “overflow,” my husband almost blushed; encounters like these thrilled him. My heart began to rage with jealousy; my Spanish blood began to boil.

“D
O YOU KNOW
what I dreamed last night?” he asked me one morning when he woke up. “No? Well I dreamed that God had met me on a path; I knew it was God because of a strange candle He was carrying in his hand. It’s idiotic, this dream, but that’s how it is. And I ran after Him to ask Him something about mankind, only the candle was shining, and I was afraid.”

This happened during the period when the
N.R.F.
*
was in the throes of its great passion for my husband. He came home with his handkerchiefs covered in lipstick; I didn’t want to be jealous, but it was starting to depress me. People would tell me, “We ran into Tonio in a car with two women.” “Yes,” he explained, “two secretaries from the
N.R.F.
who invited me to stop off and have some port at their place on my way home.”

Paris worried me; all I could think of anymore was the pretty women who were constantly pestering him.

Oh, it’s a profession, a religious vocation to be the companion of a great creator. It’s a profession you learn only after years of practice—for it can be learned. I was a fool. I thought that I, too, had a right to be admired for his work. I thought it belonged to both of us. What a mistake! In fact, nothing belongs more fully to an artist than his creation—even if you give him your youth, your money, your love, your courage, nothing belongs to you.

It’s pure childishness to say, “Oh yes, I helped my husband, I did.” First of all, no one ever knows if the opposite isn’t true. Perhaps with another wife, the writer would have been able to write something else. Certainly a woman always helps a man to live, but she can also make it more difficult for him to work. Every woman in an audience, after an hour of listening to him speak, dreamed of being Tonio’s intimate friend, the only faithful and understanding admirer of her favorite author. To be the driving force behind the pilot of
Night Flight,
the great writer! And then, right at that moment, I had to put on a wifely face and say, “Come along, husband, it’s late. Let’s go home.”