Arch of Triumph (41 page)

Bobo. Saved her life. The midwife. Now Ravic remembered. “You are Lucienne,” he said. “Of course. Then you were sick. Today you are healthy. That’s it. That’s why I didn’t recognize you right away.”

Lucienne beamed. “Really! You actually remember! Many thanks for the hundred francs you got back from the midwife.”

“That—oh yes.” After his failure with Madame Boucher he had sent her something out of his own pocket. “Sorry it wasn’t the whole amount.”

“It was enough. I had given the whole thing up.”

“Would you like to have a drink with me, Lucienne?”

She nodded and sat down cautiously at his side. “A Cinzano with soda.”

“How are things with you, Lucienne?”

“I am doing very well.”

“Are you still with Bobo?”

“Yes, of course. But he is different now. Better.”

“Good.”

There was not much to ask. A little seamstress had become a little whore. That was what he had patched her together for. Bobo had taken care of the rest. She no longer needed to be afraid of having children. One more reason. She was still at the beginning; her childlike quality still held attraction for elderly rounders—a piece of china that had not yet lost its luster through too much use. She drank carefully like a bird; but her eyes were already wandering. It wasn’t exactly cheering. Nor a cause for great regret. Just a fragment of life, on the skids. “Are you content?” he asked.

She nodded. He saw that she really was content. She found everything quite in order. There was nothing to be dramatized. “Are you alone?” she asked.

“Yes, Lucienne.”

“On such an evening?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him shyly and smiled. “I’ve got time,” she said.

What’s the matter with me? Ravic thought. Do I look so starved that every prostitute offers me a bit of commercialized love? “It is too far to go to your place, Lucienne. I haven’t that much time.”

“We could not go to my place. Bobo must not know anything about it.”

Ravic looked at her. “Doesn’t Bobo ever know anything about it?”

“He does. He knows of the others. He keeps track.” She smiled. “He’s still so young. He thinks I won’t give him the money otherwise.”

“That’s why Bobo must not know anything?”

“Not because of that. But he would be jealous. And then he goes wild.”

“Does he always get jealous?”

Lucienne glanced up, surprised. “Of course not. The others are business.”

“So only when there isn’t any money involved?”

Lucienne hesitated. Then she slowly blushed. “Not for that reason. Only if he thinks there is something else.” She hesitated again. “That my feelings are in it.”

She did not look up. Ravic took her hand, which lay forlornly on the table. “Lucienne,” he said, “it’s nice that you remembered. And that you want to go with me. You are charming and I would like to take you with me. But I cannot sleep with anyone on whom I have once operated. Do you understand?”

She raised her long dark lashes and quickly nodded. “Yes.” She got up. “Then I’ll go now.”

“Yes. Adieu, Lucienne. Good luck. Take care that you don’t get sick.”

“Yes.”

Ravic wrote something on a slip of paper. “Get this in case you don’t already have it. It’s the best. And don’t give all your money to Bobo.”

She smiled and shook her head. She knew and he knew too that she would do it nevertheless. Ravic looked after her until she disappeared in the crowd. Then he called the waiter.

The woman in the blue hat passed by. She had watched the scene. She was fanning herself with her folded newspaper and she showed a mouth full of false teeth. “Either you are impotent or a pansy, my dear,” she said pleasantly in passing. “Good luck and my thanks.”

Ravic walked through the warm night. Flashes of lightning swept over the roofs. The air was still. He found the entrance to the Louvre lighted. The doors stood open and he walked in.

It was one of the night exhibitions. A few of the rooms were illuminated. He walked through the Egyptian section, which looked like a huge lighted tomb. The stone kings of three thousand years ago squatted or stood staring motionlessly out of granite eyes at groups of sauntering students, women in last year’s hats, and bored elderly men. There was a smell of dust, stale air, and immortality.

In the Greek section, in front of the Venus of Milo, stood a whispering group of girls who did not resemble her at all. Ravic paused. After the granite and green syenite of the Egyptians, the marble was decadent and weak. The soft, well-rounded Venus was a little like a housewife contentedly bathing; beautiful and without
a thought. Apollo, the lizard-killer, was a homosexual who needed more exercise. But they were standing in rooms; that was what killed them. It did not kill the Egyptians; they were made for tombs and temples. The Greeks needed sun, air, and columns through which shone the golden light of Athens.

Ravic walked on. The large hall with its staircase came steadily toward him. And suddenly, high above everything, rose the Nike of Samothrace.

It was a long time since he had seen her. The last time it had been on a gray day. The marble had looked dull and in the dirty winter light of the museum the princess of victory had seemed hesitant and freezing. But now she stood high above the staircase on the bow of the marble ship, illuminated by spotlights, gleaming, her wings wide spread, her garment pressed tight by the wind against her striding body, bright and ready for flight. Behind her the wine-colored Sea of Salamis seemed to roar, and the sky was dark with the velvet of expectation.

She knew nothing of morals. She knew nothing of problems. She did not know the storms and dark ambushes of the blood. She knew the victory and the defeat, and the two were almost the same. She was not temptation; she was flight. She was not enticement; she was unconcernedness. She held no secret; and yet she was more exciting than Venus, who by hiding her sex emphasized it. She was akin to birds and ships, to the wind, the waves, and the horizon. She had no country.

She had no country, Ravic thought. But she did not need one either. She was at home on all ships. She was at home wherever there was courage and conflict and even defeat if it was without despair. She was not only the goddess of victory, she was also the goddess of all adventurers and the goddess of refugees—so long as they did not give up.

He looked around. No one else was in the room any longer. The
students and the people with Baedekers had gone home. Home—what other home existed for one who belonged nowhere, but the stormy one in the heart of another for a short time? Was not this the reason why love, when it struck the hearts of the homeless, shook and possessed them so completely—because they had nothing else? Had he not for this very reason tried to avoid it? And had it not followed him and overtaken him and struck him down? It was harder to rise again on the slippery ice of a foreign land than on familiar and accustomed ground.

Something caught his eye. Something small, fluttering, white. It was a butterfly that must have flown in through the open entrance door. It had come, perhaps, from the warm rose beds of the Tuileries, startled out of its perfumed sleep by two lovers, then dazzled by lights which were unknown suns—many and bewildering—it had escaped into the entrance, into the sheltering dark behind the big doors, and now it fluttered about, lost and courageous, in the spacious room where it would die—tiring, sleeping on a marble cornice, on a window ledge, or on the shoulder of the radiant goddess high above. In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep again on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.

Sentimentality, Ravic thought. The goddess of victory and the refugee butterfly. A cheap symbol. But what touched one more deeply than the cheap things, the cheap symbols, the cheap feelings, the cheap sentimentality? What had made them cheap? Their overclear truth. Snobbery vanished when things became a question of life and death.

The butterfly had disappeared in the semidarkness of the dome. Ravic left the Louvre. Outside the warm air met him, tepid as a bath. He stopped. Cheap feelings! Wasn’t he himself at the mercy
of the cheapest of all of them? He stared into the wide courtyard where the shadows of the centuries brooded and he felt suddenly as if fists were striking him. He almost staggered under the attack. The specter of the white Nike poised for flight was still before his eyes; but behind it another face emerged out of the shadow, a cheap face, not a precious face but one in which his imagination had become entangled like an Indian veil on a thorny rosebush. He tugged at it but the thorns held fast, they held the silk and golden threads, they were already knitted together so that the eye could no longer distinguish clearly between the thorny boughs and the shimmering fabric.

Face! Face! Who asked whether it was cheap or precious? Unique or existing a thousand times? One could pose questions beforehand, but when one was caught one no longer knew. One was imprisoned by love—not by the one person who happened to bear its name. Who could still judge, blinded by the fires of imagination? Love knew no values.

The sky hung lower now. At instants soundless lightning tore sulphureous clouds out of the night. Formless and with a thousand sightless eyes the sultry warmth lay upon the roofs. Ravic walked along the Rue de Rivoli. The shopwindows blazed under the arcades. A dense throng of people pushed its way along. The cars were a row of twinkling reflections. Here am I, he thought, one among thousands, walking slowly past these windows filled with glittering junk and precious things, my hands in my pockets, an evening stroller—and my blood trembles within me, and in the pulsing gray and white labyrinths of two handfuls of mollusk-like matter, called a brain, an invisible battle is raging, making reality appear unreal and unreality real. I can feel arms touching me, bodies brushing against me, eyes scrutinizing me, I can hear the cars, the voices, the turmoil of palpable reality, I am in the midst of it and yet farther away than the moon—upon a
planet, beyond logic and facts, something within me is crying a name, knowing it is not the name and nevertheless crying it aloud; crying it into a silence that always existed and in which many cries have died away and from which never an answer has come and, knowing this, it still cries, the cry of the night of love and of the night of death, the cry of ecstasy and of collapsing consciousness, of the jungle and the desert, and I may know a thousand answers, but this one is beyond me and I can never attain it.

Love! How much that word had to cover! From the softest caress of the skin to the most remote excitement of the spirit, from the simple desire for a family to the convulsions of death, from insatiable passion to Jacob’s struggle with the angel. Here am I, Ravic thought, a man of more than forty years, trained in many schools, with experience and knowledge, who has been beaten down and has risen again, sifted through the filter of the years, having become more callous, more critical, colder—I did not want it and I did not believe it, I did not think it would come again—and now here it is and all my experience is of no avail, all the knowledge makes it only the more burning—and what burns better in the fire of the emotions than dry cynicism and the stacked wood of the critical years?

He walked and walked, and the night was wide and resonant; he walked heedlessly, not knowing whether hours or minutes were passing, and he was not surprised when he found himself in the gardens behind the Avenue Raphaël.

The house in the Rue Pascal. The faint outlines of the floors, on top the studios, some lighted. He found the windows of Joan’s studio. They were bright. She was at home. But maybe she was not at home and had only left the lights on. She hated to come back to dark rooms. Just as he did. Ravic walked over to the street.
A few cars were parked in front of the house. Among them a yellow roadster, an ordinary car dressed up like a racing car. That might be the car belonging to the other man. A car for an actor. Red leather seats, a dashboard like that in a plane with a profusion of unnecessary instruments—of course it must be his. Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned—

He went back to the gardens. The smell of blossoms came out of the dark, sweet, mixed with the odor of soil and cool greenery. The smell was strong as before a thunderstorm. He found a bench and sat down. This is not I, he thought, this belated lover sitting here on a bench in front of the house of the woman who has forsaken him and looking up at her window! This is not I shaken by a desire which I can thoroughly dissect and yet not master. This is not I, this fool, who would give years of his life to be able to turn time back and regain a blond nothing babbling blissful nonsense into his ear! This is not I, who—to hell with all pretenses—is sitting here, jealous and crushed and miserable and who would like to set fire to that car!

He lit a cigarette. The silent glow. The invisible smoke. The short comet’s path of the match. Why did he not go up to the studio? What could happen? It was not yet too late. The light was still on. He would be able to master the situation. Why did he not get her out of it? Now that he knew everything? Get her out and take her with him and never again let her go?

He stared into the darkness. What good could it do? What would happen? He could not throw the other out. You could not throw anything or anybody out of another’s heart. Couldn’t he have taken her at that time when she had come to him? Why hadn’t he done it?

He threw away his cigarette. Because it was not enough. That was it. He wanted more. It would not be enough even if she came, even if she came back and everything else was forgotten and drowned, it would never again be enough, in a strange and frightful way, never again enough. Something had gone wrong, at some point the ray of his imagination had failed to hit the mirror, the mirror that caught it and threw it back intensified into itself, and now the ray had shot beyond into the blind sphere of the unfillable and nothing could bring it back again, not one mirror or a thousand mirrors. They could only catch a part of it, but never bring it back; by now its specter moved forlornly through the empty heavens of love and only filled them with radiant mist which no longer had any shape and which could never again become a rainbow around a beloved head. The magic circle was broken, the lamentation remained, but hope lay shattered.