Reasons of State (40 page)

“If you don’t like my friends,” she said, adopting the dry, cold tone that he had sometimes been afraid of, “if you don’t like my friends, take your bags and go to the Crillon or the Ritz. They have good rooms. Room service and an elegant atmosphere.”

“Sodom and Gomorrah!” yelled the Head of State.

“That’s why they got rid of you; for talking drivel,” said Ofelia.

“And who is this?” asked all the others.

“
Mon père, le Président
,” said Ofelia, suddenly solemn, as if to mitigate the brutality of her earlier remarks.

“
Vive le Président! Vive le Président!
” they all shouted together, while one imitated a clown’s foolish antics, and sang the “Marseillaise.”

“Go to bed, Papa.”

The sunlight shone through the drawing-room curtains in spite of the electric light still on in the room. Morning had begun for the whole city.

“Let’s go to Bois-Charbons,” said the
Ex
to the cholo Mendoza.

“Bye-bye!” said Ofelia, and while the two men went down the great staircase, the others leant over the balustrade with masks on their faces, singing to the music of “Malbrough”:

“
Alors … on a eu des malheurs, mon bon Monsieur?
” said Musard, looking more than ever like the moustachioed leader
of the Arc de Triomphe, when he saw us arrive. (It was clear he had come across my portrait in some newspaper recently.)

“
Oh! Vous savez—les révolutions …
” I said.

“
Les révolutions, ça tourne toujours mal
,” said the wine merchant, taking out a bottle. “
Voyez ce qui s’est passé en France avec Louis Seize
.” (I thought of the frontispiece of Michelet’s
La Convention
in Nelson’s edition, with Citizen Capet on the scaffold, very dignified, with his shirt open at the neck as if he were consulting an otolaryngologist.)

“
Ce sera pour la prochaine fois
,” I said, raising my hand to my neck. Possibly realizing, rather late in the day, that his reference to Louis XVI had been slightly unfortunate, Monsieur Musard tried to mend matters:

“
Les révolutions, vous savez … Il paraît que sous l’Ancien Régime on était bien mieux. Ce sont nos quarante rois qui ont fait la grandeur de la France
.”

“This chap has been reading
Action Française
,” said the cholo Mendoza.

“
He’s treating us to a bit of Barrèsism
,” I said.

“
Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé
,” said Monsieur Musard, filling three glasses. “
C’est la maison qui règale
.”

I drank my wine with delight. From the back of the humble café came a pleasant smell of resinous wood, such as was sold in little bundles fastened with wire, to light coal fires with. There on the shelves, as if no time had passed, their shapes and labels unchanged, stood the bottles of Suze, Picon, Raphaël, and Dubonnet.

“What are you going to live on now?” I asked the cholo. “You’re not an ambassador anymore.”

“A man who thinks ahead is worth two. I’ve got more than enough money.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“Thanks to me the population of our country has thirty
thousand new citizens, who don’t figure in the census or know what our map looks like; forged passports and cards of citizenship for them … Poor people without any country. Victims of the war. White Russians. Expatriates.
Heimatlos
. I was doing good. Besides, the transactions went through the diplomatic bag. I wouldn’t have been the only one. I’m no saint. Other people use it for worse things.” (He made the gesture of someone sniffing.) “
That business
is a great temptation, because now it brings in a lot. But it’s dangerous. However, with the passports, I keep a duplicate of the Embassy stamps and seals. So the shop stays open … discreetly, of course.”

“Excellent: our compatriots deserve nothing better” (a sigh). “Oh well! It’s difficult to serve one’s country, old man!”

We returned to the Rue de Tilsitt. As I went in, out came a new porter, a war casualty, probably, because his left cuff was fastened with a safety pin to the shoulder of his blue jacket, and he wore a badge on his lapel. I had to explain that I was the master of the house before he let me pass, with theatrically embarrassed excuses. The drawing-room curtains were still drawn. Several of last night’s revellers were asleep on the divan, in armchairs or on cushions scattered on the carpet. Stepping over their bodies—some of them interlaced or piled in heaps—I at last reached my bedroom. I took my hammock out of the cupboard and hung it on the two rings put there for it. On the Arc de Triomphe, Rude’s Marseillaise was singing, as yesterday, as always.

But if the Marseillaise was still there, with her vociferous leader and the boy hero between sabres and palm trees, to me Paris seemed deserted. I realised that this very afternoon when, after a long sleep, I tried to make a list of what could be rescued of my life in this city. Reynaldo Hahn didn’t answer the telephone. Perhaps he’d gone to live in the suburbs. “
Abonné absent
,” said a female voice from the exchange.
The Distinguished Academician, always so understanding, to whom I wanted to confide my sadness and disappointments and whose advice I wanted to ask about—possibly—writing my memoirs, had died months ago in his flat on the Quai Voltaire, the victim of an incurable disease, after a mystical crisis that created a considerable stir in Catholic circles and caused him to spend whole days praying in the cold church of Saint-Roch, associated for me with a novel by Balzac I read as an adolescent in Surgidero de la Verónica. (I don’t know why churches connected with Bossuet or Fénelon—in style, I mean, like Saint-Roch, Saint Sulpice, or the chapel at Versailles—fail to inspire me with devotion. To get the feel of a Christian church, I need it to be shadowy, enveloping, full of relics and marvellous images of decapitated saints, blood, sores, tears and sweat, lifelike wounds, jungles of tapers, silver limbs and gold viscera on the altar for ex-votos.) I knew that after Gabriele D’Annunzio had got caught in Fiume, he had retired—so they said—now a prince—so they said—to his Italian house, where with his back against a wall of rock he could see the prow of a battleship, raised up there in memory of some brave deed or other. I learned that Ofelia had told the truth and that Elstir’s paintings had fallen out of public favour: his delicious seascapes could still be found in the less successful galleries, mixed up among any pictures containing waves, boats, sand, and foam that appealed to those who had made fortunes out of the war. Embittered by the fall in the price of his work, Elstir had retired angrily to his studio at Balbec, where he tried to achieve some sort of “modernity,” which distorted but added nothing to his individual style, giving a sense of uneasy effort, as little appreciated by his admirers of yesterday as by those who were today following new currents. In music something similar was happening: nobody played Vinteuil’s work anymore—least of all his Sonata—except
schoolgirls, who put away his music in a drawer, after their piano lessons, and devoted themselves to the strange subtleties of “La cathédrale engloutie” or the “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” unless they were indulging themselves with the vulgarities of Zez Confrey’s “Kitten on the Keys.” And the young, those “in the know”—of what?—the snobs, amazed by the Russian music brought over by Diaghilev, treated the fine maestro Juan Cristóbal as a “
vieille barbe
,” and disowned him just as they used to disown
Rhinegold
. And worse, inconceivable things had happened: Anatole France, who could well have remained in the world of Thaïs and Jérôme Coignard, had irrelevantly declared himself a socialist at the last moment, proclaiming the necessity of a “universal revolution,” including America—no less!—and giving large sums of money to that abominable periodical
L’Humanité
. Things were going very badly for others: the Comte de Argencourt, Belgian Chargé d’Affaires, formerly a ceremonious, stiff diplomatist in the grand style, had been seen by the cholo Mendoza a few days earlier opposite the puppet theatre in the Champs-Elysées, in a state of utter collapse, imbecile, with the face and expression of a smiling beggar, apparently about to stretch out his hand for alms …

During these days, I didn’t dare telephone Madame Verdurin, now a princess by marriage. I was afraid a princess—or someone with the presumptions of one—would scorn a man who was, after all, only a Latin American president thrown out of his palace. And I thought bitterly of the deplorable end of Estrada Cabrera; of many dictators dragged through the streets of their capitals; of those expelled and humiliated, like Porfirio Díaz, or of those who had gone to ground here in France, after a long stretch of power, like Guzmán Blanco; of Rosas of Argentina, whose daughter, tired of playing the part of unselfish virgin, or magnanimous intercessor against the
cruelty of her terrible father, suddenly revealed herself as she really was at heart, and abandoned her stern parent when she got the chance, leaving him to die in melancholy solitude in the grey town of Southampton—he who had owned boundless pampas, rivers of silver, moons such as are seen only there, suns rising every day above horizons he had ruled over since he was in breeches, and watched the heads of his enemies go by, hawked as “good, cheap watermelons” in the carts of his rejoicing followers.

The days passed, and I hardly saw Ofelia, who was always involved in fun and games. The Mayorala, curled up into a ball under her feather eiderdown, refused to be attended by a French doctor and suffered the high fever of pleurisy without accepting any remedy but Santa Inés rum and balsam of Tolu—since none of the sort of herbal concoctions that performed miracles
over there
were to be had
here
. And I resumed my walks about Paris with the cholo Mendoza, going from Notre-Dame de Lorette to the Chope Danton, from an Avenue du Bois that hadn’t been there before to Monsieur Musard’s Bois-Charbons, without experiencing a single quiver of the city life, the air, the atmosphere that my nose and my memory sought in vain. The smell of petrol had taken the place of the country aroma—formerly everywhere, knowing no frontiers, belonging as much to the capital as to a hamlet—of horse dung. In the early morning one no longer heard the cries of the old-clothes man, the seller of watercress and birdseed, nor the rustic pipe of the scissors grinder. In the purlieus of the Place des Ternes, makers of porous jugs from Badajoz no longer arrived after a very long journey, with their donkeys decorated in the Extramaduran style. The only place that seemed permanent and unchanged was Aux Glaces at 25 Rue Saint-Apolline, where (among scagliola or mosaic tables, coloured glass windows, floral transfers on the long
backs of leather settees, a pianola with a loud tone, two waiters in white aprons with bottles on tray-covered trolleys—like those on the Raphaeël labels) women were waiting for me, who in spite of the passage of years, difference in generations, changes in personnel, a new hairdo, a certain delicate restraint now being preferred to the opulence of the end of the century, restored me to the early chapters of my history, with its first pleasures and a thousand rejuvenating memories, and far-off events, whence—as in other Continental countries—everything had been transformed, turned upside down and perverted by the accelerated changes in ways of life. Languages had been mixed together, values degraded, adolescents corrupted, patriarchs insulted, palaces profaned, and the just expelled …

Here, at Aux Glaces, I found the only permanence that had always existed—despite larger breasts or smaller breasts—here as
over there
I found presence and uniqueness, dialectic of irreplaceable forms, a common language of universal understanding. In the irreversible time of the flesh it was possible to pass, according to period, from the style of Bouguereau to that of a medieval Eve, from the décolletage of Boldini to the décolletage of Tintoretto, or, inversely, from Rubens’ multitudinous buttocks and bellies to the fragile, ambiguous appearance of a nymph by Puvis de Chavannes; aesthetic fashions, variants and fluctuations of taste all passed, lengthening silhouettes, playing with proportions, amplifying—while in other departments of life, too, fashions were subject to perennial changes—yet never altering the fundamental reality of a nude. Here, looking at what I am looking at, I feel I am witnessing the Arrest of Time, somewhere outside the present epoch, maybe in the days of sun clocks or sand clocks, and therefore liberated from everything that binds me to the dates of my own history. I am
less aware of being unseated from my bronze horses, thrown down from my pedestals; less of an exiled ruler, or actor in decline, and more identified with my own
ego
, still possessing eyes for looking, and impulses arising from the depths of a vitality that is deliciously stimulated by something worth looking at—riches definitely preferable (
I feel
, therefore I am) to those of a fictitious existence in the stupid ubiquity of a hundred statues in municipal parks, patios, and town halls.

When such serious reflections beset me in a place where I hadn’t come for that purpose, and I took in the disparity between thought and situation, I burst out laughing, and made a remark to the cholo Mendoza that never failed to delight him: “Anything but ‘To be or not to be’ in a whorehouse.” “That is the question,” he replied (for he, too, fancied himself as well-read), making signs to an ample Leda, who knew she had been chosen beforehand, and so was awaiting her time without impatience, drinking some aperitif flavoured with aniseed at the next table, and counting on a client who had said nothing to her but was worth waiting for, because foreigners were generous clients and knew how to appreciate professional conscientiousness in work of every kind.

SUDDENLY CURED OF HER FEVER AND PAINS, THE Mayorala had arisen from beneath her eiderdown, clamouring to know where she could find a church in which to carry out her promise of dedicating prayers and candles to the Virgin.