The Balloonist (28 page)

The houselights were turned on abruptly, catching a half dozen or more people standing on their seats with their fists raised. The actors (there were two of them now, the pearshaped Ubu and a rather plump lady with a monobosom who had come out on the stage to see what was happening) waited patiently, looking out on the scene of tumult below them. The roles had been reversed and it was they now who were the spectators, watching the performances out in the rows of seats.

After a quarter of an hour or so of this, Père Ubu improvised a jig and fell down sprawling over the prompter's box. This accident distracted the audience enough so that the lights were turned down and the actors could continue. The Polish Army, represented by a skinny individual wearing some pots and pans, came on. Pere Ubu usurped the kingdom, ordered all the nobles to be thrown down a trapdoor, and swore by his Green Candle. For a scepter he carried a toilet brush. At the end of every scene a venerable gentleman in evening dress tottered across the stage on the points of his toes, took down a sign with the title of the scene on it, and put up another in its place. When it was necessary for new characters
to enter they trooped in and out through the fireplace. Periodically the unacceptable word was pronounced:

“Mer-drrrrre!”

with a superfluous
r
that rolled on for several seconds. Each time it produced a new epidemic of shouts and whistles, and the performance came to a halt. M. Sarcey wrenched his impressive silhouette from his chair and left, indignant. Ubu, having slaughtered everybody else, now turned on Mère Ubu, threatening to shove little pieces of wood in her ears, lacerate her posterior, extract her brain through her heels, suppress her spinal marrow, and open up her swimming bladder. The bicycle racer, standing up again, shouted “Vive l'anarchie!” The people behind him stood up in order to be able to see, and this provoked a sporadic but general standing up all over the house. Luisa and I were standing up. Someone behind demanded “Sit down!” and I sat down. Luisa remained standing, and after several more shouts the beefy person behind her put both hands on her shoulders and attempted to push her into her seat. I groaned, seeing myself in the Bois on a frosty morning (it was December) waiting to receive a hole in my pancreas. I stood up again but Luisa had already turned and dealt the beefy person a sharp thwack with her riding crop. It caught him just on the side of his red neck, leaving a line that was even redder. He sat down without a word, Luisa and I sat down, and the play lurched on toward its end. Ubu was now on an ocean voyage, shouting contradictory commands to the sailors, ordering them to haul down the main bib and reach for their tonsils. The whole thing came to a climax in a kind of chorus, accompanied by the two-handed piano and an orchestra of pots, gongs, and cymbals.

No one seemed anxious to leave. Most of the spectators were still standing around under the houselights gesticulating and arguing. We fought our way out onto the street, assisted once or twice by Luisa's crop. “Canaille,” she remarked quite without rancor and simply by way of commentary. Perhaps she meant the beefy-faced man who had laid hands on her, or perhaps the whole pack, with the exception of course of M. Lugné-Poe, who had been received in Quai d'Orléans. A little way down rue Blanche I managed to find another cab, and we went clip-clopping off to a cabaret that Luisa knew about on the Butte, “an amusing place and some funny people.” More swine no doubt, I told myself. Was this the vulnerable young thing I had been obliged to escort to the Café Royal lest some ruffian accost her? Of course she hadn't had her riding crop then. The cab pulled up in rue des Abbesses.

It was a kind
of music hall. Once inside I saw at a glance that the clientele was highly dubious. The females outnumbered the men by three to one, but they were not there to offer their charms for male approval; most of them were more interested in each other. There was an odour of talcum, perspiration, and cheap wine. Luisa was immediately recognized and hands floated up to her from a table halfway across the room. The table had quite a zoo around it. One denizen was a young woman in tight-fitting black tights and a jersey, short hair, her face covered with white greasepaint and a kind of map of intersecting black lines drawn across it. Perhaps she was part of the entertainment and would get up and do a pantomime later. Next to her was a rare creature like a tropical bird: polka-dot blouse with fuchsia borders, red wig sticking out of a canary-coloured beret, black lip rouge, spidery dyed lashes, green shadows under the eyes. This was Elka. She sat with her elbows on the table as though she owned the place, hardly bothering to look up as we sat down, and talked rapid French with a patois lilt.

“You've been dining chérie?”

“No, I seldom eat any more. It's a vulgar habit. One has been to the Théâtre de L'Oeuvre.”

“Ah! La chose de Jarry.

Et c'était bien amusant?”

“Jolly.”

Luisa had little more to say. Instead of paying attention to Elka, she searched around the room in an interested way to see who else was there. She and Elka were elaborately ignoring each other like a pair of strange cats. Elka eventually condescended to introduce her to the others: “Mademoiselle Hickman, a singer.” This phrase seemed to me curious on two counts. First of all, it was a long time since I had thought of her as possessing a paternal origin powerful enough to confer a surname on her. Over the months she had become, in some part of my mind, the exclusive creature and product of the two old women in Quai D'Orléans, as though they had confected her out of raw materials and brought her to life through some necromancy of their own. Now she was abruptly resurrected in another guise, the child of the cowboy-martyr who had ridden out fearlessly into the mob of howling Apaches. Perhaps this
disparity, taken in the light of the hereditary theories of M. Zola, would account for at least some of her foibles and inconsistencies. But which was it, Luisa the cowgirl or Luisa the daughter of her mother, who had struck the beefy man with her crop? There was much food for reflection here. Second, Elka's phraseology now obliged me to think of her singing as professional. Why did something in me resist this notion, something coming from below the midriff and as inaccessible to reasonable argument as it was fundamental? Jealousy? Preposterous.

As for me, nobody bothered to introduce me, but I heard someone murmur, hardly bothering to whisper, “son Suedois.”
Her
Swede? Another piece of grammar with curious implications. The only other male at the table was a Peruvian, an employee of a diplomatic mission as I understood it, with oleaginous hair parted exactly in the middle and a face like a sun. His elbows were on the table too like Elka's, and he made an Incan smile.

“You perform, mademoiselle? If so I would be enchanted to come and hear you.”

“There will be a recital in February.”

“Till then—one can only wait. In the meantime …”

The devil with his pre-Columbian innuendoes. Luisa, however, hardly seemed to take notice of him. A feminine and Sapphic air seemed to pervade the place, an air of maenads. The only dancers on the floor were couples of women, and two young ladies at a table across the room—demurely clad, as a matter of fact, in blouses and long black skirts—had candidly slipped their arms about each other. Champagne came. Elka opened it—with éclat, the cork soaring across the room—and poured for both of us. Luisa and I touched glasses, her mouth set in her little well-bred and distant smile as it had been all evening.

A voice, somewhere in the depths of the room, called “Gavotte!” We were interrupted by the entertainment that broke out periodically in such places. A piano, a violin, and a set of drums played Offenbach, and two dancers cavorted into the open space in the centre of the room; there was no stage. The dancers were strong-limbed and square-jawed; the one on the left had a faint bluish shadow on her upper lip. Seizing their skirts with both hands, they kicked up their legs several times while the drum thumped punctuation, then performed the customary present-arms of their art: one foot held in the hand as far up as it would go, above the level of their heads, they bounced like concupiscent rabbits on the other foot in time to the music. The stockings were black, the rest of the costumes white. In the masses of not very clean linen, samples of bare skin were visible between stockings and knickers. Luisa was no more perturbed by this than she had been by Ubu's monosyllable. The Peruvian caught my eye and smirked.

A drum roll. The
two dancers, wearing carved wooden smiles, sprang into the air a little way twiddling their feet, and when they came down their legs split apart like broken scissors, coming to a stop stretched out on opposite sides of the floor. Applause, smoke, and more champagne. The dancers disappeared and a few lady couples took their places on the floor. Someone, probably the Peruvian, had given Luisa a long thin cigar, and now she allowed him to light it for her.

And what was the matter with me? Wasn't I enjoying myself? That was the worst of it. I was. That is, not enjoying exactly. It was a phenomenon over which I had very little control. On the one hand I found the dancers disgusting. On the other hand a kind of imaginary elastic cord established itself in my mind, without my noticing it, between those white zones above the black stockings and Luisa's businesslike form next to me in its English tweed. Now this cord gradually shortened, drawing the one image to the other. I found myself reminded of what I knew very well was under the tweed, a thought that up to then had not been appropriate or convenient because of the very tweedy briskness of her manner. This little worm prickled at me in a private place until I was exasperated. The Fiend carry off Offenbach anyhow! I pushed back my chair and announced in a firm voice that I had work to do the next day.

Elka, her tar-coloured lips fixed in a curve, looked at me and then at Luisa. “Mais tu restes n'est-pas chérie?”

Luisa hesitated for a moment, or at least remained silent for reasons connected with her own private tactics of managing the world about her. Then, with a smile quite as fixed and conventional as Elka's, she said, “No, I must go.” We rose. The Peruvian started to get up and then thought better of it, putting his elbows back on the table. As we left, the Map-Faced Girl saluted in her own way: her hand raised with palm toward us, she bent down each finger in turn until it touched the palm. The hand, like her face, was plaster-white and covered with a network of fine lines.

I handed
Luisa into the cab and climbed in behind her. With an audacity, a recklessness, ignoring the risk of the riding crop in her lap, I slipped an arm under her back and pulled her toward me on the leather seat. 16, Quai d'Orléans! She seemed to show no objection, and the tweed shoulder even settled complacently into the niche between my arm and my chest. Once she sighed, turned the pale oval of her face toward me in the darkened cab, then seemed to change her mind and looked out the window again. The gaslights of the Grands Boulevards went by dreamily. When we crossed over onto the Île on the Pont Louis-Philippe, she stirred and became her businesslike self again. We arrived before the house on the quai with its baroque marble pediments.

That ape of an Yves was still up and let us in. Then he disappeared. Luisa led me up the broad ceremonial staircase and down the hall in the darkness. Then, at the door of her dressing room, she told me to wait. “I have to change, don't you see, dear heart.”

I waited, fingering the toe of a cupid caryatid who was holding up the ceiling with the help of his companion on the other wall. In the gloom my mind quite freely generated images that were concrete enough—almost—to touch: the yellow room in Stresa, the brocade like pale peach tinged with red and gold—I took a breath, calmed myself, and looked out the window into the dark courtyard, where only a flickering oil lamp illuminated the damp reticulation of the stones. The door of the dressing room opened and Theodor appeared in his military cap and boots, buttoning the greatcoat.

“What is this?”

“I must, you see. Because only men are admitted in the place we're going.”

“Place?” “The Château Rouge, in the Marais. I told you—don't you remember? It's very droll, full of voyous and sinister persons.”

It was after two. The great clock in the hall below had struck while I was waiting.

“You're mistaken. I am not going anywhere.”

“Please yourself. It would have been more amusing with a friend. But—”

“You're not going alone?”

“Why
not?”

I could see through this sort of sham easily enough. It was only a vastly complexified and more subtle version of the tactic that had before dragged me half unwillingly from recitals to the Café Royal to fittings at Worth's and back again: the threat of some vague and unnameable peril if I was not along to offer protection. This time, still exasperated by that dumb worm of affection crawling in my vitals, I declined the gambit.

“In that case—since it's late—I'll get some needed sleep.”

“Ah yes, your work—” Rather distractedly. I had lost or was mistaken; she really was going. She even preceded me a little down the staircase as though she were in a hurry, glancing back only once. We parted on the quai, the military figure going on down under the gaslights toward the Pont-Marie. I crossed the river the other way and found a cab in Boulevard Saint-Germain. Back in that leather-lined and camphor-smelling capsule of darkness (it might have been the same one) I thrust my fists into my coat pockets and clenched my jaw. The gnawing worm was taking no account of my defiance of her, my wishing her at the bottom of the Seine; it was still as vertebrate as ever. Perhaps on my way home I should visit one of the establishments provided, for reasons of hygiene. The cabman would know. Or I could have asked Theodor.