The Laughter of Carthage (31 page)

We crossed the border next morning and were treated to disapproving civility. With innocent efficiency they studied our papers not for clues to our criminality or radicalism but for evidence of penury. Presumably they found us rich enough to be admitted for a day or so to their mountain fastness. To be poor in Switzerland is regarded as the gravest breach of taste. We drove along smooth, well kept roads. Esmé admired the neatness of the flowerbeds, the spotless lack of character in each of the orderly towns, the freshness of the paint on chalets and precisely thatched farmsteads. I half expected to see men outside their barns with brushes in their hands, washing their cows as today the suburb-dweller washes his car. It was strange how in Switzerland three dominant and vital cultures could come together to form, as it were, a vacuum. Possessing neither tension nor vision, Switzerland was the symbol of one particular future; the future desired by those same small minds who eventually sought to diminish my own achievements and thus preserve the status quo. When, that evening at sunset, we crossed into France at a little town called Sainte-Croix, Esmé yearningly looked behind her; Lot’s wife expelled from some sanitary Sodom.

Santucci seemed as relieved as I to leave the oppressive orderliness of Switzerland. He began to sing some popular song in a loud, unmelodic voice. Like most Italians he believed he was naturally musical, just as negroes labour under the delusion they are all naturally rhythmic. The wind was cool in our faces now and the white lamps of the car outlined massive oaks on both sides of the road. There were no obvious signs of the recent War, but since my geography was so vague I was unsure if the conflict had reached this part of France or not. The sweet air and the silent little towns contradicted the impression I had of Ypres or Verdun: here things looked unchanged and unchallenged for centuries. The smoked goggles we all three wore had the effect of mellowing the landscape further.

With the confidence of familiarity, Santucci swung the car along narrow roads and round sudden bends, singing all the while. As we swept through the villages he would call out names dimly familiar from the newspapers. He knew France well, he said. ‘This is where I received my business education.’ He had been attached to an aerodrome while on duty here in 1916 and had made himself an indispensable supplier of whisky and gin to Allies and Axis alike. ‘I’m no narrow nationalist but a practising international anarchist!’ He laughed and passed Esmé the wine bottle from which he was drinking. She seemed to have forgotten her regret at leaving Switzerland and drank deeply, wiping her mouth on the back of a lovely little hand. Santucci winked at her. She attempted to wink back. She squeezed my arm. He asked me to put a cigarette into his holder for him. I did so and lit the fresh ‘Hareem Lady’, the brand he favoured. ‘Why are you going to England, Signor Cornelius? You seem to prefer, like me, to travel. Are you visiting your family?’

‘I have a wife there. And business, too. I wish to register a number of patents. Everyone has told me it is best to do that in England.’

‘You should go to America instead. Most of my brothers and cousins are there. But it’s much harder now, I suppose. You can’t get in officially. Not if you’re Italian. They think we’re all arsonists!’

I smiled. ‘I’d heard you were.’

‘By nature, certainly. But by training we are very law-abiding. Our loyalties are to the church and to our families. People frequently don’t understand.’

We stopped that evening in Dijon where he insisted on buying us a dozen different pots of mustard. He was dressing a shade more conservatively now, perhaps out of respect for the French. ‘One should always buy mustard in Dijon and sausage in Lyon.’ He was evidently well-known to the little woman who ran the pension. She welcomed us through her low doorway into a hall of white plaster and black beams; Villon himself might have sprawled, pen in one hand, grog-pot in the other, upon her polished wooden floor. When we were seated at a carved elm table near the inglenook she brought us our first real taste of French food. Even France’s worst critics forgive her arrogance and uncalled-for attitude of superiority when they taste her cuisine. Esmé smacked red lips and filled her tiny stomach until it was round and hard. Her eyes became dreamy. She was in heaven again. Our hostess smiled like a benign conqueror as she cleaned away the dishes. Santucci exchanged a few polite sentences with her and then we all went slowly up the narrow stairs to our chambers.

In the secure confines of our timbered room Esmé prepared herself for bed. I laughed at her. With her papers and creams she was like a child playing at being a woman. ‘This magic goes on forever,’ she said as she climbed into the four-poster, ‘but isn’t there a price, Simka?’

It was unlike her to indulge in such considerations and I was unreasoningly surprised, almost angry. Her remark seemed like ingratitude, though I was by no means sure why, and I found that I was disturbed, impatient with her. Surely this was misplaced pessimism? I curbed my bad temper, however. ‘I think the price has already been paid. By you. By me.’ The bed was white and soft in the warm darkness of the little, low-ceilinged apartment. I enjoyed an infantile sense of safety. ‘All of it is my reward for my sufferings. And you are sharing in it. You, too, have suffered.’ I fell back on my pillows with a grunt of pleasure. They were edged in intricate lace. She grinned and leaned against me, her mood untroubled again. I appeared to have reassured her easily enough and consequently reassured myself. Esmé had no business voicing uncomfortable notions. With her firmly in my arms, I went to sleep.

Santucci at breakfast was eager to get on the road. He had a friend to meet in Paris. ‘An eminent soldier with a small army for sale. I shall need a larger car on the way back.’ It was a joke, we realised. He was wearing his formal suit of wheat-coloured silk. I envied him his elegance, for my own clothes were rather inappropriate to this part of the world. I decided to equip myself and Esmé with a new wardrobe as soon as we settled in England. I had grown self-conscious about my Russian clothing which had seemed so modish in Odessa and rather ahead of the fashion in Constantinople. Here, however, it felt heavy, shapeless and dowdy. Again I was tempted to put on a uniform, but realised it might look inappropriate worn by a man travelling with a British passport. Some of my existing luggage could be sold and what it fetched invested in one decent suit. Such details I would decide in Paris. I planned to return to my Russian identity and acquire papers for Esmé establishing her as my sister from Kiev.

When I considered the difficulties, the amount of work I should have to do, I became almost reluctant to reach Paris. I consoled myself that I should be in London within a week or two. I still found it almost impossible to believe only a couple of hundred miles separated me from Mrs Cornelius and her beloved Whitechapel. London, of all those great cities, had seemed remote, legendary: as abstract as my unrealised dreams. Now Rome and Paris took substance, but Odessa and Constantinople became merely a hazy fantasy from which I had emerged into reality. I had conserved our cocaine as we travelled, not wishing to risk famine in Paris. I had used no more than a pinch or two in the morning after waking. Cocaine has always had the effect of bringing me down to earth, forcing me to examine the realities of life. I determined to apply myself to these problems as soon as we were established in the city. I would seek out Kolya, in the hope he had not yet left. Kolya would help solve everything. I also tried to imagine what life would be like in Whitechapel. I knew a quick thrill of excitement mixed with some trepidation. I remembered my last unfortunate meeting with Mrs Cornelius, her expressed disapproval of my liaison with Esmé. My friend was bound to change her mind when she met my little girl.

As we went out into a beautiful, soft morning of pine-filtered sunlight, driving through Dijon’s picturesque streets, a cheerful Santucci described the new car he meant to buy as soon as it came on the market. An electric racer, he said. Citroën were developing it. We drove now through thinly forested hills, vivid yellow crops of mustard. Occasionally we passed an old chateau, a distant brown stone village, a farm. Passive livestock grazed in the fields, adding to that sense of timeless permanence so characteristic of rural Ukraine before the Revolution. Might my Ukraine one day return to her former perfection? Surely, I thought, the corpses and the broken gun carriages must soon sink into the cornfields and be forgotten. How could I know? How could I anticipate Stalin’s capacity for cruelty and hatred? He placed a sentence of death upon an entire country. The Bolsheviks starved the granary of Russia! They mined meadows, forests, whole villages to blow up the population, together with any invader. As I have observed many times, people grow so used to conflict and terror and death they cling to them as certainties, in the way the more fortunate cling to old, peaceful rituals. Why do most human beings resist any change, when change usually means their continuing survival? Santucci asked me my opinion of the Citroën Electric. I told him some of my own ideas for cars. These, too, would not be dependent upon benzine. They might be powered by rockets or beam wireless. I even had plans in my case for a car driven by tiny charges of dynamite.

Naturally, he liked this notion best. ‘Dynamite! There’s your answer, Signor Cornelius. From dynamite our New Europe will arise like a phoenix. All this’ - He waved a magnificently gauntleted hand at the little hills and streams - ‘must be blown away. The job was only half done when they called it off to arrange that miserable Armistice.’

I could see little reason for such destruction. ‘There’s room for everything in my future.’ I was somewhat pious.

‘To produce a genuinely different world one must wipe out every memory, every sign, every clue to the past. History must go!’ He was laughing. We took a humpbacked bridge and flew for a few seconds before returning to the road. The long bonnet of the Cunningham glittered in the sun like the barrel of a Krupps cannon. He even pointed the machine as if it were a gun. He took joy from his control.

‘You’re a Bolshevik, then!’ I shouted over the engine. ‘You should visit Russia. Go soon. They’re already putting your theories into action!’

He took this in good part, shaking his head and grinning. ‘But with so little style, my friend. If a thing is to be done properly, it must be done with grace! Any Frenchman would tell you that much.’

I had met such dandified nihilists in Peter. Most of them had died or been imprisoned in the first days of Lenin’s triumph. Not only did I refuse to take Santucci seriously, I felt a certain pity for him. If he ever experienced real revolution he must surely become an early victim. He was far more a bad poet than a bad politician, however, and one can always forgive bad poets. Power is the last thing they want. They are usually too frightened by the responsibility involved. Sometimes this does not happen: then a ferocious combination is achieved. Our good-humoured driver however was in every way amusing and entertaining. His charm remained as potent as ever. I wished he would decide to go on to London or Berlin. While one moves one does not ‘stew’. The Escape of Motoring is best when one has no true idea of one’s destination.

Yet when Paris eventually appeared, my uncertainty vanished. We approached through suburbs, sometimes on a slight hill, sometimes in a shallow valley. I had never expected to see the Eiffel Tower so soon. It dominated the city: a wonderful pyramid of steel and cast-iron: the nineteenth century’s salute to us, the inhabitants of her future. Here was the city of Jules Verne, who had been chiefly responsible for my decision to express myself through the medium of science and technology. Here the engravings from my
Pearson’s Magazines
came to life, while elsewhere the monumental tributes to Napoleon, his arches, tombs and museums, and the glorious palaces of the great French kings, almost unearthly cathedrals and churches, were ordered like the model of a pure, eighteenth-century mind: a little too rational, perhaps, a little cool, but with a superb and almost simple tidiness. We drove through suburban streets in the evening mist, with the sun red and huge above, this sense of orderliness countered to a degree by slums, buildings in poor repair, featureless apartment blocks, narrow alleys and busy, chaotic traffic quite different to Rome’s, yet moving at the terrifying pace common to old Petersburg’s. Paris at twilight began to bloom with electricity. She was a city of light. A city of delicate glass and fine traceries of stone. Her gas lamps were a vibrant yellow. Flaring charcoal from her street stoves glowed the deepest possible red. I thought I could hear music, hear her heart pounding as Santucci drove his monstrous Cunningham deeper and deeper towards the centre. Paris smelled of rosewater, coffee and fresh bread. She smelled of motor exhausts and garlic, of chocolate and wine. I looked towards Esmé and saw there were tears in her eyes. She was now truly looking upon Heaven.

Faithless creatures, we forgot Rome at once. Paris instantly became our new love. Santucci’s letting forth with a piece of Rossini did not disturb us. Bells pealed from Notre Dame. Boats hooted on the Seine as we negotiated the bridges of the Isle de la Cité. Paris was herself a symphony of ordered movement and colour. The scarlet and gold sails of the
Moulin Rouge
were the spokes of a cosmic wheel. The Cunningham boomed along Rue Pigalle and turned back along Boulevard Magenta towards Place de la République, with Santucci swearing he could never get to grips with the streets of Paris, until we pulled up suddenly just beyond the green, gold and purple doors of Cirque d’Hiver, the little amphitheatre housing the Winter Circus in Boulevard du Temple. Children playing on the pavement around the plane-trees gathered as always to Santucci, staring at the huge car. It might have been a vision of the Madonna. Their silence was broken by his salute, a squeeze of his horn, then all let forth with their questions. He sent one boy into the little hotel, whose sign was illuminated by a single purple bulb. Out came the plump porter. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand which could easily have been a penguin’s wing. Waddling up to us, nodding, swaying, he was delighted to see Santucci. Our friend called him ‘sergeant’, shook hands and spoke of the trenches. Santucci seemed to exist in a network of relationships, some business, some personal, some filial. He never dealt with a stranger. Even the man who filled his petrol tank knew him as M’sieu Santucci, mentioning a common back complaint and the new cure he had read about in
Le Figaro.
Now I listened while the porter asked after his cousins in America and the weather in Naples. He was introduced to Esmé and myself and we might have been Santucci’s blood relatives, judging by the ceremony with which he presented us. We, too, shook hands. He said he was at our service. Would we require supper? Santucci said we had an appointment to dine elsewhere. The porter blew a whistle. Out came another boy to guard the car while we were shown to our accommodation. Our room contained an old double bed, a washstand, a couple of chairs and little else, but it was perfectly adequate. After the luggage arrived we washed and changed, but soon Annibale Santucci knocked on our door to beg us to hurry. Back we went to the limousine. With horn blaring we drove faster than ever through the glamorous streets, back towards Notre Dame where the massive cathedral shone in golden glory over the black water. Across the bridge again and along Saint-Michel, into a narrow backstreet near Saint-Germain. Parking the Cunningham half on the pavement, half in the road, Santucci told us we had arrived. Disembarking, we entered a discreetly illuminated restaurant whose windows were curtained from the street, whose interior, lit by gas, was warm as yellow ivory. White linen and silver, potted palms, hushed air, revealed this place to be a temple of food, one of thousands, I was to discover, in the city. From the far end, in a curtained alcove, a thin, elderly man rose to hold out a hand, delicate as a dying orchid. The hair of his head and his moustache had the appearance of a fine mould. He smelled like a flower past its prime. His small, sad smile made me think him more priest than soldier. Feebly he gestured for us to sit with him, though he seemed upset at our presence. We were cousins, Santucci told him, from England. We would eat with them, but the business could be discussed later. The old man accepted this gracefully enough, though plainly the arrangement was not much to his taste. Folding his fingers before him in a gesture of disciplined patience he bowed again to us. His skin was probably painted here and there; it had a parched brown quality to it where it was not unnaturally pink. His hair was sparse. Only his English tweed suit, his excellent tie, did not look worn out. Indeed they seemed unnaturally new. He wore them like a borrowed carapace. He was never introduced by name, though I had the impression he was an aristocrat, a high ranking general. Any curiosity I had about him was dispelled by the quality of the meal. It was superb. We had oeuf en meruerte to begin, a cassoulet as our main course, some Neufchatel cheese and crème brûlée. While Esmé and I sat drunkenly at the table, too full to speak, capable only of grinning stupidly. Santucci and his client moved away to the bar where they ordered their cognac. The business took hardly any time at all. When it was over the soldier did not rejoin us at the table, but slipped away. Santucci returned, insisting we have some Armagnac ‘to celebrate’. ‘All settled,’ he said. ‘And, as you see, I did not have to inspect the army personally. No money changed hands. Yet everyone is satisfied. That is the essence of international finance.’