Villa Triste (3 page)

They seemed to find my presence natural, and you would have sworn we’d known one another for years. She smiled at me. We talked about trivial things. They asked me no questions, but the dog laid his head on my knee and examined me.

She stood up and announced she was going to her room to get a scarf. So she lived in the Hermitage? What was she doing here? Meinthe took out a cigarette holder and nibbled at it. That was when I began to notice he had a great many tics. At long intervals, the muscles in his left cheek tensed, as if he were trying to catch a slipping, invisible monocle, but his dark glasses hid much of this twitching. Occasionally he’d thrust out his chin as though provoking someone. And then his right arm was shaken from time to time by an electrical discharge that communicated itself to his hand, which would trace arabesques in the air. All these tics were coordinated most harmoniously, and they gave Meinthe an agitated elegance.

“You’re on vacation?”

I replied that I was. And I said I was lucky the weather was so “splendid.” And I found this holiday resort a “paradise.”

“Is this the first time you’ve come here? You didn’t know the area before?”

I heard a touch of irony in his voice and took the liberty of asking him in my turn if he himself was here on vacation. He hesitated. “Oh, not exactly. But I’ve known this place for years …” Stretching out his arm nonchalantly, he indicated a point on the horizon and said in a weary voice, “The mountains … The lake … The lake …”

He took off his dark glasses and gave me a sad and gentle look. He was smiling. “Yvonne is a marvelous girl,” he told me. “Mar-vel-ous.”

She was walking back to our table with a green chiffon scarf tied around her neck. She smiled at me and then never took her eyes off me. Something expanded in the left side of my chest, and I decided I was having the best day of my life.

We climbed into Meinthe’s car, an old cream-colored Dodge convertible. All three of us sat in front, with Meinthe at the wheel, Yvonne in the middle, and the dog on the backseat. Meinthe stamped violently on the gas pedal, and the Dodge skidded on the gravel, barely missing the gateway of the hotel. We drove slowly along Boulevard Carabacel. I couldn’t hear the engine anymore. Had Meinthe switched it off so we could coast down? The umbrella pines on either side of the road blocked the sun’s rays and cast patterns of light and shadow. Meinthe was whistling, I abandoned
myself to the car’s gentle swaying, and Yvonne’s head rested on my shoulder every time we went around a curve.

At the Sporting Club, we were the only diners in the restaurant, the former orangery shaded from the sun by a weeping willow and some large rhododendron bushes. Meinthe explained to Yvonne that he had to go to Geneva and would come back that evening. I thought they might be brother and sister. But no. They didn’t look at all alike.

A group of about a dozen people arrived and chose the table next to ours. They’d come from the beach. The women wore colored terry cloth sailor shirts, and the men had on swim robes. One of them was taller and more athletic than the others, with wavy blond hair. He made a remark to no one in particular. Meinthe took off his dark glasses. He was suddenly quite pale. He pointed at the tall blond man and spoke in a very high-pitched voice, practically a squeal: “Look, there’s that tramp Carlton. The biggest SUH-LUTT in Haute-Savoie …”

The man pretended not to hear, but his friends turned toward us openmouthed.

“Did you understand what I said, Miss Carlton?”

For several seconds there was absolute silence in the dining room. The athletic blond man lowered his head. His companions were petrified. Yvonne, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eye, as if accustomed to incidents of this sort.

“Have no fear,” Meinthe whispered, leaning toward me. “It’s nothing, nothing at all …”

His face had become smooth, childlike; all his tics were gone. Our conversation resumed, and he asked Yvonne
what she’d like him to bring back for her from Geneva. Chocolates? Turkish cigarettes?

He left us at the entrance to the Sporting Club, saying we could meet again at the hotel around nine o’clock that evening. He and Yvonne spoke of a certain Madeja (or Madeya), who was giving a party in a lakeside villa.

“You’ll come with us, won’t you?” Meinthe asked me.

I watched him walk over to the Dodge as though propelled by a succession of electric shocks. He drove off the way he’d done the first time, his wheels spinning in the gravel, and once again the automobile just missed the gate before disappearing. He raised his arm and waved to us without turning his head.

I was alone with Yvonne. She suggested a stroll in the Casino gardens. The dog walked ahead of us, more and more wearily. Sometimes he sat down in the middle of the path and we had to call out his name, “Oswald,” before he’d consent to go on. She explained that it was not laziness but melancholy that made him so lackadaisical. He belonged to a very rare strain of Great Danes, all of them congenitally afflicted by sadness and the ennui of life. Some of them even committed suicide. I wanted to know why she’d chosen a dog with such a gloomy nature.

“Because they’re more elegant than the others,” she replied sharply.

I immediately thought about the Habsburgs, whose royal family had included some delicate, hypochondriac creatures like the dog. This was attributed to intermarrying,
and their depressive character became known as “the Portuguese melancholy.”

“That dog,” said I, “is suffering from the Portuguese melancholy.” But she didn’t hear me.

We’d reached the wharf. About ten passengers were boarding the
Amiral-Guisand
. Then the gangway was drawn up. Some children leaned out over the rail, waving and shouting. The boat moved off, and it had a dilapidated, colonial charm.

“We’ll have to take that boat one afternoon,” Yvonne said. “It would be fun, don’t you think so?”

She’d just addressed me with the familiar
tu
for the first time, and she’d spoken with inexplicable urgency. Who was she? I didn’t dare ask her that.

We walked on Avenue d’Albigny, shaded by the plane trees’ leafy branches. We were alone. The dog was about twenty meters ahead of us. His habitual languor was gone, and he marched along proudly, head up, abruptly veering off from time to time and performing some quadrille figures, like a carousel horse.

We sat down and waited for the cable car. She laid her head on my shoulder, and I was seized by the same giddiness I’d felt when we drove down Boulevard Carabacel in Meinthe’s Dodge. I could still hear her saying, “One afternoon … we’ll take … boat … fun, don’t you think so?” in her indefinable accent, which I thought might be Hungarian, English, or Savoyard. As the cable car slowly climbed up, the vegetation on either side of the track looked thicker and thicker. It was going to bury us. The flowering bushes
pressed against the glass panels of the funicular, and sometimes a rose or a privet branch was carried off by our passage.

In her room at the Hermitage, the window was half open, and I could hear the regular plunk of tennis balls and the players’ distant cries. If there still existed some nice, reassuring idiots who wore white outfits and whacked balls over a net, then that meant the world was continuing to turn and we had a few hours’ respite.

Her skin was sprinkled with very faint freckles. There was fighting in Algeria, apparently.

Night came. And Meinthe was waiting for us in the lobby. He wore a white linen suit with a turquoise scarf impeccably knotted around his neck. He’d brought some cigarettes from Geneva and insisted we should give them a try. But we didn’t have a moment to lose — he said — or we’d be late for Madeja’s (or Madeya’s) party.

This time we zoomed down Boulevard Carabacel at top speed. Meinthe, his cigarette holder dangling from his lips, accelerated into the curves, and I don’t know by what miracle we reached Avenue d’Albigny safe and sound. I turned to Yvonne, and I was surprised to see that there was not the slightest expression of fear on her face. I’d even heard her laugh once when the car swerved.

Who was this Madeja (or Madeya) person whose party we were going to? Meinthe told me he was an Austrian filmmaker. He’d just finished shooting a film in these parts — in La Clusaz, to be specific, a ski resort twenty
kilometers away — and Yvonne had played a part in it. My heart beat faster.

“You’re in the movies?” I asked her.

She laughed.

“Yvonne is going to be a very great actress,” Meinthe declared, trampling the accelerator pedal to the floor.

Was he serious? A
movie actress
? Maybe I’d already seen her picture in
Cinémonde
, or in the cinema yearbook I’d discovered in the depths of an old bookstore in Geneva, the book I would page through during my nights of insomnia. In the end, I knew the names and addresses of the actors and “technicians.” Some of them remain in my memory:

Did Yvonne have a “movie name” I might know? When I asked her that, she murmured, “It’s a secret,” and placed a finger on her lips.

Meinthe added, with a distressingly high, thin laugh, “You understand, she’s here incognito.”

We followed the lakeshore road. Meinthe slowed and switched on the radio. The air was warm, and we slipped through that limpid, satiny night, like no night I’ve ever known since, except in the Egypt or Florida of my dreams. The dog had set his chin in the hollow of my shoulder, and his breath was scorching me. The gardens to our right sloped down to the lake. Past Chavoires, the road was lined with palms and umbrella pines.

We passed the village of Veyrier-du-Lac and turned onto a steep uphill road. The front entrance of the villa stood below the level of the road. An inscription on a wooden panel named the place: THE LINDENS (the same name as my hotel). A fairly wide gravel drive, bordered by trees and a mass of neglected vegetation, led to the very threshold of the villa, a big white building in the style of Napoleon III, with pink shutters. A few cars were parked close together. We crossed the hall and stepped into what must have been the salon. There, in the filtered light of two or three lamps, I made out about ten people, some standing near the windows and others lolling on a white sofa, which was apparently the only piece of furniture. They were filling their glasses and carrying on animated conversations in German and French. A tune came from a record player on the floor, a slow melody accompanying a singer who kept repeating, in a very deep voice,

Oh, Bionda Girl … 

Oh, Bionda Girl … 

Bionda Girl … 

Yvonne took my arm. Meinthe cast rapid glances all around, as if looking for someone, but no member of that
gathering paid us the slightest attention. We stepped through a French window onto a veranda with a green wooden balustrade. There were some deck chairs and wicker armchairs. A Chinese lantern cast complicated shadows, making patterns like lace or tracery, and it was as though Yvonne’s and Meinthe’s faces were suddenly covered with veils.

In the garden below us, several people were crowding around a buffet table laden with things to eat. A very tall, very blond man waved and came toward us, supporting himself on a cane. His linen shirt — natural-colored, mostly open — looked like a safari jacket, and I thought about certain characters one used to meet in the colonies in the old days, the ones who had a “past.” Meinthe introduced the tall man: Rolf Madeja, “the director.” He leaned down to kiss Yvonne and put his hand on Meinthe’s shoulder. He called him “Menthe,” mint, with an accent that sounded more English than German. He led us toward the buffet, and the blond woman as tall as he was, the vague-eyed Valkyrie (she stared at us without seeing us, or maybe she was contemplating something she saw through us), turned out to be his wife.

Yvonne and I left Meinthe in the company of a young man with a mountain climber’s physique and moved from group to group. She kissed everybody, and if anyone asked who I was, she said, “A friend.” If I understood correctly, most of the people present had played some part in “the film.” They wandered off across the garden. The bright moonlight lit up everything. We followed the grass-covered paths and came upon a cedar tree of terrifying size. When we reached the garden wall, we could hear the lapping of
the lake on the other side, and we stayed there for a long moment. From where we were, you could see the house standing in the midst of the neglected grounds, and its presence surprised us as much as if we’d just arrived in the old South American city where a rococo opera house, a cathedral, and some mansions of Carrara marble are said to exist to this day, entombed by the virgin forest.

The other guests haven’t ventured as far as we have, except for two or three barely distinguishable couples who are taking advantage of the dense coppices and the night. Everyone else has stayed near the house or on the terrace. We rejoin them. Where’s Meinthe? Inside, maybe, in the salon. Madeja comes up to us and reveals, in his half-English, half-German accent, that he would happily stay here another two weeks, but he must go to Rome. He’ll rent the villa again in September, he says, “When the film’s final cut is ready.” He takes Yvonne by the waist — I don’t know whether he’s groping her or displaying fatherly affection — and declares, “She’s a very fine actress.”

He stares at me, and I notice his eyes look misted, and the mist is growing denser.

“Your name is Chmara, isn’t it?”

The mist has suddenly vanished; his blue-gray eyes glint. “Chmara,” he says. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

I answer him with a tight-lipped “yes,” and then his eyes grow soft again, mist over, practically liquefy. I don’t doubt he has the power to regulate their intensity at will, the way you adjust binoculars. When he wants to withdraw into himself, his eyes mist over, and then the outside world is
nothing but a blurred mass. I know this method well, as I often practice it myself.