Promise at Dawn Page 14

  My mother’s face brightened. The fact that I was completely inexperienced as a tennis player didn’t worry her in the least. She had confidence in me. She knew who I was. She knew that I had it in me. The trivial day-to-day details of life, the little practical considerations didn’t count for her. For a second I hesitated, then, at sight of that expression of utter confidence and love, I swallowed my shame and my fear, sighed deeply, lowered my head and went forth to my execution.

  It was a quick business, but it sometimes seems to me that I am still on that court. Needless to say, I did my best. I jumped, dived, bounced, pirouetted, ran, fell, bounced up again, flew through the air, clanging and spinning like a disjointed marionette, but the most I can say is that I did, just once, touch the ball, and then only on the wood of my racquet—and all this under the imperturbable gaze of the King of Sweden, who watched me coldly from under his famous straw hat. Some will no doubt ask why I let myself be led to the slaughter, why I ever ventured onto the court at all. The truth of the matter is that I had not forgotten the lesson I had learned in Warsaw, the slap on the face I had received, nor the voice of my mother saying: “Next time I expect to see you brought back home on a stretcher, you understand?” There could be no question of my turning back. For her sake I was prepared to play the clown as well as the hero.

  I must also confess that, in spite of my fourteen years, I still believed, just a little bit, in fairy tales. I believed in the magic wand and, when I risked myself on the court, I was not absolutely sure that some just and indulgent Power might not intervene in my favor, that some almighty and mysterious hand might not guide my racquet—and it was just possible that the balls themselves would suddenly come to my rescue. But it was not to be: the miracle was probably busy elsewhere. I am bound to admit that this failure of the wonderful to materialize has left so deep a mark on me that I sometimes wonder whether the story of Puss in Boots is not, perhaps, just an invention, and whether the mice really came in the night and sewed buttons on the coat of the Tailor of Gloucester. In short, at forty-four, I am beginning to ask myself certain questions. But my life as a champion of the world has taken a lot out of me, and too much attention should not be paid to my occasional and passing doubts.

  When the coach at last took pity on me, and I went back to the lawn, my mother welcomed me as though I had not disgraced myself. She helped me on with my pullover, she wiped my face and neck with her handkerchief. Then she turned to the audience. How can I describe the silence, the very attentive and reflective manner in which she stared at them with just a trace of an almost inviting smile on her tightly pressed lips? The mockers seemed to be just a shade put out of countenance, and the beautiful ladies, picking up their straws, lowered their eyelashes and gave all their attention to their lemonade. Some vague, humble cliché about the female defending her young may have occurred to them. My mother, however, had no need to go into action. The King of Sweden saved us and the guests from a scene that would be too awful even to try to imagine. The old gentleman touched his straw hat and with infinite courtesy and kindliness—though it used to be reported that he was not an easy man to get on with—said: “I think that these gentlemen will agree with me: we have just witnessed something quite admirable. . . . Monsieur Garibaldi”—and I remember that the word “Monsieur” had a more than usually sepulchral sound on his lips—“I will pay this young man’s subscription: he has shown both courage and determination.”

  Ever since then I have loved Sweden. But I never again set foot in the Parc Impérial.

  CHAPTER 20

  All these misadventures had the effect of making me seek the privacy of my room more and more and devote myself fully to writing. Attacked by reality on every front, forced back on every side and constantly coming up against my own limitations, I developed the habit of seeking refuge in an imaginary world where, by proxy, through the medium of invented characters, I could find a life in which there were meaning, justice and compassion. Instinctively and, so far as I know, unprompted by any literary influence, I discovered in myself a sense of humor, that extraordinary and blessed weapon which makes it possible to take the sting out of reality just when it is preparing to strike. All along my road, humor offered me a constant protection; behind its armor, I felt invincible and secure; it has been a heartening companion, a source of strength, helping me to endure and to prevail, until it has become a living presence, almost a deity, a miracle that has never failed to work. To humor I owe my only genuine triumphs over adversity. No one has ever succeeded in wrenching that weapon from me, and I am the more willing to turn it against myself since, behind the disguise of the “I” and the “me” at which I thus strike out, it is really with the very essence of our human condition that I am at odds. Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him. Some of my “friends” who are entirely devoid of it say behind my back how grieved they are to see me, in my writing and in my life, always turning its red iron against myself. They speak, the poor darlings, who are so up to date on every piece of Freudian schmaltz, of masochism, of self-hatred and even, when I involve my nearest and my dearest in such liberating and triumphant exercises, of exhibitionism and caddishness. I pity them. The truth of the matter is that the “I” does not exist, and if “me” seems the target, it is against the human situation as a whole, underlying all its ephemeral incarnations of “I” or “me,” that I thrust that favorite weapon of mine; it is with our fraternal predicament that my laughter and derision try to come to grips, probing for something much deeper and more significant than myself; it is against the biological, moral, spiritual and metaphysical servitude that has been imposed on us from outside, dictated to us like some ugly Nuremberg law, and not only against my own shortcomings that I raise my mocking voice. In human relationships, this misunderstanding has been for me a constant source of solitude, since nothing isolates one more than to stretch out the brotherly hand of humor to those who sit in blind and pompous self-esteem behind the thick walls of their pathetic little Kingdom of “I.”

  About that same time, too, I at last began to take an interest in social problems and to wish and write for a world in which women would not be condemned to carry their children on their backs. But I knew already that social justice would never mean to me more than a first step and that I was really demanding of my fellow men that they should become full masters of their fate. I came to think of Man as a revolutionary attempt, as an uprising against the basic facts of his own biological limitations. Whenever I noticed new marks of age and fatigue on my mother’s face, I boiled with an almost unbearable sense of injustice, and my determination to reform the world and make of it an honorable place grew with each beating of my heart. I wrote far into the night.

  Our financial position was once again deteriorating. The shock waves of the economic crisis of 1929 had at last reached the Riviera and we were passing through difficult times.

  My mother turned one of the rooms of our flat into a kennel where people could board their dogs, cats and birds; she read hands in restaurants and night clubs, took in lodgers, assumed the management of a commercial building and acted as agent in one or two property deals. I helped her as best I could, in her financial struggles, by trying to write an immortal masterpiece. Occasionally I read aloud to her some of the passages of which I was especially proud, and she never failed to give me all the warm admiration I expected of her. I remember, however, that, on one occasion, when she had been listening to one of my poems, she repeated once more with a sort of shyness: “I have the feeling that you’ll never have much practical sense in your life, though why that should be I don’t know.”

  It is true that, at school, my marks in the exact sciences remained deplorable up till the time of my graduation. At my oral examination in chemistry, M. Passac, the examiner, asked me to tell him what I knew about plaster and all I could find to say was: “Plaster is used in making walls.”

  He waited patiently. Then, since it appear
ed that I had nothing more to say, he remarked: “Is that all?” I gave him a haughty look and, turning to the audience of parents and fellow students, I exclaimed dramatically: “Is that all, indeed! Do away with walls, sir, and ninety-nine per cent of our civilization would collapse!” My mother, who sat in the gallery, applauded loudly and I was saved from failing at my examination only by the exceptionally good marks I had gotten in literature.

  Business was going from bad to worse and, one evening, after my mother had spent some time in tears, she sat down at the table and wrote a long letter to somebody. Next morning I was told to go to a photographer, and there a picture was taken of me in a blue blazer with my eyes raised to the light. The photo was enclosed in the letter and, after hesitating for several days and keeping the envelope locked in a drawer, my mother finally put it in the mail.

  She spent that evening bent over her strongbox, rereading a packet of letters tied with blue ribbon.

  She must at that time have been fifty-two. The letters were old and crumpled. I found them in 1947 hidden away in the cellar. I have read and reread them several times.

  A week later, a money order for five hundred francs arrived, from Paris. It had the most extraordinary effect upon my mother. She looked at me with gratitude. It was suddenly as though I had done her some tremendous service. She came close to me, took my face between her hands and studied my every feature with astonishing intensity. There were tears in her eyes and a curious feeling of embarrassment came over me. All of a sudden I had the feeling that I was someone else.

  For the next eighteen months the money orders continued to reach us, though somewhat irregularly. We entered on a glorious period of peace and prosperity. I was allowed to have a racing bicycle, painted bright orange. I was given two francs a day pocket money and, on my way home from school, I sometimes stopped in the flower market where, for fifty centimes, I bought a sweet-smelling bouquet, which I gave to my mother. In the evenings I took her to hear the gypsy orchestra at the Royal. We stood on the pavement instead of going onto the terrace, where drinks were compulsory. My mother adored gypsy orchestras: together with guards officers, Pushkin’s death in a duel, and champagne drunk from women’s slippers, they symbolized for her all that was most romantically depraved in the world. She always warned me against gypsy girls, who, according to her, were one of the greatest dangers threatening my future, for they would ruin me physically, morally and financially, and lead me straight to tuberculosis. I was pleasantly titillated by this prospect, which, I am sorry to report, never materialized. The only gypsy girl in whom I ever took an interest as a young man—and then only because of the tempting descriptions which my mother had lavished on me some years earlier—did no more than steal my wallet, my silk scarf and my wrist watch before I even had time to turn round, let alone to catch tuberculosis.

  I have always dreamed of being ruined, physically, morally and financially, by a woman: it must be marvelous thus to make something of one’s life. I may, even now, get tuberculosis but, at my age, I doubt whether it will be in just that way. Nature has its limits. Besides, something tells me that neither guards officers nor gypsy girls are quite what they used to be.

  After the concert, I would give my mother my arm and we would sit on the Promenade des Anglais. The chair there had to be paid for, too, but that was a luxury we could afford.

  By carefully choosing one’s chair, one could so arrange matters as to be within hearing distance of two orchestras—one at the Lido, the other at the Casino—and so get a double dose of music free. As a rule, my mother took with her, discreetly concealed at the bottom of her elegant bag, some black bread and a few dill pickles wrapped in a newspaper. It was therefore possible at that time, for anyone watching the crowd of idlers on the Promenade des Anglais, to see a distinguished white-haired lady and a youth in a blue blazer, seated unostentatiously with their backs to the railing, listening to music and busily munching dill pickles à la russe with black bread, on a sheet of newspaper spread over their knees. It was delicious. But it was not enough. Something even more delicious was missing. Mariette had awakened a hunger in me which no pickle in the world, not even the dilliest, could now appease. It was already two years since she had left our employment, and yet the memory of her was still in my blood. It kept me awake at night. I wish to express here my profound gratitude to that good French woman, who opened for me the door to a better world. Thirty years have passed but I can still say, perhaps more truthfully than the Bourbons, that I have learned nothing since and forgotten nothing. May her old age be happy and tranquil and her conscience at peace in the knowledge that she has done her best with what the good God gave her. . . . I feel that I may start to cry if I go on any longer in this vein, so I had better stop.

  Unfortunately, Mariette was no longer there to give me a helping hand. My blood was in such a state of ferment and was pounding with such violence, such insistence, against the door, that the three kilometers which I swam early each morning were powerless to cool it. Seated with my mother on the Promenade des Anglais, I looked at all the enticing young givers of good French bread who passed before my eyes. I drew deep breaths, bowed my head and remained there, utterly dejected, with my pickle in my hand.

  But the oldest civilization in the world, with its smiling understanding of human nature and its frailties and failings, with its sense of compromise and arrangements, came to my rescue. The Mediterranean has lived too long with the sun to treat it as an enemy, and leaned above me with its face of a thousand absolutions.

  The Nice lycée, which was situated between the Place Masséna and the Esplanade du Paillon, was not the only educational establishment that the town could boast. My young friends and I found, in the rue Saint-Michel, a simple and a friendly welcome, at least when the American squadron was not anchored in Villefranche harbor, days of ill omen when the place was out of bounds for us and when dismay reigned in the classrooms, and the blackboard loomed over our heads like the symbol and flag of our melancholy.

  All the same, when one had no more than two or three francs in one’s pocket, it was difficult to “visit,” as they say in the South.

  Consequently, strange things began to happen in the house. First one rug, then another, disappeared, and one day on returning from the Casino, where they were giving Madame Butterfly, my mother was astounded to find that the little dressing table which she had bought the day before, intending to sell it at a profit, had literally vanished into thin air, though all the doors and windows were tight shut. Boundless astonishment showed on her face. She made a detailed examination of the flat to see whether anything else was missing. Most certainly there was. My tennis racquet, my camera, my watch, my winter overcoat, my collection of postage stamps and the set of Balzac which I had just received as a prize in school had all traveled the same route. I had even succeeded, if not in selling, at least in pawning the famous samovar with an antique dealer in the Old Town. What I got for it had at least served to save me momentarily from solitary embarrassment. My mother stood for a while wrapped in thought and then sat down and looked at me. She studied me for a long time with concentrated attention and then, much to my surprise, instead of the dramatic scene which I had been expecting, an almost solemn look of pride and triumph spread over her face. She sniffed noisily, with immense satisfaction, then looked at me again with gratitude, admiration and devotion. At last I had grown into a man. Her struggles had not been in vain.

  That evening she wrote a long letter, in her large, nervous script, still with that look of triumph and satisfaction in her eyes, as though she were in a hurry to announce to someone the fact that I had been a good son. A money order for fifty francs, addressed to me personally, arrived shortly afterward and was followed by many others in the course of a year. For the time being, I was saved. Nevertheless, I was sent to see an old doctor in the rue de France, who, after a good deal of beating about the bush, explained to me that the life of a young man was beset by snares, that the human male was extremely
vulnerable, that poisoned arrows were constantly whizzing past his ears, and that even our daring ancestors, the Gauls, never went into battle without their shields—after which, he gave me a small package. I listened politely, as one should to a venerable elder. But the visit I had paid to the Panopticum in Vilna had enlightened me once and for all and I had long ago determined to preserve my nose intact. I might also have told him that he seriously underestimated the respectability and the scrupulousness of the young women whom we “visited.” Most of them were devoted mothers, and never, never, would they have allowed us to risk ourselves in the wake of all the navies in the world without first being initiated into those rules of prudence which every navigator with a proper respect for the elements should observe.

  Dear Mediterranean! How tolerant and gentle is your Latin wisdom, how sweet and helpful is your knowledge of man, and how indulgently your look of age-old amusement rested on my tormented brow! I come back always to your beaches when the fishing boats return with the setting sun caught in their nets. I have been happy on those pebbles.

  CHAPTER 21

  Our life was entering upon a new phase. I even remember a certain August when my mother went off into the mountains—her first holiday in years—for three days’ rest. I took her to the bus, holding a bunch of violets in my hand. Our parting was heartbreaking. It was the first time we had ever been separated, and my mother cried, thinking, no doubt, of the many separations that lay ahead. The driver, having watched this dramatic farewell for a long time, finally asked with his strong niçois accent, so well suited to emotional outbursts:

  “It’s for a long while that you two are tearing yourselves away from each other?”