Promise at Dawn Page 17

  He left the room and it was suddenly as if he had left me all his anxiety and doubts. This was perhaps her last chance—our last chance. But I knew already that it wasn’t going to be easy to convince her.

  I decided to approach my mother on the subject after her return from the market—she was then usually in her best mood, as if this daily visit to her kingdom helped her to face the rest of the world with tolerance and indulgence. I put my finest clothes on, had a haircut, borrowed one of the painter’s ties, a splendid silk affair in blue, embroidered with silver horsemen, bought an enormous bouquet of red roses of the most expensive kind—“Velvet Dawn,” they were called—and about 10:30 A.M. found myself pacing the lobby, my heart beating with a nervousness that only Mr. Zaremba, who was cringing in his room, could understand. This was an important moment in my life and I was fully aware of it. It was not that I was anxious to shrug off some measure of the heavy burden of responsibility toward my mother, although I admit that this played a certain part in my wishful thinking. I also fully realized by now that the strange man of the world with the drooping mustache was looking for a mother rather than a wife, but he was a gentleman and I longed to see my mother holding the arm of someone who had better manners, less cruelty or indifference than life itself. Truly, the fact that his paintings sold so well threw a shadow of doubt over his artistic capacities—but, after all, one great artist in the family was quite enough, and this part I, quite naturally, saw falling to myself. Also I had read enough of the history of painting to know that one couldn’t be both a great artist and a gentleman, and it was a gentleman that we were acquiring and not his art.

  My mother found me in the lounge with my bouquet of flowers, which I presented silently to her, feeling a strange obstacle in my throat. She buried her face in the flowers with delight and then looked at me with apprehension, for they were quite obviously beyond my means.

  I gestured to her to sit down and she settled in a chair with the bouquet on her knees, silent and suspicious, and quite obviously prepared for the worst.

  “What’s happened?” she said.

  “Listen,” I said.

  She listened; But it wasn’t easy to find the words.

  “He is a gentleman,” I began bluntly.

  That was quite enough. She knew instantly what it was all about. She took the bouquet of flowers and threw it across the room with a violent, large and final gesture. The bouquet hit a vase and the vase smashed on the floor. Lina, the Italian maid, rushed in, took one look at my mother’s face and rushed out.

  “He has a house in Florida,” I said desperately.

  “You want to get rid of me,” my mother said.

  She began to cry. I didn’t know what to say. Or rather, I knew only too well what I wanted to say, but those were desperate words and I could not bring myself to utter them. I wanted to tell her that this was her last chance, that there would never be another man, that she needed company, that I couldn’t be with her forever, that sooner or later I would go my own way and she would be alone, that there was nothing that my love couldn’t accomplish for her except that one thing, except renouncing my own life. And as those thoughts were filling my mind and while I was fighting away the words that were ready to express them, it appeared to me that, in a way, I was trying to get rid of her, after all, of her overpowering love, of her overwhelming emotional pressure on me.

  “It’s just that I don’t want you to work so hard,” I said rather lamely. “I can’t help you, yet. He can.”

  “I am not going to adopt a middle-aged son with graying mustaches,” my mother said. “There’s something very wrong with him. His paintings sell; it’s unnatural. I don’t think we can trust him.”

  “He’s a very distinguished man,” I pleaded. “He has beautiful manners. He dresses well. He . . .”

  And it was then that I made the final and fatal mistake. I underestimated my mother’s youth of heart and her womanhood.

  “He respects you, and he will always treat you like a gentleman,” I said.

  My mother’s eyes filled with tears. She rose from her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “I know that I am old. I know that there are things in my life that are gone forever; but I loved a man once, very much. It was a very long time ago—and I still love him. He didn’t respect me and he wasn’t a gentleman. But he was a man. And I am a woman—an old woman, but I have memories. I have one son and that’s enough for me—I won’t adopt another.”

  We stared silently at each other for one long, heartbreaking moment. She knew exactly what was going on in my mind: she knew that I was dreaming of escape. But there was no escape—only loneliness. Her loneliness—and mine today.

  It only remained for me now to break the news to my poor friend. It wasn’t an easy task and I liked him enough, and loved my mother enough, to feel sad for him, for her and for myself. I just didn’t know how to convey this message of rejection without hurting him deeply, for if it is difficult to tell a man that a woman doesn’t want him for a husband, it is even more difficult to tell a little boy that he has once more lost a mother. I went to my room and sat gloomily on my bed, staring at the floor and smoking a cigarette. I always had a strong reluctance to hurt people, which is always the best way of hurting oneself. Finally, I hit upon an idea that seemed to be both tactful and eloquent enough. I opened my cupboard. I took the blue silk tie with the silver horses on it, the camera, the silk shirts, the pajamas, the fountain pen and all the other precious things that I had shared with my friend for so long. I took off the watch from my wrist Then I marched upstairs and knocked on his door. There was a faint, rather shaky “Come in”; and I went in. Mr. Zaremba was sitting in a chair, a very pale, immobile and, it seemed to me suddenly, very old man. He didn’t ask any questions. He just looked on silently, with his hurt eyes, as I put all my treasures gently on his bed. Then we remained silent for a moment, avoiding each other’s eyes, for there was nothing more to say.

  He took the train the next morning, very early, without saying good-by. He left behind the blue tie with the silver horses, carefully wrapped in white paper, and the maid gave it to me when I returned from school. I still have it somewhere, but I seldom wear it: I feel that it makes me look older than my age. I am still quite a few years younger than he was then, twenty eight years ago.

  CHAPTER 23

  Toward the end of that year, I enrolled in the law school of the University of Aix-en-Provence, and left Nice in October, 1933. My mother and I were not to see each other again till Christmas and our farewells were heart-rending. Under the eyes of my fellow passengers I tried hard to assume a manly and faintly ironic expression, while my mother, transformed suddenly into a bent old woman, and looking half her normal size, stood staring at me, with her mouth hanging open in agonized incomprehension. When the bus started, she took a few steps along the pavement, then stopped and began to cry. I can still see in her hand the little bunch of violets which I had given her. I turned myself into a statue, helped in my efforts, I must confess, by the presence of a pretty girl who had her eyes upon me. In order to give my best, I have always felt the need of an audience. I struck up an acquaintance with the girl in question, in the course of the journey. She ran a delicatessen shop in Aix, she told me, and went on to say that she had only with difficulty refrained from crying during that good-by scene, and I heard again those words which I was beginning to know so well: “Anyone can see that your mother adores you”—spoken with a sigh, a dreamy look and a flicker of curiosity.

  My room in the rue Roux-Alphéran at Aix cost sixty francs a month. My mother, at that time, was making five hundred. Of this a hundred went for insulin and doctors’ fees, another hundred for cigarettes and sundry expenses. The rest was for me. In addition there were what my mother called “the little extras.” Almost every day the Nice bus brought me some provisions abstracted from the storeroom of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts and, gradually, the sloping roof round my attic window began to resemble a stand in the Buffa Market. Th
e wind set the strings of onions shaking; the eggs lay in a row in the gutter, much to the astonishment of the pigeons; the cheese swelled under the rain; the hams, the legs of mutton and the joints looked like a still life against the background of tiles. Nothing was ever forgotten, neither the dill pickles, nor the mustard made with tarragon vinegar, the Greek halva, nor the dates, figs, oranges and nuts, and to all these good things our friends of the Buffa Market added their own particular specialties: M. Pantaleoni’s pizza made with cheese and anchovies; M. Peppi’s “garlic pasties,” a wonderful invention of his own which looked like perfectly ordinary pie crust, but melted in your mouth to an accompaniment of a succession of unexpected flavors—cheese, anchovies, mushrooms, ending suddenly in an apotheosis of garlic such as I have never since met with; to say nothing of whole quarters of beef, sent by M. Jean in person—the only authentic boeuf sur le toit, if I may say so, with apologies to the famous Paris night club of that name. The reputation of my larder spread rapidly in the Cours Mirabeau, and, as a result of it, I made a great many friends—a poet guitarist called Sainthomme; a young German student and writer whose ambition it was to fecundate the North by the South, or vice versa, I forget which; two students who were attending the philosophy lectures of Professor Segond; and, of course, my delicatessen girl, whom I met again in 1952, by which time she was the mother of nine children—a proof that Providence had kept a careful eye on me, since she never caused me a moment’s anxiety. I spent my free time at the Café des Deux Garçons, where I wrote a novel under the plane trees of the Cours Mirabeau. My mother sent me frequent letters, couched in lapidary terms, exhorting me to show courage and tenacity. They resembled the proclamations issued by generals to their troops on the eve of defeat, pulsating with promises of victory and honor, so much so, indeed, that when, in 1940, I read upon the walls that unforgettable “We shall conquer because we are the stronger,” issued by the Reynaud Government, I thought of my own especial commander in chief with tender irony. I often thought of her getting up at six o’clock in the morning, lighting her first cigarette, boiling the water for her injection, sticking the needle of the syringe with its load of insulin into her thigh, then snatching up a pencil and scribbling her order of the day, slipping out to post it before going to the market: “Courage, my son; you will return home crowned with laurels. . . .” Yes, it was as simple as that, and she never hesitated before the oldest and most naïve cliches of the human race. I think that she wrote those letters more to convince herself than me, and to bolster up her own courage. She also begged me not to fight any duels, for she had always been haunted by the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov. Since my literary genius was, in her eyes, the equal of theirs, she was afraid that I might be the third, if I may so express it. I was not neglecting my literary labors, far from it. A new novel was soon finished and sent off on the round of publishers. For the first time, one of them, Robert Denoel, took the trouble to answer me personally. Apparently, having glanced through a few pages of the manuscript, he had shown it to a well-known psychoanalyst—the Princesse Marie Bonaparte, as it turned out—and now enclosed the conclusions she had come to about the author of Fin des Morts. Her report ran to twenty pages. It was perfectly clear, she said, that I was suffering from a castration complex, a fecal complex, that I had necrophilic tendencies and I don’t know how many other interesting and exciting aberrations. The only thing missing from the list was the Oedipus complex, and I felt a little annoyed to see that even there the championship eluded me. Anyway, for the first time I had the feeling that I was becoming “somebody,” that at last I was beginning to fulfill the hopes my mother had so confidently placed in me.

  Though my book was turned down, I felt much flattered by the psychoanalytic document of which I was the object; I showed it to my friends and they were duly impressed, especially by my fecal complex, which they took to be proof positive of a truly somber and tormented soul. At the Café des Deux Garmons I was undeniably making a mark, and I can say that, for the first time, the light of success touched my brow. Only the delicatessen girl reacted, after reading the document, in the most unexpected way. The demoniac and superhuman side of my nature, the existence of which she had not, thus far, suspected, had the effect of suddenly making her reveal an exigence the satisfaction of which exceeded my powers, demoniac or not. She bitterly reproached me with cruelty when, being endowed, as I was, with a somewhat simple temperament in these matters, I expressed amazement at certain of her whispered suggestions. In short, I fear that I fell far short of my newly acquired reputation. I set myself, however, to cultivate the air of an “homme fatal,” such as I imagined would suit someone afflicted with necrophilic tendencies and a castration complex. I never appeared in public without a pair of small scissors, which I opened and shut in a suggestive manner. When anyone asked me why I carried them about with me, I would say: “I don’t know. I can’t help myself,” at which my friends exchanged meaningful glances. At the Cours Mirabeau, where I went about with a sort of fixed grin, and in law school I soon became known as a disciple of Freud, of whom I never spoke though I always carried one of his books about with me. I typed out twenty copies of the report, which I distributed generously among the young women of the university. I sent two of them to my mother. Her reaction was the same as mine: at last I had become famous and judged worthy of a twenty-page document—and written by a princess too. She insisted on reading it to the patrons of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, and, when I returned to Nice at the end of my first year as a law student, I was received with a great show of interest and spent my holidays most agreeably. The only thing that worried my mother a little was the castration complex: she feared I might hurt myself.

  The Hôtel-Pension Mermonts was thriving. My mother was now making seven hundred francs a month, and it was decided that I should finish my studies in Paris, where I would make a lot of useful contacts. My mother already knew a half-pay Colonel, a former colonial administrator now on the retired list, and a French Vice-Consul in China who had become an opium addict and had come to Nice to undergo a cure. They both showed themselves well disposed toward me, and my mother felt with their backing we had at last a solid base from which to launch into life, and that my future was assured. On the other hand, her diabetes was getting worse, and the increasingly powerful doses of insulin which she was giving herself were producing more and frequent attacks of hypoglycemia. On several occasions, on her way home from the market, she had fallen down in the street in a coma.

  She had, however, discovered a very simple way of averting this threat, since a swoon of that kind, unless immediately diagnosed and treated, was generally fatal. She therefore took the precaution of never leaving the house without pinning a little notice on her cloak: “I am a diabetic: if I become unconscious, please see that I swallow the packet of sugar which is in my bag. Thank you.” This was an excellent idea. It spared us a great deal of anxiety, and enabled my mother to go out each morning, stick in hand, with a renewed confidence. Sometimes, when I saw her walking down the street, a feeling of terrible anguish laid hold on me, a sense of powerlessness and shame, a panic so horrible that a cold sweat broke out on my forehead. Once I timidly suggested that it might be better if I discontinued my studies and found some work to do which would bring in money. She said nothing, looked at me reproachfully, and began to cry. I never again returned to the subject.

  Not once did I hear her complain except about the spiral staircase which led from the restaurant to the kitchens, and which she had to climb twenty times a day. She told me, however, that the doctor had said her heart was sound, and so there was nothing for me to worry about. I was nineteen. I did not have the mentality of a ponce. I suffered cruelly, and became obsessed with the idea that I was a weakling. Against this I struggled as had other men before me who wanted reassurance of their virility. But that wasn’t enough. I was living on her work and on her health. Two years, at least, lay between me and the moment when I could return home with the stripe of a second lieut
enant on my sleeve: the first real triumph of her life. I had no right to refuse her help. My self-respect, my virility, my dignity were irrelevant—they couldn’t matter less, in fact. The legend of my future was what was keeping her alive. For me there could be no question of noble indignation, of high moral attitudes, of posturings and grimacing, of personal pride: those luxurious goodies would have to wait. “I” didn’t matter. I also knew that the cruel lesson I had learned in my flesh and blood since childhood meant that I was condemned to fight for a world where no woman, Chinese, Jewish, Indian or whatever, would have to carry her child uphill on her back: for a world where no one would be left alone. But this disinterested form of self-indulgence would also have to wait. I had to swallow my shame and continue with my race against time in an attempt to keep my promise, to give to an absurd, fond dream at least some small core of reality.

  Two more years of law school still lay ahead, then two years more of military service. . . . I spent up to eleven hours a day in writing.

  One morning, M. Pantaleoni and M. Bucci brought her back from the market in a taxi. Her face was still gray, her hair in disorder, but already she had a cigarette between her lips and a reassuring smile ready for me.

  I do not feel guilty, I am not ashamed of myself. But if my books are filled with so many invocations to dignity and justice, if I make such a to-do about the honor of being a man, that, perhaps, is because I lived until the age of twenty-two on the sweat and toil of a sick and exhausted old woman and I still feel mad at her sometimes.

  CHAPTER 24

  The summer was enlivened by a quite unexpected bolt of lightning. One fine morning a taxi drew up outside the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, and out stepped my delicatessen girl. She made straight for my mother, and staged a tremendous scene—floods of tears, sobs, threats of cut wrists and of swallowed poison. My mother was tremendously flattered. This was everything she had expected of me. At last I had become a man of the world. Not a moment was lost; that same day every stall holder in the Buffa Market was au courant and I was greeted everywhere with respectful glances. The point of view of my “victim” was simplicity itself: it was now my duty to marry her. This she supported with the strangest argument that can ever have been advanced: “He made me read all of Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky,” declared the unfortunate young woman with an expression on her face which would have melted the hardest heart. “What is going to happen to me now? Who will want to marry me?”