A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
along the cobblestone streets of Juan-les-Pins, both men with heads bent down against the wind, their trousers flapping against the rails of their bones, Albert describing the charms of his boyhood summers chez Vidal. They did not look at the recently erected cenotaph listing the names of the Great War dead, those whose bones lay jumbled with the remains of friend and foe in the mass graves of Verdun and Ypres.
“Just promise me,” Jacques raised his head, “that we won’t sing troubadour ballads in the parlor after dinner.”
“Afraid so, old chap,” the last two words in English.
Marcel wailed. M. duPont leaned back as he coasted downhill and allowed the wind to dry his sweaty brow and neck. Marcel’s cry roused Simone from her reverie. She lifted her skirt in her hand, pretending—to no one save herself—not to have heard her son’s wail, and walked down the path. Jacques shrugged his rucksack more firmly onto his back, a soldier headed into battle.
Jacques had been gadding about France with his university chum Albert for nearly a month. The two of them were bound for the penultimate stop on their journey. They were sick of living out of their rucksacks, of drinking weak coffee served by frugal landladies, of the musty scent from their socks, never quite clean after having been washed in cold water sinks of hostels, of their aching feet. Jacques, for his part, was also sick of Albert. (Albert will never grow tired of Jacques. Forty years later he will still be dining out on tales of this ramble: Ah, let me tell you a story about living off the fat of the land. It was years ago, decades, I was traveling with my friend Jacques—Jacques Melville—and here he will pause to let that name sink in—and we came upon a lemon tree, unfortunately surrounded by a stone wall some three meters high…) Albert, aware that Jacques—never lighthearted—was becoming more and more phlegmatic, kept attempting to josh him out of his mood, although as Albert grew more antic, Jacques became more taciturn. Albert was whistling snatches from tunes—It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, The Internationale—holding up his hand to show the fur of sand adhering to his sweaty palm, saying, “Just think, yesterday these grains of sand might have been under the heel of a Bedouin’s camel in the Sahara.” He rabbited on about the effects of the scirocco on the psyche: “Those teetering on the brink of insanity”—illustrating by pretending to walk a tightrope, spreading his arms, then staggering—“may fall over the edge, while for those like you and me,” Albert continued, “it merely heats up the brain a bit, as a glass of absinthe might, bringing a pleasurable touch of insanity—”
“Those like myself, at any rate.” Jacques winked. “After dinner, I shall plead a headache, and excuse myself from the forced after-supper gaiety.”
“You’re such an old stick.”
“I can’t help it,” Jacques said, smiling for the first time since they disembarked from the train. “I was born this way. Most infants wail at birth. My mother says I stared at her as if to say, ‘Why have you brought me here?’”
The hot wind had whipped up Albert’s already curly hair, making it look like spun sugar. When they started on this journey, Albert had a cap in his possession, but it had long since disappeared. He resembled a whirling dervish, but instead of being surrounded by vast skirts, he was surrounded by the ghosts of lost objects: undershorts left to dry on the railings of balconies in pensiones and forgotten there, books left behind on the seats of second-class compartments of railway cars, combs, socks.
M. Dupont, rolling down the hill, his mail bag slung across his chest, saw the tiny figure of Simone starting down the path, and thought: What a devoted wife! M. Dupont didn’t trumpet about his opinions regarding Simone’s faithfulness, as he later kept to himself the fact that she was receiving, in addition to the twice-weekly letters in her husband’s ornate hand, other letters, also written in a masculine hand, with the name J. MELVILLE in the upper corner and a Paris return address. M. Dupont hoarded his secrets with a sense that he had a pile of riches locked within him. A secret told is one no more, and he did not want to squander his treasure. His being so tight-lipped caused consternation amongst his fellow townspeople: not only were we born on this land where the sea seeds our lands with salt as the Romans did the fields of Carthage; not only are we thus dependent on the whims of holiday-makers who may decide, after we have built them hotels with sea views, turned our family homes into lodging houses, set up restaurants and cafés in which they can dine on bouillabaisse and tourte des chasseurs—Oh, yes, madame, it’s very authentic—as a matter of fact, from an old family recipe; who may then decide our town has become a tourist trap and decamp en masse to some other locale to begin the whole process anew; not only are we cursed with the hot winds sweeping in from Africa in the summer, and the cold and fierce mistral in the winter, but we have a postman who shrugs and juts out his lower lip when one tries to wheedle the slightest bit of information out of him—such is our lot in life!
M. Dupont, having reached Simone, and working the pedals of his bicycle so it remained in place, reached into his bag and held the letter aloft.
Simone lifted it to her nose, inhaling the scent of her husband’s Upman cigars, then tucked it into the sash of her dress, and strode off towards the promontory, to the grove of cypresses bent by the wind.
Marcel’s arms and legs cycled furiously, while downstairs his grandmother, in response to Cecile’s question, “Should I go fetch the baby?” said, “No, no! Crying gives his lungs exercise.”
In the front garden of a deconsecrated monastery turned asylum for the local cripples, idiots, and ancients without relations, toward which the postman DuPont was cycling—carrying the bill from the local miller—a woman furrowed her brow, squinting at the work dangling from her knitting needles, invisible to all save her, redid an errant stitch, and set back to her work. Seated next to her, his face turned towards the sun, a blind boy, his left hand hugging his right shoulder, his right hand clasping his left, rocked back and forth. On his way there, the postman Dupont passed another knitter, Mme. Gratoit, one who did not knit garments of air but of wool, who rocked back and forth—although in a chair designed for that purpose, her foot on the cradle of her newest babe, her seventh, all alive and quite healthy, five boys and two girls—with the pride of a gardner with a green thumb.
Jacques Melville was a few years too old to be traipsing about France, carrying a knapsack and wearing clothes in need of the attention of a laundress’ starch and irons. By way of contrast, the man who was to become Simone’s husband, while he had shown up at the Vidal door on foot, had done so because his touring sedan had developed engine troubles, which necessitated him finding a night’s lodging. He’d not only worn a cream-colored linen suit, crisp despite the sodden heat of the day, but he had also presented his card to Mme. Vidal, ivory paper engraved with black: LUC HENRI CLERMONT, ingenieur en chef de la linee Athens-Istanbul, Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens, and did not flinch when Mme. Vidal quoted him a price five francs above her usual charge. (Albert will manage to get a price five francs below the usual by looking imploringly at Mme. Vidal, citing the ties of affection that bound them and that both he and Jacques were students.)
Jacques’ behavior was made even more unusual by the fact that he had a wife and infant son back in Paris. By all rights, he should have progressed to the stage of life where for the holidays one rents a place at the seaside—described as a villa, which proves to be a ramshackle cottage, and where one spends the month battling the sand which finds its way into the chinks between the clapboards of the exterior walls, and from there to the flesh of the half-eaten peach left in the larder, the gaps between one’s toes, the cleft in one’s posterior—and traipsing about in a half-stupor from the sun.
His wife, Sala, knew that such a holiday would not be much of one for the females in the family (Sala’s widowed mother lived with them), what with the ubiquitous sand, the preparing of meals in a kitchen with dented pans and a temperamental gas ring, not to mention the dealings with the local greengrocers, butchers, and fishmongers who saw it as their duty, almost religious in nature, to get the longer end of the stick in their dealings with the summer people. Better