A Sport and a Pastime Read online

  I saw before me the calm, the sheltering of many diligent hours while this town of mine exposed itself to me, its only stranger, day by day. Of course, the whole thing was impulsive. I didn’t mention it to a soul, these ideas can vanish. I went no further than imagining the moment I displayed them all for the first time. Morning in the gallery. The prints are being turned over, one by one. Ashes fall softly to the table. A hand distractedly brushes them away. Do you like them? I stand there still fresh with the aura of Europe. Even my clothes were bought there. I wait for the answer. These can make you famous, he says finally. I am dizzied. For a moment I permit myself to believe it.

  “How big is it actually?”

  Billy doesn’t know. He turns to her.

  “It’s very small,” Cristina says.

  “Fifteen thousand,” he guesses.

  “It’s not that small,” I say. “It’s bigger than that.”

  “It’s small,” he warns. “Believe me.”

  Beloved town. I see it in all weathers, the sunlight falling into its alleys like fragments of china, the silent evenings, the viaduct blue with rain. And coming back– this is much later–there are long, clear stretches with fields on either side, and we fly down an aisle of trees, the trunks all white with lime. Roads of France. Restaurants and cemeteries. Black trees and hanging rain. The needle is on one-forty. The axles are cracking like wood.

  The Grand Hotel Saint-Louis. The small court with its tables and metal chairs. Shutters of inside rooms pushed open through a wall of dense ivy. Grillwork is buried within it, forgotten balconies. Above, a section of the sky of Autun, cold, clouded. It’s late afternoon–the green is trembling, the smallest tendrils dip and sway. That penetrating cold of France is here, that cold which touches everything, which arrives too soon. Inside, beneath the coupole, I can see the tables being set for dinner. The lights are already on in the marvelous, glass consoles within which the wealth of this ancient town is displayed: watches in leather cases, soup tureens, foulards. My eye moves. Perfumes. Books of medieval sculpture. Necklaces. Underwear. The glass has thin strips of brass like a boat’s running the edges and is curved on top–a dome of stained fragments, hexagons, hives of color. Behind all this, in white jackets, the waiters glide.

  Small, mirthless town with its cafés and vast square. New apartments rising on the outskirts. Streets I never knew. There are two cinemas, the Rex and the Vox. Water is falling in the fountains. Old women are walking their dogs. Morning. I am reading An Illustrated History of France. There’s a dense mist which has turned the garden white, in which everything is concealed. An absolute quiet. I hardly notice the passing of time. When I go out, the sun is just burning through. The spire seems black. The pigeons are grumbling. There’s always the desire to talk to somebody about this time, I can’t escape it. I start out beneath the long, sulking flank of the cathedral and then begin descending. I know all the streets. Place d’Hallencourt. Rue St. Pancrace, curving down like a woman. I know the fine houses. And, of course, I know some people. The Jobs–she’s the thinnest woman I think I’ve ever seen. The waitress at the Café Foy. Madame Picquet. Now, that–I have to ask Wheatland about her.

  [3]

  THE ELEVATOR RISES, HUSHED, to a splendid apartment above the Avenue Foch. The rooms are filled with people, some of them in evening clothes. The Beneduces have given a small dinner. Everyone else was invited to come by afterwards. Two waiters in white jackets are serving coffee. I stand near the window. Below, through the dark and still fragrant trees, the traffic floats past on headlights. Paris seems wondrous to me now, even a little too rich. I’m strangely devout, I find myself defending the meager life of the provinces as if it were something special. It’s not like the life of Paris, I say, which is exactly like being on some great ocean liner. It’s in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights.

  “There’s Anna Soren,” Billy whispers.

  She has been a famous actress, I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It’s all in silence–she is made out of yesterdays. He is pointing out Evan Smith, whose wife is a Whitney. There are girls who work in the fashion houses, publishing. One meets a certain kind of people here, people with money and taste.

  “Definitely.”

  “There’s Bernard Pajot.”

  Pajot is a writer, short, the face of a cherub with moustaches, enormously fat. His life is celebrated. It begins in the evenings–he sleeps all day. He lives on potatoes and caviar, and a great deal of vodka. He not only looks like, they say he is Balzac.

  “Does he write like him?”

  “It’s enough of a job looking like him,” Beneduce confides.

  I overhear Bernard Pajot. His voice is deep and richly hoarse. He smokes a thin, black cigar.

  “Last night I had dinner with Tolstoi…” he says.

  Behind him are tiers of fine books laid on glass shelves and illuminated from below like an historic façade.

  “…we were talking about things that no longer exist.”

  Beneduce is a journalist, a bureau chief. Straight, brown hair which he wears a little too long, blue eyes, unerring knowledge. He has the calm irreverence one achieves only from close observation of the great. And he knows everybody. The room is filled with marvelous languages. People from Switzerland. People from Mexico. His wife is a lynx. Even from across the room she imposes her assurance, her slow smiles. She’s a friend of Cristina’s, I know her from afternoons on the boulevard. I see her leaving cafés. She favors knit suits, her breasts moving softly within them, but I don’t think she meets men. Her husband is too potent. He could cut them to pieces. He’d know exactly how to do it.

  She’s talking to Billy. He’s very elegant, very slim. Hair, I notice, turning grey along the sides. Everything else has become gold, the chaste gold of cufflinks, a gold watchband, the mesh dense as grain, a gold lighter from Carrier. I don’t know what they’re talking about, nothing, I’m sure it’s nothing because I’ve had a thousand conversations with him myself, but still he can hold her there somehow, Billy, to whom Cristina used to whisper in those early days that she wanted to leave the party and go make a little boom-boom. He has that white line of a scar on his mouth. One’s eyes always fall to it. He lights her cigarette. Her head is bent forward a little. Now it straightens up. They continue to talk. I notice she’s never really still. She seems to writhe in one’s gaze with slight, almost imperceptible movements.

  I wander away towards more quiet regions of the apartment which is very large. The ceilings become silent, the voices fade. It seems I am entering an older, a more conventional household. The dining room is empty and dark. The table is just as it was, not cleared. The cloth is still spread on it, the chairs are in disarray. Glass plates bear the remnants of brie and the halves of pears already becoming brown. In front of the windows is a zone of tall plants, a conservatory through which noise does not penetrate, through which, in the daytime, the light diffracts. It is a room in which I can imagine the silence of leisurely mornings, the pages of Le Figaro turning softly as Maria Beneduce glances over them, the pages of the Herald Tribune. She is in a short robe printed with flowers. She drinks black coffee stirred with a tiny spoon. Her face is natural and unpainted. Her legs are bare. She is like a performer backstage. One loves this ordinary moment, this pause between the brilliant acts of her life.

  Suddenly someone is behind me.

  “Did I scare you?” Cristina says, smiling.

  “What? No.”

  “You jumped about a foot,” she says. “Come on, I want you to meet somebody.”

  A friend from Bristol, Tennessee, she tells me as she leads me back. No, but I’m going to like her, she’s very funny. She’s married to a rich, rich Frenchman. She puts flowers in all the bidets. He gets furious. Already I dread her.

 
People are still coming in, even this late, appearing after other dinners, the theatre. Beneduce is guiding a handsome trio into the room, a man and two stunning women in suede boots and tightly belted coats. Mother and daughter, Cristina tells me. He’s marrying them both, she says. Near the bar Anna Soren listens to the conversation around her with a wavering, a translucent smile. She doesn’t always know who’s speaking. She looks at the wrong person. Her false eyelashes are coming loose.

  “You know something?” Cristina says. “You’re the only friend of Billy’s I like.”

  It pleases but disturbs me, this remark. I’m not sure what it means, I just have the feeling it will prove to be fatal. I don’t want to answer or even to appear as if I’ve heard.

  “They’re all illiterates,” she tells me.

  Through the crowd a woman is approaching.

  “Isabel!” Cristina cries. It’s her friend.

  There is no way to begin except with admiration for Isabel who is forty and dressed in a beautiful, black Chanel suit with silver buttons and a ruffled, white shirt. On her finger is a ring with a large diamond, a perfectly round diamond that catches every piece of light, and her smile is as dazzling as her clothes. There’s a young man with her whom she introduces.

  “Phillip…” Her hand flutters hopelessly, she’s forgotten his name.

  “…Dean,” he murmurs.

  “I’m the worst in the world,” she says, the words drawling out. “I just seem to forget names as fast as people can tell them to me.”

  She laughs, a high, country laugh.

  “Now, don’t take it to heart,” she tells him. “You’re the best-looking thing in this room, but I’d forget the name of the President himself if I didn’t already know it.”

  She laughs and laughs. Phillip Dean says nothing. I envy that silence which somehow doesn’t disgrace him, which is curiously beautiful, like a loyalty we do not share.

  “He’s been traveling in Spain,” she says, “isn’t that right?”

  “Spain!” Cristina says.

  His face seems to show it. There still remain the faint, lustrous tones of journeys in an open car.

  “I love Spain,” Cristina says.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Oh,” she says, “many times.”

  “Barcelona?”

  “I love it.”

  “And Madrid…”

  “What a city.”

  “We went to the Prado every day,” he says.

  “I love the Prado.”

  “What is it?” Isabel says.

  “The museum.”

  “The museum?” she says. “Why, I love it, too. I forgot what it was called.”

  “It’s the Prado,” he says.

  “Why, that’s right. I remember it now.”

  “What were you doing in Spain?” Cristina asks.

  “I was just traveling,” he says.

  “All alone?”

  Images of a young man in the dun-colored cities of late afternoon. Valencia. Trees line the great avenues. Seville at night, the smell of dust that has settled, the smell of oleander, richer, green. In front of the big hotel two porters are hosing the sidewalk.

  “No, I was with my father,” he says.

  Suddenly I like him. Cristina can’t take her eyes away. She asks when he was born, and it turns out he’s a Sagittarius which is a very good sign.

  “Really?”

  “It’s one of the best for me,” she says. “Scorpio is the worst.”

  “I’m a Libra,” Isabel says and laughs. “Isn’t that right?”

  Dean has a small, straight mouth and wide-set, intelligent eyes. Hair that the summer has dried. It’s of schoolboy heroes that I am thinking, boys from the east, ringleaders, soccer backs slender as girls.

  “You have a great face,” Cristina says. She is seized with a sudden gaiety. “You know, I’d like to do a painting of you.”

  Isabel laughs. The evening has only begun.

  At three in the morning–Cristina never goes to bed when she’s drinking–we are wandering through the disorder of les Halles. The air is chilly at this hour, noises seem to ring in it. The workmen glance up from their crates at the unmistakable sound of high heels. Isabel is talking. Cristina. They are pointing everything out. We trail foolishly between great barricades of fruit and produce, past empty bars, through the carts and trucks. Finally we emerge at the roaring, iron galleries where meat is handled. It’s like coming upon a factory in the darkness. The overhead lights are blazing. The smell of carnage is everywhere, the very metal reeks with an odor denser than flowers. On the sidewalk there are wheelbarrows of slaughtered heads. It’s right out of Franju and that famous work which literally steams of it. We stare down at the dumb victims. There are scores of them. The mouths are pink, the nostrils still moist. Worn knives with the edge of a razor have flensed them while their eyes were still fluttering, the huge, eloquent eyes of young calves. The bloody arms of the workers sketch quickly. Wherever they move, the skin magically parts, the warm insides pour out. Everything is swiftly divided. An animal which two minutes ago was led to them has now disappeared. Cristina draws her white coat around her like a countess.

  “I’m going to have nightmares,” she says.

  “We’re really going to sleep sometime?” Billy asks.

  “Let’s go to the pig place,” Isabel says.

  “Sweetheart, where is it? Isn’t it right around here?”

  “It’s just down the street,” Billy says.

  It takes us ten minutes to find it. Of course, there’s an enormous crowd, there always is this time of night. Taxis are waiting with their lights on dim. Cars are parked everywhere. The restaurant is filled. There are tourists, wedding parties, people who’ve been to cabarets, others who’ve stayed up in order to visit the famous market. It’s said they are planning to move it to a location outside the city, it will soon be gone.

  Somehow we find a table. Billy is rubbing his hands. There’s a delicious odor of rich, encrusted soup which is the specialty. Cristina doesn’t want any, she wants wine.

  “It’s not good for you, you know that,” Billy tells her. She’s had jaundice, she was in bed for months. “Why don’t you just have some soup?”

  “You have it,” she says.

  “Bummy…”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to order it for you.”

  “Go right ahead,” she says. She turns and gives us a brilliant smile.

  The crowd is thick. The waiters struggle to get through. They seem to hear nothing, or it has no effect. The patrons are multiplying as if in a dream. Incredible faces on every side, Algerian, bony as feet, cardboard American, the pink of French. Isabel is laughing, laughing. She claps her hand over her mouth and rocks back and forth a little. She’s telling about an argument that started when her husband was packing for a trip. He was shouting at her in French.

  “Now, you obey me this instant,” he said.

  “I will not.” She performed some angry, little stamps.

  “Stop doing that with your feet.”

  “I won’t.” Laugh, laugh.

  Of course, he adores her, I know they’re going to tell me that.

  “Don’t ever marry a Frenchman,” she says. Then she laughs. She is hugging Coco, her poodle, and laughing. She is opening boxes from Lanvin, the tissue crashing as she brushes it aside. The telephone rings, and it’s one of her friends. She laughs and laughs, she talks for hours.

  “Do you live in Paris?” Dean asks me.

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you live in Paris?” he says.

  Isabel is telling about her husband’s family. She’s sick of them. All they’re interested in is their grandbaby, she says. I explain I’m living in the Wheatlands’ house. It’s in a little town.

  “You know Dijon?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s near Dijon.”

  “It’s in the center of France,” he decides.

  “The very heart
. It’s a small town, but it has a certain quality. I mean, it’s not rich, it’s not splendid. It’s just old and well-formed.”

  “What town is it?”

  “I doubt if you’ve ever heard of it. Autun.”

  “Autun,” he says. Then, “It sounds like the real France.”

  “It is the real France.”

  “He’s crazy,” Billy warns.

  It’s almost five in the morning when we drive Isabel home. There are just the four of us left, Dean has gone. I am exhausted. I feel as if I am entering a grave crisis of the soul. The streets are completely abandoned. The sky has begun to pale. We pull up before a building on the Avenue Montaigne, Billy takes her to the door. I stay in the car with Cristina, our heads leaning back, our eyes closed.

  “He’s a nice boy,” she says. “Don’t you wish you were that young again?”

  “I’m not that old.”

  “Baby…” she says soothingly.

  “I only feel it.”

  “No, you look very young. Really. You look as if you could still be in school.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What were you like then?” she says sleepily.

  “It’s too long ago.”

  “No, really, what were you like?”

  “I was the idol of my generation.” I can hear her head move.

  “Didn’t you know that?” I tell her.

  The door opens, it’s Billy. He slumps down in the seat. We start to drive.

  “Let’s go somewhere for a drink,” Cristina says.

  He is silent.

  “Billy?”

  “Do you really want to?”

  “Where can we go?”

  “The Calvados,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says, “let’s go there.”

  [4]