Across the Bridge Read online

  He should not have mentioned in his lecture that the village children were of blank but unusual beauty, that they wanted steep new roads and motorcycles. It might induce plodding, leaden, salacious scholars to travel there and seduce them, and to start one more dull and clumsy race.

  All this he thought late at night in his hotel room and in the daytime as he walked the streets of Helsinki. He visited the Saltnatek consulate, because he was curiously forlorn, like a parent prevented by court order from having any more say in his children’s fate and education. He entered a bookstore said to be the largest in Europe, and a department store that seemed to be its most expensive. On a street corner he bought chocolate ice cream in a plastic cone. He did not return the cone, as he was supposed to. He believed he had paid for it. He crossed a busy road, saying to himself, “The cone is mine. I’m not giving it up.”

  So – he had become grasping. This slight, new, interesting evaluation occupied his mind for some minutes. Why keep the cone? It would be thrown away even in Saltnatek, even in the poorest, meanest dwelling. Children in their collective vision now wanted buses without drivers, planes without pilots, lessons without teachers. Wanted to come into the world knowing how to write and count, or never to know – it was all the same conundrum. Or to know only a little about everything. He saw helmets on a window ledge, ferns growing out of them. By now, the women had been taught to use pebbles for drainage. Saw children tearing uphill on the motorcycles other visitors had brought. Imagining this, or believing he could see it – the two were identical – he understood that he would never go back, even if they would have him. He would live out his six actuarial years on his own half-continent. He would imagine, or think he could see, its pillars rotting, seaweed swirling round the foundations. He would breathe the used-up air that stank of dead sea life. He might have existed a few days past his six more years in the clearer air of Saltnatek. Then? Have fallen dead at the feet of the vacant, thievish children, heard for a second longer than life allows the cadence of their laughter when they mocked him – the decaying, inquisitive old stranger, still trying to trick them into giving away their word for Kingdom Come.

  Across the Bridge

  WE WERE WALKING over the bridge from the Place de la Concorde, my mother and I – arm in arm, like two sisters who never quarrel. She had the invitations to my wedding in a leather shopping bag: I was supposed to be getting married to Arnaud Pons. My father’s first cousin, Gaston Castelli, deputy for a district in the South, had agreed to frank the envelopes. He was expecting us at the Palais Bourbon, at the other end of the bridge. His small office looked out on nothing of interest – just a wall and some windows. A typist who did not seem to work for anyone in particular sat outside his door. He believed she was there to spy on him, and for that reason had told my mother to keep the invitations out of sight.

  I had been taken to see him there once or twice. On the wall were two photographs of Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic, one of them signed, and a picture of the restaurant where Jean Jaurès was shot to death; it showed the façade and the waiters standing in the street in their long white aprons. For furniture he had a Louis Philippe armchair, with sticking plaster around all four legs, a lumpy couch covered with a blanket, and, for visitors, a pair of shaky varnished chairs filched from another room. When the Assembly was in session he slept on the couch. (Deputies were not supposed actually to live on the premises, but some of those from out of town liked to save on hotel bills.) His son Julien was fighting in Indochina. My mother had already cautioned me to ask how Julien was getting along and when he thought the war would be over. Only a few months earlier she might have hinted about a wedding when Julien came back, pretending to make a joke of it, but it was too late now for insinuations: I was nearly at the altar with someone else. My marrying Julien was a thought my parents and Cousin Gaston had enjoyed. In some way, we would have remained their children forever.

  When Cousin Gaston came to dinner he and Papa discussed their relations in Nice and the decadent state of France. Women were not expected to join in: Maman always found a reason to go off to the kitchen and talk things over with Claudine, a farm girl from Normandy she had trained to cook and wait. Claudine was about my age, but Maman seemed much freer with her than with me; she took it for granted that Claudine was informed about all the roads and corners of life. Having no excuse to leave, I would examine the silver, the pattern on my dinner plate, my own hands. The men, meanwhile, went on about the lowering of morality and the lack of guts of the middle class. They split over what was to be done: our cousin was a Socialist, though not a fierce one. He saw hope in the new postwar managerial generation, who read Marx without becoming dogmatic Marxists, while my father thought the smart postwar men would be swept downhill along with the rest of us.

  Once, Cousin Gaston mentioned why his office was so seedily fitted out. It seemed that the government had to spend great sums on rebuilding roads; they had gone to pieces during the war and, of course, were worse today. Squads of German prisoners of war sent to put them right had stuffed the road beds with leaves and dead branches. As the underlay began to rot, the surfaces had collapsed. Now repairs were made by French workers – unionized, Communist-led, always on the verge of a national strike. There was no money left over.

  “There never has been any money left over,” Papa said. “When there is, they keep it quiet.”

  He felt uneasy about the franking business. The typist in the hall might find out and tell a reporter on one of the opposition weeklies. The reporter would then write a blistering piece on nepotism and the misuse of public funds, naming names. (My mother never worried. She took small favors to be part of the grace of life.)

  It was hot on the bridge, July in April. We still wore our heavy coats. Too much good weather was not to be trusted. There were no clouds over the river, but just the kind of firm blue sky I found easy to paint. Halfway across, we stopped to look at a boat with strings of flags, and tourists sitting along the bank. Some of the men had their shirts off. I stared at the water and saw how far below it was and how cold it looked, and I said, “If I weren’t a Catholic, I’d throw myself in.”

  “Sylvie!” – as if she had lost me in a crowd.

  “We’re going to so much trouble,” I said. “Just so I can marry a man I don’t love.”

  “How do you know you don’t love him?”

  “I’d know if I did.”

  “You haven’t tried,” she said. “It takes patience, like practicing scales. Don’t you want a husband?”

  “Not Arnaud.”

  “What’s wrong with Arnaud?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” after a pause, “what do you know?”

  “I want to marry Bernard Brunelle. He lives in Lille. His father owns a big textile business – the factories, everything. We’ve been writing. He doesn’t know I’m engaged.”

  “Brunelle? Brunelle? Textiles? From Lille? It sounds like a mistake. In Lille they just marry each other, and textiles marry textiles.”

  “I’ve got one thing right,” I said. “I want to marry Bernard.”

  My mother was a born coaxer and wheedler; avoided confrontation, preferring to move to a different terrain and beckon, smiling. One promised nearly anything just to keep the smile on her face. She was slim and quick, like a girl of fourteen. My father liked her in flowered hats, so she still wore the floral bandeaux with their wisps of veil that had been fashionable ten years before. Papa used to tell about a funeral service where Maman had removed her hat so as to drape a mantilla over her hair. An usher, noticing the hat beside her on the pew, had placed it with the other flowers around the coffin. When I repeated the story to Arnaud he said the floral-hat anecdote was one of the world’s oldest. He had heard it a dozen times, always about a different funeral. I could not see why Papa would go on telling it if it were not true, or why Maman would let him. Perhaps she was the first woman it had ever happened to.

  “You say that Ber
nard has written to you,” she said, in her lightest, prettiest, most teasing manner. “But where did he send the letters? Not to the house. I’d have noticed.”

  No conspirator gives up a network that easily. Mine consisted of Chantal Nauzan, my trusted friend, the daughter of a general my father greatly admired. Recently Papa had begun saying that if I had been a boy he might have wanted a career in the Army for me. As I was a girl, he did not want me to do anything too particular or specific. He did not want to have to say, “My daughter is …” or “Sylvie does …” because it might make me sound needy or plain.

  “Dear Sylvie,” my mother went on. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes. Has he written ‘marriage’ in a letter signed with his name?” I looked away. What a question! “Would you show me the letter – the important one? I promise not to read the whole thing.” I shook my head no. I was not sharing Bernard. She moved to new ground, so fast I could barely keep up. “And you would throw yourself off a bridge for him?”

  “Just in my thoughts,” I said. “I think about it when Arnaud makes me listen to records – all those stories about women dying, Brünnhilde and Mimi and Butterfly. I think that for the rest of my life I’ll be listening to records and remembering Bernard. It’s all I have to look forward to, because it is what you and Papa want.”

  “No,” she said. “It is not at all what we want.” She placed the leather bag on the parapet and turned it upside down over the river, using both hands. I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.

  “Papa will know what to do next,” she said, altogether calmly, giving the bag a final shake. “For the time being, don’t write any more letters and don’t mention Bernard. Not to anyone.”

  I could not have defined her tone or expression. She behaved as if we had put something over on life, or on men; but that may be what I have read into it since. I looked for a clue, wondering how she wanted me to react, but she had started to walk on, making up the story we would tell our cousin, still waiting in his office to do us a good turn. (In the end, she said the wedding had to be postponed owing to a death in Arnaud’s family.)

  “Papa won’t be able to have M. Pons as a friend now,” she remarked. “He’s going to miss him. I hope your Monsieur Brunelle in Lille can make up the loss.”

  “I have never met him,” I said.

  I could see white patches just under the surface of the river, quite far along. They could have been candy papers or scraps of rubbish from a barge. Maman seemed to be studying the current, too. She said, “I’m not asking you to tell me how you met him.”

  “In the Luxembourg Gardens. I was sketching the beehives.”

  “You made a nice watercolor from that sketch. I’ll have it framed. You can hang it in your bedroom.”

  Did she mean now or after I was married? I was taller than she was: when I turned my head, trying to read her face, my eyes were level with her smooth forehead and the bandeau of daisies she was wearing that day. She said, “My girl,” and took my hand – not possessively but as a sort of welcome. I was her kind, she seemed to be telling me, though she had never broken an engagement that I knew. Another of my father’s stories was how she had proposed to him, had chased and cornered him and made the incredible offer. He was a young doctor then, new to Paris. Now he was an ear specialist with a large practice. His office and secretary and waiting room were in a separate wing of the apartment. When the windows were open, in warm weather, we could hear him laughing and joking with Melle Coutard, the secretary. She had been with him for years and kept his accounts; he used to say she knew all his bad secrets. My mother’s people thought he was too Southern, too easily amused, too loud in his laughter. My Castelli great-grandparents had started a wholesale fruit business, across from the old bus terminal at Nice. The whole block was empty now and waiting to be torn down, so that tall buildings could replace the ochre warehouses and stores with their dark-red roofs. CASTELLI was still painted over a doorway, in faded blue. My father had worked hard to lose his local accent, which sounded comical in Paris and prevented patients from taking him seriously, but it always returned when he was with Cousin Gaston. Cousin Gaston cherished his own accent, polished and refined it: his voters mistrusted any voice that sounded north of Marseilles.

  I cannot say what was taking place in the world that spring; my father did not like to see young women reading newspapers. Echoes from Indochina came to me, and news of our cousin Julien drifted around the family, but the war itself was like the murmur of a radio in a distant room. I know that it was the year of Imperial Violets, with Luis Mariano singing the lead. At intermission he came out to the theatre lobby, where his records were on sale, and autographed programs and record sleeves. I bought “Love Is a Bouquet of Violets,” and my mother and I got in line, but when my turn came I said my name so softly that she had to repeat it for me. After the performance he took six calls and stood for a long time throwing kisses.

  My mother said, “Don’t start to dream about Mariano, Sylvie. He’s an actor. He may not mean a word he says about love.”

  I was not likely to. He was too old for me, and I supposed that actors were nice to everybody in the same way. I wanted plenty of children and a husband who would always be there, not travelling and rehearsing. I wanted him to like me more than other people. I dreamed about Bernard Brunelle. I was engaged to Arnaud Pons.

  Arnaud was the son of another man my father admired, I think more than anyone else. They had got to know each other through one of my father’s patients, a M. Tarre. My father had treated him for a chronically abscessed ear – eight appointments – and, at the end, when M. Tarre asked if he wanted a check at once or preferred to send a bill, my father answered that he took cash, and on the nail. M. Tarre inquired if that was his usual custom. My father said it was the custom of every specialist he had ever heard of, on which M. Tarre threatened to drag him before an ethics committee. “And your secretary, too!” he shouted. We could hear him in the other wing. “Your accomplice in felony!” My mother pulled me away from the window and said I was to go on being nice to Melle Coutard.

  It turned out that M. Tarre was retired from the Ministry of Health and knew all the rules. Papa calmed him down by agreeing to meet a lawyer M. Tarre knew, called Alexandre Pons. He liked the sound of the name, which had a ring of the South. Even when it turned out that those particular Ponses had been in Paris for generations, my father did not withdraw his good will.

  M. Pons arrived a few days later, along with M. Tarre, who seemed to have all the time in the world. He told my father that a reprimand from an ethics committee was nothing compared with a charge of tax fraud. Imagine, M. Pons said, a team of men in English-style suits pawing over your accounts. He turned to his friend Tarre and continued, “Over yours, too. Once they get started.”

  M. Tarre said that his life was a house of glass, anyone was welcome to look inside, but after more remarks from M. Pons, and a couple of generous suggestions from my father, he agreed to let the thing drop.

  As a way of thanking M. Pons, as well as getting to know him better, Papa asked my mother to invite him to dinner. For some reason, M. Pons waited several days before calling to say he had a wife. She turned out to be difficult, I remember, telling how she had fainted six times in eighteen months, and announcing, just as the roast lamb was served, that the smell of meat made her feel sick. However, when my mother discovered there was also a Pons son, aged twenty-six, unmarried, living at home, and working in the legal department of a large maritime-insurance firm, she asked them again, this time with Arnaud.

  During the second dinner Maman said, “Sylvie is something of an artist. Everything on the dining-room walls is Sylvie’s work.”

  Arnaud looked around, briefly. He was silent, though not shy, with a thin face and brown hair. His mind was somewhere else, perhaps in livelier company. He ate everything on his plate, sometimes frowning; when it wa
s something he seemed to like, his expression cleared. He glanced at me, then back at my depictions of the Roman countryside and the harbor at Naples in 1850. I was sure he could see they were replicas and that he knew the originals, and perhaps despised me.

  “They are only copies,” I managed to say.

  “But full of feeling,” said Maman.

  He nodded, as if acknowledging a distant and somewhat forward acquaintance – a look neither cold nor quite welcoming. I wondered what his friends were like and if they had to pass a special test before he would consent to conversation.

  After dinner, in the parlor, there was the usual difficulty over coffee. Claudine was slow to serve, and particularly slow to collect the empty cups. A chinoiserie table stood just under the chandelier, but Maman made sure nothing ever was placed on it. She found an excuse to call attention to the marble floor, because she took pleasure in the icy look of it, but no one picked up the remark. Mme. Pons was first to sit down. She put her cup on the floor, crossed her legs, and tapped her foot to some tune playing in her head. Perhaps she was recalling an evening before her marriage when she had danced wearing a pleated skirt and ropes of beads: I had seen pictures of my mother dressed that way.

  I had settled my own cup predicament by refusing coffee. Now I took a chair at some distance from Mme. Pons: I guessed she would soon snap out of her dream and start to ask personal questions. I looked at my hands and saw they were stained with paint. I sat on them: nobody paid attention.

  My mother was showing Arnaud loose sketches and unframed watercolors of mine that she kept in a folder – more views of Italy, copies, and scenes in Paris parks drawn from life.

  “Take one! Take one!” she cried.

  My father went over to see what kind of taste Arnaud had. He had picked the thing nearest him, a crayon drawing of Vesuvius – not my best work. My father laughed, and said my idea of a volcano in eruption was like a haystack on fire.