Arch of Triumph (28 page)

“Who wouldn’t wish that, Joan?”

“You too?”

“Of course.”

That blue, Ravic thought. That almost colorless blue of the horizon, where the sky plunges into the sea, and then this storm deepening along sea and zenith, up to these eyes which are bluer here than they ever were in Paris!

“I wish we could,” Joan said.

“But we do it—for the moment.”

“Yes, for the moment, for a few days; but then we’ll be going back to Paris again; to that night club in which nothing changes; to that life in a dirty hotel—”

“You exaggerate. Your hotel isn’t dirty. Mine is pretty dirty—except my room.”

She rested her elbows on her knees. The wind blew through her hair. “Morosow says you were a wonderful doctor. It’s a pity things are the way they are with you. Otherwise you could earn a lot of money. Particularly as a surgeon. Professor Durant—”

“How do you happen to hit on him?”

“Sometimes he comes to the Scheherazade. René, the headwaiter, says he doesn’t move a finger for less than ten thousand francs.”

“René is well informed.”

“And sometimes he performs two or three operations in one day. He has a wonderful house, a Packard—”

Strange, Ravic thought. Her face doesn’t change. It is if anything even more captivating than before while she babbles this millennium-old woman’s nonsense. She looks like a sea-eyed Amazon while, with procreative instinct, she preaches bankers’ ideals.
But isn’t she right? Isn’t so much beauty always right? And hasn’t she every excuse in the world?

He saw the motorboat approach in a wave of foam. He did not move; he knew why it was coming. “There come your friends,” he said.

“Where?” Joan had already seen the boat. “Why my friends?” she asked. “They are really more your friends. They’ve known you longer than me.”

“Ten minutes longer—”

“Anyway, longer.”

Ravic laughed. “All right, Joan.”

“I don’t have to go. That’s quite simple. I won’t go.”

“Of course not.”

Ravic stretched himself out on the rock and closed his eyes. The sun at once became a warm golden blanket. He knew what would follow.

“We are not very polite,” Joan said after a while.

“Lovers are never polite.”

“They have both come because of us. To call for us. If you don’t want to go for a ride, the least you can do is to go down and tell them so.”

“All right.” Ravic half opened his eyes. “Let’s simplify it. You go down and tell them I have to work, and go with them. Just as you did yesterday.”

“To work—that sounds odd. Who does any work here? Why don’t you come with us? They like you very much. They were disappointed yesterday when you didn’t come.”

“Oh, God!” Ravic opened his eyes fully. “Why is it that all women love these idiotic conversations? You would like to go for a ride, I have no boat, life is short, we are only here for a few days, why should I behave magnanimously for you now and persuade
you to do what you will do anyway, just to make you feel better?”

“You don’t have to persuade me. I can do it by myself.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were of the same radiant intensity; only her mouth was drawn down for a second—it was an expression flitting across her face so quickly that Ravic could believe he was mistaken. But he knew he was not mistaken.

The ocean beat resoundingly against the rocks of the jetty. It spirited high and the wind carried off a spray of glistening drops. Ravic felt it on his skin like a brief shiver. “That was your wave,” Joan said. “Your wave of the story you told me in Paris.”

“I see—have you kept it in mind?”

“Yes. But you aren’t a rock. You are a block of concrete.”

She walked down to the dock and the whole sky rested on her beautiful shoulders. It was as if she carried it. She had her excuse. She would sit in the white boat, her hair would fly in the wind—and I am an idiot for not going with them, Ravic thought. But I am not yet suited for that role. This too is a foolish arrogance of forgotten days, a quixotism—but what else is left? Blooming fig trees in moonlit nights, Seneca’s and Socrates’ philosophy, Schumann’s violin concerto, and the foreknowledge of loss gained earlier than by others.

He heard Joan’s voice from below. Then he heard the low thunder of the motor. He did not sit up. She would take her place in the stern. There was an island with a cloister somewhere in the sea. Sometimes the cocks crowed from over there. How red the sun shone through one’s eyelids! The soft meadows of youth red with flowers of the expectant blood. The old lullaby of the sea. The bells of Vineta. The magic happiness of nonthinking. He quickly fell asleep.

———

In the afternoon he went to fetch the car from the garage. It was a Talbot which Morosow had rented for him in Paris. He had come down in it with Joan.

He drove along the coast. The day was very clear and almost too bright. He drove across the middle Corniche to Nice and Monte Carlo, and then to Villefranche. He loved the old small harbor and sat for a while in front of one of the bistros on the quay. He strolled about the garden in front of the Casino in Monte Carlo and the suicide cemetery high above the sea; he looked for a grave and stood before it for a long time and smiled. He drove through the narrow streets of Old Nice and across the new part of the city, through the squares with the monuments; then he drove back to Cannes and beyond Cannes up to where the rocks were red and the fishing villages had Biblical names.

He forgot Joan. He forgot himself. He simply opened up to this clear day, to the triad of sun, sea, and land which made a coast blossom while the mountain roads above it were still full of snow. Rain hung over France, the storm roared over Europe—but this narrow coast seemed not yet to know about all that. It seemed to have been forgotten; life had a different pulse beat here; and while the land behind it grew gray with the mist of misery, of foreboding and danger, the sun shone here and it was serene and in its radiance gathered the last foam of a dying world.

A brief dance of moths and gnats around the last light—meaningless like every dance of gnats; foolish as the light music coming from the cafés—a world having become superfluous as butterflies in October, frost already in their little summer hearts, thus it danced, chattered, flirted, loved, betrayed, and deluded its senses for yet a little before the scythes and the big winds came.

Ravic turned the car in St.-Raphaël. The small square harbor was full of sailboats and motorboats. The cafés on the quay had set
up garish umbrellas. Tanned women were sitting at the tables. How it all came back again, Ravic thought—the pleasant, easygoing way of life. The gay temptation, the release, the game—how it came back, no matter from how long ago. Once he too had experienced this butterfly existence and had thought it would suffice. The car shot out of the turn along the street into the glowing sunset.

He returned to the hotel and found a message from Joan. She had called and left word she wouldn’t be back for dinner. He went down to the Eden Roc. There were few people for dinner. Most of the others were in Juan-les-Pins and in Cannes. He sat by the railing of the terrace which was built on the rock like a ship’s deck. Below the surf foamed. The waves emerged from the sunset, dark red and greenish blue, changed to a lighter golden-red and orange, and then took the dusk on their slender backs and scattered it into twilight-colored foam.

Ravic sat on the terrace for a long time. He felt cool and deeply alone. He saw what would happen clearly and without emotion. He knew that he could still prevent it for a while; tricks and clever moves were possible. He knew them and would not use them. This had already gone too far for that. Tricks were something for small affairs. There was only one thing left: to face it. To face it honestly, without self-deception and without dodging.

Ravic lifted the glass of clear light Provençal wine against the light. A cool night, a sea-ringed terrace, the sky filled with the laughter of the sun’s farewell and with the bells of faraway stars—and, cool within me, he thought, a searchlight which penetrates the silent months of the future and sweeps over them and leaves them in the dark again, and I am aware of it, painlessly as yet, but I am also aware that it won’t remain painless, and once again my
life is like a glass in my hand, transparent, filled with alien wine which can’t be kept because it would become flat, would become the stale vinegar of dead passion.

It would not last. There was much too much of a beginning in that other life for it to last. Innocently and thoughtlessly, like a plant toward light, it turned toward the temptation and the variegated multifariousness of a lighter life. It wanted future—and all he had to offer was a bit of shabby present. Nothing had happened yet. But that wasn’t necessary. Things were always decided a long time in advance. Usually one didn’t notice and took the spectacular ending for the decision which, long months before, had come in silence.

Ravic emptied his glass. The light wine seemed to taste different than before. He refilled the glass and drank again. The wine once more had its old light flaky taste.

He got up and drove to Cannes, to the Casino.

He played calmly and for small stakes. He still felt the coolness within him and knew he could win as long as it lasted. He played the last Twelve, the Twenty-seven square and Twenty-seven. After an hour he had won three thousand francs. He doubled his stakes for the square and played Four as well.

He noticed Joan when she entered. She had changed her dress and so she must have returned immediately after he had left the hotel. She was with the two men who had called for her in the motorboat. He knew them as Le Clerq, a Belgian, and Nugent, an American. Joan looked very beautiful. She wore a white evening gown with large gray flowers. He had bought it for her the day before their departure. She had seen it and rushed toward it. “How do you know so much about evening gowns?” she had asked. “It is much better than mine.” And after a second glance, “Also more
expensive.” Bird, he thought, still on my branches but with wings ready for flight.

The croupier pushed some chips toward him. The square had won. He withdrew the winnings and left the stake. Joan went to the baccarat tables. He did not know whether she had seen him. Some people who were not playing glanced after her. She always walked as if she were walking against a light wind and as if she had no goal. She turned her head and said something to Nugent—and suddenly Ravic felt the urge in his hands to push away the chips, to push himself away from this green table, to get up, to take Joan away, quickly, past all the people, doors, away, to an island, perhaps to that island on the horizon off Antibes, away from all this to isolate her and keep her.…

He bet again. The Seven had come up. Islands did not isolate. And the restlessness of the heart could not be confined; one lost easiest what one held in one’s arms—never what one left. The ball slowly stopped rolling. The Twelve. He bet again.

When he glanced up he was looking straight into Joan’s eyes. She stood at the other side of the table and was looking at him. He nodded to her and smiled. She stared at him. He pointed at the wheel and shrugged his shoulders. The Nineteen came up.

He placed his bets and looked up again. Joan was not there any more. He forced himself to remain sitting. He took a cigarette out of the package that lay beside him. One of the attendants gave him a light. He was a fat, bald-headed man, in uniform. “Times have changed,” he said.

“Yes,” Ravic said. He did not know the man.

“It was different in twenty-nine.”

“Yes—”

Ravic no longer knew whether he had been in Cannes in 1929 or whether the man was just talking. He saw that the Four had come up without his having noticed it and he tried to concentrate
better. But suddenly it seemed stupid to him to be gambling here with a few francs in order to be able to stay a few days more. To what purpose? Why had he come here at all? It was confounded weakness, nothing else. That fed on one, slowly, silently, and one noticed it only when one wanted to exert oneself to the utmost and broke. Morosow was right. The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days. She would try to regain it—but with someone else who was capable of making it permanent. I’ll tell her that we have to break up, he thought. I’ll part from her in Paris before it is too late.

He considered going on playing at another table. But suddenly he felt no desire to. One should not do something on a small scale that one had done on a large scale. He looked around. Joan was not to be seen. He went into the bar and drank cognac. Then he went to the parking place to get his car and drive around for an hour.

As he was starting the car, he saw Joan coming. He got out. She came toward him quickly. “Were you going to drive home without me?” she asked.

“I was going to drive through the mountains for an hour and then come back.”

“You are lying! You didn’t intend to come back! You were going to leave me behind with those idiots.”

“Joan,” Ravic said. “Soon you will claim it’s my fault you are with those idiots.”

“It is your fault! I went in the boat with them because I was angry! Why weren’t you in the hotel when I returned?”

“You had a dinner appointment with your idiots.”

She was taken aback for a second. “I only made it because you weren’t there when I came back.”

“All right, Joan,” Ravic said. “Let’s not go on talking about it. Did you enjoy it?”

“No.”

She stood before him, breathless, agitated, impetuous, in the blue darkness of the soft night, the moon was in her hair and her lips were of such a deep red in her pale face that they were almost black; it was February, 1939, and in Paris the inevitable would begin, slowly, crawlingly, with all the little lies, humiliations and disputes; he wanted to leave her before this happened, and yet she was here and there weren’t many more days left.

“Where were you going to drive?” she asked.

“Nowhere in particular. Just drive.”

“I’ll ride with you.”

“But what will your idiots say?”

“Nothing. I have said goodbye to them already. I told them you were waiting for me.”