Leonora (12 page)

12

LOVER OF THE WIND

T
HE BICYCLES TRAVEL WITH THEM
, tied to the back of their convertible car. The French are fanatical about cycling, and Leonora baptises Max's red bicycle
Darling Little Mabel
and gives her orange one the name
Roger of Kildare,
four wheels rolling as one, on towards freedom. Watching the countryside beside the main road passing the car window relaxes them, after all Marie-Berthe's scenes. Leonora's lover tells her how Jean Arp, the friend of his adolescence, saved himself from prison when he stripped off his clothes in front of the authorities: scandal disarms the fearful and prudish. Leonora recounts how as a child, she could hardly manage to distinguish between the French verbs ‘to be' and ‘to have' and that Mlle. Varenne had her repeat them along with her multiplication tables.

The heat makes them open the windows, and the song of the crickets lets them know they have reached the south. The air is heaving with the heat, and Leonora feels it too. ‘This is me', and she suddenly recognises that she can't bear to lose a single second of what she is living, that Max is enormous and envelops everything, that her entire life has been lived for this very moment, that to make a false step or to look behind her could cause her instant death, that nothing to do with Max will ever leave her, not even a single white hair of his head, that his hands on her belly are just like those of the eagle on its prey, and that he won't ever let her go.

Leonora is driving: ‘I don't feel too secure here. In England, Ireland and Scotland, the steering wheel is on the right.' Her lover gives her directions. They cross a long narrow bridge, turn off to the right, and arrive at St. Martin d'Ardèche. There is just enough light for them to notice two squashed hedgehogs in the middle of the road.

‘At long last, you and I are going to live alone together,' says Leonora joyously. ‘I am ready to die in your arms.'

‘I too would die for you. But before I eat you up, let's find somewhere to have supper.'

‘Always so practical.'

They are greeted by the sounds of an inn heaving with breasts and buttocks on the eve of the local fete. The lovers walk towards it hand in hand.

‘I have a room with two beds, without bathroom or board,' Alphonsine, the owner, yells at them as if the pair were deaf.

‘What do you mean? Don't you eat here?'

‘Yes, of course I eat,' she guffaws loudly, ‘it's you two who don't. My mother is too old now to cook, and I don't plan on doing any more work than necessary. You can eat next door, in Marie's house, where she also sells cigarettes.'

‘It's true, I only have a few cigarettes left.' Leonora is getting worried.

‘Perhaps it's better that you start by showing us the bedroom,' orders the painter.

‘It's dirty. After the last five guests, the sheets now stink of bacon.'

Alphonsine spies the bicycles.

‘Those are magnificent. Would you lend me a bike one afternoon, to visit a lover who lives eight kilometres away?'

‘Of course,' replies Max.

An army of flies and any number of spiders have taken up residence in the room, furnished only with a sack of potatoes, a string of garlic and a disused stove.

‘It'll do for now. Let's go and set up camp across the river.'

Marie has a wart just like the Reverend Mother's, back in the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre.

They eat river fish and eels with mustard. They drink wine, but in reality Leonora wants only to drink in her lover, whom by now she can no longer distinguish from herself. The peasants tell them of the annual surges of the Rhône that sometimes flood the village. ‘This year we had a good crop of cherries, and we've also bottled fruit and made jam for you to enjoy, along with a vast quantity of olives in brine.' ‘You must visit the Pont Saint Esprit.' The inhabitants are friendly and, as the couple are a novelty, they watch them walking arm in arm and kissing on street corners. After a while Alphonsine, whom they call Fonfon, knows all about the lovers and becomes their accomplice. Not only does she come to live Max and Leonora's life as if it were her own, but she is also well aware of the dangers stalking them. The presence of the Englishwoman and her lover in St. Martin is the best story she has ever come across.

‘Last night when you were out, a woman phoned you from Paris. She is now on her way here.'

‘It's her. Let's go to Carcassonne, to Joë Bousquet's house. France is large enough for us to find somewhere to hide.'

On the 27th May 1918 at Vailly, near the end of the First World War, twenty-one-year-old Joë Bousquet took a bullet in his back. He now lives with all the windows in his house shuttered. The bullet in his spinal cord restricts him to his bed and to opium for the rest of his life. He claims that thanks to this wound he has learnt that all men are wounded. He writes: ‘Who am I? I float between two personae, that of my heart and the other of my death.'

He is preparing little balls of opium. Max and Leonora smoke with him as their guide. Joë Bousquet, propped up on his pillows in his room, in the perpetual twilight that admits no rays of sunlight, speaks very slowly. Leonora asks him if he does not feel angry at his fate and he replies that even before his accident on the battlefield, he was a lost man.

‘Why?' asks Leonora.

‘Because I was already an addict.'

His life might as well have been ended by the bullet.

‘I am a man blown by the winds, imprisoned by silence and solitude.'

Leonora discovers that Max, in calling her his ‘lover of the wind', uses a title he took from Joë Bousquet – who writes metaphysics and composes allegories for a number of magazines, such as the
Cahiers du Sud.

‘Lover of the wind' describes a plant without roots, pursued by the wind, which everyone tramples and breaks. The villagers call her ‘lover of the wind' to make fun of her, and Jules Michelet confirms that this plant, set in motion by a draught of air, enjoys a particular privilege: it flourishes even in the most violent whirlwinds.

‘Ever since a friend started bringing me hashish from Marseilles, every couple of nights I feel better, because the effect is gentle and lasting.'

Bousquet inhales a big mouthful of smoke, holds his breath and allows a thin stream of it to escape through nearly closed lips.

One day Leonora finds him very pale. Bald, his face of indeterminate age is the colour of marble and he keeps shivering. Under each armpit there are large and spreading patches of sweat.

‘Are you cold? Do you feel all right?' she asks.

‘I am so tired and my stomach aches.' Icy water trickles down from his brow and his spectacles slide down his nose.

Leonora wipes his forehead. To her, a first-time user, the drug doesn't have the same effect as on Max, who appears to be familiar with it; he doubles up swathed in opium smoke and forgets all about Leonora, Joë and Marie-Berthe.

Time stands still. The light shines green, as if they were in an aquarium.

‘You look like a medieval page,' Joë tells Leonora. ‘Carcassonne is the city of troubadours and Cathars. Stay here forever.'

Leonora is becoming restless.

‘You are out of danger here; and away from time. There are no clocks here. I have also decided to remain in ignorance of the date and the day of the week. Calm down and close your eyes.'

Opium has caused Joë Bousquet to reach the sea floor of his dreams and to fall for imaginary women. He confides in Leonora that to love a woman is to become carnally that woman:

‘I have lived as a woman, and I've yearned to give birth and to nourish the offspring with my own essence.'

The bullet lodged in his body follows its own trajectory. The pain debilitates him, opium is the sole remedy for his urinary tract disease, caused by the collapse of his kidneys.

‘Doesn't someone come in to look after you? What do you eat?'

‘I find people so stupid that I prefer to be alone. I eat a lot of stewed fruit. Would you like to taste a sugared fruit? I have lots of different ones, but the plums are the most delicious.'

‘The Red Queen even fed jam to her horses.'

‘Oh yes?' Bousquet sounds interested.

‘She sent me an invitation, decorated with lace, roses and swallows, embossed with letters in gold. I called my chauffeur to take me in my car to the palace but, as he's a total idiot, he had buried the car to grow mushrooms in, and as a result, the engine packed up. His stupidity obliged me to hire a carriage drawn by two horses. At the entrance to the palace, a servant dressed all in red and gold warned me: “The queen went mad last night. She is in the bath tub.”'

Joë Bousquet opens his eyes wide.

‘Which queen? The Queen of England?'

‘The Red Queen.'

‘She's the good one! Do you think they'll bury me too, just like your car?'

‘I think you'll fall to the floor like a plump plum, plop, just like that.'

Bousquet smiles and takes her by the hand.

‘It's a treat to meet you! What do you do to give yourself courage, Leonora?'

‘I sing. Or I repeat “horse, horse, horse, horse, horse” in place of saying my rosary.'

Out of love for life, Joë Bousquet at first wanted to destroy it, but has now accepted to die of it. The years of opium have anaesthetised his pain and muffled the longing to kill himself.

‘Wounded, I became my own wound. I survived in the flesh, the shame of my desires … The last years approach humbly, anxious to assist, each year bearing its own lantern. Long live my disgrace!'

It is a relief for Leonora to escape this room, where nothing enters save opium and the suffering of a poet, pained and painful, still striving to make sense of his circumstances.

13

AUBERGINES

T
HE COUPLE DECIDE TO RETURN
to St. Martin d'Ardèche. Once there, Alphonsine informs them that Marie-Berthe Aurenche came by, looking for Max.

Every morning they slowly make their way down to a river running along a pebbled shore and over stones so white they whiten the water above them. The river changes to a shade of dark green in the deepest pools along the way, then widens and flows smoothly out to sea. They strip and leap off the river bank, Leonora's mane of black hair in stark contrast to all the white. They remain there for hours on end and nobody sees when they embrace, for the river belongs to them alone. When they stretch out in the sun, the white stones retain the echo of their bodies, cradling them to sleep. Max is her guide. Sometimes he takes her by the hand, at others he releases her; he is the superior bird. The river bank is white.

‘Let's go in to the water.'

Her lover pulls her up and they enter the river. As the sun reaches its zenith, his outline begins to blur.

‘The stones want to eat you, to absorb you, I can't see you any more.'

The leafiness of its dark pools prevents her from being entirely swallowed up. ‘Leonora, Leonora, Leonora, Leonora,' Max repeats to her sex, her armpits, her leafy hair, and they make love like last night, like this morning, like right now. The stones form a wall behind them: ‘Soldiers, aim for their hearts, fire!'

The river's whiteness remains etched in their memory. It resembles the high chalky mountains that now surround them. The rocks, carved into a hundred different creatures, remind Max of a man who devoted his life to transforming the countryside into a zoo. He sculpted lions, bears, tigers, centaurs, government ministers and historical personages. The cypresses growing in the cemetery remind him of the wigs worn by women at Court in the eighteenth century.

‘I don't think the villagers are too pleased by our stripping off,' murmurs Leonora.

‘The bears, cats, rats, lambs, dogs and birds cover themselves in skin, hair, feathers and hide, and we never say that they are naked. Prawns, crabs and cockroaches wear their own creaky carapaces. Man is born naked and clothes don't grow on him, he obtains them from other skins, not out of an urge to appear decent but out of necessity. Going around dressed doesn't render us any more virtuous.'

‘Oh no? And what is this thing called virtue?'

‘Virtue is the performance of pleasurable acts.'

‘Then what is vice?'

‘Vice is the failure to perform pleasurable acts. Life is very simple; it consists in being born, dying and, at some point between the two, marrying and having children. All the rest, sacrifice, renunciation, loneliness, lead us only into the sin of sterility.'

‘We are scandalising the local people,' Leonora warns him.

‘That is their problem, not ours. Invite Fonfon to come and bathe with the two of us. Her flesh is so ample on her bones that she is bound not to accept. Decency resides not in her body but in her mind.'

It rains during the night, so next day they set out in search of snails.

‘Don't go up to collect them in the cemetery, because I refuse to cook any you find there. You'll find masses of them on the small wall running alongside Noel's vineyards.'

They hand over four dozen snails to Alphonsine.

‘You have to keep them for three days until they die of hunger,' Max informs Leonora, ‘and then you need to wash them in salt water and vinegar. They produce loads of slime but after all that are nice and clean, ready to be stewed in a garlic sauce. They taste delicious!'

While her lover sleeps, Leonora gets up and inspects a spider spinning down by its thread from the ceiling, dangling in the stripes of sunlight entering between the slats of Venetian blinds. She tries to recall the rhyme Alphonsine taught her: ‘
Araignée du matin, chagrin; araignée du midi, souci; araignée du soir, espoir.
'

The country vineyards enchant Leonora. The peasants care for their vines as if they were children. Wine is the reason the soldiers decided to follow Joan of Arc; wine was what crowned Saint Louis King of France, with the kegs stacked in the cellars, his throne was made from the biggest barrels of the finest wood. Ever since the Middle Ages, peasants have hung vine leaves over their front doors so the good spirits would look kindly upon them, and the harvest prove abundant.

‘The best vintages were 1914 and 1932,' Alphonsine tells her. ‘Some people in these parts bury a live frog underneath each vine because it enhances the quality of the wine.'

At the next table a couple are talking in strong Marseilles accents.

‘Are you camping near here?' Max asks them.

‘Yes, just across the river. The locals say that it is dangerous …'

‘And you wouldn't like to sell us your tent?'

Three days later, Max becomes a camper.

In the shade of the bluff, on the river bank of the Ardèche, the tent resembles a bundle of washing deposited there by a washer-woman. Leonora sits down at the edge of the water to brush her teeth. A few little fish breakfast on toothpaste and drink her saliva. She raises her eyes and spots a village clinging to the mountainside, with white houses and black cypresses.

‘I think we should walk up there.' Leonora points it out to Max, who is busily pretending to be a cobra lying in the sun.

‘Today is far too hot, I really don't like to walk so much in the heat.'

‘We could swim there,' and Leonora indicates the mountain.

‘A mountain can only be climbed,' replies Max, his head breaking the water, surrounded by a halo of fishes.

Whenever he emerges from the water, his eyes are two incredibly beautiful blue fishes, and his head is crowned with frothy white plumes. He stretches himself out beside Leonora.

‘What in the world could I love more than water and hot stones?' he murmurs, rubbing his stomach. ‘How sweet our life is now, Leonora … and next of all, I would like to catch a few of those little fishes and fry them,' he continues with a cruel smile. ‘You squeeze lemon over them before crunching them between your teeth. I'm hungry, go and open one of those boxes and get at the cheese. Bring bread and tomatoes. Oh – and don't forget the wine.'

‘Does sir require anything further?'

‘Grapes, bring them all over here.'

Leonora returns as asked and they eat in the midst of a cloud of flies before falling asleep. When Leonora wakes up, feeling stifled by so much sun, she sees the mountain has turned dark with shadow. Her lover is emitting a series of strangely sad sounds she can't decipher.

‘It wouldn't worry me in the least to climb your mountain now, Leonora.' Max yawns and stretches his arms.

A path leads them to a ruined arch and, the more they climb, the more isolated they feel. The streets are as black as night and fig trees grow inside the houses. A goat emerges from a doorway and stares haughtily down at them.

‘It is not a goat, it is a reptile,' Leonora advises Max.

Either way, it is the only living being they encounter. Across a crevice, they find themselves overlooking a little garden at the end of which is a wall – all that separates them from the void where, many thousands of metres down, the river runs.

At the summit of the mountain, the castle with its three sharply pointed turrets scrapes the sky. The owner is Viscount Cyril de Guindre who lives immured among the books of his library, in the company of an eccentric daughter who enjoys riding in the nude. Her name is Mlle. la Vicomtesse Drusille.

‘We could dress up as bishops and offer solemn black masses on the rock.'

Leonora closes her eyes in ecstasy and sees herself beside her lover clothed in a purple chasuble, a mitre on his head, wielding a crosier capable of exorcising the Devil himself.

The canter of horse's hooves rouses her from her pontifical daydream. An Amazon wearing only a cropped jacket dismounts and kisses Max.

‘Good evening, my precious little lovey-dovey poo poo,' is how she addresses Max. It is astonishing that a woman who looks every bit as strong as a man can produce such a sickly and affected voice. ‘Oh my poor little one, you are tired. Would you like to come and dine at the castle?'

‘Not today. Tomorrow.'

Drusille kisses Max on the nose and spurs on her horse.

‘You may bring her with you if you choose.' She points towards the English Lady Bishop who offers her a blessing by way of farewell.

‘Have you emerged from your pontifical daydream?'

‘Yes, that woman of Lawhore woke me up.'

Leonora observes Max gathering spiky leaves that smell incredibly sweet.

‘What are you going to do with those flowers?'

‘According to legend,' he tells her as he picks another handful, ‘an extremely ugly young woman, Miralda by name, used to go out wearing a veil so that no-one could see her face. Even so, a wizard fell in love with the scent of her hair, and possessed her. When he awoke and saw her face, he was so horrified that he buried her alive, leaving only her hair outside the grave. They became these flowers, thereafter called Miralda's Curls.'

Leonora inhales the aroma of her fingers impregnated with the scent of Miralda's Curls, then throws back her head: ‘What an intense perfume!'

‘Let me see. I think that now we have enough. We are going to need two stones, one flat and the other round. And we also need to get a move on before it gets dark.'

Leonora again inhales the scent on her fingers, impregnated with Miralda's Curls. Near where they have set up camp, Max asks her to light a candle and, on his knees, smashes the flowers against the flat stone.

After crushing them, he puts them on to boil. The odour is delicious.

‘Do you see?' he explains. ‘With this type of herb you can make cigarettes that are better and cheaper than Gauloises. The only thing we still need is the rice paper in which to roll them. Let's go and find some. If we leave the fire burning it'll all be ready on our return.'

Barely have they got to the square when Alphonsine calls out to them: ‘It's three days since I last saw you. Come over to dinner!'

And she rails at Leonora: ‘Why do you abandon me? Go and get some vegetables and I'll make you aubergines gratinées. Marie can pick them for you straight from her garden.'

Marie selects two purple globes dangling in the midst of some prickly leaves and holds them out to Leonora.

‘How many tomatoes would you like?' She carries on searching in the dark. ‘And I've got some good lettuces somewhere here.'

Leonora and Max sit down on the terrace. The other dinner guests are a grave-digger, a goat herd, a blind girl who smokes constantly, and elderly Mathieu, who has become part of the furniture, and keeps rolling cigarette after cigarette. Before long, Fonfon is setting a platter of aubergines in a ruby-red sauce down in front of them.

‘Leonora, if you would like the grave-digger to take measurements for your coffin, now would be a good opportunity.'

The grave-digger rises and advances on her. Alphonsine, seated next to the painter, picks her teeth with a stick. The rest of the company disappear, leaving only Mathieu. Alphonsine takes delight in speaking ill of the neighbours, particularly the drunk, lazy and abusive ones.

‘Maybe they are just poor?' Max springs to their defence. ‘In any case, I don't believe in work.'

‘Where does Mathieu buy the papers you use to roll your tobacco?' Leonora asks.

‘Aaaa!' grunts the old man.

Fonfon translates for him: ‘At the tobacconist.'

Leonora and Max bid their farewells.

‘Tomorrow Mathieu will bring some figs, and a fat rabbit. I shall casserole it in its juices with rosemary, and it'll taste exquisite.'

After buying two packets of rice paper, they return to their tent guided by the light of the moon. The waters of the Ardèche flow gently beside their path. Inside the tent the coals are still glowing under the little pot, which smells good. A curtain of steam rises when Max sets the pan down in the river in order to cool it.

‘Now the leaves are dried out and will be at their best.' He transforms the concoction into cigars. ‘You can tell me just how good this is.' Max lights one of them.

‘Who taught you how to do that?'

‘You have not the least idea of all I know. And with a dose this high, all my worries will go up in smoke.'

‘At least your wife won't be able to find her way here. Will she?'

‘You don't know Marie-Berthe.'

His wife has been left in the care of a semi-literate youth.

‘Do you think that if something happens, he will telephone me?' Max asks Leonora.

‘I don't know,' she answers from far, far away, for the sound of her voice seems to be issuing several metres over her head. ‘I don't think it really matters that much.'

‘Yes it does matter,' replies Max. ‘The village is so small that if she turns up here, she'll find us at once.'