The Chateau (5 page)

They went back to the hotel and the waitress drew them into the dining room, where she had arranged on an oak sideboard specimens of woodcarving, the hobby of her brother, who had been wounded in the war and could not do steady work. The rich Americans admired but did not buy his chef-d'œuvre, the art-nouveau book ends. Instead, trying not to see the disappointment in her eyes, they took the miniature sabots (500 fr.), which would do nicely for a present when they got back home and meanwhile take up very little room in their luggage. The concierge inquired about their morning and they told him about the fire. A sliding panel in the wall at the foot of the stairs slid open. The cook and the kitchenmaid were also interested.

Upstairs in their room, he said: “I don't suppose we ought to stay here when there are a thousand places in France that are more interesting.”

“I could stay here the rest of my life,” Barbara said.

They did nothing about leaving. They squandered the whole rest of the day, walking and looking at things. As for their journey to Brittany, they would do better to go inland, the concierge said; at Rennes, for example, they could get an express train
from Paris that would take them straight through to Brest.

The next morning, they closed their suitcases regretfully and paid the bill (surprisingly large) and said good-by to the waitress, the chambermaid, the cook, and the kitchenmaid, all of whom they had grown fond of. Their luggage went by pushcart to the railway station, and they followed on foot, with the concierge. Out of affection and because he was sorry to see them go, the concierge was keeping them company as long as possible, and where else would they find a concierge like him?

When they got off the train in Rennes, the weather had grown colder. There was no train for Brest until the next day, and so they walked half a block to the Hôtel du Guesclin et Terminus. Rennes was an ugly industrial city, and they wished they were in Pontorson. An obliging waiter in the restaurant where they ate dinner gave Barbara the recipe for Palourdes farcies. “Clams, onions, garlic, parsley,” Harold wrote in his financial diary. It was raining when they woke the next morning. Their hotel room was small and cramped and a peculiar shape. Only a blind person could have hung those curtains with that wallpaper. They could hardly move for their luggage, which they hated the sight of. What pleasure could they possibly have at the seashore in this weather? They decided to go farther inland, to Le Mans, in the hope that it would be warmer. When they got there, they could decide whether to take the train to Brest or one going in the opposite direction, to Paris. But they had not planned to be in Paris until September, and perhaps they would like Le Mans enough to stay there a week. They had arranged to spend the two weeks after that as paying guests at a château in Touraine.

Late that same afternoon, pale and tired after two train journeys—Le Mans was hideous—they stood in the lobby of the Hôtel Univers in Tours, watching the profile of the concierge, who was telephoning for them and committed heart and soul to their cause. With the door of the phone booth closed, they couldn't hear what he said to the long-distance operator, but they could tell instantly by the way he shed his mask of indifference
that he was talking to someone at the château. They watched his eyes, his expression, his sallow French face, for clues.

The call was brief. The concierge put the receiver back on its hook and, turning, pushed open the glass door. “I talked to Mme Viénot herself,” he said. “It's all right for you to come.”

“Thank God,” Harold said. “Now we can relax.”

Taking Barbara's arm above the elbow, he guided her across the lobby to the street door. Outside, a white-gloved policeman directed the flow of Saturday-afternoon bicycle traffic around the orange and green flower beds in the middle of a busy intersection.

“I think I've seen that building before,” she said, meaning the Hôtel de Ville, directly across the street. He consulted a green Michelin guide to the château country that he had bought in the railway station in Le Mans. The Hôtel de Ville was not starred, and the tricolor flags that hung in clusters along the façade, between caryatids, were old and faded. This was true everywhere they went, and it had begun to trouble him. In the paintings they were always vivid and fresh. Was something not here that used to be here and everywhere in France? Had they come too late?

The cathedral (**) and the Place Plumereau (*) and the Maison de Tristan (*) all appeared to be at a considerable distance, and since it was late in the afternoon and they did not want to walk far, they decided in favor of the leafy avenue de Grammont, which was wide enough to accommodate not only an inner avenue of trees but also a double row of wooden booths hemmed in by traffic and the streetcar tracks. Unable to stop looking, they stared at the patrons of sidewalk cafés and stood in front of shop windows. What were “rillettes de Tours”? Should they buy a jar?

Eventually they crossed over into the middle of the street and moved from booth to booth, conscientiously examining pots and pans, pink rayon underwear, dress materials, sweaters,
scarves, suspenders, aprons, packets of pins and needles, buttons, thread, women's hats, men's haberdashery, knitted bathing suits, toys, stationery, romantic and erotic novels, candy, shoes, fake jewelry, machine-made objets d'art, the dreadful dead-end of the Industrial Revolution, all so discouraging to the acquisitive eye that cannot keep from looking, so exhausting to the snobbish mind that, like a machine itself, rejects and rejects and rejects and rejects.

With their heads aching from all they had looked at, they found their way back to the hotel. Tours was very old, and they had expected to like it very much. They had not expected it to be a big modern commercial city, and they were disappointed. But that evening they were given a second chance. They went for a walk after dinner and came upon a street fair all lit up with festoons of electric lights and ready to do business with the wide-eyed and the young, who for one reason and another (the evening was chilly, the franc not yet stabilized) had stayed away. There was only a handful of people walking up and down the dirt avenues, and they didn't seem eager to part with their money. The ticking lotto wheels stopped time after time on the lucky number, the roulette paid double, but no one carried off a sexy lamp, a genuine oriental rug, a kewpie doll. In this twilight of innocence, nobody believed enough in his own future to patronize the fortunetelling machine. No sportif character drew a bead on the plastic ducks in the shooting gallery. The festooned light bulbs were noticeably small and dim. With no takers, the familiar enticements were revealed in the light of their true age—tired, old, worn out at last.

“It makes me feel bad,” Harold said. He loved carnivals. “They can't keep going much longer, if it's always like this.”

He stepped up to a booth, bought two tickets for the little racing cars that bump, and entered the sum of twenty francs in his financial diary. Only one other car had somebody in it—a young man and his girl. When Harold and Barbara bumped into them, the young man wheeled around and came at them again
with so much momentum that it made their heads jerk. He was smiling unpleasantly. It crossed Harold's mind that there was something here that was not like the French movies—that they had been bumped too hard because they were Americans. He saw the young man preparing to come at them again, and steered his own car in such a way that they couldn't be reached. But unless you did bump somebody, the little cars were not exciting. And all the empty ones, evoking a gaiety that ought to have been here and wasn't, reminded them of their isolation as tourists in a country they could look at but never really know, the way they knew America. They bought a bag of white taffy, which turned out to be inedible, and then stood looking at the merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel, the flying swings, the whip—all of them empty and revolving inanely up, down, and around. The carnival occupied a good-sized city block, and in its own blighted way it was beautiful.

He said soberly: “It's as if the secret of perpetual motion that my Grandmother Mitchell was always talking about had been discovered at last, and nobody cared.”

But somebody did care, somebody was enjoying himself—a little French boy, wide awake and on his own at an hour when, in America at least, it is generally agreed that children should be asleep in their beds. Since he did not have to pay for his pleasure, they assumed that he was the child of one of the concessionaires. They tried to make friends with him and failed: he had no need of friends. Liberty was what he cared about—Liberty and Vertigo. He climbed on the merry-go-round and in a moment or two the baroque animals began to move with a slow, dreamlike, plunging gait. The little boy sat astride a unicorn. He rose in the stirrups and reached out with a long pole for the stuffed rabbit that dangled just out of reach. Time after time, trying valiantly, he was swept by it.

“I'd take
him,”
Barbara said wistfully.

“So would I, but he's not to be had, for love or money.”

The merry-go-round went faster and faster, the calliope
showed to what extremes music can go, and eventually, in accordance with the mysterious law that says:
Whatever you want with your whole heart and soul you can have
, the stuffed rabbit was swept from its hook (the little boy received a prize—a genuine ruby ring—and ran off in search of something new) and the Americans turned away, still childless.

She asked for a five-franc piece to put in the fortunetelling machine. The machine whirred initially and produced through a slot a small piece of cardboard that read: “En apparence tout va bien pour vous, mais ne soyez pas trop confiant; l'adversité est en train de venir. Les morts, les séparations, sont indiqués. Dans les procès vous seriez en perte. La maladie est sérieuse.” She turned and discovered the little French boy at her elbow. Curiosity had fetched him. She showed him the fortune and he read it. His brown eyes looked up at her seriously, as if trying to decide what effect these deaths, separations, and lawsuits would have on her character. She asked him if he would like to keep it and he shook his head. She tucked the cardboard in her purse.

“C'est votre frère?” the little boy asked, indicating Harold.

“Non,” she said, smiling, “il est mon mari.”

His glance shifted to the bag of candy. When she put it into his hands, he said politely that he couldn't accept it. But he did, with urging. He took it and thanked her and then ran off. They stood watching while a bearded man, the keeper of a roulette wheel, detained him. The little boy listened intently (to what? a joke? a riddle?) and then he suddenly realized what was happening to him and escaped.

“I think he all but fell in love with you,” Harold said. “If he'd been a little older or a little younger, he would have.”

“He fell in love with the candy,” Barbara said.

They made one more circuit of the fair. The carnival people had lost the look of wickedness. Their talent for not putting down roots anywhere, and for not giving the right change, and
for sleeping with one eye open, their sexual promiscuity, their tattooed hearts, flowers, mermaids, anchors, and mottoes, their devout belief that all life is meaningless—all this had not been enough to sustain them in the face of too much history. They were discouraged and ill-fed and worried, like everybody else.

He bought some cotton candy. Barbara took two or three licks and then handed it to him. Pink, oversweet, and hairy,
it
hadn't changed; it was just the way he remembered it from his childhood. Wisps clung to his cheeks. He couldn't finish it. He got out his handkerchief and wiped his chin. “Shall we go?” he asked.

They started walking toward the exit. The whole failing enterprise was as elegiac as a summer resort out of season. They looked around one last time for the little French boy but he had vanished. As they passed the gypsy fortuneteller's tent, Harold felt a slight pressure on his coat sleeve. “All right,” he said. “If you want to.”

“Just this once,” she said apologetically.

He disliked having his fortune told.

The gypsy fortuneteller sat darning her stocking by the light of a kerosene lamp. It turned out that she had lived in Chicago and spoke English. She asked Barbara for the date of her birth and then, nodding, said “Virgo.” She looked inquiringly at Harold. “Scorpio,” he said.

The gypsy fortuneteller looked in her crystal ball and saw that he was lying. He was Leo. Raising her eyes, she saw that he had kept his hands in his pockets.

She passed her thin brown hand over the crystal ball twice and saw that there was a shadow across their lives but it was not permanent, like the shadows she was used to finding. No blackened chimneys, no years and years of wandering, no loved one vanished forever into a barbed-wire enclosure, no savings stolen, no letters returned unopened and stamped
Whereabouts Unknown
.
Whatever the trouble was, in five or six years it would clear up.

She took Barbara Rhodes's hand and opened the fingers (beautiful hand) and in the lines of the palm discovered a sea voyage, a visitor, popularity and entertainment, malice she didn't expect, and a triumph that was sure to come true.

T
HE
A
MERICANS
were last in line at the gate, because of their luggage, and as the line moved forward, he picked up a big suitcase in each hand and wondered which of the half-dozen women in black waiting outside the barrier would turn out to be Mme Viénot. And why was there no car?

The station agent took their tickets gravely from between Harold's teeth, and as he walked through the gate he saw that the street was empty. He went back for the dufflebag and another suitcase. When the luggage was all outside they stood and waited.

The sign on the roof of the tiny two-room station said:
Brenodville-sur-Euphrone
. The station itself had as yet no doors, windows, or clock, and it smelled of damp plaster. The station platform was cluttered with bags of cement and piled yellow bricks. Facing the new station, on the other side of the tracks, was a wooden shelter with a bench and three travel posters: the Côte D'Azur (a sailboat) and Burgundy (a glass of red wine) and Auvergne (a rocky gorge). Back of the shelter a farmyard, with the upper story of the barn full of cordwood and the lower story stuffed with hay, served as a poster for Touraine.