Authors: Paul Bailey
The Prince's Boy
For Marius Chivu
A
heart
: origin of every torment.
E. M. Cioran
And love is love in beggars and in kings.
Anon
Contents
I arrived in Paris on Thursday the fifth of May 1927. My father had said goodbye to me two days earlier at the Gara de Nord in Bucharest. On that memorable afternoon, I was welcomed to France by my distant cousin Eduard, whom I had last seen when I was a timid and secretive eleven-year-old. He greeted me in Romanian, embraced me, and remarked on the grandeur of the Parisian Gare du Nord where we presently stood.
‘Are you hungry, Dinu?’
I answered that I thought I was.
‘There’s a pleasant brasserie a short walk from here. I had forgotten how skinny you are. Let me treat you to a substantial meal before I take you to your apartment.’
I thanked him for his generosity.
‘You need to stay out in the sun, Dinu. You are far, far too pale.’
I did not say to Eduard that he might have been echoing my father, who frequently commented on my unhealthy appearance. ‘I shall try to enjoy the summer weather,’ I observed instead.
‘I shall make it my cousinly duty to see that you do.’
We were seated in the crowded restaurant by now.
‘Remind me of your age, Dinu.’
‘I am nineteen. Just nineteen.’
‘Then you will drink some wine with me?’
‘Yes. I should like to.’
He ordered a bottle of claret. It would help bring some colour to my ghostly cheeks.
I smiled at this conceit. It had never occurred to me that I looked ‘ghostly’. He returned my smile and then we both laughed. ‘Welcome to
la vie de Bohème
,’ he said when our laughter ceased. ‘And please address me as Eduard. Stop respecting me as an elder. Let us be friends.’
‘Yes. Yes.’
We shook hands across the table.
Eduard chose the dishes. I ate snails for the first and last time because their rubberiness irritated what I considered to be my discerning palate. I was happier by far with the cassoulet that followed and the
tarte Normande
with which our meal ended. At Eduard’s insistence, I had a glass of cognac with my coffee.
‘Can you talk yet about your mother, the lovely Elena? You must miss her, Dinu.’
Could I talk about her? What was there to say? She was dead, suddenly and inexplicably dead, and I was having to survive without her warmth and affection.
‘Yes, I miss her’ was all I felt inclined to reveal. Giddy with drink though I was, and tired after the long journey, my tongue would not be loosened. I had got into the habit of hugging my grief to me as something preciously mine. ‘I miss her, Eduard,’ I said again, in the hope that he would question me no further.
He didn’t. Perhaps he had understood why I was being laconic, or perhaps he thought I was exhibiting stoicism. That second ‘perhaps’ would not have been appropriate, since I was anything but stoical. She had died in September 1920 – on the fifteenth of that hated month, to be exact – and I had wept for her in the privacy of my bedroom almost every night since then. I knew, from my cursory reading of Seneca, that stoics are not given to weeping.
‘Are you prepared for your bohemian adventure?’ Eduard asked as he settled the bill.
‘I think I want to write a book. It’s my father’s idea that I should live the life of an artist in Paris, not mine. He persuaded me to come here.’
‘Did you need much persuasion?’
‘No, Eduard. Of course I didn’t.’
‘Cezar is a generous man, but I have never regarded him as especially artistic.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘Which fact makes it more surprising that he should encourage you to stay in Paris, in Montmartre of all places.’
Another cognac was set before me.
‘I am drunk, Cousin Eduard.’
‘You will sleep the better tonight.’
We took a cab to rue des Trois-Frères, which would be my address until September. I registered the passing scene with eyes clouded by alcohol and drowsiness. Everything was swaying – the buildings, the trees, the trams and buses, the men and women on the boulevards, the late afternoon sun. Nothing in my young world was stable any more.
My generous, inartistic father had secured me a garret, nothing less. Eduard and I carried my two suitcases to the very, very top of the house. This was to be my ivory tower, the ideal setting for a new existence as a poor, striving poet or novelist – I had yet to decide which I would be – whose genius was fated to be unrecognized. No, I was a poet, novelist, genius who could afford to be neglected until posterity claimed me as one of its chosen elite. My paternal benefactor, Cezar, was rich: he had opened a bank account for me; he had paid my rent for the entire holiday; he had made certain that I wouldn’t starve. I was going to be an unlikely bohemian, thanks to him.
A plump, middle-aged woman named Simone had led the way up the hundreds (it seemed like hundreds) of stairs. She was the owner’s daughter, whom he had entrusted to take care of the property. She would change my bed linen and perform any household duties, such as scrubbing and dusting and laundering, that I required. She hoped that I found the room to my satisfaction.
‘Yes, thank you, Madame.’
‘I am Mademoiselle.’
She laughed when I apologized for my unintended rudeness, observing that I was the very soul of courtesy.
‘My cousin Dinu has perfect manners.’
‘It’s been a long time since I had a true gentleman lodging here.’
‘Did you hear that, Dinu? You must behave impeccably while you are under Mademoiselle Simone’s roof.’
‘I shall,’ I vowed.
I was desperate to sleep. I was trying with difficulty to stifle yawns.
Eduard bade me a fond
au revoir
and the buxom Simone wished me the sweetest of sweet dreams and when they left I cast my clothes aside and fell into the bed she had prepared for me with its starched sheets that smelled of lavender and slept as I hadn’t slept since my beloved mother’s death.
When I awoke in the late morning of the sixth of May, I felt guilty about her sudden absence from my dreams. I had slept contentedly, and I was remorseful for having done so. I begged her forgiveness and prayed, as I would go on praying, for her immortal soul – for its lasting peace, its rest.
The story I have to tell now is the strangest of my life. I am not even sure that I will be able to account for it. The events I am going to relive and relate took place forty years ago when I was green in the ways of the flesh and the complexities of human intercourse. Let me say, simply, that the writer-to-be Dinu Grigorescu was innocent about the random nature of everyday living. He was happy in his attic or garret, looking down on the bustling city and thinking only of putting words, immortal words, on paper. The people below were as nothing to the youthful genius. He was in possession of the tidiest of ivory towers and it was from that well-scrubbed hideaway that he would send out his messages, in verse or prose, to an appreciative or incurious public. He anticipated both praise and scorn, for he knew already that artists of his calibre were born to be recognized by the discerning few and rejected by the legion of philistines whose facile judgments always held sway. That much he understood. That was, almost, the extent of Dinu Grigorescu’s knowledge.
I spoke French with increasing confidence as the first weeks went by. Eduard’s business had taken him to London so there was no one with whom I could converse in my native tongue. I was content with this. I felt like a true Parisian whenever I passed for one in lively exchanges with street vendors, waiters, bar keepers, cab drivers, tram conductors and shop assistants. To complete the disguise, I bought a beret and wore it at an angle that might be described as jaunty.
The blank sheet of paper in the attic stayed blank. I had words in my head and there they remained. I was waiting, I suppose, for inspiration. I hoped it would come to me in a sudden rush, as it had come to Rimbaud and Eminescu, my Romanian god, and Mozart, and all the geniuses I emulated. I had to be patient, I told myself as I drew my father’s money out of the bank. I had to – what was the phrase that was in the air? – ‘sit pretty’. Yes, I was ‘sitting pretty’, and I could do so with a certain confidence because I was still a teenager. I had June, July and August ahead of me. It seemed like all the time in the world.
It was on the afternoon of Thursday the twenty-sixth of May that I met the man I would know for ever as the prince’s boy. He was not a boy any longer, since he was already approaching middle age. I can now relate, without embarrassment, the peculiar circumstances in which I encountered him. I had eaten lightly and drunk somewhat heavily that lunchtime and had left the restaurant in a state of sexual excitement. The human fruit I was desperate to devour was of a much forbidden kind – nothing less than a crime against nature and a cardinal sin in the eyes of my Orthodox faith. The claret boiling in my veins was leading me towards the ideal object of my desire, first sighted in the form of a railway porter when I was twelve years old. The unknown workman, who had winked at the blushing boy whose bags he was carrying, was strong and hairy and free – I supposed – of any melancholic feelings. I paid him the pitifully few
lei
it was the custom to give public servants and was desolate when he shook my hand and turned his back on me and went off in search of another customer. I watched his retreating figure until my parents accused me of ignoring them. I collapsed into my mother’s embrace and wondered as I did so if I could ever tell her of the strange and terrifying emotion that was still possessing me.
(Of course I couldn’t. I had worshipped the porter for at most five minutes in July 1920 and on the fifteenth of September she was suddenly, inexplicably dead.)
The porter, or someone very like him, perhaps stronger and hairier, was in my thoughts as I walked – not too unsteadily, I hoped – towards the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace. I had heard tell of the notorious place from a drunken policeman in a bar near rue des Trois-Frères who had said, in the loudest of whispers to one of the waiters, that Monsieur Albert’s establishment was providing all the men in Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoyed something different – he emphasized the word – everything they craved for a hundred francs. If Albert charged the clients a hundred francs, what was he paying the queer young men who satisfied the lepers and degenerates who were in need of their disgusting services?
This leper, this degenerate, listened and took note of the address the gendarme was now broadcasting to the entire room. Dinu Grigorescu could just about afford a hundred francs for an experience that might lead him to write like Maupassant or Baudelaire or his adored lunatic Rimbaud. He would send a letter to his father with the news that he was spending Cezar’s money wisely. Such was the leper’s lustful reasoning as he strolled along rue Saint-Lazare on that sunny afternoon.
I entered the paved courtyard, decorated with bay trees and privets in large terracotta pots, and hesitated. What on God’s earth was I doing? I could easily turn round and walk away. I was on the point of doing so when the glass-paned front door with the word BAINS emblazoned on it opened and a smiling man emerged.
‘Are you one of M. Albert’s new recruits?’
I replied that I did not understand his question.
‘You innocent little rogue,’ he said. ‘You pretty minx. What is your name?’
‘Jean-Pierre,’ I answered. ‘Jean-Pierre,’ I repeated, as if to convince myself of my chosen identity. ‘I am Jean-Pierre, Monsieur.’
‘I shall ask for you next time. I shall put in an order for you, Jean-Pierre.’
I thanked him. What else could I do, or say? I ascended the four steps leading to M. Albert’s establishment and found myself looking into the cold blue eyes of its owner. He was seated behind a heavy cash box. Have I written ‘seated’? I should more accurately write ‘enthroned’.