The Prince's Boy (11 page)

He glared at me for a few terrifying minutes. I held his stare with the nearest thing to a smile that I could manage. I waited, with feigned patience, for my lover to be returned to me. When he came back, it was with a long sigh. He begged my forgiveness, which I granted him on the instant.

R
ã
zvan laughed when I told him that both my denigrators and my small number of admirers in Bucharest regarded me as a
bonjouriste
because of my predilection for speaking French whenever I had the opportunity.

‘That’s what the prince called me, too, but as a joke.’

It wasn’t a joke anymore, in 1932, and would become an insult of the worst kind as the decade progressed. To be a dandyish
bonjouriste
meant that you favoured Paris rather than Berlin, the unlikely Mecca that attracted a new breed of pilgrims.

‘“I have made the peasant boy a
bonjouriste
and I am very proud of my achievement” is what the prince said.’

My lover’s suitcase contained not only clothes and toiletries but tattered, much read, books as well. Creang
ã
and Eminescu were there with Baudelaire and Maupassant and the final volumes of Proust, in which our mutual acquaintance, in the guise of Jupien, appears in all his mischievous splendour. Few Pandars have been immortalized while they were still living. It would be Albert Le Cuziat’s privilege to remain as constant a presence as Vautrin or Rastignac, those somewhat more beguiling literary villains. He would never now be completely anonymous, like the majority of the human race.

I began to understand, as the almost blissful days went by, that R
ã
zvan had no resting place. He had been expelled, or banished, from Corcova and he was lonely in Paris since few of the prince’s friends wanted to spend time in the company of somebody they considered glum. Was I to be his saviour, his refuge? I dared to hope so. I dared to hope beyond hope that his promise that we would be together for the rest of our lives might become reality.

I was determined to find out more about his past than he had granted me in our previous, quickly curtailed conversations. I needed to be subtle and tactful. I had to catch him in the relative calm before a drunken storm. I loathed to tell myself that I was beginning to be afraid of him.

It was in just such a state of calm that I asked him why he had chosen to work for Albert Le Cuziat.

‘I have been waiting for that question, ever since we gave ourselves to each other five years ago.’

‘And now I am waiting for your answer.’

‘You will be granted it, rest assured. I will give it to you slowly and carefully, for it demands unclouded thought.’

It was early in the day. He was drinking Turkish coffee. I saw him again in the doorway of his cubicle, smiling on the stumbling boy who would soon reveal his identity, as he would his. It had been, for me, the prologue to enchantment. I wondered, for the briefest of moments, if I was still enchanted by him, and just as briefly I decided I was.

‘Did I work for M. Albert?’ he asked himself. ‘I honoured his House of Mischief – oh, he has a hundred names for the place – with my baleful presence, but I cannot say, with my hand on my heart, a cliché the prince would have deplored, that I actually worked for him. No, no, Dinicu – there are two kinds of work that I recognize. One is the work of the body and the other is that of the mind. My forefathers, my father and mother, my sister and brothers have all toiled for a living, but I have an intelligence denied to them. It was the prince’s gift to me. Did I say gift? Curse, perhaps. My work of the mind was learning French, studying the architecture of Chartres – the prince’s church par excellence – and reading the books, looking at the paintings and listening to the music that met with his discerning approval. Are you impressed by my erudite use of language?’

I said I was.

‘That is about all I have left.’

‘R
ã
zv
ã
nel, please answer my question.’

‘Be patient. I will answer it.’

I waited for him to speak again.

‘You are the only client – I hate to use that word – I ever made love to.’

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Why should it not be? The prince had been dead a few years when Le Cuziat invited me to become one of his ‘‘purveyors of naughtiness’’. That is another of his many fancy phrases, his ‘‘curlicues’’. I accepted his offer, but on my own carefully considered terms. I was to be untouchable. I would show his aristocrats – some of them rich, most of them married – what they wanted to see of the prince’s boy’s body, but there was to be nothing beyond that. They could feast their eyes on me and that was all. I was indifferent to their displays of affection, their promise to buy me the jewels and trinkets of which I had no need. I became adept at sneering. If they dared to put a hand on me, I reprimanded them for being so brazen. They were breaking my rules. Oh, Dinicu, I had to endure much sobbing and whimpering and accusations of being callous, but I think – indeed, I know – that they enjoyed themselves. If there is such a place as a seventh heaven, they were occupying it when they were with me. They knew who I was – the surrogate son of a cultivated prince – and that knowledge excited them almost to a frenzy. Until I met you, I was a brilliant actor.’

‘You aren’t any more?’

It was the silliest, the most heartless, question of my life. He looked wounded by it. He
was
wounded by it.

‘I am so sorry, R
ã
zvan. You have never acted for my benefit. You have always been sincere with me.’

He averted his gaze, preferring to smile at the ‘silly cow’ who had flirted with him.

‘Oh please, R
ã
zv
ã
nel. Please, my darling. Please forgive my stupidity.’

He turned back to me. He shook his head. He sighed.

‘I am acting now for you, for the only time. I am pretending to be offended. And now the pretence is over. Your father is impossibly in love with his fragile son. Impossibly, impossibly. Room 9 beckons. Let us not waste another second getting there. Come on.’

I am tempted to weep now at the grace he bestowed upon me that day. We went to room 9 and transported its confines, as the English poet John Donne says, into an everywhere.

There are times when kisses are much more persuasive, and adequate, than words.

When the ‘silly cow’ came to our table and asked if she could buy us a bottle of champagne, R
ã
zvan replied that we would be honoured to drink it with her.

Her name was Luiza, she told us as she sat down. She had been newly widowed. She was here to enjoy the sea air. We were quite the handsomest father and son she had ever seen. She had not embarrassed us, had she? Before we could reply, she continued by commenting on my exquisite pallor and his suntanned attractiveness. R
ã
zvan was delighted to see that she was already emboldened by drink.

‘You have such strong hands, Domnule Popescu,’ she said, stroking one of them.

‘My son’s are prettier. His fingers are very finely tapered. They are much prized by me.’

I wondered if she understood exactly what he was implying, but she seemed not to. I hoped he would stop teasing her.

‘Where is your wife and young Dinu’s mother?’

‘She’s dead, like your husband. Her passing was an enormous loss to us.’

‘I can believe that.’

Oh, you silliest of silly drunken cows, I thought, hearing her expressing commiseration. We have different mothers, I wanted to say – the Elena who was still chastising me; the Angela whose R
ã
zvan had perplexed and maybe even frightened her. Our enormous losses were subtly diverse. I was beginning to hope the champagne would run dry and the evening come to an end.

Then she fell instantly, and startlingly, asleep, as if some Puck or Ariel had dropped a magic potion into her eyes. We left her. We drifted quietly away. We talked of my exquisite pallor and his suntanned attractiveness as we climbed the flight of stairs that led us to room 9, our drab and unimaginatively decorated paradise.

His exceptionally strong hands and my finely tapered fingers were soon conjoined, and the night passed, as I recall, blissfully.

There was a thunderstorm the following day.

‘It might be the end of the world, Dinicu. This isn’t ordinary rain, it’s a monsoon.’

I found the sight and sound of it exhilarating. I swear the sky turned green with every bolt of thunder and flash of lightning. I felt insignificant, happily so, as the sea boiled over and the trees swayed.

R
ã
zvan had hidden himself under the bed.

‘What are you doing there?’

‘I am terrified. I always have been,’ he whimpered.

‘Why?’

He was too frightened to answer. He was huddled up like a foetus.

I opened the windows and went out on to the balcony, enjoying the near-warmth of the raindrops that fell on the lover of the abject coward inside.

‘It’s getting closer. It is getting much closer.’

‘What is?’

‘The lightning.’

‘You are talking nonsense. The storm is abating. You are being very childish.’

He emerged from his hiding place two hours later, when something close to tranquillity had been restored.

‘I need a very strong drink – a brandy or a whisky.’

I went down to the bar and returned with a triple measure of cognac – enough, I reasoned, to calm every one of his shattered nerves.

‘I saw someone struck by lightning, Dinu, when I was a very little boy in Corcova. She was a pregnant woman, so two lives were incinerated – is that the word? – at once. She was set afire. She was standing under a tree, to protect herself, but she wasn’t spared. I see her whenever there’s a storm.’

I held him to me. I was the comforter now. I was his protector, his mother and father, for many precious moments. He said he was sorry that I should see him so wretched.

I realized that I loved him in his cowardly state. He had become a R
ã
zvan hitherto unknown to me, a man more fragile than I had ever suspected.

R
ã
zvan said he would accompany me to Bucharest and take another train on to Paris. He had seen enough of Romania. Everyone, with the delicious exception of his Dinicu, irritated or bored him. He then revealed that he was in the mood to write a memoir. He was thinking of calling it
The Prince’s Boy
, for that was who he was. His real father was the mystery of mysteries, a man whose gentleness had been denied him by unanticipated death. It was Prince E who had moulded and created the clever individual he was today. It was Prince E who should be praised, or blamed, for R
ã
zvan Popescu’s present condition.

‘Have I the will to do it, Dinicu? Have I the determination?’

‘Of course you have,’ I answered, extracting even the tiniest hint of doubt from my voice.

The letter I read that morning, while R
ã
zvan was taking a last swim in the Black Sea, is in my possession now. The paper has yellowed, the purple ink has faded, but to my inner eye it looks the same as when I opened it in the summer of 1932. He had asked me to pack his valise in a tidy fashion, since he was embarking on a long journey. His sophistication did not extend to the neat arrangement of clothes and toiletries, of books and personal mementoes, in a suitcase.

It fell out of his copy of
Une Vie
. The envelope had a London postmark. I opened it cautiously, fearful of its contents. I felt guilty at reading what the prince had written to his protégé in 1919, a few days before he took his life, I surmised.

My Dear
R
ã
zvan
,

It is my sincere wish that you prosper. Continue your studies. The Paris apartment is yours for life. There is money in the bank at your disposal for the future. Spend it responsibly to better yourself.

You will have noted how despondent I have been since my return from Japan. The mirror offers me no solace because the face that is reflected horrifies its once proud owner. I am not so much ugly as grotesque. I have the twisted expression of a freak in a chamber of horrors. I am repelled by what I see.

‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,’ as Hamlet says. I am the ‘quintessence of dust’, nothing more. Remember me without rancour if you can.

E.B.

I placed the letter back inside the book and said nothing of it to R
ã
zvan when he returned to Room 9. It would soon be time to leave Eforie. We were still father and son as we sat on the bus that took us to Constan
þ
a.

We found ourselves a table in the salon at the Gara de Nord. We had another hour and a half together before the train that would terminate in Paris was due to depart.