Villa Triste Read online

  Oh, Bionda Girl …

  Oh, Bionda Girl …

  Bionda Girl …

  Yvonne took my arm. Meinthe cast rapid glances all around, as if looking for someone, but no member of that gathering paid us the slightest attention. We stepped through a French window onto a veranda with a green wooden balustrade. There were some deck chairs and wicker armchairs. A Chinese lantern cast complicated shadows, making patterns like lace or tracery, and it was as though Yvonne’s and Meinthe’s faces were suddenly covered with veils.

  In the garden below us, several people were crowding around a buffet table laden with things to eat. A very tall, very blond man waved and came toward us, supporting himself on a cane. His linen shirt — natural-colored, mostly open — looked like a safari jacket, and I thought about certain characters one used to meet in the colonies in the old days, the ones who had a “past.” Meinthe introduced the tall man: Rolf Madeja, “the director.” He leaned down to kiss Yvonne and put his hand on Meinthe’s shoulder. He called him “Menthe,” mint, with an accent that sounded more English than German. He led us toward the buffet, and the blond woman as tall as he was, the vague-eyed Valkyrie (she stared at us without seeing us, or maybe she was contemplating something she saw through us), turned out to be his wife.

  Yvonne and I left Meinthe in the company of a young man with a mountain climber’s physique and moved from group to group. She kissed everybody, and if anyone asked who I was, she said, “A friend.” If I understood correctly, most of the people present had played some part in “the film.” They wandered off across the garden. The bright moonlight lit up everything. We followed the grass-covered paths and came upon a cedar tree of terrifying size. When we reached the garden wall, we could hear the lapping of the lake on the other side, and we stayed there for a long moment. From where we were, you could see the house standing in the midst of the neglected grounds, and its presence surprised us as much as if we’d just arrived in the old South American city where a rococo opera house, a cathedral, and some mansions of Carrara marble are said to exist to this day, entombed by the virgin forest.

  The other guests haven’t ventured as far as we have, except for two or three barely distinguishable couples who are taking advantage of the dense coppices and the night. Everyone else has stayed near the house or on the terrace. We rejoin them. Where’s Meinthe? Inside, maybe, in the salon. Madeja comes up to us and reveals, in his half-English, half-German accent, that he would happily stay here another two weeks, but he must go to Rome. He’ll rent the villa again in September, he says, “When the film’s final cut is ready.” He takes Yvonne by the waist — I don’t know whether he’s groping her or displaying fatherly affection — and declares, “She’s a very fine actress.”

  He stares at me, and I notice his eyes look misted, and the mist is growing denser.

  “Your name is Chmara, isn’t it?”

  The mist has suddenly vanished; his blue-gray eyes glint. “Chmara,” he says. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  I answer him with a tight-lipped “yes,” and then his eyes grow soft again, mist over, practically liquefy. I don’t doubt he has the power to regulate their intensity at will, the way you adjust binoculars. When he wants to withdraw into himself, his eyes mist over, and then the outside world is nothing but a blurred mass. I know this method well, as I often practice it myself.

  “There was a Chmara in Berlin, in the old days …” he said to me. “Wasn’t there, Ilse?”

  His wife, lying on a deck chair at the other end of the veranda and chatting with two young people, swiveled her head toward us with a smile on her lips.

  “Wasn’t there, Ilse? Wasn’t there a Chmara in the old days in Berlin?”

  She looked at him and kept smiling. Then she turned her head and resumed her conversation. Madeja shrugged and gripped his cane tightly with both hands.

  “Yes … yes … This Chmara lived on the Kaiserallee … You don’t believe me, do you?”

  He stood up, caressed Yvonne’s face, and walked over to the green wooden balustrade. He remained there, looming, massive, contemplating the moonlit garden.

  Yvonne and I sat on two poufs, side by side, and she laid her head on my shoulder. A young brunette whose low-cut bodice displayed her breasts (at every even slightly abrupt movement, they surged up out of her décolletage) handed us two glasses filled with pink liquid. She guffawed and kissed Yvonne and begged us to try the cocktail, which she’d prepared “especially” for us. If I remember right, her name was Daisy Marchi, and Yvonne told me she played the lead role in “the film.” She too was going to have a great career. She was well known in Rome. Soon she left us, laughing even harder and shaking her long hair, and went to join a fiftyish man with a slender figure and a pockmarked face who was standing, glass in hand, at an open French window. He was a Dutchman named Harry Dressel, one of the actors in “the film.” Other people were sitting in the wicker armchairs or leaning on the balustrade. Some women were gathered around Madeja’s wife, who continued to smile, vacant eyed. Through the French window came a murmur of conversations, along with slow, syrupy music, but this time the singer with the deep voice was repeating different words:

  Abat-jour

  Che soffondi la luce blu …

  Madeja himself was pacing up and down the lawn in the company of a little bald man who came up to his waist, so that he had to bend down to talk to him. They passed and repassed the terrace, Madeja more and more ponderous and bowed down, his companion more and more stretched and straining upward, on the tips of his toes. He emitted a buzz like a hornet, and the only words he spoke in human language were, “Va bene Rolf … Va bene Rolf … Va bene Rolf … Vabenerolf …” Yvonne’s dog sat sphinxlike at the edge of the terrace and followed their comings and goings, turning his head from right to left, from left to right.

  Where were we? Deep in the heart of Haute-Savoie. But however much I repeat this reassuring phrase, “deep in the heart of Haute-Savoie,” I keep thinking of a colonial country, or one of the Caribbean islands. How else to explain that soft, corroding light, the midnight blue that turned eyes, skin, dresses, and alpaca suits phosphorescent? Those people were all surrounded by some mysterious electricity, and every time they made a move, you braced yourself for a short circuit. Their names — some of them have remained in my memory, and I regret not having written them all down at the time; I could have recited them at night before falling asleep, not knowing who their owners were, the sound of them would have been enough — their names brought to mind the little cosmopolitan societies of free ports and foreign bars: Gay Orloff, Percy Lippitt, Osvaldo Valenti, Ilse Korber, Roland Witt von Nidda, Geneviève Bouchet, Geza Pellemont, François Brunhardt … What’s become of them? Having summoned them to this rendezvous, what can I say to them? Already in those days — soon to be thirteen years ago — they gave me the impression that they’d long since burned out their lives. I watched them, I listened to them talking under the Chinese lantern that dappled their faces and the women’s shoulders. I assigned each of them a past that dovetailed with those of the others, and I wished they’d tell me everything: when did Percy Lippitt and Gay Orloff meet for the first time? Did one of them know Osvaldo Valenti? Which of them had put Madeja together with Geneviève Bouchet and François Brunhardt? Which of the other six had introduced Roland Witt von Nidda into their circle? (And I’m mentioning only those whose names I remember.) So many enigmas presupposed an infinity of combinations, a spider’s web they’d been spinning for ten or twenty years.

  It was late, and we were looking for Meinthe. He was neither in the garden nor on the terrace nor in the salon. The Dodge had disappeared. We ran into Madeja, accompanied by a girl with very short blond hair, on the front steps, and he reported that “Menthe” had just left with “Fritzi Trenker,” and that he was most certainly not coming back. He burst into loud laughter, surprising me, and placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  “The staff of my old age,” he declared. “You unders
tand me, Chmara?”

  Then, abruptly, he turned his back on us and went down the hall, leaning on the girl’s shoulder more heavily than before. He looked like a blind ex-boxer.

  That was the moment when things took a new direction. The lamps in the salon were switched off. The only light left was the night-light on the mantelpiece, whose pink glow was absorbed by great swaths of shadow. The Italian singer’s deep tones had been replaced by a woman’s voice, which broke and hoarsened so much you couldn’t tell anymore whether you were listening to dying moans or grunts of pleasure. Then all at once the voice became pure. It intoned the same words, sweetly repeating them.

  Madeja’s wife is lying across the sofa, and one of the young people from the group that surrounded her on the terrace bends over her and slowly begins to unbutton her blouse. She stares at the ceiling, her lips parted. Some couples are dancing, a little too close, their movements a little too precise. In passing, I notice that the strange Harry Dressel is stroking Daisy Marchi’s thighs with a heavy hand. A little group near the French window turn their attention to a spectacle: a woman doing a solo dance. She takes off her dress, her slip, her brassiere. Out of sheer idleness, Yvonne and I have joined the group. Roland Witt von Nidda, his features distorted, devours the dancer with his eyes. She’s down to her stockings and her garter belt, nothing else, and she keeps on dancing. On his knees, he tries to tear off her garters with his teeth, but she dodges him every time. Finally she decides to remove her remaining accessories herself and then continues to dance, stark naked, whirling around Witt von Nidda, brushing against him, while he remains motionless, impassive, his chin thrust out, his torso arched, a grotesque matador. His twisted shadow spreads over the wall, and the woman’s shadow — immeasurably enlarged — sweeps across the floor. Soon, throughout the entire house, there’s nothing but a ballet of shadows pursuing one another, climbing and descending stairs, bursting into laughter, uttering furtive cries.

  A corner office adjoining the salon. Its furniture included a massive desk with numerous drawers, the sort of thing I imagine could be found in the old Ministry of the Colonies, and a big dark green leather armchair. We took refuge in that office. I glanced back at the salon, and I can still see Madame Madeja’s thrown-back head (her neck was resting on the arm of the sofa). Her long blond hair hung down to the floor, and you would have thought that head of hers had just been lopped off. She started moaning. There was another face, very close, whose features I could barely make out. Her groans grew louder and louder, her cries more and more unhinged: “Kill me … Kill me … Kill me … Kill me …” Yes, I remember all that.

  The floor of the office was covered with a very thick wool rug, and we lay down on it. A ray of light beside us painted a grayish-blue bar that ran from one end of the room to the other. One of the windows was partly open, and I could hear the rustling of a tree whose branches rubbed against the glass. The shadow of those branches covered the bookcase with a netting of night and moon. The shelves held all the volumes in the crime fiction collection Le Masque.

  The dog fell asleep in front of the door. No more sounds, no more voices reached our ears from the salon. Had everyone else left the villa, and were we the only ones still there? A scent of old leather hung in the air of the office, and I wondered who had arranged the books on those shelves. Whose were they? Who came in here of an evening to smoke a pipe, or work, or read one of the novels, or listen to the murmuring of the leaves?

  Her skin had taken on an opalescent tint. A leaf’s shadow drew a tattoo on her shoulder. Sometimes it fell on her face, and you would have thought she was masked. The shadow shifted lower and gagged her mouth. I could have wished the sun would never rise so that I could stay with her there, huddled together in the depths of that silence, in that aquarium light. A little before dawn, I heard a door slam, hurried footsteps above us, and the crash of an overturned piece of furniture. And then some bursts of laughter. Yvonne had gone to sleep. The big dog lay dreaming. At regular intervals, he gave out a muffled groan. I half opened the door. There was nobody in the salon. The night-light was still on, but the glow it cast seemed dimmer, no longer pink but a very delicate green. I headed for the veranda to get some fresh air. Nobody there either, under the still-glowing Chinese lantern. It swung in the wind, and sorrowful shapes, some of them human in appearance, scurried across the walls. Down below, the garden. I tried to identify the fragrance that emanated from that vegetation and rose to the terrace. But yes — I hesitate to say it, because the setting was Haute-Savoie — but yes: I was inhaling the scent of jasmine.

  I crossed the salon again. The night-light diffused its pale green illumination in slow waves. I thought of the sea, and of the iced mint-and-lemonade drink popular on hot days: diabolo menthe. I could still hear bursts of laughter, and I was struck by their purity. They came from very far away and then suddenly got closer. I couldn’t manage to locate their source. The laughter became more and more crystalline and volatile. She was asleep, her cheek resting on her outstretched right arm. The bluish bar of moonlight that lay across the room lit up the corners of her mouth, her neck, her left buttock, and one heel. On her back, the light was like a long, narrow scarf. I held my breath.

  I can still see the leaves swaying outside the window and that body cut in two by a moonbeam. Why is it that a vanished city, prewar Berlin, is superimposed in my memory on the Haute-Savoie countryside that surrounded us? Maybe because she was “acting” in a “film” by “Rolf Madeja.” I made some inquiries about him later, and I learned that he’d started out as a very young man in the UFA studios in Berlin. In February ’45 he began work on his first film, Confettis für zwei, a very vapid and very gay Viennese operetta whose scenes he shot between Allied air raids. The film remained unfinished. For my part, when I call that night to mind, I’m walking past the massive town houses of Berlin as it once was, I go along quays and boulevards that no longer exist. I walk straight on from Alexanderplatz, cross the Lustgarten and the Spree. Night is falling on the four rows of linden and chestnut trees and on the passing trams. They’re empty. The lights tremble. And you, you’re waiting for me in that green cage shining at the end of the avenue, the winter garden of the Adlon Hotel.

  4.

  Meinthe stared attentively at the raincoated man who’d been putting away glasses. The man eventually lowered his eyes and returned to his work. But Meinthe remained in front of him, standing rigid, a mock soldier. Then he turned to the two others, who were watching him with nasty smiles on their faces, their chins propped on their broom handles. Their physical resemblance was striking: the same crew-cut blond hair, the same little mustache, the same protruding blue eyes. One was leaning over to the right and the other to the left, their poses so symmetrical you might have thought they were the same person, reflected in a mirror. That illusion must have occurred to Meinthe, because he walked over to the two men, slowly, frowning. When he got to within a few centimeters, he moved around to examine them from the back, in three-quarter profile, and from the side. The two men didn’t move, but you could tell they were on the verge of springing into action and crushing Meinthe under a hail of fists. Meinthe stepped away from them and retreated toward the exit of the café, walking backward and never taking his eyes off them. They remained where they were, petrified under the grudging and yellowish light shed by the wall lamp.

  Now he’s crossing the station square, his coat collar turned up, his left hand clutching his scarf as if he’s suffered a neck wound. There’s a scanty snowfall. The flakes are so light and so thin that they float in the air. He turns into Rue Sommeiller and stops in front of the Regent. They’re showing a very old film called La Dolce Vita. Meinthe takes shelter under the movie theater’s awning and inspects the stills from the film, one by one, as he takes a cigarette holder out of his jacket pocket. He clamps the holder between his teeth and rummages through all his other pockets in search — no doubt — of a Camel. But there’s no cigarette to be found, and then his face is convulsed by
tics, the same ones as before — the twitching in his left cheek, the thrusting of his chin — but slower and more painful now than they were a dozen years ago.

  He seems hesitant about which way to go: should he cross over and take Rue Vaugelas, which runs into Rue Royale, or should he continue on down Rue Sommeiller? A little below him, on the right, is the green-and-red sign of the Cintra. Meinthe stares at it, eyes asquint. CINTRA. The snowflakes swirling around those six letters turn green and red too. Green, the color of absinthe. Campari red …

  He walks toward the oasis with arched back and stiff legs, and if he didn’t tense himself this way, he’d certainly slip and fall on the sidewalk, a disjointed puppet.

  The customer in the checked jacket is still there, but he’s no longer hitting on the barmaid. He’s sitting at a table in the back, beating time with his index finger and repeating, in a tiny voice that could be a very old woman’s: “And zim … Boom-boom … And zim … Boom-boom …” As for the barmaid, she’s reading a magazine. Meinthe hoists himself onto one of the stools and puts a hand on her forearm. “A light port, my dear,” he whispers.

  5.

  I left the Lindens and moved into the Hermitage with her.

  One evening they came to get me, she and Meinthe. I’d just finished dinner, and I was waiting in the lounge, sitting quite close to the man with the sad spaniel’s face. The others were getting started on their canasta game. The women chatted with Madame Buffaz. Meinthe stopped in the doorway. He was wearing a very pale pink suit, and a dark green handkerchief bloomed from his breast pocket.