Honeymoon Read online

  "I know it by heart," Rigaud said.

  He could have walked down the paths with his eyes shut. Over there were the well and the phoney Roman ruins, and the big lawn cut like an English one which made a contrast with the umbrella pines and oleanders. And over there, at the edge of the lawn, was where he'd been when his mother had forgotten all about him one evening and gone back to Cannes without him.

  "You'll be safe here."

  The porter looked round the garden. Rigaud tried to conquer his uneasy feeling by gripping Ingrid's arm. He had the unpleasant impression that he was returning to his point of departure, to the scene of his unhappy childhood, and that he was sensing the invisible presence of his mother, just when he had managed to forget the wretched woman: all his memories of her were unpleasant. And now once again he would have to remain a prisoner in this garden for hours upon hours … The thought made him shiver. The war was playing a dirty trick on him in forcing him to return to the prison that had been his childhood, from which he had escaped so long ago. Reality was now resembling the nightmares he regularly had: it was the beginning of a new term in the school dormitory …

  "I couldn't have found you a safer place," the porter repeated.

  He tried to reason with himself: his mother was dead, he was an adult, now.

  "Is something worrying you?" the porter asked.

  Ingrid too was giving him a questioning look.

  "No. No. Nothing at all."

  "What were you thinking about?" Ingrid asked.

  "Nothing."

  It was enough to hear Ingrid's voice and to meet her eyes for the past to crumble into dust, with its miserable incidentals: a frivolous mother, an American water ski champion, the white hair and suntanned skin of Monsieur Bailby, and the guests having cocktails down below, by the landing stage. How could all those faded things still cause him any anxiety?

  He walked by Ingrid's side in this garden which was now minute, in comparison with what it had been during his childhood: a forest in which he was always afraid of getting lost and never finding his way back to the castle.

  "Now I'll show you round the villa …"

  And he was surprised to observe how modest the villa too seemed to him, compared with the castle he remembered in Walter Scott's novels. So that was all it was …

  •

  They chose the turret room because of its white walls. On the first floor, the American woman's bedroom was more spacious, but its dark panelling, four-poster bed and Empire furniture gave it a funereal look. Most of the time they used the salon on the ground floor, which had a veranda and opened on to the garden and the sea. One whole wall of this salon was taken up by bookshelves, and they decided to read the books one by one, in the order in which they were arranged on the shelves.

  Rigaud avoided the garden. But on sunny days they went down the stone steps to the landing stage. They bathed, and lay on the pontoon from which the water skiers had formerly taken off. Stowed in a garage hollowed out in the rock were the speedboat and the skis. Would they be used again before they rotted?

  During the first days, the Provençal porter advised Rigaud and Ingrid not to leave the villa. He made himself responsible for bringing their food. He had gone with Rigaud to the mairie in Antibes where, thanks to one of his friends, he had been able to get them a "work permit" specifying that Monsieur and Madame Rigaud were the caretakers of the Villa Saint­Georges, situated in the Boulevard Baudoin in Juan-les-Pins, Alpes-Maritimes. And after all, he had only fulfilled his mission, since the American woman had asked him to keep an eye on the villa in her absence. She had placed it under the protection of the Spanish embassy. Rigaud, who until then had wanted nothing to do with university degrees, official forms, identity papers and good conduct certificates, had asked the porter to get him all the documents that would enable Ingrid to be permanently out of the reach of the French police. So he always carried with him the work permit in the name of Monsieur and Madame Rigaud, and an official letter declaring that the villa was under the direct control of the Spanish embassy in Vichy. As a result, they were in neutral territory and the war no longer concerned them, Ingrid and him.

  •

  To be on the safe side, he had decided to marry Ingrid in church. The only proof of their civil marriage was Ingrid's false papers in the name of "Madame Rigaud". But there had never been a civil marriage. The religious marriage was celebrated one winter Saturday in the church in Juan-les-Pins. The priest was a friend of the porter, and their witnesses were the porter and the man from the mairie who had provided them with their work permit. The wedding breakfast was held in the salon in the villa. The porter had gone down to the cellar to get a bottle of champagne, and they drank to the health of the newlyweds. Rigaud added the certificate of their religious marriage to the papers he already carried with him.

  •

  They played their part as caretakers conscientiously, and cleaned the villa regularly. They tracked down the slightest speck of dust, polished the furniture, cleaned the windows. Rigaud looked after the speedboat and the water skis. The American woman and Monsieur Bailby would find them intact, if they weren't both too old to use them again after the war. Yes, the war would end. It couldn't go on and on. Everything would come back to normal. That's the law of nature. But they had to stay alive until then. Alive. And not attract attention. Be as inconspicuous as possible. They had definitively given up walking in the deserted streets of Juan-les-Pins. When they bathed, they didn't swim out more than fifty metres from the landing stage, so as not to be seen from the shore.

  Ingrid had time to devour all Pierre Benoit's novels, whose red morocco volumes occupied a whole shelf. Each one had an affectionate dedication to the American woman on its flyleaf. Then she tackled the complete works of Alexandre Dumas, bound in emerald green. She read passages from them to Rigaud, who was repainting the veranda with the last tins of Ripolin found on the black market.

  In the evenings they switched on the big wireless in the salon. Every day, at the same time, an announcer with a metallic voice gave the war news in the form of an editorial. Listening to him, Rigaud was convinced that the war would soon be over. This voice had no future, you could tell that from its increasingly metallic tones. It was already a voice from beyond the grave. They would still hear it a little longer, so long as the war lasted, and then it would fade away from one day to the next.

  One winter evening, while they were listening in the semidarkness of the salon, Rigaud asked Ingrid:

  "Doesn't that remind you of something?"

  "No."

  "It's the voice of the redheaded chap in the dark suit we met last year in the restaurant ... I'm sure it's him ..." "Do you think so?"

  As the war moved gradually towards its denouement, the announcer hammered out his phrases more and more emphatically and kept on repeating them. The record was getting stuck in a groove. The voice grew fainter, it got muffled by interference, came back clearly for a few seconds, and then died away again. On the evening of the American landing, a few dozen kilometres from the villa, Ingrid and Rigaud could still just make out the metallic tones of the announcer, lost in the hiss of atmospherics. The voice tried in vain to fight against this storm that was covering it. One last time, before becoming submerged, it broke loose in a hammered-out phrase that was like a cry of hate or an appeal for help.

  •

  They listened to the announcer at their dinner time, and the voice had lost all reality for them. Now it was no more than a background noise mingled with the music of the orchestras and chansons of those times.

  The days, the months, the seasons, the years, went monotonously by, in a kind of eternity. Ingrid and Rigaud barely remembered that they were waiting for something, which must be the end of the war.

  Sometimes it forced itself on their attention, and disturbed what Rigaud called their honeymoon. One November evening, some Bersaglieri advanced at the double and took over Juan-les-Pins. A few months later it was the Germans. They built fortifi
cations along the coast and came prowling round the villa. Ingrid and Rigaud had to put out the lights and pretend to be dead.

  ONCE AGAIN I went to look at the elephants. You never tire of them. A slight breeze attenuated the heat. I walked to the perimeter of the zoo, which ran along one of the avenues in the Bois de Vincennes on the Saint-Mandé side, and sat down on a bench. There were tall trees, whose foliage protects you. And an umbrella pine.

  After a bit I lay down on the bench. And I wondered whether I would get up of my own accord when the zoo closed, or whether I'd wait until the keeper requested me to move on. I was tempted never to go back to my room in the Dodds Hotel and to let myself slide down the slope which was perhaps my lot, after all: to become a tramp. I felt fine. Now and then I heard an elephant trumpeting. I didn't take my eyes off the dark-green foliage of the umbrella pine, which stood out against the sky. Juan-les-Pins. I too had been there, a long time before, in the summer when I was twenty-one. But I didn't then know that Ingrid and Rigaud had lived there. I'd met them the previous summer, and as I hadn't seen them since then, I had forgotten them.

  It was Cavanaugh who had persuaded me to go to Juan-les-Pins, for a jazz festival. We were not yet fully aware of our vocations as explorers. Cavanaugh was in love with the sister of a negro pianist, and he had got a job as chauffeur to another musician whose name alone was enough to mitigate my depression: Dodo Marmarosa.

  I wanted that umbrella pine, between the zoo and Saint­Mandé, to be my mediator and to transmit to me something of the feeling of Juan-les-Pins that summer, when without knowing it I was walking in the tracks of Ingrid and Rigaud. We too went bathing below the casino. And from there, we could see the enormous façade of the Provençal appear at dawn. We weren't staying there but at another, more modest, hotel in a very noisy street.

  We lived only at night. I have not the slightest recollection of Juan-les-Pins in the daytime. Except at the fleeting moment when the sun rose. There were so many faces around us that they have all become merged, and I can't make out which one belonged to Dodo Marmarosa. The orchestras played in the pine forest, and that same summer I met Annette. In those days, I thought I was happy.

  SO I HAD PLANNED to change hotels every week, and to choose them in the outlying districts of Paris that I had frequented in the old days. From the Dodds, at the Porte Dorée, I had thought of moving to the Fieve Hotel, in the Avenue Simon-Bolivar. I had intended to leave this evening, but I haven't asked for my bill. I, who have travelled so many kilometres over the various continents, I was scared at the thought of taking the métro from the Porte Dorée to the Buttes-Chaumont. After a week at the Porte Dorée, I was afraid of feeling out of my element there. Maybe I'll get up the courage to leave tomorrow morning. But really, I dreaded arriving at the Avenue Simon-Bolivar at dusk, and a too sudden break with the habits I'd got into here at the Porte Dorée.

  So I went and had dinner, as I had the previous days, at the café in the Boulevard Soult. Before returning to the hotel, I walked along the perimeter of the zoo as far as the umbrella pine.

  I've left the window wide open, I've put out the light and I'm lying on the bed with my arms crossed behind my head. I've become attached to this room, and that's why I'm reluctant to leave. But I'm considering another solution: to make all excursion every day to a different suburb. Then to come back here. If need be, to sleep somewhere else from time to time, with no other luggage than my notes on Ingrid's life. One night at the Fieve, in the Avenue Simon-Bolivar. One night at the Gouin Hotel near the Porte de Clichy … But knowing that the Dodds remains my fixed abode, and that this Porte Dorée district is from now on my base. I'd have to pay for my room for several weeks in advance. In that way I'd reassure the proprietor of the Dodds, who must be suspicious of me – I can sense it when we meet in the lobby – because I don't look like an ordinary tourist.

  Yes, from time to time spend a night in another district, to dream of the one you've left. In the Fieve Hotel, for instance, I shall lie down on the bed in my room, as I am doing now, and believe I can hear, from a distance, the elephants trumpeting in the zoo. No one will ever be able to find me in any of these places.

  •

  I was wrong. Yesterday, at the beginning of the afternoon, I had decided to visit the former Colonial Museum. All you have to do when you leave the hotel is cross the square with the fountains, and you come to the low, wrought-iron gate, and the monumental steps leading up to the museum. As I was buying my ticket at the window in the entrance, I thought I recognized, somewhere among the milling crowd of tourists and schoolchildren in the main hall, Ben Smidane's profile. I lost no time in crossing the hall, threading my way between the visitors, and I emerged in a big corner room in which one could admire Marshal Lyautey's study. Someone, behind me, placed his hand on my shoulder:

  "Well, Jean, so we're visiting museums?"

  I turned round. Ben Smidane. He smiled at me, with an embarrassed smile. He was wearing a very elegant beige summer suit and a sky-blue polo neck.

  "What a strange coincidence," I said, urbanely. "I didn't expect to meet you here."

  "Nor did I. I thought you'd gone to Rio de Janeiro."

  "Well, believe it or not, no."

  I hadn't spoken to anyone for something like ten days, and it had taken a considerable effort to utter this one phrase. I wondered whether I would be capable of uttering another. The saliva was drying up in my mouth.

  "I knew very well that you weren't in Rio."

  He was clearly trying to put me at my ease, and I was grateful to him. No need now to go into any long explanations. I concentrated, and managed to come out with:

  "You get tired of everything, even Rio."

  "I understand," Ben Smidane said.

  But I had a feeling that he didn't understand a thing. "Jean, I have to talk to you."

  He made as if to take me by the arm and lead me away gently, as if he mistrusted my reactions.

  "You don't look very confident, Ben. Are you afraid I'll misbehave in Lyautey's study?"

  "Not in the least, Jean …"

  He glanced around him, and then looked at me again. It was as if he was working out the quickest way of tackling me in the middle of the mass of visitors if I suddenly went raving mad.

  "Do you like it at the Dodds Hotel?"

  He had winked at me. No doubt he was trying to mollify me. But how did he know I was living at the Dodds Hotel? "Come on, Jean. We absolutely have to talk."

  We found ourselves in the square with the fountains. "Shall we have a drink?" I suggested. "At the zoo cafeteria?" "Do you go to the zoo?"

  I could read his thoughts. For him, I was not in my normal state.

  The sun was beating down, and I no longer felt up to walking as far as the zoo.

  "I know a café that's nearer, at the corner of the boulevard. There's never anyone in it, and it's very, very cool …"

  We were the only customers. He ordered an espresso. So did I.

  "Annette sent me," he said.

  "Oh yes? How is she?"

  I had pretended to be indifferent.

  "You must be wondering how I managed to find you? Here."

  He held out a crumpled bit of paper on which I read:

  Hôtel Gouin? Hôtel de la Jonquière? Quietud's (Rue Berzélius).

  Hôtel Fieve.

  Hôtel du Point du Jour.

  Hôtel Dodds? Hôtel des Begonias (Rue de Picpus).

  "You left it in your study, at the Cité Véron. Annette found it the other evening. And she understood at once."

  I had indeed scribbled down these names before my false departure for Rio.

  "And you found me right away?"

  "No. I've been hanging round the other hotels for four days."

  "I feel for you."

  "Annette told me she knew all these hotels."

  "Yes. We often stayed in them, twenty years ago."

  "She asked me to give you this."

  On the envelope was written: FOR JEAN, and I re
cognized one of the qualities I most admired in my wife: the beautiful big handwriting of the illiterate that she was.

  Darling,

  I miss you. Cavanaugh never leaves me for a second and I have to send you this letter without him knowing. You can trust Smidane and give him a message for me. I want to see you. I'll try to be at the Cité Véron every day at about seven. Phone me. Otherwise, I'll phone you, when I know which hotel you're staying in. I could come and meet you there, like we used to a long time ago. I'll do that without Cavanaugh knowing. I'm not telling anyone that you're still alive. I love you, darling.

  Annette

  I put the letter in my pocket.

  "Have you got a message for her?" Ben Smidane asked me anxiously.

  "No."

  Ben Smidane's brow furrowed with a studious, childish expression.

  "Jean, I find your attitude disconcerting."

  He seemed eager to understand, and so deferential towards me – I was older than he, after all – that I felt sorry for him.

  "It's very simple. I just feel tired of my life and my job."

  He was drinking in my words, and nodding solemnly.

  "You're still too young, Ben, to have that feeling. One starts out full of enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure, but after a few years it becomes a job and a routine … I don't want to discourage you, though. I'm really the last person to tell anyone what to do."

  "You don't realize, Jean … We thought you'd disappeared for good …"

  He hesitated for a few seconds, and then added:

  "That you were dead …"

  "So what?"

  He stared at me in consternation.

  "You don't know how much Annette loves you … The moment she found the bit of paper with the names of the hotels, she decided that life was worth living again …"

  "And Cavanaugh?"

  "She asked me to be sure to tell you that Cavanaugh has never counted for her."

  I felt a sudden repugnance at hearing my private life brought up, and embarrassed at seeing Ben Smidane involved in it all.

  "At your age, the main thing is to think of yourself and your future, Ben."