The Tale of the Rose Read online

  “Lead me by the hand,” he would say. “I don’t know my way up the stairs.” He loved to act the child. I set him down in his armchair, kissed him, and repeated in his ear, “You must write, write. Crémieux said so: ‘He must write.’ So hurry!”

  “Thank you, thank you,” he would mumble. “I’ll write, because you ask me to.” And in the morning I would find a few illegible pages on the little desk in my boudoir.

  He would leave early for work, and I would sleep away the whole morning. Around three or four in the afternoon I would emerge from my bed, exhausted. I wasn’t eating, and Léon would say, “If Madame does not eat, my wife and I will not eat, either.”

  An invitation for tea at the home of one of our lady friends arrived one day, but it was for Tonio alone. He came home to change and shave, as usual. My heart couldn’t bear it any longer. I asked him to stay home with me, but he refused.

  “I have a dinner to go to as well,” he said.

  I dressed in black and went out into the street, mad with grief. I wandered about at random and insulted my reflection in the windows. Suddenly, a young man stopped in front of me. He was a great admirer of Gómez Carrillo.

  “Consuelito, are you all alone?”

  “Yes, Luisito,” I replied forlornly.

  “But come, come!”

  “Where?”

  “To a tea.”

  “I’m not invited.”

  “But it’s being given by my aunt,” he said. “Come, quickly!”

  I was welcomed with open arms and a certain degree of malice. On my friend’s arm, I recovered my courage. Suddenly I was fine, far from my Don Juan pilot who told his stories about the desert with such great success. I announced that I was leaving on the next boat, that urgent matters were calling me back to Paris.

  After that flowers filled the house once more, and Enrique’s friends, too. They showered me with their affection. Now it was my turn to receive invitations. As for my pilot, he stayed home alone in Tagle, waiting for his mother.

  I finally reserved a cabin on the next ocean liner.

  “When your mother arrives,” I said to Tonio, “you can tell her I had something to do in Paris. Lucien is waiting for me, I am going to marry him. It’s my destiny.”

  He didn’t say a word.

  The days rushed by. Friends came to visit; we went to the movies and took endless, rambling walks. Finally I found myself on the boat that was taking me back to France, my heart in ruins. My cabin was full of flowers: my friends had understood my sadness.

  I fell asleep before the boat had begun to move. When I woke up, we were out on the open sea. The steward brought me a telegram. It was from Saint-Exupéry. I was also told that he was flying his plane over the boat. He would surface on the horizon from time to time and signal me from the sky. I was frightened almost to death.

  I didn’t leave my cabin until Rio de Janeiro, where I saw my teacher and friend, the great Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes. I was told that Tonio’s mother was on another boat anchored there in the bay for a few hours. I tried to ignore this.

  After eighteen days, we arrived: Le Havre, customs, my apartment on rue de Castellane. I was back in Paris. When I asked for Lucien, my concierge said he had not arrived. Where was he? There was a knock at the door: it was Lucien. Then the telephone rang, and I picked it up before I’d even had time to greet him.

  “Allô?”

  “Buenos Aires calling, please stay on the line.”

  Then: “It’s me, Tonio. Chérie, I’m coming on the next boat to join you, to marry you.”

  “Oh, really? Listen, I have a visitor.”

  “Lucien?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, send him away. I don’t want you to see him. I’m bringing you a puma.”

  “What?”

  “A puma. I’ll disembark in Spain so I can see you sooner. Leave for Spain right away. The trains are bad, so have a rest in Madrid, then wait for me in Almería.”

  “Excuse me, I thought I told you I had a visitor.”

  After that it was the same conversation, night and day. Finally I gave in after he told me, “Since you left, Léon, the valet, is always drunk, the rice is undercooked, and my underwear is being stolen. I will come to get you and marry you in any country in the world and you’ll arrange a lovely room for me, but without a cask with a golden spigot, because that’s been stolen, too. I’m not writing anymore. I’m making my mother cry because I’m in despair. Our separation is driving me mad.”

  I loved him, but I also realized how calm my life was without him. I had a considerable income as the widow of Gómez Carrillo, but if I married anyone else I would lose it. I had a lot of work to do, putting things in order, and I needed time for serious reflection, but the phone calls from Buenos Aires, from the little house in Tagle, drove me out of my mind. So one day I yielded. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll meet you in Almería.”

  I left without telling Lucien, who was behaving very badly. My dog would stay with the secretary, who said she loved it fiercely, as much as she loved my car. Everything was as it had been before.

  I have a very precise memory of the local train, the hot bricks and copper boxes filled with boiling water to warm us up. Someone in another compartment was playing the guitar. To the rhythm of the train’s rocking movement, I heard the chorus “Porque yo te quiero, porque yo te quiero,” and I traveled toward my Tonio telling myself, “Because I love you . . . because I love you . . .”

  Madrid, and then Almería, the day of his arrival. I managed to get a special permit and went out to meet the ocean liner in a little rowboat. The ocean liner had had a breakdown, a broken propeller, and wouldn’t be able to dock for a few days. My presence was announced; someone shouted: “The wife of the aviator Saint-Exupéry.” He heard that and left his mother on the boat with the puma to throw himself into my arms. He told me that the whole family was waiting for him and his mother in Marseille. But he didn’t want to introduce us right away. We had so much to say to each other, he said. His mother had hinted that marriage to a foreigner would shock the elderly members of the family. She had concluded, “But everything always works out in the end, with patience.”

  She was very diplomatic with him. She knew he was a child at heart and if you handled him the wrong way he would run away forever.

  “I don’t want to rush things with my mother, tu comprends? I’ll leave the ship secretly in Almería, we’ll buy an old car, hire a driver, and cross Spain on our honeymoon.”

  I said yes to everything.

  Valencia . . . the people in the little inns . . . the laughter of our young lives . . .

  Part Two

  The South of France, 1931

  6

  ANTOINE REALLY WAS UNLIKE any other man. I told myself I was insane: I had a house in France and a fortune, thanks to the generosity of my late husband who had made me his heir. Why torment myself further? Everything could be so simple . . . I had friends in Paris, and if I gave up the idea of marrying Tonio I could keep my fortune, for Gómez Carrillo had been rich, he had published books in Spain, in Paris; everything would be easy for me if only I kept his name.

  But I always went back to Tonio. In my mind, I had already begun to organize our life together. We would go and live in my house, the Mirador, in the south of France; it had been Gómez Carrillo’s final home. Tonio would finish his book, and then we would travel to Italy, Africa, China. He would be a pilot again, for the Compagnie Aéro-Orient. Plans ran through my head . . .

  We had said nothing to each other about our difficulties. In every village we passed through, he gave me presents. “I want you to lose everything you have,” he said, “so that every single thing you’re wearing will have come from my hands.”

  He was thin; he looked as if he had suffered. The first evening we were together again, we couldn’t leave Almería. Our feelings were too strong, and mingled with them were shyness and pain.

  “I have only one question to ask you,” he murmured, p
ale and worried, trembling with tenderness. “I haven’t slept for the last several nights, though you know I’m never bothered by a lack of sleep, but only by the hours that separate me from you. My puma was unhappy on the boat—I couldn’t feed it very well, and it tried to bite one of the sailors—I’m sure they’re going to put it to sleep. But I was even more unhappy than the puma. I couldn’t think of anything but your face, your way of talking. Speak to me, speak to me! I beg you. You’re not saying anything, why? Do you think I haven’t suffered enough? The phone calls I made from Buenos Aires were torture, and you never wanted to speak loudly or distinctly. Why? Did you always have a visitor with you? But I’m mad, I have no more time for unhappiness, I’m with you again now and no one in the world will ever be able to separate us. Will they?”

  “Yes, Tonio,” I said quietly. “Love is like faith. I left because you didn’t trust me. Your family, too, they were asking for information about me, which, you must understand, was very painful to me.”

  “Listen, little one, let me explain. Where my parents live, in Provence, the men marry women of their own background, whose parents know their parents and grandparents, and so on from generation to generation. Someone new, in our country, it’s like an earthquake, and so they wanted more information, in order to know, to be reassured. In Paris it’s less unusual, the young men from good families marry rich American girls. But in Provence, no—we’ve kept the old ways. My poor dear mother lost her head and made us wait a little while, that’s all. Besides, I’m very happy with the way you’ve handled things. If you hadn’t left, my mother would have married us off in Buenos Aires, and I would have been uncomfortable. I don’t really understand what happened when we were at city hall. I said to myself: this is for life, but I’m not sure I’ll make her happy. Then I thought, since she wants to go, let her go; she’s the one who’ll take responsibility for the break, and that’s for the best right now. At the time I had some very complicated matters to settle at the office with the Argentine airmail service. I was signing checks without knowing what they were paying for and my sweet mother was taking her time in coming across the Atlantic. Then you left me, and I was glad. Yes, I was glad, because you proved to me that you could live your life on your own. I knew you were sad, and so strong, so beautiful, and I wanted to see where your strength would take you. Only I didn’t think much about what it would actually mean. When you were really gone, I could have thrown myself into the ocean. My mother can tell you about the trip we took to Asunción Lake in Paraguay. I never once opened my mouth. I was counting the hours, waiting to take the boat to come and find you. I would have carried you off no matter what, even if you hadn’t come to Almería, even if you had married Lucien. But speak to me! Tell me that you need me too.”

  “Ah, Tonio,” I said. “The truth is that I’m here now but I’ve gone back to Lucien. I told him our whole story, all my grief, and he consoled me and promised he would make me forget it all. And yet here I am. I’ve vanished from Paris without saying a word to him. I sent him a telegram from Madrid in a moment of remorse—I don’t know what I told him.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Don’t think about anything except us.”

  “But he’s only human, and I’m making him suffer . . .”

  “Don’t be afraid, I’ll go see him. I’ll explain that we’re mad, the two of us, dangerously mad, mad with love. And that he, my God, is an old friend of yours, a friend for life. I don’t hold the fact that he loves you against him. The whole world should love you! And I’ll get your dog back, and your car, and your papers. Promise me we won’t ever talk about him again, never. You don’t need to know anything about it, I’ll arrange everything in a very friendly way.”

  “Very well, Tonio,” I said. “I entrust myself to you forever, forever . . .”

  After that we stayed at the hotel in Almería for several days. He decided to hire a taxi to make excursions in the city and then to cross Spain. He didn’t want to drive; we would be too far from each other, he said. The Valencia oranges, the little villages perched on white rocks, the places he had visited in his youth, he wanted to show me everything. He laughed like an oversized child. Our constant chattering in French drove the Spanish driver crazy.

  At last we had to go back to France, because of my dog or Lucien or his family, I don’t remember. He wanted to stay a few days longer, but I was afraid of keeping him from his family for too long; they were waiting for him and didn’t know where he was.

  BACK IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE, we were happy at the Mirador, not far from Nice. Nothing troubled us except the smell of the mimosas, which was sometimes too strong. We couldn’t bring ourselves to burn the bouquets, so we were constantly sneezing. Oh, the mimosas and the handkerchiefs in all colors! I was a newly engaged woman, but this time I wasn’t waiting for a wedding. We said we were going to break with tradition, that we wouldn’t go the way of people who hate each other because they’re forced to marry or who marry to please their families. “You are my freedom,” he told me. “You are the land where I want to live for the rest of my life. We are the law.”

  Agay, the home of Tonio’s brother-in-law where his sister Didi lived, was only an hour away from the Mirador. Didi came to see us. The two of them walked in the gardens for hours, and I stayed behind, sitting in an armchair, waiting for their conversation to end.

  “I beg of you, young future bride,” Tonio said, “you who read books, don’t wait for us. There is no end to a conversation when it is about you. The end is your disappearance—so sing, read, work!”

  One day his sister told us that one of their cousins was coming to see Tonio and his young fiancée. I was nervous. Who was this cousin, really?

  “A duchess,” Tonio told me.

  “Oh no, Tonio, I won’t come with you. You go and see her on your own.”

  “She’s coming with André Gide, you know,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “André Gide is a great friend of my cousin’s. He wants to speak to me. Come along with me.”

  At the request of the old writer and the duchess cousin, I decided to go. I was sure the cousin wanted to introduce some rich woman to Tonio. My God, the things that I, a slight young woman from the land of volcanos, was experiencing and coming to understand! I didn’t know what tactics duchesses used or what kinds of intrigues relatives might devise in order to arrange a suitable marriage.

  Gide did indeed come to Agay with the famous cousin. His voice was sugary and sometimes saccharine, the voice of a female worn out by sorrow and unconsummated love. There was nothing extraordinary about the cousin; she was elegant in her beautiful car, nothing more. She made a great show of being kind, but only Tonio’s mother was really nice to me, at once attentive and compassionate.

  The examination was going well, but then, during the meal, I drank something the wrong way and choked. The hairdresser had made my hair too curly, I was sweating, and my digestion was sluggish—to top it all off, I spilled wine on Tonio’s pants. I don’t remember anything else after that; a powerful migraine erased the faces of friends and guests for two days, and I stayed in darkness at the Mirador. I could hear Tonio circling like a caged puma. Still, he was beginning to feel at home at the Mirador; he would leave, come back, go out again.

  He also took care of me. He had stayed clear of the doctors in Nice and was reading strange medical treatises written by Spanish scholars. Among Gómez Carrillo’s books he had discovered some famous works on magic that my former husband had written, and he spent whole days and nights bent over those arcane recipes, laughing like a child at his new game. He repeated the strange stories I told him during my delirium, a peculiar delirium without fever.

  I was trembling with weakness and fear. He reassured me as best he could. He wanted me to be confident in life, but I was terrified at the prospect of seeing his family and friends again. What love-stricken young woman wouldn’t tremble before a whole tribe that thought it owned her fiancé? I was of a different stock—I
came from another land, another tribe, I spoke another language, I ate differently, I lived in a different way. That was why I was afraid, but my fiancé would give me no hint as to how I should behave.

  I did not understand why there had been, from the beginning, so many misunderstandings about this marriage. Money could easily be acquired through the books and goods of Gómez Carrillo—one trip to Spain, and pesetas would have rained down over the pinecones of Agay. There were titles of nobility, even a marquis, among the Carrillos, and the Sandovals were of the highest class. I had priests and even cardinals in my family. Through the Suncins I had a good dose of Indian blood, Mayan blood (which was then fashionable in Paris), and had inherited legends about the volcanoes that would have amused Tonio’s family. But something deeper held them back, something to do with mixed blood . . .

  In vain, Tonio tried to make them accept me. I wasn’t French. They didn’t want to see or know me—they were blind to my existence. I often complained of this to Tonio. He said it gave him a headache. He was greatly tormented by the situation and decided not to write for a while. He couldn’t. He tried, but in vain. These dissensions between the Mirador and Agay did not gladden his heart. I stopped speaking.

  One day he confided in me that he would soon be given a job as a pilot. I was delighted. “Oh yes, I’ll go to the end of the world with you. You are my tree, and I’ll be the vine that clings to you,” I said eagerly.

  “No, you’re my graft,” he told me, “my oxygen, my dose of the unknown. Only death can separate us.”

  I asked him to tell me stories about the dangers of flying, the moments when death was inescapable, and we laughed at death.

  LATER, THE COUSIN AND THE WRITER WITH the womanly voice wrote to Tonio and gave him their opinion of me: negative. Gide, in his aversion to me, wrote this sentence in his Journal, which can still be read there: “Saint-Exupéry returned from Argentina with a new book and a new fiancée. Read the book, saw the girl. Congratulated him heartily, but principally on the book.”