Authors: Studio Saint-Ex
Anio Szado (17 page)
Tonio had never been voluble in the mornings, but this morning—after hearing Consuelo’s gleeful confession and responding with a disgusted “This is how you would tame me?”—he had become all but mute.
Checking out of the Windsor Arms required a minimum of words: a bill settled, a car and driver arranged, an umbrella accepted, a tip proffered. Fine. But surely to God a woman could expect to hear her husband’s voice at least once during a monotonous three-hour car ride, and not just the abrasive progression of his pen.
Rain flopped around the Cadillac’s exterior, dreary as a string mop spreading effluent on a floor. Give me lightning, thought Consuelo. Thunder. What we need is a good, hair-stiffening storm.
The city outskirts gave way to highway, and the highway to only more highway and more rain. “How do you expect me to amuse myself?”
Scritch, scritch
.
Why the hell had she married a writer? Self-indulgent. Stony. Telling secrets to their treasured bits of paper with their scratchy pens. “You’re writing about me, aren’t you?”
His mouth was tight and silent. His pen fell silent, too. He was staring through the side window as the car approached a bridge. They passed under it; the rain slapped down hard, all at once, and Tonio startled, his arms jolting up like a baby’s at the sudden sound.
Consuelo laughed. So he was alive, was he? There was hope yet. She wriggled her bottom closer to his on the seat. “You can’t still be mad about last night, my love. It was entertaining for both of us. How you could be anything but amused is beyond me.” Amused and honored. And gratified! Most men would think they’d gone to heaven. But Tonio? Fussy as a woman these days. Everything had to be analyzed, required a decision, was contingent upon an assessment of right or wrong. As though there could be anything wrong with wanting intimacy with one’s husband. His attitude was the problem. That and his depressive silence. It couldn’t be good for Tonio to bottle everything up; no wonder he was so often ill. If he could only get his head out of the clouds, he’d see the cure right next to him.
Slowly the rain abated. Tonio found a fresh page and again began to write.
The landscape around them lifted into soft hills, quite lovely in the emerging sunshine. Remarkable Mother Nature: she knew best how to buoy the heart. Consuelo could break this impasse. Tonio seemed keen to stay huddled in his corner, but it was the job of a wife to be gracious and bend. “What are you writing now, darling? May I see? I’m sure I could help.”
Scritch
—Damn him! Consuelo made a grab for the notebook on his lap. He pushed her back. With his free arm outstretched to keep her at bay, he bent his body into a protective arch over his work. His pen moved quickly, furiously blackening a word or two at the top of the paper, then all at once he tore out the page.
“Read, since you insist,” he said. “See if I still amuse you as you seem to think I should.”
It was a letter. She held it up to the window, but his frenzied scribbling had fully obscured the addressee’s name.
Quebec City, June 3, 1942
Dear
XXXXXXXXX
,
After all our time spent apart—each in our separate country,
growing into our separate strivings and grief, sharing only silence—still in my voiceless hours my thoughts go to you who once taught me to speak.
“I want an apple. I am a student.” How crude our early words were—mine truant, careless, childishly cruel; yours the unvarnished speech of a half-orphaned girl.
Consuelo checked the defaced salutation again. His oldest sister? Half orphaned, yes, for their father died when Tonio was three. With the mother raising the children alone, no doubt Marie-Madeleine would have been called upon to perfect her brother’s speech.
Simple words were the first kindness you showed me. Only simplicity is honest and beautiful: the worker’s uniform, the naked mouth, the unadorned breast.
Breast?
It is rare (as much in language as in fashion) to hide nothing, to promise nothing, to strive for truth and not simply to impress.
She skipped back. What naked mouth? Whose unadorned breast?
It is rare, yet there is nothing more vital. For how else can one human trust another, or know love? No milestone, no invention, no great love, no great life, is built through any but the simplest and most unambiguous steps.
I asked you to do something for me before I left. Another might have read cruelty into my words. But you took them for what they were, a plain and practical request.
For this I thank you.
For I have grown very tired of being misunderstood.
I wish words had proven to be as simple as you made me hope they could be. Even now there are things I cannot put into words … or not into speech … Memories of your young body,
Consuelo frowned.
and mine—young again with you. For a year, we were two children chasing squirrels, tossing whirligigs, wishing on stars …
An older schoolgirl, then? An early, never-forgotten crush?
he with his mind dominating his body and his heart; she all heart, at home in herself, as sure of her eager body as he was awkward and insecure in his own.
Who was this girl—middle-aged woman, now—to whom he would write so freely, confessing embarrassments that were so at odds with his adult facade and physique? This was not her Tonio; he never talked to Consuelo this way!
The girl had to be a memory and nothing more. He hadn’t intended on delivering this letter, but destroying it. He only wanted for his wife to see him this way—more vulnerable even than a man drugged to sleep. He was testing her, daring her to make light of his troubles again.
Answer me this: How is it that one can believe the body to be sacrosanct, inviolate, the image and creation of God … and yet know it to be more destructible and error-prone than lowly structures created by man?
My brother died at the age of fifteen. He had been wise as a king, as diligent in the care of our friendship as a lamplighter in the tending of the flame. He had been my anchor, the angel to my devilry, my mirror in a household in which only sisters
and mother remained. My brother had called me to his deathbed, not to speak of his pain but to soothe my own. His body, he confided, would die and be gone … but the rest of him would stay.
How can a child know himself as other than body? How did my brother know what he would be in both our world and in the world that waited?
What am I to do with the secret he shared?
You spoke so wisely of the spirit and the body on the day we met. What is this body, like a soul in its power to torment and exhilarate? Mine so worn now, fickle, creaking in heavy weather, limbering to life with the return of sun … or with the thought of sunshine such as you have been to me.
When I remember your blond hair holding light—just as did mine as a boy—your undimmed innocence as intoxicating as perfume … It pains me less to think of us growing apart than to think that your light might one day grow weak.
These are dark days in the country of our fathers. They will grow darker still, and colder, before the threat subsides. You asked me once if the sky was cold …
Enough. Consuelo couldn’t turn back time. She couldn’t become the little blond friend he had long left behind. Did he want her to return to the soil, to her mother, and arrange to be rebirthed?
All she could do was change the atmosphere of the moment. All he needed after his month of lethargy was to do a job and to do it well, as well as Consuelo did her own.
There were times when a wife had to grovel and bend; there were times when a wife had to snap.
“Give me the sleeping pills. Let me kill myself!” She tore at his jacket, batting away his hands. The car wobbled in the roadway as she pushed his head into the window. Her long nails caught the skin of his forehead and ear.
Tonio yanked her to him, locking her flailing arms against his
chest. She showed some resistance; no more than was necessary. She cried a little. Tonio spoke to the driver, who had adjusted his mirror to frame the scene, and swayed Consuelo into silence.
She had had to whip up a proper storm to give him a chance to calm the seas. He would be fine now; it was like letting a toddler fight his way to sleep.
Tonio touched his fingers to his forehead, checking for blood. “You’ll kill us all,” he muttered. “Rabid cat.”
“Don’t call me that.” She slid away from him, indignant as a flower standing straight in a chilly wind. “You know I hate cats.”
The De Koninck home in the historic old
quartier
of Quebec City was a
grande maison
of quiet grey limestone. Staid, thought Consuelo. Sedate. But Tonio loved its leaded windows, its heavy banisters and soaring ceilings; he examined it like a doctor with a patient and happily proclaimed it constitutionally secure.
The hosts were similarly well settled. Charles De Koninck, in his mid-thirties, had already been a Dean of Philosophy for years. His wife …
What was the damn wife’s name?
The fuzzy drone in jet planes these days: it’s like sitting in an aerosol can. Makes it impossible to think. She’d rather have a 1930s propeller plane, whose massive racket numbed the ears and extremities but left the mind free to soar and to think … To think of nothing but the exciting suitor in the pilot seat beside her … His hands on the controls but his eyes on her … Her thoughts turning wild as she reads his moving lips …
She is there.
Then: turbulence; marbles strewn across a courtyard; her mind trips.
It was June. The wife introduced herself when Consuelo disembarked from the Cadillac. Charles De Koninck and …
Who cares
! Only the boy mattered. Little Thomas De Koninck with his blond curly hair. Tonio’s little prize. Little Tonio’s lost twin. The small, blond boy who would become a little prince.
Their stay at the De Konincks’ had been shaping up to be the usual: impeccably gracious hosts, elaborate meals, engrossed attention paid to Tonio, polite questions put to Consuelo. She was obliged to represent her husband at breakfasts and spend the mornings with Madame De Koninck while Charles put in time at the university and Tonio slept. “It’s what your husband needs,” the wife said approvingly each day, proud to give him succor and rest. But each night, dawn had been near the horizon before Tonio joined Consuelo in their bed. He claimed he was staying up only to write—not on paper but in his head. It infuriated her to realize he might never put his thoughts onto paper in her presence again.
Finally, it was Friday morning. The last day to endure chitchat over coffee and eggs Benedict, the last afternoon of sightseeing (yet another folksy gallery, another battle monument, another reverent reference to where Quebecois blood had been shed), the last evening in which they would sit four at the dinner table, the hosts fussing over Tonio’s every serving and every word, as though without their ministrations and their guestroom the man would have been dead.
Consuelo roused him early. “I told the De Konincks we’d go with them to fetch the son from boarding school.” It was a bit far, Charles had said, but a lovely drive; the scenery would do Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry good. She got Tonio up and dressed. Then she faked a sudden headache to claim a few hours of freedom—to read and sketch in the luxurious bed.
Lunch arrived—via the cook, on a silver tray—but Consuelo’s
husband and the De Konincks did not. The afternoon passed in foul tedium. By the time she descended from the bedroom to take her pre-dinner cocktail—alone—Consuelo was nauseous with boredom, furious at being abandoned. The injustices that had been served upon her this holiday! They ground like sand in the teeth.
Dinner for one was served and rejected before the party finally returned. Their spirits were as elevated as the color in their cheeks. Their words were contrite but their tone was too carefree.
Père
and
mère
De Koninck spoke quietly. Tonio said not a word, nor did he raise his eyes. Asleep in his arms was a golden-haired child.
While the mother put the son to bed, Tonio and De Koninck settled down to smoke and tell Consuelo about the day. The school’s headmaster had entreated Tonio to rally the boys with an impromptu talk, which evolved to a magic show, for which they rewarded him with a song. Tonio had responded with his favorite childhood tune, and needed no persuasion to teach the students to sing along.
By the time Thomas mastered the chorus, he understood that his new friendship with this big, funny man would elevate his status among his eight-year-old peers. That was the only explanation Consuelo could think of for Charles’s claim: “It’s the first time he’s ever begged us to stay on and take in the pleasures of his school.”
Thomas led a tour, holding tight to Tonio’s hand. Even the teachers marched behind them, and soon teachers’ wives emerged from the residences and were following along. They had a picnic and a boat ride; there were seagulls and sunshine and swans. Thomas taught Tonio clapping games. Tonio led a roving lesson on constellations, using resident pet turtles for stars.