Charbonneau (16 page)

“I like you, Baptiste,” Sophie said abruptly. Baptiste, who had never gotten a compliment from Sophie and normally would have hung on every word, was now merely pleased and interested. “You have an original mind. You consult your experience for your answers—what you’ve heard and seen yourself. You contemplate your experience and answer from that. First-hand.”

Baptiste took what she said seriously. After a moment he said, “I have been deceived by both and have learned to distrust them. From very early I had to figure out things wholly by myself.”

“What are you, Baptiste, an Indian or a white man?” Jacques asked.

Baptiste said nothing. He thought of saying that he was a white man who used his Indian blood to attract the attention of those who would otherwise ignore him. Finally he said, “I am neither. I am simply me.” And he shrugged, embarrassed.

“Why, then, do you wear that totem object about your neck?” Jacques asked. Baptiste always wore it showing, now.

“In memory of my mother, who gave it to me. I have my own meaning.” He explained Sacajawea’s message relating to the symbolism of the hoop and the fragment of meteor.

“What is your meaning for it?” asked Sophie.

“Like this stone, I am an alien.”

JANUARY 27: Baptiste’s diary: “The afternoon with
Herr Kapellmeister
, who is pleased with my progress in learning the chords; soon, he says, I will start at elementary counterpoint; I can now play the little Beethoven
andante
at the pianoforte with a reasonable facsimile of musicality; it is all great fun. Though I was at the castle, I did not see Prince Paul, who is much absorbed in making his notes on North American flora, fauna, typography, inhabitants, customs, and commerce into book form. The king lets his minstrel run free.”

FEBRUARY 2: “My tutor—at least he is officially my tutor—suggests strongly that I make an effort at the University; else why, he asks, did I matriculate? I answered that I am most given to the study of music. Sternenstein is also given, we know, to interesting people, stimulating talk, and good wine.”

“Oh, don’t tease us, Karlheinz, tell all, tell,” Sophie laughed.

He had been casting about amusing hints of the charms of a Viennese whore he had once known. “If you are intrigued by the ways of little Anna,” Karlheinz offered in his most courtly tone, “perhaps you would be intrigued by the real thing. I know a reputable sporting house in town, one where gentlemen of means can imbibe, gamble, and take their pleasure with the ladies if they like.” He smiled wickedly at her and Baptiste.

Sophie slipped out of her parlor. Twenty minutes later she came back dressed completely as a man, in fact in a rather conservative man’s costume, her short hair looking perfectly male under her beaver hat and her make-up stripped off. Baptiste laughed, because she looked exactly like a green youth going out to examine the doings of the sophisticated world. She announced that she was ready to go.

At the house she was quiet and intense at first, following Karlheinz and Baptiste from table to table as they rolled the dice. When they found a table and ordered some champagne, she relaxed and became gay. The ladies of the house, who were splendidly dressed—as fashionable and handsome as ladies of a court—flirted with the three of them. Sophie, in the middle, was infinitely amused. She asked in a whisper whether Karlheinz or Baptiste did not intend to go upstairs with one of them. They had a brisk talk about which would be the best, Sophie pooh-poohing the men’s notions and picking out entirely different ladies. Finally the men declined the opportunity. At that point Sophie got up and flirted with one, an elaborately feminine, auburn-haired girl full of giggles and sighs—just the opposite of Sophie. After a few minutes the two of them went upstairs. Sophie came back much later looking perfectly composed. She refused absolutely, on the way home, to say what had gone on upstairs. Baptiste had never seen her so full of fun.

FEBRUARY 10: Baptiste’s diary: “Our hero is beginning to suspect that his friend Madame Hoffman is trying to immerse him in culture. She has led me (always in company, so that I am frustrated in my desire to make her a licentious proposition) on a furious round of theatre, opera, and museums for the last ten days, and has given me a slim volume of the verses of Heine. She walked through the museum today at a terrific pace, spending half-hour in front of whatever she liked and dismissing the rest with scarcely a glance. She cannot be described as tolerant: She is contemptuous of all in art that she thinks is sham, imitative, the work of
poseurs
. With decorative and
roccoco
she has only a little more patience. Yet when she sees something that strikes her as original, or ‘first-hand,’ as she is fond of saying, she is full of enthusiasm for it, and most articulate about her reasons. I saw her one afternoon at salon firmly slap down a professor who criticized Benvenuto Cellini, one of her favorites.
Le sauvage naïf
, being in such matters precisely
naïf
, has only an inkling of what she is talking about.”

“Why do Europeans have such strange, rule-ridden notions about sex?” Baptiste asked. For once he had called by surprise and had found her alone. He was trying to slip up on the subject of her own romantic life.

“Why?” Sophie smiled. She let a beat pass as she settled her demitasse of coffee next to the silver service in front of her. “Are Indians superior in their attitudes?”

“Well, they’re natural. They do whatever they feel like doing.”

“For instance?”

“They copulate without embarrassment in the tipis next to their children, sometimes even in public view. A chief in a tribe where I stayed made a habit of walking around camp naked and tumescent. They’re open about it.”

“Don’t they have customs, restrictions, taboos?”

He thought a moment. “I don’t know.” He smiled sheepishly. “I guess so.” Women are property, he explained, as horses are property. When a girl comes of marriageable age, her father sells her to a brave who wants her. He may sell her again, or trade her for a while, or lend her to another man. She is property, and a rich brave accumulates wives as he accumulates all the trappings of wealth.

Romantic love doesn’t enter into it. A man marries out of practical considerations—to have his clothes and lodge made, his food cooked, his household arranged, his belongings toted on long trips, his lust appeased, his family increased in numbers. Women are useful. Of course, the Indian notion of honor assigns the woman the drudgery and the role of beast of burden. (Sophie was making faces through all this.)

Jealousy is almost unheard of. Adultery is censured, sometimes mildly and sometimes severely, but that’s because a squaw belongs to a brave, and he has as much right to her usefulness as to the usefulness of a horse. He can and does lend or sell her, but she has no autonomous rights on her own. Adultery violates a principle of property. Some tribes don’t take adultery very seriously, their ideas about it notwithstanding. But the Blackfeet cut off the noses of adulterous squaws, or kill them.

Otherwise there are no sexual taboos. Girls are expected to take their pleasure where they find it until they are sold to their husbands. Men are expected to take pleasure where they can get it all their lives. That way of doing things is obvious to the Indian, and the white man’s restrictions are simply incomprehensible to him. (Baptiste looked for an expression of approval about this, but saw nothing in particular in Sophie’s face.)

They do whatever feels good, he said. They are sensualists, and experimental ones. Indian teen-agers do in bed what respectable European couples have barely heard of. (He couldn’t help smiling.) Homosexuality is acceptable; homosexuals are thought to be following the way revealed to them in a dream in childhood. You can copulate with an animal if you want to, it’s common enough. Sometimes braves rape their dead enemies to humiliate them one final time.

And with all this, the Indian just doesn’t make a big thing of sex. That most of all.

He looked at Sophie expectantly. “It sounds awful,” she said. Baptiste was puzzled. “There’s no room for feeling.”

“They don’t have any hopeless, pining longings,” Baptiste said, “or all-absorbing passions.”

“It sounds like they have no room for feelings,” Sophie repeated. “They’re just masters and slaves.”

“They stay away from fairy tales,” Baptiste answered, uneasily.

“Baptiste, forget storybook romance. Haven’t you ever felt really strongly about anyone? More excited and more alive when you’re with them? Haven’t you ever been enthralled by anyone?” No answer. “I couldn’t stand to live with someone just from duty and habit. I want.…” She broke off with a playful smile, her eyes hinting at whatever it was she wanted.

Baptiste didn’t know what to say. If he had ever felt strongly about a woman, he thought, it was Sophie.

She rescued him by asking him to take her out to dinner. They dined quietly and leisurely at a small restaurant that was one of her favorites. They reminisced. He spoke tenderly of his mother and tolerantly of his father. She told him stories about her childhood, which had been spent in the Tyrol and at the sea. She had come to love the sea more than she could love people, she said. She seemed softer than usual. She also seemed, he thought, amused about something, but he didn’t know what.

When they got to her house, he had made up his mind to speak to her, not to tell her that he loved her, which never occurred to him, but to say that he wanted to sleep with her. He held the violence of the word he would use for it in his mind. He turned around different ways to say it, most of them blunt, some of them witty. But there in the foyer, as he helped her off with her heavy coat, he could say nothing.

So he turned her around and kissed her. After a long moment she began to pull away gently. He held her with one arm and tilted her head back firmly with the other. “I want you,” he said. She looked at him for a long time, then turned a playful smile. She slipped out of his arm before he knew what happened, walked down the hall and started up the stairs. He followed her.

They made love all night. She had a long, slender body, smooth like a swimmer’s, wide shoulders, small breasts, willowy arms and legs. He thought she was beautiful. They said almost nothing. He was afraid to speak, afraid he would sound foolish. He had the impression that she was laughing at him inside, laughing with delight, perhaps, but laughing. When he came at her again, and again, she laughed aloud. It was the only sound that passed between them. When they made love, they kept their eyes open and looked at each other hard.

As they were finishing breakfast, still without having talked, she said, “You’re in love with me.”

He shook his head no, and was conscious of her watching him.

She let it go. “Come tonight,” she said. “Not until midnight. And don’t think that you own me.”

He went to her often the next few weeks. The University had gone into its spring recess. They saw none of their friends together, meeting late, alone. He could not have described his feelings about her. Nothing that he had heard or read fit, and he thought the words people had invented for it excessively foolish anyway. He knew that it felt very serious to him. Their lovemaking was a strange mélange of solemnity and play. He talked to her intimately sometimes, not about his feelings for her, but about himself, stray thoughts and feelings he hadn’t known he had, but that seemed important. He had never spoken to anyone openly about himself.

At the end of three weeks she said that she was going for a while to the seashore near Spezia. Some friends had loaned her their cottage. She had in fact planned to leave before now. He was invited for a week. Five days after she left, he followed. They spent six days walking on the shore, musing, talking, being quiet, or lying in front of the fire. On the fourth day he thought seriously that he had never been so happy. But he said nothing to Sophie.

She got back to Stuttgart nine days after he did. He wondered where she had been, what she had done, but she was mysterious about it. They did not see quite as much of each other now. Some nights seemed extraordinary still, and on others she seemed a little distant.

One night, when they were lying in bed and she was smoking her Turkish cigarette, she asked suddenly. “What will you do, Baptiste? It’s very well for me—I have my father’s money—but what will you do?” He had not thought much about it. He would stay at the University for a while and something would come up. Perhaps Paul would secure him a place. He could get along as well as anyone. Sophie herself, lying naked next to him. was a sign of that. “I’ll do something,” he said, “later. For now, I’m doing Madame Hoffman.”

Then, in early May, she had a houseguest for five days—a Dutch mathematician she said she’d known for many years. She introduced him at her Sunday salon, and people said he was celebrated. He was a man of perhaps forty-five with a severe face and a hawklike nose, the kind of face that has seen and been through too much. Baptiste disliked him. At the salon Baptiste whispered to Sophie that he wanted to come over late that night. “Not until Henryk leaves,” she said simply, “on Tuesday.” Baptiste left the house in a pique.

He could not believe he was jealous. He would not believe it. But he did wonder whether they were lovers. She told him nothing of her other involvements, would never speak of them, he knew. He supposed he was jealous.

On Tuesday night, though, everything seemed the same. From then on he felt when he was with her as he always had, and nothing else mattered. When he was not with her, when he saw her at the theatre with someone else or watched her talking with a man at her salons, he felt a kind of helpless rage. It was as though he had two separate sets of feelings, unrelated. But he would catch himself, walking down a street on an errand, inexplicably angry without knowing why.

One night in bed he said to her bluntly, “Let’s marry.” She waited, but he said nothing more.

“Don’t spoil it,” she said.

He started to answer, but she put her hand over his mouth and then kissed him. Later that night, for the first time he could remember, lovemaking was painful and left him edgy.