Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (19 page)

“Fascinating! That little fake with her room in a fourth-class hotel and her three Balenciaga dresses!”

“Three? I thought she had thirty. They look so different every time she wears them.” Clerfayt laughed. “Lydia, since when have you taken to doing detective jobs on young chits and little fakes? Haven’t we outgrown that long ago?”

Lydia was about to throw some retort at him, but her escort came out. She took his arm as if it were a weapon, and walked past Clerfayt.

Lillian came down a few minutes later. “Someone has just told me that you are a fascinating person,” Clerfayt said. “It’s about time to hide you.”

“Was it dull, waiting for me?”

“No. When you haven’t waited for anything for a long time, waiting makes you ten years younger. Twenty years younger. I thought I would never again be waiting for anything.”

“I’ve always waited for something.” Lillian’s eyes followed a
woman in cream-colored lace who was leaving the restaurant accompanied by a bald-headed man; she wore a string of diamonds, each the size of a nut. “How they flash!” she said.

Clerfayt did not answer. Jewelry was dangerous territory; if she had a taste for that sort of thing, there were men better equipped than he to satisfy her desires.

“Nothing for me,” Lillian said, laughing as if she had guessed his thoughts.

“Is that a new dress?” he asked.

“Yes. It came today.”

“How many do you have now?”

“Eight, counting this one. Why?”

Lydia Morelli seemed to be well informed. That she had said “three” meant that she knew the exact figure.

“Uncle Gaston is appalled,” Lillian said. “I’ve sent him the bills. And now let us drive to the best night club you know. You’re right, clothes makes demands.”

“Shall we go on to still another?” Clerfayt asked. It was four o’clock in the morning.

“Yes, one more,” Lillian said. “Or are you tired?”

He knew that he must not ask whether she was tired. “Not yet,” he said. “Do you like it?”

“It’s wonderful.”

“Good, then we’ll go to another club. One with gypsies.”

Montmartre and Montparnasse were still burning with tardy postwar fever. The garish colors of the cabarets and night clubs were softened by the fog that regularly filled such places. The entertainment was all the usual fare, pure cliché. Without Lillian, Clerfayt would have been horribly bored. But for Lillian it was new; she did not respond to it as it was or as it struck him, but as
she wanted to see it and saw it. To her, the clip joints were places of pure entrancement, the fiddle players hoping for tips became, in her eyes, inspired musicians, and the gigolos,
nouveaux riches
, shady and empty-minded men and women, people who did not go home because they did not know what to do there, or who were on the lookout for an adventure or a good deal—all these she saw as celebrants of a sparkling bacchanal of life, because that was how she wanted it and that was why she had come.

That’s it, Clerfayt thought, that is what makes her different from all the others sitting around here. The others want an adventure, a deal, a little tuneful noise to fill their emptiness; but she is on the track of life itself, of life alone, and she seeks it like an obsessed huntress pursuing the white stag and the fabled unicorn, hunts it so passionately that the passion is contagious. She has no inhibitions, does not look to either side, and while I myself feel alternately old and used up or young as a child in her presence, there suddenly rise up for me out of forgotten years faces, desires, shadows of dreams, and, above all, like a flash of lightning in the twilight, the long-lost sense of the uniqueness of life.

The gypsy fiddler hung about the table, bending over his instrument, his velvet eyes alert as he played. Lillian listened, carried away by the music. For her, this is all real, Clerfayt thought; for her, it is the Hungarian steppe, the lonely nocturnal lament, solitude, the first fire at which man sought protection, and even the oldest, most banal, most sentimental song is for her a song of mankind, of its sadness, and its seeking to hold what cannot be held. Lydia Morelli might well be right—it was provincial, if you wished to take it that way. But goddamn it, you had to adore her for that very thing.

“I think I’ve drunk too much,” he said.

“What is too much?”

“When one no longer recognizes oneself.”

“Then I always want to drink too much. I don’t love myself.”

She is afraid of nothing, Clerfayt thought. Just as this night club is the temple of life to her, so every banality has for her the force it possessed when it was said for the first time. It’s unendurable. She has to die and she knows it; she’s taken the knowledge into herself as another might take morphine, and it transforms everything for her; she fears nothing, nothing is blasphemy, nothing banality. And, damn it all, why am I sitting here and feeling this mild horror of it all, not also throwing myself into this uncritical whirl?

“I adore you,” he said.

“Don’t say that too often,” she replied. “One has to be very independent to say a thing like that.”

“Not with you.”

“Say it all the time,” she said. “I need it like water and wine.”

Clerfayt laughed. “What you say is as true as what I say. But who cares whether a thing is true? Where are we going now?”

“To the hotel. I want to move out.”

Clerfayt made up his mind to be surprised by nothing henceforth. “All right. Let’s go and pack,” he said.

“My things are already packed.”

“Where do you want to move to?”

“To a different hotel. For two days, someone has been telephoning me at this time of night. A woman who tells me to go back where I came from—and a few other things besides.”

Clerfayt looked at her. “Haven’t you told the night clerk not to put the calls through?”

“I’ve told him that. But she manages to get through. Yesterday, she told him she was my mother. She speaks French with an accent.”

Lydia Morelli, Clerfayt thought. “Why haven’t you said anything to me about it?”

“What for? Is the Ritz full?”

“No.”

“Good. Uncle Gaston will faint tomorrow when he hears where I’m staying.”

Lillian had not packed. Clerfayt talked to the night clerk and was able to borrow a huge wardrobe trunk that a German major had left behind during the retreat. He stowed Lillian’s dresses away in it. She sat on the bed, laughing. “I’m sorry to leave here,” she said. “I’ve loved everything so much. But I love without regrets. Do you know what I mean?”

Clerfayt raised his head. “I’m afraid I do. You don’t regret leaving anything.”

She laughed again, her legs outstretched, a glass of wine in her hand. “It no longer matters. I’ve left the sanatorium; since then, I can leave any place I like.”

No doubt she will leave me, too, in the same way, Clerfayt thought. Like changing a hotel. “Here is the German major’s sword,” he said. “He must have forgotten it in the excitement—impossible laxness for a German officer. I’ll leave it right here in the trunk. Incidentally, you’re charmingly drunk. Luckily, I reserved a room for you in the Ritz two days ago. Otherwise, it would be difficult to get you past the concierge in your present state.”

Lillian reached for the major’s sword and saluted, still sitting. “I’m very fond of you. Why don’t I ever call you by your first name?”

“Nobody else does.”

“That would be a reason for me to.”

“Now, I think you’re all packed,” Clerfayt said. “Do you want to take the sword with you?”

“Leave it here.”

Clerfayt pocketed the key and helped Lillian into her coat. “Am I too thin?” she asked.

“No. I think you’ve gained a few pounds.”

“That’s the only thing that counts,” she murmured.

They had a cab follow them with the suitcases and trunk. “Does my room in the Ritz face on the place Vendôme?” Lillian asked.

“Yes. Not the rue Cambon.”

“How is it you were there during the war?”

“I went there after I escaped from prison camp. It was an excellent hiding place. Nobody would have dreamed of looking for me there. My half-brother lived on the place Vendôme. We are Alsatians. My brother has a German father; my father was French.”

“Couldn’t your brother have done something for you? When you were in camp?”

Clerfayt laughed. “He would have loved to have me in Siberia. As far away as possible. Do you see the sky? Morning is coming. Hear the birds? In cities, you only hear them at this time. Nature lovers must go to night clubs, so they can hear thrushes on the way home.”

They turned into the place Vendôme. The broad gray square was very still. Under the clouds, the morning gleamed a rich gold. “When you see how wonderfully people built in the past, you assume they must have been happier than we,” Lillian said. “Do you think they were?”

“No,” Clerfayt replied. He let the car coast to a stop before the hotel entrance. “I am happy at this moment,” he said, “no matter whether we know what happiness is or not. I am happy at this moment, in this stillness, on this square, with you. And when you have had a good sleep, we’ll drive south, and make our way to Sicily and the Targa Florio by easy stages.”

IN SICILY, SPRING
was in full torrent. The sixty-seven-mile course of the Targa Florio, with its nearly fourteen hundred curves, was closed to traffic for several hours every day, so that the racing drivers could train. Since the drivers also went over the course outside the official time, in order to memorize the curves, the pitches, and the condition of the road, the roar of heavy motors hung over the white highway and the white landscape from dawn to dusk.

Clerfayt’s second driver was Alfredo Torriani, a twenty-four-year-old Italian. Both men were out on the road almost the entire day. Evenings, they returned sunburned, hungry, and thirsty.

Clerfayt did not want Lillian to be present during the training runs. She was not to become involved in the business like the wives and mistresses of the other drivers, who sat with stop watches and score cards in the booths erected by the various auto firms for repairs, tanking up, and changing tires. Instead, he had introduced her to a friend who had a house by the sea, and had installed her there. The man’s name was Levalli and he was the owner of a tuna
fishing fleet. Clerfayt had considered him an ideal guardian for Lillian: Levalli was an esthete, bald, fat, and homosexual.

All day, Lillian lay on the beach or in the garden that surrounded the villa. The garden was neglected, romantic, full of marble statues. Lillian never felt any desire to see Clerfayt driving, but she loved the low growl of the motors which penetrated into the stillness of the orange groves. The sound was carried in by the wind, together with the heavy fragrance of orange blossoms. It merged with the murmur of the sea to form an exciting concert—as if modern jungle drums were mingling with the oldest sound in the world, the murmur of water, from which all life came. To Lillian, it seemed as if Clerfayt were speaking to her. The sound hung invisibly above her all day long; she abandoned herself to it as she abandoned herself to the hot sky and the white sheen of the sea. Clerfayt was always there—whether she slept under the stone pines in the shadow of some god’s statue, or sat on a bench reading Petrarch or Augustine’s
Confessions;
whether she curled up by the sea without a thought in the world, or sat on the terrace in the mysterious hour before twilight, when the Italian women were already saying
feliccissima notte
and back of every word there seemed to linger the question mark of an unknown god. Always, the distant rumble was there, the drum roll of sky and evening, and it always awoke a resonance in her blood, which throbbed gently and responded.

Then, in the evening, Clerfayt would come, accompanied by the growl, which rose to thunder when the car came close. “Like the gods of classical times,” Levalli said to Lillian, “our modern
condottieri
appear amid thunder and lightning, as if they were sons of Jupiter.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“I do not like motors of any kind. They remind me too much of the noise of bombers during the war.”

The sensitive, corpulent man placed a Chopin piano concerto on the record player. Lillian looked at him thoughtfully. Odd, she thought, how one-sidedly we are always bound by our own experience and our own danger. I wonder whether this esthete and connoisseur of the arts ever thinks of what the tuna may feel when it is swung up on the deck of one of his fishing boats to be slaughtered?

Shortly before the race, Levalli gave a party. He had invited nearly a hundred guests. The garden was lit with candles and hurricane lamps; the night was warm and sparkling with stars, the sea smooth, making a vast mirror for the huge moon which floated low and red on the horizon, like a balloon from another planet.

Lillian was enchanted. “You like it?” Levalli asked.

“It’s everything I’ve desired.”

“Everything?”

“Almost everything. For four years, I dreamed of this sort of thing, when I was a captive between walls of snow in the mountains. This is the very opposite of snow—and absolutely the opposite of mountains—”

“I’m glad,” Levalli said. “I give parties rarely these days.”

“Why? Because otherwise they would become a habit?”

“It’s not that. It’s that they make me—how should I put it?—melancholy. When we give parties, it’s usually because we want to forget something—but we don’t forget it. The others don’t forget it either.”

“There’s nothing I want to forget.”

“Really?” Levalli asked politely.

“Not any more,” Lillian replied.

Levalli smiled. “An old Roman villa is supposed to have stood on this spot,” he said, “and they had glorious festivals by torchlight
and the glow of fire-spewing Aetna. Do you think that the ancient Romans came any nearer the secret?”

“What secret?”

“Of why we live.”

“Do we live?”

“Perhaps not, since we ask. Forgive my talking about it. Italians are melancholics; they look the opposite, but are not.”

“Who isn’t?” Lillian said. “Not even stable hands are cheerful all the time.”