Love of Seven Dolls (6 page)

The giant presented it. “It’s only because I’m so stupid. Rey said he just wanted to borrow it to see if it was as big as his.”

Mouche took it from him, leaned over and kissed the side of his cheek. “Poor, dear, Ali,” she said. “Never you mind. It’s better to be trusting than to have no principles at all like some people around here . . .”

Reynardo had the grace to look abashed and flattened himself like a dog at the end of the counter. He said, “I tried to save you a piece of mine, honestly, I did, Mouche, but it got eaten.”

The girl regarded him ruefully. “Oh, Rey . . .” she cried, but there was tenderness in her voice as well as reproof. How had it happened so quickly that the iron bands that had clamped about her heart were easing, the sadness that had weighed her down was lifting? The play was on again.

Like a flash, at the first indication that she might be relenting, Reynardo whipped across the stage and with a hang-dog look snuggled his head against her neck and shoulder. Madame Muscat made a brief appearance at the far side of the booth with a small feather duster and dusted the proscenium arch vigorously.

“I warned you, didn’t I? You can’t trust him for a minute.” But she did not say who was not to be trusted. “When you’ve buried as many husbands as I have . . .” she began, and then vanished without concluding. Carrot Top reappeared, clutching a pale blue thousand franc note.

“For you, Mouche,” he said. “Salary for last week.”

Mouche said, “Oh Carrot Top, really . . . ? But ought you? I mean I never . . .”

“It’s all right,” the leprechaun replied. “We held a meeting this morning and voted you a share. Dr Duclos presided. His speech from the chair lasted forty-seven minutes . . .”

A crowd began to collect at the sight of a young girl in earnest conversation with a doll—the day’s work began . . .

All that summer and into the fall they trouped through Eastern France and Alsace, slowly working southwards, moving from town to town, sometimes part of a street fair, carnival or kermess, at others setting up the booth in the market place or square of small villages en route in the country without so much as a by-your-leave from the police or local authorities.

When these officials came demanding permits they found themselves disconcertingly having to deal with Carrot Top, Mr. Reynardo, Madame Muscat, or Dr. Duclos with Mouche endeavouring to help with the explanations, and usually their charm won the day and they were allowed to remain.

Since, by virtue of Mouche’s advent, the lean days were over, there was always a bed in an inn, cheap hotel, or farmhouse with a room to spare and sometimes the luxury even of a bath at night after a day spent in the hot sun. Only now Capitaine Coq no longer bothered to engage two rooms but simply shared one and the bed in it with Mouche.

Thus Mouche, without realising it, was possessed by him both by day and by night.

The days continued to be an enduring enchantment, the nights an everlasting torment, whether he used her for his pleasure, or turned his back upon her without a word and fell into heavy sleep, leaving her lying there trembling. Sometimes he came to the room in a stupor, barely able to stand after hours of drinking in the tap room. When this happened, Mouche looked after him, undressed him, got him into bed and when he cursed or moaned and tossed during the night she got up to give him water to drink or place a wet cloth upon his head.

Capitaine Coq was drinking to excess because he had impaled himself upon the horns of a strange and insoluble dilemma, and he did not know what to do, except consume wine until all sensation and memory was gone.

On the one hand he was taking all that he wanted or needed from Mouche. She was a growing asset to the show and he was beginning to make money. Further, she was a captive bedmate for whom he need feel no responsibility. But on the other he had made the discovery that while he had indeed been able to ravage her physically, he had never succeeded in destroying her innocence.

He hungered to annihilate it even though at the same time he knew that this was the very quality that drew the audiences and communicated itself to them. Wishing her as soiled and hardened as he was, he debauched her at night and then willy-nilly restored her in the daytime through the medium of the love of the seven dolls, so that phoenix-like she arose each day from the ashes of abuse of the night before, whether it was a tongue lashing, or a beating, or to be used like a woman of the streets. She was rendered each time as soft, and dewy eyed, as innocent and trusting as she had been the night he had first encountered her on the outskirts of Paris.

The more cruelly he treated her, the kindlier and more friendly to her were the puppets the next morning. He seemed to have lost all control over them.

As for Mouche, she lived in a turmoil of alternating despair and entrancing joy.

One night, in Besançon, in a horrible, culminating attempt to break her, Coq appeared in their room with a slut he had picked up in the tavern. They were both drunk.

He switched on the light and stood there looking down at her while she roused herself and sat up. “Get up and get out,” he commanded.

She did not understand and sat there staring.

“Get out. I’m sick of you.”

She still could not understand what he meant. “But Michel . . . Where am I to go?”

“To the devil, for all I care. Hurry up and get out. We want that bed . . .”

That night Mouche reached a new depth of shame and humiliation as she dressed beneath the mocking eyes of the drab and went out of the room leaving them there. She thought again of dying, but was so confused she no longer knew how to die. For a time she wondered about in a daze through the streets, not knowing where she was going.

Then she came upon the Citroën. Golo was sitting at the wheel smoking a cigarette, his white patch standing out in the light of the street lamp. He appeared to be waiting for her. He got out and took her by the arm.

“You come here and rest, Miss Mouche . . .” he said. He had seen Capitaine Coq go in with the woman and Mouche emerge from the inn, and had followed her. He opened the rear door and she climbed in unseeing and slumped onto the seat. Golo drove to the nearby fairgrounds and parked. The chimes of the musical clock of Besançon announced the hour of three. Mouche began to weep.

Golo reached back and took her small thin hand in his calloused mahogany paw with the fingers hard and scaly from the steel strings of the guitar. But his grip was infinitely tender and his voice even more so as he said, “Do not cry, my little one . . .” only it sounded even more beautiful and touching in the soft Senegal French,
“Ne
pleurez pas, ma petite, Ca fait vous mal aux jolies yeux.”

Mouche continued to weep as though she would never be able to cease.

Golo got out of the car, was absent for a moment and then returned. “Mouche,” he called gently. “Miss Mouche. You look here. Please Miss Mouche, you look . . .”

The insistence of the soft pleading reached through to Mouche. She took her hands from her face and did as she was bidden. She stared, unbelieving for a moment. Carrot Top and Mr. Reynardo were looking at her over the top of the front seat.

“Carrot Top! Rey . . . ! Oh my darlings . . .” Mouche cried, her heart near to bursting.

The two stared at her woodenly. Between them shone the face of Golo like the mask of an ancient African god carved out of ebony, but an oddly compassionate God. He said sadly, “They not talk for me, Miss Mouche. But they love you. That’s why I brought them here so you remember that. They always love you.”

Mouche reached over and took the two puppets from his hands and cradled the empty husks in her arms and they brought her comfort until her sorely tried spirit rebelled in an outcry that came from her depths, “But why does he hate me so, Golo, Golo? Why is he so cruel? Why is he so evil?”

The Senegalese reflected before he replied. “He bewitched. His spirit go out from him. Another come in. Golo see magic like this many years ago in Touba in Senegal when he was a boy.”

Mouche could understand this for she herself came from a country where the supernatural was accepted.

She said, “Then you don’t hate him, Golo?”

The Senegalese produced another Gaulois and lit it and the match illuminated the cream of his eyeballs. He replied, “Black man not allowed to hate.”

Mouche drew in her breath sharply, “Ah,” she cried, “I hate him! Dear God, how I hate him!”

Golo’s cigarette glowed momentarily and he sighed likewise. The noises of the city and the fair were stilled except for the occasional shattering protest of the mangy and hungry lion caged at the far end. He said, “It good sometimes to hate. But I think it better not to. Sometimes, when you hate, you forget if you sing . . .”

His guitar was by his side and so softly that it was barely audible he plucked out the melody of a Breton lullaby and he hummed it softly. Goodness knows where he had picked it up during the long, rough years of his perpetual exile from the land of his birth, in what camp, prison or country he had heard it sung by another lonely expatriate from the hard-rocked sea-fringed shores of Brittany. He remembered the words after a moment or two:

“My young one, my sweeting,

Rock in your cradle,

The sea rocks your father,

The sea rocks his cradle,

God grant you sweet sleep,

God grant him return.”

When he played it again, Mouche began to sing it with him, rocking the two dolls in her arms, for that night she was more than half mad from what had been done to her.

Yet Golo had been right; the music worked its magic and the hatred seemed to fade. In its place there returned an echo of that odd compassion she had so often felt for this evil man and which she had never understood.

Golo’s eyes were closed and he was singing, dreaming and swaying:

“The storm winds are blowing,

God rules the storm winds,

Love God, my sweeting,

Safe rides your father,

God rocks his cradle,

God sends you sleep.”

They sang it together in comfort, and not long after in happiness. Golo left off playing. When the vibrations of the strings died away, Mouche went to sleep, the heads of Carrot Top and Mr. Reynardo still cradled to her breasts. The cigarette glowed yet a while longer and then was extinguished. Darkness and quiet fell over the Citroën and its strangely assorted inhabitants.

Inextinguishable was the hatred that Capitaine Coq felt for the drab he had taken to his bed and soon he pushed her from the room, and lay there cursing helplessly, what or why he did not know, except it was the thought of Mouche, her simplicity, her gentleness, her inviolability and the impossibility of reducing her to the state of the woman he had just flung from his bed.

Yet the next day, life returned once more to Carrot Top and Mr. Reynardo and all the others. Mouche again appeared before the booth to look after, abet and interpret them to the children, large and small, infant and adult that came to look and listen.

The tour was continued, but with a change. Thereafter, Capitaine Coq took a second room for Mouche when they stayed overnight, and avoided contact with her as much as possible.

And there was yet another difference, but this was more gradual in developing when they worked their way down through Annecy and Grenoble, heading for the south of France as the weather began to turn crisp and chill. The nature of the performance was changing.

More and more the stereotyped plot was abandoned, and the characters and the story wandered off into flights of imagination stemming from the schemes of Mr. Reynardo, the streak of poetry and imagination in Carrot Top and Mouche’s unique ability to enter into their make-believe instantly.

If they remained in a town for a week, a trip to the moon organised by Carrot Top with Dr. Duclos as scientific director might occupy them during the entire stay, with the result that people came back again and again to see how the affair was progressing, whether Gigi and Madame Muscat had succeeded in getting themselves taken along, and how Mouche was making out with Mr. Reynardo who had a dishonest scheme for merchandising pieces of the moon as souvenirs.

Again, the troupe appealed even more intimately to small communities where it played, by means of local gossip which seemed to collect astonishingly in the vicinity of the puppet booth to the end that Carrot Top might call conspiratorially:

“Psst—Mouche—Reynardo. Come here. But don’t tell the girls. I know a secret . . .”

Mouche would move in closer, her plain face illuminated with excitement. “A secret. I love secrets. Oh, Carrots, tell me at once and I won’t pass it on to a soul . . .”

With his bogus smile, Reynardo would insinuate, “Is there anything in it? Don’t be a fool, Carrots. Tell me, maybe we can sell it . . .”

Carrots would protest, “Oh Rey, it isn’t
that
kind of a secret. It won’t keep forever. In fact, it won’t keep much longer. I understand that Renee Duval, the wife of Carpenter Duval back there in the audience is expecting a little addition . . .”

Reynardo would yap, “What? Why, they were only just married. Wait—let me count . . .” and lifting one paw he would pretend to tick off the months, “September, October, November . . . etc.,” until Mouche would go over and stop him with, “Reynardo—you mustn’t. That’s none of your business.”

Then for the next few minutes while the audience roared they would discuss the sex of the expected one; Dr. Duclos learnedly and stuffily discussed biology, Madame Muscat gave advice, Ali offered himself as baby sitter. Through the magic of Mouche’s personality, the villagers were swept into the middle of these odd doings and made a part of them.

Mouche was particularly adept at singling out wide-eyed children in the audience and summoning them over to meet the members of the cast, to shake hands with Ali to prove how harmless he was, stroke Mr. Reynardo and converse with Carrot Top. They were unique, and the parts of France through which they made their way were not long in discovering it. The reputation of the talking and singing puppets and the live girl who stood out front and conversed with them was beginning to precede them and when they reached Nice on the Côte d’Azur it had an effect that was to be far-reaching upon all of them.