The Tale of the Rose (11 page)

A
T LAST
the much-talked-of palace was revealed to me. The stairway was made of marble, the rooms were very large, and the furniture was almost nonexistent, in keeping with Arab sobriety. There were huge carpets on the floor and walls, large copper trays used as tables in all the rooms, divans, blue and white tiles, and very low beds.

The wives of the other pilots took me to the marketplace and instructed me in the ways of the provincial city of Casa, where the sun is eternal. The Roi de la Bière café, at cocktail hour, reunited us with the other pilots. Poker . . . Pernod . . . eggs in aspic . . . racy stories. I heard such a collection of them that I could put together an anthology. But life gave us much more than other people’s stories.

I spent my time reading at a bookstore owned by Madame Allard, dreaming about my life, strolling around the Arab city. A pilot named Guerrero came in one day while I was chatting with the bookseller. “Bonsoir, Madame de Saint-Ex,” he said. “Would you like to have dinner with me this evening? Here, this is from your husband; he bought you some fresh spiny lobsters in Port-Etienne and asked me to bring them to you.”

“Yes, Guerrero,” I said. “Come over to my place, and we’ll cook; Madame Allard will come, too.”

“I’m flying the same route as your husband,” Guerrero explained. “By chance I had a problem with my leg, so I stayed over in Cisneros to rest up. Saint-Ex was looking very careworn to me. ‘Well, old man,’ I said to myself, ‘for a young newlywed, you look positively papal.’ But we don’t actually say anything to each other. Suddenly, Saint-Ex shouts, ‘Fantastic! Eggs in aspic are fantastic, don’t you think, Guerrero?’

“‘What about eggs in aspic?’ I asked. ‘Would you please explain?’

“‘All right,’ he said. ‘I had my first fight with my wife over eggs in aspic. We were eating out, at the Roi de la Bière. I come home dead on my feet after a night of flying and she wants me, nonetheless, to have dinner at the Roi de la Bière. I don’t say much at home, you know, I don’t open my mouth. . . . At the café, the waiter asks me what I’ll have, and my wife looks at me, worried. I answer, “Eggs in aspic”; there was a dish of them right there in front of us. I hadn’t thought about ordering a full meal. “Are you sick? Are you upset?” she asks me.

“‘I don’t answer. They bring me two eggs in aspic.

“‘And then, Monsieur, what will you have as a main course?” the waiter asks.

“‘Two eggs in aspic.”

“‘My wife didn’t say a thing. I wanted to laugh. But for the second time, they brought me eggs in aspic. And for dessert, the same story.

“‘I didn’t want to say anything. Or think. It was all the same to me if I ate six eggs in aspic or anything else. But it irritated Consuelo. She was sitting there on the banquette, and then, right there in the middle of all the other customers, she stood up and shouted, “Look at them, your eggs in aspic . . . I like eggs in aspic, too!”

“‘She took all the eggs that were on the table and crushed them between her fingers right there in front of everyone, made a purée of them, and then ran home crying.

“‘I couldn’t keep a straight face. I burst out laughing. The waiter and the woman at the cash register looked so funny, watching Consuelo attacking the eggs. After a few minutes I left, too. Go tell her that the scene is forgotten, Guerrero. Tell her I’m not angry and I’m coming home tomorrow for my birthday. I’m sending her these lobsters to make her happy. And most of all, tell her she shouldn’t mistake their claws for eggs in aspic.’”

T
HE PILOTS’ LIVES
were simple and orderly, like those of all men of action. My husband flew the mail route between Casablanca and Port-Etienne.
*
A few years earlier a single pilot had been responsible for the entire route from Casa to Dakar, but Monsieur Daurat had persuaded the government to make some improvements. The pilots had changed, and the planes had been partially modernized.

Staying over in Port-Etienne was no fun: there were hardly more than a dozen men there, including the Arab laborers who were slaves of the Maures. My husband often told me, “One day I’ll take you to see Madame la Capitaine. She’s French, and she has a garden there, in that country where nothing green grows. She gets fresh-water in by boat from Bordeaux and soil from the Canary Islands. In a little wooden box, she’s growing three lettuces and two tomato plants. She washes her hair in fresh-water from Bordeaux, then waters her garden with the same water. To shelter her little vegetable patch from the desert sands, she has the box lowered to the bottom of a well. . . . When we stop over on our way through, she invites us to dinner; we always have canned food to eat, but she has her garden pulled up out of the well and displays it on the table. Her two miserable tomato plants, her three lettuces . . . It’s touching!”

When he came back, Saint-Ex told me, “You can understand that after spending time out in the desert sands like that, I come home a little wild. Down there, I think crudely; I’m a big bear, as you call me. It makes life easier. . . . I’m a bear, I tell myself, and I retreat into my silence. I’m like a different man there, I have a different skin, I need rest, calm, peace. So you make conversation for me all by yourself, giving me details about the letters we’ve received from France, about our friends in Casablanca, you talk to me about your life, about life in general. I admire you, you forget nothing, you keep me informed about this country. The doctor in Casa did this, the colonel said that . . . The latest news from the papers. But when I see you exhausted because I’m a bear who devours your words, your tender gestures, I’d like to dance for you alone, the way a bear dances, to entertain you, to tell you that I’m your bear, yours, for life.

“Listen, some funny things happen to us during the stopovers. The other day, a Christian association for the protection of women, near Dakar, sent us some fifteen-year-old girls to keep the pilots company during their night off!

“They sell those poor creatures in the market as slaves, you know. The association let us know its schedule of fees. We were to pay these virgin girls four French francs for the evening. To them, it’s a lot of money, in their far corner of the desert. We often ask them to sweep out the shack, wash a glass for us, clean a gasoline lamp. One day, Mermoz,
*
who was coming back quite late from a café in Dakar, found a little girl of about fourteen at his door. He had drunk a lot, and he told her to leave. But the little girl grew upset and started to cry; it was the only way she had of showing her despair since she didn’t speak French. So Mermoz told her, ‘Come in, you can sleep with me.’ He starts taking her clothes off, taking off her burnous, but she weeps all the harder. He gives her the four francs, not wanting to pay any more than the official rate, for the sake of the other men. He puts her burnous back on. The tears don’t stop. He takes the burnous off again and gives her a second fistful of money. ‘To hell with the official rates, you’re nice, you’re going to sleep.’ But the little girl, almost naked in the darkness, doesn’t want to leave and goes on sobbing. He no longer knows what to do. He gives her presents: his watch, which fills her with wonder, his eau de Cologne. She calms down for a moment, then plunges back into her despair. Mermoz becomes enraged. He shouts, ‘I’ve had enough! Leave, I want to sleep; go home.’ The little girl just stands there, looking lost, immobile, like someone who hasn’t yet done what she came to do. Her deep eyes gleam with an anguished light. Her mouth half open, she can’t say anything in the language of this white man who flies, who comes down out of the sky. Sounds emerge from her throat softly, as if she were speaking to herself. In the face of her immense sorrow, the pilot takes pity on her; once again he takes off the white cloth that covers her and looks her over attentively. She wasn’t like the other Bedouin women, who come submissively, their eyes lowered before wickedness. . . . The pilot finds her beautiful, even more beautiful with her strange expression. He tries to soothe the look of a hunted animal out of her eyes. ‘That’s how several of my fellow pilots have married Arab girls,’ he says to himself. At dawn, he pushes the girl out of bed. ‘Go away.’ She feels the order in the pilot’s muscles. She leaves the bed. She understands that she must go. But she sits down on the ground again, to show him she will not leave. This is more than Mermoz can bear. ‘Oh, right, you want to follow me like a slave, a dog . . .’ And he says the word in Arabic. She screams in indignation. An airplane comes rumbling down the runway. Mermoz looks at her, then shuts his eyes. Maybe, he thinks, if I pretend I’m asleep, she’ll leave. He still has long hours of flying ahead of him. He must sleep. If he falls asleep in the middle of a flight, it will be this stubborn girl’s fault. She’s stronger than he is. The pilot sighs. The two of them sneak quick glances at each other. He laughs nervously; the girl does, too. The door of the shack opens, and the pilot who just landed comes in. ‘Hello, old man!’ ‘Is that you, Tonio?’ ‘Yes.’

“‘I haven’t slept all night, look,’ Mermoz says, pointing to the little Arab girl sitting on the ground. ‘I’m exhausted, she doesn’t want to go. I’ve given her everything already, my money, even my pocketknife!’

“The little Arab girl gets quickly to her feet. ‘Perhaps you speak Arabic, monsieur?’ she says. ‘You see, I am the laundress. I can’t leave here without the dirty sheets. As for the rest of it, I’m perfectly satisfied; he’s generous, your friend!’”

Tonio translates the little Arab girl’s desires. Mermoz lets out a curse, then loads her up with all the dirty laundry. She’s finally happy and leaves.

Mermoz claimed that this story happened to Tonio, but Tonio swore that it was Mermoz who had lived through it.

I loved listening to him tell stories like this. I’m only sorry that I repeat them awkwardly because I have no way of reproducing his laugh, his voice. He was spellbinding when he told stories about the desert.

I
TS NAME
was the only palatial thing about the palace of Glaoui. In fact, it was a large and luxurious block of flats—the rental apartments of Glaoui, really. The architecture and décor were in the modern Arab style, influenced by our French civilization. What hard work it was to give a personal touch to those square rooms with their hard, unforgiving light! I understood the wisdom of the Arab sheiks: the only thing that can stand up to light like this is light itself: space. You cover the mosaics with white rugs and the walls with Arab weavings that give off a warm glow, and you set large gilded copper trays opposite each other as tabletops. You have to find the largest ones possible. They’re sold by weight; some are silver-plated, it’s rare to find any in gold. Tonio loved one great, gloomy tray, which was grayish, almost black, with timeworn designs. The more you looked at it, the less you understood the images engraved on it. We tried to read them, and it became a pastime, an obsession.

My first weeks in that apartment gave me an education in how to create a harmonious décor. Like all men, my husband wasn’t fond of having the furniture moved around. When he was there, I couldn’t shift even one small table; he thought it was a waste of time. I suffered over this. After studying and understanding the angles of the windows and checking on the location of the electrical switches to make sure the rooms would be as comfortable as possible for reading and writing, I made my plan.

One day, Tonio had to leave from the airfield at three o’clock; this time I had decided not to go with him to see him off, which took me two whole hours. I claimed I had a headache, a letter to write to my relatives. But Tonio understood human nature too well; something told me he was suspicious. First of all, he wouldn’t accept my refusal to accompany him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him offhandedly, “I don’t like going to the airfield with you to see you off.” Anyway, it would have been a lie. Every time he left, I trembled. On one occasion I was very fearful for him because we had recently buried a pilot who had crashed. Tonio circled once over the runway, just to get a closer look at me and give me a wave good-bye. He had hardly committed this imprudent act when his radio operator announced the arrival of a telegram, punishing him with a fine. We had to do as we were told and ended up paying dearly for his little spin over my head.