The Tale of the Rose (16 page)

“Little Consuelo, listen to me, I want to leave. I’ll go from Paris to Saigon, very fast, and there I will find you a little house so you can come and tell me stories.”

“Saigon is very far from Paris, Tonio.”

“
Oui, ma femme,
but the planes are safer now, they fly very fast. I’m longing to go to China.”

“Because you like Chinese women?”

“Oh Consuelo, I like women who are small and quiet. I will surround you like a queen with a dozen of those small people so that you can play with them and you will never be alone.”

O
NE EVENING IN
J
ANUARY
1936 I made enough very strong black coffee to fill several thermoses.
*
It would keep him from sleeping during the long flight from Paris to Saigon.

“Perhaps you could take some oranges along,” I said. “Promise me, Tonio, that you won’t fly over water or even anything that looks like water. It’s silly of me to bother you with my superstitions, but I don’t believe water likes you.”

“On the contrary, maybe it does like me; the Mediterranean let me swim like a fish, remember? You’re unfair to water, my darling. Don’t give me any oranges, I have a lot more fuel in my plane this time. I won’t even take an overcoat.”

“Oh Tonio, I wish it were spring already and that we were both in Saigon, in a house full of flowers!”

“When it is, you’ll be able to feed me all the oranges you want, and the little Chinese women will pick them the way young girls pick cherries in France.”

Then the mechanic and Lucas, an aviator friend, came in without knocking. They spoke in serious tones, in the voices of men who had been awake all night preparing with all possible care the route that the pilot would follow for several days and nights. They both felt responsible for their older brother, who, like a bird, was singing “Le temps des cerises” (“Cherry Blossom Time”), kissing me, and demanding another piece of chocolate, as if he were simply leaving for a drive to the suburbs.

We crossed Paris laughing and singing. I told him I didn’t want to spend the whole spring in Saigon or China. He would have to bring me back quickly to Agay, where I had promised to meet his mother and sisters. I thought the water in the Orient might be too salty to swim in.

Reporters from
L’Intransigeant, Paris-Soir,
and the other daily papers studied his every word and gesture on the runway. My husband was a true giant, and it was hard for me to stay close to him. The journalists did their job, taking pictures when we kissed and when he waved good-bye. The engine roared, and then there was nothing.

T
HE WAITING HAD BEGUN
. I no longer sang or laughed. I was free of my wifely duties, my woman’s heart seemed useless.

Paris was still asleep. I asked my friends to let me walk by myself for a while on the Champs-Elysées. I circled around the Arc de Triomphe, and for the first time, full of emotion, I stopped to gaze at the flame that burns in memory of the Unknown Soldier. I meditated and prayed for the men who had been missing since the war. I prayed for myself, too, and watched the city slowly awakening to go about its life. First there were only a few passersby, then the last of the night owls who hadn’t yet gone home, then the laborers in the train stations and the great marketplaces of Les Halles. And there were the unmistakable middle-aged women who were on their way to help other people with their housekeeping. The rhythms of their footsteps and their gazes were all alike. At eight o’clock, the waiters began to open the terraces of the cafés. I watched them and felt like having a café au lait.

How could I be of use? What was my role, really? What was my immediate duty? To wait, wait, and wait some more . . .

The faces of the office workers who stopped to have a coffee on their way to work passed before me and distracted me from the anxiousness in my heart, which remained fixed on Tonio’s absence and the danger he could be in.

But he, he was ensconced in his sky, bound for the Orient.

M
Y HUSBAND WOULD BE FLYING
for several days over sands and strange cities that loomed ever larger in my childish imagination, like the Bible’s endless deserts. I thought nostagically of my home in El Salvador, where I used to watch sorcerers pawing the dry earth in search of water like animals on the scent of a female. The wait for rain was a very tense time; the pastures were dry and the herds were dying for lack of water, which had disappeared because of the earthquakes. The peasants were worried; all their hopes lay in the sorcerers’ hands. The answer their divining rods received was a matter of life and death for the whole country. The riverbed was dry. The river had gone off on a journey through the bowels of the earth, or somewhere else for all I know. I saw whole flocks lie down on the earth to die and heard their choruses of dying moans. Yet the sky was pure blue; tropical sunlight bathed the country, flouting the hopes of men and beasts. During those agonizing days, the land-owners would gather together under the full moon, light huge bonfires that blazed red in their courtyards, make coffee, and chant prayers to make the rain come. Often the miracle took place, and rain—longed-for, cherished rain—would put thousands of sheep back on their feet. Among the men who chanted for rain that way, no one could say who would be rich or poor the next day. Equality was determined by fate. On one stretch of land, there might be dew that very night; on another, drought, thirst, and death.

I too had to pray, chant, wait, wait, and hope. I tried to remember the dignity of the peasants in the driest regions of my country. I was in an arid land, a land of tribulation. Would he succeed or wouldn’t he?

The complicated numbers the engineer reported meant nothing to me. I couldn’t have cared less about any of that. My only hope lay in our youth, which to me seemed eternal, and in our love, which was so pure that it had to have touched God. My hope lay in his strong hands, which knew how to throw all of his bodily weight, all of his energy and vitality, into the air currents flowing through an unknown sky. Only he knew how to fly like that toward the marvelous Orient.

I made my way to the atelier of one of my painter friends, André Derain. He was waiting for dawn and the first colors of the day to create a miracle of light on the hair, lips, and dresses of his models. I knew his habits well and slipped in without making a sound. I breathed in the smell of the coffee he was making on a large coal-burning stove while a very young girl, completely naked, her breasts just beginning to bloom, let her hair down, making herself look all the more naked. I sat down in the atelier’s old red armchair. I don’t think even my heartbeat made a sound that day. The great painter came and went, blowing on his big cup of coffee, eyeing the first gleams of sunlight, touching his model’s long hair with one finger. In the middle of his little promenade, he finally discovered me.

“You, Consuelo, here so early?”

“Yes,” I said. “My husband has left on a long flight and I didn’t know where to go so early in the morning, so I came to sit here with you, if I won’t disturb you.”

“But I want to paint you just as you are: don’t move.”

“Oh no, that’s too much for me to bear. You know, my husband is going to be in the air for whole days and nights and, who knows, perhaps for the rest of his life!”

He understood the gravity of the situation, for he loved his friend Antoine, and asked the model to serve me a cup of coffee.

He didn’t work at all that day. We talked about pilots, their simplicity, their way of risking their lives, how they chose to forget their companions who were killed. For them, it was natural to meet a monster-wind, a dragon-wind, a conquering wind. It was so simple. That day, Derain and his model saw me as something more alive than a woman. I contained in myself the whole life of another person, the religion of another being concentrated in the love that lay within me. They consecrated their entire day to me.

Toward evening we received the first news of our pilot: all was well. “Clear sky. No wind. Making headway.” That was the telegram Tonio sent me!

The second day of waiting was devoid of news. No hope. I kept a vigil. The telephone lay mute and motionless near my pillow. Toward evening, some friends came over—the silence was growing troubling. No news. Catastrophe could be read on every face. The silence expanded around us.

On the third day, the headlines of all the newspapers read, “Saint-Exupéry Disappears on Paris–Saigon Flight.”
*

Despair. Grief. I was wrenched with anguish and pain. I had a presentiment of great misfortune. I hadn’t wanted him to go, yet everything in me had encouraged him to do it.

Then a message arrived, enormous, lifesaving: “It’s me, Saint-Exupéry, I’m alive.”

I left at once with his mother for Marseille, where he was to dock on his return from his epic journey. We both stood on the Vieux-Port waiting for the boat, amid friends, curious onlookers, and journalists who had come to capture his first smile, his first emotion, for a front-page photo.

His boat was delayed for several hours. His mother and I had nothing more to say to each other. A great weariness overcame us both, we could feel it in our arms, our whole bodies. And then the siren announced that our dear Tonio was finally going to be returned to us.

At that moment I cried out, “No, it’s not possible. I will never see him again!”

I ran away, swift as a gazelle, but one of my friends caught me and held me back with all his force, saying, “But you’re mad!”

“Yes, I’m mad from waiting, I’m afraid. I want nothing more, nothing in the world. He is alive, he is alive, that was all I wanted to know, and now I can go, I can go to a place where no one ever waits again, for anything.”

A fit of weeping calmed me down. Soon my husband was holding me in his arms. “But you look like a clown with these tears flowing on all sides. Messieurs, take a picture of my wife,” he added, turning toward the journalists. “She is none too lovely to look at today, she’s in the midst of a great tempest, so leave me alone with her. I’m the only one who can save her.” And he whispered in my ear, “Let’s go to the hotel, the two of us. Don’t be afraid. I’m with you. I have so many stories to tell you. Is it true that you tried to flee when the boat came in? Is it true that you wanted to run away? Is it true that you wanted me to go from door to door asking where you were? I would have walked all my life to find you, just as I walked on and on, despite my thirst, to see you again. Why did you want to run away?”

“Do I really look like a clown?” I asked him, huddling very tightly against him.

“Yes, you have a big banana nose, but soon you’ll be beautiful, very beautiful. You’ll sleep in my arms, nice and calm, and I’ll take you to see the desert that spared my life. I won’t leave you again, ever.”

My mother-in-law announced that some friends were giving a magnificent dinner for us and that we should get dressed for it.

“It’s wartime,
ma petite maman,
” Tonio answered. “My wife and I are going just as we are.”

With his big hands, he gestured toward his casual clothes and my tousled head.

My mother-in-law resigned herself to it, but she wasn’t entirely pleased.

I
DON’T KNOW
how we got back to Paris and then to a clinic in Divonne-les-Bains. I do remember a doctor who made me take a bath in very hot water, which calmed my nerves.

I was finally able to sleep again, and to smile, and I wrote to my husband to come and pick me up. I was cured; I no longer wanted to run away, I wanted only to be in his arms. I was no longer a fruit that falls from the tree but a seed that wanted to be sowed, planted in the ground for all eternity. I wanted to live in my husband’s heart. He was my star, my destiny, my faith, my end. I was small, but I had within me an immense power for living. I had gathered all the starlight in the universe into my eyes in order to bathe him in its glow.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

Soon I was unfair, jealous, belligerent, impossible to live with. I would not give so much as a smile to all the women whose names were noted down in his book every day for cocktails, lunches, meetings in Paris. I missed the clear sky God had given me when he made me Tonio’s wife. I was very bad—I couldn’t endure the feigned shyness of the young girls, the high school girls who asked him to give them his autograph on a book or a photo, to say nothing of my conduct toward the women who dared to intrude further on our intimacy.

In spite of everything, I lost the battle. Tonio needed more gentle landscapes, tenderer things, lighter baggage that could be left anywhere.

I
WAS UNHAPPY
, horribly unhappy. I confided in everyone: my dressmaker, my doctor, my lawyer, my best friend. I told all of Paris. I thought, justifiably, that all of Paris would take pity on me, would protect and console me in my romantic sorrows. I was young and naïve. Today I understand what Napoleon meant when he said, “For the pain of love, the only remedy is flight.”

I had reached that point. One of my friends loaned me the keys to his pied-à-terre so I could go there and cry as much as I wanted. I was no longer loved. That was the kind of woman I had become: an unloved woman. I had just enough strength left to keep from crying in front of my servants or those who rejoiced in my despair. I took refuge in the pied-à-terre when I couldn’t hold out any longer and wept to my heart’s content; the moment I got there I took my clothes off and started crying, and went on crying until the clock struck the time when I had to return to my home and my duties as the lady of the house. My unhappiness made me forget what it was to rest. Tonio heard about a clinic in Switzerland where I could undergo a sleeping treatment. Soon I was shipped off there.

The clinic in Bern was a kind of penal colony: I had an empty room with only a bed, not even a table, and there were nightly walks to tire out the patients. When I had trouble relaxing, two ogresses came in the middle of the night and, each holding me firmly by one arm, made me pace up and down the garden paths. I decided I would be the one to wear them out. I had learned to walk in the desert! When they reached the limits of their strength, they took me back to my bed and suggested I wake them up if I wanted to go for another turn around the garden. I stretched out on my bed just long enough to rest a little and then called to them that I wanted to go back outside and walk!

I already knew the garden pathways by heart. I talked to them about the trees and all the journeys I had made in my life.

“Why can’t we go for a walk in the city for a change of scene?” I proposed.

By seven
A.M.
, they were the ones leaning on me.

The next day a different woman was assigned to me, along with a thickset man, and those two were tireless. After three weeks of forced marches, I still couldn’t fall asleep.

O
NE DAY, AT LUNCHTIME
, my husband appeared. He was led into the dining room, where each table had a number. I didn’t have the strength to eat even the lone potato I had been allotted. A familiar and somewhat brusque voice called, “Consuelo!”

For three weeks he had forgotten me, or else his letters had not been delivered.

All my bitterness suddenly rose up in my heart. His hand rested on my shoulder. “They told me: it’s number seven. Forgive me, I didn’t recognize you.”

“What do
you
want?”

I was pale and thin. He took me in his arms.

“Come with me right now. I’ll take you away from here.”

“They’re killing me. I’ve written you several times. I’ve begged you to come at once, and you haven’t answered me a single time!”

I wept in his arms. The attendants had pushed us into a small side room. “Tell me that you’re feeling fine,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m going to ask them to put your clothes on.” But the nurse was already pulling me out of his arms, saying it was time to take a shower.

I saw nothing more of Tonio after that. I no longer wrote to him. I had lost all hope of ever leaving that hellish place. His brief visit had been like a dream. I wasn’t even sure that he had actually been there. I was hungry, very hungry. The smell of food reached me from far away, from the other building, through the window. I began filching bits of bread from the neighboring room, which was occupied by a man with a goiter who never ate a thing. I mustered up a little energy, and with the help of a priest who came on Saturdays to administer confession to the patients I managed to send a long telegram to a woman friend in Paris, describing my situation.