The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (9 page)

“Actually—”

“Let them go,” Iris said, touching her arm. “Men need time to themselves. Especially when they’ve been cooped up with their wives for weeks and weeks.”

“Oh, all right. I am a bit tired. But you go, Pete.”

“How about it, Pete?” Edward said.

“I’m game if you are,” I said.

Once we had dropped off our wives at their respective Francforts, an unexpected shyness overtook us. We walked without speaking. On the sidewalks of Baixa, old men were playing cards by the light of gas lamps around which flies swarmed. Boys kicked soccer balls—this at an hour when any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon child would already have been in bed for hours.

Soon we passed my car, my Buick, dried sprays of Spanish mud on the fenders.

We stopped.

“That’s my car,” I said.

“Really?” Edward said. “Do you have the keys?”

I did, as a matter of fact. Out of habit, I still put them in my pocket every time I went out—not just the car keys, but the keys to our apartment in Paris, to my office, to the
chambre de bonne
to which Julia’s decorator had relegated our old furniture.

“Let’s take her for a spin,” Edward said. “Let’s go to Estoril.”

“But I don’t know the way.”

“It’s simple. Head to the river and turn right.”

We got in. The car’s interior smelled of naphthalene, cigarettes, some vile coffee I’d spilled somewhere in Spain. When Julia and I had first gotten to Lisbon, I’d parked the Buick and tried to forget it. For ten gruesome days, it had been all the home we had—a few nights it had been our bed—and so the mere sight of it was enough to conjure the drone of German planes, the uninflected voices of
those Spanish customs officers, the jolt of poorly paved roads. But now it was Edward, not Julia, who was sitting across from me, and the pleasure I had once taken in the car revived. His rangy legs spread out before him, he opened and shut the glove compartment, pulled out the ash drawer, lowered and raised the sunshade.

I switched on the ignition and edged out into the street, barely wide enough to accommodate such a mammoth vehicle.

“Do you drive?” I asked Edward.

“Me? No. Iris does, though.
And
sails.
And
rides.” He unrolled the passenger window, out of which he thrust his long arm.

“She seems quite a capable woman, Iris,” I said.

“She is like Salazar,” Edward said. “Prime minister, foreign minister, minister of the interior, minister of finance. She is the cabinet.”

“And what does that make you?”

“A lowly peon. Obeisant. The functionary who keeps his job by making sure never to have an opinion, then shoots himself at his retirement party … Seriously, though, my wife is a marvel. Far more intelligent than I am, though of course she doesn’t believe it. It’s because her education was so piecemeal, she never got the basics—you know, how to do long division, how to punctuate a sentence properly. Latin and Greek. God! Whereas I did Latin and Greek for eons. I’m supereducated, hypereducated. Yet compared to her, I’m stupid.”

“If you’re stupid, I’m a cretin. I’m no smarter than—than this ashtray.”

“But you
do
something. You have a job. You sell cars.”

“And you write books.”

“Stupid books. Did Iris tell Julia how we got started on them? It was a bet. Alec Tyndall, this fellow we met in Le Touquet—his wife was reading Agatha Christie. Well, one night he and I got drunk
and he bet me a hundred pounds that he could write a detective novel before I could. And I took him up on it.”

“I assume you won.”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t let him pay me. I couldn’t. By then we were getting royalty checks.”

“Royalty checks are something to be proud of.”

“No, they are not something to be proud of. The
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
is something to be proud of. The Incompleteness Theorem is something to be proud of.”

I didn’t know what the Incompleteness Theorem was. I wondered if it had anything to do with Theosophy.

“In the world I live in, men aren’t measured by their brains,” I said. “They’re measured by what they earn.”

“Then in your world I’m nothing, because I’ve never earned a dime in my life.”

“But the novels must make money.”

“Chalk those up to Iris. Like I said, she’s the brains of the operation.” He fiddled with the door lock, pulling it up and pressing it down. “Here’s where we turn, by the way.”

I turned. We were driving alongside the river. To our left the hulls of ships loomed, their surfaces mottled in the moonlight. A breeze came up, filling the Buick with maritime smells—brine, burning rubber, fish guts—that I inhaled with relish, hoping they would eradicate the naphthalene, the cigarettes, the coffee, all the tired, residual odors of our slow exodus.

“I like this car,” Edward said. “I really do. Here’s an idea. Let’s pretend I’m a customer, a stranger. Make your pitch. Sell me a car.”

“When it comes to luxury, you won’t find anything to compare with the Limited,” I said. “She’s got a whopping 140-inch wheelbase and a fifty-six-inch front seat. That’s just a trifle less wide than a full-size Davenport—and no less comfortable, because the seats
are built on a foundation of Foamtex rubber over Marshall springs and upholstered in smart Bedford cord. You could be relaxing at your favorite club.”

“My favorite club! I love that. Go on.”

“The rear armrest retracts into the seatback and has a built-in ash receptacle, while the doors are equipped with capacious side pockets, attractively shirred and ideal for holding magazines, road maps, and small parcels. Window and ventipane controls are designed for sure grip and easy operation and have richly colored plastic knobs that harmonize with the interior trim. Now let’s have a look at the dashboard. See the electric clock mounted in the glove-compartment door? Stays accurate within three seconds a year. Plus you’ve got an automatic electric cigar lighter and multiple ash receivers. Not only that, this particular model features Buick’s exclusive retractable Sunshine Turret Top—ideal for warm afternoons. But don’t think that just because the Limited is spacious, she’s slow, because she comes equipped with our 141-horsepower Dynaflash oil-cushioned, valve-in-head, straight-eight engine. You can go from ten to sixty miles per hour in eighteen seconds flat. And our exclusive BuiCoil spring rests guarantee a smooth ride even on the roughest road. Now, hold on to your seat and watch the clock.” I shifted gears, pressed my foot to the accelerator.

“Whoa,” Edward said, putting a hand on the dashboard.

We hit sixty. “How many seconds was that?”

“Fourteen. I’m sold. I’m ready to write the check.”

“You can write it, but I won’t take it.”

“Why not?”

“The same reason you wouldn’t take that fellow’s money—the one you made the bet with … No, I’m afraid I’ll just have to sell her at a loss. Well, easy come, easy go … Do you know what I heard yesterday? The last time the
Excambion
set sail, some Polish grandee
was hawking his Rolls-Royce on the pier—as the ship was getting ready to weigh anchor. Literally as it was weighing anchor.”

“But why sell at a loss when I’ll give you market value?”

“And what do you propose to do with a car when you can’t even drive?”

“I’ll leave it here. To pick up when I come back.”

“So you think you’ll come back?”

“Why not?”

I brooded over this for a moment. “Julia seems to think that if we leave, it’s for good. She’s putting in for staying here, in Portugal.”

“It might not be the worst idea. Portugal’s neutral, after all. I know, people say it won’t last. Still, I wouldn’t underestimate Salazar. He’s shrewd. He knows how to play both sides against the middle.”

“Then why are people like the Fischbeins so desperate to get out?”

“Because they’ve got no status. No standing. And look what they’ve come out of. War. Real war. They’d like to put an ocean between themselves and that. We had it easy, comparatively speaking.”

I couldn’t disagree with this. In Paris, the war had at first seemed little more than a costume party. In anticipation of air raids, Julia had bought herself a Charles Creed
alerte-plaid
poncho and an haute-couture gas-mask holder in red tweed with gold studs from Lanvin. According to
Vogue
, an haute-couture gas-mask holder was now a necessity no sophisticated Parisienne should be without.

Things got worse in the spring. A few bombs fell. Nonetheless, the attitude of the newspapers remained phlegmatic. Then one afternoon, on my way home from work, I happened to notice smoke rising from behind the foreign ministry. I wondered if it was another bomb. It turned out that the functionaries were throwing bales of documents out the windows, onto a bonfire.

That evening, under cover of darkness, the government fled the capital—first for Tours, then Bordeaux—and the next evening, our
Buick packed to the hilt, Julia and I followed suit. In the gas-mask holder, which had never held a gas mask, we put everything we didn’t want the customs agents to find.

“Look,” Edward said, pointing out the window. “It’s the Exposition!”

I looked. The Exposition was floodlit like an aerodrome. Everything about it was titanic: the pavilions, the statues, the fountains shooting sprays of water sixty feet in the air. “This is what happens when modernism comes under the spell of Fascism,” Edward said. “The avant-garde becomes the vehicle for the promotion of the very forces it should seek to subvert. A modernist vernacular is hijacked for the purposes of promulgating the values of an idyllic past, a past that never was. A sort of politically enforced nostalgia … Is that perhaps the definition of Fascism?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“And to think that this time next year it’ll all be torn down.”

“Really?”

“Of course. It’s just a stage set. Otherwise how could they have knocked it up so fast? You know, you’ve really got to hand it to Salazar. He’s got that show-must-go-on spirit. I mean, the war couldn’t have come at a worse time for him.”

“At least the hotels are full.”

“Oh, but they were supposed to be full. With tourists, not refugees.”

This was correct. Earlier I had asked Senhor Costa how many of the guests at the Francfort were in Lisbon for the Exposition. “Perhaps ten,” he had said—under his breath, as if it was shameful. “As for the rest—what passports I have seen, sir! Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Soviet, Luxembourger, Nansen. All come to Lisbon, and why? To leave Lisbon.”

What was odd—what no one at first understood—was why Salazar had let so many refugees in in the first place. Edward’s opinion was that it was all thanks to the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. “Do you remember the scene at the consulate?” he asked. “The consul was signing visas all night, signing every visa that crossed his desk. When Iris and I were there, he had a rabbi helping him, an old-style rabbi, wearing a prayer shawl. The rabbi would stamp the passport, then the consul would sign it. No questions asked. Like an assembly line.”

Though I didn’t remember the rabbi, I did remember the consul: a fat man with a beard, spooning stew into his mouth with one hand and signing with the other. It was true, he wasn’t turning anyone away. It was also true that when Julia and I finally left with our visas, at around eleven at night, the consulate was still open and showed no signs of closing. By contrast, the Spanish consulate closed every afternoon on the stroke of five, no matter how long the line snaking up its stairwell.

“The point is, by signing all these visas, the consul was flagrantly violating his orders, which were not to issue a single visa without getting clearance from Lisbon. He had a conscience—for which he’ll pay dearly. And in the meantime Salazar’s stuck with a hundred thousand refugees.”

“Can’t he send them back?”

“Back where? Spain won’t have them. France won’t have them. Did I tell you about the couple Iris and I met on the International Bridge? The wife was Dutch, the husband Belgian. It turned out they’d made it through the French border patrol and crossed into Spain, only to be told by the Spaniards that there was something wrong with the wife’s visa—they couldn’t read the date or something—and she had to go back to France and get a new one. So then she walked
back to the French side of the bridge, where the French guards told her that she couldn’t enter France because she didn’t have a French entry visa. So then she trooped back to the Spanish side, only to be told … Well, you get the picture. For all I know, she’s still on the bridge.”

Julia and I had also crossed the International Bridge. There were two lanes for cars—one for ordinary cars, such as ours, which moved at a crawl, and the other for vehicles with diplomatic plates, of which perhaps ten passed during the five hours we spent on that bridge. Getting through Spanish customs took another five hours, at the end of which an officer mapped out a route to the Portuguese frontier. If we diverged from this route, we were warned, we could be arrested.

Spain might have been the worst part of the trip. Julia refused to eat anything. Such was her fussiness about the sanitary facilities that she developed an acute case of constipation. For hours at a time she played solitaire—she had rigged up a sort of board that she could hold on her lap—or gazed at the photographs of our apartment in
Vogue
, from which she sometimes read aloud: “It was the wish of the lady of the house, an American long resident in Europe, to maintain the flat’s Parisian charm while reducing its Parisian crowdedness. Less of everything—Colette instead of Proust! Matisse instead of Ingres!—but still distinctly
à la française
.” She had only one copy, and it was getting dog-eared.

Now, in the Buick, I looked at Edward. I wanted to reassure myself that it was actually he, not Julia, who was in the passenger seat. Like a dog, he had his face out the window. “Look, we’re in Estoril!” he said. “There’s the Atlantic!” He pointed at a hotel, from the roof of which the name ATLÂNTICO pulsed out in neon. “And that’s the Palace!” Again, the name, PALÁCIO, was written on the roof—which led me to wonder if he’d even actually been to Estoril. It was an impression
he liked to give, that anywhere he went was a place he’d been before.