She picked up her bag from the table and took out a fifty-lire note. Tears had welled in her eyes.
‘I can’t say anything, I’m his secretary … but I’d feel I was helping to right a wrong if you would accept. I have a son like you. He travels too, and I would be awfully sad if something like this happened to him …’
‘I’ll send you the money as soon as I get back to France, if you’ll give me your name and address.’
She gave them to him, and he went out into the street to find Ernst, who was waiting with his bicycle.
‘No papers,’ Jean said. ‘Just fifty lire that the secretary lent me because she took pity on me. I was treated like a dog.’
He recounted the consular official’s welcome.
‘You see,’ Ernst said, ‘if something like that happened to me at a German consulate I would immediately denounce the man to the party.’
‘Denounce? No, that’s too disgusting. You don’t do that!’
‘Why not? He’s a saboteur. You would be doing your country and your party a service.’
‘There isn’t one party in France, there are thirty-six … Listen, Ernst, we don’t think the same things, and even so we’re great, and true, friends. Right now I only have one thing I want to do: to get to the border. After that I’ll manage on my own …’
‘Then you need to find a car or a truck to take you to Ventimiglia. Let’s get out of Rome.’
They walked to the edge of the city, and at the Florence road stopped next to a petrol pump. They waited two hours before a truck stopped. The driver poked a superb head, shaved like a Roman gladiator’s, out of the window.
‘Dove vai?’ he asked.
‘Francia.’
‘Anche io. Francese?’
‘Sì, sì, Francese.’
‘Allora, monta!’
Jean only had time to say his goodbyes to Ernst and promise to write to him.
‘I thought of a present for you to remember me by,’ Ernst said. ‘You’ve got nothing left, so take my Italienische Reise. One day perhaps Goethe will be your companion, as he is my father’s. You’re more like my father than you are like me, and Goethe could have been a French writer if he hadn’t chosen, when he was twenty, to write in German.’
‘Thank you, Ernst. I’ll take it, and when I get home I’ll send you a Stendhal.’
‘Goodbye, old Hans.’
‘Goodbye, old Ernst.’
They shook hands vigorously, and Jean climbed up to sit next to the driver, who spoke a little French.
‘Anda de baggages?’
‘No baggage. Everything was stolen.’
‘Porca Madonna! All righta, tomorrow nighta you will be in your country. Ligha me a cigaretta. My name eez Stefano. Yours?’
‘Jean.’
‘Jean, Gino! Bravo. Andiamo.’
Stefano let the clutch in and Jean watched his friend’s sorrowful face. But at seventeen there are no adieus. Life’s road is long, and you believe it will be paved with reunions.
Between Rome and the border he lit a good thirty cigarettes for Stefano, who drove his heavy truck like the devil, stopping every six hours to sleep for a few minutes, his hairy arms folded across the steering wheel. He spoke little, sang a lot, switching often from Italian to Tino Rossi’s French ballads. At the border he hid Jean behind a crate. It was seven in the evening as they drove through Menton. Jean asked to be dropped there.
‘No, my young friend. You are ‘ungry. You ‘ava no money. Come to my girlfriend’s.’
They took the high corniche road, and a while later Stefano pulled up outside a restaurant with a striking sign: Chez Antoine. Mireille Cece had recognised the sound of his engine. She was standing on the doorstep.
8
The author wishes to express a purely personal feeling: that it is sad to have abandoned young Ernst in the previous chapter, to leave him to go on towards his dreadful destiny. Yes, it is undeniable that from the autumn of 1939 onwards this young man will sow death all around him, but he will be repeating a lesson he has been taught, and without that lesson that subjugated so many souls in the young Germany, victorious at the recent Olympiad, victorious in the diplomatic sphere, and soon victorious militarily throughout Europe, without that lesson he would doubtless have been a romantic young man with a heart after his own father’s. He was being readied to perform the role of a robot, and the robot would only break when it faced the revelation of the extent of the disaster it had helped to create. Adieu then, Ernst, of whom we will perhaps speak once or twice more without glimpsing again that face of a young Germanic god, with his straw-coloured hair, blue eyes and prominent cheekbones. To console us, though, here is Mireille Cece, of all unexpected people, standing in the doorway of her restaurant in a red dress with white polka dots. She throws her arms around Stefano’s neck. In the balance she would not weigh heavily beside Ernst. The moral balance, I mean. But much as the young man’s dogmatic idealism still possesses a certain charm — a naïve charm — so her carnivorous realism is impressive. Her unfortunate experience with the customs officer has not cured her. At the same time as keeping up enthusiastic and disinterested relations with Stefano, whose hairy chest and powerful thighs trigger an almost ecstatic frenzy in her, she has found a successor to Antoine, indeed gone one better than a mildly libidinous sugar daddy: an amorous prefect, who ensures that his gendarmes turn a blind eye to her small-scale smuggling. She is thirty-three and her vine-shoot look is at its peak. Sinewy, swarthy, almost flat-chested, restlessly in motion, she is not one of those voluptuous creatures between whose bottom and breasts some men love to lose themselves. On the other hand, there is not one eligible bachelor who, passing within range, fails to guess what flame keeps her warm. I feel that we are edging towards the trivial, that we would do better not to elaborate, and merely limit ourselves to six words: in bed Mireille is a bomb. She has lost her girlish softnesses, to the benefit of her feminine confidence. Her black hair, tied back, severely frames her taut, lively face and large, constantly sparkling black eyes. All the more sparkling now that Stefano has hardly taken her in his arms and she can already feel through her light dress how badly he needs her. And then there is Jean, in an open shirt and a pair of shorts too short for him, standing on the roadside, wondering if he still exists. Fortunately Stefano is a true friend, one who knows how to master his emotions.
‘Mireille,’ he said, ‘Gino eeza French friend. He eez ‘ungry and I wanta you to find ’im a bed for de nighta.’
Mireille opened her eyes and caught sight of Jean, looking gauche and embarrassed. Her immediate thought was that he was handsome, and then that something could be done for him.
‘Come with me,’ she said.
Jean’s tiredness was so great that, having wolfed down some dinner, he collapsed onto a camp bed that had been put up in the pantry and only awoke the next day when Mireille appeared in a dressing gown with a steaming bowl of coffee.
‘Stefano has gone,’ she said. ‘He told me what happened to you. You can write to your parents from here. Where do they live?’
‘Near Dieppe.’
‘Do they have a telephone?’
‘No, it would be difficult, but perhaps they can send me a postal order. While I’m waiting I’m going to look for work.’
‘Work? There’s plenty here. You can help in the kitchen.’
And so there is Jean, washing dishes in a restaurant. It is surprising that Mireille, a simple soul, did not ask the question, ‘Near Dieppe? Do you know an Antoine du Courseau?’ but she had never left the Alpes-Maritimes, and the name Dieppe meant little to her. We should add that Antoine had never revealed his real surname either. She had taken him to be a commercial traveller, a good father and husband, generous, although protective of his anonymity. In any case it was ancient history, and since the unmasking of the customs officer plenty of vigorous lovers had shared her bed, erasing the memory of her first benefactor.