‘Nor me.’
He left her early and climbed back up to Montmartre on foot in the blackout. Figures loomed out of the darkness on the same pavement and stepped aside as he went past. He realised he was walking at an intimidating, brutal pace through the shadowy closed-down city. Opening the studio door, he heard a scuffle and a woman’s cry. A single low lamp lit Jesús’s bed, where he was lying with the girl he had sent away the evening he and Jean had had dinner.
‘Sorry!’ Jean said foolishly.
‘Can’t a man ’ave a fuck now and then!’ Jesús murmured with unexpected shyness.
‘I’ll come back later.’
He returned just before the curfew and found Jesús alone in a dressing gown.
‘I’m getting in your way,’ Jean said. ‘I’d better find myself a room.’
‘Listen, Jean, you gettin’ on my nerve. You is too little to live alone. Now tell me: what is with Claude?’
‘She’s here.’
‘And she explain to you?’
‘No. And it doesn’t matter?’
‘Aïe!’
‘What?’
‘You is really en lov’.’
‘Do you think so?’
Jesús held out his arms and swore it was so, on the Madonna of the Begonias.
‘How often does it happen in a lifetime?’ Jean asked anxiously.
Jesús assured him that certain men never experienced what it felt like to be in love, and that others in contrast fell in love with every girl they met. He personally had never been like that. No feverishness or sweaty palms, ever, and as soon as his passion was satisfied, an irresistible desire to chuck the girl out. He could not remember having made love to any girl twice. He tried to remember their names, tried to recall a moment of sweetness or tenderness that they might have spontaneously shown him. He couldn’t. He inspired sweetness and tenderness in them as little as they did in him. Jean commented that in that case, deep down, he was still a virgin. The Spaniard protested. He was not a virgin, he suffered from an ailment. His blood possessed an antibody that destroyed love. Jean, on the other hand, was in the grip of a virus and his love affairs made no sense to him unless they felt as if they were for ever.
‘Is always the lov’ of your life!’ he said with a despairing expression. ‘I canno’ keep up with you.’
‘Claude is the love of my life.’
‘You is twenty years old!’
‘Twenty-one.’
Jesús roared with laughter. The difference was, of course, vast. In fact it demanded celebration. They opened the magnum of champagne that Madeleine had brought. The bottle had been cooling on the window sill and they drank it from tooth mugs. Jesús’s unmade bed gave off the scent of the woman who had been in it an hour before. On the bedside table lay a silk scarf she had left behind. Jean pointed at it.
‘She’ll be back for that tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow? No. I will no’ be ’ere. You too.’
‘Why?’
‘We are ’avin’ dinner with Mad’leine.’
‘I didn’t say yes.’
Jesús had said yes for him. The situation was becoming untenable. Madeleine was deeply offended. One day or another they would need her, or to be more specific her Julius, whom it seemed everyone in Paris had fallen for. Without him, women would go naked, and the theatres and film studios close for lack of costumes. The Germans made Jesús as anxious as Fu Manchu. Yet what real reason did he have to keep out of their way? He was a Spaniard and could not give a damn whether they had won or lost a war, because it was not his war. Julius could not be as bad as all that. He did a thousand small favours, handing out travel permits, clothing coupons, fuel coupons for heating, cigarettes, liquor. At home his door was always open to fashion designers and fashionable young hairdressers, and on certain evenings, mixed up haphazardly with his suppliers, writers, poets, actors, dancers, art critics and film directors. As for Jean, the thought of going without Claude for a whole evening made him more reluctant than the bad memories he had of the Germans from his participation in the brief battle of France. He admitted as much to Jesús, who pretended to tear his hair out and called him a very sublime moron. What was he talking about? Claude disappeared in a puff of smoke for three days, and he hesitated to stand her up for a single night? If he went on that way, she’d start thinking she could behave however she liked! A man who was really and truly in love could not behave more stupidly. Jean did not know what to say.
Madeleine lived on Avenue Foch in an imposing panelled apartment whose owner, a Jew who was also a great art lover, had taken refuge in the United States as soon as the Germans had attacked. Julius kept up the same staff: two hoary manservants, two maids and a butler whom he had had freed from a POW camp to resume his old post. There were rumours that, under the guise of a requisition, the Jewish art lover and Julius had come to a working agreement: a luxury apartment in return for an assurance that the treasures on show would not be subject to any confiscation. Although he had been forewarned at length by Jesús, Jean was nonetheless dumbfounded to find Madeleine in the new role she had created. He tried to remember her the way she had looked two years earlier, standing in a peignoir on the landing of the building in Rue Lepic, taking refuge with him and Chantal one morning when Jesús had nearly set fire to his apartment, and again in 1939 when she had played the ambiguous part of Madame Miranda at Cannes, a little more polished than before but still retaining some of the gestures of the humble streetwalker she had once been. Refusing to colour her hair, she had a fine head of grey hair that softened her tired-looking expression. The make-up artist’s skills had turned a previously vulgar mouth into a worldly pout and smoothed the first signs of crow’s feet. Palfy’s lessons had borne fruit: the suburban accent had gone along with most of her mispronunciations. In short, to all intents and purposes — though she still did not know who was who — she could be mistaken for a woman of the world, even in the rare letters she wrote, in which there were so many spelling mistakes that nobody believed they were not deliberate. As time went on Palfy, who was a bit fogeyish about such things, urged her to give up writing altogether, and she, more than happy, concurred.
‘I thought you were avoiding me,’ she said, kissing Jean. ‘And why haven’t you brought your divine lady friend?’
‘Divine’ was a word much in vogue, which the fashionable young hairdressers with whom she spent a couple of hours every day in order not to look as if she had been to the hairdresser — oh subtle accomplishment of long toil! — used to describe the least of their amazements.
‘She’s not divine,’ he answered. ‘She’s just a woman with a little boy she can’t leave on his own in the evenings.’
He tried not to feel he had been right to hesitate to come and allowed himself to be led towards a group surrounding a bald, plump man with a scarred cheek. Julius Kapermeister had none of the cold, condescending distinction of a Rudolf von Rocroy. The son of a solid line of Dortmund industrialists, he certainly possessed a more than modest opinion of himself, but concealed it beneath an unctuousness that was excessive, particularly if you knew the extent of his official functions — and even later, when you learnt what their objective was. Unused to Germans, Jean had a feeling of unease he found hard to shrug off. Julius spoke precise, heavily accented French, but we shall spare the reader a phonetic transcription of his words. One is enough, and Jesús will for ever chew his French into a sort of pidgin, while Julius had already made considerable progress in less than a year and could express himself relatively fluently in correct French.
‘So here you are, Jean Arnaud!’ he said with affected surprise. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Madeleine, yet never seen you. I was beginning to think you were refusing to meet us! There are one or two French who, it must be said, are rather stubborn — though in one sense I forgive them — they’re reluctant to understand …’