I had thought I would be alone with him there, but there was monsieur Nina looking at him, stationed at the foot of the bed. As we did not know one another (I mean to say that he knew that I was the lady who was passing as monsieur Bébé’s mother, but we had not seen one another before this), we looked at one another suspiciously, though he didn’t say anything when I approached and stood beside monsieur Bébé. We stood there for a while, and I saw that the tears were running down his cheeks and that they’d made like a furrow near his nose.
“You were there also the night of the party,” I said, hoping to distract him. “Monsieur Bébé … monsieur Linard said that you were very unhappy and asked monsieur Loulou to go out and keep you company.”
Monsieur Nina looked at me without understanding. He shook his head, and I smiled at him so as to cheer him up.
“The night of the party at monsieur Rosay’s house,” I said. “Monsieur Linard came out to the kitchen and gave me some whiskey.”
“Whiskey?”
“Yes. He was the only one all night who offered me something to drink … And monsieur Loulou was opening a bottle of champagne, and then monsieur Linard let fly a jet of foam in his face and …”
“Oh, be quiet, be quiet,” murmured monsieur Nina. “Don’t mention that … Bébé was crazy, really crazy …”
“And you were sad because of that?” I asked, so as to say something, but now he didn’t hear me, he was looking at monsieur Bébé as if to ask him something, his mouth moved repeating over and over again the same thing until I couldn’t watch him any longer. Monsieur Nina wasn’t such a nice boy as monsieur Bébé or monsieur Loulou, and to me he seemed very small, although people in black are always smaller, as Gustave says. I would have wanted to console monsieur Nina, he was so despondent, but at that moment monsieur Rosay came in and motioned for me to go back to the salon.
“It’s getting to be morning now, madame Francinet,” he said. His face was getting green, the poor fellow. “You ought to rest for a bit. You’re not going to be able to stand the fatigue, and pretty soon people are going to start arriving. The burial is going to be at nine-thirty.”
In fact I was dropping from weariness, and it would be better if I slept for an hour. It’s incredible how one hour of sleep refreshes me. So I let monsieur Rosay take my arm and lead me out, and when we were crossing the salon with the chandeliers, the window was already a pale pink, and I felt cold in spite of the fire in the fireplace. Monsieur Rosay let go of me at that moment all at once, and stood looking at the doorway that led to the entrance hall. A man with a scarf knotted around his neck had come in, and for a second I was frightened thinking that maybe we had been discovered (although there was nothing illegal) and that the man with the scarf was a brother or something like that of monsieur Bébé’s. But that was impossible, he had such a coarse air about him, as if Pierre or Gustave might have been brothers of someone as refined as monsieur Bébé. Behind the man with the scarf I suddenly saw monsieur Loulou looking as though he were scared, but at the same time it seemed to me he looked satisfied that something was about to happen. Then monsieur Rosay motioned me to stay where I was and took two or three steps toward the man with the scarf, without much wanting to, I thought.
“You’re coming?…” he started by saying, in the same tone of voice he used to talk with me, which at bottom was not at all friendly.
“Where is Bébé?” asked the man with a voice that showed he had been drinking or shouting. Monsieur Rosay made a vague gesture, wanting to keep him from entering, but the man came forward and swept him aside with just a look. I was very surprised at such rudeness at such a sad moment, but monsieur Loulou, who’d been standing in the doorway (I think it was he who’d let the man in), broke into peals of laughter, and then monsieur Rosay went over and began slapping him as you would a boy, just like you would slap a boy. I didn’t hear very well what they were saying, but monsieur Loulou seemed happy in spite of having his ears boxed, and said something like, “Now he’ll see … now he’ll see, that whore …” although I don’t like to repeat his words, and he said it several times until suddenly he burst into tears and put his hands to his face, while monsieur Rosay was pushing and pulling him toward the sofa where he stayed, sobbing and crying, and everybody had forgotten about me, as usual.
Monsieur Rosay seemed very nervous and couldn’t make up his mind to go into the dead man’s room, but a moment later you could hear monsieur Nina’s voice arguing about something, and monsieur Rosay made up his mind and ran to the doorway just as monsieur Nina came sailing out protesting, and I would have sworn that the man with the scarf had given him a good shove to throw him out. Monsieur Rosay backed off, looking at monsieur Nina, and both of them began to speak in low voices but even so it came out shrill, and monsieur Nina wept in despair and made such a face that I felt very sorry for him. Finally, he calmed down a little and monsieur Rosay led him over to the sofa where monsieur Loulou was, who began to laugh again (that’s how it was, they could as soon laugh as cry), but monsieur Nina made a disdainful face and went over to sit on the other sofa near the fireplace. I stayed in one corner of the room, waiting for the ladies and reporters to arrive, as madame Rosay had instructed me, and finally the sun was shining directly into the panes of the window and a servant in livery showed in two very elegant gentlemen and a lady, who looked first at monsieur Nina thinking that perhaps he was family, then they looked at me, and I had my face in my hands but I could see very well from between my fingers. These gentlemen and others who came in later passed through to see monsieur Bébé, and later they gathered together in the salon, and some of them came over to where I was, accompanied by monsieur Rosay, and gave me condolences and pressed my hand very feelingly. The ladies also were very friendly, one of them especially, very young and pretty, who sat down beside me for a moment and said that monsieur Linard had been a great artist and that his death was an irreparable misfortune. I said yes to everyone and I was really crying, although I should have been pretending all the time, but it affected me to think of monsieur Bébé inside there, so handsome and so young, and of what a great artist he had been. The young lady kept patting my hands and telling me that no one would ever forget monsieur Linard, and that she was sure that monsieur Rosay would take care of the fashion house just as monsieur Linard had always wanted, that his style would never be lost, and many other things I don’t remember but always filled with praise for monsieur Bébé. And then monsieur Rosay came looking for me, and after looking at everyone around me so that they would understand what was about to happen, he told me in a low voice that it was time to say goodbye to my son, because they were going to seal the casket soon. I had a terrible fright come over me, thinking that now I had to do the hardest scene, but he held me up and helped me to sit up, and we went into the room; there was only the man with the scarf at the foot of the bed, looking at monsieur Bébé, and monsieur Rosay gestured toward him pleadingly as though to have him understand that he ought to leave me alone with my son, but the man answered with a wry face and shrugged his shoulders and didn’t budge. Monsieur Rosay didn’t know what to do, and went back to looking at the man as though imploring him to leave, for other gentlemen who must have been the reporters were just entering the room behind us, and really the man was very disrespectful there with that scarf and his way of looking at monsieur Rosay as if it were to insult him. I couldn’t hold back any longer, I was afraid of them all, I was sure that something terrible was going to happen, and even though monsieur Rosay was paying no attention to me and was still making gestures at the man to convince him to leave, I went over to monsieur Bébé and began to cry and wail, and then monsieur Rosay held me back because really I would have wanted to kiss monsieur Bébé on the forehead, for me he was still the best of them all, but he didn’t let me go and begged me to calm myself, and finally made me go back to the salon, consoling me while he was squeezing my arm until it hurt, but as for that, no one could feel it but me and it meant nothing to me.
Then I was on the sofa and the waiter brought some water and two ladies were fanning me with their handkerchiefs, but there was a large crowd in the other room, and new people came in and gathered around me so I couldn’t see what was happening. Among those who had just arrived was the priest, and I was very happy that he had come to accompany monsieur Bébé. It would soon be time to leave for the cemetery, and it was good that the priest was going to come with us, with the mother and the friends of monsieur Bébé. Certainly they, too, would be happy that he was coming along, especially monsieur Rosay who was so upset, all the fault of the man in the scarf, and that he was so careful that everything be correct and as it ought to be, so that people should know how good the dead man had been and how much everyone loved monsieur Bébé.
THE PURSUER
In memoriam Ch. P.
Be thou faithful unto death
Apocalypse 2:10
O make me a mask
Dylan Thomas
Dédée had called me in the afternoon saying that Johnny wasn’t very well, and I’d gone to the hotel right away. Johnny and Dédée have been living in a hotel in the rue Lagrange for a few days now, they have a room on the fourth floor. All I have to do is see the door to the room to realize that Johnny’s in worse shape than usual; the window opens onto an almost black courtyard, and at one in the afternoon you have to keep the light on if you want to read the newspaper or see someone else’s face. It’s not that cold out, but I found Johnny wrapped up in a blanket, and squeezed into a raunchy chair that’s shedding yellowed hunks of old burlap all over the place. Dédée’s gotten older, and the red dress doesn’t suit her at all: it’s a dress for working under spotlights; in that hotel room it turns into a repulsive kind of coagulation.
“Faithful old buddy Bruno, regular as bad breath,” Johnny said by way of hello, bringing his knees up until his chin was resting on them. Dédée reached me a chair and I pulled out a pack of Gauloises. I’d brought a bottle of rum too, had it in the overcoat pocket, but I didn’t want to bring it out until I had some idea of how things were going. I think the lightbulb was the worst irritation, its eye pulled out and hanging suspended from a long cord dirtied by flies. After looking at it once or twice, and putting my hand up to shade my eyes, I asked Dédée if we couldn’t put out the damned light and wouldn’t the light from the window be okay. Johnny followed my words and gestures with a large, distracted attention, like a cat who is looking fixedly, but you know it’s something else completely; that it is something else. Finally Dédée got up and turned off the light. Under what was left, some mishmosh of black and grey, we recognized one another better. Johnny had pulled one of his big hands out from under the blanket and I felt the limber warmth of his skin. Then Dédée said she’d make us some nescafé. I was happy to know that at least they had a tin of nescafé. I always know, whatever the score is, when somebody has a can of nescafé it’s not fatal yet; they can still hold out.
“We haven’t seen one another for a while,” I said to Johnny. “It’s been a month at least.”
“You got nothin’ to do but tell time,” he answered. He was in a bad mood. “The first, the two, the three, the twenty-one. You, you put a number on everything. An’ that’s cool. You wanna know why she’s sore? ’Cause I lost the horn. She’s right, after all.”
“Lost it, but how could you lose it?” I asked, realizing at the same moment that that was just what you couldn’t ask Johnny.
“In the metro,” Johnny said. “I shoved it under the seat so it’d be safe. It was great to ride that way, knowing I had it good and safe down there between my legs.”
“He finally missed it when he was coming up the stairs in the hotel,” Dédée said, her voice a little hoarse. “And I had to go running out like a nut to report it to the metro lost-and-found and to the police.” By the silence that followed I figured out that it’d been a waste of time. But Johnny began to laugh like his old self, a deep laugh back of the lips and teeth.
“Some poor devil’s probably trying to get some sound out of it,” he said. “It was one of the worst horns I ever had; you know that Doc Rodriguez played it? Blew all the soul out of it. As an instrument, it wasn’t awful, but Rodriguez could ruin a Stradivarius just by tuning it.”
“And you can’t get ahold of another?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Dédée said. “It might be Rory Friend has one. The awful thing is that Johnny’s contract …”
“The contract,” Johnny mimicked. “What’s this with the contract? I gotta play and that’s it, and I haven’t got a horn or any bread to buy one with, and the boys are in the same shape I am.”
This last was not the truth, and the three of us knew it. Nobody would risk lending Johnny an instrument, because he lost it or ruined it right off. He lost Louis Rolling’s sax in Bordeaux, the sax Dédée bought him when he had that contract for a tour in England he broke into three pieces, whacking it against a wall and trampling on it. Nobody knew how many instruments had already been lost, pawned, or smashed up. And on all of them he played like I imagine only a god can play an alto sax, given that they quit using lyres and flutes.
“When do you start, Johnny?”
“I dunno. Today, I think, huh De?”
“No, day after tomorrow.”
“Everybody knows the dates except me,” Johnny grumbled, covering himself up to the ears in his blanket. “I’d’ve sworn it was tonight, and this afternoon we had to go in to rehearse.”
“It amounts to the same thing,” Dédée said. “The thing is that you haven’t got a horn.”
“What do you mean, the same thing? It isn’t the same thing. Day after tomorrow is the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow is much later than today. And today is later than right now, because here we are yakking with our old buddy Bruno, and I’d feel a lot better if I could forget about time and have something hot to drink.”
“I’ll boil some water, hold on for a little.”
“I was not referring to boiling water,” Johnny said. So I pulled out the bottle of rum, and it was as though we’d turned the light on; Johnny opened his mouth wide, astonished, and his teeth shone, until even Dédée had to smile at seeing him, so surprised and happy. Rum and nescafé isn’t really terrible, and all three of us felt a lot better after the second swallow and a cigarette. Then I noticed that Johnny was withdrawing little by little and kept on referring to time, a subject which is a preoccupation of his ever since I’ve known him. I’ve seen very few men as occupied as he is with everything having to do with time. It’s a mania of his, the worst of his manias, of which he has plenty. But he explains and develops it with a charm hard to resist. I remember a rehearsal before a recording session in Cincinnati, long before he came to Paris, in forty-nine or fifty. Johnny was in great shape in those days and I’d gone to the rehearsal just to talk to him and also to Miles Davis. Everybody wanted to play, they were happy, and well-dressed (this occurs to me maybe by contrast with how Johnny goes around now, dirty and messed up), they were playing for the pleasure of it, without the slightest impatience, and the sound technician was making happy signs from behind his glass window, like a satisfied baboon. And just at that moment when Johnny was like gone in his joy, suddenly he stopped playing and threw a punch at I don’t know who and said, “I’m playing this tomorrow,” and the boys stopped short, two or three of them went on for a few measures, like a train slowly coming to a halt, and Johnny was hitting himself in the forehead and repeating, “I already played this tomorrow, it’s horrible, Miles, I already played this tomorrow,” and they couldn’t get him out of that, and everything was lousy from then on, Johnny was playing without any spirit and wanted to leave (to shoot up again, the sound technician said, mad as hell), and when I saw him go out, reeling and his face like ashes, I wondered how much longer that business could go on.
“I think I’ll call Dr. Bernard,” Dédée said, looking at Johnny out of the corner of her eye, he was taking his rum in small sips. “You’ve got a f
ever and you’re not eating anything.”