Tad, keeping a finger on the globe so he wouldn’t lose his place in the Gobi or the Sahara Desert and die of thirst, glanced coldly at his sister. At sixteen, Tad Bronicki seemed to have such knowledge of the world that the only thing left for him to do was add a few small corrections to the planet’s history and geography.
“The child suffers from an excess of herself,” he said.
This whole time, the piano behind the curtain at the far end of the attic had continued to play; the invisible musician must have been a thousand miles away, carried by the melody to some faraway realm that neither our voices, nor likely any echo of anything else of this world, could reach. And then the music stopped, the curtain was drawn back, and I saw a very gentle face beneath a tousled thatch of hair, with eyes that still seemed to be following the notes, flown off to the unknown. The rest of him was the big body of a teenage boy of about fifteen or sixteen, hunched down as if encumbered by his size. At first I thought he was watching me, but the more attentively Bruno seemed to be looking at you the less he actually saw you. The concrete reality of this world — “an object of utmost importance,” as Tad said — inspired in Bruno an indifference mixed with surprise.
“That’s Bruno,” announced Lila, inflecting the word “that” with a mixture of tenderness and pride of ownership. “He’ll be awarded first prize at the Conservatory for his piano playing someday. He’s promised me. He’ll be famous. Actually, in a few years we’ll all be famous. Tad will be a great explorer, Bruno will be applauded in concert halls everywhere, I’ll be the next Garbo, and you …”
She studied me for a moment. I blushed.
“Well — it doesn’t matter,” she said.
I lowered my head. The efforts I was making to hide my humiliation must have been utterly useless, for Tad leapt to his feet and bounded over to his sister. In Polish, the two teenagers exchanged what appeared to be a flood of insults, during which my existence was completely forgotten, allowing me to regain my composure a little. Upon which a manservant dressed in a white coat entered the attic, followed by a chambermaid. I recognized him as Monsieur Julien, the waiter at the Clos Joli. They were carrying two trays laden with pastries, plates, cups, and teapots; a cloth was spread over the floorboards and tea was served upon it. At first I thought this might be a Polish custom, but Tad explained that it was to “bring a little bit of simplicity into this household, with its intolerable habit for luxury … Actually, I’m a Marxist,” he added. This was the first time I’d heard the word, and I took it to mean the habit of sitting on the floor to eat.
Over tea, I learned that Tad had no intention of becoming an explorer, as his sister demanded. Instead he had set himself the goal of “helping men to change the world” — he gestured toward the globe near the window as he declared that Bruno was the son of an Italian butler, now deceased, who had worked for the Bronickis in Poland; the count, having discovered that the boy possessed an extraordinary gift for music, had adopted him, given him the Bronicki name, and was helping him to become “the next Rubinstein.”
“Another investment,” Tad informed me. “My father’s planning on becoming his impresario and making lots of money.”
I also learned that the whole family would be leaving Normandy at the end of the summer.
“That is, if Papa’s creditors let him, and if he hasn’t sold off our estate in Poland,” Lila commented. “But none of that matters a bit, really. Mama will get us out of it again. She always finds some very rich lover to come to the rescue at the last minute. Three years ago, it was Basil Zaharoff, the world’s biggest arms dealer, and last year it was Monsieur Gulbenkian — they call him ‘Mister Five Percent’ because he gets 5 percent of the revenues of every English petrol company in Arabia. Mama loves Papa, and every time he ruins himself and starts threatening suicide, she … well … how shall I say it?”
“She heads for the coal mines,” Tad summed up briefly.
I’d never before heard children talking about their parents that way, and my astonishment must have shown, because Tad gave me a friendly slap on the back. “Come now,” he said. “You’re as red as a beet. What can I say, we Bronickis are all a bit decadent. Do you know what decadence is?”
Silently, I nodded yes.
But search as I might through the famous Fleury “historical memory,” I couldn’t for the life of me find that word.
6
I returned home resolved to become “somebody” as rapidly as possible, preferably before the departure of my new friends, but my resolve expressed itself in the form of a high fever, and I was obliged to stay in bed for several days. Within me, my delirium revealed the power to conquer galaxies: I received a kiss from Lila’s lips in thanks. I remember that, returning from a particularly hostile planet, following an expedition where I’d taken a hundred thousand Nubian prisoners — I didn’t know what the word Nubian meant but it seemed to fit these interstellar predators admirably — I dressed to offer up my new kingdom to Lila in a suit adorned with such a profusion of gemstones that at once, at the sight of such intense brilliance beaming up from an earth that had until then held only a very modest position among the light years, a veritable panic broke out among the brightest stars.
My illness ended in the sweetest of ways. The room was very dim: the shutters were closed, the curtains drawn, for it was feared that measles might, following these few days of hesitation, break out abruptly. Back then, one aspect of treatment was to keep patients in the dark, in order to protect their eyes, and Dr. Gardieu was all the more concerned because I was already fourteen — the measles were running late. It must have been noon, judging by the light that poured into the room as the door opened and Lila appeared. She was followed by the chauffeur, Mr. Jones, his arms loaded with an enormous fruit basket; behind them came my uncle, who kept warning Mademoiselle of the risk of fatal contagion. Lila stood in the doorway for a moment, and despite my extreme agitation, I could not help feeling the premeditation in the pose she struck against the bright background, one hand toying with her hair. While the visit was about me, it was above all a dramatic moment: a young girl in love arriving at a deathbed, and although one could not leave out the love and the death, they nevertheless ranked as accessories. Lila held her pose a few moments more as the chauffeur deposited the exotic fruit basket on the table. Then, rapidly, she crossed the room, leaned over me, and brushed my cheek with a kiss, despite my uncle’s repeated reminders to Mademoiselle of the powerfully dangerous and contagious nature of the microbes that quite possibly filled my body.
“You’re not going to die of sickness are you?” she demanded, as if she expected me to depart from this earth in some entirely different and admirable way.
“Don’t touch me, you might catch it.”
She sat down on my bed. “What’s the use of loving someone, if you’re afraid of catching it?”
A wave of pleasant heat rose to my head. My uncle smoothed his mustache. Mr. Jones stood guard over the exotic fruit basket, whose lychees, papayas, and guavas evoked Parisian luxury more than they did tropical climes. In carefully chosen terms, Ambrose Fleury stated the gratitude that, according to him, only my state of weakness prevented me from expressing. Lila went and drew the curtains, opened the shutters, and became all light; she leaned over me in the flood of her hair, where the sun, knowing a good thing when it sees one, supplied itself liberally.
“I don’t want you to be ill, I don’t like illness, I hope you won’t make a habit of this. You can have a little cold from time to time but not more. There are enough sick people without you. There are even people who die, and not at all from love, but from God knows what horrible filth. I understand dying of love, because sometimes it’s so strong that life can’t withstand it, it snaps. You’ll see, I’ll give you books where that happens.”
My uncle, aware of Slavic custom, proposed a cup of tea; Mr. Jones glanced discreetly at his watch and “permitted himself to remi
nd Mademoiselle that she was expected for her music lesson,” but Lila was in no hurry to leave; it was pleasurable for her to see herself in my silently adoring gaze, where she reigned — I was her kingdom; seated on the edge of my bed, leaning tenderly over me, she let herself be loved. As for me, I only truly regained my wits after she departed: I was more conscious of her visit after it ended than while it lasted, this perfumed half hour during which, for the first time in my life, I felt the first wafts of femininity drifting over my face, my first sensual proximity. After Lila had left me, I waited a quarter of an hour, then got up and crept from my bed, so that my uncle would not notice my troubled state. It lasted all day. I dressed and spent the afternoon walking through the countryside, but there was no palliating it until nighttime, when nature, in her benevolence, took it upon herself to relieve me as I slept.
The sky-blue Packard convertible came to collect me every day, and my uncle began to grumble. “These people are inviting you into their home to show they aren’t prejudiced, that they’re open-minded and allow their daughter to be friends with a little peasant boy. I ran into Madame de Bronicka in Cléry the other day. You know what she was doing? She was visiting the poor, like in the Middle Ages. You’re an intelligent boy, but don’t aim too high. It’s a good thing they’re going away. You’d end up picking up bad habits.”
I pushed my plate away from me. “Well, I don’t want to be a postal employee, at any rate,” I announced. “I want to be someone entirely different. I have no idea of what I want to do because it’s too big, the thing I want; it doesn’t exist yet, I’ll have to invent it.”
I spoke in a loud, confident voice with my head held high. I wasn’t thinking of Lila. I didn’t even know that inside what I was saying, inside this desire to surpass myself, to fly so high, to achieve great things, was a young girl, was her breath on my lips and her hand resting on my cheek.
I returned to my soup.
My uncle seemed pleased. He squinted one eye ever so slightly and smoothed his mustache to hide his smile.
7
A few miles from La Motte, beyond the Maze pond, surrounded by ash and birch trees, was a ravine. Long ago, this forest had been maintained for Colbert’s navy; now it was a wilderness; many red oaks grew there — where the axes had once done their work, snarls of bushes and ferns. It was down in this ravine that my uncle had helped me to build my wigwam, by a spring whose extreme old age had left it mute and infirm. Due to some strange play of currents, kites launched at the edge of this ravine took to the air with an ease that was explicable to my knowledgeable guardian, but which I ascribed to the sky’s friendly benevolence toward me. It was there I ended up some two weeks before the Bronickis’ departure, looking up at Ambrose Fleury’s latest creation whose nickname was Bastle, a kite shaped like a split-open fortress, with a crowd of little men that fluttered as if they were storming its walls. I was giving it a little more freedom up there, up where it was at home, letting out the line, when suddenly I was pushed and punched. Still holding the reel, I found myself on the ground, my assailant bearing down on me with all his weight. Rapidly, I saw that he did not have the force or the skills to match his bellicose intentions, and, although I had only one fist free, I had no trouble extricating myself from the situation. He fought courageously, throwing big, disorganized punches, and as I settled down on his chest, pinning one of his arms with my knee and the other with my hand, he strove to butt at me with his head. The only effect this had was surprising me, for certainly it was the first time I had inspired such strong emotions in anyone. He had fragile features, an almost feminine face, with long blond hair. The energy he gave to the fight could not compensate for his narrow shoulders and weak hands. Finally, exhausted, he grew still, rallying his forces, then commenced to wriggling again. I stuck to the task of keeping him on the ground, without letting go of my kite.
“What do you want from me? What’s your problem?”
He struggled to butt my stomach with his head, but succeeded only in smacking his neck against a rock.
“Where did you come from?”
He didn’t answer. I began to feel a little awed by his blue gaze, which he clamped on me with a kind of limpid fury.
“What did I do to you?”
He remained silent. His nose was bleeding. I didn’t know what to do with my victory, and, as I always did when I felt I had the upper hand, I rather wanted to spare him, even to help him. I leapt to my feet and backed away.
He remained on the ground for a moment, then stood.
“Tomorrow. Same time,” he said. With that, he turned his back on me and departed.
“Hey, listen!” I yelled. “What did I do to you?”
He stopped. His white shirt and handsome golf trousers were soiled with dirt.
“Tomorrow. Same time,” he repeated, and, for the first time, I noticed his strange, guttural accent. “If you don’t show up, you’re a coward.”
“I’m asking you: what did I do to you?”
He said nothing and stalked away, one hand in his pocket and the other arm bent, his elbow against his side, a posture I found extremely elegant. I watched him until he disappeared among the ferns, then I reeled Bastle back to earth, and spent the rest of the day racking my brains to try and understand why I had been attacked by this boy I had never seen before in my life. My uncle, when I confided my encounter to him, expressed the opinion that my assailant had intended to steal our kite, having been unable to resist the sight of such a masterpiece.
“No, I think it was me he was after.”
“But since you didn’t do a thing to him?”
“Maybe I did something without realizing it.”
Actually, I was beginning to feel guilty of the very cruelest kind of transgression — that is, the one we have no idea of. No matter how hard I thought, the only wrongdoing I could come up with was having followed Lila’s suggestion that I release a snake in the middle of mass a few days earlier, which had had an extremely satisfying effect on the assembled company. Impatiently, I waited for the moment I’d meet my adversary again, and would oblige him to tell me the origins of his vengeful rancor, and what wrong I had done him.
The next day, he appeared just as I was arriving at the wigwam. I think he had been waiting for me behind the blackberry hedges that lined the ravine. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped jacket — a blazer, as I learned to call it once I had gotten the knack of high society — white flannel trousers, and, this time, instead of pouncing on me, he took up a boxer’s stance, with one foot in front of the other and his fists in front of him. I was unnerved. I didn’t know a thing about boxing, but I’d seen Marcel Thil, the world middleweight champion, strike exactly the same pose in a newspaper photo. He took a step toward me, and then another, pumping his fists as if savoring ahead of time the knockout blow he was about to land on me. Once he got near, he began to hop and dance around me, occasionally touching his cheek with his fist, sometimes hovering up closer, then springing back or hopping to the side. He danced around like that for a while, then he hurled himself at me. I met him with my fist, which he took square in the face. He fell to a sitting position, but got up immediately and went back to dancing, occasionally reaching out his arm to strike at my body with blows I barely felt. Finally, when I’d had my fill, I gave him a good old Norman slap across the face with the back of my hand. Though I didn’t intend to, I must have hit him hard, for he fell yet again, his lips bleeding this time. I’d never seen such a fragile kid. He wanted to get up, but I held him pinned to the ground.
“How about you explain yourself now.”
He kept silent and looked me straight in the eye, with a defiant air. I was at a loss. I couldn’t give him a good thumping: he really was too feeble. The only way to get him was to wear him down. I held him on the ground for half an hour. Nothing doing: he wouldn’t speak. I couldn’t very well spend the entire day sitting on him. I was worried I’d
hurt him. He had courage and resolve, the poor fool. When I finally let him go, he stood up, smoothed out his clothes and his long blond hair, and turned to face me.
“Tomorrow. Same time.”
“Oh, go shit in your hat.”
I went over my conscience again, and, finding nothing anyone could possibly reproach me for, concluded that my stubborn adversary had mistaken me for someone else.
That afternoon, as I was reading the volume of Rimbaud that Lila had given me, I was interrupted by the familiar sound of the Packard’s horn in front of my house. Quickly, I ran outside. Mr. Jones winked and greeted me in his habitual and affably mocking way: “Monsieur is invited to take tea.”
I ran upstairs to freshen up, put on a clean shirt, slicked down my hair with a splash of water, and, finding the results of my efforts unsatisfactory, ducked into the workshop for some glue, which I used as hair pomade. Solemnly, I climbed into the back seat, spread the Scottish rug over my lap; and then, to the great displeasure of Mr. Jones, who had just started the car, I leapt out of it again and dashed up to my room — I had forgotten to shine my damn shoes.
8
The Bronickis’ sitting room was full of people, and the first to catch my eye was my mysterious attacker: he was standing with Lila, showing not the slightest hostility toward me when my friend took his arm and led him over to me. “This is my cousin Hans,” she told me.
Hans bowed slightly. “A pleasure,” he said. “I believe we’ve met before. And that we’ll have the occasion to meet again.” Nonchalantly, he walked away.
“What’s going on?” Lila demanded with surprise. “You look strange. I hope you’ll be friends. You have at least one thing in common: he’s in love with me, too.”
Madame de Bronicka was in bed with a migraine and Lila wore the role of hostess with ease, making the rounds of her guests with me. “I’d like to introduce our friend Ludo, the nephew of the celebrated Ambrose Fleury.”