The Vexations Read online

  “How are you going to get a piano up the Butte?”

  “No idea. Have a seat.” He gestured at the piano stool. “I need to take the light to the other room to find a button.”

  “They look like this,” Philippe said, lifting his shirttail to show his fly. “I mean, any button will do. But if you happened to have different kinds. Or just a pin. If you can lend me a pin, I’ll be fine.”

  After Erik disappeared with the lamp, the sudden dark felt vertiginous. Philippe groped for some mooring and accidentally struck the piano keys, an ugly yowl of notes.

  “The neighbors,” Erik hissed from the next room.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He felt above the keys to grip the open fallboard and concentrated on breathing until Erik’s footsteps returned.

  “Which of us is likely to be less hopeless at this?” Erik said, needle and thread in hand. The button was a tarnished metal that Philippe suspected Erik had clipped off his own clothing. He was too grateful to protest.

  “I’ve never mended a thing,” Philippe said truthfully. “My mother did it.”

  “Me, then,” Erik said with a sigh. “Trousers off.”

  Philippe winced, but of course sitting in his drawers would be preferable to Erik jabbing into his crotch with a needle. He stood and let his trousers drop before he remembered to remove his shoes. Then he folded to untangle himself.

  “Your socks are appalling,” Erik said idly, as he arranged Philippe’s trousers in his lap. He removed a small notebook from a pocket and handed it to Philippe.

  “How was the rest of the exhibition?”

  “I didn’t know you’d left. I was looking for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Just looking.”

  “The army?” Philippe asked, taking in Erik’s unexpected competence with the needle.

  “And boarding school. My grandmother would have mended things on the weekends, but I didn’t want to have to thank her for anything. The other buttons are loose as well. Should I reinforce them while I’m at it?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Philippe said. He curled his hand and ran his fingernails across the tops of the keys, so gently the only sound was a light clicking. “You know I’ve never played a note?”

  “Don’t. It’s late.”

  “I didn’t mean I would. Just saying I hadn’t.”

  Erik shrugged, sewed.

  “May I read you something?” Without waiting for an answer, Philippe flipped through the notebook to the last page. It was an apology poem he’d written for Miguel, not for the shove, or for running, although he was humiliated by those now, too. But for the weeks of silence afterward, the way he’d treated Miguel like a ghost he would no longer allow himself to believe in, the way Miguel’s school life had become unbearable once he was a solitary target. “What happened between you two?” one of their nemeses had asked him, and Philippe sealed Miguel’s misery by telling an uglier version of the truth. He thought that once they finished school, once he had saved enough money clearing the ruins to take the train to Paris, it would all be behind him. But he’d been seeing Miguel on every street corner since his arrival.

  The poem was the best work he’d managed: regret as heavy as a marble statue, a city choked in its own ruins, trying to clear and build on top of its mistakes. It was the first time Philippe had read the words to an audience, and he delivered them slowly. “Could you do something with it, do you think?”

  “Again,” Erik said, and Philippe read it through twice more. Erik looked thoughtful, then finally shook his head. “I can’t hear it. I’m sorry.”

  “Would you want to try later, with the piano?”

  “There’s an awful lot of feelings in it,” Erik said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Maybe I’m not ready.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  “You’ve written plenty of songs about love.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How is love not a feeling?”

  “It’s not a feeling when it’s in a cabaret song, rhymed with ‘dove’ and ‘heaven above’ and all the rest. Ruby lips and hair dark as darkness. Then it’s only cliché.”

  The quote from “Sylvie” was a low blow, but Erik wasn’t wrong.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” Philippe said. “I don’t mean just the writing. I mean—are we even friends?”

  “Of course we’re friends.”

  “Truly?”

  “You’re trouserless in my living room in the middle of the night while I do your sewing. We might as well be married.”

  If you want to kiss me I’ll let you, Philippe thought, but did not say. What about himself? Was it let or want? His imagination failed him. Not when it came to the act—he could imagine the kiss itself, but nothing beyond it. Erik’s whiskers would be scratchy, he supposed. The prospect confused more than excited him. But confusion was not repulsion, which was the way he’d been raised to think of such a kiss, between two men. When he thought of Miguel, it was with wonder. Miguel had been able to imagine the two of them as something other, something more, than what they already were. His friend had had more vision that day in the bedroom than all the artists at the Incoherent Art exhibition put together. Philippe always considered invention one of his shortcomings as a writer, but he also wondered if it was his larger failing as a person. Miguel had looked at him and seen someone different than who Philippe understood himself to be. Erik had looked at a potato and seen a piece of art.

  “I want to give you what you want,” Philippe said at last, “but I can’t figure out what that is.”

  “A fool’s errand, since I never know myself.”

  Erik was breezy as he said it, and Philippe didn’t know how to respond. Then his stomach, embarrassingly, spoke for him, a growl that seemed earsplitting in the silent room.

  Erik invited him to eat the leftovers on the windowsill, the dregs of Erik’s stepmother’s Sunday dinner.

  Philippe couldn’t prevent wild fantasies from taking root, even in the few seconds it took to reach the window. But the food was a quarter of baguette and a cold bowl of potatoes. “Do you have a fork?” Philippe asked, trying not to sound disappointed.

  “Somewhere,” Erik said, but made no move to unearth one.

  Philippe decided he could eat with his fingers.

  “They agreed to buy a song,” Erik said. “At dinner. Just ‘Sylvie’ for now, to see how it sells. A flat fee up front and then royalties, depending.”

  Philippe was so shocked he spoke with his mouth full. “That’s fantastic. You didn’t even tell me the songs were finished.”

  “My father said they all sounded rather similar. He worried about trying to bring them out at once.”

  “Makes sense to be cautious. Not that I think they sound alike, of course.”

  Erik bit the thread, and wound the tail around the last of the buttons. “There. These are still about the saddest pair of trousers in Paris, but they won’t fall off. Let me get you your share of the money.” He laid the pants over the back of the armchair, and disappeared again with the lamp.

  Philippe stood eating in the dark, then licked the bowl clean. The potatoes sat lumpy in his otherwise empty stomach, and a suspicion about whether the song had really sold clumped there, too.

  “It’s not much,” Erik said, returning. First he tossed Philippe a rolled-up pair of socks, worn but clean. Then he placed a fistful of money directly into the pocket of Philippe’s trousers where they hung on the chair. Not the neat stack of bills Philippe had imagined, but a wad of crumpled francs and coins.

  “I don’t need charity,” Philippe said, although he did. He needed it desperately.

  “The socks are so I don’t have to look at your feet, and this is your half of the advance. We’ll split the royalties down the middle too, if there are any.”

  “Then tell your parents thank you from me.”

  “She’s not my mother. My mother’s dead
.”

  “I’m sorry,” Philippe said, and stupidly held out the bowl, rather than putting it back by the window.

  “Keep it,” Erik said. “A gift. Eugénie has a hundred of them at least.”

  “Another gift? Tell me the truth. Did they really buy one of our songs?”

  “They did,” Erik said. “I’m telling the truth.”

  Philippe let himself believe it. But instead of the warmth, the triumph that he had expected to flow through him, he felt the same plunging fear that had come when Erik took the lamp away. He thought he’d been longing for darkness. Paris was so maddeningly bright he’d become nostalgic for nights in Tarragona. Paris was a thousand moons suspended over a thousand street corners, galaxies of illuminated signs and windows. There was always enough light to write a poem by. But whereas the painters and sculptors and musicians had stopping points, 365 of them, when there was too little light to paint, or exasperated neighbors insisting on a halt to the noise, Philippe never did. For everyone else, it seemed, there was a moment every day when the world told you to knock off and have a rest, raise a glass and pretend you’d accomplished all that day that you’d meant to. Factory workers had a whistle. Farmers got winter, bricklayers got dusk. Night-soil men and grave robbers had the dawn. But there was nothing in Philippe’s life that could tell him when it was time to stop.

  And without the small pauses, how should he recognize the bigger ones? The moment when he gave up on writing altogether, either his ability to do it well or its ability to feed him? The moment he tried to get hired on at a factory outside Paris, or put his tail between his legs and begged his parents for money to return to Spain? If no one, not even Erik’s parents, could be persuaded to pay money for his work, then Philippe had his answer. Not the one he wanted, but an answer all the same. But if they bought one of five? If they bought a poem he’d written when he was fourteen years old, set to music by someone who wouldn’t know a good poem if it sank its teeth into his ass, what kind of answer was that? If the song had never even been finished and Erik was lying, he had no answer at all. Except that Erik cared enough for him to lie. Philippe supposed that was something. It wasn’t an answer to any of the questions he’d brought with him to Paris, but it was an answer to something.

  Louise

  — 5 —

  Without your fingers blushing

  I MEANT TO GO TO MASS THIS MORNING, BUT IT WAS POURING rain, and a chilly dampness pried its fingernails under the window frames and into my knees and hips. The day felt more like February in France than the usual February in Argentina, which I would once have compared to August but is now only itself, febrero, a summer month. Buenos Aires on even its coldest mornings is rarely as cold as France, but I am much older than when I last lived there, and so feel it more. By this I mean both that the cold worms more easily into my joints and that my patience for enduring it has thinned. But then, my patience for many things has thinned.

  I could just stay in bed, I thought, and no one would care. I had no lessons, no arrangements with friends. No classes to teach at the resettlement center or the French Institute. Only God to greet, and I thought He would understand. We have been through worse, He and I, and if He is willing to forgive the things I have thought or said of Him, then He will forgive me a morning spent in bed. It was a delicious morning, the decadence of sleep and warmth and not bothering. Occasionally I reached for a book, pulled it under the covers with me, drifted off again after a few pages. When I got hungry I ate a small bag of alfajores that the mother of one of my students had given me. I rose occasionally to use the hall toilet. I did not bathe.

  My only regret was that the day made me think with admiration of Estelle and even Agnès, my substitute mothers, rising every morning in their sea-chewed houses. Yes, perhaps Agnès’s maid—the country girl working for little more than board in the closet off the kitchen—already had the fire lit. But if her mistress didn’t rise, what would the girl think? And what would she tell the other maids, when they saw one another at the market, and what would those girls tell their mistresses? No doubt it was Agnès’s presence that indirectly kept all the sinks in Honfleur scrubbed.

  If people stopped caring what others thought? Well, it would be too easy to stop doing everything else, too. To pry apart the last of the alfajores, eat both sweet halves, and never venture out for more. But Monday always comes, and my piano students, and the classes at the resettlement center or the Institute. My life is full enough to keep me in it.

  Besides, in a boardinghouse one’s absence from meals is noted quickly. I’ve lived at this address long enough for all the residents to have formed their opinion of me: I am an independent-minded eccentric or a sad spinster or a glutton. “You have a big appetite for an old lady,” I’m told. “How are you so thin?” People are much blunter in Spanish than in French, which troubled me until it didn’t any longer. After forty years I think in Spanish. Occasionally I still dream in French.

  An Italian girl has moved into the neighboring room with her beau, an Argentine boy from the wine country near Mendoza. “We’re going to be married soon,” she assured me at breakfast her first morning, when all I’d done was advise her that Señora Rodríguez made better maté than coffee.

  “I don’t care,” I told her, meaning that I was not scandalized, but it came out coldly.

  “People mind their own business here,” she said. “I like it.” The General Immigration Office was slow because of the war, she said, plus the latest Argentine coup d’état, but once she had the proper papers, there’d be a wedding and a better job, something more than cleaning houses in Recoleta. She referred to it as “the war in Europe,” even though by February 1944 the war seemed to be happening everywhere but here.

  Several of my piano students lived in Recoleta, I offered.

  “Rich stiffs,” she said conspiratorially, assuming that I too had never been in such houses as anything other than hired help.

  I did not correct her. I prefer the light sort of friendship that takes place over meals and makes no greater demands. Comments on the weather and complaints about the food, although in truth the proprietor and his wife cook plentifully and well enough.

  “But so much meat! There’s nothing like home-cooked,” the Italian girl says with a sigh during dinners, and I understand that she is refusing to think of this as a home. She’s sure that 46 Chacabuco is only a way station before her beau takes her somewhere better. Maybe to the big houses in Recoleta or Retiro, even a country house in Temperley.

  That this is the only home I have and that I am barely able to afford it, that I pile high my plate with medialunas at breakfast and asado at dinner because I am trying not to need lunch: I do not tell anyone these things. Why embarrass us both?

  After I returned from Paris to Le Havre, I set myself a goal of practicing rigorous realism. I thought of this as a skill to cultivate, the custom of seeing the world as nearly as possible for what it was, for seeing myself as close as possible to the way that others saw me. No more dreams of rescue, of heroic brothers. Conrad wrote me that this was an admirably scientific habit of mind. I don’t know anything about science, I wrote back. But I am trusting in its power to reduce disappointment.

  Fortin and Estelle had begun discussing my marriageability at great length. They often started conversations while I was playing piano, assuming I couldn’t hear, and I asked my teacher if we could work on some very quiet pieces, saying I wished to hone my skill at playing pianissimo.

  Fortin had continued to pay for lessons uncomplainingly. He’d even bought a better piano. “This is for me,” he said, “not for you. You’ve gotten good enough that it isn’t unpleasant to listen to you.” He asked for music after dinner, as he read the evening newspapers. He liked the Germans—Brahms, Bach, Beethoven—and was a little ashamed of this. “Surely even the Boches can get a few things right,” he said.

  “The devil makes seductive music,” I said, to tease him.

  He asked for our countryman Saint
-Saëns, but I could tell his heart was not in it. He seemed relieved when I told him Saint-Saëns wrote mostly for the opera, not for piano.

  Fortin was an orderly man, and he enjoyed orderly music. Likewise, he wished me to be married in an orderly way, and he made an orderly appraisal of my prospects: I was not a great beauty, but not unpleasant to look at. I read books, but not too many. I had ideas enough for companionable conversation, but not so many I might think them worth writing down. I had done well at the convent school, but was not inconveniently or self-importantly pious. In the column of my deficits, though, my lack of assets or income counted heavily. Trying to look on the bright side, Fortin—who believed he had instilled in me an excellent foundation for a life of sensible moderation—praised my lack of expensive tastes, never mind that I had of course been given no opportunity to develop any.

  Does it make me sound like the dullest creature imaginable to confess that Fortin and Estelle’s appraisal pleased me, that I felt myself higher in their esteem than I would have guessed? Well, then, in the spirit of realism, perhaps I was that dull. And if I am less boring now, is it something I have tried to cultivate, like pearls, or merely a product of circumstance? Sometimes I suspect that the most interesting things about me are the things that have been done to me or the choices that have been made for me—the irritants themselves—for I have made no pearl.

  Ever since I’d finished school Fortin sometimes invented tasks for me to do at his office. I understood that he was displaying me to the clerks. This was mildly humiliating, but worse was that nothing came of it. My cheeks burned every time I so much as walked past his office, so that the men of the port district must have thought I was the color of a cooked lobster.

  Without school, the hours were long, although the hours had also stretched long with it, beset as they were by the sisters’ lessons in domestic economy and moral science, such that languages and mathematics and natural history were squeezed into the small corners of the day. I could not make sense of whole swaths of Conrad’s letters about his studies. The mayor had proposed a girls’ lycée for Le Havre, but there had been years of argument over what location would best shield its pupils from unsavory influences, and by the time it finally opened I was too old to enroll. Not that Fortin was likely to have allowed a secular school. Nor that I was likely to have had the brains to make a success of it, he said, when I rued aloud the mayor’s slowness.