Letter from Casablanca Read online

  Inevitably Bishop went to change the record. The sickly sweet tones of Cole Porter’s songs swept over us. Bishop was crazy about him. She thought that Cole Porter suited Fitzgerald. Or else she put on Nat King Cole singing Quizás, quizás, quizás. Anyway, I liked King Cole’s song, too. I felt it concerned me. It caused in me a slight melancholy. Siempre que te pregunto, que cómo dóndey quándo. … I tried to go on. All of you looked past me at the sea and the lights of the coast. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alps that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows… . But something hindered me. My voice was uncertain, I heard it. Why did it pain me to go on? Was it perhaps the evening? Was it the lights of the coast? Was it Nat King Cole? I stared at the twilight, y asi passando el dia, y yo, desesperado … You could at least have made a gesture of agreement. But no, you looked at me as calmly as the others, as if you didn’t know that all that concerned me. I go well through the night, right, Martine? I told you with my eyes, for a few nocturnal moments, and then you go to sleep and sleep, sleep, sleep. The wind blows the awnings. There are lights down there on the coast … But the day, what is your Perri during the day? He’s the character in a little game, the figurine in a story.

  Enough. I had no wish to recite anymore, the others also had no wish to stay to listen to me. The game was open. That beginning was enough for openers. Now Bishop was aware of Rosemary Hoyt involved in dancing a slow, very sentimental dance. I agree that she wasn’t eighteen years old any longer and in the water she wasn’t capable of Rosemary’s “sharp little crawl,” but what did that matter? It was all too mixed up. Rosemary danced with Tom Barban, who should have danced with you, but this would have happened tomorrow evening, maybe. For that evening the roles were assigned, and Mr. Deluxe was perfectly suited to the part of the adventurous, dissatisfied ex-aviator, not bad at all, moreover, maybe a little too distinguished for a legionnaire, too well-nourished. As for the other two, you didn’t need much imagination to place them. They were so irrelevant and therefore so interchangeable, the handsome Brady and his blonde. And as for you, yes, you were a splendid Nicole. You did her perfectly. You looked like Lauren Bacall, your Tom Barban said. I heard him whisper it to you. What a pain. And his clumsy attempts to hide with the edge of his jacket his erection visible under his linen pants? Intolerable. But he was Tom Barban, the legionnaire. Legionnaires are very virile, you know, dancing with a lady who looks like Lauren Bacall.

  But I, who was I? I wasn’t Dick, even if I had his role—in real life, I mean. And I wasn’t Abe North either, no, in spite of my old novel. I would never have known how to write another, even if everyone pretended to think the contrary, much less would I have written the story of our painful history. I knew only the beginnings of other people’s novels from memory. I belonged to an analogous story. I was a character transmigrated from another novel, its stylization in a smaller dimension, without grandeur and without tragedy. At least my model had his own grandeur as a gangster. But my part did not foresee madness, without even a dream for which to sacrifice life, without even a lost Daisy—or worse, my Daisy was you, but you, however, were Nicole. I was a game in our game: I was your dear little Gatsby.

  The night advanced with little steps. You’d have liked this sentence in my story, too, right? I’ll satisfy you: the night advanced with little steps. In fact, the tender night advanced with little steps. Now the phonograph played Charlie Parker’s “Easy to Love.” I had bought that record. Under the sobbing horn of poor Bird there was an almost happy chatter from Stan Freeman’s piano, almost smothered chuckles, a little phrasing of happiness. I would have preferred Jelly Morton, but for Rosemary he was a bore. It was impossible to dance to Jelly Morton. Well, what to do at that hour of the tender night advancing with little steps? St. Raphaël or l’Hôtel du Cap? St. Raphaël was better. What do you do at the Cap once you’ve had the Negronis? You croak from boredom. And the handsome Brady (but what was the handsome Brady’s name in real life?) agreed to any program whatsoever as long as he could make sheep’s eyes at you. His stupid little blonde would have followed him anywhere. “C’est cocasse,” she chirped, “c’est cocasse.” It was all cocasse, funny. Even Deluxe’s old Benz was cocasse, with its beige mudguards and its inner dividing windows. It had belonged to a retired Parisian taxi driver. He boasted about having bought it so cheaply. “I’m heartbroken only because he wanted to keep the taximeter. Sometimes there are people who get fond of such stupid things! …” And he laughed with all those very white teeth. He had too many teeth: deluxe teeth. Oh, was that a cheap shot?

  But who was Mr. Deluxe, a refined musicologist? Come on, with that name! I think that he, too, was a little cocasse, like his Benz. “I loved your novel very much for its musicality,” he told me. What a fool. “But in your next novel—because you are writing another one, aren’t you?—in your next novel have the courage to express your love of music. Don’t be afraid of quotations, cram it with names, titles, they quickly create magical fiction. Put in the names of Coltrane and Alban Berg. I know you love Coltrane and Alban Berg, and I find myself in agreement.” He spoke of loving Alban Berg. He would have liked “to have more time to discuss it,” but then he didn’t go further than Gershwin. But how could he understand death, with that beautiful smile of his? You couldn’t understand death either, it was out of your reach for the moment. You could understand the dead, but death and the cadaver are two different things. Death is the curve in the road: to die is only not to be seen. Do you remember these lines? I said them one evening, but I deceived you. They weren’t by Fitzgerald, even though everyone believed they were. It was a false quotation, and inside myself I enjoyed the deception. We were on the coast, I think near Villefranche. I quoted the phrase and said: Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise. Deluxe braked almost at once. He murmured something like “Sublime, sublime,” some such nonsense, and wanted us to go down to the beach. We had to take off our shoes and walk as far as the shore line holding hands, a man and a woman, a chain. It was urgent to do something lustral, they were his words, it was an homage to being, to being there, to the fact of being on the straight and narrow path of life. In short, to hell with the curves, this was the concept.

  Your mother, yes, she understood death. I understood at once when I met her that she was a woman who understood death. And she also understood the same thing about me. She understood that there was a little of this in my stupid novel, and that’s why she did everything to make it become a book. She prevented me from arriving in Mentone. She freed me from the condition of “poor young aspiring writer, son of immigrants, returning to his native land with a manuscript in his pocket.” Did you think that my love for Fitzgerald was so vast as to have driven me on a pilgrimage through his itinerary? That my descriptions of his hotel in Baltimore were the result of a maniacal passion? It really isn’t so. Let’s say that I’m a reporter. I spent my early childhood in that hotel. I prefer to pass over the particulars. My father was a waiter there for twenty-nine years. He had known Fitzgerald, he had some books with his dedication, he often talked to me about him, and also about Zelda, who had liked him very much. She was fond of him because my father prepared very comprehensive drinks for her. She even put him in Save Me the Waltz under another name. Then the hotel in the course of the years had fallen into decadence, the clientele had deteriorated. They had given my father and me a room in the rear wing. After Mama’s death he wouldn’t have known to whom to entrust me. At least I was safe there, or at least so he presumed. He spent his last years serving supper to old fur-wrapped whores, to distinguished morphine addicts, to argumentative pederasts… . Here he is, my Fitzgerald. Your mother understood many things about me. And so did I about her. Would you like to know exactly what our relationship was? It’s not something you can say in a few lines. I loved her very much, I think that’s enough.

  Everybody wanted St.
Raphaël, and instead the evening then dragged on at the Hôtel du Cap. Maybe the Negronis were a little strong. And then there was a quantity of Gershwin for Mr. Deluxe. And then there were the Arrigos installed on the terrace. Who could resist those two? They were two perfect McKiscos, bitter and quarrelsome, too cocasse. At ten o’clock at night they were at each other’s throats. They seemed to have just emerged from Tender Is the Night. It was impossible to shake them off to go to St. Raphaël. They’ve never known they’re the McKiscos, poor things, probably they didn’t even know who Fitzgerald was. “And your novel, Perri, at what point is your novel?” Mrs. McKisco always repeated the same question. She was polite, over-solicitous. She wore very elegant scarves and a pearl shamrock on the collar of her white jacket. Mrs. McKisco was never seen without her white jacket. I said that it wasn’t going badly, yes, it truly wasn’t going badly, I was at a good point, look, the story already had everything, dramatics, I mean, but with a bit of frivolity, frivolity’s good for drama, two destinies which don’t meet, a wronged life, two wronged lives… . Despair? Of course, but in moderation. Maybe a death. Of him or of her, I didn’t know yet, or else, what can I say, a great betrayal. But principally inadequacy in life, as if nothing is enough, and a sense of waste, and with it something like non-reason, and then a perverse selfishness. Mrs. McKisco sighed with understanding, as if saying, “But to whom can life ever be enough?” She lifted her voluminous breast, the pearl shamrock sparkled. Mr. McKisco watched her grimly as if he were about to bite her. She was melancholy, incongruous, her unhappiness was of a touching simplicity. Away with you, Mrs. McKisco, I would have liked to comfort you. Rest your generous breast on my shoulder and unburden yourself, cry. It’s true, your life is wasted, your husband is an orangutan full of Pernod, you have too much money and now you ask yourself what good is money, what do you do with your paper mills. But it all goes for nothing, right, Mrs. McKisco? There were some children you would have wanted, and instead you find yourself here stemming old age and solitude. You’d like to convince yourself that children aren’t everything. You look at the lights of Cannes and want very much to cry. Come with me to the railing, let’s look at the sea. I tell you about a frivolously despairing novel and we laugh about it like crazy, all very Fitzgeraldish. He’s a writer of a single book, has had a decayed childhood which every now and then aches with acute sharp pains. In his lifetime he got away with methods that were not exactly clean. Let’s say that he’s rather a crook, but deep-down he’s good. Would you like to hear the beginning? He’d begin this way, for example: In 1959, when the protagonist of this story was thirty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage… . To tell the truth, the beginning isn’t mine, dear Mrs. McKisco. Only the dates are mine, but it’s almost the same.

  Toward midnight Mr. McKisco collapsed on the table. He needed to be lifted up bodily. Even Bishop was rather drunk. She gave one giggle after another, she was a happy drunk. Now she felt right in shape for a little visit to St. Raphael. Away we go, a fast run to eat a couple of shrimp. At that point I got away. I preferred to wait for you at home. In any case, within an hour you’d have returned. Would you like to know why that night of August 12 I didn’t come back? I’ve never wondered why you didn’t come back. I don’t want to know, I don’t care. But I want to tell you why I didn’t come back. It’s very funny. Because it was St. Macarius’ Day. My father’s name was Macarius. I wanted to remember him by myself, far away from your house, without interference. And then I had the photograph of Scottie in my pocket. I have it here in front of me now, too. It was taken when she was four years old. Scottie has a flowered dress, white socks, and pigtails burned by the sun. She carries a puppet in her hand, a kind of sad-eyed basset-hound. She holds it dangling by one ear. His name was Socrates, do you remember Socrates? I bought him. There’s a hole in the photograph: that’s you. And there’s the villa in the background, taken from the west side, the stairs covered with an American vine that led to Scottie’s rooms, the white door with the little pieces of engraved glass, very English. So I had the photograph of Scottie in my pocket and I sat down at a cafe. I felt really well. My plan was perfect, and then some place toward Mentone you could see fireworks. It must have been the festival of a patron saint. It seemed to me to be a good omen. For a month and a half, every Saturday evening, I crossed the border in my car. There was a customs agent, a boy from Benevento, who came on duty at exactly ten o’clock for the night shift. By this time he was used to seeing me. I went to get a cup of coffee in Italy. At half past ten I crossed the border again. “Homesick for Italian coffee, sir?’’ He greeted me with his hand to his visor. I responded to the salute. Sometimes I stopped for a brief chat. For him I was a rich man with a mania for Italian coffee. He’d never have dreamed of looking in the car. Asleep under a car robe, Scottie would have passed perfectly.

  I loitered for a little while along the sea-front, watching the fireworks toward Mentone. It would have been for tomorrow evening. It was St. Macarius’ Day. The night was beautiful. I thought about my father dead in a fetid hotel in Baltimore. I stopped at the “Racé” to pick up some money. I had contacts there, but this was the last time. I needed that money to set up an honest business in Italy. Not that I lacked money, but the more I had the better: the first days wouldn’t have been easy. At the “Racé” there was a jam session with an incredible type who imitated to perfection Rex Stewart, a cornet player with Ellington in the Thirties. He was happy. He played “Trumpet in Space” and “Kissing My Baby Good-night,” imagine that. I was happy, too. I stayed a little while and then left and took a long walk because I had a desire to breathe fresh air. There. A whole life can change over a trifle. Or stay the same.

  Time is perfidious. It makes us believe it never passes, and if we look behind, it’s passed too hurriedly. You’d like a sentence like this for my story, right, Marline? I give in. Time is perfidious. I look behind, it passed too hurriedly, and how slow it was to pass! Almost twenty years have gone by, and for us Scottie is still four years old. But after all, I, too, am the same age as then for you. Because I’m unattainable. In a certain sense I’m eternal, here, where I find myself. I’m beyond the curve in the road, do you understand that concept? Twenty years should have been enough to understand a concept like this. You, on the other hand, no. You’ve remained on the straight and narrow, exposed. You’ve grown old, Martine, it’s normal. At last you won’t fear the arrival of old age any longer: it’s here now. There haven’t been any signs of Bishop. She disappeared in England. But I know what happened to her: she became a half-nun, she never married, she lives in a convent in Sussex, she teaches American culture to young girls from good families. Even Deluxe has grown old, by God. He lost all his aviator’s looks. He came to see you sometimes, but it’s impossible to take up the game again, it allows him nothing more. He’s a corpulent gentleman with a blue Citroën who does business in the suburbs: farewell, Tom Barban. And even the villa, how it’s aged. I passed by it recently and imagined going in. On the boundary wall, next to the gate, there’s a little panel of blue tiles with a brigantine with blowing sails. We bought it at Ēze Village, do you remember? On the wrought-iron gate the white varnish has peeled off. Where the color has come off, because of the sun and the saltiness, in large galls that crack under the fingers, a fine, very yellow rust has formed. It must be necessary to push the double doors very hard, otherwise they won’t open because the hinges are stiff. When you finally succeed in opening the gate, after having shaken it rather impatiently, it emits a soft, prolonged squeak, like a far-away moan, in front of us. Once I happened to raise my eyes mechanically in the search for the emitter of that lament, and then I saw the sky blue of the sea. To the right of the gate, after the entrance, under a pa
lm tree, there’s a porter’s lodge painted yellow, a little room that looks like a miniature house. Once the night watchman’s tools were kept there. Now I imagine what’s there: a baby carriage with a folding lop, as you see in photographs of the Thirties, a child’s cordless xylophone, some old records full of scratches. They’re unbearable things. It’s impossible to look at them, but it’s also impossible to get rid of them: you need to find a little room. But why do I describe to you things that you know better than I? To create a note of wastefulness in my story, a sense of dissipation? You always preferred desperate, futile lives. Francis and Zelda, Bessie Smith, Isadora. … I do what I can: it’s as much as we have at our disposal. Ah, yes, the villa has really lost its tone, it would need a good maquillage: facade, windows, garden, gratings… . But money is scarce, they lack Ferri’s discreet little business affairs, so dubious but so remunerative. You don’t eat tradition for dinner. If only you could begin to think how to utilize everything. The location is of a rate elegance, the rooms are magnificent, so deliciously art-nouveau. You could retire to the rooms that used to be Scottie’s, so you’d be even nearer to her memory—and then two rooms are enough for you by this time—and turn the rest into a hotel. A small hotel, but very elite: ten bedrooms, dining room on the ground floor with green lampshades on the tables, pianist on the terrace after supper, a lot of Gershwin, moonlight and Bacardi. The rich, middle-aged Swiss adore this kind of place. You ought to find an appropriate name, refined but witty. For instance, “Au p’tit Gatsby.” And thus you could face a tranquil old age, spending your afternoons in peace and quiet looking at the coast and thinking of the future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out. our arms farther … And one fine morning … It’s a Fitzgerald finale, of course.