“There you go. I have no talent for anything.”
I would console her. Nothing gave me more pleasure than these moments of despair, which allowed me to take her in my arms, to brush over her breasts with my hand and her lips with mine. And then a day came when, losing my head, I abandoned my lips to their mad inspiration and, not encountering any resistance, heard a voice of Lila’s that I did not know, a voice that no virtuoso singer can surpass. Even as the voice went to my head and bore me away beyond everything I had ever known in life of happiness and of myself up until then, I remained on my knees. The cry rose so high that I, who had until that moment never been a man of faith, felt as if I had finally rendered unto God what was His due. Afterward, she remained motionless on her bed of flowers, both of her hands forgotten on my head.
“Ludo, oh Ludo, what have we done?”
All that I could say, from the very deepest reaches of the truth, was: “I don’t know.”
“How could you have?”
And, when you think of all the ways there are to encounter faith, the sentence I came up with was utterly comical: “It wasn’t me, it was God.”
She straightened herself a little, sat up, and wiped away her tears.
“Lila, don’t cry, I didn’t want to make you unhappy.”
She sighed and brushed me aside with a wave of her hand. “You idiot. I’m crying because it was too good.” She looked at me severely. “Where did you learn that?”
“What?”
“Goddammit,” she said. “I never saw such a fool.”
“Lila …”
“Shut up.”
She fell back. I lay down beside her. I took her hand. She withdrew it.
“Well, that’s that. I’ve become a whore.”
“Good God, what are you talking about?”
“A fallen woman. I’m a fallen woman.”
I realized that she was saying it with a great deal of satisfaction in her voice.
“Finally, I actually managed to become something!”
“Lila, listen …”
“I have no talent for singing!”
“But if only …”
“Yes, only. Shut up. I’m a whore. Well, I might as well become the greatest and most celebrated whore in the world. The Lady of the Camellias, minus the tuberculosis. I have nothing more to lose. My life is all traced out for me now. I have no choice anymore.”
As well as I knew the ups and downs of her imagination, I was appalled. It was a kind of superstition: it seemed to me as if life were listening and taking notes. I sat up.
“I forbid you to say that kind of horseshit!” I yelled. “Life has ears. And besides, what, all I did was li …”
“Ah,” she said, and placed her hand on my lips. “Ludo, I forbid you to say such things. It’s monstrous! Mon-strous! Go away! I never want to see you again. Never. No, stay here. It’s too late, in any case.”
One day I was returning from our daily rendezvous in the shed when I ran into Tad, who was waiting for me in the hall.
“Say, Ludo.”
“Yes?”
“How long have you been sleeping with my sister?”
I was silent. On the wall above my head, the colonel of the Imperial Guard, Jan Bronicki, hero of Saint Domingue and Somosierra, raised his sword.
“Don’t make that face, old boy. If you think I’m here to have a talk with you about the honor of the Bronickis, you’re very silly. I just want to prevent any misfortunes. I bet you don’t even know that the cycle exists — neither of you.”
“What cycle?”
“There you go, that’s just what I thought. There’s a time — about seven days before the period and seven days after — when women cannot be impregnated. You therefore risk nothing. So since you’re so good at calculations, don’t forget it. And don’t be stupid, either of you. I don’t want to have to go see some farmer’s wife with her knitting needles. Too many girls die from that. That’s all I have to say and I’ll never mention it to you again.”
He slapped me on the shoulder and began to walk away. I couldn’t let him go like that. I wanted to justify myself. “We love each other,” I told him.
He looked me over attentively, with a sort of scientific curiosity. “You feel guilty because you’re sleeping with my sister. You must have about two thousand years of guilt, there. Are you happy? Yes or no?”
Saying “yes” seemed so inadequate that I kept silent.
“Well, there’s no other justification to life or death. You can spend your whole life in libraries, you’d never find another answer.”
He departed, his gait nonchalant, whistling softly. I can still hear those few notes of the Appassionata.
Bruno avoided me. I tried to tell myself that there was nothing to feel bad about, that if Lila had chosen me, it was as independent of my own will as when a ladybug lands on your hand. But I was haunted by the pain I saw in his face when we happened to catch each other’s eye. He spent all his days at the piano, and whenever the music stopped, the silence that followed, of all the Chopin pieces I knew, seemed to me the most devastating.
11
My work with Bronicki was not limited to his financial enterprises. I was also assisting him in the creation of a scheme intended to help him win a crushing and final conquest of the casino, which up until then had remained an impenetrable stronghold that he dreamed of storming and overtaking once and for all. Stas would place a roulette wheel on the bridge table and throw the ball, even calling out, “No more bets, please!” for heightened realism — a cry, I must say, that seemed to well up from those hidden depths of the soul we like to call the subconscious. My only contribution to this desperate quest for a “system” was to memorize the order of the numbers as the ball fell and then recite them back to Stas ten or twenty times over so that he could try and detect a little wink from destiny somewhere in them, while at the same time I searched his sideburn-flanked face for the death of that same dream. At the end of a few hours’ pursuit of the blue yonder, he would mop his brow and murmur, “My little Ludovic, I believe that I have overtaxed your forces. Go and get some rest so you’ll be at the top of your game.”
My compassion for him and my desire to help grew so strong that I began to cheat. I knew that the count was searching my recitations for numbers and combinations of numbers that repeated in a certain order. Only vaguely aware of the potential consequences of my very poorly placed goodwill, I set about rearranging the numbers as they fell, much in the way that séance participants cannot help pushing at the table to maintain the illusion. It was a disaster. Having asked me to recite several times over the numbers I had arranged into series, Stas Bronicki was suddenly overcome by an expression I can only qualify as wild-eyed. He remained frozen for an instant, his pencil in hand, ears cocked as if he were hearing some divine music, and then invited me, in a voice hoarse with emotion, to make my recitation over again. I did so immediately, with the same well-meaning deceit as before, and he brought his fist down on the table with formidable force and thundered in the same voice his ancestors must have used when they drew their swords and led the charge into battle: “Kurwa mać! I’ve got the bastards! They’ll cough up for me now!” He leapt to his feet and departed from his office, and I, in my innocence, felt very pleased with my good deed.
That evening, Bronicki lost a million at the Deauville Casino.
I was with Lila the next morning when the count returned home. An hour before, Podlowski had warned us of the disaster, adding, “He’s going to blow his brains out again.” Lila, who was having tea and honey on toast, did not seem particularly moved.
“My father can’t have lost that much. If he did, it can’t have been his money. So he’s only lost debts. He must be feeling relieved.”
These Polish men and women before me really did possess the admirable sturdiness that had made it possible for t
heir country to withstand every catastrophe. I expected to see Genia Bronicka in full hysterics, with telephone calls to doctors and fainting spells, upholding the fine tradition of her theatrical techniques; instead, I witnessed her descend to the dining room in a pink negligee with the poodle under her arm. She dropped a kiss on her daughter’s forehead, tossed a friendly hello my way, called for her tea to be served, and observed, “I put the revolver in the safe. He mustn’t find it: he’d sulk at us for a week. I don’t know if he borrowed the money from the Potockis, the Sapiehas, or the Radziwiłłs, but for heaven’s sake it’s all the same — a gambling debt is a debt of honor, they understand that well enough. So one or the other of them will pay, what matters is that the Polish nobility uphold its traditions.”
Tad walked down the steps in his robe, newspaper in hand, yawning. “What’s going on? Mama looks so calm — I fear the worst.”
“Father has ruined himself again,” Lila said.
“That means he’s gone and ruined someone else again.”
“He lost a million at Deauville last night.”
“He must have really had to scrape around for that,” Tad grumbled. The chambermaid had just arrived with warm croissants when Stas Bronicki made his entrance. He looked haggard. Behind him followed the impeccable Mr. Jones, carrying his coat, and then Podlowski, the factotum, the blue-black of his five-o’clock shadow giving him twice the jaws and chin as usual.
Bronicki contemplated all of us in silence.
“Can someone here lend me a hundred thousand francs?” His gaze came to rest on me. Tad and Lila burst out laughing. Even kindly Bruno had a hard time hiding his mirth.
“Sit down, my friend. Have a cup of tea,” said Genia.
“Fine. What about ten thousand?”
“Stas, please,” said the countess.
“Five thousand!” roared Bronicki.
“Marie, heat some more croissants and some tea,” called Genia.
“A thousand francs, for God’s sake!” bawled Bronicki in despair.
Archie Jones put his hand inside his jacket and stepped forward, still carefully holding the count’s checked overcoat. “If Monsieur will permit … A hundred? Fifty-fifty, naturally.”
Bronicki hesitated a moment, then grabbed the note from the chauffeur’s hand and dashed outside. Podlowski raised his own hands and shoulders in a helpless motion and followed. Archie Jones bade us a polite goodbye and departed as well.
“Well, there you go,” said Genitchka with a sigh. “The English really are the only people you can count on.”
That was a phrase I would come to hear often, albeit in very different circumstances.
12
I don’t know whether it was the Sapieha princes, the Radziwiłł princes, or the Potocki counts who provided my employer with the funds lost through the scheme for which I was so innocently responsible, but in the days that followed, Le Manoir des Jars was overrun with Polish gentlemen looking extremely elegant and swearing like sailors. Terms such as “that asshole Bronicki,” “that walking shit,” and “that son of a bitch” rained down from all quarters, so much so that it seemed as if those same phrases were falling from the lips of the colonel of the Imperial Guard, Jan Bronicki, in the aforementioned portrait. Poland’s greatest names seemed to be swooping down upon the roulette wheel’s unhappy victim, who faced the tempest with the utmost composure, as befits the citizen of a country accustomed to being reborn from its own ashes. He was unwavering in his line of reasoning: he hadn’t had the second million his “system” required to break the bank. Therefore, if someone would only be willing to advance him those two million, he would return to the front, and no later than tomorrow the men cursing him now would be the first to send up victory cheers in his honor. But for once, it appeared that even the staunchest of Polish patriots were furling the flag and losing confidence in victory. Bronicki held long and secretive meetings with his factotum, to which I was invited, although there was no need for calculations, since the only figure emerging from the whole situation was a big fat zero. It was decided that the family jewels should be sold, and Bronicki went to request them from his wife. He was met with refusal. Lila, who had witnessed the scene, settled comfortably in an armchair, eating candied chestnuts — “Since we’re going to be poor, I might as well enjoy things while I can,” she said, laughing, as she told me how her mother maintained that the diamonds and pearls in question had been given to her by the Duke of Ávila when he was the Spanish ambassador in Warsaw, so it would have been immoral for her to part with them for her husband’s profit.
“As usual in our family, honor comes first,” was Tad’s comment.
Only one fallback position remained to the last of the Imperial Guards: to return to his properties in Poland. They were impregnable to the enemy, as they were part of a set of historic landholdings jealously guarded by the regime of colonels that had succeeded Marshal Piłsudski and his officers. The castle and estate were located at the mouth of the Vistula River, in the “Polish Corridor” that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Having already installed a Nazi government in the Free City of Danzig, Hitler was now demanding its “restitution.” The property had been declared inalienable in 1935 and the Bronickis received substantial aid for its upkeep.
I was horrified. The cruelty of losing Lila seemed to me to be incompatible with everything I knew of being human. The months or even years that I would be obliged to live apart from her revealed the existence of a duration that reflected nothing I was capable of calculating. My uncle, watching me wilt away as the fatal hour approached, attempted to explain to me that literature contained examples — in cases of extreme affliction — of loves that had survived years of separation.
“Definitive departure is better. You just turned seventeen, you need to make a life for yourself, and you can’t become solely dependent on one woman. For years now, you’ve lived for her and by her alone. They may call us the ‘crazy Fleurys’ but even we need to be a little reasonable, which in French is also known as ‘seeing reason,’ though I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this expression stinks of renunciation, giving up, and submission. If the French had all ‘seen reason,’ France would have disappeared a long time ago. The truth is, you can’t have too much reason or too little madness — but I’ll admit that while not too much and not too little might be a fine recipe for the Clos Joli and our friend Marcellin when he’s in the kitchen, sometimes you’ve got to know to lose your head. Good gracious, here I am saying the exact opposite of what I’d wanted to say. Might as well suffer a whole lot and get it over with. And even if you must love this girl your whole life long, she’s better off going away forever, it will only make her more beautiful.”
I was patching up his Blue Bird, which had taken a tumble the day before. “What exactly are you trying to tell me, uncle? Are you advising me to live reasonably or to keep my reason to live?”
He lowered his head. “All right. I’ll say no more. I’m the last person to be giving out advice. I’ve only ever loved one woman in my life and since it didn’t work out …”
“Why didn’t it work out? She didn’t love you?”
“It didn’t work out because I never met her. I could see her in my head, I saw her every day in my head for thirty years, but I never found her. We didn’t meet. Sometimes imagination can play really dirty tricks with you. It’s true with women, with ideas, with countries — you love an idea, it seems like the most beautiful idea of all, and when it materializes, it doesn’t look a thing like itself anymore, or it even becomes complete horseshit. Or you love your country so much you end up not being able to put up with it at all anymore, because it’s never the right one.” He chuckled. “And so you make your life, your ideas, your dreams into … kites.”
Only a few days remained to us, and our goodbyes were made of looking at the woods, ponds, and old paths we would never again see together. The end of th
e summer came in soft tints, as if it felt a certain tenderness toward us. The sun itself seemed reluctant to leave us.
“I want so very much to do something with my life,” Lila said to me, as if I weren’t there.
“That’s only because you don’t love me enough.”
“Of course I love you, Ludo. But that’s what’s so awful. It’s awful because it’s not enough for me, because I still keep thinking about myself. I’m only eighteen, and already I don’t know how to love. If I did I wouldn’t be constantly thinking about what I am going to do with my life — I’d forget myself entirely. I wouldn’t even think of being happy. If I truly knew how to love, I wouldn’t be here anymore, there wouldn’t be anyone but you anymore. True love is when there’s nothing but the other person anymore. So there you go …”
Her face took on a tragic expression. “I’m only eighteen, and already, I cannot love,” she exclaimed, and she burst out sobbing.
I was not particularly moved. I knew that she’d begun renouncing things several days ago — first medicine, then architecture — in order to enter the Warsaw Conservatory for the Dramatic Arts, and thus to rapidly become the darling of the Polish stage. I was beginning to understand her now, and I knew that my duty was to be a connoisseur of the sincerity of her voice, of her chagrin, of her distress. As she brushed a strand of hair from her face — a movement that still to this day is a woman’s most beautiful gesture to me — watching for me from the sky-blue corner of her eye, she did everything but ask it aloud: “Don’t you think I have talent?”
And I would have sacrificed anything to preserve the sublime grandeur of those heights in her eyes. I was, after all, dealing with a girl whose idol, Chopin, had gone and aggravated his tuberculosis in the damp of the Majorca winter just to please George Sand; a girl who had often reminded me, her eyes shining with hope, that Russia’s two greatest poets, Pushkin and Lermontov, had both been killed in duels, the former at thirty-seven and the latter at twenty-six; that Hölderlin had gone mad with love; and that Heinrich von Kleist had died in a suicide pact with his beloved. All of that, I told myself, for once in my life throwing the Slavs in with the Germans, was Polish stuff.