A Sport and a Pastime

important. I mean, you have to understand things. They have their own pleasures.”

“She’s starved,” Dean says.

“A little, probably. It’s because you were there tonight.”

“Maybe.” He smiles.

“Listen, when someone thinks you look like a movie actor, that’s something right there.”

“Yes.”

“Especially when you don’t even resemble him.”

Dean laughs.

Dijon is hung in mist. We drive along empty streets. He knows the way perfectly. In front of us the blue neon of the Rotonde appears. We park and walk to the door. Now we can hear music, out of place in the fog, the silence. When we step inside, the darkness shatters like glass. On a little stage rimmed with light a band is playing. Couples are dancing, everything is very loud.

The waiter wants us to order champagne. Dean shakes his head: no, no. He knows the routine. We sit there watching it all.

“What music,” he says.

“Do you think it’s good?”

“Christ, no,” he says.

In the middle of the crowd is a girl with an African—I’m certain he’s a student—in a cheap grey suit. They have their arms around each other. As they dance it’s like a playing card revolving. The jack of spades vanishes slowly, the queen of diamonds is revealed. Their mouths come together in the dark.

Across from us there are more Negroes, but these are Americans. Soldiers. One can see it immediately in their faces, their clothes. They have thick mouths, a certain crudity. And they’re big. They have great hands, broad shoulders. They seem ready to burst out of their clothes. There are Coke bottles on the table—for their French girls, of course. One of them sits in a skimpy, plaid dress, green I make it to be. Short-sleeved, though the night is cold. She turns her head a little. She’s very young. Pure, expressionless features. Suddenly I am in anguish, I don’t know why—she obviously cares nothing—but somehow because of her predicament. She looks sixteen. Her young arms flash softly in the gloom.

Now one of them begins talking to her in that rich, melodious under-language. She doesn’t understand him— perhaps it’s the noise of the band. He leans closer. His mouth is moving just next to her ear. She nods her head then. She looks at him calmly and nods. The others are sitting with their huge forearms on the table, listening to the music, occasionally passing a word. I can’t see the other girl very well. Her hair is quite long. The music is crashing around us. The drummer’s face is wet.

We have traveled from Innsbruck to bedlam. It’s no longer possible to talk. I’m very sleepy and suddenly a little depressed. I keep looking across to their table. When they leave, I am sure I know exactly how it will be. They’ll go out to a big, green Pontiac at least five years old, maybe a Ford. The muffler is broken. The sound of the engine is powerful and raw. She sits between two of them in the back. That means… I don’t really know what it means, what low, graceful phrases are offered in the dark. As Rilke says, there are no classes for beginners in life, the most difficult thing is always asked of one right away. Still, they are not so bad, these black men. They are very sweet, I have heard, they are very tender. They will spend every penny they have on a girl, absolutely everything. They are foolishly generous. I envy them for that.

We drive in silence through a dense fog which swallows the headlights of the car. The yellow beams are smoking before us. Nothing can be seen. La Rotonde is very distant. The doors have closed behind us, the music has disappeared. We crawl down invisible roads, barely faster than a walk. The drive home will take hours, the last hours of a night which we have left behind. We’ve given it to the soldiers. They possess nothing. They withhold nothing. When the bill comes they reach in their pockets vaguely and ask each other for coins.

I have the window partly open. The damp air leaks on my face.

“I have to learn more French,” Dean says.

“Well, that’ll come. I see you writing down words all the time.”

“The trouble is it’s all food,” he says. “That’s the only thing I can talk about. You can’t just keep talking about food.”

“You’re right. You should read the newspapers.”

“I’m going to start.”

We are sneaking past the outskirts of Dijon, only occasionally passing anything we recognize, an intersection, a particular sign.

“I’ll tell you what’s great about this country,” he says suddenly. “The air. Everything smells good.

“It’s the real France,” he says. “You were right. I’d never have discovered it if it weren’t for you.”

“Oh, you would have.”

“No, I’d just be hanging around Paris like everybody else. It’s easy to do that. But who goes to Dijon?”

“Not too many people.”

“Or Autun?” he says.

“Fewer.”

“Nobody,” he says. “That’s what makes it.”

[8]

THE MORNINGS ARE GROWING colder, I enter them unprepared. Icy mornings. The streets are still dark. The bicycles go past me, their parts creaking, the riders miserable as beggars.

I have a coffee in the Cafe St. Louis. It’s as quiet as a doctor’s office. The tables have chairs still upturned on them. Beyond the thin curtains, a splitting cold. Perhaps it will snow. I glance at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her. Still, it’s depressing. One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.

These dismal mornings. I stand near the radiator, trying to warm my hands over iron that’s cold as glass. The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it. Most of their rooms are dark as the poorhouse. There’s an odor of tobacco, sweat and perfume, all combined. A dispirited atmosphere in which every sound seems cruel and isolated—the closing of a door, footsteps beneath which one can detect the thin complaint of grit, hoarse bonjours. One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. I see her almost daily. I can always go down there on some pretext, but it’s difficult to talk while she’s working. Oh, Claude, Claude, my hands are tingling. They want to touch you. In her elaborately done hair there is a band which she keeps feeling for nervously. Then she touches the top button of her sweater as if it were a jewel. Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses. A green stone on her index finger. And she wears several wedding bands, three, it seems. I’m too nervous to count.

“You’re not from here, are you?” I had asked her.

“Oh, no. I am from Paris.”

“I thought so.”

She smiles.

“But do you like it here?” I said.

“Oh,” she shrugs helplessly.

When I am near her I can almost experience the feel of her flesh, taste it, like a starving man, like a sailor smelling vegetation far out of sight of shore.

She opened her purse and took out photographs of herself made in the salons of hotels. It happened too quickly, I wanted to look at them longer. She had been a mannequin, she said. She traveled around to do shows in those days. It was very nice. Weekends in Vichy, she told me… weekends in Megeve.

December the third. A day that promises nothing, that passes quickly. In the afternoon, a light snow, a snow