‘Wet weather, dry pocket,’ Brague says.
“For four years now, I’ve spent seven or eight weeks in Lyons, dear.
And my first visit was to the deer in the Parc Saint-Jean, to see the little tawny fawns with their ignorant, loving eyes. They’re so numerous and so much alike that I can’t single out one of them: they follow me along the iron fence with a trot that makes pockmarks on the soil, and they beg for black bread with a distinct, obstinate, timid bleat.
The fragrance of the lawns and of the stirred-up earth is so strong in this park at the end of the day, in the motionless air, that it alone would be enough to send me back to you if I attempted to escape . . .
“Goodbye, darling.
In Lyons I’ve rediscovered wanderers of my sort, whom I had run across here and elsewhere.
It won’t mean very much to you if I specify that one of them is called Cavaillon, a comic singer, and the other is Amalia Barally, who plays the role of dignified older ladies!
And yet, Barally is almost a friend, because two years ago we performed together all over France in a three-act play.
She used to be beautiful; a brunette with a Roman nose, she’s an old hand and knows the hotels of the whole world by name. She has sung operetta in Saigon, acted in Cairo, and enchanted the nights of some khedive or other . . .
“Besides her cheerfulness, which is resistant to poverty, I enjoy her protective nature, her skill in looking after people, and the delicate motherliness of her gestures—the prerogatives of women who have sincerely and passionately loved other women: it leaves them with an indefinable attraction, which you men never perceive . . .
“Goodness, what a long letter!
I could spend all my time writing to you; I think it costs me less effort than speaking to you.
Hug me!
It’s almost night, it’s that bad time.
Hug me very tight, very tight!
Your “RENEE.”
“April 15
“Darling, how nice you are!
What a fine idea!
Thanks, thanks with all my heart for that washed-out snapshot, yellow with hyposulfite: both of you look charming in it, my dears.
Now I no longer want to scold you for having taken Fossette along to Salles-Neuves without my permission.
She looks so contented in your arms!
She has put on her face for being photographed: a mug like that of a burly wrestler, holder of the gold belt.
“It’s obvious, as I observe with a somewhat jealous gratitude, that at that moment she wasn’t thinking of me at all.
But what dream was in those eyes of yours, which I don’t see since you were looking down at Fossette paternally?
The loving awkwardness of your arms around that little dog moves me and makes me laugh.
I am slipping this portrait of you, alongside the other two, into my old leather letter case—you know, the one you think looks mysterious and malevolent . . .
“Send me more photos, won’t you?
I took along four; I compare them, I examine you in them with a magnifying glass, to rediscover in each one, despite the finicky retouching and the excessive highlights, a little of your secret being . . . Secret?
Oh, no, there’s nothing deceptive about you.
I think that any silly girl would know you at a glance as well as I do.
“You know, I say that but I don’t believe a word of it.
In my teasing there’s a nasty little desire to oversimplify you, to humble the old adversary in you: that’s the name I’ve always given to the man destined to possess me . . .
“Is it true that there are so many anemones in your woods, and violets?
I saw violets around Nancy when I was riding through this area of eastern France—rolling ground, blue with firs, furrowed by lively, glistening streams in which the water is of a greenish black.
Was that you, that tall fellow standing there with bare legs in the icy water, fishing for trout?
“Goodbye.
We’re leaving for Saint-Etienne tomorrow.
Hamond hardly ever writes to me, I complain of it to you.
Try to write me often, my dear worry, so that I don’t complain to Hamond about you!
Hugs and kisses . . .
“RENEE.”
We’ve just had dinner at Berthoux’s, a restaurant for performers, Barally, Cavaillon, Brague, I, and the Caveman, whom I had invited.
He doesn’t speak, his whole mind is set on eating.
It was a real actors’ dinner, noisy and enlivened by a rather sham merriment.
Cavaillon paid for a bottle of Moulin-a-Vent.
“You must be bored stiff here,” Brague joked, “if you’re shelling out for a vintage bottle!”
“You said it!” was Cavaillon’s brief reply.
Cavaillon, young but already famous in vaudeville, is the envy of all his colleagues.
They say about him, “Dranem is afraid of him,” and that “he earns whatever he wants.”