Promise at Dawn, Page 2

  “You must choose a pseudonym,” my mother said. “A great French writer who is going to astonish the world can’t possibly have a Russian name. If you were a musical genius, it wouldn’t matter, in fact it might be a help, but it wouldn’t do at all for a giant of French literature.”

  This time, the “giant of French literature” was in complete agreement. For the last six months I had been spending several hours a day poring over an exercise book, trying out a great variety of noble-sounding pen names, in red ink. That very morning I had settled on Hubert de la Valiée, only to succumb an hour later to the nostalgic charm of Romain de Roncevaux. I could not, I felt, better my first name, Romain: unfortunately there was already a Romain Rolland, and I was not in the least prepared to share my glory with anybody. It was all very difficult. The obvious trouble with pen names, I decided, even with the most inspired and impressive ones, was that they somehow failed to convey truly the full extent of one’s literary genius. I was almost ready to conclude that a pen name was not enough, and that one would still have to write books.

  “Of course, if you were a famous violinist, our real name, Kacew, or even better, my stage name, Borisovski, would be excellent,” said my mother with a sigh.

  This “famous violinist” business had been the cause of one of her greatest disappointments, and I feel guilty about it to this day. Struggling to survive, and seeking some miraculous short cut to the “fame and adulation of the crowd”—she had been an actress once, and the dream of success and applause had always remained with her—she had once nourished the hope that I was going to reveal myself as a child prodigy, a combination of Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin. I was barely seven when she presented me with a second-hand violin acquired at a pawnshop in Vilna, the town in eastern Poland in which we found ourselves temporarily stranded on our slow trek west from Russia, and I was solemnly introduced to a tired old gentleman with long hair, an astonishing high and stiff white collar, dressed always in black velvet, whom my mother addressed in a low, respectful voice as “Maestro.” Twice a week I plodded through the snow to his house, carrying the violin in a yellow wooden case lined with violet velvet. All I remember today of the “Maestro” is the expression of profound astonishment on his face each time I dutifully applied my bow to the strings; and I can still hear the cry “Ai, ai, ai!” he would utter, covering his ears with both hands, as I was giving my best. He must have been a man who suffered deeply from the lack of universal harmony here below, a lack to which I must have contributed notably during the three weeks that my lessons lasted. One day, no longer able to bear it, he snatched the bow and the violin from my hands, announced that he would speak to my mother and sent me packing. What he told her I shall never know, but my mother spent several days sighing, looking at me tearfully, and pressing me to her bosom in tender forgiveness.

  A great dream had left us.

  CHAPTER 3

  In those days in Vilna my mother survived by making hats to order for a clientele recruited through the mail and through notices posted in shop windows in the better parts of the city: each carefully handwritten notice haughtily informed the prospective customers that “the former head of a famous Paris fashion house, to occupy her leisure time, will agree to make hats to order for a strictly limited and discriminating clientele.” She tried to resume this enterprise several years later, shortly after our arrival in Nice in 1928, in a two-room flat we then occupied in the Avenue Shakespeare. It didn’t work out, so for a while my mother made lampshades and costumes for the little Provencal dolls then very popular with tourists, administered beauty treatments in the back room of a ladies’ hairdresser and then performed the same service for dogs at a kennel in the Avenue de la Victoire. At night, she read palms in restaurants, compensating by her acting abilities and great assurance for her total ignorance of that ancient art. Later came the already-mentioned showcase at the Negresco, the hawking of jewelry from hotel to hotel, the part interest in the taxi and another in a vegetable stall at the Marché de la Buffa. Throughout those years the symbolic beefsteak always appeared punctually before me at noon, and nobody in Nice ever saw me either ill-shod or poorly clothed. There was nothing I could do to help, and my budding virility only deepened my feeling of helplessness and frustration. I felt guilty for having failed her so badly as a child prodigy and I never really forgave myself my lack of musical genius; to this day I cannot hear the names of Menuhin or Heifetz without a pang of remorse. Some thirty years later, when I was French Consul General in Los Angeles, it happened that my official duties called on me to present the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor to Jascha Heifetz. After pinning the Cross on the chest of the great violinist and reciting the traditional formula: “Monsieur Jascha Heifetz, in the name of the President of the Republic, and by virtue of the powers conferred upon me, I hereby name you Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor,” I suddenly heard myself saying, in an only too audible whisper, with my eyes raised to the ceiling: “I can’t help it, I just didn’t have it in me.”

  The maestro showed some sign of astonishment: “I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Consul Général?”

  I hastily kissed him on both cheeks as tradition required, and thus terminated the ceremony.

  I knew that my mother’s own artistic ambitions had never been fulfilled and that she was dreaming for me of a career she had never known herself. This longing for something that, for lack of a better definition, I can only call “talent at all costs” led her to dig inside me for some hidden artistic seed, for a nugget of talent, or rather, as she never did things by halves, for a secret bonanza of genius that would lead us both to some supreme triumph, greatness, and material success. Years later, her longing and my own desperate attempts to find in me some trace of a gift, some creative power, gave me the basic theme for my novel The Talent Scout and helped me to imagine its central character, José Almayo.

  I was determined to do all I could to make her, by proxy, so to speak, through my achievements, a famous and acclaimed artist; it was only a matter of choosing the right field; and, having hesitated for a long time among painting, acting, singing and dancing, after many a heartbreaking failure, we were finally driven to literature, which has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads.

  The painful word “violin” was never again mentioned between us and soon my mother began to look for some other way to the stars.

  Three days a week, carrying my dancing pumps, I obediently followed my mother to the studio of Sacha Jigloff, where, for two solid hours, I conscientiously performed pas de deux and entrechats, while my mother watched me with a smile of wonder, occasionally exclaiming:

  “Nijinsky! Nijinsky! You are going to be a second Nijinsky—I know what I am talking about!”

  She kept a hawk’s eye on Sacha Jigloff and never left me alone with him, for, as she hinted darkly to me, old Sacha had “a sick mind”—but even so I was utterly surprised and frightened when one day Jigloff tiptoed into the corner where I was taking a shower and tried to bite me—or so I thought in my utter innocence—with the result that I gave vent to a hair raising howl. I can still see the wretched Jigloff running in circles around the gymnasium pursued by my mother brandishing her cane and uttering the choicest insults from her very rich vocabulary. Thus ended my career as a great ballet dancer. There were other dancing schools in Vilna, but my mother was not taking any more chances. The idea that her son could be lost to the love of women was intolerable to her. I must have been barely eight years old when she began to talk to me about what she called my future “successes,” a promise of mysterious and yet interesting delights, of moonlit balconies, of ardent vows at dawn, of sighs and languishing eyes under half-lowered lashes, of hands furtively pressed, of bitter parting tears and of the sweet tears of surrender. There was a slightly guilty smile upon her lips as she thus talked to me, perhaps in spite of herself, looking strangely young, bestowing upon me all the tender tributes which had once been h
ers by right of beauty: their memory and perhaps a secret and nostalgic regret must have still haunted her. I leaned against her with a nonchalant air, listening to her promise with a far greater attention than she was probably aware of, licking the jam from my slice of bread and butter to keep myself in countenance; I was far too young to understand that she was merely trying to exorcise the loneliness of her own life as a woman, and her own secret longings and memories.

  Thus, with the ballet and the violin abandoned by the roadside, and prompted by some instinctive understanding of my mother’s dreams, I decided to try my hand at painting. I began to spend long hours brush in hand, and soon found in my schoolboy’s water-color box a source of endless wonders. Time flew by unnoticed as I sat in my corner, sucking my tongue, getting slowly drunk on reds and yellows and greens and blues, and experiencing a strange and intoxicating feeling of power—to this day, painting seems to me the only true way of possessing the world.

  I was in my tenth year when my drawing master at school spoke to my mother. In his opinion, her son clearly had a talent for painting, and he advised her to take this gift seriously and help it to develop.

  The poor man certainly didn’t expect the effect his innocent revelation would have upon my mother. I shall never forget the look of terror upon her face when she came into my bedroom, the air of utter discouragement as she sat there facing me with an air of silent supplication. Where painters were concerned, this woman, who never spoke the word “art” in other than a tone of almost religious reverence, was nevertheless hopelessly imbued with the middle-class prejudices of the time; all painters were condemned to poverty, despair, disease and drunkenness. In her mind, painting and ruined lives went hand in hand. Incapable of imagining me moderately gifted, her inflamed imagination rushing at once to extremes, she immediately saw me as a misunderstood genius, drowning my sorrow in alcohol or starved into consumption. What she knew of the tragic careers of Van Gogh and Gauguin—incapable of seeing me in any light but that of a hero, she was now seeing me as an ill-starred one—now put her into a state close to panic and brought tears to her eyes. All this she expressed at last, in a few words that bore the unmistakable mark of a far greater knowledge of the world than I could understand then:

  “Maybe you are a genius, and then they will make you pay for it.”

  From then on, my box of water colors developed a tiresome habit of disappearing, and when, after a threatening scene, I would manage to get it back from her and start painting, she would leave the room, only to come back almost at once, prowling around me like some restless animal, looking at me with such apprehension that one day, sickened by the whole business, I left my paints and brushes alone and never touched them again.

  I have never quite forgiven her this, however, and whenever I look at a good painting there is more frustration in me than pleasure, and when I wander into an artist’s studio, I shyly pick up the brush and stare at the color-splattered palette with the eyes of a boy eight years old: when I finally turn away, it is almost with the impression of leaving behind an essential part of myself.

  Where writing was concerned, however, my mother harbored none of those superstitious fears and prejudices; on the contrary, she gave it her full-hearted approval, regarding literature as if it were some very great lady well received in society, and courted by the very best people.

  Goethe, she told me, had been loaded with honors, and died rich, Tolstoy was a count and Victor Hugo President of the Republic—where she got that last idea, I cannot say, but she clung to it tenaciously. Then, just as she was describing literature as blessed with respectability and social recognition, a cloud descended upon her face.

  “But there is still the danger of venereal disease,” she told me. “You must be very careful. Guy de Maupassant died in madness and Heine was paralyzed.”

  She sat there under the mimosa tree, over the railway, smoking, and looking worried.

  “It starts with a pimple,” she warned me.

  “I know.”

  “Then your nose falls off. You must promise to be very careful.”

  “I will do my best.”

  My love life at that time had not taken me beyond fascinated peeping under the skirts of Mariette, our daily maid, when she climbed on a stool to wash the walls.

  “Perhaps it would be better if we married young—some nice, clean girl,” my mother concluded, with an expression of obvious disgust.

  We both knew very well that that was not what was expected of me: society women, and only the most beautiful and desirable among them, prima ballerinas, great actresses—Rachel, La Duse and the divine Garbo—to quote only a few chosen at random—nothing else would do. It all seemed very acceptable to me. If only the damn kitchen stool was a little higher, or, even better, if Mariette would understand how important it was for me to start my career at once . . . I was thirteen and a half, and already eager to get on with the job.

  And so, with music, dancing and painting out of the way, we resigned ourselves to literature, in spite of the venereal peril, and began to look for a pen name worthy of the masterpieces which the world was to receive from us. I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me. Now and again, my mother would pop her head discreetly through the door, and lovingly watch her son in the throes of creation. We were both getting terribly impatient to know, at last, under what name we were to become famous, and we were both so far removed from reality, and so deeply immersed in our dream, that the idea that I could have much better employed my time by selling newspapers in the street, running errands, or doing any other kind of work to help my mother make a living never occurred to either of us.

  “How is it going?”

  I read out aloud to her the immortal words of my inspired labor of the day. I must say that I was never satisfied with my efforts. No name, however noble and resounding, seemed worthy of what I meant to accomplish for her sake:

  “Alexandre Natal; Armand de la Torre; Terral; Vasco de la Fernaye . . .”

  After each glittering parade of conquering names, we looked at each other, and shook our heads. No, it won’t do—it won’t do at all. It seemed to us that all the good names had already been taken: “Goethe” had already been grabbed, and so had “Shakespeare” and “Victor Hugo”—and yet that was exactly what I wanted to be for her. As she stood there in the door, listening and smoking nervously, turning over in her mind each new and noble-sounding name I was offering her, there were moments when tears came to my eyes, when I could no longer bear my need to shield and to protect her, and it seemed to me that the world was not large enough to contain all my love.

  “What we really need is something like ‘Gabriele d’Annunzio,’” my mother said, adding, with a hint of profound admiration and respect: “He made La Duse suffer terribly.”

  She had always considered it proper that a great artist should make women suffer, and she clearly expected that I would apply myself to that task. She still belonged, and deeply so, to the old-fashioned bourgeois world, where “success with women” ranked with official honors, medals, splendid uniforms, champagne, jewels and ambassadorial receptions as an essential attribute of a man of the world. She was romantic in a way that today can be found only in bad literature, and she tried desperately to make me take my place in a dream of the nineteenth century Russian girl, in a world of Viennese waltzes and gypsy music, horsemen, camellias, whispers at dawn and tears by candlelight. When she spoke of Vronsky and Anna Karenina, she stroked my hair, looking at me with such a strange mixture of admiration and reproach that there was no mistaking who Vronsky was in her mind. Perhaps deep in the unconscious of this woman who had once been so beautiful, and who had loved deeply a man who had abandoned her, there was a longing for
emotional and physical revenge, and so she expected her son to be both triumphant and invulnerable, and to inflict upon others what had been inflicted on her. After an exhausting day, going from door to door, introducing herself to the English tourists in the luxury hotels as an impoverished member of the Russian aristocracy, reduced to selling the “last of my family jewels”—after a day of humiliating and often sterile effort, for she rarely brought off more than one sale a month—she would come into my room, light a cigarette and sit down with a smile, facing the little boy in short pants, who, crushed under the burden of such a love and of his own helplessness and desperate desire to protect her, spent his days in hunting for some name beautiful enough, grand enough, promising and magnificent enough to express all he wanted to give her, a name that would ring loud and clear in his mother’s ear, with all the convincing echo of his future victories:

  “Roland de Chantecler, Romain de Mysore . . .”

  “Perhaps it would be more prudent to choose a less aristocratic name, just in case there is another revolution,” said my mother.

  None of the pseudonyms I kept inventing ever satisfied her, none of them, she seemed to think, was good enough for me—or was it, perhaps, that she was thus trying to give me confidence in my destiny and the courage to achieve it? She must have been aware how desperate I often felt, how deeply I resented still being only a child who could do nothing for her. For so many penniless years, her life had been a daily battle for survival: I knew this, and yet all I could do to help was to hide my knowledge from her. Each morning, leaning over our balcony, I watched her, as she was setting out for her daily battle down the Avenue Shakespeare, with her cane, her cigarette and her little bag filled with the “family jewels.” Often she caught sight of my anxious face, and waved, smiling happily, while both of us wondered whether this time the ring, the watch, the necklace, the gold snuff box, would find a purchaser, so that the rent could be paid, and the debt settled in the grocery shop. And so . . .