Twilight and Moonbeam Alley Read online

  He thanked her, not effusively, and left, unaware of the value of the casket that he himself was carrying. And so, after acting out a comedy of her feelings in front of them all, she deceived even the last man to cross her path.

  Then she closed the door and quickly took a small flask from a drawer. It was made of fine Chinese porcelain, with strange, monstrous dragons coiling and curling in blue on it. She looked at it with curiosity, toyed with it as carelessly as she had toyed with her fellow men and women, with princes, with France, with love and death. She unscrewed the stopper and poured the clear liquid into a small dish. For a moment she hesitated, really just from a childish fear that it might have a bitter flavour. Cautiously, like a kitten sniffing warm milk, she touched it with her tongue; no, it didn’t taste bad. And so she drank the contents of the dish down in a single draught.

  The whole thing, at that moment, seemed to her somehow amusing and extremely ludicrous: to think that you had only to take that one tiny sip, and tomorrow you wouldn’t see the clouds, the fields, the woods any more, messengers would go riding, the King would be horrified and all of France amazed. So this was the great step that she had feared taking so much. She thought of the astonishment of her guests, of the legends that would be told of the way she had foretold the day of her death, and failed to understand only one thing: that she had given herself to death because she missed the company of humans, those same gullible humans who could be deceived with such a little comedy. Dying seemed to her altogether easy, you could even smile as you died—yes, you could indeed, she tried it—you could perfectly well smile, and it wasn’t difficult to preserve a beautiful and tranquil face in death, a face radiant with unearthly bliss. It was true, even after death you could act happiness. She hadn’t known that. She found everything, human beings, the world, death and life, suddenly so very amusing that the smile she had prepared sprang involuntarily to her carefree lips. She straightened up, as if there were a mirror opposite her somewhere, waited for death, and smiled and smiled and smiled.

  But death was not to be deceived, and broke her laughter. When madame de Prie was found her face was distorted into a terrible grimace. Those dreadful features showed everything that she had really suffered in the last few weeks: her rage, her torment, her aimless fear, her wild and desperate pain. The deceptive smile for which she had struggled so avidly had been helpless, had drained away. Her feet were twisted together in torment, her hands had clutched a curtain so convulsively that scraps of it were left between her fingers, her mouth was open as if in a shrill scream.

  And all that show of apparent merriment, the mystic prophecy of the day of her death had been for nothing too. The news of her suicide arrived in Paris on the evening when an Italian conjuror was displaying his arts at court. He made rabbits disappear into a hat, he brought grown geese out of eggshells. When the message arrived people were slightly interested, were surprised, whispered, the name of madame de Prie went around for a few minutes, but then the conjuror performed another amazing trick and she was forgotten, just as she herself would have forgotten someone else’s fate at such a moment. Interest in her strange end did not last long in France, and her desperate efforts to stage a drama that would never be forgotten were in vain. The fame she longed for, the immortality she thought to seize by force with her death, passed her name by: her story was buried under the dust and ashes of trivial events. For the history of the world will not tolerate intruders; it chooses its own heroes and implacably dismisses those not summoned to that rank, however hard they may try; someone who has fallen off the carriage of fate as it goes along will never catch up with it again. And nothing was left of the strange end of madame de Prie, her real life and the ingeniously devised deception of her death but a few dry lines in some book of memoirs or other, conveying to their reader as little of the passionate emotions of her life as a pressed flower allows one to guess at the fragrant marvel of its long-forgotten spring.

  * Lady, yours is a beauty bright, never flirtatious, never vain; your liveliness will show no spite, and never seeks to inflict pain. Yours, all the bounty of the mind, a spirit gracious, full of love. In graver questions wise you prove, in matters light, charming and kind.

  * Now I shall die, oh do not mourn for me!

  MOONBEAM ALLEY

  THE SHIP, delayed by a storm, could not land at the small French seaport until late in the evening, and I missed the night train to Germany. So I had an unexpected day to spend in this foreign town, and an evening which offered nothing more alluring than the melancholy music of a ladies’ ensemble in a suburban nightclub, or a tedious conversation with my chancemet travelling companions. The air in the small hotel dining-room seemed to me intolerable, greasy with oil, stifling with smoke, and I suffered doubly from its murky impurity because I still tasted the pure breath of the sea on my lips, cool and salty. So I went out and walked down the broad, brightly lit street, going nowhere in particular, until I reached a square where an outdoor band was playing. I went on amidst the casually flowing tide of people who were out for a stroll. At first it did me good to be carried passively away by this current of provincially dressed persons who meant nothing to me, but soon I could no longer tolerate the company of strangers surging up close to me with their disconnected laughter, their eyes resting on me in surprise, with odd looks or a grin, the touches that imperceptibly urged me on, the light coming from a thousand small sources, the constant sound of footsteps. The sea voyage had been turbulent, and I still felt a reeling, slightly intoxicated sensation in my blood, a rocking and gliding beneath my feet, the earth seemed to move as if it were breathing and the street to rise to the sky. All this loud confusion suddenly made me dizzy, and to save myself I turned into a side street without looking at its name, and then into a yet smaller street, where the senseless noise gradually ebbed away. I walked aimlessly on through the tangle of alleys branching off each other like veins, and becoming darker and darker the further I went from the main square. The large electrical arc lamps that lit the broad avenues like moons did not shine here, and the stars at last began coming into view again above the few street lamps, in a black and partly overcast sky.

  I must have reached the sailors’ quarter near the harbour. I could tell from the smell of rotting fish, from the sweetish aroma of seaweed and decay that bladderwrack gives off when the breakers wash it ashore, from the typical fumes of pollution and unaired rooms that linger dankly in these nooks and crannies until a great storm rises, bringing in fresh air. The nebulous darkness and unexpected solitude did me good. I slowed my pace, glancing down alley after alley now, each different from its neighbour, here a quiet alley, there an inviting one, but all dark, with the muted sound of music and voices rising so mysteriously from invisible vaults that one could scarcely guess at its underground sources. For the doors to all the cellars were closed, with only the light of a red or yellow lamp showing.

  I liked such alleyways in foreign towns, places that are a disreputable market-place for all the passions, a secret accumulation of temptations for the sailors who, after many lonely days on strange and dangerous seas, come here for just one night to fulfil all their many sensuous dreams within an hour. These little side-streets have to lurk somewhere in the poorer part of any big city, lying low, because they say so boldly and importunately things that are hidden beneath a hundred disguises in the brightly lit buildings with their shining window panes and distinguished denizens. Enticing music wafts from small rooms here, garish cinematograph posters promise unimaginable splendours, small, square lanterns hang under gateways, winking in very clear invitation, issuing an intimate greeting, and naked flesh glimpsed through a door left ajar shimmers under gilded fripperies. Drunks shout in the bars, gamblers argue in loud voices. The sailors grin when they meet each other here, their dull eyes glinting in anticipation, for they can find everything in such places, women and gaming, drink and a show to watch, adventures both grubby and great. But all this is hidden in modestly muted yet tell-tale fashion be
hind shutters lowered for the look of the thing, it all goes on behind closed doors, and that apparent seclusion is intriguing, is twice as seductive because it is both hidden and accessible. Such streets are the same in Hamburg and Colombo and Havana, similar in all seaports, just as the wide and luxurious avenues resemble each other, for the upper side and underside of life share the same form. These shady streets are the last fantastic remnants of a sensually unregulated world where instinct still has free rein, brutal and unbridled; they are a dark wood of passions, a thicket full of the animal kingdom, exciting visitors with what they reveal and enticing them with what they hide. One can weave them into dreams.

  And the alley where I suddenly felt myself a captive was such a street. I had been idly following a couple of cuirassiers whose swords, dragging along after them, clinked on the uneven road surface. Women called to them from a bar, they laughed and shouted coarse jests back at the girls, one of the soldiers knocked at the window, then a voice somewhere swore at them and they went on. Their laughter faded in the distance, and soon they were out of my hearing. The alley was silent again; a couple of windows shone faintly, mistily reflecting the pale moon. I stood drinking in that silence, which struck me as a strange one because something behind it seemed to be murmuring words of mystery, lust and danger. I clearly felt that the silence was deceptive, and something of the world’s decay shimmered in the murky haze. But I went on standing there, listening to the empty air. I was no longer aware of the town and the alley, of their names or my own, I just sensed that I was a stranger here, miraculously detached in the unknown, with no purpose in mind, no message to deliver, no links with anything, and yet I sensed all the dark life around me as fully as I felt the blood flowing beneath my own skin. I had only the impression that nothing here was for me and yet it all was all mine: it was the delightful sensation of an experience made deepest and most genuine because one is not personally involved. That sensation is one of the wellsprings of my inmost being, and in an unknown situation it always comes over me like desire. Then suddenly, as I stood listening in the lonely alley as if waiting for something that was bound to happen, something to urge me on, out of this somnambulistic sensation of listening to the void, I heard, muted by either distance or a wall between us, the very faint sound of a song in German coming from somewhere. It was that simple air from Der Freischütz, ‘Fairest, greenest bridal wreath’. A woman’s voice was singing it, very badly, but it was still a German tune, something German here in a foreign part of the world, and so it affected me in a way all its own. It was being sung some way off, but I felt it like a greeting, the first word I had heard in my native tongue for weeks. Who, I asked myself, speaks my language here, whose memory impels her to lift her voice from the heart in singing this poor little song here in this remote, disreputable alley? I followed the voice, going from house to house. They all stood half asleep, their shutters closed, but light shining behind the shutters gave their nature away, and sometimes a hand waved. Outside there were garish signs, screaming posters, and the words “Ale, Whisky, Beer” promised a hidden bar, but it all appeared sealed and uninviting, yet enticing at the same time. Now and then—and I heard a few footsteps in the distance—now and then the voice came again, singing the refrain more clearly this time, sounding closer and closer. I identified the house. For a moment I hesitated, and then pushed my foot against the inner door, which was heavily draped with white net curtains. However, as I stooped to go in, having made up my mind, something came to life in the shadow of the entrance and gave a start of alarm, a figure that had obviously been waiting there, its face pressed close to the pane. The lantern over the door cast red light on that face, yet it was pale with fright—a man was staring at me, wide-eyed. He muttered something like an apology and disappeared down the dimly lit alley. It was a strange greeting. I looked the way he had gone. Something still seemed to be moving in the vanishing shadows of the alley, but indistinctly. Inside the building the voice was still singing, and seemed to me even clearer now. That lured me on. I turned the door-handle and quickly stepped inside.

  The last word of the song stopped short, as if cut off by a knife. And in some alarm I felt a void before me, a sense of silent hostility as if I had broken something. Only slowly did my eyes adjust to the room, which was almost empty: it contained a bar counter and a table, and the whole place was obviously just a means of access to other rooms behind it, whose real purpose was immediately made obvious by their opened doors, muted lamplight, and beds made up and ready. A girl sat at the table, leaning her elbows on it, her tired face made up, and behind her at the bar was the landlady, stout and dingy grey, with another girl who was not bad-looking. My greeting sounded harsh in the space, and a bored response came back with some delay. Finding that I had stepped into such a void, so tense and bleak a silence, I was ill at ease and would rather have left at once, but in my embarrassment I could think of no excuse, so I resigned myself to sitting down at the table in front of the bar. The girl, remembering her duties, asked what I would like to drink, and I recognised her as German at once from the harsh accent of her French. I ordered beer, she went out and came back again with the lethargic bearing that betrayed even more indifference than the empty look in her eyes, which glowed faintly under their lids like lights going out. Automatically, and in accordance with the custom of such places, she put a second glass down next to mine for herself. As she raised her glass she did not turn her blank gaze on me, so I was able to observe her. Her face was in fact still beautiful, with regular features, but inner weariness seemed to make it coarse, like a mask; everything about her drooped, her eyelids were heavy, her hair hung loose, her cheeks, badly made up and smudged, were already beginning to fall in, and broad lines ran down to her mouth. Her dress too was carelessly draped, her voice hoarse, roughened by smoke and beer. All things considered, I felt that this was an exhausted woman who went on living only out of habit and without feelings, so to speak. Self-consciously and with a sense of dread I asked a question. She replied with dull indifference, scarcely moving her lips, and without looking at me. I felt I was unwelcome. At the back of the room the landlady was yawning, and the other girl was sitting in a corner glancing in my direction, as if waiting for me to summon her. I would have liked to leave, but everything about me felt heavy, and I sat in that sated, smouldering air, swaying slightly as the sailors do, kept there by both distaste and curiosity, for this indifference was, in a way, intriguing.

  Then I suddenly gave a start, alarmed by raucous laughter near me. At the same time the flame of the light wavered, and the draught told me that someone must have opened the door behind my back. “Oh, so here you are again, are you?” said the voice beside me shrilly, in German. “Slinking round the house again, you skinflint? Well, come along in, I won’t hurt you.”

  I spun round, to look first at her as she uttered this greeting, in tones as piercing as if her body had suddenly caught fire, then at the door. Even before it was fully open I recognised the trembling figure and humble glance of the man who had been almost glued to the outside of the pane just now. Intimidated, he held his hat in his hand like a beggar, trembling at the sound of the raucous greeting and the laughter which suddenly seemed to shake her apathetic figure convulsively, and which was accompanied by the landlady’s rapid whispering from the bar counter at the back of the room.

  “Sit down there with Françoise, then,” the woman beside me ordered the poor man as he came closer with a craven, shuffling step. “You can see I have a gentleman here.”

  She said this to him in German. The landlady and the other girl laughed out loud, although they couldn’t understand her, but they seemed to know the new guest.

  “Give him champagne, Françoise, the expensive brand, give him a bottle of it!” she called out, laughing, and turning to him again added with derision, “And if it’s too expensive for you then you can stay outside, you miserable miser. I suppose you’d like to stare at me for free—you want everything for free, don’t you?”


  The tall figure seemed almost to collapse at the sound of this vicious laughter; he hunched his back as if his face were trying to creep away and hide like a dog, and his hand shook as he reached for the bottle and spilled some of the wine in pouring it. He was still trying to look up at her face, but he could not lift his gaze from the floor, where it wandered over the tiles. And only now, in the lamplight, did I clearly see that emaciated face, worn and pale, his hair damp and thin on his bony skull, his joints loose and looking as if they were broken, a pitiful creature without any strength, yet not devoid of malice. Everything about him was crooked, awry, cringing, and now, when he raised his eyes, though he immediately lowered them again in alarm, they had a gleam of ill will in them.

  “Don’t trouble yourself about him!” the girl told me in French, roughly taking my arm as if to turn me round. “This is old business between the two of us, it’s nothing new.” And again, baring her teeth as if ready to bite, she called out to him, “Listen to me, you old lynx! You just hear what I say. I said I’d rather jump into the sea than go with you, didn’t I?”

  Once again the landlady and the other girl laughed, loud and foolish laughter. It seemed to be a familiar joke to them, a daily jest. But I found it unpleasant to see that other girl, Françoise, suddenly press close to him with pretended affection, wheedling him with flattery from which he shrank, though he didn’t have the courage to shake her off, and I was alarmed when his wandering gaze, awkward, anxious, abject, rested on me. And I felt dread of the woman beside me, who had suddenly been roused from her apathy and was full of such burning malice that her hands trembled. I threw some money on the table and was going to leave, but she wouldn’t take it.