James Baldwin - Another Country

Then Yves stood beside him.

“Madame Belet will be here in a few moments. She is cooking for us a chicken. And I have bought some whiskey and some cigarettes.” Then he looked at Eric and frowned. “You are mad to be standing here in your bathrobe. The sun is down and it is getting cold. Come in and get dressed, I will make us both a drink.”

“What would I do without you?”

“I wonder.” Eric followed him into the house. “I also bought some champagne,” Yves said, suddenly, and he turned to face Eric with a small, shy smile, “to celebrate our last night here.” Then he walked into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he called, “Madame Belet will be here soon.”

Eric stepped into the bedroom and began putting on his clothes. “Are we going out after dinner?”

“Perhaps. That depends. If we are not too drunk on champagne.”

“I’d just as soon stay in, I think.”

“Oh, perhaps we must have just one last look at our little seaside town.”

“We have to get packed, you know, and clean up this house a little, and try to get some sleep.”

“Madame Belet will clean it for us. Anyway, we would never be able to get it done. We can sleep on the train. And we do not have so very much to pack.”

Eric heard him washing the glasses. Then he began to whistle a tune which sounded like a free improvisation on Bach. Eric combed his hair, which was too long. He decided that he would get it cut very short before he went back to the States.

Eventually, they sat, as they had sat so many evenings, before the window which overlooked the sea. Yves sat on the hassock, the back of his head resting on Eric’s knee.

“I will be very sad to leave here,” Yves said, suddenly. “I have never been happier than I have been in this house.”

Eric stroked Yves’ hair and said nothing. He watched the lights that played on the still, black sea, from the sky and the shore.

“I have been very happy, too,” he said at last. And then: “I wonder if we will ever be so happy again.”

“Yes, why not? But that is not so important — anyway, no matter how happy I may become, and I am sure that I shall have great moments yet, this house will always stay with me. I found out something here.”

“And what was that?”

Yves turned his head and looked up at Eric. “I was afraid that I would just remain a street boy forever, that I was no better than my mother.” He turned away, toward the window again. “But, somehow, down here in this house with you, I finally realized that that is not so. I have not to be a whore just because I come from whores. I am better than that.” He stopped. “I learned that from you. That is really strange, for, you know? in the beginning I thought you thought of me like that. I thought that you were just another sordid American, looking for a pretty, degenerate boy.”

“But you are not pretty,” Eric said, and sipped his whiskey. “ Au fait, to es plutôt moche .”

“Oh. Ça va .”

“Your nose turns up.” He stroked the tip of Yves’ nose. “And your mouth’s too big”—Yves laughed—“and your forehead’s too high and soon you won’t have any hair.” He stroked Yves’ forehead, stroked his hair. “And those ears, baby! you look like an elephant or a flying machine.”

“You are the first person who ever say that I am ugly. Perhaps that is why I am intrigued.” He laughed.

“Well. Your eyes are not too bad.”

“ Tu parle. J’ai du chien, moi. ”

“Well, yes, baby, now that you mention it, I’m afraid you’ve got a point.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I have been with so many horrible people,” Yves said, gravely, “so soon, and for so long. Really, it is a wonder that I am not completely sauvage .” He sipped his whiskey. Eric could not see his face, but he could imagine the expression it held: hard and baffled and terribly young, with the cruelty that comes from pain and fear. “First, my mother and all those soldiers, ils étaient mes oncles, tons, ” and he laughed, “and then all those awful, slimy men, I no longer know how many.” He was silent again. “I lay in the bed, sometimes we never got to bed, and let them grunt and slobber. Some of them were really fantastic, no whore has ever told the truth about who comes to her, I am sure of that, they would chop off her head before they would dare to hear it. But it is happening, it is happening all the time.” He leaned up, hugging his knees, staring at the sea. “Then I would take their money; if they made difficulties I could scare them because I was mineur . Anyway, it was very easy to scare them. Most of those people are cowards.” Then he said, in a low voice, “I never thought that I would be happy to have a man touch me and hold me. I never thought that I would be able, truly, to make love with a man. Or with anyone.”

“Why,” Eric asked at last, “didn’t you use women instead of men, as you despised the men so much?”

Yves was silent. Then, “I don’t know. D’abord, I took what there was — or allowed what there was to take me, ” and he looked at Eric and grinned. He sipped his whiskey and stood up. “It is simpler with men, it is usually shorter, the money is easier. Women are much more cunning than men, especially those women who would go after a boy like me, and even more unattractive, really.” He laughed. “It is much harder work, and it is not so sure.” His face dropped again into its incongruous, austere melancholy. “You do not meet many women in the places I have been; you do not meet many human persons at all. They are all dead. Dead.” He stopped, his lips pursed, his eyes glittering in the light that fell though the window. “There were many whores in my mother’s place, but — well, yes, there have been a few women, but I couldn’t stand them, either.” He moved to the window and stood there with his back to Eric. “I do not like l’elégance des femmes . Every time I see a woman wearing her fur coats and her jewels and her gowns, I want to tear all that off her and drag her someplace, to a pissoir, and make her smell the smell of many men, the piss of many men, and make her know that that is what she is for, she is no better than that, she does not fool me with all those shining rags, which, anyway, she only got by blackmailing some stupid man.”

Eric laughed, but he was frightened. “ Comme to es feroce! ” He watched Yves turn from the window and slowly pace the room — long and lean, like a stalking cat, and in the heavy shadows. And he saw that Yves’ body was changing, was losing the adolescent, poverty-stricken harshness. He was becoming a man.

And he watched that sullen, wiry body. He watched his face. The dome of his forehead seemed more remarkable than ever, and more pure, and his mouth seemed, at once, more cruel and more defenseless. This nakedness was the proof of Yves’ love and trust, and it was also the proof of Yves’ force. Yves, one day, would no longer need Eric as he needed Eric now.

Now, Yves tilted back his head and finished his drink and turned to Eric with a smile.

“You are drinking very slowly tonight. What is the matter?”

“I’m getting old.” But he laughed and finished his drink and handed his glass to Yves.

And, as Yves walked away from him, as he heard him in the kitchen, as he looked out over the yellow, winking lights along the shore, something opened in him, an unspeakable despair swept over him. Madame Belet had arrived and he heard Yves and the old peasant woman in the kitchen. Their voices were muted.

On the day that Yves no longer needed him, Eric would drop back into chaos. He remembered that army of lonely men who had used him, who had wrestled with him, caressed him, and submitted to him, in a darkness deeper than the darkest night. It was not merely his body they had used, but something else; his infirmity had made him the receptacle of an anguish which he could scarcely believe was in the world. This anguish rendered him helpless, though it also lent him his weird, doomed grace and power, and it baffled him and set the dimensions of his trap. Perhaps he had sometimes dreamed of walking out of the drama in which he was entangled and playing some other role. But all the exits were barred — were barred by avid men; the role he played was necessary, and not only to himself.