Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘It’s nice to meet some pals.’

Jean’s memory was working at high speed to try to put a name to the traces this strange creature had left there. She held out her hand with its red claws to take the glass of beer the waiter had brought her.

‘Cigarette?’ she said.

‘I don’t smoke, as you know very well.’

‘What about this young man?’

‘No thanks.’

‘A handsome boy like you!’

‘I do a lot of sport,’ Jean said, looking away from her.

He was sure now that he even knew the woman’s voice.

‘What sport?’

‘Rowing.’

She heaved a sigh.

‘I thought only the English rowed. I used to love watching them training on the Thames … before I buried myself in this bloody holy city with that sad sack Gino …’

The veil fell, and Jean experienced an indefinable relief. He recognised her, with her mulatto’s complexion and her dyed hair. On the boat from Westminster Bridge to Hampton Court an Italian wearing a seedy Borsalino hat had licked her face, and after some escapade in the bushes she had pulled out her knickers and put them back on in full view of the other passengers. On his last evening in London he had caught sight of Baptiste, the butler, threatening to slap her in the hall of the Chelsea house. Her life had apparently improved since then, if her jewellery was to be believed. She had even filled out a bit. Her double chin wobbled. Did she still have such good legs? He would have had to look under the table. While she was talking in English to Salah, he wondered to himself whether he would really enjoy going to bed with her. He decided that he might, as a disinterested experiment. But it took two to make it happen. She had doubtless married her Italian with the Mussolini jaw, the Gino she had described as a sad sack. Perhaps Salah could help. Unless he himself was the girl’s lover, as Baptiste had been. How could he find out? He finished his beer and stood up.

‘Salah, I have to go and find my friend. Can I see you tomorrow?’

‘You’re leaving … Tomorrow? Yes. Around the same time, outside the Adler. I’ll warn Monseigneur and Madame, who will certainly want to meet you.’

‘I’ll be there. Good evening, Madame.’

The woman stared intensely at him, opening wide her big black eyes with their thick false eyelashes. The moment Jean was back out in the street, he forgot her. Ernst was the only one on his mind. Jean was afraid that his friend would not forgive him for having stayed with Salah. Could a person really be so stubborn? If several million young Germans, enlisted in the Hitler Youth, all reacted like that to the sight of a black person or a Jew, they were doomed to stay within their country’s borders. Stendhal had been right to say that the Germans ‘need never reproach themselves for anything so personal as an opinion’. When he reached his hotel he was told that Ernst had just returned and gone up to the room they shared, a broom cupboard overlooking a courtyard where women shrieked and children whinged from early morning till night. They were too young not to crash onto their mattresses and sleep like logs when they were tired, and Jean was unsurprised to see Ernst, naked, stretched out on his narrow iron bed with his face buried in a pillow. Fine. Explanations could wait until tomorrow.

The explanations did not take place, Ernst suggesting, as soon as they opened their eyes together — awoken by a more intolerable screech than usual — that they leave the city for Ostia.

‘I’ve had enough of old stones, seminarians in crocodiles, icy churches and baking piazzas. Let’s go and swim.’

‘Fine by me,’ Jean said, eager to repair the wrong he had done, even if it was imaginary. ‘But tonight I need to come back to Rome, I have an appointment.’

Ernst did not ask with whom. They retrieved their bicycles from the garage.

‘What do you say we use the occasion to leave this horrible hotel?’ Ernst said.

‘Where will we sleep?’

‘I don’t know … on the stones in the Forum, on the Appian Way. We’ll find somewhere … Don’t worry.’

They loaded their belongings onto their luggage racks and pedalled out in the early light of morning all the way to Ostia, where they found themselves a beach of soft sand to rest on. The sea beat lazily against the shore with a knowing sluggishness. Fat women in black, their sleeves rolled up to reveal arms even whiter by wrists and hands weathered by the sun, vegetated beneath parasols, regularly called their straying children back from the water where they were paddling up to their ankles, like clucking hens. Fortunately there were some prettier creatures too, beautiful Italian girls of fifteen or sixteen with olive skin and velvet eyes and here and there foreigners, mature-looking English girls, Americans in flower-covered swimming hats, Scandinavians with tanned skin and pale hair. After Rome’s segregation and over-solemn atmosphere, that made it impossible to get to know the city quickly, they rediscovered others of their own age who had also cast off their clothes, setting their bodies free beside a sea that gave itself to them, warm, blue and calm, without a past. Jean and Ernst dived into the water like children, came up for air, and got into a game with two Swedish girls, no goddesses but in their scanty swimsuits terribly naked and desirable. Conversation in English, their common language, turned out to be too hard, and they gave up and sat at a mobile stall that served salted veal in paper cornets.

‘It was a good idea of yours,’ Jean said. ‘We were starting to feel that we were the new Goethe and Stendhal. Did either of them ever talk about going for a swim in the sea?’

‘I don’t think so … Perhaps it’s time we summoned them to answer for their errors.’

‘We’re not a court.’

‘But that’s where you hold someone accountable.’

‘Accountable? How, dear Ernst? No one has ever been perfect.’

‘Dilettantes! That’s what they were, the pair of them. And there’s no place for dilettantes in the new Europe. You go and talk to the workers, the peasants, you’ll see what they think of dilettantes. National Socialism will sweep away such parasites. Listen carefully …’

‘No, Ernst, you’re seriously getting on my nerves now. Here we are at Ostia, sitting on a beautiful beach, and there are girls playing catch right in front of us. Do you really think this is the time and place to be solemn? Save your propaganda for another day.’

With their mouths full of bread and salted veal, they continued to argue, half-serious, half-laughing.

‘No one will believe we could have been such stupendous failures on this trip,’ Jean said.

‘Failures?’

‘Clumsy, pathetic.’

‘Why?’

‘We haven’t managed to pull a single girl.’

‘Does that interest you so much?’

‘Yes. I’d like to. I’d have the feeling of being a man, at last.’

Ernst could not hide his disappointment.

‘Poor Hans, that’s not how you become a man. If every Frenchman is like you, within two or three years your country will be a German colony…’

‘… which will colonise Germany. It’s true that I don’t know a lot, only the curriculum for the bac, but according to the history books, those who are devoured will devour their devourers, in other words the best forces that Germany can muster will be undermined by the example of our carelessness and frivolity … Remember how the decadent Greeks corrupted their Roman conquerors.’

‘Ah, you believe that … but you’re talking about Latins and Greeks. They’re not Aryans. Aryan men are not so vulnerable in their victories, and Aryan women—’

He did not finish his sentence, but sprang up from his stool. Two boys, jumping on their bicycles, which they had left on the seafront, clearly in view, were about to ride away. In a single movement Ernst was on the first one. He grabbed him by the throat and rolled on the ground with him, followed by Jean who caught the second and had him full-length on the cobbles when he abruptly noticed that Ernst’s thief had the upper hand. He rushed to his aid, seizing the thief, who was pummelling the German’s already bleeding face, and holding him in an armlock. There was a brief struggle, amplified by the shouts of passers-by and the panic of the girls on the beach, and the thief was knocked out. The two friends stood up, to discover that in the course of the fight Jean’s bicycle had vanished. Someone pointed out the direction it had taken and they dashed that way. The bicycle appeared at the end of a narrow street and disappeared again. Ernst’s nose was bleeding, and his chest was splashed with blood.