Mavis Gallant - Overhead in a Balloon

Another person to survive her was my first wife. One night when Juliette and I were drinking coffee in the little sitting room where she received her women friends, and where we watched television, Juliette said, again, “But how much of what she says does she believe? About her Catholicism, and all those fantasies running round in her head — that she is your true and only wife, that your marriage is registered in Heaven, that you and she will be together in another world?”

“Those are things people put in letters,” I said. “They sit down alone and pour it out. It’s sincere at that moment. I don’t know why she would suddenly be insincere.”

“After all the trouble she’s made,” said Juliette. She meant that for many years my wife would not let me divorce.

“She couldn’t help that,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. It’s what I think. I hardly knew her.”

“You must have known something .”

“I haven’t seen her more than three or four times in the last thirty-odd years, since I started living with you.”

“What do you mean?” said Juliette. “You saw her just once, with me. We had lunch. You backed off asking for the divorce.”

“You can’t ask for a divorce at lunch. It had to be done by mail.”

“And since then she hasn’t stopped writing,” said Juliette. “Do you mean three or four times, or do you mean once?”

I said, “Once, probably. Probably just that once.”

Viewing me at close range, as if I were a novel she had to translate, Juliette replied that one ought to be spared unexpected visions. Just now, it was as if three walls of the court outside had been bombed flat. Through a bright new gap she saw straight through to my first marriage. We — my first wife and I — postured in the distance, like characters in fiction.

I had recently taken part in a panel discussion, taped for television, on the theme “What Literature, for Which Readers, at Whose Price?” I turned away from Juliette and switched on the set, about ten minutes too early. Juliette put the empty cups and the coffeepot on a tray she had picked up in Milan, the summer I was researching the Stendhal, and carried the tray down the dim passage to the kitchen. I watched the tag end of the late news. It must have been during the spring of 1976. Because of the energy crisis, daylight saving had been established. Like any novelty, it was deeply upsetting. People said they could no longer digest their food or be nice to their children, and that they needed sedation to help them through the altered day. A doctor was interviewed; he advised a light diet and early bed until mind and body adjusted to the change.

I turned, smiling, to where Juliette should have been. My program came on then, and I watched myself making a few points before I got up and went to find her. She was in the kitchen, standing in the dark, clutching the edge of the sink. She did not move when I turned the light on. I put my arms around her, and we came back to her sitting room and watched the rest of the program together. She was knitting squares of wool to be sewn together to make a blanket; there was always, somewhere, a flood or an earthquake or a flow of refugees, and those who outlasted jeopardy had to be covered.

I got to London by way of Marseilles and North Africa, having left Paris more than a year before. My aim was to join the Free French and General de Gaulle. I believed the weight of my presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election. There was no vanity in this. London was the peak of my hopes and desires. I could look back and see a tamed landscape. My past life dwindled and vanished in that long perspective. I was twenty-three.

In my canvas hold-all I carried a tobacco pouch someone had given me, filled with thin reddish soil from Algeria. In those days earth from France and earth from Algeria meant the same thing. Only years later was I able to think, I must have been crazy. When you are young, your patriotism is like metaphysical frenzy. Later, it becomes one more aspect of personal crankiness.

Instead of a hero’s welcome I was given forms to fill out. These questionnaires left no room for postscripts, and so only a skeleton of myself could be drawn. I was Édouard B., born in Paris, father a schoolteacher (so was my mother, but I wasn’t asked), student of literature and philosophy, single, no dependents.

Some definitions seemed incomplete. For instance, I was not entirely single: before leaving Paris I had married a Jewish-born actress, so as to give her the security of my name. As far as I knew, she was now safe and in Cannes. At the same time, I was not a married man. The marriage was an incident, gradually being rubbed out in the long perspective I’ve described. So I saw it; so I would insist. You have to remember the period, and France occupied, to imagine how one could think and behave. We always say this — “Think of the times we had to live in” — when the past is dragged forward, all the life gone out of it, and left unbreathing at our feet.

Instead of sending me off to freeze on a parade ground, the Free French kept me in London. I took it to mean they wanted to school me in sabotage work and drop me into France. I did not know special parachute training might be needed. I thought you held your breath and jumped.

Two months later I lay in a hospital ward with a broken nose, broken left arm, and fractures in both legs. They had been trying to teach me to ride a motorbike, and on my first time out I skidded into a wall. The instructor came and sat by my bedside. He was about twice my age, a former policeman from Rouen. He said the Free French weren’t quite casting me off, but some of them wondered if I was meant for a fighting force in exile. I was a cerebral type, who needed the peace of an office job, with no equipment to smash — not even a typewriter. I asked if General de Gaulle had been informed about my accident.

“Is he a friend of yours?” said the instructor.

“I’ve seen him,” I said. “I saw him in Canton Gardens. He came out the door and down some steps, and got into his car. I was carrying a lot of parcels, so I couldn’t salute. I don’t think he noticed. I hope not.”

There was a silence, during which the instructor stared at his watch. Presently, he inquired what I wanted to do with my life.

“I think I am a poet,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

After that they sent me a regular hospital visitor, a volunteer. Juliette was her name. She was seventeen, from Bordeaux, the daughter of a colonel who had followed de Gaulle to London. She had a precise, particular way of speaking, with every syllable given full value and the consonants treated like little stones. It was not the native accent of Bordeaux, which anyone can imitate, or the everyday French of Paris I’d grown up with, but the tone, almost undefinable, of the French Protestant upper class. I had not heard it before, not consciously, and for the moment had no means of placing it. I thought she had picked up an affectation of some sort while learning English and had carried it over to French. She had, besides, the habit of thrusting into French conversation brief, joyous, and usually irrelevant remarks in English: “You don’t say!” “Oh, what a shame!” “How glad I am for you!” “How gorgeous!”

From behind a mask of splints and bandages I appraised her face, which was still childlike, rounded as if over a layer of cream. A beret kept slipping and sliding off her dark hair. “Oh, what a pity!” she remarked, pulling it back on. She was dressed in the least becoming clothes I had ever seen on a young woman — a worn and drooping tunic, thick black stockings, and a navy sweater frayed at the cuffs. She had spent five months in an English girls’ school, she told me, and this was the remains of a uniform. She had nothing else to wear, no thing that fitted. Her mother was too busy to shop.