The Exiles

by MONICA STIRLING

THE room was one of the cheapest in the hotel. Its faded yellow wallpaper was patterned with blue roses, its faded crimson carpet with green leaves. The plaster cornices were crumbling and, in one corner, were lightly draped with a spider’s web. The low double bed had been covered by a peacock-blue shawl. Beside the chipped highboy was a large tin trunk on which had been laid out a dozen books, a plate of oranges, a potted hyacinth. A bath, washbasin, cooking lamp and utensils were hidden behind a wooden partition. In the middle of the room was a glass-lopped table surrounded by chairs — two armchairs upholstered in machinemade tapestry, two deal ones. In one of the chairs sat a woman.

Her name was Manuela, her nationality Spanish. She had just put on the lablea bottle of the cheapest armagnac, two glasses, and a package of Gaulloise cigarettes. Now she was waiting for a man.

From the street below came the battle cries of vendors selling newspapers of opposing political tendencies — Humanité! Le Rassemblement! — and sturdy murmurs from around the market stalls, which kept late hours. Cars hooted, shrieked, whined, as if in angry derision; and in a house across the narrow street a radio, tuned to a foreign station, was blaring a tune Manuela didn’t recognize as “Nature Boy.”

Presently there was a tap at the door. Manuela’s lively expression became livelier. The key was outside the door. A man let himself in. His name was Arcosh, his nationality Hungarian. After a second’s hesitation, he hurried unflusterodly to Manuela and bent to kiss her hand. Then he slicked back his hair and sat down. Manuela filled their glasses generously and offered cigarettes, Raising their glasses, they wished each other a happy new year. Both spoke fluent French with a marked foreign accent.

To the wall over the bed were pinned a reproduction, cut from a magazine, of Carpaccio’s Lagoon Scene; a photograph of a woman whom Arcosh did not recognize as La Pasionaria; and two picture postcards, one of Boucher’s Jeune Femme Étendue, the other of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Arcosh looked at the pietures eagerly. He did not greatly care for art, other than music, but prided himself on his psychological sense, and thought these pictures would tell him something about this foreign woman with whom he’d become acquainted in the elevator. He’d been glad to accept her impulsive invitation. He too was a foreigner, alone in Paris on New Year’s Eve, and this evening he had climbed upstairs hoping for the best: the best meaning, in his vocabulary, a very limited and precise pleasure for which he had much appetite. But the dissimilarity of the pictures puzzled him. It took all his fine formal manners not to show bewilderment as he looked from the lovely lagoon, with its two mysterious figures setting out in their gondola, to the photograph of the darkly ravaged woman, the strawberries-and-cream body of Boucher’s sweet libertine, and the austere majesty of Michelangelo’s juvenile Madonna brooding over her dead child.

Manuela watched her visitor with benevolent amusement. This was her most characteristic expression. She knew precisely what he was thinking. It had never occurred to her to pride herself on her sense of psychology — or indeed on anything save the prodigious appetite for life that had proved her most useful possession — but she often guessed what people were thinking. Manuela liked people, and lacked censoriousness. Curiously, Arcosh glanced front the pictures to their owner.

Manuela was a tall woman in her late thirties. Several years of malnutrition had made her unhealthily plump. The thick dark hair that curled to her shoulders was streaked with gray. Before the Spanish civil war she had been a pianist. Now that her hands had been frozen as the result of mountain fighting she earned a poor living teaching Spanish and doing odd jobs which sometimes proved very odd indeed. Her family had repudiated her on account of her ideals and now she no longer fell sure of the ideals on account of which she had embraced repudiation.

But despite the loss of family, friends, ideals, profession, country, comfort, Manuela’s interest in life had not deserted her. For her, every day was really a new day, exciting as a Christmas package to an unspoiled child. Anything might happen! And in the meantime there was always someone needy with whom to share a few francs; someone hungry for whom to boil a saucepan of soup beneath the printed notice “Clients who cook or wash clothes in their rooms may be INSTANTLY ejec ed”; someone whose unhappiness in love needed to weep itself out on an ample breast. Perhaps because she was never bored by other people’s stories, because she saw through their unconscious pathos and sordid self-delusion to the elements of grandeur and beauty as endemic to human beings as are birth and death, Manuela was seldom without some battered creature running to her as a starved cat runs to a saucer of milk. She could not see anyone lacking love without feeling personally responsible.

Arcosh would have been astonished, disconcerted, to learn that Manuela’s unpremeditated invitation had been the result of compassion. A tall, handsome, blond, greenish-blue-eyed man in his early forties who viewed revolutions only as social solecisms, he lived on a charity he considered less than his due and spent his extensive leisure conspiring in a refined and impractical manner in the back rooms of cafés with literary pretensions. Dead empires and decayed royal families adorned his thoughts as blue roses adorned Manuela s faded wallpaper. Selfassured and self-possessed — in so far as so tenuous a self could be possessed by anyone — he mimed his way through his exile with the complacent mockery of a ballet dancer who is convinced his talent will obtain indulgence for all his moral faults. His chief inconveniences came from his appetite for women, an appetite in which fastidiousness fought a losing battle with greed.

In the days when he had been an indigenous aristocrat in income as well as in blood, Arcosh had provided many a beauty with a valid reason for dropping pearly tears into a lace-bordered hand kerchief. Lately he had found himself obliged to make do with little girls who wore pants rolled to the knees in imitation of Life magazine and insisted on expatiating on Existentialism at moments when they should, properly, have been swooning with gratitude. More than once he had caught himself grumbling that the girls of today were not like their mothers. Then, realizing that this was a sign of age, he shut his mouth and looked around.

In this mood he had met Manuela. She was not a young girl; she was poor like himself; like himself she lived in a cheap hotel — but she was the daughter of a Marquis and maybe when she took off her cheap dress he would inhale from her luscious body the fumes of generic costliness without which he found life a vulgar farce.

2

THEIR second drinks having suffused them with illusions of warmth and hope, Manuela and Arcosh discussed their plans for the evening.

“I had thought we might eat here,” said Manuela. ”I have quite a kitchen in my bathroom. I could make us soup and there is spaghetti and ham and fruit and I even have butter and good coffee — and a bottle of champagne, quite a New Year’s feast, what do you say?”

Arcosh did not know what to say. His sensitive nostrils flickered disgustedly at the idea of the cheap room, so like his own, filling with the smell of cooking cheap as that to which he was accustomed. With genuine anguish he thought of subtly lit night clubs where, to the accompaniment of ersatz tzigane orchestras, starched waiters served caviar, foie gras, hot toast, iced butter, and long-necked bottles in silvery buckets. But because he knew that all his wallet could offer Manuela was a restaurant with sawdust on the floor where foreign students would elbow their way through a bad meal accompanied by loud and jejune arguments about the liberty of the individual, Arcosh smiled and said that would be delightful if you are sure it will not be too much trouble, dear friend?

In fact it was delightful. Manuela was a fine cook, and produced not one but two bottles of champagne. And after the coffee, came more armagnac. Arcosh ventured to take Manuelas hand, which she gave him as readily as she would have given him a match to light his cigarette.

The room was dim now, only the bedside lamp lit. The noise was muted in the street below. Absent-mindedly Arcosh let his delicate fingertips explore Manuela’s forearm. He adored this moment, the moment when every goose still had time to prove herself a swan. Inaudible violins playing in his head, Arcosh slid his hand above Manuela’s elbow. Her flesh was soft and fragrant. Slicking back his hair, raising his chin, flattening his stomach, Arcosh remembered dear dead women with whom he had once waltzed, whispering as he did so assignations that committed them to the kind ot trouble he considered appropriate to their station in life.

Skirts that the moths had long ago devoured rustled softly through his narrow imagination, and Arcosh looked searehingly at Manuela’s strong brown face, striving to find there the enchanting fatuity with which he had once played so prettily. “Destiny . . .” he murmured, with a look appropriate to Charles Boyer in a close-up, “destiny does si range things to us. . .”

Manuela smiled accommodatingly. She felt very sorry for Arcosh. Throughout dinner his conversation had reminded her of that of an aged and jobless actor referring to his petty provincial successes of a decade ago as if they were actual triumphs on the stages of great capitals. Let him indulge in pompous vocal preliminaries if that was his fancy. She looked forward to the moment when she would hold his head against her breast much as a fond mother looks forward to tucking up a child and kissing it good night.

Suddenly there was a clatter of horses’ hoofs in the street below. A certain familiarity about the sound made both exiles react instantly. Together they pulled open the window. Swathed in floating scarves of fog, a detachment of Gardes Mobiles was riding by in full battle regalia. Manuela and Arcosh looked at each other without speaking. Violence had played too great a part in both their lives for them to be indifferent to the faintest whiff of it.

They shut the window and sat down. The sound of the horses’ hoofs receded. Arcosh put an arm around Manuela’s handsome shoulders. But they were no longer alone in the room. The past was there now, a censorious third person criticizing their love-making.

“What do you suppose that meant?" asked Arcosh, trying to make his voice sound urbane, unconcerned.

“Trouble with the strikers,” said Manuela. “It said in the papers they were going to call the troops out.” Without knowing she was doing so, she sighed. She could not remember a period when her private life had not been like a contraband object, infallibly confiscated by public events.

“New Year’s Eve,” murmured Arcosh, anxious to reintroduce a senlimental note. “Where were you this time say . . .” he hesilaled, searching for a period he had enjoyed, “say five years ago?

Manuela reflected. Then she smiled, stretched her arms, forgot Arcosh.

“This time five years ago? I was in the mountains. Madonna, but it was cold! Our clothes were in rags. We had to lie as close together as pigs in a litter to keep alive, let alone warm. We’d just gotten hold of some first-rate machine guns. That was before my arm was broken. We were due to blow up a train.”She began to laugh. “That was the time we hid in a barn and mother of God if there wasn’t a bull in it! You can’t imagine what a terrified group of partisans we were! One look at that bull and we ran like crazy! Still we blew the train up. . . .” Manuela’s voice trailed away, the enjoyment left her face. Somberly she stared into a future in which there would be, for her, no more of the kind of friends as united as pigs in a litter. Then, her natural courtesy reasserting itself, she asked, “And you, where were you then?”

“I?” Arcosh gave a little social cough, cleared his throat, and looked at Manuela reproachfully. The daughter of a Marquis. Deplorable. Had he realized her tendencies he would not, he told himself, have come here tonight.

“I,” he said with dignity, “was getting dressed for a ball. One of the finest balls I’ve ever attended.”Pleasure drove the pedagogic note out of his voice. He saw his starched shirt, his elegant coattails, the felicitous way in which he had glided, the admired of all beholders, kissing white hand after white hand.

Like a pooler pigeon he arched his chest, remembering the little German baroness he had escorted home. She had told him she adored Goet he and next day Arcosh had sent her a beautiful edition of this poet accompanied by a basket of flowers and fruit and the appropriate quotation from Verlaine. It had been the beginning of one of the most charming idyls Arcosh could remember: champagne glasses winking in the firelight and the little baroness murmuring endearments through her disordered rivers of ash-blonde hair. What a temperament she had had! . . . and how convenient had been her husband’s absence on the eastern front. “Ah, those were the days,” said Arcosh, pressing his fingertips to his lips and throwing an imaginary kiss into the air.

Suddenly a notion occurred to Arcosh that entirely restored his good humor: he would be doing Manuela a favor if he made love to her. After all not even woman of forty, not even every Marquis’s daughter, had the opportunity to be courted with old-world grace and refinement by a man who had possessed some of the silkiest heads, finest profiles, snowiest breasts in Europe, a man who had given many a noble scutcheon a traditional blot. With infinite condescension he laid a manicured hand on Manuela’s throat. Without brusquerie she stood up and began clearing the coffee cups. When she; had done so she came back and sat down at the opposite side of the table from Arcosh. Neither smiling nor speaking they stared at each other. The silence became oppressive.

3

FOR the first time since boyhood Arcosh considered a woman as something other than pleasure fodder. Uneasily he turned away and stared at the dim Carpaccio reproduction. It was really very elegant he thought, trying to remember an Italian duchess he had known in Venice — and to use the memory as if it had been an aspirin.

With an effort Manuela considered a human being as something other than a creature in need of solace. My body is becoming flaccid she thought, my mind weak; but all the same I am not yet a philanthropic institution to which everyone can apply.

With all the power she had once possessed she willed Arcosh to look back at her. When he did so something strange happened. His eyes seemed to dull, his chin to sag, his hands to tremble. For a moment it was impossible not to see him as he would be when, having lost his hair and gained a paunch, he became the fatuous old man who had lurked inside his bright boyhood as a future tenant lurks about an apartment whose previous owners are moving out.

Simultaneously Manuela’s bulk seemed to dimmish, her hair to darken, until her leonine person became no more than a pale frame for the dark and vivid girl she had once been. An apprehension of the nature of violence rushed between them like a torrent they had surveyed from opposite banks.

“Life is a very strange thing,” muttered Arcosh querulously.

He looked so old, tired, and foolish that Manuela had much difficulty in not running to him. But some not entirely worn-out spring of her past life made her say “very strange indeed” with dry equability.

Arcosh stood up. He went to Manuela, kissed her hand, and thanked her for a pleasant evening. Then he moved to the door. A great actor could not have expressed futile grief more felicitously than Arcosh was doing by hunching his shoulders and shuffling his feet.

An agony such as she had not known for years stirred in Manuela. Hushing it as she would have hushed a fractious child, she wished her guest good night.

On the threshold he hesitated. “Destiny,”he murmured — but he was no longer at all like Charles Boyer — “destiny does strange things to us.”

“Very strange indeed,”acquiesced Manuela.

After Arcosh had gone Manuela stretched herself upon her bed. The faded yellow wallpaper of her room was patterned with blue roses, its faded crimson carpet with green leaves. Its plaster cornices were crumbling and, in one corner, were heavily draped with a spiders web. From behind the bathroom’s partition came a smell of cooking.

For a moment Manuela wished she were dead. Then she remembered the young Spanish painter and his wife who’d recently sell led on the floor below. They looked as if they didn’t get enough to eat. Tomorrow she would ask the porter about them, Tomorrow was another day. Manuela rolled over and slept. Not for the first time she forgot to turn out the light.