It is quite impossible, the way these vagabonds take my hospitality for granted. Day after day they troop through my hotel, assuming I owe them a holiday; that I, the mere proprietress of the Fonda Franca, was born to serve them. The situation has grown worse lately, although the police assure me that sooner or later they will put an end to this. Sergeant Consuelo stopped by recently to say he was coming to grips with the “refugee situation,” as he calls it, although I am less than convinced of his sincerity. (His breath was heavy with alcohol, and he kept forgetting my name.)
The rudeness of these people is miraculous to behold. I try to tell myself that they do not know any better. It is all a matter of breeding. They don’t know—or care—that my father was a member of the city council in Nice or that he was trained in law and accountancy at the University of Paris. I can still see him, the dear man, in his navy pinstriped waistcoat (unbuttoned), his collar staves (undone), his stocking feet propped on a velvet ottoman while he read the newspaper or the novels of Anatole France. There are few men around these days of my father’s caliber. The new men have no sense of civic pride, and duty means nothing to them. They sneer and scoff. It is not their fault, perhaps, given the general state of our culture. But whose fault is it? The blame must lie somewhere.
We had a large, sunny flat on the avenue Victor Hugo, with two bedrooms for servants. Huge plane trees shaded the building in summer, and one could buy warm chestnuts from a nearby vendor as the leaves turned yellow and swirled in small clouds along the curbside. My sisters and I wore dresses from Paris—almost all of them from Chanteque, where my mother had an account; we ate chocolates from Switzerland and learned how to play the viola and to dance. On two occasions we spent extended holidays with a distant relative in Besançon. The citadel in that jewel of a city stays with me, its image of impregnability.
My father’s fortunes dwindled in the late twenties, which was sad. Once I tried to get him to explain what was wrong, and he said, “Little girls know nothing of finance.” He had no gift for politics, I’m afraid, which is a bad thing for a politician. Nice was rife in those days with the worst sort of maneuvering and backbiting, and there were deceptive types in all branches of government. Someone accused my father of embezzling money, and he was put on trial. One of his so-called friends said the worst things about him, but the case was ultimately dismissed. It was groundless, of course. But my father never recovered from the shame (the local newspapers carried the story on the front page). Even worse, his investments on the Bourse were shortly thereafter sucked into a vortex by the collapse of the world economy; indeed, they were utterly worthless by 1930.
Mother could not weather the vicissitudes of life, and she died of a broken heart in 1933, but not before she and Father were forced to abandon the apartment where they had spent their married life together. They exchanged it for something infinitely smaller and less substantial, in a district where I as a young child had been forbidden to play. It was too frightful and humiliating. My lessons in art and music ground to a halt. All the goodness seemed to disappear from my life.
I met my husband, Claudio Ruiz, in a hotel in Nice. I had become desk manager at the Clarion, a pleasant hotel right on the water, and he was staying there on holiday. Like my father, he was a man of some distinction and education. He joined the Civil Guards during the war in Spain, when we were living in Barcelona, and soon rose to the rank of captain. General Franco himself once pinned a ribbon to his chest in Madrid, he was that heroic. But heroes have a way of dying young. Claudio was killed by a stray sniper bullet while crossing a square in Lérida, in Catalonia. If what they told me is true, he was assassinated by the POUM or some such group. I could never keep all the factions straight in that war, nor could Claudio. What he really preferred was a strong monarchy. Kings and queens, nobility and a tradition of honor. “You cannot have an ordered world without kings and queens,” he used to say. “Anarchy does not exist in the natural world. Look around you. Do you see the ants scattering a million different ways? Do the lakes try to rise above the mountains?”
My life became more difficult after Claudio’s death. Our daughter, Suzanne, was an infant, and I had to fight with his family to get my inheritance. It was quite humiliating. There is nothing worse than a family squabble over money. Two years ago, as part of the settlement, I was offered the Fonda Franca by Claudio’s great-aunt, an eighty-year-old crone who had obviously grown tired of Port-Bou. I saw here my opportunity and seized it. While not a lavish place, the Fonda Franca has its charms.
The thought of returning to Nice occurred, but I take some comfort in the distance that exists between my family and myself. My sisters, who have never seen the Fonda Franca, are apparently fond of bragging that I own a grand hotel on the Spanish Riviera. The Spanish Riviera!
If I were to speak objectively, I would call Port-Bou a dump. Its meager clutch of houses offers nothing in the way of social life. There is no gracious living, no supportive community of like-minded people. I quite enjoy the mayor, Señor López, who is radiantly senile, but the village physician, Dr. Ortega, grumbles about everything. Our priest, Father Murillo, is rumored to have a degree in philosophy from the university in Salamanca—an ancient and respectable institution—but one would never guess it from his conversation. He plays cards all day in the Café Moka, drinking vino con gas and making rude jokes about women. One hears terrible stories about him, but they are probably not true, or not completely true. (I dislike going to confession, nevertheless. One can smell the wine on his breath in the dark little cubicle, and one does not trust his penances.)
There is an elderly English duchess who lives in a spacious white villa just along the coast, though she never deigns to associate with people of the village. In her mind, we are all peasants, the hoi polloi, even savages. (You know what the English are like!) She has a shiny black Hispano and a Maltese chauffeur. General Franco will, I suspect, take care of her in good time. The English are not welcome here.
I am glad to say that life has not been devoid of color. My classmate and dear friend, Valerie Frunot, once had an apartment overlooking the old harbor in Antibes, and I spent many weekends there in summer as a young girl. It was lovely to see the yachts, with their crisp white sails skittering along the horizon. Valerie was later sent to a lycée in Paris, where she met and married an international banker. For reasons I cannot fathom, she does not respond to my occasional letters. I suspect she was troubled by my father’s declining fortunes. Bad luck rubs off.
It goes without saying that I have dined in many well-known restaurants in Paris, including Chez Lumiet and the St-Jacques. My mother’s second cousin by marriage, Madame Felice de Cluny, once lived on the Place des Vosges in a house with a frontal view of the King’s Pavilion—not far from where Victor Hugo himself used to live. She was driven into poverty, as it were, by a sudden change in her husband’s fortunes and is now living with her sister-in-law in Rouen. How the mighty have fallen!
Suzanne is seven now, with dark Spanish eyes like her father’s. Her chestnut-colored hair droops in ringlets over her collar, rather fetchingly. She is a wonderful girl, but it has not been easy to raise a child in this meager village; there is no one for her to play with, nowhere for her to go. I sometimes worry about her future, but that will have to wait.
When our material conditions improve, and the war is over, I will take her to Paris for a proper season. I must introduce her to her great-uncle, Dr. Maurice Berlot, who has a lucrative medical practice on the rue St-Denis. (His wife, I must confess, has never been welcoming. I tried to visit them once, several years ago, but she complained of headaches and refused to let me stay with them. It was excruciating, especially since I had Claudio with me. I had to invent the most appalling stories to protect Claudio from Madame Berlot’s utter failure of courtesy.)
Suzanne attends the local school, but she does not like it. The teacher, Señor Rodriguez, seems to lack the power to inspire his pupils. Though he has been teaching here for thirty-five years, he was never properly certified. “Señor Rodriguez is foolish,” Suzanne has told me. “His hands are always shaking, and he smells bad. The other children are hooligans.” I quite agree with her about the other children, but what is one to do?
I feel quite lucky to be in Spain, since France is crumbling: Revolutionaries clog the streets, and riffraff wander the back roads. A former schoolmate of mine who lives in Tours wrote to me only last week to say there is no end of trouble. “The trains are full of Gypsies and Jews,” she says. “No one is safe anymore.” You pay more for a loaf of bread today than you paid for a decent loin of beef in my childhood.
The world appears to hate the Germans, but they only want to restore order. Hitler and the National Socialists have tried to encourage in the citizens of Poland, Belgium, and France a sense of civic responsibility, which is always a good thing. General Franco holds many of the same goals for Spain, and one sees the improvements (although they occur slowly in a backward country such as this one). The streets of Madrid sparkle for the first time in decades, the train service is reliable and inexpensive, and most of the anarchists have been put in graveyards or jails, where they belong. The general has campaigned against drunkenness, and it has largely worked; at least one no longer stumbles over bodies on the sidewalks of the capital! A new spirit of vigilance is alive in Spain, and it will soon waken in France and elsewhere. It may even come to Port-Bou in time.
I do not like Hitler himself, not as a man. From what they say, he is a megalomaniac. This absurd goose-stepping of his troops is surely a bad sign: Pomp is one thing, preening another. In the newsreels, one sees a glint of insanity in the man’s eyes, and his little mustache twitches when he speaks. I am told that his accent is atrocious. But sometimes one has to endure a rude display of egotism, and petty vanities, in a politician, especially when times are bad. Hitler has surely done a lot of good for the Germans, and they seem to appreciate his efforts.
One day (if all goes well) I will sell the Fonda Franca and move back to the Riviera. It would be pleasant to end my days in a small hotel by the sea: a whitewashed cosmos, with gilded mirrors and nut-brown parquet floors. I’d fling open the tall wooden shutters of my bedroom each morning in summer to address the water, the bluest of skies, the orange sun. Flowers would droop and dangle from dozens of clay pots lined up like soldiers along the ivy-clad walls of my garden. And I would drink café au lait with a ruined Russian princess all morning on the terrace until it was too hot to stay outside a moment longer. For relief, I might swim in the sea or retreat to my library, where books and pictures would delight me throughout the afternoon. Later, after a deep siesta, I’d dine with a handful of distinguished guests, who would invite me to their houses in Paris, in Milano, in Munich. “I’m afraid I don’t have time,” I’d be forced to say. “I almost never leave the coast anymore. But you are so kind to ask.”
The Fonda Franca sits in the oldest garden in the village, on a limestone cliff, with sea views that rival those of Amalfi, where Claudio and I spent our honeymoon at the Hotel Luna. (The padrone told us that Richard Wagner lived in this hotel some years before and wrote Parsifal there. It is so peculiar how little details like this will stick in one’s brain like a fly in toffee.) As in Amalfi, the air is scented with lavender and thyme, and there are clusters of lemon and olive trees mixing with tall cypresses. The local wines are surprisingly good, especially the whites, which are dry and fragrant. I try to keep a small cellar well stocked, but it is not easy—everything is so expensive.
I occasionally play Parsifal on the gramophone these days. The music reminds me of a world elsewhere, a larger and grander place, where dignity and aspiration are respected, even revered, and where the mysterious elements of life are simply taken for granted. There is so little else to bank on, to lure one into the future.
I pity my poor Suzanne. She will inherit an indecent and impoverished world, unless some drastic cleansing occurs; this war may well provide such a cleansing, yet somehow I doubt it. The Great War did nothing of the kind.
The Fonda Franca was badly in need of repair when I took it over. It was dismaying at first, though I did the best I could with the small amount of capital at my disposal for refurbishing. There are two main floors, with four rooms to rent on each. Suzanne and I occupy a small flat on the ground floor, at the back, with French doors in our sitting room that open onto a small pool, which attracts wonderful birds.
The high ceilings in the public rooms give the hotel a certain elegance, although the plaster is cracked in many places; in one bedroom, a vast chunk has broken off, and the joists have been exposed. In another, the chandelier has recently come crashing to the floor; fortunately, it was occupied at the time by a soporific gentleman from Romania, who seemed not to notice. The crash woke everyone but him!
There is a toilet at the end of the corridor on each floor, and only in the past few months have they been brought up to standard. One sits in relative comfort on the wooden seats, which were made in England, and pulls a tasseled green rope to flush. The gurgle and sump is lovely to hear when the mechanism is working properly. “A good toilet is the beginning of prosperity,” my father used to say. He made sure that the Hôtel de Ville in Nice, where he worked, had toilets in perfect working order. (He would have hated most of the toilets in Spain, where the Arab tradition of a hole in the floor has prevailed, even at some of the good hotels in Madrid.)
The dining room still needs work. The table linen is shabby, and the room is far too dark, largely because it faces northwest. A southern exposure is crucial in a good dining room. The floor has been lacquered brownish black, and that poses a small problem: No matter how bright the day, the floor exudes a lugubriousness in keeping with itself. I fight back with potted plants, with flowers in season, and with colorful paintings, but there is only so much one can do about a dark room. A proper crystal chandelier would help, perhaps a Bavarian one, but I cannot afford one now, since fewer and fewer of my guests seem willing or able to pay their bills. It has become quite maddening, the way they all take advantage of me! My establishment should be called Madame’s Poorhouse.
My hospitality is often noted, but I have had it with scroungers and misfits, bohemians and wanderers. They flee France in droves, hiding in hay carts, tunneling like moles through the filthy dirt, scaling mountains like Alpine goats, tiptoeing like thieves past the Spanish customs, who cannot possibly cope with the numbers. Sergeant Consuelo has said he would like the people of Port-Bou to assist in small ways. “How can we do everything by ourselves?” he has said. “Our law-abiding citizens must cooperate!”
He could certainly do more than he does, but I will help when I can, as I can. Last week, I told him of the presence in my hotel of a man who was obviously destined for the hangman’s noose. He had apparently crossed the border on foot, although he reeked of fuel. His snarled beard and gap-toothed smile alerted me to the problem, and though he paid in cash upon arrival (as I insisted), I had good reason to suspect him. His papers did not seem in order, his French was foul, his Spanish nonexistent. I believe he spoke Hungarian or some such thing. “He is obviously a Bolshevik spy,” said Consuelo, after questioning him for twenty minutes or so in his room at the hotel. The man was turned over to the French border police, who have become less bungling in the past year or so.
A number of army officers from León made reservations this morning by telephone: four men for four nights. I am looking forward to their arrival, this weekend, since one of them knew my husband at the military academy. He has promised to bring a photograph of Claudio, aged twenty or so. It is a shame I never took pictures myself, but I just didn’t. The result is that Suzanne has virtually no idea of what her father looked like, so any photograph is welcome.
I must clear out the hotel before they get here. It will not please them to consort with the types who now seem my only clientele.
Three days ago, a couple of silly French girls arrived. They are only eighteen or nineteen, and I saw no need to question their stories. The papers they showed me were in order. I suppose they simply want to get away from France at this time, and I can understand their motives; nevertheless, one cannot be too careful. The girls plan to stay here until tomorrow or the next day, before continuing on to Portugal—where everyone is headed. One of them has a sister who will arrive soon, perhaps tomorrow.
Another suspicious guest is an elderly gentleman from Belgium, Professor Lott. He has been staying here for the past week. If one can believe his story, he taught history in Brussels for some years. I quite like his manner, which is discreet, but there is something evasive about him. “This is certainly true, madame,” he says repeatedly, even when I have not asked him to verify a statement. I would distrust him were he any younger, but he is probably seventy-five or eighty. A man of that age deserves some credit and respect. Moreover, one cannot expect perfection in one’s guests. This is the wrong sort of business for a purist.
Three Germans stumbled into the hotel this evening. They are obviously Jews: a mother and her son, who say very little, and a rumpled little man called Dr. Benjamin, who appears to have injured his leg along the way. He hobbles about, groaning and wincing, with a briefcase that never leaves his sight. I do not think he has shaved properly in several days, and his rancid odor will be unwelcome in my dining room.
The evening buffet had just finished for the night by the time they got here, but they seemed terribly hungry, so I took pity. What else can one do? A human being is a human being, despite his or her passport, or lack thereof. I put out a plate of cold meat, olives, and cheese, with a loaf of bread, then tried not to look as they devoured everything within ten minutes. The boy, who is called José, ate like a pig, as boys of his age invariably do. I kept Suzanne well away from these people.
They grew quite talkative after a few bites of food, and produced an exotic array of travel documents. That they are forgeries is not in question: The color of the paper is all wrong, and the stamps are ludicrous. Even the photographs are blurred. But these people do not seem like criminals or spies. Just more Jews on the run. The world is overwhelmed by Jews, as usual. Hitler has sent many of them to work camps or deported them, and the French will soon follow suit. But where will they go? Spain does not want them now any more than it did in the fifteenth century. America will absorb them, perhaps; the Americans have a way of absorbing everything like a great putrid sponge. One will soon be able to smell them across the Atlantic.
Dr. Benjamin claims French citizenship, and he speaks the language well enough, with only the slightest rustle of an accent. I heard him whispering in the parlor with Professor Lott a while ago, and I wondered if this was a secret rendezvous of some kind. Why else the camaraderie? It would be too awful if the Fonda Franca became a well-known watering hole for spies, the sort of thing one reads about in cheap thrillers.
I have put Dr. Benjamin in the worst room, the one with the hole in the ceiling. His friends, the Gurlands, will stay in the next room, which has two beds. They are apparently intent upon leaving in the morning, on the Madrid train, and this is all well and good. It would be dreadful if they were here when the officers from Madrid arrived. It would make no sense to them that I, the widow of Claudio Ruiz, should be harboring such people.