Chapter 15

Stanley lay perdue for the next few days. But I now knew where she was living—in an ugly new building near the Place Magnan. Growing impatient, I called on her.

Her two-room apartment was comfortable but cheerless, with tubular furniture, bare floors, a tiled bathroom and a view of a sunless cemented patio. There was a rudimentary kitchen in the bathroom, with a small gas-stove, a cupboard for dishes and a garbage-can; the washbasin doubled as the sink. She showed me everything proudly. She was wearing white satin lounging pyjamas cut with the same economy as her duck trousers.

‘I can’t offer you anything to drink,’ she said. ‘But would you like a glass of milk and a biscuit?’

The milk, served in jelly-jars, was parboiled, fortified, homogenized and tasted like the dregs of an English rice pudding, and the biscuit was lined with stale fig-paste. I noticed a ukulele on the table beside her.

‘A little. Would you like to hear something?’ She picked it up and ran her fingers over the strings. ‘Mozart, Ravel, Segovia, or just something simple?’

She handled the little instrument as if it were a guitar, and with corresponding skill. First she played the simple refrain, slowly and clearly, underlining the melody with broad sweeping chords, then rendered the swift little verse in dance rhythm; then repeated the slow refrain with a few grace notes. After that she kept building on both with taste and invention, decorating them with surprising obbligati. Her eyes had grown remote, her straw-sandalled foot tapped the chair-cushion. She cuddled the absurd instrument like a baby—and all at once, as if irresistibly compelled, she began to sing in a small husky voice as true as a tuning-fork and with heart-rending pathos:

O see, what careless Love has done,

For now my apron strings won’t tie—

O see, what careless Love has done!

O what will my poor mother say?

She’ll fold her hands and hold her tongue,

For she had beaus when she was young ...

She broke off suddenly. ‘It just goes on and on. But the melody is nice, isn’t it? It’s old English.’

Her mouth drooped. ‘I’m not. I’m supposed to be a violinist but I’m no damn good. Don’t talk to me about it. What do you do?’

‘You know,’ she said sipping her milk and looking at me over the rim of her jelly-jar, ‘I think we’re going to be real friends.’

The next morning she joined us on the beach outside the Dora Melrose. She was wearing a tan raincoat with a belt, epaulets and revers. She and Bob looked each other over carefully: it was clear they were not going to hit it off.

‘Of course not,’ said Graeme. ‘Sit down. And take off your coat or you’ll be roasted.’

‘You should have brought your bathing suit,’ I said as I helped him scoop a seat for her among the stones.

We sat and talked for a while. She spoke of New York, and Bob asked her about a number of famous people whom she had never heard of.

‘No, I lived in Gramercy Square. With a man called Jackson. Did you ever hear of him—Derr Jackson? He’s disgustingly rich.’

‘He wasn’t dirty at all. Just a little odd. He was very nice, he taught me all kinds of things—about books and pictures, I mean.’

‘He told me to throw out Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst. And he lent me Ben Hecht and Cabell and Percy Marks.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’ she said. ‘They’re all pretty good writers, aren’t they? Better than Ferber and Hurst, anyway. I liked Jurgen, it made me cry: that poor man.’

‘He has strong opinions about modern books,’ said Graeme. ‘He doesn’t like any of them. He’s a writer.’

‘Oh! I never knew. It’s just like violinists. You’re never supposed to like anybody later than Paganini.’

‘That’s just it. You go by what Liszt said. The big thing is, he’s not in competition, he’s dead. You’ve no idea how jealous musicians are. I had a girl friend who slept with Heifetz once and no one at the conservatory would speak to her for a week.’

‘Did you know,’ said Graeme after a while, ‘Paganini actually died here, right in Nice?’

‘We should all go and look for the place this afternoon,’ I said. ‘It’ll be somewhere in the old town. When did he die?’

‘On the 27th of May 1840,’ said Stanley reverently. ‘Of phathisis. Something in his throat.’

‘I’ll bet the house is still standing,’ said Graeme. ‘We’ll have a swim before lunch first.’

Stanley took off her coat and appeared in a one-piece white bathing suit that emphasized her Maillolesque build.

Bob was coming out of the water as we went in. ‘I’m going in to do some work before lunch,’ he said shortly.

‘Do you think he’s still mad?’ said Stanley, bobbing up and down in the waves. ‘I guess I’ll have to read some of his books and tell him how good they are. That’ll fix things up.’

She met us in a café on the corner of the Place Magnan, wearing a white pleated skirt, a blue sailor’s jersey with transversal white stripes and a beret: whatever she wore gave her an outré, carnival appearance.

‘You say he died here?’ said the snuffy little one-armed man behind the desk. It was obvious he regarded the idea as unfavourable to tourism. ‘You might look for him in the cemetery.’

‘We’re really more interested in seeing the house where he died,’ said Graeme. ‘I heard there was a plaque on it.’

‘I doubt it. Paganini,’ muttered the old man. ‘An Italian. Was he a bandit?’

‘Oh, an artiste, said the old man scornfully. ‘My dear sir, we have plaques and statues to the memory of great statesmen and illustrious generals like Marshal Masséna, who was actually born in Nice. But I’m afraid we would have no record of any foreign violinist.’

The old man clamped his lips shut in a silent, hideous rage, picked up a newspaper, and waved his stump at us in dismissal.

‘We could wander around the old town and try there,’ I said. ‘It’ll be nice and cool.’

We entered the maze of narrow streets and in five minutes were completely lost. Stanley was enthralled.

‘This is the nicest part of the whole city,’ she said. ‘All these little outdoor shops and pushcarts. And the old, old houses, so mysterious! As though they were falling down. I’d like to live here.’

I had often felt the same way about some of the older parts of Montreal, but I remembered what the houses were like inside—the darkness, dirt, smells and plumbing; here, things would be even worse.

We seemed to be moving constantly into poorer quarters. The streets grew narrower, the houses more broken-down, the washing more ragged, the children dirtier. At last we stopped.

‘All I know is, we’re lost,’ I said. ‘You can’t even see the sun for direction. How do we get out of here?’

A short thickset man in black came around a corner, singing in a loud, florid baritone. He stopped as soon as he saw us and swept his hat off.

‘Gentlemen and lady,’ he said. ‘We meet again! What a pleasure. You are looking for our little theatre, no doubt. Let me show you the way. We have a matinée that is just beginning. The price is much lower in the afternoon. Only fifty francs for each of you. An excellent movie, La Bonne à tout faire, very blue!’

‘What we are really looking for,’ said Graeme firmly, ‘is the house where Paganini died. Is it near here, do you know?’

‘Paganini? The immortal Paganini? The great magician? Follow me, gentlemen and lady, it will be a pleasure.’

‘I’ll bet he’s taking us to the theatre,’ I said to Graeme. “‘Magician”, did you hear?’

The man in black, carolling, led us through streets that were still more poverty stricken. We seemed to be constantly going down back lanes and alleys; several times we passed under archways that were almost tunnels; once we went right through the back of a grocery shop and came out on the other side. Suddenly we turned a corner into a blaze of sunlight and our guide swept off his hat and pointed dramatically to a narrow four-storey house of peeling brown plaster with tightly shuttered windows.

I looked up and saw a weathered stone plaque, the same colour as the wall, with the heavily capitalized name niccolo paganini cut into it, surrounded by some writing in ornate smaller script.

‘Gentlemen and lady, our little theatre is right next door, down the passage. I will make you a special price of one hundred francs for the three of you. Agreed?’

‘We’ll think it over,’ said Graeme. ‘In any case, we thank you many times for showing us the way here. We are indeed obliged.’

‘A pleasure.’ He swept his hat low, paused for an instant, then shrugged his shoulders and went off down the street.

We sat on the edge of a stone horse-trough and looked at our find. It was a quite ordinary-looking house, rectangular and without ornament, with a perfumer’s shop, a stationer’s and a dry-cleaning establishment on the ground floor. I could see no concierge’s lodge.

“‘In questa casa”,’ he said. ‘It’s all in Italian. Let me see: “In this house towards evening on the 27th of May in the year 1840, died the great Niccolo Paganini, a Genovese. Here his soul rejoined the Muses and was caught up once again in the eternal harmony of things.”’

We went into the dry-cleaning shop that spanned the main entrance and asked the patronne if we could see the room where the great man had died.

‘Impossibile,’ she said crossly in Italian. ‘This is not a public building. Everything is locked up anyway.’

‘Isn’t there a concierge?’ Graeme asked in his rather shaky Italian. ‘We would pay something.’

An old woman in a black shawl came shuffling from the back of the shop, a hand cupped to her ear.

We followed her through the back of the shop and came out into a handsome stairwell that at one time must have connected directly with the street. Panting, a hand pressed to her spine, Mamma Lucia toiled up the shallow steps and paused on the first landing. The whole place was unspeakably dirty and deserted; it looked as if no one had lived there for twenty years. We went on up to the second-floor landing, where the old woman clung to the stair-rail, her hand now pressed to her side. She nodded towards an ornate peeling door. ‘One moment and I will open it for you.’

She produced a bunch of keys and began trying them all in turn. At last the lock turned with a screech; she opened the door and gestured silently.

We went in. The room was large, almost pitch dark, covered with dust and absolutely empty.

Mamma Lucia was waiting on the landing outside; she held out her hand and Graeme gave her seven francs. ‘Thank you, Madame. You have been very kind.’

We followed her down the stairs and found the woman of the drycleaning shop waiting at the bottom and looking up, her hands on her hips.

There was a rapid-fire exchange in Italian: the patronne seemed to be accusing Mamma Lucia of fraud. The old woman ran into the shop. The other was still scolding her as we left. The last words I heard were Mamma Lucia’s. ‘What difference does it make?’ she was squeaking. ‘It was just the same as the room above! One empty room is as good as another...’

‘I’d like to stop at the first bar and have a drink,’ she said. ‘It’s my treat.’

We had three brandies at the counter of a little bar around the corner. It had been a wonderful afternoon.

‘You’re not doing any work,’ he told me. ‘How do you expect to get anywhere if you don’t work every day? As for jelly-bottom, she’s just a run-of-the-mill parasite. You’re wasting your time with her.’

I see now it was more than that: it was a matter of choosing between enjoyment and achievement, between the demands of life and art. The choice is presented several times to everyone at a very early period in his life, and after he has chosen one or the other a few times in succession his course is almost irrevocably determined. Such apparently random and unimportant decisions are much more serious than they appear; for, alas, the direction of one’s life does not wait on maturity or wisdom, but is settled in the most offhand manner by emotion, appetite, and caprice. It was Balzac, I think, who said it was vital for a young man to decide very early on his ambition in life, simply because he was bound to attain it. But I did not know this, and telling myself once again that I could always return to the toilsome life of art, I chose once more the primrose path of present enjoyment. The important thing in life was to have a good time.

It is hard to say now whether I regret this reiterated choice whole-heartedly. Considering where it has led me—to the breakdown of my health, the failure of my hopes, the frightening prospect of an early death—I should be more remorseful and repentant than I am, and thus able to give good advice to others. But I can only see, if the choice were presented again, I would be bound to repeat it; and all I can promise myself at the moment is to be a little more careful in exploiting the resources of pleasure in the future—for something tells me I am not going to die, and there is going to be a future after all.

Thus the attractions of literature and authorship yielded to those of Stanley Dahl. The former, in fact, had hardly a chance: my own youth as well as hers, her charm and simplicity, the easiness of our friendship, the sensual feast she spread before me at an age when desire is always clamorous and always insatiable, all carried the day. She also had an allowance of $150 a month from some mysterious source (possibly Dirty Jackson) and seemed ready to share it with Graeme and me.

‘Say,’ she told us a few days after our Paganini excursion, ‘my month in the apartment is up tomorrow and your Madame Gyp has a nice big room free. I think I’ll move in—if you and Graeme don’t mind.’

‘I’m going to Athens,’ he said ‘to have another look at the Parthenon. You three lovebirds have a good time. I’ll be seeing you.’