I do desire we may be better strangers.
Shakespeare, As You Like It
THERE are myriad facets to invisibility, and not all of them reflect comfort or security. Often I have been in pain, in my chosen role of The Stranger. Just as often I have counted on being so, and was not. Learning to be invisible has, of course, some moments worse than others. Perhaps I felt them most fiercely during the first months of my stay in Aix in 1954. I was alone in Europe for the first time in my life really; always before I had been the companion of someone well loved, who knew more than I did about everything, even things like tickets and monies. I had been younger, too, and full of confidence. Now I was single, with two small daughters, and a world war and some private battles had come between the two women of myself, so that I felt fumbling and occasionally even frightened.
Perhaps it was a little like learning to walk again: I must try hard to trust my weakened muscles, my halting tongue, and most of all the dulled wits in my graying head, so that my children would not suspect me and lose confidence. Once I got them into the dubious haven of “family life” with the Wytenhoves, I faced the unfamiliar prospect of long days which were my own responsibility. I went at it doggedly.
I could count on two or three walks across the Old Town to see Anne and Mary as they got out of school at noon, and then in the late afternoon. We would go to the Deux Garçons or the Glacier together for an ice or a sandwich: that would take two hours in almost every day.
Then coffee and reading in bed would use another half-hour or so each morning.
Slow roamings took another two hours or three … drifting along the streets to listen to the fountains and ruminate upon the proportions of the rose-yellow façades, three-to-six-to-nine, and the cornices, and the corner Madonnas, and the caryatids turning breasts and backs, male and sometimes female, to my gaze; and the open markets in three squares and occasionally along the narrow streets; and the libraries and museums: all these accustomed me to my invisibility.
Only occasionally did this pattern desert me, for a few moments of sharp loneliness which had nothing to do with my outer life, for I was received everywhere with the dispassionate courtesy of the French people. Friends of friends had sent introductions to me. Ladies of different levels were generous to me and helped me find lodgings and apples and knitting shops. I soon knew where to go for different kinds of books, and early learned the trick of roaming through the dime store, Monoprix, when I knew what something looked like but could not find the word. Paper clips, I learned from a delighted clerk, were called trombones, because that is the way they are.
All these warm details of my attempts to be independent of my own self were heartening, but could not ward off forever the flashes of complete aloneness, which I came to watch for as warily as any lost hunter. One danger for me, I soon found, was irritation, exasperation, impatience. I often felt them, not for myself in the main but for the people I was coming to know.
It sometimes seemed unbelievable to me that mature men and women who had withstood all the trials of wars and invasions, imprisonment, grief and hunger could continue to be stupid. Stupid they often were, no matter how tutored or naturally intelligent.
At times there seemed to me to be no order in their actions, but only a fumbling confusion quite separated from what they must surely know instinctively. Such waste of human spirit, I would groan, when I watched Fernande stumbling through ten hours of unthinking labor for what might possibly need one hour, just because that was the way her mother and grandmother had done … or Madame Lanes long after midnight, her face drawn with fatigue, secretly darning her white gloves for tea the next day because no lady had ever worn beige gloves or black gloves at four o’clock, in public, in Aix, winter or summer, cold or hot … or people hurriedly carrying one small pitcher to the fountain five times before lunch, instead of two small pitchers or even two large ones in one or two trips.
It hurt me to see this senseless extravagance of the strength that even some ten years after the last Occupation was plainly drained in all these sad wearied people. It was not brisk efficiency I wanted for them, but I could not help feeling a kind of cosmic exasperation at their stubborn clinging to patterns which had long since been improved upon. Sometimes it seemed to me that the women I came to know in Aix felt an apparently voluptuous pleasure in exhausting themselves with archaic ceremonies which taxed them almost past remedy.
The meals at Madame Lanes’ were a good example of this, with their intolerable changing of plates and silverware and their dutiful chatter. Behind it, I knew of the dismal skullery kitchen with its inadequate dribble of cold water and its diminishing stock of chinaware, and its desperately thin larder. I knew of the frantic scribblings and figurings for each day’s market list, and of the hurried scurryings through the town to find beans or even bread a few cents cheaper. I knew that the wine in the fine glasses was watered to its limit. I knew that the current slavey’s eyes were swollen because the cook had hit her for having an epileptic seizure between the third and fourth laborious courses.
And always Madame Lanes was imperturbable and gracious, and did not push us genteelly out of the drawing room until ten at night, when she would firmly close the door, groan once or twice, and then sit down to the game table, to attend to her accounts until time to fall onto the little divan she kept half-hidden behind the well-polished grand piano (every other bed in the apartment was rented, to keep up this desperate gentility).
All this impinged upon my spirits in an occasional but dangerous thrust of world-pain, especially in the first and most solitary months of my new role of invisibility, and I must go raging out into the streets and walk with my own ghosts until we were amiable once more and safely isolated from the confusion of the others.
At first I felt lonely, now and then, because of the language. I soon got used to French again, although never with the elasticity of my younger years. Gradually I accustomed myself to the realization that I would never speak the language as I had always dreamed of doing, and that I must content myself with my blessed capacity to savor it when other people spoke or wrote it. My conversation was for the most part devoted to pleasant chitchat with market women and waiters, but my ears and eyes grew more and more attuned to words, and often I felt quietly complacent, to keep my solitude in hand so deftly with a lecture on the radio or a poem from La Nouvelle Revue.
A side result of this preoccupation with the language was my keener sensing of my own tongue. I read even the banalities of an American newsweekly with cleared eyes and ears. I re-read paperbacks like Brave New World and Swift’s letters to his domestics with a fresh delight. Harmless drollery like Cold Comfort Farm became almost unbearably funny to me. I was like a person giddy with a fever, amenable to every drift of meaning. It was a kind of ointment to my creaking spiritual muscles, in those first months of self-inflicted development as a ghost.
As I remember now, I was very conscious for quite a time of being hopelessly and irrevocably an outlander, and more especially an American outlander. This feeling had nothing to do with my own snobbishness. I have never felt any need to apologize for my mannerisms, my beliefs, my accent, or anythings else that betrays my Yankee birthright. Occasionally I have met people of older countries who have seemed patronizing about my less polished reactions than their own, but if they have been ill-bred enough to sneer a little, I have dismissed them as such.
In Aix I came in for a certain amount of the old patronizing surprise that I did not have an “American accent,” which I do; that I did not talk through my nose, which I don’t; that I knew how to bone a trout on my plate and drink a good wine (or even how to drink at all), which I do. I accepted all this without a quiver: it was based on both curiosity and envy.
What was harder to take calmly, especially on the days when my spiritual skin was abnormally thin, was the hopeless admission that the people I really liked would never accept me as a person of perception and sensitivity perhaps equal to their own. I was forever in their eyes the product of a naïve, undeveloped, and indeed infantile civilization, and therefore I was incapable of appreciating all the things that had shaped them into the complicated and deeply aware supermen of European culture that they firmly felt themselves to be.
It did not matter if I went four times to hear The Marriage of Figaro during the Festival: I was an American culture-seeker, doing the stylish thing, and I could not possibly hear in it what a Frenchman would hear. This is of course probable; but what occasionally depressed me was that I was assumed to have a deaf ear because I was a racially untutored American instead of simply another human being.
(Once my ten-year-old Anne came home from the Dominican day school greatly upset because a little girl whose father had been imprisoned when the Yanks occupied Aix said, “Ugh … I smell an American.” Anne was the only American there, and when she told me of it she said seriously, “I probably do smell a little, because I haven’t taken a bath in a tub for quite a while, but I don’t smell because I am an American. Dirty American girls smell just like dirty French girls.”)
Sometimes at Madame Lanes’ I would be hard put to it not to ask to be excused from the table in a silent pet, when she would ask me blandly if I objected to some delicious dish which she had ordered to please one of the other boarders.
“I know you Americans don’t care what you eat,” she would state, and it was not until I knew her better that I could hear the friendliness in her teasing. “It always amazes me about how little you notice flavor and seasoning. You seem to have no definite tastes … only prejudices.” And so on.
Then she would detail the gastronomical requirements of her other more demanding and therefore more sensitive and worldly boarders: the Swiss must have cream sauces with their meat; the Swedes would not tolerate garlic, olive oil or even tomatoes; the English wanted mustard always with meat; the Corsicans loathed cream sauce as well as mustard, but could not subsist without garlic, olive oil and tomatoes. Furthermore, Frenchmen from different regions must eat their native dishes and follow their set table-habits. All this was in exciting and glamorous contrast to the sterile monotony of American tastes: we apparently cared nothing at all for the niceties of palate.
And so on.
And so on.
No, I would rage silently. No, we crude Yanks are too polite, too well taught, to demand Boston baked beans or tamales from a French hostess. And I would smile politely, and curse the forthright boarders from Stockholm and Ajaccio, and enjoy what was set before me, for it was good.
Gradually I stopped my secret flashes of exasperation at the table, and knew with an increasing awareness that there were indeed many areas of perception where I would always remain innocent, at least more so than a person of an older wearier race could be. It became a strangely satisfying thing to know, on the other hand, that there were so many things I could and did appreciate, for which people like Madame would never credit me. It helped me to live alone from them, which I had to do anyway.
My outward blandness with Madame Lanes became increasingly sweetened with a real affection and an understanding of her veiled mockery, but occasionally in Aix I decided swiftly to wipe out this or that sneering person from my life and thoughts. It was as satisfying as discarding a rotten apricot from a bowl of fresh fruit, or lopping off a dead branch from a healthy tree. I had no personal feeling about either them or my ruthlessness; I did not care if they found me, the quiet perhaps colorless woman, unperceptive and oafish. I did care that I was thought to be so because I was an American … and when this was made plain in an ill-bred or stupid way, I simply eliminated the culprit.
Once, for instance, I was introduced through friends in Dijon to a very important and in some ways charming older woman. She gave me valuable advice about finding a good family for my children to stay with … things like that. Finally she asked me to have lunch with her and a few people who might be interested in helping me with my French, which, she assured me smoothly, was already past any real need for improvement.
The apartment above the Place des Prêcheurs was beautiful, one of the long airy waxed places that seem to exist only in old French towns, from Paris to Bordeaux to Strasbourg to Marseille. Tall windows looking into the green boughs, curtains drifting over the polished floors, books everywhere, noble armoires lined with padded Provençal cottons: it was a harmonious simplicity, where only man was vile.
My hostess was a short hearty woman, married late in years to a much older man, a retired colonel who mumbled distantly as he came into the drawing room, where a tiny fire burned in the marble hearth and the windows shook a little now and then from the great organ in the Church of the Madeleine next door, playing for a noon Mass.
There was a fire in the dining room too, made like the other one of the five-inch twigs I was soon to grow used to as the only heat in my room at Madame Lanes’.
There were three other guests, two near-mute assistant teachers from the Lycée who might possibly consent to exchange conversation with me once a week, and a red-headed tall thin Englishwoman with a deliberately throbbing bass voice and department store tweeds, who spoke nothing but schoolgirl French to me and often passed me later on the Cours without nodding, pretending not to see me.
At the table I sat next to the Colonel, who ate steadily. He was very senile, and unbelievably obscene in a quiet way which he knew nobody but I could hear. Now and then he would glance slyly at me through his crumbs and driblets, and murmur an invitation straight from the walls of Pompeii, and then chuckle as he popped a whole chestnut tart into his sagging mouth.
Gradually I came to believe, almost frantically, that my hostess had hated my old friends in Dijon since her first college days with them, and that now she was avenging herself, on me, for their greater worth, their brilliance, their strength and bounty. I was her victim. It shook me. She shook me. I could feel my inner head flapping back and forth on its neck like a rag doll’s as she battered me with her merry little chuckles, her understanding glances.
“Tell me, dear lady,” she would shriek down the table at me with a comradely twinkle, “tell me … explain to all of us, how one can dare to call herself a writer on gastronomy in the United States, where, from everything we hear, gastronomy does not yet exist? Explain to us, dear self-styled Gastronomer, to us poor people of this older world …” and so on.
And so on.
The other guests smiled or snorted genteelly, according to their natures, except for the Colonel, who stuffed more sweets into his toothless face. It seemed the longest meal I had ever endured, and its rich tedious courses bit like acid inside me, metamorphosed by anger and ennui.
“And now, dear lady,” my hostess would sing out gaily, “now that we have eaten this little French luncheon, so simple but so typical of our national cuisine, tell us just how you managed to invent such profitable fiction about one of the sciences, when even Brillat-Savarin could not! We await your dictum!”
They would lean forward obediently at her signal, the two girls stunned with food and fear, the Englishwoman rigid with snobbish inferiority. The Colonel would belch and finger his fly under his spotted napkin. I would stiffen my mask and steady my voice behind it, firm in my ruthless decision: I would never speak anything but a civil good day to this person again.
The next day I sent her a huge box, shaped like a coffin woven of reeds and twigs, filled with the most beautiful flowers I could find in Aix, fresh from the gardens of Nice. It was my private funeral piece for her.
All this was good for me. It made me accustom myself to acceptance of my slow evolution as an invisible thing, a ghost. The art of silent anger strengthened me, and as it changed to tolerance I felt even stronger.
The catharsis of pain, I reassured myself sententiously: it is purifying me with all this anger and exasperation, and it does not make loneliness intolerable, but rather betters it. Or maybe, I occasionally confessed, it simply diverts my attention?
Perhaps it was better not to try to remind myself that to the Aixois I was and would remain, no matter how well they might come to know me, an outlander, a tall, middle-aged well-bred American, just as irrevocably as I might have been a Swede or a German or an Italian, except that unlike older nationals I must face always a basic racial naïveté, rather as a callow young clerk in the diplomatic corps must face himself as such in the company of consul generals and ambassadors. I must remain impassive. Inside, my growing ability to be alone would protect me and keep me from being arrogant.
This certitude has, ever since, been of great comfort to me in thin moments.