Ah! what avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
Rudyard Kipling,
The Benefactors
ON my invisible map of Aix, the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta has two lines of sad and bloody ink in its printing that should make it a distressing street for me, but that do not keep me from walking often there with gratification. They are both connected with the old Law School, and one is for a man and both are for words.
Brondino is the man. He is indelibly alive for me, although the last time I saw him he was dying, and later I read that he had indeed snuffed out, like the final inch of a very slender candle. For weeks before that, his bookshop was locked, with a quickly dusty card stuck in the door saying Closed because of illness, and the reprints of pictures which he used to clip on cords strung across his small window were curling and losing their colors in the dampness and the rare sun of the dark narrow street.
That last time, he was climbing painfully out of a taxi to go into his shop, with of course a pile of framed reproductions on the sidewalk and under both his arms. I helped him with them, and he told me that he had been very ill and had submitted to all kinds of tests, which proved at least that his heart was a strong one.
He spoke somewhat hysterically of a miraculous cure that he was being given by a radical young doctor who was despised and feared by the established physicians of that most radically conforming of all towns, Aix. From there he went on to a poster of an exhibit he had sponsored several years before, when his choice of a Picasso sketch of bathers was banned by the City Fathers as lewd. And that reminded him of another case of provincial stupidity, and another, and all the time he was weaving with weakness against his table.
I left as soon as I could. In one direction or another it was Brondino’s usual pattern, impossible to alter or arrest: a half-hour of agreeing and listening, mute in his feverish flow of scorn and erudition … I had an appointment I must keep, and I never saw him again.
The time before that, the next to the last one, I was walking down the Cours past the open-fronted flower shop on the Place Forbin, and there stood my poor little twisted friend leaning against the wall.
He was shocking to see, and I knew that although he actually looked much the same as always, he was in deep pain this time, so that his normally green-gray pallor and the normal suffering in his large sunken eyes were suddenly shocking. It seemed improbable that he would recognize me, so intense was the expression of agony in him; but he took his hand away from the wall when I spoke, and I shook it gently in the inescapable habit of the Midi.
I could not help asking him if he was all right, although the words were fatuous and almost insulting.
He replied with only a little less than his customary flow of impeccable angry French, but this time he was furious not at the government nor the art critics nor the publishers but at his own mortality. His breathing was shallow, and grew lesser with his railing at the pain he was being subjected to, which he considered a personal affront; and after I made sure that he would not let me help him and that he preferred to walk at his own creeping speed to the taxistand, I left him as fast as I could, to save for him some of the air for his diseased and martyred lungs.
I went to the shop a few more times, but it was always closed. I could tell by the occasional new reprints in the dirty window that he was still there occasionally. And I could tell from the withdrawal of my children when I mentioned getting Christmas presents there that they dreaded to see this little tortured man who had for so long been good to them.
When we first came to Aix, and they lived in the old Archbishop’s Palace on the shady square to one side of the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta, perhaps the first or second shop they noticed in their neighborhood was Brondino’s. They stopped always in front of his window, to look at reprints they recognized, or new ones they loved or hated, and he noticed them too with his lost feverish eyes.
One day we went in together and it was as if we had been there before, and when he saw that Anne and Mary knew how to open portfolios and let the pictures stand up or fall forward with hardly a touch, he was as delighted as an innocent child himself, and invited them to come whenever they wished, alone or together or even with me. They accepted gravely, and the invitation always stood and was often used.
When we went away the first time we had an agreement with him to send me posters whenever really good ones came along, for by then he knew my tastes. Of course he never did. I in turn knew him well enough not to expect him to. I never wrote to him, but often, especially when I looked at my favorite of all I had bought from him, the one Marc Chagall did for the town of Vence, I thought poignantly of him and of the murky legends I had half-heard, half-deduced, when I was in Aix.
He was, everyone agreed, eccentric, perhaps mad … not dangerous, but often foolhardy, and as often ridiculous to the straitlaced Tories like Madame Lanes. They shunned him for a radical and perhaps even a Communist, and deplored what was felt to be his strange attraction for the young law students, the foreigners, the struggling artists, the intellectual mavericks of this rigid cultural hub.
Here is what I remember of his history, one person’s vision, distorted, untrue, prejudiced, but which for unknown reasons I heard with my inner ear and saved from all things I did hear straight and not listen to:
He was a professor in the School of Law, and after the Liberation he was put on trial, having been accused of revolutionary activities or at least tendencies toward them. He was revered by many students, largely the hotheads and idealists and most vociferous and of course least acceptable in the stiff academic society of Aix. Because of the inexplicable esteem in which he seemed to be held, he was informed that he would be let free, but free from what I do not know except imprisonment itself, if he would take an oath that he believed in Divine Justice.
He shrugged.
In some embarrassment the Court then said, “Well, perhaps in Human Justice?”
At that he sneered openly, or laughed, or even spat. I do not know any truth at all about this except my own inner recognition of some such admirable follies.
He was allowed to go free, but never again as a teacher of Justice as it is meant in the governmental parlance. So he set himself up, almost next to the old Law School, and for several years sold books of every kind to the loyal and fascinated students.
Gradually he let his obsession for modern art take over most of his ponderously crowded little shop: he had a hundred theories, all passionate of course, about exposing children in schools, and their parents in bars and cafés, to the best of all paintings well but inexpensively reprinted, and he bought piles of good reproductions, so that this unbelievable clutter swelled upward and outward until going into his place was like being a pin pushed into a ripe fruit: it seemed as if a sweet juice of papers and prints and dusty books would spout out into the street through the door.
Almost always other people were there when we were … brave pins. They were elderly decisive nuns buying replicas of all his Last Suppers from Da Vinci to Dali, or bearded young cinéastes discussing Italian camera techniques, or, rarely, people like Picasso or Poulenc or Tailleux shaking Brondino’s hand in a strangely conspiratorial way …
From his taxi drivers and other mutual acquaintances and our own eyes it became plain that at times he was more exalted than at others, and whether it was because of medication or alcohol or plain neurotic exhaustion none seemed to know. I myself would guess that now and then he deliberately overdosed himself with any of a possible dozen modern tranquilizers or mood-changers, from the way he acted, but I doubt that he drank much at all, for I have known people of his same feebly articulated build who reacted much as I think he would have done to alcohol: unrewardingly. However that may be, his absences from the shop became more frequent after we returned to Aix in 1960, and he forgot even more things that he had promised to remember … packages to be mailed, books to be ordered, prints to be laid aside.
Once, for instance, in early January of that year, Donald Friede uncovered a ripe pretty prize in Brondino’s place, a clean and complete run of a series of satirical lithographs by a German artist whose name I forget. He snapped at them like a happy carp, paid for them, and got Brondino’s firm word that they would be in New York within three weeks.
Then, that April, when the children and I returned to Aix from Lugano, Donald asked me to remind Brondino that the prints had not yet arrived. It was our first view of the change in him, the one that seemed to make Anne and Mary unwilling, like most young animals sensing the touch of Death’s finger, to return to the overcrowded excitement of his fat portfolios and all the quick conversation and the purchase of another print, a new Dufy, a forgotten poster …
He promised to send the lithographs to New York at once, and to my embarrassment climbed dangerously up over half-opened cartons of old papers and new books to show me that they were indeed there on a high dirty shelf, wrapped, ready to mail. I should have taken them and sent them. Instead, fearing to offend him, I left him a new copy of the address.
But several months passed, with occasional weary reminders to me from America and from me to Brondino when I could pin him down. Then in November the prints did arrive, in perfect shape, and were even more valuable than Donald had at first suspected. This pleased him because he liked them and had concluded a good bargain, and me because I felt quite sure that Brondino had known all along their real value and had not really cared about either selling or sending them.
Not long before we left Aix the first time, he had said that his only child, a remote handsome girl I had seen once or twice, was applying for a Fulbright to America. I told him that I would be glad to help if I could, but I felt that my suggestion was not of any importance to him and perhaps even a little unwelcome. Then, when we returned, five years later, I asked him about it and he became very sardonic, in a contained quiet way which was more disturbing than his usual furious blast of sarcasm. She had been turned down because of his reputation, he inferred bitterly. There was nothing more for me to say except ask where she was … teaching Greek and Latin in a small provincial high school …
I felt a curious satisfaction in him, behind his love and disappointment for his daughter. It was as if he had finally, conclusively, proved himself the scabrous and even destructive rebel he had always fought to be.
And then he was not at the shop for many weeks.
Since one final day when I stood looking passively at the dead flies under the fading pictures on the sagging piece of cord in his window I had not walked up the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta. I had had enough of it for a while. Or was I like my children, averse to feeling Death’s finger? This kind of anesthesia was short-lived, of course. There was too much more there on my map, especially in the Place de l’Archevêché nearby, that was traced in less murky colors than his own …
Brondino died on April Fools’ Day, 1961. I read many notices and heard much talk of him, largely good now that it was too late. On his door a black-bordered notice said that he had died suddenly, but I knew better. And I agreed with what one of the editors of La Semaine à Aix wrote:
“Our visitors to the next Festival of Music … how many musicians and amateurs, how many critics and writers, how many famous soloists frequented the literary meeting place led by Brondino … will be as lost as we are, robbed of an interpreter who was always for them the best guide to our regional painters and writers, just as Aix itself is robbed bruskly of a devoted and faithful lover and we are of a friend.”
I can never think again of him without hearing in the back of my head the word justice, and then back of it, the dark bloody spot on my map, the word assassin as I am told it was said once, over and over, in a whisper that became a kind of scream, echoing now always in its syllables for me, in a classroom filled with young men, studying law in the old building past Brondino’s and perhaps still in his shadow.
They were all between twenty-three or -four, a little past the Occupation which they had lived through as boys, and they were perforce hard and old for their ages. They were taking an advanced course in jurisprudence from a professor whose domestic concupiscence was even more noted than his legal knowledge. I do not know how these things become public property, but it was said openly, and apparently believed, that after the birth of his twelfth child he had been told that another confinement would kill his wife.
Nevertheless she conceived again, delivered the child, and died at once of an exhausted heart.
And as the professor returned to his class after her funeral, and stood to face the silent room of young-old men looking at him, a slow whisper began to beat into the air, never more than a whisper but endless, like a drumbeat, or like a cuckoo in a dream … “the snakelike sound of hissing,” one great American criminal lawyer said of it, “which of all massed human noises is the most frightening.”
“Assassin, assassin,” the students whispered. “Assssassssin, asssssassssin …”
I do not know anything more about this day: how the man left the room, or if he paled or covered his ears. I was told that within a few months he married a young strong woman with eight children.
And willy-nilly the word is always a nightmare scream of whispering to me as I pass the old Law School in my ghostly wanderings, and Brondino’s self-crucified face is a part of the meaning of Justice itself, but the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta is still a good street for me, because of the way it bends, and the places it leads to, and all the other inks it is printed with.