I couldn’t say when exactly the little incident I’m about to relate occurred. I didn’t take it seriously at the time and even today I’m not entirely certain that it had anything to do with our later breakup. One day we were talking about her old circus partners. There was sufficient detachment in our voices that the possibility of regret was not allowed to enter. Then Arabela told me straight-out, as though she’d just remembered it:
—Did you know Dik was my husband?
Of course I hadn’t known. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to think it. Dik, that ageless, bald, alcoholic creature? The revelation was more comic than troubling.
—And why are you telling me this only now?
—I don’t know. It never came up.
—You’re extraordinary, Arabela. Extraordinary. We’ve been living together all this time, you go into detail about all kinds of things, every day we banter for hours about whatever crosses our minds—and it doesn’t occur to you until this moment to tell me something so much more significant?
—That’s the way I am, Stefan. Absentminded.
I said nothing for a moment, disarmed by the simplicity of her reply. Then I blew up:
—And why Dik? Of the four of them, why did you choose him?
—Perhaps because it was easiest with him. See? It was very hard to live the way I was, like in a family, with four men. Married to one of them, the other three had to behave. In this kind of a situation, the most important thing is to avoid love affairs and complications. And at least with Dik the idea of love couldn’t enter into it—right?
Then I remembered catching Beb’s look that evening at the Medrano, in the changing room, and right then I began to wonder if Arabela’s decision to leave them was a more serious matter than I’d first believed, and whether her bond with them was more than just an arrangement between performers. Perhaps that boy Beb might have had an opinion on the matter. When on tour not so very much later, in a cabaret theater in Germany, I came across news of her ex-colleagues and I have to admit I was the one whom it jolted. They had performed there two weeks earlier and had since moved on to their next engagement, wherever that was. We came across their name and photograph in the theater sections of the local newspapers and I learned that their act had met with some success. They’d progressed since we’d seen them last. They weren’t big stars but they put on a decent show as a warm-up act. I looked at the photographs with great interest and noted how they’d simplified their equipment, poses, and colors greatly.
—These fellows are going to do well someday, I mused.
—Maybe, said Arabela, noncommittally. It was plainly all the same to her.
I pressed on stubbornly:
—They’re missing just one thing: you. Up there, on your silk swing, doing nothing, displaying yourself and smiling—you were the poetry in their trapeze act. Their useless flower. Even a director of genius wouldn’t have come up with such an amazing detail.
I said this to probe her or tease her or perhaps just to exercise my old instinct for meanness. But I certainly wasn’t mistaken, and, looking at those photographs, I realized that their act did lack a female presence, just as a ring might lack a gem.
Arabela heard me out, then took my arm and blew me a kiss as if to say reproachfully, Now, let’s be serious and forget all that nonsense.
I don’t really know why all these insignificant details are coming back to me now. I pass the time trying to remember them, the way you might try to reconstitute a game of chess you’d played. Probably they have nothing to do with what happened later and it wasn’t these little incidents that caused us to break up. Rather, it was something simpler and yet harder to explain. Something that bore a striking similarity to how our love began and which might be called an affair, if such an expression could be applied to Arabela, with her childlike mentality.
Many strange things passed us by and we let them go, loving each other on the final day just as we did on the first, in the same gentle state of voluptuousness in which everything felt familiar, like the eternal taste of bread. This can go on for a year or two or ten…Or it can end at any moment. Splitting up? It happened so simply that, if I consider it very honestly, I’d find it more important to talk about the green coat Arabela wore during our first winter together or about her black dress with the yellow collar (the one that made her look much taller and made her skin pale and smooth) than to talk about how we split up.
It was in Geneva, at the beginning of September. We’d gone there to open the entertainment season in the casino’s theater while two hundred paces away, at the League of Nations, Aristide Briand was opening the diplomatic season. That passionate autumn when the project of the United States of Europe was first discussed, in a frivolous celebratory atmosphere, and I’m not exaggerating if I say that Arabela’s presence contributed to it greatly, as it was de rigueur for the foreign ministers to gather at nine, in their boxes, at our concert.
Dazzling mornings by the lake, the fluttering white dresses at Quai Wilson, the reporters besieging the Hotel des Bergues, the photographers lining the streets in the hope of snapping somebody famous…It was idyllic, as idyllic and relaxing as a piece of operetta.
One morning, on the quay, somebody shouted at us from behind. It was a young man who’d just jumped off a passing tram. We were on the lakefront, enjoying watching a group of English girls playing water polo. Arabela was laughing freely, the sun on her face. We turned around in surprise and at first she didn’t recognize Beb, now right next to us and embarrassed by his own overexcitement at seeing her again.
—Well, Beb, said Arabela, without raising her voice. “You’ve changed, Beb: you’re looking well. But you’re still missing a button on your waistcoat. You’ll fix it this evening, won’t you? Do!”
Yes, Beb had certainly changed. He wasn’t as pale as before, and he looked taller and fitter. He wore a gray summer suit, and in that bright September sunlight, there was something extremely juvenile in his surprise and excitement. He explained briefly that he was only in Geneva for a few days, passing through. He had to leave that evening for Montreux, where Sam and Jef were waiting for him: they had an excellent booking.
—Dik? asked Arabela.
—We lost him four months ago in Algiers and haven’t heard from him since.
—And the rest of you?
—Fine. Success, money. Arabela, if only you knew how well we’ve been doing. I told you back then that big things were waiting for us. You remember, back when you left.
He spoke quickly, animatedly, with his hands in his pockets to stop himself from gesticulating, walking half a pace in front of us so that he could look in Arabela’s eyes. He was as giddy as a schoolboy and I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t refrain from asking him, sympathetically, like a friend:
—Tell me the truth, Beb. Do you still love Arabela?
He answered straight back, lifting his chin with a certain haughtiness, but with goodwill:
—Yes!
—You’re talking nonsense, the two of you, said Arabela. “Let’s go and get something to eat.”
Beb took the evening train for Montreux, and we went to do our usual nine o’clock show. I was very relaxed as I put on my suit. It would be nonsense to say I had any kind of presentiment. I sat at the piano and looked at Arabela and told myself, as I did every evening, that she wasn’t beautiful and couldn’t sing, and then accompanied her earthy voice with the same astonishment and profound peace, and it made me so melancholy, like ten slim fingers combing through memory and forgetfulness. After the show we went for a late walk along the quay. A cold wind of uncertain season blew down from the mountain, too hard to be a summer breeze, too gentle to be autumnal.
—It must be good now, up there in our room, said Arabela, leaning on the guardrail, facing the lake, squeezing my arm hard.
We went slowly up the hotel stairway, deliberately dragging out our steps, knowing that a good night awaited us, and indeed we made love then, unhurriedly, attentively, entrusting ourselves to that moment of embrace and listening to the circles of silence expanding about us in the dark.
I think that even the slightest misunderstanding that might still have remained between our bodies must have dissipated then in the closeness of that night. In the darkness, she lay like a little sleepy animal, and her smile was warm. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t shocked the next morning when, as I was waiting for her in the lobby, I saw her coming down the stairs toward me, beckoning me with a wave, and she said, as though asking what time it was:
—What would you say, Stefan, if I ran off with Beb?
—I don’t know, sweetheart. I think it would be complicated, with the theater here. We have a contract…
—I’d sort that out…
—All right! Let’s try then!
I accompanied her to the station after lunch. All she took was a single, small case she could carry by hand. The rest of her things were being sent on. We made small talk until the train came, then we shook hands undramatically, with complete mutual understanding.
—Put your coat on if it gets cold in the evening, Stefan. It gets very cool down on the lakeshore!
It was five, getting on toward evening. I walked into town and bought the papers on the way to see what had happened that morning at the League of Nations. There had been heated debates.