I could not sleep thinking of all that had happened. I had to tell the Senyor that I had taken one hundred francs from the travel fund, but I did not know how to. I was not willing to mention Dona Xima under any circumstances. I had no objects of value other than a gold chain and pendant. The pendant I had already given to the wounded police officer and the chain alone would probably not be worth the amount I needed. Even if it was, sooner or later I would have to make up another lie to explain how I had lost the chain. Yet would I not have to do so anyway since I was missing the pendant? Around dawn I managed to doze off and I was sleeping soundly when the Senyor walked in and sat at the edge of the bed.
‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘to ask you for three hundred francs.’ My eyes were open and I thought I was dreaming.
‘Don’t open your eyes. You’d never guess whom you look like.’
I preferred not to make a guess. Even though I was the administrator and depository of the funds, two days prior to our departure he had asked me for forty duros in case we were separated at any point. Since until then we had always gone out together, I could not imagine how he had spent all that money. His request was highly suspicious. Who else could it be but Dona Xima? I suddenly decided to talk and told him everything that had happened to me without omitting a single detail. He listened with a look of satisfied curiosity. When I told him about my conflict with the officer, he put his arm around my neck.
‘You hit a policeman, my dear boy? He dared to grab you by the arm? Very good. Who did he think he was?’
At the very thought that a foreigner (even though in that case we happened to be the foreigners) had dared to touch my clothing, all his love for the French seemed to vanish into thin air. He pondered for a moment.
‘You say you thought you’d seen Dona Xima?’
‘I was probably wrong. Does your Honour know where she is?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ and he looked towards the balcony.
I thought he was lying and felt my anger rise within me.
‘So your Honour needs three hundred francs? Yesterday I took a one hundred franc bill to give to the poor police officer. Until we’re back in Bearn I won’t be able to pay you back.’
And so as to leave nothing unaccounted for and to purify myself after telling all the lies I had told (and the ones I had been about to tell), since I had already mentioned Dona Xima, I confessed that I had also given away the gold pendant that he and the Senyora had given me. He smiled.
‘You seem to be awfully concerned about this policeman,’ he said, with a mischievous look on his face. ‘Now you can’t say you haven’t had an adventure in Paris. I’m having one, too. Give me the money I asked you for and stop thinking about what you spent…on the policeman. Poor Joan, don’t you see we’re older than you?’
His words expressed kindness, authorizing confidence, so I dared to ask him how he had spent the forty duros I had given him in Bearn. Far from being taken aback, he answered in a pleasant tone, as if he did not find my question the least bit inappropriate. ‘I only have ten duros left.’
I understood I was not to press the issue, but he added: ‘The village priest is in charge of giving one duro a week to Madò Coloma and we hadn’t settled our accounts for weeks. Are you and the Senyora naïve enough to think that someone can really live on the milk of one goat and two loaves of bread a week?’
I gave him the three hundred francs. One hour later I was saying mass at Saint Roch, in a state of mind you can imagine and with Dona Maria Antònia as the sole member of my congregation. After the celebration of mass, God chose to favour me: ‘Before lunchtime,’ a voice within me said, ‘you will have proof that the Senyor is not with the person you suspect.’ When we returned to the hotel, the Senyora had not given up her idea of taking a boat down the Seine. There were boats leaving the Quai du Louvre every quarter of an hour. She decided to go to Passy and land on an island.
‘You’ll see, Joan. They’re beautiful desert islands. On Sunday they’re full of people, but today there won’t be a soul. We’ll sit under a tree between the sun and the shade and say our rosaries.’
In addition to being a famous river, the Seine is a place of great beauty, with its placid, abundant waters and lush forests nearby. Past Saint-Germain, the banks form a majestic valley full of avenues and rich in game. We landed on an island that was indeed deserted—there was no one there but us—yet full of birds who offered us a concert worthy of being performed at the Opera. Ahead of us walked a bellboy from the hotel carrying two red velvet cushions trimmed with gold braid, which were apparently used during the visits of the Duchess of Edinburgh. The Senyora asked to use them to sit in the boat, and also asked for the boy to come and carry them, which gave us prestige in the eyes of the hotel staff. We said our rosaries. The bellboy fell asleep on the grass. After we had been listening to the birds sing for quite some time, Dona Maria Antònia said, as though she were talking to herself: ‘The Senyor is so strange sometimes, Joan. I’ve never managed to understand him.’
There was a pause, and since I had dared not open my mouth, she continued: ‘Neither you nor I believe he has gone to Auteuil. He used to be better at telling lies. Now that he’s getting old…’
She fell silent and stared at her hands, once so beautiful and now frail and withered. Her blue eyes were full of melancholy.
‘I don’t know,’ she added, talking to herself, ‘whether he made up that silly story about Auteuil because he’s become old or whether he thought it would do now that I’m so old and forgetful.’
I was moved by the subtlety of her thoughts.
‘We have no right to think ill of anyone,’ I said.
She dropped her pensive tone and regained her usual liveliness.
‘We have no right to be stupid, if you ask me. What could he be up to at his age, my God? You who know him better than I…’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yes, Joan. I’ve known him longer and more intimately. But you…’
She stopped and looked at the sky of the same irresolute blue as her eyes, inherited, according to her husband, from a Norman ancestor. They were bright eyes, sometimes a little hard, yet at that moment they seemed misty with sadness. They would have been even more so if she had known everything I knew and could not reveal. Only three hours earlier, the Senyor had said ‘I’m having an adventure, too,’ and asked me for three hundred francs. For a moment the turbulent scenes from his past ran through my head. Dona Maria Antònia tried not to find out about unpleasant things, but we will never know to what extent she was successful. That day I glimpsed an intimate, painful suffering in her: that of moral incomprehension. May God forgive me if I dare say that in the presence of the Senyor, Dona Maria Antònia gave me the impression of a savage in front of a piano. And nonetheless they were cousins, they bore the same name and shared part of the same blood. They loved one another. ‘But love between man and woman has never implied intellectual understanding, but rather the fusion of two opposites, the amalgam of two metals that lose their characteristic qualities,’ my benefactor proclaimed. Dona Maria Antònia’s last words had struck me because I did not know exactly how to interpret them. ‘Yes, Joan, I’ve known him longer and more intimately, but you…’ She never finished her sentence, and I never asked for an explanation. My pride did not stop my eyes from filling with tears, and I kissed her withered hand.
‘In a sense,’ I told her, ‘I’m an offence to you, Senyora.’
And how poorly endowed, my God, was I to live with this old family of Bearn! Fourteen years ago, I had fainted in a moment of need by the fireplace, and Dona Maria Antònia, a Senyora, had given me an example of strength. Now, at the age of seventy, the same lady again defeated me on a desert island on the Seine. When she heard my words, her eyes, which before being of gauze, like the sky of the lie de France, had been of agate, became two spring flowers, two weightless marvels, two little bouquets of forget-me-nots. Her gaze seemed to smile and point with delicate mischief to the boy half asleep on the grass.
‘Joan, for God’s sake, that boy has already seen abbots kissing the hands of marchionesses in the museum…My goodness,’ she added, ‘what if the boat didn’t come by again? Wouldn’t we be scared?’
She was not. We suddenly heard a low sound which seemed to come from the east. The birds cried and flew away. We saw a sort of cigar-shaped balloon coming from the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. Then I remembered that in the paper I had read that the Tissandier brothers had announced their second scientific flight in an electrically propelled balloon of their invention,
‘How can they drive a balloon in the air?’
‘The same way one would drive a steamship, I’ve heard, with a propeller revolving and a rudder.’
She remained pensive.
‘Anyone who has any sense,’ she said, ‘can’t approve of such things, and yet who knows whether eventually we’ll end up travelling by balloon. Years ago the Senyor invented the automobile and we all censured it. Nowadays it would seem that the automobile is here to stay.’
She may have felt remorse about having opposed the invention, now that the idea had triumphed. But that’s how all the Dona Maria Antònias of the Universe are and always will be. The Senyora, strong and cautious like the Biblical Leah, was bound to the earth.
The balloon was drawing closer. It was the shape and colour of a cigar, thick in the centre and almost pointed at the ends. It also reminded me of a whale, and in neither case was it pleasing to the eye. As I was to learn later, it was twenty-eight metres long, or more than seventeen Mallorcan canes, and full of a very poisonous gas that was also explosive. We could already see a sort of large basket hanging from what one might call it’s belly; it seemed to be made of woven reeds and carried a lot of machinery. Three men stood there making signals to each other, pulling levers and pushing buttons. Two of them, large and tall, with beards and moustaches, must have been the inventors, the Tissandier brothers. The other man, Heaven help me, was the Senyor. Dona Maria Antònia and I recognized him at the same moment and looked at each other without saying a word. The monstrous whale flew very low over our heads and disappeared slowly to the south, vibrating and swaying like a big bumble-bee. Despite the danger my benefactor was in, I felt deeply comforted, and I remembered the voice I had heard during mass: Don Toni was not with Dona Xima. The three hundred francs had not been spent on a romantic adventure; they had probably been given to the Tissandier brothers, since in France, as in many other places, you rarely get something for nothing.
Our boat arrived a few moments later; we embarked in silence and moored by the Louvre. The Senyora entered the hotel preceded by the bellboy with the two velvet cushions of the Duchess of Edinburgh, like a real princess. The agents who were spying on us from the Théâtre Francais did not miss a single detail of our triumphal arrival, and one of them wrote something down in his notebook. I dare mention that for renting the cushions and employing the services of the bellboy for two hours they added sixty-two francs to our bill and when I asked for an explanation, assuming they had made a mistake, they answered that it was an extraordinary luxury, not included in the usual rates. (‘Oh, my Lord,’ Dona Maria Antònia commented, ‘a luxury? That little boy who’s knee high and doesn’t do a thing all day? I think a half a pesseta ought to be more than enough to pay him.’)
The Senyor was late for lunch. He was very excited; being of a sincere nature, he did not like to lie except when it was absolutely necessary, and he was dying to tell us about his adventure. However, knowing his wife would disapprove and not wanting to start an argument (‘there is not a single idea that does not contain its own possible refutation,’ he wrote in his Memoirs,*) and given that he had a fertile imagination, he found a way to reconcile whim and convenience by inventing one last lie in order to tell the truth.
‘The gentleman from Auteil,’ he said, ‘took me to see the departure of the dirigible balloon and introduced me to the Tissandiers, the famous engineers. Have you heard of them? The papers have spoken of nothing else for days. The Tissandier brothers are very pleasant. They showed me into the crew car. It’s comfortable, with chairs to seat three people…’
Our silence seemed to disconcert him; it is so true that sin is a weight heavier than lead. The situation was becoming tense, yet I chose not to intervene. In the end, Dona Maria Antònia intervened while devoting all her attention to peeling an apple and did so with that seemingly frivolous tone characteristic of the Bearns which has even fooled me, who was raised among them, many a time.
‘Joan and I saw you fly over the Seine, Tonet. Weren’t you afraid of having an accident?’
The Senyor replied in a natural tone: ‘No; it’s a very safe vehicle. You’ll see…’
He described how it worked. She listened benevolently. The catastrophe had been warded off.