Women

Chapter II

Chapter IIThe evening is cold, blue, filled with faded sounds drifting over from town, over the lake, where electric lights glow in the distance. It’s Thursday and there is a military band playing in the park.

Almost everyone from the small hotel had caught the 8.27 boat to attend the concert. Ştefan Valeriu had stayed behind. The entire valley, opening out in front of the terrace, is tinted deep blue by the glinting bark of the cherry trees.

“Do you play chess, sir?”

“Yes.”

Why did he say “yes”? It would have been so easy to say “no” and then he would still be outside, free to continue his stroll on the terrace. A thoughtless “yes” and now he is at a table in the dining room, condemned to concentration.

His partner is a tall, dark-skinned, bony man, middle-aged and ugly. He plays slowly, calculating his moves.

“You weren’t interested in going to the concert?”

“No.”

“Me neither. My wife was dying to go, so I let her. But I…”

Ştefan lost a rook, was building up to an attack on the king.

“You are from the Midi?”

“No. I’m Romanian.”

“Impossible! You sound French. Or maybe I’m just not used to the accents here. Because I’m not from France. I’m Tunisian.”

“Tunisian?”

“Yes. I mean, I’m French, but I live there. I own several plantations. My name is Marcel Rey.”

Ştefan’s attack failed, and as his pieces had been decimated in the course of play, he capitulated. The others were returning from town. They could hear the whistle of the steamboat as it drew near to the jetty.

They walked outside into the courtyard to meet them. A chorus of voices, cheerful exclamations, hands being shaken, noisy greetings.

“Oh, Marcel, if you knew how beautiful it was!”

“Renée, meet this gentleman, our new friend. Ştefan, this is my wife.”

She was a tall, slim woman. In the darkness, he could only make out her eyes. Ştefan kissed her hand. A small, cold hand, that gave nothing away.

*They went on a day trip to Lovagny, to visit the castle, the three of them. Marcel Rey, his wife and Ştefan. And there was also Nicolle, the couple’s little girl. They walked for a long time, laughed, posed for photographs. Monsieur Rey had bought a small cine-camera which he sometimes used to capture particular scenes and then sent the film to be developed in Paris.

“Renée, move over there next to Monsieur Valeriu. That’s right, laugh, talk, I need to see some action.”

“If we’re going to shoot a movie together,” Ştefan whispered, “I’d rather it was a love scene.”

He said it lightly, casually, so that, if need be, he could easily turn it into a joke.

Renée smiled vaguely and said nothing. Ştefan played with the curls of Nicolle’s hair. Monsieur Rey carried on filming.

*He found out all their family history. They had both been born in Tunisia to two old colonial families, in a small town. He had been to France once before, in 1917, only to be shot in the shoulder after two hours in the trenches and then sent back home a week later. Until this summer, she had never travelled further than Tunis. They were married in 1920, had a child – Nicolle – in 1921, bought a vineyard in 1922, a plantation a year later, and two more every year since. Djedeida, their little town, was about 50 kilometres from Tunis. A tight set of Europeans, hemmed in by the many local tribespeople, who scratched a living in the slums and wandered menacingly through the streets. The Reys slept with a shotgun by their pillow. Saturday evening, when the workers gathered to be paid, Renée kept guard by the phone, in case they needed to call Tunis for help. She told him all this calmly, evenly, a little wearily, and Ştefan Valeriu had to needle her with questions to extract the details.

“Can you pass me my shawl? I’m cold.”

He threw it across her deck chair and, trying to cover her legs, his hand paused on her knee. Renée started, afraid, and cried out instinctively: “Nicolle, Nicolle!”

In the evening, Ştefan replied to some letters from Paris:

“I don’t know anyone here. Just a Tunisian family, an accomplished chess player and his virtuous wife. I can’t see us sticking together.”

*He unties a boat from the hotel jetty and rows to the middle of the lake, where the chains of mountains arrange themselves around him symmetrically, throws down the anchor and lays down at the bottom of the boat, dropping the oars to the side and allowing them to float in any direction.

He feels a laziness, a pure, unapologetic laziness, tranquil as an enormous absence. He shuts his eyes. The sun envelops him whole.

Earlier, in the dining hall, he had noticed the young couple who had recently arrived at the hotel and who were occupying the annexe in the courtyard, away from everyone else. Their honeymoon, probably. She was remarkable. She had come in timidly, slightly dishevelled, and the look in her eyes revealed to Ştefan the signs of the previous night’s passion. It was almost as if she brought with her, filling the whole house, the scent of the bedroom, of warm, sensual pillows, of two sleeping lovers stirred by morning’s diaphanous light.

“Unbearable! It’s contagious! We ought to complain!’, Ştefan protests to himself.

A whirl of water crashing against the boat, the distant shout of a swimmer, the clock at Saint-François-de-Sales striking ten, are the only reply.