Chapter 31 I can´t believe you are the moon of the Pack Jenny.
“I still see you as a child of eleven and I can´t believe you are the moon of the Pack Jenny.” I felt anxiety. As if this child had been a secret and was now revealed. How could I exorcise it? I saw a sentimental Henry, awed and intimidated. I became ironic and mocking, wise, and teased him.
“Where are the black cotton stockings?” he asked. “And the basket with the diary in it?”
There was no remedy. I had brought this child so vividly before Henry that she had an existence of her own.
Ronnie said, “It’s strange, but with you I feel relaxed. Most women make men feel strained and tense. And I feel at my best because of that.”
He had received a cable from June: “I miss you—I must join you soon.” And he was angry.
“Why angry?”
“I don’t want June to come and torture me.”
“What I am afraid of, Ronny, is that June will break our friendship.”
“Don’t give in to her, keep your wonderful mind. Be strong.”
“I could say the same to you. Yet I know your wisdom will be of no use to you.”
“It will be different this time.”
Has Henry really become aware that he is a man of talent, imagination?
I know his deviltries, too, his begging and borrowing and gold-digging; but I know a Henry who is not in his books, who is unknown to June or to Dave. I am not blind. He has shown me a different Henry. When he wears his hat, it hides his thinning hair at the top and he looks thirty and irresponsible. When his hat is off, he looks like a balding professor, with his glasses and his gravity.
Dave comes into the kitchen. The kitchen table is covered with manuscripts, books, notes, and once you sit at the table, there is no room to move again. The three of us were looking at the map of the near forest to go to hunting tonight. Davepointed to the places he and Henry wanted to see.
I asked Ronnie to write something in the diary.
Ronnie wrote:
“I imagine that I am now a very celebrated personage and that I am being given one of my own books to autograph. So I write with a stiff hand, a little pompously . . .”
Brennan’s private house, three floors, with a small front garden and a back garden, the kitchen in the basement, his office and parlor on the first floor, bedrooms on the second floor, resembles the house in Brussels where we lived when I was eight and nine years old. It also resembles the house my father lives in now, in Passy, in a quiet well-bred street where gardeners take care of the plants, where cars wait with chauffeurs in them, where no children play in the street, and no beggars are allowed.
When I first arrive, the window is open and I can see the upper half of his bookcase, which reminds me of my father’s bookcase in Brussels and how I spent hours in it when he was out of the house, reading on a chair which was resting on another chair so I could reach the books on the top shelf which were forbidden to us. It was then I read Zola, without understanding half of it, spent hours wondering why the lovers who had been caught in a mine explosion had been found clasped together so tightly they could not be separated, or why the woman who had been given a sleeping draught by Monte Cristo was later found to be pregnant. Impossible to fill in these blank spaces. But I read.
When I first came to Paris we had rented the bachelor apartment of Mr. Hansen, an American who was going away for the summer. It was all we could find. He had left his clothing, his books, his personal belongings in the closets.
Trying to tidy up one day, I was cleaning out the shelves and found the very top shelf, in a very dark corner, stacked with French paperbacks. I took them down, examined them, and then realized from the lurid drawings of naked women that I must read them in secret too, and could not leave them lying around the apartment for Joaquin to see, or my mother.
One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me. I had never read erotic literature in America. These were the novelettes which were sold on the counters by the Seine, on the bookshelves of the famous quays. They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits. Some were well written, others purely informative, and others sensational and unforgettable. I had my degree in erotic lore.
These books affected my vision of Paris, until now a purely literary one. They opened my eyes and my senses, they sensitized me so that I became aware of maisons closes, red-light districts, prostitutes on the boulevards, the meaning of drawn curtains in the middle of the afternoon, hotels by the hour, the role of Parisian hairdressers (the great procurers), and the acceptance of the separation between love and pleasure.
I was far from my other method of education, from the days when I read books from the New York Public Library alphabetically, having no one to guide me.
Mr. Hansen’s bachelor books were illustrated, in color: some in eighteenth-century style, some in contemporary style. I became familiar with boots, whips, garters, black stockings, frilled panties, alcoves, mirrors on the ceilings, peepholes in the walls, and the inexhaustible varieties of erotic experiences.
In those days, when a window opened and a couple stood embracing in front of it, I could sense the whole atmosphere, and get vicarious shivers of pleasure. I developed such antennae that when I went to people’s houses I could divine which couples were faithful and which ones having love affairs, and often detect the lover or the mistress. It was as if I had developed a sixth sense in matters of vibrations and sexual currents between people. I was often right. I could detect the presence of desire like a sourcier.