There were not more than twenty small tables on the Fee Blanche’s patio. Ernst was the only patron, as he was every day until lunchtime. He and M. Gargotier had become close friends. At least, so Ernst believed. It was so comforting to have a place where one could sit and watch, where the management didn’t eternally trouble about another drink or more coffee. Bien sur, the old man never sat with Ernst to observe the city’s idlers or offer to test Ernst’s skill at chess. In fact, to be truthful, M. Gargotier had rarely addressed a full sentence to him. But Ernst was an habitue, M. Gargotier’s only regular customer, and for quite different reasons they both hoped the Fee Blanche might become a favorite meeting place for the city’s literate and wealthy few. Ernst had invested too many months of sitting at that same table to move elsewhere now.
“A good way to remove a measure of the body’s influence is to concentrate on the mind,” he said. He gazed at the table top, which already was refilling with rainwater. “When I review my own psychological history, I must admit to a distressing lack of moral sense. I have standards gleaned from romantic novels and magistral decrees, standards which stick out awkwardly among my intellectual baggage like the frantic wings of a tethered pigeon. I can examine those flashes of morality whenever I choose, though I rarely bother. They are all so familiar. But all around them in my mind are the heavy, dense shadows of events and petty crimes.”
With a quick motion, Ernst emptied the table top once more. He sighed. “There was Eugenie. I loved her for a time, I believe. A perfect name, a lesser woman. When the romance began, I was well aware of my moral sense. Indeed, I cherished it, worshiped it with an adolescent lover’s fervor. I needed the constraints of society, of law and honor. I could only prove my worth and value within their severe limits. Our love would grow, I believed, fed by the bitter springs of righteousness. Ah, Eugenie! You taught me so much. I loved you for it then, even as my notion of purity changed, bit by bit, hour by hour. Then, when I fell at long last to my ardent ruin, I hated you. For so many years I hated you for your joy in my dismay, for the ease of your robbery and betrayal, for the entertainment I provided in my youthful terror. Now, Eugenie, I am at peace with your memory. I would not have understood in those days, but I am at last revenged upon you: I have achieved indifference.
“How sad, I think, for poor Marie, who came after. I loved her from a distance, not wishing ever again to be wounded on the treacherous point of my own affection. I was still foolish.” Ernst leaned back in his chair, turning his head to stare across the small expanse of vacant tables. He glanced around; no one else had entered the cafe. “What could I have learned from Eugenie? Pain? No. Discomfort, then? Yes, but so? These evaluations, I hasten to add, I make from the safety of my greater experience and-sophistication. Nevertheless, even in my yearling days I recognized that la belle E. had prepared me well to deal not only with her successors but with all people in general. I had learned to pray for another’s ill fortune. This was the first great stain on the bright emblem of virtue that, at the time, still resided in my imagination.
“Marie, I loved you from whatever distance seemed appropriate. I was still not skillful in these matters, and it appears now that I judged those distances poorly. Finally, you gave your heart to another, one whose management of proximity was far cleverer than mine. I could not rejoice in your good fortune. I prayed fervently for the destruction of your happiness. I wished you and him the most total of all disasters, but I was denied. You left my life as you entered it — a cold, distant dream. Yet before you left, you rehearsed me in the exercise of spite.”
He took a sip of the liqueur and swirled it against his palate. “I’ve grown since then, of course,” he said. “I’ve grown and changed, but you’re still there, an ugly spatter against the cleanness of what I wanted to be.” With a sad expression he set the tumbler on the small table. Rain fell into the anisette, but Ernst was not concerned.
This morning he was playing the bored expatriate. He smoked only imported cigarettes, his boxed filters conspicuous among the packs of Impers and Les Bourdes. He studied the strollers closely, staring with affected weariness into the eyes of the younger women, refusing to look away. He scribbled on the backs of envelopes that he found in his coat pockets or on scraps of paper from the ground. He waited for someone to show some interest and ask him what he did. “I am just jotting notes for the novel,” he would say, or “Merely a sketch, a small poem. Nothing important. A transient joy mingled with regret.” He watched the hotel across the square with a carefully sensitive expression, as if the view were really from the windswept cliffs of the English coast or the history-burdened martial plains of France. Anyone could see that he was an artist. Ernst promised fascinating stories and secret romantic insights, but somehow the passersby missed it all.
Only thoughts of the rewards for success kept him at M. Gargotier’s table. Several months previously, a poet named Courane had been discovered while sitting at the wicker bar of the Blue Parrot. Since then, Courane had become the favorite of the city’s idle elite. Already he had purchased his own cafe and held court in its several dank rooms. Stories circulated about Courane and his admirers. Exciting, licentious rumors grew up around the young man, and Ernst was envious. Ernst had lived in the city much longer than Courane. He had even read some of Courane’s alleged poetry, and he thought it was terrible. But Courane’s excesses were notorious. It was this that no doubt had recommended him to the city’s weary nobility.
Something about the city attracted the failed poets of the world. Like the excavation of Troy, which discovered layer upon layer, settlement built upon ancient settlement, the recent history of the civilized world might be read in the bitter eyes of the lonely men waiting in the city’s countless cafes. Only rarely could Ernst spare the time to visit with his fellows, and then the men just stared silently past each other. They all understood; it was a horrible thing for Ernst to know that they all knew everything about him. So he sat in the Fee Blanche, hiding from them, hoping for luck.
Ernst’s city sat like a blister on the fringe of a great equatorial desert. The metropolitan centers of the more sophisticated nations were much too far away to allow Ernst to feel completely at ease. He built for himself a life in exile, pretending that it made no difference. But the provinciality of these people! The mountains and the narrow fertile plain that separated the city from the northern sea effectively divided him from every familiar landmark of his past. He could only think and remember. And who was there to decide if his recollections might have blurred and altered with repetition?
“Now, Eugenie. You had red hair. You had hair like the embers of a dying fire. How easy it was to kindle the blaze afresh. In the morning, how easy. The fuel was there, the embers burned hotly within; all that was needed was a little wind, a little stirring. Eugenie, you had red hair. I’ve always been weakened by red hair.
“Marie, poor Marie, your hair was black, and I loved it, too, for a time. And I’ll never know what deftnesses and craft were necessary to fire your blood. Eugenie, the creature of flame, and Marie, the gem of ice. I confuse your faces. I can’t recall your voices. Good luck to you, my lost loves, and may God bless.”