Free The Tale of the Rose by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery Page B

along with me.”
    At the request of the old writer and the duchess cousin, I decided to go. I was sure the cousin wanted to introduce some rich woman to Tonio. My God, the things that I, a slight young woman from the land of volcanos, was experiencing and coming to understand! I didn’t know what tactics duchesses used or what kinds of intrigues relatives might devise in order to arrange a suitable marriage.
    Gide did indeed come to Agay with the famous cousin. His voice was sugary and sometimes saccharine, the voice of a female worn out by sorrow and unconsummated love. There was nothing extraordinary about the cousin; she was elegant in her beautiful car, nothing more. She made a great show of being kind, but only Tonio’s mother was really nice to me, at once attentive and compassionate.
    The examination was going well, but then, during the meal, I drank something the wrong way and choked. The hairdresser had made my hair too curly, I was sweating, and my digestion was sluggish—to top it all off, I spilled wine on Tonio’s pants. I don’t remember anything else after that; a powerful migraine erased the faces of friends and guests for two days, and I stayed in darkness at the Mirador. I could hear Tonio circling like a caged puma. Still, he was beginning to feel at home at the Mirador; he would leave, come back, go out again.
    He also took care of me. He had stayed clear of the doctors in Nice and was reading strange medical treatises written by Spanish scholars. Among Gómez Carrillo’s books he had discovered some famous works on magic that my former husband had written, and he spent whole days and nights bent over those arcane recipes, laughing like a child at his new game. He repeated the strange stories I told him during my delirium, a peculiar delirium without fever.
    I was trembling with weakness and fear. He reassured me as best he could. He wanted me to be confident in life, but I was terrified at the prospect of seeing his family and friends again. What love-stricken young woman wouldn’t tremble before a whole tribe that thought it owned her fiancé? I was of a different stock—I came from another land, another tribe, I spoke another language, I ate differently, I lived in a different way. That was why I was afraid, but my fiancé would give me no hint as to how I should behave.
    I did not understand why there had been, from the beginning, so many misunderstandings about this marriage. Money could easily be acquired through the books and goods of Gómez Carrillo—one trip to Spain, and pesetas would have rained down over the pinecones of Agay. There were titles of nobility, even a marquis, among the Carrillos, and the Sandovals were of the highest class. I had priests and even cardinals in my family. Through the Suncins I had a good dose of Indian blood, Mayan blood (which was then fashionable in Paris), and had inherited legends about the volcanoes that would have amused Tonio’s family. But something deeper held them back, something to do with mixed blood . . .
    In vain, Tonio tried to make them accept me. I wasn’t French. They didn’t want to see or know me—they were blind to my existence. I often complained of this to Tonio. He said it gave him a headache. He was greatly tormented by the situation and decided not to write for a while. He couldn’t. He tried, but in vain. These dissensions between the Mirador and Agay did not gladden his heart. I stopped speaking.
    One day he confided in me that he would soon be given a job as a pilot. I was delighted. “Oh yes, I’ll go to the end of the world with you. You are my tree, and I’ll be the vine that clings to you,” I said eagerly.
    “No, you’re my graft,” he told me, “my oxygen, my dose of the unknown. Only death can separate us.”
    I asked him to tell me stories about the dangers of flying, the moments when death was inescapable, and we laughed at death.

    L ATER, THE COUSIN AND THE WRITER WITH the womanly voice wrote to Tonio and