The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (28 page)

We helped drag the boat ashore. The boy jumped out—he was wearing nothing but a loincloth, and the remains of a laurel wreath perched on his head. His lips and cheeks were gaudily rouged.

“The Americans come by sea
and
by land,” Cocteau greeted us, “while my wise Russian sticks to land. I'm most happy for all invasions. You've arrived just in time. You shall see. Tonight will be magnificent! Never underestimate the benefits of a deep harbor!”

He was not wrong. By noon the American battleship had docked, by midafternoon the quayside was swarming with giddy sailors, and by early evening the Hotel Welcome, which turned out to be a bordello as well as a hotel, was replete with them. Liquor flowed freely. Cocteau accompanied a local accordionist, violinist, and trumpeter on the hotel's out-of-tune Pianola. The whores, who seemed to have been selected to appeal to an impressive range of tastes, lured their increasingly inebriated clientele into increasingly libidinous dances.
Weldon and I sat at a small table near the entrance, away from the commotion, and drank pastis with two of Cocteau's latest “
enfants,
” Jean Bourgoint and Maurice Sachs.

Sachs was a familiar face, a habitué of Le Boeuf, but Bourgoint was new to me, and I found it difficult to take my eyes off him. Alas, the more he talked, the more vacuous he seemed, whereas Maurice—pudgy, ill-shaven, disheveled—exuded considerable conversational charm. He soon had us all in tears of laughter with his story of having to smuggle his mother into England, as she faced arrest in France for having passed a bad check.

Weldon asked Sachs if it was true, as we had both heard, that the walls of his bedroom were covered in photographs of Cocteau.

“It
is
true,” he affirmed sweetly, “and there is one particular photograph to which I pray every night.”

Bourgoint seemed to find this inordinately funny.

“At least I don't sleep in the same bed as my sister,” an offended-looking Sachs told him.

“Jeanne and I are twins,” Bourgoint said. “Why shouldn't we?”

“I happen to know as a matter of fact you're not twins. Your brother is her twin.”

“We're spiritual twins,” Bourgoint countered, as if that somehow settled it. Cocteau would some years later immortalize those “twins” in his
Les Enfants Terribles
.

“Depravity of all kinds fascinates me,” Weldon said. “If you're in love with your sister, you shouldn't be ashamed. I left America in order to discover people like you. And you as well.” He turned to Sachs. “I think it's marvelous that you worship at Cocteau's shrine. Where I come from, everyone is so boring. It repulses me.”

Sachs looked perturbed. “I'm not sure how admirable it is to be a tourist in other people's misery,” he said.

“Oh, come,” Weldon said, “it's what we Americans are good at. Besides, we can afford it. That's certainly what Sergey likes about me.”

I told him his finances had nothing to do with my affection for him.

Arching his eyebrows, he gave me a look. “Let me get this round,” he offered. “And the next as well. I know perfectly well you're all penniless.”

None of us, I am sorry to report, declined his offer.

IT WAS VERY LATE. THE AMERICAN SAILORS HAD returned to their ship; the whores were having a nightcap in the bar; Weldon had gone to bed, as had Bourgoint and Sachs. As requested, I knocked on Cocteau's door. I found him lying in his large bed, atop the coverlet, scribbling madly. Without glancing up, he patted the mattress to indicate I should join him. When I had slipped off my shoes and settled in comfortably beside him, he flung aside his writing. “Beastly muse,” he said. “Well, I'm done with her for the evening. And now I have you,
mon petit
. How lovely to see you here in the splendid south. It must all seem wonderfully strange and heaven-kissed.”

I told him my family used to summer in Biarritz, but that I had been very young and scarcely remembered a thing.

“I too came as a child, but most assuredly not with my family,” he said. “No, when I was fifteen I ran away to Marseille. Such a foolish little romantic I was, besotted by the likes of Jules Verne and Pierre Loti. An old Chinese-Annamite woman found me lost on the docks and took me to the rue de
la Rose, in the old quarter. I explained to her that I didn't want to go home, telling her my family was monstrous, which wasn't true at all. For a year I lived there under a false name: a boy had drowned and I had his papers. I worked in a Chinese restaurant that was also a
fumerie
and a brothel. Everyone smoked; the opium was of the finest quality. But I was young then, and had no need to smoke; however, the other pleasures on offer I certainly did investigate.”

As he spoke, he caressed my thigh, and in return I petted him as well. We were two children, sleepy, at perfect ease with each other.

“It was the happiest year of my life,” he continued dreamily. “But enough of the past. Let's speak instead of the present. How has the God of Love treated my favorite Russian?”

I told him that Weldon was amusing, impetuous, earnest, though I worried sometimes that he considered me an exotic specimen, an extension of the Russian icons he collected.

“But you
are
exotic, my dear. All you Russians are. We never know quite what to make of you, which keeps us tantalized.”

“Still,” I said. “It can be rather tiresome at times.”

“You sound unhappy,” he diagnosed with discomfiting certainty.

“Not at all,” I told him. “Why should I be?”

I was still smarting from Weldon's remarks earlier in the evening. Cocteau had gradually worked his hand higher up my thigh till he had found the spot he sought. I surrendered without resistance to his long, kneading fingers. When I reciprocated his attentions, he purred, “You see, I'm fully brought back to life. How terrible those weeks in the clinic. And how little I knew what lay in wait for me upon my release. You've heard the news, I imagine.
Everyone
, it seems, has heard the news, and everyone has his own opinion. Not that I care that some profess to be scandalized by the return of a loyal if prodigal son to the Church and its sacraments.

“I've never renounced my faith, after all. Shall I confess this to you,
mon cher?
I, the most frivolous of men, have often surprised myself by slipping into out-of-the-way churches, to offer up a solitary candle to our Lord. I don't think I fully understood, at the time. Indeed, I thought nothing of it. But God knew. What is that marvelous line by your countryman? ‘God sees everything, but waits.' For me He has indeed waited—and then He made His move. It was at a dinner party at the home of Jacques Maritain, that most exquisite of Thomist philosophers. One of the guests had come straight to Paris that very evening from a mission to the Bedouins. He might as well have been an angel sent straight from the Lord. As he spoke of his work in Arabia, I was knocked for a loop. Punch-drunk, as they say of boxers. Room, books, friends: nothing existed any longer. I was
caught
. Yes, my dear, it's true. A priest gave me the same shock as Stravinsky and Picasso. Three days later I made confession and took the sacraments in Maritain's private chapel in Meudon
.
”

I felt a queer shiver at his words. It was years since I had last been in a church, save once to peek inside St.-Séverin, which lay just a few doors down from my current lodgings—and that only to admire the architecture. I associated those occasional visits I used to make, during that horrible time in Yalta, with a kind of cowardice, a cringing animal fear of imminent extinction I had not been afflicted by in quite some time. Enveloped in European safety, my soul had grown fat and indolent. For years I had had the luxury of neglecting its condition entirely. Now that I regarded it, I was not sure I liked what I saw.

“You can't imagine what Radigo's death did to me,” Cocteau continued, though I only half listened, absorbed by my own thoughts. “Left alone and half mad, I knew in those weeks and months that I should raise my hands to heaven for help, but I simply couldn't. So I sought instead Baudelaire's artificial paradise. It's excruciating,
excruciating
, to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious. And speaking of
excruciating, what delicious release, finally, to… Well…”

He regarded the aftermath of the mutual convulsion he had brought us to. “We've made quite a mess of ourselves, haven't we? And yet I've thoroughly enjoyed our little chat. I shall remember it for a good long while. I hope you will as well?”

Later that night, after I had slipped into bed beside the peacefully snoring Weldon, I dreamt of God as I had not in many years. In the dream He invited me into His wood-paneled study and was showing me a map. He no longer looked like Michel Fokine; I have no clear impression of His face in the dream. He had shed Father's military uniform for a plum-colored smoking jacket. Instead of a desk there was a card table, and on the card table was laid out, much as Mother used to lay out jigsaw puzzles, a collection of Tarot-like images connected to each other by intricately embroidered filaments. The images were like small motion pictures, busy scenes that I failed to make out clearly, despite His urging me to do so. “Fate,” said God. He touched the map with His fingertip, and the images changed—but from what to what, exactly? Try as I might, I could not see them clearly. “Providence,” He said. He touched the map once more, and again it changed. “Free will,” He said. I had the sense that He was growing rather exasperated that I could not make any of this out for myself.

 

Our month in the beautiful south drew to a close. The night before we were to leave, I stopped by Cocteau's room to thank him for his gift of sun and sea. As I approached his door, Picasso's least stupid smell in the world brought me up short.

I hesitated before knocking, but my desire to take proper leave of my friend overcame my reluctance to discover him in this lapse.

“By all means enter,” he said from within. When I opened the door I could see, by the dim light of a lamp over whose shade a silk handkerchief had been draped, Cocteau propped on
his elbow in bed—and beside him, likewise recumbent, Jean Bourgoint.

“Ah, welcome,
mon petit
. I knew you would come. The flame draws many a lovely moth, does it not?”

When I said nothing, he went on. “Are you surprised? I suppose you must be. How complex this life is! Yes, I'm perfectly aware I was saying only yesterday that opium resembles religion about as much as an illusionist resembles the Christ. But it's so easy to get lost among these distinctions, isn't it? Come. Have a little of my pipe. This is very fine, infinitely better than Shanghai Jimmy's famous mud.”

Bourgoint said nothing, merely stared glassy-eyed in my general direction.

“Come,” Cocteau repeated. He stretched out his hand to me. “Please.”

“Weldon will have what the Americans call a ‘fit.'” I said. “Despite everything, he's quite the Puritan.”

“Americans,” Cocteau replied. “I'm so tired of Americans. America reminds me of a girl who's more interested in her health than in her beauty. She swims, boxes, dances, leaps onto moving trains—all without knowing she's beautiful. One suspects she doesn't even care. Enough of it, I say. I so much prefer my Jean-Jean here, who knows one thing, and one thing only, which is how to be beautiful.”

Bourgoint gave Cocteau an ineffectual little shove. Cocteau ignored him, taking instead another delicate effusion of smoke into his lungs. There was something so charming about the two of them, something so calming in the scene before my eyes, that I realized how very much, these past months, I had secretly longed for opium's solace.

“You
understand
,” Cocteau told me as I slid into bed beside him. “Of all my friends, you
understand
.”

Weldon was not as understanding.

“You've been smoking,” he said when I returned to our room.
“I can smell that horrid smell on you. You've been dishonest with me, and that dishonesty has ruined our final night here.”

I attempted to explain the circumstances.

“I despise that little Frenchman,” he told me. “And I don't understand your infatuation with him. He ruins young men. Forget the religious blather;
that's
his true vocation. He plans to completely destroy that poor Bourgoint fellow, who's really too innocent to live. He's clouded Sachs's head with incense and mumbo-jumbo—a shame, because at least Sachs has an intelligent head on his shoulders. The man exults in chaos. Just look around us. We're living in a brothel, for God's sake.”

“I thought you found all this pleasingly exotic.”

Weldon paced the room. “What do you want from me?” he shouted. “What have you ever wanted, besides all the little luxuries I can provide you with? Admit it: you're still very angry about what happened to you and your country. You haven't even begun to come to terms with what it means. That's why opium holds such a damnable attraction for you; it allows you to neglect what you don't want to face up to. I thought I could somehow replace opium in your affections, but clearly your grief is much, much deeper than I can assuage.”

I wondered how long he had been rehearsing this particular outburst.

“I don't think you know yourself at all,” he went on. “You pretend not to be serious about anything, but you're completely blind to your own predicament, Sergey. It hurts me to have to speak this truth to you.”

“What would you have me do, then?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don't know. This is so tiresome.
You're
so tiresome. I wish I'd never met you. Or no: I wish you'd turned out to be real. But there's nothing there. There's just a flicker, and then on closer examination there's nothing.”