We met by accident. The first time I
saw her she instantly reminded me of a woman in a fresco at the Palazzo Ducale
di Mantova. Hence the allusion to The Ebony Tower. She was telling the waiter in her fluent but accented French that he had got it wrong, again. She turned to me,
for no reason other than I was at the next table, and asked if I knew how to
mix a drink. I could try, and I did, and she was delighted. Her tipple, as she put it, was red vermouth,
un Martini rouge, with a very precise proportion of soda-water and ice: ice
first, then the vermouth, then the bubbly. She decided she liked me because I
got the mix just right for her.
Madame was old when I met her. She
married late in life and had been, even so, a widow much longer than she had
been a wife. The table scraps of her personal biography that she fed me every
once in a while didn’t make a feast, perhaps a casse-croûte and a slim one at
best, but it was an interesting life she had led. An army brat from Oklahoma,
daughter of a perdurable colonel who amazingly managed to dodge retirement in
the face of the army’s up-or-out version of the Peter Principle, she had
nothing to tell me about the time after she left college—I think without
bothering to graduate—until she met her husband when she must have been near
forty. Then it got good.
He was a diplomat, and either
someone at le Quai d’Orsay really didn’t like him or he was a born adventurer,
but he was posted to Vietnam, several countries on the verge of riot and
dissolution in Africa and, as a treat, Bulgaria or Albania, but not both. Madame
loved it. As an ambassador, he always had enough of a budget to live well,
which in those countries at those times was not difficult, and not far shy of
splendid: good wine always materialized, servants were abundant, grateful for
the work, and did not steal more than decency permitted, and the European works
of art that came on the market were definitely not forgeries—he evidently had
the eye of a connoisseur and the heart of a detective—and could be had for
practically nothing with nothing by way of provenance either.
Best of all, as far as I could
understand the stories, there was really nothing to do in these posts save
passing the time with the other European diplomats, their hangers-on, and the
occasional transient ex-pat, who may or may not have been a spy or a crook, but
could always tell a story or sell something cheap to earn a meal and a free
flop for a week or two. Considering newspapers arrived two or three months late
if at all, radio was BBC on shortwave or nothing at all, and local news was
nothing at all minus a great deal, visitors were bundled right into the bosom
of the community and tended to stay. The cagey ones were able to figure out how
to arrive at a diplomat’s new posting after a decent interval and start the
process all over again.
Why not? Everyone came out on top,
which is even better than everyone being above average. It was like frontier
life, but instead of the tales around the campfire or singing around the piano
in the parlor, there were complicated narratives, sexual and political
intrigues, a fair amount of gambling for petty stakes which had a way of
mounting up, and best of all dressing for dinner. With a longish siesta in the
afternoon in all these sweaty boon dock posts, it was possible to sit down to
dinner, with silver, china, crystal, and servants in uniform, all the guests dressed
to the nines, including jewelry, around eleven in the evening. Samuel Beckett
said that all days are the same, except the last day, which is shorter. They
did Beckett one better. Dinner at eleven meant going to bed after five or six
in the morning, and waking up just after noon in time for a light lunch in the
heat and, a little later, a siesta. Short, sweet, days, in an ebony tower.
It was a lovely, fun-house-mirror of
a moveable feast that had passed by. No one was ever going to see it again. But
she did not seem to care about that, only that her mirror was smashed when he died
of a heart attack while on leave in Paris. So she stayed. This is when I first got to mix her a drink.
Even then, it was clear, if I
bothered to think about it but tried not to, that he had died with his boots
on, that the broadsword of history had clobbered that—what was it?—early
post-colonialist or pre-post-modernist moment not long after his heart called
it a day, but slowly, by a thousand cuts, with bits and pieces falling off the
wagon, the paint chipping, the windows breaking, until there was nothing left
but a pile of scrap by the side of the unpaved road. If Madame knew this—of
course, she had to—it had no place in her recollections. And good for her.
Better to be sociable tell stories
and to listen to stories from me and her other admirers who would arrive and
depart as erratically as I. She came
leaning on her cane the table was ready for her drink and a chair waiting. The
coming and the going, however slow and difficult, were le prix d’entrée for
her, just like travel on dirt roads and by rubber-band airplanes once upon a
time.
I was called away. When I returned I went by the café and asked
for Madame. I learned that she had
not been around for a long time. No one even
knew where she lived. The waiter shrugged and asked me if I wanted to drink to
her memory, on the house. I declined.
