Payne's Soliloquies °1-°4
 
Roman Payne
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It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvion wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.


For four nights we drank and feasted at the banquets in the holy square of St-Germain. Many friends of old assembled; tried companions, those long-traveled, with stories yet untold. There, we gathered beneath the broad moon that hung like a pendant on a string. We danced beneath festivity lanterns, dropping blushing light on the lawns and stones. On prosperous tables, gentle bread was laid. Brimming were the bowls. From elegant flasks, wine was poured – good wine, well seasoned, long ago pulled from ancient grapes. Golden-lipped girls with sleek hair and eyes as slender as pearls strolled in and out in their clouds of perfume, summer sacks dangled on fresh arms burnished by the copper sun from days spent in private ways on provincial strips of shore. We toasted the city and the passage of time, and we laughed with gladness in our hearts, merry in our ways, until nights overturned to dawns.
It was then on the evening of the fifth night that I resigned myself to remain in the rooms I kept overlooking the square and not go out, as I desired to finish up some of the projects I had weighing on my mind. These were heroic times and I had much work to undertake.
From a solitary evening walk along the river, I came alone up the rue Bonaparte. Entering the room to which I held key, I approached the summer basin, freshly spilling of water; and from it, I splashed my face to tame the heat. The mail had been slipped beneath the front door and I took the envelopes to the table to examine them. One was from Nadja, rose-colored paper and a hand-colored pomegranate. Her letter was brief but excited. She was high in spirits. Everything was settled. She would be coming in the fall to study at the Beaux Arts.
‘Hopeful Nadja!’ I smiled, and flung open the window with thoughts of that eastern beauty on her far-flung shore, her sun-cooked archipelagos. Was there anything like Nadja?, with her magnificent sloping waist and long saltwater back. Hopeful Nadja, she could be . . . No!, this was no time to dust my thoughts with the powdery prints women’s footsteps leave behind. There is much work to be done! . . . All of this and a summer’s eve, I muttered, “The temperature throbs and, one by one, evening birds peck at the humid hours, leaving spicy dusk with sweet tempered beaks.” It was clear thoughts were coming fine. I knew great work would be done this night.
Filing the letters in a forgotten cabinet, I took to the desk to where I lay pen to work. I wrote one line, then a second, humming my hero’s exaltation. Feel the tremendous heat! Any stopping this swelter? Watery pitcher, water clean, I drank cool tasteless water down and took to the window to feel the draft.
My feet sounded noisily on the wood floor as I crossed the room. Bright is the Parisian sky – and crisp! Down in the square below, I observed the nightly banter beginning to form. “Holy banquets!” I cried with displeasure in my heart. “Sacred feasts!” Down in the square of St-Germain, one saw the assembly of the evening’s fresh young girls, les parisiennes parfumées, donning newly-cinched cotton tops. Streamers ran softly over ancient stones. The colorful paper lanterns infused with light in the dusk, stretched across the lawns and were bowing and bobbing with the currents of summer winds. I left the window open and returned to the desk to continue my work.
One hour over-passed another. A little work was set to stone, chiseled and arranged. Dark grew the sky and the strumming of newborn songs came from the square up into the airy room. Then there were songs, now there was laughter. Now a girl was shouting to friends. Did they want to drink champagne? She did. Happy, one could tell, were those tender vocal cords, never once torn by rugged years. Sweet like a klaxon’s song in private bows. Sweet was her chime. Would I have to shut the window? Must I deprive myself of summer evening wind? Cannot the nightly air belong to me as well? I, after all, have a battle-worn hero who needs a lofty breeze. In defeat I abandoned the chair and returned to the window.
Now the banquet was in full bloom. Sweet smiles, I saw, laughter from sweet eager girls, dressed in tissues light, their frosted lips and braided hair, bound breasts and fragrant hips, holy tender wrists and palms, arms that raised to sing their psalms . . . “Let us end these happy feasts!” I implored madly. Just one night! . . . For one night, I wished for peace. “Silence all! . . . Do you not realize I am planning a hero’s homecoming up here?” Alas, the revelers heard me not. I brushed my brow of sweat, and upset sighs I put forth as I closed the window shut and walked over to the piano to tick out a tune.
No avail.
With the still air, the heat, the muted sounds of the reveling outside, my hero’s tale was waning. I couldn’t get the poor wanderer home.
Again at the window. I sought the latch to open it anew and let in a draft. A clear view I had of all the happy gardens. From where I stood, one easily saw the crystal wine flutes emptying themselves into delighted mouths. One could count the specks of glitter on the smooth shoulders of ladies. Officers in uniforms, white-jacketed servants carried corpulent bottles beneath their arms. “Cursed night!” I cried, and the moon was swelling majestically to add to my frustration.
“And if I should die this very eve?” I asked of the heedless revelers, “If I should perish on some accidental chemist’s drug, hazardly taken before your rosy dawn? You, gay-tongued ladies and men, speak up! Would you be happy sacrificing your hero’s song for the dregs of this night’s wine?” My words availed me aught. Ceasing to speak, I kept my eyes fastened to the noisy square, all the while trying to think of how to return to my work. Now the band had stopped to allow one fiddle player the party’s attention. The fiddler was gangly type with long bandy legs, he wore a smoking and everyone seemed to take a great interest in what he was about to play – the women especially. All gathered around.
His fiddle began slow. Eyes darted around his uneasy movements with the first caresses of the bow. Then, as he sped up, his arms began waving rapidly like the wings of a moucheron. It wasn’t such a feat! I knew the very concerto, a most predictable piece! Still, his equine mallet got the proper attention and the fragrant ladies, all dewy-eyed, perched around him with mouths gaping in emotion.
It was during this show, I saw among the maids below, one young girl who struck my curiosity. She was in the group, among the others, though somehow apart from everyone. A young girl, shorter and more fair than her fellow ladies. Her shoulders sat upright like fruit on a tree, and her breasts swooped down like two birdlings learning flight. Those shoulders were bare and smooth and bronzed like amber resin forever preserving youth. Around her small neck of rosy skin she wore a pretty band of peach silk. And from that silk, hung a golden locket or bell, which appeared to ring each time her soft neck pulsed. And every descent that violin took, from major key to minor, her chest heaved and her neck it trembled and that golden bell it rang.
“Senseless to think I instruct my hours,” I sighed in defeat, shutting the window anew, wiping the summer dew from my humid crown. I realized now that staying in this coop would truly avail me naught. It was time to find my own girl. I had clever Adélaïde, that fair doe with her collarbone of pearl. A famous dancer at the Palais Garnier, with a famous body smooth as fresh split ivory, and long too. She would be waiting for me now, this very night, this very hour, in her sweltering loft overlooking the grandeur of the lawns of Luxembourg. I imagined her well: her low cut dancer’s top, thin and pressed with summer wetness against tiny alabaster breasts.
Sweet eve sang softly as I wandered along. Sweet eve touched me gently! It was nice of me to leave off my work again to enter anew the vibrant life of the festive streets. I passed quickly through the Place St-Germain without stopping to smile at friends. Up through rue des Canettes I walked, along then through St-Sulpice, up the rubbled rue Férou. Adélaïde would welcome me gorgeously on this balmy night. When I came inside her courtyard, I saw the windows of the concierge were open, blowing wild-patterned sheets with spicy smells of Portuguese cooking fires. Her children were babbling away in the kitchen. I took quietly to the discreet stairs. Up on the top floor, Adélaïde greeted me…
“Lover of old!” she cried, the gentle fawn.
“Lady of youth!” I sang with outstretched arms.
“So long to see you, Aleksandre! Would you like tea?”
“Good girl, no! . . . Just wine.”
We kissed each other a timely hello with long ago thoughts, and then we sat at a well-made table laid with summer fruit and gentle wine. Adélaïde nodded happily to me and poured the glasses. Her forehead shined with summer heat. In due time, I smiled, give us this night our nightly wine; and after we had drunk, I stood and went to the window overlooking the silent trees of Luxembourg.
“I’m going to take a bath, Aleksandre.”
“Fine, fine,” I called back to the far-away voice. I heard brazen water filling the long ivory tub and I smiled. I turned back to the pleasant window, back to my soft-chilled wine, back to the garden beyond, back to myself drifting farther away from the city where I was. Streams of traffic on the rue de Vaugirard poured in and around me, and the great garden came to resemble, now a sea of black tar encrusted in bronze, now a gulf of obsidian flung amongst the city’s copper lights. As one wanders bravely, looking into darkness, so my mind went off in errant ways. Alone, I began to wonder what I had to be glad about. True, it was summer; and after all, I could travel. It would soon be August. I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then, I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure. Aye, these were empirical times! Each moment making its own singular impression, either in thought or in vision, odor or sound. Surely I could travel, or I could stay in Paris. I had the season of summer. Then after summer would come the even better season of autumn. After would come the winter, followed then by the fragrant spring.

It was while I made my peace with the gardens and streets that Adélaïde bathed her delicate body. I returned to the table to drink the last of the cool wine. I then walked to the balcony to take a breath. Adélaïde had finished her bath. When I came back to the room, I saw she had cast her towel away and was lying naked on her damp bed, allowing the summer heat to dry her. There on the bed where she lay waiting, I poured oil in a Constantinian lamp and lit the ready wick. Upon her body softly stirring . . .
Stirring softly, her skin took the sweet oils from my hands and the summer songs dropped from my giving lips. In the niceties of July, I fell deep upon her with silk and sweat, and lifted her high with the palm of my hand on the small of her back and felt the little tips of her well-known teeth upon me, the gentle arch of her tender feet and the strain of her creamy legs, shuddering long like a tremolo string.
Afterwards, we lay torn and battered like bruised animals.
“I’ll be leaving for Vienna in a week, you know…” Adélaïde breathed this softly, while smoothing my hair with her dovelike hand. “When I get back, I’ll have moved.”
Vienna, I thought. That’s right, I’d forgotten. Adélaïde would be going for three months to dance at the Wiener Staatsoper, illustrious hall. When we would see each other again, it would be in the cold months of winter.
“Where will you have moved to?” I asked.
“Just down to the quai. I found a bigger place. Next time you come to visit it will be down there.”
Thus hearing, I looked around her little place at Luxembourg I knew so well. I thought then that I might miss it, though I never would. Three months, she would be gone, I considered. Let me savor then her body now, laced in humid midnight hours. With strength and skill, I brought her into me anew. We breathed and were blown like ships on windy seas. Afterwards we lay silent. Panting fresh. Adélaïde ended the silence with sentimental words…
“Do you remember what is was like when we met?”
So hearing, I spoke thus, recalling a time two summers past:

We met in the courtyards of night.
I brought you a strip of silk,
while you brought a slender key,
tied to a strand of perfumed cloth.
By a prosperous fountain we kissed,
our noses were filled with the fragrance of summer.
You took me upstairs to your room.
We had to be silent, your sister was sleeping.
We made love on the balcony stones.
Ours was our youth in that long-ago time…

“It was beautiful,” she interrupted, the dew of passion on the corners of her lips.
“I can go on if you want, fair Adélaïde,” I said coursing her chin with my fingertip.
“It was then like it is now,” she smiled, and added with a smirk, the clever girl, “…and it was sure romantic of you, Aleksandre, to show my sister to the train station the next day.”
“Yes,” I said, “I just don’t remember why your sister was sleeping here in the first place, or where she was going to on the train.”
“To Montpelier! . . . where she lives with my parents. But you remember!” Then… “Aleksandre? . . . Will you come to see me the day I get back from Vienna? You can sleep in my new place.”
In Autumn, after the silence of August, many things had changed. Adélaïde had left for Austria. The drizzling rains began. In public houses we drank coarse seasoned wine and wondered privately about the coming winter and the new year. I woke early some mornings to walk in the damp darkness along the rows of animaleries along the quai de la Mégisserie. There I would come to meet a melancholy group: a man named August and the younger one, a Russian immigrant, called Pavel. The two shared a loft and worked downstairs in The Bone Shop; it was an old brocante tucked between flourishing poppy nurseries along the banks of the Seine. It was for the memory of those two melancholy men that I mapped the autumn moon in the key of G, and it will be for them that I one day write the Vermian Opera in D minor. But that will all come later.
It was also this autumn, that I would come to meet sweet Katell, that fair cast-away child who’d wandered awhile and then settled on the Boulevard Magenta. This is how it happened:
I was obliged to meet with a certain German composer staying in the north of the city. The whole thing was against my better judgment, and I thought to cancel the meeting, but something that I read that was printed about him in Le Monde made me take a liking to him. It was said that he only spoke French and German, that he didn’t like other composers, that he hated artists in general and had a distrust of all foreigners. This, and the rumor that he only composed songs late at night when absurdly drunk made me change my mind.
I found myself the night before at the café L'Entreacte near the Opéra. I decided I would stay in the neighborhood rather than wander back to St-Germain where I’d been working. That way I could take my time in the morning and wouldn’t have to travel far to meet the German.
I found a hotel on the boulevard Magenta and booked a room for the night. The girl working at the desk was the fair Katell. She had made a deal with the owner that she would work the desk in exchange for the room where she lived in upstairs.
When I entered the hotel, Katell was reading a magazine and wore a citron yellow décolleté top. She also wore a hint of bright yellow on her lips and eyelids, and this freshness came out in gleaming beams of sunlight, slyly beaming from eyes that were light brown; lynx-shaped eyes that seemed to follow whatever object was moving in the room until they would come back to you bat themselves coyly, with confident timidity. Katell was as short as Adélaïde was tall. Her coquine lips were naturally and seductively swollen and when she looked at you, they would come together to smooth her shimmering lemon gloss.
Katell turned her back to get the key to my room and I noticed her back was small and beautiful shaped and deeply suntanned without the slightest blemish. We talked and she told me she’d been all over. She had left home at sixteen to travel, had worked for a year in Asia, had met all sorts of people, and she never returned home. She’d liked Greece the best, though she didn’t like the smell of the little streets and the churches. But she liked the smells of the cafés and the musicians’ songs that played there. She like the bravery in the Greek tales and songs. She'd read Homer in French and was trying to read it in Greek. She liked the valor of Zeus, she liked his promiscuity, and she admired the craftiness of Athena. She also liked Artemis, although she was convinced her chastity wasn’t intentional. “It’s like Mary,” she told me, “You know in the original Greek, Mary wasn’t described as a virgin. She was just described as a young girl, but not a virgin . . . somewhere, someone got it all wrong!”
Katell said she would always be catholic. She said she believed in God and loved him (she insisted that him be spelled all in lower-case) and would always love him, though she didn’t like his books. The characters in the Bible were sorry people, she said. “They’re horribly meek!” she told me, “and worse, they’re proud of being meek! . . . Can you imagine?!” Katell liked Jesus but she preferred Achilles.
I asked for a room and furnished priceless papers to ensure the young miss of my honest identity. The passport I used was weathered and had to be smoothed out to be read correctly.
“Monsieur…” she began, trying to make out the type.
“Frederic” I helped her, “Frederic de Quincy.”
“Frederic!” she repeated, looking wildly at me. I like the way she pronounced that strange name with her tender lips.
Later in the evening I sent for wine and she asked to drink some with me, and I asked her if she wanted to hear new song. “It is a heroic piece,” I insisted; and she was glad about that, and I asked if she had an instrument.
“There is a flute downstairs.”
“A silver flute?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That will do fine.”
Katell went to get the flute and when she came back we went to her room and played and sang and she learned the words to my song. Her room was bare, even for a hotel room, and when it was late and we thought to sleep, she asked if I had any toothpaste or soap. I didn’t. I was traveling without luggage and had hoped the hotel would furnish such toiletries. She blushed when I told her this, and said she hadn’t either these items and said she always seemed to have trouble taking care of the necessities.
Katell then left to the hall and called one of her girlfriends to come over. It seemed she was helping a friend with a place to stay while the hotel owner wasn’t around to object. The friend was called Julie. She was a dark-haired creature with shy, cervine eyes. She was obviously less experienced than her older friend Katell. Julie brought toothpaste and soap and the three of us washed and sang and played the silver flute and kissed and were happy until, at the blue light of dawn, we fell asleep, all three of us tucked in a tight-sheeted bed. When the hotel maid rang in the morning, I rose and kissed the girls’ sleepy foreheads and snuck away to meet the German.
Winter came quickly that year. I hadn’t remembered how much I enjoyed the chill of late November, but when it came I was glad. Many things changed but much stayed the same. I saw people of old – writers and scholars, actors, bankers, and mathematicians – we often gathered in private houses where we feasted on hot soups and fragrant wines. Nadja had finally come to Paris to study, as she’d always wanted to; and I was doing my best to introduce her around the Left Bank society. She took a fortunate place in a golden-heated room on the rue Jacob, near the École des Beaux-Arts, and she spent her days there amid towering easels, or in the museums where she sketched the marble gods and drew the painted heroes. I often saw her at night.
Katell too was back in Paris after having wandered away. She now had a place on the avenue de l’Opéra. Her kitchen lacked soap and salt but her bathroom was furnished with scents and creams and she had acquired furniture too. They were prosperous times for young Katell. She had gone to Rome for a few weeks and had returned with a good amount of money.
The invitation came on a Wednesday. Katell had cooked and asked if I was hungry and if I could bring some candles. I wrapped a well-knit scarf around my neck, found a coat in the armoire, descended to the Place Colette and headed up the avenue.
In her little studio, Katell and I sat at her well-made table, laid with good bread and ample wine. A generous radiator brought forth heat and the sky outside the window gave night. Katell had been reading from Herodotus. When I arrived the book was set by an old aluminum Bialetti kettle that chugged as it cooked coffee on the stove.
We ate with great praise for the delights of well-prepared food. There were sturdy bowls piled with hand-rolled semolina cakes stuffed with cèpes and chevre cream. Blushing oils were strung over tender cooked legumes. After the rich meal, Katell and I rinsed the plates with clear water. I then went to the window, as was my custom after a meal, and I began to wonder about all that I had to be glad about – now, again, in my life, in the world. Everything, I decided. They were joyous times. I had the pleasures of wine and prosperous meals, the sly lips of sweet Katell. This, and I had the fortune of solitude. That, and the season of winter: blessed time when one can walk out into the peaceful morning and find silent streets steeped in frigid darkness. Blessed empirical season! . . . No one could say that my life was lacking.
Sitting softly on the edge of the bed, I sang to Katell with an old wound guitar. We then clasped hands and kissed, and when the shards of moon out the window passed by and the frost on the sill was black as an unused hearth, I took to her bed with wool and down and made love to her. we slept warm that night and close beside.
I woke early the next morning, before daylight broke, and left the sleeping girl to dream. In that tender room, a little brass mantle clock ticked along the fifth hour. Into the basin, I drew water, warm, and washed my face and shaved. I cooked coffee in the kettle and drank it silently at the window. Those candles I’d brought, I lit anew, yet they did hardly a thing to light upon the dark wood floor where lay scattered pieces of Katell’s clothes. No longer citrus-hued cotton tops; now was the winter. All dark brown and grey, the beige straps of Katell’s bra showed like muddy rivers running along the burnished earth that was her long burgundy scarf. Her winter stockings were rolled and set about her shoes: black heels, pointed like javelins. Books were scattered about on the floor. I saw she had been reading from Cities & Countries; it lay face down to mark the page. I walked again through the silent room to the window to inspect the dawn. It threatened not to be light for a long while. Before I left Katell’s room, I sat beside her and studied her in the darkness. She spoke in her sleep and I kissed the soft down of the back of her neck and she clung to me for a moment and then let go. I took my winter frockcoat from the closet, and dressed in my leather gloves, my scarf of winding cashmere. After buckling the sturdy leather satchel where I kept my papers, I descended the stairs and headed down the avenue de l’Opéra. A winter wind was howling.
Back at the room to which I held key in holy St-Germain, I drank my coffee and opened the letters that had been piling up beneath the door. A wax-stamped note had been delivered by the fair Adélaïde. She was back in Paris after much success in Vienna. She now lived on the quai Voltaire, had new clothes to enjoy the cold. All this and she wanted to see me right away. I looked at the calendar and thought of the season. Days were over-passing. I realized I had much to accomplish if I wanted to seal the projects I had started. Ambitious projects they were. It was still early in the month but there was no time to waste. I was in heroic form, strong of mind with a fine-formed body. There were no limits to the greatness I would create on that hearty desk where I lay pen to holy craft. Still, I had to avoid the company of women for awhile.
 
 
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