The Influence Peddlers Page 10

  Cavarro was proud to see his publicity man become the center of the conversation, even if he was sometimes afraid he would veer onto radical ideas.

  When they took the stand, the doctors weren’t in agreement about the cause of the ruptured bladder: external force, internal rupture, the shock of the cold bath, or contractions from vomiting, at least ten whiskeys, the witnesses said—McNab had the number repeated while claiming that he didn’t want to sully the victim’s memory—ten whiskeys, and vomiting. There was also another woman who had drunk ten whiskeys: the accusing witness, Maude Delmont, she had admitted it. And after the weekend, Zey Prevon claimed that Virginia Rappe had shouted in the bathtub, “I’m dying, I’m going to die!” Then Fischbach, one of Fatty’s friends, swore that he hadn’t heard that. He had seen Miss Rappe tear off her clothing in the living room, and he had carried her, himself, to the bathtub. Judge Louderback asked him how he had done that. Fischbach tried to grab the judge by the right arm and the left leg. The judge panicked, and the audience burst out laughing.

  Gabrielle apologized for telling Rania these details. Everything had become grotesque.

  “No more grotesque,” Rania said, “than a twelve-year-old girl being married to an old man, and who swallows a bottle of bleach . . . But here there aren’t judges to deal with it.” She was silent . . . The despair of the girl . . . bleach, burning, agony . . . disgust greater than any pain, and I dare call pain what I am experiencing?

  Arbuckle finally took the stand, telling about that Monday, Miss Rappe on the ground in the bathroom: I went to tell Miss Prevost. Miss Delmont joined us. Miss Rappe was pulling off her clothes. I went out. When I returned she was in the bathtub. Miss Delmont was rubbing ice on her body. I took a piece. She yelled at me. She told me to put it back where it was and get out. Soon afterward, with the hotel manager, we put Miss Rappe in another room.

  A doctor testified after Fatty. He had treated Miss Rappe in 1918 for a chronic infection. We were a bit lost, only the Hearst newspapers were clear, said Samuel, a large drawing on the front page, a spider web, Fatty in the center, with two bottles of whiskey, and around him the faces of seven women, Rappe, Delmont, Blake, Prevost, and others I don’t remember, Virginia Rappe, with her eyes to the heavens like Mary Magdalene, and the headline: “They Walked into His Parlor,” Neil recalling Hearst’s declaration: the trial has “sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania.”

  The trial lasted until the beginning of December, said Cavarro, and in the end there were ten votes for acquittal and two against! A new trial was set for the beginning of January 1922. With such results it would be only a formality.

  And what was really something at the second trial, Kathryn added, laughing, is that Fatty’s wife had come back to live with him. If Fatty lost she wouldn’t have had a cent, of course, but that was something, a bastard husband, a wife who is still there when things are going badly—a lot of American women could identify with her!

  If I understand correctly, Rania later said to Gabrielle, with Americans it’s money that forces a woman to stay married, not love? Gabrielle had laughed without answering, keeping something Kathryn had said to her in confidence to herself: Love forms knots, and then it pulls them apart, I have been knotted and pulled apart more often than is fair, now I’m staying put. Rania turned her head to look out at the countryside and thought of the one who only came alone, wa an tamaneitu chei’an, faenta koullou attamanni, and when I desired something, you were all my desire . . . He and I, under my eyelid . . . To be two, again, a home . . . But choose him . . . Is it a sin? So that one is punished before having committed it?

  You never liked Fatty’s wife, Neil said to Kathryn, I wonder why. Kathryn clenched her teeth. One day her friends had forced her to hide because Fatty’s wife had found a gun and was looking for her all over Hollywood—that crazy woman got it in her head that I was trying to steal her husband from her . . . That made him worth more.

  The district attorney Brady had again chosen not to have Maude Delmont testify. She had just received a one-year suspended prison sentence for bigamy. The two other girls at the party, Zey Prevon and Nancy Blake, were enough, but now they were accusing Brady of having sequestered them and threatened them with prosecution for conspiracy in the murder if they didn’t say what he wanted! The next day, the district attorney questioned Semnacher: he wanted to talk about the ice again. Semnacher refused, and the district attorney called him a liar . . . The prosecution was now insulting its witnesses! McNab then questioned his witnesses, about the victim, gently, the glasses of whiskey, the drunk woman, the outbursts of rage, she tore off her clothes . . . The witnesses didn’t voice any judgment, even the one who said he had seen Virginia Rappe “puke her guts out” during a party, but the rumor was buzzing in the opposite direction, a nasty rumor, the pack against the woman, said Kathryn. District Attorney Brady was flabbergasted, said Samuel. McNab had sworn that he would not attack the dead girl and here his witnesses were tearing her apart. He wasn’t encouraging them. He even seemed to want them to stop! When it was a matter of the witnesses for the prosecution, he forced them to speak. But the defense witnesses, they knew so much that out of respect for the jury he held them back, and all of that regarding alcohol, abortions, chronic infections.

  Gabrielle asked if they might pass over those details. “American justice,” Neil said, “loves the facts!”

  “And money,” Kathryn added. Later, Gabrielle continued to fill Rania in: in America money is practically a sign of divine election, and if they fail, they give themselves a kick in the behind and start again. Gabrielle had seen how things worked at a big newspaper in New York, the notices from the management in the elevator, with the amount of money paid to such and such a journalist for such and such a story, permanent competition among those people, the ease with which they showed you the door, and the one leaving was even more fatalistic than a Nahbès peasant: he left the place with his cardboard box, “no hard feelings.” I’m firing you without negative thoughts, so you shouldn’t have any. They’ll take you back one day, perhaps, leave them with a good impression—that was the rule of the game—so that her own newspaper, managed by a sort of blackmailer, seemed like a haven of familial stability to her.

  Brady couldn’t even count on his victim anymore, and to shorten things, McNab decided not to have Fatty testify. The jury’s deliberation lasted several hours, with two interruptions for additional information, and the results were the same as in the first trial, ten for and two against, but this time Fatty was found guilty! McNab had blown it, said Cavarro, he should have had Fatty take the stand. The jurors hadn’t pardoned him for that defection. Or perhaps they had seen the truth, said Kathryn.

  12

  A LOVELY SUMMER

  Overall, it was a lovely summer, with demanding film shoots, then the pool, the beach, walks, parties, talking with friends, people were careful not to break any ties. Many found that Ganthier had intolerable ideas, but Neil and Francis liked him. Francis enjoyed provoking him: We let you French talk, you call us decadent materialists, and in the meantime we make more and more cars, airplanes, machines, and we’re not at all sure we’ll come to your aid the next time the Germans decide to beat you up. Gabrielle had asked the colonist why he didn’t go more often to mingle with his own Prépondérant friends.

  “They’re idiots,” Ganthier had replied, “They don’t know what a great nation should be.”

  “You are our charming reactionary,” Gabrielle had said.

  To show that he had good taste, the colonist asked the journalist to read the poetic chronicles signed by a certain Lousteau, in a magazine published in the capital.

  “No, I didn’t write them, it’s not a pseudonym, believe me, I wish it were . . .”

  Gabrielle flipped through the pages without saying anything, then:

  “Your poet is amusing, when there are colors they’re ‘red, blue, green,’ and his landscape is ‘the sea, the mountains, flowers’!�
�� Gabrielle marked each element with her hand, “the sun, kisses, perfumes,” always in threes, in each phrase, in a line, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . She kept tapping the table in rhythm, “houses, temples, public squares,” and with verbs it was the same thing, “abandoned to the world, returned to heaviness, beaten down by the sun” . . .

  “Ganthier, do you really like that? Wait, here’s another: ‘I learned how to breathe, I became integrated, and I fulfilled myself,’ long live the ternary! He easily uses a half dozen per page!”

  Ganthier had stopped doing battle with the wasp that was interested in the jam on his toast. He looked up at Gabrielle; she was waiting for his reaction. He took advantage of that to linger on her forehead, which was covered by a lock of brown hair, her dark brown eyes, and he criticized her for not being sensitive to the rhythm. She shrugged her shoulders: It didn’t have any rhythm. It was sis boom bah, the fanfare of an army. Real rhythm can’t be bought ready-made. It has to be created! Ganthier held his ground:

  “His prose is uplifting!”

  “No, it’s like a tune in triple time. Is your Lousteau an officer? Is he Commander de Saint-André?” Ganthier didn’t answer, he thought Gabrielle was reading too closely. It wasn’t fair, he almost said, even your skin, seen under a microscope . . . But he kept that to himself and said:

  “No one reads like that. With a magnifying glass Flaubert would be tossed in the trash. Lousteau has wonderful images, you’re jealous!”

  She blew up: Flaubert on the contrary hunted down such things, and sis boom bah from beginning to end was numbing.

  “Your Lousteau should try a fourth term every once in a while, it would make him much more interesting. As for his images, my hairdresser uses the same ones!”

  Gabrielle continued to read other fragments out loud, shaking her head: “. . . ‘delicate edges of long blue irises,’ you can tell the author wants to please women! And this . . . ‘drops of color that tremble on the ends of her lashes,’ I would tremble . . .” She turned the pages, parodying shivers, then she sighed with satisfaction: “Ah, so Monsieur Lousteau can be more vigorous: ‘the rocks sucked by the sea with the sound of kisses and the smile of its brilliant teeth.’ Can you imagine, the sea that sucks and the sea that shows its teeth, it’s going to bite! Ganthier, aren’t you ashamed to be reading such things? Is your poet Saint-André?” Ganthier didn’t want to give her a name. It was a true secret. Gabrielle responded that she was going to do some investigating. She would find it, and would tell everyone, “but if you tell me in confidence, it will stay a secret between friends . . .”

  Ganthier gave in because of the warmth with which she said the word friend:

  “Lousteau is a high-ranking bureaucrat. In fact, he is Marfaing.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Gabrielle said, “The colonizer who wants to become sublime through poetry . . . And it’s good to confide in me.” Ganthier was furious with Gabrielle and with himself. He would have preferred to defend those chronicles better. He liked them, but something in him also agreed with Gabrielle’s contempt for Marfaing’s writing.

  For fun, Gabrielle sometimes asked Ganthier if he didn’t want her to reconcile him with the one he called the young widow. He refused. The journalist teased him:

  “You’re afraid your energy will dry up if you don’t have any more enemies!”

  “I wonder what you can find interesting in that zealot!”

  “Rania’s not a zealot, she’s a nationalist who dreams of the West, but only partially, and that’s why you don’t like her, and men want to shut her up!”

  Ganthier remembered a little girl who loved to laugh who sometimes called him “uncle” and told him he had ears like the devil . . . At fourteen, fifteen, she became hostile toward him, appearing only with a scarf covering her face when he visited Abdesslam.

  Occasionally there was also a picnic, the specialty of the colonials. “At my farm!” Pagnon had said at the beginning of the month of August, “Don’t bring a thing, I’ll take care of it all . . . and my wife will supervise.” More than a hundred people came, at an hour when the sun was still far from setting, but had softened a lot. They had set up trestle tables with white cloths, bottles, glasses, platters of salads, meats, Spanish rice, couscous, potatoes with harissa. Everyone filled his plate, walked around the braziers and the pits to smell the merguez, grilled sardines, sides of pork or lamb chops, then went to sit on a rattan chair or one of the Louis XV chairs that had been brought out from the house. Some men even sat on large rocks to show how hardy they were. The more agitated ate standing up going from one group to another. It made you thirsty. Pagnon’s wine was easily at 55 degrees—it was a wine that didn’t last and that quickly went down one’s throat to the bladder—and some even put pieces of ice in their glass.

  Thérèse Pagnon was the perfect hostess. In a dress of orange silk that blazed on her hips and chest, she gave every man the impression that she found him the most interesting one there. She was like the wine: she put everyone in a good mood. Even the boar—that’s what they called Pagnon—was smiling. He liked seeing his wife standing out, not because it made her happy, but because he became the husband of a wife whom one noticed, a real wife of a head surgeon.

  Thérèse was also smiling. She smiled at her husband, who waved at her. She also smiled at Claude Marfaing, who understood what was in that smile, because he was laughing with Gabrielle Conti. And Thérèse thinking that Gabrielle is trash, a Parisian, always wearing trousers, but today with her legs hanging out, the famous legs of Gabrielle. Thérèse is sure that one of them is larger than the other, but men don’t see that sort of thing, and they like those legs, chiseled, as they say, a treat. Thérèse doesn’t agree. They are too muscular, too visible. She doesn’t seem feminine, plus she does a man’s job. They say that’s how she spent the war, instead of taking care of the wounded or watching children, and she doesn’t know what that’s like—she doesn’t have any, over thirty and not married. And men are interested in her. They don’t understand. They don’t understand anything, that she couldn’t care less about men. And there’s that idiot Claude, who is laughing to make her laugh, that woman is a public danger, a brunette without shame! And Claude Marfaing knows why Thérèse is smiling at him, because she can’t do anything else. Her husband is there. He’s watching her. Everyone is watching Thérèse, who is watching her lover flirt with the journalist from Paris, a madwoman. You remember what she wrote two years ago, when she came the first time, at the time of the riots at the Grand Sud, her articles on that visionary, Ben Something or Other, a tramp, a sort of backward-looking preacher, with his beard and his rags. She had compared him to Christ—worse than crazy, a provocatrice!

  All around, people pretending not to notice anything, but everyone sensing that something was about to happen. It had been some time since the contrôleur civil had been pulling her chain. You could easily see what he wanted to do with Gabrielle Conti. He was Ganthier’s rival. It seems they joked about it between themselves, a competition that rejuvenated them, and there was Marfaing flirting right in front of Thérèse, who was becoming furious, and you could understand . . . You know . . . A wife, when a whore arrives, she can control that, but it’s trickier for a mistress—there’s no contract, no common goods—and when she wants to control, it’s a lost battle. The paradox with Thérèse was that she held things together only by threatening to make the first move, to break things off while creating a scandal. She forced Marfaing to stay with her by threatening to make an exit that would be more terrible than all the good-byes he could have imagined, and the day had perhaps arrived. People weren’t voyeurs, but they didn’t want to miss anything. Pagnon’s picnic was going to be a success, and no one cared about what would happen to Marfaing. When the loves of a pretentious man are falling apart in public, the only thing to do is fill your glass and wait!

  At some point Thérèse decided to intervene. She needed a pretext. She grabbed a bottle, and headed at a
right angle toward Marfaing, who immediately understood what was coming. Anything to avoid an incident, he bowed to Gabrielle Conti: Excuse me, dear friend, there’s another question of protocol to settle with our hostess . . .

  Gabrielle was not the type of woman who was left alone at a gathering. Two officers took advantage of her solitude while Marfaing went to Thérèse, his face joyful, the contrôleur civil, the man in charge in the region, his glass almost empty. He held it out in front of him. He’s going for a refill from the wife of a great notable. All is for the best at the best of all possible picnics. The glass out in front of him was also meant to keep his mistress at a safe distance; she was probably quick to slap a face. Thérèse served Marfaing his wine while scolding him under her breath, all smiles and clenched teeth. He didn’t respond that he was paying her back for looking at Cavarro. He said that he was obligated to talk with other women, otherwise people would think he was under a thumb, and they would start looking for whom that thumb belonged to, and they would ultimately find out, or they would think he was queer.