The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [328]
detour for her sake. She'-s a kind, grateful, and by and large docile woman. So we went at this hungry speed through Rouen and then bore north toward the channel. She was telling of Vichy in the good old days and of the celebrities she knew there. It was her cunning way of getting the conversation round to du Niveau, for she never missed a chance to discuss him with me, and what she really wanted was to warn me to be on guard, that he was unscrupulous. Not that she wasn't grateful, you understand, but she also was beholden to me and she hinted at various crimes he was guilty of. I realized that she was simply romancing about him. He represented some great ideal to her which her spirit was hungry for. We were getting close to her destination, and I wasn't too sorry, even though it was a sad, dark day and I'd have to continue to Bruges alone. The ride by way of Dunkerque and Ostend is a terribly melancholy one through ruins and along the grim Channel water. Only a few kilometers from her uncle's farm the Citroen's engine began to miss and finally we stalled. I picked up the hood, but a lot I know about motors. Besides, it was freezing. So we started to walk toward the farm across the fields. She was going to send her nephew to town for a mechanic when we got there. But we had a good long way to hike, three or four miles across the fields, which were brown, turfy and stiff, these fields where battles of the Hundred Years' War had been fouoht, where the bones of the killed English were bleached and sent back to be buried in churches, where wolves and crows had cleaned up. The cold, after a time, made you gasp. The tears were cutting tracks over Jacqueline's face, which was flaming through the makeup. I was stung and numb too, hand and foot. "Our stomachs may freeze," she said to me after we had gone about a mile. "It is very dangerous." "Stomach? How can the stomach freeze?" "It can. You can be ailing for life if that happens." "What do you do to prevent it?" I said. "The thing to do is sing," she said, desperate in her thin Paris shoes and trying to stretch her cotton muffler over the back of her head. And she started singing some night-club song. The cold blackbirds flapped out of the woods of rusty oaks and even they must have been too cold for noise because I heard no grating from them. Only Jacqueline's poor voice which didn't appear to get far over the thin snowy pockets and furrows. "You must absolutely try to sing," she said. "Otherwise you can never be sure. Something may happen." And because I didn't want to argue with her about medical superstitions and be so right or superior wising her up about modern science I decided, finally, what the hell! I might as well sing too. The only thing I could think to sing was "La Cucaracha." I kept up La Cucaracha for a mile or two and felt more chilled than helped. Then she said, after we had both worn ourselves out trying to breathe in the harsh wind and keep up the song cure, "That wasn't French that you were singing, was it?" H I said it was a Mexican song. "^ At which she exclaimed, "Ah, the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!" The dream of her life? What, not Saigon? Not Hollywood? Not Bogota? Not Aleppo? I gave a double-take at her water-sparkling eyes and freezing, wavering, mascara-lined, goblin, earnest and disciplinarian, membranous, and yet gorgeous face, with its fairy soot of pink and that red snare of her mouth; yet feminine; yet mischievous; yet still hopefully and obstinately seductive. What would she be doing in Mexico? I tried to picture her there. How queer it was! I started to laugh loudly. And what was I doing here in the fields of Normandy? How about that? "Have you thought of something funny, M'sieu March?" she said as she hurried with me, swinging her arms in her short jacket of legof-mutton sleeves. "Very funny!" Then she pointed. "Vous voyez les chiens?" The dogs of the farm had leaped a brook and were dashing for us on the brown coat of the turf, yelling and yapping. "Don't you worry about them," she said, picking up a branch. "They know me well." Sure