An Aristocrat

On Thursday and Friday, Manuela, my only friend, comes to tea. Manuela is a simple woman and 20 years wasted dusting others houses have not been able to rob her of her natural elegance. ‘Dusting’ is a polite term for all the grunt work she does, but the rich will never call something by its name.

“I empty the rubbish bins full of sanitary napkins, clean the puke of the dogs, clean the bird cages. One would never believe that animals so small can make so much caca!” she would tell me in her soft and whispery accent. “Dusting?! That would be a lovely thing to do!”

When she comes to my place at three in the afternoon - Tuesdays from the Arthens, and Thursdays from the Broglies - she would have used Coton-Tige to clean all the bins which inspite of her regular cleaning are as dirty and as disgusting as any other toilet in the world because that is one thing the rich have in common with the poor: the human body with its repugnant intestines to empty waste matter.

One must admire Manuela. She performs tasks which others turn their noses up at but she stays as refined as ever.

“To eat a walnut, one must spread a tablecloth’ says Manuela as she extracts a smaller hamper of clear wood from her old basket. The hamper has almonds set in little spirals tissue paper. I prepare the coffee. We won’t drink it but we both enjoy the smell. What we do drink, in silence, is a glass of green tea and as we nibble our almonds.

Just as I am a traitor to the archetype of the concierge, Manuela, completely betrays her class. She is a Portugese maid living illegally in this country. Her father’s name was Faro, and she, born under a fig tree after seven siblings and before six more, was sent to work in the fields early and married off just as early to a construction worker who was working in France. She has four children of her own who are French by birth but seen as Portugese by society. Manuela though, is a true aristocrat, a real one of the grand sort who does not have to suffer any kind of competition because in her heart she bears the essence of etiquette and .Who, after all, is an aristocrat? It’s a woman untouched by vulgarity even when she is surrounded by it.

The commonness of her marital family, their Sundays, made stupid with laughter and being born feeble and without prospects, the commonness of a neighborhood marked with the same desolation as the hellish factories that its men descend into everyday, that of her employers whose money does not mask their pettiness and who address her as they would a scabby, mangy dog. You should have seen Manuela offering me her pastries as if she were a queen to understand her grace. Yes, really like a queen. With Manuela there my home is transformed into a palace and our little snacks into a feast for royalty. It’s the way a storyteller can make life look like a shimmering stream into which all the sorrows and boredom of life disappear, Manuela made our drab existence seem warm, gay and dramatic.

“Young Pallieres bid me good morning in the stairwell,” she said suddenly and broke the silence that had fallen between us.
I indulged in a little smirk and then shrugged and said ,“He reads Marx.”

“Marx?,” she asked me, pronouncing the ‘x’ as a soft ‘ch’ in her accent that reminded me of clear skies.

“The father of communism,” I replied.

Manuela snorted disdainfully. “Politics,” she said,”A game for the young rich that they don’t share with anyone else”. She thought for a second, knitting her eyebrows, “Its not like his usual reading though.”

The graphic porn that the young ones hide under their mattresses doesn’t escape Manuela and young Pallieres at one time had quite a collection of titles such as “The Naughty Noblemen”

We spent some time laughing and reminiscing in the quiet way that seasoned friendship has. These moments are precious to me and my heart feels bruised every time I think of the day that Manuela will fulfill her dream and return to her country for good, leaving me here, alone and old, without company that at least twice a week, makes me feel like a queen. I am apprehensive. What will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything and asks me for nothing, leaves

We could hear footsteps in the hallway followed distinctly by the sound of someone pressing the button for the elevator. It was an old fashioned elevator with black grilled shutters. The insides had padding and wood paneling If it had been large enough they would have had an attendant inside it. I recognized the footsteps we heard.: It was Pierre Arthen, the food critic and snob extraordinaire who lived on the fourth floor. The way he would screw up his face if he ever had occasion to stand at my threshold you would think he had been forced to enter a dirty little hovel. Well. I’ve read these famous critics and I know what they are worth.

“I don’t understand the whole thing,” said Manuela to whom a good roast is a good roast and that is the end of that.

There isn’t much to understand. Its sad to see a talent like that go to waste from sheer blindness. Pages and pages of dazzling prose on a tomato. Can one be so talented and yet so blind to the reality of things? I have frequently asked myself this, when I see him pass by me with his nose turned up high. The answer to this seems to be ‘YES’. Certain people are incapable of understanding or contemplating ‘life force’ and spend their entire existence on holding forth on people and things as if they had no soul. Mere delivery of observations made over the course of subjective experience.

As if in response to my unkind thoughts, the footsteps turned quite suddenly and Arthens rang the bell.

I got up, taking care to insert my feet into the sort of slippers that my role demanded. The only thing more clichéd than a caretakers slippers would be a combination of French bread and berets. I knew I would exasperate the Master, a living ode to the impatience of predators, when I did this. What came next was worse. I opened the door slowly, just a crack and thrust my nose out suspiciously. Hopefully my nose was red enough and shiny enough.

“I’m expecting a package through the courier,” he told me, with narrowed eyes and pinched nostrils. “When it arrives, can you bring it to me without delay?”

That afternoon, M. Arthens sported a huge polka-dotted floppy necktie which floated about his patrician neck and didn’t suit him at all. The leonine mane of hair on his head and the ethereal silk about his neck formed between them a sort of airy tutu in which any signs of manly virility were lost. And what the devil, that neck-tie reminded me of something. I lost my smile as I recalled. It reminded me of Legrandin, the caretaker in Marcel (Proust)’s “The Search for Times Past”. This tie looked like the one he sported – the one that expressed all his dilemmas, caught as he was between the world he belonged to and the world to which he wanted to belong. It was just such a scarf that he would have used at Place de Combray, when he met the narrators parents. He didn’t want to greet them but just before it was too late, just before he had passed them completely, he let his scarf fly in the wind - a extraordinary, melancholy greeting.

Pierre Arthens, who knows his Proust, and doesn’t, I’m sure, imagine any place in it for caretaker’s without sufficient meekness, impatiently scratched his neck waiting for my answer and said “Can you bring it to me immediately?” (The courier – the packages of the rich don’t use the usual ways of the post)

I came back to myself.

“Yes,” I said, setting new records in brevity, encouraged by his own abruptness and the absence of a ‘please’. His use of just the interrogative and the conditionnel, excused me, I thought.

“Its very fragile,” he added, “And I would request you to be careful.”

His adding an ‘I request you’ to his command didn’t really please me. Perhaps be thought I was incapable of being sensitive to subtleties of syntax and used them only out of habit. You know you are at the lower end of the pole when the person speaking to you is polite only in his words and doesn’t think you can understand his tone.

“How fragile,” I asked him in a tone that wasn’t polite at all.

He sighed and I could smell a hint of ginger in his breath.

“It’s an ‘incunable’ (an old edition).” he told me, and I just looked blankly back at him while he puffed up even more with his pride of ownership.

“Yeah. Okay. Much good it will do you,’ I said with some disgust. “I’ll bring it up as soon as the courier gets here.”

And I shut the door in his face.

I’m sure Pierre had a story to tell that evening about his caretaker who got indignant because he used the word ‘incunable’ in her presence and she thought it was something scandalous. Each time I thought of him telling such a tale, I got happy.

God knows which of us has given the worse accounting in this incident.