Ravel Read online

  The special arrives at last, hauled by a type 120 locomotive, a hybrid version of the high-speed 111 Buddicom. The porters begin stowing the luggage in the baggage compartments while Ravel takes his leave of the ladies, deploying his very best manners: compliments and hand-kisses, thanks and professions of friendship. Then he gets on the train and easily finds his reserved seat in the first-class car, by the window, which he lowers. They engage in more smiling and ever-smaller small talk until departure time, when the ladies pluck from their purses handkerchiefs they then begin to wave. Ravel waves nothing, contenting himself with one last wry smile and an uplifted hand before closing the window and returning to his paper.

  He is leaving for the harbor station at Le Havre to sail to North America. It is his first trip there; it will be his last. He now has ten years, on the nose, left to live.

  TWO

  AS FOR THE OCEAN LINER France, second of that name, aboard which Ravel will head off to America, she still has nine active years ahead of her before her sale to the Japanese for scrap. Flagship of the transatlantic fleet, a mass of riveted steel capped with four smokestacks (one a dummy), she is a block 723 feet long and 75 feet wide, sent into service twenty-five years ago from the Ateliers de Saint-Nazaire-Penhoët. From first to fourth class, the vessel can carry some two thousand passengers besides her five hundred crewmen and officers. This ship of 22,500 tons burden—propelled at a cruising speed of twenty-three knots by four groups of Parsons turbines fed by thirty-two Prudhon-Capus boilers generating forty thousand units of horsepower—needs only six days for a smooth transatlantic voyage, while the fleet’s other steamers, less powerfully driven, take nine to huff and puff across.

  A Ritz or Plaza under steam, the France triumphs not only in speed but in comfort as well: Ravel has barely stepped on board when a band of impeccable cabin boys in brand-new red livery leads him along stairs and passageways to his reserved suite. It’s a luxurious apartment with chintz curtains, inlaid woodwork of sycamore, Hungarian oak, kingwood, and bird’s-eye maple, furniture of citron wood and palisander, and a spacious bathroom of vermeil and clouded marble. After rapidly inspecting the premises, Ravel glances out one of the portholes that still, for the time being, overlook the quay: he observes the throng of well-wishers jostling one another while waving handkerchiefs—as at Saint-Lazare—but hats and flowers as well and other things besides. He doesn’t try to recognize anyone in that crowd; although he welcomed an escort to the train station, he prefers to set sail on his own. After he has taken off his coat, unpacked three items, and arranged his toilet articles around the sinks, Ravel goes off to reserve a seat in the dining room from the maître d’, then a steamer chair from the deck steward. Waiting for the ship to get under way, Ravel spends a few moments in the nearest smoking lounge, where the mahogany walls are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There he has one or two more Gauloises and—judging from certain lingering or averted looks, certain discreet or knowing smiles—the impression that people have recognized him.

  That’s not unusual, and with good reason: fifty-two years old, he is at the height of his fame, Stravinsky his only rival as the world’s most revered musician, and Ravel’s picture is often in the papers. That isn’t unusual, either, given his appearance: his lean, close-shaven face and long narrow nose form two triangles set perpendicularly to each other. Dark eyes, a restless and piercing gaze, bushy eyebrows, hair slicked back to reveal a high forehead, thin lips, prominent ears without lobes, a matte complexion. Elegantly aloof, icily polite, not particularly talkative, he is a man of courteous simplicity, gaunt but jaunty, dressed to the nines at all times.

  He was not always so clean-shaven, however. In his youth he tried everything: sideburns at twenty-five, with a monocle and chatelaine, then a pointed beard at thirty followed by a squared beard and, later, a trial run with a mustache. At thirty-five he shaved all that off, at the same time taming his mane, which went from bouffant to permanently severe and sleek and quickly white. But his chief characteristic is his shortness, which pains him and makes his head seem a little too large for his body. Five feet three inches; ninety-nine pounds; thirty inches around the chest. Ravel has the build of a jockey and thus of William Faulkner who, at the time, is dividing his life between two cities (Oxford, Mississippi, and New Orleans), two books (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), and two whiskeys (Jack Daniel’s and Jack Daniel’s).

  A blurry sun sits in the cloudy sky when Ravel, alerted by the sirens announcing that the anchor is weighed, goes to the veranda deck of the liner to observe the activity from inside the enclosed promenade. The deep fatigue of which he complained that morning in the Peugeot seems to vanish at the song of the three-ton sirens: suddenly he feels light, enthusiastic, charged with enough energy to go out into the fresh air. But that doesn’t last: very soon he feels very cold without his overcoat, pulls his jacket tightly closed across his chest, and shivers. The wind has come up suddenly, clamping his clothes against his skin, denying their existence and function, attacking the surface of his body head-on, so that the man feels naked and must try repeatedly to light a cigarette, since the matches haven’t time to catch fire. He finally succeeds but then it’s the Gauloise, which, as in the mountains (brief memory of the sanatorium), no longer tastes right: the wind is taking advantage of the smoke to slip alongside it into Ravel’s lungs, now chilling his body from the inside, assailing him from all directions, taking his breath away, mussing his hair, sending cigarette ash into his eyes and onto his clothes—he’s overmatched, best beat a retreat. He returns with everyone else to the shelter of the glass wall to observe the steamship’s maneuvers as she turns heavily in the harbor, crosses the roads, bellowing as she goes, and emerges grandly off Sainte-Adresse and the Cap de la Hève.

  Since they are swiftly out at sea, the passengers have just as swiftly lost interest in the view. One after another has deserted the enclosure to go marvel at the sumptuous fittings of the France, her bronzes and rosewood, gilt and damask, carpets and candelabras. Ravel remains, preferring to contemplate as long as possible the green-and-gray surface streaked fleetingly with white, which might furnish him with a melodic line, a rhythm, a leitmotif, who knows. He’s well aware that it never works that way, that inspiration does not exist, that composition takes place only at the keys. Still, since this is the first time he has ever seen such a spectacle, it doesn’t hurt to try. After a moment, however, it seems that no motif has presented itself and that Ravel, too, is growing bored: the shadow of tedium has its foot in the door, hand in hand with the boomerang return of fatigue—which incoherent reflections provide more proof that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to rest awhile. Ravel wanders in the bowels of the ship looking for his suite, almost amused to be lost in that apartment house on the high seas. Back in his quarters, he lies down on the bed to wait for Southampton, where the France will put in only briefly toward sunset. After which, the Atlantic crossing will truly begin.

  Once more he feels weak, having breakfasted barely at all on a hard-boiled egg he downed on the quay, and besides, the huge volume of sea air has saturated his frail chest. Stretched out, he tries to nap for a moment, but since his nervous tension is at war with his weakness, this conflict merely goads both increasingly exasperated contenders into engendering a third malaise that is mental and physical and greater than the sum of its parts. Although Ravel sits up and attempts to read, his eyes skid over the lines without grasping the slightest meaning. He gives in and gets up, pacing the suite, studying it in detail without any better result, and finally decides to rummage through his suitcases to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. No, not a thing. In addition to a small blue valise crammed full of Gauloises, the other bags contain—among other things—sixty shirts, twenty pairs of shoes, seventy-five ties, and twenty-five sets of pajamas that, given the principle of the part for the whole, offer some idea of the scope of his wardrobe.

  He has always taken care with the selection, maintenance, and replacement of his clothes. When not following the lates
t fashions, he invariably precedes them: he was the first in France to wear pastel shirts, the first to dress entirely in white if he so chose (pullover, trousers, socks, shoes), and he has always been most attentive and particular on this point. In his youth he was observed wearing formal black with a stunning vest, a jabot at his neck, an opera hat, and butter-yellow gloves. He was observed with Satie in a raglan overcoat and bowler hat, carrying a Malacca cane with a curved handle (this was before Satie began badmouthing him). He was observed gazing into the distance, one hand tucked inside the front of a frock coat, and this time sporting a cronstadt hat, during a candidates’ recess at the Prix de Rome7 competition—this was before he’d failed the examination five times in a row, having taken too many liberties with the assigned cantatas for the jury members not to have taken umbrage, declaring that although Ravel had the right to consider them fuddy-duddies, he would not get away with treating them as idiots. He was observed in a black-and-white suit, black-and-white-striped socks, white shoes, and a straw hat, his arm still prolonged by his cane, the cane being to the hand what a smile is to the lips. He was observed as well, chez Alma Mahler, upholstered in a striking taffeta—this was also before Alma let some ambiguous gossip about him flourish unchecked. Apart from all that, he owns a black dressing gown embroidered in gold and two tuxedos, one in Paris, the other in Montfort.

  When, announcing Southampton, the sirens raise their voices once again, Ravel dons his overcoat to go watch the ship draw alongside the quay. Viewed from the upper deck in the abruptly fallen darkness, the port is much better illuminated once the yellowy spangles of the street lamps have outlined both banks of the channel leading into the harbor. Ravel begins to discern the frames of the tall cranes looming over the piers, a Mauretania in dry dock, the bronze angel towering atop the Titanic memorial, and a green train of the Southern Railway sitting alongside the quay on which, shortly before the steamship berths, Ravel also notices a small group of people. When the vessel has been made fast, one of them steps forward, folder in hand, and climbs briskly on board as soon as the gangway has been secured.

  Gentle voice, sage expression, sober dress, wing collar, monocle: Georges Jean-Aubry seems like a professor or a lawyer or a doctor, or else a professor of legal medicine. Ravel met him more than thirty years ago, Salle Érard, at the premiere of his Miroirs performed by Ricardo Viñes. Jean-Aubry, who lives in London, has traveled to Southampton to greet Ravel during this brief stopover and present him with a copy of La Flèche d’or, his just-completed translation of Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, to be published in the coming year by Gallimard. Convenient reading material, he thinks, for Ravel during the voyage. As for Conrad, he has been dead for three years.

  THREE

  THREE YEARS BEFORE CONRAD DIED, Ravel and Jean-Aubry had gone to see him. The visit had been no picnic. More solidly built than Ravel, Conrad was, like him, a short man of angular features and rather few words. And even less inclined to pour out his feelings, given his ill health, neurasthenia, and erratic moods, his wrists and fingers crippled with gout and lumbago. When he was willing to talk, it was in colorful French with a Marseilles accent, a souvenir of his first stay in France: three years aboard various vessels of the Compagnie Delestang & Fils, as a passenger at first, then an apprentice in the merchant marine, then a steward, before his attempt to kill himself—when he aimed to put a bullet through his heart but missed, right after Ravel was born.

  So, Ravel often proving, like Conrad, not too chatty, their conversation had had a tendency to dry up, despite a few oases where the former spoke guardedly of his enjoyment of the latter’s writing, while the latter strove tactfully to hide his ignorance of the former’s music. In this desert, Jean-Aubry had shuttled between the two mutes like an exhausted fireman, trying to bestow upon each one in turn a little artificial respiration. On the deck of the France, that meeting evokes a few brief memories, and after Jean-Aubry promises to send Ravel a copy of Frère-de-la-côte, his translation of Conrad’s The Rover, also recently completed and due to appear at the same time as La Flèche d’or, the sirens bring that conversation to an end and it’s adieu Southampton.

  Back in his suite, Ravel doesn’t feel up to changing for dinner. All things considered, tired as he is, this evening he doesn’t really feel like facing the dining room, either. Informing the staff of this after having room service bring him a Pernod, he prefers to compose his menu himself, finding it amusing to reproduce his daily terrestrial fare in Montfort-l’Amaury out on the high seas: mackerel au vinaigre, a thick steak (bleu), some gruyère, fruit in season, and a carafe of white wine to wash everything down.

  Then it’s still early, not even nine-thirty once all that has been eaten. After dinner at Montfort, ordinarily, since sleep is inconceivable, the night has barely begun. The reduced scale of Ravel’s home condenses a wealth of possible activities, even though they may be only momentary, or merely idle impulses. From the kitchen to the drawing room, via the library and the piano, a last little turn around the garden—Ravel can have lots to do even though he doesn’t do a thing, until he must finally head off to bed after all. But here? No distractions, no tasks, no attachments, no desire, either, to go kill time in the bars or the gaming rooms of the France. Although his suite is of course smaller than the house in Montfort, it produces a doubly inverse effect: too roomy in one sense, at the same time it allots his body the precise range allowed by a hospital room—a vital but atrophied space with nothing to cling to but oneself, and which still feels like a floating sanatorium. Ravel turns to the first page of Jean-Aubry’s Conrad translation and considers the first sentence: The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only—not a bad start but this evening no, not in the mood. Once won’t matter, why doesn’t he just go to bed.

  So here he is undressing. Then, after hesitating over his pajamas—in the green spectrum—and finally opting for the emerald instead of the veronese, he unfolds one of his twenty-five suits of sleepwear. So doing, he yawns and feels drowsy, which comforts him in his decision. He turns off every light except the bedside lamp, intending after all to read awhile before trying to sleep. Once in bed, he opens the translation again, tackling the second sentence and pressing on: She seems to have been the writer’s childhood’s friend. They had parted as children, or very little more than children. Years passed, his eyes are already blinking by the end of the fourth sentence, he has completely lost track, he’ll try again tomorrow. Reaching confidently for the lamp, as if they were old friends, Ravel turns out the light, and at barely ten o’clock, drops off—he who invariably chases sleep until dawn only to snag just some mediocre cut-rate, secondhand variety or indeed none at all—like a rock down a well.

  He sleeps and the next day, as on each day from time immemorial on the ocean liners of the world, everyone is served a cup of bouillon at eleven o’clock out on deck. Wrapped in a thick plaid blanket on a deck chair, nice and warm despite the salt spray, you sip the steaming bouillon while contemplating the ocean; it’s quite pleasant. Deck chairs like these, soon to appear in gardens and on beaches, on terraces and balconies, are currently to be found only on the decks of transatlantic liners, which appellation they will keep, out of attachment, when they set foot ashore.

  Ravel’s chair has blue and white stripes, and the promenade deck, made of yellow pine from the Canary Islands, is veined with red. So: Ravel is gazing at the ocean like the other passengers without striking up a relationship with them, that’s not in his nature. Although he has given up the cold aloofness of his youth, he has hardly become a man who throws his arms around other people. To his right is a couple who look like industrialists; to the left, a woman of thirty-five completely on her own, her eyes moving back and forth between oceanic contemplation and the reading of a book that almost causes Ravel, who is trying to decipher its title, to discreetly dislocate his neck.

  As for him, open upon his knees lies the manuscript left by Jea
n-Aubry, introduced by the author as “A Story Between Two Notes.” Ravel has just finished reading the first one—A remarkable instance of the great power of mere individuality over the young—and now, his bouillon finished, since the air is growing chilly, he abandons the deck for the reading room, pausing along the way to examine the décor of the grand staircase of yellow and gray Lunel marble, a replica of the one in the mansion of the Comte de Toulouse in Rambouillet. While the other passengers scatter, some toward the gymnasium or the squash court, others toward the pool, the electric Turkish baths, or the miniature golf course, perhaps the boat deck for a game of shuffleboard, or the smoking room to be fleeced by professional cheats, Ravel prefers to continue reading while awaiting lunchtime. When the moment arrives, however, rather than proceed to the dining room where he has a reserved seat, he elects to postpone the meal, which he’ll eat a little later at the à la carte restaurant. Fewer restrictions there: one goes when one likes and eats what one likes. As it is the last day of the year, the evening threatens to be long, lively, bountiful, noisy—in the expectation of which, Ravel prefers to eat lightly.