Riviera Idyl

All our pretty world, so carefully built, collapsed in a day. Her hubsand in Paris assumed that she was with relatives in Lyons; my wife in London believed that I was working out details of a contract in Milan. As for us, we were supposed to be looking, from our villa balcony in Grimaldi, at the diamond glitter of Monte Carlo and Nice starring the soft darkness of the coast--and we were meant to say the age-old things that all lovers say. Hopes, lies, scenery, endearments, intoxication: mud. An hour after we had unpacked, the rain began. Another hour later, we had our first vicious quarrel.

Early the next morning, I took a lonely walk in the downpour. I came across an abandoned quarry in the hills, strewn with rotting carnations, and I saw a beautiful, amber Persian cat chewing at the throat of a dead rat. A morbidity seemed to rise from the ground as I walked on. The smell of jasmine became intolerably sweet. The coast line had disappeared in a vast silver tarnish, and up above Ventimiglia in the pre-Alps, the rivulets had flooded. They came together in a torrent at the break in the (continued on page 236)riviera idyl(continued from page 124) mountains and when I arrived at my remembered river, it had changed from a slow stream into a rage of water. Tumbling in this tide I saw a naked body--it was a papier-mâché window dresser's dummy, naked except for shoes and stockings, its red mouth still printed vividly on the pulpy face.

What do you do in the midst of disaster? Over a bleak lunch in the villa, we agreed on one thing: You go to the circus. I suppose we both had the same notion--it was better to be miserable looking at something else than each other. The last act of the world would be a boring little provincial circus camped on a mud flat at the end of our affair. Then she would vanish into a northbound train and I, eventually, would land at London airport. Cold homecomings, in the rain, no doubt.

So, that afternoon, we drove down the winding, slippery road in my rented Fiat. Through the drenched air, we could see the river beginning to erase its banks. Upstream, it had gnawed away the underpinnings of two houses and we watched them--miniature in the distance---fall slowly into the water, swirl into midstream, break into fragments of roof and timber. On the wide, brown, mud-freighted hemorrhage of river, they swept past Porto dei Pescatori toward the sea.

I didn't look at her. I had a flash of a dissolving papier-mâché mask with red lips printed on it. Vivienne--could anyone possibly be Vivienne? A dummy's name. My tense, lovely, amber girl of a month ago surely had been called by another name, but it was lost now.

The little port looked unthreatened as we entered its streets. The mole and the stone embankment where the fishing boats were moored to iron rings, the stone arches of the arcade around the cobbled square, the yellow or ocher houses with their shuttered windows; all this seemed safe and solid enough. But once we were out of the town again, heading toward the old parade ground where the circus tents were pitched, it was different. The rain seemed denser, the thin sheets of water on the flats seemed to grow and merge even as we looked. And when we came to the tents, the circus band seemed to be playing in sheer terror to drown out the sound of the surf nearby. I locked the car, bought our tickets and we went inside.

The performance had already begun and the clowns were coming into the ring with an exaggerated fanfare from the band. We looked around--the audience was not large--and found seats without trouble. I sat next to a local monument--a bourgeois bonhommewith a white mustache, wearing a broad beret and a voluminous blue cloak. A redolence of wine surrounded him.

Three of the clowns were going through a frantic routine of chasing and beating the fourth. The victim stumbled through an elaborate mime of fear and stupidity. He ran to the empty lion cage and tried to squeeze through the bars; he tumbled in a clumsy somersault; he waved his arms to implore the audience. He was a man of about 60 with a gray, bushy beard; according to the notice board, he was Kurz-Le-Clown. The three others were nothing much to watch--they did what all clowns do--but Kurz was clearly a performer. Somehow, even in the crude, tumbling routine, he managed to transmit a feeling of the eternal victim, a man forever pursued by joking clods. Finally, he escaped from his tormenters and scrambled up a little stepladder, where he stood appealing for rescue before they shot him. One of the others pulled a huge, comic pistol from his baggy pants and aimed at Kurz. There was a flash and the bang of a powder cap. With immense mock dignity, Kurz fell to the sawdust and they dragged him off.

"Quelle honte!"said the old man next to me, and then, "Du vin, monsieur?"He produced a bottle of red wine and two clean little glasses from beneath his cloak, poured ceremoniously and offered them to us. We thanked him and accepted. "The next act will be less shameful," he said in French. "The circus owner himself performs with the big cats."

Tarzan, the notice board read--and he was a reasonable copy. He bounded into the ring, all muscles and leopardskin tunic. But Lord Greystoke would have winced at the brilliantined black hair. He bowed, cracked his whip and the lions began to come in through the caged runway. The band was playing something it regarded as jungle music. The crowd applauded.

Kurz, restored to life, had come forward to open the cage door and Tarzan entered. He first went into a safety cage and then opened the inner door. As the last of the lions came through the runway, he marshaled them into their proper places. The ritual of movement began.

"They look like huge, jealous women," Vivienne whispered to me. Half true--there was a certain snarling about precedence, but it seemed to me that the great cats were edgy for some other reason. They made restless, false moves and Tarzan would make them readjust. He was not bad, not at all a bad trainer, but even we could see that the timing of the act had gone off a little. Tarzan exerted himself, used the whip, and the order was restored for the moment.

The lions were parading in a circle when we saw the first slip of water under the tent. It washed in near one of the exits, then spread into a dirty pool about ten feet wide. A woman screamed. We realized that the crowd, without being aware of it, had been anxious about this all along. The thrash of sea against the shore had been an undertone in every mind. Now there was panic. The crowd began to spill down over the plank seats, children scrambling, women with babies running frantically.

"Do not move. Stay here!" the old man in the cloak said to Vivienne and me. "It is not a disaster." I took Vivienne's hand. He was right--the water seemed to be spreading very slowly. Then I saw that he was looking not at the small flood but at the cage. The lions had panicked into rebellion.

Inside the bars was a massive confusion of bodies, a scrimmage of giants. One lion, roaring, reared above the others. Tails whipped the bars. The band had stopped playing and had fled. We were left with the sound of people crying out, the roaring of beasts, the suddenly loud beating of the surf. The old man next to me was on his feet. He was pointing at the cage and, strangely, shouting something at Kurz the clown, who had not left with the others. "Ravidac! Attention!" were the words I caught.

Vivienne gasped and caught my arm. Then I, too, saw it--Tarzan's limp arm beneath the haunches of one of the lions. In the next instant, we watched the clown, with something like a broomstick in his hand, going into the safety cage. "Oh, no!" said Vivienne. "He's insane."

Of course he was. The whole big-cat act depended on clockwork timing and everything happening in its right order. In a moment, the scared lions would pull them both to pieces--but no. The clown seemed to be working them somehow, just with his puny stick. Desperately, I thought, "He's seen it all so many times before; he must have learned something." Now he was talking to them, stepping adroitly into available openings, making them move. The pathetic victim-clown turned, miraculously, tall and commanding.

I never saw what prods or tricks he used, but all at once, whatever they were began to work. "Look, look," Vivienne said--a lion, belly down and appearing to mutter in its beard, was slipping into the runway that led from the cage. Another followed. The rest of them retreated, jostling to get back into their sequence around the edges of the cage. And then it was over quickly as the file of beasts moved without trouble into the runway.

Vivienne was sobbing. In the empty tent, quiet except for the background of surf, her crying sounded very distinct and musical. I put my arm around her. Two of the circusmen came in and carefully helped Tarzan out of the cage. He had some blood on him, but he seemed to have escaped anything serious. In a moment, he was sitting up in a chair, wiping himself with a towel. We went down to the ring, the three of us.

Now that it was over, I almost wanted to laugh. It was too much. The little clown, in a moment of panic, playing the hero. Pratfall, horror show and then the grandiose, corny climax of melodrama. But the worst of all ironies was that the great rescue scene had been played after the audience had departed, the instant of glory before an empty house.

The old man in the cloak had walked up to the clown and was bowing. "Monsieur Ravidac, accept my congratulations on one of your finest performances," he said, "just as in the old days."

The clown looked at him. I had not noticed before that Kurz's eyes were, oddly, a pure, bright blue. "I am Kurz the clown. I know nothing of any Ravidac," he said in a humble old man's voice.

"What's all this about Ravidac?" Tarzan asked from his chair. "Are you making some kind of comparison? Of course, we all know that name from the past----"

"But this is Ravidac," the old man said, turning. "The greatest of all lion tamers. As a boy, I saw him many times at the Cirque d'Hiver and at other places. I'd know that style anywhere. I used to have his picture pinned on my wall."

"I never heard of him. I am named Kurz," said the clown in a dull voice of self-abasement.

"You handled the lions like a master," said Tarzan. "Only a man who ... but let it pass. If you say that you are Kurz the clown, then it is true. A man can be what he wants to be."

"Nevertheless," said the old man in the cloak, "we have witnessed a performance that only Ravidac could provide. I do not dispute your name, monsieur, but"--he slowly took off his beret and turned to the empty seats--"I salute the spirit of the great Ravidac one last time."

"Ravidac is dead," the clown said with a sudden arrogance. Then, with a listless clown shuffle, he walked out of the tent.

A pallid late sun had appeared in the west when we went to the car. The empty parade ground looked like a huge broken mirror reflecting the light in pieces. Now that the rain had stopped, the worst of the river's flood seemed to be stanched. It had fallen back to its normal banks and its noise had lessened.

Driving back, we suddenly found all tension gone; we talked, laughed, interrupted as if we were children excited by our first circus.

"Of course he is Ravidac," Vivienne said. "Don't you see that it all sounds so bogus that it must be true?"

"Nonsense," I said jokingly. "He is an old clown named Kurz. For years he has dreamed of being the great lion tamer. Alone in his tent at midnight, he has practiced every move of his hero. He has lived on the crazy thought that someday his moment would come."

"Oh, but you are wrong," she said, pinching my arm. "Don't you see? The famous performer realizes at last that he is beginning to falter. His retirement is announced. But when the time comes, he finds that he can't imagine life outside the circus. He changes his name, learns the clown's routine----"

"But the noble motive? The tragic theme?" I asked. "To rise to the heights of purest claptrap, the story must have something moral about it."

"Bien sÛr,"she said. "And it is a very sad one, of course. The great show is dying. The days of the circus are over. A few shabby companies still appear in the little country towns. The once-great Ravidac, hidden under the name Kurz, expresses all his despair in the humiliation of the clown. He enfolds the tragedy of the circus within his own soul and three times a day, matinees and evening, he is mocked and then murdered symbolically."

"Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto!"

Laughing, we seemed to forget all the depressing clichés of our own small drama. That night we made long, good-humored love. Afterward, we opened the doors and stood on the balcony, feeling the keen east wind and looking at the scatter of diamonds that marked Monte Carlo and Nice. The next morning, the wind veered and came warmly from the south. The jacaranda looked like blue snow against the blue sky and the jasmine on the furry trunks of the palms smelled very fresh.

We went to the balcony again and Vivienne spoke to the horizon. "I salute the spirit of the great Ravidac one last time."

"Because he tamed two animals?" I asked.

"And also because he has provided a comedy to make two children happy," she said.