It’s our fourth time on the Riviera. Now I can say that we’re always there. Four times are enough for an ‘always’, at least in literature. One takes out the rubbish, the other selects outfits. One waters the plants, the other is still picking outfits. A clear division of roles. It’s usually well past midnight by then and our flight is only a few hours away. Sleep is out of the question. We’ve done this so often that it doesn’t even upset me anymore. I wrote to my mother that I would be unavailable for a while. ‘Even less than usual?’, she wrote back, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Hotel du Cap, Antibes.’
Until recently they didn’t even have internet and you could only pay with cash. Until the late twenties, there was always an hour without cable in the afternoon, no phone after seven. This led to a holiday feeling, even in wartime, that was enjoyed by such calibers as Zweig, Roth, or Hofmannsthal.
Only the colors of the awnings have changed, the landscape is paler, and the first employees are no longer here for biological reasons, but most have been here long enough that they have become Hotel du Cap themselves. They say in the past guests would have stayed longer. For weeks, months, summer loves. The most famous people of their time took their routines with them, left clothes and cigar boxes here for the following year.
It makes a difference whether you show up at the beginning or at the end of a season. The staff enjoys those who come at the beginning because they have forgotten what guests are actually like, and those who come at the end too because it’s almost over. Until Gerald and Sara Murphy came and rented half the hotel with a Chinese man to keep it open in the summer, there was only the winter season. They asked for a chasseur, a cook and a garçon. When Coco Chanel showed up with a sunburn, the summer season on the Riviera was perfect. There is only one story about this and it is always the same. It feeds on the aristocratic magic of the Murphys, who brought their artist friends from Paris and the Jazz Age, hangovers and wars, the lost and rediscovered Garden of Eden, film festivals, colour film scenes staged by Slim Arons and all the other people who dress like that and take photos of it by the pool. I like the Murphys’ time as adorable parents, stylishly dressed, chic, with no smell of effort, with a sense of detail and order that they taught their Picassos. These people not only liked this lifestyle, they had invented it.
Matisse gave this time beautiful colours. Cole Porter wrote ‘Anything Goes’. The Kennedys came with all their children. Windsors, Churchills, trillionaires, oil tycoons in swimming trunks, kings who came to eat and stayed to die. There were meals under trees, long conversations by the pool, light clothes, nicknames, old friends, and a Hayworth who lamented, ‘Oh, every man I knew fell in love with Gilda, but woke up with me’. Joe Kennedy jumped into the water here right after he heard on the phone that Germany was declaring war on France after all. The Cap d’Antibes became a holiday resort of global political significance.
What we think we know about the 20s or 50s is romanticised and remembered in such a way that hardly anything real fits in between. This romanticisation makes us sad because the present never feels like the past, even though it will be past and perhaps it was. We think we have to live by it, but no one who lives lives like that. Just look at the photograph of Hemingway hanging in the hotel. He’s standing on the floating dock without a care in the world, like a person who disguises himself as a piece of furniture, who neither gets along with Gerald Murphy, nor can appreciate this completely adapted life with its daily disguises. Plus a nervous Scott Fitzgerald, who takes the Murphys’ life and changes it, but not how it might have been.
All these people have slept together for a shoot, invited each other to dinner, cheated on each other, goaded, hurt, and engaged. They dated, tried to kill each other, acted out, loved, broke up, and made up. They have stolen the show, stolen the clothes, and talked again to whom no one should talk to after all.
It’s not the famous people’s fault what has been made of it today, but any story is worth as much as its present. And while one or two are not yet finished being told, another one already begins here. Ours.
We had chosen the beginning of the season. The sky is already blue in April, the Americans are not here yet. You arrive, go up the few steps, greet the doorman, start with the acquaintance and say to the concierge that you are not available for anyone. Nobody calls anyway, but I’ve always wanted to say that. You ask for a daily newspaper every day before nine and tell the housekeeping lady to keep our windows open day and night. All reservations have to be postponed for an hour and a half. So now you sit there and wait in the lobby for your soul to follow. The lobby is big and high and beautiful, all bathed in afternoon light. On the left large paintings and a map of the region that no one had ever looked at, the concierge said.
After the first beautiful days, our souls arrived and the days became the same. That was perhaps the beauty of it. In the mornings, before the wind, I rowed around the Cap and back and sometimes around the bay until you could see Jules Verne’s villa. Once I saw a man sitting on a rock taking photos of me. I rowed a bit closer and realised it was a real paparazzo, I thought they were extinct. I rowed up to him and said I wasn’t famous at all and he said that’s okay, he was saving them for when the time comes. He hadn’t seen anyone row around the Cap since Kirk Douglas. We lay down together and enjoy the open window, the warm feeling and the view over the sea. We go for breakfast on the terrace, which at this time of the day is still in the shade and entertained by seagulls. We apologize to the staff for being so late, but that doesn’t matter here.
We had been given a suite on the second floor and from the sea I could see the many open windows. From the room you could see past the shutters over the pine trees to the sea and the Îles de Lérins to the Esterel, which many painters liked. You go down the stairs through the revolving door and towards the mountains for quite a while. The path is lined with hundred-year-old pine trees. The view takes off, as if over a ski jump, and everything is almost as beautiful as one had imagined, making the walk to the sea much shorter than one had thought.
With all the beautiful life, it was the desire to get blisters on the hands, to enjoy the exhausted creation, the coast, the sun, the sea. The endless sky, the Grand Prix races, Picasso painting here and fathering children with a woman 40 years younger, the raspberry tarts, the pool, the white of the wine held against the sky looking like the hotel, red nails, her brown wet skin and the dark clouds on the horizon over the sea. The height of happiness was so endurable. The head looks for its problem, but I can’t do anything about it, apart from influencing a bit what to make out of it.
It was paradise for swimming, but the Americans just sat at the bar or had the bar brought to them all day. They sat there until they sounded like the last ice cream of the day being carried away in a cooler after drinks. Then they were overcome by the boredom that always sets in for American tourists when they are left to their own devices in the afternoon. They had books with them too, but to take pictures of them. Most rich people give up what they like to do to be rich, and when they can do it again, they don’t remember what it was. They blame the bad weather or the lack of sleep or the poor employees for their moods. You are outraged by so much stupid ignorance until you feel compassion, understanding despite contempt, realise that these people are all in you, that’s why you row. Tired of doing nothing, we usually went to the room afterwards, recovered from a hard day at the beach, found our way back to our natural state in bed and later still in front of the bookshelf. Our few, light things lay around like evidence. With the windows open we slept the sleep of the grateful until aperitif, and sometimes beyond.
Sometimes I was silly enough to arrange meetings with people on the terrace during the day, but that only made the minutes in front of the shelf more enjoyable. Besides, without a meeting we would never have seen the terrace in the late afternoon light, Portuguese time. The terrace then looked like it was made of sparkling wine. You looked out to sea and thought of the war days here and what a contrast that must have been. The English couple we had a date with had a good sense of humor and found afternoon tea just as retarded as we did. Between them both there was the worldlessness of love. They had the satisfied faces of sincere people, at the beginning of the end of their lives, discipline, will and the goal to stay together. They had toiled all their lives and were now trying to enjoy the time they had left, taking holidays in French cities with cathedrals and happy days. Maybe this is where love begins. There is an ascent in it, development, challenge, and value, a going beyond. The English woman then addressed me directly. Her voice sounded wordless, as if from a dream. They said we were still so young and beautiful and like the Murphys, only without children. They said we complement each other very well, we’re the same in the important things and different in the right ones.
When they went to dinner, we were still sitting in front of our second glass. I asked her what her dream had been today, on the beach. She said she had dreamt about cheating and what it meant. Vanity, she said. It’s social remnants of empires long gone, cultural wormholes, but it still hurts everyone. One is then close to madness and the other hides things, out of their own shame, into mystery. But the worst thing about it is that something breaks between the two, something privy that only the two of them knew about. Does that mean a couple must always know more than the person they are cheating the other with? ‘Maybe’, she said, taking a sip of her drink. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Would you tell me?’ ‘Me?’ I asked. ‘I can’t even keep to myself that I think the receptionist is beautiful. And you?’ ‘I don’t know, but I think so.’ You don’t know what people do and think and keep to themselves. ‘You would have to decide for yourself.’
Afterwards, we mostly walked around the Cap and the bay of Antibes to disperse. We saw normal people drinking cheap rosé, fishing, freezing, very much in love. We looked for the Murphys’ house, but didn’t find it because it now belongs to a Russian who had just as little taste. She thought the water looked as if Monet’s colors were melting. It smelled of cold flowers and hundred-year-old pine trees no longer drying in the sun. Behind Cannes, one could see the pink Alps of two countries that knew no borders here. She asked if everything was really as different then as it is now and looked peacefully ahead. I said no, without diminishing the slight impact among things. It just hadn’t passed yet. How many moments would you have to cherish if you were aware of the good outcome right now? She thought for a moment and had the sea behind her on her side. This background suited her. I didn’t know anyone who had the sea and the thoughts looking so good together. I wrote it all down like I was out of my mind and had idealised her all the way back to the hotel.
When we arrived for dinner, the English couple was just leaving. A piano was playing so that the silence could be endured. It was like eating in a university library in exam times. The waiters hurried around and the couples sat there bored and needing to talk. I couldn’t stand the silence because it made me feel like the kid in the Chinese restaurant who waited in front of his Cola-Cola for the food to come and for his parents to talk to each other. When the food finally came, they kept asking how we liked it and I told them, but the waiters didn’t hear. They were so programmed or spoke almost only French. They asked, Madame, Monsieur, how is the veal? Hard, I said. Oh, thank you very much, Monsieur. But at least the wine was good, although the Sommelier only brought a heavy cart with a thousand Châteaux on it that nobody who knew anything about wine could do anything with. He said I shouldn’t drink the wine cold either, and I said yes. Vivaldi is the pinnacle of civilization, this is just etiquette, like changing wine glasses. You don’t get a croissant, you get five, not a double short coffee, but three desserts and two singles, served by people who should love what they do and not just do it because. With me, this leads to anger, she has a laugh attack and my anger dissolves, because it’s contagious.
We had two or three last drinks and stood on the balcony looking out at the Riviera at night, like a picture framed by shutters. If one destroys oneself with another cigarette, then at least with the view of Cannes. With a naked body and the woman you love. It was the same view as before and the same lights, maybe more, maybe less, but they flickered just the same at night over the bay in the rising air masses. They flickered like the memory of a memory that did not die after all. With the height of the hotel and the weightlessness through which a light, warm wind passes. I wonder if we will ever try to read Tender is the Night again. She said, come on, it’s late, let’s go inside. I said, did you know that even actors are turned down here today when the hotel is fully booked? Regulars have priority, even if they’re gardeners. We lay with the windows open and listen to the frogs and wonder how many there are. Probably not more than five, but it sounded like an army and so did the dreaming.
On our last day, Damien almost ran into our cabana and spoke without asking and without distance. He said, Madame, Monsieur, hurry up, you have to go to the airport. We had forgotten to think for ourselves during our time in the hotel. He already had our suitcases and I put on a suit. Damien said he hadn’t seen a man go from swimming trunks straight into a suit to the plane for a long time. We were very late, later than usual anyway. It was actually hopeless, just like back in Rome or when we missed the second train in a row to Madrid. While running to the car, I remembered the scene of Remarque leaving the hotel in a grey Lancia after the start of the war. He was with Maria Riva and told her that she had to remember everything. If you remember, you have it forever. I said look at this landscape and remember. In the intoxication of farewell, everything takes on an exaggerated effect that does not correspond to the true value of things, but to its very essence.
