The Cleverness of the Characters Cast: Interpreting the Persons of Descartes

                The narrator of the story recounts the phone conversation he had earlier.  His interview subject suggested they have tea together.  He recalls the homework he had done on his interview subject: the careers she has had throughout the years.  She had brought audiences to their feet and governments to their knees in her lifetime, both within the frame of artistic beauty.

                When he catches his first real glimpse of her, through a mirror’s reflection in a café pillar, he stops to observe the breath-taking beauty that is Madame Descartes.  Even in her old age, she still had an unmistakable elegance about her.

                After introducing himself and apologizing for his tardiness, he fumbles with his notebook and begins busily taking notes.  She replays her career as a performer and a model, a photographer and writer, alongside her love life and her interests.  She recalls with faint and distant sadness the horrors of war and the violent deaths that ensued.

                Then, without skipping a beat, she asks the narrator to “put your notebook down’ I’ve/Decided to take your picture.”  As he tries to ready himself for the suddenness of becoming her subject, instead of the other way around, he is intrigued at “the small café table/Which Madame had so easily turned.”

                In the first read, things seem to be going easily enough.  This is due, in part, to the fact that there is no clash of perspectives.  It’s just the narrator’s.  So then why, at the end, is Madame not quite the woman we had first imagined?  And why is the narrator not quite as talented with spoken words as he is with thoughts?

                The tale of this afternoon tea with the Madame offers a good look at two very interesting types of personalities.  Not much is said about David St. John, the author of this poetic piece of literature, in his narration.  But when we look within the narration, the way he acts and then reacts to Madame Descartes, as well as the way she reacts to him, we can see into his character and learn something about this reporter.  Secondly, we have Madame Descartes, who seems the retired showgirl, but is much more the wizened cynic than most will ever know.

                He (St. John) walks into this story, and he doesn’t seem to lack a sense of confidence.  He’s a writer, and he works hard.  And he’s taken an interest in this latest subject of his, Madame Descartes.

                Madame Descartes, St. John has discovered, has a beauty so ageless that St. John calls her reflection “unmistakable”, and so unique he finds it “riveting/As the Unicorn’s/Soft eye.”  From the text we can interpret a woman who knows the life of a goddess.  Many of us wonder what it must be like: to be instantly liked, constantly sought after, inadvertently pleased (because it seems that such a pretty, likeable-looking face shouldn’t be walked all over by this less-appealing world).  She knows what it’s like.

                And here is where St. John accidentally slips the first glance of a self-portrait: “Her beauty/Was so close to a vengeance—one exacted by the world/Upon those of us so ordinary, so weak, we can barely/Admit its existence.  So I just sat there…”

                He then goes on to tell us more about Descartes.  She provides to her interview a look at the glamorous life of the pretty people.  So what happens?  She gets bored.  She “took several lovers” and then “the fatigue set in.”  She just keeps getting bored!  Poor thing doesn’t even know (or perhaps it’s that she’s grown too numb to care) that St. John, and billions of others on this planet, would love to have her life.

                Alas, though, since multiple lovers will not satiate her search for happiness, she gets married.  This, too, grows old quickly.  And that was when Descartes stumbled upon photography.  She uses this latest love of hers to document the grotesque images of war (which, of course, our ill culture eats up) and attains even more fame and riches!  Yet still, she seems unimpressed with the world and, if it can be of any shock to you, bored.  Not completely, though…We find out at the very end of the story that, while St. John has been taking notes on Descartes, Descartes has been taking note of St. John.

                “‘And now,’ she said, ‘put your notebook down; I’ve/Decided to take your picture.”  She’s intrigued by this little man, who I’m imagining is actually quite a nervous and confidence-lacking individual.  I derived this from the way he calls himself “ordinary” and “weak” and spends so much of the poem/short story just reflecting on her physical attractiveness.

                In these last few lines, then, we stumble upon something even greater than the famous Madame Descartes, and it is that the famous Madame Descartes has become intrigued by this reporter.  Intrigued enough to make him into one of her works of art.  If she were to give it a twenty-first century name, one could imagine she might name it “Zac Smith”.

                St. John finishes the story with my favorite lines of the entire literary piece.  I have already shared the last few words, but it is the collective lines that provide the greatest insight.  (I am just now feeling, with some interest and some sadness, as well, that the this “greatest insight” might actually be an insight into myself.  Did I pick this piece because it reminded me…of me?)

                “Before her consoling wink, I simply sat back, trying somehow/To smile, to look worldly, desirable, nonchalant—/My hands so self-consciously gripping the small café table/Which Madame had so easily turned.”

                In the end, this is really who these two characters ultimately are: Madame being the character who turns tables, and St. John being the character who wants so badly to entertain the small thought that he is someone that someone might be interested in, someone who spends far too much time admiring beauty while “self-consciously gripping” this small table where he thought he knew, for sure, how to posture himself.

                I’m not so sure at all how this interpretation matters.  But I think I can finally tell you why.  From the first time I read “My Tea with Madame Descartes”, I genuinely felt like I was the narrator: hard-working, a bit of an odd ball who finds the lives of has-beens so fascinating, self-conscious and nervous, and “trying somehow/To smile, to look worldly, desirable, nonchalant…”

                And I admit—with some shame but in all truth—that I’m just kind of hoping that one day I’ll find the Madame Descartes within myself, and maybe even one day out in the world, who finds me so fascinating that they want to take my picture.  Could ya’ imagine that?  Someone, for my artistic appeal and in my attempt to “look…desirable, nonchalant”, wanting me…