SECRET WEAPONS
Strange how people are under the impression that making a bed is exactly the same as making a bed, that to shake hands is always the same as shaking hands, that opening a can of sardines is to open the same can of sardines ad infinitum. “But everything’s an exception,” Pierre is thinking, smoothing out the worn blue bedspread heavy-handedly. “Yesterday it rained, today there was sun, yesterday I was gloomy, today Michèle is coming. The only invariable is that I’ll never get this bed to look decent.” Not important, women enjoy disorder in a bachelor’s room, they can smile (mother shining out from every tooth), they fix the curtains, change the location of a chair or flowerpot, say to put this table where there isn’t any light wouldn’t occur to anyone but you. Michèle will probably say things like that, walk about touching and moving books and lamps, and he’ll let her, stretched out on the bed or humped down into the old sofa, watching her through a wreath of Gauloise smoke, and wanting her.
“Six o’clock, the critical hour,” Pierre thinks. The golden hour when the whole neighborhood of Saint-Sulpice begins to alter, ready itself for the night. Soon the girls will begin to emerge from the notary’s office, Madame Lenôtre’s husband will thump his leg up the stairs, the sisters’ voices on the sixth floor will be audible, they’re inseparable when the hour arrives to buy a fresh loaf of bread and the paper. Michèle can’t be much longer, unless she gets lost or hangs around in the streets on the way, she has this extraordinary capacity to stop any place and take herself a trip through the small particular worlds of the shop windows. Afterward, she will tell him about: a stuffed bear that winds up, a Couperin record, a bronze chain with a blue stone, Stendhal’s complete works, the summer fashions. Completely understandable reasons for arriving a bit late. Another Gauloise, then, another shot of cognac. Now he feels like listening to some MacOrlan songs, feeling around absently among the piles of papers and notebooks. I’ll bet Roland or Babette borrowed the record; they ought to tell somebody when they’re taking something. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? He sits on the edge of the bed and wrinkles the bedspread. Oh great, now he’ll have to pull it from one side to the other, back, the damned edge of the pillow’ll stick out. He smells strongly of tobacco, Michèle’s going to wrinkle her nose and tell him he smells strongly of tobacco. Hundreds and hundreds of Gauloises smoked up on hundreds and hundreds of days: his thesis, a few girlfriends, two liver attacks, novels, boredom. Hundreds and hundreds of Gauloises? He’s always surprised to find himself hung up over trifles, stressing the importance of details. He remembers old neckties he threw into the garbage ten years ago, the color of a stamp from the Belgian Congo, his prize from a whole childhood of collecting stamps. As if at the back of his head he kept an exact memory of how many cigarettes he’d smoked in his life, how each one had tasted, at what moment he’d set the match to it, where he’d thrown the butt away. Maybe the absurd numbers that appear sometimes in his dreams are the top of the iceberg of this implacable accounting. “But then God exists,” Pierre thinks. The mirror on the wardrobe gives him back his smile, obliging him as usual to recompose his face, to throw back the mop of black hair that Michèle is always threatening to cut off. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? “Because she doesn’t want to come to my room,” Pierre thinks. But to have the power to cut off the forelock someday, she’ll have to come to his room and lie down on his bed. Delilah pays a high price, you don’t get to a man’s hair for less than that. Pierre tells himself that he’s stupid for having thought that Michèle doesn’t want to come to his room. He thinks it soundlessly, as if from far off. Thought at times seems to have to make its way through countless barriers, to resolve itself, to make itself known. It’s idiotic to have imagined that Michèle doesn’t want to come up to his room. If she isn’t here it’s because she’s standing absorbed in front of a hardware or some other kind of store window, captivated by a tiny porcelain seal or a Tsao-Wu-Ki print. He seems to see her there, and at the same time he notices that he’s imagining a double-barreled shotgun, just as he’s inhaling the cigarette smoke and feels as though he’s been pardoned for having done something stupid. There’s nothing strange about a double-barreled shotgun, but what could a double-barreled shotgun and that feeling of missing something, what could you do with it at this hour and in his room? He doesn’t like this time of day when everything turns lilac, grey. He reaches his arm out lazily to turn on the table lamp. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? Too late for her to come now, useless to go on waiting for her. Really, he’ll have to believe that she doesn’t want to come to his room. Well, what the hell. No tragedy; have another cognac, a novel that’s been started, go down and eat something at Leon’s. Women won’t be any different, in Enghien or Paris, young or full-blown. His theory about exceptional cases begins to fall down, the little mouse retreats before she enters the trap. What trap? One day or the next, before or after … He’s been waiting for her since five o’clock, even if she wasn’t supposed to arrive before six; he smoothed out the blue coverlet especially for her, he scrambled up on a chair feather duster in hand to detach an insignificant cobweb that wasn’t hurting anybody. And it would be completely natural for her to be stepping down from the bus that very moment at Saint-Sulpice, drawing nearer his house, stopping in front of the store windows or looking at pigeons in the square. There’s no reason she shouldn’t want to come up to his room. Of course, there’s no reason either to think of a double-barreled shotgun, or to decide that right this moment Michaux would make better reading than Graham Greene. Instant choices always bother Pierre. Impossible that everything be gratuitous, that mere chance decides for Greene against Michaux, or Michaux against Enghien, I mean, against Greene. Including confusing a place-name like Enghien with a writer like Greene … “It can’t all be that absurd,” Pierre thinks, throwing away his cigarette. “And if she doesn’t come it’s because something’s happened; it has nothing to do with the two of us.”
He goes down into the street and waits in the doorway for a bit. He sees the lights go on in the square. There’s almost no one at Leon’s where he sits down at an outside table and orders a beer. From where he’s sitting he can still see the entranceway to his house, so if … Leon’s talking about the Tour de France bicycle race; Nicole and her girlfriend arrive, the florist with the husky voice. The beer is ice-cold, he ought to order some sausages. In the doorway to his house the concierge’s kid is playing, jumping up and down on one foot. When he gets tired he starts jumping on the other foot, not moving from the door.
“What nonsense,” Michèle says. “Why shouldn’t I want to go to your place, when we’d agreed on it?”
Edmond brings the eleven o’clock coffee. There’s almost no one there at that hour of the morning, and Edmond dawdles beside the table so as to make some remarks about the Tour de France. Then Michèle explains what happened, what Pierre should have assumed. Her mother’s frequent fainting spells, papa gets alarmed and telephones the office, grabbing a taxi home and it turns out to be nothing, a little dizziness. It’s not the first time all this has happened, but you’d have to be Pierre to …
“I’m glad she’s better now,” Pierre says, feeling foolish.
He puts one hand on top of Michèle’s. Michèle puts her other hand on top of Pierre’s. Pierre puts his other hand on top of Michèle’s. Michèle pulls her hand out from underneath and lays it on top. Pierre pulls his hand out from under and places it on hers. Michèle pulls her hand out from the bottom and presses the palm against Pierre’s nose.
“Cold as a little dog’s.”
Pierre admits that the temperature of his nose is an insoluble enigma.
“Dope,” says Michèle, summing up the situation.
Pierre kisses her on the forehead, kisses her hair. As she ducks her head, he takes her chin and tilts it to make her look at him before he kisses her on the mouth. He kisses her once, twice. She smells fresh, like the shadow under trees. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, he hears the melody distinctly. He wonders vaguel
y at remembering the words so well that make total sense to him only when translated. But he likes the tune, the words sound so well against Michèle’s hair, against her wet mouth. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, als …
Michèle’s hand digs into his shoulder, her nails bite into him.
“You’re hurting me,” she says, pushing him off, running her fingers over her lips.
Pierre sees the marks of his teeth on the edge of her lip. He pets her cheek and kisses her again, lightly. Is Michèle angry? No, she’s not. When, when are they ever going to find themselves alone? It’s hard for him to understand, Michèle’s explanations seem to have to do with something else. Set on the idea of her coming some day to his place, that she’s going to climb five flights and come into his room, he doesn’t follow that suddenly everything’s solved, that Michèle’s parents are going down to the farm for two weeks. Let them, all the better, because then Michèle … Then it hits him all at once, he sits staring at her. Michèle laughs.
“You’re going to be alone at your house for fifteen days?”
“You’re a dope,” says Michèle. She sticks one finger out and draws invisible stars, rhomboids, gentle spirals. Of course her mother is counting on faithful Babette to stay those two weeks with her, there’ve been so many robberies and muggings in the suburbs. But Babette will stay in Paris as long as they want.
Pierre doesn’t know the summerhouse, though he’s imagined it so often that it’s as though he were already in it, he goes with Michèle into a small parlor crowded with antiquated furniture, he goes up a staircase, his fingers grazing the glass ball on the banister post at the bottom. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t like the house, he’d rather go out into the garden, though it’s hard to believe that such a small cottage would have a garden. It costs him effort to sweep away the image, to find that he’s happy, that he’s in the café with Michèle, that the house will be different from the one he imagines, which would depress him somewhat with its furniture and its faded carpets. “I’ll have to get the motorcycle from Xavier,” Pierre thinks. He’ll come here to meet Michèle and they’ll be in Clamart in half an hour, they’ll have two weekends for excursions, I’ll have to get a thermos jug and buy some nescafé.
“Is there a glass ball at the bottom of the staircase in your house?”
“No,” Michèle says, “you’re confusing it with …”
She breaks off suddenly, as if she had something bothering her in her throat. Slumped on the stool, his head back against the tall mirror with which Edmond tries to multiply the number of tables in his café, Pierre acknowledges vaguely that Michèle is like a cat or an anonymous portrait. He’s known her such a short time, maybe she finds him difficult to understand too. For one thing, just to be in love never needs an explanation, you don’t have to have friends in common or to share political opinions to be in love. You always begin by thinking that there’s no mystery, no matter who, it’s so easy to get information: Michèle Duvernois, age twenty-four, chestnut-colored hair, grey eyes, office worker. And she also knows: Pierre Jolivet, age twenty-three, blond hair … But tomorrow he’ll go to her home with her, half an hour’s ride they’ll be in Enghien. “Oh, fuck Enghien,” Pierre thinks, brushing the name away as if it were a fly. They’ll have fifteen days to be together, and there’s a garden at the house, likely very different from the one he imagines, he’ll have to ask Michèle what the garden’s like, but Michèle is calling Edmond, it’s after eleven thirty, and the manager’ll give her the fish-eye if he catches her coming back late.
“Stay a little longer,” Pierre says. “Here come Roland and Babette. It’s unbelievable how we can never be alone in this café.”
“Alone?” Michèle says. “But we came here to meet them.”
“I know, but even so.”
Michèle shrugs, and Pierre knows that she understands and that she’s sorry, too, at bottom, that friends have to put in such a punctual appearance. Babette and Roland have their usual air of quiet happiness that irritates him this time and makes him impatient. They are on the other side, sheltered by a breakwater of time; their angers and dissatisfactions belong to the world, to politics or art, not to themselves ever or to their deep relationship. Saved by force of habit, though, by the automatic gesture. Everything smooth, ironed out, numbered and filed away. Happy little pigs, poor kids, and good friends. He’s on the point of not shaking the hand Roland reaches out to him, swallows his saliva, looks him in the eye, then puts a grip on his fingers as if he wanted to break them. Roland laughs and sits down opposite them; he’s got the schedule from some cinematheque, they can’t miss the show on Monday. “Happy piglets,” Pierre gnaws away at it. All right, I’m being an idiot and unjust. But a Pudovkin film, oh come on, couldn’t he look around and find something new?
“New?” Babette teases. “Something new. You’re such an old man, Pierre.”
No reason to not want to shake Roland’s hand.
“And she had on that orange blouse and it looked so good on her,” Michèle’s talking.
Roland offers his pack of Gauloises around and orders coffee. No reason to not want to shake Roland’s hand.
“Yes, she’s a bright girl,” Babette is saying.
Roland looks at Pierre and winks. Tranquil, no problems. Absolutely no problems, placid little pig. Pierre loathes their tranquillity, that Michèle can sit there talking about an orange blouse, as far from him as ever. He has nothing in common with them, he was the last one to come into their crowd, they barely tolerate him.
As she talks (it’s about shoes now), Michèle runs a finger along the edge of her lips. He can’t even kiss her nicely, he hurt her and Michèle is remembering. And everybody hurts him, winks at him, smiles at him, likes him very much. It’s like a weight on his chest, a need to get up and go, to be alone in his room wondering why Michèle hasn’t arrived, why Babette and Roland took a record without telling him.
Michèle takes one look at the clock and jumps up. They set the date for the cinematheque, Pierre pays for the coffee. He feels better, he’d like to talk a little more with Roland and Babette, says goodbye to them affectionately. Nice piglets, good friends of Michèle’s.
Roland watches them going off, going into the street full of sun. He drinks his coffee slowly.
“I wonder,” Roland says.
“Me too,” says Babette.
“Why not, after all?”
“Sure, why not. But it would be the first time since then.”
“It’s about time Michèle did something with her life,” Roland says. “And if you ask me, she’s very much in love.”
“They’re both very much in love.”
Roland looks thoughtful.
He’s made a date with Xavier at a café in the place Saint-Michel, but he gets there much too early. He orders beer and leafs through the newspaper; he doesn’t remember too clearly what he’s done since he left Michèle at the door to her office. These last few months are as confused as a morning that isn’t over yet and is already a mixture of fake memories, mistakes. In that remote life of his, the only absolute certainty is that he’s been as close as possible to Michèle, waiting and being aware that he’s not content with that, that everything’s vaguely surprising, that he knows nothing about Michèle, absolutely nothing, really (she has grey eyes, five fingers on each hand, is unmarried, combs her hair like a little girl), absolutely nothing really. Well, if you know nothing about Michèle, all you have to do is not see her for a bit for the emptiness to turn into a dense, unpleasant thicket; she’s afraid of you, you disgust her, at times she rejects you at the deepest moment of a kiss, she doesn’t want to go to bed with you, she’s horribly afraid of something, just this morning she pushed you away violently (and how lovely she was, that she crushed up against you when it was time to say goodbye, that she’d arranged everything to meet you tomorrow and go out together to her place at Enghien) and you left tooth-marks on her mouth, you were kissing her and you bit her and she bitched, she ran her fingers acr
oss her mouth and complained, not angry, just a little surprised, als alle Knospen sprangen, you were singing Schumann inside, you sonofabitch, you were singing while you bit her on the mouth and now you remember, besides you were going up the staircase, yes, climbing the steps, your hand grazing the glass ball on the banister post at the bottom, but Michèle had said later that there was no glass ball at her house.
Pierre slides down the bench, looking for his cigarettes. After all, Michèle does not know much about him either, she’s not at all inquisitive, though she has that attentive and serious way of listening when he unburdens himself, an ability to share any given moment in life, oh anything, a cat coming out of a garage door, a storm on the Cité, a leaf of clover, a Gerry Mulligan record. Attentive, eager, and serious at the same time, listening as easily as being listened to. As though from meeting to meeting, from one conversation to the next, they’ve drifted into the solitude of a couple lost in the crowd, some politics, novels shared, going to the movies, kissing more passionately each time, letting his hand run down her throat and touch her breasts lightly, repeating the endless question without an answer. It’s raining, let’s get under that doorway; the sun’s burning down on our heads, we’ll go into that bookstore, tomorrow I’ll introduce you to Babette, she’s an old friend of mine, you’ll like her. And it turns out that Babette’s boyfriend is an old buddy of Xavier’s who is Pierre’s best friend, and the circle will start to close, sometimes at Babette and Roland’s place, sometimes at Xavier’s consultation room, or at night in the cafés of the Latin Quarter. Pierre will be grateful, without knowing why, that Babette and Roland are such close friends of Michèle’s and that it feels as though they are protecting her discreetly without any particular reason for Michèle’s needing protecting. In that group nobody talks much about the others; they like the larger subjects, politics or trials, and more than anything else to exchange satisfied looks, pass cigarettes around, sit in cafés and live their lives feeling that they’re surrounded by friends. He’d been lucky that they’d accepted him and let him in; they’re not easy to make friends with, and they know all the ways of discouraging newcomers. “I like them,” Pierre thinks to himself, and finishes the rest of his beer. Maybe they think that he’s already Michèle’s lover, at least Xavier must think so; it would never occur to him that Michèle would have been able to hold him off all this time, without any definite reason, only hold him off and go on seeing him, going out together, talking or letting him talk. You can get used to some weird things, get to think that the mystery will explain itself and that you end up living inside the mystery, accepting the unacceptable, saying goodbye on street corners or in cafés when everything could be so simple, a staircase with a glass ball at the bottom of the banister, that leads to the meeting, to the very truth. But Michèle said that there isn’t any glass ball.