The phone rang. It was ten o’clock. We exchanged glances, at first astonished and then full of hope: it must be Anne, phoning to say that she forgave us and that she was coming back. My father leapt to the phone and shouted down it a joyful ‘Hello’.
Then, in a voice almost too low to be heard, he just said, ‘Yes, yes. Where is that? Yes.’
It was my turn to stand up; I was becoming fearful. I watched my father as he passed his hand over his face in an automatic gesture. At length he gently put the receiver back and turned to face me.
‘She has had an accident,’ he said. ‘It happened on the Route de l’Esterel.13 It took them some time to discover her address. They phoned Paris and were given our number here.’
He was speaking in a monotonous, mechanical way and I did not dare interrupt.
‘The accident happened at the most dangerous spot. There have been a lot of accidents at that particular spot, it seems. The car fell fifty metres. It would have been a miracle if she had escaped.’
I remember the rest of that night as if it had been a bad dream: the road coming up to meet our headlights, my father’s face set rigidly, the door of the clinic … My father did not want me to see her. I sat on a bench in the waiting-room staring at a framed print of Venice. My mind was a blank. A nurse told me that it was the sixth accident at that spot since the beginning of the summer. My father still did not come back.
Then it struck me that, in the manner of her death, Anne had once again marked herself out as different from us. If we had committed suicide, my father or I – always assuming that we would have had the courage to do so – it would have been with a bullet in the head and we would have left behind an explanatory note designed to be permanently unsettling to those responsible and to trouble their sleep. But Anne had bestowed on us a magnificent gift by making it entirely possible for us to believe in an accident, given the dangerous spot and the instability of her car. It was a gift that before long we would be weak enough to accept. And, in any case, if I now refer to it as suicide, I’m taking rather a romantic view of it. Would anybody be likely to commit suicide on account of creatures like my father and myself who have need of no one, either living or dead? Be that as it may, my father and I have only ever spoken of it as an accident.
We returned to the house the next day at around three o’clock in the afternoon. Elsa and Cyril were waiting for us there, sitting on the steps. To us they were just two drab, forgotten characters, neither of whom had really known Anne or loved her. There they were with their petty little love stories and the two things that gave them any appeal, their good looks and their discomfiture. Cyril came up to me and laid his hand on my arm. I looked at him: I had never loved him. I had found him kind and attractive; I had loved the pleasure he gave me; but I did not need him.
I was going away, leaving behind me that house, that boy and that summer. My father was with me. It was he now who took my arm as we went into the house.
Inside were Anne’s jacket, her flowers, her room, her scent. My father closed the shutters, took a bottle from the fridge and fetched two glasses. It was the only remedy we could aspire to. Our letters of apology were still spread over the table. I pushed them aside and they fluttered on to the parquet. My father, coming towards me with a full glass, hesitated, then avoided stepping on them. I found all that symbolic and in poor taste. I took my glass in both hands and drained it in one gulp. The room was in semi-darkness. I could see my father silhouetted against the window. The sea was beating on the shore.
Twelve
The funeral took place in Paris, in fine sunshine, with a crowd of curious onlookers and much black. My father and I shook hands with Anne’s elderly relatives. I looked at these ladies inquisitively: they would most likely have come to our house to take tea with us once a year. People looked at my father with sympathy: Webb must have spread the news about his planned marriage. I caught sight of Cyril looking for me on the way out. I avoided him. The resentment I harboured against him was completely unjustified but I couldn’t help it. People around us deplored the dreadful, senseless thing that had happened and, as I had still some doubts as to whether the death had been an accident, I was glad about that.
On the way back in the car my father took my hand and held it tight in his. I thought: ‘I am all that you have left and you are all that I have left, we are alone in our unhappiness,’ and for the first time I wept. It was not unpleasant to shed tears. It was quite unlike that emptiness, that terrible emptiness I had felt in the clinic while looking at the print of Venice. My father offered me his handkerchief, wordlessly, his face ravaged by grief.
For a month the two of us lived as widower and orphan-girl, taking all our meals together and not going out. We sometimes spoke a little of Anne: ‘Remember that day when …’ We spoke about her cautiously and without looking at each other, for fear of causing ourselves hurt or lest something be triggered in one or other of us that might result in something irreparable being said. Our wariness and our consideration for each other had their reward. We were soon able to talk about Anne in a normal way, speaking of her as of someone dear to us with whom we would have been happy but whom God had called to Himself. I am writing ‘God’ instead of ‘chance’, but we did not believe in God. We were fortunate enough in the circumstances to be able to believe in chance.
Then one day at a friend’s house I met a cousin of the friend’s whom I liked and who liked me. I went out with him a lot in the course of just one week, as one does with a person, frequently and foolhardily, when a love affair is just beginning, and my father, who was not well suited to being on his own, did likewise with a rather ambitious young woman. Life took up again along its old lines, as it was bound to. Whenever my father and I are together, we laugh and talk about our conquests. He must suspect that my relationship with Philippe is not platonic and I know perfectly well that his new girlfriend is costing him a lot of money. But we are happy. Winter is nearly over; we shall not be renting the same villa again, but a different one, near Juan-les-Pins.
Only, when I am in bed, at dawn, when all that can be heard in Paris is the sound of cars, my memory sometimes betrays me: summer, with everything I remember of it, comes flooding back. Anne, Anne! I repeat that name very softly to myself, over and over in the dark. Then something stirs within me that, with eyes closed, I greet by its name, sadness: Bonjour tristesse.
A CERTAIN SMILE
* * *
To Florence Malraux 1
Love is what happens between two people who love each other.
Roger Vailland2
PART ONE
One
We had been spending the afternoon in a café on Rue Saint-Jacques,3 an afternoon in springtime like any other. I was quietly rather bored: I was moving back and forth between the jukebox and the window while Bertrand discussed Spire’s lecture. I remember that, at one moment, leaning against the jukebox, I had watched the record rise slowly and then place itself at an angle against the needle, almost tenderly, as if it were a cheek. And I don’t know why but I was suffused with a fierce sense of happiness and with the overwhelming, almost palpable intuition that I was going to die one day and that there would no longer be this hand of mine on the chrome ledge, nor sun in my eyes.
I had turned towards Bertrand. He was watching me and when he saw me smile he stood up. He would never accept that I could be happy without him. Any happiness of mine had to be limited to the important moments in our life together. I was already dimly aware of his attitude but on that particular day I couldn’t bear it and I turned away again. The piano had introduced the theme of ‘Lone and Sweet’; the clarinet had taken it up and I knew its every note.
I had met Bertrand during the previous year’s exams. We had spent an anguished week side by side before I went off to my parents’ house for the summer. On the last evening he had kissed me. Then he had written to me, initially in a detached way. Subsequently the tone had changed. I had followed these gradations fairly feverishly, so
that when he had written: ‘I find what I am about to say ridiculous, but I think I love you,’ I had been able to reply to him in the same vein, quite truthfully: ‘What you have said is ridiculous, but I love you too.’ This response had come to me quite naturally, or perhaps I should say I had replied in parrot fashion. My parents’ property, on the River Yonne,4 offered few distractions. I would go down to the riverbank and for a while would watch the shoals of undulating yellow weed on the surface, then I would send smooth, worn, black pebbles skimming across the water, like swallows swooping. All that summer I repeated ‘Bertrand’ to myself, thinking of him in the future tense. But in one way, striking up a passionate affair by letter seemed to me to be enough in itself.
Now Bertrand was standing behind me. He was holding out my glass and when I turned round I was right up against him. He was always rather annoyed at my not participating in their discussions. I liked reading well enough, but talking about literature bored me and he couldn’t get used to that.
‘You always put on the same tune,’ he complained. ‘Mind you, it’s not that I don’t like it.’ He had adopted a neutral tone for those last few words and I recalled that we had been together when we had first heard that record. I was always finding that he had little surges of sentimentality for things that had been markers in our relationship but that I hadn’t remembered. ‘He means nothing to me,’ I thought suddenly. ‘He bores me, I really don’t care about any of this, I’m nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing,’ and the same absurd sense of exaltation took hold of me.
‘I have to go and see my uncle, the one who travels a lot,’ said Bertrand. ‘Are you coming?’
He went ahead and I followed him. I did not know this uncle ‘who travelled a lot’ and I had no wish to know him. But something in me meant that I was destined to follow a young man’s close-shaven neck, destined to allow myself always to be led away without any resistance on my part, just with these little thoughts, as ice-cold and slippery as fish, going through my head. And affection came into it too. I walked down the boulevard with Bertrand. Our steps were in harmony, as our bodies were at night. He held my hand. We were slender and pleasing to the eye, in a picture-book way.
All along the boulevard and standing on the platform of the bus taking us to the uncle who travelled a lot, I felt really fond of Bertrand. Whenever the jolting of the bus threw me against him he would laugh and put a protective arm around me. I was leaning up against his jacket on the curve of his shoulder, a man’s shoulder so conveniently placed for my head. I was breathing in his smell, I recognized it easily and it affected me. Bertrand was my first lover. I had got to know the smell of my own body through his. It is always through the bodies of other people that you discover your own body, the length of it and the smell of it, distrustfully at first, and then with recognition.
Bertrand talked about this uncle who travelled a lot, whom he did not seem to like very much. He told me that the travels were something of a farce – Bertrand spent his time looking out for the farcical things other people did, so much so that he tended to live in fear of himself being part of some farce without realizing it. That struck me as farcical in itself, which made him furious.
The uncle who travelled a lot had arranged to meet Bertrand on the terrace of a café. When I caught sight of him I told Bertrand that he looked really quite nice. We were approaching him when I said that and he was standing up to greet us.
‘Luc,’ said Bertrand, ‘I’ve brought a friend, Dominique. This is my uncle Luc, who travels a lot.’
I was pleasantly surprised. I said to myself: ‘He’s a genuine proposition, this uncle who travels a lot.’ He had grey eyes and he looked tired, almost sad. He was handsome in a way.
‘How did the last trip go?’ asked Bertrand.
‘It was no fun. I had an extremely dull inheritance case in Boston to sort out. There were dusty little lawyer fellows coming out of the woodwork. All very boring. What about you?’
‘We’ve got our exam in two months’ time,’ said Bertrand.
He had stressed the word ‘our’. Studying together at the Sorbonne made you feel like a married couple. You talked about the exam as if it were a baby.
His uncle turned to me.
‘Are you sitting exams too?’
‘Yes,’ I said vaguely. (I was always rather ashamed of my activities, even though they were minimal.)
‘I’m out of cigarettes,’ said Bertrand.
He stood up and I watched him go off. He had a rapid, supple way of walking. It sometimes occurred to me that that assemblage of muscles and reflexes and olive skin belonged to me, and it seemed to me to be an amazing gift.
‘What do you do apart from exams?’ asked the uncle.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Well, nothing much.’
I raised my hand dismissively. He caught it in mid-air; I looked at him, taken aback. Immediately, and for a split second, I thought: ‘I like him. He’s rather old and I like him.’ But he laid my hand back on the table, smiling:
‘Your fingers are all inky. That’s a good sign. You’re going to pass your exam and you’re going to be a brilliant lawyer, even though you don’t seem to be very talkative.’
I began to laugh along with him. I did so want to make a friend of him.
But Bertrand was back already and Luc was talking to him. I didn’t listen to what they were saying. Luc had a slow way of speaking and large hands. I said to myself: ‘He’s the archetypal seducer of little girls like me.’ I was on my guard already. Even so, I felt a little stab of displeasure when he invited us to lunch a couple of days from then, but with his wife.
Two
Before going to Luc’s for lunch I spent two rather boring days. What was there for me to do, really? I could work a bit for an exam that wouldn’t lead to much, I could sit around in the sun or I could be made love to by Bertrand, without much reciprocity on my part. Having said that, I did like Bertrand. As I saw it, trust, tenderness and respect were not things to be sniffed at, and I didn’t really think a lot about passion. It seemed to me perfectly normal to live your life without experiencing any genuine emotion. Living, essentially, meant seeing to it that you were as content as you could be. And even that wasn’t always so easy.
I was staying in a sort of family-run residence, inhabited exclusively by female students. The people in charge were broad-minded and I was quite easily able to come back in at one or two o’clock in the morning. My room was large, with a low ceiling, and completely bare, for my initial plans for decorating had very soon fallen by the wayside. I didn’t ask much of my surroundings, as long as they didn’t get in my way. The house had a provincial atmosphere which I really liked. My window looked out on a courtyard, enclosed by a low wall, and over it brooded the permanently circumscribed, polluted skies of Paris, skies you could sometimes glimpse receding into the distance above a street or a balcony in a gently touching way.
I would get up, go to classes, meet up with Bertrand and we would have lunch together. Then there was the library at the Sorbonne, there was work, there were cinemas, the terraces of cafés and friends. In the evening we would go dancing or instead we would go back to Bertrand’s place, where we would stretch out on his bed, make love and afterwards talk for a long time in the darkness. I was fine, and yet, inside of me, like some warm, living creature, there was always that hankering for languor, solitude and sometimes exaltation. I told myself that it was probably something to do with my digestion.
That Friday, before going to Luc’s for lunch, I called in to see Catherine and stayed for half an hour. Catherine was lively, bossy and permanently in love. I hadn’t chosen her friendship, it was something I was at the receiving end of. But she looked upon me as being fragile and defenceless, and I liked that. Indeed she often struck me as being quite marvellous. My indifference to things seemed to her to have something poetic about it, as it had for a long time seemed to Bertrand, before that sudden, insistent desire to possess me had taken hold of him.
On that particular day she was in love with a cousin and she recounted this romance to me at length. I told her that I was going to have lunch with some relatives of Bertrand’s and, as I spoke, I realized that I had rather forgotten about Luc and I was sorry that I had. Why did I not have one of those naïve and never-ending tales of love to recount to Catherine? It didn’t even surprise her that I hadn’t. We were already so rigidly set in our respective roles. She would talk and I would listen; she would advise and I would stop listening.
My visit to her depressed me. I went to Luc’s without much enthusiasm and even with some trepidation: I was going to have to chat, be friendly and project an image of myself to them. I would have preferred to have lunch on my own, twirl a jar of mustard round between my fingers, and be vague, vague, completely vague …
When I got to Luc’s, Bertrand was already there. He introduced me to his uncle’s wife. Her face had something radiant about it, and something very kind and lovely. She was tall, quite well-built and blonde. She was beautiful, in fact, but not in an intimidating way. It struck me that she was the type of woman that many men would like to have and to hold on to, one who would make them happy, a gentle kind of woman. Was I gentle? I would have to ask Bertrand. I certainly took his hand, I wasn’t loud, I stroked his hair. But I detested loudness and my hands loved the feel of his hair, which was warm and thick, like the fur of an animal.
Right from the start Françoise was very nice. She showed me round the flat, which was luxurious; she poured me a drink and she sat me down in an armchair, all in a relaxed, attentive way. The embarrassment I had felt regarding my rather worn-out, shapeless skirt and sweater faded. We were expecting Luc, who was working. I thought I ought perhaps to pretend to show some interest in Luc’s job, something it never occurred to me to do. I would have liked to ask people: ‘Are you in love?’ or ‘What are you reading?’ but I never wondered what their job was, although to them it was often of prime importance.