“Well, let’s go back,” I said, after a pause.
We killed the evening playing cards with Manette.
The next day I refused to face the sun and the strident shrieking of the cicadas. What was the point? I knew that confronted with the palace of the popes, or the Pont du Gard, I should remain as unmoved as I had been at Champeaux. I invented a headache so as to stay at home. André had brought a dozen new books, and he plunged deep into one of them. I keep up to date and I knew them all. I looked through Manette’s library. The Garnier classics; some of the Pléiade collection we had given her as presents. There were many books there that I had not had an opportunity of going back to for ages and ages: I had forgotten them. And yet a feeling of weariness came over me at the idea of reading them again. As you read so you remember; or at least you have the illusion of remembering. The first freshness is lost. What had they to offer me, these writers who had made me what I was and should remain? I opened some volumes and turned a few pages: they all of them had a taste almost as sickening as that of my own books—a taste of decay.
Manette looked up from her paper. “I’m beginning to think that I’ll see men on the moon with my own eyes.”
“Your own eyes? You’ll make the journey?” asked André, with laughter in his voice.
“You know very well what I mean. I shall know they are there. And it’ll be the Russians, my boy. The Yankees missed by a mile, with their pure oxygen.”
“Yes, Mama, you’ll see the Russians on the moon,” said André affectionately.
“And to think we began in caves,” went on Manette meditatively, “with no more than our ten fingers to help us. And we’ve reached this point: you must admit it’s heartening.”
“The history of mankind is very fine, true enough,” said André. “It’s a pity that that of men should be so sad.”
“It won’t always be sad. If your Chinese don’t blow the world to pieces, our grandchildren will know socialism. I’d happily live another fifty years to see that.”
“What a woman! Do you hear that?” he said to me. “She would sign on again for another fifty years.”
“You wouldn’t, André?”
“No, Mama: frankly I wouldn’t. History follows such very curious paths that I scarcely feel it has anything to do with me at all. I have the impression of being on the sideline. So in fifty years’ time.…”
“I know: you no longer believe in anything,” said Manette disapprovingly.
“That’s not quite true.”
“What do you believe in?”
“People’s suffering, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.”
“In that case,” I asked, “why not the bomb? Why not annihilation? Let everything go up and there’s an end of it.”
“There are times when one is tempted to wish for it. But I prefer to hope that there can be life, life without suffering.”
“Life to do something with,” said Manette pugnaciously.
André’s tone of voice struck me: he was not so uncaring as he seemed. “It’s a pity that that of men should be so sad.” How feelingly he had said that! I looked at him and I felt such a wave of feeling toward him that all at once I was filled with certainty. Never should we be two strangers. One of these days, maybe tomorrow, we should find one another again, for my heart was already with him once more. After dinner it was I who suggested that we should go out. We climbed slowly toward the Fort Saint-André. I said, “Do you really think that nothing counts, apart from doing away with suffering?”
“What else can count?”
“It’s not very cheerful.”
“No. Even less cheerful since one does not know how to set about it.” He was silent for a moment. “Mama was wrong in saying that we don’t believe in anything. But there’s virtually no cause that is entirely our own: we are not for the U.S.S.R. and its compromises; nor for China, either. In France we are neither for the regime nor for any of the parties in opposition.”
“It’s a comfortless situation,” I said.
“It goes some way toward explaining Philippe’s attitude: being against everything, when you are thirty, has nothing very exalting about it.”
“Nor when you are sixty either. But there is no reason for betraying one’s opinions.”
“Were they really his opinions?”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, of course he is disgusted by flagrant injustice and gross corruption. But he has never been really politically minded. He took on our opinions because he could not do otherwise—he saw the world through our eyes. But just how deeply was he convinced?”
“What about the risks he ran during the Algerian war?”
“That did genuinely revolt him. And then the speeches and the protests and manifestos—it was all action and adventure. It does not prove that he was deeply committed to the left.”
“It’s a quaint way of defending Philippe, pulling him to pieces.”
“No. I’m not pulling him to pieces. The more I think it over, the more excuses I find for him. I see just how much we weighed him down: in the end he had to assert himself against us, at any price. And then talking of Algeria—he was sickeningly disillusioned over that. Not one of those fellows he endangered himself for has ever taken any notice of him since. And the great man there is de Gaulle.”
We sat on the grass just under the fort. I listened to André’s voice, calm and convincing; we could talk to one another again, and something melted inside me. For the first time I thought of Philippe with no anger. With no pleasure, either, but tranquilly: perhaps because André was suddenly so near to me that the picture of Philippe was blurred and indistinct. “We did weigh him down,” I said, candidly. “Do you think I ought to see him again?” I asked.
“It would hurt him immensely if you were to go on not being on speaking terms with him: and what would be the point of it?”
“I have no wish to hurt him. I feel indifferent, that’s all.”
“Oh, of course, it will never be the same between him and us.”
I looked at André. It seemed to me that between him and me everything was the same again already. The moon was shining, and so was the little star that faithfully accompanies it: a great peace came down upon me. Little star that I see, Drawn by the moon. The old words, just as they were first written, were there on my lips. They were a link joining me to the past centuries, when the stars shone exactly as they do today. And this rebirth and this permanence gave me a feeling of eternity. The world seemed to me as fresh and new as it had been in the first ages, and this moment sufficed to itself. I was there, and I was looking at the tiled roofs at our feet, bathed in the moonlight, looking at them for no reason, looking at them for the pleasure of seeing them. There was a piercing charm in this lack of involvement. “That’s the great thing about writing,” I said. “Pictures lose their shape; their colors fade. But words you carry away with you.”
“What makes you think of that?” asked André.
I quoted the two lines of Aucassin et Nicolette, and I added regretfully, “How lovely the nights are here!”
“Yes. It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner.”
I started. “A pity? But you didn’t want me to come!”
“Me? I like that. It was you who refused. When I said to you, ‘Why not leave for Villeneuve right away?’ you answered, ‘What a good idea. Do go.’ ”
“That was not how it was at all. You said—and I can remember your words exactly—‘What I should like is to go to Villeneuve.’ You were sick of me: all you wanted to do was to get the hell out of it.”
“You’re insane! My obvious meaning was I should like us to go to Villeneuve. And you replied, ‘Go on, then,’ in a voice that quite chilled me. But even so, I pressed you.”
“Oh, just as a matter of form. You certainly reckoned on my refusing.”
“Not in the very least.”
He was so sincere that doubt seized me. Could I have been mistaken? The scene was there fixed in my mind: I could not make it change. But I was certain he was not lying.
“How stupid it is,” I said. “It gave me such a jar when I saw you had made up your mind to go off without me.”
“It is stupid,” said André. “I wonder why you thought that?”
I reflected. “I did not trust you.”
“Because I had lied to you?”
“You seemed to me to have changed for some time past.”
“In what way?”
“You were playing at being an old man.”
“It was not a game—you said to me yourself, ‘I’m growing old,’ yesterday.”
“But you let yourself go. In all sorts of ways.”
“For example?”
“Mannerisms. That way of messing about with your gum.”
“Oh, that.…”
“What?”
“My jaw is slightly infected just there; if it gets bad my bridge will go and I shall have to wear false teeth. You see what I mean!”
I saw what he meant. Sometimes I dream that all my teeth fall to pieces in my mouth, and all at once there is senile decay enveloping me. False teeth.…
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There are some nasty little things one keeps to oneself.”
“That may be a mistake. That’s how misunderstandings arise.”
“Maybe.” He stood up. “Come on: we shall be catching cold.”
I got up too. We walked gently down the grassy slope. “Yet to a certain extent you were right in saying that I was putting it on,” said André. “I overdid it. When I saw all those fellows so very much more decrepit than I am and yet still taking things just as they come, without moaning about it at all, I told myself that it really would not do. I decided to pull myself together.”
“Oh, that’s it, then! I thought it was my not being here that had made you so good-tempered again.”
“What a notion! Far from it: it was largely on your account that I determined to take myself in hand. I don’t want to be an old bore. Old is quite enough: bore, no.”
I took his arm: I squeezed it. I had recovered the André I had never lost and that I never should lose. We walked into the garden and sat on a bench at the foot of a cypress. The moon and its little star were shining over the house.
“Still,” I said, “it’s true that old age does exist. And it’s no fun telling oneself that one is done for.”
He put his hand on mine. “Don’t tell yourself any such thing. I think I know why you did not succeed with this book. You set off with a sterile ambition—the ambition of doing something quite new and of excelling yourself. That is a fatal error. To understand Rousseau and Montesquieu and to make them understood, that was a solid plan and one that carried you a long way. If something really grips you again, you may still do good work.”
“All in all, my literary work will remain what it is: I’ve seen my limits.”
“From a self-regarding point of view you may not go much further, that’s true. But you can still interest readers, make them think and enrich them.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“For my part I’ve taken a decision. I shall go on for one more year and then stop. I shall go back to learning, bring myself up to date and fill in my gaps.”
“You think that after that you will set off again with fresh strength?”
“No. But there are things I don’t know and that I want to know. Just so as to know them.”
“That will be enough for you?”
“For some time, at all events. Don’t let’s look too far ahead.”
“You’re right.”
We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life? We sat there side by side beneath the stars, with the sharp scent of the cypress wafting by us; our hands touched. For a moment time stopped still. It would soon start flowing again. What then? Should I be able to work or not? Would my bitterness against Philippe die away? Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.
* * *
* A difficult, competitive postgraduate examination for university and lycée posts.
The Monologue
The monologue is her form of revenge.
FLAUBERT
THE silly bastards! I drew the curtains they keep the stupid colored lanterns and the fairy lights on the Christmas trees out of the apartment but the noises come in through the walls. Engines revving brakes and now here they are starting their horns big shots is what they take themselves for behind the wheel of their dreary middle-class family cars their lousy semisports jobs their miserable little Dauphines their white convertibles. A white convertible with black seats that’s terrific and the fellows whistled when I went by with slanting sunglasses on my nose and a Hermès scarf on my head and now they think they’re going to impress me with their filthy old wrecks and their bawling klaxons! If they all smashed into one another right under my windows how happy I should be happy. The swine they are shattering my eardrums I’ve no more plugs the last two are jamming the telephone bell they are utterly repulsive yet still I’d rather have my ears shattered than hear the telephone not ringing. Stop the uproar the silence: sleep. And I shan’t get a wink yesterday I couldn’t either I was so sick with horror because it was the day before today. I’ve taken so many sleeping pills they don’t work anymore and that doctor is a sadist he gives them to me in the form of suppositories and I can’t stuff myself like a gun. I’ve got to get some rest I have to I must be able to cope with Tristan tomorrow: no tears no shouting. “This is an absurd position. A ghastly mess, even from the point of view of dough! A child needs its mother.” I’m going to have another sleepless night my nerves will be completely frazzled I’ll make a cock of it. Bastards! They thump thump in my head I can see them I can hear them. They are stuffing themselves with cheap foie gras and burned turkey they drool over it Albert and Madame Nanard Etiennette their snooty offspring my mother: it’s flying in the face of nature that my own brother my own mother should prefer my ex-husband to me. I’ve nothing whatever to say to them only just let them stop preventing me sleeping; you get so you are fit to be shut up you confess everything, true or false, they needn’t count on that though I’m tough they won’t get me down.
Celebrations with them, how they stank: it was ghastly enough quite ghastly enough on ordinary days! I always loathed Christmas Easter July 14. Papa lifted Nanard onto his shoulder so that he could see the fireworks and I stayed there on the ground squashed between them just at prick level and that randy crowd’s smell of sex and Mama said “there she is sniveling again” they stuffed an ice into my hand there was nothing I wanted to do with it I threw it away they sighed I couldn’t be slapped on a July 14 evening. As for him he never touched me I was the one he liked best: “proper little God-damn woman.” But when he kicked the bucket she didn’t bother to hold in anymore and she used to swipe me across the face with her rings. I never slapped Sylvie once. Nanard was the king. She used to take him into her bed in the morning and I heard them tickling one another he says it’s untrue I’m disgusting of course he’s not going to confess they never do confess indeed maybe he’s forgotten they are very good at forgetting anything inconvenient and I say they are shits on account of I do remember: she used to wander about her brothel of a room half naked in her white silk dressing gown with its stains and cigarette holes and he clung around h
er legs it makes you really sick mothers with their little male jobs and I was supposed to be like them no thank you very much indeed. I wanted decent children clean children I didn’t want Francis to become a fairy like Nanard. Nanard with his five kids he’s a bugger for all that you can’t deceive me you really must hate women to have married that cow.
It’s not stopping. How many of them are there? In the streets of Paris hundreds of thousands. And it’s the same in every town all over the world: three thousand million and it’ll get worse and worse: famines there are not nearly enough more and more and more people: even the sky’s infested with them presently they will be as thick in space as they are on the motorways and the moon you can’t look at it anymore without thinking that there are cunts up there spouting away. I used to like the moon it was like me; and they’ve mucked it up like they muck everything up they were revolting those photos—a dreary grayish dusty thing anyone at all can trample about on.
I was clean straight uncompromising. No cheating: I’ve had that in my bones since I was a child. I can see myself now a quaint little brat in a ragged dress Mama looked after me so badly and the kind lady simpering “And so we love our little brother do we?” And I answered calmly “I hate him.” The icy chill: Mama’s look. It was perfectly natural that I should have been jealous all the books say so: the astonishing thing the thing I like is that I should have admitted it. No compromise no act: that proper little woman was me all right. I’m clean I’m straight I don’t join in any act: that makes them mad they hate being seen through they want you to believe the stuff they hand out or at least to pretend to.
Here’s some of their bloody nonsense now—rushing up the stairs laughter voices all in a tizzy. What the hell sense does that make, all working themselves up at a set date a set time just because you start using a new calendar? All my life it’s made me sick, this sort of hysterical crap. I ought to tell the story of my life. Lots of women do it people print them people talk about them they strut about very pleased with themselves my book would be more interesting than all their balls: it’s made me sweat but I’ve lived and I’ve lived without lies without sham how furious it would make them to see my name and picture in the shop windows and everyone would learn the real genuine truth. I’d have a whole raft of men at my feet again they’re such groveling creatures that the most dreadful slob once she’s famous they make a wild rush for her. Maybe I should meet one who would know how to love me.