In Search of Lost Time (6 page)

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us is imposed on them by our certainty that they are themselves and not others, by the
immobility of our mind confronting them. However that may be, when I woke thus, my mind restlessly attempting, without success, to discover where I was, everything revolved around me in the darkness, things, countries, years. My body, too benumbed to move, would try to locate, according to the form of its fatigue, the position of its limbs in order to deduce from this the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, in order to reconstruct and name the dwelling in which it found itself. Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders, offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept, while around it the invisible walls, changing place according to the shape of the imagined room, spun through the shadows. And even before my mind, which hesitated on the thresholds of times and shapes, had identified the house by reassembling the circumstances, it – my body – would recall the kind of bed in each one, the location of the doors, the angle at which the light came in through the windows, the existence of a hallway, along with the thought I had had as I fell asleep and that I had recovered upon waking. My stiffened side, trying to guess its orientation, would imagine, for instance, that it lay facing the wall in a big canopied bed and immediately I would say to myself: ‘Why, I went to sleep in the end even though Mama didn't come to say goodnight to me,' I was in the country at the house of my grandfather, dead for many years; and my body, the side on which I was resting, faithful guardians of a past my mind ought never to have forgotten, recalled to me the flame of the nightlight of Bohemian glass, in the shape of an urn, hanging from the ceiling by little chains, the mantelpiece of Siena marble, in my bedroom at Combray, at my grandparents' house, in remote days which at this moment I imagined were present without picturing them to myself exactly and which I would see more clearly in a little while when I was fully awake.

Then the memory of a new position would be reborn; the wall would slip away in another direction: I was in my room at Mme de Saint-Loup's, in the country; good Lord! It's ten o'clock or even later, they will have finished dinner! I must have over-slept in the nap I take every evening when I come back from my walk with Mme de Saint-Loup, before putting on my evening clothes. For many years have passed since Combray, where, however late we returned, it was
the sunset's red reflections I saw in the panes of my window. It is another sort of life one leads at Tansonville, at Mme de Saint-Loup's, another sort of pleasure I take in going out only at night, in following by moonlight those lanes where I used to play in the sun; and the room where I will have fallen asleep instead of dressing for dinner – from far off I can see it, as we come back, pierced by the flares of the lamp, lone beacon in the night.

These revolving, confused evocations never lasted for more than a few seconds; often, in my brief uncertainty about where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed, any better than we isolate, when we see a horse run, the successive positions shown to us by a kinetoscope. But I had seen sometimes one, sometimes another, of the bedrooms I had inhabited in my life, and in the end I would recall them all in the long reveries that followed my waking: winter bedrooms in which, as soon as you are in bed, you bury your head in a nest that you weave of the most disparate things: a corner of the pillow, the top of the covers, a bit of shawl, the side of the bed and an issue of the
Débats roses
,
¹
that you end by cementing together using the birds' technique of pressing down on it indefinitely; where in icy weather the pleasure you enjoy is the feeling that you are separated from the outdoors (like the sea swallow which makes its nest deep in an underground passage in the warmth of the earth) and where, since the fire is kept burning all night in the fireplace, you sleep in a great cloak of warm, smoky air, pierced by the glimmers from the logs breaking into flame again, a sort of immaterial alcove, a warm cave hollowed in the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat with moving thermal contours, aerated by draughts that cool your face and come from the corners, from the parts close to the window or far from the hearth, and that have grown cold again; – summer bedrooms where you love becoming one with the soft night, where the moonlight leaning against the half-open shutters casts its enchanted ladder to the foot of the bed, where you sleep almost in the open air, like a titmouse rocked by the breeze on the tip of a ray of light; – sometimes the Louis XVI bedroom, so gay that even the first night I had not been too unhappy there and where the slender columns that lightly supported the ceiling stood aside with such grace to show and reserve the place
where the bed was; sometimes, on the other hand, the small bedroom with the very high ceiling, hollowed out in the form of a pyramid two storyes high and partly panelled in mahogany, where from the first second I had been mentally poisoned by the unfamiliar odour of the vetiver, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and the insolent indifference of the clock chattering loudly as though I were not there; where a strange and pitiless quadrangular cheval-glass, barring obliquely one of the corners of the room, carved from deep inside the soft fullness of my usual field of vision a site for itself which I had not expected; where my mind, struggling for hours to dislodge itself, to stretch upwards so as to take the exact shape of the room and succeed in filling its gigantic funnel to the very top, had suffered many hard nights, while I lay at full length in my bed, my eyes lifted, my ear anxious, my nostril restive, my heart pounding, until habit had changed the colour of the curtains, silenced the clock, taught pity to the cruel oblique mirror, concealed, if not driven out completely, the smell of the vetiver and appreciably diminished the apparent height of the ceiling. Habit! – that skilful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless very happy to find, for without habit and reduced to no more than its own resources, our mind would be powerless to make a lodging habitable.

Certainly I was now wide awake, my body had veered around one last time and the good angel of certainty had brought everything around me to a standstill, had laid me down under my covers, in my bedroom, and had put approximately where they belonged in the darkness my chest of drawers, my desk, my fireplace, the window on to the street and the two doors. But even though I knew I was not in any of the houses of which the ignorance of the waking moment had instantly, if not presented me with the distinct picture, at least made me believe the presence possible, my memory had been stirred; generally I would not try to go back to sleep right away; I would spend the greater part of the night remembering our life in the old days, in Combray at my great-aunt's house, in Balbec, in Paris, in Doncières, in Venice, elsewhere still, remembering the places, the people I had known there, what I had seen of them, what I had been told about them.

At Combray, every day beginning in the late afternoon, long before the moment when I would have to go to bed and stay there, without sleeping, far away from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom again became the fixed and painful focus of my preoccupations. They had indeed hit upon the idea, to distract me on the evenings when they found me looking too unhappy, of giving me a magic lantern, which, while awaiting the dinner hour, they would set on top of my lamp; and, after the fashion of the first architects and master glaziers of the Gothic age, it replaced the opacity of the walls with impalpable iridescences, supernatural multicoloured apparitions, where legends were depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window. But my sadness was only increased by this, because the mere change in lighting destroyed the familiarity my bedroom had acquired for me and which, except for the torment of going to bed, had made it tolerable to me. Now I no longer recognized it and I was uneasy there, as in a room in some hotel or ‘chalet' to which I had come for the first time straight from the railway train.

Moving at the jerky pace of his horse, Golo, filled with a hideous design, came out of the small triangular forest that velveted the hillside with dark green and advanced jolting towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off along a curved line that was in fact the edge of one of the glass ovals arranged in the frame that you slipped between the grooves of the lantern. It was only a section of castle and it had a moor in front of it where Geneviève stood dreaming, wearing a blue belt. The castle and the moor were yellow, and I had not had to wait to see them to find out their colour since, before the glasses of the frame did so, the bronze sonority of the name Brabant had shown it to me clearly. Golo stopped for a moment to listen sadly to the patter read out loud by my great-aunt, which he seemed to understand perfectly, conforming his posture, with a meekness that did not exclude a certain majesty, to the directions of the text; then he moved off at the same jerky pace. And nothing could stop his slow ride. If the lantern was moved, I could make out Golo's horse continuing to advance over the window curtains, swelling out with their folds, descending into their fissures. The body of Golo himself, in its essence as supernatural as that of his mount,
accommodated every material obstacle, every hindersome object that he encountered by taking it as his skeleton and absorbing it into himself, even the doorknob he immediately adapted to and floated invincibly over with his red robe or his pale face as noble and as melancholy as ever, but revealing no disturbance at this transvertebration.

Certainly I found some charm in these brilliant projections, which seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and send out around me such ancient reflections of history. But I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with my self to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things. That doorknob of my room, which differed for me from all other doorknobs in the world in that it seemed to open of its own accord, without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its handling become for me, was now serving as an astral body for Golo. And as soon as they rang for dinner, I hastened to run to the dining-room where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard, and well acquainted with my family and beef casserole, shed the same light as on every other evening; and to fall into the arms of Mama, whom Geneviève de Brabant's misfortunes made all the dearer to me, while Golo's crimes drove me to examine my own conscience more scrupulously.

After dinner, alas, I soon had to leave Mama, who stayed there talking with the others, in the garden if the weather was fine, in the little drawing-room to which everyone withdrew if the weather was bad. Everyone, except my grandmother, who felt that ‘it's a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country' and who had endless arguments with my father on days when it rained too heavily, because he sent me to read in my room instead of having me stay outdoors. ‘That's no way to make him strong and active,' she would say sadly, ‘especially that boy, who so needs to build up his endurance and will-power.' My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he liked meteorology, while my mother, making no noise so as not to disturb him, watched him with a tender respect, but not so intently as to try to penetrate the mystery of his superior qualities. But as for my
grandmother, in all weathers, even in a downpour when Françoise had rushed the precious wicker armchairs indoors for fear they would get wet, we would see her in the empty, rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered grey locks so that her forehead could more freely drink in the salubriousness of the wind and rain. She would say: ‘At last, one can breathe!' and would roam the soaked paths – too symmetrically aligned for her liking by the new gardener, who lacked all feeling for nature and whom my father had been asking since morning if the weather would clear – with her jerky, enthusiastic little step, regulated by the various emotions excited in her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the power of good health, the stupidity of my upbringing and the symmetry of the gardens, rather than by the desire quite unknown to her to spare her plum-coloured skirt the spots of mud under which it would disappear up to a height that was for her maid always a source of despair and a problem.

When these garden walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner, one thing had the power to make her come back in: this was – at one of the times when her circular itinerary brought her back periodically, like an insect, in front of the lights of the little drawing-room where the liqueurs were set out on the card table – if my great-aunt called out to her: ‘Bathilde! Come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!' To tease her, in fact (she had brought into my father's family so different a mentality that everyone poked fun at her and tormented her), since liqueurs were forbidden to my grandfather, my great-aunt would make him drink a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in, ardently beg her husband not to taste the cognac; he would become angry, drink his mouthful despite her, and my grandmother would go off again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling, for she was so humble at heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and the little fuss she made over her own person and her sufferings came together in her gaze in a smile in which, unlike what one sees in the faces of so many people, there was irony only for herself, and for all of us a sort of kiss from her eyes which could not see those she cherished without caressing them passionately with her gaze. This torture my great-aunt inflicted on her, the spectacle of my grandmother's vain entreaties and of her weakness, defeated in
advance, trying uselessly to take the liqueur glass away from my grandfather, were the kinds of things to the sight of which you later become so accustomed that you smile as you contemplate them and take the part of the persecutor resolutely and gaily enough to persuade yourself privately that no persecution is involved; at that time they filled me with such horror that I would have liked to hit my great-aunt. But as soon as I heard: ‘Bathilde, come and stop your husband from drinking cognac!', already a man in my cowardice, I did what we all do, once we are grown up, when confronted with sufferings and injustices: I did not want to see them; I went up to sob at the very top of the house next to the schoolroom, under the roofs, in a little room that smelled of orris-root and that was also perfumed by a wild blackcurrant bush which had sprouted outside between the stones of the wall and extended a branch of flowers through the half-open window. Intended for a more specialized and more vulgar use, this room, from which during the day you could see all the way to the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, for a long time served me as a refuge, no doubt because it was the only one I was permitted to lock, for all those occupations of mine that demanded an inviolable solitude: reading, reverie, tears and sensuous pleasure. Alas! I did not know that, much more than her husband's little deviations from his regimen, it was my weak will, my delicate health, the uncertainty they cast on my future that so sadly preoccupied my grandmother in the course of those incessant perambulations, afternoon and evening, when we would see as it passed and then passed again, lifted slantwise towards the sky, her beautiful face with its brown furrowed cheeks, which with age had become almost mauve like the ploughed fields in autumn, crossed, if she was going out, by a veil half raised, while upon them, brought there by the cold or some sad thought, an involuntary tear was always drying.